Practice Autonomy Podcast

The Storm has Arrived for Private Dentistry

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 05:00:00 -0400

Back in 2011, I gave a lecture called “The Coming Storm for Dentistry.”

I warned that insurance companies would choke reimbursements while corporate dentistry scaled up and swallowed private practices.

Fourteen years later… well, here we are.

In this week’s Practice Autonomy Podcast, we open that time capsule and compare those predictions to the real 2025 data — and it’s chillingly accurate:

🦷 PPO reimbursements are lower than last year for one-third of dentists.

💰 Overhead is rising faster than collections.

DSOs now employ more than 1 in 4 new grads, backed by billions in private equity.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. I also share the same three-part counter-strategy that still works today:

1️⃣ Get Bigger – Build multiple sources of new-patient flow.

2️⃣ Get Faster – Run your practice with precision systems that out-produce corporate offices.

3️⃣ Get Stronger – Align your team so you can move faster than any DSO.

If you’ve felt that “Viking raid” from corporate recruiters or insurance clawbacks, this episode will hit home — and give you a roadmap to fight back.

Stay independent, stay sharp, stay private

How to Develop Superstar Staff, Discover Their Secrets, and Keep Them Happy

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 05:00:00 -0400

Staff has gotten so expensive. It's so expensive to keep good team members that any successful dentist knows it is the #1 item on the P&L by far these days.

And yet, it's so important to keep those key players.

The success or failure of a dental practice is overwhelmingly dependent on its staff, who function as the critical intermediary between the doctor and the patient.

A significant portion of patients place more trust in the opinions and expertise of the staff than in those of the doctor.

To achieve peak performance, doctors must understand the unique motivations, perspectives, and "secrets" of their staff members.

Uncovering these underlying factors is essential for breaking down barriers to productivity, resolving internal conflicts, and fully implementing the practice's vision.

Get Dental Staff Secrets Mindmap Here

How to Take an Extra Day Off Every Week and Produce the Same

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 05:00:00 -0400

Most of us waste a ton of time each day.

I'm not asking any dentist to rush through any procedure or exam.

You should demand excellence for yourself every second of every day.

But, you're kidding yourself if you think you're not wasting time.

My theory is that if you are taking a day away from your family to be at the dental office, you should make every second count.

What I believe you will find is that you can absolutely be as productive while working less if you put your mind, heart, and soul into that pursuit.

If you pull this off, you'll basically give yourself a vacation every single week.

Imagine how much your family will appreciate that!

In this episode I lay out the basic concepts that allow this to happen.

See what you think and let me know.

Behind the Scenes of the Last Bootcamp - So you want to be a dental speaker?

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 05:00:00 -0400

20 Bootcamps in 5 years. Enough was enough. It was time to move on....

But, it was a ton of fun and also super challenging.

I'll share what made it great and what some dentists do to try to make your life miserable if you put on courses to try to help them.

The REAL life of a dental speaker isn't what you think it may be.

Here's what the Practice Autonomy Podcast is all about.

Each episode, you'll hear proven systems, strategies, and stories that help you cut insurance dependence, streamline your workflows, bring more work in-house, and protect one main thing as a private practice dentist, your freedom.

Dentists Need More Practice Autonomy Now Before It's Too Late

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 05:00:00 -0400

Here's what the Practice Autonomy is all about.

Rising from the Ashes of Your Dental Practice: 12 Steps to Rebuild after Catastrophe Strikes

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 05:00:00 -0400

Current events are full of crisis events that affect so many, dentists included.

In 2013 a lightning strike started a fire that burned down my dental practice.

4 months later I delivered a lecture on how we responded to the crisis in 12 steps.

While some things have changed, the principles and many of the action items are uniquely appropriate for any dentist who finds themselves in the midst of catastrophe.

Or, any dentist who knows how lucky they have been to avoid disaster and wants to prepare before it's too late.

3 Types of Crowns You Can 3D Print in Your Dental Practice

Thu, 20 Apr 2023 05:00:00 -0400

CAD/CAM milling technology including CEREC is dying on the vine.

The march to 3D printed crowns is underway and if you get in on the front end of the bandwagon, you can save tons of overhead on your lab bills.

There are 3 Big Ways to 3D print crowns right now.

Listen up and catch the wave of the future before most dentists know what hit them.

Go to 3DPA.org for a free report:

3 Big Mistakes Most Dentists Make When they Consider 3D Printing

3 Most Profitable 3D Printing Procedures for Dentists

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0400

Some of the things dentists rave over as they add 3D Printing to their practice are really cool, but don't exactly move the needle when it comes to ROI.

Then, there are a small few that pay the way for everything else the super techy nerd gene that all dentists have (myself included).

Today we're going to talk about the procedures that will pay off your initial investment the fastest.

After you pay that off, you will have a lot of choices on what to do with the profit.

One of the best things I have seen is to lower your fees to patients so that both you and your patients have a big win from this.

Plus, you will be securing your practice by insourcing at a time when sending out labwork can be dicey to say the least.

Getting Started in 3D Printing at Your Practice from Scratch – 3 Simple Ways

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 09:00:00 -0400

You realize you need to start 3D printing.

You're busy. We're all busy. But...

You realize you need to start 3D printing for all the amazing reasons you're hearing and reading about.

What is the easiest and simplest way to start from absolute zero?

Here are the 3 simplest ways to start printing and realize the power of what it can open in your practice.

Get more free 3D printing resources at 3dpa.org

3 Case Acceptance Problems that 3D Printing Solves for Dentists

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0400

Case acceptance and case presentation problems are rampant in our profession.

Is it us or is it the patients who get in the way of them getting optimal care?

Maybe it's a little bit of both, but luckily things are getting easier.

3D Printing can break down some of the biggest barriers that cause "empty chair" syndrome.

After you listen to this episode you will want to go on over to the 3D Printing Association website and get our free resources to help you get started.

www.3DPA.org

How 3D Printing Can Help Build Your Practice During a Recession

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0400

Will we, won't we...

Are we going to have a recession, who knows?

The "Experts" all say we will. But, most dentists I know haven't seen it yet.

Still, if there was a way to improve your practice overall while securing your practice in the case that we MIGHT have a recession.

Well, that's what I call a no-brainer.

We've talked in the past about the Aesop's fable of the ant and the grasshopper.

This is a classic example.

Don't be a grasshopper!

And, while you're at it, learn these 3 awesome ways that 3D printing makes your practice even stronger when that pesky Recession hits.

If it hits.

Best 3 Free Softwares for 3D Printing

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 14:30:00 -0400

3D Printing can be expensive enough when you're first getting started.

Why not use FREE software if it's just as good?

We think so, too, and this episode is dedicated to helping you make good and informed decisions as you start your 3D printing journey.

Visit us at www.3dpa.org for more 3D printing resources and to claim a copy of the checklists we use for our Top 3 3D printed procedures.

3 Ways 3D Printing Makes Same Day Dentistry Possible Like Never Before

Fri, 03 Feb 2023 09:00:00 -0400

Same Day Service has been a buzzword in dentistry since the early days of the CEREC and milled crowns.

Until 3D Printing burst onto the scene in 2020, most dentists didn't feel like things like same day starts for clear aligners or dentures were possible.

Everything is changing rapidly and here are 3 ways 3D printing can make same day dentistry a reality like never before.

And, as a result, 3 ways you can increase case acceptance and gain your patient's trust.

3 Ways 3D Printing Will Make Your Dental Practice Better

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0400

I'm not only talking about only lowering overhead or reducing the need for more staff,

I'm talking about making the quality of your practice better.

Here are 3 ways 3D printing will do that.

Go to www.3DPA.org to get 3 FREE checklists for our Top three 3D Printing Procedures we use everyday in my practice.

Watch this episode on YouTube here:

https://youtu.be/vE_Z6fD3HoQ

3 Everyday Procedures that 3D Printing Will Change Forever

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0400

Dentistry is always changing, but 3D Printing is speeding that up fast.

Learn 3 procedures that dentists do everyday that will be so impacted, that they will be changed forever...

And sooner rather than later.

Go to www.3DPA.org to get FREE checklists for our Top 3 3D Printing Procedures we use everyday in my practice.

Watch this episode on YouTube here:

https://youtu.be/NP6_gibD75M

What am I missing by not 3D Printing in my dental practice?

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 09:00:00 -0400

There is a ton of buzz around the topic of 3D printing in dentistry today.

3D Printing opens the doors to ways that 3D Printing can help any dentist.

If you're just now starting your journey, or you are just now realizing there is something to this, don't worry...

You're not too late!

Here are 3 Big Reasons 3D Printing can positively impact you and your practice.

Go to www.3DPA.org to get FREE checklists for our Top 3 3D Printing Procedures we use everyday in my practice.

Watch this episode on YouTube here:

https://youtu.be/Sh0f2XBMXKM

How to Keep Your Hygienist Happy So She Doesn’t Quit

Sun, 06 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0400

A quick update on the No Surprise Act from the ADA and, then...

The main event.

An article from a hygienist explains how we can keep hygienists happy.

That way they won't quit and cut off the lifeline of the practice and such.

Every dentist should hear this one and then read the article for themselves.

You really don't want to miss this one!

No Surprise Act Will Affect Dentists - No Surprise Here

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 01:00:00 -0400

Once again, dentists are caught in the crosshairs of more regulation.

While it seems it could have been worse, all of us will likely have to change some of our ways to stay on the right side of the law.

On today's Dental Headlines Show, we will discuss:

Which (Very Few) Dentists are Exempt
The Most Likely Area You Will Be Affected
What Seems Like the Most Commonsense Way to Approach these Changes

And More.

Dental Headlines - Jan. 7, 2022

Thu, 06 Jan 2022 18:49:00 -0400

Dentistry in the News: January 7th, 2022

WHO finally recognizes SDF. What's on 2nd. I dunno who's on 3rd.
AI is coming and where is Will Smith when you need him to fight a robot?
Dropping PPOs is always a good idea apparently... Duh
Bonus points if you know what POSA is and what to do when you see it.
The alphabet squad explains why mobile and teledentistry are good for everybody

...And Much, Much More.

When and How Can We Re-Open? – Dr. Tom Larkin Takes Action to Save Our Practices

Fri, 03 Apr 2020 09:00:00 -0400

Dr. Tom Larkin is a professor and a private practitioner.

He has been screaming (well, not screaming, he's pretty soft-spoken) from the rooftops for years that we had to change the way we operated because it was just a matter of time before our profession would be changed forever.

Enter COVID19.

If we want to re-open and get back to any type of pre-covid normalcy, there are things that we MUST do right now.

IF YOU FIGURE THIS OUT, you will have an advantage over everybody else.

Oh, and the Elephant in the Room..... HYGIENE!

How in the heck are we supposed to deal with hygiene re-opening?!?

Well, it's at the 15:26 minute point, but don't skip ahead or you'll miss details you Must Have today.

Remember, we're all in this together!

You can visit Dr. Larkin's dental bootstrap project here:

www.PhoenixDentalProject.com

Special Crisis Edition – How to Rise From the Ashes Again

Wed, 25 Mar 2020 09:00:00 -0400

When this crisis if over, we must Restore our Practice, Remake our Systems, Rebuild our Dreams, and Reclaim our Future.

Note: you can watch this video in our Facebook group here

In 2013 I faced a similar crisis when my practice burned down overnight.

This lecture details the exact steps I took then to rebuild my practice

This is your opportunity and now is the time for all of us to "Burn Down" and failed systems that were already causing us pain and remake them perfect!

Remember, we're all in this together.

If you would like CE credit for this episode or watch the video of the lecture, go to our Facebook Group at www.facebook.com/solodentists

This is the community of solo and small practice owners navigating this crisis.

Orthodontics Under Assault – Dr. Amanda Wilson Reveals the Real Dirt on the Ortho Industry

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 09:00:00 -0400

TOO BUSY TO LISTEN RIGHT NOW? GET THE TRANSCRIPT HERE

Dr. Amanda Wilson levels with dentists about what is going on in ortho today and with Smile Direct Club, including strategies to take them on and use their millions spent to boost your own practice.

Dr. Amanda candidly pulls back the curtain about what is really going on with the Purple People Eaters and the decline Orthodontists have seen for the past decade and a half.

After telling us what we should REALLY know about Smile Direct Club, she dives into how it's a No-Brainer that general dentists should be adding Ortho to their practices...

Then, she tells us exactly how to do it!

From wire braces, to Invisalign, to In-House aligners, and even White Label trays...

Dr. Amanda explains in detail how we can all save Two-Thirds of our lab case fees!!! WooHoo.

Any self-respecting general dentist who wants to add ortho to their practice (and you would be dumb not to want that) needs to listen to this podcast VERY slowly and take notes.

If you don't, you probably don't need to be doing braces anyway.

She gives us that many amazing tips, diamonds, tricks, secrets, etc. Tune In Now!

Go to her website to learn all about the special offer (truly a great one you shouldn't turn down) here:

www.StraightSmileSolutions.com

Can Memberships Rescue Practices Under Assault? – State of Dentistry 2019

Sun, 07 Apr 2019 00:19:30 -0400

Jerry Jones and Dr. Chris Griffin unveil the #1 way to rescue dental practices under assault using memberships among other brilliant ideas.

Recently Jerry Jones released the shocking 6th edition of the State of Dentistry. He has researched every aspect of the current dental economy and interviewed the very best in our field.

His conclusions are startling and this post-report interview might even be better as he reveals the one thing that made his practice sell for more than it should have.

Any dentist can duplicate this winning strategy.

Listen in and take careful notes if you want the #1 way smart dentists are securing their practices even in these challenging times.

Drs. Erin Elliott and T-Bone Agarwal – Future Shifts of Private Practice – Season 3 Episode 3

Wed, 19 Dec 2018 22:21:16 -0400

The Dynamic Duo of Erin Elliott and Tarun “T-Bone” Agarwal is fighting the status quo of how to practice and how to learn better than Batman and Robin teamed up to fight crime. Just exchange Raleigh, North Carolina for Gotham and you get the idea. Nestled in the Appalachians is one of the hottest learning centers in America and it’s not by accident. Whether it’s Dr. Erin’s Sleep 101 course or T-Bones 3D workflows, dentists who travel down to see them are never disappointed because these two give more than any student would expect.

Today, T-Bone challenges me on catching the wave of the future in private practice and Erin tries to keep him calm while adding her own 2 cents in a much less ‘in-your-face’ style that is uniquely her own.

Did they convince me to change my ways…

Listen and you’ll find out, plus much more like:

Why practicing non-solo doesn’t have to mean losing autonomy
The biggest reason why most dentists will never try to work in difficult procedures, like Sleep and 3D, and how a simple but effective hack would change that
The trick to getting students to implement once they get home that almost nobody shares and why you probably don’t implement either

And much, much more.

Enjoy

Elijah Desmond – Dental Super-preneur Season 3 Episode 2

Thu, 29 Nov 2018 02:25:48 -0400

Elijah Desmond is the dental Super-preneur whirlwind who is famous, not for being a hygienist, or for co-founding DentalHub 360, or for co-founding Smiles at Sea, or Driven Dental Marketing….

Those things are cool and all, but Desmond is famous for being just a tremendous human being. This was evidenced over the holiday when I saw his video about helping an anonymous dentist who was struggling. I donated a little bit and I encourage you to as well.

If Desmond says it’s for a good cause, I believe him and after this interview, you should, too.

Here’s the link to his GoFundMe page

Dr. Nathan Ho – New Patient Expert – Season 3 Episode 1

Fri, 16 Nov 2018 17:00:23 -0400

Today we interview Dr. Nathan Ho, new patient expert with a specialty in getting tons of amazing ‘real’ reviews. This is quickly becoming the number 1 way to get patients at a reasonable cost.

You can watch part one of this awesome interview on his Facebook Group, Dental Win Win.

You can also watch the Video Podcast of this interview on our new YouTube Channel.

Productive Case Acceptance – Season 2 Episode 10

Fri, 21 Sep 2018 20:17:37 -0400

We’re back with Chris Moriarity, productivity specialist and overall great guy.

In this episode Chris shares how he would approach the problem that I have been having lately….

Low Case Acceptance.

No guys, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. You just have to roll up your sleeves and solve the problem.

Chris breaks me down and then builds me up.

You’ve got to hear it, then you’ll understand.

Renaissance Dental Mom – Season 2 Episode 9

Sat, 21 Jul 2018 22:17:49 -0400

Dr. Emily Letran is someone special in our profession.

An immigrant from Vietnam, she has become a true leader in dentistry and an inspiration for women dentists everywhere.

Her story is a tear-jerker, but the way she has conquered life step-by-step will leave you looking for her name on seminar stages all around.

Listen in and you will learn how she:

Drove the fast track from communist food lines to high achiever and even became so good at this, she is now a certified coach
Finds a way to always take Action to Win even though she is ‘busier’ than dentists who feel ‘maxxed out’
Has created a seminar series to teach others how to take massive action

She is truly an inspiration. Don’t miss out!

Season 2 Episode 8 – A Very Productive Coach Pt. 1

Sun, 17 Jun 2018 02:23:47 -0400

Chris Moriarity has worked with enough dentists by now that he knows that massive hyper-production is not the only important statistic. He also helps solo and private practicing dentists find out what makes them happy in their profession. Of course he knows how to make their production numbers rain down if that’s what they want.

Here’s part 1 of a very interesting discussion that was planned for only one episode, but was found to contain too many gems to edit down that much.

Season 2 Episode 7 – Stand Out as an Implant Dentist

Sat, 03 Mar 2018 14:52:44 -0400

We caught up with a true Stand Out Dentist, Dr. Ron Receuver of Louisville, Kentucky. He totally transformed the way he practices over the past decade to become the go-to guy when locals think of dental implants in that area.

If you want to learn how to stand out as an implant dentist or just to transform your practice period, you should pay close attention to this interview.

In it you will learn:

How he transitioned from insurance dependence and general practice to “The Implant Guy”
How he learned a much better way to attract the patients he wanted than the ‘Standard’ discounted and free offers most dentists fall victim to thinking work (Hint: they really don’t anymore)
How to Dominate Your Market Area doing things that scare most dentists

And Much, Much More…

Life After Dentistry with Jerry Jones – Season 2 Episode 6

Mon, 13 Nov 2017 09:56:00 -0400

One of the biggest questions that I keep hearing is, “When Can I Safely Retire?”

Well, if you have had that thought rolling around in your head, today is your lucky day. Jerry Jones is a practice owner and a dental marketing coach extraordinaire for over a decade. He has also been hearing that a lot lately and I sat down with him to see what best practices he has seen work from his dentists who were in that same boat.

In this episode you will learn:

Great options for dentists who want to ‘Slow Down’ but don’t want to actively retire.
The Revenue numbers that dentists need to be hitting if they want to actually Get Out of dentistry safely.
The Top Mistakes that he and I have both seen dentists make when they try to Get Out Too Soon. Plus how to avoid being a statistic in that regard.

And Much, Much More…

Dr. Mark Costes on Growing Multiple Practices – Season 1 Episode 5

Tue, 31 Oct 2017 01:52:52 -0400

Dr. Mark Costes is the founder of multiple dental practices and also of the wildly successful Dental Success Institute. Today, he gives his unique experiences to answer questions about dentists and their path toward growth and retirement.

In this episode you will learn:

The things you MUST get right if you even want to consider owning multiple practices (most shouldn’t)
The most common mistakes he has personally seen dentists make as they try to choose a new way to practice and how could they have simply avoided them if they followed this simple principle.
The very best options he has seen for dentists who want to slow down, but don’t want to retire and can’t imagine their income going down.

And Much, Much More…

Can Your Supply Company Help You Achieve Work/Life Balance? Season 2 Episode 4

Fri, 06 Oct 2017 14:36:16 -0400

A 4^th generation CEO is breaking traditions and breaking the mold of the way that dental supply companies communicate with today’s dentists.

Julie Charlestein reveals the cutting edge ways that she is steering her company, Premiere Dental, into the next frontier of interactive patient treatment alongside a new generation of dentists who value collaboration moreso than most every generation in the past.

In this episode you will learn:

Why millennial dentists think about practice differently than “old Gen Xers” (Note: both Julie and Dr. Griffin are Gen Xers) and the media that her company is using to communicate in a way that’s a win-win.
How the ‘3 Day Dentist’ is becoming the norm for new dentists who are seeking to become the most balanced generation of dentists EVER
How a “nimble” company like Premiere can take advantage of the newest advances in multiple channel supply fulfillment to help agile dentists avoid headaches and unnecessary aggravation.

And Much, Much More…

Reinventing Tomorrow’s Conferences – Season 2 Episode 3

Fri, 29 Sep 2017 03:47:06 -0400

Dr. Jason Luchtefeld is changing the face of one of the most famous dental conferences in the U.S. He joins us to discuss how the Dentaltown Townie meeting is staying ahead of the times and how they are innovating next year’s event to stay relevant with the changing tastes of today’s dentists. Dr. Luchtefeld also reveals how the Townie is not only embracing technological advances, but making sure that dentists who commit their precious time to attending leave with multiples of ROI on their investment of time and money.

On this episode we will unveil:

How Howard Farran is constantly challenging the Townie Meeting team to innovate and stay ahead of the field
How unique tracks at this year’s Townie meeting will triple the value of attendees there
How the CE Director at a Top 5 Dental Meeting can bring value to attendees for years after they attend

And Much, Much More…

The Silicon Valley Bonus System – Season 2 Episode 2

Fri, 22 Sep 2017 18:45:16 -0400

Walt Disney and Steve Jobs Inspired the Most Amazing Team Bonus System in History. Learn how you can convert it to your dental practice to motivate and reward your dental team WITHOUT creating a monster, runaway bonus system that will eventually wreck your practice and make everyone miserable.

In this episode you will learn:

How to identify a Death Spiral Bonus before it makes everyone miserable and kills your team unity
How to apply the Silicon Valley System to your Practice in a way that could double your practice and make your team love you for it!
You can stop spending THOUSANDS each year with big marketing companies and slick consultants who try to convince you that your results are better than they actually are.

And Much, Much More…

Season 2 Premiere – Is Live CE Dead? 7 Reasons You’d Better Hope Not

Sun, 17 Sep 2017 05:37:00 -0400

Season 2 Premiere – Our new direction will be 2 fold. First, we want to draw attention to the declining popularity of Live CE and to promote the 7 reasons why it is an integral part of our profession that we cannot let die. Secondly, we want to re-commit to our belief that a motivated, happy dental team will always outperform teams that aren’t enthusiastic and engaged. That can make all the difference in your practice and in turn, your life.

In this episode you will learn:

5 Big Excuses Dentists Make to Not Attend Live CE that mark them as candidates for early retirement
7 Big Benefits of Attending Live CE that Sub-Par Dentists Ignore and Winning Dentists Use to Their Advantage Every Day
The Power of a Motivated Team in Creating the Practice and Lifestyle You Really Want at Work and at Home
The Danger of Living with a Death Spiral Bonus in Place

And Much, Much More…

7 Inconvenient Truths Bound to Change Solo Practice Forever – Season 1 Episode 24 – Finale

Fri, 21 Oct 2016 16:42:45 -0400

We’ve come to the Season 1 Finale and it has been quite a ride. As we finish this year I wanted to make sure that everyone listening understood that moving forward, this show will be focused on the Solo, Private General Practitioner.

Along those lines and following up on the 7 Big Problems we talked about last episode, today’s episode will focus on 7 Inconvenient Truths that Will Continue to Drive the Direction of the Solo Dentist in America.

If you can understand these and align your practice accordingly, you stand a great chance to prosper moving forward.

In this Episode You Will Learn:

The ONLY Circumstances that must exist if you are going to practice as a “Cutting Edge” Insurance-Free (relatively speaking) Practice. As Fox Mulder once said, “They are out there.” But, as I say, “They are hard to find and harder to make successful.”
Where the Search for “New” Income will have to come from during the next decade. It is the only place left to look and it will cause some serious friction in our profession as the Solo GPs will face serious opposition.
Why Patient Visits being down was bound to create trickle-down GP income downturns and what smart dentists are doing to try to fix the issue.

Plus Much, Much More…

Saving this Profession – Season 1 Episode 23

Sat, 18 Jun 2016 02:00:23 -0400

It is true that we are members of one of the greatest professions on the planet right now. It is also true that anxiety is growing about our future. Today, I address a question that has become all too frequent at my seminars, “What is the Biggest Problem Facing Dentistry Today and How Can We Solve It?”

After putting a lot of thought into that question, I have come up with 7 Big Problems and 3 Rules that Can Fix All of Them if we have the will to impose them.

In this Episode You Will Learn:

How Dentistry is Slowly Losing it’s Heart and Soul Due to Outside Forces and How You Can Build a Wall Around the Heart of Your Practice that Will Make You the Strongest Practice in Your Area
How Inaction and Shortsightedness Have Plagued Our Profession as of Late and How You Can Use Farsightedness to Innovate While Others are Fearful to the Point that They Will Become Pawns of the Next Phase of the Takeover
How we Should Be Using the Ronald Reagan Rule to Keep Us Alive in the Evolutionary Fight that is Going on in Washington, Plus How to Become a “Warrior” Leader Who Has Complete Control and Respect at the Office.

And Much, Much More…

Stop the Overhead Surge – Season 1 Episode 22

Sat, 11 Jun 2016 02:00:53 -0400

One of the first line items to get blamed when things aren’t going all that well in your practice is your office overhead. While there are many instances where Overhead is the culprit, the way that dentists look at overhead and how to attack it, often overlooks the most effective ways to cure the disease.

Today we dive into some of the less obvious and most powerful ways you can whip your overhead numbers into shape so that they work for you instead of dragging your practice down like a bag of bricks over your shoulder.

In this episode you will learn:

The magic of Identical Room Setups in Same Day Capabilities to Boost Daily Numbers up to Your Next Plateau for Good.

The Ordering System to Almost Guarantee 5% Clinical Supply Costs so You Can Quit Worrying Over Which of You Favorite Supplies You Have to Do Without Each Month to Avoid Going Over Budget and Catching “Over-Ordering Syndrome”

How a Simple Check Can Transform a Dull, Uninspired Team into a Team of Superstars Who Will Pull You Along to Meet Your Most Amazing Goals

12 Steps to Lock Down Your Non-Insured Patients so That Poachers from Down the Street Can’t Even Begin to Entice Them Away from You with Cheesy New Patient Offers.

And Much, Much More…

Controversial Scheduling Solutions that Solve Rampant Problems – Season 1 Episode 21

Fri, 03 Jun 2016 13:00:18 -0400

It you are victim of the “Chronic Cancellation Disorder” this episode is for you.

We are NOT going to tell you we can solve this problem for you!

Instead, we have a very unique way of dealing with the issue that is a complete Win/Win for you and the patients. Listen up and we’ll reveal this Strategy Step-by-Step.

In this Episode you will Learn:

Our Famous and Very Controversial Hygiene Scheduling Strategy that Causes Audiences to Gasp Across the Nation….But, Solves the Cancellation Problem Every Time it is Tried
How You Fit into One of the 4 Quadrants of Dentistry and How You Can Profit in any of the Top 3 of them You Choose
How to Recognize the 5 Overhead Monsters Lurking in Every Practice and How to Shine the Light on Them So You Can Destroy the Beast
How to Stop Whining About How Your Patients Lie to You and How You Can Smile All the Way to a Full Schedule Anyway

And Much, Much More…

Never Run Late Again – Season 1 Episode 20

Sat, 28 May 2016 02:00:44 -0400

Running late is one of the Top 3 causes of Doctor stress and burnout in the U.S. While it is truly impossible to KNOW exactly how long each appointment will take, it is very possible to control a schedule in a way that allows for speed, efficiency, quality, and staff happiness.

Today we will discuss several tools that if employed can solve 80% of Doctor’s Stress Problems.

In this Episode you will Learn:

How to Solve the Hygiene “Jaws” Scenario Before It Happens So You Don’t Get Your Blood Boiling From a Distance
The Reason Why Some Dentists Prep So Slowly, (and why they really aren’t being slow on the important parts) and How You Can Slash Minutes Off Each Prep.
Why Doctor Stress is So Rampant and the Characteristic that Can Dissolve 80% of Your Stress if You Strengthen the Trait

And Much, Much More…

Harnessing Visualized Workflow to Create Amazing Workdays – Season 1 Episode 19

Sat, 21 May 2016 02:00:38 -0400

What if there were a way you could harness all that chaos, visualize the path of highest productivity with the least stress, and create a Workflow that allowed you to create a lifestyle that was ideal in every way: money, time off, happiness, fulfillment….

There is and it’s the concept of Visualized Workflow.

In this episode you will learn:

The 3 Ways You Can Project this Powerful Principle into Action in Your Practice Immediately for Less than 5 Bucks!
How to Install ‘Signal Boards’ for Your Front Office, Your Clinical Staff, and Yourself So You Never Let Important Projects or Tasks Slip Through the Cracks Exposing Your Practice and Personal Lives to Massive Lost Opportunity Costs that Can Wreck Your Retirement and Make Your Everyday Existence Miserable
The Proper Way to Create Retrospective Meetings that Maximize Future Benefit for Minimal Time Investment that Streamline Your Team’s Productivity Every Day and Every Week.

And Much, Much More…

Solving the Hybrid Digital Challenge – Season 1 Episode 18

Sat, 14 May 2016 02:00:34 -0400

Dental practices have been attempting to go completely digital for the last decade. It is a HUGE challenge.

Today we discuss how we created a Hybrid Model that not only solved our ‘digital’ problem, but also solved the communication problem between the clinical and front office team members.

In this episode you will learn:

How Solving the Digital Problems that Have Kept Us From Paperless Perfection for So Long
The Hands-Down Best Scanner on the Planet that Can Slash Hours from Your Team’s Workload of Useless Busy Work
The Reasons Why You Struggle to Present Correct Financials Using Only Digital and the Way to Solve This Once and For All
The Secrets Behind Fast Financial Arrangements and How Any Front Office Person Can Master Quick and Accurate Treatment Presentation Leading to Case Acceptance

And Much, Much More….

Read Full Transcript

The Dr. Chris Griffin Show – Season 1 Episode 18

“The most extraordinary thing about trying to piece together the missing links and the evolutionary story, is that when you do find the missing link and put it in the story, you suddenly need all these other missing links to connect the new discovery. The gaps and questions actually increase its extraordinary.” Now who said that?

Welcome to the Dr. Chris Griffin Show. Your resource for leveraging systems and technology to easier workload, increase productivity and provide you with the time off you deserve to live the life of your dreams. It’s time to practice productivity in the passionate pursuit of a better life with your host, Dr. Chris Griffin. The Dr. is in.

Yes, yes. Hey everybody! I know that was kind of a weird quote right? That just not seem like it belonged to a dental podcast. But anyway, thanks for tuning in this week. Let me share what, why I said that. That was a quote by none other than the famous Sir David Attenborough from England. Now if you don’t know who that is, David Attenborough, he has been a naturalist his whole life. And he’s also been in charge of the BBC as a director of programming. You know he was like their big league in the 60’s and 70’s. You know, he’s been called a national treasure. He’s been voted one of the top 100 Britons of all time. So anyway, he’s got a hundred titles like all the, all the famous guys over at Britain. You know he is a, he is been a member of the Order of Merit, Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, Commander of the order of the British Empire. I mean hey, you know…some of these titles are super cool and I think it will be awesome to have them.

But why I put a quote about evolution in this podcast? Well, today, we’re going to share with you something that I’ve always called “The Missing Link” and it’s the missing link, not an evolution but the missing link in Dentistry between the front office and the clinical. There’s always a conflict. Every office I have ever even thought about consulting with has had a conflict between the front office and the clinical. They always struggle to communicate, they struggle, you know they have you know, the front office said, they have their agenda. The clinical, the back office, they a lot of times they have their agenda. It just it’s really aggravating and frustrating for everyone and especially the patients. But the big loser in all of this communication difficulty has always been the ability for the office to produce the high level of productivity. Because and one of the main reasons is, it’s just really hard to do same day dentistry.

To do same day dentistry, you have to have all your ducks in a row. You have to have really good communication between the front and the back because there’s always a very small window you have between the diagnosis when the patient’s really hot to get it done and your staff telling you whether or not they think within a reasonable doubt that you actually get paid for this okay? Or if they even have enough information to present an accurate or semi accurate number to the patient about what this might cost. I mean how can you do any kind of treatment planning if you can’t figure out what something actually is going to cost the patient, right? It just stops you in your tracks, a lot of offices just give up on it and say, “Oh we’ll figure it out and we’ll get back to you or we will schedule you for 2 weeks and by the time you come back, we’ll figure it out and let you know what you’re going to owe.”

I mean all these things run around the patient’s mind and once the patient leaves the practice, what I call the “Butterfly Effect” kicks in. We had a whole episode about this where so many things bombard the patient, that’s going to possibly keep them from coming back in. Where I live a lot of times it’s because the spouse was going to use that money to buy a new bass boat, you know or trolling motor. And that’s just, there’s just always something. And so if you can avoid the butterfly effect, by doing same day dentistry, it’s inevitable. Your office productivity is going to go up. Everyone’s going to be happier but it’s hard to do. It was very hard even for us to do until we found our missing link and that is not only the missing link for communication, it also is the hybrid system between digital practice and physical practice.

It’s an amazing concept and I hope you can stay with me because here in a minute, we’re going to describe this tool. And that’s what it is, it’s a tool, to the best of our abilities on audio. If you see me in a live lecture, or on a video doing it, it might be a little more clear but I’m going to do my dead level best to describe it the best I can. And as always if you have questions, hey email me. Well I’ll do my best to help you understand what we’re doing, okay? So after a few words from our friend, John Lee Dumas, we’re going to shoot you back to our lecture from Oklahoma City when we discussed “The Missing Link”. Okay everybody, enjoy!

This is John Lee Dumas of EOFire. And if you’re ready to ignite your productivity, explode your growth and burn down the barriers to your dream life, the Dr. Chris Griffin Show is where you need to be.

Let’s talk about the orange card then. Well does anybody have questions on the color coding and all that stuff? That’s a great question. Okay, so for exams, actually there’s 2 levels in that AB card. And so the freight finder and the endo spray, and the cotton pliers; we keep them in the little wrapped autoclave bags on the second level. And if we don’t need them, they just go right back into this. Absolutely, very good question. Yes. Well yeah but I mean, when you’re using cassettes, it’s really no big deal. I mean, I’m way more interested in not wasting time than wasting money for the instruments which is minimal, in my opinion. So, and I slowly got by super expensive stuff. So yes, and you know if you open it, if I don’t use it, so what? Close it, throw it back in the autoclave.

Okay, now this is the little jewel that I had just to make my stuff over in Arkansas for. This and also, this sort of came…I was using it before the…this is my orange card that I used for treatment planning before the fire. And this is the orange card that I used after the fire. So let me tell you the difference. So office burns down, good news, patient charts burn down. So you don’t have to worry about storing them, for 7 years right? And so, well that’s good. Also in the past, 3 times, I had in 3 different times in the last decade I would say, “You know what? I really need to go completely digital.” You know, I just need to go digital. This is like 2000 and whatever. I need to go digital. So I would try to go digital, it just wouldn’t work. I mean something just did not work; you messed the flow up, the staff didn’t like it, blah blah blah blah blah. All kind of reasons, right? And I think that I’m the kind of guy that pushes through problems and solves it. I never can solve the digital problem.

Okay, so the office burns down and I’m like, if there was ever a time to go digital, this is the time, right? It seems like it. So we say, “Okay, what would we need to do to do digital?” Well, we would need to certainly do a better job at clinical note taking, which we were kind of already doing okay clinical note taking but I got serious about doing the templated notes in Dentrix, do you guys use that? You know. So I got serious about that. So finally we fought that battle and we kind of won that. I had to get serious about, you know, there’s a lot of paper in dentistry, so what do we do? And amazing I found this scanner that is like off the hook, guys. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried new scanners but it’s not like the old days. There’s a scanner from Fuji, I believe. Fujitsu, Fujitsu called the Scansnap. And the way that I found it was I’m a big…do you guys in here use Evernote software? Evernote? So I’m like an Evernote geek, right. it is like my digital brain. Everything that I use in Evernote.

And then one day, I found out, Evernote has a special Evernote scanner; that you can scan your stuff into Evernote as a PDF and it will search it and it’s great! And so I got it, I’m a geek, I buy it and I turn it on, it’s got the little green Evernote elephant on it. I think “Wow, this is cool!” So I start feeding my papers in there and I’m like, “Holy cow! This is amazingly fast! I’ve never seen anything like this. This scans front and back and like…Shoop! Shoop! I mean it’s so fast!” and I’m saying “Wow, this is amazing! I wonder if I could use this in the dental office.” Sure enough, Fujitsu makes the same scanner without the green elephant on it, that didn’t cost $400, it only costs like I don’t know, $200; because it’s not Evernote, just big old Fujitsu. And so I got one for the dental office. And sure enough, that scanner is probably the one thing that allowed us to go really digital because now it takes no time. We’ve got it hooked into a couple of workstations. We’ve got 2 of them at the office; one at 2 different workstations.

