The Accelerator Systems Every Practice Needs To Scale Smarter With Carrie Webber

Jonathan Moffat is joined by Carrie Webber, owner of The Jameson Group, to talk about the systems that separate thriving practices from those stuck in survival mode. From scheduling chaos to team misalignment, Carrie shares what she calls the “accelerator systems,” the key areas that impact profitability, culture, and sustainable growth. They explore how most practices plateau not because of a lack of effort, but because they’re missing clarity, structure, and intentional team development. If your business feels busy but not productive, this conversation will help reset your strategy and build a more profitable, well-run practice without burning out.

Find Jonathan at jonathanmoffat.com
Learn more about Aligned Advisors at alignedadvisors.com
Connect with Carrie at jmsn.com

Find Jonathan on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jonathanmoffat1
Find Carrie on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/carriejamesonwebber
Follow @jameson_management and @carriewebberspeaks on Instagram

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The Accelerator Systems Every Practice Needs To Scale Smarter With Carrie Webber

I’m so excited to have with me a special guest, Carrie Webber from The Jameson Group. Carrie, thanks so much for being here.

Thanks, Jonathan. I’m happy to be here.

Carrie Webber Of The Jameson Group

A little bit about Carrie. Carrie Webber is the President and Owner of The Jameson Group, a nationally recognized dental management, marketing and coaching firm. She’s helped thousands of practices across the country become more productive, more profitable, and more fulfilled in the way they practice.

Carrie’s a sought-after speaker and contributor to dental publications, and she’s been named a Leader in CE by Dentistry Today for six consecutive years. Congratulations. She brings a powerhouse blend of strategy, leadership, insight, and practical systems to move practices forward fast. Carrie, you also said you guys have a podcast as well. What’s the name of your podcast? Where can people find that?

Yeah, so we have a podcast too, and I just told Jonathan, “I think you should be a guest on my podcast.” It’s called The Jameson Files. It’s actually a nod to The Jameson Group. Actually, my husband, Jess, and I are second-generation owners of The Jameson Group. It was founded by my parents, doctors John and Kathy Jameson.

My dad is a retired dentist. In the ‘90s, way back in the 1900s, my father had a recurring column in dental economics where he interviewed trailblazers, doctors in dentistry that were really on the forefront of technology, and he would interview them and how to call them in dental economics every time called The Jameson Files. We started this podcast and when we were trying to think of what are we going to name it? I said, “I think we should name it The Jameson Files.” Here we are, carrying an old name forward into the future.

You guys are a staple in dentistry. I think I was telling you even before we had met, I’ve heard your name throughout the years that I’ve been in the dental space. Congratulations on carrying that legacy forward and continuing to do a great job for our industry.

Thank you. I appreciate that.

How The Accelerator Systems Work

I’m excited about this episode’s topic because I was telling you as we were chatting before we started, this is a question I actually get asked a lot, which is about how do I scale? How do we grow? How do we scale? What is scaling and how does that look for different people? Let’s jump into what is the accelerator system? What do you need to know to scale? What do we need to know if you can’t seem to scale? Tell us a little bit about what this Accelerator System is and how it helps.

When we were prepping for our time, we had talked about that scaling can mean a lot of different things. I appreciated that you said that because I came up with this concept and it’s not really a concept. It’s a lecture that I do, and it’s really taking in some of what I would say are the greatest hits of dental practice success.

You’re not in consulting and marketing we’ve been in consulting for 35 years. We’ve been in marketing for well over fifteen years. You don’t do it for that long without seeing a lot of different versions of dental practices and dental businesses. The truth of the matter is the systems and execution of great business concepts, it’s not specific to dentistry, really. It’s really true great business practices that have helped many businesses over the years be successful. When you blend it into the systems that are specific to dentistry, it helps dental practices thrive.

Whether you’re looking to grow your solo practice to be more productive and profitable, if you’re looking to expand your services, expand your provider numbers, expand locations, these are some of the key aspects that are either helping practices grow or hindering practices because they’re not doing it or doing it well.

Some of them are soft skills and some of them are hard skills. When people are always telling me they’re stuck, they’re plateaued or they’re shrinking instead of growing, we take a look at these aspects of their business and determine are what are you doing intentionally and what are you doing accidentally? What do you need to be more consistent about sharpening in your execution of your day-to-day strategy and workflow? How do you grow your business acumen? There are aspects of it that are individual to the leader, and then there are pieces that are more applicable to the practice depending on those soft skills of those hard skills that really can help a practice accelerate.

