You're Busy, So Why Isn't Your Practice Growing?

If your days feel jam-packed but your dental practice still isn’t improving, the problem usually isn’t effort. It’s urgency. The loudest problems in a practice always win, and they trick us into believing we’ll work on systems, leadership, and growth “once things slow down.” They don’t slow down, and that’s exactly why so many practice owners feel stuck, overworked, and quietly frustrated.

We unpack the real difference between reactive work and proactive work in dental practice management. Reactive work is the constant stream of fires: insurance denials, upset patients, schedule chaos, staffing surprises, and equipment problems. It keeps the lights on, but it doesn’t build the future. Proactive work is what creates a practice that runs without you: onboarding systems, checklists, phone scripts, KPI scoreboards, P&L review, and leader development that prevents issues before they explode.

We also talk about why this matters for your key leaders, especially the office manager. Many office managers spend their whole day reacting like a highly skilled admin employee, when what you really need is protected time for true management. I share the shift I had to make when I hit a breaking point, and how blocking and defending CEO time became the turning point for building momentum again.

If you’re ready to stop living in reaction mode and start building a calmer, more profitable practice, listen now, share this with a colleague, and subscribe so you don’t miss what comes next. And if you want help installing systems and protecting proactive time, book a free strategy call at dentalpracticeheroes.com/slash strategy, then leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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Transcript

Paul Etchison 0:02

Have you ever gotten to the end of the day and thought, I was busy every single minute of that day, but I really don't feel like I actually even moved the practice forward at all. And you would probably be right. You answered a ton of questions, you put out a ton of fires, you had to look at the schedule and ask them to move patients because they double booked you again. You answered to upset patients and you dealt with insurance denials, you fixed up treatment plans, and you solved everybody else's big urgent problems, and somehow eight hours disappeared. And then you thought about your list of all those things that you've been meaning to do, like improve your onboarding or rewrite all the confirmation texts for the practice, or maybe sit down with your office manager and show them how to do something, create a department end-of-day checklist or a beginning of day checklist. Look at your profit and loss, and maybe even call to cancel some of those things that you subscribe to that you never ever use, yet you still continue to pay for, or maybe meet with some members of your team. All these things that you could be doing that would be helping your practice, they just keep getting pushed to tomorrow. And it's not because they're not important, it's because honestly, they just don't feel urgent. And that is the trap. Because the things that actually will change your practice, the things that are going to grow your practice, they never ever come with a deadline. Isn't that funny? Have you ever thought about that? So if you're like most practice owners, and I know you are, you keep telling yourself that once you get caught up, once things slow

Busy All Day Yet No Progress

Paul Etchison 1:32

down, that'll be the time that you will work on the systems. Maybe once you get that team together, you just got a lot of turnover right now. I get it. And you just don't have a full team. You don't want to pour a lot of training into them right now because they're not your long-term team yet. You still need to hire some more people. So it doesn't make sense to work on those things. But I'm hoping after some period of time doing this, you finally actually realize that, dude, things don't ever slow down. The there's always gonna be another emergency, there's always gonna be another patient that's upset, you're always going to have another fire to put out, the compressor is gonna break, you're going to run out of some supplies. So today I want to show you why urgency is quietly stealing the future of your practice and your well-being. And we're gonna talk about the difference between reactive work and proactive work and why the biggest improvements in your office, they almost never, I mean, I can think of very few times that they ever feel urgent. And lastly, how protecting that proactive time is one of the biggest differences between people that are super successful and people that just stay stuck. Because the practice that you have next year, that you're going to have next year, I promise you, what you choose to do today will very, very much affect where you will be next month, in a few months, next quarter, next year. Now you are listening to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast, where we teach dentists how to be the CEOs of the practice, empower their team, and build a practice that runs without them. I'm your host, Dr. Paul Edison, a practice owner, author, and dental coach who works just one clinical day a week while my team runs the business for me. Today we're talking about how we should be using our time as owners. And we're not just talking about us as owners, we're talking about our team leaders as well. All right, let's get into it. Now, first things first, we need to accept something about human nature, your brain. The little thing that's less than 10 pounds but somehow consumes like 25% of your body's energy, it is wired for urgency. That's the problem. Your brain is naturally gonna pay attention to whatever is screaming the loudest. That might be the phone ringing, it could be the upset patient, it could be Mr. Jones, he's back again. Why does Mr. Jones keep coming back to our practice? We don't like Mr. Jones, but he keeps coming back and he's making our life hell. And guess what? He's back today. It could be the broken compressor you had. We had one of those a few weeks ago. Maybe a hygienist who just put in their two weeks' notice and you have a ton of patients that you need to figure out what the heck are we gonna do with them? Those are the things that you are a business owner and they demand your attention. They are so urgent. You can't just push them off to the side. They need to be dealt with now. But we need to accept that we are people that want to be working on our business. That's why you

