Do You Turn Your Back on These Front Office Mistakes? – Episode 75

Do you know what’s happening in your front office? Has your staff been properly trained to offer appointments, ask for payments, and deal with cancellations? In this Dentist Money™ episode, Reese welcomes Laura Hatch, founder of Front Office Rocks, an online resource for dentists who need specialized training for their team on all aspects of the front desk. Laura discusses the four most common challenges in the front office and their financial impact on a practice. She also offers solutions to improve communication within the office, strengthen your value proposition against the competition, and increase case acceptance.

Show notes:
https://youtu.be/YgbnDtCDlTM
www.frontofficerocks.com
laura@frontofficerocks.com

Podcast Transcription:

Reese Harper: Welcome to The Dentist Money Show, where we help dentists make smart financial decisions. I’m your host, Reese Harper, recording in studio this morning with a guest that flew in from San Diego and took little bit of a sketchy Uber ride to come over to the office. Laura Hatch is here from Front Office Rocks. How are you doing, Laura?

Laura Hatch: Good, I made it!

Reese Harper: Ya, I was surprised that you are doing well and alive. The text I got from you was like, “Great, everything is fine except I am in a sketchy Uber car and I’m worried for my life.”

Laura Hatch: Yes, I am worried about going back to the airport today. This guy had Kiss stuff all over his car and it was very dirty, but I made it.

Reese Harper: And you were on time, which was great!

Laura Hatch: No, but he did drive 45 MPH down the highway. I was looking around a little bit, but I made it.

Reese Harper: Maybe he was just being really safe.

Laura Hatch: Ya, he has done over 7,000 rides for Uber. I don’t know if I’ll give him five stars. When I leave town, I’ll think twice about that one.

Reese Harper: I have been really excited to have this interview because you have produced frontofficerocks.com. For people who don’t know, it is a content resource that basically trains you and your front office about how to run the business more efficiently. Laura has spent a lot of time both in an office, and as a professional coaching/training/speaking on this subject. I know that this content is really resonating with audiences all over the place. It has been great for me to find another resource that our clients can have to understand how to address problems that most commonly occur in the front office. I wanted to have you on today to sort of give people an overview of what the common challenges are. What are the big mistakes? I think I want to start by having you give people your background and how you sort of had this idea of, “I need to produce content.” How did you start doing that?

Laura Hatch: How much time do we have?

Reese Harper: I’ve scheduled eight hours, we might have to cut it down to a 4 hour podcast.

Laura Hatch: Exactly, I’ve got a flight in a couple of hours. My background is human resources, training, organizational development, all of the business sales stuff, and I am married to a dentist. I met a guy in undergrad and asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up and he said, “either a dentist or a mechanic.” I was rooting for the mechanic because I really don’t like the dentist. I am getting better after a lot of years.

Reese Harper: That is good, so you were ok with that?

Laura Hatch: The first couple of days working in the dental office with the drill noise and the smells and stuff, I wasn’t sure. But if I were married to a mechanic, I would be talking about cars not teeth. Anyways, my husband graduated from the University of Maryland in 1999. In 2003, he decided that he wanted to start a scratch practice. He came to me and said, “why don’t you run the front, I’ll be in the back, it will be amazing.” Right, ok? I will run our office. I knew nothing about dentistry. I didn’t know that teeth had numbers and surfaces. I knew nothing about dentistry. I knew customer service and systems, training, management. I went and learned. I went and saw all of the big speakers. I remember seeing Linda Miles. She is the original dental consultant. I read articles in Dental Economics. We didn’t have the internet…

Reese Harper: You were having to digest stuff from all over the place. What year was that roughly?

Laura Hatch: 2003, just outside of Baltimore.

Reese Harper: Ya, there probably was not a lot of online content then!

Laura Hatch: No, there was not. And there wasn’t a school for dental office managers either, or training. And my husband, no offense University of Maryland, but they don’t teach them that in school! They don’t learn how to hire, fire, and communicate. We figured it out and grew that practice outside of Baltimore. In 2006, we were doing great, practice was going well and we had figured out the dental part of it. Then we went to San Diego, CA for a hygiene training seminar. December 2006 in Baltimore was freezing and awful. December 2006 in San Diego was beautiful with nice weather. So we decided to move to California. We sold our house and practice. It was kind of one of those meant to be things because it happened so fast. To the point that a few weeks into the paperwork I asked my husband, “can you even practice in the state of California?” He is like, “oh, I don’t know. Let me check!” Luckily, that was the first year that California offered reciprocity. We were pretty lucky. We moved to San Diego in 2007, and started looking at buying a practice. Practices were selling at 125% of collections.

