Turn Stress into Strategy: Mastering Work-Life Balance as a Dentist – Episode #644

On this episode of the Dentist Money Show, Jake Elm, CFP® has a conversation with his client Dr. Ben Friberg who shares his journey of becoming a dentist and practice owner. Dr. Friberg talks about what it takes to build a fulfilling dental career and shares how aligning his personal values with his business transformed his practice and his life. He highlights some strategies to overcome burnout, create a strong team culture, and embrace mentorship. Tune in for strategies on how to create a meaningful and successful dental practice.

Check out Dr. Ben Friberg’s book here!

Related Readings

Knowing vs. Doing

Annual Financial Benchmark Results for Dentists

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Podcast Transcript

Intro: Hello everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Dentist Money Show, brought to you by Dentist Advisors. We have a very special show today where we interview one of our clients, Dr. Ben Friberg. He works with our very own Jake Elm. and as we were preparing for this show, Jake did so much work, incredible work on an outline and coming up to, things to talk about in a discussion. Ben, and they, they work together, as advisor and client. So we thought, you know what? Let’s just have them do, have the discussion together. So this is a really cool opportunity to have an inside look between, one of our very own advisors. We’re talking to his client again, Dr. Ben Friberg, about his new book, who that is, that is releasing here pretty soon and they, they cover, A ton of different, very important topics from leadership to mindset to frameworks that, Ben has, come up with over his experience, being a dentist, being a really successful practice owner, and having some really, deep, meaningful and really, hard experiences in his life that he shares. You are not gonna wanna miss this, the life lessons that Ben shares. A really great conversation between Jake and Ben. As always, we hope you get something of value of this, and we hope you enjoy the show.

Jake Elm: Okay. I believe we are live. Welcome everybody to the Dentist Money Show. today on the show, we have a really special guest, Ben Friberg. Ben, how you doing?

Ben Friberg: I am doing really well. I’m excited to be here.

Jake Elm: I’m way excited for this

Ben Friberg: Long time Listener, first time guest.

Jake Elm: Longtime listener, first time guest. Yeah, Ben, I want to get to your story and introduce you here, but. Just so the audience knows, Ben is one of our clients here, our dentist advisors.

We try to get on, we like to do these types of podcasts periodically, where we are bringing on real life dentists. I know a lot of times we have dental professionals and other advisors, and we talk about finance things, but I think for our listeners, it’s really helpful just to see and see and hear about the stories of other dentists who are actually practicing out in the field. I don’t know, Ben, if you experienced this, you probably have, but a lot of times when I’m talking to other dentists. Being your own practice owner can be a bit of an isolating profession where it’s like, I’m doing the best I can, I’m doing the things that was taught to me by maybe my mentors, but I don’t really know what anyone else is doing. And I would actually like to know more. This is why conferences are so popular and dentists like to get together, study clubs and whatnot, to talk to other dentists, but maybe listening to this podcast can help a little too of just seeing your, of hearing about your experience and maybe they can relate to what you’re going through anyway.

So let’s get started here. Ben, I just wanted to open up again. We’ve known each other for a few years now. I’ve been working for a few years, I’m not quite sure I knew exactly about your winding path to dentistry, which I’m curious to dive into a little bit here. Before we get into that, sorry, Ben, just briefly introduce yourself, where you live, a little bit about your practice, just kind of where you stand currently.

Ben Friberg: Yeah, so I Dr. Ben Friberg. I’m a dentist in Wilmington, North Carolina. I’ve been practicing for a decade. I’ve had my startup, it’s been open for six years now, and focus on just kind of bread and butter dentistry. I place some implants when it’s easy, I’ll do, you know, some premolar endo if it’s easy. Uh, but, you know, do some veneers when the patient wants ’em. But nothing, nothing out, you know, nothing crazy. I’m not like a full arch, you know, every week doing four cases or anything like that. Really enjoy my time off. I work, uh, three and a half days a week and I take seven weeks off per year and make sure that I spend all of the holidays that my kids are off of school. I schedule off of work to make sure that I’m present for them and that I’m living life now, as best I can. I.

Jake Elm: Super cool. Okay, let’s get into all of that, Ben. I mean, part of the reason you’re on here is we’ll talk about your book that you’re launching here at the end too, and your kind of consulting business trying to help other dentists achieve what you found right in your first decade of. Practicing here. Let’s start from the beginning, ’cause I always maybe wanna set up a timeline here.

Ben Friberg: Yeah.

Jake Elm: Again, I read through your book that you have, which we’ll talk about here, but you had a bit of a winding road to dentistry. You started a little bit later. Is that right? Getting into dentistry. So where’d you start your career and how’d you make it to dentistry? Decide you wanted to become a dentist.

Ben Friberg: So I started off wanting to be a general contractor, so I’ve got a business management degree and a minor in construction engineering. And right outta school I was vice president of a regional construction company. So I, I, started from scratch, the Portland division and the Seattle Division of Empire Community Construction, and we focused on rehabilitation of existing properties. And I ran that, company, it was the one of the fastest growing divisions in the company. Ran that for several years and had about a hundred employees, several million dollars in, in, in, uh, revenue, and kind of hated every minute of it. Like

Jake Elm: What did you hate about it? I’m curious on what wasn’t vibing with you.

Ben Friberg: You know, an office space where he is like. Every day is worse than the day before. So you’re, when you ask me how I’m doing, it’s the worst day of my life. Like, that resonated with me because it was an industry that was very cutthroat and it wasn’t, there wasn’t a lot of integrity. There was a lot of back, you know, back channel act action going on in that level of, of construction, you know, walking into somebody’s boardroom and, and trying to, to book a half million dollar construction project. There’s people who are gonna do things. That you’re not comfortable doing to get that type of work. And I was starting to realize that more and more that it wasn’t a, it wasn’t the the way that I wanted to do business. The other thing was that what I was doing, I didn’t feel personally connected to, I didn’t feel like it was a valuable thing for me to be doing in my life.

