39: Upside Down Leadership as a Dental Practice Owner: Part 2

Hey, dental associates and new practice owners. Welcome to the Associates on Fire podcast, powered by Practice cfo. This is the podcast that teaches you what you never learned in dental school, the financial side of dentistry. We cover topics from planning for ownership, buying a practice, to student loans, taxes, and all things financial for the hungry to learn. Dental associate. So let's light it up.

On to chapter five. So chapter four was about personal responsibility, not blaming other people, taking on ownership. I think we've touched on that a little bit throughout this. I think I'll read one quote from the book Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink. I think is his name just a phenomenal book? In our thrive acronym on our wall, the E stands for extreme ownership. He said, once people stop making excuses and stop blaming others and take ownership of everything in their lives, they are compelled to take action to solve their problems. It is much harder to own things than it is to attempt to pass them on or to blame somebody else. And then it dies and nothing happens.

Yep, yep. But without taking on ownership, leadership will never happen.

And I love that we talked about delineating expectations clearly so people know what they are owning you. You can't really have extreme ownership without very delineated expectations of what is being owned. Okay, onto chapter five. Let go of the past and challenge your limiting belief. The lesson is leaders refuse to let yesterday hold tomorrow hostage. Tell me about that one.

It goes along with the concept of blame. And the phrase I use is leaders, don't blame leaders. Solve.

This next one then is the whole idea that we are. We operate at the level of our limiting beliefs. And so, for instance, for you to make a decision about, oh, wait a minute, I'm actually not effective in this role of both being a visionary and an integrator that had to process through you.

Had you stuck with those two mindsets and said, no, I can do them both, your practice itself would be limited. And you would find that the growth of the practice itself would be stunted because of just the dynamic that happens when you have a team that doesn't really know where they're going and why. Okay, let me give an example, Wes, of a practice that I worked with maybe five or six years ago.

A doctor who is a lot like you, very dynamic individual.

A great, great visionary oral surgeon.

Incredible individual, great leader. But he had this habit of no consistency in his practice. And so one morning they'd start at 7, one morning they'd start at 6, one morning they start at 8. One night they'd work till 5. He wanted to do this he wanted to do that. He wanted to do, you know, all these different procedures and his team was just burning out well within him. He had this belief that they could do it all.

Because he felt confident enough in himself that he could.

The reality was though, that his team needed time and space, which he mentioned to be able to actually make things happen that he had described. I'll always remember the time that I sat down with him after spending a day interviewing his team and he looked at me and just said, bob, am I gonna make it? And I said, doctor, you are, but not the way you're doing it right now, because three fourths of your team is ready to quit tomorrow.

And then we had a two hour conversation about his style and what that was creating in terms of a belief system for him as opposed to all the other styles of his team and how they weren't mixing together.

But within that two hour conversation, light bulb started to go off on his, inside himself and he started realizing that, you know what, he had a belief that said everybody is like me.

And so if I just keep pushing more of me on them, they're going to perform the same way that I'm performing. That was a limiting belief. But once the belief was dissolved and suddenly he was able to look at his team through realistic lenses, his practice took off. Because once again, you can't run faster than your leader. But once your leader really gets clear about where they're going and why and is effective in leading, amazing things happen.

Speaking of amazing things that happened, one of the most amazing things for me as again, I like to weave in my own journey here on these, in these subjects is.

As we found an integrator, which was somebody who actually originally started out as essentially my administrative assistant about seven years ago, who has just proved to be so phenomenally capable at everything given her. And so when it came to the point a couple years ago, about a year and a half ago, of deciding who will play this role as integrator, I put her forward to the partner. She's not a partner of the firm, although that is a possibility. And, and there was a lot of skepticism around it because again, she didn't have that background. Ultimately I got enough consensus to move forward with this. And now those partners who had their concerns are by and large very on board with this. But what I had to do is I sent her to the EOS conference. She's had some one on one coaching, she has an EOS mentor, she's read the books, there's various books in the EOS system and she has run with it and she is so excited about this new opportunity to be a leader herself. And now she is. I find her to be so effective that she is giving me the guardrails that I frankly need as a visionary. And she will tell me that's not on our initiative list this year. We need to park that. We can put it on the issues list, which is a separate list, sort of like a back burner list.

