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
3 Rules for Making Changes That Actually Stick
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Ever feel like no matter what you change in the practice, you’re “wrong”? Push too hard and the team melts down. Stand still and nothing improves. We break the cycle by showing how to make progress without chaos: one focused change at a time, packaged around a clear outcome, supported by micro check-ins, and closed with a real finish line your team can trust.
If you’re ready to roll out systems at the right pace and build a team that embraces improvement, subscribe, share this episode with a colleague, and leave a quick review. Want hands-on help and a custom plan? Book a free strategy call at dentalpracticeheroes.com/strategy.
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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.
One of the hardest parts of owning a practice is this. If you don't make changes, nothing improves. But if you make too many changes, the team will have a meltdown. And it feels like no matter what you do, you're wrong. Standing still feels unproductive. Moving forward feels risky. And meanwhile, you're just trying to make the practice better and you're trying to improve. You see, teams don't burn out because the owner just wants improvement. They burn out because the improvements stack too fast with too little follow-up, too little clarity, and too little celebration of what's already been done. But there is a sweet spot, a way to change things without creating change fatigue. Today you're going to learn how to make improvements, keep the momentum high, and how to avoid overwhelming your team while still moving that practice forward. Now you are listening to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast, where we teach practice owners how to build a team-driven practice that runs smoothly, profitably, and effortlessly, even when they're not there. I'm your host, Dr. Paul Etchison. I'm a dental business coach, two-time author, and a practice owner who works just one clinical day a week while my team runs the business. If you want to practice less, earn more, and actually enjoy owning your practice again, you are in the right spot. All right, let's get into it. Now, today we're talking about teams getting overwhelmed by the amount of change. I remember during my practice career, my team would complain all the time, why are things changing so much? Why can't we just keep things the way they are? We're always changing. There's so many things to remember. Oh my gosh, the sky is falling. So why do teams get overwhelmed by change? And a lot of these feelings, I really think, can be managed by what we do as practice owners. But first, let's talk about why they get overwhelmed in the first place. First of all, no one knows what finished looks like. Nobody is telling them, nobody is deciding. If the team starts something but then never hears about it again, they assume the next change is going to be exactly the same, temporary, half done. Is there ever an ending to this? When is this new change? When is it good? When is it done? Or will we ever even talk about it again? Which brings us to number two. There aren't check-ins or wins along the way. Us as practice owners are not celebrating the wins and we're not checking in and supporting our team. The team needs to have some sort of closure when we're changing something. They need a beginning, they need a middle, they need an end. And without an end, every single initiative that you start is going to feel like just another plate for them to keep spinning while they're still trying to remember the last thing you changed. And what we don't often realize as owners is we can silently pile these plates up for our team by just saying things, just changing things, little things, little comments that we make here and there. Hey, I think we should do it this way, that way. And we we think in our mind, this is like just a little quick fix, but to our team, it's another system. It's another habit, it's another expectation that we're piling onto them. Their plates are already full. If we're just adding things to our systems, like a little bit here, a little bit there, making suggestions, and we don't get formulaic or document it, it can easily mentally feel like we're just piling more and more onto our teams. Now we have to accept for our team that uncertainty leads to emotional fatigue. Changes bring along some element of uncertainty. And when the future feels unstable, this is for anybody, this is just like pure psychology. One new thing is coming next. The brain is now burning extra energy, preparing for the next disruption. It just starts to feel like nothing is ever stable at the practice, and everything is just pure chaos. Another reason why the team is often fatigued by a lot of change is they don't feel like they're part of the decision. They just feel like the change keeps getting done to them instead of done with them. We just keep throwing things at them and the resistance spikes, and the team puts up their guard and they try to make these things not work. That will never work. Here, let me show you why this won't work. Well, what about this situation? What about last week? They try to poke holes into every change that you make because they're really not against that system in itself, but they're just feeling like there's too many things getting thrown at them. We need to include them more. Now, in our in-person mastermind that we had in Florida in October, we did