Brett Allen (00:19)

Hi, Brett Allen here, host of the Marketing32 Show, where I connect with leading dentists, dental influencers, and industry experts to uncover the latest and greatest strategies, insights, innovations to help your practice grow and thrive. This episode, as always, is brought to you by our team here at Marketing32. We are the only dental marketing team with a performance guarantee that if you don’t grow, you don’t pay. We truly are invested in your growth and making a positive impact in the industry through ethical, honest marketing.

We don’t work with everybody, so give us a call. If you need help with marketing, ⁓ head over to Marketing32.com. We’ll have a quick discovery call and find out if it’s a great fit to work together. Quick shout out to Callie Ward. Recently had her on the team, talked all about effective team communication and how your team knows the solution oftentimes, but they just don’t know how to articulate it. So check that one out. Great episode. Excited to have a new friend on the show, Rebecca Herring.

She is the founder of Transformational Dental Coaching and a powerhouse in dental operations, helping practice owners build confident leaders, dial in rock solid systems, and create teams that actually love showing up. With 25 plus years in the trenches of dentistry, she blends real world strategy with down-to-earth coaching to eliminate chaos, boost profitability, and elevate the patient experience.

She’s also known for helping practices scale smarter by integrating virtual team members and practical AI support. So dentists can lead with clarity and teams can breathe again. I’m excited to talk about that today with you, Rebecca. Thank you for coming on the show today. This will be fun.

Rebecca Herring (01:51)

Excited to be here. Thanks for letting me come.

Brett Allen (01:53)

Yeah, yeah. So let’s before we kind of get into what it is you do and how you help practices, tell us your background. How did you get into dentistry? ⁓ take a few minutes to just walk us through that and what you’re doing today.

Rebecca Herring (02:06)

You bet. ⁓ actually I was born into dentistry, literally. My dad’s a dentist. My mom was a hygienist. And so as a really big family, we all participated and supported my dad in growing his dental practice. So we all helped honestly stuff envelopes and lick them and put stamps on them, you know, back in the day when we didn’t have all these really ill amazing electronic tools to help us. ⁓

Brett Allen (02:12)

okay.

Okay.

online. Yeah.

Rebecca Herring (02:35)

And then my dad did a lot of humanitarian work. And so each of us, my siblings or seven of us, we ⁓ we were given the opportunity to travel with my mom and dad and do humanitarian trips, which really honestly instilled in me the importance of that patient experience, and ⁓ traveled with my parents to Guadalajara, Mexico, and was able to serve for a week with them in I

Brett Allen (02:59)

Yeah.

Rebecca Herring (03:04)

an orphanage with children. And it was right after I’d had my first baby. And it really just touched me in a way that you see the benefits of really being able to serve everyone. And I will it it was life changing, honestly, for me.

Brett Allen (03:05)

Wow, that’s cool.

That’s awesome. I love hearing these stories about dentists who do philanthropic work and help other people. Yeah, that’s that’s awesome.

Rebecca Herring (03:30)

Yeah, for about the last fifteen

years of his career, every year he would take a trip and travel around the world sharing his talents with those that were less fortunate.

Brett Allen (03:36)

Y that’s cool.

That’s awesome. So you grew up in dentistry. Did you then work in dentistry? ⁓ were you working in that practice?

Rebecca Herring (03:45)

I did help my dad ⁓ through like going to college and such in the summers and helping him integrate. He was one of the first that brought dentrics into was a two into a dental practice. It’s kind of fun, interesting to help him there. ⁓ but no, my first career actually I was a college professor and if I know the next question out of your mouth is gonna be, what did you teach? ⁓

Brett Allen (03:52)

Mm-hmm.

⁓ okay.

Yeah.

Rebecca Herring (04:10)

Coaching was a part of that. I was a professional ballroom dancer. And so I worked at the College of William and Mary. ⁓ and I taught ballroom dance to ⁓ those that were majoring in kinesiology or dance.

Brett Allen (04:14)

wow, okay.

that’s awesome. Cool. I bet that was fun.

