Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today. I know the Benevis team is thrilled to have you as Vice President of Field Operations, especially as your personal and professional passions closely aligns with the company’s commitment to caring for the oral health needs of the underserved.
Why don’t we kick things off by talking a bit about your career journey?
Originally, I transitioned into the dental world in May of 2010, having previously worked in retail management after college. I was putting in long hours, grueling shifts, and I had a long commute, which was just not sustainable when I was also trying to grow my family. I started perusing what else was out there and I found a job posting looking for people with a bachelor's degree in retail management experience. I was like, wait, that's me.
It was a dental office manager position. They were doing a company-wide reorganization, and I was selected as one of those 10 individuals who for four months trained in everything dental. Every week I was doing something different just to learn about the dental industry and I just fell in love with it. The value I was able to add every day. The opportunity to change a patient’s life. There is just something so rewarding in seeing how getting somebody out of pain or just seeing how emotional people start reacting to receiving dental care. It can be life-changing, and that was special to me.
Since finding your passion in dentistry operations, you’ve stayed in the dental field for your career?
Since that first office manager’s job, and it’s coming up on 15 years now, I would say I’ve been on a unique journey towards learning how to collaborate with providers. For me, I felt my personality compared to theirs was like a perfect mesh. And some of those colleagues I still consider some of my best friends today. As I progressed throughout my career, I've worked at large DSOs. I’ve worked at a smaller startup DSOs. I've worked in de nouveau new office build models. I've worked in M&A, and so I've been able to experience so many different things in dental and I've learned so many best practices from each stop I've had along the way.
At Benevis you are responsible for running regional operations. What does this mean and what types of initiatives do you currently oversee?
Great question. I always love to say that as an operations leader, I’m coming in to support a practice. It is our desire to fill in the cracks or fill in the gaps, smoothing and paving the way for more efficient business practices that can set you up to increase access to care and serve your patients more effectively. For example, by adding continual training and development for operators as well as clinicians and back-office staff, we're able to continue to grow from a business perspective.
In an operations role, we love to set targets that align with our great clinical execution, which can really help us not just deliver care, but also continue to grow our earnings for our providers, for our team members. To me, any way that we can continue to streamline or improve best practices on the operations side, can really help us not only serve more patients, but become more efficient to allow revenue to increase for all of our team members, which is a win-win for all.
Having centralized operations is so important within Benevis. What sort of benefits do the practices realize from this kind of approach?
The benefit of having centralized operations is to continue to take more tasks off of the team members in the offices so they can serve patients. That is our number one objective, identifying how we can make things simpler, easier, more streamlined and take the time-consuming tasks off the individual practices. We help maintain the facilities, build their teams and help them grow their practice. We are dedicated to giving them the resources they need to make their job easier so they can focus almost exclusively on serving patients.
What are some of the things you enjoy most about the role?
I'm the most passionate about leadership development in my role, and I know my counterpart Pam and I are really aligned about the importance of this at Benevis. I think the more empowered that team members feel, we are going to see better results and a happier and healthier workforce as a whole. One of the things I love the most about being an operator and a leader is seeing growth and success. I’d love for one of my team members to take my job someday, because to me, that's the biggest accomplishment in my role, their success.
Anything else you’d like to share?
I’m just so grateful for my wife and our six kids. They’ve been right alongside me on my career journey and continue to support me even when we were moving to places like Northern Wisconsin or to South Texas to North Texas and now to Tennessee. It’s been a wild ride and I’m just so thrilled to be at Benevis and serving all of these children who previously hadn’t had access to care, but now they do. I just love the mission and the opportunity to continue to grow and find ways to be more efficient and to serve more patients. It is a wonderful thing to do every day.