This week, the Dental Amigos welcome Sharon Bleiler, DMD, practicing dentist and co-founder of Team Care Dental, and her husband Colin Ambler, MBA, business strategist and software architect behind the platform. Together, they transformed their 14-chair practice in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania into a model of team-driven growth and innovation.

In this episode, Sharon and Colin share their journey from building a start-up dental practice to launching Team Care Dental, a platform that empowers staff through real-time incentives, performance tracking, and culture-building tools that drive profitability and engagement.

To learn more about Sharon, Colin, and Team Care Dental, visit www.teamcaredental.com.

Listeners who want to reach Paul can do so at Paul@DentalNachos.com and those who want to reach Rob can do so at Rob@RMontgomery-law.com.

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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Bumper  

Welcome to the Dental Amigos podcast with Dr Paul Goodman and attorney Rob Montgomery, taking you behind the scenes of the dental business world, all the things you didn't learn in dental school, but wish you had Rob is not a dentist, and Paul is not a lawyer, but since Rob is a lawyer, we need to tell you that this podcast is for informational purposes only and shouldn't be considered legal advice. Listening to this podcast does not and will not create an attorney client relationship, as is always the case. You should formally consult with legal counsel before proceeding with any legal matter. Learn more about the Dental Amigos at www.thedentalamigos.com. And now here are the Dental Amigos.

Rob Montgomery

Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of The Dental Amigos Podcast. I'm Rob Montgomery, and I'm joined, as always, by the Head Nacho himself, Dr. Paul Goodman. Great to be talking, Rob. It's good to be talking with you too, Paul. I'm excited for our guests today. We’ve got some Philly folks who I had the pleasure of running into recently and having a great conversation about their product and their business—Team Care Dental—which is a platform that helps dental practices track the performance and incentives for their team. We're going to hear more about that and what they're doing for dental practices, and it's exciting technology. Before we get started, Sharon Bleiler and her husband Colin Ambler started a startup dental practice in 2015, which has grown into a 14-chair, associate-driven practice in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania. Colin took the internal systems that used to motivate the team and grow the practice into a simple, easy-to-use software program. Colin brings his expertise in the business and technology space to the business. Colin has an MBA from the University of Chicago. Sharon, as a practicing dentist, knows what dental practice owners need to incentivize their staff. So it's a great melding of different backgrounds to generate what is a really awesome product. They started this as a solution for their own office, but as with all good things that work for you, it's evolved into something that they now share with the dental community, helping other practices achieve similar financial success. And Paul, as every practice owner knows, the day-to-day challenges of running a dental practice—team engagement, accountability, operational hurdles—are real. This platform, the Team Care Dental platform, was built from the ground up in their office to solve those exact problems: to take your numbers and incentives off of Excel spreadsheets and create a culture where the staff are empowered, aligned, and motivated to help the practice thrive. So without further ado, here's Sharon Bleiler and Colin Ambler. Welcome, Amiga and Amigo, and thanks for being on the show.

Sharon Bleiler

Yes, thank you for having us. I'm Sharon Bleiler.

Colin Ambler

Thanks, Rob. I'm Colin Ambler. You gave us a great introduction and summed up what we're doing here amazingly well, so we're excited to talk about it with you guys.

Rob Montgomery

Yeah, I'm super excited to continue our conversation. Sharon and I were at an event, and I hadn't seen her in person for a while, so we were talking about things other than our normal legal stuff. She's very enthusiastic, obviously, about the platform—the software that you guys have—so I'm excited for you guys to share it with our audience today. But before we get started, we have to cover the most burning topic.

Paul Goodman

So you guys are here, homegrown with us, but if we were going out for nachos, what's your favorite topping? And which place would you want to go to?

Sharon Bleiler

I'll go first. It's definitely pulled pork on top of nachos—any kind, that's absolute. And I might say Urban Village in Northern Liberties—my favorite.

Colin Ambler

I'm a steak nacho guy, and I love, also in Northern Liberties, Dos Segundos.

