Dental Guiding Point
To make the business side of dentistry less lonely, less stressful, and more successful — by giving away the practical knowledge, systems, and leadership insights from someone who has been in the trenches, growing from $0 to $21 million a year. The lessons here are real, hard-won, and designed to help dentists thrive — in practice, and in life.
Dental Guiding Point
Stop Working IN Your Practice and Start Working ON It
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Most dentists know what needs to change — they just can't find the time or energy to do anything about it. Dr. Mark Dill and Toria Plank break down why dentists stay stuck in Groundhog Day, why tiredness is just unwillingness in disguise, and the mindset shift that separates practice owners who thrive from ones who just survive.
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I have one thing that I'll say that I feel like dentists struggle with the most. Hey guys, welcome to the Dental Guiding Point. I'm Dr. Mark Deal, and with me is the one, the only Ms. Torian Plank. Hey guys. And today we're talking about things that plague your dental office and presenting solutions that we have found work for us. So why would they not work for you? Yeah. Why is that? Why does it not work for other dentists? The one thing that I see dentists like struggle with the most is this. They have it up here in their head. Yep. But and they know what they need to do. And they know stuff ain't right and they want to make changes. But those changes take time and effort and attention. And they're this deep in somebody's mouth. They're elbow deep in somebody's mouth. So how do you get stuff from here over to actually making changes? That's what I think dentists struggle with the most. The one thing.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, they quit or they just don't think they're quitters.
SPEAKER_01Dentists are just nothing but a bunch of quitters.
SPEAKER_00It's not that they're a bunch of quitters.
SPEAKER_01They just I don't think you're quitters. Only Torya thinks you're quitters.
SPEAKER_00I do.
SPEAKER_01Wow.
SPEAKER_00But it's not because it's not because that they are a quitter. It's just because it's going to take so much energy. It's easier for them just to keep doing what they're doing, and or they feel like they don't have the people or the support behind them, or it's just too much work for them. And I get that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So for all of you guys, raise your hand. No, don't raise your hand. You might be driving. Keep your hands on the wheel. Question though. How many of you guys, five o'clock kits or whenever you finish? And there's crap that's been like brewing in the office behind the scenes. And you're like, you know what? It seems like it's fine. I'm out. I'm going home for dinner, going home to my spouse.
SPEAKER_00They'll figure it out.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Like, you know, um, I'll ask me how I know. I've been there. That's for our boy Vinky. Um, yeah, so I've been there. Here's the challenge. You know that things need to be organized, coordinated in the office. You get that. Um, and you probably even know the solutions. It's just I'm clinical, so I'm working on patients. My team needs to be the ones to do all this stuff, but like I don't have time to tell them what to do or how to do it or oversee them doing it. So I'm over here working on patients one after the other. And at the end of the day, I'm just like mentally fatigued. I like there was a time in my career where I could go home and my wife may ask me, you know, do you want any green beans? And it's like, I just put them on my plate. Like, I don't know. I'll either eat them or I won't. I I don't know. I don't want to make another single decision.
SPEAKER_00You know what my favorite line to say is, right?
SPEAKER_01No, I have no idea. I feel like I'm getting to know you all over again. What is it?
SPEAKER_00What's my favorite line? You know.
SPEAKER_01100%.
SPEAKER_00I'm done. Tiredness equals unwillingness.
SPEAKER_01Tiredness equals unwillingness. I should have known that. Just I'm feeling a little tired today, so I didn't really want to say that.
SPEAKER_00What are you unwilling to say? I know.
SPEAKER_01Or do I didn't feel like saying it?
SPEAKER_00But really, think about it.
SPEAKER_01No, you've said it before, and I've thought about it, and the verdict's in. I think you're right.
SPEAKER_00I know I am.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, she does. She always knows she's right. Tiredness is unwillingness.
SPEAKER_00Right. So if you really sit there and think about it, everything that you do not want to do um is you're just not willing. Like, let's take, for example, go for a jog. I mean, I know that's not dentistry, but go for a jog. You're like, uh, I don't really feel like it. You're unwilling to do it. I mean, as simple as that. I don't want to go check, uh I don't really feel like going to check this patient. I'm so tired. You're just not willing. That's all it is. So you gotta change your mindset. You know what? I'm gonna push past that. Push past push past the uncomfortable of that tiredness. And then when you actually achieve whatever it is that you weren't willing to do, you feel pretty damn good about it.
SPEAKER_01Well, uh, you know, there for a second, I was feeling very offended, but now you said a curse word. So now I'm ready to be willing. Oh did you not go for your jog? I didn't go for my jog. Okay. So here, like now that we've offended half the dentist out there and said that you guys are unwilling.
SPEAKER_00Um that is not my point.
