Dental Practice Heroes

You took an implant course and came home fired up. Six months later, you’re still referring those cases out.

In this episode, Dr. Taher Dhoon, founder of Colorado Surgical Institute, shows you how to make your course pay off and keep your best team members in the process. Learn what your team should be doing before you ever leave, what to do as soon as you get home, and what to say when patients tell you they can’t afford treatment.

Topics discussed:

00:00 Introduction

01:35 Finding the implant model that fits your practice and life

05:00 What stops dentists once they’re back from the course

07:25 Learning new procedures before you feel ready

10:19 What your team should do before you leave

15:19 How to avoid overspending on equipment and implants

17:14 How to get surgical reps without working for free

19:16 What to say when patients say they can’t afford treatment

24:52 Why you don’t need full arch to build a wealthy practice

Explore hands-on training programs and mentorship opportunities at Colorado Surgical Institute:

https://www.coloradosurgicalinstitute.com/

This episode was produced by Podcast Boutique https://www.podcastboutique.com

Use the same marketing company as Dr. Etch!

Get your free demo with Relevance Marketing by Clicking Here

If you are ready to increase your new patients and start growing your practice, visit www.relevanceonlinemarketing.com and see what you've been missing with your current company. 

Take Control of Your Practice and Your Life

We help dentists take more time off while making more money through systematization, team empowerment, and creating leadership teams.

Ready to build a practice that works for you? Visit www.DentalPracticeHeroes.com to learn more.

By the time a problem shows up on your P&L, it’s been quietly building for months.

In this episode, the DPH coaches share the numbers every practice should check weekly to catch problems while they’re still small. You’ll learn the four pillars that help you figure out what’s actually wrong, why a busy front desk can hide what’s slipping, and how to make your team part of the solution.

Topics discussed:

00:00 Introduction

02:07 When production drops and you can’t pinpoint why

06:42 The first step to building a proactive practice

09:01 Turning your numbers into a story your team understands

12:21 Four pillars to assess before you fix anything

14:31 The weekly numbers even small practices should check

17:12 How to involve your team (and where teams go wrong)

19:21 The major treatment plan mistake that loses cases

21:29 Where to start when everything needs improvement

This episode was produced by Podcast Boutique https://www.podcastboutique.com

Use the same marketing company as Dr. Etch!

Get your free demo with Relevance Marketing by Clicking Here

If you are ready to increase your new patients and start growing your practice, visit www.relevanceonlinemarketing.com and see what you've been missing with your current company. 

Take Control of Your Practice and Your Life

We help dentists take more time off while making more money through systematization, team empowerment, and creating leadership teams.

Ready to build a practice that works for you? Visit www.DentalPracticeHeroes.com to learn more.

Your dental practice can be profitable and still feel like it’s slowly breaking you. That’s the reality for many solo dentists sitting in the $1.2M to $1.7M range: the schedule is packed, the team is busy, and yet problems keep slipping through the cracks. Patients fall off the follow-up list, insurance details get missed, the front desk feels underwater, and you end up being the only person who can “fix it” day after day.

We walk through why that happens and why “we just need more systems” is usually a misdiagnosis. The real ceiling is owner capacity, communication flow, and leadership infrastructure. We share a practical sequence for dental practice management at this stage, starting with schedule optimization and block scheduling to increase production per clinical hour. The goal is to create protected CEO time without sacrificing revenue, so you can finally work on the business with energy instead of dread.

From there, we dig into leadership development, culture protection, and why your best employees must shift from doing everything to teaching others through onboarding and standardized training. Then we tackle the associate dentist decision: how to know when you’re actually out of capacity, why waiting has real risk, and how the first associate can transform the practice from an owner-dependent job into a scalable business.

If you’re at that $1.5M crossroads, take a hard look at your schedule and how much depends on you, then reach out at dentalpracticeheroes.com/strategy. Subscribe, share this with a dentist friend, and leave a review if you want more straight talk on building a profitable practice with a team you can depend on.

If you are ready to increase your new patients and start growing your practice, visit www.relevanceonlinemarketing.com and see what you've been missing with your current company. 

Take Control of Your Practice and Your Life

We help dentists take more time off while making more money through systematization, team empowerment, and creating leadership teams.

Ready to build a practice that works for you? Visit www.DentalPracticeHeroes.com to learn more.

Bringing on an associate is supposed to buy back your time. So why do so many owners end up regretting the decision?

Brian Hanks, dental accountant and author of How to Buy a Dental Practice, works with dentists at every stage of ownership and has noticed one blind spot that derails associateships. In this episode, he shares where many owners go wrong, the three numbers that signal your practice is ready for an associate, and the only reliable way to keep associates in your practice long term.

