Welcome back to another episode of the SPG podcast. This is yet another installment of the SPG Dr. Spotlight series. And with me today is one of the people that was at the top of my list. Our schedules haven't really lined up the way we wanted them to, but we're making it happen. Thanks for being flexible. Dr. Aaron Miller, Aaron, welcome. Thank you. It's good to be here. I know we were playing a little bit of scheduling tactics, trying to figure out when we're going to do this.
And I know showed you once, but it's good to be on your podcast. Thanks for having me. Well, it's a joy to interview you because you were, like I said, at the top of my list of people that I wanted to feature in the Dr. Spotlight just because I know your story probably better than I know anybody's story at SPG. And yours is one for the ages.
And it's interesting that we're sitting down now about a week removed from the intro to all the next course that you and Steve co-taught, which I think is a nice cherry on top of the first phase of your career. It's kind of an inflection point in a lot of ways. And it's been really, really cool to see your trajectory go pretty parabolic in the last couple of years.
So without getting too much into the weeds of where you're at now, I'd love to hear the way that I start all these episodes is why dentistry? So for you, Dr. Aaron Miller, why dentistry? Yeah, that's a great question. So I always knew I wanted to be some sort of health care provider, whether that was a physician or a dentist. Part of that probably stemmed from my oldest brother. He owns a carpet cleaning business.
And so when we were, I worked for him when I was a teenager, just kind of pulling the hoses around into the houses and stuff like that. And it seemed like all the dentists and doctors always had the nicest homes that we went to. And it's like, huh, I think I could do that. And then so that's kind of what I had my mindset on because it seemed like their lifestyle and what they could provide for themselves and their families was pretty good.
And then in undergrad, I was debating between medicine and dentistry. And I was pretty dead set on medicine, actually. And I worked at a local surgical center in Utah where I did my undergrad. And it was very interesting. All the stuff I was exposed to, a lot of different surgeries. But it seemed like the doctors were always kind of a little bit stressed out and bogged down. And they also had to work for a hospital, which they always kind of grided about and complained about.
Then I shadowed a dentist. It was a local periodontist and I shadowed and I was like, oh my gosh, that's what I want to do. I want to do something like that. I can do a high level procedure, whatever that might be. And also I can own my own practice. And that was my original thought going into dental school was, okay, I like the patient interaction. I like dealing with the sciences and biology and all of that stuff, but also working with my hands.
And so I felt like dentistry was a good, a good middle of the road for that. And yeah. So that's initially why dentistry is because I felt like I'd be able to do that. I could work with my hands, kind of utilize dabble and different things that I liked and also have the possibility if I wanted to own my own practice, which it seemed like a lot of the medical doctors were a little bit jealous or in use of dentists. That's kind of how I started out.
It's funny because I think you put as much initial thought into healthcare, like why healthcare as I did, you saw the measurable financial success. I grew up in a household that looked unfavorably upon people flouting the trappings of success. So I had to overcome a lot of negative psychological programming over time to get out from under that burden of like being judgy of people that were conspicuously successful. And so that was a lot of rewiring. Did you deal with that?
Like as you were, as you were getting into healthcare, did you have those preconceived notions? You've learned over time that by rewiring that mindset, you open the door to possibilities that otherwise would have been out of reach because you had those preconceived ideas that you hold too near and dear. Did you run into that at all? Yeah, for sure. And one aspect of it is part of partially my upbringing.
So I'm the youngest of a large family and all of my siblings have differing levels of success, you know, from like a financial standpoint. And so what I kind of within the circle that I was part of or exposed to in dental school, where I was kind of having my eyes open to what's possible within dentistry from like a financial standpoint, I'm like, wow, why this is can be very, very financially rewarding.
And probably a lot more than most of my siblings will ever unless they have a significant trajectory change, you know, that they'll ever have access to. And so for me, that was one aspect. And then the other aspect of things is initially kind of part of this was like the SP podcast, like traditional shared practices, which is like single site GP kind of practice ownership. I was kind of wanting to venture down that route is what my mind kind of partially was pulling to.
