Mickey (00:01.286)
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Beyond Page One podcast. I’m your host, Mickey. Today’s guest is Trey Miller. Trey is the owner of Smile Solutions Dentistry located in Harrisburg, North Carolina. Is that correct? Awesome. He’s a passionate dentist committed to providing top-notch dental care for the community. Strong focus on supporting the health and wellbeing of his patients, and team members. Trey strives to make a positive impact through his practice.
Trey Miller (00:14.944)
That’s right.
Mickey (00:30.534)
Smile Solutions Dentistry in February of 2020, is that correct? Awesome, he hasn’t looked back since. Dr. Miller, you took a fascinating path to dentistry. Can you walk us through your journey from playing baseball to being a dentist and how those early experiences continue to shape your practice today?
Trey Miller (00:34.4)
That’s right.
Trey Miller (00:50.56)
Yeah, yeah, no. So I did not grow up wanting to be a dentist. I don’t feel like, I don’t know, many people do, unless you have a parent that’s a dentist, that’s usually 90 % of dentists out there. And yeah, I grew up, I’ll get to that in a minute, but I grew up playing sports and that’s about all I did, baseball, basketball, football as a little kid. Kind of, kind of.
As I got older, I just kind of gravitated toward playing baseball and kind of went with it and enjoyed it and ended up playing in college. I was fortunate enough to go and play and I had a great experience doing it. It was something fun. Would I do it again? Probably not. You know, you miss a lot of the college experience and playing college sports. But it was something, you know, it was a dream.
Mickey (01:18.982)
Thank you.
Mickey (01:29.415)
Played Division 1, right?
Trey Miller (01:46.688)
You know, you dream to do it and dream to play for the rest of your life, even though that’s slim to none as far as your chances go. But you know, you realize it and you move on. But it was good. And then after graduating, I started trying to figure out, if I needed some other avenue to fulfill the sports aspect of what I’ve done for the rest of my life. So I decided I was going to start getting into, I decided I was going to run into a triathlon. No idea why. I just said.
Sounds like a good idea. And so I started running in triathlons and I enjoyed most of it. Usually, once it was over, I enjoyed it. But the bicycle part, the cycling part was my favorite part. And I had a friend who was big into cycling and racing. And so I started racing. And that kind of took off after I graduated. So I worked for five years at a local government in their environmental field. And I did it just to fund my hobby of cycling across the country and racing semi-professionally from Florida to Massachusetts. I had a blast doing it. And then I met my wife who was a big cyclist at the time too. And we ended up getting married and started thinking about kids and family and what am I going to do. Luckily through undergrad, I had planned to go to medical school and I had done a bunch of internships to realize that the medical field was not for me. So I had the grades to get in luckily and through some uncomfortable, well through an uncomfortable Thanksgiving with my in-laws, they decided that I would be a great dentist or I think they said pediatric dentist because I like kids that’s uncomfortable for your in-laws to tell you that you need to take a whole different career path. But I did. So I started thinking about it. My brother-in-law is a dentist is where it came from. Or my wife’s brother-in-law, technically. And I started thinking about it. I was like, well, I like working my hands. I like helping people. I like the idea of owning my own business.
Mickey (03:51.43)
Thank you for watching.
Trey Miller (04:07.072)
And so I shadowed a dentist or two and I was like, wow, this is fascinating to me. And, you know, fast forward, I guess that was 15 years ago, I’d say maybe 12, 15 years ago, and here we are. So I’ve enjoyed it, love it, love the practice, love what I do, love helping people, love the business side of dentistry too, which is, you know, something that I’m, you know, kind of at the, at where I’m sure we’ll get into it later, but you know, more and more drawn to just because of our size and scale. So yeah, here we are.
Mickey (04:42.854)
That’s cool. Are there any notable mentors or role models during your academic or professional journey?
Trey Miller (04:50.368)
Yeah, there’s many. It’s hard to mention them all. I’d say in academics, of course, you have professors in undergrad that before you get to dental school were key in kind of developing who you are. I even had one that I called on the phone five years after I graduated and he answered, he’s like, hey Dre, how’s it going? I said, pretty good. He said you’re a man letter recommendation thing about going to school and he was like yeah sure no problem I’m in the middle of a lecture right now I said I’ll get to better the week which is awesome you know I remember like he and I went played golf one time in undergrad you know I don’t know how many undergrad students go play golf and he shows up and he brings the cigar and I didn’t smoke cigars and he brings that extra cigar he’s like you want a cigar? I’m like he’s Yeah, alright, like, I mean, how many times, you know, just so I’d have a story to tell, I smoked a cigar and played ground and golf with my professor in college. So we had a good time. His name is Dr. Tom. Gosh, my brain’s gonna go dead here. I hit me in a minute. His name was Tom, but he’s a super nice guy. But anyway, so, but before that, I think, you know, my first year or two of undergrad, you know, I was just a typical undergrad.
Mickey (05:53.062)
Yeah, okay.
Trey Miller (06:13.6)
playing sports, having a good time, probably too much of a good time. And I think I had like a 3.2 GPA. And I had a doctor that I was shadowing that he kind of took me under his wing. I played baseball with his son who was a year younger than me. And we played on the same team one time. And so anyway, I would go to his practice. And I was at his house one day and he was printing off some stuff for me to read. And he goes, I remember he had these glasses and he looked at them his glasses and he’s a very serious man and he is like, he said, what’s your what’s your GPA? And I was like, you know, I was like, it’s a, I was like, well, I’m working on it to 3 .2 and he looks at me and he goes, it’s not good enough. And, you know, it was the first time in my life someone’s ever told me like, I’m not good enough, you know, I’ve always been an achiever and I’ll never forget that. And, from that point on, you know, I realized I’ve been playing baseball the rest of my life and I need to get me together. I think I made one B from there. I was like in a little small course I was upset about but and graduated with a 3.8. So he was if he would ever said that you know I don’t know I don’t know where I would be and I kind of took one comment one statement from somebody you respect to you know change a course for at least it was for me. You know from the dental side you know I’m you know I graduated always new so I you know I was a little bit older going to school and I’d worked a little while.
