Dr Dan Shaffer

Every hour you spend on a task someone else on your team could do is an hour that isn't earning what it should. That's the starting point Lamia Murray, Founder of Dental and Me Consultancy, gave a room full of practice owners at Beyond The Chair, and it's worth sitting with before you read any further. Lamia's session focused on intraoral scanning, but the lesson underneath it applies far beyond the scanner. Growth in a practice doesn't come from the dentist working harder. It comes from...

Most of us know our monthly numbers. We know what came in last month, roughly what came in the month before, and we have a general sense of whether things are trending up or down. Fewer of us know what a single hour in the chair is actually worth once the overheads are stripped out. Dr Pav Khaira worked his out. The average practice costs around £85 an hour just to keep the surgery running, whether or not there's a patient in the chair. That means an empty room isn't neutral. It's a cost...

Dental school teaches you how to treat patients. It doesn't teach you how to get found by them. That gap shows up everywhere. Maybe your website hasn't been touched since it launched. Maybe your Google Business photos are years out of date, or your social media has gone quiet for months. None of that feels urgent until you realise a patient is looking at all of it before they ever pick up the phone. Emma Anastasi, Founder of Diamond Dental Staff, puts it plainly: your online presence isn't a...