Episode 152 | How to Build a Business That Runs (and Grows) Without You with Dr. Ruth Mannschreck

What if stepping away from your business actually made it stronger? 

That’s exactly what I explored with this week’s guest, Dr. Ruth Mannschreck - a retired dentist, business strategist, and founder of Shoreline Strategies. Ruth built a thriving dental practice while raising her two young sons. But when her daughter was born with medical complications, life—and business—had to change. Fast.

What’s remarkable is how she adapted. With honesty, humility, and a collaborative spirit, Ruth transformed her practice to run more efficiently than ever—working fewer hours, growing revenue, and creating a team culture that thrived.

In this conversation, Ruth shares the exact steps she used (and now teaches others) to streamline businesses, build strong systems, and create a company that can run—and even sell—without you working 24/7. No hype. No nonsense. Just smart, tested strategies that work.

If you’ve ever thought “I can’t step away” or “my business can’t run without me”—you need to hear this one. You’ll walk away with ideas you can implement right now.

About Dr. Ruth Mannschreck:
Dr. Ruth Mannschreck is a dentist, business strategist, and founder of Shoreline Strategies. Ruth built a thriving dental practice while raising two young boys, but everything changed when her daughter was born with complications and spent weeks in the Newborn ICU. That experience led her to cut back her hours, build smarter systems, and actually grow her practice—and now she helps other business owners do the same through her programs Business Lifestyle by Design and Prep It to Sell.

Resources:
www.WorkFewerHours.com

www.ShorelineStrategies.com 

LinkedIn

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Transcript

Do it one more time. Second try. There's no third try. My guest today is Dr. Ruth Mannschreck. Ruth is a dentist, business strategist and founder of Shoreline Strategies. Ruth built a thriving dental practice while raising two young boys, but everything changed when her daughter was born with complications and spent weeks in the newborn ICU.

That experience led her to cut back her hours, build smarter systems, and actually grow her practice, and now she helps other business owners do the same through her program's, business, lifestyle by design and prep it to sell. Ruth, welcome to the podcast. Thank you, Kay. I'm so happy to be here. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

It's been really fun to get to know you both, both through my research that I did beforehand and our conversation before we started recording. And out of all the vast experience and knowledge that you have, one of the things that jumped out at me is work fewer hours. And you had an interesting comment on that about time management.

So let's start there. Is that okay? Sure. Many of my clients come to me and they say, I need you to teach me time management because I work too many hours. I have too much to do. I never get to see my family. I need time management and. My response to them has always been, there's really no such thing as time management.

Time is this ethereal thing that we made up to be able to talk about the passage of history. We don't manage, we have absolutely no control over the time. What we can control and what we want to manage is behaviors, both our own and our team, our employees behaviors in a business situation. My, my path to getting your life back, to getting a sense of not a sense of balance so much as in, I like to think of it as in harmony, like music, an accord between your work life and your personal life is to manage your behaviors and the systems, et cetera, in your business.

Now you were forced to take a completely different look at things. I know. So we've gotta hear that story about your daughter and what happened there, because Sure. You haven't told me yet. So I, of course wanna know and our listeners do. And I always forget this part, so my daughter says, you have to start with this part of the story.

My daughter is great. She's got her master's in rehabilitative counseling. She's married. Life is great. But when she was born we had two little boys and my practice was humming along five days a week, just fine. But when she was born, she had some complications and she was in the hospital for weeks, as you said.

When she came home, she had to see eight different doctors every week. And I thought I couldn't walk away. My practice was booming. I couldn't just set it down and say, sorry folks. Now I'm gonna be a mom. So I. I got together with my team, and that's really important. It's not like I came up with a genius idea on my own, my team and I said, we have to cut our time in half because I need the other two and a half days to care for my child and take her to all these doctor's appointments.

And we did it. We went through just a year of testing everything you can imagine to get it down to there, my team's rule for me was Dr. Ruth, if you don't need a handpiece or your dental license to do it, you can't do it. So that kept me from doing all the million things that a business owner wants to do because we can and we know how.

And it didn't occur to me that this was a great feat until I was in the hallway outside my office and the doc from next door, everyone in our building was a doc. And the doc from next door said, Ruth, what are you doing? You are never here. And yet. You're paying your rent you're still seeing patients.

What are you doing in there? And we put together the five different changes that we did in my office and he became my first coaching client. That's how I got started teaching other professionals in private practice how to really streamline what you as the owner, as the founder, as the expert in your business, what you do and how to make to work toward a business that runs itself.