Paul Goodman

That's a guy—no, Dos Segundos. But yeah, thanks for the tip, guys.

Colin Ambler Yeah, we're big fish-down-in-Northern-Liberties guys. And there's a great...

Rob Montgomery

Cool, cool. It's good. So let's dive in. So Team Care Dental—tell us, in your words, specifically, what problems were you looking to solve, and what improvements were you looking to make in Sharon's dental practice when you developed this product?

Colin Ambler

Yeah, sure. So we got into growing the practice, and we were doing a lot of things on spreadsheets. We've got advice. I don't think we are nearly the first people to think that incentives are a good idea or to attempt to implement them, but the practical reality of it is that it's hard. There's a lot of record-keeping, and there are a lot of shortcomings that happen when you do this—maybe the old-fashioned way on spreadsheets. You're trying to pull information out of your Dentrix or your Open Dental and update so that there's some visibility into staff members. The idea is that you want people to have transparency and to be able to be motivated by the progress. Then you start to have a bigger staff, and you have to do some record-keeping and say, “Okay, well, I gotta pay this person this much and this person this much.” I've seen it a lot with other dental offices too, and in my own experiences, where it's just a lot of work, and you're questioning what the actual results and long-term outcomes are. We started to do these things because we believed in incentives. I think there's just a general belief from us—and maybe a lot of practitioners and business owners across the country—that they're not really satisfied with the outcomes that come from hourly-paid employees. People can have a tendency to not put their all into every hour of the day, and incentives can really be powerful. Then there's this gap of implementing them and actually running this incentive program, which is hard. So we did that at our own practice level, and we had a scaling practice to a team of 50–60 people with increasingly complex incentive opportunities and bonus programs. And me, as a technology guy, said, “You know what? This is getting really complex on spreadsheets, and I really want to build something that is the Rolls Royce of giving this transparency to staff members and having it be this undercurrent of motivating, performance-driven culture.”

Rob Montgomery

Interesting. So what incentives and what bonus programs are you talking about? What are these metrics that you guys are incentivizing people and bonusing people in the team on? Give us some examples.

Sharon Bleiler

I'm gonna say—oh, I was gonna say, you know, as a dentist, you're doing—you know, you're trying to practice for eight hours, and you're trying to run this business, and you don't really have clear insight. And Team Care gives you that accounting, fulfillment, performance, and transparency to every single person in the office—what they're doing—front desk, hygiene, doctors—so you're really giving credit where credit's due. And while that's happening, the practice grows because everyone starts to get excited. Everyone has a separate login. Everyone's getting visibility on what they did. We have leaderboards that will kind of show everything that's happening—from people reactivating people, people pre-appointing people, treatment plans that are coming in, accepted or not accepted. And everyone is attached to that—like a doctor, hygienist, a front desk person. So now everyone's kind of—it's kind of like you're a baseball player. You're seeing your stats, which everyone loves. One of our most popular and biggest, quickest growth and easy-to-put-in-place incentives is reactivation. And as a dentist, we all know—or some of us don't even realize—how many people we're losing out the back end. We call—Colin calls it—like the leaky bucket. You know, you can be getting 100 people in, but if six months ago those 100 people that you saw aren't coming back, you're losing patients and you're not growing. So what Colin developed was an actual living, breathing list that is constantly updated from your PMS. You know, all of us were always printing them out, trying to go through, crossing people off. As soon as you printed that list, it was already, you know, antiquated. So this is something that you're going on. Every single person has a separate login. They can log in, they can make that call, they can make that appointment, they can leave a voicemail. And we have found about a 70% return financially on this. So if your office can make 1,000 calls a month, you're going to get about 100 extra people coming in by reactivating them. And if each one of them, you know, is worth $500, you're looking at an extra $50,000 a month just from doing this. And we've proven it over and over and over, and it gets people excited. We kind of give—whoever makes those calls of people who actually attended the visit—they get $10. So you might have spent, you know, $10 a person for those 100 people coming back, and you're going to get $50,000 a month. So it's—I’ll let Colin talk more about that—but it's actually—I actually get excited about it. When an office isn't doing well, or they feel this flatness of their office, and they start to see this, it's amazing. And it's such an easy, low-hanging fruit thing to start.