Determining The Right Time To Scale Your Practice

How do you know if you’re ready to scale or if your practice is ready to scale? Are there metrics you should be looking at? You talked about plateauing. I’ve seen, even in my business, plateau could mean like literally revenues just gone flat. It could also mean that as the visionary, as the CEO, as the president, as the doctor, you just are like, “I’m not feeling as fulfilled e every time I walk into the office.” Where do you see that in terms of you’re in a place where you’re ready to scale?

Your company and our company have a lot of synergy here, Jonathan, because I know that you start a lot of clients in what you what you call a roadmap. I feel like there’s a lot of synergy there. I talk to doctors every week that are trying to decide, “Do I want to do coaching? Is this what I need?” Something has happened, something has spurred them on to engage in a conversation with me. A lot of times, the conversation is about they’re on the cusp of burnout. They feel very stuck. They feel like they’ve done everything to the point that they know how to, and they cannot get past whatever the ceiling is that they keep hitting.

There’s a lot of variations of it. They’re frustrated, discouraged. There’s a lot of that emotion happening in dentistry for a lot of reasons. Cost of running practices is going up. If they aren’t doing the work to continuously grow the profit margin of their practices, they’re taking a big hit financially because of salaries and the cost of lab and supplies and all of those things.

A lot of the team management is becoming very frustrating to doctors. I think the first thing that I always try to help doctors understand is important are what are softer skills of business ownership, leadership and entrepreneurship. That is the leadership piece. Do the doctors know why they’re there, why they’re doing what they’re doing? Do they know what it is they want to be known for doing?

Do they know where they’re taking their practice? In their mind’s eye, what is their ideal vision for their practice? Do they know who they are? What are the things that are most important to them in terms of how they work as a team and how they work with their patients? Do they know how to do it? Are they setting goals and strategies? Are they training to systems and skills that help them achieve whatever that vision is?

Do the doctors have that clarity or the owners have that clarity? Have they clearly and consistently communicated that clear message to their team? A lot of times, there is a terrible game of assumption happening. A lot of wishing and wanting and disappointment, but there’s never been a very clear conversation with the players of the game, of what game is it that we’re playing?

Do you think that’s because the doctor doesn’t have clarity around that or do you think it’s just because they don’t know how to communicate that? Do you think it’s like, “I don’t want to tell my team what I really want because then they’re going to think I’m greedy?” What do you think? What have you seen?

All of the above. Some doctors have never thought it through. It’s fun when you work with a client, I’m sure, who has done their own work and has that clear vision, and now they’re looking for the tools to help get them there. The truth of the matter is that’s not necessarily always the case. Doctors purchase practices that have its own history and their own baggage and its own bad habits or whatever, and then they just inherit it. If they don’t have clear vision of who they are and what they want to evolve that business into, then they find themselves stuck in somebody else’s vision. That happens a lot of times with doctors who are 5, 10 years out.

They’re like, “What is this? I don’t even know. I’ve been trying to make this work and I’m frustrated,” because they don’t see themselves in the practice. They don’t know. Even if they do know, they’ve not told their team. I do a lot of lectures across the country to team. I do a lot of team building and patient experience presentations and the total team approach to practice success. I often will ask the audiences to the team members that are there, “How many of you know what your doctor’s vision is for his or her practice and know what their expectations are of you and your role in that vision?” I rarely get people who raise their hands.

When they do, it’s maybe a handful. I’m actually really surprised when I get them. Pleasantly surprised. Only once has an entire team in a lecture been able to tell me the doctor’s vision and their core values of their practice as a whole team. They were able to answer that only one time. There’s this disconnect of what a doctor envisions for practice success and a team’s understanding of what that is.

We’re all throwing darts. It’s like pin the tail on the donkey. We’re all blindfolded and we’re just throwing darts somewhere hoping we’re hitting a target because everybody’s just trying to guess what right looks like. There’s that disconnect of expectations and a vision and of values or they get clear on that but they don’t know how to actualize that in the practice.

This happens a lot. I know that you lecture a lot across the country too. People will get great ideas and they’ll think, “This sounds good in theory, but I don’t know how to make that happen in my practice. I don’t know how to implement that in my practice.” That’s when we get more into the hard skills in terms of actual systems, skillsets.

