Dental Practice Heroes
Where dentists learn how to cut clinical days while increasing profits - without sacrificing patient care, cutting corners, or cranking volume. We teach you how to grow a scalable practice through communication, leadership, and effective management.
Hosted by Dr. Paul Etchison, author of two books on dental practice management, dental coach, and owner of a $6M collections group practice in the south suburbs of Chicago, we provide actionable advice for practice owners who want to intentionally create more time to enjoy their families, wealth, and deep personal fulfillment.
If you want to build a scalable practice framework that no longer stresses, drains, or relies on you for every little thing, we will teach you how and share stories of other dentists who have done it!
Dental Practice Heroes
David Maloley - Getting the Results you Want from your Practice and your Life
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Dr. Dave and Dr. Etch discuss why most dentists don't get the results they want from their practices and their lives.
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Take Control of Your Practice and Your Life
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Hey everybody. Dr. Letchison here, the dental practice here's full case. Thanks for listening, everybody. I have a really great guest today. A good friend of mine, the relentless dentist himself, Dr. David Maloli. And we talk about his high performance coaching. The more we talk about just being in a high performance individual, my overachievers as dentists, why aren't we clear on what we want? Things like this happiness for the film. And I just tell you, this is one of my favorite interviews, man. I just love talking about this stuff, and I think it's such it's so valuable to us dentists to really think about why are we doing what we do and get down to the heart of the why and things like that. So I know you're gonna love this episode. Alrighty, already everybody, welcome back to the Dental Project Heroes Pumpcast. I'm super excited about my guest I have today. I have a fellow humble caster, Director David Maloli, who is a dentist out in Vilic Hamaranum. I believe it's Avon Cameron Ramum. And yeah, and he's the founder of the Relentless Dentist Podcast, so you're gonna recognize that voice. And just recently, he started doing high performance dental coaching and is now, like me, an author of a book. So we're definitely gonna talk about that. So super pumped for our conversation today. And thanks for having taken the time to do it, David. Welcome to the podcast.
SPEAKER_00It's an honor, man. I think you and I connected a while back and became fast friends. So I respect everything that you're doing and the message that you're carrying out there. It's really an honor to share some of the thoughts I have with your audience. So thanks for the opportunity.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for that, man. So now you are you're out in Vale Valley. Is it really called Vale Valley, or is it what is it?
SPEAKER_00Vale Valley is a marketing term, quite frankly, that helps support the ski industry and the tourism industry. The community operates, the county operates as a community. So the airport is a little further west. Vale is world-renowned, it's in the east part. Beaver Creek is really close to where I practice. So it's a comprehensive term that sells plane tickets and lift tickets, and it makes it easy for people to understand. But I live in a little town called Walcott and I practice in a town called Avon, which is really at the base of Beaver Creek Ski Resort.
SPEAKER_01Now, you're from, and forgive me if I get this wrong, are you from you from Nebraska?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, born and raised in cattle country in Nebraska, went to both undergrad and dental school there. So where I live now and how I live now is is much different than anything that I would have aspired to in the early 80s.
SPEAKER_01Nice. Now, I don't like to spend too much time on backstory, but I think it's important for our listeners to hear yours. Can you and I know you had a difficult startup once you got into Colorado, but explain how you got out there from Nebraska and why you chose out that way.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so went to dental school at Nebraska, but I took what's called a health profession scholarship to the U.S. Army for a couple of reasons. One, I wanted to stay out of the red and didn't want to incur the dental debt that was growing at the time. But two, I kind of had a vision that I wanted to serve my country. And my father had done that. My grandfather was a medic in World War II. So I felt like it was just one of those things that I wanted to say I did, and it kind of was going back to the begin with the end in mind. And so that led me to uh residency in South Carolina one year at Fort Jackson. And then I got orders to go to Europe. And it was the European experience. I lived two years in Germany and two years in Italy that kind of it kind of decompressed me. It got rid of some of my strong workaholic tendencies. When you live in Italy, you can be as urgent as you want to. And the the phrase they use commonly is ah domani. Like, well, worry about it tomorrow. What's the hurry? So I really appreciated how they celebrated life in Europe. You didn't need to be a birthday party or anniversary to have a bottle of wine and a five-hour meal, a multiple course meal. And so from there, after I left the army, I was in an associateship. My wife was a founder in an internet startup in Charlotte, North Carolina. And we entered the rat foot race fast and furious. And I had worse culture shock moving from America to Europe than I had moving from Nebraska to Europe. And it helped me kind of set the sails on what I really wanted for life. And when I stumbled across the resort area that's I now live in, it reminded me so much of Europe. And literally within an hour of being in Vail, I was like, this is it. So I took the leap and I did a about everything wrong that you could do in a startup. Didn't really research the demographics, the economy was horrible. But the calling, the the I was really compelled to live the lifestyle where I knew that I could play, essentially have a vacation every week, being out on the bike or skiing. And that's what really drove the necessity of getting the practice off the ground.
SPEAKER_01And you learned a lot.
