Daily Habits of a High-Performing Dental CEO | Dr. Scott Leune on Shared Practices Podcast
Here is the full transcript of the video
Richard:
Welcome to Shared Practices. We dropped the 2.0. We’ve gotten feedback that this is just shared practices. We’re going to figure that out moving forward here. But I’m excited in this episode to conclude a discussion that we’ve had over a period of now a couple months as we’ve released these every other week with my co-host here, Dr. Scott Leune. Scott, welcome back to the show.
Dr. Scott Leune:
Yeah, thank you. I’m excited to kind of put a bow around this whole topic of what it means to be an effective CEO in a dental organization.
Richard:
Yeah, just like we’ve said in the previous episodes, if the listeners have not heard the previous episodes a hundred percent, go back, find those episodes. This has been phenomenal, high level, but also concrete content around thinking like A CEO, which dentists frankly do not get training on and doesn’t come naturally to a lot of us because we get so in the minutia, so in the weeds. And the topic today was me, the whole time we’ve been talking about this, we’ve been talking about checklists, we’ve been talking about how to manage people’s finances and operations, this just reveals my insecurities and my inadequacies. I want to figure out how to manage me, manage the CEO in a very concrete way, including checklists and specific things to make that job of thinking at this high level baked into our daily, weekly, monthly flow as a dental CEO. So I appreciate you being willing to entertain this last episode and basically do an encore on this topic. So thank you.
The Importance of Personal and Professional Habits
Dr. Scott Leune:
I’d like to think, I’ve said this I think in one of the episodes of the past, but my brain works in outlines, in little pieces and little building blocks. I like kind of getting down to the nitty-gritty of the steps of what to do. And of course we have to step way back and look at what we’re building here, but too many times, especially in dentistry, people talk about the big picture without talking about the blocks, the building blocks needed to put that whole thing together. So I want to talk about these Lego pieces. What does it mean? What do we actually do as a CEO? And before we kind of dive into that, I actually want to ask you a completely unrelated, seemingly unrelated series of questions. Richard, if you think about what does it mean to be a healthy husband and father, what does that mean? Let’s just talk about physically healthy, what do we do in the morning? What do we do in the afternoon? What do we do in the evening? What does that mean? Real quick.
Richard:
Fitting in some sort of exercise, depending on your goals, eating in a sustainable, reasonably healthy way that has whole foods that are nutritious, drinking plenty of fluid that doesn’t have calories or a bunch of acid. All those things would be some fundamentals. And then getting enough sleep and managing our stress.
Dr. Scott Leune:
So if we were to checklist that out in this weird kind of analogy, we would say, okay, every day when you wake up, you potentially have this kind of life checklist that says, “I’m going to work out an hour a day. I’m going to eat this for breakfast, I’m going to eat this for lunch.” Are you going to meditate? Are you going to read? Are you going to rest? What else are you do in that first half of the day?
Richard:
Right? And ironically, I actually have this checklist for myself of I wake up, my goal is to start my workout. I don’t put the full hour on there, but if I know if I at least start and do something, it’s more than likely I’m going to finish it. I want to start my tracking of my macros and my food for the day. I read scripture, 15 minutes and journal and have kind of a self-reflection tool. And that’s my morning checklist that ideally I can get done before my kids wake up. That’s my goal.
CEO Checklists: Concept and Daily Applications
Dr. Scott Leune:
So now we’re getting somewhere, because what you just said is so hard to do if we just want to do. It’s so hard to wake up earlier if we just want it. It’s so hard to work out every day, not just this one day I’m deciding I need to, but every day. It’s so hard to journal, to actually have the discipline to stop life and do that. To stop life and read scripture is so difficult. To eat right is so hard, yet it’s seemingly so simple.
It’s seemingly so simple to just go sit in the corner for 30 minutes and go read that book. Right? It’s so simple to talk about it, but to actually do in life is very difficult because in our life, we’ve got the temptations, we’ve got the temptations of things we want or the temptations of having to correct things we don’t want. We’ve got the winds of life blowing us left and right, and those winds are very powerful. They’re very loud. And what’s not so powerful and loud is the need to be still, the need to read, the need to work out, the need to eat right makes no noise.
