How to Staff Smarter in Dentistry (E. 262)

“They don’t sit in our location, but they are a part of our team. We don’t outsource something to get it off our hands; we’re bringing someone in to support us.” ~Dr. Nikki Green

In this insightful episode of Everyday Practices Dental Podcast, host Regan Robertson sits down with Dr. Nikki Green of Fort Worth Cosmetic & Family Dentistry (Fort Worth, Texas) and JW Oliver, Visionary at SupportDDS, to explore an eye-opening approach to staffing that has transformed dental practices across the profession. Dr. Green, a trailblazer in remote work for dentistry, shares her journey of embracing remote team members through SupportDDS, a global staffing solution founded by JW Oliver. Starting in 2017, long before remote work became mainstream in the field, Dr. Green successfully integrated remote team members into her practice, freeing her in-office team to focus on high-impact tasks that truly move the needle

As you listen to this episode, we want you to think about the following questions:

• How can I trust a remote employee to maintain my practice’s standard of excellence?
• How can I get my team on board with the idea and eager to integrate a remote employee?
• How can I effectively manage a remote team and ensure a quality patient experience?

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Announcer: The Productive Dentist Academy Podcast Network.

[00:00:02] Dr. Nikki Green: It wasn’t that I was wanting to hire a team member to do anything to replace her or to replace any other internal team member. It was to take some of those mundane tasks off of her plate. So she could do the things that she enjoyed and that she was even better at.

[00:00:18] Regan Robertson: Welcome to the Everyday Practices Podcast. I’m Regan Robertson and my co-host, Dr. Chad Johnson, and I are on a mission to share the stories of everyday dentists who generate extraordinary results using practical proven methods that you can take right into your own dental practice. If you’re ready to elevate patient care and produce results that anything but ordinary buckle up and listen in. Are you tired of working harder every year? And it still feels like you’re stuck on a plateau. You know, your practice is doing good, but you know, you are capable of more. The problem is not your effort. It’s having a clear plan with action steps you can take immediately register for the PDA conference before December 13th and unlock a one day virtual business planning session with PDAs, CEO, Victoria Peterson, and Dr. Maggie Augustine. In just the last 10 months alone, PDA clients who use these strategies have boosted their collections by an average of 219, 000. Imagine how you will feel knowing your patients are healthier, your bottom line is healthier, and you can feel confident about your future. There’s only 50 spots available, and if you miss it, you have to wait another year. The difference between those who wait and those who take action today is a dental practice that has purpose and value, profit and a whole lot of peace of mind, head to productivedentist.com to register before December 13th and set yourself up for growth. We look forward to seeing you in Texas. Welcome to another episode of everyday practices dental podcast. I am your host Regan Robertson and Dr. Chad Johnson. Our faithful co-host is out dentisting right now. No surprise to anyone, but that’s great because I have another dentist joining me today and a visionary and entrepreneur, massive CEO that you guys are going to want to hear from today, uh, JW Oliver and Dr. Nikki green. Welcome to our show today, guys.

[00:02:10] JW Oliver: Hello, Regan. How are you? Thank you.

[00:02:11] Regan Robertson: You know, it’s going to be a good day. If I’m talking to both of you right now, as you’re tuning in, what is this about? Well, sometimes in order to move a business forward, it requires us to think differently and thinking differently can be scary. It can be exciting. Most of all, though, I can find it can be really difficult to do and finding a guide that can help make that process easy requires trailblazers and if you’ve ever seen that video online about the first follower, it takes that one person to do something crazy. I think they were dancing on a grassy knoll at a concert and nobody else was doing it. There was one person who believed in that crazy person dancing. They got up, they started to dance too and it started a movement and support DDS. Which is our topic of the day really did that and what y’all have been doing is helping dentistry change the way it looks at employment in regards to remote hiring. This I’m particularly passionate about because when I was 14 years old, way, when the internet was like barely even existing. I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I could just work on a computer from my room and meet people all over the world? And you know, you fast forward to today and that is reality. So, um, I’ve invited Dr. Nikki and JW to be guests today because I want to dive into changing that narrative and shifting perspectives on remote work and we’ve got two really exceptional stories here. So, Dr. Nikki, let’s start. Let’s start off with you, Dr. Nikki green, longtime PDA member and support DDS supporter. So you were, you were an early adopter of remote work in the dental practice. So I’m wondering, could you just paint a picture for us where you’re located, your practice and kind of what issues you were encountering that even gave you an idea, like, “Hey, I got some problems and I, I need some creativity to solve them.”

