by How Dr. Whitney D. Weiner and Whole Dental Wellness blend high love with high accountability in setting goals for the organization.
Dr. Whitney D. Weiner has always been goal-driven. It’s a big reason why she’s been able to grow Whole Dental Wellness into a successful multi-location dental group practice in a little over six years.
“In life, I am a huge believer in vision boards and if you put your mind to it, you can build it, you can go there,” she said. “Maybe it’s because I am from Iowa, where ‘Field of Dreams’ took place; if you build it, they will come.”
While on a personal level she is a natural driver, applying a systemization of goal setting to how she led her team came with some worries.
“In full transparency, I was really scared at first to share our numbers and subsequent goals with our team,” she said. “As a business owner, I was nervous with the conversation. If I shared that we were doing well, would they think it was just boasting? If I shared that we were doing poorly, would people think their jobs were on the line? So, how do we start with financial literacy 101? How do we educate the team on what is the bare bones of a Profit & Loss statement and how they can drive change within our organization?”
Her team, though, was incredibly supportive and receptive to the discussion. They welcomed the numbers’ talk and introduction of targets to hit. “After all, people don’t know how to win if you don’t share with them how to keep score.”
What could have been a source of consternation has turned into a source of strength and growth for the Whole Dental Wellness team. In the following interview with DEO Magazine, Dr. Weiner shares the steps she and her leadership took in systematizing their organization’s goal setting, deciding what goals to focus on and how to keep score, factoring in the unforeseen challenges and uncertainties that will come along the way, and more.
DEO: How do you, as a leader, try to set ambitious goals for yourself and your team?
Dr. Weiner: That was one of the really hard things before we landed on our goals. We did not want to give a huge P&L presentation that was confusing. Instead, we developed the six or seven levers that everyone on the team could understand. We color coded it, green for good and red for improvement. If something was red, what are the six action items that we can have to help drill into that? And then, we’ll check it next week, next month, next quarter and see where our progress is.
All of this has come to fruition because of our team. I cannot take credit. We have an incredible team that has been instrumental in building this out. Our Integrator and my personal coach, Josey Sewell, has coached us on how to implement the business operating system. She’s helped us build out the happiness/culture side, and hold accountability in tandem with our fractional CFO, Scott Judy, who has overlaid the metrics. During a 1:1 coaching session, Josey broke down for me how I have led with so much love, and while that is a superpower, I have struggled with accountability. This really stuck with me.
I’ve always been high love. I see myself as a Care Bear shooting Care Bear hearts at everyone. I try to lead by uplifting and empowering. However historically, this high love came with low accountability. Josey helped me see that to be a leader and build this great company to achieve our BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), I must be high love and high accountability. This has been our mantra and we’ve been able to use metrics as a non-emotional way to bridge that gap. “Hey, we love you and we’re here to support you. In the business, this is what we need from you to be successful together.”
It’s been an evolution. At first, I was scared, but now I see that feedback is such a gift. When the team knows how to keep score, then they want to win. But if they don’t know how to keep score, how do they know if they’re winning?
We have a whiteboard in every office, and we’ll put one or two things on it that the managers track. For example, last Fall, we focused on the number of appointments, because that’s something that everyone in the office can understand. We called it the “Operation BITS” (Butts In The Seats). We would literally track the number of appointments in each office. Then, we set a little mini game where we said, “If you exceed this number of appointments, then for every appointment, we’re going to put $50 in the hopper and split that amongst the team members.” This drove positive behavior. We are still working toward an incentive plan as fundamentally I believe we win as a team and lose as a team. I chose carrots over sticks every time, but my internal struggle is, does one really need a carrot to do their job?
Our leadership team meets weekly, and we go through that scorecard. While the higher-level leadership is looking at a few dozen KPIs, at the office level, it’s as simple as one or two because we really want people to feel like they can drive impact without it feeling too scattered.
DEO: As a business leader, how do you prepare your team for unexpected challenges and uncertainties in the market?
Dr. Weiner: When we set our budgets, we try and spend 20% of our time looking at the past and 80% looking forward. “Here’s how we performed in the past … this was great, and this kind of sucked. How are we going to set the goals to achieve next quarter?”
This all starts with our team’s projections. Let’s say we’re trending up in number of appointments. If we stuck with that, each provider did this much an hour and we increased appointments by this amount. Our leadership team will say, “Let’s multiply those two things together. And while we’re not changing our budget for the year, this is our forecast. Is our forecast good enough for the next 90 days or do we need to ratchet something up?”
For us, we identified that our hygiene was killing it, and our doctors were not last quarter. The doctor’s production per visit was really low. So, we are focusing on this as our Q4 rock and attacking it via a multi-prong approach. Our team crunched numbers on the cost per acquisition of a new patient, we determined how many new patients we needed, and now we are spending money on targeted ads that were timed to launch at the same time as our new websites. We are dialing into the algorithm of how much money do we need to dump in to spit out x number of patients, and our regional manager is working with our location level managers and teams on ensuring things like new patient reappointment and the customer experience are dialed in. It is one concerted effort.