So how did you get into coaching in the dentistry then? from there?

Rebecca Herring (04:30)

So

after I retired about fifteen years ago, my body was done.

My mind was not. ⁓ And so I decided to go back into dentistry where my passion originally started with coaching and working with teams with my dad. And that’s basically how I got started. I worked with a lot of ⁓ private practice with multi-locations or with small DSOs and really grew from there. ⁓ Started up in on back on the West Coast where my dad was located. He’d already retired by then, but started working.

Working with some of the dentists that I had known growing up and helping them grow their locations. ⁓ From there, I took a little bit of a break, as I think a lot of people in dentistry tend to do, and stepped into a startup in the veterinary world in their HR business partner role, ⁓ working with very huge teams in their HR role, which was enlightening.

Brett Allen (05:23)

wow.

wow.

Rebecca Herring (05:35)

and fun, ⁓ but also gave me a new perspective on ⁓ compassion, empathy, and really having some of those really good one-on-one ⁓ tough conversations and growth and development when working with individuals in leadership and C-suite roles.

Brett Allen (05:54)

Awesome. Awesome. I bet there’s some fun stories in there that you can share.

Rebecca Herring (05:58)

There are some really good ones, but you know maybe we’ll save that for another day.

Brett Allen (06:04)

Well good.

So I I think I love talking with consultants and coaches who have experience working in operations because so much of marketing there’s there’s this whole other half of marketing that’s in the practice that we as marketing t team members don’t really have an impact on. We drive patients in the door, we get the flow happening, the demand create that, but then there’s all this that goes into

patient experience and team. So from your perspective, what are what are some of the most common repeat problems you see practices trying to fix over and over when it comes to operations?

Rebecca Herring (06:42)

I think some of the biggest things that I see in practices that they keep dealing on repeat, right? The patterns, they keep showing up in different ways, but they’re really not separate. They’re gonna be things like our schedule keeps getting really messy, or our case acceptance is down, the insurances are causing problems. There’s so many mistakes, or honestly, coming right down to what you mentioned in Kelly’s conversation that she had with you, communication just isn’t working.

They really aren’t separate problems. They really are connected. ⁓ And really it comes down to just the lack of clarity, having consistency in the practice and a structure and how the practice is going to operate day to day.

Brett Allen (07:24)

Yeah, so systems, it sounds like having understand proper understanding systems in place. What are walk us through where do where where’s that a deficiency in the practice? So people rely too much, I think, on people sometimes, right? I notice this in my business too, where you have A players and you’re just like, They’ve got it. I’m gonna put a person in place to fix this, they’ve got it. Is that is that a big thing that you help practices uncover?

Rebecca Herring (07:44)

Right.

It really is. It’s it’s easy sometimes when we have really great team members or they’ve been with the practice for a really long time and we start to really rely on ⁓ what we call our unicorn team member, right? The one who just knows everything. They know how to do all the systems, they know where all the passwords are, they know where all the different things are in the in the practice and what works well, they know all the patience and

Brett Allen (08:11)

Mm-hmm.

Rebecca Herring (08:13)

You know, she’s the one we go to if if if we have a problem with the insurance or if we have a problem with our PMS system, right? She knows how to schedule it correctly, or he knows exactly how we want to ⁓ work with the treatment case presentation. So we’ll we’ll just use him. ⁓ and the problem that we run into is that when we only work with one specific person, what happens when they’re not there?

What happens if they get sick? What happens when they have a family member that passes away and they aren’t at work that day? We realize that the system that we’ve created really isn’t a system and it’s not a stable process that we’re using in our practice. We’re really just dependent on that one person. So over time, what this does is it puts a lot of pressure on our strongest team members.

And so what this then becomes is a safety net for everyone else in the practice, right? So when someone’s not as confident in a certain role or a specific system that we have, they become dependent on that one person. And what happens is then it leads to stress and burnout and frustration. And we really want to be able to rely on our own.

confidence and our own personal systems to the practice, not the systems of one single person or maybe two people in the practice. ⁓ We just need to have a protocol that s works no matter who’s in the building.

