Dr. Bill Williams is a Master of the Academy of General Dentistry and a fellow, master or board eligible for a ton of other dental academies. He currently divides his time equally between working on patients, coaching dentists and being a husband, dad and grandad.
Bill is a native Atlantan, having attended Auburn University and the Medical College of Georgia School of Dentistry. He’s a PADDI certified scuba diver, certified Guerrilla Marketing Instructor by J. Conrad Levinson, a photographer and avid reader. He has led 12 mission trips to Africa and Central America.
He enjoys interacting with his fellow dentists in the Solstice 5M Masters Academy and 5M Mastermind to help them double their practices and finish well. His books, Marketing the Million Dollar Practice and the $10,000 a Day Dentist, both debuted on Amazon.com as a #1 Best Seller in Dentistry and have helped thousands of dentists worldwide find new focus and purpose in their dental careers.
Dr. Williams, married to his wife Sheila for 40 years, loves to travel and that love has been inherited by their two sons, Will and Tyler. Will married a British lady and they live in London, England with daughter, Harper. Tyler is a country music singer/songwriter, a keynote speaker, and a NASCAR/Sprint/Midget race car driver. They both work with Dr. Bill and Sheila in the 5M Mastermind.
In May they’ll be headed to Iceland for the wedding of his dental partner to his niece. He believes in the concept of the family business.
http://www.solsticedentaladvisors.com/
VIDEO - DUwHF #951 - Bill Williams
AUDIO - DUwHF #951 - Bill Williams
Howard: It is just a huge, huge honor for me to bring back Bill Williams, DMD, MAGD who is a master of the Academy of General Dentistry and a fellow master or board eligible for a ton of other dental academics. He currently divides his time equally between working on patients, coaching dentists and being a husband, dad, and granddad. Bill is a native Atlantan, having attended Auburn University and the Medical College Georgia, School of Dentistry. He is a Pattee certified scuba diver. Certified Guerilla Marketing Instructor by J. Conrad Levinson, a photographer, and avid reader. He has lead twelve mission trips to Africa and Central America. He enjoys interacting with his fellow dentists and the solstice 5M Masters Academy and Five M Mastermind to help them double their practice and finish well. His books: Marketing The Million Dollar Practice, and, The $10000 A Day Dentist, both debuted on Amazon.com as a number one bestseller in dentistry and have helped thousands of dentists worldwide find new focus and purpose to the dental careers. Dr. Williams is married to his wife, Sheila, for forty years. Loves to travel and that love has been inherited by their two sons, Will and Tyler. Will married a British lady and they live in London, England, with daughter, Harper. Tyler is a country music singer, songwriter, a keynote speaker and a NASCAR Sprint midget race car driver. They both work with Dr. Bill and Sheila in the 5M Mastermind. In May they'll be headed to Iceland for the wedding of his dental partner to his niece. He believes in the concept of the family business. My God, I've done a thousand podcasts and I almost never bring anyone back for a second time, because if you bring someone back then the other one thousand want to come back and that’ll be another three years just do that. But, I brought you back because you just wrote a new book.
Bill: Howard, you put a testimonial in the book that I led off the book with because it was the most outstanding of all the testimonials. You identified something that few others do and I just appreciate you being such a supporter of what we're doing here at the 5M and the $10,000 A Day Dentist became more than just a lecture it became a phenomenon.
Howard: Yeah, and it's also on our YouTube channel. I think it's the most viewed YouTube channel. I think we have more views on you with that, than Carl Misch on implant dentistry or Gordon Christian on dental material, so kudos to you. And it shows it's more important than ever because these kids are walking out of school $350,000 in debt. I mean you and I when we got out of school you could make a lot of really dumb mistakes and still do well. But when you're coming out of school three hundred and fifty, I was lecturing at the A.T.C. dental school, Sunday, to all their dental students and there were kids that were going to graduate $400,000 in debt. And when you're $400,000 in debt, you better get your first three or four or five business moves solid. Would you agree?
Bill: I would. If they make the wrong step and then they get stuck a foot in the mud . When were in Kenya we were walking down the path and our feet get stuck in the mud and it pulled our shoes off, and so you don't get to go very far without shoes on in Kenya. And it's just like that for the dental student, if they don't made the right move right out of school they are going to end up with twice the debt because they made the wrong move.
Howard: So walk them through your journey. First of all tell them what 5M stands for on the 5M Mastermind.
Bill: I grew my practice from zero to five million in ten years and I figured that I wanted to have something that was a catchphrase to get people interested in what I'm doing. And so I just stuck five million on the front of it. It's a pretty crazy number that most people don't think they could ever get to, but I show people how to do that on a regular basis. And a lot of those people that I work with eventually have a five million dollar practice and so that's the reason five million is 5M.
Howard: In how many locations is that five million dollar practice?
Bill: Just one office.
Howard: I know. Almost every time I go to dental school there's some ambitious kids and I say, “Well what's your goal?” And then they go, “Five, ten years out of school I'd like to own five offices. and I'm like, “Well, why would you want five offices doing a million dollars a year when you can have one office doing five million?” I mean it's a bizarre goal to say you want five offices. I mean you did with five …
Bill: The concept is five offices have five overheads and five staffs. I would rather deal with one staff and one overhead even though it's a little bigger facility, you're still going to have the same number of dentists, but you're going to have a lot less staff and a lot less overhead.
Howard: Right. I mean I agree completely. So, I want you to walk through your journey. Where did you learn all this? How did you come out of dental school? All your classmates got A's in Calculus and Physics and Geometry and the Kreb cycle. What do you think was different about your journey from birth to when you graduated that gave you business savvy?
Bill: I was no different than anybody else in my class although I was a little more efficient than some of them. And I took all the normal courses right out of school, P. Dawson, Harold Gelb, Barney Jankelson, but the thing that turned me on to being a productive dentist was very different. I went to Quest with Ron McConnell and Gary McLeod and I was sitting there in the middle of the five hundred and thirty something people watching Ron McConnell on stage and he had this grasshopper in a jar. And I saw him talk about the story of that little grasshopper who would be jumping up and down bumping his head on the lid and he made the analogy that's a dental student or a dentist just right out of school. That the little grasshopper learns eventually to stop jumping because it bumps it’s head on top of the jar lid. And so then along comes somebody like a guru, a mentor, a teacher that says,”I'm going to screw the top off this lid.” and the grasshopper learns that they can jump eventually and be free out of that jar. And so that was an epiphany for me to find out in that quest, 1981, sitting there that I could do different. That I didn't have to follow the rules all the time, so I became a rule breaker and a rule creator and I started learning how to set goals. I read,“Thinking Grow Rich,” by Napoleon Hill and I started setting audacious goals not just average goals. And one thing led to another and I finally ended up at Omer Reeds in Phoenix and I was in the Nepali A - anatomy of the accelerated practice or what they call the million dollar roundtable and I had set a goal to be a speaker at that event in 1985. And by 1986 I got an invitation from Omer to come and speak and so that was a time where setting a goal, an audacious goal, because that had not been a million dollar practice before then. And so in one year, I got to be a million dollar practice after I set the goal. I got to speak at Omer Reeds. And when I gave the talk it was called, ‘Stepping Stones to Success,” and when I gave the talk guess who was in the audience?
