What Big Companies Do To Ensure Profitability with Ravinder Nottra [CPD Available]

Welcome back to the Dent to Invest podcast. I have sat here in front of me today particularly interestingly, Mrs. Ravinder Nottra. Rav's speciality is something called the Neme Technique, and also in addition to that, something else called the Sigma technique.

She combines them both and applies them to the dental industry to come up with two special recipes that can boost our profitability, not just as associates and practice owners, but also more generally insofar as putting revenue across all business interests because this can be applied to anything. And it is worth mentioning that Toyota used these methods, the Sigma method, in the 1950s to become the business that they are today. And we all know how that went, so let's tune into this one for sure to find out more.

As ever, you can claim your CPD for this episode within the official Dentists who Invest Smart Money Members Club. Smart Money Members Club also includes multiple mini courses and webinar series on finance for dentists, including how to become as tax efficient as possible, as well as understanding investing. All of this content counts as verifiable CPD, and you can download your certificates there and then upon completion of each lesson. In addition to this, we also include a whopping 10% discount on your dental indemnity and a 5% discount on lab bills for dental principals, amongst other perks and discounts for members.

Please use the link in the description to claim your verifiable CPD for this episode. Rav, well, I mean I'm looking forward to this. The point of this podcast is to teach people about things that they've never heard of for and bring new ideas to the dental industry. So I get a funny feeling that we're gonna do both today on this podcast.

So, Rav, when it comes to yourself, I think it's best to intro you as a profitability coach for Dennis. Is that fair to say? Yeah, that's correct. Nice one.

Alright, well, listen, I think we should just jump straight in with the main course, so to speak, the meat and potatoes off this podcast, which is to talk about both those techniques that we mentioned in the intro. So the first one is the lean technique, the second one is the Six Sigma technique, which is the technique that Toyota used to become the business that they are today. Interested to hear about both for sure. And then what we should talk about is how we can combine them to be as successful as possible in our businesses, not just as principals, but obviously including associates in that bracket as well, because we are businesses too, of course, and we have to look at ourselves in that sense, particularly whenever it comes to profitability and yes, of course, being ethical and fulfilling our duty of care to the patient and everything along those lines.

So, how about that as a place to start? That sounds great. Cool, let's jump straight in. Yeah, let's jump straight in.

So, what I'll do, let me ask you uh a question to all the listeners. So, when was the last time you finished a full clinical day? And did you know where your day's revenue came from? So, most practice owners I speak to, they say they can't remember or they just don't know.

So, what I'd like to do today is introduce you to a way of seeing your practice using a methodology that is being used by many businesses across the world for many years. So that includes McDonald's, Heathrow Airport, uh, Formula One, and the NHS. So, what we'll do, James, if it's all right with you, we'll talk about one really simple example of some of the pain that's we face in practices on a daily basis. And we can call it the 30-minute wait.

So a patient comes in and they're waiting around 30 minutes before they see a clinician. So there's lots of reasons for that, and I'll just pick out three as an example. So the reason they could be waiting could be the day started eight minutes late, so that 9 a.m.

appointment overran, and then as a result, it's called a cascade defect in manufacturing. So every patient then has a problem when they come in, they're always having to wait even more. The second reason could be the surgery turnover took 14 minutes instead of five minutes of preparation. And then the third reason could be the patient before them arrived 12 minutes late.

So these are just a few examples. Now that one of those doesn't cause a 30-minute wait, but a few examples put together uh do. So those of it, those are everyday examples of the kind of pain we face, especially operationally on a day-to-day basis. So if we take it up a few levels and look at the financial framing, now Christian Co's report tells us that 15% of patients either cancel or don't turn up.

And that can be as high as 30% for some dental practices. Now, the average turnover for a dental practice in the UK is around 867,000. So 15% of that alone is worth £130,000 worth of booked revenue that's just evaporated. And then adding to that, one more start, so 62% is the average overhead a dental practice is paying.

So for every pound that a dental owner makes, they're only keeping around 40 pence per pound. And then just adding to that, so if we look at the EBITDA and the impact on that, so 200 uh sorry, 200,000 pounds improvement in EBITR, and I've seen this happen in some of the practices I've worked in, at seven times multiple adds a valuation of 1.4 million pounds. So that can be found in things like untracked uh outstanding balances from patients, procurement, overspend, hundreds of manually invoiced processes, or a dormant patient base that sits in the thousands.