And part of that was because you have benefits of owning your own practice and also having the control of it. And it seemed like it was all, you know, sunshine and butterflies there. And so now I'm realizing there are downsides to that, but there's pros and cons with everything. But I'm realizing that it is a lot better to be part of a team and be part of something that's bigger and more than just you, because then you can really niche into what you're good at or what you like doing.
And you don't have to wear so many hats. And so I feel like in my, my setup that I have now with SPG, I feel like I am able to kind of lean on more of my, my strengths and hopefully shy away from some of my weaknesses. Well, that's what it's all about on a team.
And I wish I could tell you, Aaron, that that was part of the planning of SPG was like, oh, well, obviously each of us that's on the team gets to amplify and magnify what we're excellent at more so than the people that we're on the team with. I wish we would have known that coming in. But I think that was just a happy byproduct, honestly, of, of going into this. And as you were talking, I wrote down a couple of notes.
And one theme that you've brought up at least twice so far is the notion of control as it pertains to private practice ownership. And I want to bring in a story that happened to me this past weekend. I took the family to Branson, Missouri to do, you know, the polar express train ride.
And it's the running joke around the south and the Midwest is that Branson is like the, the defanged de-clawed version of Las Vegas because there's like shows and attractions and rides and, but it's, it's geared towards elderly and little kids. It's just a weird thing. It's a, it's a weird, uh, confluence of, of all of those different variables. But we were there and I was in a coffee shop.
We were walking around like this little manufactured Christmas town thing and I get tapped on the shoulder and he goes, Hey, are you Alex? I'm like, yeah, I'm Alex. And he goes, Oh my gosh, like you, you came to UMKC and you spoke. And because of the SP podcast, I bought a practice right out of school. His name's Colin. And we were talking about it.
And I realized that the types of challenges that Colin is in the middle of facing right now, being what, like six months out of school, there's so much that he's navigating. And he bought a great practice. It was like a four-op practice. He's going to do great. He's going to do amazing. He got a great deal on it, but it's almost like the quality of challenges or like the caliber, the magnitude of challenges that he faces.
Are kind of small, like it's kind of small potatoes and like there's work that has to be done in order to even get him in a position to do the type of dentistry that he wants to do because there's an element of keeping the wheels on the bus with hygiene, with staffing, with training, with existing patient relationships that takes a whole lot of emotional capital to navigate. So you're protecting your investment to keep the wheels on the bus before you can even think about, I want to go digital.
I want to do, you know, advanced procedures. I want to add implants. Like that's almost across the board necessarily an eventual thing rather than immediate thing. And to your point, this car comes back to what I talked about at the intro to all in four course. When you're in general dentistry, you have the illusion of control. You have the illusion of autonomy, but in reality, your boss is the insurance company unless you find a way to niche out. Which is what we're doing at SPG.
We're nitching out to the point where we can we only do the dentistry that A, we like to do. B, that energizes us. C, that pays us well and D makes the most impact across the board to all of our patients, which is really fulfilling to our teams at the same time. And again, this to me, part of it was in the planning part of it was like implicit in the type of dentistry that we chose to double, triple and quadruple down on.
But honestly, a lot of what I just said happened is a happy byproduct yet again of, hey, this is a really great area of dentistry that doctors love. Patients appreciate teams can get behind. And I want to bring that bring that back to what you said a second ago about by being a member of the team, you're allowed to niche out. Because think about like today, it's Monday morning, you're you're at the dental office. What would you rather have on your docket?
Surgeries or crown preps and quad fillings. I'd rather have a double all on four. Exactly. Because for me, that's the least that's the least stressful thing. Is the surgery that you know, now that I am I've done so many of them uncomfortable. The least stressful thing for me is a surgery because pause time out time out time out. The least stressful thing is the surgery. Yeah, because I'm I'm in the zone and I'm I'm the I'm the artist creating the art then I don't.
I don't have as many other variables. Hopefully the patient is, you know, mildly sedated or or so. There is a small aspect of them having some impact on it. But for for the most part, you know, I'm I'm in control of everything and I'm just doing my thing. Whereas when I'm not in surgery, the patient if even if it's a post off check, those are pretty simple and straightforward.
