Host Track: : Welcome to the Shared Practices Podcast 2.0. I'm here with my co-host, Dr. Scott Luna.
Host Track: : We are continuing this conversation about the dental CEO, and we are in the
Host Track: : depths of discussing one of three pillars, managing operations.
Host Track: : Scott, give us a little bit of, you know, welcome to the show and give us a
Host Track: : little bit of the framework overall so people can find themselves in this overall journey.
Guest Track:: Yeah, well, by the way, I'm glad I'm even on the show because my puppy chewed
Guest Track:: the power cord that went to the major internet box I've got for my entire house
Guest Track:: and the building behind it.
Guest Track:: And so I didn't have internet for a while. But anyway, that's what I'm dealing
Guest Track:: with. But sure, let's just dive into dentistry.
Guest Track:: I love this topic, the CEO. So if you haven't heard the previous episodes,
Guest Track:: you really need to stop and go back and listen to them.
Guest Track:: But as a review, to be a dental CEO might mean to manage three big pillars.
Guest Track:: One is operations. The second is how we spend money, the expenses.
Guest Track:: And the third is managing the people. The people obviously is what's doing everything.
Guest Track:: That's how we make money and spend money. We have to have accountability.
Guest Track:: We have to have a whole process of managing them that we're going to talk about later.
Guest Track:: Managing how we spend money is insanely important, but we've started with the
Guest Track:: first pillar, operations. How do we create the collections?
Guest Track:: The operations is what everyone does every day. And as a CEO,
Guest Track:: in the last few episodes, we talked about this concept of a really intelligent
Guest Track:: way of looking at numbers.
Guest Track:: We've got these five areas, patient flow, diagnosis, case acceptance,
Guest Track:: capacity and collections.
Guest Track:: And we identified ways in each of those five areas to look at a simple number
Guest Track:: and to know immediately, are we are we good or bad? Are we healthy or not?
Guest Track:: You know, is this practice needing our attention? Do we need to diagnose treatment
Guest Track:: for our own business as a CEO, or are we good?
Guest Track:: So that was kind of a quick little general review, but you have to go listen
Guest Track:: to those episodes because we dove into a lot of detail.
Host Track: : Yeah. And this is, my favorite part of this is when we get to talk about application.
Host Track: : So rubber meets the road, where does stuff break? What actually happens in dental practices?
Host Track: : And what can we do about it? And so now that we've talked about what we should be looking at,
Host Track: : we've mentioned some areas of improvement, but I do want to bring and talk through
Host Track: : specific examples, common examples where we see practices that are broken.
Host Track: : And a lot of times we can self-diagnose as like, yeah, we're not good at this.
Host Track: : Maybe we suck at this one thing in our dental practice or there's room for improvement. But.
Host Track: : Knowing how to improve or where to go or what resources to rely upon,
Host Track: : how to train these systems or build these systems, policies into our practices,
Host Track: : a lot of dentists want to be pointed in the right direction.
Host Track: : And this might even be creating future episodes as we talk about this.
Host Track: : We'll hit a topic and say, here's the high level, and maybe we need to come
Host Track: : back and do a series on this specific topic.
Host Track: : But the first thing that comes to mind was in
Host Track: : that first area of you
Host Track: : know we were talking about patient flow we talked about retention
Host Track: : we talked about marketing activities where
Host Track: : a lot of dentists kind of get distracted in in that as being the important thing
Host Track: : but then the call volume the the call miss rate as well as the call conversion
Host Track: : i've been guilty of this where i know that we're not in my specific offices
Host Track: : that I've run in the past,
Host Track: : I know we're not handling the call side of things great.
Host Track: : I know that we're not taking control of the conversation, but I almost,
Host Track: : I don't have the skills, even though I've talked about this and podcasted,
Host Track: : I don't have the skills to train
Host Track: : my team on like what's my, in my head around what we should be doing.
Host Track: : And, and so how do you help dentists to figure out, you know,
Host Track: : we have our coaches work with the team members.
Host Track: : We almost bypass the dentist at shared practices. It's like,
Host Track: : let's get our coach coaching the dentist on the high level things.
Host Track: : And then you can kind of leave the room and we're going to train the team on
Host Track: : answering phones and building these systems.
