Establish Your Niche and Practice with Passion: Attract the Patients You Want to Treat

You're listening to the Phil Klein Dental Podcast So in your mind, you're providing the best care possible. You're providing conservative treatment. You're selecting the ideal materials for each particular case. You're providing your patients with various treatment plans that are appropriate, not only for their finances, but also for their age. You're treating each patient as an individual, just like you would treat a family member. The question is, do your patients know this? Do they know how great you are? And it's important that they do because it's going to help you grow your practice. To tell us how to do this is our guest, Dr. Lauren Rainey. Dr. Rainey owns and operates her own clinical practice and currently teaches direct restorative techniques to dentists in the U.S. and Canada. Before we bring on Dr. Rainey... an endodontist, I can tell you root canal preparation can be stressful, tedious, and exhausting. And part of the problem is that dentists typically use too many endodontic files, and they use them in somewhat of a haphazard sequence. This makes the procedure more complex, longer, and less predictable. That's exactly why Colteen developed the HyFlex EDM file system. With only four endodontic files used in sequence, you can effortlessly clean and prepare the root canal system to working length case after case. Using a simple pecking motion with the opener, glider, shaper, and finisher, you'll quickly see how much faster your endo procedures will go and how efficient you'll become in achieving exceptional canal preparation. So if you're looking to speed up and simplify your root canal procedures consistently without compromise, check out the HyFlex EDM file system from Colteen. To learn more, visit colteen.dental. Dr. Rainey, it's a pleasure to have you back on the show. Thanks. Thanks, Phil. Good morning. Good to talk with you. So we talked offline, Dr. Rainey, about how... It's important to attract the kind of patients to your practice that you want to treat. And a big part of doing that is differentiating yourself as a practice and establishing your niche in dentistry. Tell us about that. Yeah, I mean, I'm a general dentist. I love the variety once I got out of school of being a generalist. I learned how to do all these cool things. How could I sort of silo myself immediately after learning how to do all these cool procedures? But, you know, in the real world, I ended up... a practice that was just down the street from an endodontist and across the street from a periodontist. And I had pretty much every specialist under the sun in a giant medical dental building across the street from me. And there's no way that I could practice to the same standard of care that they could given their sort of subspecialty. But after being in practice for a little bit, you start to realize that there are certain procedures that you're more drawn to than others. And I think that just kind of happens naturally. when i was in practice or when i started i guess i still work with an executive coach and he put me on to this sort of 80 20 um principle i don't know if that's something that you're familiar with at all yes 80 20 is a very popular concept of where you should where you should be driving your energy and what you're correct and what you're getting out of it for sure right so he put me on to this sort of 80 20 thing which i never really thought about um but when i started looking at my practice i realized that you know that 20 of the procedures i was doing that gave me a lot of joy and i was excited about like that was really driving the the vibe of my practice like i was doing it was making me feel good and i didn't feel you know fatigued by doing that i wanted to learn more and for me that was in um doing extensive composite work and i had an older demographic of patients that i was seeing uh kind of retirement age and up and i was just seeing a ton of broken down teeth and the ended on us just down the street from me was also seeing a ton of broken teeth and we started putting our heads together like there's got to be a better way than you know endo for every single tooth and crowning all these teeth because every once in a while You know, well, maybe it wasn't every once in a while, but not every single tooth that had a hairline fracture in it needed, you know, root canal therapy and full coverage on it. So when I started doing these sort of bigger composites and learning more about how composite could be a really strong material if we just applied it properly, I realized that that's really where my passion in, like right in my practice was. Right. So you decided that you're going to go further, push the envelope. with direct restorative, obviously studying the adhesive layer, the whole concept of really meticulous technique. Because again, today's new bonding agents and adhesive systems, some of them are just phenomenally powerful. Correct. But you got to do it right. You got to follow directions and you have to... Right. But again, that's what, I mean, from my standpoint as being an endodontist who I don't practice any longer, but I would assume that... would be doing this generally. Why does that