[00:03:54] Dr. Nikki Green: Sure, I’d love to tell you that story. Although I first have to say saying that I’m going to somewhat feel Chad Johnson shoes today maybe makes me a little bit insecure, but I’m going to do my best, Chad. I’m going to do my best. I’m going to be the token dentist today. Yeah, so I’ll tell you my story. So my practice is located in Fort Worth, Texas, and I have owned and operated this practice, I guess, going on 18 years, bought kind of a small fixer upper kind of practice back in 2008 and spent the first good 10 years of that practice, just kind of changing it into my own and building it, building out a multi-practitioner large team, large organization and really, I guess the pain point that we’re gonna talk about today came probably circa 2016, 2017. So this was prior to remote work, even really being much of a thing at all in dentistry but the pain point was, is that I had these really skilled front office team members that were spending far too much of their time doing what I considered to be low revenue, very mundane tasks, but there were things that had to get done, you know, anything from spending too long on the phone, you know, with insurance companies to spending too much time confirming appointments. I mean, just things like that, that we all know has to be done in the dental office but, you know, I had these really cool quality team members that could have been doing something that was much more productive and added to the bottom line of practice and so JW has, who’s been a long time friend and someone that we’ve bounced ideas around with each other for many, many years. He told me this dream child that he had, uh, building this remote team member organization in Harare, Zimbabwe and even though I would love to play myself the hero that I was an early adopter and I believed in it from the beginning, I said, J. W., this is never going to work in dentistry, but whatever, I’ll try it. So 2017, I hired my first remote team member and I’ve had at least one ever since. I’m now up to, I think there’s about five team members that support me and or my husband and our two dental practices and even support us personally through some an EA role, but I’ve believed in the organization ever since. So I’m a follower and an early adopter and a believer and now an advocate.

[00:06:00] Regan Robertson: Thank you, Nikki. Can you be our eyes and ears, especially for our listeners are who are like, “Okay, well, you’re well versed in it now. You’ve obviously had to overcome some learner hurdles along the way.” Like what was the process of going through and how did you work through some of those initial hiccups?

[00:06:16] Dr. Nikki Green: One of the very first initial hiccups, and I’m finding this now that I’m working with support DDS and helping support clients. One of the initial hiccups when you’re first doing it is getting over team objections. So, um, initially it’s a hard concept. I mean, it’s hard enough for us as the leader and visionary of our own organization to change our mindshift and think about utilizing a remote team member but sometimes it can be really hard for some of those ladies or gentlemen that are working at our front desk and have always done it a very traditional way. That was probably one of the initial hiccups was just getting over that limiting belief with my office manager and she was a tough cookie. J. W. remembers and, and Jury’s her name. She’s still around here. Uh, I love her. She loves our remote team and she’s a huge advocate of our remote team now, but who in the beginning, she was a little slower adopter than I was, but we just stayed the course. You know, I just kept casting the vision as to really that I wanted this team member to be an, a helper for her. It wasn’t that I was wanting to hire a team member to do anything to replace her or to replace any other internal team member. It was to take some of those mundane tasks off of her plate so she could do the things that she enjoyed and that she was even better at and once, once that mind shift happened, that’s when team member number two, number three, number four, and number five came about because now my internal team is driving that bus. Who else can we get? What else can we delegate to a remote team member?

[00:07:37] Regan Robertson: I have a really technical question for you because what you’re describing reminds me of like what we’re seeing with AI right now and some of the, you’ve got the crowd that’s motivated and excited about it and then the crowd that’s very fearful, I think all the way back to when automobiles were invented or the camera was invented, you had the same. Same feelings and so the goal of it is to aid humanity, not hurt humanity and it’s able to prevent us from stalling out basically in our businesses and being able to grow and thrive and help everyone. Your office manager was stuck and you said it took some time to help her. Was that a series of conversations? Was it some meetings? Like I know you Nikki to be a really great communicator. What did you kind of find worked for you and then was able to catch fire with your team?

