Latest / My Dental Playbook / 044 5 Pillars Every Dentist Needs Before Location #2 - Part 2

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044 5 Pillars Every Dentist Needs Before Location #2 - Part 2 · My Dental Playbook

• 0:00
  You can have a second and a third and a fourth location without doing any of this stuff.
• 0:04
  But if you want to do it at with the least amount of stress possible, this is what how I would do it.
• 0:09
  Here's the guarantee.
• 0:10
  If you go and do all these things before you open your second office, you'll be very happy that you did that.
• 0:14
  Welcome back to another episode of My Dental Playbook.
• 0:16
  I'm your co-host, Gary Bird.
• 0:18
  Along with my friend Dr.
• 0:19
  Blake Hamblin, we're going to be diving deep into his office and how he's doubled his collections in just under 12 months.
• 0:25
  We're also going to be talking about his journey to a$10 million practice and what he needs to do to get there.
• 0:30
  You're going to see behind the curtain, and Dr.
• 0:32
  Blake is amazing at sharing the hard details that you need to know so you can do the same too.
• 0:38
  If you want to grow, this is the show for you.
• 0:41
  Stay tuned.
• 0:42
  All right.
• 0:42
  Welcome back to episode number two of how to make sure that your ducks are in a row before you open your second location.
• 0:51
  We've seen this over and over and over again.
• 0:52
  Someone has a really successful office, they open a second second office, and it just absolutely falls apart because it's harder.
• 1:00
  So there's some things Dr.
• 1:01
  Blake has been working on as he's thinking about possibly someday opening a second office.
• 1:06
  And if you haven't watched the first episode, it's the first pillar that you have to have in place, which is systems.
• 1:12
  And we went deep into systems.
• 1:14
  We we gave a ton of resources around that.
• 1:17
  And today we're going to cover the other pillars.
• 1:20
  So systems are one of the most important things that you need to have for a new practice.
• 1:25
  But then number two is going to be profit.
• 1:28
  Three is marketing.
• 1:30
  Number four is a practice leader to bring with you to the new location, which is really smart.
• 1:35
  And then lastly, attracting and retaining dentists.
• 1:38
  Dentistry is really important to have dentists.
• 1:41
  That's uh it's hard to do dentistry, hard to do dentistry without dentists.
• 1:45
  So that's that is a must.
• 1:46
  So let's jump into this.
• 1:48
  Uh let's talk about profit.
• 1:49
  So what what do you need to have in place profit-wise at your first location before you even consider a second location?
• 1:56
  I I don't know if it's necessarily a number.
• 1:58
  It's just that you have to understand that you're running a business, and as much as you want to scale, you've you've got to make sure that you're you're making money somewhere.
• 2:07
  Uh I just see so often where if it's not practice one, uh bank rolling practice two, it's they're they're both failing.
• 2:17
  And I I want everyone to be successful, but I also want everyone to like live a long life and and be happy and all of those things.
• 2:26
  And I I think step number one is just figuring it all out while you're in one location.
• 2:31
  Your life's only gonna get more complicated as you add more locations and you're you're you're splitting your time and your effort.
• 2:37
  And knowing that if all else fails, you can still run this other practice because of how well the first practice is running or otherwise is a really wise thing to do versus I'm just gonna start find practices and hope it works.
• 2:53
  Right?
• 2:54
  Like that's that's not a good way to enter business.
• 2:56
  Yeah, uh the thing that I've seen that really stress stresses people out is that you've built your first practice, you're financially comfortable, but you're not like you don't have like$30 million in the bank comfortable.
• 3:08
  You have some money in the bank, you got everything paid for, you're working three days a week, like you you have a really good life.
• 3:15
  So you're like, hey, let's open a second location, but then all of a sudden it starts sucking the profit from the first location, and now you actually have a failing overall, you have a failing business because the the because the second location is just draining the first location.
• 3:29
  And the main reason I think that happens is because we forget that so often our businesses are built around us.
• 3:36
  Like if and in in in full transparency, if I didn't exist in my office, my office wouldn't be half of what it is today.
