58: The D.O.P.E. System

Welcome to DSO Secrets. I know what it's like to be an entrepreneur in the dental industry. I've had my ups and downs just like you. There's so much opportunity to be excited about, but so few resources to get answers. From here on DSO Secrets, we get you those answers so you can change the lives you're meant to bless and achieve your personal success.

When I was working as an associate rat at a school, I never imagined I could own these many practices with this amount of support. So thank you.

You have helped build my marketing mind

to a whole new level. You have this natural talent, this unique ability.

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of DSO Secrets. I'm your fearless host, Emmett Scott. And I'm so excited today to talk through a barrier, a constraint that is killing some of the best, most talented dentists and business partners out there. And we just got to come up with strategies to get through these things because you're all's ability to have greater and greater impact on your customers, on your patients, on your staffs, on the doctors that you support is just critical to grow this industry and to have the influence on communities and frankly on the world that we're looking to have. So when I see talented, ambitious, just like amazing people running into these barriers, I think we have to discuss these. We've gotta come up with solutions to get around them and we've gotta make them elegant, easy to implement. So let me just talk through a couple things that I'm seeing with some very specific talented individuals out there and the barrier that they're running into. And I'm gonna give you a tool that anyone can use that applies no matter what your size of business. This is just so helpful. And it's been helpful for me not only on my business side, but in my personal life to lower my anxiety and increase my effectiveness. Sounds like a pretty good tool, huh? So let me first describe some of the keys I think are critical to having a business model. This won't be all comprehensive, but I'm gonna go through three, and on the third one, I'm gonna really drill down on on the tool that I use to increase effectiveness and lower my anxiety. Number one is I just think that understanding your why and having a very clear why is very important. Now when you first start off, your why might be just to meet cash flow. And I get that, but that'll only motivate you so much. And you know, again, initially it might be I'm just excited to be here. I'm excited to be in the space. I'M excited to solve these problems that are super obvious and right in front of me. But as those grind you down, as maybe you're successful and you hit new horizons and you climb new mountains, it's critical that you think through and step back and say, why am I in this? What am I really trying to accomplish? What's my bigger cause? And I just put that out there as something that will be a consistent journey. You'll nail it down at certain times. But frankly, if you're successful, you'll climb that mountain, you'll look out and you'll say to yourself, okay, I need another why. I need a bigger why on what am I doing here and what's the impact I want to have? But I'm not going to talk too much about that today. I just want to put that as a placeholder. Number two is you've got to be really clear, and I think this is critical is understand the niche. Who is it that you serves? Too often I talk to someone, I say, now who's the customer that you serve? And the first thing they say out of their mouth is, well, I'm a general dentist. I'm a gp. You know, they might even go as far as saying, well, we're a super gp. We do a lot of different procedures. But again, that's something that you'll want to refine over time. Like, who is the customer that I'm servicing? And you can pull this out of your practice management software. If you've been practicing for any period of time, say I. Okay, if I divided this by age or some other demographic, who is it that we're really attracting? We're putting our antenna up. We're out in the marketplace. Who is it that's really loving our product that we want to make sure that we service really well? It's helpful for me to understand my avatar, and I've done other podcasts on that, so we're not going to discuss that fully today. But I'm just going to say that that's critical. So who I'm talking to today has some level of why already figured out. And they have a niche. And you can see that because they've got successful practice or practices that, that are growing, but they're stuck. And so I want to talk through where I see as the next barrier that people are getting stuck. And it's so easy to recognize because when you talk to them, you can hear it in their voice. It's this mixture of. Of excitement and total overwhelm. Emmett, I've got So much going on. I've got this, and I got this, and this needs to be solved. And it mixes between these really cool opportunities that they're looking at and these total failures, obstacles, concerns, frustrations that they're trying to overcome, just like total fear with total excitement, and it's awesome. And that's entrepreneurship. But when you ask them about where they're getting traction, where they're moving forward, where they have momentum, you find that they're starting to feel