How to Create the “Perfect Day” in a Dental Practice (Without Burning Out)
Every dental practice has days that feel effortless. The goal is to make those days happen more often. Those days seldom happen by chance; they’re created when the schedule supports both patient care and the business. In a Sunrise Dental Solutions masterclass, Dr. Tony Feck and practice coach Dr. Matt VanderMolen outlined the specific systems and leadership principles required to create an ideal day in your practice.
What an “Ideal Day” Really Means
An ideal day in dentistry has two distinct components:
1) Patient Care
An ideal schedule for patient care looks like this:
- You start on time and stay on time
- Lab cases are back and ready
- The team is prepared
- Appointments flow smoothly
- You finish on time (and sometimes even get a real lunch)
2) Business Objectives
If you’re the owner, the ideal day also must support profitability.
With practice overhead averaging roughly 73%, dentistry operates on far thinner margins than many people realize. Profit is not excess, it’s the fuel that sustains the practice. It pays for quality team members, advanced technology, ongoing education, and a facility that supports efficiency and growth, all while protecting the doctor from long-term burnout.
The Five Pockets Framework: Why Your Schedule Drives Your Life
Every dollar produced in your practice has a purpose beyond today’s expenses. A sustainable practice supports five essential financial priorities:
- Retirement — consistently funding long-term financial security
- Taxes — eliminating quarterly stress and surprises
- Long-term goals — education, a future home, or other major life plans
- Contingency — protection for unexpected expenses and disruptions
- Vacation and discretionary spending — because life shouldn’t be deferred indefinitely
Each appointment scheduled in your treatment rooms contributes to one or more of these priorities. That’s why control over your schedule isn’t a scheduling tactic, it’s a foundational business skill. When your schedule is intentional and goal-driven, it supports both the practice and the life you want outside of it.
Setting Practice Goals the Right Way
Effective scheduling starts with clear, measurable goals. Without them, the day defaults to “do as much as possible,” which creates stress, inconsistency, and confusion for the team.
A practical goal-setting process begins with reality, not guesswork:
- Start with a budget based on the previous year’s actual expenses.
- Adjust for rising costs, including inflation.
- Account for personal financial needs and long-term priorities.
- Determine how much the practice must collect to cover all obligations.
- Work backward using the practice’s collection rate to calculate required production.
- Break that number into monthly and daily targets.
- Distribute daily goals across providers, including the doctor and hygiene.
When you build goals this way, they aren’t arbitrary or aspirational—they’re necessary.
The Foundation of the Perfect Day: Team + Systems + Leadership
To consistently create ideal days, you need three ingredients:
1) A Great Team
Not just “bodies”—rather, the right people, in the right seats.
Abide by the principle: Slow to hire, quick to fire.
Not because you want to fire people but because hiring right prevents most downstream chaos.
While compensation matters, it is rarely the primary reason great team members stay. They want to be part of a practice with vision, purpose, and leadership that gives their work meaning.
2) Great Systems
Production is ultimately limited by capacity.
A practice cannot grow beyond what its physical space, staffing model, and clinical flow can support. When goals exceed available operatories, assistants, or systems, the schedule becomes strained and unreliable.
Treatment rooms represent one of the strongest investments a practice can make because production scales directly with capacity. When the right number of operatories are supported by adequate staffing and efficient systems, the schedule becomes easier to manage, growth becomes predictable, and daily goals become far more achievable.
3) Great Leadership
Leadership is the most challenging part of building a consistently productive practice and the most empowering because it’s the area you control most directly. The success of your schedule, your team, and your practice ultimately reflects how clearly and consistently you lead.
Strong leadership starts with setting clear expectations. Your team needs to understand what success looks like each day and how their role contributes to it. From there, leadership requires ongoing feedback, meaningful training, and consistent support so people know how to improve and feel confident doing their jobs well.
Just as important is reinforcement. When positive behaviors are recognized and encouraged, they are repeated. Over time, this builds momentum and accountability without relying on pressure or micromanagement.
At the core of effective leadership is integrity. When your actions align with your words, trust develops. And when trust is present, your team is far more likely to buy into the mission, stay engaged, and work toward shared goals making consistent, productive days possible.
Who Controls the Schedule?
Every schedule is controlled by someone. The question is whether that control belongs to your patients or to you and your team.
In many practices, patients unintentionally dictate the schedule and choose times and appointment types without understanding clinical flow, production goals, or capacity. When that happens, the practice becomes reactive, the day feels chaotic, and consistent productivity becomes difficult to achieve.
When you and your team control the schedule, you create a structured framework that supports efficiency, focus, and predictability. This doesn’t reduce patient care, it improves it. By designing a schedule that works for the team and the practice, you are better positioned to deliver high-quality care consistently and without unnecessary stress.
The Three Rules of Goal-Focused Scheduling
A schedule that consistently supports production and profitability does not need to be complicated. It does, however, need to be disciplined. Goal-focused scheduling operates on three non-negotiable rules.