Howard: Who?
Bill: It was Ron McConnell.
Howard: And how do you spell McConnell?
Bill: M-C-C-O-N-N-E-L-L, the founder of Quest.
Howard: And he was the founder of Quest? You said there were two names with Quest.
Bill: Gary McLeod.
Howard: Yeah.
Bill: M-C-L-E-O-D.
Howard: M-C-L-E-O-D.
Bill: Yeah.
Howard: Now are they still in the game?
Bill: They're both in the game. I think Ron is retired by now. McDougall up at Dallas Texas also was one of the founders. Terry Hodge has worked with them. Bill Blatchford actually was one of the early guys in the group and he was an instructor in that time period too.
Howard: Wow.
Bill: So I’ve really learned how to set goals. I learned how to vision, have a view that nothing is impossible. Omer always told me, “If it's been done, it's probably possible.” So I kept watching for people doing better than I was doing and I always wanted to saddle up to them and work with them. And so I spent time with the guy you mentioned earlier, the implant fellow, Carl Misch. He came to my office and spoke at my seminars and I went to his office and spoke at his seminars. And I was talking TMJ and neuromuscular dentistry back then and he was talking implants. This was 1985.
Howard: Wow, that was one of the greater podcasts I ever did. I think that one lasted two and a half hours. He was dying and I’ve never seen anybody, I mean we call this dentistry uncensored, but I've never seen anybody that brutally honest and I wasn't going to stop him. I mean he just kept going and going. You could tell he wanted to get this rant out and he ranted for two and a half hours. It was the best implant lecture I'd ever heard in my life. Just an amazing man.
Bill: Yeah, Carl was a giant.
Howard: Oh my God, yeah. And so I got out of school in ‘87 and Quest was ‘80 so when I got out of high school Quest was the dominant force, so whatever happened to those guys?
Bill: Well, Ron and Gary stopped doing it after a period of time. I don't know how long it took them, but you know everything has a ten-year cycle. Just about everything good goes for ten years and then it kind of fizzles out and so Quest finally stopped. And some of the guys who were in the group with us became, people who took things farther forward like Paul Bass, Paul was in our Quest group and he went on to start Fortune Management and things like that just kept going. Some of the guys in our Quest group went on to work with Kindred Mercer and KMC.
Howard: Wow, wow. So you had an interest and an appetite for more information that was one of the driving reasons I did this podcast because one of the things I noticed after ten, twenty, thirty years is that the people who signed up to get their FAGD and went out on this diet to accumulate five hundred hours. It seemed like the people who took a hundred hours of CE a year were the ones crushing it. And I thought you've got an hour commute each way to work, here's an hour, instead of just waiting for your small town study club to have one meeting once a month. Now you could listen to a guy like Bill Williams and then on the way home Carl Misch because the more information that gets in between their ears, increases the chance they’re going to be successful.
Bill: I remember taking probably four, five hundred hours of CE a year. Every other weekend I was in a class and eventually, there were no more classes to take and so I started going to places and saying I'll teach classes. And so I started volunteer to teach and so remember the old US Dental Institute, Orthodontics?
Howard: Yes.
Bill: Well, I was taking that class and there was no TMJ in it and so I went to Ed Keyvans, the guy who was running it, I said let's put on a TMJ class. And so we started the first TMJ class in [inaudible 00:11:55] Dental Institute and over a five year period, I was teaching the senior TMJ instructor. And then Larry Tilli and Ralph Garcia and a whole bunch of others came on and started teaching more TMJ classes and so that grew. And so being a consistent student and then once you become a student then you become a teacher that's the way you learn the best. You do one, you teach one.
Howard: So tell us about your new book.
Bill: The $10,000 a Dentist is now a published book. It’s been on Amazon for a few months now and it's been sitting there in the top ten. It’s been number one for many weeks and it documents how I create $10000 a day every day. Now the reason I came up with that title is because I was putting together a lecture for my Mastermind and I wanted to teach the guys what I was thinking would help them the most. And so I put together the lecture and I came up with fifty ways to become a $10000 a day dentist. And if you look at it all you have to do is break down the daily things you do into small pieces and then get somebody to help you run those systems. And so I'm all about running systems. After I taught the class everybody in the group started doing $10000 a day. Some of them every day of the week that they worked, not just once in a while and so I thought that was such a powerful concept that I turned it into the book. And not only did I just put fifty things in a book I wove a story around five dentists that I met along the way and I gave the book a hero called Alex Middleton. Dr. Middleton is the dentist who is the guru or guide to five different dentists. Each of the dentists has a certain place in the dental factory you might say. Some are young, some are old, some are more service oriented. Some are what I call gunners and so I try to approach every style of dentist out there so it would make it interesting for a dentist to read this thing and understand that he's talking to me. So I want to reach the dentist out there with a believable story that they all could become $10000 dollar a day dentist. Not just the super guys who do ten implants and things like that. Well, Alex is actually identified at the end of the book and so Alex is actually the author of the book, so Alex is this guy.
Howard: Really.
Bill: So I start off the book talking about Alex and how he interacts with all these dentists, but in the end, I say really all my friends will recognize Alex as they go through the book.
Howard: So talk about your journey through the dental jungle and what stepping stones to success.
Bill: I started out in a practice in Stone Mountain, Georgia and I was teaching didactic dentistry, TMJ, neuromuscular dentistry, reconstruction, and orthodontics. I was practicing four or five days a week and I started building and I went to Quest and I went from being an average dentist to being a fantastic dentist in terms of growth because Quest really set me free. And I talked about earlier the grasshopper that got let out of the jar and that was me. Once I saw that there was a need to work with practice management and marketing and build your team and do communication and leadership I saw a whole new side of dentistry that I didn't see before. I was technically good already from all the training, but I didn't know how to market myself and manage the team. And so by going to practice management classes then I just started growing tremendously and so we built about a twelve operatory, eight thousand square foot building. We call it the Quest 18 wheeler back then and we ran that thing for twenty-three years in Stone Mountain. Once I got to the point where the area started turning downhill, though I sold the practice and moved and so that was like the tale of two different practices. The first one was more of a technical growth period, but it had its faults. It was just a practice that I couldn't grow beyond a certain point. I brought associates in, they'd all leave. I brought them in, they'd leave and it was because the area was turning bad. And so I realized I needed to sell that and move to a new place and start over and so at age forty-eight I started over. And at forty-eight usually people are thinking about how they're going to wind down, but I was starting over and so I had a little bit of knowledge and a great location. And so I just started building it and our second place where I went up I had three operatories and three staff members. But we grew to a million and a half within three years and so I said well we could invest a little bit more and grow bigger and so I went on to do a five operatory building and then we expanded to ten operatories and eventually to fifteen operatories in the same building. And I learned something from that Howard, I said if I can design a building that is expandable like an accordion, this could make sense for somebody who wants to grow to be multi-doctor practice. And so I started teaching how to become a multi-doctor practice and have multiple associates. And that's the secret to the success that I've had, is that I can do with my own hands up to two or three million dollars. That's all I could possibly do. But if I had associates that could add on. Each associates is easily capable of doing a million dollars if you market right and train them upright. And so that's kind of been my process over the years just to develop myself to my maximum and then find the associate who wants to grow or do the same thing.
