Welcome back to the SPG podcast with me today is a fan favorite. You guys like these episodes better when it's not just me waxing poetic into a microphone. You like it when it's a participatory exercise. So back by popular demand is Dr. Derek Williams, our director of Dr. Leadership here at SPG. Derek, how are you doing this morning? Doing great. Always excited to spend the morning talking. Me too. That's my output these days is
talking, deciding, connecting, being an air traffic controller in my email inbox. That is the day. For those of you of a certain age, you remember the show Where in the World is Carmen San Diego. That was a TV show that was a board game. And so inquiry minds want to know, Derek, where in the world is Dr. Derek Williams right now? Yeah, interestingly, this is the very last day of our like almost two year journey. So we're in, uh, no way. Yeah, we're going off big in Vegas.
Yeah. Yeah. We're in Vegas and tomorrow we will head back to Utah and we'll basically stay in one spot in the RV, start looking at houses, making offers. And so it's, this is really kind of like our last, our last travel destination. Folks, this is unrehearsed. We didn't plan this.
Okay. That's awesome. So I guess, because when, when you and I spoke about a year ago, and we were just starting to scratch the surface of what would be possible with you deciding to work with SPG, you, you shared your vision for the infinity symbol across the U S, across the, you know, the, the contiguous 48. Did you complete the infinity symbol? And then what led you to want to put down roots? Yeah, good question. Yes, we did complete the infinity symbol. So it's a, yeah, it's fun.
You know, we started out with kind of the idea, let's spend a year doing a loop of the East since, you know, we're probably going to settle in the West. We can explore more there later. And a few months in, my wife was like, this is awesome. Let's do another loop. Let's do two years. So we've, uh, we've essentially completed that. And, uh, it's, there's a lot of bittersweet. It's been, you know, obviously, you know, living a lifestyle like this long term has a set of challenges.
There's plenty of, you know, benefits, um, but there's a lot of compromises to be made. Um, our oldest is 14. The youngest will be seven in a couple months. So our kids are in that age range where they're starting to, well, we're getting the sense that there's a little bit of more of a desire to put down some roots, get some long term friendships, have a little bit more time with cousins and aunt and uncles and grandparents. Um, so it's, uh, it just feels, it feels like
the time is, is right. Well, that's, it's been really cool chronicling all the different places that you guys have gone over the past year that we've been working together. And, uh, I guess the, the other question I have is, cause what I think about is the, the things that you're afforded to be able to do by being in the same place all the time, favorite restaurants, and my case, favorite coffee shop, like stable gym to go to, cause like for you to remain fit and for you to,
like go on your fitness journey while being on the RV journey. That's really impressive to me. Cause like you've, you've gotten leaner and more healthy than I've ever seen you while driving, however many hours per week. So hats off to you. But no, I guess what are you most excited about, about setting down roots? Cause I feel like outside looking in, it's kind of a buyer's market right now with, with houses in a lot of places in the country. Cause I've, in, in my neck of the woods,
market saw there's so many for sales signs everywhere. And it feels like there's so many houses that just have been sitting on the market for a while. So are you thinking buy immediately or rent and see if you like the area and then commit? Like what, what are you thinking there? Uh, yeah, we're, we're, I, I would anticipate making an offer and getting into a house within, within, um, within a month. Uh, I think we're relatively comfortable, you know, we, we kind of, we know
the areas. And I think one thing that is so great is that doing this for the last two years, essentially every location that we've ever spent more than a couple weeks, we always feel like, we could live here. Like there's a lot of nice people. We like the, the amenities, like where I suppose it's a, it's a bit of a commitment to be happy and enjoy life regardless of, of the circumstances. And so I have, I definitely have concerns and questions and fears at times, but as
a whole, I have a lot of confidence in our ability to be happy and to thrive wherever we're at. So it seems, uh, a little bit in some ways less impactful and, and significant as far as like the exact details of where we're at. That makes sense. Well, congratulations on the culmination of a long journey. It's, it was the journey of a lifetime that, that you went on with your kids, especially while they were of that age who want to partake in something like that with you. And,
and I know that was deeply meaningful. It's going to be something that you and your, your wife and your kids are going to remember forever. And I think it's interesting that we're recording this right now as, as that part of the journey is coming to a close. And then you're launching on a new phase of the journey because the, the reason why I wanted to talk to you Derek was we, we had a,
a double episode, we had two episodes that we recorded on the SPG pod back in October. And we, we talked a lot about your path to get to SPG and then what you were seeing as being opportunities in the company. So if you haven't listened to those two episodes, go back and listen to those. But today I wanted to ask you a few questions about what you've learned at SPG so far. What has spoken to you? What do you feel like has been better than you thought when you joined?
