Dr. Edwards (00:00):
The younger dentists today may be in that mindset where they can plug it into AI and everything's going to work and they're going to have all these agent employees doing all their phones and everything else, which I'm an AI believer, but I think that the School of Hard Knocks has told me that real life doesn't really work that way. It's about the energy you put into people and growing people around you and building their skill sets both personally and professionally.

Dr. Souyias (00:34):
Thanks for listening to The Special Lists presented by Referral Lab, the podcast for dentists and dental specialists.

Dr. Souyias (00:43):
Good evening and welcome to another episode of The Special Lists. I am your co-host, Dr. Jason Souyias, and I'm here with my other co-host, Dr. Cameron Full.

Cameron Full (00:53):
Yes.

Dr. Souyias (00:54):
And Dr. Michael Sada.

Dr. Seda (00:56):
Still here, my brother.

Dr. Souyias (00:57):
Not microwaving any steaks this time.

Dr. Seda (00:59):
No. We'll allude to that later in the end.

Dr. Souyias (01:03):
We'll allude to that later on.

Cameron Full (01:04):
That was a really good one though, man.

Dr. Souyias (01:06):
That was a good episode. That was a good Seda-ism.

Cameron Full (01:09):
It was a good Seda-ism.

Dr. Souyias (01:11):
It is. It was a great Seda-ism. I'm glad. It's going to be the sound blurb from that last episode.

Dr. Seda (01:16):
It's going to be on my gravestone.

Dr. Souyias (01:19):
Well, tonight's guest, we are pleased to have Dr. Michael Edwards coming to us from Indiana.

Dr. Edwards (01:25):
Hello all. Thank you.

Dr. Souyias (01:26):
Welcome. Glad to have you on the show. Thanks for being on with us.

Dr. Edwards (01:31):
Thank you very much. I'm excited to be here.

Dr. Souyias (01:34):
So Michael has spent much of his career working at the chair, but he's also had to learn how to build an organization that does not depend on him being involved in every decision. That transition has probably taught him about leadership as dentistry and leadership in dentistry has. And the hard part, realizing the way you naturally work is not automatically the right way for everyone else. So it sounds like some school of hard knocks lessons that Michael has brought up. He is a diplomate of the American Board of Periodontology and founder of Implant Dentistry and Periodontics in Fishers, Indiana. Been at that since 2006. And he got his dental degree from the Indiana University School of Dentistry in 2001, and also did his perio there right after dental school. And not only that, this guy has to call the three of us friends somehow. It's nice to have you on with us, Michael. So thanks for being here.

Dr. Edwards (02:39):
It's a pleasure. Thank you guys. Yes, I'm an Indiana guy and have spent most of my career in the chair working hard and just like all of us. And then my wife's a dentist, as you guys know. And that combination, I guess she's a pediatric dentist, and that combination basically pulled me into doing a lot more management than I anticipated when I started my career. It's been, as you said bluntly, a school of hard knocks, right? You take a few gut punches and things like that, but it all kind of goes with it. And I guess my message, when I look back at what I can learn from myself today is that sometimes the dentist is in the way. The bottleneck becomes the dentist and you. And it's really difficult to see that when you're in the midst of it. And I'm sure many of you guys can relate where you're seeing patients and you're just going through your day and then you're having a quick minute in your office and you've got people filing in that have been waiting for you and they need decisions on this, that, and none of it's really clinical related.

(04:16):
It's all management. And so it just got to be a lot. When I was younger, I felt like the mad scientist in Back to the Future movies, where he's running around, his hair's all crazy.

Dr. Seda (04:38):
Doc Brown.

Dr. Souyias (04:40):
Doc Brown, that's right.

Dr. Edwards (04:41):
Yes. Doc Brown. So I felt like Doc Brown just running around and I'm spewing up -

Dr. Seda (04:47):
1.21 gigawatts.

Dr. Edwards (04:49):
And no one understands what I'm talking about. And so that got kind of exhausting and I felt like it was not really how I wanted to lead. And so it was after going through a lot of that where I shifted my mentality. I understood that this can't go on. I actually listened to a lot of feedback from my team. I asked for the feedback, I received it and I tried to internalize it and work on myself. And it helped me learn how to delegate and understand that delegation, it's not an abandonment of the tasks. It's really just a change of ownership.

Dr. Seda (05:46):
Well said.