Howard: And how long did you keep your average associate?
Bill: I think the best ones stay around ten years.
Howard: Right.
Bill: Most of them don't stay longer than that. I've had a few that were four/five. One or two will be one and done, but most of them will stay for five to ten years.
Howard: It's a plague in dentistry today where these DSL’s I mean their average dentist stays only with them one or two years and it's no different in Wall Street. I mean at Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Microsoft the average millennial programmer’s only staying with them one or two years and they move on.
Bill: Well they're always held up with the big apple in front that you can make it big somewhere else and the way to get a raise is just to go somewhere else. Talent moves.
Howard: Hey, I want to back you up just a little bit. You were big into neuromuscular, [inaudible 00:18:56]orthodontics. Dr. Bernard Jankelson was the founder. He's born in South Africa. He lived in Saskatchewan, Canada. Went to the University of Oregon. But to this day you don't see really schisms of camps in Endodontist or pediatric dentistry. I mean everybody agrees on at least the eighteen/ twenty-year-old. Why is there is such a schism in neuromuscular dentistry versus, what would you call the other TMJ Camp Dawson, just CR Dawson?
Bill: It’s a joint dominated position more than it is muscular generated. The neuromuscular camp ...
Howard: Yeah, okay the neuromuscular camp is Dr. Bernard Jankelson, so neuromuscular dentistry. What would you call the other camp? What would you call Dawson's camp?
Bill: Well it used to be called CR whoever they wanted to find CR.
Howard: Yeah, so CR. So it's kind of unique in occlusion that you have these two major religions. I mean you have two different religions like Buddhists and Hindus and occlusion and then all the other specialties is pretty much all Buddhists. Do you agree with that assessment or not really.
Bill: I do. I used to go up to Chicago back in the day when I was teaching a lot of TMJ and we would have the galactic mandibular wars and that would mean that we would have the neuromuscular dentistry on one corner. We'd have the CR guys in the other corner and they would debate each other and throw rocks across the room to see if they could hit each other in the head.
Howard: Did you bring a lightsaber?
Bill: Yeah.
Howard: But what is the …
Bill: My friend Larry Tilly actually started the TMJ Alliance, which was a group of dentists who came together, like the United States there were a lot of factions of TMJ groups that aligned together on the side against those who would not accept neuromuscular dentistry. So the TMJ Alliance had five or ten different big organizations to line up and try to understand how we could all coexist together. It was almost like the United Nations of dentistry.
Howard: Yeah, the only reason I keep harping on this point over the last thousand shows is the fact that it confuses the kids when they come out of school. They almost feel they don't want to go spend $3000 on a weekend course and then find out they’re in the wrong camp, but they never have those thoughts when they're going to learn Endo or Perio or Pedo or Prost or anything else. The internet is [spotty? 00:21:30]. I'm in Phoenix and the whole town’s under construction so it's crazy. In fact, Dentaltown was down six hours the longest ever last week because some construction guy hit the fiber optic line. If a young kid asked you today who is the absolute leader in neuromuscular occlusion. Who would you say that is, at teaching it, understanding it the most?
Bill: Bill Dickerson kind of brought it back with LVI. He kind of discovered neuromuscular dentistry and kind of championed it for a number of years and so that resurrected it from where it had been. Just kind of languishing a bit with not too many people teaching it. But you know one of the best people I think out there that teaches is, is a guy called Clayton Chan and Clayton who's doing an excellent job. He used to teach LVI, but he was an original guy in neuromuscular industry years and years ago. There are a couple of people out there that are very good. I'm pretty impressed with the International College of Craniomandibular Orthopedics, ICCMO. I've been a member of that for probably twenty years and we have annual meetings in the United States, but biannual every two years internationally and so they have extremely good meetings. For about two days you will have the best speakers in the world attend and I was down in Buenos Aires back in the spring when we had the Argentine Delegation put on a great show. Next year they're going to be putting on a show in Moscow, Russia.
Howard: Nice, nice.
Bill: Maybe I'll go to that one. I've been all over the world with these guys presented in Florence Italy, Venice, Germany, Frankfurt Germany, Osaka, Japan, Calgary, Canada so it's been a road traveling event.
Howard: Yeah, and you …
Bill: [inaudible 00:23:27]
Howard: Yeah.
Bill: One of the things I like to do all the time is hit that meeting.
Howard: Man, I think St. Petersburg, Russia is another great city. Moscow's amazing, St. Petersburg’s mind-blowing. What a country. They cover twelve time zones. And who would you say is the number one instructor today in CR?
Bill: I haven't taken too many new classes in TMJ, CR stuff in such a long time, but the people that work in my office are in the Speir group, Speir Institute. So I think they're doing a job.
Howard: Back to your Mastermind group. You got a new Mastermind group coming up. Today's February 6, when's your next Mastermind group start?
Bill: The next one is going to be starting May 21st, 22nd.
Howard: May 21st and 22nd and you limit your class to nine?
Bill: Nine dentists.
Howard: Nine dentists.
Bill: Nine special dentists.
Howard: Nine special dentists. You still have seats available for the one in May?
Bill: Yeah, we've got a couple of seats left, yes. We started a group in January and so we'll teach one group and then we'll start another group. So we’ll have a total of eighteen dentists in a year that we’re mentoring.
Howard: Yeah and what...
Bill: So we got one for one full group already. We've got another group building right now.
Howard: And what are these? Are these kids that just got out of school that want to get on the right foot? Are they guys in the middle, plateaued and stuck? Are they guys at the end saying, I love the way how you talk about, what do you call it, retire well?
Bill: Finish well.
Howard: Finish well. So is it more starters, stuck in the middle or trying to finish well?
Bill: I would say definitely finish well is number one. Stuck in the middle is number two. A lot of guys are doing very well when they come to us, but they take off and do a lot better once they're with us. So that's the people who do the best. A practice with a really good dentist who wants to do better really, really zooms further in our program. A guy that’s struggling and not having a very successful practice has so many things to overcome. They aren't quite as effectively going to grow. To them they’re growing a great amount, but I'm just saying as far as dollar amount of improvement the good guys who are already doing well do the best. Let me give you some statistical thing that I’ve seen with a couple of guys. Kevin a guy in New York took our program for two straight years. He didn't jump out after one year and he was averaging $10,000 every day after a few months with us and now he's doing fifteen a day on a regular basis. A guy named Brad in Oregon grew four hundred and fifty thousand in his first year and he did seven hundred and seventy thousand his second year and he was only with us one year. So he grew twice as much almost the second year as he did the first year. And a guy in Arizona there went from one million to one point eight million. He's averaging a hundred and fifty a month, whereas before he was right at a hundred a month. Mark in Texas averaged fifteen thousand every day since he took our class just about thirty days ago. We have an immediate impact once we teach them a couple of our nuggets. I basically teach them what's in the $10,000 a day book, but I give it to them in a different way I guess when they're in the Mastermind. And we have an accountability built into it to where the guys call each other up during the week and so they'll have a mentor that’s with them not just once a month or once a quarter, but every day. Every week.
