Building & Growing a Sustainable Dental Practice – 2025 Guide by Dr. Scott Leune

This podcast features a conversation between Scott Leune and Gary Bird and serves as a masterclass on building a sustainable and fulfilling dental practice—one that aligns with personal and professional aspirations rather than merely chasing growth for its own sake.

Key highlights:

Defining a Dream Practice:

• According to Scott, growing for the sake of growth does not necessarily lead to happiness or success.
• Leune emphasizes that a dream practice should provide both financial and time freedom, rather than just focusing on expansion.
• The discussion highlights the importance of dentists defining what they truly want instead of blindly chasing scalability.

The Journey Matters:

• Scott believes that success should never come at the expense of health, relationships, or mental well-being.
• Scott suggests that avoiding burnout requires structuring work in a way that allows for both personal and professional fulfillment.
• He advises dentists to make small but significant adjustments, such as reducing work hours or choosing more fulfilling types of dentistry, to create a more sustainable career.

Mindset and Decision-Making:

• Leune thinks that flexibility in practice management is crucial for long-term success.
• He warns that many dentists make business decisions out of stress or fear, rather than focusing on sustainable long-term goals.
• Scott challenges the common belief that selling a practice is the best solution to stress, suggesting instead that restructuring work environments can be a better approach.

The Role of Leadership vs. Management:

• According to Scott, leadership in dentistry is not about charisma or scaling a large operation—it’s about achieving results that provide both financial and time freedom.
• He believes that a well-managed practice should rely on structured systems, accountability, and clear expectations, rather than depending solely on hiring “the right people.”
• Scott stresses that a strong practice is built on habits and processes rather than just good intentions.

Strategic Execution – The Three Pillars of a Dental Practice:

• Leune explains that every dental practice operates on three key pillars: Operations, Expenses, and People.
• He suggests that effective practice management requires balancing these three elements while maintaining efficiency and profitability.
• The discussion points out that hiring and training staff properly is just as critical as controlling costs and ensuring smooth day-to-day operations.

Building a Sustainable Business Framework:

• According to Scott, dentists should engage in Quarterly Strategic Planning to identify three major areas of improvement and tackle one issue per month.
• He strongly recommends working with experienced mentors and coaches to gain insights and avoid common pitfalls in practice management.
• Leune emphasizes that continuous business education is just as vital as improving clinical skills.

The Role of a Business Coach:

• Scott believes that a great business coach should align with a dentist’s values and have proven experience in building successful practices.
• Leune advises that dentists need an external, unbiased perspective to identify blind spots and take actionable steps.
• He reassures that hiring a coach—any coach—is a step in the right direction, as consistent accountability and structured guidance will always lead to improvements.

Final Message from Scott:

The key to building a sustainable and fulfilling dental practice is not about rapid expansion but creating a structure that offers financial stability, time freedom, and professional satisfaction. Dr. Scott Leune encourages dentists to take control of their careers, plan strategically, and ensure that their journey is as rewarding as their destination.

Here is the full transcript of the video

Scott Leune:

To grow for growth’s sake doesn’t necessarily make us happy. It doesn’t mean we’ve got a practice of our dreams. It doesn’t mean that we’re accomplishing the things we want in life. Outside of dentistry, I think sometimes it’s a really good thing to pause, take a step back, and maybe reset a few things. I think a lot of people think of leadership for scaling, but the reality is most practices and most dentists are not going to scale. This might sound really strange, but I’d like to for a second, just throw that word away. I think what we’re trying to do is get results in a way that we’re proud of that gives us the financial and the time freedom.

Defining Your Dream Practice

Gary Bird:

Welcome back to another episode of Dental Marketing Theory. I’m your host, Gary Bird. I’m the owner of SMC National where we help offices just like yours, level the playing field against the big guys out there. So you can grow the way that you want, but you can’t grow the right way if you don’t actually know what you want. I have the one, the only the Scott Luna who’s going to come on and do a masterclass on how to build your dream practice. It doesn’t matter if you’re just getting started or if you have a ton of practices already. It’s going to be a really impactful show that’s going to cause you to think differently, and that’s what Scott’s good at is changing the pace of the way you’re going to think about the information that’s in front of you and give you a new window to look through.

So he doesn’t really need any introduction. There’s nothing really I can say to hype them up more than what his name and what his reputation is. So you’re going to want to stay tuned for this one. All right. We are live, and I’m excited about this conversation. We actually filmed a podcast not long ago and I haven’t even released it yet, and I saw Scott in person, so I’ve seen him everywhere. If you haven’t seen Dr. Scott Luna, then you probably aren’t in the dental industry, and so he’s everywhere, and I got to bring him on a podcast and then I saw him at an event last weekend and we got to talking and we wanted to come on and have a conversation about do you even know what your dream practice looks like? So Scott, do you want to frame this for the audience of what we were talking about and why we thought this would be a useful podcast?

