📍  Hello everyone and welcome back to No Silver Spoons. I'm your host, Sarah Beth Herman, CEO of dentistry support, and today is a special episode. I want to talk about something I believe is one of the biggest operational misunderstandings in dentistry. Now, if you're listening to this episode and you're not part of dentistry,

you're gonna learn something from it. But if you are part of the dentistry world, listen up. Strap in. We are getting to work today. The topic I'm gonna talk about is something that actually affects your stress levels, your team's happiness, your profitability, and the overall health of your business. And that topic is efficiency versus perfection.

Because if you've been in dentistry for any length of time, you've probably experienced this very moment. You walk into the office, the phones are ringing. The patients are at the counter. Insurance needs to be verified. There's two people already in the lobby waiting to be checked in. Claims are aging.

Someone needs help with a treatment plan. A patient is asking questions about their bill. The schedule has holes in it, and you look at your front office team and you're thinking. Why can't we just get everything done? Why can't the insurance verification be perfect? Why isn't billing caught up? Why can't every phone call be answered immediately?

Why can't every claim be paid instantly or at least on time instead of aging to 30, 60, or 90 days? Why can't every employee just be perfect? Now did everything I say just stress you out and immediately make you think I've got to turn this podcast episode off because holy cow, that's really stressful.

And this episode is meant for you right now. You listening, the one working in the dental office right now, the one that owns the practice or leads it wholeheartedly. You are asking people to do a job that is structurally impossible, and when we expect perfection in a system that isn't designed for it, what we create is frustration.

Frustration for the team, frustration for leadership, frustration for patients. And frustration for the business. So today I want to talk about the shift that changes everything for a dental practice. And that shift is this. Efficiency matters more than perfection.

You see, dentistry doesn't have a people problem. Dentistry has a structure problem. In most practices, the front office has quietly become the catchall department. Here is your warning. The list I'm about to rattle off, it's going to stress you out, but it's meant to make a huge impact. Your catchall front office is answering phones, greeting patients, verifying insurance, submitting claims.

Posting payments. Following up on aging reports, collecting balances, managing cancellations, scheduling treatment, communicating with clinical, handling patient's concerns, helping the doctor, helping hygiene, helping your assistant, helping everyone, and structuring what needs to be covered in tomorrow morning's huddle.

The reality is simple. We hear that list right now. But most days we're not hearing it and we're wondering why things are falling through the cracks. When one department is responsible for everything, it becomes impossible to focus on what actually drives the business. But every C-suite at A DSO is expecting perfection, and somehow that's translated into the single owned practices or even the five to seven group practices.

And what actually drives a dental practice forward is not admin work. It's revenue producing activity. It's answering new patient calls. It's scheduling treatment. It's filling open chair time. It's protecting recare. It's helping patients say yes to treatment that has been prescribed Those activities, they create production.

 But when your front office is drowning in administrative tasks, those activities, they disappear. Let's just take a shift for a second and talk about something most dentists never even learn in dental school. The financial structure of a dental practic. You see, the average dental practice operates with around 60 to 65% overhead, which means for every dollar your practice collects, more than half is already gone before you pay yourself.

And the single largest expense category in most dental offices is, you guessed it, payroll. Personnel costs, they often account for 25 to 30% of collections. And in me saying that, it's extremely generous because most of the dental practices I speak to when I ask them to pull up their p and l or to ask their accountant for it and look at what their personnel costs are, it's typically 45 to 49%.

And maybe you're shocked hearing that. But I promise you there are practices out there, hiring front office team members at way higher of a revenue cost than they should be. Now when I talk about personnel costs, I mean your front office assistance, hygiene benefits, payroll taxes, and so much more.

So staffing. It's not just a people decision, it's one of the most powerful financial levers and your entire business. And when staffing becomes inefficient, your profitability is suffering immediately. Your team is overwhelmed and your leadership is exhausted. When most dental practices feel overwhelmed, the natural reaction is really simple.

Let's hire another person. You've said that in the last two weeks, I promise. Do we just need more staff? But hiring is expensive in ways that most people don't calculate. You see, it's not just salary. It's the recruiting process and everything. You used to recruit them. That costed money. It's the interviewing process and who you paid to interview, even if it's just yourself and maybe you're not on salary, you're on an owner draw.

