Building Your Cosmetic Practice Within Your Practice

Episode #413 with Dr. John Cranham

If you had to guess, how many of your patients dislike their smile? You've got more than you think! Some of your patients just aren't talking to you about it. Whether it’s whitening, veneers, or bonding, there is a growing demand for these types of procedures. And to help you build this area of your practice, Kirk Behrendt brings in Dr. John Cranham, co-founder of Cranham-Culp Digital Dental, with the best advice for getting started. To learn how to build your cosmetic practice within your practice, listen to Episode 413 of The Best Practices Show!

Main Takeaways:

Balance your general and specialty procedures.

Intentionally block out time for your larger cases.

Understand your patients’ problems and desires.

Cosmetics can be a gateway to better oral health.

Visualization and planning are especially important.

Quotes:

“What I love about cosmetic dentistry is that, with my training and background in occlusion from Dr. Peter Dawson, I learned really early that there were a lot of people that had ugly smiles because of underlying functional problems. And form follows function, and function follows form, and it became my gateway into restoring and helping people become more healthy, biologically and functionally, even though they may have been driven by esthetics.” (4:03—4:33)

“The practice within the practice, to me, is figuring out how much of my time as a general dentist that I'm going to spend doing specialty procedures, and what is going to be my balance on the general side doing my bread-and-butter.” (6:15—6:30)

“I think the healthiest practices that I've seen in the people that I've coached and taught over the years are those ones that have this really healthy general practice. They’ve got a couple hygienists, and they are good at bread-and-butter dentistry and single crowns, and they’ve got a good perio department, and all the things that make for a healthy general dental business. And if you can get to the point where your salary and your bills are being paid out of that general practice, and then you take two, three, four days a month to block to do a large case, well, after you pay the lab bill, all that money falls to the bottom line and it becomes your fastest way to really significantly increase your income.” (8:27—9:15)

“The one thing you've got to remember about cosmetic dentistry is, the occlusion can be dead-on, the restorations can be fitted perfect, perfect margins or near-perfect margins. But if the patient doesn't love it, it’s kind of a failure.” (13:53—14:10)

“There's a definite process, when you go to the specialty side, that I think a lot of dentists underestimate.” (17:29—17:38)

“When I do a smile design case, I want the temporaries to blow [the patient’s] socks off. I want them to look at the mirror and be thrilled with where we’re going. And that only happens with a process of data collection, having time to do that, having time to study it, do some designing.” (20:27—20:46)

“For a long time, we taught that you should always bring everybody into the doctor first and do an hour-and-a-half exam, and do full records, and all this stuff. And I tried that, and a lot of the patients were turned off by it because they didn't need all that. So, I think it’s important to first look at your patients through the lens of, what kind of problems do they have, and what are their desires.” (23:19—23:45)

“A great diagnosis, like getting really confident about what is going to be the best plan for this patient, is critical for the patient to accept treatment.” (26:14—26:23)

“As time has gone on, I have learned that the more I can think about a case upfront — and I've done a lot of cases so I can think through things pretty quickly — I know that...