And you know, that’s a good thing because my wife, well she’s not…she’s there like say, she’s not really like. But when she’s there, it’s a really good job for her because she just sits there and scans notes and stuff in. And on Thursdays, the staff will all pitch in and scan some of the paper, you know. You got paper, oral surgery, orthodontist, insurance, EOB, everything. So that allows to help go digital. So I’m like, “Alright, we’re going digital. So how are we going to do our treatment plans digitally? Let’s go all in.” Well, there’s a problem. I have years…and so here’s what we found for trying to go completely digital on the treatment plan. And it’s my fault but I don’t know how to solve it and I don’t know how any practice could really do a great job a 100% because there’s always going to be a time when somebody’s in for hygiene. Maybe I say they need you know I said, “Hey you want to pull it or you want to fix it?” “I want to pull it.” “Okay. Let’s pull it down for extraction.” But they don’t want to schedule.

Six months later, they come in, “Oh, I change my mind. I want to fix it.” “Okay. Let’s put it in for root canal crown.” Well you know you got those 2 things on top of each other. You guys know what I do. They’re just never 100% clean so there’s always going to be multiple stuff in that’s confusing. It is hard to figure out when you’re trying to go fast, when you’re trying to do same day dentistry; trying to go fast. Anything that confuses the person, just trying to put together the treatment plan slows you down. And so we tried and tried and tried but we could not go as fast, digital only, with treatment plans as we could using our old orange card system. But I said, “Dead gone it! You know, this is really aggravating but okay, I give. We’ll just have…this will be the only piece of paper in the office for the patients, right? Now I told you everything bad news would happen to me. About that time, that I said “Okay, the orange card is the only thing we’ll have and we’ll just use it for treatment planning. And we’ll work towards maybe going digital and that but we’ll just say that‘s good enough and it really is good because this one card didn’t take up like you know, I used to have file cabinets everywhere. And now we just have 1 file cabinet and you know, you can fit thousands of these cards in there and there’s no problem.

I don’t trust my staff to double check that and maybe I don’t even trust myself to look at the computer, right? I like to hold the medical history in my hands because I’m just, I got to do it. So I can review things very clearly. So in keeping with my efficiency ideas, and we still just have one piece of paper for the whole patient for the whole office, we go ahead and we put the medical history on one side of this orange card, and we put the treatment plan organizer on the other side. And as, you know, as this fills up, I know this is old school but we just take the old treatment organizers like we used to use and we put it over the top of the other one and then we staple it. Then as so as time goes by, sometimes you might have one of these for patient that’s got 2 or 3 or these stapled on it. And if it gets too thick, you just take the staple out, take this, scan them in a Fujitsu scanner into your Dentrix document system center and put a new one on, you know and clean it up if you have to. That’s the way that we solved it.

Now let’s go through this and I’ll show you why I really…I know it’s you know it sounds crazy and it sounds way too old school but I don’t think there’s a faster way to get information from diagnosis to financials back to the patient than this right here. So here you go, from the top of the card, it just has the stuff right here. And the way that I used this is I will walk into an operatory and this is actually we have a little paper holder flat against the wall in each operatory and this is always out facing me. So whatever we’re doing, I always this sort of my triple check last thing, I just look up, glance and I use it to cheat on patient’s names right? Because my eye sight used to be where I could see a computer screen across the room and now, I can’t. So I just walk in and I see this and I’m like, “Hey, Mr. Brian. What’s going on?” You know? And if I’m fooling anybody, but you know, it didn’t hurt to call people by their actual name without going “Hey, Mr. Brian.” You know? I can just walk in and glance and just keep talking.

How’s Suzy doing? You know you just do all that good old stuff that people talk about. So you know that’s how you use the top part. Now the bottom part is there’s room for 4 different spaces and like I said earlier, I’ll do a full mouth treatment plan. But I usually don’t diagnose past the first couple of a points. And so what I really want on here, I’m happy for Dentrix to house a complete treatment plan, but on here, I really just want the first few appointments charted on this thing. Because it’s very unusual in my practice for people to say, “Hey I want the whole lunch enchilada”, they usually just want the tooth they came in for and I might be able to talk them in for another tooth too. And so we’re going to fill out for each appointment; each one of these lines going this way is for each appointment.

And the little descriptors that we have that you know, this I also how I keep things going fast; units of time. So if I diagnose a root canal crown and a core on a molar, it’s always going to be 7 inch of time; which is 70 minutes. So it really takes me 60, I always give myself a 10 minute cushion on every appointment, okay? So in units of time, there’s a production. That’s just a “Yes” or “No” field. So the staff will just mark “Y” or “N”. That way, they know if they’re supposed to be charging for something that day or not. The things you don’t be charge for, you know. Crown seats, adjustments, stuff like that. Order, I always order these and the reason is important to have that on here is because the first time you see somebody, yeah, it’s first thing, second thing, third thing. As time goes on, they might do this, then they break this tooth. Then things kind of get out of order so you got to keep things. This allows you keep things reordered so that you’ll always know what you really need to be doing next. So let’s just say, I’m getting through an appointment. I always turn around and look at this card and then I’m talking to the patient about the next thing they need. And I quickly know, without having fumbled through Dentrix and find out on the big massive treatment plan. I always know just through the glance and I don’t know if it makes them feel like I’m so on top of their case that I’m always remembering what goes next or what. But it’s just a very seamless way to make things go smoothly as I’m doing. You know, talking to them about treatment.

And room number, that’s on here for the financial staff. So my assistants will actually, I’ll tell them, So let me give you an example: So I do a big treatment plan, I go tooth 1 to 32. And then I’ll say, number 14 was hurting and first thing we’re going to do is...in my office we say everything. So I’ll say, “We’re going to do everything on tooth 14, seven units of time.” And my staff knows that that means, to right on here number 14 root canal, number 14 core build up, number 14 all porcelain crown. Okay? And 7 units time, they put that in there and then they will carry this, actually, up to…so there’s an example of that. There’s an example of what they write into the scripter area. They will carry this up to the front desk, the front desk fills out the right side of this card for each appointment. Now for the whole treatment plan, just that appointment.

So they will actually figure out the money on the thing. So they’ll go back here and they’ll look at this and hopefully the insurance has been verified. So they fill out every one of these fields. The estimate, estimate insurance part, deductable, whether or not the patient has a credit or debit. A discount you’re offering them, final estimated patient’s part. Then let’s say the patient owe 12 hundred bucks, and they can’t pay 12 hundred bucks today, but you know, interest is going to pay you 15 hundred. So you’re glad to do it today. And you just you know, as long as you can get some of the patient’s part, you’re willing to extend some financial arrangements. So maybe they’ll say, “Okay, 12 hundred in 3 payments. 4 hundred today, 4 hundred next month, 4 hundred in 2 months.” They would actually write the financial arrangements down right here on the card then my staff person would date it, and put staff initial. They would initial in and then the…

Patient on to patient. They initial that, I’m not saying that this is going to hold up in the court of law. I have no idea but it sure does solve a lot of problems if there’s ever a dispute about payment and the patient goes back and says, “Well I didn’t really understand that was going to cost this.” And you show them, whoa you know, here we go. Therefore I initialed it after we discussed the payment options and here’s where you signed it. And that solves a lot of problems. But really and truly, the whole purpose of this, is just to be the backbone of the fast financial arrangement system...

7 Deadly Dental Practice Killers – Season 1 Episode 17

Thu, 12 May 2016 18:24:29 -0400

The 7 Deadly Wastes are paramount in any profitable production system in the world. In this episode we will delve into the 7 Wastes that Kill Dental Practices and Eat Away at Their Profits from the Inside Out. Learn how to Destroy these Internal Rots and You Will Be Well on Your Way to Creating a Profitable Practice Powerhouse.

In this Episode You Will Learn:

Why I Despise Block Scheduling and a Better Way to Create Consistently Profitable Scheduling

Why Opportunity Cost is THE #1Killer of Practice Profits and How You Can Identify, Resolve, and Take Advantage of this Amazing Profit Center No Matter How You Choose to Practice

How to Make Your Operatories Quickly Deployable “Cycle Time” Weapons instead of Cluttered, Dusty Millstones Around the Neck of Your Practice Slowing Down Your Team and Your Production

The Most Powerful Statistic Any Dentist Can Ever Track, that the Top 1% All Monitor and that I am 99% Sure You Won’t Be Brave Enough to Measure, Regardless of How Much Money it Will Make You.

And Much, Much, More…

7 Deadly Dental Practice Killers – Season 1 Episode 17

Thu, 12 May 2016 18:24:29 -0400

In this Episode You Will Learn:

Why I Despise Block Scheduling and a Better Way to Create Consistently Profitable Scheduling

Why Opportunity Cost is THE #1Killer of Practice Profits and How You Can Identify, Resolve, and Take Advantage of this Amazing Profit Center No Matter How You Choose to Practice

How to Make Your Operatories Quickly Deployable “Cycle Time” Weapons instead of Cluttered, Dusty Millstones Around the Neck of Your Practice Slowing Down Your Team and Your Production

The Most Powerful Statistic Any Dentist Can Ever Track, that the Top 1% All Monitor and that I am 99% Sure You Won’t Be Brave Enough to Measure, Regardless of How Much Money it Will Make You.

And Much, Much, More…

Fusion of Japanese Efficiency and American Private Practice – Season 1 Episode 16

Sat, 30 Apr 2016 02:00:04 -0400

Today we flood the airwaves with the Ultimate Dental Productivity System that was crafted as a direct result of the careful application of Asian Efficiency principles from the LEAN Management Theory into the American Private Dental Practice. Some call this the Samurai Production System because it cuts out all the waste associated with most offices and still leaves room for the Cowboy Way in us to be creative and our own dentist.

In this episode you will learn:

How Color Coding your Operatories and Sterilization Rooms can save you Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars over Your Career
How We Use Rows of Bins in the Toyota Style to Save Enough Time Each Week to Take a 4 Day Weekend EVERY WEEKEND, and How You Can Easily Adapt This to Make Your Family a LOT Happier.
The Adaptation of the Powerful Japanese concept of Kanban Signal Boards to Direct the Entire Day to Make My Daily Routine Brain-Dead Easy so I Can Focus on the Patients and Build a Connection that Builds a Curtain of Solid Steel Around My Patient Pool, Plus Throws Off Dozens of Direct Referrals Each and Every Month

Plus Much, Much, More…

Read Full Transcript

The Dr. Chris Griffin Show – Season 1 Episode 16

“If everyone is moving together, then success takes care of itself.” Now who said that?

So you may have actually heard that quote. That is from a very, very famous person in American history, Mr. Henry Ford. You all know him? He’s the founder of Ford Motor Company but Henry Ford was also maybe more importantly the unwitting founder a concept called Lean Management. Now Lean Management is something that was adopted in post World War II, Japan. And help build some of the largest companies that the world now knows into that juggernaut that they are. And all this really came from these strategies and concepts that Henry Ford developed’ really going way back. I guess some people say the Father of Lean Management was actually Eli Whitney but moving forward, Henry Ford really make that happen with his assembly line for his cars.

And then his concepts were taken off over the post towards Japan and you know, they just went nuts with it. They actually developed this Lean Management theory into something amazing and it turned out into you know, the Toyota production system. That’s basically based completely on concepts Henry Ford came up with. So I thought it was certainly appropriate that they were used to quote Henry Ford today. Now today, we’re going to dive in to this Lean Management theory as we go back to the lecture I did in Oklahoma City and we’re going to be talking about all kinds of amazing things that I have applied in to dentistry from these Lean Management concepts like color coding, visual learning, Kanban boards and just on and on. So I’m really excited today, it’s absolutely something. It’s true to my heart in dentistry, it’s what I really think helps everyday dentists really make a difference and getting more dentistry done; it helps everybody, patients, doctors, team, everybody. So let’s go ahead and let’s jump back to the lecture and let’s hear all about the Lean Manufacturing theory.

The fun parts are the rewards, and I’ll tell you what I like to do, I like to like combine work and fun. So like if we’re doing really well, I will take my staff on a sea trip with me or something like that. Be sure you’re acknowledging things every time somebody does something really well. I’ll show you some pictures. So 2005 was the year that we converted from the cosmetic practice to the higher volume practice and you know, we had a great year; I mean a blowout year. I think we went that year from 600,000 to 850,000 or something like that, in 2005. And so I sent everybody on a cruise, right? I figured, “Heck you guys worked your butts off, we’ve accomplished something, there you go.” You’re you know, I sent them to Cozumel. This year, you know everybody had quit, we had a new team, I had so many new people that it seems simple. But we use Dentrix right? Who uses Dentrix? In here, a lot of people.

You know if you use Dentrix forever, it’s not that hard but if you hire 3 or 4 new people, it’s not the easiest thing in the world for everybody to pick up right? So this year, I took everybody to the Dentrix training down in Orlando and then we spent a whole day in Universal the next day. Now let me tell you something, this was the staff, there was a lot of bickering going on between these new girls that I hired. After we took this trip to Universal, it has been smooth sailing. That was last November and everybody is getting along. It’s crazy, I mean it was so bad that I had staff coming to me they’re you know, Lupita she’s like “I don’t know what we’re going to do, you know, this one hates that one and that one hates that one. And I don’t know.” You know, anyway, we took this trip to Universal, it fixed it. So you know, I think that there’s always ways that you can be creative and figure out you know, ways to make things better between your staff.

Okay, so how do we help them be the best staff they can be? So we put them in a right environment and one of the things that…I was telling somebody this morning that there’s a Toyota plant 22 miles from my house; they just put in 7 years ago. And you know, it’s a big deal. It didn’t really helped my practice that much, I thought it would. But what it did do is sort of…I have a lot of patients now that go work at Toyota and boy, Toyota. They mean business with their management system. So they mean business with their, the way things work, the way their lines are, they are serious. And one of the things that Toyota does that I picked up and put it into my practice, and it made a huge difference there, too. It’s like things are different colors. This particular line, if you go into a plant, any of you ever been in a Toyota plant? So you haven’t have like different color stuff like the line that suppose to well this particular part on the body of the car is orange? They’ll have a line that’s green that’s doing something totally different. They have a line that’s yellow, they have…yes, everything’s color coded.

And so I thought, okay, if Toyota thinks it’s important enough to make things color coded to help their staff, maybe it would help my staff. And then I thought, how does this apply…how does this apply to a dental office? Well, you know, if Toyota thinks it will help things to move faster, maybe it would help me. Because sometimes when I go into an operatory and sit down to work, have any of you guys ever experience this? You go in, you sit down and it’s just not really ready for you to be in there yet, you know. You’re ready to do the work, you’re ready to pick up the high speed hand piece and start drilling, but everything’s not in there. And so how can you efficiently start working if you know that you’re just going to have to stop and somebody’s going to get some more stuff in there. So I said, Okay, well that seems like…maybe there’s a way that we could use that concept of color coding and Toyota would probably say visual learning and stop all of these forever. A lot of this goes back to…all the way back to Henry Ford and Lean Management.

Any of you guys know about Lean Management? Well 3 or 4 years ago, I was actually asked to come speak to the Engineering College Entrepreneurial Program in Mississippi State. And so, by the way that’s really cool, so I get to go back and speak to this class of 200 kids who are in an entrepreneurial class but they were all Engineers, about how that I was able to do a dental office that produced so much per hour or more than the other dentists in the area. So I get up there and this is awesome because this is the same exact classroom where I took Psychology 101 in Western Sib so I thought that was awesome. Gave the speech, the kids were awesome; they were asking all kinds of questions you know. Here’s the dean that asked me to come Dean Martin up there in the black sweater. You know, this guy here is probably a millionaire by now. He had all this entrepreneurial ideas; the other guy, the president of the organization.

So anyway, we do all this and so it’s over and Dean Martin is walking me out to my car and Dean Martin says, “So Chris, it’s amazing how you incorporated Lean Management into all these dental office systems.” And I said, “Dean Martin, I don’t know what you’re talking about because I’ve never heard that term before.” And he said, “Oh, that makes sense.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Well the things you were saying, completely agreed with the Lean Management theory but the terminology you were using were all screwed up.” And I said, “Well that makes sense, because I made it all up myself. So there’s no doubt that I’m sure it was.” I said, “I hope I didn’t confuse the kids in there.” So anyway, the Lean Management System says, that you always must work towards the Kaizen which is Continuous Improvement. So everything you do from this day forward should move you toward your ultimate goal. And Toyota’s crazy man, they have like 100 year goals and stuff and that’s just how they do it.

So there’s also a concept in Lean Management called Poka-yoke. I’m sure I mispronounce it. Any of you guys speak Japanese? No, excellent. Well I’m just pronouncing the heck out of this. But, so here’s an example of how that color coding could help your staff and help you solve the problem of walking into an operatory and not have everything perfectly set up for you. In everybody’s office, you have probably got a countertop. Everybody got a countertop? You got a countertop? Okay, alright, good. So in my particular office, my countertops that I like to put my equipment on or my supplies is at 12 o’clock behind the chair. Doesn’t work everywhere but 12 o’clock is where mine are. So this is what the example shows. And so what we decided to do was, like, if this is the countertop, it sits have of this table right here. We took and measured it, and we figured out what is the exact perfect way that this would need to be set up so that if I walk into the room, I’m exactly ready to get to work with no stops. Okay?

And so we would set the room up perfect. I would come in, I would sit down and we’d do like mock procedures and we’d be like, “Oops, sorry. You forgot so and so…” “Oh, yeah yeah yeah.” So we worked in and we got it just exactly perfect. I signed off, “yes it’s perfect”. The clinical team leader looks at it, “yes it’s perfect”. Okay, so we would put down. I mean this is just like old school as it gets but we would take, I took like a poster board and I cut it out like exactly the right size of the countertop, right? Put all the stuff on there that I would need for the procedure. You know, everything; instruments, syringes, whatever, bur blocks, everything. Set it down there and then take a pencil, trace around it, pick it up and write down what it was. Right? So then, once we had that, we pretty much just sent it to a graphic designer and they made an exact size replica of our poster board on PDF, print it out, color coded every single item.

So we made…and by the way, we make these templates for every procedure and so the gauze is always purple on every one of our templates. The syringes they’re always pink on every template because that’s always gray and they’re always in the same place. Although for each procedure, as you can imagine, there’s different things, right? So we have an extraction template. We have a segmentation template. This is a composite resin template, we have a crown template, we have a root canal template. But everyone’s, every…the background color’s different for every procedure. If there is a similar item, like the cassette always goes front left. It’s always gray. So that helps your staff know, they know where everything goes. So they don’t have to try to remember where he wants the cassette on this procedure versus this procedure, where they want the gauze on this versus this. And so this goes through.

The cool thing about that is, it really helps everybody out because you put this down so when we’re setting the room up, they’ll put this template down and I’ve got better pictures in a minute. They’ll put the template down, they’ll put all the supplies on it. If they forgot something, it’s staring you right in the face. If you forgot the bond, there’s a black square there that says “bond” which is telling you “Oh I forgot the bond”. So before we tell the doctors it’s time for him to come in here or her, “Let’s go get the bond and put in on there.” And once everything’s covered you know, okay it’s perfect. I feel good about it. Now we can go tell the doctor, right? Bur blocks, I went all out with this Toyota thing, man. We decided…because I’ve been to all these courses. Every course you go to there’s Dr. so and so’s bur block, Dr. so and so’s bur block. I said, “Man forget this. I just need to figure out a bur block that I can use for every single procedure.

And so I took all these burs that I used and I’ve got it down to, 15 burs. Okay? This is the 15 burs that I use for every single procedure in the office. And then, we even color coded this by taking the autoclavable tape, cut in squares and put it over the block. Punch in a hole in it and so you know what happens if you’re drilling on a person and the bur gets dull? And if you’re like mean, you take it off and you toss it over your shoulders. You say “Give me another 18 diamond…” or whatever. Well a lot of times, a staff…whose staff that might turn a room over? You? Okay. So are there times you come in here and all the burs that were in the room to begin with are not there when you leave, right? Okay. So then a lot of times, what would happen is, this bur block goes to the sterilization but because you’re so busy, this bur, this number 18 diamond never gets put back in there. It gets put in the autoclave, maybe it’s put in the cassette, gets back to the room again, the doctor gets ready for the 18 diamond, “Whoa, where’s the 18 diamonds?” It ain’t there, now there’s a pause. You either get to use a different diamond that you don’t like or the assistant’s going to get their tail up out of their chair and go to the supply room, get another bur and come back. Lots of delay.

So what are we, we’re fighting against every second of everyday. There’s delay and wasting time. So there’s a way, there’s a way to full proof you bur blocks. And so that way, the staff, they always know, “Okay, we’re missing a light blue diamond.” That’s a you know, we call it a sharp diamond in my practice, I just use common sense terms for everything. Okay so they know to get another sharp diamond if that one’s missing. Whatever color it is, it just clicks and there it is. You don’t have to think about it. Supply area, this is our central supply stocking area, okay? So every template has a color in the background. Composite resin is orange, every one of these supplies coordinates to a supply the row of orange bins in the supply area. So now, the staff not only knows when the thing is set up exactly right, they know when they’re setting it up if they come to the supply room and we have this little blue baskets they used to carry supplies from here to the room. They know if they take one supply out of each orange bin, then everything that needs to go into the room for a composite resin should be there. You don’t have to think about it, right? they just pull one supply in each bin.

And of course, every now and then you miss one; whatever. But the template tells you if you miss it. So there’s no way the doctor ever gets to the room without the thing being there and this really speeds it up for the staff. And we tested everything you could possibly test. We tested just having a lot of bins and the thing that hangs people up on this, they don’t like is I will have, like let’s say I use a lot of Septocaine. Everybody like to use septocaine pretty much? Right. So I will have a bin of septocaine in the orange row, a bin of septocaine in the yellow row, in the blue row. So I have multiple places that I have septocaine, right? My staff or in the beginning they would say this and the staff that I teach will always say, “Well that’s stupid, now when we’re stocking this room, we got to put 5 septocaine in 5 places instead of just one big bin. We could always get it out in 1 bin.” But it’s not just septocaine, it’s everything and that’s duplicated, right?

So it’s a heck of a lot easier when it’s a busy day, you know; Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday in my office and we’re cruising and trying to get to 12,000. It’s a heck of a lot easier for the staff just to put a bucket down and put one thing out of each bin in a color and go to the room then have to try to think, “Okay for this procedure, he needs septocaine, he needs brushes, he need binding agent, he needs this.” You know, if you just have…if it’s just in one place, then you have to remember every single time you need to get a supply. But if you have multiple places and they’re all color coded, you just go Boom boom boom boom boom! To the room off you go. This cuts down setup room times by minutes. I mean, 6-7 minutes probably per procedure. Okay, yes. Let’s answer questions. Yes, okay okay, yes. You know we tested a couple of ways, I actually tried doing like a you know, you see a butcher paper, we have it on a roll when you tear it off. That turned out to be really, hey hard to get somebody to print and be complicated.

It turned out to work better for us, we just printed the one poster for each procedure, and then we had it laminated really good with what they call a quarter inch, edge seal lamination. And so when you’re measuring your counter space, be sure that you leave off at least a quarter of an inch all the way around the edge because you need that quarter of an inch for the lamination to stick over the poster. So over time, as the lamination kind of frames, it never get to the poster word and de-laminate. It’s really strong, I mean it’s…after the fire, it’s one of the things I was able to dig out of the ashes and save. I actually dug them out, cleaned off the black soot and they’re still fine; I mean they’re that good. The lamination is that good on those things. So yes, that’s how you do that. This is usually like the concept that people like. Normally, so this is the one like people really come down to my office and see when they come to my office.

Here’s the route board, okay? So in Toyota, they have these Kanban signal boards. Okay? In Toyota, they always except there are big old fancy ones, right? But they, everybody in the factory knows how things are flowing down the line every second of every day, okay? And that’s, I mean this is just one of those concepts if the workers now how things are flowing, it keeps everybody on track and motivated. So I thought how can we put this in a dental office. And so, this is…I got this from my trip down to visit Monticciolo’s office as I was telling you about this...

Become a Dental Speaker, Author, and Expert – Season 1 Episode 15

Sat, 23 Apr 2016 02:05:26 -0400

Our Special Guest Penny Reed and I share our formula of how we became recognized in this elite club and how we think you should begin your journey to becoming an in-demand dental speaker, author, and expert if you have an interest in cracking into dentistry’s most inner circle, the Speaking Circuit.

With over 35 combined years of experience in the Dental Speaking Industry, we will share the most common ways that dental speakers sabotage their careers and how they can make choices that make them highly sought after. You will learn:

How to Become Known for a Hot Topic, Giving You a Huge Advantage
How to Create a Strong Platform that Develops a Web of Interest
The Fastest Course to Getting Booked Solid Without Sitting Around Waiting for the Phone to Ring

And Much, Much More…

Resource: Best Dental Speaker Course by Dr. Griffin and Penny Reed

Click Here to Learn More

Read Full Transcript

The Dr. Chris Griffin Show – Season 1 Episode 16

“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.” Now who said that?

Let me tell you guys, anytime I get a chance to throw out a quote from a theoretical physicist, I’m going to take that chance because I guess it’s not every day that overlaps with the world of dentistry. But here you go, that quote was by none other than world famous doctor, Neils Bohr. Now Neils Bohr was a theoretical physicist like I said, he’s from Denmark and I mean this guy’s done, he did so much. I mean this guy developed all these theories about Physics back in the 20’s. You know, then along comes…and he wins a Nobel prize by the way for all that. And then comes along World War II, the guy fights the Nazis, the Nazis gets after him, he runs away to Sweden then he ends up in England. He becomes part of the Manhattan project that won, eventually won World War II for the Americans. And then after that you know it’s just off to the race as he founds the Neils Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and it just goes on and on from there.

So this is one of the smartest guys that ever lived on the face of the planet. Now why did I throw that quote out? Well because today’s show is a lot about being an expert in what to do if you are an expert and recently, I did a project with Penny Reed. Now Penny is someone I’ve known forever. Of course I’m about to introduce her in a minute, of what I’m going to share with you but we, for years, wanted to do a project together. But you know, hey, we both coach dentist and it seemed like we’re going to compete with each other. It seemed odd and weird and so we could never find a way to do it until now. So we both have a passion for motivational speaking and just speaking in general. And both of us have kind of pulled ourselves up from the boot straps and become speakers in this dental field. Just you know, basically on the force of our will and so we want to share with everyone how that we did it. And how that we think it’s very possible but there’s a formula that you could follow and you could also become an expert in this field and the speaker and author and all that stuff if you want to.

So, we held a live training on April 19th. So I just took the body of that live training which I had to edit it a little bit because let me tell you, there was just some comedy of errors. Just a lot of crazy stuff happened with me having to update apple right before the webinar because it’s something that, I don’t know why and then it has some conflicts with the webinar program. And anyway, there are a lot of editing but I got it down to reasonable time frames. So I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to share this training with you guys. I hope you get a lot out of it. If you’re interested at all in being an expert in the field, this is for you. Okay? If you want to hear about implants and fillings and stuff like that, hey maybe just fast forward in next week, but I think there are a lot of people out there who are interested in this topic. And so I’m really proud to share it. Please forgive the audio quality, like I said it has some crazy technical difficulties but we fought through it and the content is just killer. Okay? So I’ll see you on the other side.

Hey everybody, this is Dr. Chris Griffin and welcome. Now you are in the right place tonight if you are looking for the training on the top 7 mistakes that dental speakers make when launching their careers. I know this is a little bit of a different topic usually on this training webinars. We’re talking about you know, improving your dentistry and all this stuff. Well tonight, this is a special thing that’s just for dental professionals and we’re trying to help as many people as we can and learn about this career. Now let me throw out a little stat out at you, okay? There are about a 130,000 general dentists in America. There are about 1 million dental professionals that support the dental industry. Now if you think about it, there are about 2,000 speakers in the USA that focus primarily on just speaking to dentists. Okay? That means that less than 1/10 of 1% of all the dental professionals out there have taken advantage of this opportunity that we’re talking about tonight.

This amazing opportunity for a second income; a second career in some cases, and in just a whole lot of significance in contribution to our profession. So by the end of this session tonight, you’re going to know what that top 1/10 of 1% know. Or what, or tonight really kind of what they don’t know but as we go through that, you’ll learn also what they do know that allow for this type of opportunity to happen. Now tonight, in a minute I’m going to talk about our co host, can you read and I’m going to explain why she is absolutely perfect person to be part of this training with us. But right now…

Dr. Griffin: Hey Penny! Are you there with us?

Penny: Hi! I’m excited about being here with you tonight. And boy, I think we’ve pretty much got both of the ends of the spectrum covered for the dental professionals, with you being the dentist and me being a former office manager. I’m super excited about working on this project with you. Chris, I’d like to tell them how we met. Can I tell them that story?

Dr. Griffin: Hey, go for it!

Penny: Alright. Yeah, I remember pretty much the time when we first met by phone because my daughter who will be 17 this summer, hard to believe, was about 8 weeks old. And Dr. Griffin had called, he’d been in practice for probably a little over a year. Because Chris, looks like you graduated from dental school in around ’98. And he called me and asked about us possibly working together and I said, “You know I got this sweet little baby that I’m enamored with and presently I’m not taking any new clients.” But he wound up working with another one of our team members which was awesome. And I did get the opportunity to work with him and Boy, he has…I knew he has the potential. He has really exceeded the expectations that I think most dentists and dental school would…Chris I’m going to go ahead and brag about you a little bit. I believe your first speaking engagement occurred in 2002 in Houston, Texas. And some of you may or may not now that Dr. Griffin started out wanting to be an Engineer. Isn’t that right, Chris?

Dr. Griffin: That is true. That is true.

Penny: Now that’s true, right. So what’s awesome about this and what really has helped build his dental business outside of the practice, is the expertise that he has in efficiency. He thinks differently than some of the rest of us too, which is great. That means we have a lot to learn from him. And then he founded in 2008, Effective Dentistry LLC and the Capacity Academy and he teaches his concepts both of the Clinical Efficiency and Practice Management to other dental offices. And he has spoken all over the country and what else I think is really cool is that Dr. Griffin hosts AGD approved hands-on training courses at his practice in the Metropolis of Ripley, Mississippi; which I actually have relatives that live in Ripley, Mississippi. Which is nearer him over there. And dozens of dentists and I know that they brought some team members with them, so I’m sure hundreds of dental professionals have travelled from across the United States and Canada to Ripley, Mississippi to learn from him. So he has got a lot to offer, expertise-wise, not only as a presenter but also as a meeting planner and a dental business coach. So I’m super excited to be working on this project with you Chris.

Dr. Griffin: Yeah you know that ever since that fateful night of 17 years ago when Penny rejected me of when I was (Penny laughs) seeking out for help and begging her for help with my brand new practice, you know. It’s time for us to finally work together. But hey, it’s finally happened and I’m looking forward to…you know, Penny, it is amazing to me. I think we have had dentists down here that have traveled. I mean like you said, Ripley population 6,000. We got all sorts…I already know how many provinces there are but I believe all other provinces in Canada have been represented here in over half the States. It’s just shocking if you think about that.

Penny: Wow!

Dr. Griffin: You mentioned 2002, just a quick little tiny story about that. I owe all my speaking career really to Howard Farran because he was on the front row in 2002, when I gave my first presentation and I was so you know, exhilarating that I looked down about 5 minutes and I’m thinking “Oh my gosh, Howard Farran, one of my heroes on the front row!” Howard Farran is dead asleep; arms fold and head back. About 15 minutes into the 1 hour lecture, he starts to audibly snore. So he is snoring and snorting, the people around him are looking and laughing and he sort of chapping and poking. They look at Howard, you know and I just, I’m like “Oh, my gosh! This is awful, I’m going to die and I’m never going to speak again.” And so I end my presentation, you know mercifully the slides go black. The next guy is getting on the stage and Howard snaps to attention and wakes up, stands up on the front row, turns to this crowd of about a 100 dentists and starts waving his arms up in the air like a basketball player to give me a standing ovation and then he turns around and gives me the loudest standing ovation I’ve ever heard. And from that moment on, I was absolutely hooked on this crazy thing, right?

Penny: That’s awesome!

Dr. Griffin: So no matter what Howard Farran does to the rest of his career, and he is a little bit you know, he can be a little comfy at times but he’s aces in my book and I’ll be you know, I’ll be his guy from now on. But Penny, if you don’t know Penny, let me tell you…you are in for a treat tonight. Because now Penny, like she has done it all. She’s been a, you know office manager extraordinary. Now a lot of people on this call, you guys maybe some…there maybe some office, I think there are. In fact, I know there are some office managers out there who signed up for this thing. Now she went, she was so amazing at that course. She got a little taste of this up and she, she ventured out into coaching and it’s turned her into now she’s an author, she’s been a dental management consultant. Obviously more than 17 years, she’s began her career in 1992. Like it says, as a manager from ’94 to 2001, she was a franchise owner and a director of training for a dental management company that was founded by none other than Tony Robbins. Now that’s the one that I called her and tried to get her to help me. You know, Tony Robbins is a big tall guy with a great smile you see on late night T.V. So then 2001, she launched her own dental coaching business. You know, hey, God bless you Penny. You know dealing with dentists, if the majority of your income comes from dealing with us, every day of the week, God bless you. You know if you’re a dentist you know how hard and difficult it can be to deal with you sometimes. She has written articles by mail for most of the major dental publications. And she’s been speaking to audiences all across America too since 1999. Penny is also a long standing professional member of the National Speakers Association and the book that she wrote, which I am currently holding in my fingers is…you hear me flipping the pages? Is “Growing your Dental Business” okay? It’s a really good book, I can honestly say. I have read this book and I can like every word, Penny but I have read a good bit of it. And it is pretty awesome, you got some good quotes in it too from some dentists that I know. So I thought that was pretty good. And as a result of all these worksheets put in, her clients are more focused, they earn more and they have more confidence about their business and they have happier teams to support them. That’s a big thing too having happier teams because it certainly makes your life better when you have a happy team. So that’s it Penny. You’re head’s probably gigantic by now.

Penny: It really is. My headset’s a little bit tight but I guess we’ll keep on going here. Thank you for all of those kind things and it really is amazing how this journey has led us up here and really I think in a nutshell, and I won’t necessarily read this next slide all together immediately for you. But here’s why I’m so excited about tonight’s course. And that is when I think back to 1997 probably. When I approached my first meeting planner, and while you know, I took a big deep breath, swallowed hard, and walked up and said, that was an exhibit at that meeting. I said, “I would love to be a speaker at one of your meetings in the future.” And he was like, “Oh really? What do you speak on?” And I don’t even remember what I said. It probably didn’t make a whole lot of sense, but now looking forward and what many of the conversations that Dr. Griffin and I have had together our whole world when putting this course together and this training together is to save you not only the pain. And I would say some of the embarrassment, probably. If some of the things that I said and maybe we’re just lucky enough or nice enough to get booked anyway. But also call for the mistakes, you know time is money that we made when we were launching our speaking careers. So I think we’re going to have a great time tonight, stay with us, you know through to the very end. We’re packed a lot of tips in here for you. And Chris, I don’t know if there’s anything you want to add before we tell them what mistake number 1 is.

Dr. Griffin: Well for my point of view, what I would like to see everyone. Everyone that gets under this field and by the way, I see a couple of people signed in that I know really well. So if you’re on and I know you really well, Hey! It’s good to see you signed in. But at the end of the night, I would really like to see everyone that mostly get into this field to be able to conquer the fears and doubts that hold you back you know. For pursuing what I think is an amazing opportunity that’s fun, that’s profitable, is significant and I would really feel like you’re doing a wonderful service of contribution to your profession. That is absolutely what I would like to see happen. Now also that and of course if you’re ready to get into the, and we probably need to get into the 7 mistakes. Time is going by but I feel like what Penny and I are trying to do is really pull back the curtains to a lot of people who are afraid to share and don’t know ways to share with people. Because hey, like I said, there’s only 2,000 speakers out there that’s less than 1/10 of 1%. So a lot of people don’t want you to know what’s going on. Well Penny and I have been there, done that, we want you to know what’s going on. So hang tight and at the end of this 7 mistakes tonight, we’re also going to give you a place where you can go grab the night slides. So I encourage you to take a lot of notes but absolutely we’ll give you the resource if you need at the end of the night to get what you need. So hey, are you ready to jump into these?

Penny: Absolutely!

