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
Building Your Practice Bridge: How Missing Systems Create Risk
The bridge you're walking across has missing planks. Every step feels uncertain, progress slows to a crawl, and you might even consider turning back. This perfectly captures what running a dental practice feels like when critical systems are missing or broken.
Most dental practices struggle with five fundamental gaps: inadequate onboarding that never fully integrates team members into the culture; collections and financing systems that allow money to leak through cracks; chaotic scheduling that creates daily stress instead of predictable production; case acceptance approaches that focus solely on the dentist rather than leveraging the entire team; and leadership systems that fail to create accountability and coordination. The consequences manifest as constant frustration, team turnover, and profitability challenges.
Take Control of Your Practice and Your Life
We help dentists take more time off while making more money through systematization, team empowerment, and creating leadership teams.
Ready to build a practice that works for you? Visit www.DentalPracticeHeroes.com to learn more.
Imagine you're crossing a bridge, but some of the planks are missing. Every single step feels risky and you can't trust the bridge, so you slow down, second guess yourself and maybe even turn back. That's what it feels like running a dental practice without solid systems. You keep trying to move forward, but those weak spots keep holding you back. Today, we're going to take that analogy and break it down for your practice. We're gonna look at the most common planks that are missing in dental offices and why so many owners try to patch the problems instead of fixing them outright, and I'm gonna give you a simple way to rebuild your bridge so that it's strong enough to carry not just you as the leader of the practice, but your entire team across. So by the end of this episode, you're going to see exactly where the gaps are in your practice and how to start closing them, one plank at a time. Now you are listening to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast, where we teach you how to create a team-driven practice that allows you tons of time off, tons of profit and tons of freedom, all while taking amazing care of your patients and your team.
Paul Etchison:I am Dr Paul Edgison. I am the host of the podcast, a dental coach, the author of two books on dental practice management and the owner of a large group practice in the South suburbs of Chicago. If you're looking to build a practice that is a true business and not a job, you're in the right place. All right, let's talk about this crazy planked bridge that you're walking across. Now, for some reason, I don't know, I think you have to imagine the bridge, because I don't know if anyone's actually walked across one of these bridges Like I'm picturing, like cartoons, like you're in the Amazon jungle and stuff, and it's like ropes with planks and stuff. So maybe you've actually had that experience, but nonetheless, you get an idea of what I'm talking about. So when we look at our practices, we have to decide as the owners what are the missing planks, what are the parts that are missing in the functioning of our practice day to day? And I can tell you I've been coaching for six, seven years now the most common planks that I see in practices are the onboarding, these new hires. They never get fully trained and because they never get fully trained, they never really get fully invested in the culture of the practice, which leads to a lot of training and onboarding which isn't really done very well. So it's so important that we decide these things. We have to figure out how we train people. We've got to figure out what are the things that we want them to know, who is going to train them, who is going to be responsible for them and who is going to hold that trainer accountable for training the trainee so often overlooked, and it's not one of those things that seems like a lot of fun to put together. But I assure you, when you do it, man, you feel those results and it makes a big difference in the longevity of how long your team members stay with your practice.
Paul Etchison:All right, the next plank is collections and financing. We've got money leaking through all of the cracks in our broken systems, so we've got to figure out our practice. When do we collect? How much do we collect? How do we finance? What are we willing to finance? How do we? What systems of financing do we use, and does everyone know how to use them? What is the verbiage that we use? How do we say it to our patients in a way that's kind and polite but still assertive enough that they comply with our policies? So this is often one of the most disappointing things to have not functioning in your practice because you've done everything, you've done all the work, you just didn't get paid. And a lot of times our practice owners will say, hey, I, you know, I got this policy. I've been telling them to do it, this is how we do it, but it doesn't get done and nobody checks on it. So if that's your practice, that's a very important plank, all right.
Paul Etchison:The next blank is block scheduling, when our schedule creates chaos rather than control. So how do we set up our schedule for success? I worked with someone, dr Pat Vuong, and he implemented the DPH block scheduling system in his practice. Now he had a big associate driven practice, much like mine, and they were doing about $350,000 a month. They went practically overnight from 350,000 to 500K a month, so that practically overnight from $350,000 to $500,000 a month. So that is an additional production, a jump in yearly collections to of about $1.8 million, if they can sustain that. So that shows you the power of the schedule, and we luckily get to create the schedule. We are the creators and the inventors of the schedule. So there's no reason for us to set up our days in ways that create chaos and make our lives miserable while we're at work.
Paul Etchison:All right, the next plank is case acceptance systems. You know owners can think about this. Often. We'll say, hey, I want to do, I want to learn how to talk to my patients to get them to say yes to more things. But we forget about the team. And how do we get the team to understand their roles in case acceptance? How do we utilize everyone in the office so that we can maximize the amount of patients saying yes? And I know that might sound nasty like we want our patients to spend more money in our practice, but think about this If you are ethically diagnosing, then every time your patients say yes, they're getting healthier. So why wouldn't we want that for our patients? If we are only telling them they need things that they actually need, then we should want them to say yes to everything we say. We should want 100% case acceptance. So let me remind you, it's not just you at your practice that case acceptance is hinging on. Now. You are the most important piece as the owner, as the dentist, but your team can do a lot of this as well. So there's nothing wrong with trying to improve in that.
