Hello! And Welcome to our first video episode of T-Bone Speaks Podcast!
Today I’ve been submitted a question by the wife of a dentist, looks like the practice manager of a new practice. The person’s name is Lydia and then the message says:
Hi T-Bone! I have learned so much from your podcast and really appreciate all the advice and information you share. As a non dentist, wife of a new practice owner, I get very excited about the many many of the products and services you mention. When I share these things with my husband he is often skeptical, noting that you are probably just endorsing the products who pay you to endorse them. Is this the case? Are you comment sided by anyone you promote other than CEREC? Examples being Front Office Rocks and RevenueWell
Thanks.
Lydia, thank you so much for asking this question. it’s an unbelievably important question to ask and one that I think should be asked of any speaker that’s out there and any trainer and educator. I think it is not unusual for them to be skeptics and for people be skeptical about what we are going over and what we are learning.
So, certainly let me address that up front: I have no financial interest in any specific Dental product that I talk about, not even CEREC for example. Not even Sirona Cone Beam or anything like that. I do not receive any money for a sale of those products, I do not receive any compensation in that sense.
That being said, I am a trainer, speaker and I do have been training for many of these products and techniques. So from that perspective, I am paid when I do speak for those products, I am paid when I do training for those products, and certainly when we hold workshops at our training center, obviously I’m paid for those things.
So it’s also important to know that the vast majority of the products that we are using in our practice, we pay for. Certainly, very clearly all the high dollar items we actually pay for, our cerec machine our Cone Beam machine, things like that. Also in the beginning, when I first start using a product I may be testing it at no charge during a beta period. Some software products I like RevenueWell for example and then I start paying for the product, and then over time some of the companies do offer me a discount or even in some cases free membership with these programs as a speaker trainer for them. But then again, I am not obligated in any way to them. And quite frankly my personality is such that I’m really pretty much going to do what I want to do, even if that makes me not liked by some of the companies. So I’m always going to be a colleague and honest to each of you listening. So I want to make sure that I addressed that with you.
So now let’s talk about your husband for a second. I appreciate the skepticism and I would always say that it’s important to be skeptical, but I also believe that with that skepticism you should always take a look and listen to the message with open ears and open eyes, but with the level of skepticism there. So, I can tell you also to make you and your husband feel better and for all of other listener out there, is that everything that I do or I talk about come from real world experience. I am the owner of a full-time general practice, my practice as a network PPO provider, as someone that goes through Team Turnover, someone that has overhead struggles, we have ups and downs in our practices. I don’t have a practice unlike most of you out there, so I take great pride in that, I mean there are times where I wish my practice is perfect but it’s not there, but I take great pride in having a practice that is like %80-%90 of the practices out there. I think the big difference is, my mindset is probably different, and my motivation, my desire and my drive is probably a little bit different from most people. And also I’m willing to take risks, and I’m also willing to fail along the way. So I think those are the things that really are probably a little bit different for me than many other people. So, I encourage you guys to keep listening, I’m assuming your husband is probably skeptical about RevenueWell or product like that. Certainly RevenueWell in not only only option, is the one we are using in our practice, there is RevenueWell, Smile Reminder, which is now SolutionReach and DemandForce, those are good products. PatientActivator from 1-800-DENTIST, there is Lighthouse 360 So there is lots of good products out there. I think ultimately we have to look at all the products, see the ones that make the most sense for you and then certainly make the best choice. In our practice we started with DemandForce the smaller minder, and now we are using RevenueWell. We like RevenueWell because of its deep integration with eaglesoft which is the practice software that we are using, and we also like it because it’s able to pull treatment plans and pull procedures that are completed and allows us to customize what we send to our patients, and also allows us to do what I call drip marketing or what is known as drip marketing where you can send people messages over a period of time and set that time out so that you can send people messages along the way.
The other area that some people are sometimes skeptical of is sleep apnea. We have had tremendous success with sleep apnea and certainly I’m not alone in that, there are hundreds and hundreds of practitioners, thousands of practitioners who are having success with sleep apnea, so I would encourage you guys to get into that. And then the other areas that I often get skepticism on is in our in-office payment plan. We have had tremendous success with that and of course I would love to say that one hundred percent pay rate, but that’s simply not true. In the very beginning we had less “non pay”, and of course the more you do things and the more flexible you become the more your “non pay” goes up, so that’s part of when you become a bank and choose not use third-party financing and do things internally, that is part of the risks that you do take. But we would never look back and go back with some of that, we have been very pleased with that. I think some of the keys with doing in-office payment plans is to really monitor what is going on and keep a close eye and have a clear system in place. We found that at times when we went through Team Turnover, our systems got a little bit off and things got change that way. So, you want to make sure that is happening. Now, Front Office Rocks I have no Financial arrangement with them or whatsoever. In fact I don’t even subscribed to their product this time, but I know Laura Hatch, I know her husband Tony Hatch, I have known them for several years, and I happened to met Laura several times and I believe they have a wonderful product. I have friends that are using the product, that are very pleased and I believe any type of training for your front office team is critically important. So, I won’t say that I endorse any product necessarily, but certainly my job and my goal as a podcaster is to bring you multiple products. For example an alternative product to Front Office Rocks is the All-Star Dental Academy, that’s done by Alex and Heather Nottingham out of Florida, they have a very nice product as well, slightly different from Front Office Rocks, but a very nice product as well. So for front office training there as well.
So, there are a lot of choices out there but I want to be crystal clear on this and I want to wrap with this again: I don’t have any Financial biases in the products that I recommend simply because I want to be an honest person, my reputation is critically important to me. Do I have clinical biases? Of course I’m going to be clinically biased, nobody wants to buy a product and use a product and not feel that the product that they are using is the best, but I also want to be upfront that I am certainly get paid for speaking of not going to go speak for free. I get paid to train, I am a certified trainer for many of the products that I do talk about that we are actually using in our practice and then as owner of 3D-Dentist and our training workshops certainly I have a financial interest in the success of those workshops. And certainly we do market those workshops through our podcast.
So, Lydia thank you for the question and hopefully this answers that question for you and many others out there.
One more thing if you could take a chance to subscribe to our podcast on iTunes that would be great and you will receive it directly on your phone, the audio version of it. If you could also leave us a review on iTunes that would be fantastic and if you have questions that you would like to answer all you have to do is submit your questions by visiting www.tbonespeaks.com and you can submit your questions there.
Thank you very much and have a great day!
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