Host Track: : But I want to hear your perspective on where to go to get better at call conversion
Host Track: : and answering the phones.
Guest Track:: Well, yeah, let's back up. I'd like to use an analogy for a second,
Guest Track:: just to make sure everyone listening is kind of on the same page here.
Guest Track:: So if we think to a really skilled surgeon, you know, in the medical space,
Guest Track:: you know, what does it mean to be a skilled surgeon?
Guest Track:: It means that number one, they can diagnose incredibly well,
Guest Track:: they can see that there's disease, and they can diagnose the treatment needed, right?
Guest Track:: So they can see the disease, and they can diagnose what to do about it.
Guest Track:: And then next to be a really skilled surgeon, they have to be able to implement that diagnosis.
Guest Track:: They have to actually be able to perform the procedure, surgical procedure.
Guest Track:: If we use that analogy to being a CEO, we need to be able to diagnose the problem
Guest Track:: really well to see it that there's disease, but also to know what the solution is.
Guest Track:: And we have to be able to implement that solution really well.
Guest Track:: We in dentistry so often fail in these three moments, but especially the first
Guest Track:: one, to not even see the disease.
Guest Track:: And that's why it's taken so long for dentistry to kind of adopt the concept of metrics tracking.
Guest Track:: It's taken dentistry so long to even understand how do we use metrics to help us find the disease.
Guest Track:: Most dentists don't even know national averages, yet they know if we've got
Guest Track:: a four or five millimeter pocket, we might have periodontal disease.
Guest Track:: They don't know if we have phones disease. They don't know if we have reappointment disease.
Guest Track:: They haven't been taught or learned kind of what that disease looks like.
Guest Track:: So I know that, you know, probably everyone listening to this knows that I give
Guest Track:: these really like intense like training seminars, these events that you and
Guest Track:: many others have been to.
Guest Track:: And when I started giving those events, it was all around like teaching people
Guest Track:: how to do the surgical procedure on their practice.
Guest Track:: And over time, I realized they couldn't even see the disease.
Guest Track:: So it's had to, of course, now take this holistic approach and teach people
Guest Track:: how to actually find the disease in a very intelligent way, in a very kind of efficient way.
Guest Track:: So I think that that's where we're at. Before we can even say,
Guest Track:: what do we say on the phone?
Guest Track:: We need to understand that we need to see the disease with the right number.
Guest Track:: So start there. how do we even know we have
Guest Track:: a problem on the phone you know we need to have the
Guest Track:: missed call rate the conversion rate in front of us and if you're not getting
Guest Track:: that through ai or through you know your marketing company might have some of
Guest Track:: that technology if you're not hand auditing it maybe you have to do that you
Guest Track:: you will never be able to understand if there's disease there so we have to have that first well.
Host Track: : Then then let me dig on that a little bit,
Host Track: : There's voice over IP, there's regular calling. Depending on your marketing
Host Track: : company, they might be call tracking depending.
Host Track: : They've got different numbers to track different marketing efforts.
Host Track: : If someone is fairly unsophisticated in this, what's the minimum to start?
Host Track: : Or if you were doing a startup and you could design the system the way you'd
Host Track: : want to, how can you get the most data out of your phones?
Guest Track:: Well, I don't know if I'd get the most data I can possibly get.
Guest Track:: I'd want to get a very nice sampling of the right data.
Guest Track:: So typically, you can run, there's
Guest Track:: a couple companies out there that allow you to run AI on your phones.
Guest Track:: The AI will listen to the phone call and will tell you things like, did you answer or not?
Guest Track:: If you did answer, did they convert to an appointment or not?
Guest Track:: How much was that potential phone call worth? Did they ask about certain procedures?
Guest Track:: They ask about insurance?
Guest Track:: Did you mishandle the call or not? You're literally having this AI agent auditing
Guest Track:: your call for you. There's a couple of companies that do that.
Guest Track:: Also, the marketing company that I've been using for years has also developed
Guest Track:: their own AI that does it.
Guest Track:: It does it specifically on the new patient leads.
Guest Track:: That's the most important lead to get this information on.
