Operations in Action

Show Notes

In this episode of the Shared Practices Podcast, Richard Low and Scott Leune explore how to implement operations in a dental practice. They discuss real-world strategies for optimizing patient flow, managing key financial metrics, and building a culture of accountability within the team. This episode offers actionable insights for dentists ready to take their operations to the next level. Key Highlights: 

1. Optimizing Patient Flow: Discover how streamlined patient scheduling and flow are critical to practice efficiency and profitability.
2. Tracking Financial Metrics: Richard and Scott discuss the importance of monitoring key financial indicators to align operations with practice goals.
3. Building Accountability within Teams: Learn how to foster accountability across your team by setting clear expectations and creating reliable systems to manage performance.

 

 

Ready to see operations in action? Tune in now to learn how to implement these strategies and run your practice more efficiently!

 

 

Have a question or topic you want us to cover? Reach out to us on social media or our website at www.sharedpractices.com. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review if you enjoyed this episode!

What is Shared Practices | Your Dental Roadmap through Practice Ownership?

A bootcamp in small business ownership and practice management for dentists, giving the new graduate a roadmap to successful practice ownership. We interview the best dentists, experts, consultants and more on our weekly show. Here's the topics we will be covering in our 8 Seasons:
1. First Years as a Dentist
2. Think Like a Business Owner
3. Money and Numbers
4. Startups, Acquisitions, and Partnerships
5. Internal Systems
6. Marketing & Growth
7. Leadership, Vision and Culture
8. Beyond Dentistry
Go to SharedPractices.com to download the 8 Season Roadmap.

Host Track: :
Welcome to the Shared Practices Podcast 2.0. I'm here with my co-host, Dr. Scott Luna.

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We are continuing this conversation about the dental CEO, and we are in the

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depths of discussing one of three pillars, managing operations.

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Scott, give us a little bit of, you know, welcome to the show and give us a

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little bit of the framework overall so people can find themselves in this overall journey.

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Yeah, well, by the way, I'm glad I'm even on the show because my puppy chewed

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the power cord that went to the major internet box I've got for my entire house

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and the building behind it.

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And so I didn't have internet for a while. But anyway, that's what I'm dealing

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with. But sure, let's just dive into dentistry.

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I love this topic, the CEO. So if you haven't heard the previous episodes,

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you really need to stop and go back and listen to them.

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But as a review, to be a dental CEO might mean to manage three big pillars.

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One is operations. The second is how we spend money, the expenses.

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And the third is managing the people. The people obviously is what's doing everything.

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That's how we make money and spend money. We have to have accountability.

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We have to have a whole process of managing them that we're going to talk about later.

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Managing how we spend money is insanely important, but we've started with the

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first pillar, operations. How do we create the collections?

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The operations is what everyone does every day. And as a CEO,

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in the last few episodes, we talked about this concept of a really intelligent

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way of looking at numbers.

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We've got these five areas, patient flow, diagnosis, case acceptance,

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capacity and collections.

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And we identified ways in each of those five areas to look at a simple number

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and to know immediately, are we are we good or bad? Are we healthy or not?

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You know, is this practice needing our attention? Do we need to diagnose treatment

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for our own business as a CEO, or are we good?

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So that was kind of a quick little general review, but you have to go listen

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to those episodes because we dove into a lot of detail.

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Yeah. And this is, my favorite part of this is when we get to talk about application.

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So rubber meets the road, where does stuff break? What actually happens in dental practices?

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And what can we do about it? And so now that we've talked about what we should be looking at,

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we've mentioned some areas of improvement, but I do want to bring and talk through

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specific examples, common examples where we see practices that are broken.

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And a lot of times we can self-diagnose as like, yeah, we're not good at this.

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Maybe we suck at this one thing in our dental practice or there's room for improvement. But.

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Knowing how to improve or where to go or what resources to rely upon,

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how to train these systems or build these systems, policies into our practices,

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a lot of dentists want to be pointed in the right direction.

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And this might even be creating future episodes as we talk about this.