We’re also asking ourselves, “How can we as leaders empower and coach our dentists to be more efficient and productive? What’s the rate limiter?” So, we had 30-minute one-on-one conversations with all our doctors, and we went through a quarterly check-in. We asked questions like, “How happy are you to come to work every day? Would you like to be more productive? If you could make more money, would you want that, or would you reduce your hours?” We’re trying to level set with the doctors. Everyone says they want to make more money, right? Well, how do we do that?
I was so impressed with our doctors. Not one of them said, “You don’t give me enough new patients.” They said, “You know what? Maybe I could learn to do a little bit more endo because I’m referring a lot of that out and I’d like to master that skill.” Or “What I’d really like is some more training on clear aligners because we have these two new scanners, and I would love to understand that workflow and how I can educate patients better.”
We’re not as systemized or dialed in as I’d like us to be, so currently our approach has been more centered on surveying our current team members. We identify the problem. Metrically, we have a production per visit in the doctor column showing numbers are down. That’s a problem. How is the company going to attack it? Our marketing team is going to dump in new patients. Our location level teams are going to work on training the importance of reappointment, correct categorization of referral source, and optimizing the patient experience.
So, I ask myself, how am I going to help lead that as a Chief Dental Officer (CDO)? Basically, I’m here to support through conversations and training. I’m happy as a periodontist to come in and teach macro level treatment planning and surgical techniques if anyone wants to expand in that area and I want the doctors to know that whatever they need from me, I’m here. I also am working to hire coaches to help them level up their game in different areas. Are we following up with our patients and ensuring they know we care about them as people and not just the once every three or six months that they are in our chair? How are we wrapping a bow on our patient experience to make it five stars every visit?
DEO: How do you try to stay on top of evaluating and onboarding the latest technology?
Dr. Weiner: To me, technology is great when it uplevels the care we can provide our patients. Is it allowing us to better diagnose? Is it allowing more efficiency in how we perform our procedures? Is it providing an educational tool to bridge the gap as we arm our patients with all the information they need to empower them to make the best decisions for themselves and their individualized care? Is it just flash for marketing? I’m not saying that the flash for marketing isn’t important, but to me, when we are evaluating new technology, fundamentally, I view our role as that of an educator. So, I ask myself, is the product going to allow us to educate our patients better or be better doctors and better surgeons? And if it doesn’t do one of those two things, we don’t invest.
For example, take computer-guided implant placement. I’m a periodontist, so when a patient comes in for an implant consultation, we’ll take a 3D intraoral scan of their mouth and a cone beam, then after explaining the implant process we send our patient home. They’re in the office for 20 to 30 minutes tops. I will tell the patient that when they’re not here, I’m going to do my homework and digitally plan their implant. It’s precise down to a 10th of a millimeter. I’m going to have a computer printout of a surgical guide for me, and I tell the patient the surgery will take me about eight to 10 minutes. This is an example of how technology aids two-fold: I can show the patient in 3D their bite, smile, and underlying bone, walking them through any potential concerns so it is an amazing, color coded 3D educational tool. The surgical guide then makes my surgery faster, easier, and less invasive with a predictable outcome. To me, this is when the tech really hits the mark.
DEO: How do you stay ahead of the curve on the patient experience?
Dr. Weiner: That’s a really good question. One thing I love to do is have my friends and family be secret shoppers. They will come in as new patients and I don’t tag them as “Weiner friend” or give away that they are linked to me. After their visit, I will ask them questions like, “What did you feel when you first walked in our space? What was that atmosphere and noise level? Were you greeted with a smile? What did it smell like? Did the doctor greet you by name?”
Patient experience is something we’re always trying to level up. I used to get so deflated by the occasional one-star review, but it’s feedback, and we need that feedback. Sometimes, it’s a ridiculous comment about cost or something out of our control, but sometimes, it’s real. We try and use those poor reviews or patient comments as teaching moments to take back to the team and lean into them versus brush them off with an excuse.
For example, I recently got an anonymous Gmail account message in my inbox from a customer that read: “Dr. Weiner, I’m so excited about what you’re building. This women empowerment, female-owned thing is incredible. I’ve had a lot of work done, and I’ve always felt so connected to your mission and your vision and your team. But I have to tell you about the last time I was in your office. I was getting a filling done, and the dentist and the assistant were watching TV. I literally felt like they didn’t have me in mind, and they were laughing and talking and doing the filling. I know that you have talented doctors and he likely was still doing great work, but I felt like I wasn’t the focus. I wanted to let you know anonymously about this happening because I know how important your company and the patient experience is to you and if I were you, I would want to know and address it.”
I wrote this patient back: “Thank you so much for sharing this with me. It means a lot to me that you would care enough to take the time to do that and allow us to grow from this experience. Please give me a week to lean into the team and investigate this and provide training around it and I’ll be back to you.”
