Employee Impact on Dental Practice Success

making people feel good that they're part of something and that you can't do it without them. It's not like you are better than them. It's we are a team and together we are all creating something better. We're all profiting from it. We all have more freedom because of it. Life is better from all of us interacting with each other. Welcome to the Phil Klein Dental Podcast. If you're a dental practice owner or an associate and you have a staff of folks that help you out every day to run that practice, you understand the value of a good employee. To tell us all about it is our guest, Dr. Todd Snyder. Dr. Snyder is a regular contributor to VivaLearning.com. He's a cosmetic dentist, international author, lecturer, and consultant to a variety of dental companies. He can be reached at www.legion.dentist. We'll be getting to our guest in a second, but first... 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So whether you're taking your first step into digital dentistry or you're looking to add additional equipment, check out Shining 3D Dental's complete digital dental portfolio. To learn more, visit shining3ddental.com. Dr. Snyder, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me, Phil. So we're talking about dental employees today, and it seems obvious that in order to have a well-running practice, you need good people. But tell us from your experience as a dentist and a trainer, how important are the employees to the business of a dental practice? Well, let me position it back the other way. If you're a dentist and you have no employees, how successful can you be, right? You can't. You need a team. Now, how big the team you have is based on the skill set of each individual, right? So based on their training or the knowledge they bring in. is going to determine how many employees you need to get the job done. And so for me, I always want less. Less employees is more for me personally, and I'm inclined to pay them substantially higher because I'm expecting far more out of them. But I see many offices in my mind that are way overstaffed. And hence, I find more problems amongst employees, but also... If you have a lot of employees and they aren't as accountable for the tasks they have to do in the day, there's more people kind of twiddling their thumbs, so to speak, or finding time to play on their phone. And I find that you're not as productive. So for me, I want highly skilled individuals or highly outgoing individuals that are very good at communication that I can train on the simple aspects of dentistry. There's nothing more irritating than to hire someone who's playing with their phone. when there's things to be done in the office. And then you end up thinking about it during the day and the quality of your life goes down. Like you said, you're going to probably hold on to really high quality employees at a much better rate with a higher salary anyway. They'll have to work a little harder, but they're getting paid more and they're less likely to leave, especially the good employees. Now the question is, how do you find the right employee? That's a great question. During COVID, well, even right now, everyone's talking about how hard it is to find employees in any business. And I had to find a new front office during COVID. And what we do is we look outside the box. We always think differently. I don't want to hire someone that's been in dentistry typically because they come with the baggage from wherever they've worked previously. And I don't want that. I want someone that's outgoing, that can communicate with people well, and that people love talking to them. So we put out basically an ad looking for someone that wants to be a concierge, that someone has a history being a concierge. and so with that we found 340 something applicants for our front office position and from there we then had to you know narrow it down to the final you know five to ten people and so again thinking different advertising what you want in a different manner to bring you a type of customer or not customer a type of employee that you're looking for that's us thinking outside the box So when you were looking for that front desk person, you did not even say needs dental experience? No, because I can train someone on dentistry. Dentistry is the easiest part. It's just the communication. Like if you can interact with people well, we'll teach you the rest. It's kind of like Southwest Airlines mentality. It's like they want to have great people that cracking jokes and being nice and courteous, you know, over the PA system or greeting people. That's the type of person I want handling my phones. Yeah, you just don't want their infrastructure, their technology infrastructure. Their employees may be nice, but their technology infrastructure, that's not an example of success. We weren't going, we were talking employees, that was it. I know, you're talking employees. I could hear the gears churning in the audience's brains when you said Southwest Airlines. Okay, so you went out and you had 350 people respond, which is a lot of people. First of all, how did you go through those 350 applications? Well, we weeded them out by asking certain questions and making them send a video within a certain timeframe. And so if people couldn't follow the directions, they were instantly cut. So that weeded out a lot quickly. And from there, watching the videos and just seeing the way people talked or communicated or interacted, the way they presented, instantly weeded out more people. So we found it to be very fast and effective to whittle it down to just a handful that we could then meet with. That's amazing. That's very clever because more than 80% of them, probably were like, I'm not going to make a video for somebody I don't even know. And I don't even know if I want to work there. And you just weeded out 80% right there. You don't want in your office in the first place. Exactly. You find the right person and they're incredibly cordial and professional and they relate well to people and they say the right things and they're whatever, everything you want in a person to represent the face of your office, but they don't know anything about a dental office. So how do you train them? Well, you