Hello, welcome. Today's episode of the KLAS Solutions Dental Education Podcast. I'm your host, Phil Cole, and today we're going to take a deep dive into the exciting world of launching your own dental practice. We're going to unpack the comprehensive journey of transforming your dental career from an employee or an associate to being your own business owner and starting that practice from scratch. So we're going to break this down into several different segments. But I think the most important thing when starting a dental practice, this cannot be a solo mission. It's not about creating a powerful collaborative ecosystem that is just revolves around you, but instead, you have to think about your team and creating a team around you and that team, think about that as the foundation of your practices success. First, you want to identify some key roles beyond just your clinical team. Consider bringing in first of all, I think one of the most important things having a practice management coach who understands all the nuances of the dental business itself, and also the dental business or the dental practice itself. So there's two, there's two big differences there. And I think sometimes that gets lost. So many times we have dental coaching out there that talks about or, or only is concerned about the clinical things the business you know how to schedule better, different things like that, all necessary things that you need to have. But I think the thing that is missed the most is having a practice management coach that is a business coach. So in other words, how do you run the business landscape and all the nuances. Do you understand what how to read P and l's and balance sheets? Do you understand how to forecast or do projections for your practice so that as you grow, you have those goals set in mind? I think those are just a couple things when it comes to having a business coach that is way different than just having a practice management coach, per se, that's going to take care of the practice another one that I think is is really, really missed. And I see this happen all the time. It doesn't matter what state we cover, but that is getting a good financial advisor, and when I say financial advisor, financial planner, I think there's two. And I know that you've heard on my other podcast many times, I think there's a distinct difference between an investment guy and a financial planner, financial investment advisors are doing exactly that. They're advising you on how to gain the best interest on your investments, how to, you know, accumulate the most money as fast as possible, and so forth. But the difference between and that's it, I guess. Let's just stop there. But the difference is, is the financial planner advisor is the person that specializes in making sure that money is working for you in all kinds of different buckets. So you have your 401, K, you may have some real estate that you want to get into besides owning your own practice real estate, you know, there's your investments, there's your life insurance policies and different things like that. And how, when it comes to retirement, or how it comes to maybe you need to, instead of taking out a loan from a bank, you can take a loan out from yourself. How all of these different things can be managed by having a good financial planner. I think it's something that is is not utilized enough. The other thing that I will say, and I'm a big proponent of this, I say it all the time, making sure that when you're dealing with financial advice advisors, financial planners, that you're picking people that also understand healthcare or understand dental I think too many times, we once again, miss out on just picking a financial planner. But if they don't understand the healthcare or the dental world, then some things are lost on that. And we work with dental specific, you know, financial advisors. So if anybody ever wants or needs some help in understanding or, or, you know, can you get us in front of just, you know. Reach out, give us a call. The other one, I will say, that coincides with that is a great healthcare focused or dental specific attorney that can navigate complex regulatory requirements and understand what needs to be in those transition contracts, and what needs to be an associate contracts and so forth. So many times we deal with people that say, you know, well, my, you know, Uncle John is a bankruptcy lawyer, and he's going to do this transition for us. And there is so many times or he's going to do the Associate Agreement, whatever the case would be, and there are just so many times that we end up wasting the person wastes so much money, the seller or the buyer, or in this case, since we're talking about startups, doing a startup, you're wasting so much money on the account That doesn't under, I'm sorry, I'm the lawyer that doesn't understand, the attorney that doesn't understand how to write these leases up, how to deal with the leases, or how to deal with anything else. It's just very, very important and last but not least, I think the other one is having dental specific accountant that's familiar with dental practice, financial structures, and an accountant that understands because here's the big thing that noone that you'll you'll soon learn when dealing with the CPA in your accountant, they are always about save tax now and then a good Financial Planner is always going to be to save taxes later. Well, what ends up happening always that butting of heads, right? Because one wants it now. One wants it saved for later. And so when you can get good dental advisors like this, they understand, and there's a good amount of give and take when that takes place, and it's so important, so having creating the right Dream Team for yourself, outside of just your your clinical team. Now the next, I guess, section or segment, I would say that is important is crafting your business blueprint. Your business plan is, you know, your North Star. It's not just a document, it's a strategic roadmap that will guide every decision and key components need to be included in this. So, for example, you need to have a comprehensive market analysis, you need to know what have detailed service offerings. There's so many times that I see websites with dentists and even health care professionals