From Survivor Care to Ideal Care (E.153)

WHAT THIS EPISODE REVEALS

“Your ideal care will fail without support, without your team being aligned and empowered with systems. Vision alone isn’t enough.” – Dr. Braden Baird

Most dentists spend their early years in “survivor care,” reacting to broken systems, high stress, and production demands. Dr. Braden Baird shares how he broke that cycle, producing $1,000/hour just two years out of school by shifting to a philosophy of ideal care built on team alignment, systems, and mentorship.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN

• The difference between Survivor Care and Ideal Care, and why it matters.
• How to align your team and build systems that actually support productivity.
• The role of mentorship, continuing education, and community in accelerating growth.
• Why vision alone is not enough because systems drive sustainable success.

IF THIS SOUNDS FAMILIAR

• Your days feel like chaos, and you are constantly reacting.
• You struggle to delegate or get your team aligned.
• You are producing well but feel unfulfilled or burned out.
• You want a clear path from associate to owner without the stress.

NEXT STEPS

Stop surviving and start building a practice that works for you, your team, and your patients.

Explore the Clinical Calibration Institute and discover the systems that move your practice from chaos to clarity.

TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Victoria Peterson: Welcome back to another edition of From Chairside to Boardroom, uh, as we talk about how your clinical, um, philosophy and calibration impacts the value of your business. Here with me today is Dr. Braden Baird, and if that name sounds familiar, yes, he is Dr. Bruce Baird’s incredibly talented nephew, and he’s here to talk to us from Survivor Care to ideal care and how building a philosophy can pay dividends as a dentist. Welcome, Braden.

[00:00:38] Dr. Braden Baird: Thank you very much, Victoria. I’m so glad to be here. Thank you for having me on.

[00:00:42] Victoria Peterson: I’m glad to have you here too. Just to set the stage, I want everyone to know that you’ve been in dentistry for a long time. You graduated dental school way back in 2023, and, uh, you’re just finishing up a two-year associateship and preparing to purchase your practice, and I thought this was just a really terrific crossroads to grab you for this because in, in one sense, you’re ending a journey and have lots of insights from an associate’s perspective, and you’re beginning a journey and learning what leadership, uh, philosophies you wanna develop as you become an owner. So welcome.

[00:01:28] Dr. Braden Baird: Absolutely. Thank you very much. It’s so been a journey already and starting another one for sure.

[00:01:36] Victoria Peterson: If you had one piece of advice for dental practice owners working with associates, uh, can I just, tell people that. Well, I am gonna tell people you produce over a thousand dollars an hour, two years outta school when the national average is 475. For all owner doctors, it’s about 275, 375 an hour for associate doctors. So what is the secret sauce? That allowed you to produce three times more than your run-of-the-mill average, and I don’t mean to call any dentist average, but statistically you’re three times above than average for productivity. What’s the secret there?

[00:02:19] Dr. Braden Baird: You know, I’m still figuring that out a little bit, but what I can point to the most is one, I just care so deeply about not only the people that I’m taking care of, but also what comes out of my chair and out of my hands, um, so that’s the base of it, and then really, I don’t think, you know, I’m doing too much other special than trying to create great relationships with the people around me. Um, I can’t do it without getting team on board. I can’t do it without getting to know my patients and diagnosing comprehensively and treating them in that same manner, you know?

[00:03:04] Victoria Peterson: Alright. You, you don’t sound stressed like most associates that I talk to. Did you come out without student debt?

[00:03:12] Dr. Braden Baird: No, I’ve got debt.

[00:03:15] Victoria Peterson: Are you not married and, and have kids and you’re, you’ve got financial goals that you know with you and your spouse that are weighing on you. Do you not have any of those? ‘Cause I mean, seriously, you don’t seem stressed.

[00:03:27] Dr. Braden Baird: It’s, it doesn’t seem that way, but, uh, there, it’s there a little bit, but yeah, I’ve, I’m married. I’ve, my wife and I have been married for three years. We’ve got a little seven month old. We’ve got all the, all the things, all the things to think about.

[00:03:41] Victoria Peterson: Well, as we, I, I’m picking on you a little bit here because I want people to know, just because you have the last name Baird, it wasn’t like there’s some silver spoon that paid you half a million dollars of tuition and, you know, life is gravy. You’ve had to like really start from ground zero and work your way up. You just didn’t, you didn’t come out of the womb producing a thousand dollars an hour. You had to do something right to get there.

[00:04:05] Dr. Braden Baird: Yeah, drawing down the, the same, you know, dirt roads that, that my friends have too.

