Practice Production, Prioritized: Is your office manager making your practice successful?

After having the opportunity to observe thousands of practices and teams over the course of my career, I can confidently say that the presence of a world-class office manager is one of the key factors in the success of any practice. Unfortunately, some dental office managers lack management experience or education and are therefore limited in their ability to run a practice. 

But management is a science; college degrees are awarded in this field. So what should an office manager be doing to give dentists freedom to focus clinically, build excellent patient relations, and enjoy their careers? 

1. The office manager should function as a chief operating officer. In business, chief operating officers run all day-to-day operations of the organization, either directly or through delegation. Office managers should be responsible for everything that is not clinical in the practice. This means that they need the ability to design expert systems to carry out functions, ranging from scheduling to new patient experience, and train key team members accordingly. 

2. Office managers need to understand human resources, laws, regulations, and the leadership aspect of helping people to reach their true potential. Once the team is trained, the office manager should not micromanage the team hour by hour or day by day—nor should the office manager jump in to do the team’s tasks (or continue to do tasks that were part of his or her job in the past). The office manager’s role is to create the best opportunity for each team member to excel, remain motivated, and enjoy their work. 

3. Office managers need key performance indicators (KPIs) to determine the performance of the team and the practice. Office managers need to know key figures ranging from production, production per day, production per hour, production per provider, production per new patient, production per patient, number of no-shows and last-minute cancellations, levels of insurance reimbursements, and so on. This is how managers understand how the practice is functioning. 

4. The office manager needs a regular meeting schedule with doctors. It is the responsibility of the office manager to develop an agenda that has recurring standing items and new business that needs to be discussed. The office should solicit agenda items from the doctors, and the agenda should be written and handed out at the beginning of the meeting. At the end of the meeting, the office manager should summarize which decisions have been made, who has further responsibility, and the associated deadlines to create accountability. 

There is very little information available for dental office managers to improve performance. Office managers need to access more than just one-time webinars to do things like improve practice performance and the team at the same time. Management is different every day—new issues and challenges arise and team members have different levels of performance at different times for reasons ranging from personal issues to illness, making the office an ongoing chess game. Office managers who excel enjoy the opportunity to think creatively, solve problems,and take the practice to the next level.

Editor's note: This article appeared in the March 2026 print edition of Dental Economics magazine. Dentists in North America are eligible for a complimentary print subscription. Sign up here.