Your most loyal team member just cost you $50,000 this year. She’s been with you for eight years. Patients love her. She’d take a bullet for your practice. And she’s systematically destroying your new patient conversion without even knowing it.
Dr. Brian Rochford discovered this truth through a flash drive that arrived in his mail from the Scheduling Institute. What he heard on that recorded call made him want to “immediately log off” – not because his team member had bad intentions, but because she had zero training on systems that actually convert callers into patients.
“It was one of our team members who’s still with our team, who we loved, was an awesome team member who I did not set up for success,” Dr. Rochford recalls. “The phone call was the most cringiest thing I’d ever heard. I couldn’t even hardly finish it, it was so bad. Not because of any bad intentions, because of bad training.”
The biggest barrier to practice growth isn’t bad team members. It’s good team members operating without proper systems and training.
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The Loyalty Trap That’s Costing You Patients
You trust your longtime team members. They care about patients. They show up every day with genuine intention to help. But intention without infrastructure creates expensive blind spots.
The false security of tenure tricks practice owners into assuming experience equals effectiveness. Dr. Jeff Goldberg learned this lesson when implementing new phone protocols at his North Carolina practice. “I had some that were here 20, 30 years. ‘I know how to answer the phone. Don’t tell me how to do my job. You know, I’ve been doing it this way for so long, there’s no reason for a consultant to come in and tell me how to do any better. I’ve been doing it longer than he’s been alive.'”
Length of service doesn’t equal skill at patient conversion. Your eight-year veteran might excel at scheduling existing patients but stumble through new patient calls because she’s never been taught the difference.
Intention vs. impact creates the cruelest trap of all. Your team member genuinely wants to help every caller. She spends 15 minutes gathering insurance information, asking about their dog, building rapport. Meanwhile, three other calls go to voicemail because she’s tied up being “helpful.” Those missed calls represent $18,000 in lost annual revenue per call, based on average orthodontic case values.
The “we’ve always done it this way” blindness affects successful practices most. When referrals flow naturally and the schedule stays full, informal systems feel adequate. But informal systems can’t scale. They create what Dr. Rochford calls a “multimillion-dollar lemonade stand” – profitable but primitive.
The Real-Time Reality Check Every Practice Needs
Dr. Rochford’s flash drive moment reveals why assumptions about phone performance are dangerous. “I was like, you got me. Let’s give him a call,” he says about his reaction to hearing the recorded call.
The power of recorded evidence cuts through the comfort of assumptions. Most practice owners believe their phones are handled well because they see their team’s genuine care for patients. But care without conversion methodology produces random results. Some callers book appointments. Others don’t. Nobody knows why.
Recording reveals the gap between what you think happens and what actually happens. Dr. Goldberg discovered his team was spending precious time on low-value activities while high-value opportunities slipped away. “We were spending 15 minutes on a call trying to get someone&#...