So you have given yourself a tool to give also yourself the biggest chance of succeeding at doing this. And I think many of us are that way. Many of us with just the wants and the desire is not enough. We don’t have the discipline, so we have to install discipline. And one way many of us can do it is by deciding to live off of a checklist. Then if we can actually accomplish that, whatever’s on the checklist we end up doing, so we can therefore engineer the life we want. We can engineer the morning we should have. We can engineer being the CEO our business needs. What is the version of that in dental? What is eating right? What is waking up? What is working out? What is scripture reading? What is that in our dental checklist is where I think this episode needs to go. Does that sound okay to you?
Richard:
Absolutely. And I love this concept because it separates out the deciding what to do, here are the things that need to get done, maybe even in an order that we want to prioritize them, and the executing of them, the actual doing of them. Because if you leave those together and you’re waking up and deciding what to do, you’re getting to your dental office and you’re seeing patients, you’re running all over the place and you’re having to decide what to do in what order and get yourself to do it, which are two separate tasks. We’re just pre-planning this, deciding what to do in what order, which then makes it easier to have the discipline to get it done. So this is great. I’m excited to dive into the specifics.
Dr. Scott Leune:
Well, here’s the deal. The tasks that we have to do as a CEO, we either got to do them or we got to do all the extra work that comes from not doing them. So we’re either going to, whatever, audit the day sheet once a day, or we are going to do all the extra work it takes whenever we find out someone’s been embezzling money from us or have been making mistakes on our adjustments and write-offs and all the unwinding and all the stress and all the tasks that come from that. And so obviously it’s much easier to work out a half an hour a day than to suddenly end up near heart attack in your life, having to manage these massive crises that shake you to the core and completely turn your life inside out and upside down.
Some of us though don’t need a checklist. Some of us just need the knowledge. We’ve got the drive, we’ve got the focus, we’ve got the discipline. Man, those that I’m speaking to right now, you’re superheroes. The rest of us are normal. And even if you’re the superhero that doesn’t need the checklist, the people that work for you need their checklist.
All right, so what the heck goes on this checklist? To be a CEO, in a way we’re an office manager, and in a way we’re an owner, and I want to say we’re not a dentist. How do we find time to do all those things? It’s like if we live a life where we haven’t been working out and then we decide, you know what, we need to work out every morning. How do we find time to work out every morning? Well, we have to prioritize it over time for something else. Most people prioritize working out over time for sleep and then they realize, “Well, if I get up earlier, I need to go to bed earlier.” And so in essence, they prioritize working out over the night before of watching Netflix for half an hour extra or scrolling, the dead scroll for half an hour extra.
So what are we going to compromise in order to create the time to even do a checklist? My suggestion is not getting up earlier and getting to work earlier because there’s a lot of life activities that happen before work that aren’t movable sometimes, like dropping kids off to school. My suggestion is we start patient care a half an hour later. In that first half hour, that’s our CEO time. It says on the schedule CEO time, there’s no doctor patient scheduled, if the is the owner doing the CEO tasks. So that’s my first recommendation is we block off the first half hour of the day, no patients, no cutting teeth for the dentist, for the owner. Instead, we’re going to be a CEO. How does that sit with you?
Richard:
Yeah, I can see our listeners instantly reacting of losing that production or feeling like they’re behind on the day. But you said specifically the dentist cutting teeth, so potentially hygiene patients, potentially other patients that are not being seen by the owner provider could be there. And like you said, the consequences of not doing these things are worse than maybe not prioritizing them first thing in the morning. So yeah, I can see some instant pushback in the minds of some of our listeners. This might be hard for some people to stomach.
Dr. Scott Leune:
I agree with where that’s coming from, but I find that it is coming out of, oh, I hate to use this word because it’s such a negative word, I don’t mean it so negatively, I mean it literally, but it’s coming out of ignorance. It’s like, let’s use the analogy of a restaurant. It’s like a chef thinking, “Oh, we got to get people in. We got to get people in. We got to make more meals, make more meals, make more meals.” But the whole time the customer service isn’t good. The place isn’t as clean as it should be. They don’t turn over tables quick enough. And while the chef thinks they’re being really productive just prepping another set of meals in the morning, they’re actually just busy. They’d be a lot more productive stopping and fixing the problems in the restaurant than just making another meal for another customer in an inefficient broken model.
Look, we’re not talking about being a CEO full-time, we’re not talking about being a CEO for half the day, we’re just talking about 30 minutes. But we will make way more money in those 30 minutes maintaining or correcting our company than we will cutting another damn tooth. Let’s cut our teeth in a company that’s been corrected that is healthy. Let’s not cut more teeth and damage our company. So I don’t know if that makes sense.
