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Are you ready to take a refreshing and practical look at the business side of your career? In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Shahin Safarian, a seasoned dentist, entrepreneur, and coach who urges private sector dentists to embrace financial literacy. Shahin's insightful perspective draws a connection between understanding key financial metrics and improving both patient care and business efficiency, a concept often overlooked in the profession.
In the second half of the episode, we delve into the pressing need for innovation in dental practices. Not just the technical aspect, there's an often ignored realm of lead generation, patient engagement and operational optimization that can propel your practice to new heights. Dr. Shahin softens the intimidation factor around modernizing workflows and systems in such a traditional profession, making it sound not just attainable, but also essential.
What You'll Learn in This Episode:
Don’t let the finances of your dental practice intimidate you. Dive into this conversation with Dr. Shahin and start making informed financial decisions for your practice today!
Sponsors:
For high quality AND affordable dental supply options, visit The Dentists Supply Company(TDSC) website today! Our listeners get a special deal - 25% off on orders over $500 - Just type in the special code: TDM25 at checkout for your exclusive offer. AND if you're a member of your state's Dental Association, you may be eligible for additional savings upon providing your ADA number. Click or copy and paste the link here to save today! https://www.tdsc.com/
You can reach out to Dr. Shahin Safarian here:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drshahinsafarian/
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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drshahinsafarian
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Michael: Hey, Shahin, so talk to us. What's one piece of advice you can give us this Monday morning?
Shahin: Well, first of all, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate the time and the opportunity. this notion we're talking private sector, we're talking practitioners that want to stay in the private sector.
So we're not talking DSOs, we're not talking DPOs, we're not talking multiple practices and. multiple associates and 25 or 30 plus employees in a single small business, in a single dental practice, small business in the private sector. What you need to focus on is you need to focus on your financial numbers.
The health of your business trumps everything else. and the more old school or, or seasoned dentists that, you know, got licensed in the eighties and the nineties, and maybe even a little bit later, Their thought process is that we need to focus on the patients and the patients come first. Well, I tend to say, yes, patients certainly have value when you're working in your business, but when you're working on your business, everything, is trumped by the health of your business.
And that comes from your financial numbers. So If you are a private dentist in the private sector, you want to focus on understanding your financial numbers. And that's really most important because if you have a healthy business, you'll be much better capable and able to take care of your patients in your community at the highest quality possible.
If you're in a stressed environment and you have financial stress in a business. And you have to try to meet payroll. You have to try to pay rent. It becomes a lot more complicated as far as the efficiency and patient experience of what, um, your patient and your community will experience at your practice.
Michael: Okay. So then, break it down for us. What's the health benefit? And what does it healthy look like?
Shahin: Yeah. So, you know, there, there's a lot of notions as far as what you need to net out of a practice. Ideally, you want to net at least 30 percent as a private practitioner or more. ideally you want to get, I mean, even some of the more seasoned dentists that really understand how to efficiently run their business.
they're over 50 percent on their net, from their practice. So if you are in a practice, it's a million dollars. Do you want to be in a situation where you're netting 200, 000 or you're netting 400, 000? That comes a lot from the practical components of how much attention you pay attention to the financial numbers.
So I would say minimum you want to be 30 percent net, um, out of your, uh, business.
Michael: So then what financial numbers should we start paying attention to right now? If we're listening to this and we're thinking, okay, I have a analytic software, we're looking at the numbers. What do we got to pay attention to?
Shahin: Yeah. Look at your expense report. Um, and so there's the practice analysis software that if you've been in business for three to five years, you should incorporate, um, but you also have to look at your bookkeeping and your expense reports and the key number that you want to pay attention to right out of the gate is payroll.
Um, payroll is one thing that's really out of control in most dental practices that we're discussing here today. Okay. So, um, I think that's a really important component of, what you need to pay attention to. First, that's your biggest expense. Then obviously you've got to deal with rent. You've got to have a distinction between fixed expense and variable expense.
Fixed expenses are payroll, are your rent, are your office loans or business loans that you're holding every month that you have to pay out, to every single month. Variable expenses are a little bit more your marketing, your supplies and, and some other, factors that come in, but you have to really pay attention to, to payroll.
I think that's one key component that a lot of doctors are really overlooking. And what ends up happening is complacency comes into play, empathetic. Doctors are paying attention to the, employees that they've had longterm in their practice. And so we have to understand again, financial numbers trump everything else.
The business health trumps everything else. If the numbers don't make sense, it's time for you to make some decisions.
Michael: That's interesting. So then when it comes to the payroll, being out of control. What is out of control? What have you seen?
Shahin: Yeah, so, one key metric that a doctor needs to pay attention to is production per hour.
what their production per hour is dictates a lot about a practice. And you want to target being 600 per hour plus. if you're a private practice owner and you're at 300 an hour, 400 an hour, you're not really running a very efficient business. You want to be a macro producer. And there's a lot of discussion in this, and we don't have enough time to get into all the details, but.
