Author: Darren Kaberna

As I travel around the country working with different dental teams, I hear many doctors say to me “If I just had a staff that would only do this” or “If I just could come into work and not have to worry about my team”.  On the flip side of that I hear a lot of team members blaming the “front office” or “back office” for the issues in the practices they work in.

I have been in the dental field for many years and have seen the struggles that many offices face first hand from different perspectives and I have come to understand that the struggles in an office and in many dentists careers comes down to their leadership ability.  It often does not have anything to do with their staff, location or patient base (as many of them think it does).

Leadership means different things to different people.  When we talk about leadership in dentistry and what it means to be a owner/leader of your team I like to remind doctors that transformational leadership comes from someone that can create an inspiring vision of the future of their business, they can motivate their team and inspire their team to engage with that vision, they deliver on their own vision and they coach and build their team to be more effective in achieving the vision.

I believe that teams in dental offices are looking for this kind of leadership to guide them and if there is not a strong leadership presence at the very top you will continue to get the same results you always have had.

Owning your own dental practice in 2017 is an opportunity to to capture great rewards professionally; however, for you to truly capture the best rewards of what dentistry has to offer you must become the transformational leader that your team needs.

I have seen doctors come to the realization that the issues in their business ultimately come down to themselves.  I have also seen that when a doctor owns that and make a conscious decision to change it is when you notice they no longer have the concerns of “If I just had a staff that would only do this” or “If I just could come into work and not have to worry about my team”.  Not only do those concerns go away the conflict between the “front office” and “back office” tends to be a thing of the past.

I urge all of you that have these similar concerns in your offices to dig deep and consider if you are being the leader you need to be for your team.  I think you will be amazed at what can happen in your practice if you take action and change.

If variety is the spice of life then cross training is key in keeping your dental employees engaged and providing huge value to your dental practice. As a leader, it is important to understand each employee’s role within your practice. This provides clarity in expectations as well as appreciation for what each team member brings to the table. Cross training can provide huge value to the dental practice such as having coverage available when an employee calls in sick or is on vacation…

It also serves as a great tool to re-engage your employees! By bringing more variety into your office your team is challenged to learn a new skill set to sharpen their methods while becoming empowered to add more value at work. This gives them the opportunity to do something different and lessens the risk for work related injuries, such as carpal tunnel, by breaking up repetitive motion tasks.

This week challenge your team by asking how they feel about being team players and being open to trying something new with cross training. Do you have employees who tend to get tunnel vision on “their stuff?” At the end of the day, are they checking in with one another and helping each other so everyone leaves together as a team? Or do they quickly clean “their room,” type “their notes,” and bolt while others are left behind? Imagine what something as simple as changing this behavior would facilitate for your practice, your patients, and your employees. Use cross training as a way to better understand and appreciate one another.

Then ask your team: How can we be victorious as a group? How can we all achieve a level of success that we’ve never achieved before?

I think back to a story I once heard about a double decker bus driving around in Chicago and getting stuck underneath an overpass. While all the passengers are taken off the bus, traffic is stopped, and the driver is scratching his head as to what to do a 10 year old boy walks by and asks the adults “Why don’t you just let the air out of the tires?” Sometimes we get so used to how we do things we think there is only one way to do it.

The beauty of cross training is it allows your entire team to give a different perspective and feedback on how things are being done and what, if anything, can be done in a better or more efficient manner. This in turn creates a culture with team building and employee buy in which is key in long term success for your office. Reach out to your coach today if you are ready to see these changes in your office!

If you haven’t done it by now, you are probably a little late.  However, better late than never!  It’s time to remind your Dental Patients that if they don’t take advantage of their unused insurance benefits by the end of the year, the benefits will not roll over to next year.  They will “waste” the benefits they paid for and the needed dental work that could have been done.

One way to send the notices out would be email; if you’ve done your due diligence and asked for your patient’s emails.  If not, there are other ways.  If you have a patient communication service, such as Revenue Well or Light House, they will be able to help you send the notice out in different ways, such as texts.  Also, you have the added benefit of tracking who read the message so you can determine your ROI (return on investment).  The slowest, and most costly, would be regular mail.  If you aren’t a great writer, as many of us, ask your coach for assistance and access to prewritten letters that AMP already has.

