see the video: http://vimeo.com/66419383

Dr. Lavine:

Well, we’re going to go ahead and get started here.  Welcome, everyone.  This is Dr. Lorne Lavine.  Many of you know me as the Digital Dentist.  Many of you are aware of the fact that I’ve been doing these webinars for a number of years.  I’ve done close to 160 webinars, and anytime I present a new speaker, a new topic, I’m always a little nervous.  I never know how many people are going to register. My fears were very much unfounded tonight because, as of this morning, we had over 725 people that were registered for the webinar, and a good chunk of you are already here.

I’m only going to speak for a couple of minutes.  I want to make sure that Dr. Griffin can talk for as long as he’d like.  He also said he wants to leave as much time as possible for questions in the end.  All of you, on your screen, if you haven’t been on a webinar before, you should see a little webinar Go To Panel.  You can go ahead and type your questions as you think about them.  We’re probably not going to get to the questions until Chris is done speaking, but as you think about them, type them in.  We’re going to do our best to get to all those questions by the end of the evening.

Within a couple of days, you’re all going to get a number of things.  First off, when you log out tonight, just indicate if you would like Dr. Griffin or myself to follow up with you.  That only takes a few seconds to fill that out.  We are recording this webinar.  So, in case you can’t stay until the end or you get distracted, don’t worry about it.  All of you will be sent a link the next day or so that you can download the entire webinar so that you won’t miss a thing.

Again, for those of you who don’t know me, I’m Dr. Lorne Lavine, and many of you have hear of me before.  I’m sure.  Many call me the Digital Dentist.  What I’ve tried to do over the last number of years is present webinars that I think are interesting.  They may not be my areas of expertise, which is technology and computers and networking and data backup, but, really, the focus here is just to provide some content that I think is interesting and stimulating.  If it’s controversial, it’s okay, but at the end of the day, it’s got to be something valuable.  I have no doubt that we’re going to hit on all those things tonight.

Tonight’s presentation is called “High Capacity Dentistry”, and I was talking to our speaker before.  It’s just amazing some of the concepts that he has been able to develop.  There’s something which he calls his high capacity dental blueprint, which was created over 100 years ago, but it’s only been recently that it’s been rediscovered and translated into modern practice.  It pretty much works every time it’s tried.  We’re certainly going to hit on that.

What are the seven deadly dental waste that almost every practice suffers, and how do you get rid of it?  Does is really require terminating people, which is what we all want to avoid?   What about the seven ways to stay relevant within the next three years and lay a foundation for the practice of tomorrow?  I’m sure many of you are wondering what the most overlooked daily production booster in the history of practice is.  We’ll talk about that.  When it comes to something like diagnosing, is there a process? We’re going to look at his three step diagnosis that pretty much eliminates case rejection.  These are all things.

It really gives me great pleasure tonight to introduce Dr. Chris Griffin.  Most of us know Dr. Woody.  He’s one of the most educated dental educators.  He’s called Dr. Griffin as “Ripley’s Believe or Not Dentist”, and it’s a play on the fact that his practice is in a town called Ripley, Mississippi.  It’s a small town.  There’s five other dentists there, but he is not competing with them.  He’s just dominating over them.

He’s got 3000 active patients. He routinely schedules over 50 patients each and every month.  He’s been called the most efficient man in dentistry, and he’s practically giving away some of his practice secrets.  So, it really gives me great pleasure to turn the screen and the mic over to Chris.  Chris, we are so excited to have you hear tonight and really looking forward to tonight’s presentation.

Dr. Griffin:

Lorne, hey man.  It is such an honor and such a pleasure to be talking to you and your folks.  Honestly, I don’t speak a lot to people.  I know there are a lot of people who have registered for this, it looks like, are on the West Coast and of course all over the country and all over North America, too, but I don’t speak a lot to people out West.

So, first off, let me just apologize for my accent.  I promise you I’ve tried to get rid of it.  There’s not much I can do about it.  I’m from Mississippi, born and raised.  I grew up in a farm.  It’s the truth, and that’s just the way that I talk.  So, forgive me for that, but I think I got a lot to share with everybody that’ll help everybody out.  So, whenever you say “go” Lorne, I’ll just head out and start talking about it.  I guess that’s my okay.

Dr. Lavine:

Yeah.  You go for it, Chris.  We’re ready.

