How to Talk About Dollars and Numbers and Not Sound Greedy

You’re alone in your office after hours, staring at the numbers, and you can feel it: the practice has more potential. The hard part isn’t the math. The hard part is saying “production goals” out loud without feeling like you’ve betrayed patient care or turned into a salesperson. We’ve been trained to talk dentistry, not revenue, so it makes sense that money talk can feel awkward, corporate, or even greedy. 

We walk through a simple but powerful reframe for dental practice management: if you don’t define what production, growth, and profit mean, your dental team will define it for you, and it often turns into pressure, discomfort, and underpresented treatment. That discomfort leaks into case acceptance, financial conversations, and patient trust. Then we use three questions to anchor the conversation in ethics and confidence: do patients need what we recommend, do we do good clinical work, and do we take great care of people through the full experience? When those are true, presenting treatment becomes clarity, not manipulation. 

From there, dental office metrics stop being “just numbers” and start representing value provided: pain relieved, teeth saved, disease treated, confidence restored. We also make the case that healthy dental practice profitability can improve patient care by funding better technology, training, team retention, and a calmer practice culture that isn’t desperate for every yes. If you want a stronger, more aligned team and sustainable dental practice growth, this is the mindset shift that makes the leadership conversations easier. 

Subscribe to Dental Practice Heroes, share this with a practice owner who hates talking about money, and leave a review so more dentists can find it. What’s the one “number” you want your team to see as patient impact?

Check out www.relevanceonlinemarketing.com if you want to get the same great marketing results as Dr. Etch.  Mention DPH and get your first month FREE!

