Linda: But I thought, "If that was my dentist, he better be freaking awesome."
Linda: Or I'm not going to stay there, because it's a very weird feeling at the front desk. There's no comfort. It was stark. I thought, "No, make this lobby more of a family room," versus just this stark, cold room.
Anne: Hello, everyone. It's Anne Duffy, and welcome to the Just DeW It podcast. I'm so happy that you're with me today because I have a really special guest.
Anne: But before we get started today, let me tell you a little bit about Linda Kane. She is the owner of Dental Office Rescue, a dental operations strategist, speaker, and former founder of Zeroed In Dental Solutions. With more than 20 years in dentistry, she helps practices improve leadership, systems, culture, and long-term growth through a people-first approach that blends strategy, resilience, and real-world experience.
Please help me welcome my dear, fun friend, Linda Kane. Hey, Linda.
Linda: Thank you so much for having me here. This is a dream come true. I'm so excited to be here with you.
Anne: This is so much fun. Come on, we have to talk about this, Linda. Before we get started, she tells me that when she was 11 years old, living on a farm, her folks would leave for two months at a time.
She's 11 years old, Linda. I'm looking at you now, and I see this beautiful picture behind you of horses. Four beautiful horses. I know you just moved, and your picture just came. Tell me a little bit about what is so meaningful about this picture, and how does it relate to what you do in the offices that you are training, coaching, and helping get on their way?
Linda: I'm so glad you asked, because the horses mean so much to me. Growing up, I was raised a little bit like I was Amish. My dad decided to get rid of the big equipment and farm our farm with the horses. One thing about the horses—my life growing up was kind of hard. My dad was not really a kind person. He was a very difficult person, so there would be a lot of stress when he was home. But one of the things that is so magical about horses is that they have no judgment. They don't look at you and think, "Oh, your hair looks weird," or, "Geez, you were late for work," or, "You had that same excuse last time."
They just love you, and they feel your energy. That brown one with the blonde hair that you see right there was just like the one I had when I was growing up. And that big, giant horse was so tall. You couldn't even put a saddle on him, he was so big. You just rode him bareback. I never even put a bridle on him. I just held his mane. That horse could just feel my energy. When I jumped up on him, climbed up on him, I could push with my right leg, and he would go that way. I'd push with my left leg, and he'd go that way. I could lay down on him, and he would just walk. He knew. He could read my emotion.
You can't fake energy, right? You just can't fake energy. So I use this when I'm consulting in offices, because the reality is there's so much judgment and guilt and all kinds of feelings in a dental office, and horses don't do that. They just love you, and they feel your energy.
Anne: What a life experience you've had. Of course, that's just the tip of the iceberg for Linda Kane. We'll have to have you back again and talk about your upbringing and how you managed to milk the cows, feed the horse, and do all that as an 11-year-old walking to school.
We were laughing. Our kids think they had it hard. I'm just like, "Okay, just try walking in Linda's shoes." But you describe yourself as both a strategist and a humanist. What does that mean in the context of helping dental practices?
Linda: I think the world is so loud and noisy right now. There's so much action going on in dentistry. You go to a conference, Anne. You know all these conferences that you go to. You walk through the exhibit hall, and everything's boasting of AI, and AI can do absolutely everything for you.
The reality is, dentistry is a very human industry, and it's very relationship-based. I feel like sometimes we get in situations—and I think quite often we get in situations—where doctors just make decisions and don't even consult their office. They don't consult their team. They just make decisions because they get wowed at an event or something.
Anne: Yeah.
Linda: The reality is, I really want to be there for the offices. As we're evolving and changing, I want to help them keep the human side of dentistry in place and work the systems that are the human, patient-forward systems, but still utilize smart technology to bring technology in where it's going to be the most useful to support the human, right?
There are crazy, busy tasks that we don't need to do. I'll give you an example. I went into a dental office this morning. I recently moved to Arizona, and I thought, "I'm going to go hit up a couple of dentists that are near me." My brother told me, "Go to my dentist." So I went to my brother's dentist this morning, took him a copy of my book, took a flyer, and I sat in that lobby and waited for 30 minutes for the girl at the front desk to be done doing an insurance verification, during which she's saying all kinds of private information to the three of us sitting in the waiting room.
I thought, "Oh my gosh, I hope I get to talk to this doctor." Because that's where smart technology could come into play. Let somebody else do your insurance verification so you can be patient-forward for those four people sitting in the lobby who have not had one word said to them. Smart technology with humans working.
Anne: And just today, we're talking in 2026, and we are in May, and so much technology is around. I think there are so many offices that, let's face it, the dentist doesn't have time to figure out the best approach in their office, the best tool for their teams to use, or how to implement it.