I wanted to have a personal, meaningful connection with the people that I was working with. And that’s what kind of started steering me towards medicine. I looked at, into going into being a physician. I looked at being a physical therapist for a long time, but my mother-in-law’s a dentist and she really, she really got ahold of me over a couple years and was like, you need to be a dentist. You need to be a dentist. These are all the reasons why, and I remember actually I was, I was I back in school to be a physical therapist working on just this nasty paint job with my brother and we were, we had to wear bunny suits ’cause it was lead-based paint. It was 90 degrees. And she called me and said, you get to work for yourself. You work four days a week, you get a finished product, you get to build relationships with patients. And I’d been ignoring her this whole time and I, you know, I put my respirator back on and my brother was like, what was that about? And so I told him and he is like, yeah, sounds real bad. And that was the trigger that, that was the big switch that kind of opened my mind to dentistry. And it’s kind of been that way ever since. And so I went back to school and graduated when I was 33. So I was one of the old guys in class.

Jake Elm: Yeah. It’s funny that we call 33-year-old now, looking back when it’s, again, you’re so young, you’re just getting started. I think that’s a great point, Ben. We do a lot of conferences and I’ll go do speaking gigs at a lot of these dental schools, and sometimes I get this sense around dentistry from a lot of these kids who are just getting into it. They’re like, I don’t know. My student loan balance is pretty high. I’m going to talking to all these dentists and they’re complaining about being in, in the chair and their back is hurting and there’s a lot of these financial obligations and I don’t know if dentistry’s as great as I thought it was getting into it.

I love hearing that other side of it. And we see this all the time working directly with dentists. It can be a. Really awesome profession. It really can be. You can be your own boss, you can create a flexible schedule. You gotta help people for crying out loud, which is really fulfilling, and you can make good money while you’re doing it. So I still think even with huge like skyrocketing student loan balances and all this stuff here, the corporatization of dentistry, which people are worried about, I think you find, and I agree with that, dentistry can still be an awesome, awesome profession, right?

Ben Friberg: Yeah, absolutely. you know, the process that I talk about in my book, because what ended up happening to me was the same pattern of working really, really hard and doing everything for my construction company and getting that off of the ground, and then making sure that it was operating, you know, I was, you know, my territory of of projects was over five to six hours. Of driving between my northern most and southern most, and I was a road warrior and working, working, working and not, not enjoying my life. And then when I would spend the time doing the things I enjoyed, I was so tired and stressed that I didn’t enjoy them anyway.

Jake Elm: Yeah.

Ben Friberg: And so I started doing the same thing in dentistry and it was leading me to start feeling the same way that I’d felt in construction as I was about my, my practice, my pride and joy, you know, built it from scratch and it’s gorgeous and it’s just everything I always wanted. And I started to resent it and I realized that I had to take a big step back and I had to identify what my personal vision was for my life, what my personal mission was, and my personal core values. And then from there, understanding what I wanted out of my life first. Then designed the practice and made decisions in my practice to reflect that truth first, not the other way around cause I was putting my practice above all else. And as dentist know, the practice will take whatever you’re willing to give it.

Jake Elm: Yeah, this is great, Ben. I mean you’re, I want to take a step back here ’cause this is awesome, what you’re touching on here. So you decided to get into dentistry? Yep. You did a startup, opened up your own practice. Talk to me about those first couple of years of just, again, like the practice on emm. Curious on your first couple of year experience with your startup.

Ben Friberg: So as a startup, I used ideal practices. Shout out Jamie Amos and Steven Schroder. Um, fantastic, fantastic group to work with. If you’re doing a startup and in the first year, I was one of the fastest growing startups in the nation. You know, we had, we had done over a million dollars in production in the first 12 months, and covid shut me down on month 10. So, you know, it was, uh, it was stressful for sure. but we, we had a really good marketing plan. My previous experience in business kind of showed me what it takes for advertising and marketing to drive growth in a business. And within the first, by the end of year three, we were at over $2 million in product. We, 2.1 million in production. Um, solo doctor, you know, at that point I had a team of 11 and. We were exhausted. We were absolutely exhausted. ’cause I had an associate mindset still of production, not profit.

Jake Elm: Yeah. You mentioned in your book what you were doing, 8:00 AM to late PM days frequently. I mean, how often was that happening?

Ben Friberg: So as an associate, I would work a 12 hour shift and in my practice while I was splitting.

Jake Elm: Uhhuh.

Ben Friberg: So I would work a 12 hour shift on Mondays and on Wednesdays, for a while.

Jake Elm: God.

Ben Friberg: But I, you know, I, I was able to get out of that within seven months. So I was able to be full-time in my practice every seven months. And we still work 12 to 12 on Mondays. which was just one of the reasons I did it was ’cause the corporate dental chain across the street was doing it. And I thought I had to compete directly with them. Um, come to find out you don’t,

Jake Elm: Yeah.

Ben Friberg: You know, they, uh, they’re a great source of, of patience. yeah, so I just felt really burnt out. I, I realized like if I continue in this path of production, production, production, I. It’s going, it is gonna end the same way that my construction company did.

Jake Elm: So was there ever, was there a turning point then, Ben? Okay. You started out this practice, you’re feeling like, okay, production. Production production’s my focus, and you had some success really early on. Again, going from a million in the first 12 months, all way up to 2 million from the outside. You’re looking at those numbers like, this is great, this is what every practice owner wants, is to grow at this rate. But was it all. Peachy and Rosie from the inside of it, or how are you feeling during this ramp up process?