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We'll hit a topic and say, here's the high level, and maybe we need to come

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back and do a series on this specific topic.

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But the first thing that comes to mind was in

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that first area of you

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know we were talking about patient flow we talked about retention

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we talked about marketing activities where

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a lot of dentists kind of get distracted in in that as being the important thing

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but then the call volume the the call miss rate as well as the call conversion

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i've been guilty of this where i know that we're not in my specific offices

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that I've run in the past,

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I know we're not handling the call side of things great.

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I know that we're not taking control of the conversation, but I almost,

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I don't have the skills, even though I've talked about this and podcasted,

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I don't have the skills to train

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my team on like what's my, in my head around what we should be doing.

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And, and so how do you help dentists to figure out, you know,

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we have our coaches work with the team members.

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We almost bypass the dentist at shared practices. It's like,

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let's get our coach coaching the dentist on the high level things.

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And then you can kind of leave the room and we're going to train the team on

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answering phones and building these systems.

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But I want to hear your perspective on where to go to get better at call conversion

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and answering the phones.

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Well, yeah, let's back up. I'd like to use an analogy for a second,

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just to make sure everyone listening is kind of on the same page here.

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So if we think to a really skilled surgeon, you know, in the medical space,

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you know, what does it mean to be a skilled surgeon?

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It means that number one, they can diagnose incredibly well,

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they can see that there's disease, and they can diagnose the treatment needed, right?

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So they can see the disease, and they can diagnose what to do about it.

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And then next to be a really skilled surgeon, they have to be able to implement that diagnosis.

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They have to actually be able to perform the procedure, surgical procedure.

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If we use that analogy to being a CEO, we need to be able to diagnose the problem

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really well to see it that there's disease, but also to know what the solution is.

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And we have to be able to implement that solution really well.

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We in dentistry so often fail in these three moments, but especially the first

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one, to not even see the disease.

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And that's why it's taken so long for dentistry to kind of adopt the concept of metrics tracking.

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It's taken dentistry so long to even understand how do we use metrics to help us find the disease.

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Most dentists don't even know national averages, yet they know if we've got

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a four or five millimeter pocket, we might have periodontal disease.

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They don't know if we have phones disease. They don't know if we have reappointment disease.

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They haven't been taught or learned kind of what that disease looks like.

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So I know that, you know, probably everyone listening to this knows that I give

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these really like intense like training seminars, these events that you and

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many others have been to.

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And when I started giving those events, it was all around like teaching people

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how to do the surgical procedure on their practice.

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And over time, I realized they couldn't even see the disease.

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So it's had to, of course, now take this holistic approach and teach people

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how to actually find the disease in a very intelligent way, in a very kind of efficient way.

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So I think that that's where we're at. Before we can even say,

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what do we say on the phone?

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We need to understand that we need to see the disease with the right number.

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So start there. how do we even know we have

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a problem on the phone you know we need to have the

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missed call rate the conversion rate in front of us and if you're not getting

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that through ai or through you know your marketing company might have some of

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that technology if you're not hand auditing it maybe you have to do that you

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you will never be able to understand if there's disease there so we have to have that first well.

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Then then let me dig on that a little bit,

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There's voice over IP, there's regular calling. Depending on your marketing

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company, they might be call tracking depending.

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They've got different numbers to track different marketing efforts.

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If someone is fairly unsophisticated in this, what's the minimum to start?

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Or if you were doing a startup and you could design the system the way you'd

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want to, how can you get the most data out of your phones?

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Well, I don't know if I'd get the most data I can possibly get.

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I'd want to get a very nice sampling of the right data.

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So typically, you can run, there's

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a couple companies out there that allow you to run AI on your phones.

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The AI will listen to the phone call and will tell you things like, did you answer or not?

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If you did answer, did they convert to an appointment or not?

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How much was that potential phone call worth? Did they ask about certain procedures?

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They ask about insurance?

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Did you mishandle the call or not? You're literally having this AI agent auditing

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your call for you. There's a couple of companies that do that.

