Stop Losing Money In Your Practice Now With Steven J. Anderson & Austin Moffat

Jonathan Moffat and Austin Moffat sit down with Steven J. Anderson, entrepreneur, author, philanthropist, and dentistry’s “Yes Man,” to share five daily disciplines that every practice needs to do to stop losing money. From patient check-in to deposits and audit trails, Steve explains the simple systems that prevent embezzlement, protect your team, and give practice owners peace of mind. With decades of experience leading the Total Patient Service Institute, Crown Council, and the Smiles for Life Foundation, he delivers proven processes every dentist should hear.

Find Jonathan at jonathanmoffat.com
Learn more about Aligned Advisors at alignedadvisors.com

Find Jonathan on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jonathanmoffat1
Find Austin on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/austinmoffat
Connect with Steven J. Anderson on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stevenjanderson1

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Stop Losing Money In Your Practice Now With Steven J. Anderson & Austin Moffat

With me is Austin Moffat and we are both pleased to have with us a special guest. Someone I’ve known for many years, Mr. Steve Anderson.

It’s great to be with the Moffat brothers.

Raising Millions Of Dollars For Smiles For Life Foundation

It’s great to have you and your brothers as well, Greg, through Crown Council. Maybe we have a little bit of time to get into Crown Council here and talk about what an amazing organization that is and Smiles For Life and all the amazing impact you’ve been able to have there. I was reading through your bio and the Smiles for Life Foundation has raised over $50 million for kids in dental charities worldwide, which is amazing. That’s truly amazing. Congratulations and thank you for making such a massive impact. Not only in our space but across the globe as well. It’s awesome that you guys been able to do that.

Smiles for Life Foundation is a huge effort. There are thousands of people involved in raising that money through the whitening campaign we do every year. It’s a great new patient generator, but it raises a ton of money that benefits a lot of people. It’s a fun effort for doing good.

One of these days, I’m going on a trip. In 2024, you may or may not know. For our client Christmas gift, you could nominate a team member and then we did a raffle. We’re sending one of our clients out of Austin as a dental assistant. We drew and she’s going on an all expenses paid trip to go on a Smiles For Life charitable trip.

She’ll be going to either the Dominican Republic or Mexico.

I think we should go in October.

Those are one of the projects that we fund through the Smiles for Life Foundation, so dental humanitarian expeditions where they get to work side by side with local dentists in those countries. It’s a life-changing experience. It is remarkable.

Dentistry’s “Yes Man” Steven J. Anderson

It’s great. As I said, I’ve had the pleasure of being at many Crown Council Awards ceremonies and seeing the impact, Garth Brooks on stage and other fun things you guys get to do through that foundation. Again, thank you for that massive contribution. Our guest today needs no introduction. Steve Anderson is one of the most well-known and most recognized voices in the dental business. Every time Steve and I get the chance to connect, we start just popping off all the amazing things he’s doing, which is amazing.

He’s known in the industry as the Yes Man. He’s helped many of the biggest names in our industry grow thriving practices with systems that make it easier for patients to say yes to treatment. Steve is the Founder of Total Patient Services Institute, Crown Council and Smiles for Life. He’s the bestselling author, award-winning entrepreneur and one of the most respected thought leaders in our space. Thank you for being here, Steve.

Thanks. This is a great collaboration. For context, Austin, I think I’ve told you this. I did have some early aspirations of being an accountant. The first day of accounting 101, I finished that first day, that first class, and it was very clear to me that it was not my calling. I have huge admiration for what the two of you do and a huge respect. What I’ve chosen to do in my business life is surround myself with very good financial expertise because creating all the financial pieces is not my strength. I like to use financial information to make very good decisions. I appreciate everything the two of you do to make it easy for business owners like me to do what we do best. Hats off to you guys. You do something I could never do myself.

I appreciate that. Let me you. That debits and credits conversation, that’s it. You’re either in or you’re out.

Jonathan, as you mentioned for those that are maybe reading that this is their first time or our first time together. A couple of points that are relevant. I’m not a dentist. I take pride in that. I should have been a dentist. I was sharing with Austin. I took an aptitude test when I was eighteen. I had forgotten about the results but I went back and reviewed them. My number one career recommendation was Dentistry. This is a trivia but I scored in the 95th percentile worldwide in finger dexterity. I’ve never done anything with it, but that was one of the main reasons.