Rob Montgomery

So reactivation is one thing. What are some of the other metrics that you're measuring and incentivizing people and tracking?

Colin Ambler

Yeah, we put things into three buckets—and we like to—I shouldn't say buckets. Playbooks is maybe the better, more appealing term. And those three are: growing hygiene, number one; growing profitability, number two; and growing social reputation, number three. And we use those as a framework. And there's a couple different recipes that are included within each one. And I think we get a lot of action on that because the laborious work of doing the record-keeping is handled—all the tracking. You just have to kind of announce it as an opportunity. And so inside the hygiene playbook, the reactivation is a strong piece. We also do goal-based—I think it's really common for offices to want to set a monthly target for their staff members and introduce a payout for reaching that target and saying, “Hey, listen, the production goal, the collection goal, the hygiene goal, the pre-appointment goal for this month is X. And if we hit that goal—and maybe if we exceed it by certain tiers—each staff member will receive a payout for that.” And so the goal-based is very common. And you know, within each of those other categories—growing profitability, growing social—inside the growing social one is a really popular one that's review-based. We automatically consume all of the reviews from Google, Facebook, Yelp, and we automatically—it's exciting—we automatically tag the staff members that were involved in that patient's visit and issue the payout. And we do this payout process automatically, so that people are getting real-time payouts. It's like a Venmo that happens through the technology. They enroll their bank account. And so I think we've—what we've seen, to kind of sum that up—is that there's a really exciting behavior change, a behavior shift that happens when people receive a relatively tiny—maybe like a micro bonus—on a relatively frequent pace. You know, it's like, in a given day, I might have reactivated three or four patients. I might have got, you know, one or two Google reviews. I might have closed three or four treatment plans. And at the end of the day, I'm given this day sheet for myself of my activities, and, you know, a nice little bonus and a pat on the back for doing a good job—and like, an excitement to come back tomorrow and do it better.

Rob Montgomery

And this is really cool. And so is that—is everybody in the office on this plan or different?

Paul Goodman

If I could interject before you do this, as someone who, you know, loves stats and is inspired by them—just share with me, Sharon or Colin. But since Sharon and I are the only two people special enough to have gone to dental school on this podcast, we are unique, special people.

Rob Montgomery

You are special people for other reasons too.

Paul Goodman

I have found that everyone has different motivating factors, and I think this is awesome. How do you make sure this creates camaraderie instead of team competition? I could just see there is a potential for the team members—some are inspired, but some are like, “This person is doing more than me. How come?” How do you manage that part of it?

Sharon Bleiler

That is such a great question, because I was—I was being like—Colin and I are like the yin and the yang. I'm like, “Oh, I don't want leaderboards. I don't want people to be competing. I don't want hygiene trying to go quicker or anything.” It's all about well-placed incentives, and it's all about how you handle it as the doctor. We have not had that in any of the practices. You just put in—we use the leaderboards to teach more than to—leaderboards up there, you can show it, you don't have to. I have found that front desk outrightly loves it. They love the actual competition of it. And you can also have goals—you can have them incentivized in something that's a group goal. It doesn't have to be individual. It could be “Everyone's getting this if we do this.” I think, like the docs—what we've done with them—you know, as you're training docs, if they do 10 treatment plans and five people need work, the docs always think they did a really good job explaining to the patient what they need, and they think the front desk maybe didn't get the person to actually do the work. It's such great feedback, because the docs start to realize, “Wow, maybe I didn't explain that well. Maybe this happened.” There's notes on the treatment plan. Everyone really does get together on it. And I know what you mean—I was really worried about that. But it's all in how it's implemented and how you put those incentives out. Like reactivation is a clear one. No one feels competitive. If they can get to the calls, they do it. If they can't, it's fine. You get an incentive if you did it, you don't if you don't. But really haven't found that. I found that—I try to do some—we do some incentives that are individual, we'll do some that are group, and it's all what people want out of it. You know, we found the hourly wage is kind of dying. You know, it's not really motivating people, and it's actually made the people more excited to come to work instead of drudgery.

