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Marketing is different than it was five years ago, especially now that AI is firmly entrenched in so many communities. Kiera talks about how AI, online reviews, and local trust are more important than ever, and what you and your practice can do to keep patients coming your way. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: Kiera Dent- Dental A Team (00:00) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera, and I hope you're having a great day. I am having a great day. I love being in office with offices. I love working with practices. I love being with our team. I love seeing my team elevate and grow. I love watching and seeing just wins. I love hearing how our clients are doing. I love to see the wins our clients are getting. Honestly, dentistry is so great and it's fun. It's fun to see the evolution of the Dental A Team. I remember when I started this, there is no way, shape, or form that I honestly thought. That we would have this many clients that I get to celebrate and love on and just rally to see them hitting production goals that they never thought they'd do, having profitability, working through leadership team issues, ⁓ revamping what they believe is their why and their power. very invigorating to see offices wanting to possibly sell to a DSO and then finding other alternatives, having offices sell to DSOs, having offices bring on partners and associates. To me, that is one of the most like rewarding parts of owning Dental A Team is to see so many people and to get to be friends with so many of you and to truly watch I would say like the good guys and girls win. And ⁓ my job and our company's mission is to truly like your success is our passion. So I'm excited. I hope that you're excited. I hope you remember the dentistry. We're so lucky to be a part of dentistry. We get the most incredible job and it's it's not just a job. I think it's a life changing experience we all get to be a part of. So today I just want to kind of like dive into like AI reviews and ⁓ trust are genuinely kind of changing how patients choose their dentists. And I've been watching this and we've been talking about it within our private doctor communities and ⁓ just recognizing that the world's changing on how people are picking dentists now and how are they finding you? And this is a little ⁓ I feel local. So some areas are gonna have more AI influence versus other areas are possibly going to have less AI influence. But I think for all of us to just kind of figure out like how are patients choosing to go to the dentist? How are patients coming and picking dentists? Cause I do believe that marketing and the AI, it's different than it was five years ago. So I'm also finding that patients truly have already figured out who they're probably gonna call before they even call you. So like they're gonna determine do they trust you or not before they even make that first phone call. And before I used to feel like we could win them over, and I still believe we absolutely can, but a lot of it's already coming. And so it's coming before they talk to you. And it's more than just having a website. It's you gotta be able to build that trust online with your patients before they even walk through the door, before they even want to make a phone call with you. So I just want to talk about like how is AI changing behavior, why our reviews like genuinely matter, how things are changing over there, things are shifting. there's some new algorithms if you're not familiar with how Google is switching it up for us, and really just trying to give you guys some preps because I believe that there are maybe some possibly three areas for a practice to focus on to really like be the choice of your community. So we're big on making sure that we work. We work across the globe. We work across the nation. So seeing practices and how patients are making decisions from small boutique country villages to very metropolitan cities to places where there's not even like more than like five team members to choose from, to little isolated islands out in the Caribbean, you name it, we've seen it all. And so just really trying to help offices ⁓ look at things differently and to be observant. And so I want you guys to to realize that there's still ways to stand out. I think there's still ways for us to make big influences. And right now, AI is so new that we don't know all the ways of how it's working. And so just giving some tips and ideas to kind of have that healthy conversation of what is the innovative way for practices as of today, knowing that it could shift and change. But I believe that when we're on the cutting edge and we're being attentive to this, we're trying to stay as up to date as possible without like killing ourselves off, I think is very important and very astute as CEOs. they have the phrase innovate or die. And I believe the practices do need to innovate. We do need to be on top of this. Otherwise we will get ⁓ dated very quickly. So ⁓ I think what was happening is patients are they used to rely a lot on referrals and I still think that that is a piece of it. But I will say it's a referrals and then it's a verify. So they're verifying referrals. They're looking to see, hey, my friend told me this dental office. I'm gonna go double check it. And the way I'm gonna double check it is I'm gonna go read the reviews. I'm gonna check their website. I'm gonna look at social media. I'm gonna search online. Do you how many people are looking? Like you guys, I just went on a trip. I asked Chat GPT. I said, build me out the best hotels, the best locations. So people are starting to use AI. It's not all algorithm from the reviews and different pieces. It's pulling from that, but it's also not there. So we're kind of all looking like AI tells me this and I'm gonna go check the reviews. So We're starting to have a lot more pieces to that. And so I really do believe like your online presence is a lot of times the exact first impression. And we're looking at evaluating trust before they come in and they're going to like evaluate your treatment. So can I trust this? Do they have a good online presence? And I know that that's annoying because not all the best practices are the ones with the highest reviews. However, society and for years of training of five stars, we're starting to learn that that's what we trust. So I believe that there can be two practices side by side, similar services. One has recent reviews and online engagement and like very clear online presence. The other one hasn't updated anything in years. Patients are gonna look at both of those side by side and they're most likely probably gonna choose the one with the great reviews. Even if they're identical practices, even if they do the great same dream, even if the one who doesn't have a strong online presence is better, people don't know that. And it like you have to be present, you have to be winning online in order for people to want to come and work with you. So For me, it's you've got to make sure you're building that trust online. You've got places where people can see you. And we have to remember different types of buyers are going to look at this differently. So if your demographic and population is going to be a more senior patient base, you might still be newspaper flyers, ⁓ having webinars, CE, things like that, where you're in person with them more. If your demographic is anything of like 60 and younger, they're probably online. not all the 60, like from the 50 to 60 range, that's still variable. But anyone pushing that 50, they are in that realm where they have been trained with reviews and looking online and things like that. So, and regardless if your patient base is older, you have to remember that next wave of patients coming that are probably going to be your patients long term. They are that younger generation. So people don't want just recommendations anymore. They want confirmation. Like I want to trust. I think that in the world of AI where people are really questioning what's real, what's not real. We're asking for referrals. We're verifying online. We're trying to put all the pieces together because we're inundated with so much noise that people are really trying to sift through the noise to figure it out. So ⁓ I think if you one one call to action on that is like re review your online presence this week as if you're a brand new patient. What's our social media look like? What are our reviews saying? When was our most recent review? What's our worst review? It's okay to have a bad review. Like it truly is. How you respond to that bad review is actually going to weed out patients and it's also going to show people a lot about you. It's okay to not have the best reviews. It's not okay to have a lot of bad reviews, but it is okay because guess what? Everybody goes on there and the first thing we do is we look for the newest and then we go for the worst. We want to see, we want to see what happened. That's what's also going to make you stand out is real. I don't want you having a lot of bad reviews, but it's okay if you do. It just depends on how you respond and also pay attention. Are there things that you can fix and change with those reviews? Sometimes even calling those patients can help with those reviews. But look at that, see, go ask people to like type into Chat GPT. Go do it on your own. See if you pull up, see where things are at. Are you the most recommended dentist? Look at those items. If you're not pushing like five, six, seven, eight hundred reviews right now. A lot of people are going to gloss over because there are other dentists that are going to whoop you because they've got like they're going to beat you in the race because they have more reviews than you. So that leads into our second thing of reviews really are becoming word-of-mouth marketing. And they're not just nice to nice to have anymore. They truly are like part of the patient experience. And so You've got to have consistent review generation. You've got to have reviews that are talking about patients' stories. You got to have team involvement asking for feedback. Now, a latest update with Google algorithm is if they have the team member's name in there, they're starting to like disqualify some of those. I did have a practice tell us that they lost like 15 reviews in one day. Now, this feels a little weird to me, and I hope Google's listening. Not that I think they care about Dental A Team podcast, but I hope they do. Because to me, I'm like, I actually want patients to talk about. their team. I understand that there's ways that we can gamify the system and we can like have our team members try to get their names and reviews. However, a lot of people are going to talk great about it. So in our mastermind, we were talking, we do have a dentist who has over 1500 reviews and she said where she's actually getting the reviews is right at the end of the appointment when they're checking out. They are asking for reviews right then and there and the text message is going to that patient while they are still in the practice. And people are like, we don't want that. Like they're busy on that. And I was like, guys, she has 1500 reviews. I think she's got something going really, really well for her. She's figured it out. She's doing an incredible job and they're going for it. So this is something where like mistakes on reviews are where we only ask occasionally. You've got to be very consistent. We've got to be asking every single time. ⁓ we don't want reviews to be an extra task. Like, we don't want to ask for reviews when there's a problem. We're like once in a blue moon. You've got to have a steady stream of consistent reviews coming through. I love Swell. Swell's been one of my best best. Review generators across the board. I've tried tons of them. I personally love Swell. You guys can tell them Dental A Team sent you. We still get like OG back at the very beginning when Zeke and Kiera met when we were just babies building our businesses. And Zeke still honors that pricing over there. So definitely would recommend them. It's Swell ⁓ dot I think it's CX. It's been a while since I've said their website, Swell dot CX. sorry, Sw Swell CX.com, I believe is their website. And Head on over there, the SwellCx.com, let them Dental A Team sent you. It is truly one of the absolute best review places, but putting it right then and there, asking for it, having them go through. Some people use their computer softwares. Regardless, you need to be attracting and getting reviews on a consistent basis. And I'm talking like one, two, three, four, five a day. Yes, I said a day, because think about it. If you have two hygienists, if you've got four hygienists, if you've got six hygienists, We are seeing eight patients a day. So minimum you're probably seeing 16 patients a day on hygiene side. Doctor side's probably pulling in at least eight more. You're seeing like 30 to 50 patients per day on a low end, up to like 100, 150 on a high end, even up to 200. Pediatric, you're seeing a ton. So think about if we're only getting like even 5% of those patients are leaving a review. That's a very small amount that I believe that we can all get trickling in there. So reviews. At scale, they are going to build trust. So think about it: the best restaurants, the best thing, but be a practice that's review-worthy. We've talked about this on so many other podcasts. We can link some of those for you. But make sure that your practice is doing an incredible experience because you want to have a consistent review process instead of hoping that reviews will happen naturally. You've got to be asking for it. And I know that that's annoying, I know it's awkward. Do believe me. Do you think I like coming on here and be like, hey guys, leave us a review? So if you want to feel good about a review, go leave us a review. Give five stars on Dental A Team, give five stars on our podcast. It feels good to leave reviews. And so that way you can also feel good asking for it. And it's something where just like working out doesn't feel good at the beginning, but then it feels real good. This is just asking people to like share their great experience with the world about you. There is nothing wrong. If you've done a great service, ask those people to share about it. It's a great way for more patients like them to find you. So that's gonna be like step two. And then step three around that is going to be like, I do believe that local trust is becoming a very big competitive advantage. So technology is growing, AI is growing, but I still believe that like trust still wins and having local people and consistent people like building that local trust. So having those reviews, having those referrals, having raving patients. I just came from an office. I'm so proud of them. They've grown from four ops into 15 ops, and now they're looking to add on to 25 ops. So it's only been a couple of years. I think we've been together about four and a half years. So really fun. And to see them, they're getting patients looking at their reviews, having people tell them that they're a great dentist…
Full show notes at the publisherFor the CEOs out there, how are you planning out your weeks to keep your business humming for the short and long terms? Kiera talks about what it means to plan and delegate as the leader of your company, as well as three tips that CEOs of multi-million-dollar practices live by when it comes to success. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: Kiera Dent- Dental A Team (00:01) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera, and I hope you are having an awesome day today. I hope that you're loving your life. I hope that you remember that we just are so lucky to live this life, that we are so lucky to work in dentistry, that we get to have our life calling. I am just so excited to podcast with you. I am coming in off the road. You guys know that when I've been on the road, it's a great time. I love seeing offices in person. I love working with teams. I love seeing how very simple. pieces can actually help out a practice. And it was really, really fun. So I'm just excited. I'm I'm lit up and I hope you are too. So today I wanted to go through just a fun ⁓ I realize a lot of people listening and a lot of our clients and even myself included, a lot of what we're trying to accomplish as business owners is how do we become the CEO of our business and how do we block that CEO time and how do we actually work on the business? Like everybody says like you got to work on the business and not in the business. And I just get annoyed with that. I'm like, okay, but great. Like Tell me what that actually means. Tell me what I'm supposed to do. And so today I wanted to break it into very much a what exactly does that mean? How do I actually do it myself as a CEO? Giving you guys some tips of what do you do on Sundays or when you block your time? How do you set up your week for success? So I think a lot of time it's ⁓ there was I think it's like if you fail to plan, you set yourself up for failure, something like that. Like there's a quote, I'm sure I could have done a better job on that. But it's so many times people come in and they feel like they're just very reactive instead of proactive. And early in my career, there was a great client of mine who was like, Kiera, do you know how I prep for coaching calls? And I was like, How? He's like, I go to a coffee shop, I spend 30 minutes preparing for a call, I sit there, I ponder, I make sure that I'm very intentional. He's Do you know how sometimes you feel like you come into calls? Mind you guys, this is like Kiera, like two weeks into owning her own business. And I was like, He's like, You feel like you just rush to the call and ⁓ At that time he wasn't wrong. And it was a really great thing for me to recognize and I think about that often of what are we doing with our weeks as CEOs? Are we running into them haphazardly, not even prepared? Or are we like the client was where we take the time to plan, to prepare, to see what we can actually delegate to our team, to other team members on it, or are we just in reactive mode? I think it's more the how proactive are we versus how roactive are we. So I want to just walk you guys through specifically what I personally do, things that have worked well for my success, things that have worked well for clients that we work with. To hopefully give you just some good tips of how you can set yourself up as a CEO and maybe start doing things a little bit differently. Like they say, success leaves clues. So let's give everybody clues and tools and different things that we all can do together. So that's what I wanted to do. ⁓ and also just realizing like you genuinely don't find time to work on your business. You don't find time to be a great leader. You don't find time for this. You have to create and make that time. So ⁓ one thing that I noticed is like, we're going to work on how to stop reacting and be a bit more proactive. So I think when I look at it, you're trying to be a doctor, a manager, HR, scheduler, problem solver, like just answering all the problems and you're trying to do it in real time rather than sitting there focusing. And I will say when I look down the line, I can tell when I've been proactive and I can also tell when I've been very reactive. So I just wanted to kind of give you like three tips how specifically I do it, what I do, and what I've seen other offices do and other doctors do that are very successful. And like I said, The my elite practices who are the multi-millions, who have multi-offices, who have their lives where it feels like they just have it together, these are things that they all do too. Now, how you do it, when you do it, that's gonna be up to you. But all of us do a lot of the same things. So ⁓ number one for me, I block my time on Sundays. So you can do it whenever. I do not like having the Sunday scaries. I don't like walking into my week. I also don't like to plan on Fridays. So whatever it is, I'm usually downright tired on Friday. And so that's not usually my best day. So for me, it's on Sunday. So it takes me about I usually plan 30 minutes to an hour, is how long it takes. ⁓ and I still have a physical planner. So, however, it's gonna work well for you. But I like to see physical space. I'm a very visual person, and so I like to see my physical space. So I actually walk through and I go through my entire week. I map out exactly what is there, what's on the calendar, and I I go out four weeks. So I'm looking ahead to see. What things are on the books, what meetings do I have? You could be looking at your production. So you could be looking to see what do you have coming up? What projects are coming up? What pieces are coming up. ⁓ like right now, mid-year, I'm looking at my taxes. So I'm looking in the different buckets of from as a CEO in the business, like what's my profitability, what's my culture, where are we headed? It's about to be mid-year. So I'm looking to see what what pieces do I need to get done there. I'm also looking for me, I've got podcasting, I've got meetings, I've got Bookkeepers. I've got different people that I'm meeting with. And so where is that at? And I always am looking four weeks out. Now, office managers should also be doing this as well. So this is for doctors and OMs. What do I have coming? Like what's coming up on the schedule? What are the team challenges? I'm looking to see what team things need to get done. What projects are we doing? What initiatives are we rolling for this week, for the next week, and the following? What I found is when I'm on a four week run, I'm able to catch things, I'm able to ha better utilize my time. I'm able to see like, gosh, we've got vacations coming up. Do we need to do more production right now? So I really, I personally, Kiera Dent loves looking four weeks out. So looking to see where it is. ⁓ and then I look at this week. So by looking four weeks out, I'm able to say like, where am I maybe put in meetings that I don't need to be a part of? ⁓ where am I missing? What team members are going to be out? What things do I need to proactively plan for? So I'm really looking and like overseeing a lot of those scheduling pieces. Now managers should be doing this as well, looking to see. Do we have our schedules covered? Do we have different pieces? For me, I'm looking to see who can I delegate, who on my leadership teams in and out, consultants being on the road for you when our associates out. And I think when we proactively can look at this, we can look at our production. We can look at where am I working on the business? What big projects and initiatives do I want to get done? So for me, I just noticed that where it's at. I really do think doctors who are looking at their production a week out, two weeks out, three weeks out, four weeks out, you're going to be a lot more proactive and I know a lot of dentists get into the rut of just kind of being robotic. Like we go and we do our exams. When you're constantly looking at your week, what is my production? What's my dollar per hour? How am I looking? What were my cases? Reviewing my cases last week, which closed, which didn't close, looking at my PL, looking at my numbers, looking at my meeting with my office manager, what things are on my plate that I could delegate to my office manager. I'm always looking. I also have a list of things that I write down. you can have it as a a digital version or you can have it as a paper version. I technically do both. ⁓ but really looking to see what is my game plan. So that way when I walk in on Monday, it's very much prepared. I also am planning my leadership meetings. What things does my leadership team need to have in place? What do my consultants need to have in place? ⁓ what do I need to be relaying to our COO and our CFO and what things do I need to have them working on as the CEO? Like at the end of the day, the CEO, we are orchestrating. Yes, we do have a lot of people that work for us and with us. ⁓ but I'm orchestrating of Who do I need? What meetings do I need to have? Where do I need to make sure that I'm running these pieces? So maybe you're looking at what do I need to get my lead hygienist to be working on? What things if my dental assistants could take over would help me out? How are our supplies? What are our budgets? This isn't saying you're managing the practice. And I hope that you're hearing of you're looking at to me, I feel like I'm kind of doing an inventory. It's almost like I'm going to go grocery shopping. Like what's the inventory of my business? Where are things and what do I need to have the different departments do? Because if I can proactively just get people working on one or two projects throughout the week that don't rely on me, we're able to make a lot of movement and momentum. And I've actually found my friend and I, really, really successful CEO. We were talking about that. And he said, Kiera, could your business sustain without you being there for a month? And I thought about it and I was like, actually yes. Like I'm very proud of our team. I'm very proud of what we built. They could last a month without me being here. I've tried it, I've tested it, I know for a fact they can, I know they could go for longer than a month. But he said, but will they grow without you there? And I've thought about that a lot. And so for me, when I'm taking my CEO time and I'm blocking my week, it's I believe we're almost like the wind in the sails. Our team is the boat. Our team is the sails. You as a CEO need to be the wind. So how are we going to grow? How can we work through our team and not have everything sitting on our shoulders? I'm very, very cognitive of what meetings am I in, what what projects are being assigned to me, what projects are assigned out there, what things have I not followed up on. Who do I need to follow up on to make sure things are moving? And I will say it just it takes that load ⁓ off of my brain and allows me to really be present and to step into Monday in that week very confident, but also not just the week. We're looking at the month. And so we're always in this proactive piece. So really looking at the financials, looking at the business acumen, looking at what my OM should be doing, and then who can I delegate to? So the next piece to this is once I have it all mapped, once I've looked at it, once I've removed it. Then I'm gonna be delegating. So I literally have a list of here's all the items Kiera has on her. Are these things really for me? Or who's better at that, who's more equipped, and who actually has the time to do it? So I will delegate out projects or tasks. Or if I know I have a big project coming up, so maybe we're working on operations manual, or maybe you're working on an Invisalign promo, or maybe you're working on ⁓ getting your hygiene period protocol written. Are there people that can help you with this project that are just as good, if not better than you, that you could delegate out tasks to them? So I'm I'm really thinking in it's not even project management. It's more like, okay, I need to get these projects done. Who has time? Who's available to do this? And also whose responsibility is this? If Kiera's not the only one who can do it as a CEO, it doesn't sit on my plate. I'm going to pass it to somebody else. If it truly is only something me as a CEO can do, and that's not out of pride, ego, or things that I like. I need to delegate it and make sure it's followed up with. So I look at my personal assistant, I look at my EA, what things can they take on? I look at our marketing team, our sales team, our rev team, our CRO, our CFO, our COO. Which ones of those can take these projects on? Who do I need to follow up with? So like truly, you delegate out to the team around you and you make sure that you're utilizing each of them. And so ⁓ I really think it's just a valuable thing. I think it sets you up for success. I know it sets you up for success. And it's also working through your team. ⁓ we've been talking about this a lot in our leadership meetings and on our leadership team of how do you work, like how do you get everything done? And I think there's different types of leaders. There's those who want to just do it all themselves, and then there's those who work through their team. And working through your team is delegation, it's elevation, it's not abdication. It is really working through your team, meaning all of us are working together, all of us are getting the projects done. One person's not carrying the weight, and the rest of us are just sitting there. on the boat alongside them, but we are working through the team. And this is how you prevent burnout. This is how we prevent having things stack up. This is how you're able to again be that like wind that pushes through the sales. So how do I work through my team? Because there's always a lot more that needs to be done that can't get done. How do I look at my systems? How do I review different pieces? I got to scratch those itches like maybe our finances aren't as tight. Maybe our billing's not as tight. Like let me look through this. It doesn't mean I need to do a deep dive. I can delegate and say, hey Sarah, I'm curious about our EOBs. Can you take a look through the last three months and give me an assessment of where we're at? Like should take you about an hour. Do you have time to do that this week? I'd love that. And I'd love a report back by Friday. Absolutely got you. I make a note of the things I should follow up on as well because I don't like to delegate. I don't like to ask and then not follow up. And that's something that I will say I'm not naturally gifted at and something I have work really hard at. But really, it's a how do I plan my week? How do I work through my team? And then the next piece is when I do delegate, delegate outcomes not. tasks. I think that this is such a a beautiful, different frame of mind to think of. ⁓ so with a team instead of calling overdue patients, it would be like you own the schedule, ⁓ I need you to call as many unscheduled or recare patients to get it full and to report your progress weekly. That's a different thing. So now it's a it's an outcome of owning the schedu…
Full show notes at the publisherDoes your schedule seem to weaken during July, August, and even into September? Tiffanie and Kristy dive into both proactive and reactive measurements your practice can do to keep things chugging along. This includes creating a schedule template that works for everyone no matter the season, creating an ASAP list, working on recare before the schedule falls apart, and more. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: Tiffanie (00:00) Hello, Dental A Team listeners, and welcome back to another episode. Today it is myself Tiffanie and Miss Kristy. I am always so happy to podcast with any of the ladies here at the Dental A Team. ⁓ but Kristy, you are a favorite. You bring a calm and a sense of peace to my life, and I appreciate you being here for us. It's fairly early in our day on a Monday morning, and ⁓ back. From I'm just back from vacation. Kristy, you've barely had a couple days back from vacation. So we're really just jumping right in today and knowing that I had podcasting on my schedule. Coming back from vacation was slightly stressful. Remembering that it was with you really truly calmed me. And I was like, yeah, that's not gonna be an issue. Easy peasy Monday morning. So Kristy, thank you for being here. Welcome to the podcast today. How are you? How has your summer been so far? DAT- Kristy (00:54) Yeah. I'm so happy to be here with you and start our week off like this. it is it's hot here in Arizona right now. So getting this done early and being able to ⁓ be cool while we're doing it is is a relief. But yeah, summer summer's going well so far. Tiffanie (01:03) Mm-hmm. That's fair. Good, good. It is hot here and we've actually had a super mild summer so far. ⁓ we came home, we were in Hawaii last week and we were it was funny because actually the people who live in Hawaii ⁓ were like, you're from Arizona, this must not be too bad. And I was like, actually it really isn't, it just has that added humidity. But we were with ⁓ we were with my fiance's like company puts on these trips and so there were people from all over the country there and you could see the people from the Midwest like dying and there's I was like, gosh, I guess this is hot. But once you I feel like when you're in the heat when heat is such a normal everyday occurrence, ⁓ living in Phoenix area, when you go to other places like hot is just hot and it we didn't feel quite as affected. But then coming home, this like 101 yesterday felt like 120. Without that humidity, it really is a different it is a different kind of heat. So I I feel you. But you've got your pool And you've had a ton of pool time, which is awesome and I love I love having you here in Arizona. DAT- Kristy (02:19) Yeah, me too. And it's I agree with you, Tiff. Everybody's like, it's so hot there. And I'm like, but it's hot here. When you get that humidity and stuff other places, it's like it's it's so different. Tiffanie (02:20) Good. Good. Yeah. Yes, yes. We had ⁓ some family here over the weekend and one of them said, Yeah, it's hot. He's from Austin. He's like, But you can breathe here. He's like in Austin, it gets so thick you can't breathe. And I was like, This is very true. We can breathe. It does feel like an oven when you're baking those those cookies, you know, you open the oven and it comes straight at your face, but you know, hot is hot. So I agree. Mildish summer but super hot still. And ⁓ with the summer upon us and beautiful weather, we do love the heat. We do like to get out of town, ⁓ go see some water, some oceans, or really just hang out in our pools. So we do get the summer slumps here in Arizona as well. But I think a lot of the country ⁓ they're really, really traveling a ton. We get a ton of visitors over the summer, ⁓ which is wild, but we really do from like March to November get a lot of travelers here in Arizona. So With that said, we know that schedules can really fall apart. Even here in Arizona, they do. Unless you're a pediatric practice, my pediatric practices are thriving during the summer because parents are getting all the kids' stuff done. and probably my ortho practices as well. Kristy, you probably have worked with a few of those practices who are probably thriving right now, and I hope thriving the rest of the year. But for those practices that are really, really having that like summer slump. We thought we'd give some ideas, some things we work with with with our practices every single day ⁓ here at the Dental A Team. So gosh, Kristy, some of the pieces that I see and I and I think honestly, May this year was was weird for a lot of our clients. I think across the Dental A Team, we all kind of all of us consultants said, Are you guys experiencing this? Did your practices have this? And May just kind of was a weird month. It was a down month for a lot of practices. DAT- Kristy (04:17) Yeah, yeah. Tiffanie (04:19) And I think a lot of people went on vacations. So for whatever reason, June was a little bit better, but we're into July now and we can kind of see those summer slumps hit July, August. And then in September for most of the country, Arizona, we start going back to school next week, which is wild, mid-July. But for most of the country, they're going back to school end of August, ⁓ towards like beginning to mid September. So we see this weird slump for the next few months. And Kristy, I thought it would be interesting for us to really kind of dive into some things that we can do as proactive measurements and then also reactive measurements as these things come up. Kristy, I think that dentistry is super reactive. ⁓ and we tend to like sit around and wait. We don't even realize that we're doing it, but we're waiting. We're reactive. We're reacting to decay. We're reacting to periodontal disease. We're reacting to patient scheduling, the patient's canceling, to the phones ringing, to DAT- Kristy (05:00) True. Tiffanie (05:16) someone needing something from us. Everything is like a reactionary process, but I really love putting in some proactive measurements to give us back some of that control. I think, Kristy, that is you thrive in all of the areas, but I really think that you thrive in some of these proactive measurements because I I think you're so calm. And and I think both of us thrive in a sense of peace. And for us, those proactive spaces and controlling as much as we possibly can, like why wouldn't you do it if it's available? So I think that that for you is something that keeps that sense of peace going for you. With that said, there are some pieces that you've worked really hard on in your career becoming a freaking rock star at. So I would love nothing more than to hear from you on how you help guide your teams and your practices in making sure that they have a schedule, that their schedule is working for them, you know, no matter what time of year it is. What are some pieces that you love to work on with your clients? DAT- Kristy (06:24) Yeah, well for one thing, Tiff, you know, we we love to project out our year. And so in projecting out the year, we can see those trends of the time of year where maybe, you know, we all like to think of September, but it doesn't have to be just that time of year. You know, there are some areas of the country that maybe ⁓ people go more camping and ⁓ different activities that Tiffanie (06:41) Yeah. Uh-huh. DAT- Kristy (06:53) affect their schedule, right? So with that being said, I love to have a templated schedule that can meet the needs of the practice. If we if we have a scheduling template in place, at least we're doing our