Reese Harper: And real estate was selling for five times the normal value.

Laura Hatch: Yes, exactly. We bought our house at the market high and then it just dropped. That was a fun roller coaster. It is back up though. It is getting there. The house down the street just sold for the same price we bought ours, so it is turning around. We decided we didn’t want to buy a practice. We didn’t really do our homework. We are in a place with way more competition, the economy is tanking, and we are twenty minutes away from Mexico. People are like, “oh I need an implant? I’ll just go to Mexico and get it done.” We knew how to open a practice and start a scratch practice so we just applied what we knew. In 2008, we started in San Diego and we now have a 2.5 million dollar, super healthy practice.

Reese Harper: Very healthy practice.

Laura Hatch: Yes, after starting two practices, I went on the road a little bit and started doing some speaking. I found that the offices were still asking the same questions. How do we handle phone calls? How do we get patients to pay?

Reese Harper: Even though all of the information is out there, and you would assume that maybe things would change a little bit, the questions would be different? But they were still asking the questions that you were asking yourself in 2003?

Laura Hatch: Exactly, and a lot of it comes from, a lack of training for the doctors. Most of the time office managers were promoted into this position from being a good dental assistant, or the doctor’s wife, or something. We don’t have a lot of training in the front office area. We kind of hope that we can figure it out with the right intention, but not the right systems. I had this idea for myofficerocks.com. I didn’t want to go into offices and be a consultant, but I wanted some resource. I went to my husband and said, “I think I wasn’t to start doing videos.” He was like, “Ok, I’ll get the iPhone.” I was thinking something a little bit bigger than that. I have a friend who I pitched the idea to and he has built a few businesses so he helped me tweak it a little bit. He helped me realize that people would not sit for an hour long video, so we started doing short videos. I would work all day in the office, and then take everything that came up with the staff or whatever, and I would come home and film these videos. It was like 12 hours of real life content put into video for other staff. I did that for about two years, building up the site. Then we launched about two years ago. It is all online videos. It is all the little things that we do at the front desk. Not that they aren’t important, but how to offer appointments, and how to ask patients to pay, and how to handle cancellations and no shows. All the things that the new receptionist needs to know how to do. We have never really had a good way to train our employees, so that is really the foundation for the website.

Reese Harper: Well, let’s get into some of the focus of the interview. I would love for it to be allowing people to listen to some of these issues that you have probably talked about and recorded about and try to get an idea of some of the main problems that you felt like are the hottest pieces of content. The things that people are really constantly asking for. Let’s start with some of the biggest mistakes that you feel like are happening at the front and kind of walking through those one by one. Let’s start with maybe the one that comes to mind as the most egregious, or the most challenging.

Laura Hatch: I think for me the number one, the first thing, is the phones. I always say that the most important technology in your dental office is your phone. Now my husband would say it his CEREC or whatever. That is great technology, but if we are not handling the phones well, than we are not scheduling new patients and not doing a lot of CEREC’s. There are other training companies out there that will train on phones. My training is on everything on the front desk, but phones are the most important thing. Unfortunately, in the dental office, when we hire somebody new we try them out on the phone. We are spending money on marketing, getting referrals, and review, and then we try somebody out who we don’t know if they will be any good. They know nothing about our office, to see if they are any good on the phones. That is the worst thing we could do. Really make sure that whoever answers your phone is fully trained and understands the “why” behind answering the phones.

Reese Harper: I am a dentist that has never thought about this before, help me to understand the wrong person to put on the phone.

Laura Hatch: Anyone who is not trained, and anyone who does not understand why that first phone call is important. I mean, think about it. This is the first impression of the person who is coming to your practice. It is that first phone call. If you have someone that is hurried and doing three things at once, or they put it on hold right away, or it rings six times. All of those are your first impression. When we talk about wanting patients to accept treatment, and be long term patients, well let’s start with that first impression. If we seem busied, and hurried, and we go to insurance first, then that is a huge pet peeve of mine. When staff go right to, “what insurance do you have?” or “can we verify your insurance?” before you have even got to know the person or even know their name. What that does is set up the relationship with the patient that insurance is important. Then when we are in a case presentation and we are trying to let the patient know that the procedure is important they are waving their insurance book at us, and we feel like patients are all insurance driven. We started the relationship that way before we even found out how they heard about our practice. It is not necessarily the wrong type of person answering the phone…

Reese Harper: It is just the wrong training.

