The Dental Marketer Should You Hire Virtual Assistants? Solving Common Staffing Issues for Dentists | Dan Johnson | MME
Still on the fence about hiring virtual assistants? In today's Monday Morning Episode, Dan Johnson shares his wealth of experience managing staff in a dental office setting. He unpacks the dynamics of the hiring landscape over the past 12 years, highlighting the increased competition and rising wages that employers face today. Dan underscores the pivotal role of creating a robust office culture, tailoring work schedules to meet employee needs, and offering enticing incentives such as trips to maintain a motivated team. Yet, despite these diligent efforts, he candidly discusses the persistent hurdles in employee retention and introduces an innovative solution that has proven indispensable—virtual assistants.
Dan details the advantages of integrating virtual assistants into the workforce, emphasizing their exceptional work ethic and adaptability. By incorporating this strategy, his practice has not only navigated staff shortages but also experienced significant growth. Additionally, Dan reflects on the importance of thinking outside the box and surrounding oneself with smart, capable individuals to facilitate mutual growth.
What You'll Learn in This Episode:
- How has the hiring landscape changed for dental practices over the last decade?
- What strategies can create a strong and motivating office culture?
- Why adjusting work schedules can significantly impact employee retention.
- The role of unique incentives, like trips, in keeping staff motivated.
- How virtual assistants can revolutionize your dental practice operations.
- The benefits of leveraging remote talent for flexibility and efficiency.
- The importance of creative problem-solving in staff management.
- Tips for finding and surrounding yourself with capable, growth-oriented individuals.
Tune in to this episode and take your practice growth and staffing strategies to the next level!
Sponsors:
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You can reach out to Dan Johnson here:
Phone: 254-652-5717
Mentions and Links:
Podcast Episodes:
People:
Tim Cluley - Midwest Dental COO
Software/Tools:
Places:
Businesses:
MPS Program with Midwest Dental (Dental Supplies)
If you want your questions answered on Monday Morning Episodes, ask me on these platforms:
My Newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/
The Dental Marketer Society Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2031814726927041
Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)
Michael: Hey Dan, so talk to us. What's one piece of advice you can give us this Monday morning?
Dan: So a piece of advice I give is, something that we've dealt with in our, personal offices. And that is the hiring process of trying to keep and retain staff members. Over the years, about the last 12 years, as we had went from one practice to multiple practices, we found that hiring has been up and down.
When we first started hiring was easy. everybody wanted a job and it was a good place to work good field to work in, especially for the front desk. pretty easy eight to five job, but as the years have gone on and time has gotten tougher, and then minimum wage has gone way up.
Like before we could hire pretty effectively at a pretty decent wage and be competitive. But now a lot of places are, offering jobs at 17, an hour. And so our normal, quote unquote, easy front desk positions have been harder to find because they can go somewhere else. and find a job. So my bias is a way to not only hire, but to retain, employees.
And really for us what has happened is we have a great culture in office. We do the trips. We actually adjusted our schedule from eight to four. In our offices to try to help our team members be able to get off early get home to their kids when they get out of school because most of our team members are female and so they want to be home with the kids.
And then we also provide, lunch we kind of did it tailored to them, but we found over the, especially the last couple of years is itjust haven't been enough. We'll hire somebody on for a position, let's say a front desk position to answer phones. And three months later, when we do what we call check ins, we don't call reviews.
We call check ins to see how things are going. We might've hired this team member to come in from, 10 to six. three months down the road. They don't want to do it anymore.
When we meet with them, they're like, I don't want to do this, but they want us to give them a raise for less work. we've been struggling with how to coach. And how to uh, manage this, situation with all team members. we feel like we're a great workplace. We have good humor in office.
Our hours are good. Our pay is competitive. We do yearly trips, with our team Like we've been to Zion's national park. We went to grand Canyon. We've been to Flagstaff. We took our producers to Florida and then we incentivize. Every single one of our team has an incentive based program on top of their pay, based on goals we've set in our office.
so what we found with all that is, it's not enough. And it seems like never to be enough. And as business owners, it's frustrating because not only do we have to pay employees more and do incentives more we're a uh, PPO office So our insurance. premiums don't change. We have to write off 30 40 percent of everything that comes in pretty much.
And so we're actually losing money. We've lost more money over the years than we have because we can't adjust our fees. We adjust our fees. Insurance says it doesn't matter. You can raise it to 1000, decide how much we're gonna pay. And so we're trying to combat. rising costs and the ability to hire quality people.
so my bias to that is, is something that we actually found. I had a friend of mine that is in the dental field in Florida, reach out to me and said, Hey, we actually use virtual assistants. My first. Thought went to artificial intelligence, but all AI, cause it's a big craze, right?
There's a lot of really cool things with AI. And it's going to be in our lives forever. but I was like, hi, VAs, you virtual assistant, what can they do? And you know, like, well, they can credential, they can insurance verification, all these things.
