Dental Practice Heroes
Where dentists learn how to cut clinical days while increasing profits - without sacrificing patient care, cutting corners, or cranking volume. We teach you how to grow a scalable practice through communication, leadership, and effective management.
Hosted by Dr. Paul Etchison, author of two books on dental practice management, dental coach, and owner of a $6M collections group practice in the south suburbs of Chicago, we provide actionable advice for practice owners who want to intentionally create more time to enjoy their families, wealth, and deep personal fulfillment.
If you want to build a scalable practice framework that no longer stresses, drains, or relies on you for every little thing, we will teach you how and share stories of other dentists who have done it!
Dental Practice Heroes
Incremental Progress for Big Outcomes
Unlock the blueprint to turning your dental practice aspirations into reality with actionable insights from our latest episode. Discover how setting clear objectives and measuring outcomes can create a culture of continuous improvement and accountability within your practice. With tips on starting small, like auditing a couple of phone calls each week, this episode reveals the power of incremental progress in achieving your dream practice.
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I help dentists create thriving practices that make more money, require less of their time, and empower their teams to run the office seamlessly—so they can focus on what matters most.
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What is the one difference between dentists that grow their practice versus the ones that stagnate? Well, it's implementation, and easier said than done, I know, but today we are going to teach you how to think about your objectives, structure your goals and how to get things moving in your practice so that, each and every day you show up, you are one step closer to the practice of your dreams. Let's get to it. You are listening to Dental Practice Heroes, where we teach you how to build a scalable practice, make more money and take more time off. I'm Dr Paul Edgison, author of two books on dental practice management, dental coach and owner of a group practice collecting over $6 million in the south suburbs of Chicago. I want to teach you how to grow and systematize your dental practice so you can spend less time practicing and more time doing whatever it is that you love. Let's get started. Hey, what's up everybody? Welcome back to Dental Practice Heroes. I am joined by each of my DPH coaches, dr Steve Markowitz and Dr Henry Ernst, and we're just taking apart topics and giving you some actionable advice.
Speaker 1:In this episode, we're going to talk about something that we see everybody struggle with, and I know you know what I'm talking about. We're talking about implementation and I can tell you for me, working with many offices the offices that I work with that tend to do better. Just they do better than everything. They're the implementers. It's not always the proper implementation, but they're doing something. So, steve, what is your thoughts on this? We were talking before we hit record and we were talking about recording on phone skills, but the fact of the matter is nobody cares about phone skills and Steve said something. He said yeah, he said everybody knows what a great phone call is, but nobody implements. So what are your thoughts on this whole idea of implementation and getting moving?
Speaker 2:It is the opportunity for us to make progress and you were asking for ideas and I had this great idea that both of you guys loved about dissecting a phone call. Loved about dissecting a phone call and no one's ever listened to it's my least listened to episode. So let's not do that. And it just led us to the conversation of, like, yeah, everyone knows it and no one wants to do anything about it. So I think what happens is we get stuck in, not knowing where to start, so we don't do anything. Or it's like when you walk into a dirty room and you don't even it's too dirty, so you don't do anything, you just leave.
Speaker 2:What I would recommend is for us to spend a lot of time with anything we can talk about the phone call, of what is the result that we're trying to get from that phone call, and if we care enough about that result, we'll do something about it.
Speaker 2:So, yes, everyone knows what a great phone call is, but the purpose of a great phone call is not to have a wonderful conversation for someone, it's to create a brand for the office and it's to get someone to schedule. So if we're measuring the right things and focus and have a goal and know what the goal of what we're trying to accomplish is, we will start to do something, and I think that you've said this many times, paul just do freaking anything, just start. Progress leads to progress. For me personally, there are many times where I feel stuck and the thing that's helped me most is taking a second of writing out where I want to go, is taking a second of writing out where I want to go, making sure that's enough for me to take action and then ensure that I'm having someone I'm talking out with to see progress in myself. So I don't stop.
Speaker 3:I think that motto is great Do something. We get so overwhelmed sometimes that we just like a turtle, we just go inside the shell and do nothing. We mentioned beforehand, like talking about phone calls right, and we all are nervous. Mentioned beforehand like talking about phone calls right, and we all are nervous like gosh. The phone calls are the window to the office. If we don't have a good phone call, people aren't going to come in. I mean, I'll just give you a simple example.
