164: 3 Key IT Shortcuts To Help You Build A Successful DSO

Welcome to DSO Secrets. I know what it's like to be an entrepreneur in the dental industry. I've had my ups and downs just like you. There's so much opportunity to be excited about but so few resources to get answers. From here on DSO Secrets, we get you those answers so you can change the lives you're meant to bless and achieve your personal success.

When I was working as an associate right out of school, I never imagined I could own these many practices with this amount of support. So thank you. You have helped build my marketing mind to a whole new level. You have this natural talent, this unique ability. Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of DSO Secrets. I'm very, very excited to take on the topic we're about to take on today, which is the best it DSO Secrets that are out there and shortcuts, I should say. I'm very excited to introduce our guest. He has, he's a second time guest now on the show and we got a lot of great feedback actually from the content that was provided the last time. So excited to have our guest back. This is Jacob Irving, the CEO of InTech and he is just well known throughout the industry, is knowing all things it, all things CIO minded and CTO minded and then just everything about the dental space. Jacob, why don't you take a second and just introduce yourself to the listeners.

Yeah, happy to be here. I guess last time I gave the whole spiel. So I don't know if this is where I have to like say my favorite color and ice cream, all that, but basically I've just been in the dental, dental space for a decade. I've been in it for more than two and really started Intech because I have a passion of thriving together with our customers and our employees. We want this to be a place where our technicians want to stay so that they get trained and are even more valuable for our customers. And the whole purpose of it was to help growing DSOs who want a stable IT infrastructure. And not just so that they can say they have it, but so that they understand the reason that helps them retain profits because they're up and running and producing. That's the whole end goal is have chairs producing every day. Right. And take away the pain of unnecessary IT complications. We don't want people having to do copies and pastes in places whenever you can automate it. But so that's, that's why I'm here and that's what I love to do. That's what gets me up in the morning and keeps my team Running every day.

Awesome. All right. So really excited for you to share these three IT shortcuts, because that's what everybody's looking for nowadays is how can I simplify? How can I do things more simply? Um, I don't have time and energy and a budget to take on complex things or things. Things that are just overly burdensome on my team because. And I can't hire more. Wages are going up. We're all, you know, looking at our margins and. And trying to manage the bottom line as best as we can. Before we jump in, though, Jacob, I just need to share something with the group that would hopefully be helpful. If you have not signed up for the DEO Gross Summit, which is June 8th through 10th in San Diego. I've got a promo code that the DEO team just gave me that I want to share with you guys that I think it might be the best promo code out there if you haven't already signed up. So what will happen is you get 300 off the ticket, plus you get a free paperback copy of my book that just came out. Deo's financial secrets to grow dental organizations. Just go to deosummit.com and when you are in the checkout phase, you put in the promo code D E O ken. All capital D E O Ken. And that'll get you that special offer. And I hope you guys will. If you haven't signed up yet, it's an event you absolutely have to be to. It's going to be along the same vein of types of things we're talking about today. All right, Jacob, so let's go ahead and just jump right in. You kind of curated these three key shortcuts for dentists and DSOs that are trying to scale and grow. Let's. Let's jump right into number one.

All right, perfect. Before I do that, though, real fast, I want to say I've been reading your book and it's been. Even though I'm not a DSO, it's been really helpful. Like the cash. The 90 day cash flow has been really helpful to open my mind of what I need to be looking at that. So. And the fact that it's audible audio now, I already download that because I don't fall asleep listening to you, but I do that when I'm on the bike or out walking the dog. So that's been awesome to have.

Awesome. So thank you for the feedback.

Yeah. So, yeah, I have kind of three shortcuts that I was thinking about, and one of the things is I don't Think the shortcuts isn't technology. Technology just helps you get there. It takes whatever idea you have in any process and just helps speed it and validate it. But you got to have the right mindset first, and then technology can leverage your business model and the mindset and everything from there.

So, yeah. Can I insert something here really quick? It's something I learned early in my career and this is what you said, but I'm going to rephrase it slightly differently to hopefully help everyone listening, even get a better handle on it. What I found is you can't buy or implement technology to solve a problem. You actually have to have your smart people solve the problem, and then you use technology to automate that solution and then your smart people can then go and start and find the next problem and solve that and then hopefully automate it, you know, and then move on, move on to the next.

