Episode 116 – Clarity, Courage, & Commitment

“It’s all about relationship, that’s the only way you’re going to solve this particular puzzle.” – Regan Robertson

When Your Plans Hit the Fan (Part 3): Clarity, Courage, & Commitment
In the final episode of this candid series, Regan and Dr. Chad dig into 3 key pillars that helped Chad’s endurance and longevity as he recalibrate after the upheaval of 2020 including:

• Relationships and communication
• Marketing
• Ensuring flawless delivery of standard of care

If this series was helpful for you, please reach out to us at podcast@productivedentist.com. We’d love to hear from you!

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

REGAN: That all gets back to relationship.

CHAD: It really does.

REGAN: I mean, that yeah, that’s the only way you’re gonna you’re gonna solve this particular puzzle. In my humble opinion. We’ve been talking a lot about communication, you’ve communicated with your team, you’ve communicated with yourself, number one, yes, candid with yourself and gave yourself positive self talk during some pretty crummy times. Diving into the team, helping them understand their goals, helping, you know, helping everybody understand their part, which one of the things in your I can’t remember if it’s your vision, or mission, one of them was no drama, like lower drama team,

CHAD: Yeah, on our standard of care of all things.

REGAN: And I noticed even with like, with myself, or with my children, if we have unclear direction, or we have time on our hands, I find that’s when the drama tends to come up. Because you have to fill your brain with something. So you’re giving them very focused scope of this is what we’re achieving together as a team. Yep. So you know, going fee for service like you did remember, I held my breath, because I’m risk averse. So I was like, What is he doing? Why are we gonna do this? It’s gonna be interesting to see how you’re going to be doing.

CHAD: I don’t know, but I’m gonna do something.

REGAN: Oh, I loved it. It was great. It was fantastic. I thought it was really I mean, you had a lot of confidence around it, knowing that it might not be, you know, the easiest path, but you were gonna do it might as well pull the band aid off in 2020. I mean, what else can happen? Murder Hornets? I mean, I don’t know. So you did that. And then and then communication, I really do see that as being a very key pillar to to the endurance that you had through 2020, you had to communicate it with your patients and your team. And now you’re having to re communicate, re educate again, on on this, you know, the fees are going to go back up in 2021. So come January 1, I don’t know how, how patients responded to it if they came back or not, you know, to schedule that treatment in the year before the before the fees went up. So how has how has relationship building? In other words, do you actively work on a referral plan? Do you talk about? Do you talk about that? Is that important to your marketing success? How does relationship factor in?

CHAD: Yeah, so we have internal referral, that is our highest ROI. Because it’s relatively cheap to implement and to manage? And then it you know, basically, if you are treating people, right, you’re going to get them to refer other people. And so, yeah, we’re, we’re refocusing our marketing, of course, what’s really cool. And again, this one is what makes me a raving fan about productive dentist Academy is that you know, being comprehensively all in the marketing team and Sara is taking advantage while taking advantage of knowing our stats and then out reallocating the money where we need it the most.

And so one of our offices needs the most new patients so we’re trying to work on that some another office just needs to be working on its branding from within to make sure that the existing patients that are now under my care, have feel like there’s continuity of care feel like you know, so everything’s going nice and smooth with that and that they know what kind of treatment that we now offer it’s really cool when people go Oh, you guys do that in house now. That’s really cool, you know, whether it’s placing an implant or doing Botox or or sending a text message that they can now you know, schedule their appointment and or cancel it, you know, just by hitting see, you know, stuff like that. So I

REGAN: I love that.

CHAD: Yeah. So no, yeah, we’re implementing more marketing stuff into it. And, and that is a bigger picture of part of the bigger picture of how we’re trying to move in the right direction. You know, everyone’s always calibrating right. And it’s exhausting. Communicating, but it’s it’s more exhausting to not communicate and not hit your goals.

REGAN: And not hit expectations. unspoken expectations. That’s right. So I’m curious, when it comes to the marketing, because I’ve known you for almost  I don’t know, almost 10 years, I guess, yeah. And to see you in your marketing journey, and I think you were a doctor that was really good at sharing his authentic self, right out of the gate, you pulled humor, and you pulled your own personal passion for travel and photography, into your practice. So I think you’ve been really good at showing who you are to your community and your team. But now you’ve got Johnston. And Anthony, you’ve got two new practices, right?

CHAD: Yes.

REGAN: Did you allocate? Did you know? Like, I’m gonna have to put this percentage here Did you realize that you were kind of even though it’s under the same brand, did it feel like it was starting over in a sense?

CHAD: It ended up being more work than I expected it to be, but, but at the same time, having all the same brand help, because we could carry what we knew into the new place, and basically just start saying, okay, the culture that we have there, we want to implement it here. The systems that we have there, we want to implement here, the branding, the marketing that are there, we want to bring it here, for example, like getting our, our Google My Business Page up and running, you know, a couple of them, they weren’t, you know, up at all. And so but, you know, dropping pictures in so that way, it starts ranking, better trying to get, you know, reviews, stuff like that. That’s, I mean, yeah, there’s a lot of gardening to be done to this land to make it into an actual salvageable garden.

REGAN: Right. Right. And that, and there were areas I think that you just reflected that were timesavers. For you, like, for example, you didn’t get three separate websites. So you kept it under one house?

CHAD: That’s right. That’s right. Well, and even our radio, we, you know, do that all under the same name. So that way, everywhere, you know, these offices are all, you know, 20 minutes apart from one another, but the radio station that’s hitting all these different areas, it helps that, you know, it’s like now we’re available in this location, this location and this location, you know, that people go, Oh, I wouldn’t have gone over to the east side. But you know, I’m on the north side. Yeah, I’ll go there.

