Greetings and welcome back to another episode of the SPG podcast. This is the next in the series of the SPG Dr. Spotlight. These have been a huge hit so far. Thank you all for the wonderful feedback that I've been getting about how impactful these episodes have been for you. They've been a joy to record. I look forward to these every single week. I try to put several recordings of my schedule just because they're uplifting for me.
And I know that they're extremely helpful for those that listen to. So thanks to all the SPG doctors who are participating. And if I haven't reached out, send me an email to make sure that I get you on the books to schedule a recording. So today's guest needs no introduction within the SPG family. This gentleman kills it in every sense of the word at SPG. He joined the company a couple years ago and he has been just an immediate personality fit, cultural fit, clinical fit.
And if I had the means to have some type of a cloning program, I would be cloning this dude till Kingdom come. So without any further ado, welcome Dr. Grady Gore's Grady. How's it going, man? Good. Good and happy to be here and happy to talk some shop about SPG. It's going to be fun. Man, this is a treat for me. Thank you for waking up at the crack of dawn to do this specific time. Let's get started this way because I love asking our SPG docs because sometimes I know the story.
Sometimes I don't. And for you, I think I know a little bit of the story, but chances are there's some gaps that could be filled in. But why dentistry? That's like a patient question. I grew up in a dental family. My grandpa was an oral surgeon. My dad was a dentist. My older sister is six years older than me. She's a dentist. So I was really, really exposed to it growing up. And I really resisted it for a long time because of that. I was like, I'm not just going to follow my dad.
But as I explored other career paths, kept coming back to it. Architecture is what stuck the most. But then it was probably my freshman year of undergrad. And I was like, all right, I'm gone for it. Committed to it. So you have some of the artistic skill set. If you were to sit down and do some type of a three dimensional schematic of a building that would be within your wheelhouse. Yeah. It's interesting, right? Like building and all that kind of stuff.
And I feel like that especially in full arch, there's a lot of what we do. You can definitely use that side of your brain how we're going to put this together, how we're going to put the puzzle pieces together and get this arch to function well for years to come. Yeah. It's first principles thinking beginning with the end in mind. Did you ever entertain the notion of working alongside your dad, buying your dad out or following in your grandpa's footsteps to go into OMS?
I thought about OS for a little bit, but didn't want to do that much more school. And I think like OS training is wild. Like one of my best friends is in residency right now. And the stuff those guys do on the day to day is insane. And I don't think that would be my career as an OS. You know, I think a lot of what like the pride of practice or all surgeon does is accessible as a GD. So I didn't entertain that for too long.
My dad was retiring when I was like a freshman in dental school and my sister was working there. So I kind of knew that if I graduated one back home, kind of always be little brother. You know, even if I was like working with my sister and like we have a great relationship, I kind of felt like she worked with dad. I never would. She had more experience. She'd always had a leg up. So I wanted to go do something alone, like at least for a little while, is what I was saying at the time.
And I had a lot of professors in dental school that was like, yep, worked with my brother, worked with my cousin, don't do it. So skiing has always been like a huge passion of mine, grew up ski racing, like through college. So I just looked at opportunities close to the mountains and Reno came up as an even dentist. So I did the classic SP mailer campaign and came out here right after dental school. Oh man, the old SP mailer campaign.
I need to drag up the image of mine that I sent out back in 2016. It's brutal. It's just like a year ago. It's like, oh man, well, it worked. Here we go. Dude, it worked like a charm. And I think back in the day, it worked even more because it was largely unheard of for practice owners to get mailers soliciting practice sales of any kind back then, much less from a private individual. But nowadays, yeah, it might get lost in the shuffle. So it'd be a tough go trying to do that nowadays.
I still think that's like an attractive thing for retiring dentists. Right. I just sounded to an individual I don't have to deal with like the complications of selling to a DSO don't have to deal with this huge workback thing. I think it probably still works. I think it definitely still works. I think it could still be a win win for both sides of the transaction.
There's just a lot of more, a lot more complicating factors nowadays with interest rates and lendability of young dentists and the lack of nest egg of some of the older people that might be reticent to deal with any type of sub optimal deal terms. And so I think I think it's a, I think it's definitely still a great option, but I don't think it's as straightforward as it might have been, you know, five or 10 years ago.