Is that.

Would you agree with that?

I completely agree. That's. And you want to take those people that whole. I don't know if we talked about it here, but you and I have had conversation about the make it up, make it real, make it reoccurring. Right? You want people who can make it up figure it out, then pass it on to a team who can make it real, build it, automate it, everything like that, and then give it to a team who can just work it day in, day out. And that's really where magic happens in any process, in any business. So that's right.

That's right.

So to that point, the first one, the first shortcut is start with the end in mind. So we get asked a lot of times, like, if I was starting to practice from scratch, what should I do? And they're looking for like the tactical what should I go buy? And I'm always going, okay, three years from now, what does this look like for you? And like I'm looking at the next, like three weeks. Like, let's, let's, let's elevate our, our mindset here. So one of the things, one of the tools we use a lot is we use impact filters and strategy circles. And that's something that could be dived in later. But when you can write an impact filter that says, this is what I want to get and here's what it looks like, then you pass. That's really helps with the make it up part of a process. Then to make it real, I give it to a team, say, here's my outcomes. Now tell me why I'm not going to get there and that really helps a ton. I even use this in my personal family, right? I've got eight kids. And so when we've got, like a big event coming into the house, I'll write an impact filter. Here's what I want to look like. I don't want to be stressed. I want to have everything clean and everything. And then we'll put it on the whiteboard. And my kids just jump in, say, here's why that's not going to work. And, oh, here's what we need to do. I can take that on. And it's amazing how people come together on that. So that is a tool I use to help visualize what the end is and communicate that with the team. But what I think this comes down to is, first, people are looking here for it, right? So I know we talked a little bit about this last time. Cloud versus servers. To me, you need to just figure out which way you're going. And the high level of IT servers give you stability and reliability. They've been here, they're never going away. Because even the cloud is just servers in the cloud, right? I mean, there's always gonna be people developing stuff. So if you have a server in your office, then there's a lot more integrations for that already. Because how many times have you been on a cloud with a cloud provider and you say, I'd really love this, and go, oh, that's a great idea. We'll give that to our development team. And you go, oh, great. And then you follow up. Oh, it's on the roadmap. Okay, well, it's been on the roadmap for three years now. When am I going to get that? And they're like, eventually. So that's where I think you pick your poison, right? If you have servers, you got to figure out backups, redundancy, things like that. But if you have cloud, you still have to figure out network redundancy. And then you have to play this game of, do I want to go pay developers? And Most dentists and DSOs didn't get in the game to be software developers. They got in the game to run practices, right? So you just need to know that. I believe everyone has choices, but what we can't choose is what's on the other end of that stick. So if you choose local servers, that dictates some of your options. If you choose cloud, that dictates some others. So I think some of the best run practices I've seen are usually on open dental or some other not super complicated software. Some that gives a little bit of customization, some access to backend. But the biggest reason I think you need to figure this out is you want highly connectable software stuff that other third parties are writing for this and not blocked because they can't get access to the backend. Right. So we see practices that have open dental and they're using Dexis or xdr, maybe even they're using Jazz, which I really love that, the warranty model that Jazz has. And if they're using Mouthwatch, which is the right price for the right quality, those offices have very few issues. As far as your 2D or 3D, that's the doctor's choice. We'll make that work. Open dental integrates with all that. Or worst case, you just use the 3D software because that's what you're needing it for, right? Sure. So I think you figure out that tech stack and then you just go with it. And if you do that earlier and don't test it in one office, then the next office try something else out. If you do that, you're going to stress out your management team because they won't know how to get everything, how to support it. So that'll just at the end of the day make you not sleep as well.

So yeah. And if you're building a group, you ultimately want to try to have the same equipment and the same software being utilized in each of those areas. Otherwise you just, each time you introduce a new practice management software or you introduce new X ray software or those things, the complication goes out the roof and now you have to hire more people to manage more things. When like you said, by just sitting down and thinking it out and planning for a second, you can avoid a lot of those headaches in the process.

