Episode #249: Victoria Peterson – Helping Dentists Become Investment-Grade Practice Owners

Dr. Eric Block: Welcome to the Stress-Free Dentist Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Eric Block. As always, I want to inspire, entertain, and educate you on the best tools and technologies out there. My goal is to help make your practice and career more profitable, efficient, and most importantly, more enjoyable. And check out all of my nonfiction and children’s books on Amazon and check out the stress free dentist.com for any upcoming events. And if you’re feeling you’re a dental professional that’s burnt out, or you just feel stuck or want to get to that next level, visit the International Academy of Dental Life Coaches or www.iadc.com, and we’ll get you matched up with a life coach that understands dentistry. I also wanted to thank our amazing sponsor, Ekwa Marketing. They have helped me and my practice over the years to improve with SEO and website performance. And to find out how you can make your practice dominate in your area, go to www.ekwa.com/msm-sfd to book your complimentary meeting. Again, that’s www.ekwa.com/msm-sfd. Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode. And today we are joined by Victoria Peterson, who is the co-founder of PDA or Productive Dentist Academy. How you doing today?

Victoria Peterson: I’m doing great. How are you, Eric?

Dr. Eric Block: great. Yeah, it’s, it’s great. I’ve been getting to know you, over the last few months, and I had the pleasure of going on your podcast and, actually getting a copy, of an upcoming book that I want to talk about that you’re working on. but actually let’s, let’s go into your origin story. How did you first get involved with dentistry and helping dentists?

Victoria Peterson: Oh, my goodness. in high school, I don’t know if you hit this moment, but somewhere in, my junior year of high school, I realized that I had more than enough credits to graduate high school, but I had to go another year and take college prep classes to prove that I was smart enough to go to college. And that really did not make sense to my brain. So my parents were, my dad was an Army reserve, so every summer he would go away for two weeks for training camp, and my mom would go with them. Why they left teenagers on their own, I have no idea. But it left me lots of time to ponder. I drove about 35 miles to, the local junior college. Found out that within one semester I could take one class, get my high school diploma, and then start immediately into college.

Victoria Peterson: So when my parents came back at the end of the two weeks, I had it all laid out. I have my application. I said, here’s what I wanna do. and they said, sure, why not? And, I knew this was the late seventies. So back then, women were going to college to find a husband, we would call it, to get your MRS degree. And I knew they weren’t gonna let me do that. So they had a program on dental hygiene. We loved our dentist. It was something that was very important to my parents and off to dental hygiene school, I went not knowing what in the world I was setting myself up for, but it was, look through the catalog, what can you take? My goal was always to do two years and then transfer to the University of Georgia and study business, which is what I ended up doing.

Victoria Peterson: I moved from, just north of Jacksonville, Florida, up to Athens, Georgia, and, went to UGA and it took off from there. And it was a wonderful career. My first 15 years, I worked everything from Medicaid to high end aesthetics. I retired out of full-time clinical in the mid nineties. when, the A CD was just forming, all of these things were going, I was working for Dr. Deborah King. We had people flying from all over the world to come to our office. So it was really nice to have that foundational clinical experience in so many different settings.

Dr. Eric Block: And, where did, where did you grow up and then where did you go to hygiene school?

Victoria Peterson: Oh, I went, I grew up in St. Mary’s, Georgia, so some people might know that as the Kings Bay Naval Base that came in after I left. And I went to school at, Jacksonville, Florida, Jacksonville Community College back then. It’s, it’s re been renamed since then.

Dr. Eric Block: And then you, did a business program at, UGA, you said?

Victoria Peterson: Yeah, I started at UGA. my education is very eclectic. I have 256 credit hours and no degree because I studied what I studied like an entrepreneur. So a foundation was in business finance, law, business law, contract law, things like that. Accounting. I really thought I was gonna be a CPA. So did a lot of accounting classes, and then the internet came along, and e-commerce came along, and marketing took center stage. So I would take classes in that. So through University of Phoenix and a lot of different things, so many mentors over my career. When I became a consultant, it was in 1995, I joined the Tony Robbins Organization at the time. He was part of Fortune Management and had so many mentors and great opportunities there to combine clinical knowledge with business knowledge with human behavior. And so that’s where it started really galvanizing was in the late nineties, early two thousands, pulling it all together that way. And then the final degree designation was in 2018 when I earned my doctor of spiritual studies.

