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This week, I published two blogs in my normal daily blog, which were heavily business orientated and if you're here for the business culture.

You can see them below: 

Only the Paranoid Survive - How dentistry is...

The Super Associate

In that blog, I did a bit of a state of the nation of what it looks like in dentistry in the United Kingdom at the moment, at least from our perspective and from the perspective of the people we get to speak to a lot of the time.

One of the obvious things is that the cost of providing dentistry is increasing again (and again and again).

Some of the factors that drive the increase are as follows:

1. If you're NHS, you effectively got a below-inflation pay rise for your contract; all your prices went up, but your wages didn't.
2. The cost of staff. Since Covid, investing in teams and staff has become critical in dentistry. If you haven't got a handle on that, you might find out how difficult it is to do dentistry without a nurse or receptionist.
3. Supply companies put the prices up year on year, quarter on quarter, whether you like it or not.
4. Costs of associates.
5. Cost of your rent, your premises
6. National insurance cost that comes in in April for all your staff (part-time and full-time)

It's a tricky thing to navigate, isn't it? Looking at all of this and seeing the prices increase, there are only really two ways that you can offset the cost increases that you have within your business.

The first is to generate more income, and the second is to take less income as an owner.

You get to choose.

If you go for the first, one of the simplest ways to do this is to increase your prices. I say 'simple' because you just increase your prices (obviously not if you're NHS, and that's another problem), but in an independent world, you can just add your price increase in. Maybe you decide at the start of your financial year to increase by 5%.

For most of us, that seems like a lot, but actually, that's the cost of living increase, in fact, probably not even covering it. So, realistically, maybe you need to go to 7.5%, but if you go to 7.5% in one jump, people will notice and question what they're getting for their money.

This is part of owning a business.

This is part of the leadership.

What we have developed in the practice using our practice management software (Dentally) is the ability now to flick a switch (my guys will tell you it's more complicated than this, but that's what it looks like to me). Therefore, we can apply incremental press risers, well, actually…whenever we need to.

What we generally do is do something in the region of 2.5% to 3% when required, perhaps twice yearly.

Honestly, it more or less goes unnoticed in our practice, both by the team and by the patients.

People expect price rises, people expect prices to go up, people look at petrol prices in the supermarket all the time, and they see them change and alter, and they understand.

One of the best ways to handle incremental price rises is always to have the narrative to hand as to why that is necessary. "Our rent's gone up", "Our rates have gone up", "The cost of our energy is enormously higher than it was before"., "The costs of compliance, the cost of staff, the cost of materials", whatever you want.

In order to have this in place, though, you need a system and a structure; you need to know your numbers to be able to count them and make an objective decision as to how to do it.

One of the most extraordinary parts of the Digital Dental Entrepreneurial Program is the finance week with Hayley (enormously hard work for her). You would come out of that with a much better system and be much closer to looking at incremental price rises instead of dropping a bomb in your practice every 2 years when you realise you don't have any money.