That's very true. And what I find is a lot of DSOs say we're going to let the doctors choose and, and everything. And that's, that's good. Every DSO has to find their secret sauce of their doctor relationship. But I've, I found almost every DSO starts there and eventually they get to, all right, we're going to let them choose these things. But our platform, we need to this be standard because that's really the only way the DSO can give scalable Support to the DSOs is if you have the data and the systems there. Otherwise you're, you're not scaling, you're doing one to one growth for everything. And then like you said, hiring an expert for this software, an expert for this software and then an expert to marry Those two together, it just becomes cumbersome and costly.

So yeah, and you don't get the the advantage of what's called operating leverage. Right. Which is as you build centralized services out, those are generally fixed costs. And so the more revenue that you can push through that fixed cost, the more is going to waterfall over that fixed cost down to your bottom line depending on how your structure is. And so from a financial perspective, you can drive profitability much more successfully the more standardized you are. And the only way you get standardized if you step all the way back and say okay, what type of patients do I want to serve? What type of treatments are we going to be offering? What type of doctors am I recruiting to these pract. And then you can start to build out your IT stack to support those things and then consistently replicate it throughout, you know, however big. If you want to be two practices or 20 practices.

Right, exactly. Because otherwise if you let it and the choices are made there, you almost have the tail wagging the dog. Right.

You don't almost. That is absolutely the tail wagging the dog. Same for accounting and finance people. You don't want them making those decisions. You want your business go to market strategy to be what drives those decisions.

Yep. The make it up needs to to set the vision to make it recurring needs to follow it, not say well I can't do that because you didn't think through this. So on another tactical standpoint, I also recommend getting the same like equipment don't just go buy what the flavor of the month is at Costco or Amazon deals like get the same like tech stack. Like if you're going Dell go Dell servers, workstations, everything. So that then going to your same point about efficiencies, you also you want your tech people to not have to learn five different firewalls and try to figure out okay, I have to do this update for these Dell computers and HP need this like just give one so that you can automate and push all that out. We, we believe strongly in getting a unified firewall platform so that you can see it across all offices. And you can then if you want to do VPNs and stuff. We love the Ubiquiti stack because not only we're based out of Texas, but we're all across the country. But DSOs are spread out too and you need to be able to see what's going on in one location. And so Ubiquiti has really good central like one single pane of glass to see everything in push updates. We also then Put in our, our battery backups that are smart battery backups because we get a lot of times where an office goes out and we don't know why and the battery backup actually reports like if it's a power issue, if it's a network issue. So you want to make sure you have all these remote tools like dentists won't go into someone's mouth without taking some X rays. Don't start drilling, it doesn't want to go. Start just moving things around in your network and all that. We want a little bit of diagnostic going on, but too many times that's where I see dentists skimping to save a couple bucks. That really hurts them in the long term. So spend the extra two or three hundred bucks for the right firewall and the right battery backup might cost you an extra thousand over what you would put in. But that is a shortcut that'll help you later on down the road. You'll, you'll be fine for the first year or two, but when you really start scaling, that's what'll hurt. So, and the last part about this is you just need to figure out your support model. I like to compare support. It's on ad hoc or full support. And this goes down to it, guys. We always go, are you Apple or Android? And like we almost make this decision, oh, you're Android, I'm not gonna like we have some fun around that. But if you look at it like I was just looking at the percentages, Android's at 45% and Apple's at 55%. And if I look at it, I see a lot of people go Android because I want custom, self driven, I can do what I want to with it. They can also brick it many times themselves. Apple kind of protects you from doing that, says here's a template and we'll help give some proactive stuff. And what they roll out usually works really smoothly. Whereas when I, I myself have an Apple and an Android because I play in both worlds, see what's like. But. And so I tell people I play in both, but my family is all Apple because I want one platform that everyone's on and so it's stable and easy. So you just need to decide what your support is going to look like. Do you want something that's more ad hoc and just we'll drive it, when we need it, we'll get help or do you want someone who kind of takes that on for you? So that's one thing you got to look at early and figure it out. And it could be that you more from ad hoc to like maybe go from Android to Apple eventually. But the other big part is projects. DSOs aren't here just to like manage a few. They want to grow. Right? That's the whole usually the driving factor. And we're looking for DSOs that are trying to grow. So you have to figure out there's some years that are heavy growth years, we're doing acquisitions or de novo, and others are like, we're not doing that. We're going to refine things internally, clean up some systems and so it bounces back and forth. So are you going to have one internal team who pivots between those priorities and you might have that whole phrase jack of all trades, master of none, or are you going to have two teams that specialize on that and you got to keep, got to have the cash flow to keep moving that forward? Or do you go external and find a partner who is a specialist in those things and you only pay for them when you need them. Right. If you decide, hey, we're not growing this year, let's put this on pause, great, then that team can go pivot to other project and stuff. But when you need them, you haven't lost, especially you don't have to hire again and retrain and everything. So those are things that I believe that's why I started intact, because I think that is the better option and that's what we build all of our process around to help. But that isn't for everyone. But it is a, again, it's a mindset you need to think about early to decide what stick you're going to pick up and then take the following end of that stick. So my, my big question is, do you want to be the one the staff's calling or do you want to pass it on to someone else? Right. Do you want to be the jack of all trades or do you want to be a specialist? Again, you're here to grow a DSO or be the dentist. You don't want to be the IT guy. Some do.

