Elite Provider Track- Build a Foundation of Success- December 2021

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Hey everyone. Welcome to the Elite Provider Track. I'm Tanya Dunlap, the managing director at Periprotect and I am thrilled to have Gary Katie from Next Level practice with us. Thank you, Gary for coming today.

Hey Tanya, nice to be here.

You and I have done this for a long time for paraprotect providers, this Elite Provider track, and it's been really successful and we decided with the grace of Dental Learning here who's welcomed us to do a different kind of a style, a podcast style program in a series of webinars to bring the Elite Provider Track to everybody else. Because it has just been a couple of years and we know, Gary, that your work has made Perio protect providers so much more successful. And we are proud to just share this with everyone else. So as we get going, this is a series. We'll be meeting once a month on Friday afternoons and we'll be going through your book, Million Dollar Dentistry.

Oh yeah.

And if you who are watching, if you have not yet gotten a copy of this, it's in the handouts, you're welcome to download it. Today we're going to be talking about chapter one, which is about getting a little bit of control over the chaos. And in this book, Gary, you talk about a dentist and you know, the day in the life of a dentist who's living in chaos. Right. And let's throw the pandemic on that. That's made it a little harder. But the whole goal of this book is to help doctors focus on what they love about dentistry, right. And to give them a plan to make it better. Talk a little bit about this, please.

Yeah, you bet. You know, I created a fictional character, Dr. Larry Laser Guy, and his wife Lisa, of course, and Lisa Laser Guy. And they are fictional characters that really make up 80% of the dentists that, you know, I've seen over my 25 years and over 6,000 practices that we work directly with. And they, you know, I find that dentists were ill equipped to leave dental school and become a business owner. And really, you know, how do you empower your team how do you be more profitable? How do you have the free time to enjoy it? How do you engage your team? And, you know, there's just all this complication and chaos, and I call it webinar fatigue. That's why we're not going to be slinging patterns, PowerPoints and slides here, because we want to get. We want to roll up our sleeves and give our audience and our group, our followers here, practical information, simple information, easy to digest, and go, I can take that right now and go use it. And we're going to do that over our residency here at Dental Learning center, which is going to be a blast. And we're doing it on Fridays because it's relaxed space for most doctors. They can come in and just relax. And on the West coast, it's 9am and East coast, and you're going to just have fun. We're going to have fun. We're going to make it simple and easy to understand. So we're going to dive right in. And, you know, what you can count on are three things from the work that Tanya and I are going to do. You know, we believe that caring and dedicated dentists deserve three primary things. Number one, debt, freedom. You know, this burden of money and this mountain of money can get handled by following the systematic process. The second thing, frustration, freedom. You know, the things that you're uncertain about, the things that you're grappling with, like hiring people or you hired people, now you got to train them. And like all the acute things and the stuff that's been really nagging at you, you know, they're going to be addressed here. And the last thing is you're going to have the time to enjoy it. And those three things, those three promises, debt, freedom, frustration freedom, and free time to enjoy it, is what we're going to go do. So let's do it, Tanya.

Let's do it. Every episode is a different chapter. Today. Our learning objectives is to get out of the chaos, just acknowledge that it's there, and start to think about making a plan to get out of it. We are going to talk a bit about effective communication, primarily with the team and to patients, so that you can set a standard of care that makes case presentation smoother and patient acceptance easier. And then finally, we're going to do a little bit about leadership, because you are so excellent, Gary, at trying to help people like Larry Laser Guy in the book, become really effective leaders in their practice. And I, I talk to a lot of dentists. I try to get to 100 dentists a week. And there's webinar fatigue out there that people are just tired in general and they know that they want to do something different with their practice. Right. We're in a new kind of world here. When they know they want to do something different, they know they want to do it better. 2022 around the corner is a good time to be thinking about it. And you have always focused on using hygiene as the driver of a practice and reverse engineering. So can you talk a bit about that?

Yeah. The engine that drives a practice is our hygiene department. And one of the key things about the hygiene department it really, if you want to scale, if you want to grow, if you want more time off, if you want all the things that you want, if you don't have your engine built in a GP office, that being hygiene, it's very difficult because then you're relying on your hands only to be profitable or to do the patient education or to engage the patients. And the most trusted people in a dental office are the dental assistant and the hygienist. Yes. Men and women that are dentists. I know that you think you're trusted and I know that you're probably caring, loving and. No, I know you are. But when people. I tell people what I do in the industry I'm in, they go, I. I love going to hygiene, but I hate talking to the dentist because then I'm going to find out what's wrong with me and then they're going to charge me and it's going to hurt, you know, all those things. So we're going to transform this. And when you give people what they want first, then you can give them what they need. And that's really the game strategy that we're going to talk about. And we're going to talk about, really how to build a foundationally solid hygiene department, even in the face of not being able to hire a hygienist, or if you have one, being able to bring them up to speed very simply and easily, to have the whole practice run extremely well.