Howard: So you said your most popular customer to your Mastermind group is the finish wall group, but …
Bill: Right.
Howard: But the one that you helped the most is the one stuck in the middle.
Bill: I think the one that grows the most is the finish well group because they are more focused. The ones that are harder to help are the ones that are stuck in the middle because they have so many problems. They're harder to help. I mean we’re usually talking staff problems when we talking stuck in the middle too, Howard. That usually is what keeps most dentists from being very prosperous.
Howard: Now you say stuck in the middle because your son is a country singer, songwriter and, Stuck in the middle with you by Bob Dylan who got a Nobel Prize in what, literature?
Bill: Literature.
Howard: My God, [inaudible 00: 27:51]. That's one of my favorite songs, “Stuck in the middle with you,” by Bob Dylan. That is an amazing song. But so stuck in the middle is harder to help.
Bill: It is.
Howard: Why are they stuck and why are they hard to help?
Bill: A lot of them have made some bad decisions along the way and they have to start over. So I relate to those guys because I started over.
Howard: You mean sell the practice and move and go somewhere else?
Bill: Some of them they've got skills, but they don't have a population to work on. They’re starting over, literally.
Howard: Yeah, I've had several conversations with dentists literally in tears because they were born and raised in a town of five thousand. Their company factory was shut down. They're telling me all these scenarios and I'm like, “Dude, business in three words is supply and demand. You don't have a demand for you. You have to leave.” And then they get all emotional, “I can't leave. I was born here. My wife’s born here.” and I mean my ancestors came from Ireland. I mean sometimes you just got to move to do what's best and I mean it's not like you have to move back to China. You can just move maybe an hour up the street.
Bill: One of the sad things that I see Howard, is that dentists are taught by some guru out there that they can be special and then they will get big headed and think well I'm going to go be special in a big town. And so they move from their small town to a big town and they set up in the middle of about eighty-five other dentists and they think that their special training is going to make them very popular. And it really doesn't ever turn out that way very often. They become another small fish in a big town and they would be better off stayed in a rural or a suburban practice than trying to get into the middle of the most ritzy zone of the city.
Howard: So you're saying demographics matter?
Bill: It matters a lot. I mean the more successful dentist, typically is going to be those who are on the periphery, not down in the center of all the wealth.
Howard: Yeah and Americans are emotional. They believe if you build it they will come. I tell them that's a Disney movie and when they say, "I don't care about demographics I want to live here,” and I say, “Well, if you don't care about demographics go to Somalia. Go to Ethiopia. I mean if it doesn't matter I mean just go to Somalia and you're going to crush it.” I mean I've been in Somalia, Ethiopia, Tanzania, South Africa. I mean demographics matter and you know I take it serious as a heartache. Is there anybody you recommend for demographics?
Bill: No, I don't really get into that too much Howard. I wouldn't want to be putting out any names for a demographics. I pretty much did my own demographic work to figure out where I wanted to go and I took all the information from the banks and I looked at what they look at. But I pretty much only stay in one place so I don't really look for too much in the way of who to tell me where to go.
Howard: So did I ever tell you about my demographic story?
Bill: Tell me?
Howard: I was a senior in dental school, no I was a junior dental school so I wrote to the Department of Economic Security in Washington DC ask them what their job forecast were for the country. They sent me back this really nice, this is back in snail mail where it was two weeks each way, and they send back this report. They said that they thought between when I wrote it from ‘85 to 2000 United States to create thirty million jobs and half of them would be in five cities, Boston, Tampa, Phoenix, Orange County and Silicon Valley. And being a little boy from Kansas I didn't want to live in the snow in Boston. I didn't like the insects in Florida and I thought everybody in California was a granola head weirdo and I didn't want to raise a family there. So that left Phoenix, so I wrote Phoenix Economic Security. They sent me the same reports and I got a six foot by four-foot map of Phoenix. I traced out the three hundred and three census tracts. We didn't have computers, we had index cards. I made three hundred and three index cards. On each one I just said how many, I wrote the board of dental and got a list of all the dentists from the Arizona State Board of Examiners, and for each of those little squares that I traced out on the map on the index card, what was the dentist to population ratio? What was the median household income? And what was the percent change of population growth from ‘70 to ‘80 to the ‘85 mini-census. And on those three variables, I picked two. The best one was in North Scottsdale, but they were rich people so I gave that to my classmate, Steve Hayes, and he went there and just crushed it. And then I took the second one. I wanted to go to Phoenix because I know I'm not the type of guy that's going to go in there and fit in in Beverly Hills. I mean I'm a hillbilly from Kansas born in a barn with the door open, so I wanted to go to Phoenix and so I went to Phoenix and just crushed it. And then all these people always told me, they still tell me this is there in Phoenix, “Well, Howard you're lucky because you set up in [inaudible 00:32:56] …?” Lucky? I'm pretty sure I moved a …
Bill: Oh yeah.
Howard: A thousand miles for that luck. Born and raised in Wichita Kansas, Dental School Kansas City, Kansas and I'm lucky because I spent half a year picking my location. And now these kids come out of school and they're millennials and it's just crazy. I mean we still don't have a dentist forty miles away in Eloy. When you drive from Phoenix to L.A. at the Arizona California line Blyth, there's no dentist. They don't even have one. I mean you could work Monday through Thursday four ten hour days then at night one weekend, you could just drive four hours and you'd be in the ocean now in L.A. in a condo or you could drive four hours the other way Friday, Saturday, and Sunday and crush it in Scottsdale. But they want to live in Scottsdale and they want to practice on the beach looking out at the ocean and they set up these million dollar practices in the area where there's a dentist for every three hundred and fifty people and then they're just confused their whole life why they're not special.
Bill: Well, I agree with that. That’s what I’m teaching the guys just go find the demographic place that's underserved and you will be more powerful. Your ability you can change overnight when you can see thirty or forty people, whereas you see five or ten people in a month, new patients. Totally different.
Howard: So you talk about fifty ways to create the perfect day. Talk about some of those fifty ways to create a perfect day.