Rethinking Growth in Dentistry

Scott Leune:

Yeah, I see a lot of people kind of chasing growth, chasing maybe money and just to grow for growth’s sake doesn’t necessarily make us happy. It doesn’t mean we’ve got the practice of our dreams. It doesn’t mean that we’re accomplishing the things we want in life outside of dentistry. And so I think sometimes it’s a really good thing to kind of pause and take a step back and maybe reset a few things. What is a dream practice? What does that mean to someone? We need to understand what our win looks like. What does a finish line look like so that we don’t get sucked into making decisions that are not going to leave us there. So if a dream practice is something that gives us time freedom and financial freedom, then maybe that doesn’t align with having five dentists working in our, or maybe it does. Maybe that’s what it takes to get that time for, but we have to really figure that out and define that first. And I’ve seen a lot of really cool dream practices that maybe would inspire people if they start kind of trying to define that for themselves.

Understanding the Entrepreneurial Journey in Dentistry

Gary Bird:

Yeah, this is such an interesting topic because this is really an entrepreneurial type topic because you kind of have to pick your road when you work for somebody else. They tell you when to show up, they tell you when to leave, they give you your check, and then you check out and you check in. But when you start a business, the world is your canvas. And I know what happened to me was, man, I just wanted so bad to be successful, whatever that meant. I didn’t even know what that meant. I just knew I had to get more clients and had to work with better clients and better people and provide better results. But then I got to this interesting place where it was like, man, if I could just do, I was doing everything. I was a jack of all trades, right in the company.

I was a chief everything officer. And then one day I said, man, if I could just do sales, that would make me really happy. And then I just got to that place and I was only doing sales and I was like, I don’t want to do sales anymore. If I could just do marketing for my company, I’d be really happy if I could just stop managing accounts, I’d be really, really happy. And I did each of those things. I remember at one point I was just like, if I could just have meetings all day, that would make me really happy because I was doing so much desk work that I just wanted to be in meetings all day. That was horrible. I didn’t want found out really quickly. No, I don’t want to be in meetings all day. Really for me, over time, it’s become having the flexibility or the options to choose what I want to do. That’s success for me and having the freedom to do that. But it took me a long time to figure out that’s what I wanted. So for you, Scott, whether it was for you or for what you’ve seen in other doctors, how does someone even begin to go through that journey and make that figure out what they want to be when they grow up, so to speak?

Enjoying the Journey, Not Just the Destination

Scott Leune:

Yeah, I think a lot of us do think about the end. We have this kind of bigger goal, this bigger vision, and it kind of has to sound big. Otherwise it may not feel like we should be proud of that vision. It wouldn’t inspire anyone else. So we come up with these big things, but I want to start off by saying that we need to enjoy the journey there. So often we ignore the journey. We almost justify everything by what we’re trying to accomplish, but on the way we can lose our health, we can lose our relationships, our mental stability and sanity, and we can feel burnout. We can lose connection with why we’re even doing what we’re doing. The journey needs to be enjoyable. So of course we’re going to define the dream, but we need to get there in a very healthy way, and that takes maturity.

The Keys to Avoiding Burnout

We can’t be reckless about this. If we’re reckless, we start compromising important things in our life, justifying it by this vision or dream. A lot of dentists feel burnout, and so they then change vision. I had rather not do the dental anymore. I just want to focus on the business. They say because the dental is burning them out, instead of maybe fixing the dental burnout, maybe doing different types of dentistry, doing it for less days a week, doing it in their beautiful office with the team that they enjoy being with. So it’s important to say the journey is incredibly significant, but when I look at the end, I see a lot of commonalities with Dennis. I think that in general, we all want financial freedom also in general, we all want time freedom. A lot of people say they want to work, but I really see it being more like they want the option to work if that becomes important. They want time freedom. There’s a lot of dentists though that want to work. What else are they going to do?

The Balance Between Clinical and Business Success

Gary Bird:

Yeah, there’s some dentists that literally love the, I did an interview with one recently. He just loves the clinical work and he doesn’t want to have anything to do with the business side of it. It literally stresses him out. He hates it. He loves his team. He’s like, I have a great team. I have great people, but I just want to do clinical work.

Scott Leune:

Well, again, I would challenge that dentist. The business side stresses him out, so I don’t want to do the business side. He says, what if when we feel stress from a side of our organization, we try to relieve the stress running away doesn’t necessarily fix things.

Gary Bird:

Totally agree. So actually what he did, he sold his practice and he gets to practice now. He set up a whole organization around the stuff that he wanted to do. What are your thoughts about that? Is that the right way to tackle that kind of stress or would you look at it differently?