Good for you for bringing the human side, because that's what everybody's struggling with right now: retention. If you don't focus on that, you're going to really have some problems.
Linda: The world is yearning right now for human touch. There's so much disconnect after COVID and with all of the technology that's come, all the social media, all the bots. You can't even tell what's real and what's not when you're on Facebook. The world right now is yearning for human interaction. That's the part I want to harness and keep in place, but still not work ourselves crazy. Let's utilize some technology, but let's not make everything about technology.
Anne: That's so true. I know you go into a lot of offices, and kudos to you. A lot of people think the clients are just going to come to them. The old-fashioned knocking on doors, picking the phone up, doing a few cold calls when you're new. I hope if you're listening, this is who you are: Miss Woo, positivity, developer, arranger, and empathetic soul.
Your strengths—you are just living your strengths, Linda. It is kind of Woo-ish to be able to say, "I'm just going to walk into dental offices." It kind of lit you up when you were talking about it today. But I know that when you're walking into a struggling dental office, what are the biggest problems you usually see, and what's often happening beneath the surface?
Linda: The very first thing that I feel when I walk in a dental office is the energy, very quickly, because you can feel that from five to 10 feet away. If you walk in and there's nothing, there's not a feeling at all, like it felt today when that girl was just on the phone forever doing an insurance verification.
Anne: Did she greet you and say, "Hey, nice to see—"
Linda: No, she was behind a little half wall. You couldn't even see a human. You just heard a voice. All of us just came in and sat down. To me, that was a void. But if you see human life, you see people at the desk, and you see hustling and bustling, you feel the energy. You just feel the energy that's in the room. Either they're going to quickly dismiss you, or they're judging every second of you while you're standing there talking to them. They're the typical gatekeeper of the front office. They're protecting that doctor. They're trained to do that with the people who just stop at the front desk.
But I think when I get an entrance into an office and I get to start working with an office, the energy is the very first thing I feel. And then when I start pulling the numbers, I see the disconnect, just the lack of knowledge that they don't have. They don't know what they don't know. They need someone to teach them. A lot of offices don't have servant leaders in place. They have people who are punching the clock, coming in and doing their thing, and don't really care if things are getting worked like they should be.
Anne: Fair is good enough, right? Fair is good enough.
Linda: Mm-hmm.
Anne: So, telling me a little bit about your background growing up and why you love horses and why they're so special to you, it is the energy, and it also really is your empathetic heart, which is a natural gift that you have. You could actually sense that, and so can everybody else who walks into an office. Unless that doctor has such a great bedside manner, and that really extends to the front office, it is really important these days.
Linda: Very much so. I found myself sitting there because when I go into dental offices, I am full-on judging everything. Just like we work in dentistry. We look at people's teeth. We just do. When we talk to people, we look at their teeth. But the reality is, when I sit there, I'm kind of watching everything, and I'm just here to drop off a flyer and a book. I'm not trying to do any more.
But I thought, "If that was my dentist, he better be freaking awesome."
Anne: Yeah.
Linda: Or I'm not going to stay there, because it's a very weird feeling at the front desk. There's no comfort. It was stark. I thought, "No, make this lobby more of a family room," versus just this stark, cold room.
Anne: And such an easy little tweak.
Linda: Yeah.
Anne: A nice pillow, maybe a candle, new drapes, or something like that. But the greeting and those kinds of things—I mean, not many people will put up with that for long. Did you get to see the dentist, by the way?
Linda: No, he was back in the back, but I did write him a very sweet little thing in the front of the book that just said, "This is my brother. I'm his sister. I relocated here. I would love to meet you. I know you're busy with patients. I'd love to meet you." So I wrote him a little note, and I do think I'll get to communicate with him. I think he is a great guy when I hear my brother talk. He just probably doesn't know what he doesn't know, and I would love to get a chance to share it with him.
Anne: Well, right. No offense to the guys out there, because we love men, we love dudes. But he's a man. Women have that intuition of, "Let's make this beautiful and serene, with a little nice music." It's so funny. This is a total generalization, but there are a lot of dentists who are really nerdy, and they don't have that sixth sense of welcoming and making a space one that you love to sit in. "Oh, I can't wait to sit in the reception area because there's going to be a little coffee there for me, and I'm going to hear some nice music, and there's some fun laughter going on." Nothing. No, nothing. Wow.
Linda: It was a zero when I walked in there. It was a zero. I was like, "Wow, I can't wait to talk to him. I'm going to talk to him." It's a mission. I'll be talking to him.
Anne: I love how you are so sweet. You're positive in everything you do, Linda. You've got such a great smile. You're judging, but you're judging on how you can help them be better, not like, "Oh, God, this is..." I just know I can help you. Let me help you. Help me help you, right?