Guest Track:: We don't necessarily need to know, you know, what some salesperson said when
Guest Track:: they called our practice trying to sell us Ozarka water.
Guest Track:: You know, we want the data on specifically the new patient calls the most valuable.
Guest Track:: So we need to have that set up first. Otherwise, we'll never see the disease.
Guest Track:: We have to take that x-ray on our phones.
Guest Track:: And once we get that x-ray, as we've spoken about in the previous episodes,
Guest Track:: the two main numbers we're looking at is, are we answering calls?
Guest Track:: And if we are, are they scheduling?
Guest Track:: And if we're answering them, that has to be set up properly.
Guest Track:: Answering more calls doesn't mean you train your team to answer more calls.
Guest Track:: They're already trying to answer calls. What are you going to train them on?
Guest Track:: Answering more calls is probably tweaking your phone system structure while
Guest Track:: also utilizing a virtual employee or virtual answering service that can schedule patients.
Guest Track:: That's like that ingredient that you would prescribe. That's the medication
Guest Track:: you would prescribe if you found phone disease.
Guest Track:: You'd say, okay, take this pill. If you need to answer more calls,
Guest Track:: take the virtual assistant pill.
Guest Track:: And, you know, it's so interesting to me how few dental offices have incorporated virtual assistants.
Guest Track:: And I think it's because they don't know that they've got this cancer.
Guest Track:: They don't know they're sick to begin with. So they don't think they need to
Guest Track:: take this medicine. Does that make sense?
Host Track: : Yeah. And I would say the side effects of these medicine that people are scared
Host Track: : of is, number one, they don't want to pay for the AI software.
Host Track: : But you think about how much money goes into marketing when you are spending
Host Track: : marketing dollars and how valuable a new patient is, one more new patient per
Host Track: : month, two, you know, five,
Host Track: : the investment in the dental AI software on top of whatever else you're doing,
Host Track: : and the investment of time and effort to set these things up ahead of time or
Host Track: : to work with a virtual assistant or to work with a company.
Host Track: : I think there is a fear of the amount of cost and disruption that these efforts experts will take.
Host Track: : And once again, this is important, non-urgent tasks that there are going to
Host Track: : be other fires to put out.
Host Track: : There's going to be resistance from the team of like, we're doing a good job of this doc.
Host Track: : Like I swear we're catching the calls and we don't need to change our phone
Host Track: : system and change all of this.
Guest Track:: So yeah, let's dive into that. So, cause hold on, you know, all this cost,
Guest Track:: all this fear, all this pain, all this conflict about maybe using AI or,
Guest Track:: to see if there's a problem.
Guest Track:: I tell you what might cause fear or cause for pain is getting a colonoscopy.
Guest Track:: But my Lord, if you find out you've got colon cancer, you've just saved your life by doing it.
Guest Track:: Using AI is way easier than a colonoscopy and it's going to make you a whole
Guest Track:: lot of money if you find that you've got some kind of issues there on the phones.
Guest Track:: Let's make this simple for a second. The national average practice,
Guest Track:: just the national average, they answer 68 out of 100 new patient calls.
Guest Track:: And of the 68 they answer, they end up scheduling 29 appointments.
Guest Track:: That's national average.
Guest Track:: So 100 new patients called. We paid for marketing for 100.
Guest Track:: And we ended up with 29 appointments because we missed some calls and we didn't
Guest Track:: convert some calls. We ended up with 29 appointments.
Guest Track:: If we if we make that number bigger, let's say a practice usually gets 100 new patients a month.
Guest Track:: Well, that means they could have had like 300. Right?
Guest Track:: If I were go to practice and I were say, Hey, if we utilize AI software for
Guest Track:: a few hundred bucks a month, and we figure out what's going on on your phones,
Guest Track:: and we correct some of these issues, we could take you from 100 new patients
Guest Track:: a month to 200 new patients a month, without more marketing,
Guest Track:: Now, suddenly that like sounds like a very smart thing to do.
Host Track: : Right.
Guest Track:: You see, we need to bring it down to like, how does it impact me, the dentist?
Guest Track:: Why do I care? Why do I want to go through the trouble of putting AI software
Guest Track:: in place to tell me if I've got cancer and then the trouble of treating the cancer?
