KPIs That Run the $5M Dental Practice

Most practices are either tracking nothing, tracking everything, or tracking the wrong things entirely — and the result looks the same: a busy practice you can't fully control.

This episode will tell you what metrics actually matter and what they're telling you about your practice. Learn how to track KPIs without getting overwhelmed, use data to find trends, and solve problems in your practice.

Topics discussed:

• KPIs to check every week
• What each metric say about your practice
• 4 scorecards for running your practice
• How to use KPIs to track team performance
• Leading vs. lagging indicators
• The dumbest data point in dentistry
• Why a dashboard you check monthly is useless
• The treatment plan acceptance trap

This episode was produced by Podcast Boutique https://www.podcastboutique.com

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Transcript

When Busy Feels Out Of Control

Paul Etchison 0:47

If your practice feels off and you just can't explain why, the numbers will always seem to know before you do. But the problem is most dentists, I mean, we're not tracking our numbers, or we're not tracking the right numbers, or they're just tracking everything and they're not using any of it. So it's really easy to end up reacting to everything instead of truly leading your practice. You feel busy, but you're not in control. And often you're not totally sure what you should even be fixing first. So it's not surprising that this is the sort of stuff that gets you overwhelmed. Where do I start? Well, today we're going to show you how to actually use the metric data that you have from your practice. We're going to talk about what numbers matter, what numbers don't, and you can just forget about, and how to turn all of that information into better decisions and better systems and ultimately a better patient experience. Because when you understand this, when you understand the numbers and what we should do with them, all that data stops feeling so overwhelming and it starts becoming one of the most powerful tools that you have to use to grow your practice. It becomes your dashboard. Now you're listening to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast, where we teach you how to create a practice that is more profitable, more organized, and a whole lot less dependent on you. I'm your host, Dr. Paul Edgison, author, dental coach, and owner of a multi-doctor practice here in the South Suburbs of Chicago. And today I am once again joined by my DPH coaches, Dr. Henry Ernst and Dr. Steve Markowitz, two of my favorite people. And these are two guys that are in it every day. They're running big practices, they're leading big teams, and they're using this stuff we talk about in real life. Not just talking about it on a podcast, they're actually doing it. All right, let's dive in. Welcome back to the Dental Practice Heroes Podcast. We are here today with the Dental Practice Heroes coaches and deciphering all the mysteries of the world and giving you solutions to every single one in a way like you've never had it given to you before. It's magic. And today we're gonna be talking about data. And what do we do with these numbers today? And how do we actually like track them, use them for a team? How do we use them for our benefit? I mean, we can get a lot of data, probably more than we need, but how do we decipher through that, get through it? So I'm gonna pass it to you, Steve. Steve's got six practices. So at a certain point, all he has, his whole experience of some of his practices is just a number. Is it would that be accurate to say? It's like just a note, like you don't, you you you don't go there, like you don't, you don't I think that's very fair to say.

Steve Markowitz 3:24

And I think the reason for that is I don't want to be feeling things. I want to be sure and understand exactly without emotion how to make the practices better. And anytime that I'm I walk into a practice and I start to see something that doesn't really make sense to me, I immediately go back to my computer and I'll look at I'll start looking at some data. What I tell my managers and I tell my leadership team is like the data should be your ground zero of when you're starting to see something, let's take a step back outside of the hustle bustle of patients checking in, checking out. Let's just look at some facts and let's have the data dictate what the best next step should be. So, where I thought this would be a a good episode was first like how do we introduce data to our team? What numbers are we tracking? And when have you seen it most beneficial for you guys? And I think that if we can start to have the people listening to this podcast understand that it's not just to make more money, and a lot of your team will say that, it's so that we can actually take better care of our team and better care of our patients. We can use data to our advantage and we can actually help and create a clear result for our team to celebrate.