know, I hit on this in our last podcast, so if people didn't hear it, go back and listen to it again. But we talked about All-Star Dental Academy, which will train someone on phone skills, basically talking about different aspects of appointment times and, you know, the dentistry aspects. All the different things that someone up front should know as far as handling emergencies, people that are canceling last minute, how to motivate them and whatnot. But then the dental part is easy as far as training them on how often you like to do cleanings and what the reasoning is behind it or veneers or crowns. It really isn't that complex because you're just trying to talk to a person in a manner to get them to say yes to coming in. You're not trying to dive deep into diagnosing or talking about the dentistry. So there's ways to get around some of the... I guess aspects that someone might not know in the dental world that, you know, Hey, the reason we haven't, you come in is to meet with the doctor and he can answer all those questions for you better than I ever could. So let's go ahead and get you appointed. You know, like there are ways to talk in a manner to get people to come in without going down the road of, you know, crazy dental diagnostics and technology and whatnot. Okay. So give us an example of your practice. How many employees do you have? You want to talk about that or is that something? I have three. I have a hygienist, I have an assistant, and I have a front office. Now, the new office will actually have a virtual front office. So with artificial intelligence, as we talked about earlier, as well as someone that is phenomenal at sales and communication, that is off property somewhere else, they can handle the call. You don't need to be sitting in my office to handle the call. And with technology the way it is, they can put them into my software as far as booking the appointment from anywhere on the planet. So I no longer need someone sitting at the front desk. Now I'm outsourcing. Is that something that's becoming more prevalent in dentistry? I don't know of anyone out there doing it. There may be some somewhere. I don't claim to be the first one doing it, but I haven't heard anyone talking about doing it. But again, I'm looking into the business world and applying a lot of business concepts to my existing. dental business. But if I call Dr. Snyder, am I going to be rerouted to Malaysia? It depends on who you want to hire. You can hire people in Canada, in America, Malaysia, Philippines, wherever you want them to go. Obviously, I want someone that has a great communication skill set that sounds like they're in America. They could be in Canada or someplace else, but yeah, definitely. Very interesting. That I've never heard of for a dental practice, but it makes total sense. Plus, you have two offices. For you, it really worked well. And you are the man of efficiency all the way through and through. Yeah, there's no doubt about it. So you talked about finding the right employee, how important employees are to the business. And you talked about how to train them. How do you get them to care about the success of the business? I think someone needs to be a part of the business. You know, that they see the goals, that they see how you care for the patients and you care for your employees, that you truly want the best for everyone. you're also willing to compensate someone for doing their job well, but you're also going to hold them accountable that you are, I don't want to say really strict, but they know when they get there that you're not a pushover, that they're going to be held accountable. We'll be getting right back to our guest in a second. But first, with countless dental composites on the market today, choosing the right one can be overwhelming. Yet a few products rise above the rest, and VOCO composites lead the way. 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And when they have appreciation for who they are and what they do, they like being there more often. They've done research to show it's not necessarily about the money someone makes. It's more about what they feel and where they work. You know, providing some type of help or benefit. Do they feel appreciated? You know, those that they found are the most critical aspects of employees staying and working in a business. And so taking time to do something nice for your employees, just out of the blue, not just on their birthday or Christmas or what have you, but just out of the blue, just saying, hey, thanks. You're phenomenal. I appreciate it. Here's a gift or here's just a letter, a handwritten letter or, you know, just a pat on the back nowadays, you know, whatever it is. But making people feel good that they're part of something. and that you can't do it without them it's not like you are better than them it's we are a team and together we are all creating something better we're all profiting from it we all have more freedom because of it life is better from all of us interacting with each other These employees that you have in this one office that you just opened up recently, you have two, right? You said a hygienist and assistant. If we're talking about the Vegas office, I will only have, well, actually I'll have zero employees, but the California office has three. The front office, hygienist, assistant. So Vegas has no front office and no assistant. The assistant is a 1099 that comes in occasionally. So tell us more about the outsource solution you have with that front office person who's not really in your office. The person calls, they think they're calling your office. That person answers the phone. How does the process work from there? They can create that first appointment and from there, automation takes over. Now, should they want to actually call and get a hold of me, they can actually get a hold of me. But for the most part, most people don't call back unless they're like, oh, I forgot what day it was. Well, that automation handles that. Or, hey, I forgot where your location is. Well, that's in the automation as well. So there's a lot of stuff that one could ask that instantly they get the answers they need. You know, there's like top five common asked questions. Usually it's not like, hey, I need to ask