Bill: It starts out really with what I call the five truths, Howard and I kind of break them down as ten each of the five truths and mindset encompasses one of those truths. And under mindset, you've got certain things that you have to believe in and you have to get your team to accept. And so, for instance, one of them is 100% readiness. I love that one because it sets my day up perfectly every day. I want my team ready for me when I walk in the door. I want my patient ready for me when I walk in the door. I want the patient ready to accept the treatment that we're going to plan to do that day before I walk in the room and we don't have to discuss it. And so we have all this concept built around readiness and if I'm ready to work that means I really want to work. And so I work hard all day long on people who want what I'm doing. There's no discussion. It's [inaudible 00:35:27] for a dentist to go in and just do what he does. That's all we want to do, is do what we do and so I set up systems to have the light on, the chair back, the syringe ready, the topical place so I can go to work. And I can always have chit chat time and social time after the Novacaine’s in place because it takes a while for it to take ... if I want to go off to another room and work I can go in another room too. So that's one of my concepts. That's one of the fifty. We make a lot of hay out of same day dentistry, which is a popular concept today. Everybody knows same day dentistry. In the days of Stone Mountain, I was always doing 10% more dentistry than I booked every day and I would have half my schedule fall apart and that was one reason I left the town down there in Stone Mountain because half the people wouldn't show up to their appointments. And so it was hard to make my daily go down there, but up here in Swannie where I live now, people basically keep their appointments and so I'm doing thirty to 50% more than my scheduled appointments every day. So my goal Howard is to always schedule to go that's one of the fifty ideas to be a productive dentist. Schedule your goal. So your goal might be five thousand a day, it might be ten thousand a day, it might be more. So I said okay my goal is ten thousand a day and if you'll put that on my schedule I'll do it. And it got to be that that was easy to do. A lot of dentists say, “I can't do that. How does anybody do that?” Well, I've done over ten thousand a day average for the last fifteen years every day I work. And it’s because it became a system. I just expect to do it. My staff expects to do it. Our patients we talk to them like we expect them to say yes every time we suggest anything and so it's an expectation, mindset. I believe a dentist can grow their practice to five million that's my mindset and so everybody that I approach when I teach is that whatever your goal is we're going to help you get there. And so I have this thing called a go key list and the go key list is a list of a hundred things I did to go from zero to five million and so I said if you just start at the first point on the list and do everything on the list by the time you finish the list you'll have whatever size practice you want. A million dollar practice, a two million dollar practice, a three million because it's all spelled out. All you have to do is follow the steps. Stepping stones to success.
38.00 Howard: So what do you think keeps dentists from doing same-day dentistry. I'm a huge believer in same-day dentistry. Our office manager is always preaching it, but it just seems like for thirty years the knee-jerk reaction is, “Well, let's go up and get you scheduled for that filling,” and for thirty years you have to work with the hygienist, the dentist’s like, “Well, let's do the damn filling right now.” I mean who the hell would want to come back. What are the barriers to the obvious?
Bill: The dentist has to actually want to do it. The staff has to be told the dentist wants more work. We set up a morning meeting for every day and we kind of hold a five minute morning meeting, the huddle, we call it and we identify where the holes are in the schedule and if I don't have any holes, I'm not going to be looking for a lot of work-ins. But if I have holes then I'm going to ask the staff these are the places I want them and if I'm still without a person in that hole, that part of the schedule, when I go to check the hygienist in, if they have a small thing to do, like Friday I had three of them. I did two extra fillings and two extra crowns just because I asked people to do extra. I just ask them, “Would you like to stay and do that today? I've got time if you’ve got time. I could work it in my schedule if you'd like to do it.” And so I just get into a habit of asking people when I'm in the hygiene room, “I can do this in a few minutes if you’d like to get it done. You don't have to come back and 90% of them say yes. 90%. The ones that can't do it just have another appointment or they’re business people or they got to pick up kids at school. That's the only reason. If they're there they're going to do extra. And that's one little, small tidbit that if a young dentist would learn to stop thinking about what people might not do, just think about what they will do.
Howard: A lot …
Bill: Mindset.
Howard: A lot of people are wondering if you're doing a $10,000 a day production and you're doing same-day dentistry, do you routinely work through your lunch?
Bill: Almost never actually, Howard. I had a two-hour lunch yesterday.
Howard: People always ask me if I work through my lunch.
Bill: I don't hardly ever work through my lunch.
Howard: I said do you think I’d be this fat if I was missing lunch every day?
Bill: No, I like to see …
Howard: You know how I could also prove I’m not two-faced. If I was two-faced would I be showing you this face? So you do say same-day dentistry, but you still take a lunch.
Bill: Yeah, I work normal hours, eight to five. I don't work late. Sometimes I get done at 4 o'clock.
Howard: So …
Bill: I've gotten where I'm leaving early.
Howard: So you and I know dentists. I mean we've been working with them for several decades. We know what they're thinking, [00:40:33 inaudible], they’re driving to work and they’re thinking, first of all, $10,000 a day. Where is he getting all these new patients and number two, no one ever accepts treatment. So and then when you look at national insurance data it's pretty obvious that when you go to something as simple as a radiographic, two surface class two cavity that when you diagnose a hundred million of them, you only drill, fill and bill 38% of them. So where are you getting these new patients? The national average is that you got to tell three people they have a cavity in need of filling for one to do it. So how are you changing that funnel? Where are you getting these new patients to come in the funnel and how are you getting a higher close rate than one out of three?
Bill: I think I've got the answer to that one, Howard. The new patient experience is the total answer. We bring our patients in to see the doctor first, not the hygienist. I do a specific exam that co-diagnosis everything with them. They kind of get an understanding right there what's going on and then I bring them back a different day for the consult. And I don't ever do the consult’s, I let my staff to the consult’s and so for about thirty years I've not done a consult on a regular basis. So all I'm doing is sitting in the operatory doing dentistry while they’re talking to people. They're selling dentistry for me and I'm doing the preparations. I'm doing the surgeries. I'm doing the orthodontics. I'm doing the dentures. It's my job to do the dentistry, not to talk to people and so the one thing I always consult with dentists about is, stop talking and let your staff do the talking. I have a treatment coordinator who does all my consults. We have a new patient experience where we tour them around the office. We like to give them a tour of the office before I tour their mouth. The reason is we want them to bond to us in the new patient exam and the new patient tour, they get to see and smell everything. They build trust, they build rapport and once they get into our office, into the operatory, they've already got a feeling for who I am and what I'm going to be looking for, because our team has done a really good job. And I've actually interviewed them for about five or ten minutes even before I get into the operatory, so I'll split my exam up into a meet and greet, the tour and the operatory where I examine them is three separate events and then the consult ...
Howard: Okay, say the three separate events again.
Bill: The tour, my interview with them and then my exam of them. Three separate places, three separate events and the final thing, which is the consultation occurs on a different day that I don't even participate in. I always leave them with the concept ...
Howard: So you …
Bill: That if they need me …
Howard: You call that person a treatment plan coordinator?
Bill: Yeah. I have a treatment coordinator who presents everything. I have a new patient experience member who tours them. Any of my dental assistants can do it now. We don't have one person doing it, anybody can do it, but they have a tour, a great explanation of everything about our practice.They look at what's on the walls. They talk about what's on the walls. They talk about the machines, they pass the laser, they pass the C.T. scan, they get the story as they go through. They get introduced to the different hygienist. They get shown the Osha certificate that says we sterilize everything, so they just get acclimated to our philosophy of practice as they tour. It builds on what they already saw on the website. So the website kind of sets the stage for them to expect and then we deliver when they get in with a great experience. And then when they get in my operatory and meet me after I've already had the interview, which is like personal time and listening to them time, then it’s my time to examine them and wow them. And they always have this one statement when I finished that exam, Howard, “I've never had an exam that thorough before in my life.” Now you do all that before you ever talk about money and needs. They usually say yes and that's why we get such high acceptance rates it’s because they already believe I'm going to tell them what they need and it’s needed. It’s not something I'm trying to sell them. So I don't have too many people turn down treatment except for those you just can't afford it. And then they don’t trust...
Howard: [inaudible 00:44:55] anomily. Orthodontists, I mean 95% of them within two years out of school,realize they need a treatment plan coordinator to present the treatment. And I think the reason is because an orthodontists new patient is worth sixty-five hundred bucks. The dentist, I don't even think 10% What percent of dentist do you think have a treatment plan coordinator?