[00:08:22] Dr. Nikki Green: I think first we sat down and we talked about what are the things that you guys just hate to do? Like, let’s talk about that first and I always say low-hanging fruit with the remote team members, insurance verification and JW kind of, you know, rolls his eyes when I say that, cause we’re not just an insurance verification company. We can do so much more, but our team members hate that. That is a task that they just absolutely hate. So you build trust sometimes with your team by finding those tasks that they just are repulsed by and let’s delegate those out first and then you slowly build trust with the team until now we actually have a remote full-time hygiene coordinator. Well, that’s a very trusted position and so you, but you just have to build trust on both ends. I had to build trust with my internal team that I wasn’t trying to replace them, but that I was trying to help them and then the remote team had to build trust. with my team to make sure that they were capable and, you know, and adept at doing whatever it was we were going to ask them to do.

[00:09:15] Regan Robertson: So what you just did right there, Nikki is a big fan also of StoryBrand. So you know, I am a StoryBrand certified guide and, and Nikki just did the number one thing. She made her employees the hero in the story. So by helping them overcome what they don’t enjoy doing, she put herself in quite a position of power to activate change in a great way and I think that’s just such a beautiful illustration. So, you know, if I’m listening to this, that would be the first area I would go and attack. What problems do your team have? What do they hate doing that that could be off-boarded in a way that is helpful and the second thing I wanted to highlight Nikki with that too, is I can understand how this would feel. There’s our team, meaning our, we are physically together every day. Dentistry is traditionally so in office that it would feel like a us and then a them. So could you walk me through the incorporation? Cause if I understand it correctly, this is, this is your team. It’s not even an extension. It is your team. How did, how has that communicated and how does that feel now compared to how it was at the beginning?

[00:10:13] Dr. Nikki Green: Yeah. I mean, sometimes it’s even just a change of verbiage and I think JW did a great job of this early on. It’s like. Stop using the term outsourcing right that we use the term in sourcing because I like to use return. They’re a remote team member. I very rarely ever like to even use the word internally with my own team that we’re going to outsource something because that sounds like it’s probably not going to be done as well, but we’re going to do it just to get it off of our hands and that’s really not the case at all. We’re going to bring a team member in. They don’t happen to see it sit in our location with us, but they are a part of our team. So there’s things that you can do to bridge that gap. I mean, luckily this is 2024, which just makes it easier than even back in 2017. Zoom was around, but it was not near the phenomenon that it is now. So you can bring those team members in for your morning huddles. I mean, we do, we have a big TV in our break room, which is where we meet for morning huddles and we’ll bring our team members in. They’ll be on that TV with us. There’s a studio. speaker where they can participate in morning pedal with us. So as we’re talking about the seven new patients, they’re on the schedule today. Well, one of our team members, one of her sole jobs is making sure everything is ready for those new patients. So paperwork is done. Insurance is verified. Welcome calls been done. They’re confirmed. Well, she can speak up and say, “Hey, I’ve had a hard time getting hold of Mrs. Jones. I’ve texted, I’ve called, I’ve emailed,” but at least we know, right? Whereas if we didn’t have Tina as a part of our morning meetings, then we might all be going, well, did they do their job? Did they do what they were supposed to do by bringing them into the meetings that eliminates that us versus them.

[00:11:43] Regan Robertson: That’s beautiful. I have a culture question for you, because as you know, we have all remote workers at PDA. So it’s really me in an office. I have a couple of people that come in a couple of times a week, but it’s completely virtual. How do you incorporate your culture? Like, so for example, if you just all go out to lunch as a team, that’s going to be difficult for your remote team as well. How do you have celebrations or do things that kind of incorporate your remote team members. So they still feel like they are part of that in person team, even though they physically can’t be there.

