Dr Anfrew Greenland: 0:00

Welcome back to Voices in Health and Wellness. This is the show where we spotlight leaders who are reimagining how care is delivered in today's ever fast-changing landscape. I'm your host, Dr. Andrew Greenland, and today's guest is someone who brings deep experience, heart, and a whole lot of practical wisdom to the table. Joining me today is Dr. Larry Stanleigh, a Canadian-based dentist, speaker, and educator whose work focuses on transforming internal systems and elevating relationship-based care in health practices. With credentials too long to list and decades of clinical experience, Dr. Larry helps teams rethink everything from how we greet patients to how we hire, train, and lead. Larry, thank you so much for joining us this afternoon and welcome to the show.

Dr Larry Stanleigh: 0:43

It's a pleasure to be here.

Dr Anfrew Greenland: 0:45

So perhaps we could start at the top. Would you mind um sharing a little bit about your journey and how you ended up where you are today and the work that you're most passionate about?

Dr Larry Stanleigh: 0:54

Sure. It's uh, you know, one of the things that I found um in in small business, yeah, especially in healthcare, is having not only you understand your why, but having your team understand your why. And then and then it becomes a mission and a vision of of how you want to practice and how you want to live. And um I'm uh I'm the second youngest of 13 children born and raised in Toronto. Uh when I got into dental school, I'm the only one in my family who's in healthcare. Uh, and uh, and uh when I wanted to uh get into medical school uh or dental school, um I couldn't afford it at the time, and so I joined the Canadian forces and they sent me out west. I'm now in Calgary, Alberta. I've been here 38 years now and uh uh love the city, love the uh this part of our country. It's uh it's an amazing uh place to live and work and play and raise a family and and stuff. But I I um I like being a general practice dentist. I like um uh doing a little bit of everything, and then over the years, just naturally um I have found myself going into a bit of a niche. So although I'm a general practice dentist with a focus on uh cosmetic uh components of dentistry, as well as uh periodontal care, uh gum health, and and uh and sports uh medicine and dentistry, uh I'm the chief technology officer of a Canadian sports performance mouth guard company and uh athletes we fitted have won 11 Olympic medals, including gold and silver, gold in uh summer and winter Olympics. But I've uh now 80% of what I do is I deal with oral facial pain and TMJ dysfunction on people who have had trauma, car accidents, workplace accidents, victims of violence, that kind of thing. Um, and it's um it's fascinating work I uh I get to do. My uh my moniker on my business card is building smiles and changing lives, and everything I want to do in my life is that. And and then the most recent thing that I've been doing, uh, and I say most recent over the last uh eight years or so, I am also um speaking, coaching, um uh working with people. And I don't speak in the clinical realm. I find dentists are very critical of whoever is speaking if they're not affiliated with a university, and even if they are, they're very critical. And I just didn't want to be up on a stage and having a bunch of people in the audience, and it's usually only a handful of them uh that are very critical because I just uh my life is too busy to stand up and take it from colleagues that don't know any better. So I um speak on the business side of things. Um I have uh uh business systems that I call success is all about relationships. And uh it's my um belief that uh that uh relation building relationships uh takes away the need for sales, and building relationships leads to success. Uh so um uh it's all about how we meet, greet, treatment plan, schedule our patients or our clients, how we hire, train, lead our teams, and how we market internally and externally on these big these uh relationship-based business systems that uh that truly work, uh they're low cost and very effective. And um that's what I do. Amazing.

Dr Anfrew Greenland: 4:11

Um, with that, I mean you said that you don't generally speak in front of dentists. So so who is your audience and what are you what are you looking to help them achieve?

Dr Larry Stanleigh: 4:20

Well, well, uh uh I'm I'm incorrect if I if I gave that illusion. Uh a large part of the people who hire me to speak are dentists, dental organizations, dental study clubs. But the topic isn't clinical, it's business. Um, but my business lectures have gone beyond that. The business systems that I've worked with, I've worked with a uh chain of tea houses in uh in Taiwan, uh I worked with a health spa in Singapore. Uh so the the breadth of groups who can utilize these relationship-based business principles and systems uh is across the board. If you deal with people, these systems work.