Bill: Not too many. I mean most people have a front desk person or two, an insurance person and a receptionist.
Howard: Yeah and the dentist I always say, “Do you think you could have excelled at a sales job like selling Mercedes and Lexus or private jets or luxury real estate.”
Bill: No.
Howard: It's like okay so your skill set to get A's in Calculus and Physics and Geometry, nobody would hire you to sell luxury homes. You would not make it in real estate, but you think that that's selling. And then they even admit that they don't like the word selling. They think it's a four-letter word. They think it’s gross. They say, “I didn't go to school to become a salesman.” “Okay, then why are you selling dentistry?” “Oh, I don’t sell dentistry.” “Yeah, that's why you're doing seven hundred and fifty thousand a year and think of all the poor kids that left here with untreated decay because you couldn't even convince a kid to get a filling or convince a mom.” I mean the basics. I mean I'm not talking about selling bleaching, bonding, veneers and a bunch of exquisite dentistry. I mean no one needs to have teeth bleached. No one needs veneers. I'm not talking about that stuff. I’m talking about disease. Removing pathology and disease and microorganisms and fungus and viruses. They can't do that and the orthodontist get it and the general dentists don't get it, but you get it and that's why you're doing $10,000 hours a day.
Bill: That's a big reason. You know I used to get forty new patients a month when I was a solo dentist and to process forty people that's not easy. If you do a full exam and do a full consultation you're talking a lot of hours you're taking out of a day, if you're getting forty or fifty a month instead of …
Howard: I want to go back and ask you a very controversial thing in dentistry. This is dentistry uncensored. I don’t want to talk about anything anyone all agrees on, but my gosh on Dentaltown there's battles between the new patient cleaning or the new patient see the dentist first. And one camp says if I call up Bill Williams in Shawnee, Georgia and say I want to get my teeth cleaned. And they say well they just want to come and get their teeth cleaned we're going to schedule to come and get their teeth cleaned, but you don't do that. You, new patients see the doctor first. They get a tour and then they meet you. So what would you say to young dentists, and a lot of these guys might be, you’re stuck in the middle, what do you think about first visit, new patient cleanings?
Bill: Well, it's not my system that I promote as the best because I've got statistics that say that when you do the doctor first exam and go through the new patient experience that way you have double the treatment acceptance and you have higher value treatment plans because you see with different eyes, when you do it on your own versus when you're looking over the shoulder of a hygienist. So it is graphically different, but also Howard, I say this, we’re firm in principle, flexible in procedure. I think I learned that from Dick Barnes. You basically will bend to let a patient come into the practice when they're adamant about getting a cleaning so we have the opportunity, the possibility that they'll get into the office and see the hygienist. Now in our office I've tried to set it up to where we do the same exact exam in the hygiene room instead of giving them an hour or forty minutes like some dentist will give them two hours to go through that process and they still get their teeth cleaned. And if it's a perio patient then they're going to get started on the perio maybe or maybe they're going to be talked into saying we really don't want to clean this horrible periodontal disease right now. We want to break it down into four or five visits. So we do have ways to break it down and not start.
Howard: Break it down all, I love that term. The difference between breaking it down in the 70s versus the 80s?
Bill: Breakdown.
Howard: Yeah.
Bill: Yeah.
Howard: Well in the 70s …
Bill: The Valley of the Dolls.
Howard: I'm only saying this because your son is a musician, but in the 70s it was always two or three frames and then they break it down and then the song. But then in the 80s they do like a refrain or two, break it down and then do a refrain or two. They move the breakdown from the end to the middle. Did you notice that?
Bill: I didn’t know it. I”m not much a musician to have noticed it like you would, but …
Howard: Ask his son if he agrees with that or thinks I'm crazy, but …
Bill: Speaking of that let me tell you one really cool thing Howard, Crook and Chase is a country countdown show that’s indicated nationally and my son was just identified as the discovery of the week last week on Crook and Chase for his new album he just produced and put out in Nashville.
Howard: My gosh. My three favorite streets in the United States is Second Avenue on Nashville, Beale Street in Memphis and Bourbon Street in New Orleans and I tell dentists all time. A lot of dentists tell me, “Well I'm not a country music fan.” I said, “Dude, everyone's a country music fan when you're downtown Nashville.” So a lot of these people the mindset of the country music is from back fifty years ago, but and lot of people say, “Well you know I'm not big into jazz.” “Dude, when you're on Beale Street, Memphis you're going to think jazz is everything.” Same thing at Bourbon Street. Those are just the three most exciting music. Well, congratulations on your son. That's got to be fun.
Bill: It’s called Begin. It's called, Good for me and it's Tyler Williams live.
Howard: Well I'll tell you what you know what you need to do Dentaltown has a quarter million dentists and there's fifty sections, root canals, fillings, crowns, one is leisure and then one is music and if Pot Dadio went under music and said this is my son's new record or album, I can't tell you how many dentists, including myself, would buy it just to support one of their homies son who’s breaking out.
Bill: Cool.
Howard: You need to go on there and do that and then I'll push that on social media too. But we got to give your son the dental mafia push.
Bill: Hey, that will be fantastic. He also teaches with me in the 5M Mastermind. He's one of my speakers. He's so good.
Howard: Well …
Bill: He's a Zig Ziglar trained speaker.
Howard: And when you make a post I'm sure he's got a bunch of YouTube stuff. So on your YouTube you click share and first it shows a link, but the button next to it says embed and that shows a code you cut and paste that. And then on Dentaltown, there's a YouTube logo so you hit the little YouTube logo, drop the embed script and now the YouTube video is in a message board so they can hear songs and all kind of stuff like that. I think it be great marketing for him, your course, everything.
Bill: I'd love to put him out there for all the dentists out there. That’d be superduper.
Howard: By the way, I was going to ask you, you have a YouTube video. What does finishing well mean to you? Any YouTube videos you want me to send you to splice into the end of this video, this podcast, you should, is that the only one you want me to or are there other ones you want to add?
Bill: I'll put a couple out there for you.
Howard: Yeah, email them to Ryan.
Bill: Yeah. I’ll do that.
Howard: Yeah.
Bill: Okay everybody be sure and watch the videos to follow the podcast because Howard has said that they are worth gold. If you watch them you'll make more money.
Howard: I want to switch gears completely back to the finishing well. It's my experience that most dentists don't think about finishing until they're actually ready to finish. They’re sixty-five or sixty-six or sixty-seven and say, “I think it's time to sell the practice,” and that's a huge mistake. You always talking about you need to start thinking about this five to ten years advance. What age do you think dentists should start thinking about finishing well?
Bill: Fifty-five is a good number. If you want to really consider sixty-five as a finishing day. What I found mostly in dealing with older dentists is that most of them don't retire when they think they will, they go longer.
Howard: Right.
Bill: And a lot of them can't retire and that's why they go longer. Now there's a group of us that like dentistry so well that we stay in it. And what we want to do is retire or slow down on our own terms. We enjoy what we do. We don't want to give it up, but we'd like to work like I am two days a week or three days a week. I know a lot of dentists who totally sold their practice, retired and came back within a year.
Howard: Because there didn’t have enough money or bored out of their mind?
