Our guest this week Dr. William Walden, a graduate of the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville School Of Dentistry. Awarded a Fellowship in the Dental Organization for Conscious Sedation and currently practicing in Paducah, Kentucky.
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Host: Ladies and Gentleman! This is the Dental Up Podcast brought to you by Keating Dental Lab, a full-service, award-winning dental laboratory. Each week, you’ll learn tips and techniques from real world dentists, bringing your in depth interviews, motivating stories, current events, and sports. Here’s your host, Shaun Keating.
Shaun Keating: Hey everyone! Shaun here! Welcome to another episode of the Dental Up Podcast. Our guest this week is a graduate of the University of Kentucky and the University of Louisville School of Dentistry. Awarded a fellowship in the Dental Organization for Conscious Sedation and practice in from Paducah, Kentucky, please welcome Dr. William Walden, DDS. How’s it going Dr. Walden?
Dr. Walden: It’s going great, Shaun. Thanks for having me on.
Shaun Keating: Aw man, thank you so much dude. I know how busy you are and I know we don’t have a whole lot of time today. You’re squeezing me in between patients but dude man, thank you so much and I always like to start off talking a little bit about sports and I know you’re a Ram fan and you kind of were bummed that they left you there in St. Louis but you’re a Ram fan for sure. We got them out here now. What do you think about them this year? You still going to pull for the Rams or no?
Dr. Walden: Absolutely! They signed a lot of their players and they’ve got some new players and of course they had a new coach last year and I think they’re going to be exciting if they can get Donald signed. So yeah, I’m hoping for the best.
Shaun Keating: Yeah. They just signed Gurley to a big contract like 60 minute but yeah. Donald man, they don’t got him signed yet but I think they will but it’s just great to have them back. They’re kind of an exciting team with the new quarterback and just they got some of those [inaudible 00:01:54] from, I think he came from Miami but he was real big in Detroit and then a couple cornerbacks but yeah, we’re excited and it just starts today. In Irvine, we have UC Irvine they’re practice, preseason practice here now so it’s just right around the corner so as soon as I get done with my little podcast with you, I’m going to drive on down and take my tie off and roll my sleeves up and go watch a practice here so we’re-
Dr. Walden: Oh! That sounds wonderful!
Shaun Keating: Yeah! We’re excited for sure, man!
Dr. Walden: I’m ready for football but I’m a big fan of St. Louis Cardinal baseball fan and their season’s not doing too well.
Shaun Keating: Yeah.
Dr. Walden: So I’m ready for football now.
Shaun Keating: Oh, I bet you! And you know it’s hard to believe that a week from today, I think we got the Bears and the Raven’s next Thursday starting off preseason football man. So it’s already amongst us so it’ll give us something to do to go hit the pizza parlor or our own little man caves or a lot of us have our football rituals but I get excited when football comes around. I just love. I run my dang dental lab like a football team. I mean, I just … I do. I got my front office. I got my defensive backs. I got my quarterbacks, special teams and I grew up playing football. It’s how I run my business and I’ve been doing it for 33 years in the field. I just kind of learned a lot with teamwork, commitment. You’re only as strong as your weakest link, the whole thing. But it’s kind of weird but it works for me and I love it but what about you and like high school, what sports did you do and tell me a little bit about that?
Dr. Walden: I played football. I was a quarterback on the football team. Shaun Keating: Yeah.
Dr. Walden: I played baseball, basketball, ran track, and so yeah. I was a good athlete but not a great athlete but I loved it. I was fast. I could run fast so-
Shaun Keating: Yeah.
Dr. Walden: Yeah. We talk about teamwork. You know football, one player can’t win a championship, can’t win a game, and that’s an awesome team sport and so many people, after you leave football, whether you don’t play in college or after that, you miss it.
Shaun Keating: Yeah.
Dr. Walden: Because it’s such a great team sport and everybody has to work in harmony.
Shaun Keating: Yes.
Dr. Walden: Much like a dental practice.
Shaun Keating: Absolutely. I remember my coach always saying, “We have to be a cohesive unit! A cohesive unit!” I didn’t even know what cohesive meant back then but it’s like we all work together. We all win together. We all lose together. It’s a great thing and I just-
Dr. Walden: I’m turning and looking on my wall right now. There’s a picture of Vince Lombardi and it says, “What it takes to be number one.” And so sometimes for self-motivation and sort of keep you pumping, I’ll read Vince’s speech there and it’s great.
