by Karah Karah | Jun 27, 2018 | Legendary Leadership
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As a young dentist just starting out, it can be hard to know which direction to take your career. But thanks to people like Dr. David Rice, the next generation of dentists can get access to tools that will help them succeed on both the clinical and business side. Not only has David achieved success in his career, but he’s also done—and continues to do—amazing things to help dental students along their own paths to success.
The founder of igniteDDS—a free continuing education community for dental students and young dental professionals that provides live local events, online webinars, and more—David is passionate about helping younger dentists navigate their early years in the industry. In this episode, he shares the wisdom he wants to impart on up and coming dentists, the mantra that helped him get to where he is today, and inspiring insights that both new and seasoned dentists ought to take to heart.
Key Quotes:
- “Sometimes we’re worried about the tactic, or the strategy, or the meeting, or the conversational skillset to get our team to reach higher levels, but oftentimes we’re not treating them outrageously well.”
- “I highly recommend some kind of postgraduate program to everybody. It was such an instrumental year for me, not only to pull all the concepts that didn’t quite make sense to me in dental school together, but confidence and speed and the ability to know … if someone else can do it, so can I.”
- “I’m a huge fan of young dentists to choose mentorship over money whenever possible because those first three to five years are so, so important.”
- “We’re so conditioned throughout our formal education to tell somebody the answer … but it’s easy to make a mistake when we try to just talk at people as opposed to really listening to what they have to say.”
- “The more you invest in the person sitting knee-to-knee with you, the faster you’re going to grow and be successful.”
- “We’re really not a patient-centered practice; we’re really a team-centered practice. And when our culture is firing on all cylinders, the patients just come in, and they feel it, and they respond.”
- “Spending time working on your business is really, really valuable, and it’s easy to lose that time because you’re so busy trying to produce dentistry.”
- “Challenges are a part of the game, but you can get through it on the other side and sometimes—if you play it right—come back stronger.”
- “Take the leap. Don’t be afraid to jump out of the plane and figure out how to open the parachute on the way down.”
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by Karah Karah | May 23, 2018 | Hints for Happiness
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Growing as a leader starts with growing as a person, and no one knows that better than Dr. David Maloley. He’s going solo today to share a few things that have significantly improved his quality of life, and as a result, have helped him be a more effective leader in his practice.
Listen in to hear the top three gadgets that have become major parts of Dr. Dave’s morning routine, as well as his advice for starting your day off strong. You’ll also hear his tips for improving your mental state and what it really takes to be the leader your practice needs.
Key Quotes:
- “If you can own your day, you can use that as a building block. Then you’re well on your way to building an epic life, and that starts with a morning routine.”
- “No matter what your quest is—building a dental empire, serving your patients—meditation is a good foundation.”
- “All my breakthroughs in my practice were when I was working more on myself than on the tactics within the practice.”
- “Strong systems are really important, but you’re not going to change your life by fixing the way your phones are answered … True growth is going to happen from growth within the leader.”
- “When you transform the leader, you transform the practice, and it must start in that order, or it’s not sustainable.”
- “High performance is about increasing fulfillment and decreasing stress over time.”
- “Health is the wealth. If you’re tired and exhausted, you’re going to be kind of a coward and an ineffective leader.”
- “We’re sold this myth that as we get older, our energy decreases. I don’t believe in that at all. There’s so many ways that we can get our bloodwork right and get our morning routine right so that we have the same energy that we did as a teenager.”
- “When those difficult times come along … I want to be a higher level person so that I can take that head-on.”
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by Karah Karah | May 2, 2018 | Legendary Leadership
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In this episode, you’ll get to listen in to Dr. Dave’s recent interview on the Business of Dentistry Podcast. He shares personal stories of his own challenges and the valuable lessons he learned as he built his career. Listen in to hear his inspiring words about finding clarity, what it takes to be a great leader and more.
Key Quotes:
- “Life moves fast. I used to think about five-year plans and ten-year plans, and now a quarter goes by, and I’m like, I don’t want the same things I wanted 90 days ago.”
- “That’s, I think, a struggle in society, but certainly in dentistry as well, is like you start living out somebody else’s dream and then realize it too late. If you can always be course-correcting, I think that’s probably the best advice, to have a beacon, which would be like your annual plan or even your life plan.”
- “It takes some serious time alone to reflect and design [a life plan, but] otherwise your schedule will get full of other people’s agendas.”
- “My theory was in 2017 that if I did nothing else but worked on myself, that I could make my practice grow, and I didn’t need to be constantly turning all these knobs like hiring somebody or a new marketing tactic or new phone skills.”
- “If you’re the CEO of a dental practice, if you’re the lead producer in a dental practice, you’re the racehorse, and so you have to create ways—whether it be through delegation and leadership or just flat out automating or eliminating things from your life—so that you’re not feeling run down at the end of every week.”
