Hello, happy Monday SPG prepared a quick slide show to run through today to give you guys a bit of a fresh perspective on where we are in the month. We're almost at the end of June. We're almost halfway through 2025 as crazy as that is to say. I wanted to offer some thoughts and some encouragement about where we are thus far into the month thus far into the year.
Also, just give some broad ranging updates on where we're going as a company, things that we're learning and hopefully some lessons that you can take to your patient care, your team dynamics, and hopefully continue to maximize your own impact within your practice and within your community.
As a reminder, listen to the SPG podcast. If you haven't downloaded that, go to your favorite podcast app and look for it. Try to release episodes at least once a week, sometimes solo, sometimes with Dave South to Cholie, sometimes with Dr. Guests. It's a who's who.
I try to record those in a way that really just helps you to increase your level of understanding, increase your effectiveness as a person, as a teammate. Download that on your favorite podcast app, be it Apple Podcast, Spotify, Pocketcast, any of those. Stay tuned for those. In SPG, for any of you that have worked in dentistry before or have been at other DSOs, you know that we're different.
Part of the way that we're different is in how we look at recruiting. Obviously, the way that we've evolved our current recruiting apparatus for all of our practice level team members has improved measurably over the last six months over the last year. But the way that we recruit doctors is also very, very unique because in most cases, it starts with a podcast.
For those of you that have been around us for any length of time, you know that SP was the original podcast around which all of the SPG founders sort of circled our wagons, so to speak. And that was all about leveling up dentists understanding of what's possible in their careers. And so we merged everything that we built to that point to form SPG, but the podcasting itch has never gone away. It's only evolved.
And so the way that we serve dentists at large now in addition to our SP efforts comes from Dr. Voorholt on the Full Arch podcast, which then spawned a course where we're teaching future SPG docs as well as doctors that just want to learn more about Full Arch implants.
We bring them together and we teach them about our SPG way of approaching these cases and executing these cases predictably to level up what these doctors are capable of and also obviously have the ripple effect of enhanced patient care across the country. So here's Dr. Miller getting mobbed by his adoring fans. Get your autographs now before they get too expensive. And then here's me and Dr. Voorholt lecturing. I'm just drinking coffee, but Voorholt's doing the real work up there.
And this was a three day course that went without a hitch in Texas. And the reason I share this is because this is just one of about 15 or 20 ways that SPG is just completely 180 degrees different from any other company that you're going to find.
We instead of saying, hey, go do the surgery yourself. We 3D printed a bunch of jaws with periodontal involved teeth, took the teeth out, leveled the bone, simulated the pilot drill, put the implants in, understood some of the patients, attached the multi unit abutments to the angled implants, made some temporary prosthetics from a 3D printer. I mean, we did the whole entire procedure from planning to surgery to loading the temps in a setting like this in the classroom.
It was incredible. And my thought process behind this was if we're going to be a different DSO, we're going to be a different company. We have to start from the basic fundamentals and do those differently too. And so Dr. Recruitment, Dr. Training is just one example. And this level of depth is something that I want to start building with all members of our teams, with all seats on the bus.
Because the more that we can identify what the basic needs are for everyone to be able to perform at their best, the more that we can tailor the recruiting on boarding and training the right way. And then that results in the output of really strong successful practices with top to your patient care. That's what it's all about. So we're getting better about understanding and controlling for those inputs that yield those outputs that we all want.
It starts with these core values, right? So everything that we do needs to relate back to these. We recently changed the order of these where we start with what we control about ourselves, the first three, attitude of gratitude, constant improvement, and sense of ownership. You get that foundation as an individual because you only you control how much you adhere to those three.
If you control for those, then you're in a position to be a great teammate by serving your team first and communicating with one another with compassionate clarity. Lay it out, but do so in a not on purpose mean angle to it, right? You want to be clear yet compassionate and delivering feedback and working together. And you do those first five, then you're in a position to create raving fans.
