Your Future Practice Won't Materialize Without Protecting This

We describe the moment every practice owner knows: you block CEO time to build better systems, then lose it to nonstop interruptions and tiny fires. We share how protecting leadership time, setting clear availability rules, and focusing on KPIs turns you from the bottleneck into the builder of a practice that runs without you. 

• why CEO time disappears faster than clinical time 
• protecting leadership time like production time 
• the difference between reacting all day and creating real growth 
• a simple closed-door boundary for uninterrupted work 
• what to do when CEO work feels uncomfortable 
• starting with KPIs, a problem list, and one-on-ones 
• spotting repeat questions and turning them into systems 
• training the team to make decisions without you 
You can book a strategy, call it dentalpracticeheroes.com/slash strategy. 
And if this episode resonated with you, I would really appreciate it if you left a review. 

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Transcript

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When CEO Time Gets Hijacked

Paul Etchison 1:40

Okay, I want you to picture something. You're on your fourth day of clinical at the office and you blocked off the last half of the day so that you could work on the business. Or maybe you're coming in on an additional day. Maybe you're coming in on the Friday, or maybe you're one of my clients and you got yourself down to three days and you know it's that fourth day that you're working on the business. But either way, you block off some time on the schedule to work on the business. You got no patients, no procedures there. You got no hygiene checks. Hells, yeah, no hygiene checks. You know what I'm talking about. And you tell yourself that today I'm gonna focus on some of the systems that maybe my front desk or some of the systems in our new patient conversion. And you're finally going to look at the KPIs, that once-a-month thing that you know you should be doing, if not every other two weeks, and you start coming up with solutions and things that you want to work on. And someone knocks on your door and you're in a good mood, so you welcome them in. Yes, welcome. What can I do for you? They got a quick question, someone's on the phone, they need this, then the front desk needs some help, and then another patient is requesting you, and then someone's calling because they're upset about something that happened and some billing, and they're oh, then you got a one-star review, and before you know it, your complete day of CEO time completely disappeared, and you reacted to every little fire in the practice, and you just got frustrated. And by the sixth time that somebody knocked on that door, you were ready to choose somebody's head off. Have you ever had a day like that? I mean, I've had so many days like that. I actually used to share my office with the other doctors in my office, and it was a pass-through from the one hallway to the other hallway. So people were walking by me all the time. And every time they saw me, hey, you know what? Hey, you know what? Oh my gosh, I had to tell you something. Oh my gosh, I had to ask you something. And it got to the point where I just wanted to pull a hood over my head and be like, leave me alone. This is an important part of my business as well. I need to work on the business. But let's be honest, this does happen at dental offices and it is one of the biggest reasons practice owners stay trapped because you keep telling yourself you want the freedom, you want what comes with it, you want to have a practice that doesn't depend on you, but you don't protect the time to actually build it. And most dentists are incredibly disciplined people. We went through all that school. We got through dental school, which was just like, oh God, it's just a horrible four years. And I hope yours was better than mine, but mine was a horrible four years of stress. And, you know, we we are very disciplined clinically. You show up, you work hard, you stay productive, you take care of your patients, but leadership in running a business, it requires a completely different skill set. It requires space, um, thinking, uh, reflecting on what's going on. You have to plan, you've got to make goals, you've got to decide things. And the problem is that most owners never truly develop those muscles because they spend all day reacting instead of truly leading their business. So today, I want to talk about the CEO time that you keep sacrificing to take care of another patient, to take care of another fire, another thing that your team needs. And I want to talk about why protecting that time, the CEO time. It's one of the most important things that you can do as a practice owner. And the fact that you're failing to protect it, it is quietly keeping the practice dependent on you. And even those little things that don't bother you that much, they add up and they can just destroy your progress. So the future version of your practice is going to be created in those hours that you probably keep giving away.

