5 Mistakes Dentists Make to Fall Behind the Competition – Episode 70

Do you ever wonder if you’re overlooking simple business fundamentals? Do you struggle to articulate your priorities as a practice owner? While the decisions you make throughout your career are endless, there are basic principles that give the best business leaders an edge over the competition. In this episode of Dentist Money™, Reese welcomes Tanner Milne, founder of Menlo Group, the largest dental real estate brokerage firm in Arizona. In this interview, Tanner takes off his real estate cap and speaks to dentists as a business owner who understands the growing pains of entrepreneurship. He offers insights for better hiring, better planning, and better marketing to keep your practice thriving.

Podcast Transcription:

Reese Harper: Welcome to the Dentist Money Show, where we help dentists make smart financial decisions. I am your host, Reese Harper, we have a special guest that flew in today. He just got off of his hot rod, the Chrysler 300M that he picked up from the airport. Am I saying this correctly? Did they get you to upgrade for insurance?

Tanner Milne: I declined.

Reese Harper: I would like to welcome to the show, back by popular demand, Tanner Milne. Tanner, welcome to the show.

Tanner Milne: I would like to know if I am actually back by popular demand?

Reese Harper: You are! I had like three people say, “that was one of the best shows I have heard.” They want you and Rich to be brought back onto the show independently. You both have different stories to tell. Someone was stoked. I have got to hear the story about what really happened in the airport this morning, and I want to hear how this insurance pitch goes to convince executives to upgrade their car?

Tanner Milne: It was fairly compelling. He led me to believe that I was an executive. He said, “sir, most of our executives upgrade to this basic level insurance.” Some people go for the platinum insurance plan which is 30$ a day more than the car itself for the day, and he said, “but our executives like you they go for the basic plan which is 10$ a day additional.” Then he tried to instill in me the executive mindset and what a sound executive would do. I, nonetheless, declined. I am feeling a little guilty.

Reese Harper: I liked how you said you believe the margin on insurance at the airport is about 100%. That is what makes you decline. I don’t know how many people have actually ever made a claim on that.

Tanner Milne: In business school we did a case study on Enterprise Rental Car insurance plans. The margin was all in the upgrade. The insurance upgrade is where they make all of their money. The car is a loss leader.

Reese Harper: Interesting, I wouldn’t have thought of that.

Tanner Milne: So even if they give me some catastrophic story, no matter what I am already, “decline, decline, decline.”

Reese Harper: The case study was enough to compel that, huh? Today the reason we wanted to do this show, you and I have been talking about this for a month now, but you have had a lot of experience. For people who don’t know you, you run one of the largest dental real estate brokerages around the Phoenix metro area. You have a lot of experience interacting with dentists and real estate transactions, but you have also started four different business from the ground up. Two have done well, two haven’t. Let’s talk a little bit of your background and what those were, then we will get into some of the areas we want to talk about as it relates to those experiences. Tell me a little bit about what the business were and how you ended up where you are at today.

Perfect. Three of the four are in the professional services space. That includes commercial real estate, practice transitions, and the fourth was software as a service. Through my commercial real estate exposure I developed a software platform to resale to commercial real estate brokers. We missed on that one.

Reese Harper: Probably learned a lot of things the hard way. Let’s get into some of the tough lessons you learned from doing something like that. What is kind of something that you say, “look after having built a business like this, I learned this lesson the hard way, and it took me a while to maybe pick up on it.” What is something that comes to mind right out of the gate?

Tanner Milne: I have thought about this and hiring the wrong people is a big part. What I mean is wrong employees, wrong vendors, wrong consultants, wrong trusted advisors, all of the way through. I think for a lot of us, including myself, I didn’t really know what I wanted. Let’s lump all of those people into the same category to say, “what is their job description? What are my expectations? What are their key performance indicators? How do I know if they are doing a good job?”

Reese Harper: Why do you think it is so hard for people to hire the right people? You are hinting at it I think, but why is it so hard?