Dr. Griffin: Okay, so mistake number 1. Now if you’re on tonight’s call, there’s a good chance that you are in possession of the, what I’m going to, okay I’m just going to go right up. I say one of the best special reports that’s ever written, right? The report that Penny and I wrote about how you can find or pinpoint the absolutely perfect topic that can make you a sought after dental speaker. I’ve seen so many people out there, when, I’m sure Penny will back me up on this. When I’m going to speak, a lot of times you’ll speak right, you speak for a couple of hours, 4 hours, 8 hours sometimes if you will. At the end of the thing, there’s always going to be 4-5 people coming up, they want to talk to you, ask you questions; most of the time it’s about what you just spoken about. Now there’s always somebody, maybe a couple people kind of lurking behind that initial group. And once you’re through answering those questions, they sort of come up to you and the question that they usually ask is, how could I learn to do what you just did? I would really like to get into this field but I just don’t know how. And so inevitably, what I will do is I’ll say, “Okay, well hey what’s your message? What do you talk about?” and the response I get usually “Oh, I can talk about a lot of stuff. We did a lot of stuff that’s really good and awesome. You know.” Well that’s the problem. That’s the mistake right there. Most, if you can’t clearly define like how about a like a micro niche, if you will, of an area of expertise, then it’s going to be really hard for you to get your foot in the door because you’re going to just you know, you’re going to look like just whatever else you know, the same old same old copy cat stuff that everyone’s talking about. For me myself, I would say when I was picking out a niche, I was really passionate about people, you know, not succumbing to this idea that anybody, anywhere can have a really high end expensive boutique type practice, right? And so we developed a way where you could make a really high amount of income, just seeing regular folks. And so I chose dental efficiency and productivity is sort of my niche. Now you know looking back, I picked out. I certainly picked out a very micro niche. There was not a lot of competition, I feel like there’s a reasonable chance I’ve planned near the top of the heap of people that are trying to talk about that. But the downside is of course that’s not a huge niche. So you know, I’m not getting, I’m not getting that…I’m not the guy that’s talking about implants; like you know I’m no implant guy. But if somebody’s looking for the productivity guy, I’m on the shortlist almost every time. Penny, I know you got a story too just like that, right?

Penny: Oh, absolutely! And one of the things that I...

Practice Achievement Formula Part 2 – Team Chemistry – Season 1 Episode 14

Fri, 15 Apr 2016 09:00:03 -0400

We all know that without the Doctor or the Patients, no treatment can exist. I contend that without a sound team of fun, hard-working, motivated, and upbeat team members, neither the Doctor, now the Patient can have an outstanding visit to the practice.

The Dental Team is THE KEY to unlocking happiness in all aspects of your office life. Today, we explore the Staff component of the SPEnD Continuum in the Practice Achievement Formula.

In this Episode You Will Learn:

How your Team members can Make or Break Case Presentation and How You Can Leverage Their Ability to Connect with the Patients in Ways that You Just Cannot

How to Destroy the Disease of Duplication in the Dental Practice to Make Your Own Team as Efficient as Greased Lightning!

The Blueprint of How You Can End the Days of Team Members Disrupting the Flow with Distracting Confusion and How You Can Become the CEO of Your Practice, Plus the Benefits that Come from Now Having to Deal with Every Single Problem, Every Single Day

And Much, Much More….

Read Full Transcript

The Dr. Chris Griffin Show – Season 1 Episode 14

“The strength of the team is each member; the strength of each member is the team.” Now who said that?

Folks, that was a good one, that was one of…well you all know how much I love basketball. I talk about it all the time. And well NCAA’s over now, I’m not as much of a pro basketball fan. But this particular quote came from the one, the only, Zen master himself, Phil Jackson. Who coached not only the world famous Chicago Bulls from the 90’s with Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen. Who made you know this year, their record, the All-time single season wins record is in jeopardy from the Golden State Warriors. It’s not that I don’t think the warriors are amazing, which they are. But of course the bulls are from my wheel house era, so I kind of seen how the records fall. But he was their coach and then he was coach for the Kobe Bryant, Shaq O’Neil, Lakers. Now he’s the coach of New York Knicks, not having as much luck with the Knicks this year or last year. But Phil, you know, if anyone can turn that ship around, he can do it. But there’s no question, Phil Jackson has a place in history as one of the greatest thinking coaching minds ever to set foot on a basketball court.

So that’s one of the reasons why I picked that quote because when I was looking through good quotes for today’s episode, which is all about staff and teamwork, this one just jumped off the page because it really is true, the strength of the team is each member but the strength of each member is the team. That’s so like Phil, such a Zen Master quote. So anyway, today’s episode is going to be awesome because we’re going to go back to the Oklahoma City lecture but this lecture started to get really good because as we deep dive into the Practice Achievement Formula, and we all know that staff, that’s the very first part of that formula, today we get to that part of the lecture and really get deep deep into detail on that. And we’re going to cover a lot of other cool things right? We’re going to talk about you know, how to avoid duplication in the practice. We’re going to talk about how to delegate, how to be a real CEO, how to develop team leaders. Just a lot of stuff, okay? It’s going to be really awesome. So listen up, here we go…

Now how do you count a case accepted when you chart it? Okay, okay, that’s good. That’s good. How about you? Alright. Do you know what your percentage is? What?! You’re lying. It’s not 98, what are you talking about? 98. Huh?! I’ve never heard of 98. 73 is decent. That’s like what people shoot for. Darn front desk run. See she should know that she should at least get close to the National average but yeah…98? Golly, man that’s yeah, yeah no kidding. Yeah I don’t know about all that. Okay, well good. Well you have some interesting, you have some Sherlocking to do next week. See if you’re really at 98%. Check out form, “Hey what happened to that patient?”

Okay, anyway. Get around to do that now. The thing that holds up a lot of people is financial arrangements. So I have probably managed to convince somebody they need to do something. They probably say, Okay let’s do it. But the thing that holds us back a lot of times is the money. Is the money ever an issue in any of those prices? Okay. Well good! I’m glad that’s the same in Oklahoma City. Good. So that’s the problem we all have anywhere. Now I have told you guys it bumps up the percentage of chance if you get them to do it, bumps up significantly if you can do it today, while they’re here. That’s not only possible, right? Found the middle of doing that implant, I’m not going to try to work in another root canal and a crown, a number 15 probably. But you know, within reason, there’s always more time available than you think there is. Behind the scenes that got everything verified, so your team should be able to you know, staff feverishly charts what you say, get it into the computer, get it to the financial people. About you know, the front office people who already verified the insurance. They figure out the patient’s part. And now it’s time for somebody whether it’s you, I hope. You know, I’m too wimpy to do it myself. So I actually have Lupita do my financial arrangements with people.

And so she let my practice go and now she’s got a number and now she can figure out how she can actually going to pay for it, right? So they’re making, the patient’s going to make a decision. We hope that they’re going to accept the case. In which case, we go into our really quick room setup protocol that involves a lot of cool stuff. We’ll talk about it here in a minute, do the treatment. You know, at the end of the appointment, that’s another way we can get a lot of referrals after the appointment’s over, we do a good job. And after bleeding everywhere, you’re hurting real bad, you probably want to bypass this. But if everything went well, you got a little script that the assistant gives to him as he’s working him up and says you know, “We’d love to have more people like you here.” And check out person at the front desk, they also have a little part in that. They give a nice little card, care to share card, or whatever you want to call it.

And then the person appoints for the next appointment. And if they didn’t accept the case, then that’s when we kick into our marketing protocols and we actually have follow up when we do that; by phone and by mail. And then if they still don’t do anything, they go into a reactivation project protocol where we actually every few months will get the patients who haven’t been in it. So you wrote in 6 months or 6 to 13 months and we classify and we send them mail pieces or column or whatever we decide to do for that particular reactivation project. So I’m going to a lot of more detail here in minute but that’s kind of a broad overview of that’s how it works in my office. That’s how things kind of flow through. That’s how it is generally kind of looks like you get behind my back when I’m telling my staff that I wanted to do something in a hurry. Or something like that.

That’s one of the 2 things that Dr. Ted’s staff changed their practice was the route board and the orange card which I got up here which I’ll show you guys in a minute too. Alright, so but first, let’s go through the staff, the staff part of the lecture because that is one of the 4 parts of this formula. That is…this was taken before the fire; this is for long term staff. They’re making them smiling big because they’re all making a lot of money and now there’s only 1 left…Lupita. Lupita is the only one left, right? All the others have gone away. It’s sad too because I’m actually the third one there is cousin, my cousin. She couldn’t stick it out either. I went to a high school with the first one. I went to high school with the first one and this third was my cousin and they were *woosh* right out of there. It’s too tough…too tough Dr. Griffin! And Amber actually, her husband moved to North Dakota and the oil fields, that’s not really you know, whatever.

Alright, let’s take a couple of minutes with this. I’m just going to share some insights for the doctor’s staff, close your eyes and ears. Don’t watch any of these or might get a kick out of it.

For 2 years, I actually taught a class in Atlanta that was just for dental staff. Doctors really were encouraged not to come and so doctors would actually say “I want you to train my staff” and so I would train their staff but I would know if a doctor came, the staff would not act right? They wouldn’t act honestly. They would lie and it’s like you know, if I get the staff away from the doctors, then I could sort of get into the bottom of things and try to help the doctor actually come up with the solutions. So at each course, and at each course I don’t know how many hundreds of people came through that course. But you know, every doctor’s got 6, 7, 8 staff would give a handout and one of the questions on there was “I wish the doctor would…” and it’s always got the best answers. So here’s some that I’ll share with you. I wish the doctor would…”communicate better with his staff, be more aggressive with authority”. I don’t know who this person was but “and stop worrying if people like him or not.” Okay?

Well she’s actually…I got a lot of these actually. A lot of staff would tell me that their doctors worry so much about what the patients thought about him that it affected the way the treatment plan, that it affected the way they ask for money and everything else. So this is just something that the staff thought. Here’s another one, “I wish the doctor would stand up and enforce his standards, not worried whose toes his stepping on, make sure everyone is following his rules.” And this is a theme too we heard all the time because a lot of team members would tell us, that some tyrant in each office was running things but they can get away with anything and if I do something, you know, whoever knows who’s telling the truth in these deals. But it’s something to think about because these are actual quotes. And I can guarantee you, some people in your staff are saying things that are probably kind of like this.

“*Sigh* I wish the doctors would put his foot down and stop of all of the office drama. Make sure everyone knows what is and isn’t acceptable from his employees and stop trying to please everybody.” You see a theme developed in here? This is…this is something that, I mean, you see over and over. “Communicate better with us and appreciate what we do.” This is also a common theme; a lot of staff feels underappreciated. They feel the doctor don’t appreciate them. “He doesn’t take time to listen to the issues that we have. We want to make the practice better.” Now listen to this, if you’ve actually got somebody that honestly says something like this, that’s great, right? You got somebody who cares about the practice. If you’ve got somebody who truly cares about the practice and it’s not you, then you need to figure out how to make that person, and give them an environment where they can excel.

“I wish the doctor will allow a light to shine.” Now this person went into some detail and literally they 1, 2, 3, 4, or let go of negativity. This trust and security, uncertainty of his staff, communicate what he wants better. You know I worry every time you see numbers and something like that I would worry about it. “Communicate with his staff more often and more clearly.” “Spend less time on his desk and more time with us.” Now this is interesting, I used to get this a lot. Team members from all over the country and Canada would tell me, I can’t get the doctor out of the office. He’ll see a patient then go right into his office and shut the door and I think he’s just on the internet in there. I hear that all the time and I’d have some doctors that will be like “Hey man, isn’t there…surely it’s…do you go in your office a lot?” and I have one guy telling me who’s like “Yeah, you know, I just hate being there so much and I like to go in my office and watch haunted videos.” Okay. But I mean, I heard this so much, there’s got to be some truth in it.

So and maybe somebody even in this room that maybe do that more than they should, I don’t know. Here’s a good one, “I wish the doctor would fire Tina or at least stand up to her. Follow through with the standards he has for the whole office.” You see a trend here? It seems like a lot of office have one person, you know that, everybody hates but just the doctor who loves her for whatever reason. “I wish the doctor would talk to his wife about not calling so many times during the day.” I just thought, I’ll just throw it in for fun. Does anybody here ever had that issue? You know what’s funny is, my wife actually used to…she used to call. Then I quit taking them actually. But then you get, you know, then you get in trouble at home but I’m so…that’s one reason why I quit taking the lunch just I’m like “Listen, I work through lunch what do you want me to do? I’m so busy.”

“I wish the doctor would stop yelling at me in front of patients and get a new office manager not his wife.” Which now, I have looked in the mirror on this one because since the fire, my wife actually works at the front office. She’s not the office manager though but she does work out there. And you know typical, she comes when she wants to come in and then leaves when she wants to leave. So I’m a hypocrite. “I wish the doctor would be a better leader. Stand up and let this practice be as good as we know it can be.” I say, I mean if you could really…I mean I know the doctors would get ticked off if somebody telling them you need to be a better leader but if you can have somebody who really cares? I mean heck, figure out a way to make their life easier. How do we make their life easier? Now here’s where it gets tricky, because we’re trying to make everybody’s life easier, our life, their life, whatever. But there’s some painful parts in this to make it really easier, you first have to set some standards. And part of the standards, you know, you really need a job description. Okay?

How many people are running around the dental office, and here’s what we find. If somebody does not have clear job descriptions, don’t feel bad if you don’t. 10% of the dentists probably do. So what you invariably have, we used to do this. Like I said, it’s part of that big coaching program. And this would happen every time, so we would, one of the first projects we would do with people. So you guys are getting this for free, it is like $35,000. We would have the whole staff sit down, and on a piece of paper, just write down, line item, line item. What do you do in the practice? You know? Turn on the lights, suction you know, whatever. And then we would take and we would look at the staff and we just lay it out and had a big old table before the fire and we’d lay it all out, and I was “Alright, let’s look for duplication.” Okay?

Invariably, 2 or 3 people would have exactly the same thing down. For multiple stuff, exactly the same thing. I mean as simple as turning the lights on in the morning, it would be 3 people that would think that was their job. Turn the nitrogen tanks off at night that would be on 3 or 4 people’s list. You know, everything you can think of, in doing treatment plans to financial arrangements to verifying insurance cards, photocopying insurance cards, whatever it is. There’s always duplication in every office and tons of it, right? So what do you think happens when more than one person thinks it’s their job? There’s always somebody else to do it; it’s always somebody else’s fault. Or somebody else, “Oh I thought, I thought somebody else was doing it.” You know?

So one of the first things we would do, is we would take in, we would rate a natural job description for every person and we would remove all that duplication and we would take everything that was duplicated and we would ask the doctor, who do you want to do this? 3 people say it’s their job, and they would always say. The doctor would always say, “Oh really? I didn’t know that. I thought that it was Tina’s job.” So you know, but the staff didn’t know. So we would get all and we’d make a job description, for every single person in the office. And that’s painful, let me tell you. People pay me big money to set this up for them and I would say, 20-25% ever actually followed through and did it. Even after we went to the trouble of giving it to the doctors, the doctors still wouldn’t do it. Why do you think they wouldn’t do it? Push back from the staff. They would scare of the push back from the staff. They knew it was better for the practice but they were scared of the push back from the staff.

Create team leaders, this is painful. There’s always going to be somebody that’s a…if you’re the doctor, and the way that I compress my workweek from 5 days to 3 days, okay, was that I couldn’t do every job. Right? I had to take a lot of stuff off my plate, so when I’m at the office 3 days a week, if we’re going to get, if we’re basically, if we’re going to do a minimum. In our office, we try to do a minimum of $12,000 in a work day and my crown fee is 693 for a you know, all porcelain crown; so that’s low. So that’s a lot of dentistry right? 12 grand a day. If we’re going to do that and if we don’t do that, there’s problems. You think money doesn’t work out right then I cannot, I cannot have the hygienist coming up to me, asking me if you can get off work in 6 weeks. I cannot have an employee coming up and telling me that their kid’s sick. I can’t have somebody coming up and having a complaint about the way they’re being treated. I cannot have any of that. That cannot happen.

I have to produce Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. That’s already not optimal days, it’s just better for me alright? So these, all this stuff has to go away. So how can it go away because I mean the bill, it still has to run, I’m still the CEO. The place still hasn’t happen. So the way that I fixed it, and the way that these offices would have done well have fixed it because they will actually have 1 or 2 people that are in charge of different areas. And there’s even, you can have 3. You could have, so like in my office, we have an office team leader, we call it clerical team leader and we have a clinical team leader. Well and since the fire and everybody quit, now we just have 1, office manager. It’s not ideal but Lupita is the only there that’s really qualified, I think, to do the job. But when we had a bigger staff, and we had 14 ops, we had…Lupita was in charge of the clinical staff, including the hygienist. I know you guys don’t like that but everything clinical flowed down to her and if she couldn’t solve it, she could come talk to me. But that was it because she knew how to talk to me. She knew not to interrupt me in the middle of something that’s really important. She knew how to approach me so that we could get things done...

Practice Achievement Formula Part 1 -Season 1 Episode 13

Sat, 09 Apr 2016 02:14:23 -0400

Years of searching led me to a discovery that changed the way we view every single action involving the pursuit of practice growth and happiness. The answer to Ultimate Practice Success is not found on some remote mountaintop in a monastery or in a tiny cabin in an inaccessible swamp.

The true secret to solving the riddle that has eluded so many dentists is in creating synergy between the 4 elements that make up any dental practice. Those elements are represented by the acronym S-P-En-D, and any dentist who ‘spends’ enough time concentrating on improving these elements will without doubt create the practice of their dreams.

In this episode you will learn:

The way to master the element that drives the engine of the practice and the element that can make any dentist miserable when it is out of kilter. This solves 90% of your practice troubles if you get it right, sadly few ever solve the riddle
How to cure the incurable disease of no-shows in the practice in a very unconventional way. Few will have the guts to proceed and those who do will wonder why they ever did this any other way.
Why “Mystery Calls” are no longer effective and the simple trick that REALLY fixes the phones.
The first step of our Famous 3 Step Diagnosis that Most Miss and that Can Skyrocket you Case Acceptance when done right.

And Much, Much More….

Read Full Transcript

The Dr. Chris Griffin Show – Season 1 Episode 13

“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement and success have no meaning.” Now who said that?

Oh, that was a good one. That was a good quote now, the reason that I picked that quote is because today we’re going to dive in to our practice achievement formula. If you’ve been following along, you will know that we’ve been taking little excerpts from our recent full day lecture in Oklahoma City and this is the part of that lecture where I dive into my Practice Achievement Formula. We won’t have time to get through the whole thing today, but we’re going to definitely get started on it. Now the quote was from our friend, one of our founders from the one hundred dollar bill, Benjamin Franklin. The last great renaissance man of America, some said. But then had a ton of great quotes and I will probably quote him again before the show’s over, I’m certain. But let’s take Ben’s advice and keep that quote in mind as we listen to our Practice Achievement Formula today. And I’m going to shoot you back off to Oklahoma City. Here we go.

But anyway, here’s the formula. So I finally sat down and thought about it long enough that I decided, there’s really only 4 parts to any dental practice, okay? There’s…and the letters would be SPEn and D. So there is 3, that is the staff right? Because that’s the big part. We found out earlier, that if your staff’s not on board, it’s really hard to get stuff accomplished. Okay? That’s part 1. As you get this sheet that I got you guys to write on as we go through all this, you know. I don’t expect you guys to take everything I say and go home and try to do it next week. But what I would love is like if you guys just picked…if you could come up with 4 things for each of these letters, write it down, and work on one of those things each quarter. And at the end of the year, a year from now, you would have, you’d have 16 really good thing down at your practice that would surely help you.

The second part is patience, okay? Because without patience, there is no practice. Environment is a big one. Environment is a big one because it is very possible to put a good team in a bad environment and it will not work. But you can put a subpar team and a great environment and that subpart team will actually rise up and become a better team. Maybe there’s a subpar because you can do enough good stuff teaching team, right? And the doctor, the doctor is the last part and I put that in there because just like, if you want to do like Dr. Ted? And you want to run wide open and have 20 people at the parking lot all the time? Hey, go for it. If you want to do like Dr. Bryan? And you want to work 2 days a week and go fishing a lot? Do that but you need to figure out what you…what makes you happy because at the end of the day, if you as the doctor are not happy, what’s the point? I mean what’s the point in any of these. Right?

And the 3 questions I want you to think about as we go through all this, or how would you…how would you want your practice to look? How do you want to live your life in general? And then once you get everything cooking like along those lines, how would you like to grow? And that would be sort of growing significance in contribution. And probably, as I can assure you, I do appreciate…man, I appreciate Oklahoma City Dental Society for paying me this nice honorarium to come talk to you guys, I do appreciate that. But I mean I got to drive 10 hours both ways and I took a day, you know, a day that I could have been working and I’m here.

So if you think about it, there must be some reason that I do stuff like this besides the honorarium money, and it’s really just because I love the…I love to sort of spread this message and help people do better in their own practices. And I guess that’s kind of what…once I get my practice is going good, I got you know, I got my setup where I wanted it from my life, then I’m thinking, well now it’s time for me to help other folks. And these are kind of symbols, so as we go through like I put these symbols up on the slides or something, it just kind of let you know what category something falls in. But that’s the staff, the patient, I guess that patient one is kind of like a symbol of there’s a lot of patients out there and you, they’re trying to find the patients for the practice. And of course you get the globe, environment, Al gore and then the doctor.

So the new patient life cycle. So let’s think about the patient, this is all about the patient part right now. We got to figure out…now last night, I had to warn you guys because I forgot something to draw along so last night I actually drew some little sketches on my iPad and then put them on here, they’re pretty ugly but they’re coming here in a minute. But to fully understand where the new patients are coming from or any patients are coming from, period. You got to kind of understand where they started out. So this is the first ugly drawing of the day. Alright? So way over her on the left, you’ve got the patient pool, so out there, anywhere you work. Oklahoma City got more that most but anywhere you’re working, there’ a pool of folks that might could be patients at your practice.

Now what you’re always trying to do is you’re trying to pull out 8 patients from that general pool, by some form of marketing. Okay? They could be direct marketing, it could be indirect marketing through referrals; that’s always the best. But you know, sometimes you got to get the ball rolling with external marketing. Then once you have attracted a person that thinks enough of you, to actually call your practice, you have to make sure that however that person tries to connect with you, whether it’s by phone, or these days they could be by text or email or contact form on your website even. You have to make sure that your systems are down on that process so that they actually finally make it to the building of the practice, right? Because we’re still not doing digital outsource dentistry yet.

And then once you get to the building, then there’s a whole lot of stuff that has to happen inside the building. So the patient has a really good experience, so that when they leave the building, they decide to come back to the building and stay as your patient instead of going back to the general pool, right…because that can happen. It happens to everybody, it happens to me all the time. I had a patient this week, had been my patient for since 1999. I had done 15 crowns on her, her husband’s insurance changed. I was on their PPO and it changed to one I’m not a member of. But he still would have paid for the cleaning because it was pretty much all she needed. So she came into my, and stayed for a while… I didn’t even thought about it. She came in, whatever, Wednesday, the last day I worked. She came in Wednesday, a crown I did in 1999 had fallen off, it was a solid gold crown she wore a hole in it and it came off and she said, “I just thought I should come to you for this.” She said, “You know I had to stop coming here as a regular patient.” I said, “What?” She said “Yeah”. She said, “I’m sorry that I’m not, you know, you can’t see me anymore.” I said, “What are you talking about, Maggie?” She said, “Well I got this letter from my husband’s insurance and said that I had to go to one of these dentists on this list, you weren’t on it.”

And so I said, “Okay.” She said “But I went to him, I didn’t like him very much. I was thinking about coming to you anyway. But I just hate to pay for a 100% on my pocket.” So I said, “Well hey, you know I am not a member of this PPO, yes, but you know your cleaning stuff will still be covered and it still covers you, it’s just you don’t get as big a discount.” But I said, “You know I’ve worked with you, you’ve been my patient since 1999.” She said, “Are you serious?” And she’s like get a red in the face and get mad because she liked misunderstood this insurance company letter and in her mind it was saying that she was not allowed to come to me anymore, right? And the reason she didn’t…I said, “Why didn’t you call us and ask us?”She said, “Well I was so embarrassed you know I love you guys so much I was just embarrassed to call and say I was going somewhere else.”

So that is the kind of thing that’s going through our patient’s minds guys. I mean it sucks, it’s not right but it’s…that truthfully happens. Anyway, to make a long story short, she went ahead and she cancelled her insurance. She dropped her insurance and she ended up, before she left she signed up for my in-office dental membership plan which I’ll talk about later this afternoon; which is awesome by the way. Are any of you guys doing that? You do that. So we’re not good enough for you guys? Well hey, you know. Yeah you can do, you can’t do anything wrong. I’ll share with you guys what I did. I actually doubled my memberships. Two years ago, I doubled them from 350 to 700 in 6 months. I’ll tell you guys what I did to do that.

So anyway, let’s see. I bet these guys get to bring their lunch in 7 minutes. Alright so that’s the patient life cycle. So here’s the new patient. Like I said, I apologize to these drawings. This is last night, but this is you know, I was testing out the new Ipad pro pencil, so this is what I came up with last night. Like I said, there’s a bunch of you out there, I mean if you don’t think there are, how do we get them? So who…I mean this has been done to death, and I hate to even go over it but it’s really every practice I work with, there’s generally an issue here. So I might as well go over it. But how many of guys feel like you have a really good handle on what happens at your incoming phone calls? Or do you use…you think you do? You may, you girls are here. So maybe you do.

A lot of places don’t, so I’ll just share with you guys what is not supposed to happen on any incoming phone call. Because think about it, this person likes your practice enough to try to connect with you. Do you think at least…will you at least owe it to them to try your best to let them connect to us but the goal on this is not to verify their insurance. Okay? I cannot tell you, we’ve lost so many patients from people they’ll call in, we ask them a thousand questions, part of that is verifying their insurance. We used to do that, we used to do their medical history, and what’s the argument for that? You guys, do you all…anybody know what the argument is? For why you would ask somebody a thousand questions on the phone?

The argument I hear all the time, people say, well if we don’t ask them the questions when they call in, and when they get here, it takes forever to verify their insurance or get their medical history filled out. Of course these days, there’s cool stuff where you can do medical history when you’re on the website and all kind of stuff like that. But you’ll be surprised, there’s still a lot of practices out there when somebody actually calls your office, the receptionist probably starts ignoring whatever. You know a human being is standing there, instead of being a concierge and giving them a great experience that are already standing here, they’re on the phone asking somebody who may not even show up for their appointment a thousand questions. Right?

And what we have found is, my staff resisted this forever. But what we found was, we actually measured it. And so we took 30 people that they did it their way, they asked a thousand questions, 18 of them showed up. A 30 booked appointments, 18 showed up. We did 30 my way, who have proved that said “Oh that’s great, yeah, when can you come in? Alright now that will be great. Oh, okay. We’ll see you then.” So out of 30 people who made appointments, 25 of them showed up, okay? Still 5 didn’t show up, but that’s going to happen. That’s just going to happen; I don’t care where you are.

So we had, obviously, way more showed up now. You spend all that time on the phone, with the 7 people that never showed up. What difference does it make if it would have taken you longer when they got there to ask them questions or verify their insurance, they didn’t show up. You wasted precious resources when you could have been using those resources for something else on those 7 people. Our goal is not to make sure they’re a good fit for our practice now. I will give you a caveat if you’re in a heavy Medicaid area like I am. And people are asking you, do you take MedicAid? Absolutely. I’m okay with saying, no. No if you don’t want them but because you can’t run into trouble there. But pretty much if it’s not that, I mean, well I’d like to take everybody because I can’t tell you how many times farmers that have pig manure on their feet, on their boots getting on my brand new A8 chairs, by the way. Will whip out a fold $100 bills and pay off a $15,000 crown or root canal with cash.

You know that happens all the time, so we don’t prejudge anybody. We don’t stress them out and I really think that a lot of like those 7 people who didn’t show up, I think the reason they didn’t show up is because we stressed them out. I mean they’re thinking, Oh crap, they’re asking me all these questions, maybe they don’t want me there. You know? I think that could be it. You could…be careful you don’t schedule an appointment they’re not ready for. If you pressure somebody into an appointment, you’re just asking for a no-show. And I don’t know, how many…does anybody in here do these mystery calls? Where people call your office? You do everything.

Alright so this half is nearly a hundred percent of the time. You’re staff, they’re not stupid. So they know I you’ve hired somebody to do mystery calls at your office. They know that as the doctor, you’re going to get a report every month. Okay? So in these cases, if you don’t ditch what I’m talking about, but every month the doctor gets a report, and they graded out somebody’s called the office, pretended to be patient, report it, graded it and told you what you do wrong. And told you what Suzy does wrong. So the staff knows that right? So they figure out, you know either if it’s the area code, they are used to get the mystery calls on; which is usually not your area code. Or if it’s like blocked, they know, “Oh blocked call! I’d better be on my toes and do it right.” But the rest of the time, they do it how they want to do it. I guarantee you. So the goal is not to get a perfect score on the mystery call by doing the scripts exactly right. The goal is to get them exactly to come show up at your office. Okay? That’s the whole 100% goal.

And there’s my new office, guys. After the old one burned down. It’s so pretty isn’t it? Oh, I’m proud of that. The only thing that survived is this plaque. I’ve prized that off the wall of the one that burned. That’s the only thing that made it through the fire. So then the next part of the lecture is going to be primarily about going through the in-office staff which is actually what I’m really good at. Alright so, yeah the first impression is they want to do business with you is because they like you. That’s the whole point; make them like you so that they’ll hopefully stay there forever. We have found empirically, that gifting does improve our frill numbers because when we do it, our frill numbers are high and if we don’t do it, our frill numbers are lower. They don’t dip off the charts but they do dip.

So years ago, when I was heavy into external marketing, there was a period of time where I thought I was a genius. For about 2005 to 2008, we averaged a 150 new patients a month; and that’s a lot. And that’s a lot. We’re working 3 days a week, too. That’s really more than you need. That’s more than you should have because when you’re trying to run a 150 new patients through there and do any kind of reasonable treatment plan on them, I mean it’s tough. That’s a tough one but we did it. Now overtime, I’ll just tell you, I mean it’s so silly but I’ll tell you what I did. I haven’t been able to create lightning in a bottle twice. In 2005, I started advertising, free exams and free x-rays. And for whatever reason, it just hit and it was so good, but overtime, that stopped working as well. And you know, I never really loved the offer anyway. It just worked so well, I quit doing it. But as I quit working, we jerked it off the market and kind of got tired of doing it anyway.

But what we were able to do, is we were able now, my practice is almost 75% of my new patient has come from referrals. So we get about 40-45 referrals every month. But my new patient numbers are way down however, actually my production numbers are up a little bit from then because the 150 new patients a month, a lot of them, you know just wanted the free exam, free x-ray. Now I was willing to do it because a good many of them converted to great patients. But it’s a lot easier to practice when you get 60 new patients or 65-70 and you’re not on your head off. The referrals, they are just plain ‘o better when they get on there. I remembered the good old free exam, free x-ray people, Gee whiz! They were hard to convert. But these referral people, they pretty much…it’s not a question of whether or not they’re going to accept treatment. It’s just a question whether or not they can afford the treatment that you’re recommending. And I may not always do exactly what I want to on them, but if they come in as a referral, it’s almost a slam dunk. They’re going to stay and do something.

I think it is good if you can come up with your own way to roll out the red carpet for your new patients, whoever

Stressed Out Doc to 3 Day Weeks Plus Bass Fishing – Season 1 Episode 12

Sat, 02 Apr 2016 02:00:47 -0400

This week we share a couple of really big success stories. One of my former coaching clients was the epitome of a stressed out dentist for years before he discovered how getting more productive led him to such great increases that he could go to 3 day weeks. He even had so much free time on his hands that he took up serious tournament bass fishing.

His story is NOT unique for those who have the fortitude get their practice productivity house in order. Great things can happen. Hear his story plus a bonus story about another great productivity success.

In this episode you will learn:

The lengths you need to go to protect the environment in your practice, including letting team members go who may be good at parts of their job, but drag down the whole team. If you have the guts to do what’s right for the practice, you create an atmosphere where you can burst through your current plateaus.
How Dr. Brian finally got serious and actually increased his production while decreasing his weekly patient schedule to 3 days per week and how you can start down the path to Weekly 4 Day Vacations Each and Every Week.
How to set the stage for our Practice Achievement Formula

And Much, Much More…

Read Full Transcript

The Dr. Chris Griffin Show – Season 1 Episode 12

“To think accurately, you must separate facts from mere information.” Now who said that?

Hello everybody. Well if you had a little trouble with that one is because it’s a bit of an obscure quote but don’t let that fool you because the quote itself comes from the one, the only, Mr. Napoleon Hill. Now Napoleon Hill, and I’m sure you guys know who he is but I’m just going to go over this for the folk in the back row who may or may not have read his most famous book. He wrote a book called “Think and Grow Rich”. Now “Think and Grow Rich” appears on the top 10 reading list of all business books of all time that I’ve ever seen every list I’ve ever seen has it up there.

And he basically studied the lives and got to be really personal friends with some of the biggest shots of his time in the world. This is to name a few of them. Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, John D. Rockefeller, Charles Schwab, Woodrow Wilson, okay? W. Wrigley, the list goes basically on and on. It’s a who’s who of his snapshot in time and he studied these folks and bold down what he found what was like their essence of success into first, a gigantic book called “The Law of Success in” 16 lessons. And later, a more condensed version called “Think and Grow Rich”. And he’s just if you have not read it, go buy it, go read it. Now it’s a little bit out there at times but the concepts, the basic principles are absolutely rock solid.

And the reason that I used him and that book as an example today because one of my favorite chapters in the book is called “Accurate Thought”. And what he’s trying to get across is that you absolutely must find a way to separate facts from pieces of information but it’s basically separating facts from fiction when you’re making good decisions. And that affects each of us every single day. And I get into that a little bit is we go back and we listen in a little fly on the wall back in Oklahoma City, in my recent lecture there. And we’re going to talk about that then we’re going to head into some other really cool topics. We’re going to talk about some hiring, some firing. And then how we became by some, coined the most productive Dental office in America. So sit back, relax, enjoy this little segment. And we’ll see you on the back end.

Alright, Okay. So I told, I was told in the back I need to hurry up and get to my solutions. So that’s what we’ll do. I’ll try, I’ll try to…I’m trying to paint a picture for you guys right? So anyway, I’m here until you guys get tired of asking me questions whenever today or two. So like I gave that book the Accurate Thinking chapter is all about you know, it’s great to set a goal and set a deadline and say “I’m going to do this.” I’ve been in a lot of coaching groups as you’ve probably figured out. And almost a part of every coaching is setting goals and trying to achieve them. If you read that chapter in that book or if you just take my word for it, that sometimes you just have to get serious with yourself and say, okay not only is this an achievable thing that I’m trying to do, but even if it is achievable, am I really willing to pay the price that it’s going to take?

And so I tried my best to just break down what I felt like made up of dental practice that would succeed in Ripley, Mississippi. And I read a lot of books like you know, that’s why I’m giving away these books. And I just took this the other day just for the heck of it. So this is like my office downstairs, I do like my wife won’t even come downstairs in my house. It has my office, all my computer stuff like I got 4 or 5 computers and I’ve got a media room with a you know, 60” TV. That’s where I watch my ball games, I got movies, chairs and stuff. And so, but my wife just refuses to come down there because she says, you know, she says I’m a pack rat and it’s junky and she refuses to clean it or anything like that. And then I say, well then I say, “Well can I hire somebody to clean it for me?” “No! Nobody’s coming into my house and clean something in my house.” So I think she’s getting it. She wants me to clean it but it’s probably never going to happen. You know I’m just, I’m kind of a pack rat.

I mean I’ve got banker’s boxes, like if I wanted to, if you had a bunch of good articles and books and stuff on the internet, I would like to make a banker’s box with your name on it. I would turn off all these 3 ring binders full of information and threw all the boxes, and threw all the binders in the box and write your name on with a Sharpie and I’d stack it up. Now that’s how I do research. So I got these banker boxes everywhere and you know, it’s probably never going to satisfy my wife. Occasionally I can bribe my daughter to come down there and do something but I do truly believe that the more you read, it opens your eyes to more possible solutions right? And I brought some of my favorite books that I’ve really gotten a lot out off over the years.

So after doing a lot of thinking, remember that girl that I had put on the throne and let her rule the whole office? I decided, I had to get rid of her. Now this turned out to be one of the most painful instances in the history of my life. But still, she was ruining everybody’s life. And finally, I said “Well, good Lord! This could blow up the whole practice. I guess I got to get rid of this person.” So I thought about it, of course my wife gets so torn up about stuff. I mean she flipped out, she said, “Oh my God, this is going to ruin us. We’re going to have to leave town, we’re going to have to change churches.” You know, I mean it was so bad.

But anyway, I made up my mind. I got my actual data together. So I just called her in and got a witness and sat her down one morning. She always got there real early. Now there’s a tip for you. When somebody gets there real early, and they stay real late, that is never good, right? It’s never good. So everybody does that now, thankfully I used to think, “Wow, she’s such a hard worker.” Anyway, I called her in and said, “Listen, I’m going to have to let you go.” She’s like, “Is this a joke?” She’s kept saying it over and over I’m like, “No, I’m sorry. I’ve decided that I’m just going to have to let you go.” She’s like, “Is this a joke? What’s going on here?” you know, she’s looking for Ashton Kutcher to come out of the closet or something, I don’t know.

