Ep 152: The Scariest Things We’ve Seen in Dental Practices

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Dr. John Meis (00:02.569)
Hey everybody, welcome to this episode of The Double Your Production Podcast. I'm Dr. John Meis here with a very scary, scary hockey mask blingy person. Hey Wendy, how you doing?

Wendy Briggs (00:15.438)
That's right. I'm good. Obviously, this is our Halloween episode and we are talking about the scariest things in dentistry. And I had to represent the bling. For those of you that are watching the podcast, I have a very obvious Halloween costume. was laughing because I'm like, it's a hockey mask or it's Jason the serial killer. I'm not going keep it on the whole time. But I, you know, I don't ever want it to be said that I can't participate in the theme.

Way to be in theme. That's awesome. Very good. All right. So we picked out a few of the scary things that we've seen in practices and with dentists and a few things maybe we can help you avoid. So what would you like to start off with, Wendy?

Well, first of all, I got to show some Halloween cuteness because I kind of scared everybody right off the bat, right? One of my favorite things, we'll talk about my favorite Halloween things first and then we'll get into the scary things because these were actually made by a super talented lady who was an office manager, one of the practices that we worked with and she's become a good friend and she makes these absolutely amazing art dolls is what she calls them.
So a little bit of our scary Halloween time decorations. Here's one example. then she makes this scary things, they're not quite as scary. So anyway, now we can properly get into the topic of the Halloween theme.

Very nice. Okay. All right. Very, very cute Halloween stuff. Well done.

There you go. Good job, Dana Engelman. She's a true artist. Anyway, so scary things. We've seen a lot over the years of really scary things, things that we certainly want our listeners to avoid, things that maybe you wouldn't quite believe unless you'd seen them with your own eyes. So not serial killers, not witches, not ghosts, but things that are really happening in dentistry on a daily basis. And they can be quite terrifying if they happen to you.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. So do you have one you want to start off with?

I'll start off with probably some of the things that maybe other people have experienced. The thing that probably threw me for a loop earliest on in my coaching career was when I visited the office of a hoarder. And I visited several of these over the years. And it's fascinating because people that live there, work there every day don't see it. But when you walk in, if you're a patient, to me, I was... shocked and almost speechless for a minute at the state of this practice. And it wasn't the front stage space, the reception area was clean. But as soon as you walked in to go to the back operatories, in this example, the hallways were lined with boxes and supplies and materials and equipment that was broken and no longer in use. And as you walked past, there were several operatories that were full of the same stuff. And the shocking thing was there was a pathway for the patients to walk, but it had become a very narrow pathway. So that was one of the scariest things I saw early on. thought, how do I even address this? Can we have a conversation about it? Because to me, that would be terrifying as a patient to walk into that state of chaos.

Yeah. Yeah. An analogous one is the practice that has 30 year old equipment, and they know they can't get parts for it. So they buy broken ones and they store them just so they can pull the parts off to get more years out. So they'll have an op or two just stacked full of old dental equipment, none of which works. So yeah.

Right? So that was pretty scary. What about you?

All right. Well, I have one from my past, a practice that I was involved with. They had one of those signs where you could put the letters, you squeeze the letters and you put it in the sign. You see them sometimes on like Burger King's and anyway, had. Yeah, right. Right. So marketing slogan on an outdoor sign. And they had a staff meeting and they were throwing out suggestions and some of the suggestions were jokes, but they wrote them down. And then someone used one of the ones that was clearly meant to be a joke and clearly inappropriate. And the slogan they put on the dental office sign was, we do our business in your mouth. No joke. Scary.

Yeah, and it probably wasn't up there very long.

No, it was up there for a very short period of time, but long enough that people got pictures taken long enough that they ended up on being on Jay Leno long enough that it was shown on the Today Show and long enough that they won an international award for the worst business slogan from some company I think in in in Belgium, so

Well, there are those that say no publicity is bad publicity, but that's a pretty scary example of well-intentioned people thinking they were funny that ended up... If it were my practice, I would still have on the website winner of an international award.

Yeah, sure as seen on Jay Leno. Yeah.

Yeah, they don't have to know why it was so long ago. Well, that's great. I've got another one. I've got one example of a practice that had a relatively new hire and the doctor could not figure out why collections was all of a sudden becoming, you know, worse and worse and a bigger problem and a bigger problem, only to find out about nine to 10 months into the employment of this new person that someone in the practice discovered an entire drawer full of insurance checks because this new hire didn't understand how to properly put them in, like putting them in. And so rather than actually entering the payment and accounting for the payment, they just would shove the envelopes in the drawer. And by the time they found it, it had become such a problem. Some of those checks were no longer valid and it created a huge headache. So that's scary as well.

