From Burnout To 55 Percent Overhead: A Dental Business Playbook

Send us Fan MailWhat if a 10 percent drop in overhead could raise your income by 40 percent? We sit down with Dr. Tony Tamaro to map a practical path to 55–56 percent overhead while keeping care personal, ethical, and high quality. The key isn’t grinding more—it’s changing the model: price your time, not just your procedures; run a doctor-led new patient interview that builds trust in minutes; and align your days around comprehensive, quadrant-based care that reduces visits and raises production per hour.Tony walks us through the numbers dentists often ignore. Salaries, including payroll taxes, should live near 20 percent; lab around 10 percent; rent roughly 3–5 percent. Many practices blow past those targets because they overhire and under-measure. We break down how to calculate hourly production and true procedure costs, why annual fee increases are responsible and necessary, and how to use real-time dashboards instead of waiting six weeks for CPA reports you can’t act on. You’ll learn how dropping insurance dependence, updating fees, and focusing on high-value procedures can stabilize cash flow and cut chaos.We also dig into the human side. A 10-minute doctor interview before the exam—asking about goals, fears, and barriers—can transform case acceptance from 35 percent to 90 percent. Pair that with comprehensive diagnostics, clear visuals, and AI support to reduce doubt, and patients start owning their choices. By training in aesthetics, function, and occlusion, you can deliver bigger cases with fewer appointments, which means a calmer schedule, a smaller team, and a healthier business.If you’re ready to run a dental business, not just a practice, this conversation gives you the framework, the metrics, and the mindset to get there. Subscribe, share this with a colleague who needs it, and leave a review with the one metric you’ll start tracking weekly.For more information contact the Pacific Aesthetic Continuum at https://thepac.org.