Page 9 - The Dental Entrepreneur

The Dental Entrepreneur

Solo practice or even participation in a group practice has always been about wearing many
hats. It may be that of doctor, accountant, purchaser, psychologist, plumber, and on and on.
The process of setting up a dental practice will require you to obtain a variety of skills if you
intend to do this in an economical fashion. If you intend to hire experts to make every single
decision for you, you will quickly find yourself involved in a project that you probably cannot
afford at an early stage of your career.

The incredible financial burden that students face today, combined with the fact that dental
schools continue to give minimal attention to the business side of dentistry make the new
graduates entry into the marketplace very challenging. Many students today are having to
delay their becoming dental entrepreneurs by taking associateships, residencies, and other
employment positions that give them the time to collect their thoughts, get experience ,improve
clinical speed, and arrange finances. This is in stark contrast to 25 years ago when most
graduates began “scratch starts” right out of school. It is only by becoming a dental
entrepreneur that you can in my opinion achieve the income levels commensurate with the risk
and effort that you put into becoming a dentist. I hate seeing a young person bounce around
the first 5 to 10 years of their career because of their inability to get good guidance. That is a
tremendous amount of time making average pay when you have invested so much both
financially and emotionally for this opportunity. A properly structured and disciplined career
should begin to yield financial independence by at least year 15 but that is unfortunately far
from the norm today.

Wantrepreneur Vs Entrepreneur

I hear Mark Cuban use the word ”Wantrepreneur” quite often in the popular TV show Shark

Tank. I think it is a worthy observation. Knowing the clear distinctions between the two
mindsets is a valid starting point. Everyone is not cut out to be an entrepreneur. That is neither
good nor bad. It is simply a fact. I have no problem at all with an individual being an employee
their entire life. As long as it is your choice and you are not in an abusive or compromised
position. The majority of the employment situations I see young people settle for today have
some degree of these components in them. That is the entire premise for me spending the
hundreds of hours developing this material. I want this to be your choice.

The starting point on any book on entrepreneurship should begin with a self inventory when a
person is brutally honest with themselves.

When I started to create the following table, I noticed that there was a culture of certainty in the
entrepreneurial mindset. That is why my first two lectures in the “Business of Dentistry” lecture
series dealt specifically with mental strategies and goal setting. Just as success in dentistry
revolves around people not clinic skills, being an entrepreneurial is really behavioral and not a
technical skill. That an interesting observation. That is why the first chapter is,Should I do this?

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