Ben Friberg: You know, part of it was exciting ’cause it was the startup phase and you’re, you’re celebrating all of these new benchmarks, all of these new wins. Oh my gosh. We’re, look at how great we’re doing. So that, that was motivating in itself. But once you finally got to the top of the mountain and I’m looking around, I realized I was probably on the wrong mountain. Right. And so the big trigger, there’s two, two events that happened that kind of triggered me to realize this. The first one is I got home at like nine o’clock at night. My kids were asleep. And on the drive home, my wife sent me a text that said there was a nine word text. Kids are in bed, they missed you again tonight. And it was the word again, right? It’s like it’s still kind of, I, I get a little bit emotional thinking about that. And I got home and I remember kind of walking into my daughter’s bedroom and, and she had this little elephant snuggie and I picked it up off the floor and I put it on her neck. And the question kind of came up is how many more agains well, they experience right of me not being there, but it wasn’t just me not being there physically, it’s when I was home, I was so tired or stressed again that I wa I still wasn’t there. We were at a point where we would go on vacations and it would take me two days before I could wind down enough. I would be irritable, I would be absent. I wouldn’t wanna engage ’cause I was so exhausted that I couldn’t be present. The life that I was doing this practice for, it was completely opposite priority set for my life. And so that’s, that. Those were the kinda the big triggers. And I got, I got to work the next day and I looked at my team and they were all just kind of staring at the floor, tired, exhausted. And I thought to

Jake Elm: They were feeling the same way. You were feeling someone. I mean, they felt that

Ben Friberg: Yeah. I mean, we’re, we, were a close team, a great working team. But you know, it was like how many more agains will they experience in their, you know, in their families and their lives? And so that’s where we started to really change the way that we operated the practice.

Jake Elm: Okay. Yeah. That’s so interesting. I love that story where that the family aspect was kind of that. It’s funny you remember that one individual night where it was maybe like an uneventful night, like there was nothing special about that day, but for some reason that was a turning point there for you. Well, let’s get into this. I want to talk about the switch then of Okay. Feeling burnt out, not being there for your kids. I mean, it was really taking a toll on you and then making that decision. Okay. Why? You know, you always use this term, the practice should serve the dentist. Right, Ben? Which I really like. Cool. Let’s get into that a little bit more of, so like what were some of the changes you started to make? Like once you had this realization like, this isn’t working for me on a personal level, the practice should be helping me not the other way. What were some of the changes you started to make that you felt made a big impact?

Ben Friberg: Yeah, the practice should serve the dentist, and that doesn’t mean that everybody in the practice serves the dentist, right? It’s not this monarchy where you’re sitting on a throne that’s. Actually the opposite of, of what the book talks about, about how to build a hierarchy structure of support for your team and then your patients that you are the foundation of. But I needed to, to create specific goals for the practice that had daily, daily production and collection goals that met certain criteria for profitability that allowed me to take time off.

Jake Elm: Okay, so that was one of the big things you identified first is like, I just need more time off with the family. Right.

Ben Friberg: Yeah. Yeah.

Jake Elm: One of your big goals there.

Ben Friberg: You know, I, I had taken maybe two to three weeks off per year and almost felt guilty about it. I would always get a locum teems doctor in, and I would make sure that the practice was still busy. And then I realized they need a break too. And so we created a production and collections kind of schedule. That allowed us to work 168 days per year, so less than right half of the year. So it turns out for me it’s seven weeks off per year is what I take. And we did it in such a way that the practice is more profitable because we’ve made our schedule so efficient during each day, we work our butts off. Like it’s, it’s, they’re, we’re working, right? We’re packing those days. We’re still producing the same amount. We’re actually producing more now. We collect more now than we ever did before, and I take much more time off. And so that was creating a, a goal that everybody understands. They understand the purpose of the goal and the benefit of the goal so that we can have, and they all get, they all get six weeks paid vacation in my practice.

Jake Elm: Okay. Yeah.

Ben Friberg: So it’s, it’s a mandatory vacation that everybody has to take when I’m off. The, the lights are turned off and the the doors are locked so that we all get that rejuvenating time with our families so that the practice serves us.

Jake Elm: Was there any ramping up period, Ben, to get to this seven weeks off, or did you just go from one to the other because

Ben Friberg: It was,

Jake Elm: Yeah.

Ben Friberg: We looked at the numbers and the practice could support it,

Jake Elm: Okay.

Ben Friberg: We had, we had the collections that we needed to keep the practice profitable if we are able to hit those daily goals.

Jake Elm: Okay, because I talked to so many dentists who are terrified of this, right? Where I will talk to many doctors who are like, yeah, I am burnt out. I know I need to take time off. But I am just really scared to do so. Like it’s not only just the cost of the vacation, but when I’m out of the practice, our collections are gonna go down and maybe the patients are going to get mad, they’re not going to understand either, and they’re just really scared to take some time off. And so that’s why I was wondering like, did you just also make a decision to do this and everything worked out, or you just really knew your numbers and you’re like, Hey, the practice can support it as long as we reach our, like was there any dip in. Collections or productions. When you started implementing these weeks off, like that first year that you started doing this, did you have to take a step back? Income wise?

Ben Friberg: One of the things that we did is we realized that we were in network with some very, very unprofitable PPOs. So when we looked at our overhead. Then we looked at our writeoffs, our overhead was more than the write off,

Jake Elm: Oh wow.

Ben Friberg: So that was non-profit dentistry. And I, I’m an entrepreneur in a for-profit business, and so I realized that I had to get rid of those in network relationships so that my fee for service and my high-end PPO patients were not subsidizing these bad insurance plans. So we, we made a very conscious decision. To change relationships that were no longer profitable. And that increased our ability to see patients that were profitable. So our collections went up and our production went down. So our profitability, and you were part of this process, Jake, you saw the numbers, you’re like, what’s going on in your practice?