differentiate you from the next GP? You'd have to ask all the other GPs, I guess. No, I'm just joking. You found your niche by going to another level with saving teeth without driving these patients. to having more extensive dental work and reducing the overall cost of their treatment, which is a huge thing. But how do you get that message to the patient so they know to come to you so they don't have all this extensive, expensive treatment that you may be able to find solutions for clinically using direct composites? Well, I think it goes back to the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words. I've always been super transparent with my patients and with my team about what I'm doing, what I'm thinking. and like why i think x y or z is the proper treatment i mean you can always show everyone and if they're willing to hear you out then i think you've got a really great rapport there with the patients that i started treating and said well would you let me work on your tooth in a different way i'll take some photos as i go we'll review them and most of my patients said yeah i trust you you take whatever classes you take you seem to know what you're doing they just put their feet up and you know half fall asleep But I think pictures and then showing them what I did, why I did it. And I had a lot of engineers and scientists in my practice. So it was pretty easy for me to sort of speak to them on a scientific level as to here's your tooth. Here's a photo. Here's where we see stress fractures. Here's where we see a change in modulus of elasticity, things like that. And then choosing materials and explaining to them like this comes at X cost because I need to do 17 steps to get there. They were willing and open to hear me out. What you did was you explained to them what you could do for them to get a result that didn't entail a lot of tooth reduction and extensive treatment. And they obviously bought into that. These were intelligent people. They would say, sure. Basically, you're establishing yourself as a conservative dentist in treatment. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. i mean how many times have you heard a patient say i got a crown and i hate it or i got a crown and i get food stuck or now i need a crown isn't there anything else we can do besides a crown and like that was the real piece for me that got me to shift my thinking about like okay well how else can we do this without a crown like what are the other alternatives and as soon as you do that for one person i mean there was one woman who came in and said i don't want a crown and had broken off like two-thirds of tooth number five and i said well i went to this class last weekend i ran down the street literally actually my assistant ran down the street actually to the same end of honest grab some materials from this class that we had taken both taken together and then put the tooth back together sort of layer by layer by layer this woman went on the internet and told people what she had done she told her neighbor she told her two daughters and then two or three years later when she snapped off part of tooth number 24 comes into the office and says i have my bionic tooth that you saved before i don't want to crown on my front tooth whatever you did there do it again yeah phenomenal these kinds of procedures basically sell themselves and i'm not here to talk about selling dentistry because i don't really believe that's what my role is but i was able to give her an option that she felt good about saying i have this you fixed it this way i told all my friends now my friends want bionic teeth too so why is it that that patient understood the benefit of direct restorative without having a lot of education, unless of course you explain this all to her, but she came in with the premise that she didn't want a crown. Why is that? She'd had a poor experience in the past. And unfortunately as like a 20 something year old had an injury and had crowns on her lower, I want to say her lower canine and lower lateral and never liked the color, never liked the way the gum looked and just really wasn't. a fan of them. So it was her own personal experience that drove her to ask some more questions. And the fact that our practice was really big on photography and involving our patients in their own treatment decisions on what their options were. I think the combination of those two things made her feel comfortable enough to say like, look, here's what I want. Can you help me? And sometimes the answer is no, right? You know, sometimes the teeth are not restorable and you have to be the professional and say like, no, you can't have. a unicorn tooth like it just doesn't work that way yeah it's funny because i'm interviewing a lot of dentists on this show and i'm hearing more and more about how general dentists are doing miraculous things with direct restorative well they may not be so miraculous now they were considered back in the day they would have been considered miraculous but now um they're pushing the envelope with it and some of these doctors are just getting so much gratification out of practicing dentistry this way because they're doing this stuff in one visit, but they're making it profitable because one of the things that