Yeah, great point. Yeah, great, great point.

So, so that's the first one about kind of beginning with the end in mind, right. The next one is speak the same language. You know, Ken, that we, we call people pigs and chickens in our company and it's a term of endearment. And people might go, why'd you call them a pig? And we have reasons internally for it from the agile and from our core values. So what I see a lot of times is companies, they're saying words that means different things to the two people in the conversation or even worse, the group. And everyone goes out thinking, oh, I heard them say this, I'm going to go make this because of that. So I think one of the biggest things you have to figure out is data. And data can fast track you or it can cripple you. Yeah. So I think there's.

You have to. And you have to define it. Right. So what one person calls production, another person thinks about it differently, and another person thinks about differently in the same organization. You've got massive miscommunication and massive problems. And that's where data gets like completely disastrous and, and not helpful.

Yeah, it's on production. It's also on like, what's a new patient? And what's new patient production? Is it the only the first visit or is it the first six months or is it. And then when are they a new patient again? If we haven't seen them for three years, are they a new patient because they came in from new marketing efforts? Like, figuring all that stuff out is something that you need to be thinking about early and not just go, oh, we'll figure it out later. Like, we put the field on our new patient form, new patient this and that. That's not enough because unless you're going to pay someone to go look through all those forms and find that back, you need it in the system. We need to figure that definition out. Right.

Well, and I do have a little bit of a gripe here because it seems like most practice management software program or tools, they, they have different definitions within their system. So you can run two different reports and they can be stating new patients as two different numbers because one report's counting it one way or, you know, analyzing one way and another report's going another way. And it really does create a unique challenge in the DSO space, which is you need to define what your, you know, you need to come up with the definition of what each of these terms is and then stick with that consistently. And then, and ultimately it means you end up not trusting your practice management software or at least, you know, with what is the one report you can run in your practice management software that's defining it the way that you want it to and you want it to be consistent through your organization.

Exactly. And so that's why I'd say even make up some weird names for production so that people know, oh, when they say that, I know what it is. Right. So I always like to have fun with it and make up words on the spot. And then. But not just that one time, but then you. Then you go train that out to everyone so that they know it. But so that kind of data that. What kind of data you need to be looking at. Right. First of all, the problem with practice management softwares right now is they're built for the clinical work, like appointments and production and treatment. Right.

And charting.

Right.

Your doctor charting and things like that.

Yep, yep. And claims. And they do that very well. But what they don't do is track all the CRM and the lead activity. And like, what about the people that I'm working on that haven't set an appointment? Like, where do I keep them? And so where do most people do that? In Excel spreadsheets or Google Docs or worse, paper and pen. Right. And you can't scale off of that.

Oh, and the one other I've seen is they put it on Sunday on the schedule.

That is that too. And then like. And where do I go find them? Oh, you just go scroll back to the last couple weeks and figure it out.

Yeah, they're on Sunday. What. What is going on here?