An important metric to pay attention to is when I am clinically in the practice, what is my production per hour? And we notice that if your production per hour is low, payroll is going to go up. And so many times what we recommend is you have to be innovative. In order to create ideas in order to grow your business, or the other option, obviously, is you don't have to be open five days a week in order to hit your production.
If you're producing Um, 400 an hour and you're coming home at, you know, 3, 000 days, five days a week, you can do that in three or three and a half days, you don't need to be open five days a week that automatically reduces your payroll.
Michael: You mentioned being innovative to grow your practice. What have you seen where they're like, wow, that's, that's innovative?
Shahin: Yeah. So there's not much innovation in doctors. Um, and unfortunately the reason is, is because we're not business owners. We're not, we're not built and developed as a business owner or clinician. So many times what we end up doing when we want to learn to be innovative, we go and learn more clinical dentistry.
But the reality is, is to be innovative means. Things like this. How do I build a system or an operation in my business to where I'm able to maximize. lead generation at the top of the funnel. We're talking now sales funnel. How do I maximize lead generation? How do I maximize my ability to engage with the leads?
How do I optimize that engagement to convert into new patients in my practice? And how do I optimize those new patients to say yes to me? And so that system or that operation is basically. Pretty much nonexistent in most private practices. So one of the things that I would highly recommend on the innovation side is you've got to upgrade your business to 2024, which is where we are today.
Still, many practices are lacking the systems. The technology and the software in order to run an efficient operation. And so that's the first thing is really take a look inside your operations and see where you're lacking, where you're not up to date in what standard practices are today.
upgrade, update yourself, and then build these systems and operations in order to maximize the potential lead generation coming in. Cause at the end of the day, one great way you can grow your business is by getting new patients to say yes to you.
Michael: So if we're looking at our operations right now and our systems, how do we know we need to upgrade it?
For example, if we're like, I'm just going to give you an example, right? I'm going to say some names. So we're like using. Solution reach, right? Like old school solution reach and stuff like that. And there's new software coming out and all these things, but as a practice owner, how do I know, you know what I mean?
Like if I'm not even, so,
Shahin: so let me give you a couple of examples. If you're still traditionally, if you still have a traditional phone system and you don't have a VoIP phone system, you're outdated, meaning. When a new patient calls, they're all centralized in one area or one phone line, you're outdated.
So, what you need to do is create yourself a VoIP phone system. That VoIP phone system will allow you an opportunity to separate. So when you call my office, it will say, if you're a new patient, click one, all other callers click two. Well, here's how it starts. If you're a new patient, you click one, you go into a certain funnel in my business.
There's a different person that's a dental concierge that's going to connect with you. That concierge is going to be an individual that is going to be your point of contact through your patient experience at my office. And so now you have a point of contact, we'll name her Jill, who you can go to every single time when you have administrative questions, insurance questions, scheduling questions, what's next.
questions and financial questions. That is your point of contact. Now in more complicated practices, they'll have obviously an insurance coordinator. So there might be some, some, uh, steps or some others that are going to be involved behind Jill that are going to support you. But that's one thing. The other thing is, is we have to have a phone tracking system.
So we need to be able to listen to phone calls, actually listen to phone calls, not have the phone call software and not listen. So you can have the software and not take advantage of it. That becomes an expense. If you have software and you take advantage of the software and its capabilities, that becomes an investment in your practice.
So you listen to the phone, um, You understand why you have a poor engagement in your front. Desk with the lead generations that are coming in. Remember the only responsibility of a marketing firm Is to generate leads for you and nothing else So everything else as soon as they trigger that lead the marketing firm's job is done Now it's your internal team that takes over and this internal team is a team that the doctor is not innovative enough to understand how to manage How to run like a professional organization.
At the end of the day, the owner is a dentist, but first he's an owner of a corporation. That corporation needs to run like a professional team, which means that dentist owner is the vice president and the general manager of the talent. That he has on his team. Well, how do you manage that talent that's on your team?
What ends up happening is that owner dentist opens a dental practice, forgets about the corporation, forgets about the professional environment, and just wants to practice dentistry, doing the type of dentistry that they want to do. So they open a practice to become self employed. They don't open a practice to run a corporation.
So innovative means this mindset that I am first a CEO of my corporation, and second, I'm a dentist practicing within the corporation. That's why we have a W 2 draw for the owner dentist.
Michael: Interesting. Okay. So that's on the
Shahin: top of the funnel, right? And then it trickles down to so many other factors that we can discuss as well, depending on how much time we have.
Michael: No, yeah, that was, that was wonderful. I appreciate it. Awesome. Shaheen, thank you so much. And if anyone has a further questions or concerns, where can they reach out to you?
Shahin: Yeah. Just follow me at Dr. Shaheen Safarian, um, Dr. Shaheen Safarian, um, on Facebook, LinkedIn or Instagram, and then just send me a DM, send me a direct message on one of those channels I'll be happy to connect with you and give you some more guidance on what you need to do next.
Michael: Awesome, Shaheen. Thank you so much for being with me on this Monday morning episode.
Shahin: You got it, buddy.