8 Steps to Massive Implementation Success – Season 1 Episode 4

The Dr. Chris Griffin Show – Season 1 Episode 4

“Action may not always bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.” Now who said that?

Welcome to the Dr. Chris Griffin Show. Your resource for leveraging systems and technology to easier workload, increase productivity and provide you with the time off you deserve to live the life of your dreams. It’s time to practice productivity in the passionate pursuit of a better life with your host, Dr. Chris Griffin. The doctor is in.

Hey everybody this is Dr. Chris Griffin. Thanks so much for taking time out of your busy practice to hang with us here at the Dr. Chris Griffin Show. Now this episode is really going to be near and dear to what I have going on in my personal life and practice right now because I’m actually in the process of getting deadly serious about implementing tougher cases into my practice specifically implant cases and I’ve been doing implants for a few years but I’ve been really doing the simplest ones and you know how to do a little bit. But you just kind of get tired not knowing how to the really tough stuff. And you want to be kind of master of that but you know how much it’s you know, how much effort it’s going to take to get to that mastery level, right? So you kind of hang back and you have all these excuses like a thousand excuses why you are not currently pursuing mastery of a certain thing.

But bottom line, the time has come I finally took enough revving from one of my best friends who’s really become quite an implant master. And so he’s…it’s really an interesting story. This is kind of getting off topic. I’ll get back in a moment, we’ll circle back, okay? But we were sitting in class in dental school in our, I don’t know D2, D3 year; something like that. And at the University of Tennessee they had a lecture on implants. That’s about all we had was a lecture, we certainly didn’t do any implants in the clinic but you know, let me just take you back to when I was in dental school right. I mean I’ve been practicing now for 20 years, seeing patients for 20 years and so they we’re actually putting in these blade implants, right? Have you ever seen a blade implant? If you’re younger or you’re not a dentist; a blade implant is for dentist who would actually, I mean these were customized right? I’m not even sure what they were made out of. Well they were made of some kind of a metal that was compatible; bio compatible.

And they would take this metal and they would shape it into a blade shape right? And in their garage a lot of times, they would hammer these holes in it to aid an Osseointegration and make it all custom shapes and stuff. And they were all really blades almost like ice skating blades and you would actually I guess weld the what would now be the housing of the implant and on to this blade and cut a slight maybe we pop it open with a chisel or something in the person’s jaw bone and put it in there and stitch it up, let it heal and sure enough, there were people walking around Memphis, Tennessee. You would have this for years and it seemed that they work a lot of them. Now a lot of them failed. A lot of them failed and nobody does it much anymore, although I am told that I think in Alabama, there’s still a study club that meets once a year and talks about blade implants. So anyway, that’s just I don’t know why we even got off on that tangent but the whole thing circles back to say, we’re sitting in that class and we said to each other, “Wow, implants! That is like the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.” You know, someone who suffered through wearing dentures their whole life. Now they get the opportunity to basically get their teeth back; that is futuristic. That is awesome, that is amazing!

And so we said right there, we’re going to go into practice together someday and we’re going to be Implantologists. Okay, there really wasn’t even such a thing as Implantologists back then. Certainly not that I’d ever heard of. The school didn’t promote that; no that’s not a certified specialty by the ADA. But anyway, so we went on through dental school and guess what? Dental school got harder, we figured we’d better just would best be about getting good at the things that would get us our degree. And so the Implantology dreams sort of fell by the way side. Well fast forward 20 years and my friend took a course. Actually he heard about this course at our annual summit that we had in Memphis, 2000 I guess that was 2014. He heard the speaker Dr. Jason North, could I give you some props there. Jason, shout out to you down in Robertsdale, Alabama. Jason was on my stage and he just, you know, he’s obviously a very good dentist. He did very good implants himself. And he just threw out that he had taken what was in his opinion, the most amazing implant course in the world. And it was taught by Dr. Michael McCracken, who’s a professor at UAB in Birmingham and then you know, it’s just amazing hands on and lots of live patients, anyway it was blah blah blah blah…he just went on and on about how great it was.