Yep. So when you first said Sunday, I was thinking like Monday dot com. Like, oh, they're putting them there. That's at least better. But yeah, you're right. They're mostly using their, their operator scheduling software.

Yeah, Yep.

And they're not even patients. Right. But so then they got all that stuff there. So the first thing is you got to figure out where you can track that and everything. But there's reports that you need to build, and these aren't super complicated, but it's basically you say, I can't have a patient who, who looks like this. Like, I can't have a patient that doesn't have a phone number and email. Like, I need a list that says here's who they are. Because I either need to delete them because there's nothing I can do with it, or I need to go find that email or phone number. Right. I can't have a patient who had treatment but doesn't have an appointment that it's tied to, because then I can't get production by appointment or production by provider. Right. So I call these Geigo boards or Whack a mole boards. GEIGO stands for garbage in, garbage out. Right. I can only report on the. What's in the system. And if you put garbage in, then that's what you're going to get. So I like to build these dashboards that say, here's the filters and the Numbers that don't make sense. This should get to zero, because then if you look at this board and everything's zero, then you know, oh, my data is accurate, right? And then it also helps you see, okay, why is it this way? What human did that? What, what training do I need to go give to them? Like, what are they not understanding? Because training doesn't happen. Just fly by training. You got to train them seven plus times for them to get it. But these dashboards help take the emotion out of it and say, I know you, you do this on most of them. Here's the two that you missed for whatever reason. Let's go get those cleaned up. And I also strongly believe you shouldn't be the one cleaning it up. You need to put it to them because otherwise they'll keep doing what they're doing and you're still doing this. And then you just create this technical debt where you're having to keep the system clean rather than going and stopping at the source. So that's another it shortcut and trick. Unless you want to stay up every night cleaning up data just to trust your reports. So first start figuring out what does that dart guy go and get that cleaned up. The next thing is, you do have snapshot views, right? Daily huddles say, here's what's going on right now, right? And so to borrow a term from my wife, because we had about, for about 10 years where she had a chronic illness. We still fight it to today, but we'd go and she'd get blood work. But the blood work only tells you what's going on right now, right? But when we wanted to know what was really going on in her body, we went and did some hair samples. Because then you have like months worth of data. Because I don't understand all the science, but your body deposits stuff there to say, here's what's going on, right? So take care of today with the blood and with your daily huddle and like, what's. How do I need to fill my schedule? But that won't tell you the health of your practice or your DSO and everything.

So, yeah, it's true. It's. It's trending data. It's the ability to see what's happening over time. And I refer to this as putting things in context where it's like, hey, if I say, hey, look, here's our production, like, okay, is that good or bad? If you don't have anything to compare it to, you don't know. But if you compare it to the same Month, prior year or last month or you know, last week. And so, so trending data becomes the ultimate way to in my mind, optimize performance. It tells you what's going on and then you can see if you're moving up and to the right or down or down into the left, so to speak. Or down into the right.

Exactly. And that is what DSOs need to start getting to. And so that goes back to the first point. You got to have the right stack that can support that and the right process and right training. And then you can see this because what will happen is you'll find a bottleneck. You'll go do the makeup, make it over recurring to fix that bottleneck and see the data says yep, you're good. And then you're going to find another bottleneck. Right. So that's what people need to understand, that there's an evolution of that data. And so you need to start with the whack a moles, then make sure your huddles are good. But this is where you need to start getting to spending most your time is in the trending metrics for sure. And that all goes to kind of what you alluded to at the beginning. Master data management. You got to define it. What is a new patient? What's new patient production? Make sure you have all your codes by a category. Make sure, you know, adjustments versus write offs. One, one trick I'll give here that I think I found super helpful and we kind of discovered this at cdp. But then I've been able to help other organizations do it. Use adjustments for anything before the cell. Right. And use write offs for everything after that helps keep things very clean, especially with open dental. One of the values of that is adjustments is more against just the patient ledger. Write offs are actually against a code. So you can see why am I, why, why are my, is my fee schedule off? Did I miss getting some pre ops on this? Is my doctor not credentialed. And that will drive a lot more organizational change and impact. So you can really make sure your write offs aren't there. And so adjustments become a marketing expense, write offs become a how can I go make things better? So that's something I, if your system can do that, do that because that is super impactful for a billing team and to know if you're gone. So no question the holy grail for data is can I tie my marketing efforts into my operational efforts to my financial collections. Right. And so anyone who can track their leads, whether it's in a CRM or they or they modify their practice management to do that and really make sure that all their operations are good and then tie into their erp. Those are the people are going to one have the highest multiples with PE and sustained profitability for yourself if you're planning on staying this for long game. So that's, that's what you got to do is start speaking the same language. But also so begin with the end in mind. Speak the same language so that you know where you're at in the process. Perfect.

