Growth Through Patient Retention with Michael Dinsio and Paula Quinn of Next Level Consultants

if you don't have great patient experience, if you're reactive and not proactive, if you all are on the same page, patients are going to feel that. So it is, it is a job. Um, it's also a service industry job, and it's our patients' one hour. So we owe it to them to be prepared, uh, to, to be happy and to help them have— in, in what already is a stressful, stressful environment for them, because nobody loves coming to the pretty much is, is that patient experience. And that morning huddle is gonna be the number one thing to prepare you for that.

This is Growth in Dentistry, a dental intelligence podcast where we ask the question, what does growth in dentistry mean to you? I'm Steve Jensen, a data dental nerd and your host. Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Growth in Dentistry podcast. Super excited for today's conversation. It's a classic, one that is hard to screw up, but I am super excited for the insights that our guests have to share. Now, before I jump in and introduce, uh, Paula and Michael, I first want to give a huge shout out to the team at Dental Intelligence for sponsoring this podcast week after week. A lot of work goes into producing these, and I'm super grateful that they are willing to produce them. As always, they have an offer for our listeners, so they'll give you a $50 gift card just for checking out a demo. If it's been a while since you've checked out DI, or if you haven't ever checked out DI, they've got some cool new stuff that's been released. They've got some automated consents I think that a lot of people haven't seen yet, where you can set up a code to say, hey, every time I have a D2740 scheduled, I want you to automatically send out this consent form. Whatever it is, uh, you can have it set up. What else is cool and new? They have a new AI assistant that's attached to the scorecard, so you can go ask it questions about your business's performance. And the AI will give you summaries of how things are going. So there's some cool new stuff in there. If you haven't checked it out, definitely check out a demo. Okay, with that out of the way, I wanna introduce our guests. I have Michael Dinsio and Paula Quinn from Next Level Consultants. Now I've known you guys for a long time, but listeners might not know you, so I'll give 'em like a quick little background to you. So if you guys have never met Michael, Michael comes from a banking background, so he's a total numbers guy. He's cranial. He's one of the brightest people I've ever met when it comes to looking like high level, what does the industry need? What do practices need to win? Uh, and he fell in love with the consulting side of dentistry, so he got out of banking and got in consulting and founded Next Level Consultants. And then Paula, who's like his right-hand partner in crime, is also one of the most insightful people I've ever met. She is Think of her as like the boots on the ground. She has done every single role you can imagine pretty much. I think every role you can imagine in dental practice. She's done assistant, she's a registered dental hygienist, she's run the business, she's owned two dental practices. So she's sat in all of those seats and now working at Next Level Consultants helps with all of like the, the boots on the ground. Every single team member she can relate with and she's got phenomenal insights. So I'm super excited to have both these folks on the show. So welcome Paula and Michael.

Awesome, thank you. I don't know if I can, uh, echo that energy yet, but thank you.

Let's go, Paula, let's go!

So here's the idea, here's where I want to start. So for listeners, you probably hear me talk about benchmarks all the time, and one of the things I've been paying attention to the last couple of years is the average practice is just not growing. So the number I'm looking at is their patient-based growth. So I talk to doctors and they're like, yeah man, like I'm spending money on on marketing and I'm getting 30 new patients a month or 50 new patients a month. Um, but when I go jump into their dashboards and I look at their actual growth, like how many patients are they gaining but how many patients are they losing, they're pretty much flat. So the average practice is growing their patient base by like 1.8 to 2%, uh, of their whole patient base. So like for every 1,000 patients you're getting a couple of patients, it's basically nothing. Uh, you're not feeling any impact on the schedule. So Michael and Paul, I thought I'd just start with just kind of like a softball question. You guys know what's going on there? Do you see the same thing? Do you have any suggestions for these practices that they think they're growing, but they're really not?