- “What are you doing to take care of yourself so that you can serve? It’s kind of a paradox like you need to be selfish to be selfless is really something that we have to come to comfort with.”
- “Courage is not the absence of fear. It’s doing the things that you’re scared of because you know that gets you to the destination that you want.”
- “Sometimes we use perfectionism as a badge of honor because it sounds really good, but sometimes it’s just fear and excuses packaged in a nice little wrapper with a bow on it.”
- “Your teams need psychological safety, so they need to be able to ask their dumb questions or make their mistakes without feeling chastised; they need to know that you have their back.”
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by Karah Karah | Apr 18, 2018 | Bold Biographies
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Sometimes the biggest challenges we deal with as dentists are moral dilemmas. It can be tempting not to admit to making a mistake—especially when you know a patient wouldn’t know the difference—or to advise someone to undergo an expensive procedure they don’t really need for the sake of making a higher profit. We’ve all been there, including Dr. Bryan Stimmler.
The owner of North Brooklyn Dental Care, Bryan is a big proponent of sharing the challenges we face as dentists, not just the successes. In fact, helping others to learn from his mistakes was his goal in starting The Better Dentistry Podcast. In this episode, Bryan opens up about the difficulties he’s faced along his dental journey, his own major mistakes, and the important lessons he learned as a result.
Key Quotes:
- “I don’t care that you can do veneers, you know, I can do veneers too … I want to see a screw-up. I want to learn from your mess-ups.”
- “There’s not a healthy communication on the challenges that [dentists] go through—whether it’s life or the business side of things or the clinical side of things—and we need to open up some discussion on that.”
- “To be a good dentist, to do better dentistry, you’ve got to get your ego out of the way and you gotta do what’s right. … Better dentistry is getting back in there [after a mistake] and getting it to where it’s supposed to be and then swallowing your pride and apologizing to all of the patients that are waiting for you because you screwed up.”
- “There’s a quote that kind of goes along the lines of, when you think your life is tough, someone’s always had it worse.”
- “When someone’s quiet a lot of times, and then they dish out just a one-liner—those are the ones you need to listen to.”
- “I hear from residents all the time that they don’t feel like they’re learning anything, and when you’re in the thick of things, you don’t even realize what you’re learning. We’re watching you work, and I can see your clinical proficiencies from when you started until when you ended, so you are learning, whether you think you are or not.”
- “In hindsight, [my associateship] was so valuable that I’ve actually told residents, go find a bad associateship. If you have the intentions of opening up your own office, go see what the worst of the worst is. … You’ll find out everything that you shouldn’t be doing, and that’s much more valuable than getting an associate position at a place that is a well-oiled machine and you don’t even know what they’re doing that’s so good.”
- “I always tell people to find a mentor. … Find some mentorship and read a lot.”
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by Karah Karah | Apr 11, 2018 | Bold Biographies
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Do you feel like you don’t have your future quite figured out yet? Don’t sweat it. Being successful doesn’t mean you have to know every detail of where you’re going. The key is being willing to put in the work and keep moving forward. Just ask today’s guest, Dr. Chris Green.
A third-generation dentist and the owner of Green Dental Care, Chris says he’s still figuring out his vision, and he has accepted that the road to get there isn’t always a direct path. In this episode, he shares what he’s learned along his own non-linear dental journey, as well as the importance of knowing that finding your path to success can be a fluid process that you continue to figure out as you go.
Key Quotes:
- “A smiling dental team—that’s the type of thing that can make up for a lot of flaws.”
- “When we think about leadership and owning a practice, we think so much about first impressions. But last impressions are super powerful, as well.”
- “Dentists a lot of times either put not enough focus on their practice or too much focus on their practice.”
- “That’s the beauty of the profession: You can run a practice however you want and create a lifestyle. … It’s an exciting time to be a dentist in my mind.”
- “One of the things that it took me a while to figure out is that if I was the most interesting or the smartest guy in the room, then I wasn’t learning or gaining anything.”
- “Some of these practices just need new energy—they need a young, hungry dentist to get in there and be a little bit better of a leader and be a little bit better of a businessperson, and if you’re a lot of that, then the sky’s the limit.”
- “For me, it just hasn’t been a linear road to get to the vision—I still don’t know if I have my vision totally figured out. It’s a fluid process. The more I know, the more I realize I don’t know, and as I learn more, I realize that there are many ways I would have done things differently, but you’ve just gotta keep plowing ahead.”
- “The simple epiphany I had was that I could always make more money, but I could never make more time.”
- “Sitting down once a year, or once a quarter, or however often to evaluate your vision, write it down and reverse-engineer how you’re going to get there—that will get you in the right mindset as to not expect shortcuts.”
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