Sandy Pardue is the Director of Consulting at Classic Practice Resources, a dental consulting company that provides high-level services to practicing dental professionals. With over 25 years of experience, she is an internationally recognized lecturer, author, and consultant specializing in team training, organizational systems, and practice expansion. Sandy has been named a “Leader in Consulting” by Dentistry Today magazine for 12 consecutive years.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [02:23] How Sandy Pardue got into the dental industry and discovered her passion for systems
• [05:22] Tracking statistics before it was common in dental practice management
• [08:17] The biggest organizational mistakes dental practices make and how to fix them
• [12:05] Why having structured systems is the key to reducing stress and increasing profits
• [19:49] How to improve case acceptance and handle patient objections effectively
• [22:54] The first step every practice should take today to get more organized and productive

In this episode…

Running a successful dental practice requires more than just excellent clinical skills — it demands organization, streamlined processes, and a team that works efficiently. Many practices struggle with inconsistent systems, leading to stress, lost revenue, and frustrated staff. So, what’s the key to creating a well-structured, profitable dental practice?

According to Sandy Pardue, a leading dental consultant and industry expert, the key lies in implementing clear, repeatable systems that ensure consistency in daily operations. She highlights how most dental offices unknowingly allow inefficiencies to creep in, with team members handling tasks in their own ways rather than following proven processes. Without structure, practices experience scheduling chaos, declining case acceptance rates, and financial leaks. Sandy emphasizes that when systems are in place, stress is reduced, teams work more efficiently, and profitability soars.

In this episode of The Marketing 32 Show, Brett Allen sits down with Sandy Pardue, Director of Consulting at Classic Practice Resources, to discuss how dental practices can improve systems and increase profitability. They explore the most common inefficiencies in dental offices, how structured systems boost revenue, and why proper team training is essential for long-term success. Sandy also shares strategies for improving case acceptance and handling patient objections effectively.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Brett Allen on LinkedIn
• Marketing 32
• Sandy Pardue: LinkedIn | Email
• Classic Practice Resources
• Dr. Spencer Greer on The Marketing 32 Show
• Dental Drill Bits Podcast
• Dental Drill Bits Facebook Group
• Dentaltown
• Front Desk Pro

Quotable Moments

• “Most practices think they’re organized — then they hire someone new, and everything changes.”
• “Predictable results come from consistent actions. If your team follows a system, success becomes repeatable.”
• “The front desk is the heart of your practice. If it’s disorganized, everything else suffers.”
• “Case acceptance isn’t about selling — it’s about educating patients and helping them make the right decisions.”
• “Your practice’s success depends 100% on what happens inside your four walls, not external factors.”

Action Steps

1. Establish clear systems for every role in your practice: Defining structured workflows ensures consistency, reduces inefficiencies, and helps team members perform their tasks effectively.
2. Assign ownership of key practice functions: Designating specific team members to oversee scheduling, collections, and case acceptance creates accountability and improves overall practice management.
3. Track KPIs regularly: Monitoring metrics like production per provider and case acceptance rates helps identify opportunities for growth and improvement.
4. Train your team on verbal skills and patient communication: Educating staff on handling objections and guiding patients toward treatment decisions increases case acceptance and trust.
5. Hold structured team meetings to identify bottlenecks: Regular discussions on practice challenges and missed opportunities foster collaboration and drive continuous improvement.

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Marketing 32, the only dental marketing agency with the Practice Impact Formula™ for predictable growth without financial risk.

With a focus on new patient generation, addressing missed opportunities, and expert scheduling, Marketing 32 has helped over 170 practices in the US, Canada, and Australia. Grow in 30 days, or you don’t pay — it’s that simple.

To learn more, visit marketing32.com and schedule a 15-minute discovery call. If you’re a visionary practice ready for impact, Marketing 32 is ready to help you grow!

Episode Transcript:

Intro 00:13

You are listening to The Marketing 32 Show with your host, Bret Allen.