Dr. Edwards (05:47):
I was able to start to master some of those skills. I read up on all the business books and talked to guys like you that are running successful offices and doing amazing things. And so I really started to focus on what is my time worth and how am I using it? Am I maximizing my time? Are there things I'm doing legally, I have to do certain things? And then there's a lot of other things that legally I really didn't have to do, but I couldn't give up the control. I was just a dentist that likes control. And so I always -

Dr. Seda (06:38):
I have no idea what you're talking about.

Dr. Souyias (06:43):
You know what? I think one of the most poignant things you said in there too is when you're the bottleneck, you don't see it.

Dr. Seda (06:48):
Yes.

Dr. Souyias (06:50):
And I think that happens to so many of us. And I've said this before in other episodes that one of the best things that happened to me were my big screw ups early on in my career that changed my mindset of I always look first at how I'm probably the problem. I'm probably the problem when things aren't going right in my office. And by looking at it through that mindset, man, I think it really changes the offices that we're able to run.

Dr. Seda (07:22):
Yeah. Well said.

Dr. Souyias (07:25):
So that's such a thing that when you're stuck in the middle of that, you don't always see it. And dentists are notorious. We like control over things. We don't like to give up things. We're doers. We don't want to... So what made you realize, Michael, that when you had to like, "Okay, I got to give some of this stuff up."

Dr. Edwards (07:51):
What made me realize it was when I was getting feedback that my tone was not good with my team, that my ways of communicating, I was so distracted all the time that I never seemed undistracted. When I was with patients, I seemed distracted. And when I was with my team members, I seemed distracted. And my communication style was so direct and short because I was always rushed to get to the next thing and conquer the next mountain. And I didn't really understand that you had to slow down to speed up. And it's true. I do feel like slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

Dr. Souyias (08:48):
We've been watching the same TV shows.

Dr. Edwards (08:50):
Yeah. I mean, someone said that to me and I was like, "That makes so much sense." Because especially in surgery when you're doing that and you're not rushing through, but you're just on point and you feel like it's just going. And so I didn't feel like anything in my life at that point was really smooth. It was very disjointed and my communication wasn't effective. And so I listened to the feedback and actually I started to meditate every morning and just I learned how to -

Cameron Full (09:31):
Your skin regiment looks great.

Dr. Seda (09:33):
You started to moisturize.

Dr. Edwards (09:35):
Yeah. I started to moisturize. I worked out. I did all the things to just try to take better care of myself and learn how to calm my mind.

Cameron Full (09:48):
Your office is pretty feng shui behind you there.

Dr. Edwards (09:51):
Yeah, it was impactful. It was impactful because I regained a lot of respect with my team and they saw the changes that happened to me and they were grateful that I was working on myself. And I think I inspired a lot of them to get better because we had a shared vision that we were all working towards. And then it really just became about, okay, we're here and things are going well, but the systems gaps became a bigger problem. What I could find was I could be Doc Brown at two offices. I could be Doc Brown at three offices and still keep it all together and do a lot of my stuff and still have this perception that I was able to handle everything. And then I realized that, I mean, we wanted to grow at the time. My team wanted to grow and I wanted to grow and we started taking on more.

(11:01):
And then the systems started breaking. The old systems weren't working for four or five offices. It was a lot of chaos. My leadership was kind of this more authoritarian leadership because it was just, I said something and it happened, it was go and I didn't have to be super organized with the... It could be essentially reactive. And so I lived like that for a while.

Cameron Full (11:38):
Clinical communication style. And that's the thing is at some point you had to speak to the organization, not just the clinical team.

Dr. Edwards (11:47):
Exactly.

Cameron Full (11:48):
And you were making it work just by leading clinically, that's appointed and operator. And at some point along the way, when you started adding more and more people to the mix, not everybody's a clinician, right? You have to start to talk to them differently.

Dr. Edwards (12:05):
Not everybody's a clinician. And it was really easy to run my clinical team, but it was much more difficult when I'm talking to the admin team at the Pedo office and they speak a different language. I mean, it's an entirely different language.

Cameron Full (12:28):
For those listeners out there, tell us a little bit about your practice group real quick so they have some frame of reference.

