Just by coincidence I happened to be seated next to dental practice management expert Gary Kadi at a recent conference, and we struck up a conversation in between speakers. We realized we had seen each other in the gym that morning getting our one-hour cardio session in before the conference started. We talked about how easy weight loss is to figure out, but how difficult it is to do. People always ask if there is a secret to weight loss, but it is just common sense. From this conversation came a discussion about “radical common sense,” which we continue in this interview. Enjoy!

Dr. Michael DiTolla: Gary, you and I had a chance to meet each other when we both attended the Milestone Scientific CCLAD (Computer-Controlled Local Anesthetic Delivery) conference this May in Florida and happened to sit next to each other. And the course of conversation became very interesting, in hearing about what you do for dentists, as you started to explain your concept of “radical common sense.” It really struck a chord with me because a lot of times in dentistry we tend to kind of overcomplicate things, and I like the approach of using radical common sense. Before we move onto that topic, however, why don’t you tell us about your background and also how it was that you first became involved in dentistry.

Gary Kadi: Sure, Mike. My background is in business and team development. I’m not a dentist, though everyone thinks I am. I got involved in dentistry about 15 years ago, when I had two firms: a marketing firm and a management consulting firm. At the marketing firm, we worked to bring people to service professionals like dentists, chiropractors and other different types of businesses, and I got a great education by interviewing each of these businesses. I interviewed more than 1,000 businesses and really learned the intricacies and best practices and found what was really going on behind the scenes so I could market them externally.

I got a lesson on how to structure systems, processes and things related to each of these businesses. Of my clients many were dentists, and I realized that I really loved and had an affinity for dentistry. I was excited to learn about dentistry. With my management consulting background, I learned how to make team members accountable, how to follow through on new thoughts, and how to bring in systems that were sustainable and that dentists could follow through on because this is usually the biggest challenge in dentistry. But the number one reason I chose dentistry amongst all professions was this question: “When was the last time you bought something that you didn’t think you needed, was going to cost you a thousand dollars, may hurt you and take time out of your day?”

When I saw that question, I thought, “If I can come up with a solution that we can install, implement and customize for general practitioners, then we might have something that can really change the industry.” What we take on is solving that problem. The other piece to this is enhancing the quality of people’s lives. I noticed that the quality of life for practitioners and team members — there was a big gap between what was possible and how dentists and dental teams were living. So, our background is not just building great practices but building great lives. Just as supermarkets created new aisles for “green” products because they didn’t exist before, we use the word “consultant.” We don’t actually apply that word because it lumps us into a category of business that has done wonderful work but automatically gives people the perception about the type of work we do. What we do is a category that didn’t exist before. We actually focus on business and team development, with our product being the outcome of what a doctor and dental team want — not just in the business sense but also in quality of life.

That’s a little background about myself. I live in Manhattan with my best friend, Judith, whom I married six years ago, and my son, Rome, who is four and a half years old. We have an office in Scottsdale, Arizona. That’s where part of my team is, and we also have a team in Manhattan. So, that’s a little background about the company and myself.

MD: Let’s go back to something you said because you put it pretty succinctly: as dentists, we tell people they need something they perceive they don’t need, they probably don’t want, and they probably can’t afford. It’s interesting that you put it in such simple terms because that kind of defines one of the challenges of being a dentist. When I ask dentists why they became dentists, they usually respond, “It’s because I didn’t want to go into sales.” And now all of a sudden we have something for sale that people don’t have a perceived need or want for or don’t think they can afford. That’s an interesting situation to find yourself in, is it not?

GK: Yes, exactly. And people don’t buy solutions for problems they don’t think they have. Endodontists didn’t use our company in the past, but they are calling us now because their referral sources are drying up and they don’t know what to do. A lot of general practitioners are doing much more endo now than they did before. But the thing is, when people go to endodontists, they know there’s a problem. It’s symptomatic. There’s pain. They know something is associated with it, so they want to get it fixed. Problem — solution.

