Welcome back to season two. We are officially at episode 17 you're seeing my face for the very first time.
If you don't already know me in person, I'm Sarah Beth Herman, your host here at dentistry support, the podcast. I have a guest with me today and I'm so excited for you to meet her. Krissy and I go way, way back into our dental years working together while I was traveling all over the Western part of the U S and I had a great time getting to know her leadership style. Krissy Andres is our very first. First guest here on Dentistry Support the podcast. Today we're talking about all the good things that come with mentorship, why it mattered to me, what that looks like, before I get into all of that, I just want to welcome you, Krissy, to the show.
Thank you so much for joining us. Joining. Yes, thank you for having me. I'm excited. Krissy and I, we always say we never want our phone calls to ever end because we love talking. We just could banter back and forth for hours.
Right? I appreciate it. I'm here for it. Let me get into why I want to talk about mentorship and why this episode is even titled get a It is so easy for me to get stuck in my own head. I have been a person for many, many years, and I think these tendencies still creep in where I just think I know everything, where I think that I am the smartest person and I always know what's best.
And honestly, a lot of that is just being full of myself. I always promised myself. On this podcast that I would be real with you . I would tell you all of the really true things about myself because I don't think that I'm too different than you, Krissy, or than any of you that are listening, we've all been there before.
And we all think so highly of ourselves. Once we get a few years of experience in previous episodes, I've shared how it's very easy for us after two or three years in the same position to be like, wow, I am. expert. I know everything. And everyone just starts coming to you for knowledge I'm going to take you back to when I worked under a particular chief executive officer who I looked up to in a lot of ways. And at this time I was the regional director of operations. I was overseeing, 33 dental practices at the time we needed to terminate an office manager I don't think at the time I knew I was really being mentored, but I look back now and I've realized that in so many scenarios I've been being mentored all the time.
Even you right now, whoever you are listening, you're being mentored by someone you don't even know it, but 10 years from now you're going to tell stories. about the experience that you're in right now. This employee, we needed to terminate for a lot of different reasons. She at the time was pregnant.
That was not why we were terminating her, but her pregnancy had taken her down a path where her performance was really rough and she was missing a lot of work. So, There were a lot of contributing factors that led to that termination from poor performance to not being able to be at work to sleeping on the job.
It had nothing to do with her actual pregnancy, but at the time, all of her excuses came back to that pregnancy. That was a real big challenge, right? Cause as moms, we always want to lend grace to whenever someone has to not be at work or if they have doctor's appointments, they have to go to, and man, we love our moms.
We love those that have babies, those that are going to have babies, those that get pregnant while they work for us. We love that, but there are always needs of the business that we have to keep into consideration. We gave this specific office manager. seven months of excuses, seven months of hearing the same thing and her not showing up to work and the business not even being able to open multiple days out of a week.
That just led to so many different challenges. And so we needed to terminate her. But this specific office manager was so rough. I mean, I was almost, not almost, I was intimidated by her. Absolutely. I was intimidated by her. My chief executive officer came in and said, Hey, Sarah Beth, we have decided to bring our HR team in and we've decided to move away from this team member.
We know we need to terminate her. I'm just going to go ahead and handle this for you. And I was like, Yeah, that sounds great. I'm, I'm stoked about that. You go ahead and handle that. She was intimidating. The situation was really stressful because she was pregnant and I felt like she was in a protected class.
She was. It was devastating for me to have to think about terminating her because she was pregnant. And I did like her as a person, but as an employee on a performance level, she was such a challenge for me him offering to terminate her. Yes, let's do this. He can go terminate her. I don't have to feel uncomfortable because who likes firing someone?
I don't know a single person that gets any enjoyment out of that. He goes and he fires her and I just felt such a sigh of relief. Like I didn't have to go do this. He came back and he asked me to meet him in his office. So I went over. I sat there for an hour and he shared with me all of the ways that I did not measure up as a leader and the expectations he has as a leader that is underneath him.
He shared with me the very first eye opening experience I had as a leader being mentored by someone else. And that was if you hire someone, you have to fire that person. So if you're the hirer, you're the fire. Even if someone offers to go do the dirty work for you, you never let them go do the dirty work alone.
You show up, you are there, you swallow your pride, you do the tough things, you handle the tough calls. If it was your hire, it's your fire. Even if it wasn't your hire, you still show up. I needed that. I needed to be mentored in that respect. I've also learned when I have operated out of a selfish mindset or when I've operated selfishly just in general, not even that it was my mindset, but it was just an automatic process for me to go through, a learning experience always came from it.
