Is Buying Single Ply Doing You Any Favours
There’s a moment in most people’s lives when they stand in the toilet paper aisle and make a calculated decision to buy the cheaper, thinner, single-ply option. It feels like a win. Less money spent, same job done. Except it isn’t the same job done, is it? You use three times as much to get the same result, so the “saving” disappears somewhere between the shelf and the bathroom. The same thing happens with cheap tissues that fall apart after one blow of the nose.
I think about this a lot when working with practice owners, because this exact pattern shows up everywhere in the way a dental practice is run. It’s rarely a deliberate choice to cut corners. It’s a genuine, well-meaning attempt to save money that ends up costing more in ways that are harder to see on a spreadsheet.
Take hiring. It’s tempting to opt for the cheaper recruitment processes, such as just placing an ad on Seek, rather than spending the money on expert recruiters. But if that person isn’t the right fit, you’re back at square one in a few months, having spent time training them, paying their wages, absorbing the disruption to your team, and then starting the whole process again. The apparent saving of hiring quickly and cheaply gets swallowed whole by the cost of doing it twice.
Or think about the decision not to bring in a professional cleaner to the practice. On paper, it looks like a sensible way to trim overheads. Your team can just tidy up at the end of the day, surely. What doesn’t show up on the profit and loss statement is the quiet resentment that builds when clinical and admin staff are expected to take on cleaning duties on top of their actual jobs. That has a cost too. It shows up in morale, in how valued your team feels, in the culture you’re trying to build. It’s a real cost, just not one that appears in a line item.
Recall bags are another lovely example. Skipping the toothbrush, toothpaste and little extras in a recall bag saves you a few dollars per patient. But you also lose a genuinely delightful moment where a patient feels looked after and leaves your practice thinking well of you. That’s not just a nice gesture; it’s part of the patient experience that builds loyalty and word of mouth. A few dollars saved, a much bigger opportunity missed.
And then there’s the one we’re all guilty of, which is doing this to ourselves. We tell ourselves we don’t have time to rest properly, to sleep enough, to actually switch off and recover. It feels efficient in the moment, like we’re getting more done by giving up less time to ourselves. Except the bill comes due eventually, in reduced effectiveness, in a compromised immune system, in getting sick and having to stop completely for a few days when a bit of proper rest along the way would have kept you going. We’re using three times the effort to get the same result, exactly like the thin toilet paper.
Very few decisions in a dental practice are purely a saving or purely a cost. Most of them are both at once. Buying single ply saves you money, but costs you effectiveness. Skipping the professional cleaner saves you an invoice and costs you a bit of your team’s goodwill.
Every choice we make in a practice, big or small, tends to carry a benefit on one side and a drawback on the other. The trick isn’t avoiding decisions with drawbacks, because there’s no such thing. It’s asking yourself honestly, before you decide, what am I gaining here, and what am I giving up to get it. That one question, asked properly, tends to lead to better decisions.