But the patient's like, a little bit tender here still and they're kind of, you know, they're just being abundantly cautious. They're they're nervous because they just made a big investment had a big surgery, but everything is fine. Like you have to manage the patient patient communication relationship. Also all of that stuff, but the least stressful thing for me now is in in surgery and it wasn't always that way. But it's a good spot to be and when that's the when that's the case.
I have so many questions. OK, number one, when was that inflection point? When was that transition point where you went from pit in the stomach? Oh, shit, I have a surgery tomorrow to. Oh, thank God, I have a double tomorrow. That's that's an opportunity for me to live in my flow state. We're going to come back to flow state in a second because I have questions about that.
But roughly, if you had to just put a number of arches on it, like when did that transition happen to where you realized, hey, I've got a double tomorrow. And I'm not all puckered up and scared. Like when did that happen? Yeah. So before I just just give a little more background on me. So after I graduated from dental school, I worked on implant. I went to implant pathway and I worked internally as like a fellow.
I was technically just an associate dentist, but I had a lot of exposure to things there. So I feel like I had a good stomach lining coming into it beforehand, coming into SPG in my office, but still even then it was probably four to five, four to five months. Because at the start, you know, it's big cases, big dollar amounts, and it's a little bit nerve wracking jumping into the deep end, right? You do you do an all on four and at the start, you basically cross your fingers and pray, right?
Even though even though you've followed all the sound surgical protocols, all of that, there's still an element of unknown, which is unsettling because if that let's say it's your first all on four, you haven't you don't know what to expect on how it's going to heal, right? Even though you're following all the proper principles, but then a couple months down the road, the patient comes back, you take off their temps, you take an x-ray, you look at things that's like, okay, everything healed up.
Basically, how is expecting to? And then over the next month, you have a few more handful of those cases coming back. And then whether it's conscious or subconscious, that starts building your confidence and your mindset like, hey, all of these are actually integrating and turning out to be successful cases. And now I don't have to worry about the something failing, you know, and obviously there are catastrophic failures at times, but that's more just patient.
Like independent, like patient cases, that's not across the board. And so I would say it was probably four to five months where I saw my first batch of cases from like my first month or two coming back and everything was integrated and and panning out. If you could teleport back and talk to yourself in month one month to and you know that in month one month to you may look calm, cool and collected on the exterior when you're facing patients and doing the procedures and talking to your team.
But inwardly, you might be a little less at ease. What would you go back and tell yourself you today to you say two months into SPG where you come in with having knowledge of surgery, knowledge of managing complications, you can handle soft tissue, you can you can get people on the right foot, but then actually doing the arches. There's still that little bit of I need to see proof.
I need to see the proof and the pudding, the healing happened and then I can feel completely at peace about what I'm doing. So what would you tell yourself to shorten that learning curve? Yeah, I would just tell myself, one, hey, I've seen all your cases, you know, they look very nice. And there those they're successful. Don't worry about failure. And then the other thing I would say is the proof is in the pudding.
Just keep following the fundamentals and the fundamentals are fundamentals for a reason. And that's what makes the case successful. And so that's what I'd probably tell myself. And also I would probably tell myself, don't get worked up over the weekends like reviewing CTS for like next week's patients because the patient will still be there and you can plan the case when you get into the office on on Monday morning. You don't need to plan it necessarily Sunday night.
And I would probably just tell myself, like, hey, it's okay to kind of separate a little bit. So I can kind of fully decompress and recuperate because, well, it is still it is still a taxing on on your mind and on your body doing forage. But even even when you're comfortable, you know, it's still it's still somewhat of a burden that you have to carry. But you don't necessarily have to carry it all the time, right?
You you can you can take that load off, recover and like kind of make sure you're in a good space mentally and physically. And then jump back into it. So that's really good advice. And I really like what you said about trusting the fundamentals. That's how you're able to get out of your brain and to get out of that sympathetic nervous system type stress response and to say, let's breathe. Let's go through what happened. I try I followed the fundamentals to the letter to the best of my ability.
And chances are barring any kind of patient non compliance issue, things are going to go well. And I want to tie that back into something you said earlier because we want to trust the fundamentals. I think that's a phenomenal tagline that we can use for anyone listening who's internal to SPG who's external to SPG and wanting to get into this type of procedure.