SPEAKER_00Oh my gosh. Yeah. All from this, all from the school of hard knocks.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Most of the advice I give young dentists is to not do what I did. But the life lessons, the professional lessons, there were times when I would have, I mean, I was praying for mercy and, you know, thought the practice might crash and burn. But now in hindsight, I realize that it was all a blessing and really helped set the foundation for the stuff I love doing today.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01And, you know, David, when I hear you speak, like the one things I really like about you is just how your your take on life and personal success. Like the I wouldn't say the fluffy things, but the things that really ultimately matter more than the practice success is just how we feel and how we're accomplishing our goals and having success in every area of our life. Now, I kind of want to just take this podcast. That's where I kind of want to go with it, because I don't feel like I've done that with any guests yet. And I think I can think of anyone else that's more suited to do it than you. Sounds great. Yeah, so if we want to be successful in every area of our life, you know, ultimately like happy, fulfilled, and I think a lot of us high achievers kind of fail at that. And I think just going through dental dental school in general puts us all at that high achiever end. Why do you think that is that we we struggle with that so much?
SPEAKER_00I've seen two common trends, I think, in the conversations that I have through publishing the book, through speaking, through coaching, through strategy sessions. Sometimes it's just off the cuff after a meeting over a couple beers when people get really honest. But two things that I see again and again is one, you mentioned the achiever. We're designed and been rewarded. All of our training is to go to the next level. If some is good, more is better. And that helps define who we become in a lot of cases in our practices. So that's one distinction because I see almost an exact contrast where some dentists will leave dental school thinking, okay, I've got the license. And there's comes with it sometimes a sense of entitlement. Well, okay, now that I'm doctor and I wear the white coat, there's certain salaries and things that should be provided to me. And you and I both know clearly that the marketplace doesn't care what degree you have, it decilla it matters how much value you're adding to the system. So those are two contrasts that I see. The third one that kind of bridges the gap between both of them is a sense of feeling of I'm not enough. And I saw that again and again and again, and I felt it personally. And it's kind of a miserable place to live. But when you look at the career progression of you and I and all of our colleagues, we're trying to prove ourselves worthy of dental school. So we build up this essentially a resume. You can look at our GPA, you can look at our DAT scores. We're trying to prove that we're enough. And then once we get into dental school, we keep jumping through hoops to prove that we're enough, prove it with enough test after test. You know, it starts with an interview and then we keep getting tested for four years that ends with a licensor exam. So getting off that hamster wheel, if we've always been rewarded to be a little bit more, can provide a significant amount of insecurity. And that's where you get these bogus conversations with dentists. Like they produce this, but they don't tell you what their collections are or what their overhead is or what their just fictitious numbers. And it ends up being like this a story of who caught the biggest fish, who caught the most fish. And life I've learned again the hard way that it should be much more robust than that. So the last thing I would say is people just don't know what the hell they want. It's a lack of clarity on what the outcomes in their practice should be and what they're really aligned to doing. Like, for example, I have a CT scan in my office, but I'm not a tech person. Like I'm not really that compelled to get into the nuances of that and then leverage that into 3D printing, all that sort of stuff. So I've had to define like where my limits are and what I have to delegate and outsource simply by I mean, we're all drawn to certain things and really defining who we are and what we want. Getting that crystal clarity, I think, is the first step on the escape plan if you feel like you're on that hamster wheel or shredmill, I would say.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, and I would I would agree with you that whole I'm not enough thing and how we had jumped through hoops. I remember being 4.0 and undergraduate and then getting to dental school and everything's like weighted on curves. And I'm like, I'm like the I'm like the C like C minus kind of student. You know, I'm like, oh my god, I've never got a C in my life. And then in the dental school, that's like all I could pull the first two years. And I just remember thinking, oh my gosh, I don't belong here. Yeah, and then and then I got to clinical and that was where I found my flow. But holy moly, man, it's just it's so true. We get stuck in that. I mean, we do that our whole life. That's just it's just self-selects for these people.
SPEAKER_00It's tragic, you know, because if you look at it from a bird's eye view, when I speak to a room of dentists, particularly practice owners, like that's really a leak company. You've got an advanced degree, lots of people were left in your wake when you got into dental school. I think it's more competitive than ever. I'm not sure I would get into dental school in 2018 when thankful I did 15 years ago. But you think about being a doctor, think about being a practice owner, an entrepreneur. Those are two hoops that most people never get through. And to not realize that we're elite and that we have this golden ticket of opportunity that once we've left a lot of competition behind us, that you know, certainly hard work is behind it, but sometimes it's just working smart and like yourself, like cutting back, you know, first it takes some time. Like now people want to talk to me about hey, tell me about how you work three days a week. Well, first I have to tell you about how I work five days six days a week and then five days a week, and then four days a week. So it's certainly a process, but if you're optimizing the things in your practice and working on your the little things that get ignored, the leadership acumen, aligning your team, understanding the the business and the numbers, things that you outline in your book, I mean your book is a perfect textbook on just start highlighting and start finding holes in the bucket in your practice and start plugging them. And then that's when things really take off. But if you think that this insecurity is all of a sudden gonna go away because you're have the best hand skills and clinical acumen in town, it doesn't serve you to the degree one would think. And we're and my my feeling is that it's not the people that are struggling, it's not their fault because no one ever said, like, okay, you have one tool in your toolkit, but you have to go find and develop others to make sure that you're a well-rounded business owner and clinician. Otherwise, you'll end up trying to make your practice ascend by running yourself into the ground. And that's what I see a lot in the profession. And there's just a better way to do it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I totally agree with you. And I was on Gina Dorfin's podcast recently, and she was saying, like, you know, what was the biggest, like, what's the number one thing that you think helped you get to where you were? And for me, it's always been like my team. It's just been like utilizing the team, and and you can't do it all yourself. So you have to do it. And like you said, you've got to be clear about things. You gotta be clear about your expectations and clear about where you want to go. Let's divert back to I want to talk about the life stuff. So, like for dentists that are really just trying to grow their practice and they're just burning out because they're putting so much energy into it and not getting anywhere, it's kind of hard to have that life work balance. So, I my question for you is is there even such a thing as life work balance?