Dr Anfrew Greenland: 5:05

So, how does your week pan out at the moment? You're doing lots of different things. There's clinical work there, speaking and mentoring. How do you um carve up your time? What does your week look like if there is such thing as a typical week for you?

Dr Larry Stanleigh: 5:17

Um a typical week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday uh is when I work clinically. Uh that's when I have the joy of having a team of uh of uh mostly women who I get to work with every day um and treat the people who have trusted me with their their health and and to do my work to get them better. Um I use my Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays to do medical legal reports, to uh to fly around and uh give my lectures and coach uh um businesses uh and um and uh things along those lines, develop new topics to talk on, to be part of uh podcasts. Uh that's what I do on the other three days. Saturdays are my days to do nothing that has to do with work.

Dr Anfrew Greenland: 6:04

Yeah, work-life balance, all important. I'm glad you're giving yourself one day officer. Um I find correct. I think you've spoken before about how most healthcare marketing is ineffective and expensive. What's not working that used to, or did it never work?

Dr Larry Stanleigh: 6:19

Well, one one of the things that I think never works is the idea of SEO, search engine optimization. The Google and other search engines are constantly changing their algorithms. And so to stay on top of wanting to be the first page on Google can be very expensive, and causing you or somebody you hire to change your website frequently just to try and be at the top of Google. But I know that in most businesses, um, most healthcare businesses, and now if you've got a product, that's a different story. Like if you're selling infrared saunas, that's a different story. But if you're in healthcare, it's not about being at the top of Google because someone in dentistry isn't just doing a random search, cosmetic dentist New York. That's not what they're doing, they're doing dentist near me. And then the search engine goes to the maps, and you can put your website on Google Maps and on Apple Maps for free. Although they're changing that, I think you now have to pay a small fee. But it's a small fee. We're talking dollars, not hundreds or thousands. And once you're on there, if you're physically close to them and you've got a basic good website, you show up in the top four or five because you're on the map and you fit the algorithm, dentist near me, doctor near me. So you don't have to spend thousands. I know some dentists are spending $40,000, $50,000 a year on their websites in search engine optimization. And the general rule of thumb in marketing is a three to one return on your investment. So if you're spending $50,000 on your internet marketing, you should be getting $150,000 or $150,000 of new business in the first year from that expense. And most of my colleagues never track what they spend on their marketing, and they have no clue where the money's coming, but they think they have to do it. So it's a it's a waste of time, it's a waste of money. The number one source of referrals uh to my practice are from other people who already know us. So it's building those relationships, and that doesn't cost money either. So I'm not saying you spend no money, you need to have a good website, it needs to be clean, it needs to be modern, it needs to be refreshed regularly. So there's an expense involved with that. You should have a social media profile, being on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube and LinkedIn, and for those who are interested, TikTok. I'm not on TikTok, but I think my clinical practice is those are the things you should be on, and you should be contributing to them regularly. So there may be an expense involved with that, but it's not thousands of dollars or tens of thousands of dollars to do every year, to do that kind of thing. But those are how you build and maintain relationships with people. This is really fascinating.

Dr Anfrew Greenland: 9:43

So Google really Google my business for the local stuff, but not the SEO stuff. What about um where where do you see practices wasting money in terms of trying to grow? And obviously, we've talked a little bit about the marketing side and the the use or misuse of Google, where else are they wasting their money?

Dr Larry Stanleigh: 10:01

Well, you know, we we have this idea that we need to grow fast. But what we really want in at least in health care and the health and wellness realm, even if you're having um a yoga studio or or uh or a healthcare facility that involves some sort of movement, you aren't looking for someone for a single purchase. You want someone who's gonna come and they're you want them to repeat. So it's about building those relationships. And so you you don't need to spend money. I know a dentist who spends $40,000 a year on a billboard, and he said he got two people from it. $40,000. I don't, I don't get it. I don't get what the what why they do that. Um uh so uh the focus really should be on finding who your fans are and and marketing to them. So if you've got um uh I've got a patient who's got who's really big, I'm not a pet person, but she's a big fan. She's referred about 25, 30 different people to me. And the average new patient will bring in about 20 to $2,250 in the first year. So she sent, you know, 30 of those people. She's you know, I've I've she sent me about $75,000 worth of work, uh, of income from one person. So I pay attention to this person, and she's really big into pets and stuff like that. And so she was involved with a run to raise money for the local pet society, and I became a sponsor of that run, and and it didn't cost me a lot of money, but the presence supporting someone who is a fan of mine just increased that fandom, and I got people from that, and so you so it's finding your targets, it's paying attention to the people who are doing business with you, and then finding a way to support them, build those relationships.