That is scary. Those EOBs are hard to read, I'll have to say, but nonetheless, oh, that one's an ouchie. The next one that I can think of, and these are just places where we've seen practices suffer major losses, and the next one is maybe the category of insurance. And we've seen three, I know of three big, you know, insurance problems. One, the dentist did not have disability insurance and every dentist should have the best disability insurance that you can get because the chances of you having some disability, at least temporary during your career is very, very high. So no disability insurance. And what's one of the other ones that we've seen?

Well, remember a few years ago, we had Dr. Alan Mendez come speak to our summit and he had a tragic accident on the lake on the 4th of July and he lost his leg. He almost lost his life. Thank heavens his teenage son had been an Eagle Scout and knew how to place the tourniquet because that saved his life. And to wake up and think, how am going to practice and support my family and my team when you've just lost a leg? That's tremendous. And again, I'm not certain what his insurance situation was, I know he recovered from that very, very well. But that's an example of something that's really scary that can happen if you aren't protected, right? I think the dentists in his community really stepped up and helped him get through it. But we can think of probably in between 10 and 15 more examples of health issues that became scary. Other insurance challenges were Dr. Ed Hood, again, spoke to our group at our Summit not too long ago about what happened with their flood.

Yeah. Yeah.

And he told the story about how they had business interruption insurance. They had insurance on the building and the contents, but they didn't know that the insurance for the contents of the building wasn't even close to what they needed to replace the content of his building. And after that 1000 year flood in Denham Springs, he had a brand new C rec that had just been delivered the week prior that he still paid on, even though he was never able to use it. So those types of things can become, you know, terrifying to have to figure out how to solve those challenges.

No, absolutely. And when it comes to kind of any insurance, make sure you understand what is covered and what isn't covered. Sometimes agents in the quest to give you the lowest price also give you the worst coverage. And so make sure that you understand what the coverage is and what the coverage isn't. Business interruption insurance is often, often absolutely riddled with ways that the insurance company can wiggle out of pain. And so make sure that you kind of understand what's going on there. All right, so what's another one?

Gosh, I think I showed one of these videos in one of our lectures a couple years ago, but the next one I think needs to be providers doing dumb things, right? And I'm not, I shouldn't say just providers, team members doing dumb things. The example I'm thinking of is the one doctor that thought it would be funny to film himself riding on a hoverboard from treatment room to treatment room and actually providing care to patients on the hoverboard. I think he was sued. think he possibly even lost his license.

He did lose his license, yep. So that was in Alaska, yeah.

Yeah, terrifying. Other things, know, even just pranks or silly videos, even though we're trying to be funny, we have to be mindful that we are healthcare providers. And so we have to think before we do things. I think there's a video series called Dumb Ways to Die or something like that. And I've seen a few videos that could possibly be featured on that show.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

There was one where the assistants thought it would be funny to take the, assisting chairs and have a race in the alley behind the practice. And they strapped these assistant chairs to the back of a car. and they're being pulled, you know, racing through this alleyway. And of course the chairs swing in and could be easily, you know, taken under the wheels of that car. So, you know, dumb ways to die could also have a dental version if we wanted to.

Absolutely. And so I guess the lesson there is social media, if you're going to do TikToks and things like that, remember you're trying to improve the public's opinion of the practice, right? You're not going to want to be doing stupid things or dangerous things because it makes the practice look worse. It may get lots of views, but you really want a lot of views on something that doesn't make that makes you look less professional. Yeah, for sure.

There was actually a video series not too long ago that was a doctor telling, basically saying things that doctors think but don't say. And it was like 10 just horrible, horrible things. And it was on like the practice's account. So it was patient facing. It wasn't just one dentist to another. And that can be really, really damaging.

Yeah. Yep. You and I, Wendy, both follow a guy on Facebook, and I'm not going to say his name, but when he gets a patient complaint on Facebook or Google or anything, then he writes responses that are incredibly inflammatory. And it's quite amusing, but I'm not sure it reflects well on the practice. I mean, they're funny for us to read and to share, but not exactly a practice builder, I'm sure.

Yeah, yeah.

Some of the other ones are good friend David Harris at ProsperiDent. He has worked with our clients multiple times. He is the world's expert on dental embezzlement. And we have clients that have been embezzled in the millions of dollars. And so that is something definitely to be scared of. And the scary thing about this, as he describes it, is that often the person that is embezzling is your most trusted person. It's the person that you feel most comfortable with, that you rely on the most and trust the most. And it's a really hurtful and damaging thing when you have that experience.

Yeah, I would say in that same category, we had one of our members share a story at a retreat not too long ago about how his payment processor, a third party payment processor was hacked and they were able to access bank account information. So another scary thing in today's world is making sure that you are on top of your financials. The team was so, he was so fortunate that his team caught it day one.

Yeah.