Shaun Keating: Oh yeah. He’s just fricking … a legend for sure. And I remember I used to always wear the shirt, “Football doesn’t build character. It reveals it” and so it’s kind of
neat. It’s done us well through the years. I got some aches and pains from it but it was from … I did too. I did the basketball, baseball, track, and I was actually in gymnastics too, believe it or not. I did that for fours and my older brothers all did gymnastics so I was big high bar man and vaulting but that was a few pounds ago. I couldn’t do any of that stuff nowadays. I think of it now and I was like, “That’s crazy doing double back flips off that high bar” and I didn’t know how to land them but I did it every time. I just had balls and went for it so I see some of my guys at my reunions and they go, “Man, you’re the craziest dude in gymnastics!” and “Oh! We just watch you in amazement!” And I’m like, “Yeah, I just really didn’t know what I was doing but I went for it.”
Shaun Keating: Well, cool man. Let’s Dental Up now, Dr. Walden. Now, tell me, why did you get into dentistry and at what point did you think, “I want to be a dentist?”
Dr. Walden: I didn’t grow up thinking necessarily when I was younger that I was wanting to be a dentist. I knew I wanted to do something in the healthcare field. Go to medical school, dental school, do something like that. And I was at the University of Kentucky and my roommate was wanting to go to dental school and so after my second year there, I said, “You know, I’m going to go head and put an application in and see what happens.” So I put it in, they took me, and off I went. I got it early and so … in dental school, I did the research with the cancer program in the medical school and we were dealing with some head and neck tumors and doing some essays on that. I did that for two summers ’cause I needed to have some spending money for my dates and stuff like that. I think they paid me a $1,000 each summer.
Dr. Walden: But anyway, so I was thinking about med school and graduated from dental school and I went to Europe with about six people. We … I had a little bit of money left over from my student loan and you took your board exams and you didn’t know if you passed or not for about six weeks so we went over there and I got over and got chilled out and said, “You know, I think I’m ready to go start.” And so that was before my senior year. I had to work with a dentist and came back to Paducah and worked with him and he told me he said, “If you want to come back just let me know.” He said, “I’m busy enough. We can keep you busy.” So I got back from Europe and I called him and said, “I think I want to put my [inaudible 00:07:09] and go to work.”
Dr. Walden: So I didn’t actually work for him. He was in a building that he could knock out … we knocked out a wall and I put me an offertory in and paid for it and I got my own employee and did that for about three months and then another dentist called me and said that he was going back prosthodontist school and wanted to know if I wanted to take over his practice and so I went and met with him and then sure enough, in February of 1984, I moved out and took over his practice and he stayed there three or four months until he went to school and the previous owners of the practice had been two brother and they had been practicing there for about 40, since the 40’s, 40’s and 50’s.
Shaun Keating: No kidding!
Dr. Walden: So it was an old practice and it needed a lot of work and so I worked hard but I didn’t have a passion. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I didn’t have a mentor and so in 1995, I feel like I’m just spinning my wheels, and I saw this about a dental boot kamp, Walter Hailey.
Shaun Keating: Okay.
Dr. Walden: And I signed up to go to dental boot kamp in January of 1995 and I remember the course was $2,500.
Shaun Keating: Oh geez.
Dr. Walden: And I was the local rotary president and their annual conference was going to be in Nice, France.
Shaun Keating: Oh geez.
Dr. Walden: And I wanted to take my wife and go there kind of as a second honeymoon but I said I can’t do both and so I thought, “Well for $2500, neither one of us are going to make any money and make me happy or one is just going to give me a vacation” so I signed up for the dental bootcamp and I put it on a credit card and paid it over three months and it was dental bootcamp on the road. It was in St. Louis and we got there for the weekend and I said, “If I’m spending $2,500, I’m going to sit on the front and get all the information I can.”
Shaun Keating: That’s cool.