Dr. Eric Block: Mm-hmm .

Victoria Peterson: So, it’s, I would say it’s a very entrepreneur, entrepreneurial route to education. , I looked at how do I wanna serve was the first question. And the second question is, what do I need to learn?

Dr. Eric Block: And so you said in the mid nineties you went from clinical hygiene to becoming a consultant.

Victoria Peterson: Mm-hmm . I did.

Dr. Eric Block: And, when, and you worked with, that’s amazing. You were able to work with, the group with Tony Robbins. I’ve heard of Fortune Management. tell me how, the, you co-founded, PDA, how did that whole thing start?

Victoria Peterson: Yeah, so along the way, one of the programs that I built for Fortune is still going today. It’s called Hygiene Mastery. So I was, I was a full business consultant. My territory was Connecticut. So I would fly from Atlanta to Connecticut a couple times a month, and worked with a great group of doctors in New England. I loved it. And I also built a program called Hygiene Mastery. And within the Hygiene Mastery Group, we, wonderful hygiene consultants that are still in the marketplace today. Rachel Wall inspired Hygiene. I hired Janet Hagerman, who works in the DSO space now, Patty Suey, Cristal, some, we came together and developed this program. And then when that project was over, I left that franchise system and was sitting out a non-compete. I had a two year non-compete. I had two little kids at home by that time home.

Victoria Peterson: They were eight and 10 years old. And I decided to move from Atlanta. Seven and a half million of my closest friends is to a tiny island north of Seattle, population 16,000. And I was a single mom, and I thought, this is where I wanna raise my kids. Where you can say, go ride your bike and be home by dinner. It’s still that kind of place now. And my kids loved growing up there. And one of the practices that we had consulted with was Dr. Bruce Baird. And Bruce and I knew each other from the speaking circuit. We would hang out in the green rooms before you go on stage and got to know each other. And he had started, a seminar for doctors. It was a doctor only seminar on productivity. And after the first program, they immediately said, oh my God, you’ve got my head on straight now.

Victoria Peterson: I had no idea. it was just, it’s a paradigm shift. And Bruce used to say, product productivity is not what you think. It’s what you think. And really help doctors to see that to be more productive. You didn’t speed up and try to cram more procedures in your day. More single tooth dentistry. You slowed down and looked comprehensively at what was going on with the patient. And once doctors got that, once it, you can’t unsee it. And then they wanted their teams to be trained. And so he called me up and he said, Vic, I know you’re on a little island like two hours from any major airport. However, I’m doing this program. If you’re not doing much, can you come down, next month I’m doing another program. Just sit in on it and see if you’d like to help me out with a team program.

Victoria Peterson: And that’s how it all began. I sat in the back of the room in 2004, and I’m taking notes on my laptop. He thought I was on Dental Town or checking email or things like that. But, I kind of think in PowerPoint. So as he would present, I pulled up, I created PowerPoint, used his color scheme, and said, well, this is what your team would need to learn. If the doctor thinks this, the team needs to know that if our procedure is this is our SOP for that. And he called me up at lunchtime on the second day, kind of annoyed with me, I think, . And he said, Hey, Vic, why don’t you come up here and tell em what the team program’s gonna look like? And I was like, great. Kind of borrow your laptop, plugged in the fire stick. the USB drive did about a 20 minute on, based on what you learned yesterday, this is what I think your team should know.

Victoria Peterson: And he went, that’s it. So, we shook hands that day and said, let’s put something together. Let’s go all in. You’re a consultant, I’m a speaker. Let’s see what we can do. And that handshake has led to, a 21 year history here with our company. And, that was it. It was a handshake and one agreement all in. And where we are today is our employees own 30% of the company. So over time, we grew the consulting division. This, the events, an ad agency, the Phoenix Dental Agency. It’s a dental first, marketing company. All of that just grew out of two people who had a lot of respect for each other, who thought we thought the same, but we thought very differently.