part to try to control it the best we can. And so with that too, I always like to think of what big procedures maybe could we drive during that time. You know, maybe it's ortho starts or maybe it's a big case, you know Because again, from the business owner, the bills don't stop. We have those demands to meet, even if maybe we're closed for a week during that summer month. Tiffanie (07:33) Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree. I had a client ask me a few weeks ago why like what else does block scheduling do? If we're already if we're full, right? If our schedule is full and we're getting close to goals, like aside from there being a template that shows where things go and it helps people to be able to schedule, because that's something I love is the the training of the schedule or the ⁓ removing the thought. process of trying to figure out where to schedule someone. I love where can we simplify things so that I can use my brain power in something else. So I had a client the other day say, you know, okay tip, like try to convince me, why else? Why else block scheduling or productive day scheduling? So Kristy, what is your what is your take on it? Because you've spent a lot of years working specifically in that realm of productive scheduling. DAT- Kristy (08:24) Yeah. To that point, I I think for the team members, we have to remember that's our sanity. The schedule is our day-to-day operations. And so when we say it's been a chaotic day, truly we probably have to reflect back on ourselves and see what did we do to create that that chaotic day? And remember Just because we may have seen 30 patients in one day doesn't mean we were productive. And so having that scheduling template is going to give us the best outcome possible for our day. And like you said, Tiff, if we have it plug and play and we teach team members these are the type of things that we put in this type of block, we're gonna we're gonna have a better outcome. And yes. The component we don't control necessarily is the people, right? But if we build it to have the best outcome, we're certainly gonna be far better off in the long run than we would have been without having. You know, I always like to say if you and I, Tiff, are gonna drive from here to New York, if we don't have GPS, it's gonna be a crazy drive. We may be be going back roads when we didn't need to. So Tiffanie (09:17) Yeah. Okay. DAT- Kristy (09:40) Again, think of your schedule that way. We're formulating it in the best possible outcome. And again, when we have those slump months, we can change our template for that time to make sure we ensure or to ensure we have the best outcome for our day. Tiffanie (09:58) Yeah, completely. I agree. I love your GPS analogy. That one always makes me really happy. Especially because my internal GPS is wild and I would be going like I'd end up in California real fast. Like five hours in, I'm like, I'm at the coast. Like I would be in San Diego. So I I do love that one. Now with the productive scheduling as well, I love rules, right? I love their I love it being easy. And if we're gonna implement a system, we have to have tools that do make it easy that don't, they're not causing more chaos. And and for the short term, right? Implementing something new, there's always gonna be a little bit of chaos. There's always gonna be hurdles, you're always gonna find those spaces. But in the long run, it should make your life easier. And something I come across with that, with the block scheduling is that people become very black and white about it because it's a block and they're like, well, we didn't find a crown, right? We didn't find a crown, so we have a hole in the schedule. And I love and doctors are fearful of that, right? And and office managers. But mostly doctors are like, okay, cool, but I don't want them to not schedule because they didn't find it. And I'm like, well, that's the wrong thought process, right? We need to back up a couple steps and say, this is our ideal. This is what we want it to look like. And in the event that we cannot fill it, something hasn't come across, which is a completely different episode, different podcast. If you're not finding it, you're not getting it in your schedule. That's a that's a completely different subject. But if that event has occurred, you didn't fill that hole, then I usually say, Kristy, and I I think we're probably on the same page here, I usually say 48 hours ahead. So two days ahead, fill it with something. I don't want you to put like, don't delete a crown block for an occlusal filling. If you don't have to, like that would be like today, maybe. ⁓ but DAT- Kristy (11:36) Mm-hmm. Tiffanie (11:45) Fill it with something so that we're productive no matter what. And we might not reach goal because we didn't fill it with what we needed to within that production, but we're still a little bit closer and it allows us for same day treatment as well. Do you feel the same, Kristy? DAT- Kristy (11:58) Yeah, I 100% feel the same way. We have to make our minds go back to when COVID happened and we think of those non-emergent things. And yes, when you have a good templated schedule, you probably are gonna push out some of those occlusal fillings, Tiff, like you were talking about. And it's okay. Unless it was like so blown out, which your doctor's gonna tell you we need to get them in sooner than later. But in those instances, the great news is you're gonna build up your priority list. Tiffanie (12:13) Mm-hmm. DAT- Kristy (12:28) too. And so when those summer slumps hit, now we've got other other options to choose from as well. So I love that you made that point. And and it goes back to all of us forming those agreements together. And we all have to honor what we said. Tiffanie (12:45) Mm-hmm. Yeah. I love nothing more than an ASAP list. I used to live and breathe in that ASAP list because it was just so easy. And the way that we do our scheduling at Dental A Team in general, with you know, notating like how how early or how soon we want them to come back, putting dates on it, and then also with the block scheduling, all of those pieces help us to build that. And that's that's another thing I get asked by clients all the time is okay, well, what if you know, we we are too full and we can't see them. We don't have it available. We you tell within the next two weeks and my next appointment is three weeks. And I'm like, that's fantastic. Put at three weeks and then add a note in there and add them to your as soon as possible list so that you have a group of people who are like, ⁓ great, because Doc wanted to see me sooner than that. Yes, absolutely, let me come in. So I love that you mentioned that. And for your summer slump, like That's beautiful. Your unscheduled list, your broken appointment list, your ASAP list. I love a broken appointment list because they were already committed at some point. And so they're usually a little bit easier to slide into those last minute ⁓ slots in the schedule. So there's a million things that we could go on with that. But with that said, building those opportunities is huge. And we're in the summer now. And so maybe right now you might be realizing. that you don't have those opportunities built and you're like, gosh, okay, cool. Sounds great, ladies, but I don't have an ASAP list. Or I don't we, you know, we were so full in the spring, we didn't we weren't able to make recare calls. I hear that one all the time. Well we're too full. So if we make recare calls now, we have nowhere to put them. Like, well, I know. I hate that I hate that statement. And I get it. I've lived it, right? We've all been in office and we've lived tha…
Full show notes at the publisherDAT podcast listeners loved this episode, so we're re-releasing it! The Dental A-Team is hearing a lot about practices' struggles with communication. In this episode, Kiera and Brit discuss ways to enhance communication in a practice, and even reach a breakthrough point. They touch on the following: Establishing ground rules of communication in your office Stop assuming everyone knows how to communicate How to bring up that you want to have better communication practice-wide And more Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: Kiera Dent (00:00) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera. And today we are bringing you something so special. I am so excited because this is one of our most popular episodes from the archives. Whether you're hearing this for the first time or catching it again, I am so excited because it's jam packed with a ton of takeaways that you can start using right now in your practice. We have released thousands, literally thousands of episodes. And I wanted to start bringing a few of these amazing episodes back for you. So I hope you enjoy. And as always, thanks for listening and I'll catch you next time. on the Dental A Team podcast. speaker-0 (00:32) And you guys, I have a really, really fantastic consultant on the podcast with me today. If you don't know her, you should get to know her. Her name's Brittany. ⁓ Britt has joined our team. Gosh, it's almost been a year rolling in on our year, and Britt is just a breath of fresh air on our team. She is somebody that inspires me, ⁓ pushes me to be a better consultant as well. So I'm super jazzed to bring Britt back on the show. Britt, how are you today? speaker-1 (00:56) I'm good. Thanks for the introduction, Kiera. Always fun to hear what you have to say 'cause it's always delightful. speaker-0 (01:02) I know. It's probably the best part of the whole podcast, actually. Like I just get a rave on our team on the podcast, which is something I definitely love. So Britt, you are a a unicorn of a human. It's kind of funny, guys. The way we interview consultants is pretty an in-depth process. Like we have an initial call, then you we encourage them to go through an online course, then we do a mock coaching call where they have to actually coach the consultants as if we were a team. And then typically we have them fly out and go to a practice with me to see if traveling's like in their DNA. Because I've had a lot of people say I can travel and it just is not their thing. Like there are people who can travel and then there are people who like really can travel. And so Britt, you kinda like skated right through that. We interviewed you and it was just this like, yep, we're gonna hire her. And lo and behold, here you are a year later. It just I'm shocked at how great it worked out because you're just a dream and I love it. It worked out so well. speaker-1 (01:54) But lo and lo and behold, I could actually travel. speaker-0 (01:58) Well what I I did ask you the question of how many bags do you take when you travel? Because you can tell if somebody's a traveler or not a traveler. But yeah, you are a solid traveler. You and I we trend speaker-1 (02:11) I've been stuck in a foreign country, yes. So I feel like that's a pretty good qualify qualifier. speaker-0 (02:17) ⁓ but no guys, if you have not met Britt, Britt is one of the traveling consultants and offices genuinely love Britt. when I when she goes to offices, I love getting emails or text messages from those offices saying that Britt just knocked it out of the park. So today I'm excited, Britt. You are ⁓ really fantastic on this and you and I actually just consulted a practice together. I I need to stop saying we don't say each other that often because you and I actually do run into each other quite a bit on the road. ⁓ we do. It's pretty fantastic. So we were just at a practice together a couple of weeks ago and I thought this was such a cool thing that you did with this practice. So ⁓ just to give a little bit of a background, we were with a practice and communication was just a struggle, which I'm not going to lie, every single office. But you tell me if it's on your end, but every practice before we go visit them as the Dental A Team, we send out an anonymous survey. well it's actually an Anonymous. It's not anonymous. We know who you are. So they it's it's branded. We know your name. ⁓ but it's a survey sent out to all the team members to find out what are their issues in the practice, things that they love about the practice. And I will tell you, without like it's happened a hundred percent of the time, at least one person says communication on every single office. So I know this is a big deal. Britt, how about for you? I absolutely speaker-1 (03:37) Every time. Mm-hmm. And it comes up often. And I communication is a constant effort, which is why it comes up often, because it's so important. speaker-0 (03:47) For sure. I mean, if you think about it, communication is what we do all day long, whether it's with our patients, whether it's with each other, whether it's with our spouses or our families, like communication is super important. I just think it's always interesting when people say communication, I feel like it's this really broad umbrella for problems. And I'm like, no, no, no. Like let's get to the nitty gritty. Is it communication on? Cause there's great communication, but I think it's just such a large, vast net. that we cast that it's hard sometimes to pinpoint like what is the communication because I'll have practices that will over communicate. Everybody knows this, this, and this, and they still deal with communication. And so with this practice, ⁓ I think it was just a lot of missed expectations, which I found is typically the reason communication comes up. People are expecting or assuming other people will do something. And then when that's missed, that's when people get frustrated. And so it tends to fall back under communication. But Britt, Take it away, you did a full team training with this office. It was kind of a retreat style, which I don't know what you've been doing right in this world. You're getting a lot of those retreat styles. speaker-1 (04:48) I don't know either, but I'm glad it's working. speaker-0 (04:51) So typically our style is like we go in, we'll consult. We're doing like hands on training with an office and then we usually do like a two hour meeting. But Britt's been getting a few offices that are wanting like these three to four hour meetings, which honestly as a consultant, that's like when you guys see your schedule and you just have like crown prep after crown prep after not crown prep, crown seat after seat after seat, where you're like, that's gonna be busy. That's like a four hour meeting for a consultant. I would equate that to like, Whoo, all right, it's gonna be busy. But kind of walk us through with this practice and other practices. It just wasn't this one particularly, but kind of walk us through what you did to help enhance this communication and really bring some breakthroughs to this practice. speaker-1 (05:30) Yeah, for sure. I think you you hit one really key point, which is expectations when it comes to communication. And I think the other thing that goes hand in hand with that when expectations aren't being met through our communication is then we start to lose trust with our team members. And we start to lose trust in communication. And so people really just start to shut down. And it's hard to kind of get that motor going again because everybody goes into a protective mode. And so we're all just kind of walking on eggshells. We're nervous to have conversations that need to be had. And then it just starts to kind of spiral, unfortunately, into a place where we don't know how to get out of it. And so with this office, I was realizing that that's kind of where we were. We had hit the point where we've kind of lost our trust. We talked about some tools on how to have uncomfortable or crucial conversations with team members. But they were just still really struggling to see like how does that actually go into play because it's kind of like I've been there, I've tried it and I got burned. So speaker-0 (06:33) Well, 'cause like you said something that I thought was I've never thought about this. Because you said people lose trust and then we spiral downward. And I was thinking like, and what's bummer and also awesome is the only solution to it is communication. So the thing you've lost trust in is the key to your success and freedom and happiness. But if you lose trust in that, there's really nowhere else to go. Because if you're not communicating, things won't get better. So I had never thought about like the thing that caused the problem is the thing that's going to get you out of the problem as well. But you have to really regain each other's trust. And you're right, it's kind of like, but how? I logically understand it. I conceptually can see this, but how is this really gonna work? And I thought you did a brilliant job of breaking down this how. speaker-1 (07:20) Yeah. And so it comes down to like yes, at some point someone's gotta put themselves out there and be vulnerable to try it. And it can be really hard when we know there's old habits in play. So we kind of went back to the basics of communication to where we we created and it was with the team, we had their input. All right, what are our ground rules gonna be for communication? Kind of like our rules of engagement. What are the things that all of us right here, right now today are gonna agree to so that we can feel more comfortable to start engaging conversations with each other that need to happen. And so we created it, we typed it out, everybody signed it. So we all agreed that we're gonna comply with those rules. And it's basic things that just needed to kind of be said and be put out there so that we know we're all on the same page, which are things like we're gonna give each other. like the benefit of the doubt and give each other the benefit of the doubt, understanding that we're all coming with the best of intentions, right? We all care about this team, we all care about this practice, this business. And so we are ultimately having these conversations to solve things and to work together and to to make improvements. ⁓ some of the other rules we had in place are ⁓ we go talk to the person who can help us solve the problem. Right. So a lot of times we when we start to lose trust, we'll go and talk about something with our our buddy or our friend that we trust. And at that point we're just gossiping and we're not actually having a conversation with someone who can actually help to solve the problem. So we're actually just feeding into the problem instead of solving anything. ⁓ some of the other rules we had are we speak respectfully, ⁓ which means in volume and tone. ⁓ so we control our volume, we control our tones so that our conversations are productive. ⁓ we listen to each other, right? So we listen to what the other person has to say and we don't interrupt them. We hear them out. we also put into place, I think, if it gets too heated, like someone can call time out and we can step away for a minute, but we're gonna come back to that conversation that day to