Dr Anfrew Greenland: 12:05

Some really great lessons in marketing here. I really love this. What trends are you seeing around patient expectations or team dynamics that others might be missing? Because I know this is part of your work and your speaking work, talking about the the patient side of things and the operation side of things. What are you seeing?

Dr Larry Stanleigh: 12:20

Well, you know, uh interesting. I I um I was talking to um uh a business that is considering bringing me on uh to coach their their business, and they're involved in uh uh practice coaching sales, uh that kind of stuff. And and uh they're nationwide. And they have a coach who works with them who's all about adult education. And you know, in dentistry, especially, we we uh we have we see a problem in a in a person's oral health, and then we have a treatment plan that we want to to uh provide for them or recommend to them. And what do we do? We we educate them about what's wrong. And people don't want to be educated, they really don't. Um, we have to find a way to get them to want what we want for them, and so it's not the golden rule. What do we want for our patients? So, what do we want them to have? Uh, it's not what we want um for ourselves, because what if they don't want what we want? Um, and so it's a matter about what I call the diamond rule. It's about finding out what a person wants in front of you and then finding a way to deliver to them what they uniquely desire. So it takes time to get to know people, and once you get to know them and you understand where they come from, then you can customize your conversation so that you what you want for them resonates with how they are, where they are, and then they're gonna want what you want for them, and uh, and so it's it's a bit of a trick in uh understanding conversations and understanding personalities and uh and go from there. So, from a team standpoint, I actually have the team go through personality testing. And and in this case, I like the Discovery Insights system, which is a company based out of Scotland, uh, your neighbor. Um, and uh it's a it's a great system where they assign colors to personalities and and it's intuitive, it just makes sense, it's easy to understand. And then you can customize how you deal, train, lead your team members based on their personality profile and then your personality. So the more you understand yourself, the easier it is you understand how you need to communicate with others as well. So, but the big key is um is is the mistake is not educating people about what you think they should have, it's about learning who those people are, finding out what it is that they want, and then to give them what they uniquely desire.

Dr Anfrew Greenland: 15:03

Lots of psychology in there. Yeah, are you seeing a broader shift in how uh patients are choosing their providers now, or in how providers think about leadership?

Dr Larry Stanleigh: 15:13

Yes. Um people are savvy, the internet is uh ubiquitous, and the people's ability to access information, whether it's right or wrong, or good information or bad information, their ability to access information is easy and expensive. And so people are naturally skeptical, especially uh the younger generation, the people in their 20s and 30s, they are very skeptical and they are very cognizant that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and they all think that if you're proposing something to them that is expensive or extensive, yet they don't understand the need for it themselves, they're gonna question everything. And I don't think questioning things is a bad thing, um, uh, but we're seeing a lot of it. A lot of distrust, a lot of uh animosity, a lot of anger, a lot of polarization. It's a challenging world to be in today, and so we need to build trust.

Dr Anfrew Greenland: 16:19

Thank you. Um, obviously, you spend time working with practices. What are the most impactful bottlenecks that you're seeing in practices right now in terms of and in terms of how you advise um these practices, how to kind of overcome these things?