SPEAKER_00To be honest, like for me, that that phrase has never resonated. To me, it's all integrated because when I'm home with Bennett or out on the state, say I'm out skiing with Bennett, to take an emergency call and go into work mode temporarily is not uncommon. Likewise, I mean, if there's a reason that I'm going to work and hustling and trying to grow that practice year after year, quarter after quarter, it's my family and it's a bit of a legacy thing. So to me, it all has to be integrated. And once you integrate it, you can start to find that like taking care of yourself and a morning routine and being healthy drives your energy. If you show up 10% more energetic in your practice, well, is your team gonna be more energetic? Yeah, probably. They'll have a little bit more buy-in because monkey see, monkey do, right? Like an organization takes on the personality of its leader. And if you have the case of the Mondays, well, guess what the rest of the team is gonna do? And so making sure that you're taking time to be selfish, some of that's clarity work and understanding what you need to get out of the next quarter, the next year, how you're defining that, what the priorities are in the practice, and then sharing that vision with the team, all that stuff gets pushed by the wayside so we can do one more crown, which seems productive at the time. But if you're headed in the wrong direction, you don't want to find that out 15 years later. Defining and redefining how things are going and where we're headed in the short term and making sure that the trajectory is there to make sure that these goals are being met. Sometimes they're sprint goals, 90 days, sometimes they're longer, long-term goals, like where do I want to be in five years? Maybe that's you've got passive income from your practice and you're only a clinician doing the procedures that you want to do one or two days a week. So if you don't define that for you yourself, the default usually doesn't lead to a very happy outcome. It leads to frustration and burnout, like you said. So it's taking time and really knowing what the drivers of sustained success are. Certainly, I'm an advocate for hard work, but there's other little knobs and dials that you should turn to make sure that your life is a lot more robust than getting people out of pain and giving them a smile is a powerful objective. But I think you can build on that. And I think that's still a pretty limited scope.
SPEAKER_01As far as that clarity work goes, which I think is so critical, how does someone really sit down and do this? Someone that's like, I always hear people talking about this, and then a mission vision, like, how do I do a mission and vision for my life and all this? But they never really get that pen to paper and never really take that step next step. What advice would you have for those people?
SPEAKER_00One is schedule time to do it. For me, it's happening on some level every morning, on a bigger level every week, on a bigger level every quarter. And then at the end of the year during the holidays, I set aside a half of a day to make sure that my quest is not getting knocked off course. And the reality is that it's always getting knocked off course. And so if I don't take that time to steer it back into the right direction, you can end up in a place that you don't really want to be if you just get lost in the busyness of life. So I say job one is just making the time. Above and beyond that, there are all sorts of strategies. The most important one for me, and it sounds a little bit tragic, but for me, it's really helped set me free, is to be able to say what you want to be proud of on your deathbed. And my assumption is that I'm gonna live to be an old man, but I don't know that tomorrow isn't promised to me. So there's a little bit of a short-term, long-term balance that I'm always trying to make sure that I'm not if I'm just trying to play for legacy, I can get uh go a year without stopping and smelling the roses. So it's a little bit of making sure that both boxes are being checked, that my son is eight this year. There he's gonna do things in this eight-year window that won't be available at nine or ten. He's gonna be willing to do things with me as a dad that if he's like me as a teenager, that I'm gonna be nothing but a distraction and a and a hurdle to keep him from getting what he wants. And I was a little obnoxious and independent as a teenager, so I hope he doesn't follow suit. But the bottom line is that once you kind of come to peace with that we're all kind of on a death march. And again, I don't mean that to be overly tragic, but it's the truth, right? It's the one thing that's guaranteed. How are we going to engineer the days and months and years to make sure that we don't have a bunch of deathbed regrets? Because that's certainly common where old people are telling their grandkids, don't do what I did or I wish I would have. So a lot of what I do is just engineering away from that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and it's so true. My my wife has got this book and it talks about all the different ages of kids and growing up, and this is what they need to hear from you at this age, and this is what they're like, and this is their cognition. But on every section or every year, it says how many weeks until graduation, like she'll let move away, and then like, and how many summers you have left. And when you put it in that, like when you look at it, like you got Bennett's eight, and my my daughter's about to turn eight. Man, I mean, she's in second grade, like, and you know, how many more years till she's gone from college, and how many more years till she gets to that adolescent stage? And it it just flies by, man. And it's it's it's so true what everybody says. It goes by quick and scary when you put it like that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it always seemed cliche to me when I didn't have kids, and then you realize the don't blink, you'll wonder where the time went, all those sorts of things really come into reality. And you mentioned something that was a trigger for me a few years ago. I saw a video, I think it was by a dental consultant, but he was talking about 16 summers that we get with our kids, and that really resonated with me. It was a wake-up call that some of the things I was doing in my practice were certainly contributing to my practice, but were detracting from my family life. And so I mean, there's easy ways to engineer everything, just like the systems in your practice. Like Bennett knows that I'm gonna do something, some father-son with things with him every single week. And he's gonna define that. Sometimes it's a movie, sometimes it's a bike ride, sometimes I'm limited on time because I'm traveling, but he's still gonna get that window of he and I having deeper conversations, having fun, whatever he decides, because I know that there's gonna be a time where that's not available. And I'm not looking forward to that, but I am looking forward to the person he'll become because I invested that time and made those deposits in his emotional bank account, his confidence bank account, all those sorts of things. And that's not something that you can rush. It's something that needs nurtured. And if you miss those windows of opportunity, you can pay for it later with rebellion.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So tell me, what would you say? I think a lot of us high achievers, we get into this almost this rat race mentality when we're we're in this culture that almost like celebrates working hard and just like not sleeping. Like I wake up earlier than you and I do more work. I work later into the night than you. And the reason we're all doing it is to get to that next step because we're just like, oh man, I'm gonna retire early. I'm gonna get five practices and wrap them all up in this roll-up with this even a multiple, and then I'm gonna go sit on a beach. What do you say to the rat racers that are always trying to get to the next step but not really sitting and enjoying the journey? Which which I will admit, I'm I'm one of those, and I'm definitely guilty of that. But what would you say?