Trusting the fundamentals is a wonderful initial slogan to get behind and to use is probably some type of a mantra where you can tell yourself and your team like, Hey, we're following the fundamentals. We're following first principles of planning this case and executing this case. We're doing all the little things right. Therefore, chances are the fate is going to be on our side and we'll get a good result. I want to tie that back into what you said earlier about when I'm in surgery.
I feel like I'm an artist creating the art. And that struck me because so many people in the full arch space teach full digital, full guided where we're planning things out ahead of time. And we're quote unquote removing the guesswork or we're accounting for exactness of the planning and like, Oh, the implants are going to be at this angle with this AP spread because I said so ahead of time.
But we just spent a whole weekend talking about fundamentals of being able to navigate the inevitable challenges that befall us. Going back to the fundamentals, I feel like when people rush to do fully guided, you're ignoring the fundamentals. You don't understand the actual mechanics of planning the surgery, understanding what feels good, the term that you use in the course was haptic.
Like understanding the feel of the implant going in the bone, the feel of the various osteotomy drills navigating the bone. And you get that sensory feedback, which actually is the way that the artist expresses him or herself on the canvas, so to speak, because if you just follow the Bob Ross video and you do it without understanding how the colors actually interact and mix together,
how the texture should feel. Is this too wet? Is this too dry? Then you don't have full mastery because you're mimicking because you're superficially trying to execute the surgery without fully being able to understand because we know having done this procedure that some percentage of the time, you can plan till the cows come home on the cone beam, but teeth don't cooperate on the way out. Bone doesn't end up being the same as you projected to be.
Things don't feel as good as they look on the x-ray and then guess what? The case through your curveball, and if you aren't approaching it as an artist with his or her canvas, then you're not poised to be able to modify your approach and exhibit that true mastery and still get a really, really good outcome.
And to me, that comes from fundamentals. So walk me through, I guess, number one, your thoughts on someone new leaning on fully guided as a crutch, the pitfalls of that, and how instead it's better to develop a strong base of knowledge and experience in the fundamentals. Yeah, that's a great question. So with fully guided, it seems like it's a good idea because you're like, okay, we have our CT, we preplan our implants,
we can put everything exactly where we want to. Great idea, right? But realistically, that's not how it happens. You have to get your guide in place. You have to make sure it's stable, fully seated, and all of that is a challenge in and of itself. And then you have to trust the guide that there's no distortion. Everything is exactly right to where your implant or your osteotomies are going, where you planned it.
And so one of the things with fundamental all on for surgery, then this is all that Steve and I talked about with our intro to all on X course, is we do the same thing. Every single time we get predictable results are our flat reflection. We make our incision the exact same every time our flat reflection the exact same every time. Are kind of the landmarks of where we're aiming to place our implants as the exact same every time. And so you can visualize all that.
But when you do a guide, you put the guide on and the rest mentally you can check out because the implant or your osteotomy is going where the guide is going to let it go. And so you just kind of cross your fingers and hope that that's going where you had planned it previously. Also, there's some in my opinion, there's some downsides to guides as well because a big part of implants in all of your drilling protocol is keeping the not letting the bone over heat.
And so when you have a big guide on there, it usually will prevent the irrigation from your implant and piece. And so not only are you doing it a little bit more of a blind technique because you can't really see through the guide exactly where you're going, but you run the risk of overheating the bone. So if we take a step back and remove that and we just follow sound fundamental all on four protocols.
We get very predictable results. We do the same thing every single time. You do your angled implants just anterior to the side is two in the front just as all in four was designed to be. And it makes things a lot less simple, a lot quicker on the surgical side of things because you're not mounting a big full arch guide and you're reducing your overhead because we don't have all that extra planning and design fabricator guide fabrication.
And we're able to kind of pivot if the bone is different, like the haptics is telling us something different. We're not just drilling and placing the implant and hoping we get torque. If the bone tells us something different, we have the freedom and autonomy to kind of adjust our plan on the fly. And so this is something with our with new doctors. I think is very important because there's a lot of complex things out there trans sinus trans nasal terro voids, i dramatic implants.
