Dentistry Uncensored Highlights: Intents and Purposes

Dr. Howard Farran and Scheduling Institute founder Jay Geier discuss the importance of intentionally defining a culture in your dental practice

For the past 35 years, Jay Geier, founder and CEO of the Scheduling Institute (SI), has made it his life's work to help people grow and reach toward their full potential. His work has paid off: SI has been voted the No. 1 consultant and adviser in the dental Townie Choice Awards for the past 11 consecutive years, and No. 1 in the orthodontic TCAs for the past six.

Scheduling Institute clients include Dentaltown founder Dr. Howard Farran: In 2008, the team at Today's Dental was trained on the Five Star Phone Training Program, SI's flagship program that propelled the company into its position as the most effective adviser to private practices.

In November, Geier reconnected with his old client for an hourlong installment of the Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran podcast. An edited excerpt of their conversation follows.

Howard Farran: I almost never bring anyone back on the show a second time, but Jay blew it out of the sky last time. I just want to say right out of the gate: This is not a paid advertisement. You are a fantastic leader and doing so much for people, so it’s great to be with you. It’s a lot of fun.

Jay Geier: I thought today we could talk about culture. We’ve discovered that the subject isn’t talked about a lot in dental school or continuing education courses, so I’d like to help listeners make that commitment and understand what “culture” is.

HF: My homies are made for figuring out the cosine and tangent of a triangle, and now they’ve got to lead people—hygienists, staff, assistants—and deal with patients. They weren’t made for that!

JG: Howard, “culture” is what the people who work in your organization think about you. Every business has a culture. And everybody, when they walk into that business, will make a decision about that culture. So if I had my way, everybody would get a hat and it would say: I own culture. That’s the beginning step. They’ve never taken on that responsibility and they’ve got to because by default, no matter what they do, they’re in charge of the culture.

When you think about the culture you want to have, let me give you a definition the way we would say it to a doctor: “a high-performing, patient-centric, growth-oriented culture.” That’s a mouthful, but think about what you want to create.

HF: So, you say the dental office culture is what your team thinks of you, the dentist– owner, and should be a high-performing, patient-centric, growth-oriented culture. What letter grade would you give the average dental office in America?

JG: Probably a D, because of the “default” culture. If this is the first time you’ve ever thought about culture, that means you don’t have an intentional culture, you have a default culture. You’ve got to swap that and move to the intentional.

In 2021, recruiting is going to have to be a priority for most doctors. They did a study to figure out what the most talented people wanted in their jobs, and they got it down to three things. One, they want a better boss. Is there a better boss than a lot of the dentists you’ve seen over your career? Answer: not very hard. Right?

HF: Right.

JG: Next was a brighter future—in particular, they were looking to be stretched and trained. Training is actually a recruiting tool, but you’d be shocked at how few people actually use it. The third thing they want is to be part of a larger vision—some kind of meaningful contribution to the world.

HF: OK, I know how my homies think, and they’re going to say, “Sounds warm and fuzzy and all that, but how does this actually affect my economics? Is this just feel-good stuff—a rah-rah rally? Or will it affect my practice and the bottom line?”

JG: Let’s turn this around and think about the typical doctor who goes to a seminar, gets a great idea and tries to implement it with a team but it doesn’t go anywhere. That is a reflection of your relationship with those people.

Trust is the greatest accelerator of ideas. A lack of trust causes no movement at all, and things are very, very slow. Imagine if you had a culture where every time you had an appropriate idea, that culture would absorb and execute that idea. That’s kind of the fantasy that any leader would have.

HF: “Trust is the greatest accelerator.”

JG: A lot of people don’t realize the reason your team doesn’t do what you ask them to do is that they don’t trust you.

HF: When you come back from a seminar all excited and say something, they’ll roll their eyes because they know it’s going to be just like it always has, given enough time. They always say, “Well, nothing’s ever going to change.”

JG: Because they trust in that more than something else.

HF: Do you think the average dentist out there has the tools? Is it a trainable skill to be a leader and have a culture that’s intentionally designed, as opposed to default culture?

JG: All of these things can be learned. The question is: Are you willing to put in the work? So much of this is about submitting and not thinking you know everything.

HF: Dentists think, “I know there are so many things wrong with our office— people get upset, leave bad reviews, don’t come back—but I’m just going to double down on marketing. I can burn and churn 50 new people a month and none of this matters.” Where would you prioritize? Marketing, technology, consulting?

JG: I’ve identified an absolute correct hierarchy, and No. 1 is human capital. When you talk about your team, that's human capital. You can be a great coach but if you’ve got no talent, you have a problem. So, normally we look at human capital first. For instance, if your phone ratings are correct, go market.

By the way, many people think just because a marketing company is recording your phone calls, that constitutes training your team. That’s not true. Anyone who thinks that recording the calls constitutes telling them how to do it right, you’re dead-wrong. You actually still have to train them! Human capital first, then marketing.

A guy calls me up, he’s getting 50 patients and they’re all advertised, and I’m telling him he is in deep, deep trouble. Because the number that matters is the number of patient referrals as a percentage of their entire population. You should be over 50% patient referrals. You would have a great culture because culture is also what your patients say about you.

HF: So you’re saying that if you have a great culture, your word-of-mouth referrals should be over 50% of your new patients?

JG: Yes. Your human capital is trained correctly so when the patient comes in, the experience is all about them. Most of the work is about patient-centricity, which is basically a team member saying, “You know what I’m going to do for eight hours? I’m going to put myself second and put the patient first in a system that’s designed to make the patient feel a certain way.”

HF: At your events, there are guys from towns like Reno, Nevada, who are just crushing it. The mindset of your followers is unbelievable.

JG: I appreciate that comment and—I tell them this, but it’s true, I don’t have a client I don’t like. Part of the reason is culture! You’re going to one of my events, there’s not an excuse-making culture or a whining culture. They’re there to do what we need to do. I think I have a great job, and it has been a tremendous journey.

HF: I still think the fundamental thing: My own friends in this town, they don’t even know how many incoming calls went to voicemail and were never answered.

JG: There’s no doubt that every process has a start, and a finish, and why someone wouldn’t fi x the start. ... I mean, why is it that someone can be so naïve that they would go and try to fi x the back of something, and not the front? Talk about making things more complex than they need to be.

We suffer from something I never thought I’d suffer from: People think they know what we do, so they don’t want to do it. So today, we have something called a Blueprint Day where basically we walk [clients] through and look at their history, figure out what their growth rate is, talk about their goals and figure out what they want.

So, today, I’d say, “You could get a Blueprint Day, you could certainly start with something related to our new-patient phone program, or come to one of our events.” Because I’m always like, “Look, I want someone to come hear what I have to say, figure out if you like our culture. Don’t judge it from afar. Come in.”