It becomes very clear very early on in conversations with doctors are in what I would call the Accelerator Systems in a practice either are just happening by ac by accident or they’ve unraveled a bit, or there’s not been enough attention to actually streamline and elevate the level of execution in those systems. It’s funny. You know how it is when you’re in the trenches of your own business, it’s hard to see where the issues are.

How To Hire Slow And Hire Right

That’s what I was just going to ask because I think what happens, and I’ve certainly been there, you’re so busy just with your head down working, just trying to get through the day and it gets to a point where you little maybe feel like you’re on a hamster wheel a little bit. All of a sudden, Jenny, the dental assistant, quits. I’m like, “You need to hire a new dental assistant,” or the hygienist quits, “You need to hire a new hygienist or associate,” and then your scramble. Hire the person and they just get thrown right into it, “We need you right there.” There’s no training.

What happens is the doctor gets frustrated because they don’t know. We put ourselves in this cycle. It’s like this downward spiral. We get more frustrated. What tools, advice or systems do you teach your clients? How do you remove yourself from pick your head up, take a look around and actually take control of the situation or have that conversation around. What is our vision? What should training look like? What do you guys teach there? How do you get someone out of that?

Let’s peel that back a little bit. To your point, yes, there’s a lot of hiring from desperation, and we’re coming out of a season, maybe in a lot of places are still very much in this season, where it’s very difficult for practices to find the right employees. Especially hygienists. That’s been a really big struggle over the last few years.

It doesn’t change the fact that the best practice is to hire slow and hire right. Nobody wants to hear that because I need somebody in that position. I’ve been going for four months now with nobody in that seat, and we’re going crazy. “Thank goodness. Here comes a warm body that has five years of dental experience. I’m just going to hire that person, and because they have experience, they can just go and start doing it. Thank goodness, tomorrow, I don’t have to do that anymore.”

If you don’t hire and onboard new employees correctly, any effort you’ve ever put into establishing systems in your practice or skills and cohesiveness across the board in your practice for efficiency, for productivity, for patient satisfaction, all of those things go out the window. They may know how to schedule, but do they know how to schedule correctly for you and for your practice?

The moment you get people doing a system differently all over the place, you no longer have a system. That happens a lot because we don’t intentionally train and onboard, we don’t set expectations clearly from the beginning. We don’t have, to your point, clear roles and responsibilities. I can’t tell you how many practices I talk to and they have 4 or 5 business team members, but nobody knows who’s responsible for what.

What happens is, when nobody knows who’s responsible for what, who’s the ultimate responsible, it doesn’t mean that, Jonathan, if you and I are both on the business team that you won’t pitch in and help if I need you to or answer the phone, even though I’m first on the phone if I’m dealing with a patient or whatever the case may be. If nobody knows who’s on first and what’s on second, then we easily fall into the habit of, “I didn’t know I was supposed to do that. I thought Jonathan was going to do that.” Herein lies the unraveling of a business team.

All of the things you ask are important. We need to have clear roles and responsibilities so that we can clearly communicate expectations of each team member’s roles and what’s expected of them. We need to be clearly and intentionally training from the very beginning to set new employees up for success of what right looks like in this practice. Not in the practice they were in before, but in the practice that they’re in now, and that we also do have continuous training.

I know a lot of practices have team meetings, but they don’t have thoughtful team meetings. They may have an office manager, like a talking head reporting back to people preview. There’s an extraordinary amount of disengagement in teams because they’re checking their phones, they’re coming in late, they’re spending the team meeting talking about what they did last night, what their kid’s doing at the baseball game, and they’re not having a real team meeting. If I’m a practice that has a vision of where I want to go and how I want my team to be performing and how I want patient care to be handled, and how I want a patient experience to be, that’s different from where it is now.

I need to have intentional training every single time I have a team meeting with my team, and I need to have an agenda. What we’re going to talk about and what we’re going to walk through, what we’re going to review, what we’re going to practice, the conversations that we’re going to role play, the verbal skills, we’re going to work on, all of those things.

If I want my team to be better in performance, if I want our systems to run more smoothly, we have to have time to work on those systems and skills. It’s not just telling you in passing five minutes after you did a bad phone call, “Can you not do it that way anymore?” How do I do it? I can’t just miraculously improve my skills if I don’t have time, if I’m not shown what right looks like, if I’m not shown a better way, and I practice that better way, and I have a chance to become more competent in my skills.