[00:12:10] Dr. Nikki Green: Well, luckily, I think JW solved that problem for us as clients, honestly, because it is hard to think outside the box sometimes for that, but JW has set up such an infrastructure there within support DDS that helps facilitate that. So just a week or so ago, I sent all of my remote team out for lunch and I coordinated that through my client success partner, which we call a CSP and I coordinated it through her. So it was a little bit of a surprise for my team, but they all went to lunch. They had a fabulous lunch. They all dressed up. They took pictures. They sent me pictures, you know, through my WhatsApp, it kind of coincided with, I had shipped some swag over there. So a Yeti cup and some Halloween candy and some notepads and mouse pads and things like that. So it kind of coincided with that. So not only did they get to be taken out for a nice lunch together, but they got some gifts from the office. Um, they’re all, you know, now, when I’ve talked to them on the phone, they’ve all got their purple pens and so you just do the same thing that you would do internally. And luckily, like I said, JW is really kind of helped facilitate that. I actually got that suggested to me from my CSP like I wasn’t great about thinking of that on my own, but my CSP said, “Hey, Dr. Green, I know you’ve got some swag company. Would you like me to help you plan a lunch?” And I’m like, “Yes, absolutely. Plan me a lunch,” and they just add it to my next month bill and you know, it’s great. Seamless easy,

[00:13:29] Regan Robertson: Man that is that, that kind of support is incredible and I’ll tell you, yes, I’ve had the same thing where they reach out and be like, you know, you might, you might want to consider this for your remote team and having that support is priceless because you can hire remote workers as an individual and, and it can be difficult as business owners to coordinate and think of all of those things, or even have your office manager as well. Before I switch over to JW here, I have kind of an emotional question and then a really, you know, hard data question. In fact, let’s go to the data question first, because Nikki, you are very business-driven in my mind. What tangible business results have you experienced as a result and cause you continue to expand your remote team? There’s a reason for it. I’m assuming it’s bringing more down to your bottom line. There’s something going on that’s really working other than feels good to help your team members be more efficient in practice.

[00:14:13] Dr. Nikki Green: Yeah. I mean, so, you know, just to kind of. start at a high level at, you know, staffing in the dental industry across the U. S. right now is just a struggle and maybe particularly some of those administrative team members because some of our administrative team members are getting opportunities that they’ve never gotten before, like work from home or things like that, that maybe we didn’t have available within the dental practice. So it’s, it’s a solution for that. It’s been a solution to that for me, particularly over the last seven years. It’s also at a reduced cost. cost, you know, there is a reduced cost to the full-time team members just simply because of where we live and what our, you know, what our economies demand and such. So that’s, that’s definitely a cost savings for you at the practice level and as you scale that, that cost savings just gets greater and it just continues to multiply. Um, but from a tangible aspect of like what the practice has achieved, my internal team members have not sat on the phone and verified an insurance in seven years, because they’ve just got people who will do that for them. You know, now that can you, can you monetize that? You probably could, if you talked about the hours spent doing that, but from a monetization standpoint, probably the biggest role that we just recently incorporated was having that full-time hygiene coordinator. So again, that’s one of those roles that no one internally really wants to do. It’s a constant game of Tetris. We know it’s frustrating, but we have a remote team member that keeps our four hygienists. And that’s a task in and of itself, but she keeps four hygienists. Saturated at 90 percent or above and she does it week after week after week month after month after mont. That’s been huge, especially this year. This has been a soft year for us. I’ve you know, you know this Regan We’ve talked about it just candidly. It’s been a soft year Um doctor production has suffered a little bit just because we’re a fee for service practice We’re in a tough economy. Our hygiene revenues have continued to increase and I have no doubt it’s because I have a dedicated, smart, high-quality team member over in Harare that’s keeping that hygiene schedule full. So we’ve at least had that as a backbone, um, and something that’s just continued to improve even through a rough economy. So that’s been huge.

[00:16:15] Regan Robertson: What are the words when you have meetings with your hygienist? What are the words that they used to describe how they feel about having that 90 percent bill rate?