Speaker 3:A lot of us use some kind of software that has metrics and see how many calls do we get. That's a sign if our marketing is working, because it prompts somebody to call. But are people actually doing the steps to get somebody in? Just a simple thing you can do and this is for any owner, right? Whatever, most of us have some kind of system where we can hear our calls.
Speaker 3:Audit two calls, two calls a week, right. Who can't audit two calls a week? Right. And when you do your meetings, pick out the good ones, pick out the bad ones. And it's not about shaming somebody or why 'd you do that, it's about education, right? Listen to this call. What would we have done better? Do we like this. Do we not like this? And just make it an educational thing, and it also kind of lets people know hey, somebody's listening, right, I'm not on here, there's somebody out there that is listening. And when I call Paul's office or Henry's office and there's that little thing that says your call may be blah, blah, blah, yeah, it is, we can listen to it. So just don't get overwhelmed. Find a system. My brain always works in EOS, so I'm thinking about okay, maybe I can audit a call a day, and if I do that for like a month, man, I'm going to make a lot of progress.
Speaker 1:I'm going to find little holes, I'm going to find things that can be better, and just that one little step is going to get us to improvement. Yeah, and I think every single person I could almost say every single person listening right now, if they audited just two to five calls, they would hear things that they were like huh, wow, it's funny because I put together the phone training and I had a few different offices let me listen to their phone calls and I didn't have to dig very deep to find some bad ones, to find a lot of bad ones. I had to dig deep to find good ones. Now, when we did this with my team, we listened to some calls and this was probably like three or four years ago. We were like dude, we got to do something, so we did a meeting.
Speaker 1:We have two shifts, so we had the early shift stayed late and the late shift came in early. So I met with them each separately and we went through phone calls as a department with the front desk. We did this for probably five or six weeks in a row until every single call just sounded amazing. There wasn't anything else to give any kind of constructive criticism on. But what was interesting about that is like everybody was getting better. But, like you said, henry, now they knew we were going to listen to it and I hate the idea of people doing behavior only because they're going to be managed on it, like I want them to do it from some internal factor, but we don't know people's motivation, so we can't really say why they're doing it, but it works. That's my whole point of that.
Speaker 2:But maybe it started there, paul. It started with having to manage someone until they saw the benefit. They're like the practice is busy, we're getting all these new patients who cares if I'm a little rushed on the phone? And then there was that push from you in managing them. That showed wow, actually I felt better about the job I was doing because the outcome was different, or I felt like I was even helping these patients better. That is the benefit of managing. But I think my question for you would be what made you want to? That's a lot of work to have 12 meetings and shut down time. We're talking about implementation and self-starting. What was it that made you want to do that?
Speaker 1:Listen to some phone calls. Just be like my God we've got a crisis.
Speaker 1:We've got to do something. Yeah, the pain points were bad. That's what it was. And, honestly, for us, because of the two shifts there was just do we want to meet with people one-on-one? Gosh, that's no. We got 10, 12 people. There's no way we can do that. And then having one meeting where everybody was together, it's just not feasible. In my office we can't unman the front desk. I mean, we're open too early, too late. There's no time for us to do it. So that was our best solution for having a time to do it.
Speaker 1:But then, yeah, like I said, it went a few weeks and at a certain point it was like, hey, these meetings are getting a little stale. I think we're good and I think it's something that we're doing again, which we're supposed to do it every year. And I was in disbelief when I had somebody have their four-year anniversary the other week and she had never done phone training. So I'm like well, how do you answer the phone for the past 1400 days that you've been here? But it's interesting, it's? You look at anything and you try to come up with implementation. I love what you said, Steve, is it's like well, what is the goal? Our goal is that we want to have a starting, a positive relationship with our patients on the phone, and my problem is I'm not. I'm missing opportunities. So, looking at what is the goal, how do we solve it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Do you think that people's lack of motivation is that they're comfortable with the status quo, so doing something different is more effort than they're willing to make? The answer is let's make it painful enough to want to do something about it.