Paul Goodman

I like that. That has a lot of value. I could see the potential. I know as someone who was a restaurant server—one of my main jobs outside of dentistry—there was a direct correlation to your performance and your income, and you thought about that moment to moment. And I think that was a good thing to think about, whether it was making patients happy. I like what you have on social—social reputation. I think that's really cool.

Sharon Bleiler

Yeah. And everyone can kind of join in at their pace, and you're including the entire office. And I am with you—I was so worried about that. And it's not at all. It's actually—everyone's excited. You know, someone said, “That's why you really have a staff-based growth.” And we're like, “My God, yeah, we do.” The staff is like, “Hey, let's do one more—let's do one more cleaning today. Let's do one more treatment plan.” All of a sudden, the people who were stopping a half an hour before work ended are now pushing to the end. They want to hit numbers. And I think one of the biggest things is—everyone has a login. Everyone's seeing it every day, and that's a big deal. Because if you wait till the end of the month to bonus someone, they're not even thinking about it. They're not looking at it. Maybe the last week of the month they're like, “Oh,” they get a little excited, but you're kind of too late to hit your goals if you start on the 21st, you know?

Paul Goodman

I am with you. I think it's cool. I want to ask one more question back to Rob on the dental side. So I see that this has an impact. But the most popular word for dentist in 2025, Sharon—because my dad was a dentist, and he kept his appointments on a piece of paper—and some days, I'm very jealous of that life, right? Simpler time? Yes. So how about the integration? You add this to your practice—is this something that sits on your desktop by itself? Is it integrated with Dentrix or Open Dental? Tell us about that.

Colin Ambler

Yeah, yeah. Really big deal. We're directly integrated to 40-plus different practice management systems. It's really important for us to be able to distribute this to a lot of audiences. I think we found that there's a lot of coaches and consultants that really like using this as a way to monitor results and performance in their client offices, and then also give them recommendations that they can have—kind of like task-oriented, outcome-based approaches to it. I think we've had a lot of success in that with different organizations. They're going into offices, they're talking to doctors. You know, we have analytics—and who doesn't? Analytics is very common. And so to the point of the practice management connection—yeah, all those things are completely drawn from the PMS, and we think in real time. But I think the question that we always had with that was like, “Okay, well, my production or my hygiene—or you pick a KPI—that number is underperforming. What do I do about it?” You know, it's like—if I'm a doctor, and I'm trying to do all the patient care, and then come up at the end of the day and try to evaluate, “How did the front office—how is the business doing?” Okay, this number is doing poorly. There seems like a lack of mechanisms to get people aligned to some corrective action. I think that's really what we were after with this. Okay, well—the analytics is one piece. Yes, that comes from the direct connection to the practice management systems, and we have full coverage on those. But how do we get change? How do we change? How do we have behavior shifts with the boots-on-the-ground staff members to get them to want to do things with better outcomes?

Rob Montgomery

It's interesting. So it sounds like we have kind of two things happening here. We have the staff—the team—that's able to track their individual performance, and then the practice owner has an overall dashboard that you could view these different KPIs and determine what's happening that's better or worse in a given day or any given period.