Right. Well, mine would be, you know, focusing on, you know, of course I use Dental Intel every day, the analytics portion, and that retention chart is one of our favorites to show and You know, the main thing that's happening are as many people are— it's not even just leaving the practice because they're unhappy, although that happens. It's no one's following up with them. They, they go into 6 months without an appointment, a year without an appointment, 18 months without appointment, then all of a sudden they're not considered active in the, in the practice. So I think in today's world we have to be, you know, not relevant, quick, easy, efficient, and, and, you know, unfortunately chase these patients down. Um, we care more about their dentistry than they do, so, you know, it's kind of up to us to keep those patients that are already— we've already paid for, we already have a relationship with, all the things above— is how do we keep them in the practice? I mean, that's, that's the biggest thing.

Yeah, when you were, when you were saying that, before we jump into the weeds, One of the things I just thought too, like I've kind of wondered globally, why is that even happening? Like why are we adding all these patients where in the past the same amount of new patients seem to grow the businesses, but you know, things have slipped and there's a few things happening in dentistry, you know, like we're losing team members. So like I know staffing has been an issue for a number of years. Office managers have turned over. Like I look at like why people are signing up for Dental Intelligence and one of the common things I see is an office manager has now moved to a different office and they say, oh, I used it in my previous office, I want it in this one. So I know there's like a lot of shifting happening with team members amongst practices. And I think whenever that happens, you might lose control of like legacy systems. Like if the system was only just a team member holding it together and there was no like documentation or like agreeance amongst the team, that might be one of the issues. You know, so I don't know, you guys, you know, Michael and Paul, you guys work with like a lot of younger dentists. Do you see that? Like if they go buy a practice or something, do they have a lot of team turnover and you have to kind of reset on systems?

Yeah, totally. And you know, Mary Jo or whatever her name was up front, it was all in here or on sticky notes, you know. And yes, you know, I think it's lots of things. I think loyalty looks different, both patient and team, right? It's like, what's in it for me? You know, the days of like, you get— I'm saying Mary Jo, so you're welcome if there's a Mary Jo out there. Um, you know, they came to one practice, they were there 25, 30, 40 years. It just doesn't work that way anymore. Now, is it close to my home? Is it convenient? Do I get paid enough? You know, did someone tick me off today. I don't know what words I can use, but, um, you know, they, they walk out, you know, it's all over. I'm not putting up with this kind of stuff. I, I think there's a lot more pressure on younger dentists, and so the way they treat employees has to look a lot different and is different. Um, so I, I think there's all kinds of things happening. I think with patients, the loyalty Again, it's, it's efficient. It's the same with employees. Is it close to my home? Is it easy? Can I get a hold of them 24/7? You know, um, so I just think it's— the world has changed.

Yeah, Stephen, I was thinking when you, when you said that, you said, um, you know, a front office person leaves and goes to another office and incorporates Dentalinto. I'd be curious to see if you backtracked to see if the office that, that Nancy, Mary Jo, if the old office was still using it, because I find that like you'll find a few team members in an office just live and die by Dental Intel. A lot of the other office just kind of doesn't. And, you know, I, I think back to what you, what you said is, is like it's, it's all about systems. And it's kind of sad to see that, you know, they— the new patients used to be like 20 to 20 5 is what you needed to grow a practice. But I think with those patients, like Paula said, not being loyal, cancellations feel like they're up, no-shows feel like they're up. And so if your system is just not tighter, you don't have a system. If it's a— if it's like Paula said, the sticky note, or if it's Dental Intel, it's still a system. And if the system's tight, then you're going to catch the slippage. If you don't have a system, then you're not going to see that growth. Uh, with any new patients and—

well, let's just be really— systems cannot be tight with sticky notes.

No, they're not. No, they're not.

I don't care how good they are. They, they can't be tight.

The, the conversations, like, I've had a lot of conversations in our, with our clients and our program about marketing. It's like marketing, marketing, marketing. Let's get tons of people through the front door. But it's like, why would you spend so much money in marketing if you're just letting what you have go right out the back door. Like, we're, we're so focused on what's on the— what's happening on the front, we're not paying attention to what's going on at the back. And that's what's great about Dental Intel, is you can have a locked-down system, like a morning huddle, daily huddle, like I think we're going to probably pivot to here. So yeah, no, it's systems-driven.