And as we'll talk about today, creating raving fans is what it's all about because in dentistry, anybody can do a filling, anybody can do a crown, anybody can do a root canal. But did the patient receive a level of care that was above and beyond what they expected? Did we over deliver in dentistry? You've all heard me say it's famously straightforward to over deliver. I'm not going to say it's easy, but it's it's fairly straightforward to do it.
And it's just because people come in with such a low bar for what dentistry is. It's expensive. It's painful. It's inconvenient. They're going to shoehorn me into a treatment that I don't really want or I don't really understand. So if we over deliver slightly on each of those elements, then we stand to create a raving fan. They tell other people about us.
They leave five star Google reviews. They put a lot of good energy into the community and then the flywheel spins and we get more successful every single time we create a raving fan experience for someone. So that's why that's the apex of our pyramid in terms of our core values. Everything builds towards us being aligned on that eventuality as being our measure of success. And that's true whether you're a member of the SPG central team or whether you're a member of one of our SPG practice teams.
So two of the main cultures or subcultures you could say at SPG are the central team and all of our practice teams. Now the central team has its own culture and by way of reminder, a culture is not a shared set of beliefs. A culture is an alignment and a commitment to a shared set of actions. So when faced with similar situations will Spokane dentures and implants react the same as Sarasota dentures and implants.
In theory, yes, but at the same time each practice has its own subculture that is aligned with and derived from this knowing that when curveballs happen, when things come across our plates that are not necessarily straightforward or challenging, then you have to react in accordance with the core values and everyone has their own individual artistic interpretation of what that looks like.
But at the end of the day, what we want to do is to put ourselves in a position to be able to create more of these. For those of you that were at our recent SPG central retreat, you got to hear from Lenny and his daughter, Sherylie.
Lenny was treated at Orlando dentures and implants and he is the pinnacle of what it means to be an SPG raving fan because he came in with very low expectations, a whole lot of trust issues, dental anxiety of the works because a lot of our patients are in the positions that they're in to need our type of dental care because they've deferred treatment, because they've been afraid, they've been mistreated in the past, they had preconceived notions about dentistry that weren't necessarily true,
that we have to patiently and methodically disambiguate for them. We have to meet them where they are and understand that it's going to be a step-by-step process to educate them, earn their trust, get them over the finish line to be in a position mentally to be able to receive the care that we're able to provide. And Lenny did an amazing job with that. In the coming months, we'll have more photos and video snippets and experiences of what that was like.
But what's cool about SPG is that each practice has the gift, has the ability to be able to create their own linnies. Like, linnies happen every single month. There was a point that I believe Danielle made in the RM chat recently about how we want to create linnies everywhere we go. There were some little tag lines, some hashtag that she came up with that was really no lenny left behind is what it was, no lenny left behind.
And I think that's pretty clever because these people come to us because they haven't had this type of transformational care. This is what we do. And so let's stare that in the face and let's take that opportunity to create more raving fans, create more linnies. And here's an example. So this is from Dr. Brady up in Brandywine. This patient came in and this patient felt like he was on an island.
He felt like he was never going to get the treatment that he needed. And in the initial couple of steps that he experienced at Brandywine, that notion was reinforced. And it was just the way things go sometimes. But Dr. Brady and his team got this patient over the finish line. And here's the summary from Dr. Brady. This was in one of our Dr. Discord chats. There's a lot of gold in those Dr. Discord chats.
But this was yesterday's case, Dr. Brady's words. This patient had previously failed IV sedation back in January due to severe dental anxiety and the history of drug use. Despite our anesthesiologist's best efforts, we couldn't achieve adequate sedation without intubation. He burned through the propofol, became combative, and even pulled out his IV mid procedure.
When he woke up and realized we couldn't move forward, he was devastated. So that experience reinforced his preconceived ideas. Like, oh my gosh, I'm too far gone. This is not for me. It's hopeless. Luckily for us, fate intervened. So continuing with Dr. Brady's account. At the time, our office wasn't set up for general anesthesia, but we didn't give up on it.
