While there are a lot of books on the broader dental industry, only a few are dedicated to the unique challenges of growing an orthodontics practice.
So to help you on your journey to a profitable practice that enables the lifestyle of your dreams, we’ve assembled a list of the best books on running and growing a successful orthodontics practice.
With these six books on the business of orthodontics, you’ll be well on your way to setting up your orthodontics practice for tremendous success:
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The 6 Essential Books for Orthodontic Practice Growth
1. The Ultimate Practice: What Medical School Forgot to Teach You about Building the Life of Your Dreams
As an orthodontist, you’re one of the most educated professionals in our society. You’ve studied at the highest levels for at least a decade and must understand and apply complex principles in your practice every day.
Yet, running a successful business has little to do with your skills as a clinical orthodontist. So why, in all those years of schooling, does nobody show you how to grow and run a highly-profitable orthodontics practice in today’s marketplace?
Instead, new doctors or first-time practice owners are often lost, trying to do everything on their own, from developing a marketing plan to paying the bills to treating patients.
That’s why The Ultimate Practice is one of the essential books on orthodontics. It’s a crash course in everything an orthodontist didn’t learn in medical school about how to grow a business.
In addition, it teaches you how to build a lifestyle that makes running an orthodontics practice enjoyable rather than a source of endless stress.
This book shows you things that are critical to your success, like:
- Why you must align your marketing with operations to achieve sustainable growth
- How poor staff training is costing you all your profits
- The biggest mistakes doctors make that drive new patients to competitors
- How improving the patient experience boosts your bottom line
- The “lead follow-up strategy” you need to convert more patients, guaranteed
- How to become the CEO of your practice, work fewer hours and make more money
In this definitive guide to growing your orthodontic practice, you’ll learn the exact Patient Acquisition and Retention Framework™ that the authors have used to increase orthodontists’ revenue by over 400%
You’ll begin to understand why a great marketing company is critical to your practice’s growth. And you’ll get crucial advice on choosing a marketing company that delivers a high return on your investment (ROI) rather than blowing through your marketing budget with nothing in return. Growing a successful practice is much more than a sleek web design, social ADs, and SEO for your company.
2. The Scalable Practice: The Missing Role to Grow Your Practice Faster & Easier
Orthodontists can only grow when they see more patients. The best orthodontists can produce as much as $10,000 per hour when focused on clinical work.
So why do most orthodontic practices produce less than $1.5M per year? And why do only a select few ever break the $3 million barrier? Because they spend too much time managing their practice and not enough time working with patients.
This book reveals the secret to the country’s most profitable orthodontics practices: your practice makes more money the less you’re involved in the operations. That’s why handing operations over to a trusted Chief Operations Officer (COO) is the key to building scalable orthodontics practice.
This book on orthodontic practice management shows you how managing human resources, optimizing scheduling practices, and worrying about cash flow are not good uses of your time. Yet they are critical to the success of any orthodontics practice.
So rather than trying to learn a new skill—managing the business side of your practice—your business will grow faster if you hire someone with the right skill set to do it for you.
This essential book gives practical examples, talks through real-life case studies, and shows how to find, hire, and implement a COO into your practice to empower you to grow from a boutique office to a dominant force in your local orthodontic market!
3. Front Desk Secrets of the Nation’s Fastest-Growing Orthodontic Practices
Could the lowest-paid members of your team be the most important to your growth?
In this orthodontic growth book, you’ll learn that most orthodontic practices miss four to five calls daily from leads looking to start treatment.
If your practice could find a way to recover just one of those missed patients per day, you could add another $1,000,000 to your production in one year!
Front Desk Secrets is the best book on orthodontics if you’re looking for easy ways to add more revenue to your practice without spending more money on Facebook ads, event sponsorships, or billboards. Because it shows you how to take leads you’re already getting and convert them into paying patients (instead of missed calls, no-shows, or fence-sitters).
While many practices treat the front desk staff as just another pretty face, this book reveals why the nation’s fastest-growing orthodontists invest serious attention into hiring, training, and building a team of world-class scheduling coordinators.