Team meetings are a huge opportunity in terms of accelerating a practice, because if they’re done right, we’re working on things. We’re working on systems, we’re clearly communicating expectations, we’re reviewing best practices, and we’re practicing those conversations and we’re reviewing how to appropriately schedule. We’re reviewing how to have that financial conversation with the patient. We’re practicing how we answer the telephone, all of those things that are hindering us from being as successful as we could be.

Addressing The Constant Lack of Time

I can already hear the docs, “I don’t have time to do all that. How do I do that? I don’t have time.” What’s your solution for that when you’re like, “I don’t have time, or I don’t know where to start,” what do you tell them?

That’s my favorite debate. Come at me, doctors who don’t have time. Come at me. I’m ready. As a business owner, you don’t have time not to work on your business. This is the hardest obstacle that I find doctors have to overcome. Productive time means a patient’s butt is in the seat. You can have just as much productive time working on the long game of your business if you block it and use it right.

What a lot of practices do is when they don’t have good meetings, when they don’t have effective, productive meetings in place, and they did it because they’re supposed to but they’re not well executed, then it seems like a no-brainer to fill that hour or 90 minutes or whatever it is with patient time because, “I can be more productive. Let’s just bring that emergency in, and then let’s just end the team meeting.” Lo and behold, you look down 6, 12 months down the road and you don’t have team meetings anymore.

Number one, you block it and you honor it. It is a necessity for your business. If you want a higher engaged team, if you want a team that’s engaged, if you want a team that’s continuously improving performance, if you have goals on new patient growth, treatment acceptance increasing, if you have production numbers that you want to elevate to, if you are starting to introduce another provider into your practice, if you are integrating any new technology or procedures, any of this, a team meeting where you can train and speak to that is a necessity. You block the time, you honor the time, and then you plan for the time. You don’t just walk five minutes before you walk into the team meeting, huddle up with your office manager and go, “What are we going to talk about?”

It’s not just about talking about your key performance indicators, which I want you to. I want there to be set goals. A big piece of accelerating is to measure what matters so that you are reviewing and evaluating regularly, “Are we hitting the appropriate numbers to take this practice where we want it to be?” As you know, Jonathan, your numbers tell a story. Your numbers are telling a story on how well you’re doing everything else.

I want set goals and I want the team to know those goals, and I want to review those goals. Everything from our production and our collections and our hygiene production and our new patient numbers, I want all of that to be reviewed. That’s not the only reason for a meeting. If your meeting is simply just sit around and talk about the numbers, and talk about what everybody should be doing and have somebody talking at the rest of the team, then we’re not doing it right.

As you’re talking, it reminded me of a conversation I had and I’m sitting there, I’m like, the I don’t have the time, I get that. We all feel that. The reality is it’s not true. It’s maybe something we tell ourselves or something we feel. Generally, my experience, again, I speak for myself, is it’s usually evidence of just some other chaos or noise in my life that feels like I don’t have time. I don’t know about you, but how many of your doctors work four days a week?

Most of our clients do. You’ll get a kick out of this, Carrie. I was on a call with a client and his associate, and the associate wants to buy into the practice. One of the things that we were looking at, it was that she needs to pick up more doctor days. She needs to get busier in the practice before they can buy in. We were looking at the financial arrangement and what that would look like, but for both doctors to buy in.

My client goes to the associate, “I know you take Wednesdays off. Maybe you could pick up a Wednesday.” She goes, “That’s my day off. That’s my time to get other stuff done.” I said, “You may have to just give up your day off so that you can see patients.” She goes, “How would you feel about giving your day off?” I said, “I don’t take any days off.”

I think it’s just this mind shift that if you are serious about wanting to work on your business, like you’ve talked about, you have to have that dedicated time. I love what you said, block it off. Spend that time and honor that time. That’s the other piece. I struggled with this for years. I still am not perfect at it. I have blocks on my schedule for different things that I need to do. Meetings usually I’m pretty good at. Usually, it’s stuff with just me.

Something always comes up that’s going to hijack that time. Not allowing it to hijack that time, I think it’s such a disciplined skill that if you can learn that, you’ll see so much productivity in your business that isn’t necessarily driven from you seeing patients. I love how you said that, because I do think a lot of times, we connect productivity or revenue or profitability to time in the chair. As you and I have both seen, you can actually impact the practice productivity a lot by doing activities outside of the chair and working on the business. I love that you said that.