And I saw this in my last case. Now, I've got a few thought-provoking questions for you, James. So uh the first one is if your practice turned over £800,000 a year and your overhead is around 62%, recovering just 5% of that revenue will give you £40,000 annually. So what could you do with that?

Uh well, I mean, it's uh it's it's certainly nothing to sniff at, uh, isn't it? You know, it's uh I think we get blinded by the figures as dentists sometimes. You know, sometimes when we've got practices that are making, I don't know, six figures, seven figures, something along those lines, that we forget that these uh what seemingly small percentage improvements uh actually put a noticeable amount of cash into our back pocket because 40,000 pounds in somebody's back pocket, I mean, a lot of people never see that money in their whole life.

Do you know that could be the difference between having a full-timer and not? So another question. I mean, if you're a practice owner, you're going into work and you're fully booked for the day, but did every appointment start on time? And did every appointment, every patient, leave with a the next appointment booked in?

So if you're answering no to any of those questions, then you're not actually full, you're actually leaking revenue. And if your most experienced nurse left tomorrow, could your practice run at the same standard the next day? So if not, then your operational knowledge is living in people's memory rather than in systems or processes. So that itself is a risk to the valuation of your practice.

So now let's talk about the exciting bit. So this is the methodology now, and you've already mentioned Toyota. So there's two parts to this. So I'll talk about lean first.

So lean came about in the 1950s, so Toyota was almost about to go bankrupt and they needed to compete with American firms. So the way they wanted to do that was first of all look at their operations and look at where they can reduce waste. So Tai Chiono started looking at his operation and asking a few simple questions. So he said, out of everything that's produced in this factory, what are we doing that actually builds the car?

And what are all the processes that we are doing around the car, which is waste. So, for example, correcting errors, producing too much. So, this is where the lens around lean came in. And what he said was you only produce what you need and when you need it.

So this was known as the product Toyota production system. So it's another another TPS. Um, and basically he said you find everything in a process that does not add value for your customer and you remove it. So the bridge to dentistry, you could think of it as the 30-minute appointment.

So if you think of all those wasteful activities that you are doing, when you when you come into practice, think of it as um waiting in a queue that's wasteful. Um completing the form, which you've already done online and you're really doing it again. Um when you are going into the chair, the clinician then is pulling up the notes, and you could have done some of this beforehand. So it's removing the waste and looking at all the time they're spending in a practice, how much of that is waiting, and how much of that is actually spent receiving clinical treatment.

So if you map that out, you'll be quite surprised how much clinical time is spent on the patient compared to the minute they walk in the door to when they walk out of the door. So that's lean. Um, so lean is looking at the process, naming it, and then removing all the wasteful activities. Sig Sigma is a methodology looking at variation.

So when you are a clinician, uh you conduct a clinical process, and that could be doing a filling, for example. So the clinical process of doing a filling is almost identical from one clinician to the other. The variation sets in when it comes to the other tasks that have to be done either side. So talking to the patient, prepping the chair, prepping the tray, prep, taking payments, having a conversation with your nurse.

So that creates a variation. Ideally, what you want is for every standard of treatment to have a uh standardized time which you can allow some variation for. So if doing a filling takes 15 minutes, you can allow a few minutes each either side for variation. But the point is to have an allocated time for each of your treatments so you have some variation, but you can allocate your time more effectively.

And we can talk about that and how we use data. So nobody has systematically applied uh Six Sigma to the dental practice and the operation until now, so we can explore more uh examples of those. One thing I do want to introduce you to is tack time. So tack time is a German terminology and it refers to heartbeat or rhythm.

So if your clinic is open for eight hours a day and you have 16 patients, your TAC time is 30 minutes. So you know your 30 minutes are allocated for 16 minutes for 16 patients. By the end of the day, you'll finish on time, all your treatments will be complete, and you'll know where your revenues come from. So TAC time is looking at the available clinical time divided by patient demand.

If you start to fall behind, you are then chasing patient demand. So once you start falling behind, you'll start to see delays and bottlenecks. So that can be your measure. So your tack time is the heartbeat of your incoming demand.

So now we can look at some industry examples. Um so this is where it comes alive, and I think this is where you start to see um how the world operates with this process. So if you go to McDonald's drive-thru, it's pretty consistent. So the taste of a burger, it's not the best.

If you buy a burger in Birmingham or in London, it tastes more or less the same. And that's because McDonald's are not known for the best-tasting burgers, they're known for consistency and process. So if you go through the drive-thru, you'll know you'll be waiting a couple of minutes. You won't be waiting 15-20 minutes because that's not what you expect.

