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Hosted by sandy pardue
5 episodes with sandy pardue
4 episodes with sandy pardue
3 episodes with sandy pardue
3 episodes with sandy pardue
3 episodes with sandy pardue
2 episodes with sandy pardue
4 episodes with sandy pardue
2 episodes with sandy pardue
We're diving into a topic that separates struggling practices from high-performing ones—your front desk metrics. Dana and Sandy break down the most important KPIs your admin team should be tracking daily, weekly, and monthly. Spoiler alert: if you're not measuring it, you can't manage it! Whether you're brand new to tracking stats or need a refresh to re-energize your team, this episode gives you simple, actionable ways to bring structure and accountability to your schedule, collections, and patient flow. You'll learn how to: ✅ Track leading and lagging indicators ✅ Set realistic goals that don't overwhelm your team ✅ Empower employees to “own” their numbers ✅ Reduce cancellations and no-shows ✅ Create a consistent system for growth—without expensive software
Gossip at Work: The Hidden Cost of Chatter Dental Drill Bits with Sandy Pardue and Dana Salisbury Gossip at Work: The Hidden Cost of Chatter 0:00 Episode Description Gossip may seem like harmless chatter, but it has the power to erode trust, damage morale, and derail productivity in your dental practice. In this episode, Sandy and Dana tackle the tough topic of workplace gossip—what it sounds like, why it spreads, and how to stop it before it takes a toll on your culture and your team. From NLRB rules to real-life consulting stories, they share practical ways to address negativity, encourage accountability, and build a team that thrives on trust. Plus, Dana delivers scripted verbal skills you can use right away to shut gossip down respectfully and effectively. Whether you're a practice owner, manager, or team member, this episode will help you foster a workplace where professionalism wins and gossip has no place. In This Episode You'll Learn: Why “friendly chatter” sometimes crosses the line into legal risk What the National Labor Relations Board says about banning gossip How negativity spreads—and how to stop it at the source Why some team members resist consulting and how to handle it How to create a safe, gossip-free workspace with open doors and clear roles The real reason broken appointments and low morale go hand in hand Why clearly defined job descriptions reduce friction and confusion How to use team agreements and core values to unify your staff A leadership lesson from the book The Energy Bus by Jon Gordon Verbal skills to shut gossip down with professionalism Why patients are paying attention to more than just your dentistry Bonus Resource: Want a team-building moment at your next staff meeting? Look up the poem “Nobody's Friend” and read it aloud. You might be surprised by the conversations it sparks. Upcoming Event: Front Desk Pro – Philadelphia May 9, 2025 Use promo code SECRETSAUCE (capital S in Secret and Sauce) to save $100 per person Seats are limited and these events always sell out! Thank You to Our Sponsors: Plan Forward Plan Forward makes membership plans easy. Their revolutionary platform helps you grow your dental practice, improve patient loyalty, and create predictable recurring revenue. Learn more at planforward.io. Mango Voice Mango Voice is a cloud-based phone system built for dental offices. It's packed with smart features that help your front desk perform at its best—from call recording and routing to texting and integrations. See it in action at mangovoice.com. Identity Dental Marketing Your marketing firm should tell you who's landing on your website and what they're doing there. Identity Dental Marketing does that—and more. From website strategy to SEO and patient attraction systems, they help you grow smart and stay visible. Explore at identitydental.com. Subscribe & Share: Love what you're hearing? Don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review, and share this episode with a dental friend who's ready to build a drama-free, high-performing team.
Want to retain great employees and build a team that runs like a dream? It all starts with one-on-one conversations that count. In this episode of Dental Drill Bits, Sandy Pardue and Dana Salisbury share how regular one-on-one meetings can transform your culture, boost accountability, and keep your team growing in the right direction. They break down the timing, tools, and tone of a successful one-on-one—plus how to turn them into growth opportunities, not gripe sessions. If you want more engagement and less drama in your dental office, start here. What You'll Learn: How to set up meaningful one-on-ones with your team Why these meetings are more powerful than traditional reviews How to use self-evaluation tools to start real conversations What to document and track before each meeting How one-on-ones can reduce turnover and improve morale The role of emotional deposits and team development in retention Real Results in Action: Sandy and Dana discuss what happens when one-on-ones are done right—from better communication to uncovering training gaps before they become performance issues. Learn why most team breakdowns stem from a lack of connection, not capability.
Is your hygiene schedule disappearing before your eyes? You're not imagining it! No-shows, last-minute cancellations, and poor confirmation strategies can leave your hygiene team scrambling and your bottom line suffering. In this episode of Dental Drill Bits, Sandy Pardue and Dana Pardue Salisbury break down why hygiene schedules fall apart—and how to fix it for good! From smarter pre-scheduling to foolproof confirmation techniques, they're sharing real-world solutions to keep your chairs full and your patients accountable. What You'll Learn: ✅ The #1 reason why hygiene schedules collapse before your eyes ✅ How pre-scheduling the wrong patients is hurting your practice ✅ A foolproof confirmation system that actually works ✅ The perfect balance of texts, calls, emails & postcards for max confirmations ✅ Why new patient time slots should be set in stone (and how to protect them!) ✅ The morning huddle strategy that prevents no-shows before they happen Real Results in Action:
Episode Description Unexpected call-outs can throw your dental practice into chaos—but they don't have to! In this episode of Dental Drill Bits, Sandy Pardue and Dana Pardue Salisbury break down how to create an attendance culture that keeps your team accountable without being rigid. They'll share real-world strategies for managing sick calls, setting clear attendance policies, and keeping your team engaged. What You'll Learn: ✅ How to prevent a culture of absenteeism from spreading in your practice
Hiring is one thing—but the interview process is where you make or break your chances of getting the right person. In this episode of Dental Drill Bits, Sandy Pardue and Dana Salisbury share expert strategies to help you conduct interviews with confidence, ask the right questions, and avoid costly hiring mistakes. What you'll learn: ✅ The difference between situational vs. behavioral interview questions—and why both matter
Finding the Right Candidate Hiring the right person for your dental practice can feel like searching for a unicorn—but it doesn't have to be! In this episode of Dental Drill Bits, Sandy Pardue and Dana Salisbury dive deep into how to attract and hire top talent for your dental practice without the frustration. What you'll learn: ✅ Why a strong job ad is your first (and biggest) hiring tool ✍️ ✅ How to attract working professionals instead of job hoppers
Running a stress-free, efficient dental practice starts with the right systems. In this episode, Dr. Eric Block talks with Sandy Pardue about the power of SOPs, clear team communication, and structured policies to reduce stress and improve productivity. They discuss handling common staff issues, finding and hiring top-tier employees, and creating predictable success through proven systems. Tune in for actionable strategies to build a thriving practice!
Episode Title: Wasted Time, Open Time, and Maximizing Your Schedule Episode Description: Welcome to another exciting episode of Dental Drill Bits! This week, Sandy Pardue is joined by a very special guest—Dana Pardue Salisbury, the original co-host and HR business professional. Together, they kick off the new season with a deep dive into one of the most critical topics for dental practices: managing open time in your schedule. Discover actionable tips to identify, track, and eliminate wasted time in your practice. Whether you're dealing with broken appointments, patient no-shows, or underutilized slots, this episode equips you with practical strategies to improve productivity, enhance patient care, and boost your bottom line. Plus, hear Dana's unique perspective on the patient experience and why over-communicating about appointment changes can backfire. Stay tuned until the end for a game-changing resource that could revolutionize how you handle in-house membership plans! What You'll Learn in This Episode: Dana Salisbury's journey back to Dental Drill Bits and her insights on training and development for dental practices. The real cost of open time and why tracking it is crucial. How to calculate daily, hourly, and per-unit production goals. Strategies to reduce cancellations, no-shows, and last-minute reschedules. The importance of maintaining a reliable call list and leveraging patient interactions. Patient perspective: Why excessive appointment changes can harm patient satisfaction. The role of team meetings in addressing missed opportunities. An introduction to Plan Forward—a custom dental membership platform offering tools for automated billing, patient communication, and more. Sponsors: Don't just look ahead. Plan Forward. Discover the dental membership plan partner that empowers your entire office. Created by a team in your shoes. Find out more here, and be sure to mention Dental Drill Bits for a special offer! https://www.planforward.io/ Take Action Today: Start tracking your open time and production goals now! Print out your schedules, analyze past weeks, and involve your team in finding solutions. Remember, every day is an opportunity to optimize your schedule and serve your patients better. Subscribe & Leave a Review: Enjoyed this episode? Don't forget to subscribe to Dental Drill Bits and leave a review. Your feedback helps us continue to deliver valuable content!
This is a question Sandy Pardue gets quite often in her events, so we decided to cover it here! Here are a couple things you want to do: You need a time clock software. (Sandy recommends a software) Don't give everyone access to change their time clock. Create a policy, and be super specific in this policy. (Sandy gives us great examples). What to say if someone still violates the policy? (Sandy provides us with what to do, a script, and how many times should we allow it). How to present the overtime policy at a team meeting.
Is your dental practice losing revenue despite your best efforts? If so…you might be missing out on several opportunities within your dental practice. Want to learn how to capitalize on them? This episode is for you. My guest is Sandy Pardue from Classic Practice Resources. Sandy is a renowned keynote speaker, author, and consultant specializing in dental practice management. With over 500 practices served under her belt since 1993, Sandy has earned a reputation as the "systems guru" for her expertise in developing and implementing effective dental office systems. Dentistry Today Magazine has recognized Sandy as a leader in dental consulting speaking every year since 2003 thanks to her entertaining yet practical style, which has inspired countless dental teams to enhance productivity and profitability. She's joining me today to talk about the 3 R's of Practice Management — retention, reactivation, and recall — and explain how simple adjustments can lead to significant improvements on your bottom line. Sandy shares her insights on missed opportunities in scheduling patients, the importance of proper phone etiquette, how to balance automation with a personal touch to boost patient retention, and much more. Tune in for practice advice that every dental practice can start implementing today! PS. Interested in getting $100 OFF on Sandy's Front Desk Pro or Office Management Pro Training Events? Visit Classic Practice Resources and use promo code “Secret Sauce”. — Key Takeaways: Introduction (00:00) Meet Sandy Pardue & her consulting company, Classic Practice Resources (01:36) Missed opportunities when scheduling patients (04:04) The Rs of practice management (16:28) KPIs to monitor for dental practice efficiency (24:43) Sandy's offerings through Classic Practice Resources (27:16) Lightning round Q&A with Sandy (30:01) — Connect with Sandy at Classic Practice Resources: Facebook Instagram — Learn about the upcoming Supercharge Your Dental Practice 2-day event in September here. Use code RAVING to save $100 on registration. — Learn proven dental marketing strategies and online reputation management techniques here. This podcast is sponsored by Dental Intelligence. This podcast is sponsored by The Doc Sites, the leading provider of websites and online marketing for dentists. Raving Patients Podcast is your go-to place for the latest and best dental marketing strategies that will help you skyrocket your practice. Follow us for more!
Clint and Russ bring back Sandy Pardue to talk about her upcoming classes and pick her brain about managing dental offices. Sandy talks about her two seminars Front Desk Pro where she covers scheduling and her new course called Office Management Pro where she covers how to run an office. We talk about a variety of business topics from scheduling to collecting money to training employees. If you want to learn more about Sandy's upcoming courses and her consulting company, it is called Classic Practice Resources. She also does a regular podcast called Dental Drill Bits as well. Finally her Facebook group is Dental Gumbo.
Hey there, Michael Arias here, and on this week's Monday Morning Marketing episode, we're continuing the essential topic - patient retention. This episode is brought to you by the one and only Sandy Pardue, of Classic Practice, and our podcast Dental Drill Bits. Did you know that up to 50% of patients leave practices over the course of five years? That's a staggering number, but there are steps you can take to combat it. One of the simplest is to ask your patients how their last visit was and really listen to their answers. It's important to never give up on retaining patients, even if they've been inactive for years. With around 170,000 dentists in the US, it's crucial to stand apart by showing how much you appreciate your patients being there. Most importantly, don't forget to always keep an eye on your attrition numbers! It's hard to fix what we don't track, so these metrics are especially important for the health of your practice.Dive into my conversation with Sandy Pardue to learn more on patient retention!You can reach out to Sandy Pardue here:Classic Practice WebsiteDental Gumbo Facebook GroupOther Mentions and Links:Dental Drill Bits PodcastADA - American Dental Association4 Seasons Hotels and ResortsThe Ritz-CarltonIf you want your questions answered on Monday Morning Marketing, ask me on these platforms:My Newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/The Dental Marketer Society Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2031814726927041Our Sponsors & Their Exclusive Deals:Dandy | The Fully Digital, US-based Dental LabFor a completely FREE 3Shape Trios 3 scanner & $250 in lab credit click here: meetdandy.com/affiliate/tdm !Thank you for supporting the podcast by checking out our sponsors!Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)Michael: Hey, what's up Sandy? Sandy: Michael? Hey, I, I was just, uh, looking at our reviews on iTunes. Michael: Nice. Yeah. Guys, don't forget, if you can press pause right now. Go leave us a review on iTunes. Let us know how we're. And then come back and listen in. Cuz in this episode we're gonna be talking about something super important.I'm sure you're looking at the title Why Patients Lead. Sandy: Yep, yep, yep. This is a deep topic, . Okay. This the deep topic and for the listeners, and they've heard us talk about patient retention, which is gross. You know, we've talked about that. And, and for the new listeners, I mean, they'll, you just have to know this number if you say like, okay.Like 170,000 dentists. You hear these different reports, 166,000, 170,000. But we all know, cause you've worked in these practices that get at least 10 new patients a month. Right? Some of them are getting 20, 30, 40, 50, a hundred new patients a month. So I'm gonna say we know that at least 1.6 million people are changing dentists every single month in the United States of America Now.That being said, I saw another interesting statistic then from the American Dental Association that said that 25% to 50% of patients in any given practice are lost over a five year period. Whoa. That's crazy. Okay. I believe that, actually believe that could be worse now than it than ever. Because of so much of their automation, we have less personal contact.Mm-hmm. with people now because we're all living so fast and we count on text and that kind of thing. You need those personal, the personal contact for sure. But you know, when you look at people in general, and we already know that they don't love coming to the dentist. But why do they leave? And, and here's the thing.Most practices are not tracking this, and that's scary to me. Mm-hmm. , so they don't have any idea how many people are not coming back. And then the whole recall process is terrible in most practices. So what you need to do, I like to keep an attrition monitor. An attrition monitor. Now this could be as simple as having an Excel.Where your front office, every time they learn that somebody is left the practice, they put the name in and uh, their family members and why they're leaving. If they say they changed dentists because of insurance or they changed dentists and you don't know why, or maybe they moved out of town, maybe they died.So you've got all this information, okay, about that patient, and you can start to see who's leading. And I think that's very interesting to track. But the fact is that most practices don't do that. They don't really look close into their recall process to see that, okay, maybe in the beginning of October they had 300 people that needed a cleaning.They never go back in November and pull that same report and see that they still have 180 people that are due to come. In October, they did not come in. That's a huge problem, but why? Okay, why? Why is this happening? Number one, no one's watching. Number two, no one's following up. That is huge. And number three, nobody's actually tracking it, so, Those are the things that the practices need to implement versus, here's the thing, and I was explaining this to a friend of ours yesterday who was looking for a local dentist and he's been going to somebody and he is not having a success with some work that he, major work that he was having done and this particular practice he's been going to, I see a lot of TV ads and things and I'm, so that tells me, and I happen to know they're getting about 150 new patients a month and they've been getting 150 new patients a month for 10.So where are the people going? They haven't had to hire more hygienist, right? This is telling me that people are coming in and they're not staying. So practices that are listening, you need to be paying attention to this. But one thing you can do, this'll help you get some of them back and find out while they're leaving.Now you guys, you've heard me talk a lot about the reactivation program that I, I love, and that's like sending. Postcards with return service address on there. So you get back the, to see who moved without ever having to call them. You, they call you, you get back about 20% without a phone call. It's a great project to do, but uh, you could also do a fall insurance letter.That's a great thing to do right now. These are all activities to get people, but you've gotta communicate and you've gotta find. Why they're leaving. Okay. When you do this type of activity that I'm about to describe, you'll learn a lot about your practice. So what you wanna do is. Somebody that's a good communicator in your practice.If it's been around and they know some of these patients, that's even better. You wanna get them on the phone, they start calling and you let 'em know we're updating our patient records and we notice you haven't been in for a while. And then zip it up, let them talk now. And uh, they see what they say.Well, yeah, I know I need to get in. Or they say, well, I've changed Dennis, or I'm never coming back there. And that's when you. That pointed question. If I asked you a question, how was your last visit here? And then listen and see what you can learn. See what you can learn. Now, if somebody immediately says, put me in your inactive files, okay, , and sometimes they do that and sometimes they might just hang up, but you can't be scared of them.You just keep doing, and that's where your scheduler is gonna try to discover any problems, because here's the. Patients can act crazy, but most of them are not gonna be crazy. And then sometimes when we meet these practices that are constantly firing patients, they are firing people less than, right? Well, I promise you that many people aren't crazy when you've got the practice two doors down, that never fires anybody.That tells you that the people inside the practice are the ones running them off. Does that make sense? Mm-hmm. Michael: Yeah, that does, that makes a lot of sense. And I like that. So we're asking them almost like as a post-op kind of thing, right. Once they're home or something, we ask them, how was your last visit here?Or once they're in the practice, we're like, Hey, the visit before this, how was that? Yeah. Sandy: Or, or say it like, can I ask you a question? I'll always like to say that first. Mm-hmm. and, and with a high pitch at the end. Can I ask you a question? And wait, how was your last visit here? That just opens up a conversation and that's when they come out with all kinds of things.Like they left me in that chair and nobody tam to check on me. I was so thirsty. I was . You know, people get upset about things, right? They get quoted the wrong fees, the fee changes. Nobody told them in advance. Thought they were gonna see Susan, but uh, April was the hygienist. You know, they get, there's all these reasons because people are really sensitive about their mouths.Okay. I'm just gonna tell you, people are super sensitive about their mouths. They are. And so, and people are just, they expect good customer service, especially people. West High expectations, more successful people. You know, they're used to going to the Four Seasons or the Ritz Carlton, and you want these kind of patients.You know why they have money and they have rich friends, and so you wanna cater to these people. You don't wanna make them mad, and so you've gotta make sure we talk a lot about the tone of the office. Well, you've gotta make sure that your team is supporting you and your view. And they're happy to be there and they're wearing smiles cuz all of these things contribute to patients leaving.They have a lot to do with your attrition. So you've got your team supporting you and complimenting you. A practice should be growing, not shrinking. So every year you should be growing and need, you need to hire more people. It's because you're retaining and growing these people that say they're never coming back.You need to let them know the person that's calling, well, I'm sorry. We're not gonna be seeing you here again. We sure did enjoy having you as a patient. You know, a lot of times people when they hear something like that, they may be in between of leaving the practice. Maybe they were going to leave and then they got this phone call and they heard something like, And they, they never found that other dentist, so they will go ahead and appoint.You can, you should never give up on your patients. I had somebody I saw in Dentaltown recently where he said he was gonna inactivate everybody that hadn't been in 18 months. Well, my gut got real tight. Okay. I'm just like, ugh. Because I know how hard it is to get those new patients and 18 months goes by really fast.Mm-hmm. , I went 15 months without getting my teeth cleaned. Last time I did Sandy Cardew, I did , and so it just made everything. I'm glad my dentist didn't inactivate me. That's insane. Of course, I know how to take care of my. And, you know, I have a little scaler at home, so I believe me, I'm, I'm okay. But you, you know, people leave most of the time cause of the service they received or they felt like