Ep. 19: What an Office Manager Does and Why You Need One
In the dental industry at large, the term “Office Manager” can have a lot of meanings, ranging from a vague “front office person” to a true executive or Chief Operating Officer. So in this episode, Jeff Blumberg discusses the proper role of an Office Manager in a well-organized office and why every practice, no matter how large or small, needs a competent OM.
Topics:
:55 – Why you absolutely need an Office Manager
4:23 – 10 qualities you should look for in an Office Manager candidate
7:07 – Where do you find an Office Manager?
10:54 – The Doctor - Office Manager dynamic: What are the Doctor’s responsibilities and what are the OM’s responsibilities?
Links:
The MGE Communication & Sales Seminars - https://www.mgeonline.com/abc
Learn more about MGE – https://www.mgeonline.com
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Questions From This Episode
What does an office manager actually do, in MGE's definition?
The office manager functions as the CEO of the practice, with the doctor as the board of directors. They manage, lead, solve problems, hire, train, and onboard staff, and drive growth in the business, planning and running day to day operations so the doctor's goals actually get met.
Do I really need a dedicated office manager if my practice is small?
Yes. Office size doesn't change the need, only how the role gets structured. In a smaller practice, the manager may also wear other hats, like treatment coordinator or scheduler, but they should still have real management responsibility. As the practice grows, those other duties get handed off to new hires until the manager becomes full time in that role.
What qualities actually matter most when choosing someone for this role?
Ten stand out: being solution oriented, comfortable directing others, able to command attention and respect, highly productive, a fast learner, ambitious and driven, always improving themselves, unafraid of hard work, trustworthy, and above all, responsible, meaning they reliably follow through on what they say they'll do, often faster or better than expected.
Does an office manager need prior dental experience?
No. Some of the best office managers came from completely unrelated fields, including a former Federal Reserve economist who helped grow his spouse's oral surgery practice from around 300,000 dollars a year to 3 or 4 million. What matters far more than industry background is being a fast learner with the core qualities to develop into an executive.
What's the actual difference between the doctor's job and the office manager's job?
The doctor sets clinical standards, practice goals, office policy, and oversees finances, while managing the manager and staying involved in key hiring decisions. The office manager runs day to day operations: scheduling, collections, hiring and training staff, proposing policy, and keeping the doctor updated. In short, the manager runs the business, and the doctor focuses on selling and delivering dentistry.
Episode Transcript
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If you were to do a deep dive to find out more about every MGE client who is really killing it in their practice, one of the first things you'd notice is that they have an amazing office manager, someone who's an excellent executive and really knows what they're doing.
If you're an MGE client, when I say office manager, you know exactly what I'm talking about. You know what they're supposed to do, what you would expect of them, and that you're absolutely supposed to have one, it's not optional. If you're not an MGE client, the term office manager in the dental industry can mean any number of things, similar to treatment coordinator. It really depends on the office, it might be a senior receptionist, a senior front desk person, or the bookkeeper.
So what I want to talk about in this week's episode is why you absolutely need an office manager, what the position is, how we define it here at MGE, what qualities this person should have, what they're actually supposed to be doing, and the whole doctor and office manager dynamic. My name is Jeff Blumberg, and I'm your host.
Let's start with why you need a manager. Look at how a private dental practice is constructed from a business perspective. The one person you can't be without in a dental office is the dentist. The dentist is normally a trained clinician who opens a business, and now has to run a business, while also being the primary service provider in that practice, since technically you could run a dental practice with no hygienist at all. I don't recommend it, but it's possible.
So the doctor, who owns the business, is also the primary producer, the primary servicer, the primary maker of the product or service. Your time as that producer is best spent chairside, that's what you should be doing. So if you're chairside, say, seven clinical hours a day, four or five days a week, while that's happening, who is running the business? You might have decent administrative staff, but if you don't have a manager, nobody is actually managing.
Part of why this even gets treated as acceptable is a misunderstanding of what managing actually means. Managing is dynamic, it's happening constantly in real time. It's someone making sure things that are supposed to get done are getting done, that objectives are being met, and that when something breaks down, it gets fixed. There's no way to be the doctor and the manager at the same time.
So when there's no office manager, you typically see one of two scenarios: either the doctor is hoping the front desk staff, none of whom have been given actual management authority, are somehow keeping things on track, or the doctor is trying to manage while also being a doctor, which directly hampers their ability to produce.
