Ep. 21: Weekly Management Meetings
When you get busy with patients, it’s hard to make time for keeping up with the “business side” of dentistry. So in this episode, Jeff covers how to quickly and effectively handle the important management matters each week and ensure your practice stays on track toward achieving your goals.
Topics:
1:06 – Why it’s important to hold a weekly meeting with your OM
5:44 – The practice statistics you should review each week
12:13 – Other important points to cover when you meet
Links:
Learn more about MGE - https://www.mgeonline.com
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Questions From This Episode
Why should the doctor and office manager meeting happen weekly instead of monthly or quarterly?
A week is a short enough window to catch problems while there's still time to fix them. If a practice is targeting 100,000 dollars for the month and the doctor doesn't check in until the 23rd, discovering collections are only at 45,000 leaves almost no runway to correct course. Weekly check-ins would have flagged a slow first week early enough to actually redirect effort and still hit the monthly goal.
What are the four things covered in this weekly meeting?
Office statistics, the next two weeks of schedule as it relates to the month, financial and personnel matters, and marketing performance, both new patient marketing and outreach to existing patients. Each area ends with concrete action items for the week ahead rather than just a status update.
What six statistics should a practice track weekly, and why do those specific ones matter?
Production, collections, and new patients are the familiar three. Beyond those, track treatment plans presented versus accepted in dollar value, new patient calls including shopper calls, and recall appointments specifically, not total hygiene visits. Recall appointments in particular are the practice's real growth statistic, since that number should climb steadily if new patients are actually being retained rather than quietly falling off the schedule.
Why look two weeks ahead in the schedule instead of just the current week?
Because the more advance notice you have on a scheduling gap, the easier it is to actually fill. A cancellation discovered the same day is far harder to address than an opening spotted two weeks out. Reviewing the next two weeks together lets the doctor and office manager flag empty blocks early and intentionally route upcoming treatment presentations into them.
How should marketing be reviewed in this meeting to avoid wasting money on underperforming channels?
Compare calls and conversions across every active channel, postcards, newsletters, Facebook ads, Google ads, on a weekly basis rather than waiting for a campaign to fully fail before addressing it. Ad performance naturally declines over time, so catching a channel's decline early, say Google pay-per-click ads that have been running unchanged for weeks, allows for a quick refresh before response rates drop significantly.
Episode Transcript
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Your schedule has time built in for clinical procedures, and hopefully, as I covered all the way back in episode one, time built in for treatment presentations too, since you're not going to produce much if there's never time to actually present treatment. But have you built management time into your schedule? If you're like the average practice, you haven't, and that's a real problem, because without dedicated management time, there's no mechanism to actually confirm your practice is on track to hit its long-term goals.
That's what I want to cover this week: a simple format for a weekly doctor and office manager meeting, so the two of you can make sure what you've actually intended for the practice is what's actually happening. My name is Jeff Blumberg, and I'm your host.
Let's jump right in. The first question I usually get from a newer client is, why weekly? Shouldn't this be monthly, quarterly, or annual instead? You can absolutely still hold an annual meeting, a good venue for laying out yearly goals, and quarterly check-ins are valuable too. But we recommend a weekly cadence specifically because management tends to only happen when time happens to present itself, which in practice usually means never, or only once something has already gone seriously wrong.
Meeting weekly keeps you genuinely on top of what's happening, and that shorter interval lets you catch problems while they're still small. Here's a concrete example: say your monthly collections goal is 100,000 dollars, and you're not meeting regularly. You happen to catch your office manager on the 23rd and ask how things stand, only to find you're at 45,000 dollars. With just a week left in the month, there's very little room left to fix that. Had you been meeting weekly, you'd have known after week one that the practice was only at 15,000 dollars, early enough to actually take corrective action and still land closer to your goal.
So how do we actually structure this weekly meeting? I want to give you a genuinely basic format here. Some of our more advanced clients, especially those who've completed the MGE Power Program, run a more sophisticated version of this. But if this is your very first exposure to any of this, I want to keep it simple enough that you can start using it immediately after listening to this episode.
First, it needs a fixed schedule, same time, every single week, week in and week out. The only acceptable exception is a holiday or being out of the office. This matters more than it might seem. One of the biggest reasons new initiatives fail in a practice isn't that the idea itself was bad, it's a lack of consistent follow-through.
Take a referral card program as an example. You introduce it enthusiastically at a staff meeting, everyone's on board, cards go out for a week or two. It comes up again at the next staff meeting, maybe engagement has already started slipping. By the following meeting, life has taken over and it's quietly forgotten. Months later you find a stray stack of cards in a drawer and wonder what happened. The program itself wasn't the problem, nobody kept actively reinforcing it.
The same principle applies to any new routine, a morning huddle, for instance, needs to happen at the same time daily without fail. Do it consistently long enough, and eventually skipping it feels stranger to the team than doing it. Do it inconsistently, three times, then a gap, then an attempt to restart, and it never escapes that awkward, easily-abandoned new-habit phase. The same logic applies directly to this doctor and office manager meeting: same time, every week, no exceptions beyond genuine unavailability.
Block off 30 minutes to an hour weekly for this. You'll be executing on action items throughout the week, but this specific block is where you decide how the ship is actually being steered, and where you make any necessary course corrections.
There are four things to cover in this meeting: office statistics, the next two weeks of schedule as it relates to the month, financial and personnel matters, and marketing, both new patient acquisition and outreach to your existing patient base.