What do you think has been a surprise for you? Just give us the overview because you've been working, working with us for coming up on a year now, you were circling our orbit. We were talking, you were coming to events and trying things out, but almost one year in, what have you learned, what's been surprising, what has been a pleasant surprise, and then what, what have you learned as being some, some opportunities going forward? That's a lot of questions, but I really just want
to get a sense of how's it been going a year in? Yeah, yeah, I appreciate the question. I think honestly, like the number one word that comes to my mind is just gratitude. I just feel I honestly have, have loved the last year. I was telling my wife a couple days ago, she was saying like, man, you're kind of like involved in different projects. You're relatively busy, and I was telling her, I was saying, you know what the greatest part is? There is not one of
these things that I'm doing that I don't want to be doing. I started out conversations with you founders and kind of talking through options and seeing how things might work. It's easy to be excited during that phase of things where there's like, we're like kind of looking at possible options and paths. It's something that's new and flashy, you know, in a sense. So it's really fun for me almost a year later to feel like I have the same level of enthusiasm
and excitement. I think I've seen, I think one of the greatest things is that I feel like, as I was learning about SPG and talking to each of you founders, I was able to develop kind of a sense and an idea of what the culture is like, what things are going well, what are some of the challenges. And I think what I really appreciate now looking back is that I feel like all of you were very honest and upfront. There was no desire or intention to kind of like try and hide
anything. This is where we're at, this is what we're looking for, this is where we're trying to go. And so, there's definitely been things that I have seen and that may have been surprising to me. But overall, I feel like it was a, the picture was painted well and it's really fun. I just enjoy having a seat and being on a team and getting to work with just a lot of different dynamics and moving parts.
So what's funny about hearing you say all that, Derek, is that you and I come from extremely similar backgrounds, dintily speaking, where we bought similar GP style practices that were very hygiene led, that were new patient focused, we offered a lot of different procedures running the spectrum from fillings to crowns to root canals to surgical extractions, we added implants.
And we learned that success and dentistry by that kind of old definition that seems antiquated now is by being all things to all people led to success in that specific style of
practice. When you came aboard to SPG, we spent a lot of time talking about the nuances of the denture and implant model, the similarities and differences between the traditional GP way of operating insurance driven drill fill bill till Kingdom come versus, hey, we see people that are dintily disenfranchised, people that have avoided dental care like the plague for a lot of years, or they had all their teeth out and they got a lot of dental care, but then they were burned by it,
or they had a misunderstanding of what was possible for their long term restorative situation. And so as you learned the ropes with the ins and outs of our practice model, you became pretty much a master of understanding the different steps in the chain, the things that a doctor needs to be aware of and potential stumbling blocks for that doctor at every point in the process from working with his or her team from welcoming new patients in the door, connecting with those
patients, executing the care. There's a lot of things that are unique, dressers, challenges, potential stumbling blocks that are unique to the denture and implant model that are far different than what you and I were accustomed to working through in the GP realm. And obviously, like in my case, I added a bunch of full arch. I did a lot of work to become the implant guy
with doctors working with me to handle more of the GP load. But what have you learned, or maybe what is different than you expected in learning the nuances of this denture and implant model, and then what have you learned determines a lot of the success or the fulfillment that folks can hope to achieve in this model? Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. There's two immediate things that stand out to me. It's pretty much a given that every doctor that is here
enjoys full arch dentistry, or they enjoy surgery. And that's why they're here. They want to be doing these types of things. They like the lower volume flow to the day. So it's relatively obvious to me why they're here. I feel like almost across the board, we see these similarities and what's attractive to the doctors. And I think if I'm to try and distill down two very quick things like off the bat of what allows a practice and a doctor to do well, I think it really kind of comes down to,
I would think the first two things are diagnosis and the consult process. I mean, we can't do anything until we have a patient that is committed and ready to move forward. And so I think we have realized so much over the last six months, thanks to Matt G. pouring over the numbers and recognizing how critical it is for us to be talking and recommending