• 3:43
  And that has nothing to do with how great I am.
• 3:46
  It's just with the intentionality that I present to my practice.
• 3:50
  And when you go to office number two, you can't give 100% to office one and a hundred percent to office two.
• 3:57
  You're going to be split.
• 3:58
  And so I think we kind of forget that.
• 4:01
  And so that's where some of these other things that we'll talk about will tie into some stuff.
• 4:05
  Yeah, I actually have a doctor that we work with that he opened a bunch of locations and he had to go to like the his fifth one, he had to go and start working there.
• 4:14
  And as he's working there, he's not making money at the other location.
• 4:16
  He's like, I don't even want to be here because the amount I'm generating is so much smaller than because for you, it's like, okay, you're generating$200,000,$300,000.
• 4:25
  If you went to a new location, you wouldn't be generating two or three hundred thousand dollars if you were there 100%.
• 4:30
  And if you went 50-50, you're basically losing$150,$100,000 at the first location.
• 4:37
  And now at the new location, you might be doing$40,000,$50,000 if you have an associate, you know what I mean?
• 4:42
  If everything goes really well.
• 4:43
  So it's like something's going to break, so you've got to have room in that first location.
• 4:48
  We have a Dr.
• 4:49
  Blake shared his PL uh statement with us that you fill in the blanks and it figures it all out for us.
• 4:55
  Uh nobody really likes filling out PLs, but this one's really simple to use, nice spreadsheet, works really well, and it gives you targets and benchmarks as well.
• 5:03
  Um, something to definitely help with that.
• 5:05
  It'll be the resources down below.
• 5:06
  Now let's let's talk about marketing.
• 5:09
  Um, so I'll kind of cue up this one.
• 5:11
  So what I've seen is people start a practice, very, very successful.
• 5:17
  They build it over like 20 years.
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  They do very little marketing.
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  I talked to him, uh I just talked to a guy recently, actually, I did a podcast with him.
• 5:23
  He's he's doing six million dollars a year.
• 5:25
  He's spending like$5,000 on marketing,$10,000 on marketing, but he's been doing this for years.
• 5:32
  So he's built, basically he's just built a ton of patient referrals.
• 5:35
  So he's about 160 new patients, and they're mainly patient referrals.
• 5:40
  He has a boatload of Google reviews, and you can do that over a long period of time, right?
• 5:45
  Totally.
• 5:46
  But when you go to a new office, you you're starting at ground zero and you have to get that office as fat off the ground as fast as possible.
• 5:53
  So you need to actually know how to market.
• 5:56
  And this is where people get themselves in trouble with marketing, is they never learn the skill.
• 5:59
  What's cool about your office, Dr.
• 6:01
  Blake, you guys already learned it.
• 6:03
  You're gonna be able to eventually taper back on marketing here and start moving that to a second location.
• 6:09
  That's that's the pitfall that I've seen over and over and over again.
• 6:12
  It's like, oh, it only I pay$5,000 and I get, you know, 50 patients a month.
• 6:16
  I don't need marketing.
• 6:17
  It's like it's a startup, you're gonna need marketing.
• 6:20
  I've said this before, but we as dentists believe that marketing has like black magic.
• 6:23
  There's this thing that just like happens in the ether and then patients show up or they don't, right?
• 6:30
  And this marketing company is good or this marketing company's bad.
• 6:33
  And we feel like we have to learn everything before we do it, right?
• 6:38
  And we talk a lot about this in our mastermind of just go create the problem and you'll you'll figure out the solution on the back end.
• 6:45
  And that's been my experience with marketing was trying for two and a half years to figure out what would work, and finally we met you guys, and and thankfully it it's worked really, really well.
• 6:55
  But through that process, I've learned so much about marketing.
• 6:58
  I've learned more things than you probably even know that you've taught me about marketing, right?
• 7:03
  And so there are there are conversations and there's ways I would approach a second location that now having done it in the first location, I'm just infinitely better.
• 7:13
  Just like with building the building.
• 7:16
  Like I think we did a great job building the building, but I bet I paid about 20% more than I would have if I built if I built another building.