Brett Allen (09:42)

Yeah, systems are huge. Jeff, my business partner, he’s brilliant at that way, organized, has everything documented. We have from our fulfillment side, all the different team members, what it is their processes that they run and manage is pretty well buttoned up. I’m proud of him and and grateful for him. ⁓ but is is it I guess the question would be in the dental practice, since I don’t know a ton about back office stuff and what’s going on with

Team management, patient experience, like internal and how that’s managed. Do you have systems for everything? Do you do you ever? I mean, at some point you do need to rely on people to own something and get the job done. That’s their role. But does everybody need to know all the systems? And do you have kind of you a a shared workload? Is that what you mean by not relying too heavily on one person?

Rebecca Herring (10:32)

Well what I mean is when we rely on someone, a particular person to know everything, that’s where that stress and that we’re we’re we we don’t have the clarity that the all the whole team needs, right? And so we’re playing a guessing game sometimes. I don’t want my team to guess what the process is. I want them to know what the process is.

Brett Allen (10:38)

Hmm.

Mm.

Rebecca Herring (10:55)

So even if someone working in my front desk area as an admin doesn’t understand clinically what happens in the back in detail, I do want them to understand that when, let’s say, our back office clinical team comes to the front, I do want them to understand that this is how the process in the back worked, and vice versa, right?

Brett Allen (11:15)

Hm.

In awareness, yeah.

Rebecca Herring (11:16)

I don’t expect my

clinical team to understand the full revenue cycle management process, but I do think it’s important to understand what things that they actually do in the back, how it affects the front, and how when we drop the ball in one of those systems that we have, how that ends up affecting the protocols and the performance at the front. So when we forget to let’s say set complete a procedure.

Brett Allen (11:21)

Mm.

Mm.

Rebecca Herring (11:42)

And our process in the front is when we come and we check out the patient and we’re going to set complete everything we did that day, and that from there we create the claim, but we don’t send it till the end of the day. If that’s our system, it’s okay. But we’re also determining when the patient leaves how much they’re going to pay out of pocket. And so when a team member in the back

Doesn’t complete their system or their process of checking the patient out, making sure everything was done, that ultimately does end up affecting the people at the front and their system because now they forgot to collect, let’s say for fluoride, right? And so it does the systems there in place so that we all do our jobs efficiently and effectively. But if someone drops the ball or they’re guessing or they’re not sure, and so they just kind of, I don’t know, well, I’m

Brett Allen (12:15)

Mm.

Rebecca Herring (12:27)

just walk them to the front, they’ll take care of it, they know what they’re doing. It does ultimately affect everyone in their job and doing their job efficiently, effectively, and their performance does matter because then whose fault is it?

Brett Allen (12:36)

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Are there are there certain systems that you run into that aren’t in place in a practice? Are there certain ones it’s like, man, this one is a commonly missed system or ki process and there needs to be one.

Rebecca Herring (12:52)

I think that there are quite a few systems that maybe don’t have they might have it in place, but they haven’t detailed it out ⁓ enough that everyone understands the process in detail. And this I think is really what comes down to be key to a to a team and also to a practice.

Brett Allen (13:06)

Okay.

Rebecca Herring (13:13)

It’s nice to say, well, when the patient comes up, we let them know what we did in the back, and then they do this and this, and then to the front, we do this, this, and this, and then they’re out. But when frustration settles in and we start doing a little bit of guessing, we’re not sure, and we don’t have every single touch point laid out, and everyone understands their role that they’re playing, whether they’re clinical or they are admin, this is where frustration starts to build.

Brett Allen (13:32)

Mm.

Rebecca Herring (13:40)

And this is where we come back and we keep having the same conversations over and over and over. And we think that we have different conversations, but ultimately they’re the same same conversations we’re having over and over again. We just think it’s a different system. It’s really the same one.

But this is really where people get exhausted and they’re tired and they just wanna kinda normalize and they wanna get a system that’s in place that works for everyone in all their positions and no matter what they’re doing in the practice, clinical or front office.