So, what McDonald's are doing, they are investing in process and then people follow the process. It's not the other way around. So it's consistent, it's predictable, regardless of shift, staff member, or location. So if you are going to a practice and you're booked in for a composite restoration, one associate might take 30 minutes, one might take 47.

So you've got some deviation there, and that's when your delays start to set in in practice. So the process again of a composite restoration is identical, but everything that happens around it is not. So McDonald's have a standardized written process for everyone who works there, regardless of who's in that day. And actually, you could do the same for dental practice.

So for a composite restoration, you could have a tray card for each appointment type, you could have a pre-appointment checklist, everything needs to be documented, and then you've got a documented handover protocol that any clinician can follow on any day. So it's about documenting what you want to be the standard. And any deviation from that is fine. So you can set your deviation.

I'll allow five minutes each side of my standardised process. So a composite restoration, if that takes around 30 minutes, you might allow a variation of 25 to 35 minutes. So if you think of the bell curve, it's if it's flat, then you've got too much variation. You want to make your bell curve tall and slim, and you've got a limit each side.

So if you have an associate who is taking far too long, they might have a training requirement or they might need more support. But equally, if they finish in 15 minutes, that might also be an issue because they might be cutting corners, which could be putting your business at risk. So it's always good to have a standardised time for any of your treatments. You can then allocate your time more effectively and efficiently.

And it also gives your associates or your team members some guidance around what is expected from them. UK Dentists, Dennist Who Invest now has an official platform where you can learn about finance and obtain UK compliant, verifiable CVD at the same time. The only platform that exists on which you can do both. The Smart Money Members Club has hundreds of hours of mini courses, webinar series, and live day recordings on all things finance slash tax efficiency for UK dentists.

This includes complete courses on how tax works for UK dentists, finance so that you can invest and grow your own money, business so you can improve your profitability as an associate or principal, and for those out there that want it, there's also a mini course and how you can responsibly enter the crypto space using measured amounts of capital. I've gathered this content from the best of the best I could find in each respective area so that you know that this is how people at the forefront of each field advise their clients.

The Smart Money Members Club also contains discounts on common things that UK dentists need to pay for on a regular basis. This includes a whopping 10% discount on dental indemnity, the offer to beat your income protection deal no matter what you're paying, and for the principals out there, 5% discount on lab bills and 10% discount on practice insurance. These are designed to offer hundreds, if not thousands, in annual savings. The purpose of this members club is to not only boost your monthly income but also manage your outgoings as much as possible and therefore create more profit.

To celebrate the launch of the Smart Money Members Club, and given that the CPD deadline is coming up soon, I've decided to offer the first month of this platform entirely for free. This offer will end in the coming weeks as soon as the current CPD cycle is up. To collect your CPD for this podcast episode using the Smart Money Members Club, feel free to use the link in the description of this podcast. I mean, yeah, you can ask a question right now, you know, in your practice, when you look at the most carmine procedure, does it take the same time regardless of which associate is in?

So if it doesn't, then that variation is going to be costing you time and money across the week. Yeah, yeah. No, I I hear you, I hear you. I mean, um, I think you could probably further subdivide that into uh complexity, uh, you know, uh, because obviously uh certain root canals are going to take way longer than other root canals.

Um and definitely the devil's in the detail, yeah. But yeah, high level, okay, cool. Yeah, you do want to ex if you know if one associate is doing an upper central incisor in like 45 minutes for a root canal, and then another one is doing it in like two hours, then obviously we definitely want to look into that, you know. So I I I think that yeah, I I like I like it from that perspective.

It's definitely good to explore these things. Yeah, cool. And then the second example is around Formula One and the pit stop. So imagine 1950s uh Silverstone car tire change.

So that used to take anywhere between 30 seconds to four minutes, so huge variation there. And nobody really looked at the process or asked questions. So what was happening there was they were they weren't preparing well for when the car stopped and came in. It was only when the car stopped, came in, did they start to go and fetch a tire, look at things.

It was all really messy. Um, the mechanics were tripping over each other, then they'd bring the wrong tire out. So quite often things went wrong, and quite often the tire changeover was four minutes. Um and then a Japanese engineer around the same time called Shigio Shingo was looking at the production line of manufacturing, and he was looking at the changeover time.