• 7:23
  And the same thing's true.
• 7:25
  And I'm sure you have things like, oh, I wish we would have put this here rather than there.
• 7:29
  You know what I mean?
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  Like, you just don't know until you do it.
• 7:31
  Um, and marketing's the same way.
• 7:33
  Like you, you it's funny.
• 7:36
  Now when you're going to look for locations, you're like, you're thinking marketing first.
• 7:39
  Like, hey, how many new patients could we get here?
• 7:42
  What would the cost be?
• 7:43
  What does the competition look like?
• 7:44
  Most people just go start practices, they don't even think about that.
• 7:48
  And that's it's just a dangerous place to start a startup.
• 7:53
  So get your ducks in a row.
• 7:54
  If you're not marketing at your current location, start.
• 7:57
  Not you don't have to spend a ton of money, but just start so you can see what it's like to schedule, to uh convert on the phones, all the things that you're not tracking right now, you're gonna have to learn those at the new location.
• 8:09
  It's way cheaper to learn them at the first location uh before you start.
• 8:13
  So um down below, I'm gonna link a map and competition um evaluation.
• 8:18
  So if you want, if you're like, hey, I need to see where to open up my next little practice, or I need to start marketing at my current location, the link will be down below.
• 8:26
  Okay, so let's talk about pillar number four.
• 8:30
  You're gonna need a practice leader for the new location.
• 8:34
  Now, when I think of this, uh, this is probably like a super nice to have.
• 8:39
  And I think for you, you're like, no, this is what we're doing, um, which is smart.
• 8:45
  But what I have seen, I've seen people do this, and they gut their old office, and then their their new office is like they're paying a boatload of money for salaries at their new location, and and and then the old location's falling apart because they lost they sucked all their leaders out.
• 9:03
  So, how are you gonna tackle this?
• 9:04
  Or did I did I when did I get there?
• 9:07
  Uh but I I think what I've learned is as you scale and as you grow, you have less dental problems and you have more people problems.
• 9:18
  And so when you go from one office that maybe you've grown, uh like like for example, in our practice, we've grown quite a bit over the over the years, and now we have you know close to 20 team members.
• 9:31
  Well, now if I go start another practice, I'm gonna instantly have another 10.
• 9:35
  And when you talk about like needing sophisticated management, studies have shown like anything over roughly about 12 to 15 people, you've got to add more leaders and management to bring in.
• 9:47
  And certainly as you eclipse the 20 to 30 people, like you need sophisticated leaders that know how to solve problems that aren't just daily annoying things that we deal with as dentists, but like how do we handle this HR issue?
• 10:01
  How do we handle uh how how what's our philosophy on hiring?
• 10:05
  Like, what are these these things?
• 10:07
  Like you need you need actual like people that we just don't really hire in dentistry until you reach that point.
• 10:13
  Does that make sense?
• 10:14
  And yeah, it's um it's it's like a basically it's an office manager if an office manager was really an office manager, or a because most people use them as like their TC and their front desk and their office, like they're not really managing anybody, they're doing duties that you don't want to give to somebody else.
• 10:31
  Um, but an office manager would manage everybody in the team and they're the ones making sure everything's happening, or a regional manager would be like the next step up from that.
• 10:42
  If you had four or five offices, they're overseeing those four or five offices.
• 10:46
  But yeah, at most offices don't have that infrastructure that's working on the business, they're not actually working in the business.
• 10:55
  Yeah, and you're you're gonna hit a point in which you just get overwhelmed and you're like, I I need someone else who understands what I'm going through.
• 11:04
  And that practice leader can often be that.
• 11:08
  It it may not, and and I'm a big fan of having a dentist be a leader in the practice, but you still need somebody that gets it from the operational standpoint.
• 11:18
  You need somebody that gets like what you're mentally and physically going through when you have to have that tough conversation with Sally because she's late for the 15th time.
• 11:27
  Like those are the hard things that wear on you.
• 11:31
  And if you try to do it on your own and try to split it, you can do it.