total paralysis by everything going on. So this is what I'm going to talk about today is what's the tool to increase your effectiveness, increase your. The time you spend to ensure that it's on the most important things. And this gets harder and harder and. And takes more and more discipline as you scale and grow, even at a single location, if you've been successful, this can be very difficult. And let me tell you what I think is the trap that so many of us fall into as we see entrepreneurship and business ownership about running through walls and coming up with ideas to solve problems. That's absolutely true, and it's critical in order to help your team to overcome the obstacles in front of them. But there comes a point where coming up with a new idea isn't the needed product anymore. It isn't the constraint that's keeping the business from scaling. In fact, I love the definition that weaknesses are really the overuse of your strength. So oftentimes when I find myself stuck, what I ask myself is, where is my strength being overutilized and I need to back it off? That's really counterintuitive because most of the time when we see problems, we go to apply our strength even more. We come up with more ideas on how we can solve it, more ideas that would help the business to grow, more ideas for staff to implement, more ideas that would create an amazing patient experience, more ideas for our doctors to do. And oftentimes we just bog down the system or overall. So what are you to do when you see all of these issues? And frankly, your personality is probably like mine. We could go into a restaurant right now and we could point to a thousand things that they could do to make their business better, to improve the customer experience, to make things faster. Just looking at constraints, looking at designs, it's kind of in our DNA so that we see opportunities around us to improve the world, and that's what's helped us to get here. But now that we've got so much, so much opportunity, so much fear, frustration, concerns, obstacles that we're trying to overcome. Now we're starting to get paralyzed, and a new tool is necessary. So here's this new tool. I'm going to give you an acronym that I love. We use it with our team, and it's called dope. D, O, P, E. Dope. All right, so you're going to. You're going to be dope. Like, yeah, that's how cool this podcast is. Once you're done with this, you'll have a tool and you can just say, hey, I'm dope. Right? All right, so the first one is D. And D is for Discover and Dump. All right, It's a double D, but I still just spell it D, O, P, E. Discover and Dump. Now, this is the part that you're already good at, which is all those ideas that you have, all those opportunities, get them down on paper. Now, what I love to use is Google sheets. It's just simple. It's easy to share with other people. But the part that most of us don't do is writing it down in one place other than maybe occasionally on our whiteboard, which I like to do that near the end here, and I'll talk through that. But initially, just getting them down on paper. See, the problem with the brain is it's not very good at calendaring and it's not very good at organizing and prioritizing, which is the reason why when you're in the shower, all of a sudden, this idea pops up and says, hey, shouldn't you call so and so? Or aren't you supposed to be taking care of this? Now? Here you are, fully naked, soap on your body. Like, it's not the ideal time to execute on anything other than getting clean. So. So why does the brain do that? Because the brain doesn't understand the context of where you're at and when's the best time to notify you. And so you hit the snooze button, so to speak, and. And then you're driving in the car, and boom, brain gives you another idea, etc. All right, so you got to get it out of the brain, and I'm going to dump it onto this sheet. All right? So that's step number one. Now, I'll tell you, for me, emotionally, just doing that step oftentimes brings a physical relief. Like, okay, all these ideas that seem like taking over the universe are now down on paper. I can see them, touch them, feel them. I can see that there's 20 of them. I can see that there's 10 of them. I can see that There's 200 of them. Whatever there is, they're now a finite number. They don't feel as infinite to me. So I love just like dumping that down. Okay, now number two is to organize them. This is the reason I like put them in Google sheets, because now I have a set of columns that I can start to flesh out the ideas a little bit more. How would I organize them? Well, I might have a column that says, who's the end user or customer that I'm trying to serve with this idea? All right, so if you think about your ideas, they probably fall into three or four categories. Like at the end of the day, is this making the patient experience better? So I might put patient in that column. Right. Or in that cell next to that idea. Or is this really about the staff and making their life better? Maybe one of the ideas was, man, I've never done employee reviews and everybody's asking me for raises. I need to get that figured out right now. That's a huge, epic project. But I'm going to put that, that's a staff oriented project. Okay, maybe doctor compensation. I've really never systemized