Bill: Part of them were bored, part of them wanted more money. You get used to a lifestyle and you start living off your retirement and you quickly realize that you don't have enough to live that same lifestyle. I set a goal twenty years ago to retire at my current lifestyle and so I didn't give up on that. I mean I was driven to create the practice I created and sell it when I did sell it because I had a goal in mind. I set the goal twenty years ago.
Howard: So talk about what are common mistakes and good solutions for finishing well. One of them you said is start ten years before you want to finish. You need to start planning it out.
Bill: Have your facility large enough to expand to add an associate because that is the number one way to amass a fortune. If you want to double your ability to retire the amount of money you have at retirement, you need to grow your practice in multiples. Your own hands get more tired, more arthritic the older you get and so you need to bring the young hands in to expand not try to do it all yourself. And if you could say two dentists could produce three times more than one dentist can at sixty-five years old. Two dentists where one guy's older but wiser and one guy that’s younger and more energetic. Those two guys are going to produce probably three million instead of one million for the senior dentist. That's going to make you practice a lot more valuable when you sell it.
Howard: This may sound…
Bill: That’s the key.
Howard:This may sound [inaudible 00:55:46], but it's really part of the retirement, a lot of the young dentists right now at eighty still they’re asking me, “Well when I start a practice is it dumb to rent for from age twenty-five to sixty-five for forty years or should I get the land and building.” And the reason that's relevant is because when you retire if you're going to sell your practice and have this nest egg, would you sell the practice and then sign a ten-year lease to this real estate so you have a ten-year income stream? So let's break this through. If a dentist was going into Shawnee would you say, “Dude, don't rent for forty years? Go build land and building.” And then number two, so talk about renting versus leasing and how does that affect retirement?
Bill: I've had two big buildings that I built and I've had two lease whole spaces that I leased from. So I think if you're young you probably should look at leasing a space, your first place. I don't think most dentists are smart enough when they get out of school to know where to go and how big to grow. So I think you ought to learn for the first ten years how to become a dentist and then once you've learned how to really rock and roll you ought to build a practice it’s going to propel you into retirement. And if you're smart enough to go to the place you're going to end up with, that's the smartest guy in town. The guy who moves around three or four times is going to have a lot of wasted effort, so it depends on really how wise you choose your first place. Like you chose Phoenix and that was wise. I chose Atlanta and that was wise, but I still chose the wrong neighborhood in my first place and so …
Howard: Explain why it’s the wrong neighborhood. Was it because it was too poor? They say neighborhoods on a hundred year cycle. They build them. They’re brand spanking new and by a hundred years they’re crack houses. What was wrong with your first area?
Bill: Yeah, ours was a transitional neighborhood. In Atlanta, you've got a situation where the neighborhood values change dramatically as the population shifts into it. So right now in Shawnee, for instance, we are the most diverse community in America. There are more nationalities who live in Gwinnett County, Georgia than any county in America. Asians, Hispanics, Blacks, Caucasians, Middle Europeans, Southeast Asians so we're diverse. Now that wasn't the case down in south [inaudible 00:58:28] where I was. That was homogenous and it went from homogenous white to homogenous black in about a twenty year period and so the differences in your neighborhoods make a big difference where you locate.
Howard: Do you believe in the hundred year real estate cycle where when you build new houses those are the newest houses, but so at fifty years so if a dentist is coming out of school at twenty-five years old and this area, the houses are fifty years old, well by the time they're fifty years old, fifty plus twenty-five, by the time they're sixty-five it's going to be the poorest of the poor. There's going to be a lot of crime, homeless all that. Do you believe in that cycle?
Bill: I do. Yeah, that's exactly what happened to us. The crime increased. There was a person shot dead on my corner where my office was and that was one of the last straws that made us want to leave the area. And the golf course across the street from us turned to weeds.
Howard: Yeah.
Bill: I mean people stopped playing golf. They started just having a pasture for cows down there.
Howard: And then a lot of people just they just won't make a decision. My dad used to always say, sorry my French, “Shit or get off the pot. Make a damn decision.” And I applaud the fact that you made a decision that it's time to move. And a lot of dentists say to me, “Well I can't sell my practice.” “Dude, it's called the greater fool theory.” I don't care if a stock goes up 500% and you need to get out of it some other fool will buy it. You can sell any dental office in the world to a greater fool and so it's a greater fool theory and I applaud people who can make decisions. And young dentists they mess up with it even on simple dentistry. I mean they know that through the sensor they see the decay is deep, but their heart is so big, they’re going to try to save it. And just try to switch the spoon, excavators and try to put some decals on it and then the whole damn thing blows up and then the patients all mad at them. I mean my Endodontist in Dental School, [inaudible 01:00:47] said I diagnose whether it's a root canal or filling by holding the bitewing at an arm's length. You don't sit there and get a microscope and look at under his damn radiograph. You think it's in, it’s in. If you know for sure it's not it's not, but if you’re not sure and the tooth’s talking at all do definitive treatment. And it’s very definitive to sit there and say you know what this neighborhood is now sliding on the back half of the slope and it's time to pick up and move. How far away was Shawnee from your first location? How far did you move?
Bill: Thirty-five miles.
Howard: Yeah, big deal thirty-five miles.
Bill: I didn't take hardly any patients with me I started from scratch.
Howard: Right, and you did that one time.
Bill: One time.
Howard: Yeah, and you know what, oh my gosh I ...
Bill: I was twenty-three years in the first practice and twenty-one there on the second one.
Howard: Oh, so you're almost in the new location, “You know what yesterday was, Ryan?”
Ryan: What’s that?
Howard: The Berlin Wall yesterday it’s been taken down as long as the wall was put up. The wall was put up for ten thousand three hundred thirty-three days and now the Berlin Wall has been down for ten thousand three hundred thirty-three days. Isn’t that amazing. Yeah. But yeah that's amazing so sometimes you just got to move. And these young dentists, we had a podcast the other day on where these states like Iowa, they have a list of twenty county’s that don't even have a dentist. And if you go there the state will write you a check for fifty thousand. Delta Dental will write you a check for fifty thousand. I coach some of these kids in small towns with no dentists they go to the mayor. I mean first Street and Main Street half the buildings are boarded up, so you just walk down there and the mayor will say, “Pick a building, it's yours. I'll give you title.” And then in Phoenix and Atlanta, you couldn't get a loan, but that small bank in that small town he'll give you a loan. He'll give you a signature loan with no assets, nothing. So you go in there and Delta gives you fifty, the state gives you fifty, the city gives you a damn free building and you have no competition. You can get a signature loan for anything. I mean I know dentists who did this that the first year did a million four hundred thousand. Took home four hundred thousand in cash and these are the ones that were told they'd never be able to pay off their $400,000 student loans and at the end of the day I say, “Well what's the nightlife look like?” And they're, “Well, one I'm married and starting a family but number two we're just an hour away from the big city.”
Bill: And it's safe.
Howard: Yeah.
Bill: That’s good.