The Financial Reality of Selling vs. Sustaining Your Dental Practice

Scott Leune:

There’s no right or wrong, but I think that people sometimes decide to sell for the wrong reason. When you sell a practice, you’re typically selling it for something like five times your ebitda, five times your profitability, your cashflow. You’re getting five years of cashflow upfront, but after that five years, that money’s gone. Your lifestyle has spent that money. I would much rather have an organization, a dental practice that I don’t need to sell for five times money today. I’d rather have a hundred times ebitda. Maybe I could own it for 20 or 30 years because it doesn’t burn me out. I pass it on to my kids, they pass it on to their kids and let’s get a hundred times ebit, a hundred years of profit out of this thing. Or at least let’s build it that way. If we build an organization that doesn’t poison our life, it nourishes our life, it gives us energy, it doesn’t take it away.

So if we’ve correct these stress points and we build an organization that gives us financial freedom and time freedom that does something we’re proud of in a way that makes us happy, we can have that for a very long time. We don’t need to run away from one side of it. We don’t need to sell it, although the people that do that also good at justifying why they did it and that justification can look like good advice. It can look like laws to learn. But again, I want to challenge people. What is your dream practice? Maybe you can create a dream that says you don’t chop any of it away. Maybe a dream practice is that you’re doing only the dentistry that you feel passionate about, that that fulfills you somewhat and you’re doing it with people that you want to be with. You want to be around and you’re doing it in a facility that makes you proud of what you’ve done and that makes you happy to walk into that other people find good and that that organization is giving you enough money that you have freedom and it’s giving you enough flexibility that you can spend your time doing what you want to do.

And all of that can provide you almost this business nourishment to make you feel fulfilled. Even though the more entrepreneurial you are, the more you want to start a new project in your career. But how about every new project or every new phase we start becomes a healthy journey and it doesn’t steal part of our life outside of that. That to me is a dream practice to strive for.

Leadership and the Role of the CEO Dentist

Gary Bird:

So what I hear you saying, and maybe this is because I’m hearing it through the lens of the way I want hear it from my journey, is what you’re really aiming for is flexibility to be able to do what you want to do or change the freedom to change your mind of like, I want to do more of this, or I want a better because you say it’s a beautiful facility. Well, you build a beautiful facility, but in 10 or 15 years it’s not a beautiful facility anymore, right? It’s old now and you need to upgrade things. You need to change things, technology changes. So it’s having the ability to change your mind and the flexibility to do that. But you have to be have that. You have to be very intentional, and that intention is at the beginning. If you wait too long to get intentional, then you get yourself kind of stuck in positions that you might not want to be in long term.

Scott Leune:

You know what? It’s not beautiful anymore. That facility I have to redo. It is the journey. I now have three dentists instead of one is the journey. And we can make that journey something that we like or we can make that journey control and burn us out. If some dentists feel like they just don’t have the energy or the time to even work on their career yet they spend so much time on Netflix or on Instagram and they spent so many years working for someone else and they’re not taking the time to correct the stress, or how about we just work two hours less every single day than we currently see patients? Why not just peel away those two hours if that’s what’s needed? What are we scared of? Because if those two hours allow us to then build the discipline we need as a CEO in our organization and to give us the extra space we need, we all need too much time, too much space so that when the spikes of stress happen, they don’t break us.

Check out the Dental CEO Mastery Seminar by Dr. Scott Leune

When the opportunities come in front of us, we see them and we’re not too busy to pass ’em on. So if it takes working less as just an example, work less. If it takes stopping doing some type of dentistry or learning a new passion in dentistry, then we learn the new passion. And if we don’t own a practice, it’s harder to make these decisions that selfishly improve our life. So that’s another component. A lot of people may dream of a dream practice but may be fooling themselves saying it’s not the right time, the right time to do the right thing is probably going to be right now. It just will never feel completely safe for certain. You have to have this uncomfortable confidence to do what you know is I use this example sometimes when I lecture my courses. The U five or 10 years from now would love to have this day back, the U five or 10 years from now, would love to make decisions today about what you’re going to do.

Are you making that you 10 years from now proud with what you’re doing? Or do you know that you’re going to look back and regret not doing something sooner? And I’ll tell you the regrets I see usually come from not doing what you know could have should have done. The regrets usually don’t come from trying too many things or trying to be too good or starting something new that you were excited about in the moment. The regrets usually come from what we didn’t do, how long we stayed in Medioc, whether that’s a relationship or a financial situation. Let’s not do that. Let’s not continue doing that. Let’s not be the fool 10 years from now that looks back and said, I know I should have. I always wanted, I just didn’t. So maybe someone needs to hear that it’s not going to ever feel perfect to become an owner, but I’ll tell you, it feels much less perfect to not be an owner. And so we just got to make that uncomfortable transition into the unknown of jumping in the pool and swim. And once we are becoming an owner now, our dream practice is actually more of a reality. Our ability to control our day is gone way up.

