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Ronda Holman: Financial Mistake
114 Plays1 year ago
🔥 Ignite your dental practice with insights from the experts! 🎙️ In this week's episode of Dental Fuel 🔥🚀, Ronda Holman, a seasoned dental assistant with over 24 years of experience, exposes a critical financial mistake - PEOPLE. 🤑 Join us as Ronda explains how your team can be the ultimate asset 💎 or the ultimate demise☠️ of a dental practice. Your dream dental office flourishes when your team exemplifies the values you want your patients to see. Get ready for an eye-opening episode!
Ronda specializes in helping to create the ideal DDS-DA relationship. Empowering dental assistants to continue their education so their chair side skills continue to elevate as they learn why they are doing what they are doing and not just what to do. Once the DA has a firm grasp on the exact needs of their dentist they can bring ease to the complexity of dentistry. Practicing dentistry can be stressful and hard but finding the joy in it becomes much easier when you have a true operative partner. You can find Ronda outside of the treatment room on IgniteDA Instagram and Tiktok. Her influence goes much further than dental assisting with her passion to help recovering oral breathers with over 135k followers on The Airway Champion TikTok account.
Connect with Ignitedds: @ignitedds
Connect with Ronda Holman: @ronda_holman_
Ronda Holman on Tik Tok: The_Airway_Champion
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Transcript
Introduction to Dental Fuel Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Dental Fuel, the podcast that focuses on what no one else is talking about. Mistakes. The dental world is full of before and afters, and no one is talking about the middle. Dental Fuel brings you the unspoken in-between.
Sponsorship by Doctors Disability Specialists
00:00:13
Speaker
Dental Fuel is brought to you by Doctors Disability Specialists, a team dedicated to helping dentists and physicians with disability insurance, life insurance, and comprehensive business planning. Dental assistants can make financial mistakes? Of course they can.
Financial Mistakes in Dentistry
00:00:27
Speaker
Rhonda Holman talks about her financial mistake in this episode. But speaking on finances that you also mentioned here a little bit earlier, the stark difference like you mentioned between the debt that a dental assistant likely doesn't have compared to that of a practicing dentist is huge. What financial decisions have you made in your life that were a huge mistake?
00:00:49
Speaker
Or what mistakes have you seen clinicians make financially that you feel that we could all learn from? Actually, that's great. Let's see. I have so many. It's almost hard to point out financial mistakes.
00:01:05
Speaker
A lot of dental assistants, I mean, this is probably, it's outside the office usually. We tend to have like side gigs, you know, to compensate, offset some of the cost. And sometimes I've seen, it hasn't happened to me, but that doesn't mean it won't. I don't think it will. It hasn't. And I'm pretty aware of
Challenges of Personal Sales for Dental Assistants
00:01:25
Speaker
it. Anyways, you see these lines being crossed in the office. So let's say you are approached to be an ambassador of some type of dental related product.
00:01:35
Speaker
And they say, hey, you get a commission if you sell XXX product. And then you're like, oh, you know, I'm in dentistry. Like I have a basic knowledge of oral hygiene. And then somewhere along the line, you get so comfortable in the sales tactic that you end up bringing it into your dentist office.
00:01:54
Speaker
And you say, hey, you know, I was like, they've got this toothpaste, but I also have a link for this other toothpaste. And that's, it's awful. Like you cannot mix the two because I don't know if it's an education level issue or just the basic knowledge of like how business is run. And so I haven't had that happen personally, but I have seen it where the lines get blurred. Like people will promote products that their business doesn't actually offer.
00:02:23
Speaker
because they brought in their side business as like, I'm here, they're a captive audience, let's talk about this toothpaste. And so I've seen people lose their jobs over that. And it's now, I think more than ever, because of all these affiliate marketing things and dental assistants are looking to stay a dental assistant, but they want to offset the living costs.
Compensation and Education for Dental Assistants
00:02:46
Speaker
I myself, I had three jobs when I was a brand new dental assistant outside of the military. So I would work and I restored a practice like general restorative practice during the day. And then I would waitress at night. And then I worked at a movie store on the weekends. So I had three jobs.
00:03:04
Speaker
I mean, granted I didn't have a husband or children at the time, but that kept me comfortable. When you first start dental assisting, depending on what state you're in, and that's where that whole regulation thing comes in, I was making $11 an hour. If I didn't love what I did, I could have made $2 to $3 more at a fast food restaurant. I think for dentists, that's something that they forget.