it wasn't fair or they didn't like they were treat the way they were treated.That's what they always remember how they were treated. So that one phone call to follow up on these people that hadn't been. Instead of saying, hi, this is Sandy from Dr. Gutes, I was calling to set up an appointment. You know you're gonna be more personable with them. Letting them know, with missed seeing you, doctor asked me to call.And you do it in such a kind voice. You don't, it's not just, I'm following them, schedule an appointment to you or send a text like I got yesterday. It's time for your cleaning. I didn't even say what dental office it was from . I was like, who is. Was it from my husband or me? I didn't, you know, and then I saw the text, and by now I've gotten about 25, 30 other texts and I forgot all about it until I was just talking about it here, , Michael: until right now.I was just talking about, yeah, exactly. So then the, the three points keep, no one's watching, no one's following up, no one's tracking. No one's watching is we have to keep an attrition monitor. Right? Yeah. And that. What is that in our practice management Sandy: software or No, you need to create your own Excel document, Michael: and that is you're literally looking at who needs to be reactivated.You're following up with the Sandy: calls and stuff. The attrition monitor are the people that have left the practice. Those are the people. You're gonna only enter the people that are not coming back, so, You have pulled a report from your dental software, you see who hasn't been in for a long time. Go back three years, go back five years, you have a smaller practice, go back five years.Then what happens is as you're making these calls, then you find out someone's not coming back. They're entered on that sheet. So it could be that they moved out of town. They changed dentists. They changed dentists because of insurance. I wanna put that in a separate category. So let's see, what did I say?Change dentists, say Joseph of insurance and moved out of town and deceased. So, and then I like to send a letter to every one of them. If they're deceased, they get a sympathy, the family gets a sympathy. So some type of communication goes to them. Even if they changed Dennis, it's because of insurance. I want them to know that they're welcome to come back to the practice.And so I'm calling these people, it's like I'm, I'm calling all these people that haven't been in, and I'm not calling them for a cleaning. I'm calling them because doctor asked me to call. Cuz we miss seeing them in the practice and I'm continuing this conversation letting them know how much we've enjoyed seeing them on a regular basis.You know, ideally we're gonna reactivate them. If they say, oh, well you know what, I'm not coming back. Or, you know, my grandson is a dentist. Now, you know, or you are gonna tell you all these things. Or if you don't really know the reason why, it's okay to say, well, in order to complete our clinical records, may I ask why you wish to become inactive for the reason, and then they'll tell.And then you make sure that you put that in, in the computer file. And if it's like a, it's, it's an upset. You know, a lot of times when you're talk to these people, you realize they're upset about something, some misunderstanding or, or bad communication somewhere. You've gotta get that handled. You've gotta report it to the doctor and get it handled cuz they're gonna go around and tell everybody.Michael: Mm-hmm. . Okay. Okay. And then that's how you keep it, the monitoring, right? The attrition you have to follow up with. every Sandy: week. To me it should be going ongoing. Like every day she's making a few calls and she's putting on the list, and then doctor as or the manager says, oh, can I see our attrition list? How are we doing?Oh my goodness, look at this. We learned out of those calls that she made in a week that we lost 25 patients. It's just data. Okay? Running a business, you've gotta have data. Stats are everything. I love them. They, they give you a picture of everything going on, and so that. If you have a lot of people leaving the practice, you need to know.And if you're not keeping up with it, you don't really know it, or you just know a number and you don't know who it was. So I like to communicate to the people that leave because they do come back. I've seen that first in, and they'll come back. Michael: Gotcha. So then what do we do in this scenario when they're like, oh, you know what?Yeah, I didn't like that. Uh, I didn't like that this person did that. Or did something happen? That's why I left. I, I'm finding another person. Right. Is. Are we trying to win them back or is it more like, oh my Sandy: goodness, always, because if you don't, they're going to go talk around town for the next 10 years about you.It's always better to have friends. It's always better to have really good relationships in life. Um, you know, it's never good to have somebody that's not happy with your service. And, you know, people, like, if you think about, you know, why, like, why would I stay at my dental office? Well, you know, I kinda like 'em.I like how I feel when I go in there. Everybody's really friendly and I feel comfortable because I'd been there for a long time. And I feel like that work has lasted, that, that dental work. I mean, it, that's what people say, things like that. Right? Or, you know, they love it when they get like, oh, you know, I get my birthday cards from my dentist.He's the first one that sends me a birthday card every single month. And people like that, they like it. Or, or you can hear 'em talking like, oh, my dentist, this is, this is what my husband's friend told me yesterday. I like this, Dennis. He's got a lot of good UpToDate technology. Hmm. He said, but I, I just don't like what he's doing with my den.And I'm like, okay. So this is a guy that my husband has known for about 50 years that he worked with about 50 years ago. And every year they have a phone conversation. And that was yesterday. And I overheard some of this conversation. So he has an upper denture and he w, he was in an accident years ago and he lost some of his teeth.So he is trying to, he want some implants, he's trying to do some work with to his mouth and he doesn't like what's happening. So he calls us and starts telling us about all this You. And that's what they do. He said, you know what, one thing I do like too is they gave me his, an emergency number after I had my surgery there.And so that was the thing that impressed him. So he was impressed that the technology, he was impressed that he got that doctor said, look, if you have any problems, give me, um, you know, give me a call at this number. And so you're giving them kind of like you're impressing them and they have like a reason to, to stay.And they're, they're looking if they found your practice and they're gonna stay. If you have, number one, a good care system, number two, you are communicating with them for that recall process, right? You're reaching out, you're in the calling, you're texting, you're sending cards, whatever it is you're doing, you're not being idle.And I'm telling. The way they feel when they come in there, in that atmosphere and the technology and how easy it is to get an appointment. Those are the things that they are gonna like. Oh, and, and look, we had a friend that told us this at dinner one night. It's like every time I go to the dentist, I'm telling you, I, it's like he's mad and he's just assistant, he's like throwing the instruments down and I don't know what's going on.Look, those are the little things that make a difference in the practice. Okay? So you can't, you can't do that. You cannot do that. And, and the way the team are interacting with each other. Yeah. They also, the things that's gonna have them stay to your practice is because, you know, if you come across. That you're rushed being impatient or you know, you seem like you're mad at your employees, they're mad at them, or you're not telling them what's going on with their mouth.The last hygienist I saw was so good and she, she knew I was in the dental industry, but I think she probably does this with all the patients. So she was like telling me constantly, you know, what she was gonna be doing and um, yeah. And if they feel like. Overcharging or focusing on money, that'll be a turnoff for sure.I think that if the practice is giving them more reasons to stay, you're, they're gonna be fine. Being aware of who's coming, leaving. Okay. Who's staying? You've gotta, you gotta take care of your patients. . Michael: Yeah, I like that. Like it's, as long as we don't see it, like you said, idly by. Right. Like, give them more reasons to stay than to leave.Right. I mean, maybe mistakes will happen. The more can compensate for that, right? Yeah. Um, and then monitor them. Any final words for this Sandy: episode? The only other thing I wanna add, Michael, is I would like for everybody to start watching that attrition number and know how many patients they're retaining.That is the most important statistic that you can keep. You're always looking for new patients. Let's close the back door. Let's keep some of those patients as you currently have. Michael: Gotcha. Awesome. So guys, if you want to talk about this episode, come on the podcast or submit any questions. Then you can do so by joining the Facebook group Dental Gumbo.And at the same time, don't forget to leave us a review on iTunes. It helps us out a ton. So please go ahead and do that. And thank you guys so much for tuning in, and we'll talk to you in the next Sandy: episode. Yeah, Rebe, have fun. Reactivating those patients.
Join this podcast's Facebook Group: The Dental Marketer SocietyJoin my newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/[Click here to leave a review on iTunes]Guest: David RiceBusiness Name: Ignite DDSCheck out David's Media:Instagram: @igniteDDSIgnite DDS Facebook GroupEmail: david.rice@ignitedds.comOther Mentions and Links:The Psychology of MoneyDavid on Episode 159The Making Of Facebook GroupSandy Pardue (Classic Practice)PattersonJon Miller (Patterson)Henry ScheinBencoBank of AmericaHost: Michael AriasWebsite: The Dental Marketer Join my newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/Join this podcast's Facebook Group: The Dental Marketer SocietyMy Key Takeaways:Lending banks do not want to see that you have no debt, they want to see that you can SAVE money. Keep some savings in the bank when securing a loan!Many dentists start off with more than they need. Try running lean an mean at the beginning and add more ops later.Always consider the logical answer before making quick business decisions based on emotion.Podcasts and books are great learning resources starting off, but plan to have 3-5 good mentors to put things into action!Look at the dentist demographics in your area as well as the patient demographics. If there are hungry dentists saturating the market, another location may be better for your startup!Planning to reassess and improve your professional relationships every 90 days is imperative to growth.Please don't forget to share with us on Instagram when you are listening to the podcast AND if you are really wanting to show us love, then please leave a 5 star review on iTunes! [Click here to leave a review on iTunes]p.s. Some links are affiliate links, which means that if you choose to make a purchase, I will earn a commission. This commission comes at no additional cost to you. Please understand that we have experience with these products/ company, and I recommend them because they are helpful and useful, not because of the small commissions we make if you decide to buy something. Please do not spend any money unless you feel you need them or that they will help you with your goals.Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)Michael: David, how's it going, man? That's great. How you doing today? I'm doing pretty good, man. Thanks for asking. If you don't mind me asking, where are you located right now? David: St. Petersburg, Florida. Is Michael: that where you're, are you speaking right now or is that where your David: hometown Yeah, so that, so St.Petersburg is home for me, although I do dentistry in, uh, east Amherst, New York, which is Buffalo. So I've got a. Michael: Yeah. How far is that? David: You know, it's about a two hour plane flight, door to door. But I, I, I chunk my time, so I'm in St. Pete for, you know, a month, month and a half, and then I go back there for a week or two and so on and so forth, Michael: man.So he racking up the, the miles man, David: Yeah. Yeah. Delta and I are besties. Michael: I know. awesome man. So we appreci. Everything, man. I, I know a lot of the listeners here are from the startup group, dental Marketer Society, Facebook group too as well. A lot of other groups. You drop a lot of, knowledge, expertise, especially for startups.Do you have, your own startup practice, or was it an acquisition or. David: So I, you know, I kind of ran the full gamut, which I think is important for your listeners to understand. Mm-hmm. , you know, as they listen to people, as you know, advice from folks who've done things lots of different ways matters. So I was an associate, I did three acquisitions and a startup.I've sold it all. I'm back to being an associate again by design. And, that, that matters when you're listening to folks. You know, one startup is great, 10 startup. Means something, you know, one acquisition is great, 10 acquisitions mean something. Mm-hmm. wanna be careful who you're listening to. Michael: Yeah, that's true. Mm-hmm. , when you went to three acquisitions, was that your, out of the three acquisitions in the startup, which one was the first where you dove into? David: First one, uh, was, was an acquisition. there are reasons to do one versus another based on your goals, demographics. opportunity, things like that.But first one was an acquisition. Michael: Gotcha. And then you continued to acquire more and more and then decided to do your startup like that? I, David: I did. And you know, part of the reason I did a startup, part of the reason I acquired other practices as well as did the startup is, , people like to put you in a box and say, well, of course you're sober, successful, you're in East Amherst, New York, not Buffalo or de pew or Lancaster or wherever.Mm-hmm. . And, um, so I just decided, well, I'm just gonna keep going and prove, you know, there are processes that work, they're universal, and then Yep, there are some things that shift based on geography. So that was, that was my why, honestly. And it was fun. And we got to put some young docs in really great positions early on to, you know, become owners and, and to take over.Gotcha. What Michael: were the processes when it came to the acquisitions where you're like, this is universal man, it's, it's whatever acquisition you jump into, it's gonna happen like this. And then what are some things we gotta look out for where it's unique? David: Yeah. So I'll tell you some of the things that are important from a process standpoint are, um, how you sequence them.So the first thing you need to do if you wanna buy a practice or start one, is like, get with a lender and get pre. Step number one, 100% of the time. then things differ. But, so acquisition, once we had the lending in place, then we started saying from a vision standpoint, like, who do I want to be?What kind of practice do I want to have, kind of dentistry? Do I want to do what? ZIP codes, location, location, location, support that rather than trying. really high-end cosmetic dentistry in a demographic that couldn't support it or go into a neighborhood and wanna do bread and butter dentistry in a neighborhood that didn't understand that's not what they wanted.So, you know, get the lending down, figure out what kind of practice you want to build from a vision standpoint. Then build your kind of your core team. and, and build out your, your business plan to deliver just like 10 steps. I love, but just a couple Michael: there. . . So you said get the lending down. Let's, let's jump into it with you, right?Sure. How did you get the lending down and then how did you figure out what kind of practice you wanted? David: Man, great question. So here's, here's the first thing. I got the lending down the wrong. , so don't do what I did. Mm-hmm. , you know, I love to teach from the mistakes I made. most of you who are young dentists are being told by maybe parents or faculty or maybe even folks that you see online that you should be like, knocking off your debt, knocking off your debt, knocking off your debt.Not true. Absolutely. 100% false. You should be going income-based repayment, making your minimum payment possible. Dashing cash. and then the moment you've either acquired your practice or if you start up, started up a practice, then crush your debt. I did it backwards. I, I went to a lender with zero debt.I owned a home with also zero debt and I was a bad lender cuz banks don't want to take away your home or your dental practice if something goes sideways. They wanna look at an account and say, Hey, here's 150, $200,000. And if, God forbid, you're the half of a. , we've got a way to make ourselves whole again, don't do it the way I did it.bank Cash, that's the first lesson. Michael: Okay. So was it hard for you to get a loan cuz of that, or who'd you go with? Yeah. Who'd you end up having to David: go with? So I went with Bank of America, I did. Three of my, my loans through them over the years. They're, they're, they're awesome. They've been great. They have a dental division.They're the largest dental lender out there for a reason. and there's some lessons there too. Part of it is rate, but it's not all about rate. But I went with them and yeah, my first loan was, was tough. I had to have a co-signer, like, oh, think about all that, man. I was 27, I had zero debt. I was firing on all cylinders, and I needed someone to co-sign my.because I did it wrong. So don't do Michael: it wrong, . Okay. So like depth is good in this situation, right? Like you want to have that, cash in the bank. David: So yeah. Cash flow is king. Mm-hmm. . And if you have, ballparks say 50 to 80 grand and a bank. and you show a bank that you can, save money, not light it on fire, cuz you're all excited, you finally get a paycheck. They're not actually gonna take a dime of your money. They just need to see that you're capable of saving money. And then there's other things they need to see too. But I didn't have that right. Even though I thought I did all these things right. What they saw was like a zero net balance. And that wasn't, that wasn't good for me as a young dentist who wanted to be an.Okay, Michael: so then you got the lending down. Yeah. What are the, here's, here's the process where you're like, okay, I'm just gonna get an acquire this practice right here, or how'd you figure out Yeah. The steps for that, like the practice that you David: wanted? Yeah. So I knew for me, I wanted to do complete care. I wanted to do, I wanted patients who wanted like to invest in the.and you, you guys know the dentistry that's out there. It's, you know, call it full mouth rehab, total health, whatever you wanna label it as. But they weren't, I didn't want patients who came in on an emergency only. I didn't want patients I had to fight. So whether we like that or not, that requires a dental iq.Doesn't mean you have to be smart or, in, in life in general, but you have to have a high dental iq. You have to, you have to inherently value that kind of dentist. Or it's an uphill battle to build, 2,500, 3000 patients who get to that value. That's something we can build over time. But if you're gonna buy a practice, you wanna buy in an area where people sort of instinctively get that.So we targeted zip codes and said, Hey, they had to have a certain household income, their family structure had to look a certain. , we wanted a family structure, not 10 kids, but maybe one or two kids. Mm-hmm. and people who, who lived in, in certain areas and he shopped in certain places and they, they liked and bought certain goods and services cuz we knew if they valued those things, they would value the dentistry we wanted.So that narrowed it down for me, like three zip codes in, in Western New York, which is where I want it to be. So do that wherever it is you want to. And, narrow your search. And then from there, you know, there's some really good companies out there that can tell you should you be in a strip mall? Should you be in a standalone?Should you be, a, at a complex that houses 10, 20, 30 businesses And you can study all that stuff and put yourself in an optimum position. Michael: Gotcha. Did you go with any of those companies? Those really, really good. . David: at the time a lot of them didn't exist. So who I did go with and who I still rely on to this day is I called my friends at Care Credit and said, Hey, you guys know, don't just know dentistry, you know, like healthcare.Mm-hmm. . So tell me in these zip codes what neighborhood I should be in. Am I in a corner? Um, what kind of building I should be in? And they had all that data, which was super. Michael: Gotcha. Okay. So you figured out like the, the patient base that you wanted, right? Like the exact type of patients then you went from there.Yeah. When you've acquired these practices, cuz this has happened a lot in the past where numbers look inflated, right. whether it's production collection, new patients and they get in there and they're like, this is not at all what I thought it was gonna be. Yep. David: Did that. No, thankfully I had great people on my team who knew how to look at not just the top end number, but why those numbers got there.And they also knew who, how to dissect the practice based on the team that was present and say, Hey, this is the team you can count on moving forward. So these numbers should hold true or. , you know, this team member's been there 35 years, they're probably gonna retire. Or this team member, these team members only been there six months, so they're turning people over.So that's gonna be something you need to consider on building a new team. So they dissected the numbers themselves, they dissected the processes. Um, we looked at existing team and culture. We looked at insurances. Participated versus accepted versus network. We looked at all those factors and then we looked at goodwill.So if you're buying something, if you're thinking about buying a practice, ultimately that's what you're buying. You're buying me the seller anointing, you the buyer, as the greatest dentist on the planet and the person I've been searching for my entire career. And when you have all those things put together, you will not lose.more than 10% of the patient base, and you should lose less than 5%. And anyone who tells you you're gonna expect to lose 20 or 30, they don't know how to do what they should know how to do. Don't listen to that advice. Michael: Gotcha. Okay. That's really, really good advice. So then, mm-hmm. , you built three acquisitions.So what was the, why not do a fourth one? Why'd you do a startup instead? David: prove, I could prove I could take a startup to a million dollars in under 18 months, so that, that was. . Michael: Oh man. So break that process down to us, like how did that happen? David: Yeah. So, okay, so similar process. Go get a lender, get your pre-approval.interesting enough. , your easiest lend is your first one, friends. So do that one, right? Every time you go back to a bank, yes, you, you have history, but you need to have really strong history. So in my sense, it worked out really great cause I had strong history, but in general, your first lend is easiest.So start a practice. We looked at the same thing. What kind of dentistry do we want to. , what zip code codes will support that kind of dentistry? what kind of marketing plan are we gonna need? Because now they're not butts and seats from day one. We've gotta build butts and seats. And, and then how do we build the right lean team to open the doors with?And how do we build the right le um, have the right lean, build? . So we didn't build a space that was too big. and we're paying for things that we don't really need. There's, there's lots of myths out there. Like, oh, build it for like six ops. No, do not do that. build lean and mean. You can move, you can expand.worry about being locked in a space that's too small. That will be the best problem you'll ever have. so simple things that work and are repeatable Gotcha. Michael: Halene and mean. David: We did four ops. we plumbed all four, but we had only three outfitted. One as a main restorative op, one as a hygiene op, and one is sort of an overflow that you could use either way now.I'm gonna caveat this. So imagine that I'm in a community that knows me already, so I had an advantage over you. Somebody who's doing a startup and no one knows you. Mm-hmm. . If I'm doing a startup and no one knows you, do not. Don't plan on having a hygienist for like six to eight months. Like go in as dentist, have an assistant who can also answer phones.And then as soon as you can warrant adding somebody, add someone at the front desk. So you have front desk assistant dentist, and last, and not least add hygiene, but, I went and lean with, a trio. I'm gonna say most of you'll go and lean with the trio and, unplug hygiene. Michael: Hmm. Okay.That's really, really good. And then mm-hmm. , what was your marketing David: plan? marketing for us, we had an advantage. One of my really great friends owns an ad agency that deals with outside of dental industry, so n f l, like big time folks. Hmm. But they took us on, out of friendship and then we targeted procedures and demographics of people that we knew would mix.So we went urban with the. We knew we were gonna target essentially millennials as our patient. So what are procedures that we knew they wanted and what are factors we knew they wanted? So convenience was number one. Technology was gonna be number two, services like, know, Invisalign and things that people in a demographic whitening would want would be number three.And then we just built everything from that core sort of found. Michael: roughly monthly. How many new patients were you getting? 