Manage the Size--and Quality--of Your Client Base

By Ashley Byrne, Associate Director, Byrnes Dental Laboratory, Wheatley, England; 50 employees

In my 17 years of running a lab, we’ve grown between 10-25% per year; most of this was well-planned, successful growth but we’ve also had a few years of unprecedented growth and that can put major pressure on any business. Just a small increase in your client base can put you over the top very quickly, sometimes in as little as a week.

In order to maintain quality, we typically pace our workload by limiting the number of units our ceramists can fabricate in one day. That works very well until we reach capacity and then cases must be managed by prioritizing the work of our key clients.

We have a process of grading clients from A-D, with A being “lovely, good paying, great office team and a pleasure to work with at high volume” down to D, being the opposite. Our A and B clients usually pre-book large cases and...