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 High-ROI Levers Every Dental Practice Owner Is Missing
What if you could dramatically improve your dental practice without working harder or longer hours? The secret lies in understanding the butterfly effect – how small, strategic changes create massive ripple effects throughout your practice.
Most dentists make the same critical mistake: believing that increased production requires more patients, more procedures, or more associates. They chase these "big wins" while overlooking dozens of small levers hiding in plain sight – levers that could multiply profitability with minimal effort.
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.
All right, I want to talk about a movie that dude. I loved this movie when I was in college. It was called the Butterfly Effect with Ashton Kutcher. I was never a big Ashton Kutcher fan, I don't know why. I just didn't really like him on that 70s show. But anyway, I really like this movie and here's what it's about.
Speaker 1:It's about this guy. He's having headaches and every time he has like a headache, he blacks out and he goes back in time to like formidable, like moments in his childhood or when he was growing up, and he changes what he did in that time and then when he comes out of the headache, his life is completely different. The idea being, if you've ever heard about the butterfly effect, it's saying that, like a butterfly, flapping their wings across the world, can create a tsunami on the other side of the world. Just how these little, tiny things over time, and just they set off this chain of events that has really big effects. So I was thinking about this in the realm of practice ownership and I said, dude, what are those like small things that we can do in the practice that have these huge butterfly effects on our quality of life and our profitability, and the way that we can do in the practice that have these huge butterfly effects on our quality of life and our profitability and the way that we run our practices. And I think there are these things. There are these little, small levers that we can just crank down and they make a big effect, and that's what I want to share with you today. So we're going to figure out what are these small little levers in dentistry that we can pull that have big effects. Let's do it.
Speaker 1:All right, you are listening to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm your host, dr Paul Etcheson. I am the author of two books on dental practice management, I'm a dental coach and I'm the owner of a large five-doctor group practice in the south suburbs of Chicago. Now we want to teach you how to have a better life by creating a team-driven practice that runs without you, that is high profit and requires very little of your time. So if that's something you're looking for, you are in the right place. All right, let's jump into it. We're talking about levers today. Now, the first point I want you to understand is that these levers there aren't just a few, they are everywhere.
Speaker 1:We often think, as practice owners, that we need these massive overhauls, we need to change everything, and what I want you to realize is that in reality, these small little tweaks, they can add up if we can create like a tighter script with our team, maybe a better handoff, maybe we do some things with our block scheduling. There's tons of these things. I'll give you an example. In my practice we dropped Delta like two years ago and guess what? We stopped seeing new patients for Delta. What happened? Did they stop calling? No, we stopped converting them.
Speaker 1:So what did we do? We looked into it, we created an action plan and a lot of it was training with the team. But essentially, if I had to say what did we do? We used to just say, hey, we do take your insurance, but unfortunately we are an out of network provider. And then we would just sit there and the patient would pause and they'd say, oh okay, thanks, see ya, and they would hang up. That would be it. After we say that now we just keep going and we say, but if you have a PPO, you still get benefits at this office. I can look at your plan and tell you what those benefits are. If you would like me to. Can I do that for you? And oh man, we changed one little thing that we said and now we see out of network new patients from Delta. So we're seeing more new patients, and guess what? These are great patients because they're out of network. They're not on that stupid Delta PPO fee schedule that you can't even pay your team with. I mean, these are great patients. So what a little tiny lever to pull to make a big difference.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's talk about why you might miss these things as an owner. Often you want to chase these big wins. You want to say more operatories, let's do more marketing, let's add associates the associate fallacy, as I like to call it. We just have to add associates and everything gets better Wrong. Now see, you are overlooking all these little leaks that are right under your nose in your practice, and I can tell you from experience, it is so common, we all do this stuff.
Speaker 1:I remember when we first opened like we started getting some momentum with new patients. I was a solo doc, four days a week. We were seeing 80 new patients a month and, my God, everything was so efficient and so great until we looked at the numbers. But guess what? We didn't look at the numbers. So we didn't know. So we were happy. Because when we looked at the numbers, we realized we had a big cancellation problem. We realized we had a big attrition problem. We realized we had a big case acceptance problem. But guess what, when you don't look at those things, you don't know. Because you're seeing so many damn new patients, all that stuff doesn't matter because it makes up for that. But the thing is, as soon as I started doing things for the attrition, for the cancellations and for the case acceptance damn dude, we ran out of space so fast. So everything was fine. Ignorance is bliss, but it's one of those things that we miss them because we're not paying attention, we're not looking for them. So you've got to look, you've got to be checking your numbers and you've got to be seeing, talking to your team, finding out what are these little levers that you can pull, what are the little tiny things you can optimize and make more efficient, and I promise you you're going to get big results from it. Now I want to share a story with you.
Speaker 1:When I had my first associate come on, I cannot remember what the reason for us hiring a consultant was. I think it was my first bout of overwhelm. This was like the first time that I was like okay, I have an associate. It was supposed to make my life better. I doubled the size of my team and life is now worse. What the hell is going on? I need some help.