Why Leadership Time Comes First

Paul Etchison 5:03

Now you are listening to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast, where we help dentists create mega profits, smoother systems, and businesses that finally feel manageable. I'm your host, Dr. Paul Edison. I'm a practice owner, I'm an author, I'm a dental coach. I work just one clinical day a week, and my team runs the business. And I want to teach you how to do the exact same thing. All right, let's get into today's topic. It's a good one. Now, here's the main point, and I want you to think about this and ask yourself and be honest. How strongly do you protect your clinical time? How aggressively do you protect your production time from little things, from maybe like reps popping in or meetings or other things? Like that's the productive time. That's when we're making the money. You protect that time. But your leadership time and your CEO time, that gets sacrificed constantly. I know it does because I've worked with so many people. So admit it, when there is dentistry to do, you will make it happen. But when it comes to reviewing systems, leadership meetings, training people on your team, talking to people on your team, being proactive, analyzing the KPIs, the numbers, the hiring, all that stuff, it all just feels less urgent and you just keep pushing it back. So first thing we got to do is we got to realize that the work that is going to build the future practice, we're creating. Remember, we are creating a practice we want. We're not reacting to everything because we can't, when we're reacting, we can't create. We need to create the practice we want. It should be the work that you do first, but it is so often the work that you will postpone and delay. It is the least prioritized time in a dentist schedule, and it shouldn't be that way. Which brings us to the next point. Your practice, it can't evolve if you're always reacting. Growth takes planning. Growth takes setting up of the goals, it takes execution. And when you spend your whole day answering questions and solving tiny problems and putting out little fires and dealing with the interruptions and all that stuff that just happens during the day, you're gonna go home exhausted because of all those decisions you made. But structurally, uh nothing improved, nothing got better. And then we can also, I hope we can acknowledge that being busy is not the same thing as growth. It's not the same thing as progress. We can very much, as practice owners, be busy, but not grow at all, not make any progress. Now, remember when COVID happened, we shut down our waiting room and like we hadn't used it for months and months and months. Remember the patients were waiting in the car, and we would text them when they're supposed to walk in the building. And there was

The Closed Door Rule That Works

Paul Etchison 7:23

part of me, I was pretty damn convinced, that we will never use a waiting room ever again. This is wasted space. Let's get three more operatories. And so I wasn't quite ready to pull the trigger on three more operatories, but here's what I did: I built myself an office in the waiting room. Now I didn't put it in the waiting room because the last place I want to be is available to all the patients in the waiting room. I annexed some space in the waiting room, and the door to enter into it was from the clinical section. But I'll tell you what happened. Everybody forgot about me for a little bit. Everyone forgot that like my office moved up there and they just kind of assumed I wasn't there. And I got all of this time where I was just working on things uninterrupted, and it was the best. Like people didn't remember that I was over down this little hallway here, and they would have to go down here to get to me. Like whereas before, remember, I said I was sharing an office with my associates, they would walk through and just see me all the time. So, dude, it was the best. I got so many things done. Now, fast forward, give me two, three weeks, people start to learn there's where he is and they found me. But the what the thing that I learned from that process was, oh my gosh, like I need to be unavailable to people at certain times. So, what I did is in the next meeting, I said, Hey guys, when my door is my door's always going to be slightly closed because patients will walk by. Don't want them to like pop in and say hi to me. I don't want them to see me. But when my door is closed but still cracked, feel free to come in. But if it is shut all the way, don't even knock on my door unless the building's on fire and you got to get me out. I'm not available. I'm not here. Pretend I'm not here. And I had to hold some people accountable to that as well. They would knock on my door and I'd say, Hey, you knocked, but that door was shut. We talked about this. Okay, what did you need? I'll help you this time, but next time I don't want to have this conversation with you again. But my point being is that it was so much easier to get things done. And when I came home at the end of the day, I didn't feel so drained because we want to work on things that excite us. And sometimes when we're working on the CEO stuff, at least for me, that's the stuff that excites me. It's the fixing of problems, it's coming up with new solutions. I like really love that part of my job. But when it constantly gets interrupted with a question here, a question there, and then you just realize you just wasted a whole day by doing really low value work, low production work. Uh, maybe you saw a patient or two, but like you wasted your whole day. And that's what I was doing when I kept my office in there. So, my solution for you is not not necessarily build yourself an office in the waiting room, but you got to figure out a way to prioritize that time. So, now let