Colin Ambler

Yeah, yeah, that's right. And I think that's the point. The owner wants to see—the owner, doctor wants to see—the overarching view, and we need to have all the data flowing through. And just like Sharon mentioned with reactivation as an example—it's like, we present the list of patients, and we're very precise and accurate to find who needs to be called. In this example, it's like—we don't want to call someone that was called yesterday. We don't want to call someone that's not due. We have a very precise way of presenting the patients that need a phone call so that it's very easy for staff members to interact with. And the managing staff—the owner, the office manager—can, with a couple clicks of the button, announce an opportunity and say, “Hey, listen—for the next 45 days, we're going to create this opportunity for you. If you make phone calls and any one of your patients that were called comes in for an office visit—and we cross-reference that with the practice management software—you'll get this bonus payout.” And so it's kind of like—from dial to dollars. You know, they track the phone—the patients that they called—and then Team Care, in the background, observes patients coming in and out of the office. And if one of those patients comes into the office and it ties back to one of the staff member's phone calls, the payout instantly happens. And so there's this kind of layering system of practice management system data with staff activity and bonus opportunities that creates this automation to give people the transparency into their payouts and get money for the activities and the results that they were accountable for.

Rob Montgomery

Now is Team Care making recommendations for what the dollar amounts of those bonuses should be, or is that entirely up to the user and the practice owner?

Sharon Bleiler

Yeah. And I was gonna say—Kyle's worked with so many offices. You know, we all are starting to become a little bit of a community, because everyone's seeing what other people are doing—what's working. Everything works differently. But yeah, we definitely make recommendations. We found with reactivation—if someone attends—we're giving $10. That's what I do at my practice. We do $10 for everyone who attends, and you can get immediate payout, or you can wait till the end of the month. There's so many—I feel like there's so much I want to say about it, because it's so great. But yes, we definitely make recommendations. We will definitely do demos. We help people when they're starting out—help practices become successful with it.

Colin Ambler

With the recommendations—I think it's a really valid question, because a lot of doctors might not know where to start. And I think, you know, the biggest mission that we're on is to make sure that this is a really profitable outcome for the office and the doctor. It's like—nobody wants to spend $1,000 on staff incentives just to have $1,000 in return. That would be a poorly designed incentive. And, you know, we've kind of learned a lot through time, and we have these playbooks that have these default recommended values. You can, of course, tweak them if you want to sweeten the deal and stuff, but we always make sure that with all of these incentives, at the end of it, we can show a return on investment—an ROI—that says, “Well, you put this much dollars into it, and it generated this much patient activity, or this much production fill, or this many treatment plans, or this many Google reviews.” And we're very conscious to quantify that so that, number one, the doctor feels really good about it. And number two, that we as a platform—like Sharon said—can be a community that is constantly learning and constantly understanding what are going to be the best models that yield the highest outcome results for the offices. And typically, we can see—like with this reactivation—$10 is a really good and motivating number for staff members. You know, if you can imagine someone's making $20, $30 an hour—$40 for hygienists, whatever—but a $10 bonus for one of these patients and doing things, it tends to move the needle. And when a dental patient—when a patient comes back in the office—the typical U.S. average is somewhere in the range of about $700 average patient production value. And so we see this huge, outsized result—that I paid my staff $10. I didn't pay them for the attempts that they made—100 attempts—but they only get paid when the patient is seen in the office, and we can cross-verify that against the system. And so it results in the $10 I've paid to create the activity that generates me, on average, $700 production per patient. And so what Sharon said earlier—the 70x return—is this huge win for the office. You know, it maximizes people's downtime, and it was only based on results. There really is no risk. And the dental practice had a big win from it—from doing this with the patients back in the door that were otherwise...

Paul Goodman

Also—interject—the summer zone in dental practice for two decades trying to reactivate hygiene patients. Rob, it's one of the more annoying jobs, because you're calling people up and saying, “Hey, you forgot to come in for your cleaning.” And not many of these people are so thrilled that you called them to remind them. If you're calling to remind them—if you're getting free ice cream—they would be happy. So to give—whatever the right word is—grace to the office team. You know, back in the olden days of 2006, we sent someone to a phone with a book and said, “Call these people. Good luck.” Twenty years later, it's the same people. But it works well, because many of our patients do want to say, “Oh yes, I do want to get my teeth cleaned. Thanks for reminding me.” I mean, it has the very similar thing—when your car place reminds you to get your car serviced, you think, “Well, I don't want my car to break down,” but it's not like the most fun job to have. So when you add in—I think you guys do two things really cool. One is the small financial bonus, and two is you gamify it. And many people just like games—and I like them in general.