that throw out every service there is because they feel as though it's going to attract patients, but they don't even do them. I'll give you just a quick example. I see websites all the time where it will say they're do, they do root canals, you know, all comprehensive root canals, implants and stuff like that. But then when a patient calls, we only do anterior, you know, root canals, or whatever the case may be. You know, we do ortho, but they only do Invisalign. And so the the idea of throwing all these detailed service offerings on a website and social media does not mean that that is what you are doing. So, you know, be detailed. Make sure you're putting the services that you want to offer, and make sure that you are setting up a competitive landscape assessment of what's around you and what you want to do for your practice and that you're going to have the passion to do,once again, financial projections. It's a must, once again. Going back to that other the talk about what we had before with the CPAs and accountants, there's so many accounts that we run across that when I talk to Dennis, that like my CPAs never told me about financial projections. They don't do forecasting and so forth. It's vitally important for those so that, you know, especially in a startup situation, those projections are going to change. We're going to when, when we do a startup with with our clients, we put that projection in, but then that projection can change for the in the first one to five years drastically. We've had practices that have blown it away. We've had practices that barely made it in the projection. And so what we've got have to do is adjust those projections, and then. Forecasting those projections with different things, if we add this, could this make the difference? And so forth. So it's vitally important on that marketing strategies, making sure that marketing is a key point in a startup is we'll talk about that later in this podcast. But you know, once again, another key component and then something that is not just for anybody that's listening for this. For startups. It's not just for startups, it's for every dental practice. Operational protocols, I don't know how often with operational protocols that they're missing, we we talk to coaches. When we do assessments and stuff, there's so many systems that are not there so many protocols that don't exist. And then they wonder why their practice is hurting when you're doing a startup. And this is, this is your chance to go from, you know, 00, on the plate, to putting everything down to be as successful as possible, you have to have everything covered. So when developing your plan, be brutally honest about your strengths and potential challenges in your area that you're going to face a realistic and data driven. Business Plan attracts people, investors, and it will provide not investors, I'm sorry, but clients, patience and so forth, and it provides clarity for your practice and your business journey and patience will see that the next one, I would say, is in another segment three, I guess, is understanding your market now, this is, this is a big one, because I think when doing startups, this is, This is maybe mishandled, I think you need to market research your for your practice. It's your secret weapon. You're just not opening a dental office. You're trying to solve specific community dental needs. Critical factors have to be then investigated. And I think that one of the biggest things that I see is, well, I first will go with I'm going to give you a couple bullet points, I think go first, then real estate, and a couple things that go along with real estate second. And we're putting these in first so local demographic data. The reason why I'm emphasizing this first is I see so many times where, where someone does a startup, and the first thing they do is try to find the building. And you've you're just trying to find a building that's available, that fits the the the ability for you to put in a six operatory dental practice. But you've done no local demographic data, and so you need to make sure that you're looking at that local demographic data. You got to look at the population age distribution. You need to look at the insurance landscape for that area, you need to know the saturation of practices around you. And I think this is something that's big. Most demographic reports will show how many dentists are in the area. But I think the thing that's missed is that and one of the things that we look at when we're doing our demographics is we're looking at how many practices are in the area, and with those practices, then breaking down the practice, how much saturation of patients is there. You know, if you're going to move into an area that has, say, 10 other offices within a 10 mile radius, and we see that there, on average, there's only 1200 patients available amongst those 10 locations. And now we're going to put you in there. We're not going to suggest putting a startup in that area, because you don't want to practice that. Can only that the saturation is only 1200 in the first place, which means you got to now grant you gotta go after 1200 patients, then that's it, versus trying and then win over all the other patients that are in the other practices. Instead looking at the saturation, and when you see saturation of 20 503,000 patients, now you have that ability to go in and grab those patients and compete with those other practices you know, looking at and understanding what the patient segments are too. So if you are wanting to go in and do some specialty work, what kind. Kind of work is available in that area that you want to go into before you sit there and say, hey, I want to do a bunch of implants, but there's only in that area that you're looking at possibly, say, $2 million in a 10 mile radius of implants. Now you may say $2 million is huge, but not when you're competing against 10 other practices that also may be advertising for implants. Now you sit there and take those implants at 2 million and divide that by 10, and now you're looking at a whole different number that isn't going to support possibly the projections that you set. So that's why I always say it's very important when doing a startup, that be looking and do the demographics first. Once you have