Kiera has talked to a ton of doctors to come up with tips for how to fill that CEO time that so often feels fathomless. The ideas include blocking out your schedule to understand your frequency, committing to "deep work" time, optimizing whatever you can, and more.

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Kiera Dent- Dental A Team (00:00)

Hello, Dental A Team listeners, this is Kiera. And today is a fun rift of a CEO, giving some CEO tips. And I was just on a birthday trip. You guys, had a birthday and it was so fun. And my husband and went off to Austria and Amsterdam. ⁓ We have traveled a lot. If you guys have been a podcast listener, you know I'm obsessed with traveling. so because we've traveled so much, we're kind of on to off the beaten path locations and.

This year I was like, Hey, I've never seen the Tulip festival in Amsterdam. Like let's head on over there for that. And so when we were there, some of these ideas came to me and I realized this would be, again, I love some white, white noise space guys. If you are an owner of a business and you have not booked yourself one trip that you are off the grid completely. when I talk my, so it was my birthday when I was gone and ⁓ luckily I have some like great friends in my life that texted me. My phone is off off.

Like I kid you not, is on airplane mode. I don't even put it on wifi. Like I don't text people. Jason has his phone and I will say it's the greatest gift I give myself. And one of my friends did not know this quite as well with me. And she was like, Hey, said my other friend, like I texted care like two days ago and I haven't heard from her. She's like, ⁓ when care travels, she is like dead off the grid. Like you will not get in touch with her. If something happens, even if her house is on fire, like she'll deal with it when she gets home, like genuinely she's off the grid. She needs to have that, like just shut off downtime.

And I will say for any of you, and I told an office to do this a while ago and they came back from their trip and they were like, Kiera, that was the best gift and we're going to do that now forever. And so for you, that would be my like birthday gift to all of you to do for yourselves is take a week, completely shut off. No Slack, no emails, no text messages, ⁓ completely turn your phone off if you can. Tell your family where you're at, like have it to where someone can be reachable if necessary. But I will tell you, I sleep better.

than I ever do. ⁓ I come back refreshed. My team all tells me like I am such a happier boss when I come back. I feel like my relationship with my husband is so much stronger because I feel like he gets his wife back. I feel like I come back. I was in the Tulip Festival. There's videos that I have not posted. They're just for Kiera. I feel like literally skipping like a little girl through these Tulip Festivals. I feel I go back to the true core of who Kiera is. I don't need to be a boss. I don't need to be a CEO. I don't need to be a consultant.

I am able to be like free bird Kiera out there. Jason even calls me bird when we travel and it's just a space. So there's a little tip for you that I hope you listen to and I hope you take and hey, if you do it, send me a message and let me know how it went for you. I will also fair warn that sometimes what I call it is it's the adrenaline. What would it be? It's like coming off of the adrenaline. So that drop.

Sometimes I get angry. So fair warning that that does is the dopamine drop if you will and I felt like I have had like three days where I'm just sheer angry and I'm like what is going on? I'm on vacation. I'm in this beautiful place and I'm just mad but it's because you go from being so high tilt throttle to nothing that your nervous system does kind of have this like whiplash. So I have found that some ways to ease into that is one knowing that two I tried to hit the gym like three or four times when I'm over there because that allows like

a lot of that energy to just get expelled rather than going from like high level to nothing. And then I've also found that like reading books, so something for my mind, I usually try to do fiction books. So it's not like obsessive learning, ⁓ but just taking my mind into a different space. Some of those can be a tip for you. again, hopefully some of those help. But ⁓ today I wanted to go through like, how do I actually block and use my CEO time? Because I think that this is a zone that a lot of people want to do as owner doctors and, but they're like, I just don't know what to do during CEO time. So I wanted to

just share with you what I personally do in the company, how I block it, what I have, and then also letting you guys know that we actually have a forum and I'm happy to share it with any of you. can reach out, email us, [email protected], but like what do I actually do during my admin time checklist? This has been built with lots of different doctors input and also what I personally do.

So for me, I do have a personal assistant and I have an executive assistant. So first step is if you don't have either of those, and I know I talked to a lot of dentists and they get weird about it they don't want to have an executive assistant or a personal assistant, but I will say hands down, this is something absolutely that's tactical that you should do. I have my personal assistant actually watch my schedule and then her job is to go through and to refine my schedule. And she does an amazing job. She's like, hey, Kiera, you're running back to back to back all these meetings. You need to move into some different places. Like these are some things that I think you need to do.

We actually have an Excel spreadsheet. just so you know, I do have an Excel spreadsheet. I'm looking at it right now as I'm podcasting for you. And I look in there and I put in and I have on my like on the right hand side, I have my scheduling needs, what my frequency is. Like we've got podcasting in there. I've got certain coaches that I need to get into. I've got my workout time in there. I've got like my C-suite meeting with the COO and the CRO and our lead consultant and ⁓ Britt and my EAPA meetings and the bookkeepers and our fractional CFO.