40. 40. Wow. Okay. So then today, where do you see it go wrong? Where do you see, like, where people are like, I'm trying to do all these Facebook. I don't know. You know what I mean? Like a bunch of stuff.Where do you see it go wrong? David: Oh, lots of places. So people don't, um, it goes wrong when you don't do your home. it goes wrong when you emotionally attach yourself to a location, and say, boy, I really want to be here, but you haven't studied to see, can that support you? One, are there enough patients per capita Two, are they the right patients for the style of practice you want to build?that's one piece. Another piece is, investing in, in lease space or ownership. I would tell you if you're doing a startup, Nine out of 10 times you should lease not own. you wanna lower your, cashflow out. Cuz again, this, this is a cashflow game too. So the faster you can get the positive net, the better.So most often that's leasing a space. Hire someone to negotiate for you. Uh, you would be shocked at the um, negotiation leverage you have when you get somebody in the game who understands how to beat a landlord. if you're thinking of doing a startup in the next year, the a n u, this could possibly be the best time to do a startup in the last 15 years.so Awesome. So, you know, side then size of space, don't overbuild. I think a lot of people overbuild and then I think a lot of people over dentally, tech out get foundational pieces of technology that really, really matter. outfit your primary room to do all the things you want it to do, and then everything else is kind of nice to have.If it fits in your budget, I would rather you spend way more money on your marketing, than outfit three rooms, Mac, daddy them. You can always come back and invest in, uh, more equipment. So I think those are the big ones. Okay. If it's me and what I'm seeing out there, Michael: is a good, like, rule of thumb when it comes to, cuz it, you know, you hear that a lot, like, invest as much as you can in your marketing.What's a good, like percentage wise when you're, when you're looking at David: that man, it, it's, it's, honestly, it's hard to say. I'm gonna say the average startup today is 700 grand. So if you said you're spend. Oh God, 10% of that, 15% of that on marketing. That's, that's, that's probably a healthy budget.I think it's easy for people to go, it's easy for people to underspend and then wonder, why am I only getting a couple patients? Cause there's, you know, you know, from what you do, there's like a critical mass number and you have to, you have to hit that threshold in order to cross over the other side. So I would say minimum 10, 15% of that load you.Michael: Okay. It's interesting. I feel like, do you think some people look at the unicorn who like, oh, I opened up where I wanted to, did what I wanted to, did all this. And then they're like, I throw money at you, like, tell me how to do it. You know what I mean? Kind of thing. Do you think that's kind of like, I guess like common instead of, all right, we should sit down and do our due diligence here and this is not gonna work out.David: Yeah, I think that's, um, unfortunately. , it's, uh, you know, social media. There's a blessing and a curse to it. The blessing is we meet people and we, we can learn some best practices. The curse, the downside to it is we're really like tiptoeing in somebody else's water and everybody's circumstances are different.So I think, yes, unfortunately probably eight out of 10 people look at the unicorn and say, well, I'm just gonna do it that way, and that way might not be the way at all there. There needs to be process. this should be a zero emotion and a 100% logic driven process for everybody who's gonna do it.Cause the feel good goes away the moment the bills start coming in and the revenue doesn't. Michael: Yeah. Yeah. Cuz I feel like I get, I hear that a lot, David, where it's like, oh man, I just needed my own place to do a startup. This is my own brand. Finally I can do what I want. You know what I mean? And there's a lot of emotion and I guess emotion kind of sells, but like, is that, is that wrong?David: I'm just gonna say that I, and I'm you, anyone who's watching me, like, I'm not an absolute guy. I'm like, life's gray in the middle. But if you're making your choice on emotion yes. That is in, in that situation, it's 100% not the right way to do it. There are instances where you're gonna wanna start up and then there are instances you're absolutely not gonna wanna start up.You're better off buying a practice. And then there are instances you might be better off staying an associate a little while longer to bank more cash and wait for the right opportunity to open up. it's e it's easy as a young dentist to think, man, I'm not moving fast enough cuz I'm watching all these people sprint.I think what, what we don't see is all the behind the scenes stuff. Like it's easy to take a snapshot of my life today and be like, wow, that looks really great. But I'm here to tell you, like for every good thing that's happened, there's been like a hundred bad things, . that's just not what we talk about on social media all the time.We don't talk about the work and the stress and the days. I would close the door and be like, you know what? I'm not paying myself today. I'm gonna pay my bills. I'm gonna pay my team, and then I'm gonna try to figure out how I'm going to. and like I had those times just like everybody else had those times.So, you know, if you're thinking about this process, like really sit back, get with the small, and I mean small, like three to five people, mentors, stops and start listening deeply to their lessons and not this wide swath of people. Cuz you're gonna get a hundred different answers from a hundred different people.Yeah. Michael: So then what would be. Where you're, somebody's telling you, let's just say like, all these people are. I, I think I've heard it somewhere where they're like, undercover mentor, right? Where you don't know that, David, you're my mentor, but I've been listening to your stuff, watching your po, you know what I mean?Kind of thing. So it's like, all right, I'm listening to David. And now what would you say to be like, Yeah, you do need a startup. You do need to do a startup. Yeah. What, what would be the, okay. , the David: okay for it is, the first thing I would do is I would look in an area and I would say, okay, where do I want to be?So here's where I want to be. Then I would say, what are the li where are the realistic opportunities in like those three zip codes? Can I acquire a practice in those three zip codes for a reason, like a fair value? yes. Or. yes. I'm here to tell you buy the practice, don't start one. unless you're looking at a group of dentists who've been there, who are already, really enjoying life.So if you went into where I, my first practice where I started and you talked to my partner, my former partner, mark and Laura, and, and you wanted to compete, you could do a startup in their neighborhood. because they're already getting 60 new patients a month like clockwork. Everything's good. They don't have to worry about it.So if you want to come in and do some marketing, like they're like, ah, come in my neighborhood and do some marketing. Now, if you wanted to do a startup in a neighborhood where there's six people who are just like you and everybody's hungry and everybody's trying to build, and maybe it's people that are, uh, two, three years ahead of you, so they have some systems in place, that is not the place to start up.You're gonna get buried. , no matter how good you think you are. Mm-hmm. . so I think always look at not just the patient demographics, but the dentist demographics. And if the dentist demographics are people who are on autopilot and you wanna do a startup, go for it. If they're really, really new and they're not doing a lot of things, well go for it.But boy, if they're in the middle and they're hungry and they do a lot of things right, that's not the place to do a startup. Don't do it. Michael: Okay. Any like specific place? Like are you thinking of like Frisco or California? Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter. Okay. Doesn't matter. David: Yeah, just any place where there's a population.Population of people. so it doesn't, I mean, Buffalo, New York, I can, if you wanted to be in Buffalo or some suburb, I could tell you do not go to East Amherst. , do not go to Orchard Park. You wanna be in Buffalo proper, you wanna be in Lancaster to Pew, you wanna be um, in Lockport. All those places are opportunity.But if you go to one of the three places where all the Beth dentists who are really hungry are, it's gonna be a tough haul uphill. Michael: Yeah. So then that's like the strategy. But when it comes to like, I guess cuz you said to ignore the emotion, right? To, so yeah. Let's ignore the part where it's like, oh, I just want to do my own startup.Yeah. When would it be okay then, or how do you know if it's like, I'm just being impatient, I need to find a better associate, uh, ship, or I need to find an acquisition. You know what I mean? Like when is it the okay to be, like, is it just when you're doing research and you're like, I feel like owning a business or, or how does that work?Yeah. David: I think when you are ready, like when you wake up in the morning, you think I'm ready to be a practice owner, then you should Go for it as a practice owner. But I think then you need to look at what's the best path for ownership for me. Mm-hmm. . and you should be patient enough to know that, like getting in the right relationship in life, like you might find Mr.Miss, him, her wonderful when you're not looking. So it might not be today, it might be three months, six months, or a year from today. So it own that. You wanna own, that's amazing. But don't take a bad opportunity in a rush if it takes you eight months, 10 months, a year to get exactly what you want. It's worth the weight.Michael: Gotcha. Okay. And then why is this the best time in past 15 years to do it? David: So there's gonna be this little thing called the recession hitting the world. not if it's when, and it's how intensely. The great news is dentistry, like it is pandemic proof, it's recession proof. We've already been through multiple recessions.Dentistry does really, really well. So here's the win. , you're going to be successful because you're still going to do dentistry, despite the economy. The wins are, you're gonna be able to negotiate with landlords much better because that's, uh, a business world that doesn't do well in recession. People stop paying rents.Mm-hmm. . So now you, you're a really good tenant, or if you wanna buy a piece of property, property values are gonna dip 10, 15, 20%. So you're gonna buy for less. Equipment. Now you're not gonna go to, any major equipment company and get like a 30% off deal, but you are gonna get a deal and you're gonna get a lot of perks.You're also gonna be able to get your equipment a whole lot faster. So maybe it took me eight, nine months to get my equipment and it takes you six, which gives you time. To get to your startup factor, like you've made the decision, you're doing it, you've done all your homework. Now your goal is to get the doors open as quickly as possible.Cuz then time is money. So, real estate's gonna be a better buy. Equipment's gonna be a better buy. Supplies will be a better buy. And you're gonna do the same level of dentistry you would've done, uh, economy booming or economy just doing okay. So you're in that buy low sell high kind of place and, and realistically, you know, just two years.you already have an asset that's probably worth, you know, 1.5 to two times x. And that's doesn't happen very often in that chart of a span kind. That's Michael: good. I like that. So then if we were one a little bit, your three acquisitions in one startup, you let that go when? David: life and timing. Seven months pre covid.Michael: Okay. So pre covid life and ti. , David: it was part of an eight year plan. so yeah, I'm a, I'm a planning nut, so I had an eight year plan, where I, I love doing dentistry. I continue to do dentistry, but what I knew is Ignite was gonna take me to a different kind of business. And, it allows me to reach and work with young dentist.all the time, which I love even more than doing dentistry full-time. And the other part for me, from like a life and a vision standpoint, it is, it gave me total mobility. So my wife and I wanted to live someplace where the sun shined every day. My dental practice was in a place where it's fine, like 20 days a year.So , you know, ignite allowed us to move and take our, like our next life. earlier than it would've otherwise had I stayed a dentist full-time. So our practice needs its leaders there full-time. I get to go back and do all the things I do clinically and um, tech-wise, I get to build content there, which is amazing.And then, um, I get to go, you know, be with my wife in Florida the rest of the time, which is, you know, that's our sort of perfect life design. Mm-hmm. , Michael: that's how you created it, right? Yeah. Towards the. Man. So you planned that out like that. Interesting. Okay, man. Mm-hmm. . So then I wanted to ask you, um, throughout your process of your acquisitions, also your, your startup and everything like that.Sure. And what you've been seeing lately, what have been some of the best companies to work with, and then some of the worst ones. David: So I'll caveat this with I'm different than many dentists where I believe that loyalty really. So I'm a Patterson guy. Mm-hmm. , and I've been for 29 years now.That doesn't mean if you went to work with Shine or Benko or somebody else, that that's bad. That's not bad. Um, but my relationship started with Patterson years and years ago. They've been amazing to me. We've worked together with every single thing I've ever done, and it's been a craziest success. So if you don't know who to go to, I highly recommend that.If you say, man, I work with Scheiner Benko and they're doing right by me. , stay with them, be super loyal to them. that's been, uh, I think a life premise. I do that with flights and hotels and everything, like loyalty pays big time. So I like Patterson. if I'm you guys and I'm talking like startups or first practice, one of my favorite people in dentistry, his name is Jonathan. I love Jonathan. He's, he's integrity through the roof. He's got a banker's background, but he literally has devoted his whole life to, your first practice, whether it's an acquisition or a startup. And I love, love, love that cuz he has no vested interest in which one you choose. It just needs to be the right one for you.That's like solid objective information. . he's tremendous. I'm a B of a guy. I also like provide, I think they're, they're also a very good lender. So I, I work with, uh, young docs on both of those lens all the time. I don't have no skin in the game. I just know that they both can deliver. sometimes one's better than the other just based on timing and, and offers they have. And sometimes it's just likability. Like, here's a couple good people. Pick who you wanna work with. Mm-hmm. , What spaces are you looking for Michael: in, I guess gimme like from the processes of your startup, right? Where you're like, okay, we built it, but now after like one, two years, three years after it's up and running because like, let's just say for example, there's a.So that, that leads to another question like, cuz you mentioned loyalty, right? When would it be okay to let that loyalty go? To be like, man, you screwed up way too many times. Like, these claims are, I can get 'em better done by somebody or I don't know. You know what I mean? yeah. And it's different now too, cuz of social media.Like, you see everybody's saying they're the best, they're the, you know, contact this person and all these things. So Sure. Kinda like in that area. David: Yeah, so that's, and that's a really good point. What I would recommend to all of you is you reassess every relationship you have every 90 days. So I'm not looking to make a move, but I am looking to make sure people are performing.And that's on part of, that's on them, on on, on the other side of the relationship. But part of that's on me too, as an. You know, as the quote, c e o of my company and as a leader, is to define my expectations to all the people we work with and show them what a win is for you. Tell them, and, you know, when we work together, these are the things that matter most to me.And then if you, every 90 days are circling up with them, they're either checking all those boxes or they're not. So for me, I, at 90 days, if somebody wasn't doing their job, I would say, Hey, remember when we promised? that these three or five things were really important, you were gonna do those things.They'll say yes. You'll say, okay, so help me understand how we missed. I don't know, two out of the five. What are we gonna do about it? How do we fix that in between now and the next time we get together? And then if they fix it and it stays fixed, amazing. If they don't, then you know that's, you've given your best to the relationship.They clearly look at it differently than you and. Then it's time to move on. Um, but I think like all relationships, when we communicate really, really well, here's what we need from you. And they say, here's what we need from you, and then we, we both work at delivering what we need. Then you'll find you'll have 10 year, 15 year, 20, 30 year relationships with people, and your life will go much more smoothly as a business owner in addition to costing you a lot less money.Michael: I like that. So today still, David, do you re reassess it every 90 days or after like 10 years? You're like, we got it. We got, we're, we're David: pretty cool. Mm-hmm. , we still do, we do it with every insurance. not with dental insurances, but like male practice, disability, life. Uh, we do it with our financial planners, in the office for the 401k and our profit sharing outside of the office.For what we do alone, I do it with my C P A, we do it with our attorneys. and um, you know, it's, it was really cool when I was with the practice all the time and, and Mark and I were just partners together. We did it together. We brought everybody in and we round tabled it. We're like, okay, you're all on our team.Cuz what's really interesting is sit down with the CPA and they're gonna give you, this advice, you know, over, you know, over in one cap. And then you sit down the financial planner and they might be in a totally different camp. No, no, no, no. That's a bad idea. Do this. But when we bring our cpay and our financial planner together, And it's not a, one versus the other.It's more the goal is to win. So share why you c p a see it this way. Financial planners share why you see it this way? It's so cool to see people interact and say, you know what? Wow, I never really looked at that way. I get why you want to do that. So what if we did a little bit of this and then we did a little bit of that, and then we assessed what works best and then we'll do more of what works and less of what doesn't work.Don't be afraid to take your external team and unite them in a room or a virtual room on a regular basis and have everybody talking to everybody. It's gonna make them feel really good because you're in this with them. It's not a transaction and you'll get really crazy better results when everybody communicates with everybody and people aren't butting heads all the time, you know, over turf.Michael: So you do that every like quarter or every 90 days. Mm-hmm. you, you get everybody together and. David: Yeah, that, and we, yeah. And I'll tell you pro-tip, when you're building out a space, do the same thing. We got our architect, our general contractor, Patterson as our distributor, who's gonna supply the equipment, all the subs, electric, plumbing, the whole nine yards.We got 'em all together at, at a table, handed out a little information sheet, said, this is who y'all are. This is all your. . So we are gonna build this place together. And when you feel like somebody's holding you up, then let that person know along with us and we can hold everybody accountable in this process.And our buildouts went much better that way than when we tried to do them not doing it that way. Michael: I like that man. So you let the, you let them know, Hey, if you hold us up, everybody else is accountable kind of thing. . David: Mm-hmm. . And you know, cuz you know, it's, it's, he said, she, she said, so if you're building a space out and, and you're, you're running behind, which happens too commonly in Buildouts.Mm-hmm. , someone's gonna say, oh man, I couldn't come in and do my job cuz so and so didn't do theirs. Well, once you put everybody in a room and you hold them accountable to each other, then they, I can't blame if I'm a plumber. I can't blame the electrician cuz boy, we, we all know each other now. So if you had a problem with the electrician plumber, it was your. So let that person know and let us know there was a problem. So we knew what to expect. Michael: Okay. I like that man. Okay. So we wanna reassess every relationship every 90 days, right? All together. Yeah, everybody. And then make sure we talk to everyone, let them know their roles, communicate and so forth. Okay.Interesting. So, David, I know you, you do a lot now, I dunno if you're more busier now than you were when you had all the acquisition. So real quick, what's your area of e. . David: I'm gonna say I'm a leadership and culture builder. That is, that is my, there are, there are things that I'm pretty darn good at, but that's what I'm pretty darn good at, that I really, really love and I'm a huge fan of.So I work with young folks all the time on how to build that in their practice. And sometimes it's a personal thing. Most of the time it's a practice thing. when you really get it, you realize it's all the same. Mm-hmm. . So yeah, that's how I personally help people. And outside of that, I'm gonna say my superpower is just connecting you for the right people.Big ocean out there. My job is just take the ocean, turn it into a pond, and then you as a, a young dock side, who in that pond you should play with. But at least we've weeded. , all the other fluff. Yeah, Michael: everything else is unnecessary. So then what can a dentist do today to improve their, their marketing or their business?David: First thing I would do is I would look at my internal systems. I'm a big fan of external marketing as well. I'm here to share with you if your internal systems aren't buttoned up. , um, you can reign in, you know, a hundred phone calls a day and you're not gonna convert mm-hmm. . So why spend the time, the energy and the dollars on that unless you have your internal systems buttoned up?So I would work on that. I would work on my, my diagnostic skills, my treatment planning skills, and especially my communication skills from first phone call to passing the baton from one team member to the. To treatment plan and case acceptance to follow up. And if you master that process that you do all day every day as a team, you, you can't help but grow at least 20% in less than six months.I mean, it's, it's hard not to grow that fast. Michael: Yeah. So then look at, if, if you were to give us like a couple bullet points, like besides phones, right? Because like obviously if phones aren't converting, then we. You know, marketing is just being always what's, what are some internal systems that you've seen where people continue to miss it after year, two, year three, year four, and, and