Another valuable way to get the message out is Facebook.  How many people don’t look at their Facebook daily, or several times a day?

Be prepared for those patients that might not have any benefits left and they will call and ask, “Why did you send this letter to me?”  This would be an excellent time to inform them that you can only instruct them of what work needs to be done today; you cannot advise them of how much it will cost, or much pain they may be in, if they wait until the new year to do the treatment.

If you are lucky, and have been entering insurance information regularly, your dental management software will have a mail merge feature that will only target those patients with benefits left.

If you haven’t done this notice yet, you might want to get on it ASAP before you have no openings in your schedule before the end of the year.  Remember, always reach out to your coach if you could use some help!

Every business owner struggles with creating cohesiveness among the entire organization making sure that everyone is going in the same direction. How can we help the team in your Dental Practice all go in the same direction? How can we grow and thrive.

So often individual agenda’s get in the way of the organizations agenda and as a result of that no progress is made. Sadly, each individual is so focused on their own agenda that they forget to realize that if the entire organization isn’t successful than their agenda is going to fall apart.

A lot of leaders don’t realize that one person can have a massive impact in any size organization. So much so that they can literally drag it one way or the other. Think of tug of war, the front office vs back office, patient vs office, doctor vs assistance on either side. When someone walks up to the middle of that tug of war and just pulls the rope in another direction, the whole thing is pulled in that direction.

Just like that one person can pull a whole organization down or can come in and be that fire cracker, pulling the company to that different level of performance in life.

Even when trying to do the right thing by ourselves, valuing our individual goals sometimes gets swayed or gets in the way because we’re not looking at the bigger picture. Having tunnel vision is extremely beneficial if you’re on the clinical side right, focusing on one area of the tooth. However, it’s not always the same in life. Sometimes we do need to step back and really look at the bigger picture.

What can we do differently?

We can stop, step back and lead as an entire group. Especially as a leader, answering the question are we going the right direction? As Stephen Covey puts it:

“Management is one thing leadership is another. An army is marching through a jungle, management makes sure that we are keeping our pace up, that we’re marching, that we’re getting through the jungle in the right direction. Leadership, climbs a tree making sure we’re going the right direction.”

You have to have both.

The leadership group of an office needs to take the time to get together and make sure the office is going in the right direction. Once we are, we need to defer some of this to management and make sure we’re doing it the right way.

• Are we offering better services to our patients?
• Are we treating our patients better than we ever have before?
• Are we improving profitability?

It’s a simple order of operations. As a leader, fuel that fire! The smallest things can fuel that fire, showing appreciation to your staff members, a pizza party, a happy hour (if you do that type of thing) – On the other side of that if you’re an employee reading this right now, how can you help raise up your leaders?

What can you do today, to help this organization?

In my opinion, with the experience I’ve had in offices, the Scheduling Coordinator position is one of the toughest in the office; IF it’s not handled correctly.

An empty chair isn’t always a bad thing. I’ve been told that an empty chair can generate up to quarter million dollars in revenue per year. A practice can use this chair to put the emergencies that they might otherwise not be able to see and they go down the street to another office that can accommodate them. As you have probably seen, an emergency exam can generate anywhere from $100 to $1,000 plus in production.

On the other hand, though, an empty chair can hurt a practice if it’s because of a last-minute cancellation or no show. If it was a hygiene appointment, we’ve not only lost the hygiene production but the restorative work generated from the hygiene exam. 65% of diagnosed treatment comes from hygiene. In addition, we have to book that patient another hour appointment resulting in the same amount of production for double the time; plus, the time to possibly having to call that patient and rebooking.

Also, lost revenue causes what we call the “break-even point” to take a hit. The break-even point is what it takes to pay the bills each month. For instance, what if takes $50,000 to pay all the bills and it takes 3 weeks to produce that much; that means the fourth week is the only week you make actual profit. What happens if that fourth week falls apart with empty chairs; or, you have empty chairs in the first three weeks? You won’t even have a full week of profit.