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Also, the marketing company that I've been using for years has also developed

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their own AI that does it.

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It does it specifically on the new patient leads.

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That's the most important lead to get this information on.

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We don't necessarily need to know, you know, what some salesperson said when

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they called our practice trying to sell us Ozarka water.

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You know, we want the data on specifically the new patient calls the most valuable.

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So we need to have that set up first. Otherwise, we'll never see the disease.

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We have to take that x-ray on our phones.

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And once we get that x-ray, as we've spoken about in the previous episodes,

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the two main numbers we're looking at is, are we answering calls?

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And if we are, are they scheduling?

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And if we're answering them, that has to be set up properly.

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Answering more calls doesn't mean you train your team to answer more calls.

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They're already trying to answer calls. What are you going to train them on?

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Answering more calls is probably tweaking your phone system structure while

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also utilizing a virtual employee or virtual answering service that can schedule patients.

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That's like that ingredient that you would prescribe. That's the medication

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you would prescribe if you found phone disease.

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You'd say, okay, take this pill. If you need to answer more calls,

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take the virtual assistant pill.

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And, you know, it's so interesting to me how few dental offices have incorporated virtual assistants.

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And I think it's because they don't know that they've got this cancer.

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They don't know they're sick to begin with. So they don't think they need to

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take this medicine. Does that make sense?

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Yeah. And I would say the side effects of these medicine that people are scared

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of is, number one, they don't want to pay for the AI software.

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But you think about how much money goes into marketing when you are spending

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marketing dollars and how valuable a new patient is, one more new patient per

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month, two, you know, five,

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the investment in the dental AI software on top of whatever else you're doing,

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and the investment of time and effort to set these things up ahead of time or

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to work with a virtual assistant or to work with a company.

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I think there is a fear of the amount of cost and disruption that these efforts experts will take.

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And once again, this is important, non-urgent tasks that there are going to

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be other fires to put out.

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There's going to be resistance from the team of like, we're doing a good job of this doc.

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Like I swear we're catching the calls and we don't need to change our phone

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system and change all of this.

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So yeah, let's dive into that. So, cause hold on, you know, all this cost,

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all this fear, all this pain, all this conflict about maybe using AI or,

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to see if there's a problem.

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I tell you what might cause fear or cause for pain is getting a colonoscopy.

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But my Lord, if you find out you've got colon cancer, you've just saved your life by doing it.

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Using AI is way easier than a colonoscopy and it's going to make you a whole

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lot of money if you find that you've got some kind of issues there on the phones.

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Let's make this simple for a second. The national average practice,

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just the national average, they answer 68 out of 100 new patient calls.

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And of the 68 they answer, they end up scheduling 29 appointments.

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That's national average.

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So 100 new patients called. We paid for marketing for 100.

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And we ended up with 29 appointments because we missed some calls and we didn't

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convert some calls. We ended up with 29 appointments.

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If we if we make that number bigger, let's say a practice usually gets 100 new patients a month.

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Well, that means they could have had like 300. Right?

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If I were go to practice and I were say, Hey, if we utilize AI software for

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a few hundred bucks a month, and we figure out what's going on on your phones,

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and we correct some of these issues, we could take you from 100 new patients

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a month to 200 new patients a month, without more marketing,

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Now, suddenly that like sounds like a very smart thing to do.

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Right.

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You see, we need to bring it down to like, how does it impact me, the dentist?

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Why do I care? Why do I want to go through the trouble of putting AI software

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in place to tell me if I've got cancer and then the trouble of treating the cancer?

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Well, I mean, you're going to make a lot of return on this without even considering

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how much a new patient is worth.

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Just the thought of being able to have twice as many new patients,

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without having to hire some rock stars of this or a rock star of that and move

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your practice to an amazing location or redo all of your facility or double

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your marketing budget. All of that's painful.

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But putting AI software in place and training your two or three front office

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people, that's so much easier than a colonoscopy.

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You can get that done. Does that make sense?