Dr. Walden: And my wife went with me. She sat on the back row and so I was sitting next to a dentist from St. Louis and we sit together all weekend and he was 10, 15 years older than me and he just kind of took me under his arm and said, “You’re going to do great. You’ve just got to [inaudible 00:09:12]. You’ve got to do what they pay you to do.” So I listened to Mack Lee and Walter Hailey and Jolene Jackson all weekend and I bought Mack Lee’s tapes he had on periodontal disease and being an older practice, we probed few teeth. We took bitewings and that was about it.
Shaun Keating: No kidding?
Dr. Walden: And so I think about and I say, “I’ve got to get in gear here” and so I started doing what they were telling me and started trying to develop some verbal skills and then I said I signed up to go to another boot camp and take some staff members and the dentist that I met in St. Louis, he was a client of Jim and Susanne Du Molin out in Tiburon, California, and so Jim contacted me and wanted to know if I would be interested in their services and he sent me a package of information. He called me a week later and said, “Well, how did you
like my information I sent you?” I said, “Oh, it’s wonderful, Mr. Du Molin.” I said, “This is exactly what I need to get a financial plan, get someone to take a look at my practice.” And he said … I said, “I would like to do it next year.” I said, “I’m still paying for my boot kamp.”
Dr. Walden: He had the verbal skills that I didn’t have and he said, “Well, we don’t want money to get in the way of what you want.” He said, “If we can find a way to get the money out of the question and work it into your budget, do you think that’s what you want to?” I said, “Absolutely.” So we financed it over a years time.
Shaun Keating: That’s awesome.
Dr. Walden: And so he said, “Okay, here’s what you need to do. I’ve got two hygiene consultant groups. I want you to call each one of them and they’re going to want all of your practice numbers of how many patients you see, how many [inaudible 00:10:53] you do, how many new patient exams.” And so I did that and so I ended up picking one of the hygiene consultants. That’s another
$15,000.
Shaun Keating: Oh geez.
Dr. Walden: And they finance it through GE Capital Paracredit for about three years.
Shaun Keating: Yep.
Dr. Walden: But that was one of the best things I ever did.
Shaun Keating: Oh yeah.
Dr. Walden: And they came into my office and they set us up as a total team approach where you’ve got to have the hygiene program where you’re doing complete exams, probings, and it starts with the hygiene and then they helped develop the restorative side of the practice and we continued going to the boot camps. I got into a couple of mastermind groups and the next fall, I went to the Du Molin’s annual meeting out in Tiburon and so I was there meeting a bunch of dentists from California and they were talking about, “Oh, we’re going down to Baylor here and going to Bill Dickerson and doing a veneer course.”
Shaun Keating: No kidding.
Dr. Walden: I said, “Who’s Bill Dickerson?” They were talking about all this stuff and then I realized, “Man, I don’t know anything. I’ve got to get with it.”
Shaun Keating: Yeah.
Dr. Walden: So sure enough, I went and listened to … I went and heard Dickerson in St. Louis and then I went David Hornbrook’s Over the Shoulder program.
Shaun Keating: Yeah.
Dr. Walden: And this time, Hornbrook and Dorfman and Dickerson all kind of split up and they formed formed PAC-live out in the University of the Pacific in San Francisco so I took my team and patient and we went out there and had a prep weekend and learned so much and then came back a month later. Again, this is one of those things, you know, I had some credit card debt.
Shaun Keating: Yeah.
Dr. Walden: But my practice started transforming. We got into sedation dentistry and that really was a big kicker for my practice. We started … we got into the radio marketing for sedation and so then we started getting a different type of client community. In Kentucky, we lead a nation with people with dentures.
Shaun Keating: No kidding?
Dr. Walden: So we get so many people that come in and they’ve got 15, 20 rotten teeth and they need so much work and their high fear and this sedation brought them to me.
Shaun Keating: No kidding?
Dr. Walden: And so my practice was starting to transform and the more I did this, the more I realized I’ve got to get more training. These sedation patients, they want you do the root canals for them. They want you to do the extractions. So I had to go do more root canal training. I had to do surgical course where I can get up stuff and so as we’re doing this, we were adding chairs, more hygienists, and eventually, I moved out to a new office in November of 2000.
Shaun Keating: Okay.
Dr. Walden: And that’s where I am now. Well, we’ve got eight offertories and four hygienists and two dentists.
