Episode Transcript

Auto-generated transcript: Honing Your Practice Owner Skills

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. He named into a family. So happy that you are able to join us this evening. And spend some time with us. I'm Wendy Askins, Prosperident, Superbizing Examiner. My co-host this evening, our Amber Weber,

a Superbizing Examiner at Prosperident. David Harrelitt Harris, our fearless leader at Prosperident and Dr. Wayne Kerr, is joining us as a special surprise tonight. Leaving. Hi Wayne. Hey Wayne, how are you? Great to be with you tonight. What a privilege.

Thank you. So good to have you. Awesome. And it's my pleasure to introduce a guy I've known for years. He is one of the finest men to ever walk the planet in my mind. His name is Wayne Kerr. He is a former practicing dentist. He's a master of the Academy of General Dentistry,

which is a pretty elite group. He's now a teacher and educator and speaker. Wayne is hands down the coolest senior citizen I know. He's got a lifetime of experience. And we were just delighted to have him share it with us. So Wayne, it's great to have you. And we look forward your contribution tonight. If you're a great pleasure and privilege to be here.

Thank you for your very time words. There's a challenge in being a practice learner. In addition to doing good clinical dentistry, because if that part doesn't happen, nothing else is really important. You wear a lot of hats as a practice learner. And you're stretched a lot of ways. And really what we're going to do tonight is try to give you a little bit of help and some tools in handling some of these areas.

And I'm going to quote a couple of people. I'll start with Harry Truman, who said the buck stops here. And I guess another way you could put that is that crap rolls downhill and as a dental practice learner, you're going to forever live in the valley. So how do you make it work? Well, there's a business strategist who does a lot of work within us. His name is Chuck Blakeman. And Chuck wrote kind of a seminal book a number of years ago.

And the title of the book is making money as killing your business. Now, this book is not specific to dentistry, but it certainly fits. And the temptation is always to, or the trade-off, that you always make is between, I spend the next 20 minutes doing something inside somebody's mouth, or I spend the next 20 minutes doing something that runs my business. And what I'll say is that most dental practice owners suffer from a predisposition to the first one. That's the happy place. That's where you want to be.

And that makes it easy to make the decision in terms of doing something billable in the next 20 minutes. David, can I explain to you a short story? Please. So it's my first week in my first practice in 1978. I have, this is my new dental supply rep. And I leave the app at the door. And I come out.

And I spend several minutes meeting him and getting to know him. And telling him I'm looking forward to working with him through the coming years. He says, you can't be here talking to me because you're not making any money. Unless you're back in the app at the right spin on the bird and grind it down. Somebody's tooth. And I said, no, I think I will learn a great deal from you through the years with regard to new products, new techniques, new pieces of equipment that can help me perform a higher level, provide a greater level of service, being more efficient, and therefore,

or productive, and therefore more possible. And that's my story that I learned early on in my career that you got to work on your business as much as you work in your business. And that's a very important point. Absolutely. And very theoretically, everybody who's here listening to us tonight could be doing the same thing tonight. Good night. I mean, they could be spin in the bird and treating people.

Some time investments that do not directly generate you revenue are, are still vitally important. And we're going to talk about a few of those tonight. We are going to talk about a few of this. And the first one starts with accountability. That's owners accountability by the way. In my entire career in dentistry in orthodonics, it's been heavy in delegation. And I've loved that because I've been able to do so many different things within different practices and different businesses. But delegation does not need application on the part of the business owner.

The business owner still has to follow up on that's delegated task to make sure that they're being completed accurately. The very first casualty of investment is transparency. And that's Amber's quote. Oh, Amber. Listen to that again. The very first casualty of investment is transparency. I'm often baffled about what sometimes when I speak with clients and I'll ask them questions and they'll just say, I don't know. You know, and of course they didn't know the investment was happening, but there's no follow up.

And then, you know, someone once told me, you know, I ask the same question. I ask for this employee to explain these transactions to me for over a year. And she just told me, don't worry about it. I haven't taken care of. You go back in the clinic and you do your thing and let me worry about it. So again, there we see there's no transparency in the transactions that are being completed. And also, you know, we often talk about our teams being families like our daytime family and she's my work BFF, however you want to call them. But I'm baffled also how it is that there are some people who get threatened if you try to make a suggestion to them or you offer advice to them

or you ask them to train another employee so that you can do cross-training. This is an issue because in best-lers don't like for anyone to be in their space. They want to be alone and they have to be secretive and they are not transparent. But accountability starts from the top. The greatest, what's the word I'm looking for Dave? Detection is the greatest what?

What's deterrent? Detirent. Oh my gosh I failed the test. What? Detection is the greatest deterrent to investment. So if an investor feels like you're on to them or you might be detecting some issues with that, just step up and ask them that question. Because accountability starts at the top. It starts with the business owner asking questions, making the staff members aware that the business owner is looking at certain reports or they are doing a reconciliation and they're looking at what goes in the bank. And it doesn't come naturally for healthcare givers because we want to trust each other with our full hearts. We want to give our hearts to our patients