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Transcript

The Quiet Fear Around Numbers

Paul Etchison 0:01

All right, picture this. You're sitting there in your personal office at the practice. Everybody's gone home. It's just time for you, some silence, and looking at the end of the day numbers. You're fishing through the numbers, you're running some reports, and then you get an email from your accountant, and it's last month's profit and loss. And you look at this and you know in your heart that you have more potential. You know you can do better. You know the team can do better. And you really, really just want to get the team on board with this. You want them to get the same goals as you. You want them to be fired up like you are about production and dollars and numbers. But then you think to yourself, how can I talk about numbers with my team? That sounds so awful. This, we are dentists. We are supposed to be about patient care, not about dollars. And because of that, you probably feel uncomfortable talking about numbers with your team, like genuinely uncomfortable talking about production, collections, growth, goals. It just feels wrong. And you might be afraid of sounding greedy in front of your team. I mean, you don't want your team thinking that all the doctor cares about is money. So, what do you do? You avoid it. You avoid setting the goals, you don't talk about growth, you don't get clear about growth, you don't talk about case acceptance, you don't talk about profitability. And what ends up happening in your practice is you create this unhealthy disconnect. So I want you to ask yourself, what does your team think about when they hear the words like production or goals? Do they immediately associate them with like pressure, with greed? Maybe those sound a little bit corporate, like corporate dentistry to them. And if that's the case, in my opinion, that is a problem. Because healthy and ethical growth is truly not about just squeezing more money out of patients. There's nothing wrong with growth at all. Because our practice grows when more of our patients get the care that they actually need. Emphasis on they need it. So today, I want to completely reframe the way that you think and speak to your team about productions, goals, and money. Because if you feel uncomfortable talking about numbers, your team's gonna feel uncomfortable too. And that discomfort will quietly affect the case acceptance that you're practice, the confidence of your team, the communication with your patients, the way that you lead and ultimately patient care and patient health as well. So today we are talking about how to talk about money. Now, you're listening to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast, where we teach dentists how to be the CEOs of their practices, empower their team, and to build a practice that runs without them. I'm your host, Dr. Paul Etchison. I'm a dentist, a two-time author, a dental coach, and someone slightly maybe just obsessed a little bit with owners building practices that give them their life back. All right, let's get into it. Now, most dentists, when they went into healthcare, they weren't thinking about the business. You're probably one of them. You were trained clinically, you never thought about the revenue. It didn't matter to you. You weren't thinking about margins or profit of all that and so on and so on. So at no point during your dental journey of becoming a dentist and owning a practice, were you even remotely ever prepared to discuss money or profitability or growth or goals with your team. So now that you own your practice and you're leading a team, the second the numbers come up, you internally associate it with pressure. You associate it with selling and manipulation of the patients, you associate it with greed and all these nasty negative things. Because deep down, you want to share the numbers with your team, but at the same time, you don't want to sound corporate. You don't want your team judging you, you don't want your patients to feel pressured by any means, and you don't want to feel like a salesperson, right? I mean, we hate selling things. So recently, on one of our posts on Instagram, Dr. Steve is talking about the fact that if you're a solo doc in an office doing one and a half million dollars a year, so that's like hygiene doing 500k a year, the doctor themselves doing about a million dollars. And what he's talking about is that typically that would require the doctor to do about$4,000 per day. So if you break it down to a daily goal, the doctor has to do about$4,000 a day. Now, when you look at that, that's not much more than like two crowns and some other random stuff. And it's not a lot, but I had somebody comment on that post. And this person wrote, Has our profession come to this? Whatever happened to treating the patient and doing great dentistry, it worked for me for 30 years. So that comment kind of irked me a little bit. It led me to think about two things. First, I started thinking about how much I hate the internet and all the trolls on it, and like the fact that somebody with 30 years of dental experience under their belt would even go through the trouble of commenting on something like that. Like this person so triggered by this post of one and a half million dollar office. I mean, we're talking about$4,000 of production in the doctor chair. I mean, it's not really unrealistic, huge numbers by any means. I think a lot of our listeners probably do that before lunch. But anyway, I'm not triggered. Promise. Didn't bother me at all. But I assume that this person is making the assumption that since we're talking about production, we must be greedy to some extent. So that's what this person is essentially saying with their judgmental little trolley post. And as anyone with an office that has done$1.5 million a year, surely you know you're not taking good care of your patients because you could never take good care of patients. If you're doing$1.5 million a year, a big whopping$125,000 a month. That is way over the limit of taking good care of your patients. So you better stop doing that stuff now. We need to bring ethics back into dentistry. Shame on you. So that was the first thing that I thought about. And the second thing I thought about with that post is I commented back. I said, well, why not both? Because the fact of the matter is, we can do both. And we do. We can do$1.5 million of dentistry and we can take great care of our patients. But here it is. When we talk about money, sometimes we have this inner conflict that arises, and we need to do