Speaker 1:And I had this associate, lorraine, and she came in. She observed us for like a full two days. It was a really valuable two days. I really liked having her in there. She was great and I remember her and I were sitting in my office and she's asking me a lot of questions. So we're sitting there. She's sitting across the desk from me and she's asking me a bunch of questions, she's taking a bunch of notes and she's telling me things that she observed. And I kept making excuses for this and that and this, and she stopped me in the middle of a sentence at one point and she said you know what, if you get one thing from me during this visit, this is what I want it to be and I'm just like okay, like what's that she's like? I want you to realize that you have an associate and that you're the leader of this practice and that you are so much more valuable to your team and to the profitability of this practice as a trainer and a leader and not as a dentist. You need to stop being a dentist so much. And I was just like holy shit like, but I'm really good at being a dentist, I like being a dentist. I can't stop being a dentist. But she was right.
Speaker 1:The thing is, is we default as dentists? We say if I want more money, I have to do more procedures. That is the thing in my practice that I can do that. No one else can, because I'm licensed to do it. But what I want you to see is that the biggest ROI is not from squeezing in one more filling or one more crown or one more hygiene visit. It's from fixing the systems that make every single filling, every single crown and every single hygiene visit more profitable. And owners are so much more valuable as lever pullers, not as extra producers. So when you're looking at your practice and you're thinking, how can I get more out of what I already have? It's not in cramming more patients, it's not in seeing more new patients, it's not in doing more crowns. It's in pulling the small levers that work within your existing systems and your. So what are some of these levers that we can pull.
Speaker 1:I'm going to give you a few examples. One big one case acceptance. If we can just change the way we talk about procedures, that's a big lever to pull. If you can build rapport with every new patient before you talk about dentistry, that's a huge one. If you can train your team on how to simply talk about every procedure, there's a big one. If you can train your front end team how to present treatment as a treatment coordinator and how to utilize all their financial tools, that's another big one. There are so many things that will help case acceptance, all the way down to the way you answer your phone affects it. Everything affects case acceptance.
Speaker 1:All right, let's talk about cancellations. That's another one. Everything affects case acceptance. All right, let's talk about cancellations. That's another one. Creating a cancellation policy that your team can follow and hold them to be accountable to actually following it. I talked to a lot of practice owners and they say, yeah, we get cancellations, but we fill them really fast. Cool, I'm happy you fill them, but what would be nicer would be if you didn't have to fill them at all, if people just didn't cancel or you didn't let those type of people get on your schedule in the first place. So there's ways to do that.
Speaker 1:What about scheduling? There's so much we can do about scheduling and I think that's one of the things that Dental Practice Heroes really stands out in with our training is man. We will create a schedule in your practice that will make you hit your goals and it becomes the barometer for everything else. When you get that schedule template set up the right way, it just becomes a matter of how do we fill these blocks in our schedule and what can we do to make sure that it happens?
Speaker 1:Let's talk about team trainings. I mean, nobody trains their front end. Nobody does it. If you tell me you do it, I'll say what do you do? What did you do? Phone training, like four years ago. Most people don't pour into their front end team and it's such a missed opportunity. Team trainings, even just simple huddles at the beginning of the day to put everybody on the same page there are so many little trainings you can do and this is what we do with Dental Practice Heroes. I mean, we just started this mastermind. I got 15 dentists with me, we just kicked it off and we are going through my seven phase Omni practice program, start to finish. We are going to optimize every little thing in our practice. We're going to pull every single lever. We're going to do it. What do you think is going to happen to these people after 12 months of doing this? Are their practices going to be different? Hell yeah, and there's going to be echoes. There's going to be echoes throughout their family, through their life, through their relationships, because of how their practice runs.
Speaker 1:So let's give you some tactical takeaways here from me. The first thing I want you to do is you got to invest some owner time in what I call the scaling work. I call this deep work, I call this acceleratory work. This is the stuff that is not urgent, but it is super important to take you to the next level. So invest that time. It doesn't take a lot, maybe a half an hour, an hour every week.
Speaker 1:Just sit down and block out some time to plan, to say what am I going to do, and audit all of your practice systems for leaks. Where are you losing time? Where are you losing patience? Where are you losing dollars? Where are you screwing up case acceptance? Look at all these leaks and these levers that you can pull and then just choose one.
Speaker 1:Say this is the one I'm going to tackle this month. Pick one, commit to improving it for 30 days, get your team involved, ask some input what to do and then, after 30 days, measure that impact and celebrate. Because guess what, if you put the time into it and you can inspire your team to do it, you're going to have some nice results to celebrate with your team and stack those wins, just like I mentioned, with these 15 dentists who joined my mastermind this year. It's a 12 month program. We are going to stack win after win over 12 months, so these people are going to get some big results.
Speaker 1:So, in closing, I want you to see that your highest value as an owner is not just doing dentistry. It is pulling those levers that multiply everyone's efforts. So what is that one lever that you can pull this week that would pay you back far more than doing one more crown, because it wouldn't be just that short-term one more crown, it would be the value of one more crown for the future of your career at your practice. I want you to think like that way and if you need some help pulling those levers, finding those levers, guiding your team, inspiring them for it, creating the systems of leadership in your practice. Please check out our website, dentalpracticeheroescom. We are happy to work with you. We will have a free strategy call and I will at least talk to you about what's possible and, at the bare minimum, you're going to learn something. So set up a call with me, all right. Thank you so much for listening and spending some time of your day with me. I will talk to you next time.