• 11:34
  You're just gonna pay a price for that.
• 11:36
  Yeah, so anybody who's a parent's gonna understand this statement.
• 11:40
  Anybody who's not's not gonna understand it.
• 11:42
  You have to have good cop, bad cop.
• 11:44
  You have to.
• 11:45
  There's somebody that needs to be able to come in and say, hey, you shouldn't have done this.
• 11:50
  This was bad, and here's the punishment.
• 11:51
  But then you need somebody to come back in on the back end and be like, hey, we love you, we're here for you, we're gonna turn this around and get this going because those relationships break.
• 12:01
  And that and sometimes you can swap, right?
• 12:02
  Sometimes it's the mom's a bad guy, the dad's a good guy, vice versa.
• 12:06
  Depends if you're dealing with a daughter or a son, how their emotional temperament is towards certain things.
• 12:12
  Like, all of these things matter.
• 12:14
  So when you're in an office and you're the only leader, you have to do it all, and you're doing dentistry, which is super hard.
• 12:21
  So you don't really usually have the time to sort through all the emotions and all the all this kind of stuff.
• 12:26
  When you get that second leader, they can go in and be the bad guy and you can go to clean it up as the good guy, or vice versa.
• 12:32
  You can go in and lay it, and then they come back in and clean it up and say, Hey, we all we want you here.
• 12:36
  Dr.
• 12:37
  Blake wants you here.
• 12:38
  He talks about how great you are all the time.
• 12:40
  It's just we got to get this thing right because the office can't function without you doing an amazing job.
• 12:45
  So I think that's huge.
• 12:47
  And having somebody that you can take with you without gutting the other office.
• 12:52
  So building, start building that person now.
• 12:54
  Like, who's that person gonna be?
• 12:56
  And maybe even build two people.
• 12:58
  And something that I've seen that works really well with this, if you want to start developing these next like level two or tier two leaders, is start to give them duties or jobs, not the whole job, and not don't dump all the work on them, but give them one project that a leader would normally do and tell them say, hey, I want to give you this.
• 13:19
  I think you're ready for it.
• 13:20
  I want to see how you do, and then I want to work through it with you and I want to help you with it.
• 13:23
  And give them a leader opportunity and then an opportunity to lead and see how they do.
• 13:29
  And if they do well, it's and you can do that with two people.
• 13:32
  I've done that where I'll have two people running simultaneously, like giving them leadership opportunities and seeing how they respond to them.
• 13:39
  So you don't don't just give somebody the job.
• 13:41
  Here's the big mistake that I see is people give people a leadership position because they're good at the job.
• 13:49
  Yeah.
• 13:50
  Worst thing you can do.
• 13:51
  Just because you're good at marketing doesn't mean you can manage a marketing team.
• 13:54
  Uh that my mentor has, and that he just says leadership is assumed before it's assigned.
• 13:59
  And what you just explained is like let them prove to you that they can do the job before you give them the title of the job.
• 14:07
  So Totally.
• 14:09
  I'm totally with you.
• 14:10
  Um that's that's exactly right.
• 14:11
  And it's it's you can see really quickly if someone has the ability to lead.
• 14:17
  It's a totally different skill set than anything else you're doing in the office.
• 14:20
  And even if you're not good at leading, because a lot of dentists they don't they want to do dentistry, they don't want to lead an office.
• 14:26
  You can actually watch how they interact with other people or even how they lead you in certain situations.
• 14:32
  And that really if you can be humble enough, when you see somebody who can lead, like lean on them, allow them to become the leader.
• 14:39
  It'll make your job infinitely easier.
• 14:42
  Um, and uh that's a great one.
• 14:45
  Okay, last one.
• 14:46
  So the fifth pillar.
• 14:47
  So we got systems, and then we gave you in part one, go back and watch that.
• 14:51
  And we gave you the the five different parts of the systems you need to make sure that you have profit, marketing, practice leader for new location, and attracting and retaining dentists.
• 15:02
  Now, on this front, if you want to, do you want to plug some of the opportunities you have for this?
• 15:07
  Because I know you're yeah, so we're we're actually in the process of hiring.
