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"Instead of saying 'I have to', say 'I get to'"
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AUDIO - Patrick Wahl - HSP #112
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VIDEO - Patrick Wahl - HSP #112
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Patrick Wahl served as the Director of the Practice Management program at Temple University for 15 years, and was named one of the "Leaders in Continuing Education" by Dentistry Today for seven.
Pat received his DMD from Temple University and his MBA from the University of Phoenix. He completed a General Practice Residency at the Medical Center of Delaware as well as an endodontic residency at the University of Pennsylvania. He practices with his brother and his wife at Wahl Family Dentistry in Wilmington, Delaware.
Pat combines his passion for business and people, helping other successful practices become more successful with his partners Lorraine Hollett and Ginny Hegarty at Office Magic. Pat's new eBook is called "Magic Words & Life Lessons: What to Say and What to Do At Work, At Home, & Everywhere."
Email pat@officemagic.com
Cell (302) 229-9520
www.officemagic.com
Howard: It is a great honor to be interviewing one of my friends for, gosh all the way back in the day. I think I met you 25 years ago.
Patrick: I am truly humbled, and I just want to say that you were my original inspiration. You started my interest in practice management. Just quickly, my brother Mike, my older brother Mike he's 5 years older so he had already been practicing when I just graduated. One of the first things he did was give me a tape when I graduated of you speaking at an ADA convention, back when you wanted to be the Jimmy Hoffa of dentistry. I had never heard anything like it. It was just so funny, it was just such a blast, just so unusual, so different, so candid, so different and so honest. You sparked my original interest.
Howard: You know what? Going back to all those, the turmoil days of my early speaking career, because half the places I spoke at for the first 10 years literally put into writing they'd never have me back ever again, and all the complaints.
Patrick: The ironic thing is you always had standing room only and people overflowing and then they'd ban you.
Howard: Can I tell you the only thing that finally explained it to me, because you had to be me to live through this. You're sitting there lecturing, everybody's busting up laughing and then when it's all over, the people who had you said, "You offended people and you said fart and damn." But it was watching the movie Private Parts, and Howard Stern stayed true to himself. He knew these jokes were funny, he knew that everybody in the construction site was laughing and the only people that had a problem with it were the station owners. They just kept firing and firing and firing and you got to watch the movie, and he just stayed true to himself and finally one day, one radio station said, "I don't like him but a lot of people do."
Now he's the highest paid radio personality in the world on Sirius, so I always said, my thing when I lectured is I wanted to talk to you as if you were my friend. As your friend I would tell you exactly what I thought and I wasn't going to lie to you, and I always thought growing up in America that all the politicians are lying, and all the business ... Anybody that came up to you with a suit was trying to sell you something. I just thought candid honesty, I'd rather have someone honest with me and not agree with a thing he says, but I'd like the person because he was honest. I never had a political correct bone in my body.
Patrick: It was so refreshing and again, I wasn't offended by anything but I think the proper word would be irreverent, which is I think a good thing.
Howard: That was another weird thing I would see at the dental convention. You'd go to this dental convention and one of your buddies would show up in a suit and tie with PowerPoint and give the most boring presentation of your life. You just couldn't even stay awake and then as soon as the seminar was over we'd all go hit the hotel bar and then the drinks would start flying, the cussing would start flying and the great stories would start flying and then you'd have a blast from 5 to 2 in the morning. I'd think, "Why wasn't that the lecture? If that had been the lecture it would have been awesome."
Patrick: The greatest sin is to bore and the best teachers are those that spark an interest to learn more because you can't really learn anything just sitting there. If you turn that spark on in someone, that's the greatest accomplishment and that's what you've done for so many of us.
Howard: We should just have a mutual admiration club since we both admire each other so much.
Patrick: I feel like we're on the Merv Griffin Show. "You're so great I'm so great. Everything's so great."
Howard: So before we get into this, all your expertise, I just wanted to say there are 5,000 kids just graduated dental school last week. I went to the AT Still graduation over here in Mesa and all these young kids are walking out. You and I, we've basically have been in this profession coming up on 3 decades. You got out in '90. You've been out 25 years, I've been out 28 years. First of all, I want to ask you from you practice management expertise, what is the state of the American dental industry? Especially how it was when you got out of school to now, and what's your diagnosis of it today and where do you think it'll be when all the graduates are in their 50's like you and me?
Patrick: Well, it seems like just yesterday that you and I were the young graduates, but I still think it's a great choice. Frankly, I think the whole country's in trouble, but I think dentistry may still be the best choice, and I think there's still a lot of opportunity out there. What I would tell a young graduate is that any experience is good experience, whether they learn what to do or what not to do, and get as much experience as you can. You might have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find the right mentor. But find the right mentor and it's still out there.
Howard: Yes, and experience comes in different ... The most common email I see to me or on the message board is, "I got out of dental school. I'm going back to my small town in [Patuka 00:05:24], Kansas and there's 2 associate positions. One will pay me 25% of production and the other one will pay me 30% of production but I have to pay half the lab bill. Which one should I take?" I'm like, "Dude, really? Your decisions going to come ..."
Patrick: The one with the patients.
Howard: Will one teach you practice management? Will one teach you how to do endo? Will one teach you how to place an implant? You already are under $250,000 in debt. I'd rather you have a job and make a little less money or a lot less money and just keep learning great things. I think the biggest part of looking for a job as an associate, I would want to got in there and say, "Doctor, How many wives have you had? Doctor, how long has you average staff been here? In America, the average American only holds their job 3 years. I'd want to find a doctor whose average staff has been there at least 6. Do you have recall, do any of your patients come back for a cleaning? If he says I'm on my 5th wife and I'm living with my 1st cousin and the longest staff member has been here 2 years and I have 8,000 charts and as part-time hygienist. I don't care if he paid me $200,00 a year, just run.
Patrick: You are right on, but even financially I just want to point out, that there's nothing more misleading than the statistic of the percentage that an associate is paid. Because in some offices maybe you're paid 50% of production and yet the owner dentist doesn't want to give you any patients, versus you're in some booming practice that gives you everything and they pay you a much smaller percentage. You're going to end up making more money there financially, but I further agree with you that the experience is much more important.
Howard: The other thing is if you are going to be truly patient centered, I mean, your office is paid for for 168 hours in a week and it's only open 40 hours a week because it's doctor-centered, and Americans are used to 24 hour Walgreen's and hospital emergency rooms don't close down on Christmas or Hanukkah. Airplanes, you can catch a red eye flight from Phoenix to Chicago at midnight and when your office closes at 5:00, so there's a lot of pressures towards group practice.
