Practice owners like dentists and doctors juggle competing demands on cash: overhead, staff, loans, taxes, personal expenses. They often start late with heavy debt and no business training. A financial planner who understands practice operations helps set revenue targets, track metrics, and control where each dollar goes so owners can actually save and retire.
Practice owners have a lot of people demanding their dollar. They've got their overhead, they've got their staff, they've got a landlord, possibly they've got banks, they've got the irs. They have their personal budget with, you know, family and recreation. There's a lot of things demanding their dollar. One of the most important things that doctors can do to become financially independent is, is that they can learn how to direct each dollar in the most effective way possible. I call it traffic. Controlling their dollar.
A practice owner needs a financial planner and specifically one who's dedicated to understanding their business needs because they are a completely unique scenario versus your typical 9 to 5 working person. For instance, they start later on in life being able to begin practicing. They're generally laden with student debt from the extra school that they had to versus some of their peers. And then when they move into being a business owner, they have to take out generally a bank loan to finance that. So with a shortened window, a higher debt load, and frankly, little to no formal education on the complexities of business and finances, they need someone to assist them, to guide them through that process and ensure that they're maximizing the return on their investment in themselves as well as in their practice.
A practice is a business and businesses don't succeed without targets and without plans to get to those targets. And oftentimes practice owners are clinicians and don't necessarily have the tools or knowledge or time to sit down and do planning. If you don't plan, you'll never hit a target. You know, just like if you're going to get a degree in something you need to plan out. I'm going to apply for this school. I'm going to get an excellent test score, then I'm going to do this level. Of course, over the next four years or whatever it may be. The same thing is true in business.
You have to make goals for your corporations. So we'll set out revenue goals, profit goals, we'll even dig down into what your hygienist should do, if that's one of the people in your office, what the front office should do in terms of these various metrics or key performance indicators. These are terms that the business world is always used but a practice owner may not be familiar with.
Dentists are. They're trained clinically, they're trained to fix teeth. If you're, you know, if you're a medical doctor, you're trained to do what you're taught in dental school or medical school, but you're not often trained to run a practice. Now, there's a lot of financial planners out there, and financial planners will usually come and say, hey, Doctor, for you to retire at age 60, you need to set aside $5,000 a month. That's the easy part of financial planning. Right. Real financial planning is how do we traffic control that dollar within your practice, such that you have the most output to you as an individual to save and to meet your personal financial goals. And so at the heart of our planning is really business planning. It's three part business, one part personal, because if we get that business right, we'll get the personal side right. And doctors really need somebody to step in and help them do that analysis of how to manage their finances so that they can do what they do best, which is giving patients a great experience and helping grow their practice.