Right.

That we can get to as we work through these more important items. Other areas where I am so grateful for her is she's okay to be the bad cop where the bad cop is needed and I stay the good cop. One thing that I've always struggled with is having to let somebody go. It's always been the most difficult part of my job because I just love people and even when they're making mistakes and those mistakes carry on and they're not fixed. I just. They're human beings and I know they're going to go through a difficult period in their life if I have to let them go. But there are times where you have to do that and, and the EOS system is very clear about that. Especially if people aren't willing to adjust to a seat on the accountability chart if they're not willing to GWC or live up to the expectations needed. You have to let somebody go because you need everybody in this together. You do heart and soul into this thing.

Absolutely. And I'll always remember a phrase I heard years ago when we had to let some people go. With my first real management job, the CEO said we don't do anybody any favors by putting them in a position where they can't do their best.

And what I'm finding is sometimes if you hold on to a person who isn't contributing in a healthy way to the practice that other people who are absolute keepers and critical to your process, to your. To your company culture, brand delivery, everything are their stability is put in jeopardy at the company.

Exactly.

And so I've always had to remember that. So now some people may say, hey, Wes, this is a cop out. You're not the one terminating somebody when they have to let them go. Because I always did before. I just assumed that was my role. Well, she now does the termination. She works with hr and if there's a sort of compensation payout, whatever, she makes sure that we're following all of those things. Why? Because she's an executor and she's in a process and she's into making sure it's done right. And it just makes sense that way. That doesn't mean I might not go shake their hand and thank them for being here and say say goodbye. But I'm letting her do her job and then I'm doing my job. And it's so healthy to have somebody remind me what hats I wear and don't wear and have a check on my own self.

Which is kind of an example of a limiting belief that you had inside that I need to be the one that does this.

And as long as that belief was in place, then it also creates this backwater of people that shouldn't be inside your practice, but stay there because of Wes's belief that I need to be the one to do it, but I don't want to do it right. So that challenging, limiting belief, it's recognizing what they are because we, it's fascinating as people, we don't go beyond them.

But once we recognize and challenge them, that's when we're able to make change.

And there are so many limiting beliefs that I had. It's. It is a very thick list of.

We all do beliefs.

And for example, when I started to delegate clients onto some of our other advisors because I, I had to get out of the clinical at some point and at least in the style and model of my company.

Right.

In order to play this role of visionary and work with the integrator on the company systematically and growing the company and doing what I do best, which I feel like is giving people a vision of why we exist and what we do and understanding that they need. Doctors need a financial system in their life. They need a platform, a game plan, and they need sometimes some coaching on that. They need somebody sometimes to actually do the work for them so they can focus on being a visionary themselves. And that's what I love to do, is talking to prospects and clients and our team and just the market in general about. About what practice CFR does. Does for doctors.

Yeah.

One question I have for you. This is, this is now taking this concept of an integrator visionary separation of duties and applying it to a dentist who owns a practice. Let's say they're a practice that's doing maybe 1.3, 1.4 million and they have, I don't know, six, seven hygiene days and they've got their front. A couple at the front office. They may or may not have a manager. How do you recommend in your leadership coaching that they go about creating a kind of a visionary executor set role is. Is the doctor still having to play executor or integrator because it isn't a 30 person business. And if that is somebody else, how do they. Who is that and how do they train that person? Because I see it in a practice that has 25 people, there's often a true. They'll just call them office manager or maybe operations manager. Right. That person is a natural, I think, fit for that position. But what about more of a standard practice at 1.3 million with maybe a smaller. A smaller team?

Wes, what you do position is you can still maintain the role of a visionary as a dentist.

But what I recommend in that level of practice is that you've got team leads who are responsible for the different departments. So you have an assistant team lead, you have a front desk team lead, you have a hygiene team lead. They become your integrators.