solve it, right? And we come together, whatever conversation we're having, we come come to solve it. ⁓ some other rules when someone comes to us with ⁓ a topic or something they want to discuss. we always say thank you, right? Thank you for coming to me. Thank you for being willing to have this conversation, which also just helps to set the tone. So any team that's kind of struggling can come up with some of their own kind of rules of engagement, the the code of communication that we're gonna stick to and agree to. ⁓ so then we know those are the ground rules and I can be more comfortable, even if I've been burned in the past, to give my team members an opportunity to change and to start to have those conversations. speaker-0 (10:12) I think it's really brilliant how you did this because hearing this, I wasn't actually there when you did this meeting. But I know the team. And so what's cool is I can hear rules from different people on that team because sometimes I might not think it's super important to actually listen to somebody. Now you guys might laugh and be like, Kiera, whatever. And I'm like, I'm actually super intuitive 90% of the time and I can pick up on things very quickly. ⁓ and it's just come from years and years of training. But for Brittany, she might want me to actually like that's something super important because she never feels like I listened to her. And so for all the team members to be able to put their rules into play in a safe place where we're just creating rules of communication with each other versus it being one on one. So it's the entire team working together, building it together. And I would say these are for teams like I think this is a really important like thing to do, no matter what size your practice is, no longer how long you've been in practice. As you were saying it, but it made me think of my family. Like you go to some people's homes and they have like our home rules. Like we love each other. We have each other's back. And my family didn't technically have something like that. But I knew my mom always said, our home is a place where it's a safe place to be. Like so we wouldn't make fun of each other. We wouldn't yell at each other. Like it was a place like you can get made fun of all day long at school, but you know when you walk through those doors to my parents' house, it is a safe place that all of us are safe to be in. And I just thought like that's pretty much what you did with this practice is you created a spot and ironically, just knowing those things. can actually fix a lot of the problems because now it's like, okay, great. We all know the rules of the game. ⁓ ironically, Tiffany gave me this really cool calendar and it has a quote. So every day I flip it. And today's quote it says, you have to learn the rules of the game and then you have to play better than anyone else. And I think with this, like, learn the rules of the game. Learn what and how to communicate. And then I really do love that this is play better than anyone else. So listen better than anyone else does because what's going to happen is I'm not trying to elevate myself above you. I'm really going to listen to Britt and I'm going to listen to understand. I'm not going to listen to respond. Like let me hear what she's saying and then let me like also not come with heated heated emotions on this. Let me come to solve it. Let me come to to really have that. So I think it's important for practices like when you have this, I would say this is like core values two point Because it's just helpful. We all assume that everyone knows how to communicate with each other, but they don't. We all come from different backgrounds, different lifestyles, different ways to communicate. In my family, it was always one of respect. And I you better believe if we burped at the table, we were doing twenty five push ups. Like I'm not kidding, like it was kind of a joke, but it was just it wa…
Full show notes at the publisherKiera shares the three most common pieces of bad advice out there when it comes to growing a practice. She encourages doctors not to keep applying new pieces of information to growth, but to understand how to filter the best pieces for your practice — and shares three truths to making this happen. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: Kiera Dent- Dental A Team (00:00) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera. And today we're gonna talk about a couple of lies feel so harsh, but I think these are maybe some misnomers, some beliefs that a lot of dentists are told about growing a practice that aren't true. Or they could be true, but they don't have to be true. So again, like I don't want to say it's lies. I just think it might be a possibly wrong way to look at things if you want. And so I want to talk about some of those like what are the like three biggest lies, if you will, with air codes around lies. Because I think about a lot of advice is given to you about how to grow a practice, but I don't think it's all true. I think that there's ways that we can look at it differently and get different outcomes. And I don't think people are trying to mislead. ⁓ but I just I feel like it's incomplete. And so I want you guys to recognize that growing your practice and evolving your practice isn't about following more advice or doing more things. I think it's actually about filtering like what is the best way to do it. And for me, Lazy or efficient, take your pick. I prefer the term efficient. ⁓ let's just get you the most efficient way to grow your practice that keeps you sane, that doesn't burn you out. Because again, I'm about the yes success model. It's all about you, making sure you're living your absolute best life, followed by earnings and profitability and then systems, structure, and scale for you. We've got to have those in place for you. And so I'm really, really big on growing, not for growing sake, but to grow in the way that's best for you, which is why vision and you are the most number one important thing. So when you go through this, I just I want you to realize like we don't have to stay stuck, we don't have to say overwhelmed, and we don't have to plateau. But there's ways that we can walk through the most common lies, if you will, that are talked about with growth. And then three truths that actually will drive real sustainable growth for you. So number one that I hear a lot is like you just need more new patients. Now, this can be true. Like I said, lies are with an air quote, and you don't always have to be doing marketing spend and you don't have to constantly be attracting people. And like to me, it's constant marketing spend. Attracting instead of retaining and full hygiene with low case acceptance. Like that can be some of the things. And what's wrong with that is a lot of offices, like when they're telling me, Kiera, we're at like 90 new patients a month. I'm like, cool, you got a backdoor open problem. Like, if we just close that back door, you probably wouldn't need as many new patients, but your ego is screaming, I need more new patients. Or I've got just all these patients coming through, and that's again, we're not retaining them. Or our hygiene schedule is full, but like our doctor schedule is wide open. Well, we don't have great case acceptance. So to me, Gotta have like great patients coming in, retaining them, and follow through. So growth actually comes better from conversion, not volume. You do need both, which is where I don't think it's a lie. Like you do need patients. We gotta have at least 30 new patients per doctor per month in a like a GP practice. Pediatrics usually run in like 75 to 90, depending upon the the location and what we're looking for. So, like more patients aren't gonna fix leaky systems. So another Another one, like I said, I'm gonna go through them and they'll tell you like some solutions to fix it. Work harder and produce more, like outproduce your problems, add more days, work longer hours, do more dentistry personally. But like that's burnout. I just had a doctor and she's like, Kiera, we talked about production and I just can't do it. And I was like, Yes, because you're not supposed to do it. We're supposed to have goals. We're supposed to have the whole team. Like I I was with an office and their goal is like twenty-five thousand a day. But the dentist isn't doing all that and they're out by like four o'clock and we're just scheduling better and we're making sure all the hygienists are up to goal and each doctor's up to goal. Like profit doesn't always follow production. I don't care what your top line is, I care what your bottom line is. So you have to like there is a zone where a lot of doctors work more, but they don't actually make more or they like take home the same. And to me, that's nonsense. Like I'd rather you scale it back and have a small practice than having this high, I don't know, ginormous one and not taking home profit. So You've got to have, we've got to have efficiency, we gotta have systems, and we gotta make sure it's not all on hue. And then like let's talk about what growth and profit are that we actually wanna hit, not just a top line number. So I I'm really big on like you don't have to work harder and produce more. There's actually a way of how like what do we really need to produce? How do we actually build a schedule? How do we use the entire schedule? How do we use our morning huddles to win rather than just produce, produce, produce? Okay. Another myth is hire more people and we'll fix it. Like just throw money at your problems through hiring people, through doing this, like this thing will help us. Like, let's add team members. I have an office and I think they've got like 10 people in the front office. I'm like, my gosh, that's psychotic. Like, but everyone feels overwhelmed and overworked. And I'm like, yeah, because no one has clear job descriptions. No one has an end-of-day checklist. No one has like ownership of it. We just keep piling more and more people on rather than like, all right, what's broken? What's a true system? Because I typically say, Per doctor, I want one for an office team member, except for if there's only one, then I want two. But that's usually a pretty good ratio. Office managers are like debatable if they're there or not. So if you look at that, this is where, but like we overstaff, but we don't have clarity. We got payroll, but like our payroll sky high, but we saw the same issues. Payroll should be sitting at 30%. Like that should be where we're at. Even if you're like here, it's so expensive. I'm like, I know, but we also can't overpay. We can't have so many team members. There are ways that we could like. You can outsource. There's so many things that we can do. And that's not for me to say we can't hire people. It is for me to say, like, we got to be smart business owners too. So a lot of times people don't fix broken systems. Confusion scales with headcount. Trust me, I used to have a team of five. Now I got a team of 25. It's crazy. It's very thrilling. So, like, you can add more and more people, but if we don't have systems and processes and like, clear job descriptions, you're just gonna create more chaos and you think you're gonna fix it, but you just add more, then you're stressed because your cash flow is less. It doesn't fix. You got have structure before you have growth. So people don't fix systems, systems support people. So a couple of now like truths. Okay. So we had like lies. All right. Number one, like I said, you just need more new patients. Number two is work harder and produce more. And number three was hire more people. It'll fix it. Now like I said, hiring people might fix it. Producing more could fix it. having more patients could fix it. But things that are really going to help are like set systems. Like I was in a practice and I'm like, okay, we just need to get a set schedule. Like I said, they're like, I'm exhausted. I was like, perfect. What is each provider's daily goal? What's their hourly goal? What's our hygiene goal? We need to make sure those are in place. So that way it's not just reliant on one doctor. Now we got to look at our case acceptance. Let's look at our patient flow and let's look at billing. Like to me, a lot of these things like if I just fix case acceptance, I don't actually need a ton more patients. If I just fix case acceptance, it's like why don't we actually clothes the patients that are in our chair. Can we do same-day dentistry for them? Can we get referrals from them? So I'm having quality patients come through. We're diagnosing and we're accepting. Like, what if I just have those? Like those things in place will actually grow your practice. Having 30 new patients a month per doctor is going to grow your practice. Having reviews that tie to that, making sure our collections are at 98%. So many offices actually are profitable, but they're not collecting the money. So they feel broke. But I'm like, that's actually a system that's going to grow you. So like let's just go after a few systems that are gonna truly grab scheduling, block scheduling. What are the provider goals? Let's hit that. Let's talk about that at Morning Huddle every single day. Let's look at our case acceptance. Our case acceptance, if you're at GP, like we're not doing huge cases, you should be at like a 70% acceptance. If we are at all on X, I'm usually at like 35 to 40. What's our case acceptance? What are we closing? Are we doing single dentistry? Like what are we diagnosing? Are we diagnosing three tens of what we're trying to produce? If not, I need to go fix my case acceptance. That is my system to fix. That's going to actually grow my practice. That's gonna put money on my books. Billing, just collect the dang money. Like fix that. That's actually gonna grow your practice. That's gonna grow your profit. That's what's actually gonna grow you. Now, another thing that's actually gonna grow you is having strong, strong, strong profit. You've got to have profit. Like that's gonna grow you. I don't care what your top line is, you gotta know your profit. So, what how do we figure that out? We're gonna look at our BAM. We're gonna figure out exactly what our practice needs to make, including paying you. And then we're gonna make sure that we have enough patients, we have enough case acceptance, we have enough providers, we can block schedule this to actually produce it. Then we gotta make sure we're collecting it. Because if not, we're not going to get it. You have to be profitable. We gotta look at efficiency. How many team members do we actually need to have? What are their job descriptions? Have clear job descriptions, a KPI per person of a number that's gonna drive the business forward. That's going to fix our practice. You don't need more people. You don't need more production. You don't need more overhead. We need to make sure our overhead is correct, that we're adequately staffed, that we have the correct amount of production and procedure mixes. Some people just don't do enough dentistry. Like you don't diagnose enough. I need you not to diagnose a single crown filling. I need it to be a crown if it's really a crown. If we can't do this, like we might not need as many team members. Can we outsource and use a biller that's not an in-house? I don't know, but there's ways to get creative. You've got to look at it. For me, it's non-negotiable. Your overhead needs to be at 50% or less. Doctor pay needs to be at 30%. Our profit margin needs to be at 20%. You've got to go look at it. We either need to cut costs, increase production, or increase collections. One of those three things is gonna make you there. You've got to get profitable. It's not like that's really going to grow you. And sometimes growth comes from contracting. Businesses are like breathing. It's gonna expand and it's gonna contract. Sometimes we're gonna be a bigger team. Sometimes we're gonna be a smaller team. I've done this myself. I've grown too much and I've had to cut. And then we grow again and then we have to cut. It's not because I'm trying to be irresponsible. It's because I genuinely need to like the business didn't grow as much as we thought it would. We now have to contract. You have to be able to make those decisions. Now I hope that you are not like grow, contract, go contract. Like let's not be like adding and cutting team members on a consistent basis all the time. Like more stability. But really look, what are the job descriptions? What is the KPI? If I hire this other person. How much more revenue are they going to put in? What are they going to do? I get it. We want to help our team. But I was in a team the other day and they had an outsource builder and this builder was asking for more hours. And they were like, no, this is what you agree to. This is how many hours we want. Let's see if we can actually like what needs to get done. They're under staff. They have a front office team member that's out on maternity leave. But for that team to recognize like more hours doesn't fix our problems. Like we need to be more efficient. How can we be more efficient? A lot of team members, when I go into offices, are not being fully utilized. So before you go and say, like, we need more team, maybe we should look at their job descriptions, maybe look at our org chart. Let's look at what people are doing and what they should be doing and what they're capable of doing. And then let's see how we can like simplify things. What things can we like delegate out? What things can we hire out? What does that look like? Because if we can get those things put into place, do you realize how much happier every single person is? These are the things that actually grow a practice. Looking at your numbers, knowing your profit margins, having the systems in place that actually put money on your books, hygiene. Let's talk about hygiene. Making your hygienists are doing three times their pay. That's going to grow your business. It's not like just pump new patients in. It's not pump production on the books. It's not these things like work harder. It's not that. It's genuinely right, people. Let's look at our numbers. Let's see. Now it's like okay, if I know the payroll should be at thirty percent, I now have the dollars allotted for that amount. How I spend those dollars is your decision. It's your discretion. I don't really care. But you know the metric. So if you know the metric, you know most offices are able to accommodate this. You've got to figure out how for you you can accommodate this. Do I need to increase my production? Then can I look at my block schedule? Can I look at different ways? Can I look at my case acceptance? Can I look at my diagnosis? Do we have better handoffs amongst all of us? What little things are gonna be able to grow you and your practice? That's…