Brett Allen 00:18

Hi, Bret Allen here. Welcome to The Marketing 32 Show, where I connect with leading dentists, dental influencers and industry experts to uncover the latest strategies and insights and innovations that help dental practices grow and thrive. This episode, like all the other episodes, is brought to you by our team here at Marketing 32. We are the only dental marketing agency that I know of that offers a performance guarantee. So if you’re not growing with your current marketing company, come over to us. We’ll help you grow. And if we don’t, you don’t pay. To learn more about us marketing32.com is where you go. Schedule a call with us and we’ll see if it would be a great fit. Quick shout out to Spencer Greer who I recently interviewed. Go check out his episode on how he grew his two practices worked with has now worked with Dsos and and how he how he’s helping individual practice owners take their practices to the next level by not leveraging marketing, but all the internal things that you do to grow. So on that note, we’ve got an awesome person. Her reputation precedes herself in the dental industry. She is a consultant, speaker, dental systems guru, and Dental Drill Bits Podcast host Sandy Pardue. She’s been in the industry for over 25 years. Sandy brings a ton of real world experience to dental practices, and she is all about the value and helping teams. So I’m excited to have you on the show today. Sandy.

Sandy Pardue 01:43

Hi. Hi, Brett, and hello, listeners. I’m excited to — I love to talk. That’s one thing about it all this morning, I just got through recording a training video and I had a group that I was training from all over the United States. So I’ve been talking all day and I’m happy to do it.

Brett Allen 02:04

Well, great. I know you’re going to provide a lot of value today. Excited to have you on the show. Thank you again. So let’s talk a little bit about Sandy and how she got into the dental world. And what are you doing now? So tell us your background for those of you who may not know you and then what it is you’re doing with classic practice resources.

Sandy Pardue 02:23

Okay. Well, I was going to be a stay at home mom. I went to LSU. I thought maybe I’d be a teacher. I loved my speech class, but I got married very young and thought, yeah, you know what? I’ll just. We’ll buy our first house and then I’ll just be a stay-at-home mom. And you know what? A lot of people in the dental field know my daughter Dana, she worked at classic practice for 16 years. And she got her MBA and she went off away from mom, you know. So she’s but she still is on my podcast with me. She co-hosts the podcast did a little bit, but yeah. So I stayed home with her until she started kindergarten. And I was like, man, I gotta do something. And my best friends were like, Lisa and Bob on As the World Turns, you know? I was like, and Nikki on The Young and the restless is like, oh, man. I mean, I’d get up and have dinner cooked and everything done by 9 a.m. That wasn’t the life for me. So I had heard about this dentist that was actually a friend of ours, and I heard it from a friend of ours that he was doing $1.2 million. And this is in the 80s.

Brett Allen 03:41

Okay. Wow. And in the 80s. That’s big.

Sandy Pardue 03:44

With solo practice, no marketing, and there was no insurance, right? It was like all fee for service. And he was doing 90 units of crown and bridge a month, and he had 18 team members. And I’m like, you know, now I would like to manage an office like that. That would be fun. So this is in the 80s in the South. Economy was not that good and there were about 70 or 80 applicants, is what I was told by the that current office manager and I got hired. So he hired me. But he wanted me to learn all the positions in the office while I was like, okay. So I did a little bit of everything, but at the same time, now remember, this is before the internet. So people were coming from literally around the world to tour that practice. They were coming from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England. A lady came from Japan twice just to tour that practice. Because it was so organized, people heard about it. And so these people would come in and I was the one that would show them around and explain how we did things. and then they were like, well, gosh, can Sandy come to our office and we want to set up our office just like this. And so that’s how I got into consulting. So by the late 80s, early 90s, I was starting to giving these full-day, actually day and a half seminars on scheduling systems, accounts receivable, setting up ways to track statistics, which was unheard of back then.

Brett Allen 05:19

How to write all the major meetings and checklists.

