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
The “Stop Doing” List That Makes Practices More Profitable
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Ever feel like your practice is stuck on repeat, fighting the same fires while your stress keeps rising? We get honest about why that happens and how to stop it—by freeing your leaders from task overload, building systems that hold, and protecting the time required to actually lead. When owners and department heads operate in reactive mode, the practice can’t scale. The fix isn’t hustle; it’s structure.
If you’re ready to set up a leadership team with clear roles, evaluations, and playbooks, let’s talk. Subscribe, share this with a colleague who’s stuck in reactive mode, and leave a review to tell us which task you’ll delegate first.
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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.
Have you ever become frustrated with the people or departments on your team because the same problems keep coming up over and over again? You've talked about it before, you've came up with solutions, but yet here we are, week after week, still talking about the same issues. Why can't we progress? Why can't we move forward? Why does it feel like we keep getting the same results? Well, today I'm gonna tell you why. Now, I've been helping dentists for the past six or seven years, and I've been helping them create a practice that runs without them, the kind of practice that scales, the kind of practice that becomes crazy profitable, that gives them the freedom to live a life unlike any of their friends. And that's the beauty of dentistry. It allows us to do that as practice owners. But a critical component of that is the leadership team, creating leaders in your practice. It's one of the best things you can do for your stress and for your life and for your practice and profitability. But unfortunately, it's one of the most difficult things to get off the ground because sometimes we just can't find the time to do it. And maybe you can relate as a practice owner. You have to lead your practice. You know that there are things that you should be doing. You should be looking at KPIs, you should be providing training, you should be working with your team and brainstorming and collaborating and trying to make things run more efficiently, but you haven't a moment to do so because you're so damn busy seeing patients and putting out fires all day. You don't do anything proactively because you don't have the time. And all you're doing is you're reacting to this, reacting to that all day long. Now, this also happens with your leaders at your practice, such as your office manager, maybe your hygiene lead, maybe your dental assistant lead. This happens to everybody on your team, and it's one of the biggest killers of growth in a dental practice. Leaders cannot lead because they're buried under tasks. And when leaders don't lead, problems don't get solved. They just get recycled over and over again. And then your leaders get stuck in reactive mode and nothing ever gets done proactively. Well, today I'm going to give you the exact steps to free your leaders so that they can stop running around and putting out fires and start actually leading your team and hence free you up from the stress and problems that make you want to leave your practice every single weekend and never come back. Have you ever felt that? I'm sure you have. So let's talk about it. Now you are listening to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Paul Etchison, author of two books on dental practice management, dental business coach, and the owner of a large five-doctor practice in the south suburbs of Chicago. If you want a practice and a life that allows you to make more profit in less time and gives you the freedom to take off an insane amount of weeks each year to spend with your family, you have come to the right place. All right, let's dive into our topic today. So recently, I was the guest on someone else's podcast. And she asked me if I could go back earlier in my career, what would I tell myself? And I thought about this for a bit because what would I tell myself? Like, you know, that thing. It wish I knew back then what I knew now. And what I think would have really changed the trajectory of my career as a practice owner. For me, it comes down to this. One of the biggest issues we went through as a practice as we were growing is that we had great culture and we took great care of people. Now you ask, why is that a problem? And I'll tell you, here's why. Because we grew so damn fast, faster than we could adapt to. And with that came mountains of stress for me as the practice owner. And back then, I never really realized how me doing dentistry was the root cause of all that chaos and stress. It was because I was spending all my time doing dentistry. Now I remember one day, starting off my week, it was a Monday, and I showed up to the practice and I had a bunch of post-its on my desk. I remember sitting down at my desk and seeing all these post-its. And then my main dental assistant, she's in there and she's telling me about a fight that two other assistants were having, they got into last week. And then I get a knock on my door, and my office manager pops her head in, and she's there to tell me about a repeat problem patient that keeps on calling and wants me to call them back. I hate that. There's nothing more draining to me than knowing a patient, it will not accept talking to my team. They want to talk to the owner. So I took a deep breath and I literally just stuck my face in my hands because I was just so frustrated. And my office manager, Justine, she asked if I was okay. And I just remember feeling this deep anger, like this fire burning inside me. And I looked down at all those post-its and all the things sitting at the edge of my desk, the piles of papers that I had, of all these things