Dentaltown June 2018 - 12

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.
When you say you're going to take

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

12

JUNE 2018 // dentaltown.com

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 borrow other
people'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:
Dr. Jeanette 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! I've
flown a thousand times in airplanes to get to lectures,
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Dentaltown June 2018
