Ep. 63: Transitioning from Chairside to CEO
At some point in your career, would you like to spend less time chairside? In other words, would you like associates to do the day-to-day production while you manage from a CEO role? Maybe it’s so you can focus on expanding and adding more locations. Maybe it’s so you can be flexible with your time and travel more. Maybe it’s so you can semi-retire while still having a successful practice. Whatever your motivation may be, in this episode Jeff discusses how it can work and what it takes to get there.
Topics:
:46 – The basic business structure
5:20 – Why hygiene is one of the main keys to doing this successfully
15:15 – Adding an associate doctor the right way
24:32 – That final step of transitioning away from chairside
27:30 – Maintaining oversight on as the owner/CEO
Links:
The MGE New Patient Workshop - https://www.newpatients.net
The MGE Communication & Sales Seminars - https://www.mgeonline.com/abc
The Dental Treatment Coordinator Training Course - https://ddssuccess.com/p/treatment-coordinator-training-course
Free consultation - https://www.mgeonline.com/free-practice-analysis
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Questions From This Episode
What is the sales and production doctor model, and how does it actually work?
The owner doctor becomes a dedicated sales doctor, personally presenting nearly all treatment plans while keeping only a small amount of clinical work, larger cases or implant placements once or twice a week, and one or more associate doctors, the production doctors, perform the bulk of the actual dentistry that gets sold. It's not simply handing an associate the leftover work nobody wants, the associate is functioning as an extension of the owner's own production.
Why does it take building up volume in three specific areas before this model can actually work?
Every business, including a dental practice, has to sell, deliver, and bring in new customers to sell and deliver to, and a solo practitioner typically hasn't built enough volume in all three to support a dedicated sales doctor and a fully busy associate at the same time. The first steps are strengthening case acceptance, increasing new patient flow, and building out hygiene, since hygiene is both a recurring revenue source and the engine that generates the referrals and outstanding treatment a sales doctor will eventually need to sell.
Why is 22 to 25 percent of production actually a fair and attractive rate to pay a production doctor, even though it's lower than a traditional associate's pay?
A traditional associate is doing their own selling, their own scheduling, and typically only getting the smaller cases the owner doesn't want, so 30 to 35 percent of a modest volume still nets a modest income. A production doctor is simply handed fully sold, high value treatment plans and only has to perform the clinical work, so 22 to 25 percent of a much larger volume, sometimes $80,000 or more a month, actually nets considerably more money for genuinely more enjoyable work.
Why can one sales doctor typically support more than one production doctor?
Presenting and closing a large treatment plan, say ten crowns and two root canals, might only take 20 to 40 minutes, while actually performing that same treatment takes hours and hours of chair time. That enormous gap between how long it takes to sell a case versus deliver it means one doctor's selling capacity can usually keep two or three production doctors fully busy, assuming there's enough new patient and hygiene volume behind it.
Once a doctor has fully phased out of chairside and sales, what oversight should they still maintain, and why?
Real financial oversight, oversight of overall practice statistics, and periodic clinical oversight, spot-checking lab cases and outcomes roughly once a month, since a marketing mistake is fixable in weeks and a sales mistake in a day, but a clinical problem takes far longer to fix and does lasting damage to a practice's reputation. The goal is real freedom and control over your time, not walking away entirely, since an unmonitored business is the fastest way to lose everything that was built.