Episode #479: How Your Team Can Help Your Practice Be Financially Successful, with Jenni Poulos

You can't do great dentistry without talking about numbers. And to do that, you need to first understand them yourself. Once you know the metrics that matter, you can help your team be aligned with the goals for your practice. And today, Kirk Behrendt brings back Jenni Poulos, one of ACT’s amazing coaches, to help you navigate the difficult conversations around money and numbers with your team. Conversation leads to collaboration! To learn how to get started, listen to Episode 479 of The Best Practices Show!

Episode Resources:

•  Jenni’s email: [email protected] 
• Jenni’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jenni.poulos 
•  Jenni’s social media: @actdental
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Main Takeaways:

• It is okay to be profitable.
• Make conversations collaborative.
• Get your team to weigh in so you get buy-in.
• Educate yourself before educating your team.
• Be comfortable talking about money and numbers.

Quotes:

• “Bottom line, you do run a business. And your business needs to be healthy, and it needs to be smart.” (3:05—3:14)
• “Sometimes, we get stuck when we have to talk about those other smart pieces, those things that are around money, because we think, ‘Gosh, they won't care,’ or, ‘They won't understand,’ or, ‘They won't be bought in.’ And I'll tell you, the team is telling themselves their own story about the finances of the practice. So, let's help fill in that story with some true pieces. Help them understand some key concepts around money and around finances that are going to help support the business.” (3:32—4:03)
• “People don't think holistically about how many people are actually supported by your practice. We look at who comes into the practice every day, the five, six, seven, 10, 20, 30 people, and we think, ‘Okay, I'm offering some level of support to just those people.’ But then, we look at who’s behind those people. There are dads, and moms, and kids. There are whole families that are reliant upon what's happening in that practice every day.” (4:31—5:09)
• “When we open our eyes a little bit and think about who are all the people that are connected to this practice, we realize we get to actually do a lot more for a lot more people than we realized. And the team members see that too. They begin to feel like, ‘Oh my gosh, I'm not just supporting me and my family. I'm also helping to support the hygienist, and her kids, and their family, and their dreams, and their goals.’” (5:10—5:40)
• “It’s okay to be profitable. Your profit is to your practice what oxygen is to your body. Without it, both die. And so, we’ve got to have a reasonable amount of profit.” (6:56—7:07) -Kirk
• “Profit lends itself to margin — emotional margin, time margin, profitability so you can make decisions financially. It can help you slow down and enjoy people. It can help you commit to more quality. So, it’s okay to be profitable.” (7:07—7:28) -Kirk
• “We need to educate our teams on where our goals come from, why we have certain agreements, policies, and systems around collections, why we don't want to be a bank to our patients, why we can't just say, ‘Yes, I would love for everyone in this office to make $100 an hour.’” (7:36—7:58)
• “Before you have targets, financially, you've got to have data. This becomes the foundational piece where most people go wrong.” (9:54—10:02) -Kirk
• “Not given appropriate information, we make up our own story. Like, I could be a team member, I feel like I'm working super hard here, but we don't really talk about any data. So, I'm going to make up my story about the boat that the doctor just bought, and they're going on a lot of vacations, and all those things. And so, now, the story runs rampant.” (10:05—10:25) -Kirk
• “The best thing that you can do to get your team to help you, number one, is have great core values around being healthy and smart.” (10:25—10:34) -Kirk
• “Having understanding around our numbers, good data, gives us a snapshot of the opportunities for growth. And when it comes to our teams and their role, it also gives us an opportunity to educate them around what the number is, where the number comes from, why it’s important, and actions that we need to take to get that number healthy.” (13:05—13:28)
• “When we think just about collections, you said team members say like, ‘We’re collecting 85%. That's awesome!’ They just see this big number, but they may not understand like, okay, we’re collecting. Yes, we’re collecting 85%. And it’s taking us how many days to collect that? Or, it takes us how many days to collect that other percentage? As a business owner, you're responsible for educating your team around these items. Well, one of the things that is really important that we can learn about is the decreasing value of the dollar.” (13:28—14:08)
