Back to another episode of the SPG pod. I'm your host, Dr. Alex Sharp. And this is the first episode of March 2025. We are in March people. How did that happen? It seems like we just started the year, but January is in the books, February is in the books. And here we are in the final month of Q1 2025. And for all of us in SPG land, it's been a rip roaring start to the year. We've had very strong performance in January and in February. And
then March, I feel will be the cherry on top. And I wanted to start today's episode with a story that relates to some of the, some of the lessons that I've been learning lately. And some of the lessons that I want to impart to all of you to help all of you level up in your performance and in your job satisfaction and your career and ultimately hopefully in your lives. And the story relates back to a project that I started my junior year of college
for my honors interdisciplinary studies minor. I had to write a thesis. And the advice that I got throughout college was make the thesis about something that you're interested in so that it doesn't feel like work when you're going through all the hours and hours and hours of research and prep work. And this was in the days before AI, before chat GPT. So you had to
actually read books and highlight stuff and make outlines and use post it notes. And so the topic that I chose being a music nerd was sort of like chronicling the history of music as it pertained to the way that people listened to it or the way people experienced it rather would be a better way of phrasing it. So I went through all of the different ways that people had experienced music from the dawn of civilization through all the different time periods throughout history and
the different technological advancements that happened along the way. So music started off pretty rudimentary with with just, you know, rehearsed sounds over and over again rhythmic that people had a reaction to. And then eventually we came up with our standard way of categorizing all the different notes that are common in music theory, which resulted in written music. So it's reproducible music. And back in that time, the only way to experience music was to either play it yourself or listen
to someone else playing it. So it was like a one to one interaction of someone playing someone listening or a group of people listening. Later on, that whole format changed and evolved when you had concert halls, you had a larger group of people being able to experience the music at a given time. So one way to look at that is we transitioned from a lower leverage use of the musician's energy to
play for oneself or to play for a small audience to then be able to play for a larger audience. So more leverage for one hour of a concert, more people could hear the music when you went from one on one interactions to a concert hall. Then, eventually, we were able to record music on acetate plates on vinyl records on some of those earlier ways of having music to be able to be recorded and kept and codified and maintained. And then what happened from a leverage perspective,
you could record a song one time and then it could go all over the world in theory. So that was a game changer. So one musician could record a song and then essentially, if it could be shipped out via physical means, the whole world could hear it. Obviously, there's going to be a geographic constraint a lot of the time where people around that person, if you recorded it in Memphis, then chances are people in Memphis would be more familiar with your work than people on other
continents. But that's different now with with the advent of digital technology. You can record a song, you can upload it to YouTube, you can upload it to Spotify. And really, anyone in the whole world right now could access it if they search for your name or you get your name out there. So leverage has increased, not just linearly, but I would say geometrically over time, where people are able to have more impact and have more people listening to them with one unit of time and
cremet invested than ever before. So leverage is an interesting concept. And I harp on it all the time with with doctors and with team members. But that story to me really embodies what leverage is about because when you have technology at your back, when you have a group of people that are all developing better ways of operating and more effective ways of scaling your time, then it's easier to get more done per 15 minute hour long half day increment than you did before.
This was really obvious to me on last Friday's call where it was our VP of operations, Mr. Dave Saltz-Cholie conducting a call with our RMS and our sales training team, and then also a few of us on the leadership team, where we were just talking about best practices, giving an update, giving us a state of the company update on what we're seeing, what we're learning, what we want to focus on, clarifying what the most efficient ways of operating in the day to day are, because we
all know that as we get more efficient, we get more effective in general if we're keeping the right things in mind. And so that was one of the takeaways from the call for me was the fact that we're getting so much clearer on how we need to be spending our time. What are those relatively few actions that fall in the important category, but not necessarily in the urgent category? And I would hazard to say that right now in March of 2025, all of our practice level teams are so
much clearer on what leads to success than they ever were in months and years in the past. And
that's been an iterative approach. We've learned so much every single month, every single year, and it was really brought to bear in that call, because it wasn't just the fact that Dave brought a lot of great updates and clarified a lot of questions that people had, but the actual meat of the call for me came from so many of our practice operations managers and smile consultants sharing what they've seen to be most effective, particularly around how to have great conversations
with patients, how to dispel some of the challenges that patients come in facing or the objections that they might have. Because if you think about it in terms of leverage, and a great quick definition of leverage for me is what amount of input can yield the biggest output. And for me, if I'm on the phone with a patient and I'm thinking of it in terms of leverage, I know that I have the ability to have a meaningful connection be forged with that patient before they ever walk through the door.