Okay? And it's. Dentists have an interesting role because they're both a visionary and a producer at the same time. All right? But the concept I try to teach is that you can delegate everything off your plate except vision, direction, pace and whatever else by license or by talent should reside with you. Everything else should be given away to those that can do it better than you can. And those team leads, if you will, meet with them frequently, empower them to know the direction you want them to go on and where the practice is going, and train them as leaders. They can lift your load dramatically.

Obviously, you get up to a $2 million practice, you're probably talking about an office manager who then becomes a different person in this mix. But I still think team leads are a really important element inside any level of practice.

Agreed. And maybe the smaller it is, it gets sandwiched a little bit. But you still have team leads. I know in our case we have essentially an integrator over each department. Now, we don't call them an integrator, but they do oversee that department. And they have their own L10 meetings or their own traction meetings and their own sort of initiatives and rocks and issues. And they meet sometimes less frequently, maybe twice a month, in some cases once a month. But the point is, is that they're still meeting and they're going through the same rhythm that our.

I guess I'll call it our high level management team, which is our eos team leadership team is doing.

I think that's really valuable. And dentists, a lot of these young dentists are wanting to scale something bigger. Some of them want to have multiple offices, some of them want to grow maybe even into a dental partnership organization. If you want to really go larger and to the extent that you want to scale, I think to that extent, at some point do you have to start to even delegating clinical. Bob, go ahead and tell me if you think I'm wrong here, but if somebody wants to get to a $5 million multi specialty practice.

That in order to oversee that chaos and organize that chaos, it's almost like you need as much time being a leader as you are a clinician.

Perhaps even I think you need more to be candid.

We recently had on my last podcast was Dr. Moranju who runs a about a four and a half, $5 million multi specialty practice in loyalty. And he owns this practice 100% and it's got a number. I think it's got seven specialists who come in. He's got I think 24, 25 team members and.

He does a lot less production than a lot of my single doctor standard practices do. Doing $1.3 million. His production is fairly low, but it's been about a six year process for him to build these, these department, these team leaders, to have an office manager who kind of integrates or does a lot of the execution.

He's very, very meticulous clinicians to bring in dentists who are going to catch.

Exactly.

Yeah.

He's got SOPs, he's got it all laid out, very, very detailed and they're all used in his trainings. But that's what it takes.

I think. It is, yeah. Yeah. If that's your goal. It is. What he's literally doing is.

Getting away from the chair so he can help his team succeed.

Right. And ultimately perform in the role as the primary leader. And that's exactly what he should be doing. I mean, it's great that he's still wet fingered and that he's working clinically.

But his real value to the organization now is to leverage the human talent that he has and be able to help them become him.

Or as you say in chapter six, leaders let their team become their hands.

Correct.

And I think from a very practical standpoint, if somebody's wanting to grow to become a 3, 4, $5 million practice, there is a phasing into the role of a leader, perhaps more full time. And you're juggling again, you're wearing those hats, you're doing a lot of the clinical work in those early years, but you phase out of that. One of the challenges financially, and this is sort of my realm very specifically, is when you have somebody come and do your clinical work, you will earn less money because you're paying somebody, say 30%, 35%, whatever that is, to do what you were doing before. And your sort of associate pay for yourself is now being given to somebody else. And so there's a trade off there and a sacrifice that has to be made, I think, in the real world in order to transition a little bit out of clinical and into leadership. Now.

That can be smoothed out in different ways, but I think that's just a reality that a lot of dentists struggle to accept and is to say my income is going to go down for a period of time, it might be two years, it might be three years, that my income is actually less than it could have been. Now, in this case, Dr. Moranjo has a very good income. I know, I know his. I know his income, and he would never brag about it, but he has a better income.

He said he's. His income is higher than 100% of his production. Quite a bit higher than 100% of his production.

Why?

Because he has so many other sources of income spread throughout his company that he's been able to create processes around and almost profit centers. He's just done a great job at doing that. Okay, on to chapter seven, a total commitment to your team Success lesson Leaders create other leaders. We've sort of spoken about this one quite a bit.

Any.

Any additional thoughts you want to add to that?

Yeah, and I'm just going to play off of the client that you just talked about.

Leaders create other leaders. And how they do that is they think of themselves as a teacher.