I knew right away I was going to open up my practice. I was at a great practice and so where I was, people thought I was crazy for leaving, busy. They were going to offer me a position to buy in there. It just wasn’t the right path for me. I didn’t want to be a partner. I wanted to do my own thing and write my ship. I just knew it and I’m glad. Even if I made less money, I would have you know, that was a great choice. And I started listening to podcasts. One of my favorites was the Bulletproof Dental Podcast and Dr. Peter Bolden, Craig Spodak, and I listened to them all, and some of them three or four times. And I just liked the guys listening to them. I thought they’d be fun guys to hang out with. And so I remember I emailed Peter, Dr. Bolden, one time, and because I was doing a startup and no one had done podcasts on startups which is very different than everything, you know, than just owning a practice. And I had this great idea that, you know, I wrote down my goals. I had like five goals that I wrote down and then the last one I wrote down was like get invited, have the chops to get invited onto the Bulletproof Dental podcast. And then I remember staring at it and I’m like, ooh, you know like these two great dentists have these massive practices that do this big podcast and summits and I just wrote this down now I gotta make it happen. And so I wrote him one and you know, ended up, we did, we’ve done three or four podcasts since then. And we had a podcast before, before I opened my practice and I had one after we opened and then I joined their mastermind for three years. And you know, they’re just great people, great, great.
Trey Miller (09:34.336)
you know have massive amounts of wisdom from business to dentistry and you know those were you know great instrumental and you meet so many people along the way and some are ahead of you and doing things that you you know you pick up on there’s a Dr. Trey Tippett down in Texas that a good friend of mine now he’s been a phenomenal mentor and I’ve even had some mentors come in you know they didn’t call them mentors but sometimes you get pushed from people who are behind you too.
I’ve mentored other doctors and they’re chasing me. And so because they’re chasing me, it makes me want to do more just so that I don’t want to be better. But I hope they do. If they do, I’m happy for them.
Mickey (10:18.374)
Yeah.
Mickey (10:22.662)
That’s awesome. That’s cool. Walking through the process and the strategies that you implemented when you established your clinic, it sounds like right during the start of the pandemic, probably a pretty crazy time to start.
Trey Miller (10:38.432)
Yeah, yeah, that was scary, to say the least, you know. You know, I leave this phenomenal practice, I’m doing tons of ministry and going to a place where I have no patience, other than my wife and two kids and my parents who drove an hour and a half just to be patient. And then the pandemic hits and I’ve got to shut everything down.
Mickey (10:42.278)
Yeah.
Trey Miller (11:04.64)
before we even started, or my equipment company, they dropped everything into my office, literally in boxes. My chairs and all my equipment were just here in boxes, and they all got laid off the next day. And so, I couldn’t even, there was nothing I could do. And, you know, masks were hard to find, gloves were hard to find, N95s, you know, you’re just scrambling everywhere you can to do whatever you can. I’m a little man on a totem pole because I have no, I mean, I have no first right of refusal. I have no existence. So I had to lay my team off before we even started. So I had to shut them down. And luckily, they both, I only hired two people, but luckily they both came back. And I just stayed positive through the whole thing and just kept telling myself, this is going to be the best thing that ever happened to us. And it’s funny how you say something, you just say it over and over and over and you start believing.
Mickey (11:41.602)
Yeah.
Trey Miller (12:04.832)
And the people around you start believing it too. And it truly was. I mean, there ended up, you know, hindsight, well, we won’t ever know otherwise. But there was, you know, a massive backlog of patients from other practices. And when we finally got the green light to open and I finally got all my stuff in and operational, then, you know, we had offices down the street that were sending people to us because they just could not get.
They couldn’t get people in and then people call on with emergencies and massive amounts of pain and look, fortunately, I do all kinds of surgical procedures and you know, emergency type procedures that, you know, it’s not much that leaves our door that they walk in the door. And so yeah, we did, we had multiple offices sending people to us or, you know, they just can’t, people would just call around till they could find somebody that could see them. I’m like, well, how about two o ‘clock? You know, and they’re like, sure.
Otherwise, I can’t get in for months that they’re in the office. We had families of five that would call and say, hey, we’re trying to get our teeth cleaned and we can’t get in our office until October. We’re like, well, we can see you next week. They’re like, great. A lot of them are still patients here. It was a tough stressful time. I think by far the best thing that ever happened to us. My goal was from day one, dental.
Mickey (13:03.654)
Yeah.
Mickey (13:19.814)
That’s awesome.
Trey Miller (13:30.272)
Most dental offices will collect about $850, $900, I think is the average across the nation, maybe less, somewhere in there. My goal is to do over a million dollars in year one, which is a stretch considering you have no patients. I ended up doing 1 .3 in my first year, 12 months. So I’m super happy and worked super hard went through all kinds of hurdles, and fired my marketing company a month before I opened, which was a whole other conversation. But I found out I didn’t own the hosting and the web pages of my site. I owned the domain, but not the hosting, not the actual pages. And got extremely upset and just said, see you later. So it was a wild ride, to say the least.
Mickey (14:05.638)
Cheers.
Mickey (14:19.75)
Yeah.
Trey Miller (14:28.896)
But it’s been good. I’ve learned a massive amount and developed a great team, which is what it takes to run any business. So that’s what I’m most proud of.