Speaker 1:Man, you know, what you just made me think about is that I think honestly, when we did this last time, it was shortly after our expansion there was a lot of people that just didn't have any training on how to answer the phone. I think there is some level of comfort. They should be talking up the office oh, you're going to have a great time, you're going to love everybody here, blah, blah, blah. And I think some people get lazy and don't want to do that stuff, and sometimes the enthusiasm is not always there as much as it should be, but I think a lot of it's the end of the training and from us as decision makers too, or as implementers, it's easier to not do anything because we can justify that things are going well.
Speaker 2:the practice is growing. Look at all my reviews things like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean I'm in a similar situation now is that we have had I mean we've got like 1,800 five-star reviews. I think we've got six or seven negative ones and we've got three. I want to say three or four of them have happened in the past, like five weeks, which is so unusual.
Speaker 2:I had two one-star reviews yesterday for the first time. They both came on the same day, so it was like dagger dagger both in the same day.
Speaker 3:So it hurts. So one thing that comes to my mind and Nick Saban is I've like looked up to that man so much in his leadership style and all this stuff. But One comment that I never forget he always says is never let a failure go to waste. So when he wins a game he's not as like he's just I'm all like relieved I didn't lose. But when I lose, that stings and I don't forget it and I learn from it. So I'll give you a real life dental example.
Speaker 3:Somebody that I was working with just took all these courses and sleep apnea training and those of us who do that, those cases are like five $6,000 lots of times. So we did all this training and all this stuff and after a while it's just nothing's happened in the office. Well, lo and behold, audit some phone calls and somebody called and asked about that and the person answering the phone says we don't do that here. So all of that time and effort and money is useless because you've got a front desk employee that doesn't even answer the phone correctly and is closing the door on all of the stuff that you just did.
Speaker 1:That happened to me on Masseter Botox there you go.
Speaker 3:So if we're going to do all these things, we have to make sure that everything is running correctly. It's your obligation as a business owner. And if you feel overwhelmed I know it's like repetition, but, dude, just do it. It's for the greater good, even if it's a little bit. Another thing that comes to my mind is there's a little part of me. We're probably similar to you. We have like handful, here and there, one-star reviews. I actually look at one-star reviews as an opportunity. They are. This sounds crazy, but what you do is you just basically put your head down and say I'm sorry, it wasn't up to our level. We hold such high standards here. We go above and beyond for our patients. That's why we're only office in this area. It's open until eight. We're dedicated to the community. It's almost like you're giving an infomercial.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So this way, somebody looks at it like you know what they responded. They're normal people. That other person must have been crazy.
Speaker 1:I love it when somebody leaves the long ass, one star review. I'm like, yeah, just keep going. Keep going, babe. Make it long, because the longer it gets, the less credibility they have and there's no chance nobody's reading. And I'm like, okay, they're going to see the beginning and then they're going to go right to our response.
Speaker 1:I have feelings, just like the rest of us, and I had somebody that was complaining about how wet his face got, how wet his face got, and my original response is like usually I don't respond right away, but I was going to the lake house for the weekend so I just pounded it out and I did it and my first line was like I'm sorry you got wet when you came to our dental office. I hope you dry soon. And like my office manager called me and she's like you've got to, she's like I get it, but she's like you're better than that. This isn't for your response to that person. I'm like I know it's for everyone else that's going to read it and that's what I do and I look at reviews.
Speaker 1:I go to the low respond and when I see a whole bunch of oh, we can't find you as a customer of ours or this, and just the denying, and it doesn't look good. It's really bad. I'd like to you know a few more minutes to switch gears, since we were starting talking about implementation. I'll go to you, steve. Well, my thought is that a lot of people skip out on implementation because they never really sit down and figure out what they even really want to begin with or what goals they're going for. What is your goal setting process look like?
Speaker 2:Oh, took a hard left there, paul. All right, it's easy for me to use data so I can start with a financial goal or a number goal. It could be like number of reviews or number of active patients, or number of dollars of revenue or dollars of EBITDA and then I sit with that for a little bit. I was like, okay, I'm at one. What's it going to take to get to two? Is that something that I cared enough about to want to just do anything to get there? And I'll put it down. I'll come back and when I come back and I look at it, if it still means and gets me excited, all right, now let's create the how, and that's what I'll do.