Think about it this way: how much are you worth to your business per hour when you're actually producing as a dentist? Anywhere from 500 to 1,000 dollars or more per hour, depending on the type of dentistry. There's no way it's ever cost effective for you to also be a full time manager, since you're never going to pay an office manager anywhere near that hourly rate. You could have a great office manager earning six figures, and you're still nowhere close to what your own chair time is worth, and frankly, if they're earning that much, the practice should be doing very well.
So that's the core point: you have to have a manager. Without one, it's not just that nobody's watching the store, nobody's actually running it. Nobody is making sure the things you wanted accomplished are actually getting accomplished.
The way we view it at MGE, the office manager is essentially the CEO of the practice, and the doctor is the board of directors. The manager is expected to manage, lead, solve problems, hire, train, onboard new staff, and drive growth in the business. That's the basic definition.
So what kind of person are you actually looking for? You could imagine all kinds of criteria, but here's the thing, it's usually not what people think they should be looking for. When I first talk to a new client about hiring an office manager, I often hear qualities that aren't actually critical to success: they need a certain amount of dental experience, they need to be mature, whatever that means exactly, I've gone back and forth on that one for years, they need to be serious. There are a lot of assumptions about the right attitude for a manager, and many people overlook some of the most important basics.
So here are ten qualities to actually look for in an office manager, since this person is going to function as an executive.
Number one, they're solution oriented. If everything you ask them to handle turns into a problem, that's not a great sign. Number two, they're willing to direct other people, some people simply can't do that as a manager. Number three, they command attention, compliance, and respect, respect specifically is earned over time, but they need the basic potential for it.
Number four, and this is one of the most important, they're genuinely productive. Capable of working hard and producing real volume, not just medium or mediocre output. Over time, they should be able to competently perform essentially any non-clinical job in the practice.
Number five, they learn fast. You can usually tell by training them on something and seeing whether they pick it up quickly and execute it correctly, since they're eventually going to be training other people themselves. Number six, they're ambitious and driven, you're hiring this person to help grow your business, so you want someone who also wants to grow.
Number seven, they're always looking for ways to improve themselves. Number eight, they aren't afraid of hard work or business growth, if someone's looking for a cushy job where they can coast, that's not your ideal candidate. Number nine, they're trustworthy.
Number ten, and the most important one, they're responsible. If you gave this person, whether it's your dental assistant, a front desk team member, or a hygienist, something to handle, did they actually pull it off exactly as expected, maybe even faster? Did they follow through completely rather than just saying they would and not delivering? That level of reliability is what you're really looking for.
So where do you actually find someone like this? Some of these qualities develop over time, but in my experience, many of the best office managers in our program were already working in the practice. Former dental assistants, former hygienists, front desk staff who worked their way up and got promoted into the role. Those are consistently some of the strongest managers.
The other common path, and yes, people say you shouldn't work with your spouse, but a lot of MGE clients do successfully, is bringing in a husband or wife from an entirely different industry to run the practice. We've had clients whose spouses came from banking, Wall Street, or senior corporate roles. Jeff Santone, our client executive here at MGE, spent years building his wife's oral surgery practice as her office manager, taking it from around 300,000 dollars a year to 3 or 4 million, and he came from the Federal Reserve as an economist.
Which gets to the next point: prior dental experience isn't actually necessary, if someone's a fast learner, they'll pick it up quickly. And the whole don't work with your spouse idea, we've disproven that repeatedly, it can actually work really well, having someone else fully invested in building the business alongside you.
But it doesn't have to be a spouse. It could be someone already on your team, your chairside assistant, someone already up front. If they have the basic raw material, the core qualities, you can train them into someone who genuinely delivers, and part of that training is executive development, which is why our core program at MGE, the Power program, is essentially executive training built for both the office manager and the doctor together.
Before I get into how the doctor and manager dynamic actually works, one interesting point worth mentioning. We've had plenty of doctors over the years ask, why do I need executive training if I'm going to have an office manager, can't you just train them? Consider what the doctor's actual job becomes at that point: managing the manager. If you're not trained as an executive yourself, it becomes very difficult to bring an executive up to speed or effectively manage one you've trained. That's why when we train a manager, we train the doctor around the same time as well.