Full show notes at the publisherTiffanie and Nikki share what dental practices should be looking at it now that we're halfway through 2026. Such milestones or touchpoints can include the goals you set at the start of the year, production numbers, the metrics ranges for healthy practices, and so on. From there, Tiff and Nikki talk about how to turn your midpoint numbers into game plans for the remaining six months. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: Tiffanie (00:00) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. We are back at you again. ⁓ we do four of these ish a month. We do one a week. myself, Tiffanie, and the consulting team. And I always pick from my consultant crew ⁓ whoever can be the best cohort on the topic and also their schedules, which is a fun. little alignment of ⁓ situations here regarding our topic of choice today. So today I have Nikki. Nikki, thank you for making yourself available this morning for pivoting with me. I know I had some ⁓ travel stuff last week and had to move calls around so we had to move this call around and I just appreciate you so much Nikki and for pivoting and and Nikki I'm gonna I'm just gonna say it. It's funny. And we all kind of podcast from wherever we can. We try to ta stay as centralized as we possibly can, but we all at some point or another are in a very different place than our norm. And Nikki has had so many fun spots. So if you are a an avid podcast listener, you've heard Nikki's and you've not watched, I want you to go back and like look through all of Nikki's and see all of her different backgrounds because it's just so fun. Nikki Mack (00:55) Yeah. Tiffanie (01:09) you're like our Carmen San Diego, Nikki. How are you doing today in ⁓ your new space today that is a very temporary and then you'll have a new new space, but how are you doing over there? Nikki Mack (01:20) Yeah, doing great today. ⁓ this may just be my thing. I may have to find somewhere new to podcast from every time. We'll just yeah. Yes. ⁓ I did love Carmen San Diego, so absolutely I'll just wear a red hat. You'll see me out and about. That would be amazing. ⁓ yes, doing good. super happy to be back. I can't get enough of doing podcasts and Tiffanie (01:27) I like it. Or pop something in there that people have to find, like what's different. I don't know. I love it Nikki Mack (01:47) No matter where we are, absolutely we're here for our listeners and we're gonna get it done. So I'm ready. Tiffanie (01:52) I love it. I love it. thank you. And listeners, you guys know if you've listened to us at all that we truly do love what we do, that we are here to ensure that we give as much information out to the dental world and beyond. We have listeners who aren't even a part of the dental world because entrepreneurship is all the same. Business is business is how I describe it. So whether you're dental, whether you're outside of dental, I know we've worked with podiatrists and optimists. And chiropractors and all kinds of different businesses. We've helped CPAs and financial advisors and all kinds of different organizations because at the bottom of everything, business is the foundation here and dentistry is what you do on top of that foundation. So we're excited for you guys to be here. We're excited to be ⁓ hosting this podcast to be delivered in July. July is one of my favorite months of the year for multiple reasons. Brodie's birthday is in July. He's actually eighteen ⁓ this year. The the recording of this podcast, he will be eighteen in almost a month from now. So that's crazy and scary. And for those of you who have been listening for as long as we've been doing this, you probably remember when little Brodie, who's like nine or ten, maybe not even yet, eight, ⁓ came on and he talked about having a working mom. So really cool. If you've been listening for a long time, you know who he is. But July is also one of my favorite months of the year because this is really kind of our reset month. This is where I just kind of slow down in life and in business and really take a look at what are the things I said I wanted to accomplish this year and where am I at in relation to those things? Do I need to pivot? Are did things change? Did I have things on my docket that I was like, gosh, that's kind of arbitrary or Too much or you gosh, I'm really just not gonna get to that this year and that's okay too. So have we changed things that maybe we need to reevaluate and reset? for me personally, I said I'm gonna do a pull up this year, and you what, it's still on my docket, but six months, seven months into the year, not having made ⁓ a lot of progress on even attempting to do one, I think I'm a little behind the wheel on that. So needing to reevaluate, but that's really what we're talking about today. So whether it's personal goals, business goals Family goals, whatever they are, this is a really great time of year to just take a step back and really, really, really push forward on what we want our life to look like. So we brought Nikki on today to help us with that as far as the dental industry and the and the dental business. And Nikki, from your perspective, consulting practices, I know this is the time of year as well that we're gonna take a look with our clients and we say, Hey, how was Q2? So we've already done a how is Q1. We go through, we evaluate quarter one in comparison to last year at the same time. Well that now our consultants are all going through for their clients and really evaluating quarter two in comparison to quarter one and also in comparison to the projections that we made with them earlier this year. So as we're prepping for that and as we're getting ready to have those conversations with our clients, Nikki, what are some of the key indicators, the KPIs that you have always loved watching for your practices? ⁓ in consulting, in managing, in working within the DSL world, all of your different spaces, what are the ones that you really like to take a look at in July? Nikki Mack (05:16) So for me, I mean, production's the obvious one, right? Like we never really take our eye off of production ever. Q one, two, three, four, always. ⁓ but I think deeper than just production, it's looking at those metrics that drive production, especially that we started the year with the intention of working on. So a lot of my offices this year, it's case acceptance. Like 2026 is all about case acceptance. Tiffanie (05:23) Yeah. Nikki Mack (05:42) And so for me at this halfway point, that's where I'm really like digging into that number. So what does the percentage look like? And there's metrics, right? And there's ranges and there's healthy offices and things like that. But like I tell my teens a lot when we first start, the biggest thing I'm looking at is just where are we? So like January, ⁓ if we've been together for a while, where our starting point is, your percentage now is what I care about. And then how are we going to increase it? So hopefully by July. We've seen some movement in that number and production would reflect it. But if we don't understand how we're driving that production, how do we keep doing it or make those changes? Like we said, going into Q3 that we need. So ⁓ I would say case acceptance is a huge one. Are you tracking dollars? Are you tracking percentage? Whatever we've been looking at, let's really dive into it. And then honestly, another one that I've seen a lot lately is ⁓ New patient retention. So we a lot of doctors have expanded or brought in associates or we have a lot of new practice owners, right? And so new patients, we know it, they matter, they're super important. But if we're bringing a ton of women and they're all just leaving and not like staying with us, then like that's a lot of time invested. ⁓ so we've I've seen a lot of focus this year with what's our new patient numbers and then who came back. So July is a perfect time to really be dialed in on that because we're going to start to see those six month recares come back, the ones from the end of last year. So that's a super good number, in my opinion, to really get an eye on the health of your practice and how some of our systems are working. Because I love a system. Tiffanie (07:27) Right. All right. That's what we're here for, right? Yeah, I I totally agree. And I love the new patient spot too, like in conjunction with the case acceptance that you said both of those, because oftentimes we will look at the case acceptance and we'll say, Gosh, I w our case acceptance is really high, but our we're still not meeting production, or our case acceptance is really low. We've got to Gotta do more ⁓ case ex you know, case acceptance, whatever. But when you start to really dive into it, a lot of times our case acceptance will tell us every time our case acceptance will tell us what our diagnosis is as well, right? So if we're only looking at what is our percentage of case acceptance, whether it's dollar or yes or no, it doesn't really matter. But if we're only looking at that number and we're never looking at how much have we diagnosed, we kind of miss the boat there on the in between. So as you're taking that mid year. Check-in here in July. I think that that is a great place to start. I totally agree, Mickey. Because at that point you can say, do we have the opportunity to meet the goals that we are projecting towards? So where are we at? We always say go look at what your full goal was or is, right? So what are we supposed to do by December 31st, 2026, or whatever year you're listening to this in? What are we supposed to do by the end of the year? And where are we at in relation to that? So six months. Nikki Mack (08:39) Ha ha Tiffanie (08:46) Seven months, you know, into the year, are we six months worth of production towards that goal, or do we need to re-establish a different goal moving forward to account for missed opportunities? Now I'm gonna say something here, and my team members just know I love you. Doctors, make sure you do this. So if you're tracking, you're like, all right, guys, I listened, Nikki, I heard you, and I'm actually ahead on my goal, and I'm ahead by $50,000 this year. Keep your goal the same. Do not adjust your goal down to meet that other goal. And I know that that sounds kind of obvious, but I want to just state it because there are a lot of people that are like, ⁓ awesome. This month is short, so like it's okay, we don't really have to push. Like, no, no, no. Keep pushing and hit for that top tier goal every time so that you have that buffer if it's ever necessary. Or best case scenario, we end out ahead. Now, the other flip side to that is that. A lot of times what we'll see is we might be short by like 20,000 or 10,000, something not like massive. It might not be a whole month's worth of production, but it might be that like ten to twenty thousand dollar mark. So then what we're doing is we're saying, okay, great, this is what we've done. This is where we're gonna go, where we need to be. That gap is now added to the months coming. So if you've got ten thousand dollars that you're short, divide that by the next six months, add that crown cost, by the way. Add that extra crown into your monthly goal and then reestablish what that will look like. That's your mid year check-in. So then to Nikki's point of the case acceptance, I love that, Nikki, because if we know where we're going, now we can say, okay, how are we gonna get that? Like, how do I get now to 145 instead of that 143 mark? How do I get that extra couple thousand dollars a month? And why was I short to begin with? So what happened there that Nikki Mack (10:11) Right. Tiffanie (10:41) caused that that mishap and it could have been hours, it could have been days closed, but it could have also been in that case acceptance and diagnosis. So then we start really looking in. So production, collections should match your productions or at least be 98%, right? And then in order to hit those, what does our case acceptance look like? And do we have enough opportunity to hit those goals? And if the opp the opportunity isn't there, now we're gonna say, okay, great, why aren't my new why aren't I getting enough new patients? Or Nikki, one of my favorite ones is we have a slew of new patients, sometimes too many, and we're not diagnosing what we need to diagnose from them. And I'm and I think Nikki this can be misconstrued sometimes because it's like, well, I diagnose what my patients have. Super cool. I totally agree with you. We are never, ever, ever going to be the consulting company that's like, no, no, no, there's more, find it. Maybe there is, but I don't know. I'm not sitting in your chair and dentistry is, you know, it's completely objective. So Nikki Mack (11:16) Yeah. Tiffanie (11:39) I'm not gonna tell you how to dentist. I'm just gonna say, do we have the right opportunities then? So if you've got clean patients coming into your practice and you're hitting new patient numbers, but we're still not hitting diagnosis, are we reaching the target audience that you need in order to sustain and grow your dental practice? And Nikki, I think that falls into play where we've got now the KPIs, you know, production collections, those are those are hand in hand, case acceptance and then that new patient mark. Are we getting the right new patients? Because to your point, Nikki, in July, if that first six months of new patients didn't give me the bucket that I needed, I have time now to reevaluate and say, okay, well what does this need to look like? How does my hygiene department need to grow and do my new patients need to shift and change with that? And is that something, Nikki, that you've seen like all over the place. Is that like how how often are you seeing that we just arbitrarily kind of grab the new patients that we can and then miss marks and are like, wait a second, what's going on? Nikki Mack (12:42) Yeah, I think because a lot of times it's easy to feel like, well, a new patient is a new patient and that's a win, you know, like we hit 45. But to your point, we have to be intentional, right? And there is a degree of we market, you know, to the audience, right? We hit the keywords, we're the Google search, we know what we're looking for. But most of the marketing companies that our offices work with, they say those similar things. Like, what are you trying to bring in? Tiffanie (12:49) Yes. Nikki Mack (13:10) I had an office, for example, that was changing some of their insurance, you know, contracts. And their emergency ads were bringing in a lot of those insurance-driven patients. So they were having a real struggle with maintaining the schedule they were trying to build with where they were trying to go and who was coming in. And we realized it's the ads, right? You know, that's why this number is so high and it's so hard. So we pivoted, which Ironically enough, on the flip side, I had another practice just a couple weeks ago. We were having this new patient conversation. They're focusing on some emergency dentistry targeted ads because they do have a little bit of flexibility. We've got a new associate, which is, you know, always great for opening up schedules. And so we realize that we can accommodate some emergencies, righ…
Full show notes at the publisherKiera has talked to a ton of doctors to come up with tips for how to fill that CEO time that so often feels fathomless. The ideas include blocking out your schedule to understand your frequency, committing to "deep work" time, optimizing whatever you can, and more. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: Kiera Dent- Dental A Team (00:00) Hello, Dental A Team listeners, this is Kiera. And today is a fun rift of a CEO, giving some CEO tips. And I was just on a birthday trip. You guys, had a birthday and it was so fun. And my husband and went off to Austria and Amsterdam. ⁓ We have traveled a lot. If you guys have been a podcast listener, you know I'm obsessed with traveling. so because we've traveled so much, we're kind of on to off the beaten path locations and. This year I was like, Hey, I've never seen the Tulip festival in Amsterdam. Like let's head on over there for that. And so when we were there, some of these ideas came to me and I realized this would be, again, I love some white, white noise space guys. If you are an owner of a business and you have not booked yourself one trip that you are off the grid completely. when I talk my, so it was my birthday when I was gone and ⁓ luckily I have some like great friends in my life that texted me. My phone is off off. Like I kid you not, is on airplane mode. I don't even put it on wifi. Like I don't text people. Jason has his phone and I will say it's the greatest gift I give myself. And one of my friends did not know this quite as well with me. And she was like, Hey, said my other friend, like I texted care like two days ago and I haven't heard from her. She's like, ⁓ when care travels, she is like dead off the grid. Like you will not get in touch with her. If something happens, even if her house is on fire, like she'll deal with it when she gets home, like genuinely she's off the grid. She needs to have that, like just shut off downtime. And I will say for any of you, and I told an office to do this a while ago and they came back from their trip and they were like, Kiera, that was the best gift and we're going to do that now forever. And so for you, that would be my like birthday gift to all of you to do for yourselves is take a week, completely shut off. No Slack, no emails, no text messages, ⁓ completely turn your phone off if you can. Tell your family where you're at, like have it to where someone can be reachable if necessary. But I will tell you, I sleep better. than I ever do. ⁓ I come back refreshed. My team all tells me like I am such a happier boss when I come back. I feel like my relationship with my husband is so much stronger because I feel like he gets his wife back. I feel like I come back. I was in the Tulip Festival. There's videos that I have not posted. They're just for Kiera. I feel like literally skipping like a little girl through these Tulip Festivals. I feel I go back to the true core of who Kiera is. I don't need to be a boss. I don't need to be a CEO. I don't need to be a consultant. I am able to be like free bird Kiera out there. Jason even calls me bird when we travel and it's just a space. So there's a little tip for you that I hope you listen to and I hope you take and hey, if you do it, send me a message and let me know how it went for you. I will also fair warn that sometimes what I call it is it's the adrenaline. What would it be? It's like coming off of the adrenaline. So that drop. Sometimes I get angry. So fair warning that that does is the dopamine drop if you will and I felt like I have had like three days where I'm just sheer angry and I'm like what is going on? I'm on vacation. I'm in this beautiful place and I'm just mad but it's because you go from being so high tilt throttle to nothing that your nervous system does kind of have this like whiplash. So I have found that some