I have as much trouble keeping New Year’s resolutions as anyone else.  With my birthday on December 30^th, the urge to make changes in my life is doubly strong.  Surprisingly, the resolutions I did keep were the ones we made in our practice.  There was power in having someone else keep me accountable...

Patients and parents often react negatively to hearing what they consider bad news.  It may be the need for extractions, or the advantage of uncovering a gingivally impacted tooth, or the risk of decalcifications due to poor brushing.

Here are three suggestions to make these types of discussions mo...

I’ve found that it’s nearly impossible to make any significant improvements to the practice after Thanksgiving and before the New Year.  Everyone is so distracted by the Holidays.

So, after many years of failed attempts at trying to make practice improvements during this season, we finally gave up....

It’s been a rough year! We all need a break!

We routinely close the office during the week between Christmas and New Years to allow our staff to enjoy more time with their families.  Unfortunately, the last day before the break and the first day after the week we're slammed!  Broken brackets, lost ...

In Key PEOPLE Principle #1, we discovered that:

Successful practices with great teams hire and retain “good heads” & “good hearts”, not necessarily just “good hands”.  And that great leaders recognize that hiring the right TYPE of person is more important than getting the best SKILLED person.  

In...

In Key PEOPLE Principle #1, we discovered that:

Successful practices with great teams hire and retain “good heads” & “good hearts”, not necessarily just “good hands”.  And that great team leaders recognize that hiring the right TYPE of person is more important than getting the best SKILLED person. ...

What DO successful practices do to get the right people on their team and get the wrong people off their team?   

There are probably as many approaches to finding good employees as there are practices.  Most of us have come up with a way to hire, fire, and review our staff through some form of tria...

COVID-19 has disrupted all of our practices. There were weeks (or possibly months) in which New Patients, Observation patients and Starts were curtailed.  And now we’re trying to establish a new practice equilibrium by rethinking “how we’ve always done things”.

This year, we’ve played catch up, res...

Confronting an employee is tough to do and easy to avoid.  A dental practice is an intimate environment and there are few places to have a confidential conversation without everyone else knowing about it.  That being said, WE are the ones who benefit or suffer from the behavior and performance of ou...

"Every day there are patients to treat and treatment plans to do and, oh yeah, there's that staff person I need to talk to and the dentist I need to call.  And then there’s payroll to get out, supplies to order, a new chairside assistant to train and, yes, I must do something about marketing because...