I’m not a dentist. I’m a patient. I consider myself a human behavior researcher and investigator. I got an open reading assignment in the third grade and the book that I chose was How to Win Friends and Influence People. What I love to do is, I’m always on the hunt for what works. My thesis project in college in business school was why businesses fail. I did an entire year-long research project on that. I’ve been on this path for a long time.

I got drawn into dentistry a long time ago from some dentist that discovered what we were doing in other areas of business and fell in love with it. We fell in love with dentistry and have been doing it ever since. Our team at total patient’s service, which is our coaching education team. We focused, Jonathan, as you mentioned on one word and that word is yes. What does it take to create an environment where it’s easier for the patient to say yes to need a treatment?

Everything we do is centered around that. Our community has grown over the years. The Crown Council is focused on going on how to create the culture and what we call a culture of success that makes it easier for team members and patients to do the right thing. Speaking of the right thing, we’re going to talk about five things very quickly and this is where our worlds merged. We show practices how to make money. You guys show them how to keep it.

Jonathan, you work on ways to help them keep it and grow it. This is where they interact. From a practice management standpoint, what I’m going to share are five ways or five things that every dentist should do every day. This is a daily discipline that every dentist should engage in to ensure that what they make, they keep. That it stays in the right place.

Here’s the purpose of the conversation of what we’ll do in the next few minutes to save time, save money and eliminate a lot of frustration. It’s designed to protect patient assets, meaning everything the patient brings into the practice that stays in the practice protects practice assets, so what belongs to the practice stays in the practice. This will protect team members. It protects the owner, the leader of the practice. It provides more peace of mind for everybody concerned. This is the design of what we’re going to do. Again, five easy simple things.

Receiving Mentorship From His Accountant

Let me give you part of the backstory. I have a controller in one of my companies who has become one of my most respected mentors. I pulled him out of retirement from Verizon. He was a career controller at Verizon. He took early retirement with a great payout. He never had to work again. I knew him and I knew retirement was not going to fit well with him. Jonathan, I know you work hard to get a dentist. You can retire but it’s the financial freedom but I knew that retirement was just not going to work for him. He’s just not like that.

I waited for about 90 days till he ran out of stuff to do, then I called them up. I made this proposal to him. His name is Steve. I said, “Steve, I’ve got a place in one of my companies and I need somebody like you. I can’t afford you because you have way more expertise than what we need but I want to take you out of your misery from retirement and get you back productive.” He thought about it. He called me back and said, “I thought about this. I’ve got a couple of conditions.” I said, “Alright. Hit me.” He said, “I’ll agree to do this under the condition that you never ever trust your accountant.” I said, “Steve, you’re going to be my accountant.” He said, “That’s right.”

I said, “Why would I hire somebody I can’t trust?” He said, “I didn’t say can’t trust. I said don’t trust me. In other words, you’re never going to put me in a position where you have to operate on trust alone because that’s not fair to me and it’s not wise for you. I’m going to show you how big companies, big organizations set up checks and balances so they never have to run on trust alone.” It’s not fair to a team member to put them in a position where everybody just has to trust them, especially when you’re talking about handling money. It’s not fair to them to set them up like that and not good business just to operate on trust. He’s taught me so much over the years and he tests me every once in a while.

He called me up not too long ago and I was on the road. He goes, “Steve, we got a vendor that we need to get paid. Is it alright if I just sign the check for you and we get this out the door?” I said, “Sure, Steve. Go ahead.” He said, “Have I not taught you anything?” That’s a little bit of the background. These five things are things that protect team members so you never have to question whether they’re doing the right thing. It gives the dentist and the practice owner the peace of mind of knowing that everything that’s coming into the practice or should be coming into the practice is coming in and stays in the practice.

How To Stop Losing Your Patients

Let’s talk about five areas of potential loss that need to be checked every day. This is one of the most overlooked areas and I’m going to be counterculture here for just a minute. Area number one is lost patients. How can you lose a patient? Again, I can give you a whole backstory of case after case of why you need to check these areas but here’s the first area. Checking to make sure you have the proper patient check-in procedure.