Laura Hatch: Yes, the why and the purpose. People call our office and they don’t know what to ask but about insurance or price. That is all patients know. They might know that they should brush their teeth twice a day, and that they are supposed to go to the dentist every six months. But they don’t know what to ask, so they say, “do you take my insurance?” We have to understand that is what patients ask, but that is not why they should be picking our practice. We need to take control of that call so we can get them to come to our practice. There is a lot of training that goes behind that.

Reese Harper: Let’s talk about that for a minute. I am putting someone in charge of all my inbound phone calls. It doesn’t matter what position it is, sometimes more than one person will be taking inbound calls. Is it fair to say that the process of who takes inbound calls is less thoughtful? There is not a dedicated person sometimes?

Laura Hatch: Well, it is also that we might have one person who is trained but that person is off for an hour on lunch, or doesn’t work Friday’s. She/he is really good at answering phones, but now we have other people answering phones.

Reese Harper: Usually it is not just getting one person to where they are capable right?

Laura Hatch: Yes, it is everybody who answers the phone.

Reese Harper: In your practice how many people are trained that way?

Laura Hatch: All five of us are trained on how to handle all new patient calls. Then our dental assistants are trained to answer the phone, but they are trained to take good messages. Just like you don’t want me assisting in the back. Last time I gave a guy a hickey on the inside of his cheek from the suction, I am not a good assistant. I don’t expect dental assistants to know the ins and outs of insurance and I don’t want them going down that route, or answering those questions if they are not trained. So everybody in my office is trained. There are a lot of little things. There is a lot going on at the front desk, there are like forty people, calls coming in, and we are supposed to answer the phone super chipper and happy.

Reese Harper: Every time.

Laura Hatch: Yes, every time. We need to understand why that is important, right? That it is that potential first impression with that patient.

Reese Harper: It is so easy to forget that just because you are having a crazy day and your life is insane and your office might be crazy. You have to be careful to not send that impression to a person who is having a good day. Someone who is calm and excited to call you, or looking forward to maybe learning more about the practice. I mean it happens in a lot of services businesses where our tone and attitude affects the perception that people have about our business and that is the first impression.

Laura Hatch: You can’t change that! One of the things that I teach is that before you answer the phone, even if there are like six people standing in front of you, you take a deep breath and you smile. You have to take a deep breath to slow you down, and you smile because patients can feel it through the phone. Even if it is a current patient, then that is just good customer service. For anyone calling in to make sure that person calling in feels important and that you are taking the time for them. That is huge. That is really the why. One of the big things that happen in the dental office is that the doctors go to seminars and they say, “Ok, I want you to answer the phone with a smile all the time.” The girls up front, or staff upfront, are like, “ok, have you worked up here?” They need to take this internally. They need to understand why answering the phone with a smile is important. That is probably my next biggest issue in dental practices. The relationship between dentist and front office teams. Dentists come up and say, “fill my schedule.” Then the front office team goes, “great, how?” That is the disconnect between the dentist and front office.

Reese Harper: We talked a little bit about answering the phone with a smile and you mentioned this thing about insurance. They are either going to ask about price or insurance. When they call in and they ask me about price, what do you say to that?

Laura Hatch: Right, so we don’t want patients to pick us off price. Unless you are the cheapest dentist in town, you won’t win on price. I train the staff to say, “we cannot diagnose over the phone, but we offer free second opinions and consultations.” Once you come in we can go over everything. Key words being, when you come in. We have a better chance of closing the patient when they come into the office, you know? And if the patient continues to push, then we will say, “you know, every dentist is different. Some might put a filling in a tooth where one will put a crown. Come on in for a free consultation.” If we get someone pushing, pushing, pushing then we give them a range. It is anywhere between $200-$2000. When you are answering the phone, you need to be in control of that call. That patient doesn’t really want to go to the cheapest dentist. We need to get them in because we have the best dentist.

Reese Harper: It would seem to me like that’s intuitive, but I’m curious how many people do you think just go and look up the code and give a price. How often does that happen?