Paul Etchison 4:41

Yeah, and I think it's important for you to point that out, is that it's not about money, it's about creating value and servicing our patients. And a lot of us we say, well, I wish my team would understand that. Well, you've got to explain that to them. You've got to frame that. If you don't frame that, I think honestly, if you don't explicitly say that, there's a high probability it will get misunderstood that way. So I think it's very important that you do set some ground rules around discussion of the numbers and why you're doing it, because people want to know what your motivations are. They want to know what your intentions are. So, Henry, what's this like? I mean, how deep do you get in the numbers?

KPIs That Reveal Patient Experience

Henry Ernst 5:16

How important is it for you? My mantra is always that the numbers tell a story. No matter what we're looking at, the numbers are going to tell some sort of story. So there's a lot of things that we have on our KPI metrics board that we look at weekly, quarterly, but they all tell a story. Let's give one example. So, treatment plan acceptance is a great one, right? We monitor our treatment plan acceptance. And why is that important, right? You do a great job, Paul, of talking about the wow experience. Like, what does that look like from the time that I call, from the time that I'm greeted in the office, from the time I'm presented a treatment plan? What does the office look like? If our treatment plan acceptance is going a little lower than it normally is, that's my first thing. I get curious. Hmm, are we answering the phones correctly? Is there a bathroom messy? Like so many little things, right? And all of a sudden you start looking at that and all of a sudden you can improve it. Missed call rate. We want to be a practice that is always growing, that is always consistent, even though we're, you know, an established practice. Hey, if we're not answering the phones, we're missing opportunities and they're going to the next one. And every number that we look at has a goal. And we're looking at every week how much percent of that goal are we at? So if we want to get 50 new patients every week, okay, last week we got 40, we got 80% of the goal, right? It's not not great, it's not bad, but maybe, you know, and then we look at those consistency numbers. Is it the next week 30? And then it's 30. Hey, we're like really low. What the hell's going on? Right. But it also gives us to like pat on the back, like, hey, you know, we were at 52 last week. We're 101% of the goal, or whatever that looks like. So we have lots of things we track both as a practice and as an associate doctor practice. We have all of our doctors with we measure stuff too. We measure production per hour. It's not about the numbers, but is it about how are we servicing our patients correctly, right? If we're having a$300 extraction that takes us two hours, that's not right for that doctor. It's probably not for it for the patient either. We always show our doctors how many new patients they saw last week. This way, if a doctor ever, ever, ever came up to me and said, Hey, I'm not really producing that much, I can look back and say, you know what? You saw 20 new patients last week. Most practices don't see 30 in a month, right? So let's look at something else. We also look at reviews. How many reviews last week did we have that had your name on it, doctor? So it kind of promotes the growth of the practice. It also promotes the those associate doctors producing a practice within a practice. So we can talk about lots of things. If I humanize it, the numbers are telling stories one way or the other, no matter what number you're looking at.

Paul Etchison 7:48

I love that. You know, I thought was cool is we did the thing that you mentioned, Henry. We did this with my all-day team meeting with my team two Fridays ago. It's an exercise where there's a trait list. And you could pull one off the internet, you know. I'm sure like I could provide it. Don't even email me about it. You just pull one off the internet. But it's a trait list, and you say, hey, what do we want in our team members? What do we want? What do we not want to do, or what do we want in the best teammate? And what's a not in a in a good teammate? And we also did this what traits do we want out of a practice, and what traits do we not want in our practice? And we use this thing called Slido, which just pretty much links it into a PowerPoint presentation and it builds the word cloud. And what I thought was really interesting is the traits that we did not want. And my whole point of telling the story is that this is something that would be very subjective, that would be hard to quantify. But like here, we can even quantify this is that I've got 30 people at this meeting, 143 responses. What traits do you not want a teammate? Top three were lazy, defensive, and negative. And the top three traits we do not want in our practice are negativity, drama, and chaos. So it's like now we can focus on those things and have discussions about them. And just like Henry mentioned, focusing on new patients, whatever we're focusing on, that becomes the focus of the current time. We can only focus our energy on so many things at once. So it's like pick and choose. There are no right amount of things that you should be checking. I think there's a baseline amount of metrics, but it's like, what's hot for you right now? What's the hot potato in the practice? Steve, like you're very focused on the numbers because you've got to, because it's kind of all you see of your practices. But do you find in your practices that the ones that you're not in very often that it's consistently the same metrics, or do you feel like that ebbs and flows?

