Ep. 113: The Practice Owner’s Core Job Duties
We’ve discussed the job duties of several positions, such as the Receptionist, Treatment Coordinator, Office Manager, etc—but what about the Owner? Owning a dental practice IS a job, too! So this week, Sabri Blumberg joins us to discuss the six core job functions the Owner needs to perform and that should never be delegated to anyone else.
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Questions From This Episode
What's the single most important thing an owner doctor actually needs to produce, according to Sabri?
A fully functioning, competent office manager, since division of labor makes running and expanding the business the office manager's actual job, not the doctor's. The owner's real product isn't the dentistry itself, it's whether they successfully created a genuinely capable person to run the business day to day.
Once a practice finally has a great office manager, should the doctor eventually take over as CEO themselves?
No, not by displacing someone who's already doing the job well just to claim the title. Instead, the doctor can use the time that frees up to become the face of the practice, help with marketing, or open a second location, expanding their own role without taking the office manager's job away from them.
Why does an owner need to personally write policy, even if the office manager is highly capable?
The office manager's job is to enforce policy, not create it, since only the owner has the authority to actually approve it, though anyone can propose it. Without written policy, the office manager has nothing concrete to correct staff against, and it doesn't need to be polished, even five simple lines recorded on a phone and typed up later counts as a real start.
Why does an owner need to explicitly lay out the practice's vision rather than assuming staff will simply understand it?
A new hire arriving from an insurance-driven practice will default to that same mindset unless the actual vision, treating patients for genuine health rather than just what insurance covers, is clearly laid out somewhere they can see it, like a general policy manual. Without that explicit vision, staff have nothing to measure their own decisions against, and a team pulling in different directions creates disagreement and slows growth instead of driving it.
What's the recommended minimum interaction between an owner and their office manager to stay genuinely aligned?
At minimum, a dedicated time set aside every week, away from the office where distractions like ringing phones and walk-in patients won't interrupt it, to review statistics, finances, and personnel decisions together. A quick few minutes before the morning meeting can help too, but the real, irreducible minimum is that one weekly, uninterrupted session.
Episode Transcript
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Jeff: We've done a ton of episodes on what to expect and how to more effectively perform various positions in a dental practice, the office manager job, scheduling, the treatment coordinator role, finance, and so on. But what about the job of practice owner? Is there more to being a business owner than simply owning a business? Of course there is. Just like any other position in a practice, the owner position comes with specific duties, responsibilities, and most importantly, expected results. That's what we want to cover in this week's episode. My name is Jeff Blumberg, and I'm your host, joined this week by Sabri Blumberg, our Deputy Chief Operating Officer here at MGE, in charge of all of our technical delivery, and the most experienced and seasoned technical person here at the company, having worked with several thousand clients to genuinely excellent results. Glad to have you on this week, Sabri.
Sabri: Thanks, Jeff.
Jeff: So when you go over the idea of the owner's job with just about every MGE client, you have six basic things you consider the irreducible minimum, and that's what we're going to hit on today, since we could easily spend hours on everything you'd expect of an owner. Let's just jump right in. I know the first one you go over is the most important.
Sabri: The first and most important function of the owner is to appoint somebody to run the business, an office manager, and to actually get that person fully functioning. If you look at the main product of the business owner, it's a fully functioning, productive, competent office manager, and running that office manager. Division of labor tells us that's the office manager's job, essentially the business equivalent of a CEO, to make the business expanding and profitable.
Jeff: So why wouldn't the doctor just be the CEO themselves?
Sabri: Because they're usually busy doing dentistry. So if the doctor tries to be the CEO too, that job effectively goes undone, we're just pretending it's being handled. It's a genuinely big job, hiring staff, training staff, correcting staff, laying out production targets for the month and making sure they're actually being met, keeping marketing consistent, both internal and external, and effective and cost efficient. I could go on. If you do those things badly, it's tremendously expensive for the business. Even something as simple as the phone not being answered properly, and leads coming in from your marketing not converting, which is a huge problem in dentistry.
Jeff: That's true, roughly three out of four calls that come in as potential new patients end up wasted.