all that information, and it's a sound information, you feel good about what you're walking into. Now go find the building. And if you can't find the building at that time, then you have a decision to make, but better to go find out that information first, then go buy real estate, get the lease, and then find out that you're going to be struggling. I see this with startups all the time, and where they call us in for coaching, and we have one in South Carolina that had called they did a startup, did exactly what I said, bought the real estate first, because that's the area that they wanted to be in, and they found this great opportunity. Didn't do the demographics. They're on year six, and they're still struggling not where they wanted to be. So once again, don't let that happen to you. So the second part of it, though, is then real estate, you know, selection, and that's crucial as well, because you got to look just beyond what rent prices are you got us. You got to make sure that you're looking at, you know, the proximity to the residential areas and what kind of area you're going to be bringing in public transportation, routes, you know, visibility and signage we have, we have a doctor that said that they wanted to move because they, in this case, they didn't do a startup, but they bought a practice in the practice, they thought they could get a great deal on this practice. Well, I shouldn't say they thought they did get a great practice on real estate. The problem is is they have no visibility. They sit back in the corner, and the landlord did not offer any road signage. So the only way people know they're back there is if they find them through Google. So it's devastating. So there's a lot of things that you want to look in and investigate before you sit there and think of like it's time to go to the it's time to get this practice started. The fourth segment is your financial foundation. You know, budgeting isn't just about numbers. It's about strategic resource allocations, and you need to interconnect, you know, all your budget streams. First of all, I think what's important is, is your personal budget considerations. What are your living expenses during the startup phase? Do you have a husband or a wife that has a job, and can it is some of their dollars going to help fund the family during the startup phase, are you going to have another associateship for a couple days to help fund while the startup project is is in, you know, a startup phase, you know, do you have personal emergency fund? Another banks call liquidity. Do you have liquidity? Do you have a rainy day fund, whatever you want to call it, you know, do you have that so that if something was to take a turn for the worse? And here, I mean, I done talking about it, but it still is the easiest one to bring up, I guess, and that is, you know, your the COVID when COVID hit, if you did a startup and you were six months into the project, and boom, COVID hit, and everything was shut down. Do you have that personal emergency fund to handle the rest that was drastic, but those are just some ideas. Do Are you ready? And have you thought about potential reduced income, initial income, lowering it, and then, once again, have you looked and considered loan repayment strategies? So that's just on the personal side. And then there's the Business Financial forecasting. So once again, with us at KLAS, our we have a whole list of things that are looked at and taken care of. But you know, you have your you have your construction costs, you have your equipment and. Investments. You know, the equipment vests is something that I think that every time we've done a startup, we, almost every time, have to tell our clients, you can't have that because they think that doing a startup many times is I get to go in with a clean slate and get everything that I want, instead of having the the equipment that they were, that they've been an associate in. And that's not necessarily true. The equipment investment is something that is is gotta be looked at and forecast it out properly. You know you have initial staffing costs. You have marketing expenditure, expenditures, technology infrastructure. You know you have practice management software, it so you have ongoing operational expenses period. Let's just put it that way. And so those are the business financials that we we look at as well. So what you want to do is create those multiple financial scenarios. You can create a very conservative one and create a moderate one, and then you can create the optimistic one, so that you can build the practice that you want, but yet that it fits according to what you feel comfortable with, but also, once again, what fits inside the budget that the bank is going to give you the Next segment five would be strategic timeline development. You know your timeline is your execution blueprint. Break your startup journey into clear, manageable phases, you know. So first of all, you have the plan and preparation. We talked about some of that you got to complete, the market research, the demographics, finalize your business plan, secure initial funding, and then begin your team recruitment with KLAS Solutions. We do this. We have a workbook that we work through all of these things, along with all the checklists and stuff to keep you focused and making sure that you're going through all the phases, right? But then you you have your infrastructure development. So you gotta secure the location once again. You gotta be can't begin looking at equipment search. You gotta develop your operational systems. You have to do initial marketing incentives. And you have to start to build all of the other layout of the the construction itself at the same time. Then, you know, you got that kind of, that pre launch preparation where you're get, you got to get your team training going, OSHA training, and all your regulatory things, your technology set up, and in a working order, you got your marketing campaigns now need to start being launched. You have to have a soft opening preparation. So for us, it's so important we bring in our coaches to make sure that all the protocols, rules and roles and responsibilities and systems are in place, and that they're taught to the team, the team with the team training, so that we make sure