I'm going to talk to you about one more. example and then I'm going to get into some things I want you to hear from Krissy about her experience and what mentorship has meant for her and what it's looked like for her in her future and what she sees it's going to be in her future. A long time ago, I started to learn about what emotional intelligence was.
EI is how everybody describes it. They just turn into a little acronym. I still screw up all the time when it comes to emotional intelligence. I still take things too far. I still stress out way too much. I still worry all the time about how I respond to things and I still fail to respond the right way.
When I think about emotional intelligence and how something really stressful comes, I need to remember myself that it's just a momentary stress. Someone asking me to change something, to do something different, to change my process, to improve what I'm doing does not mean that I'm a bad person or that I've failed at something.
Just because someone asks me to do something different doesn't mean I'm a bad person and I made all the mistakes it just means that they have a different perspective, a different vantage point, and I need to learn to be moldable in that situation. I don't have to know everything and I don't know everything.
Just because someone asks me to do something different or teaches me a different way to do something. I'm not eternally bad for that. I'm not the worst candidate for this position. And that's a hard thing I think for us to get to. Krissy, I want to shift to asking you some questions, to getting some feedback from you.
I want to learn more about what your experience has looked like. I want our listeners to be able to take what you're going to share today and understand that they're not alone in their journey. When you think about mentorship, you think about What it means for someone to mentor you, what would you say is your most significant experience with a mentor?
How did that shape your career? How is it shaping your career?
Sarah Beth, I, I think history has shown us that, you know, we find something we're successful at it and then we gatekeep it. And that's just like the general consensus around. for somebody to be vulnerable and to want to coach that and to share that with any other business owner is a most.
It's unheard of, right? Right. We we're in this mindset of, okay, we wanna help others. We wanna help you grow. I've had a couple mentors paid and not paid. And whether you think about it or not, there are people along the way that has changed that trajectory for anybody. And you can sit back reflect and say.
I see how that person could have shifted this or this moment really molded who I am as a person and the leader that I chose to be. And I have a couple and without them, I will tell you, I would not be anywhere near where I am. And in fact, going back, if I could go 10 years ago, I would have brought on a mentor a long time ago, whether it was paid or not, because I understand the value.
And the impact it made on my life. Whether or not you have one, you need to get one. I think whether it's personal or professional, there's big wins to be had with it. Ultimately you just don't know what you don't know. If somebody can get you there faster, absolutely encourage that. Yeah.
And take that as a win because somebody wants to pour into you in the ways that other people poured into them. that's a huge win for me. It's. changed everything.
Krissy, when you say paid or unpaid, some of our listeners may not know that the unpaid aspect of a mentor. So you're going to find friends, right?
That totally inspire you, that you love, that you care for, that you're like, man, they're an inspiration to me. When you have a friend that's an inspiration to you, whether they're strong in business, Whether they are, a leader in an organization you work for, that's an unpaid mentor. You should be listening to that person and the advice that they give you and take this free opportunity to be mentored and pay attention closely.
When you're talking about a paid mentor, that's someone that you actually pay for their services. You find someone that you connect with, you click with. Later on in this episode, I'm going to talk with you about how to find a mentor because Is such a buzzword right now. People are talking about digital downloads.
They're talking about mentorship programs, seven figure groups. All of these things are buzzwords and they look really, really pretty online. They have the pretty fonts and the pretty aesthetics. And you're like, gosh, I really want to be a part of that. But there are some things that we want to watch out for, the biggest thing if you can agree with me Krissy is that you're saying pay attention to your surroundings.
There are mentors all around you, paid or unpaid, but you need to focus on what those relationships can look like for you if you pay attention to who's mentoring you in your current experience that you're in right now.
I think a lot of times those friendships, you don't look at what they go through that you just, you're like, Oh, they're venting to me or they're, they're just, there are problems, but really it doesn't matter.
Business is business and people is people. How can I take what happened to them and make sure that in my industry that I'm not doing the same thing. And I am coaching through that. Right. Yeah. Huge thing. And you hit it head on when you're saying, Hey, listen to your surroundings.
There's learning to be had everywhere.
Something that just really stood out to me about what you just said. When we look at people that are in our circle, I think sometimes we're either intimidated by them because you're so successful. We're jealous of them because they're so successful.
We want to see them fail, hear me out for a second. We want to see them fail because we don't want to see them as more successful as us. What I want to challenge anyone listening to this episode to do is to see other people in your circle as successful as you. Recognize them for the way they could mentor you if you foster that relationship.
And if you know someone in your corner that is already mentoring other people, do business with them, do business with them because it matters because they offer something that is in your circle that the universe is literally telling you, you need to be a part of, and I'm going to tell you that from a standpoint that Krissy, you personally have paid to be part of mentor groups that I've run.