Anyway, she throws this gigantic fit, finally after 15 or 20 minutes she kept saying “It this a joke?” and yeah “I can’t believe this” and all this. Finally, I just I said “Look, I’m sorry. You know I’m going to go ahead and pay you vacation for the year but you just need to go and get your stuff and go.” And I got up and walked off. It’s bad, I mean it was as bad as it gets. She finally left. So all they say was like “Killing the wicked witch” you know or that Fantasia movie where you throw somebody down or the witch down the well and they just claw the sides and she just, she did not want to go. I mean it was bad, bad. But after she left, it is crazy because I got like 80% of my staff came up to me 1 by 1 over the next couple of weeks and said, “Oh, I’m so glad you got rid of her. I was thinking I was going to have to quit because I just couldn’t take the mental abuse anymore.” You know, it’s crazy. It’s crazy.

And I didn’t know any of it was going on. You know why I didn’t know it was going on? Well that’s one reason but she was smart. You or anybody knew what she did all the time? She would always come to me, she would always pat me in the back “Hey Dr. Griffin, do you need anything?” Oh and she would bring me baked goods and she was always, you know she would publicly talk about how great I was. She knew how to work it, man. She was always on my side. Every time there was any kind of discussion in the office, she was right there. She was on my side. And she would just you know, she would lay down the law to everybody else. I was, my ego got in the way and I believed she was really that great.

So when I let her go, however, that started the revolution. So, so now we were freed up because we could actually, maybe we’d get something done because everybody now. We fired somebody, let me just tell you this. Have you guys already fired somebody? You all have fired somebody? When you fire somebody, like there’s a…there’s like a period right, of just this wonderful delusion or whatever just for a couple of weeks to a month. Or people actually are scared you might fire them and they’re actually like “Oh crap, I’d better really do what’s supposed to be done.” You know? I mean it’s great because you can get a lot accomplished in a short amount of time.

So I figure, okay. Like I said, I think how to do stuff. I try to break down the practice for myself. I try to do work what I knew wouldn’t work, read all the books I possibly could read. We started training as a team; we actually joined this you know, practice management group we’re training. Besides that, I actually just literally went down a list of people I heard speak that I knew were good dentists. So then I would call them up and I would say, “Hey can I come visit you and spend a day at your office?” And you know, a lot of them said “Yes”. Some of them were free, some of them cost some money, you know but it’s just… the one I got the most out of ever was the one I got a visit on a guy named Dr. Vince Monticciolo in Tampa Florida. Any of you ever heard of Vince? You and I have heard the same stuff. Probably because of Woody Oak stuff, I’m guessing. He was on there or something.

Anyway, Vince…his was expensive. I mean it was like 6 grand, I kind of spend the day with him but I got so much out of that, Holy Cow! And I’ll show a lot of you guys what I learned there that it really changed the course of my practice. And then we developed the blue print. Then I mean I had to get serious, we had, we set aside times. We would meet as a team for a good 6 months, I would actually bring in lunch, catered lunch every Wednesday. We’d have a 2 hour Wednesday lunch where I paid for the lunch and then we just train all 2 hours, you know. And I hate to say, we’ve lost some of that steam now. I’m so lazy, I just work 3 days a week and then we go take a lunch and then I’m out the door. I don’t even stay around but I will tell you this, if you get things done, if you get it going right, it’s just like that barge going down the river. It’s really hard to get it off track, you know. You get it going good, it’s hard to get off track. It’s hard to get it to turn around if you get into the wrong direction but if you get it going the right direction, it’s tough to get that messed up too.

So this is like, I did this little chart here. This is sort of when I was getting really serious about all these, you know. I went to see Vince and I bumped up a little, I went to see Dr. Gary Cameron in of course he’s from Asheboro, North Carolina. You all ever heard of Gary? His claim to fame is he’s the dentist that was the first dentist to try to sell his practice to Heartland in North Carolina and the State Board sued him and made him give Heartland back 3 million dollars or whatever they paid him. And anyway, he’s a good guy. He just got hung up in a bad deal. Roy Smith, I went to see him twice. The second time I went to see him. If you’ll notice there’s a big bump here. There’s a big bump from there to there. Guess what? Some of these people I would go to just by myself, I would take notes, I’d come back. I would try to get everybody fired up. Well it works to some extent but then I got smart and I said, okay I’m going to carry my staff to Roy’s the second time. So we all spent the day there.

So when your team actually sees what, you know…when you’re team’s looking at what you’re looking at, boom! We just want it like crazy! And then, I started getting in my head. Okay, well now I’m a genius right? So I’m not only going to have this amazing practice, but I’m actually going to try to own a chain of dental practices. So I paid a Dr. Wayne Martin in Louisville $45,000 to spend a day with him. Anybody know Wayne? Wayne’s got like 30 something practices in and around Louisville Kentucky, you know. I think he goes all the way to Cincinnati and down into Bowling Green but he’s got you know, 30 something practices. And the thing that I learned there was that I did not know was how much work it is to own multiple practices right? I didn’t know, I just though “Oh you just put your system into practice then you go to this practice, then you go to this practice and everybody does good after that.”

Well what I didn’t realize, and I should have thought about this, you guys ever seen one of those Circus people that spins plates? Okay, so you get this practice going good right? You go over here and get this one going, and get this one going, well this one over here, this is starting to lose some momentum right? Get it slowly going over here, whoop! And then it’s like, Oh Man! I can’t imagine, 32 practices, are you kidding me? But he said the thing to me that made me realize I’ll be a solo dentist for the rest of my life. Is he said, “Chris, you know, I really love what I’m doing but you know, it’s just good that I don’t like to play golf or fish or anything like that, because on the weekends, when I would be doing that, I’m actually running numbers and working on administrative parts of the practice, of the company.

And I said, whoa! Wait a minute. You mean I can’t play golf or fish? He’s like, “Yeah, if you want to make this kind of money, you got to give something up.” I’m like, “I don’t think that’s going to work out.” So and then he also said something that’s made me shy. I’ve had associates, well I don’t have one now. I don’t know if I will ever have another one, unless one of my kids wants to be a dentist but I have had associates since then, I didn’t like it. So I’ll probably won’t ever have another one. I’m just pleasantly happy doing what we’re doing just by myself. So I came up with this what I’m calling the Practice Achievement Formula, I don’t know if that’s a good name or not; you may think it’s cheesy. It probably is a little cheesy but that’s the handout I gave you guys. And as I would go through this, not the book but the single sheet; the one that’s got the S and the P and all that on it?

So this is kind of what I came up with, Oh, I’ll one more time; I’m going to brag just a little. I don’t get to brag on myself much but this formula actually got an article published in Daily Economics about it. So you know, woop woop! I thought that was pretty good. At that time, I used to think Daily Economics was the best magazine in the world. Also Dental Town, I did a video course for them. Has anybody seen that video course? Nope. Anybody ever watched a video course on Dental Town? No. Anybody know Dental Town had video courses? Okay. Alright. So anyway, I was number 2 in 2014. Yeah, in 2014 I was number 2. And still to this day it’s had 365 podcasts but I think mine is still number 12. So they’ve only been 12 as podcasts it had 1,000 downloads; that’s one of them.

So I feel like there is something to this. It may seem super simple by the time we get through the day but anyway, I feel like it’s help some folks. Yeah I’ll tell you, so here’s I’ve come in my office for different times over the years. So we actually call it, and some of other guy came up with this name but he said I could use it because I thought it was a pretty good image. We call it the Navy Seal Day, I was not in the Navy, but I have a lot of respect for the Seals but they say that after they came through and they learned how that we do our process, it felt like this intensive training as if you know the Navy SEAL version of Dentistry. So that’s what we kind of call it.

Oh yeah, so I’ll tell you a couple of stories here to name before we get into because I got to be honest, the 4 minutes of this stuff is kind of boring. But it means good but it’s boring but I’ll tell you a couple of stories maybe to help you understand why that I’m so passionate about sharing it. This is true, different people that have been through the years with me, it takes a little while to get this going. Like this is not something that you just go home Monday, and it just starts working and you’re like “Wow, this is so amazing it changed my life!” This is more like just put this in place, and in 6 months to a year or two years, you’ll look back and you’re like “Holy Cow, that really changed everything for the better.” But it was a little bit effort to get it going.

So it’s multiple times, I have so many times now, I got to tell you. At first, to quote the bible, there’s a lot of ladling and gnashing of teeth because let’s say, let’s take some examples. So there’s a guy, I don’t want to call his actual last name because he is a great guy. But he didn’t tell me to tell this story, so I’m not going… But so let’s just say Dr. Ted. So I’m driving down here yesterday and I actually forgot, I was going to give you guys, this is something I’ll be talking about this afternoon. That’s part of the formula deal but I was going to give everybody a copy of that, right? This is what I’m using in my office, I forgot them. I’m driving here and I’m thinking, Oh Crap! I forgot that. It’s going to be hard to explain without at least a visual aid. If I just had one, I can at least show everybody. I forgot some slides but it’s not the same.

So I’m actually in between Oklahoma City and Memphis, Dr. Ted works. And he came to my practice 2 years ago and you know, his practice was, his practice…well I mean, it’s rough. Like in 2012, I had a seminar in Dallas. So I used to put on these big gigantic events because like I said, I love the idea of big daily events; a lot of dentists, a lot of...

Dental Butterfly Effect – Season 1 Episode 11

Sat, 26 Mar 2016 02:00:40 -0400

The Butterfly Effect is very real and very misunderstood leaving most dentists unaware that they have just shot a hole in the middle of their production goals without even realizing it. Solving this mysterious phenomenon cures most ills.

This week we continue down the path we started in episode 9 from our Live presentation from OKC. This should be called the name dropping episode as we cover people who have altered my own path from Drs. Paddi Lund, Roy Smith, Scott Perkins to celebrities like Tubby Smith, Bobby Knight, and John Calipari.

You will learn:

How to know when you are under the influence of the Butterfly Effect and how you can harness its power to explode your daily production.
How to learn how to make “God’s Band-Aid” and when and where you can apply it.
How we solved the problem of being in a factory town and how you can use our lessons to make the roots of your practice go so deep that it can survive any drought that might come your way.
The AHA moment that changed the course of my career forever and how you can find your own AHA that can give you the life you always wanted.

And Much, Much More…

Read Full Transcript

The Dr. Chris Griffin Show – Season 1 Episode 11

“You can get totally messed up trying to please everyone with what you do but ultimately, you have to please yourself.” Now who said that?

Yes of course, everyone knows that quote, right? Well, I don’t expect you guys to get all these quotes and actually this time I pulled it from the world of entertainment; more so than the world of history or business greatness. You know that’s what I usually like to do on these things but however I am a gigantic fan of the person who provided us with this quote. I’m going to give you guys a little hint, okay? Forgive me for being off tune about this. Dum dada damdumdumdum .... Okay, like that was really terrible. But just imagine as the James Bond thing music and the guy that provided that wonderful quote was none other than Pierce Brosnan, the James Bond before Daniel Craig. So and that’s probably not even my second favorite Bond but hey, the guy was still awesome, you got to admit. I am a huge James Bond fan so, hey I think that quote works. And it really works well with what I’m going to talk about today.

And I am going to take you guys back to be a little fly on the wall in Oklahoma City from the lecture I gave a few weeks ago now. Because the stuff that really, I cannot duplicate what happened there. It was just a lot of it was off the cuff. I can’t even remember how I put things if I tried to but the way it came out was wonderful. I’ve gotten, really maybe more good feedback from that lecture than any lecture I’ve done in a while. So let me take you guys back there and we’re going to delve into a lot of stuff. Starting with a little bit of what happened after the fire in my office, if you don’t already know. And working our way to some other big topics like how I try to certify myself to success; my fear of marketing, fear of letting myself try to do more same day dentistry. Big things like that and what was holding me back and you guys are going to get a ton of value added today. So with no further ado, let’s travel back in time and go back to Oklahoma City.

So here’s the next, so I’m like you know, I’m seeing…I know I screwed up at this point and I know that this bonus system is unsustainable. This is pre fire. And so I went to a lecture and I heard a guy from Australia speak, Dr. Paddi Lund, everybody ever heard him talk? I’m just hating myself, these guys are referred to as popular 10 to 15 years ago. But anyway, Paddi’s an Australian dentist and his claim to fame was he was so OCD that he could, he’s just about…you know it was a struggle for him just to get to the office every day. You know, it was a struggle for him to leave everyday because he washed hands until it bled and stuff like that. He actually created a practice in Australia that is pretty much you know, I don’t know that you can do that in the states, I don’t know if you can do it anywhere. But it’s of such a boutique practice there that did not even have a sign on the door. I mean it just wasn’t addressed and you showed up by appointment. I mean everything is 5 star to the hilt and one of his big things was he didn’t want any stress in his life because stress makes his OCD just blow out of proportion.

And he wanted his team to be happy. So he created this scale, so every day, he would have his dental staff write his…their level of happiness on a scale of 0 to 10 every day. And if it wasn’t like a 7 or 8, he would go to him and say “Sarah, what’s wrong? Why did you rate us as a 4 today?” and she would tell him and he would, you know, they would talk about it and they would you now. I mean this…I mean I’m a jerk. I mean I can’t do that, I can’t go to people and just say “Hey tell me why you feel this way?” This is not going to work. But he did it, so I thought, “You know what? This sounds okay. I want my people to be happy. I want to be a nice guy. So let’s try to do it. Let’s figure out how to have a happy-centered practice.”

So I allowed pretty much my staff to dictate policy from that point forward. I tried this for 6 months to a year, something like that; I don’t know how long. But we would do that, we would do it every Thursday. You know we would take a, we would have a meeting…a big long meeting and we talk about our happiness scores for the week. And how, how’s everybody doing this week, you know. How can I make your life better? How can I make you a happier person? What could I do to help you? Anyway, this was a weird period in my practice life where I would just, I would just, for some reason, just scared to death of my staff. At this point, I don’t think I’d ever fired anybody. You know? I think I was so young, I never fired anybody.

That will do wonders for your life when you learn how to fire people right? I mean how many of you guys, how many have you fired somebody in here? The first person you fired, do you remember, like was it real scary? And you hated to do it because you felt bad, you thought you were a failure of probably too because you had to fire them, whatever? I did anyway. But you know what, after 3 or 4, it’s not that big of a deal right? So like, listen, “It’s not you, it’s me.” Right? Here’s the situation. I really think you could be great if you were working in a crystal meth recovery clinic. But right here at Griffin Dental, I think you know, it’s just not a good fit. So I think I’m going to go in and give you the rest of the day’s pay. You just get your stuff and get out. Please. But by the end, this is the mistake that I made. And this, led to this.

Now somewhere along the middle of 2000, I was starting to figure this out; that, yeah it’s interesting. When I have nothing on my schedule, and I diagnosed a coronary root canal, I can usually get the person to stay. But if I reschedule them, oddly enough, they’d tend to not come back. Hmmm, I started to just twirl around in my head. So I thought, “Hey guys, why don’t we start this big promotional program where we like promote that we can do their vice dentistry while they're here today. Let’s figure out how to do that.” But my staff did not like it at all. So I actually developed this ad, which I think it’s a cool ad, right? You know, you don’t have to put off dental care and get seen today. I mean, I don’t know.

We developed it but we never ran it because my staff’s like, “Listen, you can’t promise people we’re going to do their dentistry today and there’s no way, it’s never going to work. We’re maxed out as is.” I said, “Maxed out? We did $50,000 a month. What are you talking about, maxed out.” Right? But anyway, they said that word to me multiple times. “We’re just maxed out.” What does that mean, maxed out? So if we’re doing 50,000, now we’re doing a 150? You said you were maxed out at 50? What’s that mean, I’ve gone back and asked those who were still there. “You know you never told me you were maxed out for doing like 50,000 a month? What was going on?” And she’s like, “I don’t know. I thought I was maxed out.” So anyway, I don’t know that there’s such a word as “maxed out”. It’s kind of a joke.

You know what, I even went to the trouble of saying if in order to be seen today, you must call the office prior to 10 am local time and be willing to accept available options. I don’t know, that’s some lawyer junk, it’s probably better I never run that ad, it’s a little cheesy looking. But the reason I think that I was noticing that people wouldn’t come back every time when I reschedule them is this. So if you already, I don’t know how it is in Oklahoma City, now you guys are maybe so affluent. The people just have time on their hands and all the money in the world, it don’t matter. But in Ripley, if they got a job, you know they’re pretty proud of their job. They don’t want to lose that job.

The factories in Ripley have all got some kind of point system. I don’t really know how that works but like you get 10 points a year and if you missed part of the day it's minus a point. You miss a full day it is minus 2 points or something and it’s like a 'no questions asked, no crap policy.' If you get 10 points, you’re out! You know, good luck. And so they don't want to use up those points on teeth, you know. And then there’s not that many teeth on Ripley, not many as there are in Oklahoma City, I’m sure, but a few there are, they just hate to use that up. and so they’ve taken off work to come to your office. They’re there.

Now if you can figure out a way to see them and do at least some of their work today, then there’s a reasonable chance in their mind that’s worth money to them, right? That’s worth even more than a discount. The fact that if they’re here, I’ve already I’ve taken off, I can get it done right now. I don’t have to miss anymore work or get any more points on my record. If I can just get it done today, I’ll think I’ll stay. I think I found that to be true. Now just think of all the stuff that hits this person the second they leave your chair side that you diagnosed. Okay? So the second that they get up on the dental chair. You know, cell phones going off, they’re texting the kids you know, they get a babysitter. Hey if they got kids and they got a babysitter for the day, do you not think that’s not worth something for them not to have to try to get another babysitter? And line all that up again?

They get up front. Maybe they start thinking about how much it cost and they’re like, “Oh man I have to come back you know and pay 10,000 bucks” blah blah blah. They leave your office, you know they get in their car and so they get back to work. Maybe their boss gets on them, you know where I came from, bosses are kind of mean. Maybe they get on them and fuss at them for missing. That’s actually happened, I mean it actually happens. So the boss is probably trying to fuss at you when you miss work. So then they’re thinking “Oh gosh, I probably can’t make it back for that second appointment.” What about when they get home? What about when they have to try to tell their husband that they’re not going to be able to buy their bass boat this year because they need to get their teeth fixed. Or their new hunting rifle or stuff like that. Okay? All kind of stuff.

And so I called that the butterfly effect because you know there’s that theory that circulated years ago that a butterfly flapping its wings over the Galapagos Islands could cause a hurricane that hit the Gulf of Mexico. And so that’s what I say, you know if somebody leaves your dental chair, just the tiniest little thing can push them off course. And they are very likely could end up not coming back to your appointment. And it really, I don’t know how it is here, but in Ripley, a lot of times people will schedule that appointment, something weird happens to them, makes them think they don’t want to come back. They won’t really tell you they’re not coming back. They just won’t show up. Right? That happens all the time.

So, oh this is a good one. Then I think we probably attest on a lot of these. So I thought “Well if I can’t really make it doing all this stuff, let’s just try to do everything and just get certified at it, right?” So actually at cosmetic dentistry I went to all Dr. Gerety’s courses. I did the you know, the fast brace stuff. You know, so I do, I actually do a lot of braces. I tried to become a general dentist/ortho kind of guy. We’d talk about sedation dentistry, the implant dentistry you know, I would tell you, I don’t…the slides never got here, dog gone it! But I have, I would tell you guys I don’t get anything out of it but you guys may have a wonderful implant training course here. But if you guys ever need an amazing hands-on implant training course, there’s a great one at UAB. It is really tremendous, Dr. Michael McCracken.

I tell you hundreds of hours of implants CE and I can tell you, I never ever got trained in like that. It’s at…it’s at a crystal meth recovery clinic, it’s what it is. So I guess UAB has got some sort of grant where they actually employ people that have recovered. They fix their teeth and then they work on the teeth of the people that have come through the crystal meth recovery and like Dr. McCracken says, if you’ve been on crystal meth a few years, you probably need to see your dentist. Right? So there’s plenty of work to go around. And it’s really cool because they have not only a couple of doctors but they…well, they’re all doctors. But they have 12 first year residents running around helping you.

So you know you’re there. Somebody’s got your back 24/7. You can do really complicated cases. First time that I ever reflected you know the flaps enough to expose the whole lower jaw, I was there. And you know, it’s just something that I just would be scared to do in my practice without somebody just right on my shoulder. Actually it’s cool the residents were actually on a hard case, they’ll actually be your assistant. And you know and he’s like, he’s like “I wouldn’t cut right there.” You know. He said, “You might want to get a finger asked if you’re going to reflect right there now.” You know, okay. Alright now hey, that’s the way to learn. Right? You don’t learn by cutting on a pig’s jaw. I mean it’s okay but you just don’t learn as well.

So now it’s cool just right there. I never would have learned about…how many of you guys have ever done any…do you guys do any bone grafting and membrane placements? Anybody? Have you ever used that PRF, platelet rich fibrin? Have you heard of it? It’s amazing! It is so easy to do. You just draw 4 vials of blood. I guess my IVs, that’s the one thing I still use, drawing blood right? IV Training. But you draw 4 vials of blood and you spin it in a centrifuge; a cheap centrifuge, a $500 centrifuge. Spin it for 12 minutes and you basically then you get you know, what looks like red water and then snot at the bottom. So you don’t follow your snot into a compress, and then you compress, you squeeze all the liquid out.

And I’m not kidding you guys, it’s like, it’s like creating skin. It is amazing! You get the most bio compatible membrane that ever existed on the planet. You get this big old sheet of membrane and then you get all the juice you squeezed out. You mix it in with your freeze dried bone and then also you know, it helps the bone stay put better, long enough for your body to create a new bone. So I mean you feel like you’re, you know, a Dental god you know, doing that right there is a really cool technique and this is one place you can go learn and find out about it.

Anyway, as fun as it is to geek out about dentistry, I still don’t believe you can build a proper foundation of your dental practice or make as much money as you’d like to make by just focusing on that kind of stuff. And this is the last big mistake that I’ll talk about this morning. So lunch is at 11:30? Okay? So let me go over this one and then we’ll take a break. If that’s alright with you guys. The last big mistake that I can tell you guys that I made that I see a lot of people making is, I had one employee who I thought was so good. And one of the reasons I thought she was so good is because she consistently told me “I’m so good.” Right? I pretty much let her dictate policy for most of the office. I kind of gave her the keys to the kingdom. Not only did I hire her but I paid her 50% more than I ever paid anyone. Right? To come in and also I brought her in and I just transplanted her to the position of office manager; completely removing a couple of people who have been in the position similar to that and now immediately creating friction there.

But I’m thinking, well if she’s so great, it won’t matter. It will all solve itself. So well first off, let me just tell you, this hardly ever works. It didn’t work for me, it’s not going to work for you probably. As time went on, I started to figure out. A. She’s not nearly as good as I was led to believe and B. You know it’s Ripley, it’s just the way it s down there. And what did I do? Well I still thought, okay so I can’t fire her. What could I do? So maybe there’s some knowledge that I could impart that would save the situation. Who knows who this guy is? Come on, basketball fans, what’s his name? There you go. Yeah do you like him by the way? Okay yeah, that’s good, that’s good. I agree. He probably is.

But I’ll tell you a good story. It’s a good story. Now so I’m a big basketball fan, right? So I thought, okay who would know how to coach because I still thought maybe she’s a superstar and I just don’t know how to coach her. Who would know how to coach a “superstar” person on a team? And I said there’s no way, there’s no way this guy’s going to write back to me. But I busted out 50 handwritten letters right? On a really nice stationery to who I considered 50 top coaches in college basketball at that time, right? So I was writing down the list and I’m a big junky, I wrote them all men. I wrote Krzyzewski, I wrote, you know, I wrote everybody you could think of. So out of 50 letters, I was you know, I thought I was being smart. I waited until the off season, you know after the final four, early summer; they’re just doing camps and stuff. So they’re not really you know, they might potentially could read this, they might reply. How cool would that be if they replied, you know.

So out of 50 letters, how many do you think I got back? How many? Oh man! Okay, so who said 30? Down. No. No. No. No. Keep going down, keep going down. You guys are awful at this. Forget it. I’ll just wait…It’s 3! You guys said every number but that. Man, you guys are very terrible Bingo players. Alright so there were 3 people that wrote me back. Number 1, is anybody in here a Texas Tech fan? Well right now Texas…nobody? Okay. Tubby Smith, alright, at that time he was in University of Minnesota. So I get back this nice...

John Lee Dumas – Interview with World Famous Entrepreneur – Season 1 Episode 10

Thu, 17 Mar 2016 18:10:16 -0400

We finally caught up with the man in charge of one of the fastest growing enterprises in one of the fastest growing industries in the country, John Lee Dumas. John is the creator of the EO Fire franchise, short for Entrepreneur on Fire, which shot to the top of the podcasting industry a couple of years ago and has since expanded out into many different areas of influence. John is also my mentor in the podcasting space and the man responsible for helping me bring the message of practice productivity to this Show. This is a very special interview for the man who has interviewed more than 1200 Entrepreneurs including Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin, and basically anyone who is anyone in the business and entrepreneurial space.

In this interview you will learn:

How John approaches Goal Setting and how his specific strategies led him from Law School to greatness with exact action steps you can start using tomorrow to help you reach your goals once and for all.
How John built EO Fire into a Juggernaut and then began branching out into new and profitable streams of income. He answers the question about how a dentist could branch out into new opportunities with almost guaranteed success while protecting their #1 source of income, their practice. This is the key for all of us who aspire to create 2nd and 3rd streams of income.
How to Work with you Spouse and put them in a situation where they feel comfortable, and have all the tools to succeed while carving out an important role in your own empire. If your spouse works with you now or if you want them to, this advice could save your marriage. You will finally the respect you deserve because when you do this right, your spouse will understand your daily struggles and have their own role in your team success.

Plus, John makes his NCAA tounament picks and Much, Much, More…

Read Full Transcript

The Dr. Chris Griffin Show – Season 1 Episode 10 (John Lee Dumas Interview)

“I was done living a life I woke up not excited about.”

Now who said that?

Well everybody, it should be no big surprise but the quote of today comes from none other than our guest, John Lee Dumas. John Lee Dumas and let me just tell you guys a little bit about John. He’s going to be on the show with us in just a few moments. But John, is the foundering host of EOFire. Now EOFire is a big time podcast and now if you’re listening to this. I know you have found the world of podcasting, right? Podcasting has become gigantic, I mean gigantic. iTunes has made podcasting gigantic all across the world and now podcasting straight which is not only into iTunes but also different venues like Stitcher radio and places like Soundcloud; places like that.

But John is such a profoundly amazing teacher. He’s the one that I sought out when I was trying to learn how to get into podcasting or doing shows in a podcasting format. The reason I sought him out is because I’d seen just an amazing rise in his show EOFire. EOFire should be considered probably a flagship for all entrepreneurs. The name is entrepreneurial, E entrepreneur on fire. But EOFire is sort of has a unique take so John when he was trying to say the niche he was trying to get into podcasting, he realized, “Hey, nobody out there is putting the work to produce 7 shows a week; 1 each day. Let me tell you guys, doing 1 a week is hard enough, right? Seven shows a week? Are you kidding me? It is amazing! The amount of work and passion this guy puts in to everything.

Plus if you will go and listen to his shows, and I recommend subscribing to EOFire. If you listen to his shows, he openly talks about his income streams and the amount of money he makes doing his show and it is amazing, I mean we’re talking very far north of what most dental practice in America make during the year, produced during the year. So John really knows what he’s talking about. He’s got a brilliant business mind and he really has gotten EOFire was number 1 in business and iTunes for a long time. Of course there’s always everyone and their dogs putting out in their podcast these days. And so it’s not always number 1 anymore but it’s huge. The listenership is gigantic, he has over 1 million monthly listens. He’s interviewed over 12 hundred entrepreneurs on his show.

Now this is the place to go if you want to get new ideas about things, right? And a lot of these ideas you can turn right around and just put them right into your dental practice especially anything related to the marketing or business principles. And truly he’s also got a very motivational aspect to the show. I just really like his show. And also we get into this a little bit in the interview, but I want to ask John about how it is working with his significant other. Kate Erickson is John’s long time girlfriend and she has her own show called Kate’s Take which is really just an audio blog of EOFire but she works hand in hand with John on his show also. And it’s just, since so many of us have our significant other working in our practices, I want to get into that and see just what John thinks about that, really. Okay? They could get really exciting and I hope I don’t put him too much on the spot right? I hope I don’t fries toast up from under him and Kate’s not listening and gets mad at him. Hopefully not, I’m sure not. I mean she seems like the sweetest person in the world.

So anyway, I’m really excited. This show has been months in the making trying to get him scheduled. This guy’s schedule is so tight, so tight. But he was gracious enough to fit me in. I guess maybe because he is my mentor in this podcasting world and he is an amazingly awesome guy to be a mentor for anything like this. So I really appreciate what he’s done for me and I appreciate John jumping on the show just like he’s about to do. Okay everybody, hold on to your seats, get your notebooks out, get ready to take some notes. The one, the only - John Lee Dumas.

John Lee: Alright, hey everybody.

Dr. Griffin: Just as promised, I have on the line tonight, John Lee Dumas. Now John, I’m not going to embarrass you by some, you know, amazingly flattering buy because trust me, I’ve already done in the lead up to this interview. But so folks this is the guy who’s been doing this amazing promo for me periodically on the show and it’s the guy that really got me into podcasting. He is really one of the reasons why I’m able to share my messages with you guys. So John, are you there tonight?

John Lee: I’m here, I’m ready to rock Dr. C. Let’s burn this place to the ground.

Dr. Griffin: Alright man, so let me this real quickly say. I’ve got some questions for you now. John, I did not give him the questions tonight, so like there’s no cheating. This is all just straight, straight off his brain right?

John Lee: Yeah and I am terrified about what you could have in store for me.

Dr. Griffin: Okay, well good. Now the first one is going to be a soft ball but after that, it just gets increasingly difficult, okay?

John Lee: Oh, yeah.

Dr. Griffin: Alright. So here’s the first question we got for you. Alright so John I think maybe you are best known in the entrepreneurial space for setting and achieving seemingly impossible goals, right? This is all evidenced by your powerful story and I think my audience which is made up primarily of dentists, they have trouble finding time. And I mean in their opinion, trouble finding the time to even set goals. Much less ever find a way to stay on path to achieving them. So in a few words, I would love it if you could just impart some wisdom along the lines that will help a busy professional find a way to set and achieve their goals.

John Lee: So this is the reality, is that most people don’t struggle finding the time to set goals. The struggle in actually setting the correct goals and this is where I really set out what the freedoms there are to fix that to teach people how to set smart goals. And that acronym Dr. C, for smart is Specific Measurable Attainable Relevant Time bound. So it’s important that people actually sit down and make sure that their goal is a specific goal. That it is measurable on some level. That it is attainable, I’m not saying you know, walk on the moon in a hundred days, that’s not attainable. Is it relevant to your life? Like is it something that’s really actually important to what you’re doing in your business, with your health, in your relationship. And is it time bound? Are you setting an end date? So you have an actual time bound if you’re dued on that. So it’s not a time thing, it’s an actual structure thing. Because once you have that in place, we’re talking 5 to 10 minutes of a day. You just start making significant progress to your big goal.

Dr. Griffin: You know, now that that acronym, you are the first one that I’ve heard that actually put that out there, I don’t know. Did you come up with that yourself? Or is it something that you gathered along the way?

John Lee: No I’ve seen that across many different platforms throughout the years and that’s something that I’ve always completely agreed with and resonated with. So I knew it would be part of a freedom journal.

Dr. Griffin: Yeah, that freedom journal. So folks if you don’t know what the freedom journal is, recently John had this project which I don’t…is it true your project is one of the biggest of all time on this thing called Kickstarter, right?

John Lee: Yes, Kickstarter’s a crowdfunding platform and the freedom journal is the number 6 most funded publishing campaign of all time on Kickstarter.

Dr. Griffin: I mean that is amazing. Now that sets up a later question I got for you but I just want everybody to realize as in I didn’t know what Kickstarter was until probably 6 months ago. So this is something that hasn’t really gotten big into the dental field. We don’t know a lot about it but trust me guys, it’s…crowdfunding is a big deal and the fact that is it top 10 of all time. That is, that is really saying something.

John Lee: Yes, let me cut it here for one second, I think that Kickstarter actually is a very interesting platform for dentists. I mean the reality is this, is like you guys are in the mix every single day. You know what works in your industry and you know what doesn’t. Like you know, like you must be saying like, Why does this run on electricity? And you know what, I always have these cords everywhere. You know, I’m making stuff up because I don’t know the dentistry world. But you know those huge, huge pain points in your industry. And what Kickstarter does is it allows you to prove the concept of an idea by, you just say, Hey, I don’t have the money to create this yet or I don’t want to take the time to create this until I get proof of concept. So you can put an idea there and say, Hey if I get like x number of dollars raise like say $250 raise then I’m going to go out and create this thing. But I know it will help every dentist and people who have done things like that has gone viral in the dentist community and people have risen a ton of money and then gone down and created a great product that really improved dentistry in general. Now that’s just an example but it’s thinking outside of the box which is really important.

Dr. Griffin: Oh, it really is. And it’s so much different about 15 to 20 years ago, one of my best friends and I, we came up with what we thought as a great idea for a product that would help with root canals right? So you look 20 to 25 thousand dollars later in lawyer fees and prototypes. And then we realized, you know what, there’s really no proof of concept so we scrap it. But Kickstarter kind of bypasses that, right?

John Lee: Yes, it really bypasses that and again, it really goes back to proof of concept.

Dr. Griffin: Okay, well hey I appreciate that because you certainly segwayed into another featured question. Well I’ll tell you what, why don’t you spend just a brief couple of minutes or whatever, sort of laying out your story because I don’t know that everyone is listening. After tonight, I hope everyone is a listener of also your podcast, EOFire. I’ll plug that all day long. But why don’t you give everybody kind of the lowdown on how you got to where you are right now.

John Lee: Absolutely. So you know for me, I’m just a country boy, Dr. Chris. That grew up on a small town in Maine. Well I spent the first 18 years of my life there and then decided to join army ROTC for college. So I spent 4 years as a cadet. Graduated and was commissioned as a second lieutenant back in May of 2002, which for everybody out there who remembers 9/11 will know that that made me the first class commissioned officer’s post of 9/11. So we knew that it was real deal holy field stuff. And sure enough, you know we were off and deployed to Iraq. Within 18 months of graduation, I did a 13 month tour of duty in Iraq as an armor patrol leader in charge of 4 tanks and 16 men. Right after the military, I experienced a lot of different careers and I failed in all of them. I tried law school, I hated it and quit. I tried commercial estates corporate finance, residential real estate, just none of these areas just really fit my needs. So I said, hey you know let’s just keep trying, let’s keep swinging the bat like what do I see as a void out there in this world. And I, becoming a big consumer of audio books and that got really expensive because audio books are not cheap. So it lead me to podcast which is free, valuable and on-demand content and I just fell in love with the medium immediately. I saw the value of it, I couldn’t understand why there wasn’t a seven day a week podcast because I was driving to work 5 days a week, going to the gym on the weekends. Like, I wanted to be consuming a interview with an inspiring entrepreneur every single day so that I can have my AHA moments since I decided to be that change that I wanted to see in the world to quote Ghandi there, and I launched EOFire September 2012 and here we are talking 13 hundred episodes later over 1.2 million listens per month. And it has been quite a ride.

Dr. Griffin: Yeah isn't that something. I mean, it certainly is. I’ve actually followed you for, I don’t know, a little over a year and you know it’s been meteoric in the year that I followed you John. It’s really amazing.

John Lee: Absolutely, you know it’s honestly listeners like you Dr. Chris that will get that see the value in the episodes that I do that has grown in this large audience that I can then turn to and say, Hey fire nation, what are you struggling with? And then listen to their pain points, their obstacles, their challenges and then turn around and create a solution and you know, the most recent example is the Freedom Journal. But there’s been Podcaster’s Paradise, there’s been Webinar on Fire. So it’s really about delivering value consistently.

Dr. Griffin: You know it’s funny, you’ve got the on fire series but you know, back in 2009, I also did a series of seminars we called staff on fire; if you can believe that. And we’re trying to…we’re teaching dentists how to motivate their team to do bigger and better things. So if you ever see that website name, you know I’m not copying you, okay?

John Lee: (Laughs) Hey, we are all standing upon these shoulders of giants.

Dr. Griffin: Hey, you know you mentioned the Aha moments, I mean obviously your podcast is a great place to get those. I think a lot of not listenership, the dentists out there. I think that it’s just like almost like you spend so much of your energy going through professional school. And it’s like, “Okay, you know what? I’m just going to work now.” And no one really takes the time to look for those new things and get those Aha moments. I mean it ‘s hard to get a goal done if you don’t have the Aha moments to start with.

John Lee: Absolutely.

