Dental Practice Heroes

Leaving Clinical to Mentor Doctors Into Partners w/ Dr. Sten Erickson

• Paul Etchison, Sten Erickson • Season 3 • Episode 90

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Most owners manage the day-to-day; Dr. Sten Erickson is turning doctors into partners. He joins me in this episode to share how he stepped into a true leadership role and expanded his practice after leaving clinical work behind.

From scheduling weekly meetings across multiple practices to case reviews, we talk about the strategies and systems that help him get doctors ready to lead, drive culture, and grow a multi-location practice without micromanaging or seeing patients. Tune in to hear how he structures his time to mentor doctors and scale without burning out!

Topics discussed in this episode:

  • Mistakes as a young practice owner
  • The ideal practice size of new owners
  • Maintaining culture as you expand
  • Dr. Erickson’s meeting schedule and training system
  • How your role changes when you step back from clinical
  • Strategies to keep associates engaged and growing


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Paul Etchison:

What do you actually do when you stop seeing patients? So many owners ask me this question when they finally decide to cut back on clinical days and suddenly they don't know what their role is outside of the operatory. Today, I'm joined by Dr Sten Erickson, who has stepped away from all clinical work to mentor his doctors and lead his team across three practices. He's sharing exactly how he spends his time, the surprising way they run their team meetings and what he does to turn his doctors into great partners, not just clinicians. You are listening to Dental Practice Heroes, where we help you to create a team and system-driven dental practice, one that allows you to practice less and make more money. I'm Dr Paul Etcheson, a dental coach, author of two books on dental practice management and the owner of a five-doctor practice in the south suburbs of Chicago. I want to show you how being intentional about ownership can create a practice that supports your life instead of consuming it. So if you're ready to create a true business that runs without you, you're in the right place. Let's get started.

Paul Etchison:

Hello everyone, welcome back to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast. I'm your host, dr Paul Etchison. We got a good guest today. We got Dr Sten Erickson. He is the owner of Pathway Dental Group in Santa Barbara County. There's three practices, so multiple practice owner. He's also mentoring younger dentists who want to follow in his path. So we're going to pick apart his brain today and see what it's like to have three practices. So welcome to the podcast, dan. Thank you, paul.

Sten Erickson:

Yeah, look at Borda.

Paul Etchison:

Dude. So tell me about your journey from just dental school to ownership and to the first practice. What did that look like for you?

Sten Erickson:

It looked rocky. That's what it looked like. I think for a lot of people it does. But I went to USC dental school kind of first year out ended up working for the clinical dean at USC. He had a practice in the area so worked with him for a year. It was kind of a clinic atmosphere, which I think a lot of people did, and just churning and burning and learning how to get efficient and do what we do Kind of always knew that I wanted to be have a larger practice or potentially multi-practice, wanted to be have a larger practice or potentially multi-practice.

Sten Erickson:

So one day just kind of moved up to Santa Barbara. We figured out that we wanted to live here and started knocking on doors and that's how I found my first office and we actually actually partnered up with my, my first partner, for we bought 50% of the practice almost immediately and about nine months later about the second 50%. And then when that closed, about two months later I actually had a doctor next door to me and the building that we were in passed away so his wife asked me to take over.

Paul Etchison:

So it was like overnight, within three months, you know, a couple strokes of the pen, my life changed quite a bit, so you mentioned that you always you felt like you always wanted multi-practice, Like what about? It drew you.

Sten Erickson:

You know, one of the things that always drew me to dentistry was the entrepreneurship of it, and I really I love the technical aspect. I mean I did a ton of CE and McCoy Sky, I did a ton of implant CE kind of a lot of stuff like that. I was sitting on boards with AEC so I loved all the clinical stuff, but I always, you know, what originally kind of attracted me was being an owner of a business and kind of getting to, you know, write your own script, and so I really didn't have it in my mind that you know we were going to create a DSO or anything like that. But I always knew that I wanted to have something bigger. I knew I wanted to have dentists kind of work for me. I know I wanted to have a bigger shop no-transcript.

Paul Etchison:

First practice Like how long were you since graduation?

