The Lean Dental Practice

Your production is up. Your overhead went up with it. Nobody decided that.

Overhead almost never rises in a way anyone notices. A supplier adjusts prices two percent. An extra order goes out because nobody checked the shelf. A service contract renews on terms negotiated four years ago. None of it is dramatic - and all of it is permanent until somebody opens the books and looks line by line.

The Lean Dental Practice is a practical cost-control guide for dentists and practice owners who would rather keep what they produce than produce more to cover what they lose. No austerity theatre. No advice to buy cheaper gloves. Just the systems that stop money leaving the practice without a decision behind it.

Inside, you'll learn how to:
• Calculate your real overhead ratio - and understand why comparing it to a published benchmark tells you almost nothing
• Sort every cost into fixed, variable, or step, so you know which ones respond to process and which respond to decisions
• Run a twelve-month line-by-line audit that surfaces the drift, the renewal, the duplicate, and the orphan
• Build an inventory baseline in a single afternoon, then set par levels and reorder points that end both stockouts and dead stock
• Measure inventory turns and stop paying for shelves full of cash
• Cut expiry losses with a rotation rule your team will actually follow
• Consolidate your spend and negotiate with suppliers from information instead of frustration
• Catch price creep with a fifteen-minute quarterly audit
• Read the contracts that renew themselves, and build the calendar that defeats them
• Find the software seats and modules you're paying for and nobody uses
• Decide whether to buy, lease, or wait on equipment - using utilisation, not enthusiasm
• Track the six numbers that tell you whether your cost structure is improving

The book closes with a 90-day cost reset that sequences every change so your team experiences it as order rather than austerity - and names the three mistakes that make cost programmes collapse in month four.

Who this is for: practice owners, office managers, and anyone responsible for what the practice spends.

A note on scope: This book covers the business side of running a practice - overhead, inventory, purchasing, supplier management, and capital decisions. It does not address clinical procedures, coding, insurance billing, or regulatory compliance. Procedure pricing is covered in Book 5 of this series. For clinical and regulatory matters, consult your professional association and qualified advisors.

Book 2 of The Dental Practice Owner's Library.