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How Strategy Milling Affects Profitability
Strategy Milling provides the opportunity to offer a lower cost restoration to your clients while increasing profitability.
To understand this concept, let's look at the traditional analog scenario of how gold restorations are created and the costs that are related to that process.
- Lab receives case from Dr.
- Model work is created - materials & labor
- Die is cut & trimmed - labor
- Sealer and spacer are applied - materials & labor
- Crown is hand waxed, sprued, set in ring former, invested, allowed to set, removed from ring former, heated, metal is melted, casting is made, ring is set to cool, divesting takes place, de-spruing happens, THE GOLD IS WEIGHED, the restoration is examined for bubbles of overextensions and fit to die, machining or "finishing" begins and ends with the polishing of the restoration - labor, materials & down time.
All of the above steps are pretty common to technicians.
Using Strategy Gold Milling?
- Steps 1, 2, 3 are the same.
- 4. Scan, design, email file.
- 5. Receive restorations, 10 minutes of labor and it's finished.
- Sell it.
Also pretty common is the event of purchasing the gold alloy which is where cash flow is impacted. Upon purchasing the alloy, it is marked up by a percentage. How much? 25%? 50%? 100%? I have seen and heard of all of these percentages.
Why do we do that? This is what we were taught by watching our peers or listening to our mentors. Selling higher than purchase price covers the expense of floating that much inventory while you move from the day you purchased it to the day you sold the last bit of it. Laboratories have to cover the cost of economics affecting the outlay of cash. Agreed? Agreed. We became gold brokers.
Now let's consider this question. Are you a zirconia, lithium dislocate, titanium, chrome cobalt, or wax broker? No. You do not weigh any of these materials when you use them... you simply figure out the cost of the puck or block divided by the average unit capacity of the material and charge your profit margin based on averages. This allows you to sell these restorations at a flat fee to your accounts and in the end, you win. Your accounts buy these items knowing the final cost of the restoration.
You can now do this with gold. Strategy eliminates you needing to be a gold broker and allows you to work off of averages to sell flat fee gold restorations to your clients and win against the averages.
Our infographic shows some of the cost/profit ratios. We don't suggest you use these... we suggest you look at your previous 6 months sales of gold restorations and see what the average selling price was. What was the average profit margin? Take the average and lower it by $20.00 or $25.00. What price are you looking at? Where does that fall in line with our example infographic? What about your profitability? If you sell a high noble restoration on average for 325.00 a unit and are at about a 40% profit margin.
If you could:
- Lower your sale price to $300.00 per unit
- Produce it with less labor and no outlay of cash for gold
You could realize a profit margin of about 80% while lowering the overall cost to the client and sell far more gold crowns to them.
In a conversation with a Dentist this morning, he told me of his experience at a meeting where the question was posed: "How many of you still use gold?" He raised his hand. He was the only one. He was then asked: "How do you still sell gold? He told them: "I'm the Dentist. My patients trust me."
We know from our survey that the two reason s Dr.'s don't sell more gold is; cost and patient acceptance.
(This Dr. still casts his own gold crowns. He controls the cost and likely doesn't have to mark up the product too much. However, he sells more because the patients trust him and he knows it's the best material all the way around.)
Cost, it turns out, meats that they don't know the cost of the restoration at the time of making the sale with their patient.
Patient perceptions... see example above... is led by the dentist. The dentist is reluctant to sell gold not because it isn't better than other choices, but because the other choices have known costs associated.
Now you can provide your Dr.'s this peace of mind with Strategy Gold Milling... you can offer the flat fee to the Dr. and sell more of something that easy integrates with other digitized products in your current lab workflow, increasing cash flow, minimizing materials and labor costs, & increasing profitability.