We worked closely with our anesthesia partners to get GA protocols in place so we could still help him. During that period, he truly believed his treatment just wasn't meant for him. He even asked for a refund. Thankfully, we were able to keep him engaged, rebuild trust, and salvage the case. So as I'm reading through this,
I'm thinking about all the different times where Dr. Brady could have given up. The patient could have given up, but through our efforts to retain the patient's trust to remain in contact with him, to not let him give up on himself or on us. We had to go the extra mile to keep this patient from just throwing up his hands and saying, you know what? I'm done. We're not doing this. But we persisted.
Yesterday, everything paid off. Everything went smoothly under GA, and the patient left with so much gratitude. He shared today that this is the exact reason why he didn't end up going to the big center of like Clear Choice or Nubia. None of them made him feel as genuinely cared for and supported as we did. He specifically praised our consistent follow-up, empathy, and the personal attention from our entire team.
We created not just a new smile, but a lifelong raving fan. It doesn't get any better than that. Like, I've done a lot of dentistry in my life, and I've done, you know, veneer cases, full mouth rehab cases with crowns, TMJ stuff, ortho, everything. There's no way to replicate this type of service, this type of impact through really any other means and dentistry aside from doing full-large implant care, period, full stop.
This is a gift. The patient received a gift. The team at Brandywine received a gift. I received a gift by getting to experience this, you know, second hand through Dr. Brady's narration of it. It's just astounding what we're able to do, and each of us in our practices has the ability to replicate this for our patients every single day.
The way that we continue to level up our ability to have an impact is by understanding what John Maxwell and his book, the 21 Laws of Leadership, he called it the Law of the Lit. This is the first law of leadership in that book. And the idea is that our ability to lead our teams is the ceiling. It is the governor. It is the bottleneck. It is the limiter on our effectiveness in terms of how we perform the measurables, the output. And so leadership is the lid, or lack thereof, is the lid.
I like this because I think that every single person at SPG is a leader. We're all leading either ourselves, our teammates, and or our patients, some combination of the three. And so the better we are at leading, the better we are at serving those whom we're tasked with leading, the more effective we are. And for me, if I'm thinking about at the practice level, how can we level up our leadership? It comes down to advocating for that patient to have that type of outcome
that we just described so viscerally from Brandy want. Because these people have all of these reasons to not want to move forward. They have every reason in the world that it's inconvenient, it's expensive, it's going to be laborious, it's going to be painful, it's going to be fill in the blank. But what they don't see is all of the repetitions that we've seen of people having their lives transformed. And so part of leadership is service. Part of service is advocacy.
So advocating for the care that we know is going to transform our patients' lives. So our leadership ability in aggregate together, as well as individually, is going to determine the impact that we have on our roles at SPG and on our patients' lives. Another way of looking at this, and I've told this to some of our doctors and doctors that I've mentored recently, is that in some sense, and this is rough, but in some sense, the doctor performance
determines kind of like the floor performance of the practice. But what takes a practice to the next level is the doctor plus the team. It's all of the people roving in the same direction in concert. And a doctor trying to muscle things over the finish line can only go so far versus a doctor with a team that's just as adept, just as capable, just as motivated. That's where you get into one plus one equals three territory. And we see examples of that across the company.
And that's going to be the culmination of a lot of the efforts that I'm leading on the doctor development side is how do we continue to develop a team? We continue to develop our doctors as leaders and as communicators so that they can then lead our teams most effectively. So that's something that we're going to continue to pour into our doctors in service of. So our identity at SPG, we get clear on what it is every day.
But what we know is that success at SPG comes down to three legs of the stool. I'll solve it in our market and marketing are our operations and our ability to fulfill on the care that we provide. So market operations and then production. Those are the three legs of the stool. And I think if each of us didn't audit and we wrote down which of these three legs of the stool do I impact the most? Sometimes it's one depending on your role. Sometimes it's all three depending on your role.