Why Urgency Hijacks Your Brain

Paul Etchison 4:22

listen to this podcast. The work that is going to change your practice, it is never gonna scream at you. It's going to whisper at you. It's going to say, Dr. Edge, you really should be doing this. Why aren't you doing it? What kind of person are you? You are a horrible practice owner. You never do anything you're supposed to be doing. All you do is put out fires and you complain about how crappy your office is, but you don't do the things you need to do. It's never gonna walk into your office and say, Doctor, you need to rewrite your confirmation text today. They could be improved upon. Doctor, today is the perfect day. Oh my gosh, look at how beautiful it is outside. You should stay inside. And I know it's your day off, but I mean, seems like a great day for building an onboarding system, wouldn't you say? When's the last time you looked at your profit and loss? What are you like lazy or something? Well, I guess those things they will just quietly wait. And because they quietly wait and they don't yell at you, the progress, the progress that we're looking for, the progress we know we should be getting, it just whispers and we don't listen to it. And that's why so many practices stay exactly the same month after month, quarter after quarter, year after year. We're stuck doing the reactive work. It's that reactive work, it keeps the practice running, it keeps you alive, but the proactive work is what's going to change your practice. And that is like the heart of this episode. Just recently in our VIP growth program during an office manager session. So we do these monthly sessions where I teach a topic to members of your team, we were teaching to the office managers and we were showing what is the difference between an office manager and what most office managers are, which is like the highly skilled admin employee, the admin employee that knows the insurance in and out. And the thing is, is when we looked at all the things office managers are typically doing versus the things that us as practice owners, we want our office managers doing, it's that we want them doing proactive work, but they get stuck doing the reactive work. I'm saying they're reacting to a stack of insurance payments, they're reacting to insurance denials, a patient that's upset, they're reacting to tomorrow's schedule needs the insurance verified, they're reacting to payments that we didn't get or that we need to send out statements, things like that. Always reacting. Now, I'm not saying you should be ignoring these things. These things need to get done. And I know, I mean, these these are emergencies a lot of time. They're real, they're there, you have to do them. But the reactive work is the stuff that keeps today's practice functioning. But it's never going to grow your practice. When we say working in the business versus working on the business, that's what we're talking about. So you need to see how much of your time are you spending and your office manager. This is what we were talking about in this last session that we did with the people in our program. Is that we need to have a certain amount of our days has to be sent on proactive

Reactive Work Versus Proactive Work

Paul Etchison 7:14

work, and it can't be spent on it only when we get caught up with all of the reactive stuff. So those examples, like what is a proactive thing? It is like creating checklists, it's building onboarding stuff. It is sitting down with people on your team doing one-on-ones, finding out what we could improve upon. It's reviewing the KPIs, it's looking at your profit and loss, it's creating scoreboards and talking to your team about things that you want to track. It's training your department leads on how to have proper conversations, accountability conversations with tact and grace so that they can continue to train your team. Uh, working on phone scripts, listening to phone calls, going over cases, looking at all of your confirmation texts and wondering how somebody can get four, four confirmation texts, and they can't take two seconds out of their life to press C, send. I'm gonna be there, Doctor. Why is this so hard, Mr. Jones? And what are you doing back in the practice again? I told you we don't want you. All you do is complain and you blame us for everything. Those are the things that we want to be working on. Those are those proactive things, but they don't have deadlines, they're never going to feel urgent. The only way we are going to get to them is if we make the time. Remember, the reactive work that is the stuff that keeps the lights on. But the proactive work is the stuff that's going to build your future. It's the stuff that is going to cause change. If you want to keep things running exactly how they're running at your practice, just keep doing reactive work. Nothing will change. Now I've been coaching dentists for like eight years now, and I can tell you that it's it's very easy for me to tell if someone on their team, the leaders, typically it's an office manager. We're we're typically most offices have an office manager. I would say maybe one out of, I don't know, 15 actually has an office manager that's doing managing. And you say, like, well, I don't I want them to manage, but I don't know what it is. It's proactive things. I can look at their schedule and I can tell you if they're doing proactive things or if they're not. And this reminds me of when I would say had my, I don't know if you would call it a midlife crisis, but those that have been listening to this podcast for a very long time will know that in the summer of 2021, I took a little bit of a break from the podcast. What was that about? Do you think I just wanted to sit by my pool and chill? No, I was having like a major crisis. I was just so sick of everything. I just partnered up with MB2. I thought all these feelings I had about the practice were going to change. And, you know, we shut down during COVID. I came back and I said, This sucks. Like, why is everything falling on me? But I had this big practice and I had leaders on my team, but my leads were all stuck in reactive work as well. And that's when I had to sit down and say, you know what? I need to set apart time. I remember driving in my car on the way of the practice and trying to think about how I am going to dig myself out of this hole. I don't have time to do it. I don't have time to do it with all the patients I'm seeing. I don't have time to do it with the podcasts. I'm just too busy. I'm doing things all day long and I'm not enjoying my life. And I said, you know what? I have to schedule time to try to figure out this thing. So I did it. That's exactly what I did. I started scheduling blocks into my schedule that could not be booked with like coaching calls or anything else. It was just like a four-hour block where I was going to work on things that propelled my business forward. Now, what I did during those four-hour blocks was different every day, but I promise you, it was not getting caught up on things.