Sten Erickson:

Not even a year, oh wow. So yeah, not even a year. There's. You could call it hot to trot or just blind ambition, whatever it is. But uh, I knew I wanted to own a practice pretty, pretty quickly, and I don't know if I was ready for it, but I, whatever, I, I made it happen. So yeah.

Paul Etchison:

So I'd say, like, looking back, like do you wish you would have waited a little bit longer? Do you think you made it harder on yourself than it needed to be, or was it about the right time?

Sten Erickson:

I think it was about the right time, but I definitely made a lot of things harder on myself. There's no doubt about that. I ended up buying a bigger practice. It was kind of in the $1.5 million range, which I know wasn't like I couldn't handle that from a volume standpoint. I definitely could at that point, but it's a big nut to have when you're out of school, and so I think in retrospect there's a number of things I would have done differently, but one of them definitely would have been buy a smaller practice and then grow it, instead of kind of trying to hold on to a bigger practice that had already been more or less optimized in a lot of ways.

Paul Etchison:

What makes it hard about acquiring a practice that's doing it's already successful, versus one that's underperforming?

Sten Erickson:

For me, I think it was that in order to grow it significantly and really get an ROI on my loan and everything else I put into it, it was going to take a lot. And so in Santa Barbara specifically, there's not a lot of large practices. We're a smaller town and so the town you know there really wasn't room for four or five million dollar practices. You know, I think that's kind of changing in certain areas and I think it's definitely changing a little bit in Santa Barbara, kind of changing in certain areas and I think it's definitely changing a little bit in Santa Barbara.

Sten Erickson:

But I think it just became more difficult for me to make a big splash with the practice when I, when I came in, versus if I would have gone in with a 500 or 750 practice. I think I could have doubled that in very short time, you know, and doubling a $1.5 million practice is a little bit more difficult, especially when it's just me, and so that was something I think you know now I would have the confidence to do it, no doubt about that. But when I was, you know, whatever, 29 years old, something like that, that was 28 years old. That was something I hadn't done before and so I just didn't have the, you know, the knowledge of kind of how do I?

Paul Etchison:

how do I get this done? So it's more from like an ROI standpoint is that you weren't able to grow from where you started, but were you able to sustain where you were at at that 1.5?.

Sten Erickson:

Definitely able to sustain and I actually grew at about 30% kind of in the first year, which I think was pretty good. But I still looking back and I think a lot of the guys that I've talked to that have been really successful with practice purchases, especially kind of their first practice. They've really started in that kind of smaller to medium size range and then they've really seen a big jump in some of their production With your first practice.

Paul Etchison:

What would you say? The biggest challenge was that you remember Staff team. Yeah, always Just taking over, just like getting into there and getting them on your side.

Sten Erickson:

Yeah, I always worked with them before we bought the practice and so you know I knew the team and they knew me and so they were very comfortable. I was working on there four or five days a week and then my partner who retired after about the second half, he was only working a day or two. So it was essentially my practice. When I had bought it I had already been pretty established there.

Sten Erickson:

Some of it's the overhead with this team and you know just people that have a little bit of a bloated salary and sometimes performance was iffy, and so it's kind of making those hard decisions Are the people kind of do we kind of bring them along? Do we kind of get someone in there? That's kind of fresh blood? Those decisions were definitely hard, but just kind of keeping everyone motivated and aligned and rowing in the same direction was always a really big challenge for me in the beginning for sure, especially when we were growing, because I think they I wasn't as good at explaining my vision and so I think when we were making these big strides for growth whether it was a marketing push or even buying a second practice, things like that, hiring an associate I don't think they really understood why I was doing it and I was kind of not as confident myself to explain it, because I thought they might think that we're trying to be, you know, the next DSO and they wouldn't want to stay around, and so I think that was a shortcoming of mine.

Sten Erickson:

But staff overhead, especially in California, is always a challenge, that's for sure.

Paul Etchison:

Yeah, so you realize that vision is important, and projecting that to the team and explaining it. Was there like a certain instance in which you, when you learned that, yeah, there were probably multiple, you know.

Sten Erickson:

I think one of the main ones was when I tried to attempted to kind of split myself in two between when we bought our second location, which was about a year, a little over a year after I purchased the second half of the first practice, which was about a year, a little over a year after I purchased the second half of the first practice, I basically attempted to work seven to one, one to seven, you know, in one office, one in the other office, and so you know that was going pretty much every day through the week, and during that time when I'm just running around with my hair on fire, you know you don't have a lot of time to coach team members or build the culture or things like that.