that. My contracts are all over the place. I've always just kind of customized things based on the next doctor and what they negotiated. And I want to get that simplified, I want to get that organized. So maybe that is a Dr. Experience, end user, customer that I'm thinking of. So I'm going to have this column and I'm going to put these ideas and probably under one of those three categories because in my mind, those are kind of my three customers. Now if it's I want to go acquire, you know, a new location that I'm looking at that might be a project that's on this list here that I might just put under growth. Now you could think of it and say that's really about impacting more patients. Because if I acquire that practice now, I've got new patients that I can touch and feel and give new services to. And so that's really a patient orient. So however you want to do it. But it might be easiest to just call that growth initially to kind of organize these things. All right, so out of dope, we're now on the O and we're starting to organize now. Another column I might put in place is Scope or Description. So I put this idea down, but that idea is a huge idea. You could drive a Mack truck through it. So what are all the different pieces to it? Like, how do I really want to describe it? Right. What are we Trying to get doctor Contracts completely done or are we trying to add a paragraph specifically in there? I'm thinking of the project of like Dr. Contracts, obviously, but determining like what the scope is going to be and starting to organize my thoughts more clearly because oftentimes, honestly, we do this drive by delegation concepts and we don't organize our thoughts very well at all. Especially when we go down to start interacting with our team, we might say, hey, we need to get this better, right? Like that's, that's like our project management process. We just kind of throw it over our shoulder and we hope that our team's smart enough to read our mind and understand the scope of the project. So I like to have a column where I start to formulate a little bit more of the scope. I might have something like due date or like, when do I expect this to be completed? Just starting to force my brain to, to determine if I really think that this is going to be done in one week or if this is six months or if this is two years. But starting to put a little bit of pressure that not everything can get done tomorrow. That's a good exercise to have. And so I like a column around that. I might have a column around who's the champion. Like, who ultimately is responsible for this, who's going to really own it, whose idea is this, who can really perceive what needs to happen next, etc. Oftentimes in our organization, that's going to be myself or one of our executives who's going to champion and lead this project. I might have a column for who the specialists are going to be or who the project manager is going to be. Like, who else am I going to need in order to get this done? Under specialists, that could be a whole list of individuals. I might need a doctor to help me kind of flesh out. I might need a front desk person. I might need. I might need my office manager, whoever it might be. I might need a vendor, right? Depending on the project, I'm going to list that under my specialists. Now you can imagine this spreadsheet. I've got all my ideas and I've started to organize using the O and dope. I've started to organize the concepts by using these columns. And I'm starting to understand something. The first thing I'll probably see is that the champion for a lot of these projects are myself. Champions for a lot of these projects might be one other person or the specialist. Oh, I need the office manager on almost all of these to flesh these out and to get more Clarity. So immediately I can start saying, wait, I have only so much bandwidth. Like, I don't care how successful you've been, you get the same 24 hours. The loser who hasn't been able to do anything with their life, right? Like, all of us are in the same boat together when it comes to time. So what are we going to now do when we see that reality that we actually can't do all of it? I think one of the problems or traps that a lot of us run into is that busy is the same thing as effective, or overwhelm is the same thing as ambition. And they're not. Right? Being effective is critical. That's the only way you really have impact. So there is an honesty component. There is like a stark reality that happens as you start to organize things where you have to say, I'm not going to get to all of these tomorrow. In fact, the reality is I haven't been getting to all of them. And pretending like I have might have made me feel like I'm taking a lot of things on. And maybe it allows me to even play a little bit of victim role. Like, hey, I'm doing my best. That's all I can do. But really what it's making me is not effective. And so I just have to be honest and start saying, listen, I'm not going to get to a lot of these things for a while now. That's a scary moment I found for a lot of people. I remember going through those now. You know, it's become a process. And it's not scary because I know how being effective is so much more impactful than being spread thin. But I remember when I'd have to kind of let those fires burn, and I wondered