Scott Leune speaks to Dentistry about the US recipe for dental business success and how UK professionals can access this fountain of knowledge.
Please introduce yourself and tell us a bit about your career
My name is Scott Leune, and I’m a dentist from the United States. Early on, I suffered a pretty severe back injury that put me into a wheelchair for the first 11 years of my career. I’m not in a wheelchair anymore, but during that time, I was forced to go into the business side of dentistry.
Since then, I’ve built and sold many practices myself. I’ve helped build several hundred practices and I’ve also made it my life’s work to understand how to run the everyday parts of a dental office, so that patients receive an excellent experience and the business is highly profitable. I’ve done things like uploaded millions of minutes from phone calls into AI to try to understand if certain phrases are more likely to lead patients to schedule appointments. For example, is there a preferable way to talk about the cost of dentistry so that more patient schedule?
I’ve made it my life’s work to to look at the business side of dentistry and find the laws and the truths behind it. That has resulted in more than 20,000 dental offices in the United States using me or one of my companies to help run their everyday business operations – amazing!
How would you describe your design philosophy?
When it comes to practice design, we’ve got a very unique way of designing dental offices so that they really meet three criteria:
- They’re gorgeous, which provides an excellent patient and employee experience
- They’re highly efficient, which means we can get all the rooms in that we need to get in
- We save a lot of money through designing offices in innovative ways.
The result of this is that dental offices can open from scratch with a beautiful design in a decent location, and do so at a low cost base, so that they’ve got a lot of working capital to then grow the business. This is why many of our start-up dentists end up achieving one million dollars take home pay in early on.
On the practice design side, I believe we need to have beautiful offices. They’re highly efficient and save the owner quite a bit of money, and we’ve created a specific way of doing that over the last 20 years that I’ve been in dentistry.
Your upcoming seminars will share some of those insights – can you tell us more?
For the first time in my career, we’re bringing the the North American seminars to London. In early June, we’ve got two big events.
One event teaches how to design, build and open start-up dental practices, where we also teach that design philosophy. That’s super exciting because when dentists come to our start-up event in North America, their whole career usually changes. They decide to open a practice on their own, and they finally have the working environment they want, the technology they want and the people they want. They have a dental practice catered to them that’s highly profitable.
The other event that we’re doing is our two-day flagship event on mastering the business side of dentistry. There are always a hundred of moving parts in a dental practice. For each one of those moving parts, there’s a recipe to do it at a high level to become a top performer. How you answer phones, how you present finances, how you talk about the clinical need, how you manage the schedule, how you lead people – all of those things have a recipe. Like I said earlier, I’ve dedicated my entire career to understanding those hundred or so recipes. In this two-day event in London, we are going to go through all of those recipes.
What benefits does this course bring dentists in the UK?
Trying to put myself in the shoes of the dentist in Europe, I realised some might wonder, why would they want to listen to someone from the United States talk about dentistry? Isn’t dentistry different in the US versus in Europe? And the answer, of course, is yes and no. There are foundational business principles that are shared. There are common problems we share, there are pain points, there are solutions, and there are ways to become incredibly profitable that we share.
I’ve had the opportunity to travel the world as I’ve got clients all over the globe. I can tell you that, for better or worse, the United States is about five years or so ahead of Europe in its dental journey. So in other words, the trends that are happening now in the US will be happening in Europe over the next five years. So it’s a wonderful opportunity to look at the US as the future. If we learn the trends in the United States, we become very prepared and educated to take advantage of these opportunities in Europe. And boy, are there a lot of opportunities in Europe. I’ve seriously considered doing business in Europe because it’s just so wide open to do well if you understand the right strategy around the business side of dentistry.
Sometimes in dentistry, we shy away from talking about money because we ultimately go to school to treat patients. We go to school to become a master of our craft and to help people. And sometimes bad people can do bad things in the name of money, right? So it’s a topic that dentists sometimes feel uncomfortable to talk about.
I want to make sure everyone knows that we must be very ethical in how we treat people. We have must have the highest standards of clinical care. We do not need to mistreat anyone to make money. While doing what’s best for the patient and for our team in a very ethical way, we can still be highly profitable and become very wealthy doing good things. What we teach over here in my side of the world is centred around those foundations.
What will the experience of the events be like for a dentist attending them?
Dentists in the UK or in other parts of Europe are probably having to deal with nationalised dentistry in some way, working for someone else maybe not in the way they’d prefer. Or maybe they do own a private practice, but it’s not as profitable as it could be. They’re working really hard, they’re dealing with scheduling and employee issues – those problems are all opportunities to solve.
In the beginning of my career, I struggled with a lot of those things as well. But after going through this deep process of learning the ideal ways of doing every little moving part, I understood that most of us just need to be shown how to do it a different way. Even if what we do today is working, there can be a way to do it that works a lot better.
So, a dentist coming to my event is going to hear a very fresh set of ideas. They’re going to see a lot of facts, a lot of examples, a lot of proof of how to do it a different way. They’re going to walk away from that event never seeing dentistry the same. And while they may be exhausted from hearing me speak for two to three days over 100 different things, they are going to be fired up to go back and implement this new way of doing things.
I can guarantee it’s going to be fresh, new and exhilarating. Think about what dentistry could be moving forward when we solve these pain points, when we understand the true laws behind the business side of dentistry. Someone coming to these events is going to walk away wanting to build wealth and build the ideal practice for their life and their patients.
Not a lot of people from either side of the ocean are working hard to share with the other side – here’s a lot of lessons all of us can learn. If someone in Europe were to learn the best there is to learn from European dentistry and share that with North America, we would benefit greatly from that, and it hasn’t happened for me. I’m excited to try to bring these business practices to Europe, so that your problems can also be solved. It’s time to take advantage of this huge opportunity to establish something that we’ve figured out how to do over here in the US.
This article is sponsored by Scott Leune Education.