Gary Bird:

Yeah, I love that. Now I know what people are thinking because I’ve been in the negative mindset before as an entrepreneur. We’ve all been backed into that corner where you hear somebody like Scott Luna talking and you’re like, dude, you’re really successful and you’ve done a lot of great things. So yeah, that positive mindset and all that kind of stuff is great, but you don’t understand I have this situation, my wife just left me. My kid is sick, my practice is doing this, and my best team member just quit on me. And these are all things, you have all those stories. The last episode that we did, if you haven’t watched it, Scott literally goes through and shares his whole journey of what’s happened to him and how he hurt himself and really, really hard stuff that would cause most people to quit, but you’ve decided to keep going. So for those people out there that are listening to this and they’re going, okay, that’s great. You’ve been successful in stuff, so it’s easier for you to say that. Could you walk through how you developed this mindset in those negative times? How the negative times actually is the time to get in the position to get to where you want to be?

Scott Leune:

Yeah, it’s a really cool question you just asked. Maybe one of the cooler ones I’ve ever been asked. I didn’t really have the right mindset until I started having kids. I’ve got five kids now. But one trick I do to trick myself is when I’m kind of in a negative moment where I’m catching myself saying, I just can’t for this reason, for that reason, I stop and I say, okay, if I was giving my child advice, if I was my child and I was going to give them advice on what to do in life in this moment, what would be the right thing to say to them? That’s what I need to be saying to myself. And if I can have other people in my life that can be honest enough with me to tell me those things as well, it also tricks me into moving on.

What I also know when I’m not in that negative space is that these negative moments aren’t actually that real and negative. They’re very temporary. It’s a tiny blip in the life. They’re usually a sign for you to start the next chapter. When something bad happens, we can get emotionally sucked in and crushed by it, and we can think of it and hold onto it for years. But the reality is it happened in a split second and now it’s in the past. The past no longer exists, and whatever future we’re worried about doesn’t exist either. The only thing that exists is right now and what’s the right thing to do right now? Those negative things are so often that sign of what to do next of a reason to start the next thing. So it’s difficult. It’s difficult when we’re hurt, when we’re stressed, when we’ve broken, but if we can remember that this is the start of the next chapter of our life, what do we want the chapter of our life to be, the next chapter of our life?

What should the title be? Should it be I’m stuck in mediocrity doing nothing with my life and just complaining because this happened to me? If that’s not what we want it to be, we need to start writing a new title. But again, the way I trick myself is I go back to my kids and I think, what would I do? What would I tell my children? Another way to trick yourself is pretend like someone else bought this practice, someone else bought this situation. What would be the first thing they do to immediately improve the situation? If someone else bought your moment, what would they do? And we need to see that. We need to trick ourselves into saying, now’s the time to start that I say trick because our brain has convinced us it’s not. So we got to trick that brain into thinking, oh yeah, it is. It actually is. All of this is mindset issue. We get in our own way.

Breaking Free from the Culture Myth

Gary Bird:

Yeah, okay. So the mindset is super important because if your mindset’s not right, you’re just not going to get to where you want to go. There’s not a lot of people who are we could point to that are super successful and the way they think about life is backwards. So mindset is super important. And then from that mindset, you also have to create a realistic world that you want to live in in the future, which can be difficult. And so I love the framework that you gave of creating a world where you have the flexibility, where you have the options. So if I’m creating, I’m thinking about this as if I was a dentist, so it’s like got to get my mind. I got to trick my mind. What advice would I give to my kids? Or what would this really success? What would Scott do?

What would Scott tell me to do here in this situation? And that goes a long way. I’ve actually used that framework before and it’s very, very helpful because it breaks everything down. What would be the next step now to somebody who’s building that dream practice? What other frameworks would you give them? Now, let’s assume that this person already owns a practice. They’re already knee deep. They’re probably in student debt. They have a lot of business debt as well. They probably have team issues and things like that. So now their mindset’s, right? And they’ve now decided I want to create freedom for myself to choose what I’m going to be when I grow up, so to speak. What would be the next framework or next step to create that dream practice?

Developing a Framework for Sustainable Success

Scott Leune:

That’s a great question. So in owning a practice, I kind of see there’s three major pillars to owning a dental practice. As a CEO, you have to manage your operations. That’s the day-to-day. You’re used to looking, watching people, do how you answer phones and present finances, operations, create your collections. You have to manage that. That’s one category. You also have to manage your expenses. That spins your collections. That’s another category. And the third category, you’ve got to manage your people and inspire them and build accountability and give them training and direction. Those are the big components of your practice. Now, you don’t have to get any of ’em, right? If you just gently improve something within those three things, you will probably see more success. So it’s not about jumping from being unhealthy to healthy out of shape to overnight. Now I’m in shape. It’s about what’s the framework where I will be on the path of getting in shape?