Laura Hatch: When we opened in San Diego, when we decided to open our office, signed the loan and all that stuff, my husband got the first postcard from one of our competitors and he was like, “there are competitors marketing, we are in trouble!”

Reese Harper: He’s like, “there is competition!”

Laura Hatch: I did mystery calls into these offices because I was trying to figure out what they were charging for things. So I called the office that is literally across the street from where we are now, and I said to the girl, “I am calling because I am new to the area and my last dentist said I needed a crown.” She asked if I had insurance, I said, “no I don’t.” Then she goes and gets the fees, and said, “don’t quote me on this, but it is $1400.” She said, “if you get Delta insurance it will only be $999.” Now for me, I was happy because I was writing down what they were charging. This is an employee in her mind saying, “1,400.00 is expensive.” She was trying to help the patient by telling them to get insurance. I told her I would call back. I told my husband, “don’t worry, we don’t have any competition. If this is how they are answering calls, we will be fine.”

Reese Harper: Interesting, let’s talk about another mistake that you see in the front. We have talked a lot about phone skills, insurance, price, a lot of available and accessibility stuff. All of this is really good and foundational. What else comes to mind if I say, “we are going to do a diagnostic, what is wrong with this practice?”

Laura Hatch: The next thing I would say is the fact that we do treatment plan presentations at the front desk. So the doctor present the treatment at the back and tells the patient what they need. Then the patient says, “ya, ya, that sounds great.” That’s what they say to the doctor. Then the doctor leaves and to the assistant the patient says, “what do I need?” Then we walk them to the front desk and present the money at the front desk. Think about when you go to buy something, you know we were just talking about your lap top. You aren’t really sold on buying it until you know how much it is. Then you think, “do I need it, should I wait for it to go on sale, should I find a less expensive one?” It is the same with what we sell. We are asking our patients to spend thousands of dollars on something that is not that fun. When we are fulfilling at the front desk and we are showing money at the front desk, they are only seven steps away from the front door. They don’t want what we have. Drills and needles in their mouth? Thousands of dollars? Then we show them the price, and that is when we are getting into the actual sale, right? If you are doing it at the front desk there are people all around, they can run out the front door as soon as possible. I like to tease people and say, “tie their shoelaces together and you’ll have a better chance.” That is the worst thing you can do. Either do it chair side where you set the patient up, and have an eye to eye conversation. In my office, everything goes in the consult room. We talk about their treatment in there because when I get into the finances and insurance I need an environment where I can have a real conversation with the patient and help answer their questions and help them get through these issues that they have. What happens now is that the patient says, “ya good, put me on the schedule.” Then we aren’t sure if they are going to show up or they have to go home and think about it. Doctors present the treatment in the back and they think the patient is sold. Then the patient goes up front and says, “I have to think about it.” Then the doctor is upset because he closed it and thought it was done. That patient is not closed until they know what they are going to pay.

Reese Harper: Explain one more time in an ideal scenario how you would like it done?

Laura Hatch: I would always do it in a consultation room.

Reese Harper: So sometimes the consultation room has to be the operatory?

Laura Hatch: Right, or the doctor’s office, sometimes the doctor will have boxes and magazines all over. Clean off your desk and if this is a large case, and you really want to close it, then do it in person. If you don’t close the person, then the teeth won’t show up. My ultimate would be a consultation room, if you don’t have that, do it in an operatory. Set the patient up, take off the gloves, mask, and everything that makes you look like a sterile dentist. Then start that conversation with the patient. Then understand that the patient is going to push back. They are going to say, “that is expensive. Is that worth it? Can I do it cheaper? Is this my only option?”

Laura Hatch: Yes, think about when you buy something. I always tease because I like to buy shoes. I am going to go to the mall this afternoon, when I go look for shoes I will pick them up and say, “do I really need them, should I wait for a sale, should I go to another store?” That is part of buying. When you buy a car, you think about the leather seats etc. It is the same with us. What happens is that we don’t give the patient the opportunity to work through those questions. Then we say, “ok, well, we will put a watch on it or wait till the next time you come in.” Really they were in the buying process, they were considering it, then we didn’t stick with them long enough.

