Do you want more control over your life? Then it’s time to invest in yourself and your practice! In this episode, Kirk Behrendt brings back Dr. Lenny Hess, senior clinical director at The Dawson Academy, to talk about the best investment you can make: your education. He shares how the upcoming seven-course curriculum will transform your thinking and lead you to a more fulfilling career and balanced life. To learn more about Dawson’s Core Curriculum and what it can offer, listen to Episode 939 of The Best Practices Show!
Do you want more control over your life? Then it’s time to invest in yourself and your practice! In this episode, Kirk Behrendt brings back Dr. Lenny Hess, senior clinical director at The Dawson Academy, to talk about the best investment you can make: your education. He shares how the upcoming seven-course curriculum will transform your thinking and lead you to a more fulfilling career and balanced life. To learn more about Dawson’s Core Curriculum and what it can offer, listen to Episode 939 of The Best Practices Show!
Learn More About Dr. Hess:
Learn More About ACT Dental:
More Helpful Links for a Better Practice & a Better Life:
Main Takeaways:
Quotes:
“People will always pay for quality. One of the things that Dr. Dawson ingrained in me is the realization that people inherently want to do what's best for themselves. But most dentists aren't giving people the opportunity to choose to do what's best. They're only doing, ‘Well, what will my insurance pay for?’ Or if I'm going to try to recommend treatment, which path do I think will have the least amount of resistance to where the patient will schedule because we're not busy next week, or whatever that is. That's kind of a paradigm shift. All you need in dentistry is you need a dental chair and a patient in the chair. That gives you the opportunity to be in the people business.” (10:10—10:44) -Dr. Hess
“One of the greatest things about dentistry is you have the opportunity to create your practice and mold it however you want it to be to support your life. That's one of the most important things. I see too many dentists spending their life supporting their practice — and your practice should be supporting your life. You have to find out what's important for you. Do you want to be there to take your kids to school in the morning? Do you want to coach your kids' little league team? Do you want to be the soccer parent, or whatever that is? Then, you can craft your hours based on how it's going to support your life.” (11:25—11:55) -Dr. Hess
“There is so much to learn to be a dentist these days. When you get done with four years of dental school — here's the reality. When you graduate from dental school, you don't pass an examination of maximum competency; you pass an examination of minimal competency. That's what a board examination is. I think a lot of dentists realize when they're coming out, ‘Wow, there's such a deficit of things that I need to know,’ as soon as they get into private practice.” (15:34—15:58) -Dr. Hess
“Most patients are victims of the standard of care. Most patients that come in, if they're 55 or 60 years old, their mouth is in a state of continuous decline. That's because they're a victim of standard of care because, ‘Well, what will insurance pay for this year? I've got three teeth that need to be worked on, or more.’ What will insurance pay for? Practically nothing. So, there are a lot of young dentists out there that realize they want to do bigger cases. And I'll be honest, I don't think there's any academy in the country or the world out there that teaches how to do big cases better than we do.” (17:08—17:41) -Dr. Hess
“One of the greatest things that [Dr. Dawson] gave me was the proper mentality. Pete taught us that we're in the people business. If people don't like you, and if they don't trust you, then they're not going to do dentistry with you. Like, who do you write a $40,000 check to that you don't like? I do it one time a year in April, that's it, to the IRS. Otherwise, I don't write big checks to people I don't like and that I don't trust.” (22:31—22:53) -Dr. Hess
“The real thing in dentistry is that if what you're doing is not predictable, it's not profitable. If you’ve got to replace dentistry, you're losing all your profit. It doesn't take many hiccups or failures for you to completely lose all the profit on a case. So, that's one of the most important things that we teach by teaching dentists how to do this the right way, is giving you predictability — and that gives you profitability. That's when dentistry becomes fun. That's when you have patients that are happy. When you have happy patients, then they're sending you other patients that they want to be happy as well. That's what's great, is when you become that go-to person in your community, the problem solver in your community, then people come to you.” (31:26—32:07) -Dr. Hess