So you made it, you made it to Reno and what was work like in Reno for the first little bit when you were there as you were trying to solicit places to go, maybe like a corner dental office with three ops or something to, to, you know, wet your whistle. So what was that process like? Yeah. So I, I worked two part time jobs right away. I did JP for like nine months before starting with SVG.
And one of those part time jobs, you know, we had like the whole contract to, to buy the office after about a year, like had how we were going to value it, all that sort of stuff. Seven hours fee for service office. Um, I got thought I, I really struggled with that opportunity. Um, but I wanted to work part time somewhere else just because moving halfway across the country. Um, you know, I'd rather have 50% of my time suck if I, if I whiffed on one of these and a hundred percent.
So, um, I also worked at, you know, kind of like a, another fee for service office, kind of like high end, um, all bonded, that kind of stuff, cosmetic stuff. Um, and in both were pretty good, but the one that I thought I was going to buy really just wasn't quite big enough for two docs. So it was kind of slow and, um, it was pretty old, like outdated. So I got a Henry shine wrap to come through. And I was like, look, this is kind of what I'm looking at doing with the office ballpark.
What is this going to cost? And he was like, honestly, 250, 300. Mm. And then also I was like, Oh, this doesn't make a ton of sense. And I wasn't super busy. Didn't feel like I was getting a lot better because I just wasn't doing a ton of dentistry there. So I started looking for a different part time gig. Um, and ended up with another one for at that point. Think it was like four months I was there before I ended up moving to SPG. Um, but while I was there, like it was, pretty good.
Uh, certainly doing more dentistry than the one before, but still was hungry to find no ownership opportunity. And, um, by the time I was talking to green, I was coming here. I was really far along, um, with a purchase in South Lake Tahoe. That was pretty stoked about, um, 70 year old Dennis. So selling like a million dollar office for two 25. Whoa. And, uh, yeah, wild. It was one of those like, this seems too good to be true, but I do need to figure out if it really is or not. Right.
Um, like had an elbow, I and had one Dean and all this stuff. And, um, like we were really about to do it. And I thought we were two, three weeks away from signing an asset purchase agreement. And Grino called me and asked, um, if I stayed Reno and do this. And I was like, well, okay, maybe, and Reno's not like a big town, but it is, like it's a city. There's a, there's a hospital here. There's a college here. It has that place.
Yeah. Um, in South Lakes, like 30,000 people, like really transient, like seasonal workers and then like the ultra, ultra wealthy. Dude, that's a hard place to make a living, just saying. So sorry. Yeah. Um, so I called my now wife. And I was like, Hey, what do you think about this? Might not feel so isolating. Um, like we're not assigning this huge note. You know, it feels a little bit easier. She's from Nebraska. So it just felt like we had a little bit more freedom.
Um, and here we are ended up doing it, ended up falling in love with full art. So I wrote a couple of notes down as you were talking and there are those notes that I wrote from what you said are some of the fundamentals of why SPG exists. You're, you're assertion about OMS stuff being accessible to a GP. We're going to talk about that.
The fact that you were nine months out of school before joining SPG, we're going to talk about that and, and spoiler alert, when we get further into this episode, uh, your eyes are going to bug out of your head, particularly with just how quickly Grady acquired the skill set and honed of the skill set and started knocking on the door of mastery of the skill set from zero to 60 really, really quickly.
And then the third thing you wrote what, or that I wrote was weighing the pros and cons of traditional GP ownership versus the opportunities afforded by aligning with SPG. I think those are three really great things to dig into. And what I'd like to start with is, okay, you're nine months out of school. You join Reno Dintures and implants.
Tell us about the learning curve, the amount of experience with full arch surgery, full archadintillation, tissue management, uh, alveolar plasty, like your experience of doing those types of procedures coming into SPG and then what the ramp looked like as you were continuing to perfect those skills in the office. Yeah. Um, I think anyone that comes into the model and not having done full arch, like there's, there's a lot of work to do for sure.