Colin Ambler

Yeah, that's right. And like—yeah, reactivating—number one is, like, there's a logistical job there of pulling this list, managing who called who, observing, “I hit the book. I called a million people. Did they come in? Did they not?” Like, you know, there's all these question marks around this. And then number two is—yeah, the staff members—nobody wants to make cold calls in any kind of role. And it's like—to get people to do that—they're just not going to do it because you pay them hourly. I think that's one of these comments that we often get from doctors. It's like, “Why do I have to incentivize someone to do something that I already pay them hourly to do?” And I think the answer is often like, “Well, because it gets results.” If you continue to pay them hourly, they're just not going to make those phone calls, and you won't reactivate those patients.

Rob Montgomery

Yeah, because when you say there's a 70x return—just for example—on reactivation, how far out? How long are you—what kind of tail are you tracking with that? Like, is that just somebody comes in for a visit or two? Or are you looking at this patient who has been reactivated, you know, six months ago or a year ago, is still coming in on a regular basis? When you say 70x, what period are you actually measuring with that?

Colin Ambler

Yeah, great question. So I'll answer that just in maybe a sequence. And Sharon said a lot of these things earlier. One of our recommendations is to make as many reactivation calls as you do hygiene visits. So if you're a practice that sees 500 hygiene patients a month, then you should make 500 phone calls as a rough benchmark. And if you make 500 phone calls, you'll get about a minimum of a 10% return rate from those calls. So you'll get about 50 patients from those calls. And once you say, “Okay, well, I got these 50 patients back in the door,” to your question, Rob—“Well, how much did they yield in return?” We look at it from two sides. Number one is the visit they have when they come back in. When they come back in for the first time, we recognize some level of production from the X-rays, the cleaning, the prophy, the exam. You know, maybe that's something like $100 or $150 worth of production when they came in for that first visit after they got the reactivation call. There was some production there. And then we observe them for 60 days—is our best mark. And we observe, “Okay, did they do a crown? Did they do a root canal? Did they do something in the tail of the next 60 days?” And then we observe that number, and we combine them together. And typically, if you have 50 patients—if you take $1,000—those patients would be $50,000 of production. And it's not quite that. It's maybe $40K or $30K or something like that. We see that very commonly with practices—that they do 300, 400, 500 calls, they get 30, 40, 50 patients. And those 30, 40, 50 patients generate somewhere in $20K, $30K, $40K of production. We see it all the time—and that's a 60-day period.

Paul Goodman

Which is somewhat conservative—even better—because I think that's a super conservative, and you know, positions—what you guys are doing—is even extra awesome, because I think that's a pretty conservative timeline.

Sharon Bleiler

And I think the thing about this is—look, someone has to do it. It's what you said—we used to print out the list. Someone would make a couple calls. The list would go somewhere else. No one knew who called who. Since this is live—no one in the office wants to do it. Now you're incentivizing—but we walk them through it. It's like when you're clicking through something. They get on there. They open the person up on Team Care. A script is there. They make the call. They just have to push a button: Did I get a live person? Did they make an appointment? Did I get a live person? They want me to call them back in a week? I left a voicemail. They get closed out. They go back into the system to be called—whatever you want. It could be two weeks later, a month later—so you're not annoying them, because it's live like that. It's amazing. People leave a voice message all the time, and then maybe the next day—or say someone calls—they all the time, people say to us, “Oh my God, I'm so glad you called. I know I missed that appointment. I couldn't remember even when I was due or what happened.” They make the appointment. Maybe two days later, that person still gets credit. And now you've started this Pavlovian thing where these people are excited to do it. And we have people coming in saying, “Hey, you know, I'm so glad you called me. I haven't been in.” It's really amazing. And it's just one aspect of the thing we do. But it is amazing. Once you start doing it in your office and you're seeing the results and how people feel. People start to be really excited.

