Welcome back to the Shared Practices Group podcast. I'm your host, Alex Sharpe, and this is the first episode of April. So welcome to April. We just finished Q1, and an SPGQ1 was amazing. We achieved a whole lot as a company, as a collective, as a network of 36th-century and implant practices, but I think it's oftentimes easy to celebrate those macro-zoomed-out overall wins and to sometimes not properly celebrate the individual day-to-day wins.
What I mean by that is a lot of times we think about what we achieve in the aggregate when you look at the overall performance of the company, but we hear these glimmers. We see these indications of the amazing work that we do on a practice-by-practice level.
And that's one of my favorite things to do is to visit our locations, visit our teams, connect with our doctors, our small consultants, our operations managers, our dental assistants, our lab techs, and learn exactly what makes them tick, because each team is poised to offer something a little different to the patients that walk through their doors. And no better example of that exists in my mind than the example that we learned about last week from Peach Tree Dinters and Implant.
There was a gentleman that came in with his wife, and his wife was in the middle of care when she passed away. And obviously, this gentleman who'd been married to his wife for decades and decades was completely just inconsolable. He'd lost his best friend. He'd lost his life partner. Our team, instead of just doing the garden variety, so sorry for your loss, they truly took that as an opportunity to create a raving fan out of this gentleman.
He took it upon himself to start his own journey to getting a new smile and to reclaiming his ability to chew and function the way he wanted to. And the team at Peach Tree personalized that experience to a degree that I just haven't seen before. On this gentleman's birthday, he had expressed that he was scared about having his first birthday in so many years without his wife. And so the Peach Tree team gave him a birthday party. They had a cake and candles and sang him happy birthday.
And then he left just this glowing Google review about how he felt like the Peach Tree team wasn't just the place where he was getting dental care. It was the place where he found family in a time when he needed it most. And to me, that's what we have the power to do at SPG. We are not the type of dental company that sees 150 new patients a month.
We're the type of dental company that is able to slow down, look people in the eye and offer truly customized personalized care plans that are delivered in a way that is unique to that person. Because not everyone comes in with the same problems or the same goals or even the same expectations. And that's why we can't do our job without first pushing the pause button and understanding truly what is motivating this person that's sitting in front of me. What itch am I helping to scratch?
And it starts by realizing that they're not just coming in for teeth. They're not just coming to see us because they want implant retained prosthetics. They're coming in to see us because they want what the implant retained prosthetics, the new teeth all on for the snap indenture. They want what that unlocks. They want the new job. They want the new relationship. They want the ability to go out and eat steak and commune with their friends.
They want to either recapture what's been lost or they want to finally unlock what they see other people experiencing and enjoying about having what they perceive to be a full set of teeth. And so I think this is a great opportunity with us entering a new quarter. We're entering the second quarter of the year, Q1 in March and February and January. All of those months were incredible for different reasons.
But in April, May and June, I really think it would be good for each of us to think about what does plus one look like and for some backstory. When we're thinking about creating raving fans, when we're thinking about giving that next level of service for folks, it's not about meeting their expectations. Everyone has kind of basement level expectations of dentistry. And obviously people come to us. They want it to not hurt that badly. They want it to be fairly prized.
They want it to be convenient within the realm of possibility. But really the creativity for us comes with how that experience goes. What are the creative artistic flourishes that we're able to layer into that experience for that patient to make it feel like it's customized to them? And obviously we're not going to have the opportunity to hit it out of the park like the peach tree team did with their patient. That's not going to be every single time nor should it be.
But I do think that it's important to think through what does over delivering plus one look like. If that's paying attention to what the patient says about their favorite food, maybe that's getting them a $25 gift card at the end of treatment to outback Steakhouse if they want, if they talked about being excited about eating steaks. I mean, the examples are endless.
And with the high degree of leverage that we have in the procedures that we offer, we just have that ability to give people that plus one service because we're not just doing feelings, we're not just doing boring, rudimentary dentistry that so often is what people expect out of us. We're doing something that really does take someone from where they start to where they end up and very seldom are they the same person at the end of that journey.
And so think about how we have that power to make that experience not just a good one, but a great one or at best an exceptional one. And so think about how you can be creative and how you approach those opportunities with your patients. Understand that we can change someone's view of dentistry just by making it, making that experience more attuned to what they're looking for.
And think about how plus one service can be part and parcel of what you commit to for the coming quarter because I think that that's how we differentiate ourselves. People more and more view dentistry as a commodity. I was thinking earlier about how used to, and this was even true when I got out of dental school, but there was an information asymmetry. And what I mean by that is people were not that informed when they came to the dentist.
They didn't come in having preconceived ideas or having done a ton of internet research about what their options were. They treated the dentist as the purveyor of those options. And obviously that wasn't universally a great thing. I think it's ultimately, we can't really say if it's good or bad that people come in more informed. I think there's pros and cons, but the game on the field as it is in 2025 is that people come in having done a bunch of internet research before they come to see us.
And so rather than saying, Oh, it's easier when we could just tell people what our best recommendation was and they would go with it. That's not the reality anymore. So what do we do? We can say, all right, well, the good news is that people come in having a little more dental vocabulary. They have a better framework of understanding about what the options are. And so then it's up to us just to differentiate ourselves.
And we don't do that by talking about what we do that's the same as what everyone else does. We do that by celebrating our differences and planting that flag and saying, this is how we are different. And at SPG, a straightforward, honest, authentic way of doing that is to say we customize our care for exactly what our patients need.
We're able to layer in all on fours over dentures, traditional dentures as needed, as dictated by the patient's goals and the patient's anatomy in the patient's situation. And we're able to make it right for that patient based upon what they're looking to get out of this procedure.
And in addition to what we do, how we do it is what we can be committed to doing differently than anyone else to make sure that the experience is as smooth as possible and that we're exceeding expectations at every step along the way. So think about what makes us different. And to me, what makes us different is our commitment to individualizing the care and to doing so in a way that respects the patient's goals and helps put us in a position to over deliver. So hope that helps.
Be looking for more content on exactly how we can make it more systematic to deliver that plus one service to our patients each and every time. But enjoy the rest of your week. Hope everyone has a wonderful April. Talk to you again soon. Hey, I wanted to catch you before the podcast was over. It's Dr. Stephen Voorholt here from the Full Arch podcast. Shared practices podcast on all things full arch implantology.
And if you've ever considered yourself considering or thinking or getting interested in full arch implants and what that looks like, please join us in Dallas, Texas May 29th through the 31st. We have two courses run concurrently. Intro to all the next one is for those of us who have never done an arch or maybe we've done a smattering of arches and we just kind of want to learn the basics again and have a really good foundation.
Intro to all the next two, which is May 30th to 31st is going to be all things digital. So how do we go with the 3D printers, the scanners, the photogrammetry, all of that stuff and kind of boil it down to the bare bones and what you need to know. So come learn all the nuance, all the basics, all the fundamentals from a great group of doctors. It'll be staffed fully from shared practices group, our DSO that does full arch implants. We really look forward to seeing you in Texas in late May.