Dr. Edwards (12:36):
So my practice is... So I'm a periodontist by training and my wife's a pediatric dentist. And so essentially what we've done is she doesn't like to manage and do a lot of that. She's a clinician and a mom essentially. And so as we grew and her practices grew, Pedo can grow relatively fast because it's less referral base. So I started doing the management for everything and we started building these systems that would work in perio, and then I would try to combine them with hers and they would not necessarily work. And I quickly learned that these are not really universal systems that are more specific to the vertical. And so once we started getting that down and then my cousin graduated and I partnered with her on an office and we started an ortho office recently. So we have a lot of complexity, if you will. It's all dentistry and it sounds like it's all dentistry, but it's not because there's a lot of different nuances in each of those specialties.

(14:02):
And so that's why I was, in a way, forced to become very acute at understanding the gaps in these systems and understanding what was working and how to manage through the specifics of each, and yet also tie that into one big shared goal as an organization to keep our whole organization together and moving so that systems like HR, revenue cycle, those types of systems really could be universal to some degree. And so what I learned is it's really the clarity, having the clarity of the systems and actually a written out SOP. I mean, it sounds generic and everyone says it, but if there's -

Cameron Full (15:07):
But there's also a difference, Mike, before you roll into this, there's a significant difference between organizations that take the time to document and organizations that then actually live by the documentation. So in a roundabout way, we're saying training.

Dr. Edwards (15:26):
Exactly.

Cameron Full (15:26):
Actually training is the better word for it. To train, you need some standard operating, right? So that's the regiment by which you train by. Otherwise, it's just, "Hey, shadow me, follow me. Watch what I do." Oh, this is when you throw it in the oven. And when it dings, it works. It's done. Well, why? I don't know. That's what the guy showed me before. I have a little bit of haterade there for some of the AI stuff on that stuff because I just think it's made the access to those things so easy. Did you read it? Now here you go, here's 50 pages. What do you think? I don't know. You took three seconds to do it. But when you get an org of your size, it's like, okay, we have to have some of this stuff in place if we want to have any consistency across our organization.

Dr. Seda (16:14):
Edwards, how do you keep people accountable to the systems, as Cameron's saying? Because it's funny, we've been working on the SOPs in my office and my pain point has been not doing the SOPs and writing them out as Cameron said, but now you've got them in place and you've got to actually follow them and have ways of measuring when you're actually not following them.

Cameron Full (16:39):
Everything goes back to accountability. Whether you got the best AI product in your back pocket or not, you still got to manage the individual doing the thing.

Dr. Seda (16:48):
Yes.

Cameron Full (16:49):
And that's where, again, before we had excuses and the excuses before... I'm sorry, Edwards, we're hijacking your time. Before we had excuses and the excuse was, if we only documented this, then we'd know what to do. Well now, okay, that shit's out the window because I got a $20 cloud subscription and we're going to work on this this weekend because my wife's out of town. Bingo, bango. I've got every SOP in the book. Yo, doctor, still got to hold them accountable. And when you're doing well enough, the accountability costs you an employee and six months more of training somebody. And it's like, oh man, she's annoying or he's annoying, but is it really worth that time saves? You know what I mean? Yes. That's what it all falls back onto, especially when you turn 50, Seda. Especially when you turn 50, it's like the pain of not turning 50, the pain of that new training, of that six month is much greater at this point.

Dr. Souyias (17:50):
Than dealing with someone who's not following the SOP ideally.

Cameron Full (17:55):
I mean, they pull it out a little bit early. Is it really worth it?

Dr. Souyias (18:00):
With hygiene, we're afraid to hold hygienists accountable to what we want because we all feel like we can't find another one.

Cameron Full (18:07):
There's a whole department for this in corporate. It's called HR. There's a whole department for holding people accountable when executives don't want to hold people accountable.

Dr. Edwards (18:16):
So I think you hit a few things.

Cameron Full (18:19):
Fired up about this shit, Edwards.

Dr. Edwards (18:20):
To answer your question, Seda. I would say you got to have the transparency. You got to make sure that if there's an issue that you need to hold people accountable to, to Sirius's point, I always look to myself first, are we making this clear for people? Because they didn't do it for some reason. And probably the reason is, is it clear? And that's my baseline. So all this stuff has to be transparent so it's findable. And then you have to be disciplined enough that you coach back to it all of the time.

(19:03):
And so that's the key is you have to be disciplined enough to coach back to it. And what is easy is for you to do that in your office. What is difficult is to build a culture that you have leaders in every office buying into the discipline of coaching people back to the SOPs routinely every day. So basically I would say transparency and just the discipline of coaching back is the key. And the way I coach people is not the same. So there's a big communication adjustment that has to happen depending on who I'm working with.

