The cost of becoming an implant dentist

Ha! Ha! This is an amazing question to answer and one that we will never be asked openly but are often asked by the ‘back door’.

People spending thousands of pounds on a year implant course want to know when they will get their money back, if you look back at the people who have done this and investing heavily in their implant careers, you can see a pattern as to how this works. It’s actually the same as almost any business set up.

This is called the J curve. If you imagine an X and a Y axis (X begin horizontal), if you imagine that part way up the Y axis there is a line that says 0, that is your breakeven point where you haven’t spent any money. At 0 you start to spend and spend, then the line drops dramatically from 0 towards the X axis before it curves along the bottom and then starts to catapult back up, past 0 and way beyond; this is the J curve of business.

What everyone is interested to know is at what point does the vertical line pass the 0 as it goes back up into profit. The truth is, this is different for different practitioners but let me give you a quick calculated example. If you decide to charge £2,000 for your dental implants in your practice, following on from your year implant course, then we can make some assumptions about how much money you’re likely to make.

If you’re a principle in practice you’re likely to make approximately 40% of that turnover as gross profit (£800 per implant). Remember that you will have set out on an implant course which might have cost you £10,000. Let’s forget about the travel and accommodation relating to the course and loss of practice income during the course, let’s just stick to the bare bones.

You’ve spent £10,000 on the course and £6,000 on an implant kit and motor (£16,000). You make £800 per implant placed and restored (a rough outline). You will need to place 20 implants and restore them the following year to break from the cost provided. Remember now though, that you don’t have to pay for the course again, nor the kit again, and although there are some add on costs, every implant from now on creates a profit. This is the concept of sunk costs and lifetime value. In three years’ time, when you’re placing the 20 implants that you learned to do on the course, you’re not outlaying any money on training, or kit and still making the profit. If you do this for 10 years you’ll make a lot of money.

The really clever people invest heavily and early over a 3-4 year period, understanding that some of the money will be recouped in year 1,2 and 3 etc. And they can usually break even through the education part of the process exiting the other side as experienced and confident implant practitioners with an extremely viable business model going forwards.

We find that people who are then willing to invest and spend are those who take the longest time to develop going forwards, because their attitudes and values towards money are different. The Campbell Academy runs a business course which will allow you to understand these figures a lot better.

Just as a final a side to this conversation, in my own career between 1994 – 1999 I estimated how much I had lost in comparison to my friends who had qualified at the same time. Due to my work as a hospital practitioner and my development in surgery and implant dentistry, a conservative estimate would have put me at £135,000 a year less in earnings alone (four more hours worked) than my friends who had entered general practice. That was somewhere close to £30,000 a year of investment at that stage. Realistically, it takes a considerable investment to break through the glass ceiling and to catapult to another place