Dr Larry Stanleigh: 16:33

Well, you know what's interesting. Um different businesses have different issues. Sometimes it's just an internal issue with the team not talking to each other. Sometimes it's about uh the back door being so wide open that you'll get you'll get two new patients, but you'll have three people leaving the business at the same time. And so that the business is shrinking. So it's a matter of again customizing, finding out what it is that that people want, what they need, um, and and talking. When it comes to the team, often you'll have businesses where you've got administration teams, you've got salespeople, and or in my in my case, uh assistants, uh, people providing clinical treatment, dental hygienists, um, dentists, and they don't talk well to each other. They they they have this sort of turf protection. They have this idea that, oh, the people and admin don't understand the complexities of our jobs, and they create this schedule that doesn't work, and all they do is complain or or um pardon the expression, bitch, um, or or get angry with each other. But solutions happen when people talk to each other, and so we have in our business, we have agreements, and I got this uh from Tony Robbins actually. And the agreement is if I've got a problem with Betty, I don't tell Sue about it, I have to talk to Betty, and then the other agreement is if Sue if I talk to Sue about it, about Betty, the agreement is Sue has to say, Well, don't tell me that you've got a problem with Betty. You need to talk to Betty. So it's a way of forcing team members to talk to each other, and once you open up that door of communication, you find a way to resolve the issues, and sometimes you'll find a team member is just not willing to engage in conversations directly with other team members, and then you have to find a way to say, you know what, you're not a fit for our team. We need to help you find another place to work, and uh and that happens. Um, but when you find the team that's right, who talk to each other, who communicate with each other, uh you build long-term sustainable teams that that work. Uh, I have two people, two women who've been working with me for 31 years now. I've got another one who's been with me for 22. I've got another one who's been with me for 16. And the patients, our customers come back and they see the same faces time and again, and there's this continuity of their care, and we've built these relationships that matter, and the practice grows. The practice I'm in right now, um uh eight years ago, was doing 600,000 in the in the year. Um, and we have I helped manage to grow that in six years to over 3.2 million on these relationship-based principles. So it can be done. You don't have to spend a ton of money, but you need to be patient because relationship-based systems takes time. Uh, you know, you're not gonna make it overnight, you're not gonna make it next month, but you're gonna build something that's gonna be long-term sustainable. So if you're not retiring in the next two to three years, you can do this. Um, but so that's so the team is that's a big one. Having those agreements is is is huge. And you apply those principles across the board, it works great.

Dr Anfrew Greenland: 20:10

Thank you. If you had a magic wand and you could fix one thing overnight in a typical healthcare business, and let's we'll say we've dealt with the team dynamics. Uh, what would it be? If it's not a team dynamics problem, what's the next biggest problem that you see in the businesses you work with?

Dr Larry Stanleigh: 20:26

Um and again, I guess it gets back to these relationships. Um, so many of my colleagues in dentistry see a person as teeth attached to a body as opposed to a body that just happens to have teeth. So you need to flip the narrative and look at the whole person. It's like confunctional medicine. So much in medicine and healthcare is specialized. We tend to, you know, you've got the you've got orthopedic surgeons, and what do they do? They specialize. So you've got there's one surgeon, all he does is shoulders. And so if you go to him and you've got a knee problem, he says, I can't help you. All I do is shoulders. And in uh the healthcare system in Canada, the way physicians, general physicians, are um compensated is they you've only got enough time to see someone and take care of one problem. But the human body is complex, and you know, in functional medicine, sometimes there's five or six issues that are interacting with each other, and you need to address them all if you want that person to get better. And the same thing happens in dentistry. We tend to get focused on just teeth or just gums or just one thing or just two things, and not understanding that the mouth is attached to the whole body, and there are systemic influences on the mouth, and there's bodies in this in the whole, there are uh portions of the body that's affecting the mouth region. And if we don't step back and look at the whole body, then we're missing the forest for the trees, and people don't get better. If we want to elevate our care, we need to look at the whole person as a whole person that just happens to have the small specific portion that you deal with.

Dr Anfrew Greenland: 22:18

I can agree with you more. You're singing my language, because um I mean even my day job, I'm actually an emergency physician, I'm still one of the few generalists around. And I think the trouble is we are in a healthcare system now where everybody is so super specialized, nobody's joining the dots, nobody's taking a holistic view. You know, you can be seen by four different specialists in a hospital, all you know, amazing at what they do, nobody's joining the dots. There's no cross-communication, there's no understanding of anything outside of the region they're working in. And I often joke with my patients is a shoulder problem or a knee problem, or a right knee problem, or a left knee problem. That's how super specialized it feels like it is these days.

Dr Larry Stanleigh: 22:54

Yes, yeah, yeah. Yet uh, you know, I I have people come to me and they're clenching and uh and there's wear on their teeth and they've got headaches and stuff because they're clenching. And um uh one of the common causes of clenching is a pelvic imbalance. And so I have people stand up and I look at them and I have them walk and I look at how they walk, and then they realize, and so that I need to get them with someone who can deal with their pelvic imbalance to decrease their clenching. People don't do that, you know. You do, but but uh, but too many of our colleagues don't. I know it's sad.