Richard:
The other way to reframe this as well is to give yourself a set of tasks that you need to be doing every day or that you want to be doing every day via a checklist and not carving out prioritized time for it is to set yourself up to fail every day at doing these tasks. If we’re trying to fit these in between patients and in the cracks of the day, the reality is some days we will manage to do that and other days we will fail and things will slip. And some people have this stronger than others, this guilt, shame, frustration, demotivation around feeling overwhelmed, feeling like you’re not in control and that things are slipping and that it’s your fault as the CEO for missing these things. So I think there’s the long-term consequences of not doing these things, but there’s also the minor psychological uphill battle that we’re setting ourselves up to fail every day by not carving out time.
Dr. Scott Leune:
Well, putting it on a sheet of paper offloads a tremendous amount of subconscious conflict and stress. So when we have it on a sheet of paper and can just see it and not have to remember any of it, now we feel like there’s this path that doesn’t take up our emotional space, and we’re a lot more effective, we’re a lot more efficient that way. It’s almost like if we had to study for midterm and dental school, the worst way to study for that is at the last minute in crisis mode without an outline, without cue cards, without organization whatsoever, and just kind of open up the book and all the pages and kind of skim through the whole thing and just react to what we see. And that’s how people manage their dental offices. They just wait until the crisis moment and just look left, look right, whatever they see, they go address.
A much more efficient way about studying and about running a business is to have a very organized outline of what to do, of what to study, of what tasks to accomplish. And then our efficiency is maximized, our effectiveness is maximized. So if we think about our dental office, what are the things we should do every day to run the business every week, every month? Not to process the patient, not to process the patient, but to run the business to manage our company? Can we write those tasks down and not have to remember, but just remember to do them, to just look at the sheet of paper?
So I’ll start, let’s just brainstorm here. I’ll just start of things that we might have to do every day as a CEO. And some of them might sound super important, some of them may not sound important at all, but they all have a moment where if we don’t do them, we get bit. And so I’ll say that one thing we have to do is we have to audit a chart every single day, because we’re going to make sure we have HIPAA, health history, consent forms, financial arrangement forms signed. We have reappointed the patient, we collected the money from the patient, we posted the procedures under the correct provider codes, we’ve filled out the clinical notes.
Show me one of those things I just said that is useless to us. I dare anyone. Because at some point if we don’t do those things, it can bite us hard. And anything that can bite as hard, we should have a very lazy way of continuously checking. That’s important. Lazy meaning it doesn’t eat away our energy, but continuous, it becomes a habit. So what if we did an audit of one chart every single day? Hopefully most days we wouldn’t find a problem, but every moment we found a problem was a moment we get to stop that particular thing and it’s a moment we get to reinforce that we have a culture of accountability. So we find a problem, we positively address it while it’s tiny incipient decay in our business, which shows our business that we do have a culture of measuring, looking, auditing and having accountability. So I would say chart audits, one.
Richard:
Just real quick. I would say if someone lacks conviction around the importance of this, all it takes is your first patient lawsuit and all of a sudden you feel very strongly about the importance of this and making sure that you’ve had patients sign the appropriate paperwork, the notes are being done. Because as soon as you go through that discovery process with a patient who’s suing you and there are things missing and your case gets weaker and weaker and your stress level goes up and up, you’ve got that conviction for the rest of your life. Much better to avoid that in the first place.
Dr. Scott Leune:
Absolutely. I feel like that’s the secondary reason why I want to audit. The secondary reason is probably what most people find as the primary reason: to catch the problem so that it doesn’t blow up on us. That’s a secondary reason. The primary reason why I want to audit is because it brings a culture of accountability that will impact all kinds of things that people do every day. We will live in a different vibe, a different personality of saying, “Yeah, we cross every T and we dot every I. That is how we run our company.” And so there’s that huge benefit.
So if someone’s listening to this and saying, “I’ve got a great dental assistant. They always get all the forms signed, they always do everything.” Got it. You may not feel like you’d find a mistake if you audit today, but that’s not the main reason why you audit. You audit to install a culture of accountability. And trust me, we’re all human. You will find issues.
So another audit I want to do is stuff that doesn’t show up in the chart. I got to walk through the place. I got to walk through the practice once a day because there’s no report that tells me in dentrics that my restroom’s clean, or no report that tells me that patients are getting headphones put on and pillows and blankets and so forth. There’s no report that tells me the beverage bar is stocked and that the video games are turned on and the light bulbs are working. So these are things that are important to the patient experience. They’re important to running our company. They definitely create impressions in the patient. I don’t want the patient seeing a dirty restroom and thinking that our dentistry is dirty or billing is dirty.