SPEAKER_00I'm as well. We talked about knowing what you want, so getting crystal clear. But the second question, typically for a dentist, you know, if I get on a coaching call for them, well, is how do I do it? And dentists are really how people. We have a A process that you use to place an implant. There's certain steps for each procedure. There's certain instruments and materials that you need. So I understand why the question is always how, but for me, that's like the fourth question on if you're going through a clarity sequence. The next one is knowing why. And if you have a crappy why, then you should scratch the what until you get a better why or until you get a better what. And so it's not taking the time to really understand why do I want it. If it's to be the next Dr. Etchison or the doc next Dr. Maloli, that is a crappy why. Um because we're it's not that we can't show you the way in certain degrees, but if you're trying to mimic somebody else, you see that in a profession, it's a stumbling block. It actually brings up a quote that I often show when I present, and it's landed for a lot of people. Typically, the higher achieving the group is, the more it lands for them. Quote goes like this, and I can't remember who said it, but it's unhappiness is not knowing what you want and killing yourself to get it. And so not knowing what you want and why you want it is the thing, the kind of the asterisk that I would add to that. So once you have a compelling why, then you know that you've set the sales in the in the right direction. The third question that I always kind of kind of instigate or make sure that somebody understands is who do they have to become to get it? Because if you look at my practice growth, and I hope you agree, Paul, is that my practice growth has been on a trajectory relative to my personal growth. Sometimes that's leadership acumen, sometimes that's business acumen, sometimes that's a clinical skill set, but rarely is that what unlocks things for me. And so making sure that you're progressively trending upward on some kind of key criteria, I think, in a life is what drives a practice. Because if you just try and drive a practice with brute force, you'll get growth. But sustainable growth is questionable because if you're burnt out, your team isn't going to show up. They're going to feel it. Your patients are going to feel it. They feel how you show up. And when I look at the best months I have in my practice, it's because I showed up in a little bit more engaged, intentional manner. So that would that would be my guidance is make sure that you not only know exactly what you want out of your practice in your life, but why you want it. And if you don't have a compelling why, then it's time to go back to the drawing board and rework some of those thoughts that you originally had because oftentimes you're just pursuing someone else's vision and version of success, which won't lead you down a road of fulfillment.
SPEAKER_01Gosh, man, that's you said that so well, man. So how did you get into how did you decide you wanted to start coaching?
SPEAKER_00You know, it's something that I always felt called to do. I've had a myriad of different coaches. Some of them dealt directly with dentistry, some of them dealt with mindset. I've had a cycling coach, and I always felt like regardless of what I invested in that, I always got an ROI. It made my life a little bit easier. The thing that I noticed is that when they I'd enter the conversation with them, they were able to show me lots of blind spots that I couldn't normally see. And now as a coach, I can see why is because if you come to me with all this trauma and drama in your practice, whether it's staffing issues or cash flow issues, I enter that same conversation without emotion. And so I can see little kind of doorways that are easy to step through, place things that you're missing, opportunities that you're missing. And it almost doesn't even have to be a coach that's doing that for you. As long as you're surrounding yourself with people that help you grow, you can celebrate victories, true friends you can brag to, and it doesn't come across as like competitive or boastful, but they'll also you can share your struggles because we all have them. But usually they've had them in some way, shape, or form as well, and they can see a door that you can't see because you're so wrapped around the axles of the stress of it, the emotion of it. So it's something that when I started my podcast five years ago, I knew that I was kind of attracted to, and I knew my career was headed in that direction. But some challenges in the practice and some challenges with life knocked me off that route temporarily, but I was always called back to it. And last year I backed off on the number of days I worked in the practice considerably. And that allowed me to really take off with some of these passion projects that had been eating at me for a long time, but I hadn't really had the bandwidth to pursue them.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. You know, I I just talked to Derek Williams and we were talking about three days a week. And I don't want to go into that too deep, but I resonate with that because when I went down to three days a week, that's when I started doing a lot of the things that I thought of, like writing the book, as getting the podcast going, starting doing speaking and things like that. But what did you see in your production when you went down to three days a week? Did it did it hurt you?