And of course, medically speaking, that means like we’re going to eat relatively better and we are going to start a habit of working out in the right way. In dentistry, that looks like having quarterly strategic planning where I say once a quarter, what are the next three most important things we need to do? And that will be my monthly implementation project for the next three months, once a quarter, what are the next three things that we need to do? We’re only going to chip away at what I look at as my practice issues. We’re just going to do one thing at a time, but oh my goodness, we’re going to screw it in all the way. We’re not going to just tap it and call that effort. We’re going to screw it in all the way. That’s why it’s only one per month. What helps with this is getting continuous education, continuous business education and connecting with people that are either coaching you or inspiring you, that gives you the shortcuts so you don’t stumble along the way and it gives you kind of the drive to keep going.

So for me, if I now answer your question differently, what are the ingredients? The ingredients are to learn and be inspired so that you can create next month’s plan consistently for your practice? And where you end up might be one little location with a million dollars take home pay, or it might be 10 locations and you’re not picking up a handpiece That’s depending on what you consider your latest dream. But one important part is that as you get to that dream, you have to enjoy what you’re doing. It cannot kill you, it cannot burn you out, otherwise you’ll resent the dream, you’ll resent the practice and you’ll start saying weird things. I think I want to sell it.

Gary Bird:

So it’s mindset and then having that mindset of just it being in a positive place. And then it’s getting into that freedom where it’s like, okay, I want to build freedom for myself so I have the flexibility. And then you said ops, expenses, people, quarterly meeting, coaching and inspiring and then just learning and growing into that next person that you want to be. One of the things that popped into my head and I went through this journey, and I see dentists do this all the time, is they get into, there’s basically a framework, right? So it’s like I’ll use marketing, but it applies to dentistry, it applies everything. It’s like first I learned how to run Google ads. That was the technician for dentists. You’re learning how to do the clinical work and it’s just reps, and you get in and you get good at it and maybe even become great at it.

But then there’s the next step where it’s the entrepreneur side, and this is where you actually get really good at making money at it, and you’re actually producing money from that skillset and more than you were maybe when you began because you’ve learned how to be faster at it or you learn how to double results from it or whatever. But then there’s this next stage that I see, and this is usually, I would say this is the hardest stage is you have to actually become a leader to develop people underneath you to do that thing. And it’s totally different than the first two steps. Here’s a lie that I used to tell myself that I totally believed, but then found out really hard. The hard lesson was because I’m good at running Google ads, I will be an amazing entrepreneur. And there was some truth to that, but then I said, oh, then I’ll be an amazing leader because I was good at running Google ads, which is totally false.

It had nothing to do. The leading of people had nothing to do with my knowledge of ads and dentistry. I see people fall into this trap too, is I’m amazing. I’m the best dentist in the world, clinically speaking, I’m amazing. They become good at the entrepreneur side, meaning they probably learn how to speak to patients well. They even learn how to even deal with some team members well, but then when you go to the leadership side and you try to scale it, it’s a whole new world. The things that you learned over here almost don’t apply over there. And that’s a brutal, for me, it was brutal. It was really, really hard. Do you see it the same way? Do you have a different framework that you use for that or how do you see it from the dental side?

Scott Leune:

I think a lot of people think of leadership for scaling, but the reality is most practices and most dentists are not going to scale. I think that another problem with the word leader is that we have this connotation in society that looks at being a good leader as being someone that can be likable or can be inspiring, can be charismatic, that is really people focused because we are leading people. This might sound really strange, but I’d like to for a second, just throw that word away. I think what we’re trying to do is get results in a way that we’re proud of that gives us the financial and the time freedom we need to get results. Don’t look at it as being a leader for a second. How are we going to get the result of time and financial freedom with the clinical quality and experience that we’re proud of?

We don’t have to be charismatic. We don’t have to build this amazing culture. We don’t have to connect with people emotionally. What we have to do many times is have some very specific habits. We’re going to audit these things to accountability. We’re going to once a month review these items to make decisions. We’re going to have these set meetings, we’re going to have this set structure. We’re going to have these really boring habits that when we put ’em in place, we drive consistent results. And that is kind the operator of A CEO, the operator’s brain that says we are going to perform to achieve these results. Now of course, I don’t want to do that and not be good to people. I don’t mean that, but a whole lot of people hear the leadership conversation and immediately think those people things and culture and everything.

