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
The Drinking Game that Taught Me Practice Culture
Ever have one of those nights where you're exhausted but someone talks you into staying up anyway—and it turns into the most fun night ever? That's exactly what happened when my family convinced me to play our ridiculous Italian-themed drinking game called "Garlic and Oil" at the lake house.
The truth is that strong practice cultures aren't built through mission statements—they're created through shared experiences, inside jokes, and rituals that bond your team together. People connect through experiences more than tasks. In my practice, we've developed unique cultural elements like our appreciation token system, morning huddle rituals, and our notorious "P2P" feedback approach where team members literally ask, "Can I pee on you for a second?" before offering constructive feedback. These might sound silly, but they create our identity.W
Text us your feedback! (please note: we cannot respond through this channel))
The 2025-2026 DPH Mastermind is now taking applications! Make this the year you decided to create the practice you've always dreamed about!
Take Control of Your Practice and Your Life
We help dentists take more time off while making more money through systematization, team empowerment, and creating leadership teams.
Ready to build a practice that works for you? Visit www.DentalPracticeHeroes.com to learn more.
You ever have one of those nights where you're so close to going to bed, you're tired, you can't wait for your head to hit the pillow and then somebody talks you into staying up and doing something and it ends up being one of the most fun nights of your entire life. It was Memorial Day weekend and we were at the lake house with my family and my brother-in-laws and my mother-in-law, and it was just a busy day. You know, we're out on the boat, we're drinking, we're having a lot of fun, but come around eight o'clock at night, it's time to go to bed. Right, we're tired. But then my brother said hey, let's play garlic and oil.
Speaker 1:And if you're a longtime listener to this podcast, you know what garlic and oil is. It is the lake house drinking game that me and my Italian in-laws invented and it is the most ridiculous game you've done ever played, and I'll explain to you what it is. But we played garlic and oil, which essentially is like quarters, like where you bounce the quarter into the shot glass and when one shot glass catches the other shot glass, that person drinks. But we throw in a bunch of Italian rules, like instead of saying ready set go, we say ready set spaghetti. So you're bouncing your quarter into the shot glass and it's going around. Now if the person in front of you bounces a quarter into your shot glass, that reverses the direction of the shot glass from counterclockwise to clockwise and everybody has to yell red purple flakes and you have to spin counterclockwise. Now there's a lot of rules to this game, right? And if you spin clockwise you spin the wrong way. That becomes a Parmesan penalty, which you get a penalty later after the round. Now, after the shot glass catches the other shot glass, that is when it all goes down. So that means that person has lost. They're going to now have to take a shot of something. This is bad when you lose, so you've got to be punished.
Speaker 1:And everybody pounds on the table and yells garlic and oil three times, and then we all yell shame and we start throwing limes and bow tie cooked pasta at this person, just whipping it at them, and they cannot cover their face, they cannot try to protect themselves, they just have to take it in the face. And it is hilarious and it's so shameful and it just it's so funny. So now, because we've been doing this we've probably played this six or seven times at the lake house. We've invented so many rules. It's like I'm laughing as I'm thinking about it. Then you become the linguine loser and you have to wear a strainer on your head and you have the little sign that says linguine loser. You have to go around and pick up all the limes off the floor, you have to pick up all the bow tie pasta and then you have to take a shot.
Speaker 1:It made me think some things about the practice, and that's what I want to talk about today. So we're going to talk about how garlic and oil applies to the culture of your practice and what you can do to improve the culture at your practice. I am Dr Paul Etchison and you're listening to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast. This is where we teach you how to run a practice that is team-driven, allows you to take a lot of time off and make a lot more money, all while taking amazing care of your team and your patients. So if you're looking to work less days and make more money and have more balance in your life as a practice owner, you've come to the right spot.
Speaker 1:Let's talk about garlic and oil. Now I might have to post this. Maybe I got some videos of it. I think I'll post it on my Instagram. I got to filter them and make sure there's nothing too raunchy in there, but it was a great weekend because we actually had some college kids with us. We had about four college kids. Man, I still got it. Guys, I can still party with people in their 20s. I can still hang. I definitely proved it that night.