In the first book of the paradigm-shifting Orthodontic Practice Growth Series. Luke Infinger, Co-Founder & CEO at HIP, shares:
- The must-have attributes of a multiple 7 & 8-figure front desk team
- Processes and procedures that will keep your scheduling coordinator turning leads into new patients
- Essential scripts that screen for quality, schedule consultations, and reduce no-shows
- How to use tempo and tone to break down resistance and increase conversion
- The “Speed to Lead” process that results in 100% more bookings
- The follow-up process that doubles conversions of new patient consultations
- Office setup, workflows, software, and tracking that will multiply your revenue
The key to millions of dollars of revenue growth may already be in your office. This book gives you the tools you need to unleash the full patient-closing power of your front desk team!
4. The Ultimate Treatment Coordinator: Closing Secrets of the Nation’s Top 1% Orthodontic Practices
This orthodontic growth guide starts with a simple principle:
The average orthodontic practice converts just 52% of its consultations into starts.
Yet the top-performing practices often convert 80% or more.
For a practice conducting 50 consultations a month, that could be a $1,000,000 difference in annual production.
This book gives you five critical growth hacks to boost your conversion rates and start scaling your practice as soon as next month without increasing your operating expenses.
You’ll get step-by-step instructions on how to execute the exact steps proven to start more patients, like:
- How to respond to leads in 5 minutes or less and schedule them within 72 hours
- Techniques to boost conversions by “pre-framing” fees and same-day starts
- Double your office’s capacity with the 30-Minute New Patient Consultation
- How to get more ‘yeses’ with the 5-Minute Fee Presentation
- The Proven Playbook to start 80% of new patients on the same day
A highly-skilled and expertly trained TC will turn prospects into patients and increase production faster than you can imagine. So if growth is on your agenda for this year, pick up this orthodontic book to find out how to do it.
5. Profit First for Dentists: Proven Cash Flow Strategies for Financial Freedom
Even when you’re growing (or especially when you’re growing), keeping money in the bank is always a challenge for orthodontics practices. That’s why our fourth book suggestion for orthodontists is all about cash flow.
Because so many patients are on payment plans, your sales will always outpace your incoming cash. And you’ll need to be laying out more and more expenses for equipment, supplies, and salary to support your growing patient base.
So how do you balance these to make your finances work day to day? Inside the book, Drew Hinrichs, CPA, and Barbara Stackhouse, RDH, MEd, show you how to apply the core principles of Mike Michalowicz’s best selling book Profit First to a dental setting.
If you’re an orthodontist that wants to have more insight into how much money you have today, how much you’ll have tomorrow, and how much you’ll have next year, this book is for you. Improving cash flow will help you finally understand your finances to boost your profits, control your spending, and confidently grow your practice.
6. 50 Must-Read Business Books to Grow Your Orthodontic Practice: Why These Classic Texts Matter More Than Ever in Today’s Economy
Okay, maybe we’re cheating a bit with our 6th suggestion for orthodontic books. Still, this final selection is an indispensable resource for the doctor who wants a masterclass in business success.
Dr. Dustin S. Burleson’s book is a recap of the books that have helped him the most in his role as coach and consultant to thousands of the world’s top-performing dentists, doctors, and orthodontists.
His list contains some well-known business classics, like Napoleon Hill’s Think And Grow Rich, modern classics like Good to Great by Jim C. Collins, and a mix of topics ranging from marketing to sales to neuroscience and beyond.
If you’re a doctor who wants to grow and has an insatiable desire to learn and understand the principles of a successful business, put this one on your orthodontic reading list!
FREE BOOK: Orthodontic Secrets
Want to Skip the Reading and Get Right to the Results?
If you want to grow your business in the next 12 months and don’t have time to waste, skip the reading list and book a consultation with HIP today.
We’ll show you the exact tactics we’ve used to create over $100,000,000 of revenue growth for our partners, like Fishbein Orthodontics, Dr. Jennifer Orthodontics, All Smiles Orthodontics, and more. And then, we’ll work side-by-side with your team to implement those practices quickly, so you can start treating more patients without flipping pages.