Steve Markowitz 9:33

No, I think we're lucky in dentistry. There's not that many levers that we need to pull to make a practice successful. There's a Peter Drucker quote that says, What gets measured gets managed. I love that quote because to measure things, we're gonna have data from it. Just like you just did that exercise with how is your team feeling? You can actually get data from that and then make it actionable.

Paul Etchison 9:55

Yeah.

Scorecards And Doctor Accountability

Steve Markowitz 9:56

I mean, you can go by round of applause, how do you feel? But that's hard to quantify. Yeah. So when I started like really understanding how important data was, and I would say that was, I don't know, probably 14, 13, 14 years ago at this point. So we have four scorecards. The first one that we started to do was the operational scorecard. I didn't call it that it then. I didn't call it that then, but the operational scorecard is really what is the leading and lagging measures of that office, which is production and everything that goes underneath it, collections and underneath everything that goes underneath it, visits and everything that goes underneath it. And if we can really start to see trends in those categories, we'll be we'll be at a very good place to be able to know what we need to focus on. Because yes, the focus might need to change, but I don't mean I don't want data from from another category. If I'm at Henry's practice and I'm getting 50 new patients a week, like that's incredible. I probably don't need to spend a ton of time talking about our new patient process because we seem to have it dialed in. But I don't want to lose track of that number because if in six months from now I'm looking at as we're like 25, 32, and I'm like, oh no, like, okay, is this just a season or is this something that's a trend? So there are only so many numbers that are important in dentistry. I would recommend you create a scorecard for yourself. I'm happy to go through mine and share ours and then just continue to track those on a weekly basis. Right now, for us, we have that operational one that I spoke about. Once you get over a couple doctors, I think it's healthy to know how your doctors are treatment planning, how you know your doctor's case acceptance, how you know your doctor's hourly is. I think it's important for you to know what your AR looks like. I mean, that's a whole nother uh scorecard that we have. And then the financial scorecard, which is your cash flow, your PL. If you have those four things, and I don't even know if every office needs them, but if you're able to do it, you are just as sophisticated as any DSO that exists in the country.

Paul Etchison 11:54

I'm just curious, like provider level metrics such as case acceptance, diagnosis, things like that. Do you find it's effective to kind of not post them publicly, but let the people like say your whole hygiene department knows what the dollar per hour is for every hygienist? Do you guys put that out there? Do you feel like that's effective? Do you feel like you want to pin them together or create a competition or no?

Henry Ernst 12:17

We do it for doctors. So we have a doctor scorecard that is up on our and where all the doctors hang out, and it has all the doctors like on a column and it has their production for last week. So we usually post it on a Tuesday for the last week. It coincides with when we do our weekly L10 meeting. So production per hour, new patients, how many reviews were in my name, and treatment plan acceptance. And I think it does a couple things. It's not meant to be like a scarlet letter. I think it creates accountability. It also creates a little, a little bit of culture of competitiveness. I never want to be the low person on the totem pole, you know, and all the doctors have different goals. Like my production per hour goals is higher than them. I'm not more special than them. I just do a lot more things. I do IB sedation, I do wisdom teeth that they don't. So it creates those things. And I think it's nice too when people see it, right? It's there. It shows them that I want to also show them as an owner how many new patients you're getting. I know we talked about it before. This is how many new patients you saw last week.

Paul Etchison 13:16

For me, I remember like putting reviews mentioning someone's name. And we did this specifically. We had it on a scoreboard, it was on dry eraseboard in our sterile area. And we put it on there and we wanted to check between our three doctors. And the thing was, is over time we developed a trend. There's a doctor that never gets a review, mentions her name. And when I really looked back and I got real with myself, the whole reason we started tracking that and the reason we displayed it was because I didn't want to have a conversation with that doctor about their patient experience. Like that was like my solution for not having a difficult conversation was like, let's track patient reviews and let's put it up there like a scarlet letter and let's point to it and let's talk about it publicly because that's a lot easier and that's gonna make everybody feel better than me just talking to someone one-on-one about I've got concerns about your experience with patients, doctor. But I think it's fun to have wins to share wins. I think that's what I want to point out is that it's fun to share wins when we do have them. Steve, you were gonna say something.