Dr. Griffin: Well here’s…Okay. So here’s another question, John. So another area that in my opinion, you are one of the foremost authorities in the world is in building multiple and new streams of income. Okay? One thing that you do that I think is amazing and you probably didn’t invent this either but you’re the first that I saw do it. You have these income reports periodically on your podcast, right? And those things are just amazing. And if I would recommend my own listeners, I’d go if you’ve not yet subscribed to EOFire, Entrepreneur on Fire. Go ahead and subscribe to that and I would encourage you to do that and find those income reports where you…where John basically has laid out his inner workings of his business. He’s laid them bare for everybody to see and so. I mean this is really amazing. Now a lot, it’s a question I get a lot, a lot of my subscribers, they’re looking for new streams of income they can exploit. And some say, “Yeah hey Chris, I really want to do something else” but a lot of people say “I want to keep doing what I’m doing but I would love to find something new that I could get into” and find another stream of income where they don’t have to trade time for dollars. So what would you say to someone that sort of look in to get into some new stream of income or an additional source of income and succeed there?

John Lee: Well this going to sound a little prejudice but the reality is that they should listen to EOFire because that’s the point of my podcast. I mean every single day, seven days a week, I am bringing a different industry, a different niche, a different area of entrepreneur, who’s both successful and inspiring. And breaking down their journey, how they started, their biggest failure moment, you know the lessons they learned, their Aha moment that led them to success and of course, why they’re crushing it right now. So EOFire is a treasure tool for people that are saying, hey like “I think I’m going to expose myself to new ideas, to other entrepreneurs that are doing different things and maybe spark my own Aha moment.” And again with over 1.2 million listens per month, I mean we’re doing something right and we’re definitely sparking Aha moments across the world.

Dr. Griffin: It is and it’s crazy. I mean how exactly…at this point I suppose people search you out. But how in the world do you find content for 7 days a week? That amazes me.

John Lee: Yes, so the beautiful thing about my podcast is that it’s an interview based podcast. So I just line interviewees up and they’re successful and aspiring entrepreneurs. They definitely have to fit a criteria. They have to fill an application to pass the process and once they do, it’s amazing! And we love that aspect of it and we bring them on the show and they provide the value. So I’m just providing the platform, the processes and the systems. They provide the content and the value, 7 days a week.

Dr. Griffin: Okay, hey and you know, you mentioned in your story that you were an army ROTC. Now this is not really on topic of what we’re talking about today but I just got in my...

Simple Practice Breakthroughs LIVE from OKC – Season 1 Episode 9

Sat, 12 Mar 2016 02:24:50 -0400

Recently I traveled to Oklahoma City to deliver my new lecture, Simple Practice Breakthroughs. The topic of the lecture was just that, a history of how I tackled seemingly complex problems that popped up in my practice and how we solved them as a practice team. In this opening monologue I opened up and revealed lots of little insider tips that had been previously unsaid. It was a lot of fun for everyone.

In this episode you will learn:

How I got hooked on being an ‘Achiever’ and the resource you can use to duplicate that trait to rapidly increase your success

The real trick to getting your money’s worth out of even very ‘expensive’ CE courses and how to leverage that investment into multi-millions in production for the rest of your career

How I ‘manned up’ to finally face my unruly hygienists and what I learned that will make daily existence with your Practice Wives into the kind of relationship you always wanted from the second you decided you wanted to be a dentist.

And Much, Much More…

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The Dr. Chris Griffin Show – Season 1 Episode 9

“Good judgment comes from experience and a lot of that comes from bad judgment.” Now who said that?

Well you probably may have heard that one before, it doesn’t have a lot to do with dentistry but that is from the late great Will Rogers. He was a true American, a true American cowboy, a true American philosopher and just one of the most amazing guys that ever lived. If you don’t know much about him, I would encourage you to just look him up on Wikipedia. I actually went to a play about Will Rogers, the whole play was about Will Rogers on my honeymoon 22 years ago. Okay? And you know I could not condense his life into a couple of sentences but if you don’t know much about him, go check him out or at least Google Will Rogers quotes and you’ll be laughing your head off. Okay?

And the reason that I picked Will Rogers to begin this episode, is because recently, I spoke to the Oklahoma City Dental Society and had a full day lecture there, I had a great time. And this people who travelled there know, you’re flying to Will Rogers International Airport. Okay? So that’s the deal of course, you can pick a 100 quotes of his and it would be applicable to just about anything that you would want to talk about, okay? If you have common sense, so this week, I’m going to let you guys kind of sit in the back row of the lecture hall in Oklahoma City and here are some of the things we’ve talked about. It was an amazingly fun lecture, I had a great time. They were wonderful hosts and I just wanted to share some of the things we talked about with you guys. So sit back, relax, and enjoy some of the lecture from Oklahoma City.

Okay, alright. Now this is you know, this reminds me too I feel like I’m back home at church because nobody sat on the front row right? Everybody tried to get on the back row and then some of you got squeezed up a little closer. But as few…this is not a huge crowd, right? So by the end of the day, one of my primary objectives is I would like to meet every single one of you and be you know, hopefully strike up a friendship that last forever you know. As far as I’m concerned, I mean it’s a 10 hour drive from Mississippi, I don’t really love flying. So you know, it’s kind of a trick. So I’m going to drive out here 10 hours. So really I can meet everybody and get to know all of you guys. I hope that you enjoy what I prepared for you. If you came here and you wanted to see a bunch of slides of me doing implants or see wrecked crowns or stuff like that. I mean that’s not what today’s going to be about.

I do a lot of that but that’s not what today is going to be about because that’s just not what I have found that I think really helps folks. This is the part of the lecture that I like the least. So I’ll just tell you because if I would sit in your seat and somebody gets up here starts talking, I’ll kind of want to know where they’re coming from or else I might not care what they’re trying to say, right? So let me just at least go ahead and tell you kind of who I am, and why that maybe you should listen to me about some of this stuff. if there’s anything that I’m really, really good at, right? So I’m standing up here, saying “Hey I’m this great dentist, I’m this super expert, you should listen to me because I know exactly what I’m talking about.” What I would tell you is that I have made, I think I have made nearly every mistake and had nearly every catastrophe that could happen to a dental office happen, okay? And so over, I’ve now been treating patients for 20 years. And in those 20 years, I mean these all happen. I mean I’m sure the good Lord could send some more stuff my way, you know. Like the book of Job but a lot has already happened. Right?

So I’m going to share it with you guys what else happened to me and how I dealt with it, how I recovered from it, you know. I’ll show you how I nearly bankrupted my practice 3 or 4 years in and how we recovered. And actually got up to 3 times the 88 national; actually also turning my schedule now from 5 days a week to 3 days a week. And like I said, I just want you guys to learn how I made a bunch of bad decisions and how I recover from it. And you’re going to learn throughout this lecture. If you don’t like it, I apologize for some reason, I really like this stick figure cartoons and I’ve got one of those programs where you can customize these things for your lectures so you’re going to see a lot of them.

So, where to start? So I went to dental school in the 90’s. Now and this is…who all, so mostly everybody here is Oklahoma City side, right? Mostly everybody here is from Oklahoma? I guess they’re all of you. Is that true? Everybody here is from Oklahoma. Now do you guys…is it like where I’m from when you have to have an affiliation? Like where I’m from. It’s either Ole Miss or Mississippi State. So is it like that here, OU and Oklahoma State? So what like how many of you guys are OU in the room? Okay, so boomer. I guess I didn’t realize what you say, so that’s good. How many people are in OSU? Oh, it’s really cool, it’s like half and half. I like, where’s Rachel? Rachel you put this thing together, she’s always…she’s awesome.

So that’s good. I went to Mississippi State, so I hate Ole Miss, right? I hate them. But you know, anyway I’ve also got some cool trivia questions and as the day goes on, I’ll ask some trivia questions and maybe you’ll have some prizes for that. But it is true in the, you know, hey footballs can’t even hear in the South, in SCC. And this is the truth…I was, I stopped…I lectured in Birmingham a few years ago and I was coming home and I wanted to get a, you know I do my own yard work. I don’t farm that well, well my kids now do a lot of it; 16 to 15 year old boys. But I do my own weed eating a lot and I heard about these new “Four stroke gas powered weed eaters”. Wow man, I’m going to get one of those things. And so, I’m on my way home from Birmingham because you know, this uses real gas than use the 2 stroke oiling gas mixture.

So I’m on my way home from Birmingham and stop off in Lowe’s, into Lowe’s. And so I go in and get the weed eater, I’m coming out with it. And this is no joke. What appeared to be 2 complete strangers walking out into Lowe’s, one walking in one walking out. I was right behind one and this woman goes “War eagle” and the guy coming in goes, “War eagle.” and then they just crossed paths. So you know, I mean that’s how it is right? That’s how it is in the South if Football rules everything. But, so I go to dental school, I went to Mississippi State. Actually started out in petroleum engineering, I bet some of you guys know some petroleum engineers around here right? because it’s a pretty big oil country but not the petroleum industry right now.

But my roommate, my roommate actually…I left, I obviously left petroleum engineering. He actually went to Houston, Texas, started at the ground floor, worked his way through some deals and now he’s the CEO of a huge oil company in Texas and worth a gazillions of dollars and stuff like that but he’s a multi-multi millionaire. So I sometimes wonder, if I made the right decision getting into dentistry but you know I must have like it because I’ve driven 10 hours just talking to you guys. So I go to University of Tennessee. Now is there anybody here, I guess nobody here goes to the University of Tennessee. Are you serious? No kidding. When did you graduate? 2005? Wow, you’re a youngster.

Well, they still…I don’t know because I left in the 90’s but were they still kind of mean and hard on folks? Well I don’t know, I mean. Well I’ll tell you, so when I went to University of Tennessee, now there’s a guy. He’s an older guy. Have any of you guys have taken some courses from Dr. Big Bob Girdy? The braces man? So if you know Big Bob or if you know Big Bob, you’ll know that he’s pretty rash and he says things he doesn’t exactly watch what he says. He’s not politically correct, you know but he’ll tell you the truth. Now the teacher doesn’t hate us or anything. They wouldn’t do it in front of the patients. They would always, they’d come over and sit down, and you’d say “Hey, what do you think does it look okay?” and if they’d say “Yeah” and if they’d smile and say it looks okay then you’re good. If they didn’t say anything, and they’d get up and they’d say “Come back here”. Yes, you’re about to get a chewing out now.

Anyway, we get together now and we joke about it how much we got and stuff but I do think it helped us you know, because if we made it through that, you’re a little tougher. But I got out of UT and I went in with my home town dentist, alright? The guy I love, I love the guy. I mean I really thought he was the greatest dentist on the planet and I thought that I was going to be his partner and take over his practice and we’re going to rule North Mississippi with his gigantic dental practice right? And did any of you all go into associateships right out of school? Okay. Are you still with the person you went in with? Is anybody still with the same person they went in with? You? Well you know I usually get one, usually it’s a bigger room and there’s still just one. And really I’m surprised that you’re, you know…that’s good. Are you related to him? Okay. That is amazing, good.

So me, just like mostly everybody else, you know it didn’t work out. So after let see, 1999 June 1st, I no longer had a job and I’m in my home, I’m in my hometown, right? Now this is not like I can just go somewhere else in Oklahoma City or Edmond and get another job. I mean we’re 45 minutes into the hindered lands, I mean this is nothing, nothing out there. And so you either have to you know, you either have to stay there and do whatever. You got to drive 45 minutes or an hour to try to get into another job in associateship which probably wouldn’t work out either. Of course you know you’re out of school, you have some debt. I thought I had a lot of debt. You know I owe $60,000 and that turns out these days maybe that’s not a lot of debt. That’s a whole different story, I’m going to get into that.

I mean I talked to a guy, I ate dinner last night with a guy that’s on the Oklahoma Board Administry and he’s also an adviser for the dental school admissions and he was telling me that he thinks that the high cost of dental school is actually failing corporate dentistry. Because when you have so much debt getting out of school, you’re just so scared to take on a whole practice of your own that that’s where everybody’s getting all their feeder dentist and it’s just like a continuing cycle. All of you apparently is working towards trying to figure out a solution to try to combat that, I don’t know. Basically a guy would always say, a barge going down the Tennessee River. It’s going to take a while to get that thing turned around if you can get it turned around.

But anyway, here I am. My wife says, guess what? I’m pregnant with our first kid. So I’m in debt, no job, a pregnant wife, no prospects, we’re in my hometown, her hometown, we dated since high school, got married when we were 19 and 20. So she ain’t going anywhere. Okay? So I just had to get serious with myself saying what are you going to do? So I decided to just go ahead and just hang a shingle. And so I started my own practice. Now here’s interestingly enough, we were just talking about attendance, you see meetings has gone down over the years. In the year 2000, right after I started this practice, I went to the profitable dentist meeting in Destin Florida. Have you guys ever been to one of those? Did you went alone? Did you like it? When did you go?

So in the year 2000, there were nearly 2000 total attendees and right at a thousand dentists showed up. And I go to this and I’m like, “Wow, this is the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen!” I mean this is great, you know. Everybody’s excited about dentistry and I’m on the right profession and you know I’m just psyched. And it’s probably what made me like the idea of speaking someday, you know because the speakers out there were great. Everybody’s fired up and I actually went up and introduced myself to Woody Oakes who’s the editor of the Profitable Dentist Magazine and you know he’s a big basketball fan and we struck up a good conversation and I got you know, I got talking to him. And I told him how that I didn’t have you know, what bad stuff that happened.

June 1st I had no idea what I was going to do. June 7th I bought a piece of property, with 1 acre and a house that had not been lived in for 3 years because the lady had gone to nursing home. It’s right in the center of Ripley and me and a retired carpenter and my grandfather, renovated it into right out there and I saw my first patient by September 1st, 1999. So it’s less than 90 days and we spent less than $200,000 for the property, and all the renovations and all the equipment and everything. And Woody just thought “Wow, that’s the greatest thing I’ve ever heard!” So he put me on the cover of the magazine back then. Right?

But still, even though things were going okay, I’m still in Ripley, population 6500. We’re a very declining industrial town. And back when I was a kid, we had 2 or 3 major furniture factories okay? And basically employed thousands of people but those companies, all but one, have all gone under. And the one that’s still there only employs about 500 people. So as you can imagine, we went from this deal where a lot of people had dental insurance to now, nothing. And I don’t take Medicaid, so it’s a stuff situation. So I’m still in this kind of town, I’m making a little bit of money, but I’m working you know, 5 ½ days a week and it’s just not really fun. And so, I went in search of something else to do because I’m thinking, this cannot be the way that I need to practice dentistry, 5 ½ days my whole life, it’s just not even fun.

So I enrolled up to a dental meeting in Nashville Tennessee, with one of my best friends, Dr. Steve DeLoach from up there. And it was put on by the Las Vegas Institute. Now I am 25 years old, and I go through this meeting. I guess maybe I’m really naïve who’s easily influenced and so when I leave that 3-day meeting, I am a proud owner of a $30,000 tuition to the Las Vegas Institute. Now I really have nothing bad to say about the Las Vegas Institute because I had a great time when I was out there. The speakers were great, it was a lot of fun, I learned how to do cosmetic dentistry real well, but you know, Ripley, Mississippi. I mean how many people are walking in wanting…10, 12, 14, 28 for porcelain restorations, right? Very few, very few.

Let’s see, so I go out there and I’ll tell you what else. So I go to LVI, and so I’m thinking, okay I want to be, and my friend and I agree. We are going to be the greatest cosmetic dentists the South has ever seen. Right? And so we go back and it’s just not really working for either one of us. Then we say, well it can be that cosmetic dentistry’s not going to work for us, maybe it’s the system we’re using. So then, after we go to LVI like 4 times, you know, we fly out to Las Vegas 4 times and spent 30 grand, maybe 6 times and then we say, “Well, I’ve heard about this Pete Dawson fella, let’s go down there.” So we fly to Tampa Florida 4 or 5 times and we take the Pete Dawson continuum. And once again I learned a ton of stuff down there. I mean aren’t you guys Pete Dawson folks? Right? So I know a lot about occlusion and I figured out why some of my stuff didn’t work as well as I’d hoped.

But so I learned a lot and to this day, a lot of stuff I learned at Pete Dawson’s classes I still used. You can use a lot of his stuff just bread and butter. Now what I did I come back from there and think, we’ll now I’m going to get rich by doing occlusion adjustments on people, right? Well that didn’t work either, so I didn’t get rich doing that. I mean I tried a lot of stuff. So I thought, well maybe it’s just some other issue I’ve got. So if this is not working, what else can I try? So when you’re out of these institutes, one of the things that I’m not kidding your verbatim is said is, “If you want to be the best dentist in your area, you can’t have normal prices. You have to have the highest prices in town. If you’re not the highest price in town, people will automatically think you’re not the highest quality dentist in town and you’ll never succeed at this.

So I mean I’m 25, I’m like okay let’s do it. I’m not going to ask you guys what you charge for a crown, that would be impolite but just so you know where I’m coming from, at this time, a PFM crown in my hometown went for about 500 bucks. There was a guy in town that charged 400, every fest about him being slow in getting all the business. So we all charged about 483, something like that. And so guess what I did? I doubled it. I said, well if I’m going to be the highest in town, I’m just going to go for it. So I get up, I think I’m charging like 979 for a PFM which you guys may think is low now. At that time, 979 is pretty high in my town. So I jacked those prices up there and surprise, surprise! The people still didn’t come. Alright? They’re still not coming. And when they do come, they’re like, “What? How many crowns am I getting for that?... What now, is that a denture?” I mean you know, I get all these questions.

Plus, I mean I’m doing…I’m trying to do all porcelain work back then and it’s very difficult. You know, the bonding is super hard. The porcelain by the way is very difficult. You know, if you did a lot of porcelain work 20 years ago, you’ll know. You know, it broke a lot. It’s not like the porcelain that’s today. So that was one mistake. Then I think, well I’ve already got these Delta patients, so maybe if I can convince them they should be paying more than 400 something more a crown. You know, and when I say a crown, I’m not just talking about crowns because it reflects everything from crowns for something; a filling of 79 bucks or whatever. So I did sort of that’s just what I’m saying to give you guys an idea of where I was at.

So if...

My Decade of Mistakes and Recoveries – Season 1 Episode 8

Sat, 05 Mar 2016 02:00:39 -0400

The only superpower I know I have is to make more mistakes than the average dentist. All successes and recoveries after those mistakes happened as a direct result of the analysis of those mistakes and the redoubling of efforts to make those mistakes right moving forward. The purpose of this episode is to save all of you years of frustrations and give you the shortcuts I have learned without you having to suffer through the sequelae of my mistakes. You get a head start on your success by stealing takeaways from my misguided labor so you can reach the top of the mountain much faster than I.

In this Episode You Will Learn:

All the mistakes I made after trying to convert my general practice to a Cosmetic Advanced Services practice and how you can avoid the pitfalls to create your own niche practice
The details of the letter I sent to a group of patient that lost 98% of that pool of patients and what I learned that can help any practice retain their patients and close the back door.
The worst way to try to boost your hygiene department. (Hint: Your hygienists and you will think it is a good idea at first. Don’t be fooled) Plus, the right way to build a rock-solid hygiene foundation.
The number 1 way to look like a wimp to your staff and how to look like the leader they need instead.

And Much, Much More…

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The Dr. Chris Griffin Show – Season 1 Episode 8

“If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” Now who said that?

Hey everybody! That is one of those quotes that you hear your whole entire life but you don’t always necessarily, you don’t know who said it right? it just, well over time it’s just part of the common culture. But in this case, I’m going to tell you who said that, it was a guy named William Edward Hickson, now also known as W. Hickson. Now he was a British education writer, he was the author of a book called “Time and Faith”. Now I have not read that book but I’ll tell you what, it’s got a great subject matter because as we talked about way back in I think Episode 4, of this season. Time is very important and I think faith is also very, very important. So there you go, he’s also created and writing a part of the British National Anthem. So there you go, the line out of the proverb that he actually wrote is called “Tis a lesson you should heed, try, try again. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, try again.” Okay?

I like it, I like it. So anyway, British guy, very, very famous saying, very famous proverb but maybe you didn’t know who said it. Okay? Well anyway, the reason that this is an important quote in one that I wanted to share with you guys today, is for a reason as I’m getting ready…I’m actually getting ready this week to do a full day CE course in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Right? I like Oklahoma City, it’s one of those places I had not been too much into recently and I’ve in and through Oklahoma City 5 times, maybe 4 or 5 times in the last 2 years and you know it’s really not that far of a drive. I drive a lot of places I go and it happened to be on Highway 40 or US Interstate 40 and which I can hop on really close to my home. And go through Memphis and Little Rock and next thing you know, you’re in Oklahoma City. And you’re like, wow this is actually not that far. But I’m getting ready to do a CE course there for their dental society.

And one of the thing that I’m going to talk about, is I’m going to talk about all the mistakes that I have made over the years. Right? A lot of mistakes and because it…truthfully, who wants to go to a course and hear the guy that’s going to get up there and just talk about brag, brag, brag. I’m so good, I’m so good, I’m so good. That’s one of the things that’s just making me sick about the political race this year. It’s just the word “I”. I’m not going to, I don’t like to get into politics, religion or ball game affiliations in public. Okay? Because those things can get heated, however, with my kids at home I’m always like when a couple of politicians are up there I’m like, alright let’s count how many times they say of the word “I”. I just hate that! But anyway, nevertheless, I would say most of the people listening to this, the dentists in America, I think we’re 98% Republicans; so most of you have strong political opinions.

But nonetheless, when I was preparing this lecture, and I started to think about all the mistakes I’ve made, I thought, wow this is really cool! So I may not be an expert about anything but I’m pretty darn sure I’m close to being an expert on messing things up or making mistakes. And if there’s anything that has been a redeeming quality of me in my life, it is probably been the fact that I try and try again, after I fail. And so this is just one of those things I’ve always know, I don’t even know who said this. If I can find who said this quote, I might use it as a quote one time before I show it.

But sometime in my life, I heard that it’s a lot better to make 5 decisions and make 4 of them wrong and get 1 of them right than the wait, wait, wait, wait, wait and then either just make like 1 decision or just don’t even make a decision. Because if you just make the 1 decision, you got a reasonable chance in being 1 of the 4; because if you make 5 decisions and 4 are going to be wrong, if you only make the 1 decision in the same amount of time I’m making 5. Now I get a lot of percentage chance that I’m going to get at least 1 right. And a right decision is worth the heck of a lot more than a wrong because you can usually, you can usually recover from a wrong decision, right? A mistake normally, people will forgive you if you’re humble, contrite. People will forgive you. I have certainly found that to be the case because I have made a plethora of mistakes in my life; as the outlaw said, the El Jefe in the Three Amigos.

So anyway, I just thought I would…as I’ve been studying my mistakes, I thought I’d share them with you guys. This is the Dr Chris Griffin Show, you guys should hear my mistakes because they are plentiful. When I got out of dental school, I talked about this last week. When I was in dental school, you know. Dr. Steve DeLoach and I had said we were going to be implantologists when we got out and we you know, we did not do that because school got hard and we got interested in just getting out of school and get practices going and stuff like that. And I still say out of the class of, I don’t know how many people, 75. Or something like that. They graduated with me at UT. Dr. Steve DeLoach is the only one that had the guts to hang a shingle, day 1 out of practice that day I went to school. I mean he’s the only one, so I mean I may stand corrected maybe there’s a mistake too but I’m pretty sure he’s the only one that June 1, 1998 had a job as his own boss at his own practice. And it has worked out for him marvelously.

I hung my shingle, September 1ST 1999. I was pretty close, I don’t know if I was number 2 in the class but I was pretty close to also hang in my shingle right out of school. So anyway, we wanted to be implantologists. We gave it up, we just pursued other things. But I have in my first year of school I actually pursued and associateship and actually went in with my family dentist. And as things go in associateships, as I went I’m lecturing across the country, a lot of times I will ask how many people in here have been an associate and then a lot of hands go up, you know; 89% of the room goes up. And then I will say, okay, how many of you are with the dentists that you started out with in your first associateship? And like almost every single hand goes down. Inevitably, one or two will stay up if it’s a big crowd and most of the time, those are children of dentists that went in with their dad of their mom or something like that.

And that’s just the way it is, there’s nothing wrong with that. I wish my kids would want to be dentists and go out with me someday. But that’s it, if you go in as an associate in a practice, then you’re not related to the person you’re going in with, chances are, it’s not going to work out. So if you’re hearing this, the dental school, a little shoutout to the…I want to shout out and get your name right but it’s Ambitious Dental Students Group, I believe. I got a really nice note from one of their members this past week that said that they had actually studied my dental talent courses and he was actually asking for some extra materials that might go with those videos and so I sent that to my assistant to give to him. And I’m sure she did because she’s awesome. But you know it was awesome, it was really good; I like getting notes like that. If you have a note you’d like to send me, that’s a pleasant one, man I’m all for it. Just go to drchrisgriffin.com and fill out the contact form and send it to me. If you have something to say that’s a critique, that’s not so pleasant, I guess I probably should hear that too. I’m not as eager to hear those things. If you’re dentist, you know…you know what I’m talking about. We don’t like to hear negative stuff; we hear plenty of that all day long.

So anyway, getting back on track, shout out to the Ambitious Dental Students Group. I think they maybe originated, I’m not sure if it’s just a dental town group or I actually got an email from someone at Northwestern Dental School and in a similar type thing. So shout out to all you guys and thanks for paying attention. I hope some of my stuff could help you. But anyway, we hung our shingles and we kind of got away from the implantologist thing. However, we decided that…well I mean, well let me step back a month or two, July 1st 1999. My associateship failed. I am without a job, I am sand’s prospect of any said job. I have a little bit of school that I’m not going to say it turn ahead that’s like $60,000 worth of school debts but you know, Hey it’s debt, 1999; that’s still quite a bit. And my wife has just announced to me, guess what? Hon, I’m pregnant. So she’s pregnant with our son, my oldest son who is our first born and I had no job. And I don’t know what to do because you know, it’s not like I live in a Metropolis. I moved back home after dental school and it’s a pretty small place.

So but anyway, buckled down, decided to buy my own practice, hung my own shingle in my home town without a single patient and it’s worked out pretty nicely. September 1st 1999, I opened up and guess what? After a year of an associateship and a general practice, lots of extractions, lots of filling, lots of root canals, crowns and dentures, I decided. This is not exactly how I would like to practice. I would like to practice the way Steve and I said we’re going to practice back in dental school. I’d either want to be an implantologist or something way cool. And at that time, if you’re older than me, now if you’ve seen patients more than 20 years, you will remember the late 90’s were dominated by cosmetic dentistry. Cosmetic Dentistry had boomed during the 90’s. Veneers were the rage, I mean veneers were just huge, huge deal. I remember in dental school I got 2 veneers. I was so stoked about it. You know, they were pretty awful.

When you come to think about it, we had to stack our own porcelain for those, are you kidding me? I didn’t even remember how to do it. It was something, golly, we did some kind of foil on our dyes and then we stacked them; I don’t remember but it was just gut-wrenchingly terrible and then they were kind of ugly, honestly. But you know, I knew there was potential there. And so when I’m my own boss in ’99, even with no money, I decided I think I’m going to be a cosmetic dentist and I asked Dr. Steve, “Hey Dr. Steve, we both have our own practices, would you like to pursue this with me?” And so yeah, he said “Yeah! Let’s do it”. So he and I, along with a couple of other of our friends; shout out to Dr. Troy Kerber from Dyersburg, Tennessee. We, you know he didn’t go to school with us but we became friends in this pursuit.

So we headed out and we signed up for the Las Vegas Institute, Dr. Bill Dickerson and went after that amazing place and we believed after we went there that we were going to dominate our local markets with cosmetic dentistry and you know, we started…we started doing it. We started doing a lot of cosmetic stuff and I have started advertising these fancy advertisements in magazines, Mississippi magazine, which is sort of an upper class magazine here. And you know, I spent a lot of money on that and had a model come in for a photo shoot. I did all these crazy stuff, I did not make a dime on that advertising; zero dollars. I mean good grief! I was 25 years old. Who would go to a 25-year old dentist for a full mouth porcelain reconstruction and that does not…this doesn’t compute now that I’m much older. I did not understand what I did not know at age 25.

So you know, going along with that train of thinking, I started to have some occlusal problems and you know, certainly not blaming anyone’s school of thought. But I thought, well I’m you know, maybe I’m not smart enough to grasp for seclusion. So let’s go somewhere else. So Dr. Steve and I went down to Tampa, Florida to the Dawson Institute. Pete Dawson who is an amazing human, a great teacher, I learned stuff there that I still use today actually. And you know, but that was a pretty big investment at time. Las Vegas Institute was you know, the intro course, I think 2 weeks spaced out by about a month to care for a patient, I did something veneers on him. A funny story about that, the person I did veneers on, was my hygienist; who’s still with me today. She’s been with me since 1999. And you know, she’s got a lot of capital built up because she made that trip, she was my hygienist, I just hired her and she agreed to go out there to get veneers done which you know, it’s a big…it’s a big leap right there.

So no matter how much she ticks me off to this day, I always remember she did that for me. So you know, I’m joking I mean I. those of you who have a dental practice and you have hygienist you know that I’m just kind of joking. Sometimes they really make you a little bit anxious about overall their value far outweighs their aggravation but you know it’s just funny to talk about. But as we go out there to the Las Vegas Institute and she’s my patient, she was already getting numb I mean a little like number 8 and 9. This is before, by the way, this is the days before Septocaine and it kind of keep her numb. A, because I’m doing like I don’t know, 10 veneers across the upper front and we’re trying to follow this LVI guidelines. And it’s different than the way that I’ve prepped before. It’s just different and I was 25 years old, my prepping was not the best, so I’m kind of slow at it. And she kept waking up and at the end of the day, I mean I just, she was in pain, and you know it just took forever.

And so when I finally get her temporized, she’s somewhat, somewhat happy about things. But you know that’s a lot to do, I mean it’s a lot of preps and we went out to dinner that night and she was still kind of numb and in pain and you know, we still laughed a little bit because we went out to this jousting tournament thing at Excalibur Casino out there because the course is in Las Vegas. And they serve you like a chicken with a knife, that’s all you get and you know, it was kind of funny although a little bit painful too once you try to eat that chicken with a knife and that’s it. Anyway, when you we go back later on to seek the case, my chairside assistant was my assistant and she’s my patient and we’re getting ready to seek this thing. It’s just hard to see that kind of 10 unit case right? It’s just kind of difficult and we’re getting everything ready to glue them on in my eye, I got my loops on, my eyes are focused on the teeth and gluing them on and trying to get every margin perfect. And there’s a little bit of a delay and I don’t think much about it. But when we’re done, my assistant tells my hygienist, “Hey you know, the reason there was a delay was I dropped 2 of your veneers in the garbage can and I had to dig them out. Sorry.” That is the, anyway…that is the craziest thing ever. But they made amends about it, they joked about it later. But anyway I thought that was funny and I was glad it was an employee of mine and not a patient…an actual patient I brought from Mississippi to the course.

But anyway, that’s the account of the story of LVI. So we go down to Dawson and we try to learn better occlusion and we did learn a lot about occlusion when we’re down there. To this day though, we went to a lot of Institutes. We went to the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry, meeting in Boston. We actually made an effort to try to hear every single accredited member of the Academy speak that we could at that. And we actually had designs on becoming accredited ourselves in the AACD. But as time went on, it doesn’t matter how good of a cosmetic dentist you are, if you do not live on the part of the country that’s can do so they have in multiple cases like that. It is tough to make a living.

So that was a huge mistake for me to spend I don’t know, 40 or 50 grand my first year in practice on those institutes, although it really improved my skill level and probably improve my case presentation skills and my case acceptance percentage, it still was 50 grand and I didn’t do 50 grand worth of those kind of cases. I just didn’t do it. I ended up having to do cases like the having a new discounts and just to get to keep my practice up and I had to do a lot of discounting to do that. And then you know, it just became painfully obvious. You know I am in a blue collar town. There was a guy here across the road. If you ever see a photo of my office, you will see a McDonalds in the background. Okay? Now the owner of that McDonalds, great guy, his son is actually a dentist in Waco Texas, good guy. And I always ask him and said, you know at McDonalds, you guys are crowded 24/7. Your parking lot’s full, your drive thru’s backed up but why is it that all the other restaurants in town, they come in business, they go out of business? They come in, they go out. He said Chris, you just have to face it, Ripley is a hamburger kind of town. Okay? And it was, it is so true. Every restaurant that tries to come in that’s not fast food immediately fails. It fails within months. And I’m in a blue collar town and I always try to do fancy cosmetic dentistry and it was failing.

So what the people needed in my town and still needs to this day is to get out of pain. Okay? They wanted to get out of pain however that is, whether it’s pulling the tooth, whether it’s doing a root canal on the tooth, and you know, you get to do a fair amount of crowns but you got to do a lot of fillings to get o those crowns. And you get to do some implants but you got to do a lot of partials to get to those implants. And that’s just the way it is and I’m so, you know as time has gone on, I developed basically my whole...

Best Implant Course Ever – Season 1 Episode 7

Sat, 27 Feb 2016 03:15:52 -0400

After hundreds of hours of dental implant CE, I stumbled upon the most secretive and powerful hands-on training ever. In this episode I chronicle how I performed 4 of the most challenging surgeries I have ever attempted and learned 10x more than I ever have in one course. You should put this course on your bucket list if you want to become a true implant dentist and feel more comfortable with 90% of the cases that walk through your door.

In this episode you will learn:

Why only 10% of the true general dentists in America place dental implants
Details of what REALLY scares us about placing them and how to methodically overcome those fears
Why the “Foundry” is one of the most magical places on Earth. Right up there with Disney World.
How to know when you need to spend the money on a Cone Beam, when you are in the Safe Zone, and when to Punt to the Oral Surgeon.

And Much, Much More…

Click to Enlarge Mindmap

Read Full Transcript

The Dr. Chris Griffin Show – Season 1 Episode 7

“We are realizing how health can be affected by the oral state and how somebody losing their teeth will lead to all kinds of systematic problems such as atherosclerosis or cancer.” Now who said that?

Hey sports fans, welcome to another episode. I just want to thanks everyone so much for being awesome listeners and downloading the podcast and going and subscribing. Thank you so much for helping us you know, our rank go up on iTunes, that’s been awesome. The quote I threw out at you before the intro. Now that when you’re probably not going to get you know, because it’s a little bit detailed. And this, I got to warn you on the front end, this episode is going to get a little bit geeky for the dentists. And even if you’re a dentist, it’s going to get kind of geeky for you too because if you could possibly not be into what I’m going to talk about, but maybe and you probably should have thought about it, I know you heard about it. And so hopefully after today I can do a little convincing for you and encourage you to get into this field. This still growing field that is just, you know, just an amazing place to be.

So the quote about how oral health affect everything and even lead to problems such as cancer, that was said by Dr. Michael McCracken, UAB professor and totally awesome guy who I just hang out with this past weekend. And that is another reason why that I’m doing this show right now while this is fresh in my mind because I just really had an amazing experience and I just felt like I, you know, if I’m going to have the Dr. Chris Griffin Show, I got to share my experiences and the ones that are totally awesome like the one I just had, we got to share that. There’s another quote that he had that I’ve never heard before, that’s really applicable to all of us dentists, who are all doing surgeries basically every day. And I’ll explain that one later. Well actually that quote is pretty cool; it is “Small incision, bad decision.” Now he may or may not have even come up with that. That possibly could be from somebody else, I don’t know but he did say that in his lecture. And so anyway, I thought I’d pass that on there for you.

If you’re looking at your mind map and you’re following along as you always know, we go clockwise. And for whatever reason, I always start these mind maps out if you’re looking like at it clockwise at the 10 o’clock position, we go around and in a clockwise fashion. And so obviously, I had a great experience this past week. What I did, let me just tell you guys what I did. I, after several years of badgering I was convinced to take another hands on implant course which I’ve taken many. I meant to pull my AGD transcript up and just see how many I’ve taken over the years. Rest assured the reason I have not yet gotten my Masters in the Academy, is not because of implant training because I certainly have enough hands on hours to do me for a while on that. But I had some friends that really encouraged me to go to this one particular course and we’ll get to that in a little bit later in the show too but I always resisted. And you know, implant dentistry has been around forever. I’ll never forget, I don’t know, I was freshman or sophomore year in UT. I was sitting in class with one of my best friends and we had a lecturer on implants. And back then it was not even like the cool, awesome titanium implants that we have now; it was you know blade implants. They were showing us these blade implants and even then I thought “Wow, this is the way of the future. This is so amazing. I want to be an Implantologist.” And he said the same thing, sitting in class. He didn’t remember doing it but he did, he said it. He said he also thought he wanted to go into implantology and we were so green, we didn’t even know that wasn’t a thing. We didn’t realize Implantology was not a specialty, we just saw the potential and thought “Wow! That could be awesome!”