There is a phrase. I was in Boston and I was speaking at the Boston Yankee meeting. One of my real good friends in Boston is Dr. Mike Scialabba, who leads the Massachusetts State Dental Board. One of the things that he said to me and everybody knows this, especially in legal. Is that, “If it’s not in writing, it didn’t happen.” When push comes to shove, if you’re ever called on the carpet for malpractice or anything that has to do with the state board. If it’s not in writing, your defenseless. It’s got to be in writing. This is one area, it’s what’s your patient’s check-in procedure.

This is going to sound retro and old-fashioned, but I’m going to give you the standard. You can check against your digital system and see if it meets the standard, if you have a digital check-in system. Here’s the standard. I have a HIPAA compliant form that is a patient sign-in form. HIPAA compliant because they can sign in and then it makes a copy of their signature and you can take off. It’s an adhesive knowing you can take it off as they sign in. There’s no exposure in this. Now again, you might say, “Steve, come on. This is old-fashioned.”

Here’s the deal. The standard for protection is you must have a patient sign in system in the patient’s writing. In other words, if they just click a button to sign in. It’s not sufficient. That’s not proof they sign in. Anybody can click a button. What you have to have is their signature, in some way, shape, or form in their writing that they checked in. If you don’t have a patient sign in system that has the patient signature when they sign in, it’s not sufficient.

Steve, what is this protecting the doctor from?

I’m going to get into the land of nefarious people who do things. If you don’t have this, then basically anybody could sign a patient in, including a patient that never showed up. They could potentially bill a patient’s Insurance who never showed up and get paid in some way, shape, or form for transactions that never happened. Unless you have something that proves that the patient was there in their handwriting. You’re opening yourself up to potential malfeasance. This is all based on case studies and things that have happened.

The bottom line is, the standard is to have a patient check-in process with the patient’s signature. If your digital system has some place where the patient literally signs in in their handwriting. That’s good if it’s digitized. If not, this is the standard, so you’ve got something in writing. This form, HIPAA compliant, is on Amazon. If you just search for a HIPAA Compliant Patient Sign-In sheet, it will show up. Otherwise, you’re practice management software, if it’s integrated, digital sign-in. As long as their handwriting is in there, then you’re good. That’s number one.

How To Take Control Of Your Production

Number two, lost production. How could you lose production? These are potential procedures that got performed that never got billed. You want to make sure that the team, for example, we got the clinical team, then you got the business team. We got to make sure that everything was coded and recorded properly. The second place to check and again, we’re going to do this every day. If I’m the provider, I’m going to check the patient sign-in sheet and make sure that everybody that I saw signed in and there’s no names on there that I don’t recognize.

The second thing I’m going to check is my provider day sheet. It’s long. It’s got a lot of stuff on there, but I’m going to check this to make sure that everything I did shows up. Again, if you do this every day, it only takes a few minutes. You cannot do this once a week. Too much. This is daily and how you wrap up the day. Did everybody I see sign-in and did everybody who sign-in get seen? That’s check one. Check two, day sheets. Is everything that I did or every procedure that I perform on this day sheet and are there any procedures that I didn’t do on this form?

If one potential area of loss is, if there’s something going on that shouldn’t be going on. Procedures can show up here that you never did, which is then a sign or a red flag of, “Are they doing what they’re supposed to do?” Again, checks and balances to make sure that the right hand knows what the left hand is doing and everybody’s on the same page.

Steve, if you had a practice. Let’s say, you’ve got 5 or 4 associates. Is it safe to assume or safe to say that you would have your associate or each doctor or each provider check their own day sheet and speak of checks and balances. Do you have them sign off saying, “Yes, I checked my day sheet for the day,” then turn that into the office manager? How would you run that with the associate run practice?

If you’re an associate and you’re being paid on production or collections, which most everybody is. In fact, if I were an associate, I’d demand that this be part of my daily routine because I want to make sure I get paid for everything I do. Yes, I want to check this to make sure that everything I did got attributed to me. All my production got coded to me and didn’t get coded to somebody else. It didn’t get coded by the hygienist or to whoever else. Everything I did got credited to me and everything I did got posted.