Topics discussed:

00:00 Introduction

01:51 Where owners go wrong with associates

04:24 Which doctor patients belong to

06:37 The numbers that say you're ready for an associate

10:04 What happens when you hire an associate too early

11:53 The reality of keeping associates long-term

16:23 The biggest mistake dentists make becoming an owner

22:22 How often buying a practice really goes wrong

25:01 How adding a doctor raises the stakes of ownership

Grab Brian’s book, How to Buy a Dental Practice, for just $10 and free shipping:

SPECIAL URL FROM BRIAN

Connect with Brian Hanks:
https://www.dentalbuyeradvocates.com/

This episode was produced by Podcast Boutique https://www.podcastboutique.com

Use the same marketing company as Dr. Etch!

Get your free demo with Relevance Marketing by Clicking Here

If you are ready to increase your new patients and start growing your practice, visit www.relevanceonlinemarketing.com and see what you've been missing with your current company. 

Take Control of Your Practice and Your Life

We help dentists take more time off while making more money through systematization, team empowerment, and creating leadership teams.

Ready to build a practice that works for you? Visit www.DentalPracticeHeroes.com to learn more.

If you have been grinding to “improve the practice” but your days still feel the same, you are not alone and you are not lazy. We dig into a hard truth: you can spend an entire year fixing what is broken and still end up with almost the exact same dental practice, the same pressure, and the same dependence on you. The missing piece is not effort. It is the difference between problem solving and creation.

We walk through the two paths to change. The first path is reactive problem solving with a proactive layer: something goes wrong, we fix it, then we build a small system so it does not repeat. It is necessary work, and it delivers an immediate payoff. But it will not automatically produce the practice you want. The second path is creation, and it only happens when we deliberately protect dentist CEO time and go looking for it. That is where we define what we actually want, then design the structure to match.

You will hear concrete examples you can apply right away: reducing owner stress by building a leadership team, hitting production goals by designing a schedule template that supports targets, and creating consistent patient communication through all-team training instead of constant corrections. We close with a simple prompt you can use before every work session: “Am I fixing something or am I creating something?”

If you want support mapping the next version of your practice, book a call at dentalpracticeheroes.com/slash strategy. Subscribe, share this with a practice owner who feels stuck, and leave a five-star review so more dentists can find the show.

If you are ready to increase your new patients and start growing your practice, visit www.relevanceonlinemarketing.com and see what you've been missing with your current company. 

Take Control of Your Practice and Your Life

We help dentists take more time off while making more money through systematization, team empowerment, and creating leadership teams.

Ready to build a practice that works for you? Visit www.DentalPracticeHeroes.com to learn more.

Being the most capable person in your dental practice can feel like a superpower, right up until it becomes the reason everything still depends on you. I’m Dr. Paul Etchison, and I see this pattern constantly with dental practice owners: we’re great at hiring, interviewing, running meetings, resolving conflict, smoothing over upset patients, and handling the sensitive admin work, so we keep doing it. Then we look up one day overwhelmed, frustrated, and wondering why nobody takes initiative, even though we accidentally trained the team to wait for us.

We dig into the competence trap and the real cost of “rescuing” the practice with our strengths. When we hold onto too many responsibilities, our team stops stretching, leadership never develops, and we lose the time needed for the work that actually changes the business: building systems, improving structure, spotting inefficiencies, and thinking like a true dental CEO. The turning point is a simple question that cuts through perfectionism and control: “Does this actually require me?” It’s a better filter than asking whether someone can do it as well as we can on day one.

You’ll also get a practical delegation playbook: audit what you own (on paper), pick one meaningful responsibility to move away from yourself this week, and make it the last time you ever do it by creating training, documentation, or a quick video. If you want a dental practice that runs without you, this is how you start building autonomy, accountability, and scalable dental practice management. Subscribe, share this with a practice owner who needs it, and leave a review so more dentists can find the show.

If you are ready to increase your new patients and start growing your practice, visit www.relevanceonlinemarketing.com and see what you've been missing with your current company. 

Take Control of Your Practice and Your Life

We help dentists take more time off while making more money through systematization, team empowerment, and creating leadership teams.

Ready to build a practice that works for you? Visit www.DentalPracticeHeroes.com to learn more.

You can have a solid team, good new patient flow, and real culture momentum and still feel weirdly stuck. That’s the trap we dig into today: the belief that you should wait until you feel 100% ready before making a big move in your dental practice, like dropping from four clinical days to three. I share a recent coaching conversation with a practice owner who has all the ingredients to cut a day right now, yet keeps postponing it for “sometime this year,” and we unpack what’s really going on beneath that word.

We break down why certainty is rarely a prerequisite for smart dental practice management. Fear is sneaky, and it often disguises itself as being responsible: “I’ll do it when the schedule is cleaner,” “when the systems are tighter,” “when savings are higher.” But those goalposts keep moving. The cost of waiting is not just lost production, it’s lost CEO time, lost energy, lost family time, and another year of operating the same way. Confidence doesn’t arrive first; it shows up after you commit, execute, and prove you can handle what comes up.