Tanner Milne: I think first and foremost as a continuing, learning, business owner, you don’t totally know exactly what you want. You don’t know what you are looking for and then you only know once it is not working that it is not working. Then it is like, “oh crap, if I would have laid out the proper expectations from the beginning, but now this person has been my office manager for two years and they don’t do anything the way that I want them to do it.” I think generally speaking, most small business owners, and I deal with hundreds of dentists, so I know exactly what they deal with, most of them hate the hiring and firing. It is like, “oh my office manger is awesome, she deals with that.” And it is like, “ok, really?” But it is even within that realm where I have really awesome conversations with my clients and I get past my role as just real estate advisor, real estate broker and we just talk about real issues, real problems. It is not knowing what you don’t know. When you are in that situation you realize that something is not going right. It is hard to have clarity until you are like in the thick of knowing you are in a bad situation or you know you have an unmotivated person or you have got a bad apple within your organization or you have hired the wrong vendor or the wrong architect or the wrong CPA or whatever!

Reese Harper: Ya.

Ryan: You don’t really know that until you are into it. Then you realize you have got to get out of the situation. Before you hire a new financial advisor, CPA, real estate broker, you don’t really know what you are looking for.

Reese Harper: Ya, it’s like what is next? I don’t like what I have got, but what is good? Or what should it feel like, right? What should it feel like to have the right manager, the right office manager, the right associate, the right real estate broker, since you haven’t had a good experience with it it’s hard to know what the expectations should be. I find that all the time, where people kick the can down the road of changing their service provider. They don’t really know the difference that the right provider makes.

Tanner Milne: Right.

Reese Harper: They don’t know the difference that the right office manager or associate makes, CPA, attorney, coach, etc. They don’t know the difference that the right person makes because they haven’t had it. Sometimes if there is no pain, that can also be a reason why you don’t make a change. If there isn’t really pain, it is not good, but it is not bad, it is neutral and there is no problem there than that can also be a reason to not do anything about it. You are coming about this from an angle of having seen your business grow all of the time. Every year you have grown. Most dentists listening would say the same thing. They are getting bigger and better. How do you know that hiring the right people makes all of the right difference? When did you know personally that hiring the right people was so important, when did that start clicking for you.

Tanner Milne: I would be shocked if there wasn’t a listener that is not thinking, “I’ve had one, I have made a wrong hire.” Whether that is an employee, a subcontractor, or something else, you know you’ve made mistake. When you first recognize the mistake, you have got to begin to pause, take time to delineate what the ideal would have looked like, even when you don’t know. I mean I have hired very few architects personally. I have had a lot of clients who have, when a client asks, “what is a good architect look like?”

Reese Harper: It is hard to know exactly because you haven’t experienced the good side of that, probably.

Tanner Milne: I think you have got to stop and think through what would that mean even when I don’t know what would a good architect mean. If it is effective communication and to what sort of accountability or what would determine a successful outcome? If you don’t stop to think about those things then you just hire people and that is when they are over budget and delayed and terrible communicators. It is then we are complaining. Then you realize that we didn’t even establish that. If we expect something from our staff they have to know it, could be a daily report on collections or whatever. You have got to establish that at the beginning. You can’t after two months, or two years say, “you are not doing your job.” Well, am I making sense?

Reese Harper: You mentioned to me in the past a story from Think and Grow Rich.

Tanner Milne: I read a lot of books and this was one of the foundational books for me starting Menlo Group in 2008. I have read it probably a dozen times. I will butcher it, but the story goes that there was an ambitious young lad that sought the gold rush in the West. He goes West and found an area where there was supposedly a ton of gold. He found the right area, there was gold in “them there hills” ya know. He went back East to his family and pitched for everyone to invest in machinery, mining equipment and what not. He spent all of the investment dollars, bought all of the equipment, mined, and had a little bit of success. He kept mining and it was like moderate success. So the story goes that he said, “to heck with it.” He sold all of his equipment for pennies on the dollar to a junk man. The junk man then hired a mining engineer, a specialist, to go and do studies with geotechnical type studies and found that the previous lad was three feet from gold. He was almost there. The book tries to push the story as, never give up, don’t give up three feet from gold. What I took from it was the difference between the junk man that then became one of the most successful miners in the gold rush era and the first guy was that he hired the right advisor. He hired a specialist instead of relying all on his own. You know, I bought the right equipment…

Reese Harper: I’m working hard, putting my hours in.