[00:16:22] Dr. Nikki Green: Oh, they love it. You know, I mean, I just want that. That’s what they want to do. They want to come to work and they want to clean teeth. You know, they know that when there’s holes in their schedule, that, that’s It’s not good for them, it’s not good for the practice, it’s not good for the economics of the practice. You know, I remember one time early in my career, I literally had a hygienist leave me because she goes, “Y’all just aren’t keeping my schedule full,” and it was really kind of like eye opening to me, like, whoa, this is my problem. This is not her problem. This is my problem and she doesn’t like it. So, you know, I, I learned early on just how important that is, but you know, when he’s got four hygienists across, that’s a daunting job and it takes nearly full-time dedication. So Tendai over in Harare, she does an amazing job with it and one of my favorite things to have happen is to have a patient come in and say, “Oh my gosh, I spoke to Tendai. She has, she has the most beautiful French accent.” I said, “Well, it’s not French. Um, she’s actually in Zimbabwe,” but they love that, you know? And when I say, “Yeah, Tendai’s worked for me for like four and a half years,” they’re like, “Are you kidding?” I’m like, “Yeah, she’s, she’s amazing. Isn’t she?” “Oh my gosh, she’s amazing.” So that’s one of my favorite things is when patients come in and comment. Thank you so much, Nikki.

[00:17:29] Regan Robertson: Go ahead JW.

[00:17:31] JW Oliver: Well, I was just going to comment on the hygiene coordinator position. I just got back from one of our clients that has a number of offices. They’ve been using us for other services, accounting, front office, director, first impression thing. Midsummer, they hired people basically to focus on the recare. He just told me that they’ve got 22 offices that in September, their hygiene production was up 30 percent over September of 2023 and he says, September is one of our worst months of the year. He said, and yet our recare was up 30% and he says, most people may not realize, but the next two weeks of a doctor’s production is based on the hygiene and so he says, not only was our, was our recare up 30%, our upcoming next two weeks production was up. So I think that’s a very important role to think about as well.

[00:18:15] Regan Robertson: Oh, man. Awesome. So many times I hear, especially in dentistry, but really with even small business owners, it’s always focusing on the new, the new and the more and the new and the more and optimizing what you have on the inside is the best and healthiest thing that you can do. Optimize what you have, take great care of patients and part of that commitment is making sure people are getting in for those preventative treatments. It helps them become the hero as well and JW, if I can shift over to you, there are people in the world that capture those ideas that come from the nether region, right? They get delivered somehow, and it takes a really brave soul to put them into action and I think 2017 was probably around when I met support DDS. So I must’ve been on that beginning phase and that was right when I was considering the same thing for PDA. I was wondering,”Gosh, you know, maybe we could bring in some outside meaning outside outside help and incorporating them in. Why not?” You know, it would be great for us. So I’ve known about support DDS for a long time, and it’s been really exciting to see the development of it. Did you anticipate JW? Cause I can’t imagine I couldn’t have what was going to happen with staffing as it is right now. Time. And again, a big, big, big, if not the number one, at least number two concern that I hear about from dentists today, the difficulty in attracting and retaining talent. So can you give us a journey from 2016 to today and what you’re seeing and then jump us into the future of where you’re planning to go?

[00:19:33] JW Oliver: Yeah, I think all businesses come out of a necessity. You’re you’re trying to solve a problem, right, and you recognize there’s a problem. This really started. The problem was that in Zimbabwe, there was a high unemployment rate, 80 percent unofficial unemployment rate but yet you had 94 percent of our team members who have University education. So they’re very smart. They’re very capable. And because of the low number of jobs and the high unemployment rate, they’re actually willing to be very consistent. I want to comment on that as an example. If you look at some of the recent stats ADA puts out, they’ll say that over 52 percent of front office team members are actually looking or thinking about looking for another job. Well, you know, most people will say, well, that’s not my office. Well, maybe it’s not your office, but it’s still probably a high number. Our attrition rate, we just calculated it for the year is under 6%. It’s a half a percent 0. 52 percent a month that we lose team members for attrition. So not only is attrition a difficult piece, but it’s also just finding team members, right? Having capable team members and whether we’re talking about in the dental, we do a little bit in the vet, the legal space and some other areas. It really is the same problem that they’re having COVID changed things. As you mentioned earlier, when Nikki first came on board, “It was okay. What are those low hanging fruits?” Oh, insurance verification. Okay. They can do that. That’s a back office piece and that wasn’t quite as hard because they could focus on it. They could be very good and they could be diligent about it and try to stay in your front office, trying to kind of switch back and forth but as COVID came in, as. The lack of available resources started to rear, which it still does. Even today, it was like, you think they can answer the phone for me? And because our team members had this beautiful voice, I say the Queens English sounds like they’re from London. They’re able to actually pick up the phone without any disparity between thinking that this is in a foreign country. They actually just think, Oh, they have a nice English accent. You asked me about where are we going? We started off, I remember when Nikki first came on board, we had, we had nine team members and hers was one of ’em and we were just trying to figure out how do we scale this? How do we make it work? And today that was in Zimbabwe and here we are today. We’ve got locations in Harare, Zimbabwe, Lusaka, Zambia, and in Costa Rica for our Spanish speaking and, and now we’re approaching 1300 team members and that’s happened over, you know, just the course of, uh, say seven years. Six years.

