Welcome to another episode of the SPG podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Alex Sharpe. And I wanted to do an episode today, chronicling some of the takeaways that I've had over the last week or so. I live here in Arkansas and I had the pleasure and the privilege of doing a mini SPG road trip within Arkansas. I visited the team at Springdale Ditchers and Implants last week. And then the day afterwards, I visited the team at Little Rock Dintrass and Implants.
And I wanted to share some of the things that I learned from those visits. In my role at the company, one of my favorite things is that I get to periscope up and out to see the wide ranging landscape of dentistry to understand what's going on in our chosen domain. But I also get to go practice by practice and learn what works specifically for each team.
So that shifting in frame, that shifting in focal distance, I guess you could say, is one of the best parts about my job because I can look and see what's happening in the broader landscape and take that to our teams. And then by the same token, I can learn from each individual team and see what might help us that one team may be doing or innovating or learning and then extrapolate that out to everyone.
So what unites us all together though, that SPG, is that we want to maximize our impact as individuals, as team members. And luckily, we have an ability to do that that's unparalleled in the industry because we're able to predicate our entire offering to all of our patients on high impact surgery, on transformational dentistry, the type of which is rarely done at scale across the country.
So obviously by doing fixed arches, by doing implant retained dental solutions, we're able to make a more measurable impact per patient than most of us ever could for those of us that were in the GP realm once upon a time. And so the full arch options open up a lot of possibilities for our patients and the possibilities that exist for us at our practice level though, comes down to how we want to offer those solutions.
What we do is democratize the fixed arch to as many patients as possible, thereby maximizing our individual impacts and the impact that we have as a team. But how we do it comes down to having some creative license using our core values. And I wanted to spotlight specifically some of those differences, yet parallel paths that I saw meeting with the Springdale team last Thursday and then meeting with the Little Rock team last Friday because they're both going to the same place.
They're doing very similar things at the end of the day. When you see the type of care that they provide, but the how is definitely informed by the uniqueness of the personalities within those practices. And we're getting better and better at seeing that there's a lot of flexibility in how the treatment gets rendered, how things are spoken about to the patients, how the team functions. And so the theme is similar, but there's variations on that theme, which we'll get into today.
So let's start with Springdale. So Springdale, we had a focus day, Cassie flew in and we were able to take some time away from the office in a conference room near the office. And we actually just sat down and we zoomed out and we said, okay, what's going well? What are we here to do? What can we celebrate? And then what do we want to commit to going forward based upon what's been going well and what do we need to continue refining to get us where we want to go?
We looked at past performance, we celebrated a really strong march that the team at Springdale engineered and experienced. And then we thought about what can we take from those lessons that we learned in March and then even in the months that maybe we're a little more challenging prior to March and carry forward going into April and beyond. Because in our model, in the Dintran implant model, if we're not careful, we can experience some really noticeable ups and downs in performance.
The number of cases that we close relative to the number of cases that we perform in a given month, it's tough to equilibrate those to where we're doing roughly the same in terms of the number of starts that we have. And then the number of cases that we're then fulfilling on the production side, on the back end.
And so we talked about those themes and hearing from the team, it was really interesting to hear their perspectives because we had some movement, some new roles, some role shifting, some new faces. And so I tried to get down to the bare fundamentals of why we're here, what we're seeking to do, what are the things that each person needs to bring to the table every day? And it was really great to get to give Dr. Leke and Springdale a platform to talk to his team and celebrate what they do so well.
But then at the same time, state what his goals are for his practice going forward, what success looks like for him. And then that gave the team a fresh pair of eyes to view each patient opportunity so that they understand how every patient relates to everyday's performance, which relates to every month's performance, which then gets stitched together into the whole aggregate of each year's performance.
And so it was really cool to see the light bulbs going off for everyone and for the team to understand. Here's where the smile consultant role fits in with the practice operations manager role. And then here's how the new DA that we're hiring is gonna play into what our current DA team is doing. And here's how the lab tech fits in. So shout out to Dr. Leke, Andrea, Andy, Yahira, and Kernan to do such a great job every day in their practice.
Let's move to Little Rock Dintrids and Implants on Friday. That was a little bit of a different experience because Dr. Aaron Miller, our Director of Clinical Development, flew in to handle a revision case. So patient had had an all on for, one of the posterior implants, the bone wasn't very good. So the implant was ailing and about to start failing back there. And so he came in to support Dr. Hargis in placing some teragoid implants.
So it was a win-win because Dr. Hargis got some experience doing teragoids. We also had a patient that left a raving fan because we're able to make a great situation out of one where the patient was dealing with some implants that weren't doing so well. And so that was a great experience to show that, hey, even when the patient's anatomy doesn't cooperate, even when things don't go perfectly according to plan, where there's a will, there's a way.
And we're able to generate a really great outcome for that patient, even though we had to get a little creative. And the team was there on Friday, Dixie, the small consultant, Stephanie, Operations Manager, the dental assistant team, Abby and Beverly were there, Mike, the lab tech was there. So it was really amazing to see them rallying together on a Friday to make this happen for this patient.
Because ultimately what we're here to do, how we maximize our impact comes down to our ability to make those raving fans out of our patients. And sometimes to give that raving fan experience to deliver plus one, it requires coming in on a Friday. It requires doing the extra procedure to make sure that we have enough grab in the jawbone to make sure that we have enough torque. It means going the extra mile. And that's what I saw our teams doing this past week.
So just a quick reminder, always be thinking about what can we do plus one? What are the patient's expectations of us? And then how can we over-deliver on those plus one? I say, till I'm blue in the face, that in dentistry people's expectations are very, very low. They're, I guess you could say that they're hardened to what the typical dental experience is, but at SPG we're anything but typical. We don't wanna be offering the same type of experience that makes us a commodity.
How we differentiate ourselves in the marketplace, how we compete with other dental offices and other companies comes down to plain and simple, how we treat our patients. So the goal at SPG is to create raving fans of as many patients as possible. And we do that by delivering consistently plus one care where they get what they expect to get. And then they also get the extra, the personal touch, the experience of being served by an SPG team, which is not what they'll receive anywhere else.
So whenever you're dealing with patients that expect you to be a commodity or they view dentistry as a commodity, it's a service-based industry. Everything that a patient receives at a dental office is a service. So how do we redefine those expectations? We show them what real service looks like. And I'm proud to say that with those teams that I met with this past week, I saw that service front and center and the commitment to creating raving fans.
Next up, I'll be visiting Dr. Severs and his team in Greenville, South Carolina here in a couple of weeks. So I can't wait to report back on that. But as always, listeners to the SPG pod shoot over any ideas that you have on topics that you feel like would be beneficial to learn about, anything that you're interested in, anything that you want me to spend extra time covering. I'm happy to do so on these episodes.
I try to make them short and actionable and impactful to get us all calibrated across the country. But thank you all for your efforts. Thank you for all that you do for our patients and your teammates every single day. And I hope everyone has a good rest of the week. Thank you. 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. 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.