And this was part of the process, was we were very intentionally, we created a spreadsheet of write-offs based on insurance plans versus overhead. And as our overhead went down. Our profit went up. We started getting rid of more and more unprofitable insurances to the point now where we’re balanced, where our schedule is full, but it’s not overbooked and it’s not booked with unprofitable dentistry. And that was a big thing that we had to focus on, and that took us a year and a half to do methodically and successfully so that we didn’t just. Blow up our practice and, you know, some of the, one of my coaching clients was told by a very well-known consulting company, just, yeah, just pull the bandaid off, go out of network, you’ll be fine. And it almost bankrupt him. And I’ve been coaching him for the last year to rebuild this practice and luckily now he’s, he’s back to over seven figures. but you gotta do it smart.

Jake Elm: I see that often as like, yeah, this, the pull this, the bandaid off method where it’s like I, it’s hard to calculate the numbers. I don’t really know my own numbers, so I’ll just try this and see if it works. Um, so you’re saying like if you had to give one piece of advice then for dentists who are looking to take time off or anything like that, is it really just knowing your numbers, just know exactly. Collections, production, your insurances, just, would that be it? Or would would it be something else?

Ben Friberg: Well, let’s say that you’re working 20, let’s say you’re working every day of the month, right? You’re working 20 days per month. But you’re averaging $5,000 a day in collections. That’s not very productive. That’s not very efficient. You could work $10,000 days and work 10 days a month and you’ll have the same collections and work half as much, and you can still pay all of your team the exact same amount of dollars. So you give them 10 days paid off. Because they made the same amount of money for the practice. Your overhead stays the same. But the biggest difference is now you’ve got all this time off, you’re recharged. You’re more likely to do dentistry. You’re more likely to do same day dentistry. When you’re charged up, you’re more likely to actually diagnose dentistry when you’re charged up. There was a study done that doctors diagnose significantly less on Thursday afternoons than Monday mornings.

Jake Elm: Oh really?

Ben Friberg: Cause we don’t wanna do the dentistry. So when you’re looking at it, it’s like, eh, that’s a watch. Like you’re, you’re so tired and you’re so burn out, you can’t even think about doing the work. So you’re not diagnosing it, you’re not communicating, you’re not actually spending the time with the patient to, to educate them on the benefit of it because you’re so dang tired.

Jake Elm: Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay, let’s, that’s great, Ben. Let’s pivot here. I mean, not really pivot, but stay on the same topic of. The practice to serve the dentist. I really love that phrase that you talk about there. You also mentioned in your book and was talking to you, you always talk about values, right? Like, what are the values of your practice? What should you be prioritizing? do you have any recommendations for how to go about that? Or Ben, what did you do when you’re like, okay, I’m, I’m taking a step back here. I need to figure out what my values are. Can you just talk about what your values were? How’d you identify those? And how that led to kind of having this practice aligned with, with what you want.

Ben Friberg: So, yeah, practice alignment. Right? So aligning your personal vision, mission, and core values with your practices.

Jake Elm: Okay. Yeah.

Ben Friberg: That’s, that’s. So beneficial, right? Because when things are not in alignment, they’re pulling you apart, and that’s where that stress comes in. That’s where being worn out comes in, right? Because it’s not truly fulfilling. So it’s not rewarding you, it’s actually taking from you. So when you do an exercise to figure out what your practice, vision, and mission and core values are. It helps you align yourself to what you truly want in your life and then out of your practice. And then when you routinely communicate that to your team through morning huddles, through one-on-ones, through your monthly meeting. If you are continually using those tools of leadership to empower your team, they are going to be building the practice of your dreams with you. So when you are, when you have this just crystal clear picture of what it is that you want out of life and in your practice, and then you communicate that really well and consistently, the people who stay in your team resonate with you, and that energy is positive and it helps create that culture and practice where your practice is fulfilling and serving you. The people likely who do not believe in that same vision or mission or core values, that picture that you want out of your practice in life, they will self-select out. Right. Or sometimes you do have to cut them off. Right. You know, we, in the book, I actually talk about how important it is to protect your culture by firing people, but or as I say, make them available to the free market economy.

Jake Elm: Yeah, I mean, this is so smart, Ben. It seems simple or almost obvious, right? Like of course you would want a business that aligns with your own personal values, but this feels like one of those things that’s way easier said than done, right? Like, I, I get this when, when we’re doing just personal financial planning for clients where we like to ask like, what do you want out of life? What are your goals? And sometimes people will say. I’m not really sure. Or they’ll give you the classic, yeah, I wanna spend more time with family. I want to go on some extra vacations. But they don’t really have a clear picture of what does like my rich life look like? You know what? What do I actually want? I think that’s hard to find a little bit there. I liked your story, you told, I just wanted to hit on this ’cause I liked the story in the book where then you said one day. Like you were on the verge of missing your son’s graduation, right? Elementary school graduation. Can you, I’m just curious on just trying to help people figure out what their own values are. How did this experience like help you identify your values here of missing your son’s elementary graduation? I would just love if you could talk to that experience a little bit more.

Ben Friberg: Yeah, so one of my weaknesses is scheduling and calendaring myself. Well,

Jake Elm: Okay. Yeah.

Ben Friberg: I got my dates mixed up. So we’d closed the practice for the morning of my son’s graduation on the wrong day. So the, the day before I, I realized it and I had a full schedule of patients and. I think it was probably a $10,000 morning. And I told my family, I’m like, I’m so sorry. I, I, I can’t, like I made a mistake. And, and they understood and they’re like, okay, it’s, you know, it’s not that big a deal. And as I was driving to work, I passed my, my son’s elementary school and I remember just feeling this incredible sense of dread and just anxiety about the decision that I had made.