ways to ease into that is one knowing that two I tried to hit the gym like three or four times when I'm over there because that allows like a lot of that energy to just get expelled rather than going from like high level to nothing. And then I've also found that like reading books, so something for my mind, I usually try to do fiction books. So it's not like obsessive learning, ⁓ but just taking my mind into a different space. Some of those can be a tip for you. again, hopefully some of those help. But ⁓ today I wanted to go through like, how do I actually block and use my CEO time? Because I think that this is a zone that a lot of people want to do as owner doctors and, but they're like, I just don't know what to do during CEO time. So I wanted to just share with you what I personally do in the company, how I block it, what I have, and then also letting you guys know that we actually have a forum and I'm happy to share it with any of you. can reach out, email us, Hello@TheDentalATeam.com, but like what do I actually do during my admin time checklist? This has been built with lots of different doctors input and also what I personally do. So for me, I do have a personal assistant and I have an executive assistant. So first step is if you don't have either of those, and I know I talked to a lot of dentists and they get weird about it they don't want to have an executive assistant or a personal assistant, but I will say hands down, this is something absolutely that's tactical that you should do. I have my personal assistant actually watch my schedule and then her job is to go through and to refine my schedule. And she does an amazing job. She's like, hey, Kiera, you're running back to back to back all these meetings. You need to move into some different places. Like these are some things that I think you need to do. We actually have an Excel spreadsheet. just so you know, I do have an Excel spreadsheet. I'm looking at it right now as I'm podcasting for you. And I look in there and I put in and I have on my like on the right hand side, I have my scheduling needs, what my frequency is. Like we've got podcasting in there. I've got certain coaches that I need to get into. I've got my workout time in there. I've got like my C-suite meeting with the COO and the CRO and our lead consultant and ⁓ Britt and my EAPA meetings and the bookkeepers and our fractional CFO. I have all those meetings that I need to be hitting. And so we look to see where are those at, where are the meetings that I need to have, but non-negotiable for me is my deep work time. So that's my CEO time. That's my deep work time. I have to have on busy weeks, non-negotiable, I need a two hour block. Like that is a non-negotiable for me, must, must. And it's during the day. I don't do it on my Fridays or my day off. I don't enjoy that for me. I get really actually annoyed to do it on those days. So mine gets blocked during my time. For dentists, I recommend you do it during your time. ⁓ Working hours, I recommend that you block it in there because if you're producing, let's say $1,000 an hour, you've got to be doing at least $2,000 worth of value during that time. again, when you're giving that up, you tend to be a lot more productive. for me, my first week is very busy. I, first week in the company is something that is none of our favorites. Like we love it. But it's hard, it's heavy. We have our doctor mastermind that we do. I usually do podcasting on the first week. I'm meeting with a lot of my direct reports. It's a heavy week for me, but we still have my non-negotiables. And so I just look at my timing and I know Monday's a full meeting day, Tuesday's a coaching call podcasting day, Wednesday I'm meeting with the COO, CRO, CFO. I have all those meetings to make sure that they can move on their items from Monday. That for me, it's a pretty heavy day. And then I've just got a lighter afternoon on Wednesdays to just catch up on projects. Thursdays where I'm, and for me, I also have to know where is my ideal time. So when you're blocking your CEO time, you need to know where are you the most optimal? For me, I'm always the best in the morning. Like seven, 738, like right there is where I'm gonna start like cranking and I'm gonna just go solid for about two hours till 10. My worst time in the entire day is three o'clock. Like I am dead and usually around 11, I start to like. zone out and I'm not as productive. So I've just had to try that. That's a trial and error. Test yourself. See, do you like the mornings? Do like the afternoons? Do like the end of day? Like where are you? Brittany's zone, she's a night owl. That girl, she starts to get her prime optimization on it like three, four, five o'clock at night. Like that is when that girl, she starts to churn and she puts out her best work and we both know that. I'm like, amazing. We work on very polar opposite different ones. So like she needs to put her deep works over your OMS, finding out as well for them. But for me, Mine is Thursday mornings is where I put that deep work. Then what I prefer to do is on my weeks where I'm not as busy. So I do coaching calls every other week. On my non coaching call weeks, I have two hours on Tuesday, two hours on Thursday. So I'm blocking four hours for myself. So your personal assistant, your executive assistant, they should be blocking this. And to me, this is a like, you do not like, you know, like a stove is hot. Like we don't touch that. You never touch my deep work blocks like ever. Don't ask me to schedule there. Don't ask me to put a meeting there. Do not ask me to disrupt that time. And I am so strict on my deep work time that people know like, we don't touch that with a 10 foot pole. And your team needs to know that. Doctors, also recommend a lot of times, especially if you do it in the morning or the afternoon, go to the library somewhere where people aren't going to find you. Go to a coffee shop where you can like headphones in zone out. But I found when a lot of times my doctors are trying to do CEO time and they're at an office, their door is being knocked on. If you want to be in the office, you need a sign on your door, and I've done this for several doctors, where it says CEO time, do not message or do not enter. And it needs to be like, if someone knocks, because they always do that knock like, hey, sorry, doc, it's just real quick. Do not for one second respond, because your team needs to learn that you're dead set on this. Like, this is your only time, you guys, that you get to work on the business. The only time. Otherwise, what happens is you become the CEO that never sleeps because your CEO time is in the middle of the night. It's early, early in the morning. It's late at night because you never have time for your brain to actually fix these problems. And so your brain just churns on all this. Like I need to check the books. I need to check this. I need to have that. So what you do is when you're exhausted, you try to like get all these things done rather than having set times. You can also build in your schedule. Like there's a set time for paying the bills. If you're doing that. I know I've got some doctor doing that. I would hope that your OEM does that and you just have meetings where they report to you. But again, depending upon where you are on this journey, you really need to block it. Now, great, we figured out how you block it. Now what do you actually do during that time? So for me, big things I'm gonna be working on are usually for me big projects. So I have a lot of presenting, a lot of events, lot of like, right now I'm reworking our entire customer journey and that's a big project that needs to get done. I'm working with our CRO and like, building out budgets and working models. And I need to review all of the projections she sent over to me. like, it's the, the projects that for me, like, there's a lot of things like approving payroll or stamping off on this budget that don't require a lot of time. But if my marketer, our CRO is sending over to me, like an entire proposal of their growth marketing plan, that's not something that I'm going to be doing in like a quick, like 15 minute block. Like I need set quiet, like uninterrupted focus time is what that really is. So imagine like studying for a big test, like you guys like blocked everything out. That's what you work on here. So it'd be your overhead, your P &L, like going through your CPA reports for you. Looking to see credit card charges, like looking through the P &L, like what's a detailed report, what things are on there, are fees categorized correctly. You do this once a quarter, have your CPA send it over to you. You can do it once a month, but you look at that. What about my cost per procedure? How much does it actually cost me to do every single procedure? And like, how could I reduce my overhead? Looking at my expenses, looking to see my tax estimated bill and have we saved enough for that? And do I have enough money set aside for that? You can go through that. We have an entire systems checklist. You can actually go through all the systems of the practice. I have it set up per month and this is a great time for you to actually review. All right, let's look to see how are our doctors being optimized? What trainings could I put into place? What things could we bring in the practice? How could I maximize and optimize this? Could we do training with our team for this? What about areas for my like schedule? Like let's review the schedule. Am I the most optimized when I'm producing or is there a way that I could type my block schedule up and be stronger on it and produce more with minimal effort? Like to me, CEO time is where I'm squeezing the juice out of the lemon. Like where can I optimize this a little bit more? How could I optimize my hygiene department? Let me look, is there a way I could add curadont? Can I find a better way to teach my hygienist? When was the last time we reviewed our periope protocol? Is that still what I want them doing? What could I do on like what would doctor do? And could I train at my hygienist to actually tee up treatment better for me? What if I want to bring on an associate, like let's go through an entire associate onboarding document, set it up. What's my training schedule with them? What are my case studies I'm going to put together with them? Do I have a doctor study club that I'm going to do? What about looking at our new patients? Let me review all of our marketing dollars. Where am I spending the marketing dollars? Are we answering the phone? What's our phone conversion rate? Let me actually assess my entire front office. Like where are the areas that are keeping us so bottlenecked? And is there AI or different processes or different systems that we can put in place to make it better for them? Let me go through all of our treatment plans. What did I diagnose? What was scheduled and why? What things am I missing? And how could I tighten up my treatment planning process? How can I work with my treatment coordinator and what things do she or he and I need to work through so that way I can close more cases and help more patients? ⁓ Just looking through all these different things. going and listening to treatment plan presentations of the team, listening to how my hygiene team's training up Floyd and Perio, looking, going and talking to my biller and saying, walk me through our AR. Like I want to…
Full show notes at the publisherHiring is hard right now. Kiera talks about a critical mistake offices tend to make when filling new seats: Hiring not just for skill, not just for culture, but both. She walks listeners through aligning your hirees with your core values, requiring a full team assessment, and involving your full staff. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: Kiera Dent- Dental A Team (00:00) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera. And today I wanted to talk about a big hiring mistake that I see offices make and how to fix it. I'm not just going to leave you on a cliffhanger, but like, let's talk about how to fix it because I know hiring's a beast right now. I'm in the suck of it, but don't forget, this is the success tax. We don't get the suck without the success. Like you have to have both. so hiring is a beast, but I think fixing some of these things, working through it and great news times are changing everybody. ⁓ it used to be that, ⁓ It used to be an employee market and I think it's now shifting. so for people feeling like there's not great team members out there, I will say that the market has shifted and we've actually made our most amount of hires in the last eight months as a Dental A Team company. And ⁓ I think I've learned a lot that I'm excited to share a lot of these hiring mistakes that I've made, that I've seen offices make and how you can fix them. So ⁓ I really think that there's a simple three steps around it that you can solve it. And who knows, I might go beyond the three. But really helping you guys prevent that team turnover, protect your culture, um, and really, you know, doing it in a great way. Then only teams obsessed with making dentistry easier for you guys. Um, our experiences helped hundreds and thousands of team members build strong teams and to do it with fun and ease and to make it a place where you're obsessed with going. I actually just spoke with a doctor the other day and she said, Kiera, you need to use me as a testimonial and I need to get her on the podcast. Uh, but she said, A year ago, I hated my practice and I didn't like going and I was ready to literally burn the whole thing down, burn my life down and walk away. And she said, Dental A Team changed my life and you saved me and you saved my practice. And now it's a place where I'm obsessed with going. I'm so happy going there. I love my team. I love my patients. I love what I'm doing. And I think if that's not a testimonial for you of what Dental A Team can do in a very short amount of time, having a doctor who absolutely hated their practice to being obsessed with their practice and being so happy every single day is amazing. ⁓ I also think that ⁓ just really being here as a person who is hopefully a friend in the industry, we help practices, we fly to your office, we work with you virtually, but you don't have to do this alone. Everybody says dentistry is an isolated island and I would say only if you want it to be. We have a community, we bring our doctors in person together if you want so you can be around a community of like-minded dentists. We physically come to your office and we also work with your team virtually and being team members ourselves. Every single consultant on our team has to be a team member, front office, back office experience to where we don't just understand you, we actually are you. So let's talk about hiring. So that was talk about like hire for culture and not just skill. And I think mistake number one is not getting both. I think there's certain roles that you absolutely 100 % can just do culture and train it up. I will also say that there's a lot like an office manager role. There's no way I'm going to recommend that you train them up. Now you can pull someone from banking, you can pull other people and yes, you can train up, but depending upon the space of your practice, hiring for skill and culture is essential. And I think I used to just feel like, like we train, some great people on for culture. And I was like, do you know how much of an uptick learning hill I had for not having any skill there? So you can, but I want to say that if you just hire for culture and not for skill, you've got to have a longer bandwidth, lower expectations of them being able to immediately help you. Like that person's gonna take a good six to 12 months. I have an office right now and they train up dental assistants. They go through 90 days worth of training in an office and it usually takes those dental assistants about six to nine months before that assistant actually feels comfortable and competent to where the doctors feel like they can trust them. So when we look at it, I know you're desperate to fill the seat, but I wanted to say like hiring mistake number one is being desperate and just filling the spot. And I have done this, Britt and I talk about it often. And we always say like, is this a red flag that we're not paying attention to? So I feel like hiring mistake number one is you ignore the red flags. So it could be a culture red flag, it could be a skill red flag, it could be an expectation misalignment red flag, but getting better at hearing those red flags and not being desperate on your hires is a big mistake that I'm watching dentists make. And so like, make sure that the resume looks great, but how can I then like test them on it? What things can you do? And as you go through the hiring process, don't be afraid to refine, tweak, change up and make better your process. I can't tell you how many times Britt and I were like, great, we missed that on that last hire. We're gonna add this to our hiring interview questions and we're gonna ask that next time. I just had a doctor and they brought on somebody and clinically they're not on the same page. And I was like, you guys, this is like a one in a million. I've never had this in years and years and years of hiring doctors. We're gonna add that to it. For hiring doctors, we started asking for actual production procedure reports. I'm not just gonna take you telling me you're doing a $7,500 day. Show me the reports. I don't need to see patient names, but I do need to see what you were able to do that is diagnosed under you. I need to see a sample HIPAA schedule of what your normal day was. Like there's ways that you can ask for things and get better at sleuthing and sussing out information rather than just taking it at face value. Resumes are lied on all the time. I talk to recruiters and I'm not saying people are bad. I'm just saying that like 90%, I think they told me, think it was 75 % of all resumes are lied on. And I was like, wow, okay. So then we need to trust and verify. So I would just say like, don't miss the red flags and have somebody like Britt, appreciate, she calls me out and I call her out and we say, is this a red flag that in three months we're going to regret? And sometimes that desperation can hit you hard. I would say have somebody on the other side of you that doesn't allow you to make desperate hires. So, And then what I do is for us, we really do hire by our core values. So you guys can either have core values or have like the top three personality traits that thrive in our office and put that in our interview job ad, put that in our interview questions. So for us, like we hustle, like that is a big thing. Like Dental A Team runs hard. And if that's not your style and you're more like slow, steady, move on. Dental A Team will never be a happy place for you. Like I move quick, our team moves quick. You've got to be a fast