Sandy Pardue 05:22

I mean, we had all of that. So we were doing all that before. It was like the cool thing to do. I mean, we had checklists for new employees, checklists when people left. We had a whole library of every job and what worked and what didn’t work and verbal skills. So that’s how I got started. I did not want to leave that practice. I will say some listeners may have heard that story before. I literally cried every day for a year because the doctor’s wife is the one that saw my potential. She’s the one that pushed me and I was like, but I don’t. I love my job. Yeah, and I. I did. I loved my job. And she would say, let’s go to New Orleans. She’d pick me up on a work day and go, you know, trying to caught me, caught me into leaving to be this consultant. So, so finally I said, okay. And that’s what happened. And then all of a sudden he had six patents in the dental field. So he invented a crown remover and he’s like, okay, we’re going to switch gears. You’re going to be going to all these dental shows and showing this crown remover. So I’d still do a little bit of consulting and I’d go to these dental shows about 12 a year. And that’s how I really got in. A lot of people that asked me to write for them and speak at the meetings, and it just grew from there. So now you got my story. The rest is history. Oh, let’s not forget Dental Town. In 2002, I signed up on Dental Dentaltown, and I literally worked with hundreds of those doctors. Even Howard Bryan.

Brett Allen 06:57

Yeah, yeah, that’s. A great community. Yeah. So you figured out some things early on in terms of tracking metrics, all the internal things that you could then leverage into helping and making an even bigger impact than just one.

Sandy Pardue 07:10

That’s right. And then in. Systems, it’s like the whole idea of systems, like recipes. I mean, we early on even had a policy on how to write a policy, a policy on how to write a checklist. I mean, everything that I’ve ever thought taught, it’s all in writing about around 2,500 documents of just information, successful actions.

Brett Allen 07:38

And that may be probably the biggest thing is that most practices probably have a deficit or an inefficiency around processes and how we document it and how we communicate that to our team, how we’re hiring people. So we’re bringing in the right people for the right position and all of that.

Sandy Pardue 07:56

Exactly. Yes. This is great.

Brett Allen 07:58

Yeah. This is a great segue into what you’re doing with Classic Practice Resources. What. Let’s talk about that. So when you come into a practice, what’s the biggest things that you find are like the holes in the bucket, so to speak. Yeah. What’s the big value there?

Sandy Pardue 08:17

Keep in mind that most practices think they’re organized and then they hire someone new. And what they do is every time they hire someone new, instead of coming that person coming into structure that’s been created and taught how the successful actions of how that practice runs, they bring everything they did at the office down the street, whether it was good or bad. And now that’s the new system. So people get a little they twist up this whole concept. If I have a recipe for something delicious, maybe I make a good carrot cake, homemade carrot cake, or Italian cream cheese, or I make a good gumbo. Right? So I’ve got a recipe for it. And it’s in writing and it’s followed consistently. So the consistency gives me predictable results of my gumbo or my carrot cake or whatever it is. Right. So let’s take that and look at it from the business perspective, okay? In a dental office there is a best action, a best way to do our best practices for our own skills. New patients, collections, past due collections, financial arrangements, scheduling confirmations, preventing broken appointments. There’s about 42 systems in the practice. So each one of these systems I’ll Let’s think of it like a recipe. So you’ve got to find the best way to do it. It can’t just be. We do it. What’s the best way for the best results? That’s your recipe. So the only way to have the predictable results is to have consistent actions by the team. It’s that it’s that easy. So. But that’s not how dental offices usually run. So usually you’ve got team members that are doing it their way. You’ve got untrained team members. You’ve got a doctor that’s working very hard and often very stressed. Okay, look, look on Facebook. Look in these groups and you see. It is that the people, the dentists are so stressed. They want to get out of dentistry.

Brett Allen 10:35

Yeah. You go to dental school to become a clinician. And there’s all these other things of being a business owner and a team leader and all of that to create a patient experience that you just don’t get in dental school.

Sandy Pardue 10:46

No, that’s exactly right. You’re exactly right. So the solution is structure and thinking of it as a business. So most dentists, when they get out of school, they’re thinking, oh, what kind of chair am I going to put in my operatories? And what kind of, you know, when they should be thinking, how am I going to structure my business? And that’s how most businesses run. The administrative part of the practice in dentistry is the stepchild. It’s the stepchild. It gets the least amount of attention.

Brett Allen 11:19

It trickles out. It flows over into everything else in the practice.