And I knew that, that that feeling that I was experiencing was because I was acting in a way that is not in line with my core values, my personal core values. And so I, I called my office manager. I said, Hey, I’m not coming in. I’m going to my son’s graduation. I know that’s really inconvenient for everybody, but it’s a decision that I have to make for myself and my family. And I closed the office for the morning,

Jake Elm: And they, you just rescheduled. Everyone closed the office and you went.

Ben Friberg: Yep. Because I, I know as an entrepreneur that I can, if I lost every one of those patients, they all hate me now, never gonna come back. That’s really unfortunate. And as an entrepreneur, I know that I have the tools available to replace them.

Jake Elm: That’s so cool.

Ben Friberg: I don’t have the tools to replace the experience with my son that that never comes back. So that for me was. One of those times where I knew that my personal core values have to trump my practice. Core values mission, right?

Jake Elm: Like your core values only mean something if you actually live by them. Right. Or implement, I think is the point that, right, you’re trying to make, I just love that story. The reason I wanted to highlight it is I will talk to a lot of doctors who say, Hey, I, I’m a little burnt out. I, one of my core values is to spend more time with my family. I would love to do that and, you know, attend more ball games, going on, more vacations, whatever it may be. and we’ll go through the numbers and I’ll say, okay, well, I mean you’re making a pretty good income here. You can’t afford to cut back a half a day or to bring on an associate. You’re like, you can cut back.

It may cost you a little bit of income, you know, or something on the front end, but you can cut back if this really is a priority to you. And I feel like often the response I’ll get is, oh, okay, well like, let’s just see how this goes. Like that. Dropping income or sacrificing something for those core values is sometimes people like, it sounds good in their heads, but when they’re like, Hey, you’re gonna lose 30 or $40,000 if you wanna prioritize your family here, they’re like, nah, never mind. You know? No one likes to see their income drop. And so this is where I just really taking some time to think about what do I really value? How important is this to me? Again, Ben, you would probably argue though there probably is a way around this where you can probably spend more time with the family and not have to have the drop in income, right? Like you said, like how you structure things. There’s a best of both worlds here. but I do wanted to highlight that sometimes there are sacrifices you may need to make. If there are personal goals that you want and you’re working yourself to death, maybe one of the solutions is just you’re gonna have to cut back a little bit to maybe you’re making a little bit less income, but that’s okay.

Ben Friberg: Yeah. Well, when you look at the stats of 30% of dentists retire early because of physical pain, right? Neck, back, shoulder, wrist. This is a marathon, and you need to be doing everything you can to treat yourself like this is gonna last 20 to 30 years. So if you’re into practice for 10, 15 years and you’re starting to feel burnout, that should the h, the house is on fire. Right. You’ve gotta figure out how to put that fire out and never reignite it because you have another 15 to 20 years of your career left. So being very intentional of what you want your life to look like and then designing the practice around that and part of, sure. Part of that is what is your income level, right?

What’s the lifestyle that you expect to live for the amount of work you’re putting into your practice? Some of the happiest dentists I know. Run relatively small practices. They take a ton of time off, and they live a, they live a very comfortable yet conservative expenditure lifestyle, and they’re loving life because they’ve shrank their expectations and they’ve shrank their workload and they’re doing great. And so I think that that’s the, the challenge is that how do you design that lifestyle that you’re happy and then work only as much as you have to to get there.

Jake Elm: I love that point of having a long-term view. I think it, we just, as humans, we make a lot of mistakes in lives when we’re only thinking about the here and now, and we’re not trying to see the full picture. Hopefully dentistry can be a long and lucrative career, and you need to make sure that you’re not burning yourself out or hurting your body. Unnecessarily when it’s like, hey, like the goal here is to be in this for the long run. Right? If you can build a practice that’s like, let’s have this be here around for decades. with that, like not getting burnt out, I did wanna talk about, Ben, you mentioned your book. One of the parts that really impacted me was just some of your, I. Issues with mental health and mental health struggles that I know you’re really passionate about. I wanted to hit on this, ’cause I think we don’t talk about this often on this podcast, or maybe dentists don’t talk about this often, but I know you’re is something you’re passionate about and like to touch on. So could you just tell us more about maybe some of your experience with mental health struggles and some things that helped you?

Ben Friberg: Yeah. So when I was running the construction company. Uh, ended up the stress and anxiety. You know, I was, I was 23 years old running a multimillion dollar construction company, and that was a lot of stress and I didn’t have the tools, the experience and the resilience to deal with that stress in a healthy way, and it led me into having really bad anxiety and then depression that turned into suicidal ideation.

And at one point in my life, I was alone in the woods with a gun, right? Like it was at that level of my life. And there was this stigma of taking antidepressants, taking medication to help me through this stage of my life. And I remember I, you know, I went to a mental health counselor and he said, Hey, I will not treat you unless you’re taking some sort of antidepressant. And I was very caught off guard by that. And I would, and he said, Hey. Would an M, would an orthopedic surgeon operate on your leg if it were broken? If you told him you were never gonna wear a cast and never wear crutches? Never use crutches. Never, ever. They’re like, it won’t be successful. We’re not gonna operate.