All right, let's jump to number three because we're going to run out of time here. This is great stuff.

Number three is plan for the run or your crawl forever. We always tell people, let's crawl, walk, run. We take you as you are and grow with you. Right. We don't come out as babies. We're not giraffes who like get dropped from like 10ft and start walking. Right.

So that's a great analogy. It's a great analogy.

So if you plan for the run, then you do that in your practices, right. You figure out the, the software and the X rays and the, the chair side process and everything like that. Right. But why are you not doing that for your DSO? We almost like the, the DSOs I've seen focus on the practice level software, but never themselves. And if who is the customer of the dso? A lot of people say it's the patients. I'm like, you're not signing contracts with your, with the patients, you're signing contracts with the doctors and that's you're giving service to. So you need to have a system as a DSO to be able to take all the inputs from them and make sure you're delivering on what needs to be done with them. And so that's your customer. And if you have pe, then you also have a boss, you have the board, right. You need to show them like this is how we're doing, this is what we're doing. Good. So it goes to reports, but it goes to something deeper which is your management system. I remember at the early days at CDP we had our executive meetings and stuff, but we needed a little bit more structure and so we put Agile in and so we use that and it helped over time. I found EOS is my favorite and preferred tool. And so that's something that if you want to keep your sanity, you want use Mac one day and Windows the other day and Linux and just change it up. You need to find one operating system that you get comfortable with and know how to use so you can trust it. So if you can figure out a tool that's going to help for your dso, you need to spend the same amount of effort as you do figuring out your practice as you do for dso.

And one thing, if I can layer in here, something that the DEO has come out with recently is their own take and spin on an operating system that is specific for a dental practice based organization. Whether you've got one dental practice or you've got a hundred or even more, they've come up with a very unique offering and there are a lot of, there are a lot of dentist entrepreneurs that have signed up for it. So I don't mean to show up and throw a plug in there, but there's a very dental specific one. EOS is very much, you know, kind of, it's, it's got something for everyone there. And, and I'm sure your company benefits a ton from it. But just there, there are some really cool options out there. And I just, I want to put this one piece into. I, I want to emphasize that as a dentist who didn't go to business school, something like this is so helpful to learn how to build strategy and how to build a plan and get your team aligned and get your culture aligned with all of these other pieces of the puzzle. It's so, so helpful. And don't feel embarrassed. You went to, you went to dental school like you're, you learned chemistry and you learned all the other sciences. So that would allow you to be a great ultimately chairside provider. People like Jacob and I went to business school and learned about, you know, these other types of things. And so some of these things come more naturally to us. But even Jacob, right, he's got a, he's using EOS as a system so that it gets his whole business all lined up. And I see people using the DEO's Program Operating System and there's a lot of really interesting, great options out there. And I, I encourage people to do it and, and sign up for it because it just brings so much clarity.