Yeah. And if I can just add to that, you know, which is probably where this is going to go anyways, is I think offices have to focus on patient experience all the way around. Like, hands down, it's— if you can create an environment, um, that meets your patient's needs in lots of different ways, that's, that's what's going to create the loyalty. And what I have found with Dental Intel is, you know, it's, uh, you know, it, it creates opportunity with the patients. It creates, you know, if you've got a tight system, you honestly can back time in your day, which allows you, you know, to focus on other things. And I think that's probably what I get most out of Dental Intel is it's, it's not just numbers, but it's like helps you tell a story about the patient, provide opportunity for the patient, which then creates, you know, a different kind of experience. I mean, that's how I see it anyway.

Yeah, no, I, I definitely agree. I agree, I agree. Like, as I'm thinking about this problem, I might have you know, patients slipping through the cracks. And there's other things too that practices are dealing with, like treatment acceptance is down. Michael mentioned, you know, cancellations, no-shows are definitely up, you know, industry-wide. So as an owner or an office manager, I might have kind of all these ideas swirling through my head, like how do I solve these, like, big— they almost feel like mega problems, you know. How do I reroute the business in a positive way? So I think for the sake of this conversation, you know, Paul and Michael, if it's cool, let's start drilling down into some of the like daily basics. Like what are some of the practical things people can start thinking about that might help solving some of, that might help solve some of these problems? So like patient retention or treatment that's falling through the books, or maybe it's AR or whatever the task is. How do you think, you know, Paula, I don't know if you wanna be the one that takes it, but how do you think about solving these problems at a practical level for the team?

So I don't know if you want to ask that in a different way because I don't want to answer it wrong, but—

oh no, I, I just want you to answer.

I feel like you pick out 4 metrics, 3, you know, I mean, sometimes starting with 1 is enough, but I think that there are somewhere between 2 and 4 metrics that you can focus on, on a daily, weekly, monthly basis that will organically just change the way you do things. And you can't just have— you can't just look at the numbers. You got to look to see where it's failing you and how you need to maybe look at it differently the next day or the next week than you did the week before, or else it's just going to be a number. So I think knowing the metrics of maybe 4 things, knowing the industry standards for those 4 things, and where you fall. And I think that tells the story of what's going wrong. And then, you know, not to pump us, but hiring a coach, because it's not just about— you got to know what to do, but then you got to hold everybody accountable to doing it. So there's multiple, you know, facets in this. If you want to get into what metrics I think are important—

I do want to get into that.

Let's get into that. But I, but I will say that Paul is on to something here, because when we help clients, like, with, with growth, or, you know, taking their practice to another level, it, it's always, you know, and we meet you wherever you're at. So like, the really successful doc is trying to get to another level, or someone that's struggling is trying to just get to the averages, whatever, wherever you're at in that kind of meeting you in place. What's fascinating, because we help with all of them, but what's fascinating is the ones that are just crushing, they're trying to get to like top 1%, right? They're already top 10, they're trying to get the top 10. Those folks are like on the metrics, they're following it like Paula just said, they're tracking, they're probably looking at 10, 15. Paula said start with 4, which is probably the average Joe needs to just start with Tracking or, or one. Um, you know, that's the big difference is, is like when we look at those struggling practices, they're not tracking anything. They're walking in, they're just being super reactive and the days come into them and they wake up at the end of the month saying, shit, I don't have enough money in my bank account. It's like, that's it. You know? So I, I love where we're going with this because start small and do it bite-sized pieces.

Yeah, I totally agree. But Paula, why don't you share, why don't you share a few of those metrics? You guys jump in with clients all the time, you know, so what are the, the common, some of the common pitfalls that you see? And then we'll start kind of building the system around how to track that. What can we do on a daily basis? Maybe hit some huddle stuff if that's cool.