In general dentistry, 90% of treatment is not symptomatic. It doesn’t hurt and it doesn’t look bad, so how do you engage the patient? This is the biggest challenge, as you mentioned before, because a lot of health care practitioners are caregivers and don’t like to sell anything. We actually don’t like to force and manipulate sales. The root word for “sales” means to “assist,” not to manipulate or take advantage of, which is what it has become over the years. So, we really understand practitioners. Like, how do you get practitioners who don’t want to sell to speak in a way that engages the patient? That’s the type of methodology we’ve invented so that dentists can engage the patient and convince them to accept treatment, versus being manipulative with scripting and the old traditional ways of presenting treatment and selling the patient. We don’t even have our practitioners step into that pool because once you get into that, you can’t get out of it.

MD: Yeah, that makes sense. I can see how that could be a real slippery slope. Well, I mentioned earlier your concept of radical common sense, a term that I love. Explain what you mean by the term radical common sense.

GK: It’s a term we coined; we made it up to really speak and embody our philosophy. It was born from my grandfather, who was one of my mentors and heroes in business, and in life. He once said to me, “Gary, the best educator, the best people who are trained to educate, they take complex things and simplify them.”

For years, the industry of practice management has been about doing more, doing better, and doing different. What happens is that it becomes perceived that one must do even more. But what we’ve found is that you can actually peel layers off and not do all these things, and focus only on the things that matter and make a difference. If we can drill down and isolate and simplify the whole process of practice management, the business side of dentistry, and the whole component of the people side of dentistry. If we can make it so radical common sense that an 18-year-old single mom with no background in business could manage an entire practice — that’s who we want to speak to. A lot of people want to justify their existence by making things complicated. We actually take a counterintuitive approach and believe the gift is in simplicity. That’s how radical common sense was born.

If we can make it so radical common sense that an 18-year-old single mom with no background in business could manage an entire practice — that’s who we want to speak to. A lot of people want to justify their existence by making things complicated. We actually take a counter-intuitive approach and believe the gift is in simplicity. That’s how radical common sense was born.

MD: That’s interesting, and that’s a lot of what I try to do in my educational efforts here at the laboratory. I look at some of the clinical mentors that I’ve had over the years, people whom I really respect. People who either had a real set of hands, real God-given talent, or had a great system that was very complicated to do. I try to look at what they’re doing and find more simple ways to do it. I mean, you could come up with the most elaborate management system for a dental office that would result in maximum production and collections. But if it’s too much, I take it the staff will never buy into it.

GK: Absolutely. You know, it goes back to what we call “justifying your existence.” When I first got into this field, when I used to be called a consultant, my immediate approach was: “Well, if I’m charging for this, I have to really make myself sound smart and give them a lot of stuff.” Even when I spoke early on, my natural mindset was that I had to come across as incredibly intelligent and knowledgeable. What if they found out that I didn’t know it all?

But to tell you the truth, it came from my low self-esteem. I had very low self-esteem, I wasn’t sure of myself and that caused me to overcomplicate versus simplify. Some of the tools we teach doctors in order to build their self-esteem are the same ones I used on myself. A lot of the tools that we came up with in this radical common sense process, we live ourselves. We live these principles and we practice them on ourselves because we are not immune to what dentists go through. People used to ask, “Well, you’re not a dentist, so what gives you a right to be in a dental practice?” I agreed with that, so I sat in every chair that was in a dental practice. I didn’t cut or scrape teeth because I don’t have a license to do that. I’m not the greatest assistant, by the way, so you definitely don’t want me to be an assistant either. But I used to think the front desk looked so easy. One of the chapters in my next book is “Why the Back Hates the Front,” and now I totally understand the reason. It’s because the back looks busy, and they are busy, handling instruments and having their “roller skates on.” Up front it looks like they are emailing their boyfriends, but let me tell you something. You sit up at the front desk, and the phone rings. You pick it up and the patient starts asking questions you can’t answer, and then the hygienists release three patients on the hour … and it’s chaos. Now, I have so much more compassion and understanding for what it’s like to live in each of those positions. We created this radical common sense methodology from a businessperson’s perspective and understanding of how to build teams and apply the nomenclature and the science of dentistry to those components.

MD: There’s a culture that seems to exist in organized dentistry that practice management classes aren’t “worthwhile” enough to earn continuing education (CE) credit. Since we have a required number of hours to take, dentists tend to ignore these business-oriented classes and it makes it difficult to work on the business of your practice. So, if a dentist came into my practice offering business advice, I might say, “You’re a dentist, so why should I listen to you about this business topic?” While I wouldn’t listen to you, Gary, about how to prep a crown, I do listen to you when it comes to business stuff. I mean, how does being a dentist relate to the business of running a practice?