As a CEO, once a day we got to audit the place. We got to walk through and use our eyes and ears. And of course, like I said, once a day we got to look at a chart. So those things only take minutes, minutes. But if we do this little workout for a few minutes a day, we build some biceps of accountability. I’ll start with those two. What do you think we should add to the list? What else should we do every day as A CEO?
Richard:
We did a few episodes on managing operations and talked about building the operations dashboard of high level metrics in the different areas of operations of delivering patient care. And so it might be appropriate to spend a few minutes looking through those high level metrics that are relevant on a daily basis.
Dr. Scott Leune:
Good. So I love that you brought this up. I would say I absolutely agree with you. Part of what we do as a CEO is look at certain numbers that tell us a story. Are we reappointing people in hygiene or not? There’s a number for that. Are people saying yes to treatment? There’s two numbers for that. We definitely want to look at those numbers. The question though is how often should we look at that number because maybe looking at it on a daily basis is not enough data. So I would say that a lot of the numbers we look at as CEOs might be looked at on a monthly basis. There might be some things we want to look at on a weekly, like are we achieving our weekly goal? If we are not trending to achieve the weekly goal, we still have some time to make some decisions to try to correct that before the end of the week. So that would be an example of a weekly number we look at. If we have a weekly goal, we want to look at it.
But a lot of those numbers, I would argue we need to look at on a monthly basis. We need to look at our scheduling rates and our missed call rates on a monthly basis, our hygiene production per day on a monthly basis. We might look at metrics for marketing on a monthly basis, case acceptance on a monthly basis. Because looking at it less than a month, it can be too easily skewed by chance by certain patients on a certain day just happen to not say yes for whatever reason. Doesn’t mean we’ve got a problem, doesn’t mean we have cancer.
Richard:
We talked about phones before as something that if we’re not listening to them, we have no clue what’s being said on the phones. Is that something that’s a daily or a weekly or a monthly type task?
Dr. Scott Leune:
Yeah, I would say that’s a weekly task of listening to a call or two once a week. What’s great now about technology is you don’t necessarily need to listen to them anymore. If you have AI running on your phones, then all those calls are categorized as being scheduled or not, missed or answered. When they weren’t scheduled, how much were they going to be worth had you scheduled them? Why were they not scheduled? And here’s a whole transcript of what went on. So once a week we would want to go audit a call. And I sometimes refer to this as the Friday call of shame, where at the end of the week we as a front office are going to listen to one or two calls that aren’t calls we’re proud of, kind of like an athlete would watch film of a game they played in or my daughter would listen to recording of herself singing on stage in a musical theater performance. We get better that way.
What we’ve said so far is, okay, daily we’ve said office walkthrough, audit and a chart audit. Weekly, we got a phone call audit. Monthly, we might look at our core metrics that tell us if the operations are healthy. Let’s back up to daily. I want to add a few more things on the daily, some ideas. So every day, what else do we need to be thinking about? What else do we need to be looking at? I might say that once a day as a CEO, we might need to have a morning huddle once a day as a habit. We might need to look at the adjustments and the write-offs on a daily basis because those are immediate money lost or gained. And if we find a problem with that, we want to solve it immediately. It takes seconds. We might want to make sure that the deposits are balanced just so we have accountability around that.
We also, by the way, every day want to look at our to-do list and our delegated list. So let’s talk about that for a second. When we do these audits, when we look at things as a CEO or throughout the day, things pop up that need to be done. And some of those things we need to do, but we can’t do them right this second because we’re cutting a tooth. So we need to put it on our list of things we got to do, our to-do list. But then sometimes we’re going to delegate something to someone else. “Please call Mrs. Jones to reappoint her.” We’re going to delegate that to someone. We need to write that on our delegated list. So if you could imagine maybe this checklist is a sheet of paper for us, but the bottom half of the sheet of paper is two columns, our own to-do list and our delegated list. And once a day we’re going to go make sure we did our to-do and the other people did their things we delegated. That might be a daily habit as a CEO.