REGAN: Did you? Do you have extra team allocated to the marketing effort of marketing to extra practices? Or do you use PDA and then –

CHAD: All PDA, I just, I think, though, within the Office, we’re finding that we need to kind of have some people in charge of taking photos, sending it to Sarah, and, you know, trying to figure out like, what each offices niche is going to be according to because I’m also trying to promote the, the associates not just the Chad show, which is why my office isn’t called Johnson dental, for example, you know, that it’s, it’s a bigger picture of kind of trying to remove my name before I’ve even retired.

And having the and having the core values shine through and those associates, right, part of the culture piece.

REGAN: Okay, so thank you for spending an hour and a half of your life with me. And all of our listeners, can we revisit time with you? Well, thank you. In three months, we I think we should revisit and do this in real time and see us how that plan is coming to fruition?

CHAD: Yep. Cuz I’ll tell, like, I’ll call it right now. What I mean, this is probably foresee that I’ll get 80% of it done.

REGAN: That’s what you feel committed to?

CHAD: Yes. And I’d love to, you know, shoot for 100% now that the nation knows, you know, but like, at the same time, it’s like, Listen, if I get 80% of this done, I’m gonna be so much further ahead. than I am December 2020. Yes. And I’m alright with that.

REGAN: That’ll be a definition of success for you is what you said. Yeah. And that is different to different people. So right, some people couldn’t do anything but 100%. Right, that that would be indicative to me that maybe you’re not dreaming large enough.

CHAD: Yeah, maybe? Yeah. So I mean, I’m just, yeah, I think this next year is going to be a good year, I think we’re going to be closer to our two year goals. Maybe it takes three years to get to the two year goal. But the fact is, in two years, I’ll be closer to where I’ve aligned myself and my team, and that we’re in harmony with each other and with our patients.

I even explained our business meeting to our team that, you know, that the patients do they see continuity in what they are noticing with the marketing and how our brand should be versus what the so their expectations, are we meeting those expectations that we set them up to expect Time will tell? I mean, but you know, like, if we’re aware of that, you know, at the handoff at the phone call, when when we first meet the patient, you know, like are they expecting to, to kind of get a talk about Invisalign, because they see that on our website. Are they excited? Because one of their cousins that referred them said that they got an implant that I’m going to talk about their edentulous spaces that need implants. Yeah, I better, you know, and it had better be smooth.

Because I think that’s that that is your every day. That is the vision, that’s what you set out. I think it was standard of care if that’s what it was on that document, I saw your standard of care. If I showed up every day, and said this practice why I am here we are passionate about the oral systemic link that to me says this is a no matter what it is. It’s a very serious conversation that we’re having, even if it’s Invisalign, it’s still we’re having a serious because there is a connection to even the aesthetic, to the health of your mouth, to how you feel about it, how you focus on it.

REGAN: You get what you focus on where focus goes, energy flows, and I think that’s a beautiful. That’s a beautiful statement. And I think that gets everybody rowing in the same direction. What I heard from you Chad, was clarity, courage, usually, I would say confidence, but I think it’s courage, clarity, courage and commitment. Yeah, that’s what you’ve done for yourself over this year.

CHAD: Well, thank you. It was a it was a time of self exploration. Because it’s not like I mean, we talked for a little bit, but it’s not like we really planned on where it would go.

REGAN: No, no, that’s the best part about these interviews, is they sit down with Chad and Reagan.

CHAD: Right. Well, and I appreciate the audience for I guess, you know, being passive participants I guess you know, that’s the the fun of a podcast as you can kind of zone out. But if this meant something to you, then engage with us, you know, and if you want to shoot me a private email chad@productivedentist.com, and of course, regan@productivedetnist.ciom you can also you know, see this stuff on Facebook. So if you look up productive dentist Academy, we post this kind of stuff there. And we’ll see your comments and questions, if you want to engage with us, either privately or publicly, on this kind of stuff. So feel free to get ahold of us.

We have nothing better to do right. Now, but seriously, I’d love to, you know, like for the eye, it is interesting, I’ll get two or three comments, you know, from either people locally or on a national level on Facebook, maybe even where someone will say, Hey, listen to this. And that, actually, I connected with that quite a bit. And I’ll be like, that’s really cool. You know, I’m glad that that some of this stuck with some people. So I’m sure that’s not the case for everyone. Some people might listen and go, Oh, this is dumb. But for the people that this really connected with, I hope that my transparency allowed afforded for them to go, you know what, that is exactly how I was feeling about it. And I want to follow that path. One example is the business foundations class. And does that start back up in January Reagan?

REGAN: It does, it kicked off January 14.

CHAD: So that’s worth investigating into guys. Check that out. And that, of course, is being promoted via emails, if you’re getting those it’s also being promoted on the Facebook page and on the website productive dennis.com. So feel free to check that out. And I’m glad to have made all those plugs. So Reagan, you don’t have to.

REGAN: Well, thanks so much. I’m glad that you I’m glad that you continue to find value in it. And and I think there’s a lot of power with putting the heart on the sleeve and just saying this is this is the real this is the honesty and I am always leery of anybody who says that, you know, it’s just you just get up zing motivated. You just push yourself through the day and everything is a win. And we know that that’s not the truth. So I think it’s really good to share the struggling side as well as the winds, it makes the wins that much more sweet.

All right, until our next Everyday Practices Podcast, have a great week!