Mickey (14:37.99)
That’s awesome. So with that being said, in your opinion, what are the three crucial elements for building a successful and sustainable business in today’s market?
Trey Miller (14:47.52)
Yeah, I mean, your team’s number one. I mean, you can’t do it without a great team. There’s only so much that I can do, especially as a dentist. I mean, we can’t grow any more from me doing more and more procedures. My team has to be able to take care of people. I’ve got to set the guidelines to be able to trust that someone answers does it nicely answers with a smile gets people inefficiently and takes care of people because it’s not just me here, it’s a lot of us and we have 20, 27 employees. And so it’s making sure that we’re all moving in the right direction, the right path. That would be number one and without a doubt, the most important one. Two, being clear and having clear and concise direction of what you want personally.
I think it’s important to understand yourself and know what you want because owning a business is not for everybody. You don’t do it for money, you don’t do it for glory. A lot of times you take it on and you make less money and you can a lot of times. So you have to do it for the right reasons. Knowing your vision and knowing yourself is key to running a business always having that North Star and knowing what direction you’re headed. And last, I mean, you could go any direction. For us, you go through so many different phases of your career. It’s just, and I don’t know, a third one would be tough to sum up. For me, I try to keep everyone in line and keep everybody moving in the same direction more and more every day. You know, and it’s just hard. You know, it’s this. So I don’t know. The third one I may have to pass on.
Mickey (17:01.798)
Fair enough. You’ve mentioned COVID-19 being one of the biggest hurdles. Were there any other hurdles that you encountered when scaling your practice?
Trey Miller (17:14.912)
I mean we’ve gone through so much and you know I’m speaking next on Friday at the Bulletproof, the same podcast that I was telling you about. They have a conference and I was kind of going through different things and you know we’re speaking on you know managing growth from startup to three million dollar practice you know and that’s kind of you know kind of talking about different phases and different things.
You know, hurdles are there’s so many hurdles that that, you know, we always go through. I mean, the biggest one-day one was the marketing company. And, you know, and I kind of took that over and, you know, and now it was, you know, I had time during COVID, you know, I had two months to learn how to do things, you know, and I so I said, No, I’m not paying you the remainder. I had like a $50,000 contract with them throughout like you know, a year and it was pretty heavy on the front end. And so, you know, I canceled my marketing company. I pointed my domain to a different website the same, like the same day that we signed agreements to part ways and, you know, and then took it over and took it upon myself to learn how to do it. You know, I run my own Google ads. I outsource all my individual-like components. You know, I don’t do everything.
But we run specific marketing campaigns, like video marketing campaigns that are highly sophisticated and funnels. And to be able to target if someone watches a video for more than 50%. And so that was a huge hurdle in the beginning, just trying to get over and learn and not be held to constantly feel like you’ve got to pay a marketing company more and more just to keep the patience that you have.
That was kind of a big relief for me. And then it goes on from, I feel like every week, it’s like, what’s the biggest problem that’s going to have the biggest impact on what I need to do? Because we’ll never get everything that we need to get done on a given day, given week. And your list is longer and longer and longer. And it’s just finding the most important problem, I think, business. And it’s maybe business in general just finding what’s the most pressing problem that’s got the biggest hurdle to overcome with the biggest return on investment of your time. And how do we fix it? How do we efficiently fix it? And then how do we move forward and continue? And sometimes that’s fixing things because you start having employees leave because of complicated processes. And sometimes, a lot of times, it’s because of things that I’ve implemented. And I’ve had periods of my time and career in this practice where,
You know, I had so many great ideas that were just awesome. I had awesome ideas, which they were. I still think they were. But they became so complicated at scale, you know, and they may be great at, you know, 10 patients a day. But when you start seeing 50 patients a day with three doctors and, you know, and you’ve got 100 and some new patients a month, which is what we tend to have.
I think we averaged 144 last month. Those great ideas get extremely complicated. As we had, for instance, I was using a third-party finance company to help people pay for their procedures and just the volume that we had to deal with was I ended up having to have a fully dedicated person just to manage the one account just because I thought it was such a great idea. And it still was. And it made sense. But we’ve started cutting out all those processes that were too complicated, so to speak, just because of scale. So anyway, that’s a long, drawn-out answer. But I just constantly look for it you know, what’s the biggest problem I had to deal with? How do I fix it? And how do I move on to the next?
Mickey (21:30.566)
Yeah, that makes sense. It’s, I feel like that’s just kind of, so it comes with owning a business. Oftentimes. I read a book once it was called Eat That Frog, just kind of, and it’s talking about tackling the biggest problem right away. Just get it up.
Trey Miller (21:44.384)
Yep, yep, yeah, and now I’m working on my team, you know, my team doing the same thing, you know, and teaching them that like, you will never fix all your problems. Like, I will always have more stuff for you to do than you can do. And it’s your job to be able to look at that and to say, you know, what’s the most important right now and to have the biggest impact on all of us here today.
Mickey (21:51.526)
Exactly.
Trey Miller (22:11.936)
whether that’s making sure people are coming in the door or making sure that we’re not having problems with insurance or insurance payments or patient payments or people with the front desk scheduling inappropriately that’s causing us to not be as productive as we need to or maybe it’s a major issue in the back that something’s going on that we need to work on and focus on. So yeah, it’s just, right, it’s just, that’s business and fix it and just always move forward, you know, over and over.
Mickey (22:42.918)
It’s awesome. What role do systems play in creating simplicity and clarity within your practice?
Trey Miller (22:51.616)
Yeah, great follow-up question. I was the guy in school everyone hated in most of life, that highly overachieving guy. I had a OneNote document, like a 200-plus page OneNote document of different types of systems. I had five ways to answer the phone call. I just had to pick which one was the best before I even opened.
