Good morning. Welcome to the third week of June 2025. A couple of reasons for today's message. Reason number one is I want to provide a shout out to the whole company, to all of our doctors, our small consultants, our practice operations managers, our lab techs, our dental assistants, our central team, and just say, wow, this has been the best start to the month. We've ever had performance-wise. It's a testament to a lot of things.
Number one being that a lot of us have put in so much hard work over the months and over the years. Some of our practice performance is the culmination of years and years of development and training and practice, and it's coming to fruition. We'll shout out specifically teams like Orlando, where they've been doing the right things for so long. They've been honing their inputs, and now we're seeing the outputs come to fruition. That's a lesson for all of us.
The notion of if we continue to do the right things day in and day out, the outputs are going to eventually happen. It may not be immediately, but we'll see the truth come about in the scoreboard. We're seeing that across the company so far in June. Great job on the first half of the month. I think the retreat for all of us, the doctors and small consultants, really crystallized what we know as possible.
I've had several conversations with RM's and with practice team members talking about Lenny, talking about how we learned so much from Lenny and from his daughter at the retreat to where we can really see that, hey, every single phone call, every single new patient consultation, every single treatment plan, every single procedure that we perform, we have the rarefied opportunity to create the next Lenny because we saw firsthand that it wasn't just, hey, he got new teeth.
The guy's whole lease on life changed, his view of dentistry changed, his daughter really had her confidence restored and what dentistry could unlock for her dad. That was just one patient among the thousands that were able to treat every single year.
Another sidebar that I wanted to share is we had a little bit of a kerfuffle on a dental Facebook group recently where one of our practices now inhabits a space that was vacated by some dental Facebook influencer and the guy was taking issue with the fact that we have so many Google reviews.
He was charging us with having fake Google reviews or all this impropriety going on because I know from my past experience that people in this area don't leave good Google reviews and he just could not conceive of the fact that at SPG we're legitimately getting Google reviews that called out the team members by name that expressed how over the moon the patients were with their treatment and hey, denture patients just aren't that happy.
There's no way denture patients are going to leave five star Google reviews. To me, that's really clearly industry standard thinking. That's the type of thinking that most people bring to providing the service that we provide. They create these limitations and so that's where we're up against. That's what the patients come into us thinking that dentists think that way.
Dentists have a very narrow definition of success by doing the procedures that we provide and that obviously percolates out to the patients. They come in with that very diminished narrow viewpoint and so we have to meet these people where they are. We have to commit, we have to approach all of our patients knowing that they're fearful.
They have a very scarce mindset around dentistry and it's not just because of their own experiences, it's because of the mindset that their prior providers brought into the room consciously or unconsciously. I just wanted to share that little tidbit because we're starting to spread our wings a little bit as a company. People are taking notice of us and it's the old adage, all publicity is good publicity.
You read those Facebook posts and you read the, I guess, the butt hurt you could say and it just makes you chuckle. But anyway, be that as it may. I wanted to share this passage. This passage was shared with me by a mentor and it's called for a leader and it's written by a monk named John O'Donahue.
I think this applies to all of us at SPG because like we know with Lenny, like we know with all of our raving fan patients, it's not just one person that stewards that patient to the outcome that they receive. It's not just the doctor, it's not just the small consultant or the operations manager. It's every single person, every single link in the chain is responsible for allowing that outcome to happen.
If any one person drops the ball from marketing to contact center to practice operations manager, to smile consultant to dental assistant to doctor, any one person drops the ball, the raving fan experience is kaput. Just doesn't happen. And on the one hand, that's kind of scary. On the other hand, we can remember that people's bar for dentistry is famously low, which means that each link in the chain needs to be solid, yes.
But what it actually takes for that, those links to be solid is not hanging the moon and shooting for the stars. Every single step of the experience, it just needs to be better than what people expect. So take a breath and understand that we can deliver raving fan experiences without everything being perfect. I think that's important to remember. But the reason I'm sharing this is because my favorite definition of leadership is being a good servant. Leadership is service.