One thing that comes to mind is how you talk about your team. And I know you're retired now. I just wanna throw that out. Sure. So you are retired as a dentist, but you had a culture among your team where they wanted to support you and you weren't the dictator telling people what to do. And that obviously, you realize and agree with me that is just so huge.

You can't do it all by yourself. Exactly. And there isn't anything to be gained by pretending in front of your employees that you have all the answers. Like they saw how I was a leader before and I turned myself inside out. And they noticed. They've been there, they were there yesterday and today Dr.

Ruth walked in with all this new stuff. You can't do that and have their respect. And I walked in this, that moment of authenticity. I just walked in and said, we have to figure this out. Let's do it together.

They were marvelous. So I always want to encourage business owners to really engage with the creativity that is housed within your employees. They don't often show it because a lot of times as owners, as the boss, we don't always encourage creativity in our employees, but there's a wonderful wealth of perspective because they look at your business, your, in my case it was my patients, but they look at your clients or your customers from a different perspective than we do as the boss or as the owner of our business.

And boy, that made our five little steps of how to do this. It made it so much easier when we incorporated their brain power into what we were doing. So I do wanna hear what those five steps are. A couple things that came to mind. Business owners only do what you can do. Only do what only you can do.

I think we're all, oh, we could, I can do that. I can do that. And maybe even I can do it a little better. I can do it the way I want to. But the most successful people delegate. I love just pick one thing that you are the best at or you love to do. Like you would do it even if nobody paid you.

That's how much you like doing it. Just do that and like, how can you tweak your world, your day, your environment, your culture, so that's all you have to do to run your business. When we, especially people who have started their practice from scratch or started their business from the ground up, we know how to do everything and we have this great work ethic, but we never back off.

We don't know how like. it feels like it's the wrong thing to do to back off the accelerator and let somebody else take over, and I think that's what keeps many of us burning ourselves out too long. Is that it? Boy, it just can't be the right thing to do for me to not excel the way I have been since the very beginning.

It's hard to shut off. And it's our parents' fault. They told us work hard. I know. I help us get the a, get the degrees right. We talked a little beforehand, you're. And result really was working fewer hours, you were the best dentist. None of your staff could work on teeth, but you created a culture and a system.

And we talked about this work, fewer hours is just a buzz phrase now, and I said before the recording, I think a lot of it's just blowing smoke because everyone says, oh yeah, I wanna quit my nine to five, or I wanna work fewer hours. But it's not that simple. But you did find a way to do that. So help us figure out how we can apply that to our businesses.

Sure. So do you want me to run through the five that we work on? Yeah, you can jog, you don't even have to write. Sure. Okay. So the first one is we really developed robust operating systems and. The place to start. If you're thinking about how can I consolidate things in my, how can I streamline things in my business is think of what I call your customer journey.

From the moment somebody answers the phone, who does that? What do they ask? Where do you record it? How do you hand off that information to the next step where they get scheduled? I'm making stuff up where? Where they get scheduled for something, and then the next step is delivery of services. And how does the communication go?

Who's in charge of this? Who makes changes? And then all the way to the end, in my world. When you're done getting all your services done, we put you in what's called a recall system. 'cause every six months, four months, you come back and get your teeth cleaned. Every business should have a recall system.

It'll look different and it'll be for different reasons, but you always wanna stay in connection with your customers, your clients, so your patients. So that whole system all spelled out so that if a person needs to be cross-trained, if your practice is small, if your business is small, you can cross-train people because it's all spelled out.

Should I get hit by a truck? My, my team is gonna know exactly how to run that system without me. And having someone else run every step of that process keeps me as the owner from being the bottleneck, because many times owners design a system and hand it to their team, but they have to check in with the owner like every other step.

And then there's this line outside the owner's door asking questions and trying to push things through because the owner's now the bottleneck for getting things done. So it's, that's the first place you have a system for everything. How you answer the phone, how you ask people to pay their bills.

Everything that you do in the office can be turned into a system, and that gives your team more control, more creativity about how they get it done. So that's the first piece. Okay. The first piece, so we'll we may or may not get through all the pieces, but Sure. We're gonna give a resource at the end where you can find out more.

I'll just throw it out. Work hours.com and, Dr. Ruth has a lot of resources there, so I'm wondering, so you develop a system.

Okay. I don't know if you heard that, but the yard guy is right outside my window. And we had to pause for a second because I couldn't even hear. So Ruth, we were talking about your systems, or maybe you call it one big system, so you explained some of the pieces of that, but how do you, how get that to coalesce and be in a form that your whole team knows where it is, what it is you, how do you integrate that perfect or whatever the word is?