While I was in no position to pursue it not only is it a pretty substantial investment, you know. But that’s okay, if it’s worth it, it’s worth it. It was 10 months out of a 12 month period, you had to go down for a 3-day weekend and I was just not about to commit that right then. But my friend did. He signed up. He went down to Birmingham for the 10 months. He got amazing at implants, now he’s going back, and he’s actually using this next course to get his IV certification. And so this has been a tremendous tremendous value to him and he will not shut up about it. He will not shut up about why I need to go, why implants are changing. In this practice now he knows no change in my practice. He knows how I make everybody happier, better, blah blah blah blah blah…it makes you tons of money, people love you and I just got tired of listening to it. And I was like, “Okay okay, guess what? I’m going.” But I’m not taking the 10 month course, I’m taking their mini course. And so I just got back from the first session, it was in New Orleans and you know, he can’t get enough. He likes the course so much, he’s going back and he’s sitting through the course you know, for free, even though he has already sat through it, just because he loves this course and this professor so much. Anyway, swear I’m standing right now and I am you know committing that 2016 is going to be the year that I get really serious about learning how to do more difficult implants. So we will see how it goes. I’ll keep you guys posted.

Now let’s back to our quote, right? Our quote, and this applies to me it’s going to apply to you too as we go through this today. The quote was “Action may not always bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.” Now who said that? That would be the one and only Benjamin Disraeli, okay? Now you guys may not know who that is, let me fill you in. okay? Benjamin Disraeli was a British Prime Minister many years ago. He founded what is known as the conservative party over in England and he is the only Jewish Prime Minister to ever serve that post. So a very important dude from years passed and another thing and I don’t know why, why do I care about stuff like this. He’s also the first Earl of Beaconsfield. I just think that’s too cool, you know. I guess he’s sort of royalty type of thing, I don’t know why I like stuff like that. I mean have you even thought like it would be the best to be some kind of royalty. I don’t even know that these days it might means you’re rich or famous or anything but like at the end of the movie King Ralph, I wouldn’t want to be the king of England, certainly. I would not take the job if you gave it to me but hey at the end when they made him a Duke or something like that, and gave him his little castle off in the countryside and a yearly sty pin. I’ll be all over that now. You’ll find me in a nice little golf course there in England and you might even spend some summers down here in the golf coast and then go back to England for the rest of the year. Hey, now I’d be all over that.

So anyway, let’s get this to an area that might actually help you guys. Today, you are going to get the blueprint for successful new procedure and implementation into your practice in 8 easy steps, right? And here’s a set of state in the house, but that’s what we’re going to do. This is the 8 step process that I teach everyone who has gone through my coaching program, DDS leaders and I don’t know, this is the thing that I do myself. It’s sort of when we talk last week about time genius and that whole process. Well this is kind of along the same lines but not really. This is really the implementation path and it’s sort of like a checklist. You can almost break this down into a checklist as you move forward trying to accomplish any goal in your practice. And after this episode, you’ll be able to be confident that you can go to a course like I’m doing right now. And actually place that information into your practice in the form of action and you will see if I can do that. I will see if I will put my money where my mouth is right? It really solves the problem of feeling helpless because well in respect to this. I, a lot of times will look at the case, and I want to do it and listen, I will preach this until my dying day. There’s never a better time to close on a case, than if you can do the work yourself and just do it right then. If you start it right then, you might finish it right then. At least start the process today. Today, today, we use that all the time. Let’s start today. But you feel helpless when you have to refer out thousands. Hey, some prices will fare out millions of dollars each year. That’s a M, not a B but a M anyway. Millions of dollars worth of stuff for specialist that you could do if you took time to master it then I have referred out plenty of implants in my life. Now I won’t say millions but certainly, Oh easy six figures every year for the last decade. Implant that I was not good enough to do in my practice.

So here we go, we’re going to run through this process that we have used to successfully lead. Oh I guess dozens would be a fair assessment of our private clients through the process over the last 4 or 5 years that we had the coaching program. So here we go, so it could be doing implants. It could be braces. And by the way, my friend’s now mastered implants. Well he’s going and he’s going to try to master ortho this year and he’s signed up for the said conference with the ortho course that I did way back in 2005. And you know, just to show him up, I called the day and I signed up to sit down the courses myself you know, as a former student just so that I can do to him what he’s doing to me. I cannot you know, let him win over. We’ll be taking a lot of classes together this year which is actually pretty cool. We haven’t done that in a long time. But when you are, when you are getting ready to implement anything, first thing you got to do, this is a simple one. It sounds so simple, not as simple as you might think of all the time. You have to actually choose a path.