I get to lead this company by serving the company. That's what I try to do every single day. I'm not perfect, but that's my intent is to serve all of my constituents, which is everyone listening to this right now, and put everyone in a position to succeed based upon their knowledge base, based upon the access to the tools that they need to do their job. And really, the best thing that I like to do is to elevate everyone's understanding of what they're capable of.
That's what makes me excited to come to work every day is knowing that I can help each of you succeed a little more based upon the knowledge that I'm able to hopefully share. And this passage is no exception. So I'm going to read it so humanly for a second, and then I'll highlight some key points for a leader. May you have the grace and wisdom to act kindly learning to distinguish between what is personal and what is not. May you be hospitable to criticism.
May you never put yourself at the center of things. May you act not from arrogance, but out of service. May you work on yourself building up and refining the ways of your mind. May those of you who know, sorry, may those of you who work for you know, you see and respect them. May you learn to cultivate the art of presence in order to engage with those who meet you. When someone fails or disappoints you, may the graciousness with which you engage be their stairway to renewal and refinement.
May you treasure the gifts of the mind through reading and creative thinking so that you continue as a servant of the frontier where the new will draw its enrichment from the old and you never become a functionary. May you know the wisdom of deep listening, the healing of wholesome words, the encouragement of the appreciative gaze, the decorum of held dignity, the springtime edge of the bleak question.
May you have a mind that loves frontiers so that you can evoke the bright fields that lie beyond the view of the regular eye. May you have good friends to mirror your blind spots. May leadership be for you a true adventure of growth. Now I've read that several times now. I made some notes on it. And what strikes me is how there's elements of all of SPG six core values in that passage.
So if you go in order from attitude of gratitude to constant improvement, to sense of ownership to team first to communicating with compassionate clarity and to creating raving fans, there's elements of all of those in that passage. I'm going to pull out my marked up passage here and I want to call out a few things that really struck me just going in order from the order that it was written in.
So number one that I really love is being hospitable to criticism, meaning that you have to be open to being communicated with compassion clearly. You just have to have that or else you're too soft. You're too stuck in your ways and you're not going to function well on a collaborative team in an environment that's working on something bigger than each of us. May you act not from arrogance, but out of service we create raving fans. We only do that by serving people's needs.
We're providing health care. It's a service. It's not a commodity. And so service is a big word. Service means putting the needs of the person that is paying you or is trusting you with their health, putting their needs ahead of yours for that moment in time. Easy to say, hard to do, but we're all called to do that. And so that's what we measure ourselves by, is our ability to fulfill that. I also liked being a servant of the frontier. That one is worth thinking about.
So we at SPG are doing something new. We're doing something novel. As we stand here right now, we are the biggest GP full-large implant platform in the country. Already full-stop. No one else does what we do with the caliber of GP implant dentists that we have. And we already own that marketplace. And so what does that mean? That means that we've plowed forth on an uncharted path, which is brought with it opportunities to build from the ground up.
We've been able to put our unique fingerprints on stuff, but it also meant that we had to reverse course a couple of times. We had to shift gears. We had to pivot. We had to learn things the hard way. But what we're committed to is when we learn things, we hardwire those lessons into what we're currently doing so that we continue forward with that newfound knowledge because that's the only way to learn. There is no map for where we're going. We're charting the map as we're going.
And to some people, that's the most exhilarating thing ever. Like to me, that's really freaking cool. But for others, they want to have them. They want to have everything like the professional cartographer. They want to see the whole entire Rand McNally Atlas before they start driving. And that's okay. It's just that's not the company that we are.
I also want to highlight the fact that the wisdom of deep listening, that's so important for us in terms of patient care, because I'm guilty back in the day of tripping over myself to educate by listening to respond, not listening to internalize.
