Is starting a dental practice good business?

A recent article in the Dentistry magazine claimed that starting up a dental practice is the 4th best business to start if you want it to be successful.

The list was as follows:

1. Nursing homes (91.4% success)
2. Road freight services (90.9% success)
3. GP services (90.1% success)
4. Dentistry (90.0% success)
5. Engineering design activities (89.7% success).

Figures can be seen here.

The article got me thinking into why this could be true.

I have been training dental practices for 13 years and I have I seen every type of practice you could think off. NHS, Private, old ones, modern ones, successful and not so successful ones and I have to admit seeing Dentistry come in 4th did surprise me.

There is no doubting that people will always need a dentist to look after their teeth but there are so many parameters for me.

To be more or less 100% certain that your practice will be a success you need to buy a practice with an existing patient database. This means you don’t have to spend money on lots of new marketing and adverts to generate patients.

If the practice you buy has an existing NHS contract this increases the chances of you being successful. If you are starting a practice from scratch it can be very difficult to get an NHS contract especially in England. Success can simply depend on the area in which you build it.

Cost wise you have all the costs you can think off, solicitors, builders, dental equipment and then you hit the things that you don’t see, insurance, staff wages etc. Once you have added these costs into setting up a brand new practice it can take 6 to 12 months to get a decent patient database that keeps you busy on a daily basis. So it could be year 2 before you start to see any profit or even longer.

Luckily at Dentally we can help with these costs. As we are a cloud based dental software application, we don’t need you to go out and buy expensive hardware. We don’t need you to buy an expensive server or pay for hardware support. If a machine breaks you just get a new one. If you think about this process logically a 4 month contract with a hardware supplier is easily the same money as a new computer.