Reese Harper: A lot of times what I think patients are lacking is conviction about the treatment plan. They want to know, “is this important or not?” No one wants to spend money on unnecessary dentistry. But if it is important, and you have diagnosed it, and you do feel like it has a meaningful proactive part of their life, then it seems like there is just a hesitancy for most dentists to sort of make a recommendation and strongly educate the patient on the outcome. Every patient is looking for an easy out to sort of say, “great, I am glad that I didn’t have to do it.” I love hearing, “I’ll put a watch on that.”

Laura Hatch: I always ask the doctors, “what are you going to watch it do?” We are going to watch it get more expensive and bigger. I am married to a dentist, so I know how dentists think.

Reese Harper: The psychology of that.

Laura Hatch: Ya, this is you putting your skill, your training, your ability out there as the commodity. Now when someone says, “that is expensive,” you take that personally. You think am I’m charging too much or should I give a discount? One thing we hear a lot is to not let the dentist talk about money. I disagree. The reason that they say that is because the first person to give a discount in the office is the dentist. The patient is asking for money off and the dentist is like, “totally!” I talk with doctors a lot about how we talk about overhead. This is your area. Your arena and not mine, but they will spend money and time paying a dental assistant to try and find gloves that are ten cents cheaper per box. More so than they will trying to up their customer service and sales skills. If you want to lower your overhead, up your dentistry. That is easier than finding cheaper gloves. I am really big into getting the doctor and front office team to understand the importance of presenting treatment, and what is going on in that process and understanding what the patient is going through and our ability to sell more dentistry. At the end of the day, we are selling. We are up against big screen TV’s, Mac Book Air’s, vacations, and ours is not as fun. We have to be good at selling.

Reese Harper: Tell me about front office vs. back office. Where is my dollar best spent when it comes to training?

Laura Hatch: Dentists tend to spend money on CE for themselves, which is great, because it is a good excuse to go to Scottsdale or on a cruise or whatever. The next is on dental assistants and hygienists. They all need CE. There is a reason for that. CE keeps you fresh, up to date, remembering why it is important to diagnose gum disease or whatever the case may be. They have kind of gotten that down. What we don’t invest a lot in is our front office team. We don’t have required CE in the front office. We don’t have required training to go to. That is something I am trying to change. We handle so much in the front from the first phone call to schedule, payment, reviews, and we get beat up a lot.

Reese Harper: No question.

Laura Hatch: We get insurances downgrading, patients upset, people cancelling. For me it would be to make sure that the entire team is getting more than just clinical training. We are all getting training on customer service, good hand offs, how to run a good huddle, and all of that. I think it is super important.

Reese Harper: Is it easy for you to see that the front is neglected and the back gets most of the investment, typically?

Laura Hatch: In dental school they did not teach that stuff. It makes sense for a dentist to think we need to get better in our production. That is where they are comfortable. My husband used to tell me all the time, “I am super comfortable in the operatory, not in the consultation room.” That is where we need to improve the conversation. At the end of the day, your name is on the wall. You need to be a better owner.

Reese Harper: If you looked at this ownership idea, what is the best way that a dentist is going to learn how to improve the business of dentistry? How does a dentist get CE in business training? How do you coach people on that?

Laura Hatch: I think that now, luckily, there is a ton more resources for a dentist to go to. There are groups that are outside of dentistry just to teach you how to be a better leader. There are great speakers that talk about leadership, there are consultants that you can work with. The biggest thing is that because it is out of your comfort zone, that is probably why you are not doing it. The point is to find something. Find something that you feel connected to. I have gotten involved with a lot of the dental management consultants now and they are all different types. Let’s look at what you think you need in your practice, and then find somebody that aligns with you, right? Get the training you need to be a better leader. I am actually writing a book right now, knock on wood, hopefully it will be out soon. It is really just to help the doctor understand the importance of their role as a leader in communicating with each one of their front office team members. The front office is the area where dentists turn their head and ignore and say, “I hope they know what they are doing.” That is just silly as a business owner. You don’t have to know how to do our jobs, but you need to know what to expect from us.

Reese Harper: And what the job entails, the description is, the expectation for how it operates.

Laura Hatch: Exactly, and getting help is super important. I know there are some dental schools that are starting to bring a little bit more training in, but that is probably the biggest thing that is missing in our industry. The dentist and the staff need the training in the business, communication, sales, leadership, and not so much in the clinical stuff.

