Dental Practice Owners Understanding Ownership

Episode #363 with Andre Shirdan

You would never advertise, “Please come run my million-dollar business. No experience necessary!” But not understanding ownership in your business is like doing exactly that. And to help you become a better owner of your practice, Kirk Behrendt brings in Andre Shirdan from The CREW Process to share the four pillars you need to know to understand how to run your practice. If you’re ready to be the business owner you need to be, listen to Episode 363 of The Best Practices Show!

Main Takeaways:

Dentists are never trained on understanding practice ownership.

Four important Ps in your practice are: people, process, profit, and philosophy.

Philosophy is the strongest pillar of the four Ps.

Every single dental procedure needs to be a process.

51% of dentistry is technical. 49% is people and customer service.

Understanding KPIs and norms will help in understanding the business of dentistry.

Quotes:

“My brother-in-law was the worst businessman in the whole world. Phenomenal clinician, but really the worst businessman in the whole world. And coming in and looking at it, I realized dentists are never trained on [understanding ownership]. And we go in and train these guys how to run their businesses, but they never really get it. I mean, in general terms, they're not accountants; they're dentists. And that's what they should do, and that's what they do best.” (5:23—5:50)

“What I found is that a lot of [dentists] abdicate that responsibility [of running their business] to somebody else — like me. I worked the front desk, but I did everything. But we, front desk people, and I always consider myself a recovering front desk person, I came in — and think about this. If there was a Monster ad, it would say, ‘Please come run my million-dollar business. No experience necessary, and the girls will train you.’ And that's really what I came into, as running this business having no idea how to run a dental practice. And I realized that almost everybody that I ran into had that same story.” (5:52—6:29)

“What was really interesting about when COVID hit, I got these phone calls from doctors who said, ‘All my staff is gone. I've never had to put anything into my software. I've never had to do this, and I need to become the owner of my business again. I need to be able to run my business that I've never had to before.’” (6:30—6:56)

“And that started this chain of events, which was, now I have to train a doctor to run a software, to understand what the reports mean, to understand the discrepancies that we typically see or get explained away from a front office person who says, ‘Oh, yeah. That's just an adjustment we make for this,’ but now understanding how that impacts different things, understanding why the deposit slip, when I deposit $1,000, I only get $960 out of my bank account — well, there are credit card fees and care credit fees, etc., etc. — and understanding that where they never really got it before, they just sort of handed it off to the accountant.” (6:57—7:34)

“I think the biggest benefit [of understanding this] is the ability to understand it if you need to understand it. We don't have to. I always say it’s a light switch. Just flick it. You don't need to know how electricity works. But there's some value in walking into Home Depot to buy a new light switch and understanding how the electricity actually gets to that switch. So, you have to understand it even if you don't ever do it on a regular basis. You've got to understand the process, or — to use that analogy — you get shocked.” (7:55—8:22)

“What happens a lot of times is, in the course of my consulting time, I recovered $750,000 worth of theft where the doctors had no idea it was happening to them. And this last...