Dr. Griffin:

Okay.  Alright.  So, first off, let me just go ahead and show this.  I went ahead and took the liberty because a couple of things I’m going to be talking about, when I’m giving lectures like this to big groups, a lot of times, we’ll print out worksheets that help you follow along with the lecture.  It’s not completely necessary that you have this worksheet, but I put a couple of items on a website for you.

So, if you get a chance, you can go to my company website, www.thecapacityacademy.com/digital-dentist. That’s for Dr. Lorne, and we put these sheets on there just to help you follow along.  We’re not going to even talk about the part of the worksheet probably for a little while, but it’s there if you need it.

Alright, about me.  Let’s just talk a touch about me, and I don’t want to talk long about me because that’s not why you’re here.  You here to help your practice, and I want you to help your practice.  You probably need to know where I’m coming from and how I came to these conclusions that I’ve drawn.

In high school, I was the kid that was always really good at math.  So, that led me to think that I wanted a career in engineering.  I went to Mississippi State University.  That’s 110 miles from my house.  That’s the furthest I’ve been from home at that time, and I go down there.  I’m happy as could be in engineering school.  Actually, I had a roommate, a good friend from [06:39].  This will just show you how jealous I am.  He just had his company valued at $1 billion, and I just couldn’t be happier.  I was the guy that was pulling him through all those classes at State, but now he’s the famous guy.  That’s okay.

So, we’re down in Mississippi State.  We’re doing engineering, and we love it.  About my junior year, it came time to decide if I was going to be serious about engineering.  I had to go get a job at an engineering firm for a summer job.  So, I was getting ready to do that.  About that time, I was approached by my family dentist, and he said, “Well, Chris.  I believe you’d do real well in dental school.   Why don’t you go to dental school and come back and be my partner in Ripley, Mississippi?”  I thought, “That sounds a lot better than me going to Houston, Texas to work for an old company,” because I’d never really been far from home.

So, I had the engineering background, but in my third year at Mississippi State, I went ahead and swapped my majors.  I finished up all my core curriculum, got accepted in dental school after three years, went to University of Tennessee, and I got out.  I thought, “Hey, the rest of my life I’m going to go with my family dentist, and we’re going to be happy.  This is going to last forever.  We’re going to have one of the best practices in North Mississippi.”

How many times does it work out when you’re going with your hometown dentist and you just think it’s going to work out?  Well, I can tell you.  In my class of 90 people, about 70 went in with someone in their first year out of school, and I think 69 of them did not work out.  So, it’s very uncommon for it to work out.  I was no different.  We had a split up.  It got a little bit ugly.

I ended up building a practice here in Ripley because I didn’t sign a [08:23] because I’m from here.  I wouldn’t have done that.  So, I’m building a practice, and it’s tough.  Actually, a lot of building, bought some land and remodeled it in less than 90 days.  We remodeled the whole thing, me and one guy doing all the work ourselves, working 14 hour days.  I personally did that, did the construction work myself, and I build the building.  We’re open.

Things are going good.  I’m thinking, “Great.  We’re going to have a great general practice.”  Within six months, I started liking cosmetic dentistry.  Now, if you think back to the 1990s when I was doing this, it was probably the peak of cosmetic dentistry.  So, what did I do?  I thought, “Let’s just go ahead and sign up for the big institutes.”

So, I went out to one institute out West a bunch of times, a bunch of money.  I got pretty good at doing veneers, pretty good at doing all porcelain work.  I was somewhat good at doing full mouth reconstruction, and then, I thought, “These full mouth reconstructions.  They work sometimes, but other times they don’t work that well.”

So, I went down to an institute down in Florida, went there a bunch of times, and I got in.  So, I felt I’m really educated.  So, I come back to Ripley, and what do you do when you think you’re so well educated?  You say, “I have a nice general practice, but I think I’m just going to try to have a completely cosmetic boutique practice in a town of 6,500 blue collar workers whose main industry which is a furniture factory just closed.”

Now, you would have I would have better common sense that that, but I didn’t because I thought I’m such an amazingly skilled great dentist now that I can just do it anywhere. At the institutes they tell you that you can do any kind of practice anywhere, and I believed them.  I was gullible and young.  I got out of dental school when I was 24 so at this time, I was still 25, 26.  I’m obviously not very wise, but I tried it for a few years.

I just about ran the practice into the ground.  I just about went broke, and that’s embarrassing.  My grandfather had actually put down some money for me to start the practice.  It’s all very embarrassing. I’m not doing well.  I was always the golden child. I always thought I was going to be the guy to beat the world, and here I am failing.