Dental Practice Heroes
Where dentists learn how to cut clinical days while increasing profits - without sacrificing patient care, cutting corners, or cranking volume. We teach you how to grow a scalable practice through communication, leadership, and effective management.
Hosted by Dr. Paul Etchison, author of two books on dental practice management, dental coach, and owner of a $6M collections group practice in the south suburbs of Chicago, we provide actionable advice for practice owners who want to intentionally create more time to enjoy their families, wealth, and deep personal fulfillment.
If you want to build a scalable practice framework that no longer stresses, drains, or relies on you for every little thing, we will teach you how and share stories of other dentists who have done it!
Dental Practice Heroes
The 5 Biggest Time Wasters Killing Your Practice Efficiency
Ever feel like your day moves at the speed of the slowest checkout lane? We unpack the hidden inefficiencies that quietly drain hours, stress your team, and shrink profit—then replace them with simple, durable systems that make your practice feel calm, fast, and predictable.
We start with the most common culprit: unprepared operatories. You’ll hear how to standardize rooms for the 90% of procedures you do most, set visual par levels, and stop the scavenger hunts that interrupt care. From there, we attack duplicate admin work—re-explaining fees, reprinting treatment plans, and rescheduling canceled visits—and show how firm pre-collection policies and clean financial consent cut out second touches. The result is less confusion for patients and fewer fire drills for your front desk.
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Take Control of Your Practice and Your Life
We help dentists take more time off while making more money through systematization, team empowerment, and creating leadership teams.
Ready to build a practice that works for you? Visit www.DentalPracticeHeroes.com to learn more.
All right, imagine this. You know, when you're at the grocery store and you're trying to pick like the shortest line for checkout, you're sizing up the cashiers, you're like, how fast is this one moving? You know, you're looking at it, and then you pick the one that you want. And no matter what, I swear it always feels like you picked the wrong one. But the line that you pick, it always looks short. But then picture this. The cashier keeps calling for price checks. They're rescanning items and it's not working. They ran out of bags. And then all of a sudden, when it gets time to check out the person that's about to pay for it, whips out a check like they were surprised that they were going to have to do it and they start filling it out. And what should have taken just two minutes drags into 10. That's what happens in your dental office when inefficiencies start to pile up. Small slowdowns multiplied across the day, add up to hours of wasted time, stressed teams, and lost profit. Now, one thing you should know is patients don't always notice the efficiency, but they will feel the inefficiency. So that's what we're talking about today. I'm going to give you the five biggest time wasters so that you can look at your practice and see if any of these are happening, what you should do if you find them, and how you fix them. Let's get to it. Now, you are listening to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Paul Etchison. I'm a dentist, I'm a dental coach, and the author of two books on dental practice management. I also own a multi-doctor practice that nearly collects $6 million a year. And on this show, I'm sharing strategies to help you grow your profits, work fewer days, and create a practice that runs like clockwork without you. So let's talk about these five biggest time wasters. The first one, unprepared operatories. We don't have the operatory set up properly. It's not ready to go. We have to ask for something. We have to ask for the articulating. Maybe we have to ask for a certain instrument. We didn't have this ready to go. It wasn't stocked in the room. I remember back in the day when we first opened, we were always scrambling for bite blocks for some reason. You know, the bite blocks, the little rubber ones that hold the kids open. I love using these on kids because they always close. So we put them in there. We've got three sizes that we use, and we were always looking for them. So I said, damn it, we need to buy some more of these things. So we did. We bought some more of them and then it worked for a little bit, but then the same thing happened because they were all getting put into one operatory. We're all in one spot. So then what we did is we took the drill and we cut numbers into these bite blocks so they knew exactly where they went. So that when we needed one, it was sitting in the drawer right there. This is the idea of making all your operatories 100% ready. Not only do you need to train your team on what you want for 100% ready, but you need to look at the things that you're stocking in your operatory. For example, if there's something that you use 90% of the time, it should be in every operatory. You're going to save yourself time, even though you need to order more inventory because you need one of these in every operatory. If you use it 90% of the time, have it in each operatory. Now, sometimes there's stuff we don't use that often, and maybe that can be located centrally, but we need to be thinking ahead and we need to get our assistance to think ahead so that we don't lose time in the operatories. I always tell you, owner doctor, you should be pounding out dentistry, $1,200 an hour. Okay. Try to shoot for $1,200 an hour. What do you think 30 seconds is when you're pounding out $1,200 an hour? Just doing the math in my head, I'm pretty sure $10. Because it's $20 a minute, 30 seconds would cost you $10. Think about how that adds up. Okay. When you're producing at that level, every second counts. So make sure that you're not losing time to dumb things like that. All right. Number two, time waster number two, doing things twice without realizing it. And this is what I we are so guilty of at the front desk when we don't pre-collect the entire portion. When you don't pre-collect the entire portion of the patient payment, the next time you see them, and I'm talking in instances of pre-collecting, okay? The next time you see them, there is a high possibility you will tell them that they owe the other half or what they didn't pay in full. And they're going to be like, huh? I thought I paid for this. What do you mean? Show me this. Okay, what does my insurance cover? And now you have to get out the treatment plan again. You have to figure it out. You have to audit it to make sure it's correct. And now you have essentially presented this treatment plan twice. Okay, that's one example. The other is when we make an appointment for someone and then they don't keep it or they cancel it, then we have to make them an additional appointment. So when we look at this transaction on a per patient basis, we've had to schedule it, then we had to take a phone call to cancel it, and then we had to take more time to schedule it again. So we're doing that twice. So there's a lot of things we could be doing in the office that we don't really realize that