What Single Ply Toilet Paper Can Teach Us About Running a Practice
Is Buying Single Ply Doing You Any Favours There’s a moment in most people’s lives when they stand in the toilet paper aisle and make a calculated decision to buy the cheaper, thinner, single-ply option. It feels like a win. Less money spent, same job done. Except it isn’t the same job done, is it? […]
Don’t Confuse Reflection for Worry
Have you ever sat with a problem for days, turning it over and over in your mind, and quietly started to worry that something’s wrong with you? That you’re one of those people who overthinks everything, who can’t just make a decision and move on? I want to offer you a different way of looking […]
Standards vs Systems: Why Your Practice Needs Both (and Why Most Teams Only Have One)
Here’s a question worth sitting with for a moment. If you asked five different people on your team to explain exactly how a patient should be greeted when they walk through the door, would you get five different answers? If you would, you’re definitely not alone. We see this gap in almost every practice we […]
Why Patients Say “I’ll Think About It” (And What They Really Mean)
Every dentist and treatment coordinator knows the moment. You have explained the treatment plan, answered the questions, and then it comes: “I’ll think about it.” The patient smiles, thanks you, and walks out the door. Some of them come back. Many of them do not. It is tempting to hear those words as a polite […]
The First Four Seconds: Why Your Receptionist Makes or Breaks Patient Trust
Every patient relationship your practice will ever have starts before the dentist walks into the room. It starts the moment someone calls your front desk, or walks through your door for the first time. Some research into first impressions suggests it can take as little as four seconds for a person to form a snap […]
We Don’t Remember What We Don’t Understand
Every dentist has had this moment. You’ve shown your trainee dental assistant how to set up for a procedure more times than you can count, and yet they still hand you the wrong instrument, or forget a step, or need prompting again. It’s easy to read that as a bad attitude, or as someone just […]
Don’t Let the Doom and Gloom Into Your Practice
Turn on the news any day of the week and you will hear it. Cost of living. Economic pressure. Households under stress. Interest rates. It is relentless, and it is loud. And I understand why practice owners and dentists absorb it. You are running a business. You care about your patients. You are human. When […]
Half of Australia Isn’t at the Dentist. Here’s How to Reach Them.
The Chairs Are There. So Are the Patients. So Why Aren’t They Booking? Here’s something that might surprise you. Across Australia, roughly half of all adults visit a dentist in any given year. That means the other half, tens of millions of people, are not sitting in anyone’s chair. Some of them don’t think they […]
The Leaking Bucket: Why Your Database Is Your Greatest Untapped Asset
Every dental practice I’ve ever worked with has one thing in common: a database full of patients who already like them, know them, and trust them. And in almost every case, that database is quietly leaking. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just a slow, steady drip of patients who drift away because nobody reached […]
The Execution Gap: What’s Really Standing Between Your Practice and Its Potential
I came across something in a Clinic Mastery (https://www.clinicmastery.com/) email recently that really resonated. They cited a Harvard Business School study finding that 67% of well-formulated strategies fail – not because the strategy was wrong, but because of poor execution. The challenge isn’t a shortage of good ideas. It’s that good ideas rarely get fully […]
Hiring for accountability is the missing link in building a thriving dental practice
There is a growing tension within dental practices that is quietly eroding team cohesion, patient experience, and leadership focus, and it is not always being addressed at its source. What I am observing more frequently is not a lack of care or capability in team members, but a lack of personal accountability. It shows up […]
The Subconscious Reason Team Training Doesn’t Always Land
You’ve invested in training. You’ve introduced the courses, the workshops, maybe even a consultant. On the surface, your team appeared open to it. They turned up, participated, maybe even took notes. And yet a few weeks later, in the day-to-day reality of the practice, nothing has changed. The phones are answered the same way. The […]
The Five Questions That Could Change How Your Team Sees Each Other
Team bonding days are a wonderful thing. Whether it’s a cooking class or a painting afternoon. These experiences do something genuinely valuable. They remind us that the person next to us at the dental chair is a whole human being. They remind us that we actually like each other. And that matters more than people […]
Avoid Avoiding Conflict!
You know that feeling when everything seems fine on the surface, but something’s… off? Patrick Lencioni calls it “artificial harmony,” and I’ve seen it play out in dental practices in two very different ways. Both are equally damaging, and both stem from the same root problem: we’re so terrified of conflict that we’ll do almost […]
The Three Ways We Treat Patients (And Why Only One Actually Works)
One of the reasons I love the Christmas break is the time I get for reading and contemplation. I recently finished Dr Bryan Laskin’s book, The Patient Manifesto. There’s a chapter called “The Mindset Shift” where he talks about the difference between apathy, empathy, and compassion in healthcare. As I read it, I kept seeing […]
When Burnout Isn’t About Workload
I was listening to a podcast yesterday and something the guest said made me pause. They suggested that burnout can often be a result of a lack of vision. Not an overload of tasks and too much pressure. But vision. The more I have contemplated on this, the more it makes sense. Think about building […]
We Can Only Build Systems as Good as We Are
Yesterday, I attended the book launch of my mentor Ashkan Tashvir’s new book, Sustainabilism. If you haven’t come across Ashkan’s work before, he’s the creator of The Being Profile, a framework I’m now an Accredited Practitioner of, and one that has profoundly shaped how I approach leadership and practice management. During the launch, Ashkan said […]
Slow down…
There’s something I’ve come to realise after years of working closely with dental practices, observing teams, and speaking with countless patients. It’s this: when we slow down, we communicate better. Much better. I don’t mean slowing down just for the sake of being more thorough or ticking communication boxes. I’m talking about something deeper. Slowing […]