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Yeah. And that's why I wanted to double down on this because I think there is

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a hesitancy and a reservation to do this.

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And we're going to get to this in the future episodes.

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When you change things, this is going to take a cycle of change and training and auditing.

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And so that commitment to, I am convicted of why this is a problem.

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I can see the data and I want to do something about it.

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And it is going to be disruptive for a little while, but the value is on the other end.

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I think that's a horse that we can keep beating because I think people are missing

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the opportunity and they're letting their fears and their resistance around

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this issue stopping them from getting there and a lack of knowledge.

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They maybe don't have the skills to teach the team members.

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That's where I started with this. Often dentists don't even know how to help

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their team members and they need a coach.

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They need someone who can come in and work with their team on these skills.

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Yeah, so let me reiterate this again. The three components to fixing something

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like what I introduced at least initially, the three components of an excellent

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surgeon is to be able to see the disease, diagnose the treatment and perform the treatment.

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So we need to be able to see a problem on the phones.

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We need to be able to diagnose what needs to be done about it.

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And then we need to actually be able to implement that, that solution, right?

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So seeing the problem is step one. That's through, for example,

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the AI issue, the AI product, the AI service, then we need to know,

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okay, what do we do about it? What's actually best practices?

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How am I supposed to answer more calls? How am I supposed to schedule more patients?

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That's actually why most people come to my events is because we go through like

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100 of those things within two days and they walk out like, aha,

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I know now how to do all of these business procedures, right?

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I've just in one weekend learned a hundred new business procedures,

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how to fix these diseases, right? So they have to know how.

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And so how do we answer more phones and how do we convert more patients is the

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next thing to talk about.

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And then of course, after they know how, well, shoot, knowing how is not enough.

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You have to actually do, you have to implement.

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And implementing is always going to be micromanaged by you, the leader.

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Even if you're using a coach, or a consultant, or an office manager,

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it will still be micromanaged by the leader.

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It will take less time. If you utilize other people to help you,

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it will be less work for you.

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But there's always going to be a phase of micromanaging the implementation of

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this to get it to stick all the way.

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So we've talked about phones, you know, How do I see the disease? That's going to be AI.

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Now we need to say, okay, well, what do I, if I have this disease,

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how do I know how to treat it?

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So how do we treat a missed call rate problem or how do we treat a conversion

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rate problem? Is that where we should go next?

Host Track: :
Yeah. And, you know, we're not going to be able to get to all the five knobs

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that we're talking about, but I just wanted to follow this through of from these

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like three surgical, you know,

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parts of being a great surgeon and see what that looks like.

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Because I think some of our listeners, when they hear all of these things,

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there's this flood of, oh, these are great ideas, and then nothing happens.

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And so walking them through the journey of addressing some of the bad data that

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they're getting back or the areas for improvement is worthwhile, in my opinion.

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So we've set up AI because we should, as a CEO, know what's happening on the

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phones because it impacts dramatically our big first knob.

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And we find out with AI, oh, we're missing too many phone calls.

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Now we've identified the disease. We see it on the AI x-ray.

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There it is. We're missing too many calls.

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Now, how do we treat that disease? All right.

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Well, one solution would be

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when we miss a call, we forward that call to a virtual employee of ours.

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We don't have one, but we understand that that is one prescription to solve

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this disease is the pill of having a virtual assistant.

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So we would find a company that has virtual assistants. And let me walk you

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through what that's like, by the way, when you have a virtual assistant.

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It is and it's changed dramatically over the last couple of years in such a good way.

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So there's companies that operate in other countries in the world.

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And they have offices, office buildings, they have managers and trainers for

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all of these virtual people that we quote unquote hire.

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And if we're wanting to hire someone to help us answer these phone calls,

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we would tell the company, we want to hire someone full time or part time,

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and the company would line up five or six people to interview.

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And we'd interview them over Zoom. These are college educated.

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They speak English. They can speak Spanish.

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In their country, this is a coveted job. It's a well-paying job for them.

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It's a respectable job. They want the job. They don't want to lose it.