if they would burn down my whole business, knowing that I couldn't get to them as quickly as I'd like to. But I can just promise you that if you'll do this process of dope, you'll find that you're working on the most important things. And it's kind of like if you've ever had a bunch of cords that have all been tangled up, you know, and they're sitting there on the kitchen counter and you're like, oh, crap, I'm gonna have to undo these. I guess with Christmas and Halloween and other lights coming up, most of us will be doing this activity. You know, it's interesting because as you start to untangle just one of those strands, how the other ones quickly fall apart, right? They quickly start to organize themselves. And what I've Noticed in doing this process of taking a spreadsheet, dumping all my ideas and starting to organize them in these columns, that as I go to engage on the most important thing, the other things start to solve themselves faster than I expected. If any of you have ever done, like the debt snowball payoff process, and I won't explain that here, but it's kind of the same thing, like, focus really creates faster results than spreading your money across multiple debts. So anyway, that being said, the next thing is obviously organization. Now we're going to move to prioritization. Hopefully I've given myself enough data that as I look across my spreadsheet, I asked myself one question. If I could only do one of these things, which one is the most important that I have to get done? Now, this will be the hardest part of this whole process because your brain's going to say, they're all important, they all have to get done. They all need to be number one. Or it might kind of say, well, not that one or that one, but every other one, right? So let's say we have a list of 20. It's going to say 10 of them, 12 of them, 15 of them are just absolutely critical. And you would argue, emmett, if I don't do that, everyone's going to quit and we're going to die and the world's going to explode. And that's just how the brain, out of fear and anxiety, tends to work. And so really having that discipline to say, okay, really, what is number one? Now, I have gotten to a point where I can do number one, but I just have to put down number two, three, four, five, six, six and seven very quickly. And as long as I can look at those first five as kind of a group, then I do feel better. So just being honest, this is still a process that you're constantly training your brain towards. And kind of seeing those first five, that's helpful. And then I start to see, yeah, there really is kind of these natural breaks between these other things. They're really great, they're great ideas, but, man, I really got to get those first five done. Okay, so starting to prioritize, starting to prioritize, looking across and saying, if I don't get this done for patients, what's the impact if I don't get this done for doctors, what's the impact if I don't get this done for staff? And I've got to now say, but which of these is most important? Like, if I only got one of them done, I got to get that one done. Otherwise, that'll have the most negative or positive impact by either not getting it done or by getting it done. It really has a huge impact. So prioritize is that third step. And now I'm ready to engage now in our process engagement means that now we're handing it to a project manager who's using a more sophisticated system to, to do the exact same thing again and to vet out the different tasks associated with those projects. But I'm not going to go into that today because I think what's most important is this part of the process. The other pieces are helpful as you scale. But for right now, if you can get this dope project process done, it'll bring so much relief. Now, so what do you do once you've done this? What do you do like the next day? I've got this beautiful spreadsheet on it. It says, this is number one, this is number two, this is number three. Well, now you have your marching orders. Like you wake up in the morning, you look and you say, what is everything I can do on number one today? Now, some of you still have day jobs, you're still in the chair, you're still doing other items that are just kind of day to day tasks. I get that. And those things have to happen. But any free time that you have, you're working on number one. Now what if you're waiting on somebody else? You know, let's say you've emailed something to a vendor and you're waiting for a response back, or you've asked an office manager to do something specific, you gotta wait and give them a little time to complete that part of the project. What do you do then? Because that's number one, you work on number two, all right, you use all your time, energy, whatever you have left over and you work on number two. And if you get that to a place where you have to wait for a little bit, you work on number three. But you really never go past the first three to five, especially if you're a smaller size. You're just not going to have enough bandwidth. You got other little tasks. Now what happens when someone comes in with a rocket issue, right? Or something else? You might have to address that if it's kind of a one day task. But if it's like another idea, I'm putting it on the spreadsheet, I'm organizing it, I'm asking