So I’m going to sum this up and I’ll turn it over to you. If I’m looking at some ideas of daily things as CEO, I’m going to do a chart audit. I’m going to do an office walkthrough audit every single day. I’m going to look at the adjustments, the write-offs and the pods being balanced, and I’m going to lead a morning huddle. And I’m also going to make sure by the end of the day that the delegated items and that my own items were done. And if that was always done correctly, we’ve just solved a lot of stress points for people in their own life today. Think of all the stress that happens when people don’t do what you ask them to do, or that you don’t do what you were supposed to do, or you forgot because you didn’t write down, or you didn’t check the adjustments in write-offs until a year and a half later when she’s been stealing from you for nine months.
So these are pretty simple things. Those are daily things. Before we go to weekly things, you want to add anything to that?
Richard:
Sure. The other thought I had was to be looking at your team members daily checklist, so auditing their self accountability, whatever form of accountability you’ve set up around that.
Dr. Scott Leune:
Well, I don’t know. So yes, I agree with you, we need to make sure people are using their checklists. And we can do that with our eyes throughout the day as we’re walking and talking and treating patients. But what are we actually going to audit? That the sheet of paper exists? That they’ve checked off a bunch of boxes? Anyone can check off a bunch of boxes. In a way, our chart audit and our facility audit is auditing that they did their job. And how do they remember all the components of their job? By utilizing their cheat sheet, their checklist. I don’t even look at their cheat sheet. I want to grade the test. I want to grade the chart. I want to grade the facility. Whether they use their checklist to make a perfect score or not is up to them, “I need a perfect score,” and they have a cheat sheet to help them.
So as we talk about weekly, we talked about maybe listening to a phone call every week. We also may want to audit high crisis things that are happening. So if we’re dealing with any ongoing problems, we’d want to make sure we insert that audit into a more frequent schedule than normal. So for example, maybe we audit the reappointments in hygiene once a month like the rest of our metrics, but we find we have a problem, and now we’ve got this whole kind of monthly implementation plan to fix this problem. Well, if that’s on our monthly implementation plan, we might decide for that problem, maybe we need to look at it every day, have daily accountability on it as we try to implement something new. Or maybe it’s been a problem that we fixed, but we’re still kind of sore from that wound, and maybe we want to look at it every week for a while.
So what’s cool about this checklist, concept of it at least, is it’s not a static document. It should be updated and changed based on what we’re accomplishing. It’s our way of telling ourselves what the heck to do for the next month. We’re just going to put it on paper first.
Weekly and Monthly CEO Responsibilities
Richard:
What that brings to mind as well is we mentioned a cadence of meetings on one of our previous episodes, talking about a quarterly meeting that leads to monthly initiatives or emphasis. Those also might translate into what you were just saying, either the crises or the change management that we’re dealing with. There might be daily or weekly components to that. And as you just said, this should be a living document in that. And it’s been the same thing for me in my morning routine. I’ve built some core habits and solidified those core habits and then started to add things to them. But sometimes I’ve overcommitted myself, I’ve added too many items or I’m consistently failing to do certain items and I’m like, “Okay, should this be on my morning routine or not? And do I need to add or remove or change it or make it a little more concrete or achievable?” It is a flexible living set of items for yourself, but if you’re using it every day, you’re going to know if it’s working or not.
Building Accountability and Refining the Checklist
Dr. Scott Leune:
Well, when you tell your story of your morning, of you’ve got this checklist, you wake up early, you work out, you read scripture, you journal, you eat right, you have this time, these habits, you know what the most powerful thing to your life you said of those items that outweighs everything else you said combined, and I’d argue by tenfold? The most powerful thing for sure is the fact you have a framework, not what you’re actually doing, but the fact you’ve taken control of your life to do what you choose to do. So the fact that this checklist exists and that you operate on it is 10X, 100X more important than the things on the actual checklist. And that’s the big initial challenge for A CEO. Can I take control of my effectiveness first by having a framework? Whether or not the stuff on the checklist is perfect isn’t nearly as important as the fact that I’ve now turned into a checklist-using CEO. That’s the most important thing.
We’ll go back to more weekly items. Once a week we might pay bills. Once a week we might calculate the bonus based on our goals if we have a weekly bonus. We might review the time clocks once a week before that gets out of hand. We might have a staff meeting once a week, an office manager once a week. We might calculate hygienist compensation once a week. We might have some sort of meeting or calculation with our associate dentists. We might perform social media updates once a week. And it sounds like a lot, but all those things just take minutes, and those minutes add up to maybe 15 minutes a day of work. And I said block off a half an hour. Well, the other 15 minutes of every morning is for reacting to what you looked at, to creating the delegation, to doing your to-do list.