So if I can get around any of those objections that they have or better yet surface those objections, give a solution to those objections to the point where the the patient or the potential patient is satisfied and ready to give us a chance and ready to talk to us, that's a very high leverage use of my time as opposed to the innumerable other things that could take up your time on a daily basis at a
practice. And so I think that is a growing edge for us is all of a staring in the face of what are the three to five actions every single day that take precedence over the litany of other things that can definitely cloud my calendar if I'm not careful. And we didn't talk about that directly on the call, but that was one of the subtexts for the call for me was that being in the SPG Dintran implant model, we know that there aren't as many moving parts to the
Dintran implant model as the GP model. That was one of the questions that I posed on the call was, raise your hand if you've been in the GP model, if you've worked in GP dentistry, whether at a GP private practice or in a GP DSO, over half of the room raise their hands. And a lot of us develop bad habits, frankly, in the GP realm. I know I did. And it was a compensatory response to all of the different whirlwind of things that demanded my attention. And if I'd really taken a step back
and assessed, what is the best use of this hour of time right now? I might have been about 15 or 20% successful using my time wisely throughout my tenure as a GP dentist, because I spent so much time
worrying about things that really didn't matter. If you boil down your goals into being giving a raving fan experience to as many patients as possible, and performing as well as possible to make the practice successful, if I would have boiled down my deliverables along those two axes, then I don't think I was all that effective at scaling my time and thinking about things in terms of leverage. Eventually, I got better at it when I realized, okay, a great use of my time is to train dentists
to be effective communicators, to be efficient in their procedures. And then I realized, okay, if I can spend an hour doing this, then that can, you know, return to that person that I'm talking to multiple fold, because I took the time to share my insight. And then now you think about what I'm doing at this very moment, I'm recording a podcast for all of our team members to listen to, to hopefully have at least one light bulb moment, one epiphany, one piece of clarity around, oh,
I'm spending my time doing xyz, but it feels like I'm spinning my wheels. It feels like this activity is not in service of creating raving fans out of our patients or in service of making this practice as great as it could be. So maybe that's an opportunity for me to talk to my supervisor to work with my team to figure out, okay, is this really necessary for me to keep doing? Could this be automated? Could this be delegated? Because I feel like I'm a better use of my time, a better
way to lever my time is to fill in the blank there. Because with our model with the denture and implant model, I always say it's simple, but not easy. There aren't that many steps to it, but each step has a disproportionate impact on our ability to serve our patients and have strong
performance month over month. But I will say that we're getting better and better every single month with how we're operating with how we're working together with how we're understanding the actions, every single patient every single day, every single month, every single year that lead to success. And the final thing I'll say is that what really knocked my socks off on that call last Friday and shout out to Dave for crushing it with the content. But my favorite part was the
collaboration between all of the smile consultants and the operations managers. We have such a density of talent at this company. It is nuts to think about where we started a few years ago
with the what we thought we knew. Just every every step of the way we've learned so much and we've learned what types of personality traits and experience levels lend themselves most effectively to each role, not to mention just refining the types of roles that we started practice with or that we know a practice needs to be needs in order to be able to succeed at each step in its journey. We've just learned so much and to be at this point now in March of 2025
where I am just over the moon proud of the people that have joined our company. So that's number one is just the caliber of the people. But the other thing that really shook me to my core on that call was the fact that so many good ideas came from our practice level team members and it also exemplified the fact that everyone's comfortable surfacing observations and giving feedback
because the quicker that feedback loop is the faster will improve. One thing that I hope is obvious to all of you is that if we hear a good idea regardless of who it comes from, we will pounce on that idea. It doesn't have to come from me. It doesn't have to come from Matt G. It doesn't have to come from Dave. If it's a good idea that is demonstrably better than what we're doing and in some domain or the other, we will adopt it. We'll at least test it out. We
will give it it's just do and we will give it a go. So keep those ideas coming because that's how we've improved. We can't just presume to know the best way to do everything. So many of our advances have come from at the practice level seeing opportunities and exploiting those opportunities. So keep those ideas coming and in closing, I want all of you to really think about how can we leverage this team because we can leverage our own time. I think we've gotten a lot better at that
and there's probably still meat on the bone there. But just as we do in our doctor Discord chat where doctors pose questions, help each other with cases refine our treatment planning approach and how we talk to patients about their treatment needs, the same type of collaboration is available to us on the non-clinical side amongst our small consultants and our operations managers. So how can we create that density, that corpus of knowledge and of collaboration,
similar to what we do on the doctor side amongst our non-clinical team? I know we have small group chats, I know we have RM chats, but use that to its fullest potential. And then also on the central team, our central team chat, I'll just say it has gotten pretty quiet. So don't, don't, you know, don't hesitate to put ideas in that central team chat because I love it when that chat is lively. There's a lot of wisdom to share. There's a lot of opportunity for us to help each other
get better. I know shout out to Cheryl. She put a really great quote in there the other day to get us all fired up. So keep those coming, communicate, help each other to improve. But I just wanted to give a shout out to Dave for such an amazing call last Friday. It really got us off on the right
foot for March. And let's finish Q1 strong. The focus for the entire quarter has been new patient maximization, which as a review means obviously getting as many bookings as possible and also making sure that once we have that patient booked on the schedule that they show up and that once they're in the practice, we do everything we can to maximize our impact to help them get the outcome that we know that they want and need. So thank you all for your time. Hope this was
somewhat of an enlightening episode for you. So think about how effectively you can use your time for the betterment of our patients and for the advancement of our company. So thank you so much. Enjoy the rest of your week. Hey, I wanted to catch you before the podcast was over. It's Dr. Stephen Voorholt here from the Full Arch podcast shared practices podcast on all things Full Arch
implantology. And if you've ever considered yourself considering or thinking or getting interested in Full Arch implants and what that looks like, please join us in Dallas, Texas May 29th through the 31st. We have two courses run concurrently. Intro to all the next one is for those of us who have never done an arch, or maybe we've done a smattering of arches and we just kind of want to learn the basics again and have a really good foundation. Intro to all the next two,
which is May 30th to 31st, is going to be all things digital. So how do we go with the 3D apprentice, the scanners, the photogrammetry, all of that stuff and kind of boil it down to the bare bones and what you need to know. So come learn all the nuance, all the basics, all the fundamentals from a great group of doctors. It'll be staffed fully from shared practices group, our DSO that does Full Arch implants and we really look forward to seeing you in Texas in late May.