Testimonials
This interactive meeting will help you to learn “where your patients are,” through better understanding their beliefs, circumstances, and values. Through this process you will be able to help your patients create their own “Health Success Plan!” Thank you Paul, for confirming that we need to build better relationships with our patients first before we can build better dentistry!
Michelle M. Lee, DMD
Visiting Faculty, The Pankey Institute
Fleetwood, Pennsylvania
This course is important for anyone who wants to provide more comprehensive dentistry to their patients through helping them to make better decisions for themselves... Paul and Charley were amazing - as usual!
M. Johnson Hagood, DDS, FAGD, AACD
Visiting Faculty, The Pankey Institute
Vero Beach, Florida
This meeting will help you learn how to shift your patient’s thinking from a left brain skeptical and analytical mode of functioning, to more of a right brain, and creative problem-solving mode. It was fantastic!
Brian S. Vence, DDS
American Academy of Esthetic Dentistry
American Academy of Restorative Dentistry
Founder, Chicago Academy of Interdisciplinary Dentofacial Therapy
Oakbrook Terrace, IL
This workshop will help you to learn how to help your patients explore their treatment options, as well as achieve their health goals in a very supportive and non-threatening environment... The dinner experience at Charley’s was excellent!
Lynn Turk RDH
Patient Care Coordinator for Brian S. Vence, DDS
Oakbrook Terrace, IL
This BBSC meeting helped me to learn more about how the brain works with regard to receiving and processing information, as well as how to better communicate with my patients. This process will help my patients to choose better pathways toward higher levels of oral health.
Michael T. McCartney, DMD, FAGD
Adel, Georgia
This way of practicing allows for true professional fulfillment in dentistry. The art of patient connection and interaction is getting lost as small intimate practices are being bought-up or pushed-out by large organizations which seem to be in it only for the profit. If we take the time to understand human behavior and “our ways”, then we will be able to achieve so much more both personally and professionally!
Tracy Poirier, RDH
Premier Hygiene Solutions
Ottawa, Canada
This workshop is for anyone who wants to develop a truly relationship-based dental practice. The content of this course is invaluable. I am always amazed at how much I gain when I spend time with high quality people!
Rodney Baier, DDS
Atlanta, Georgia
This approach to dentistry could save the profession of dentistry as we know it, while simultaneously providing maximum benefit to the public. I totally enjoyed the experience, and especially interacting with all of the great people! Outstanding!
Kevin P. Dougherty, DDS
Chatham Township, New Jersey
If your Mission is to help your patients become healthier, it all starts with helping them make healthier choices. This meeting will help you do exactly that!
Kurt Williams, DDS
Louisa, Virginia
Most dental practices are built upside down.
We chase production before purpose. Install systems before building trust. Track numbers before clarifying meaning. We attend the best postgraduate centers, adopt better scripts, purchase the latest technology — and still the practice feels hollow. Still the days feel heavy. Still something essential seems missing.
And the tragedy isn’t merely financial. It’s existential. Because when we build a practice the wrong way, we often end up living inside a future we never consciously chose.
I’ve watched this pattern repeat itself across decades of practice and teaching. Bright, ethical, hardworking dentists — genuinely good people — remaining stuck. Not because they lack skill or effort, but because they’re trying to create a new future while remaining psychologically faithful to an old identity.
The people-pleasing associate. The approval-seeking provider. The conflict-avoider. The exhausted owner who has quietly confused busyness with progress.
We say we want freedom, but remain loyal to chaos. We say we want peace, but remain loyal to over-control. We say we want growth, but remain loyal to an identity formed in scarcity.
So the real question becomes: How can we say we want a better future while clinging to the identity that created the present?
That question sits at the heart of everything Janis duPratte and I have been building together.
And it’s why we created Design Your Destiny.
This is not a practice management seminar. It’s something deeper and more personal than that.
It’s built around a simple but profound framework — the Practice Development Pyramid — which holds that a healthy practice must be built the same way healthy human development occurs:
Meaning → Relationships → Systems → Growth → Money
That order matters enormously.
We begin with Vision, Purpose, and Mission — not slogans or branding language, but genuine philosophical clarity about why the practice exists, where it’s going, and how the team will think, behave, decide, and serve.
From there we move into Leadership — because culture isn’t created by staff meetings or wall posters. Culture is modeled. It’s formed through repeated behavior under pressure. The dentist must become the emotional and ethical thermostat of the practice, not merely its thermometer.
Then — and only then — does patient care come fully alive in the right way. Person-centered dentistry doesn’t sell treatment. It facilitates understanding. It slows things down enough for patients to think, feel, clarify, and choose well. That’s when trust compounds. That’s when loyalty replaces compliance. That’s when growth becomes organic.
Systems follow. Not as the foundation, but as support structures that reduce friction, protect relationships, and serve people. And financial health — production, revenue, growth — sits at the very top of the pyramid. Not because money is unimportant, but because it is a lagging indicator of alignment. When the lower levels are strong, financial stability becomes more predictable, more sustainable, and far less stressful.
———
We are living in a time when dentists are being trained — subtly and directly — to build their professional lives from the top down. Start with production. Push efficiency. Chase speed. Increase volume. And then hope that purpose, team trust, patient loyalty, and personal fulfillment will somehow emerge later.
They rarely do.
A preferred destiny is not stumbled into. It must be designed.
And that requires a different kind of courage — the courage to ask:
What future am I actually building?
What old identity am I still protecting?
What kind of person must I become to lead that practice well?
Janis and I are hosting Design Your Destiny on Bent Mountain, Virginia, September 25–26, 2026. It’s an intimate, small-group workshop for dentists and key team members who are ready to build something extraordinary — not just financially, but in terms of meaning, health, relationships, and a life genuinely worth living.
We are already half full.
If something in you is saying "there has to be a better way" — I’d love to have a conversation.
- Paul