Steve Markowitz 14:15

Yeah, I think if I was more confident, I would share them publicly and have everyone have. I mean, they're on our dashboard. You can go check it if you want, if any of the doctors want to, but I don't share it publicly with all the doctors or with the hygienists of where their numbers are. And it's mostly because I know that some people may be offended by that and I don't, and everyone's motivated by something different. But what I do try and do is when we have doc some doctors that are just crushing it, whether it be they they just have an incredible hourly production or they have an incredible case acceptance or whatever it is, that needs to be shared because there's something that they're doing differently. So if one of our doctors see does 150 exams and has and treatment plans, I don't know,$50,000, and the there's another doctor who does 100 exams and treatment plans$250,000, and they're both seeing the same patients and believe and have a similar philosophy on how patients should be treated, there's something different happening. So, what can we learn from the doctor that's doing$250,000 of treatment planning and see to how we can incorporate that into how we function every day? So I think that's when Henry says the data tells a story, those are the types of learning that we can utilize this information from to make us better and to hold each other accountable to the things we say we want to do.

Internal Referrals And Keeping Care In-House

Henry Ernst 15:37

I'll take a point or two. So, yes, you're right. In 2026, it's easily to upset somebody, offend somebody. We kind of change the numbers into you know something that can be calibrated. So let's say we've got four doctors and each of them has a different production per hour goal, right? You've got a newer doctor that maybe their production per hour goal is$600 an hour. Let's say that person did$540 per hour last week. That's 90%. You're not 90% of your goal. The next doctor, maybe their goal is$800 production per hour. They did$720. That's 90% also. Both of these doctors, even though they're different true numbers, got 90% of what we expect, right? The other thing is if we get a doctor who's consistently crushing it, we're saying 140% of production per hour goal, 150. You know what, doc? It's time to raise that level instead of 800. Let's go to 850, right? So it consistently allows people to grow. And you can also use numbers to address a problem. A few years ago, we had a problem where we have a system where we want people to stay into the practice because we do so many different things between molar endo, IV sedation. We want people to stay within the practice. You mean like not refer them? Well, internal referral, we call it internal referral. So patient comes to see a doctor and doctor's not comfortable doing root canala number three. Well, we don't automatically default and just give them the endo slip. We give the other doctors in the practice a chance. Hey, doctor, are you comfortable doing this to number three? And I'm always the last line of defense because most of the time I would say yes. So I give all the doctors a chance, and then I come back and I most of the time say yes, yes, we'll do it. Well, so what was happening was it wasn't happening like that, and they were just getting defaulted, just referred out. And it was like, dude, we're missing so many opportunities. We're a big practice, especially me, because I only work two days a week. So, you know, I like to see those patients and keep them in the system. So production per new patient, we started measuring that as a metric to add to our scorecard to address this problem. And then it was at one point, it was pretty darn low. It was probably like for a big practice like ours, it was probably like$600, which is terrible, right? And our goal was like$1,500. So now we've tracked it over the years and we've just kept it on our scorecard. Now it's consistently, consistently where we want it to be. And what is that a sign of? That's a sign that we're keeping people in-house. So problem, put it on your scorecard to address the problem, and now you've got problem solved.

Leading Versus Lagging Indicators

Paul Etchison 18:50

Yeah. I think it's important to talk about the leading versus the lagging indicators as well. Like leading is something that's going to affect a metric down the line where the lagging is sometimes that's evidence of something going wrong. I think one of the things that, you know, we're looking at cancellation percentage or maybe schedule utilization, that can be like a lagging indicator of your policies. It could be a lagging indicator of your communication skills that your front desk has. I mean, all sorts of stuff. Yeah, you know what made me think is when you're just saying that, Henry, was I remember back with referrals, like I noticed that my associates were referring out to an endodonist. Now I was doing all the molar endo. So I was like, well, what? They don't think I'm doing a good job. What the hell's up with this? So I got curious and I asked some questions. They didn't like that I was doing the crown. They wanted me to send it back to them. And I was just like, you know what? I the patient's here. It takes me five minutes to do the crown after doing the endo. I think it's the right thing for the patient. I get what you're saying. You want to have the crown sent back to you, but I just don't think that's the right thing for the patient.