Speaker 2:With we're getting to the end of the year, when we start to think about what 2025 is, when I start to think about what 2025 is going to look like, all right, do I want to do an expansion? Let me write that down. I'll just sit and I'll start. I'll just write down every single thing that comes. Do I want to do an expansion? Do I want to add a location? Do I want to bring in a chief marketing officer? Do I want to just start throwing crazy crap on this piece of paper and then I'll start crossing things out or I'll start putting things together that may be similar, and then I'll walk away and just put it down, and then I'll come back and look at it and I'll start circling. I'll circle like five to seven things and that's going to be my focus of the big projects that I want to do for 2025, that I'm so excited about. I can't not do them.
Speaker 3:What do you think? Eddie Love it, and I think maybe what you're kind of doing and what you're mentioning, steve, is reverse engineering. We're just trying to reverse engineer. What does this look like? Let's take a step backwards. Let's talk about EOS this year.
Speaker 3:We started the year with saying, hey, we want to do 150 Invisalign starts this year. Okay, well, let's break it down. That's about three a week. So we want three a week. Reverse engineer some more. What do we need to do to get to that? Well, we need a lot of consults. Okay, some more. What do we need to do to get to that? Well, we need a lot of consults. Okay, where can we pull those consults from? We can pull them from hygiene.
Speaker 3:Okay, let's try to scan again, starting slow. Maybe one person every morning in the hygiene rooms, right, we've got three or four hygiene rooms. That's a lot of at-bats, right? So you kind of start with that reverse engineering and then that's going to lead you to implementation. Okay, guys, we're going to scan one person in each hiding room in the morning and one in the afternoon to start with, right, and oh my gosh, now that's leading to two Invisalign starts every week. Awesome, right, and maybe let's do two. So you start slow reverse engineer to get to that goal and the next thing you know you're like halfway in the year. You're like, hey, we've got 70 Invisalign starts. It's halfway through the year. Okay, we're kind of there, we're on our way, it's working. So I think reverse engineering is basically what you're mentioning, steve.
Speaker 1:I think, like what you're saying is a lot of people struggle with, as they say oh, we're really trying to do more Invisalign this year. It's like no, I'm going to educate and train my team on how to discuss these conversations, what to look for. We're going to try to scan people and talk about what's possible.
Speaker 1:Like that's the difference between an idea in the shower and an actual action on the idea, and I think none of us really a lot of us don't get past that. Wouldn't it be nice phase? Wouldn't it be nice if?
Speaker 2:the you know, I think that's the implementation block is like it's so easy to create the finish line. I want to do 150 starts Great, everybody does. They have this great idea and then it just goes to nothing. So I think, from an implementation standpoint, it's easy to create the finish line. You need to create the map on what's going to get you to that finish line and then don't go directly to the end by step, exactly, and then you'll see progress. And all of a sudden you have 150 starts and you're like, wow, that was really cool. I can't believe this was a year in the making, as opposed to sitting there January 1st and being like we're gonna do 150 starts and then everyone claps because it's on a PowerPoint.
Speaker 3:I think the main thing that you're mentioning, paul, is when there's that goal. What's the difference between an idea and a goal? The goal should have a yes, no answer to it. You know what I mean? Hey, we want to do one more, invisalign. Okay, how many, how much? Right? Is it a yes, no? If it's not a yes or no, then you have not come up to me with a goal. We want a goal that we can measure, that we could say yes, no, and we can say we wanted to get to 75 starts by the middle of the year. We only got to 70, whatever that percentage is, or that percentage of the way there. So that's a yes, no.
Speaker 1:One thing I want to share is that we're doing lasers and hygiene, and I've mentioned this before, but my hygiene lead just told me when we implemented this before we implemented our new way and we really said, okay, we got to figure out a way to get more of these. We had done something like 160 procedures for the whole entire year. Now we're doing over 300 a month. We didn't get it by just hey guys, keep talking about it, talk about it more. We actually role-played. We talked about verbiage. We came up with everybody's verbiage and had them send us into them and then we made a document of these are the best ones, try this. And then we motivated it and incentivize them to talk about it. And now we get the results.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, I know people listening, you're thinking about something. You're like dang it. There's that one thing I want to do and what do I got to do to start getting that implemented? Reverse engineer and just commit and, like we all said, people that do the best are the people that are going to actually implement and move forward. So if you're thinking about hiring a coach to help you think through some of these things, you can hire Steve or Henry. They are happy to work with you. Check them out on dentalpracticeheroescom. No-transcript.