Dr. Eric Block: Yeah. I had the pleasure of getting to know Bruce, and he wrote the forward to one of my books. And, I’ve been to some of his courses and such a great guy. So I’m happy that I had the chance to get to know him. and yeah, you mentioned that, he was training the dentist, but he needed you to help train the teams. And I feel like that is so important because I’ve been there, I’ve gone to courses and seminars, and I come back all fired up, and you have to get your team on board because you can’t be the only one excited about something new and change. You gotta get everyone on board.

Victoria Peterson: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Dr. Eric Block: And now, I, and there’s so many things that you said, that are interesting to me. what ex exactly, is the academy, how does it work? is it, is it all, virtual, or do you have to go live? is it a whole program throughout the year? How does it work?

Victoria Peterson: Yeah, I would say from the beginning, we’ve been member built and driven. That’s, that’s what drove the foundation of PDA. That’s what drove the content that we developed. Because I had been a full service consultant. And at the time, full service consultants would come into your office, quarterly, six times, eight times a year. I was now living two hours north of any airport and had two small children and no extended family support, . And I went to Bruce. I said, are you getting on a plane? He’s like, Nope. Am I getting on a plane? No. So we probably started the first virtual coaching network back in 2005. And back then, I’m telling you, it was fax machines. Text messaging wasn’t a thing. having, modules online was still very difficult. But we started that way quickly. Went back to an in-office program where we went in a couple times a year, not six or eight, but one or two.

 

Victoria Peterson: And, for those listeners who don’t know, while we’re still talking about Bruce, he passed away, just four months ago. And so we had, we had prepared for this, not for his demise, but for succession planning, ’cause business owners do. So in July of 2025, we executed on his exit plan, and the company bought back his shares, and he was working out his one year employment agreement. And we were in the midst of transitioning, productive Dentist Academy into something broader. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched the movie Moneyball.

Dr. Eric Block: Mm-hmm.

Victoria Peterson: Right? And so you’ve got, was it Jacoby, was the star player and the Oakland, a’s, where they keep losing their star players and you don’t have the salary cap to go and get more star players. And Bruce and I really believed in that concept that his replacement needed to be multiplied, by many voices. And the consulting work that we have been doing had really turned into what we call building an investment grade practice. So productivity is great, but when we looked back, we went, the doctors are more productive. The team has clarity on their roles and what they’re doing. We’re talking about cashflow, but we’re also talking about building value, building your practice as an asset. And that was something that has haunted me from the very early days of my career. One of the bosses I love the most, was in his sixties when I started as a hygienist.

Victoria Peterson: And a few years in, he couldn’t buy his wife a bracelet for Christmas. He couldn’t buy her any gift for Christmas. And I had, he had seven daughters. I was close to all of them. I said, what’s going on with Dr. Bob? Why is he upset? He’s like, well, the business isn’t doing so great right now. And I said, how can that be? We’re busy. We’re booked up. We’re booked up forever. People love him. what do you mean the business isn’t doing well? Well, it turns out that they were never asking for money. I literally would walk patients to the front and they would pull out their checkbook. And the phrase back then was, no, Ms. Ruth, your money’s no good. Here, I’ll send you a statement. And there was over $65,000 sitting in accounts receivables. This was in, let’s call it 1984.

Victoria Peterson: So 64,000 was a lot of money back then. And I looked at the new office manager and I said, you don’t know these patients, but I do. We’re gonna write a letter to them, and we’re gonna say, something to the effect of, it is such a pleasure working with you. We’ve been changing over our billing system, and our accountant has made us aware that you have a small balance. If you could please use the self enclosed envelope to repay it back, we know you value the great dentistry our doctor does as much as we do. Thank you so much. And we collected $40,000 in about three weeks because there was no system in place. Right? So the light bulbs at I was probably 25 at the time. So the light bulbs had been going off about systems and operations, and I came from an entrepreneurial family.

Victoria Peterson: So that was very natural. And then, and probably to a great extent, now, 95 Aden, 95% of dentists can’t retire at age 65 and maintain their lifestyle. Now, maybe that percentage is 80, but it’s certainly a terrible statistic for all the stress you go through in your career. And by the way, Bruce has always said, stress is the number one killer of productivity. So the work you do de-stressing yourself, getting your own physical, mental, emotional, self balanced in all aspects of your life, getting systems in place that allow the team to carry the business, and you lead the team, without that, you’re not gonna be productive. But being productive and not knowing how to balance your profit and loss statement, not knowing how to work with your financial planners, not preparing for those times, nine out of 10 dentists are still gonna come up short at the end of their career.

