When it comes to scaling smarter, not scattered, there are three mistakes owners make that hurt efficiency, profitability, and leadership. Kiera talks about how Dental A-Team helps practices simplify methods so that success is humming across all locations.

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The Dental A Team (00:00 )

Hello, Dental A Team listeners. This is Kiera and I hope you are having such an amazing day. Today is podcasting day and I actually did a little reel for you guys to come and enjoy getting ready for me on podcasting day. My husband and I, we did this funny thing when I got like amped myself up and we're like, I love my life. I love my job. I love podcasting. And I don't know if you guys have seen that little girl.

 

who does that where she gets so excited about life and it's like, I love my bed, I love my hot tub, I love my view. And truly I love all of you. And I'm just super excited to be here with you podcasting, to be talking about great things in dentistry. And today I think that this one's going out to our multi-practice owners. And these are three costly gaps that I've noticed within multi-practice ownership that really try to highlight some of the gaps because at the end of the day, the podcast was created

 

to help all dentists elevate, to help all of us rise, to positively impact the world of dentistry in the greatest way possible. And that's what we're about. That's what our mission is. That's what I'm about. And so today going out to those multi-practice owners, or for those of you thinking about multi-practice ownership and do you want to do this? do you want to like, what are some of these gaps that maybe could also impact solo practice owners? So at Dental A Team, do work with solo practice owners, multi-practice owners. We work with...

 

like from basically one million, you know, you're maybe at that 650, one million range, all the way up to that 10, 15, $20 million range as well for practices. And there is a no one size fits all in Dental A Team I'm very, very, very, very big on who we hire and who the people are within our company. And with our clients that this is your life. This is your dream. There is no ultimate destination that we're trying to get all of our practices to. There is no final

 

You've got to hit this in order to be excellent within Dental A Team. is what is your life? We have some owners that are working at two or three days a week. We have some owners that are working six days a week. We have some that want multi-practice ownership. have others that want solo practice ownership. We have some that are solo practitioners doing 4 million in one location of about six to seven operatories. We have others that are in multi-locations doing 2 million. So really there is a no one size fits all. It's more what do you want to be? And we call this the yes model. So where do you

 

personally and professionally want to be. stands for earnings to make sure you're profitable and S stands for systems and teams to support that. So really making sure that way you can say yes to your life, yes to the things you want in life. That's what we're about. So with that, like when you look at multi-practice ownership, it does not necessarily mean adding more profit. I've talked to several multi-practice owners that are actually making less money in multi-practice ownership than they are.

 

prior to expanding to multi locations. Think about it. You've got one location that's doing really well, the other one's not doing so well, well, your good one has to then support your not so cash flowing one. So sometimes it actually can be a lot more costly for you. And so for you to just realize that some of the ways that we can do this will actually impact solo practitioners. ⁓ And so the three things that we're gonna work on today are like,

 

things that hurt efficiency, they hurt profitability and they hurt leadership. So when we look at this, doing a deep dive on that, that's really what I want you to look at of like how you can scale smarter and not scattered because really with multi-practice ownership, I remember the day we opened our second location. Our first practice was doing, it was 500,000 to 2.4 million in nine months. And then we opened our second location and you better believe that it was like just adding more fuel to this already burning chaos fire. I think that's really, really clear. And I hope you heard that it was adding more fuel.

 

to the chaos fire, not to the profitable fire, but to the chaos fire. ⁓ And that was really, really, really struggling. ⁓ It was hard on me. It was hard on our practice. It was hard on the team. I was not showing up as a great manager. I was not showing up as a great ⁓ leader. I was not showing up as a great partner. ⁓ I was not showing up great in my marriage. It was like literally just trying to swim through and feel like I was trying to survive rather than doing it smart. And so that's something really big that we've been wanting to do for all of you is

 

to give you this smarter way. Dental A Team was really here for you. It was built by people who are just like you, who have been in your shoes, they don't just understand you, but have actually been in your shoes, who's walked the walk, talked the talk, and we've done it very successfully. So I love to help offices. Hopefully we're helping you. ⁓ And if you love this podcast, please be sure to like it, start, share it, because that's how we're able to help and influence more people. number one, the biggest number one miss is no centralized operations. So that means ⁓ we don't...

 

we don't have a central plan and instead our practices are individual islands. This was very much my practices. We had our one and it was doing certain things and we had our second one and it was not doing certain things. And so going from each practice felt like I was going to multiple different locations, multi different pieces and that really gets hard. And so we have inconsistent systems which means we have unpredictable outcomes. And then on that, like we did not have a set way that we'd schedule. So we'd schedule one way at our first location another way at our second location.

 

Our billing was not the same. The way we were insurance verifying, our fee schedules weren't even the same because we were in two different cities. And so we had different fee schedules. ⁓ Reporting was not the same. We did not have leaders in both practices. We did not have SOPs that could scale. Like truly our operations manual was not done and we just thought buy another practice and let's go through this. Rather than having a set standard, and this is something I'm really big on when people want to go to multi-practice ownership or they're already in multi-practice ownership. This is really where we start. There's a practice that we're working with and

 

I think about them, were, the solo doctor was running around to every single location, trying to out-produce the problems instead of fixing the problems at the base level. And that's going to be through this of like centralized systems and getting systems in place and like having our scheduling and our billing and our cashflow consistent and looking at each of the individual practices ⁓ to make sure that they are centralized. And so when we work with multi-locations,

 

What we do is we actually simplify it down. So you don't necessarily have to have centralized billing or scheduling like right away. Once you get to that four or five, usually it's very recommended to have centralized billing or I've got some practices that are multi like it's one location, but they have about 15 to 17 operatories. Well, that does count in my opinion as multi ops, multi practices, cause a lot of times multi practices are like five ops or more. So you think about a 15 op practice that's like three practices, but just under one roof.

 

So even in this larger practice, I often recommend we start to centralizing. So we have a set standard of how we're doing billing. We have different reporting metrics. You've got to have the KPIs. We've got to have the set system. So what we started to do i