hot seats with everybody. What a hot seat is, is you bring a problem that you're having at your practice and you explain it to everybody in the group. Everyone in the group asks questions, and then we all offer solutions. We brainstorm on a solution, we come up with a plan, and we're all offering our own personal wisdom. And this is one of the beautiful things about the mastermind is you get all these different opinions and you learn from everybody. Now we had this owner, and he was saying that his team keeps bringing up there's way too many changes happening at the practice, and they're overwhelmed by it. But this owner, he's excited. I mean, he just acquired this practice a year ago. He wants to change things, he wants to have a DPH practice, he wants more ease and more profit. He's raring to go. But the team is like, pump the brakes, dude. We haven't changed anything here in the past 30 years. So he's up against all this resistance. So the team's letting him know about it. So we probed, we probed, we asked questions, and we discovered that the changes were getting made here and there. Not like at a meeting. It was just like he would walk up to the front desk and say, We're doing this. He would walk to the tell the hygienist we're doing it this way now. And then also there wasn't a lot of follow-up or check-ins on the previous changes. We didn't see how those things were going, and we didn't see how the team was feeling about it and that everybody was handling everything okay. So that needed to be managed. We needed to change our approach on not what we were changing, but more so how we were packaging it up and how are we nurturing that momentum of that change that we were creating so that the team could change and make progress, but still feel enough stability and ease through the process. So, as practice owners, how do you do that? Here is your guardrail, the one change at a time rule. You cannot implement five new systems at once. I don't care how good you are, you just can't do it. You can dream in parallel, but you must implement in sequence. So, as the owner, you have to ask yourself, what is the one change that we are committed to this month? Now, just that, just focusing on one thing, that's gonna lower your team anxiety probably by half. But we really want to package a lot of changes into one change because remember, we can only focus on one thing. So instead of saying something like, hey, we're gonna update our voicemail message so we tell the patients they can't cancel over the voicemail, or we're gonna update our confirmation text to let them know about our cancellation policy. And we're gonna make sure that we call the patients who are unconfirmed at a certain time, and we're gonna start explaining our cancellation policy when we schedule them for hygiene and all these things that we're doing. That can feel like, oh my gosh, we're changing so much. But if we can package that into this month, we're focusing on one thing, and that's reducing cancellations. And that's how you're gonna explain it to your team. And then you need to add something like, and when will this change be officially done? How long will it take to complete? No matter what the system is, pick an end date when it's over, when it's implemented, when we are fully functional. Now, this is something that is rarely ever done. And sometimes there are cases where we can't really ever be finished. We won't be finished with reducing cancellations. We don't reach some endpoint, but at some point we reach the end of the transition where we're done doing things the old way and we're consistently doing things the new way. So talk about when it's going to be done because having that end time or that just what signifies that we have completed our task, that brings relief. That brings stability. That lets them know that in the future, the stability is coming. And then lastly, when we're talking to our team, we want to acknowledge the challenges that they're going to go through because there are going to be challenges. We want to make sure that we're telling the team, hey, we know there's going to be challenges, we know we're going to make mistakes, we're going to work through this together as a team, teamwork, and we're going to figure this out how to get this done together as a team. So a lot of it is in the way that we're speaking to our team. So let's talk about more practically how do we do this? What does the framework look like? So, step one, we're going to announce the change, we're going to bring clarity to it, we're going to explain what we're changing, we're going to explain why we're changing it, and we're going to be very clear with what we want to do and who is going to do it. We are changing this system because of this. Here is what success looks like in this system. Simple. And then we're going to give a 30-day window. 