Speaker 1:So why is garlic and oil so fun? Because it's a ritual, right, you've got this. Almost like. I was so tired I didn't want to play, because I know garlic and oil is a lot of shouting and there's a lot of screaming and I didn't have the energy. But you force it, you put the energy into it and then that energy becomes contagious and we're doing this shared ritual. Everybody knows what to do. We all yell red pepper flakes and you rotate counterclockwise. Everybody yells one, two, three ready set spaghetti, the linguine loser. It's a bunch of inside jokes and it's just fun and everybody's doing the same thing together. So I ended up going to bed thinking man, that was so much fun. I can't believe.
Speaker 1:I wanted to go to sleep and I didn't want to play that, but it made me realize that is that culture, and especially culture at our dental practices. It's not really built with the mission statements. It's built with the moments, these rituals, the inside jokes, the chance, the things that you do at your practice. These are these moments that will build that culture and people will always bond more over shared experiences than they really do over shared tasks, like they will bond more over the experiences that happen at work rather than the things they do together at work, if that makes sense. So you've got a role as a leader of your practice to set that tone and you've got to play and you've got to participate.
Speaker 1:When you're showing up and you don't have energy and you want to go to tone, and you've got to play and you've got to participate. When you're showing up and you don't have energy and you want to go to sleep, you just got to get in there and fake it until that energy arrives, because your energy is going to be contagious and your team is going to model your behavior. So if you're showing up, you're bringing enthusiasm, so will your team. If you're showing up like a grump and you're all pissed off like I have been at some points in my career and probably not that long ago I probably had a week like that. It's going to show up in your team as well. But leadership, it really means you got to lean in, even when you're tired.
Speaker 1:So let's think about the rituals and things that you do at your practice. What about your morning huddles? I mean, can that become a ritual? Can you add something? My associate coach, dr Henry Ernst, they do like a pledge of allegiance for the morning huddle and it's just, it's not a pledge of allegiance, but they recite their core values and it's like a pledge I am going to take care of people and this, that and this. And it's like this oath that they take every day and it's something they do as a team. It's something that bonds them together.
Speaker 1:What kind of ways are you doing things that are ritualistic at your practice that you can make special and build the connection with your team? What about? How do you like appreciate your team? Do you call people out and say do you recognize when people do something great? You know we do something in our practice called appreciation tokens. Everybody gets three appreciation tokens each month. You hand it to a team member and you say today, I'm appreciating you because of this. At our monthly meeting, everybody turns in their appreciation tokens. Each month you hand it to a team member and you say today I am appreciating you because of this. At our monthly meeting, everybody turns in their appreciation tokens for tickets, which we then put in a raffle and we raffle off prizes for the team. So the more appreciation tokens you get, the more likely you are to win a prize. But it's really about it's about the way of calling out each other and saying hey, I appreciate you.
Speaker 1:Another ritualistic thing we have at our practice is I say grace over guilt. I have mantras. These are things that I say and these are words that I use with my team. They use them as well. I know they make fun of me behind my back sometimes, but they're not making fun of me in a mean way. It's just because I say it so much no-transcript. So we call this peer-to-peer P2P.
Speaker 1:So the way we open that up is you go to someone. You say hey, can I pee on you for a second? So you're going to P2P on them. So can I pee on you for a second? That is what we say can I pee on you? And it's kind of a nice lighthearted way. But then the person goes oh okay, what did I do? You know what? It's just a, and it's something that we do at our practice.
Speaker 1:I mean, we've got words that we've just made up, like you cannot say retainer, or you can say retainer to a patient, but if you're going to talk to me about retainer, you better be saying retina, because we don't call them retainers, we call them retinas, and I have convinced so many people that come work for me that it's always been commonly mispronounced as retainer. It is actually retina, but that mispronounced as retainer it is actually a ratana. But that is just something, the inside joke that we just started a long time ago, and we call them ratanas. It just sounds better, right? So these are the kinds of things that create this, how we do things here, and I can tell you we're having an all day meeting coming up this Friday and one of the things that we're going to talk about is how to approach somebody and have more peer to peer.