It's training, it's onboarding, it's management, turnover, coverage gaps, overtime, human error, retraining taxes, leadership time benefits. Paid time off sick time. And I understand this better than most people because since 2014,, in my own company that I solely own and I am the CEO for, I've personally hired over 700 people.

So when I talk about hiring challenges. I'm not speaking from theory. I'm speaking from experience,  one of the most important lessons I've learned through all of that hiring is this. Most dental practices are not overworked.  They're misallocated. Your best people are stuck doing tasks that don't grow your business.

They're working on old money instead of new revenue. They're chasing claims instead of filling the schedule, they're buried in admin instead of helping patients move forward with treatment. That is not a talent problem, you guys, that's a workflow problem.  One of the most dangerous illusions in dentistry is confusing.

Busy with productive. Your front office might look incredibly busy all day long. Phones ringing. Insurance questions, patients talking to them, tasks everywhere. Paper piling up, but busy doesn't equal productive because the activities that grow a dental practice are very specific. Answering new patient calls, scheduling, treatment, filling, canceled appointments, maintaining recare, improving treatment acceptance, protecting the schedule.

These are the activities that are generating revenue. Nothing outside of that. So I'm gonna repeat this again. Answering new patient calls, scheduling treatment, filling cancellations, maintaining recare, improving treatment acceptance and protecting the schedule. But when your team spends the majority of their day buried in administrative work, those high value activities get pushed aside.

So when someone asks me, Sarah Beth, , what am I gonna do with my front office if I hire dentistry support to do my billing, my eligibility in my phones? answer's so simple, you're gonna have them answering new patient calls, scheduling treatment, filling cancellations, maintaining recare, improving treatment acceptance, protecting the schedule.

That's it. Those high value activities should never be pushed aside, and that's what they're gonna be focused on. Let me share a quick story. A few years ago I was working with a dental office and they felt like they were constantly drowning, and maybe this story will feel like I'm talking about your office, but that's how common this is.

Great doctor, great team. Amazing patient care like next level, but every day was just this chaotic mess. The insurance verification wasn't caught up. Their phones were ringing constantly, and patients were going to voicemail because they couldn't answer the phones quick enough. The schedule had holes everywhere.

The front office team was overwhelmed and literally in this scramble mode because there were always holes and always cancellations that they were literally filling same day, but because they were filling the schedule, same day, insurance wasn't verified. And because they were constantly on this treadmill and hamster wheel of filling the schedule.

No one was actually working aging, so their collections numbers were so low, and all of this wasn't because people didn't care, but it was because so many people had their hands in one pot trying to do too many jobs at one time. So I asked this owner one simple question,  who in your office is responsible for making sure your schedule is full?

He paused for about three minutes, maybe a little bit longer, because I remember on the call it was such an awkward time of silence because he couldn't just answer who was responsible, like who's the one person. And I think that it was such a long pause because the answer in his mind was technically everyone, but also no one at the same time.

 You see, the front office was supposed to do it, but they were also verifying insurance, working, aging, sending claims, chasing claims, really posting payments, helping patients, answering phones, responding to clinical questions, training a new hire, figuring out payroll.  But once

We removed some of that administrative overload and then restructured the workflow, something very interesting happened. You see, overnight the team didn't become perfect. What they did become was effective. , Their phones were answered faster. Now that they're on board, their schedule was filled more consistently.

Now that we're working their claims. They moved to a predictability level so we could actually see what money was on its way and use that to forecast expenditures.

Once we actually took off billing from their plate, and our team sent daily recaps letting them know the status of claims every day. They no longer had to figure out how to fit that in. You see, we moved their claims to more of a predictability bucket where we knew what money was coming in so we could use that to forecast expenditures.

There were so many more efficiencies and effectiveness measures that we took and put into place, but ultimately the office felt like they could breathe again.  Now that experience for me in this office, it reinforced something that I believe deeply today and always, and in the future, I'll continue to believe the right system unlocks the right performance, not perfection, but efficiency.

Now, a lot of times I get on calls with dental offices and they want to talk about ai. So let's address this topic that everyone in dentistry is talking about right now. Artificial intelligence, ai, what it means, what it's doing, what we're talking about.  AI absolutely has a role in dentistry, but in my opinion, administrative dentistry is incredibly nuanced.