And they were able to recover most of those funds because he had signed a contract, but not with this third party company. And they were the ones that had had the security breach. So that's just something else that's terrifying to watch out for. know, when you're signing contracts for payment processes or payers or, or any accounts that you work with in that regard, make sure that you read the fine print. Although we all hate reading the fine print, you've got to do that. You already mentioned that with insurance, you know, it's really important that we understand what we're signing to what we're agreeing to and who else can access our information because there are people out there that are trying to make the easy buck and they do it by stealing money from you. So we've got to be careful on that as well.

So another thing that I see people doing that's very, scary is not understanding the profitability of their business, not being able to read financial statements, not being able to make the adjustments on financial statements to find the true business profitability. And when that happens, practices can operate at a significant loss for periods of time. We had one client that went through our Executive GPS program. Brilliant lady, great dentist, great leader, but wasn't following the finances. And she owned this beautiful practice and was, you know, in many ways killing it on the revenue side. But the expense side had gotten so out of whack, she would have been making more if she was working for a DSO as an associate. And so you know, really understanding that now and when you're a single location, you know, there's enough safety and fudge factor that you're, you you might be making bad decisions, but you're not going to, it's not going to take you down.

But you get two or three locations and you don't know that. You get three locations and one of them is closed unexpectedly for a fire or a flood. And the number two practice doesn't perform as well. All of a sudden you can't make all of your obligations. And I've seen practices go under and go into receivership in that kind of situation. So that's scary stuff to me.

Absolutely. I would say as well, Dr. John, the profitability formula, the challenge that we're seeing in today's world that can be scary is the higher increased costs, the increased wages in some markets are threatening even long time well established practices. So I agree. think the profitability of your practice can be scary. And there are some people that would prefer not to look at it because again, that's why it can be scary.

Yeah, great.

And we just had a conversation not too long ago with a group that was doing $10 million in revenue every year, but their costs were $10 million every year. so, yeah, so that becomes terrifying as a long-term proposition. And I can't tell you over the years how many doctors, great doctors will reach out to us and say, "We can't afford to retire because I wasn't looking at what I needed to look at."

No, it's not unusual.

So in those circumstances, the non-scary part is that they recognize that they needed some support and some help. And the good thing is often for many of those people that there is a happy ending at the end of that scary moment. So, aligning yourself and getting in touch with people that can help you escape that scary situation is important too.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah, all right. So this one is kind of a strange one, but this happened in one of the practices that I was managing at one time. The doctor had a mental health challenge and threatened to kill the team, texted them and email them death threats. So...

Yeah, that's terrifying.

And yeah, it is terrifying. And a maybe less terrifying, but still challenging, situation was one of our clients recently had a doctor who got into an online spat of a political nature after a really horrific event happened. And it was so bad. His response was so disturbing that he actually lost his job because of it. And the practice lost a lot of goodwill.

Yeah, and that's unfortunate because sometimes we allow tempers to rule the day or we can make questionable decisions. And we think that there's a level of anonymity online, but people are really good at figuring out who people are. And I think certainly I'm not a fan of the cancel culture or the mob mentality that can permeate, but it is a reality. We've seen other questionable decisions. We've had doctors reach out whose hygienists showed up to work drunk. We've had doctors that struggled with substance abuse. There are all kinds of questionable, scary situations that can spiral out of control. We've seen horrific crimes happen in dental practices where patients that were disgruntled is probably not the best word, but violent patients that returned and caused harm.

Yes. Yes.

to practices. So, you know, there can be really scary situations in the world today that that permeate and trickle down. And so, you know, part of the things that we talk about, we talk about a lot is is how to handle crucial conversations, how to how to care for your own mental state in such a way that that you're not in that downward spiral of negativity. And if you are having anxiety or stress or fear, please reach out because we know all too well, we see great dentists, great people think that there is no way out and end things in a horrible way as well. So that's something that's really important for people to be aware of. Take care of yourself.

So we know there's all these scary things that can happen in practice. And so just as a Halloween episode, we thought it'd be fun to walk through some of them. And so if any of these things are happening, you're concerned about it, check into it. Let us know. We can help you figure out where you are. We can help you figure out between the things that we help practices with and the many, contacts we have. There aren't any problems in dentistry that haven't been solved by somebody at some time. So it's just a matter of getting in the right room with the right people and that's what we love to do.

Absolutely, and if you recognize that maybe you're not as protected in some of these areas, whether that's insurance or any of these other areas, certainly take a good look, take a step back, take a good look at what guardrails you may need to erect in your practice, in your organization, in your lives so that these scary things don't happen to you.

That's it. All right, everybody, that's it for this episode of The Double Your Production Podcast. We'll be happy to see you next time.

with a less scary topic. Take care, everybody. Bye-bye.

That's for sure. Thanks everybody.

Ep 152: The Scariest Things We’ve Seen in Dental Practices

Ep 152: The Scariest Things We’ve Seen in Dental Practices

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