The Dental Practice Heroes Podcast With Dr. Paul Etchison

You end a whirlwind clinical day feeling like a champ, until the production report steals the win. We’re tackling the real metric that decides your freedom: dollar per hour. When you stop chasing raw revenue and start engineering each hour for high yield, your schedule calms down, profits rise, and time off stops feeling expensive.We lay out concrete targets you can actually hit: $650 per hour as the floor for associates and general clinicians, and $1,000–$1,200 per hour for owners who tighten systems and add selective high-value work. Then we make it practical. You’ll hear fast, repeatable benchmarks for core procedures—class II composites in 15-minute bites, crown plus buildup and delivery inside an hour, night guards with five minutes of doctor time—that show how small changes stack into big hourly gains. Extractions become strong earners when paired with ridge preservation, and we unpack the timing traps that keep molar endo at $500 per hour instead of $1,400, including access, patency, and a crisp obtura