Brett Allen (14:11)

Yeah. Yeah, it’s good advice. What what do you think what tends to happen if you don’t have systems in place? I know you mentioned people get stressed, there’s burnout. ⁓ what are some other long-term impacts to the practice, the team, the culture? ⁓ what other things happen start you start to notice? Like if I’m a doctor, I own a practice. ⁓ are there common symptoms that I can look for that say I need to address my systems or I need to do better at that?

Rebecca Herring (14:37)

I think something that’s really important is making sure that our teams really feel aligned. And if they don’t, you’re gonna notice that you have some team members that are ⁓ you’ll see it on their face, right? Their attitudes start to shift. They used to love coming to work, they were really positive and upbeat at work, they they loved working with the team, they contributed to ⁓ conversations in our team meetings.

those types of things, and you’re gonna start to see them shift and become a little more quiet, a little more reserved. They’re gonna kind of pull back, and they’re gonna not they’re not gonna feel as though there’s they’re in there and positive and apart and just go getters, right, on our teams anymore. And I think that’s kind of the first sign. They’re gonna start to do some of that withdrawing from our from our team. And you’ll find that.

Brett Allen (15:10)

Mm.

Not be as engaged.

Hmm.

Rebecca Herring (15:29)

Sometimes they’ll be sick and they’ll start to call out and they’ll come in late. And at first we won’t think anything of it because they’re such great team members and ⁓ you know, we’re just we’re just a little tired, it’s okay. But really we’re gonna start to notice it in those kinds of ways. The effectiveness and their effort and their attitude. Yeah, the performance side of their jobs.

Brett Allen (15:52)

Performance drops, yeah. Would I I

would imagine you would s you this would be kind of a common thing that would happen with more than one team member and not just yeah. So if you’re you’re experiencing that where people start their position, year one is great, year two, year three, or maybe even sooner than that, maybe months.

Rebecca Herring (16:02)

yes.

Yeah, sometimes sometimes. But as we talk about, we know we start to utilize our really great team members and we start to rely on them, right? Because they they know it all. They jump in, they do it. They’re not afraid to stay a little late. They’re not afraid to come in a little early. They work a little bit into their lunch hour to make sure we’re ready to start after the lunch hour. They’re the ones that we rely on the most, and they’re the ones that will start to

feel it. They start to get a little frustrated. They’re gonna express it at first to say, we we need a better process for this specifically. And they’ll just start to stop talking about it when the system doesn’t get resolved. And we don’t start to work through the system in a way that benefits the whole team, not just necessarily them, but

Brett Allen (16:47)

Mm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Rebecca Herring (17:02)

It’s an operational piece. Operationally, we need to fix something so that everybody is working more efficiently and effectively. Does that mean we need another team member? Or does it mean we need to look at the system, whatever it may be, and we need to walk through it in a way that we stop and pause and say, let’s, you know, a new patient calls. What is the process? Start to finish.

And we really need to document it, not just talk about what we’re gonna do, but document it and write it down so that we can go back and refer to it when maybe we hire a new person, or we feel like we’ve kind of slacked off a little bit, you know, six months after we’ve talked about it. We need to come back to that written process again and just say, let’s refresh this one more time in our minds. Or we bring a new team member on, and maybe they’ve come up with a better

more efficient way that they like to do it and it works better for the practice. Go back to that written SOP and say, okay, let’s walk through this again. What do we want to change or update in our system? Maybe you bring on a new platform. Maybe you bring on a new tool, front or back. And now our process needs to be updated and we all need to get back on the same page again.

The cost isn’t just operational, right? It’s emotional, it’s your culture, and sometimes it’s even financial.

Brett Allen (18:25)

Yeah, I can imagine it can have a huge impact when you don’t have things in place. ⁓ I talk to dentists all the time who are like, I’m stuck, I haven’t been able to grow beyond this certain point. ⁓ they are doing marketing and I’m like, Okay, so maybe it’s not the marketing, it’s something else. or maybe it’s the the approach they’re taking to marketing. That could be a problem too. But ⁓ these things Yeah. man, that’s always the biggest one.