And like you said, scaling and what you described. I’ve experienced too, when you go from one to 10 to a hundred to a thousand of anything, that’s a whole different game. But I believe that too often we associate that game with dentistry and the reality is maybe only one out of a hundred of these dental stories has a scaling game. A lot of those other stories, those 99 is just about perfecting this operation that’s not scaling. We’ll hire someone every now and then, maybe someday we’ll add a second dentist, but that is not a scaling game that is having consistent results.

Gary Bird:

Yeah, that’s such a good answer and I love that because I mean, let’s be honest, if you go and listen to anything in dental, and it used to be more so especially when the labor market was much more robust in the dental industry, and right now it’s harder to, the whole labor side has changed. So you hear about it less, but everything was about culture. It’s like, Hey, this isn’t working in your practice. Culture, culture, culture, culture and culture is important, but all this other stuff that you’re describing, it’s much more manageable, especially early on because you can actually wrap your hands around it. You could actually see it on a spreadsheet. It becomes very tricky to put a culture and people managing those kinds of things into a spreadsheet. You can do it, but it’s much more confusing. So someone who’s listening to this and they’re like, stink, I got four practices or I have two practices, what you’re describing to them is much more manageable and especially towards building that dream practice.And I also think, and you may be doing this on purpose, you are slipping culture into it because what is culture? Culture is winning. Culture is doing things the right way. So if you and I played on a basketball team together and we were losing all the time, it wouldn’t be a good culture on that team. Even if we’re best friends, even if we’re both great at basketball, it wouldn’t be good culture losing all the time. But if we win all the time, all of a sudden culture becomes a lot better. And what I hear you describing is a framework to win, a framework to be successful, a framework to move in the right direction, and also creating clarity for your team because by creating clarity for yourself of like, okay, you’re focusing on this, you are producing these results, that’s creating clarity for the team members, which creates a better working environment. Is that right? Is that what you’re describing there?

Scott Leune:

Yeah, so what you’ve just said is actually what makes up the majority of what I might call culture. It’s the results of how we run the company and how we treat each other, how we treat the business. But I think that the connotation associated with word culture is different. So yes, when you bring accountability because you’ve got these boring weekly habits as a CEO and these meetings that are all structured and these very non charismatic things in your business life, that brings a culture of accountability, it validates that people are doing a good job or it addresses problems right when they pop up that there’s expectations that come along with that. And if you have these boundaries in your company that say, we’re not going to do unethical things, we’re going to treat people well, we’ve got these patient centered rules, these staff centered rules that can all be ingredients for a culture that says we are patient centered, all of that becomes a natural result.

It’s the effect of having these habits in place that’s a lot different than trying to force a culture from personality onto a company without having the habits you need to run it. You see, sometimes I feel that the people that say culture, culture, culture are the ones that don’t know how to actually operate the company, and they rely on having to find the very best people and influence and convince them to want the best for the company, and then it works. That’s what I wonder sometimes because I can take people that are not what anyone would consider are great people, but you put ’em in the right environment and they do great work. And that was not culture. That was having a proper business format, processes, checks, some accountability, positive accountability. And it’s interesting is when you have a company like that, your vision of a dream company might change when the practice doesn’t burn you out every day.

When you’re not dealing with staff issues that annoy you or break you, then suddenly what you think you want can change. And I don’t mean to sound anti entrepreneurial or antis scaling, Lord knows I’ve done plenty of that, but maybe getting our money, our time and our life right first and then having a bigger and bigger vision after that is the right order as opposed to risking our money, hurting our life, stealing our time in order to go after some big thing we think is a vision, just be told, have great culture. I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s a good framework.

Gary Bird:

I love that you’re spot on. There’s definitely there has been, and it’s a less now, but there has been in the dental industry from my point of view, just looking in cultural overkill where it’s just like, and again, a lot of times it’s presented in a way that you really can’t do anything about, right? It’s presented in a way that you can’t manage, but if you’re winning together, if you have clear expectations, then it does become much easier to have a winning culture. With that said, one of the things that I’ve seen with frameworks, I’ll use EOS, but there’s other ones out there with EOS. I’ve seen people implement EOS and they get a lot of traction. They really get going, and that’s what it’s actually called. It’s called Traction the book, and you get that traction. But then what happens is the framework with the OS is like whoever’s in the room bringing the issues and the loudest about those issues, that’s what we’re going to focus on.

And it doesn’t actually tell you what to focus on as far as the issues go. And so it lets you kind of build your own KPIs and lets you throw out your own issues and next thing you know, you can end up in weighing left field. Don’t ask me how I know because I’ve done it before. And so how do you help people with that? Scott, is this something that you coach on where you’re like, here, use this framework, this is what dentists should be focusing on from a framework standpoint and from a KPI standpoint, or is there a couple different options or is there different systems out there? How do you break that down so that people don’t end up in left field focusing on totally the wrong things that are actually going to hurt their business? They’re orderly. They’re meeting every day, but they’re meeting about the wrong things. You know what I mean?