I love the name of Dental Office Rescue, and I know it's more about systems. I know you're geeky in your own right about systems and numbers. What impact are you really trying to make for dental teams and practice owners?
Linda: This one is a deep one for me because having gone through what I've gone through in dentistry, losing a doctor to suicide is a very hard thing to go through. Keeping a practice together after it happens, taking care of a family after it happens, taking care of the patients after it happens—it's the hardest thing I've ever gone through.
So for me, I'm on an absolute mission to rescue dental offices, to rescue the doctors, and to save their lives. I don't want another family to go through that. I don't want the patients to go through that. I don't want the team to go through that. It's such an overload.
I was talking to someone—I won't name them by name—but I was talking to someone who is a counselor, and we were just at dinner. We were casually talking, and he learned what I do in dentistry. He never really knew what I do, so I told him what I do in dentistry, and he said, "I have six of my clients right now who are dentists." I thought, "I'm not surprised by that."
Don't think I'm not going to go to his little counseling office and take him some flyers and some books, because the reality is, if he can get them connected to me, maybe I can help them in their offices and take some of that burden off their shoulders. But kudos to them for going to counseling, where a lot of them don't. A lot of them just sit in their own little worry, in their own little silo or their own little box, in their own little remote town, when they need to be reaching out and finding out who can help them.
That's why I have my Dental Office Rescue podcast. It's why I have my Dental Office Rescue book, because I want to get it in front of them. I'm doing everything I can to get it in front of them so they see that there's help. There's help out there, and you don't have to live with this by yourself.
Anne: You're not alone. There's so much here, Linda. Did you have any idea that was going to happen with your boss? Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Linda: It was hard. It was a brand-new startup practice, which has its own struggles. He was an older doctor. He was a retired doctor, and he started the practice. He hired a young gun doctor to come in, who was new, fresh out of school. He'd worked about two years before and thought he was kind of a big deal in those two years. So he came in as a highly skilled, advanced young doctor. He was a pretty cool guy. He really was, until he wasn't.
He had a negative, "I'm better than you" personality, and he thought it was his job to counsel kids who were maybe heavy or overweight on their diet and what they should eat. He was a very big proponent of fluoride, and some moms don't like fluoride. You've got to be understanding about that. He just really made a ruffle in our small community.
I tried everything I could. I got involved with the chamber. I did everything I could to keep the relationships great in the community, but I just couldn't battle all the bad juju he was putting out there. Patients talk in a small community.
That was really a struggle for this owner-doctor, and eventually he let him go. It was hard to find a doctor to come work in our small community. So he still had his license, and he came in and was working as the dentist in the office. There were problems, I think, in his family also because of this little dental office, so it was a compounding problem. But it was all things, right? All the things that are stressful: running a practice, getting a practice to grow, combating these problems from this doctor who left, and how horrible that was.
Anne: That hurt him deeply, I'm sure, because he had built such a great reputation, and to have it just implode—that's a dream that was lost.
Linda: Yeah. I can tell you, on the Thursday before it happened, he came to me. We both went into the office. We weren't open. We both went into the office. I was just doing some things there, and he was just doing some things there. He came in and sat in a side office where we did consultations, and he just started to cry.
He's very religious, and he goes to the same church I do. He said to me, "Linda, I can't go to church alone." And I said, "You can. I'm the poster child of going to church alone. I'll come with you. I'll go with you. You don't have to go alone." That was my feeling that something was really wrong. But I didn't know that this would happen. That was on Thursday, and then on Sunday, he took his own life.
I'll never forget when I got the call Sunday night from his daughter saying, "Hey, Dad won't be at the office tomorrow." And I said, "Okay. When do you want me to move the patients to?" And she was like, "Well, I don't know. I'll have to get back to you." I thought, "Ooh, that's not right. Something's going on."
Monday morning, his best friend, who was also a dentist, called me and said, "Linda, I think you need to sit down." He's the one who told me the news.
Anne: Wow.
Linda: But he's also the doctor who made a miracle happen. He knew so many of the older, stick-together dentists in our valley, and he got all kinds of volunteers to come in. Every day, I had volunteer doctors coming with their totes of supplies and their assistants in tow, and they would come in for a three- to four-hour shift. That's how we carried the practice along for three months until we sold it, just volunteers in our valley coming in and volunteering their time.
Anne: Wow. What a good man he was, and what a good person you are. He didn't want to let you down or his family, and that says so much for dentistry, and it says so much for your area and why you have chosen this path for yourself. I know you well enough to know this is a calling for you, because Dental Office Rescue is exactly what you are doing.
Linda: Do you know how I got that title?