Sabri: Right, and that's just bad training, bad procedure, bad protocol at the front desk. But you can't be watching that when you're in the back doing dentistry, you're not going to catch it between a root canal and the two crowns you're prepping next.
Jeff: That makes sense.
Sabri: So when I say a fully functioning office manager, I don't mean somebody who files your insurance for you, I mean somebody who's actually running the business. And the way I judge whether the owner of a practice did a good job is by looking at the office manager, because that's their product. Did they actually create an office manager? And I use the word create deliberately, because you're not simply going to hire an office manager.
Jeff: I think that's half the problem, honestly, not to get too far into the office manager job itself, but it really depends on the office. Office manager can mean two completely different things depending on where you ask.
Sabri: Correct, and unfortunately in dentistry, that specific position, the way we define it, doesn't really exist as a standard hire. You're not going to just hire somebody already trained to do exactly this. You have to create a hybrid, someone who understands the systems of dentistry, understands dentistry itself and how it makes money, and can deliver an excellent product to patients, combined with genuine business sense, how to make a business profitable, how to utilize staff and resources to create more.
Jeff: So you need an executive who's genuinely familiar with dentistry.
Sabri: Correct, and sure, you can find that, but there's always the risk we've all experienced. You hire somebody who was supposedly great at collections at another practice, everyone raves about them, but you don't really know them until they're actually working for you. Are they consistently productive? What are their idiosyncrasies? How do they operate under real pressure? You don't know any of that until you've actually worked with the person.
Jeff: That's always the danger with hiring. I've gone both ways on this myself over the years, hiring someone and being genuinely excited, thinking they'll handle everything, and then bringing them on and realizing it's a real disappointment. Then I swung the other way, expecting nothing from a new hire so I wouldn't be let down, which is also terrible. Now I try to stay genuinely positive about anyone we hire, otherwise we wouldn't have hired them, but I stay attentive, watching to see if they can actually do it.
Sabri: Right, you learn what the person is actually capable of and where they're missing training, and then whether they're trainable, because not everyone is. That's the most important thing to me, since I've trained a lot of people, and so have you. The real question is whether they can absorb it and actually do it.
Jeff: That brings up an interesting point, if the owner is responsible for the office manager's functioning and training, they need to genuinely know what they're doing themselves, or how would they train them properly? How would there be any real supervision?
Sabri: Right, there'd be zero supervision if you don't actually know what you're doing.
Jeff: I think supervision is interesting to unpack a bit. If someone walks out of school with a business degree and goes to work for a big corporation, that grounding matters, though I've talked to HR folks at large companies who say the bigger value of the degree often isn't the specific content, it's proof they could stick with something for four years. To me, a degree mostly just means you've earned the right to start learning that field, since most of the time these companies still teach someone from the ground up once they're hired. But at least with a business degree, they already know what a balance sheet is, what resources are, in a general sense.
Sabri: Right, but you still have to bring them up to speed on how it actually works in your specific business. There's formal training, and then there's understanding what actually works in the real world, which is exactly why we insist on training both the doctor and the office manager. We handle the formal training, but you still have to show them how things work in your own practice.
Jeff: That's right.
Sabri: And until the doctor has an office manager in place, they're responsible for those functions themselves. It's not realistic to expect them to do a genuinely good job at that on top of everything else, purely due to time constraints, even if they're fully capable. So they need to handle those functions in the meantime, but work quickly to get a real office manager in place, otherwise they're robbing the practice of its own potential productivity. You end up with a doctor working incredibly hard with a group of people helping them, instead of an actual organization where everyone is genuinely pulling in the same direction.
Jeff: Let me explore this a little further before we move on. Say I'm the doctor, I've hired an office manager, they're doing a great job, we've built the practice up, and now we have associates in place, so I'm not really needed chairside anymore. Wouldn't I become the CEO at that point?
Sabri: You could, but I wouldn't recommend bumping a fully functioning, great office manager off that position just because you suddenly want the title. You might instead spend your time on other things, becoming more the face of the practice, helping market it, or opening a second location if this one's going so well. There are different ways to expand your own role. But you don't degrade the office manager's participation in what you've built together by taking their job away from them.