They realize that their role is to literally help educate, train, empower, and help set up the systems that allow the team, I talked about this earlier, to have control. They don't lose control as a leader, but they have relinquished control. But they have the systems. You've got your scorecard. I mean, you know what's going on inside your practice, even though you're not the one doing it all. And that's an amazing place to be when you can finally do that.

One of the systems that I absolutely love in dentistry is Dental intel, because of the power of the information that it gives practice owners, leaders, and everybody else within the team that needs it to know what's going on and also to know what needs to happen next.

Do you think, Speaking of technology, I think Dental intel is phenomenal. Great, great technology. If you are wanting to be a good leader, because a good leader needs data and a way to measure progress against goals. And Dental intel does that quite well. Do you believe that any dentist who wants to put into practice a good leadership system, a good leadership philosophy and style in their practice? Do they need a. What I'm calling a platform platform? I always think in terms of technology, like a software platform. You have a login, there's. There's different modules and pages and functions and fields and all of that stuff that helps you get something very specific done. That's a platform. Well, business can feel very. Leadership can feel very soft. Oh, I need to inspire. I need to create vision. I need to set expectations. But do you believe that there needs to be a platform that has either a technology that can play this role for them or a set of documents that are leveraged as they roll out a leadership program? Do you have any thoughts on that? And does Upside down leadership maybe have some tools and templates that people could use?

Wes, let me clarify the question. As far as a platform goes.

I would have to say that the platform is more industry specific, but I do think that systems themselves are vital to be able to create predictability within a business and to create predictable outcomes, which is actually why we implement systems. But another platform that's needed is to be able to measure what those systems are delivering. Okay, so scorecards are absolutely vital to be able to know. I tell my clients all the time, numbers don't tell you everything, but they do tell a story. And the question is, what's the story?

And as you become familiar with, for instance, benchmarks across different financial indicators or practice indicators, suddenly you can start to compare and contrast what your practice is doing compared to other practices, which then just leads to the question of, okay, why, why are we different? Are we in? Are we out? What's taking place? And if we're out, you know, if we're way above the norm, figure out how come and how are the other guys doing it? And we can't.

Okay.

Yeah. And sorry to cut you off there.

That's fine.

I know for me, I. I don't think I could have. I don't think I could be building out a leadership program that I'm still building out. I'm not an expert on this, but I feel so much more confident in myself as a leader having this EOS platform. And the EOS is very much a platform because it has a number of templates and tools and instructions on how you lead a meeting. For example, let me give you a very clear example. We use a software called Traction Tools. The EOS system didn't have a software platform to actually run this on. They just had a bunch of PDFs and you would print out the PDFs and you'd use them for your meetings and your accountability chart and things like that. They are now coming out with their own software, but we've been using one that's been around for a few years called Traction Tools. And when we have our L10 meetings every week, the leadership team, it actually has a very specific agenda built into it. And each agenda item has an amount of time allocated to that agenda and it tells you how much time you have left. And then it goes red when you're running negative on that time. And there's a tangent button that the integrator will press when Wes starts going off in la la land about all of his great ideas. And literally on, yeah, it literally has tangent, all these stars start flying on the, on the screen to get us back on track. But when I say a platform, something like, like that has just been invaluable to me to guide. Now I know that there always has to be some flexibility for the rollout and the nuances of your business and your team and how you do things and whatnot. But, but having that, having this vto, having this Traction tools, having, I mean even down to when I have ideas that come up on my phone, I have three phone numbers and they're built into my speed dial and, and I text them and it goes directly into the Traction Tool software for personal to do's for EOs, leadership team to dos. And then just issues that I want to put on that back burner issue list. Because stuff like ideas are always coming, they're always popping all the time. And usually I'll send myself an email or something like that and get to it later, but now I can just text it right in there. But there's so many features like that all throughout the system that create for me what feels like a platform that, you know, it's like a football field. Okay. I know where the lines are, I know where I'm trying to get to. I know where the field goal is, the tuck, the end zone, the sidelines, all of that stuff. And you know, there's a referee and everything.

Yeah.

So that's been very, very helpful for me.

That's beautiful. I've never spent the manpower to be able to create something of that level, you know, with consulting.