And to be honest, systems are massively important for any business. And my number one with them is my son’s in fifth grade. And so my biggest thing is, can I develop this system so that my son can do it? And it’s not to degrade the employees that you have. It has nothing to do with that. It’s, can I make this so simple that it’s anybody can walk into this building and pick back up based on a fifth-grade level to be able to get the job done that we need? And you know, that’s from, you know, step-by-step training protocols of like how to answer the phone, you know, answering three rings or less, answer with a smile, answer, you know, take care of their problem and get them scheduled in five minutes or less and don’t waste people’s time.
Mickey (23:59.238)
I love that.
Trey Miller (24:17.024)
you know, and just kind of outline like exactly and it’s more detailed than that, but how, how to do everything, you know, like we even have, you know, videos of how to like do certain things clinically, you know, so that we can start to train assistants on a much faster scale so that they can just walk by and like if something has like a cleaning schedule or protocol, they can scan a QR code and just watch the video and I don’t have to take somebody else’s time to go train another person in the back. And so, yeah, but at one point in my career, I will say that I went way overboard with systems. And to the point where I had this, there was one day I came in and I remember saying to myself, like, I have made this so complicated that it does not need to be. So I got on for about a year, a massive tear to just completely remove anything complicated and to just make everything easier and easier and easier. I got rid of that third-party finance company. I had an internal benefits plan that I thought was a great idea for people who didn’t have insurance, but the management of it was just awful. Anything complicated, I completely got rid of if I didn’t need it. I tried to get rid of it, which is what I tried to do. If I felt like I had to have it, then I would make it absolutely a simple thing.
Mickey (25:38.886)
Mm-hmm.
Trey Miller (25:44.892)
And that’s that was a big hurdle. I’m about done But that was a big hurdle of the system from both ends
Mickey (25:56.23)
Yeah. How do you approach hiring the right staff to support the growth of your practice?
Trey Miller (26:05.28)
We’re constantly hiring. You have to be constantly hiring.
Mickey (26:10.95)
What is your team size right now? You said 20.
Trey Miller (26:14.048)
About 20 people. We have three doctors. We have six, well, seven assistants. I have an operations manager and I have five front desk. And then I’ve got quite a few permanent part-time people that come in maybe two days a week. Just like I have hygienists. There are a lot of hygienists out that only want to work two days a week. So I just kind of pair them up with somebody else who wants to work two days a week. So it’s about 20 people in total.
Mickey (26:35.302)
Yeah, hygiene, yeah.
Trey Miller (26:43.904)
I’m a big proponent of companies called Culture Index. They do personality tests. It’s very applicable feedback that I get for any business in general. It’s amazing how accurate it is. I’ve never been wrong. It’s like I’ll hire people anyway sometimes and then their personality is like always comes back to their personality. And every time I’ve had to fire someone, I always go back and look at their personality test and I go, yep, I should. Like there it was. I knew it before, it’s my fault. So I make everybody take a personality test and try and build teams within. And I try to pair certain individuals up together and it’s amazing how you start pairing up these different personalities and how their happiness goes up, how their productivity goes up. So I’m very clear on the front end that I’m very protective of our team. I don’t want, I don’t let anybody in here that’s going to mess with our team. And it’s, we spend more time together, I say all the time, we spend more time together than we do with our own families and we have to all get along. I’ve got 18, 19 women here. And so it’s a lot, it can be a lot of things that you have to deal with, but we all get along. I mean, we don’t all, not everybody likes everybody, but they all respect each other and they get along and we try to take care of our patients. And so, I mean, hiring is just, you know, some of it is, you know, you just have somebody constantly looking at, you know, Indeed ads or, you know, and just constantly looking for a person to hire and then.
Part of it is I try and scrape any barrel that I can to find people, whether that’s from schools or, you know, I participate with several schools and their assistants will run through our, like one of their off-school sites that they have to come through. We pull a lot of students from that. You know, I schedule talks that are, where I went to West Virginia University for dental school. So like I’m scheduling talks to go back there just to talk and meet and buy everybody dinner whether you need someone or not, you just never know. So, I mean, it’s just a constant battle, you know, just to keep hiring. You just always hire.
Mickey (29:09.446)
Yeah.
Mickey (29:18.342)
Awesome. I found something interesting about Smile Solutions. You guys partnered with Dream On 3 Foundation. What inspired you to champion this cause and how has it impacted the patients in your community?
Trey Miller (29:25.984)
Yep.
Trey Miller (29:32.128)
Yeah, so we did that our first year, and for every new patient, we gave money to the program. And so it’s a phenomenal cause. I used to have it there, but I guess I took a bit, I put up some cabinets recently and I used to have a picture on the wall. And what they do is they give dreams, they sponsor dreams for kids with disabilities.
And so similar to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, but Make-A-Wish tends to be more on the terminally ill side, and Dream on Threed is more on the local, it’s more local, any kid with some type of disability, and they don’t just exclusively look for terminally ill patients. And it was just a great experience, something I love, something I’ve been passionate about because it had a sports background which is, you know, they gave the kid a sports-based dream. So, like, you know, one kid got to be an announcer at some, at a baseball game with, like, some famous announcer. Yeah, I forget which one. And then they’ll take kids to, you know, they’ll take kids all over the country to do, you know, all kinds of fun things that we wouldn’t even think about doing. And it’s always a surprise, always a big deal. I’ll always, you know, cameras and limos, and they just pick them up. Parents know they pick them up, and they take them to the airport, and they go.
And so it was, you know, as far as, you know, that was one of those things, you don’t always do things for, you know, publicity or, you know, that was just something that I wanted to do for me to give back and give back to the community as a local organization started here in Harrisburg. And I enjoyed it. You know, I just, I do it again. My team, you know, I thought I found out is we started kind of going a different direction because like, you know, that was mine.
