Well, after a hiatus, we are back with another episode of the SPG Pod. This past week has been wall to wall in a very good way, probably the most jam-packed, high leverage, high yield week I've had in my time at SPG. And we're going to recap as much of it as we can today. And I say we because I am joined by Mr. Dave Soutchitoli. Dave, how are you? I'm doing great. Yeah, just recovering, but more energized than ever. What are you recovering from Dave Pratel? We just got back.
Most of us on Sunday from our impact leadership team retreat with all small consultants and doctors with the exception of a few who had to miss for other extenuating circumstances. But what a great time. Jam-packed two days, lots of relationship building, lots of trust building, lots of incredible content. So I'm excited to go over that today, especially for you central team members who missed and those who missed our time together.
So this retreat was born out of, I would say way more planning and way more strategic choice than normal because in the past, we've done these retreats and we've made them emblematic of what our focus was for that time and what that translated to was easy example, like for the doctors. Tons and tons of clinical stuff, tons and tons of clinical how-tos and really just spending our time focusing on building some of the foundational elements to success at SPG.
And one thing that I talked about this weekend was the fact that in the past, we had to spend time on clinical. We had to spend time on getting calibration clinically because that's the keys to the kingdom. Our ability to fulfill the dentistry predictably, safely, efficiently across the platform is paramount to our success. And so we had to spend time on that. And so what did we notice? Like when you joined us, you saw, wow, they're pretty good clinically.
Like we have a great methodology for recruiting and onboarding, managing performance of our doctors, but then some of the pieces of the puzzle around the other two of the three legs of the stool, such as like marketing and operations, needed some attention because we put so much of our focus on fulfillment because spoiler alert, we're dentists running a DSO. So we've got a lot of emphasis on the fulfillment side.
And so this retreat, I'll come back to that, we spent time figuring out what does the company need? That is something that the whole company can benefit from hearing. What's the way of packaging that message? So before we start recapping the retreat, Dave, what were some of the thoughts that you and I bandied about? I'd say starting about what two or three months ago when we understood like, okay, we got a, the countdown is on to get this retreat going.
So what were some of the discussions that we had that caused us to choose impact as the operative word for the retreat? Yeah, like you said, I'll just double click on that when I came in with, with founders who are doctors, obviously the clinical elements of operations of the organization were developed and really in a strong point.
And, and I think you and I really saw this as an opportunity and we'll keep coming back to this phrase of the SPG way of really being able to project and solidify what is the SPG way both clinically and operationally? And then really what's the, where is the crossover between those two? Because they have to be working in tandem for us to be successful. And so I think we saw this as a way to really solidify what are those things now and what are those things moving forward?
And so for me, I felt like this was, this was the such a foundational building time that we can really build off of in a way that we probably haven't been able to project it. I mean, we have other meetings and other calls, but when you go soup to nuts all the way from core values and vision and where we're going all the way through the entire, you know, patient journey of a process and really go step by step like we'll talk about in a minute.
I feel like this was our opportunity to really set that foundation. And I think we seized upon that well. The thought of impact came about in just wanting to give us a sort of clarion call around what is the most important thing that we want to focus on. And when you really think about who we are as an organization, we have so much impact for our patients in the industry and the different distinctives as you've laid out over the past couple of days in terms of who we are and how we go about it.
And really wanted to just double down on how do each of us in our role help to both play into that impact and maximize our impact. And so, you know, it would have been nice to have like a clicker to see how many times we said impact over the past those couple of days. I bet it would be in the thousands, but, but I really feel like we, we achieved that well.
And so that was some of the thinking I think that went into putting this retreat together and all the different, you know, elements around it. That's funny. You mentioned the repetition of the word impact. I remember about maybe nine months ago, I was in my living room and I was fresh off of listening to a podcast that talked about how some of the really great companies come up with this formula of articulating what the deliverable is across all levels for choosing to work alongside the company.
Because it's not just about what is it? What does the company do for its customers? It's what does the company provide by virtue of, of affiliating with the platform for its team? And the, the, the equation was verb your noun. Something your something. And I, and I have this whole list, I could dig out of one of my retired notebooks from that time period, but I was workshopping a bunch of stuff. And when I hit upon maximizing your impact, I thought, ah, that's it. I fart for us.
You, you're not trying to find something to shoot for. You're trying to find something that describes what's already there. That's how you know it's resonant. That's how you know it works. And that's how you know that it applies at all levels to all people. It does to me, just like it does to you, just like it does to our doctors, our small consultants, our central team members. And so impact was great.
And what we spent a lot of time on was understanding the impact that we have already had as a company and the impact that still lies before us and the, the quarters and the years and the decades to come. And I think what we did really well was we got down to the ground level truth of what that impact looks like. And we did that by welcoming our raving fan VIP, because we talked about our core values.