Speaker 1:How can we pee on each other better? Because it's something that I see my leads doing, but I don't see the team doing it as much as I like. So we're going to role play some situations on how to pee-to-pee on each other with the idea of being hey, we want to interact this way, we want our culture to be this way. So, rather than just hope it turns out that way, we are going to model it, we're going to explicitly say it and we're going to practice it. And that is how we create culture, not by just having a mission and vision statement, even though I do think those are very important. But you've got to be clear with your team what you want.
Speaker 1:And another part of culture that comes up is I remember back when we closed for COVID and then we came back and we opened back up and we had all these protocols and we had like the mask fitters on because we were in the N95s and we had the mask fitters because we just felt like they were more comfortable. But it was like you walked into that practice with the mask on and you didn't take it off until you left. I remember like leaving the practice and I get into my car and I'm sitting there and I'm running. I'm saying you know what? I just walked out of that practice and I don't think I said bye to more than two people, which is very weird to me, and I was just sitting there. I'm looking at my back door of my office, wondering if I should go back in there and say bye to everybody, and it just brings this idea to me that that is not who I am. I feel like we've got to have relationships with the people that we work with. So you've got to say goodbye, you've got to say good morning, but when I'm just walking out of my practice and not saying bye to anyone, it's become a transaction.
Speaker 1:We have a transactional relationship and what I noticed is that when we came back from COVID, we weren't allowed to get together and do anything outside of work. We weren't allowed to go places and have meetings and have a few drinks after work or do any of our events that we usually did. Those relationships they suffered. So then we decided you know what, we are going to get together and we're not going to take any pictures of it and we're not going to tell anyone about it, because we felt like someone would post online hey, look at this office, they don't care about protocols, they're all having fun in this.
Speaker 1:When we finally got together and spent time as a team, like we always did, you felt those relationships reignite and you felt the culture feel different. So this is the thing we shut down our practice for meetings. We shut down two hours a month. We shut down one day every quarter, full day and we do things that are fun together as a team. And you might look at that and say, oh my gosh, how much does it cost you to shut down for a day? How much does it cost you to literally pay my team Like I'm going to pay them this Friday, I'm going to pay them all for four hours of work. We're going to be sitting outside at a picnic place having drinks and barbecuing, so I'm paying them to hang out with each other. So there is a cost involved in it, but I think it's much less than the cost of not doing it and having a crappy culture.
Speaker 1:You want your team to get along together, to have great relationships, and that requires you, as the leader, to give them situations where they can get to know each other and you encourage that sort of behavior. We're there to take care of people, but we're also there to have fun. So that is my challenge to you this week. I want you to look at your practice. I want you to think about what am I doing to shape the culture here? What am I doing to create relationships with my team and make sure that they have relationships with each other. And what am I doing to bring positive and enthusiastic energy that is contagious, much like the energy that you have to bring when you play garlic and oil after the ready setty spaghetti and you don't want to be the linguine loser. That energy is contagious and everybody gets into it and you might just have one of the most fun nights of your life.
Speaker 1:So if you like tips like this and you want to learn more about how to run your practice so you can have more time off and make more money and have more systems driven practice that gives you peace when you lay down at night, knowing your practice can run without you, please go to dentalpracticeheroescom and look at our training options, look at our coaching options. We can help you do it. That's what we do and that's what we love doing as coaches. So check that out, dentalpracticeheroescom, and check that out, because I'm telling you, come around August, we got something new coming up and the offer that is up there right now is going away very soon. You will never get it as cheap as it is right now, but more on that in the future. We're gonna do something pretty cool this summer. So thank you so much for listening. You guys have an amazing week.