There are indications for all those types of implants in all those different more advanced techniques. But you stay true to fundamental on for surgery. You're still going to be able to solve 90 something percent of cases. Very rarely will you need will you need one of those others.
Most of us in the full arch world, we see that a lot because we follow all the big name for specialists that are over the past 20 years have done all the revisions of all on force after they've been in service for x amount of time and at some point they need a revision.
So I think for for doctors, especially for SPG doctors, we need to think, Hey, it's okay that doctor Holt's caught is placing quad zygos and terro void implants on almost every case because doctor Holt's cause on a different level than all of us. And he's handling a different level of complexity of cases. He's handling like the point 1% at the very, very top, right? But with standard on for we're solving 90 to 95% of for cases.
And that's a box we want our doctors to thrive in because the more complicated and types of implants you do, the more complicated the complications are. And so if you stay in the textbook on for kind of in that box, I think you're you're more likely to just have a more pleasant experience. And then obviously over time, you can add in some of those other adjunctive things that helps you solve more cases, right?
Maybe instead of 90 to 95% of cases with a standard on for you can solve like 95 to 98% if you can add a palatable approach or things like that. That's such a helpful framing, Aaron, because being able to label it as, Hey, with a basic, I would say intermediate level all on force skill set 90, 90, 90, 95% of the time.
And then we live with the ones that don't fit within that box or if we have a patient that we really want to help, then we can find a solution where we fly out a clinical mentor or we find creative ways to treat that case if it truly requires creativity. But as you were talking, I drew out a little flow chart that makes sense in my brain because I think in flow charts.
And so if we're approaching things with a desire to acquire those fundamental skills, we have to have two things in order to transition from learning the fundamentals to approaching intermediate level proficiency in then eventually in pursuit of mastery.
So if we're going to double down on the fundamentals, we have to have these two things we have to have simplicity, meaning we have to avoid the bright, bright, shiny object syndrome that people who've been doing this for a decade or more unknowingly or knowingly project out into the ether as being, Oh, you got to do this or you're an incomplete surgeon or you got to do that or you're lesser than when in reality, if you're at SPG and you're doing this procedure.
You're in the top, whatever percentile of dentists making an amazing impact in the whole country. So there's that the other piece in addition to simplicity is the reps like we talked about. Excuse me, because like you said, you have to develop your way of doing this the same way every time. How you anesthetize how you reflect the flap where you go first with your implants, how you do your osteotomy drills. We talked a lot of the course about even when you're early on in your in your process.
This is something that Grady helps me to see when we did his recording of his doctor spotlight is even when you're early on, it's good to find some way to measure yourself. Don't give yourself a complete free pass just because you're new to this. You may not be thinking about measuring yourself in terms of, Oh, I did 10 arches this month at first.
Maybe it's like four or five arches. But then in those arches, you can think about, did I have to repeatedly pick up the same instrument, meaning am I inefficient? Or am I able to keep one arch in a reasonable timeframe? Did I schedule for two arches and I had to end up just doing one because it ran over? If so, why did it run over? Was it patient management? Was it incomplete planning? What made me less efficient than I wanted to be? So I like that framing of we want simplicity.
We want to cut out a lot of the noise because so much of what's on social media, especially when you're learning, is just noise, frankly, and then get your reps in within that well-defined clinical box where you're able to treat 90 to 95% of the cases that walk through the door. And then eventually incrementally, and we have some doctors that are at that point now where I feel like they've been doing this for about two years or more.
And we're starting to see opportunities for them to knock on the door and be a little curious and say, Okay, how can I expand my clinical box? But I think to your point, there's a crawl, walk, run element to this. And it's like I tell my son, he sees his friends hoist in three pointers on the basketball court and I'm like, Can you make 10 layups in a row? I don't think you can make 10 layups in a row.
So why are you even thinking about hoisting a three pointer? Like show me 10 layups in a row and then we'll entertain the notion of an elbow jump shot, not to mention a three pointer. So let's make 10 layups in a row first. And that can be that kind of knowledge and simplicity can be transferred back to dentistry where we want to get out over our skis and do the crazy stuff because it's bright and shiny and sexy on social media.
