Ask George: Is Your Perfectionism Killing Your Dental Practice Management?
Shared Practices | Your Dental Roadmap through Practice Ownership
Dr. George Hariri | Shared Practices Network
4.9 • 559 Ratings
🗓️ 29 December 2025
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Are you the primary force rolling every "boulder" up the hill in your office? In this insightful Ask George episode, George and Richard explore why building leaders is the non-negotiable secret to exponential growth and true leverage. Most future owners struggle with the transition from clinician to CEO because they fear the "drop-off" in quality when delegating. However, effective dental practice management requires a team-led approach where you empower others to perform tasks at 80% of your capacity so you can focus on your zone of genius.
We dive deep into the hierarchy of leadership, from the essential role of an Office Manager to the strategic deployment of Lead Assistants and Lead Hygienists. George introduces the A/B/C task audit—a powerful framework for identifying your highest-value "A" tasks while offloading energy-draining "C" tasks to team members who actually enjoy them. This shift isn't just about giving orders; it’s about fostering a "sense of ownership" where your team cares about results (like reappointment rates) as much as you do.
You’ll learn the "Document, Demonstrate, Observe" system for error-proofing your delegation and why the cost of a team member's mistake is actually a necessary investment in your associate to owner transition. Whether you are refining your dental growth strategies or preparing for dental business ownership, this episode provides the survival guide for building a culture of accountability and purpose. Stop being the bottleneck and start building the leverage required for a high-income, high-freedom practice.
Ready to take the next step in your dental practice journey? Visit https://sharedpractices.com to learn more about our Buyer Representation and Coaching services, designed to help dentists buy, grow, and optimize profitable practices. You can also use our Free Look to evaluate dental practice opportunities with real data before making a decision. For daily Dental Moneyball insights, strategy tips, and updates, follow us across our social channels.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the shared practices podcast. This is an episode of Ask George, and we are going to talk about |
| 0:10.1 | real stuff. These are just my favorite episodes because we are always pat ourselves on the |
| 0:16.4 | on the back by the end of it. Like, how are we still podcasting about this and still pulling out |
| 0:20.7 | gems that are new, that our audience hasn't heard? So a little self-congratulary at the beginning |
| 0:26.7 | and self-indulgent. I apologize for that, but I'm excited. Yeah, absolutely. And I think we're talking |
| 0:30.9 | about a topic today that I would think a lot of our audience needs, which is this idea of building |
| 0:36.0 | leaders in your practice. You know, I had a really |
| 0:38.7 | good analogy once told to me about the process of case acceptance, where case acceptance is like |
| 0:44.6 | rolling a ball up a hill. And you got to get the patient aware of the concern. That's a push. |
| 0:51.1 | Then you've got to get them to understand what happens if they do nothing. That's another push. Then you've got to get them to understand what happens if they do nothing. That's |
| 0:54.6 | another push. Then you've got to get them kind of clear on the financial and the treatment process |
| 0:59.3 | of moving forward with treatment. That's another push up the hill. And all of this is to get the ball |
| 1:04.8 | to the top of the hill where they say yes. And then the ball starts rolling down. You collect payment, |
| 1:10.0 | you do treatment, you bill to insurance, and then, you know, we're done with that procedure. And there was this analogy where it's like every patient, you know, if you're checking for two hygienists, you're seeing 16 patients a day and, you know, maybe 40% of them, you got to roll that ball up the hill. If the dentist is doing all of the work and is making the patient aware and talking about all of the |
| 1:29.5 | steps required for the patient to say yes, it is going to be exhausting and ultimately you're going to do |
| 1:36.0 | less. And the same thing is for practice growth. To grow a practice, there's many balls that need to go up |
| 1:41.3 | the hill. And there's procedures that you need to hold teams accountable for. There's training that needs to happen. There's, there's all types of stuff |
| 1:48.2 | that needs to occur on the management side to effectively run and grow your business. And so I want |
| 1:53.3 | to extract that same mentality for our episode today, which is, I think dentists a lot of the |
| 1:58.6 | times have a hard time delegating to their teams |
| 2:01.1 | and empowering their teams because they don't do it as well as the dentist does, right? |
| 2:07.3 | And so it's hard to let go or to pass off. |
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