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Clients. They're clearly things that I teach them in regards to meeting agendas and you know, problem solving methodologies and stuff like that. But nothing, nothing like that. So that's great. I love it.

But I think what's powerful about what you do though, Bob, is that it all starts with the character and the vision and the, and the, the drive of that owner that coaching the individual. If the individual isn't coached first, then none of this will happen. It doesn't matter how great of a platform you have built out. The platform is just a subsidiary to really the most important element of leadership, which is the leader, him or herself and so that's where I find that to be so valuable. And I've had a coach myself help me at different points in my own.

It's invaluable. I have too, because we all have blind sides. And it just really helps to have somebody who can help you navigate and give you confidence that where you're going is correct. Because there are bumps in the road, as you know.

There are. Let's go to chapter eight, the power of clear expectations coupled with accountability lesson. Leaders expect the best from their teams and then they lead the way. Comments on that one.

Well, that's where the thought about RJEMS came out, you know, a little bit ago. Those clear expectations are magic because they do one thing for the leader and that is they help them know what's going on inside their business. They help their team members know how they plug in and what they do. But then, as we talked about earlier, they create a cadence of accountability, which then creates traction. It creates momentum within an organization. Takes a little bit of time to get that done. But boy, the power of having that type of document to be able to roll out with your team and to use yourself is worth every second you spend with it.

How do doctors. On this note, I've thought about this a lot. How do. How do doctors, or how do leaders create those clear expectations coupled with accountability? As, as the. As the chapter is focusing on how. How do you do that without.

Making the person being led feel overwhelmed or micromanaged or pressured? Because I've had a few moments where that's been the outcome when I'm trying to set expectations with somebody.

What I found is it has to be an iterative process between the leader and the person that they're leading their team member.

I love the methodology and I got this from Covey in his book 7 Habits, Roles and Goals. It was a time management tool that he actually taught. I expanded that to expectations and metrics. The idea being instead of giving it like a job description, which frankly I don't believe in, I think they're glorified checklists that take. They have no meaning, no context. Okay. Instead, give them five or six roles and allow them to actually choose what those roles title should be and then let them. You start with what you think the goal should be, but ask them for feedback. If those roles were done superbly well, what would it look like to you? And then together talk about. And if those things are all in alignment, how would we know it? Okay, because Covey made a phrase years ago. He said, with no participation there's no buy in. That's the whole thing about the top down model is there's very little participation in decision making or in charting a course. In the upside down model there's a ton of participation. That's the type of culture that I'm actually advocating in Flip youp Focus is a culture of participation where problem solving is a joint effort and actually the leader steps back and becomes a facilitator more than a, you know, I'm going to tell you what you have to do. I'm going to facilitate this discussion so collectively we can decide how we're going to solve this problem. And when you allow people the freedom to start to chart their own course and decide what they're going to do or at least how they're going to do.

Creates a lot of momentum inside of them and they don't feel micromanaged. In fact they feel empowered.

That might be in my experience that could be one of the most important things we've talked about today that I think that one of the most important things, at least for me that you share today is.

I always view Wes role. I come up with the ideas, I delineate them out and then I say ready, go and I put them on people's laps and they go. And every time, all the way down to the staff level position at my company, every time I get together with them and it's my goal to take everybody out to lunch twice a year. Every time I get together with them and I just hear their voice tell me about their experience in their job working with me. I always learn something that I didn't know before that changes my view of what their role should be and the expectation that I have of them. And so I'm trying to.

Change my process here. When we come up with our initiatives, I sort of know where these problems are because problems surface, they start to squeak throughout the company. I'm like, okay, we've got an issue over here. It's, it's something going on over here on our accounting department that we're having. Maybe some categorizations aren't done right. Our financials are wrong. Maybe they're not something as opposed to the assets correctly. And these things have effects on taxes, they have effect on our financial planning analysis and all that. The X ray is wrong. And so I think I know what the problem is. Well, we just need to have another person review or maybe we need to go change something in our software, whatever that is. But when I go and I talk to them, I hear oh, the software is so slow because there's so much data going back eight years that sometimes you're having to leave the page and you forget to come back and update something. Just something totally unexpected like that comes up. And now it makes me say, oh, well, okay, we really have to revisit our technology here and let's go do some demos and decide on that. That's just a small example of a lesson learned for me that whenever I come up with a concept or an initiative, I need to recruit the people in that conversation who are going to be actually rolling it out on a day to day basis and also the ones who interface with that problem.