We talked about how the core values build when you go from starting your day with gratitude to committing to constant improvement, to owning your role, to being a team player, to communicate with compassionate clarity, it all culminates being able to create raving fans for our patients. That's, that's a great measure of success. No greater impact than that.
And so I think it was you who had the idea to say, Hey, what if we found a real life living, breathing SPG raving fan to come to the retreat and share his or her journey with us? Uh, because what we talk about all the time at SPG is we don't just provide teeth for people when people work with us. They're not buying teeth. They're not buying Zirconia and titanium. They're buying what the teeth unlock for them.
And I think by doing this raving fan VIP feature, we helped to really put a face in a name and a voice and a clear image to what teeth unlock for people. So tell me about what made you think of the, the raving fan VIP notion and then walk through how that came to be and the impact that it had on everybody at the retreat.
Yeah. Yeah. And for those of you, if you're trying to like picture in the flow, I mean, we, we wanted to start and we did our intros and company intros and talked, you know, long-term vision and where we're headed and all of that. Um, but we wanted to put this in the first day with the everybody, all the doctors and small consultants together because as you think about, and we talk all the time, you know, on the, on our calls, we'll show before and afters and we'll bring up patient testimonials.
It is a completely different experience having that person in the room and being able to actually converse with both the patient. And in this case, the caretaker who was an advocate for that person through the process and then being able to have the doctor and the small consultant who was engaged in that process with them all the way through.
So it was really, uh, I mean, it was an incredible 30 to 45 minutes that, um, that I really wanted us to make sure that we started the day off with remembering again, what are we, what are we working towards? What's the mission and how do we create that impact?
And so, um, obviously because it was in Orlando, we started looking at patients in Sarasota and Orlando, um, working with those teams to identify, you know, who would be somebody who'd be willing to come and speak in front of, you know, 85, 90 people about their experience. And as you know, you know, for a lot of these patients, they have dental anxiety.
So even to ramp that up to another level, yeah, you know, not only you had to go through this once, but come and tell us your whole story in front of a group of 90 people, you got to find a unique patient who's willing to do that. Um, and so, uh, I had calls with a few different patients. Some didn't, uh, want to do that. Um, but we landed upon, um, Lenny Lindgren, um, who was out of, uh, Orlando dentures and implants and, um, just an incredible guy, 77 years old.
And, uh, he has had an incredible experience. And I think, I don't know if this was captured. Alex, cause we kind of went over it, but, um, he's actually not even in his finals yet. He gets those within the next couple of weeks, but, but the entire journey has been so positive for him that he was, uh, him and his daughter were both willing to come and share their experience. And so we, uh, we welcomed them. The team didn't know they were coming and it was an incredibly impactful experience.
And, and we, we learned a lot of nuggets there. Alex, maybe share with me since you were the interviewer. What were some of the highlights that came out of that conversation with Cheryl Lee, who was his daughter, a caretaker advocate and, uh, Lenny. Oh my gosh.
I feel like we could have spent the entire rest of the retreat, simply just recapping line by line things that they said, because you could take direct quotes from the transcript of that interview and just really derive a lot of our principles from what they said.
Uh, number one, if I'm thinking about their, um, their journey to finding us, um, if I put myself on their shoes and try to get in their brains and understand their mindset when they were selecting a provider, I think that's where we have to start.
And they shared something that I think is lost on many of us because us as dentists, us as dental professionals, we, a lot of times think that people come in expecting to be oversold to air quotes, meaning they expect to be treated like a nail because the only solution is a hammer. And the opposite was true with Lenny and Cheryl Lee, where they came in, expecting to be, uh, I guess pigeonholed into dentures. Yeah, exactly.
That blew, that blew my mind because they had this preconceived notion that I'm Lenny, I'm 77. A dentist and a team is going to look at me and just say, yeah, you're too old. You're going to get dentures, which is just nuts to us. Like we, we could not even fathom that being a preconceived notion, but that was their ground level truth. That was the, the, the idea that they were operating under. And we only know that.
We only get that information by asking questions and customizing our line of approach when we're doing a connection call with the patient, when we're doing the initial interview with the patient, these are all things that you simply would not know unless you ask, unless you ask the right questions, forge that connection with the patient, get the patient to tell you what they're optimizing for, what they care about, what they're afraid of. And that just blew me away.
And I was so thankful that we, that we got that out of them at the retreat because it was so illustrative of things that can cause people to not move forward because they don't feel like they trust the person they're talking to. They don't feel listened to. They don't feel like the care is being customized to them. So I was just so thankful that they shared that. And that's just before they even started treatment. That was just their, their worldview and their perspective.
And even, even as they were narrating the experience, they never stopped using the word dentures. They kept referring to his prosthetic, his all on four healing teeth, his conversion prosthesis that he's wearing right now and loves and, and he's steak and does everything he wants to do. They still use the word dentures. So we as dental providers need to mirror. We need to pair it.