the doctor something specific. That usually doesn't happen. But if they need to, they can get transferred over to me. Otherwise, they show up with all their forms already digitally sent to me ahead of time. They show up. We're standing there to greet them and we take them right back to the operatory. So I've got my dental assistant on the day. I know I have someone showing up. And so it's just the two of us. And when we're done, patient leaves, we wait for the next one or we're done for the day, you know, depending on what time of day the patient's coming in and whatnot. And what about if someone calls and asks about dentistry? I'm new to your neighborhood and I don't know you. And I say, okay, I want to call Dr. Snyder's office. And I talk to the person who answers the phone and say, yeah, so how much periodontal work do you do over there? Or, you know, just some dental questions. That person who you're outsourcing to, how are they going to answer that? Yeah, so there is basically preset, you could say, kind of conversations that would occur. And a lot of that is built around AI. And so this person on the other end can basically go through the preset kind of conversations. But also if they feel like they can't answer something, then they're honest. Like, look, I don't have that answer for you. But that's the beauty of Dr. Snyder. He has, you know, the ability for you to have a virtual consultation. I can go ahead and set you up for one of those and you can talk to him right over the Internet and see him and ask all those questions. or he offers consultations live and in person in his office, we can set you up for that one as well. What works best for you and your time? We're talking about the success of a dental practice based on how important the employees are, but you got rid of all your employees except a couple, which is, that's your second office. Well, we talked about how important it is for the employees in the one office where we have trained them and found the right people and whatnot. So we hit on that, but then we all said, well, the number one problem in a dental office, as reported by ADA, is dealing and managing employees. So I always say a problem is a gift. What if you remove the problem? How could you remove those people and have a better business? You know, you're removing liability, removing overhead. You know, there's a lot of things you're doing. And so that's basically what we streamline into the new office. Do you think that many dentists have too many employees that are wandering around the office and not really being that productive? You know, out of all the different offices that I've gone into and or met or coached, that's what I find. But I'll tell you, 99% of dental offices say no, we're not. because it's hard to say I'm wrong. But once they see it and change it, you're right. It becomes a very appreciative thing. You saved me money. You saved me discomfort. I wish I would have done that a long time ago. But also, you can take the money you were paying for that employee and now spread the money amongst the remaining employees to rise to a new level. I do want to mention to the audience that if you want to get a hold of Dr. Snyder to actually engage in another level of learning that would help you implement some of these concepts into your office, that could be a game changer. He's available at legion.dentist, L-E-G-I-O-N .dentist is his website. Yeah, you can contact me directly or you can sign up for our newsletter or sign up for one of the courses, whatever works best for you. There's also a phone number there if you want to reach out to me specifically. The newsletter is free? Yeah. What do you have in your newsletter? You know, my newsletter is a lot like my podcast. It's basically things that I've either found in that week or that couple of weeks, just in interacting with clients or dentists online that DM me or things that I read in social media. that create, you know, something in my mind, it triggers it. And I say, you know what? People should think differently about this topic. Let me tell them like kind of my thoughts on it or what I've done and what's worked for me or, you know, what has not. worked for the majority of dentists out there and yet they choose to stay where they're at. Well, here's the solution as opposed to staying there for five to 10 years and then being frustrated and upset that you never did anything. And so really everything I offer is to try and help a dentist to think differently and look at things in a different way to alter their path so they can have more freedom and more financial revenue in their pocket, let's say, so they can enjoy more of life as opposed to, I hate to say it, at some point here, insurance is paying so low. you can't be profitable and so many dentists don't look into their numbers they don't realize how bad it's getting often until someone shows them like hey look at this and like wow i had no idea that's the whole goal is to wake people up in the newsletter and the podcast let me show you something yeah no that's a fantastic point and it's so common for people not only dentists to get in the routine of doing the same thing over and over again and this is this is what they know this is what they're comfortable with this is their comfort zone And you say it perfectly when you say a problem is a gift because you're approaching that problem in a way where you're going to innovate whatever that problem is into something that's even more positive than just solving it. You're going to go a step further and make things even better that you wouldn't have done if you didn't have that problem in the first place. So that's the gift part that I guess you're referring to. Exactly. Yeah, fantastic stuff. Dr. Snyder, thanks again for your time. Congratulations on... the success you're having with Legion.Dentist. And of course, your podcast, Delusional, Winning the Weekly War of Dentistry, great name. And we'll look forward to more of these in the future. Thank you so much. Thank you, Phil. If you're enjoying this podcast, please leave a review or follow us on your favorite podcast platform. It's a great way to support our program and spread the word to others. Thanks so much for listening. See you in the next episode.