Alex Nottingham JD MBA and Shelly VanEpps discuss solutions for seasonal drops in dental practice productivity, focusing on September’s common dip. They emphasize tracking KPIs to identify trends, front-loading schedules with high-production procedures, the value of coaching to ensure consistency, and more!
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About Shelly VanEpps
Shelly is the VP of Business Development & a Mastery Coach with All-Star Dental Academy. By aiding in the growth and expansion of All-Star, Shelly’s passion for dentistry allows the company to focus on guiding dentists and their teams towards achieving their vision of a successful dental practice. Because each office has their own definition of “success” Shelly focuses her attention on customized coaching by applying her 21 years in the dental field to each department within the office. In addition, as a John Maxwell Certified Leadership Coach, Shelly enjoys working with doctors and office managers on shifting their approach from a managerial approach to a more effective leadership style.
About Alex Nottingham JD MBA
Alex is the CEO and Founder of All-Star Dental Academy®. He is a former Tony Robbins top coach and consultant, having worked with companies upwards of $100 million. His passion is to help others create personal wealth and make a positive impact on the people around them. Alex received his Juris Doctor (JD) and Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Florida International University.
Episode Transcript
Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:02
This is Dental All-Stars, where we bring you the best in dentistry on marketing, management, and training. Welcome to Dental All-Stars. I’m Alex Donoghue, founder and CEO of All-Star Dental Academy. And with me is Shelly Van Epps, the COO and lead coach at All-Star Dental Academy. And our topic is September. So apparently September isn’t the best time of year, Shelly. Tell me about this. What’s going on? No. It’s on a regular basis, year after year. September.
00:30
September tends to be that month when every practice that we work with, I shouldn’t say every, that’s pretty aggressive, but majority of practices that we work with tend to see a decline in their production collection. Just the practice takes a backseat, it steps backwards. It’s like you’re having a great year and all of a sudden you’re heading into that third or that fourth quarter and it’s like comes to a screeching halt and pulls you back again. And so.
00:58
We haven’t coined it. It’s been known that way in the dental world for a long time. And it’s something that is worthy of discussing as we’re heading into September again, for 20. You don’t you just cut that out. Well, whatever. No, I’ll keep it in. This is a podcast. You can keep a lot of stuff in. It’s kind of Yeah, whatever we are. Okay, but but even if it’s not September, but there’s certain months that are that
01:27
that drop and there’s some seasonality. It’s like, what do you do in that situation? And what are the culprits or and so on that we look at the silent killers facing your practice? We’ll talk about that at the end. So with the these months, September, for example, what is our what is our topic? Oh, and just remind everybody we’re doing this series, or you and me, Shelly and Alex, Alex and Shelley. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we’re gonna give you a topic. We’re talking about how to overcome
01:55
the problem with September, our coaching tip, and what’s new at All-Star. So topic today is what? In terms of how do we address this issue of September? Yeah, so I think it’s both a preventative approach and looking ahead, knowing your strategies, looking at your KPIs, your key performance indicators, and knowing the trends within your practice, whether it truly is, like you said, September, or if it’s July every year for your practice. At some point,
02:24
practices either maybe you take more time out of the practice, you go on vacation every December or whatever it is that brings that particular month backwards. And so what we want to do is be mindful of those trends, make sure that we’re aware that it’s coming and set the stage for success, maybe front load that particular month in particular for success in that month so you don’t see a huge dip. There’s nothing more frustrating for owners than to have
02:54
ups and downs and even in production and collection. Yes. It’s like I can pay for everything. No, I can’t. Oh, I can pay for it. It’s this up and down that just stresses the owners and the doctors out. And so every business faces that. I think before we get to kind of our coaching tip, you know, kind of painting that picture as you’re talking about, because all businesses face that, that seasonality, the ups and downs. And I think some of them you can see happening.
03:22
right? And you plan for that if you’re going on a long trip and you don’t have enough associates to cover, cover this. If it’s September, for example, that’s the problem. What do we know about this trend? Why does it happen? What can we do about it? There are some tips that we can adjust. And with coaching, which tell me a little bit about coaching. So with, with your coaching clients, you’re doing the, you’re looking at these KPIs, you’re coaching them. Do the KPIs.