We need to meet the patients where they are and not force them to use the elevated dental terminology, not correct them when they say the wrong thing. Use their language, get on their level, reciprocate the verbiage that they give to us because that fosters connectivity and that builds trust and you build trust in order to get to the outcome that we all want. And so I don't know, I could, I could go for five hours on my, on my takeaways and that, that interview. But let's, let's start with that.
Let's start with your perspective on what we just talked about, which is understanding that they had years of mindset that, that they had, that they, that they came in with, that only, only because we met them where they were, were we able to even get to the yes? Yeah. Yeah. It was clear that they had gone down a path of, uh, the many, many different streams that fed into them wanted to make that decision. They did see us on TV.
Uh, so through, through, uh, through wellness hour, I believe, um, I think it was Austin at the time. Um, and they, uh, you know, I think there were a couple different things going on. They were, he was very clear that they did not want to continue down the road of patchwork dentistry. He was very clear that they didn't want to continue to try to, you know, put this thing together, um, and kind of tie it together as a shoestring, um, in terms of creating full function again.
One of the things that I thought was really interesting is his daughter was just as much of an advocate. And one of the things that she said was, I wanted to see my dad smile again. And, and that was a driving force. You know, she was like, he's always been a smiley, you know, happy, go lucky guy. And you know, he would, uh, the story she had, and we'll share the interview. Obviously was, you know, he, at one of the, uh, uh, I think it was trick or treaters for one Halloween.
He was like, should I just put a bag over my face? Cause I don't want to scare the kids away. Right. So there were other features there, but they came in very educated, knowing they didn't want to do patchwork dentistry, knowing that they had a clear outcome that they were shooting for. And it took, uh, it took us uncovering that goal, aligning with their visions and objectives and then finding the path forward.
And so yes, we have to be, we have to be so clear that our role is to uncover that rather than for our role to determine that vision for them, um, and, and bring our own ideas and our own visions into that, because he easily could have been a patient that we could have said, yeah, you know, you're too old.
All these different things will put you in a traditional denture, which is what they were afraid of, but, um, there were, there were years of them thinking through, uh, how do I regain function? How do I regain that smile? Like Sherry Lee was saying, and, um, they came in with a very clear vision. And luckily we were able to uncover it and then partner with them and achieving that vision for Lenny.
Yeah, because I think it's helpful to meet people like Lenny, because we, we talk about at the very high level, like part of my job is to telescope in and out between the grand vision of the company, which is to democratize the fixed arch far and wide across geographies, across demographics. And by doing that, we're democratizing the fixed arch to the patients, but even more upstream of that, we're democratizing access to providing that type of care to dentists.
Like we have to do that first before we can reach the patients, obviously.
And the more people wrap their arms around what it really means to democratize access to those Lenny like outcomes, the easier it is to overcome the challenges, because there's challenges inherent to every brand of dentistry, every path that you could follow, whether you, whether you restrict your, whether you restrict your scope of care to sleep at me, a patient's or you, you restrict it to TMJ, you restrict it to work, though, whatever the restriction is that you impose on your
scope of practice as a dentist, there are trade offs. And I've met with, I've had, I've had a weird number of meetings today. I've already had five meetings today. And four of those meetings have been with individual SPG docs. And it's just like, it's interesting to think about SPG docs. They are aware of those trade offs and they thank their lucky stars for their trade offs, because there's so much about dentistry that you just don't have to deal with in our model.
And once you understand that, yes, there's, there's downsides. Yes, there's annoyances as there are with every model, but the amplitude of the good stuff that comes from democratizing the fixed arch to people far outweighs the challenges. The sunny days when done well are way, way bigger in amplitude than the negativity from the rainy days. And that's why I love the notion of democratizing the fixed arch, because when you, when you say, okay, what does that really mean?
It means you have patients like Lenny that in a parallel universe would be resigned to removable dentures that would be shut into their houses, that would be having inadequate nutrition and then having the, the, the ripple effects of systemic health consequences that stem directly from being a dentulist without a sound foundation to chew with and function with, you would have sons and daughters of patients like, like Lenny
that wouldn't have the confidence that their parents are going to continue to enjoy their sunset year. I mean, it goes on and on and on.
And so I feel like by doing that, by having Lenny and Sherri Lee come to our retreat, we were able to show our doctors, some of whom are joining us, some of whom are about to open practices with us, some of whom are getting their sea legs under them as SPG docs and also show our smile consultants, some of whom are newer, some of whom are in the midst of seeing patients transition from doing the procedure, having their healing teeth, and then having their finals.
And then we also have our central team members who are by and large, nonclinical. They aren't seeing the transformations as frequently as our practice team members are. I mean, just having everyone see the same thing and hear the same thing and witness firsthand. The difference that we made in not just Lenny's life, but everyone around him's lives. I mean, it's just something to hold and I'll.
