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
Work Less, Collect More: The Hidden Math of Owner Freedom
If you’ve ever felt like the glue holding your practice together, this conversation will challenge that belief and give you a new playbook for freedom. We unpack a counterintuitive idea—the Void Principle—where you stop filling every gap so your team has to step in, decisions spread, and systems mature. Through the story of Dr. Lance, a high-output dentist who cut his clinical days and raised income yet still feared taking more time off, we show how real autonomy arrives only when the owner steps back on purpose.
Ready to trade heroics for a practice that runs without you? Subscribe, share this with a colleague who needs it, and leave a quick five-star review to help more owners find the show. Want personalized help designing your freedom plan? Book a strategy call at dentalpracticeheroes.com/strategy.
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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.
Now, I want to share a story about a client that I'm currently working with. His name is Dr. Lance, an incredible dentist, hard worker, awesome clinician, just a great dude. I really, really like working with him. But when I first met him, he was a solo doc working at a practice, doing clinical five days a week, taking three weeks of vacation off a year. He had two kids, a third one on the way, and he was wearing every single hat in the practice. So we started working together. In less than a year, we had systematized everything. We were able to increase his production per hour so he was able to cut his days back. We delegated stuff like crazy so that he wasn't doing everything. And eventually we added an associate for him. So, and suddenly, less than a year, Lance is working three days a week and making 35% more money than he was. So he's working less, he's making more money, but he's still only taking off three weeks per year. So he asked me, he said, What is next? And I said, Man, you're doing so well. We're looking at what is his monthly burn? How much money is he spending? He's making way more money than he's spending, but still just three weeks off per year. So we're trying to build this practice. That's what we do at DPH. We're creating practices that give you a lot of time off where you make more money and less time. We can do that. That's what we do. But he wasn't taking off any more time. So I asked him, I said, Lance, why aren't you taking off more weeks? Like, why don't you take some vacations? Or just even if you're not even taking a vacation, just take time off from the practice. Enjoy all of your hard work. And he said, Paul, if I'm gone too much, I just think this whole place is gonna fall apart. He was fearful that if he left the practice too much, that all this stuff, all this hard work, it was gonna fall apart. And that's a valid concern. But I told him, I'm like, Lance, it's not gonna fall apart if you truly want freedom. Now you put all this effort in your practice and you created this freedom, but you're not taking it. We've got to take it. And I get the fear. But here's the truth, all right? If you are a practice owner and you start to build this freedom into your practice, if you're always available to your team, your team never has to step up and you truly never get full freedom. When you are the safety net, no one else has to lead at the practice. And when you fill every gap yourself, nobody else on your team has the chance to grow. So today I want to teach you how to get comfortable creating what I call voids in your practice on purpose so that your team can rise to the occasion, your stress can drop, and your practice can grow without you being glued to it. Now, you are listening to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast, where we teach you how to build a team-driven practice that gives you more money in less days and gives you the freedom that you deserve being a practice owner. Now, I'm your host, Dr. Paul Edgeson, the author of two books on dental practice management. I'm a dental coach and the owner of a large five-doctor practice in the south suburbs of Chicago. If you want a practice and a life that allows you to make more profit while taking off an insane amount of time to do your hobbies, spend time with your family, or do whatever it is that you like, you have come to the right place. All right, let's dive in. Now, my first point I want to express to you is that it is the fear that keeps the owners trapped. Owners like yourself, you'll think that if you don't do it, it won't get done right. Or if you take time off, the practice is going to fall apart. Or if you let other people on your team handle the big tasks, they're going to mess it up. Maybe if you're not available, the patients will be upset that you're not there as much. Or if you let your associates start to see all your patients, that you will lose them as patients in your practice. But here's the truth the practice will not fall apart. It's only you that are falling apart. And it's because of your mindset. You are not the glue of the practice. I promise you're not the glue. You're the bottleneck. I assure you that things can be done correctly without you. And if you built your systems correctly, the practice is not going to fall apart. You can let the others handle the big tasks. Now, they might mess up, sure, right? But they're going to learn from that mistake and they're not going to mess it up next time. And if you're not available for all of your existing patients as much as you have been in the past, sure, your patients might be upset, but they're not going to be so upset that they're going to switch dental offices. And if you let your associates