Shaun Keating: Oh, that’s so cool!
Dr. Walden: And so in the last 5 to 10 years, we’ve moved into implants and we’re getting training with the implants and it’s great here in Kentucky because like I said, we’ve have so many … much dental need.
Shaun Keating: Yeah.
Dr. Walden: And of course, you know, just because we have dental needs doesn’t mean they’re going to do what you tell them to do.
Shaun Keating: Yeah.
Dr. Walden: They’ve got to want to do it and you’ve got to have the verbal skills. And so my staff and I, we’ve had the communication skills through the boot camps and the crown counsels and I’ve been out to John Kois’ program ’cause he was continuing them in Seattle and you know that’s what I would tell any young dentist that you need to … you’ve got a lot of knowledge when you come out of school but you need to go and get the advanced training.
Shaun Keating: You know, I like the way you’ve done your practice management and your CE talked a little bit about Kois. Tell me a little bit about the CE, some of the CE have done and what you kind of recommend out there.
Dr. Walden: After I got a bunch of the boot kamps and realized I didn’t know anything, then I had to go take Kip Wither’s endomagic.
Shaun Keating: Yeah, right.
Dr. Walden: Went and did that. Went to the manufacturers courses. Shaun Keating: Beautiful.
Dr. Walden: We went did the PAC-live program with David Hornbrook. Went out and … went to John Kois. Went through his entire curriculum out there. And John is such a great teacher. Everything is researched based and I just can’t say enough about going to John Kois.
Shaun Keating: Yeah. He’s great.
Dr. Walden: And he really is and-
Shaun Keating: We actually had him at my lab here man. I had him and I paid for him personally to come on out here to my lab and we had a 100 doctor’s sign up to come watch him and it was an all day course and that dude, he started at like 7 am and went to like 5, 6 o’clock and he wanted to keep going and I’m like, “No, dude. Come on, man! That’s good! Let’s go eat.” And he’s like, he’s such a humble … he’s so humble.
Dr. Walden: Did some of you tech go out to his course out in Seattle?
Shaun Keating: Yeah. We’ve got them. My general manager and one of my senior Cerma’s they kind of went out and got accredited through … they’re going through the whole thing and he actually … they go on his boat and everything. It’s quite the-
Dr. Walden: Yeah, oh his boat, yeah. Oh that’s fun. Shaun Keating: Yeah.
Dr. Walden: I even took my dad with me one time and my friend Lexington, Dr. Tony Feck who he is one of the doc’s teachers and he had summarized dental solutions he’s kind of … we’re kind of good friends and we take a lot of courses together and so we kind of went out and did about two courses a year and then took three or four years to go through the curriculum and oh we loved going on the boat. I love boating.
Shaun Keating: Oh, that’s so cool.
Dr. Walden: So my dad, he likes boating, and so I took him out there with me one time and they let him pilot the boat. He has his captain’s license.
Shaun Keating: Oh, you’re kidding?
Dr. Walden: But it’s intense. You start at 7am and you go to 5pm.
Shaun Keating: Yeah. It’s non-stop and like I’m not really good when it comes to that stuff and I’m trying to watch and listen in front of all these dentists and man, it just kind of goes right over your head a little bit for some of us knuckleheads but it’s amazing.
Dr. Walden: Right? Some people try go to do it all at once. They’ll stay for a whole week and take two course and then come back and do it real quick but I found for me, I needed to kind of absorb it and go back and practice it some before I came back and did some more. And so my daughter, now that she’s out of school. She’s done her GPR. She’s got her sedation permit. She placed some implants while she was in her GPR but now she knows she needs … got to get out and learn the other stuff so she’s going to go to Pankey or-
Shaun Keating: Dawson?
Dr. Walden: McCoy-
Shaun Keating: Yep, yep.
Dr. Walden: Or STEER or Dawson and do the Over the Shoulder programs and actually takes some patience because it takes doing that.
Shaun Keating: Oh yeah.
Dr. Walden: You come out of school you don’t know how to do a full mouth rehab and you’ve got to get that training.
Shaun Keating: Yep.