Scott Leune:

Yeah. Maybe an analogy we can use as someone that coaches a soccer team, you could have a younger coach coaching the soccer team with the same format, the same strategy, and you can have an experienced coach coaching the same format, same strategy, but they will get completely different results. Your framework is kind of how you run something. It’s like how you are organizing your thought process, but there’s also this whole other aspect that says, do we have the experience and the knowledge to know the focus on the right thing? Do we have the right vision? Do we have the right kind of priorities? Is really what it is

Gary Bird:

In the soccer analogy, I think that’s so good. Should we work on building our offense right now or should we work on defensive derails, right? Knowing when to do which ones based on your strengths or weaknesses versus your competition strengths or weaknesses.

Scott Leune:

So in a dental practice, if we don’t have enough money, then money needs to be one of our priorities. If we don’t have enough time, needs to be one of our priorities. If we have a lot of money, if we have a lot of time stability, non disruption should be our priority. So there’s a whole strategy on how do you select the next few things to address. Usually when you don’t have excess money and time, you are addressing money and time. Of course, if you’ve got a clinical quality that trumps everything that has to be fixed immediately, but after that, you’re typically going after money and time until you’ve got enough of one of those and then you are trying to protect that money and time. And when all of that’s done, you’re typically then going outside of your dental practice. You’re saying, okay, let me protect the practice and let’s focus on other aspects of my life that I might want to improve.

This is why having a business coach can be very valuable because the business coach is not wearing the blinders you have on and they, they’re definitely not skewed by the past scars that you have, the traumas you’ve endured. So they can kind of see things in a much more broad and clear way to help you understand maybe what those next three things should be that you’re looking at. Also, a lot of times our desires or our wants are actually ignored by ourselves. What we really do is we just react to our pains, react to our stresses. So again, we say things like, I want to focus more on the business when we’ve never freaking done that yet. We’re telling ourselves that’s what we want. We like, no. What’s actually happening is the clinical side of being a dentist is wearing us out because we don’t feel like we can take a vacation. We’re covering three or four hygiene columns at once. We’re running like crazy and not making as much money and we’re like, this can’t work for me, so I’m going to run away from it and say, let’s do the business side. No. So sometimes we need an outside group, an outside coach or someone to hold us accountable to seeing the way it really is and doing the next thing we should be doing.

The Power of Coaching and Continuous Learning

Gary Bird:

And I think, and I’ve been taught that coaches are a hack, so you’re going to learn from their experience, but let’s be honest, Scott, there’s great coaches and there’s mediocre coaches and then there’s some coaches that’ll just point you in the wrong direction. Not maliciously, just they didn’t do things the right way in their career. So they became, if you can’t do so, you become to teach. Right? There’s people that fall into that category. I know for you, you, you’ve done a great job of helping a lot of people. You’ve impacted a lot of people, and that’s largely where your reputation has been built is that you did something and then you showed other people how to do it and then they were successful and went and told other people about it. How would you go about identifying the right person to work with? What are some signs, either negative signs like don’t go and work with these people, or positive signs like this is somebody that I want to listen to that’s going to get me down the right track?

Scott Leune:

Well, you don’t have to find the right person because if you’re looking for the right person, you’ll never get a coach. All you got to do is find a coach and you is highly likely you are going to get better In some aspect. You can find just about any personal trainer and just showing up and being accountable to something is going to make you healthier. Whether they’re the right one or not, whether they’re the best or not, that’s not as important as you might think. It’s however, if I was going to try to find the coach, the one I might say is going to be the best coach for me, what I’m probably looking as a couple of things. Number one, do their philosophies align with what I feel makes sense for my life? Philosophically speaking, are we talking the same kind of thing? If I’m someone that values a lot of time away from my family, I may not choose a coach that is gung ho, go all in on your company and go build it to 20 locations.

So do we philosophically have alignment of some sort that makes me feel comfortable? And then the next thing is how long and how often, how many have they done this for? Because unfortunately with social media, you can act like anyone you want to be. It doesn’t mean you are. So you definitely, and I know it’s a cliche answer, but there’s a difference between hiring a charismatic consultant type person that’s never owned their own practices, and that’s helped the people for the last two years compared to hiring someone that’s been completely beaten up by life and has done 200 practices themselves and they’ve been helping people for 10 years. And I’m not describing me in neither one of those, by the way, but you know what I’m saying here. You want to go with someone that philosophically aligns with you and that has been very experienced in helping people.

