Hey, before we jump into today's episode, this is Dr. Stephen Vorholt from the Full Arch Podcast, Shared Practices Podcast on all things Full Arch Implantology. I wanted to let you know and remind you that we have our second course coming up. It's going to be May 29th through the 30th. That's for the Intro to Olenex Level 1. And that's for people who have never done it, never even learned about it. This is the introductory course for you.
We'll go through patient selection, treatment planning, surgery, follow-ups, all the way to long-term maintenance. If you are already doing some Olenex and you want to get into the digital realm, we are now offering and launching Intro to Olenex 2. It'll be May 30th to 31st, also in Dallas, Texas. And we're going to be talking about all the things you need to know for going digital in Full Arch. 3D printers, scanners, photogrammetry, you name it.
We'll talk through how the treatment planning rationale changes and all the little nuances that you need to pick up if you're going to go digital. So join us in Dallas in May. We look forward to seeing you there. Welcome back to another episode of the SPG Pod. I'm your host, Alex Sharpe. And today we find ourselves in February 2025. As crazy as that is, January is over.
We survived the cold, we survived the crazy weather, we survived the illnesses, and we're dusting ourselves off and we're in February. So today I wanted to start off by shouting out SPG for an amazing January. What's interesting about this January is that it's the first year where when you look back a year ago, you look back at January 2024, and you realize that it wasn't a foregone conclusion that we would have a more successful month this January than we did last January.
Which is interesting because we've grown so fast, we've added so many new locations, we've moved so quickly and so rapidly that every year we look back and we say, oh, well, obviously we blew the previous year out of the water when we compare month to month. This was the first time where we'd had such a strong performance in a month of the prior year that we actually thought, okay, we have to be strategic in order to say, hey, we've improved year over year.
Because in a young company, it's important to have that continuous narrative of improvement each year. So for the year of 2024, we'd done extremely well, and January was the starting point for that. And so we ended the year with over a 10% improvement revenue-wise, which is huge. So shout out to everyone on the team for making that happen.
And what I want to get into today though is a principle that I think applies to our lives, to our roles within SPG, to people that are listening outside of SPG. And this is something that I see as being pretty consistent regardless of what we do. And the reason I bring it up is because I was working with the team at our GP office in Arkansas yesterday, and we were talking about hygiene. We're talking about the different hats that dental hygienists wear.
And what we've always trained on at that practice is that hygiene rests on a three-legged stool. Leg number one, being responsible for talking to patients about prevention. Leg number two, talking to patients about their periodontal or gum health needs. And leg number three was the treatment acceptance part of the stool, where we're talking about potential treatment needs, we're co-diagnosing alongside the doctor, we're helping to start that conversation before the doctor comes into the room.
So those are the three hats that a hygienist wears, prevention, perio, and treatment acceptance. And we trained yesterday on the fact that years ago, we spent a lot of time sprinting to get good at prevention. And then the next year, we sprinted to get good at periodontal health. And so it wasn't that we sprinted and then forgot.
It was that we sprinted and then integrated what we learned and what we committed to about prevention and periodontal health into how we operate, which puts us in a position to then focus on treatment acceptance. That's going to be the 2025 focus for that practice is measuring how effective we are at talking about treatment needs and helping patients to commit to those treatment needs.
Because in years past, we focused on other things, which then puts us in a position to focus on this part of the role and part of how that figures into the practice success. At SPG, on the denture and implant side, it's no different. In years past, we focused on cash flow culture. That was Q1 of 2024. That cash flow culture was such an intense focus for us that it birthed a lot of new systems and a lot of new approaches that have just become part of how we operate, which is amazing.
It's not that we don't focus on it. It's that it's built into the way that we conduct ourselves every single day. Same thing with making sure that we're diagnosing appropriately at the practice level, specifically around all on fours. That was the big focus this last quarter, Q4 of 2024. Starting the year, it's not that we're not aware of it, but it's just not the sole focus.