He goes, it’s the same way with mental health. There is something going on with an organ in your body and it needs help right now. That’s all it is. This is something. To help you get into a stable position so that we can then fix the problems. And so I, I did over two years of, of counseling, I did about two years of antidepressants, and through that process, I learned the tools to be mentally resilient to handle the stress of my career. This is something that dentists don’t get never in our training from high school to college, to to graduate school, to residency. We do not ever get taught the tools to deal with the stress of the job we’re about to have. What we do is incredibly stressful. We work in a dark wet hole with a tongue that can’t be controlled. We have to work as fast as we can and nothing can get wet. That’s crazy what we do and. We’re isolated, like you talked about before, we’re by ourselves. We’re the only one that has the knowledge, the risk, the liability. We’re the ones that write the check, so we are isolated from everybody in those rooms every day.

So all of that combined creates this just intense pressure that dentists feel, and we were never given the tools to deal with it. So if anybody is feeling burnt out, is feeling anxious and depressed, seek professional help to develop a skillset, a list of tools that you can use to help run this race for the rest of your career. And if you have any thoughts of suicidal ideation, any thoughts of suicide, reach out to someone. Find me through my website, whatever it is that is a permanent solution to a temporary fixable problem.

Jake Elm: That’s awesome, Ben. I’m glad I, I don’t, I feel like I can’t really follow up much there. I think you said that really well. I’m glad we hit on that here. super important, just anecdotally, I was talking to somebody the other day who they said, being a practice owner. They said, I’m, I like the phrasing. They said, I’m sick of being the person everyone comes to for their problems. Like, I have to fix everything. I’m the one putting out fires, not only in my business, but kinda on the personal side too, you know, being the head of a household and they were like, I’m really, they were contemplating moving to becoming an associate again, just for the fact of.

I’m sick of being the guy everyone cuts to for their problems. That weighs on you. And like you said, man, just the stress of owning a business, being your own clinician. You can feel like the weight of the world on your shoulders

Ben Friberg: Mm-hmm.

Jake Elm: And yeah, they don’t talk, of course, they don’t talk about it in the school or how to handle that, but handling like your mental health and making sure you’re equipped to handle this stress. I dunno, is that, that’s like one of the most important skills you can have or the most important skill you can have as a business owner, as a dental practice owner. Um, so I love that Ben, thanks for touching on that, sharing your story there.

Ben Friberg: Absolutely.

Jake Elm: That’s fantastic. Um. A few more things here. I just wanted to touch on and we will pivot a little bit here. Maybe some more like nuts and bolts types of things that you talk about of like running a successful practice in your book. Um, I wanted to talk about team and having the right culture. This is, this is something that I think like 100% of the practice owners I talk to in our meetings bring up, like their main struggle is their team and working with people, right? The happiest part of their day is when they’re in the chair. It’s kinda the easiest part there. Um. Tell me again, we can take this a bunch of different directions, but just some of the tactics and things you’ve used. Let’s start with the most broadest question of is there any silver bullet? Is there any magic system or tools we can use to try and hire a good team?

Is, is there anything you’ve found of like, this will help get better people around you or No? Is that too, I mean, I know there’s

Ben Friberg: There is no silver bullet in entrepreneurialism, right? As an entrepreneur, if anybody says this is the silver bullet, just walk on by. Right? It, it is, being an entrepreneur is, is incredibly challenging and there’s no one right way. What I can say though, as far as recruiting goes to help. To help onboard the best possible candidates is to have core values for your, have your mission, your vision, and your core values as part of your interview process. So this is something I teach my clients is when we’re hiring a new person, you want to draft questions before the interview that will be experiential reflective answers to lead to one of your core values.

Okay? So one of my core values is go the extra mile. The question I ask is, tell me about a time where you had to go above and beyond your job description.

Jake Elm: Hm.

Ben Friberg: Right? And so hopefully they’re gonna say, oh yeah, when I was doing this, I had to do these three other things, and it was no big deal. I just kind of did it ’cause it needed to be done. That’s the answer we’re looking for. Right? Or if it’s, you know, I want to have a positive team culture. So I ask a question, Hey, tell me about a time that you had a conflict at work with your coworker or a supervisor. I’m not saying the key here to these questions. Don’t follow that up with the, with the answer question of, and how did you deal with it? Leave that out. Leave it very open-ended, and not leading the witness, right? That’s gonna give you the best idea of how this person behaves. Regarding the way that you expect people to behave in your practice, but that starts back with those primary leadership principles that we talked about, vision, mission, core values, and then drafting questions from there.

Jake Elm: Okay.

Ben Friberg: Then the key to great team culture is conflict. Not having a lot of it, but it’s how you deal with it, right? We need to shape the way that people interact and behave. Into a cohesive group of people that all are doing the same activity towards the same goal. And so making sure that, Hey, you know what? These are the three things that I noticed today. I really love how you did X, Y, and Z, but you know what A, B, and C that wasn’t in line with our core values. Really wanna make sure that hey, the next time this happens, that this is the the way that you act. Thank you so much for all the hard work that you’ve put in.

Thank you for everything that you do. We really enjoy having you here. So we call it the crap sandwich, right? Compliment, accountability, compliment. And that’s done in private and it’s done in such a way that is a PO positive outcome for both parties. And that’s like when we talk about like getting the team together and like all that type of stuff. Those conversations are really important. The other thing with conflict is I tell my team the same thing I learned in marriage counseling. If you have a problem with someone, you have two choices. Bring it up using I statements and deal with it together,

Jake Elm: Yeah.

Ben Friberg: Or it’s not important enough to bring up, so you can’t harbor any feelings of resentment or anger or frustration. You do have to truly 100% let it go. There is no middle ground ’cause. Middle ground is called resentment and bitterness. The same thing is true in your marriage as it is on your team. So if you as the doctor, have a problem with the way that one of your team members is performing and you choose not to bring it up, you are not allowed to feel bad about it. So you have to have the courage to have those accountability conversations. And guess what? Employees who are held accountable, employees who have great job descriptions, employees who know exactly what that you expect from them. They are better performers and have higher job satisfaction than those who are ambiguously letting just living in your practice.