Tanner Milne: Then Napoleon Hill, in the book, calls this guy Aru Darby. So I always say, are you a Darby? Are you that guy? Don’t be three feet from gold and not hire the right people, or make the wrong decision. As learning business owners, entrepreneurs, technicians, professionals, whatever we are doing, we don’t know everything. But if we don’t stop and say, “I need an advisor. I need a professional consultant, a new employee, or we are going to be three feet from gold and miss out.”

Reese Harper: That is great insight. It is an important principle to remember. Sometimes it is hard for people to pull the trigger on hiring the right person because it seems like the right person always causes some sort of a financial sacrifice. I think that is part of it. Hiring the right person for where you are at. If you are doing $250,000 in collections, the right person might be your first $30,000 hire. That is painful right? That is 10% of your sales! By the time you pay your debt and taxes you barely have enough to hire one person. When you are doing five million in sales or 2.5 million in sales, that next right hire might be someone who is getting paid almost as much as you are or more than you are. It really cuts into your personal income and it is scary and you are left with less. If it is the right architect or coach, those people are typically always a financial sacrifice from where you are at in your life. The right architect for someone building a town home is different than the architect building a 2.5 million dollar custom home or large commercial building. I think that is something that is hard for people. I don’t know if you have experienced that where the gut check of usually maybe hiring the right person is, “do I have the budget for this?” Is this the right person considering my current means/constraints?

Tanner Milne: Absolutely. I don’t think it is wrong in any capacity to ask the other person, what would success look like? If you are hiring an employee, then in a year from now or three years from now what would have to be true in order for you to say, “I made the right decision to hire you.”

Reese Harper: Yes, what is the outcome?

Tanner Milne: Yes, put it on them. I think that is a fair question. It is not just, “invest with me, or let me find you the next deal or space, put that back on me.”

Reese Harper: If I cannot articulate to you what success looks like and that doesn’t give you peace of mind and make you feel like we are on the same page with where we are headed than that vendor or that hire might lack a lot of clarity on what they think they are going to deliver, and nobody will be happy. You see that a lot. You see that with a marketing agency that is unclear with what success looks like, their website is a mess, their own marketing is a mess, but they are looking for customers? Dentists are supposed to hire the marketing agency based on a statement. Something like, “we will help you grow.” However, they haven’t been able to get their own marketing house in order at all. The dentists ends up hiring that person and ends up getting unclear results. They are dissatisfied with the lack of clarity and outcome. They aren’t picking a marketing agency, every service provider, every employee, every associate, every office manager, you have to have a clear idea of what success looks like. If they can’t articulate what it looks like, if they were to take that position, they probably don’t have enough experience to handle that position. Maybe when things are real tight and real early on, maybe you are just looking for a warm body, ok? At some point you have got to stop hiring whoever is available and making lateral moves from my assistant is now my office manger right? Just because they are there and you don’t want to go and find the right person. You don’t want to take the time it takes to make the right hire. You have got to change from warm bodies to the right hire. The right hire needs to be able to articulate what value they can add, if they can’t clearly articulate it, then it doesn’t feel real clear. Like you said, “expectations and time frames, clear product, service and delivery.” All of these things have got to be transparent and they have got to have conviction that they can deliver on that. You will be managing that person, right? Which is an unfortunate place to be. If you thought you were going to take something off your plate and then you end up managing another person to do the job you thought they were going to do.

Tanner Milne: In fact, we just got kind of got through, I’ll be a little vague because of the situation, but we had an under performer and we knew it. As I consulted with others in our organization it was, “well, this person is better than no-one.” That was the consensus. I felt that that was not ok. I am not building an organization around the philosophy that someone is better than no one. That is the norm, right?

Reese Harper: I heard this, politics aside, I heard this on the news like a year ago. There was a member of congress that was defending a particular senate seat and he said, “well, he is not a terrorist.”

Tanner Milne: Really?

Reese Harper: Like, that was the rational. Why this person was adequate for the job, was at least he’s not a terrorist, you know?