Rob Montgomery

Question. So we were talking about reactivation and hygiene visits specifically, but tell me about some of the other metrics that you're tracking. As far as—I think you said, Colin—growing profit, and then growing social reputation. And the growing social reputation—I mean, that's somewhat intuitive—but I am kind of curious about the specifics. Does somebody get incentivized for a four-star review or just five-star reviews? If you could talk to both of those points—so, you know, specifics on social reputation, and then just some generalities on what you're measuring in growing profit.

Colin Ambler

Yeah, sure. There are two areas that we do within incentives in the social world. One of them is around the reviews—and I'll touch on that. And the other one is around social media content—and so I'll touch on that too. But the Google reviews, I think, is something that we do that's really slick. It's always been a difficult thing to try to attribute who was involved in that patient's experience. And we would do this in a very manual way, and then we just evolved through it to do it very automatic. And then it's been just a full feature in the platform that everyone has access to. But the way the mechanics of it are—that Mrs. Jones creates a review on Google, and Mrs. Jones is one of our patients. Mrs. Jones may have just said, “Hey, I had a wonderful experience.” Maybe she didn't mention the hygienist, she didn't mention the doc, she didn't mention anyone's name. She just wrote a five-star review. And so the old-school way to kind of do that would be like, “Okay, let me look up Mrs. Jones. Let me see when she was in the office. Let me see which appointment provider was there. Which hygienist did she see?” I might look in the clinical notes to see who did the exam as a doctor, who did the treatment plan as a front desk. And then I can kind of tie all those things together. And we started to get smart and do that in an automated fashion.

Rob Montgomery

Okay, Sharon, so like, how do you see that playing out when you're boots on the ground in the office with the staff? Like, how are people reacting, and what are they trying to do to enhance those reviews as a result of tracking that?

Sharon Bleiler

I'll say too—from the reviews—first of all, people love it anyway. An email comes through—instead of telling them to track down the review—an email goes into the office immediately. And since everyone has logged into Team Care, they will get something that says, “You got a five-star review,” whether you were mentioned or not. And that just boosts morale right there. It's like, “Oh my gosh,” and it makes people step up and do even better. And that's not even just a financial incentive—that's just like a feel-good. Everyone's being recognized for what they did. One of the other social things we did that Colin's talking about—that is newer to us, that people are loving—is social posting. If they post something about the office on the office site—maybe a patient coming in, or an interesting thing that happened at the office—they're getting incentivized for that. So the social is just blowing up. That's probably our second biggest. The other thing I wanted to talk about real quick is treatment plans—because this is my new favorite. When a treatment plan is presented, we now do it in the room with the patient on an iPad. The patient sees what it is, and it's kind of a click-through version for them to accept. It gets rid of a lot of awkward financial conversations, because stuff is presented right on the iPad if they don't accept. The wonderful thing is—every treatment plan that's written is on Team Care—so they can be looked up. If they were deferred, they can be scheduled later. A doctor can look through it. What we do at our office is—at the end of the day—each doctor sits with one of the treatment plan coordinators and kind of goes over their treatment plans. There are notes in there so that the doctor can say, “Oh, you know, why did this person not accept?” or “What happened here?” It gives them a feeling—they get an idea of what's going on. I feel like a lot of times, associate doctors leave for the day and they have no idea their success or failure rate on what they presented. And they usually don't think it had anything to do with them. It's such a wonderful tool to be teaching the doctors—for the front desk and the doctors to interact. I mean, the whole platform is a lot of teachings too—not just incentives. That really brings the office together—when people are starting to talk about the day-to-day things that are going on that are working and aren't working.