So a machine is running, you have to stop it to change over the die, for example. And then he asked questions around what tasks can we do while the machine is running, so when the car's running, and what task can we do when the car has stopped, or in this case, when the machine has stopped. So if you separate those tasks out, you have internal tasks, which can only be done when the car has stopped, and external tasks, which can be done beforehand or after. So this methodology is called SMED, so it's single-minute exchange of dye, and it's the discipline of converting internal work to external work as much as possible.

So, how does that relate to dentistry? You can think of it as your chair time, because that's costing you money, or you can think of it as your waiting room. So the waiting room queue is not caused by what's happening in the waiting room, it's what's caused by what's happening beforehand. So you go into a practice, you speak to receptionists, you might have to fill out a form.

You might be late because of parking, and then the clinician then takes a while to pull up their notes. So you could be waiting a good four to five minutes before you actually sit down. Whilst you're talking, there's a cue starting to build. So these are some of the tasks that when we look at before they arrive into practice, which is the pit stuff, what can be done before they arrive?

So, I mean, at the moment, I think most practices send out a text to remind them. But actually, you can call them beforehand, confirm the procedure. Do they know how much it costs? Do they know where to park?

Can you send them the forms to fill out digitally rather than doing it on the day? So once they come in, they might not even have to interact with the receptionist. They can come in and maybe just click to say, I've arrived. So the receptionist is no longer dealing with anyone who's coming into practice.

She can therefore deal with all the patients then who are leaving to book in their next appointment and take payment from them. So that's another, it's a cleverer way of looking at how to reduce that bottleneck in practice, which then has a knock on effect on the chair time. So then you can utilize the chair time to bring in more patients. Does that make sense?

Nice. Yeah. So I I guess uh the key thesis or philosophy of this technique is. Just exactly what you were saying at the start.

We look at everything that doesn't add value, yeah. And we remove it, or as you were saying in the analogy of the Formula One car, like what stuff can we do while the engine's running, and what stuff can be done beforehand? Because even though, yeah, I get that, that it's it's kind of how can I say this? It's all stuff we kind of know, but do we do it as a whole thing, you know?

Do we actually have a systemized way to do it? Or in all the things that we have to do in a day, you know, what is actually distracting us from doing this really important stuff. So we need to say it out loud, yeah. And there's a saying that I like we need to be reminded more than we're taught, basically, because like I was saying, we kind of know this stuff is important, but it just falls by the wayside.

Whereas actually, if we focused on this stuff, we'd probably have more time to do other things as well. So it's about priorities. 100%, yeah. And I I do hear that a lot.

I haven't got time to do it. But I think the best way to see it is what's the current process costing you now? So if that receptionist is tied up, you can't answer the phone. And you might have a query come through for an Invisalign, um, and then they'll go ring the next dental practice, and then you could have potentially lost three or four thousand pounds of sale.

You know what? Can I just say something on that really quickly? When you hear someone say, uh, I don't have the time to do this, what they're basically saying is I don't, I this is not a priority for me. Because everyone's got time, everyone's got the same amount of time, right?

Um, even the most successful people in the world have the same 24 hours in the day as us, but they're just better at knowing what they should prioritize and what they shouldn't. Whereas what I see people do a lot in business is prioritize the wrong things. Um, and then when someone tries to give them input on prioritizing other stuff, they say they don't have the time, right? Which kind of basically low level suggests that they want to just keep doing the same thing they did before, even though they're also simultaneously complaining about that because they've seen the help of a consultant.

So, what I'm saying is be open-minded, guys. And I I've done I'm not saying I haven't done it before, I've done it a million times, but I also know of that little psychological delusion. So sometimes I catch myself about the set and I'm like, hmm, maybe not, James. Let's let's let's listen to this one out, or yeah, let's uh let's give this a go.

And then sometimes uh you know, there's been times before where I've been stunned, I've been like, oh my god, this is actually miles better. But you've got to be open-minded in the first place. And I don't have time, smoke screen. Yeah, definitely.

Uh and you know, I mean, this example I'm going to refer to, this is really powerful. So this is relates to the NHS. The NHS use lean and Six Sigma and have done for a number of years. But if you would just think about A.

And uh just the camera. Just keep going. Okay, so if we think of AE and the time spent in AE, so you may wait several hours. I think four hours is the target time, but think of how much time you actually receive in clinical treatment, and then you could be waiting again.

Now, when people automatically think the reason you wait so long in AE is because there's a problem with capacity. So there's not enough triage nurses or there's not enough doctors around to look at you guys who come in with a broken leg or whatever it is. But when lean was applied, it actually the bottleneck wasn't there, it was right at the end of the process. So the problem was there weren't enough beds up on the wards, and the reason there wasn't enough beds on the wards is because the discharge process took too long.