Rebecca Herring (18:44)

What if it’s your person answering the phone? Maybe you’re spending the

money on the marketing. And really, doctors, have you ever called your own practice? Have you done a little secret shopper call? And do you know how the person answering the phone is taking those marketing calls? You’re spending the money, but how is the person taking the call?

Maybe it’s just spending a little time explaining to the person taking the calls, how do you want them to explain the marketing money that you’re spending? How do you want them to talk to those patients that are calling in? Maybe it’s just phone training.

Brett Allen (19:06)

Yeah.

I’ll cut that part out. My daughter’s blending a smoothie. I’m like, we’ll we’ll we’ll cut this part out. So we’ll go okay. Are are there some things that you can like w what should a practice do to kind of implement a cadence to bring processes, like educate the team on processes, to review them? Are there is there a certain like methodology, workflow, like what how d how do teams do this?

Rebecca Herring (19:20)

I’m like, ⁓ was that bad? I know.

This is such a great question, so I’m really glad you’re asking. I think one of the biggest shifts that a practice can make is to immediately stop treating concerns as repeated problems, like isolated mistakes, and start asking better questions. So instead of saying, why did this happen or who dropped the ball, but to ask more along the lines of what part of our system allowed this to happen again?

That one question changes the conversation. It’s no longer blaming who did it, right? Who did this? Why did this fall through? And it turns into problem solving. So maybe it’s insurance verification, right? One of our more time-consuming tasks, but also extremely beneficial to our practice. If we don’t do it right, right, we don’t put it in our PMS system correctly.

Money comes out wrong, the amount to collect from the patient is wrong. So we’re not blaming anybody, but let’s sit down. Let’s walk through this touch point by touch point. We make the call. Maybe it’s our information sheet we’re using to collect the information. Whatever it may be, but let’s sit down and let’s walk through it. Not blaming, but as a team, let’s sit down and walk through this. Maybe it’s the schedule.

Maybe we’re not scheduling effectively. Okay, doctors, maybe they went need different times. So maybe we need to document Dr. Smith needs two hours for a crown, but maybe Dr. Joan Jones needs only an hour and a half, right? Let’s be effective. How do we help the people on our team be effective? And let’s invite the team in to talk through the process. Not blaming, supporting.

What do we need to do? Who touches it? Where does it break? What is unclear? Let’s make it so it’s clear and assume. This is the most, I think this is the most important question. Assume it’s never been taught to anyone. Right? Super important. Yeah, we we as if we’ve been in dental forever, right? We just know, ⁓ just do this, this, and this, and we assume everybody knows the rest. But

Brett Allen (21:34)

yeah. There’s little nuances that you have to yeah.

Rebecca Herring (21:46)

When we define the ownership and we had tightened the workflow and create a very simple standard outline of how something’s going to be done that the whole team can follow, there’s no vagueness to our process, and everybody can follow it. So if your five-year-old walked in, could they follow your process? Right? Make it a real process, everyone can do it, and then

Brett Allen (22:04)

Yeah, I love that. Yeah. Could they follow it? Yeah, make it simple. Yeah.

Rebecca Herring (22:13)

Go back and revisit it. Go back and revisit it every six months.

Brett Allen (22:16)

Yeah. There’s a methodology I learned ⁓ in Boy Scouts called the EDGE method. ⁓ the EDGE is a is an acronym for explain, demonstrate, guide, and enable. So if you can t walk people through explain it first, demonstrate how to do it, guide them through it, and then empower them, enable them to own it and and do it. But that that applies in a lot of areas. Do you have when you work with a client

Rebecca Herring (22:19)

Ha ha ha.

I love that.

Brett Allen (22:42)

What what’s kind of y walk us through kind of your process? What what’s what’s it like to work with you?

Rebecca Herring (22:47)

So for me, I really enjoy working with ⁓ dentists, their leaderships, their leadership member or members, and their team, and in several different ways. So I love meeting with the doctors, I love their feedback, because like you said, as a dentist, they’re gonna have a different perspective on their business than their leaders or even their team members.