But as things go, dental school got harder and harder. And I you know, I decided I was going to be just probably good enough I mean just to get my degree to be a dentist. And you know that’s good enough. Let’s forget these ideas of fancy implantology. But it’s been around for a long time. I think some of the cases they were showing us back in UT was from even the 80’s. And as things have gone by, more and more dentists are placing implants. I have seen statistics that ranged anywhere from 10% to 20% of dentists out there are placing them. I think some people say it’s closer to 20, some people say it’s a little bit more than 20. I don’t know, I mean I think of…I go around and lecture. And I think that of course, a lot of people restore implants but if you talk about the people who placed the implants, it’s really only about 10% of the general dental population that place them.

Now a lot of specialist place them and boy I didn’t know there’s a big turf world over implants. I mean Golly, the oral surgeons of course, they think that’s them. Endodontists like to place implants, I found out. Prosthodontist, who knew that? A lot of Prosthodontists think they should be the guys placing them because they know where they should go to make the prosthesis the best of. So and if you get real technical down to it, General dentists are some of the first ones that brought implants on to the scene an actual reality. So you know, there’s a lot of people who claim to be the ones that deserve to be the dentists who are truly qualified to place these implants. I’m not going to get to that argument because I love everybody. And if you’re good at placing implants, go for it. There’s plenty of missing teeth out there and there’s going to be more missing teeth, so I don’t see why it’s going to be a problem. Now if you’re a specialist, and you feel like you must charge way more than general dentists, because you’re a specialist and obviously that’s going to hamper your ability to do more cases. However, if you’re a general dentist you better darn well know what you’re doing when you’re placing them because you’re not a specialist. Alright?

And regardless of what price you placing them at, you better know your stuff because if a specialist really get kind of a pass, now they’re all…you know, specialists they’re all great and all professional but if you have more letters up behind your name, you know you get a little bit of a pass if something goes wrong. If you’re a general dentist you don’t necessarily get that pass. So if you’re going to place implants, I think that, I think you better know your stuff. And that’s kind of why I went to this course because I want to know how to do more types of implants and want to have my stuff together and I want to be really good at it, you know. I know there won’t be a problem. So I would say that one of the interesting things about, just talking about real quickly the people, the amount of people that are placing implants are only a very small percentage do what I would call a hard cases. You know where you’re going to potentially run in through things with a name and also Dr. McCracken said that during the lecture. I picked that up from him. I’m certainly not going to try to steal any of his quotes, I don’t know where he may have gotten them himself but most cases out there are “hard cases”. I mean, you know, I have a lot of patients interested in implants but for the most part, I’d refer them out because of some issue and it’s not just as simple as drilling a screw into a piece of wood; like one lecturer said years ago when I went to his lecture.

So why is it, why is it that we, as general dentists are so scared about implants? Or even some specialists out there. Why are you scared? I think it’s probably because of those worst case scenarios. In placing implants, some of the worst case scenarios are really worse than other things you do. Like you’re probably not going to have trouble, nerve damage or bleeding problems when you’re done of filling; it’s just not going to happen. Now you know, we all know, you could have extended numbness from a shot you give someone; an injection. You could have bleeding problems from extracting the tooth, you know. Instruments can slip, there’s all kind of…there’s why you have a formal consent because, you know, medicine’s not perfect. It’s called medical practice for a reason. It’s not…you’re never going to have that exact perfect result every single time. But I think that implants have had such a mystery and there’s been a lot of misinformation out there for so many years that a lot of dentists were just scared of them. I’ll include myself in that. I was just scared of them.

I mean I don’t want to cause irreversible damage. I don’t want to have lingering numbness because I encroached on a nerve that has a name. I don’t want to have a bleed that I can’t stop. That was maybe the biggest thing that scared me all these years. I, you know, I don’t want to hit the lingual artery. I mean I don’t want to…I just don’t want that to happen. And you know if you’re out there and you’re supporting your family and you’re making plenty of money, without doing things that run the risk of bleeding or numbness or irreversible damage, you know, what the heck are you doing, man? Why would you get into that and expose yourself? But as time went on, it just became more and more obvious that as more of my patients needed something like this, and I saw their hesitancy to go to the oral surgeons that I would refer to. And man the oral surgeons are so good, I love those guys. I mean they have saved my bacon so many times. And I’m not you know, I’m not an advocate for general dentist out there. I’m just trying to steal patients from your specialists or quit sending specialists to your patients. I think specialists play a major role in a general dentist’s life. If you got to have them, and you need to help them out and do stuff for them too because they really can help you on a tight.

But there’s just a large amount of patients who are not going to go to this specialist for anything in where I live. In big cities, it’s probably different specialists who are right down the street but where I live, a lot of people are asking for things and I just…if I’m not, if I don’t do it, nobody’s going to do it. So I knew that I had to get serious and after today, I’m going to teach you the things that I learned from taking this course I just took. That it’ll help you know where you can go, if you want to get really serious about dental implants so you won’t be so scared and confused. And I think that’s the major thing that we’re looking for. So hey, where did I go? I mean that’s the big question right? I went all the way to the big city of Birmingham, Alabama. Well two cities actually. I went to New Orleans, Louisiana and Birmingham, Alabama. It’s a course called Implant Dentistry Surgical Placement and Restoration Implants. It’s kind of a you know, I love you Dr. McCracken, but you now maybe not the most enticing title. I mean it’s not going to jump off the page at you. It’s a group, I think some people referred to them as Alabama Implant Education and you know, I guess I just always thought if something this life changing, earth shattering, amazing were this close to me. I mean Birmingham is 2 hours basically from my doorstep; why would I not know about it? I mean, would everyone would just not be running down there and telling everybody else to go? I mean that’s what I thought and so I resisted.

I guess maybe 3 or 4 years ago, I had a friend from Robertsdale, Alabama named Dr. Jason Northcutt. Now Jason has been and has a couple of claims to fame years ago was on a CD called something about future superstars of dentistry with Greg Stanley, who interviewed a bunch of dentists and Jason was one of them that he interviewed and years later I ran into Jason at some other courses and we struck up a friendship. He got really good at implants and you know, everyone…some of you have been to my seminars; my yearly events and I invited him to be a speaker at one of those. And he came and he was a great speaker. He talked a lot about implants, how it changed his practice. And the little thing there was he just had one little bit slide and he said “Hey guys, if you’re interested. You should go down to Birmingham and take this course.” And you know threw the slide up. I don’t know how many people from that course went but one of the people who went from that slide was Dr. Steve Deloach, one of my best friends up in Dickson, Tennessee.

Now Dr. Steve, he would tell you himself that for a while, he’d probably hadn’t been as excited about new things in Dentistry as he used to when we first got out of school. I mean he and I, we went all over the country literally trying to learn everything we could. We wanted to be these amazing cosmetic dentists right out of school, I know I’ve told you that story before. He was right in there with me. We both wanted to do this exact same thing. And then, you know, life took over, we started having kids, we both kind of got out of that. And you now, he’d be the first to tell you, we kind of lost interest of new things in dentistry. We saw that slide and he liked Dr. Northcutt’s presentation, so he goes down there and he takes their big course. They got a big course and a little course. I just took the little course but it was really big for me. But he took the 10 month course which is you know, it’s a big commitment but he goes down there and I got to tell you, I’ve never seen a change in a single person like I’ve seen in him over the past years.

So he is absolutely on fire for dentistry and he’s doing big cases left and right and it’s just amazing to see some of the work he’s doing. And he’s honestly gotten really advanced, more advanced than me in that area. And it kind of bugged me, you know and my competitive nature took over and I was you know, for a year he badgered me. “You got to go take this course, you got to go take this course.” It wasn’t just me either like they should be paying this guy a commission because he got me and I think 4 of our classmates. We all went down there pretty much together. And we all experienced it in the short course and you know what Dr. Northcutt and Dr. Steve, they know what they were seeing 110% true. It was an amazing experience. Who are these people that we just met? I mean, you know it’s crazy but I didn’t even really thought I’ve gone through hundreds of hours of implant training as always boring and stale. And I just you know I didn’t get it and the hands on portions are on pigs and you know dental forms and I just didn’t get it. And so I got it after this course.

So who are these people who finally got through this amazingly thick skull of mine and manage to teach me things that I’ve you know, after 20 years of practicing patients I did not know yet. Well I may get some of this wrong because I didn’t read like there are bibles or anything but from being around them, I guess 8 days or so, the whole course is run by this guy, Dr. Michael McCracken; the guy we talked about earlier with the quote. He is a professor at UAB but he runs this residency program that’s sponsored through another University that’s also in Birmingham. So it’s kind of you know, it’s not really UAB but he’s kind of he’s sort of from UAB. I guess he’s kind of associated with it. He was actually mentored by Dr. Carl Misch, you know the famous Implantologist guy. Who probably mentored a lot of this folks but he also did mentored Dr. McCracken. And you know Dr. McCracken is just an amazing lecturer by the way. If you have not heard him, amazing!

He’s just sort of has a way of getting through. He seems always be happy and not beat and has a smile on his face. But he talks about the tough stuff too. The stuff you need to know. I have been to a lot of implant courses where they don’t tell you the bad stuff, right? They tell you the good stuff, they say, “Whoa, you’ll make a lot of money, you know. It’s not that hard. It’s like screwing the pieces, screwing the piece of wood.” Well you know, he tells you you can do it but he’s going to tell you the stuff to watch out for and he’s going to be real clear about the dangers and everybody’s going to help you work through what you do about it if something bad happens. I think that was the beauty of the course is just finally learning the downsides, the worst case scenarios but what you do about that happens. And hey, this is not the end of the world. We’re just going to prepare for things to go the way they need to if something goes wrong, we know how to correct it and we’ll keep moving forward.

And it’s just so clear and he’s a very good educator, a very good educator. He put me to shame as far as speaking skills and so you know, I was just super impressed. We got down to this course in New Orleans and so there’s 3 days of lecture. It’s great! There’s some hands on stuff. kind of like the stuff I’ve done before on the dental forums. Blah blah blah…same old, same old. But the real magic came when we go to this place called The Foundry. Now this is close to Birmingham, in a city called Bessemer, Alabama you know. Not exactly the rich suburb of Birmingham but it’s a very special place because they have a recovery center there for addicts. And what they’ve done, Dr. McCracken and also his partner in crime, Dr. Guy Rosenstiel, who by the way, also amazing guy! He was just a great, just like the greatest guy in the world. They have, they run a residency program and they have like 10 or 11 residents running around. For sure I don’t know, school guys. Some of them stay 1 year I think some stay 2 years. If I have a son, graduating dental school, I would want him to be in this program. It is that good. It is amazing what these guys are learning!

But you know, so you got the 2 doctors, you got the 10 residents and a bunch of the staff are people who have recovered from this recovery center. And you know, as Dr. McCracken said in his lecture, if you’re own...

Dental Bonus Horror Stories – Season 1 Episode 6

Fri, 19 Feb 2016 17:52:04 -0400

Incentives can be very powerful, yet they also undermine virtue if not planned out carefully. Since we always strive for a Kaizen Culture where every action makes the world or practice a better place, we must burst the myth of the one-size-fits-all Bonus System once and for all.

The examples of Bonuses Gone Bad should scare even the most confident doctor. Use their example to avoid catastrophe.

In this Episode You’ll Learn:

How to Avoid the Dark Side of Bonuses and Incentives
Why One-Size-Fits-All Practice Bonuses are a Ticking Time Bomb (with Examples)
How Medicine tried their version of Bonuses called P4P and How They Crashed and Burned
The ONLY Safe Way to Incentivize Your Best Team Players

And Much, Much More…

Click to Enlarge Mindmap

Read Full Transcript

The Dr. Chris Griffin Show – Season 1 Episode 6

“When you rely on incentives, you undermine virtues. Then when you discover you need people who actually want to do the right thing, those people don’t exist because you’ve crushed anyone’s desire to do the right thing with all these incentives.” Now who said that?

Okay, I think I got a few of you on that one. That was a, that’s a little bit of a tricky one. I didn’t go into the distant past, the way we go a lot of times when we do these things. But I did actually pull this off a pretty recent tad talk that I thought was pretty awesome. And I’ll be telling you about that too. So let’s tell, let me tell you a little bit about the author of the quote. It’s Dr. Barry Schwartz. Now Dr. Schwartz is a professor of Psychology at Swarthmore College and he is also a, I found out after I’ve Googled him, a frequent New York Time editorial author. And, but the tad talk that I saw that I was so impressed by, and it makes so much sense for so many things in the book he wrote along with that tad talk. The tad talk and the book, they’re called the Paradox of Choice. And this is from about 10 years ago but and it’s a little crazy when you watch it. I mean, he’s on stage but he’s on these shorts but he’s a super smart guy, you can tell. And he’s got so much to say and so many things he says really apply to a dental office. He’s really amazing.

So yeah, Dr. Schwartz gave that quote and not only besides that, he gave another quote that I think is very applicable to what we’re talking about today and that quote is “Too little attention is paid to the dark side of incentives, they are anything but a magic bullet. Psychologists have known this for years and I’m sad to say that I didn’t necessarily learn that as quickly as I have in dental practice. But we’re going to go through that today and we’re going to talk about bonuses. The title of the today’s episode 6 is Dental Bonus Horror Stories. I was thinking about using a like a Vincent Press voice if I could conjure one to say that but I guess I couldn’t really come up with a good person that I thought I could imitate. So we’re just going to use my regular voice. But there are some horror stories out there and today you’re going to learn the upside and the horrible downside to some of the most common dental staff bonuses around. And they all have ups and downs. You will know the potential good you can do for your practice and you’re going to learn the potential destruction that can happen if you’re not careful.

After today though, you’re going to be able to move forward with the bonus structure that you think will give you that highest risk reward for your practice if in fact you do choose to move forward with the bonus structure at all. And I certainly have done and seen almost everything there is out there to do or see in this area. So I feel like I have a little bit of something to say to you that’s going to help you. Now when we talk about dental staff bonuses, I guess mostly everything we’re going to talk about comes from the world of pay for performance because I guess that’s a concept that goes back maybe even to the industrial age. Or for sure as we’re coming out from the industrial age and we start to get into a more corporate structure, businesses and commerce in general, they’ve made this assumption that people really care about money more than anything else. And don’t we make that assumption a lot of our own practices. You know I certainly make that assumption way more than I should. I mean of course, I know that I’ve made that assumption, I’m constantly trying not to make it and we’ve all got stories about the little old lady that you know waddles in and wants to spend 10 grand and you know, you hate to even present her the treatment and she whips aside her coin purse and pulls out silver and gold nuggets. I mean I’m just using hyperbole here but you know, we all know about that and I mean everyone’s got them. I’ve got the personal medic aide who paid me 6 grand for a bridge several years ago that changed my mind on the whole concept.

But I think that most of the concepts in our industry came from these theories that workers in our case, dental team staff members, want money. And they want money worst than they want anything else in their life. You know that’s just the concept and I mean I don’t know, I’m sure those people are out there but I don’t…I just you know, as time has gone by, I’ve seen that that’s just not the case. That’s just not homogenous at least. So however, I have also learned that there are seasons of your practice and times in your practice just when bonuses are very valuable and it would in fact be foolish not to use the bonus in your practice. So we’re going to talk about how when you decide to cross that bridge and offer your staff a bonus. You do need to have a healthy fear of that situation because it can really do more obstruction than you can realize and a lot of people have really wrecked a pretty good dynamic in their practice because they didn’t pay enough attention to this. However, every bonuses of any kind does have a purpose and there is a season. I’m sure there’s a song out there for that that I’m not also going to try to sing for you but every bonus has a purpose and has a season. As long as you as the doctor, understand the positives and there can be positive; there can be a really, really good positives and you understand the negatives. And there can be really, really bad negatives that every bonus exacts on your practice. There is a toll to be paid, right? There is a toll, there is a price and there can be a great reward.

So let’s dive right in, right? The first thing I would like to dispel, if you ever go to a practice management seminar and you hear the person on the stage talking about how this particular dental bonus is the bonus that everyone should be using. I would probably cut my losses, pack up my things quietly as to not be impolite because I don’t want to be impolite. And I would ease out the back door and I would not listen to anything else that that person has to say because that person is an idiot. Okay? It’s just not out there. There is no bonus that fits everybody. And if someone tells you that, they will lie to you about other stuff, too. That’s a fact, I’m just telling you. I’ve been around the game long enough now in my 20th year seeing patients. I’ve been a see junky my whole life. They’re lying. Okay? Sorry, they’re lying.

Now, on the flip side, there’s a lot of people out there that would give you a multiple disdain, a ton of different bonuses. And they’re not liars but they’re confusing. So what happens a lot of times as you hear them you’ll think, “Well I can’t do that. I mean that’s too confusing. I don’t know how to make that decision. They’ve given me too many options. I’m going to have the Paradox of Choice, just like Dr. Schwartz said. And I’m not going to do anything. And so I ended and you think well gosh I’m fine and I’m doing something and it’s better than doing nothing but I try this really simple bonus.” And it’s just not going to work for you. It’s going to work for a while, possibly. It might. Something that they work for a while then let me just tell you, let me just be the mean bad guy that opens up this vault of dental practice management and opens myself up for sure a lot of Chris’ if I’m saying this but these simple bonuses are designed to keep a what’s called in the Industry a quick win. Okay?

Because we all know dental practice management coaches and consultants that if we can get you a quick win then we’re going to think that we’re smarter enough to listen to this other stuff too. And a lot of times, first impression being what they are, we can get you that quick win no matter how it might hurt you later. You know you’re going to stick with us at a certain amount of time. And I’m sad to say that some consultants out there are really only interested in tracking how long you stay with them. And then once you wise up and leave or start questioning them, then they’re more than happy to bring you on to the next consultant that you might find and just try to get in their mind a new patient, if you will; a new client. But there is no one size that fits all bonus system. Now as we’re breaking this down, let’s look at 2 ways that a bonus system might work. Okay?

There are 2 things that people want in life; money being one and some form of rewards or recognition being the other, okay? I will tell you that if you could find a group of people who could be solely motivated by wanting to do the right thing, and being recognized for that in creating significance in the universe or the practice or whatever I mean you’ve got it absolutely made, absolutely made. It don’t happen much though. It’s pretty rare. And the trick is figuring out which employees are those kind of people who can be motivated by those good things and are not so money motivated. And also if they say they’re money motivated, maybe it’s just because they haven’t been educated as to what else is out there that made us don’t know what else to say. Right? They may have heard somebody else say that, and they thought, “Hey that person seem pretty smart, I’m going to try to be money motivated too. Maybe that’ll get me where I want to go but it just rarely ever does. And you got to understand the motivation of your team members. It’s always going to be different, it just is.

And so that’s kind of “Unfortunately doc, that’s your job to fair this out.” I don’t know that you can put this off in office manager or someone else in your practice. Because ultimately if it’s your butt on the line, and you’re the person that signs the checks, you’re kind of responsible to pick the team and to improvise the team the way you want the team to develop. That’s just, I’ve had to rebuild the team, you know for the last few years and I’m so thankful that we did it this way this time because the last time, I did it the wrong way. And I can share so much about what I did wrong. Now if you ever think I’m telling a few things that are right, that’s wonderful. But the way I view this show and a lot of things I do and teach, let me at least help you guys learn what not to do. Okay? I may not be the guy, that’s the genius that has all the answers, but I’ve got a lot of answers to things that don’t work. Okay? Please, please notch those things off your mind. Don’t do them and at least you won’t make those mistakes. Right?

So I’ve at least increase your percentage chance probability to make a good decision that really does a good job for you if you can at least do that much. Okay? Now so you got the money bonuses out here and then there’s other things you can do to create incentives that are more rewards based or recognitions based. Gosh another book, I’m going to recommend here just off the cuff is the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish. And I’ll try to get a link in the show notes to that too. I mean I keep giving you guys books to read, right? I’m so sorry. You know, I know that you guys are busy. It’s a great book too though, it really delves into things that you can do besides monetary recognitions. And I use that book so much when I’m designing my goal setting and my yearly planning and my incentive based stuff like that. I use that all the time.

And one thing you can look to and I talked about this way back in Episode 2 of Season 1. We’ll link that in the show notes too but I talked about these theme adventures you can create. So you get the whole team and pull them together and they’re you know, they’re on the same page looking at this goal. When they get there, you reward them. You can reward them by like sending everyone on a sea trip, you know, to gosh we talked about sending people to New York, send people to the Caribbean. You don’t have to get fancy like that. You can send people to a lot of other places besides that. So they can be just down the street, hey a good friend of mine every year if they ever served a certain goal he sends them in a limo to Nashville and take them to the mall and they do stuff like that. So I mean you go back and listen to Episode 2 again or you know read the transcripts or whatever. You’ll get some of the ideas, I wanted a lot of detail to different things we’ve done in my practice and that I’ve seen other doctors do very successfully, okay?

So there’s a lot, a lot of things you can do in the bonus incentive world right? But now let’s get into more of the monetary stuff. Maybe a little bit of the reward thrown in but let’s talk about the big ones that I’ve seen and let’s talk about horror stories too. And I may or may not withhold names to protect the innocent because I don’t know exactly where we’re going with this. But I feel like if I tell you these stories that really happened it’s going to help you. So I may have to get kind of specific. So the first kind of bonus, let me talk about myself first. Right? So the first kind of bonus that I know that is an absolute disaster if you do it wrong is an hourly pay incentive; an hourly pay incentive. And by the way if I didn’t mention earlier, all of these money type bonuses should really fall under the header “Pay for Performance”. Pay for performance is a concept like we said that came out of the Industrial age probably but it got really popular in the healthcare/medical world a few years ago. But the studies, they’re coming back really negative on how this is affecting the medical world. And you have hospitals that based you know, hirings and firings on these metrics of performance that you got paid on how well you perform. And there’s just a lot of things in medicine that you cannot measure and then also the metrics put on a huge burden on these teams in these hospitals. Just do the metrics and just do the work, the pencil work instead of treating the patients.

And so these hospitals have mega failures recently. If that tells you anything, so I’m hoping we can once again learn from the badness in the medical world to help ourselves and the other you know, the dental world. And if you’re listening to this and you’re a chiropractor, optometrist, whatever; all these worlds, maybe we can learn from our brethren and the medical fields that just seem to get hammered first on everything, don’t they? I mean I feel sorry for those guys most of the time. But the hourly pay incentives, okay? Now let me explain kind of how this works. If you have a team of 5 people or whatever, you create the amount of money that you feel like the practice has to produce or collect or both, to set a baseline, so everyone is kind of getting a baseline of pay. And you give everybody just a baseline hourly pay. I did this myself starting in 2005. And so you’d set this and so they got this base, and as you grow, you’ll increase their hourly pay from their base number, let say from $8 and you increase it by some amount of cents, hourly, as you’re production or collection grows.

And so in my practice, we started this bonus, we were collecting $50,000 per month back in 2005. So I ran into a person that taught me this kind of bonus about the same time that I was coming out of my flirtation with the cosmetic world where I was trying to be this amazing cosmetic/whatever type dentist, right? Just the best cosmetic dentist in the world, we all know that it didn’t work. I was an idiot for thinking I can do that, I know now but I did it. So I was doing about $50,000 a month and we set everybody’s pay accordingly. Alright I have a small team about 5 people and we started growing because not only did we change their bonus structure but I’d also set things in motion where we changed our solid practice and that’s where we changed into more of a high productivity high volume style practice ala Vince Monticciolo, like we talked about last week.

And so there were a lot of things going on, not only that I’ve changed the style of practice, I was really into the practice. I was really motivated, I was hard charging and I was trying everything I could try to get better and do better. I was pulling the staff with me. They were doing more than they’d ever done before and our practice quickly grew from 50,000 a month to 75,000 a month, to a $100,000 a month, to a $125,000 a month, to a $150,000 a month. And those people who have been making, let’s say I set their base to like $10 an hour at $50,000 a month. Well, they’re making $25 and $30 an hour. Right? I don’t care who you are. You can’t earn $30 an hour in Ripley, Mississippi doing the same job you’re doing when you’re making $10 an hour. There’s…I’m all for rewarding team members as your practice grows, there’s nothing wrong with that. That is great, you should be doing that. But you can’t triple their salaries. They can’t be triply effective, they can’t be. It’s impossible. They can’t be doubly effective. If they could be doubly effective, you should fire them for doing a terrible job when they’re making $10 an hour. Okay?

That was so stupid. And now you get all these high paid people, well guess what? When you hire somebody else to help your practice because you went from 50,000 a month to a $150,000 a month, no longer. I mean you got to have more people. Those high paid people can’t see that many more patients. Just because you’re making 3 times the money, you can’t see 3 times the patients. You can’t make temporaries in 3 rooms at a time, it is impossible guys. You cannot do it, okay? So I screwed up. You see you got these high paid people and they’re happy being high paid. They’re trying to help you cope with that idea, so they can keep being high paid. You’re finally losing battle and I fought that battle for years. And I thought I could outrun those numbers and out produce them and I just could not do it. I could not do it because my staff overhead percentage went from 20% to 22, to 24, to 25, 28, it got up to 33%. At that peak I think, maybe 35% before I pulled it back.

But you know, and I’ll be honest, I have relationships with those people

Calm Your Stormy Practice – Season 1 Episode 5

Sat, 13 Feb 2016 03:57:34 -0400

There is 1 Thing you can do to solve 99% of your problems, but it may not be what you think. One of the inherent challenges of practice is the shear number of moving parts we have going on in any given day.

That coupled with our culture of celebration of multi-tasking has steered us in the complete wrong direction in terms of our best practice when treating patients AND running a successful small business. We solve that today.

You Will Learn:

Why you should avoid Multi-tasking like the plague, but how using smart focus can actually make you better
What the 1 Thing is for your practice to grow and how to make that 1 Thing foremost in your team’s mind
How to install an office “Eagle Eye” so you ALWAYS know where you are needed next so you don’t have to stress about it.

And Much, Much More…

Click to Enlarge Mindmap

Read Full Transcript

The Dr. Chris Griffin Show – Season 1 Episode 5

“Multitasking is a lie” and here’s another one for you, “You can do two things at once but you cannot focus effectively on two things at once.” Now who said that?

Yes, yes and welcome back everyone. Now that was a little bit of a tricky one, huh? A little bit of a tricky quote there. It could’ve been a few different people. So let me go ahead and just fill you in. That was none other than Texas real estate agent extraordinaire and also New York Times bestseller, Gary Keller. Who wrote an amazing book. I’ve got to say, it’s called The One Thing, the surprisingly simple truth behind the extraordinary results. Okay? It’s an excellent book I’ll recommend that book for you. We’ll try to get a link for you down at the show notes if you want to check it out yourself. It’s one of many books that I have acquired through the years and read through at break neck speed but I’ll tell you that one is the one that I certainly stopped at a few times to smell the roses because it’s a tremendous book and I’ve found after researching him a little bit that before this, he had only published a real estate book and I have absolutely a zero and I mean zero interest in real estate books. But you know what? This one thing book is pretty darn good. So pick one up if you get the chance. Get an app book or a kindle book or however you want to read it.

So today’s episode, the name of today’s episode is Calm Your Stormy Practice with one thing, okay? Sort of play off that book but also you know, it’s Springtime in Mississippi. So it’s not a stormy season. I guess I had that on my mind. And also no matter how good of a manager you are, how good of a doctor, how good of a dentist, how good of a whatever, how good you are of a practice manager, you’re going to have some stormy seasons come through your practice and also your life. And so I thought this was a pretty good episode to dive into some things and really share with you the number 1 thing that we did to calm our stormy way of practicing. And we’ll get to that a little bit later in the show but today, you are going to learn how you can run a very highly productive practice while not violating a law. Now what law might that be? Well if you read this book, if you’ve read this book, if you get a chance to go read this book. There’s a law that’s coming out these days. You know every time you pick up a paper in neuroscience and stuff like that. They’re doing research all over the place that suggests that this American idea of multitasking, which would be, I suppose the idea would be that multitasking is essential if you want to be successful. Well it’s really not only is it not successful, it’s also not possible. Right?

And so there’s a law out there that pretty much says that multitasking is no good because it is not possible. But I’m going to teach you guys today how you can run a very productive practice and a very busy practice. if that’s the way you choose to practice; without breaking that law, without violating those rules. And also how you can harness the amount of amazing power of focused multitasking, okay? So I have named something now. Not only are we not breaking the law of multitasking, we’re out here naming stuff. Boom! That’s just the way we roll right? Focused multitasking, now I hope no one has that trademark, because I haven’t ever heard the term but I just did and just pulled it out of thin air as I was writing up the show notes for this episode. But there is a thing we do called focused multitasking. And we teach it, believe it or not. We’ve been teaching it since 2008. So good grief, it’s been 8 years now. This thing will allow you to unlock your practice goals if you’ve hit a plateau, if you’ve hit a sort of a stumbling block or a block aid. Whatever kind of synonym you can come up with there. If you’ve hit something like that, and you just cannot get passed it. You’re just really, really, really struggling and you just want to hit this goal but you’ve always had it in your mind but you cannot seem to try this. Try this focus multitasking we’ll be talking about here in a bit. It’s really amazing! It’s really good.

Now and I’m telling you, I learned it from a doctor. I learned to kind of, I mean it’s kind of a base knowledge of it. Of course, I expanded on it and I feel like we’ve almost perfected it in my practice and I’ll be sharing that with you today. It’s pretty awesome! And after you learn this, you will be able to solve most of the road blocks that are out there keeping you producing, underproductive, not re-allowing your practice to reach the high level that you would like. Right? So let’s dive right in. Let’s do a little background before I get in all these fancy solutions that we’re talking about. Let’s talk about the multi tasking. Now there’s multi tasking but that’s really a myth. Okay? From what I’ve read, in current referee litterateur, there’s actually no such thing as multi tasking, however, there’s certainly something called switch tasking. And that’s really what you’re doing when you think you’re multi tasking. So I’ve always been the kind of guy that said, I wanted to, you know I thought I was so brilliant that I could actually watch TV and study at the same time for a test, right? It’s really not what I was doing. I was really watching TV a little bit and then I was studying a little bit. And I might have been on it in rapid sequence Back and forth but if I had focused all of my attention on the studying or on the TV watching, whichever was more important at that time, either of those tasks would’ve been done better than what I was doing.

Now how I got through school and got to this point? I’m not sure because I certainly have never really focused on things the way I probably should have. But recent neuroscience proves that you will almost always, always finish to independently focus tasks quicker, you know if you’re doing like one at a time, that’s all you’re focused on than trying to do both at once. It’s every time guys, it’s every time. So and if the tasks that you’re trying to accomplish are complex, that just makes it that much harder. Okay? It’s just that much worse. So that is, that’s the deal. So if you’re out there thinking, okay Chris, well thanks a whole bunch! So I guess we’re in the wrong profession, right? Because I can’t just sit down in the cubicle and focus on this one project for two hours and get done with it and take it to my boss and say “Didn’t I do a good job? I’m so focused and awesome.” I’ve got a practice to run. You know I’m trying to see a patient, I’m trying to numb up a patient that’s very difficult to deal with. I Guess someone is not paying their bill in the back. The hygienist is screaming at me, the hygienists are doing their own thing. You know how hygienists do? They just do whatever they want to do all the time and I don’t know what I can do to single focus things in my practice one at a time. That’s just not happening. Or maybe you’re one of these kinds that got a practice like a cosmetic practice and you’re seeing one patient in the morning, one patient in the afternoon. Or like a military doctor who’s a friend of mine who said, they actually had a quota of 2 patients in the morning and 2 patients in the afternoon. And I mean that’s, well you can do it then, you can do that.

Yeah if you’re in a modern practice and you run it at a reasonable rate without a whole bunch of advance services. Then I think you’ve got to take this and you know, say “Wow!” I mean I bet most of the day I’m trying to multitask but it’s just not possible. I mean, when they’re trying to numb somebody and while I’m doing that, I’m thinking about the cram preps there next door that I got to get to. I’m thinking about the lab case that I’ve got to send off for and we take a shade on that. It’s how the porcelain going to match and all this. I’m trying to think to get my lab first and get the whitening cases poured up. I mean I just don’t know. So I’m constantly multitasking all day.

And at the end of the day, we have an okay day, I feel pretty good about myself and I think “Wow, you’re a pretty good multitasker.” But now you’re telling me Chris, that multitasking’s a myth, what I’ve been doing has just been a sham. I’ve been fooling myself and everyone else. And so how am I supposed to run my practice now? I just don’t understand. Well let me introduce to you your salvation. Okay? Because a few years ago, we came upon this truth and I had to… you know I had to take deep look inside and I had to admit to myself. “You know what? You know Hoss, you admit you’re super productive. You’ve been thinking you’re some kind of multitasking freak, super hero freak in nature.” Well you’re really…you’re not. Thank God! And you probably have been hurting your efforts because you’re just trying to multitask all day long. And don’t our patients deserve a 100% of our attention? And I’m actually, that is actually something I’ve taught since 2008 and I’ve always had trouble trying to reconcile a busy practice with the fact that I knew that patients deserve 100% of our attention at all times.

And so, we actually came up not only with the term and a theory, but we actually put it into practice. So I came up with this term called Focused Multitasking. How how’s this, how’ this work? So it’s really not multitasking. So I’m not breaking those laws. I’m not violating the myth of multitasking. I just called it multitasking because it’s the common usage term. That’s what people would call what we do but you as the individual doctor, you have the power to change them. You know, you can change the way that it’s perceived then actually create a situation that’s ideal or very, very much better than historic multitasking; a lot of us do. And a lot of the way that we do that is divide up complex procedures which we have a bunch up, and you do too in your practice every single day. So we divide up these complex procedures into very small independent chunks. And then, we execute chunk after chunk after chunk after chunk. Okay so let me go into little details. So you’ve got a, you’re doing Crown prep, okay? You’re doing a crown prep and in one room, you’re doing an emergency exam in another room, and down the hall, you’re supposed to go check your hygienist out and doing a few exam on that patient, okay? After the hygiene appointment, well you’ve got 3 things going on at once right? This sounds bad. It already sounds like this is multitasking. Well guess what? It becomes focused, what I’m calling, Focused Multitasking. If instead of worrying about those 3 things at one time and thinking about all 3 at one time, you just chunk it out.

So on the crown prep, you walk into the room, you’re going to focus on that patient with 100% of your focus and you are going to give an injection. Okay? You talk to the patient and do a little chit chat, and check through medical history and make sure everything’s on the up and up. And you’re going to give an injection, you’re going to give the best injection you can possibly give. You’re going to give that injection, and give that anesthetic without any regard, whatsoever, for the patient across the hall waiting on your exam that’s in pain or the patient in the hygiene room who’s getting ready down there. And once you’ve given that injection, and you leave the room, you’re no longer going to think about that patient and take them back to him. And you’re going to cross down the hall and you’re going to talk to that emergency exam, you’re going to find out what’s wrong with them. You might order some x-rays and while you’re in there, you’re going to absolutely focus 100% on that patient. And then you’re going to leave the room and you’re going to forget the patient for a few minutes and you’re going to go down the hall, you’re going to check hygiene and you’re going to give them 100% of your focus for that procedure. Okay? And you go throughout the day and you just focus on little chunks at a time.

So to the outside world and everyone else that looks like you’re multitasking, but as we all now know, you’re not multitasking because it’s really impossible. I guess it’s much closer to switch tasking, but the way we’re describing it we’re focusing as we do it. Okay so in that way, we also don’t violate our own personal code of providing each patient 100% of our focus while we’re with that patient, it’s not that I feel like it’s absolutely essential. I will not take shortcuts on that, that is 100% the way it’s got to be. Okay? Alright, so that’s how it operates and practice that can be productive and yet focused. Now how exactly did we harness this in our practice and that’s what we’re going to talk about now. In our practice, well let me take you guys back a few years. So this is a little bit of a funny story, I would assume that my friend does not mind me telling the story on the radio. So back in 2005, it was an interesting year. We were trying, I’d actually come to the conclusion that in all cosmetic practice, it was not going to work in Ripley, Mississippi. Now some of you out there who are a lot brighter bulbs than I am, would probably come to that conclusion a lot sooner but I’m stubborn and bull headed as they say around here. And I wanted to make it happen. I wanted to be known as this great cosmetic dentist through Ripley, Mississippi and just show everyone it could be done if someone went to work and study hard enough.

Well somewhere between the year 2000 and 2005, you know it became obvious to me that was not going to happen. And so, you know, I said “Okay, what do we need to do? Because I do not want to live a life where I’m not productive and successful you know I have goals and I would like to meet financial goals, personal goals, achievement goals, and so I decided that I just wanted to be very, very good general practice. And you know, not be this amazing, famous, cosmetic guy but however, be a very well educated general dentist who could do a you know, good percentage of almost every procedure while we’re referring to highest end stuff. And so I embarked on a journey all over the country to find doctors who represented different aspects I wanted to learn. Well this so happened that my good friends, Dr. Steve Deloach, Dr. Pat Clark and myself, we were riding to Atlanta Georgia taking on a course on ortho and one of it, I think it’s me. It’s always me. Right? I’m the guy that studies CE, I was just that guy. So I always came on trips with these stacks of CD’s and nobody would want to listen to them but I kind of forced just to listen to one or two on a road trip right? So I pulled out this CD, and one of them was a Dr. Vince Monticciolo and he was in New Port Richey Florida. You know, and so we go t the course, we listened to the CD on the way down there. It was awesome! I mean we were so, all three of us were like “Wow!” This guy knows his stuff. He sounds super awesome, we want to go learn from him. And so I called him up and I scheduled for not only us three, but I think 5 more that are good friends who graduated from Tennessee together, to go. Now we did. Some of us flew, some of us drove. We played golf, we stayed in this amazing Country Club down there and played golf and went to his office for a full day. Really, Vince was such an awesome guy, such a nice guy, such a smart guy. It just blew you away how intelligent and what a great dentist he was. So while we’re down there, you know, we made friends with him and it was a great day. And we all took away tons of just valuable information.