Right. And it's not just. You're just going to make a change. Right. There's a formula here and we're going to unpack part of the formula over the series. But the point of reverse engineering is to get higher case acceptance. Right. Higher income, more income and a more motivated team. Do you want to talk a little bit about the chaos model and how to break free from that?

Yeah. Because here's the thing. Information, Tanya, without implementation, has no value.

Zero.

And this is why we're dealing with webinar fatigue because doctors are only looking at if I get more information or the right information, then my life's going to turn out. I'm going to unpack in two minutes or less. The chaos model. And once you understand the chaos model and. And why it exists, how to break free and to progress, this is at the heart of transformation and implementation. So I'm going to share with you now. I'm going to break out the old iPad, and I'm going to draw it for you. Because we process analog, not digitally. So slow. So the first thing to know about the chaos model is something called the comfort zone. So we have the comfort zone, right? And that's where we like to reside. Right? So inside the comfort zone. Now, why is it the comfort zone? Because we know where we're working, we know who's being with us, and then everything is tied together. We know our job, we know where we work, we know the people we work with. We know how patients respond. Now I'm going to draw this. And this on the outside is the progression zone, the progress zone. But what's in the middle? Chaos. We got chaos in the middle. Now, to break free from chaos, first you have to understand what it is. So we're going to give you a way to launch through this. So how do you launch through it? Well, in chaos, the reason why it's chaos is you don't know the pattern and you don't know the parts. If you don't know the parts and you don't know the pattern, you don't know how to do it. And if you don't know how to connect all those parts, that's where this residency we have here and what we call the launch program. You're going to have the ability to really meet with me for a half hour, and I'll be able to go through the chaos that you have. You'll be able to tell your story, and you'll be able to bust free from your comfort zone and then understand what it's going to take to walk out and move you into progression. Progression is that outside zone. And that's where all the fruits of your labor reside. Your profitability, the freedom around frustrations, all that stuff. But that line doesn't get there unless you understand the chaos. And we're going to keep unpacking it and breaking it down for everybody each time we go through the process. So strap yourself in. Here we go. That's the chaos model. Now you have an understanding of how to break free from Fear. So let's dig in and dive in. Let's do it.

Yeah. So one of the first things that you recommend for a million dollar hygiene department, really, this is a way to break through, and there's a systematic way to do this, is to use a healthy mouth baseline. I'm going to show an example of a healthy mouth baseline. But the point of all of this is really to make sure that you can educate patients more easily. Right. You can get better case acceptance. So you'll increase your profits and your revenues and to make sure that the patients and the team are all on the same page. Because let's face it, patients don't really know what's healthy and not healthy. They know what hurts and what doesn't. They know what looks good and what doesn't to them, but they don't really know what's healthy. So this is an excellent tool that you developed that I'm really excited for you to share with the group today.

Yeah. I was born on Croton, on the Hudson, New York City, outside of New York City. And this was created because doctors wanted to get off insurance. Doctors wanted to bring on associates. Doctors wanted their patients to accept treatment. Like you said, doctors don't like to be salespeople. Doctors want patients to listen to what they have to say, understand it, and say, yes, I want to do something about that. There was nothing that existed that did that because the fundamentals of educating and having somebody buy were missing. So I invented this process called the healthy mouth baseline. And it's used chairside as an interactive tool. So once it's built and everybody will have a sample of it here, you'll be able to actually put it up on your TVs or your monitors. And when the patient sits down, you begin the process and set context and purpose for each meeting. You know, the other thing that this takes on is a lot of hygienists are awesome at relating to the patient. The problem is they send up, they end up talking about Johnny's soccer game and what's going on in the community, but they're not talking about a systematic approach to educating patients so that they invest in treatment. Now, one of the key things here is as we go through the healthy mouth baseline, it's a way to simply introduce it and add value immediately. So the chair side presentation is. Mrs. Smith, I know you've been coming to us for 100 years and we appreciate that. And what we realized is our patients don't understand what a healthy mouth is. They're not clear about what it is. So we got together as a team. Dr. Jones said we should get together. We laid it all out. And what we have here is the basics of what's healthy. And what we're going to do is, as I go through today's appointment with you, we're going to see, first, I'm going to let you know what's healthy. Then we're going to see what's healthy and what's not. And then I'm going to let you know the different opportunities that you have to take care of that. How does that sound? And then you get feedback and permission. They step right in, and this begins the education. Now, you have a structure for education, and it is a game changer as it relates to. To the difference to having patients be sold or patients invest in the care that they know they need, not that you tell them they need. Tanya, do you like to be told what to do?

