by Karah Karah | May 16, 2018 | Magnificent Marketing
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When it comes to marketing, many practices and businesses tend to focus on the wrong things. Naren Arulrajah explains what is going wrong and how to truly focus on the customer, relate to them in a real way and leverage social proof. His advice on handling failure, being an effective leader and gaining the trust of your customers is extremely real and valuable.
Naren discusses how he originally failed his way to success and how his rough start ended up pointing him in the right direction because he was willing to learn from it and make necessary changes. He also shares some great advice on how to establish authority and create real relatable messages that clients connect with. Naren provides many tools to strengthen your impact and lead people in a way that brings out their strengths.
Key Quotes:
- “Every good thing that happened to me came out of failures or came out of dead ends.”
- “I don’t believe in managers, I believe in coaches.”
- “I don’t believe in this idea of, “Let’s work on your weaknesses” because if I work on your weaknesses, you’ll have strong weaknesses. So I believe in this idea of how to bring out the best in you – your strengths.”
- “The more it was about me, me, me – the less I got what I wanted.”
- “Marketing – the way you get people to know you and then choose you.”
- “We are social animals – We do what others do. So when someone else buys a product and writes a review, now we trust that.”
- “When somebody is being grateful and at that moment you ask them for a favor, they will say yes.”
- “We don’t trust people who say they are perfect.”
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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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by Karah Karah | Apr 4, 2018 | Legendary Leadership
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Sometimes life can throw you curveballs, but it’s how you deal with them that makes all the difference. Dr. Steve Markowitz is a third-generation dentist whose unexpected leap into learning the business side of dentistry firsthand came during his first year of dental school. After a tragic accident left his father unable to practice, Steve stepped up to help keep the business running and learned key lessons that drove him to where he is today.
Now in charge of three multi-specialty group practices just outside of Boston, Steve has accomplished a lot in his relatively short career. In this episode, he shares the ups and downs of his journey through dentistry, as well as his tips on team building and leadership that will help guide you to a more successful practice.
Key Quotes:
- “Just be the best version of you. Let your patients know, and your team know, that it’s kind of an act that we’re doing, but it’s really important to be the best version of yourself when you’re in the building.”
- “I saw the business of dentistry before I even ever saw dental patients, and that was really eye-opening to me because I knew that there was a way to make the business of dentistry successful at the same time while I was learning how to take care of people.”
- “Anything I could get my hands on or listen to that made me a better person or a better leader, I would try and get it in my system.”
- “Too often in our profession, [leadership] just gets flat out ignored or people deny that leadership is even a job for them.”
- “The grind is exhausting. Always try to take a step back and remember why we’re here, why we’re doing this, so we can take really good care of each other and really good care of our patients, and then it becomes bigger than the grind.”
- “If I were to point to one fault in my career, it’s that I was way too independent and I thought work ethic was the supreme value, and I didn’t rely on resources and friends.”
- “Your dental license is really a golden ticket, and you can choose your own adventure and take it wherever you wish.”
- “Never let a patient see you sweat. Never let your team see you sweat. It’s only going to get them worked up. You are the captain of the ship … and if you’re stressed out and if they know something’s wrong, it’s going to make everything more crazy than it has to be and the results will not be as good as you want them to be.”
- “Nobody has gotten to where they are without help from someone else, and the sooner you can realize that and reach out to people and be willing to accept advice, the quicker you’ll be successful.”
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