see all of your patients, you're not going to lose them at the practice. As long as you put the proper training into your associates and you train your team on how they endorse that person to the associates. So you as the practice owner, unfortunately, well, you're not as important as you think. I am so sorry to tell you that. Now, my second point I want to get across to you is that there is like this paradox of leadership, is that your presence as the leader prevents the growth of your team. When you always step up, nobody else has to. When you always solve the problem, nobody else learns to. When you're always available, no one else becomes resourceful. Your presence as the owner is preventing your team's potential. You're not protecting the practice, you're actually suffocating it. You can't always be there. If you're trying to create a practice that runs without you, you need to let your practice actually be without you, which brings us to what I call the void principle. Okay, this is my big teaching concepts for this episode is that when you stop filling every gap, you start creating intentional voids in the way your practice runs. Someone on your team is going to step in. You know, in every office, there are someone on your team is going to step in, but we have to do a few things first to set up a type of team that's going to do this. Now, in every office, there's these hidden leaders. Now, you have them. You might look at your team and say, I have no leaders on my team. I promised you, you've got them on your team. Every team has them. You have people on your team that want to do what's right for the team. They want to do what's right for the patients. They are capable of handling more responsibility than they're handling right now. And they have the skills, they have the motivation. They just won't step up until you give them a void to step into. Voids create opportunity, and opportunity creates ownership, and ownership creates leadership. But you need to create that sort of culture. You have to, as the practice owner, encourage the acts of stepping up. You've got to encourage people handling issues without consulting you or consulting their managers. You have to tell your team that you trust them, that you believe in them, and that you're comfortable with failure. You want your team to understand that failure is expected. They are expected to mess things up. We know that things are going to get messed up. I don't care how good you are at your practice and how special of a person you are, you are going to mess things up. And that's okay as long as we learn from our mistake. So you want to create a culture like that at your practice, and that starts with you talking about you wanting that type of culture. So I love explaining to my team the culture of coachability. We are always getting better. We never reach a point where we're perfect. There's always something that we can learn and we will learn from our mistakes. Another thing I like to say at my practice is grace over guilt. And what I mean is that I want to hear about as the owner, I want to hear about when things go wrong. I want us to be comfortable sharing when we screw things up because we want to offer grace. We're not going to make people feel guilty because when we mess something up, that is a blessing to us. That is an opportunity for training. It's an opportunity for creating a new system to look at a new way of doing things. We've got to expect failure. We need to expect it and learn from it. There's no finger pointing, there's no blaming, just an objective look at failure with a focus on solutions, not on the mistake itself or who made that mistake. And if you can create that type of culture where it becomes safe to fail, where it's safe to mess up, and you express your confidence in the team and your team's abilities, and you also express the wish that you have as a leader for them that you want people on your team to step up, you will create all the necessary elements for people to fill the voids that you create. Now, I want you to think about this. If you never step out, if you never create the voids, no one's ever gonna step in. Now, growth in itself requires discomfort, right? We all know that we need to have some discomfort for growth. We need to get out of our comfort zone. And that's for you and the team. So when you step back and you create these voids as an owner, you allow your team to stretch. You give them room to make decisions without you. You show them that you trust them, you push them into leadership and you force the systems in your practice to start evolving. As opposed to when you're there all the time and you're doing everything, they always default to you. They always stay dependent on you and they never build that confidence in themselves to handle what's in front of them. And then the worst part is that you'll never get that freedom that you desire that comes from building a DPH practice. Now, when I say DPH practice, I'm talking about a practice that runs without you, the kind of practice that allows you to only do the procedures only when you want to do them, that allows you to take off so much time doing the things that you love, spending time with your family so much that your friends are gonna ask you, dude, do you even work at all? And it might even feel like personally, you feel like you don't work enough, that you're not doing enough, but that's good. And you're gonna know in your heart that you put in the extra work up front to create that type of leverage, to create that type of practice that you could work less. So it is work, but it pays off. It's an investment in your future. So I want you, as the practice owner, to start looking for areas in your practice that you can