Victoria Peterson: And when you think about, I don’t know, what do we flow 20, $30 million through our hands in our career, and we can’t, we can’t find the four or five or 8 million to serve as well. Once we put up the handpiece. that’s my mission. That’s why we, that’s why we founded the investment grade practice. And that’s the book that you’re, you’re so kindly, reading for me, pre-reading and giving me input on. So the Productive Dentist Academy is the seed for what we’re moving into, what we’ve been, this framework has been alive and working behind the scenes in our consulting for over five years now. And what I can tell you is that the doctors who are running this framework, when they go to market, they get one to two points higher on their multiple when they go to sell. So if the market is getting five x, our doctors are getting seven, eight, some get nine. Now, I can’t promise you that, ’cause the market shifts all the time. But when you’re talking about, $400,000 and ebitda, the difference between a five x and a seven X is life changing.

Victoria Peterson: So that’s, that’s our premise, is we begin with your end in mind. What’s your financial freedom number? What does this business need to do for you? Because if it’s not doing something more than giving you a paycheck of benefits, you should sell your business and go be an associate. Right? So a business should be designed to support your life. It should, it should give you freedom of time, freedom of finance, depth and relationships and satisfaction. That’s, that’s why we build businesses, or at least one of the reasons, one of the possibilities for it. So that’s, that’s how this has blossomed.

Dr. Eric Block: And that’s really one of the beauties of being in this industry, being a dentist, is that, we come out, we come outta school and we have a license. We get our clinical skills, but then we have the ability to actually open up, and have a business that very high chance is gonna be profitable and, be successful. It’s so rare for a dental office to go outta business. whereas a lot of other, of our, medical colleagues, PCPs, primary care, they’re usually part of like a bigger group, and they don’t actually have their own business. That’s one thing I love about dentistry is having something that I can build, that investment, that value, and then ultimately, when it’s time for me to hang it up that I can, that I can sell. now do, are most dentists coming to you? They’re working hard. They’re busy, like you said, but they just feel like something’s not right. Like the money’s not flowing like they expected, or they’re more stressed and they just need, they just need help.

Victoria Peterson: Yeah. I always say we solve $300,000 problems. You know, you don’t invest in consulting. any consultant you work with, it’s going to be 30 to $50,000 a year depending on what you do. So for that, you’re gonna wanna get five to 10 times your money on it, right? So what are $300,000 problems? case acceptance is one of those, and that usually comes back to diagnostics. Are we clinically calibrated to diagnose? Is are hygienist representing a cosing with the doctor? If you have multiple doctors, are you within a click or two of each other on what you would recommend? I think we underestimate how much that fragments the team. So when there’s no clarity between providers, patients walk out the door. I did some research, oh, years and years ago for the Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry. I was writing for their publication.

Victoria Peterson: And one of the things they wanted me to research is, what emotion do you have to tap into for patients to say yes? And of course, they trust you. Of course they respect you, of course they like you. But the one emotion where they say yes is confidence. So I need to be confident that I’m in the right place, that I like these people, that they’re caring, that I can trust them. I need to be confident that what you’re telling me is true. I own that I have this disease and I’ve gotta be confident that I can afford it. That, these conversations should be natural. These should not hit you out of the blue. And so that’s where we start with case presentation and diagnostics. We always teach, have since the beginning, diagnosis by risk factors. And the communication side of what you might learn at Coist or Spear are those that are oral, systemically based and risk factor based.

Victoria Peterson: But how do you make that simple for the team? How do you make that simple to communicate with the patient? So simple effective communications is one reason you might engage a growing reason, and this one has really shocked me, is the egregiousness of PPO write-offs. Now, for years, we’ve been able to work with any practice on any sort of revenue mix. We could through verbal skills or redesign a service mix, we could make those PPO fee schedules work. But I will tell you the last 12 offices that I’ve evaluated, I do a free practice analysis for anybody who wants it. You could jump on, we’ll have a, I’ll grab some data, we’ll do a 30 minute call, we’ll take a look at what’s happening. I am seeing 50, 55, 60 2% write-offs, 62% write-offs. And I’m talking not in little practices that don’t know what they’re doing.