SPEAKER_00It went up by 15%. Right. I can't tell you exactly how that happened mathematically, but it goes back to what I mentioned before. Like I showed up energized and enthused. One, because I had some rest, two, because I had some time to work on the business, which is something that I always enjoyed. And then what happens? Your business takes off, and then all of a sudden suddenly your time gets eaten by chair time. I used to have breaks during the day. You know, a lot of times I'm squeezing an emergency over lunch, and these are long days typically. And so to have the bandwidth to get really get strategic with the practice, to really get strategic as a leader, to make sure that I was guiding the team in the right direction. It allowed me some time. And it wasn't so much the time, but it was the attention. I had space where I could really get clear with are we on target? Are we off target? If we're off target, why are we off target? If we're off target and I know why, it doesn't take me long to figure out what I need to do as a next step. Is it to staff things differently? Is it to have a difficult conversation? Is it to invest in you know new technology or a new procedure? When I'm going, when I was going four days a week, my dad would laugh at me because he's kind of a six or seven day a week guy. I was spent on that. I like the last half day, I always felt like I was I had hit the 20 mile mark in a marathon.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00And I was kind of just going through the motion and that stops. So when the team shows up, batteries included, and you show up batteries included, patients feel that goodwill goes up, case acceptance goes up, and it all trickles down to the bottom line. So I hate to make that an energetic conversation because it sounds a little bit fluffy, but it's the reality of leadership is that if you show up in a different way, so does your team, and then it doesn't take long to start seeing the results across the board.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you know, and when I went to three days, that was the one thing I realized is that I hadn't really spent much time working on the business. And it's when you actually have I just think three days is ideal. Well, right now I'm at two and a half, and and we'll see where that goes. But the same conversation I had with Derek Williams, he said, Yeah, I don't know how it works, but we just we we ended up producing more on three days than we did on four. So that's a theme.
SPEAKER_00And and one of the things that I should mention is I took my team through a training that's comprised in a book called the Team Success Handbook. And I changed their mindsets. I always already knew this because I had been an entrepreneur for a few years, but changing the mindset, and a lot of dentists need to do this for themselves, it's changing your mindset from time and effort to results, knowing that your patient does not care if you spent five hours on that procedure or four hours on the procedure or two hours on that procedure. It's really about the deliverables, and in the case of a practice, it's the value you're delivering. So if you look at it from that construct, squeezing four days to work into three is not really that hard to imagine because you're just dialing up the value by 25% or 30%. So it's a mindset shift, and again, it's easier said than done. But if you get all the team thinking in a similar way and having a similar conversation, then you start to see the ship turn pretty rapidly.
SPEAKER_01Now that was the team success handbook? Team Success Handbook, yep. I've never heard of that.
SPEAKER_00Awesome. It's a byproduct of strategic coach. People may or may not know Dan Sullivan, and he has somebody on his team that works just with teams. And so the book is written on a very elementary level. And I'm I'm not saying that to demean team members, but it helps them understand entrepreneurial language, even though they've never been really introduced to it. So, like batteries included is an idea that comes from that, meaning, like, if you're dragging your feet on Monday, say six team members are showing up and you're the seventh, you're bringing them down. So the simple understanding that you're letting down patients and team members and owners and practices by maybe not getting enough rest or staying out partying on Thursday night or whatever it looks like for you, understanding that there's certain commitments that you have to be involved in when you show up for work, if goodwill and case acceptance are gonna be strong and ascend over time. Once you get the team thinking like that and you make them owners of something, then it takes a weight off the owner. And that book really spells that out in a way that everyone can subscribe to. One chapter in that book may take 10 minutes to read, and then you roll that into a team discussion. It was instrumental to the progress we made going from four days to three days.
SPEAKER_01Wow, I I gotta check that out. I really like that idea. That's cool. All right, so let's switch gears. So tell us a story about something that you failed at, but you learned a big lesson from.
SPEAKER_00The short answer is leadership. I grew up on a farm working with cousins and uncles. It wasn't a very sophisticated lifestyle. I probably learned to use profanity at the age of three or four, and that was used against me or used to direct me at the time. And so I came from a very candid uh bringing and I responded to it. It worked for me. And that, yeah, I saw that through athletics. My first career pursuit was athletic medicine. And so I was on the an athletic trainer for the Nebraska Cornhuskers in '94 and '95. And they were undefeated those two years, won national championships. And you'd see these linebacker coaches grab people by the face mask and tell them they were nothing, and watch kids respond to that. I was, you know, I go into dental school. In some ways, dental school for me was like that: like, you know, you're not good enough, go back and do it again. The wax up looks horrible, go back and do it again. This isn't quality work. And then again, in the army. So I my upbringing was around very directive, almost dictator style leadership. And I brought that into the practice, thinking being a good leader just meant being assertive. Well, you surround yourself with a bunch of kind-hearted young ladies, that doesn't work very well. And it took me a while to see that. And I would put the blame on them because they weren't responding. I'm like, I can't be any more clear. Here I spelled it out for you. I gave you the details, I gave you the deadlines, what's going wrong? And I just wasn't a very savvy leader and really delving into that and seeing the tragedies and some of the hurt that I created. The specific story that I would give you is when one of my top performers pulled me aside and says, Dr. Maloli, you make me feel insignificant. And that reality, like as I tell you that, like it still gives me chills. She was one of my favorite people in the world. And to think that that I was inadvertently doing that broke my heart. And I end up losing that employee over that situation. But I was going from that, that's not enough, push harder, go faster. And I maybe overstating it. I mean, I wasn't like, I wasn't snapping the whip, but I wasn't enrolling them in the vision. I wasn't encouraging them. It was kind of more of a critical stance and learning to go another way and aligning the team and taking it from a very vertical management structure to a very horizontal peer style management structure has created a ton of fulfillment for me. Certainly a ton of revenue for me, loyalty from the team, which creates loyalty from the patients. So that was one place that I really struggled. And now, just kind of like clinical dentistry, once you start studying leadership, you learn a lot, but you also learn what you don't know. And so it exposes you to this journey that's almost a rabbit hole that's never quite complete. If someone were to come to me and say, I've got leadership figured out, I would run away from them because I don't think you ever have it completely figured out. It's humans are very complex and it's kind of vegotistical to think that you've you can be confident in leadership, but to think that you've learned it all and not engaged in a lifelong journey, I think is a dangerous place. So that was a painful lesson that caused me a lot of hardship emotionally, a lot of sleepless nights, a fair amount of turnover in the practice. But again, in the hindsight, it's all a blessing because now it motivates me to understand the better way and really to be able to execute that on a high level.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and I think with the whole leadership thing is you you can read books after books, it but you've got to get just the experience and you've just got to screw up and just hurt people's feelings and just learn from it. Because it's it's just it's inevitable. Like we always you always see people on the podium, they say, I want you to learn from my mistakes so you don't make them. And I'm always, yes, yes, yes, I'm taking notes. And then like within the next two years, I'm like, I did that exact same thing that other guy did.