Um, before SPG, I was doing a fair amount of surgery at, um, one of those two associate shifts, uh, one of the doctors there was like a, maybe I D fellow. He was a pretty good mentor. Um, let me watch anything he was doing would help me when I had cases. And, um, at Creighton, we didn't have residency programs. So we got to do it a lot of surgery there. Um, like Kiefer is another good example of that. Like you can get a lot down in dental school.
And a lot of full arch is just like putting yourself on a good platform early in the surgery and you can get it that just doing dentures. Yeah. We did a ton of that at Creighton. Um, also a lot of third molars get used to like flaps, big flaps, tough suturing and third molar cases way back there. Um, and also like a little bit of like stress tolerance because it's, it's third molars. You're close to the nerve. Like do you know where you are? Are you getting lost?
Um, and just like relying on yourself to, to trust what you're seeing, trust the anatomy and go at it and systematically. So I think that that's like what I leaned on when I was starting. Um, but then it's just like drinking from a fire. And I think it's like the best thing about SGG is the group of doctors we have. Like don't get me wrong. I love C, but being able to like ask anyone in the group. Anything when you get stuck is such accelerated learning.
Like anything you're curious about, anything that's not making sense. Like you can get anyone on the phone pretty quickly and, and they'll really, really help you through that. Um, so like the mentorship we have here was, it was huge for me. Um, textbooks reading through all that kind of stuff. And then you get no ideas, talk through them. And you have the, the case flow to put this all to use quickly. Yeah. So I think you can, you can get good pretty quick at SGG.
What you described was exactly why I just never completely. Sword as a full-large implantologist because I did it on an island. Like yeah, I'd gone to courses and yeah, I'd developed text threads with other doctors who had integrated full art implants into their practices, but it's not the same as having mentorship pods and big giant Facebook chats with 40 doctors in there. And it's, it's true. I think what you just said, which is the best thing about SPG is the group of doctors that we have.
That's always been the case. Like that's always been our biggest strength. That's been our unassailable superpower that we've brought to the table is the collection of talent that we're blessed to have treating our patients across the country.
And what's, what's been cool from my perspective to see with you, Grady, is that you, you started out as a mentee learning, getting, getting your feet wet, understanding the fundamentals, executing cases and then now now you're mentoring a lot of our newer, younger, less experienced doctors. So what has that evolution been like from learning, being the mentee and then now you're still learning, but a lot of it is like learning through teaching. So how has that evolution felt?
Um, like the transition doesn't feel like, like much frankly, um, it just feels like you're still talking about cases. Right. This is what I would do. This is what I'm thinking and just kind of going back and forth with different doctors and, you know, with doctors that like really care about your success. Like that is just so unique.
It's not the, you know, like the OS that you have a good relationship down the street that's busy with their own day or even like a mentor doc in your save office that has an interest in your development, but also has their own schedule to deal with. You know, we're across all the time zones. Like at any time, if you can be mid surgery and get somebody on the phone to help you work through something. Um, so I think the, the transition hasn't been, um, like a big thing in my mind.
I think it's still just talking shop with all the docs all the time. Right. Like it's, it's fun. It's Dennis stuff kind of nerdy, but I enjoy it. Dude, it's, it's the nerdiest thing you've ever seen. Like even this morning there's, there's stuff and like jokes being made that only a dentist could hope to laugh at him in that chat and it's, I would love to get an account of how many messages go off in that SPG docs chat every day. It's in the hundreds, like every, every day.
But then part of it too is that we've gotten more refined with the individualized pod chats, which I think adds another layer of openness and vulnerability because especially for a newer doctor, it can feel daunting to stick your neck out and say, Hey, everybody that I recently just met and some of whom I haven't met in person yet. Here's this case that I'm struggling with. So that's where I love the small group setting for people to get welcomed fully into the fold.
And then they can be squeaky wheels like the rest of us in the doctor chat. So I think, I think that's really cool. So as you were getting acclimated and getting, getting your feet under you and drinking through that experiential fire hose, as you put it, you had a lot of the experience dealing with soft tissue stuff, leveling the bone, creating that good foundation for implants.