Reese Harper: I think it is tough. There is a book that you have probably read called, The E-myth, where it defines the different types of personality profiles of different leaders/entrepreneurs. I would call a dentist a professional, practitioner, kind of like a lawyer or CPA. You run this little business, but you are also doing the job. In the E-myth it talks about three personalities. One is a technician, one is a manager, and one is an entrepreneur. The technician is the personality type of the business owner. All of these are three personality types of business owners, but the technician is the business owner who just loves to do the work. The manager is the personality type of someone who loves organizing it all, and putting it into boxes and making sure that there is a system in place. That everything is running smoothly, he is not really the doer. The entrepreneur is the visionary person. The person that is looking out into the future and saying, “what do we need? What’s the next step? How do I grow and build?” I have found that most dentists tend to be technicians. Most of them tend to be the people that do the work and not organize the work. They are not the manager and they are not necessarily the entrepreneur. If they had a second skill though, I would say entrepreneurial type. It is rarely the manager, however. It is rarely the person that says, “I love organizing the front and making sure that patient communications are done appropriately, that are copies are good. We have a good email system and marketing communication, and we have a regular event that we put on.” There is not a lot of structure in the front. Both from a marketing perspective, a patient communications perspective, and training operationally on what the business of dentistry that we are trying to deliver. It is usually just a technician the people show up and see and everything else just tends to be, “I hope we get by.” They are not really saying that, it is just that you can literally get by without doing anything in the front. You can do 600-700 thousand of collections and survive without a business where you are interact with patients. If you are trying to grow your practice to be more profitable, to do more collections, and to actually retire earlier. If you want to put yourself in a position where you can have some financial independence at an attractive age, you can’t ignore the business of your practice. I just think that is an important part of any professional’s career. We cannot ignore the operation itself.

Laura Hatch: Well, and think about it this way. Dentists giving discounts, they are on all the insurance plans, and they are afraid to talk about money with patients. They send one of the staff in to do it. At the end of the month, your staff goes home. They have a nice weekend. The lab still gets paid, Patterson and Shine still get paid. The only person that is really suffering is you. You are not putting money in your kids college fund, or retirement fund because of your fear of doing this. You can learn how to do this, right? You don’t have to be the CEO of the fortune 100 companies, but a little bit more in your office. Just have a morning huddle and staff meeting at least once a month. Check in with your staff. These are little things that your staff will actually support. If you have a good staff, you tell them what your goal is and where you want to go, there is a good chance your staff will be all over that because most dentists don’t. They just come to work, talk about the treatment, do the treatment, go home at the end of the day. Every month, and year is the same, and we get stuck in this rut.

Reese Harper: That is great insight. We don’t have a lot of time left, but I wanted to ask a few more things that we have not hit that are stresses up there at the front. What are other things you see up there in the front? I just don’t want to miss any real nuggets.

Laura Hatch: Yes, gossip is a big problem. I can say this because I am a female, dentist wife, that runs our practice. I think that gossip and drama in the dental offices run rapid. Some offices worse than others, but it is something that dentists tend to ignore, and not address, ok? My point in bringing that up is that no matter if it is hidden and happening in the sterilization area, patients feel that. You can’t offer great customer service when your hygienists are mad at the assistants and the front end is mad at the assistant. The patients will hear them slamming instruments around and all of that. Part of where I believe this starts in our offices is with the schedule. We have a schedule and the schedule can make or break our day. How well we build the schedule, how much time we give, all of it. There needs to be a scheduling policy in the practice. What happens is, for example, we have an emergency patient call in. The front office team asks the doctor where they should put an emergency and the doctor says over lunch. The next thing you know there is an emergency over lunch and now the assistant is mad because they have to work through lunch again. They are mad at the front office staff for scheduling them through lunch. The doctor is behind because he had to squeeze in that emergency, so the hygienists are mad, and the hygienists are mad at the assistant because if they would just work faster everyone could just go out for lunch. This is the foundation of the stress and drama. If you really want to build a great customer service practice and a great experience then we have to try to keep as much of that out of the practice as possible. I know that dentists tend to just kind of look the other way or they don’t know how to address it. They don’t know how to handle it and it really can affect the practice. There is actually a dentist that I am friend with and I went to his office recently and he had this beautiful front desk with a check in and a check out. It was supposed to be this one big area, but there was this random door built between the two desks. I asked him why the door is there because it didn’t fit. I was told because the lady that sat at the checkout desk and the check in desk, didn’t get along. The doctor’s solution was to build a door so they didn’t have to see each other.