Brett Allen (23:12)

Mm.

Rebecca Herring (23:12)

So for me, I’m going to meet with the dentist and we’re going to spend a good 90 minutes to two hours talking through their practice. What do they feel like are their pain points not only as a dentist, but with their leadership team and with their team members? And honestly, we’ve all heard this phrase, but what are their wigs? What are their wildly important goals? Where do they want to get not only in this first year of working together, but where do they see themselves five and ten years down the road?

Because those goals also can affect some of the things we want to put in place the first year working together. Their leadership team will also have a different perspective, and I meet with them separately too. Where do they see some of their pain points working not only with the dentists or dentists, but their own personal struggles in leadership and with leading and guiding their teams? And then same with meeting with their team members. ⁓

admin team and the clinical team. And we approach it the same way. Where do they, where do their team members see themselves a year from now, five years from now? Are you still with this practice? And are you getting the growth that you’re looking for in your own career with this practice? A lot of people, when they’re working in a practice, sometimes feel like they hit a ceiling.

Brett Allen (24:16)

Mm, yeah.

Rebecca Herring (24:33)

Like I don’t have anywhere else to go in my career. And a lot of times that’s why they choose to move on. Not necessarily about money, but they want to feel like they get to grow in their career. Some that’s why they stay so long in a practice is because they actually feel like they have a place to go. So when I work with their teams, I want to know where where do you want to go here? And how, like, how far can we help you grow? Classes, courses, growth.

And do you want to see yourself leading a team here? Some? I just want to come to work. I’m just here to get a paycheck, right? Okay. Let me know that. But if you see yourself as someone who teach me the next thing, I want to learn this. I want to know how to. What’s my can I be an F Fta or an Eda? Can can I get better? Can I get better?

Brett Allen (25:03)

Yeah, I love yeah. Yeah. And that’s fair, that’s fair. Yeah.

A players wanna grow yum.

Rebecca Herring (25:21)

Those people are looking for accountability. They want to grow. They want to be better. Those are the team members you want to keep incentivizing. What’s our next goal? Two months from now, the next two months, the next two months. That makes them feel passionate about coming to work.

Brett Allen (25:26)

Yeah.

Developing and develop Yeah.

Yeah, love that. Well, this has been a great conversation, a ton of value here. ⁓ there’s so much that I’m sure, you know, we’ve only scratched the surface on and going deep with you, having someone like you in the practice in the trenches, working through friction points and challenges with the team, I’m sure it’s super valuable. ⁓ I always close with one golden nugget. What’s that one thing? If you could help our listeners have this epiphany, what’s that what would be that one thing would have a

big impact for their life, their practice.

Rebecca Herring (26:06)

I think for me, valuing our team members is really important. People that feel valued and appreciated in the things that they do and bring to our practice, practices is really key. And when they feel valued, they will always give you more than you expect of them. And so we need to stop asking our team members who made the mistake.

Brett Allen (26:26)

Mm.

Mm.

Rebecca Herring (26:32)

and start

asking them what system will allow them to stop making mistakes and start growing and building our teams. And it starts with appreciation.

Brett Allen (26:40)

Mm. I love that.

That’s awesome. Yeah, that is great. That that that gave me some ideas of things I need to do better. Well, thank you, Rebecca. This has been so awesome. ⁓ anyone who’s interested in contacting you, getting in touch with you, where do we send them?

Rebecca Herring (26:48)

Ha ha ha.

They can find me on any of the social medias and LinkedIn under my name Rebecca Herring or under Transformational Dental Coaching. And you can send me an email at Rebecca at your TVcoach.com.

Brett Allen (27:08)

Awesome. All right. We’ll put that in the show notes. Thank you again for coming on, Rebecca. This has been educational for me. I’m sure many have taken gotten value from it too. ⁓ thanks for coming on.

Rebecca Herring (27:18)

Thanks, appreciate it.

Brett Allen (27:19)

All right, everybody, until next time on the Marketing Thirty Two show. Have a great rest of your day, great rest your week. Take care.