Victoria Peterson: one practice producing 500, $3,000 a month, writing off on average, 275,000 a month, a month. And when I, when I shared this with a doctor, and he is, he, we get locked in the mindset. That’s why I love what Bruce said. It’s not what you think. It’s what you think. And it’s like, well, you’re telling me to raise my fees, that’s not gonna help. That’s just going to increase my write off. And I said, no. What I’m asking is, let’s take a look at the design of your business. So most of us organically grew the practice. You went on some plans, patients came in, you got into your day to day, and you got into your rhythm. And over time, when your admin team turns over, I think with every turnover, if you’re old enough, I think Eric, you’ll get this. It’s like a xerox copy of a copy of a copy.

Victoria Peterson: And that second person may not have known what the first person did. And by the third person, if you’re not hiring for that specific skillset, the quality of your claims goes down. And when they go down, the write-offs go up. And so I’m seeing it’s not only contractual obligations of a 25 to 30% write-off, but there are so many billing and coding errors now. And then when it gets posted to the ar, here’s what happens. Doctors that you may not know, this is a, this is a secret money leak. We really just go look for the money leaks. When you say, oh my God, my AR is out of control, look at this over 90 days, I want this cleaned up. If your admin team doesn’t know how to clean it up, they are going to adjust off those balances. Give you a list and say, I tried, I called, it’s non-collectible.

Victoria Peterson: We need to send ’em to collections. And I want you to hear that the same way that you hear it when a hygienist writes in their chart notes, WNL when they’re perio charting, we never looked. So, you’ve got that WNL I remember training hygienists and they would go, Ms. Johnson, you’re due for x-rays today. Do you wanna take those x-rays today? Because it’s totally up to you if you wanna do it or not. I think that maybe you wanna wait. Do you wanna go ahead and do it? And their head is going up and down in all the wrong directions. Same thing happens with collections. You get burned out and you get tired. And it’s not their fault. It’s just, it’s a system defect. And we were taught to, we were taught to think in minutes and units. So if I want hygiene to be more productive, I go from 60 minutes to 45 minutes to 30 minutes.

Victoria Peterson: I wanna go from a head count of eight to nine to 12. But if you’re riding off, I just did the math on this, Gary Takas, and I have really been working on this. I did the math on it. If you’re riding off more than 15% from your hygiene department and salaries at the rate of 55, 65, 70 $5 an hour, you’re making a dollar and 10 cents an hour in your hygiene department. So you’re making about 130 bucks a month. I see. That’s not investment grade. You can have a million dollar hygiene department, but you have to have revenue integrity first, clinical calibration, and clinical integrity second. And then comes the communication skills. And I think that’s the part, sometimes when you hire a consultant, you can hire topical consultants, teach my team how to answer the phone, or clean up my ar you, that’s very necessary. But we work at the level of holistic business design. So is my business designed to decrease my stress and give me the lifestyle that I deserve? Is my cashflow designed to give me long-term wealth? You know, are my systems in tech? So I’m not, I’m not for or against insurance. What I’m for is building a revenue mix that serves your practice and serves your pace. Does that make sense at all?

Dr. Eric Block: Yeah, that’s great. And when you start to add these things, they compound on each other. the write-offs, the ar, the claim errors, you’re, you have, low treatment plan acceptance, all these things add up, and it can really put a lot of stress on the dentist then. And I’ve been there. And when you’re stressed, you’re not on your A game. I would often just wait and monitor and not treatment plan and do, and that goes, everything starts at the top. And when the staff sees that and the hygienists see that you’re not, at your a game and really educating and treatment planning and getting that treatment plan acceptance, your productivity definitely goes down.

Victoria Peterson: Can I ask you a question? Mm-hmm . You said, when I’m not on my A game, I start waiting and watching instead of mm-hmm . Educating. Why did you do that? Because you’re not alone. This is the pattern. What is it that flips the switch there?