Those are weekly. And I know we have limited time here, but just some ideas for monthly real quick. Monthly, we’re looking at all those metrics. We’re also reviewing our profit and loss statement, specific numbers that are very controllable. We’re reviewing marketing reports, any sort of outsourcing reports. We’ve got a reputation management we got to look at. We might be meeting with our practice management coach or our consultant if we have a coach or consultants. We might be meeting with our accountant as well if we use them as a coach or consultant. We’re looking at our collections, AR days, sales outstanding. We might at that point be looking at our phone’s metrics. So maybe we’re auditing a call once a week, but we’re looking at the phone’s metrics once a month. We’re having monthly meetings with our team that’s a bigger meeting about implementation, and we’re selecting next month’s implementation project if needed.
These are all kind of ideas of things that should be done. Again, I challenge anyone listening to this to find one thing I said that we should just skip, that we have no risk on. If we never look at it again, we’re going to be just okay. No, I argue that everything I said has a degree of risk if we don’t do it. If you are scarce, have a scarcity mindset, or if you’ve got an abundance mindset, everything I just said has a huge opportunity of positivity and growth when we do it. But no matter what, it all breeds this kind of culture of accountability.
And because it’s on a sheet of paper, I don’t have to store all that in my head. I don’t have to worry about it in between patients. I don’t have to worry about it when I try to go to sleep at night. I know that I’ve got, the most important thing I’ve said on this call, I’ve got the framework of how I operate. If I’m not doing the right thing, I got the checklist method. I just swap out the wrong thing for the right thing and that is how I roll. Does that make sense?
Richard:
Yes. And I’ll say that the reason we were able to dive or the value in diving in the specifics, even though it might not all apply, I think very often the reason people don’t get started, they don’t start doing this, is they just don’t know what to put on there. And that decision of what to even start with prevents them from doing anything at all. So now that we’ve given people an idea with some very concrete daily, weekly, monthly options, you just need to start, like you said, that being the most important part.
And I would add, make this satisfying. If you really like physically checking it off with pencil or pen or a whiteboard, whatever version of this, or a laminated version, make this feel good to you in a way that feels good. Or if you’re one who, “I just need to see it. I just need to see the line items, I don’t need to actually check it off,” turn this into a routine, into a ritual that is satisfying to do, or pair it with your favorite drink, whether that’s coffee or protein or whatever the heck you want to do, and make this time that you’re leaning into and looking forward to rather than beating yourself over the head trying to do it.
Dr. Scott Leune:
I love that. Analogy back to working out is, if working out for me meant I had to get on a row machine every day, I just don’t like that. I just wouldn’t do it. Even if I had a checklist that said, “Scott, get on the row machine,” it’s probably not going to last. But man, I love running outside. I love playing soccer. I love playing pickleball with my kids. And if we can attach it to something that is positive for us, it makes it a lot easier to make that the habit.
I want to, for just a second, take a moment to kind of talk through the progression of maturity when it comes to this concept of the checklist and the CEO. We start, the most important thing in the beginning is to just have a checklist you use. I don’t care what’s on it. It could only have three things on it, I don’t care. Step one is having one that you use every day. That’s the most important step actually. Then we go to, okay, are the right things on it? That’s the next step. And if the right things are on it, then we go to, are we doing it the right way? And then we go to, are we doing it efficiently the right way? And then finally we end up with, do we still want to do it or should we delegate it to someone else?
And I think too many dentists skip to the end. They don’t have a checklist. They don’t even know if it’s the right stuff. They don’t even know if they’re actually doing it the right way and if it’s being done efficient, and they just say to someone else, “I just got so much on my plate, I just want to hire an office manager. I want them to do it.” They haven’t gone through the process of even defining what and how and how often and all that kind of stuff. So that is, to me, a very important linear progression of becoming an effective CEO when it comes to your tasks is this whole concept of starting with a checklist and going all the way through. And then at the end you decide, are you going to delegate some or all of these items. And by then it’s easy to delegate, it’s easy to train, it’s easy to audit the person you delegated to to make sure it’s getting done. Does that make sense?
Richard:
Yes. And the slow methodical, you began the call talking about Lego blocks, these frameworks and these little subcategories, this progressively refining very small parts of our business to the point where we feel we have iterated and we feel confident in the how, the why, the efficiency, and our ability to turn over, teach someone, have someone else do this and hold them accountable. That is, I think, one of the funnest parts of building a business is building and refining these systems and figuring out our optimal version of this.