Henry Ernst 19:51

So there was a point in time, me being the total democratic guy I am, like whatever, we're just trying to be open for everybody. At one point, I was doing that where I had like root canal here, and right afterwards, the associate doctor would have the crown on their book.

Paul Etchison 20:05

I can see that.

Stop Tracking Noise Start Taking Action

Henry Ernst 20:06

But no, but here's what happened about three or four times. The patient, like, we had a good experience, and they said, Oh, can you just do the crown too? And what am I supposed to say? No. Yeah. So we had that happen a few times, and then I just adopted the Paul policy. If I'm doing the root canal, I'm just doing the crown. There's plenty of to go around. It's good for the patient experience, you know. Because how much does it suck? What do you call it, Paul? Do you call it referral jail or something like that? Specialist prison. Specialist prison. So we have it so many times where people walk into our office with that little endo slip from another office. We're not endodonists, but they're like, can you just do it all? People want that. And so that's why we track that metric. And yeah, I just do the Paul. So thank you for that policy, Paul.

Paul Etchison 20:48

Yeah. Specialist prisons for anyone listening is when you refer somebody out, you won't do the procedure until this other procedure is completed first. And where I see this happening a lot with my associates is that it's a wisdom tooth, and there's like a distal on a second molar, and they say, we can't possibly restore this without the wisdom tooth out of the way. And I'm like, they're not gonna get the wisdom tooth out. They're just gonna go somewhere else. They're just gonna let this bomb out. Just restore the damn tooth. Do your best. And after the wisdom tooth's gone, if you got to come back into it, come back into it. But that's a good example of specialist prison. And the other one is too, is when you send to a periodontist and you say, I gotta get this periodontal condition evaluated before I do this crown. What are they gonna do? They're gonna measure it and take x-rays? Can't you do that? These are, if you could tell, these are things that frustrate me. I got someone's face in my mind as I'm saying this. Steve, what are you hearing? Get angry. Get angry, Paul. I'm pissed.

Case Acceptance By Dollars Or People

Steve Markowitz 21:38

So I think what happens a lot of times when when people invest in like a dashboard or some metric software, and then they they just check it once a month or whatever, and it just doesn't do anything. The important thing to take away from this is not the data. Like the numbers themselves are just the numbers. They told the story, but you need to do something with it. Data becomes really an important tool when it's used to implement change. So when I think about my own journey and utilizing data, like, yes, it's been helpful, but it's been helpful because I wanted to make changes and I wanted to grow. So if you're thinking, if you're looking at your practice and I'm like, this is as good as I want it to be, and I don't want anything to change, maybe check data, maybe don't, maybe not. I don't really care. But if you want to build your practice and change something, you need data to support that growth. And then you can actually see and measure and manage the growth that you're trying to implement.

Paul Etchison 22:33

What's the dumbest data point that we get with these systems? Like can you think of anything that's just completely useless?

Steve Markowitz 22:40

It's only as good as the data that goes into it. So most of the most of the shitty data is because the person putting into it is also not implementing the right stuff.

Henry Ernst 22:48

I don't think it's one thing that bothers me is people track treatment plan acceptance by money. And I just always hate that because I don't think that you're dialing into the patient experience, right? That's a good point. In my opinion, that may almost make some doctors want a treatment plan not optimal and just treatment plan less, right? I look at it like baseball, one for one. We got a hit. Was it a single, a double, a triple? Doesn't matter. People said yes, they give a chance to keep coming back. So I don't like that metric that we have in dentistry where people measure treatment plan acceptance by money. I like the by person.