Dr. Souyias (19:56):
Before you get into that, explain what coach back to the SOP means to our listeners.

Dr. Edwards (20:02):
Let's say that we're in a exam situation and the handoffs were just botched. This is a common scenario where the handoff to the doctor was botched, the doctor handoff to the treatment coordinator was botched, and it just didn't go well. So when I talk about coaching, I'm talking about then we sit down and we visualize together. So I would ask a question like, why don't we just walk through that exam and imagine what it would be like if the doctor came in the room and the assistant had already raved about the doctor and already explained what their training was and what all he has going on with the situation, how many cases he's done similar to theirs. And then the exam went through and what would it have been like if the doctor teed up the treatment coordinator with creating that urgency of what was going on, doing a clear, concise explanation of the recommendations and then handed off all the expertise of the benefit conversations and the financial options and all the expertise of the financial coordinator.

(21:42):
So that's what you first have to do is create the ideal so that the team members understand the expectations. They can impregnate that ideal process in their mind and then you go, "Okay, well, you guys understand that? Wouldn't that have been great?" And then you kind of reel back to, "Well, what really happened? Help me understand." So now I'm at the point where I'm listening to learn and I'm asking to empower. Okay? So now I'm listening for... And they're explaining in their own words what happened? "Oh, I came in and didn't say anything. I just was checking on my phone while you walked in the room or whatever. And then the doctor botched it. He just said," She'll take care of you, "and walked out and stuff like that. So then they understand what the real was. So you create the ideal and then you create the real and you talk through that.

Dr. Souyias (22:54):
Discuss the differences.

Dr. Edwards (22:55):
And then you have to work on the gap.

Dr. Seda (23:00):
Souyias, is that what you do in your office?

Dr. Edwards (23:02):
It is. Yeah.

Dr. Seda (23:03):
Jason, can you hear me?

Dr. Souyias (23:07):
Yeah. Sorry.

Cameron Full (23:11):
What was that?

Dr. Souyias (23:12):
I don't know. I was messing with my hair because it looked like it was sticking up like a rooster tail. Anyway, sorry, I couldn't answer because I was so enthralled by the rooster hair sticking up. Yes. I like exactly what Edward says is that we've got the ideal that we try to strive for, and when we don't hit it, we kind of figure out the delta, like what went wrong and what could we have done different to get more ideal in that situation? We have a monthly meeting in our treatment coordinators meeting where we talk about that and we share those experiences as a whole. Both doctors and all the treatment coordinators and all the financial coordinators tell stories from the past month of where did we do exceptionally well at meeting our standard and where were there spots where we missed and what could we have done different to hit those spots better?

Cameron Full (24:06):
Yeah. Edwards has a pretty sizable team. He's got a number of practices, right? Jason, you've got a pretty sizable team.

Dr. Souyias (24:19):
But one practice.

Cameron Full (24:20):
Yeah. But for the average, the reality is this is hard to do if you've got a regular size team. The commitment that you have to make, you maybe have two administrative team members, you've got what, two or three assistants, you've got a hygienist. That's your team, man. That's it. It's small business. And yet oftentimes because I think of the level of education and the groups that everyone surrounds themselves in, I think there's this expectation that you should be managing your practice at a much higher level. And I think there's that difficulty that's there saying, "Man, I'm not doing enough. I don't have time to do all these meetings. I don't have time to do all this coaching. I'm just trying to do surgery or my schedule's slammed and I've got kids at home." And it takes time, just like Edward said, "It takes time and the reward for that is not something that happens overnight.

(25:29):
That is like a commitment that you have to make to this type of, I'm not going to say system, but the management of your team.

Dr. Souyias (25:36):
Yeah.

Cameron Full (25:37):
It's the management of your team. And I think what's interesting about this is this takes away from heroes, right? So this drives directly into one of his points. And that is when you don't have systems, you're not coaching people to work as a team, you're depending upon - Superstars. Individual high performers to keep your practice afloat at different individual positions. And that just sets you up for disasters later down the road, which all you guys have experienced. I've experienced in my own business experiences when you're not managing, you're not coaching, you hire, you pray to God that you hire the right person over and over again and you're like," Oh man, I can't lose them. I can't lose them. I can't lose them. I can't lose them. "Your experience leading Michael shows with how you talk about this stuff because it shows that you've made mistakes.