• 15:11
  By the time this airs, we'll we will have filled that position.
• 15:13
  But I I do believe that uh probably by the end of this year, maybe early next year, we will probably need another another doctor as well.
• 15:22
  Um, and so yeah, going into that, obviously you need dentists to be able to practice dentistry.
• 15:28
  Um and having a good recruiting method for that, uh, you know, it's been funny, I've been interviewing, you know, four or five dentist dentists a day for the past week or two.
• 15:39
  Um, and the same question I get, you know, what are you looking for in an associate?
• 15:44
  And I think I I've surprised them because I I just they're like, is it a full-time or part-time position?
• 15:50
  I said, I'm just looking for the right person.
• 15:52
  Uh I'm happy for if if it's a part-time dentist, then great.
• 15:57
  I'll figure out how to fill the other the back end.
• 16:01
  We'll find two part-time dentists.
• 16:03
  Um, I'm looking for the right fit.
• 16:06
  And for me, if I was going into another location, I would want somebody that um has had time and uh I and I think Jason actually mentioned this, but you know, spend some time in the flagship, really learn the culture, really learn how we do things, and then they can go be that practice leader in another location where you might stay there or you may backfill them with another associate.
• 16:29
  Um but attracting and retaining great dentists and and making that position so good that they don't want to leave is what what I try to do.
• 16:39
  Um now there's gonna be people that no matter what, they want to be an owner and they could be killing it as an associate, they could be producing you know$1.5 million a year and taking home you know$400,$500 grand a year doing that, but they just want to be a leader, they want to be an owner of the practice and they want it to be theirs, and that's awesome.
• 16:59
  Like they should do that.
• 17:01
  But I think if you can do some of the things that we've talked about, like feeding the associate, making sure that the associate's got treatment on their on their schedule, um it'll go a long way in and keeping them around.
• 17:16
  Got it.
• 17:17
  Yep, I totally agree.
• 17:18
  And as we said before, like the most important thing to have a dental office is to have dentists.
• 17:24
  If you open a location and you have rent, you have uh all the supplies, all the employees, staff, yeah, you have all this stuff going, all these fixed costs, and your dentist stinks because no one wants to buy treatment from them, or they're over-treating, or they're just not getting it done uh clinically, that you're like three to six months out from getting another one.
• 17:50
  Like, you gotta have that person that you can lean on.
• 17:53
  So why not start them at your first location and see how they do and then say, hey, let's move over here.
• 17:58
  We're gonna give you another opportunity, and you'll get to do more of the stuff that you want to do.
• 18:02
  So I totally agree with that.
• 18:04
  I've seen that over and over and over again where offices open and then they gotta immediately close because they as Aspen's dealing with that right now.
• 18:11
  They're shutting down across the country because they can't fill their office.
• 18:15
  And to be clear, you can do all you can do this, you can have a second and a third and a fourth location without doing any of this stuff.
• 18:22
  But if you want to do it at with the least amount of stress possible, this is what how I would do it.
• 18:28
  And I'm not saying I have the answers, but this is though you asked me what it is.
• 18:32
  This is well, this is what you're piecing together right now to go and do it.
• 18:35
  And I think it's really helpful, it's very thoughtful, and you've watched a lot of other people do it, right?
• 18:40
  And you've watched a lot of people do it wrong, too.
• 18:43
  And so this is this is just the things that we've seen.
• 18:47
  Here's the guarantee if you go and do all these things before you open your second office, you'll be very happy that you did them.
• 18:53
  I remember that.
• 18:54
  Yeah, that's it.
• 18:54
  Like, is there other stuff you need to worry about?
• 18:57
  Absolutely.
• 18:58
  But get these things in place first, your life will be much better at the second location.
• 19:02
  So great show.
• 19:03
  I appreciate you sharing all your wisdom and and I know uh how busy you are.
• 19:07
  So thanks just for hopping on and uh sharing uh all this good stuff with the audience.
• 19:11
  Of course.
• 19:12
  I'm glad I could do it.
• 19:13
  Peace.