Well, what is cool is the morning huddle, kind of a lot of those metrics just lie within that because you've got your production or daily goal. You've got, you know, from the next, the previous day, the people who left without being scheduled. Um, then you got your morning huddle with opportunity from a treatment standpoint, from a hygiene standpoint, from family member standpoint. Um, and it's cool because you have some celebrations in there if, if there's a birthday or things like that. So a lot of that data, if you literally just did the morning huddle and all the components that are within that, you right there is the best start ever. Um, because you could incorporate obviously the cancellation and no-shows are gonna automatically happen throughout your day. If you have your morning huddle open, someone doesn't show up, you can just quick click follow-up and follow up. So for me, it's, you know, um, you know, obviously we always want to meet our goal or look at our goal and see You know, if we're there, if we're not, what opportunity is available. So those, you know, unscheduled treatment, unscheduled hygiene, if there's crossover in the schedule, like, can we— can Paula move from restorative to hygiene or vice versa? So I think honestly, if we just concentrated on the metrics within that, because if someone cancels, I'm going to mark, create the follow-up, and a follow-up is another huge thing that I work on with with team members. So it kind of kills all the birds with one giant stone, I think.

I agree, I agree, I agree with you. If people don't know kind of what Paula's describing, I'm explaining, I'm like, oh, that's exactly what is inside the huddle. If people—

yes.

Oh, the way that Dental Intelligence structured the morning huddle, and then maybe we can even talk about this in a second, like what if I don't do a morning huddle? But the way we structured the morning huddle was basically, hey, what are the What are the big problems we see occurring in every practice we're working with? And we, could we just boil down all of those issues into these like bite-sized daily pieces where if a practice would just focus on those things every single day, it'll add up to the point where by the time we get 180 days into the working year and we just finished the year, then like we will have made like a big impact on patients. And that's, you know, all the things that Paula just mentioned, like, hey, we wanna we want to get patients scheduled to come back. So we're going to make that very obvious, like who's scheduled, who's not. And then if we just end the day with more people scheduled than we ended with, if it's 1 every single day, then that's 180 more that we, you know, that we didn't lose. And then if it's 2 more than we started with, and now it's, you know, 360, assuming it's 180 working days, I think pretty average for a practice. But you know, the idea there is we can just take these small bite-sized pieces Now maybe one of the questions I wanna ask you guys, because even, even DI, we've got over 10,000 customers and I'm telling you not all 10,000 are even using the morning huddle. Like there's this struggle in the industry where we're full of so many good ideas, but it can be so hard to like actually implement it. And that's why I agree, Paula kind of made a plug for a consultant. Am I gonna make a plug?

Okay. Yeah. No, made a plug for a particular consultant.

Me?

No, I'm just kidding.

A particular consultant.

Consultant. Yeah, for Next Level, which I'm a big— but the idea, I think sometimes we can like overestimate our ability as an operator, like overestimate our ability to actually take a good idea and like get it into action and get the whole team to adopt long term. So can you guys talk me through maybe a little bit like how have you been successful getting teams to do like a great morning huddle as an example? Like what does that actually look like? Do you have any examples of practices where you're like, hey, like we help them implement a few simple things that really had a big impact on the business, but they needed help, you know, like it wasn't, wasn't going well by themselves, right?

Well, I, I think just honestly, from a clinical standpoint, any— not any time, most times when I introduce this to the dental assistants and the hygienist, it's, it is a lifesaver because they don't know all those front-end reports and they're going into their clinical notes, and then they're opening up their imaging system, and then they're like trying to, you know, go into 5 different windows to audit their day. And for me, you know, whenever I do a hygiene program or anything with clinical, the light bulbs go off, because if they can go to one spot and see what radiographs are due, um, what unscheduled treatment is there, um, you know, if you look at a— because you can look at two different views by operatory or by just your day. I always click over, teach them to click over and just see if there's holes in the doctor's schedule. Like, could the patient— does the patient have unscheduled treatment and could the patient be moved over? And then you got the patient card. Like, if you wanted to, you know, you look at do they have insurance or not. It's it doesn't— I always say it doesn't weigh like my conversation, it just makes it easier. I just know what I'm doing, you know, know your audience, I guess is the best way to say it. So I think that is where I see the biggest change is when I can— when I get the clinical people on board to just look at the opportunity for the day, both family members, unscheduled treatment, and if there's crossover in the schedule.