The experience is important because they’ve seen a lot of different personality types that they’ve now learned how to coach in a lot of practice situations. They have now learned how to optimize a younger coach. No matter how talented they are, they have not seen a thousand different personality types that they have to somehow convince to better their lives with. So those are I think, the two most important things, but ignore that. At least just hire someone, hire someone, and you’re going to be more fit than if you didn’t. So don’t have this procrastination because you’re fearful you can’t find someone. You can always let ’em go. You can always just find the next one that you think is going to be better and let the first one go, but don’t

Gary Bird:

At picking the next one too. In my experience, I’ve hired all different kinds of consultants for myself. Every time I get a little bit better at being able to identify the person that’s going to be able to help me, because the first time I hired a coach, I had no idea what to expect. And then from there you just learn and you develop. So I love that advice. So just this is not the answer that people want, but this is the answer that people need. So we’re talking about how to build your dream practice. So first starts in your mind, you got to have the right mindset, and Scott walked through, did a great job of breaking down how to do that. Then you have to get to the place where freedom is your priority. Having the freedom to be able to make choices, you have to desire that, have to want that because you’re going to change your mind along the way.

And then from there you break down ops expenses, people, and every quarter you’re meeting and you’re picking three things to work on one every single month. How do you know which things to work on? You pick a coach. Well, which dental coach should you pick? Just pick somebody and get started. And if you want to be selective, try to get somebody with the most experience possible. But like you said, you’re going to end up getting ahead if you just work with somebody. I think that’s a good place to park this unless you have any additional thoughts. If someone wants to reach out to you and say, okay, Scott, I want to get started on this, is there a place for them to connect with you? And I know you got a lot of new stuff going on, a lot of exciting stuff going on. Are you at liberty to share any of that, of what you’re working on and how you’re helping other dentists?

Scott Leune:

Yeah. Let me first off say that I don’t think anyone should hire me as a coach just because they watch this podcast. I think that the next step, if you actually wanted to potentially be involved in my life and vice versa, is you’d probably go to one of my intense training courses, like two days of 400 pages of like, here’s exactly how you run a high success company dental office. That’s probably the next step. And if you were interested in learning about that, you can go to my website, scott luna.com, Scott LEUN e.com. Of course, if I have openings for coaching, I’d be happy to talk to people about that. But getting information first is really important because sometimes you’re not ready mentally to commit until you’ve understood what this actually is first. Sometimes you have to have the information before you’re even able to make a commitment that’s bigger than that.

So I think getting that information is probably the first thing. I’m on Instagram, it’s my personal account. If anyone ever wanted to message me on Instagram, it’s me. So you could always do that as well, but I don’t want this podcast necessarily to be about me. What I hope this would be is kind of maybe a wake up to someone listening to this that’s like, you know what? I do need a new title for the next chapter of my life, and I don’t need to have it figured out. I want to enjoy the journey. I want to have a path that leads to freedom. I need to take the next step. If someone gets to that point because of our short little conversation, then this was an amazing moment to have, and that is what I’m hoping.

Gary Bird:

That’s awesome, Scott. And I’m going to go contrary to Scott. I’m going to contradict him and say, go with his first advice of just get started. I love that advice. That was awesome. And I know that you didn’t mean that for yourself, and I know you’re trying to keep people aligned with the decisions that they make. But here’s the thing I know, I know this audience well, and I talk to them every single week multiple times, is that there’s a lot of people who are listening right now that this is exactly what they needed to hear. And you’re talking to somebody who’s done it and you’re talking to somebody who’s, or you’re listening should say to somebody who’s done it and who has helped a lot of other people. And so get the courses, go to Instagram, follow Scott. I consume all your stuff, and I haven’t actually been to any of your events, so I want to do that someday, but I can consume your stuff online.

I love these conversations that we have. It helps me as an entrepreneur, so I can only imagine the impact that it has to somebody that’s actually running a practice. So Scott, thank you so much for coming on, sharing your knowledge, sharing your journey in the first episode, and just coming on and really reframing this conversation because this isn’t what people talk about. This is what we just went through, the exercise we just went through, building your dream practice. People are like, how many patients do you want? What kind of quality of patients do you want? What kind of treatment do you want to do? How many days in the chair do you want? And those are all part of it, to your point. That’s all part of it, but it’s not the whole thing. It’s not the whole enchiladas. So I love what you just broke down. It was very, very informative and really it’s going to hit, I know it’s going to land really, really well with our audience, so thank you for coming on,

Scott Leune:

Gary. Thank you for having me on. Of course, everything you’re doing for everyone in dentistry, but I really appreciate you giving me this window of time to kind of get my message out there for people that I really want our profession to make this slow kind of change into a new direction where we’re valuing life this way. We’re valuing business this way. We’re getting away from these superficial kind of things that we call wins of lots of locations. And so I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to tell that story.

Gary Bird:

I’m a hundred percent with you, man. This is awesome. Thank you for making the change and being the change.

Scott Leune:

Awesome.