You and I are friends. We go way back, way back. Now we own companies together. So what I'm saying is that if you have anybody in your circle that does anything to help advance other people and their careers, switch your mindset. You don't need to be worried, stressed out, jealous, envious. You don't need to do that.
You need to join that circle. Be part of it. Challenge yourself to swallow your pride and be like, Hey, they, they might know what they're talking about. And even if you don't believe a hundred percent that they know what they're talking about, listen for more than five seconds, support them in their journey.
I saw a quote, Krissy, that said, , you will make more friends from clients than you will clients from friends. And I want to change that, right? How can we change that? How can we teach the future leaders, the generations that come after us to recognize the value and people that are already in our circle?
Why are we seeking outside of our circles to create these friendships or be mentored or have these partnerships when our circle contains really valuable people that can
support us along our way? It opens your mind a whole lot more to what's possible. You know, we have feelings above our heads.
Sometimes it takes an outside source to be like, Krissy, you're in your head on this. Like you've got, you have the discipline, you have everything going for you to be successful in whatever you're doing, believe in yourself. And sometimes you just say, I've got you, I'm going to change this moment.
And I've got you, but I already know that you have this. It's a big deal to have those people in your circle. And if you don't, Find them, seek them out.
Krissy, have you ever had an experience where you had something really tough that you either had to handle, you had to address, maybe you're really embarrassed and you were a crappy person during that situation.
And you realize now that if you would have had a mentor, maybe things would be different. Do you have anything like that? And I, I don't mean to ask you that in a way where like, I want to embarrass you publicly, from a vantage point of people want to relate to other people. And I think when we stand on a platform like this podcast where we're teaching, we're training other people, we're guiding people along in their journey.
We need to have experienced things that allow people to see we're real because we're in a different place today than we were 20 years ago when we started our journey as career women. Right. So share with us, where have you been?
Yeah. Things have you gone through? Tell me.
I have some stories. , and that's all part of mentorship, right, is people that are have gone through these situations that can coach you through them. So it's not as difficult the next time. Some that really stand out and I'm going to be You talk about vulnerable.
I'm being vulnerable right now. And I still, to this day, think about it. And I ran into this coworker a couple of weeks ago and my heart just broke. The apologies that came from it, because I still think about this moment. So it's crazy that you asked that. I was 22 years old. I worked really hard.
I had been in the dental industry since I was 18 years old, I get into this clinical director role instantly in my mind, I'm like, who's my top performers and who's not? This person, she'd been with a company for a while. She just was not my top performer and I was going places. I'm driving this team where we're doing great things.
I felt she was in the bath, popping holes out the back. I approached management and I was like, this isn't working out. She's had all this stuff going for her. We give her all the tools of what I thought was the tools at the time. I made the executive decision to recommend letting her go.
Mind you, she has a family. I loved her. Just like you said, I love people and I poured into people and I loved what she had to bring to the table, but professionally, like she just, she wasn't guiding my team where I needed it to be. We let her go. And I forever look back at that conversation and I forever look back at that whole situation because.
That did change her whole trajectory of her life. She completely got out of the industry and made a whole nother life for herself in a different medical field. I look at that and I go back and I'm like, as the leader I am now with mentorship and the things that I've learned, I would have never done that before.
Now that you've experienced working with people on a totally different level, what would you have done differently than the way you terminated her? The circumstances of terminating her? What would be different?
I didn't give the benefit of the doubt.
I didn't pour into her. As the way that a leader should have. The better response would have been, let's have a conversation about this. Let's give you proper training. Maybe you don't know what you don't know. You're your reality is your own perception, right? Maybe in her head, she thought she was doing great, you know, and who was I to discredit that situation instead of giving the benefit of the doubt and say, Hey, you know what, you're not quite where I need you to be, but I'm going to coach you.
I'm going to hold your hand and I'm going to push you through and I'm going to make you successful. Now I get, sometimes you can do that and they're not going to be great. It still doesn't work. Right. The leader I am today says. If I've poured into them in all the ways that I can, if I've showed them the support, made them successful, give them the tools to be successful and they truly weren't, I can feel good about that because I know that I
Yeah, you
did your part, you did everything you could and it still didn't
work
out.
Absolutely threw her to the wolves and said, and I, to this day, like I said, I feel horrible. But you know what? That changed me because. I vowed that I would never in a million years do that to another team member, as long as I live.
And that's been my platform. For you people has been so successful for me. Because you know your priority, you know the things that caused you to fail before. And you know what to do to ensure that they don't fail as well.
