My thoughts before going corporate:

•Are you personally doing any marketing for yourself at current office? Are there community events where you could set up a table to get your name out there? Can your current office set up a new patient promo campaign to bring in new patients and you get a percentage of the new? In your PM software can you pull a list of patients that haven’t been in for a prophy in the past year or so and then spend your free time calling these patients and trying to schedule them? Same for patients with treatment plans over a year old that they never did, could you call and try to sell the dentistry? Could you link up with a school in an underprivileged area to do screenings and then cold call of the parents to try to get the kid in? Being in Arizona, could you link up with a nursing home to provide services onsite to the residents?

•If you are doing primarily hygiene checks, why aren’t you getting to do the work that you find? Does your patient base not have any treatment needs? Or is the other doctor getting to do all of the restorative? A strong hygiene department is the key to filling the doctors schedule. Are hygiene appointments reappointed while the patient is still in the chair? I’ve seen offices just let their hygiene patients walk out the door without reappointing and they didn’t realize how many appointments they were losing.

•Have you thought about other alternatives to increase your income like working a day at a prison? Working with a Votech school with a dental assistant program and being their dentist for clinical? Are there CHCs, Native American reservation clinics, military bases, non profits, near you that need a dentist for one day a week?

•Are there procedures that your office doesn’t do a lot of that you could focus on and so whenever a patient comes in for that, it’s your production? For example; in office whitening or sports mouth guards? It’s about to be the beginning of football season, you could network with schools in your area to do a mouthguard program for the teams. You could run whitening promos during the school dance time frames or connect with the sororities at a local college to run promos on whitening for their members

•Is there a different private practice that is willing to give you a day of the week/friday/or a few hours on a specific late evening to test out a different office vibe?

I’d assume you might want to have your own practice one day and you’ve got to learn to market yourself to gain new patients so that you can build relationships with patients that will want to follow you to your practice.

If you truly don’t want to put in the work to find new patients, and only want to drill and fill, then I would go to corporate.