00:03:28
Speaker
is you're asking someone to learn a lot, to do a lot, to give a lot, and then know that there's financial opportunities that are more abundant and jobs that make them think less. And so that is a hard thing to wrap your head around as a dentist. I'm not a dentist, but I've been around enough of you guys that I see that being a fundamental glitch in the matrix, is understanding that I did have to sacrifice
00:03:57
Speaker
You know, if you want me to be better, like, you have to compensate for that. I mean, I hate to say it's like you pay for what you get, but if I see the new shiny thing next door and nobody's investing in my education, I think that's the easiest way to do it, is to literally do the CE thing.
Investing in Dental Assistant Education
00:04:15
Speaker
Like, take me to a CE, put me on a plane with you, put me in a hotel, make me feel like you've invested in my education and my future so that we can be better together.
00:04:26
Speaker
And that, that honestly is like the biggest game changer needle mover for a lot of dentists when they don't want attrition anymore. They want to find a core team that will stay with them till the end. And there are, like you said, there's programs and stuff to learn about how to be a better leader, but it's the people are the asset. At the end of the day, the people are the asset.
Proving Worth through Metrics
00:04:50
Speaker
You could have the shiniest chair. You could have all the prettiest bells and whistles in your office. It's super aesthetic. You have all the tech. But if your people are rotten or bad or not the image that you want to portray to your ideal patient base,
00:05:06
Speaker
You're treading water. You're never going to be happy. Yes, I think it's so important to build a team that will help model the vision that you would like to see in your practice, and to do that compensation obviously will definitely help. On the flip, I think that we have heard a lot of stories of assistants, maybe especially from the newer generation of those who are just coming out, asking for a very high number. Oh gosh, yeah, they don't know their worth. What are your thoughts on that?
00:05:35
Speaker
Um, I, yeah, I, so I'm a mentor to a lot of dental assistants, right? And so they'll come to me and I'm, I'm very straight shooter. I'm like, dude, I've been doing this a long time. You have to put on paper what you bring to the office.
00:05:48
Speaker
And I'm not talking about like smiles and hugs. What, how many bleaching trays did you sell last week? How many gloves did you not change by getting up and down? Like look, if you want metrics, like if you want more money, show me where you're making me money or saving me money. And that is a thing that I think all dental assistants can grasp that concept. I always tell people, I'm like, pretend it's your practice.
00:06:16
Speaker
Pretend you're the one paying for that box of gloves. Pretend you're the one who has to pay for that denture to be remade if you drop it while you're cleaning it. Right, yep, put yourself in the perspective of
Contribution Tracking Challenges
00:06:27
Speaker
the dentist. And that can be something every new dentist, age-seasoned dentist, whoever puts in their manual, their job description. I want you to understand the basics of a small business.
00:06:41
Speaker
Or even, I mean, this could be group, PPO, it doesn't matter. I think all of us at the end of the day want to take home more than we spend inside the practice. And there's ways to tweak that. It's just you as the dentist, you have to set the bar. I expect my assistant to know the cost of running this place when the lights are out. Great perspective.
00:07:06
Speaker
great perspective just overall I think that you know we want to compensate our assistants and show them that they are valued but it's the landscape has just been really challenging as of late but it's great to see both sides and I think that that's wonderful advice to give to assistant to bring those metrics and say hey like this is this is what I bring to the table this is how I am helping you
00:07:28
Speaker
Help me out a little bit. And we don't have that same ability like you can with hygiene. You can track what comes out of their room. But me, I'm floating between up three, up four, up five, who knows what I said to who that made them decide to do this or that.
00:07:43
Speaker
Yeah, that's harder to gauge. Yeah, I mean, if you are deserving of financial compensation, you have to prove it regardless of the industry that you're in. So, dentistry wouldn't be any different. Absolutely. Even for associates, that's the same kind of thing.
00:08:00
Speaker
Yep.
Preview of Next Episode
00:08:01
Speaker
Be sure to tune in to our next episode where Rhonda talks about a team mistake that her and her team have made. You can find Rhonda on TikTok at the underscore airway underscore champion. You can also find her and the advice she gives to dental assistants on Instagram at Ignite Dental Assistance. You can follow Ignite DDS at Ignite DDS, and you can find me on Instagram at tsmiasdas.dds. Be sure to check out our sponsor, Doctors Disability Specialists.