Okay? What’s this path going to be? Now we’re talking about implementing procedures in you practice. This could also be learning how to do some sort of marketing that’s befuddled you for a long time. Let’s say Facebook Marketing. Maybe, anyone? Anyone? Facebook…does anybody know how to push a couple of buttons and get their practice marketed on Facebook. Not everyone. Not everyone knows that, so you have to choose a path; my path this year’s implants. And once you choose that path that is not all the battle, you know. That’s not even the amount of battle that you used to have like in the GI Joe commercial, that’s half the battle. No, that’s not half the battle but it’s a lot of the battle because now you can with laser light focus attack the area that you’re wanting to move towards. Right?

So phase 1 of this process, if you’re taking it. Phase 1 is Bootcamp preparedness. Now when I used the term bootcamp, they represent what I would consider like a total immersion into research, education. If you look back at the time genius process we talked about last week, this would also be where you go and find a mentor and do some visual learning by watching videos on Youtube or anything online. Binds courses online, anything like that. This would also be where “Hey, you signed up for a hands on course to go learn it and know that you’re going to have that mentor there with easy access to them.” Right? This is all part of the bootcamp preparedness and this is something I take very seriously. I never just haphazardly sign up for some course or something and say, “I’m just going to sign up and see what happens.” No way. I mean when I decide to take action in a certain direction, I mean I throw myself into it. And this is what I think every successful person does and what you should do if you want to be successful in anything. So that’s phase 1. And it takes a while to get through phase 1. Right? It’s not like “Okay, I did that.”

And I watched the…I watched the, have any of you guys seen, I’m dating this podcast right now. But have any of you seen that during the National championship, they had that mayhem insurance commercial and you know, he starts out saying “You know I watched 10 minutes of a 2 minute tutorial and then I went out and bought the biggest chainsaw that I could find.” Alright? You know, that’s what we don’t want you to do right here. You don’t want 2 minutes of a 10 minute tutorial and start drilling holes in people’s jaws right? You’re going to hit something that has a name and that is not good. So really, to get serious about this now we don’t want you to be a lifelong student, the kind of person that gets kicked out of College because they’ve taken all the credits that that College has to offer, right? And never takes action. And never lives a real life and is a perpetual student. We don’t want you to do that but we want you to get very serious and really really dig in and merge yourself. And that is Phase 1 Bootcamp preparedness.

Now let’s talk about Phase 2, Phase 2 is sort of…I’m naming this the simulation phase, okay? This is where you test things, you do trial runs. You know, in my case, I didn’t…This first course we just took, hey we didn’t go in there and start drilling holes in people’s heads. No. We’re using, we used faked bones or actually, I don’t know. Maybe they were real bones but they were not in people’s heads. They were on table tops and there was a really cool simulated gums. You know, we got to work on and do surgery with the gums on this fake bone and we did all that in models and that’s cool. I’ve done courses before where you used hogged jaws and stuff like that. I mean that’s the testing phase. Because you want to get really good at something before you push it out in the public. In medicine, it could be dangerous to do that. I have known people who have really rushed procedures to market way before they knew what they were doing. Way before they were confident. Way before they were even confident. I mean it was…and that gets them into trouble. They put that big billboard up and it says all that stuff that you can do. But if you’re really not good at it, that’s a problem because you’re going to get yourself into trouble. In the world of medicine, especially, It’s very hard to recover from that when you jump in and try to put yourself out as an expert when you really just a novice. And this is where Phase 2 comes in. We’ll need to do some testings, some trials, and maybe some recalibration. Maybe you figure out, “Ooh, I did not know what I was talking about.” And I go back and I learn some more. And take some more education, stuff like that. And they’re sort of a back and forth between phase 1, phase 2, phase 1, phase 2. And eventually though once again, you got to keep moving forward. You got to keep taking action.