You're, you're learning the actual mechanics of angling the implants appropriately, assessing torque, deciding when to load, when not to load, but then also throughout all that, there's the stomach lining piece that you mentioned earlier. So what was it like juggling the acquisition of those skills to hone the craft of performing the surgeries while developing that thickness of stomach lining? Yeah, I'd say like the first three to four months, it was pretty tough.
Like really stressful, a lot of sleepless nights, those first three to four months where, you know, you're trusting your knowledge, you're, you're trusting the way you're going about these surgeries. But you haven't seen a peel. Right. So then when people come back, you know, when you check integration on the all these implants, you see how they're doing. You know, you look at this conversion that you put in four months ago and everything's fine. And patients happy.
You know, the implants are solid. Good tissue. Like that was a huge exhale. Um, you know, I think there's, there's always going to be some level of stress and full-large. Um, you know, it's, it's serious stuff. It's a big deal for the patients that we're taking through all this. Um, but I do think you really just need to, like, rely on your, your protocols, like everything that you have set up and know that there's whatever 37, 30, I don't know what we're at. 37 other offices doing it this way.
Yeah, it's working. And the trust piece, I oftentimes talk about the trust piece in terms of the team where a team has to experience the exhilaration of delivering a final before it clicks, before it all makes sense, before the entire progression culminates and gets tied up with a bow. And then it's like, aha, that's what we do. I get it now. And then there's a different level of passion and understanding and puzzle pieces fitting together in ways that they previously hadn't.
But it's also the case for docs, like the docs can understand the theory till they're blue in the face. We can read all the different textbooks, all the different training modules. We can watch all the SPG training videos. We can do all the over the shoulder that we want.
But until we internally, this early understand that everything's going to be OK and that chances are everything works out great and living with the fact that some minute percentage of the time things go sideways, but then if we trust our compassion and our ability to communicate clearly, then even those are going to work out OK long term. That's the key to not having those sleepless nights extend any further beyond that three to four month window, because I think you're exactly right.
I think the first three to four months, you have to start seeing the proof of concept before you can allow yourself to exhale. So let's normalize that. Let's make sure that everyone realizes that when you're new to the model, first three to four months are going to be stressful. They're going to be a little chaotic. You're you're learning, you're perfecting your your approach.
And then you start to see enough thumbs up, enough examples of the work going well so that you can say, all right, let's ratchet it up into second gear. Let's keep climbing because what we're doing is working. Does that sound like what you noticed at about that three to four month mark? And then what changed after that three to four month mark? I don't think there's a huge change outside of just like your emotional capacity to to deal.
I think that's that's really the main thing, you know, because you're you're still just just focused on getting better and improving. And there's always stuff to work on clinically. So I think it just gives you like a little bit more head space to zoom out a little bit and, you know, and reset new clinical goals and decide what you want to go after next.
Speaking of clinical goals, how quickly in your evolution, did you start assigning yourself a monthly goal, quarterly goal, weekly goal, daily goal? How did you start to think about goal setting and the attainment of those goals? Because to me, what we just talked about precedes goal setting and we need to normalize that too.
Like the fact that you have to develop the confidence, the proof of concept, the I got this and then we can really hone in on goals because it's easier to hit goals when you have the hardwired self confidence, self concept of I'm developing as a GP implantologist. I got this. Now I can start thinking about performance and and maximizing my impact. So how did how did the notion of goals enter into the equation for you?
I've always been a goal center and I think I disagree a little bit because in that first window, like there's so many clinical goals that you can set for yourself. Love them. Like when it's in, like you can break the surgery down, right? You can have you can have a goal of I don't want my assistant to leave the surgery up because everything's in there ready to go. You know, I have the Alvio done at, you know, this amount of time in or whatever it's going to be.
All right, you can break down little goals just to do a single large and really just focus on doing every step to completion right away. Um, like I tell some of our newer docs, like try to pick up every instrument once. It's, it's really, really hard, but that's mastery, right? That's going to be what makes you a fish in, you know, do every step to completion, do it well and then, and then move on to the next one. And it's just kind of build it, but break.