I just can't tell you how many people I've seen come out of school and they're in a group practice making 200, 225 and it's like 3 doctors sharing this practice, and they're covering hours 6 days a week. But they have to own their own part, they have to own their own part, just like you let out the dog in the front yard and he has to pee on all 4 corners. Then they go out to this small little dentist-focused practice and they make $125,000 a year, and they're stressed out the rest of their life, and they walked away from a $250,000 job with complete liquidity and no responsibility and when you go on vacation you got 2 other guys covering your emergencies.
I really feel the most important thing about these graduates is they're going to make some of the biggest decisions in their life. Are you going to marry a stay-at-home mom that spends 10,000 a month or are you going to marry one of them women dentists in the class that you graduated with that'll make 10,000 a month. That's a game changer of $5 million over your career. Rule number 1, marry one of the girls in your class. Do I have to go down there and arrange the marriage for you? Number 2, gosh, these guys will ...
Patrick: It was the best thing I ever did.
Howard: You married a girl in your class?
Patrick: Well, not in my class but she's also a dentist, and no wife of mine can stay home. I mean, we can't both be like that, watching daytime TV all day, that's not going to work. One of us has to work. I'm just kidding. But I did marry a dentist and you're right. That's a great decision.
Howard: Your brother's a dentist. Was your dad a dentist too?
Patrick: He was.
Howard: That's what we see around the world. There's 7 billion people and probably 6 billion out of 7 billion work in the family business. If you're born to an African goat herder, you do goats, so there's a lot of family tradition in occupation. How's that work for your family?
Patrick: With you, too, I just want to point out, although your dad wasn't a dentist, he was a business owner, and you grew up knowing the entrepreneur's life, knowing hard work, knowing customer service, and applied all those lessons, of course, to dentistry.
Howard: Yeah.
Patrick: I've noticed that in staff too, like Lorraine, my all-time superstar. She grew up in the restaurant industry.
Howard: Is she still with you?
Patrick: Yeah.
Howard: What does she do now?
Patrick: She's working mostly with real world endo, but we also work together. She's helping them run their seminars mostly.
Howard: Fantastic.
Patrick: Again, I think it was that background growing up in her family's restaurant industry, restaurant business just like you, that was the ultimate training for dentistry.
Howard: Absolutely and you see it all the time, when the mom stayed home and made cookies and the dad worked on the line at GM, the dentist got out of school and they were clueless. But if their dad was a dairy farmer or a corn farmer or owned a restaurant, or anything that had free enterprise, they came out crushing it. I always thought the dentists who grew up in dentistry they had 2 legs up because, just like in dental school. I can't believe my undergraduate degree wasn't to become a hygienist.
Because the people, the dozen in our class that got a hygiene degree first, they already learned half of dental school and then during dental school on Saturdays they could work for $40 an hour 8 to 5, and I was in there at Walgreen's for $3.25 not learning anything about dentistry. I see that in med school too. I was talking to my doctor today, and first she became a CPA, then she became a CNA, then an LPN, then a RN, then a phlebotomist, and then a PA, and then a physician. She graduated with no debt.
Patrick: I used to tell girls that I was a CPA back when I was a car parking attendant. I was single. This stuff works. Just a little tip for the single listeners out there.
Howard: What made you get into office magic 25 years ago? What got you interested in that flair?
Patrick: I was already interested in practice management, perhaps as I mentioned, from being so entertained by you, but just blind luck. Our family practice accidentally hired Lorraine, not as an office manager but as a just entry level position. She had no dental experience. She came in and wanted to do everything differently, stuff that I thought was crazy. She wanted to start talking about money on the phone before we ever met the patient and she was so enthusiastic, she seemed so confident we didn't want to tell her no, even though we thought a lot of it was crazy. Then I was observing her. I would see all the patients not just throwing money at her, but hugging her, saying how nice she was.
We were sending out more than 500 bills a month back then, and just seeing all the changes that she made and how all the patients loved her, even though she was doing stuff that seemed counter-intuitive or that we thought the patients wouldn't like. That got me interested in figuring out what exactly she was doing and we started recording the phone calls and writing down the things she was saying, trying to train everyone else on the team. That turned into books and tapes and now here with you.
Howard: Going back over, if we were looking at hall of fame changers in dentistry, you were really the one ... You were the first one that I ever heard of beating the doorways of going to a state [inaudible 00:13:01] practice and I have to tell you 25 years ago back in the day, in the late '80s, early '90s, that just sounded crazy. What you explained to the entire industry is that ... Right now the ADA says that the average overhead, and they have great statistics by the way, statistics come down to most important things, how do you choose your sample? What is your sample size? If I randomly pull your name do I throw the name back in the hat? They have outstanding statistics, and they're saying 64% overhead is the average overhead for general dentists in the United States.
That's two-thirds and what dentists don't understand is that if you only collect 95%, you think in college, in chemistry and organic and physics and 95% is an A. But if you don't collect 5% and you have two-thirds overhead, that means 10% of your overhead is just from the free dentistry you did on people who had no intention at day one of ever paying you. Then the dentist comes back to you and says, "I've got high overhead." It's like, "Dude." Like you said, when Lorraine walked in your office, you were sending out 500 statements a month. You gave them the hamburger, they ate it, they went home and chewed it up and swallowed it and digested it and then we're paying someone about 5, 6, $7 a statement, mailing them through the snail mail begging them to pay their bills and you reversed that and you led the charge in that.
Patrick: The patients were happier and the stress reduced. It was just better for everybody. Of course, I don't want to pretend that ... You're too kind. I don't want to pretend that I did that alone. I stood on the shoulders of people like Gary Takacs. I remember one of my ... Way back when he had a column in Dental Economics he said, "Payment success begins with the belief that you deserve to be paid for your efforts." That was big for me. If you can't collect it, don't produce it.
Howard: Wow, that was Gary Takacs wrote a column like that back in the day?
Patrick: That was the first time I read it and that had a big effect on me.
Howard: If you can find it on Google send it to me, because he lives up the street from me, I'll go pin it to his front door.
Patrick: This was pre-Google but it's probably there somewhere.
Howard: You also said when you saw what Lorraine was doing it was counter-intuitive, and most all success is. You're born a social animal that is only going to survive with the group, so you're born to be passive or low key, and you want to play well with others and it's just very counter-intuitive to be offensive or to say, "Well, I want my money now." Because you're hard-wired to say, "Whatever you want to do, whatever you want to do. I'm a co-monkey, cat, dog, ape, I just want to please you."
Patrick: I'm the worst, Howard. I will get into taxicabs, and I'll say, "Wherever you're going. I don't want to take you out of your way." I just don't want to deal with the whole confrontation. We've all got to be more assertive.
