The Power of Personal Philosophy (E.141)

“It’s not about working more, because I was working very hard. It’s about working smarter.” ~Dr. Maggie Augustyn

In this episode of the Investment Grade Practice Podcast, Dr. Maggie Augustyn shares her journey from burnout to building a thriving, patient-centered practice. She reveals how defining her philosophy of care, mastering business metrics like hourly production, and fostering a strong team culture transformed her approach to dentistry. Tune in for inspiring insights and actionable strategies to reignite your passion for both patient care and practice leadership.

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

• How does defining your personal philosophy of care impact your patient relationships, team culture, and practice success?
• Are you tracking the right metrics to truly understand your practice’s performance and profitability?
• How can you better align your team’s goals and strengths with the mission of your practice to create a more cohesive and supportive environment?

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Announcer: The Productive Dentist Academy podcast network.

[00:00:02] Dr. Maggie Augustyn: I truly and sincerely enjoy the relationships that I am forming with my patients. I love running a practice. I love clinical dentistry. I stand behind what I talk about.

[00:00:16] Regan Robertson: 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 PDA’s 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, 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.

[00:01:14] Announcer: Welcome to Investment Grade Practices. In today’s conversation, your host, Victoria Peterson, sits down with Dr. Maggie Augustin to discuss her journey from a struggling dental practice to a thriving one. Through strategic planning and a solid philosophy of care, Dr. Augustin shares her insights on becoming a true CEO, increasing profitability, and creating a cohesive team. Let’s dive in.

[00:01:40] Dr. Maggie Augustyn: One of the things that I came to realize that I never knew because running a practice was such a hardship, but it was a hardship because I didn’t know what I was doing and having learned what to do, I came to realize that being the CEO of your practice, being a CFO of your practice, is actually far more exciting than I ever knew that it could be. It’s really fun. It’s kind of like putting together a puzzle. One of my favorite times of the year, believe it or not, is around this time of the year when you begin to plan out your next year and you begin to look at the numbers of this year, and you begin to plan for what you hope to attain next year and you can plan for growth if you want to, or you can plan to just keep your ship steady as it is. PDA Doctors, we are high achievers and we like to plan for growth, but however, however you want to do it, that’s up to you but doing projections, analyzing data, seeing how the year went, why did it go that way? What can we improve? Looking out into 2025, figuring out where my hourly is going to be, figuring out where I can put my hygienists. Figuring out whether or not we can close the back door on the patients that we’ve lost. Figuring out what we can expect in terms of new patients. That is, that is really exciting for me.

[00:03:08] Dr. Victoria Peterson: I love that. Um, you talked about projecting top-line growth, right? Mm hmm and more revenues or more this or that, is there also like in that, in those steady as you go years? Do you think there’s opportunity there to go kind of deeper into operations and overhead and how do I not just work harder and see more patients, but how do I bring more to the bottom line,

[00:03:35] Dr. Maggie Augustyn: In terms of reducing overhead and becoming more profitable?

[00:03:37] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Profits, maybe that’s what we focus on in those.

[00:03:39] Dr. Maggie Augustyn: Yeah, that, that was one of the things that I learned very early on. It’s not, it’s not so much about working more because I was, I was working very, very hard. I was very, very tired. It’s about working smarter. So what is it that’s happening and what can you do about increasing the bottom line about increasing your profitability? And so what was really interesting to find is that as you increase your production, specifically your hourly production, that’s a very, very important number to track that I think most dentists and practice owners never look at. That is not something that I ever considered. In fact, I’ll tell you when I talk to my accountant, that is not something that, that he even thinks about or tracks and it’s something that I can’t ever move forward in running my practice without looking at. So when you think about looking at profitability and looking at your hourly production, you can increase your hourly production. There’s very little that happens with your overhead as you do that. Okay. Yes, maybe you need to add an assistant and depending on really what you’re adding in terms of your service mix, your overhead might not go up very much, right? Your lab fees might not go up. Very much your fixed expenses in terms of your rent or your utilities. That’s not going to change and so when you go up in your hourly production, right, if you go up from a thousand to 1400, that’s all. That’s all going to be, a lot of that is going to be profit and so those are, those are a lot of really important things that I never understood as a practice owner, just kind of ran into a circle, worked as hard as I could, but without understanding how that impacts your bottom line or your profitability, you might be working on the wrong things and really not gaining much in terms of what you’re, what you’re taking home or how you’re able to reward your team members because they’re working just as hard as you are.

[00:05:39] Dr. Victoria Peterson: I love that. Well, how did understanding production per hour different than like, I’m sure you were setting a daily goal or a monthly goal, what was the magic of going to hourly?