Jake Elm: Yeah. Yeah. This is why you come to the Dentist Money Show. ’cause not only are we giving you tips to help your practice, we’re giving you some marriage counseling tips, which is fantastic. We’re hitting on everything here. Um, Ben, are you again, like finding the right people’s, not an exact science. You kinda have to get lucky and the right people coming on more to on top of. Setting the culture like you talked about, which I think was great. Are you a quick, I mean, are you supposed to be quick to fire? Are you a person who’s, like, if they’re not hitting this team culture, you’ve had discussions with them. Do you just get rid of them? Do you keep working through with it? I’m curious on like if there’s dentists out there who are, like, I, I’m trying to implement this culture, but my staff isn’t quite living up to it, but I’m scared to fire them because who knows if I’m even gonna find another person who can replicate what they do. Any tips for that tough situation?

Ben Friberg: That, that situation is in every good entrepreneur’s mind at all times, right? Um, you’re either creating a leveling up strategy for every one of your employees and then proactively working with them so that they become their best versions of themselves within your practice. If you get to a plateau where your kind of performance improvement plans are not working anymore and their performance is not adequate for the position you need to replace them. But you do need to be honest with yourself before you do that and say, have I given this person every opportunity in the way that they learn to improve their performance? Have I held them accountable? Have I created a Pathway for success? Do they know the expectations and do they know how to achieve those expected results? And if those are all yeses, then yeah, you do need to make them available to the free market economy.

Jake Elm: Okay. I love the way, your way of putting that. Okay. I, we’re getting close to wrapping up here. I just wanna ask a few more things, getting a little more nuts and bolts, the marketing side of dentistry. I know everyone struggles with this. You have a section dedicated on this. you mentioned that you know, as a dentist you’re the chief marketing officer, right? Of your practice as a title you should embrace. What, is there a mindset shift that dentists need to make out there of like, what is that mindset shift around marketing? What is like a common mistake that you see of how dentists can change how they’re thinking about marketing?

Ben Friberg: So I would say the, the most common mistake is that they believe that hiring a website company is marketing

Jake Elm: Hmm.

Ben Friberg: And then you’re done. You just, they, they give you a budget, you give ’em the money, and then all of a sudden new patients start flowing and, and when they don’t, it’s all their fault. So you go, so what’s the solution? You gotta go find another one. You give ’em six months and they’re like, oh, I don’t have the 40 new patients per month that I want. Oh, next. Right? Marketing is a forever changing dynamic. Part of being a business owner. Marketing is always changing. Advertising tactics are always changing. What used to work then doesn’t work. Now. That’s like asking somebody who started a practice in the seventies, Hey, what was your marketing strategy? How’d you do so well? It’s like I, I put a sign on the front door and then people started walking in. That doesn’t work anymore. Right? So marketing is a very, very dynamic element of owning a practice, and you need to understand that.

So chief marketing Officer, right? You need to understand what marketing is in a broad term, right? Marketing is how do I communicate who I am and what I do to people who I want to work on or work with, right? To my potential patients. That’s marketing in general. There’s multiple tactics within that, internal and external marketing. Then there’s advertising, which is paying people to put your message in front of others. You need to know all of that and have an understanding of how that is working in your practice to get the patients that you want. You have to do the work. Beforehand though, who are the patients that I want? What’s the type of dentistry that I want to do? Do I have, you know, in, in marketing it’s called an avatar or ideal patient. Mm-hmm. So those are things that you need to understand. And then when you hire a marketing company, you need to work with them to communicate what you want, who you are, how you want to be perceived in your community, so they can create the, the imagery in the marketing and the branding around that. And then feedback on advertising. I work, I’ve got relationships with probably seven or eight different advertising companies, and the biggest thing that they always talk about is they never get feedback from the doctor.

Jake Elm: Uh,

Ben Friberg: They just say, I want more new patients. Like, do you, well the ones I sent you, what happened to them? Were they good? Were they bad? Right. More isn’t always better. So having an understanding of them, the ROI of your advertising, I got 10 new patients. I did $40,000 worth of dentistry on them in the first three months. That’s a good rl. You know? So having that communication of managing the marketing and messaging and, and. Holding them accountable is really, really important. It’s not a set it and forget it activity. I could talk for four or five hours on this.

Jake Elm: And one other thing with marketing, that’s awesome. You, I just wanted to hit on this because I thought it was fascinating. You talk about internal marketing too, right? Within your practice, not just external.

Ben Friberg: Oh yeah.

Jake Elm: To hit on that for just a quick second of what does internal marketing mean?

Ben Friberg: Internal marketing is communicating what you do as a dentist to those people who already trust and ni who know, trust and like you. Your current patients. So if you aren’t routinely asking patients what their goals are with their oral health, they’re going to go in and outta your practice without ever getting the dentistry that you want to do. So we routinely ask, Hey, you’ve been coming here for two years, we’ve just updated direct X-rays. Wanna make sure, do you have any changes to your oral health goals? How do you feel about your smile? Any changes to your smile that you’ve considered in the last couple years? I haven’t really asked you this.

I. But are there any changes? All of a sudden, patient’s been in my practice for four years. We just did 10 veneers. Right? And without the, oh, I didn’t know you did veneers. Oh, I do. And I love ’em. And you’re gonna love ’em too, right? So that’s the type of thing that’s internal marketing, is making sure that you’re continually engaging in marketing activities. The new patient exam, right? That’s a marketing activity. Communicating what you do to those around you in hopes to do dentistry.