you have to go in there again and be like, keep an eye on this system or create a system for this.What are some of those? Sure. David: I'm gonna say low hanging fruit. people don't have assistant to. Patients for referrals. that's an easy one. you know who your best patients are, you probably want more of them and not just more of like the random person. So having a system for asking for referrals is a big one.Having a system to, be up the case acceptance model from hygienist to dentist. Is another really, really easy one. So as a dentist, you should walk in a room and that patient should be primed. They should already have a, a firm grasp of everything you're gonna say. You and your hygienist should have a really nice system to communicate with each other before you walk in.And then adding to that system how you share what you share over a patient's shelter. There's tons of data to show that your patients listen more to what they overhear than what they. . Um, and then the third one is system for accountability. And that is everybody does what they promised to do and I've seen so many dental practices fall off the ledge cuz everybody gets excited about something and then three months later, six months later, three years later, they're doing it.Same darnt thing that they did in the beginning. So accountability is everything. Gotcha. Michael: Okay. Interesting. Now these next couple questions are just to get into the head of someone who. Ran practices and startups, right. Acquisitions. But right now, what would you like to see more from a practice owner? David: I would like to see more leadership.this is gonna be a hard truth for some of you, but people don't leave jobs. They leave you. So if your team is walking out the door, they're leaving you. And I know you think it's about a dollar an hour or two bucks an hour, it's. . It's a good thing that we point to in today's world, but since the dawn of time, strong leaders build strong teams and strong teams stay cuz they're a part of something bigger.Do you Michael: ever feel like somebody ever comes to you and like, David, I'm trying to lead this, and then you're, you look at them, you talk to them, they're trying, but you're just like, you're just not a leader man. Like you're not meant for this role. Has that ever. David: It, it happens a lot. And I, you know, I don't blame anyone when that happens because unless you have invested more time and energy in learning to be a leader, it's, you know, it's inherent in some people.Some people are natural born leaders, but most people learn leadership as a skillset, just like they learn everything else. So I think what happens is, whether it's social media or parents or you read a book, you, you think you're taking these great lessons and bringing them to the table. somebody's hearing a totally different message than what you are verbalizing or even better what you're showing them, right?Mm-hmm. , who you are is different than who you're speaking to them, so the connection is getting lost. So if you feel like this isn't going perfectly well, you know, spend some time to learn to be a leader. It's just like wrapping a tooth. You have to be taught. Michael: Anything you recommend? Like, cuz you mentioned that and I'm like, oh dang.I do that sometimes. Like I'll read a bucket and I'm like, we're doing this and then a year from now I'm like, what happened to that? We, we should have done that Right. Kind of thing. So what would you recommend where we go to get taught? David: Yeah. So first I'm gonna say read all the books. That's, that's always a good thing.Listen to all the podcasts, that's always a good thing. But look at that as like very 1 0 1 information. Mm-hmm. And then I'm gonna say, take a deep dive in leadership with somebody. So, Sandy Paru, great example. Like somebody who knows how to teach leadership. something I do a lot, I teach leadership a ton, um, to young d dentists.there's probably 10 people I could name that, you know, if, if you guys wanna follow up with me, I'll give you all 10. Like, I doesn't matter to me. There's, there's like so much work out there for all of us. It's not a thing. So I'm happy to share all the people that I think are really, really good.But find somebody. that you, you really trust what they say. Check on them, right? Check to see who else thinks they're really darn good at what they do, and then go all in and stop dabbling and stop listening to people in a Facebook group, including our Facebook group, right? Listen only to that person.That's how you're gonna succeed. Mixed messages. It's just noise and it's a diversion from us succeeding quickly. Michael: Yeah, a hundred percent, man. I agree. So then right now, What do you hate about dentistry or dislike ? David: the blessing and the curse of social media. I hate social media and, and I, and I share that with all of you telling you that I built Ignite TDS on social media, right?right? Mm-hmm. , we reach a million people a month. We built our entire company on social media, but I still, the problem is most of social media today is affirmation and it is not information. Mm-hmm. , it's people going to comm. and, um, it's not all groups, but certain groups who've got some significant popularity.listen, they're Dan Kennedy marketing trained. They're har, they're honing in on three pain points that they know you have. And if you just pay attention, there might be 20 posts a day, seven days a week. But over the course of six months, they all say three things. They all harp on the fact that student loan debt is.and shame on dental schools, they harp on insurance companies are awful. Shame on insurance companies for paying you less. there's a few others out there, but, um, I don't like that. I don't like people who, who position themselves to generate business out of fear. It works. I get it. But I, that's my biggest dislike in dentistry today.Michael: Ah, when you were mentioning that, I, I started thinking of because, you know, we're all part of a lot of Facebook groups. Interesting. Yeah. No, no. I, I agree a hundred percent. Like, so then what would you, I guess, what would you like to see change from that? Just completely stop that or, David: in, in a perfect world, like, yeah, I'd like people to just stop, but that's not gonna happen.So what, so what I would like, honestly, a realistic world is each of us. As a, uh, social media user go in with both eyes wide open, and even in those groups where there are things like that, that I dislike, there's really good information, so don't throw it all out. Just go in and realize when somebody says this, they're saying it for a reason.They're pushing you to an end. if that end game is your perfect end game, listen, if that is not your perfect end game and it's challenging your beliefs and where you wanna go and making you feel like um, you can't get there, then you need to minimize your exposure to it. Cause it repetition will get you and eventually wear you down and make you feel like you can't.And, and I'm here to tell you, dentistry is still today one of the greatest professions where everything is possible. So you want to go be a fee for service dentist. I can teach you how to do that and make a lot of money. You want to be a P P O dentist. Um, better people than me can teach you how to do that and make a lot of money.You wanna be a Medicaid dentist. Different people than me can teach you how to do that and make a lot of money. My job is to just help you in the lane if you're in my lane, and then get you to somebody who's in a different lane if you wanna be in a different lane. Michael: Yeah, man. And I like that man affirmation and that information.You're right, there's a lot of. , we used to be information overload. Now it's just opinion overload. Totally. Like everybody has an opinion for everything and states it as a fact. You know what I mean? Yeah. Everybody's David: an expert. Like, and that, that's what I mean. If, if I literally, if I owned one, and in fact even if I owned my four practices and I didn't study practice models and work in like 50 practices a year, times the last 25 years. my information would be purely opinion and would mean nothing to you. So when somebody says, do these 10 things, how many times have they done it? How many different ways have they done it? If it's under 20, stop listening. It's irrelevant. Michael: Yeah. If it's not applicable. Do you think it's more like, cuz like, oh, we're in the same boat.I have like that common ground, like we're both just started up kind of thing, right? Yeah. David: So they. Yeah, I, and, and there's value in that. So there's value in knowing that we're all in this together and that we're not alone. w Edwards Deming, who's probably the greatest economist America has ever seen, but certainly a top three, if you don't know him, study him.94% of our successes in our systems, I can't build a good system. One shot. I have to have multiple shots over time. I can't have
We have a special episode this week asking doctors, practice owners, and dental industry professionals for their answers on these three big questions!1. "Give us the 3 best words that describe this past year."2. "What 2 things do you wish you would've said 'NO' to?" (this could be anything such as personal life or in your business/ practice).3. "What advice would you like to give to yourself as you begin the New Year?"Listen in on this week's episode to learn what has been driving our featured guests in 2022 and what to look forward to in 2023!You can learn more about The Featured Guests here (In order of speaking):Dr. Addison KilleenDr. Ashley DawsonDr. Kathryn AldermanDr. Nathan CoughlinDr. Paul EtchisonSandy PardueDr. Tyler BradyDr. Chad DuplantisIf you want your questions answered on Monday Morning Marketing, ask me on these platforms:My Newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/The Dental Marketer Society Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2031814726927041Our Sponsors & Their Exclusive Deals:CARESTACK | Cloud-Based Dental SoftwareSCHEDULE A FREE DEMO TODAY!Click the link below and get 1 MONTH FOR FREE + 10% OFF your Annual Subscription + 50% OFF Your Set-up Fee!Check out CARESTACK now: https://lp.carestack.org/thedentalmarketerDandy | The Fully Digital, US-based Dental LabFor a completely FREE 3Shape Trios 3 scanner & $250 in lab credit click here: meetdandy.com/tdm !Mango Voice | The best VoIP phones for small business with top software integrations & in-house customer support.Click here for Mango Voice's completely FREE startup package!ORClick here to get 2 FREE MONTHS with Mango VoiceThank you for supporting the podcast by checking out our sponsors!
Sometimes new practice owners want to outsource insurance verification, billing, phones, and more… but is it really necessary? In this episode Sandy Pardue lets us know the exact math and patients you must have in order to officially outsource or become more efficient in your practice. First, every single practice owner needs to know their overhead and understand that your “team” overhead is your largest percentage. Most practices get in trouble when they overpay their people/ team. This could happen due to outsourcing inappropriately. We discuss the only absolute times you MUST outsource, what would be ridiculous to outsource, and what needs to always stay in-house and how to make it all happen.
If you're not feeling the effects of inflation now, you will be in a couple of months! Save this episode because it will teach you how to “inflation proof” your practice! Sandy Pardue lets us know about 10 specific steps we need to take in order to get lean and mean and control our practice through anything. The first step is: KNOW WHERE YOU ARE. You need to be hungry for your overhead percentage numbers at the beginning of the month, don't just leave them to your accountant/ bookkeeper. Knowing your numbers are statistics in your practice, and statistics are meant for you to know where to make adjustments. Listen in to hear the next steps and how to immediately implement them into your practice.
Does this sound familiar: “We've had a lot of cancellations and I don't want to pay my hygienist during down time” Some of you may lean towards doing this. In fact, the hygienist may HATE this so your hygienist has to look or act busy so you won't deduct their pay. Do NOT do this anymore! Your hygienist AND you (the practice owner) deserve a full schedule always. In this episode Sandy Pardue tells us exactly how to do this. Remember, hygienists want to see patients and they want a full schedule! It's the practice that doesn't put enough pressure, enough urgency, on the front office to fill that schedule.
This week Clint and Russell interview Sandy Pardue of Classic Practice Resources. Sandy works as a consultant helping dentists establish systems in their offices. We discuss everything from hiring processes to questionable business practices to her interesting first experience as a dental consultant in the Northeast.
If you're not even aware of your treatment closing percentages... then that's the first thing you need to know TODAY! Sandy Pardue breaks down the whole process on how we can get more "YES" from our patients. She gives us real life examples, steps, scripts, who is responsible for this on our team, and even deep quotes! We also discuss what to do if someone says "NO".
Do you feel like your best efforts are being undermined? Do yu have someone in your team who is always going to you and complaining about others, pushing back on changes, procrastinating or coming up with excuses of why things are not done... but they are super nice about it all in front of you? Sandy Pardue gives us 5 signs that show you have a "Sweet Saboteur" in your practice, someone who is almost toxic to your team, and she lets us know how to either change their behavior or get them out ASAP! We also discuss how to clean up a toxic work environment and how often should we evaluate our team to make sure everyone is content and happy.
Staff meetings should be an orderly, productive, and uplifting meeting. One of the ultimate goals with every meeting is to have unity. Sandy Pardue breaks down exactly how our staff meetings should go in order for them to not only be productive, but to get us closer to our goals (better unity in your team, more collections, more profit). We discuss how long team meetings should be, the difference between morning huddles and these meetings, how often you should hold them, and what exactly needs to be covered and said.
No one loves being a micromanager. In this episode Sandy Pardue breaks down exactly why someone starts micromanaging, 4 action steps you must take today to stop the micromanaging process, and how to improve you trust in the work your employees are doing. We also talk to the team members who want to let their boss know that they feel micromanaged. Sandy lets the team members know exactly how to bring this up to your boss and communicate to them so that it can stop.
If you are asking yourself if "morning huddles" are worth it, then you're probably doing them all wrong. Sandy Pardue breaks down exactly how a "morning huddle" should run. We discuss how long it should be, who needs to start it, what the doctor needs to do, who should be involved, what exactly needs to be discussed, what to do if someone is late to the huddle, and more! Remember, morning huddles are necessary to keep you in control and on track with your goals.
There is a benefit to being transparent with your team. When you share with your team then they feel more engaged and they also feel more trusted, but how far should you go with transparency of the business? Sandy Pardue fills us in on what we should share with our teams, what should specific team members know and focus on, and what we should ALWAYS keep private. We also discuss how to set good supply numbers, production/ collection numbers, payroll percentages, and what each position/ team member should be tracking.
Have you ever wondered what your team really thinks of you as a leader? If not, you should. Sandy Pardue talks to us exactly how we can become a better leader for our employees. She also lets us know how we can become friends with our team members but still keep that high level of respect that you need. We also discuss what should we do if you are short staffed and you decide to delegate even MORE responsibilities to a team member, how you should delegate this and what you can do for the team member so that they don't burn out.
Not every single re-care appointment will show up exactly when they are supposed to. This sucks because it also leads you to try and market more for new patients. So step back a bit and build a system to improve your reactivation process. In this episode Sandy Pardue gives us a proven system that will drastically improve your reactivation process. Two things you want to do: 1. Look right now at your analytics/ software and see how many existing patients in your practice need a cleaning... today! 2. Listen to the podcast to hear what number 2 is (; This is a proven system that will bring back 9-19% of existing patients who need a cleaning or more!
HR issues are probably the thing Sandy Pardue hears the most about when consulting with practices. Therefore in this episode she breaks down the top 10 HR mistakes she has seen, heard, and witnessed. She also gives us the solution for each mistake. Listen closely, more than likely you have either experienced one of these mistakes, will be making one of these mistakes (not anymore after you hear this episode), or know someone who is making the mistake.
Sandy Pardue gives us a list of 5 things we need to review ASAP to make sure we are getting the absolute most out of our hygiene department. 1. Learn what procedures are not being performed. 2. Set goals JUST for your hygienist 3. Learn how to pay your hygienist 4. Do a "Hygiene Bonus" 5. Have Impactful Communication Listen in as Sandy explains each one with great detail and instructions on how to implement them.
In this episode Sandy Pardue let's us know how there is so much more that happens besides just "asking" for a review... and sometimes we don't even ask! So in this episodes we break down the steps. A couple things you want to do is: Boost the confidence of your team. Make sure your employees are complimenting other team members IN FRONT of the patient. Ask the patient in a leading way, for a review as they are already complimenting the doctor/ hygienist/ assistant or whoever worked on them. We also discuss how to handle and reply to a negative review.
This is a question Sandy Pardue gets quite often in her events, so we decided to cover it here! Here are a couple things you want to do: You need a time clock software. (Sandy recommends a software) Don't give everyone access to change their time clock. Create a policy, and be super specific in this policy. (Sandy gives us great examples). What to say if someone still violates the policy? (Sandy provides us with what to do, a script, and how many times should we allow it). How to present the overtime policy at a team meeting.
In this episode Sandy Pardue gives us the 5 action steps every single practice owner should be taking to get an incredible amount of momentum happening in the beginning of 2022. The last thing you want to do in 2022 is play catch up or start off slow. And you especially don't want your team knowing or feeling it is slow! We discuss: 1.Invest 139 dollars in a book called: National Dental Advisory Service. 2.Keep educating patients. Most practices have another practice within their practice, 1 million or 80k in unscheduled treatment. Now is the time to contact them. 3.Find out who has unused insurance benefits. 4.Keeping the chairs filled and asking them if they have anyone in the family that needs an appointment. 5.Promote more elective procedures. Verify that you are doing specific procedures.
This has happened to all of us! We call a patient to confirm their appointment but they don't answer. You call them again... and still no answer. Do you just consider them as a cancellation, a no-show, do you double book that time slot just in case, are you just going to hope they show up and leave them on the schedule?! Sandy Pardue gives us the exact steps and instructions we must take to handle patients who do NOT confirm. She gives us specific scripts, how many attempts we should make on a confirmation, what needs to be said, and where to discern and make moves in this situation.
In this episode Sandy Pardue gives us her "3 Day Report" that will increase collections and decrease broken appointments. This will also answer the main question "should we schedule the patient first and then collect payment OR collect payment and then schedule the patient"? Sandy teaches us step by step how to do this. We also discuss scripts on what to say to patients who are past due on their payments, how to do health credit ratings on patients, and how to create a "scheduler" in your practice who is responsible for the WHOLE schedule.
The 3 Rs for Future Practice Growth Episode #343 with Sandy Pardue Every practice should have a great recall system. And the problem isn't that dentists don't have great recall systems — it's that they think they have one, when they actually don't! If you are one of these dentists, today's guest has a ton of great advice. Kirk Behrendt brings in Sandy Pardue from Classic Practice Resources to teach you three simple things to help you improve your practice. She will teach you recipes for the 3 Rs you need: a recall system, retention, and reactivation. To learn how to implement these Rs and develop the best recall system, listen to Episode 343 of The Best Practices Show! Main Takeaways: You need the 3 Rs: a good recall system, retention, and reactivation. A good recall system includes calls, texts, emails, and snail mail — something for everyone. The majority of broken appointments were people that were prescheduled. Not every patient deserves to be prescheduled. There's nothing in the practice more important than filling the schedule. Don't run from your upset patients, run to them. Practices that value relationships will retain more patients. Retention goals for every practice owner is about 83%. Patients coming in every 18 months is a healthy retention number. January, February, March, and April are the best months to start reactivation. Patients absent from the practice for 13 months or longer is a reactivation prospect. Quotes: “Retention in dentistry is not good. It's actually, in many practices, only 50% to 60%. And that's very low.” (03:42—03:50) “165,000 dentists in the United States of America, and some of them are getting three new patients a month, and some are getting 130. So, let's just say that 165,000 dentists got 10 new patients a month. That is a lot of people changing dentists every month. We have a huge problem in dentistry. Now, we put what we're going through with COVID-19 in the mix. Patients, if they haven't been in touch with the practice, and maybe the practice has dropped out some of their vital systems, they're going to be looking for a new dental home. And that's what happens in dentistry whenever you stop communicating with people, or they don't feel comfortable calling because a long time has passed. So, it's important to have those systems in place that keep them coming back.” (04:00—04:57) “Every practice should have a good recall system. A problem is that they think they have a recall system, but they don't. And what I mean is, as I go into practices — I've worked with over 600 dental practices — one of the first things we'll ask is, ‘What is your retention?' And they're like, ‘What do you mean?' Well, they don't know. And the second thing I'm going to ask is, ‘Can I see your recall recipe in writing?' And they look, ‘We don't have that.' So, what that means is, they never really developed a recall system.” (05:13—05:56) “What happens is, [practices] get a third-party company that helps with text messaging and emails. And now, they have just said, ‘Okay, they're going to handle it.' That's not good. And then, they say, ‘Oh, yeah. Well, we use this company.' And you guys that are listening have all heard of them, and they're all great companies. But here's the problem. When I ask the practice, ‘What is that third-party company communicating?' they rarely know. And if I ask how often, they rarely know. And the fact is, they have no recall system, which I like to call a “recipe.” (05:59—06:42) “The only thing that will give you consistent results — because any practice owners, they're familiar with having a day that's like, $1,000, and then a $5,000 day, and we might shoot up to $7,000, and every day is a surprise. The only way you'll ever have predictability in your practice, ever, is through consistent actions by your team.” (07:57—08:22) “If you're just starting and you don't have [a third-party software to find retention], it's okay. You don't have to go get that...