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah. You're tired and you're unwilling, and you look old. No.
SPEAKER_00But if they if they figure that portion out, you control your body, you're out.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. So let let me actually uh put this in in frame for a dentist and what she's actually saying. So think about unwilling and just kind of hang on to that for just a second. And let me say, okay, well, if you're working in your business or on your business, but you can't really do both at the same time, right? So you show up to work and you have an administrative day that is working on your business usually. Now, if you're paying bills and you know, doing that sort of thing, that's really working in your business. But if your administrative day is creating systems and policy manuals and training videos and things like that, that's working on your business. Okay, so if you show up in your clinical and you're working in someone's mouth, that's working in your business. So, in order to be able to work on your business and implement the things that we suggest in all of our other videos, you have to be willing to do a few things. One might be to wake up early, to stay up late, to work after hours, to work on days that you don't have patients scheduled. That's a willingness. And if we tie that into tiredness and we say, well, you know, I, you know, I just I can't, I can't do that. I can't cut like I'll work eight hours on patience all day. It's hustle and bustle and everything. Like there's just no way that I can stay and do this or get up early and do this, uh, work a Saturday or a Sunday, you know, dealing with this, or you know, even a Friday if we're off on Fridays. So that's the version of unwillingness that Toy is referring to. It doesn't mean that you're like, you know, helpless, you know, unwilling, you know, person or whatever. It's a little bit of a, you got to kind of get this muster up and say, you know what, I'm gonna do whatever it takes, because these things that I work on are going to advance my business. It's like shifting gears on a bicycle. You're pedaling really, really fast right now, and all this stuff's going on in your office that you're not necessarily um proud of, and you don't feel like you're moving very fast. You're waking up every day, it's groundhog day. Go in, do the same old crap, you know, drama, whatever, um, you know, telling employees what to do and stuff, and dealing with all their, you know, and then there's like, okay, I'm tired of this, and I'm actually going to work towards a more coordinated and organized office. I'm gonna put some organization in place, and I'm gonna have to start getting up and making myself, you know, to-do lists in the morning. Trust me, it works. Because you're gonna walk in first thing, 8 a.m. You know, people are gonna be like, hey, doctor, what about this? What about that? What about this? What about that? That is your day is running you instead of you running your day.
SPEAKER_00Been preached that a lot.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah. Yeah. So you show up with all these things that you wanted to get accomplished, and then you don't get any of it accomplished. But that's because your day is running you. So that's why you have to put things on a piece of paper and keep it out there where you can kind of see it, unless it's something that other people don't need to see, so that you can refer to it. But when you're when you've only got, you know, two, three, four, five minutes in between patients and stuff, it's hard to implement some of this stuff. Um, so that's where you have to start to create space. Um, if you're trying to do it over lunch, then you end up working through lunch or into lunch. Um, somebody else needed something during lunch and you didn't get to it. So, first thing in the morning, that generally is my recommendation for best time to do it. You're fresh, you're not worn out, and you're not tired, and then becoming unwilling.
SPEAKER_00We talk about it around the office. I mean, we're like, if you if you've never watched this clip on YouTube, it's called the line mentality um clip. You know the one I'm talking about? You got line mode and gazelle mode. So my staff like to joke and they're like, um, we're in line mode, we're in line mode. So we'll go through there and like, are you a gazelle right now? Because we like talk crap to each other. Um, and that's kind of where you have to be, is in line mode the whole time, is like, I'm gonna make a change. And it starts with, you know, that mentality itself is I'm making a change.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, in the video that she's talking about, um, you know, it is on YouTube, but uh it in the video she's talking about, it's you know, why is the lion the king of the jungle? It's not the biggest the elephant is, it's not the fastest the cheetah is, it's not the smartest. But when a lion walks up to an elephant or a giraffe or you know, a gazelle, it doesn't think run, it thinks lunch. And it's all about the lion mentality. And not that everybody has to be out there to try to compete to be the you know, Olympic gold medalist of dentist or anything, but just keep in mind what your ideal scene is. Um, you know, how do you really want things to be? I mean, we all went into dentistry so that, you know, we were our own boss and you know, we could have everything the way that we want it, but then we find ourselves years into it, working in a chaotic environment with people that stress us out. Um, and we're just trying to make it, you know, keep our head above water each and every day. And until you start to think a little bit more of like from a business and an entrepreneur standpoint, and starting to put, you know, systems in place, you really don't ever achieve that harmonious environment that you thought you were going to get when you decided that you wanted to be a dentist.