Guest Track:: Well, I mean, you're going to make a lot of return on this without even considering
Guest Track:: how much a new patient is worth.
Guest Track:: Just the thought of being able to have twice as many new patients,
Guest Track:: without having to hire some rock stars of this or a rock star of that and move
Guest Track:: your practice to an amazing location or redo all of your facility or double
Guest Track:: your marketing budget. All of that's painful.
Guest Track:: But putting AI software in place and training your two or three front office
Guest Track:: people, that's so much easier than a colonoscopy.
Guest Track:: You can get that done. Does that make sense?
Host Track: : Yeah. And that's why I wanted to double down on this because I think there is
Host Track: : a hesitancy and a reservation to do this.
Host Track: : And we're going to get to this in the future episodes.
Host Track: : When you change things, this is going to take a cycle of change and training and auditing.
Host Track: : And so that commitment to, I am convicted of why this is a problem.
Host Track: : I can see the data and I want to do something about it.
Host Track: : And it is going to be disruptive for a little while, but the value is on the other end.
Host Track: : I think that's a horse that we can keep beating because I think people are missing
Host Track: : the opportunity and they're letting their fears and their resistance around
Host Track: : this issue stopping them from getting there and a lack of knowledge.
Host Track: : They maybe don't have the skills to teach the team members.
Host Track: : That's where I started with this. Often dentists don't even know how to help
Host Track: : their team members and they need a coach.
Host Track: : They need someone who can come in and work with their team on these skills.
Guest Track:: Yeah, so let me reiterate this again. The three components to fixing something
Guest Track:: like what I introduced at least initially, the three components of an excellent
Guest Track:: surgeon is to be able to see the disease, diagnose the treatment and perform the treatment.
Guest Track:: So we need to be able to see a problem on the phones.
Guest Track:: We need to be able to diagnose what needs to be done about it.
Guest Track:: And then we need to actually be able to implement that, that solution, right?
Guest Track:: So seeing the problem is step one. That's through, for example,
Guest Track:: the AI issue, the AI product, the AI service, then we need to know,
Guest Track:: okay, what do we do about it? What's actually best practices?
Guest Track:: How am I supposed to answer more calls? How am I supposed to schedule more patients?
Guest Track:: That's actually why most people come to my events is because we go through like
Guest Track:: 100 of those things within two days and they walk out like, aha,
Guest Track:: I know now how to do all of these business procedures, right?
Guest Track:: I've just in one weekend learned a hundred new business procedures,
Guest Track:: how to fix these diseases, right? So they have to know how.
Guest Track:: And so how do we answer more phones and how do we convert more patients is the
Guest Track:: next thing to talk about.
Guest Track:: And then of course, after they know how, well, shoot, knowing how is not enough.
Guest Track:: You have to actually do, you have to implement.
Guest Track:: And implementing is always going to be micromanaged by you, the leader.
Guest Track:: Even if you're using a coach, or a consultant, or an office manager,
Guest Track:: it will still be micromanaged by the leader.
Guest Track:: It will take less time. If you utilize other people to help you,
Guest Track:: it will be less work for you.
Guest Track:: But there's always going to be a phase of micromanaging the implementation of
Guest Track:: this to get it to stick all the way.
Guest Track:: So we've talked about phones, you know, How do I see the disease? That's going to be AI.
Guest Track:: Now we need to say, okay, well, what do I, if I have this disease,
Guest Track:: how do I know how to treat it?
Guest Track:: So how do we treat a missed call rate problem or how do we treat a conversion
Guest Track:: 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
Host Track: : that we're talking about, but I just wanted to follow this through of from these
Host Track: : like three surgical, you know,
Host Track: : parts of being a great surgeon and see what that looks like.
Host Track: : Because I think some of our listeners, when they hear all of these things,
Host Track: : there's this flood of, oh, these are great ideas, and then nothing happens.
Host Track: : And so walking them through the journey of addressing some of the bad data that
Host Track: : they're getting back or the areas for improvement is worthwhile, in my opinion.
Guest Track:: So we've set up AI because we should, as a CEO, know what's happening on the
Guest Track:: phones because it impacts dramatically our big first knob.
Guest Track:: And we find out with AI, oh, we're missing too many phone calls.
