Are You Making First-Year Mistakes in Dental Practice Management?

I mean, I think, what did the first 90 days of ownership look like for me? And I'll tell you, for most practice owners, the first 90 days are gonna feel pretty rough in a lot of ways.

And that's not meant to scare people away from ownership or anything like that, but typically in life, anything worth doing is hard.

And when you're starting something up, the stress and effort is typically going to be asymmetrical to the reward that you get out of it in the short term.

And that could be said for owning a dental practice or a lot of other things in life.

And I think, yeah, anything worth doing is worth taking some risk over and making an investment.

And yeah, early on, you're going to pay it more often.

Hopefully, you're paying for it more early in your career than you are later on.

But there's just so many traps that can be waiting for you.

And we're going to go through these in these episodes.

But You're coming in as the new doctor and you're worried about paying bills and whether people are going to like you and whether your team's going to be there.

And maybe you're a young dentist and you could be straight out of school like I did, or maybe you're You've been practicing for a few years and you still haven't prepped 500 or 1,000 crowns.

And you still have that clinical learning curve.

So taking all that on is a lot.

And that was my story as well.

I've been pretty vocal on this podcast that the first six months for me clinically were really rough.

And I also had a lot of practice management knowledge behind me and a lot of support and got dumb luck in getting the right team around me.

But the clinical side, yeah, man, was kind of brutal for a second.

I had dreamed for years of what it would be like to be a dentist, and I found myself in this spot where, yeah, I was just kind of taking losses a lot of days or getting my butt kicked clinically and also not seeing a lot of reward for it early on.

But I think the thing that I would encourage people to think about or know is that if you've been good in your due diligence and you're buying the right opportunity, there's always light at the end of the tunnel.

And I knew that was the case for me, even though things were a little... difficult early on, I kind of knew and I trusted in the plan.

I knew where we were going and I could see the progress and where we were going to get there.

So you kind of have some control of like how demanding it is, right? If you want to see exponential growth or you're buying a practice that's a little bit more of a fixer-upper, You're taking on some more work and stress early on, right? And so you have some control over that.

And you can kind of tailor that up and choose your own adventure if you want to.

But the real reason the first 90 days feel bad is that a lot of this work is just unglamorous.

You're setting things up.