So you'd be discharged and then you'd wait a few hours for a letter, a few hours to be picked up, you might wait for pharmacy sign-up. So you could be in hospital for another seven, eight hours before you are actually leaving that bed. And once that bed becomes available, then someone on AE can then move upstairs into the bed. So the bottleneck was actually in the discharge process on the board of patients leaving rather than in AE itself.

So AE just got clogged up because they there was nowhere for these patients to go. So I guess what I'm saying is the bottleneck isn't always where you think it is until you stop and map the process and then start to measure it. And then the Heathrow Airport, and I wanted to share this one because this is so simple, it is a little bit of common sense, but at Heathrow Airport, when people are going through the scanners, um, that's where the that's where the bottleneck occurs because that is only when they start to remove their shoes, take what uh laptops out of bags, um, and then that that had a compound effect on the rest of the queue.

So the queue just got longer. All they did was put some simple signage up along the queue to say, in two minutes' time, you will be going to the scanners. Please make sure your shoes are removed, bags are out, phones are out, keys are out, and so on. So that didn't even cost anything apart from the cost of signage.

Um, but as a result, they didn't invest in extra security lanes or extra staff. They just invested in a little bit of signage, and the result was incredible. It had a massive impact on the Q tie, which dropped right down. So going back to the previous example, you can do this in dental.

So, you know, you spend seven minutes or so gathering information with a patient that arrived at 10 o'clock. That information can be done before they arrive to practice. So I have another question. Um what and it's for you and for listeners.

So, what does your current practice send out in terms of communication between when they book in an appointment and when they arrive in practice? Um, well, I'm gonna guess the typical stuff is if it's a first appointment, obviously they're gonna need medical history and and uh you know, how can I say this? Uh presenting complaints and social history and everything along those lines, um, or the reason for attendance at the very least, even if they don't have a complaint. And then after they're gonna have subsequent appointments, you want email reminders and text reminders, some sort of cadence on that front, at least at the very, very, very least, to remind them about their next appointment.

Yeah. And I think it's thinking about how effective you can be before they're in practice. So always think of your practice and your chair time as the most precious resource, and it's thinking about what else we can do with the patient to keep them engaged before they arrive and after they've left. So um we'll move on to the next bit now.

So this is around the sort of test stakes and a few simple tools that you guys can take away with. So we have around, well, just over 2,000 practices in the UK that are owned by mid-sided groups, so sort of three to 29. And it's worth noticing that um as practice starts to scale up, that's when the processes start to creak and break down. So if you've got one practice, it could be running really well, but it might well be relying on institutional memory and the skill of people in the practice.

When you try to open a second one, you try and replicate that, and then by the time you get to the third one, it starts to creep down and problems start to occur. So there's delays, there's complaints, sickness, and so on. So if you think of a single practice that might have poor processes, that might be costing you somewhere between 40 to 80,000 a year. Now, a five-site group that's just going to be multiplied.

So every site then will be losing money every year, and it does become harder to manage to staff, and it becomes harder to sell. So corporate buyers now look at that as part of the valuation. So it's always a good idea to have standard operating procedures in place before you even start to scale up. So going back to the £200,000 improvement in EBITDA, if you think of that as seven times, that adds £1.

4 million to the sale price of your practice. And that £200,000 I can guarantee will be somewhere in your practice without you having to spend more money on staff opening hours before you even implemented AI tools to make your process run more efficiently. It will be in there somewhere. And the last practice I went to see, that was a three-site practice, and there was half a million pounds sitting in his practice in various processes right across his operations that he didn't know he had.

And that was to do with the way he was using suppliers, the way he was procuring um sickness and so on. So that was even before we started to look at implementing something new. So that's massive. Um, and then the three tools I want to mention um really simple for you guys to take away, implement straight away.

So the first one is called the five whys. And it's if you think of a little child always saying, why, why, why, it's a little bit like that. So you might have a problem. Let's go back to the patient waiting 25 minutes.

So you ask why, and it's because a previous appointment overrun. So, why did the previous appointment overrun? Because the wrong tray was set up, as one example. And why was that?

Because the nurse who came in, she was quite new and she didn't know how to set it up. And the reason is there was no standard way of setting up the tray for that type of procedure. So this the answer is we just need to put some standard processes in place so anyone who comes in, no matter whether they're experienced or inexperienced, can pick that up and deliver the same standard as any other tray. So the fix isn't always to run on time, the fix is to have a written tray standard.