I would think too from protecting the owner doctor. You’d want to make sure that if you’re paying on collections or net production or just a production like X-rays, for example. Where does that go? Does that go on the assistant? Does that identify with the doctor? If it’s not supposed to be assigned to a doctor but it is assigned to the doctor. Now, you’re paying a percentage on procedures that the doctor shouldn’t have been paid for.

How To Craft And Implement Practice Guidelines

I could tell stories about this. Again, like in balance, just double check and make sure everything landed where it was supposed to land. We got a patient check-in sheet and the provider day sheet, making sure everything’s there. Number three, adjustments. This requires some guidelines. One of the things that we recommend is a document. This is an internal document, financial guidelines for the team that outlines all things financial and what’s permitted, including what can be adjusted off and what has to have approval before it can be adjusted off.

For example, in most practices we work with, we set a standard that says, “If the write off is going to be more than,” let’s say $200 or $100 or whatever it is. “If we’re going to write off more than that amount, it has to have doctor approval.” We all need it. If somebody’s going to write something off, we better all be in agreement about what we’re doing. One of the areas to check every day is the adjustments report. What got adjusted off?

Now, the other check and balance is in the financial guidelines and in the practice management software, there’s defined adjustments. One adjustment that is not permitted is miscellaneous. There are no miscellaneous write-offs or adjustments. It has to be, whether it’s an insurance adjustment or a courtesy discount for friends, family members or the prepayment discount or whatever it is, but they are defined adjustments. There’s no just general adjustments.

Again, you’re going to review the adjustment report to make sure that everything’s in alignment and everybody knows what they’re doing. There’s no credit adjustments, debit adjustments or miscellaneous. They need to be specific categories. Specific categories like insurance adjustment, prepayment 5% courtesy adjustment, a friends and family policy. If you have one, then that would be an approved one. Also, if you have any employee discount. That’s a yes. All the adjustment categories need to be specifically defined. Nothing general or miscellaneous because that just opens things up to potential mess up.

As you know it’s one of the biggest red flags that there is more than likely embezzlement happening in the practice.

How To Verify Your Financial Deposits And Reports

That’s what this is all about. You’ve got the patient check-in, the provider day sheet and the adjustment report. The fourth area is lost deposits. This is just a quick check. We’re going to make sure that the deposit report matches the deposit slip. In other words, what went into the bank, the same thing that what we’ve reported that shows up in the practice management software is what it says got deposited. Those two things need to match.

Now, I grew up in a house where my dad ran the largest ad agency in the Western United States his whole career. One of his biggest accounts was one of the largest banks in the West. I got raised on a pretty heavy diet of banking training. One of the things is common knowledge. One of the things I was trained early on is that if you’re a teller at the bank, you don’t go home unless you balance out.

At the end of your shift, you have to balance out the money that you started out with, either you gave out, deposits received and money given out. All that has to match 100%. You can’t be one penny off. If you’re one payoff and you can’t find it. You’re putting a penny in the deposit to make up. Everything has to match 100%. The same thing here with the deposit report. What the practice management software says, when in the bank matches your bank deposit so those two things match up. There’s a lot of a lot of things. Let me address two things.

Most everything can be done now electronically like desktop clearing for checks. Everybody ought to be doing desktop clearing where you can just deposit the slips. You don’t have to go to the bank. That’s pretty clear. If there is a bank deposit that needs to be made for cash, the rule is whoever writes out the deposit slip, so whoever collects the money, is different than the person who takes the money to the bank.

Unless you’re the practice owner, you can do whatever you want but if we have different team members doing this. If a team member collects the money, that needs to be a different person than the person who takes the money to the bank. Very quickly, we’ll say, the only person that goes to the bank is the owner dentist or if it’s a multiple location, it’s a practice administrator but it’s different than the person who collected the money. Check and balance and make sure it all works.

Insurance companies started this virtual credit card payments system, where they send you a virtual credit card as payment for claims and it is a mess. It creates a wide open opportunity for theft because anybody can use a virtual card. In some cases, they send these by email. Sometimes, they send them by text or by fax. It’s just a mess. We’ve worked with practices and they just start doing this. In some practices, we’ve had to escalate it all the way to the CEO of the company to get them to stop.