Um, but I think after that, then, you know, it's, it's what does the office need? Um, what do you even need as a, as a provider to make this sustainable and make it work? So I think there's always goals to just set no matter what stage, like when I started here, we had pretty good patient flow. So one of the goals is like, okay, how do I handle all these people that want this done? Right. Great problem to have. Great problem to have.
Yeah. So I looked at like, okay, if the surgery takes this long and all the follow up appointments pretty much take an hour, like how many can I realistically do in a week and still care for these people appropriately? You know, so we, we built a, like a restorative day. We built two surgery days a week and a consult day. And I was like, okay, we're going to, we're going to do this. And I feel like I can still give everybody the attention they need at this level. Right.
And then as things have progressed, you get more dialed in with the team, get more efficient, you know, add stuff here and there, um, start setting new clinical goals. Um, you know, maybe you want to go after terabytes. Maybe you want to go after science lifts, do more soft tissue stuff, whatever it might be, it kind of becomes a playground at some point. I really love what you said about the progressive categorization of goals, because you're absolutely right.
Even in the early stages, goals can, it should be set around clinical efficiency, success rates, the ability to perform the, the procedures efficiently, to be able to delegate appropriately to your team, the speed of procedures, because there's a correlation, obviously between speed of the procedure and the, the lack of post-op discomfort, the, the, the exhibition of mastery of the procedure. Like there's so many benefits to being able to cut down that total procedure time.
And then eventually, yeah, you, you turn the corner and you start to have your eye on a different type of goal setting performance. And then you can, yeah, layer in the goals of acquiring more clinical skills, broadening the type of care that you're able to offer to your patients. I think that's a wonderful framing for everyone listening to think about is that.
In every single part of your evolution, there's something that can be measurably impacted regardless of what, what, what point you're at in, in your growth. And so once you started, once you started getting the fundamentals down and you felt like, okay, I'm executing these surgeries. Well, my feedback from my patients is that I'm getting my feet under me, breathing a little more easily, not freaking out as much.
How did you start to understand that capacity, the, that you referenced, the ability to say, okay, my office as currently staffed and constituted with our number of hours that were open, number of surgical slots available. What did you determine your capacity in a month to be like number of arches? Um, right now it's about like, I want to do 16 arches of month. Um, so Mondays and Wednesdays. Um, I like our bigger surgical days.
And then on Thursdays, we try to schedule if I'm doing like a, like a snap in or a single large. And if we have like a single implant case, we might throw that in on a Tuesday, one where mostly done consults. Um, so we basically just set the schedule up that way and then, you know, fill it up. And as it grows, start looking at, okay, what are we going to do? A surgery on a Friday to kind of keep things within reason.
Um, or do we need to like kind of unpack this a little bit more and figure out how we're going to do more surgery? Yeah. I think it's just kind of, yeah, listening to, so the case flow that you have. Um, and if you have more time, like there's, there's more things to focus on, you know, even focus on your consults, you can, uh, like for a while, I had a goal when we were still in a wag, like one wax trying for a patient. Like let's get really good photos. Let's get really good records.
Then when they come in, let's nail it because, you know, to redo another wax trying is it that big deal now, but it does take time. You know, especially when you talk about patient relationships, like that's really important and full-large. Um, and when you can nail things like that, you kind of sail through a surgery that was a little uncomfortable or, you know, an implant that you had to replace.
Um, but if you keep dripping in little mistakes here, there at some point, people are going to get upset, you know, so I think it's just figuring out the hangups, the bottlenecks and, and cycles to knock them down. Yeah. I mean, it's really easy to make up ground in the restorative side by that being smooth because that feels more controllable because surgery stuff happens. Variables come into play.
And even a straightforward procedure can have the perception, depending on the patient of that was a terrible surgery. When in your brain, it's like, it really wasn't like compared to what I normally see, like that actually went smoothly, but the patient can tell themselves their own story. And so then your face with making up ground on the restorative side. So I think that's a wonderful framework for all of us is how many wax try-ons are we doing per patient?
Are we doing, are we habitually having to remake stuff and redo stuff and re-measure stuff? Or are we nailing it the first time? Because that is a huge part of customer service. Totally.