Howard: Yeah, and so a lot of success is counter-intuitive. Another thing is that people who own their business or become doctors, physicians or lawyers, usually are hard-wired to be the 400-pound gorilla. The 400-pound gorilla that got you to become a doctor, dentist, lawyer, business owner, that's not the delegating type. That's the controlling type. You want to control everyone around you, and all these successful people delegate everything.
Patrick: You made a great point before about how associates can do very well, and I think most everyone is given the advice that they need to be their own boss. A lot of us have parents who convinced all of us that everyone is better off being their own boss. My parents gave me great advice, and it was probably good advice for me, but I think that not everyone is cut out to be their own boss, and there are ... As you pointed out, you can do very, very well as an associate and every today, perhaps you have to work in more than one office, but there's still extraordinary opportunity out there.
Howard: Well, look at Clear Choice. I mean, not Clear Choice. What's the big implant company where they're doing 4 on the floor?
Patrick: Brican, no, no. I have it in my head.
Howard: Implant Centers of America?
Patrick: I know who you mean. I just attended a seminar and I can't place it right now.
Howard: Yeah, so there's several chains that will come in and do a million dollars ... But basically, [inaudible 00:17:22] ophthalmologists. There's 5,000 ophthalmologists, but 400 of them do 99% of all the Lasik operations. Only 400 are going to say, "Hey, I'm going to buy a million dollar laser and get on TV and radio and billboards and ramp up. Basically 95% of ophthalmologists say, "I can't compete with that." These implant companies are doing that, and the reason they can do it is because they will find implantologists 50 miles up the street in a small town that needs more work and so they're getting periodontists and oral surgeons from surrounding small towns to come into the big downtown L.A., Phoenix, Denver, and slug out a bunch of implants.
But yeah, I think ... Well, I'll go back to you said not everyone's cut out to be owner. If I write another book, and I want to talk about your book, I wrote my book Uncomplicate Business, how you only manage 3 things: people, time and money. You make something, sell something, watch the numbers. I want to write a book called The Giggle Factor, because when you've traveled around the world like I have ... I'm going to Australia again next month and it'll be like the 5th time I've been down there, but when you've been to 50 countries, it seems like the richest countries, the people are all stressed out of their mind. The United States, Germany, Korea, Japan Singapore. They all got TMJ and migraines and lower back and irritable bowel and angina, and they're supposed to be the happy ones because they make all this money.
Then when you to go Brazil and Shenzhen and the backstreets of Kathmandu, and everybody's just giggling, and they're poor. I look at America, it's like all the kids, they're just all giggling, they go to the park, they still play make-believe, they're swinging in high school. But all of a sudden society says, "Oh, no, no, no. You got to get a career and get married and have a bunch of kids." Then they're just freaked out for 40 years and then you don't see them smile or laugh again until the retirement, the kids are gone, they get a divorce, they're single and back home and free.
They're like, "Oh my God. What the hell was that?" That's [inaudible 00:19:21]. I mean some of these people just drive to work without a care in the world because they've got a Lorraine running the whole show, they got a group practice, they get to work 5 minutes before their first patient. They just crush it all day long and they're making 200, 2 and a quarter, 240, with no stress and then they're like, "Oh, this can't be good because it's no stress and I'm having fun and I'm giggling, and I'm laughing. Let's see if we can ruin that."
Patrick: I couldn't agree more. If you truly ... If your dream is to own a practice, by all means you should, even if you end up making less as a result. You should follow your dream, but I think some people follow that thinking it's their dream, when it wasn't necessarily. They shouldn't feel obligated to do that.
Howard: I also want to say that going into successful offices, every consultant will tell ... I know all of them. I've probably had dinner with every consultant and their spouse in the last 25 years several times. They'll all tell you that when they walk into a dental office, they can smell in one second if they're crushing it or not. It's because the first person they run into is Lorraine. It's high energy. It's fun. People are throwing money at her, people are hugging her. The whole atmosphere is just karma, energy, positive. Then the other 9 dentists across the street, you walked in there and it's like some weird library. You know what I mean?
Patrick: Happiness is a moral obligation because it affects others. It affects the people around you.
Howard: Why is it that whenever anybody talks about the US Constitution, which was one of the greatest pieces of technology ever invented, 1776, which is ironic it came out the same year as the first economic treaties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. What's even weirder is that Adam Smith and the Declaration of Independence were both written by a 32-year old Scot, so economics and America has a lot to do with 2 32-year old Scots, but it's amazing how everybody always talks about freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, right to bear arms. I read that Constitution and what I'm seeing is pursuit of happiness. Be happy. You don't have the right to live across the street from me and make me unhappy. If I'm not bothering you and you're not bothering me, let's be happy. Pursuit of happiness is something that's often overlooked in dentistry, you know?
Patrick: Absolutely. I don't know what to add other than I think you're referring to the Declaration of Independence.
Howard: Right. Right.
Patrick: An equally important document.
Howard: Right. I'm sorry. I got that wrong. Hey, what made you write a book? Is this a memoir? What made you sit down and write your latest book?
Patrick: Oddly, I think the 2 of us simultaneously had the same inspiration, which was to go through, from what I understand, your book isn't out yet, but from what I understand ...
Howard: No, my book's out. My book's out. I'm just pre-selling it. I'm not going to print them until I have the orders in because I don't know how many I should print, and there's huge savings on print.
Patrick: Well, [inaudible 00:22:25] eBook because I don't want to pay for the printing at all.
Howard: Yeah.
Patrick: I did you one better.
Howard: Right, and that's the future. Actually, according to Amazon, the future is audio books, so what I need to do, is I'm going to go in the session and read that book. Are you doing yours as an audio book?
Patrick: I'm going to do that too, and I love audio. That's what I do myself. I listen through my iPhone all day.
Howard: So do I.
Patrick: Yes. It's so much easier than reading. I think possibly because we're dentists, we're so dependent on our eyes all day, the last thing I want to do when I get home is to read instead of listen. It's so much easier.
Howard: Absolutely.
Patrick: From what I read about your book, you went through all your stuff and stripped out the dental and made it applicable to everyone. That's exactly what I did. It's the best of Office Magic. I just went through everything and made it non-dental specific. Of course, since my background is dentistry, it's all particularly applicable to dentistry, but I tried to make it for everybody, even your kids, just good advice for everyone.
Howard: Well, tell us some of the highlights. You were talking about 3 magic words for instant motivation.
Patrick: This is going to sound fawning or that I'm pandering, but again, I learned this from you. When you were talking about dentists being burned out, not wanting to go to the dental office, and yet they won't fork over for some particular instrument or technology that they might enjoy. You are the living embodiment of you go to work to play instead of to work. That's what we all have to do. In fact, I wanted to ask you because I know that you lost I think 50 pounds. Is that right?