Dr Anfrew Greenland: 23:34

What can you perhaps share something that you've learned the hard way in terms of building systems or teams that you now teach to others to avoid because of your you know you've learned from learned from your own experience and you pass it on to others?

Dr Larry Stanleigh: 23:46

Well, you know, uh people I I'm uh I'm not a young man anymore, and people say, When are you gonna retire? And and I'm I'm well on the one side, I'm grateful that I love what I get to do, and I have no intention of stopping it. I mean, some of the richest people in the world, uh uh Warren Buffett, for example, he's in his mid-90s, and he still wakes up in the morning, puts on a suit and tie, and he goes to work. He doesn't need to. He's one of the richest men in the world, but he does it because what he does still matters and and it still drives him. He still makes a difference in people's lives, not just his own. And uh, and I'm that in that position. I I'm gonna keep doing what I do because I'm making a difference in people's lives. I'm building smiles and changing lives every day. Um, so I'm not retiring from that standpoint. But the other side of the coin, I've been in my past very good at spending money and very bad at saving money. So I haven't saved enough for retirement as well. And so one of my things that I talk about, um one, you know, I will I will often many of the people who uh uh ask me to help them are younger dentists who are fairly early in their career and they've bought a practice and they've spent seven figures buying this practice, and they're having trouble managing everything because uh trying to finance seven figures is a very hefty monthly outlay. And so the money is a big deal, and you go to bed and you worry about that, and you lie awake at night, you know, worrying about that. And and so we need to look at how we spend our money as well. We're often we're spending poorly and we're not paying attention to what we're spending our money on. So you need to look at that, and there are ways to to do that. I I early in my career, for example, I bought my practice from a guy who had retired after 44 years, and he walked out on Friday and I walked in on Monday. But we had the same personality and the same philosophy of treatment, so it worked. We I had over a 90% retention rate. Uh, in dentistry, the average retention rate, when you when a practice is sold for the new dentist, the average retention rate is 40%. I mean, 60% of that practice leaves when a new dentist comes on board, even if that new dentist was endorsed by the previous dentist. Uh it's a terrible retention rate. And that's a ton of money that just sort of walks out the door in the first month. So I didn't want that to happen. So I worked very hard in retention. Um, and uh, but I had I and I kept the relationships with the dental lab that he used to work with, and with the specialists that he used to refer to, and with the dental supply company and dental repair company that he was working with. And, you know, things went by, and and I was I was uh learning about uh accounting and as small business people, we've got to not just be uh a practitioner, we have to be an accountant, we need to be a marketing specialist, we need to be an HR specialist, we need to have all these different hats on. And of course, we didn't get that training in in medical school and in dental school and and and physiotherapy school and massage therapy school and chiropractic colleges, they don't teach us this stuff. We have to find out a way. So my bank, thankfully, was great, and they and they provided courses for a lot of this. And I learned about how in uh in dentistry the top uh four expenses are um uh salaries, uh rent, uh, dental supplies, and dental lab. Those are the uh top four expenses. And other than salaries and rent, which are somewhat fixed, the other two are variable. And they should be falling within a window, the supplies in the lab. And the dental supplies should be falling in the five to seven percent window. So if I've got $100 of expenses, five to seven dollars of those expenses should be my supplies. Well, I was spending 12% on my supplies, and I went to my rep and I said, you know, my supply costs are too high. And he said, Well, I'll lower the price of this product or I'll lower the price of that product. And I said, Great, yeah, yeah. And months went by and it didn't change, it was still too high. And so I was talking to um another uh company, and uh, and after um, and this is a whole longer story, which we don't have time for, but we got to the end of him exploring what my goals in my career was, and and he said to me, instead of just lowering prices on specific products, if I helped refine your business so that we got your supply costs from 12% down to six percent, would you do business exclusively with me wherever we can? And I said, Yeah, because that was thousands of dollars every month that I could then have my dental assistants not spend time looking for bargains and just be able to work clinically. And they did, they came on board, and within three months my dental supplies costs dropped to where they were supposed to be. So the the lesson is know your numbers, know where you're spending. And if your numbers are out of align with industry norms for whatever business you're in, then you need to find a way to get them back into industry norms. If you're within industry norms, then you need to look at not how do you cut your costs, how do you increase your revenue. So it's you know, it's it's about finding that balance.