Howard: And with driverless, autonomous cars right around the corner I really think that the suburbs are going to jump out further because right now the bad thing about living out in the suburbs is you have this hour commute to work. But when you're at home you can't get any workout. I mean I had four kids, every five minutes dad, dad, dad, dad, dad. And then they go to work and they sit in their cubicle and all these people have to come by and say, “Hey did you watch the Super Bowl last night?” You can't get anything done at work so, but you've got to go to work because you got staff meetings, team meetings. So I could just sit there and see that these fully autonomous cars will just be a box with your desk and your computer, so the minute you walk out the door you don't care if it's a two-hour commute. You're going to get on your computer and do all your email get all your work done. Then when you get to work you’re going to do all the meeting and face time you have to do. And then when you find out what you got to do then you're going to commute back a two hour home and get all your work done on the way home. And then when you walk in at home you'll be able to unhook. So I think these rural dentists are going to do very well.
Bill: I agree with you.
Howard: We are twelve minutes into overtime. Is there anything you wanted to talk about that we didn't discuss?
Bill: Well I think you covered everything that’s important. I'd like to invite anybody that's interested in the Mastermind to contact me. I do have the online program where doctors who can't get out and come to me, they can take the program online and do 90% of the material we do in our Mastermind with an online 5M Masters Academy so that's available. And I've been doing that for about seven years Howard, and it’s produced some phenomenal results just in the online program.
Howard: And how much does the Mastermind group cost?
Bill: Twenty five thousand.
Howard: And do you have any terms or finance or anything for that?
Bill: Yeah, totally available to finance it over any number of years that they want to. So we've got a financial option where people can pay thousand a month, five hundred a month, just depends what they want to work out with us. We've got a plan.
Howard: And what's your success rate with these nine dentists?
Bill: Oh gosh. I think the lowest is two hundred thousand increased. Some of them increased seven hundred thousand in a year. So our [inaudible 01:06:01] is extremely good. Anybody who takes the program can't grow half million, I'm disappointed in him.
Howard: Well, Bill I know your generation. I mean Bob Epsom, a buddy of mine I mean he owned DenMan, he owned Rembrandt and he would never go on Dentaltown and toot his own horn or say anything, you ought to start a thread on Dentaltown and start talking about this. That's your target market. Most of us go home at night and they say, “I just want a beer and watch ESPN.” Who are these dentists that go home at night and spend three hours on Dentaltown? I mean that's your cream of the crop. Why don’t you go in there and talk about this on Dentaltown?
Bill: Okay. Is it a blog area you’re talking about? Put a blog ...
Howard: No. We have blogs, but I would just go to the message board under Practice Management.
Bill: Okay, I'll put in a message board today and I'll start a thread and see where it takes us.
Howard: Yeah and if you're shy and humble just say ... You know what you ought to do is, you ought to post your podcast you did with me. You ought to start a thread and say, “Did you see my podcast with Howard, and I just did a second one with him and he told me I should get on here and talk about that.” And the other reason I think you should do it is they’re already talking about your Mastermind. Look at all these different threads. I mean if you just go to Dentaltown to do a search for Mastermind they’re already talking all about it. So get on there and start a thread about your $10,000 a day deal and then you can actually drop the YouTube video in there, so just go to YouTube, put share, and there's the code, you drop it in the YouTube button and drop the video in there and then tell them you’re starting another group and it's May... What did you say it was, May 21st and 22nd?
Bill: Twenty-one, twenty-two yeah, May. October/January will be the next group.
Howard: So …
Bill: Two days in Atlanta.
Howard: Yeah and my final question is, how is your depression going after the Falcons lost last year in the Super Bowl? It was exactly a year ago Sunday. Are you still in therapy?
Bill: It was a tough week after we lost in the last second with the biggest flop in Super Bowl history, but I’m so glad that Tom Brady fell on his face this time.
Howard: Oh my God, I was rooting for the Eagles so bad. Howard Goldstein who's in charge of the message boards online CE, he's born and raised out there in Philadelphia and he's the biggest... He said he finally completed his sports bucket list. The Eagles won this year. I swear to God that was, I think one of the greatest games ever. I can't remember a game like that.
Bill: It was a replay, an instant replay almost of Atlanta, but thank goodness the Eagles came out ahead.
Howard: Yeah.
Bill: Those birds flew higher.
Howard: Oh my gosh that was a great game. I mean whenever a football game comes down to the last minute, that's all you want. You just want it to be a game till the very end.
Bill: It came down to the last throw of the game.
Howard: Yeah, I know. Well hey, I want to thank you for all that you've done for dentistry. I want to thank you for coming back on the show a second time.
Bill: It’s an honor.
Howard: You and I both know that dental schools, they teach way too much Calculus and Physics and Geometry and they don't teach anything about H.R, treatment plan presentation. They get out of school they don't know basic business.
Bill: It’s all about leadership, communication, practice management skills. If you want to be a good dentist you got to major in those areas, not just technical.
Howard: Absolutely. Okay and on that note, I hope you have a rocking hot day.
TESTIMONIALS:
Dr. Brad Hester: “You want to get the team involved with your process and your goal of $10,000 a day and make it fun for them so that you can all celebrate together. That really makes a difference.”
Dr. Kevin Poupore: “He wants you to improve other parts of your life as well as just being a dentist. He doesn’t just focus in on the practice, he tries to help you see that you need to read all those things; you need to be paying attention to your family and your health. We talk about that in the Mastermind group.
Dr. Gregg May: “Most people function from a place of scarcity. Although they've been well trained on their clinical skills, they don't utilize all of their God-given abilities to be able to produce a life that is more balanced between family and professional. Having Bill as a mentor or a coach, to have direct access, to be able to ask direct questions anytime you need something answered is of huge benefit.”
Dr. Kevin Poupore: “He has modules that you can use online to learn certain areas. What I get the most out of is when I go right to his home and we’re part of our Mastermind group. You’ll sit in front of everybody and explain how you're doing. Then he’ll help you diagnose what you can do differently to make it better. He has a concept on being a $10,000 a day dentist. Now I’m a $15,000 a day dentist, just from getting the idea from him and all the little nuts and bolts and how to implement it.”
Dr. Gregg May: “Any investment in any type of knowledge that can increase your income and increase your livelihood and give you a better lifestyle, even a more balanced lifestyle, is something that you should always invest your time and energy on.”
Dr. Kevin Poupore: “He wants you get out in the community and help other people to do what they're interested in as well. It’s like a cycle. You help other people, they help you. It's important in any aspect of your life to do what you believe.”
Bill William: Hey, it’s Dr. Bill William of the 5M Mastermind and a lot of dentists are asking me how are we so effective and efficient at achieving these numbers and I wrote the book called The Ten Thousand Dollar A Day Dentist, and earlier at marketing, The Billion Dollar Practice. And what we share in those books is implemented in the 5M Mastermind and so we show you some techniques and systems that we could put together that will help you. A lot of dentists want to retire with a large nest egg and my goal when I put together this Mastermind is to help dentists to finish well. That means to build there practice up to its most valuable point and then figure out how to transition it to the next phase. So you need to start five or ten years before you're ready to retire, to implement some of the steps that will lead you to have twice as much on retirement day as you have in your current plan. We're going to start a new Mastermind February 23rd and 24th, 2018. Our group is limited to nine dentists so if you'd like to be in that group, apply online today. We'll see you soon. Thank you.