Ponder this: How much is ONE extra hour on your doctor’s column worth? And how much would you be willing to pay for that one extra hour if it meant not extending your business hours?
I am invited to speak at study clubs, dental meetings, sales events all the time and share my experience with buying big technology. Often times this technology costs upwards of $150,000 and is seen as a huge financial risk for many practitioners. I remember my first big purchase that cost over $200,000 and I thought to myself, do I really need this? The buyers' remorse was strong!
Having gone through the process some 5 times now - yes, 5 purchases each over $100,000 - it gets easier! However, that doesn’t help you with your first purchase.
What helps with the first purchase is to understand cash flow. When you buy a technology that allows you to do more dentistry, be more efficient or attract more patients, your top line goes up. In fact it can go up substantially. What if I told you that within a few months of owning my first Solea, I started producing $10,000 more revenue a month in simple restorative alone. The average note for a big purchase like Solea is $2,500/month for 5 years. If we are looking at cashflow on a monthly basis it's like someone gives you $10,000 for every $2,500 you give them. This is what you would call positive cash flow, and you should make that deal every time.
But what if you want to be more conservative and say your production “only” increased $5,000/month, that is still really good math because this translates into $30,000 more on your bottom line at the end of the year. If the average practitioner works 16 days a month they would need to produce an additional $312.50/day. Every dentist in the world has an extra 1.5 fillings they could squeeze into their existing day if they didn’t need to wait on local anesthesia. My average filling with Solea is less than 10 minutes of chair time. So if I need to meet my goal of doing 1.5 more fillings a day, I need 15 minutes of chair time in an 8 hour day. When I was contemplating buying Solea, I had a stopwatch on my wrist that I used to measure how much time I spent waiting on anesthetic. I was shocked to see that it was over an hour a day. Accordingly, if you value an hour of doctor doctor time at $500/hour, then you’ll pay the average monthly note on your laser in 5 business days - and the rest is clean profit.
Simply put, Solea converts your non-billable anesthetic wait time into billable procedure time. After purchasing my first Solea laser, I repurposed this time devoted to waiting on anesthetic (which simply means leaving the room and killing time doing something else) and chose to do an extra 4-5 fillings a day. As a result, my revenue jumped over $10,000/month in simple restorative, which meant the laser paid for itself FOUR times over.