Dr. Walden: Sometimes dentists have to … we have to … you come out of school and you’ve got a pretty good ego. You’ve got all this knowledge and you worked hard for
four years and you think you know everything but you’ve got to sit that aside and realize that you don’t. And I remember Walter Hailey said, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” And I think that’s what happened with me. It was about 10 years before I was ready.
Shaun Keating: Yeah.
Dr. Walden: And now I’m just kind of [inaudible 00:18:17] and-
Shaun Keating: That’s awesome. You did a lot of education and I remember one of your old partners, Scott Bridges man. He’s a great guy but he always talked so highly of you. I mean, just it was always education, education. Let’s do these courses and you know, look, it’s paying off. I mean, you guys got some many cases in this lab right now and it’s from all aspects. I mean, you got implants, you got dentures, you got high aesthetic cases. We’ve got full upper, lower rehabs that we’re doing. I got one right now. I think we did all the wax ups and I think we’re building the lower up first and then we’ll cement those and then I think we’re doing the upper and so man, my hat’s off to you and it just it takes some time in the trenches and you know … go ahead.
Dr. Walden: The funny thing about dentistry, Shaun, is that we’re able to do a lot of different avenues of dentistry. We get to do the full mouth rehabs and there’s different ways of doing rehabs. You can rehab them with the dentures and implants.
Shaun Keating: Yep.
Dr. Walden: And in Kentucky, we have a lot of people with dentures. So we do … we stabilize the dentures with implants if they can and we use the narrow diameter implants, what they call mini implants.
Shaun Keating: Yep.
Dr. Walden: They work on a lot of people and we use the root floor implants and we’ve a … we’ll do four implants or six implants, whatever we have to do.
Shaun Keating: Exactly.
Dr. Walden: But we’ll do the root canals. We’ll do the veneers. And so it makes it nice to able to all types of dentistry and with so much dental need here in Kentucky that we’re able to do change a lot of lives.
Shaun Keating: I bet. It’s just … where did you get any of your education on sinking implants?
Anyone in particular?
Dr. Walden: Well, with our mini implants, we had a mastermind group I was in, we had Todd Shatkin who was … he’s got his own company now.
Shaun Keating: Yeah.
Dr. Walden: Which is Shatkin First … he actually did a private training for our mastermind group he had it up Philadelphia for us.
Shaun Keating: Okay.
Dr. Walden: And Scott and I both went to that. So that was kind of a starter and then you know, I’ve been to different seminars and stuff but then we went to Bicon program. We were in Bicon … my partner and I were up in Bicon this spring.
Shaun Keating: Okay.
Dr. Walden: At their program. Bicon’s a … they’re a first class outfit. We’re impressed with them. We did Osteoready with Brady Frank and Tony Feck. Bihorizon’s, we like that implant system. So for different situations, we like different systems and that’s nice. It’s not a one all … one fits all. My daughter and I and her mother in law, who’s a dentist in Chicago, we’re going to Zurich, Switzerland in September doing a course up there that my daughter’s mother in law, she’s in a study club in Chicago and the entire study club’s going.
Shaun Keating: Oh, how cool is that? That’s really getting after it man. I love it!
Dr. Walden: Yeah.
Shaun Keating: I think the Switzerland thing-
Dr. Walden: Shaun, you know, that’s what keeps young. That’s one thing having a young partner and a daughter that’s a dentist. They keep me going.
Shaun Keating: Aw man. And you look young. You look like a little Hollywood star like you’re on TV, man.
Dr. Walden: Yeah.
Shaun Keating: And from what I hear, you’re all over the radio and TV. Is that … tell me a little bit about your marketing strategy. You kind of do a little bit of everything. Tell me a little bit about that.
Dr. Walden: We have a local NBC affiliate here in Paducah and they used to have a noon call- in show that asked questions and it was live and so I did a segment on there for a couple of years and then when they decided to make some changes, my father was saying, “You know, that’s been really good. People look at you as an expert. You’ve been on this noon news show” and so we came up and did the dental health update with Dr. William Walden as a 30 second spot. It was kind of like the old Dr [inaudible 00:22:22] Lee on NBC.
Shaun Keating: Yeah.