[00:21:43] Regan Robertson: Wait, wait, wait. Back up. I don’t mean to make you slow down. Did you say you went from nine and you’re at 1300 now?

[00:21:48] JW Oliver: Yeah, we have 1, 000, almost at 1, 300 total team members in it. It’s continuing to grow each month. It’s been amazing. And it’s been amazing to see the growth. You know, you said something earlier, first of all, Bruce Baird was the one that came up to the term insourcing. He was actually visiting our facility in like October of 2019. He goes, “Well, this is an outsourcing. This is insourcing,” and I went, Oh, that’s stuck. So I got to give Bruce the credit for that as well but you talked about Nikki making the heroes. out of her team. And I think that’s real important. I want to focus back on that for a second because when you think about somebody who is going to accept the task, it needs to be their idea. The most successful clients we have are the ones that go to their team and say, “Hey, what can we get off your plate to help you be a better person? What can we take off your plate to help you happier and healthier in your job?” And when you get it from them and you say, well, I’ve got a solution, I’ve got this company that can do that. It’s about building that trust, buddy. Story came to my mind, Regan. You’re talking about building trust. My mom, when calculators kind of first came out and became kind of mainstream, she’s 89 now she’s amazing. She smiles and has that has as much energy as you do and she’s crazy, but she would get on this calculator and she would do it and then she would take a piece of paper and she would check it to make sure the calculator was right

[00:22:58] Regan Robertson: Trust

[00:23:01] JW Oliver: Right and so I think it’s the same thing if you literally, I’d never thought about that analogy until right now but if you think about that, it’s a little bit like that. “Oh, okay. Well, they can do this insurance verification thing, but you know what? Can they do these other things. Could they really answer my phone? Oh, wait a minute. Could they really schedule in my PMS? Oh, wait a minute. Could they make outbound calls for hygiene, recare?” So I think it is about building that trust. Now we’ve scaled a little bit and we’ve got more team members under us. We’ve kind of gotten past a little bit of that because it’s usually a referral or other people are doing or the number one podcast in the country, like this one that’s able to expose it as well. So yeah, I think it’s important, but we’re excited. We’re excited. We’re growing. We continue to grow. We just captured a little bit. We’ve got dental clients in the U S the UK, Canada, and now even in Australia. So it’s exciting about where we’re going as well.

[00:23:50] Regan Robertson: Wow. Absolutely. Amazing to me. So, gosh, 1300 employees. Are you still in that, in that you had this beautiful, like skyscraper. In Harare, if I recall, like paint the visual picture for us. What does this look like for the team? So I’m going to shift focus since you, you are there quite a bit. I know your team is there also. I’ve talked to Rob and he’s on your team. Um, again, being our eyes and ears, what is it like to be in, in the Zimbabwe office? Especially at 1300 now. That’s crazy. I just, congratulations. I love this.