There's a couple other couple of other lessons, I think that came out of it and then we can move further in. I mean, lots of conversation around that the expectations for the process were set soundly and communicated often. And then we met those expectations. There wasn't anything where Lenny felt that we weren't upfront, transparent and honest.
And so again, our value of compassion and clarity, I think really resounded in that example, something that we need to continue to lean on, to set right expectations and communicate what the process is going to look like. The other thing that really stood out for me is we need to not discount the role of the additional caretaker in this process. Because and continue to engage them in that. You know, she was she was communicated with all throughout.
She was just a part of the treatment process as Lenny was. She knew what was going on. And so for her to say, like, I feel like I got a new family in Orlando. After, you know, towards the end of this process is pretty incredible.
So we can't discount the role of the additional caretaker, individual who might be helping somebody through this treatment, keeping them engaged and then making sure that we set and then meet those expectations using using compassionate clarity when we need to, when things are not quite right there, or we need to push the surgery, this, you know, date out a little bit or whatever it might be.
But, you know, definitely a lot of operational lessons there for us and all around it was just about the best, the best, you know, outcome that we could have asked for really solidified that our model has incredible impact.
And so if we can do more Lenny's and leave no Lenny behind, then I think that's what we need to really focus on is is every one of you are going to have Lenny's who come through your door and who's a, you know, 77, you know, a year old individual who wants this function back, who wants to smile again. Let's leave no Lenny behind and continue to focus on creating raving fans the way that we heard in this retreat. Stealing that one, Dave, leave no Lenny behind. That's an avenue hashtag.
Oh, that's so good. Well, Daniel, Danielle gave me that hashtag, but yeah, it's awesome. All right. Well, credit goes to Danielle for that one. So we, that was, that was definitely the main course. That was the entree for, for the warning one of the retreat. And then at lunchtime, we, we split the room and we started doing domain specific training. And collaboration where the doctors were on one side of the sound proof wall. That actually worked pretty well.
Yeah. We were concerned about it, but it worked. Oh my gosh. It was a nothing burger. It was great. And then on the other side, we had a smile consultant focused training. And let's start with the, your, your side of the room where it was you, Madgy, RMS, smile consultants, the lion's share of the central team. What were some of the intentions for, we'll, we'll just zoom into the afternoon of Friday? What, what were some of the things that you guys focused on?
Yeah. So I started out the day by really working on this concept around self leadership. And for me, every, you know, the success of the practice, the success of maximizing the impact in our roles comes back to how we lead our time and focus our time around high leverage behaviors.
And it was a thread that we had in the morning as well, really talking about, you know, our operating model is essentially marketing, getting people in the door, sales, getting a yes, and then fulfilling sales and creating raving fans like we saw with Lenny. And so we spent some time really defining when you break those down even further, what are those activities that, that advance? Those objectives most, most quickly and most readily.
So I started out with coming back to the conversation of you as an individual, the way that you show up and who you are will help it maximize your impact. And so talked about some things like moving from being reactive to proactive. For me, that's a first principle around self leadership that as a smile consultant, as a doctor, as a POM in a practice, if we can move from reactive to proactive, then we can have incredible impact. And I talked about it really in two ways.
One is you have a responsibility to control how you respond to your environment. And so even just in terms of like creating culture within the practice, how we respond when a patient is denied or is upset, we have a responsibility to not just react.
And I gave the story that, you know, one of the hallmarks of being a mature adult is that you do, you don't just react to your environment, you respond, you take a moment for, you know, that, that thought to move from your lizard brain all the way to your prefrontal cortex where you can respond with emotional intelligence, with empathy, with care. And I told the story that I remember when my youngest daughter, Lila, who's five now, and she was like two and a half.
My son Holden tried to take a toy from her and she like, grab the arm and just bid it like latched on left teeth marks, right? When that was for reacting to her environment, but that's not how we can operate as leaders in this space as dental professionals. And so really spent some time focusing on that. And then about how do we be proactive? How do we plan our weeks, begin with the end in mind?
How do we time block to make sure that we're making the right outbound activity that we're driving our own actions to make that high impact? And so, you know, we spend a lot of time there about advancing their own self leadership in the morning. And how to be as focused in their time and in their activities as possible as it relates to marketing sales and fulfillment.
What I find most motivating about my job every day, and I feel like it's probably the same for you, is that abundance mindset wise, if people work for us for a week or a month or a quarter or a year or a decade, I really feel like we make every effort for people to become better people by being a member of our team. And whether they feel that way or not, we ultimately cannot control. But I think we teach skills that translate to life beyond SPG. Oh, yeah.
So I think what you're talking about is you're teaching them to become better people, which makes them better team members and then ultimately better servant leaders of their constituents. Like oftentimes it's their patience or if you're a central team member, then a better servant of those at the practice level. And so I think that's a phenomenal place to focus in an evergreen place to put your time, energy and effort across the company.