Dr. Seda (26:37):
Over the years for me, one of the biggest influences on how I approach this in my practice is Edwards. And I remember 10 years ago hearing him talk about these different systems that he's using and different books and leadership styles that he's learning about. And ultimately, I think it comes down to exactly what we're talking about, which is two things. And these are things that you've got to really lead from the top with. The first is the systems as we're talking about, right? As Cameron said, if you've got the path laid out for everyone, it's easier for them to walk down it to the place you want to go. And the second thing is not rushing, not hurrying or trying to be fast for the sake of being fast, but working with a sense of urgency. And that may not look fast to the patients or to everyone around you, but each person should be operating with a sense of urgency to make sure things are done on time, sense of urgency to make sure that they're done with excellence.And when you combine those two things, that's when things start to really hit on all cylinders and feel really good. Yeah. So systems are super key and keeping people to task in terms of following them is an art form. I think we've hit it pretty well here.

Cameron Full (28:03):
But I think Seda, I think you have to hit your temperature has to rise to the point where you're so tired of all of the individual management that you're ready to commit to just the system of management itself. I've had enough individual performers not meeting my expectations over and over again. And so you know what? I'm willing to get rid of that. I'm over it and now we're going to hold individuals accountable to doing their jobs. And because what will happen is that there's going to be a period where there's some upheaval, and that's what people don't want to get through. And then there's a period where the cream rises to the top. And you know who wants to be held accountable? High performers.

Dr. Seda (28:50):
The people that are doing their job and doing it well.

Cameron Full (28:53):
They want to be acknowledged for their work. They want to work in places where others are acknowledged for their work and the practice of business gets better because you then attract the right people too.

Dr. Edwards (29:06):
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you get exposed when those under performers leave and you realize that they just kind of kept everything in their little world and didn't share it. And that's where you're vulnerable. And I just recognized that early and tried to pick out. Well, that would always happen and there would be a big gap to fill. And then I'd ask my team, who wants to fill it? And most of the time I was tapped out and lo and behold, people would raise their hand and somebody would. And -

Cameron Full (29:55):
The person that already has too much shit to do is the one raising their hand to help you with more stuff.

Dr. Edwards (30:00):
Yeah. I mean, that's true. I mean, a lot of these people had full backpacks. So what eventually happened is those people were the ones that became really... Now I have two teams. I have my clinical team that I work with daily, and then I have the executive team. And the executive team is really the ones that have been with me the longest or that I've spent the most amount of time on how do you coach someone? How can we build a culture here where accountability matters? And some of the team members are better at certain things than others. So we rotate a lot. So I'll have the executive team rotate through the different offices and have special meetings. And those team members, most of them have been with me for 15 plus years at this point. And they didn't start out that way. They kind of went along with the school of hard knocks like I did.

(31:21):
So a lot of them didn't have a formal education, but they had an education. I think you need the three Es, you need the education, you need the experience, and you need the emotional intelligence. And if you get those three E's, then I think you can be really successful. And so I've worked with different kinds of personalities on our executive team. We all go at it, but we are very real with each other. And I think that matters too, because they know that they don't have to necessarily impress me to get a promotion or something like this. It's not fake at all. It's so real that it's uncomfortable for everybody at times. And I think you have to get to that vulnerability standpoint with your team where they are willing to go out and work for the same goals that you have and do it in the spirit of how you would do it.

(32:37):
Having a structured communication process with your team also has been a total evolution from where I started. So I do think that trying to promote your people from within, like you were saying, Cameron, rather than just plug in a hole when someone quits and just plug a hole and keep plugging a hole and I'm wondering why no one likes that job or it just never seems to work. I've done that and that can be frustrating too.

Cameron Full (33:19):
I absolutely love that particular comment. When practices, oftentimes just through the experience of having a pretty wide range of visibility, when you have practices that have a lot of really tenured team members, so you have three or four administrative team members and those three or four administrative team members, or even clinically too, but I speak more so towards the administrative team, those three or four tenured team members have been there for five, six, seven, 10, 12, 15 years, whatever. And then you got that one that just constantly spins out. And it's like, well, you know why, right? It's because those people keep dumping on that person everything they don't want to do because they have all the authority in the practice, all of it. They've got it all. And so it's like, man, maybe we should look at what's happened there, who's responsible for what?