So then I wanted to get like, okay, what does the team care about? And then, so now we kind of do more of like a team, like what does the team want to do? And what are they passionate about? So we always try to give back in some fashion. So, yeah.
Mickey (31:26.726)
Yeah.
Mickey (31:37.798)
That’s awesome, good for you. I love that you’re the business owner, but you’re asking your staff, what are you passionate about? What do you want to give back to? Because they’re working there with you, right? So that’s cool to see, good for you. For aspiring dentists who are considering opening their practice, what are some of the biggest challenges that they should be prepared for?
Trey Miller (32:04.192)
Yeah, the first thing I always do is make sure, as I said earlier, owning your practice is not for everyone. It’s highly stressful. You’ve got clinical aspects, you’ve got business, you’ve got employees, you’ve got HR, you’ve got everything that comes at you. And I always make sure, don’t do it for the money, because the math doesn’t work the way you think it does as an associate.
And you always think, I’m doing all this dentistry and the doctor’s making so much money off of me. And that’s not true. And there are times when you’re better off, you’re much better off just staying as an associate. You show up at eight, you leave at five, you have nothing else to worry about. You go home to your life and you take your vacation and you enjoy yourself. And so I think number one, know yourself and have your reasons why you want to run a practice. If it’s to build a culture that’s yours, to do something different, to make a name for yourself, make something that you and your kids and your family are proud of that will be remembered for the rest of your life, well those are whole different reasons and those are reasons to do it. If you’re driven and just one of those people who’s never satisfied unless they’re driving for it, then absolutely go for it. But if you like to take a vacation and you know, you don’t like having a lot of stress and you like investing and you want to take your money and invest in real estate that has nothing to do with dentistry. You can make just as much money doing completely different things. And so, you know, but if you do dentistry is a phenomenal field. It’s, you know, it won’t be, we’re seeing a consolidation of dental practice like medical, you know, and it’s holding off because patients still like the, you know, the smaller.
Mickey (33:42.694)
Yeah.
Trey Miller (34:00.8)
a smaller less corporate-style practice. Doctors still like practicing in a private practice versus a corporate type practice. There are still some good ones out there but you know understanding that like that’s coming and do you just want to be a dentist or do you want to go ahead and try and get ahead of it or take advantage of it to some degree and you know and just know it knows who you are what you want to do. I mean long-term.
I mean, I’ve cut back clinical more and more. Enjoy it, always will, but the business side of dentistry is more, you know, like for me, like I can’t grow anymore, like as a business with my own two hands. And so like I, you know, I’ve either got to decide to stop or I’ve got to stop practicing clinical in the next couple of years. And I mean, I’m opening up another practice. It’s about 20 minutes from here, It’s a 5,000-square-foot building that we’re building, that I’m building and owning, and then we’ll be managing. So pretty soon, probably in the next two to five years, I won’t have a choice but to stop practicing. But I enjoy it. I enjoy running. I enjoy pulling the levers of my P &Ls. I enjoy making sure everyone’s coming together as a team to do better. Those are all things that I enjoy. So I know it. And that’s just. So hopefully that helps. I don’t know if that helps there.
Mickey (35:30.918)
Yeah, no, that answers that for me. Funny enough, so I was supposed to go to dentistry, but yeah, so my brother’s a dentist, my cousin’s a dentist, my cousin’s wife’s a dentist, my other cousin, my dad’s a denturist, my grandpa was in it, and I’m the baby of the family and everyone was like, I grew up around it, right? And I was like, everyone’s good and they’re making good money. And then I realized that I hate blood and I like talking to people.
Mickey (35:57.478)
So listening to you talk about, you know, scaling the practice and I see it from my own experience. My brother who’s built practices, like he’s, he’s still a dentist. He still works with patients, but not nearly as much. If he wants to scale the practice, he’s got to be in the business. Yeah.
Trey Miller (36:09.664)
Right. Right. Yeah, you can’t. I mean, there’s too much. You know, I struggle to get through my emails sometimes every week, like just basic emails. I just don’t have time. And when I sit down clinical, I’m so busy. Like I literally will go eight to five, rarely get a lunch, and just, you know, all I can do. And I do it three days a week now. And that’s, that’s, you know, and when those days calm, I just know I’m behind until Saturday trying to catch back up on everything else they need to catch up on. Whether that’s banks or lawyers or accountants talking to accountants or just trying to keep everything moving is a lot. On a small scale, you can handle a lot more, but once you start getting above $2 million in total revenues and 15, 20 employees and you know, you’ve got to keep everybody together and that’s more important than you sitting there cranking out lots and lots of dentistry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, that’s 100 % true.
Mickey (37:17.158)
Yeah, you’re babysitting half the time.
Mickey (37:24.326)
The dental field is constantly evolving. How do you stay up to date on the latest advancements and technologies?
Trey Miller (37:28.096)
Yep.