No.

No one does. And consider the minute you tell people what to do, the game's over. Here's the other place that the game's over. If you're not using this, what typically happens, Tanya, what happens when a practitioner walks in and a patient's sitting there? What questions do they usually ask?

How are you doing today? Does anything hurt?

Exactly.

Do you have any concerns?

Exactly. And here's what you do in this moment. Your game's over. That is Ms. Pac man for the millennials out there, if you haven't heard what that sounds like. Come on. That was my dad joke of the day.

It was pretty good.

You gotta laugh at my stuff. Come on. Hey, but here's the thing. If you're a symptom fighter and it's not your fault because you were trained in dental school or hygiene school or assisting school to find the chief complaint, search what it is. And then once you search it out, they tell you, here's the problem. It creates a dysfunction where doctors and hygienists and team members lose their power because they're having the patient dictate what to be treated.

Right.

Huge problem. Now, here's what it does. It creates only 28% case acceptance. 2, 8. And in patient retention is 22%. Very low in terms of building a practice, especially post pandemic. So all the pandemic did was highlight the areas of inefficiency and the areas that need to be corrected. If you don't correct these things, you're going to end up. There's two types of dental teams right now. Those that are trying to get to pre pandemic levels and those that are breaking records. And this is not. I'm not blowing air here.

This is.

There's a divide going on because I look at P&LS, I look at measures, I look at metrics. 20 a week, at least. And this is what's going on. And this is the game changer right here.

Tanya, this game changer. If you guys want a copy of it, it's in your handouts. You can download it, give you a good idea and you can follow along. It has worked so well for perio protect providers that we built a little bit on it. Gary, we've been working together for years. I have gleaned so much wisdom from you and from your coaches because you have the complete package here for dental practices who really want to make it a good change. But under that headline there, how healthy is your mouth? We added or. Dr. Michelle Hucky and Liz Affuente. This is their office. What's your number? This is another good way to, like, raise awareness without telling patients what to do. What. Your number refers to your number of bleeding points. So at periprotect, if you're not already a periprotect provider, we offer prescription trays that deliver medication really deep. Patients wear them at home. It's excellent home care, 10 to 15 minutes at a time. It is a great way to reduce pocket depths, but really we shine in decreasing bleeding and inflammation. You already collect the data. You already know. You should already be collecting the data. Patients should know their bleeding points. Pick a number. Pick a number that you think is healthy. I don't think you can get everybody to zero, but let's say it's 10. If the patients are 10 or higher, you start talking to them about better home care and that better home care is not necessarily better. Brushing and flossing, because if they already have pockets, toothbrush and floss just don't get deep enough. Neither do rinses. So you start talking to them about it and you set up a way, it's a system to begin to implement this new home care therapy so that they can get healthier. And if you have this standard just in the same way for the healthy mouth, baseline, Gary, you have a standard of what's healthy and what's not. If it's not healthy, then what's the natural question?

What'd you like? What do I do?

What do I. What do you recommend? Right. What do you recommend now?

Also, Tanya, if somebody says, how much is it? Or does my insurance cover it at this point, after they've Engaged in it. And then they ask, then you've done your job at engaging them and now they're buying. And now in their head they're trying to figure it out. But if they say do whatever my insurance covers before you've set this as a benchmark, they're just saying, I don't think I need it do do whatever it covers because there's no skin off my back. And they just throw insurance at it to go away because they don't want to tell the truth that you didn't create value for me in my mind.

Yeah. And sometimes they'll ask that, sometimes they'll say, you know, it depends on how much work they need. Some people are going to show up and they need a crown, three fillings and you know, you're concerned lumps you found in their mouth. I mean there's a lot of things that are going on in dentistry and especially because people have avoided care for a while. But at least they can walk away with this. You can put it on the screen, you can print it out for them, but they walk away knowing the areas of concern. And this is really important, everybody. Because gum disease, for example, is one of the most under diagnosed diseases across across the globe. And it shouldn't be. People can't make educated decisions about their care if they don't even know their situation, they don't know their diagnosis. And the sooner we can intervene, the better off for your patients. Right, and let's just talk about some of the new data that came out related to the pandemic chronic inflammation like gum disease, they believe is contributing to the severity of COVID This matters. People's people are better educated at this point and it really does help. So Gary, this healthy mouth baseline can be implemented immediately in any practice. Right. And you have been a longtime advocate for focusing on existing patients. We know we need new patients, but you don't have to go out with an expensive plan and get new patients. Why not?