GK: I agree, and I’d like to give you a distinction here because I think it’s really appropriate. We give our dentists not only what to do, but how to implement these changes. Here’s an example of that.

What you’re talking about is what we call a “filter.” A filter is the subconscious and automatic screening process that only validates your beliefs or particular point-of-view. So, in other words, if you believe that I should be a dentist to coach you and that’s your filter, then we’re definitely not going to be doing business together. But if you have a filter called, “I want a business or personal development expert, someone who comes from that place but also understands the clinical side and science and nomenclature of dentistry and has the compassion and understanding to know what it’s like to be a dentist,” then your filter validates that and I become a resource for you. And filters are like loupes — you can either lower your filter and open up some new opportunities or, like inverted loupes, it makes your world smaller because you’re looking to validate your beliefs. And our beliefs either allow us to grow or they keep us where we are. And this is how we have breakthrough, quantum results — by giving dental teams the tools to apply how they perceive each other and how they perceive patients.

MD: I don’t want to gloss over something you said earlier, because I haven’t heard it mentioned much or seen it mentioned in many articles. You said the building of self-esteem was one of your personal breakthroughs. It sounds like this is one of the things you do with your dentists that makes a huge difference in their lives. Again, here’s a filter; that’s something you never hear about in dental school or organized dentistry. Talk a little bit about self-esteem and what you see — you’ve worked with a lot of dentists. Tell us what you see with the average dentist and their self-esteem, what you’re able to do to help increase that, and the effect that has on their practice and overall happiness with life.

GK: Yes, thanks for bringing that up. It’s one of my favorite topics. You know, my whole life, it feels like I’ve lived a double life. On the outer veneer, it looks like I’ve had it all: I drove a nice car, I had beautiful women, I traveled around the world, and it looked like I had it all handled. But deep down inside, I was really bankrupt and empty. I knew I had to improve this and to examine how I got to such ruin. How could I have what looks so good on the outside work for me on the inside? Wherever and however you’re operating, it’s coming from a place — we are often trying to get to a place. But one of the things I’ve learned is about coming from a place. So, if you want more love, you come from a place of love. If you want more respect, you come from being respectful. Being confident is already inside you. We know how to bring it out in those who are willing.

I know you’ve heard this cliché before, but here’s the tool that we implement to help doctors and treatment coordinators with presenting treatment (this applies everywhere). We call it the “MBA – Management By Agreement.” There are agreements that you have with others, agreements that you have with yourself, and agreements that you have with your morals and values.

Agreements with others can be something such as: I agree to be on time and show up for that. That’s how you build trust with others. The self-esteem is really learning how to trust yourself. So if you make an agreement to go to the gym and you continually don’t go to the gym, then you know that you can’t trust yourself to follow through on things that you say.

For me, I’ll give you a personal example, this is where I had my breakthrough: I used to drink. My nickname was “Party Fresh.” I used to say I wouldn’t have wine when I came home, but I would continually have wine when I came home. Then I would wake up the next morning and beat myself up. I realized at some point that this had to stop. I was not able to trust myself anywhere else in my life. The minute I stopped drinking, when I said I was going to stop drinking and I actually stopped, all of a sudden my self-esteem started to rise naturally. I came from a place of confidence, knowing that no matter what I would be able to do it. You can count on me and I can count on me. That’s where it comes from. I was able to trust myself.

By the way, the current economic crisis is not about money, it’s about lack of trust. The economy flattened due to lack of trust, and the practices that are future-proofing themselves are the ones that know how to build trust with their team and then translate that trust out into the world. So it starts with trusting yourself first, building your own self-esteem, and then trusting yourself and keeping your agreements with yourself. Then, secondly, building that trust with your dental team. Once you have created trust with your dental team, you can go out and create trust with your patients and have them trust you on a whole new level. I didn’t trust my team in the beginning. I would micromanage these people — and they are talented, powerful people. I had the most amazing team of people (I’m still in awe of them every day), but I would micromanage them because I didn’t trust myself. Therefore, I didn’t trust them. And the minute I started trusting myself, I started to trust them. Our business is going to double this year because of the transformation that happened in myself, which I’ve now given away to my team. I also put structure into place — I don’t want to miss that. I now trust myself to know what I need to put into my business, and it’s showing up in the productivity and the awareness of our services in the dental industry. I’m just so blown away by this single distinction of trusting oneself and building one’s self-esteem.