fixed arches to people. There's too much of the time that we were, I think, shying away from the conversation or a little bit too apprehensive or afraid of what the patient was going to think of things. And I think we are getting much more to the point now where it's just, if the patient is a candidate, we're just going to move forward with a presentation and let them know what we think is the best option. I think we have much better improved in that way. And I think
the second aspect of that is the consult process. I'm so encouraged by what we've done, bringing in smile consultants and allowing someone that can be really, really good, really focused on just that one aspect of the job takes a lot of pressure off of the doctor and allows them to focus on good clinical outcomes and really enjoying the schedule and the flow of their day. And everything that you just said, obviously, I'm well aware of, but it hits me differently
in light of a conversation that I had at the coffee shop early this morning. So I go in the coffee shop that I go in every day to get my two coffees, don't judge. And the guy sitting at the bar is someone that's been there a bunch and we've never actually spoken. And he gets up and what's weird is he stands up and he and I see eye to eye, which is not normal. I don't normally see eye to eye with people. And he's like, Hey, you're a dentist, right? And I said, yeah, don't hurt me.
Because he's like my size, but bigger. And he goes, yeah, I heard you're a dentist, which office is yours? And I said, well, it's the one, you know, right down the road and I pointed to it and he goes, well, I've been going to this one over there. He points at the other multi doc office in town. And he goes, they quit taking my insurance. I said, Oh man, I hate to hear that. What what insurance do you take? And he said, at none. I said, Oh, great. Well, we definitely take
at nine on my head. I'm thinking we've renegotiated the fees. The fees are actually pretty good with with atna at the GP office. And so we talked and he actually his wife knows the the wife of Dr. J, who works over there. And we got him basically business card. He's going to call and get scheduled for comp exam, which is awesome. But that got me thinking that in the GP realm, you just never know what's going to walk in the door. You never know what type of conversation you're going to
have to have. You never know if this person has maybe maybe they need periodontal therapy, maybe they need SRP, but they have never had that before. So you have to walk them down the path of understanding that we need this type of periodontal therapy rather than just a regular above the
gums cleaning, or maybe they never had a filling before. But then all of a sudden they come in with rampant decay and you're having to have this very, very difficult conversation of, yeah, I can understand that your prior dentist didn't have any conversations with you about your treatment needs. But as it stands today, right now, based on these x-rays, here's what I see, here's what I recommend. And so you have to be so nimble to handle all of these different kinds
of conversations. Whereas when you look at the denture and implant model, there's a way tighter variance of the types of problems that we're solving, the types of needs that people have, so that we can develop a really detailed, targeted understanding of this person's coming in with this type of problem, this person's coming in with that type of problem, this person is coming in complaining about breaking teeth and failing dentistry, this person over here has been
a dentulist for 20 years, and they're ready to go out and have steak again. There's only so many different avatars that we see, which means that from a dentist's perspective, it's not necessarily easy to get great at building a case for why the treatment that we provide solves that specific set of problems. But it's way in the heck easier than if you're just making a treatment plan from
scratch with root canals here and crowns there and on lays there and partials there. Like when we have the simplicity of a constrained number of treatment options, it's way more straightforward to be able to articulate those effectively, because most of us dentists, we don't have the gift of GAB, we didn't go to dental school because we were on the debate team, we went to dental school because we were good at science, and because we were good at math, we were good with our hands,
and we're craftspeople and technicians more so than extemporaneous communicators. So we like the simplicity, and I think the more that we lean into that, it's definitely more a feature than a bug. Has that been your experience? It's definitely a benefit. I think any time, I mean, honestly, I think it kind of comes down to the individual and what do they prefer? If I'm going to be completely honest, I actually enjoyed
the GP model. I enjoyed feeling like I was juggling things and had to be all over the place. But I don't find that that is what SPG doctors are looking for. They're here because they didn't enjoy that challenge of having to juggle all of those things. And so in my opinion, it's a huge benefit. It's a pseudo-specialist, right? It's someone that can basically say, look, I'm going to set 90% of what I have had to focus on. I'm setting that aside so that I can go all in on this one