But understanding how every action that we take, hand and should relate to one or more of the legs of the stool. And so every day as a company, we get a lot closer to being very targeted with all of our actions and all the things that we focus on to where if it doesn't support one of those three legs of the stool, do we need to do it? To make sure that the word gets out. People know our name. People can find us.
Marketing. So where we can set ourselves up for success and help the patients to say yes and that the practice runs well, operations. Then the third leg of the stool is fulfilling on the high quality clinical care. So like those are the three legs of the stool. Worth talking about with your team's worth pontificating on and morning huddle. Three legs of the stool I think are really clarifying for me to make sure that we're allocating resources and that we're focusing on the right things.
In that same breath, I want to share some of the actions that we're taking on the SPG central team to integrate a lot of the feedback that we've received. Because I like to say that feedback is our lifeblood. I want feedback to become even more of our lifeblood because the ground level truth at our practices needs to be dictating more of what we do centrally.
And so here's some examples of things that we've learned through feedback and that we're coming up with solutions based upon going forward. So there's a strong desire for internal mobility at our practices. And that's something that as a young company, we're going to continue to find more ways to allow for that for those that want to do more and be more and grow within SPG.
We're going to constantly be looking at ways to harness that and leverage that communication communication, no matter how good it is, it could always improve. I could do one of these every single day and I could still be doing more and serving better in that regard. So communication is definitely a blue sky opportunity.
So we set up the second office emails, the announcements chat. We're doing more calls on the PMSC side as well as Monday boards to track things, training by position, process improvements like expense reimbursement, tracking on Monday boards, performance management. Big one, right? This is an example of something that as a company, as we've transitioned from survival mode early in our journey to now being at the point where we're starting to perform well and we're starting to thrive.
We're seeing that there's a lot more opportunity than we realized to just continue pouring into our individual roles and thriving in that regard. So DA, DA Growth Path is one example as well as a lot of our efforts to support our new hires with the 30, 60, 90 reviews. That's also big. Finally, I want to make sure that we recognize the Virginia Beach team. So Virginia Beach opened up today, June 23rd.
The last update I got was that three of the first five patients on the schedule that showed, they're humming along. So you reach out to your teammates in Virginia Beach if you think about it and then offer them. Congratulations. Secondary to my point about feedback, we have a poll survey that is due in three days. So we are listening to every shred of feedback that we get.
Can we act on every shred of feedback that we get right now? No, but we're going to be looking at patterns. We're going to be looking at trends. And we're going to be coming up with next actions based upon those trends. Also, Avora, that's still, we're in the onboarding phases with that. That's our new software that allows us to train and constantly improve on how we handle consultations. Office level guidelines are going to be sent out on that if you haven't yet heard.
So I just wanted to record this today, just to pass along some updates and offer some encouragement because June has been our best month ever so far. And I think it's due to a lot of factors. It's due to by and large continuing to get the right people on the bus as a company. It's the people that have been on the bus for a long time getting clearer and clearer on how they contribute the most.
And really, it's just seeing the power of what we do because I get to go to Little Rock every week because we were using Little Rock. We're using Dixie and Stephanie and the Little Rock team to train our newest smile consultants. They fly in. We train them before they go to their home base. And what strikes me is it's just repetition of seeing lives transformed that really puts people in a position to thrive.
You see it, you believe it, you speak with a lot more conviction when patients come through the door because we know in our bones that we are in the best position to help that person, more so than they could ever receive help in some of our competitors because we customize it to what they need. We speak in their language. We try to lower that threshold, lower the activation energy to get over the hump for people to say yes.
So, we're a much stronger company than we've ever been before being here in June 2025. So, thank you for an amazing month. Thank you for all that you do for your teams and for your patients. And I want to continue to be more frequent with these types of updates. So, if you think of topics that you want to hear more about or things that you want me to cover that you'd be curious about, shoot me an email,
Alex at sharedpractices.com. And hope everyone has an amazing rest of June. Thank you for an amazing month. And we're just getting started. See ya. Bye.