I think that's good, Paula, because, you know, it's that clinical team that kind of just goes through the schedule and they're like, oh yeah, we're doing a crown at 1, you know, okay. And the front office is like so supposed to be so numbers-driven, so, you know, they're supposed to drive the back, right? And so they're kind of thinking that way, but To Paula's point, like, that's, that's what's so great about Dental Intel's huddle is it's got a— it's got something for everyone. And even the front office folks, you know, I, I just find that like they're not collecting as good as they could. They're not paying attention to tomorrow's, uh, production goals, like trying to be proactive on, on the numbers. And, you know, I, I just feel like you're right, like from a clinical perspective and a front office thing, you You can get really get granular with this conversation.

Um, what's cool is I think like the clinical people can see some front office stuff that they would never go look, and then front office can see some clinical stuff that they would never— shouldn't say never, I have a lot of front office that audit the hygiene schedule for them. I'm like, okay. Um, but everyone can help because those follow-ups too, it's like if I'm a hygienist, my patient doesn't schedule it's just as easy for me to click a follow-up and now put it in Mary Jo's hands next week or whatever, if the patient needs to look at their calendar. So I think it can help us all help each other. I think it helps me understand Front more because I can see if the patient has a balance. I can— it's so easy. I don't have to go in and out of different reportings or different pages. I can just see it all from one, one thing.

So So I don't know what you asked. We walk into a lot of offices and they're just not— they're doing a huddle, but I'd say like 8 out of 10 times before we even get involved, it's just kind of rattling off what's on the schedule. And the idea here is that, okay, that's not really a huddle. No one needs that huddle. Everybody can read. Paul always says, you guys can read, right? We don't need to, like, huddle and read it together, you know? It's about being proactive and it's about finding opportunity and it's about tightening up what's slipping through the cracks so that we can grow that patient number that you were talking about in the beginning of the episode. So that's what it should be about.

And like, 90% of the huddle is me by myself, right? I mean, like, all my auditing, all it's me. I'm now coming to get with my team it's really just, you know, now no bottlenecking patient experience. Everyone can read all of that other stuff. So I think it's— but one thing I wanted to say earlier too is, you know, you had mentioned 180 days, working days. We're talking about monthly goals. So I don't want to go— since it's on my mind, it's a little off subject, but I want to go here because I'll forget. Um, that's probably one of the biggest problems I see in a practice is if we have a goal of $100,000 a month, we're in day 25 and we're freaking out. We're not going to hit our goal. Well, you've, you've already missed the opportunity. So Michael's favorite thing is the, uh, calendar, the calendar analysis. I forget what it's called now. Is that what it's called?

Schedule analysis.

Schedule analysis.

Like monthly, weekly view.

Yeah.

So I always go, the first thing I do when I set them up is go and make sure I put it on net. And then we teach them to look, you know, if they're in the red, concentrate on those days when you're scheduling to go. And when you're in the green, who cares how many patients are on there if you got your goal, right? Because organically you're going to get same-day treatment if you're auditing your, your schedule.

Oh, I actually— I mean, like, I mean, like a sidestep, but I love you bring it up because that— I just did a training this last week for the whole DI team where I'm like, hey, I realize we're not talking about this, and this is one of the most powerful things to go and look at because I go jump in and, and probably 90+ percent of practices I look and they are maybe scheduled to go 1, maybe 2 days in advance. Once I get 3 days out, they're not even close to goal. Like, they are, they're so reactive with this.

I know, I— Steven, I— Paula probably gets a little uncomfortable when I get the, the, the team sometimes because I You know, usually these dental offices, these massive, like, flat, you know, flat screens are huge. And I pull Dental In Town, I pull up the whole month.

Yeah.

And I'm like, hey, great week.

Red, red, red, red.

Sometimes I could just get a little aggressive. But, you know, it, it's just like, you know, these doctors are always talking to me about their money and how little they have or how much more they want to have. And it's all— it always equates to wages. As it relates to collections. And, and if you just look down the line 3 weeks, 2 weeks down and it's not even close to their number, if they even know what their bare minimum number is, that's a whole nother episode. And if it's not, start talking to your team about collapsing days and it's like it's right there.