Yeah, I mean, you know, two other concepts that we brought out in that time were just again, a first principle for me, seek first to understand then to be understood and
using that methodology, that's for any of us, right? That's in a consult, that's in working with a doctor, that's in doing a doctor download, using active listening to be to seek first to understand the person across from you, rather than just pushing your point so that you can be understood, not listening to make a response, but listening to truly listen. So that's a, I mean, again, that spans every relationship you have in your life.
And then we kind of ended with to set up the rest of the time, like, how do we pursue that constant improvement, which is obviously one of our major core values and how do we get 1% better every single day and stay in that process. So it was a good first morning and then we came back to
this concept of the three legs of the stool. So again, we've got three major workflows that define how our practices are successful, getting patients in the door, getting patients to say yes, and then fulfilling those sales and creating raving fans. But we also now have three critical positions that hold up that success, that support it, that could not be balanced without these three people. So we have the practice operations managers,
the small consultants and doctors. And so we spent some time really looking at how do we optimize that partnership and that interplay between those three roles to fulfill that patient journey from sit marketing to sales to fulfillment. And each of us plays a role in that, but we also own different areas of that. Doctors primarily own the fulfillment side of it, right? Not saying small consultants and POMs don't spend time doing that,
but they own that piece. Small consultants really need to own the sales process, getting patients to a yes. And then practice operations will own more of the marketing side, helping to get patients in the door. But POMs, for those of you who are listening, you play such an integral role as a fill the gap individual who sort of spans over those three functions, marketing, sales and fulfillment,
to make sure that those things are happening. And so we talked a lot about how to optimize those relationships so that we can be as successful as we possibly can be. So spent some time there before getting, and I can keep moving forward, but before we talk about some of their concepts. I think it's interesting that you highlighted so much of the operational fundamentals on the small consultant side, because we did something similar on the doctor side, that
afternoon of day one, where we spent time just really zooming out with the doctors. And we got very, very specific on kind of the keys to success as you think about the patient journey. So we started with a really great narration of our marketing process from George. George went very deep on what we've learned and how best to structure our marketing efforts across channels. And we saw with Lenny, I mean, how did Lenny find out about us? TV. It's 2025.
People still watch TV. Like the way that we find a lot of our patients are through like people watching paid advertising on TV. It's amazing. And just goes to show that what you as a 30-something year old man think would drive new patient demand and create a reputational capital amongst our viewers and listeners is not necessarily what does do that. So that was interesting. But no, marketing has come a whole heck of a long way. Marketing has become an unassailable strength
of our strategy. And it's unique to us, which is great. And the doctors had an opportunity to ask questions, give feedback. It was so good. I learned a lot. And then we went to something like what you're talking about where we spent time understanding that a doctor's ceiling at SPG is inextricably linked to the amount of capability latent in his or her team, meaning how well and how consistently are those at the practice level performing at or very close to the top of their
certifications, specifically on the dental assistant side. Like so Erin and I talked about examples of elements of the workflow that can ultimately be owned by the dental assistants. And we gave examples. We gave ways to structure development paths for DAs because it's interesting there's a dichotomy between how a DA growth path can be structured from the inside out, like from the central team to the practices. But then there's going to inevitably be differences
in approach. And and I guess you could call it eccentricities for each practice and each each doctor where you can only do so much from the central team outwardly compared to what the doctors themselves have to come up with and develop to fit their own individual needs. So that was a focus during that session. Did you tell them, did you tell doctors to all come talk to me about how to develop their DAs? Because I like that message I sent this morning. I had I had a lot of doctors
coming up saying, you know, what best practices operationally do you have for that? And obviously I've been working with Nina on creating some structure there. Yeah, I think their questions were even a little bit more about about what you're talking about. Not the the sort of unique ways that I mind non negotiable that are really, really hyper important to me as an individual doctor, how this a certain surgery set up for or whatever. And how to lay out those expectations clearly.