[00:04:11] Victoria Peterson: I love it. I love it. So in this episode, a lot of doctors do kind of live in this place of survivor care. Have you seen that and, and if you did, how did you make a choice to position yourself for ideal? I, I heard you say what’s important is what comes outta my chair, how I take care of the patients, how I relate to them, how I deliver ideal care. So have you seen Survivor Care and how did you avoid that?

[00:04:39] Dr. Braden Baird: Yeah, I’ve been a huge part of Survivor Care, I’d say for the majority of my time so far, um, I, you know, I’ve spent two years in a PPO practice. We did have, you know, a lot of turnover. There was, you know, minimal training, not a lot of marketing, and, you know, a lot of things to deal with there, and, you know, by the end, um, and especially, you know, towards the middle end there, I found myself really just trying to carry all of that load and carry all the responsibility of this ideal care that’s I wanted for my patients, um, on myself. You know, I just thought if I’d worked harder, I could still deliver that ideal care, um, but you can’t really outrun that forever. You can’t outrun the, the, the broken systems and the, the extra efforts. So it was kind of my wake-up call whenever I had my son and I didn’t have all of the extra effort to give, um, and so I wanted to get home and see him, and I wanted to, you know, have the time and relationship and not bring the stress home, um, and so that was, you know, a big point where I, I knew that I at least wanted a different future. You know, I didn’t know if I could change it in the moment, but I knew that I wanted something different.

[00:06:13] Victoria Peterson: Okay, and that’s not to say that, uh, practices who accept PPO fees are better or worse or anything like that. It’s, it’s just a model, um.

[00:06:24] Dr. Braden Baird: No, absolutely. There’s, there’s absolutely a way to do that and do it well and function very well through that, um, my example is just a specific scenario that could have, um, also worked really well.

[00:06:38] Victoria Peterson: Perfect. Perfect. So as you, uh as you wind down, like time of being an associate and now you’re thinking about taking over practice then and you will have associates, what’s one piece of advice that you’re giving yourself as you cross that threshold?

[00:06:57] Dr. Braden Baird: Yeah. Uh, one piece of advice I’m giving myself moving forward is definitely, that’s my ideal care will fail without support, without the team being aligned and the team being empowered with the systems to do this ideal care.

[00:07:18] Victoria Peterson: I love it, and what do you think that associates need most to become aligned to something like that?

[00:07:24] Dr. Braden Baird: Um, I think especially newer associates, but all associates needs a structure. Um, they need that system and they need the alignment. They need to know, you know, what are we, what do we do whenever we see this, you know, to be able to support the hygiene. What do we see whenever our perio is severe? Like what’s the protocols? What’s all of that? Um, so one is structure to build off of, ’cause you’re still figuring out, like and thinking hard during the procedure a lot of times. Yeah, much less thinking. Everything else that’s going around it. So if there’s that, um, it helps a lot. On top of that is communication, a time of communication before you even get there, before I get there as an associate communication throughout the whole thing and communication of where are we going as an associate and, and owner partnership relationship. I think without any of those three parts, it’s, it can be a rough going.

[00:08:32] Victoria Peterson: Well, and you’re, you’re bringing up something that it, it’s kind of the invisible, I don’t know, secret. It, it, it’s, it’s the thing that runs in the background is every owner doctor I have ever met said, I love mentoring. I would love to mentor an associate. I would love, I love teaching. I love teaching my team, like most docs really love that, ’cause I feel smart. You learn something new. We’re all learners, we love it, and then they start mentoring. They go, I hate mentoring. I hate mentoring my associate. This is ridiculous. Don’t they teach ’em anything in school these days, back in the day when I was in school, like it gets in that conversation, right? And why aren’t they bringing in their own new patients? And what the hell, I can’t leave for a day without ’em tearing everything up with the team, like it just gets there, but I, I think that’s why we built Clinical Calibration Institute and we’re so excited to have you there as a faculty member because you are young and fresh and all of that. What is your, I don’t know what your generation is? You’re, you’re not a millennial. Uh, you’re, 

[00:09:33] Dr. Braden Baird: I think I’m the last millennial year.

[00:09:36] Victoria Peterson: Last millennial at the ripe old age of 29 almost. Right. So you’re, you’re kind of the future, and when we embarked on building CCI, and I just had Dr. Kim Koch reinforce this last week. He said, “Oh my gosh, what you’re building here has never been done before. Never has there been one learning platform that have the standards and the teaching materials for caries for, you mentioned perio. How about function? How about aesthetics? How about sleep apnea and airway. There’s no one place where that work lives. So how in the world would you train your associate? How in the world would you,” because I’ve spent a year trying to gather all of the experts and all of the faculty to say, “Hey, can we put this into one body?” And it’s evolving. You know, we’re in early stages of it, and it’s nearly impossible, or as an owner, you spend five years and $200,000 to go learn all this stuff. How do you teach your team? So that’s kind of what I wanna dive into here, because you’re a, you’re a big part of helping us build this.