Sandy Pardue 11:23

It’s the heart of the practice. It determines the success or the lack of it is those administrative systems. And of course, the technical area delivers the dentistry.

Brett Allen 11:37

Okay. So let’s talk about that. Let’s dig into the systems that you help to implement a doctor who doesn’t have this awareness or even know where to start? You’ve got all this background, you’ve worked with so many different practices, you’ve seen different methods and how it’s done, and you’ve probably figured out the best way, I would assume.

Brett Allen 11:56

And so. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I yeah, from what I hear, you’re awesome. So tell us about that. What how do you where do you start?

Sandy Pardue 12:05

Okay. So listeners, you might be feeling stressed or you might be thinking, well, we have good days and then we have days that aren’t so good. There’s a lot of broken appointments. There’s holes in the schedule. I’ve got $1 million in unscheduled treatment. And all you know is everything’s falling apart. You need to train your team. Well, first off, you want to take a team. Inventory is what I like to call it. Like look to do you have the people in the positions that can bring you the bone. It’s like in other words, can they do their job right? It’s like, that’s because you have to have the right people. And I’m going to use this as an example. I have a client right now that I’ve worked with off and on for a long time. He’s got a beautiful practice, beautiful practice, like a solo practice, doing almost $3 million. It’s very impressive. On four days a week fee for service, I’m going to add.

Brett Allen 13:00

Oh, man.

Sandy Pardue 13:02

Oh, yeah. It’s beautiful practice. And so he has a little situation where he knows that there’s somebody that’s just not the right person on the team, and a little afraid to go and search. I want you to know, we put an ad in last week and we already have three very hot candidates. I mean, like Monday, we had them. So Monday I spoke to them Monday night and we just put the ad in Friday. And I think he’s going to hire two of these people. We’re going to he might end up hiring three of them, I don’t know. He’s going to hire two because we’re going to promote one person to office manager. That is existing, an existing person. So you have to try to get the right team, right. So you have to decide it’s going to happen. If you’re telling yourself, I probably can’t find anybody, it’s hard to find good people. Guess what? You kind of get what you think in life. So change that mindset and start working on the business part of your practice. Learn all you can. Get your team trained. You know, I do these front desk pro seminars, which I’m going to say I did one last week in Ohio, one the week before in Houston. I’m going to be in Burbank, California in March of 2025 and then again in Philadelphia in May. Let me tell you, you know, and that that is where you start. How do I get organized systems? How do you get systems? It comes with what needs to be done in each position. A lot of people just have too many cooks in the kitchen in their practice, where everybody’s doing a little bit of everything and there’s very little accountability. So you need to like, this is how we’re going to do this. This is who is in charge. Let’s measure their actions. So that’s what a lot of practices fail to do. So if you’re the leader and you want to have somebody in charge of the schedule, they need to know they’re in charge of the schedule. I’ll go to these seminars where I’m speaking to hundreds of people and it could be half of them are front office. And I ask, who in here knows, like where the scheduling queen. They’re in charge of the schedule and nobody raises their hand. It’s like they nobody knows in the practices that they are responsible for the schedule. And you know what? Nothing in the practice is more important than the schedule. What? The schedule is not filled. Nothing else matters. So you start with appointing a scheduler, okay. And then that person. You need statistics that align with their actions, what they can control. I’ll give you an example of how not to do it. Sometimes people put the hygienist. Their statistic is office collections. That makes no sense. They can’t control it. So your conditions are okay. I’m the scheduler. I’m responsible for the office production. I know the goals per provider. If you don’t have goals, set them today like you need goals. Production goals for every provider. The scheduler needs to know what they are. That’s how they build the day. Then you need that person monitoring or tracking their calls out how many appointments they made from their calls out the number of broken appointments, the percentage of time filled. These are very important statistics that they can control. If they’re going up, they’re doing a good job. Same with the treatment coordinator. Treatment plans presented and accepted. Same with the person that’s responsible for the income, the financial coordinator. What statistics do you have that person in charge of should be office collections. The goal is 98%. They should be monitoring that. What’s the balance? The 30, 60, 90 days? Who’s in charge of insurance? You know what, Brett? There’s four departments at the front desk. A lot of people don’t realize that there’s four departments. You’ve got the financial insurance scheduling and the practice concierge or receptionist person. If you’ve got less than 18 patients being seen a day, you just need one person to do those four jobs. If you have 18 to 32 patients a day being seen, you need two people. After 32 patients a day, you need a third person. You don’t determine how many people you need at the front by production people. That’s like a myth in dentistry. It’s like. That makes no sense. Yeah. I’ve got yeah, I’ve got people doing $3 million a year and we only need two people up front.