As I mentioned earlier, there are ways to train the Scheduling Coordinator to know the right way to keep the schedule full. AMP can suggest different ways to schedule, use your software to create lists of patients due for treatment and how to use Facebook to alert patients of an opening. In addition to training, a person needs to be tenacious in getting the job done; just OK is not enough. The empty chair is not going to fill itself. Lost revenue has an impact on every person in the practice from the doctor down.

If you would like more information on keeping schedule full, and revenue coming in, give us a call and speak to one of our coaches!!

One of the hottest topics in the dental industry is “How to Build a Successful Hygiene Program”. Vice President Barbara Maddy talks directly to the hygiene department about the growth the doctor hopes for from their hygiene department.

Hygiene can grow a practice in two ways:

1. Treating Periodontal disease
2. Offering Restorative treatment

Periodontal disease
Question for all of you Hygienists out there. Are you treating periodontal disease that you see? Are you doing bloody prohies? At the end off our day is your neck and back hurting. If so are you doing more effort for a patient and coding it as a ‘healthy prophy’ when really it’s not healthy. Or not treating it because the insurance doesn’t cover it. Ask yourself, are either of those a benefit to the patient?

What if instead, we sit the patient up and say “I can’t do a healthy prophy for you today because you’re not healthy. Even though your insurance covers it 100%, you’re not healthy. But what I can do for you is….” and explain what you see and how you’ll treat it.

Are you willing to sit that patient up and explain to them what they have. Express to them your concern for them losing their teeth if this is not treated. Elevate value by explaining the severity of the situation in a way they may understand, cancer, erectile dysfunction, etc.

Be bold. Be honest. Treat the patient.

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Offering Restorative treatment
(This does not mean diagnose.)

1. How many patients that you see, that are adults (2nd molar is fully erupted, not an age) have wear on their teeth? 90,95%
2. Now answer this, how many of your patients are offered a night guard? How willing are you to offer this solution to someone who is in their 20s to help them save not only their teeth but from them paying $$$$$ when they’re older.
3. What about fluorides? 
4. Why did we stop doing sealants after age 18,19,20? Is that groove on that tooth the same at 18 as it is at 30? Can we seal a groove so it’s a space we can clean?
4. Are you using your intra-oral camera? You have 50-60min are you maximizing that time with your patient. While they’re laying down still, waiting for doctor to come in show them their mouth. Explain some areas of concern that the doctor may want to take a look at.

What are you doing in your hygiene chair during that time? Are you willing to turn that tv off and be the clinician that you are.

The question is, are you willing to have all of these conversations outside of insurance?

Whatever we focus on in life is what we get. Between recent world events such as natural disasters with hurricanes, fires, and earthquakes or political unrest in North Korea life can get loud! Combine those things with personal and professional challenges in life and often times we get to the point of questioning how do we get past the noise? Being a Stephen Covey fan, this reminds me of him talking about the circle of influence versus the circle of concern.

In the circle of influence positive energy is present which enlarges the circle of influence with a proactive focus. In the circle of concern negative energy is present which reduces the circle of influence leading to a reactive focus. My question to you is which circle are you focused on, one of influence or of concern? Reality says that we will all deal with some kind of disaster at some point in our lives and often times we cannot control what happens; however, we can be proactive in our approach by having clarity of what we want and a plan on how to get there along with flexibility to change the plan as needed with a proactive approach.

Often times we are presented with solutions that are sent our way which we may overlook or send away because we are panicking as we start to drown in disaster. If we can be still enough to catch our breath, take a look around, reassess, and grab an outstretched arm our circumstances can quickly change. It can be so hard at times to understand why bad things take place but I firmly believe there is always something we can take away from it that prepares us for whatever the next step is we need to take. This is not a journey meant to be taken alone. Often times we need a sounding board or to take an outstretched arm; allow your coach at AMP to give you the tools to get past the noise and stay in the circle of influence!

