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MailAugust 2022--“I'm here with my good friend Dr. Saam Zarrabi, the CEO and founder of Rodeo Dental & Orthodontics,” says Amol Nirgudkar, CEO of Patient Prism, who is eager to catch up with our Patient Prism client at the 2022 Dykema Definitive DSO Conference. “Tell me a little bit about where Rodeo is going this year.”
“2022 has been a challenging but awesome year,” says Dr. Zarrabi. “We've got strong growth built in. We're in Colorado now, and we're looking to enter a third state in 2023. Like everyone else at this meeting, we are dealing with staffing shortages and recruiting to find the right teams.”
Recruiting Dentists
“We’re utilizing headhunting services,” says Zarrabi. “We’ve increased our online presence, bolstered our recruiting team, and we’re working hard on this. We recruit in dental schools, and I love working with my alma mater Pacific Dugoni. We teach and talk to the students and cultivate the younger dentists to come into an environment where we support building their careers through education, many residencies, and things like that. We will hire someone right out of dental school, cultivate them, and lean into the education piece for them.”
Rodeo Dental & Orthodontics has what they call their “mini-residency program.” When new dentists are hired, they are put on tracks such as case presentation, multidisciplinary group practice, pedo, endo, ortho, and oral surgery – all in-house. “And then we'll set up days where we'll work with some nonprofit groups, bring in volunteer patients, and create a cool CE course around it,” says Zarrabi. “And we'll do that for each specialty track so people can level up their skills in their areas of interest.”
Zarrabi says the number one demand for dentists coming out of dental school is mentorship.
“More than what they are getting paid, more than the environment, they want mentorship, so we give them mentors to work with. It’s different than when I came out of dental school in 2008. I got thrown into practice. I got launched and had to sink or swim. That was incredibly stressful, and we don’t want that for our youngest doctors.”
Coping with the Labor Shortage
Rodeo Dental is seeing greater patient demand than in 2019. “The challenge is staffing capacity,” says Zarrabi. “The bottleneck of capacity right now is in doctors and staffing but we don't want to burn our teams out with overscheduling. When you have smaller teams, you can’t have them on a rolling schedule to see patients until 7:00 pm or on Saturdays as we did historically. We’ve made adjustments to maintain the happiness and continuity of the teams.”
Zarrabi continues, “We're committed to our biweekly town halls where we have all 1,000 team members and employees sharing stories with each other on Zoom. It's a 30-minute morning team huddle. People are giving shout-outs to each other, and it's almost like a pep rally. So that's something that is new in today's environment. We've also got our Rodeo Mix Platform, which is our own intranet where team members can share stories, celebrate birthdays, and things like that. So that's been an awesome addition to maintain a great culture of appreciation for each other.”
No Shortage of Patients
Rodeo Dental & Orthodontics is a Patient Prism client with 33 locations in Texas and Colorado. In each of its locations, they provide comprehensive dental services for all ages of patients with specialists rotating within regions.
Patient demand keeps them busy at all their locations. A visit to their website will show you just how amazing their brand is. Take a moment to see their themed lobbies and creative entertainment designed to promote friend-to-friend and family-to-family interactions that are captured and shared in real-time.
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