And now Vince, he was into things at that time we we’re not ready to get into but some of us got into it later but like obvious sedation and you know, crazy really complicated implants, stuff like that; stuff that’s taken me 10 years to really get into. But one thing I knew I could do and I could take away, was he had lot of operatories but things weren’t running really smooth, I mean it’s really amazing how smooth of an operator this guy was and so one of the keys I thought he had was just a little bitty like a white board. Not even a whiteboard, it was just like a piece of white laminated wood or something on the wall that had a glossy surface and they were using dry erase markers on it and some of the assistants were just writing down what was going on, where they need to go, what patient was wearing blah blah blah! And it was a little bit chaotic but boy they were using that thing and they were hopping. And there was a scene I said, “Boy this was brilliant! I’ve never seen anything like this.” And so you know, I took that concept and I brought it home. We started working with it and you know first thing I did is put a big old white board into the hall of our practice and we used it to start writing on it.

And as time passed, it became more and more obvious the things we should write on it and the things we shouldn’t write on it. And over the course of a couple of years, we modified and modified until we think we came up with a pretty darn efficient way of doing it. I actually even came out I think in maybe 2010 with a product that I sold dentist when I go speak at lectures and I would sometimes offer this manual in these DVDs of called “The Route Board”, that’s what we called it because it routed me from place to place throughout the office. This thing, I mean I’m telling you, it is a lifesaver. So I took Vince’s initial concept and I sort of blended it with the surgery boards I’ve seen in hospitals and so what you have is you have this board. That’s a route board for lack of a better term and we actually have 3 columns on it. One column’s priority, one column says procedure and one column says place. And so you know in our office, we’d number the operatories right? And so I guess I have 9 ops. That’s not to say that I suggest to have 9 ops, just for the sake of argument, we do have 9 ops. And let’s say that I’m in a room doing something and I come out in the hallway and I find a board and I look at the board and it says, priority number 1 is for me to go...

8 Steps to Massive Implementation Success – Season 1 Episode 4

Fri, 05 Feb 2016 16:30:34 -0400

Most Goals Fail. The reason is that while it is important to commit to a goal, if you don’t have a rock-solid blueprint for the implementation of that goal, it is doomed to fail. Today, we share our 8 Step Process for Implementing Any Goal or New Procedure into Your Practice.

You Will Learn:

Why Goal Setting without an Action Plan is Doomed for Failure
How to Organize a Boot Camp for Each New Implementation Goal in the Practice So It Gets Done FAST
How and When to Spend Money on Each Project, Plus When to Recoup Your Investment Before it’s Too Late

And Much, Much More…

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The Dr. Chris Griffin Show – Season 1 Episode 4

“Action may not always bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.” Now who said that?

Hey everybody this is Dr. Chris Griffin. Thanks so much for taking time out of your busy practice to hang with us here at the Dr. Chris Griffin Show. Now this episode is really going to be near and dear to what I have going on in my personal life and practice right now because I’m actually in the process of getting deadly serious about implementing tougher cases into my practice specifically implant cases and I’ve been doing implants for a few years but I’ve been really doing the simplest ones and you know how to do a little bit. But you just kind of get tired not knowing how to the really tough stuff. And you want to be kind of master of that but you know how much it’s you know, how much effort it’s going to take to get to that mastery level, right? So you kind of hang back and you have all these excuses like a thousand excuses why you are not currently pursuing mastery of a certain thing.

But bottom line, the time has come I finally took enough revving from one of my best friends who’s really become quite an implant master. And so he’s…it’s really an interesting story. This is kind of getting off topic. I’ll get back in a moment, we’ll circle back, okay? But we were sitting in class in dental school in our, I don’t know D2, D3 year; something like that. And at the University of Tennessee they had a lecture on implants. That’s about all we had was a lecture, we certainly didn’t do any implants in the clinic but you know, let me just take you back to when I was in dental school right. I mean I’ve been practicing now for 20 years, seeing patients for 20 years and so they we’re actually putting in these blade implants, right? Have you ever seen a blade implant? If you’re younger or you’re not a dentist; a blade implant is for dentist who would actually, I mean these were customized right? I’m not even sure what they were made out of. Well they were made of some kind of a metal that was compatible; bio compatible.

And they would take this metal and they would shape it into a blade shape right? And in their garage a lot of times, they would hammer these holes in it to aid an Osseointegration and make it all custom shapes and stuff. And they were all really blades almost like ice skating blades and you would actually I guess weld the what would now be the housing of the implant and on to this blade and cut a slight maybe we pop it open with a chisel or something in the person’s jaw bone and put it in there and stitch it up, let it heal and sure enough, there were people walking around Memphis, Tennessee. You would have this for years and it seemed that they work a lot of them. Now a lot of them failed. A lot of them failed and nobody does it much anymore, although I am told that I think in Alabama, there’s still a study club that meets once a year and talks about blade implants. So anyway, that’s just I don’t know why we even got off on that tangent but the whole thing circles back to say, we’re sitting in that class and we said to each other, “Wow, implants! That is like the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.” You know, someone who suffered through wearing dentures their whole life. Now they get the opportunity to basically get their teeth back; that is futuristic. That is awesome, that is amazing!

And so we said right there, we’re going to go into practice together someday and we’re going to be Implantologists. Okay, there really wasn’t even such a thing as Implantologists back then. Certainly not that I’d ever heard of. The school didn’t promote that; no that’s not a certified specialty by the ADA. But anyway, so we went on through dental school and guess what? Dental school got harder, we figured we’d better just would best be about getting good at the things that would get us our degree. And so the Implantology dreams sort of fell by the way side. Well fast forward 20 years and my friend took a course. Actually he heard about this course at our annual summit that we had in Memphis, 2000 I guess that was 2014. He heard the speaker Dr. Jason North, could I give you some props there. Jason, shout out to you down in Robertsdale, Alabama. Jason was on my stage and he just, you know, he’s obviously a very good dentist. He did very good implants himself. And he just threw out that he had taken what was in his opinion, the most amazing implant course in the world. And it was taught by Dr. Michael McCracken, who’s a professor at UAB in Birmingham and then you know, it’s just amazing hands on and lots of live patients, anyway it was blah blah blah blah…he just went on and on about how great it was.

While I was in no position to pursue it not only is it a pretty substantial investment, you know. But that’s okay, if it’s worth it, it’s worth it. It was 10 months out of a 12 month period, you had to go down for a 3-day weekend and I was just not about to commit that right then. But my friend did. He signed up. He went down to Birmingham for the 10 months. He got amazing at implants, now he’s going back, and he’s actually using this next course to get his IV certification. And so this has been a tremendous tremendous value to him and he will not shut up about it. He will not shut up about why I need to go, why implants are changing. In this practice now he knows no change in my practice. He knows how I make everybody happier, better, blah blah blah blah blah…it makes you tons of money, people love you and I just got tired of listening to it. And I was like, “Okay okay, guess what? I’m going.” But I’m not taking the 10 month course, I’m taking their mini course. And so I just got back from the first session, it was in New Orleans and you know, he can’t get enough. He likes the course so much, he’s going back and he’s sitting through the course you know, for free, even though he has already sat through it, just because he loves this course and this professor so much. Anyway, swear I’m standing right now and I am you know committing that 2016 is going to be the year that I get really serious about learning how to do more difficult implants. So we will see how it goes. I’ll keep you guys posted.

Now let’s back to our quote, right? Our quote, and this applies to me it’s going to apply to you too as we go through this today. The quote was “Action may not always bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.” Now who said that? That would be the one and only Benjamin Disraeli, okay? Now you guys may not know who that is, let me fill you in. okay? Benjamin Disraeli was a British Prime Minister many years ago. He founded what is known as the conservative party over in England and he is the only Jewish Prime Minister to ever serve that post. So a very important dude from years passed and another thing and I don’t know why, why do I care about stuff like this. He’s also the first Earl of Beaconsfield. I just think that’s too cool, you know. I guess he’s sort of royalty type of thing, I don’t know why I like stuff like that. I mean have you even thought like it would be the best to be some kind of royalty. I don’t even know that these days it might means you’re rich or famous or anything but like at the end of the movie King Ralph, I wouldn’t want to be the king of England, certainly. I would not take the job if you gave it to me but hey at the end when they made him a Duke or something like that, and gave him his little castle off in the countryside and a yearly sty pin. I’ll be all over that now. You’ll find me in a nice little golf course there in England and you might even spend some summers down here in the golf coast and then go back to England for the rest of the year. Hey, now I’d be all over that.

So anyway, let’s get this to an area that might actually help you guys. Today, you are going to get the blueprint for successful new procedure and implementation into your practice in 8 easy steps, right? And here’s a set of state in the house, but that’s what we’re going to do. This is the 8 step process that I teach everyone who has gone through my coaching program, DDS leaders and I don’t know, this is the thing that I do myself. It’s sort of when we talk last week about time genius and that whole process. Well this is kind of along the same lines but not really. This is really the implementation path and it’s sort of like a checklist. You can almost break this down into a checklist as you move forward trying to accomplish any goal in your practice. And after this episode, you’ll be able to be confident that you can go to a course like I’m doing right now. And actually place that information into your practice in the form of action and you will see if I can do that. I will see if I will put my money where my mouth is right? It really solves the problem of feeling helpless because well in respect to this. I, a lot of times will look at the case, and I want to do it and listen, I will preach this until my dying day. There’s never a better time to close on a case, than if you can do the work yourself and just do it right then. If you start it right then, you might finish it right then. At least start the process today. Today, today, we use that all the time. Let’s start today. But you feel helpless when you have to refer out thousands. Hey, some prices will fare out millions of dollars each year. That’s a M, not a B but a M anyway. Millions of dollars worth of stuff for specialist that you could do if you took time to master it then I have referred out plenty of implants in my life. Now I won’t say millions but certainly, Oh easy six figures every year for the last decade. Implant that I was not good enough to do in my practice.

So here we go, we’re going to run through this process that we have used to successfully lead. Oh I guess dozens would be a fair assessment of our private clients through the process over the last 4 or 5 years that we had the coaching program. So here we go, so it could be doing implants. It could be braces. And by the way, my friend’s now mastered implants. Well he’s going and he’s going to try to master ortho this year and he’s signed up for the said conference with the ortho course that I did way back in 2005. And you know, just to show him up, I called the day and I signed up to sit down the courses myself you know, as a former student just so that I can do to him what he’s doing to me. I cannot you know, let him win over. We’ll be taking a lot of classes together this year which is actually pretty cool. We haven’t done that in a long time. But when you are, when you are getting ready to implement anything, first thing you got to do, this is a simple one. It sounds so simple, not as simple as you might think of all the time. You have to actually choose a path.

Okay? What’s this path going to be? Now we’re talking about implementing procedures in you practice. This could also be learning how to do some sort of marketing that’s befuddled you for a long time. Let’s say Facebook Marketing. Maybe, anyone? Anyone? Facebook…does anybody know how to push a couple of buttons and get their practice marketed on Facebook. Not everyone. Not everyone knows that, so you have to choose a path; my path this year’s implants. And once you choose that path that is not all the battle, you know. That’s not even the amount of battle that you used to have like in the GI Joe commercial, that’s half the battle. No, that’s not half the battle but it’s a lot of the battle because now you can with laser light focus attack the area that you’re wanting to move towards. Right?

So phase 1 of this process, if you’re taking it. Phase 1 is Bootcamp preparedness. Now when I used the term bootcamp, they represent what I would consider like a total immersion into research, education. If you look back at the time genius process we talked about last week, this would also be where you go and find a mentor and do some visual learning by watching videos on Youtube or anything online. Binds courses online, anything like that. This would also be where “Hey, you signed up for a hands on course to go learn it and know that you’re going to have that mentor there with easy access to them.” Right? This is all part of the bootcamp preparedness and this is something I take very seriously. I never just haphazardly sign up for some course or something and say, “I’m just going to sign up and see what happens.” No way. I mean when I decide to take action in a certain direction, I mean I throw myself into it. And this is what I think every successful person does and what you should do if you want to be successful in anything. So that’s phase 1. And it takes a while to get through phase 1. Right? It’s not like “Okay, I did that.”

And I watched the…I watched the, have any of you guys seen, I’m dating this podcast right now. But have any of you seen that during the National championship, they had that mayhem insurance commercial and you know, he starts out saying “You know I watched 10 minutes of a 2 minute tutorial and then I went out and bought the biggest chainsaw that I could find.” Alright? You know, that’s what we don’t want you to do right here. You don’t want 2 minutes of a 10 minute tutorial and start drilling holes in people’s jaws right? You’re going to hit something that has a name and that is not good. So really, to get serious about this now we don’t want you to be a lifelong student, the kind of person that gets kicked out of College because they’ve taken all the credits that that College has to offer, right? And never takes action. And never lives a real life and is a perpetual student. We don’t want you to do that but we want you to get very serious and really really dig in and merge yourself. And that is Phase 1 Bootcamp preparedness.

Now let’s talk about Phase 2, Phase 2 is sort of…I’m naming this the simulation phase, okay? This is where you test things, you do trial runs. You know, in my case, I didn’t…This first course we just took, hey we didn’t go in there and start drilling holes in people’s heads. No. We’re using, we used faked bones or actually, I don’t know. Maybe they were real bones but they were not in people’s heads. They were on table tops and there was a really cool simulated gums. You know, we got to work on and do surgery with the gums on this fake bone and we did all that in models and that’s cool. I’ve done courses before where you used hogged jaws and stuff like that. I mean that’s the testing phase. Because you want to get really good at something before you push it out in the public. In medicine, it could be dangerous to do that. I have known people who have really rushed procedures to market way before they knew what they were doing. Way before they were confident. Way before they were even confident. I mean it was…and that gets them into trouble. They put that big billboard up and it says all that stuff that you can do. But if you’re really not good at it, that’s a problem because you’re going to get yourself into trouble. In the world of medicine, especially, It’s very hard to recover from that when you jump in and try to put yourself out as an expert when you really just a novice. And this is where Phase 2 comes in. We’ll need to do some testings, some trials, and maybe some recalibration. Maybe you figure out, “Ooh, I did not know what I was talking about.” And I go back and I learn some more. And take some more education, stuff like that. And they’re sort of a back and forth between phase 1, phase 2, phase 1, phase 2. And eventually though once again, you got to keep moving forward. You got to keep taking action.

So phase 3 is actually what I call the Take Action phase. You have to finally just say, “Alright I have studied this enough, I’m going to take action and implement.” I’m going to get off the couch, I’m going to jump in the pool, whatever you know whatever you want to say about it. We’re going to move forward and we’re going to get going. Now in the case of trying to put say, a new procedure in your practice, let’s start out small. Okay? I’ll give you an example of what I didn’t start out small. Actually the first day I ever used implants, I placed 14 implants. Now that sounds crazy. It is crazy. The reason I did that though is because I actually paid an instructor to fly to Ripley and he hung out with me over my shoulder and helped me do those 14 cases, 14 implants, that’s not cases. And every step of the way, he’s holding my hand and we discussed the cases beforehand, we discussed during, we discussed after. And that was a great way to do it and that’s the only time, that’s the only care beyond, that’s the only time I was saying “Go for it and don’t worry about tiptoeing this.” But you know, as I would say the first time that I would do a sinus lift implant? Yeah, I’m going to tiptoe, I’m going to be way careful man and I’m going to get a patient in there that I only have to bump that thing up about a millimeter and I’m going to go super slow with that. And then you know, once I’m competent in doing that we’ll move on to bigger and better things but I’m going to tiptoe into it. Don’t confuse tiptoeing in cautiously, for not being brave and courageous in taking massive action. I would say you’re taking massive action just by introducing a new procedure into your practice. You don’t have to jump in with both feet before you know what you’re doing. And that could be the ruin of all. So don’t do that.

Now phase 4, before you do what you’re doing. You are competent and you are confident, okay? Now it’s time to take massive action. Start doing a lot more. Start looking for ways to increase the flow through your practice of these types of procedures or whatever it is that you’re trying to do. This would be when I would also consider launching like a marketing aspect to whatever you’re doing. So once I’m really confident in implants, I’m going to start putting on billboards in it and stuff like, I’m going to do billboards, ads, Facebook marketing, everything that we do. Oh yes, the community mailer, absolutely. That’s a no brainer. We’re going to do all that stuff that we know it works. We’re going to hold that back until we’re really, really confident in our...

Time Genius Productivity Secrets of Hyper-Productive Practices – Season: 1 Episode 3

Fri, 29 Jan 2016 17:09:41 -0400

We all know that Time is the only commodity that cannot be created or multiplied. That’s why we should all treat it as the MOST VALUABLE currency on Earth. Today you will get a behind the scenes look at the most Productive Practice System on the planet so you can learn how to make your own practice Hyper-Productive. Learn the 12 Laws of Time and how you can harness their power now to make your life better.

You will learn:

How to stash away millions in the Secret Currency of the New Economy
12 Laws of Time that can either set you free or put you in Time Jail if you don’t understand them
How to Become the Biggest Practice in Your Area

And Much, Much More…

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The Dr. Chris Griffin Show – Season 1 Episode 3

“Time is Money”. Now who said that? Let me give you guys a little hint here. The same guy also said, “You may delay but time will not.” I bet you know who this guy is. In fact, I bet you got his picture on your purse on right now. Think about it.

Yes, yes, yes, if you haven’t figured it out yet, I bet you have. Or at least you had time to Google it right but the guy who said those quotes “Time is Money” and the other one was none other than Benjamin Franklin. Benjamin Franklin who, I mean who’s famous for so much, there’s really no reason to go into it. Everyone knows Ben Franklin was the first great American; one of the founding fathers, US ambassador to France. Just Google him, go to Wikipedia and you’ll find accomplishment over accomplishment. The reason we’re talking about it today is I don’t know is that anyone in history has gotten more done with what they had available to them as far as tools and stuff like that than Benjamin Franklin. So yeah, time is money and he’s the guy that you want to think about if you’re trying to perfect the way that you look at time. So today, we’re going to talk about that is absolutely near and dear to my heart. And that is the subject of time.

Now why do you think that that’s so important to me? Well, it seems that awhile back, I was thinking really hard and long about the goals that I wanted to accomplish in my life. And I want to accomplish in my practice and stuff like that. And you know, a lot of people think that almost all your goals should be based around money. And to a certain degree, it is true. That’s certainly and absolutely true. But if you really get to the heart of it, I think that you will find that most things in life that are really valuable have at least as much of an importance placed on the time that’s involved as the money that’s involved. In fact, I would propose to you that time is really the most valuable commodity in the world. Time, not only it is the most valuable commodity; it’s only the real currency that matters because you cannot buy time with money. I think we all know that. There’s only so much time in the day, you only have so much time in your life to live right? You can’t buy more than that, no matter how much you try to spend on it. Sure you might can afford a surgery here or there but the truth is, time, especially when you’re healthy and happy and wise, you know. Time; that has no price tag okay? And furthermore, you can’t stock pile time right? There are no time billionaires. Everyone has a certain amount of time and we don’t know how much that is. Right? We know how much we have in a given day or something like that. But we don’t know how much time we have on this planet. So you cannot stock pile time.

There’s a really cool movie out not too long ago where, you know, the main characters, that’s how they judge wealth in the future because everyone had a counter on their arm and it listed how many seconds or minutes they had left in their life. And when those hit zero, no matter how healthy you were, you were killed. You know, that was their future. So in that case there were time billionaires. But in the real world, they would live in the day. There’s no such thing. There is no compound interest effect for time. Okay? You cannot store it up and let it compound like you would store money in the bank. Time can buy pretty much any goods and services if you think about it that way. Okay? There are also time addicts. Okay, there’s a time addiction that’s running through our culture right now. I don’t know if you paid attention to it but there was a time guys, let’s think back to it now. I’m 42 and when I was in college, at Mississippi State, there was the burgeoning effect of a little thing called the internet. We had a room in our dorm and it had about 10 workstations and you were allowed to go in there and get on this “internet”. But there were very few sites and it was not, you know, we really don’t know what it was, I mean, I certainly I missed the boat on this one. I wish I could go back in time and learn more about that and buy stocking companies like Amazon. And things like that. But I didn’t, I didn’t. I mean I saw the value of it but I had no idea that it would just surround our lives the way that it has.

But yes, there are time addicts because think about it, people get angry now. Some people get angry. If you actually call a person, now this is the way we used to communicate in the good old days. Actually when I was a kid, some of you young people are going to, I’m just giving you history lesson here. The phones had a rotary dial on them. And a cord that attached them to the wall and if you wanted to talk to someone you got to call them. But it was a pretty big deal when someone called you. You stop what you were doing, you answer the phone. That’s just the way it worked. But now, think about texting. Most people prefer text over phone calls. In fact, there’s a growing percentage of people in the United States that gets angry at someone if they call them instead of texting them because in their mind now, they view the person has called in and say “Hey, my time is more valuable than your time. And how am I going to call you and expect to speak to you right now?” Instead of just texting them and so they can answer at their leisure when they have a chance. Now as you probably noticed, a lot of people just text right back and forth right away, right? And there’s a whole fluidity to that. But yeah, time is way too important that it used to be for everyone. There look at, look at when you have a slow internet connection; when you don’t have LTE as something that didn’t exist a few years ago. My kids, if they don’t have any LTE connection on the road, they get upset. Road rage, people get mad all the time driving down the highway. People drive way too fast most of the time, but, yeah people get road rage if they need to get somewhere and they can’t get there as fast as they’d like. It’s not even that they are being blocked from not getting where they’d like to go. It’s as if they, if they are slowed down they’d get angry. Okay?

Let’s look at the way that time saving addiction has entered into the business world lately; or not even necessarily lately. Let’s go back in history a few years. McDonald’s, they sort of pioneered fast food. There’s a, you know, an argument to be made as to who was the better entrepreneur, the McDonald’s brothers or Croc but no question about it. McDonald’s is the name that you think of when you think of saving time getting your food. It’s not how good the food is, I’m saying, you saved time. Another company just recently that’s saving lots of time in making billions out of it. Has anyone used Uber? Now I have to admit I have not yet had the pleasure of using Uber but I hear it’s really cool. So if you’re in the city, of course I’m not in the city, that’s why I haven’t used it. But if you’re in a city, you can use your phone to call an Uber driver with the app or whatever and they will show up and pick you up. You don’t have to fight with taxis and all that stuff. But Uber is actually tapped into that addiction of time that we’re all feeling here in America. Okay?

Let’s think now about some of the things that time can buy. I would propose to you that time can actually buy money. Okay? Yeah, they said that money can’t buy time but time can buy money. Because if you think about it, whatever you choose to do with your time, especially business wise, you’re going to get paid a proportionate amount of money to the value provided by the time that you’ve given. Now sure, you could just you could say “Oh, I’d like to be paid for my time and I’m just going to sit here on this stool” And your time is not worth that much. But if you make yourself, make your time worth something, then you can trade time for money. Now I would also say that that is one of the least liked business models for entrepreneurs everywhere is the model of trading time for dollars. But it’s a very valid point that you can trade is time for money. I would also say that financial freedom, okay? Is you think about money being the more powerful thing between money and time. Financial freedom really focuses on money right? But I think that is a hugely inaccurate idea. The fact that you can have so much money that you’re financially free, there’s always going to be a bigger entity. Even if you’re a billionaire, the entity would then be a government that could come and take your money. You can set yourself up and become as protected as possible but there’s always someone who could take your money. However, if you have time, and you spend your time right now to buy something, they can’t take that away from you; your memories or whatever. Like let’s say you would like to buy an experience. Okay? A little concept that I would call present autonomy; you have the right to do whatever you would like to do at this particular time, you have freedom from external control or influence. Okay? That’s present autonomy and you can buy that with time. Okay? Once that has happened, you can’t take that away; nobody can. I mean I guess someone can kill you but you can’t take away the time that was actually spent experiencing something on that earth. Okay? And that sort of delves into the spiritual round. You can use time to grow spiritually. You can use your time to make yourself in better physical shape so that you have a better chance to enjoy other experiences you buy with your time.

So the whole point of all this is time is actually the commodity you should be using to passionately pursue your better life and that’s where it all starts and it ends; is the commodity of time. So I have throughout my life, ever since, I guess ever since I’ve been on my own in my practice. I have to admit, I kind of feel like I was lazy until the day that I started my own dental practice because, you know, things had come kind of easily for me and I’m not proud of that but it just, I was lazy and soft, if you look at it that way. And there were things I knew that I wanted to accomplish in my life and the day that I was sitting on my kitchen floor trying to decide, you know, with my wife pregnant with my first child, my son, and had no job, had no prospects of a job, and I didn’t know if I was going to have to take my wife and offer her back to my home town and take her back to a big city, you know, and work for the man or work for someone up there. Or if I was going to have the guts to stick it out in my hometown and build my own practice from scratch. That is the day that changed everything for me as far as being lazy. One of the things that I was being lazy about was I just was not being as productive as I could be. Okay? I wasn’t taking time to plan things out. I was sort of haphazardly going through life. Sort of living off whatever abilities the Lord had given me and I wasn’t maximizing my time. I think that a very good phraseology is a quote that I heard one time. I think Peter Drucker said it and I hate to quote that because I’m just on top of my head right now. But you look at efficiency versus effectiveness. Now you know, I might have been doing some stuff, but I wasn’t very effective at accomplishing any of my goals; whether they be personal or professional. And so after that day on the floor of my kitchen, at a soul searching night that I had and came out the next day with the resolve to work 14 to 20 hour days until I built my practice up to a certain level. I would say that I was a lazy, ineffective person. But after that experience, I became very hyper productive and after today’s show, I want you to know exactly how that I approach the art and the science of setting and achieving goals and the ultimate objective of saving and redistributing time to work for you. Okay? Because that’s what I had done ever since back in 1999. Now once you learned the most effective system for obtaining new productive goals. This is like magic guys, you can use this system over and over and over again to build the life that you want and if I’m not being too presumptuous, I would love to be the person who spearheads the movement for us as a society to value time over money or being one of the people, I mean there are a lot of people out there already doing this but I would love to influence you if I have any influence at all over your thinking right now. To value time over money more than you have. Okay? Because you, let’s think about the Psalm 42, okay? Now I have a lot of 40 to 50 year old friends and they, for the most part, a lot of them that are very successful, I have some very successful friends but a lot of the ones that are very successful in my mind, they do try to weigh a lot of their very valuable 40 to 50 year old time for money that’s future money right? Now there very well come a day for some, some of them become very well-off. But there may come a day when sure, they’ve got so much money that they can do exactly what they want. But I would be the person to tell you, man, if you feel good right now; well I’m 42, if I feel good right now, what would I pay if I had to do something fun? If I want to go fishing for 6 hours, you know, when I’m 47 I’d feel great. I’d have a wonderful time. What would I paid for that if I were 55 and I were super wealthy? What would I pay at 55 to feel great and go fishing for 6 hours, you know. Maybe you can’t even feel great whether how much you had paid for it.

So I’m a big proponent of spending your time now to really maximize your experience here on earth or whatever you’d like to do and also accomplishing goals. You’re never going to feel better probably than you do in your youth. So even though I’m a true believer that when you have a clear goal in mind, working very productively toward that goal is very important. I also think that you should take time and spend that time wisely while you’re young and feel good and you know, it would also be nice to spend some of that time when you’re younger to create a mechanism. So maybe your earning power doesn’t completely go to zero when you hit 65, right? If you have a system in place that will allow you to earn money, you know, up to the point of you pretty much not caring at all when you’re, whatever that age is, then that’s great. You may spend some of your time now developing that system.

So let’s dive into this, the Time Genius System that I’ve written about. I guess I’ve published my book in 2010. I think I wrote it pretty much most of 2009 but the system that I wrote about that was, is really personalized in my system. The system overall has really been tried and proven over time. Over the last decade, I’ve really tried to work on the Time Genius System that I created for me and I’ve really gotten it down to a science as much as I think I can. But the principles of being productive and effective and saving time had been around for pretty much forever. It’s just that not many people subscribe to them the way I think they should.

So let’s dive right in. the first, if you’ve gotten my book, I would, Hey listen, if you buy my book on Amazon, what am I getting? I don’t know, 30 cents. I don’t know what it is, 20 cents. I don’t know, it’s not much, but if you look in that book, if you have it, if you want to grab it off Amazon. I’ll put a link in the show notes. One of the first chapters is called “Goals are worthless”. Okay? Goals are worthless. Now I’ve just spent a lot of time telling you that I’m big on setting goals and achieving them, right? Achiever is probably a good classification for the way that I feel about my life. However, most people are on the wrong track when they’re trying to set their goals. They just have an idea, “Hey, I’d like to lose weight.” “Hey, I’d like a million dollar business.” “Hey, I’d like to have 5 million in the bank.” Okay? That’s well and good. But can you really say for sure how you’re going to get there. Because the truth is, if you don’t have what I call a definite ideal goal in mind, something very, very specific, and a way you can work backwards from that. It’s very unlikely you’re going to ever achieve that instead you’ll be just in this perpetual state of trying to clothe them out and achieve this unattainable goal. It’s not attainable because you’re never really broken down the steps to get there. Okay? So in my book, I have also got a tagline in the book called “Design, Implement, and Achieve”. Now the editor they said, “Hey Chris, I don’t know if this makes sense ‘Design, Implement, Achieve’ was just typo. Shouldn’t that be ‘Design, Achieve, Implement’? And you know, looking back, could I have worded this a little easier to understand and made it more clear. I was trying to be concise but at the same time get my point across. And I don’t know, maybe some of it did, some of it failed, I don’t know. But what really, let me explain ‘design, implement, achieve’ to you. So you have to design this ideal goal. And you have to design a way to get there. Okay? That’s step 1. Now in my mind, step 2 needs to be proof of concept. Okay? Because if you’re not sure that you’re going to be able to achieve this goal that you’ve set up, you’re going to get bogged down, you’re going to get confused, you’re going to get lost, you’re going to go off on tangents.

So one of the first things out of the gate that I believe you need to do is you need to just go for the gusto, guns blazing. You need to achieve, I know, I’m sort of confusing myself right? Design, I mean, anyway, you have to achieve this once. So you have to implement it. Implement your system, your systematic approach for achieving this definite ideal goal. You have to achieve it once. Right? And to do that, you have to implement all the steps but you’re just going gang busters. And once you’ve achieved it once, then there’s a whole process for making it permanent in your life. Because I don’t think it’s great to achieve a...

Create Amazing Team Adventures – Season 1: Episode 2

Fri, 08 Jan 2016 03:03:31 -0400

The Dr. Chris Griffin Show: Season 1, Episode 2 –

Creating amazing team bonding experiences is one of the most powerful team productivity strategies ever invented. In this episode we will walk you through how to create not only experiences, but adventures that will become investments in your practice that will pay dividends for the entirety of your career. During this week’s productivity segment, we walk you through our complete Tour of Universal Studios with the Wizarding World of Harry Potter and Jurassic Park, among the fun themed areas we explored as a team.

You will learn:

The Most Fun and Unbelievably Creative Way to Get Your Practice Out of a Rut
10 Awesome Examples You Can Use to Craft Your Team Experience
Why Getting Offsite Allows Your Team to Bond Like they Cannot at Home

And Much, Much More…

Click Mindmap to Enlarge

Read Full Transcript

Transcribed from the actual audio of the Dr. Chris Griffin Show...

The Dr. Chris Griffin Show – Season 1 Episode 2

“Putting on the same jerseys doesn’t make you a team. You’re still a collection of individuals until you have a common goal.” Now who said that?

Yes, yes…Hello everybody! Welcome once again to the Dr. Chris Griffin Show. This is actually Season 1 Episode 2 and I want to thank you for tuning in. Now let me go ahead and reveal who made that amazing quote back there. I think it’s very applicable quote to anyone who are in to dental practice or medical practice or any small business. That person was the one and only Mr. Harry Sinden, GM Coach and president of the Boston Bruins. Now if you are not a hockey fan, let me fill you in. Mr. Sinden actually presided over the longest playoff stretch consecutive seasons in the playoffs with 30 seasons as a GM. Now that’s a pretty big deal. 30 years in a row going to the playoffs and also in his 4th season, 6970 he also coached the Bruins for their first Stanley Cup in 29 years and all I can say is who stays with the team for that long? I mean that’s a pretty big amazing thing anyway. I mean I’ve always heard a coach, most coaches I’ve heard says that as a joke, that every year they make 10% of their fan base angry. So after 10 years, no one’s left to be their friend or be a fan of theirs to try to keep them around. I’m not sure about the advance math on that deal but we’ll, we’ll forgive the people that say that because it is a very simple way of saying that “Yes, staying around for a long time in one place as a head coach is a hard thing to do”. And I think it’s a hard thing to do as a doctor or anything else like that to be the boss man and the person that calls the shots for any extended period of time. I can do the first 10 years, yeah. That’s almost like the honeymoon phase. After that, people that stay with you that long and longer, you know, it’s up to, and there are people that are super loyal, and then there’s also going to be people that kind of get in your nerves and sure you keep them around because you think they’re really good or whatever, but it’s always a challenge staying around for a long period of time.

And so now of course I’m speaking with great wisdom as I’ve had the same dental practice since 1999. I do still have, in fact, an original employee that’s still with me. And yes, you know, it’s a give and take but she’s really, you know, she’s amazing person at what she does and so hopefully I’m not the worst doctor in the world to work for. So we have a good give and take. Anyway, that’s the guy that gave the quote and I think it’s a really good way to start this out.

Now we’re going to talk about something today that a lot of you out there, I’m afraid, have not taken advantage of. You guys are probably leaving so much money and productivity on the table by not taking advantage of this amazingly powerful tool that anyone can do, by the way. This is not something that’s left for the ultra rich or the ultra smart. Anyone who’s thinking can get this done in their practice, small business or whatever. So after today, you are going to be privy to the most powerful team productivity building strategies ever invented. And of course, if you know me, you can tell the hyperbole is flowing off my lips as usual. I really do believe it’s a huge deal. And we are going to walk you through exactly how to create for yourself this powerful strategy. Okay? Anyone wondering what that powerful strategy is? Maybe you didn’t read the show notes yet or the title of the podcast. But what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be teaching you how to create amazing team experiences. Okay? Amazing team experiences. So a lot of times you think, you know a lot of people have this trouble of, they feel like, yes, work is work and when 5 o’clock hits, you know, it’s always like the old cartoon. I can’t think of the dog’s name right now. But you know you had Wile E. Coyote and the white dog with the red bangs. If I remember that, all day long. It was Wile E. Coyote’s job to try to steal sheep and all day long it was the dog’s job to stop him. Now these guys, they beat each other up, they beat each other to death. You know usually Wile E. is getting the worst end of the stick for sure but when that end of the day whistle goes off just like it would in a factory, you know, they stop what they’re doing; usually Wile E. Coyote’s getting pounded over the head or something. They stop, the dog will put him down, and they walk and get their lunch box and they’ll leave. Okay? So that’s the way that a lot of us view the work day at our practice. You think, okay, I will accept the fact that I’ve got to come in and get this done. I’ve got to bust things down and be a good doctor and I’ve got to, you know, I got to be a good leader, whatever that means to me. And by golly, at 5 o’clock, when that bell rings, I’m out of here. Okay? And I think a lot of your team members would feel the same way too. But what I’m going to tell you. Is with just a small amount of creativity, not even a ton of creativity, right? Just a small amount of creativity you can create this either onsite or offsite adventures for your team. Well you call them adventures, experiences, whatever. And these things are going to give you so much invisible currency. This is going to put it in your bank account. So the next time you’re kind of, you know a tail at your practice and you’re acting bad, it’s going to put things over on your side of the column. So they might overlook a little more and maybe things are a little more pleasant. Sort of gives you a little leeway to not be perfect all the time when the team is really on your side. And they know that you’re looking out for their best interest because you’ve proven it to them by doing amazing things like creating amazing team experiences. Okay?

