Kiera gives advice to those practices stuck in the $1 to $2 million range (because the same problems tend to apply). These hurdles can often be addressed in the leadership, systems, and mindset arenas, and Kiera spells out specific steps your practice can implement today to burst through the barriers. Episode resources: Subscribe to The Dental A-Team podcast Schedule a Practice Assessment Leave us a review Transcript: Kiera Dent (00:01) Hello, Dental A team listeners. This is Kiera and I am so happy to be podcasting with you today. I hope that you are just loving your life. I hope you remember that we are so blessed and so lucky to be able to do dentistry. I mean, talk about it. So many people dream of this world. So many people want this world and yet you get to live the dream. You get to live the freaking dream. This is your life. And so today I thought it would just be fun to tackle into this of, you know what? Why are you still stuck at 1 million? and how to break through, or maybe while you're still stuck at 2 million and how to break through. I feel like there's very similar problems from zero to 2 million. So I thought, hey, let's talk about it. Yes, it might seem like, okay, no, they're not quite the same. Actually, they're pretty darn the same. And I thought, hey, why not tell you why you're still stuck here and how to break through that ceiling? I remember once I was told about like the wifi symbol, and I feel like every one of those layers is just your next layer. And it's like, how can I burst through that next layer and actually make my life easier? I remember I also had a friend and I was working towards my first million. I remember when I hit our first million in the company and my friend texted me and he said, Kara, now that you've hit your first million, the rest are easy from here. And I will say getting to that first million mark is tricky, but then getting beyond it. So from really, it's like zero to 2 million. Honestly, a lot of these things are going to apply. So you're still stuck at 1 million. Let's break through that plateau. You guys, this is the Dental A Team and we freaking love helping practices break through limiting beliefs. Create the impossible into the possible. Make your life easy. Make your practice experience amazing and truly give you the life and practice that you deserve. I'm obsessed with having your life and business on purpose. Truly, why not? Like why? Why be a business owner? Why do all these hard things if we don't get to do the life that we wanted to have all the things that we wished for and to give our teams the same type of life and experience as well? So the reality is when we look at this, it's not clinical skills typically. Sometimes it is. Sometimes you do need to take some courses. If it's clinical and you're struggling clinically, think Coice and Spear and a lot of those will be really great for you clinically. So typically though, it's not clinical. It's systems, leadership and mindset. Like literally that's what it is. It's the systems, it's the leadership, it's the mindset. Systems do tie into our numbers and knowing that. And so I just want to break through like these three little hidden barriers that oftentimes keep practices stuck and some ways to get around that. So you can plateau through that one million, that two million mark. and really be on your way to great success, but doing it not harder. How about that? Like, I don't want to work harder here. I don't want to have to do more. Don't worry. When you actually put these things into place, you get more time back. You get more happiness back. It's not like, let's do this and have less happiness, less time, but you can if you do it your hard way. But we're going to teach you, today I want to teach you how to do this easy. Are you on board for that? If so, welcome. I'm super happy. I'm Kiera. This is the Dental A Team. We created it to help hundreds and thousands of offices scale beyond that 1 million mark to get to the 2 million, the 3 million, the 5 million. We have offices doing 500,000. We have offices doing 1.5. We have offices doing 3 million, 5 million, 10 million, 20 million. The reality is these things apply across the board. There's different layers and different ways to fine tune and refine based on the size of practice you are. But at the end of the day, these are really easy areas to help you see where your gap is and to break through. This truly is an episode that's for practice owners who know that they're capable of more, but honestly don't know where to go. I hear all the time when people talk to us about joining dental hygiene, they're like, Kiera, I don't know what I don't know. I'm like, you're right. So let's help you. Let's like peel off the mask, give you the resources and make it to where life is so much easier for you. So number one, the first block that I want to break down for you is you are wearing too many hats. This happens all the time. It's called the bottleneck. Like think about it. We're like squeezing it because we're wearing too many hats as business owners. And oftentimes what happens is as the founder, you are so used to coming in, being the person who does all the pieces because that's what you had to do when you started it. But that's also a falsehood. And also what it does is it creates chokeholds because what we're doing is we're micromanaging lack of delegation, lack of trust. This is where it gets like really stuck. And the offices were able to break through and evolve. put systems into place, they realize that they need to have a delegation ladder at our summit, if you were able to attend, awesome. If you weren't, you missed out on our amazing delegation ladder where we literally show you how to go in order of the tasks to be delegating and in what order based on the size and the growth of your practice. So when we get overwhelmed owner or stagnant teams or reactive decision-making, what we need to do is we need to build a leadership depth. So we're training our office manager, we're empowering our leads and we're letting go of low ROI tasks. Like literally Dan Martell has a book called Buy Back Your Time and it was shocking to look at that. And that's where we came up with our delegation ladder of, wow, like if we could honestly help you all see that we could shift it and these are the tasks to go in order of, and we're delegating out. If you're producing 200, 300, 400, $500 an hour, get rid of those low tasks that truly are not serving you. So on our delegation ladder, the way we started it is we have at the bottom layer, your number one thing to delegate out first is going to be administrative tasks. After that, it's going to be patient experience and case acceptance. After that, it's treatment coordinator. And that's going to be our case acceptance heavily. So we've got patient experience, making sure you're not the star of the show. Then we move into treatment coordinating and case acceptance. Then we move into marketing and branding. And then we move into leadership. And then beyond that, we move into overseeing. So if you're stuck in the administrative tasks, well, awesome. Let's wait till we need to delegate that and empower that out. If you're stuck in being the patient experience, The practice runs because Dr. Smith is in the practice and everybody loves Dr. Smith and Dr. Smith, if they're not there, no one wants to come. No, it should be the whole team experience. This isn't Kiera Dent. This isn't the Kiera Dent show. This is the Dental A Team show. There are so many great consultants. They're such a great team experience, but I don't run it. Yes, I have an influence and I started at the beginning and the core values as to why I started the company, that exists as our culture, but I'm not the one responsible for our client experience. Literally, I am here to podcast. I'm here to do our doctor think tank and I'm here to go speak at events. That's literally what I do now. And I get to see all of you, but I get to influence and train our consultants. I get to help and train in different areas. I get to influence the company because I'm clear at the top in the leadership spot because we have great consultants that take care of our client experience. You should have great team members that take care of your patient experience. Then you need treatment coordinators. You should not be the one doing all the cases and closing all the cases. And if you're not there, we can't close. It should be that your team can close cases without you.