we're doing multiple times. Think about if you don't collect it all. Now you have to audit the chart, you have to make a statement, you have to send a statement, you might have to do a patient call, you might do a text to pay. Look at all the things you have to do additionally that you've already should have done already. So don't do things more than once and watch out for a lot of these ones with like the admin sort of stuff, because it can really get sneaky because you don't realize that this part of the appointment has already been done on a different day, on a different visit. And now, because of your crappy systems, you're doing it again. All right, time waster number three, inefficient patient flow, bad handoffs. We create bottlenecks at the check-in. The hygiene to doctor transitions get sloppy, or the checkout process gets sloppy. It's like this relay race where we just every time we're we're sprinting away when we get the baton, but we just can't pass it to the next person right. So that's why handoffs are so critical that they are done in a certain way and that you role play these with your team. For example, there is tons of time wasted when you walk a patient up to the front to get a treatment plan when the front desk doesn't know that patient is coming. So they have to go and look at the treatment plan. They have to look at like all the insurance benefits to make sure it's correct while the patient's sitting in front of them and sometimes trying to have like a conversation with them. Okay, what happens then? That becomes inefficient. That's a bottleneck. And what does it do? Sometimes it results in incorrect treatment plans. We make mistakes because we don't have focus. And what happens when we make a mistake? Oh my gosh, the patient has a balance and they're upset in more and more time, just like the previous one. So you need to focus on making our handoffs good, making sure that we are communicating as a team and we're working together to have this patient flow be super smooth. All right, number four time waster, not pre-collecting the patient portion. I just talked about this is chasing money after treatment wastes so much time. It creates awkwardness, it has a leaves a bad feeling in the patient's mouth. Everything sucks. You should have strong collection policies and you should never, ever, ever bend them because when you do, you set yourself up for more work and failure. Now, let me tell you what else happens when you don't pre-collect the patient portion. Patients are less likely to show up. If you have a same-day cancellation problem on the doctor side, the easy way to eliminate it. I'm talking about eliminate that nearly 100% is to collect the patient portion to schedule a visit with the doctor. You will nearly eliminate that 100%. And this is one of those things your team feels uneasy about this. I don't know how the patients are going to react. I assure you, try it and be very confident in the way that you speak about this policy. The patients will not care. This one is so easy to do. It's such a mindset trick that we think the patients are going to be upset to do this. Now, this is not like a restaurant where we can't pre-collect because we have no idea how many drinks they're going to order. We don't know what food they're going to order. We know what the treatment is that they're coming in for. So collect for it. There's no reason to wait to the end. You should do it now. And if you do it to schedule, you're going to get that added benefit of the patient always showing up, nearly always. All right. Lastly, number five, not having a morning huddle or any sort of daily alignment. If you do not check in in the morning before your day, your day can be full of surprises. So what I want you to do is when you meet with your team in the morning, make it short, make it quick, but make it matter. Look at your schedule, find the areas where you're going to have some issues. You can tell. You know you can look at your schedule and you know there's going to be some busy points. Hey guys, this part's going to get a little bit busy. You know, if we could have one of the hygienists numb for this patient, or if we could just be aware of it, let's not add anything else in here. This part in the day is going to really require everybody all hands on deck and everyone to give their best. Okay. Also, you want to be talking about what is the goal today and what are our opportunities to meet our goal if we're not at our goal. And then the last thing you want to talk about in these morning huddles is just your little rally cry. Let's change somebody's life today. All right, guys, let's go blow somebody away today. Let's go do something amazing for someone today. Those sort of things, those add up to your culture. Remind your team that this is more than just a job. We are doing something truly special and we should not take it for granted. So, last one, make sure that you are having a quick morning huddle. All right, so here's your tactical takeaways. You've got to work on these little things with your team. And that is about training. That's about looking for all these little things, like these inefficiencies, like not having the operatory set up, different ways to make them more efficient when we need certain instruments or certain supplies, making sure the rooms are fully stocked. These are all systems and accountabilities that you bake into the checklist that you have for your office. And this is what we do with our coaching clients. We build all these things so you have these at your office so everybody knows what to do and you don't have to remind them. Okay, look at what you're doing and say, did I do this twice? Are we doing this more than we need to do this? Is there a small tweak or something in our process we could change so that this could be faster or we don't do it twice? All right. Next, script your handoffs. Teach your team, what do you need to know? Ask your front desk team. When I bring you a patient and I give you a handoff, is there anything I leave out? Is there anything else you want me to tell you? Like what am I not communicating to you? What do you need to know that I'm not sharing? Next, switch to those pre-collection policies. They are so easy and man, what a big difference it makes. And then lastly, run that 10-minute quick morning huddle every day. So, wrapping up, most practices do not need to work harder. They need to work smoother. So, by fixing these five big time wasters, you're gonna reduce stress, you're gonna run on time more often, and you're gonna be able to see more patients without even feeling busier. The efficiency, it's not about speed, it's about the flow. You fix the slowdowns and your practice can finally speed up. And what follows right behind that is increased profits. So look for these things this week when you're at your practice, see what you can improve on. And if you want help, someone to go A to Z with you for all these things for managing your practice and teach you how to do it and inspire and motivate your team as well as hold them accountable. Reach out to us at dentalpracticeheroes.com, set up a free strategy call with me. I'm happy to talk to you on the phone about it. So thank you so much for listening today. I really appreciate it. And we will talk to you next time.
