HOW WE WORK

12 levers. One flywheel. A practice that compounds.

The framework, the engagement, and the operational rhythm.

THE CENTRAL IDEA

The flywheel principle

Every turn of the flywheel is another step up the mountain. It is also why we never work on a single lever in isolation. Fixing marketing in a practice with a broken recall process leaks the marketing investment back out the other side. Fixing consumables in a practice with no financial visibility produces a saving the principal can't see. The system is the unit of intervention. Anything less is a fragment.

The 12 profit levers are not a checklist. They are a flywheel. Each push makes the next push easier. Improve recall, treatment plan acceptance, and chair utilisation by 10% each, and you don't get a 30% lift. The levers compound.

THE COMPOUNDING MATHS

Small gains don’t add. They multiply.

+10% Recall × +10% Treatment plan acceptance × +10% Chair utilisation = +33% more production 1.10 × 1.10 × 1.10 = 1.33 Most costs are fixed. Extra production drops to the bottom line. More production +33% More profit ≈45% 45% PROFIT IMPROVEMENT An illustration of compounding, not a projection. The diagnostic sizes the number for your practice.

THE FRAMEWORK

The 12 profit levers

4 domains. 12 levers. Each one measurable, each one connected to the others, each one with a clear path from current performance to target.

Revenue Generation

A · REVENUE GENERATION

01 New Patient Acquisition

Marketing efficiency, online presence, referral systems, conversion rates.

02 Recalls

A significant source of preventable lost revenue.

03 Treatment Plan Acceptance

Diagnosis without conversion is lost revenue. The presentation matters as much as the diagnosis.

04 Fee Schedule & Payer Mix

10-15% below market on fees they never updated. Quiet leakage.

Capacity Utilisation

B  ·  CAPACITY UTILISATION

05 Chair Utilisation

Booked vs available hours. The single biggest opportunity.

06 Cancellations & No-Shows

The cost is rarely visible until it's measured. Always larger than principals expect.

07 Hygiene Productivity

Hygiene is the recurring revenue base of a practice.

Cost Discipline

C · COST DISCIPLINE

08 Staff Costs

Scheduling against demand, not against habit. The largest controllable cost.

09 Consumables

Sourcing, ordering, waste. Routine annual savings of 1-2% of revenue.

10 Lab Costs

Case mix, supplier mix, communication. Quiet margin leakage.

Operational Foundations

D · OPERATIONAL FOUNDATIONS

11 Financial Visibility

The dashboard the practice should have but doesn't. An enabler of every other lever.

12 Online Reputation

Compounds with marketing, recall, and acceptance. The cheapest growth lever most practices ignore.

THE ENGAGEMENT

The three-step process

Each step earns the next.

90 MINUTES 01 4 WEEKS 02 12 MONTHS 03 Discovery Conversation We take a proper look at your practice. You hear exactly what we see. No cost. No commitment. Diagnostic Engagement Four weeks inside your numbers. A real plan, yours to keep. Fixed fee, by practice scale. Profit Programme The 12 levers, worked in sequence. Profit growth you can measure. Retainer + a share of the profit we add.

THE RHYTHM

The 12-month rhythm

What you can expect, month by month.

First four weeks

Diagnostic

Diagnose · Strategy

Discovery

Deep practice immersion. Interviews with the principal, the practice manager, and the leadership team. Data extraction from your practice management software. Establishment of the baseline financial position.

Analysis & roadmap

12-lever scorecard completed. Priority levers identified. 12-month roadmap published. Performance dashboard built and populated. First monthly business review held.

Months 1-6

Priority lever work

Execute

Focused execution on the top three to five profit levers identified in the diagnostic. Monthly business reviews. Weekly dashboard refresh. First quarterly business review held in month three.

Months 7-9

Compounding phase

Execute

Priority levers stabilised. Secondary levers engaged. Half-year strategic review. Performance share recalculation against documented baseline.

Months 10-12

Sustainment

Sustain

All 12 profit levers actively measured. Operational rhythm fully installed. 12-month review with the principal. Decision on renewal, graduation to lighter-touch, or formal close.