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I don't know about you, but I don't always feel like dental employees in the

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US and Canada feel the same way.

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Or call center employees in the US.

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Yeah, exactly. We're call center employees. Exactly. There's no website that

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you go to where you can just line up six interviews and they all show up and

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they're all college educated and can speak well and they really want the job.

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So they line up these people and we interview them over Zoom and we pick one.

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And they are going to log in every day and only work for us, only our practice.

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They are coming somewhat trained. They've gone through certain training sessions

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and modules before we've interviewed them.

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So they're coming somewhat trained, but they're not obviously trained on us.

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So we are going to train them like we would train a regular employee on us.

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And they'd log in every day in Zoom. I'd get a report on what they did and they would be live.

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I could talk to them every single day and they're going to do what we assign to them.

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And it might cost us $13 or $14 an hour, all in.

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No payroll taxes, no benefits.

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They're not getting Friday COVID. They're not taking maternity leave.

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You know, there's no added cost. They're not complaining that it's too hot or

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too cold in the practice.

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Like they are all in 13 or 14 an hour performing this function.

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All right. So our primary purpose in this hypothetical is that they answer the calls we miss.

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Well, that means they're going to be bored most of the day because we don't answer.

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We don't miss calls every minute of the day. So how about we have them do insurance

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verification, or maybe we have them process EOBs, or we have them confirm appointments.

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Or I've got some practices that I coach one-on-one, for example,

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that actually have them do check-in.

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We've got a digital check-in process with a screen, with this person there to

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help answer any questions patients might have and to greet them.

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It's not kind of normal for most practices to do it that way,

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but I'm just kind of like trying to open your mind a bit.

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So we've got this virtual assistant whose primary role actually isn't answering the phones.

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They're busy all day long verifying insurance and confirming appointments.

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But when we miss a call in the practice, it's after two rings transferred to

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them, and then they answer the call and save it.

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If they only have, excuse me, if they have a 90% answer rate,

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because they only get one call at a time, then that means 90% of our missed

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calls get saved overnight.

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Overnight. That hasn't changed the conversion rate yet, but it's changed the

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missed call rate. And in this hypothetical, we said that was our problem.

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Overnight, it's solved. And I've got now this employee that is not only enabling

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us to have tens of more patients per month and all that that's worth,

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but they're also performing other tasks that my team doesn't have to perform

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now. Does that make sense?

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Yes. And I'm grateful that you walked through this because,

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I remember in the early days of call centers in dentistry,

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one of the concerns was like, okay I'm getting

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a different call center person maybe they're trained on a few

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practices they're bouncing back and forth maybe the call center scales and the

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there was a high quality at first of call center people who were answering and

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as they scale the quality kind of isn't there or there's turnover and the person

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that we used to be working with isn't there the thing I like about this process a lot is,

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They really are like an employee of the practice and you can get to know them

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and train them and invest in them.

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And the return is there. The security is there.

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And that process is different than what it has meant in the past to outsource these missed calls.

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And I've seen personally, as we've done some outsourcing of answering calls

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at our group, that there's a huge difference between one person and the next.

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You know, you might have a very skilled, very articulate, very low accent individual

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answering the calls over here.

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And if you scale and eventually that's not the person who's answering the phones.

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So I just I think it's worth pointing out the differences between solutions

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in the past and what this looks like now.

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Well, obviously, things change, right?

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So the past internet speeds weren't fast enough to do the job that's done today.

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And technology wasn't efficient enough either.

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So in the past, in order to get costs down and to get kind of everything making

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sense, you had to run volume, you had to have call center setups.

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And I built probably one of the first big ones in dentistry,

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you know, back in the day when just internet wasn't even fast enough to do it well.

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And that had a domino effect of issues and inconsistencies in quality and so

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forth that you've described.

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However, if you're listening to this, don't let old medicines side effects make

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you think that there's a problem with the new medication that doesn't have a side effect.

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And let's not let the fear of side effects make you ignore that you've got the

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cancer to begin with, right? We have to solve this problem.