So when you're, when you're getting into juggling all of the different aspects of full art industry, because what I always tell people is when you're opening a location or you're getting a location off the ground, early on, it's all consults, then it's consults and surgeries, then it's consults and surgeries and restorations. And then you're just layering on more and more types of procedures.
So how have you juggled all of the different litany of demands from, from all of the different points that the patients are at in, in their journeys? Because when I was on site, what was really impressive was seeing you have mastery over your schedule. Like during morning huddle, you knew where every look, every patient was in his or her process. You were the one running the huddle. Like you knew where every patient was in the journey.
So how do you number one, have that level of knowledge and detail and sense of ownership over the patient's journey along the process? And then number two, how do you make the pieces fit schedule wise in a busier office? So I think like the ownership part of that is given, right? Like you're going to do full-arch and take these people through such a big long process. Like you got to stand on it. You got it on it.
I use just like a Google sheet for all my patients that breaks down the whole process. So at the end of every day, like I go through it and basically check off the people that came through. And then we use just regular route slips that open down. My right notes, all my assistants before huddle and enrolled through it. We do most of our story of an afternoon after surgery, see some post stops and restorative stuff in the morning while surgery is getting ready.
I don't, I don't feel like I have a great answer. Besides, like, I think that's just kind of what full-arch requires. I was going to say earmuffs, everybody. You can't coach the give a shit. Yeah. You just can't. Like you either have it or you don't and docs that have it. They portray the sense of ownership. Like it's not just a phrase on a wall.
It's lived out in how you work with your team and how you work with your patients and where you place the blame when something goes sideways, how you handle a crisis, all of those things show how much of a sense of ownership you have, even if something isn't always your fault. A lot of times as the leader of the practice, it's your responsibility. So yeah. Love to love you. I'm going to say that.
Yeah. And I think like the, I don't really know the quote, but like leading from behind and then like when you're saying something goes wrong, times are tough. Like that's when you lead from the front. I think full arch is a really good place to do that because a lot of the restorative steps are really fun. You know, like people are getting a new smile. It's exciting. They're getting prototypes.
They're getting finals and when everything's going smooth and in the case is rolling, like, you know, the assistants can do a lot of that. And it's cool. And it's fun for them. It's fun for them to build relationships with patients too. And it also helps you be more productive. Right. But then you do have to schedule it in a way. So if something needs to be addressed to you, you have a capacity to do it. So we don't really schedule much outside of consults, during surgeries, shout out to Cheryl.
She's awesome on our schedule, um, templating stuff and making sure we're, we're like rolling through things efficiently. Um, cause like when you, when you have patients that are confused or upset, that's brutal, right? Like it can be one in 20. It's brutal. Um, so I'm getting dialed in with your team. Um, especially getting dialed in through TL. Like you can, I think like there's more capacity here still. Like I think we can do more, um, than we are right now. It's just going to.
And take refining the process. You know, like sharpening the song and do more. That resonates almost exactly with what I was talking about with Aaron Berger on a prior episode of, uh, Dr. Spotlight where you can have a month that feels triumphant and amazing. And the sense of accomplishment of, Oh my gosh, everything that has, that we've put into this practice has led here, like great month numerically, but it wore me out, it wore the team out.
The team wasn't equipped to be able to shoulder the load of such a busy month. Because maybe the doctor has imported into the team, well enough, or maybe things haven't been done in the slow times to make everyone ready for the busy times. And that wasn't what happened to Aaron because what Aaron said was, man, we had our biggest production month ever in October. And it didn't feel that crazy.
It's because he had been very, very methodical, just like you about knowing the schedule, demonstrating that, that sense of detail about all of his patience and all of that culminated in crazy production month that didn't even feel that crazy because the team had been developed some methodically over time. And so I want to go back to your, your goal of 16 arches. So when you have a month where say the prior month, you've diagnosed and collected on minimum of 16 arches.
Now we're for easy math producing the 16 arches in a given month. How does that feel throughout the day, like being able to render that care, pop out for consultations and, and how, how does the team's level of training and proficiency factor into the perception that you have of how easier or hard that month happens to be? I feel like right now 16 arches a month is pretty sustainable. Like the team we have right now has been here for a while.