something about that. So I know you probably became a dentist to help people. So it's not surprising that when money comes up, you may get uncomfortable. And it's that discomfort that leads to not being okay with discussing numbers with your team. But here's the thing: when you avoid discussing numbers, when you avoid giving the numbers any sort of meaning, well, your team, they're gonna create their own meaning around them. And usually that meaning that they create is wrong. Your team might think this office only cares about money, production, higher production means higher pressure sales, growing a practice, growth. It means being greedy, the doctor is greedy. Because since everyone at this office has avoided talking about numbers and goals and things of that nature because of the discomfort, nobody has reframed it for them. So if you don't define, as the leader of the practice, if you don't define what the growth means, what the numbers mean, the people are going to define it themselves. And often they are going to define it negatively, they're going to feel weird about it. And when people feel weird about production, what do they do? Well, they might present the treatment weekly. And let's face it, because the patients, I mean, they're people with feelings, they're reading our body language and basing a lot of their trust on the way that we communicate. Patients can easily lose confidence in their provider if that person is uneasy about what they're talking about. The patient can feel your uncertainty. So, what are we gonna do about this? I'm gonna give you three questions that would change the way that you think about this. And I want you to use these three questions with your team as well. So, question number one, I want you to ask yourself do you believe your patients truly need what you recommend to them? Or are you just making it up? Now, I know what the answer is. Yes, of course, your patients need what you're recommending to them. So if the answer to that is yes, then presenting treatment is not pressure, it's clarity. Avoiding hard conversations doesn't protect your patients. It actually hurts them. I mean, for example, if a patient needs 10 crowns, well, I mean, they need 10 crowns. What are you supposed to do? Should you just tell them that they need another crown every six months for the next five years? Every time they come in for a cleaning, you tell them they need another crown. I mean, that doesn't seem like very high-level care or any sort of ethical care by any means. What if you did that? What if you delayed telling the patient what they really need because you felt bad about it and a small problem becomes a large problem? Maybe a cracked tooth becomes unrestorable because you are uncomfortable. Is that ethical? Because you see, clarity, it's not pressure. It's just that. It's just clarity, it's truth. It explains the patient's condition accurately and completely to them without any hesitation, without any judgment. It just is. So, first question to ask Do you believe that your patients need the treatment you recommend? Let's move on to question number two. Okay. Do you believe that you do good clinical work? And I know you do. Because if you didn't, you couldn't sleep at night. So if you truly believe that you do good clinical work, that means that your dentistry is improving the lives of your patients. Your treatment is helping people. Your care that you provide matters. And thus, you should not feel guilty about helping patients move forward with treatment because you've already established that you only recommend things that patients truly need, and now that you only provide treatment to patients that is clinically great. So you should have more confidence now, having asked yourself those two questions. But let's move on to question number three. Do you believe that you take great care of people when you provide treatment and everything else that you do at the office? See, patients, they're not only paying for dentistry, they're not paying for that end result. They're paying for the entire experience, they're paying for trust, comfort, confidence in you. They're paying for the relationship that you have as a doctor with your patient. Patients are not just paying you for procedures, they're paying you for the trust that you create. Which then brings us to the big idea here. If we believe that patients truly need what we recommend, and we believe that all the dentistry we provide is clinically good, and we believe the level of care that we give to people, we take great care of them, then it brings us to what do the numbers actually represent? Do they represent greed? No, not by any means at all. I mean, production, numbers, dollars, they represent problems solved, pain relieved, teeth that are saved, confidence that is restored, dental health that is improved upon. And think about the fact that every single identialist patient at your office, or every patient that has rampant decay, their dental decline at one point in the past, it started with something very small and very insignificant. So, what I'm saying is every problem that we solve for our patients, no matter how small, it is preventing the progression to identialism. So these numbers are not just numbers, they represent people, they represent the value provided to patients, they represent the treatment that was needed and that it was completed with quality care, and that it was done with a level of service that builds trust and a quality doctor-patient relationship. So, what is wrong with that? Because what makes the dollars increase? Well, more patients accept and get more treatment done. And when those dollars increase, more disease gets treated, more suffering gets relieved, more health gets restored. That is something we should feel proud of, not ashamed about. But we do, we feel ashamed about it, and it makes us uneasy to talk about it. I remember this patient I had, Jenna. Okay, she was so sweet. She came in, she was so timid, shy. I mean, she was just embarrassed. We're sitting there in the operatory, she's sitting across from me, and she's telling me her story, but it's taking her a very long time to get it out because it's just such an emotional thing for her. She's explaining how, like a long time ago, she got hit in the mouth and half of her tooth broke off, and she never got it fixed, and it's slowly progressed. I mean, you know, you've heard this story before, but now she's to the point. She's not going out with her friends. She doesn't feel like she can keep a job. She feels like everyone's looking at her. She's covering her mouth