Don't go there. Don't go there.

Well, we have to.

We have to.

Yeah. But what I, what I was saying, though, about that calendar is we're, we're so worried about like the monthly goal. Like, let's just— like, I love that, you know, you can put in like, what do you want to produce per hour? You put that in, you put the clinical hours in, and now you get your daily goal. And it's— we look at— we're always looking at lag measurements in, in dental practices. Like, oh, yesterday we did $3,000, you know, or what— if we're even looking at that. Um, we're usually looking at it like I said, day 25, panic mode, we're nowhere near our goal. So what I love, you know, to show them is like, hey, this is where we are at today. Here's all your opportunity with these 8 hygiene patients, these 8 to 10 doctor patients. Here's all the opportunity. Let's get, you know, unscheduled family members. Like you said, if we can just get them to schedule one additional person, look at just that opportunity. And if we focus on that our same-day treatment's going to go up. We're going to hit goals that either exceed what we're already at— you know, we didn't, we didn't make it, we're going to exceed it— or make our goal. Like, it— so many things are just going to organically happen by paying attention. Folks, uh, what do they say? What, what you focus on grows. I mean, there's lots of sayings out about that, and that's really all it is. It's like, you know, if you were to get up in the morning and have something on your mirror and you're like, yay, yay, let's go team, you know, it's, it's the same thing. It's like, just pay attention and it's just gonna happen. But we're so always looking at past stuff that the opportunity is gone. It's gone. Sometimes you can ask Michael, I used to do this for my team, but now I do it for the teams we coach. Not always because it takes me forever. I go through every person on like the next day or the following day, and I write down FMX. You know, why do we take Bitewings? They're a year and 4 months old, but FMX is 7 years old. Like, you should have done an FMX last time, but FMX, you know. Or there's not even x-rays on there, um, no fluoride. I'm like, put the fluoride on, even if the patient says no. Let's put it on and take it off. Not— if it's not on there, a hygienist probably isn't going to ask about it, you know. So put all the codes on that are possible, then go from there. So I'll audit— I'd be careful, HIPAA— I don't put patients' names, I put initials. And then I, I do it all and I'll send it to them in an email. And, you know, both hygiene and doctor schedule, every opportunity that's on there— birthdays, unscheduled family members. I mean, everything they could see in dental intel, but I'm like, they're not looking. So I'm literally going to throw it in their face this morning so they can say, oh, okay, and this is how you run a morning huddle. Um, but you don't even really run it like that because that's auditing prior to the morning huddle, but it, it gets them there, do you know what I mean? So I, I do that every once in a while just to spice things up. Yeah.

Now we have just been like fire hosing people with like all these possible—

I know, right?

And, uh, no, no, it's great. No, I like— I think people appreciate it. As you guys listen to podcasts, like whenever I'm listening to podcasts, I just like hearing the conversation and then small little things will hit out. Like for listeners, it might have been like, oh wow, I didn't even think to look at who's coming in that has unscheduled family, or, or like maybe Paula, I've never thought about like looking and see, hey, is there a hole in the doctor's schedule and coordinating with the hygienist to say, hey, like do some semantic priming, like remind them, hey, like feel how I'm touching that. There's like a brown spot on your tooth and show them with the mirror. I touched that with my, my scaler and feel how it's kind of sticky. Like that means there's probably something there the doctor needs to take care of. You know, he's probably going to talk to you or she's going to talk to you about that when they come in. You know, you can do stuff like that to help prep the patient for the convos. And maybe people aren't thinking more strategically around how to, how to convert the opportunities in their morning huddle. So I like I love all the things that you threw out there around like, hey, here, here are things you might think about aligning against in the morning huddle beyond just reading everything. I freaking love that.