The current economic crisis is not about money, it’s about lack of trust. The economy flattened due to lack of trust, and the practices that are future-proofing themselves are the ones that know how to build trust with their team and then translate that trust out into the world.

MD: Wow, that is pretty amazing. Again, that’s not the kind of thing you typically hear in talking to the average practice consultant. And I’m sure there are dentists who hear success stories from other practices you’ve worked with and get excited about the prospect of having the practice of their dreams, but there must be some dentists who upon hearing what this entails may not be a good fit for you guys. I would think that self-esteem or some of these other topics may not be the most comfortable thing for a lot of dentists to hear or talk about. Would you say there are some dentists who just want to throw a symptom or something else at the problem? Because it sounds like your system asks the dentist to make some fundamental personal changes to their life.

GK: Absolutely, this is definitely not for everybody. It can work for anybody, but you have to be ready and willing. If you’re not ready and willing, it’s not going to happen. See, what you’re talking about, Mike, is dealing with a symptom. You know, throwing a symptom at the problem. What’s going to happen is it may sit there for a few weeks, a few months, maybe a few years, but it’ll never completely go out of existence. We are working with two things: are we dealing with the symptoms or are we dealing with the source? When we do a diagnosis, we find out what people are complaining about or where the inefficiency lies. And we drill down to the source point of where it originated. Every upset or inefficiency in a person’s life or practice is in one of two places: either in a broken agreement or a missing agreement.

When we work with doctors, and teams actually, we’re not interested in doing surface stuff. We’re interested in getting into the root cause of things. And yes, you have to be ready for this. If you’re not ready, it doesn’t work. We actually qualify our clients prior to working with them; they have to meet certain needs and criteria so to make certain the relationship works. We put them through a series of questionnaires. The way we structure our program is to make sure it’s a good fit for the both of us rather than, if you have a pulse and a certain amount of money we’ll take you as a client.

MD: That makes sense. I think the same is true for dentists who want to take every patient. They operate in the position of being desperate, so when a case comes in where they know they might not be the best person to do it, they’re going to do it anyway because the checkbook balance is a little low. And they end up starting a case they know deep down they probably shouldn’t start. So, are you saying that in addition to the dentist building self-esteem and all the changes that come, this also happens for the team members as well?

GK: Oh, yeah. Our work not only applies to the dentist leader or owner, but to the entire team. And the beauty about this, this is where the real value comes in, is that we believe in our business. And we transfer this to the dentist. It’s not just good enough to be able to provide the service, but it’s all about living a better life. You can give your staff a great opportunity where they can generate a great income, but their life becomes further enhanced because of the work they do in the office and a whole new loyalty is born. There’s a whole new reciprocity that happens when you care for your team members on that level. Not only do they grow personally inside the practice, but they grow professionally and personally at home as well. I can’t tell you how many times they bring this work home to their family and then come back and say, “You know, it not only works here at the office, but it works with my teenage son who I couldn’t get to make his bed and always leaves his socks lying around.” They learn how to manage people, and kids especially love some of these tools that I’m mentioning. So, it’s really wonderful to see the transformation of doctors and teams and families, too. It just really spreads like dropping a pebble in a flat pond of water and seeing it trickle out. It’s very profound.

MD: You know, one of the cultures of dentistry is that clinical quality is kind of the end-all, be-all of what we do. That, in order to have the “practice of your dreams,” you need to go out and take more courses, get better clinically, and sign up for a couple of institutes. It’s all about chasing the elusive goal of clinical excellence. And while I don’t want to necessarily downplay the need to be clinically acceptable or better, it doesn’t sound like your plan necessarily has a lot to do with the dentist changing how he or she does things clinically. Am I missing something?

GK: No, not at all. We believe that every successful practice is like a stool with three legs. There’s the clinical side, the business side and the people side. Our expertise lies in the business development and the people development side. That may be developing patients through their compliance and having them follow through on their treatments, or retaining patients and then running the practice like a business. Most people work for their business; what we do is a paradigm shift in which we have the business work for the owner. With so many clinical experts out there, we really just focus on our core area of expertise. We only work with general practitioners, and we only work in the areas of business and team development.