When you commit to being more savvy about the business of dentistry as dentists or practice owners, you start to realize there are a lot of behind-the-scenes wheels that when they’re well-oiled and they’re turning correctly, it really helps us have ideal dental days. Also, that clarity of vision, that clarity of where you want to take things, your roadmap, for example, on the financial side, when you know what you’re trying to work toward and why you’re doing it, your decisions change.

You may take a look at the entire model and how you’re practicing and say, “This isn’t even how I want to practice.” If you do want to be a 4-day a week practice, then it’s really important to get clear on what do we have to accomplish every day of those 4 days to meet all of the goals, to meet my financial goals, to meet my practice growth goals, to take care of my patients, to take care of my team. What do those days need to look like and how do we actualize that type of day consistently? We’re not going to have perfect days every day but you sure as heck aren’t going to have perfect days when you don’t even know what a perfect day looks like.

When you’re saying that, a quote came to mind. It’s Roy Disney. Walt’s brother has a quote. He says, “When your values are clear, decision making becomes easier.” I think that ties in what you were saying. Having that clarity around the vision, the values, design with purpose. Designing what your perfect day or your perfect schedule.

As you said, perfection is not something that’s obtained. I think it’s something that it’s always sought after. We’re always working towards perfection. I don’t know that I’ve ever met anyone who’s like, “I’ve got it perfectly.” I always joke about this. When we had our practices, I’d look at my regional manager when everything was like going really well.

Why Dentistry Is A Relationship-Based Business

We’d have weekly meetings. I’d look at her and I’d go, “Shoot,” because everything was going great, and I just knew it was a matter of time before something broke. It was just there. I love that. We talked about soft skills, and then you brought up hard skills. When you have these doctors that are so used to coming in, doing dentistry, seeing patients, diagnosing, doing that, I think a lot of people don’t talk enough or appreciate enough, you have to make this shift to being something else. That’s really hard. How do you do that? How do you teach that?

Let me preface this by saying this. When I talk to teams, whether you’re a solo practice or you have multiple locations, like you had your multiple locations, Jonathan, I want every member of the team to know how to execute those systems, how to execute conversations. I want that cross-training because if I’m a member of a team in a multi-location organization, I want to know as the organization’s leader, I could pick you up from your practice and drop you into this other practice and you’d be okay.

It would feel cohesive. In a team, I wanted to know that all the conversations that they’re having from the business team member that answers the telephone to the hygienist that’s about to check them out from their continuous care appointment, that we all sound like we’re playing the same song. Think of it like a band. Everybody’s a member of the band. If one instrument is playing a different song from the rest, it’s this blaringly obvious issue.

Dentistry is such a relationship-based business. The doctors, to your point, understand that you can’t get by by your clinical skills alone. You just can’t, because you’re never going to get to do that dentistry if you don’t have what we call the pillars of the patient practice relationship in place. That’s that the patient’s trust you, that they see a need for what you’re doing, that they feel a sense of urgency for the care, and that they see value in it.

A lot of these systems are either helping us to be as productive as we can be, or helping to build those pillars with patients so that we are consistently successful day after day. A lot of times, these systems either are just accidentally happening or they unravel, and it’s not this intentional sabotage. It simply starts to happen. One of the big systems is scheduling. So many times, doctors will call because they’re having this pain point and they think it’s this issue over here, but that’s really just a side effect of the root cause. The root cause is typically falling somewhere in scheduling.

We’re not scheduling with production goals in mind. We’re not scheduling for variety in the schedule. We’re not pre-blocking so that we’re setting ourselves up. As I said, block time for team meetings. We want to be blocking the right types of appointments throughout our schedule so that we’re really like a scheduling architect. We’re creating an ideal day, day after day.

Instead of practices having this rollercoaster experience where one day I had a great day, the next day was terrible. One day I produced through the roof. The next day all I did was a bunch of no fee appointments. I was so exhausted, I could barely get to the car at the end of the day. I had no money to show for it. That happens a lot. What I find happening is there’s a lot of backlog of patients. They’re trying to cram a lot of patients in when and where they can.