Join this podcast's Facebook Group: The Dental Marketer SocietyGuest: Sandy PardueBusiness Name: Classic Practice ResourcesCheck out Sandy's Media:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sandy.pardue.35Host: Michael AriasWebsite: The Dental MarketerJoin the podcast's Facebook Group: The Dental Marketer Society JOIN MY EMAIL LIST HERE FOR GROUND MARKETING STRATEGIES AND TACTICS.My Key Takeaways:What do patients that "no-show" have in common.Every practice needs an "appointment wrap up" process.What to ask a patient in regards to following up with them.What's the best script for confirmation calls.What to do when presenting treatment plans to ensure a second visit.Please don't forget to share with us on Instagram when you are listening to the podcast AND if you are really wanting to show us love, then please leave a 5 star review on iTunes!DON'T FORGET TO:Join The Newsletter here and be a part of The Dental Marketer FamilyClick here to see how you can attract new patients immediately and consistently!Click Here to join the Ground Marketing Facebook Group
Join the discussion on Facebook!Full Transcript:Jonathan:Welcome to the Tooth and Coin podcast where we talk about your adventure of being a dental practice owner. In these episodes we're going to be talking about problems that you will likely face as a practice owner, as well as give an idea about actionable solutions that you can take so you can get past this problem in your practice. Some of these concepts are really big ones, some of them are very specific but we hope that these episodes help you along with your journey.Jonathan:Now a very important piece for you to understand is that this is not paid financial advise. This is not paid task or legal advice. We are not your financial advisors, we are not your CPA's, this is two CPA's talking about informational and educational content to help you along with your journey. It's a very important piece for you to understand. Another thing that you need to know is that if you enjoyed today's content, join us on the Facebook group. We've got a Facebook group that is active with dentists that is going to have content talking about what we're talking about today to continue the discussion. Agree with us, don't agree with us, have a story to tell, have something to share, join us on the Facebook group. If you go to Facebook and you search for Tooth and Coin podcast, click on it to join it and be able to join us there.Jonathan:Finally, if you need some more help, we're developing a list of resources that are going to be centering around our topics of discussion to be able to help you a little bit more than what the content is doing. If you'd like access to that whenever it becomes ready, all you have to do is text the word Tooth and Coin, T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444. Again, that's Tooth and Coin, all one word, no spaces to 33444, reply with your email address and we'll email you instructions on how to get into the Facebook group as well as add you to the list to be able to send you those resources when they're available. If they're available, we'll go ahead and send them to you as well.Jonathan:Onto today's episode, hope you enjoy it. Hey there ambitious dentists, today on the Tooth and Coin podcast we're going to be talking about the number one most exciting thing in dentistry which is fraud. Everyone's afraid of it, everyone hates it, everyone hears this happening and thinks that it may happen to them. I've seen numbers from really smart people say that something like one out of every three, to one out of every two dentists will at some point in their career, be embezzled upon. It's a staggeringly high number of dentists may actually be effected by this in their practice. I get a lot of questions and a lot of confusion about, "Why does this happen? How does it happen? Is a CPA firm going to help me with this problem in my life?" And things like that.Jonathan:The answer is not... it's a nuanced answer like so many things are, it's not a one size fits all. Today's discussion we're going to be talking about the problem that is embezzlement in dental practices and I've already kind of highlighted what the problem is, people they can steal your money. To highlight that problem I'm going to be asking Joseph, Joseph has actually lectured on this topic before and then we're going to turn the tables around and Joseph's going to talk to me about in terms of the CPA firm helps with this problem inside of our clients and what our perspective is and how we view our service for our clients when it comes to this really nasty thing inside of not just dental practices, but all small businesses.Jonathan:Again, the main problem is that a lot of people are going to be embezzled upon, dental practices for some reason tend to be targeted a lot for embezzlement. Joseph, why don't you tell us why does fraud occur in small business, especially to dentists.Joseph:That number that you just spit out, that's nuts. I don't know that I've heard that. Somewhere between 30 to 50% of dentists get embezzled upon during their career. I guess if you look at the average dentist, we're talking about 30 plus years, we're talking most of them are going to own their own shop or at least the ones that are listening to our podcast are going to own their own shop at some point. I guess when you put it out that long, I guess that increases the odds. The Small Business Administration talks about the percentage of businesses that fail. Maybe dentists are so high because they're such a great business to be in and they've got such longevity with them, I don't know.Joseph:Man, that's a crazy stat for sure.Jonathan:It really is. I think the reason that is is because there's a lot of different forms of embezzlement, there's literally someone stealing tons and tons of money, and then there's people that are stealing supplies. Embezzlement has... or stealing hours even, just putting too many hours down compared to what they worked for. You may be one of those 50% but it may be that somebody padded hours for three months before you fired them. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're getting hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars stolen.Jonathan:Yeah, it's a big number and something you've got to be aware of. You've got to be on top of.Joseph:That'll wake you up in the morning. If you're listening to our podcast bright early in the morning, that should wake you up and get your attention.Jonathan:Oh yeah.Joseph:Jonathon, as CPA's we are specifically trained to think a certain way and you may think that this is right, you may think that this is wrong, but one of the things that they've just kind of ingrained in our brain is that everyone's going to steal from you given the right set of circumstances. That's kind of the way we're trained to think is, "How do we think about it in terms of those specific pieces?" Kind of the tried and true piece that we always point to in the CPA world is what's referred to as the fraud triangle. Do you remember the fraud triangle? Have you talked about the fraud triangle since you took the CPA exam?Joseph:Did you wake up in the morning, you're like, "Hey April, what's going on babe? Let's talk about the fraud triangle."Jonathan:The triangle that I usually refer to is the cheat, fast and quality, is that triangle. I don't usually talk about this triangle, the fraud triangle. Talk to me about the fraud triangle.Joseph:There's three sides to the fraud triangle, right? That's why we use a triangle, three sides. We've got three different pieces to fraud. The first part of the fraud triangle, and it doesn't really go in any specific order, but one of them is incentive. "Do I have an incentive to commit fraud?" I'm going to use your example. If I go and I pad my hours, in other words if I go out and I say, "I didn't work eight hours today, I worked eight and a half," but I actually only worked like seven in a half. That's padding my hours and I'm going to have a direct incentive from that.Joseph:Kind of the higher levels of financial management there is the incentive that if our PNL numbers look better, I'm going to get a higher bonus. If my overhead percentage stays under a point, then I'm going to get some sort of financial incentive. Incentive's the first piece of the fraud triangle, anything else that you might think of in the dental world that would be part of an incentive for fraud? Do we have any... I would imagine some of them. Go ahead.Jonathan:Yeah, there are tons of incentives for fraud in this world. There's tons of incentives for people to... really the main incentive that people have inside the dental world is usually just money. That's the incentive for people to try and take it. They want more money. Whether it's money that they deserve or not, that's what they are typically wanting.Joseph:Got it. Maybe you have a new patient bonus to where if you have X amount of new patients that are out there, and if you get those new patients numbers, that may be the incentive that somebody goes and then creates a new patient inside of the software, or something silly like that. Incentives the first piece of the fraud triangle.Joseph:The second piece of the fraud triangle is opportunity. Opportunity is probably the one that is easiest to understand so if I am working the front desk and somebody pays in cash and they give me $80 worth of cash. I have the opportunity to stick that cash right inside my pocket. I was just looking at some financials for one of our clients that has multiple employees that have the corporate credit card. If you're walking around with the corporate credit card in your wallet as an employee or team member of a dental practice, then you are presented every single day with the opportunity to whip that card out at wherever you want to and do that. Opportunity's the second piece.Joseph:The third piece that is I think the more psychological piece that's out there, is what's called rational. The rational basically is a way for our mind to justify that what I'm doing is okay. It may go something like this, "Well Mr and Mrs dentist is just doing so well, they're making all this money. I see all of these deposits come through. They pay me a pittance, I'm making minimum wage or not nearly enough." I've just rationalized in my head that it's okay to take money, to pad hours, to swipe the corporate credit card, to take any form of all these different pieces that are out there.Joseph:That's the three pieces of the fraud triangle that we were trained upon way back when inside of CPA land. Opportunity, incentive and then rational. What one kind of sticks out for you Jonathon?Jonathan:It's almost always opportunity to me is what it seems like to me in terms of why this happens. When it happens in this industry, I guess is a better way for me to say it. Usually it seems to be opportunity. Someone perceives a weakness in, this is CPA talk, internal controls which for everyone that's listening, internal controls are effectively like, "Hey, nobody's looking over my shoulder when I'm doing this, and I can just take that money if I want to. If you've ever seen Office Space, it's whenever they do the thing, they have this computer program that rounds it to the next penny and they're like, "No ones looking at this. All we have to do is round this fraction of a penny up and then put it into a different bank account and literally no one will ever figure it out because it's literally we're talking about hundreds of thousands of transactions. We're talking about a hundredth of a penny per transaction. That transaction will never be looked at or flagged so that money will just be in this bank account."Jonathan:It's opportunity is what typically happens in dental practices, is they think that, "Hey, I'm the only one who writes the checks. I'm the one who receives the inventory. I'm the one who pays the bill. I'm the one who signs the check. I'm the one who receives the patients money. I'm the one who enters it into the practice management software. I'm the one who takes it to the bank." There's no one really looking over their shoulder. Opportunity, usually to me I think is the first path towards... into the dental space of it, is they realize, "Hey, there's a little bit of an opportunity there."Jonathan:I'm fully, fully, fully, fully not going to downplay the fact that there's some type of motivation typically that makes them look for those types of things, but in dental practices, those opportunities seem to arise a lot. I think that's just due to the nature of it being in a smaller business. In your time as a CFO, did you ever have any moments there was the opportunity for fraud at your old place that you could... obviously if it's something that you're not allowed to talk about, don't talk about it but is there anything that you can think of that you've ran into in your career when it comes to fraud?Joseph:I think there are certainly things that as a CFO controller, as a business owner, there are certain steps that you take to try to prevent fraud. One of the things that you were just mentioning there was the same person that's opening the mail is making the deposits and entering stuff into the patient management software. One of the things that we talk about is an accounting term is segregation of duties. You don't want to have the same person that's doing all of those things.Joseph:One of the things that we had to always make sure was that every time a patient came in the door, it was a documented patient encounter that went into the patient management software. What that's going to do is that's going to generate the opportunity to create the coding for that specific encounter. What was the procedure that was done? What was the product that was delivered? Once that whole thing starts, then that really is a good catch about a bunch of different things.Joseph:If somebody came in for a pair of compression hose that were $80, that gets entered into the patient management software, that's then going to give them... they're going to have to pay the $80 because it wasn't covered by insurance. When you think about it in terms of that it's like, okay, if this $80 invoice gets generated, if the patient pays cash and the person that's taking the payment, the front desk person or the clinician or whoever it is, takes that $80 and puts it in their pocket rather than in the company deposit, what's going to happen is because it's in the patient management software, an invoice is going to get generated. Then the patient is going to go ahead and get a bill the next month. If you got a bill for something you already paid for Jonathon, what would be your first thought and what would you do next?Jonathan:If I got a bill for something I already paid for I'd say, "Hey, they've not processed your payment, we need to call the vendor and see what's going on."Joseph:Yeah. Not that that happened regularly, but that was just one specific piece that we had in place. I think the other stuff, I think that probably every CFO's big nightmare or controllers big nightmare is these company credit cards that are out there. Credit card companies make it really, really easy for you once you have a business credit card to order additional card holders and additional probably. I was always real hesitant to have somebody get added to the company credit card because it just creates this opportunity and if you take the opportunity and you take the rational, it may be one of those things where somebody's got the corporate credit card and it's time for them to go out to the lake and go fishing this weekend, and they just whip the company credit card out and fill their bass boat up with fuel on the company.Joseph:That's going to look like a charge to Exxon or Shell or Conoco, whoever it is, it's not going to be one of those things. Obviously if you've got somebody that's looking at all that stuff, they say, "Well typically the gas charge is $25, and all the sudden here's an $85 charge on Friday afternoon to Conoco," that may raise a red flag. I think that kind of goes back into the other piece of it is that if you do have a company credit card and you do have people that have those, you need to be reviewing those charges every single month. I don't want you to get carried away and review it daily and think that everybody's stealing from you but you definitely need to give it the old eyeball test.Joseph:Jonathon, I don't know if you're familiar with the formal term of eyeball test, but I was talking to a client about this the other day, I was like, "Man, you need to give it the eyeball test." He's like, "What's that?" I said, "Well, you just kind of take a look at it and see if things look out of whack." What I just mentioned is if typically your gas is $25, $30, $32 and then you have an $85 charge, that doesn't pass the eyeball test. That's something that you need to look into.Joseph:The other thing is that you've got... the IRS requires that you have documentation for every single thing that you're claiming as a business expense. If you've got these credit cards that are out running around, you've got to have some sort of system to collect the receipts and to document that and to say why it was an ordinary necessary business expense. If it comes under scrutiny, that's what the IRS is going to say. I was told by an IRS agent that whenever they presented proof that this was an ordinary necessary business expense, they pulled out the credit card statement and said, "Well, see right here it says Exxon Mobil $24," and they said, "A charge on a credit card statement is not enough documentation to prove that it's an ordinary necessary business expense.Joseph:Those are a couple of things that jump out. Having multiple people having dual controls and segregation of duties, those are big things. Making sure that every patient encounter is entered into your patient management software. One thing I was talking to a client about the other day was one of the things, if I'm sitting back in my CPA brain and I'm trying to invent ways to create fraud, is to review your adjustments report. Let's say, go back to this $80 compression hose, let's say that that patient comes in and they pay $80 and the person that's working the front gets really, really smart and they say, "Oh, we'll just put a patient credit adjust for $80," which means that that patient won't receive a bill and it'll show up as they had actually paid but the cash didn't make it to the company bank account.Joseph:That's something else that's out there. You need to be reviewing your adjustment reports. What would you think on adjustment reports? Is that something that we recommend that they do daily or weekly or monthly? What are your thoughts on those adjustment reports? We made our software so easy to just write balances off, I think somebody with some authority needs to be looking at those. What are your thoughts on that?Jonathan:There's a few. I don't know if it would be called an adjustment in whatever practice management software our clients are using, whether it be [inaudible 00:17:55] or [inaudible 00:17:56] dental, or soften, or whatever it is that they use. They all have the ability to do those types of things. One of the big dangers that a lot of these practice management softwares have 10 ways to do the same thing and really only one of them may be the right way. It will work on the surface but if you were to dig back the reason for doing it in a certain way, usually there's a reason you do it one of those 10 ways for whatever it was you were doing, and a lot of practices use practice management software incorrectly.Jonathan:One of the reasons we typically recommend having an office manager consultant person be able to come in and teach you how to do those the right way so that you are making sure everything goes in their correctly. In terms of the adjustment piece, yeah absolutely. One of the things that I tell people in regards to one of the best ways they can help prevent fraud, is to have a very solid end of day process in their practice. What I tell them is when I was in high school and college, I worked for what doesn't exist anymore, but a video rental store...[crosstalk 00:19:05]Joseph:You're dating yourself there.Jonathan:At the end of every night we had a countdown... yeah. At the end of every night we had to count down the registers which meant that you open the register, you printed out a report from the little software that was done in MS-DOS or some type of shell station. You print out this report, it comes out in that really big wide paper, it said, "This register had this much in cash. This much in checks, and these much in credit card payments go through this register." We had four registers and you had to countdown each register and make sure that every dollar was accounted for that went through that system.Jonathan:Then you had to, if it was cash you had to tie it up or put a rubber band around the cash and you had to put the checks, you had to have a ten key register printed out of that. You had all the credit card receipts, it's done together as well and you had to have it attached to that piece of paper that got printed out from that report and it had to go into the managers box every night.Jonathan:That was the first time I ever encountered something like this where you'd have two managers and they'd enter in an adjustment in a different way. Eventually one of those managers got in trouble because they weren't doing it the way that it needed to be done in order for the register at the end of the night to be accurately counting everything whenever it did the month end. It was one of those things where it worked for the day, but eventually it messed something up in the calculations down the road that that person didn't see until the manager was trying to do the month end closes and things like that.Jonathan:I tell people, one of the best things you can have in your small practice, because let's face it, a lot of people can't do segregation of duties. There's two people working in the front office and one of those might be the dentist in some of our practices. There's not much that they can do so what they do is it all gets housed under one persons hat. End of day process is really important and one of the things we tell the dentist they need to do everyday, or that we've heard from practice management consultants that are office people, have said that, "Have the dentist look at their day report everyday. Their day sheet and look at literally everything that came through the practice just to make sure that it makes sense."Jonathan:One of the things they said is to make sure that there's no adjustments to any patient accounts. There shouldn't be adjustments or deletions from patient accounts because if they're doing that then they've likely done something incorrectly. The way that it was explained to me, and again it depends on how your practice management softwares set up or whatever it is, is that there should be credits to accounts or there should be charges to accounts and then there should be write offs to accounts. There really shouldn't be adjustments to services after they've already been done unless there's a very valid reason. For example, "We accidentally billed this person for porcelain crown when it was a gold crown, so we had to take the porcelain crown off and add the gold crown charge in."Jonathan:There has to be a very specific reason, there should be an indication by each of those things done in that day sheet that you get that is a part of this. This is one of the things I also heard that you do whenever you're in a larger practice as well, if you're an associate for a larger practice you should be looking at your day sheet to make sure that you got credit for everything that you did that day. You didn't get put to the wrong provider, or you didn't... if you did something it actually got put onto the fee schedule so you actually got paid for it, so that the charge went to the patient account.Jonathan:That's something that I was told needs to be done on a daily basis as a part of that day end close process. That's one thing is the day sheet. The other thing is from the end of the day close, you should have what I mentioned for the video store rental place, you should have something from the practice management software saying, "We had this much in cash come in today, we had this much in checks come in today, we had this much in credit cards come in today." That should be tied together and there should be source documents there. There should be things showing you that those numbers are actually what happened.Jonathan:It gets a little bit complex in dental because you have all these insurance payments come in through electronic transactions. We get a letter in saying, "Hey, we're going to deposit this money into your account on the 24th of the month," and then it does get deposited on the 24th but it doesn't hit your bank account until the 25th. It's kind of hard to see how that happens because you enter it, you get that letter in a week in advance so the person in the front might be entering that notice into the system the week of when they get the letter, rather than the day it went into the account or even the day that it registered in the account.Jonathan:There's some complexities that can happen right there. Another really, really good reason to have a really good office manager type consultant, a person that we recommend a lot is Sandy Pardue, she's out of Louisiana. She's really, really great. There's also other programs out there that can help you with this if you're not familiar with how to do this. There are people that can help with this type of process and get this really set up strong for your office. Really important to have that. Really important to have that. That is not something that our office does. We are not practice management consultants.Jonathan:If you tell us what is happening in terms of the flow of the accounting dollars and cents that are coming into your office everyday, we can give you just a general understanding if we think that that's... where your areas of risk might be but that's really more of an informal feedback discussion between us than being a part of the service that we get paid for from our role as a CPA.Joseph:Interestingly enough, I'm sure that you get this all the time on sales calls but CPA's, we generally don't catch fraud. It's not something that's really a part of what it is that we do. I think the number one way that fraud is caught is by accident and not by something else. What are your thoughts Jonathon? As you get a chance to explain to clients what our role as CPA's is and fraud, what's a message that you're telling them as you kind of get that question, "Oh you guys are going to audit my books and catch fraud, right?" What's your message and what's your thoughts on the CPA's role in fraud?Jonathan:It's a really common misconception and I know that there are people out there that probably propagate that misconception in terms of CPA's that will say, "Oh yeah, we're going to catch that." The AICPA, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants which for the dentists listening, that is like the American Dental Association for you guys. AICPA is the ADA for CPA's basically. The AICPA is very, very specific in how we as CPA's are to view ourselves in terms of audit, or in terms of fraud. That is basically to say that we're not here to catch fraud, that's not really our job. There are people that are CPA's that try to catch fraud, or to even be slightly more specific, they help track down how fraud was occurred after it's been discovered. Those are called forensic accountants.Jonathan:In general, fraudulent activity, there are very few services that CPA's offer that are actually designed to catch fraud. The most in depth service that CPA's offer small business, it's called an audit. There's actually a prescribed engagement called an audit under the AICPA guidelines and that audit even in that, it states in the engagement letter, or in the opinion letter that our services, even if we're doing an audit which is the most in depth thing, they're going to go top to bottom on your internal controls, and your processes and things like that. That audit will even say, "This is not meant to catch fraud." It's really just more to view how strong your internal controls are that could potentially lead to fraud.Jonathan:If they're very weak or if they're very strong, and as well as to give you an overall understanding of how your business operations are running from a business standpoint. That's the purpose of an audit. Even in the most in depth engagement, under the AICPA guidelines, it's still not designed to catch fraud. A CPA that's engaged with you to help with your tax compliance, tax planning, tax rejections, accounting services, management reports, things like that, those services are far, far, far, far less in depth than an audit would be. They are definitely not designed to catch fraud as well.Jonathan:The way that I tell people is that, "Has our firm caught fraud before? Yes, we have." We've seen credit card payments go into vendors that didn't exist. Someone had not in the office, gotten credit card information, was paying for stuff. We've seen... you and I were talking about this before, we had a client just this last weekend had a check that was written from their... this office was in California and the check was cashed in Florida with a different check number, different everything, it just happened to have their routing and account number on it. It's a $20,000 check that got cashed all the way across the country, it was just somebody had fraudulently found their information and put it down and made a fake check, and cashed this check for $20,000.Jonathan:That would be an example of something that our services are not designed to catch a fraud. One of the things that we do, is we ask our clients if we see a transaction that we don't know who the vendor is or who the payee is say, "Hey, what is this $20,000 for?" That would be an example of something that we would... I can't say that we would catch that as being fraud because what could have happened is we could ask the client, "Hey, who is Shelly Franklin and why did you write her a $20,000 check?" If for whatever reason the client had a mental lapse and just never replied to the email or said, "That was for equipment," maybe they paid Henry Shrine $20,000 and they just didn't connect the dots of being two different vendor names, then we would never know. That wouldn't change.Jonathan:That's a big example. $20,000 is a big number amount. What if it had been a $50 check? What if it had been an $80 check or something, a much smaller amount? The way our service is designed, if we don't know who the vendor is and there's no memo, there's nothing in the memo saying what it was for, then even on a smaller item like that we would ask the client who the vendor was and what the purpose was, but I know there's a lot of CPA firms out there that would just be like, "We'll just put that to contract labor. We'll put it to patient refunds," or something like that and just be done with it.Jonathan:Ours is specifically designed to ask that question the way that we do our stuff, but it's not designed to catch fraud, it's designed for us to ask questions about things that we aren't aware of. None of our services are designed to catch fraud, but it doesn't hurt to have somebody that is really familiar with the dental industry to know who the vendors are, to know, "Hey, Align Technology is a lab and A-L-I-G-N-E is not that same company." We need to make sure if a check gets written to A-L-I-G-N-E that we're going to ask, "Who is this person? Who is this vendor?" So you have that second set of eyes just kind of looking over those types of things.Jonathan:We do help. I interviewed multiple years back, and I've had dinner with him, really nice guy David Harris, he owns a company called Prosperident, it's the number one company in probably the world in finding embezzlement inside of dental practices. They help catch hundreds of people a year that have embezzled in dental practices, they're really, really good. He's a CPA, he's a CFE, he's all these things. He has way more letters behind his name then I'd ever care to have. I asked him I was like, "Hey, how can..." this was whenever we were starting the company I was like, "How can we help with this process of combating embezzlement in our practices?"Jonathan:He said, "Jonathon, we help out hundreds of practices a year catch embezzlement or to put these people behind bars if we can, or make them pay. Maybe one percent of the people that we find, the CPA ever even caught a sniffle of what they were doing." He said, "It's just because the services are not designed that way." It's a big misconception out there guys, but I want you to be certain to understand that just because you have a dental CPA does not mean you're fraud proof or you are embezzlement proof. It could mean that you have a little bit of help in someone else kind of keeping an eye on things for you, but at the end of the day, like Joseph had illustrated saying, "Hey, they used the company credit card for gas in the boat rather than gas in the car," if we asked the employee, "Usually it's a $30 gas charge, this time it was a $60 gas charge." And they say, "It was because I usually fill up when I'm at a half tank and this time I filled up... gas was expensive this week." Or, "Yeah, I ended up buying some stuff in the store," or something like that.Jonathan:We're not going to be able to tell if they're lying or not. We weren't' there. We're not going to go and put a dipstick into their gas tank and make sure that they're telling the truth about how much gas they got. You wouldn't want us to do that type of thing either because it would take us so much time you'd be paying us so much money to do that type of work that it would be a negative value consequence to you. It'd be a negative return on your dollars for doing that.Jonathan:To kind of recap that, we try to keep the episodes to 30 minutes length, the problem is a lot of dentists will get embezzlement done in some way. It occurs because of the triangle of fraud which was opportunity... tell me what they were. Opportunity...Joseph:Opportunity's one, incentive is one, like I'm incentivized to create fraudulent transactions, and then rational. "Poor little old me, I don't make enough money. I'm trying to feed my babies, I've got whatever reason, I'm trying to feed my cats. I don't have enough money because this penny pinching dentist doesn't pay me enough money." So the rational. Opportunity, incentive, and rational. The fraud triangle.Jonathan:Yeah, exactly. Those are the things you have to be watching out for. Your CPA can be helpful in this but they're not designed to be the person protecting you bar none from embezzlement. The only person who's going to be able to do that at the end of the day is going to be your internal controls in your practice, and yourself as the business owner. You're going to have to keep an open eye on what's happening. I don't want anybody out there to all the sudden start thinking that the girl in the front is this international person of mystery that's a spy that's going to be stealing all of your money. The way that you have to go about this is you need to have a lot of trust in the people that you hire, or else you hopefully wouldn't have hired them in the first place. You've got to have verification. You've got to have some tests that you'll put into place over time. Make sure that you have a super solid office set up to where you have a solid close. Make sure that you have a way that you're processing your payments to your vendors in a smart way.Jonathan:Don't give the person who's writing the checks a stamp to write your checks with. Don't...