MD: So, in other words, what I’m hearing is that this is different than simply going out and getting more clinical training to be able to create the practice. I just think that for a lot of dentists, clinical training is something they feel comfortable improving about themselves. They feel more comfortable taking clinical classes than they do working on their self-esteem. It seems like it always goes back to that because the dentist tends to return to the “What impression material are you using” or “What bur are you using” questions. They think it leads to what’s going on in their practice, but I don’t think it is. Are you able to talk specifically about some of the things that you do when you go into the practice? How does the process work?

GK: Absolutely, I’d be honored to.

MD: When you go in, does it typically start in the hygiene department or over on the dental side? Or how does it work when you first go into a practice once they’ve decided to go with your program?

GK: We have a four-step process, Mike. Step one is to discover point A, if you will. “What is existing?” And we find that out in seven primary areas: the executive division, which handles management and leadership; the administrative division, which is Human Resources facilities and equipment; then we have a division called “generating interests,” and that’s also known as “marketing.” And that’s known on three levels because there are three primary ways to grow your practice: new patients, patient retention and case acceptance.

Then, the next division is “gaining commitment.” You can interest people in becoming new patients, but if they are not committed or they don’t register as new patients, it doesn’t work. And if you see someone or you tell somebody they need to come back and they are not retained as patients and they drop out the back door, well, that doesn’t work. People can be interested in Invisalign^® (Align Technology, Inc.; Santa Clara, Calif.), but if they don’t say yes it doesn’t convert into revenue. So, that’s the next division.

Then we have finance, where it’s money in, money out. We set up the budget and structures, and we make sure doctors are paid first, then their retirement and debt.

Next, we have the scheduling for the production division, which ensures we don’t have rollercoaster days. They make sure that everybody hits their numbers each day and what’s the risk if they don’t — accountability. Then there’s the quality assurance position to ensure that patients are served beyond expectations; that they want to pay and stay and refer others because you’ve given them such a great value. It goes back to executive administration, generating interest, gaining commitment, your finance department, scheduling for production, and quality assurance. We turn over every rock to discover what each practice has in those areas.

Then we go into step two: co-creating a plan. And we start with the end in mind. We work with doctors to detach them from their past, so you have your past, present and future. Most people create their goals from their past: “Oh, I can get a little better this year, let me just increase it 10%,” or whatever it might be. We actually have the dentist go through an exercise where they detach from everything. We say, “If you can have it any way you want, say how it is.” We figure out how much time they want off, let’s say they want to work three weeks out of the month or take 12 weeks off. In those 40 weeks, they want to do $2 to $3 million. So we calculate what they need to do per day, then we design a business and build a bridge backward from where they want to end up. So, we don’t come from their past, we come from their future, which allows us to invent new solutions from that place. What we do is co-create a plan, and it’s basically a step-by-step plan from point A to this future that they’ve created for themselves. Then what we do — and this is a key part, Mike, I really want to highlight this — is roll it out to the team. We take responsibility for engaging the team because if the team is not fully on-board and ready to drive this thing, then we make them a part of the solution and show them how they will win.

During the interview process we interview each team member, and they become a part of the solution. They are the ones who come up with the idea, and then we get agreement. One of our tools that we mentioned is getting agreement with others. We don’t tell team members what to do. We engage them and show them how they are going to win and become part of the solution. We ask them what they can be accountable for and they tell us; it’s sort of like a trainer for practice. We show up and make sure they are committed to what they said. And that’s how we get sustained implementation that they really want to use, let’s say for a hygienist an intraoral camera for every patient every time. We come up with an agreement and show them why and show them how using the camera fits into all the other systems so that they willingly use it. That would be an example of that.

Step four of the process is refinement. We actually refine the process so that when it goes into place, we have a scoreboard for each team member. For instance, let’s say you want to do $1 million and work 16 days. That means you have to do $5,500 per day, with the doctor doing $4,500 and the hygienist doing $1,000. One of the tools I created is the “DPO – Daily Primary Outcome” by position, and each team member has a responsibility by position, by day that they need to be accountable for. So the coordinator has to schedule $4,500 and $1,000. The assistant has to drive the doctor’s production to $4,500. The hygienist has to do $1,000 and then recommend $9,000 in treatment out of his or her room. If you’re closing 50% of that, that’s how you get $4,500 in a doctor’s schedule every day. And so on. This gives us the ability to isolate where the source points are as to why the practice isn’t performing, so we know where to go to isolate the challenge. Then we can course-correct it accordingly.