Trey Miller (37:32.608)
So CE, CE’s phenomenal these days. I mean, you can learn how to do anything. Young doctors ask me all the time, should I go to extra school? Should I go to a GPR and do another couple of years of school? And I always don’t know, unless you feel like you left middle school and you didn’t get to do much. But otherwise, no, go start practicing. Go work for corporate. And don’t go open your practice if you feel like that you know, go work for corporate and then take CEs and learn how to do more procedures. And, you know, I do lots of surgery and, you know, and I have taken CEs to learn how to, you know, do what oral surgeons who go to school for six years learn how to do. You know, I got, I mean, I’ll take, you know, place six to eight implants per arch and currently attach the same-day prosthesis. And people walk out with, you know, teeth who didn’t have teeth for 40 years and permanently attached. And it’s highly complicated and highly technical. But you can get a whole master’s degree from CEs and podcasts. So that’s number one. Two, we just invest in technology. We do things like same-day crowns. We’ve got multiple 3D scanners for different types of procedures. We’ve got a 3D x-ray machine that shows you can turn around in all directions and look at bone structure and how dense bone is. You can plan out surgical guides for implant cases. We even take, we’ll take intraoral 3D scans with an x -rayed 3D scan and we’ll marry them together with a photo on top of everything. And then we’ll pre-plan implants for, with the prosthesis in mind. So we’re planning where the implants should go for what you need in your mouth. So it’s just investing in it and then learning how to use it. I’m just constantly trying to stay up because things do change all constantly with dentistry. They call it the practice of dentistry because we are all practicing, we will never be experts and we are practicing to get better and better every day.
Mickey (39:36.07)
Thank you.
Mickey (39:58.182)
For your same-day crown and stuff, do you have like an internal lab that you have in your office?
Trey Miller (40:04.064)
Yeah, we have a 3D scanner, so we’ll scan it. And then there’s a software that that scan goes into. And then it’ll marry an image. It’s got thousands of different types of teeth that have been scanned. And it takes the other teeth around it. And then it’ll create a tooth-like, it’ll take an image of what it thinks should have been there. And then we’ve got a milling unit that will mill. It takes blocks. They mill it out of a material called zirconia. And it’ll mill the crown, and then it goes into an oven. It’s got a fire in the back. It fires at 1,700 degrees Celsius. And it shrinks down. It comes out 23 % bigger than the tooth when it mills. And then when it fires in the oven, it shrinks down to 0 .23 microns is how accurate it is. So yeah.
It’s all expensive, but when you start looking at the math of things and your lab bills, there are just times when those types of things make sense. The patients love them. They love them. There’s nothing better than walking in with a broken tooth and walking out with a brand new one that looks just like it did before.
Mickey (41:19.174)
Yeah, same day. That’s yeah, you mean you have you have moved quickly in the short amount of years. Good for you. That’s awesome. I talked to dentists all day long and it’s like what you’re doing takes them like 20 30 years to do so I’m impressed. All that.
Trey Miller (41:32.668)
Well, that’s personality, you know. I just, I got a big gas pedal and just keep it down and don’t look behind, you know. So.
Mickey (41:42.822)
Very cool. Given your background, you likely see dentistry from a unique perspective. You’re competitive with the sports that you’ve played growing up. How do you approach patient care differently, especially with those with dental anxiety?
Trey Miller (42:00.672)
Well, medication always helps. But I think from anxiety, I mean, one, you’ve got to have a nice looking facility. I mean, there’s nothing worse than walking into a dirty, dingy, shag carpet and the smells of dental. And so we focus on all the senses from sounds that we try to play good music, something that is like one of the things proud favorites is, what’s the band? Like oldies, upbeat oldies-type music that everybody likes. This is a kind of classic music. And Earth, Wind & Fire, that’s the one. Sometimes we have to stop that because patients are dancing in the chair and we have to change the station sometimes. So that’s a big one. But it starts from, we talk about things like this.
Mickey (42:44.326)
Thanks.
Trey Miller (42:56.096)
It starts from the front desk, from the time they walk in the door, does someone greet them with a smile? Does someone talk to them? Does someone clearly outline exactly what we’re gonna be doing for the day? As doctors, there are little tips and tricks that you learn over the years. For me, I always sit down, especially when someone, everybody’s nervous. And I always try to find out what is it. I always try to joke with them and get them to laugh or something. I usually will say, well, tell me what makes you the most nervous. I’m just like, don’t say everything because that’s usually what it is. If it’s the shot, then we kind of go through that. Sometimes they don’t want to know anything. Don’t tell me anything. Just do it and let’s move on and go forward. Just try to comfort them. It’s funny, I always try to tell little stories or jokes or I’ve got kids and they’re rambunctious and one’s ten and one’s five and sometimes I’ll just tell a story and just to get people to calm down and relax or I’ll tell my assistant the story and they’ve all heard all the stories a hundred times. I told you what Sophie did the other day and they were like no and I started telling a story and they’re like I heard this all over again and I was like I’m telling you about our new boyfriend and so I’ll just tell a story and that’s it.
Trey Miller (44:19.936)
that can get people to relax. You know, one thing that I think is very fascinating to me, you know, the psychology of dentistry is very fascinating. And, you know, I don’t really, it’s more of just things that I’ve learned just through trial and error or mistakes or, you know, and one thing that I do a lot is like the element of touch, you know like it’s like if you ever have a bad day and somebody comes by and they, you know, they’ll come patch on the shoulder and they’ll say, hey, you’re doing a great job. Make sure you keep it up. Just like when you touch someone, and I mean appropriate, it’s above the shoulder. It’s a shoulder for me. It’s never going below here, but I’ll touch my arm, tell them you’re going to be okay, or I’ll hit them on the back, I’ll take the back of my hand, and I’ll just, hey, hope you have a good day, and just kind of tap them on their shoulder. But those little points can dissolve a lot of things. Little things like, you know giving you know someone praise for something sometimes their shoes you know their shoes like I like your shoes like you know my daughter would love those pink sparkly shoes or something or and so anything there’s all kinds of little things to just kind of talk about that I try to try to make people relax and get comfortable and you know and there’s more but those are kind of the big ones that I always work for and medication and that’s it that’s always a good to the people.
Mickey (45:47.398)
But my next question was going to be, you know, talking about the technical skills of dentistry and some interpersonal finesse and how to finesse them both. But I feel like you just answered that.
