Gone are the lazy days of summer, instead we find ourselves right back in the thick of things. The students are “back to school” and the rest of us are back to life and back to reality with our busy practices, children and other life responsibilities. While many of us haven’t been in a formal educational setting for quite some time, you will quickly learn in this issue of the Professional Advisory that we still have homework to do! This homework isn’t for grades, it’s far more important as it lays the groundwork for our long-term professional and personal future.
Mark McNulty’s article, “How much retirement savings do I need to spend $180,000 per year?”, essentially urges to you to find your “magic” number. Just as knowing ahead of time what to study helps you prepare better for your test, so does knowing what you need to save and grow in your investments for your future.
Similarly, doing your due diligence and finding out the 5W’s (who, what, when, where, why) of setting up a practice, new or existing, is fundamental to your success. Ian Toms gives you tips on how to find potential locations by leveraging and using demographic data in “Patient Demographic Analysis: Say Hello to a Good Buy”.
“Maintaining Growth of Our Practices” by Dr. Weintraub emphasizes that even when we think all of our work is done, there is still some reviewing and editing to be done. Here, he discusses the importance of taking time to understand the dental marketplace and consumer. In this way, we can carefully plan our websites as well as the interior and exterior designs of our practice to attract new patients and build our practices.
In school, it is important to know where to invest most of your time and effort for maximum results. Well, David Chong Yen shows us that it’s not much different when it comes to investing in various items in his article, “Big Ticket Purchases. Can I Afford it? Should I Buy it?” Knowing your return-on-investment and making small sacrifices in the present can help your financial report card in the long-run.
The article, “The Real Cost of a Dental Practice Set-up”, by Colin Ross reminds us that evaluating situations and circumstances is important. He stresses that every decision we make has upsides and downsides. As such, it’s valuable to know what you are looking for now and later in life so you make the right choices.
And last, but not least, David Rosenthal reminds us in, “Corporate Dentistry – What Vendor Dentists Need to Know” that last minute studying or cramming will not always get us the results we want. One such pearl of wisdom is that careful legal and tax planning a few years in advance is necessary before a professional corporation can be sold especially, if you want to maximize profits and minimize the tax burden.
As you can see, this edition of the Professional Advisory, outlines the work we need to do to achieve the professional, personal and financial grades we’ve set our sights on, so our reality doesn’t bite.