This is how we automate the management of the business of dentistry and the structure that we put in, so that it goes back to the original conversation of making it radical common sense. It is so simplified that you don’t have to think about the zillion moving parts that most people give their attention to and try to control. We simplify the whole process and just look at seven or eight little areas that make up the whole practice.

MD: So, there’s a chance that you have an employee or two who isn’t really pulling their weight and may in fact be a significant part of the reason why the practice isn’t running the way it should? In the old system they were able to kind of hide a little bit, but with the new system in place and accountability placed on everybody, it becomes readily apparent that they might actually leave the practice on their own volition now that there’s a little more being expected of them and things are being measured. Do you find that some team members kind of weed themselves out in an office that gives so much personal accountability to the employees?

GK: Absolutely. When people hear this process and are educated, those who can’t be responsible run for the hills. But it’s very interesting: less staff members leave than you might think. Most team members want to be responsible, but here’s what they don’t want to be: they don’t want to be blamed for not doing something. With all due respect to doctors, they want an outcome. When this system’s in place, people are responsible. If they can’t hit their number, people actually reach out and go, “Hey, I can’t do this,” and the team rallies around them.

With all due respect to doctors, they want an outcome. When this system’s in place, people are responsible. If they can’t hit their number, people actually reach out and go, “Hey, I can’t do this,” and the team rallies around them. Most doctors have a risk/reward. If they don’t hit their numbers, they can’t get paid.

Most doctors have a risk/reward. If they don’t hit their numbers, they can’t get paid. But the team doesn’t have that, Mike, because with the team you exchange time for money: “We’ll give you money and you sell time.” Well, time isn’t the reward that the dentist wants. The dentist wants outcome by position, but it’s not set up or rewarded that way. We had to shift the whole context of the relationship of how dental teams go to work in the morning when their feet hit the ground. I’ll find a jewel in the rough team member who is brand new to the industry and produces huge returns on the investment. Or I’ll find someone who’s been in dentistry for 150 years, who sits around and costs you way more than the others. What this does is really wonderful, because the biggest expense in dentistry is your staff salary. Now, everybody has a return on investment so that you watch your staff salaries. Dentists are too concerned with how much they spend for their staff. We’re more interested in how much they return for you, not how much you spend on them.

MD: I love that approach. Going back, you talked about how you don’t plan from the past, you plan from the future. I just experienced a powerful example of this in my life, which I told you about in Florida.

I set a goal for where I wanted my weight to be, and I knew I needed to lose about 45 pounds. I took that goal, put it in the computer, and it said that if I wanted to be at this weight by this date, here’s what I’d have to eat and what exercise I had to do every day. And I did what it said every day. I ate the right amount of calories. I did the right amount of exercise. And I started losing two pounds a week, just like it said I would, and I got confidence from that. It was a great roadmap and I ended up achieving that goal. But it wasn’t even until I met you, when you talked about planning from the future, that I realized just how effective that is as a technique. Had I done what I’ve done in the past — where you’re just going to the gym and not sure if you’re exercising enough, not sure if you’re eating the right thing, just kind of doing it by the seat of your pants — it would have yielded unsuccessful results. Planning from the future was a concept I was totally unfamiliar with. Now I am a complete believer, just based on my own experience. To a dentist, it might seem too good to be true to sit down with these goals and you say, “OK, let me show you how to get there.” I can see a dentist not even expecting that to happen. Is that correct?

GK: Yes, and it’s crazy. First, I want to congratulate you for creating the body that you deserve. And I want to highlight that keyword here: deserve. I also lost 40 pounds, and I’ve kept it off for six years. And I’ve had a challenge with weight my whole life. You know, I had a breakthrough in really understanding how to keep something consistently off, like weight. It was something I learned and it goes back to working with dentists. It’s something I call your “healthy deserve level.”

The title of my latest book is called “Raise Your HDL: Healthy Deserve Level for Successful Dental Teams,” because you can have all your systems and processes and you can know how to lose weight. I know how to lose weight: eat less and go to the gym more. But here’s what stops us, which we blame on procrastination or no time: underneath and subconsciously, we don’t think we deserve a good body. Therefore, we won’t take the actions needed to get a good body. Whether it’s your body, your income, your practice, productivity, your relationships — all of it, is related back to one’s deserve level.