Dr. Walden: And we’d have a … we’d say, “Okay, if you have a tooth and it’s … you’ve knocked your teeth out, here’s what you need to do. You need to do this, this, and this. And call your dentist.” I didn’t tell them to call me. I said, “Always call your dentist.” And so we had about eight or nine of these different 30 second spots and we rotated those through and then in 2000, 2001, I had patient who was a local producer, did his own stuff, and he said, “Would you ever want to do some commercials?” And I said, “Sure.” So we got a series of commercials going ’cause I had done radio with the sedation.
Shaun Keating: Okay.
Dr. Walden: I can still remember the opening sentence and it went, “If going to the dentist is your greatest fear, you need to know you’re not alone. I’m Dr. Will Walden” and those were a minute commercials and those were tremendous for us.
Shaun Keating: Oh, I bet.
Dr. Walden: But the radio kind of slowed up and we got into TV and then we’ve a … I did direct mail. I was client of Jim Du Molin’s out in Tiburon and Chrisad is located in Marin County out and we used Chrisad marketing.
Shaun Keating: Okay.
Dr. Walden: Which is direct mail which is not quite as effective in our area. We’re kind of boundaried by the Ohio river and you cross the river. But just last spring, my partner and I went out and we shot two different infomercials with Randy Alvarez and those have been working really well.
Shaun Keating: Yeah.
Dr. Walden: We’re running both of those right now and they’re geared more towards implants and sedations and the amazing thing people come in thinking they want an implant but it may be they are doing a fixing a bridge or [inaudible 00:24:06] a bridge or partial so they may not be a candidate for the implant but you do have the dentistry too so that’s been very effective for us.
Shaun Keating: Oh, that’s so cool. And Randy Alvarez. I know him. He’s a big guy, big TV personality out here so yeah man, you’re doing a lot of stuff with our California boys out here man. That’s awesome. That’s just so cool.
Dr. Walden: But it makes it exciting. You know, there’s one thing about you can tell young dentist that are coming out of school, a dentist wears so many different hats.
Shaun Keating: Yep.
Dr. Walden: You work side by side with your dental assistants so you’re a co-worker but yet, at the same time, you’re a manager and then you’re a leader.
Shaun Keating: Absolutely.
Dr. Walden: So just to be able to put all that together it takes a lot of work and you’ve got have some professional people. We have different people that have an employee handbook. So it’s not just doing the dentistry-
Shaun Keating: Yep.
Dr. Walden: It’s managing people. You’ve got to know the business side of it. You don’t just want to leave things for chance.
Shaun Keating: Yeah.
Dr. Walden: So we see patients four days a week here and some of my friends, I’m used to it now, but they say, “You just work four days a week?” I said, “No, I see patients four days a week. I work on the practice the other days.”
Shaun Keating: Exactly. It’s seven days a week, 24/7 when you own your own company. It’s pretty amazing. What about with your staff man? Tell me real quick about your practice. How many ops again? You got like what, eight ops, and how many hygienists? Tell me a little breakdown of your practice here.
Dr. Walden: Yeah, we’ve got eight ops, four hygienists, and we’ve got four people at our front desk and so we-
Shaun Keating: That’s amazing.
Dr. Walden: Our new patient exam is a two hour block and we learned this from Mack Lee.
Mack, he uses his staff to collect data and so the patient will come and we introduce ourself along with our hygienists and we tell them the hygienists are going to collect some data for us, get some pictures, get some X-rays, going to write numbers, and we’ll be back in. So they spend a lot of time with the patient, going through the periodontal aspects but they go through the restorative aspects. They don’t diagnose but they’ll sit there and say, if they’ve got missing teeth, “With missing teeth, typically Dr. Walden can offer these different types of options from this.
Shaun Keating: Absolutely. [crosstalk 00:26:33]
Dr. Walden: So they’ll do implants or crown but we’re not sure if you’re a candidate but when Dr. Walden comes in, he will determine that for you.”
Shaun Keating: That’s so cool.
Dr. Walden: And so they develop a great rapport.
Shaun Keating: Yeah.
Dr. Walden: And we take our staff with us to go training. We love taking the dental assistants. I’d love to bring them out to the lab sometime and let them get to meet some of the techs.
