I walked into a convenience store the other day genuinely thirsty, and I was met with what had to be 200 choices staring back at me from the cooler. Within about a minute, I had made my selection, and I made it on the strength of only a few things: what I was craving in that moment, what was cheapest, and what size would get me through the afternoon.
I did not consider what I might want to drink in three weeks or whether this was the beverage that best aligned with my long-term hydration goals. There were no long-term hydration goals. I was thirsty, the decision was small, and a quick choice was exactly the right kind of choice to make.
That is the appropriate way to buy a drink. The mistake so many of us make as business owners is that we carry that same reflex into rooms where it does not belong, and we make decisions about vendors, partners, software, and people with the same speed and the same shallow set of factors we use at the cooler.
Chris Mizenko.
This all came together while I was on the phone with my information technology company talking through the purchase of a new computer. Somewhere in that conversation, the technician said something that stuck with me after the call ended. He told me to buy a computer for tomorrow, not for today.
He meant it narrowly, in terms of storage, processing power, and the headroom you need so a machine is not obsolete the week after you unbox it.
The phrase kept turning over in my mind, because it is not really about computers at all. It is a lens, and once I held a few of our bigger decisions up to it, I could not unsee how often we get the framing wrong.
The decisions worth examining this way are the ones we tend to rush: a new partner, a new vendor, a new piece of software or equipment, or, yes, a new team member. What follows is an honest look at a handful of them through that single question, whether we are choosing for tomorrow or merely for today.
Vendors and the question we are afraid to sit with
Outsourcing is a hot topic at the moment, and for good reason, but it also means there are more companies than ever offering some version of the same thing. That abundance is precisely what makes the convenience store instinct so dangerous here.
When you have a wall of options and a problem that feels urgent, the temptation is to grab the one that is cheapest or simplest and move on. I would encourage the opposite: Take a step back and pause with the decision.
In my experience, anyone who truly values you and genuinely wants your business will give you the room to sit with your thoughts before you commit. The pressure to decide right now is itself a piece of information worth noticing.
The questions I have learned to ask first are the difficult ones:
- How will this affect my business today, tomorrow, and a year from now?
- What does it actually solve?
- How will it land with my team? Will it help or hinder them?
- Is this a genuine joint venture where both sides come out ahead, or am I simply a line item on someone else’s growth plan?
Only after I have worked through those do I let myself move to the easier questions of which option is cheapest and which is simplest. And here is the strange thing I keep rediscovering: By the time you have answered the hard questions, you usually find that cost was never the most important factor to begin with. That realization is where real business decision-making starts.
One practical note for when you do get to those simpler questions: Throw some variables into the mix, because life and markets change. A vendor may be cheaper right now, but if that company raised its rates tomorrow to match everyone else’s, which one would I still want to work with? Answer that and the price gap often stops looking like the deciding factor it pretended to be.
Partnerships, where the values questions become the only questions
Some partnerships never involve money changing hands at all. A referral arrangement is the clearest example, and it is tempting to treat the absence of an invoice as the absence of risk. It is not.
When there is no money on the table, the big questions do not shrink, they expand to fill the whole conversation, because what you are putting at stake is your reputation and the trust your patients have placed in you.
Does this business genuinely align with my values and my mission? How will the partnership add real value to my clients and the people they serve? And the one most of us skip when something feels free: If something changes with this business down the road, what is my exit strategy?
The shiny toy at the convention
It works the same way with software and equipment, which surprised me until I thought about it. It is easy to see the new, shiny thing and want it -- partly because owning it makes you feel like a trailblazer, the practice that is ahead of the curve. The trade show floor is engineered to produce exactly that feeling.
But this is precisely where the big questions have to come first. Sure, the software looked cleaner and more user-friendly in the booth demonstration, but how will it work in the actual flow of a Tuesday morning? How difficult will it be for my team to learn and then to train the next new team member on it after that?
Is there a real customer support network standing behind it that will help my team when something breaks? How does this genuinely accelerate the practice rather than simply look impressive? And what happens if this product does not exist in a few years -- what is the backup plan?
New things arrive daily, whether it is a computer with 10 times the storage you currently have, a cloud-based platform, or a new milling machine. The discipline is to pause on the decision rather than jump because something is cheaper, looks nicer, or is fancier than what you already own.
None of this means ignoring the practical requirements. There are boxes that genuinely must be checked, and storage capacity on that computer is a real specification with a real minimum you need to meet, just as most equipment carries hard requirements you cannot wish away.
The point is not to dismiss the simple questions -- it is to refuse to let them lead. Ask the big questions, ask the long-term questions, and make the choice for tomorrow.
Hiring, where the stakes are highest
And then there is hiring, which is its own particular kind of pain. Hiring almost always shows up as an immediate need, and the immediacy is what gets us.
We want to act fast and bring on the first person who checks a few of the boxes, and in doing so, we set the practice up for long-term trouble -- a team member who does not fit the dynamic or who does not want to learn or who is there to collect a check rather than to be part of the practice’s success.
Plan for the future when you are faced with the need to hire. We are usually already stretched thin and managing more than we should be, so why would we rush to add a piece to the puzzle that may not even fit the shape of the gap?
Take the time to build the team you want for the long term: a person who aligns with your values, who wants to grow alongside the practice, and who also checks the boxes that genuinely matter. Keep an open mind about what those boxes are.
It is hard to find people with a truly great attitude, and when you do, if they are eager and trainable, they can become your single biggest asset. That is often a better bet than the person who can do everything in their sleep because they have been doing it one particular way for 20 years and have no interest in doing it your way.
Every one of these situations carries a follow-up question. This person has 20 years of experience, but does that mean they will simply want to do it their way? This person has a wonderful attitude and personality but has never answered a phone in a dental office, so is that something we can train, and will they actually learn the system and follow it?
Do not fill the seat just because you need a warm body in it today. This person will represent your practice to every patient who walks through the door, and they can genuinely make you or break you. Ask the hard questions, think about where the practice is headed, and hire for tomorrow.
Choosing for tomorrow
None of this is an argument against quick decisions. Standing in front of the cooler, thirsty, a quick decision is the right one -- there is freedom in knowing which choices deserve that kind of speed.
The skill we are after is recognizing the difference: knowing which decisions are about today and which ones are quietly about the next several years of your practice, and then giving the second kind the patience they have earned.
The next time a choice lands on your desk that feels urgent, before you reach for the cheapest, the simplest, or the shiniest, pause long enough to ask the hard questions first. Sit with it. Let the answers tell you what actually matters.
The decision you make will almost always be a better one, because you will have made it for the business you are building rather than the moment you happen to be standing in. Buy for tomorrow, not for today -- and watch how much chaos you spare yourself down the road.
Chris Mizenko is the co-founder of Zen Dental Support, a revenue cycle management company helping dental practices run with greater clarity and efficiency. Before entering the dental space, he spent years building and leading multisite teams in early childhood education -- an experience that shaped how he thinks about culture, systems, and the human side of running an organization. Contact him at [email protected].
The comments and observations expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the opinions of DrBicuspid.com, nor should they be construed as an endorsement or admonishment of any particular idea, vendor, or organization.