I think it's so important for us to take a second to realize that, man, I could have done something different in that leadership to really impact it and make that person the very best version of themselves. But I also think about the other side of us. When I was first a leader, I was so scared to say to someone, You know, you're not where I need you to be right now.
This is where I need you to be. I'm going to help you get there, but I need you to trust me. And I need to know that you're committed to my leadership to get you there. I was never brave enough to say that. It was easier to just fire someone, go interview, find someone I liked in an interview, make them my protege and move on.
That was easier to me. But the generational leader I am today says, absolutely not. If you are gifted a person that is going to be under your leadership, you must be determined to give them every portion of you because you're trusted with leadership.
I'm glad you brought that up because think about when you bring on a team member, you, you get their resume, you interview them and you fight for them. You see, what value do they bring to the table that I can incorporate into my team? And you fight for that person to be on your team.
Yeah. Why are we so quick to fire when we thought so quick for them?
We need to be quick to hire slow to fire. If you see something in someone, hire them, bring them on. You need to hire them with intentionality.
You know, they're going to make it for some reason. It sparked into your intuition, kicked in, get them on board. Right. If you do that though, do not fire them as fast as you hired them. You need to take the time to invest in them. I've had employees for years, I have one employee. She's my longest employee I've ever had
she has been with me for almost 10 years. That is an extremely long time to hold onto someone. And I have mentored her and guide her. She came to me with no dental experience. She's now my chief operating officer. Like, are you kidding me? We grew together. We were babies together and we made this happen, right?
That's what a good leader does. A good leader understands that I'm hiring you right now because I see potential. I know you're not exactly where I need you to be, and you're not my perfect employee today. , but you're going to be the best generational leader I've ever met in my life.
And every employee that comes after you is going to be absolutely excellent because of the way I chose to invest in you and chose to mentor you. See, we're talking about getting mentored, but what you might not be hearing on this episode is that you are a mentor also. I'm a mentor. Krissy, you're a mentor.
We mentor each other. We get on a call for 90 minutes. We're teaching each other things the whole time. Krissy, I want to ask you just a couple more questions and then we're going to wrap up this episode. I swear we could just continue forever, but I feel like we're going to have to do a part two on this, I want to ask you, what do you think if anybody were to say, okay, I hear you loud and clear, I need to get a mentor.
I need to be open to those who are mentoring me that I'm not paying. And I might need to get a mentor that I actually do pay because they have knowledge and qualities that. I know I need to improve. What qualities do you believe are essential in a mentor? What characteristics make mentorship effective?
Yeah, I love this so much because I literally can plant it down to one little thing. And that's failure.
I want a mentor who has failed because in that failed, were they actually really, truly successful? You hear a lot of mentors out there. I'll, I'll coach you on this. I'll coach you on that. But if they're saying that there's no failure, they're fibbing somewhere because nobody that is truly successful has never failed.
From that, they get their greatest accomplishments. That would be. First and foremost, the biggest characteristic I would look for.
Man, Krissy, that's so good. I can just like talk about that for 75 minutes right now because we see the highlight reels of people's lives, I made seven figures in six months working from my phone.
Hire me as your mentor and I'll show you what you failed in and I'll hire you. Tell me what you failed in. I want to know all the parts of you that were trash, right? I want to know where you screwed up and you lost seven clients in a row because you didn't have your crap together That's what I want to know.
That's the truth. I want to hear I want you to get your pretty fonts that you got from canva and your gloriously perfectly posed Branding photos and I want you to trash them and tell me the nitty gritty of who you are and how you took that You And you made that into a million dollars. That's what I want to know.
If they want to mentor, they want to know how you got there. And if you don't have those stories of how you got there, how are they supposed
to get there?
Yeah, exactly.
It's a win for me.
Absolutely. Krissy. I'm going to share, I want to share a story with you if you're listening to this podcast, you're in dentistry or maybe you're not in dentistry and you're here from a totally different industry, but I want to show you the power of what it looks like to have someone mentor your business.
So maybe you're listening to this podcast And you're like, yeah, cool. Personal mentorship rocks. But my business is what really needs support. I mentored a dental practice out of Ohio. I found over the course of three years, they gave me a sampling of charts from their office. They just wanted me to take a look at what was going on on their ledgers from a standpoint of What services are we providing in our dental practice?
What is being charged out? What money are we leaving on the table? How can my providers be better? How can my billing department be better? What can we do differently? There was a hundred charts inside of this audit. And from that hundred charts, I learned that over the course of three years, this office lost 276, 000 by not charging out x rays properly.