Dr Anfrew Greenland: 29:15

Thank you. I guess um many of the clinics or that you're working with are interested in growth. And if they suddenly had a flood of new patients, what's the first thing that would break in those businesses in your experience?

Dr Larry Stanleigh: 29:31

The the joyous trouble we all um we all desire to have is too much business. Well, first um um build those relationships and people who if they if they think you're great, then they're gonna wait for you. Uh right now it is uh early October, and uh people who want to see me are booking in mid February right now. So I'm booked out four months, and in dentistry, that's unheard of. Some people are impatient and they want to be seen next week. But I'm not dealing with people who have acute pain, like, oh, my tooth is hurting. For those, we people we will see them right away, get them out of pain, but then the treatment will be booked in our regular schedule. But you need to build in the idea of how are you going to grow? You need to understand before you start if this is successful, because you go in with the idea that, yeah, this is going to be successful. How are you going to grow? You have the room in the physical facility to bring on more people and to be ready. And when you reach certain numbers, you hire the additional uh assistant, you hire the additional administrator, you get more hygienists, you get other dentists, you get other operators. And then uh in our facility, for example, we had 3,500 square feet. We had space for seven operatories where we could do clinical dentistry, but we only had four with equipment in them. But we reached a certain point within about two and a half years that we needed more space, and we uh negotiated with our supplier to for the equipment to build and equip the other four operatories. And we rapidly filled those up with hiring more people and building it up. And but it you need to have at the beginning the understanding of where you're gonna go, where you want to be, and then plan how to get there so that when it happens, you've got the plan in place, and it doesn't take a ton of time or money to do that. You just have to think the process through. It's it's about a half a day to sit down and work it out with your coach. But once you've got it in place, then you're just you're just following the plan. It's it's easy, it's like having an instruction manual in plain English. You just follow it, it's the way you go.

Dr Anfrew Greenland: 31:50

Thank you. Um, so looking ahead, what's on the cards for you in the next six to 12 months? Where would you like your practice, your teaching, or your um other businesses to be?

Dr Larry Stanleigh: 32:00

Well, I I had this this uh dream of uh getting paid to fly somewhere, um, speak on a stage, uh, get paid, and then get off the stage and then stick around and be a tourist for a couple of days wherever it is. That's that's one of my dreams. Um, and so uh I have uh uh I'm working more on on my keynote talks to so that I can have a chance to do that. Uh one of them is uh outside of business altogether. It's called The People in Your Life Are a Gift. And it's a series of true stories that have four key points uh that uh we want to stay uh identify and stay connected to the people who matter in our life, that we want to be um remove uh unconscious or sub excuse me, subconscious biases to achieve true equality, uh, that great things are to live for and the people in your life are a gift. And from that come uh workshops and stuff like that. I've got a book written on that title, uh, that title, uh The People in Your Life are a gift. And there's um been a demand to do um to convert that book into an audio book. So in the next uh three to six months, that's one of my goals. Um, but I've got some full-day training sessions coming up in February in in uh Winnipeg, Manitoba, and in Portland, Oregon in the US, where uh I'll be touching on uh all these business uh lectures, the people in your life are a gift, then and another topic, uh sleep disordered breathing, identifying it and treatment for the for the team. So these are all team-based lectures, uh, not just uh clinicians, but the whole business. We want them to all come together and learn together, and that's how businesses will grow, is if everyone understands what the goals are. So uh just doing more of that, more more uh speaking, traveling, and getting an opportunity to get paid to do it.

Dr Anfrew Greenland: 33:43

Amazing, Larry. Thank you so much for your time this afternoon. It's been such an interesting conversation, so many rich lessons in business and marketing, hearing about your journey, what you do, really fascinating. Really grateful for your time. Massively appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Dr Larry Stanleigh: 33:58

You are most welcome. It's a pleasure and an honor, and thank you for asking me to be part of this podcast.