The sole focus for 2025, to bring it back to the three-legged stool analogy, if you want to oversimplify it, you could say cash flow culture, you could say diagnosing exhaustively, and then the third leg of the stool, like we've talked about on a previous episode, is new patient maximization. That is what we are wholly thinking about for the entirety of Q1. That starts with recognizing that the battle is fought on two fronts. Front number one is on the actual number of new patients.
Front number two is the show rate that we're able to show that people show up once they've booked the appointment, so bookings and then percentage of people that make it to the appointment. So obviously, bookings comes from phone calls, it comes from clicks online, and then show rate is where the efforts of the contact center team, the efforts of the practice teams come into play, where there's a lot of influence that can happen to maximize the likelihood of folks showing up.
Because when we have the drop-off between bookings and show rate, we've seen historically that can be 60%, 70% no-shows, with a show rate, consequently, of only 30% or 40%. What we'd like to see is that show rate to get close to 50%. We feel like that's possible with the right efforts and with the right systems in place. So we're working on both sides of that coin to make sure that we have the bookings and then make sure that we have the show rate be what it needs to be.
So I just wanted to highlight the fact that by simplifying what we're focusing on, that gives us permission to say, hey, there may be other issues, there may be other imperfections, there may be other challenges that present themselves to us. But this quarter, the biggest fire that needs to be put out is making sure that folks book appointments and show up for those appointments while continuing to operate as effectively as we have been in the other areas of the company.
So we're not forgetting about anything else. It's just that when we're innovating, we're putting forth creativity, we're modifying our approach, we're open to new ideas. Most of those should be in service of new patient maximization in terms of the number and in terms of the percentage of people that show up for visits. And right now, as always, I am in data gathering phase. I am in the data collection phase. I love new information. I love new perspectives.
I love hearing what folks are doing that they feel like works versus what doesn't work. And that helps us to make these tweaks that can create maybe a show rate instead of 46%, it goes to 48%. And when you crunch the numbers, that's a measurable impact. If we could go from 46% show rate to 48% show rate, where almost half of our patients that book appointments show up, that's an incredible number. That's a great shift, especially in a company as large as ours.
So a lot of things to celebrate for January. The new edition of the SPG Insider went out on Tuesday this week. So thanks to Ashley for making that happen. Looks great. So be sure to download that, print that off, share it with your team. But as always, let's keep that focus on new patient maximization. Hit me up with ideas or things that you think are most effective, anything that you've tried that's helped to structure your schedule such that folks show up more effectively.
Because there's lots of things like that, that I've discovered in the course of doing SPG Focus Days, that sometimes we get in this groove of structuring the schedule a certain way or approaching our daily routine a certain way. And we prioritize certain actions or certain habits that when we actually think about it, why do we do that? Why do we prioritize that? Sometimes the answer is, well, that's how we've always done it. Which as we all know, is not a complete answer.
Sometimes we have been doing things the right way and it's worth continuing to do those. But other times there's a switch that you can make when structuring the schedule. Maybe your patients love coming in on Mondays compared to Thursdays. Maybe we need more openings on certain days than others. Maybe we need to strategically put surgeries certain days than others.
There's a lot of interoperability between our practices where if you're seeing something specific that runs counter to what we think is the right way to go, give us that feedback, support it with data. We'll take a look at it and maybe we'll learn something and maybe that'll give us some fuel to make some positive changes. So reach out, alexx at sharedpractices.com if you have any ideas or have any observations is the best way to improve quickly.
We pride ourselves on being able to make iterative improvements on things. The best way to do that is to gather really, really good information straight from the source. So don't be shy. Let me know what you see, but let's maximize our new patients. Let's make sure that our doors are wide open to folks for the remainder of Q1. Let's see what we can do to continue to drive that new patient flow and keep on keeping on. Hope you'll have a wonderful week.
Hey, I wanted to catch you before the podcast was over. It's Dr. Steven Vorholt 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 running concurrently.
Intro to All 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 Next 2, which is May 30th to 31st, is going to be all things digital. So how do we go with the 3D printers, 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.