When it came to simple procedures, if you're in a dental office, there are crowns done daily, right? When you do a crown, there's other procedures that go along with that crown, like a buildup, simple, standard, right? Crown and buildup. I audited these charts. And nearly all of them would say in the clinical notes that they did a crown, a buildup, I would go to the ledger, And the ledger would have a crown only.
There would be no PAs listed or billed out. There would be no billed up listed, there was no additional information. It was just the crown. It was like, What's happening here? Why are, why do we have clinical notes that don't match a ledger? How many thousands of dollars are we leaving on the table by not properly charging things out?
Here's what I want to tell you. The owner doctor that wanted me to do this chart audit, she was so rude. So full of herself. She runs a top notch practice, but I had a call with her I said, you can know anything you want. I'm proud of you for knowing all that. I'm proud of you for being successful.
I'm proud of you for building a 7 million a year practice. But I think you can do better and I'm going to prove to you you can do better. And she was like, okay, fine. I'll trust you to do my chart audit. I'm going to send you a hundred charts. I guarantee you you won't find one thing my team is doing wrong.
I mean, right out the gate, she lost 276, 000 over three years in just x rays that that's just x rays, right? There were so many things going on in that practice. She was confident. I wouldn't find a single thing. Not a single thing. I'm telling you, a mentor for your business changes everything. What are your best practices?
What is your team's non negotiables? What do your clients or customers or patients see on the outside? What can we be doing differently? What one little thing can we change? Krissy, I know you have mentored multiple businesses through Dentistry Support Academy. I want to know what your perspective is in this last few minutes of this episode.
I want to know what's your perspective. Talk through what it looks like to mentor a business and how businesses can thrive exponentially just by getting someone else from the outside to take a look. On the inside.
The thing about mentorship is a lot of people think that you're coming into it and just telling you everything that's going wrong with your business, and nobody wants to hear that, even though they'll pay you to come in to do it.
The bitter thing to ask is, okay, what can be better? What can we do? What processes can we improve? What is something that worked with someone else that might work for you too? It's being able to think of what's possible.
Yeah. Really get them to get their outside juices going, be open minded to change, being open minded to what could be possible within themselves without having to outsource anything else. It's coming back from, you know, The tunnel vision we get when you're day in and day out in the practices.
And we do that perfect, just like you said, they thought they were doing everything great. But what if there's a better way? And it doesn't matter what industry you go into. There's better ways to be had that can be learned from other businesses as you go along.
And that's better for your team, better for your patients, better for your community. It's a win for everybody at that point. I, I'm All in on mentorship. And I will continue to be mentored for the rest of my life because I understand the value of it, whether it's professionally or personally.
And you just can't go wrong. You want to be better. And that's why you're seeking out somebody to help you be better.
Krissy. I think it's time to wrap up our episode. So I don't want to, but, I want to always end our episodes with what is our thoughts. Good moment. We had so many of them and I want you all to have something to take with you.
I want you to think about what you've heard today and the stories we've talked about. my favorite thing that we talked about was, you know, When you go to find a mentor, one, understand that there are paid mentors and there are unpaid mentors in your life right now. You have an opportunity to take advantage of those relationships and also pour into those relationships because you too are a mentor.
Two, if you decide that you want to find a mentor, that you pay. There are many different places you can go to find a mentor. A lot of people are just searching Google, I need a mentor in my area. Um, Krissy and I both provide mentorship under Dentistry Support Academy. We are an online dental academy where we provide dental education business education and leadership education.
Worldwide. And we would love for you to be a part of one of our mentorship programs. The most important thing, even if you don't choose to be with Dentistry Support Academy, Krissy or myself, the biggest thing I want you to know is find a mentor who's had failure. Krissy brought up a great point above all, they can tell you all the money that you will make as a result of your experience with them.
They can tell you all of the things that will come of your business as a result of learning under their leadership. But we want to know the nitty gritty of their lives too. How have you been successful? Yes, I found you. Yes, you'll mentor me. But what kind of things can I expect in learning from you. What have you learned along your way that have made you so successful that you feel equipped to actually mentor me?
And that sounds kind of crazy, it's important. We think about that. And I'll leave you with a third thing. If you hire someone, stick it out, be bold enough to say, You're not where I need you to be. And that doesn't mean you're a bad person. It just means that we've got a road to go down. Everyone wants to be better. A baby always crawls before they walk. Sometimes you hire someone that's just crawling right now. That's okay. You're going to teach them to walk. And then the next person that they hire, they'll be crawling and they'll teach that person to walk.
That's generational leadership. That's the mentorship that we're talking about. Krissy, thank you so much for being a guest on the show today. I hope that you guys have learned some valuable lessons about mentorship, about leadership. I'll catch you guys on the next episode of Dentistry Support the Podcast.
