Hello and welcome back to another episode of the SPG podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Alex Sharpe. And I wanted to connect with all of you today to share some of the wins that we've experienced in April thus far. April has been a month that has been proof positive of the notion that what gets our attention actually sees a lot of improvement. Because at the end of the day, each of us has only a finite amount of bandwidth mentally every single day.
And it's really easy to go a mile wide and an inch deep if we're not careful. But I think as we go, we realize that if we truly want to maximize our impact individually and as a team, getting clear on how we can use that mental bandwidth every day to the benefit of those around us to maximize both our individual and collective impact, we're able to be much more narrowly focused and therefore have a greater depth of achievement. What do I mean by that?
I mean that at the beginning of this year, we rolled out a bunch of key performance indicators or wide that we wanted to focus on both as a group, as a company and also at each individual practice level. And we've made it our maniacal focus to see those KPIs improve because we find that if we measure the right things, the right behaviors and soo and success tends to take care of itself. You could think of it as lead measures versus lag measures.
You could think of it as making sure that we're focusing on the things that we can influence each day rather than looking in the rear view mirror and saying, okay, well, the scoreboard looks this way for last week's performance. We'll do better next time. We want to find things to focus on that can actually influence current and future success. And I feel like we've done that.
So, we're focusing on the new patient maximization, focusing on controllables at the practice level to the tune of can we influence our no show rate? Can we reduce that no show rate? Can we increase the number of people who have bookings that actually show up for those bookings? Because that's upstream of everything else that we do. All of our other efforts at the practice level are predicated on can people show up for their appointments at a higher and higher rate?
So, by focusing on the no show rate and making that as small as possible, then we're able to focus on everything else operationally that's required to succeed. So last week, I went to Greenville on our SPG focus day with Merit, one of our RMs. And also I got to meet with the team there in Greenville, Dr. Chris Severs, Alicia, and their whole crew.
And it was amazing because quickly I figured out that this team was one of the best top to bottom in the whole company that I've had the pleasure of meeting with. There was not a weak link in the butt, which was amazing because usually when I meet with teams, there's at least one spot on the team where I say, hey, let's put our focus here. I feel like this person could use some more development or this role could use some reevaluation.
In this situation, meeting with the Greenville team, I realized that they were operating already at a very high level. They were operating at, I would call, a very good level. So we had a fun conversation because we were able to track out, okay, what does that path from good to great look like? What are our goals? What constitutes a successful week, a successful month? And then let's reverse engineer what all needs to happen upstream of that to make sure that type of performance is inevitable.
And I really enjoyed the time in Greenville. I hate that it was only one half day meeting. But as always, I learned a lot from working with that team. And one of my big takeaways was just how interconnected we've all become as a company. One of my favorite quotes is that a company's performance is not necessarily commensurate with the plan that you lay out, but rather with the team that you build.
The team that you create, the team that you go to war with, the team that you deploy to be able to fulfill the mission and the purpose that you set out to achieve, the team is what sets your ceiling, not necessarily how well thought out your plan is. So think about that for a second. The plan can change. The actual tactics that you follow on a week or a given month can evolve with whatever happens to change in the marketplace.
I mean, tariffs and macroeconomy, all of that's top of mind right now. But those elements of the game just create maybe a little sidestep or maybe a slight tweak to strategy. But if your team has dialed in, then you can handle any of those curveballs that life throws at you.
And the Greenville team by themselves reminded me of that, but also the fact that every single member of the Greenville team was able to articulate what the SPG central team does alongside them for them, how there's an ecosystem that we've created at SPG where you don't have success in a vacuum. You don't only have success because of what's done in the four walls of the practice. So much of what happens at the practice level, obviously, is rendered by the hands of the people in that practice.
But there's so much back end support, training, calibration, goings on that can really go under appreciated at the practice level if we don't make ourselves known. So as the SPG central team, we then met on Friday to have our monthly central team all hands meeting. And in that meeting, it was apparent to me more so than ever just how invested our SPG central team is in empowering those at the practices to create the outcomes that only they can.
One of the things that I always start with early on in the presentation each month is I share before and after photos from our patients across our company. And I try to get a different cross section of before and afters every single month so that we don't have the same doctors and teams getting bragged on every time. Sometimes that happens because some of these cases are just too good not to share. I had one submitted by Dr. Renee in Boise and it's it knocked everyone's socks off.
It took everyone's breath away. Even the dentists in the room, we get so desensitized to the transformations that we're able to to assist people with that a lot of times we see like, okay, there's another whatever a dintulous person that gets new teeth or there's another person who is a who's recovering from addiction and they had bombed out teeth and wonderful.
We we helped them and it gets to be where we see the different avatars, the different common trope throughout the treatments that we offer. But there was a lady that Renee helped that just was in such dire straits with extreme periodontal disease and just the two photos weren't just worth a thousand words. They were worth millions of words that you could just stare at those photos for for hours and just just marvel at at the outcome that Renee and her team were able to provide for this lady.
And it's so critical for our central team to be able to stare in the face of this is why we do what we do. Every single person in our company has a role to either directly engineer that outcome or indirectly support that outcome. And that's what unites us all along that common purpose of democratizing the fixed arch. It never gets old. It's it's the type of care that is customized to the specific goals and needs of each patient.
And frankly, we're just honored to be able to do this every single day. And so thanks to Dr. Renee for for sharing that case. If you if you're listening to this and you haven't seen that before and after yet, shoot me an email and I'll be sure to include it. I think I think Dave shout shouted this case out on a recent smile consultant operations manager call the same day that I shared it on the central team call.
But again, this is why we do what we do is to help those who I would claim are pretty darn dintally disenfranchised. What I mean by that is patients that either have been marginalized in dentistry because of the price tag of dentistry. Sometimes it's the geographic access to dentistry. Sometimes they are dintally disenfranchised because of a lack of knowledge of their prior providers.
Or maybe they had they had they had an ailing dentition due to periodontal disease or due to rampant recurrent decay. And maybe the dentist that they were working with didn't have the vocabulary or the way of assessing their needs to be able to articulate that, Hey, you'd be a great candidate for full arts fixed. You wouldn't have to be repairing all of this ailing dental work year after year after year.
And you'd be able to save time and money and get a much more stable outcome by pursuing a better, more holistic treatment option. And so when these people come to us, a common refrain that we hear is, Oh my gosh, I didn't know this was an option. Or I'm so glad that my friend who came to see you told me about you. Or I'm so glad that I went down the Google YouTube rabbit hole last week and I found you.
Or I'm so glad that I was scrolling the the the channels channel surfing and I saw your doctor on wellness hour. So we we find people in varying degrees of of need of dental helplessness. And we we fill a very strong void in the market that that otherwise these people wouldn't get taken care of. So thank you all for what you do.
I wanted to keep this around 10 minutes today just to give you a little morsel of of what I noticed the past week, trying to connect some of the dots between what we do at the practice level and how we centrally, whether we're in finance or we're in marketing or we're in HR, we all see the unification of our efforts to be able to empower the clinicians and the professionals at the practice level to be able to serve our patients because at the end of the day, that's what it's all about.
Every single bit of success that we have is tied to two hands or four hands doing their thing at the practice level. And that's what makes the world go around. So thank you all for listening. I hope you've had an amazing month in April. Let's continue our momentum into May and let's make May our best month ever. Thank you all. Hey, I wanted to catch you before the podcast was over. It's Dr. Steven 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. All of 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.
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