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So step one is identify that you've got the cancer. Yes, we're missing calls.

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We have to fix the cancer some way.

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We might use a little radiation, we may use a little chemo, we may do a little

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surgery, but we have to get that cancer stopped.

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Right now, what I'm telling you in this example, in this hypothetical,

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is a really low side effect medication for your missed call cancer is utilizing a virtual assistant.

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And if that person we hired, by the way, doesn't work out, they end up not being

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what we want, then within a week, we're interviewing five more.

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Like we have what is practically

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an unlimited list of people to

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try to find the perfect fit wouldn't

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it be nice if that's how dentistry was like we needed an assistant so let's

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just keep using them until we find the perfect one because they're all waiting

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to be tried like that'd be great if that was actually reality it is when it

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comes to virtual assistants so that overnight solves the problem.

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However, that's just the treatment.

Guest Track::
We haven't talked about actually implementing the treatment,

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performing the procedure, right?

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So, step one was identifying the disease.

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Step two is knowing how to treat it. But step three is actually implementing that plan.

Guest Track::
We need to implement a virtual assistant plan in this hypothetical.

Host Track: :
So can I start with a question here, which is, if we're talking about treatment

Host Track: :
plan, can we talk about treatment length of implementation?

Host Track: :
So someone's coming in and they don't have AI set up. They don't know their

Host Track: :
missed call rate. They don't have a virtual assistant.

Host Track: :
What would be an expectation of like to really overhaul, build new systems,

Host Track: :
build new policies, implement an audit to the point where this is not like a

Host Track: :
top priority micromanagement of the dental CEO and they can move to other higher

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need areas of the practice as the main focus, the main change initiative?

Host Track: :
Is this a three-month process? Is this a six-month process?

Host Track: :
You know, setting expectations for the speed of change and implementation before

Host Track: :
we get into the other parts of execution.

Guest Track::
Well, you can kind of take maybe two different approaches to this.

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One approach says, before I implement anything, I'm going to do a complete scan

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of my whole business to know all the broken pieces.

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So I know what to prioritize. I know what's most important, what I need to focus

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on first. So what that scan means is I'm going to get metrics tracking set up.

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I'm going to get AI set up on the phones, for example.

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I'm going to get everything I need so that I can actually build my CEO dashboard

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or set of numbers so then I can see if I have any cancer anywhere.

Guest Track::
That's one approach. Let's scan the whole thing first and come up with a big strategic plan.

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And then we're just going to do one thing at a time. We're going to fix one

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little spot at a time. That's one healthy approach.

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Another approach says, you know, I already have a problem. I already know I have a cancer over here.

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I don't want to go through the time and the trouble to scan everything and to

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understand everything and to come up with one big strategic plan.

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I'd rather play whack-a-mole.

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I'd rather just, I know I got cancer here.

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I don't need to know should it be the most important thing we address or not

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because it just pisses me off and I'm just going to want it fixed right now

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because I heard them answer that phone that way and I need it fixed so we're

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just going to fix that so in that case we're going to run AI,

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just to know how bad is that cancer over there and then we're just going to fix that thing,

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So I, as a coach, of course, try to do the first one.

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Let's scan the whole practice. Let's find all the moments of cancer and let's

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come up with a big strategic plan.

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But then when we prioritize the plan, sometimes the emotional pain points might

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make their way up to the top, even if they're not technically as important as something else.

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If it's an emotional pain point, sometimes we need to get that out of the way.

Guest Track::
So I see that as the best thing. Now, to answer your question more specifically

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about phones, what does it take to get AI?

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Realistically, you're talking about a couple of weeks to get the company on

Guest Track::
the phone, to hire them, to sign the contracts, to integrate with your phone

Guest Track::
system and solve any riddles that there are on the technology.

Guest Track::
And then you're going to need maybe about another couple of weeks to a month

Guest Track::
of data to know, okay, how big of an issue do you have?

Guest Track::
So maybe we call that a month or a month and a half.