Reese Harper: Yah!

Laura Hatch: These are the things that really make a difference, ya know? It seems like it is simple, but it is what causes issues in the practice and people feel it. We have an office across the street from ours where the dentist is currently sleeping with one of the dental assistants. All of the other dental assistants and staff are mad and patients are leaving his office and he has no clue. They are all coming to our office because they can sense the tension.

Reese Harper: They know it.

Laura Hatch: Exactly, we don’t have that in my office. Anytime I feel it, we try to handle it right away. I tell my staff when we walk in we are on stage. We are here for our patients so every time we get a new patient from their office, that is great. But then we always ask, “are they still sleeping together?” It is good, it is juicy.

Reese Harper: What is the solution? How do you fix that? We know it is a problem, how am I fixing this?

Laura Hatch: You have to change, and this pertains to the dentist and office managers. The office manager can get sucked into this too. You want to gossip. Women tend to worry more about what other women aren’t doing than what they should be doing. They tend to think that they know more than anyone else. Really you have to stop it, and it has to start from the leadership level. You cannot allow it. You have to address it when it comes up. You have to kind of retrain a culture. That is a big thing in dentistry that a lot of people don’t understand. Your culture has to be one where that is just not allowed in the practice. Then look at the systems. The scheduling policy, do we have one? What happens when an emergency calls in? We don’t want to keep scheduling them over lunch, so when do we schedule them? This is where the systems come in, but it has to start with the leader, the owner, to understand that these are the reasons why we have to learn. We have to fix these things. When you first get out of dental school and open a practice you are like, “I am going to rid the world of cavities, gum disease, and it is awesome.” Now we wake up on Monday mornings and say, “ugh, I have to go to work.” It has nothing to do with the dentistry. My sign ups for front office rocks happen on Sunday night and on holidays. That makes me think that dentists on Sunday night are stressing about their front office and they are going on the internet looking for help. You shouldn’t be thinking about your front office on Sunday night. You should be enjoying your weekend. If you get the resources you need, and learn how to handle some of these issues, you actually enjoy going to work on Monday morning.

Reese Harper: That is great insight. I think that team and culture is something that is just essential to make sure that dentists enjoy their day.

Laura Hatch: It takes a leader. An organization needs a leader, and there are a lot of offices where there is nobody driving the ship. There is not a true leader. A leader has to stop this, or identify it, and figure out how to fix it. You have to do something, can’t ignore it. It will take over your practice.

Reese Harper: It probably can be a good office manager combined with someone who is not as strong of a leader? There has been a lot of research done on leadership. Some people have a strong belief that leadership isn’t something that can be trained and some people have s strong belief that it can be totally trained and it is a learned skill. It is controversial and a lot of people think you are born with it or you are not. I think there are a lot of people who have that paradigm. I personally feel like there are very proactive skills that can be learned and developed for anyone to improve their leadership ability, but we definitely all start at different places. Without a strong team, a strong office manager, well trained office manager, someone who is really understanding of all the systems and the processes required to grow a business, then it is going to fall even heavier on your shoulders. Invest in your front office. If nothing else it will help alleviate some of the demand that needs to be on your shoulders to be the leader in every situation.

Laura Hatch: I agree with you. We aren’t trying to turn all dentists into amazing leaders, but if we even get you to go ahead 25% then that is that much better. We aren’t looking for you to become a CEO of a huge organization. We just need to bring in a few certain things. As an office manager, I know myself, I have two owner doctors. My husband has a partner. Ultimately it is their practice. If I come to them with an idea, and they go “nah”, or they don’t make a decision on it, then I can only do so much as an office manager. As a leader, to understand your office manager you need to know we are kind of on an island. We are not the owner, our name is not on the wall, we are not as invested in the practice. We are supposed to make decisions, but we don’t have the actual decision making power. There is a whole element there. That is where a consultant would be good. If you get the right one to come in and help you learn who is solid at what task and how can you work better together.

Reese Harper: That is great insight. We really appreciate you taking the time our of your busy schedule, Laura. We appreciate you coming into the studio and putting down a high quality piece of content. We will have to have you back within the next year to do it again. There is a lot we didn’t even get to. Anything you want to leave people with?

Laura Hatch: Invest in your team. They are your best asset!

Reese Harper: Thanks a lot, we’ll look forward to having you back.

Laura Hatch: Thank you!

Practice Management