Matt Carlston, DMD, vice president of marketing and partner recruitment at Comfort Dental, connected with Becker's Nov. 28 to answer the question: "What are you doing to reduce operating costs?"
Editor's note: This response was edited lightly for clarity and brevity.
Dr. Matt Carlston: [Comfort Dental] is founded on the idea of providing high quality dentistry in an affordable manner. Because we purchase supplies in bulk, this allows us to monitor our costs across our 10 states. As a dental franchise, we continually are negotiating prices with our vendors on behalf of our franchisees. This allows us to curb costs and keep our offices functioning with a lower than average overhead. We also anticipate staff salaries being approximately 20 percent of our total gross receipts for any month. With the increase in overall payroll it has become more important for business owners to limit overtime and maintain staff. We also operate three dental laboratories. We are able to keep our costs low and still provide high quality work for our patients. Operating these labs has allowed us to not raise costs on our doctors while other labs, who operate at a lower volume, have had to raise their lab fees to compensate for the current inflation.