Then we get tactical. I explain why putting a date in stone changes everything, how to plan backwards from that date, and why you should expect problems after the jump instead of treating them as evidence you made the wrong call. We also talk through the financial fear of losing production and why reducing clinical days can actually push better scheduling, delegation, assistant utilisation, and higher production per hour, while freeing up time to work on the business like a true CEO dentist.

If you’re ready to stop living in “someday,” subscribe, share this with a practice owner who needs it, and leave a review. And if you want help picking a date and building the plan, book a strategy call at dentalpracticeheroes.com/strategy.

If you are ready to increase your new patients and start growing your practice, visit www.relevanceonlinemarketing.com and see what you've been missing with your current company. 

Take Control of Your Practice and Your Life

We help dentists take more time off while making more money through systematization, team empowerment, and creating leadership teams.

Ready to build a practice that works for you? Visit www.DentalPracticeHeroes.com to learn more.

Your practice is finally in a good place. The schedule is full, the money is good, and you actually like your team.

This episode is about what happens when this comfort turns into complacency. The DPH coaches explain why thinking "things are good" can be dangerous, the difference between healthy comfort and complacency, and how to tell if you're building the practice you actually want.

Topics discussed:

00:00 Introduction

01:59 Why good practices stop trying to improve

06:12 Fixing problems vs. designing the practice you want

07:24 What happens when you stop innovating

10:17 The frustration and clarity exercise

11:32 How to tell if you’re comfortable or complacent

15:20 The one question every practice owner should answer

16:07 The future-you test for your practice

22:42 When to keep pushing and when to take a break

This episode was produced by Podcast Boutique https://www.podcastboutique.com

Use the same marketing company as Dr. Etch!

Get your free demo with Relevance Marketing by Clicking Here

If you are ready to increase your new patients and start growing your practice, visit www.relevanceonlinemarketing.com and see what you've been missing with your current company. 

Take Control of Your Practice and Your Life

We help dentists take more time off while making more money through systematization, team empowerment, and creating leadership teams.

Ready to build a practice that works for you? Visit www.DentalPracticeHeroes.com to learn more.

That uncomfortable moment when you roll out a new system and your team goes quiet isn’t about the system at all. It’s about what they think it means. 

We’re talking about one of the most common breakdowns in dental practice leadership: we introduce training, new workflows, or higher standards with good intentions, and our team hears an accusation. I share a real example from my own practice after we dropped Delta and saw a decrease in new patients. I pushed case presentation training and treatment coordinator training to improve case acceptance, help more patients say yes, and reduce financial pressure. Months later, I walked into a lead meeting and could feel the tension, then heard the hard truth: the team felt like I blamed them for everything wrong in the office.

From there, we unpack the core idea: your team often isn’t resisting change, they’re resisting the story they created about why you’re implementing it. You’ll learn how to make your intentions visible, how to build a culture where training and feedback are normal, and how to diagnose resistance with curiosity instead of defending yourself on instinct. If you’re working on dental practice systems, team communication, and leadership habits that let the practice improve without constant battles, this one will land.

If you want help applying this to your practice, book a free strategy call at dentalpracticeheroes.com/slash strategy. And if this helps you lead with more clarity and less stress, subscribe, share the episode, and leave a review so more practice owners can find it.

If you are ready to increase your new patients and start growing your practice, visit www.relevanceonlinemarketing.com and see what you've been missing with your current company. 

Take Control of Your Practice and Your Life

We help dentists take more time off while making more money through systematization, team empowerment, and creating leadership teams.

Ready to build a practice that works for you? Visit www.DentalPracticeHeroes.com to learn more.

"They're lazy." "They don't care." "This person is the problem." You probably said something like this the last time you got annoyed at the office.

In this episode, the DPH coaches break down what to do the next time someone on your team drops the ball. You'll learn the difference between being decisive and being judgmental, when to act immediately or take a pause and get curious, and how to address problems without putting anyone on the defensive.

Topics discussed:

00:00 Introduction

02:11 The mistake most owners make

05:26 How your team labels you too

06:23 When acting fast backfires

10:52 Judgmental, patient, or decisive — how to tell

13:40 The question that works better than "why"

16:16 Why you're really annoyed

17:03 Why addressing it now helps you later

19:07 Building your practice's constitution

This episode was produced by Podcast Boutique https://www.podcastboutique.com

Use the same marketing company as Dr. Etch!

Get your free demo with Relevance Marketing by Clicking Here

If you are ready to increase your new patients and start growing your practice, visit www.relevanceonlinemarketing.com and see what you've been missing with your current company. 

Take Control of Your Practice and Your Life

We help dentists take more time off while making more money through systematization, team empowerment, and creating leadership teams.

Ready to build a practice that works for you? Visit www.DentalPracticeHeroes.com to learn more.