And I'm like, I just don't know. But the kicker for me was, we put an ad out on Indeed and some local places here, and our main office is in Waco, Texas, and we got about 15 applicants and we set up interviews. we do a group interview, 10 of them showed up, so 5 out of those 15 that we said, hey, come to this interview at 4 o'clock, we didn't tell them it was a group interview, only 10 showed up.
in that 10 as we did the group interview, 3 of them left. we do it as a group so they can see their competition. there's a whole methodology of why we do it that way. So they can say well, man, she looks put together. He looks great. There's other people that want this job. Three of them walked out.
Michael: The three that walked out. They just walked out like once they got there, they're like at now and left her.
Dan: well, No, what happens is when we do the interview we breathe everybody of how, what our culture is like, my brother gets up and I get up and we just talk about what we're looking for.
are our cultures, our office and how we kind of operate. So it's not saying the same thing to. 10 different applicants when you get in the room. It's just saving time. But then at the end of it, we say, listen,listen, see all these people in this room. You're all going for the same job.
We have two positions available. we want to make sure that you're the right fit for us. And we're the right fit for you. And after we say that three people walked right and I don't know if it's the competition thing, or if it was just something that they. We're nervous about you just don't know They didn't give us a chanceand so through the interview process We actually have them when they sit down in the lobby before we start they thought of personality assessment We want to see what their personality is like see how they answer questions what they would do in certain Situations And a side note, a funny story we did once, we had them do what we call the hamburger test.
We gave everybody 5, and we said, I need you to go over here in Texas, Whataburger is a big thing. And so we're like, I need you to go over to Whataburger. But we gave every single one different instructions of how we wanted our hamburger. So one might be, I want no ketchup.
I want whore pickles and I want onions and one might be just one. My hammer are cut in half. Just simple instruction to see if they'd follow the instructions. And when they came back, some would come back with just regular hammer. We're like in the interview? Why didn't you follow instructions?
And they're like I didn't know if they would do that. And so automatically know they would follow instructions. If we give you detailed instructions of the employer, and it's written down, it should be pretty easy to follow those instructions.
Anyways, side story. That's how we ended up hiring one of our best employees way back. This is years ago. She's still with us is because she came back and we wanted to hammer cut in force. Not just half fours, she had to tell them,
I need my hamburger cut in fours, and I don't remember what else was on there like, half mustard on one side, half ketchup on one side.
And, she said she had to go back twice, because they cut it in half, and they didn't put the ketchup on in one half, and mustard on the other half. So it showed us that, That she was willing to take direction and go above and beyond to, get the hamburger, right? we did a couple of times, people got,people didn't like it so much.
And we had some team members like, ah, it just takes too long. But for me, it was kind of a cool way to see if people fall direction. anyways, back to the hiring is when we did the interviews, we hired two girls. four front office positions, but ours is different because our front office, we have four offices.
We have one girl that sits up front for check in and check out. Cause we do most of our check in. I like our payment in ops, patients. So there's not a lot of in and outs. So it's mainly just check in and then we're walking out and say, thanks for coming, here's your appointment card for the next.
so this was for our call center, which is in the back where they had all the insurance verifications, pretties, if they, we have two follow up calls, maybe it's a hygiene recall, recare, and we hired them. And within two weeks after we did it to train, we lost one just never showed up.
Don't know why competitive pay. No, qualms about Just didn't show up. The other one, after about three months we did our check in, I was telling you,and her, we hired her for a specific task. In that check in, she wanted more money. Well, I get paid this somewhere else. My friend works in another office and gets paid this. And I want to do less work. we can't do that. We can't be like, hey, I'm going to do less work on a patient. But I'm going to charge them more It's not how that works. Likeusually when you want more pay, there should be something behind a, Hey, I'm willing to do this. Or for us, we're like, Hey, you've been doing this awesome. We're going to reward with pay. or incentives or something where it's more. So what we found through that is, the virtual assistance have changed the game.
I took a chance because I was nervous. We're talking about virtual assistants from the Philippines. So not local because we have to competitive, right? And so we hired one, her name was chin. the cool thing about is when we hired her, it I use a third party company and they sent me a couple of resumes.
I picked the one. And then we did a virtual interview with all of them. And so I was able to talk to them and like me and you, I can see them. I could talk to them and I could ask them questions. And the reason why I wanted to do that and I thought it was cool is because then I could see How they react to certain questions, you know What kind of knowledge they had in the dental field which is important because most of the people we hired had no dental knowledge we were hiring them straight out where we had to do all the training And so you spend a month and all the money training and then they walk out or they leave super frustrating and just not business savvy And so with this virtual assistance, we found that These employees or their contracting employees.