And so some against some of the sort of off or out of our time conversations around lunch or break or happy hour was was around that concept about, you know, getting clear and even developing a one sheet of like, this is how I like these things to be done. This is unique to me. And setting that expectation really clearly on the front end with with something that you can coach to. And then had a lot of conversation about, well, it's just kind of awkward to know like when and how I even
get into a feedback conversation. And so I gave the simple tip of like, I found the best way that I have ever seen effective from a doctor to a DA. And this works in other situations as well is just low voice one on one, pull the side, Haiti, mind if I coach you up for a minute. And I'm telling you that line will work wonders for you because one, it assumes if the person says no, they're not going
to say no, because then they're it's like, no, I'm not coachable. Like, no, not at all. So you get, you get you usually get a yes, which puts them in a place of disarmament, it puts feedback in the context of constant improvement. And and it assumes that they're a coachable person. And so, man, I would encourage us to normalize that across the way in which we engage when expectations are not met, pull aside, quiet, you might if I coach you up for a minute, yes, deliver feedback. And
I found that to be the most effective way to engage in that. So anyways, you must have peaked their brain because that was a constant threat of convo with the doctors. Well, if you could call it a buying signal, but it's usually a good indication that we struck a nerve for them for them to be bringing that. And that has been a topic on several of my doctor calls today. So I think where there's smoke, there's fire, there's opportunity there. And yes, what I did was I wrote it on a
sticky note. If you have RDA development ideas, come ask me and I put it on your back. Yeah, yeah. So that's why you got that. And that connects that connects to what our next talk was, which was more broadly, Derek and I got up there and we talked about the different paths of leadership development available to SPG docs, because just like there are going to be those nuances
that are unique to each doctor. And I love the one pager idea to say like, okay, within the context of the procedures that everyone does at SPG and the scheduling workflows that we all are beholden to, and we all stick the same formulary and the same X-ray philosophy and everything that's similar, there's still going to be some slight differences that that works well for us on the RDA side. Same two goes for each doc coming into his or her her own unique voice in terms of leadership,
because some of us are like you think about them, the Matt Havis is of the world, right? Like, I'll pick on Matt for a second. He is an energizer bunny. He is a born extrovert. I wish I had that gene to feel like an actual born extrovert where my battery meter gets greener and greener and bigger and bigger the more that I talk. Whereas naturally, I'm an introvert that plays an extrovert on TV and I have a finite battery life each day. I have so many words available that come out of
my mouth and once the number of words is hit, no more words come out. I don't have that. So we have that style of leadership and then we have the more normal, standard-issued dentist style of leadership, which is I don't like to be that verbose. I prefer to do dentistry. I prefer to be excellent at what I do and I want the leadership thing to be built into my day-to-day workflow so that I don't have to allocate my precious bandwidth to doing stuff that isn't like
my highest and best use and then everything in between. So we spent time talking about that. We spent time talking about how to be a good steward of those in your practice, understanding that whether we like it or not as dentists, we are looked to as leaders, whether we think ourselves think of ourselves as leaders or not, we are and what we say has a huge impact, what we say has lots of consequences both intended and unintended and so all of those nonverbal and verbal pieces
of feedback that we give to our teams, they latch on to, they amplify, they make meanings of, and so we have to understand that we're on stage to our patients at all times, but we're also on stage on a different stage to our teams and so one example that I gave was how way in the in the distant past I made a very sarcastic and ill-conceived snide comment to a dental assistant one time about the the quality of the temporary crown. I made some kind of just like dismissive
remark about it not being the prettiest thing I'd ever seen and I thought nothing of it. It was a throwaway remark I thought and then months went by and then that came bubbling over
to the point where well you said my temporary crowns were ugly. I was like where did that come from and we had to trace it back to that comment that I made that I remembered very differently from what the reaction was months later but it taught me a very important lesson which is that what is a non-critical comment to me something that just seemed like a throwaway comment among equals was perceived very very differently as a dictum from on high to a dental assistant.
So you just have to understand that sometimes the intention of the comment doesn't lend itself to the interpretation of the comment especially if you're a doctor that has the perceived high point the high ground in a relationship. So what is your sense of the doctor's relative thirst for leadership because we also did a we did a what do you call it we did a quiz beforehand like we we sent out a survey to doctors and 80% of our doctors said that they have interest
in becoming a five out of five amazing leader. So we have we have this undercurrent of desire in our doctor in our doctor course to one level up in leadership. What opportunities do you see there? Yeah I got to catch a little bit of this section because I popped over. I wish you were in there for that and the whole time. Yeah. Because from what I heard I was really excited fun to see them
engaged in asking these questions and that environment. You know and I think this is a huge green field for us to continue to grow and optimize a relationship between the POM and the doctor. They need to be aligned on the the type of culture and that we want to create within the practice
and both be working in tandem towards that end. But I think you know your survey goes a long way because the first thing that we have to just you know address as the elephant in the room is that whether you want it or not you doctors come with a level of institutional authority because they are the doctor in the practice. And so you can you can wield that influence really well or you can
not wield it at all or you can wield it poorly. And so I love the idea that one you have to recognize that even though you didn't ask for it that level of influence comes by virtue of being the doctor in the practice. Okay, accept that level of reality and responsibility. And then how do I be clear and accept that role and then how do I wield that influence
in a really really positive way. So I think you know best practices there are being willing to communicate expectations upfront early about the things that are really really important to you. Be aligned with your POM in that regard and have consistent alignment meanings between going back to that three leg of the stool with your small consultant with your practice operations manager as a doctor and advancing the success of the practice together
through consistent communication and conversation with where we're headed. So there's you know we could spend an hour there you and I are always been you know students of leadership and there's so much I think that we can continue to advance in this regard. So I love that it was a part of your guys's afternoon. You know we'd be remiss if we didn't at least highlight those opportunities.
