When you think about profit, do more patients, more days on the schedule, and more procedures come to mind? You’re not alone as most doctors think this way. But the truth is, more isn’t better. In fact, when you chase volume, you can significantly diminish returns.1
Instead of doing more, focus on leveraging what you already have.
If you want to experience rich breakthroughs in profitability, stop focusing on increasing volume. Instead, increase the value of every moment you have with every single patient and procedure. By focusing on leveraging and maximizing the resources that you already have at your disposal, including your time, space, and people, you can transform your practice.
It Involves a mindset shift focusing on value, not volume.
To start, let’s make a fundamental shift in the way you view profitability. Are you trapped in the mindset of chasing more patient visits, procedures, units of anything, crowns, and more? Know that the real key to profit isn’t in quantity; it’s in quality.
Look at the worth of the work you’re doing. What is the value of each patient visit and each procedure? Shift your focus from how much you’re doing to how valuable each thing is, and you’ll unlock a new level of profitability. For example, stop thinking about how many crowns you place in a day. Instead, focus on the value of each crown and the outcome it delivers for your patient. Rather than counting the number of hygiene appointments scheduled, focus on how to maximize each patient’s lifetime value. You can do this by adding more comprehensive treatments or upgrading their care. When you make this shift from volume to value, magic happens! Now, instead of cramming more patients and procedures into your schedule, you focus on the quality and worth of what is already available.
The 3 limiting factors: Time, space, and people
You deal with three limiting factors every day as a private practice owner. They are time, space, and people. While these are the resources that shape your practice limits, they also hold the keys to unlocking greater profit.
1. The most finite resource is time. You already know that time is your most finite and valuable resource. You have a set number of hours to work with each day. This is why it’s critical to ask yourself: How much time are you putting in versus the value you receive? Whether it’s a new patient experience, a procedure, a team training, or something else, this question applies to everything you do in your practice.
Your goal is to maximize the return on the time you invest. To accomplish this, it’s essential to get laser-focused on how you spend your time. Do you spend hours on low-value activities that don’t contribute to profit? Do you structure your appointments to ensure that you get the most out of every minute? You can’t afford to waste the currency of time.
2. Maximize the space you have. Your office has physical limits. You only have so many operatories, rooms, and equipment. You’ll run into serious limitations if you continuously add more space. The truth is, you don’t need more space to increase profit. Instead, it’s essential to maximize the use of the space you already have. This may mean optimizing how rooms are used, rethinking your schedule or staggering patient visits to ensure that every inch of your office works at full capacity. It’s not about expanding your practice walls. It’s about getting the most out of the square footage you currently have.
3. Leverage your team. The third limiting factor is your team of people. As your practice grows, it can be very tempting to add more staff to handle the workload. However, this leads to increased training, payroll, and management burdens. Instead of hiring more people, the key to maximizing your profit is leveraging the team you already have.
Your team members can handle more than you think and take on higher-value roles with the appropriate systems, training and accountability in place. You just need to provide them with the right tools to upgrade treatment plans, handle patient education, and engage patients in conversations that lead to greater case acceptance.
Maximize leverage of your current team instead of adding more people to payroll. Focus on getting them to operate at their highest potential. Then, you can increase profit without adding overhead.
The secret to optimizing your returns
The big takeaway is that volume has diminishing returns. If you continue to focus on volume and doing more, you’ll find that you make less profit because time, space, and people will all hit their limits. This is why leverage is the key to optimizing your returns.
It’s about obtaining more value out of the same effort and doing what you are currently… just better, smarter, and more efficiently. You unlock profit that most doctors overlook when you apply leverage to your time, space, and people. Specifically:
- By scheduling your day to maximize productivity and focusing on the highest-value procedures, you leverage time.
- By ensuring that no operatory sits idle and optimizing how rooms are used, you leverage space.
- By empowering your team to take on higher-level responsibilities and tasks that directly contribute to profitability, you leverage people.
You don’t need to chase volume when you leverage what you already have.
Instead, you just need to maximize the return on your current resources.
By doing this, you’ll experience the greatest breakthroughs in profitability. You’ll always have room to move the needle and increase profit without adding more to your overhead or schedule. Just ask yourself the following questions:
How can I get more out of what I already have in place?
Can I restructure patient flow?
Can I optimize the roles of various team members?
Can I stop chasing more procedures and focus on higher-value treatments, instead?
Your answers will lead to greater profit.
Remember, it’s not about doing more; it’s about getting more value from the same efforts you have in place now. Focus on maximizing what’s already working, and you’ll create a practice that’s not only more profitable, but also more scalable and sustainable.
Maximization is much better than doing more
More isn’t better. By chasing volume, you experience burnout and diminishing returns. Profitability comes from leveraging and maximizing your time, space, and people who are already right in front of you. Shift from volume to value, and from quantity to quality. Then, you’ll see exponential growth in your practice’s profitability.
Remember, your greatest breakthroughs will come not from doing more, but from maximizing and leveraging what you already have. That’s how you achieve lasting, sustainable profit.
Author's note: This is an excerpt from the new Profit on Purpose toolkit that reveals how to engineer your practice for maximum profitability.
Editor's note: This article originally appeared in DE Weekend, the newsletter that will elevate your Sunday mornings with practical and innovative practice management and clinical content from experts across the field. Subscribe here.
Reference
- JPMorgan Asset Management. Quality over quantity: building high quality equity portfolios. Special to VettaFi. Published December 9, 2020. Accessed May 23, 2025. https://etfdb.com/quality-over-quantity-building-high-quality-equity-portfolios