Rob Montgomery

That's really cool. And that's what you would consider—when Colin was talking about the different playbooks—that's the growing profit playbook that you're specifically... Yeah, cool. Well, this is really awesome. I'm glad that you guys were able to come on and talk about Team Care Dental. I was excited hearing about it when we last met, and so hopefully our audience has some great ideas. I mean, obviously, in this day and age of retaining hygienists and staff generally, the old model doesn't necessarily work. So it's really cool to hear what you guys are doing, and the approach that you've taken, and the software and the platform that's available to dentists and practice owners to do it in their own office. If people want to learn more about Team Care Dental, Sharon and Colin—or to get in touch with one of you—how would they go about that?

Sharon Bleiler

We're easy to find—www.teamcaredental.com. We love when you go to our website—you can book a demo. We're very grassroots. You're going to get someone in the dental field. So it could be me and Colin—it could be someone who's run a front desk, another doctor. We'd love to show it to offices—especially people that are struggling with stuff. It just feels really good to see offices rise up. We're all dealing with the same struggles—getting staff, getting good staff, getting them to work. Everything's going up—labs are going up, supplies are going up—and then we're struggling here. And to have the office have that feel-good again and not feel like everyone's just kind of beaten up—it really does pull your whole staff together.

Paul Goodman

It's awesome. It's great. I love it. I'm excited—I was actually texting my team to check it out, because I love things like this. I really appreciate you guys sharing. Learned a lot, and I compliment you on bringing a modern-day approach to a profession that can often be stuck in the Oregon Trail days—if anyone knows that reference to the video games. But I really appreciate it. Thanks.

Sharon Bleiler

We love demos.

Rob Montgomery

Thank you, Sharon. Thanks, Colin. When I ran into Sharon at an event that I was sponsoring not too long ago, she was really enthusiastic about it. And it's understandable. I mean, I'm not in the office, Paul, but it seems like just such an amazing tool to not only incentivize your team, but also to help manage your practice.

Paul Goodman

It's really awesome. I think—you know, dentistry—and I had an awesome dad who was a dentist, but their generation was like, money was a mystery, right? You know, they didn't have any of these KPIs or production goals, and I think that there's a lot of weaknesses to that, because then your team lives in a place of kind of darkness. And it doesn't mean that you have to take your P&L and throw it on the table and say, “This is how much money we make at this office.” But there's a middle ground to say, “Hey, when we don't have enough hygiene patients, that directly impacts all of us, and here's a way for us to get more hygiene patients that you get a reward for too.” And I think it's kind of a perfect middle ground to incentivizing your team with finances that—it sounds like what they described—are more fun than causing friction.

Rob Montgomery

Yeah, yeah. It's just—it's just enhancing the vibe and the culture in the office. And I think too that this is one of these examples of what we're seeing, really, in recent times—that there's so much available and what these things can do versus what they actually cost. You know, it's just—it's amazing. You know, it used to be that if you wanted to put something into your office of this sort, like—it’s just—it’s a six-figure investment to try this. But, you know, these things—they don't cost that much, and they have great return. And it's just one other way to really leverage technology in 2025 in a way that can help your staff be better. Yeah, I'm totally with you—like, a lot. Yeah, thanks. Well, so on that note—since we talked about reviews—you know, I think, yes, Paul, we'd certainly appreciate if our listeners would go on to iTunes or Spotify or wherever they're listening to us and give us a five-star.

Paul Goodman

I'm gonna get myself free Chipotle with your next review, so I'm gonna incentivize myself. So thanks, guys. I appreciate it.

Rob Montgomery

Thanks, everybody.

Bumper  

Thanks for listening to another great podcast with the Dental Amigos. And don't forget to tune in next time to have the dental business demystified. If you're looking for more information about today's podcast, you can find it on the dental amigos.com if you're looking for Paul, you can find Paul at drpaulgoodman.com and if you're looking for Rob, you can find him at yourdentallawyer.com This podcast has been sponsored by Orange Line Media Group, helping dentists and other professionals create content people love. Find out how we can help you take your business to the next level at www.orangelinemg.com. Till next time.

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