[00:05:50] Dr. Maggie Augustyn: You know, it’s, it’s crazy to think that our, our production, daily production was set at 2, 000 per doctor per day and now my hourly production is at 1400 hourly production, and it used to be at 2, 000 an hour. Um, it really helps you understand and break down how you need to communicate with patients and what’s important to you and what your philosophy is as a practitioner. So the difference between, for me, setting a daily production, which was 2, 000, had to do with doing single tooth dentistry, doing, you know, carries detection, and we would schedule patients for, you know, number 13 DO single appointments and I would never discuss ever a replacing missing teeth. That just wasn’t part of my philosophy at the time and today that’s changed entirely. I am here to try and make sure that my patients can be ready for any kind of joint replacement at a moment’s notice. So I pay very close attention to any kind of abscesses, any kind of cracks. Um, and tooth replacement is very, very important in its front and center in terms of my conversations. Now it is up to them what and how they decide to move forward, but that’s been how, you know, we’ve moved from setting a daily goal into setting an hourly goal for our production in terms of our goals.

[00:07:18] Dr. Victoria Peterson: I love that you pointed out the philosophy of care because I don’t think most dentists even think about that. You kind of like come out of dental school, you get in your car, you drive to the practice and you say, “Who’s next on my schedule?” You know, and, and we’ve faced such rejection that it’s like, “Oh, you’ve got an abscessed tooth. Great. I’ll fix it. See you next time you hurt,” because it’s like the grasshopper in the lid. Like, if you really don’t know how to connect, if you’re not strongly anchored in your philosophy, you know, as a former hygienist, this makes my heart sore to hear you say, I want to make sure all my patients are ready for that joint replacement or whatever that medical term is. they might be. So there can’t be hidden infections. There can’t be decay or abscesses or perio and get medical care. That’s such a strong philosophy to say I’m going to treat my patients to that level.

[00:08:12] Dr. Maggie Augustyn: I want to tell you a story. This happened yesterday. A patient came in and she’d been seen by a different dentist for a really long time. And she came to our office and almost every single one of her molars is cracked and nobody told her that before and clearly when I told her that, there was a sense of trust that was lost within her last provider and a sense of questioning of the trust in me and, but here’s the important part, the patient has been on Prolia and before that on Fosomax. And so the idea of the fact that her teeth are now cracked and they can break puts her in an entirely different risk category because it’s fine if someone that isn’t on Fosamax cracks a tooth and needs an extraction. Cool, that’s fine. They might lose a tooth, maybe they can get an implant, or maybe they don’t. Whatever it is, they’re in a different risk category than she is because she can’t really afford to crack a tooth and lose a tooth without some significant risk. She certainly can’t really have an implant. Well, she can, but there’s significant risk to that and so it’s an entirely different conversation with her at this point. And it would be unethical for me to hold any of that back. And so look, I, did not look like the good guy, right? And she told me that she said, “I left your office last year, which is when, when she and I met extremely broken and overwhelmed,” and I compassionately told her, “I don’t know that I would have reacted any differently than you would and if you want to, I can connect you with another dentist who will give you a third opinion. I get where you’re coming from, but it would be unethical for me to hold anything back from you,” and at the beginning, you and I talked a little bit off camera and, and you said that I was really excited when I initially took this course in 2020, but here’s why. When I took this course, this is one of the first things that I learned that was incredibly eye-opening. We started at the basics and the basics was who are you? As a prescribing dentist, who are you that comes into that room and advises the patient? Are you just blindly putting one foot in front of the other, reading the radiographs and just kind of are telling them? What you’re seeing, or are you really living out your purpose and your passion? And, you know, after the class, because you’re not going to figure this out within 20 minutes, it takes time to think about it. Whatever you do, whether you pray or you meditate, you talk to other people that are around you. You feel inspired by some people that you might know in the community, that was the basis of how I started to live out the rest of my career and I’m not for everybody. I’m not, you know, there’s patients that are not attracted to my philosophy and that’s okay and it’s cool and I’ll keep seeing them right and I’ll keep reminding them of treatment and I’ll tell them that every time you’re in The driver’s seat, it’s totally fine but I don’t want to hold anything back from you and patients sometimes leave because they think that they’re to take something from them or it’s I mean, nobody ever told me that, but that’s okay, but that’s how it starts. Yes, the business part is important, but just as important as running a business is this idea of figuring out who it is that you are and how do you present to the world, to the patient as a practitioner, because without it, we’re just so lost.

[00:11:31] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Yeah, this is such a great preview to the business impact, uh, course that we’re going to do this planning session that we’re going to do in January and February, but it’s also a great preview to everyone that’s new to the Productive Dentist Academy and coming to our live programs, right, and so to be able to combine this type of clarity, because that’s a leader’s number one job, right, is to be clear and to provide clarity for your team. And it’s been so amazing watching your journey over the last, what, four years, five years to go from a high volume HMO practice where patients had one mindset to a PPO practice, and we’ve talked about, should you be fee-for-service? And the answer is no, not right now. I mean, you’re blended, you do have cash patients, you’ve got insurance based patients, so this philosophy works regardless of the payer mix, right? These are the things we’re going to talk about. and business impact. We’re going to talk about who are you as a provider. Remember why you got into it, why it’s fun and once you’re solid with your philosophy, I think we’ll take them through a philosophy of care. And once you’re solid on some of the numbers to be tracked, it becomes more fun to be a clinician. Yeah and it becomes more fun to be the CEO, CFO, COO, MA, MUSE, of your practice. Like, I think it’s kind of mind blowing. Uh, Bruce always says that, “Productivity is not what you think. It’s what you think,” and so most people think that being more productive is about speed. It’s about more this or more of that, but it’s not. It’s about slowing down and taking the time to say, “Man, I am so sorry that no one has told you this before, but because you’re on this. medication, you are at much higher risk of these things happening  and maybe they weren’t cracked six months ago or a year ago, but they are today and this is what I see and I know it’s overwhelming, but I’m going to be here for you when you’re ready.” Um, nothing could point back to the ethical code that every dentist takes. More than that, right? There’s a word in the code of ethics. It says veracity, which means to be honest and tell the truth. And so I love that. You’re just pointing out that you can build a philosophy of care based on the honest truth for that patient and then learn how to educate them. So they don’t go screaming out the door, right? Terrible reviews about you. That’s our biggest fear, right?