Guest Track:: Now we've identified the disease. We see it on the AI x-ray.
Guest Track:: There it is. We're missing too many calls.
Guest Track:: Now, how do we treat that disease? All right.
Guest Track:: Well, one solution would be
Guest Track:: when we miss a call, we forward that call to a virtual employee of ours.
Guest Track:: We don't have one, but we understand that that is one prescription to solve
Guest Track:: this disease is the pill of having a virtual assistant.
Guest Track:: So we would find a company that has virtual assistants. And let me walk you
Guest Track:: through what that's like, by the way, when you have a virtual assistant.
Guest Track:: It is and it's changed dramatically over the last couple of years in such a good way.
Guest Track:: So there's companies that operate in other countries in the world.
Guest Track:: And they have offices, office buildings, they have managers and trainers for
Guest Track:: all of these virtual people that we quote unquote hire.
Guest Track:: And if we're wanting to hire someone to help us answer these phone calls,
Guest Track:: we would tell the company, we want to hire someone full time or part time,
Guest Track:: and the company would line up five or six people to interview.
Guest Track:: And we'd interview them over Zoom. These are college educated.
Guest Track:: They speak English. They can speak Spanish.
Guest Track:: In their country, this is a coveted job. It's a well-paying job for them.
Guest Track:: It's a respectable job. They want the job. They don't want to lose it.
Guest Track:: I don't know about you, but I don't always feel like dental employees in the
Guest Track:: US and Canada feel the same way.
Host Track: : Or call center employees in the US.
Guest Track:: Yeah, exactly. We're call center employees. Exactly. There's no website that
Guest Track:: you go to where you can just line up six interviews and they all show up and
Guest Track:: they're all college educated and can speak well and they really want the job.
Guest Track:: So they line up these people and we interview them over Zoom and we pick one.
Guest Track:: And they are going to log in every day and only work for us, only our practice.
Guest Track:: They are coming somewhat trained. They've gone through certain training sessions
Guest Track:: and modules before we've interviewed them.
Guest Track:: So they're coming somewhat trained, but they're not obviously trained on us.
Guest Track:: So we are going to train them like we would train a regular employee on us.
Guest Track:: And they'd log in every day in Zoom. I'd get a report on what they did and they would be live.
Guest Track:: I could talk to them every single day and they're going to do what we assign to them.
Guest Track:: And it might cost us $13 or $14 an hour, all in.
Guest Track:: No payroll taxes, no benefits.
Guest Track:: They're not getting Friday COVID. They're not taking maternity leave.
Guest Track:: You know, there's no added cost. They're not complaining that it's too hot or
Guest Track:: too cold in the practice.
Guest Track:: Like they are all in 13 or 14 an hour performing this function.
Guest Track:: All right. So our primary purpose in this hypothetical is that they answer the calls we miss.
Guest Track:: Well, that means they're going to be bored most of the day because we don't answer.
Guest Track:: We don't miss calls every minute of the day. So how about we have them do insurance
Guest Track:: verification, or maybe we have them process EOBs, or we have them confirm appointments.
Guest Track:: Or I've got some practices that I coach one-on-one, for example,
Guest Track:: that actually have them do check-in.
Guest Track:: We've got a digital check-in process with a screen, with this person there to
Guest Track:: help answer any questions patients might have and to greet them.
Guest Track:: It's not kind of normal for most practices to do it that way,
Guest Track:: but I'm just kind of like trying to open your mind a bit.
Guest Track:: So we've got this virtual assistant whose primary role actually isn't answering the phones.
Guest Track:: They're busy all day long verifying insurance and confirming appointments.
Guest Track:: But when we miss a call in the practice, it's after two rings transferred to
Guest Track:: them, and then they answer the call and save it.
Guest Track:: If they only have, excuse me, if they have a 90% answer rate,
Guest Track:: because they only get one call at a time, then that means 90% of our missed
Guest Track:: calls get saved overnight.
Guest Track:: Overnight. That hasn't changed the conversion rate yet, but it's changed the
Guest Track:: missed call rate. And in this hypothetical, we said that was our problem.