[00:10:53] Dr. Braden Baird: Yeah, um, well, thank you, and how would you train the team and everything outside of that is a big question, um, yeah, like, like you were saying, I’ve spent the last two years and, you know, the four years of dental school before that, trying to train myself and see where my, well where I align with what do I believe I’m taking in all of this information all at the same time as I’m growing things are changing even with that, um, but yeah, I definitely think there needs to be that at least base, kind of the North Star to come back to and to reference to, and to, to build off of with training the team, um, it’s like, yeah, go ahead.

[00:11:39] Victoria Peterson: It’s like walking a tightrope backwards in high heels over flames. That’s what I think being a dentist owner, practitioner is like in today’s world. So let me ask you this, a lot of authors, a lot of those people leadership training says, you know, as a professional, just craft your vision and everything else will fall into place. Have you found that to be true?

[00:12:05] Dr. Braden Baird: I wish it was true. I, I’m definitely a dreamer and I can cast the vision and make the plans and I can just say, this is where we’re going, um, but we’re definitely not gonna get there with just the vision, um, it just, what I’ve seen is it doesn’t work without the systems. What you have to cast a vision. You have to define, you know, your ideal care, what that looks like, and you have to align the team to that. Make sure we’re all on board. We’re excited about being able to take better care of our patients in these ways, and you have to put the systems behind it. You know, I, you have said before, um, you know, we’re not going to fall, uh, say it one more time, fall to the level of our, and

[00:12:56] Victoria Peterson: You don’t, you don’t rise to your goals, yu fall to the, you fall to your systems. That’s the one.

[00:13:02] Dr. Braden Baird: Yeah, and so I definitely, coming out of school, I have all the goals and aspirations and I come up with new ones every year, um, but I’ve experienced inaction in the thick of it. It’s always falls back to what has been trained and what the system is, um, so it’s all important and it can’t work without the actual gears turning it, which are the systems there, the inner workings of this, you know, bigger vision that’s actually going.

[00:13:34] Victoria Peterson: You sound like you’re speaking from experience here. So what was your aha moment that helped you break through and start including the team and delegating more? Like what, what, what, did you just wake up one morning and went, “Oh, I don’t, I don’t know. What am I doing here?” How did that happen? What was your aha moment?

[00:13:53] Dr. Braden Baird: Um, you know, that’s, uh, tough to really point in a moment. I think it really was coming back from my three weeks. I was lucky to have a paternity leave. Coming back from that and wanting to practice differently before that when it was, you know, me and my wife and I was fresh and everything, the fresh dentist I could just power through and put more effort and more time to make up for what I thought was making up for the systems, and then I came back and I didn’t want to, you know come in in the morning and then blink once and the day is like this huge chaos and it’s over with, you know, just flying from chair to chair. I think that was really the breaking point of like, “Wow, I don’t think I can do this every day for a long time” I, I need to bring in, you know, not bring in, but I need to bring the team together as much as I can and start delegating, start training, start aligning, um, and see what I can do as much as I can as an associate to build the systems that are right around me.

[00:15:09] Victoria Peterson: What did it feel like? I mean, ’cause that does sound, the roller skating and, and regardless if you’re two years or 20 years in that roller skating back and forth, feeling like you’ve got to do it all yourself. I had a dentist one time and I’m, uh, this was early in my consulting career and I’m evaluating, I’m observing, and I said, “You know. You work for your assistant?” And he goes, “What do you mean?” I said, “Well, you ask her to take an impression, and she said, would you please mix the alginate for me? You mix the alginate for your assistant. Like that’s backwards.” I’m, that’s probably an extreme case, but what did it feel like when you went in and like you blinked and the day was over? What did it feel like in your body? What did it feel like emotionally when you were in that mode?

[00:15:56] Dr. Braden Baird: Yeah, it was, it was taxing and it’s, I wasn’t getting the fulfillment that. I wanted, um, I wasn’t remembering the people that I saw in that last hour, much less the day or week. Um, you know, there is a, a bit of it that’s like the thrill of, you know, I’m producing great and yeah. You know, we’re flying through, we’re doing cool stuff, and then, you know, after a month of that, or, or you can go longer, it’s just, it feels taxing, and I’m not, it doesn’t feel like I’m giving my, or, or at least having the chance to fulfill my purpose. You know, I’m just doing teak at that point, whenever I’m flying around, um, and so I, it was, could felt better.

