The new year is here! Hopefully you spent some time in the last month or two of 2024 to gather your data and reflect on where you are within your practice and your journey. If you didn’t, that’s OK! But now is the time!
We recommend using this time to dig into your data so that you can set new SMART goals for 2025 to take your practice to whatever your next milestone is. Whether that is adding a hygienist or an associate doctor, getting out of network with an insurance company or even adding a partner or selling your practice, now is the time to identify which milestone you will hit this year. Here is the process we recommend for starting 2025 out the right way.
- Gather your 2024 data. A good place to start is looking at your production and collection reports but it goes beyond that. Pull your detailed year-end 2024 profit and loss statement so that you can look at what your expenses are. Typically, you can pull this from your QuickBooks or accounting software or ask your CPA to help. Use all this data to evaluate where you are currently. How profitable were you in 2024?
- Determine where there is growth opportunity. This is when it is helpful to use benchmarks to determine where your practice is currently, versus where you’d like to be. Could your hygiene department increase its production per hour? Is your credit card company increasing their rates without you knowing? Is your practice ready to bring on another dentist?
- Set SMART 2025 goals! SMART stands for: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timebound. We recommend starting with a profitability goal and then extrapolating that out to smaller goals that will help you navigate how to get there. Goals to consider could be:
- Gross Production (we recommend setting a gross production goal for each dentist and the hygiene
- Understanding your adjustment percentage in relationship to your gross production
- Collections (your front desk staff can help to meet this goal)
- Creating a more efficient and cohesive team
- Evaluating your vendor contracts for opportunity to reduce expense
When you start the year off with your true numbers from last year and a vision of where you want to go this year, it makes all the difference! The next step in goal setting is to take the big, overarching goals, and break them down. It’s a good idea to break them down by provider and by month and eventually drilling down to create daily goals for your entire team. Get clear focus for yourself about where you want to go, so you can help create focus for your team and start the year off building the path forward, together.
If you want more information on any of these topics …
- How to figure out your profitability percentage
- What adjustments you should be reviewing annually
- How to negotiate vendor contracts
… please feel free to reach out to a member of our team. We are always here to help you become the best business advocate for your practice!
Stay tuned for our next blog post: Breaking down the big goal for 2025 into smaller ones.