So, Wes, let me give you, let me build on that and probably give you even something that's more valuable and maybe the most valuable thing of the time we've spent together.

One of the, and just to say one of the challenges that you have is that you want to tell.

Because you've come up with the problem and you've come up with the solution, then it just makes sense to you. And so, boom, this is it. Now you guys go, go do it right.

A good friend of mine, Katherine, I tell, who's a management consultant, leaders leadership dental consultant out of California, I once heard her say in a meeting, I have learned that the question I have to ask myself is, how can I not tell them?

And I asked her later on, what do you mean by that? She said, because what I've learned is that people will defend to the death an idea that they've come up with, but they'll also fight like heck for something that they're told. Okay, so how do you merge those two things together?

Simple system. I don't know where I heard about it, but it just seems to work. And that is like this problem that you found with, you know, a need to audit more. Okay.

I've tried to teach leaders that your role in creating a participative culture is actually to be a catalyst, not the answer person.

And one way that you do that is by asking really good questions. Okay. So for instance, in this type of setting, you can go through a group problem solving session where the first thing you do is you're the facilitator, but you're not the answer person, even though you have ideas of your own. But how can you not tell them? And you start with define the goal. What is the goal of this system? What is the clear outcome that we can all agree on that this system should deliver? And put it in writing. I love the big post. It Notes, for instance, that you know can turn any room into a conference room. But you can use a whiteboard to define the goal. And once the goal is defined, everybody buys off on it. Then start off with the question, what are we doing today that's working?

What's working to help us achieve that goal? And squeeze everything out of that orange that you can. And then as a facilitator, then you create those guardrails so that you don't jump into what's not working until you finish with what's working. And then you say, okay, what's not working?

And then you squeeze as much out of that you can. But the cool thing is once you understand collectively what the goal is and what's working and you start talking about what's not working, then you keep track of, okay, therefore, what.

Who, what, how, what are we going to do different and how are we going to know that we're doing it different? And you actually energize a group around the change. But the coolest thing is they own it, not you.

That really is chapter nine, Create a culture of participation and ownership Lesson. Leaders know that participation breeds ownership, commitment and results. We hit that dead center with that comment there. I, I love that comment, Bob. It is very true that to the extent that they are involved in the kind of creation of the solution that they feel that it has their fingerprints on it. They're going to feel that ownership because they came up with it.

Exactly. Yeah.

And, and that in, in the EOS system they call that the I, the IDS phase, the identify, discuss and solve phase. And that's actually the largest portion of the agenda in our weekly meeting is to go over or IDs, these issues that are being put in the list throughout the week as we're hearing it from different people throughout, throughout the company. And one of the things that I.

Let me just object in that Wes, that I agree with that philosophy, although I think there's sometimes chronic issues that we run across that we can't get done in 10 minutes time. Just like it took you a day to create your mission statement, you know, but the process is what created the real gold. And your buy in happened through the process. Same thing happens as you see chronic issues happen day in and day out. But you need to call a timeout and really go through a process improvement exercise instead of just an ids.

Yes. Some of these issues that are just bigger, they're a bigger issue and they need buy in that's going to take, you're almost changing a process or the way something is done on a recurring.

Basis, literally, you are changing. Yeah. Yep.

That'S so. So that's chapter nine. Create a culture of participation and ownership. Chapter 10. What keeps the magic going? Appreciation and recognition. The lesson is people who feel appreciated will go above and beyond your expectations. I find that to be the case with my kids. I find that to be the case with me, and I find that to be the case with people in general and people here at practice. Cfo, any comments on that section, Bob?

Yeah, I will say from the stand, if you want to improve your leadership tomorrow, just go home and start saying thanks.

