Four Tips For Starting a Dental Clinic

But before you set up shop and open your doors to patients, there are some key steps to take on the road to success. Becoming a business owner can be thrilling, lucrative, and professionally enriching, but it can also be a risky venture when you aren’t fully prepared. To ensure that your clinic is a success, follow these Four Tips For Starting a Dental Clinic.

1. Do some homework.
Talk with current practice owners about what challenges they faced, what they did to prevail, and what (if anything) they would do differently today. Once you’re comfortable with the challenges you’re likely to face, you’re ready to move on to tip No. 2.

2. Build a network of trusted advisers.
Starting on the day you decide to start a practice, you’ll meet many people. As you filter through all the advice and various relationships you’ll establish, it is important to team yourself with industry-specific advisers who will help you with the many crucial decisions you’ll make.

3. Determine Your Resource Needs
One of the more challenging aspects of running your dental clinic is anticipating its needs before your doors open. For example, will you require a full staff? Do you need a full suite of new dental equipment? Some new dental practices fail by taking on too much too quickly, so it’s best to start slow and build your practice as it expands naturally. You may find it beneficial to speak to an established practice owner about their experience, and learn what type of resources they had in place when they first opened. Remember that you can always scale up, but it’s much harder to scale down.

4. Establish professional and practice goals.
Goals can be short-term, moderate-term or long-term, and are really just targets that are achievable and measurable. Once you establish a goal, the measureable component will help you stay focused and force you to adjust and reinvent ways to achieve it. Professional goals can set the bar for a certain number of new patients per week or month, the number of hygiene appointments, a dollar amount for monthly production or collections, and so on. Be disciplined, as only you are responsible for the overall performance of your business. A simple tool of having specific goals for you and your team may make the difference of success or challenges.