I have all those meetings that I need to be hitting. And so we look to see where are those at, where are the meetings that I need to have, but non-negotiable for me is my deep work time. So that's my CEO time. That's my deep work time. I have to have on busy weeks, non-negotiable, I need a two hour block. Like that is a non-negotiable for me, must, must. And it's during the day. I don't do it on my Fridays or my day off. I don't enjoy that for me. I get really actually annoyed to do it on those days. So mine gets blocked during my time.

For dentists, I recommend you do it during your time. ⁓ Working hours, I recommend that you block it in there because if you're producing, let's say $1,000 an hour, you've got to be doing at least $2,000 worth of value during that time. again, when you're giving that up, you tend to be a lot more productive. for me, my first week is very busy. I, first week in the company is something that is none of our favorites. Like we love it.

But it's hard, it's heavy. We have our doctor mastermind that we do. I usually do podcasting on the first week. I'm meeting with a lot of my direct reports. It's a heavy week for me, but we still have my non-negotiables. And so I just look at my timing and I know Monday's a full meeting day, Tuesday's a coaching call podcasting day, Wednesday I'm meeting with the COO, CRO, CFO. I have all those meetings to make sure that they can move on their items from Monday. That for me, it's a pretty heavy day.

And then I've just got a lighter afternoon on Wednesdays to just catch up on projects. Thursdays where I'm, and for me, I also have to know where is my ideal time. So when you're blocking your CEO time, you need to know where are you the most optimal? For me, I'm always the best in the morning. Like seven, 738, like right there is where I'm gonna start like cranking and I'm gonna just go solid for about two hours till 10. My worst time in the entire day is three o'clock. Like I am dead and usually around 11, I start to like.

zone out and I'm not as productive. So I've just had to try that. That's a trial and error. Test yourself. See, do you like the mornings? Do like the afternoons? Do like the end of day? Like where are you? Brittany's zone, she's a night owl. That girl, she starts to get her prime optimization on it like three, four, five o'clock at night. Like that is when that girl, she starts to churn and she puts out her best work and we both know that. I'm like, amazing. We work on very polar opposite different ones. So like she needs to put her deep works over your OMS, finding out as well for them. But for me,

Mine is Thursday mornings is where I put that deep work. Then what I prefer to do is on my weeks where I'm not as busy. So I do coaching calls every other week. On my non coaching call weeks, I have two hours on Tuesday, two hours on Thursday. So I'm blocking four hours for myself. So your personal assistant, your executive assistant, they should be blocking this. And to me, this is a like, you do not like, you know, like a stove is hot. Like we don't touch that. You never touch my deep work blocks like ever. Don't ask me to schedule there. Don't ask me to put a meeting there.

Do not ask me to disrupt that time. And I am so strict on my deep work time that people know like, we don't touch that with a 10 foot pole. And your team needs to know that. Doctors, also recommend a lot of times, especially if you do it in the morning or the afternoon, go to the library somewhere where people aren't going to find you. Go to a coffee shop where you can like headphones in zone out. But I found when a lot of times my doctors are trying to do CEO time and they're at an office, their door is being knocked on.

If you want to be in the office, you need a sign on your door, and I've done this for several doctors, where it says CEO time, do not message or do not enter. And it needs to be like, if someone knocks, because they always do that knock like, hey, sorry, doc, it's just real quick. Do not for one second respond, because your team needs to learn that you're dead set on this. Like, this is your only time, you guys, that you get to work on the business. The only time.

Otherwise, what happens is you become the CEO that never sleeps because your CEO time is in the middle of the night. It's early, early in the morning. It's late at night because you never have time for your brain to actually fix these problems. And so your brain just churns on all this. Like I need to check the books. I need to check this. I need to have that. So what you do is when you're exhausted, you try to like get all these things done rather than having set times. You can also build in your schedule. Like there's a set time for paying the bills. If you're doing that. I know I've got some doctor doing that.

I would hope that your OEM does that and you just have meetings where they report to you. But again, depending upon where you are on this journey, you really need to block it. Now, great, we figured out how you block it. Now what do you actually do during that time? So for me, big things I'm gonna be working on are usually for me big projects. So I have a lot of presenting, a lot of events, lot of like, right now I'm reworking our entire customer journey and that's a big project that needs to get done. I'm working with our CRO and like,

building out budgets and working models. And I need to review all of the projections she sent over to me. like, it's the, the projects that for me, like, there's a lot of things like approving payroll or stamping off on this budget that don't require a lot of time. But if my marketer, our CRO is sending over to me, like an entire proposal of their growth marketing plan, that's not something that I'm going to be doing in like a quick, like 15 minute block. Like I need set quiet, like

uninterrupted focus time is what that really is. So imagine like studying for a big test, like you guys like blocked everything out. That's what you work on here. So it'd be your overhead, your P &L, like going through your CPA reports for you. Looking to see credit card charges, like looking through the P &L, like what's a detailed report, what things are on there, are fees categorized correctly. You do this once a quarter, have your CPA send it over to you. You can do it once a month, but you look at that.