that I had to get to. And then I remembered the list of things on my phone, my personal to-do list of all the things I had to get finished this week. And one of which was a task that had been on my to-do list for like three weeks. I had to put in the new blockouts for the schedule. And it was just a huge project that I just couldn't get to. So remember, I looked up at my assistant. She's waiting for some guidance on the other assistants that are in the fight and they're not getting along. And then I look up at my office manager. She's waiting for a response to tell when I'm going to call this patient back. And I just exploded. I told them I was sick of this. And I was thinking, why am I the only one that can handle these things? Why am I the person that has to do this? Why are all these post-its here for me? And I remember they were like taken back because I somewhat snapped on them, which they really didn't deserve, but I did it. I was just acting emotionally. But then I took a deep breath. I looked at my schedule that day. So I could see, you know, what time I was going to call this patient back. And the schedule was just packed. I was overbooked. I didn't have any time to call that person. And I would have to call them at the end of this day that it was already stressful enough. And on that day, it was like my first day of the week. I worked nights. It was 8 p.m. It was when I was going to get off. So I wasn't going to be able to call this person until 8 p.m. And again, like I was having week after week, I was having another worst Monday ever. And that's when I realized I cannot manage and lead my practice every day if I'm here seeing a full day of patience. I was looking at that full day and thinking about all the things I would be able to get to, all the things that needed my attention, but I couldn't do because I was seeing a full day of patience. I need time. And it was the patient care that kept me from having that time to do those things and hence was keeping me from having the type of practice that I wanted. Now you might be saying, hey, you're the doctor. You need to see the patients. You're the dentist. But the thing is, is that seeing patients is really delegatable. I mean, you can grow your practice with associates. You don't have to be the only person seeing patients at your practice. So it was then that I decided I need to cut my clinical time some more. And I needed to be consistent about not seeing patients on the days that I was at the practice, supposed to not see patients. You ever done that? You have your like your non-clinical day, you're going in to work on the business, and Mr. Jones, he's there and he wants you to see and do his exam, or someone else, the emergency comes in, it's a longtime patient. They only want to see you. So I kept getting sucked back into patient care. So I said, I need to be consistent that in the days that I'm not here to see patients, I'm not seeing patients. No exceptions. I need to have time to handle these things that need my attention. And if I didn't get to them, I would continue to be stressed out. I would continue to be overwhelmed. And I would continue to take out the frustration on my team like I did that day. Now, this is exactly what happens to the leads in our practice. We will build a leadership team, we'll set them up for success, but then they spend all their time every day doing tasks. They get sucked back into their position and they need to be leading, but they can't because they don't have the time. So that brings us to point number one today. Why do your leaders get stuck doing tasks instead of leading? Well, there's four problems that contribute to this. The first problem is that they were promoted to being a lead because they were great at tasks. It's typically your front desk person becomes the office manager, your hygiene leads your best hygienist, your dental assistant lead is your best dental assistant. They were your top people in every position and they know how to do everything there is for that department at the practice. So they're the person that everybody goes to, right? Because they know how to do everything. But you promoted them to a lead because you want them to lead. But yet they got there because they were good at tasks. And so when they become the lead, they often get stuck continuing to do what they're good at, which is those tasks. But you, as the owner, you want to get them free of those tasks. You want to give them the freedom and the time to lead their team, the time to train the others, to grow the departments and refine the skills of everyone. And you might even get to the point where they have the time to do this. But then what happens? All of a sudden, somebody quits. You have some turnover, you become short-staffed. And guess who's available to pick up the slack? It's your lead. And then the turnover pushes everything back onto them. And again, they no longer have time to lead. Everything goes back onto the leader's desk and they will happily pick it up. And all of a sudden, you lost your leader that you worked so hard to get because they lost the time that they needed to lead. And let's talk about another thing that might happen to your leads. It might be a reason they don't have time to lead. They often feel bad delegating things. I mean, they want to be the hero. They want to get things done. They're a great employee and they love their team members that they work with. And at one point before they were the lead, these were essentially their peers. They were all equal on an equal level. They were all working in the department. But now you've given them this like rank. You know, you give them this like, they're a step above people. They are the leader. And to some extent, they can feel guilty about that. And they don't want to be bossy and they don't want to burden others and delegate things. And they often don't know how to ask people to do things. So instead