[00:14:07] Dr. Maggie Augustyn: It is a fear. It is a fear, and they might. You can’t agree with everybody, and you can’t make everybody happy. One of the things that I learned along the way with PDA is that every now and again, one of these reviews makes you look real. You can’t make everybody agree with you, and that’s okay, and those reviews aren’t pleasant to read, but when you do a good job, when you take care of your community, you will end up burying those reviews. I think, no matter how you come to the table, when you have defined who you are as a provider, and then when you end up showing up as that person, and then when you have your team rally around you and they’re living out who they want to be, it just becomes so much more enjoyable than just running room to room doing 13 DOs and I, I mean, any DO sucks, but, um, but that conversation was not an easy conversation to have and that patient, so she came in yesterday and she’s like, I, I only want to do two fillings,” and she’s got this treatment plan. That’s like 40, 000 and she says, I only want to do these fillings, number 20 and number 21,” and the first question I asked her, and I said, “How did you decide to do these two fillings? When we talked about all these cracks?” And she’s like, “I only want to do these two fillings,” and it was actually kind of an uncomfortable situation because, you know, um, she wasn’t terribly pleasant. She wasn’t terribly pleasant. I didn’t know why and I didn’t know why until the end of the appointment, when we, you know, got into it with a fair amount of compassion on my end to figure out why was she unpleasant. Well, she was unpleasant because she lost trust in just about everyone. Um, but had I been doing 13 DOs and really didn’t care about who she was or who I was or why I was doing what I was doing, I never would have found out and so last night she ended up sending me a long email just asking more questions, which I encouraged her to do and I don’t know what she’ll end up doing and it sucks. I feel really bad for her, but I’ll be here every step of the way to support her on that but that’s how. All of this has come into play. I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t have started to do comprehensive treatment planning had I not understood the business part of it. I would not be here doing comprehensive treatment planning had I not understood my philosophy of care. I wouldn’t have trained my team. team and I wouldn’t have gotten my team’s buy in had I not been living my philosophy of care, right? They need to see me believe in it before they stand behind me. It’s just all an array of things. It’s a domino effect that just leads to a successful practice.

[00:16:36] Dr. Victoria Peterson: I love it, Maggie. I want to wrap up this because I think this is such a great preview for everyone who is considering coming to the PDA workshop, coming into coaching, taking part in this business impact workshop that’s only available if you come to the seminar. I want to work with doctors who are committed like you are to, you know, not just dipping their toes in and finding a few gems, you know, like, “Okay, philosophy. Care. Got it. Read my P& L. Got it.” Yeah. It’s more than that. So we want to work with people who want to be on a journey with us. So can you just in a sentence or two, just encapsulate, I know you do a whole speech on this of where you were then in terms of savings and where you are now as a business owner just a few years later.

[00:17:18] Dr. Maggie Augustyn: I was lost and I was walking blindly. Just putting one foot in front of the other. I hated coming to work each and every single day and I couldn’t wait for work to end. People hated working with me and I was losing patients all the time. It was not something that I was proud of and I talk about it pretty freely and I talk about it to show the difference. I truly and sincerely enjoy the relationships that I am forming with my patients. I love running. a practice. I love clinical dentistry. I stand behind what I talk about. I love holding a handpiece and, you know, we’ve come to a place that as a result of the changes that I have made within the way that I think, I’ve been able to get my team to rally around what they want to do and they’ve discovered their own strengths and we’ve been able to get their buy in, but on their terms. Not on our terms, we didn’t force them to do that and they want to work here. They want to take care of our patients and it’s really been 180 degree turnaround between what my life used to be and what it is now.

[00:18:26] Dr. Victoria Peterson: I love it. Thank you so much, Maggie. I can’t wait to teach this class with you.

[00:18:28] Dr. Maggie Augustyn:  It’s been a dream come true for me.

[00:18:34] Announcer: Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Investment Grade Practices Podcast. If you find value in this episode, help us spread the word by passing it along to a dental friend, subscribe, and give us a like on iTunes or Spotify. Learn more about building your Investment Grade Practice at productivedentist.com today.