Sten Erickson:

So you're kind of relying on them and themselves to kind of really create their own culture. It's, you know, people who say what has been told is, you know, whether you think you have a culture or you don't, you definitely do. It just might not be exactly what you've guided or what you've, you know, intentionally built. So that was where we lost control a little bit and we were finding a lot of things that we didn't like.

Sten Erickson:

And it was a big realization that we really needed to kind of rein in the culture and I really maybe needed to take a step out of clinical a little bit just to kind of focus on some of the coaching with the doctors. And it was kind of a big wake up call. We did lose some people good people, I think along the way. I take full blame for that, just not having that culture in place, but I think it really was a wake-up call for me to say, okay, we had a good culture in our first practice. I can just copy-paste and put that an hour away and that was naive at best. You know, it really takes an intentional effort to kind of continue that culture.

Paul Etchison:

So if you said, if you had to look back from the first practice to the second practice, what was the difference Like? What was the major difference in the culture?

Sten Erickson:

You know the culture. I think the second practice definitely was a very closely held practice from the previous dentist that owned it and it was meaning that he was, you know, friends in the community. They're almost at the same church, almost at the same high school and things like that, and so to go into that location and kind of be the new dentist you felt like a little bit of an invader, and I know that happens a lot with very closely held practices everywhere. But to do that when I also had a practice that I was holding onto an hour away was an especially hard challenge. So that was a tough one.

Sten Erickson:

A lot of patients no-transcript that are not, you know, wild about the old doctor retiring and things like that. That always happens. But we know how to get new patients, we know how to treat and plan, we know how to produce, you know, at this point so it becomes a little bit more of what our skills are versus trying to act and operate like that previous dentist just to hold on to those patients. And so I think that was a little bit of a realization for me, not to say that went bad, but I think it could have been a lot easier.

Paul Etchison:

One of the things that I strongly believe is that it's really hard to grow practices. You know, from a managerial, entrepreneurial standpoint, when you're just seeing patients all the time. It just becomes very difficult Because in one is like you want to say you don't have the time, but sometimes you just don't have the energy. You've got the time but you don't have the energy to do it. What did you do to like change this culture at the second practice?

Sten Erickson:

That's exactly what I did. I took a lot. I took a big step back clinically, and I remember exactly how many days or anything like that. But I essentially reserved a lot of time in my day to either shadow different doctors or shadow the team and just kind of be there working with them when I wasn't seeing patients. And so I think that that was a big one. And then on the days that I was working clinically, I would always make sure that I was next to a doctor working clinically. I would always make sure that I was next to a doctor, and part of it was just hey, this is how I operate, this is how I roll, take what you can and kind of learn from me a little bit.

Sten Erickson:

And then I had kind of built my practice over a fairly short period of time and was doing a lot of IV sedation and bigger cases and a lot of surgery and things like that, and so that was the way I knew to build a practice. That was my strategy. So I was trying to really force that on them. I think they wanted some of it, but I also do think I was maybe forcing it a little too quick on some of them. So I think really getting in there and kind of seeing where's their capability, where's their competency right now and seeing that firsthand, and then it's okay, I can meet you where you are from a coaching standpoint. I can see where you are hey, this is how we're going to get to the next step, instead of hey, I think you're right here, let's go ahead and do a full mouth implant case right now. You know, I think that it's exciting for some docs, but they're just not ready for it.

Paul Etchison:

Yeah, I think that's great information, because a lot of docs like how do you run your business? And often like what I tell them is that it's not things that you'll schedule. You're just there, like working with people, and they're like well working, what? So I love if you could share, like other than shadowing doctors, like what are some other things that you were doing when you took a step out of that clinical role to step more into the running the business?

