I'm back to another episode of the SPG podcast. I'm your host, Alex Sharpe, and I was inspired to do another solo episode for you. It's been a while. And I've heard Dr. Aaron Miller knock it out of the park doing a solo episode on the full large podcast here recently. So I thought, you know, why not? Let's dust off the solo microphone stand here. And let's have at it. So we find ourselves in 2025.
And I'm always thinking about what can we do as a company, as a team, as a collection of individuals to continue to spur us forward. And what I wanted to do today is connect about a book that I read years and years ago, but whose author recently has been on a podcast circuit. And so I thought it was helpful to use some of the, some of the ideas contained in his teachings to inform how we want to look at 2025 and the path ahead of us. So the book is Essentialism by Greg McEwen.
And Essentialism talks about, as you might expect, putting out a lot of the extraneous distractions, cutting out some of the things that don't serve us. It's a productivity book without being about productivity, if that makes sense. It's productivity.
And in most scenarios, if you're thinking about David Allen's getting almost said the wordy-dirt and David Allen's getting stuff done philosophy, for example, it's about cramming more into the day, capturing as many sources of information as possible and collating them, codifying them, organizing them, and not necessarily cutting down on the sheer magnitude of what you're doing, but just making it more allatable is the way that I understood that when I was when I was learning that.
But Essentialism is more removing the stuff that is not necessary to focus on what's most important. And what I think would be great is just to connect about what is most important, what are the things that as a company we're really focused on in Q1 of 2025. And to look forward, I want to connect about some of the things that we've done in the past that answered that question for us, what's most important? And I think a great way to start this is we look back to 2024.
So many of you were here in 2024. And when we were starting the year, we had an all-out assault on what we called cashflow culture. Cashflow culture came to be because in the course of growing our company from 2021 to 2022 to 2023, we were sprinting towards market leadership. We were gaining a geographic market share across the country such that we were able to support a large remote workforce, an amazing central team that's self-contained to be able to support all of our practices.
But in order to do that, chicken or egg, we needed the requisite number of doctors and practices to justify that central team so that central team could be well-endowed enough to support all of our practices. So fast forward to now, we've solved a lot of those cashflow culture type challenges. It was through a lot of hard work and a lot of dedication, a lot of discomfort in Q1 of 2024. But then look what happened. We focused on it. We made it part of our wiring.
And then now it's a phrase that comes about in our lexicon almost every single day. I hear it, I think at least once a day. And that's an example of what we want to get our level of focus to be here in 2025. So what are we focused on in 2025? What's important? What's important is putting ourselves in a position to raise our ceiling. That's going to be the overall thought process for the whole year. This is going to be a year of transformation. This is going to be a year of achievement.
This is going to be a year of focusing on a lot of different growth-oriented projects. But first, in order to do any of that Q1, we have to be laser focused on new patient flow. We've been performing well on a per-patient basis. We've been democratizing the fixed arch to far more people than we ever have before. We've achieved a lot of consistency of performance and some strong team members at the practice level and at the central level. But the focus for all of us is new patient flow.
That's how all of our success is going to be measured. So how can we promote new patient flow in service of raising our ceiling as a company in 2025? So that's what we're defining as being most important. Now question two is what's your highest contribution? The answer to that is going to be a little different for all of us.
So my highest contribution right now is to record this podcast, to raise awareness, to get everyone starting to think about the new patient flow opportunity that we have, and how they can seek to improve it and how we at the practice level, at the central level, can all do different things from different vantage points to drive that goal that we're all going to rally around. So in review, what's important in Q1 2025, just like in Q1 2024, the focus was on cash flow culture.
The focus on Q1 2025 is on new patient flow. That's what we're all going to rally around and focus on. And then you want to think about, depending on where you sit, whether you're a doctor, whether you're a member of the central team, or whether you're a practice level team member, what can we do to drive that new patient flow? We all have different controllables. So one of those controllables is at the practice level, how can we manage our capacity?
How can we structure our schedule in such a way that we're arms wide open for our patients rather than arms folded and standoffish? Obviously, that's never going to be our intention to be arms folded and standoffish. But if a patient is calling and the first available consultation is not for three weeks or something, then that's the implication. That's what they take away. And keep in mind, we're dealing with patients that are historically, dintily underserved.