Insurance verification alone cannot involve frequency, limitations, missing tooth clauses, downgrades waiting periods, annual maximums, coordination of benefits, and thousands of different insurance plans behave differently. A system may retrieve information, but human judgment is still required. Knowing how To follow up on claims that are months old.

That should have never been to begin with, if we just would've submitted it with the right information to begin with. Knowing how insurance companies actually behave. Technology, yes, it can assist, but experience still matters, and I'll forever stand on the mountaintop that humans must touch insurance.

All the time. AI can't simply read every single insurance company's information and articulate that properly to those that are speaking to the patient in person. There are far too many intricacies that have to be addressed and looked at in every capacity, and this is exactly why I built dentistry support, not to replace your team.

But to protect them because your in-office team should be doing the things only they can do. Connecting with your patients, protecting your schedule, improving case acceptance, creating an amazing patient experience. What we do instead is we carry the administrative weight eligibility, billing phones.

Follow-ups. Insurance research, workflow support, and we do it with structure and accountability. While your traditional staffing often consumes that 25 to 30% of collections on a really good day, most days it's 45 to 49%. Our goal at dentistry support, is typically to operate

around three and a half percent or less, depending on the level of support required. And we don't charge a percent of collections, and we don't charge itemized fees for every little thing we do. It's a flat rate cost. We base our pricing on the number of FTEs or full-time employees needed for the workload you have.

That means our incentive is aligned with providing the right support, not taking a cut of your revenue. Support without accountability doesn't work. That's why our model focuses on structure daily recap, reporting, team monitoring, performance tracking, continuous training, workflow improvement. We screen our team carefully.

We monitor their output. We record and review interactions. We analyze efficiency and we consistently improve. We have even had third party case studies conducted on our workflows to evaluate and improve our operational performance. Because practices deserve more than just extra hands.

They deserve operational clarity. One of the biggest changes that leaders need to make is this, stop trying to build the perfect employee, start building the right systems. Perfect employees. They don't exist, but great systems do. And when the system is right, your team feels less stressed, your schedule becomes stronger, claims move more consistently.

Patients are happier and our leaders, you, you finally get your time back. Efficiency creates freedom and perfection creates burnout. Before we wrap up this episode. Here's your, that's good moment. The time of every episode where we really focus on things that you need to take from this episode and bring into your everyday life.

Here are three things I want you to remember from today's episode. Number one, your front office should be protecting and producing revenue, not drowning in administrative tasks. Number two, payroll is often the largest expense in dentistry, reaching up to 49% of collections. Which means inefficient staffing has a massive financial impact.

And number three, perfection is unrealistic and complex operations, but efficiency is absolutely achievable. And when efficiency improves, everything else gets better. And that is really good. Before you jump to our next episode, or even scheduling a call with our team, I want to leave you with a few quick updates.

First, if you're someone who likes listening to podcasts on faster speed, try replaying this episode at 1.25 or 1.5 speed, and see what ideas stick the second time around. Sometimes the second listen is where real perspective shifts happen. Second, if this episode made you think about someone you work with or a dental bestie you have, send it to them.

Text it to them, share it with a colleague, because the reality is a lot of people in dentistry are navigating the same challenges, and sometimes the best conversations start with, Hey, you should listen to this. And third, if you're curious about working with dentistry support and what that might look like for your dental office.

And maybe even what getting started looks like. It's actually so simple. Our onboarding process takes about 10 business days, and it happens in five simple steps. Step one is discovery and workflow review. Step two, SOP, alignment and system set up. Step three, team assignment and training. And step four, integration with your practice and workflows.

And step five, we're going live with support and reporting. Within about 10 days, practices typically have our team fully integrated and supporting their administrative workflow. And once you're onboarded, you have direct access to our team 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year through our HIPAA compliant chat system.

No more calling or no more emailing. Waiting for someone to get back to you. You can instantly connect with your team assigned to your practice. And yes, they're assigned to just your practice. You are not in a virtual warehouse of people where everyone has their hands in the pot. We are working just with you with your dedicated team.

That means secure communication with our team from anywhere. Your office, home, phone, laptop, wherever you are, because real support should feel connected. Not distant Dentistry support exists because dental practices deserve better systems, better workflows, and better support, and leaders deserve the ability to actually lead their business.

Again, thank you for spending time with me today on no Silver 📍 Spoons. I'll catch you on the next episode.