In 2020, Dr. Ross William was fed up with the slow growth trajectory of his dental practice located in the rural town of Paris, Texas, population 24,807. He was only averaging an increase of around $5,000 more per month each year. This was unacceptable to him, because while only 32 years old, he wanted a lifestyle dental practice where he could work less and earn more. And he didn’t want to wait until he’d been working for twenty or thirty years in his practice to get it.

“Why wait?” Dr. Williams said. “I'm coming up on the best years of my life for travel... the 10 years when your kids are old enough to be independent and you can take them places, but young enough that they're not all in college or where you've got to start bringing their spouses and trying to do all of those things. I want the financial freedom of that. I want to be around, hanging out with them and doing stuff and not be slaving away all day."

Dr. Williams graduated from dental school in 2015 and after a year and a half of trying to find the right practice, he ended up taking over the practice of an older dentist whose health was failing in his hometown of Paris. The practice was doing between $20,000 and $30,000 a month. “He was massively under-treating his patients,” Dr. Williams said. “We were able to immediately bump up to $50,000, but I was slow and had no idea what I was doing.” In 2017, he built out a different practice. He now shares a building with his father, who is a medical doctor. “We have two separate businesses, but our practices are in the same building. We share a waiting room, but otherwise, we’ve got completely different staff. When he retires in a few years, I plan on building out the rest of the building.”

When he saw a Team Training Institute ad on Facebook in December 2020 that talked about doubling your production, he decided to sign up and go all in. While Team Training Institute is the biggest investment he's ever made in coaching, Dr. Williams said his self-evaluation convinced him that his previous approach to coaching wasn’t getting him where he wanted to go. “I had a bad tendency to take the cheap way out on some of these coaching things in the past and got very little out of it,” Dr. Williams said. “This time I dove in headfirst, and their money-back guarantee is a no-brainer.”

What He’s Achieved Already In Just 12 Months

Within 12 months of joining The Team Training Institute, Dr. Williams increased his net production by 55.56% and is working only three and a half days a week. Despite higher expenses due to adding staff and purchasing new equipment, his profitability has gone way up. He hit the same profitability as the previous year by August 2021. He also hit his three-year financial goal early! “We hit our three-year goal in year one with The Team Training Institute,” Dr. Williams said. “I am really pleased.”

The following are the biggest strategies that Dr. Williams applied in the past twelve months to begin creating his lifestyle dental practice that earns him more while working less.  

Be Fully Transparent About Your Struggles

Dr. Williams attended his first meeting with The Team Training Institute in Phoenix, Arizona, in late January 2021. During the meeting, he was open and honest about what he was experiencing in his practice. Although the solution presented by Team Training Institute seemed counter-intuitive, after implementing advice from just that one meeting, within a month, his production increased by close to double.

“We talked about some problems we were running into during the meeting and Dr. John Meis said, ‘Let's take a poll in the room here. What does this guy need to do? Every person in there said, “You need another hygienist.” At the time I was working with just one and I responded with a bunch of ‘yeah, buts’ and Dr. John said, ‘No you need another hygienist.’ On day two of the meeting, Dr. John said, “Ross, did you hire another hygienist last night?’ When I said no, he responded, ‘Why not?’ I hired another hygienist and our revenue skyrocketed. We went from an average of $55,000 a month to $90,000 by March 2021. It was a huge, almost immediate jump.  I became a believer that day.”

Change Your Approach To Production Goals

Before completing both Hygiene Explosion and Perio Explosion training, Dr. Williams says there was no urgency from his staff in hitting practice goals. The biggest gains came from changing how he rewarded performance, focusing on same-day production, and setting up his operatory correctly.

“I found both trainings quite helpful,” Dr. Williams said. “I am surprised at how big an impact it was when I switched to The Team Training Institute’s daily production bonus system. I used to have monthly bonuses, which in my head, I thought were great, but it didn’t do squat for us. Now my team is always looking at how we are doing and where we can add things today to meet our goal. I hear them on the phone all the time and hear them saying, ‘Who can we get in here? We’re a few hundred bucks shy of our bonus, let’s go!’ The Team Training Institute’s bonus system really helps my team focus on what we can do today to get our bonus and has gotten them into the mindset of how we can do same-day production.”