Yep. I was thinking my mind, it's, it's all about clarity. When I started run this in my company, you get it forces you to make decisions to be purposeful. Going back to that begin with the end in mind. Right. What's your 10 years, three year, one year and your 90 days and what's your next seven days look like? Right. So to me there's, there's two different from E Myth revisited you have on the business and in the business, right. So in the business you need something to track like what, what, what's my compliance farm supposed to be doing? What are my trainers doing? What is my biller's doing? Right. And the PMS can do for some of that. Some things I've seen other people use just to give some actual nuggets. Airtable, Podio, Smart sheets. Good day. These all have some good free versions. If your central support is small, like probably 15 or less, then you can get on some stuff here. I would not use Google or Excel. Google and Excel are not CRMs. So I think too many people, there's, there's a phrase I like to use that nothing is as permanent as a temporary solution. And people say, oh, just make a spreadsheet for that. And then what happens is now you got 85 spreadsheets to be able to, how you have to look at, to see how every project's going. Get a project management tool that is built for that and use that. You're not using your offices, you're going to use it in your central support. So do that. If you need someone to react, you're going to pay for it Monday. Asana Trello, Jira Airtable. Good day. They have some upgrades to it. Again, I'll reiterate, Google and Microsoft are not that Microsoft Teams has some good functionality in there about chat and tasks and stuff, but I'll just throw it out there. My choice is Zoho1. I think the price to value that you get for that package and what you can do to really set up your DSO as a service organization, that's what it is, it's a service organization so you should have tools that let you service your customers and that's what a CRM is all about.

So, and I, I have personal experience working with Jacob on Zoho and the platform's phenomenal. It's, it's strong, it's capable, it can do everything. And then when you have somebody like Jacob and his team around you, they can, they can customize and, and it's, it's extremely affordable relative to the other options that are out there. So I, it's, I don't know, Jacob, I've seen you work miracles with this stuff.

It's amazing. Well, that's why you gotta have the right tools, right? You're not gonna send a dentist in to do an extraction with a pencil, right? It doesn't work. So the last part I'd say is you have the in the business stuff to do, but you also have the on business so you Were talking about the DEO's operating system there. Find a tool that tracks that we use 90io. It's a beautiful program that is highly customizable. It isn't just EOS specific. We've used Bloom in the past. It was track formally traction tools. They might get mad at me. I won't use them right now. They've, they've really kind of butchered their system. 90io is the one that I like. But find something because there's times as a DSO leadership team you need to know your task. Like what do I have to do today to keep the business running and then what are my tasks to help with the long term of it. And so 90IO is that my tasks are there and that's what I focus on. So I can sit down and I'm not bounce back and forth. We, we don't multitask well. Right. So focus. I'm going to get my task done today and then what are my to do's for on the business? So getting them in that place. Then at night when I wake up with oh I gotta do that, then I know what system to put it into and make sure it's not dropped. So those are the, those are the three things that I've got that technology supports all that. But again going back to it, if you don't have a plan then technology is just going to make your bad plan even worse because it'll be bigger and harder to clean up. Right? So think about it early. Find someone who can kind of help you think through it. Avoid the brick walls and say yeah, don't go with that provider, go with this. Here's why. Because they understand your use case and what you're trying to get out of it. And I think we all, we all have these struggles with the software doesn't do what we want. So we need to communicate and collaborate as a community to say here's what could actually work and, and go from there and start building your own secret sauce. If you're going to get those multiples and everything you're looking for, it might take some stress to figure it out. But no one can figure it out for you. You've got to do it yourself and work through that. So that would be my secret. Do that work now because it'll make life easier later and then you will actually be able to sit on a beach. My, my goal and what I did last year is I actually sat on the beach and had a scorecard delivered to me that showed the nine core metrics that I care about in my company trended over the last 90 days. So I could look at that and I was gone for two weeks and was just like, yep, everything's working green, green, green, good. That's what we want to get to. And that's what technology can help you get to if you set it up the foundation the right way. So that's my silk box. I'll get off of it now. Thanks.

Moment. Yeah, this has been fantastic. There's so many great little nuggets in there because you talked about it from a business perspective, but then layered in the how it is such a critical element of all of these elements as they fit in, fit into your business. So this has been absolutely fantastic. Thank you. Jacob. If any of the listeners want to reach out or contact you, what would be the best way for them to do that?

That's a good question. The best is just my email, jacob@ntechtogether.com or if you go to intactogether.com we got a chat there and you'll be talking to someone who can get you to the right person there. But yeah, me, me or Brian are the best ones. Brian@Intactogether.com Outstanding.

Again, Jacob, thank you so much for joining us. Many, many thanks to all of you who joined in to listen to this episode on all things the top three IT shortcuts, which is begin with the end in mind, speak the same language and plan for the run or you will crawl forever. Happy day.

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