FRANKIE HOLMAN, JR.
PRACTICE COACH
As an endodontist, your schedule is carefully constructed to achieve practice and financial goals. But occasionally, life intervenes – a family emergency, unexpected illness, or an urgent commitment – and you need to cancel a day that was previously dedicated to treating patients.
At first glance, it may seem like the cost of that missed day is simply your average daily production. For example, if you typically produce $10,000 per clinical day and work 160 days a year, the immediate production loss as a percentage is:
- Daily production lost / planned annual production
= $10,000 / ($10,000 x 160)
= $10,000 / $1,600,000
= 0.625% of your planned annual production.
A little more than half a percentage point doesn’t seem like much, but that figure doesn’t tell the whole story — especially not in a procedure-intensive specialty like endodontics. Let’s break it down more accurately.
Your fixed costs — rent, staff salaries, equipment leases, insurance, and most administrative costs — don’t disappear just because you cancel a day. The only expenses you avoid are your variable costs, which in most endodontic practices are minimal and well under 10% of revenues. Even assuming a high rate of 10% for simplicity in this example, that means roughly 90% of the day’s lost production comes directly off your net income.
Here’s how the numbers look in terms of actual profitability, assuming your overall expense ratio is 50%:
- (Daily production lost – variable costs) / planned gross profit
= ($10,000 – $1,000) / ($1,600,000 – 50% overhead)
= $9,000 / $800,000
= 1.125% of your net income
So even though you’ve lost only 0.625% of your annual production, your bottom-line income takes a 1.125% hit — nearly double the impact.
In other words, if you miss two or three clinical days without making them up, your total production may look only slightly off at year end, but your take-home income will feel the difference. It’s the financial equivalent of practice-wide inflation.
What can you do?
In endodontics, where every day is focused on time-sensitive patient needs, making up lost production is critical. If you do have to cancel a day unexpectedly:
- Reappoint and rebalance your schedule based on urgency of treatment.
- Proactively add another clinical day to your calendar as soon as possible.
- Consider extending hours slightly on surrounding days to make up time.
- Communicate transparently with referring offices if needed.
By staying disciplined about recapturing missed days, you protect not just your revenue, but your referral relationships, profitability and long-term financial goals.