So I love that you outlined that maturity of this process because that is the satisfying momentum building part of being a business owner, is you figure these things out. And then once you figure them out, you don’t have to worry about this Lego block. You get to move on to the next one and tweak and optimize and progress in that area. And eventually you’ve got this well-oiled machine that you’ve engineered each part and optimized each part and the efficiencies stack and compound.
Dr. Scott Leune:
Yeah, it’s easy to get a car to drive for hundreds of thousands of miles if it was built properly and then well-maintained. So we need to have a well-maintained set of operations that we are the maintainers of as CEOs. I give the CEO training course, which is like 16 hours of this stuff, super intense. And one thing I say is nowhere did I say we needed to be charismatic, nowhere did I say we needed to be super influential, we needed to be dynamic leaders. Nowhere did I say we needed to all love each other. Because if you think about if my job is to lift weights, the personality of my personal trainer, I could definitely have a preference what they’re like, but the reality is just about any personal trainer that is tracking me and tells me what to lift next is going to get the lifting out of me. No matter what the personality profile is of this CEO, the fact they’re doing these tasks are going to get the vast majority of the performance we need.
Now, sure, we want to learn how to be an effective leader, an effective communicator, an influential person in our organization, but I would say that those things are of tiny importance compared to the tasks getting done no matter what your personality is. Of course, on the extremes of this would be someone that’s got personality flaws that get in the way of doing any tasks. So I’m not talking about that. I’m not talking about sicknesses. I’m just talking about the fact that in the middle, the 80%, we’ve got people that have varying strengths of communication and various strengths of leadership. That doesn’t bother me. They are going to get the vast majority of the work done as a CEO as long as they do the tasks properly. If they do the audits, they do the checks and balances, they get the result they want. And so don’t allow our personality, the perception of ourselves to become our excuse as to why we’re not getting the results we want as a CEO. That’s not the case. It’s because we’re just not doing the darn work. That’s the problem.
Leadership Traits and Overcoming Challenges
Richard:
I love this. And the fact that it is not required to have certain traits in order to be an effective executive, to be an effective CEO of your company. I will take issue with the word that you said, personality flaws that prevent us from doing this. They’re challenges, Scott, and I feel personally attacked because I am one that has these flaws and works to overcome them. And so this is especially valuable. I think the more challenging it is for you as a practice owner to be diligent about the small things, the more structure, and this is how I work, the more structure I’ve set up for myself and sometimes even accountability.
So one last layer to this is not just building all of this. If we need a coach to report to of, “Hey, here are the things that I’m really doing well on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, here are the things that are still a challenge for me. Can you help me work through this? Or can we set up some reporting for myself?” Some of us might need that additional layer of accountability on top of the structure that we’re setting up for ourselves. Both of those things can be used to overcome some of those personality challenges.
The Role of Coaching and Continuous Improvement
Dr. Scott Leune:
What a great use of time and money is to have a coach help you become the most effective CEO you could be for your entire organization. Let’s define it a little differently though. Personality flaws and maybe what I would call personality weaknesses. We all have weaknesses. We all wish we could have certain things stronger about our personality, especially when we’re leading an organization. What I meant by flaws is these extreme detrimental things like, “I can’t control my temper and lash out and scream at people and I have to leave the room because I can’t take this moment. That’s normal for me.” That’s a very detrimental thing.
So the reason why I’m making this definition right now is because I don’t want people listening to this saying, “Yeah, I’ve got this weakness and that weakness,” thinking that that’s a justifiable reason to not get the results you want. I think our weaknesses, we all have them and some of us have a lot of them, me, I’m one of them that has a lot of them, and we can get the result we want. If we have these detrimental flaws that are just crippling us, we need to seek help for that. That’s really hard to have a high performing organization if the leader has these mental moments that are incredibly damaging to their company. So being a introvert who doesn’t like conflict, who doesn’t seem to get the words out right all the time is perfectly acceptable to have a top performing organization. But being someone that lashes out at people and makes personal cuts at them and cusses at them and says inappropriate things just because you’re in a bad mood, that’s a detrimental flaw that we need to get corrected. That’s what I meant by that.
Richard:
Fair enough. I appreciate the nuance there. Because if anyone has worked around people like this, there is an impact. The culture, the accountability, everything is affected by these uncontrolled issues that we need to work through and we need support on. So you mentioned a course around teaching dentists how to be a CEO and think like this. Tell us a little bit more about that course. We both shared practices, Scott Leune, we both offer coaching that helps with checklists, that helps with practices and dentists get organized. But tell us a little bit more about that course and where we can look for it.