Okay. A great question. And the way you do that is with the second piece, which is communication. The systems all by themselves will frustrate your team to death if there isn't, like just dead on communication. That runs all by itself. And by communication, I don't mean more meetings. You do need meetings.

Some, not many. I don't like meetings, but so think about the problem sometimes is that a business will develop silos. So you have a silo for sales, you have one for marketing, you have one for service delivery. And if you look at a silo or silos on a farm, they don't communicate except way up at the top.

And you can't do that in a business. In a business. You need your silos to talk to each other from the very bottom, all the way up to the top. And that is the communication that has to happen. So when you are designing your systems, every step along the way, you have to think, now I have this information.

How am I gonna store it? And how am I gonna communicate it to somebody else? And how am I gonna put it somewhere where everyone can access it that needs it and can make a report to find it? So those pieces, that's all communication in its different forms. Can be all set up as you're doing the systems, but that's what gives people ownership.

That's what gets them engaged in each system because they learn, okay, I get information from here, I do my job, and then I hand it off to the next person and know how to do that. And the minimum number of meetings that I feel you have to have really depends on your industry. In the dental world, we had what we called a morning huddle, and it was a standing meeting.

We didn't sit down, we stood because we only had 10 or 15 minutes. And we ran over, we ran through the schedule for the day, and then we looked at the next day's schedule and do we have all the lab work? Is everything ready to go for that day? That saved us so much. I. In jibber jabber communication between people, that was a huge part of our streamlining was not having communication happen willy-nilly.

Some people texted, some people called, some people would just run across the hall and yell. We had to get it all down. So if you're gonna talk to a client, you use these forms of communication. If you're gonna talk to each other, you use the, this one form of communication. And if you wanna talk to the doc, you use a different form of communication.

So there wasn't, we cut down on how the volume and the amount of communication and just made it just what we needed to get those systems to work together. That all makes a lot of sense. I love the standing part because Oh yeah, these are the bane of, I know many businesses' existence it. So much time is wasted.

I like on Zoom meetings, I just have a timer I have that tells me when to stop. I'm like, okay. So much time we have. So and then the other thing I wanted to point out, of course anyone listening is gonna know about moose. That's what we call our ideal target market. Uhhuh. You watching can see the big picture of the moose in the background.

Yeah. My branding, but. I like your point of following up with customers. So we say, okay, your moose is this particular kind of customer or prospect I should say. Then you turn them into a customer and then it's surprising how often the ball just gets dropped. Your customers are your best moose.

Those are the most likely you people you can sell to Now in the dental industry, of course, yes. Every six months. That's how I go often. I go and I swear I not only use a Sonicare, but I do floss. I floss and the dentist always says, you know what? You really do floss. Yes. And so you'll keep those teeth until the day you don't.

You want them to outlive you. Good job. When I was a kid, I remember the sign in my. The kid, dentist, what do they call it? Pediatric dentist, and it said you don't have to floss all your teeth, only the ones you wanna keep. That's right. Yeah. It's very true. So take care of your teeth people.

So simple, but, so true. It's, and it's just something that you really have control over with your health. So many things we don't, but that is something that we do. I like the minimizing the meetings, communicating altogether, standing up, and then also having a real structure in place so everyone knows how this works.

The silos comment. That is so true. Of course, I am. My specialties are branding, sales and marketing. And especially marketing and sales. Oh my gosh. Siloed. They're always siloed. Yes. They don't talk to each other. They don't ask each other what they think. So if you do that, this and you do, that doesn't work.

No. Everyone has to know. And it's all industries. It doesn't have to be professionals and private practice. It can be any service industry. Think of the trades where people are out selling roofs. And if the seller of roofs doesn't talk to the guy who's delivering the roof. All the workers that are gonna do that, boy, miscommunication happens all over the place.

Seems silly. But when I coach with those people, that's what happens. They have silos that don't talk to each other, so yes, it's all across the board. All the different industries that I've worked with, they all have these same problems. So if your listeners want just one fast little tip, I like to work toward having a meeting where there's limited amounts of discussion and a lot of decision making.

And one way to do that is to, we have everyone who's gonna make a presentation or should make a presentation during a meeting to make a video, a loom, so to speak, or a BombBomb of their presentation. So that all that ahead of time presentation is done. People have a chance to think. Before they get to the meeting.

So there's less discussion, fewer questions, and a lot more decision making. And meetings get shorter and more effective when you try that. That is brilliant. That is brilliant. I love it. So a loom, so they actually, during the meeting, instead of giving their spiel or whatever Oh, before the meeting.

Before the, because they should. So the people see the, they watch the meeting, they watch the loom before they come. So they've already digested it, have time to think about it and come up with great questions. And then they come and you just start with the questions instead of everybody sit there and watch the presentation.

