Dear listener, it is possible to scale your practice and keep your sanity! Kiera discusses three overall pieces of advice for those who have expanded/want to expand to multi-practice ownership, including centralizing atmosphere and tactics, establishing leadership infrastructure, and keeping your communication fluid.

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Transcript:

Kiera Dent- Dental A Team (00:00)

Hello, Dental A Team listeners, this is Kiera. And today I wanted to dig into multi-practice management and how this can be something so fun. I know several of you have multiple practices. I had multiple offices and I just think that this is a space of like, all right, here we go. How can we make this amazing? And how can we lead, scale and stay sane? I think is a big spot because I think that when we go from one practice to two practices, I know I went.

insane and it was not fun. And so for you, I just wanted to break this down because I really think this is a popular thing. And also if you're sitting on the fence of should I grow, should I not grow, I think it's going to be a fun discussion for us today. And I just wanted to say, welcome to the Dental A Team podcast. I'm Kiera Dent and I'm so happy you're here. I love all things dentistry. I love everything that we're about. I love helping you have the best day. I love positively infusing you and your practice with goodness. I love reminding you that you are in the absolute best profession.

And this podcast is made free because you guys share, review, like, and you're able to bring in more and more listeners for us. So I just want to say thank you. And if you haven't done that today, please share this, like this, review this. That's how we're able to stay at the top of the list for more offices to be positively impacted, to grow their practices with ease, and to realize dentistry should be fun again. So with that, I want to talk about like, when we go into multi-practice ownership, it can get really freaking thrilling. So.

I want you to look at like, okay, things that we need to do are as we grow and evolve. Number one, I want you just to ask why are you doing this for ego? Are you doing it for impact? Are you doing it for fun? Are you doing it to be acquired by a DSO? Knowing your why and then putting that up on the mirror so you never miss it is going to help you tremendously. Like genuinely a hundred percent just have that why because then it gets really, really thrilling. And so for you then it's going to be, okay, great. Once we have that,

I look at like, what can we centralize? So when we brought our second practice, it was make everything very, very simple and very easy for us. Meaning I want it to be all of our software is going to be the exact same. So we have the same software, the same colors. So from practice to look like the different locations when doctors go multi offices, it actually is very easy. Also, we had billing. So we had one person who was over the billing of all the practices. What about our reporting? Can we have the same reporting? So different scorecards that are reporting the same thing.

over the location that we have at centralized so we can quickly look and see how is each location doing. And then also making sure like our handbook, our SOPs, our operations manual is the same. So we set up the operatories the same. We do the same thing for hygiene. Everything is the same. So again, think about McDonald's. Could you imagine McDonald's or Chick-fil-A or any fast food restaurant opening multi-locations if the experience isn't the same that actually gets hard. Now there can be some nuances but the core infrastructure should be very, very similar.

Then after that, you also want to make sure that you have the same culture, team culture and patient experience. So again, go back to Chick-fil-A, the employees all have about the same, the culture is the same, we have the same experience every time we go in, no matter where I'm going across the nation or the globe, it's the same experience. And so for you, how can we make sure that we've got same team culture, same patient experience? You want to make sure your leadership team is really, really solid. And then you've got to have like shared tools. So the KPI dashboards, we've got to have low

specific views. So if you're having things that are on a ⁓ software, so like if Open Dental, you've got to have it to where I can access every single practice easily or if it's in the cloud and there are pros and cons between cloud software versus none. I have found that a lot of cloud softwares are awesome for ease of access at home. I will say Dentrix Ascend is my least favorite even though know they're coming back and they're popular. What happens is like I have a practice that switched to curve and they love it.

but there's nothing that can really integrate oftentimes. So you can't get analytic reports. You can't get other things. They're not as open source for you. And so if you ever want something outside of that software, that's usually cheaper, more affordable, helps you. That tends to be an issue with the cloud-based softwares. But when we got multi-practices, it becomes much easier because then we can sink in. We can look at it. We can have centralized billing, centralized, re-care, centralized phone systems, but you can also do this with a server. So when we look at this,

I think it's really great because we have practices and when we standardize how we schedule, we standardize our software, we standardize our billing procedures, the practices actually grow 10X. So I have a location, there's five practices and when we standardize these items, I kid you not, we add about a million per practice per year. So when you go across this, five million growth and you get 10 million growth and you get 15 million growth and you get 20 million and consistently every single year we're typically adding, but it's because things are standardized, things are centralized. We're able to say, right,

All offices, this is how we're now gonna block schedule. All offices, here are your goals. All offices, the billing is processing. All offices, this is how we do new patients. And it really is able to help you. So you've got to centralize what you can across the board and then have it localized at certain levels. But then it means like each office manager does the same thing, but they're making sure team spirit and team culture is the same. Patient experience is the same of what we do as an overarching multi-location area. So that's step one.

Step two is we wanna build a leadership infrastructure. So what this is, is we've gotta make sure that we've got regional managers, office managers, department leads. Sometimes multi-office locations are gonna have a hygienist that's over all hygienists of all practices. Other times it's at the practice level. But regardless across the board, there are set standards and set processes that are going to be there for you. So I really wanna make sure that you have that. And then we also need to clarify like who has ownership of this, who's entering scorecards, who's entering KPIs.

I like it to be that each office manager is responsible for their practice. So that way their office needs to be profitable, hitting the K...