And then, but I think we just got to keep coming back to being intentional around the things that you want to work on. Like, what Paula does, um, in office is, is, is work on things in a quarterly time frame, right? Because To us, if you're working on the next thing and the next thing and the next thing and the next thing, you usually— things don't stick. It doesn't become habits, patterns, whatever. So I challenge your audience to just take a deep breath, especially the younger docs that own, because, hey, I know what owners like. I didn't sleep very well last night. I was texting Paula, stressed about something, as owners do. You want to fix everything always, even if it's at 3 AM in the morning, right? Um, but like, like you said, if you make one change and you do it 180 times a year, that's like massive.

Yeah.

Um, so just tackle 2 things a quarter and you're gonna, you're gonna see some, some success there.

Yeah, I think that's really good advice. Um, uh, so many times we can just try to focus on too much all at once and then we just do it kind of like half-assed, kind of poorly. We don't get through a full execution. So I think that's really thoughtful. I like the idea of slowing down. Michael or Paul, I don't know if you have a suggestion, but how do you even figure out what you should be focusing on? How do you identify those two major things? I mean, obviously that comes with experience. For you guys, I think, or for me, it's pretty easy when I look at a practice, we're like, yo, this is like the, the punctured wound, like the bleed that we need to like really focus on fixing, but sometimes that's not as obvious to a new younger dentist.

Yeah, well, I mean, for me, again, I go back to lead measures rather than lag. So production to me is a lag measure of, of what, what do we need to do to get the production that we want to get. And, you know, if we're talking about Dental Intel as a whole, or just even even a dental practice as a whole, I think, you know, the biggest thing for me would be number one, the morning huddle. Because if you don't have great patient experience, if you're reactive and not proactive, if you all are on the same page, patients are going to feel that. So it is, it is a job. Um, it's also a service industry job. And it's our patient's one hour. So we owe it to them to be prepared, uh, to, to be happy and to help them have— in, in what already is a stressful, stressful environment for them, because nobody loves coming to the dentist pretty much— is, is that patient experience. And that morning huddle is going to be the number one thing to prepare you for that. If you're prepared for that, your production your schedule is automatically going to organically fill up because you're going to have, again, the unscheduled family members, you're going to have the unscheduled treatment, you're going to be looking at the crossover. That opportunity is just going to breed opportunity, so you're organically going to hit your production. Um, the second thing for me is that we, we started it out with retention and marketing for new patients and all that, and that would be creating up some kind of follow-up system. If you're not, if you don't have dental intel, I'm sorry, um, you know, sticky notes aren't going to cut it. Some of the practice management softwares, you can kind of do stuff like that, but it's— to me, I always tell people, it's like my cell phone. If I have a hair appointment in 2 weeks, I have to put it in my calendar. And as much as I love to get my hair done, and I'm a female, I'm not going to miss it for the world, I will miss it if I don't put the date and time in there. Um, so when you— when a patient says, I'll call you, or you say, I'll call you, you've got to put it in the calendar. And that follow-up system is that calendar.

It times 150.

Yeah. Oh yeah, I've made it into that. But hey, I'm calling Paula on this date and time because patients will rarely call you back regardless. I mean, you got those great— not crazy, great crazy that like, oh, I've got a cavity, I got to get it filled. But majority will not. So it's up to us to follow up. And you've got to have a nice— there's got to be order around your cadence of when you call and how many times you call and what you say when you call. So tracking that— I call Paula today, I don't want to call her in a month from now. The process— I lost it. I lost the momentum of it. And if I call her today and she doesn't answer and then I wait 2 months, I've lost the momentum. So there's got to be a cadence to it, and Dental Intel allows for that. So I, I would say if, if you're going to do anything, whether it's Dental Intel or not, is a morning huddle with, you know, a plan around your patient's day. And the second thing is, if they leave that practice without an appointment, there has to be some— there has to be a follow-up, or they become that statistic 12 months, 18 months I mean, I think that's the number one thing— two things offices freak out about: when we show them their unscheduled patients, and when we show them that retention rate of how many patients didn't just leave their practice, just nobody followed up with them, and they're just this big statistic. Um, you know, and, and not, not everyone's out to sell a practice, but when you go to sell your practice, it's only those 18 months of activity that reflect on your patient base. So you, you can have another 1,000 in your 18 to 36 months and nobody—

try 4,000. Try 4,000. We get, we get active patients of— I saw one the other day, it was 10,000 and they actually only had 1,200 active patients.