[crosstalk 00:34:58]Joseph:Signature stamps.Jonathan:Yeah. Exactly.Joseph:No, don't do that.Jonathan:Don't do that. Make sure that the person who's receiving the inventory is tying those inventories to... or having whatever's coming in also be verified so that you're getting what you're supposed to be getting, you're getting what you paid for. Make sure that your day sheets don't have too many adjustments on them. If they do have adjustments make sure they're totally verified. Make sure that you have a solid deposit set up going. There's a lot of things that you've got to have, make sure they're solid and strong and then the most important thing probably I would say to do at the end of all that is to randomly test those systems.Jonathan:Test them once a quarter will probably be fine, just pick five transactions to randomly test once a quarter, and you will probably be fine. Then outside of that look for weird behaviors from your employees. One of the more common ones that people talk about is there's that office manager that just they do everything, without them the system would fall over. Even the dentist doesn't know what she does. She's always the first one there and she's always the last one to leave, she never takes a vacation. If she does, she's really, really anxious about who's doing what in the office. That's kind of the tell tale sign of someone who has opportunity because they're the only person who knows what's going on. Doesn't mean that they're going to do it, but that is kind of the tell tale sign.Jonathan:Also, look at spending patterns, if you're paying your office manager $40, 50, 60,000 a year, and they always have a new vehicle and maybe they don't have a spouse or something like that, keep your eyes open on that. And keep an eye on your numbers, make sure that your ratios make sense. If they don't sometimes that can lead to it. This has been the episode on fraud, opportunities, how the CPA helps you and the misconceptions surrounding that, and a whole lot of information in the 36 minutes.Jonathan:Joseph, is there anything else that you wanted to state in terms of this topic?Joseph:Don't let your deposits have cash back on them. That's another one. That's a pretty simple step that you can take at the bank, that's one of the things I tell brand new practice owners. If you're not going to be the one taking the deposit to the bank, don't allow it to have cash back. "Oh, $10,000 deposits worth of checks and I get $8,000 back in cash." That's one thing I meant to mention earlier that I didn't. No cash back on deposits, set your accounts up that way.Jonathan:That's a good one. Yeah, that's a good one. Just as a quick story time in this one, I had an attorney call me and he was like, "Hey, we have a client that..." their controller was writing hot checks or something like that, the person that was inside of the business and they were doing something similar to that. They were like, "The CPA didn't catch it. The business owner took them 12 months to figure it out and the person who was doing it was sending the money overseas." The person ended up leaving the country before they realized what had happened.Jonathan:That's a really good example of after doing all the recording and stuff, there's also that step of getting it to the bank. That's definitely a real thing. Anyway, all right guys, we will see you next time on the Tooth and Coin podcast. This has been one about fraud, if you have any stories about fraud or any types of interesting situations that have happened with that, make sure to share it inside of the Facebook group and to share it with the community. We'd love to be able to hear more about it. We will see you guys next time.Joseph:Bye guys.Jonathan:That's it for today guys, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Tooth and Coin podcast. If you are going to be a practice owner or a new practice owner and you're interested in CPA services, head on over to toothandcoin.com where you can check out more about our CPA services. We help out around 250 offices around the country and we'd love to be able to have the discussion about how we can help your new practice. We do specialize in new practice owners, so people who are about to be an owner of a practice they're acquiring, about to be an owner of a practice they are starting up, or has become an owner in the past five years. That is our specialty.Jonathan:I would love to be able to talk to you about how we could help you in your services with your tax and accounting services. And if you enjoyed today's episode, again go to the Facebook group. Talk to us about what we've talked about, join in on the discussion, and let's create an environment where we can talk about some of these things so we can all help each other get through these things together so that this adventure of business ownership is more fun, more productive, and better in the long term.Jonathan:Lastly, if you want access to those resources that we are currently building, just text the word toothandcoin to 33444. That's toothandcoin, no spaces. T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444, reply with your email address, we'll send you instructions to the Facebook group, we'll send you the resources when they're available, and we will see you next week.
Alan is joined by three amazing guests to discuss hiring and how COVID has changed everything when it comes to being an employer! The guests: Dr. Matt Standridge is a clinician, educator and podcaster who’s been on the podcast a whole bunch of times and has had some pretty serious hiring and staffing issues over the last year! Sandy Pardue is the founder of Classic Practice Resources. She’s an absolute wizard with office systems and should be the first person you think of for consulting and team training. Sandy is also a podcaster and has been on the show a bunch of times, too! Paul Edwards is the founder of CEDR Solutions. You need employee handbooks and CEDR Solutions is who you should get them from. Also...CEDR Solutions is basically an all in one HR solution for dental offices. The conversation: Matt turned over almost his ENTIRE TEAM in the last year! (Oof) Are people "getting paid to stay home?" The hiring situation was getting tough before COVID! Child care, home schooling and family situations have really affected dental hiring How has politics affected people and their work situation? State by state unemployment changes This hiring situation is unprecedented! ALWAYS BE HIRING! Work on your hiring skills and culture! Don't poach, but always be receptive Sign on bonuses? Generational differences in hiring moving forward Sandy presented at a meeting! It's weird, but it's happening! Voices of Dentistry coming January 21-22, 2022! Last words from Paul: work on your hiring skills Last words from Sandy: hire fast, fire fast Last words from Matt: record a "video explanation" for positions that you're hiring for to screen potential candidates! Links from the show: Classic Practice Resources CEDR Solutions The Very Dental Facebook group (password: Timmerman)
Join this podcast's Facebook Group: The Dental Marketer SocietyGuest: Sandy PardueBusiness Name: Classic Practice ResourcesCheck out Sandy's Media:Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sandy.pardue.35Host: Michael AriasWebsite: The Dental MarketerJoin the podcast's Facebook Group: The Dental Marketer Society JOIN MY EMAIL LIST HERE FOR GROUND MARKETING STRATEGIES AND TACTICS.The Systems You Should Have in Your Practice:1. Vision/Goal Setting/Attainment2. Human Resources3. Office Management4. Practice Statistics5. Procedure Manuals and Policies [Creation and Updates]6. Meetings [Staff Meetings and Morning Huddles]7. Inter-Office Communication8. New Patient Process9. Handling and Prevention of Broken Appointments10. Financial Policies/Arrangements [Guidelines and Scripting]11. Hygiene Department/Soft Tissue Program12. Overhead Monitoring13. Patient Flow/Routing14. Patient Records/Creation/Updates/Defensible Documentation15. Recall Process16. Patient Retention17. Patient Reactivation18. Letters/Mail Handling19. Scheduling20. Confirmation 21. Phone Skills22. Customer Service23. Emergency Patients24. Treatment Plan Presentations25. Incomplete Treatment26. Accounts Receivable [Current and Past Due Collections]27. Insurance28. Patient Education and Communication29. Clinical Efficiency30. Practice Management Software/Computer Usage/Security31. Housekeeping/Maintenance/Equipment32. Accounts Payable/Bookkeeping/Payroll33. Internal Marketing34. External Marketing35. Fees/Coding 36. Requisitioning Supplies/Inventory37. Sterilization38. Infection Control39. HIPAA [verify only]40. OSHA [verify only]41. Lab/Case Process42. Office Security/Safeguards to Prevent EmbezzlementPlease don't forget to share with us on Instagram when you are listening to the podcast AND if you are really wanting to show us love, then please leave a 5 star review on iTunes!DON'T FORGET TO:Join The Newsletter here and be a part of The Dental Marketer FamilyClick here to see how you can attract new patients immediately and consistently!Click Here to join the Ground Marketing Facebook Group
Hi guys and welcome to another episode of the Delivering WOW Dental Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Anissa Holmes. And I am so excited to be here today. Today, we're actually going to be talking about something that is very dear to my heart, and that is how to get dental patients to keep coming back for life. As many of you guys know, I absolutely love the whole concept of marketing. Why? Because there's so many people out there that need to find us. We have a gift to be able to help them to be able to serve them, to be able to make them healthier, to be able to change their lives. But at the same time, we want to make sure that once those patients come in, that we keep them coming back for life. We keep them referring to others. And so I'm really excited today to actually share some pearls, some tips that I have actually implemented, I've used along the years of my practice, I've been practicing for 22 years. And so it's been really exciting to have patients who've been with us for years and not just patients, but team members that have been with us for a really, really long time. So really excited to be able to share these pearls with you today. So as it looks at, how can we start to get patients coming back for life? What we have to really start thinking about, and I talk a lot about this within our programs. I talk about this a lot here on this podcast and our Facebook group as well is as you're starting your practice journey, as you're opening up your practice, or as you're starting to think about getting your practice out there and becoming known, one thing that's really important that I always ask is what do you want your practice to be known for? What do you want people to say about you when you're not around? And for me, absolutely, it's all about delivering an amazing wow experience. In fact, at the end of our patient visits, we actually send out an email. And what I'm looking for in that survey is for them to say one word. I'm actually waiting for them to say the word wow. I want them to say, "Wow, I can not believe that my kid was able to go to the toy box first." Or, "Wow. I can't believe that the team was so kind and so nurturing and they listened to me." Or, "Wow. I actually got a hand and arm massage before my treatment." Or, "Wow. I cannot believe that every month, they're doing amazing things to be able to serve this community." Because when you start creating what you want to be known for, what's really exciting is that now your patients will start to tell other people what you are actually putting out there. So it's really interesting. And as we look at, for example, the demo space. I remember when I first started this podcast, about four or five years ago, I was fangirling on all of these amazing dental coaches, dental speakers, dental gurus that were out there. They were speaking on stage and I just wanted to be able to pick their brains and to be able to learn from them. And so I remember interviewing so many amazing people and when I decided to create my first live event, my Delivering Wow summit that was held in Jamaica, I remember reaching out to a lot of the people that I had interviewed on the podcast. And one of those people was actually Sandy Pardue. Many of you guys know Sandy. She is the guru of scheduling. And I reached out to Sandy, and I said, "Sandy, I would love if you would be willing to speak at our conference." And Sandy said, "Absolutely, I'm there." And she's like, "I'd love to go to Jamaica." So Sandy's there. And all of a sudden, I start sending out information to all of the speakers. And Laura Hatch was a speaker, many of you guys knew Laura. Elijah was a speaker. Bruce Baird was a speaker that year. We had a lot of amazing speakers. And as I sent out the information to them, one of the things that I started to say that I sent out to them was that this was going to be the dental event of 2018. And I kept saying it. Well, next thing you know, Sandy Pardue was saying it. Now, this was my first event. And I was very adventurous, trying to get 400 dental professionals to make a decision, to get on an airplane, to fly, stay in an all-inclusive resort, carry their teams. And a lot of people didn't know me at that time, but guess what?They knew Sandy, and Sandy said it was going to be the event of 2018. And so what I want you to understand is that as you're looking at building your practice and having your patients to say things about you, you actually have this really interesting and unique ability to actually manufacture what you want people to say. And so I actually wanted to have the speakers to say that, and that's exactly what happened. And so the same thing happens in my practice. So as I talk about, we want to be known for delivering amazing while experiences as I'm coming on, for example, and I'm doing a Facebook live, maybe I'm coming on and I'm doing a Facebook live talking about that we are doing a new service that we're really excited about called Pero Protect. And it's going to help patients who have bleeding gums and gums that are starting to look long, or I'm doing a Facebook live where I'm talking about the fact that we're going to do a free small makeover and change someone's life in our community. Well, one of the first things that I'll say on that Facebook live is before we get started, let me just tell you a little bit about what we're known for. Number one, we're known for seeing our patients on time. We're known for delivering amazing WOW experiences. For example, when you come in, there's going to be an iPad and headphones to take away the sound, we serve freshly baked [inaudible 00:06:26], kids get to go to the toy box first. And we're also known for the amazing technology that we have in our practice and how we serve our community. And we're also known for beautiful, natural looking dentistry. Because I'm out there and I'm sharing what we're known for on the Facebook live. Now, what happens is that people who are seeing us on Facebook, they start to hear it over and over and over again. And now they start to share it. And now they start to internalize it. When we have a new patient that comes in and they're calling us on the phone, we're saying, "Thank you so much for calling. What is it that you're wanting to learn more about? Why are you scheduling your appointment?" But then we'll say, "Before you come in, let me just tell you a little bit about what we're known for." We do the same thing when the patient arrives. I walk in as a doctor and I say, "I'm so happy to have you here. Let me tell you a little bit about what we're known for." So we constantly do that. So the first thing is, if you want to have dental patients to keep coming back for life, I want you to really think about that. And it could be that you want to be known for great experiences. It could be that you are making a decision that you want your practice to really focus on a specific service. Maybe you want to do high end, high level, complex cases. You want to be known for doing comprehensive dentistry. People who have had teeth that are worn down, broken down, missing teeth. You want to be known in your community for being that dentist that has the knowledge and the competency and the skill set to be able to help those people. Well, as you're doing your Facebook lives, or as you're communicating with your patients, you want to let them know, even when they're calling on the phone, maybe they're price shopping, what makes your practice different. Okay? And that's the number one thing. So there's actually three points. That's the first point is that you really want to think about what do you want to be known for? The second thing that you want to do, if you want to have your patients to come back for life, is you want to make sure that you are involving your patients in all of the marketing that you're doing that's involving the community. So you might say, "Well, Anissa, what do you mean by that?" So, one thing that I really love within my practice and I love seeing colleagues do, it's so exciting, is seeing them serve the community. When we decided to go into dentistry, I can tell you, when I went into dentistry, I wanted to be a doctor to help people. I wanted to be able to change lives. And so when we are doing things where it shows that our community really cares about people, our patients are going to connect with that. They're going to tell other people. And in fact, the type of marketing that I love and what I love helping colleagues with is getting to the point where you don't have to focus on Google ads that are $2,000 to pay Google at an agency. You don't have to worry about $5,000 mailers. Once you implement doing marketing where your community and your patients know what you're known for, and they're telling others, you can not turn that off. And so it's very, very different where perhaps you have a Google ad and you decide next month, "Oh gosh, I don't want to run it anymore." All of a sudden those potential new patients dry up, with this type of marketing, where you're involving your patients in the marketing that you're doing now, again, you continue to create that referral source and you continue to put out in front of them that your practice is different, and they want to tell people and they want to keep coming back. And so a few examples of that we have done is actually this month, we are looking at a clothing drive. So a clothing drive could be, Christmas is over. And now a lot of people have gotten new clothes. Let's do something over the next month or over the next two months if you want to have it linger for two months and go for that time. And what we'd love for you to do as a family activity is we'd love for you to clear out your clothes that you have in your drawers, drop into our office and what we're going to do is we're actually going to take those clothes and we're going to donate them to missionaries of the poor. And what we're also going to do is we're just going to have some fun with this. And randomly, we're going to select one person to win a gift card to our practice, maybe a $200 gift card. Well, now when you're running that type of campaign, what you can do is you can go on, you can do your Facebook live. And remember when you're doing your live, introduce yourself. Also, make sure that you let people know what you're known for. But now what you can do is in addition to doing your Facebook live, for example, on Facebook, then now what you can do is you can email your patients and you can send them the link to watch that Facebook live, which will increase the views and visibility. And part of that is asking people when you're on the Facebook live to actually share this video with everyone that they know who are their Facebook friends, so that others can participate as well. And that's going to allow, in terms of Facebook strategy, to be able to organically get way more people, to be able to see your Facebook page to your practice and within your page, if you have even before and after photos of the dentistry that you're doing, you're not going to be necessarily boosting these, but they'll see the dentistry that you're doing. If you're wanting to be known for sleep apnea and you've got information on your page about sleep apnea, or you got patients that are creating testimonials of their experience and how their life was changed, or maybe you have a wife talking about her husband and how her life was changed, because he's no longer snoring. That would be great, right? So you're sending people, you're driving traffic to your Facebook page. And what's really cool about that, is that now, again, your patients are seeing that you're doing something great for the community. You're sending out maybe a little text in letting them know how they can participate. Other things that I also recommend and what we implement with our clients that we have within our marketing program for delivering well is we're actually giving you the flyers. And so we want you to have a flyer. We actually give you a Canva template, so you can go and edit, put your practice logo. But you'll take that flyer and you'll post it around your office. And so we actually have these flyers that we post at the front desk, we'll post them right outside of the operatory. So we make sure that the patients see what we're doing. And as the patients are coming to check out, we also say, "This month, we're doing a clothing drive to support missionaries of the poor. We'd love for you to participate and maybe go home and clear out your drawers and drop them back off to the office." Now, are your patients all going to participate? Absolutely not. In fact, you may only have 5%, 10% to actually participate, but what will happen is that it leaves a lasting mark in their mind that you're always doing something to serve. And that's why I'm a huge fan, and within our delivering while marketing program, within our clients, what we're doing is we're actually leading and helping practices or team members to implement these campaigns. And so every month we're doing something different. Typically, in February, we're doing a children's free day of dentistry. We also recommend that you send out press releases to your local media so that they know that you're doing this. You can get a lot of free exposure. I've actually been invited to speak on the local news, talking about our free day of dentistry. It's really incredible, but there are lots of amazing things that you can do every single month to be able to get out and share that you're doing something with the community. And again, you want to involve your patients. Another thing that you can do as well, that we do. And we also help practices within our program is looking at creating a monthly email that goes out to your patients. And that can be photos from last month's community and campaign announcing what you're going to do in the next month or the current month, and also sharing an educational article. And that could be about any procedure, invisalign, All-on-4, sleep apnea. And that way you're serving as giving education and also showing that you're different. So that's the second way that we can keep our patients coming back for life is to keep enrolling them on why your practice is different, why it's unique, why you care, why you serve. The third way that you can keep your patients coming back for life is obviously you want to do great dentistry. You want to be able to connect with your patients. But even deeper than that, because we've all heard that before. One thing that I want you to think about is when you're creating your patient experiences, when you're creating your practice culture, when you're hiring your team, when you're doing your social media posts, everything that you're doing, all of the different facets, I want you to think in a different way. I want you to think if I were to ask any patient that walked to the front desk, how was their experience today? And maybe because you're creating content for your Facebook page, is to create such a great experience that you know, that they would give what I call a sliced bread testimonial. And what do I mean by that? I had a patient one time that came into the office and we asked her if she would share her experience. And she said, "This practice was so good it's the next best thing to sliced bread." And so we actually started to call our testimonials sliced bread testimonials, and so on our whiteboards where we're tracking all of our different services and we're holding ourselves accountable to conversations and continuing to learn, we actually have a goal of getting at least five sliced bread testimonials every single month. Which is really cool because we typically will get way more. And we actually don't share all of them on our Facebook page, but going into the mindset that every patient will be willing to give you a sliced bread testimonial makes you really think about what sort of team am I going to have, to have, to get that. What sort of are we going to have, to have. Again, simple things. We have our kids that go to the toy box first, right? That doesn't cost us anything extra, but it's something that people remember. And now when you have a mom coming in, you can say, "How was your experience? How was your child's experience?" And they'll say, "Oh my gosh, John got to go to the toy box first. And this experience was amazing." Or, "Every time I tell them we're going to the dentist, he always gets excited because he knows that he's going to get that toy. He knows there's going to be his hot chocolate there for him. And he knows that it's going to be a really great experience." So hopefully those three pearls that I've shared with you will help you to understand the process of getting our patients to keep coming back for life. It's one thing to be able to do marketing campaigns, to be able to get in front of our patients. But the key is how do we keep them and we keep them coming back. We keep them as raving fans and we keep them referring? All right, guys. So that is pretty much it. Thank you for joining us for this week's episode of our Delivering WOW Dental Podcast. If this served you, I'd love for you to continue to listen, make sure that you're subscribed to our podcast. Also, if you haven't done so already make sure that you join us inside of our delivering while Facebook group, dentalbossmovement.com. If you are a member of Clubhouse, join us in the dentist club. We'd love to have you where we can connect, communicate and collaborate. Go into Clubhouse, start a room, start sharing your knowledge with others. And also we do have our upcoming marketing and practice growth challenge, where we will actually help you to set up your whiteboards, to set your goals. We're going to run a social media campaign together. We're going to help you create your marketing plan for the entire year. And we'd love to get you in and to join that challenge, you can go to deliveringwowchallenge.com. And if you type in the code, podcast, you can actually get free access. All right, guys, that's it. Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode, take care and enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Delivering WOW Podcast with Dr. Anissa Holmes. We'll catch you next time.