But there's plenty of opportunity within the fundamental strike zone, so to speak. Yeah, for sure. And I think that's, you know, early on in a SPG doctor's progression, you just do a standard approach. Like, I would much rather have a doctor. For instance, I do site visits and travel some of our doctors. It's like, maybe we could do a trans sinus here and we can get like a couple extra millimeters of AP spread.
Well, I don't like that because we're introducing the complexity of a trans sinus implant for only a couple millimeters of AP spread. So I would much rather have stay in the box. Let's just do standard volume four. And when you're ready, you can venture down that kind of trans sinus or whatever the advanced procedure is, you know, but I don't want a new doctor to.
I don't want us to venture into something that is not kind of the fundamental. And then they think that's a common place. And then either they have some failures with those, which makes it hard to manage. Or they just have some non ideal cases pan out because they're trying a more advanced procedure from the get go that maybe they're too early on. And so I would rather just say, let's stick to the fundamentals. And we can just do a little bit of a short and dental arch on this case.
And then when you're ready, you can implement those things. And so that's kind of my philosophy with things. I'm really glad that we had that intro to all the next course, week or two ago, because it helped me to get clear once again on how important it is to just lay down the gauntlet and draw the line in the sand and say, I just want to do this procedure.
Because so many of those doctors that read that course, it's going to be such an uphill battle for them to carve out the space in the schedule. Well, that's even secondary. If primary, you have to market, you have to source the patients, you have to train your team on how to talk about these cases. And you're going to be lucky if you're doing one arch a month. And like, I never even got to that point doing one arch a month because I was sourcing mainly from new patients that may happen.
Luck of the draw to come in or that needed to be converted from perio maintenance, things of the writing was on the wall. Let's do something different. And you just have to get your reps. And that's why I'm so thankful that at SPG, we do better about not muddying the water and not over complicating the scope of service with our dentists because if we were to try to say, oh, let's keep hygiene in house or oh, let's do certain kinds of crown cases.
Like, yeah, you could have more revenue, but at the expense of development and at the expense of simplicity. And so the further along in life I go, the more I appreciate just refining and focusing and getting narrow because by being narrow, that's where the potential for mastery really lies. And I've seen that in my own path and my own role. I've seen that with you. And so I wanted to follow up with that concept of how has narrowing your scope.
And it's interesting for you because you had dental school where you did a lot of general dentistry. But then ever since you graduated, you self corrected almost where you didn't even give yourself a chance to say, let's go explore and find myself dintally. And you just didn't do that. You're like, no, we're going to go do surgery. So what led you to just say, all right, I'm right out of school, screw it, let's just focus and narrow and I can live without all that other junk.
Yeah, I think I. That's a great question because before dental school, I worked for a period honest and I remember the coolest thing I ever saw was he did an all on four and this is this is one of the big selling points of SPG is the the reason of this happened.
So the period on us did the all on four. This is the period on us. I worked for upper, lower. Oh, I know where this is going. It was, it was a coolest surgery, right? Because I, I had no clue what's going on. I'm just a pre dental student, but it seemed awesome. Right? I'm just sectioning blood. And it's like, Hey, this is cool.
And then prosthodontist comes in and then does the pickup and conversion. And uh, that part was kind of foreign and like taboo. It's like, what the heck is going on here? It's like a crew like like, Dint your desk fine all over the office. You know, we're used to just a clean little perio office. And so you have it's juggling between the multiple providers. I remember at one point, it was like, Hey, hey, Ryan, I think, uh, the problem is that it's not just one of the things that's going on.
And then at one point, it was like, Hey, hey, Ryan, I think the prosthodontist is saying this to the period on us. Hey, Ryan, I think we need to turn this implant a little bit. His timing was a little bit off. And it's like the patient's already sutured and he's done. So then it's like, okay, you go back and rotate the timing. Then the prosthodontist put the multi unit back on all that.
So for me, that was a very eye opening experience. I, Oh my gosh, this is awesome. Looking back now, it's like, well, that's why patients should go to SPG because they have the doctor doing the timing of the implants and also the restoration of the implants. And so they're getting a better outcome because we're controlling it all right. But I think from that at that point, that was like the turning point for me where I was like, I really like surgery.