And it'll blow people away. In fact, I remember years ago having a very talented treatment coordinator from a client call me up and say, bob, I'm going to another practice. I said, tammy, you've got to be kidding me. Why? And she simply said, the doctors don't notice what I do.

You know how often that happens? A lot.

But if you'll catch people doing things right and acknowledge it either through a note, through a thank you, through a card, something. Appreciation, I believe, is what fuels the human heart. More than money, more than. More than recognition, more than title. I'll always remember years ago when I wasn't in dentistry, but I was asked to build a budget for this operational division friend and I And I took two weeks putting it together, working 14 hour days. And when it was all said and done, we got a card from our Boss with a $50 gift certificate to the best restaurant in Salt Lake.

I didn't do it because of that, but I'll always remember that it probably took him like five minutes to do it, but it lasted a lifetime.

Makes me think of my coaching my boys in tennis, where after a tournament when I just tell them what they did wrong, they feel like they are not enough, they're insufficient.

Correct.

Even though they did many things right. And I have been guilty of that and I've had to learn that the hard way. I think my older son sort of lost that motivation. Right. And he's a senior now and he's essentially not playing tennis anymore, even though this is like his moment to shine in some ways. And I let him make that choice and I support him. And now he's taking up golf and surfing a little bit more and doing these things that he wants to do on his own. And I'm great, I'll be there with you, but my 11 year old, I'm really going to focus on those things. He's doing well and just help him feel appreciated. For his effort and his own development. Because I have this book, it's kind of a Dale Carnegie how to win friends and influence people concept. It's helping other people feel appreciated. But it was written by the dad of the Bryan brothers, which are two doubles tennis players, probably the best American doubles players of all time ever. And their dad said he would always try to make comments to somebody he's talking to when his kids are around in kind of the peripheral geography and can, can overhear. And the dad would compliment their boys, his boys to somebody else, knowing that they were hearing it and that he believed and found that that just had this great effect on helping his boys have this self confident that their dad really believed this about him, that they were good players. And so I know that people are motivated by that. I am super motivated by that, of course. And, and as a company we're commonly bringing up issues that are done wrong. We're having to have discussions about things being done wrong. Absolutely diluted out almost with the things that they're doing right.

Yeah, yeah. And such a great point. Dentists are in the very same kind of world. They specialize in finding what's wrong, talking about it and then getting it solved. So they become really great problem finders. Okay.

Individually great problem solvers, but it overshadows the good things that practice is doing. So for instance, in a team meeting, I always like to lead off with what are your wins? What's going well? Because we're so good at finding what's going wrong.

That is another EOS concept. We always start every L10 with what's one good thing going on personally and in your business.

Yeah, and I think it's a correct concept that we thrive on appreciation. We thrive on.

Feeling like we are contributing to something and that it's recognized that we're making it happen.

Let's end off chapter 11. There's actually two more chapters. Chapter 11 is building culture by design or culture by design. Building something that is truly sustainable. And in chapter 12 is the unselfish organization. What does ultimate success look like? The lesson is teamwork is just the beginning. Just I think ending off on culture and what you stand for ultimately as an organization is a great ending point here. I will just start off with my thought on this. I have a brother in law who.

Is the CEO of one of the fastest growing companies on the Nasdaq and it's called the Trade Desk. And he started this company. When I met him, he was, he was without a job, living with my mother in law and I asked my, I said to my wife, I said.

This guy should marry.

Yeah, yeah. Like, I mean, it was, I was really questioning the sanity of her sister at the time. A very entrepreneur, very brilliant guy. Didn't want to be in a job just for a paycheck. And he was, you know, trying to scope and find that. That position that was going to give him a good launch. He was early out of his career an English major, and yet he's the CEO of a, of a. Wow. Of a, Of a. Of a public company. And. But I remember we were at Disneyland one time and I think he had, at that time, maybe he wasn't public yet. I think he had maybe 80 or 90 employees and he had his first round of funding. It's a, it's a ad tech company. And, and I said, what's the most important thing in your job as you, as you're growing so fast? He said, the most important thing in my job is culture. It's culture. It's. It's making this place that everybody is excited about, that they feel, they feel part of something and, and just a space of, we're changing our industry, we're changing our space, we're doing something really unique here. And so everything he was doing was about creating this, this excitement from, from shirts they would wear in the company to.