Howard: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Patrick: I don't know the specifics of how you did that, but I assume that instead of telling yourself that you have to exercise, you told yourself that you get to exercise and you found something that made it fun or turned it into a game, like you do with dentistry. You have a real gift for that and it rubbed off on me
Howard: Then what are the 3 magic words?
Patrick: The 3 magic words are "I get to," instead of "I have to." If you think about someone in a wheelchair, if you were to tell them that you have to exercise, that person might remind you that you get to exercise. You get to go jogging or play basketball or whatever it is that you might enjoy. Again, that's why the audio books and podcasts are so much more enjoyable for me than reading because I can do it at the same time as I'm doing those other things.
Howard: Well, you know, I think that pathology on the extreme really helps explain the healthy human. I mean, a palm tree doesn't laugh or cry or run. It's not hard-wired. When you see a human in summer so depressed they can't get out of bed, that means everyone can get a little sad. When you see 30,000 Americans kill themselves, you know that everybody has thoughts like, "Oh my God, if that happened to me, I'd kill myself." Humans need a lot of motivation and they need a lot of inspiration.
Life is challenging. The hardest thing about life can be getting through it, and Southwest Airlines, hire on attitude, train for skills. We just want someone that has a good attitude. We can teach them. We can serve drinks and pull down the fire chute and administer oxygen. We can teach them how to fly a plane. What we can't teach you, though, is an attitude, and that's got to be an inside job. So many people blame all their problems on their mom, their dad, their grandpa. My God, it's crazy.
Patrick: It's a struggle for everyone, and I just want to call you out one more time. I'll never forget, many years ago, a dentist contacted you who was suicidal and what you did was rather than keeping it secret, you let everybody know about it and brought it out for discussion. Again, everyone struggles. Not everyone's happy all the time. Our job is to try to be.
Howard: Last year in Phoenix, we had 3, and it's usually 2 or 3 a year, and I had one back in the day, I think it was ... Oh my God, I'm thinking '95, and he lived an hour on the other side of the town and it was like 1:00 in the morning and he called me and he wanted me to ... He was telling me, he wanted to leave a message for his daughter. I said, "Well, you know what? I make audio cassettes. Why don't I just come over and record it?" He goes, "You'd do that for me?" Oh my God. I went over there, gun's on the table. Crazy. I mean, it's just crazy. Getting through life's tough, and I loved him like a brother, but yeah. So, leadership in one lesson. How are you going to do leadership in one lesson?
Patrick: Well, I supply a clip in my seminars from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. There's a great scene in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest where McMurphy, Jack Nicholson, is told by Nurse Ratched, the big nurse, that no he's not allowed to watch the World Series. What he does out of frustration, he sits down, he pretends that the World Series is on, in front of the blank television that's turned off, and he just starts announcing it. He announces it with so much enthusiasm, he's so convincing, it sounds like such a real exciting game, that all the other inmates, all the other patients in the mental hospital, crowd around and they're hanging on his every word, because he just does it with such enthusiasm.
That's leadership in one lesson, that if you know where you're going other people will follow. You can actually observe this same behavior in sled dogs. If the lead dog shows any sense of being lost, the other dogs will stop following him. They won't follow him anywhere. But if you're committed to something, if you're unconditionally committed, and this gets back to the young dentists. We talk about ... Let's say their real goal is to have their own successful practice. How badly do they want that? The real question is what are you willing to sacrifice to get what you say you want? Are they, for example, willing to move to where there might be an incredible opportunity? We all want certain things, but the real question is what are we willing to sacrifice to make that happen? That's what will tell us how badly we want it.
Another dental application, Larry Winget says, "People don't care that they believe what you're saying. They care much more that you believe what you're saying." In other words, if we're trying to educate a patient or persuade them to do something, if we don't believe it ourselves, whether it's about payment or dentistry or anything, if we don't believe it ourselves, the patient will pick up on that, but if we believe this is a great payment option, or we think this is the best dentistry, the patient can detect that, too. They care much more that you believe what you're saying than they do that they believe what you're saying.
Howard: That is so true. You just took me back to, in 1994, I kept writing these great articles and sending them to all these magazines, but unlike Gary Takacs, no one was publishing mine, and so finally I'd be at these conventions and I finally got to meet the people that were denying my articles. I realized, "Oh my God. They're not even dentists. They're bosses to dentists." These companies are owned by ...
Patrick: That's how Dentaltown started? I didn't know that.
Howard: Yeah. These corporations, they'll have like 80 magazines and one's like dentists and then firemen and hygienists and nurse. It was just a vertical, and I thought, "Oh my God, the only time these people see the dentist is when they get their teeth cleaned." I thought, "Well, I'll set up my own," and everybody told me in '94, they go, "Well, you can't do that because these are multi-million dollar companies that own hundreds of magazines and they will crush you." I said, "Yeah, but I'll do it 12 hours a day, 7 days a week. I don't have to make a penny on it. If I do this 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for 30 years and don't plan on making a penny, how are you going to compete with that?" That thing, I had lost $1 million before it stopped losing. That's how committed I was, because I just loved it. I just thought what I was doing was the most fun thing I'd ever done.
Patrick: Well, I just learned a great story. I didn't know that.
Howard: Yeah. I thought finding these great, real people like you in the trenches, real people like you, like Lorraine. Real people and not some big fancy practice in Key Biscayne or Beverly Hills, working on movie stars. I'm talking about real world stuff in real world rural and middle America. It was just so cool and it was so fun and [crosstalk 00:30:57].
Patrick: And you have all of doing it for you for free.
Howard: Yeah. Yeah, and my guys, my heroes back then, when's the last time you hear the name Earl Estep? Are you old enough to remember that guy?
Patrick: My parents were huge followers of his.
Howard: Oh, yeah, and he was this Country Gold guy and just down old hillbilly stuff. That's how people work in Texas. You know what I mean? It was just, it was country gold. I had so much fun, and I never cared about any of the competition, and now here it is ... That started in 1994. Now it's 2015 and all the third parties rank us as the number one dental magazine in America.
Patrick: That's amazing. My dad loved Earl Estep. We still have the newsletters somewhere. I'm not sure where, but they're somewhere.
Howard: Oh my God. You know, someone needs to find all of those and digitize them.
Patrick: Get them on [crosstalk 00:31:45]
Howard: Yeah, I'm going to do that as a project. You say 3 magic words give you instant charisma.
Patrick: If you can learn to become genuinely fascinated by the lives of other people, you will be a hugely successful dentist, or hugely successful at anything you do. Politicians are masters at convincing us that they're genuinely interested in us. Now, in many cases there, they may not be. But if they can make you feel that way, they're going to be very successful. The 3 magic words are "Tell me more." Anyone can remember this or utilize this in their own job. "Oh, you're a foreman. Tell me more about your job. What's the most challenging thing about your job? What's the most frustrating thing about your job?" Because being a great conversationalist is not about being interesting or about reading books. It's about being interested and asking questions.
