If you haven’t had the chance to check out the rankings of states by average dental practice scores from our Sikka Success Report™, do it today – it’s fascinating. When we noticed that Vermont had long been holding down its lofty perch at or near the top of the rankings, we asked the question, “Is this just because it’s a ‘rich’ state?” For that matter, is the success of a state’s average practice tied to its per capita income? We’re happy to report that it’s not:
The correlation is negligible, at 0.056 (i.e., any difference in per capita income only explains 5.6% of the change in Practice Success Score, and vice versa). And Vermont isn’t a particularly high-income state, anyway, as you can see. In effect, it “punches above its weight” in the success of its dentistries.
But we didn’t stop there – we were having too much fun making scatter plots. So next we tried correlating the average state resident’s yearly dental spend with our success scores:
This time, we do see a mild positive correlation of 0.300, which makes intuitive sense. Although in this case, Vermont does have the 6th-highest average per capita dental expenditure, it’s still an outlier for the massive success of its practices.
The phrase “demography is destiny” is generally attributed to 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte. That the phrase is still used is a testament to its wisdom, but the fact that dental practice owners do not have artificial ceilings on their business performance imposed by the characteristics of their surrounding areas is a happy contradiction of this “rule.”
Here at sikka.ai, we wake up every day ready to help practices optimize the business side of things while they handle the clinical side. But I guess that’s no surprise to any of you, since we are, after all, the Practice Optimizer Company®. If you want to “punch above your weight” in terms of your practice success, check out Optimizer Classic Premium.