Tanner Milne: The bar is pretty low at that point.

Reese Harper: When that is the rational, when that’s why he was suitable for the position. Sometimes you will hear that to a lesser degree with employee hires or retaining people. “Well, we got to have someone do it!”

Tanner Milne: He can file a tax return.

Reese Harper: That’s the rational.

Tanner Milne: My advice as it relates to this one topic is, and look I am learning just like everyone else, be slow to hire, and be quick to fire, When you feel like you need someone right away, then hire a temp. Do not make a long term permanent hire just to fill a seat.

Reese Harper: That is great. I think we can wrap up that subject in that fashion. Let me throw that same question back at ya, what lessons have you learned that have been important in growing your business?

Tanner Milne: What I’ve seen in particular as I have interacted with a lot of dentists is that there is no plan and no purpose. The same could be true in my business. You can show up do the job and go home, but you don’t even know where you are trying to get to. Your people don’t know where they are trying to get to. Everyone fills a role, but are they committed to something greater than just check in and check out? Is there more of a purpose being what they are trying to do? People want to get behind a purpose. When you see these growing companies, I have been listening to a book that Peter Teal wrote, Zero to One. I mean you hear the stories from the founders and the early employees, there was a purpose. They were creating a new digital currency. When you think about dentistry you can look at it as a fairly commoditized space. You can build a purpose around what you are doing as far as patient care and an incredible experience. Marriott built a business not just for another room, or another hotel, it is building an experience. You have got to come up with something. Have a plan and a purpose or people are just going to work. They are going to get an offer from the guy down the street or the gal down the street because it is just a job. They are just going to a job. There needs to be something more to what they are doing, contributing to something greater or you are just going to work everyday and there is no excitement. There is no fulfillment.

Reese Harper: When you say you have got to have a plan, how have you seen that evolve in your own practice? Has there been a time when you felt like your plan wasn’t very clear and then it has become more clear? What do you mean by plan?

Tanner Milne: Well, my business has evolved. My strategy has evolved. I think within the plan there is maybe a business plan, and then there is even like a marketing plan. I am not a marketing specialist, by any stretch. I have learned that over time and through a lot of trial and error that if everyone is your customer then no one is your customer. If you don’t have a specific target segment and a position and a message to the market… I think you have done an excellent job at that. You are a financial advisor to a select group. You have created a unique value proposition to the dental community even though you could serve the masses. That is a plan.

Reese Harper: Ya.

Tanner Milne: Instead of just all things to all people, “come on in, here is what we do, we do a little bit of everything and a lot of nothing.” I think a lot of small business owners and a lot of different segments turn into that.

Reese Harper: It is easy to just be a “yes man” to whatever opportunity comes through your door, right? I was just having a conversation with a friend yesterday who runs a law firm. It was kind of eye opening I think to both of us after the conversation where we kind of broke down the type of practice that he was building and it was really like three businesses within one. There wasn’t one type of customer or a type of service. It was not an experience he was trying to deliver. There was family law, contingency work, there was business and case litigation, there was new entity set up and the revenue streams were very spread out and it was a smaller company. Similar to like a one or two location dental practice that was doing well, but there is still a need for growth and a marketing plan and it was really eye opening for him to look at his business and say, “ya, I really don’t have a super clear plan and strategy for how we are going to clarify our marketing message and what we are bringing the community and how we are going to acquire customers.” I think that as a dentist, it is very, very similar. A lot of times there are within a dental practice, there are a lot of different types of dental practices. A lot, even for GP’s there is a ton of different experiences that you can create. They are based around a lot of different messages. Those messages can range anywhere from a strong message around location to a strong message around experience, to a strong message around the type of service you deliver to the (by type of service, I mean the service experience) you can have a message around the type of services you are delivering. Those could be cosmetic, a family driven message, a dental spa, a local message, a street corner location, convenience for the working class urban population. I mean your city and location and personal skill set really does have a ton to do with how you position. If you are really not sure what type of services you want to deliver, or what type of experience you want to be, and what the overriding purpose is then it would be easy to say in a dental practice is, “great dentistry and great people.” I mean, it is like, if that is your message, “great dentistry, great people.” It is not clear enough. It is not a real marketing plan. The more complex it is, the harder it is for people to know how you differentiate. It is interesting because I think a lot of people in dentistry would say there is not really a way to differentiate dentistry like you can other industries or other businesses. I am telling you the same conversation that I had with my attorney friend that I am mentioning, that was the first comment that he made at the beginning of lunch. “Well Reese, it is easy for you to differentiate, but in my business, I can’t. I am an attorney.” It is interesting because I have heard that same thing from financial advisors. They say things like I do financial planning, I can’t differentiate it is just financial planning. I have heard that from dentists too. I have heard that from real estate agents. I mean, it is not true.