“The thing I constantly tell my young dentists in the crowd is you come into a course like this, and your brain goes into sprint mode, and you forget that you're running a marathon. I tell everybody you’ve got to think about your career in five-year chunks because five years goes by so quickly. You and I are in our 50s. For me, a month feels like maybe a week or 10 days. Like, I can't believe it's almost the middle of August. I don't know where this year went. Every year, it goes quicker, and quicker, and quicker, and it means more. So, you've got to think about meaningful changes. There are ways that you can make instant changes in your practice, but meaningful changes take time because what that requires is self-improvement on your end, and that requires self-improvement on your staff as well.” (32:14—33:04) -Dr. Hess
“What I always tell people is when you leave this class, one of the first things you need to do is you need to sit down with your staff, and you need to tell them what you learned and why it's important. What's the benefit for the patient? And now, what's the benefit going to be for our practice? Because if you're a hygienist or you're office staff, if they can't have a meaningful conversation with a patient on the philosophy of care, then the baby goes out with the bathwater, doesn't it? It doesn't mean they have to have a technical ability to maintain what you've been saying, but they need to have a philosophical knowledge base for them to be able to make sure that continuity exists no matter who that patient is interacting with. All of these things take time. Plus, you have to develop the clinical skills. If you want to drive a car 108 miles an hour, you don't hop in there. You’ve got to work your way up and learn how to manage these cases.” (33:05—33:57) -Dr. Hess
“There's never been a better time to invest in yourself. It's applicable to anything. People say, ‘Well, what's the right time to get married? Well, there's never a right time to get married. Right? What's going to be the right time to have kids? Well, there's no such thing. What's the right time to invest in myself as a dentist? There is no better time than now because, honestly, when we do get those dentists that come in that are 15, 16 years in practice and now they're just getting exposed to this, now they're living with this tremendous regret because they're looking around and they're like, ‘All these dentists have been out of school for four, five, or six years.’ We get so many that graduated a year or less. It's bonkers. It really is bananas. They're looking, and I think they're envious of the fact that, ‘Wow, you get 15 years that I didn't get to be able to change your practice.’ So, you can be in control. I think a lot of dentists feel like they're not in control. If you want control, the way that you could control is by not being afraid to invest in yourself.” (43:28—44:33) -Dr. Hess
Snippets:
0:00 Introduction.
0:43 How Dr. Peter Dawson touched their lives.
4:15 Dr. Hess’s background.
8:58 People will always pay for quality.
10:45 Create the 50/50 balance.
14:16 Dr. Hess’s course demographics.
16:29 The Dawson Academy’s banner year.
18:27 Wear and managing forces, explained.
21:17 Dr. Hess’s philosophy.
25:17 The seven-course Core Curriculum.
29:35 The evolution of dental education.
33:59 The golden age of dentistry, explained.
35:31 Are DSOs taking over?
40:08 The five-year chunk for Dr. Hess.
43:11 Advice for younger dentists.
Dr. Leonard Hess Bio:
Dr. Leonard Hess, DDS, joined the Dawson faculty in 2009 and is now the Senior Clinical Director at The Dawson Academy. He owns Union County Center for Comprehensive Dentistry in Charlotte, North Carolina, and he practices full-time in addition to teaching continuing education courses. He is a member of the editorial board for Inside Dentistry and has had over 17 articles published in peer-reviewed journals. He is also a member of the American Academy of Restorative Dentistry, AACD, ADA, AES, and NCDS.
Dr. Hess began teaching continuing education courses in 2005. The topics include occlusion, smile design, treatment planning, preparation design, and practice integration of complete dentistry. He has taught full-day continuing education courses at the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry’s national meeting, The Greater New York Dental Meeting, AACD National Meeting, Pacific Dental Conference, Ontario Dental Association meeting, and The Yankee Dental Conference. Dr. Hess has also taught courses in Japan, Germany, Poland, China, and Canada.