30 days is plenty of time to change something and have new habits settle in. And if you're having monthly meetings, this is a perfect amount of time because you're going to talk about something at your monthly meeting. You're going to strategize, talk about how you're going to do it, say when what we're going to do, involve the team, and we're going to revisit this. And we want to be completely done with this transition by the next meeting. Now, the next step is you can't just set it up and then come back to it a month later. And I see this happen so much in my coaching clients. It just doesn't work, guys. You've got to do micro check-ins. You've got to check in with the team. Might take you five minutes. It's short, it's simple. But ask them what's working? What is not working? And what do we need to tweak? What do we need to alter? I remember at my office when we implemented the pre-collection policy, which is essentially we're going to make the patient pay half of what their copay is to schedule the appointment. We're going to try to collect 100% of that copay, but we will accept half. That is our policy. And I remember walking up to the front, checking in with one of my front desk team members like a week after we implemented this and rolled it out. And I asked her, I said, hey, like, how's it going with the pre-collection policy? And she mentioned some issues that were coming up. And so I asked her, I said, Oh, tell me about the issues. She said that a patient had come in and this old guy, he was super upset. He's never missed an appointment. Why all of a sudden now are we asking our patients to put down a payment to make an appointment? She didn't have a good script for that. Why now? So, because I asked this information, not only did I have my team feeling supported by me, I was also able to involve them in what they thought we should do. But then together, we were able to create a script for why now all of a sudden. And had I not followed up, the implementation of the system could have like easily just fizzled out. And we would just go to the next meeting and say, hey, what happened with that? And we'd say, Well, we didn't really do it. I don't know what happened. It just didn't work. So if you don't check in, the system can fizzle out. But when you are implementing something and it's new, you've got to keep the dialogue going. This is your job as the owner, as the leader of the practice. And like I said, 30 days is plenty, meeting to meeting. So at the next monthly meeting, you need to talk about it. This is huge. So many practice owners just have a meeting and then they go to the next meeting and they're always talking about what is pertinent, what's important right now, but never revisiting what did we talk about in the last month? What solutions did we come up with and how did they work? So at the end of the 30 days, at the end of the month, at the next monthly meeting, you gotta say, this is our new normal. We have changed this. Great job, guys. Or maybe you're asking them like I did with my micro check-in. What challenges did we run into? What can we change? What issues need solutions? And make sure to celebrate that progress. You know, anchor the wins. Make it part of the identity of the practice that we change things, we come up with solutions, and we have wins. So that the next time you go to make a change, which is hopefully going to be every month, you should always be changing, always evolving, is that your team will have the capacity for it because it won't feel overwhelming. It was finite. It wasn't piling on and piling on. It was very clear. We had an end date. We talked about it, we kept the dialogue going. So here's the big breakthrough that I want you to realize is that the teams don't necessarily fear change. They fear unfinished and unsupported change. When things pile up, they start to panic. However, when things feel structured and sequential one after another and they're supported, they feel that stability and they can relax. And you, as the owner, can shape that emotional environment. So here are your tactical takeaways for this episode. Don't stack the changes, group them and sequence them. One change per month, but put a lot of changes into that change. Be clear about it. And during your meeting with the team, you're gonna announce it, you're gonna say when it's finished, and you're gonna celebrate the wins, but don't forget to check in along the way. Always define what done looks like. Like I mentioned, some systems, they don't have a done. Done is when we're fully implemented and we're not doing it the old way. Whereas some systems, such as like an AR cleanup project, that will have a done. We are done when our 90 plus AR is less than 1% of our total AR. Make sure that those little weekly check-ins so that you can keep the dialogue going, keep your team supported, and include your team. Make them be part of the change. Your team has a brain, I assure you, and they can use it and they would love to use it if you were only to ask. So change is not the problem. Chaos is the problem. And when your team feels supported, informed, and involved in the change, they can handle anything. But when that change stacks up with a bunch of ambiguity and there's no structure and there's no formula to it and there's no support, your best people start to burn out. So slow it down. Make sure you get one thing done before you move on to the next. Work it in a sequence, finish what you start. And that's how you can create a calm practice that can evolve constantly without overwhelming everybody on your team. And if you want help rolling out systems at the right pace at your practice, or maybe you want to build a team that embraces change instead of resisting it, set up a free strategy call with me at dentalpracticeheroes.com slash strategy. It is totally free. There's no pressure, and you'll leave with some clarity on exactly what to do next. And if I think Dental Practice Heroes can help you along the way meet your goals, I will share what coaching options we have, and you can decide if that's something you want to dive into. Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate you taking time out of your day to spend it with us here, and we will talk to you next time.
