Should your staff be aware of your practice’s numbers in terms of collections, production, etc? Or should you keep them in the dark? In this episode, Jeff Blumberg discusses which numbers you should share with your team and which you shouldn’t, as well as how to keep your team motivated and focused on what really matters: patient care.
Topics:
:36 – What are the benefits of sharing the “numbers” with your whole team?
8:14 – Keeping the focus on patient care and not being money-motivated
15:20 – What numbers shouldn’t you share with your staff?
Links:
Bonus Plan Ideas – https://www.mgeonline.com/bonus-plan-ideas/
Learn more about MGE – https://www.mgeonline.com
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Questions From This Episode
Does Jeff recommend sharing production and collections numbers with the whole team?
Yes, with qualifications. He says sharing goals and month-to-date numbers helps the team function as a coordinated unit, since staff can't know whether they're meeting expectations if they don't know what those expectations actually are.
Why does Jeff say every position in the office should have its own assigned statistic?
When responsibility is shared across multiple people, like three interchangeable "front desk" staff, nobody is actually accountable when something goes wrong, such as an unexplained opening in the schedule. Assigning one person ownership of a specific number, like collections or new patients, creates real accountability and lets that person track their own progress toward the goal.
What does Jeff say goes wrong when a practice becomes too focused on hitting a production number?
He describes offices bumping patients' delivery appointments, the visit where a patient actually gets their final crown or restoration, in order to squeeze in more production before the end of the month. Since production is booked when treatment starts rather than when it's completed, chasing the number itself can mean deprioritizing the appointment that matters most to the patient.
Why does Jeff recommend sharing patient wins and successes with staff, not just the numbers?
He says people naturally fixate on negative experiences, so a single difficult patient in a day of otherwise good ones can leave staff feeling like the whole patient base is unpleasant. Regularly sharing genuine wins, a patient thrilled with their treatment, for example, keeps the team grounded in the fact that most patients are good people and that the work they're doing matters.
Why does Jeff say he wouldn't share exact profit or overhead numbers with staff?
He says that even a great team, given a clear surplus with no other context, will almost always vote to spend it on bonuses or equipment rather than save it or pay down debt. His workaround is setting a bonus threshold noticeably above the practice's actual overhead, so there's a buffer for variable costs, and sharing that threshold with staff rather than the real overhead figure.
Episode Transcript
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Should you share your office numbers, production, collections, with your entire team, your entire staff? Are there any real benefits to that, and what are the drawbacks? Wouldn't it just make your staff focus on the numbers, or start asking for more money? That's the subject I want to get into this week: should you share the numbers with your team?
I'm Jeff Blumberg, and I'm your host. I'll start with a simple answer to the question. Should you share the numbers? Yes, absolutely, yes, with a couple of qualifications, which is what I want to cover in this episode. I want to go through why you'd share the numbers, what the benefits are, and which numbers you shouldn't share.
Let's start with why you'd share them in the first place, and what the benefit actually is. First off, what do these numbers represent? I'm talking about office collections, production, new patients, numbers you probably don't have a problem sharing with your group already. From a business standpoint, they represent whether your office is expanding, contracting, or just staying the same, and in an inflationary environment, staying the same is essentially contracting. They also show, numerically, what the combined efforts of everybody in the office actually produced.
You're a team, so as a team, this is what you're making, this is what you're creating together. It shows what everyone's combined effort is actually causing. And being a team, to some degree, implies coordination, that's the basic concept of a team. Think about a sports team: you have to know Player X is going to be in a certain position, or the whole thing falls apart, you throw a pass and nobody's there to catch it. You have to be coordinated to actually function as a team.
Here's a simple example of how the numbers play into that. Say I'm the treatment coordinator, and I know we're supposed to collect a certain amount this month, and I have a patient with a payment due when they come in for treatment, and it's the 29th. I'd make sure I got them in before the 31st, because I know I have a collections goal for the month, and that patient's payment helps me make it. That's part of being a team.
Now imagine the opposite: you don't share the numbers, and your staff has no idea what they are. They have no sense of the end result of what they're actually doing. If I'm a treatment coordinator with no goal communicated to me, how would I even know whether I'm meeting expectations?
Which brings us to goals. Do you actually set monthly production and collection goals? You might, as the doctor or as management, I've seen this a lot, especially with newer clients: they set goals but never share them with the team, or they don't set goals at all, and the office just sort of drifts along. Picture your office as a ship. With no goal, you have no destination, you're just out there having a nice time sailing, not actually trying to get anywhere. Without a goal, there's no real end result or objective for staff to work toward, people just show up and do their tasks without seeing how their day-to-day work affects the overall health of the practice. You should have some form of monthly statistical goal, ideally a weekly one too, that's a separate discussion, for every position in the office.
That starts with having a real division of labor, also its own topic, but you want people accountable for specific things in the practice. What tends to happen in a lot of dental offices, and healthcare generally, especially on the administrative side, is you end up with the "front desk." Say you have a busier office with three people up front, and we just call them "front desk people." What do you actually expect them to do? Collect money, file insurance, verify benefits, schedule patients, handle walkout statements, answer phones, and so on. Three people, and nobody's really responsible for any particular result.