They're not technically your employees that they work extremely hard They'll do anything that you need or want and they're willing to learn with no questions I can say I hired you for this position can you do this for me and they would not even question it jump on it and do it so the thing I took away from is sometimes we have to look outside the box Of what we're normally used to doing because I know this not only in our offices, I am part of Mps program with midwest dental supply.
They're a big supply company in texas and oklahoma I talked to Tim Cloutier, COO, and me and him are real good friends. he's told me over and over, like all his offices that his reps supply for struggle finding employees, not only clinical employees, but admin employees.
people are just looking for solutions. so I think the solution that you have to do is sometimes step outside your box. and find the untraditional ways of how do we grow as a business. doesn't mean you can't find really good people locally. And I think it's important that we try to find people locally.
But sometimes you have to say, okay, I have to do what's good for my business because I have people in my business to support. As a business, we're not only looking out for our paycheck. We are stewards of everybody that works for us. We help their family have food on the table, cars they drive, and it's important for us to keep that going and keep our business growing and thriving.
So not only we can help them, but we can also hire others to do other things. Like we started one office with four ops. one doctor and two hygienists. Now we have four offices. six doctors, eight hygienists, and about 30 admin assistants. just think about the impact that you can make on people's lives.
By doing that, by hiring and growing. I had one office that I was talking to me. He's like, well, I want to hire local. I just want to stay local. think it's more authentic. And I'm like, great. But if you're not getting the work and the value out of the people you're hiring locally, you're going to struggle to grow.
And then if you struggle growing, how are you going to hire more people? That's not how it works. So if you're able to bring people in on your team that can do things that you're not good or your team's not good at. Help you grow so you can hire more assistants or you can purchase another office or you're grown enough that you hire another doctor on your team or hygienist.
And so there's other ways to facilitate and make that process. Better for your office and for your team. it's just a different way because I know all offices are struggling with this the ones that I hear we've had people for 30 years. I'm like you've never had turnover Come on, all businesses have turnover all of them.
So because people leave and lot of times they just I think the grass is greener on the other side and people leave for a dollar more is your sanity and how you're perceived at work and your uh, how you feel worth a dollar more.
For me, it's not like I'd rather be in atmosphere that I really like and enjoy working in the people I work with and sacrifice a little bit of pay to have the enjoyment and not the stress. So. I gotta go to work today. You know, it's like, yeah, I get to go to work. I got cool people I work with.
We have fun. Yes. There's stressful days, but overall it is pretty amazing to work with the people I work with. And I'm lucky because I work with my brother, and some people might say that's It can be bad, but me and my brother are completely different, but it works well. He's a year younger than me.
And we've been good friends since we were little, and it's just worked very well. And so we'll continue everything we do. All our business stuff is me and my brother, any business thing I did, we do it. We're always involved with each other. So
Michael: it works out that way. Nice, man. So then.
Thinking outside the box. Awesome, man. So Dan, I appreciate your time. If anyone has further questions, you can definitely find them on the dental marketer society, Facebook group, or where can they reach out to you? Well, yeah,
Dan: reach out to me directly. I give my cell phone out to anybody. it's 254 652 5717 so you can text me a lot of people might have questions like how we did it with our virtual assistants or with our team a lot of people might have questions because my background is I'm not A doctor that's the difference people like oh my brother's a doctor.
on the business side. My background is I own a bunch of Kentucky Fried Chickens And when my brother was going to Ohio state, he said, Hey, would you ever come help me run my dental practices? Long story short is, I ended up selling my franchises, moving down to Texas when he had one practice but we had a goal of how we were going to grow it.
And so my perspective is a little bit different than a dentist perspective or a clinician perspective because most of the dentists out there that are listening, They don't make you take business classes, which is just crazy to me. you're going to school to be a dentist.
Most of them come out as owners. But they're not sure what to do. And so finding somebody that can do things for you, to help you grow a business is the best way, to grow. One of the best advices I've ever had. had Don Bardem on your podcast. little bit ago, right?
. Mm-Hmm, . He,
Dan: He gave me advice about eight years ago. Don's a mentor of mine and he told me the smartest people in the world put people around them that are smarter and better than them at things they can't do. And that helps everybody grow. And so that's what we've done is. I might be good at certain things, but when I grow businesses, I put people on my team that are better things that I'm not good at.
I'm more of a big thinker. I'm not a more of a structural, do things in North. So I find somebody that can do that for me. keep me on task and do this. And can it be frustrating sometimes for sure, but overall it is well worth putting people around you. And that's how me and my brother have done it.
His strengths are not my strengths. My strengths are not his strengths. But it works well together to how we have grown from one practice. With four ops We grew it and we built it now at 17 authorities with four doctors and four hygienists.
And so through the program and putting people around you is something that has helped us push past and grow professionally and, in our just personal life.
Michael: No, that's beautiful. That's great advice. So that's going to be in the show notes below. Reach out to Dan at the same time, Dan, thank you so much for being with me on this Monday morning episode.
Dan: Thanks, guys.