Dr. Scott Leune:
The CEO training course I actually do with George, George, Shared Practices, George. You can go to scottLeune.com, my website, Scott L-E-U-N-E.com. And you can see it’s there, the CEO training. It’s something I’ve done for a long time, and man, do we need more of it in dentistry. Think about how many courses there are about clinical stuff, how many courses there even are about the general systems of business or how many people talk about marketing. But gosh, all that stuff that we learn, if we can’t understand the foundation of how to be a healthy CEO for a company, everything else is just harder to do. So I’m very proud of the fact that we’ve decided over the years to tackle this topic and to create the frameworks that are easily taught, easily understood, and then implementable. I’m not a motivational speaker and I can’t get on stage and just say the right words and get everyone to change their life because with a tear in their eye, they’ve had this emotional aha moment and now they’re suddenly a different person.
That’s not me. But what I can do is give really straightforward real world steps and tools that take the common dental CEO and elevate them to the highest level they’ve been at. And that is what I attempt to do in this course. It is for us regular people who just need accountability and organization, who are tired from being victims of chance of what happens with our team and with our patient flow, and just feel a disconnect. We need to gain control. We need this practice to fit in our life better, to give us better money, to give us better consistency. That’s who I’m talking to right now. That’s who I want to teach.
Richard:
What is extremely motivational, though I might take issue with what you just said about not being a motivational speaker, I will say that having a clear picture of what’s possible and how to get there is incredibly motivating. And that has been the case as I’ve attended your courses, we’ve built our courses, and even as we’ve podcasted. Between last time we recorded and now I’ve just got the itch and now I’m looking at listings, I’m looking at potential acquisition targets, because I’m like, “Dang it, this just is fun,” and I can’t help but browse through the. Instead of scrolling on social media, let’s look at P&Ls and potential acquisition targets. So thank you for providing that clarity and that picture of what’s possible, which is just inherently motivating.
Dr. Scott Leune:
Sometimes we all need someone to remind us of what’s possible and what’s important, and sometimes we get stuck in that moment realizing we’re not on that path. So what’s the next best thing to is to take a step left and get on that path. And man, is the path enjoyable when we come at it out of being curious, being excited about having confidence of what we could do, feeling like we’ve got direction. That path is exciting. The path is stressful if we don’t know, if we’re worried, there’s this fear of the unknown, if there’s this gap between what we expect, but where we’re at now, we don’t have this plan to close the gap. Stress builds and builds or we feel like we’re under fire. We’re in crisis mode.
Not all of us have the benefit or the blessing to go down these paths when we’re healthy and reset personally and all that, when we’re reading scripture every morning. But my Lord, what a strong moment to now go back to the business side when you are in those habits. A lot of people listening to this are maybe under fire. What happens when you’re under fire, it’s hard, but you have to take a step back. You have to list everything out that we need to change and prioritize it one bite at a time, one little step at a time, just do the next best thing. Wasn’t that in some sort of movie or something?
Richard:
Frozen 2, yeah.
Dr. Scott Leune:
Frozen 2, just do the next best thing. There’s so much truth behind that statement. And what you said earlier about having a coach, I think the word consultant and the word coach have now been overdone, but there’s definitely a piece of coaching that is done very well that is built around what you need to know and hear and see and the accountability that you need to be involved with for your own benefit in that moment. I think that people that are under fire need a coach. People that have huge opportunities in front of them need a coach. And people that just feel disconnected with where they want to be, they need a coach. So I don’t know if this is a coach infomercial or not, but I feel very strongly about it. I needed a coach to get healthy, like so many of us do. To get healthy and stay that way for the rest of my life, took a coach. It wasn’t just wanting it, that’s not enough. It wasn’t knowing how to do it, that’s not enough. It took accountability.
Richard:
We’ll have to talk about this on a future episode, but exactly the same for me has been transformative over the last year. It’s actually something that I’m going to be doing, helping some people out, some fathers and men out in a men’s group. So this gets us both excited and we’ve seen the power of this. So let’s wrap this episode up. Scott, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for diving in deep on this multi-part series on becoming a dental CEO. As always, this has been great. Thank you.
Dr. Scott Leune:
Yeah, I appreciate you making this the topic to help everyone else. This wouldn’t happen without you doing it. We’re just loving on each other now, but it’s true. So Richard, thank you for making this happen.
Richard:
Okay, we will talk to you next time on the Shared Practices Podcast.
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