When listening to the AMP TV show about sharing the same vision and embracing opportunities as a dental team. I tend to think about Steve Jobs, Co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Apple, his extraordinary career and how he grew his company into the business that revolutionized the tech industry.

We all understand the magnitude and impact that Apple has had on the world today and I can not help but think that this company did not become what it is today without a very clear team vision of where he wanted it to go. A vision that every single employee knows, lives and communicates every single day though their work.

I would like to think that the dental practices that we either own or work in could become everything you want it to be and succeed past your wildest expectations if you had a clear vision of what you desire and your staff knew what that was, lived it and communicated it every single day.

If every employee lived your vision with each patient they encountered, with every phone call they received or made, with every company you work with or may potentially work with and with every potential new patient they encounter just imagine where that could take your company.

I challenge you to hold your employees to a higher standard, create an environment where your vision is lived and expect your employees to live that vision when it comes to their work life.

The most success practices out there did not get to where they are today without a clear vision. I personally had the opportunity to work for a practice that was beyond successful and had a clear vision for fifteen years. The lessons and experiences that I took from that position will stay with me for a lifetime.

“If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed. The vision pulls you.” Steve Jobs

Are you challenged with the feeling of not being good enough?  Do you have team members in your dental office that may feel this way? As an owner or employee of a dental practice, it is key to case acceptance and a positive patient experience that everybody feels appreciated and knows their worth. 

As the owner are you demonstrating this?

This is said to be one of the more powerful topics we’ll touch on, the content and video example in this show will make you more aware of how we allow others to question our self-worth.

The TV shows starts with a video of a 7^th grader giving a speech on “Why am I not good enough?”.  She details the things she does in a day to feel good enough:

• Take a shower – you don’t want to smell
• Pick out an outfit that applies to the latest trends and won’t make you a laughing stock of the school – more than you already are
• Put some makeup on so you can show your face in public
• Style your hair with curls so others can’t see your real hair
• Shove your feet into the uncomfortable shoes everybody else is wearing – you can’t be the odd man out
• Even though your outfit is uncomfortable, and you have spent hours getting ready, you will never be as good as those other girls in school
• You cannot show emotions or they will not respect you like they used to
• Find a group of kids to walk into school with because you can’t walk alone
• The popular kids are the royalty of the school and what they say goes
• You take every word, glance, review personally and your self-esteems plummets
• It is not popular to be smart

The TV shows brings us all back to that point when we don’t feel good enough.  How many of us are still living these thoughts every day?

Brene Brown states that we have the most addictive society than ever before.  It isn’t the drugs, facebook, alcohol, etc. that we are addicted to but trying to avoid reality.  When we numb ourselves, we are numbing the good as well as the bad.  In order for others to love us we have to love ourselves first.  We have to train our brains to look for the positive and not the negative; at what makes us awesome.

In closing, remember:

1 universe, 8 planets, 204 countries, 804 islands, 7 seas, 7 billion people, don’t let 1 ruin your day

Grit is that ‘extra something’ that separates the most successful people from the rest. It’s the passion, perseverance, and stamina that we must channel in order to stick with our dreams until they become a reality. (Travis Bradberry)

The TV show starts out with a metaphor of a stone carver; how he hits a stone for days, years maybe, and the stone finally breaks on the umpteenth hit. A person walking up at that exact moment thought it was the first hit and didn’t see the blood, sweat and tears put into splitting the stone.

Gutzon Borglum may be a stone carver that you may know; he created Mt. Rushmore. Can you imagine how much grit and perseverance he needed to make it happen? I can’t even conceive the challenges, and negativity, he must have run into for the 40 + years it took to complete.

Do you have the grit, perseverance, or whatever you want to call it, to make your practice a success? Are you as successful as you want to be? Do you know exactly where you want to go? The path to success rarely follows a linear path; it is full of bumps and curves. Your path needs “course correction” to survive the unexpected that pops up. Do you have a plan for your course correction? Is your dream something that you are passionate enough to get through it?

If you can’t answer yes to these questions reach out to your coach. The two of you can sit down and come up with your game plan and how to adjust for those “course corrections.”