Steve Markowitz 23:20

I feel the opposite. So we use dental intel, they have the patient acceptance rate and the treatment dollar acceptance rate. I think they're both. Important. There are, as I look at our 25 docs every month, there is a direct correlation with the lower the treatment plan, the higher the patient acceptance. Yeah. And there gets there's a sweet spot where if a doctor is treatment planning comprehensively, and typically that number is 1,800 to 2,000, depending on their service mix,$1,800 to$2,000 per exam, where they're treatment planning enough and their treatment dollar acceptance is somewhere between 30 and 40%. And their acceptance rate is still north of 75%. When it starts to get below$1,400,$1,500, what I see is that that patient acceptance rate, or like did the patient say yes or no binary? It gets above 80%. But they've left all these other other opportunities to better help the patient because they didn't have the courage most of the time. There was something holding them back from wanting to share what they were seeing, or maybe they didn't have the tools or the communication techniques to be able to share what they were seeing with the patient. And now they're scheduled less, or they're doing a crown instead of doing the crown and the filling right next to it because they just wanted to focus on the broken tooth.

Paul Etchison 24:45

Yeah. I was gonna say when I was doing just implants and ortho and veneers, I remember my dollar uh case acceptance was like 12, 12. And I'm like, that's crazy. I feel like everybody says yes to me. But I'm like, when you're all you're doing is like swinging for the fence every time, like with these bigger cases, like I don't know if that's good. I don't know if that's really I'm sharing something very, you know, bad or you know, I don't know.

Henry Ernst 25:09

I think it it's a combination to preface what I said. Like, I think we our main thing is when we look at treatment plant acceptance, we're main measures by the person, but we also use that, we use Daniel Antel too. We also use that other one. We want to make sure that we're not underdiagnosing. We want to make sure that we're we're giving them the whole entire enchilada, as we say. The other one. Yeah, the other one. The owner of the other one's listening, like, damn it, why didn't they say it?

Slippers Stories And Final Takeaways

Steve Markowitz 25:31

The other one. Oh, I I think it is good. Like the whatever your number is, 12%. 12%. Yeah, that's great. But but the the data point for you is to compare it to what you've done in other months. So if you were to look at it in one month, you were you felt like you were treating this the same and you were seeing the same number of patients, but your acceptance was 20%, that's significant difference. So when we look at our doctor's numbers or our scorecards for our doctors, yes, it's important to be able to know what's possible and and compare to the other doctors. But more importantly, it's also let's compare to ourselves. Like I had a doctor, this was a couple months ago at this point, where he was saying he's making less money and he was frustrated. And so I was like, all right, well, let's bring up your scorecard. And we track the number of hours they work every month. And over a four-month period, he worked 70 less hours compared to the last three months. No shit, you're making less money. You're not working as much. You said you wanted to make more money. I want you to make more money. But this is what the data is telling us. What do we need to change here? Is it that we need to stop leaving at 4:30 on some days? Let's talk about that so that we can really make sure you're achieving your goals. Or maybe those goals really aren't what you think they are. That's just what you want.

Henry Ernst 26:47

There's the premise.

Paul Etchison 26:48

The numbers always tell a story. There was a point seven years ago, maybe where I got these Ug slippers for Christmas, and they're black, and we are all black scrubs. And I said, I'm gonna wear Ug slippers when I'm at work. And my hygienist was like, She's like, Patients are asking what you're doing. Like you just walked out of the room and Mrs. Jones said, Was it was he wearing slippers? I said, I don't give a crap. I'm wearing my slippers. I like these slippers, and they're black and it meets the dress requiring requirement of being black, and I will wear my slippers. And then eventually she got to the point where she's like, I don't think people are taking you seriously anymore. And I said, Well, that'll show up in my case acceptance. So we pulled up the numbers, the case acceptance numbers, and guess what? We found no difference. I will wear my slippers, team. I actually stopped wearing the slippers because they, after they pointed it out more and more, um, I remember my hygienist took a picture of me doing an exam, and I'm like, I do look like a freaking fool. Like, this is stupid. Like, what am I doing? Really? Yeah.