that you're ready to go on day one. We want it to be so that it is as if that when you open on day one and you cut that ribbon, it's like you've been there for 10 years, and it's not something where you're going, Okay, where do we put the pens? How do we use the scanner? Not sure how to use our X rays and stuff. All that stuff has been trained and ready to go, so that a patient that comes in feels as though they're not somebody that's walking into, oh, boy, what am I getting myself into? But yet, instead, we're walking into this great brand new practice, and we're we're being shown excellent customer service. Segment six checklist for your you know, our that we put in place, our guard rails against oversight. You know, create comprehensive lists. And with us, we give you checklists on all of this stuff, and it's part and it's also in our workbook. But you know, regulatory compliance, equipment procurement, you know, Team onboarding, once again, patient management system and making sure that it's working and that you have all of the other systems that connect to your practice management system working, so your recall systems, your your texting and whatever the case may be, marketing milestones as well. So all. All of these checklists are huge to make sure that everything nothing's missed. Another one is making sure that you have your startup supply list and that you just don't go order a bunch of supplies, but yet you specifically go through every single thing, making sure that we know that every procedure that you do has it ready, so that that person that walks in the door that maybe needs a certain procedure that you do, you don't have to worry about saying, We can't do that right now because we forgot to order that, because we, we just, we ordered everything else. So huge on that segment seven, marketing, what I think is, is, at the time, is marketing magic. You know, modern dental practice marketing goes beyond traditional advertising. You can still develop the postcards, and you can still do your your general, you know, I have doctors that still ask do radio and and TV commercials still work. You know, yes, every piece of marketing can work, but you have to develop a strong digital presence. You, you it's, it's just a must. You know, over 73% of dentists, client dentist patients are found by Google, by Google searches. So I've heard, I just was at a speaking engagement that a gentleman said that it's 80% so I've got the last survey that I have is 73 over 73% maybe it is up to 80% whatever the case may be, strong digital presence is a must leverage patient testimonials. This is another one way up there. Over 80% of patients pick their dentist based off of a friend, friends recommendation, a family recommendation or a testimonial on the website. Think about it. People, when you're on Amazon and you're shopping for a product, tell me, if you look at the one that says that there's four and a half stars with 5000 reviews, or if you look at the one that's is five stars with two reviews on Amazon, it without a doubt, we are looking at the one that says or has a great rating, and a ton of them utilize target social media campaigns too. You we got to be you got to be strategic. There's got to be plans, and you've got to make sure that you're, you're working the social media. Not every single person likes Facebook. As you get the younger generation, Instagram, Instagram reels, I just saw that someone was on the news saying, you know, I don't care if they take Tiktok away, just don't take away my Instagram reels. So there's a prime example of different avenues in which you must target for that customer or for that patient. You know, implement referral programs. This is, I will say, right now, I myself, personally, for my own company. Am not good with that. I forget. I'm excited that we did a good job. I leave and I'm like, I forgot to ask for that referral. And then you go back later and it just doesn't have the same pizza as so make sure you have an implement, implement a referral process in a program that goes with that, and then create educational content. And if you don't want to create it yourself, you know, I know for us, we create all the material, and then we customize it for what your practice develops, but make sure that you're dealing with somebody, once again, that's dental specific, that is creating educational content that is for your that that goes towards your practice and is going to give the feel of your practice in that and last but not least, segment eight, you know, Staff Development, once again, your team isn't just an expense, even though in any practice, we get that all the time. Now my my team is so expensive, their wages and so forth, your your practices, most valuable asset is investing in your team. Always invest in ongoing training, clear, career progression, pass. I've talked about this in other podcasts, and so I think it's vitally important that you know this, and that is one of the reasons why team members leave a practice is they do not have. Have the ability, or they do not feel that they have a clear career progression path, or they don't feel as though they they can progress in the practice competitive compensation, of course, is always going to have to be one, and then positive workplace culture, culture is another one that is gigantic, and I cannot emphasize it enough, you got to have a good culture. And when doing a startup, I will tell you the ones that we have seen that struggle are the ones that have the culture where the doctor automatically falls into that trap of feeling as though they can do it themselves, or they'll have the answers. And the ones that succeed are the ones that invest in all the things that we talked about and understand that every single person that we've mentioned is part of the that critical team to take them to the next level. So launching a dental practice is complex, but it's incredibly rewarding and it's a great journey to take on. So stay adaptable, remain passionate and never stop learning. If you found value in today's episode, please subscribe, leave a review and share with fellow dental professionals considering entrepreneurship and starting their own practice. Until next time. This is Phil Cole, wishing you success on creating your dream practice you.