Guest Track::
And now we know we have cancer. All right. Now, what does it take to fix the

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cancer on hiring a virtual assistant company?

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That's going to take another two to four weeks of onboarding and,

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you know, interviewing and training.

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So now we're maybe in it two, two and a half months. And then it's going to

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take another two to four weeks of micromanaged implementation and auditing to

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make sure it sticks and make sure that most of the wrinkles are ironed out.

Guest Track::
So it could really take a quarter from finding the cancer to completely eradicating it.

Guest Track::
And it doesn't have to be the only thing you focus on.

Guest Track::
You want to kind of start one thing at a time.

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But I would be totally fine with starting this in January, and it takes three

Guest Track::
months to complete, but starting something else in February.

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And because we can manage the implementation more than one thing at a time,

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but starting one at a time makes the heaviest weight of it happen separately from the other stuff.

Guest Track::
Well, phases it out, staggers it.

Host Track: :
And the creating of the plan, and here are the steps, and then the executing

Host Track: :
of that plan and reinforcing and then eventually auditing.

Host Track: :
I really appreciate you walking through that because I think sometimes people

Host Track: :
can hear all this information in a podcast, but seeing that,

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followed through, here's some expectations, here is an example of what this

Host Track: :
would look like, means that someone's like, okay, I can now fit that in my brain

Host Track: :
into the practice and what that would look like.

Host Track: :
And now it's a matter of executing. So...

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Yeah, the problem is who's executing?

Host Track: :
Yes.

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It's this dentist owner that's like burnout in part from their career.

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They're also burnout at the micro level from the day.

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They're struggling with emotional issues and conflicts in the practice with

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staff, with patients, with themselves, with their spouse.

Guest Track::
They're struggling with maybe health issues sometimes, financial issues sometimes.

Guest Track::
And their solution to all of this has been to just try to put their head down,

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squeeze more people in and get through the day and go binge on something to

Guest Track::
like overcome this feeling only to see it all happen again the next day.

Guest Track::
So while having a podcast and talking about it is definitely a cool thing to

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do and it's educational, for a lot of people it's merely theoretical until they're

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able to break their own cycle.

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And a lot of people to break it, they need a personal trainer of dentistry to help them,

Guest Track::
see the path and to help them get pushed up that path to kind of break these

Guest Track::
cycles and to really have the support they need to put in this kind of new way,

Guest Track::
this new chapter of their practice, their new chapter of their career.

Guest Track::
Now, some people, they wake up at 4.30 in the morning to work out and they're

Guest Track::
on a meal plan and they listen to self-help podcasts and they're a leader in

Guest Track::
their church and everyone looks at them like their life is buttoned up and they

Guest Track::
may not need someone coaching them.

Guest Track::
I would say that's a phase they're in. I think a lot of us go through phases

Guest Track::
where we are buttoned up and then we might come unbuttoned.

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But even the person that's buttoned up, even that Olympic quality athlete has their own coach.

Guest Track::
So, you know, I think that it's part of the formula that's been missing in decades past.

Guest Track::
In decades past, you didn't have coaches, you had kind of cookie cutter consultants

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with cookie cutter manuals to do cookie cutter things.

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I think we're in the era now where we really understand that there's this emotional,

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this mental component to becoming a highly effective CEO that goes beyond the

Guest Track::
mechanics of operations and financials and team management,

Guest Track::
but it also gets into the mindset and the habits of the actual person, the actual CEO,

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and they need support and help if they intend to achieve the highest level in

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the fastest amount of time.

Host Track: :
I couldn't agree more. And I laughed when you said that might be a phase because

Host Track: :
that is for me, it's that was definitely a phase.

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And then there was a phase where everything came unbuttoned.

Host Track: :
And now I'm back in the, you know, up at 415 and super excited about all these

Host Track: :
things, have all these systems implemented and have a lot of momentum.

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And, you know, I just paid for 20K of coaching with two different programs in

Host Track: :
the last three weeks because I value that.