Like I have Mo who's taken over in Richmond here this week and like yesterday afternoon we were just like hanging out in the office for an hour and a half. He's like shout out to Mo. Yeah, I think he's going to be awesome. So I think, I think you can make it feel pretty light. You know, there's, there's some of those days where you have, you know, two headache patients scheduled at the same time. Like that's inevitable, right? That's a job.
Where you have like your slammed with consults that just all happen to show up. You know, the guy that comes an hour early and he had two books side by side. Anyways, like that can be a little bit of a scramble to process, but like week over week, I think doing this, like compared to like a GD schedule is way easier to brutal. Yeah, don't even go there. Yeah. Yeah. Terrible. Yeah. Um, like I only pretty much only ever do one surgery a day.
Do in the morning, done by noon, like take a break, hang out for a little bit. See some restorative patients. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. You don't want to go back to doing root canals and crowns and, you know, single fillings and all that stuff all day, every day. Um, I'm sure about it. Yeah. Yeah. Awful. So I know, I know we're running up on time, Grady. And thank you for being so generous with your time this morning. But my parting question for you is to doctors like Mo, shout out to Mo.
We went to Dental School together. Glad that you're joining us. Pg super excited to have you to all of the new doctors joining us and to doctors that join us in the future. What is the piece of advice that you would give them that you feel like would set them up for success most effectively? I think I think like knowing what we were talking about earlier, like there's, there's going to be a fair push for three to four months, right?
When you start and just like being ready for that, like, I think clinical stress is something a lot of new doctors deal with. And I kind of hate the answer, but I agree with it when I think more whole is asked, like, how do you deal with clinical stress? He's like, just get better. You know, like just really get better, dive into it, do good work, stand on it. Um, and, and everything kind of flows from there. Um, you know, the consultation stuff's going to come.
Get really dialed in with your team lead, make sure everybody's talking about things the same way. Um, because it is a lot for new patients. They typically don't love dentists, right? Typically either had like no dental work and need their teeth out or that a ton of dental work. And now it's family. Um, so taking something that's pretty complex and, and simplifying it is really important for getting patients started. All right. Like step one is definitely getting good at surgery.
Um, but like Aaron, well, it was saying the other day, like, once you feel like you're getting pretty good at it, you want to do more, like everyone wants to do more. It's fun. Um, so I think that's, that's kind of step two of it. And that comes with, it was seeing patients paying attention to who's confused. Like that's a, that's a huge red flag for me.
Like if a patient ever calls and they're confused, like you really need to dial into that, you know, unpack it with your team, make sure it doesn't happen again. And then when you, when you're busy and you're running, it really doesn't feel like much, you know, um, like I always try to, try to view like our arch is kind of like new view does with next day finals or same day finals or whatever. Um, I don't really like agree with doing it that way.
But if you don't say, right, but if you can treat your surgery that way and their surgical temp looks like a final, everything is just a breeze. Like it's so easy from there. Um, so like really, really dialing that in. And then from there, getting people started, I think is, is sort of just a natural process. You know, like you, you can't really fake it. You got to trust yourself before anyone's going to trust you. And the only way to do that is like to know that you're really don't get work.
Grady, that's an amazing place to end. Um, thank you for all that you do. Thank you for the trust that you put an SPG by, by working with us. Thank you for all that you do to pour into our current SPG doctors to help them to learn and to grow. Thank you for allowing amazing new docs like Mo to come and shadow and learn from you in person.
Um, as I've gotten to know you over the last couple of years, I realized that you're not only a very, very gifted dentist and surgeon, but you're also just a top shelf human being. And I'm very, very lucky to work with you, learn with you, grow with you. And I look forward to hanging out with you this weekend. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it too. And, and same to you and, and all you guys on the central to you. Like you guys, you guys work hard for us. It's, it's a fun company to work for.
I don't envy your position. I love tone clinical for large, but you guys put in a tunnel where this is, this is awesome. It's, it's a fun place to work. And I really look up to you guys, you know, and, and all the hard work you guys do for us and the way you guys are staring, managing, like in this company is, is a cool thing to be a part of. Well, we couldn't do it without you. So thank you for making it happen. And thanks to all of our listeners on this episode of the SPG vodka.