Jeff: Good, that makes sense. So I'm the doctor, I've got a fully functioning, producing office manager, and my office is genuinely being run. What's the second thing on your list?
Sabri: You have to provide policy. Part of the office manager's job is enforcing the owner's policy, not creating it. Policy formulation is the owner's job. Whenever I lecture on this and tell clients they need to write policy, I get a lot of resistance, since dentists are dentists, not writers, and I hear back that it feels overwhelming, so many things to write down.
Jeff: So what do you actually tell them?
Sabri: Two things. First, it doesn't need to read like it was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, you're not trying to win a Pulitzer, just write something clear and understandable. Second, if you start now and write two policies a week, that's a hundred policies after a year, five hundred after five years. It can be as simple as, this is how I want the phone answered. I don't care if you record it on your phone and hand it to your office manager to type up.
Jeff: Good point, there's always a way to get something done if you're willing to get a little creative about it.
Sabri: Exactly. You take five minutes a day to say something into your phone, your office manager takes five minutes to write it up, and it could be as simple as, first thing in the morning, unlock the door, check messages from the answering service, clean up the reception area, water the plants, turn on the sound system. That's a basic opening policy for reception, five lines, and you're done.
Jeff: Interesting, it doesn't have to be complicated, but you do need to actually provide it.
Sabri: Right, because that's the agreement your whole staff operates on, and if you don't provide policy, your office manager has nothing to actually correct your staff with.
Jeff: It's essentially the rules of the game. Let me ask you this, say the office manager is pretty sharp and deeply in the trenches, handling all the financial work themselves because there's no treatment coordinator yet, and they have some genuinely good ideas but there's no internal financial policy written down. Would you be against the office manager drafting a policy themselves?
Sabri: Not at all, but you'd want the doctor to approve it. Anybody can propose policy, but only the owner can approve it. So that job still belongs to the owner, you can't just say, sure, whatever you want.
Jeff: That makes sense. So we've got a fully functioning office manager and developed policy, what's point number three?
Sabri: You have to develop the vision, or the purpose, of the practice. The vision of a business comes from the person who started it. I mean a genuine mission, a purpose, this is what we do here, this is what we create here. Think of a bakery, there are countless bakeries out there, some specialize in bread, some in pastries, some also sell chocolates. Different visions for essentially the same category of business. Dentistry works the same way. The doctor has a vision for the type of dentistry they want to deliver, how involved they want to be with insurance, how they want patients treated, what the actual outcome should be for each patient, whether that's full treatment plans versus partial ones, which I wouldn't recommend.
Jeff: Right.
Sabri: But you can't assume people automatically know that what you're trying to create is a genuinely healthy patient, not simply a treated patient. Especially if someone's coming from another office where the entire approach was, we only do what insurance covers, we'll leave active disease alone if it isn't covered. If that's genuinely your vision, fine, that's your call. But say I'm coming from a practice like that, and I join your practice, where the vision is restoring full health, function, and aesthetics, genuinely extending people's quality of life. If you never actually tell me that's the vision, I'm simply going to assume we're operating the same insurance-driven way I'm used to, and you'll run into real problems.
Jeff: And there's also the risk of hiring someone who genuinely believes you should only ever do what insurance covers, and shouldn't make the patient responsible for their own health at all. It's a strange kind of mental gymnastics, I've seen it happen and never fully understood it, like someone forgot they were actually a doctor.
Sabri: Exactly right, the insurance company isn't the one who did the exam, took the x-rays, and actually knows what's going on with that patient. I don't agree with that mindset at all, it takes away the patient's right to be responsible for their own health, and decides that for them instead.
Jeff: So say I'm a new associate with exactly that mindset, believing insurance coverage should dictate treatment, and I join your practice. What happens?