component of things. And I think our doctors really enjoy that. They have been looking, I think of Paige as someone that comes to my mind, she's been looking for an opportunity for years of something that could kind of check all the boxes for her. And this has been that. And it doesn't, it's not to say that it's made things easier, right? Like, I'm not sure, like, if we were to ask Paige, would she say, you know, the last couple years or however long with SPG has been easier than the
rest of her career? But I think, I hope I'm not talking for her, but I think that she would say it has been more fulfilling. I am spending more time doing what I want to do. I can say the same thing, you know, a conversation that I had with Mo in Richmond in the last month. He was just saying, man, in the last, I've learned more in this area of dentistry that I've wanted to know more about in the last six months than like my entire career. And so I think, yeah, the answer to your question
is definitely a very resounding yes. We all want to be good at what we're doing. Nobody wants to feel like you're playing with one hand tied behind your back or that you're mediocre at anything. And I think in general dentistry, unless you're Derek Williams, most of us end up feeling like we're pretty good at a lot of things. Pretty good at quadrant
feelings, pretty good at crowns, pretty good at root canals. But when you constrain yourself and you say, I'm only going to do this type of care, then it's easier to get closer and closer to that asymptote of mastery. But it's through repetitions of just a very targeted, restricted set of procedures. And I think that's what Mo is talking about. And that's what you're referencing with page, because most of our personality types, we prefer to limit what we do so we can just get really
excellent at those few things. And I think a lot of dentists don't have the presence of mind to diagnose that in themselves. A lot of our SPG docs experienced dentistry done differently at a Medicaid clinic or a regular PPO clinic. And they realized that something rang hollow for them with that type of experience to where they sought out like, Oh, I enjoy implants. I enjoy doing a procedure that people want to pay me money to do, rather than doing fillings that
nobody wants to have done. Like it's it's elective care, but it's elective care that actually increases the quality of life and and rebuilds confidence and transforms smiles. Because to me, elective care has a negative connotation of non essential. And so technically implants are elective care in that, yeah, you could do a denture or yeah, you could go around
a dentulous. So it's elective in that sense. But it's your third set of teeth. And I think to think about, you know, you have your primary dentition, your adult dentition, and some people, the adult dentition lasts forever for others. It doesn't for a variety of reasons. And so to give that third dentition back, I think you can't put a price tag on it. But speaking of Mo, you know, fellow UT grad
shout out to Mo, I love hearing that perspective. I love hearing that he's learned through drinking through the SPG fire hose so much in short, such a short amount of time that he deems valuable to be able to elevate the level of care that he provides. I just think that it's hard to replicate the number of at bats that doctors get at SPG because of the targeted nature of our marketing. Because we restrict our practices to a specific type of care. I think there's wisdom in that that
we'll see born out over the long haul. Because if we try to be all things to all people, it's hard to really achieve excellence at any one thing. What else has been surprising to you, Derek, about learning the SPG model, seeing dentures and implants become the centerpiece of what we do coming from that GP background, or maybe even specifically from your coaching background. Because you've built a lot of impressive systems around communicating with people,
cutting to the heart of the matter when trying to diffuse conflict. What have you learned around the interpersonal dynamic and coaching and collaboration through your role at SPG? Because I can tell everyone listening that when Derek joined, we had a notion of how he could provide the most value. We've iterated on that over time. We've developed a cadence where his way of
working with our doctors has been extremely powerful in a lot of different domains. But what have you learned about how to have the biggest impact around your ability to flex your coaching muscle? Yeah, it's a good question. I would say it's still a work in progress, for sure. I think there is such a variation on each individual doctor. We want to continue to set up systems in a way that really supports the doctor and allows them to really just focus on what only they can
do. We know that pretty much all the doctors are here because they enjoy the procedure, they want a lower volume schedule, and they want to do the surgery. Those are the things that I can focus on with each person. We can have conversations, talk through those things. A lot of my common questions when I'm on calls with doctors is, what are the parts that you feel like are going very well? What do you enjoy about the flow of things? What are things that you feel