(34:15):
Let's look at our SOPs there, whether they're written or not. Because listen, let's be real. If you don't have a written SOP, there's SOPs in the practice. It's just, we don't have any documentation of what they are. And they may change at a whim when the new person gets hired for the 55th time. But there is a regiment there that exists in the space. It's just not your regiment. It's not one that you can commit to. And so Jason and I were just talking about this other day. We had a friend that spun out this front desk, front office team member, I don't know, three or four times over a three or four year period and had a pretty established front office team. Otherwise it's like, well, it's because they're doing a whole bunch of the shit that the other people don't want to do.

(34:57):
There's no wonder that they're not staying. They're taking out the garbage every day. How do we distribute that work?

Dr. Souyias (35:04):
Number four, lead people who are not like you.

Dr. Edwards (35:08):
So yeah, I guess that goes back to some of this that we've covered. I'm a clinician and so when speaking to admin team members, it's different. You have to change the way you speak. And you guys have done all of these tests and the disc profiles and the different ones that have personality tests. And I do think there is something to that. I really do. But at the end of the day, modifying yourself is really the best thing that you, that's the only thing you can control. And so when having to lead people who don't speak my language, I have to learn the languages. And so it's about finding common ground and being clear, being intentional about what your goals are and just trying to get buy-in.

Cameron Full (36:36):
I think that's the gift of having a larger organization though, Mike, is the ability to have a greater pool of individuals to communicate with. Again, when you're building your business or your practice or whatever, you can hire everyone like you. And the gift of that, especially if you're a high performer, is all type A. My front office team, man, they crank. I got these two assistants. They know what the fuck they're doing. And this hygienist, we are through it. But the reality is that the second you hire in someone else that's not running at that clip, you just eject them and eject them and eject them, eject them. And really it's not a managed engagement. It's all self-managed, which there's some beauty to self-management in that regard. But I think also too, at some point you get to this critical mass where it's impossible to continue to have all the same type of individual in your practice, which therefore, again, takes us back to square one and just how are we managing the teams that we're engaging with?

(37:45):
And what you find is that when you get to a bigger team, it's actually more powerful to have the different engagements on that executive team because you know what? You may be the best at some things, but you're not the best at all things at all.

Dr. Souyias (38:02):
Yeah. We use the Clifton Strength Finder and celebrate our differences a little bit. Sometimes for example, we might get frustrated with somebody. If we're a really quick starter person, we might be frustrated with somebody who takes a long time and does things really slowly, but yet if you made me make the insurance calls, I'd lose my freaking mind. So there's strengths in those differences, like what you're saying, because there's different jobs to be done in the office. There's different roles that need to be fulfilled. If we were all the same, we would struggle because we'd all want to not do the same stuff.

Dr. Edwards (38:43):
Absolutely. And Cameron, you're right. When you point that out, when I look at some of the team members that are in these different roles that they are, and they've developed to be amazing at their positions. The girl that was answering the phone at 19 for Michelle's startup pedo office is now an expert in Medicaid and understanding all the coding and the RCM and the whole money cycle in dentistry. I mean, she's like a wizard at it. And my treatment, what started out as kind of the same position in my perio office developed these... I mean, she's amazing. She can coach better than I can. She just relates to all the team members and she's evolved to be the head of our HR. And now when I'm in a room with those guys, I mean, I just shut up and listen a lot because they're the ones that they know.

(40:11):
They know a lot more than I do about many aspects of clinical and nonclinical dentistry happening all around me.

Dr. Seda (40:23):
I think what you're talking about is such a gift, right? It's people that you've grown with over years and learned with, and now everyone knows their role and how to contribute and what it takes to adjust course when things don't go perfectly. And all that pressure doesn't reside on the doctor. And to bring it back full circle to what we started talking about in the beginning, which is learning to delegate, right? It's like this self-fulfilling loop. It's hard to relinquish control of things and give it up, but when you finally do, people grow and expand and then they take more and it takes even less from you to have to get the job done. And so it's just such an important thing. And for those of us that are kind of midway, let's say through their careers, whatever, the first few years you may not have that luxury, right?

(41:19):
You've got a smaller team, you have less knowledge. So I guess the messaging here is invest in those that you bring on to start with you and empower them to learn and grow and give them control of things to help you become bigger than what you could on your own.