Now, people often assume office manager only makes sense for a large practice, that's not true. Say you have a smaller office, four chairs, you, a hygienist, one or two dental assistants, and two front desk staff, and you designate one of them as the manager. That's a great move. That person may still wear other hats, treatment coordinator, scheduling, but they're also managing part of the time, because their head is above water and they can actually see what's happening in the practice, rather than being buried chairside.
We've seen this play out repeatedly: someone starts as manager, scheduler, and treatment coordinator all at once, then hands off scheduling as the practice grows, remains manager and treatment coordinator for a while, then trains a dedicated treatment coordinator once that role demands too much time on its own, and eventually becomes a full time manager. Office size doesn't matter, you start with a manager and build outward from there.
So how does the doctor-manager dynamic actually work day to day? As the doctor and owner, you're ultimately responsible for the business, so you need to be an executive yourself, specifically one who's managing the manager. What are you handling as the doctor? Maintaining excellent clinical care, setting the practice's goals, not just financial targets but expansion plans, mission, and long term direction. You set or at minimum approve office policy, oversee finances, manage the manager directly, and stay involved in hiring, especially for any provider or assistant you'll be working with directly.
What is the office manager handling? Planning and running the practice day to day, scheduling, collections, and making sure the numbers and statistics track toward the goals you've set. Hiring, training, and when necessary, firing staff. Proposing policy, sometimes drafting it for your approval, and staying in close communication with you to make sure your expectations are actually being met. There's more to it than this, but that covers the basics, alongside maintaining strong customer service, keeping the office running efficiently, and handling staff conflict.
As for the actual working relationship, weekly meetings to review progress against practice goals and handle any pressing business, hiring or firing decisions, and so on, work well. Daily coordination in the mornings around that day's objectives, touching base at the morning production meeting and throughout the day, and regular monthly, quarterly, or yearly meetings focused specifically on growth.
But stepping back, the simple version is this: the office manager runs the business, and the doctor focuses on selling and delivering dentistry.
Now let's walk this forward. Say you've built this out and grown a genuinely strong practice, which we've seen plenty of clients do, and now you want to add locations, step back from chairside a bit, or reduce your hours, any combination of those. The manager keeps managing regardless. And if you end up with two, three, or four locations, each needing its own manager, this original manager may naturally elevate into a senior manager role overseeing the others.
I know I moved through that quickly, but here's why I wanted to bring it up: you can never get back lost time. When clients come through the MGE Communication and Sales Seminars, where they work on improving treatment acceptance, I'll link that on the episode page if you want details, it's routine to see a 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 dollar or larger monthly increase the following month, and that increase tends to hold. The average increase per client, if I recall correctly, is about 288,000 dollars a year.
When you ask these clients what changed, did you add staff to get that increase, no. Did you run a bunch of new promotion, sure, but nothing's even come in from it yet, these things take time to generate leads. So what actually changed? Patients started wanting the treatment they actually needed and paying for it. Instead of only the two crowns insurance would cover, they're doing all six.
The point is, that treatment demand was always there. Most of these initial jumps come directly from existing patients of record. That extra 30,000 dollars a month they're now making was already available a year earlier, the practice arguably should have already been making it. Once that time has passed, it's gone. They're recovering it now, but imagine if they'd started a year sooner.
This isn't meant to create regret about not starting earlier. The point is that when you have an effective manager running your practice, you're not just more productive, profitable, and successful, you're also actually progressing toward the goals you set out for your career in the first place. How long is the average dental career, 30-plus years? How long do you actually want to be working at full intensity? Most people would like to reach financial independence in their early 50s, working because they want to rather than because they have to. Getting there happens a lot faster when someone is genuinely responsible for running your business.
That's what I wanted to cover this week, I hope it helps clarify what your office manager should be and what this role should actually be capable of. If you have questions or want more information, call us at MGE, 800-640-1140, or find us online at mgeonline.com. I've linked everything discussed in this episode on the episode webpage.
Also, as a quick aside, we've added a comment section to our episode webpage. If you have suggestions or feedback, I get notified directly when something's posted there, and I'd genuinely love to hear from you. Last thing: if you enjoyed this episode and want to hear more like it, don't forget to subscribe, it genuinely helps, and we appreciate it more than you'd know. That does it for this week's episode, we'll see you next week.