The Wake Up Call That Changed Everything

Paul Etchison 10:48

This is what I spend a lot of time doing sitting down with my leads and helping them design their schedule and their days around being more proactive about talking to their teams so that we could address issues before they happened. And that's the thing, is you get so much return on investment when you do this proactive work, but sometimes it's really hard to quantify because when we do something reactive, it's a it's a task that is like it's something we have a problem and we fix it. It's done. We can check it off our list. When we do proactive stuff, there is no end to what we can do. It is somewhat to some extent infinite. We can always be creating and and doing things differently and making better ways of doing things. So that's the lesson here. You don't just find the time, you have got to protect it. One of the biggest lies that owners tell themselves is that I'll work on it when things calm down. I'll hire a coach and I'll get the help I need, but I'll I need to wait until I get through this part of being short-staffed. I need to wait until I fix this hygienist situation. I need to wait until the things are calmed down and things are running better at the front desk. And the fact of the matter is, it never calms down. You don't find the time. You don't, you'll never just get it. You've got to protect it, you've got to schedule it, you've got to defend it the same way that you would defend a highly productive appointment. You don't say, I know my patient's here and they want to do four crowns, but I really got to be working on something else. No, you say this is what I'm doing at this time. And if you don't protect that time and schedule it, urgency is going to gladly, it will have no problem slipping itself into every available minute that you have. You don't find time for proactive work. You have to steal it. You've got to take it away from the reactive stuff. Now, every great system, everything that you have that is running super well in your practice, I promise you that that system, it started out as something nobody had time to build or think about. At some point, you had to sit down, block off that time, and create it. So this week, I want you to ask yourself one question. What is the one thing that I've been putting off because it's not urgent, even though I know it would change my practice? Maybe it's meeting with your office manager. Maybe it's getting clear about actually blocking off and getting a normal meeting cadence with your team and having the proper meetings that we know we should be having. Maybe it's time to review your profit and loss, or maybe it's time to reach out to your CPA or get a better CPA that can get you a profit and loss that is arranged in a way that you can actually make management decisions from it. Maybe it's time you got clear on your onboarding and what are the skills that your team should know in every position so that you can actually sit down with them and say, Hey, what do you need help with? I'm here to train you. Or maybe it's time you create some CEO time so you can spend that developing leaders in your practice that can do all those things, which is typically one of the first things we do with our coaching clients when we take somebody on and we start working with them, or they join our VIP growth program that we have. We know that we can get you to set some proactive time aside and work on things, but man, if that proactive time is spent working on other leaders in your practice, we know we can three, four, five X what we can get done in a year of working with us. So the tactical takeaways from today, if you remember nothing else from today's episode, I want you to remember these five things. Number one, urgency will always fill every minute that you allow it to. Number two, the work that changes your practice, it rarely, almost never, has a deadline. Number three, reactive work, it keeps today's practice alive, but it's the proactive work that builds the growth and builds the improvements of tomorrow's practice. Number four, most people spend their day responding, but true leaders, true, true dental practice heroes spend part of every day creating new things. And number five, don't wait until you have time because you're never gonna get it. Protect the time before urgency steals it. So if today's episode hit home for you and you have finally realized you are spending all of your time reacting instead of actually building inside your practice, that is exactly what we help dentists change inside of our coaching programs. We will help you create the systems, develop the leaders, develop the CEO time, what to do with it, how to install the systems, and how to build a practice that doesn't depend on you to solve every single problem. And if you'd like to see what that could look like for you and your practice, head over to dentalpracticeheroes.com/slash strategy and book a free strategy call with me. I would love to talk to you. And if you're enjoying the podcast, we would really, really appreciate it. One small favor, just take a minute, leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps more dentists discover the show

Protect The Time Then Grow

Paul Etchison 15:38

and it lets me know that these episodes are making a difference in your life. Thank you so much for listening. I very much appreciate you. And get out there and schedule some proactive time to do some things that actually matter and actually move the needle. Take care, everybody. We'll talk to you next time.