Bite-sized dental wisdom in under 2 minutes.

Your team does not need the manual.

They need the steps.

Consultants love to tell dental offices to write SOPs.

And to be clear, I think writing the SOP is valuable.

It forces you to think through the process. It helps you understand the moving parts. It makes you slow down and actually define what is supposed to happen.

But then we do this thing where we hand the SOP to the team like it’s Indiana Jones’ Grail Diary and expect them to find every answer, follow every clue, and protect it at all costs.

Sorry to tell you, but your SOP manual is probably sitting on a shelf collecting dust.

Or, in my case, sitting in a Google Drive where it was last modified in 2019.

So if someone asks how to do something and the answer is, “It’s in the SOP,” good luck.

Chances are, they don’t even know where it is.

And even if they do, they are not stopping in the middle of a busy front desk day to find page 114, paragraph 4, so they can figure out how to confirm a patient, check a voicemail, or handle a broken appointment.

So really, the SOP is where you build the system. But the team needs the system translated into actions.

Answer the call.
Check the voicemail.
Respond to the text.
Verify the insurance.
Confirm the patient.
Follow up on unscheduled treatment.

Those are the steps people actually use.

For higher-level team members, yes, the full SOP may matter. They may need the reasoning, the context, and the “why” behind the process.

But for the person trying to get the task done during a real day, they need to know what to do next.

That’s why I like checklists. SOPs explain the process. Checklists make it usable.

So write the SOP.

Use it to understand the process.

Then turn it into something your team can actually follow.

Because the goal is not to have an SOP.

The goal is to have a team that knows what to do.

-Dr. Alex

P.S. Writing the SOP is the hard part. Turning it into something your team actually uses should not be.

Milo has an AI tool that takes your existing SOPs and converts them into clean, step-by-step checklists in seconds. Paste in your process, and it does the rest.