Melissa Summerfield speaks with Dr. Jordan Soll, Chairman of Oral Health’s Editorial Board, about the upcoming Brush Up on Business series, an offshoot of the Brush Up Podcast with an emphasis on the business of dentistry. In each episode, Dr. Soll will interview an industry expert to provide our viewers with essential knowledge for running a successful dental practice in 2025. Stay tuned!
Read the audio transcript below:
Melissa Summerfield (MS): Hi, I’m Melissa Summerfield, Managing Director of the Oral Health Group. I’m joined here by Dr. Jordan Soll. Dr. Soll is the Chairman of the Editorial Board for Oral Health Group. He is also the principal and owner of Central Dental Group, a practice located in Midtown Toronto. And Dr. Soll graduated from the University of Toronto in 1984. You opened your first practice, if I recall correctly, in 1986. Let’s start by answering the question of why we’re doing this series. We’re doing a series called Brush Up on Business, talking about the business side of dentistry, the management side. Why is that so important?
Dr. Jordan Soll (JS): Well, what I’m going to say to you, Melissa, is that you, when you introduced me, you said, I had a wealth of experience. And I always like to say that if you look up the word experience in the dictionary, it says, see mistakes. I just got my 40-year pin from the ODA. So over 40 years, unfortunately or fortunately, I do have a bit of experience. And I think as the years go on and the world is changing dramatically, it is all about business and dentistry. You have to be a little bit savvy. You have to have some street smarts. It’s great if you can cut a perfect prep. It’s great if you can, you know, do a great scan. But there’s a lot more today to running a successful dental practice than having just good hands and the knowledge. You need to have some really great street smarts. You have to surround yourself with great people, and hopefully, with a little bit of luck, you’ll be successful.
MS: So how did you learn these business lessons throughout your career?
JS: Something inside me, I guess, you know, I started off, as you said, in ’86 and probably by ’88-’90 I started to read the business sections of both the Globe and Mail and the National Post a lot, and I started to always look, is there any ideas there that I can take to my practice? You know, I won’t mention the names, but I did three, you know, stints throughout my career of working with very high-profile management companies. But theirs is so highly focused on, you know, conflict resolution with staff and all dental sort of things. And I wanted to go counter current and look outside dentistry. I mean, if I’d go to the four seasons for lunch, I try to get some ideas about customer service and how I could take those ideas and implement them in my office. And it just more and more I get fascinated by the business world. I often think I should have, you know, maybe done a different track and gotten an MBA, but the track I’m in, but how can I take the knowledge that I’m seeing outside and implement it in my practice?
MS: So that’s really interesting. So you’ve gone to non-dental sources, in some cases, for business ideas.
JS: Always. And in fact, I’ll tell you one of the, probably the biggest inspirations, in the probably around 1995, somebody introduced me to a program called the Strategic Coach with Dan Sullivan. It’s a great, great program. It’s based more for people in the financial world and entrepreneurs, because it’s based on time management. And unfortunately, as dentists, we are still caught in the old world of when our hands are at the chair, we’re making money. Yes, you can have associates. Yes, you can have visiting specialists, or multiply with the number of hygienists. But there is a greater ceiling of what we do, as opposed to somebody in the entrepreneurial world on how they can really expand themselves.
MS: So, what’s the one thing that you hope for, or maybe more than one thing hopefully? But what do you want dentists to take away from this series? What do you hope that we, working together with the other experts, that we’ll be bringing in throughout this series. What do you want dentists to be able to learn or take away from this?
JS: Well, as I get older, going to be 68 in December, I plan on hopefully practicing another 10 years. People are they’re aghast when they hear that, like, my god, you don’t want to No, I don’t want to retire. I’d like to share the knowledge. I love to talk business. I love to talk strategy. So, I hope that people take away from you know, running a successful practice, it’s not a sprint, it truly is a marathon. And even after 38 years in private practice, I’m still learning, and I’m not getting it right, and I look back to some of the things I do, go, oh, did I mess up? But you learn from the experiences. How can you refine things? How can you tighten things? And I’ll talk about it more when I meet with the other experts, what’s happening now with AI and what’s coming at us, I’m just spellbound. And I’ll give a little plug for a book I’m halfway through, and it’s called “The Coming Wave” with a fellow by name of Mustafa Suleyman, he created Deep Mind. Deep Mind was purchased by Google. This guy is writing a book, and it’s just it’s numbing to understand what the next 20 years will bring. And make no mistake, AI will affect dentistry in so many ways. You know, I often laugh. Sometimes I’d hear these radio commercials for cfmt, that TV station that runs old, old programs, and they had a great sound bite from Homer Simpson saying, “the internet, is that thing still around?” It’s coming at us, and the phrase, “lead, follow or get out of the way,” always springs to my mind. You’ve got to be prepared for it. You’ve got to stay on top of it, or it’s just going to hit you like a tidal wave. So I hope that, speaking to all the experts, I hope that our listeners and viewers will take away from it that, okay, giddy up. You know it’s not nine to five and weekends off.
MS: How true. So can you leave us, maybe with one teaser tip that you’d like to share as we launch our Brush Up on Business series.
JS: The teaser tip, unfortunately, is there’s no magic bullet.
MS: No easy button.
JS: No, there is no easy button. I can’t remember the name of the gentleman who was a former CEO of Holiday Inn, but he never finished high school, and he addressed the Harvard graduating class, and he’s always said, you know, “My success, I never worked more than half a day. Didn’t matter if I worked the first 12 hours of the day or the second 12 hours of the day.” It’s a lot of work, dentistry, between regulations, regulatory bodies, government introducing CDCP, all these things. When I first started in dentistry, we didn’t have to wear gloves. We had three high speed hand pieces that we wiped down with alcohol. Things have changed. The magic bullet is either you’re all in or maybe think about a different profession.
MS: Super. Thank you. So, stay tuned. There’ll be a lot more coming up in our ongoing series, Brush Up on Business. Thank you to Dr. Soll for kicking this off, and we’ll look forward to seeing you at our next session.