Again, these little things that just create a potential problem. If you got a virtual credit card payment, anybody could pick that up and use it. The cleaning crew at night could pick it up if somebody happens to just leave it out somewhere. No virtual credit cards. Again, with a deposit slip, make sure that check and balance is there so everything matches. What came in, stayed in and went in the bank. A quick review again, patient sign-in sheet, check. Provider day sheet, check. Adjustment report, check. Bank deposit, check.

How To Prepare Your Audit Trail Report

Area number five is lost entries or edits. This is the audit trail report. This is probably the most neglected report in dentistry. Every practice management software has an audit trail report so it tracks every entry that was made in the practice. This can be voluminous. Here’s the protocol. If it’s a multi-site practice, this would be somebody in a leadership role. Only the owner or lead administrator should be the only one that has access to the audit trail report.

Why? It tracks every entry into the system. When I review this, I’m looking for anything that has been deleted. If I go to the audit trail and I’ve got payments that have been deleted. It’s like, “Why have these been deleted? Why have these been deleted out of the system?” Again, the check and balance. I had to have access to this and that’s primarily what I’m looking for, any entry and it’s been deleted because we need to have an explanation for that to understand why a payment was changed. Why was it changed? It was deleted. Why was it deleted? We’re just looking for anything that’s out of the ordinary that then merits an explanation.

How To Implement These Five Daily Practices

A quick quiz, boys. When the five areas are put in place, the doctor either needs to know how to pull their reports every day from the practice manager software. Some of these like the bank deposit needs some coordination with the front office team. Again, I’m going to check the patient check-in sheet, everybody that I saw checked in and everybody that checked in was seen. Provider day sheet, number two. Everything I did is on my provider day sheet and there’s nothing that I didn’t do that’s on that sheet. There shouldn’t be any procedure that is on that sheet that did not get done.

Number three, adjustments or all the adjustments. Do I know what they are? Is there anything that’s outlined there? Number five, bank deposits. Do they match? Is what went in the bank the same as what the report said went in the bank? Finally, a quick review of the audit trail to make sure there’s nothing that’s been deleted or changed that I’m not aware of doesn’t have an explanation. The five quick things done on a daily basis.

You can go home with peace of mind that everything landed in the right place or at least appears to have been. Those five things will dramatically cut down on the chances of theft and embezzlement. The ADA says that 50% of dentists admit a report that they have been stolen from at some time in their career by an employee. The other 50% don’t know that they have or are lying. Unfortunately, when you’re in business, these are things you have to worry about and work on.

You might have heard of our good friend, David Harris of Prosperident, the leading embezzlement and a company for dentistry. He tells a similar story where he speaks out a conference, “How many of you have been embezzled in 40%? Raise your hand. How many of you think maybe you’re beginning to embezzle another 20% to 25%? Raise your hand. The rest of you have no clue and are probably getting embezzled from, or at least a large portion.” That guy has stories time and time again.

Experiences With And Insights About Embezzlement

Steve, I’m just curious. With what you just laid down, there’s so many of our clients that if they did these things, they would sleep better at night. They wouldn’t pop up out of bed at 11:00 at night or 1:00 in the morning or whatever and wonder, “Did we collect that money?” These are processes that you’ve laid out here that can pretty much validate a yes or no to that.

Probably most if not all doctors would want some form of validation here saying, “This is good.” Our readers value and connect a lot with real-life stories. Do you have any stories that you’ve heard personally where doctors maybe weren’t doing this? They injected this right into their processes and then they’re like, “Look what we found out, Steve.” Do you have any like that?

Can we start on our own?

Of course.

When things like this happen, the first emotion usually is embarrassment. It’s like, “Seriously, how did I let this happen?” I’ve addressed this issue. I had one where he was so embarrassed to admit that it happened. It didn’t want to do anything about it because of the embarrassment. I said, “No, it’s like this happens. It’s business.” In my own case several years ago, we were expanding and we had some additional positions in one of our accounting departments in one of my companies. We hired a professional accounting placement firm to do the recruiting.

Vet all the candidates, do background checks and present us the most qualified people. They did that and we hired somebody. About eight months later, another one of my accounting team came into my office and said, “There’s something not right.” She showed me some things that she stumbled across almost by accident and I dug into it. Sure enough, things were not where they were supposed to be. We went to work and I called a certified fraud investigator. I didn’t call the police yet.