I called the practice manager and we had an office meeting. I said, “Guys, this isn’t throwing anyone under the bus, but let’s listen to what’s being said in this email. And who knows? We think that patients like to have the TV on to help their nerves, to help calm them, and it’s great that we’re all so confident as doctors that we don’t even need to look at what we’re doing, but to the patient, they might perceive that as being out of touch. So how can we solve that? How can we connect? How can we say, ‘Would you prefer for me to explain to you what I’m doing today, or would you like to just zone out? If you’d ever like that to change, please let me know or cue me in.’”
Afterward, I was able to write that anonymous person back noting: “Good afternoon. We conducted an all-office meeting to discuss the concerns that you brought to light. Everyone took your email very seriously. We are going to implement a new protocol where we’re really checking in with patients. So, thank you very much for your comments. It’s because of people like you that we continue to improve our systems with you, the patient, in mind.” The anonymous author wrote me back, noting they were thrilled about how we handled it and that they would be a patient for life with our practice.
DEO: How do you try to model resiliency as a leader while building your organization in an uncertain marketplace?
Dr. Weiner: I will be the first to tell you, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. If this job was easy, everyone would be doing it. While I am an optimist at my core, the realities of running and scaling a growing group practice sometimes hit hard. There have been times when I’ve had to move money into accounts to make payroll. More than once. And when that happens, it’s real.
How I explain that to our team is I say, “That is the risk that I take as an entrepreneur and someone who’s growing this company, and I own that. How are we going to try and not let that continue to happen?”
As a company, we are heavily invested in building out our nucleus right now. To give you an idea, we have 59 team members – 11 of them operate in our resource center. We run at about 9% to 10% for the resource center. That’s super heavy, right? That’s hard, even at a 20% to 25% EBITDA margin, to continue to be profitable, and then, pay off all our loans.
But we’re trying to be incredibly smart about having the right people in the right seats.
This year, we’re really focusing on operations, so, with Josey Sewell’s guidance, we are building out an operational system to run our company versus people like me and our team running the company. That, to me, is how we can scale. So, while we’re heavy on wages right now, and if you looked at the P&L, you’d think, “Oh, wow, that’s great with the profitability, but the resource center looks pretty heavy, how are we doing that?” The whole goal of that is that we can buy 6, 8, or even 10 more practices and maybe add one more team member to our resource center. I am of the infinite game mindset. I encourage our team to think in years, not quarters.
That was hard at first, because I was trying to convince the banks of our long-term model. They wanted to know why we have all these high-level people, and why only three locations. The math didn’t compute. To date, I have purchased seven practices and consolidated them into three locations. What we’re trying to do is be smart about our long-term goals. We are building our company with the end goal in mind – to become the most impactful dental group in metro Detroit – and we’re seeing success. There have been some huge upward swings as far as profitability and things like that. But we’re not there yet. We’re continuing to grow, and I continue to maintain a long-term mindset about our growth, which takes patience and courage. I can’t show the same quarterly return as we would without our overbuilt resource center and I’m so thankful to have a banking partner that understands our long-term vision. The long game. The one that isn’t a build at all costs, as fast as possible mentality but rather lets us lock in the foundation and build a legacy dental group. Something that we can all be so proud of for decades to come as we continue to serve the greater Detroit community.
I know the DEO talks about the dark tunnel a lot, and I feel like we are still in that dark tunnel, but there’s some sunlight too and if I’m being honest with myself, I’m happy to be in the tunnel. In some ways, I have chosen to sit in the tunnel, building, refining, and ensuring we get our systems honed before we emerge toward the sun. We are driving cultural change and making sure we have the right people in the right seat. Getting the correct people in the right seats on our bus has taken time. We’re a little over six years in. There were a lot of necessary endings and a lot of great new beginnings within our company to get to this point. Our future is so bright, and I have our team to thank for that. One of my greatest strengths, and joys, has been my ability to surround myself with teammates who inspire me and lead their divisions within our company with our high love, high accountability mindset. This is only the beginning for Whole Dental Wellness, and I am so excited for this wild ride.
| Whole Dental Wellness integrates a human focus into all aspects of operating its dental group. Whole Dental Wellness began its operations in 2018, purchasing and merging two practices. To date, they have purchased a total of seven practices that have been consolidated into three locations across the Metro Detroit, Michigan area. They own their own real estate and invest heavily into their facilities and team. Their family dental practices, Whole Dental Wellness, provide oral healthcare for all ages, utilizing current technology to provide general dentistry, cosmetic services, implant dentistry, periodontics, and specialty services. Their integrated care, specialty practice is the first true integrated care practice in metro Detroit, providing specialist support including: periodontics, endodontics, oral surgery, and orthodontics. They are an emerging group championing to be the most impactful dental group in metro Detroit. They lead with high love, high accountability. |