Running their meetings with excitement, to ping pong tournaments, whatever it is. You know, he just created this great culture in the company. Now they have, I think 1500 employees and they're worth $34 billion as a company. And, and I've always remembered that. Another statement I've heard from Peter Drucker, who I think is a business consultant, you may know.

Yes. Yeah. He was a very famous business.

He said, culture trumps strategy. And I thought about, I thought about that so much that if people here are believing in our mission, they're believing in themselves. They're excited and thrilled to be here. They will figure it out. Most of the time. They will put in the energy and the deliberate thought to figuring it out and doing their job really well because they want to be a part of it. And I love that concept culture by.

Design, if they're led well. And let me just throw out a couple of ideas. Wes. In a small business, culture is actually a mirror image of the founder.

All right. The culture that you've created within practice, CFO is literally you.

All right? And how I can say that is, it's, it was just fascinating to contrast like, you know, the team meeting that we had with you all A couple of days ago, I've had the opportunity to have a similar team meeting with a good friend of yours in his group who also does the same thing as you. Very different environments, very different people.

But very much a reflection of either one of you. And you're both doing great work in dentistry. Okay, fabulous work in dentistry. But it's just fascinating that to me it goes back to this idea that we've had from the beginning. If you really want to affect change in your organization, begin with yourself.

And the more change that happens inside of you, the more change is going to happen within your practice.

And that culture then becomes a living and breathing piece because people select in and out based upon how they resonate with you in particular, but also how they resonate with what's represented from you.

And people ask, what is culture? And I really just say it boils down to how it feels to be there. Okay, It's a gut level feeling of what it's like to be there. Yeah, they'll say to an mba, it's kind of a summation of the values, expectations and norms, but it just boils down to.

What'S it like. And what's it like is so much based upon who you are and in the type of entity that you've created. So to me, you know, just to Skip to chapter 12 and this whole idea that that unselfish organization.

When they see a boss, an owner who is intrinsically unselfish themselves.

That they know is there to help this whole entity succeed, that is vested in their career, that has taken the time to set clear expectations, I.e. relinquishing control without losing control, and then shows appreciation and creates a kind of cadence of letting people know that I really value you. It just creates this groundswell of people that want to be a part of you, what you built because it feels good. You know, you go back to Simon Sinek's phrase, people don't follow others because of what it does for that person. It's because of what it does for them. And that's why people then join, stay, tell their friends and deliver great results.

And in the end, you become the catalyst for greatness.

And it's really cool to see that happen. Okay, I'm going to reiterate that happen.

It is. I'm going to reiterate your book for people to know where they can get. It's on Amazon. That's where I bought it. Flip your focus. Igniting people, profits and performance through upside down leadership. Bob Spiel S P I E L Look it up, buy it. It's not expensive. It would be very a very good read for any owner of a dental practice and really anybody in general. But I highly encourage people to review it. And then, Bob, are you still doing practice management coaching or are you focusing mostly on partnerships and helping doctors find partners and going through that process?

Well, thanks to you, Wes.

I'm not doing a whole lot of practice management consulting in terms of growing that piece of my business right now, but we are very, very invested in helping practices A, find the right associate, but B, help partnerships either number one, reunify if they're starting to fracture or number two, chart their course if they're unclear where they want to go.

And that's a lot of fun to do.

There's a lot too, that I've worked with partnerships and a little counseling goes a long way with partnerships. Yeah, I love what you're doing there, Bob, and just love your style, your communication approach, your sincerity. And of course, the content in your book is has been phenomenal. Again, everybody, this is a part of our Associates on Fire program. We are likely changing, incidentally, by the way, the name of our podcast. And so much of what we discuss isn't just for associates. It's really for dentists at all point in their career. We love educating dentists. We find that that's really our approach to reaching the market is through a good, healthy education. This has been very valuable. Bob, thank you again for being here and I'm sure we'll have you on the show at some point again in the future.

Loved it. Thank you so much, Wesley.