Anne: No. How?
Linda: I was working in an office in Colorado, with a young female doctor who was starting her own practice in Vail, Colorado. She called me, and we had months of conversations. She was trying to purchase this new practice, and when she signed on the dotted line, she flew me out to spend a whole week with her practice.
It was funny because she had a girl from a dermatology office working her front desk. She had a girl from a podiatrist office who was going to be her assistant. She did have a hygienist already who stayed from the previous doctor, and she had to deal with a whole bunch of problems from the sale and how things had gone in the last months. I knew she needed to update her fees. She had a lot she needed to do.
I worked the first day trying to get the front desk organized, sort through all the junk that was there, see what was real and what wasn't, and get the front desk girl acclimated a little bit. Then I told her she really needed to go through her fee schedule and get her fee schedule updated right away. That was her job to do.
I saw the look on her face, and I thought, "Oh." So I got up super early that next morning, showed up at the office at 5:00 in the morning, and knocked on the window. She was sitting in there in her sweats and a sweatshirt with her hair in a ponytail, crying.
Anne: Oh, my gosh.
Linda: I knocked on her window, and she saw me. She ran and opened the door and just gave me the longest hug. She just didn't let go of me. Just the longest hug. I said, "You need some help, and we're going to work through these fees together before everyone gets here." So we did it. We worked through all the fees, and I entered them into her computer so they were ready to go for that day before we started.
When she gave me a review, she said, "If there was ever a TV show like Bar Rescue or Restaurant Impossible, if there was ever a TV show where someone goes in and helps dental offices, it would be called Dental Office Rescue, and Linda would be the host."
Anne: I have goosebumps, and that is so beautiful.
Linda: So I asked her, "Can I use that, please?" And then when I wanted the domain, I couldn't get the domain, and DeVon Banks, who is a very dear friend of mine, owned the domain. When I showed up at Dental Podfest with my book, she just had chills up and down her arms, and she ran the perimeter of the room and said, "I own the domain for Dental Office Rescue, and I'm going to give it to you."
I just thought, "Oh my gosh." It all just kind of came together. The Lord works in mysterious ways, and by divine design, He put all these things together. So now I feel like I'm fully aligned with my purpose. I don't have a billing company anymore. I'm just fully aligned with my purpose to save lives.
Anne: Linda, that is so beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. DeVon is just a beautiful Do sister. I say, "Good Dos find good Dos," and that's just something so sweet and so lovely. It's so you. If we don't follow the breadcrumbs to where our calling is, He's going to have something to say to us when we get up to Heaven.
Linda: Yeah.
Anne: He's going to say, "Hey, I sent you plenty of clues. I sent you plenty of clues." How beautiful. I do think that with so many things in the world today in dentistry, it's been tough since the pandemic, and it's not easy to run a dental practice. It used to be you put your shingle out there, and now it's like, dang.
They can't wear all those hats. I think women can wear all the hats a little easier, and I think women ask for help more often. So if you're a man, if you're a dude out there, a man who supports women in dentistry, think about that. Think about if you're suffering, if you need a little rescue in your practice.
It doesn't even have to be big, does it, Linda? A lot of it is the small little steps that, if you just knew what you didn't know, and how easy it might be for your life if you made a few changes. You have to first say, "I want to change." You have such a great way about you. I think you could talk anybody into anything. Woo. I forgot. We're both number one, and you know what that stands for? Winning others over.
Linda: Yeah.
Anne: In other words, you're going to get in there, and you're going to win them over to say, "Hey, I can help you. Let me help you." How do we get in touch with you, Linda? It will be in the show notes and all that, but what's the name of your book?
Linda: It's called Dental Office Rescue. I do have a second book, and it's called Resilient by Design. It is the book that tells my story, and it does talk about those horses. That's an important book. And I have a third book coming out that's an anthology book. Several authors are joining me in it, and it's going to be called Dental Office Rescue: The Expert Edition. I'm super excited about that coming out in probably September.
Just go to dentalofficerescue.com. That's the easiest way. My phone number's there. My email's there. You can connect with me. My calendar link's there. It's all there. Dentalofficerescue.com.
Anne: Thank you so much.
Linda: Yeah.
Anne: Well, such a fun podcast. I love it. And listen, if you want to meet Linda Kane and you want to meet DeVon Banks, then get to Charlotte, North Carolina, in November, November 11th through the 14th this year. We're going to have our 10th anniversary celebration, and you're all welcome to come sit at our table.
Good DeWs find good DeWs, and I'm lucky that I found you, Linda.
Linda: Thank you so much.
Anne: You bet. Most importantly, if you're listening, keep doing you, and thanks so much. I'll see you next time.
