📍   Welcome back to No Silver Spoons. I'm your host, Sarah Beth Herman, and in our last episode we talked about something that I think a lot of dental practices feel, but don't always say out loud, and that was the idea that perfection is not the goal in dentistry. Operations efficiency is, we talked about the reality that front office teams are often responsible for way too many things.

And we talked about the reality that front office teams are often responsible for too many competing responsibilities, from phones to scheduling, insurance verification. Billing claims, follow up, patient communication, treatment coordination. I'm sure if you're thinking of far more than I'm thinking of right now, but all while trying to maintain that exceptional patient experience.

And we discussed how that kind of workload structure can create a system where everyone is working incredibly hard. But the business still feels stuck. So today I wanna continue that conversation because if the last episode helps you realize the problem, this episode is about answering the next question.

What happens if you actually fix it? What would change in your dental practice if the administrative pressure on your team was finally reduced? What would your team be able to focus on? What would you as a leader, finally have time to do again? And what would it look like if your practice ran with more clarity and even less chaos?

Let me ask you something. If tomorrow morning your front office team suddenly had three to four extra hours per day, what would they focus on? Would they return missed calls? Would they schedule unscheduled treatment? Would they fill holes in the schedule? Would they follow up with patients who said, maybe I'll schedule next week.

Would they strengthen your recare system? Would they improve case acceptance conversions? Because those are the activities that actually move a dental practice forward. But those activities are usually the first thing sacrificed when administrative tasks. Begin piling up and when those growth activities disappear, practices often experience slower growth and more schedule gaps and more operational stress.

 And I know, you know what I mean. So let's talk about something important. Because whenever we talk to dentists about remote support, administrative support, and admin team, there is one concern that comes up almost immediately and honestly, it is a fair concern. The concern sounds something like this.

No one is going to care about my practice, like my team does. And I understand that feeling dentistry is incredibly personal. You built the practice, you built the relationships. You built the culture. You built the patient trust. So the idea of bringing in outside support, it feels uncomfortable at first, right?

But here's the important distinction. Dentistry support is not here to replace your culture. We're actually here to protect it because when your in-office team is buried in administrative overload, they have less time to deliver the experience you are actually craving that your patients have. When practices add our virtual team, something interesting actually happens.

The front office doesn't become less important. They're actually more valuable in my opinion. Because instead of being trapped in this task work mentality, they can focus on the parts of the job that require communication, even relationship building. Patients are getting better attention, we're not spending hours on the phone with the patients because we're trying to figure out the best answer. We know exactly what to do. Every call results in a conversion. Every reason someone calls is another reason production is going to happen In your practice, your scheduling is gonna become intentional and the team feels less overwhelmed.

They've got an accountability that they can now hold over a different team. People not in office people, they don't have to worry about if they're gonna call in sick. This is something that many practices underestimate. Burnout in dental offices is very real, and I know you felt it too. And it's not because people don't care.

It's not because dentistry has gone corporate. It's not because they're all about the money, but it's because the system asks us to do way too much at one time without understanding where exactly our focus should be. When a practice works with dentistry support, they're not just buying an admin team or administrative labor, if you will.

They're actually buying clarity for their practice and clarity around workflows, clarity around timelines, clarity around accountability, clarity around reporting. And most dental offices operate with limited visibility into that administrative performance. You might know that you have claims that are aging, but you might not know why or how many, or in what buckets.

You might know that phone calls are being missed, but how often you might know that insurance verification takes a really long time and it bogs down everyone, but. Not how consistently it actually is happening. One of the most powerful things that we bring to dental practices all over the United States is actually visibility, daily recaps, workflow tracking, operational reporting, performance monitoring.

And you might be thinking, wow, this is a really great commercial that you have, but it's not about that. Even if you never use dentistry support for your virtual team. This is the benchmark. This is what I want you to ask your virtual team to provide for you. If you have a former employee who wants to work from home or start their own business, having a virtual third party dental company, these are the things that they need to have, and if they're unwilling to provide recaps.

Daily workflow tracking, daily operational reporting, daily performance monitoring and tracking daily, if they're unwilling to do that, what's being hidden? What are they trying to just skate by with and collect a check on? Because when leaders have visibility, when they offer visibility. From our perspective, everyone can make better decisions.

We know what staff is needed. We know what tasks are not being done. We know what training needs to be had. We know what SOPs need to be defined.

 I guess, in my opinion, something that dentists rarely talk about openly and. It's called leadership fatigue. Running a practice is exhausting.

Hiring, training, managing scheduling, fixing problems, handling payroll, dealing with turnover, trying to grow the business, paying off student loans. I mean, you name it, I'm not even naming all of them, but you name it, you get it right. Most dentists did not become doctors because they dreamt of managing this administrative chaos that somehow has landed on our plates.

They became doctors because they wanted to help patients. Right? But somewhere along the way. The operational burden became overwhelming. And one of the things that we hear most often from practice owners after implementing our virtual dental office team , is this. Maybe it doesn't always come out as polished as this next statement, but along these lines, I feel like I can lead my business again.

I feel like I can go home with my family again, and I don't have to worry about blank. I feel like I can trust my front office again. You see, they're not having to just manage it. They're not having to just lead it. They can actually. Focus on growth, focus on strategy, focus on patients.

 Another concern dentists often have is implementation. They imagine months of disruption, complex systems changes, confusing processes, new technology that has to be downloaded and updated all the time, and all of these things. But the reality is, dentistry support is easy. It's the simplest process you can imagine.