In this episode, Susan is joined by long time friend and well known colleague, Sandy Pardue of Classic Practice Resources, to talk about hot topics! A consultant for over 25 years, Sandy shares her knowledge and tips with listeners in 5 obvious choices needed to ensure practice stability going forward, through the fall and OUT of 2020! Episode Highlights Covid-19 resurgence 5 obvious choices Quotes “It is really important that the team has confidence and stays positive.” “We are in a relationship business.” “You are either patient focused, or self focused.” “As the leader of the practice if you want your team to follow you, then you need to care for them. Compassion goes a long way.” “Have you implemented a system so you know If there are accounts that are overdue by 30 day, by 60 days?” “If you can wait, do so.” “Business slowed down and I started looking at these reports… and something seems off.” “Patients that are just patients, that are not loyal, they will change offices so fast, and they are not referring.” Links & Resources Sandy Pardue: https://classicpractice.com Sandy's Podcast: Dental Drill Bits (iTunes, Google, Stitcher, etc) Susan's Website: https://susangunnsolutions.com Susan's Books: https://susangunnsolutions.com/shop/
This episode is a replay of a webinar I did with Dr. Brett Wells of DentalHQ with special guests Sandy Pardue and Roger Levin on how to overcome the hygiene challenge we are facing in October and November from being closed during the COVID-19 lockdown.
---------------------------------- If you are ready to take your practice to the next level, Dental Business Training by Dr. Paul Etchison can be found at Dental Business Mentor. For more Dental Business Content Check out www.DentalPracticeHeroes.com Subscribe You can subscribe to the Dental Practice Heroes Podcast on Itunes, Stitcher, Spotify, Podcast Addict, Google Podcasts, Overcast, and Pocket Casts
In t his episode, Dr Lincoln Harris is joined by Sandy Pardue, a Lecturer and Senior Consultant. With over 25 years of specialising in growing practices and de-stressing practice owners, Sandy has gained extensive experience and knowledge of the dental industry. Throughout the podcast, Dr Lincoln and Sandy discuss the topics of consulting in dentistry, growing client bases and the internal/external factors that influence dental practices. #ripeglobal #ripeglobalpodcast #drlincolnharris #sandypardue #dentist #dentistry #Dentistrylife
Ashley and Michael did a Facebook LIVE series on what we need to do during this pandemic.This episode is about what systems we need to start building during this time we have due to the pandemic.Listen in as we ask them hard hitting questions, questions that YOU have asked in the Facebook Group.You can find the video interview to this in The Making of a Dental Startup Facebook Group
This unique cross-over episode of Behind The Smiles equips you with solid advice on how to proceed with your practice and patient engagement during a time when your practice needs to shut down. Good leadership is essential during this time. In this episode, Dr. Gina Dorfman, Sandy Pardue, and Michael Arias answer questions such as, "How do you deal with patients who do not want to reschedule, and say will call you when they are ready?"
Dental billing and insurance can be tricky to navigate. There are a lot of components to it from medical cross coding to claim submissions, patient billing, and so on. However, it doesn't have to be so complicated, especially if you're working with a company that caters to your individual needs such as D-TECH Billing and Claims. DeVon Banks is CEO of the company and joins me on this episode of the podcast to talk about what she's going to be teaching you at the Delivering WOW Live Summit 2020! DeVon is one of our highly-anticipated speakers at this year's event and we are so excited to have her and her team join us at the Summit in New Orleans, March 13-14th 2020. DeVon is an industry expert in insurance, revenue cycle management, and Dentrix. Her and her team at D-TECH Billing and Claims work tirelessly to help hundreds of dental offices across the country through practice management software training, dental billing, medical cross coding, and more. They take the headache out of technology management, so you can focus on what you do best – caring for your patients! In this episode, we discuss: How DeVon and her company helps dental practices grow through medical billing How medical billing is evolving in the dental industry Why a lot of dentists struggle with insurance and medical billing What type of things you can bill for that you might not be aware of What DeVon will teach at the Delivering WOW Live Summit 2020 If you want to find out more about DeVon and D-TECH Billing and Claims, you can visit the website here: https://www.dtechbc.com Have you got your tickets to the Delivering WOW Live Summit 2020? Don't miss the ultimate event for dental practices, taking place at Mardi Gras World in New Orleans, LA, March 13-14th 2020! If you want to come along and receive 12 hours of CE from speakers such as Devon, Sandy Pardue, Laura Hatch, Len Tau, and many more, get your tickets today!
Shared Practices | Your Dental Roadmap to Practice Ownership | Custom Made for the New Dentist
Our special guest is the co-host of Dental Drill Bits podcast, and is widely known as a top consultant in our industry. Sandy Pardue joins us today as she and Richard talk about where dentists fall short on leadership; keeping a "scoreboard", developing a lifestyle of learning, and how not to be afraid of your team. Listen now. •• Start getting more reviews with Swell Take control of your practice. Request a ZenSupplies demo today.
The Delivering WOW Live Summit 2020 is just around the corner and we've got an incredible line-up of speakers and social events that we know you're going to love. One of our special speakers is a close friend of mine, Sandy Pardue. Sandy is the Director of Consulting with Classic Practice Resources and one of the most highly-anticipated speakers at this year's event. Sandy has helped hundreds (if not thousands) of doctors with practice expansion and staff development over the past 25 years. Known for her comprehensive and interesting approach to dental office systems, Sandy offers a fresh outlook on how to become more efficient and productive in a dental practice. In this episode of the Delivering WOW Podcast, Sandy and I talk about how you can employ an action plan to help you reach your goals and grow your practice in 2020 and beyond. Sandy also gives you a taste of what you can expect from her speech at the Delivering WOW Live Summit, including a peek inside her incredible recipe book of practice management tips, success strategies, and more. In this episode, we discuss: Top tips for growing your practice in 2020 Why more dentists should dig deep and take a closer look at their numbers How to boost your retention rate and get patients back into your practice Why you should put automated phone systems in place to avoid missed opportunities A sneak peek inside some of Sandy's ‘practice management recipes' that she's going to share at the Delivering WOW Summit 2020 For more information and to explore other episodes, click here.
Dr. Richard Low joins the legendary Sandy Pardue in a brand new season of Dental Drill Bits! Today, after asking Sandy to sound off on the subject of morning huddles, we get a constant stream of actionable info. Who should attend, team members' actual responsibilities, and the antidote to the perceived need to micromanage are all covered in detail.
Dr. Richard Low joins the legendary Sandy Pardue in a brand new season of Dental Drill Bits! Today, Richard strikes gold. When he mentions his friend's chaotic team meetings, Sandy opens up a treasure chest of information for the rest of us! When to schedule team meetings, how to make effective agenda outlines, KPI ownership (and a lot more)--all inside.
Sandy Pardue is a lecturer, author, and the Director of Consulting at Classic Practice Resources. She has over 26 years of dental practice management, especially on seminar presentations for dental staff training, and has been named a Leader in Dental CE and Consulting for over 11 years by Dentistry Today Magazine. She specializes in being a hands-on consultant for all areas of dental practice management, which include scheduling, insurance, and office manager training.Sandy joins me to discuss some of the missed opportunities in practices and how dental practice owners should address them. She describes some of the vital parts of a typical practice, the common mistakes dentists make with their front office and potential solutions that can positively impact your revenue. We discuss lead generation strategies, the dangers of using automation in your practice, and how it can impact your patient retention. Sandy also shares her best advice to practitioners who want to succeed in running a dental practice."Missed opportunities are everywhere in practices." - Sandy PardueThis week on T-Bone Speaks Dentistry Podcast: Why new patients shouldn't be the number one priority of a practice. Neglecting the front office and how it can damage your business. How front office personnel can influence your business income. The biggest problem with recall and how you can find a solution for it. The proper way to wrap up an appointment. Lead generation in the world of dentistry and why phone calls are mandatory. Can seeing fewer patients potentially bring more revenue? The dangers of automation and its effects on patient retention. Helping assistants fulfill their goals and its effect on your practice. The most important thing to focus on to make sure beginners succeed in this profession.--- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/tbonespeaks/message
New Patient Calls with Sandy Pardue & Dana Salisbury In this podcast, Mark Dilatush, Sandy Pardue & Dana Salisbury discuss how poor handling of patient calls can have a huge effect on patient bookings. They discuss some of the topics that will be covered in-depth during any of the Academy of Scheduling Excellence seminars that Sandy will be hosting. Some of the highlights of attending one of these seminars: How to effectively handle incoming calls that produce favorable results Essential verbal skills required to increase treatment acceptance How to retain more patients How to double your new patient average How to answer difficult patient questions that put your staff on the spot Processes to eliminate no-shows and to control broken appointments **Unique to these seminars** Each practice that attends will receive one of the Classic Practice Resource flip charts, where the proper protocols are outlined for confirmation, recall and re-activation phone calls. Normally, the only way to attain one of these flip charts is by participating in the one-year consulting program. Here is a list of the upcoming dates for these one day seminars: Baton Rouge, LA on June 20th Los Alamitos, CA on July 26th Raleigh, NC on August 23rd Natick, MA on September 27 To register and view the full seminar description, please visit: ClassicPractice.com
What's up guys? Welcome to another episode of The Delivering WOW Dental Podcast. I am super excited to be on today. I am actually driving in my car. I am heading out from dropping my daughter to ballet. I just wanted to jump on spend a little while. We have had a crazy few weeks, one with wrapping up our Delivering WOW Summit so of course you guys have probably seen all the pictures if you were not there. It was an incredible, incredible special event. There were a lot of tears shed. There were also a lot of like huge celebrations, of wins, or practices that had grown over the last year by 30 or 40% from our inner circle. We also had a workshop helping practices understand the achievement cycle and seeing their gaps. Overall, it was just a great even with great, great speakers. We have since shifted our focus into the launch of our Platinum Mastermind. I can tell you, I am so excited about this program. Inside of our Platinum Mastermind, many of you guys have heard of it. I had this idea to actually teach all the things that we had been teaching in our inner circle. These are things like, "How do you create your vision for your next year, for your next three years? How do you get your team on board? How do you actually reverse engineer so that you work in a 90 day world?" I'm also looking at how can you put in accountability such as using tools like Asana, and Asana boards to actually get tasks done? How do you create scorecards that are created every single week by a member of the team so that you can look at things like production per visit, you can look at things like the number of new patients that you're getting, looking at things like your AR over 30 days percentage right? Is it within the goal that you set? It's been a really amazing year. Like I said, we decided to launch this platinum program. A lot of people really don't understand or know the full story or why I even decided to even do this. Just to kind of go into that a little bit because it is actually a crazy vision and a passion project of mine to be able to have like one place where people could come together with the top coaches. What has happened in the past is that if people needed help with sorting out for example their insurance, and understanding how to do medical billing, I would send them at Devon Banks, right? We've had so many people that needed to bring on a new team member, or change out their team members when they joined our coaching programs because they may not have had the right person in the right seat, or maybe they just didn't have the right person that fit in with their culture. We were sending people to Samantha Leonard right? We have had business boot camps in the past, and Glenn Vo has worked with these dentists and gotten them to be able to reduce their overhead by sometimes 1000 or even $2000 month. I was like, "Wouldn't it be really cool we had all of these people on one dream team helping out all of the practices?" Then I started thinking about who would the other coaches be? One of the people that I thought about was actually Gary Takacs. A lot of people are looking at how can I become fee for service? I thought about, "Well if we had him coaching people to become fee for service, that would be awesome. What if we had Sandy Pardue helping people with all of her great ideas that she has for how to get your schedule as efficient as possible? What if you had Laura Hatch on the team?" I reached out to all these people and they were like, "Yeah, definitely in." I said, "Okay, what would happen is that we would have different members of the team. We would be able to see what their gaps are. Then we would see which coach they need to work with based on their gaps." If they were, for example, a front desk person and they needed help with insurance, then they could just work with Devon right? If they needed help with understanding how to schedule, they would work with Sandy. If they needed help with case acceptance, they could work with Greg on case acceptance. The thought process was that the team members would each have whatever coach they need to work with, and again all within one program. It's kind of a really far fetched or crazy idea. I can tell you when I started coaching, I was paying about $3000 a month for my coach, and the coach was just coaching me. I just thought, "It would be great if I had somebody to come in while I'm being coached as being the leader and understanding profit margins and understanding the economics of running a business, people could also be training my team", which unfortunately I did not have. I had to figure out all of that stuff myself. Inside of the Platinum Mastermind, we're working directly with the doctors. We have [Shaquila 00:05:22] who is a mindset coach. She'll be working with doctors to help them to realize their full potential. We also will be working with the doctors so that they can understand their verbiage with case acceptance. We're also going to be working with the doctors as well, so that they understand how to get the right culture in their business, and the right people in the right seats, and really understanding the numbers and the metrics of running a business, and what happens when one number goes down and one number goes up, and how can you essentially look at lead measures versus live measures, how can you ensure that you are not waiting until the end of the month? Again, I'm really, really excited. We have been working super hard for this particular program. For me, I also wanted to make sure that the total experience of all of the members of our program would be a really great experience. Instead of utilizing a normal website or a normal software that delivers content or delivers training, I actually sought out this developer who is in Germany. I gave him my vision after doing a lot of research. I said, "I want an interactive elearning platform where people can actually have direct communications with their accountability coach and schedule a call. I want people to come in", so the doctor would come in, and they could now give access to their team members to get a coach. When the team members log into our platform, training platform, we could actually give them a diagnostic assessment to see how competent there are in their roles in the practice. From there, we can know their deficiencies. They would have a call with an onboarding coach who is also an accountability coach. We can actually customize and get them the right coaching that they need, instead of them trying to figure it out. The issue with a lot of elearning platforms is that there's just a lot of really good information, but it's not organized very well. There tends to be a lot of overwhelm. What we decided to do with the program was to again make it really organized where you would actually have each coach working within their own track, where there would be coaching sessions that would be going on streaming through the platform where the members can ask questions. Then this is really, really cool as well, as you guys know, I love Facebook. We have our Delivering WOW Facebook group. I was like, "What would be really neat is" that anybody that's going through that track, so say for example the dental assistant track with Trent, I was like, "Anybody that's going through that track, it would be nice to have like everybody to be able to communicate within that one track so that there's not a lot of clutter and confusion", which is what you see in Facebook groups, right? Then I was like, "You know what would be really cool as well is that you would have not only conversations within a specific track", so say for example all the doctors who are going through mindset coaching, that track again is a doctor only track for practice owners. Everybody would be like it would be private to those members, right? The other thing I thought would be really neat is that you could actually have communication within the platform across the job titles as well. Having like a communication thread with all of the office managers just talking amongst themselves. You don't have that benefit in a lot of the Facebook groups because everybody's like all over the place. Then the other thing too of course in Facebook groups, a lot of people are just giving their opinions. Sometimes it's good advice, sometimes it's like completely wrong advice. Having that one place where people could actually get advice from the people that are coaching and helping practices and speaking on these topics they've studied, they've done the work, they've done the research, many have written books, these would be the people that your team would have access to to be able to coach and train them. Again, I'm so excited about that. Of course, you guys know I love marketing. What we did was I actually decided to include our Facebook boot camp in the program. We also created Facebook campaigns that practices could run every single month. We actually give hundreds of images that you could use for social media. We have a Google Ads course that we're able to get from [Brent Allen 00:10:06] from Marketing 32, so we've got that course in there as well. We're also putting in some Instagram training from Jessica Emery, that's going to be there as well. Then what's really cool as well is that [inaudible 00:10:21] for many of you guys know her, she is phenomenal with marketing. She actually does marketing for a 40 million dollar dental group in North Carolina. She's actually going to be on every week doing a call helping practices with their marketing, and helping them with their campaigns and if they get stuck. What's really cool as well, one other thing is for people that are running Facebook ads and they're getting stuck, or trying to do funnels, because we actually have a funnel course included in the program as well. We actually have a social media manager who is a part of that track helping with support. I really tried to see how could I again just create one resource for everyone in a practice. For me I was like, "If all this program did was give practices the ability to be able to close one $5000 case a month, would it be worth it" right? "If it would be possible for a practice to be able to now have the ability to do more continuing education and to do more fun team building events because there was a lot more money coming in, because now there's accountability tools in place to make sure that revenue goals and different KPIs are being met, would it be worth it" right? Then I'm like, "I see what's happening with all of our inner circle practices, they're taking vacations all the time. If all it allowed the practice owner to do was to be able to spend time with their family, because now their teams are trained by the best people in the industry to train them, would it be worth it?" For me I'm like, "Absolutely, yes." That's why myself and my team have been working tirelessly on this platform because it's important. It's so important that we bring it to the marketplace. You look at even the amount of coaching, how much does it cost. I was even talking to [Shaquila 00:12:20] who is a mindset coach. She's like, "There's a lot of people that really need my help. When they come to me, they say that they're already spending $30000 a year with a coach. They can't afford to do both." For me in this platform I was like, "How can we get you everything you need in one place?" When you look at the cost of our program, so the program cost at the current time is $1200 a month, which is like so so little and just a fraction of what all of these coaches when you look at Okay it includes the Facebook Marketing, it includes marketing every month, it includes the social media manager, it includes in accountability coach. That's something that so many practices are lacking. They're in coaching programs, but there's no one to hold the doctor accountable. Even more so, for me, no one to hold the team accountable. If the team is doing things like reporting numbers on the scorecards and they know what to do when a number drops, then guess what happens? They can be held accountable, and the doctor can attend a once a week meeting with their leadership team who is like their office manager or financial coordinator or lead dental assistant, et cetera. The team can actually report to them the progress of the practice. That's when things get really amazing and really cool. We've seen that happen just time and time again with our inner circle practices, and even within my practice now going in for a one hour meeting once a week, those are called level 10 meetings. We actually teach you guys how to run those meetings as well inside of our platinum program. It's transformational guys. I am so excited again about having you guys in the program. I feel like every single dental practice needs to be inside of Platinum just because you know what happens when you have the right people training you? It makes practicing dentistry fun again. It makes the whole process of serving your patients just such a better experience because you don't have to worry about the business side of the practice. It's all taken care of. You might be wondering like, "Okay well is that cost the $1200, is that something that I can fit into my budget?" For me, when I look at expenses, for me the biggest expense is not actually taking action on what you have in front of you that can help you to be able to grow and scale your business, and give you time and financial freedom. Not having access to the training that can help you is one of those things that can certainly be a situation where there may be regrets, because again, it is a huge expense if you're not getting your team trained, if you're not billing things to medical, when they're not billing things to medical when they could be billed to medical, you're not understanding how to close those $20000 cases, and you're letting them walk through the door. That is probably the biggest expense that you could actually have. Again, I just wanted to come on and just talk to you guys about the why of why I created Platinum, and what my vision was, and why I feel so passionate about this project and this program. I know it's going to help people. This year at our Delivering WOW Summit, we had practices on stage. We're seeing a huge award called the WOW Award. That was for 30% growth or 20% growth while taking fewer clinical days in the practice. For me, I honestly I have a vision. Why am I doing this? My big why is to be able to see 200 practices on stage getting their award next year when we have our delivering wealth summit. I mean that would bring the biggest amount of joy to not only me or my team, but also all of the practice owners, all of the team members, and of course, all the coaches that have helped all of you on your journey. That's essentially what our Platinum Mastermind is. Again, I invite all of you to schedule a call with us, so we can learn more about your practice. Once you go to deliveringwow.com/platinum, you will be able to learn more about the program, all of the coaches that are there. If you're ready to get started, you can go ahead and just click the button and get started, and we'll get you in right away, get you onboarded with the onboarding coach, and start getting everything set up for your practice. Again, if you have any questions, or if you'd like to schedule a call, you can also do that on that page as well. Again, it's deliveringwow.com/platinum. All right guys, so again just wanted to jump on. I'm so excited about this program because we're going to be able to help you with all of those gaps. We have the who's and we have the right coaches. We have the right people that can train your team. You don't have to worry, we'll do all of that for you. All right guys, until next time, we will chat. Take care and keep delivering WOW.
