The fee is not the barrier
Not everyone will understand this article but some of you will. If you know, you know.
My mentor, Omer Reed, used to say that a fair fee is one the patient is prepared to pay and you are prepared to accept, without either of you losing your gratitude.
I didn’t understand that until I tried to lose a type of case altogether and ended up doing more of them than ever.
Years ago I decided I didn’t want to do any more full dentures. The adjustments, the remakes, the patients who were never quite happy irritated me more than anything else in the practice.
To get rid of my denture patients I put my fee up. In fact, I doubled it. I expected that the higher fee would send the denture patients elsewhere. Instead, I had a big surge of denture cases.
Suddenly I became the go-to denture guy.
It took me a while to work out why, because it ran against everything I’d assumed about pricing. The truth was in my own chairside manner. At the lower fee, I was sincerely hoping the patient would say ‘no’ and they could feel it.
At the higher fee, I felt differently. I was no longer hoping to lose the case. I was happy to do the work. I felt well rewarded. Patients read that ease as confidence, and thought “this guy must be good at dentures”.
This is the part most dentists don’t understand.
They assume a high fee creates resistance, so they shave the number down to make the fee “easier” to accept. But in dentistry, whatever fee you quote (low or high) the patient perceives it as way too much.
So if they’re going to feel that the fee is high either way, you may as well quote a fee that makes you happy, because that happiness is doing more selling than your explanation ever will.
A fee you resent shows up as hesitation patients can feel. A fee you’re glad to accept shows up as ease and confidence.
Across my career I’ve done over 20,000 crowns, and the pattern holds well beyond dentures. The fee is almost never the real barrier. Your own reluctance to quote a proper fee is the true barrier.
If this rings true for your own pricing instincts, it’s exactly the kind of thing we dig into properly inside my course, The Art of Case Acceptance.
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