[00:24:19] JW Oliver: Oh, thank you. Yeah. I appreciate that. I remember when I visited with you at your offices, which I guess nobody’s really there anymore. I visited at your offices and you had just hired a team member to help with some marketing and things and I don’t know, we probably did have. We were just trying to, you know, starting to scale and kind of figure it out. No, it’s really interesting. You know, we’re in the newest building in Harare and in the CBD, the central business district, we’re in a 19 story high rise that actually has a mall in the bottom. It was built in 2010, 2011. We actually now have seven of those floors. I believe we’re about to go on our eighth floor next year and each one of those has a couple of hundred people that can be in those individual floors. We have some administrative and marketing and other things, and we just literally broke ground on our own facility, which will be ready in two years. It’s a separate building. It will hold 1200 that we will scale into as well in the future but the building is a class a facility team members do like to come to work there. Countries like Zimbabwe, unfortunately, you may have power outages. You may have power half the time, which is true there. You may not have good internet. You may not have good security. So when we talk about, especially with PHI and work with HIPAA and the intricacies that go with that, nobody works from home. Everybody comes to our facility and they like coming to our facility because It is really nice. It’s a very, very upscale building that people come in and feel value. We, we put a lot of effort into our team members feeling valued, which helps us with our attrition rate as well.

[00:25:45] Regan Robertson: I was going to go right into that and talk about that, how you help the employees feel valued. So Nikki kind of led us into that and there was one. Thing that you mentioned they thought would be really important, especially for our listeners who are like, “Okay, kind of made the business case for this. I’m starting to get on board. My paradigm is shifting a little bit. What kind of support do I have in this experience?” So I think, did you say it was your customer support person? If I’m the dentist and I say, “Okay, what kind of connection do I have? In addition to the team members that I hire that sit and live in Zimbabwe, what kind of conduit do I have to talk back and forth with support DDS JW?”

[00:26:17] JW Oliver: Well, first of all, uh, we have all of our dental team members go through a certification. We call it a certified dental coordinator. They do this well before they even go into an interview. It’s a very in depth training that we’ve had in place. It’s a week long training. There is a test at the end. They learn about the various PMSs, how to do recare, how to do recall, how to do insurance verifications and then they take a test to pass that. The interesting part of it is the practice or the dentist or his office manager, they actually get to interview typically three people, just like a Zoom call. So you’re getting a video Zoom call and they get to select the team member they think that best fits their team, their culture, et cetera, moving forward. So it’s a really easy process to do and they know that they’re also hiring somebody who has that background, but it’s that piece that’s most important, Regan, it’s the connection, it’s the connection to a individual. We are not a call center. I don’t even like the word call center. I we’re, we’re not a, a BPO. All those words indicate that there’s this big group of people answering calls from various offices. They’re not related and they’re basically doing a task. That’s not what we are. As you mentioned, we feel like these are insourcing. These are your team members and that really makes a big difference too.

[00:27:23] Regan Robertson: Thank you. All right. I have one question left for both of you, Nikki. I’ll start with you. What is one thing you wish that dentists knew about Support DDS? That you think they might not know or they deserve to know.

[00:27:35] Dr. Nikki Green: That’s an easy one for me. Um, it’s how much you’re going to love working with your team members. I have such a deep love and affinity for everyone that I’ve gotten the opportunity to work with. Primarily my team members from Zimbabwe, because the Costa Rica and Zambia locations are newer, and as I’ve mentioned, I’ve been on the team for a while, but you’re just going to grow to love them just like you do your own internal team and your internal team is going to grow to love them just like they do each other. So I think that we discount, maybe when we think about outsourcing and like JW mentioned, you think it’s just like a list of tasks that you’re going to have fulfilled. We forget the human aspect of it and there’s. Such a human aspect to this particular type of insourcing, because you’re not just getting a service covered. You’re getting a quality full time dedicated team member that is dedicated to you, to your practice, to the success of your team, to the success of your practiceand they’re going to be loyal to you and work hard for you just like your internal team does. If you create the right culture for that. So I just think that especially your listeners, Regan, I, you know, I, I think I know your listeners and they understand that they understand the importance of culture within their organizations and just don’t discount that if you extend that to your remote team members, you’re going to get the same level of loyalty and the same level of service from them that you do from your internal team.