I ask this question at seminars all the time: if everybody's responsible for something, who's actually responsible? The answer is always the same, no one. So if you have three people up front and they're all responsible for everything, nobody's actually responsible for anything. If you end up with a four-hour opening in primary time and walk up to the front desk to ask what happened, in that conventional shared-responsibility model, who's accountable? Nobody. You need some real division of labor.
If I had three people up front, one might own the schedule, another might own collections, and the third might handle the phones, or maybe one does scheduling and phones while another handles collections and insurance, and the third is the treatment coordinator, arrangements like that. Ideally one of those three is also the manager, a subject for another episode. Once you've assigned that ownership, "you're responsible for the schedule," you can attach a statistic to it, your stat is monthly office production. If you're in charge of finance, your stat is collections. If you had a PR person, their stat might be new patients. Once someone has a statistic, you can attach a goal to it: we're expecting to collect $120,000 this month, and if I'm the financial coordinator, I have a vested interest in hitting that, because it's my number.
That makes it much easier to track progress. If it's the 10th, a third of the way through the month, and I'm supposed to hit $120,000 but I'm only at $20,000, I know I need to course-correct to make my monthly goal. That's the ideal situation to work in. Conversely, if it's the 10th and I'm already at $70,000 against a $120,000 goal, I can see I'm well on pace.
It's also a way to keep your expectations of your team realistic, not asking them to do things you wouldn't feel capable of doing yourself, that's basic leadership. If you're asking people to do something you wouldn't do, or something you genuinely believe is unrealistic, that's poor leadership. One of my own basic rules, and I'm not holding myself up as some perfect example, is I'll never ask an employee to do something I myself wouldn't do. That doesn't mean I'd actually do it, but it means I could, and it keeps me grounded in what's a realistic expectation. So if I have a genuinely realistic collections goal of $120,000 this month, based on doing $110,000 last month and $134,000 the month before, that's a reasonable target. If the person handling collections brings in $80,000, then $70,000, then $90,000, that might actually be a performance issue, since I've attached a clear statistic to their role and I should reasonably be able to expect them to meet the goal I've set. That's the other benefit of statistics: I've set a goal, staff know the numbers, and those goals are assigned to a specific person, so someone is genuinely accountable. That part is critical.
Now, where can this go wrong? The focus can flip entirely onto the number itself. Take collections as an example, what does a collections number actually represent? How much money the office brought in. Say the collections goal is $120,000, it's the 29th, and you're sitting at $90,000, everybody scrambling to close the gap. That's fine, you're playing the game, trying to hit the goal. But you don't want people fixating purely on the money and losing sight of what those collections actually represent, someone paying for services they need. Instead of thinking about which patients need help, who needs treatment we could get started before month's end, the conversation becomes purely "we need $30,000." Same thing happens with production. I've seen offices behind on their production goal land a large case, and then start bumping other patients off the schedule just to get that production booked before month's end.
On paper that seems to make sense, you need to hit a production goal, and here's a large procedure, great. But think about what production actually represents for a second. Production means we've charged out the service, and with most major procedures, and even some basic ones like a root canal, the work isn't actually finished yet. A filling might be done in one visit, but a crown prep isn't. So when we bill out $1,400 for the crown you prepped today, that shows up as production, your number's up, that's nice. But what's the appointment that actually matters to the patient? That's really what this is about. The important appointment isn't the production appointment, the patient's walking around with half a tooth and a temporary in their mouth. The important appointment is the delivery, getting that final restoration in, which, from a pure statistics standpoint, doesn't even register as "production." When you start bumping those non-production delivery appointments to squeeze in more production before month's end, you're bumping the appointment that actually matters most to that patient just so the office can hit a number. That's the wrong focus.
If someone asked, "well Jeff, how do we hit our production goal then?" my honest answer is figure it out. Maybe you bring people in on a Friday morning to get a prep done while still delivering everything you'd already scheduled to deliver. There's always a way to work it out, but these goals go wrong specifically when the focus shifts entirely onto the number instead of what that number represents, patients actually getting the treatment they need. That's worth keeping your staff grounded in as a general rule, because of how a couple of related things tend to play out.
Say you see 20 patients in a day, you're a solo practitioner with a hygienist. Nineteen of them are perfectly nice, normal people, some genuinely happy with the work you did that day, just friendly and polite. One person is a total nightmare. Who does everybody end up talking about in the office that day? The nightmare patient. Who's the front desk discussing at lunch, "can you believe what that guy did?" The nightmare patient. Who are you venting to your spouse about that night? The person who was genuinely awful to you and your staff. We have a natural human tendency to focus on the negative.
What can happen from there is you start to feel like everybody's like that. Your scheduler takes a couple of bad calls, your receptionist fields a couple of rude ones, or you're doing reactivation calls and a few people are unpleasant, and you start to feel like your whole patient base is difficult. That gives you a distorted picture of what your patients are actually like, because I can tell you, without even knowing your specific practice, the vast majority of your patients are good people. Sure, they're all over the map, some happy, some having a rough day, but the large majority are genuinely good people.