Paul Etchison:And the last plank that I see is leadership and communication gaps. We see teams that are uncoordinated. There's no one held accountable to anything. So what we try to work with with our clients is we try to get everyone moving together. How do we get the whole team motivated and excited and enthusiastic? How do we get the whole team motivated and excited and enthusiastic? How do we get everyone to feel important, valued and heard? And this is easily the most powerful thing that you can do for your office. But it's often like the most ambiguous and most difficult to put like into a step-by-step document. And this is where I think DPH really stands out, as our coaches are only practice owners. I mean, we've got systems for this, but we've also got years of experience learning from our mistakes, working with really big teams. I mean you aren't going to find a handbook that tells you how to handle every single situation. You're not going to find the paragraph that tells you what to do when one of your employees starts poaching other employees from your dental office. And then you got another one that keeps getting caught vaping in the bathroom poaching other employees from your dental office, and then you got another one that keeps getting caught vaping in the bathroom. That handbook doesn't exist, but I assure you. You can approach it with a framework and you can approach it with the right mindset and the right verbal skills, and that can make or break how your practice operates. So those are the planks on the bridge that might be missing in your office, and without these planks, the bridge, I mean, it's obviously it's not safe to walk across. You're going to fall through into the canyon and Dora the Explorer and boots are not going to help you there.
Paul Etchison:Now I remember a client of mine named Daniel, and he was a super hard worker and he had a successful practice. He was doing really well, like 1.5, 1.8 million but it was really burning him out and the reason was that his hustle he was a hustler. His hustle got him to success. He was putting in late hours, he had a strong sense of doing things perfectly like, kind of like you know, the perfectionist that we all see in ourselves a little bit, but he wanted everything perfectly done with care and precision, and he had really high standards for his team, which is great. But as his team grew, he found himself struggling to keep up with holding them to that high standard that he created, because they were just getting too big, and that's when things started to really slip and he continued to burn out. And when we worked together we started building those systems and often when I was telling him like hey, we got to do this, we should do this, he would tell me you know, we already have that, we've already done that, and that's the thing.
Paul Etchison:Is that just because you have it or you've already done it, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's working. Now, as dentists, we are so quick to put in an easy fix for something. We give a team member like an easy, like real quick verbal reminder, or we leave them a sticky note, or we do a one-time training with our team and then we say we never have to do it again and we tell our team quickly and we just hope that they're going to get it when they're doing things differently than how we want them to do. But fundamentally, something is missing with that approach. Or sometimes we just hope that they're just going to figure it out on their own, like the natural consequences of the way they do things are going to teach them that they shouldn't do it that way and these problems will fix themselves. And I hate to break it to you, but you know what? This never, ever works ever. It just doesn't work that way. You get the result that the same problems show up over and over and they drive you crazy. I mean it's like the holes, the planks opening up on the bridge. It's just you know there's something missing there. So you've really got to slow down, you've got to move backwards, you've got to build from the foundational point and go from there.
Paul Etchison:Now I just started working with a new client and he joined our mastermind and we often start with working on mission, vision, core values and brand promises. Now he had this meeting with his team the other week and he was telling me about it. He said it went great. He really felt good about it and he explained the core values and everything. But he also explained to his team how the core values it's not just for how they treat patients, but it's how they treat each other. And he said things such as saying please and saying thank you and respecting each other and being polite and constructive and teamwork and showing gratitude to each other. And I just thought it was so cool to see that he tied in that discussion with his core values, because we often see that core values and we say, okay, you know what. That is how we talk to patients, but we need to tie it back to like this is how we treat each other. So this is what I'm talking about these planks. They're foundational. We need to move backwards and find out where we miss that foundational piece. This is foundational culture building. That will help him build. Every single plank, every single system in his office will build off of this foundation that he set. So it's so awesome and refreshing when I hear clients do things like that. It's such a good leadership move.
Paul Etchison:So how can you rebuild your bridge properly if you feel like there are some planks missing on your bridge? So step back, look at which planks are the weakest. When we start working with clients, we often have so many different directions we could go in. It's hard, it's overwhelming. We've got to pick which ones are the weakest and which ones are the most important for tackling first, because, let's face it, you can't do it all at once. And then we just pick that one area and we build on it and we go piece by piece from there. So you do the same. So you need to do the same.
Paul Etchison:Fix one at a time, not all at once, and no matter where you start, make sure that you document it, make sure it's clear, make sure there are checks and balances as part of it and, no matter what, communicate. This is the most important part, because the thing is is, if it isn't verbalized, it doesn't exist. You have to communicate it and once you fix one of these planks, it doesn't mean that it's not going to need to be maintained. Just like the bridge, it's not set it and forget it, but the main idea is that you can build these planks one by one. I want you to lead and invite your team across that bridge and guide them, putting the planks down as you go. That bridge doesn't just hold you, it holds your entire team.
Paul Etchison:So in closing a bridge with missing planks, it is scary. Right? Look at your practice this week and decide what planks you have that are missing and create a plan to make every single plank solid so that you can walk across with your team with confidence. And if you need help doing this, set up a strategy, call with me and learn about our coaching options. We are kicking off this year's mastermind next Friday and I know there were so many people that felt like they just missed out on it. And yeah, you kind of did because it's going to be awesome. But you know what? I may have enough people to do another cohort, possibly in January. So if that's something that interests you, or one-on-one coaching, please reach out to me. Go to our website, dentalpracticeheroescom, and I want you to remember building a practice that runs itself isn't about one big giant overhaul. It is truly about strengthening your practice one plank at a time. So thank you so much for listening and we will talk to you next time.