Dr. Souyias (41:41):
But it's also important to realize sometimes the demands of the office change. The analogy, Cameron and I, we use this a lot when we're talking to people is there's booster rockets and those fall off the rocket for a reason. And so what you needed in one stage of your practice growth and development might not always be what you need to carry you through to the next level. I agree with you. I love investing in my team, don't get me wrong, but understand that sometimes the needs of the practice do change. And as you lose people that can't keep up, that doesn't negate the work they did in the first stage and what they got you. So you needed them at a particular point in your career, but now your practice has grown and surpassed that and we need to move to the next level. And often we see that it's like people who thrive in that small group environment don't always thrive as the practice grows to a higher, more systematic approach and less individual attention from the leader of the practice.

(42:54):
Those are the things that we've seen when we've talked to some of our friends about this.

Dr. Edwards (43:00):
Love it. Absolutely. I mean, and if you're lucky enough, you'll have some that will wear many hats. And so when we hire, that's in fact, one of my most important things when looking to recruit. They have to have emotional intelligence, number one. If they don't, it's just not going to work. And then people that are rigid and don't have a growth mindset, if they have a very fixed mindset, it's not going to work. I've just seen it time and time again, at least with our culture. And so they're just going to be, to your point, a rocket booster. They will last and they will help, but eventually they will fall off. What we are trying to do right now anyway is just be so mindful and so good at our onboarding and hiring process that I don't want any more boosters. I want people that will eventually be leading this whole thing.

Cameron Full (44:19):
No more boosters.

Dr. Edwards (44:24):
I mean, unless there's a specific job that we're just trying to fill, like a sterilization tech or something like that, that might be different. That's a different role. But

Dr. Souyias (44:35):
It's not your management team.

Cameron Full (44:37):
But

Dr. Edwards (44:39):
We're always looking for the gem.

Cameron Full (44:41):
But Michael, man, that's a tough thing to say. No more boosters.

Dr. Edwards (44:49):
Well,

Cameron Full (44:50):
I know that you're committed to your executive team, but what you're really saying is I'm closing myself off to the idea that there's better people to support me in a different way. There's different people to support me in a better way. You know what I mean? I mean, it's a tough thing to think about. As you grow your org.

Dr. Edwards (45:10):
Yeah. I guess I'm not really looking at it like that. I'm looking at it like -

Dr. Souyias (45:17):
You want people in it for the long run.

Dr. Edwards (45:19):
I'm looking for people that are going to work in the long run.

Cameron Full (45:22):
Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. I was saying, okay, I misunderstood you.

Dr. Edwards (45:27):
I'm not really interested in transitional hires.

Cameron Full (45:31):
Got it.

Dr. Edwards (45:31):
I'm looking for people that are going to be looking to grow with us because I know that they might start out as a sterilization tech or as someone else, but they have the emotional intelligence and they have the flexibility and that growth mindset. The rest, I can get all the rest figured out. But if they don't come in with that, then they will fall off. So that's what I meant by that.

Cameron Full (46:07):
Got it. Got it, got it, got it. I was like, he doesn't want to hire anybody. What do you know?

Dr. Edwards (46:11):
Which I thought was your point, right, Souyias?

Dr. Souyias (46:16):
Right. To some degree. I was just saying that, so again, early on in our organizations, all four of us that have businesses and businesses that we've run in the past and businesses we have today, we've gone through growth stages. And sometimes in the past, we didn't know what we know today. I mean, I didn't always know my organization was going to end up where it's at today. And I had some great people that did fall off a long way, that doesn't negate the job that they did.

Cameron Full (46:53):
Absolutely.

Dr. Souyias (46:54):
It doesn't say that they weren't important to the role they play. They were very important to the role they played in getting us to where we're at.

Cameron Full (47:00):
And it doesn't mean they're a bad person either.

Dr. Souyias (47:02):
It doesn't mean they're a bad person. It's just that we needed them the way we needed them. What we were talking about, high performers. I'm way more team and systems mindset today than I am high perform. I don't want things that depend on just one person. I don't want single point failure problems. I want systems that if someone doesn't show up today, we can still get around the fact that they're not here. Where at times in the past, we've had those individuals that they had all the information, they had all the knowledge and no one else did. And again, that was my fault that the organization was like that in the past because I didn't know any better back then. But moving forward, and again, those people did great work. What?

Cameron Full (47:53):
Or you were small and figuring that out.

Dr. Souyias (47:57):
Yep.