The certified fraud investigator came in undercover and did all the forensics. It gave me exactly what to do and how to do it the right way. We let her go without cause and then we created and did all of the reporting. We called her insurance company and they immediately cut us a check for the amount that had been embezzled because we had crime insurance. They took over the case and did their own work.

They then got in touch with law enforcement. It ended up being a federal case because it was over the federal limit for embezzlement. Over a certain amount, it becomes a federal crime. The FBI got involved. This particular person ended up being convicted and going to prison. In their investigation, they found out that unbeknownst to the previous employer they had lost over $800,000 from this individual over a ten-year period of time.

Reviewing And Keeping Track Of Your Bank Transactions

It’s happened to me. It can happen to anybody. The key is if you put proper checks and balances, it’s not 100% insurance but it will give you the peace of mind that you’re setting everything up the way you protect yourself and your team particularly. Here’s some quick additional areas to check periodically. I give you the five things to check daily and here’s some just periodic checks. Look at your bank transactions. Get online and just look through your bank transactions. Make sure that you recognize all the charges that are going through your bank as well as your credit card charge.

Glance at it every once in a while. Make sure that you know and you understand what’s there. Also, insurance payments. The insurance payments that are coming in as well as anybody that you’re paying. Make sure what’s going on. Here’s a rule. No purses or bags are allowed in the front office. If you have team members that are working there, the place for purses and bags is in their locker in the back office, but not at the front desk. Do I need to explain that?

No.

It’s super straight forward.

Have the rule and enforce it.

If you get a Home Depot or Walgreens or CVS or whatever. Any place where they have cashiers where they are handling money. They are not allowed to have a purse or a bag with them in that transaction place. It’s just too easy. Don’t create an environment where anybody would ever be tempted to do anything. It’s just like they say, “A lock on a door doesn’t stop a burglar but what it does stop is the honest people and doing something they shouldn’t do.”

Anybody who has a nefarious intent is going to figure out a way to do it. The systems up so that nobody’s tempted to do something they should not do. At least once a year, go sit down with your banker and look at who has access to your accounts and what signature cards are on file. We’ve had some cases for long-term team members. The average tenure of an embezzler, do you want to guess, guys?

Eight years.

Seven years.

Seven years. I told you that before. Typically, it’s the longest-term team member who’s the first one there in the morning and the last one to leave it at night and they never go on vacation. The team member that you trust the most. Again, check with your bank. Make sure there’s no signature cards you weren’t aware of and no accounts in your name attached to you that you don’t know what they are. Check your check stock. If you’re still using actual paper checks and you’re writing checks or printing checks. Check your check stock to make sure that there’s no missing checks up. The numbers should poncho.

We had a situation in our Crown Council office several years ago where somebody got into the office over the weekend and stole a number of things in computers and the whole thing. What we didn’t realize is they found the check stock. They took out the middle of the stack. They extracted some checks we have never known because they took it out of the middle. They didn’t take all of it. They just took some of it so that we wouldn’t notice and then they started writing checks.

Most banks have a service now and they call it positive pay. The positive pay service is a checking balance that any time a check gets presented for payment then you get notification and you have to verify that it’s a legitimate check. A lot of checks and balances. Check your payroll records, especially vacation and PTO.

We had a situation with a client not too long ago where the office manager was very generously handing out PTO to all of her friends that were on the team. Payroll is going out but unless you look at the payroll record to say, “They got paid for these many hours.” She was just siphoning off PTO and ended up hefting tens of thousands of dollars.

It’s expensive, especially if you don’t catch it for a while. It could be done so passively.

She was the beneficiary of most of the PTO. She can just give every paper. Again, you double check. I’ve already mentioned this fidelity and crime insurance. In my book, it’s required. If you don’t know what it is, you probably don’t have it. One of the things to be aware of in your business owner policy, that everybody usually has or has to have. Business owner policy will have some crime insurance in it but it’s not sufficient. Most business owner policies I’ve seen well may have $5,000 to $10,000 worth of coverage. I guarantee you that if you ever have an event, it’s going to be more than $5,000 or $10,000.