Steve Markowitz 27:40

I think you should go back to wearing slippers.

Paul Etchison 27:41

I kind of want to just wear my socks. I don't like wearing shoes. Like, I like, yeah, I want I want this. I want I want to wear it bare feet. No. I'm gonna wear my bare feet, like I'm scrubbing in the yard, like wash all my clothes with one of those like scratchy like metal things in a tub. That's what I want.

Henry Ernst 27:56

I want my flip-flops that I'm going to the beach at right after this podcast to wear in my chair. Well, you need toe coverage.

Steve Markowitz 28:01

You need something to cover your toes. You can wear your slippers.

Henry Ernst 28:05

Did you imagine that needle landing straight down on your foot and just sticking in there? Son of it. My twin daughters refused to go to a neural surgeon. They wanted me to remove their wisdom teeth. Whoa, I wouldn't want that pressure. I removed both of their wisdom teeth. And that morning when I showed up, you know, they were sedate, we sedated them too. I wore whatever I want. I wore uh mesh shorts, uh, flip-flops. It felt so empowering.

Paul Etchison 28:27

I'm picturing you like twisting your t-shirt and tying it up and getting a little belly like out there too.

Henry Ernst 28:32

No, them days are past. It's warm in here. It's so warm.

Steve Markowitz 28:34

It's funny, Henry. Like, if I'm ever like not in my full costume, costume, I feel like I can't operate. Like it felt weird. There are times where I'll go in and like, you know, clean my kids' teeth or whatever, whatever it is. And I'm like grabbing a mirror because I'm just walking in. I'm like, even without a glove, I'm like, you can't do this. I can't even see it. I'm not, I don't have the proper attire to even see out of this thing.

Paul Etchison 28:56

Yeah, I remember once we I was in my pool, I had friends over, we were drinking all day, and some kid got hit in the face with a baseball bat.

Steve Markowitz 29:03

Oh, you told us this.

Paul Etchison 29:05

And I told the mom on the phone, I said, I'm just letting you know, I've been in the pool all day long. I am drinking. I probably smell like sweat, and I would not be surprised if I smell like alcohol, but I will be right there. And uh, we took care of her. And mom was very thankful. Yeah, and everything went really good. We splinted everything up, we put the teeth back in the socket. We lost one of them, but now we're this is like four or five years ago. So they they didn't care, but I had double. That was very out of my costume. I smelled bad. I'm sure I smelled horrible.

Henry Ernst 29:30

You are a real dental practice hero. Yeah. Thanks. What an ending.

Paul Etchison 29:35

Now, at the end of the day, having the data is not the goal in and of itself. Clarity is the goal. And what the data gives you, if you use it the right way, it gives you that clarity. Clarity on what's happening in your practice, clarity on where the problems truly are and what you should be addressing, clarity on what to do next. So here's what I want you to remember from this episode. First, the numbers, they're just telling you a story. Your job is to get curious enough to understand what that story actually is. You got to ask questions, you got to dig deeper, you got to find out. Second, you do not need to track everything. Just because it shows up on a dashboard and we can track it, doesn't mean we should. You just need to track the right things consistently and actually use them to make decisions. And third, the data only matters if it actually leads to action, nothing changes, and it's just more noise and more crap to look at, more crap to think about. So this is not about turning you into a numbers person, it's about becoming more intentional as a leader because when you do that, everything in your practice starts to feel a little bit lighter, a little bit clearer, and a lot more under control, which feels good. Now, if you want help figuring out what your actual numbers actually mean in your practice and what you should do with them and how you can use them to create more freedom, more profit, and less stress at your practice, head over to dentalpracticeheroes.com/slash strategy. Sign up for a free call, just a conversation to see where you're at and what might be possible for you. And I have to ask you if you got value from today's episode, please, please, please write a five star review for us. Leave us a review. I so appreciate it. And it helps more dentists find the show. And it just feels good every now and then to be thanked and you say, you know what, I really appreciate what you're doing because I, as a podcaster, appreciate you listening. Thanks again for spending some time with me today. Have a great week, and we will talk to you next time.