For most of 2025, this North Carolina dentist was telling herself the same stories every practice owner falls back on: it’s the economy, my market is saturated, we’re fee-for-service so growth is hard. She was averaging 11 new patients a month. She had taught her team everything she knew, and the numbers had stalled out.

Five months later (without spending one extra dollar on marketing) her practice booked 42 new patients in a single month.

Dr. Sarah Myers and her office manager Shannon join Flint for one of the most no-fluff growth stories we’ve shared on the show. They walk through how training the team changed the trajectory of the practice in Cary, NC, what almost held them back, and the moment they realized roughly 30 of those 42 new patients came from existing patient referrals — not paid ads.

In this episode, you’ll hear:

• How the practice grew new patients from 11 a month to 42 a month — with the marketing budget actually trending slightly down
• The mindset shift from “I’m the doctor” to “I’m the bottleneck” — and why owning that unlocked everything else
• How a 6-person team built accountability around new patient calls without losing a single team member
• Why the patient experience went up at the same time the volume went up — and how Google reviews tell the story
• The specific advice Dr. Myers would give a practice owner two years into ownership: “Don’t try to figure it out alone”

Most of us have made a commitment and immediately started looking for the out. The diet that "doesn't count on weekends." The 90-day challenge with a Mexico wedding exemption built in. If you've ever done that—congratulations, you're human. But it's also exactly the pattern that keeps practices plateaued.

In this episode, Flint Geier shares what happened when he committed to 100 days without alcohol—no caveats, no exceptions—and why the hardest moment was the very first urge to make the exception. What started as a personal reset quickly became one of the clearest illustrations he's found of what separates thriving practice owners from the ones wondering why nothing changes.

The answer isn't in what you add. It's in what you subtract.

In this episode, you'll hear:

• Why the urge to give yourself an "out" early in a commitment is the exact moment it matters most to hold the line
• How cutting one habit quietly unlocked 100+ more productive hours in a single quarter
• The two-doctor comparison that explains why some practice owners always feel behind on time
• Why the most successful leaders subtract responsibilities rather than add more to their plate
• A simple 30-day challenge you can start this week — and what it might reveal about your own practice

What happens when someone has listened to more new patient phone calls than almost anyone on the planet — and then retires? You sit her down and ask her to tell you everything she knows.

Ginger Foretich spent 17 years at The Scheduling Institute, starting as an auditor making mystery calls to dental and orthodontic practices across the country. Over time, she evaluated thousands of practices and hundreds of thousands of front desk interactions. On her final day with the company, she shared the patterns, the misconceptions, and the hard truths that separate practices that grow from ones that stay stuck.

What she's seen is clarifying: most practices lose new patients before anyone ever walks through the door — not because of marketing, not because of clinical skill, but because of what happens in the first 60 seconds of a phone call. The fix isn't complicated. It's just rarely implemented correctly.

In this episode, you'll hear:

• The #1 mistake front desk teams make on new patient calls — and why it costs you appointments

• Why individual accountability changes behavior when group training doesn't

• What doctors almost always get wrong when trying to improve their front desk teams

• How the best practices build a culture where certification becomes a way of life — not a stressor

• The one thing Ginger says she’d tell a struggling practice owner on her way out the door