SPEAKER_00It's like it's that's the thing because the thing that may resonate for your hygienist won't resonate for your front desk. And so to figure out what makes them come alive, what challenges them, sometimes you need to put things on their plate, sometimes you need to take them off their plate, sometimes they need space because they're bringing trauma and drama from outside the house or outside the practice from home into the practice. So life is complex and people are complex, and you'll always, I think, stumble and hit your head against the wall from time to time. But it it seems to simplify itself as time goes on, and it's a muscle that it certainly can get stronger with time if you're engaging in that growth and development.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely, man. So let's talk about your most recent project. Let's talk about Titans of Dentistry.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, man, I love to. It just got off the drawing board and into reality this week. So probably one of my favorite things in the world is when an idea becomes a tangible thing, whether it be a startup practice or implementation of a new strategy. But to have this book not only in my hands, but the hands of colleagues, I think I'm taking a humble stance on this because in reality I didn't write the whole book, and my co-author Justin Short didn't write the whole book. It was written by 30 or so co-authors that really helped show some of their tragedies in practice, some of their struggles, some of the upsides, how did they unlock it? And there's more struggle than you would think from some of these people. So it's called Titans of Dentistry. And at Titans, I think sometimes gets misconstrued because you think it's a ranking of the top 30. It's not our intention. Our intention with this book is to provide insights from a wide variety of different successes. So success in in these terms is defined by the achiever. And no two roads are the same. Really, no two roads resemble one another. You might say, well, he's an implant trainer and he's an implant trainer. Well, it stops about there. Other than that, the roads are very different. And we wanted to show that, particularly to young dentists early on in their career, that you can define this path, you can use this opportunity as a golden ticket. And success leaves clues. And I think some of the insights that these doctors provided will help lighten the load, pave the path, use whatever term you want, but I think it'll make people's lives easier. In some ways, I'm a little jealous because this is the book I was looking for 10 years ago when I started my practice, and it would have probably shaved a year or two off the learning curve had I had that in my toolkit when I was getting started. Talk about how it's organized. Justin Short, my friend and partner in this project, wrote the intro and prologue. But from there, we ask common questions of 30-some dentists. Some, again, you'll know, like Dr. Dawson or Dr. Christensen. Some are a little bit more underground, and we did that by intention. They have more lifestyle practices where they optimized it, but it provides them an incredible life. Some of them are in the beginnings of their career, some of them are in the twilight of their career. So it's a wide variety, but we ask everyone the same questions. Not all of that reveals itself in the book because we edited some out, if we saw some redundancy. If we saw somebody not being completely authentic, if we saw them maybe not adding value in a specific area, they all added massive value, but we wanted this to kind of be a fire hose concept. So each section is authored by the specific dentist that we profiled. And then throughout, Justin and I provided little comments. It was inspired, the project was inspired by a book by Tim Ferris by a similar name, Tools of the Titans, and it's written in a very similar fashion because both and I got Justin and I got lots of value from that. And it's designed really to look for revelation. And that may seem like an overstatement, but most dentists will want to read it for completion. What I would encourage readers to do is sit down and not read more than a section a day. Maybe that's too much, but go through with a highlighter, dog ear it, make notes in it, and start to implement things that really resonate with you because the gems are really endless in there. And if you only take one or two gems from it to implement it, you're undervaluing the insights that these dentists brought to the table. So it's designed to be a slow methodical journey. How you do that is up to you. But to not really seek out the insights and start to implement them in your life and practice, I think you'd be doing the book a disservice. And again, that's not to be boastful because quite frankly, I didn't write most of it. But things are kind of summarized in the end by some thoughts that I had. But it's something that has become a labor of love. And the more Justin and I got into it, the more we realized that if not one person reads this book, it was well worth the two years that we put into it, just from the insights that we gained. So if we can, again, I think it's a very altruistic ambition that we have. If we can help give people a leg up that we didn't have early in our careers or mid-career or end of the career, if there's any insight that can help get you back on the a better path, an easier path, a more fulfilling path, I think then that book has served its purpose. So again, it's out this week, and um we're super excited to actually have it be in paper and ink and not just ideas rattling around uh online and in people's heads.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I ordered mine on gosh, what was it? I think I ordered two days. It should be coming today. It might actually be in my mailbox. Maybe I should get my mail. It might be in my mailbox right now, but I'm excited to get it and start taking it apart a bit. I don't I'm really looking forward to it.