What about my cost per procedure? How much does it actually cost me to do every single procedure? And like, how could I reduce my overhead? Looking at my expenses, looking to see my tax estimated bill and have we saved enough for that? And do I have enough money set aside for that? You can go through that. We have an entire systems checklist. You can actually go through all the systems of the practice. I have it set up per month and this is a great time for you to actually review. All right, let's look to see how are our doctors being optimized? What trainings could I put into place? What things could we bring in the practice?

How could I maximize and optimize this? Could we do training with our team for this? What about areas for my like schedule? Like let's review the schedule. Am I the most optimized when I'm producing or is there a way that I could type my block schedule up and be stronger on it and produce more with minimal effort? Like to me, CEO time is where I'm squeezing the juice out of the lemon. Like where can I optimize this a little bit more? How could I optimize my hygiene department? Let me look, is there a way I could add curadont? Can I find a better way to teach my hygienist?

When was the last time we reviewed our periope protocol? Is that still what I want them doing? What could I do on like what would doctor do? And could I train at my hygienist to actually tee up treatment better for me? What if I want to bring on an associate, like let's go through an entire associate onboarding document, set it up. What's my training schedule with them? What are my case studies I'm going to put together with them? Do I have a doctor study club that I'm going to do? What about looking at our new patients? Let me review all of our marketing dollars. Where am I spending the marketing dollars? Are we answering the phone? What's our phone conversion rate?

Let me actually assess my entire front office. Like where are the areas that are keeping us so bottlenecked? And is there AI or different processes or different systems that we can put in place to make it better for them? Let me go through all of our treatment plans. What did I diagnose? What was scheduled and why? What things am I missing? And how could I tighten up my treatment planning process? How can I work with my treatment coordinator and what things do she or he and I need to work through so that way I can close more cases and help more patients? ⁓ Just looking through all these different things.

going and listening to treatment plan presentations of the team, listening to how my hygiene team's training up Floyd and Perio, looking, going and talking to my biller and saying, walk me through our AR. Like I want to see, let's call people together. Where are we at with the AR? How many patients are not called? Show me an EOB. I want to see how you're entering this. Teach me those ways. Are my percentages right where they need to be for collections? Let me make sure my bank statements match my collection statements. What about onboarding? I'm going to be hiring new people. Let me check that entire onboarding process. And is it set and is it ready to go?

Does each procedure have its own checklist, pictures, accountability? If not, can I build out a process and have my whole team take this on or can I delegate this to a team member? Let me look at my marketing. Let me look at like, what is the next, like what's my one, three, 10 year plan? Let me read traction and figure out how to run better meetings. Let me read the book, Designing Your Life. Like, that was a laundry list. That's what you work on during Deep Work CEO time. You read books.

You listen to podcasts, you think about the business, you have quiet white noise time, you build associate onboarding documents, you build better onboarding. And there's a fine line because I want you to know like some of those things should be done by your OM and other people that are not you. ⁓ Reviewing marketing plans, reviewing budgets, looking to see what people are doing. That is my time that I do need to dedicate talking to vendors, researching consultants, having meetings with consultants. Like that's during deep work time. Those are things that I can do during that time. But really it's my time to work.

on the business, work on the highest level things. And I hate when people are like work on the business. I'm like, what the heck does that mean? It means that you're physically like, okay, pretend the business. We're going to go buy it from someone else. What would we go in and do if we were doing our due diligence? We'd look at their treatment plan. We'd look at their new patients. We'd look at their marketing. We'd look at their PNL and their overhead. We'd look at their EBITDA. We'd look to see where we could squeeze juice before we bought the business. If that's like an easy way for you to think of like building and working on the business, it's one, if I were going and buying a business, I'm going to go work in like

optimize those things. The second side is like, where are we broken? Like what things are not working? I realized like, you guys, our consulting team has grown, our clients have grown. I'm so proud of the business that we've built. I also realized what we used to do versus what we need to do today, there's a gap. And so now this is a big project for me of like, okay, we got to figure out our marketing to our sales, to our client success, to our consultants, to our renewals, to our masterminds.