like are holding you back? What are areas that you feel like, man, if only I had this in place, I think I could get to that next level. Everyone's different. Some doctors really enjoy the communication side of things, and they would love to do maybe all of the consults and others that are like, hey, I know, it's not my strong suit. I'm happy to let the smile consultant just take
over and I'll meet the patient once they give a thumbs up. That's part of the challenge in and of itself is we want to standardize things across the board, but we also want to be flexible to be able to cater to each individual doctor. What I feel like I've learned is just that process just takes time. How it takes place is me asking those questions, taking the one-on-one time with each of the doctors, asking the questions, understanding and listening, learning what it's
like to be in their shoes. When the better I am able to do that, the more I can draw in the RM or start some conversation somewhere else to try and optimize in some other area. There are the principles that I would say are in common across the board, listening, focusing on strong suits and weaknesses and bottlenecks, but those individual items are different in probably just about every practice. The word that comes up for me is you're describing the different parts of the console flow,
the overall position, the deliverables. I think of the word controllables. You've used that word quite a bit in your coaching and in your working with doctors. One thing that you and I have talked about before is the fact that very, very few things in number are true controllables. There's so much that we really can't control. We can influence certain outcomes, but we can't
actually grab the steering wheel and control for every bit of that outcome. We really control a lot of inputs, and we have to do the best we can to make it a foregone conclusion that the output is what we want, but then sometimes fate happens, sometimes patient preconceptions happen, sometimes team entropy happens, but focusing on controllables. What have you learned about some of the controllables that are available to SPG-dentrain implant doctors that may not always be completely obvious?
Yeah, that's a great question. I do love that. It's something that really resonated with me from Ryan Holiday and really getting clear on different tenets of stoicism. One of those is focus on what's inside your control. For me, that's made a huge difference in my own life by really trying to focus and spend the majority of my time on things that are in my control that I can have an influence or an effect on. I get a whole lot more headway and momentum. The ROI on my efforts
is significantly higher. To answer your question, one of the top things that pops into my mind is marketing new patients. I've had conversations with several doctors. If I could just get an X number of qualified patients that know that this is what they want every month, then I'd be in a good spot. I agree. As most things, it's not quite as simple when you dig in how things are done than it appears to be on the surface. In that regard, I think,
okay, I agree with you. Let's set up a meeting with Devalle. Let's see what we can do on that side of things. Here are things that are within your control at the practice level. Are you auditing and looking at the connection calls? How quickly is a connection call being made after the new patient schedules? That significantly decreases no shows and increases your number of new patients that you get every month. That's a relatively small thing. You can try and have interaction
with some of those patients. Jordan Vinger has an app, Blue Sky or C Sky or something like that. I think I posted about it. He basically has a prerecorded message that's just like, hey, I saw that you scheduled for an appointment. I'm really excited to meet you. I'm Dr. Vinger. He sends that out to new patients before they ever even come in the door. Again, that's something that you spend a little bit of time to try and optimize, get in place. It doesn't take too much
work, but again, decreases no shows, increases number of new patients. Other things would be trying to get your office to increase the number of Google reviews, having a good constant focus on that. Anyway, those are a couple ways where we can think, okay, how do we put this back? What are the levers that are inside of our court that we can have influence over the seemingly uncontrollable number of new patients? I think that's so well said. When you limit your focus to that which
only you can control, that's really important. I think there's also an element of growth that once you figure out, here's what I can control. Here's the two things I can do with my own two hands. A lot of that is mental. A lot of that is perception. A lot of that is viewing each opportunity as glass half full. I think the next logical step is to think about, what can I control of how my team perceives every opportunity? Because whether we as doctors know
what or not, our team watches us like hawks. They watch us for what we say verbally, what we don't say with our non-verbals. If we roll our eyes, if all of those things are signals that our team latches on to, I learned this the hard way. Because years back, I did an anonymous survey in my GP office and I was asking for feedback on a whole litany of things. Boy, did that feedback country in my gut because I learned that people key into different things about what you do.