Dr. Eric Block: For me, I was very burned out. I was disengaged. I didn’t want to give anyone bad news. I wanted everyone to like me. and I would just say, let’s just watch that and we’ll get you back in six months. when you’re burned out, you do that because you don’t want to have that difficult conversation with a patient. but when I overcame that, and, it didn’t happen overnight. It was something I really had to get over it in myself. I had to get comfortable with myself, and I went through with coaching and therapy, and I was able to overcome that. And now I get in there with a patient and show ’em the problem. Well, we gotta take care of this and focus on the value. and it’s just a totally different mindset than before where you’re just going through the motions and when you’re not getting treatment plan acceptance, then you just want to get more new patients, new patients, new patients, and it becomes this snowball effect.

Victoria Peterson: I couldn’t agree with that more. and I think, I think for anybody wondering like, where’s my stress coming from? when you start to see yourself just doing those one minute hygiene in and outs, don’t bother me. Tell ’em we’ll do the exam next time, or all of that. Really, I’m so proud of you and you’re such a role model for so many people that you knew or you’ve come to know, that is a sign of burnout. it doesn’t have to get any worse than that. If it’s Monday morning and you dread going to the office , or you’re like, oh my God, the hygiene schedule’s packed, I don’t wanna do those exams. It’s really a time. And it’s, it’s not just an emotional problem. And, because you do a lot of mind, body, spirit work just as I do that you can, you can fix a system within your practice that gives you relief.

Victoria Peterson: And that lever of relief gives you the motivation to eat a salad instead of a twine , ? And so it starts that upward spiral, and it doesn’t matter where you begin. If you begin on the personal grounding foundation of it, and you spiral up so things get better, or you fix systems, or you align the team, then that gives you the energy to spiral up. And that’s, that’s really the process. I think most of us get stuck in stasis. And when we’re there and we don’t see the way out, then our saboteurs in our mind take over and it could get really dark, really fast. so it’s important. These things. it, and I know you’ve seen this in the book, there’s four quadrants. There’s business value, there’s culture, authentic marketing in your practice systems. But at the center of that is the human, it is the leader. It is my philosophy of care. It is my core beliefs. It’s the values, it’s the purpose of this business. And when you’re exhausted, when you’re wired and tired, it’s really hard to hold the frame of, this is what I believe, and this is what we do when we’re at our best. So I can’t separate lifting up people and supporting people from building a great business because I think building a great business.

Dr. Eric Block: Yeah. especially in dentistry, I have a partner and we are the face of the office. it’s a private practice. We are the office, it all starts with us, the culture. And if we’re, stressed and burned out or, we’re having issues in the whole, it just, steamrolls down through the, through the rest of the office . and it can happen, it can happen fast if you let that negativity creep in, negativity can work its way into your mind pretty quickly. and, I actually wanted to just bounce back to the treatment plan acceptance part that you said. ’cause I know that’s a major issue in dentistry. let’s say, I’m feeling great. I went in there, I gave my pa the patient, a great exam, educated them, did x-rays, photos, showed them some videos, maybe even an intraoral scan. felt like I had a great treatment plan, case for the patient. But then it just, they, you find out they didn’t book, they didn’t make that next appointment. Yeah.

Dr. Eric Block: What is the most common issue there? Is it that you’re not, the batons not being passed from the team to the front desk, letting the patient think about it. What are ing out there?

Victoria Peterson: a couple of things can derail it. And they, and they can be very small things. So it’s definitely in the handoffs. Think about it like a relay team. tenant number one, connect before you, correct. So you, we teach doctors to physically sit down, take your mask off, put the patient a little bit higher than you get the, get the control and body language correct first. Because if you come in towering over somebody and going, Ms. Jones, I looked at your X-rays. It looks like you got a hurt tooth. Does your tooth hurt? Yeah, it does. Well, I’d recommend a root canal, a corn, and a crown, and a, we’re gonna use a blah. And you get into the nerdy nerdiness of the, of the materials. it’ll, and got any questions? will your insurance cover it? I don’t know.

Victoria Peterson: Ask Martha. worst case acceptance ever, never gonna work. But when you go in and you connect and you say, how long have you lived here? And, oh, you’ve got grandkids here. That’s what brought you here. And, we don’t have grandkids yet, but we’re certainly looking forward to it. You link as a human and you find four things that are in common. And so step one is people need to be heard. If you just simply listen and feedback what you heard and be genuinely interested, and I can’t emphasize that enough, failing to connect as a human first before you give them the treatment plan. nine times outta 10, they are not gonna schedule. the second thing is to educate them a bit about their risk factors. we always look for the same five things. Did that the bacteria in your mouth is the same bacteria that’s related to heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, and dementia?