They’re double booking their doctors. They’re putting a lot of what we call secondary or tertiary appointments where primary appointments should be. It turns the schedule into chaos. When we have a chaotic schedule, we can’t be as productive as we could be. We can’t deliver an incredible patient experience, which is another Accelerator System because we don’t have time to.

We can’t deliver a tremendous case presentation process, which is another Accelerator System, case presentation and case acceptance, because again, we don’t have time. We’re just flying through the day and it starts to feel like a treadmill. Those are just three examples. Case presentation, patient experience and scheduling are so married together that one not being done well negatively impacts the rest. It’s the domino effect.

How To Keep Your Schedule From Falling Apart

You talked about the importance of scheduling, which I love. What happens when the schedule falls apart? What do you teach there? How do you save the day?

When systems aren’t strong and when skillsets within the team are not strong verbal skills, we have a lot of reactive efforts happening. I do a lot of lectures on how to reduce cancellations and no-shows. Everybody wants a magic bullet that is going to, “This is it. You just do this one thing and it’s the easy button to fix this issue.”

No, you actually have to go all the way back and think about the proactive efforts you’re putting into place to reduce cancellations and no-shows from happening in the first place. That, again, goes back to those four pillars of trust, need urgency and value. When patients aren’t keeping appointments, when patients are becoming inactive in practices, when patients aren’t saying yes to treatment, we are missing the mark on one or more of those pillars.

The way that we strengthen those pillars is in the patient’s experience and these touch points throughout their experience in conversations in presentation and education that is keeping the value of not only the appointment that they’re at now but the appointment that they are going to be scheduled for in the future, building the value and building their commitment to that appointment.

It starts from the way we schedule it, the way we talk about those appointments, the verbal skills that the team members are using, the way we’re confirming those appointments, then the way we’re leading them through the appointments and how we are checking the patients out. People don’t even think about the patient checkout as the starting point of the schedule’s retention rate. When we want patients to be committed to the next appointment, it starts at the appointment they’re at now.

Our verbal skills and how we’re building that commitment, repeating that message, building the value and the importance of that next appointment with them, and moving them through the checkout process so they’re hearing that message several times, and its elevated verbal skills. We are supporting their decision and their commitment, and we’re asking for that commitment. It’s a very proactive approach versus a reactive one. What you do now is going to impact what happens in six months is basically the point I’m trying to make.

Trying Out The Rate Your Practice Exercise

Something that I’ve heard as a common theme through everything that you’ve shared is as you’re doing it, you’re making these decisions, you’re making these changes, implementing these systems, everything’s done with purpose and with a plan. Where’s the starting point? How does the doctor analyze this is the first thing I need to address in order to get me out of this hole that I’ve dug myself into. Do you have a process or a way to help them identify those?

That’s a lot of why they call us. We can come in and do evaluations of their practices with them and their performance, but they can do some self-evaluation too. I can share with you the resources from the podcast. There’s an exercise that, that I share regularly. It’s called the Rate Your Practice exercise. It lists out what we call 25 integral systems of the practice that, when those are all working well together, it’s not all the systems of a practice, but it’s some of the ones that are very integral in terms of practice growth and continuous success.

When these are all being done well, and we were rating ourselves really well in these areas, then good things are happening. We always encourage entire practices to do this exercise, the individuals of the practice, and then to take the average of how you rate it. A list of 25 systems, and you rank yourself 1 through 10. With 10, we’re perfect and 1, it’s nonexistent, and things that you’re rating yourself high on, 7 or above, you can celebrate that and talk about how what a great job we’re doing. High fives.

Anything lower than that is shining a light on an area that needs attention. We either need to discuss what the actual process for this is. We need to practice our role play, how we do that. We need to be more intentional in that area. We need to get resources for that area, whatever it is. That can be a great place for a doctor and team members to step back and judge yourself based upon your merits of how you think they’re doing.

I do encourage that we have the entire team do it because I, as the owner or doctor, may think we’re doing great in these areas and my team may rate us low. That would be a very eye-opening conversation to have. The Rate You Practice exercise is a great place to see where in these systems of the practice are we doing well, and where do we need to work, work? The key of this being helpful is being honest.

That might be hard.

We all want to say how great we are at everything. Let’s be real.

You’re not posting these results on LinkedIn, so no one’s going to see.

We don’t need to put it on Instagram and talk about how great we are with a nice, lovely filter. Take the filters off. Let’s be honest. There is a great podcast by a gentleman named Andy Stanley, and he talks about that we want to be raving fans on the outside, but fierce critics on the inside so that we can overcome the obstacles of keeping a business successful for the long haul.