Tanner Milne: If that is the message that you want to accept, my opinion is you will do fine, but you will just do fine. You will never break through. In any industry you look at the professionals that are at the top tier and they are thriving. They have grown a true business. They have created a strategy. You talk about attorneys, I have a friend whose entire message is that he is a bike accident attorney. He is really a personal injury attorney, but he has created a message and a niche. He has a hundred cyclists with his kit on riding around. He has got trucks and all kinds of gear. He has all kinds of gear that serve his message. To just accept that we are all the same, that we are just a professional, every dentist’s, every real estate agent or broker, or financial advisor, if you accept that then you are accepting status quo.

Reese Harper: And you will be ok, ya know? It is really hard as a dentist not to make a decent living. You should be grateful for that, it is a good living. You should be grateful for that and it is a good living. If you are trying to grow, than don’t accept that false message that it is all the same and I am a dentist and I can’t differentiate. It just takes a lot of effort and energy. That is what will drive new patients. If you can figure out what message will drive new patients into your practice on a regular basis, then it will work. There could be two people on the same street corner, serving the same community, but the way that you state your plan and your purpose to the community will resonate with someone differently than the person right next door.

Tanner Milne: Absolutely.

Reese Harper: The service itself isn’t something that people can experience until they get in. In my opinion, that is a very important part of it, obviously. The service experience is huge. To get them in the door requires a real clear plan and purpose around marketing and your services and if you are not making that clear than you don’t have a shot. You want to give people a reason to disagree with you. As much as you want people to say, “that’s my dentist.” It is not a bad thing to have people say, “that is NOT my dentist.” If some people are saying, “no”, to you as a dentist than you have probably started to draw a line in the sand somewhere that is going to resonate with certain people. Let’s go to another thing that you feel like has been helpful to you. We have talked about hiring the right people, having no plan and no purpose, I think those are both really essential. What is something else that you have learned in your experience?

Tanner Milne: One thing that has come to mind a lot is that what has worked in the past may not continue to work in the future. What I mean by that is that in every industry we see disruptions. There will continue to be industry disruptions. In the service space I don’t know that technology will eradicate or create the entire experience. There is still human interaction. I don’t see technology ever replacing a dentist, or the dental staff and team. I just don’t envision that, maybe I am not looking into the future far enough…

Reese Harper: Is there a generation below millennial now, I don’t know what that would be…

Tanner Milne: Look, in my strength finders test, in that assessment, one of my strengths says that I am futuristic. I feel like I see in the future a bit, but I don’t see the elimination of humans in dentistry. It is all artificial intelligence.

Reese Harper: Have you been into Brookstone lately and been in the zero gravity chair?

Tanner Milne: Did it put the crown on too?

Reese Harper: Can’t you imagine if there was a little drill coming out of the side of that thing, it is just this little small drill, it will put 3D glasses on in front of your eyes so you can watch yourself golfing down there in Scottsdale and then the drill will come in and numb your mouth, it’s got a little needle. I can see that coming.