• “Team members don't really think about, ‘Hey, when I miss that collection on the date of service, what are all of the expenses that are going into now collecting that money once the patient has walked out the door? What does it cost for me to send a statement?’ There's the actual cost of the paper. There's the cost of maybe the third-party company that’s sending those statements. There are the stamps. What is your time, team member, worth when you have to make four, five, six, seven follow-up calls, follow-up texts, follow-up emails to get that money? And then, we begin to have this light bulb moment where we understand, ‘Hey, that $10 that I would’ve collected that was worth $10 on day one, when I collect it 30 days later, is worth $6, $5, because I've had to put in all of this effort, all of this work. I've had to put out money to now get that money back in.’ People don't really think about that. And a simple conversation around that concept can shoot up your date-of-service collections, can shoot up your profitability, because then we think, ‘Hey, I've got to make sure to collect that money because I know what it's going to cost to collect it down the road.” (14:21—15:41)
• “Nothing better for you to do as a business owner, from a money standpoint, than to know where your costs are. You talk about team members telling themselves stories — you're telling yourself a really bad story when you don't know where the cash that's coming in is going out. You're angry and frustrated constantly because you don't have enough money at the end of the month. You feel like everyone’s entitled. You feel like dentistry is way too expensive. PPOs are killing — do you see where this is going?” (15:59—16:30) -Kirk
• “Before you start educating your team, one of the steps I'd put in there is to educate yourself.” (16:56—17:01) -Kirk
• “If we have a good grasp of our numbers, we set budgets based on what we know to be true, what we’re projecting in the future, and we establish budgets based on what's actually happening and what we’re planning to do, and we clearly communicate those to our team, we can adhere to those budgets. If we give them no guidelines, they're just going to do what they think is right.” (19:37—20:06)
• “A lot of times, they don't know what they don't know. So, we are responsible for educating our team about the metrics that matter, the financial pieces that matter, the expenses that matter, the things that they can have impact on, and that are going to thus increase the success, the financial success, of the practice.” (21:18—21:43)
• “It’s okay to talk about money. It’s okay to talk about numbers. When you talk about numbers, it reduces subjectivity.” (27:14—27:22) -Kirk
• “Numbers allow us to diagnose what's going wrong. Could you imagine doing dentistry without knowing perio numbers or having radiographs? Just going, ‘No, I'm going to take a peek here, and I think I know where to start.’ No way! Are you crazy? You've got to start with numbers.” (27:42—28:04) -Kirk
• “Numbers create competition. Competition is healthy. This is one of the biggest learning points in my career, is I was so worried about putting numbers up there among our coaches because they would feel resentment. And it worked the opposite way that I thought. Once we started putting numbers up there and saying, ‘Hey, look. Here are the numbers,’ it was wild how healthy and competitive that became. So, the same thing applies in your practice. When you put it up there, you're going to be surprised by how healthy the competition becomes. And I would also question you as a leader. When you put numbers up there that truly states the health of the practice, and people are like, ‘I don't know if I want to,’ is that really somebody you want to keep talking to about this important component of your practice?” (28:06—28:59) -Kirk
• “One of the coolest things that I see around [competition] is it’s not just competition, it’s also collaboration. Maybe we’re tracking our fluoride and we have one hygienist that's killing it. And everyone’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, I want to be where you are with my numbers. What are you doing?’ And then, you get to calibrate around verbal skills, and you get to calibrate around the educational tools that this hygienist is using in a really amazing way that's letting her hit these marks. And if you don't have transparency here and people can't see, that conversation will never happen.” (29:14—29:54)

Snippets:

• 0:00 Introduction.
• 2:27 Why this is an important topic.
• 4:09 How to get buy-in from your team.
• 5:51 It’s okay to be profitable.
• 7:28 How to communicate with your team.
• 9:24 Have data before setting financial targets.
• 14:11 Discussing the value of the dollar.
• 15:51 Educate yourself before educating your team.
• 19:08 Have conversations about budgets.
• 21:43 How to have conversations around raises.
• 27:11 It’s okay to talk about money and numbers.
• 29:11 Numbers lead to competition and collaboration.
• 31:28 ACT’s upcoming Money Roadmap Tool.

Resources:

Pre-register for ACT’s free Money Roadmap Tool: https://form.jotform.com/222566336541153

Jenni Poulos Bio:

Jenni brings to dental teams a literal lifetime of experience in dentistry. As the daughter and sister of periodontists and a dental hygienist, she has been working in many facets of the dental world since she first held a summer job turning rooms and pouring models at the age of 12. Now, with over 10 years of experience in managing and leading a large periodontal practice, she has a firm grasp on what it takes to run a thriving business. Her passion for organizational health and culture has been a driving force behind her coaching career. She has witnessed firsthand how creating an aligned and engaged team will take a practice to levels of success that they never believed possible!