SPEAKER_00It's important to note that we included you in that for good reason. So thank you. We both as authors have lots of respect for your journey, but also respect for your willingness to share that things aren't always that rosy, but there's a path that can get you to a better situation if you just sustain. And that's that's a common theme that we saw again and again and again is that most of these people had every reason to give up on their dream at a certain stage, but it's the persistence and the to use one of my favorite terms, the relentlessness, to continue to drive into that vision is what got them to where they are today. But there were certainly obstacles that are obvious there, and some of them really help spell that out. So I hope dentists know that if they're in a tough spot right now, or if they've been through a tough spot, or if one's coming in the future, that that's just part of the game. And to anticipate that, to try navigating around that is just wise business. But to think you'll avoid it completely is a fallacy. And that's something that I missed in the first part of my career. I thought people's paths were were just a lot easier than mine, just full realizing that I wasn't around the most authentic people. They were I was just seeing people's highlights highlight reels. And I think this book really helps people see that. There's ups and downs to the journey, but if you sustain and stay clear on what you want, that the outcome is inevitable. It's just a matter of time.
SPEAKER_01That's awesome, man. So tell me how can listeners get in touch with you if they want to, you know, pursue possibly using you as a coach.
SPEAKER_00So my coaching journey always starts with a questionnaire because one of the most powerful things I've learned in a in the last couple of years is you can never leave a place you've never been. So really understanding where you are is job one, and then understanding what what you want, what outcomes you want, are places that people sometimes don't give them the time and the space to go to. So it's a pretty thorough questionnaire. If you want to reach out to me via email and ask questions about it or get the questionnaire, it's dr.dave at relentlessdentist.com. I love sharing, I love lightening the load, I love collaborating. So any of your listeners that want to le reach out for any reason, I welcome that. But if they're interested in coaching, that's the first step. And then from there, if they look, if I think that my coaching curriculum would be a good fit for them, I don't want to waste anyone's time or money. So I always make sure it's a win-win. Then we delve into a deeper conversation, a strategy session. And if they see what they want to see from the content and think that's the path they want to go on, then then the coaching journey starts from there. So that's how it starts. But short answer is just reach out via email. Awesome. All right, David, are you ready for the sexy six? Yeah, let's do it. I'll be as uh sexy as I can.
SPEAKER_02Six sexy questions.
SPEAKER_00So, do you have a favorite quote? Yes, a quote that served me incredibly well is a quote by Joseph Campbell. It's the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.
SPEAKER_01Love it. Yeah, and that's true, man. You just got to oh, I had to have a really hard conversation with someone about two weeks ago. Yeah, I forced myself to do it, but I put it off for about two, three weeks. But after I got that conversation over with, I felt really good.
SPEAKER_00Courage is something that I when I go, it's one of the things I coach on, and it's something that I see as uh a missing link. It's people, once they know what they want, then there's just that fear of apprehension. And again, going back to our training, we're taught not to trip and fall and make mistakes. And sometimes a business or life journey isn't as strategic as our clinical journey is, not as precise. So it's almost a different skill set.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. All right, question number two what are you reading right now?
SPEAKER_00The book I'm engaging in right now, when I say engaging, I listen to it way too fast on Audible, is Atomic Habits by James Clear. So what I do if something like is like, oh my gosh, I really need to get some depth here and understand what he's saying. I usually go back, order the hard copy and listen and highlight while I read it. And that multi-sensory thing helps keep my attention and really gets me dialed into it. And I just take it slow. So that's a new favorite of mine.
SPEAKER_01That's funny. My wife gives me a hard time. She's like, You bought the audible book and you're reading it. Because I do the same thing. I'm like, Yeah, I mean, I totally agree with you. All right, so recommend a book that all dentists should read.
SPEAKER_00Oh, there's so many. I hate to use a dental book because I I've I usually steering dentists away from you know the incestuous nature of our of our knowledge, but I would have to say Fred Joyle's Everything is Marketing. I've given that book away more than any other book. And if for no other reason reading reading the title can be enough because we think ourselves as dentists, but once we switch that conversation to the marketer of dental services and realize that there's no neutral in the dental experience, it's the sights, it's the smells, it's the how your admin people answer the phone, every little touch point can be a plus or minus. Therefore, it is a marketing strategy that you need. You can call it what you want customer service, you can call it what you want, Google Ads, Facebook presence, but it's all comes down to marketing. And once that mind shift happens, life gets a lot easier because you realize that your clinical skills are just one small part of the equation.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, nicely put. Now, recommend a seminar or continue in education that you found pivotal in your education.
SPEAKER_00For me, one course early on, and there's a funny story that I shared with Bruce uh not long ago, was Productive Dentist Academy, and I'd seen him on the magazines, and he had kind of become slowly become one of my dental heroes. And literally, I had already maxed out two dental or two credit cards, uh, one personal, one business, and I maxed out my third credit card to put my whole team on a plane to go to his course. I remember literally being there and debating with myself. My hygienist was sitting at the bar uh with me. We're watching some football in between sessions, or maybe it was after, I don't remember exactly. And she bought a drink, and I had already bought myself a beer, and I remember this internal struggle whether I should buy it for her or not. And it wasn't like a leadership thing, it was like, I do I have enough money to do this. Oh all that to say part of it was the content that I received from Productive Dentist Academy and Bruce Baird, who remains somebody that I highly respect. But the other part is doubling down on yourself. And I think dentists don't do that enough, knowing that you're your number one asset and your practice is a close second. And sometimes you have to put all the chips in to make sure that you get the results that you need. And I knew that I needed an ROI from that. I had no other choice, and therefore I got one. So some of that's necessity, and some of that was insights, and those two tied together were a real powerful duo for me.