Victoria Peterson: This bacteria can, cut a hole in your tooth, you know, the strongest material on earth. God gave you the strongest thing you could ever have inside your mouth. It withstands acids, it withstands these bacterial attacks. So whatever dentistry I do is never gonna be as good as the natural. We wanna eliminate these risk factors. And some patients always ask, doc, can you fix my tooth? But the better question is, can you fix it so that it stands a chance of lasting the rest of my life? So that’s our philosophy here, is I’m gonna look at your risk for cavities, your risk for gum disease, your risk for, function, bite force, how you bite. Because if you’re a grinder and you’ve got heavy force, you’re gonna break whatever dentistry we do. That’s probably why you have chipped fillings. Now I’m gonna look at your airway and sleep apnea.

Victoria Peterson: That’s very important to your overall health. And we screen for that. We also do a head and neck oral cancer screening, because dentistry is more than teeth. It’s, it’s, we take this approach. So two minutes of education with the patients that this is why we recommend what we recommend. We link your medical history. You’re on a lot of medications that dries your mouth out, that eliminates this protective barrier of saliva around your teeth. We’re gonna put you on some prescriptive medications at home, some rinses and things that’ll help you with the dry mouth. It’ll decrease your cavities in the future. Not, I’ve never seen a dentist implement this system. And the very first thing, the very first patient says is, wow, I have never had such a thorough examination. And the truth of it is you haven’t even done the exam yet. You’ve just, you’ve educated them about how you’re going to do the exam, what you look for, and then, do your tooth by tooth, call it out, and then just speak in simple English.

Victoria Peterson: You’ve got some challenges in the upper right, but I bet you already knew that. You told me that when you came in. Overall, gums, look, gums look okay, but it has been a while. You’ve got some bleeding, you’ve got some infection. We wanna put you on our periodontal program. So you speak in terms of color and location and program and forget all of the, you need A-M-O-D-B-L here and a crown there. They don’t understand that. So connect and educate. And then the final piece, and most doctors are very uncomfortable with this, but I can tell you, our coaches can, our coaches can tell when this drops off, you have to ballpark the fee. Mm-hmm

Dr. Eric Block: .

Victoria Peterson: You have to ballpark the fee. And you have to say, Eric, you came in and you told me it’s been about six years since you came in. You were in a car accident, you had all this stuff happen, and you’re now getting around to taking a look at your mouth. And there’s, there’s some delayed maintenance. I can’t deny that. And if you were a member of my family and we were to restore you back to complete health, that might be eight or $10,000. Mm-hmm . And what I want you to know is whether it takes four months or four years, that’s totally up to you. What I wanna know is, do we have an agreement on the plan? So my recommendation is this, and this. We can phase it over time. I can stabilize things today. We can give you some things to do at home that’ll give you more time.

Victoria Peterson: Some people like that route. Other people like to get it done all at once. We can give you a couple pills. we can put you to sleep and you wake up and this work is done if you need to, you can spread your payments out over time. And that’s my team’s job. My team’s job is to support you in your health. So I’m here for you whenever you’re ready. And the place I would start, this is the key, the place I would start is the lower left. Mm-hmm . So doctors, when you get really comfortable, and I heard you say that too, I stopped worrying about what the patient was gonna say, and I was waiting and I was watching, and I was burned out to, I’m just gonna tell ’em what I see. Have a great conversation, and then put, give the patient choice. And that is actually, this isn’t a consultant’s trick, this isn’t a communication theory. This is baked into the ethical standard of the American Dental Association. So whether you’re a member or not, the ethical standard state that you act with veracity and authority. So veracity means be honest and tell them everything . And giving them authority to make their own choice. They’re in control. So, yes, there’s a framework that we teach, and that framework follows how do I connect with the patient so that they can make a

Dr. Eric Block: Great, I love that about, adding in. I know a lot of patients, they’ll ask, how much is this gonna cost? And dentists don’t like talking about money. personally, I have a whole workflow with my hygiene team. They’ll message me when they’re done data gathering. Yep. And before they start their mechanical, prophy or scaling. So I know I have good 20 to 30 minutes to get in there. Yes. So I’m not rushed, which is, which is huge. Yes. And everything you just mentioned doesn’t have to take long. if it, if it’s a new patient, I give them much longer time. But if it’s a hygiene exam, I’m there maybe three or four minutes. And exactly like you said, the first thing I do is how you doing, Judy? how the, how the kid’s doing, make a connection.