I really like surgical surgical things and implants. And that's maybe where I want to niche down into.
And I did toss around the idea of like a GP ownership and stuff like that in dental school. But I'm very glad I didn't go down that route because I'm in a set situation now where I get to utilize more of my strengths and where I think my, my skillset is best and doing surgery and having a smaller, smaller team that I get to work with in my office as opposed to a massive team like you would find in a GP office. Kind of similar to what your, your GP office used to be Alex or I guess it still is.
Because I have more control over the outcomes. There's less. It is complex, but there is less moving parts. So I can have more influence over fewer things that have equally as great of a ROI. Yeah, I couldn't have put that any better by it by, by, by nitching down and narrowing the focus, then you can get incrementally over time better at a more consistent clip than if you were just start, stop, hand in an arch this month.
Oh, it's been a dry spell. How do I do this again? Yeah. So tough. And then what you said about the, the right hand and not knowing the left, what the left hand is doing with the, the communication challenges will say between the period honest and the prostate honest. That's tough on the patient. That's tough on assuring a high quality outcome. And it's doubly tough because what did that patient pay for that double between two providers?
I guarantee you that even with that being years ago, it's, it was still way more than than what SPG charges for, for one dentist to handle the entirety of the procedure. And I know you got to run to get prepped for surgery. So the, the one question I'm going to leave you with is, what are you excited about in 2025 for SPG because you particularly, you, you have, you're at the point now where you can handle over 95% of the cases that walk through the door.
You're still continually developing your skills and adding capabilities to your skill set. But then at the same time, you're doing more and more centrally with mentoring our newer doctors, working with our clinical mentors. So you're like mentoring the mentors. Yeah. What are you excited about for your role centrally at SPG in our last few minutes? Yeah. I'm most excited for offering a more robust onboarding and training platform for our doctors.
Many of you, if you're listening in your SPG doctor, you have probably noticed there might be at times some resource or training that you wish you had that you didn't have when you started out. And so over the next couple months, well, basically we're hoping to, to roll out a revamped platform. So that way resources you wish you had, you now have. And then for new doctors, they don't have to wish they had it because they will just have it.
And so a lot of this content for our new onboarding and training is going to come from our intro to all our next course. So that's just a little teaser for that. Alex, you're going to record some of your at this or your content that you gave at the course. Vorehole and I are going to record all of our content. So it'll just be a nice crash course in a more condensed digestible form than what we currently have. And I think that's going to be a good resource.
And so that's what I'm most excited for is getting that more built out and just continuing to help and support our doctors. And because, you know, in middle of 2025, we're probably going to be starting to open more offices. And so that's going to be kind of our next phase of growth. And so basically from like a clinical support and training standpoint, we just want to get the foundation as good as possible so that we just have a nice launch pad into our next phase and growth.
So that's what I'm most excited for. And I'm very grateful to be working with SPG and the opportunities I have. I've had to work with the central team and with all of our doctors. And so I'm just grateful for that opportunity. So thank you. Well, you're welcome. Thank you for putting your faith in what we're building, Aaron. And this is true for all SPG docs. I mean, with a dental degree, the world is your oyster. You could do so many different things.
And I do not take it lightly that so many people choose to align themselves with us and partner with us. And we're hurtling towards a really exciting future. And we've already done so much. We've already helped so many people, but it's really just been the beginning. And one last thing I want to say in closing is that it's been really cool, Aaron, to see your growth from being a bright eyed bushy tail dental student to now being one of the strongest doctors in our company.
You've become an amazing leader, an excellent teacher, an extremely adept communicator. And you've constantly sharpened the saw. You haven't slacked off. Your improvement has just been breathtaking. And I'm just happy to be a part of it. So thank you for choosing SPG and thank you for all that you do for our doctors, our team and our patients. You're very welcome. All right, man. We'll go get that double. Thanks everyone for listening to the SPG podcast, Dr. Spotlight.
If you're a doctor and we haven't scheduled a time to record yet, hit me up. Alex is shared practices.com. If you're a team member or you're an external person to SPG listening to this, drop me a line. Let me know what you think about these episodes. Give me feedback. Always looking to get better. Hope everyone has a wonderful day. Thank you.