03:50
understanding their data. I know you’re big on data, right? Because I love to say, Oh, this is we need to change this. He’s like, Yes, what’s the data behind it? How can you show? Yeah, how can you prove it? And I have to like, go to the boss. Yeah, Shelley is the boss. Numbers don’t lie. Numbers don’t lie. That’s true. So does that help? Does that help Shelley? Like in terms of so the issue first step is issue is we don’t like these ups and downs. What helps us kind of know they’re coming and kind of
04:18
prevent them a little bit from a big picture. Is the KPI is gonna give us the idea what’s happening? So you have to look at your KPIs. That’s what coaching is doing. Absolutely, you have to know your numbers. You have to know the health of your practice, get a pulse for what’s working really well and what’s not, so that you can make adjustments. If you just go at it blindly in a feeling or a gut feeling, you might be making the right choice, you may not be making the right choice. And that’s where I go back to numbers don’t lie.
04:48
A lot of times people will say, Oh, I’m having the best month ever. And then we look at their numbers. I’m no, actually your best month ever was last March. And they’re like, really? March felt really bad. And I’m like, you had some really big cases, check this out. And then we look at it and they’re like, Oh, okay. So big cases that equals bigger production for me. Evidently for your practice, that is the way it’s working. And it’s different for every practice. It’s not cookie cutter, but the numbers.
05:17
are consistent from a standpoint of what we look at for one practice is the same KPI, the same indicators we look at for the next practice. It just might look a little different. Well, I love what you’re saying because, sorry for interrupting. That’s okay. We’ll get this right. We were saying beforehand, like, how do we make sure we don’t interrupt? We’ll get better at it as we go along. So when I’m listening to you about this, so you’re saying when you know your numbers well, because I think in many cases there’s this idea of the numbers, or I get it from the accountant.
05:46
Or I’m just looking at production. That’s not enough to see. Those are what our president of coaching talks about is that’s lagging measures. We need or leading. What was it? The difference of lagging and leading measures. What he was talking about anyways, he, we did a whole program on that. But the point is, is that you have, you have what’s reality or happening now and what, what you’ll find out later lagging measure, okay. So lagging measures, you’ll find figured out later. You don’t know. So, and then you have leading measures.
06:14
that are anyways, but the point is like, let’s say you get a new patient, you may not realize the money, the benefit until several months later when they accept treatment. And so we have to be, that’s what coaching is doing is you’re seeing those numbers of what’s lagging, what’s leading and how to prepare for that. And so it isn’t just a gut feeling, gut gives you an idea of the look of things, but you don’t, yes, you want to have some gut mentality, but you can’t leave all of that.
06:41
You have to do the numbers and have it justify what your gut says so that you see and you’ll prepare for that accordingly and leave enough margin that you’re not freaking out that I have to worry about payroll this month. You can be a very solvent quality business and make a lot of money and still worry about payroll because you’re running things too thin. You don’t know how your business operates. You don’t know your break-even. You don’t know your seasonality. You don’t know what’s going on. And then…
07:09
The coaching and work you do, I’ll say this and I’m gonna sound like a broken record. Everybody should be working with a coach. I’m not saying it has to be all-star coaches, but coach it. It’s so important. We’re so in our business. I’m kind of lucky because people that run all-star like yourself, Shelly, you’re a coach. So I get coaching as CEO as well. And so it helps to have that. And a lot of practices don’t have that built in because you need somebody who has a different perspective so you’re not getting into group think and so on. So we want to be proactive to avoid.
07:39
September or at least have a plan in place. So that’s the issue. So what’s our coaching hack, our coaching tip, Shelley? So by looking at the KPIs, coming up with a strategy to plan against it, to plan ahead and be preventative is the basic strategy for this. When you have different rock, pebble, sand scheduling, which is a scheduling concept that we teach in coaching of making sure that you have your big production.
