2021 brought several challenges to the dental industry, including more competition from DSOs and workforce shortages.
Here, three dentists share their biggest lessons in overcoming hurdles this year:
Rick Coker, DDS. Dr. Rick Coker's Smile Studio (Tyler, Texas): My biggest lesson from this year is that relationships are more important to practice success than marketing or new technology. Forming and maintaining solid relationships with team and patients is a key to success.
Teresa Skalyo, DDS. Grateful Dental of Geneva (N.Y.): You can't give up. No matter what is going on around you, you have a family, office and a community counting on you. That doesn't mean you can't have your moment to cry/scream/sing/laugh in the car on your way to work, but it does mean that you leave your home problems outside the office and just put one foot in front of the other. And you leave your office problems outside of your home. And you can't panic. Remain calm and just keep moving forward.
Michael Davis, DDS. Smiles of Santa Fe (New Mexico): I assumed this year we would witness the collapse or near-collapse of small-business dentistry. Despite mandated COVID-19 closures, staff shortages, the dental education-industrial complex continued saturation of new dentists into the market, the feds propping up the private equity industry with purchasing of subprime bonds and shortages and pricing on PPE, small-business dentistry limped along.
I assumed, incorrectly, the final nail in the coffin would be the U.S. Small Business Administration's PPP loan & forgiveness programs. Large DSOs were given favored status, by having their subordinate dental professional corporations do a workaround, and quickly get this federal money, while small-business dentistry struggled.
Small-business dentistry sang out to the world in the manner of Gloria Gaynor, 'I will survive.'