If you want to know what your deserve level is, take a look around your life right now. That’s what you think you deserve. Because in life, you don’t get what you deserve, you get what you think you deserve. I know it sounds so radical common sense, and one of my friends says, “This doesn’t sound too good to be true, but too simple to be true.” It’s awareness; it’s so simple that once you think you deserve it, you’ll create it. So, we talked about qualifying dentists earlier on, and what I sniff out is: Do they think they deserve to get the outcome? Because if they don’t, they are going to kick and scream the whole way. What I learned was that if they don’t think they deserve it, I can’t get them there.

As we speak, today we’re at a practice in northern Virginia. They are doing $3 million a year and they have 7,000 patients. We showed them how this could be an $8.5 million practice. And the beauty is that both practitioners, when they saw that, got a little scared. They said, “Well, that’s just a little overwhelming to us.” But they knew they deserved it and so they’re creating it. It’s happening right now and it’s amazing and brilliant to see people get what they want because they now distinguish their future from their past.

MD: The other thing is that dentists might believe that “you simply can’t do $8 million in a dental practice without ripping people off.” To me, it’s not the thinking that they don’t deserve it, but that you’ve got to be doing something wrong to produce that much.

GK: You want to notice something here, Mike. People give us reasons that look real to them. See, when somebody totally gets it, they deserve it. They don’t put reasons or justifications in the way of it. They say, “How do we do it?” And believe me, when I first had this realization, I didn’t know I was putting justifications in my space just to say why I couldn’t do it. And it’s so real and it’s so subconscious to us that we actually put things in the way of obtaining what we want to have. It’s directly related to what we deserve. So, if you don’t think you deserve it, of course you’re going to justify why you can’t have it. You are going to think “that’s stealing” or “guys making $8 million dollars are bad” or “anybody with money is bad.” I had a doctor whose father is a priest; he started out seven years ago doing $50,000. He did $504,000 this past March in the heat of this crazy recession. His dad told him that people with a lot of money are bad. This filter had stopped him — going back to that filter distinction — that filter stopped him from creating his dream.

MD: Yes, but the thing is you never know that you have these filters, right? It’s not like you look down and see a list of your filters. These have been given to you by your parents at such an early age that I would assume many people confuse these filters with who they really are. “If I don’t have this perception of money, or if I don’t believe this, then who am I?” I think we almost get it confused with who we really are.

GK: Yes, that’s absolutely right. I’ll give you an example. Not only have our filters been given to us by our parents and our past, but they have been shaped by our experiences. We work with a dentist up in Michigan, and this gentleman didn’t believe he deserved to get paid for his treatment. We wanted to see where he got this belief. And he said, you’re not going to believe it, but you helped me to see where this originated from in my world. And it was this: He said: “When I was a child, I went out and shoveled snow at my neighbor’s house. I shoveled snow there and I came back home so excited — I got paid $20 to shovel the snow! I came back to my mom, and I said: ‘Mom, look what I got! I got $20!’ She said, ‘Where’d you get it from?’ ‘From the neighbor.’ She told me, ‘Take that money back! Give that money back to the neighbor.’” And he was like, “Why?” “No! You take that back!” Anyways, long story short, he goes back to his mom years later and asks her, “Why did you tell me not to accept that $20? Because ever since then I have felt like whenever I do work, I don’t deserve to get paid for it.” She said, “Son, I owed that woman money. I didn’t want you to take it because I owed money to that neighbor.”

MD: Oh, that’s just great. And this becomes one of his core values!

GK: But that’s what happens in our whole life. We have experiences, we make those experiences mean something, and then we pattern our decisions around that for the rest of our lives.

MD: Wow, well, there is certainly a reason why humans are more complicated than cats and dogs, huh?

GK: (laughs) Mike, you’re a hoot! This is wonderful. I really appreciate the opportunity to work with you on this interview; it’s really a joy for me.

Gary Kadi is a speaker who inspires and an author who challenges, and is founder of NextLevel Practice, a dental practice business development firm. Gary actively invites reader ideas and comments at gary@garykadi.com or 866-926-0914. If you’d like to learn more about his work, Mr. Kadi’s books, resources and live event information can be found at nextlevelpractice.com.