Brett Allen 17:42

So there’s different volumes and flows in each kind of practice. Totally different. Yeah.yeah.

Sandy Pardue 17:49

Yeah I’ve taken a stopwatch to it. Like how long does it take to check out a patient, you know. And then if you’ve got a practice that’s seeing 16 patients a day and two people can’t get the job done, that’s when you need to think. What are they doing? So I just examined a practice that recently like I, I, I like something was off. They had two people that work the front 16 patients a day and they are like, we can’t get the work done. Okay. Well let’s look at your checklist. Let’s look at your systems. Well, they can’t get the work done. Well, come to find out, I learned that one of the long term employees is like going out and visiting with everybody for 20 and 30 minutes. You know all the patients in the reception room now. You can’t do that.

Brett Allen 18:34

Yeah, that’s not scalable.

Sandy Pardue 18:36

Yeah. Can’t do that. So. Yeah. You need to be friendly, but you need to learn how to greet people and make them feel acknowledged and then go back to your work. So. Yeah.

Brett Allen 18:48

So how much of what you do is, is front desk? I know that’s a huge part. And often a bottleneck we see on the marketing side is how they’re answering the phones. Are they scheduling all that? But how much of — I mean there’s so many processes in the practice.

Sandy Pardue 19:02

Well, it seems. Like a lot of it.Is we work with. Assistants. We don’t train them on procedures, but verbal skills, communication, appointment wrap ups, handoffs. Same with hygienists. We do have as part of our consulting program, we have hygiene consulting to help implement perio programs, improve their verbal skills, watch their statistics. We help the entire practice with office management training team meetings, making them more productive?

Brett Allen 19:36

Definitely. We’ll get into — do you also get into the whole case acceptance process of like the sales process, like how we’re talking to the patient, how the doctor transitions from treatment coordinator or hygienist?

Sandy Pardue 19:49

Absolutely. Yeah, we spend a lot of time on that. A lot of my seminars are on that. And I just told you earlier that I had recorded a training today with practices around the country, and that was the topic handling patient objections to scheduling and that. Yeah. So it’s very good. Yeah. And people say, well, how did you get this information? Well, for that we were recording phone calls before it was cool to record phone calls back to back. I’m talking like a long time ago. We had for 15 years recorded every call going in and out of the office, and we used those old fashioned cassette tapes.

Brett Allen 20:25

Oh, wow. Okay.

Sandy Pardue 20:26

We literally had boxes of them, and we hired some LSU students to listen to those and tell us what the patient objections were. And so we didn’t know if there’d be like five objections or 25 objections, but there were seven objections. And so. And. Then we focus on like the verbal skills and learning them. See, a lot of people will say, oh, I’m too busy to come. That’s an objection. But it’s not the real one. The real one could be fear. Absolutely or unaware. Need or they don’t. They don’t really understand, like what needs to happen or think they can’t afford it. They say I can’t afford it and that kills the sale. But I’m not. I want to be real clear. I’m not about the, you know, heavy sales and pushing treatment. I’m more about education and the team having confidence to talk to the patients and say things like, let’s get you in before it gets worse. Let’s get you in before it costs more. And so I don’t believe in hard sales with patients because I think they see right through it. But I think when you have a team that can communicate and they care, they really care about helping the patients. That’s what we help build those teams.

Brett Allen 21:44

That’s awesome. Yeah. Conviction is a huge part of selling. And if patients sniff through false conviction, where it’s just like I’m going through a process and I’m just trying to get I’m getting the yes out of you. Right. Whereas I think where it’s genuine conviction, like, hey, here’s the problem and, and here’s the solutions and here’s some options for you to choose from.