I think the as with so many things at SPG we spent our growth path to this point really discovering what are the keys to success broadly that can be copied and pasted across locations but then to go from good to great at each of our locations there is some specificity there is some customization uniqueness that we have to have the ability to double down on across locations because that's
the nature of our service based business. I said this at the retreat is that every single dollar revenue that we generate is symbolizing multiple sets of hands rendering a service. And so people are people are the keys to the kingdom for us. You can't you can't perform industry without people being aligned trusting each other working well together not having
interpersonal friction that that negatively impacts the patient experience. So that was that was a big focus and speaking of friction what we ended the day talking about on Friday was Dr. Stephen Warholt our senior VP of clinical affairs talking extremely transparently about the psychological challenges that can befall a dentist who engages in full-arch care understanding that there's a lot of pressure and there's a lot of elements in the job when we're delivering the
result to our patients. Some of them are beyond our control some of them are just biology having it's having its way with us at times understanding that there's that there's confounding factors latent in these procedures that that doctors just have to deal with and that the rainy days can come and here are he gave examples of his challenging cases what he learned from them how we how he persisted through challenges to get the patients in a great spot and he just normalized some of the
ups and downs that people can experience in full-arch and I think it's it's really special to hear someone who's been doing these procedures long as Steve who's educated so many dentists over the course of his career on full-arch to just get up in front of the the whole entire doctor populace of SPG and say like these were my challenging cases that that I had to work through it's it's not just you it's me too so I think I think that was a great way to end day one was to foster that
that level of trust and that level of connection and you could hear the sigh of relief in the room because we've all been there we've all had clinical challenges and for for VoreHolt and Aaron and everyone all the mentors to share some of their challenges really created a level of connection that that I just haven't seen before in dentistry yeah and I'll talk about kind of how we ended our day but I want to just double down on that for a minute I would love to see our teams get to
a place where you as a doctor would be able to actually share a little bit of that vulnerability with the team because I think that's sometimes where the challenges come in the practice is like it is stressful it's not simple and so sometimes that is impacting you as a doctor in a way that your team is noticing the emotions and noticing the non-verbal cues they're trying to figure out what's going on they don't know if it's them or not and so sometimes like it would be if there's
an ability to just say like yeah this is a challenging case and I'm a little bit stressed out about it right that would create a level of vulnerability in the practice to be able to because you know we want to support our doctors and so knowing where their head is at knowing that and having some empathy around the vulnerability of doing this type of treatment I think is really really important for us to focus on and continue to hear so my dream is that we get
to a level of connectedness and transparency within the practice to where we can share that and support each other through through that process so I think we can get there. So we kind of ended the day with something that's really exciting that I've been working on for a while we have been wanting to for a time create better ability for small consultants to be able
to grow through self-review of their own specific consults. We've tried some pilots with consult recording with a GoPro and a SIM card and there's some technical challenges around that and so through some different connections I had in dentistry got connected to a group of young founders who have been have come out of a Y Combinator tech development program which is you know one of those programs that birthed like DoorDash and Uber and some of our those large
tech platforms that we that we all use every day and got connected to these two young founders Danny and Justin who have a platform that they're building called Show and Tell and really when they started the Y Combinator talking to him over a beer was it was they want to build a product in healthcare in dental and part of this 10 week intensive and violent program is you have to find product market fit and so he's I think he said they went to something like 60 door to door 60
dental practices talking to owners and trying to figure out that fit so anyways long story short we got connected to these guys and and I started talking to them about the use case around how could we record consults and how could we drive through AI through agentic AI insights and consult notes that we can push into open dental and ability to review and even use the AI to flag objections that come up throughout the consult process so there's a lot of really exciting
things there but Justin himself was there and did a great job engaging with our team and spent the two days with us and what I appreciated about his approach from any of you who met him you know I told him like everything moves at the speed of trust and so now there's a relationship behind this platform and so when things don't inevitably go perfect since it's a more more of a startup platform that they have a relationship they have somebody that they can go to and so I think
him coming and being a partner with us in that way is going to go really far but we have they've pivoted and created a use case for us that is really incredible and we've been piloting it in
Sacramento in Morgantown and we'll be bringing it to every practice. Integrates with open dental really simple tool to be able to start and end a recording and then the whole time that that's happening the AI is driving insights is pulling out your consult notes and then gives you an ability to self-review and give us an ability to help coach you more effectively as a small consultant so we spent a lot of time there and that I was really really looking forward to releasing
that and seeing what our team's appetite is for constant improvement and I'll have to say that I didn't hear anybody in the room who was not hyper excited about being willing to see other team small consultant's consult recordings being able to review their own so for me that landed really really well and and I just cannot wait to get this out over the next six weeks or so.