Shaun Keating: Oh, we’d love that. [crosstalk 00:26:55] We’ll help them with the temps. I mean, a lot of times when the doctor’s bring their assistants, they go straight to the temporary department and we really kind of show them, “Hey, use this disc. Use this bur. Use this solution to glaze it. And light cure it” and just makes it night and day for them. They’re so excited but even, too, for you to see your Cermas that’s been doing your work for 12 plus years. We’ve never … you’ve never meet them and it would be so neat to get you out here and see them so we’d love to have you out here. I mean, I got big old boat too if you’re dad’s a captain and he can still do it, we’ll let him drive us around and whatever because I’ll be drinking the beers. I don’t drive my boat.
Dr. Walden: That’s great! I’d love to do that sometime. Now my dad, he doesn’t travel so much now. He’s getting a little older so but you know, yeah. Meeting the tech where you can put a face to name.
Shaun Keating: Yeah.
Dr. Walden: And a voice on phone. We try to send a lot of digital photos to you guys.
Shaun Keating: Yes, you do.
Dr. Walden: So the lab tech can … they’ve got models in front of them but if they can put a face with that model, they have a better connection.
Shaun Keating: Oh absolutely! They love it! And even the doctors too. The few, that when they do come out, they return. The next year, they’ll come out again and then it’s just like a reunion and everybody gets real excited and it’s neat ’cause we’re kind of an isolated to our lab but most of our doctors are out of state and the ones that are in California are kind of mostly northern California. We don’t have a lot of local doctors that use it and it’s just kind of weird. I don’t know why and it’s just something … it’s neat when they come in and they see our facility and it’s just kind of neat. We really love it so yeah, you definitely … we got some CE stuff coming up too and we’re going to get it all hashed out for the end of this year coming up but we’ve got a lot of stuff that should be coming around the corner here and we’ve got to get you out here for sure man.
Shaun Keating: So what about … what’s the latest piece of equipment you bought in your practice?
Dr. Walden: We’ve got Planmeca Cone Beam.
Shaun Keating: There you go.
Dr. Walden: And we’ve had that a couple years, I guess. And before doing implants, we would take a pan and look at models and stuff and that was okay. People have been doing implants for a long time without cone beams.
Shaun Keating: Yep.
Dr. Walden: But now it just gives you a lot more knowledge. You’re looking at the bone density and so that’s a big help to us but that’s a good question. I was talking to my daughter. She was interviewed with some other dentists up in Louisville and she said, “You know, they got the cone beams, the digital scanners, and all the stuff.” And I would say for young dentists, that stuff’s great but just ’cause you have that stuff’s not going to have you doing the dentistry.
Shaun Keating: Exactly.
Dr. Walden: You’ve got to learn how to do it. You’ve got to learn how to communicate with the patients and you can’t tell the patients what they need. You got to find out what they want and give them what they want.
Shaun Keating: Absolutely.
Dr. Walden: And so that’s the key to it. Yeah, having the bells and whistles are nice but that’s not going to make you a great dentist, learning the techniques and how to do the things. So I think sometimes, the young dentist can get in trouble where they get a real good dental salesman after them.
Shaun Keating: Oh yeah.
Dr. Walden: And give them the sales [inaudible 00:30:16] debt and so one of part of dentistry is managing cash flow.
Shaun Keating: Absolutely.
Dr. Walden: Any business. Your business. My business. Shaun Keating: Yep.
Dr. Walden: We’re small businesses that generate nice money but you’ve got to manage cashflow and you can imagine how somebody like a GE or a Continental or somebody that got 100,000 employees and they’ve got billions of dollars but they can burn through cash really fast.
Shaun Keating: Oh yeah. You’ve got to be frugal, especially when you’re starting off. I mean, I would do like you. Like the first 10 years, get by with what you can on the basic equipment because that’s not going to bring you more dentistry. You’ve got to just do what you got to do with the basics and invest in your education and just put your time in, just learn as much CE as you can, practice management course, learn all of that, and spend that money on that because that will come back tenfold to you. [crosstalk 00:31:15] You go buy all those bells and whistles man. It ain’t going to do nothing for you. A lot of guys get in and I did the same thing trying to get into the digital revolution back 10 years ago and that stuff, you can’t even sell it for the weight of it and I got a $100,000 3D printers that are obsolete now, that are four years old, and I can’t even sell it for scrap. It’s just nuts.
