Top 5 performance benchmarks for improving practice profitability

In today's competitive environment practitioners are constantly challenged with protecting their market share, keeping clients happy and keeping an eye on practice profitability.

Based on our own experiences with running clinical labs, we have put together a list of performance benchmarks to improve practice profitability that other practitioners may find useful.

Capturing all available information about your clients and business is a cornerstone of running a successful and profitable practice. Information that flows through your business needs to be captured in a format that allows you to retrieve it easily. Computers and software are perfect for that, so it's important you have a computerised practice. By using a good software package and storing information electronically you will be able to easily determine the following key benchmarks:

• Conversion rate (i.e. how many consults resulted in sales);
• Referral sources (i.e. where does your business come from and which part of your marketing spend gets you the best results);
• Patient recall rate (i.e. what percentage of patients are coming back in for a reline or ease);
• Revenue per clients (i.e. what are your top billing dentists); and
• Utilisation (i.e. how many hours have you spent on activities that generate no revenue versus activities that do generate revenue).

We have used BaseDiary.com.au as a tool to capture data and work out the benchmarks above. BaseDiary is particularly suitable for working with business information as it can be accessed from home and works on any computer (we even tried it on the new iPad which, by the way, worked really well in a lab environment). Whatever you do make sure you capture as much information as possible about your patients and business. The more data you have about your business the more valuable it is while you run it and especially when you want to sell it.