Cameron Full (47:57):
But at some point there's this transition point. Mike, when was that transition point for you and ADN or you and the Perio, when was that transition point that you... And if you can't identify, that's fine, but there must have been a point where you were like, "You know what? I'm not going to continue to operate this way."

Dr. Edwards (48:19):
Yeah. It was when I was just a wreck. I don't know if I was really a wreck, but I was relative to where I'm at now, looking back, I was a wreck. I wasn't devoting the time I needed to anything in a real intentional way. I was just trying to do everything but half ass it, if you will, just so we could get through it. And so it was probably 10 years ago at least, where I realized that if we're going to grow, I have to get all of this stuff really figured out deeply, not just an AI slop plan. You know what I mean?

Cameron Full (49:22):
Yep. Yep.

Dr. Edwards (49:23):
And so I think that the younger dentists today may be in that mindset where they can plug it into AI and everything's going to work and they're going to have all these agent employees doing all their phones and everything else, which I'm an AI believer, but I think that the School of Hard Knocks has told me that real life doesn't really work that way. It's about the energy you put into people and growing people around you and building their skill sets both personally and professionally so that they can show up and do what they need to do every day too.

Cameron Full (50:08):
And what's an interesting thing about... First of all, you nailed that. Absolutely nailed it.

Dr. Seda (50:13):
Totally.

Cameron Full (50:14):
And what's interesting is if you look at some of the latest projections, they're talking 12% unemployment in 2030. And so you're going to have a pick. The organizations that are well run are going to have a pick of people to bring in. And so why not now? You've got five years to figure this out. Why not now? Get your practice dialed in, get your SOPs in place, get your management team in place. Because give me another booster, Edwards. I'm going back to this. Give me as many boosters as we can get because some are going to stick and some aren't. But I think there's a lot to be said about what you... I mean, you nailed it. I couldn't have said it better myself. And that is the human component of the engagement is, and you know me, Edwards, we have major conversation. I'm a massive AI believer.

(51:19):
I'm also a massive believer of augmentation and when to and when to not. And the organizations that really master that skill, those are the ones that are going to explode over the next 20 years, right? When to apply the tech. And then now in five years, I got pick of the litter. I got a great org, people want to be here. So now I get to pick who's best for my business.Good topic.

Dr. Souyias (51:51):
It's really good. Any last wrap ups before we call it an evening, Michael?

Dr. Edwards (51:57):
Well, I just want to thank you guys for the opportunity to hang with you. And hopefully I tried to just speak to what I didn't hear when I started my practice as a leader that bottlenecked myself for a number of years. And I feel like I've shaken out of that bottle to some degree. And if I can help someone else do that, I'm here to do it.

Dr. Souyias (52:30):
Awesome. Well, this was a great episode.

Cameron Full (52:32):
What he's saying is get ahold of him.

Dr. Souyias (52:34):
Get ahold of him.

Cameron Full (52:35):
We will put his contact information in the show notes. Blow Michael Edwards up.

Dr. Seda (52:42):
We'll leave his personal cell.

Dr. Souyias (52:46):
I got to share, since I'm the keeper of useless information and we've talked so much about Doc Brown and Back to the Future today, if you ever like roller coasters and you ride Stardust racers at Epic Universe, the flux capacitor is on the back of the cars.

Dr. Seda (53:01):
Where is this?

Dr. Souyias (53:03):
At Epic Universe at Universal Studios in Florida.

Dr. Seda (53:06):
Yeah.

Dr. Souyias (53:06):
It's called the Stardust Racers. I was in line for that not too long ago, just a couple weeks ago. I'm like, "Holy crap, that's the flux capacitor." And the person looked at me and they're like, "You know what that is?" And I was like, "Of course I know what that is." And they're like, "Yeah, that was good call that I noticed it," because they don't talk about it.

Dr. Seda (53:27):
Wow.

Dr. Souyias (53:28):
It's pretty funny. So back to the Future fan, Michael Edwards, great episode. Thank you for joining us tonight on another episode of The Special Lists.

Dr. Souyias (53:37):
Thanks for listening to The Special Lists presented by Referral Lab, the podcast for dentists and dental specialists, featuring a special list from a specialist. Got a question for us? Send us a message at speciallists.com with two Ls. Transform your referral workflow with Referral Lab, the purpose-built platform for dental specialists to track, manage, and convert every referral. Request a demo at referrallab.io.