of them delegating things, freeing up their time so that they can lead their team and manage it, they just keep doing the things themselves, which is a problem because we know that they need time to lead. And as far as they're concerned, they might not see any issue in this because leaders can often confuse activity with value. They know that they're busy and they're doing their job. And they think because they're busy, they are doing their job well. But what they forget is that their job has changed. Their job is to lead. And busyness is often the enemy of leadership because leaders, when they're busy, they can't fix anything. All they're doing is reacting all day long. They're playing catch up. And that's not what you want them to do. You want them to proactively identify and solve problems before they get to your desk so that you have less on your plate. But then you start to resent these leads because you start seeing the same issues over and over again. And you're like, why can't this leader deal with this? Why can't they take care of it so that you don't have to? And you start to have this resentment and it grows and grows. But then your lead, on the other hand, you know, deep down, they think they're doing great because they're busy, they're working hard, they're getting things done because of all the tasks they do, and they're usually doing those tasks very well. And this is what you create. I mean, you create an environment in your practice where your leaders aren't necessarily failing because they're doing work and they're working hard, but their role is failing. The lead role is failing. Which brings me to our point. Leaders, they have to be proactive. They can't be reactive. A reactive leader handles problems. People just bring things to them and they solve them. A reactive leader fills holes when things fall through the cracks. You know, something falls through the cracks, the leader picks it up and fixes it. They're cleaning up messes, people screw things up and the leader fixes them for them. And they take the tasks back, they delegate them to people, but those team members may not be as good at it. And instead of helping that person learn how to be good at it, the leader just takes those tasks back. So the reactive leader works very hard, but does not work smart. And the root of the problem is that instead of this person developing the personnel at your office, they take the liberties to fix it all on their own. And when they do that, they lose that ability to be proactive about anything. They're always reacting. We want them to be a proactive leader because those are the type of leaders that will prevent things before they happen. They build systems, they train people so that those people are equipped to handle whatever comes their way. They develop their teams. The proactive leader delegates tasks permanently and doesn't take them back. Instead of taking them back when something falls through the cracks or somebody doesn't perform their job as well as they should, they work with that person instead of just doing it for them. And they see the value in using their time to coach their team, to train people, to think, to improve upon the situations and improve upon the systems that you practice so that they can save time in the long run. If we think about what is a reactive leader, well, the reactive leader, they're on that hamster wheel, right? But that proactive leader is creating the engine for growth. They're investing the time in the long-term growth and development of everybody on your team. So, how do we as practice owners help our leaders get out of the weeds and start leading like we want them to? So, here are three tactics that you can use to get your leaders free so that they can spend time leading, which is what you want them to do. All right, number one, the systematic delegation of all the lower level tasks. You know what your leaders should not be doing. All that low-level stuff, you want them to delegate it to other people. So sometimes you got to sit down with your leader and say, let's make a list of all the things you did this week. I want to know everything you did. And then you have to hold them accountable. You have to say, okay, who is gonna do this for you in the future? I want you to train somebody this week to do this so that you never ever have to do it again. And it's through that delegation, that forced delegation, that that frees the leadership minutes up for them. And those leadership minutes that you give that person now scales because they're doing things that scale your practice instead of just taking everything on their own. All right, tactic number two, your leaders need to schedule protected leadership time. And I see this with a lot of clients. They'll say, Well, I made the leadership team, but my leads aren't really doing it. And when I probe deeper, what I typically find is that, say, for example, a hygiene lead, the doctors want this hygiene lead to do leadership activities, but they don't give them time to do it. They want them to do it when they get a cancellation or in between patients or over lunch or something like that. And the fact of the matter is, is if you don't schedule lead time for your leads, nothing is going to get done. It's not gonna magically appear. Just like when you're seeing patients nonstop, you don't have time to run your business. When we, like we often say, working in the business instead of working on the business. You got to get your leads free from doing the tasks, seeing patients, those sort of things. You've got to schedule protected lead time. So, how much? I'll just give you an example. I think a lead hygienist, a lead dental assistant, a lead front desk person, they typically are going to need four to eight hours every single week. Now I know you're thinking a hygienist, four to eight hours doing admin work. Trust me, it is valuable time. It is providing them the time to lead, is