create a void. And here's the magical part you create the void, you create the culture, and somebody steps up to fill it. And often they're gonna have better ideas than you have. Your team wants responsibility, they want to help, they want to feel important, but if you're always there, they never get the chance. So here are your tactical takeaways for this episode. How do we create voids intentionally? I want you to choose one major thing that you're gonna stop doing for the next 30 days. Just say one thing, I'm not doing this, I'm gonna let someone else do it. Someone else is gonna step up and do it, or you're delegating it to someone. Now, the other thing I want you to do, I want you to schedule some unavailability windows in your life. Tell the team when you're available. And for example, I'll share with mine. I'm not personally available if I'm at the office and my door is closed. If it's cracked open, come on in. If it is closed, don't you dare even knock on that thing. I want alone time. I'm doing something important. Now, also, my team knows that they can only contact me on certain days of the week. I am not available to my team Friday through Monday. Okay. If it's Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, do not call me. If it is Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday, I am available to you. But my team knows I don't want to be bothered unless it's something very, very important. So even if they do call me in those days, it has to be pretty freaking important because I've expressed that that's the way I want. Those are my boundaries with my team. Now, during these unavailability windows that you're creating, you are not answering questions, you're not solving problems, you're not being the office hero. Your team is going to have to learn how to solve their own issues. So I want you to adopt this new mantra in the way that you're operating as an owner. Don't answer it, ask it. Okay. When a team member asks you, hey, what should I do about this? I want you to say, what do you think you should do? They will surprise you. Okay. When you prompt them and force them to think on their own, they will surprise you. They do have brains, they're very smart, they're very capable. And the last thing I want you to do, which comes back to our initial story about my coaching client, Lance, is I want you to build a practice that allows you to take time off. Choose a reasonable amount of weeks to take off. So think about okay, what is a reasonable amount of weeks I can take off as a dentist this next year coming up? And then when you have that number, I want you to double it. Just do it. Trust me. Now, you don't have to leave the country. You don't even have to go on vacation. You just have to take yourself off the schedule. You're not seeing patients, you're not planning on being in the practice that week. Now, if you want to go in and be a leader and coach your team and talk to people, that's cool. But I want you to take a lot of weeks off. And obviously, I'm talking about when you have a practice that allows you to do that. That's what we're trying to create on this podcast. That's what we're teaching you how to do with dental practice heroes. I want you to take weeks off. I want you to remove yourself from patient care. And if you're one of my coaching clients, I know that we put in the systems. I know that we have made sure that every provider is hitting their dollar per hour goal. I know that we have the profitability already to do this. I know you probably already have an associate. So, how many weeks should you take off at that point? I want you to take off every fourth week, and I want you to not think twice about it. Okay. That's what I told Dr. Lance. I said, dude, we're taking off 13 weeks this year. Let's do it. He was scared, but he jumped in and he's so happy that he did. Because now his team is learning how to operate without him. He already put the systems in place, but now they're filling the voids that he's creating by not being there as much. And that's the benefit of creating a DPH practice. You get that freedom, and damn, is that freedom palpable? You can feel it. It is life changing. So if that sounds like something that you want to do in your practice and you want some help getting that going, please go to dentalpracticeheroes.com/slash strategy, set up a strategy call with me. I'm happy to talk you through what is possible and talk to you about what coaching options we have available. It will be a no pressure call. And at the bare minimum, you're going to walk away that call with some action items, knowing what the next steps for you to do as a practice owner are. So wrapping up, most owners are not trapped by their teams. They are trapped by their own fear. The fear of letting go, the fear of handing things off, the fear of trusting other people to do the job, and sometimes the fear of being less needed. But freedom, it only comes from one place. You got to set up the systems, you got to create the culture, you got to develop the leaders, and then you've got to create the voids so other people can fill them. Your team is way more capable than you think. And the moment that you step back, you're finally going to see how strong they really are. So thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate it. Hey, and if you get a chance, could you please leave a five star review for the podcast? Sometimes I look at the reviews and I say, man, I haven't got one in a really long time. I got so many listeners. I see the numbers. I would just love if you guys took a little bit, maybe 20 seconds out of your day, to hit that five star thing and write something nice about the podcast. Hey, thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.