So one important thing to do with your staff, which also helps keep them grounded in why they're there in the first place, is to actively share your wins, your successes with patients. At MGE, we open every seminar by having clients share their wins from the past month, their stats, a new office manager they hired, something that went really well. It's funny, we've had newer clients ask, half-joking, "did you pay that doctor to say that?" We didn't, and I'm sure someone listening still won't believe me, but we didn't. For our team, hearing that genuinely matters as much as, if not more than, pay. It shows me I'm making an impact, that my team is making an impact, it shows everyone here that what we're doing matters, and it just feels good. It's also good for other clients to hear, especially newer ones, it shows them success is actually possible.
You want to do the same thing with your own staff. That patient who was overjoyed when you seated their new veneers, who cried and gave you a hug, share that with the team, so they know what they're doing genuinely matters, because it does. Dentistry is a genuinely noble profession, you're not just restoring function and aesthetics, you're improving people's oral health, which we know affects systemic health too. You're doing something good, and your employees should know that, not just in the abstract, but through specific, individual wins as they happen in the practice. Because then you start to see the fuller picture: yes, there was that one difficult patient, but look at all these other wins, we're genuinely doing something good here. If you let the team fixate purely on the one difficult person, they'll start to believe your entire patient base is like that, and they're not.
So yes, share the stats with your staff, they should know what the practice's numbers actually are, because then they can see whether they're hitting them, and whether the practice is healthy. Ideally, every member of your team has a statistic that represents what they're actually producing, and you want to make sure the focus stays on what that number represents, not the number in isolation. Production represents treatment started. Collections represent treatment that's been paid for, people actually getting the care they needed.
Now, what numbers wouldn't I share? A couple. I wouldn't share profit, and I wouldn't get specific about overhead. Those two are obviously closely related, and here's why. There's a funny dynamic that happens in groups, we talk about this specifically in the Financial Planning and Profitability seminar in the Power program. You could have the best dental staff on the planet, and say your overhead is $60,000 a month, and you collect $120,000 that month. If you sat your team down and said, "folks, our overhead is $60,000, and we just collected $120,000, I've got an extra $60,000, what should we do with it," and gave them three options, save it and pay down debt, give everyone a big bonus, or invest in a bunch of new equipment, I guarantee you, as a group, they are not going to suggest saving it and paying down debt. They're going to want the big bonus, or want you to spend it on new equipment, branded toothbrushes, branded bags for patients after visits, that kind of thing. They'll want to spend the money, that's just what happens, and it has nothing to do with them being bad people.
So when it comes to sharing overhead specifically, there are a couple things to think through. I'm fully in favor of giving bonuses, but if your actual overhead is $60,000, that's the number that just gets you out the door, covers everything right to the edge. I wouldn't start paying bonuses the moment you cross $60,001. If my overhead were $60,000, I'd probably set the bonus threshold somewhere around $80,000, because there will always be variable expenses, especially in a month where you produce or collect a lot, costs tend to run a little higher than expected. That extra $10,000 to $20,000 buffer, getting you to that $80,000 mark, absorbs those variable costs.
So as far as the team is concerned, I'd frame it as: here's our overhead, and in order to pay bonuses, we pay out a certain percentage, say 10 to 14 percent, of anything collected over $80,000. Your real overhead is $60,000, but as far as the team knows, it's around $80,000, and the bonus threshold is $80,000. Anything over that pays out 14 percent. If you collected $120,000, that's $40,000 over the bonus threshold, and 14 percent of $40,000 works out to $5,600 to divide among the team, however you've structured shares. We do have a handout on this as part of the Power program, just some basic bonus plan ideas, I'll put a link on the episode webpage if you'd like to download it, it's a simple write-up on how to structure something like this. But the important thing, if you're going to do this, is that your bonus threshold needs to sit meaningfully above your actual overhead.
So to be clear: I will absolutely share production, collections, and new patient goals with the team, along with where we stand against them month to date, in any staff meeting or morning huddle, the team's going to know exactly where we are. What I won't share is the exact overhead number. Instead, I'll say our bonus threshold starts at $80,000, and here's how the payout works above that, divided based on whatever share structure you've set up, which you can find in that handout if you want to build one out.
So, to answer the original question again, simply: yes, I would absolutely share the numbers. I hope this made clear why we think it matters, and we genuinely encourage our clients to do it, it shows progress, or the lack of it. Just remember, the most important thing is keeping people focused not on the number itself, but on what that number actually represents, someone getting treatment they genuinely need. That's really what this is all about.
I hope this helped. If you have any questions or would like some help, we offer a free practice consultation, you can schedule one by calling us at (800) 640-1140 or visiting us online at mgeonline.com. And if you have a second, we'd really appreciate a follow. The whole purpose of starting this podcast was to give the industry things you could apply right away, the same things we teach MGE clients, some of the most successful dentists in the US and Canada, at no charge, purely to help. If you wouldn't mind hitting subscribe or follow, we'd appreciate it more than you know.
That's all I have for this week. I hope this helped, and we'll see you at next week's episode.