Okay. Everybody listening, You got your money's worth out of this free podcast. That is so good. You're gonna have to, you're, I know you're gonna wanna learn more from Dr. Ruth and we will give those resources in the show notes. And yes, when you're doing a Loom video. Even I, who I speak, I, yeah.

Give webinars, whatever. Loom video, I'm like, ah, I have to think that through, really plan it through. You don't wanna just get on a loom and ramble and you wouldn't. But if it's your turn to speak at a meeting, I can totally see how someone would just ramble, start thinking through all their they do.

And you don't give people who need to digest information, think of their questions when the meeting is over, and then it's darn, I wish I had thought of that. It's I can't tell jokes because I never think of 'em in the moment. I think of 'em in the shower the next morning. It's oh, this is what I should have said.

So it's just, it just makes things go so much faster. I am so happy since we started doing that. It's wonderful. I love that tip. And it's just, you have to just get courageous and do technology. It's very helpful. You really do. And in the sales world, that's one way you can totally stand out by using video.

And of course, ai is taking over the world. I use it all day, every day. But your advantage now is showing your human side and video is the best way to do that. And you know what? Since we can't, I can't remember which word we couldn't re pronounce, proves that we're not ai. That's right.

And you get better at it with practice, you just do it again and you don't even notice after a while that Oh yeah, there's a camera in there I didn't even remember, okay. I'm gonna ask you a question. That just popped into my mind. Why do dentists and doctors call what they do?

A practice? Haven't you already had enough practice? Oh. Because so here's the truth from Dr. Ruth. When I got outta school, when I got outta dental school, man, I was out to conquer the world. I was at the top of my class. I was, I knew I could solve all the problems, and then I went into practice and things are different.

In practice, you learn, every human body is different. And every time I turn around, there's a new situation I've never seen before and I'm making stuff up hoping that this'll work. I can't bel they should call it trial and error because there's so many things we don't now, 30 odd years into it, I know that we have no clue about so much of how the human body works.

We do a great job with the part we understand, but there's so much. That makes no sense to me. After I've been looking at human bodies and doing surgery for over 30 years, it, I'm still amazed and awestruck by how our bodies work. So yeah, it's a practice. It's a practice. It's a practice. We get better at it and then we realize there's so much we don't know so much when people say I came here for answers.

Why aren't you giving me answers? 'Cause we don't know yet. We haven't figured that one out yet. Yeah. And beware of the person who says, oh, I have all the answers. I know, like you said, the really, the more you know, the more you know, you don't know exactly. You figure it out right away. Oh and I mentioned this on the podcast, my new passion for the last year and a half besides the podcast is playing the piano.

And I feel like wonderful. It, I love it. I feel like I'm a toddler in the world of music and playing the piano. My teacher who is also a composer, a brilliant composer. Wow. She just gives a few lessons on the side. A couple old ladies, me and another woman, and then third graders. But when I tell her, I say, geez, it's just so much, there's so much out there. I'll never learn it all. And she said, I feel the same way. Yeah. Boy, that's just, and so when people say that's very, when the bonus session I laugh because I say, is there anything you'd like to change about yourself?

And I've had a few people say No. And I think I'm gonna rephrase it to, is there anything you'd like to improve about yourself? Because there's always more out there. Yeah. So we don't have a ton of time, but I want you to talk about building a business that you can sell for the price you'd like to sell it for.

Sure. So real quick, the reason that I focus on helping people sell their business is because I sold my first practice and did a horrible job of selling it. None of it was the buyer's fault. I was not prepared. So these are four little things that people can do to make sure they don't go into the sale unprepared.

The first is to increase the value of your business. To some people, that means I have to generate more revenue. I have to grow my production or my collections just to increase the value. And while you're doing that, encourage people to think about what are you gonna do after you retire or after you sell.

Are you gonna start another business? Are you going to go fishing? Are you gonna travel but have a plan? Figure out what's non-negotiable in your world, it's very common for professionals to have golden handcuffs. So you can sell your practice, but you have to stay for a year, three years, five years.

And maybe you don't want, maybe you don't want that, but you need to decide ahead of time how much, how far will you go if you can only find a buyer who wants you to stay for another year. So think about who is your ideal buyer. All buyers are not the same. And I just like determining your moose, your prospect.

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Your moose, what's what, define everything about what you want. Exactly. I liken it to Goldilocks and the Three Bears because there's a buyer for every single size bed that she found. Big, small, medium. You just have to match up. What you want with someone who wants exactly that in what they're, because not everybody wants a gigantic business that has huge revenue.