Trey Miller (45:53.664)
Yeah, well, and but it’s, it’s not intuitive, you know, like, like my doctors now, like, we talk about things like this, we talk about how to communicate with people, you know if you can’t connect with people like that’s, that’s business. And that’s, you know, and I feel like, the more people that we can get to say yes, and because about 30 % of all dental patients just do whatever you tell them to 30%, another 30 % take a while 30 % aren’t gonna do it till it hurts and so the more people we can get to say yes to what we recommend, the better of a job we did as providers. And so, you know, and that’s things like for me, it’s about, you know, like talking to people like I play a game with myself. It’s fun. This is a fun game. The first time I meet someone, I walk in and try to make a connection, a non-dental connection in 90 seconds or less, and everybody. And one, you know, I don’t want to talk about teeth. It’s what I have to do. So I do it all day every day. You’re here to talk about your teeth. I don’t want to talk about your teeth, to be completely honest. But if you’ve got a fishing shirt on, we’re going to talk about fishing. You’ve got a golf hat on, we’ll talk about golf. If football or some sports is going on, I’m going to try and find something there. My kids and my wife work for Wells Fargo, and half of Charlotte work for a bank. And so I can always talk about things like that.
And finding those types of connections are massively important for people. And that’s what people care about. And that’s what they want to come in and talk about. Flip through phones and show you pictures of their dogs or their last fishing trip. Or me, I’ll go. My assistant will be mad. They’ll be mad as hell at me for taking 10 minutes to talk about my last fishing trip. And they’re waiting on me for 10, 15 minutes. And we’re all behind. And I’m like, look at this. So, right, right. But those are all things that are.
Mickey (47:48.55)
It’s special.
Mickey (47:53.606)
That’s a huge part of it. You’re dealing with people. It’s people to people. Yeah.
Trey Miller (47:57.984)
Right. Right. I think that’s lost. It’s lost a lot. You know, I mean, you know, and yes, we focus on numbers and metrics and reports and, you know, all the things that we have to do to keep moving forward and keep, you know, keep everyone in line. Because I have a lot of people to take care of here. You know, a lot of people take home salaries to take care of their families. And so but at the end of the day, yeah, we’re taking care of people. And, you know, we can’t you can’t ever lose that. Because once that’s gone, then it all becomes about numbers. Then you know, then that people feel that, you know, you know.
Mickey (48:32.646)
Do you think, this is a little off script, but do you think the corporate kind of dental giants, the Aspens of the world are falling short on that part?
Trey Miller (48:45.632)
I do, yeah. I mean, I never worked at one. You know, and some are better than others like Heartland is a pretty big one, and I think they do a pretty good job. You know, but it’s hard. You know, the bigger I get, the more policies I have, just because we have to, you know. Like, we have vacation policies, or time off, or sick policies, because, you know, because one guy or one girl just takes, you know, six days off, a day off every two weeks.
So it’s like, all right, now we’re gonna have more policies. But we try to still meet and we try to do things like smile. That’s one thing I talk about all the time. You got a mask on, like, here, put a mask on. Wrinkle your cheeks and smile under your mask. People feel that, and they feel it, and it’s important. And you answer the phone, smile. Answer with a smile. And I say all the time, which sounds weird, but I say, you know, make people feel like you care. And because we all care, I wouldn’t let people work here if they didn’t care. But you have to let them, let that patient feel the way you care. And so, you know, that’s super important that I hope no matter how big I get, that we’ll, this, you know, we don’t ever lose. And so, but, so yeah, I hope, you know, but a part of me doesn’t mind corporate. I would actually, I think one of the best business strategies ever, we just follow them around with them and practice right as close as you can to them. And people are, dentists are like, don’t work corporate. And I’m like, bring them on, let’s go. I got a spot right here, you can come. And, you know, cause I know we’re gonna take better care of our patients and you’re gonna market like crazy and they’ll just come right over next door. So, you know.
Mickey (50:37.926)
That’s awesome. That’s cool. You mentioned marketing and how you do a lot of it yourself and you taught yourself the Google ads. What are some key metrics that you use to track the success of your marketing campaigns and demonstrate a return on investment?
Trey Miller (50:56.48)
Well, Google spits out tons of different KPIs onto its Google Ads. And at this point, my Google Ads specifically, I just turn them on and turn them off. It’s flip a button. Once they’re set up and they’re running and they work well, I don’t look at that a whole lot anymore. Just if we need more patience, I go flip it on or turn the budget up. If we’re too full, I turn it down. You know, I do run a report every month of where we’re getting our patients from. So my front desk, every time we get a new patient, they record, you know, exactly where. Something, yeah, they say, you know, how’d you hear about us? And if it’s good, you know, and I want general terms like Google, which Google, you know, Google, you know, we do a lot of Facebook ads and campaigns, which the Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, like we do tons of videos. I mean, I’ve got, you know, not thousands, I’ve got tons of videos that we just run because videos can run forever. A photo can last a scroll, a video you can repurpose, you can take clips of it, all kinds of things. One of the best ones lately that’s been successful has been bloopers of me standing on camera. It’s just a bunch of bloopers. We run patient testimonial videos where patients come in and tell their stories it’s not so much us, it’s that they’re telling their story and then we are just there to give a little bit of the technical aspect of how we fix the problem and kind of how we transform their smile or a little bit of just what we did to fix it. So as far as, that’s probably one thing I’m not great at is the actual detailed metrics of it, but I look, I mean we derive probably 80, 75 % of our mean, don’t tell Google this, but 75 % of our patients typically come from Google, either an organic Google search or a Google ad click, which is hard to tell which one came from which. I’m not running too much of landing pages and data. I’m not going that far with it. I mean, if it works, it works. Yeah, I’m looking at how much, what did I spend overall for Google. How many patients did I generate from it?