What To Do During CEO Blocks

Paul Etchison 9:58

me talk about something else because I know you might be thinking, okay, well, I I would prioritize that time if I even knew what to do. Andor maybe it doesn't come easy to you. Maybe you don't enjoy doing it because the CEO work is just slightly uncomfortable. And it is for a lot of dentists because it forces you to really look at issues, it forces you to look at problems and numbers and look at potential and see the fact that you're probably not meeting your best potential. Most people are not. You've got to slow down mentally and take a pause and say, okay, what do I need to do? And it's sometimes it's easier just to stay clinically busy. I mean, it's safer than dealing with these leadership challenges. But let me give you a place to start from, okay? We've got to check our KPIs. You should be able to find out what they should be, what they around should be. I mean, whatever metric service you're using, uh, they should be able to explain this to you. This is information just well available on the internet. This is stuff we help our clients with as well. But look at your numbers, okay? That's the first thing. And I always suggest everybody has some sort of problem list. What are the things that came up? And then look at your upset patients. Look at the places where you've dropped the ball. And if you don't know about all these situations, it's time to ask the team and do one-on-ones with your team. You can find things to work on there. So there is no shortage of things to work on, but you've got to proactively find them because unlike the reactionary stuff, it's not landing in your lap. And remember, you shut that door, you put the sign on there that said, I'm not here. And maybe what you want to work on when you're in there is let people come in every time they knock. And when they knock and ask you something, figure out so how that is the last time you will ever answer that question again and ask yourself, why the heck did that answer have to come through me? Leave the door open and see how many people bother you and just try to figure out why the heck they have to come to you because you're you're bottlenecking your practice. When you answer and save everybody, it creates the bottleneck. You need to spend the time putting the systems in, training the people, and making sure that you they know that you believe in them to make decisions on their own. So, this all comes from leadership. There's a way to do it, there's a method that we teach, but nonetheless, here are your tactical takeaways from this episode. Number one, protect your CEO time like it is production time. It is just as important, if not more important. I truly think it's more important. I think we need to have the CEO time. Do we need to have as much production time as the solo

Stop Being The Practice Bottleneck

Paul Etchison 12:23

dentist? Absolutely not. But as you grow your practice and you bring on associates, you can spend more time doing CEO time and you can also spend more time doing golf time. I like golfing beer with the friends time. That's what I like doing a lot. And I did a lot of that when I went down to two days clinical. Now, number two, your practice, it will stay reactive if you, as the leader, continue to react. If you continue to address the reactive things and don't put any time into the proactive stuff, your practice will stay reactive. Three, leadership, growth. It requires uninterrupted thinking time. It's not something you can multitask. You need to focus. You need to shut the door and focus. Four, if you're constantly available to your team and you're always there, even when I'm talking about like when you're texting when you're home, that's going to weaken the potential of the entire team. You are creating victims on your team that require you. You are bottlenecking. And five, the business that you want, your future practice, it is going to get built during the time that you keep sacrificing. So stop sacrificing it. Take it seriously, block it out, and do not let your team interrupt you because you're doing important things. And if you're listening to this and you're wondering, like, why can't I have a practice that's systematized? I need better systems, better leadership. I want to know how to do it. That is exactly what we helped Dentists create through our coaching program. You can book a strategy, call it dentalpracticeheroes.com/slash strategy. And if this episode resonated with you, I would really appreciate it if you left a review. We talked very

Five Takeaways And Next Steps

Paul Etchison 13:48

recently.

SPEAKER_00 13:49

One of my coaching clients left a review. Aggressive fun. He was aggressive fun. And it was funny, he didn't even know that that was his username. I found out who that was, and now we've got a nice little uh we got a we got an aggressively fun inside joke between us. So I found out who that was. Uh, thank you so much, Mike.

Paul Etchison 14:05

All right, guys, thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate it. Go kill it this week at the practice. Be the leader, be the hero that your practice deserves, and take your practice forward. Plan it, execute, and adjust. Pivot. You can do it. I know you can. You just got to set aside the time and make it a priority. All right, we'll talk to you next time.