Trust Your Team

Adjusting how he works with his hygienists and trusting them to do more of the treatment presentations has made the process much smoother. “It’s been a real big thing to work with my hygienists on how to do those treatment presentations so that I’m coming in and diagnosing, meeting the patient, shutting up, getting out, and letting the hygienist take over from there,” Dr. Williams said. “It’s been really hard for me to do and I’m still not great at it, but when I do it, it works.”

Dr. Williams says his team “loves” The Team Training Institute because they have given them "a voice to tell him to stop micro-managing them." "That was something that was really hard for me to do, but they like the additional independence,” Dr. Williams said. “They like the additional money. The idea of me getting out of their way and letting them do their jobs is fun and rewarding... and that's what everybody wants. I had a bad tendency of thinking, ‘This is my baby, and I'm going to make sure it goes the way I want type of thing’ where that really wasn't all that helpful and getting off that was tremendously important."

Build the RIGHT team

Dr. Williams was struggling with an office manager who was extremely skilled but wasn’t working out. He ended up moving an assistant who had been a manager at a different office into the position. Not only did getting the right person in the position help the office dynamics, it also relieved stress and frustration. “Team Training Institute helped me tremendously,” Dr. Williams said. “Getting the guidance to get a good office manager in the right spot took some hard work. I really liked the other office manager. She had been so valuable, but she just wasn’t the right person for the job. It was hard to let her go but moving the other girl into the management spot was the right move. She’s got the respect of the other staff members and I can say, ‘Alicia take care of this,’ and it gets done and it gets done well. Not having to do everything myself is so nice. Now there is no drama. People know their roles and they do a good job and then we go home. It's been terrific.”

Dr. Williams also hired two more assistants, a hygienist and another front office person. The Team Training Institute helped him put a leadership structure in place and defined the responsibilities for each role. “We’ve doubled our staff this year, but even with all the expenses of that, income went up by 50 percent or so. At the suggestion of Team Training Institute, I’ve defined who has what jobs, and that really helped, so it wasn’t ‘a thing’ I had to deal with. I’ve also made a conscious effort to delegate as much as possible if it’s not a clinical issue that I have to do. I’m still holding on to some things, but it’s much better.”‍

Create Your Big Picture Vision‍

What Dr. Williams feels has been most beneficial is that he has direction and a big life vision for what he wants now. "For a long time, I always had these four-year goals... get through high school, get through college, get through med school, get through residency, build a practice,” he said. “And after a while, four, five years of building, I needed another four-year goal. The Team Training Institute gave me a good life goal, it gave me something to work on and a big picture... and that was helpful for me to have direction from them."

Dr. Williams currently works three and a half days a week. His immediate goal is to hire an associate, so he can expand the hours of operation to six days a week. He’d like to do that until his dad retires, which he anticipates will be in the next couple of years. At that point, he plans to renovate his dad’s medical practice, build out more operatories and hire another associate doctor. “I could ostensibly be working two or two and a half days a week in actual dentistry and then another half-day managing, so I’d be up there three days a week and be good to go.”

In creating his vision plan with The Team Training Institute, he recently transitioned from using his name for his dental practice to Oak Creek Family Dental. “With our vision for expansion, I had to get away from using my name as the practice name,” Dr. Williams explained.

Shifting his leadership approach to make it a group effort moving towards his practice goals has made a big difference, too. “Setting goals will make your life better when you achieve them and getting out of the mindset of ‘this is my practice’ to ‘this is our practice’ makes things better,” he said. “Success comes from leveraging other people's time, effort and money. You must do that and not just do more dentistry and work harder. Because to be honest, that sucks and is the opposite of what I'm trying to do. With The Team Training Institute I’m on the right track now. My wife says I seem much happier and less stressed. Plus, the increased revenue has allowed us to build a new house. My plan is to be in a position at age 45 or so where I have the option of working or not. I think it’d be fun to do dentistry about one day a week and manage it.”