So Mark, tell me in 2018 your practice had a good year, revenue-wise, things looking good, right? But it personally wasn't necessarily your favorite year in practice, right?
Right.
So 2018 was a really busy year for us and so as far as the amount of dentistry we did, it was the busiest year that we had had and 11 years of practice. But it wasn't necessarily my happiest. It was chaotic for the staff. You know, it's a lot of teamwork, but it's just, you know, trying to keep your head above water, trying to run on time, trying to have organization and coordination, and it just wasn't working out for us.
So some of the issues, it sounds like you were busy, you had capacity issues, just where do we put the patients, squeezing them in, stress as we all have, but maybe also some role in goal uncertainty, the team not always knowing how to best coordinate to get the job done of a growing practice.
Right.
So I have no business or management experience previously to dentistry, but I had been managing a dental office for 11 years, and I felt like I probably hit a peak where I couldn't really take it much higher with just the knowledge that I had. And I tried hard in 2017 to fix this myself, but I couldn't.
So 2018 I started interviewing a lot of the major practice management companies in America, willing to travel wherever I needed to travel to get the education I needed. But so many of them, they kind of want to string you along and, you know, be your consultant. And, you know, call us when you have a question, we'll hope you solve the problem sort of thing.
And I really wanted the education. I didn't really want a consultant. I wanted somebody that was going to train me on how to run a business, how to manage a business, statistically speaking as well. And so I came across MGE towards the end of 2018 and joined up, signed on and started with MGE in January of 2018.
So how did that so it's only been a few months now. So tell me about how it was implementing their their practices and how did that go over.
Well, so for me, I had a lot of faith in MGE in the beginning and which they've delivered. But when you come back and you're excited about it, your staff's going to be skeptical. Any new idea. Any new idea. Any change that you're going to implement in the office. So they started to fear the worst. You know, there's there's going to be some drama and stuff like that that you have to address.
But I went to work, started implementing the things that I was learning with MGE. And the staff started realizing how much better the practice was. The changes I was making was making their job satisfaction go up significantly.
And the things that they started telling me after a couple of months, maybe even three months into it was, you know, the funny thing is is we're busier now than we were in 2018. But yet it doesn't feel that way. It just feels so much better because the organization, the coordination with the practice is is I mean, we're still making changes, but it is so much better job satisfaction is up for the staff. Patients are getting healthy. So, you know, the practice is doing even better than it ever did last year. But with, you know, people being happy at the practice.
Well, that's a great idea. Patients are getting healthy. That's first and foremost. But I put right up there, you and your team, your mental health is better than it's ever been.
Yeah, we've worked together for a while and we want to continue to work together. And, you know, I don't want people to wake up in the morning and have that feeling and their stomach that they have to go to work. I want them to enjoy going to work and like what they do. We do a better job for patients when we enjoy what we're doing.
And, you know, we're still learning. We're still making changes. My entire staff is coming down and training with MGE. And they're loving it. They like what they learn. And we're going back and we're implementing.
That's great. Congrats, Mark.
Yep. We've come a long ways, but we've we've got a long way still to go too.