[00:28:57] Regan Robertson: Thank you, Nikki. How about you, JW? I would probably

[00:29:00] JW Oliver: sum it up to that. What they might not know is where we really are different. First of all, We really stress that you have to train your team member to do the task you want. I can’t just sit in a chair. It’s just like if you hired somebody in your front office but we really also stress the integration of them into your culture, being a part of your team. Now, if you don’t have good culture, sometimes even that’s OK, because we do have good culture. I know a lot of times it’s an unhealthy one, but we get a lot of calls sometimes like, “I almost think, think we’re a sweatshop, like, or, you know, we may have these people that are working in this odd environment and, uh, you know, they’re, they’re rarely able to get to work,” and that’s just not the case. I mean, to kind of paint that picture for you, we even provide healthcare, what they call medical aid insurance for all 1, 200, 1, 300 of our team members. We have a wellness center where we employ two medical doctors and nurses. So from 9 AM into 9 PM, seven days a week, they can go see a doctor. Private doctor who works in our facility place called the grind which is like a Starbucks that they have This is only for our internal teams. We have a chief fun officer. We call him our CFO. We have office olympics. We do hot dog day where we provide everybody with hot dogs. We provide transport for them late at night You know, they’re they’re working the same time zones as our clients so if they’re working central time, they may get off at midnight and it’s difficult to get right home Cars are not popular for everybody to have so we have a full transportation system that actually takes people to their door. We do an annual zim fest we host golf tournaments We have all these things that we feel like are really important to this and the last piece is we actually have a full pastoral care team. There’s one on every floor. We employ about 12 in that department now, who are there when team members are going through emotional, family, loss of a loved one, things like that. So while yes, we hope every one of our clients have amazing cultures, Regan, we realize some don’t, but we’re going to have an amazing one, which is going to help them be able to keep that attrition low and I think that’s really important to understand and guess what? We also. The last point I had to make, and then I can shut up, 51 percent of our profits go back to various ministries around the world and we’re truly making an impact with that. That was something that my partner and I wanted to do from the beginning both Christians, we both were avid to say we needed to have the give back and that’s making a significant impact, not only locally, but, but globally in some of the ministries we support.

[00:31:08] Regan Robertson: Wow. Wow. Wow. Um, how can people get a hold of you?

[00:31:12] JW Oliver: Yeah. Uh, go to supportdds. com, just support and then dds.com. Very simple. Email Nikki hers is just Nikki N I K K I and she has her own email at support dds. com. Mine is JW at support dds. com and I’m happy to take any messages as well. And by the way, we love partnering with PDA. We have for a long time. Y’all had been Team members with a long time doing some support work. We attend your events. And honestly, I don’t know anybody who smiles more than you do. And always seems to be in an amazing mood. So I put that up there. And how’s Ben?

[00:31:42] Regan Robertson: Oh, how’s Ben? Oh, my Benny. Oh, he is, he is incredible. Uh, he’s, he’s great. In fact, we always think about your tractor supply videos. I’ll send you, he’s golfing. I’ll send you some, some golf shots that he’s been taking.

[00:31:57] JW Oliver: I got to see some more. I got to see some more.

[00:31:59] Regan Robertson: Golfing and electric guitar are his jam right now. And those are his three, his three big ones right now. Yes. Yeah.

[00:32:06] JW Oliver: Well, great family. You have to, that’s exciting.

[00:32:08] Regan Robertson: Thank you so much. Hey, if you’re listening right now and this is piquing your interest, go over to support DDS.com. You can check them out. They have been longtime partners of PDA. You can also see them at our update conference in March. I think it’s 13th through the 15th this year. You can find them there. That’ll be in Frisco, Texas area. I can’t wait to see you guys in person again, soon and thanks for being on the show for listening to another episode of Everyday Practices Podcast. Chad and I are here every week, thanks to our community of listeners. Just like you, and we’d love your help. It would mean the world. If you can help spread the word by sharing this episode with a fellow dentist and leave us a review on iTunes or Spotify. Do you have an extraordinary story you’d like to share or feedback on how we can make this podcast even more awesome. Drop us an email at podcast@productivedentist.com and don’t forget to check out our other podcasts from Productive Dentist Academy at productivedentist.com/podcasts. See you next week.