the dentist would say was when they tell other dentists about it, they could say, yeah, but doing composites takes forever and they only pay this much. What this particular dentist explains is that if you did a veneer in order to match the shades, you have to do sometimes two or maybe four veneers. To make it all look good. You can't do a veneer on one tooth. But I could do a direct restorative procedure on one tooth. And I save you cutting the teeth down next to it. Or maybe four teeth. And all the cost of all those veneers. So even though it costs this much money for a direct restorative. I'm saving you a lot of money. I'm saving you tooth structure. And you're going to be much happier. And he has built a tremendous practice off that. Tremendous practice. It sounds like you've done the same. Yes. Yes. And I don't focus so much on the cost part so much as the tooth structure. I own this practice. And again, we saw a patient demographic that just skewed a little bit older. I had patients that were well into their 90s. If we put a crown on that tooth today when you're 63, are we going to have to redo that again when you're... 83 and is your health going not you but you know are they going to be healthy enough to come in at 83 and have another crown redone right like we got to be thinking about you know preserving enamel holding on the tooth structure like nothing is going to be as good as what was there before so let's make the least bad decision or least destructive decision possible now We'll be getting back to Dr. Rainey in a second, but first, if you're looking to make teeth whitening a successful part of your practice, then you need a system that not only dramatically whitens teeth fast, but also ensures little to no sensitivity. Philips Zoom Whitespeed does both. Whitespeed's light-accelerated technology speeds up the whitening process, clinically proven to whiten up to eight shades in one visit. And what's really impressive is that 99% of patients surveyed experienced little to no sensitivity with Philips Zoom. Philips offers two professional whitening solutions, in-office whitening using Philips Zoom Whitespeed, and take-home whitening, with a range of whitening gels for either daytime or nighttime use with custom trays. For a comprehensive, tried-and-true, state-of-the-art whitening solution for your practice, check out Philips Zoom Whitespeed. To learn more, visit philipsoralhealthcare.com. And the question is, it's conservation of two structure, but it's also technique and using the right materials is very, very important with your direct results. Let me ask you this about niche, creating a niche in your practice so that you could build that into your marketing strategy. How does one pick a niche? I mean, I know it's their passion, what they like, but let's, you know, we could be sleep apnea office focused. We could be a wellness office focused, clear aligner therapy. Is another focus? How do you choose which niche your office should focus on? Well, I think you've got to go back to that 20%. What's that 20% of your practice that thrives? What's that 20% of your practice that you like addressing? What's the 20% of those procedures that gives you the most? you know enthusiasm at the end of the day because naturally you're going to be drawn to be taking more continuing education courses in whatever that field is whether that be sleep or aligner therapy or wellness if you can't come back and communicate to your team what you're passionate about like how are they going to pick up on that and help you build that practice around that right you don't have to pick any one of those things just because it's the new hot topic i think you've got to really decide like what speaks to you within our profession. And within dentistry, there are just so many avenues now to take that there's got to be one thing that gets you excited about. There's got to be one CE course when you come back that you can't wait to implement some techniques that you've learned. Very, very good point. Once you find that core passion and try to materialize that, make that a reality in your practice by bringing your team, you got to get your team on board. Absolutely. Yeah. And with you, it was saving tooth structure, doing direct restoratives. Did you have a fully digital practice integrated in where you did intraoral scanning with milling? You didn't? Yeah, no. Unfortunately, we didn't get to that. It doesn't mean that it's unfortunate. I mean, I just spoke to Dr. Jeffrey Bruscia, who's a very well-known dentist. And he's saying that some of these new dentists that are coming out have no idea how to wax up a tooth. And even the laboratory people. don't know how to wax up a tooth. And he's seeing crowns come back digitally that he knows right away were created through digital design. This stuff was not done by a laboratory technician that understands tooth anatomy. So we're not there yet. We're not quite there yet with artificial intelligence and building these teeth. through digital dentistry, we're certainly getting there. We're getting there. Yes, we are. There's no question about it. Yeah, but I wasn't at a position where I was able to kind of make that full jump. Right. And maybe that's part of the reasons why you