paced individual. So for that, look to see what are some of those characteristics and then really do a litmus test on those employees, future employees, and make sure that they're really going to fit you well. So I think that you can do filtering systems on culture fit surveys. You can have video intros where they can come, phone screen for core value alignment, but really truly having a filtering process where you're not missing those red flags. You're improving your interview questions consistently, adding one more filter step to the interview. It's like for us for consultants, they have to apply, we do a mock, and then what they do is they have to do a video one. We have to do a mock scenario with them. Like have a pretty intensive consultant hiring process. For you, look to see how can I really know without hiring this person that they're going to be a great fit, not just a good fit for my practice. And I think raise your standard for hiring that we only hire great people, not just good people. ⁓ I think then other people, another mistake that I found in hiring. is that you don't involve the team. just make these decisions and you don't use the team. And honestly, having team involvement helps protect the culture, but it also makes them bought into this hire. So have them come in for a working interview, have a team lead, ⁓ lead the second interview, ⁓ and then feedback after the candidate where it's kind of a 360 awareness. So like, what does a hygiene department see, dental assistant department, front office and doctors. So have everyone have kind of like a four view and you can randomly ask people and if you're like, I didn't even meet them. Well, that's a red flag to me that that team member didn't even go say hello to each potential teammate. I know you might have a large office that might not be doable, but really trying to get that four different angle perspective on this person can give you a really good insight. know there's certain roles that I've had people help me with, assess me with others where it's like, that's just my decision to make. But the more I can get more teams involvement, more perspective on it, the better. And I will say, I just recently had a candidate and I had our leadership team give me assessments and they didn't like this candidate. And it hurt. was a big candidate for me. It was someone I really wanted to hire. And I had to just trust and believe that my team can see things that I can see. well, there's no way for me to know, right? I didn't hire the candidate. I passed on the candidate. There's no way for me to know if that candidate would have been great for us. But what I do know is the team that I have, trust. And I know they're looking out for my best interest always and for our team's best interest always. and I need to trust them. And sometimes they can pick up on things that you can't. So I would say like fix number two is involve the team. Fix number one is don't miss the red flags and improve it. And then number two, gosh, I'm like all over my mouth. So number one is don't miss the red flags. Number two is make sure that we're using a full team assessment for it. And then number three, sorry, is involving the team. Sorry guys, I'm a little all over the map on my numbers. You guys got it, we're there, we're clear, okay? Use the team, have them look at those four different perspectives, involve them, have them come in for working interviews. And I know you're like, but Kiera, people are being snatched up. The only position that's really being snatched up is hygiene. And I want to say, if you have a great culture, you've got great reviews. I also pull my team in and I have them like, we recorded our consultants saying why they loved working here. We put that on our job ads out there. We have our consultants love working at Dental A Team. And I use that in my posting. have your hygienist say why they love working for your practice and put that on your job ad if you can, have it on your website so people can go look at it. But that can also help you not have these desparate where I've got to hire them right here and right there. Also though, if you do hire and they're not right, fire faster. ⁓ I've started making decisions like I should know if a person's great in 30 days. And if in 30 days I can't say that I'd rehire them, I probably need to fire them. Anyway, but I care that so fast. And I've accepted that. Well, yes, it is fast. My A players, they rise to the top and they're great within 30 days. It doesn't take them 90 days. Within 30 days, they've made a pretty big impact into the company and I'm good with them. My ones that it takes 90 days for them to blossom and bloom, it never works out. And I know that sounds icky. I know that sounds like cutthroat. I'm just here to like speak truth to you guys. I'm here to say like what I've been noticing. when I bring on my higher level, so like an office manager or some of my bigger players, 60 days max. If I haven't seen ROI on you in 60 days, we're out. And I have put that as my standard. I used to do 90 days, but 90 days to me, that's an entire quarter that I've wasted. And usually within 30 days, you guys, you can tell, are they a great culture fit? Are they going to be a great person? Now, not always, but like I said, I have probably hired... 10 plus people in the last six months. I've gone through probably 200 plus interviews and I have cut several people in that 90 days. And that's okay. I just want to give you, I feel like I'm like really speaking to you. here we are. Like, hi, I'm Kiera. I'm going to be in your living room right now. I think I've just realized that I sit here hoping and waiting for potential rather than seeing that it's not going to get there. And for me to cut bait sooner, it's better for them. It's better for me. And it's better for the team. No one's going to land and knock hiring out of the park. 10 out of 10. You're not. And when I accepted that and I accepted that, like that's my trial period. People can interview insanely well, but I'm not giving them 90 days to prove me that they're great. I want people and I tell them, you got 30 days to show me that you're awesome. And if it's not, I'm going to call it. So they know, I know we're on the same page. And I think if you can do that, it's going to be a lot better. And then train. culture from day one, all of our team goes through meeting with me, talking about our core values, we go through every single Monday, our vision of the company, our mission of the company, how we behave. I ingrain that from day one. And if that doesn't resonate with people, accountability is high for us. People respond and they have a daily slack reminder that asks what they were, what did they work on? And I'm checking to see if accountability is a natural byproduct of this person or if they're gonna shirk and dodge away from it. So everything I do from culture from day one is put into place. We have onboarding checklists with culture values. We have a culture mentor that they work with. You've got weekly check-ins for the first 30 days. Like you've got to ratchet those first 30 days. And I know it's hard and it's even hard when I'm like, ⁓ my gosh, I put so much into this person and now they're gone. But to me, that's an opportunity cost that I have to accept and realize that that's part of hiring. So when I look at this, You got to really make sure that culture is rock solid. You've got to know that all these different pieces are so great for you, that they're there for you, that they're going to help you, that culture is big. But my big thing is make sure you don't miss the red flags, cut bait f…
Full show notes at the publisherTiff and Nikki dive into all things tech + dentistry, including what practices can implement to make the day-to-day more efficient for staff and convenient for the patient — all while keeping that personal human touch. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: Tiff (00:00) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. I am back here today with you, with one of my favorite Dental A Team consultants. We have a few consultants, and they're all my favorite, but I'm here today with Miss Nikki Mack, who many of you have met over the course of the last few months that she has been with Dental A Team, and all of you know she has a vast amount of experience in the dental industry, and she's right here in town with myself and Britt and Gosh Pam, everybody's here. Dana's down south, but that's okay. Nikki's here and she's here with me today. And Nikki, welcome to the podcast. I am so excited to have you here today. We're gonna have so much fun together. You are a bundle of energy and a bundle of fun. And I'm just excited to be here. So how are you? How are you loving this like semi cloudy weather we've got and what's life in Nikki's world look like? Nikki Mack (00:49) Gosh. It's been fantastic. I'm super happy to be back. I had so much fun last time. ⁓ and actually I'm really excited about today's topic too. So that helps, obviously, but I can't wait to talk about it. ⁓ it's gorgeous. It's still over a hundred, but you know, we learned to live with what we can get. the gloomy skies, a little bit of humidity, maybe some sprinkles. Like that's I'm ready. That's a great way to kick off my weekend. So I'm here for it. Tiff (01:00) Yeah. Yeah. I know. I agree. I agree. This is like the one time, I don't know, in maybe my entire life of living in Arizona that I can't say, yeah, it's over a hundred, but it's a dry heat, 'cause it's over a hundred and humid. So I'm not really sure what to do with that. I'm like, it's cloudy, can I go outside? And I'm like, gosh, it's still really it's still a hundred and five. So I'm not sure w how to I'm not sure how to act. Nikki Mack (01:31) Yeah. Yeah. Cloudy skies make me want a sweater, but then I walked outside and I was like, ⁓ no, that's not. That's not what's happening here. So we might have a real monsoon season this year. I can't wait. Tiff (01:43) Yeah. I know. I know. We're supposed to. We're supposed to. So we will, listeners, we will keep you in the loop on the Arizona weather. I know everybody's always dying to know. I actually it's one of the most like most often asked questions that I get when I do travel. So I know you're all just dying to hear about it. We will keep you posted. ⁓ but I agree Yeah. Yeah. Always wanted to be a meteorologist, you know. Here we are. Here we are. Nikki Mack (01:58) Yeah. We're here for your weather updates and your dental ⁓ improvements. That's what we do. Tiff (02:17) but I agree, today's topic is actually really fun and ⁓ it's it's tech techie and I think tech in dentistry can mean so many things. And so we'll narrow down kind of what we're chatting about today and and to to make it easy, I think tech has been so like virtually involved since COVID shutdowns and we've just really spun in dentistry on so many different platforms. Be used. So tech in the dental industry no longer just means we have a mill, we have a 3D printing machine, we have scanners, and that is tech, but there's so much more that goes into it and that can be involved in that that term that I'm really excited to talk about it today. And Nikki, I'm excited. I know you love tech and the technical industry and AI and all that stuff, and And you you love to geek out on it ⁓ in your personal life. And like I think we all use those tools. So I'm excited to talk about it today. And and something that I want to start this out with today is really the idea of how much we use technology in our everyday lives and how much ⁓ convenience the American citizen is after. We want efficiency. Nikki Mack (03:16) Yeah. Tiff (03:37) We want convenience. We do a lot. We jam as much into our days as we possibly can. And so being able to use technology severely impacts our worlds. And gosh, even this morning we do every Friday, we do like our f our Friday fun Friday. What's the most fun thing we did? And Diana, one of our consultants on our team, she's like, gosh, this week I ordered my groceries and they were delivered to my house. And she's like, that was life changing because she's a busy mom. And I was like, that's so funny. And then today we're talking about this. I mean, gosh, technology. We're ordering, we're ordering our groceries, we're ordering Amazon. Like, how much stuff do you order on Amazon even when you want to support the other, the other companies and the other stores? But how much are we ordering on Amazon? Because it's easy, that ease of access. We're scheduling as many appointments online as we can. I just paid a bill to my healthcare office online and making sure that we can do all of these things from our phones. in the most convenient ways as possible has become such an industry standard and a and a life standard for so many of us. I want to chat about that today within the dental industry. And Nikki, you said something before we got on, you're taking some notes, you're doing some things, and I I want to highlight that note because first we'll go through kind of like what is technology, Nikki, in your in your world and the practices you're working with, how do you see practices really using Nikki Mack (04:47) Yeah. Tiff (05:01) technology in that fashion, like for efficiencies, for conveniences, what are you seeing in the dental industry that people can implement within their practices? Nikki Mack (05:11) So I think the key when we talk about it is we want to do things that make it easier for us and convenient for the patient, right? Like those should be kind of the two, I feel like key core pieces before we use anything. But We also have to keep in mind that technology doesn't have to replace that personal touch. Like they're still coming to see us. I'm still gonna greet them at the front desk, right? We're gonna ask how their vacation was. They're a part of our practice. But people do want that convenience and you want to help the office. So I see it in ways that can help the team be more efficient. ⁓ with like virtual appointment assistance, right? Online appointments. my gosh. I mean, in 2026, I can book my oil change. online right i don't even have to call the auto shop for that. People want to be able to book it online. And then that's one less phone call that you have to take that you can be interacting with a patient, right? Face to face, engaging. So a lot of ⁓ online appointment scheduling, ⁓ bill portals, billing reminders, being able to send off statements, people can respond to the link in that text and pay for it. ⁓ all of those kind of pieces usually are the key. And then not quite our topic today, but with diagnostics, right? There's a lot of technology available that can really help you get some valuable information to put in front of the patient too. But that leads us back to efficiency, right? And offering that convenience to patients. So I think it's really those touch points is where I see it the most. Tiff (06:25) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. And I think you you touched on that like AI component for the back office for diagnostic tools. We have we talked about earlier, you know, the scanners. We have all of these digital ⁓ so we say tech, right? But really we're talking about like digital technology, right? Because tech can be so broad. So we have all of these digital resources that really do c ⁓ create conveniences for the patient. And I think we undervalue even Nikki, what you just said, we ha we have them in the back office for diagnostic tools. I think we undervalue the convenience that that can create for our patients because the convenience of understanding, I'm not la I'm not logically sitting here thinking with my forefront brain, wow, being able to see this on the on the screen is so convenient and it's making my life so much easier. But me being Nikki Mack (07:25) Mm-hmm. ⁓ Tiff (07:29) A person who can understand this, do it in an efficient and an effective way, move my day quickly, say yes to scheduling, say yes to being healthier because I can visually see it. That's convenient and it's making my experience better. And it's also to your point, Nikki, all of those conveniences, appointment ⁓ scheduling online, confirming our appointments online, paying our bills online, seeing the Seeing the AI version of my mouth, seeing how my teeth have changed, all of those things are cutting down on the effort that the human is having to put out so that that bucket of time and energy and capacity that has been left because we were using it on something else. Now we filled this capacity bucket with extra time. I can now sit as a dental professional and spend more time connecting. with the human across from me because I'm not spending the time on the phone calling to schedule the appointment or answering to schedule the appointment or doing all these pieces. So not only is it more convenient, effective, and efficient for the patient, but the team is getting some time back as well when they're used correctly. And I think that's huge. I think it makes a massive difference. Nikki Mack (08:47) my gosh, it's it's so massive. I think people outside of dental probably don't realize it, but all of us in it, we know it, right? We live it. The single most valuable thing in a practice, in my opinion, is time because it doesn't matter if you're a one provider, four op practice, or if you have six providers and twenty-five ops or three locations, right? In dental, like Tiff (09:02) Yeah. Yeah. Nikki Mack (09:11) Honestly, every minute adds up. Every right, that's why we don't want popcorn assistants who have to keep getting ⁓ things that we need for the treatment. It's why we want to be able to get a hold of a patient for a balance or an appointment so we're not circling back. Like time is so important. And if we can find these opportunities that give us some of that task time back and allow us, to your point, to Connect with the patient, right? That's face-to-face time. That's patient time. That's such a win. And if that can also be something that's convenient for the patients and give them time back in their life, because who has time to sit and wait on hold? Right. They understand you're busy, but they might have a job too. So if I can pop online, get my question answered by you, it's win-win, in my opinion. Like it just works. Tiff (09:57) I agree. I completely agree. And on the flip side of that, well, I think I have two, I have two thoughts. So one thought is I have so many team members that and I would be this team member. I think if I weren't consulting and I didn't get to see it implemented in so many offices and so many practices correctly and effectively and work, I would be the team member that's like, heck no, you are not scheduling on my schedule without me doing it. I want the control, right? That that would be me. I don't even let Nikki Mack (10:20) Yeah. Tiff (10:27) the team schedule on my schedule right here. Like I am a control freak when