So that's the five whys. The second one is I think we talked about this earlier, was Pareto. So this is the 80-20 rule. And this you can apply this to anything and everything in your practice.

But if we track the calls of appointments that overrun, if you track them in a month, your top 20 reasons will fall within two or three reasons. So, and you just focus on solving those two or three reasons because the chances are they'll keep coming back. So it could be incomplete notes or missing materials. If you solve those two problems, then 80% of your problems around patients overrunning will be solved, and you can apply that to anything.

Nice. Um, and then finally, tool three, standard operating procedures. So this is one thing every practice should have. And you can have it on any any process that you have you have in practice, whether it's raising an invoice, whether it's how a patient is checked in, and that should be the right way to do it.

The variation to those processes at the moment is invisible, and that is costing you money. Having a standard operating procedure, it's so easy to write. And I would encourage you guys to have only one or two people write them in practice just to keep it consistent and to have a date on there, a version control, and to always keep it short and punchy, and it's only one SOP per process. So each SOP starts with a verb, and it's literally you to tell them what to do, take out all the fluff, and it's just step-by-step instruction.

If your practice can't function um at a certain standard without a specific person, then you know that knowledge lives in their head and it doesn't live in systems and processes. So that's a business risk. You're not gonna rely on them, right? It's all it's literally all about how to write a good checklist, which sounds obviously dry.

Okay. Yeah. Uh, but um I never thought that I'd feel uh so how can I say this, uh, enthusiastic about a book on checklists, is all I can say. Uh, because it teaches you how to write them really well.

And it's it's can it covers in uh the book, you know, let's say they've got a really complicated project where there's lots of different people with lots of different areas of expertise. How do we make sure that they all talk to each other and approve things so that things are done properly? And yeah, he talks about the different types of checklists and how they should be powerful and punchy, like just the important things that you need to get done, not like a prescriptive list of every single item um and how powerful they can be, and obviously how massive businesses use these to make sure everything is standardized.

So the humble checklist is is huge for your business, and again, not just for an associate uh principal, but also for an associate as well, so that you can make sure that you're doing things consistently. Uh, so yeah, it's it's we shouldn't overlook and underestimate the humble checklist and doing it well. Yeah, I agree. I must admit, when I first came across them, I thought, oh, this is not the most exciting thing, but actually it is, and it's everyone's Bible, and they also need to be in a place where people can access them quite easily.

So if they're hidden away in systems where you've got to click five times to find them, they need to be easily accessible. And and you know, keep encouraging your team to keep pulling them up for any process, and then it becomes a way of life, and that's the culture that you build within your practice. So it's good to know that you uh get excited about them too. It's not just me, James.

Um, okay, so the fun I think finally for me, um, as I start to bring this to an end, uh, there's one thing you guys can do this week in practice is to pick a problem and pick a problem that perhaps has crept up quite a few times. You might try to solve it. Um and look at how you can solve it, map it out, map any problem you come across in practice. I'd encourage you to map it out, not just yourself, but with a couple of members of your team, because they're involved in the process, and you'll be amazed at what starts to jump out at you.

You'll suddenly start to see how long one part of the process might take, where the pain sits. It might not be right across the process, it might just be at one step. So that's one thing I'd encourage you to do. The other thing I want to mention is in the podcast link, there is a free e-workbook that you guys can use.

So if you've been listening today, you'll be able to put into practice uh what you've heard. So that's around um the pit stop analogy, looking at bottlenecks, looking at how variation might set in across your practice. And if you want to have a conversation with me, then let me know. That should generate a report for you as well.

So it gives you it's there's a waste calculator, it gives you a rough idea of how much revenue you're leaking. Um, and you can complete that. If you want to contact me, there's a button at the end where you can uh come through to me. And I think the final thing I just want to finish off on is Lean Six Sigma.

It's not just a methodology for certain businesses, it's a way of seeing any operation, and you could even apply it to your home life, you can apply it to anything that you do. Um, and it's a way of seeing things in a different way. I mean, this has just been a real quick whistle stop tour of a few tools, but there's so much more to it. So if you're looking to improving your practice, um then please have a look at the calculator, go on the workbook, and if there's anything you need, just to reach out to me at SeepMa Smile.

Sounds good. So, yes, that workbook that Rav spoke about just a second ago is going to be in the podcast description, guys. So if you take a look in there, you'll be able to find the link and that'll be clearly demarcated.