Sabri: If I've clearly laid out that vision in a general policy manual, we'll immediately recognize the mismatch, both from the manual itself and from your actions, the first time you only present what insurance covers and leave the rest of the needed dentistry off the table. At that point it becomes a correction, this is how you're treatment planning, but here's the doctor's actual vision for this practice, and if the associate still disagrees, that's fine, but they need to find a practice that shares their own philosophy instead. One of the most important things in a business is that everyone's genuinely pushing toward the same destination. If people are pulling in different directions, it impedes growth and creates real disagreement, the whole harmony of the practice suffers.
Jeff: Because the idea is we're all headed to the same place. If everyone's trying to go five different directions, nobody actually gets anywhere.
Sabri: Exactly right. So the doctor needs to lay out the vision, where are we going, what does this actually look like, and what are the ground rules behind it. And the doctor also needs to let the office manager build an environment where people genuinely get recognized for achievements toward that vision, make it fun, make it feel like a shared win. Make sure staff know, when a patient got genuinely healthy, when we did a great job educating someone on their treatment and our collections reflected that, celebrate it, take them to lunch, give bonuses, let them share in it.
Jeff: It's interesting, a lot of our clients do patient testimonial videos, someone thrilled with their results, and they'll put it on the website, YouTube, TikTok. That's great PR and helps marketing, creates real social proof for anyone checking out the practice online. But what I find is that in a lot of cases, the doctor or office manager doesn't make a point of actually showing that video to the staff too, which is probably even more important, since it reinforces the vision directly for the people who made it happen.
Sabri: Exactly right, it reinforces that purpose, and it gives them the confidence to push a little harder with the next patient, because they know the outcome can genuinely be positive. So that matters. Those are the first three.
Jeff: Let me recap before we move on, since I'll forget them once we get to five. Point and get a fully functioning office manager in place, create policy, and lay out and disseminate the vision for the practice. What's number four?
Sabri: You actually have to run your office manager.
Jeff: What would that look like, practically? Say you're the owner and I'm the office manager running the business.
Sabri: When a person is entirely on their own, they're going to run into problems they need to talk through with somebody, I'm thinking about running this kind of marketing, I don't have the staff I need for this, here's what I'm considering. I don't mean pushing responsibility back onto the owner for things that are genuinely the office manager's job to solve, but you need to meet with your office manager. When I say supervise, I don't mean watching them, I mean meeting with them, reviewing the goals they've laid out for the month, making sure the plan behind those goals is solid and they're not missing anything, and being there if they're struggling with something.
Jeff: That makes sense.
Sabri: Sometimes you see a genuinely strong partnership between a doctor and an office manager, and then it suddenly falls apart, and it almost always comes down to too little communication between the two of them. They stopped coordinating, disagreements never got sorted out, the vision never got revisited once it was reached, and the support each side actually needed from the other simply wasn't there. So you have to genuinely supervise, run, and be present for your office manager.
Jeff: For anyone listening who has an office manager and wants to make sure they're staying genuinely aligned, what would a reasonable minimum interaction actually look like? Getting together for a few minutes each day?
Sabri: You don't necessarily have to do that daily, though five minutes before the morning meeting can help. As the doctor, since we're already together for the morning meeting anyway, where the doctor is more in a sales role and the office manager is in a management role, a quick check-in on what's happening that day is genuinely useful. But as an irreducible minimum, there has to be dedicated time set aside every week, go to lunch together, and go through statistics and everything else.
Jeff: And not in the office, since you'll always be distracted there, people needing things, the phone ringing, a patient showing up unexpectedly.
Sabri: Exactly, get out of the office for half an hour to an hour a week, that's genuinely findable in any schedule, and hold your executive meeting there instead. Go through the week's statistics, the finances, any personnel decisions, everything that actually needs discussing.
Jeff: Good, I like that. That's number four. What's number five?
Sabri: Control your finances. That's something you should never fully hand off to a manager. You can absolutely have an account specifically for paying practice bills, transfer enough each month to cover overhead, and have your office manager pay bills out of that account, that's completely fine, but that's really a bookkeeping function, not a CFO function. The CFO function is looking at how much money is actually coming in, how much is being spent to bring that money in, personnel, marketing, equipment, and what your actual return on that investment is, approving any expenditure above overhead, bonuses, and so on. That's a job I'm never going to relinquish, being in charge of the practice's overall financial health.