So when you're talking to a patient on the phone, when you're in the room with the patient, understand that so much of the value that that patient perceives comes from how intensely you listen and how good that experience is for them because they're able to communicate with you what they really want to share. People come in dental avoidant. They come in scared. They come in lacking trust. Ingendering trust in our patients is the key to our success.
Like if you take something away from this, that's probably the thing. Ingendering trust in our patients is the key to our success because why did they avoid dental care for so long? Why are they in the state that they're in with their mouth? It's because they were afraid. But it's because they felt like they couldn't find someone that they trusted to have their best interests in mind. Number one, number two, to be able to actually make good on the promise that they received.
Because people habitually received either substandard care or they were sold a bill of goods, air quotes in their mind. And so that makes them reticent to come back in and say, all right, I'm going to learn to trust again. I'm going to learn to jump back into the dental fray and see what happens. So we have to listen first in order to customize the care to the objectives that each patient has. So listening is key.
And I also like the notion of may you have good friends to mirror your blind spots. We all have blind spots. None of us is infallible, right? That's the best part of this journey for me. In addition to working with all of you, it's the partnership. It's the team-based approach. Most of us that love SPG have played single-player games before, where we've done our own thing, we forged our own path, and we realized what was possible by being our own army of one.
And at SPG, we realized that we can certainly go really fast by ourselves, but we can go further together. And I think that's what really attracts our doctors and some of the extremely high performers that we're fortunate to work with. We love being on a team because we know that together we can go away further than we ever could by ourselves. And the path to this point has been emblematic of that, but really, we're just getting started.
And then finally, there's a couple of points in here about graciousness and kindness. This is a stressful job. Dentistry is stressful. I mean, at its core, you're doing microsurgeries on people's faces. And the lay public doesn't understand it. Some of us that are just getting into dentistry for the first time don't really grasp it. I'm lucky enough to meet with some of our newer smile consultants. So I met with Steve from Santa Barbara, I met with Sonia, who's joining Virginia Beach.
And they're coming to Little Rock to train, and I'm getting to meet with them as they're training. And what I try to impress upon some of these folks that are newer to dentistry is just what makes dentistry different from some of the other domains that they may have been experts in previously. Because if you're new to dentistry, you're new to the fact that it's very involved. It's very narrow and deep. And you have to be really attentive to detail.
So doctors have to have a long attention span to be able to perform this procedure well. There's a lot of nuance. It's a new language. You have to learn all the jargon and all the lingo. And I just think that the more gracious we are, the more kind we are to one another.
So for doctors being kind to people that are learning the rope, to communicate with you on in dental terms, to folks that are joining that are outside of dentistry, be kind to the dental providers as they're adjusting to working with you. Because we have to be unified as a team. We have to be rock solid team first. Because if we aren't solid as a team, if there's little micro fractures starting within our teamwork, then patients pick up on that.
And it's impossible to render that raving fan experience that we're so committed to. So I hope this helps. This is one of my favorite passages. I try to read this about once a day because every time I read it, I pick up something new. And I'd love to hear, like, if you want to shoot me a message, Alex at sharedpractices.com, what speaks to you about this? Because this is, there's probably 10 or 15 different passages that I could pick out and really dive into. But what do you like about this?
What speaks to you? Because at the end of the day, we are all leaders. If we're in the service industry, which we are, each one of us is a leader because we're advocating for the care that we know that people will benefit from. Sometimes we have to help them from tripping over their own shoelaces as they create barriers. And we've seen it. We've seen the raving fan experience that we can provide. We've seen the transformative nature of the dentistry that we're able to give people.
And so sometimes we have to advocate for that. And I think we're doing a better job of that than ever. But just know that whatever seat you're in on the SPG bus, you are a leader. And I want to help you develop in that domain as high as you want to go. So let me know what you think. Alex at sharedpractices.com. Hope you got something out of this. Let's finish June strong. Thank you all so much.