Tanner Milne: Ya, I am just going to nod and smile. On this same book, literally yesterday I am listening…

Reese Harper: The chair…

Tanner Milne: Computers can predict essentially everything, but apparently in image recognition they were only 75% accurate at recognizing cats. The whole argument is that humans aren’t going to be and do everything. They just can’t. Technology is innovative and anyone listening that says, “technology is not for me, or I don’t know technology,” is in trouble. My point is just because you have never done it in the past, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it in the future. I see it in my industry a lot, I didn’t need any efficiencies or streamline processes before. In dentistry where you have capitation and you are getting less for the service you have got to figure out a way to be more efficient and effective in executing whatever the service is. It is always looking to, “how can we deliver a better experience.” If you are not thinking that, I think you are going to get passed by. You can throw into that continuing education, you can look at lot’s of other industries to make them apply to your business. That is a great thing. To see whether it is what the financial industry is doing, or the lending industry is doing, and how that applies to my business in commercial real estate or in the business of dentistry. That is what we all need to be doing. We have got to be looking at all the things to improve the experience for our clients and customers. If not we will look around us and say I have a stagnant, sterile business. At the end of the day we do a lot of transition and it is sad to see dentists that have stopped innovating, stopped creating, stopped growing, and in fact they have declined dramatically. Now it is time to exit and to sale, but they want what they were doing at their prime. That can be 3,4, or 7years ago. Whatever it was, they can be doing a million and half and now they are doing six. That’s what it is valued at. On what it is doing today. I guess I am using the Tony Robbins, “if you aren’t growing, you’re dying”. When I think of the business of dentistry whether you have run one office or two dozen offices, you are still the same. There are probably plenty of professionals that are one location docs and they have no aspirations of going beyond that. That is ok! It is the mindset of continually growing and improving and enhancing what you are doing, or I guess I feel like the industry and all industries are becoming more competitive. Unless you are the one guy in town, and I don’t know in Bozeman, Montana is there one guy? Or are there six guys? We have worked with docs that have been the rural, only game in town, and you don’t really have to compete the same way. Again though, until someone else comes to town. Today things might be just fine, but tomorrow is different.

Reese Harper: I am going to go out there and start a dental riverboat dental experience. You get to come on my river cruise and get your dentistry done, and I’ll serve you some BBQ.

Tanner Milne: Can I schedule an appointment?

Reese Harper: Let’s talk about any other thoughts before I wrap this up.

Tanner Milne: Maybe I’ve got one more. I think in the service based world, this is all introspective, being so confident that you are the business. Thinking that because you are the dentist, the advisor, the commercial real estate broker, and that’s all that it is. I have seen, unfortunately, lot’s of dentists that become so confident that, “it is me.” They think even if they move fifteen miles away the people will come for them. What they don’t know is that maybe actually that patient was attached to the hygienist or the front office gal, or the office manager? Understanding that, if you don’t build an experience you don’t win. Sometimes it is the location or the convenience and they didn’t know that. I guess it is being vulnerable enough to say, “look, maybe you are the most amazing clinician or maybe you are the most amazing real estate broker.” But to think that it is all you, and only you, is a flaw. That is not an effective way to look at business ownership. I guess that is one of those when I think about successes and failures it is when you are thinking that you have got this because you are awesome. Then all of a sudden it is not working or you open your second location because you are an awesome dentist, but that was my mistake. I opened a second location but I could only be in one location at a time. I’m not even claiming that I am awesome! But, if I am awesome, I can only be awesome in one location at a time. I had to recognize that I had to build an awesome organization and process or I have nothing. I have no business. A dentist or a specialist can be in one location at a time. If they don’t build an organization then it doesn’t exist.

Reese Harper: One of the frustrating things about dentistry is that when you leave town for a week, or two weeks, or three weeks, you aren’t making any money. It costs you a lot to leave. A lot of people have to look at their practice in that way. Unfortunately, if I leave, not only does it cost me five grand to take that vacation with my family but I am losing five grand a day when I go. It doesn’t have to be that way, ya know? It can be something more than you. If your team, the hygienist and your office managers, have enough tangible relationship value with patients to where they can help bridge the gap when a replacement doc comes in for a week to handle some of the appointments. If you don’t want to have a full time associate.