Howard: Amazing points. Very good points.
Patrick: There's a big difference between, "Do you want to see my vacation slides?" versus "May I see your vacation slides?"
Howard: There's a interesting piece of research I read on doctors and physicians and dentists, where a huge complaint is, "Well, the doctor didn't listen to me." They would talk to the doctors and the doctor's like, "I'm listening. Hell, I'm taking notes. Look, I wrote down everything you said I didn't listen to." What they found out is that if I ask you a question, and I'm a doctor and I write it down and I'm satisfied, so then they go to the next question, that they don't think you're listening to them. You have to throw something back. Like you say, "Well, how long have you had this pain?" "Well, it's been there for about 2 months." "Okay, so 2 months. Wow, that's a long time." Then go to your next question, but if you don't throw something back, they're going to walk out of the room and swore you did not listen.
Patrick: Along the same lines, eye contact is very important, and not all of us ... We might think we're making eye contact with the patient, but so often either the operatoria is arranged in a certain way or we're looking up at the computer monitor, our back is to the patient. Something as simple as making sure that you have eye contact, or if you work in the front desk, to stand if the patient's standing, to sit if the patient is seated, just again, to maintain that eye contact. Same kind of thing in terms of establishing rapport, maintaining rapport.
Howard: Very good, and 3 magic words persuade imperceptibility. That's going to be a tongue twister.
Patrick: Imperceptibly, yes.
Howard: Imperceptibly.
Patrick: That Hooked on Phonics really paid off for me.
Howard: I don't have my readers on. I should just ... Now that I'm 52, I should just leave my readers on. Oh, but before you answer that, I just want to tell you one story on that sharing. The thing I like the most about, when I got into my exercise program, I got excited about the Iron Man Challenge. What was interesting is for 25 years in [inaudible 00:34:51], I have these great dentist buddies, and our activity was to go to sports bars and watch sports and drink beers and eat cheeseburgers and french fries, and had a blast and loved it, and that was great. Now, I have a new set ... Not new, but additional dentist friends, in the same area, Brad Sandvik right up the street, Louis Core, and now we get together and we'll go on a 50, 100 mile bike ride, swim a mile or 2 or whatever, and it's the same amount of giggling, it's the same amount of fun.
It's just whatever, but the thing I like the most about Iron Man is that it took me about a year or 2 to realize that when you're out there, you're playing, and there's so much to talk about with bike, swim, run, transitions, Iron Man, diet, nutrition, all that stuff. A lot of times it was the only time in my life where somebody would say to you, "Well, what does that person do for a living?" You're like, "Wow. That's my friend for a year and I don't even know," because so many times you walk into a party, you don't know what to say, so it's just like, "Well, what do you do?" "Well, I'm a dentist." "What do you do?" "I'm and endodontist." Then it goes to your whole, there's stratification of income or, "Well, if I'm a dentist and you're an electrician, or you're a plumber." I love Iron Man that it's so fun and everybody's playing, no one even cares what you do from 9 to 5, and it just ...
That's really an escape. In fact, that's the only way I judge a movie. The only way I judge a movie good or bad is when all of a sudden the credits start rolling and you're just like, "Wow." You look at the clock and you go, "Holey moley, 120 minutes just went by and I was in a trance." There's just a few people that can do that to you. A lot of other people you're looking at your clock and you're looking at your time or you're like, "Well, hopefully this is the last scene," then it's another scene and it just seems going forever. But then there's those movies where it just mind trances you for 120 minutes. Those are amazing. But 3 magic words ... Here, I'll put on my readers so I can read it ... To persuade imperceptibly?
Patrick: Well, I show another video clip in my seminars from Candid Camera. Candid Camera, of course, was the first reality show. Young people today probably think that they invented reality TV, but in fact, reality television began with our parents' generation with Candid Camera. My favorite episode, they had an elevator, and they would film real regular people getting in and off the real elevator, but they would have fake people, people working for the show, in the elevator. The people working for the show would face the wrong way in the elevator. They would be backwards, for example.
They would observe the behavior of the real people getting in and out of the elevator when they'd get into the elevator and they'd see people facing backwards. What did the real people do? They faced backwards because everyone else is. People like to do what other people do. It's human nature, so to persuade people imperceptibly, you can just say something like, "Most people choose." People want to do what other people do. "Mrs. Smith, most people take advantage of our 5% courtesy. If it's comfortable for them, you might want to do that." Or, "Mrs. Smith, most people choose the tooth-colored restoration. That's our most popular one." If it's not already your most popular one, it will be as soon as you start saying that.
Howard: Very true. My dad taught me that royally. All my friends had a curfew, and it was maybe 10:00 when you're a freshman or sophomore, then it went up to like 10:30, and then seniors could stay out until midnight. Not my old man. He didn't care about the clock. He thought that was totally ... What does a clock have to do with anything? He said, "Who are you hanging out with?" I'd say, "Alan [Funk 00:38:41]." He goes, "You'll be home by 9:00." I'm like, "What?" Then if I'd say John [Leese 00:38:45], who, we ended up going from 7th grade all the way into dental school. We graduated together in '87 in UMKC, he said, "Oh, if you're with John Leese, why would you have to come home? Hell, stay with him for a week. That guy's good. Maybe he'll rub off on you."
My dad's whole control deal was eagles fly with eagles, turkeys fly with turkeys, and everyone else had this arbitrary time, like, "Okay, well you need to be home at 11." Well, hell, if you're with John Leese at 11:00, we might be figuring out how his dad raced pigeons. We might be taking pigeon manure and building tomato pens. John used to grow these tomato plants that would grow like a tree. They would grow 3 or 4 feet and the tomatoes would all be the size of softballs because we'd dig 3-foot holes and the bottom 1-foot was just pure pigeon manure from his dad's racing pigeons. But dad was right. His dad used to brew his own beer, so I learned how to make my own beer, so yeah.
Patrick: My head is spinning imagining you in high school or even younger, had I grown up with you, what that would have been like.
Howard: I'll take that around, the 3 magic words, people like to do what other people do. I'll take the negative to that, is when a staff cancerous attitude gets out of control, they can start ... That staff member turns around and says, "I'm going to be blatantly insubordination, and I'm going to come into work and just have a drama day," and all this stuff. Then one by one the other staff just start turning around in the elevator and start being bad. It's the CEO's job to be able to spot, identify that, and get that person extracted.
Patrick: Yeah, very much so. We talk a lot about getting the right people on the bus. There's a lot of focus on how do we find the right people to hire. But you're right. We need to spend more attention to removing some weeds from the garden. That's what Jack Welch called it.