Cleaning up, that's a whole nother conversation. But I, I would say those are the two things is, is Morning huddle, which does a lot, and then follow-ups. Again, whatever besides sticky notes. Please no sticky notes. We went to an office one time and she had little ones and her entire computer, they overlapped. They weren't even just, you know, 15 sticky notes. They over— and I thought, she's not looking at those. There's no way she's looking at those.

You know, like a lion's mane.

Yeah, I mean, they're—

it looks like a lion's mane, you know.

When's the last— if you were gonna call that patient on the bottom under the 20, you're not calling that patient. Yeah, no, it's a— yeah, so it was pretty—

I think no matter what size practice, Stephen, like you, you said, where do you even start, right? And Paula's perfect because— perfect, Paula. Um, you know, is, um, you know, whether you're a large practice or a small practice, retention matters no matter what, you know, because, you know, they want to bring—

then what's the next thing? They want to bring in an associate, right? Or they want to sell, and it's like you, you can't with, you know, if, if things are going now downhill. Sorry, Michael, you were saying something.

No, no, it's perfect. That was perfect.

It's usually what you do to me, but yeah, I love it.

We could get in a fight and really show whatever we do.

Let's go to town.

Let's go.

I think today's been, today's been super awesome. We're already, we're already coming up on time, so I always, I always like to finish the episode You know, I think, Paul, you just, you just like brought things together so nicely there. I'll finish with kind of a higher level question that I ask every single guest. I ask, what does growth in dentistry mean to you? So I'd love to hear from you guys. What are you focused on at Next Level? What does growth in dentistry mean for you and your clients?

Go for it, Michael. This is perfect for you. I've answered all of them.

I mean, I think growth to me is becoming an owner, loving it, being comfortable with failure, trying to create an amazing team that respects you and wants to come into work. It's not just a job and that you aren't just stressed all the time. To me, it's a journey to get to that place as an owner. If you're already there, congratulations. That's, that's a big deal. Um, for all of the younger owners out there, or even middle career, they're all stressed out of their mind. They're trying to find the— trying to find the perfect, uh, employees, the ones that care, ownership mindset, blah blah blah. To me, like, the growth is, is getting to that place where, um, you're comfortable with being uncomfortable and your team loves your practice like you do. And dentistry is, um, what you thought it should be, but it just takes a long time to get there.

Yeah, that's— that is so good.

I agree. Can I add one thing?

Yeah, do, Paula.

Sorry. Um, growth is also— which, which, all that 100% is also systems. And, and the reason I say that is because we're— we are struggling more and more with team members and You know, when you go to certain places, people always talk about Chick-fil-A or Starbucks, or when there are repeatable systems, people can step into other people's positions a lot easier, if not seamlessly. And so, you know, all these things we were talking about this morning, I think are uber important even more today than ever, because again, loyal patients aren't as loyal. So this helps create loyal patients. Because we have more time for patient experience. And if team members aren't as loyal, we've got systems that can easily be followed and repeated. And so I would say if you wanna grow, it is, you, you've gotta have very clear systems in place that are repeatable. And I, again, plugged Dental Intel all morning, but this is one one platform that allows for that, you know, that I have found to be super— like, we won't coach a client without it just because I need systems for the systems. And so, you know, when I'm in there, you know, I'm using it as my system. And we won't go into the scorecards and all that, but I do love all that too.

Yeah, maybe, maybe to connect both your thoughts, I think, you know, I, I always tell people that if you're living a very, like, reactive life then it's gonna feel really stressful. But if you're living a proactive life, which includes like systems and plans, then you're gonna feel far more at peace about like where things are going, how you're gonna overcome obstacles as they come at you. And so I, I 100% agree in you guys' answers for Growth in Dentistry. Well, thank you both for joining and thanks for the audience members for joining again. This has been another episode of the Growth in Dentistry podcast. My name's Steve Jensen, your host. And we'll talk soon.