Dental Practice Bonus Systems for Big Case and Trust Based Practices

Dental Practice Bonus System

There are a lot of dental bonus systems floating around and I’ve seen most of them.  Quite a few will work for a year or two but then MOST fall by the wayside because they are too easily gamed by the participants.

I’ve only seen two variations on dental practice bonus systems that work for the long-term (decades) and we’ve adapted and refined both of these dental bonus systems for our members over the past 10 years.

Here are the essential keys to understand about dental bonus systems in general:

Key #1: The very best dental bonus systems are at their absolute best when staff size is small. Why?  Because there is simply more $ per individual to be bonuses.  Let’s also face it, those $ are what are motivating these small expert staffs to outperform other practices. 

If you don’t have a small staff, don’t worry, there is still one dental practice bonus system that makes sense.  In fact, if you have a large staff (which in dentistry is anything after 3 employees), there is literally only one dental bonus system that will make sense.  We provide that system to member doctors in our programs.

Key #2: The only way to get true buy-in with dental bonus systems is for it to be simple and understandable.  If you can’t understand the dental bonus system, how will the staff?  If they can’t understand it, good luck.

Key #3:  In any practice wanting to effectively use a dental bonus system, you must sell at least your big case niche services at appropriate fee’s otherwise there’s simply not enough money on the table. 

Key #4: Promote to and find patients who need you the most in the fee for service niche you enjoy.  Part of the joy of giving your staff bonuses via dental practice bonus system is that they help you do the cases you love.  Two of the most profitable areas in dentistry are dental implants and simply focusing on the “mature” patient who is 50+ who needs an expert dentist.  If you enjoy either of those things, why not find and help more of those patients.  In the end, you’ll not only be more professional satisfied, but you’ll have a better income and your staff will enjoy more courtesy of your dental practice bonus system being well funded.

Key #5: Don’t ignore your insurance patients.  Some of them will buy better treatment BUT you have to have a sales process to make that happen.  Bigger case production goes straight to the bottom line and feeds into your dental practice bonus system.

Key #6: Reward for Exceptional Long-Term Service.  Not only is it important to rewards a team functioning at a high level with your dental practice bonus system, but those who want to retain staff for the greatest period of time (decades), realize it’s important to reward significantly at each decade mark for service.

Here are the essential ingredients from the two most proven dental practice bonus systems.

For a larger practice (more than 3 team members), the dental practice bonus system only begins after breakeven is met.  Rewards are then dispensed on an hourly basis past the breakeven point.  There are two levels of reward to the dental practice bonus system.  One that kicks in immediately after breakeven and another, much bigger hourly reward, that starts only once we are past $10,000 over breakeven.

If you create a “team within a team” in a large practice devoted to big cases, that smaller team can be rewarded differently for their efforts.  If you don’t do big cases, then you stick with this simple method of rewarding.  As breakeven changes, the baseline number continues to be modified ensuring that you only bonus when the practice is truly profitable.

For a small, practice (3 team members), the dental practice bonus system is tied directly to staff percent of overhead.  This model works best when revenue is mostly fee for service and when there is an ongoing supply of “big” cases.  Team salaries are fixed as a percent of collections and any month in which collections rise above the average, a percent of the increase is split evenly among the staff.  In a practice doing a lot of big cases, the staff (and doctor) often see paychecks that other practices don’t even believe exist.

Obviously, there are more specific details needed to take the above and put it to use.

I’d absolutely love and adore giving you everything needed to let either of our two proven and effective dental practice bonus systems go to work to make your practice more fulfilling.

To get it, all we need to do is to work together on either building more trust for your practice over all others (applicable to Text2Review OR via our All-on-4 Program.

To find a time to discuss your practice, go here.