SPEAKER_01Now, I don't think you said it if you bought the drink or not.
SPEAKER_00I didn't. It was things were that tight.
SPEAKER_01But you know that that's awesome. You took that massive action where you took your whole team. Like I did the same thing, and I tell people all the time, I'm like, just do it, just do it. It's just you gotta bring the team, man. It's it's yeah, yeah. And and I I know what you're gonna say. I mean, did you get an ROI on that?
SPEAKER_00100%. Yeah, there were dozens of things that I got an ROI on. And that's the thing when people think about, and I'm not touting my own services here, but if you're thinking about investing in your team, you're thinking about investing in yourself, like it's not hard to get a thousand dollar idea if you implement it. It's not hard to get an ROI. It's making sure you have the intention to actually put your words into actions that's holding dentists back from getting an ROI here. And what what's the downside of not doing this? What's the downside of me not putting my team on a plane? Like it's hard to measure that too, right? So yeah, it's a bit of a gamble and it's a risk, but our margin in dentistry are pretty good. And if you can figure out how to continue to place bets on yourself and your team and even get an ROI part of the time, you'll do exceedingly well. Get the practice trending upward, getting your tree team and yourself training upward. It's to me, it's always the best investment a dentist can make.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it is. Now, question number five: let's share a dental analogy that you use with patients that you think works well.
SPEAKER_00Admittedly, I'm not very savvy at this. I have maybe maybe one go-to, and it's ticking time bomb. If there's urgency, if a patient says, Well, you told me I have a cracked tooth, I see a cracked tooth, uh, but it doesn't hurt, I think I'll wait, or they're alluding to that. I'd just say it's a ticking time bomb. These things tend to happen on Thanksgiving or Christmas Eve. So I would encourage you to do it sooner than later. And that usually sinks in pretty quickly. So my go-to is ticking time bomb.
SPEAKER_01Nice, nice. Now, last question. If you had three pieces of advice for a new dentist or a soon-to-be dental grad, what would that be?
SPEAKER_00Oh my god, I could probably put on a seminar because uh I feel like we've already done it, you know.
SPEAKER_01Three more.
SPEAKER_00One I think we've alluded to, but let me just be very direct with it. Develop yourself as a leader and never stop. I think that perpetual diet should be seen as like almost like exercise, like a strength and conditioning program. It doesn't take much, but if you continue to delve into audiobooks and podcasts that deal with leadership, you'll find your people skills and your influence can increase. And if you start to be able to get things off your plate and delegate that, and people actually want to take that on board, then life gets really fun and the practice grows almost without effort. So that would be one. The second one that I screwed up would be I was way, way, way too independent for too long. I figured I could figure it out through a book or dental town. And once I started podcasting, it kind of invited me to a world of peers like yourself where all of a sudden I was around people that had a common mindset and it wasn't an ego play. I could, you and I could have a kind of conversation about this really sucks when, or I still struggle with this, and it's okay. But likewise, if you get around the right circle of friends, you can brag about your best month and everyone celebrates for you and seeks out insights for themselves. So that level of collaboration I don't see a lot in dentistry, but it's it's needed. And there's a lot of animosity and tension and ego, and you know, he's a hack, she's a hack. And I have patients come in every single day that want to throw their old dentist under a bus. And I used to want to be their hero, and now I realize that I'm the next person that they throw under the bus. So I take it all with a grain of salt. But being collaborative and finding a peer group that really supports you is two. The third one would have to be something to do with clarity. I would say be crystal clear on what you want, why you want it, and then pursue that dream without guilt or apologies. Sometimes that'll be conflict from your spouse. Certainly you may get resistance from your team, but there's these things that kind of resonate. And when I say the word resonate, I mean it that will land for you and not for me, that'll land for Paul and not for you. But once you find something that really makes you come alive, you I think you should pursue that. We when I look at my son, like he pursues or thinks about dreams unapologetically without limits. And sometimes that to use a dental term kind of gets anesthetized out of dentists, I find. They can still see it, but it's getting really foggy and they've gotten on this treadmill that they don't really like. But if you can light that fire again and get them to steer towards that path, then things get gradually more progressive when they feel called to do something versus obligated to do something. So getting clear on what you want and why you want it is is always sound advice, I think.
SPEAKER_01Man, I I I can't thank you enough. This has been an awesome podcast. I just I love everything that you said, and that's always what's been what's drawn me. I've been a big fan of yours before I met you, and I actually I haven't read my book in a while, but I know I quoted you there somewhere in the beginning when you said success leaves clues, and I didn't even know what you even looked like. You were just a voice on the podcast radio for me at that point. But man, thanks for your time today, David. Dude, thanks for everything you do for dentistry. Thanks for being one of the first podcasters and kind of opening blades in that trail and really looking forward to reading your new book. And I hope some of our listeners will reach out to you for some more information.
SPEAKER_00Well, thanks for being a part of Titans of Dentistry, and also thanks for what you're doing for the profession. I think a lot of these ideas were hidden under rocks 10 or 15 years ago. So when I see people doing what you're doing and really sharing the successes and struggles and giving people a competitive advantage that wasn't available, say even 10 years ago, I honor that. So it's an honor to speak with you. It's always fun to get together, whether it be podcasting over a couple beers. So I hope I get to see you in person soon. Again, I I have massive respect for who you are and what you're doing. So thanks for the opportunity to be on your show today.