[00:16:47] Victoria Peterson: So did you get into dentistry? I mean, let’s face it, your uncle is the Productive Dentist, right? He retired after 45 years producing something like 4,000 an hour. Productivity is in your veins. What, what type of continuing education did you take post dental school ’cause I think there’s a, an element here of how did you get into this place of ideal care? And, and that created kind of this dissonance between, uh. I’m just running, running, running, and wait a minute. I wanna know my patients. I want to understand their health history. I want to understand that I’m moving them into health. I don’t know that most dentists graduate dental school being trained to that philosophy.

[00:17:35] Dr. Braden Baird: Yeah, um, definitely, there’s not enough time to train that in dental school, um, I, with continuing education, I started early in dental school. There’s, you know, a lot of people that are really generous and willing to teach dental students for much less than when you get out, um, so I would get my bearings with surgery. I went to Colorado Surgical Institute and started to, uh, build my skills down that path. Um, I went to a few different continuums, one of ’em being through like the Arrowhead Lab. I started to get my whole, you know, occlusion and functioned verbiage and like visions down, um, I’ve done, I’ve been going through the Ripe Global Restorative Fellowship that’s really great and along the way, like the courses are definitely great and all of the knowledge is awesome and necessary, but I think the biggest thing is. Really adding to and collecting like my community of mentors and surrounding myself with people that are doing this excellent dentistry, that are delivering this awesome care, um, and being able to reach out to them, right? And so that’s, the skills are awesome, but without actually, you know, building that network and having the people to lean on and to learn from their experiences. Uh, I think that can still fall short. So there’s, you know, I can give you a, a list of courses too, and I’m going through Kois right now, which is amazing on its own, um, but there also just needs to be that kind of conglomeration of the knowledge of everyone else that I put into action.

[00:19:22] Victoria Peterson: That’s awesome and I’m so grateful to you and Dr. Jackson Bean and Dr. Wade Keifer and Chad Johnson. You’re committed. You’re giving back. We don’t pay you to do this, but you’re like once a month you’re on a mastermind call with doctors to talk about these things. There’s a community set up within clinical calibration where you can ask questions of the mentors, and so we’ve tried to, uh, bring along some of our Productive Dentist Academy alumni who are real doctors in the field doing the stuff, and most of you are in. Uh, well, like Jackson’s in one of the poorest communities in Texas, you know, the average family household income is $35,000. Yet he is a highly productive, well above a thousand dollars an hour in that environment. Wade’s in Arkansas. Do I need to say more?  Wayne is a, a Kois mentor and on faculty with Kois, uh, you’re in your Kois journey. Uh, you know, it’s just a, a really great group of down to earth people, and I love the course you’re putting together for young associates on developing your clinical career path so you can expand ’cause everybody wants to come out and do the glamor stuff of implants, but if you don’t have, how do I extract a tooth? You know, with precision first, you’re gonna fail. So thank you for that. So it’s clear you are a goal setter. You, you’re in Kois. You’ve got that level of philosophy of comprehensive care. Now you’ve got your team on the same page. It sounded like even as an associate, you were getting that rocking. Is that still enough to get outta Survivor care into ideal care?

[00:21:14] Dr. Braden Baird: There’s. You know, it, it takes all of it together. Like you, you kinda listed that out, like defining, you know, what my ideal cure is, and that’s like the, you know, conglomeration of all of that knowledge, aligning the team, making sure the right team members are in place, building the systems, um, you also have to, the bonus of being a, a dentist and practice owner is ensure that the numbers support the mission and that your systems on that end are rolling behind the scenes. So there’s, you know, there’s an endless amount of things to align there, um, but it takes all of it at the same time for that ideal care to really come out. 

[00:22:00] Victoria Peterson: What systems do you think are touched, like they’re different in survivor care versus ideal care? What are, what are some of those systems that, that you might be looking at?