- First, highly productive appointments are scheduled before anything else. These appointments are what move the practice toward its daily financial objective.
- Second, once the schedule is close to reaching the daily goal, less productive appointments can be added.
- Third, non-productive appointments are only scheduled after the daily goal has already been met.
These are not flexible guidelines. They are rules designed to protect the integrity of the schedule and ensure that daily production goals remain achievable.
This system also places appropriate value on the scheduling coordinator. You cannot collect more than you produce, and you cannot produce more than you schedule. Because of that, the person responsible for managing the schedule plays one of the most critical roles in the practice. When you give that role a clear system and consistent leadership support, the entire practice becomes more predictable and productive.
Busy Isn’t the Goal. Productive Is.
A packed schedule that leaves you crawling to your car door isn’t a success. That’s survival.
The ideal day includes:
- Productivity without chaos
- Time for patient connection
- Same-day treatment opportunities
- Occasional breaks
- Ending the day on time more often
Why Holes in the Schedule Matter
Open time in the schedule is often treated as a problem, but in a goal-focused system, holes are intentional and valuable. They give you flexibility, protect the day from disruption, and create opportunities rather than stress.
There are four types of days you can walk into:
The Best Day
You are scheduled to reach your goal and still have openings in the schedule. Those openings allow you to:
- Accommodate emergencies without chaos
- Provide same-day treatment
- Spend more time building patient relationships
- Maintain a sustainable pace
- Create breathing room for yourself and the team
The Second-Best Day
You are not scheduled to goal at the start of the day, but the schedule still has open time. That availability gives you leverage to intentionally close the gap by:
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- Bringing treatment forward
- Completing unfinished care
- Filling time with patients already in the office
The Third-Best Day
You are scheduled to goal, but there are no openings. While this can still be productive, it carries more risk. A single cancellation–especially from a highly productive appointment can be difficult to recover and often leads to working harder just to maintain the result.
The Worst Day (Unacceptable)
You are not scheduled to goal and have no openings. Care is delivered and expenses are covered, but the practice fails to meet its financial objective. Over time, days like this place the greatest strain on you as the owner.
When used intentionally, holes are not a weakness in your schedule, they are a strategic advantage.
“Today and Tomorrow” Scheduling
Effective scheduling prioritizes what matters most: today and tomorrow. When gaps exist in the near-term schedule, future appointments should not be treated as untouchable.
If today has openings and later days appear full, the priority is to strengthen today, not protect a future schedule at the expense of current production. Appointments scheduled further out can and should be moved forward when doing so improves efficiency and helps the practice meet its daily objective.
This approach prevents the false sense of security that comes from a “perfect” future schedule while the current day underperforms. Being booked several months in advance may look successful, but it often limits flexibility, slows growth, and creates unnecessary friction for patients who need timely care.
By keeping the focus on today and tomorrow, you maintain control of the schedule, create consistent momentum, and ensure that near-term opportunities are not lost to the illusion of long-term fullness.
The Morning Meeting: Where the Day Is Won
The morning meeting sets the tone for the entire day. When it’s done well, it aligns the team, clarifies priorities, and creates a shared plan for success before the first patient arrives.
An effective morning meeting follows a simple structure:
- Start on time to reinforce discipline and respect
- Review yesterday, today, and tomorrow to maintain continuity and momentum
- End on a positive note so the team starts the day focused and confident
If the practice is already scheduled to reach its goal, the meeting is brief. When the schedule is short of the goal, the meeting becomes a focused planning session. The conversation shifts to identifying opportunities that already exist within the day, such as:
- Treatment that can be completed or expanded
- Hygiene patients who may be ready to move forward
- Unfinished or previously diagnosed care
- Appointments that can be moved forward to strengthen the schedule
The tone of this meeting is critical. It is not about blame or pressure. It is strategic, collaborative, and centered on problem-solving as a team.
The Leadership Line That Changes Everything
At some point, the scheduling coordinator will say, “I don’t have enough highly productive appointments to make this work.”
That moment is where leadership matters most.
The correct response is not frustration or adjustment of the rules, it is ownership. Building the conditions that make a productive schedule possible is your responsibility. That means improving diagnosis and case acceptance, attracting the right patients through effective marketing, expanding your clinical skill set and treatment mix, and increasing capacity when growth demands it.
The team executes the system. You create the environment that allows the system to succeed.
You’re More in Control Than You Think
Dentistry remains one of the few professions where you have meaningful control over your future even when the day-to-day pressures make it easy to forget that.
You have the ability to decide:
- Who you work with
- Who you care for
- Where and how you practice
- How your schedule is built
- And how intentionally your practice grows
A “perfect day” isn’t luck, and it isn’t reserved for a select few. It’s the result of clear goals, strong leadership, the right team, and a schedule designed to support both performance and sustainability.
When those elements are in place, consistency replaces chaos and the practice begins working for you instead of the other way around.