Tanner Milne: I am going to add something to what you said because I agree. There are probably several hundreds who have said, “i’ve tried that.” I guess my experience is that I have hired a lot of associates. My professional service is very similar in execution to dentistry. I build a relationship with my clients and customers and it is not always easy to pass them off to the associate where they are like, “no, I come to you. I have been coming to this office for fifteen years, or twenty years, or five years, and I came to see you, not that person.” This makes it hard. Especially with certain people, it can be impossible. But you have to decide if you are committed to growing, if that is something that you have an aspiration to do than you have got to work through associates. Find the right fit. The right fit exists, and they have paralleled values and commitment to excellence and execution of the business or the clinical delivery or patient care or customer service or whatever those things are. That is that whole slow to hire, quick to fire idea. If the associate is not working out, or your team member is not working out you have just got to continue to attempt. Once you find the right fit, it is amazing! It is amazing to get the call or the feedback from a happy customer that has worked with your associate. I love hearing that my associates are as good as I am. I want my customers to tell me that. That is when you know you have gotten somewhere.

Reese Harper: I think that is really good insight. It is an important evolution.

Tanner Milne: By the way, I’d rather work with Ryan than you.

Reese Harper: Which is good, most people would. Shout out to Sir Ryan Isaac. Ultimately, I do think that there is an element of feeling that if you can get to the point where you can look. I guess I just want to say that some people can get carried away with not being the business at all anymore and they just start being order takers and delegating everything and then it falls apart. As you do this, be persistent in hiring associates, and the correct office manager, keep rotating and don’t get discouraged by the wrong person. The wrong person is the cost of finding the right person. That is just the nature of it. If you just keep rotating you will find the right person eventually and it will stick. You will get better at identifying the right talent and personality fit for you. That could be administration of the practice or an associate. Don’t allow yourself to get disconnected from the practice too much, ever. Continue to be a producer, continue to stay focused on quality of care, be intimately involved and don’t check out. It is a rare place to get to, but it is the extreme pendulum that you can hit when you have been successful and you have hired the right people and it has worked out. Then you sort of check out and want to move on to the next thing. I see a lot of times that practices suffer when dentists have a few associates that are functioning well then they start pursuing other business opportunities and lose focus on what got them there and the practice really starts to suffer. I have seen that happen. For the people that get into this face of employing associates there is a flip side of it where the practice can easily unravel as you get distracted and start thinking that because you can do it in dentistry you can do it in burgers. Just because you can do it in dentistry does not mean you can do it in another industry.

Tanner Milne: To that comment, I would say to those individuals, if you are not investing your energy and passion into enhanced systems, or experience, or leadership capabilities, then that whole concept of growing ends. If you are not growing and recommitting to the organization than it will unravel. Look there are some talented entrepreneurs that can succeed in a lot of different industries, but that is a statistical outlier. I would caution dentists to avoid that. It is one thing to be a passive investor in other businesses, rather than you are a successful dentists with three offices and now you want to open a dry cleaning or yogurt operation. Your experience is not totally transferable. I guess my point is that if you are not continually reinvesting, than you lose the compound effect. If you stop investing than you no longer get the benefit of the compounding effect and whether that is a financial principle or a principle in activities within your organization. If you dis-engage from your dental practice and commit to your yogurt business you will lose all of the benefits of the compounding effects.

Reese Harper: You will see the four, or five, single location providers who kept reinvesting. They didn’t have associates, if you have got five associates and three locations and you stopped reinvesting appropriately into your organization than these other four or five practices around you who were single professional, single provider locations that did reinvest and did stay committed and loved their craft and were excellent at their work, and loved their patients, those people will eventually erode your market share and weaken your practice if you don’t care about it. In larger companies it is a really good financial indicator to see how much retained earnings are brought back into the company, how much stock is repurchased, there are financial indicators that let you know if a big company is actually putting money back into research and development into investing in its team and expanding its innovation. One of your points you mentioned that what has worked in the past won’t necessarily work in the future, that is the point you are making here as well. If that larger provider stops investing in their practice than people who are will take it.

Tanner Milne: The cheese is going to move, right?

Reese Harper: Yes, it always does. I really appreciate you taking the time to fly in today and drive that hot rod over here. It has been good to see you.

Tanner Milne: Look, it was all worth it for the hot rod, and of course the podcast, no doubt about it.

Reese Harper: We’ll be sure to have you back.

Tanner Milne: Awesome, thanks Reese.

Practice Management