myself these questions. What's really the scope of this thing? Who's the champion? Who's the specialist? When do I think that I could honestly get this done. And where do I think this fits in the priority of things? Is it more important than my number one? Well, then maybe it should move all the way up there. And now it's number one. Now I got to be careful that everything that comes in that feels urgent doesn't just trump everything else. But you'll see that in the process, if you're disciplined about this, you'll go, man, I'm just. Now I'm just reacting. I'm not even organizing. I'm just taking the squeaky wheel, right? And, you know, you've probably trained your team, because I've done this before, where whoever's the squeakiest wheel, whoever kind of is the most dramatic, whoever brings the most emotion, is the one who gets addressed that day. But this starts to eliminate that from the process. This starts to make you actually a really good, empathetic listener and say, oh, I understand that that's an issue. We do need to solve it. Let me get that documented. Let me ask you some more questions. What's the scope, etc. Another thing I like to have on my columns is, is this going to increase revenue, decrease expenses, or is it a compliance component? So increase revenue, decrease expenses, or is it something compliance oriented? And again, looking through that list as I have this on the spreadsheet starts to help me judge, wow, that really increases revenue. Or, wow, that's a compliance thing that if we don't solve, like, we could go out of business tomorrow. Or that's a compliance thing that is important, but it's not critical. Like, we're doing 95%, but there's a tweak or two that we can look at there. So each of those things on your spreadsheet starts to help you organize and prioritize at a really basic level. What we're talking about is a system for determining roi. Return on investment. If you think about it, every day we're making investments, we're making investments financially, but we're making them with our time and effort. I mean, even when you're in the chair, you're thinking through your to yourself, you know, do I do this procedure? I've got so and so waiting in the lobby. I got this going on. It's this time of the day. What is my return on investment? And is now the right time to get this completed? Well, you're applying that on a much bigger scale to your business now, which is, what is the return on investment, what is the effort, and what's the return for each of these projects Now I can tell you as an entrepreneur, what's easy to do is to come up with the return part right now. Not that we're good at it, it just feels easier to us. Like, if I asked you to explain one of your ideas, you would say, emmett, the reason this is most critical is it'll. It's an SOP that helps the staff just be so much more systemized and that'll help this happen and then we'll save the world and all of this will be much better. This helps patients to get this procedure. And if I don't go to the ce, then I'll never do this procedure. But if we did it, we could make $4 billion just me doing this procedure, right? Like that return piece. We get a lot of excitement or we get a lot of fear around. Like, if I don't do this, Emmett, tomorrow, my entire business will be gone. I will never exist again. If we don't get this done. That part of return we tend to be most excited about or scared about. The investment side, we're totally unclear about. Like, how much effort is it really going to take to get this done? Like, we might say to ourselves, hey, I just need to take the CE class and then I'll have this procedure and then I'll start doing it, and then we'll just make a bunch of money. When the reality is you'll take the CE class, there will be a bunch of equipment that you'll need to buy. You'll have staff you'll need to train. You'll have to determine where that fits in your entire flow. Are there new consent forms that you need, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Like, everything is more complicated than we give credit to. That's not usually our superpower is really understanding the investment that it's going to require. You know, I just need the front desk to do this. I'm just going to tell them, or I just need to create a quick checklist. You know, it just never really has the execution that we think it's going to have. And so really understanding the investment of things is critical to start to realize, okay, what should be number one. Now, this is the reason that once you get to engagement, you may go back and reprioritize like you might have something number one, because you perceive that it's going to increase the practice revenue by a million dollars. And it seems very easy to do. And so that's my number one, and I want to do it right now. And so you start working on that. And as you get into it, you go, this is a lot more complicated. Or you go and roll it out, you know, beta test it or not beta test it, and you roll it out and you realize it's not getting nearly the traction that you thought it was going to get. It doesn't have nearly the momentum you thought it would have. And so you go, wait, this is actually going to be a lot more work to execute on. And through those rounds, you'll start to realize what's the real investment. Or