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Most guides to opening a dental clinic are equipment lists. The equipment is the easy part — it is available, priced, and delivered. What sinks new clinics is the gap between opening and reaching enough patients to cover fixed costs.
This checklist is ordered by what decides that.
Before you sign anything
Work out your monthly fixed cost, then double-check it. Rent, salaries, equipment finance, software, utilities, insurance, accounting. This is what you pay in a month with zero patients.
Divide it by realistic chair-hours to get your break-even hourly rate. Now look at your intended prices. If they do not clear that number at 60% chair utilisation, the plan does not work — and 60% is a fair assumption for a first year, not a pessimistic one.
Hold enough cash for six months of fixed costs. New clinics rarely fail because the dentistry was poor. They fail because patient numbers built more slowly than the lease demanded.
Location, in the order that matters
- Ground floor with street visibility. Passing recognition brings a meaningful share of a new clinic's first patients.
- Parking or transport. Patients arriving anxious and late do not return.
- Water, drainage and electrical capacity. Verify before signing — retrofitting a compressor line or three-phase supply is expensive and slow.
- Room to add a chair. You are choosing a building for five years, not for opening day.
Check the lease permits medical use and any signage you intend. Both have stopped fit-outs after the lease was signed.
Start with fewer chairs than you plan to have
Two chairs plumbed, one fully equipped, is the usual right answer for a single dentist opening alone.
The second chair costs its capital immediately and produces nothing until there is a second dentist or an overlapping hygiene schedule. Plumb it during the fit-out — doing that later means closing — but equip it when it will be used.
Buy, defer, and lease
Buy at opening: chair and unit, compressor and suction, sterilisation, basic imaging, instruments in sufficient quantity to run a full day without mid-day sterilisation, practice management software.
Defer: anything for a procedure you will do less than weekly at first. A specialist unit used twice a month can be referred out until it is not.
Consider leasing the largest items. Preserving cash matters more in year one than owning equipment, and the cash buffer is what carries you to break-even.
Instrument quantity is the one people under-buy. Running short forces sterilisation cycles into the working day, which costs chair time every single day.
Systems running on day one
Set these up before you open, not after:
- Practice management software with patients, schedule and payments — and check the data export before you commit, because you will not check it later
- Google Business Profile, complete with photographs. Create it before opening.
- A phone number that is answered, and a plan for who answers it during treatment
- Online booking, even if only for consultations
- Appointment reminders from the first patient. Retrofitting them after a no-show problem develops is harder than starting with them.
- Written consent and treatment plan templates
- Insurance: professional indemnity and premises
The temptation is to run the first months on paper and "sort out software later." That produces a migration project six months in, at exactly the point you are busiest.
Costs that surprise people
- Waste disposal — clinical waste contracts are a recurring cost, not a one-off
- Equipment servicing and calibration — annual, mandatory, and easy to omit from a plan
- Lab work — cash goes out before the patient's final payment comes in
- Software and licences — small individually, and they accumulate
- Your own salary — plans that omit it are not plans
The first three months
Track four numbers weekly from the first week: new patients, chair utilisation, treatment acceptance, and cash in the bank.
Cash is the one that ends new clinics, and it is the one people check least often because looking is uncomfortable. Check it weekly.
Ask every patient how they found you. In the first months this is the only signal you have about what works, and the answers usually differ from what you expected.
One thing worth doing early
Open with reminders, reviews and a complete Business Profile from the first week. These compound. A clinic that starts asking for reviews in month one has a page of them by month six; one that starts in month six has none until month twelve.
In DOQ, a new clinic can start on the free tier with patients, scheduling, treatment plans and WhatsApp reminders, and export everything at any time.