Shaun Keating: So hold off and wait and I think some of the digital scanners are kind of working out pretty neat now, impression scanners and stuff. That’s kind of neat stuff but again, old school impressions still works really, really well and it’s just something to keep. And that’s one thing with me, I had a CFO … that my biggest hire was getting a CFO about a year into this and she kind of just you can’t buy nothing until we get to certain level and it was years before we could really get anything and thank God for that because I like to buy things and you get those salesman coming in and oh it sounds great.
Shaun Keating: I got a printer for my partial dentures and it’s just not really working out as good as thought and it kind of pushed me to get into this. I’m doing kind of beta test on this stuff and it’s just a different concept for what it’s doing but you know, got in a little early on that but I think it’ll work out but it’s just something for these young guys starting off for sure. That’s just great advice, keeping your nose to the grind stone, just get in those trenches, and watch your money because money will come. It will come down the line and you’ve got to put your dues in and it just takes time and then people start talking about you. You get more patients.
Shaun Keating: How far are you booked in? Aren’t you booked out pretty far? You guys are pretty busy always, aren’t you?
Dr. Walden: We’re busy but that’s one thing Jim Du Molin taught us. He said, “You don’t want to have a capacity issue. If you get where you’re booked out so far, that means you’ve got a capacity problem and you need to expand. You could add another room.” He said, “Employees don’t cost you money. They make you money.”
Shaun Keating: Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Walden: And so if somebody calls in, we want to get them in within the next day.
Shaun Keating: Yep.
Dr. Walden: We may not be able to do the actual dental treatment but we don’t want people to have to wait.
Shaun Keating: Exactly.
Dr. Walden: So we’re going to … Mack Lee taught us this. He says, “Don’t let an emergency be the thorn in your side.” Some people get so mad. “Oh we got an emergency. Gosh.”
Shaun Keating: Yeah.
Dr. Walden: He said, “Get them in and look at them and you may just do a [inaudible 00:33:40] of treatment. You may put them on an antibiotic. But they’re you’re friend-
Shaun Keating: Exactly.
Dr. Walden: Don’t let that be your enemy.”
Shaun Keating: Absolutely.
Dr. Walden: So we always want to be able to get people in everyday.
Shaun Keating: Yeah. That’s so good. No, that’s just great advice dude. That’s on the money. So what about as a lab? Are we doing okay for you man? We getting it … knocking it out of the park? Are we doing so-so? Tell me how our lab’s doing for you?
Dr. Walden: Very rarely do we have to send something back. I think we’ve got a good communication. I always want it to be where if I could give you something else
… for you to do the best job you can, you’ve got my permission to say, “Hey, Dr. Walden. Can do a new impression? Can you give us some more reduction?” ‘Cause that’s only going to help the patient.
Shaun Keating: Yep.
Dr. Walden: And so I want to be able to give you the best that I can and so the only way to do it is we have open communication. You’re not going to make mad saying you need something ’cause you want to make it better.
Shaun Keating: Absolutely.
Dr. Walden: And if there’s something I want, I should be free to ask you and I think we’ve got a good line of communication.
Shaun Keating: Oh we do totally. You’re just a dream to work and dude, I can’t thank you enough for your time man. I know you got a patient. I can hear them in your back office there. “Come on back, Dr. Walden.” But dude, thank you so much.
God bless you and your family and man, if there is anything I can ever do ever, just please ask for me. And I can’t thank you enough for all the work and just the great attitude that you have man. Thank you so much.
Dr. Walden: Thank you very much, Shaun, for the kind words and it’s been a pleasure talking with you and I look forward to a great future.
Shaun Keating: Aw, thank you so much, Dr. Walden. And we’ll talk to you real soon.
Dr. Walden: Okay. Thank you. Buh-bye.
Shaun Keating: Buh-bye.
Dr. Walden: Bye.
Host: Thanks for joining us on the Dental Up Podcast show this week. Make sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter or search the Dental Up Podcast on iTunes for our weekly feed. Don’t forget to visit keatingdentallab.com/promo for exclusive offers. Keating Dental Lab is a full- service dental laboratory and we’re nationwide. We’d love for you to send us a case so we can show you the Keating difference. If you dig what you heard, please leave a review on iTunes. And we’ll be back next week.
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