what's going to free you up stress-wise and time-wise. And this is how you develop a practice that runs without you. So when you schedule them this lead time, they can start using it for following up with a team, having accountability conversations with people in their department, checking on the systems to make sure that they're actually being performed the way that you decided, training other people when they are having trouble with certain things, making sure that everybody on your team is trained to a level so that if you lose somebody, it doesn't hurt so bad, right? I we hate turnover in our practice, but turnover isn't really that bad when everybody on the team is trained to the highest standard. But again, somebody has to train them, and that's usually the lead, and they need time to do it. So that's what they're using this time for. All right, tactic number three, and I think this is the most important one, is that we have to teach our leads that training is an investment. It is not an expense because most leads they think that they don't, I don't have time to train. It's just easier to do it myself. You know, I'll train them next time. This time, I'm just so busy. I got too many things. I'm just gonna do it myself this time. And that's the trap that kills the leadership. You've got to rewire that mindset in them. They need to believe in their heart that training others is really buying back time for their future and that doing it themselves is selling that future time. They need to be investing in their future time. And the only way they can do that is training others. So, something I'll often tell people is that if you spend 20 minutes training somebody today, you will get back 20 hours next month. Now, I don't know, maybe that's an exaggeration, but to some extent it is true. 20 minutes of training equals 20 hours next month. And so I want them to believe that they need to see the value in training people instead of continuing to do things themselves, which is so easy to get into that trap. And we're talking about training our team. Now, another thing that is kind of a side thing, but I want you to recognize it is that one of the biggest benefits of training everybody on your team is that you'll have less turnover. When you have a trained team, when people are very skilled at their job and they've been told how to do it, they're mastering their process, they tend to enjoy their job more and you'll have less turnover because we have to keep training. If your lead is the only person in your office that knows how to do something, they're not the leader. They are the bottleneck. They have to train their departments. So here are your tactical takeaways for this episode. I want you to make a stop doing list with each of your leaders. You need to make a list of all the things that they're going to stop doing and they're going to train other people to do. And you're going to pick one task on that list each week and you're going to make them and hold them accountable to permanently delegate that to somebody else. Those little small wins, they're going to start building momentum and they're going to free up your lead to do other things. Now you're also going to block that scheduled leadership time into the calendar. You're going to make sure that they have hours during each week that they can maybe put a sign on the office door. I don't know what you need to do, but they're not available. And hold these leaders accountable. Ask them every week, what did you get rid of? What system did you improve this week? What did you train somebody on? Reward that. Okay, we're going to start talking about it more with our leads because that's what we want. We want to reward that proactivity. They're getting in front of problems before they happen instead of just reacting to all the little things that happen. And ultimately, we want to reinforce this mindset of a leader. Their value is not in how much they do at the office. Their value is how much they lead and develop others on their team. So wrapping up a leader. That is buried in the tasks is not a leader. They're just an exhausted employee that's a bottleneck and has a nicer title. When your leaders stop being firefighters and they start being system builders, that is when your practice begins to grow exponentially. So the moment that you can free those leaders from all the noise of the practice, all the firefighting, and you can protect their time and you can teach them the value in training others, that's when everything in your practice gets calmer, gets smoother, gets more consistent and more predictable. And your stress as the owner goes down immensely. So sit down with your leads this week, see who needs help, ask them how you can support them and help them by holding them accountable to delegating the things off of their plates so that they have time to lead. And if you want help setting up a leadership team at your practice, this is what we do at Dental Practice Heroes. We have the list, we have the evaluation forms, we've got the job descriptions, we have got everything down so that you can have a leadership team at your practice and that your leads know exactly what is expected and what they're supposed to be doing. So if you need help doing that, reach out to us at Dental Practice Heroes, go to dentalpracticeheroes.com slash strategy and you can set up a strategy call with me. Happy to have a conversation with you over the phone, talk about your practice and your goals. And if we can help you at Dental Practice Heroes, I'll let you know about that as well. So go out there this week, start developing your leaders and protect their time so that they can develop the other people on your team so that you can rest easy and have a highly profitable, highly consistent practice that gives you the freedom to spend your time exactly how you want. Thank you so much for listening today, and we'll talk to you next time.