So phase 3 is actually what I call the Take Action phase. You have to finally just say, “Alright I have studied this enough, I’m going to take action and implement.” I’m going to get off the couch, I’m going to jump in the pool, whatever you know whatever you want to say about it. We’re going to move forward and we’re going to get going. Now in the case of trying to put say, a new procedure in your practice, let’s start out small. Okay? I’ll give you an example of what I didn’t start out small. Actually the first day I ever used implants, I placed 14 implants. Now that sounds crazy. It is crazy. The reason I did that though is because I actually paid an instructor to fly to Ripley and he hung out with me over my shoulder and helped me do those 14 cases, 14 implants, that’s not cases. And every step of the way, he’s holding my hand and we discussed the cases beforehand, we discussed during, we discussed after. And that was a great way to do it and that’s the only time, that’s the only care beyond, that’s the only time I was saying “Go for it and don’t worry about tiptoeing this.” But you know, as I would say the first time that I would do a sinus lift implant? Yeah, I’m going to tiptoe, I’m going to be way careful man and I’m going to get a patient in there that I only have to bump that thing up about a millimeter and I’m going to go super slow with that. And then you know, once I’m competent in doing that we’ll move on to bigger and better things but I’m going to tiptoe into it. Don’t confuse tiptoeing in cautiously, for not being brave and courageous in taking massive action. I would say you’re taking massive action just by introducing a new procedure into your practice. You don’t have to jump in with both feet before you know what you’re doing. And that could be the ruin of all. So don’t do that.

Now phase 4, before you do what you’re doing. You are competent and you are confident, okay? Now it’s time to take massive action. Start doing a lot more. Start looking for ways to increase the flow through your practice of these types of procedures or whatever it is that you’re trying to do. This would be when I would also consider launching like a marketing aspect to whatever you’re doing. So once I’m really confident in implants, I’m going to start putting on billboards in it and stuff like, I’m going to do billboards, ads, Facebook marketing, everything that we do. Oh yes, the community mailer, absolutely. That’s a no brainer. We’re going to do all that stuff that we know it works. We’re going to hold that back until we’re really, really confident in our abilities. And then we’re going to launch that puppy to the masses right? And once you do that, we’re going to have a big old flow coming through the door. Now you know what we always find, we’ll have some people coming in to practice for the first time who did not know that you could wear a lowered denture attached to “studs”. And you know it would help you chew better and we’ll have patience in our practice. Who will say, “Hey doctor, I didn’t know you did that?” and a few people will probably have to apologize to you and they’ll say, “Doc, why didn’t you tell me about this? I’ve had this all lowered dentures that didn’t fit for my whole life.” And I have to beg forgiveness and tell them that you know I just gotten good enough to really feel like I should mention it. And so I mention it now. And hopefully they’ll take my apology but the whole time you’re doing this, now this is a little bit of a thing I hope, sort of new lines.

I hope you pay attention to what I’m saying right here because you take massive action, right? You market. You start to really earn a lot of this procedure and you may be spending quite a bit of money on your external marketing. Hopefully on lucrative procedures, like implants or braces or whatever you’re trying to head on your practice. Hopefully you can understand that there’s a cost here and over time, you won’t have to spend as much. Now I think it’s a dangerous thing if you were to look at your expenditures. Okay? If you were’ to look at them and you were to say, “Boy, I’ve spent a ton on external marketing. I’ve spent a ton on external marketing for a long time. I’m spending the same as I did 5 years ago or I’m spending more than I did 5 years ago on external marketing.” I think that’s a little bit dangerous because what that says to me, is that you got some people in from your external marketing efforts but you were not able to hold on to them and so they pretty much exited the practice just to buy this quickly just as they entered it. Okay? And so I don’t like that. And so keep an eye on that, your external marketing budget and see what that looks like compared to your new patients and just sort of see.