Let's start with statistics. You should be keeping an ongoing, graphed record of practice productivity, what we call managing by statistics here at MGE, a genuinely deep subject, our average Power Program client spends 11 full days training specifically on this. Statistic management is far more than just charting numbers, it's knowing what action to actually take when a graph starts behaving a certain way. But at minimum, plot your key statistics weekly as a line graph so you can see clearly whether the trend is climbing or declining. Running a practice without tracking statistics is a bit like driving with all your instrumentation locked in the trunk, no speedometer, no fuel gauge, no idea what's actually happening until something goes badly wrong.
Beyond the familiar three, production, collections, and new patients, tracked weekly against the prior week and the week before that, I'd recommend three additional weekly statistics. First, treatment plans presented versus accepted, in dollar value. If you present 100,000 dollars in treatment and 20,000 dollars gets accepted, that's your ratio. Accepted specifically means the patient is doing it now, not that they've agreed to do part of it eventually. If you present six crowns and a patient does two now while saying they'll do the remaining four over the next couple of years, that's two accepted, not six, since there's no guarantee those future crowns actually happen. We've all had that conversation a year later: ready to do those other crowns? I thought we already did those.
Second, new patient calls, meaning any inbound contact from a prospective new patient, including shopper calls. Someone calling to ask what a crown costs and leaving their name and number while mentioning they're looking for a dentist absolutely counts, whether or not your team successfully converts them into a patient is a separate question we've covered elsewhere. Keeping an actual call log matters here, since without it you can't tell whether your marketing itself is working or whether the real issue is conversion, your marketing's only job is generating the call, converting it is reception's job.
Third, recall appointments specifically, not total hygiene visits generally. This is genuinely your core growth statistic, since it should trend upward over time as new patients get added and retained. These are patients coming in for a routine three, four, or six month recall or periodontal maintenance visit, a standard checkup. This number tells you directly whether the practice is actually growing or quietly shrinking, whether you're adding a day of hygiene each year, holding steady, or struggling to keep even three days consistently filled.
Those are the six core statistics worth tracking from week one. More advanced MGE clients track considerably more, but this is a strong, genuinely usable starting point. Once you're graphing these weekly with your office manager, you're looking together at what's climbing, what's declining, and what needs a course correction, especially relative to your longer term goals. If you're targeting 1.2 million dollars for the year, roughly 100,000 dollars a month, and you notice collections sitting at only 20,000 dollars by week two, that's your signal to act quickly and dig into why, what does the schedule actually look like, what's really going on.
There's a genuinely deeper layer of executive training behind interpreting statistics well, which is exactly the kind of thing we cover extensively at MGE. But even at a basic level, something interesting happens the moment an employee starts tracking their own statistic, even just a simple graph sitting at their desk, visible if they work with the public, tends to trend upward simply because most people don't want to watch their own number decline. People generally want to demonstrate they're improving, and just making a metric visible tends to nudge it in the right direction on its own.
So that's the statistics portion, reviewing what's underperforming, what's working well, and setting concrete action items for the week ahead in each area. Next: the upcoming two weeks of schedule, specifically as it relates to the current month. Even in the final week of a month, you're still looking two weeks out, since scheduling gaps are always easier to fix the earlier you spot them. A same-day cancellation is genuinely difficult to fill, one you catch two weeks in advance is far more manageable.
Reviewing the next two weeks together lets you notice, for instance, a two hour opening in your primary treatment time next Thursday morning, or a completely empty Monday the following week. That visibility turns into concrete action: as you present treatment over the coming days, you can intentionally route a case that fits well into that specific opening, keeping the whole team coordinated and aligned on the plan.
Third: financial and personnel matters. This is where you address a hygienist asking for a raise, review it together, and follow up the next week with a decision. Where you plan ahead for a scheduler who's relocating and needs to be replaced. Where you address an underperforming assistant and decide whether coaching or replacement is the right path, or recognize you're busy enough to justify a new hire. These conversations produce concrete action items too, place an ad, make a specific call, follow up on a specific issue. The entire value of a dedicated weekly meeting is that these decisions get made proactively together, rather than whenever a spare moment happens to present itself during a busy week. This is also the natural place to discuss any equipment purchases or broader financial matters affecting the practice.
Fourth: marketing. This connects directly back to your new patient statistic, but deserves its own closer look. Say you're running four active channels, postcards, a newsletter, Facebook ads, and Google ads. This is where you review calls and conversions generated by each, using your new patient log, and identify what's genuinely working versus what isn't, catching underperformance early rather than waiting for a channel to fail outright before addressing it.
For example, reviewing this with your office manager, you might find postcards and the newsletter performing well, while Google pay-per-click has quietly stalled. Digging in, you realize the same ad creative has been running unchanged for several weeks, and ad performance naturally erodes over time. That's your cue to refresh the creative and recover response rates, addressed proactively on a weekly cadence rather than after the channel has already gone cold.
Wrap up each meeting with a concrete action item list for the coming week. A brief daily check-in, even five minutes each morning, helps track progress against those items, so that when you reconvene the following week, you're comparing real notes on what actually got done, not just discussing the same intentions again. Done consistently, this is how the things you genuinely want to accomplish for the long-term health of the practice actually happen, rather than just handling day-to-day patient traffic and treatment presentations without ever stepping back to manage the bigger picture.
Keep it simple to start. I hope this helps, and this is genuinely something you can begin using immediately. If you have any questions, call us at MGE at 800-640-1140 or visit us online at mgeonline.com. You can also visit the podcast website at dentalbusinessrx.com if you'd like to leave feedback or comments. Otherwise, folks, I hope you do great, and I'll see you at the next episode.