Host Track: :
And, And I, you know, none of it's dentistry related and all of it's very high impact and high value.

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So, you know, we love having our coaches that end up serving a lot of roles

Host Track: :
in terms of execution. But also, you know, they tell me they're like,

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sometimes we're a counselor.

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Sometimes we're emotional support. Sometimes we're digging into other things

Host Track: :
that are getting in the way.

Host Track: :
And that's part of the fun of being involved in helping a dentist grow a practice

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is there's a lot to work through. There's a lot to process, and there's a lot

Host Track: :
of support needed on different levels.

Host Track: :
And it's not just, like you said, implementation and execution.

Guest Track::
That's right. You know, I think when I lecture, it's a massive amount of content,

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of information delivery, of understanding how to see the disease and understanding

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exactly what you need to do to fix it.

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When I coach, I'm doing less of that because I've already taught them how to do it.

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When I coach people one-on-one, and these are sometimes super entrepreneurial

Guest Track::
people, but sometimes they're like right out of school and they just need to

Guest Track::
make a million dollars take home pay as soon as possible to pay down their debt, right?

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I'm coaching a whole lot more on like, hey, we got stuff to do next month. Let's stay on track.

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Let's talk through the problems and the hiccups that are holding you back from that.

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Like it becomes a lot more about the implementation side of change.

Guest Track::
So these events in my life, at least, are more about like identifying the need

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to change and teaching what to do,

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The coaching is about actually getting it done. And I'm highly fulfilled in

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my career doing those things for people.

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And unfortunately for me, I have learned these things, the cliche,

Guest Track::
the hard way, on the streets with the scars and the blood and the sweat and the tears.

Guest Track::
And luckily, I think for me, the way my brain thinks in these outlines and the fact I've.

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Kind of been open-minded with change. It's allowed me to help other people achieve

Guest Track::
higher levels than I did when I was kind of in their position,

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much higher levels than I did.

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And that's actually a really weird feeling.

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Sometimes my wife will talk about it. She's like, man, these people are doing better than you did.

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And it's kind of a weird thing because I'm the teacher. I'm supposed to be the

Guest Track::
one that achieved, right?

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The reality was, I was in the front, I got all the arrows.

Guest Track::
And I can now tell them, you know, how to get through that in a healthier way.

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And it is super fulfilling for me.

Host Track: :
My wife made a comment to me earlier today about exactly that thing.

Host Track: :
And it still comes up. So this has been a phenomenal deep dive.

Host Track: :
Thank you for indulging me on what this looks like implemented.

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Before we move on to these other pillars.

Host Track: :
And in these next episodes, we're going to be discussing the next two pillars

Host Track: :
of managing finances, as well as managing people, which is more of the rubber

Host Track: :
meets the road, especially on the people end than the auditing and all of that.

Host Track: :
So anything to wrap us up before we move on to this discussion of managing finances?

Guest Track::
You know, if you're listening to this, and if any of this is speaking to you,

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it's probably a sign that you are ready to like become the next version of yourself.

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If any of this is speaking to you, it's either speaking to you from an area

Guest Track::
of pain where you got pain points that probably need to be corrected,

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or it's speaking to you from an area of almost inspiration.

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You want to live a certain way. Maybe you're not under attack and in pain.

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If any of those are happening, take advantage of that feeling of this moment,

Guest Track::
of this kind of experience, and say, you know what?

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Today's the day one of the next face.

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Now, let me kind of throw away some of my procrastination and excuses on what I want in my life.

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And let's use this moment as the universe telling me, you know, you're probably ready.

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You may not feel completely prepared, but you're probably ready to like take

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a new step in a different direction.

Host Track: :
I love it. That's an amazing invitation for action, which is what people need.

Host Track: :
Don't just listen to 40 podcasts. Let's do something about it. So thank you, Scott.

Host Track: :
Thank you for today's episode. I really appreciate having you on.

Guest Track::
Awesome. Thank you. Till next time.

Host Track: :
We'll talk to you next time on the Shared Practices podcast.