They've deferred care, they're very reactive. And usually there's some type of event or some type of epiphany or some type of realization that these patients have that caused them to pick up the phone right then. It's different for everyone. But everyone has a story. And sometimes if we're not there to answer that phone, connect with that patient warmly while the iron is hot, then that's a lost opportunity.
Because these patients are not like your garden variety recall patients that are insurance driven that come in proactively every six months to get their teeth cleaned. These are patients that have oftentimes gone out of their way to avoid the dentist, whether due to fear of the procedure itself, due to misgivings about cost, whether due to perceive lack of convenience. It's never going to fit into my schedule. Or they just have low dental IQs.
They haven't been adequately educated about the nature of their condition or the opportunities that exist to treat or mitigate that condition. So when people call, we have to do our very, very best to answer the phone in a warm way at a five degree of success. Because that really is the lifeblood of our practice is the phone piece of the puzzle and then the capacity to be able to get that patient on the schedule in a timely manner in a way that fits with their goals.
Then once they're in the practice, obviously we've gotten so much better recently about gaining treatment acceptance, building value for our customized care plan that we offer to our patients. And really the name of the game now, like I said, is just making sure that we're arms wide open to get as many new patients in the door as possible because we've done so much training, so much constant improvement around how to operate most effectively in our practices.
And now we've done so much training and we've got so many amazing doctors and practice team members on board that now the focus is on new patients. And where we'd like to get to is we would love to get to 1,200 new patients per month for our company across all of our locations. This is very doable. We have the capacity for this. It's just a matter of everyone rowing in the same direction. Rome wasn't built in a day, but that's what success looks like. It's 1,200 new patients a month.
And we know we can do it. So that's the goal is is 1,200 new patients a month. That's what's important. And then we have to think about what is our individual highest contribution that we can make towards that being the focus.
And if you're in a seat at the practice level that doesn't have all that much influence over the new patient flow, for example, if you're an SPG doc, there's things that you can do to support that new patient flow to work with your practice teams to be creative with the scheduling to make sure that you have an accepting posture with how your capacity is rigged up to make sure that you're not dissuading people from coming in.
But then as a doctor, your highest contribution may be towards continuing to make sure that we have strong case acceptance that we're connecting with people that we're listening to our patients and we're customizing the care to their specific situation, to their anatomy, to their goals, to the outcome that they're seeking. And then just be a support, be a secondary support for new patient flow.
And in docs, I have a separate training that I'm going to be putting out probably tomorrow around specific levers that you as SPG docs can can pull on to great effect. So be on the lookout for that. But yeah, I just wanted to make a quick, quick podcast episode just to get everyone on the same book of business for the coming year, because for those that were here, cash flow culture was a resounding success.
It was just something that we belabored and we repeated ourselves ad nauseam and it just became part of our ethos. And this fundamental shift around how we all focus and we all rally around new patient flow, we were still developing all the answers. We're still in the discovery phase about how we can each possess the most amount of leverage to support new patient flow. But be on the lookout because we're going to be talking a lot about it.
We're going to be driving performance based on new patients. And we're going to be supporting all of you as much as we can to make sure that we capture as many new patients as possible. Because think about this, each of us has a ceiling of performance and understanding. And we want to break through those ceilings this year. And usually that just comes from being this week, you will asking questions, offering feedback, being loud, being in communication.
And so the more that we communicate with each other and we keep each other abreast of where we are, what struggles we're having, what successes we're having. That's how we move forward as a company. And at SPGM, I'm very proud of all the ground that we covered in 2024. 2024 was a year where we tightened our belts. We got our house in order. We learned a lot about ourselves. We developed playbooks and ways of operating. We codified a lot of best practices.
And now in 2025, we take it to the next level. And step one is to everyone stare in the face of new patient flows, what we're prioritizing. And once we have that hardwired into our way of operating just like we did with cash flow culture last year, then we'll focus our gaze on something else. But I hope everyone has a wonderful week this week. Reach out with any ideas, reach out with any takeaways, reach out with any support that you could use or that I could offer.
But thanks everyone for a great start to January. Let's continue the pursuit of excellence in 2025. And I will see you next time on the SPG Pod.