Taking Advantage Of The Right Insurance Policy

It needs to be proportionate to the revenue of your practice so that you’re covered. Again, it’s one of the cheapest forms of insurance. If you got half the practices that admit that they’ve been stolen from, this may be the best insurance you ever get. A couple of resources. Here’s one. This is a group we work with that does risk management. They’re not an insurance agency. They don’t sell insurance. They do risk analysis.

In this area, you can send them your business owner policy or whatever policies you have. They’ll analyze them for free and send you back where you’re exposed. For example, in this area of fraud and embezzlement. They’ll tell you whether for the size of your practice, you’ve got enough coverage or not. There’s all kinds of areas. Let’s say cyber insurance. It’s one of the biggest areas of risk now. If you get hacked, who’s going to pay for it? We have one client where they had a hacking incident. It cost them a million dollars and lost productivity and ransom.

They had to pay to get their records back. Another one with $300,000 for a cyber-attack and with the new HIPAA high-tech rules. The HIPAA high-tech rules that just went into effect in January of 2025 have a whole new set of HIPAA requirements. It has to do with records, electronic records, and if you don’t report an incident. If you’ve been hacked or you leaked information and if you don’t report it properly, it’s like $50,000 a day per incident. It’s crazy. Again, where you expose.

You can scan a QR code and they’ll do a free risk analysis to see where you’re exposed because there’s plenty. Maybe you don’t want to cover every area of exposure, but at least you’ll know what risk you’re taking. Usually, we don’t know how good the insurance we have until it’s time to file a claim. Everybody has done this. You think you know but then you have an incident. You call up your agent and go, “Am I covered with this?” Know your policy until you make a claim. It’s like, “I’m not covered for that.”

Know what you’re covered for especially now. Here’s another big one. It’s EPLI. Employer liability insurance is huge. You’re covered as an employee against any potential claims, errors and omissions. There’s personal liability. There’s so many different areas of risk now. Again, get ready. Get a free analysis on that. Here’s the quote of all quotes that summarizes what we’ve talked about. Steve Bastian is the controller I told you about. I started this whole explanation, “Never trust your account.”

This is one of my favorite quotes from Steve Bastian. He says, “The irony of practicing good controls is that you never know the amount of loss and misery you’ve avoided because the loss and misery never happen.” Never know what bullet you dodged when you got all the right controls in place. Those are five basic ones you have to do every day. Here’s one other resource. If you go to this you can download a summary of what we call the Five-Point Daily Checklist and I created this just for you guys. You can go to Bit.ly/AlignedToPS and you can download this free eBook. It will give you all the details of those five things to check and how to put it properly in place so you can have the peace of mind of knowing that what you’re working for is coming in and you’re keeping it.

Finding Success In Simplicity And Doing The Boring Stuff

Thanks, Steve. We’ve talked about Steve before on the show. Not only are you extremely successful on your own with the multiple businesses that you own but also working with thousands of dentists throughout the years. There’s a pattern that we see. I looked at the review your bank statements. We interviewed a client of ours. They’ve got eight locations and completely associate run with over 30% EBITDA. These guys are absolutely crushing it.

What’s one of the things they do? They review their bank and credit card statements every single week and do you know what they say? They’re like, “Every single time we do it, we find something on there that we didn’t approve of or we didn’t know. We’re overcharged.” It’s just one of those things. I’ll never forget. I had a mentor that would tell me, he’s like, “I checked my restaurant check every single time. I read through it and glance through it. Eight times out of 10, I find something on there that I didn’t order.”

“He didn’t serve me and I didn’t order.”

Again, it’s just checks and balances. I was thinking and my brain can never shut off. I was in the gym and I was thinking, “Success is found in repeatedly doing the boring stuff.” The stuff that no one wants to do. The people that are disciplined in doing those five things you talked about are going to have less heartache, less stress, and have more peace of mind. Are you going to prevent 100%? Probably no, but you’re certainly going to prevent a lot less than what would have happened and have the peace of mind knowing that. There’s a lot there and I appreciate you sharing that wisdom, insight and those five critical steps every single doctor should be doing in their practice every day.