Sten Erickson:

Yeah, so I mean at the time my actually my assistant, who had been my assistant, and then she'd been our office manager, my sedation assistant, and now she's our COO. So she, she works very close, so we actually do a lot of our coaching and mentoring together. She was really working with a team and having one-on-ones frequently with them, really working with a team and having one-on-ones frequently with them. Because what happens is, you know, you have something happen, whether it's with a team member or a patient, and then when you start to kind of dig underneath the surface to kind of find out what happened, do a little triage, you realize that there's numerous places along the way that you could have prevented that. And you know, I think a perfect example is just, you know, when you have someone quit and you just weren't expecting it, right, they were expecting it, they were probably thinking about it, there were signs here and there all along the way, right, and so I think that really helped us kind of hone that in a little bit as this. Let's have these one-on-ones very, really frequently. That's how these group discussions is how these group training meetings you know pretty frequently, and so that really kind of helped us get a finger on the pulse of kind of what was going on in our own practice a little bit more, and then I would kind of take the lead on on training the doctors, but I definitely am still chair side with them for a lot of cases.

Sten Erickson:

I got all my doctors. Right now I'm wanting to place implants, so I'm placing every implant with them, letting them do it. Everything's guided. I'm kind of walking them through it. But we're doing that.

Sten Erickson:

I got a lot of them, you know, doing wisdom teeth, doing some full mouth stuff. So I'm in the office and then, you know, we also have a really pretty ironed out meeting cadence with the doctors. So when we do training sessions and morning meetings and lunchtime kind of clinical calibration calls things like that, so we really structure it and split between three offices. A lot of it ends up being over Zoom, which I don't think is a bad thing. We've actually had a lot of good results in Zoom because you have a really captive audience. You know no one can kind of have something else going on in the other room and when someone's on Zoom they're right in front of you and they're usually not as distracted sometimes if you're in the office. So you know that's. That's kind of been our secret sauce, I guess, is what's worked for us is to just really really focus on the training and really kind of have a set meeting schedule with the doctors and with the team.

Paul Etchison:

So what is your meeting schedule with the doctors? What does that look like in your practices?

Sten Erickson:

Yeah, so you know, every morning, every Monday morning, we do an all team meeting. It's usually pretty quick, usually kind of a little bit more motivation Look at some numbers real, real, briefly, not too much and you know, always kind of go over some kind of training topic that we're working on for the week. You know ready break and that's always over Zoom, because it's between all three offices, so we get everyone on Zoom. There's a bunch of different squares on there and that's it. And then my I'll kind of go through my meeting first.

Sten Erickson:

Every Tuesday we have a just a doctor call. We kind of go over some leadership topics, things that are happening with the team. Hey, I'm noticing this, I'm noticing our x-rays are not coming as quick. I'm noticing my setups are not where they should be or not on time, something like that. Hey, how can we work with different doctors? And usually it's not necessarily a team issue, it's it's the doctors that are either not portraying what they expect out of the team, and so there's a little bit of a communication issue. But we always try to hold the mirror to the doctors first. So that's on Tuesday, that's about 30 minutes.

Sten Erickson:

Wednesday, we usually have a one-on-one with one of the doctors. Thursday, we have a clinical calibration at lunch, where we just bring cases. So we used to do cases kind of on one-off basis, where they would send me cases, they would send me records, and then we would just do a call or I'd meet them in the office and we'd kind of run through a case. What I realized, though, is that was with one person, and all my doctors probably could have gotten a lot of benefit out of hearing all that, and so we ended up kind of doing it all together, and so we have kind of a set way that they're supposed to present some of the records. This is their first attempt at kind of where they're going to treat and plan where they want to go from a stepwise appointment standpoint and how they're going to design the case, and so, then, we kind of just break it down, and we do that on the Thursday afternoon calls, so those are great, and we go everything from you know an endo case that someone's having to struggle with, to an implant case to you know, hey, this is where wave one doctor doing a lot more of the thirds right now. This is where I want to you know, yes on this, there's no on that third, things like that and we'll big topic is implants right now.

Sten Erickson:

So we're talking a lot about implants and everyone's going. One person has a case. Everyone gets the benefit of at least working that case up and seeing how that goes. We get the post-ops and we kind of get a little debrief on kind of what. You know how that case went from the other doctor's standpoint not from my standpoint, but I want them to kind of talk about hey, this is what I learned from this case. So, and then if we ever have a doctor going to CE courses, which we do a lot of throughout the year, we'll kind of have a reserve, another meeting that they can basically present everything they learned to the rest of the doctor team and kind of break it down with different slides and different docs and things like that. So we can all kind of get a little bit of a benefit from from whatever they learned. So it's really cool how many doctors do you have total? We have five doctors now.