SPEAKER_00I was teaching one of my staffs today, and videos like that, and there's all these entrepreneurs and our videos and stuff, like, you know, we're we have a lot that we can offer just informational wise. And I s I have seen staff and dentists, they'll take advice from people that never achieved it, and it never made sense to me. It's like you have all this, and it's it takes that first step, that mindset of I'm making a change, and following the people that already created the map for you. So if you take one of our videos and you implement it, it's gonna make one piece of your pie just a little bit. It's gonna taste a little bit better. So if you just keep putting it together, keep putting it together, you know, you'll start making something really nice.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, my experience when it comes to working with dentists is uh that you can't achieve everything all at once. It's little by little, like Torya said. And then the second thing that I would say, like, well, where do you start? Well, you just start somewhere. It doesn't really matter where. If you want to reach out to us and tell us really what your, you know, what you feel like your biggest problem is right now, um, we can probably give you some direction to go off of. You know, we're not consultants, we have nothing to sell you, no subscriptions or anything like that. You're just reaching out to us as friends and people that have been there, done it, um, and we're in the trenches and we're doing it every day. Um, and we're not telling you guys from any angle of like trying to sell you something. We're just saying, okay, well, we ran into a similar problem. I mean, currently when we're recording this, we have three practices, but we're closing on a fourth here soon. And we've built practices, we've sold them, we've bought them, we've grown them, built businesses. Um, it if it exists in dentistry, we've we've experienced it. I mean, I've worked in public health, I've worked, you know, with the military. Um, I wasn't in the military, but I worked with the military. Um, and so uh I think I was an associate. So like I've I've just about experienced everything in my career. And so when we're talking about, you know, these things, we're gonna give you real life experiences that, you know, things that we've tried and things that we, you know, said, okay, that didn't work, and then things that we tried that did work. So, you know, maybe you're considering a situation, uh, but the decision you're making is something that we did try. And either we say, This is what happens when you do it like that, or we say, you know what, we did it exactly that way, and you're good to go. You're gonna be fine, and here's why. Um, we'll never tell you what to do without telling you like the why behind it. That's exactly how we work with our employees is we think that if you tell them the why, they will comply. So oftentimes you just tell an employee, is that funny to you?
SPEAKER_00It's his, his, he made that up. So it's cute.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I actually like it. So if you are working with your employees and you're just kind of like barking out orders, um, and they don't really understand, you know, why they're needing to do it this way or that way, um, then maybe they'll do it that way just to appease you in the beginning, but eventually they'll kind of get off into, you know, doing it their own way or the way they think is best. And that goes from making temporaries all the way to how you're answering the phones or how your patients, you know, when they call in and they need to cancel their appointment, how that's handled, everything. Sometimes employees just kind of start to get a little bit on the lazy side and you know, they do what's the easiest for them in the moment. But okay, so jumping back into you know, the the lion mentality of dentist, yeah. We we pretty much are saying this if you're gonna work in your business, then you're gonna kind of work in chaos. If there's ever a chance to be able to get out of it, you gotta be willing to do what other dentists don't do. And that is to work on your business after hours. Now, I'm not saying you're gonna do it at 3 a.m. or midnight or 9 p.m. or cut into your kids' time. And not forever. And not forever. But we dentists, we have it good. We generally work four or five days a week. There's a lot of time in there that is not family time and it's not clinical time that we can get to this stuff. So we can't sit and be unwilling and say, well, I'm busy and I don't have time and stuff like that. If you want it bad enough, you will sacrifice some time with something else that can be sacrificed, not family time, but you can sacrifice some time somewhere else to be able to find time to be able to do this. And it doesn't have to be forever, it's just to get it done. It's like remodeling your house. I mean, you come home every evening and you've got to work on, you know, painting something or, you know, redoing, you know, the floors or the carpet or something. And, you know, you know that like coming home after work and doing something with your house isn't a forever thing, but you get it done and then you enjoy it for the life of that room or your house or whatever it is. You get your office in order, you're good for a long, long time. All you gotta do is be able to maintain it. Don't break it. So watch our videos.
SPEAKER_00Are you painting something in your house right now?
SPEAKER_01No.
SPEAKER_00Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I see. I'm one-dimensional. I can only talk on literally what's going on with me.
SPEAKER_00This is what he works with.
SPEAKER_01Oh man. Yeah, see? I mean, I bet you don't have an office manager that's giving you such a hard time all the time. She used to be a chair side assistant. I told her, I said I promoted you to office manager so that you couldn't give me a hard time every single day, all day long, across the chair from me.
SPEAKER_00So I was probably one of those employees you needed to let go.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Hardly not. Okay, guys. So like, subscribe, send us comments. If you've got questions on any of this stuff, believe it or not, we will interact with you. Um, if you leave your number, we'll even call you. I mean, you can private message that, but um don't put your number out there for everybody, I guess. But um, let's blow this thing up, guys. We'll see you in the next video.
SPEAKER_00See y'all