Sandy Pardue 22:04

Yeah, right. Let me show you. Let me show you. You know, they. Yeah. Show and tell.

Brett Allen 22:10

Like a lot goes into that. And I’m so glad that you helped focus on that. We have and I know we’ve been working on this a little bit recently as our call tracking software that helps show a dashboard. It shows a dashboard on all of these different areas you were talking about at the front desk of how they can do better. But anyway, awesome. So let’s kind of I know we’ve, we’ve we’ve covered a lot today. What’s one big domino that like if we could just help a practice push this over, it would have a ripple effect across so many different areas in the practice that would really give them the value today for listening. Like what? What’s something they can do today or something they can do with you if they enlist your help. What’s that big thing?

Sandy Pardue 22:54

Well, the first thing that they need to do is get organized. I mean, that’s just start thinking about working on the business aspect of the practice, that’s the most important thing. And that’s not something that you can walk up to the front and just go, oh yeah. So everybody, let’s get busy and be organized. No, you’ve got to look at each system in your practice. Look at what’s causing you stress if you’ve got like open time because it was never filled or because of broken appointments. That’s a system. Fix that system. Don’t try to focus on too many things at one time, but look for missed opportunities with your team. Get your team together. This is something that the listeners could do this week. They just let’s have a meeting. Let’s talk about each person. How’s your department doing? Don’t let them get off track but bring like what’s needed, what the wanting needed for each department. And what are the missed opportunities to discuss it as a group that is so powerful to sit there as a group and say, how can we get better? How can we work better as a team? It’s very, very powerful. Come up with a practice vision and this is all part of it. But like I’ll guarantee you, sometimes when you ask team members like what are some missed opportunities you might have to help them a little bit, like just looking at the open time and the value of that time. That was the missed opportunity. Because you can’t get that time back, right. You can’t buy it. You can’t buy any more time, right? You can’t borrow it. It’s like you get one chance every day to make every day the best it can be. Those are missed opportunities. So you might need to help your team focus on that. What are our missed opportunities? Patients walking out without the next appointment. Have these discussions with your team. And then if they’re ready to make changes and they want to get more organized, get training for them, whether it’s my seminars or or a local CE or a dental meeting train get make sure your team gets trained. We run into so many offices that have people that have been there 15 or 20 years, and they’re stuck. They don’t even know what they’re missing because they never got out of their own four walls, which, by the way, I can leave the listeners with this. Your success or the lack of it depends 100% on what goes on within your own four walls, not the clouds over your building or the weather or the person next door. You know, I see people, oh, I’m going to get next to that practice because they do 3 million. So if I get next to them. Or here’s a quick example. You see it on Facebook. People come on and say, oh, I’m having tons of broken appointments this week. Or is anybody else a what. That’s like saying. I need to unload my dishwasher. Does anybody else need to unload their dishwasher? Broken appointments. In California, have nothing to do with broken appointments in New York or North Carolina. Or anywhere. Oh yeah. What’s going on in your own four walls.

Brett Allen 26:00

That’s so valuable? Yeah. Look within mindset shifts. Get organized and take ownership with your team. Get the collaboration. That’s so awesome. Everything you’ve said today is so valuable, Sandy. Everybody, you’ve got to reach out to Sandy. So best place is classicpractice.com that’s your website.

Sandy Pardue 26:19

classicpractice.com is the website. Yes. And my email is sandy@.classicpractice.com. And I have a podcast called Dental Drill Bits and a Facebook group called Dental Drill Bits.

Brett Allen 26:32

Let’s do this. Go there. There’s lots of great resources. Get connected with Sandy. Get the help you need today. We don’t know what we don’t know. So? So reach out and get help and have some breakthroughs so that you can get to that next level with your practice. Thank you again today Sandy. And yeah, excited to see you here soon at a new event coming up next month. But yeah thank you again.

Sandy Pardue 26:56

Yeah thank you Brett I enjoyed it.

Outro 27:00

All right everybody until next time. We’ll see you on The Marketing 32 Show. Have a great day.