Why is My Practice Engine free?

If you haven't visited us before, we can sum up My Practice Engine by stating that we are a service simply focused on providing expert, free advice on the business operations and related services (check out our tool kit to the right) for orthodontic and dental practices.  Among the most frequently asked questions we get on this site are ones like this: “Why do you say that all of your consulting and other services are free?  What’s the catch?  When do you sneak in with the big pitch or start hard-selling me to give up a big piece of my profit for your full range of services?  If not, how do you make money off of me?”

Let me try to answer each of these questions individually.

Why do you say that all of your consulting and other services are free?

You’ve read our history (For part 1, click here.  For part 2, click here).  We’ve been very fortunate to meet some excellent people in this business and we’ve been able to work with those people to achieve significant success, both for them and ourselves.  For evidence of the scope and size of Orthodontic Centers of America, Inc. (or later, OCA, Inc.), you can check out some of our old SEC filings online (here’s one).  For some evidence on the success of our affiliates, you can look at far-reaching practices like Orthodontic Specialists of Florida  and OCA Japan.  The results have been very positive, and now it is our time to pay it forward.  We’ve been able to learn a lot over the years –and we’re still developing practices all day, every day.  We want to share that knowledge with those who want to build their practices, turn around results or are just thinking about starting up a practice.  We’ve seen a lot, made a lot of mistakes and learned a number of important lessons that can benefit just about any other practice out there.  We want to be able to pass that on.

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Sometimes, you just want to talk through some orthodontic business or dental business issues with someone.  You don’t want to sign up for something, pay a fee, or go through a whole initiation process to discuss marketing strategy or employee issues or whatever is on your mind.  We are that someone.  We have contact us links in every post and on the side of this site.  Send us your question and we’ll answer it using all of the knowledge we have.  Simple as that.

When do you sneak in the big pitch?

We do not do that.  For one thing, we generally suck at pitches to doctors and any one that we might try would be an epic failure.  Second, that is not the point of this site.  We have come to believe over the years that a lot of this consulting work should be offered at no charge.

Now, if you would like us to provide some guidance or help with a major issue like a complete practice turnaround or expanding your practice from 2 offices to 10 offices, those tend to involve additional time and resources.  That will require some fee to be worked out that is mutually agreeable to both sides.  But as I’ve mentioned before, we would not come in to a developing or struggling practice and start charging hourly rates or a percentage of gross.  Nor would we help you build up a practice and then hit you with a giant fee.  We don’t get paid unless you get paid.  And we would structure any fee to ensure that you maintain an acceptable level of personal income before any compensation would come to us.

If you recall anything about OCA, you will recall that our fees were essentially 20-50% of “profit” (or net operating margin as defined by our agreements) or 12-17% of collections from day 1.  Those days are long gone and no one knows that better than us.

How do you make money off me?

We do run ads on the side of the blog so we make money when you click the advertisement that rotates as you read posts.  You don’t get charged for clicking them, but that does put a couple of bucks in our pockets.  Other than that, the point of this site is not to make big dollars.  We feel very strongly that we have good quality information that we’ve been able to learn over the years that we would like to pass on.  And yes, if you (not us, but you) decided that you wanted to engage us more fully, there will probably be a charge involved that we will try to keep as low as possible.  And we will certainly try to structure things so that you are not charged.  That’s real talk.  If you are skeptical, give us a try and let us prove it to you.  Won't cost a thing.