Because as the doctor, from the patient's perspective, obviously you're always under the spotlight with the patient. But what you don't realize is that even when you're off stage and you're not in a patient facing environment, your team is paying attention to everything you say, don't say do or don't do. I think there's a lot that a lot of us can think about with how we portray ourselves and our mindset to our team. Because if we have an empowered,
optimistic mindset, then things are going to happen. Good things are going to happen. A person I want to shout out is Dr. Kyle Hargis because Kyle and I spoke a couple weeks ago about how they had a dry spell with people getting approved for financing. They had a lot of really good consultations, but then they just ran up against the brick wall of getting people across the finish line financially. He and I have been at this long enough to know that it comes in
waves. It's easy to intellectually say, things are going to break our way here soon. We keep doing the right thing as we keep doing the right inputs, then the outputs are going to take care of themselves. And then eventually that transpired in one day, they got four arches. They go from nothing, nothing to boom, four arches in one day. That's just how it goes. I don't make the rules. I just know that if you keep doing the right thing is you keep treating every single patient
like gold, then eventually good things are going to happen. So tell me about the things that you're working through with some of our doctors, because I feel like if I'm making this into a chart or a strategy, we start with what's in between our ears. And we're looking at mindset, we're looking
at worldview, we're looking at empowering thoughts versus disempowering thoughts. And then once we get a pretty good handle on how best to understand our own inputs, then we billow out and think about how do we interface with our team and how do we structure our interactions with our team to be collaborative and net positive versus, hey, we're huffing and puffing net negative, we're getting frustrated and then our team gets frustrated. How do you approach navigating that
team dynamic as you're supporting SPG docs? Yeah, it's a good question. And again, there's a spectrum. There's those that enjoy leadership. How do I get better at leading and those that have less of a desire and it feels it's a little bit more of a struggle or a challenge for them to put thought and time and energy into that? I think one of the greatest things that you can do is just focus on improving yourself. I mean, with what you're talking, with the perceptions of others, how do
others perceive you, all of those kinds of things, I think there's value to that to an extent. But then at the same time, if you were really focusing on your example, huffing and puffing, so the outside perception is, oh, they're frustrated, upset, they're this or this. And you can look at that side of things, but you can also just ask the doctor, what are you experiencing in that moment? Well, I'm mad because this person did this and this shouldn't have happened this way.
And what it comes down to a lot of times is a lack of accountability, a lack of taking responsibility, allowing themselves to get overwhelmed or stressed or upset about things. And so I think, again, going back, what I'm saying is, I think if we can really just focus on being the best type of person that we can and embodying the simple core values, I think in some ways that goes a lot longer and further than trying to focus on some specific hacks. Try and take 10 deep breaths, try and have eye
contact, make sure that you're not talking too loudly. All those things are good and they can help you maybe even to develop some of those good principles on the inside. But I think if you try and just embody those things in your practice and in the rest of your life, that's where you're going to see a huge ROI. I can tell you're a podcast veteran because that was a masterful segue into what we're going to talk about on our next episode, which is, what do the SPG core values
actually look like in implementation? What's the method to the madness there? And what we're going to dig into is not only examples of living out those core values and how those core values serve as foundational pieces to build upon, to orient yourself towards more successful, consistent, predictable outcomes day in and day out. But also, what are the anti-values? What are the opposite of the SPG core values? Instead of thinking about how do I double down on
attitude of gratitude, how do I avoid the attitude of entitlement? So that's going to be the subject of our next episode with Derek. If he'll do do me the kindness of jumping on the mic again for a follow up because I feel like Derek's a great resource because he came into SPG midway after we were already building and we had some momentum. He's been amazing and exceedingly patient, coming aboard, asking questions, poking holes, and he's been an amazing thought partner for the
last year. So that'll do it for today's episode. And then we'll have a follow up where we dig into all six of SPG's core values and the Bizarro core values, the anti-values. So Derek, thank you so much for taking the time to record with us today. Always a pleasure to be on. Thanks for having me, Alex. Hey, I wanted to catch you before the podcast was over. It's Dr. Steven Voorholt here from the
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