Dr. Eric Block: That’s about a minute. The second minute is I asked the hygienist if there was any findings. so we get a good co-diagnosis, and then the third minute I’m getting there doing my exam, we’re looking at photos and x-rays, and then I’m presenting the plan. And let’s just say, for example, it’s a night guard, and this is a very common thing. The patient will ask, does my insurance cover it? Yeah. I’ll say, actually, it says here, that they don’t. It’s $740. I’ve had mine for 10 years. It’s a, it’s like wearing a football, like a helmet into a football game. It’s gonna protect your teeth, and it’s such a great investment for your teeth. so not to be afraid of talking about money, right out there. So I love the fact that you laid all that out of there. and

Victoria Peterson: What? It helps, it helps the doctor take that pressure off when it becomes normalized throughout the whole system. Yeah. So your website talks about money and the options we have, the receptionist, when they’re greeting, they say, I’m your patient advocate. I, if you have work to be done, of course there’s a financial aspect of that. I’m here to help you with that regard, whether it’s a hundred dollars or $10,000, like you’re having those pre-framing, we’re here to help you financial conversations upfront. And I’m surprised at the number of practices that still hold that to as the end. And it’s like surprise, which is not, it’s never, it is never a good surprise. . Yeah.

Dr. Eric Block: Yep. I love it. let’s wrap up with two final questions. number one, how do we find out more, about what you’re up to and about your upcoming book? And then the final question is, what advice would you give to the young dentist out there?

Victoria Peterson: Oh, wow. So info@productivedentist.com, really simple. productive dentist.com is our website. We do have lots of resources there that are free. You can book a 30 minute, one-on-one session with me. You can download my seven Steps to Predictable Growth. There’s some white papers and things there for you, and get on our, subscription list. You’ll be the first to know when the book comes out. and we’re expecting that, late summer. So that’s, that’s on its way. And young dentists, I have to say, we’ve just onboarded three new practice owners, and I’m so excited about the future of independent dental practice because, you’ve gone in, you’ve done public health or military service or DSOs, and now you’re taking the reins. my advice is to bake in working capital for things like, business advisors and marketing, because in the beginning you’re filled with enthusiasm and it burns like stage one rocket fuel.

Victoria Peterson: And then they’ve, and then you go, wow, I just upgraded all my computer systems and I bought this toy and that toy, and all the clinical stuff, and I don’t know how to lead my team . So, the boring things that you don’t know about are the things that you need to learn fast. So find somebody, get into a great community that challenges you and opens up your eyes to what, I don’t know. I don’t know. but I am real excited. The new young doctors who are coming into ownership are doing very well. And, gosh, that’s a whole other podcast. I’d love to come back. I don’t know if that’s your audience or not, but, we’re also seeing, why buyers need to have a buyer analyst on their side because the lawyers miss it. The CPAs miss it. The brokers miss it. but I’ve, all the horror stories come because they wrote off credit balances and you bought the ar, and now patients show up on your doorstep to get the free work. And there’s so many things that, so many from operations could help you anticipate.

Dr. Eric Block: Yeah. Amazing. Excellent episode. Thank you so much for joining us, Victoria Peterson. looking forward to the book. And, again, congratulations on everything you’re doing and how you’re helping Dennis out there. It’s, it really is amazing and inspiring.

Victoria Peterson: Thank you so much, Eric. And thank you for all that you’re doing.

Dr. Eric Block: Thanks again for listening to the Stress Free Dentist Podcast. And don’t hesitate to get in touch with me at info at the stress free dentist.com. And if you haven’t already, please subscribe on your favorite platform and leave us a review. Until the next episode. I’m Dr. Eric Block the Stress Free Dentist.