Simple things. I love simplicity and simplicity is complicated. In other words, to get things down to what matters takes a lot of work, focus and discipline. Again, five simple things and have the discipline to do them every day. You’ll prevent a lot of loss and misery, but you’ll never know it because you’ll never experience it.

Get In Touch With Steven

Steve, thank you so much for coming on here and sharing your expertise. Steve, if people want to learn more about you or ToPS or see you, I know you do a lot of speaking. Where’s the best place to go to hear more about what you’re having to share and your wisdom with our readers?

Thank you for that. TotalPatientService.com is a good place to start and our team of practice advisors. We do courses all over the country all the time. One of my favorites is our Total immersion course, which is two days of case acceptance focused systems for the entire team. Our team of practice advisors are out all over the country every day working hand-in-hand with teams to implement proven systems for hearing yes more often from your patients. It’s everything from the very first phone call to increase your calls to new patients ratio to make sure the money lands in the bank and you saw your money says yes to you.

I’ll put a plug in here for Crown Council, too. I know it’s a membership group, but membership is wildly affordable. It’s not crazy. In my opinion, one of the things that you guys have done such a great job of, aside from creating a great culture and within the organization, is the annual event. If you’re looking for an annual event to bring your team to, I don’t know if you would agree with me or not, but it’s not dental focused, which is cool.

It’s more focused on culture and alignment with the team. I know you talk a lot about culture. I’ve gone every year to the Crown Council event. I missed the last couple years but I probably went 9 or 10 years straight. It’s one of the coolest events you could bring your team to that your team will talk about for the rest of the year because you guys do such a great job putting that together. Check out Crown Counsel and their annual event. Where are you guys in 2026?

We do it in January every year to kick off the year by design. In January of 2026, it will be in one of the most spectacular places in the United States. We’re doing it at the Grand America Hotel. It’s a five-star hotel that was originally built for the Winter Olympics. The donor who built this hotel was basically an oil guy. He’s no longer with us but when I met him, he said that the amount of money that they put into building this hotel, he said, “I did the math. If I lived to be 1,000 years old, I will never get my money out of this.”

It’s one of the nicest hotels in America. We’re going to do it in Salt Lake City, Grand America Hotel. It’s going to be spectacular. Jonathan, as you mentioned the focus of the whole meeting is building the person and building the professional and the practice. It’s all very focused on team, teamwork, and how everybody can be their best in order to serve patients at their best. It’s one of the hallmarks of it.

In 30 years, we’ve done that meeting. We’ve only had two dentists that have ever presented from the main stage. That’s what the meeting is. We try and inject the meeting with outside thinking from places that you may not have ever thought of, have relevance to dentistry, and then we apply it to the practice of dentistry so you can get out of the traditional thinking box and explore new ideas and directions.

It’s a great meeting. Check that Crown Council.

CrownCounsil.com would have all the information for the meeting coming up in January.

Steve, thanks so much for joining us again, giving us your time, your expertise and being so willing to be open and sharing such a timely and important topic with all of our readers. For those of you reading, please go check out Steve Anderson, ToPS and Crown Council. Make sure to follow him on social media. Again, always releasing great information up to date. They’re in the trenches just like we are every day with doctors and just like you seeing and experiencing what every one of your colleagues is going through. Let’s learn together as a community and we’ll make our industry a better place. Austin, thanks for joining us also.

Important Links

• Steven Anderson on LinkedIn
• Crown Council
• Smiles for Life Foundation
• Total Patient Services Institute
• How to Win Friends and Influence People
• Verizon
• Massachusetts State Dental Board
• Free Risk Analysis
• Five-Point Daily Checklist

About Steven Anderson

Our guest today is widely consider to be Dentistry’s “Yes Man!”

He has worked with professionals around the world to transform their organizations and their teams to the highest level of performance with innovative systems that make it easier for clients and customers to say “Yes!. He has worked with some of the biggest names in dentistry to build their practices.

He has been named “Dental Businessman of the Year” by Excellence in Dentistry. He is a founder of the Total Patient Service Institute, Crown Council, and the Smiles for Life Foundation that has raised over $50 million dollars for dental and children’s charitable projects around the world. He is one of the most prolific entrepreneurs, authors, philanthropists, and presenters in dentistry.