Paul Etchison:

Yeah, Okay, Logistically, how do you schedule like so that everybody can be on these meetings?

Sten Erickson:

So we have our doctors are working four days. Right now. We and that's something we are pretty firm believers in I think five days a week is. This is manual labor, what we do, right, it's tough. So it's tough. I mean, every once in a while, on a Tuesday morning meeting or a Thursday afternoon, they might miss it if they have a certain day off.

Sten Erickson:

We kind of have a rotating schedule that goes over four weeks, so there's always going to be, you know, some doctor that has some day off, that's on Tuesday or Thursday, something like that.

Sten Erickson:

We'll shift them around. Sometimes if there's an important topic that we need to kind of get everyone on board with and make sure that you know, hey, it's Wednesday afternoon this time because everyone's going to be in the office, something like that. But a lot of these meetings which has been something I didn't expect and we've never asked out of them, but a lot of these meetings will have doctors log in from home and just because they want to, they just want to be a part of the meeting or they have something to say or they have something to present. So it doesn't happen all the time and we definitely don't push it. We want people to have their time away when they have their day off, but it's been kind of cool to see doctors take it that seriously, that you know they really want to come to the meeting and be a part of the team. So, yeah, it's not perfect, but I think by having that many meetings throughout the week and month we're going to hit all of them most days.

Paul Etchison:

I mean it's more attention that most people give their associates. I find that most owners are lucky if they do a one hour meeting once a week, if not once every other week, with their associates. And here you are, having these touch points all along the week.

Sten Erickson:

Yeah, I mean to your point. I was wondering the same thing what the hell am I going to do if I'm not going to see patients? And I kind of just decided I'm not going to let them fail, yeah, and this is my way to do it. And so, if I can kind of be and I'm really trying hard not to be overbearing, because I hated when I had, you know, an owner doc looking over my shoulder hey, why'd you do that? When did you treat and plan this? So I'm definitely trying to do it more in a collaborative. Yeah, me too. Hey, this is what I would do instead of you know, hey, you missed this freaking filling right there or something like that, or some stupid thing like that. So we're definitely trying to let them, you know, develop their own practice or build their own practice within our ecosystem, but we definitely know a lot just to try things out and see how it works, especially on my dime.

Paul Etchison:

I've had associates over the years that are like oh my gosh, give me more information, pour into me, listen to my exams, do this, and they really want it. And I remember one associate that she really needed it and I poured into her and back in my mind I'm like you are so lucky girl, you are getting so much of my attention and so much of my coaching. And then at a certain point she said I find myself really not liking working here because I feel like I'm under the microscope all day long. And that was an eye opener for me, where I was like, oh wow, like there is such a thing as too much coaching. So how do you walk that line with giving the doctors their autonomy and letting them feel like they're okay just the way they are, but at the same time, I'm sure you could find a million things that you want to pick at. How do you do that?

Sten Erickson:

Very carefully. I know exactly, and I mean the thing that my CEO and I talk about really a lot is they want it when they want it and they don't want anything when they don't want it. So it's almost like you need to kind of be there when you think, or right before they're going to ask, or right before you kind of see them wondering about something, and no more than that, because I have been that overbearing owner, I think, a couple of times in my career and it doesn't work out well. I think it kind of pushes people out the door a little bit. Like you said, you know, one thing we do in our practice we actually just did this with our docs this morning is we kind of do a day in the life where my COO will flash up like four or five numbers and they won't have any labels on them and they're just you know these random numbers, and then we'll kind of label them. And so one of the day in the life numbers we put up this morning was their scheduling percentage what a 10% bump in scheduling percentage would be as far as a daily production, what a 10% bump in scheduling percentage would be as far as a daily production, and then what that would mean from a yearly income standpoint and what they realized, because they were going to make $100 to $150,000 more with a 10% bump in scheduling, which is not crazy. I mean, it's something, you know.

Sten Erickson:

I think a lot of dentists that have been around for a while just all have to do is make up their mind.

Sten Erickson:

They can just go out and do it, but they didn't realize that.

