As 2021 began, dentistry was emerging from one of the most disruptive periods in its history. The pandemic had shuttered practices, altered patient behavior, strained teams, and created extraordinary financial uncertainty — but it had also opened up new opportunities for practice owners willing to adapt and lead. In this forward-looking episode, Prosperident's Wendy Askins, Amber Weber, and David Harris are joined by Kirk Behrendt, CEO of ACT Dental, to discuss where dentistry stands and how practice owners can seize the moment.
Kirk Behrendt is one of dentistry's most energetic and insightful practice coaches, known for his ability to help dental teams reconnect with their purpose and build practices they love. His message coming into 2021 was one of optimism, strategy, and focused action.
Topics covered include:
About Kirk Behrendt: Kirk is the CEO of ACT Dental, a leading dental practice coaching organization dedicated to helping dentists build better practices and better lives. Visit www.actdental.com to learn more about his work.
To learn more about protecting your practice from embezzlement, visit www.prosperident.com, www.dentalembezzlement.com, or call 888-398-2327. Schedule a consultation at www.prosperident.com/meetwithdavid.
Timestamps:
0:00 - Introduction / Show open
4:05 - The state of dental practice as the profession emerged from pandemic disrup
16:00 - The specific opportunities that the post-pandemic environment created for d
24:00 - How to reset and rebuild team culture after a period of intense stress
32:00 - The practice metrics that matter most as production ramps back up
40:00 - Leadership lessons from the pandemic
48:00 - How to think about growth, investment, and capacity in an uncertain environ
59:17 - The financial oversight habits that protect practices during periods of rap
1:08:29 - Kirk's framework for building a practice with intention and joy
1:17:41 - Closing / How to contact Prosperident
Auto-generated transcript: Hello, 2021: Full Steam Ahead
You are listening to the dental practice owner's podcast. Brought to you by Prosperident. From our unique perspective as dentistry's and bezel-lit experts, Prosperident's team can bring you the information that is important to practice owners. The dental practice owner's podcast brings you strategies, tools and tips that you can use, and dentistry's thought leaders as guests.
So sit back, relax, and listen to Prosperident's Amber Weber. Wendy Askins and David Harris. Talk about the issues that matter to you.
Friends, I am so honored to be the first Prosperident representative to tell you happy new year. I hope you're all doing well, and thank you so much for joining us this evening. My name is Wendy Askins, and I'm the supervising examiner for Prosperident. My co-hostess is Amber Weber, and she's also a fellow Texan of mine. Amber is the Senior Fraud Examiner, and then we are joined by our fearless leader and CEO of Prosperident, David Harris from Halthax, Canada.
We're thrilled that you have joined us this evening to go full steam ahead in 2021, and we've even got a special guest joining us this evening. So Amber, why don't you get us started? So, both of them have had 2021. We want to give you some great information about moving forward this year. As a company, Prosperident is best known for investigating and development, and we love the opportunity to help owners establish protective systems for their practice. So we want to help you even if, and development isn't occurring,
we have decades of experience, and all of our great experts, we come from many different fields of dentistry. So we have a lot of background and expertise that we can, we come together and help you as the practice owners, people who work in practices, people who have interaction with dental practices, we want those practices to be as safe and protected as possible, because we truly do love the field of dentistry. Our background and experience with many different types of specialists and different people in the dental industry has given us so many opportunities and windows into hundreds of successful
practices annually. So we want to be able to deliver as much information to those of you that we haven't got to work with yet. And now let's introduce our special guest for tonight. His name is Kirk Barron. Kirk is a lot of things. He's the CEO of a company called Act Digital that provides terrific consulting to people. He also hosts something.
I've been privileged to be on a few times called the best practice as show. And I did an episode with Kirk the other day and it was fun. We just laughed and carried on and it was a ball. So we are so honored to have him with us today. He's got amazing ideas about how to make your practice the best it can be. And I really look forward to what he has to say. So let's talk about the state of the world that we're in right now. You know, this past year was so bad.
I just feel like I'm blessed even if I'm alive. And I still have a roof over my hand and I have a job that I love. Sometimes you just have to get down to basics with gratitude and like gratitude, your heart. But anyway, let's talk about what the ADA says the state or the financial state of dentistry is as of about the middle of December. Now the health policy institute of the ADA conducted polling for several months last year after the COVID crisis began. And they actually had two parts of polling.
One was the recovery and renewal polling for the business of dentistry. If that's what you want to call it. And then they also had a consumer poll asking just regular everyday consumers of dentistry. How they felt about the safety of being in the dental office. And what they found out and what they published as of the middle of December is that the good news is that the 99% of dental offices are now open. A little bit less than 40, I'm sorry, a little bit less than half of the business is recorded business as usual. Ironically, as far as patient volume is concerned and adonics and oral surgeons reported the highest patient volume.
And we're going to do something a little bit different in this webinar. And since we have our gas curve, what we're going to do is we're going to have a little discussion at the end of each slide. So that we can have some other ideas about the points that we're trying to make. And one thing I'd like to hear is what you guys on the panel think about why endodonics and oral surgery happened to be like, I'm not a patient volume, that seems a little odd to me, but we'll get around to discussing that in just a moment. Anyway, there were major enterprises that responded to the polling. And commented that they were about 22% down from pre-COVID patient volumes, which honestly, if you think about what we had to go through last year as an industry, just being down 22% is not that bad. I've heard, you know, some estimates of 40 to 50% down, but thank God, it's just 22% of pre-COVID volume.
Now on the consumer side, what we're seeing is 86% of pollsters said that they had either number one, then an adonol office, since COVID started happening, or number two, they would have no hesitation into going into an adonol office. So that's 86%. So we're doing pretty good there, but there are still those patients who are concerned with their health about 14%. And they're going to hold off until a vaccine is readily available to them. And then as employers and employees, what we see is that employment is at almost 100% of what it was pre-COVID, which is awesome as well. So for our panelists, some of the questions that I have, and you guys can just answer randomly about what you think about this, in the report, it also stated that only 1% of the practices are offering point of care, rapid COVID testing. Do any of you happen to think that that's going to be an issue for... for dentistry, are we gonna have to start offering that? Wendy, I think it's the vaccine rolls out
that's gonna get less important. Do you mean what comes across from some of this, is that most people rightly believe that dentistry is safe that they can get dental treatment. And I remember when COVID first flared up, you asked about the oral surgeons and the endodontists. And I guess my theory is there sort of the least elective end of dentistry.
Usually when somebody needs the endodontists, they either need the endodontistory or paintails. So I think that's why, but I think dentistry's done a great job of reassuring the public that you're safe in our care. Yeah, another question. And I hope the endodontists and oral surgeons in our audience don't take offense to them.
But I totally get what you're saying. Another correlation that I've made, which is interesting is a possible opportunity with the fact that we're almost at 100% employment, pre-COVID employment, but yet we're still at 78% of patient volume. What type of opportunities do you think that's ringing? Yeah, can I chime in here just a little bit?