Because most practices and those that want to get that keep saying want to get to pre pandemic levels. And those that are wanting to break records this year goes back to a new strategy. See, one strategy can trump a thousand tactical things that you can put in your practice. This strategy is very simple. We call it our care system. It's CA is the acronym Case acceptance Increasing that using this retention is the R, excuse me, and the E is the experience and acquisition of new patients. So if you don't take care of the first two and you're trying to make it up with new patients, you can't outrun that. You cannot outrun that because it's an inefficient model. You put in a patient that you bring in that costs 3 to $500, 22% of them come back twice. The way to cut your marketing expense in half is have the patient come back twice and then really cut your marketing expense down by having them invest in care. Now, the value of a patient. Let's just do some quick numbers here. Let's say 2 profis 2 exam set of bitewings is 150 on average times 2 is 300. Now the old percentage is 22% of people coming back twice. That's mind blowing for doctors. You know, I'm going to offer a half hour with me and we'll talk about, I'll plug into your dentrix, Eaglesoft or open dental and I'll show you exactly what your perio percentage is. It's a game changer and a big eye opener for docs when they look at that. And when we do that, Tanya, it's like 8% of people are in advanced perio, 4% are treating it. And this is the root cause. When you can add this value, the patient will come back because it's not just a cleaning. It's not only for their oral health, but the impact that it has on their overall health. And we'll get, in future sessions, we'll get into what is complete health dentistry. How do you educate not only and raise the value proposition not only in the oral range, oral scope of things, but really in the whole body impact. And that really raises the value proposition which increases the value of dentistry and soft tissue care and decreases the patient's need to say, do whatever my insurance covers or I don't have the money for that. Right. So just, yeah, just to finish this model up, it's $300 in hygiene revenue minimally. And then when you're there, the patient can't understand treatment and get it accepted if they don't show up in hygiene. So the foundation of this model is get them back in hygiene twice when they're there. Put a patient education system in so that they invest at least the value of a crown annually. So let's just say that's 8. Let's say it's $700. 700 plus 300 is 1000, the average annual value of an adult on average. Again, I'm not saying that if there's no care there, obviously, but minimally. That's with the healthy mouth baseline. When we do this healthy mouth, baseline exercise with dental teams. And they say, I asked them how many of your patients are completely healthy hygienisae two people. And doctors say 20% of my patients. So the bottom line is there's more enough dentistry. And so if you take a thousand patients multiplied times 2,000 patients of record, that's $2 million. I talked to this, I talked to a doctor and they'll say, look, oh, I'm doing about 750, and they have the potential without new patients to do over $2 million. It's mind blowing for them.

Usually it is. And this is how you improve communication, right? This simple tool helps communication and communicate value to patients also. So, Gary, leaders, let's talk about leadership because this is super important. So the, it's always the doctor's responsibility, right, to make the practice be successful or not. But you also advocate that. You take, you make decisions, but you also decentralize the doctor. Talk about that. Because that's a kind of an unusual way to think about this.

Yeah, this is mind blowing for a lot of docs. Most docs are in the center of their business. Just to give you some examples. Like they're a leader, a manager, and like, you know, they're usually like, they don't have a person that has something between them as the business owner and their team. So in later sessions, I'm going to actually set up a reverse engineering system so that you can design your life, not default into it. And here's what I mean by that. We will sit down and you'll figure out how much money you want to make and how much time you want to give to it. So if you want to reduce down from four to three days, if you want to increase your time off from two to four to six to 12 weeks, that gives you the algorithm for how much you need to do per annum, per month, per day. And then watch this buy position. Here's what's missing in dental practices, there's no measure per day that's tied to what the doctor wants, how much money they want to make and how much time they want to spend doing it. Therefore, if you don't know what that number is, you can't hand it to a measure to a team member. Here's what happens when you hand a measure to a team member. They go, oh my gosh, well, how do I go about doing that? And now you just like we flipped the script for the patient buying. For those doctors that are having a challenge getting their team on board to do what they want Instead of delegating tasks, then you have to be a micromanager, delegate outcomes and help them get to that outcome and build a reward system. This is all described in my book, Million Dollar Dentistry. But I want to begin to give you the strategies and concepts. Remember, this one strategy trumps a thousand tactics. A lot of people are looking for tactics, these little nuggets, and they think that's going to transform their practice. What you want to begin to look for is one strategy that changes everything. And this is how you decentralize yourself and not be in the middle of your practice. And for those doctors that want two and three, four units, those doctors that want to take time off and have their practice run and not be there, this is how you go about doing it, right?