really gravitated toward direct restorative and doing the- Absolutely. Yeah, the great restorations that you did. So that's an example of 80-20, you know. Yeah. There were already the tools in my toolbox sitting right there ready for me to use. It's easy to define your niche with your team, what you want to focus on in your practice, but to get it to the patients, there's a lot of patient communication involved with that, right? Right. So was that difficult for you? I would say it was kind of a natural progression in the way that I communicated with my patients. I think that over the number of years I was with them, many of them... learned to trust. And if they had questions, I was always really open to having a conversation about what their questions were and how could I address them. Additionally, we used a lot of photography at our practice and I wasn't, you know, shy at all about showing the patients. I used both a DSLR and then an intraoral kind of stick camera. And I would put them both on the screen and just say, okay, here we go. And when we were talking about, you know, here's what we saw, here's what I did here. Here's how I started to rebuild it. And here's your final product. And they would just sit up and be like, oh, that's amazing. But even before we got to the treatment, you know, actual treatment, I would say, here's a case we did last week that looks really similar to yours. Do you want to see it? And some people don't want to see what a tooth looks like once you've taken it apart. But the majority of my patients did. They were actually really interested to know, oh, wow, that was really cool how you put it back together or what's that green thing over there. It allayed their fears about like what a rubber dam was or what a rubber dam clamp looks like. So I was just really willing and able to sort of hear the patient's concerns out. And maybe they were financially driven or maybe they were restoratively driven or maybe they were photographically driven. Like, I don't know. And being able to have those one-on-one conversations, I think, really helped build that part of my practice. Yeah. The result of this is, as you mentioned, word of mouth just spread like wildfire. You had patients that were posting things that you've done. And I think it's just the rapport that you developed, the trust, the communication. They saw the passion in you that you portrayed to them. And then you were just so proud of the work that you did that it was just infectious. To wrap up this podcast, what platform do you recommend? What kind of platform do you recommend to get the name of the office out there, to get the clinician's name out there and the work that they've done to the community? What's your recommendation on that? Yeah, I think that kind of goes back to, you know, whether we do sleep or we do clear aligner therapy, you've got to figure out a platform that makes you feel comfortable. Because if you're uncomfortable, you're not going to come across as knowledgeable or that you're really passionate about what you're doing. So if you're not... the right person to go on social media, find someone on your team that's going to put it on social media. I'm currently challenging myself to like understand what all those platforms are out there. And it's really not my passion project. I wish it were, but I found some great colleagues that really love it and understand it. And I lean on them to ask questions too and to get advice. You know, just like I would lean on an endodontist to help find an NB2. It's just another piece of, you know, small business management that it's critical to stay. But what I did find was just in casual conversations with the specialists I was working with, but also like the office managers of those offices or assistants in those offices, telling them what I was doing and communicating what I was doing to the other teams in the community was a really big practice builder. And slowly and surely, you know, people found out that I was doing black triangle closure. And then someone told someone who saw it on social media. And then I had someone drive, you know, two and a half hours from Sacramento to come see me because she had seen something on the internet. So, you know, you don't really know how people are going to find you, but you've got to be authentic. And if you don't like going to your kid's classroom and doing a presentation, then don't. But send your assistant. Maybe your assistant loves going out into the community and doing a, you know, a park community day. And if they can be enthusiastic about it, great. But yes, the authenticity comes through 110%. So, you know, there's something to be said for being comfortable being uncomfortable. But if you can't even get your point across that you're so uncomfortable, then nobody wins. Right. Absolutely. No, great stuff. We really appreciate your time, Dr. Rainey. Authenticity is the key to not only dentistry, but almost any endeavor that a human being embarks upon. Authenticity, integrity, passion. people see that in you. Yeah, it shows through. It shows through. Absolutely. Well, thank you very much. And we look forward to having me today. Yeah, very, very nice. Take care. 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