Ask George: Why Team Led Dental Practice Management Boosts Dental Practice Profitability
Shared Practices | Your Dental Roadmap through Practice Ownership
Dr. George Hariri | Shared Practices Network
4.9 • 559 Ratings
🗓️ 21 July 2025
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, George Hariri and Richard Low explore the transition from "muscling" your practice to achieving true team-led success. If you are a burnt-out clinician, your dental practice management strategy needs an immediate overhaul. Stop stepping in to solve every operational problem and start building the infrastructure necessary to empower your staff.
To achieve sustainable dental practice growth, George and Richard introduce the "Crawl, Walk, Run" framework for developing leaders within your office:
- Crawl (Clarity): Provide ultra-clarity with detailed checklists, scorecards, and clearly defined roles so your team knows exactly what "good" looks like.
- Walk (Delegation): Install a strong Office Manager to enforce accountability and handle recurring day-to-day operations so the dentist does not have to.
- Run (Self-Managing): Evolve into a self-managing team capable of downstream decision-making, including hiring, training, and onboarding new staff without the owner's input.
They also discuss why you should only promise career growth based on the "adjacent possible" six months out, rather than making unkeepable long-term promises. Finally, they explain why losing a toxic team member—while temporarily disruptive—almost always leads to better dental business strategies and a stronger culture on the other side. Master these steps to truly level up your dental practice ownership.
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 back to another episode of the Shared Practices podcast. |
| 0:07.1 | And you would think if I'm getting the episode started that Richard would not be here. |
| 0:11.7 | However, Richard, what's going on? |
| 0:14.3 | I'm here. We're just switching roles. You're just running the show. |
| 0:17.4 | I think you've always looked good with leadership, the more empowered you are. |
| 0:21.4 | So I'm like, you know what? I'm going to let George do what he does best, which is lead the meetings. |
| 0:25.7 | Actually, honestly, the other day I was thinking, I remember sometime in the last year you were talking |
| 0:29.9 | about how you've thought a lot about how to run efficient meetings. And I'm like, I need to take |
| 0:34.7 | your brain about that. And maybe there's a whole episode in that because there's lessons from the corporate world of meetings that I think dentists could probably use in their practice. But we're just having a meeting, George, and you're leading right now. All right. Well, you know, in our episode today, you know, and I think for me, you know, I want to make sure that everyone listening gets a ton of value. And so, you know, in the episode today, what we're going to talk about is team leadership, creating infrastructure, putting systems in place, and empowering your team to have what we call team-led success. And so this is something that, for example, in the marketing department that I oversee, we're working on. |
| 1:11.3 | And, you know, I have a vice president who's very, you know, involved in the leadership of the team. |
| 1:15.7 | And we're working on what we call like team-led success, team-led growth. |
| 1:20.3 | And I think it's an extremely relevant topic because dentists, I think, early in their careers, able to muscle their way to success and you do an |
| 1:30.3 | extra good job presenting that treatment plan or your team members aren't the best at putting |
| 1:35.2 | things in place for you to be as efficient as possible, but you kind of fill in for their weaknesses. |
| 1:39.4 | You know, we call that doctors muscling the practice to success. And there's a shift that occurs when that's kind of |
| 1:47.0 | exhausting. So there's a shift that occurs where you have team-led success, where you're more |
| 1:52.5 | passive in your leadership and your team is the one really doing a lot of the muscling. And it's a |
| 1:58.0 | lot easier because you can multiply yourself through other people and you can distribute that load amongst many. |
| 2:04.1 | And so, you know, what we want to talk about today is really this whole concept. |
| 2:07.5 | That's sort of my introduction. |
| 2:08.7 | And so Richard, you know, maybe as our listener here, you know, what types of questions do you think they're asking? |
| 2:13.1 | You know, where should we really focus our time and how can we really bring this concept to light? |
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