A couple of things there the the speed of trust thing is so true and you you find that not just within your own internal team but you find it with your your vendor partners that you develop over the years like SPG right now like the the caliber of companies and the caliber of people within those companies that we're fortunate enough to work with oh my gosh like medics IT I mean you know obviously Justin like I could have talked to Justin for two hours he and I've been texting
ever since the retreat like he is our people it's amazing and so it's it's so much more fun to do business with people that are fun to do business with because you understand that there's given a take with any kind of a business relationship but my favorite thing that I read in the recent biography on in video called the NVIDIA way they talk about Jensen Hwang's notion of rough justice saying that in a business transaction the individual transaction might
have a clear winner and a loser but if you have that trust knowing that over time roughly it'll be 50-50 that the the wins will accrue to each party equally over time you have to have that trust to understand that rough justice will be will be met out over time and you know I know Dave we only have a few more minutes before I have my next meeting but if you think about what you're most excited about spending time on continuing to amplify that they came about during the retreat
like what are the things that you see as being the the low hanging fruit for us at SPG to align on focusing on for the remainder of of May and then into Q3 beyond where we finish out in Q2 yeah for sure and and obviously there's a lot of other pieces we'll talk about that came up through out Saturday you know Heather and April on our side spent a lot of time really breaking down the console process step by step by step and laying the foundation of how we want that console
process or how we we know that it can be most effective and so I think for us I'm what I'm most excited about is continuing to advance that this process works and let's do it consistently over and over and over again and get really good at obviously we're making it specific to the person in front of us but also doing it with with consistency across every practice so I think we advance that in a really really big way and then like I said broke it down to all its operative
part what does the financing conversation look like what does it look like to do this that or the other so that was a huge piece for us over the of the couple days as well as I look forward for the next little bit I would say that I'm more energized than ever about both where we're headed the kinds of conversations were happening to advance the platform but also the new elements that we're bringing to put put a focus on the the like the thing that I want to do is make sure
that every person both doctors and small consultants and POMs are equipped with both the clarity and the tool set to be able to maximize their impact and so I feel like you know a lot of what we did was there from this recording platform we also discussed a CRM platform to really organize the leads that the patients that are coming through our door as an individual but I really feel like we got far in terms of laying out the the clarity and the tool sets that we
believe are most important to be able to maximize the impact and just an incredible time all around to be able to do so yeah and what I'll close with Dave is that I feel like this retreat for me was a microcosm of SPG SPG's growth and development over the past couple of years because we I made the point in one of the segments and all had all blended together but I said at some point over the course of that weekend that we've transitioned from being just founder led and founder managed
to being team led and you know you joining us in in December full-time was a big part of of that momentum shift that happened and and the way that this retreat was planned, executed, pulled off the the litany of people that spoke and shared from from Heather and April and Marty to you know Steve and Aaron and Derek and like it wasn't just me and George and Matt and Matt and Austin up their yammering like it has been in years past like it's it was team led and it was the team that had
an extreme sense of ownership and extreme sense of purpose and I think we we sent our teams back to their practices with so much renewed vigor and clarity and appreciation for what we've built and most importantly for what we're building because I made the point that for me I'm not done until we were a top 10 dso and and I've gotten so many messages with like hashtag top 10 if after the retreat so I was like oh that that resonated that stuck people want to be a part of
something big and game-changing and yeah national and lasting and persistent so I think I think we are I think we will see something different I think we we we just lived through some type of SPG inflection point at this retreat and so I'll be I'll be curious to see how we how we perform and how we continue to coalesce as a team afterward so I just want to say thanks to everyone on the central team on our on our doctor team our small consultant team that made that retreat one for the
ages any final thoughts Dave on that yeah I would just give you the final thoughts and then we'll wrap it up I do think that we'll look at this as a as a turning point in lots of ways in terms of how we are growing as a team and how we're laying the foundation for the ability to become that top 10 dso from an outside perspective I've been in a lot of these different groups before and obviously I'm biased now because this is my team but we have an incredible group of doctors and small
consultants and central team members and you know the the level of engagement with both where we're headed and the things that we're hoping to do and working on is so big and what I love about the approach we took here is that like we're building in the open that transparent clarity that we're bringing you know I'd I'd rather be building things alongside with our team rather than we've been doing this in the background for eight months and here it is you know and so I
think just the level of engagement that I saw was huge and I do think that we'll see this as an inflection point for the long term but yeah lots of incredible work love seeing the RMS and central team engage in a way with their teams that was really impactful so I'm yeah I'm highly energized a little tired from you know time zone but in lack of sleep but highly highly energized and more excited than ever for our mission and our vision where we're headed.
All right well I'm tired of doing these episodes by myself so Dave I think you and I might just have to become a fixture on this podcast together because this was way more fun and way better content because you're on here so thank you for making it happen. Yeah my friend we'll have a good rest of the day and I appreciate it. I appreciate it.