Our onboarding process is about 10 days and everything happens through five clear steps. That one comes to you every other day for 10 business days, and it takes you 20 minutes to complete. We go through discovery and workflow, SOP, alignment, team assignment integration with your systems. You see, we don't even have a software.

There's no software that has to be downloaded. It's. Real actual people trained in dentistry to do it well, you have go live support within about 10 days. Most practices have our team integrated into their administrative workflows, and because communication happens through our HIPAA compliant chat system, practices have access to our team 24 7 365.

And that means you're never guessing where your support team is. You are fully connected with them directly. You don't need to speak to a higher up. You don't need to ask for a manager. You don't need to wait for a call back or send an email and think it went to the abyss. You can talk to us anytime. You just use our chat system.

, They're online at all times. You can even tag our admin team or our executive administrative assistants. You are connected with our team at all times. It's incredible. So I want you to ask yourself one question. If, if you're listening to this episode, ask yourself one question. What would your dental office look like if your team had the support they actually need?

What would your schedule look like if efficiencies were really something we prioritized? What would your patient experience look like if admin overload wasn't a thing in your practice? What would your stress level look like? If you knew your team had a team that supported them, what would your growth look like?

Because sometimes the biggest transformation in a practice doesn't come from new technology or new marketing, or even new clinical procedures or a new training or a new laser or a new product line, because sometimes the biggest transformation in a dental practice is fixing the operational structure behind the scenes.

Before we wrap up, as in every episode here at No Silver Spoons, we have a, that's good moment and it's the time in our podcast where we're coming to an end of this episode, and I want you to remember key things, things that you can take with you. You don't have to be a client of ours here at Dentistry Support in order to learn something from this episode.

 In fact, we hope that we are just dental friends in the biggest way because my goal in dentistry has always been to serve well with a grateful and open heart, and that doesn't mean that I just grow my business. I want to pour in. To the dental community, and so maybe you're a leader, maybe you're a front office team member, maybe you're a dentist, maybe you're the owner of A DSO, and you just wanna take something that you can implement into your business.

Please do that. Please find this moment of our podcast to wrap up what you've learned today and take it back to your team. Here are the three things I want you to remember from today's episode. Number one. Your front office is most valuable when it focuses on patients and scheduling, not the endless administrative backlog.

Number two, administrative support does not replace your team. It gives them room to perform at their best and actually grow your practice. I'm gonna tell you a small story before I get to number three. I was speaking to a dental practice about two months ago. They were considering our services and they were paying a team member in their back office that was literally just staring at a computer screen.

And what their job was, was to verify insurance. Now let's break down the salary of this team member. So this particular team member made $20 an hour, and she worked a full. 80 hours every two weeks. She made $1,600 every two weeks. Times that by two. That's your monthly cost of $3,200 a month, give or take expenses for taxes and different benefits and things like that.

We'll call it 3,200. For the sake of this experiment, we times that by 12, and that gets us to $38,400 now for $38,400. This team member. Only provided insurance eligibility verification. . So that means every day they just came in and they did that. They weren't adding revenue, they weren't doing anything that grew revenue.

They were simply gathering data. Okay? So gathering data, $38,400. We onboarded this practice, and for this particular practice, based on the size of their practice, we actually charge them $3,000 a month, flat rate, $46,000 a year. It Now. Their first question was, what do we do with this team member? If you're doing that, what am I gonna possibly do for them?

Well, now they're paying us $36,000 a year. They're also still paying the other team member her $38,000 a year. However, that team member now has a production goal on an annual basis, a monthly basis, and a daily basis. And so we are using the measure of three. So this team member, she makes $38,400 a year. Now we used a multiplier of three when we multiply that by three. In order for us to reach a profitability mark that we want to for this practice, her annual goal as a team member is to add $115,200 in revenue to the practice. She is now gonna take her 80 hours a week and focus it only on adding revenue from hygiene to.

Treatment. Her goal is just to add $152,200 a year. So what we did for this team member was we divided this by 12 to give her her monthly goal of $9,600 a month in added revenue. Then we divided that by the 20 days per month, and so she has to add $480 in revenue a day to the schedule. $480 a day. That's all she has to add.

Not only is she multiplying her. Payroll, but she's paying for herself to exist in this practice and add to the practice. She's not only covering her salary, she's covering the cost of dentistry support and bringing in a profit.

It now, this goal for her is only going to be for her first three months while she gets used to her position. We already have a scalable program in effect where she's actually going to be focused on scheduling $1,500 a day and that will happen. Shortly.

So what I want you to see is that number two of this, that's good moment, is administrative support does not replace your team. It gives them room to perform at their best. How is our team performing at their best? How are they adding to your production versus just sitting in a room when an admin team could be doing that?

Number three, efficiency and operations creates clarity, growth, and a better experience for both your team and your patients. That's what you take with you to your team. If you enjoyed today's episode, share it with a colleague who might be feeling the same operational pressure in their dental practice.

And if you're curious about what working with dentistry support might look like, you can learn more at any time by checking our show notes. Our onboarding process is about 10 full business days than it happens through five simple steps. We would love to support your dental practice in dental billing eligibility of.

Phone support and so much more. Our team at Dentistry Support provides onsite training, virtual intensive training, credentialing, medical billing for dental, and so much more. You can check the show notes for full details on the support we provide virtually for dental practices nationwide. Once you're onboarded, you have direct access to your team.

24 7 365 through our HIPAA compliant chat system, so you're always connected with the people supporting your dental practice. You can learn more about dentistry support@www.dentistrysupport.com. Until next time, thank you for joining me here at No Silver Spoons.  📍 I'll catch you on the next episode.