Jake Elm: Awesome. Okay. Ben, we’ve talked about a lot of different things here. I think this has been fantastic. I’ve, I’ve loved it. From where you, when you started up your practice till now, we’ve talked about, I mean, getting to a successful practice. There’s a lot of different variables and things you need to consider, like we talked about today. I’m curious if you have, like, if you can pinpoint one thing or if there’s like one process or one system or one thought that has helped you, like that stands above the rest, like that’s helped you get from starting up to where you are now, where you’re feeling comfortable. Has there been one like thing that stands above the others or not really?

Ben Friberg: I ruthlessly, defend my company culture because I’m the only one who has to work there. Right. Everybody else chooses to, but I’ve, I mean, I can choose to, to close the practice and go be an associate. I can choose not to be there, but realistically, the activation energy for me to get out of my own practice versus one of my employees. So I make sure that my company culture is always top of mind and something that I’m always trying to improve. The other thing that I really keep top of mind, and this is a constant focus with, with our team. Is an elite level patient experience. So every single month when we have our monthly meeting, I ask the question, what is one thing that we can do to improve our patient experience?

Or one thing that we can stop doing to improve our patient experience. And those two questions keep guiding us to further and further, create an ex an experience that’s just exceptional. And so, you know, we, we have, In five being open almost six years now, we have over 905 star reviews. And it’s because that’s our focus. That’s our right. And if we can, if we can continue to deliver exceptional patient care, a lot of the other things start to help kind of figure themselves out.

Jake Elm: Awesome. I think that’s great. okay, Ben, I want to do end on a quick personal note from you quick and then we’ll get to where people, we’ve been teasing this book the whole time, right? We can kinda get to get to the book and tell people where they can find it. We like to ask people who come on the podcast, we have this term, a rich life, right? It’s like, what does a rich life mean to you? For the guests who come on, I always like to just prompt this question. You can take it wherever you want to. And so now that you’ve. You know, you’ve gone through this transformation in your practice, in your career, what does a rich life mean to you? How would you define that with where you’re at in your career right now?

Ben Friberg: Our family motto we came up with on one of our trips is, do hard things, make great memories, and be kind along the way. And that to me is kind of this reflection of a rich life of like we are, we are using this practice now to go travel, to go places that we’ve always wanted to go to, experience things we’ve always wanted to experience, to build the relationships and spend the time with the people that we love the most. And to have it in such a way that is not stressful to do Right. Is that, you know, we’ve allow, I mean, with your help and dentist advisors, right? We’ve created a financial plan that allows us to do those things comfortably. You know, we were talking earlier about living now

Jake Elm: Yeah.

Ben Friberg: And living later, right? Like it, and, and so that to me is what is the richest thing right now going on is all of those things kind of working together in harmony, working really, really hard, being very successful in the practice, and then enjoying life really, really well on the outside.

Jake Elm: Super cool. Super cool. Okay, well let’s tell people again. We’ve been teaching this book, um, for most of the podcast now, Ben, I just wanna turn the time over to you. Tell us the name of the book, when it launches, how people can get it. Just I just wanna turn the floor to you so people can get in contact with you here.

Ben Friberg: So yeah, www dot, uh, dr ben Friberg.com. That’s my website. And there you’ll find, the book called The Seven Figure Practice Blueprint, how to Lead, manage and Market, A Fulfilling Practice, and the, yeah, basically what we’ve talked about today, that personal vision, practice vision, then how to build a team, how to market, and then. Actually, there’s a chapter on philanthropy, like how do you actually use that to give back? So that’s the book. and that’s also part of our coaching program. That’s the, the book was developed off of the framework that we use when we do one-on-one personal coaching with dentists. So my goal is to help dentists who spent their entire careers learning how to be a dentist. I love working with them and help them become an entrepreneur. Right? I was an entrepreneur, luckily before I became a dentist. So the business element of this is something I truly love and am passionate about, and with good coaching, my doctors that are now entrepreneurs have made the same transition where they’re really enjoying the element of running the business instead of the business running them.

Jake Elm: Okay. That’s awesome, Ben. so yeah, and we’ll probably include that link in the show notes too, is, my guess is we’ll have that in there as well from wherever you’re listening to your podcast here. Ben, thanks so much for coming on. I had a blast here. Is there anything else you wanna share with the audience before we go? Anything top of mind that you wanted to get off your chest? If the answer is no, that’s fine too, but anything else you wanted

Ben Friberg: Big thing I wanna say is that I really believe that every dentist has the capacity to run a practice that creates a fulfilling life. And just like we had coaches and mentors and teachers that taught us how to do dentistry, I. To get there without a coach, without a, without a teacher, without a mentor, is a really, really hard way to do it. And so I believe that every dentist can get there. And I believe that coaching and teaching, just like we learned how to be a dentist, is what’s required to be a good entrepreneur. And so anybody can reach out to me, we can set up a discovery call. Talk about what your life goals are and how we can use specific entrepreneur tactics to create a practice that creates the life that you want.

Jake Elm: That’s a great ending note, I think. Right? This is, I mean, it’s so funny as a dentist, you go through all the schooling and there’s all these check boxes, and then you buy your practice and then you’re alone, right? And you’re just floating out there

Ben Friberg: What now?

Jake Elm: Yeah. It’s like, what now are we doing? It makes so much sense like, hey, let talk to somebody about this. Someone who’s been in your shoes, someone who’s done this before, who knows how it works. Getting more coaching and things is, is fantastic. Okay, Ben, that’s great. This has been awesome. I love this. for everyone who’s listening, thanks for listening, and we will see you next week.

Ben Friberg: Thank you.

Keywords: burnout, work-life balance, practice management, personal values, dental practice, entrepreneurship, patient care, professional growth, dental consulting,  mental health, team culture, coaching.

Behavioral Finance, Tracking Progress, Work Life Balance