Jeff: Not unless the office manager happens to be your spouse.
Sabri: Even then. If it's your spouse, sure, they can handle some of those functions if you'd like, that's completely fine, but even in that scenario, you still have to sit down with them and go through the finances together. You have to know where you actually stand.
Jeff: Agreed, I was just teasing you a bit there since we're spouses ourselves. You'd hope your own spouse wouldn't embezzle from you, though I suppose there's no absolute guarantee.
Sabri: Right, so that's number five, control your finances. Number six is staying on top of the practice's statistics.
Jeff: How frequently should someone actually be looking at these?
Sabri: You should know where the most important statistics in the practice stand on a daily basis.
Jeff: Let me ask you this, in any organization I've ever run, I know roughly where we stand day to day, not down to the penny, but I have a general sense of where the most important metrics are, so I know where to direct attention. When you talk to a newer client versus one who's been around a while, how often do they actually know where they stand for the month so far?
Sabri: Honestly, maybe 10 percent of newer clients know where the most important statistics actually stand. They'll usually have a rough sense of production or collections month to date, that's maybe 10 percent of the time, and even fewer know their new patient numbers. The vast majority either don't know at all, or have a vague sense but not the actual figures.
Jeff: That's something people could genuinely start fixing right now. You're not going to hit a goal if you don't even know what the goal is or where you currently stand relative to it.
Sabri: Exactly. Think of it like sailing a long journey, you wouldn't want to check your position only occasionally, you'd want to know constantly where you are, so you don't end up somewhere you don't want to be, on the rocks. The sooner you realize you're heading the wrong direction, the quicker you can course correct. So if you're listening and you don't know where you stand daily, you don't need to obsess over it constantly, but you should know, by the end of each day, how much you've collected for the month, how much you've produced, where your new patient count stands, and how that compares to your actual goal for the month.
Jeff: Because you have to set that goal in the first place.
Sabri: Right. And interestingly, simply putting attention on something tends to improve it. Give a staff member a statistic to track, and the graph often goes up purely because they're not comfortable watching it go down. If you, as the owner doctor, know you're running $10,000 behind in production for where you should be this month, that might be exactly what makes you spend that extra five minutes with a wishy-washy patient who wants to push their treatment to next time, rather than letting it slide the way you might have in the past. And it's worth remembering, improved statistics ultimately just mean improved health for patients. There's nothing wrong with that, the more you produce, the more you collect, the more people you're actually helping get healthy.
Jeff: That's a great point to end on, if your numbers are down, nobody actually wins in that scenario.
Sabri: Exactly, and make sure your staff understands that too. That was the last point.
Jeff: So let's recap all six. Appoint and get a fully functioning office manager in place. Lay out the vision for the business. Plan and review practice statistics. Run your office manager. Provide policy for the practice. And control your finances.
Sabri: Right, and this is the irreducible minimum, there's genuinely more to it that we're not going to fully cover in a podcast episode, but I'll tell you, a lot of very successful practices in the MGE community, this is essentially all they do. They don't make it any fancier than this, and it works.
Jeff: That's good to hear. The better you execute on this, obviously the more refined your end result becomes, but this is a genuinely solid starting point. I'll close with this: we hear a lot about accountability, wanting staff to be more accountable, wishing a treatment coordinator took more initiative or responsibility. But accountability really just means owning what you do and delivering a genuine result, it's another word for responsibility. If you're hiring someone and expecting certain results from them, shouldn't you hold yourself to those same expectations as the owner?
Sabri: I think that's a really good point.
Jeff: So that's what we'll leave you with this week. Sabri, thank you so much for being here.
Sabri: You're welcome, great to be here.
Jeff: And we'll definitely have you back on again plenty in the future. Folks, if you have any questions about MGE or want some help, you can find us online at mgeonline.com or call us at (800) 640-1140. That's everything we have for you this week. Have a great week, and we'll see you at the next episode.