Guest Track:: Overnight, it's solved. And I've got now this employee that is not only enabling
Guest Track:: us to have tens of more patients per month and all that that's worth,
Guest Track:: but they're also performing other tasks that my team doesn't have to perform
Guest Track:: now. Does that make sense?
Host Track: : Yes. And I'm grateful that you walked through this because,
Host Track: : I remember in the early days of call centers in dentistry,
Host Track: : one of the concerns was like, okay I'm getting
Host Track: : a different call center person maybe they're trained on a few
Host Track: : practices they're bouncing back and forth maybe the call center scales and the
Host Track: : there was a high quality at first of call center people who were answering and
Host Track: : as they scale the quality kind of isn't there or there's turnover and the person
Host Track: : that we used to be working with isn't there the thing I like about this process a lot is,
Host Track: : They really are like an employee of the practice and you can get to know them
Host Track: : and train them and invest in them.
Host Track: : And the return is there. The security is there.
Host Track: : And that process is different than what it has meant in the past to outsource these missed calls.
Host Track: : And I've seen personally, as we've done some outsourcing of answering calls
Host Track: : at our group, that there's a huge difference between one person and the next.
Host Track: : You know, you might have a very skilled, very articulate, very low accent individual
Host Track: : answering the calls over here.
Host Track: : And if you scale and eventually that's not the person who's answering the phones.
Host Track: : So I just I think it's worth pointing out the differences between solutions
Host Track: : in the past and what this looks like now.
Guest Track:: Well, obviously, things change, right?
Guest Track:: So the past internet speeds weren't fast enough to do the job that's done today.
Guest Track:: And technology wasn't efficient enough either.
Guest Track:: So in the past, in order to get costs down and to get kind of everything making
Guest Track:: sense, you had to run volume, you had to have call center setups.
Guest Track:: And I built probably one of the first big ones in dentistry,
Guest Track:: you know, back in the day when just internet wasn't even fast enough to do it well.
Guest Track:: And that had a domino effect of issues and inconsistencies in quality and so
Guest Track:: forth that you've described.
Guest Track:: However, if you're listening to this, don't let old medicines side effects make
Guest Track:: you think that there's a problem with the new medication that doesn't have a side effect.
Guest Track:: And let's not let the fear of side effects make you ignore that you've got the
Guest Track:: cancer to begin with, right? We have to solve this problem.
Guest Track:: So step one is identify that you've got the cancer. Yes, we're missing calls.
Guest Track:: We have to fix the cancer some way.
Guest Track:: We might use a little radiation, we may use a little chemo, we may do a little
Guest Track:: surgery, but we have to get that cancer stopped.
Guest Track:: Right now, what I'm telling you in this example, in this hypothetical,
Guest Track:: is a really low side effect medication for your missed call cancer is utilizing a virtual assistant.
Guest Track:: And if that person we hired, by the way, doesn't work out, they end up not being
Guest Track:: what we want, then within a week, we're interviewing five more.
Guest Track:: Like we have what is practically
Guest Track:: an unlimited list of people to
Guest Track:: try to find the perfect fit wouldn't
Guest Track:: it be nice if that's how dentistry was like we needed an assistant so let's
Guest Track:: just keep using them until we find the perfect one because they're all waiting
Guest Track:: to be tried like that'd be great if that was actually reality it is when it
Guest Track:: comes to virtual assistants so that overnight solves the problem.
Guest Track:: However, that's just the treatment.
Guest Track:: We haven't talked about actually implementing the treatment,
Guest Track:: performing the procedure, right?
Guest Track:: So, step one was identifying the disease.
Guest Track:: 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
Host Track: : 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.
Guest Track:: One approach says, before I implement anything, I'm going to do a complete scan
Guest Track:: of my whole business to know all the broken pieces.
Guest Track:: So I know what to prioritize. I know what's most important, what I need to focus
Guest Track:: on first. So what that scan means is I'm going to get metrics tracking set up.
Guest Track:: I'm going to get AI set up on the phones, for example.
Guest Track:: I'm going to get everything I need so that I can actually build my CEO dashboard
Guest Track:: 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.
Guest Track:: And then we're just going to do one thing at a time. We're going to fix one
Guest Track:: little spot at a time. That's one healthy approach.