Howard: That's why it's crazy when you have all these people backseat driving sports trades, because they'll say, "Why are you trading these 2 people for that guy? Are you just crazy?" What they don't know is behind the scenes, what is that attitude with their fellow teammates and coaches and captains. They might not care that you get a home-run every damn game, you're just toxic and you're ruining the whole franchise.
Patrick: Right. You see that often in sports.
Howard: Yeah. I bet the most ... I bet they have a lot of drama because they're all kids, what 18 to 25? They're all making millions and they're all good looking. They're all on top of the world. Can you imagine managing that?
Patrick: Yeah, but Michael Jordan was a superstar who made everyone around him better. But there are also talented people that make others worse with their attitudes. I don't want to mention any names but Allen Iverson comes to mind.
Howard: Right, right, and how do you think that's going to play over with the Patriots? Because that's in your backyard, Deflation Gate? Do you think that will have a stinging effect on fans or the brand? Will the Patriots have a different brand, because it sounds like they deflated some of their balls?
Patrick: I have mixed feelings on that. I think probably Tom Brady should have been more forthright, but on the other hand it seems like a kind of silly infraction, that I'm not clear on how that would even have benefited them. I don't know. What do you think about that?
Howard: Well, I think that Clinton ... I think Bill Clinton, he had to go through the pain of the dumbest, oldest lesson on earth, and it's don't make anything you did wrong worse by following it up with a lie because the planet, probably 6 billion out of 7 billion people believe in an afterlife, a God, or something, and they all hate the sins, but they all forgive the sinner. If they said to Bill Clinton, if they would have walked up to him and said, "Hey, did you have an affair with that girl, Monica Lewinsky?" If he just said, "First of all, it's none of your damn business and number 2, why don't you live with Hillary?" You know? "Our family dog jumped in her lap and froze to death. Get off my case. Leave it alone." People would have probably just walked away. But he lied. "I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." That was what done him in. It was the lie.
Patrick: You're right, and I'll tell you the truth, I still resent him for it, because I just want to be able to watch the news without having to explain to my wife what oral sex is.
Howard: That was a good one. But yeah, I mean the thing is with ...
Patrick: Tom Brady absolutely should have been honest and that will be the sin here, but at the same time, I think football strikes me as over-regulated, and I'm just using that as a microcosm for our society in general, that every last little thing ... I think we could do with less regulation, but absolutely he should have been honest and forthright. He probably wasn't, and it's a shame because I'm not a huge sports fan. I've gotten more into politics and away from sports, but what I observed from Tom Brady at the time is he's really a gifted communicator in many ways, and full of charisma, and this probably would have been a great opportunity for him.
Howard: I've seen it with dentists forever. About 18% of Americans are considered an alcoholic in their lifetime, some time or another, and most of that ... 80% of that's going to be alcohol, and 20% everything else, so it's not particularly strange that dentists are 18%. It is strange that anesthesiologists are 38%, so that does show the Libertarians that if you carry around a bag of narcotics all day long like Fentanyl and all these things, you double your addiction rate, and I just see it all the time where the Feds will walk into some dentist office in my backyard and he's been writing 'scripts for ... He's been stealing them, and they'll say, "Are you doing this?" They deny it, so then the Feds leave and they go to the board and they build this big case and the guy just gets the hammer thrown at him.
About half the dentists say, "I'm so sorry. I can't stop." They just put their arm around him and hug him and say, "That's okay, dude. The first time you took it, that was dumb, but now you're addicted and you need to get some help." It's all love and love and love, and the boards are so sweet to the people that say, "Yeah, I messed up. I got addicted to these Vicodin and I can't get off. Then the ones who lie, deny, play the Clinton deal, they just throw them through the ringer. The other thing with humans, our attention span is so short. If you totally screwed up, every PR firm in the world says, "Get it all out instantly, because then the clock starts ticking and then the next time North Korea launches a missile or Putin invades Chechnya or something grabs the news, they're going to forget all about you and your piddly little problem."
Patrick: You're living proof, just like we talked about earlier, you were blessed with that quality of wanting to be honest and direct, and it led to some short-term troubles with the speaking dates and now you're ... I'm assuming you are the single most successful dental entrepreneur there is. But if there is one that's more-so, I can't think of him right now. Maybe there is.
Howard: Well, you are too kind.
Patrick: You certainly show that honesty pays off in the long run.
Howard: Yeah, and so 6 magic words get you referrals without asking.
Patrick: Well, it goes back again to the non-confrontational desire that we have, the fear we have of confrontation. There's a great way to ... We've all heard, we all know that the best way to build your practice is by referrals, to ask good patients to refer their friends and family. A lot of us have trouble asking for what we want, which can be the key to success in anything that we do. I just found a phrase that I thought will be extraordinarily effective for those of us that don't like to ask or have that confrontation, which is if a patient compliments you, or if a patient compliments the practice, just say something like, "Mrs. Smith, do me a favor, don't keep us a secret. Mrs. Smith, don't keep us a secret." If you just say, "Don't keep us a secret," or something along those lines, you don't have to ask for anything. You'll send the message that you'd love it if the word were spread, that you are welcoming of new patients.
Howard: When you talk to other consultants, and they've all got their short list of their top 3, top 10, whatever, whatever. Everybody's got these things, like say you have massive staff turnover. There's always one girl in there that's been there forever the doctor thinks is the best person in the world and he can't live without. She's completely blindsided him, which is why all the other 10 positions are miserable because she's Jekyll and Hyde, and you just have all these low-hanging fruit red flags and every consultant has told me that in every office they've ever been into, the first day they observe, they never, ever have seen anyone ever ask a patient for a referral, on the first day. They've never observed this.
The thing I want to talk about is, to add to that, excellent advice you just said, is that women make about 90% of all the referrals to healthcare and education. Women have maternal instincts, women say 7,500 words a day and men say 2,000. It's the women making the doctor's appointments, the women telling their friends about it, women is a completely different beast, and women will never like you if they don't trust you. If they don't trust you they can't like you, and if they don't like you they can't love you and your office and your staff, and all that stuff. When you advertise and you get in 100 strange women in your office that first appointment. If you're processing them fast or whatever, you get almost no committed treatment out of it.
But if her friend refers her, you asked her for a referral, it shows humility. It's like, "Hey, you know, I'm done fixing you up, and if you go get your teeth cleaned every 6 months the rest of your life with Sarah or Brady, I may never work on you again. Jan's been with me 28 years. She doesn't have cavities. Do you know anybody that we could fix up or do you have any friends or whatever?" If they say, "Yeah," then that's when you ... That's just the opening. Then you go to extreme referral. "Really? Like who?" "My friend Sarah." "Well, if she's your friend, she's in your cellphone, right?" "Yeah." "Is she on iPhone? Can you FaceTime her or can you only text her or call her?" "Oh, no, she's on iPhone." "Will you FaceTime her and introduce her to me?"