you might listen to your team more and say, what do you guys think it's really going to take to make this happen? And you might have a column for that. You might start to say, this is 100 hours worth of work. Or some other way that you kind of peg what the investment is going to be. This is going to take a lot of time from myself, another associate and the office manager, some way where you say, okay, that one's not easy. So how do I think of the return versus the investment and is it worth doing? Like, if I'm going to invest, quote, unquote, a million dollars and I'm going to get out a million dollars, I really like the idea I was going to get out a million dollars. Is the investment of a million dollars still worth it, and what does that look like versus maybe initially I thought I had to invest $2 to get my million dollars. Right. So this process of dope will help to organize everything that you have going on, dump everything on the spreadsheet, come up with columns that work well for you, and you can add to it at any time and say, you know what? One of the constraints we're running into is X. Let's make a column around that and ask ourselves, is this going to require X to get that done? Capital might be one of those things that you want to have as a column as you organize the projects and then you prioritize them. And you can use your team with this too, get their feedback. You can do it initially by yourself. You can also include your team and then as you prioritize them, this is number one, this is number two. This is number three. Now you start to engage. Now we love as an organization, to make this information as public as possible. Because we want everybody to know at the executive level, at the owner level, what is our number one. See for us as we've grown as projects, take multi departments to get them executed on. If someone goes over to accounting because they need a spreadsheet or they need some data or they need some information, if that accounting department knows that they're working on a project that's number one. They know how to engage with them and maybe drop some other things to help them out. If they know they're working on a project, that's number 10. And they have a request from the project that's number two. They know how to prioritize, and they know that that project number 10 might be constrained for a while, and that's okay. Everyone's agreed that this is number one, this is number two, this is number three, four, five, et cetera. So I hope you'll think through the power of this tool and what it will do for you personally. So many of you feel like you're behind the eight ball, that you need to hurry up, that you're running out of time. I was sitting at the DEO just recently, which, by the way, I just have to say, is one of the best organizations I've ever been a part of. And honestly, I've been going to their organization for just a long time, and now I'm integrating more and helping more. But the Dentist Entrepreneur organization ran by Jake Poole and Darren is just incredible with Dr. Moser and his team. So that's my little commercial break. But as I was sitting there, one of the doctors and one of the mastermind roundtables, as we were talking through some subject matter, said, you know, we only have five years until the multiple goes down, and so I gotta hurry as fast as possible, etc. Etc. And I've heard all of that before. I've been hearing that for the 10 years I've been in this market. And he asked, you know, what do you think about that? And I said, I hate thinking that way. And the reason I hate thinking that way is because it puts me in the wrong place as a leader. As soon as I'm anxious that I'm behind and that I'm losing, I make really poor decisions. I don't organize my tasks, I don't prioritize. And so therefore, I don't engage well. And my team feels that anxiety and stress, and we don't execute as well as we can. The team loves nothing more than a leader who is very calm and very clear on what they want to do. Let me say that again. A team loves nothing more than a calm leader who is focused and clear on what they want to do. And let me contrast that to what initially we think, which is having a leader that's coming up with brilliant ideas and innovating all the time. Yeah, they like that initially, and they love it when you can solve a problem for them, but it needs to be like their problem that you're solving. They would much rather you be very clear on where you're going, very organized, very focused, and I can tell you you'll have a more effective team as you do this process. I hope you have the courage to try this out. It'll be life changing. Some of you might already have a process like this that you're using. I'd love your feedback. And if you have something that's even better, on how you're organizing, prioritizing and engaging, how you're dumping down these ideas and then organizing, prioritizing and engaging on them, come over to our Facebook site. Post what you're doing. Let's keep learning and building from one another. You guys are awesome. You're changing the world. It's awesome to be a part of it. All right, hope you love this tool. And again, come over to our Facebook site over on DSO Secrets. And until next time, keep smiling.

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