[00:22:12] Dr. Braden Baird: Yeah, um, I think with Ideal Care or, or with Survivor Care, it’s really reactive, um, you know, you get them in place, it’s what can I do for you? And then you’re just trying to think through each case individually and, um a lot of times with the survivor care that’s all on you as the dentist, the patient ends up in the chair, not really maybe prepped or not pre-warned or anything like that, and then you just sit there and look and react. Mm-hmm. That’s the same thing. That’s individual patient, but the same thing with the schedule, maybe there’s not a blow that is set up, which is a big system, how we’re scheduling to productivity. It’s if there’s an opening, get the patient there, let’s fill and try to survive there. That’s also kind of another aspect of survivor care. So, um, one, definitely the system of how the patient journey is before they reach the doctor, um, within that’s like the intake call. It’s one like showing the personality, doing great experience, but also the information you collect in that intake call of like, how are we setting up this appointment? What is needed, what’s expected? Um, and then that’s hygiene or assistant all of the work that they do to get the patients ready to see you, to get you ready to see the patient more. So, um, and yeah, where they end up in the schedule is one of the biggest, can be one of the biggest frustrations. So that’s a huge one, um, and then having that calibrated set of like the diagnostics. We are looking at all of our patients systemically. We are looking at all of these points in every person to see them as a whole, and so you’re, the little things don’t slip through the cracks. You know, the big one, you know, ready to go implant space doesn’t blind you to the other things that are like. In the occlusion that are gonna break that implant. So there’s, a lot of those systems take you out of being reactive and into having a set journey, set path, calibrators, um, diagnostics, and also, you know, the last step of that is there’s a lot of flexibility, but a calibrated way that we go about things. We know that, you know, for a small example, implants are gonna get a night guard or like just, you know, stuff like that where, you know, that can easily slip, slip through the cracks, and that could be important in your patient for not breaking it. They’re making things last.

[00:25:03] Victoria Peterson: Man, it’s amazing how much you have absorbed and put into action in two years. I, I hope that people who are listening to this have a sense of hope that whether you’re brand new in your journey or you’re 5, 10, 7 years into it, you know, if you’re struggling or you’re kind of burning out on this should have been easier, and I, and I’m not saying building these systems are easy, but life does get easier, um, when you’re producing at, you know, 700, 800, 900, a thousand, 1200, it’s because systems are in place and everybody knows the part that they play, and like you said, um, you can’t be redoing your work. You know, and, and so diagnosing by risk factors, having the blocks for that productive work, having everybody on the same page with how that gets filled, I mean, that’s, that’s foundational to having the time and space, uh, and then the communication skills with every team member. You touched on that as well, of what did we say when, and, you know, we, we walked through a lot of that. In both productive dentist and um, Clinical Calibration. So I, I’m so glad we didn’t do a lot am genuinely curious, like you’ve just shot out a dental school like a cannon, and that’s not typical. So I’m really glad to have you here today. Really excited to have you part of the CCI faculty, and we’re gonna keep watching you as you step across the threshold of ownership, and is it okay if I bring you back from time to time? We’ll have, uh, from the Baird files. I know. I’m gonna check.

[00:26:48] Dr. Braden Baird: Absolutely. You’re. I’m learning from my mentor’s mistakes, but I can fill you in on all the new ones that I make for the next ones to learn.

[00:26:58] Victoria Peterson: Well, I, I think you’re definitely on that journey from chairside to the boardroom, uh, and taking over. Uh, so we, we look for great things from you, Braden.

[00:27:08] Dr. Braden Baird: Thank you very much.

[00:27:10] Victoria Peterson: Anything else you’d like to share before we wrap up?

[00:27:14] Dr. Braden Baird: Um, you know, this last thing is one that I actually got from Starla, who’s my new coach, and, and PDA, and, um, she said this in our meeting and it really like put a new perspective to training. She said, “you know, we’re gonna train on each thing until, it’s not a habit, it’s just the way we do business. We said we’re gonna. Train on something, a habit is good and a lot of people move on from a habit. You know, it takes, however, you know, the 21 days to set a habit and all of that, but habits can be broken and forgotten,” and especially for someone with like ADHD like myself, um, but when you train it to the level where it’s. Subconscious basically is just how we do things. That’s how we talk to a patient. That’s how we bring ’em back, or like Bruce would say, a physiologic level. That’s when your systems are really humming. That’s when you’re not opening the manual to try to look at something, and I’m really excited in our new practice. Build the systems in that way to really focus, not be trying to implement seven things, but to really make one thing, two things physiologic, and then build on top of that. So that is something I’m really excited about moving forward with her.

[00:28:39] Victoria Peterson: I’m absolutely speechless. I mean, you, you just shared, uh, the whole premise of building an Investment Grade Practice. It’s, it’s there. It decreases stress today. It cash flows well today, but you’re anchoring in value for every step of the way, and, uh, what a blessing to be able to do that even before you purchase the practice. You know, that’s

[00:29:05] Dr. Braden Baird: absolutely, and a, a huge weight off my shoulders, not having to, you know, juggle all these different things that I want to train, which is my tendency.

[00:29:16] Victoria Peterson: Excellent. Alright. Thanks again for bringing with us, uh, today, uh, Braden. We’re excited about that, and thank you all for joining us on another episode of From Chairside to Boardroom here at Investment Grade Practice Podcast.