In this episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors, host Dr. Barbara Hales speaks with Morgan Hamon, CPA and partner at EisnerAmper, about the financial health of dental practices and how professionals can gain control over their profitability. With over two decades of experience helping more than 900 dental practices, Morgan shares actionable financial strategies that dentists can use to build stronger and more sustainable businesses. 

Morgan shares his expertise by outlining practical and strategic approaches that dental professionals can adopt to take greater control over their finances. Rather than simply focusing on cutting costs, he emphasizes the need for a comprehensive understanding of a practice’s financial health. This means recognizing where profits are being lost and addressing the underlying issues that often go unnoticed. Whether it’s inefficient billing, aging receivables, or overspending on supplies, Morgan encourages practice owners to act like CEOs and approach their finances with discipline and strategy. 

He highlights several common areas that often undermine profitability: 

• Uncollected Revenue: Aging patient and insurance receivables can silently drain profits if left unmanaged. Practices must regularly review and follow up on balances, especially those that are 60–90+ days past due.


• Broken Billing and Collection Systems: Many practices fail to consistently charge, bill, and collect—missing even one step can jeopardize the entire cash flow.


• Over-delegated Expense Management: Allowing staff to make unchecked purchases, particularly through platforms like Amazon, can dramatically inflate costs without the owner’s awareness.


• Lack of Financial Oversight: Without a consistent system to monitor income and expenses, doctors may be unaware of critical trends or errors that impact profitability.
  
   

By addressing these areas and taking a proactive approach to their business operations, dental professionals can establish more efficient, profitable, and sustainable practices, providing them with both financial peace of mind and greater professional freedom. 

Key Takeaway:

“Running a practice means wearing two hats: clinician and CEO. If you don’t lead the business, the business will lead you.” – Morgan Hamon 

Connect with Morgan Hamon: 

Website: https://www.eisneramper.com 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/morgan-hamon-cpa-0a9156153/ 

Connect with Barbara Hales: 

Twitter:   @DrBarbaraHales

Facebook:   facebook.com/theMedicalStrategist

Business website: www.TheMedicalStrategist.com

Show website:   www.MarketingTipsForDoctors.com

Email:   info@TheMedicalStrategist.com

YouTube: TheMedicalStrategist

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/barbarahales

Books:

Content Copy Made Easy

14 Tactics to Triple Sales

Power to the Patient: The Medical Strategist

TRANSCRIPTION (203)

Welcome and Introduction 

Dr. Barbara Hales (00:02 ) Welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales, and today we have with us Morgan Hamon.

Morgan Hamon is very interesting person. He is one where most dentists focus on patient care, but running a profitable practice is a different challenge entirely. I’m sure you all agree. Morgan is a CPA and partner at Eisner Amber, and he has spent over 20 years helping dental practice owners take control of their finances. You know, whether it’s dentistry or chiropractic or traditional medicine, you know, we all know how to take care of our patients from the perspective of our specialty, but very few of us trained in business, and that tends to be our failing, especially when we finally get the hang of it. You know, bureaucracy like moves the bar.

So this is where Morgan helps us out. He takes control of their finances, increases profitability and navigate complex tax strategies. And I’d love to propose Morgan as a guest on not only my podcast, but if you guys have another podcast, and it would be a value to your listeners, you know you might want to drop him a line as the former president of HDA accounting group. He built a firm that grew to serve 900 plus dental practices across all 50 states, and now, following a merger with one of the top 20 accounting firms in the industry, he’s continuing to help practice owners make smarter financial decisions, ready to share practical, real world financial insights for dental practice owners, Morgan will break down profitability, taxes and leadership in a way that’s easy to understand, helping dentists build stronger, more financially sustainable businesses. Welcome to the show. 

Morgan Hamon (02:28 ) Thank you, Barbara, it’s very nice to be here. Thank you for having me on your podcast. 

Diagnosing Profitability Problems 

Dr. Barbara Hales (02:33 ) Morgan, you normally talk about how to increase profitability by improving cash flow and reducing financial waste. How do you recommend doing that? How to achieve that? 

Morgan Hamon (02:48 ) Well, our approach is to really, for starters, look at the profit margin. You know what? What is that financial reward that the doctors is realizing from their from their practice? And once we know that number, then we have to set the goal post, if you will, and decide if that’s if that’s appropriate, if the doctors happy with it, we definitely have some opinions on what’s possible for for dental practice, and we’ll, we’ll visit with the doctor. Sometimes more money isn’t always their objective. Sometimes it’s more time. But then once we decide, look, you know, for for the given the size of this practice. You know, once we know that profit margin, we can then decide, look, is it? Is it above average? Is it right where we need to be? Or maybe it’s just lower than everyone would like to see it. If it’s in that final category, you know, that’s where we begin to diagnose. And there’s, from a financial point of view, there’s two factors that impact profit. There’s your expense structure, and then there’s revenue, right? So it’s, if we’re diagnosing, it’s one of those two, the go to first place to look always is expenses, if someone’s profits not where they want it. It’s like, where am I overspending? Or, I think more often than not, it’s more related to the revenue side of the profit equation. And if we’re talking marketing, that could certainly be a factor there too.

You know, is there enough money in the first place coming in to realize an adequate profit margin? Or maybe it seems like there should be, but maybe that, maybe that production’s not being collected. Maybe we have some collection issues. We’re not charging billing or collecting appropriately. So it’s really important to diagnose which one it is. You know, if there’s a if there’s a revenue issue, a collection problem, well then we don’t need to go, you know, get give our supply representatives a hard time. You. If that’s not, if that’s not where our attention should be. So that’s, that’s the overall process. Barbara’s, you know, let’s just decide where are we, and if some things needed attention, then we have to diagnose and really decide where our limited time as the CEO of our business, you know, where should we spend that time to have the best effect? 

Common Financial Mistakes and How to Fix Them 

Dr. Barbara Hales (05:20 ) What are some costly mistakes that health professionals make? And like pointing out, I’m sure is helpful, but how do you help them overcome that? 

Morgan Hamon (05:30 ) So first is to really identify what, what the issue is. So let’s, let’s, we’ll continue on with our with my example here, let’s say we decide, look, it’s, you know, the expense structure looks okay. Profit Margin is low. So we diagnose that. I diagnose that by looking at receivables. You know, are there? You know, in generally, if we have a low margin, that’ll, that’ll often coincide with a large amount of receivables, particularly a large amount of receivables that are aging out. And so we, once we diagnose that, then we can come up with some action items. Some of those action items will be in my lane, the CPA lane, and sometimes they veer over into like a practice consultant lane.

If receivables are the likely culprit, I often advise the doctors say, look, we’ve got a large amount of receivables, if we’re going to quantify that, in my opinion, in the dental world, if total patient insurance receivables, the complete total, if those exceed one month of average production, I think th