This whole little sprinkling journey has like eight different pieces to the customer journey. And I need to go refine and optimize every single one of those, have meetings with the core team members. I need to work through this. So I built a whole thing with ChatGPT. What do I want it to be? Then I scheduled the meetings with my team. Super freaking pumped. That's a huge, huge, huge business initiative. No one on my team is going to think of that. Like maybe they do.

But that's Kiera's job. That's a CEO's job. That's where I need to be putting my time, my effort, my energy. That's what drives your business. What's going to make your business? Like you can also do a SWOT analysis. Like what's my strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. A lot of times I go back to my idea boards. I have a book that if you guys know, I've talked about on the freaking podcast and I'm just chicken guys. need, what is it called? Like when you write under a different name, that's what I need. I'm just scared of reviews of my writing.

So I'm like, I need a pen name. Like I just need to make up a name and publish the book. It's ready to go. It's been built. I need to get that done. But I spent a lot of my CEO time writing a book. You spend a lot of your CEO time looking to see if you want to expand your business. If you want to simplify your business, you want to optimize, this is what you do. So I wanted to just get on the podcast and help you see how do you do it? Which team members do I use for it? Where are mine blocked? And how do you set yours up? And I would say,

Today, listening to the podcast, my action items to you would be number one, I need you to find out where your prime optimize time to work is. Is it morning, afternoon or end of day? Then the next thing is I need you to block two hours minimum every single week. Then three, email me, talk to me, whatever you need to do, but I need you to build a CEO checklist and I need you to start working on those optimization pieces every single week consistently. And I need this to be like your bootcamp workout training where you commit to doing this for the next eight weeks and then we reassess.

Non-negotiable, not interrupted, not like, I don't feel like it today. It's a, have locked in for eight weeks. If you need an accountability partner, well, high five, I'm Kiera. This is what we do. This is why people hire us. It's because you usually know what you need to do. You just aren't willing to stay committed to doing it. Why am I paying my personal trainer so much for a photo shoot that we're doing? Because like yesterday I benched freaking Reese's. I was exhausted. I was tired. I haven't slept for days coming in off that trip. Jet lag's a beast. So that was a fun flip.

⁓ exhausted, tired, not wanting to hit my workouts, not wanting to hit my macros. And she said, Hey, Kiera, you got three weeks left before your photo shoot. Here are the things you need to do when that happens. Like you're good. This is what happens in tomorrow. This is what I want you to do when you get that craving. Here's exactly what you're going to eat. I don't know. Even have to think today going into it. We're not going to binge on the Reese's eggs. Yes. Did I go buy like five packages post Easter because they're my favorite treat. And if you want to like schmooze me, send those to me. Absolutely.

But I needed somebody to hold me accountable to it. When the days are hard, when things you don't know what to do, when I'm, I told her, I was like, I don't know what to work on now. Like I'm having a hard time hitting my workout. She's like, all right, let's rework it. Let's figure it out. Sometimes having a coach that holds you accountable, that pushes you into this is one of the fastest, easiest ways to get more results with less effort. She holds me accountable to it. It's not hard. She's there in my corner when things fall apart. She's there in my corner when things are surviving. I talked to her, maybe.

30 minutes a week, if that. And it's usually like every other week, if that. It's usually a quick text of like, hey, I'm struggling here, I just need your help. Or, hey, I need you to hold me accountable this week to making sure I get my CEO time done. We as consultants are that way for dentists, because you don't usually need a whole new operating system, you just need someone to help you stay accountable to the things you know you need to do. So if we can help you with that, reach out, [email protected]. But today commit to having CEO time dedicated for you, for your business.

It's one of the greatest gifts I can give you. So yes, go on vacation, happy birthday to you when that happens or whenever you want it to be. And the second thing is have your dedicated deep work CEO time. Hopefully that gave you a nice laundry list of things to work on. What I do, the only other thing that I didn't share with you is throughout the week as things come up on me that I know I'm gonna need more brain power to do. I have my personal assistant. say, hey, pop this in on my deep work. My deep work block is set as a private thing so people can't see it.

So she goes in and puts all the things that I need to work on. So when I show up to deep work, I'm not spending thinking time of what do I need to work on? It is literally already there with all the links, all the pieces. And that's her job is to make sure when I walk into deep work time, it is exactly what I asked her to put in there. The things I want to work on, things she might see that I need to get answers to that are not like a simple answer. That's not taking my time. These are like heavy items. And her job is to make sure my deep work is always there. So if that helps you, who I use, who on my team,

Sometimes I feel like these are the little like peel back the curtains of what do other CEOs do? This is what our doctors do. This is how we share in the masterminds. Come in person, be with us, get around like-minded people. Your net worth isn't equal to your network. And I would say it might be time for you to upgrade and elevate. And I'd love you to be a part of ours. So reach out. [email protected]. And as always, thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time on the Dental A Team Podcast.