Rating your practice and then talking as a team, do you have good problem-solving efforts in place? This is where those team meetings, again, get really important because once you identify these are three areas in the practice that we’ve all agreed we’re ranking ourselves low on, so what are we going to do about this?

You have to have a great team meeting to talk through, create a strategy, have those that are doing it the best, instruct the rest of the team on those best practices, establish a process that we all agree on, practice that, and troubleshoot. The next month, set goals about it. It’s Business 101. Goal setting, strategic planning, team meetings so that we can train and develop. All of this is also a side effect of this intentional work together with the team elevates engagement, which has been a big issue in the entire workforce since the pandemic.

Not just dentistry, but it’s certainly impacting dentistry. I hear it all the time. I’m not making that up. I talk to doctors every week who are talking about their issues with team engagement. “Team members are just aren’t the same as they used to be five years ago.” What are we going to do about it? Are we going to just sit here and be sad or are we going to do something to change the conversation?

Retaining (And Letting Go Of) Your Team Members

I think we also know that as this younger workforce enters, they’re different than the workforce that’s retiring. That’s life. You deal. You’ve mentioned team a lot. I don’t want to call it a magic bullet because those don’t exist, but do you have a process that you like to follow or a proven method of how do you hire?

I got basically a multi-question here, but it’s such a timely topic because we get asked all the time. Do you have a process for making sure you hire the right people from the beginning? That’s question number one. Question number two is, with the team you already have, how do you know whether it’s time to maybe disengage from some team members that maybe are holding you back or maybe are not getting on board with your vision and with the systems you’re putting in place and are constantly challenging and questioning what you’re trying to do in the practice?

Again, I know two-pronged question there. Number one, let’s maybe start with the existing team members you have. Do you have a way or process you guys use to vet and determine whether someone’s trainable, teachable, or should stay on the team? If you do need to replace them, do you have a process for how do you replace them with someone who’s going to really be a good fit with the practice?

How much time do we have?

I know I asked you that loaded question towards the end of our time. You just want to touch on this and we use this as a jumping-off point to jump on another episode to go deeper into it. I think it’s such an important topic that so many of the doctors we talk to struggle with the team. It’s an integral part of your practice.

It’s the hardest part. Maybe not the hardest part, but for a lot of people, it is. Confrontation is something that most people try really hard to avoid. Our doctors typically want to do the dentistry. They don’t want to have to deal with an underperforming team, a disengaged team or a toxic team. We can run ourselves ragged thinking about all the different what-ifs.

As leaders in these situations, we’re often led by fear instead of led by vision. What I mean by that is we’re afraid if this person leaves, how are we going to find another person? If this person leaves, she’s been there for 37 years, all the patients are going to leave with her. All the what-if scenarios that doctors and leaders go through.

When you think about the team I talk about, I’d mentioned measure what matters in terms of accelerator and what I talk about in measuring what matters are a lot of what we consider critical factors of the business of dentistry. It’s not only those practice performance measurables, those key performance indicators, KPIs, but there are team performance measurables, and then there are the systems measurables.

How are our practice numbers? How is my team performing individually and as a group? How are my systems running? Those are the things I want doctors to have, the pulse that I want them to have their finger on on a regular basis. When I think about team, as a leader, have I clearly communicated my expectations? Am I clear and are they clear on their roles and responsibilities?

Have I trained them to the best of my ability to set them up to be successful in those roles and responsibilities? Do they know what to do, why they’re doing it, how to do it, and then do they want to do it? That’s the questions you have to ask yourself when you’re faced with, do I have the right person, as Jim Collins would say, on my bus? Do I have the right person on my bus?

The question is, do they know how to do it? Do they know why to do it? Do they know what to do? Are they doing those things? If one of those is, I don’t know that they know how to do it correctly, then I know I need to train. You have to get comfortable with uncomfortable conversations where you’re asking, “Tell me what’s happening here. Have I clearly communicated with you my expectations in this process and yet this isn’t happening? Tell me why this isn’t being done. Do you need more training? How can I help you?”