And if you want to work with Gary directly, this is the beautiful part about working with you. Gary, we appreciate your generosity. You can reach out and have just a 30 minute conversation with him and start talking about what your goals are, what you want to do. And we're, we just have five minutes left. This is super fast in these, in these episodes. So if you have questions, we would love for you to open up the chat and start letting some of these, some of your questions come through. Know that we will also be able to expand on a lot of these concepts as we're going forward.

What do we got, Tanya? They're coming in. Yep, got a few good ones there.

You're opening them up. So, Gary, how long does it normally take? This is hard to say, but you've got to practice with two doctors and three hygienists, right? How long do you expect it to take for them to start to really get some of these fundamental changes?

Yeah, it's really funny, you know, when I ask somebody how long it took for them to quit smoking, they usually say 15 years. They'll say like 15 years, right? How long? And I said, no, you quit smoking the moment you chose to quit smoking. And see, that's what happens here. When you choose to make the unacceptable, unacceptable, you start the energy change, the sea change that's going to happen. See, most people think you have to build something or do something to change. No, the minute you say, I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired, that is the minute all change happens. Because what's happened is I have a lot of docs that are like, negative, naturally dreading in survival, in fear, in avoidance. The minute you take your head out of that, the minute you look up, the minute you start changing what's going to Happen is when you walk in in the morning, all of a sudden you're going to have a different reaction to how your team's going to. And leaders, here's the definition of leadership. You go first. You go first. So the minute you shift, all of a sudden the universe around you, and this isn't woo woo stuff, Tanya, the universe, meaning the people, the things, the patterns that I showed you in the chaos model, start getting connected to the future. And here's the other thing. If you lost your passion for dentistry once you commit to something different than what you're doing now, your future gives you your present way of being. Your being is defined as how you show up for yourself and others. The day before going on vacation. Don't you get a lot of things done the day before you go on vacation? Aren't you a lot happier? Because tomorrow is going to be better than yesterday. Now here's the deal. You're on vacation, you're in paradise and tomorrow you're going back to work. You're miserable on vacation. Therefore, how long does this take? The minute you choose, because it's your choice to step into the future that changes, starts all the changes. And people line up with you. Rather than you lining up with the pandemic, lining up with your team's feelings and thoughts lining up with that, they start lining up with you and you change the way you interface. So doctors report the minute they make the choice is when it starts.

Thank you, Gary. We've got a question here about where you might find other examples of this healthy mouth baseline. And I think you've got them, if they just scan this code here, they've got access to, to it on that landing page. So that's another good way to work. And then in your book, I know you talk about this being like a guarantee. Like you, if they follow the model and they start with you, you want to talk a bit about that as a guarantee, what does that mean?

Yeah, what that means is I never want to take a dollar of a dentist money or a minute of their time if I can't help them. And what happens is I don't, I want to put, I want to take the risk and responsibility, not put it on the dentist. So that's why I do these calls. We don't get into anything, there's no obligation. I, I listen to the dentist story in a very, very safe, non judgmental way. Tanya, here's what makes this special. They're not listened to usually, Usually they'll go to their spouse and their spouse goes get on, get off your butt and go get it done and blah blah blah and there's all that kind of stuff going on or they don't know and they're trying to secretly figure it out on their own. And when I'm a very safe person because like I don't have it all handled. You know, I'm 13 years sober, my son had autism, I had workaholism, I'm a very broken down person that got built back up and so I have a very humble safe space and it gives permission for people to really tell me their story. And when they do that and then I listen to them and I give them a plan, they're just blown away because they've been talking about the weather and avoidance up here and they get really straight about it. And I'm the type of guy that I haven't done all this work for 25 plus years by taking doctors time and money. So they love if I can help my tell them if I can't I give them direction on where to go to get help.

Well thank you Gary. We're going to end our first episode. There are a few other questions here we're not going to be able to get to, but we will reply to you directly. Our next episode is a Friday in January. You'll be getting some emails about it and I look forward to it. Gary, you are excellent at helping doctors and teams recapture their enthusiasm for dentistry. So thanks for starting this series off and for committing to it through dental learning. We really appreciate you.

Thank you. Thanks everybody. Have a great holiday and we'll see you after the first of the year. Make it your best.

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