Sten Erickson:

And so, kind of seeing the numbers and kind of seeing them how they kind of extrapolate out into something they really care about, which is their take home pay, plant some seeds about okay, maybe I do need to not complain about having eight exams on my side, you know.

Sten Erickson:

Maybe I do need to, you know, not complain about having all these new patients. Maybe these new patients are kind of getting me towards my goals, and so, versus if we would have just said, hey, you got to see eight or 10 new patients a day and they're gonna say, well, it's too much, I can't do that. Well, here's why and we're not giving them eight or 10 new patients every day. But I mean, I want them to kind of be hungry for that and not necessarily it being me pushing them or kind of forcing them to do something kind of, because that has a little bit of a that kind of, you know, clinic DSO atmosphere when you start to push things. I think people really, really pull back when they get that vibe. So but if we have them come up with that realization on their own, I think it makes a lot a lot bigger impact.

Paul Etchison:

So how long has that been that you stopped seeing patients clinically?

Sten Erickson:

A little bit on and off. So I stopped about five or six years ago. Once lost an associate, one of them that I probably was overbearing on. It was kind of a big. It was a big painful time in my career so I was kind of thrown back in. I was thrown back in during COVID and then I've been out clinically this time for a couple years now, two, two and a half, three years now.

Paul Etchison:

Yeah, how do you keep from getting pulled back in when an associate moves on or something like that, when it's just convenient, well, you've got a license.

Sten Erickson:

And I always and that's part of the strategy is, if I need to, I mean it's, you know. You know, call up the bullpen and I'm in, but I it's definitely not an exercise in making more money. I'll tell you that If I get us going back in or we can either make room for me or let go of a doc. You know I can definitely have a lot more take home income. I'm definitely aware of that, but the lifestyle is not there and I don't think I'd do as good a job of being a leader. So I have really tried to focus them on. You're going to make more money and you're going to do bigger cases. You're going to have more growth and more and more coaching under our wings than you would anywhere else.

Paul Etchison:

But we've got a lot of dental colleagues that don't necessarily love doing dentistry and they say, man, I would love to be non-clinical but I don't see how that could financially work. Yeah, now you've got three practices, multiple docs. You're at a scale where you say that, where obviously it does work. But what would you say to someone who says that is the trajectory I want to go in? How would you suggest they get there faster?

Sten Erickson:

Well, first of all, I think they need to figure out is that really what they want? You know, because I think, like you said, if someone goes non-clinical and they're wondering what the hell they're doing with their lives, right? So, unless you really love kind of the coaching and the managing of the leadership, I don't know that that's going to be a worthwhile trajectory, because I think you're going to kind of get to where you thought you wanted to go and realize that this isn't for me and a lot of people end up just selling their practice. At that point the one mindset shift for me was really making decisions and kind of thinking about my practice as an owner and not even a leader, not even as a manager. But if I was an investor in my own practice completely outside of the practice, didn't have anything to do with it, never on a call, never on a meeting how would I want those decisions to be made?

Sten Erickson:

And I think you really need to sit down and calculate if someone were to come in and buy your practice as an owner and not work clinically and just hire you, you know, where would the profitability need to be after paying doctors? And I think that's something that's missed from a lot of dentists is they, you know? They just you know, take their overhead, say I'm doing, hey, I'm doing 55, 45% overhead, so that means I have a 45, 55% profit, right? No, that's not what that means. And so I think, really realizing what the numbers mean, understand what level you really need to get to to replace your income, or at least make sure that your income is going to support your personal life, so making sure that, after paying a doctor to produce that dentistry, there is something left Enough left over, yeah, but you can have the life that you want, right, yeah, left, enough, left over, yeah, but you can have the life that you want, right, yeah, yeah.

Paul Etchison:

So now you've scaled this to three practices, I mean, what is your future trajectory look like? Do you have any ambition to do some more practices?

Sten Erickson:

Yeah, yeah, we definitely do, and we did our last acquisition about three years ago. So we're kind of back in that mode. I think I told you we did a little bit of an underperforming practice, which was a lot more underperforming than we realized going into it, but we've maintained it and actually now we've kind of, you know, tripled or more the growth. So we just did a chart sale which is kind of just done. We've done a couple of those recently. But we're definitely looking for the fourth location.

