DentaltownUK July 2018 - 8

howard speaks
column

Maximize the ROI of Your CE
Does it matter which CE courses you take? Of
course-but not in the way you're probably thinking.
Business is, in three words, supply and demand
and yet I see a lot of dentists who spend their CE
budgets-all their time, all their money-on things
that their patients never asked for.
Some dentists choose to focus their CE efforts on sleep
apnea, TMD or cosmetic dentistry. These are important
topics, but often represent a small percentage of your
practice productivity. That doesn't make
a lot of sense to me. If you have a
passion for these types of cases
it is a worthwhile pursuit, but
if you are focused on rapid
growth, focus your energy
on where the money is.
I mean, I get it if it's
fun-I took those types
of courses at one time,
too!-but this is especially
true for newer dentists
who've got $400,000 in
student loans. Look at the
average income for dentists-
those in general practice make
$174,000 but endodontists make
$325,000.
You might not like doing molar endo, but do
you like sending a $1,000 molar to the endodontist
every week, while you're trying to make payments on
your $400,000 in student loans? Oral surgeons make
an average of $413,000 a year-that's more than the
average dental student graduate's total
indebtedness from dental school and
undergrad-and yet you say you don't
like pulling wisdom teeth? Orthodontics: $301,000. Pediatric dentistry:
$347,000. Periodontics: $257,000.

by Howard Farran, DDS, MBA, publisher, Dentaltown magazine

8

SUMMER 2018 // dentaltownuk.com

When you say you're going to take CE, I will tell
you a million, trillion, gazillion times: Take courses on
root canals, extractions and surgery. That's how you
pay back your student loans the fastest.

Payback is a ... challenge
The hardest thing about life is getting through it,
and when we die we're all going to live in the same-sized
house six feet underground, so it doesn't matter,
but I'll tell you what: Money is the answer
... what's the question?
You decided to borr o w o t h e r p e o p l e 's
money, at the tune of
$70,000 -$100,000 a
year, so that you could
become a dentist and
start paying back the
loan. You could have
said, 'I'm going to get out
of school and I'm going
to work for 10 years and
save up enough cash to go to
dental school', but you didn't.
You wanted to do the OPM
route-Other People's Money-and
now you're sitting on $400,000 in debt.
What's the quickest way to pay them off? The
numbers show that the biggest money is made in oral
surgery, at $413,000 a year, then in endodontics.
After them: pediatric dentistry. We have a pediatric
dental rock star right here in our backyard in Phoenix:
DrJeanette MacLean, Dentaltown's newest editorial
board member, did a couple of CE courses for us on
silver diamine fluoride, and they're some of our mostviewed online courses.
(Tangent: Don't you dare try to tell me you don't
like working on children-you used to be a kid!
http://www.dentaltownuk.com
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of DentaltownUK July 2018