Mickey (53:11.302)
Yeah, you’re pushing them to your regular site. Yeah.
Trey Miller (53:19.712)
you know, what’s my what’s my patient acquisition from Google, you know, YouTube, Instagram, same thing. I mean, it’s dirt cheap to advertise on YouTube and Instagram. You know, and occasionally, my son will see me on YouTube and like, it’s worth the repent. I’m like, I’m gonna bring a patient down and say, Dad, I saw you on YouTube. And I’m like, yes, I made it. I made it.
Mickey (53:40.614)
It’s like, wait, did you make it or is your targeting bad because a 10-year-old is seeing it?
Trey Miller (53:43.456)
Yeah, right. But then he goes, well, how many followers do you have? I was like, I don’t know. I think like 15 million watched that video. And he was like, or something, or 15,000 or not a million. It was, I thought it was a lot. Yeah. And he was like, well, MrBeast has like 20 million followers. And I’m like, cool. He’s not a dentist. Right, right.
Mickey (54:00.422)
A high number. It’s 200 million, yeah. You’ve given away with Teslas. Yeah. Cool. What’s something that’s been the most surprising or unexpected lesson that you’ve learned throughout your career so far?
Trey Miller (54:22.824)
I think the most important thing in business is having grit. And I think that was what, I didn’t realize how hard it was gonna be to run your own business. And to come in day after day, do the things you don’t wanna do because you have to do it. And because that’s what your business needs you know, take on massive amounts of debt. And, you know, with this new building, you know, I’ve got over $3 billion in debt right now. And just to stomach that type of, you know, that type of debt service to, and a family that you have to take care of at the end of the day. And, you know, and to just fight through all the struggles. I mean, that’s the biggest thing that I’ve learned. It’s probably been, you know, something that’s just been, you know, my past has taught me.
Luckily to push through those and to have you know the fortitude to just keep going day after day I mean, you know you go through periods of you know borderline depression because of how hard things can get at times and how much you owe on your plate and you know and then being able to still you know to show up and put a smile on and make everybody around you your patients your employees feel happy and appreciated even though deep down you’re just grinding through it and
Mickey (55:35.622)
Yeah.
Trey Miller (55:50.784)
You know, and that was probably the biggest surprise for me hard it was going to be. I knew it was going to be hard, but I didn’t know how hard. You know, until you start sitting up at night, midnight, and you can’t sleep because you’re trying to work through something for a week on end. So that’s been the one thing that’s kind of overarching. There are millions of little things that you go through every day, but no one can ever prepare you for how hard it’s going to be.
Mickey (56:26.438)
Fair enough. Is there an end goal in sight for you? Cause you said, you know, you started a small clinic, you know, then grew it now opening up a second location. You know, someone says, you know, Dr. Miller, what’s the end goal in sight here?
Trey Miller (56:41.568)
Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean you know, reducing clinical time and running the business. I mean, that’s, you know, and I love it. I love practicing. I love doing surgery and, you know, and I’m sure if I stopped, I’d miss it. And, you know, I don’t have any ambition to be massive corporate, you know, I don’t, I mean, you know, larger scale, yes. I mean, and part of that’s just so that you can continue to compete with these larger corporate offices that are coming in. And you can have the new technology and afford it and have the volume to be able to justify having it. And, I mean, it’s a business. And so, yeah, the end day, one day is to sell it and move on and do something different. And will that be any time soon? Not. The goal is really to set it up to where you don’t want to sell it.
I mean where it runs and operates and you’ve got people in place to do it and then you can start taking more time with your family or investing in real estate which I enjoy doing. I love real estate. We’ve invested in a few real estate projects in other parts of the country and now we’re occupied. That’s exciting. It’s fun for me.
You know, so yeah, I mean that would be the end goal. I mean, I’d be lying if I said, you know, it wasn’t to sell, but you know, why else are you, you know, running a business? I mean, that’s, you know, I feel like you don’t, you either have a job that you work in your business or you can own a business that you run, you know, and so otherwise you’re just an employee of your own business unless you have something that runs without you there.
Mickey (58:18.278)
Yeah.
Mickey (58:38.406)
All set? All set. All right, last question. Looking back at your journey, what advice would you give to an aspiring dentist or entrepreneur who’s just starting with their career?
Trey Miller (58:49.216)
I think dentistry is a phenomenal career and I think, you know, most medical doctors say they wish they’d gone to dental school. So if you want to do it, do it. And if you want to do it, you definitely can do it. I had massive reservations, am I smart enough to do this? And I always assumed that doctors dentists and lawyers were these extremely intelligent people that like were so gifted and intelligent that it was easy for them. And it’s not true. Dentists, doctors, and all professionals just work hard to get where they are. And that’s it. If you work hard, you can make good enough grades to get in if you work hard enough. I had one friend in class that I would joke with, he was number one in our class, and he could take a highlighter and just highlight the page and it would just go to his brain and everybody else, they spent 10, 12 hours days, they studied till midnight every day, they fell asleep. So if it’s something you want to do, absolutely do it. Find a mentor, find somebody that you like and respect who can help you along the way in any avenue, dentistry, business, anything. Because there are people who have been in your shoes, have walked your same path, and call you on what to do, what not to do, and how to fast-track you to a better and happier result of exactly where you want to go. So if you want to do it, do it. I still think it’s a phenomenal career. And I don’t think that’s going to end for the next 20 years.
Mickey (01:00:31.366)
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Trey. Appreciate your time today. We’re going to be posting this. I’m going to be attaching all of your socials to it as well. So if people do have questions for you, I’m sure you’ll be happy to answer any of them as well. And yeah, thank you again for your time. I appreciate it.
Trey Miller (01:00:43.968)
Absolutely. Thanks, Mickey.