The dentists that are extreme can get them committed while they're in the chair, you know what I mean? It shows humility. I want it, but women, it's all about trust. Once you lie to them they don't trust you, and once they don't trust you they don't like you, they don't love you, and the last thing you want is a bunch of women coming into your office from a billboard up the street and walking in and saying, "Who is this guy and what is this place? What are they trying to sell me?" That's another reason I'm huge on having people check in on Facebook, because the average woman in America has 300 friends on Facebook and half of Americans don't have a dentist, so they just say, "Wow. Sheila just checked in at Patrick Wahl's dental office."
Patrick: It's the social proof. People like to do what other people do.
Howard: I think Facebook could crush the search engine industry, I really do. Google's all about speed and mass numbers. I don't think that's how humans work. You can be in the middle of Kansas and Google a Mexican restaurant and it'll show you that you're 3.2 miles from a Mexican restaurant and all this kind of stuff. That might work for brands like McDonald's or things like that, but I think what could be extra huge on Facebook, if you did a search for dentists and it said, "Oh, you have 300 friends and 19 of them have checked in at Dr. Wahl's office. Here's his deal, and 6 of your friends have checked in at Dr. Farran's office and here's his deal." Then they're like, "Oh my God. 19 of my 300 friends go to this dentist. Hell, that's where I'm going."
If there's any type of needing trust, a social connection ... Look at women, the economists prove that when women go get their car fixed or call an air conditioner repairman, they're more likely to be told they need a repair they don't need. I need an air conditioner repair service. I search on Facebook and I find out, "Oh my sister's brother is an insurance guy." Now she's texting her friend Megan, "Megan, can you have your brother come by?" She instantly trusts her friend Megan's brother, and now Megan's brother's coming over and he doesn't want to piss off his sister's best friend, so yeah Google could totally crush any type of search that required trust. I mean Facebook.
Patrick: Facebook, yeah. Well, the best part about Facebook for me has been ... I used to be embarrassed by the stuff that would happen to me and how I was so awkward. Now the first thing I think of is I can post this, turn it into an awkward moment, and that humanizes you.
Howard: Absolutely. Absolutely, and it's the convenience ...
Patrick: It helps people connect.
Howard: One of my favorite hobbies is stand-up, and I'm regular around the Phoenix, Strathdale, Tempe, I just love that. I just love it. When you go into a dental seminar they all know who you are, but when you go onto a stage in Scottsdale, not one person there knows who you are, so it's just extra, extra fun, and every comedian's trick is the same thing. If I go onto the stage, I'm a man and I start saying jokes about women. Oh my God. They just want to hurt you.
I'm Irish, so I go out there and start telling jokes about Mexican and Vietnamese. They want to hurt you. The number 1 trick is just go out there and beat the shit out of yourself and everyone of your negatives is now your positives and you just look in the mirror. What are your props? Okay, I'm short, fat, bald, I'm 50, I'm a grandpa. Just go through everything that went wrong in your life and there's all your material, and people love to laugh at you. They don't really like to laugh at themselves. They're not paying money for you to make fun of them.
Patrick: Ronald Reagan was so good at that, that self-deprecating humor.
Howard: Yeah, self-deprecating humor and the thing that I think that, the biggest take-aways from the 3 greatest communicators I've ever seen in my life, that everyone else abuses is Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Oprah Winfrey. What they do is when you ask them a question, they first answer it. If it's a yes or no, they'll give you yes or no. If it's up or down, left, right, whatever, they first answer the question. Ronald Reagan would go, "Well, yes, and I'll tell you why."
Then Bill Clinton would come out there with his thumb and he'd [inaudible 00:53:44] he'd go, "Yes, and I'll tell you ..." Oprah Winfrey, "Absolutely yes, and let me tell you why." Everyone else, especially doctors and politicians, "Well, will I need a root canal?" They start talking, "Well, you know the tooth is irreversible and it's sensitive to hot and cold and percussion test," and they're just sitting there like, "Do you not know? Are you lying to me?" Like, do you believe global warming is caused by man, and then they just start talking and talking and talking.
Patrick: You're so right.
Howard: It's like, "Dude, answer the fricking question, then explain." Do I need a root canal? "Yes, and I'll tell you why." Then ramble on.
Patrick: Beautiful. Excellent. When Reagan was asked in that debate in '84 when he was running for reelection, he was already the oldest President in history, he was 73, and he was asked that question about the age issue, because there were 2 debates. At the first debate Regan didn't do well. He was stumbling through his answers, so all of a sudden the question was, is Reagan, no matter how well the country is doing, is he simply too old now? It's predictable that he would get asked that question. Then he famously answered, "I will not exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience." In other words, yes I am old. He didn't deny it. He wasn't defensive. Your fee is higher than other dentists. Yes, our fee is high. Let me tell you why. Now people are receptive to hearing your story when you're not defensive, when you're off the defensive.
Howard: I'll give you another thing, because you and I have lived through both those Presidents and by the way, Ronald Reagan was my first great President, not that I believed in all his policies and all that, but when I grew up, Vietnam War, Nixon, Carter telling everybody to turn off their heater and freeze to death. I just felt like I was in a crap country. Civil rights issues were crazy in Wichita, riots and it was just horrible. Ronald Reagan was the first one that just came out and made you just feel proud to be American. It was the first time he ever made you feel proud to be American.
But I want to tell you one take-away on how that leads to dentistry and that is everyone knows ... You were talking about leadership. If a dog thinks he knows where he's going, everyone will follow. Ronald Reagan, it clearly became apparent on some of his policies, like Star Wars or whatever, that we weren't going to build in his 8-year career, we weren't going to put lasers up there and shoot down ... Whenever it became really apparent that he was going the wrong way, the fact that he just nope, wouldn't budge an inch and we're still going and we're full speed ahead.
He wouldn't budge an inch. Actually got more support than satisfying the intellectuals. Clinton was so intellectual. He was a Rhodes scholar, he was so smart, he was so well-read, and you know he was sitting in these all-night meetings realizing that, "You know what? I am wrong and I'm going to adjust course." The next day he would intellectually go out there and adjust course, and probably it was the absolutely right reason to do it, and what did all the 330 million people say? "Oh, there he goes again waffling. He has no idea what he's doing and the guy has, he's just clueless."