when she laughs, and her life is truly affected by the fact that her dental disease has progressed so far. And this person, I mean, she's not old. She's only like 28, maybe 30 years old. So, what did we do? I mean, we took some teeth out. I remember I took out eight and nine. I mean, they were unrestorable. I had to take out her front teeth. And we restored everything that we could, and we did a flipper for eight and nine. And I remember when I put that flipper in, it felt snug. You know how sometimes, like, that flipper is you put it in, you're like, oh, it doesn't feel very good. You're like, this thing's gonna suck. This one felt really good. It felt really snug. And damn, dude, it looked perfect. I was so happy when it went in and I couldn't wait to show her. And I remember handing her the mirror, sitting her up, and her just the look on her face, and she just lost it. She was so overwhelmed with emotion, crying, hugging, just this such a warm feeling. And it was just one of those cases where I look at it and I say, damn, like we really changed that person's life. Now, you know, I helped her, but did I do it for free? No, she paid me. What did she pay me? Like$10,000. So is that wrong? Am I greedy for charging her$10,000? Or did I provide her value of$10,000? Because I promise you, after that person got the treatment that I provided, if it would have costed$30,000, it would have been worth it. If it would have costed$50,000, it would have been worth it. That was the value that I provided. And that is the value that you provide with your patients. So you need to be comfortable talking about production with your team and be proud about it. Because if your team feels weird about production, they're going to associate any sort of growth or any sort of increase in numbers with greed. And what are they going to do with that? They're going to underpresent treatment. They're going to feel weird and awkward and it's going to come off in their financial conversations. They might hesitate to follow up or even ask questions about what's keeping the patient from moving forward. They're not going to do it intentionally, but they might sound apologetic. And in the end, they create and project this uncertainty to the patients that leads them to not say yes to as much treatment and hence not get healthy. The patients don't get that confidence. They don't get that clarity that we talked about. And the sad thing is, is that it's not the patient's fault, right? It's ours. It's the way that we projected our feelings and our uncertainty onto the patient when we presented the treatment. So that's on us. That's our fault. We should be ashamed about that. Not about providing solid dentistry with a level of care that's unheard of to patients that we recommended treatment to that they actually needed. So if we help a lot of people, our numbers are going to grow. We are our office is going to grow, and we're going to be more profitable. So what's wrong with that? Let's talk about that because that's another thing I know you guys are a little uneasy talking about. Profit. Well, healthy profitability that helps patients too. If you are a profitable office, it allows you to buy better technology so you can take better care of people. It allows you to train your team. It allows you to retain your team and keep trained people on your team so they can provide a certain level of care to your patients. It allows you to improve your systems, create a better patient experience. It allows you and your team to work without stress and not be desperate for every person to say yes to everything. It allows you to support the team so they can support your patients. So success and profit actually supports patient care. It doesn't detract from it. I mean, me personally, I'd be worried about the struggling practice. They're the ones that I think are the most likely to cut corners with patients, maybe delay investments in new equipment or just delay normal maintenance of their things. Healthy practices that are profitable, they serve the patients better. And you can argue that with me all day, and I don't care. That's just the way I feel, and you're not going to change my mind. So remember, you're not chasing numbers, you are chasing value, you're chasing trust, care, you're chasing impact. And when you do these things ethically, which I know you do, growth is something that you should feel proud of. Your production becomes a reflection of the level of value that you provide, and growth becomes a reflection of the impact you're making. So here's what I want you to remember from this episode: production, it's not greed. Growth, it's not unethical. Clarity helps patients. We need to provide clarity. Confidence, our confidence in our speech and talking about money and talking about what we provide and the costs of treatment with our patients. Confidence serves them. It helps them say yes. It helps them get healthy. Numbers, anything we measure at our office is truly a measure of the impact that we're having on our patients. And healthy profitability, profit at our office, that creates an office that can take better care of people. So your team, they need help reframing what growth actually means. You need to reframe, you need to define what the numbers mean so that you can be proud of it. You can talk about it as a team, and you can set some real goals that are goals that represent the impact and care that you provide to patients, not any sort of level of greed or high pressure sales or anything negative like that. So this is just one of the many conversations that we can help you have with your team. So if you're struggling at your practice or if you're just feeling like I'm not the best leader, I can improve on this. Maybe I can have better systems. I want to know how to lead and inspire my team so that we can help more people. If you want to know what's possible and what we might be able to do for you, please reach out to us at dentalpracticeheroes.com/slash strategy. Set up a free strategy call with me. There's no pressure. I will just listen to you. I'll give you my honest opinion of what we can do and if we can help you. And I'll give you some action items for things that you can do in the near future that will help you move forward and grow your practice. And also, if you liked what you heard today, would you leave the Dental Practice Heroes podcast a review on whatever you're listening to it on? It would mean the world to me. Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate it. You have a great week this week at the office, and we will talk to you next time.