One thing I’ve got down here on my next course, you guys as usual. You can all get a copy of the mind map that I’m actually using that I built myself. This is the way that I built everything in my life. As I do mind maps to begin with because that’s just how I think. So you can get a copy of this mind map over at the website, drchrisgriffin.com. Also, when you go there, you get these mind maps. Now we’re going to have other stuff there, links to things that I’m talking about. I’m going to go back and put all that in at the end of the day. And we’re going to do that. So there’s always some good ways to get some goodies and stuff like that. But when you get these mind maps, you’re going to see a lot of notes on here. It’s a lot of stuff, I probably just going to gloss over and never even talked about on the actual show. Right? But it’s there and it’s all useful information. A lot of times I put little links and stuff in the mind maps myself, you know, for me. But it’s there for you too. You can absolutely use it for inspiration and your team building, trip building stuff too. So anyway, that’s what you do if you want to copy the mind map for today’s show.

Now let’s go over a few examples of some of the things that I have personally done with my dental practice to create these amazing experiences. Actually I’ve done this with Griffin Dental, my dental practice. I’ve also done this with Capacity Academy or Effective Dentistry, my other company. So let’s think about some of the options that I’ve done over the years and some of the, let’s also create some segments, some differentiation points. So what are some things you can do? What doesn’t have to be the most extravagant thing in the world, right? You can do things that are fun and rewarding for your team and sort of a team building thing. You can do it locally.

For a long time, well, actually many times, we’ll set these goals at the beginning of the year and some of the goals are mundane. In dentistry, some of the bigger goals that everyone keeps are production and collections. Production, of course, means the amount of money you produced in practice. And collections, means the amount of money you actually collected. Now we all wished we collected 100% of what we produced but as anyone who runs a business knows; you’re never going to do that. So whatever is going to happen is going to happen. You know, you’re going to run problems with insurance companies. You’re going to run the, there are various different issues, you know patients not paying all their bills, whatever. But anyway, those are couple of the big things we like to watch. And then also over the years, I’ll probably do a show on this too. But there’s an amazing book called “Mastering the Rockerfeller Habits” by Vern Harnish. Now that book right there allows you to sort of really sit down and think about dividing your year into time modules; like quarters even. And so each quarter, it’s even like a yearly goal, and it’s really hard to keep up with for the whole year. You might have quarterly goals or monthly goals. And each one of those periods of time, of course that has its own reward and things are really cool, you know, you might give it a good name or something. Anyway that’s a whole different episode down the road and we’ll absolutely do that. In fact, one of the goals of this show is I have an amazing, I mean I say it’s amazing, I have a really big library. Okay? So anytime I go somewhere, I’m always looking for business books. Or reading any books but then I personally love business books, right? For whatever reason. And so I’ve got this huge collection. Well right now, I’m just looking at my wall of my bookshelves. I have 2 big bookshelves at my office room recording this. And those bookshelves are just full. It’s bursting to the seams with business books. Right? And so I’m looking here at that book. There’s probably 100 books that anyone who’s serious about running a business should have some exposure to. I’m not saying you have to read every one cover to cover but you kind of need to know the basic concepts behind each one. So it’s one of the goals for me as we go through this show over the years. To periodically pull out examples and sort of have a, almost like a book party day and talk about the book and how it can relate to you as you’re trying to run your private practice.

But anyway, just make it here or there. But you can have the local fun day like if you meet your yearly goal. So this past, I guess this past year, yeah January 2015. We had met our yearly production goal. Okay? We set a goal. It was our first year back in the new building. We are actually on there half a year after a fire destroyed our practice that have been there forever. And we set a yearly goal and we met it. Okay? Now it might just be giving pats on the back or handing out $5 dollar bills. I mean what are you doing? $100 bills, well that’s even better. Well what we decided to do in my practice, if you don’t know the entire story, I only work on patients, Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Now Thursdays, I’m there but I’m just sort of there, I’m running my other businesses and there are things that’s going on at the dental office catching up on paperwork, whatever. You know, just simple stuff like that. I’m there if there’s an emergency or whatever but I mean that’s never, that never happens hardly. But I’m there. Anyway, we decided to take one of those Thursdays and didn’t tip them off until it was just about time to go. But so we tell everybody on Wednesday, “Look, tomorrow you need to show up and be ready to go somewhere. We’ll be back normal time. You have to get the kids in school. You have to pick them up, that’s fine, no problem. You know, we’re still going to be on time but we’re going to have a fun day.” So we loaded up at 8 just like normal and we head out to Memphis, the closest big town to me. And unfortunately it’s 66 miles to the mall in Memphis but that’s just the price you pay for living out in the boondocks, that’s fine. That’s what I’ve always done so I’m not too terribly against driving to go places, so we you know get out of town at 8:15 or so. You would drive to the mall, they’re not open yet but there’s like a breakfast place in the mall that’s opened. So we go in there and buy some breakfast and then I tell them the big kickers not just “Hey, we’re having a fun day instead of working. But I’m actually giving everyone of you a…” I think it was 3, thank you for reminding me that. I gave everyone $300 bills. And so we had a little game. Everyone had to go out and spend the $300 on themselves. Okay? And they had to bring me the receipts back to prove they did it but whoever gets to spend closest the $300 without going over, and it was on themselves, they got another $200 as a bonus. See that’s not an inexpensive day. However many employees I have times 300 plus another 200. Then we all met at lunch, at 12 o’clock, at the Firebird Steak House at the mall. I bought everybody a big old lunch. And of course, as you can imagine, I told them to order what they wanted. And they’re all trying to fair how to get steak and lobster with a salad and lobster, whatever, you know stuff like that. But anyway, whatever, it’s okay. We had a good time and a lot of fun and that was a huge plus as we we’re building out this year. It gave everybody a good head start, they had a lot of energy, and have a good attitude and everybody on the same page for this year.

What are some other things that we’ve done? Well we’ve done off site training/planning days. Now these are probably the more underutilized things that I’ve seen in dentistry or private practice anywhere. These off site days, I mean these things are so beneficial because you spend 4 or 5 hours on a day or two days planning out your next year, planning out your CE events, planning out your goals, planning out all kinds of important things for the practice. And we actually went to a little bunkhouse getaway. It was a little dude ranch kind of thing. And we all had a…with cabins and stuff like that. You know, it was really native and we did it on a Friday and Saturday. And you know, it was a driving distance so we drove on Thursday evening and got back Saturday afternoon. And you know when you get back from something like that, you didn’t, you usually do it on December, something like that. And once you got that done in December, so that it’s all mapped out January through December of the next year. All the really fun stuff you’re going to do. We have also done off site fun trips. So the examples are those couple of things we’ve done in the past, if we’ve met our yearly goals or whatever. I’ve sent them on a cruise, I actually didn’t go on the cruise myself. Well I’ve just sent my team on a cruise, one year from meeting one of our goals. Well it has to be a pretty good goal, like I think it was the first time we hit 1.5 million a year or something like that and I was really proud of that number because I know how we’d work to get there. So I sent them on a cruise. The next year, they still met their goal and I sent them to New York to a Broadway play. By the way, I found out that hotel rooms in New York are very expensive. I did not realize that a 100%. I mean I’m from Mississippi now. I know they say that whatever you do in Mississippi, moneywise, you can multiply by 3 up in New York. But I did not know it was that serious and they told me too that not only was the hotel room, it’s right there on Rockefeller Plaza, they say it’s not only 3 times more expensive but it’s probably 3 times smaller than the hotel rooms we have around here, whatever. Anyway, they had a good time. You know, and when you do something like this, it’s also, it’s not just the team building. It’s the stories, you know, the memories that last forever. That’s really is most powerful about it.

What else can you do? You can do, you know, go to the conferences. CME’s, CDE, straight up CE, anything like that. After people have put in a good day of studying, of being good employees, learning for you, you can have little getaways. You can grab a bite, eat together in a nice place, go listen to a band or whatever. After hours of conversations, those are always really popular. Just a good old CE trip with after hours fun. That’s a really good reward for a team. But today, what I really want to talk to you about is what we just recently did. And I think as it turns out, it’s probably one of the most fun things that we’ve ever done. And that’s why I wanted to show you and outline it so that you might want to do something like this for your team if you had the opportunity. Because I’ll tell you what, it’s still fresh on my mind. It hadn’t been that long but I’m telling you, guys, ever since we’ve been back, our productivity has been through the roof. People had a better attitude towards each other, they had better attitude towards me. I think now when I’m kind of a jerk at the office, when I’m deep in thought or thinking about something or not super sticky sweet nice to everybody, like a little more of a pass on it. Hey maybe it’s strands in, it may not last forever, but I’m telling you, it’s really neat, it’s really fun right now. So what did I recently do? If some of you may know, we lost last year, several long time employees for various reasons. And it’s been a challenge, not so much in that the patients aren’t there to work on but the challenge has been in just the management of that practice. And so our software that we used to run everything at the dental practice is, this one is used by a lot of dentists, it’s called Dentrix. And so Dentrix, even though it’s a pretty intuitive software, it’s complicated, you know. There’s a lot of, my wife says, “You got to do...

Really Taking Control of Your Practice – Season 1: Episode 1

Fri, 08 Jan 2016 03:03:07 -0400

The Dr. Chris Griffin Show: Season 1, Episode 1 –

Productivity is the 1 attribute of your practice that either inspires greatness or drains your emotional gas tank. Henry Ford inspired the LEAN management theory that all private practices follow whether they realize it or not. Learn the 5 Why’s and other ways to “Control Your Own Destiny Before Someone Else Does.”

You will learn:

How to quickly identify if YOU are running your practice (most doctors aren’t and don’t know it)
Why Productivity levels tell the entire story and how to increase them
How Henry Ford can save your practice, even though he’s been dead for 70 years
The Key to Turning Your Team into Highly Productive Team Players instead of whiners

And Much, Much More…

Click to Enlarge Mindmap

Read Full Transcript

The Dr. Chris Griffin Show – Season 1 Episode 1

“Control your destiny or somebody else will”. Now who said that?

Yes, that would be the famous Dr. Jack Welch. Well a lot of you don’t know him as doctor but calling the man doctor. He had a PhD in Chemical Engineering and so I’m calling the man doctor. Now most of you probably know him from being the CEO of G.E. for 20 years and during that 20 years, he made G.E. into an absolute juggernaut; increasing their value 4000%. So I don’t know too many people that know more about what we’re getting ready to talk about than he does. He’s a good one to lead into because we’re going to focus on Season 1 here at the Dr. Chris Griffin Show. We’re going to focus on making your practice so productive that you can take control of every aspect of it. Okay so taking control of your practice through productivity. I don’t know too many people that know more about productivity than good old Dr. Jack and I’ve been told that not too many people preach productivity and the practice more than I do. So this is right on our wheelhouse, we’re ready to get going. Let’s get started and make your practice as powerful as it can be.

Hey everybody this is Dr. Chris Griffin and welcome again. Thanks so much for joining us today. I’m really excited about first ever program - Episode number 1. And today’s topic is one that I have heard a bunch when I’ve been out there on the lecture circuit and talking to Dentists. And so, I thought what better thing to talk about in the first ever episode right here in the Dr. Chris Griffin Show. But when you talk about taking control of your practice, what does that mean? I mean I know to say it out loud it’s easier said than done, first off, but it’s the first phrase that comes to my mind. But I mean, to say it out loud, is almost like taking ownership of it, right? Because you can go through an entire lifetime and really not feel like you have control of much and especially not things that you practice the way that you would like because every single day we see little things here and there that we don’t love, they’re not perfect. You know how we are about perfection. You know, we’re professionals. But let’s dive down and talk about this, so to me, the culprit and the source of so much angst out there all across this country. You know it’s not how overhead. That’s one of the things that, of course, it always troubles us. I mean this past week, I had rather $7,000 check on something I wasn’t expecting and you know that’s just another $7,000. You know just stomping around the office saying, “Anybody else got a $7,000 bill I need to pay?” because it was something I didn’t even know we had done and we had to have, of course, you know. It’s just one of those things, and I always pay my bill, that’s for sure.

But anyway, how overhead’s really not the problem. Although, if you have the problems that caused the inability to take control of your practice. Certainly how overhead’s going to follow. Let me tell you that the problem out there lurking in the shadow is not a lack of new patients or new customers, okay? Although the sheer number of practice management gurus out there that are trying to help us build up our practices, they all claim that instant access to new patients and specifically the types of new patients that “they really want”. You know, that’s going to solve your problems and almost every, for sure, dentist out there that I talked to. They all vehemently believed that more new patients is going to solve their problem. In fact, that’s the mantra as I talked to Dentists. I mean you know I can be talking about brilliant choreography of getting patients through the practice in a timely fashion to get more productivity done and get more productivity on your staff. You know, productivity is really that big thing. We can talk about that for 15 to 20 minutes and they’re nodding their head like they’re “yeah, that’s exactly right.

So by the way, how do you get more patients? I mean I hear that all the time. And so it almost makes me think about the saying “Mo’ money mo’ problems”. I mean the truth of the matter is, most of us out there, more new patients you’re going to have more problems. It’s just the way it is because most people are really not set up, you’re really set up. I heard a person say one time that you’ll get what you deserve so really and truly, you have about the number of new patients, new customers that you deserve for your particular practice machine at this particular time. Okay, so that’s what you’re set up for. Whatever you’re doing, you’re attracting this particular amount of patients, this particular amount of money; whatever it is. And so to get more of whatever you want, you have to transform your systems a little bit, okay? That’s just the way it is. So lack of new patients, new customers, that’s not your problem. Okay the root cause of this disease is not the economy. Okay the economy is not great, recent economic changes have certainly brought a lot f issues that have been sort of hidden beneath a pretty little façade in our profession for so long. That’s okay, it was bound to happen. If you took action back in the mid 2000’s, you’re probably fine. They’re still trying to take action but you certainly do need to get on your horse. I mean, it’s good you’re listening to this show right now, but yeah you need to hurry up. But the economy is not the problem so don’t let that bug you right yet, okay? That, now that is a symptom but that is certainly not the problem. It does however underlie the things that are causing the problem. But the central cause of almost every single problem in your practice right now probably stems from the amount of hours that you’re spending at the office. Okay? And I’m not talking, well sure, hey, if you’re really happy spending a lot of hours seeing a lot of patients, that’s wonderful. But if you’re not doing that because you’re still spending a lot of hours at the office, then the likelihood in my opinion is that things are not set up the way they should be for you.

Now I’m telling you right now, you hear all the time about the patient-centered practice, okay? And it is true. While you are treating a particular patient, yes. That patient should be at the center of your world. Let me go on record right now saying that. That is absolutely 100% correct. However, if you have a standalone practice; if you’re a standalone practitioner, the truth of the matter is, your practice have darn well better revolve around you a little bit. Because if things are not set up to support you as the practitioner, as the practice owner, then eventually, you’re not going to be able to accept all the pressures that come from running a successful practice. You’re going to be staying late writing at a patient chart. You’re going to be staying late fixing insurance claims weren’t sending correctly. You’re going to be staying late writing up narratives and charts to better fight with insurance companies that are “loot way” would never getting or losing or getting claims with incorrect information. These are all things that are going to wear on you and wear down on you. Okay?

These things are the symptoms of the root problem but they’re not the true problem. The true problems exist underneath everything. They’re underneath layers and layers of your emotional blankets you’ve thrown on top of them because you don’t want to think about them. Deep down inside you’re probably know there’s a problem. You know, probably what the solution to that problem would be. But you don’t want to think about it. I mean, who would want to think about these things right? Who wants to have these terribly hard discussions with their team members, with themselves? When you are at a practice and you’re the practitioner, there are many times when you’re walking down the halls and you see something, it just makes you cringe that this is happening in your practice, right? It just makes you cringe and upsets you. You want to just stop what you’re doing and rush out, find the solution, fix the situation. Fix the situation is a good example because we are professional fixers, are we not? That’s how a lot of us, you know, that’s what we do in life. We find, we talk to patients, we find their problems and we come up with solutions to fix their problems. We are professional fixers. Okay?

But as you look at your practice, there are just so many wheels turning that if you try to fix every situation, you know your brain will just gloss over and eventually, you just blow up. You know, vent your anger, whatever. That actually happens a lot more than you would suspect, by the way. I think that’s why so many dentists are so stressed out these days and so many practitioners period. Let’s face it, if we consistently face an issue, any issue, every single day, that’s not optimal. And we know deep down that there’s just not enough fuel in our emotional gas tank and there’s a concept we need to talk a lot more about as time goes on; because I’ve heard that brought out more and more as I talked to doctors out there. They just feel like their emotional gas tank is empty. Well then it just stands to reason, if we’re walking around kind of in a fog of aggravation. Okay, that’s just what we’re doing every single day because we see these things that are not perfect and we love perfection because we’re all practitioners.

There is one thing and just one thing that can really make or break a successful practice. Because when it’s working right, nothing can stand in the way of success. Okay it’s a big statement but let’s read that again. There’s one thing, just one thing that can make or break a successful practice because when it’s working right, nothing can stand in its way. However when it’s off kilter, almost nothing else gets done in a positive or constructive manner. And that one thing is the concept of practice control. Now I apologize if that seems like a little bit of a vague or broad term, so let me define it for you, okay? Practice control is knowing that the systems, policies, protocols, standards, whatever. That you, as the doctor, have sent forth in your practice are being followed in good faith by your entire team as a unit. Okay let that sink in; your entire team as a unit. Because you are not out there on an island, you may own the place. You may be the head honcho of the place but you need a team to help you pull through this and make your practice work the way it needs to work. Okay?

You know when you see your practice with the lack of control? Let’s list a few symptoms of a practice, okay? That’s in sort of a downward spiral of control if you will. And let’s see if you flinch a little bit as I go down this list. Number 1: Staff, team members not getting to work on time. Okay? Bingo! It bothers the heck out of me; probably bothers the heck out of you. Do you think people realize how much that hurts team around when they show up 4 or 5 minutes late every day? And then you have to address the situation or you have an office manager you’re suppose to rely on to address it but they don’t want to address it either. You probably got a policy in your manual about how’s it important for “no team members to be tardy as it puts on to you strain and the rest of the team”, you know. But eventually if you practice long enough, somebody is going to test you out on that policy. It may be a new comer, okay, if so, great. Address it, move on. Worst than that, it could be a long time employee who’s just decided they’re tired of playing by your rules. Okay? Maybe they want to test the waters, just to see how far you can be pushed before you can say something to him. I’ve noticed that young, idealistic doctors have a bit of an advantage over us battle-hardened veterans. Because after a while, you know, each battle, no matter how insignificant the battle; whether it’s trying to get someone to pick up a piece of paper out of the hallway before you bend over and pick it up, even though 15 hundred people have walked passed it, you know. Eventually that’s going to rob your emotional reserve to fight on. Young doctors maybe are a little more idealistic, they got a little bit more of that emotional gas in their tank. I’ve found that somehow, team members, they can sense when your emotional reserves are running low. And that is the exact time they’re going to test you. So just trust me when I say, if you let it go on mention, you can rest assure things will only get worse. I’m practicing for 20 years, it can only get worse and more and more team members are going to see what they’re doing, that’s going to make them get worse. And if people think there’s no repercussion, they’re missing their daily start time by a few minutes here and there then it’s just going to get bad for everyone. The next thing you know, you’re seeking your first patient at age 17, okay? That’s just the way it is. So there’s one thing. So see if you cringed on that one.

Second thing, staff not observing job descriptions; now I’m making an assumption here that you actually have job descriptions. Maybe you do maybe you don’t. I hope you do. If you don’t, we’re going to talk about it at some point during this show. But many times, teams out there they have an internal hierarchy that you may or may not know about, right? Mary is in-charge of everything even though she’s not the office manager, everyone goes to Mary to cry about stuff, to fuss about stuff, to tell you know, Mary’s kind of in-charge. Or maybe the office manager is in-charge, maybe the office manager is kind of like just really just slams her fist on the table. “You’re going to do it like this! Bam! Bam! Bam!” and maybe that’s people, maybe it runs a good practice; stay away, maybe it will run some people off, you just don’t know. But the hierarchy is going to be there, internally. There’s always going to be an alpha in the group and that alpha is going to usurp the authority unbeknown to you a lot of times and go against probably what you would like to happen and they take you to upon themselves to sort of like re organize the flow of the practice, the flow of the tasks, maybe that’s even away from what you set forth. When you talk to people in your policy manual, in your meetings, and they’re going to move the direction toward what they want, that benefits them. I do think if you want to try to keep any semblance of control over what your team does in the direction that they move in, you can’t just let them pick and choose which tasks get done on any given day, okay? So you need to make sure that you figure out who they’re looking towards and you know a lot of times, I say find the alpha. Get them on your side. Well you can’t have somebody there that’s running counter to your decisions all day long and trying to get people on their side, whatever their side is. So you need to either make peace with that alpha and make sure that you guys are on the same page or the alpha is just going to have to find another place to go. Or maybe you need to find another place to go if you can’t have that discussion, right? But you got to keep control over the task are getting performed on any given day. I always tell my team, if a policy is written that makes your job tougher than it needs to be, hey, let us know. You know if you have a team leader OR an office manager, tell them what’s going on. You need to have, at least if you don’t have an open door policy which is fine and I totally agree with that, especially during the work day because you’d like to say, you need to focus on the patients. You need to have at least an open door policy between your team leaders or office managers and the people that they manage. So there can be a back and forth there in the discussion. Because if there’s really, I have been…hey, I’m guilty. I have set forth policy many times that ran counter to what I wanted to happen in the end because I’ve made it too difficult in the middle, you know, in the beginning and in the middle. However it was difficult for the person I had assigned the task to, okay? So there needs to be enough an open door policy that they can get that fixed and it’ll be great if they can get it fixed without having to talk to you personally, the practitioner. But if needs be, then that’s just the way it’s got to be.

What else might make us cringe as we go throughout the day? How about things getting done right about 90% of the time? Now hey, I know in our society these days, 90% gets an A. I don’t even know when that started. When I was in school 94 was an A, sometimes 95 was an A. My kids are sitting here telling me 90 is an A. And you know they think, “Hey if I get a 90, that’s good enough.” And I don’t know why that really bugs me, that’s neither here nor there. That’s a personal thing of mine. But hey, today’s society apparently 90% gets an A. Well we work in a little bit of a different setting, do we not? We’re in a perfection oriented profession. We have very little tolerance for words like “nearly or maybe”. Well like it or not, the minute details of our daily routine, that’s what can make or break our practice. The lab case that was nearly written up correctly, it’s still 100% incorrect, okay? The pieces of equipment that were maintained properly most of the time, they’re still going to tear up quicker than they should; and probably going to tear up in the middle of a procedure. Okay? It can’t be most of the time. When someone tells me, most of the appointments were confirmed, that means that some, which probably a lot of the...

Introducing the Dr. Chris Griffin Show

Fri, 08 Jan 2016 03:02:09 -0400

The Dr. Chris Griffin Show Episode 000

During a weak moment this past Fall, I considered scrapping the entire Winning Dentist program which I had built from scratch as a labor of love because I felt like I wasn’t delivering enough significance to enough people.

Then, I had a sure enough ‘heart-to-heart’ with myself.

What came out of that moment was the most profound undertaking we have ever attempted, the Dr. Chris Griffin Show. Episode 000 holds the reasons and the goals we hope to achieve.

In this episode you will learn:

The Powerful Reason Why We Created the Dr. Chris Griffin Show in the First Place
The Freedom that a 3 Day Per Week Practice Schedule Gives You
How LEAN Manufacturing Principles Led to the Birth of Capacity Academy
2012 Bold Predictions that Have Unfortunately Come True

And Much More…

Click to MindMap to Enlarge

Read Full Transcript

Transcript:

Quote of the Week : “A bad system beats a good person anytime.”

Who said that?

You have found your way to the Dr. Chris Griffin Show. Now let’s take a few moments to open up this first episode. Let’s just talk about what it means to be here at the Dr. Chris Griffin Show anyway. Now if you don’t already know me, I can’t imagine how that’s possible, but let’s just assume for a moment that you do not yet know me. Well you’re about to learn more about me than you probably ever even wanted to or imagined you would want to. But since 2005 and throughout the course of this show, you will hear press made plenty about my story. But since 2005, my life as a practitioner, as a general dentist, has been all about building a practice productivity powerhouse in my own practice, in Ripley, Mississippi. And also teaching other dentists from all around North America how to do the same thing and through that, we’ve also made it our mission in life to passionately pursue a better way for everyone. A better life, a better lifestyle, a better practice life, a better everything. We want to use productivity and the time game from the use of that productivity and the money game from the use of that productivity to buy the things that make us really happy. And one of the main things that makes me really happy is more time off. And that’s why I’ve committed in my practice since 2008. I have been a 3-day a week practitioner, that’s all the time I’m willing to devote to my practice and I feel very strongly that if I work more than 3 days that I would not be able to give 100 percent of myself each and every day to my patients. I think it’s a win-win for everyone. And I want to teach you guys the power in how to do the same things that I’ve done. If you pay attention to the Dr. Chris Griffin show, you will, very soon in short order, be able to identify the areas that can really boost your productivity at your practice and in turn make your life better. Okay? That’s a promise. If you can figure this out, this solves the problem of practitioners everywhere feeling helpless. Okay?

Listen like I said, I’ve been teaching dentist since 2008, okay? I’ve lectured all around the country. I’ve had a newsletter that’s coming on out to hundreds of dentists all around the country. I have talked, sat and talked, to so many dentists that I cannot even tell you how many dentists out there are hurting. That’s not just dentists, there’s medical doctors, there’s chiropractors, there’s optometrists, there’s all kind of practitioners. They’re all hurting right now. And there are a lot of reasons why they are hurting. But most of our tribe, if you will, if you want to call us a tribe, we’re feeling helpless because there’s just a daily avalanche of problems that just seems to get worst and worst and worst. And it’s my belief guys that curing the productivity issue in your practice can solve a multitude of problems. Until you’ve seen it with your own two eyes, it’s hard to really come to grips with the fact that things will get this much better. But let me tell you, no one out there has studied productivity like me and our team in Capacity Academy since, let’s say 2005, like us.

And why is that? Let me just, a little bit, a little piece of my story. But in 2000, up until 2005, I had tried to have the kind of practice that I thought that you should try to have. If you remember back, remember back to the early part of the Millennium. Okay? Extreme Makeover is one of the most popular shows on TV. Dr. Bill Dorfman, great guy by the way, but Dr. Bill Dorfman had made cosmetic dentistry into such a big thing that that’s just the direction everyone wanted to go in. It wasn’t just him, it was cosmetic surgery. Cosmetic this, cosmetic that. And it seem to me also that a dentist practicing in Ripley, Mississippi, I know it sounds funny now, but it seemed to me that I wanted to be the best cosmetic dentist in America someday. And that was my goal and I set out in pursuit of that goal and like a lot of my goals in life, I doggedly pursued it. I went all over the country, going to Institutes and everything else trying to become that amazing cosmetic dentist. I even had this little glimpse of my life, right. I even put a list. I found the list of all of the AACD Accredited Dentists in America, okay? And I put them on the back of the door of my small little office in my practice and every time I would meet one of those guys in person, I would check them off my list, make a little note about what kind of conversation we had or how the meeting was. And so I was going down that list. I was in hot pursuit of trying to become my best in what the perfect dentist was in my mind, a perfect cosmetic dentist.

And then somewhere along the way, it occurred to me. This is all well and good that you’re pursuing this vision but is it really making you happy? Is it giving you more time off? Is it allowing you to make more money? Is it giving you more freedom, more autonomy? When you look deep down inside it really wasn’t. The truth is, everyone has to look at their own situation. In my area, very blue collar area, a cosmetic dentist was not what was needed. The kind of dentist that was needed there was a dentist that could do just a good Yeoman’s job and produce good quality dentistry at an affordable price. But when you look at the kind of process that you can charge for just a regular, I’m using air quotes here, “regular dentistry”, is not quite as much as you could charge for cosmetic dentistry. How could I reconcile these things? Well, A, let’s cut out all the waste, all the inefficiencies in our practice that are keeping us from being able to do a quality job or more patients, right? And so that really skyrocketed productivity but then, I mean, who wants to be the guy that’s just wailing away just doing tons of work every single day and wearing down at an early age, right? That’s not what we’re looking for.

So after we studied that a while, the next thing we did in 2008, that’s when I committed and said “You know what? If I’m going to start this company, and I’m going to preach to people that this is the way that you need to go because improving your productivity in the office can make your life bigger and all these ways. I need to put my money where my mouth is.” And that’s the day I’ll never forget, I was out of my farm in Tippah County, Mississippi. I was actually, I actually had a hoe. You know what that is, in my hands and I was chopping weeds out of my watermelon patch. The particular weed that we have here, called the devil’s tomato was particularly bad that year in that particular patch of watermelons. And I was getting thorns in me and I was hot, I was wet and covered in dirt but I said, “You know what? I know it’s crazy but I love doing stuff like this. I would love to do stuff like this more often. I would like to have more days off. If I want to tell everyone that productivity is the way to go, let’s show them what it can really do for your practice and so that’s the day I decided to go to 3 days a week. We haven’t looked back yet that’s probably the best thing that we ever did for our practice. So when I tell you that I know how that we can help you improve your life by doing more at the time you’re at the office but making sure you have plenty of extra time off. Trust me when I tell you exactly what I’m talking about because I had done it myself. Okay? I‘ve walked the walk since 2008 every single day. Even to the point and here’s something cool that happened, that sort of leaves me into my next point. Sometime between 2008, and a couple of years ago, I actually wrote a book about some of my thoughts and ideas on productivity called “Time Genius”. Well one day I was working away at the office and one of my assistants came and they said, “The MSU president’s here.” Now around where I live, there are 2 colleges of really significance. There is Ole Miss, University of Mississippi, and then there’s my alma mater, Mississippi State University. And so around from we’re from, people call it Ole Miss and MSU. Okay? Or just State sometimes. But she said “The MSU president’s here.” Now I thought she meant a good friend of mine who’s at that time the MSU Alumni Association president for Tippah County. I said, “Well just tell him to, you know, I’ll call him later. It’s, you know, I’m in a middle of something. She said, “No, Mississippi State President’s here.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?” She said, “Just come back here at the break room and let me show you.” So I, you know, finished up what I was doing, take my gloves off, I’m taking my loops off of my head, I’m walking to the back to the conference room. And when I walked through the doors of the conference room, strangely enough, there is the actual current sitting president of Mississippi State University. He’s got a copy of my book in his hand, and he says, “Chris, you know, I read your book. I think it’s amazing! I just wanted to congratulate you and come by personally. I was in the area but I’m just going by and just tell you we appreciate you, we appreciate you’ve been an alumnus at Mississippi State. Ask if it’s okay with your permission, we would like to publish an article about your book in our upcoming Alumnus magazine.” And suddenly my jaw’s on the floor, it’s crazy! I got a picture with him but it was one of those things where it was such a, he had to go, it’s such a fast thing, you know. It was just a quick picture, it’s kind of blurry. It’s an awkward, it’s crazy! It was a crazy thing but from that, after my article was published in the Alumnus magazine, it didn’t stop there.

When I was early on in my career at Mississippi State, before I got an exception at the dental, I was Engineering student. And the college of Engineering actually has a program for post graduate students of the Entrepreneurship program, right. And they, it’s a Master’s level course. There’s a couple of hundred kids, I call them kids, they’re graduate level students. But a couple of hundred of them under each semester, and they bring in guests lecturers from around the country to talk about Entrepreneurship. Well imagine my surprise when I was invited to speak to that group. How cool is that, right?! I actually got to speak to a group of students from my Alma Mater on the stage where I took classes like Psychology101, Western Civ 1, I think I had at least 2, maybe a third class in that room. It’s so surreal to be up on that stage and it’s a cool room, too. It’s in a building called Simrall on the Engineering Row at Mississippi State and it’s a lot of wood everywhere, it’s one of the older auditoriums, it’s sort of a curved seating arrangement and it’s just right out there with the crowd. It’s a wonderful thing. It’s an amazing experience, I highly recommend it. If you ever have the authority to speak to your own mind, I cannot say enough good things about that. But I get the chance to speak to those guys and as we’re leaving the dean who had been the one who actually invited me personally, he’s walking me out to my car. And so we’re in this chitchat, you know. And as we get closer, he says, “So Chris, exactly how long have you been studying Lean Manufacturing and Lean Management Systems?” and I said, “Dean, I have never studied those systems because I know zero about it, right? I know nothing about it.” And he kind of chuckled and said, “Well It makes sense because the terminology you were using out there is absolutely nonsensical. It’s not the terminology that’s used in Lean Management. However, all the things you described on how that you’ve set a dental office up, that’s exactly how someone would set up a dental practice if they were using Lean Management Systems.” And I said, “Really?” He said, “Yeah, you really, you’ve already done all these stuff, you really need to study Lean Management.” And so he recommended some books, of course I as a good student, went to Amazon and purchase 5 books. Got them in and read them. And so I feel like, “Yeah, I’m probably as up on Lean Management Systems as any dentist in America, for sure.” And you know, probably a lot of healthcare people also, I do know there are a lot of some of the books that I’ve purchased were on Lean Management for healthcare and stuff like that. It’s been around for a while, I just didn’t know about it. And I’m pretty sure hardly any dentists know about it because every time I lecture about it, whenever I lecture, you know, no one has heard the terminology and sort of people are like “Wow, I’ve never thought of it that way.” So this is one of those cool things.

As we go through this show, it’s my hope that at least if not once a show, once every few shows we have an entire segment on Lean Management, Lean Manufacturing. Okay? So that’s my, that’s my…by the end of the, after you have listened to this show for a while, you should be pretty well versed in Lean Management and how that it can really help improve your practice, improve its productivity. So that’s...in going back to the quote at the beginning of the show, right? Who said that? “A bad system will beat a good person every time.” That is the father of Lean Management, W. Edwards Deming. Now he is an amazing guy. Okay? If you have not studied his work, he’s an amazing guy. He is the guy that General Douglas McArthur brought in to Japan to help him with the reconstruction of Japan’s economy after World War II. And his influence can be traced to so many amazing things that happen to the Japanese economy after World War II. I mean it’s just, it’s just unreal if you go back you can read what all that he did. But he was an amazing man, had an amazing intellect. And W. Edwards Deming, worth looking him up on Wikipedia, if nothing else, right? But he is the one that said that quote that I said at the beginning of the show. And expect a good quote every show. I mean I try to come up with a very poignant quote every single show. A very inspiring quote every single show.

So let’s just talk a little bit more about if that I am qualified to talk to you about this and to help you with the situations that maybe unfold in before us right now in America, okay? Let’s talk about 2005. Alright that’s the year that I decided to switch from cosmetic dentistry to a more productivity based dental practice approach. And that turned out to pay me in space. Our practice took off like gangbusters; we haven’t looked back, okay? There’s no one around back then to really say, “Oh yeah Chris, you got that one right.” And so between 2005 and 2012, I don’t know that I made that many predictions. But there was, I mean 2005, obviously I bet on myself and I predicted that the course needed to change because not only was cosmetic dentistry already hard to sell in Ripley, Mississippi. I predicted that it would get hard to sell anywhere in America. And that has certainly come true. To this day, everyone knows that that’s a fact. So 2012 comes along, I saw a few more things, the handwriting on the wall. So I had the chance to speak in 2012 in Dallas, Texas. And I did an entire lecture on the coming storm in Dentistry. That was the name of the lecture. Now in that lecture, I outlined in detail with my research why I felt like even though corporations were a big deal in 2012 that they would come to be the huge juggernaut that they currently are in 2015. And just, they’re eating up market share left and right. I’ve called that one. I don’t know that anyone called that to the degree that I did. I obviously, like I said, corporations have been around a long time. Everybody knew they were a big deal. But I made it clear in that lecture that they were getting ready to take over large chunks of segments of dentistry and that’s really was come pass. And there are a lot of reasons for that. You can check me on it, you can go back. And I’m sure you can get your hands on that lecture. It’s out there, you know, student debt, big money coming in from outside dentistry; just a big confluence of forces. Those forces coming together, that’s why I felt like the time for corporations was about to happen and it happened in a big way.

One thing I talked about that lecture that no one really thought about much was that Walmart, and places like Walmart, were getting ready to get into the dental game. Kind of like they did with optometry, kind of like they did with banking; the same type concept. Dentistry has become commoditized right now more than ever in my career. And certainly probably most of you trying to listening out there. Of course if you’re a new graduate, you might think that he hasn’t changed much at all. But, you know, years ago, in the golden ages, sort to say, it was scuff that to think that somewhere like Walmart could ever compete in the dental industry. Well they had 3 offices when I gave that lecture in 2012. That’s 3 offices, right? That’s all they had. Now in 2014, there was an articles released where there was another 25. I don’t know exactly how many they have now in 2015 but I’m sure it’s more than 28. And I’m sure the trend is telling you, it’s going to get more and more and more. I mean, look at how many Walmarts there are. And they’re going to be able to find dentists who will work at a Walmart, especially right now, they’re going to give you really good incentives to swap over. Just like a lot of the corporate entities do. Right now, you get really good deals but over time, you’re going to get squeezed if you take them up on it. And it’s just going to commoditized us more and more. But that’s just one of the big predictions that I had in 2012 that has come true.

Another thing, maybe this is not one of those things that was that big of a deal to predict but the Affordable Cure Act