What If You Don’t Have an Overhead Problem....

Not long ago, someone I’ve known for years reached out and asked, “Kevin, do you have any benchmarks for overhead? I just want to see how we compare.”

It’s a question I get all the time — and it’s usually the wrong one.

Because when most owners ask about overhead, what they really mean is, “How do I cut it?” But here’s what I told them, and what I’ll tell you: You don’t always fix overhead by cutting. You fix it by growing.

The truth is, once your fixed costs — your rent, team, insurance, and technology — are covered, every new dollar you produce carries exponentially more value. It’s the part most people overlook when they start hunting for things to eliminate.

The Math That Changes Everything

Let’s say your practice collects $1.4 million a year, with $470,000 in income. That means your overhead sits at about 66%, or roughly $930,000 in expenses.

Now imagine you grow by just $100,000 in collections — without hiring anyone new, without expanding space, and without taking on new fixed costs. The only increase is variable — maybe 20% for lab, supplies, or disposables.

That’s $20,000 in added cost and $80,000 in added profit.

Your new totals look like this:

Collections: $1,500,000

Expenses: $950,000

Owner income: $550,000

Overhead: 63.3%

Without cutting a single expense, you lowered your overhead by more than 3 percentage points and gave yourself an $80,000 raise.

That’s not theory — that’s math.

How I Help Clients Make This Happen

When I walk into a new engagement, I’ve never once found a practice that didn’t have untapped potential sitting right in front of them — buried inside their existing overhead.

Your rent, your payroll, your software, your marketing — those are investments, not burdens. You’ve already paid for the capability. Now it’s time to maximize it.

My work with clients centers around taking those fixed investments and turning them into higher performance: more efficient systems, optimized scheduling, improved conversion rates, and team accountability that directly drives production and collections.

In every engagement, once we align the team and systems, income rises — often significantly — while overhead, as a percentage, drops naturally. I’ve yet to see a single case where there wasn’t room to generate more revenue with the same resources.

The 45-Cent Bonus

Once your fixed costs are covered, your variable costs are typically only 20% of new production. Compared to your total overhead of 65%, that means you’re effectively saving 45 cents on every additional dollar produced.

That’s leverage — and it’s the closest thing to a built-in bonus your business will ever have.

The Bottom Line

You can’t cut your way to freedom. You can’t save your way to growth.

If your overhead feels too high, start by asking a better question:

How can I use what I already have to produce more?

Because once you understand the math — and once you start leveraging your existing investments — you’ll realize the truth:

You never had an overhead problem.

You just had untapped potential waiting to be turned into profit.