A fresh graduate's guide to setting up a dental practice

Establishing your dental practice demands a level of commitment, business acumen, sound financial background and knowledge of various aspects such as industry awareness, marketing strategy, etc.Indeed, the success or failure of your business will solely be determined by your judgment and decision making ability.

Here are a few important things to keep in mind before you begin your journey to a successful dental practice

The Most Important Factors to be Considered while setting up a Dental Clinic are:

1. Get Your Objectives Straight

Your objectives drive your action, therefore, the foremost activity is to figure out what you need to achieve and accomplish in life. You must first set out your goals in terms of money, learning and freedom of time. In this, you need to introspect on the amount of money you aim to earn yearly or monthly and the amount of time you wish to dedicate to the practice.

These factors will help you figure out how big or small your dental practice needs to be.

Risk and reward go hand in hand, you can take financial risks which will be rewarding later on, but do not burden yourself with a mountain load of loan. You will always be thinking of it, subconsciously and instead of enjoying your brand new practice, you will end up worrying about your finances.

You can always expand a small practice, but shutting down an ambitious big fat practice will be heartbreaking.

Invest wisely!

2.Location

After planning the size of your business, you need to select the location where you need to set up your business. Location indeed, is a vital factor in deciding the success or failure of your business. A good location will provide your clinic with a fair amount of visibility and exposure. A good location will help you attract a large number of clients which is most important at the initial stage. Also, make sure to choose a location where there is plenty of space for the equipment, staff, you and the patients. Having a pleasant ambiance will provide an environment comfortable for both the patients and the Dentist.

3.Get acquainted with all the Associated Costs:

This is another most important factor which must be considered while planning to set up your business. You first need to evaluate and assess all the expenses associated with establishing a dental practice such as:

• Monthly Rent of the Location
• Staff Payroll
• Infrastructure & Furnishings
• Water and Electricity costs
• Costs of Dental Equipments
• Taxes

Having complete know-how of all the costs before venturing will help in eliminating the surprise factor and make you prepared for financial bottlenecks. A decent Dental set up will cost around Rs. 5–6 lakhs as per the costs in India Remember, at the initial stages you might have to take care of all these overheads from your savings. Be mentally prepared for this scenario.

4.Going Solo or Partnering with Someone:

This is another vital factor considering the tremendous and exorbitant costs associated with setting up a Dental Practice. Although this is purely a subjective decision, however, setting up a Dental Practice in Partnership will help in lessening the initial financial burden.

Make sure to team up with someone trustworthy and make sure to complete all the legal formalities and paper works to avoid any future disputes.

5.Get Your Gear Right:

Utilizing equipment certified by trusted Medical Organizations will help in garnering trust among your clients. Getting basic tools such as Mouth Mirror, dental chair, retractors and Drills of good quality while also maintain good aura and ambiance will help you in attracting clients. It is always a good idea to invest in equipment for your clinic rather than decor Make sure that equipments are sterilized at regular intervals.

6.Hire the Right people

Managing and maintaining the entire clinic all by yourself is a highly daunting task. Therefore, hiring people skilled in Medical treatments and Clinic Management will help you concentrate on your core work — Treating Patients. Make sure to hire people having proper clinical knowledge and practical experience.

7.Figure out Marketing Strategy

You need to also figure out the Marketing Strategy you need to deploy. You can consider having your own website which will ease tasks such as taking appointments, making payments and other options. Further, you can advertise your business on social media platforms. You can also advertise it online by collaborating with other websites. The other ways is to post your cases on social media , try to find a social networking forum only for dentist, where you will be marketing yourself and getting connected with dentists around you

8.Maintain & Measure

Another challenge in running a Dental Practice is maintaining dental standards and measuring progress. This could be accomplished through:

• Regular Quality Checks on Dental Equipments
• Maintaining Accounts and Assessing profits
• Checking Expiry Dates of Medicines
• Providing Upgraded Training Sessions to Staff

9.Keep Yourself up to date :

As mentioned earlier find a forum, an app where you can polish your skills, grow each day revise diseases, treatment protocols on the go. Personally, I have found a lot of dentists speak highly of an app called INDIAN DENTAL NETWORK, where there is a lot of content on diseases and their management, cases from dentist across the globe, quizzes, infographics and what not. You can also post jobs if you need an associate dentist in your clinic. You can also attend various workshop from the website “BOOK MY CDE”.

We are sure that this post will definitely enlighten you with all the aspects associated with Setting up a Dental Practice in India.

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