Dr. Taher Dhoon and Dr. Chris Green met up with Sandy Pardue at the Voices of Dentistry conference. Listen up as they talk about the efforts and strategies that have made their practices successful.
Dr. Grace Yum with Mommy Dentists in Business podcasts with Sandy Pardue and Lori Webre at the Voices of Dentistry booth.
Missy Fryer joins Sandy Pardue and Lori Webre at the Voices of Dentistry podcasting booth to learn more about the Dental Office Survival Guide of 2019. Thanks for the opportunity to interview you to learn more, Buckeye!
It's easy to interview someone whose service you can stand behind! Sandy Pardue and Lori Webre met with Laura Maly and Michael Anderson of Wonderist Agency.
Shared Practices | Your Dental Roadmap to Practice Ownership | Custom Made for the New Dentist
This week’s guest is Sandy Pardue, Sandy is a Senior Consultant at Classic Practice Resources and a Lecturer specializing in growing practices and de-stressing practice owners. Sandy is one of the industry’s leading authorities on team training, organization systems and processes. Her years of consulting and speaking experience gives her a unique advantage and understanding of what it takes to motivate teams and create organized, productive practices with less stress for the practice owner. In this episode Sandy goes over some vital information for practice owners, pertaining to the administrative side of case acceptance and general practice efficiency. We start by defining some key terms and goals, then go into how we can measure them and the most efficient ways of accomplishing them. Sandy covers everything from when to utilise pre-pay methods and why proactive phone out culture is desirable, to the finer points of internal finance communication and good philosophies to build a team around. ::Links:: Sandy@classicpractice.com ::Sponsors:: Blue Sky Bio - Download the revolutionary free implant planning software Design Ergonomics - Optimize your office layout for productivity and future growth. Use the promo code "Design Today" at desergo.com for $500 off the Blocking Diagram and Floor Plan bundle. ::Timecodes:: 01:53 – 03:43 An introduction to Sandy and a bit about her background. 03:44 – 07:09 How does Sandy define a ‘system’ and why they are important. 07:10 – 13:32 Handling the financial schedule in order to counteract broken appointments. 13:33 – 20:05 Setting up a financial report and the uses of health credit ratings. 21:57 – 24:59 What metrics should you be tracking and other tips for streamlining. 25:00 – 27:44 The importance of finding proactive staff and being consistent with phoning out. 27:45 – 30:11 Pre-pay, when and when not to use it. 30:12 – 33:48 Why you should focus on case acceptance. 33:49 – 36:39 How to utilise software with, and some good practices for follow ups. 36:40 – 41:37 Clinician’s roles in treatment conversion. 41:38 – 44:29 Some finer points on internal finance communication. 44:30 – 46:10 How Sandy’s programme can assist practices with staff changes. 46:11 – 47:34 Final points on building a team.
Dana Pardue Salisbury is the Chief Operations Officer for Classic Practice Resources and the daughter of renown dental consultant Sandy Pardue. She joins Glenn and Vinh to discuss how offices can save money by training their staff more effectively and how “mystery shopping” calls can expose deficiencies in a practice. Mrs. Salisbury also discusses random topics ranging from crawfish/beer and to whether she would shave her head to become 25% smarter. Notes of Interest: *Dr. Ryan Swain, founder of Six Months Smiles, makes an appearance to discuss his feelings about being banned from multiple Dental Facebook groups *Dr. Swain also discusses a recent Facebook post about debt and how it is an epidemic in the dental community *Classic Practice Resources is the industry leader in Dental consulting and their two seminars (Spice Up Your Practice and Academy for Scheduling Excellence) have helped Dentists worldwide *Mrs. Salisbury states that most offices are hemorrhaging their marketing dollars due to inadequate training to meet the influx of new patients *Classic Practice Resources offers “mystery shopping” calls to all clients to help eliminate deficiencies and improve staff performance *Nifty Thrifty Dental Deal of the Week – $200 off tuition for Spice Up Your Practice of Academy for Scheduling Excellence seminars. Use promo code “Nifty” *Fake President Donald Trump makes an appearance Links from the Show Classic Practice Resources – http://classicpractice.com/ Spice Up Your Life and Academy for Scheduling Excellence Registration – https://www.eventbrite.com/e/spice-up-your-practice-july-14-15-2017-tickets-31966458538?aff=es2
The dynamic duo, Sandy Pardue and Dana P. Salisbury of Classic Practice Resources sat down with us for this special video installment of Behind The Smiles. Classic Practice Resources offers a selection of proven, custom-tailored programs for dental practices and has been serving and assisting the dental community for over 20 years.Visit https://classicpractice.com/
Howard sat down with Laura Hatch of Front Office Rocks, Sandy Pardue of Classic Practice Resources, and Dr. Gina Dorfman of YAPI to discuss all things practice management, human resources, profitability, and more at this year’s Townie Meeting 2018! https://frontofficerocks.com/ https://classicpractice.com/ https://yapiapp.co/
The Dental Marketer himself, Michael Arias, talks with Sandy Pardue and Dana Salisbury from the Delivering Wow seminar in Jamaica. Listen up for great practice tips, inspiration, and get to know Michael! For more information on how Michael can help you, check out thedentalmarketer.site to see how you can get GROUNDED!
Shared Practices | Your Dental Roadmap to Practice Ownership | Custom Made for the New Dentist
In season 2 episode 35, George interviews Sandy Pardue, a seasoned practice consultant from Classic Practice Resources, who gives an energetic, information packed episode. Sandy has worked with a few of the dental legends, including Scott Leune, and her experience goes back for more than 25 years. She gives many pearls for practice transitions. The range of topics go from how important systems are, setting clear expectations for new team members, and tips to maximizing the front desk - from telephone tips, to recall management, a patient reactivation project, and broken appointments. Sit back for this one -- it’s a good one! Check out The Ownership Accelerator For more information about Laurel Road Visit: https://www.laurelroad.com/sharedpractices/ Our Episode Resource Page where you can find all of the resources from our episodes - for free! Join our new Facebook Group! Reach out to George- George@sharedpractices.com Sandy Pardue, Senior Consultant and Lecturer, specializes in growing practices and de-stressing practice owners for over 25 years. As one of the industry’s leading authorities on team training, organization systems, processes, and most importantly RESULTS. Her years of consulting and speaking experience gives her a unique advantage and understanding of what it takes to motivate teams and create organized, productive practices with less stress for the practice owner.
Key Points at a Glance Sandy Pardue, Director of Consulting of Classic Practice Resources, Inc., in conversation with Naren Arulrajah In dentistry for 35 years Started consulting in 1993 Scheduling Academy Spice up your practice Make sure your internal marketing is in place What’s happening to your existing patients? Re-activation project Re-Calls Cell: 1-800-928-9289 Website: […] The post Make Sure That Internal Marketing is in Place in Your Dental Practice with Sandy Pardue appeared first on Growing Dentist Podcast Show.
Howard brought back three amazing podcast guests for an epic group discussion on managing your phone calls, hiring and firing, watching the numbers, and a whole lot more! Sandy Pardue, Senior Consultant and Lecturer with Classic Practice Resources, has consulted with offices throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Dentistry Uncensored #32 http://bit.ly/HowardSpeaks32 www.ClassicPractice.com Laura Hatch is the founder and owner of Front Office Rocks a company with the goal of helping other dental offices train and learn new policies and procedures that her team and has proven very successful in making dental offices work better. Dentistry Uncensored #235 http://bit.ly/DentistryUncensored235 www.FrontOfficeRocks.com Rohit Garg is one of the co-founders of Practice by Numbers alongside his wife, Dr. Aditi Agarwal, DMD. Dentistry Uncensored #740 http://bit.ly/DUwHF740 www.PracticeNumbers.com
Jason and Alan are joined by Dr. Dawn Kulongowski, Sandy Pardue and Elizabeth Corbin to talk about hiring in the dental office. Most owner dentists cringe when they have to hire someone new. What's the best way to know what you'll really get from a new employee? How do you sort through the applicants. This Brain Trust is packed full of no nonsense, actionable ideas for hiring. Let by Sandy Pardue of Classic Practice Resources, you'll be ready to fill your next opening in record time and get the right person. Some of these techniques are downright diabolical but they're all awesome. Get a pen and some paper before you start listening, because you're going to want to take notes! Some links from the show: The Dental Hacks Nation closed Facebook group has over 9500 members! Head over there to interact with other Dental Hacks listeners, guests and Brain Trust members every day, all day! Remember...if you don't have any thing "dental" on your FB page, we might decline your membership request. So IM the group or email us at info@dentalhacks.com. Cosmedent wants the Dental Hacks Nation to try their amazing new composite, Renamel Nano Plus! Use coupon code "Hacks Plus" at checkout on the website or when you call for an amazing 20% off any Renamel Nano Plus order! Check it out at www.dentalhacks.com/nanoplus The Heat Sync composite heater from Bioclear is one of the most important parts of the Bioclear Method. It allows you to deliver carpule after carpule of heated paste and flowable composite for the most demanding composite placement applications. Check it out at www.dentalhacks.com/heatsync Go Hack Yourself: Alan: iPad Pro 10.5" and Echo Bearcat wheeled trimmer If you have any questions or comments for us please drop us an email at info@dentalhacks.com or find us (and like us!) at www.facebook.com/dentalhacks. Or, if you prefer...give us a call at (866) 223-5257 and leave us a message. You might be played in the show! If you like us, why not leave us a review on iTunes? It helps us get found by like minded people and might even help us get into "What's Hot" in the iTunes store! Go to this link and let the world know about te DentalHacks! Finally, if you aren't an Apple person, consider reviewing us on Stitcher at: stitcher.com/podcast/the-dentalhacks-podcast! If you would like to support the podcast you can check out our Patreon page! Although the show will always remain free to download, our Patreon supporters get access to special bonus content including (at least) one extra podcast episode every months! Also be sure to check out the Dental Hacks swag store where you can find t-shirts, stickers coffee mugs and all sorts of other things that let the world know you're a part of the Hacks Nation!
Dr. Gina Dorfman joins Sandy Pardue and Dana Salisbury discuss Yapi software and how it can be utilized to increase efficiency within the practice.
Sandy Pardue and Dana Salisbury interview Rohit Garg with Practice By Numbers to talk about the software and how Classic Practice Resources uses the data with clients.
Recorded live at the Townie / Dentaltown Meeting in Las Vegas, NV. Sandy Pardue and guest host Dana Salisbury interview Howie Horrocks & Julie Mitchell of New Patients Inc. to discuss Dental Web Content for your dental practice.
Sandy Pardue hosts Dr. Bob Westerman and Dana Salisbury to discuss building your dream practice. This will be a multi-part feature and we look forward to discussing this more in future episodes.
Part 2 of 2: Sandy Pardue discusses tips on finding the missed opportunities in the administrative areas of the dental practice and gaining control over the practice schedule.
Part 1 of 2: Sandy Pardue discusses tips on finding the missed opportunities in the administrative areas of the dental practice and gaining control over the practice schedule.
Sandy Pardue and Mark Dilatush of New Patients Inc. discuss marketing your practice.
Sandy Pardue is back on the show! This time she shares her wealth of wisdom on case acceptance. If only 37% of your diagnoses being treated, you must listen to this 2 part series. Sandy Pardue, Senior Consultant and Lecturer with Classic Practice Resources has consulted with offices throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico. She is an energetic and highly competent lecturer and consultant in the area of dental practice management. Sandy has over 35 years of “hands-on” experience in the dental field, and for three consecutive years, DENTISTRY TODAY Magazine has recognized her as one of the country’s leading speaker-consultants. http://classicpractice.com/
Sandy Pardue is back on the show! This time she shares her wealth of wisdom on case acceptance. If only 37% of your diagnoses being treated, you must listen to this 2 part series. Sandy Pardue, Senior Consultant and Lecturer with Classic Practice Resources has consulted with offices throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico. She is an energetic and highly competent lecturer and consultant in the area of dental practice management. Sandy has over 35 years of “hands-on” experience in the dental field, and for three consecutive years, DENTISTRY TODAY Magazine has recognized her as one of the country’s leading speaker-consultants. http://classicpractice.com/
It’s one thing to know how to use a sickle probe. But knowing how to make your practice profitable is another. And to be profitable year after year, you’ll need to adapt to certain changes: Modern dental equipment New technology Relevant marketing strategies But there’s one part that doesn’t change: People. To run a stellar dental practice, you need a good staff. And if you’re wondering what it takes to have a good staff, there’s no better person to turn to than Sandy Pardue. Sandy is the senior consultant at Classic Practice Resources, a key contributor to DentalTown, and director of the Spice Up Your Practice training events. If you’re looking to grow your staff soon, you’ll appreciate the bonus. It’s Sandy’s employment application that will help you identify the best fit for the role. Get that here. Here are a few things you’ll discover in today’s episode: The mistake that will get potential clients going to see other dentists instead of coming to see you (and how to avoid it) What job title to avoid to prevent confusion in responsibilities (especially with larger age gaps) The four parts you need to fill in your front office (and what personality traits to look for when hiring for them) A key characteristic to pay attention to during interviews (that may cause problems if overlooked) The difference between an interview and an outerview What to do before, during, and after an interview to find the best candidates for the job (and maybe even get new clients out of it) The staffing ratio formula to make sure your business runs smoothly Why block scheduling can be a costly mistake How The Hawthorne Effect can be applied to your practice to make it more efficient Red flags when buying a practice (and the first thing you’ll want to do as a new owner) How to tell when someone’s not doing their job The key metrics to maintain a high performing office Free Episode Bonus: If you want to improve the quality of your hires, this bonus will come in hand. Sandy has provided an employment application to help you find the qualities you’re looking for, rather than relying on a resume that only shows you what they want you to see. Click here to access that now. Quote: “Nothing in your practice is more important than time.” – Sandy PardueResources: Classic Practice Resources WebsiteContact Sandy Pardue via Email Support The Show: Without you, Ambitious Dentists, this show wouldn’t exist. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please go here to give me an honest rating and review in iTunes. This allows me to evolve the show as it goes on, and also helps spread the word to other podcast listeners since iTunes promotes shows with active engagement.
Most dentists dream of a practice where they are in the back doing clinical dentistry and their office runs like a finely tuned machine without their input. That's where our guest, Sandy Pardue, comes in. Whether it's rescuing appointments from cancellations, avoiding embezzlement or helping the front office run more smoothly, Sandy and her business Classic Practice Resources can help. We had Dr. Dawn Kulongowski, Dental Hacks favorite and Classic Practice client to help with our interview. We think you'll find it valuable! The Brain Trust follows up with more dental emergency goodness! Who was that guy that used his knee on someone's chest to take a tooth out? Why has almost every patient heard that story? What are the keys to scheduling emergencies in a way that doesn't mess with your mojo? Go Hack Yourself: Jason's 3D printer The Compopen from Ronvig If you have any questions or comments for us please drop us an email at info@dentalhacks.com or find us (and like us!) at www.facebook.com/dentalhacks. Or, if you prefer...give us a call at (866) 223-5257 and leave us a message. You might be played in the show! If you like us, why not leave us a review on iTunes? It helps us get found by like minded people and might even help us get into "What's Hot" in the iTunes store! Go to this link and let the world know about the DentalHacks! Finally, if you aren't an Apple person, consider reviewing us on Stitcher at: stitcher.com/podcast/the-dentalhacks-podcast! Also be sure to check out the brand new Dental Hacks swag store where you can find t-shirts, stickers coffee mugs and all sorts of other things that let the world know you're a part of the Hacks Nation!
In episode 79 we speak with Sandy Pardue of Classic Practice Resources. Sandy helps dental practices create and monitor systems throughout the office but she's also passionate about keeping dentists out of trouble with embezzlement! Dr. Dawn Kulongowski joins Jason and Alan in an entertaining and informative discussion of what dentists can do to foil those that would steal from them! In the Brain Trust segment Alan is joined by Dr. Matt Standridge, Dr. Dawn Kulongowski, Dr. Tiffany Lee and Dr. Mike Keller to talk about dental emergencies. We talk about the basics...most common, what the appointment is like and all that. Then, we start talking about our best dental emergency stories. And it gets really good! Sandy's checklist to safeguard your practice! Go Hack Yourself: Ikea Alex drawer unit on casters (retails for $119, Alan quoted the "non-caster" unit at $60) Belmont "swing-mounted" delivery system If you have any questions or comments for us please drop us an email at info@dentalhacks.com or find us (and like us!) at www.facebook.com/dentalhacks. Or, if you prefer...give us a call at (866) 223-5257 and leave us a message. You might be played in the show! If you like us, why not leave us a review on iTunes? It helps us get found by like minded people and might even help us get into "What's Hot" in the iTunes store! Go to this link and let the world know about the DentalHacks! Finally, if you aren't an Apple person, consider reviewing us on Stitcher at: stitcher.com/podcast/the-dentalhacks-podcast! Also be sure to check out the brand new Dental Hacks swag store where you can find t-shirts, stickers coffee mugs and all sorts of other things that let the world know you're a part of the Hacks Nation!
Sandy Pardue and Howard Farran talk about staff problems, lack of systems, staff training, broken appointments, patient retention, and more! There’s a reason Sandy is considered the gold standard in practice management.
Late cancelations and no-shows are likely robbing you of thousands of dollars each month. Sandy Pardue gives you simple strategies to fix this problem. From the initial call to the appointment wrap-up, you and your team must deliver and communicate value. Sandy is the Director of Consulting with Classic Practice Resources. Her comprehensive and interesting approach to dental office systems, offers a refreshing point of view on how to become more efficient and productive in a dental practice. You can reach Sandy by e-mail at sandy@classicpractice.com or by calling 800-928-9289.
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