What I would like to see is this massive effort to get the word out where you’re spending money, you’re getting money back, and you’re breaking even or doing better than break even. Okay? You’re making money, but you’re spending a lot and over time you rant that down because after awhile the word gets out. “Oh hey, Dr. Griffin is like this implant master and you need to go see him.” And so all those external marketing expenditures now sort of get shoveled over into internal marketing which is usually under the classification of like direct referrals or something like that. Which are much cheaper and much more profitable because not only do those patients come in without having to spend those external dollars. But those patients come in basically pre-sold on the fact that you’re a good guy and you know what you’re doing. And it’s really yours to lose at that point which I’m not saying you couldn’t lose it but much better chance you’re going to really score a win with those patients and do a good job for them and hopefully get them to talk good about you in the future to their friends. Okay?

Alright, so and then, well that leads right into Phase 5; what I would like to call Internal Strengthening. So you get that massive explosion of patients that you spend a lot of money for. You do exactly what I just said. You convince them that they need to not only stay in your practice but also refer their friends and family and that strengthens your practice internally. That’s no longer really this big external push. Okay? Alright so that was phase 5, internal strengthening.

Now let’s move on to Phase 6. Now phase 6 is where the reason I’ve got this in here. Phase 6 is increasing the value of the base, okay? And the way I kind of the way that I look at this is you’ve spent all this money. You spent all of this money on your bootcamp preparation back in Phase 1. You spend all this money on education, educating yourself. You spend all this money on materials. I mean I was on ebay and pay surgical that they buy on instruments, a lot of money to be spent. You spend all this on external marketing. Well now you’ve got some internal strength and these people, hopefully you’re given your direct referrals. But just to keep the word out there in titrated to the right level, this is different. It’s going to be different for every practice but I do think that you need to continue to do some light external marketing pretty much forever. Just to keep the word out there for those people that are you know, a few people that are in need and might see it.

Also just to keep the word out there that everyone just knows in the back of their heads, “Oh yeah, Dr. Griffin he’s an awesome implant dentist”. In less than 1 day, you know, when I lose these last 4 weakly teeth, I’m going to see that guy. You know, there’s a lot of people in Mississippi that think that way. They’ll come see me when they’re totally devoid of teeth and probably not before right? But I like to see a little bit of light external marketing that’s left out into the marketplace, pretty much all the time, you know. You can put the little verbs, put it on billboards, you can enter your community mailer about every quarter rotating an implant piece. If you have a blog on your website, throw in some implant stuff here and there. If you do email marketing, email newsletter, e-newsletters, e-zines, do that from your websites. Throw in some implant stuff here and there just to let people know. And also when you do new education, do some implant stuff, take some pictures. Put little photos and stuff in your e-zines and let people know you’re still into that and you’re really serious about it. It’s probably a good future episode. If nobody’s ever walked through how to do an e-zine, we got a pretty cool concept on that. So that’s just something I’m going to jot that down right now and hopefully, in the future episode, we’ll talk about doing e-zines.

Okay, so that was Phase 6. Now let’s go into phase 7. Phase 7 well all these other phase, well phase 6 is always running in the background. Phase 7 is maintenance. Okay? And as we talk about the time genius concept last week, one thing that you have to have and it’s tough on everyone. I mean, tough. You have to have discipline. You have to have discipline to stay sharp. To not get bored, to not get careless, to not let things slip, to not let your numbers slip. To no… you know, you can get totally bored and now you pay attention to numbers. Next thing you know, your patience are way down or your expenditures are way up. You don’t know what happened right? But with some discipline, there’s no reason why you cannot maintain once you get there. Every doctor almost let it slip for a while. Back in the late 2000s, we were doing 6 figures of ortho a year. You know, the year of the fire, we did like $25,000 worth of cases. That’s, I don’t know, that’s nothing that’s 4 or 5 or 6 cases. That’s terrible. It was all because, I just, I got…I don’t know, is in a funk, I didn’t diagnose well. I just pretty much preferred everyone out. You know I assume I just had my head burn up in a fire, so just I didn’t want to get hurried or play some blah blah blah…it’s all on me. This year we’re back on track, having a huge year doing braces and ortho and you know, it’s just because I’m recommitted. A lot of things are just because the doctor has to have discipline to stay focused. If you can stay focused and stay on the ball, there’s no reason why you cannot accomplish and maintain anything. But as most things in life, staying focused is difficult. Okay?