Guest Track:: Another approach says, you know, I already have a problem. I already know I have a cancer over here.
Guest Track:: I don't want to go through the time and the trouble to scan everything and to
Guest Track:: understand everything and to come up with one big strategic plan.
Guest Track:: I'd rather play whack-a-mole.
Guest Track:: I'd rather just, I know I got cancer here.
Guest Track:: I don't need to know should it be the most important thing we address or not
Guest Track:: because it just pisses me off and I'm just going to want it fixed right now
Guest Track:: because I heard them answer that phone that way and I need it fixed so we're
Guest Track:: just going to fix that so in that case we're going to run AI,
Guest Track:: just to know how bad is that cancer over there and then we're just going to fix that thing,
Guest Track:: So I, as a coach, of course, try to do the first one.
Guest Track:: Let's scan the whole practice. Let's find all the moments of cancer and let's
Guest Track:: come up with a big strategic plan.
Guest Track:: But then when we prioritize the plan, sometimes the emotional pain points might
Guest Track:: make their way up to the top, even if they're not technically as important as something else.
Guest Track:: 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
Guest Track:: about phones, what does it take to get AI?
Guest Track:: 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
Guest Track:: cancer on hiring a virtual assistant company?
Guest Track:: That's going to take another two to four weeks of onboarding and,
Guest Track:: you know, interviewing and training.
Guest Track:: So now we're maybe in it two, two and a half months. And then it's going to
Guest Track:: take another two to four weeks of micromanaged implementation and auditing to
Guest Track:: 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.
Guest Track:: 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.
Guest Track:: And because we can manage the implementation more than one thing at a time,
Guest Track:: 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,
Host Track: : 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...
Guest Track:: Yeah, the problem is who's executing?
Host Track: : Yes.
Guest Track:: It's this dentist owner that's like burnout in part from their career.
Guest Track:: They're also burnout at the micro level from the day.
Guest Track:: They're struggling with emotional issues and conflicts in the practice with
Guest Track:: 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,
Guest Track:: 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
Guest Track:: do and it's educational, for a lot of people it's merely theoretical until they're
Guest Track:: able to break their own cycle.
Guest Track:: 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.
Guest Track:: 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
Guest Track:: with cookie cutter manuals to do cookie cutter things.
Guest Track:: I think we're in the era now where we really understand that there's this emotional,
Guest Track:: 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,
Guest Track:: and they need support and help if they intend to achieve the highest level in
Guest Track:: 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.
Host Track: : 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.
Host Track: : 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.
Host Track: : 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,
Host Track: : sometimes we're a counselor.
Host Track: : 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
Host Track: : 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,
Guest Track:: of information delivery, of understanding how to see the disease and understanding
Guest Track:: exactly what you need to do to fix it.
Guest Track:: When I coach, I'm doing less of that because I've already taught them how to do it.
Guest Track:: 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?
Guest Track:: I'm coaching a whole lot more on like, hey, we got stuff to do next month. Let's stay on track.
Guest Track:: Let's talk through the problems and the hiccups that are holding you back from that.
Guest Track:: 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
Guest Track:: to change and teaching what to do,
Guest Track:: The coaching is about actually getting it done. And I'm highly fulfilled in
Guest Track:: my career doing those things for people.
Guest Track:: 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.
Guest Track:: 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,
Guest Track:: much higher levels than I did.
Guest Track:: And that's actually a really weird feeling.
Guest Track:: Sometimes my wife will talk about it. She's like, man, these people are doing better than you did.
Guest Track:: 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?
Guest Track:: 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.
Guest Track:: 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.
Host Track: : 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,
Guest Track:: it's probably a sign that you are ready to like become the next version of yourself.
Guest Track:: 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,
Guest Track:: or it's speaking to you from an area of almost inspiration.
Guest Track:: You want to live a certain way. Maybe you're not under attack and in pain.
Guest Track:: 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?
Guest Track:: Today's the day one of the next face.
Guest Track:: Now, let me kind of throw away some of my procrastination and excuses on what I want in my life.
Guest Track:: And let's use this moment as the universe telling me, you know, you're probably ready.
Guest Track:: You may not feel completely prepared, but you're probably ready to like take
Guest Track:: 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.