Some people just want you, you get what I mean? You just have to find the right, the buyer who's looking for what you've got and focus just on them. The second thing you can do is decrease the risk. A buyer and their broker's always gonna find risk in your business. And sometimes risk looks like an owner who's the main rainmaker in the business, like the community knows the owner, they always go to him.

Most of the sales come through the owner's relationships or referral partners. When you leave the new buyer's gonna not like that, because now who's gonna be that rainmaker? Same thing if one of your employees is more productive than the rest. That's a risk for the buyer because if that employee leaves when you retire they're sunk.

They've lost a big chunk. Another example is if you have three or four clients or customers who represent a big per percentage of your revenue, when you leave, they may leave because they have a relationship with the owner. So you wanna make sure that those little types of risk you work on mediating that, like spread things out so it's not so dependent on one, one or two people.

The other thing, the third thing would be to think about what makes you different. Here's your branding. What's your competitive advantage? Why? I know what makes you UNC copyable. Yes. Yes. So if there are two dental practices in the same town, why would somebody buy mine instead of the guy next door?

I say, why would they pay more for mine than the guy next door, even if all the other things are equal, there are huge things people don't always, and I, the biggest one that I like people to think about is intellectual property. What are things in your business that are your babies?

You created it. You did it. Are you gonna license it? Are you gonna franchise it? Are you gonna sell it separately? There's lots of thought that can go into that. We don't always think about that, and the last thing is to make your business turnkey easy. Buyers don't wanna buy a job. They wanna buy a cash machine.

They wanna buy something that generates revenue, and they don't wanna spend 80 hours a week doing it. So make your business. Self-propelled, make it easy for them to just get it going and orchestrate, but not run everything themselves, if that makes sense. It all makes sense. I just feel like I'm drinking from a fire hose there.

I'm sorry. Yeah, no, don't be sorry. And I'm, I keep looking down and taking notes because, Oh, that's fine. There's so many things that come to mind. I love the un copyable angle. We, I have. We have two books and Copyable You, which is personal branding. So much of it applies to having a business, especially a small business.

Yeah. Like a dentist, dentist practice that you're so many different things, like you said, how you treat the customer, that whole flow. All of that can set you apart. The right moose for sales is always someone who sees value in what you provide. My favorite example is probably the fact that some people stay at a Motel six, some people stay at a Four Seasons.

And they may be people that can afford either one, and they spend their money in different places. So you have to find a customer and a buyer that sees value in what you're doing. And that's ready. Yeah, that's right. There's, that's ready to, has the right pain point at the right moment, right?

The moment. Yes. The moment. And so do you talk about that in your work, fewer hours as well? Or is there a different place that people can find out about that kind of information selling your business? That would be yes. So we have prep it now.com is where we have resources for your listeners, if they're interested in, it's actually a checklist of things to think about.

We talked about a few things, but there's 10 or 11 different things to think about before you think about putting your business up for sale because newsflash, it takes longer, takes a while to correct some things to make changes or to just spruce it up. Think of it like. When you sell your house, all of a sudden everyone's a critic and you have all these things that you love and they don't, and it just takes time.

It takes time to get thing because you'll get your value out of it. It's worth spending the time to do it ahead of time so that you don't regret your sale like I do, the first time. The first time. And we're out of time, but there is so much more that we can learn from you and so I'm glad that you have these resources from for us.

Yes. And I will put all of those in the show notes. How would be the best way to reach out to you LinkedIn, or how would LinkedIn is great. We you can also go to our website, it's shoreline strategies.com. Great. We will do that. And I, one thing I wrote down that I didn't want to just skip over is what a blessing that your daughter is healthy.

Yes. Oh my goodness. Yeah. I can't imagine. I've never personally, I have one daughter gone through that kind of a scare, but I've done it with plenty of other of my friends. And it's just, indescribable. I don't know. And hallelujah. That she's Yes. Yes. And I'm And your boys, they're probably okay too.

Yeah. Fine. They are. Yeah. Now she has three brothers, so we had one more after her. So yes, my daughter and three boys. She's quite a little tomboy. I know. And we didn't get maybe in the bonus e episode, so curious because I'm sure most dentists are men. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. So we'll talk about that in a couple minutes.

But you listening. Enjoy this information. Use the resources that Ruth has shared, and I hope this has given you, even if you don't do that, hey, have standup meetings and record what you need to present over Loom or one of those, platforms ahead of time. So it forces you to be efficient and it helps the people like me who need to process that information.

Dr. Ruth, thank you. I really appreciate this. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Oh, you're welcome. This was great. Thank you.

We made it. Yay. Yay. Nicely done. Nicely done