08:08
accomplished before you start throwing in the littler things, the smaller, the bread and butter type items that get you to your goal. You have to do it. You have to do the fillings, but you want to make sure your production is there. You have some of those big procedures on a given month when you know that you tend to pull back front load that month with the bigger procedures. If you’re going to be working fewer days, remove some of the sand and water from your schedule for
08:38
particular two weeks or whatever it might be and only do the bigger procedures to make up for and balance out that particular month. I know a lot of practices come December. They take two weeks off at the end of the year between Christmas and New Year’s. You’re going to do that. That’s great. That’s that’s work-life balance. That’s valuing your team. It’s an amazing thing to do, especially when that tends to be one of the busiest months of the year, if you had been open. Um, and so to do that, that’s huge.
09:07
So you better make sure those few weeks that you are going to be in the practice are very, very productive so that you can justify closing the practice for a couple of weeks. So paying attention to that front loading your schedule, following a scheduling protocol that sets you up for success and sticking to it, holding your team accountable to it. That’s probably my biggest coaching hack, I guess, would be accountability factors because approval addiction steps in.
09:34
We want to override it. We’re like, oh, but they really want to use their insurance and it’s December and I know I’m not supposed to do billings this month, but we’re going to do it anyway. Because I like this person and I feel bad because they want to use that last $50 of their insurance. You have to stick to it. If you want consistency, there has to be accountability. I love it. Beautiful. So what’s new at All-Star? So new stuff. Well, I don’t know if it’s new for everybody, but our…
10:04
dental practice excellence webinar is you just redid it. You updated it for those people who haven’t already seen it. For your suggestion. It’s amazing. It is absolutely amazing. So much great content in it. You get to see Alex’s smiling face now. It’s so nice.
10:22
But it really truly does have a lot of great content and some of it is overcoming these silent killers. A big part of it is overcoming the silent killers in your practice, setting yourself up for success and really having an excellent dental practice. And it’s a complimentary webinar. We want you to take that information, utilize it in your practices and just… So I’ll add a few things to it. So please do. No, it was a great introduction. You’ve done your homework.
10:52
Part of that webinar, since we’re talking about it, like we won’t bring on anybody to work with us until they see that webinar. Whether you work with us or not, that’s who we stand for. And we provide a lot of education because you can’t do, if you don’t have these silent killers dealt with and these situations to avoid the September situations, then you really, what else are you gonna do? You gotta build on a solid foundation. So I think you laid that out beautifully. And another…
11:21
Another thing as well is if you’re not on our email list, that’s one way of getting on our email list. We have an email that went out that every month we have a new ebook that we give out for free. Our philosophy is give so much free training because obviously our membership, we have more things that you get, but we don’t want it to be like, oh, you can’t learn unless you join. We wanna share, and that’s what this podcast is about. We’re just share, share, share, share, share, and if you need help with.
11:47
hiring, with coaching, with online training, with your entire team, we’re here, we can help you, events, but if you’re not ready for that, or you need some supplementation, a lot of our members are listening to the podcast as well, there’s so much there for you. We just want you to be part of the family at some capacity. So we have an ebook that’s going out just on cancellations that you would have access to on our list. The webinar does talk about cancellations, our policy, so I definitely think if you go to alls backslash webinar,
12:16
you’ll learn ways of reducing cancellations and some of these other silent killers that are tactics that help speak to what you’re talking about, Shelley, how to be proactive and overcome these amounts that are inconsistent. If that makes sense. Absolutely. All right. That’s also dentalacademy.com backslash webinar. Now before we adjourn, for those that are on social media or YouTube, comment. Let’s have a conversation.
12:45
because what’s great is we have Shelly and our whole coaching team and All-Star. We love to communicate with you online. And I want to know about, are you experiencing this issue in September or what months? What are you doing about it? And we can just have a conversation to help build that. So engage with us on social media. If you’re driving on listening on Apple podcasts or Spotify. Great. Listen, also leave us a review, share with your friends, follow us. Let’s have some fun here. So thank you all for joining.
13:15
And until next time, go out there and be an all-star.
13:24
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars. Visit us online at allstardentalacademy.com