it comes to my schedule. So I would be that team member, but I do have the availability to see it in so many different practices all over the country, even outside the country. We've got Canadian practices that are doing the same stuff we're doing. And I do get to see it work really well. ⁓ so I know on one side the teams are like, Tiffanie, Nikki, stop. Nikki Mack (10:55) Okay. Tiff (10:55) Do not, right? There there's so many team members that are like, do not. And I want to say that there is friction and friction can cost time and money, right? If the systems and this is Nikki's gonna talk about this a ton, but if the systems aren't right and we're not using the tool correctly, then there's friction. And what I mean by that, I have two personal stories that actually line up with this so beautifully. My first story is, ⁓ my fiance, he's got he's got two kids, wonderful human, beautiful children. His son needs ortho. Right. And so mom's like, Okay, took him to the the orthodontist, he's gonna get brackets on. It was yesterday, so it was a week from a week from the day. She's like, You just have to you have to call, set up the payments on your half or whatever, or pay it. He's like, Great, I'm gonna pay it. This man, I j I got home yesterday from travel. I said, Hey, Bryce, you know, Bryson got his his Brackets on, did you were you able to go to pay them? Because when I left last week, he tried calling them. The gal who answered the phone like, you know what? The girl who takes care of that, she's with a patient right now. She's gonna have to call you back maybe tomorrow. He's like, That's weird. Okay. He's a financial advisor. And so he's like, people are trying to give you money, take the money, right? So he's like, What is going on here? Like, what are these roadblocks? Yeah, like take the money. There should be some system. He's literally sat in our living room and said, I don't understand there should be some sort of system set up Nikki Mack (12:14) Really? my goodness. Tiff (12:24) But there's a if she's not free, someone else can take it. And I was like, Yes, system, you're you're right. You've been listening. So then I said, Okay, did they call you? He's No, and it's Friday. I tried calling them, they're closed. I was like, that's weird. So then fast forward, I'm gone for a couple days this week. I get home yesterday. I'm like, Did you ever pay them? He's like, I literally had to track them down to get them to take my money. And I thought, Nikki Mack (12:31) Mm-hmm. Tiff (12:49) That patient experience, right? That parent experience, patient experience at this orthodontist has been so not ruined, but impacted because the barrier to entry was so difficult, right? And I'm like, gosh, if they could have just sent a link, or taken the number over the phone is one thing, but if they could have just sent a link, he could have taken care of it, it would have been done, nobody would have thought twice about it, he wouldn't have been frustrated because he doesn't. have none of us have time to your point to call the practice and hunt them down to pay our bill right so that's my first story my second story is a bill I paid right I just told Nikki about this I'm like I paid I had a small bill due with my primary care physician I got the text or I got the email yesterday I was like this is phenomenal I love this right yes I will pay my bill so I pay it great got the email back it's taken care of well Nikki Mack (13:28) Okay. Tiff (13:45) 10 minutes before we get on this podcast call right now, I get an email. Same email. You have the same amount of money due to the primary care physician. And I'm like, well, this is frustrating because the barrier, again, the barrier of entry, right? And so efficiency matters. And then being able to use the efficient efficiency tools really matters beca…
Full show notes at the publisherEver feel like your office doesn't fit the standard benchmarks for growth? In this episode, Kiera and Dana riff on how to know whether going big or tightening the screws is the best way forward for your practice — including specific questions to ask yourself so you can get started on change today. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: Kiera Dent- Dental A Team (00:00) Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera and today's a lucky day. I get Dana on the podcast with me. Dana, she is Donuts with Dana. She's been my ride or die for so freaking long. I love this woman so much. And fun fact, I didn't quite prep her 100 % for this podcast and yet she still shows up for a podcast with me. So Dana, how you doing today? DAT-Dana (00:20) Doing pretty good. Listen, any podcast with you is a good time. So if I get time with Kiera, I'm showing up. Kiera Dent- Dental A Team (00:25) Well, I appreciate it because selfishly I needed to throw a few podcasts in the morning before a coaching call day. And I was like, ⁓ doing them solo. I'd rather have a consultant. So I just looked across the calendars and was like, which consultants are free and like threw them on people's calendars. And then Dana was like, I didn't even know that this was a podcast. So, but Dana, I equally feel the same. Like if I can snag you for a podcast, like let's roll girl. Let's have a good time. Dana. You're Dainty to a point, but you're also Dynamite Dana. And we just had a client who's looking to work with you. And I told them like, Dana, you don't take on new clients. Like it is a very rare season. Like you happen to have a few clients that just like you've grown them enough. They're too new level that they're not staying with us. They've been with you for freaking ever. And I was like, Dana has a very rare opening. And I remember this client was like, well, we want to meet Dana. And I was like, hold please, I'm just gonna send you a bunch of podcasts and if you need more than that, you just let me know. So, and when I was looking through them, it was like, Dynamite Dana on the podcast. And I was like, I think that one just got to stick for me Dana. Like it's the best one by far because you're a dynamic, you're dynamite and you just crush it for teams. So excited for today because today's topic is scale or simplify. Like what should growth look like in your practice? And this one I just felt was gonna be a fun rift with you and me because we have practices that. DAT-Dana (01:23) you Kiera Dent- Dental A Team (01:40) I think are on both sides of this coin and how do offices know? So I'm excited Dana to rift with the one and only dynamic dynamite, Dainty on the pod. DAT-Dana (01:52) It's getting longer and longer, but I love it. Kiera Dent- Dental A Team (01:56) But what's crazy is Dana like here's a fun fact about Dana that you guys might not know for those of you who've listened for a while great welcome if you haven't go back and listen to some of them Dana's been Don't is with Dana. I think still my favorite one, but ⁓ Dana has this wild memory you tell her one time like I can change alliterations on Dana multiple times which we've done with core values and Dana has the most current one always Dana I don't know how your memory does this cuz I'm like you'll remember that on whatever May date we're doing this podcast on that on that date it was dynamic dynamite Dainey and you're like yeah Kiera that was the latest one and I'm like how like I have a good memory but you even skunk me like it's impressive has this always been the case for you like did you crush everybody on memory like that game memory DAT-Dana (02:37) Yeah, it is. It's always been the case. And it's weird. I was trying to explain it to Britt and Nikki one time. And it's like, my brain just automatically like does alliterations and associates things with like other pieces that then I can, I don't know. It's very strange, but I'll take it. Kiera Dent- Dental A Team (02:51) I don't know. I love it. So, every year for our company holiday party, if you guys don't do it, it's a good time. have, I hope Danny still love it. Like, but we, do fun. Kiera's games are just made up games guys. And I have a great time and it's always changing the rules. Tiffanie always loses. Even if I try to like slightly ethically cheat for her, like I give her 10 tickets on the beginning and I'm like, Tiff, if you can't freaking win with that much of a jump. DAT-Dana (03:01) yeah. Kiera Dent- Dental A Team (03:20) but it's always about team trivia and Dana whoops, she skunks every single year she wins it because she just has all the memory. So maybe Dana, that's why you and I both love the holiday party. Cause I just like, even tried to make it to where you won't win it. Not cause I don't want you to, but I'm like, my gosh, like you skunk them every time. So it's a fun time. We, but I'm never letting Shelbi do it again. She made me do, do you remember Jeopardy last year? I had like 200 tickets a person that I had to like peel off and raffle off. DAT-Dana (03:32) We have... I know. Yes. Sift through, I know. Kiera Dent- Dental A Team (03:50) That Shelbi is like, that one was worth 15 tickets. And so if you guys want ideas, we're gonna talk about how to simplify our scale. Like that's our topic. But if you want us to rift on holiday party ideas, Dana, that just might have to be a topic. So email in because the marketing team has to see that you want to know this for me to make podcasts anymore. So email Hello@TheDentalATeam.com and just say like, we want to hear about all your holiday party ideas. Dana and I might get back on a rift. So, but Dana, let's talk about. scale or simplify, how do offices know? Like what are some of the defining pieces? Because I think this is something about Dental A Team I'm obsessed with is we don't have a set like model, like not every office has to have X, Y or Z, it's truly yours. like that also, I think for some offices, they just wanna be told. They wanna like, I want my mom to tell me what to do for college. Like mom, just tell me. And I think people are like, well, just tell me Dana, do I scale or do I simplify? Like how do people know? Like what's some, and again, this is a full blown, we had a few. Excuse me, talking points, I'm not here to follow any of them. I'm just here to talk like real life, like how do we guide offices if they should simplify our scale? What's kind of some of the things you start with within office? DAT-Dana (04:53) Yeah. So usually I'll honestly start with the owner and like, what do you truly love? Because if you don't love managing people, if you don't love doing the procedures that it takes to expand, if you don't love like running the business and crunching the numbers and doing those pieces, if that doesn't inspire you, then let's talk about simplifying, right? Where if, if really and truly that's why you show up every day is for those pieces, then let's talk about scaling, right? And what growth looks like and you know, what that looks like for you and it might be adding practices, might be expanding the space that you're in, it might be a variety of different things, but honestly and truly what do you love because I don't want to build something that at the end of the day just makes you dislike coming to the office more or exponentially harder. Kiera Dent- Dental A Team (05:49) I agree with you, Dana. I think this is a spot where almost giving you as an owner, the green light to say it's okay to stay where you're at. ⁓ I have an office in Florida and every time we got on a call, everybody around them was telling them to expand. So they had six operatories. They're producing 3.5 million. Their overhead, kid you not is 35%. And people were like, right. Like it's just, ⁓ it was a great practice and they worked four days a week. It was a husband, wife duo. And I remember we talked all the time and they're like, Kiera, everybody thinks that we should scale. Like we should get another practice. Like we've got this. And I was so annoyed because I'm like, everybody chirping in your ear doesn't realize what you want. What they wanted, their kids were a little, they're like, we want to be home with our kids. We have a very profitable practice. We're very happy with it. We have minimal debt on it and it's just fulfilling our life. And what we want to do is we want to have our summers. We want to go golfing with the boys. We want to. get on a boat and go take, they take a month off and they go travel because they can't and they can still pay their team while they're gone. And I think for them, they actually hit this spot of growth. And what they were looking for is they didn't want to necessarily grow the practice. They practice like who would change that up? mean, they've got the, they dropped out of insurance. Like I'm talking, they have the sweetest of the suite. They work six to three. They're off every day at three o'clock. Like you want to make a dream life for people that to me was like their dream life. And so when I looked at it, But what they did is they got stagnated and they just needed something to fulfill. So they actually then went into like church groups and community groups and she got into bodybuilding, which Dana and I can appreciate. Like she got very obsessive about like working out and putting in and spending her time in her physical health. And he spent his time in like Bible study and giving back in the community that way that I feel that if there's a spot, Dana, like you said, know thyself and be free. And it might be that you want to scale, but you don't want to scale your practice. You just need to go find another avenue of fulfillment that can be in varying shades. That doesn't necessarily need to be the practice. So I don't know because I'm such a like, I love to grow, but I have to ask myself like, why am I growing? it for my own ego? And I'm like, no, I want to like help 500 dentists. Like we're at like a hundred, 200 dentists. Like for me, how do I help 500 dentists? And then how am going to help a thousand dentists? And how do we do that as a company? And that to me, is the MO more than the dollars is like the big MO is big impact in dentistry. And so it's the number of dentists that we serve and we help. ⁓ That's what lights me up. But like Dana said, managing the team screw that we're bringing on a C-suite for a reason. Like I don't want to deal with that. I don't want to, like I need to build and to create. And that was, makes me happy. ⁓ But I think you do it because you want to do it, not because you feel like everybody else around you does it. But Dana, like, I don't know how to, we can say this on a podcast, but like, how do you really help a dentist? see that that's okay. I don't know, because we had another dentist who came to our mastermind in person and she told me, said, Kiera, I'm not like them. Like I don't have big dreams. Like I'm perfectly content doing nonprofit dentistry and taking my team on nonprofit trips. And I was like, how did you miss the loud blaring message that I preach from ups on stage? Like We don't care what you do. Like there's a dentist who works three days a week and he's so freaking happy. And I've got a dentist who's working like six days a week and he's so freaking happy. And she's so happy. Like ultimately it's not about production. It's not about days you're working. It's not about size of practice. It's about what makes you happy. But Dana, I feel like people don't see that. And they're like, no, I need to be bigger or I need to do this. Otherwise I'm failing. I don't know. What are your thoughts on that? DAT-Dana (09:24) Yeah, and I think it is having an honest conversation that sometimes like comparison is the thief of joy. And like you said, know thyself and be free. And so oftentimes, I will put together just like, a couple options, right? Okay, so you could do this, and this is what this would look like. So we could expand the practice, it could have this many ops in order to fill this many ops, we're gonna have to bring in an associate, right? And sometimes when you map out, you go down the road of, okay, now this is going to be hiring this many people. And this is going to be the process of creating a new building and this is, they kind of start to see, right? And they're like, I always talk to them about, okay, think about these plans, let's walk them through together. And like, does that make you feel joyful, excited, giddy, inspired, motivated? Or does that feel like it's going to be more work, daunting, more stress, those types of pieces? And yes, sometimes even the growth that you want has a little bit of stress added, right? Or has a little bit more work added in the beginning. But you should be truly excited Kiera Dent- Dental A Team (10:12) Yes. Mm-hmm. DAT-Dana (10:23) And you should be ready to tackle it and feeling refreshed, not looking at it and kind of feeling like, my gosh, I'm already burnt out just even thinking about the plan. Kiera Dent- Dental A Team (10:32) I would agree with you. And I think that there's like a, I think that's a good litmus test that you brought up Dana of like, how do I feel? Like, is that like a heavy weight and burden? Because like for me building a C-suite now in the company that actually freaking lights me up. Like I'm like, all right, let's like try to figure this out. I get excited to learn that piece of the business ⁓ building out and how can we do these different pieces? Like I get really excited, like building the client journeys. Those things still like excite me. But a few years ago when we talked about growing, I was like hard no. It was a like put a stop on everything. If you ask me to build one more thing, I'm tapped. Like I just didn't have it in me. And so I also hope people realize that like just because you want something today or you don't want something today, that doesn't mean it's a forever process. Like it can evolve and it can morph with you. And timing is everything. Like Dana, there's some offices where I feel like they're like sleepers and they're just asleep and asleep and asleep. And then all of a sudden like, and I'm going to expand to 10 ops. And you're like, All right, sweet. Like you and I both have a client in Nebraska and it was like sleepy client just going along status quo. And then all of a it's like, and I'm going to buy the building next door and I'm adding on to dentists. we're like, great, you're lit up for this. let's build it. So I think when people, don't know, maybe this can help people. My family was always like, where are going to move? Jason and I, this is a conversation we talked about on a regular basis. And someone said the other day, they were like, I'm going to move to the East coast. And I was like, you really want to like build your family there. And she said, Kiera, it's not forever. Like I could just go live there for two years and I could move back to the West coast. And I think sometimes we believe like I do that where I live is my forever permanent, like non-negotiable. And if I'm going to sca…
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