And then that all gets us all the way to Phase 8. And this is actually an optional phase. But this is kind of like a said about ortho. At some point if you’re in Phase 7, maintenance and you realize you know what? I have let the ball dropped. I’m just not happy; I’m not satisfied with what’s going on here. You know, I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to you know I’m just going to recommit my practice to getting back on top with this and getting refocused. And that’s what that is. The optional phase 8 is actually recommitting and going back to Phase 1 for, to run back through the steps again. And hey the second time through, not nearly as tough because you do not have to spend the amount of time on the bootcamp phase as you did the first time at all. You do have maybe to put down some notes. Hopefully, if anyone’s been paying attention to my blog articles over the years and if you’ve got an Evernote account or something like that, where you can easily pull up a library of very important documents and they’re tagged properly. And if you don’t, we’re probably going to do an episode about that someday because I really feel like it’s very important to have your own little video library.

But anyway, you just run right back through all the steps, to get back to maintenance and you rock on till you know, someday in the future when you decide “Hey, I’ve dropped the ball again. I need to recommit and go back to phase 1.” But also, if you just turned like totally happy with where you’re at, if I’m 100% happy with implants and I want to jump in to sleep apnea. Hey, I’ve maintained implants, maintained ortho, jump into sleep apnea. Go right through the 8 steps again. And though it seems like, “Oh Gosh, why do I need 8 steps?” Right? It’s ridiculous, I don’t need that. I don’t need a checklist. Well all I can tell you is goodluck because I have tried my whole life to just wing it. When I try to wing it, somewhere in the middle I get stuck, I get muddled, and next thing you know, I’m just lazy watching TV at night instead of watching tutorials and my practice doesn’t move forward. Okay? I really believe in this process. So that’s it. That’s the 8 steps.

You guys have been an awesome audience as usual. Now when you go to the website, if you click down into the show notes, below the podcast for Season 1 Episode 4, you will find the mind map that I used to create this episode. You can enlarge that, you can print it off, you know keep that in your notes. You’re welcomed to do whatever you’d like to do with that. If there’s any other cool resources, we’re going to throw in there from this episode. We’ll put them in there and also, just this week we have added to the website, a really cool…what we’d call a premium here, so I put together a book. Well actually it’s more like an e-book. It’s a PDF, you can download it and read it just like a book. It’s called “11 Simple Action Steps” that lead to a amazing practice productivity breakthroughs. Now this is an updated version of my “11 Steps…” report that I gave out. I used to print these out, well then I actually had them printed and mailed them off to people that requested them and read my articles, 11 Steps to Better Practice Productivity and this is a completely updated report and you know, it really outlines that 10 years ago, we took 11 simple steps that skyrocketed our practice productivity. And I just want to share those with you.

So I guess you can call this maybe a white paper and now there’s another word for it. So when you read this free paper, you’re going to discover the breakthroughs that revolutionized my practice and we’ve used to revolutionized and really make powerhouse. Powerhouses of productivity from hundreds of practices all across North America and you know, in this report, you know the things that I wrote about how creative treatment rooms can multiply your production. How you can delegate and use workflow choreography to streamline and to distress your office. There’s ton, well I said there’s 11 simple action steps. So easy read, I think you’ll have a lot of fun going through this, go grab the white paper right now. The website is actually practicegrowthplan.com if you want to go there. Or you can just click on the icon of the book on the Dr. Chris Griffin Show website at drchrisgriffin.com. So anyway, I hope you guys enjoyed this episode. I hope you enjoy all the free stuff I’m putting together for you. I intend to keep that up from now on. Okay? So I’m super excited about it and thanks again. We will see you guys next week with another powerhouse of productivity packed, a lot of P’s in there, episode of the Dr. Chris Griffin Show. Thanks everybody, we’ll see you then!

We appreciate you joining us for this episode of the Dr. Chris Griffin Show. Be sure to visit drchrisgriffin.com for the latest resources and updates to keep you more productive every single day you’re at the practice. So when you’re not working, you can do the things that matter most in life. We look forward to having you join us in another episode of the Chris Griffin Show; where the doctor is always in.