It comes down to the point that they’re choosing not to do it, or they simply can’t do it, then you have to know that you’re hindering yourself. That’s when it gets hard to be a leader in business. You have to decide, does this person reflect the core values of my business? Are they honoring those values? Are they helping me accomplish the mission and the vision of this practice? Are they helping me accomplish the goals? Are they performing to my level of what I need in terms of my level expectation in that role or are they simply not?”

Are there things that I can do to improve it, giving them the benefit of the doubt or is the time now to cut ties and am I doing everything I need to do to document that correctly? I’m not an HR expert, so I always say you make sure you have a great HR firm in your back pocket. So many times, doctors are holding themselves back of success because they’re dragging a person behind them on a journey.

That person, if they’re being honest, doesn’t want to be on that journey with you. They don’t want to be on your bus, because now you clearly have a vision of where you’re taking that bus. We need to have the right people on the bus, in the right seats, going in the right direction, doing the right things in the right way. It’s decision-making, really. It’s asking the right questions as a leader, “Have I done all these things and yet here we are still?” Sometimes you have to ask yourself, “Am I willing to risk my superstars by keeping this underperformer in this position?”

I know I keep going back to the vision conversation, Jonathan. I don’t mean to keep going back to that, but as a business owner myself, what we learned in transitioning to ownership of an existing business coming in as second generation, this piece was so imperative for us. We lived this, this clear vision, clear values, what was most important and what that looked like, that we as leaders had to be aligned and clear on that. We had to clearly communicate that with the team and make sure we had the right people doing that. The clearer and more confident, and the more we believe in that and are excited we were about living that, the more protective we get of who is in our space.

If you want an exceptional team, you become fiercely protective of the heart of whatever your makes your organization and then trained to success. If there are doctors out there reading that are stuck in a rut because they don’t know how to resolve an issue about a particular team member, you need to start asking yourself the hard questions. Does this team member know what I expect of them? Do they know how to do this the way I want it to be done? Do they know why this is important? Can they really do this job and do they want to? Make decisions based upon how you answer those questions.

We have a saying whenever when we’re considering letting someone go, we would always ask ourselves this question. We’d say, “Did we give them all the training and support that we could have?” I always ask this question, which is from a mentor of mine, when I first started, they said, “Are they willing and not able, or are they able and not willing?”

You can answer a lot of questions if they’re able, but not willing, it doesn’t matter how much training you give. They’re never going to catch the vision. If they’re willing and just not able, that’s an easy solution. Not easy, but at least you can provide some training and get them there, and that they’re going to take that and excel. Every single time before we would go in and have a conversation, we’d sit down and ask that, those two questions. If people that were willing but not able, we were willing to invest in them to get them to where they wanted to go. I love that.

Get In Touch With Carrie

I know we’re at the top of our time here and, but Carrie, this has been so great. Maybe we could go another hour. It is some such a wealth of knowledge and experience here. I appreciate you coming on and sharing with all of us your years and years of experience. Please check out The Jameson Files podcast. Carrie, if people want to come see you speak or learn more about you guys, where is somewhere they can go to find out more?

I invite you all to visit our website. It’s Jmsn.com. We have ways that you can reach us and find out more. You can certainly find me on social media and LinkedIn. Come find me. @CarrieWebberSpeaks on Instagram and Carrie Jameson Webber on LinkedIn. Come find us. Let us help you. Lots of resources out there. Follow The Jameson Files. Jonathan, it’s been a pleasure to be a guest. Thank you for having me.

Thanks so much for being here. Carrie and Jess, your husband, will be at our event on September 12th and 13th, 2025, so if you want to meet them in person, they’ll be there. Thank you, Carrie. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your expertise. Until next time. Thanks, everybody.

Important Links

• The Jameson Group
• The Jameson Files
• Carrie Webber on LinkedIn
• Carrie Webber on Instagram
• The Jameson Group on Instagram
• Jonathan Moffat
• Aligned Advisors
• Jonathan Moffat on LinkedIn

About Carrie Webber

Carrie Webber is president and owner of The Jameson Group, a dental management coaching & marketing firm that works with dental practices nationwide to help dentists and teams become more productive, more profitable and ultimately more fulfilled in their practicing lives. Carrie is a contributing author to several publications and blogs on the topics of dental management, leadership, marketing, customer service and business development as well as a popular speaker at dental meetings nationwide. She is a member of the Speaking Consulting Network and has been named a Leader in CE by Dentistry Today for the past six years. For more information on Webber and her company, The Jameson Group, visit www.jmsn.com.