Sten Erickson:

My doctors right now have kind of an earn in equity program where they can earn equity. So I'm definitely looking to expand that to you know, really they're owners right now but I really want them to kind of, you know, feel like and actually act like owners even more. So that's my kind of the big push is okay. How do we really kind of bring them into the fold about certain leadership and certain ownership lessons and ways we want them to operate, you know, on a day-to-day basis? So we're kind of going through financials, we're going through growth trajectories, we're going through how we're evaluating practice, acquisition targets, things like that with them.

Sten Erickson:

So, because I want partners, you know, at this point and say I want, you know, major partners, but I want people that act like partners, because if I'm not going to, you know, be in the office that much, I need people that are making those decisions very similar to the way that I would make those leadership decisions. So that's kind of my push, you know. As far as long term, I really don't know. I'm leaving a lot of doors open. You know, I think at some point, you know, having either an internal buyout or external buyout is in the cards. But I'm having fun right now and I think we got a lot more meat on the bone.

Paul Etchison:

Awesome man.

Sten Erickson:

So like you're offering mentorship to docs who maybe want to follow in your footsteps, Talk about that One of the things I think we really do well in our practices is a lot of the training, a lot of systems. We have training platforms, videos, hundreds and hundreds of videos and things like that, from anything from a doctor to team member, front office, back office, things like that. So we have that going out to a lot of people right now in doctors that want to really kind of take their training of their team members from. What we really found is the kind of magic sauce is really getting these people onboarded and trained within a 60 day period. You know cause. We will kind of look back on my career and we.

Sten Erickson:

How did we fail on a lot of these things? We a lot of times we've failed and really just kind of bringing someone on and then it was just on the job, training, right, and so what we've really made a push in the last five years or so is to they have a whole curriculum that they kind of go through, and so we've really kind of shortened and condensed the timeframe to 60 days where someone can really be in the room they're doing the surgery, they're doing chair site, they're checking out patients, they're presenting treatment plans. They're doing all that kind of within the first month, second month is kind of fine tuning those things and we really have a team member that's contributing in a big way, very, very quickly. Not to mention the fact that after 90 days it becomes a lot harder to terminate someone or a little more sticky, and so that 60 days it kind of gives you a 30 day buffer to really find out if that person is where they need to be. From a team member standpoint. So that's been a big push. We're having all of our team hire and fire. So myself and my COO does none of it so but they decide who they hire, they decide who they fire. We're doing presenting them with resumes and things like that, but they're making all those decisions and so different things like that. So docs that kind of want to incorporate things like that into their own practice and really see a need to kind of onboard someone without dental experience and that that's been our forte is really taking people from other industries that want to start a new career.

Sten Erickson:

And then we really kind of looking at helping docs. I've been reached out by a number of people that I've just had interactions with to kind of figure out how do we get associates. You know, kind of over that million dollar mark, you know, because I think that kind of seems to be a little bit of the magic number where they really start to make an impact on the practice and not necessarily a drain and not necessarily just kind of filling in gaps. Is, you know, when associates can kind of get to that million dollar number, then we can really kind of start to build a team around them and really kind of, you know, do some fun things, and so that's another push. Is that we're trying to mentor. You're having a lot of people that want us to mentor them on how do we get docs? You know they're producing five, six $700,000. How do we get them to a million dollars?

Paul Etchison:

So if anyone's interested in like learning more about that, where can they find out more information?

Sten Erickson:

Yeah, so email, email us. We have a connect at Pathway Dental Solutions. We're my COOs. She's on all the all the good stuff, all the LinkedIn and all the social and all that stuff.

Paul Etchison:

So in and all the social and all that stuff Awesome, man. But, dude, thanks so much for taking some time out of your day and spending it with the listeners. I think it's just a wealth of information and really admire the consistency that you have with your doctors. I mean, it's like I'm listening to you say this. I'm like man, that would be so nice if I did that with my doctors, but I always plan to, but it's the follow through. It doesn't always work out like that. So, but yeah, and thanks for coming on and thanks for sharing all that stuff with the listeners. It's been great, a lot of fun, paul, thank you.

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Dr. Paul Etchison

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