I thought to myself, "Oh my God." You see that in dentistry. "Well, how much is the implant?" "Well, the implant's $1,500, but if we had to do a bone grafting then that could be 150." "Well, am I going to have to have bone grafting?" "Well, I don't know. When we got in there, we could find that ..." Blah, blah, blah. The more intellectually correct you are, the patient's looking at you like, "Dude, have you ever even done this before?" Whereas the smart surgeons who place all the implants, they just have one fee. Yeah, the implant, it's $1,500.
Patrick: A flat fee.
Howard: A flat fee, and the dentist is thinking, "Some, I may lose money because I may bone graft, uncover, 3 months later the bone's gone, have to re-graft it, re-suture it, and some of these implants I'm going to take a bath on, and some of them are going to be an absolute cash cow, but I will make money overall on this flat fee and I will sound like Ronald Reagan. I will sound like the lead sled dog, I will build confidence in my thousands of patients in my practice. I'm not going to go out there intellectually like Clinton, trying to get you to explain everything that could go wrong and every time something goes wrong it'll be more unknown money and variables and freak you all out and then you just sit there and say, 'Well, I'm going to get a second opinion.'"
I learned this in car school. I learned this in car school. I was sleeping in on a Saturday and my dad comes in and wakes me up and says, "Hey, Howard. Good news. My buddy owns a car lot and they're having a 2-day training course for a bunch of new care salesmen and I told him, I said, 'Will you just let my boy ... I swear to God he won't say a word. He'll sit in the back. He'll completely shut the blank up. Just let him sit in the back and take ...'" I wanted to ride my bike all day. I think I was in the 7th grade. I was crying and upset. But anyway, the biggest take-away I remember that is a lady would come on the car and she'd see the car of her dreams.
She'd say, "And it's even got a sun-roof." Then some idiot would say, "Well, actually that's not a sun-roof. That's a moon-roof. Did you want a sun-roof or a moon-roof?" Now her excitement is all messed up and now she doesn't remember if her friend has a sun-roof or a moon-roof and now she's thinking, "I'm going to make a bad decision. Maybe I should go back and get my sister or look at the car." It's like, "Dude, she thought it was a ... She was all happy. She almost bought a car, but you had to screw it up with more information."
Patrick: Well, in endo, you don't charge by the canal, you charge by the case, so it's really the same thinking. It might be a very difficult case, it might be an easy one, but you don't charge extra because you found a 4th canal.
Howard: Your last deal, the best advice I ever got, and that's got to be your close. We're at 59 minutes, buddy. What is the best advice you ever got?
Patrick: First try restarting.
Howard: First try restarting.
Patrick: It works almost every time.
Howard: What do you mean by that?
Patrick: Whenever something goes wrong on the computer, what do you do? You restart.
Howard: Reboot.
Patrick: It'll probably be better, but I'll try to make it more dental. There's so many things that we could talk about, but again, success comes from focus. What are you willing to sacrifice to make that happen? To give a dental tip for people, one magic word: today. I think that's why you put it in your name, Today's Dental. We can do that for you today if you like. That can double your revenue right there. At Wahl Family Dentistry we go out of our way, if the patient's there, if they're ready, if we can find a way to make time to do it then, it saves so much time in the long run. The patient's right there. You don't have to reappoint, hope that the patient comes back on time. Whatever you can do today is going to increase your revenue dramatically.
Howard: How do these people get a hold of your new eBook, Magic Words & Life Lessons: What to Say and What to Do At Work, At Home & Everywhere?
Patrick: It's the best of Office Magic and it's only $11 and it's available everywhere eBooks are sold. You can get it on Amazon, iTunes, everywhere else that sells eBooks. You can get it from our website, officemagic.com. It's called Magic Words & Life Lessons.
Howard: You know what? My marketing advice to my buddy, you didn't ask for it, and you're a better marketer than I am, but I think you should go on Dentaltown and start a thread. There's 51 categories and one of them is practice management. I think you should go start a thread and it'd be your first post. You're kind of shy in that regard, and I think you should post ... Or no, you did post it. Did you post it?
Patrick: I have not posted it. I have posted over the years [crosstalk 01:01:31].
Howard: What I was going with, you've never done an online CE. [crosstalk 01:01:33]. No, where I was going, you've never done an online CE course.
Patrick: I did too, and you took it down. It's not there now. I don't know what happened to it.
Howard: Oh, was that because that was one of the first ones in 2000, and it was like 15 years old.
Patrick: No, it was maybe 5 years ago or a little more, but it wasn't brand new. Let's track it down.
Howard: Do you stand by that course?
Patrick: It's a great course.
Howard: Well, then let's get it up today.
Patrick: Let's do that.
Howard: What's the name of that course?
Patrick: I don't remember the name, but it was Patrick Wahl with Lorraine Hollett.
Howard: Oh, you know what? I remember that. Didn't Rita put that up? Was it Rita?
Patrick: Yes, I think so.
Howard: Dude, I think that was like 15 years ago, or 10 years ago.
Patrick: It doesn't seem like that long, but maybe it was.
Howard: Let's look at it, and did you start a thread on your book?
Patrick: I haven't. I use Dentaltown mostly as a reference. I usually lurk. I've not done a lot of original posting.
Howard: Well, got on there and say Howard made you do it, so they don't think you're self-serving. Go in there, or email me the write-up and give me a jpeg of your book. That's what we'll do. Email me the information and a picture of your book, and I will make the post before I go to bed tonight, and I'll push it out on Dentaltown, Facebook, Google+, Twitter. We're out of time. We're in overtime, but I just want to say [crosstalk 01:03:06] dude, seriously, you had a huge impact on me and my practice going back when Jan Sweeney and I heard you speak years ago.
I still think of you as the first one making me rethink all my statements and became a statement-less practice. I can remember what the push-back on that was, was extreme. We had no statements and how I got your message through to my staff, I said, "Well, we don't have to get rid of all of our statements, but we are doing 500 a month, just like he says. Can we shoot for 400?" It was making the goal going from 500 to 400 to 300 that basically got us to just collect our money first. I credit that for you. You made me a gazillion dollars on that.
Patrick: There's nothing wrong with making mistakes. The key is to recognize that each bill is simply a mistake and to learn from it, instead of just thinking, "Oh, that's the way it's supposed to be."
Howard: Yeah.
Patrick: What could we have done differently to prevent this?
Howard: Well, hey, seriously, thank you for all that you've done for dentistry and tell your brother Michael I said hi, and tell Lorraine I said hi.
Patrick: I will make sure he gets in touch. Absolutely. Again, you literally have been our inspiration, and the biggest influence on Wahl Family Dentistry.
Howard: I bet that was your dad, not me.
Patrick: You are good people.
Howard: All right, well, hey, thanks for all you do, buddy, and I'll see you on the boards.
Patrick: Thanks so much for having me.
Howard: All right. Bye-bye.
Patrick: Bye-bye.