WHAT YOU GET

What the reporting shows

An illustrative Performance Dashboard. Yours is built from your practice’s own data and walked through every month.

BEFORE YOU BOOK

Frequently asked questions

The things principals ask before they book a Discovery Conversation. Straight answers, no hedging.

  • Because there is no good way to recommend a 12-month engagement without first understanding the practice deeply. The diagnostic is the work, not a sales process. It produces a documented baseline, a priority lever ranking, and a sequenced 12-month roadmap. Those have real and lasting value whether or not a full engagement follows. The fee reflects that work, not access to a future engagement.

  • The Discovery Conversation costs nothing. The Diagnostic is a fixed fee. The Profit Programme runs on a monthly retainer plus a performance share of documented profit improvement above your baseline, capped annually. The structure is deliberate: the retainer covers the work, and the performance share means we earn most when you do.

  • Accountants work at the financial reporting layer: the P&L, the tax structure, the compliance. Business coaches work on leadership, mindset, and high-level strategy, usually without dental-specific expertise. kat-e-list sits in the operational middle ground between the two, inside the day-to-day running of a dental practice. None of the three substitutes for the others. The best-run practices have all three working in parallel, and we are happy to coordinate with yours.

  • kat-e-list is built for owner-operated New Zealand practices, typically one to four chairs with annual revenue between $500k and $1.5m, established but plateaued. If the practice is busy without becoming proportionally more profitable, this is built for you. If it is not the right fit, we will say so at the Discovery Conversation and point you somewhere better.

  • All four systems in the New Zealand market: EXACT, Dentally, Principle, and Core. Each exports data differently. Our normalisation layer handles the mapping, so the baseline and the dashboard work the same way whichever system you run. We work from standard exports your system already produces; nothing changes in how your team uses the PMS.

  • Less than you expect, and by design. Your time is the most expensive thing in the practice, so we treat it that way. The rhythm is one monthly business review with you and a quarterly strategic review with the wider team. Between sessions the dashboard does the measurement and we carry the analysis. Your time goes into decisions and leading the team, not into spreadsheets. The whole point of the engagement is to give you more of your time back, so spending a lot of it to get there would defeat the exercise.

  • Documented profit improvement against your baseline, measured monthly. This all depends on starting point and execution discipline. We do not promise a number before the diagnostic, because the honest answer depends on where your practice sits across the 12 levers. The diagnostic exists to replace guesswork with an estimate you can hold us to.

  • Yes. The retainer covers the engagement infrastructure: the consultant's time, the dashboard, the monthly cadence. The performance share is the variable element, and it is only payable on documented improvement above your baseline. If the engagement is not producing results, we should be having an honest conversation about why, and either party can end the engagement on 30 days' written notice. The dashboard and the underlying files stay with the practice.

  • Then the baseline gets adjusted, agreed in writing at the time. The performance share should reflect work the engagement contributed to, not windfall events. In practice, most improvement is operational rather than external, and the methodology accounts for the difference.

  • Some resistance is normal, and it is part of what the engagement addresses. Nothing is imposed on the practice. The roadmap is implemented around your leadership style and the team's existing strengths, and the diagnostic itself asks nothing of the team beyond honesty.

  • The plan and recommendation is one expert view, built from your data and the conversations. It is not a binding directive. Disagree with any part of it and we will discuss it openly at the final review. If the conclusion is that a full engagement is not the right fit, that is a valuable outcome in itself, and the roadmap is yours to execute without us.

  • Yes. Everything is covered by a mutual confidentiality agreement signed before any data changes hands. The only exception is anonymised, summary-level references, such as 'a two-chair practice in Auckland', used in marketing or speaking contexts. Your practice will never be named without written consent.

The best way to understand it is to do it.

A 90-minute Discovery Conversation is the only commitment that matters at the start. We'll talk about your practice, your goals, and whether there's a fit. No pitch deck. No follow-up unless you ask for one.

Book a Discovery Conversation →