166: Begin with The End in Mind

I think the more self awareness someone can have at the beginning of the journey prior to ownership, the better type of opportunity they could find for the who they are.

Hi, I'm Emmett Scott, and just like you, I've had my ups and downs in the dental industry, but times are changing. The DEO has built a map of how to succeed in one of the most challenging industries to navigate. On this show, we talk to dental industry leaders, solve problems, and get you the answers you need to face these challenging times and thrive. Welcome to DEO's Growth Secrets podcast for dental organizations. Now let's get started.

Hello, everyone. This is Ken Kaufman, your host for today's episode and so excited for our two guests, Richard and George. I'm going to turn it over to you guys to do a quick intro and then we're going to jump right into it.

Okay, let's see. My name is Richard Lowe. I am the host of the Shared Practices podcast and CEO of Shared Practices. And George, I'll let you introduce yourself.

Sure. I'm George Hariri. I'm the CFO of Shared Practices, and I'm one of six partners at Shared Practices. We have, I think, what is a pretty unique business. Back in 2016, Richard here started the podcast. And ever since then, we've kind of kept growing through different business models in dentistry, and now we have a DSO and a consulting company where we help people kind of run their practices.

See, this is amazing for so many different reasons, because Richard's told me his story and he started that one practice and figured out how to get that going really well and said, hey, I want to share some of these things I've learned along the way. And Richard, I think there's some commonality between you and myself and Emmett and others at the DEO where we tend to find that when we take a minute to just stop growing something and to try to articulate what we're doing, that it actually makes us better at what we're doing. It makes us more thoughtful about what we're doing. We force ourselves to think about it. And I see that. I see a lot of that in kind of how you've started this and how you've gotten to at least how you started and then how you've built up over time. So maybe could you give us a perspective on your thought process about the first dental practice, that first location that somebody has, and what is your thought process about how a dentist should think about growth with that very first dental practice?

Yeah, I'll start and then I know George will Be like anxiously awaiting for me to stop talking so he can share his side of it.

But

one of the biases we've had, we have been an acquisition oriented podcast and company since the very beginning and recently we've been doing a whole lot more startups ourselves. But our, our thought has always been buy the healthiest practice that you can grow, that you've got a path for growth is the entry point for most people into practice ownership. So buy that practice that already has enough patience and EBITDA and profitability to sustain at least yourself and then grow that into a multi doctor practice is, is our recommended path. And a lot of that comes from George's experiences. You know, I, I was podcasting about this while I was still in the army, but George was the one actually doing it and living it and building out our framework and model and learning the hard way. So I mean George, you've got more kind of personal authority to speak on this than I do in the GP space.

Yeah, I think it's interesting because, you know, I, you know, I think when we first started the podcast we were both pre owners. Right, and then you were still having your army commitment. I entered ownership right after I graduated. And you know, I think one thing that pre owners a lot of times get stuck on is they're just trying to get to ownership and they don't necessarily think through long term what they're really looking for in their life and their career and how that fits into what type of practice they own and operate. And so, you know, I think the biggest thing is begin with the end in mind. And I know that's like really cliche to say, but I, I think there's too many people that focus on, they begin with the beginning of ownership in mind and they don't begin with what five years after acquisition closing date looks like. And you know, in my case, I bought a, you know, I bought a practice that had eight operatories and ended up becoming a group practice. And at the time, you know, I walked into that opportunity thinking I wanted to be a clinician my entire career. And I would say that that's a lot of lack of self awareness because I've been very business minded and oriented and so, you know, I think the more self awareness someone can have at the beginning of the journey prior to ownership, the better type of opportunity they could find for the who they are.

Yeah, that's, that's great advice. I, I really appreciate that and maybe if you guys could talk for a second because so if this model that you've been talking about on your podcast and share and. And obviously you've been developing it over time. If the model is this, let's start with the mindset of the associate a lot of times, or maybe it's somebody who's just graduated out of school. There is, I think DSOs don't have as bad of a wrap with new graduates as in the past. It seems like dental schools in the 2010s were talking a lot about how DSOs are bad or consolidation is bad, and it should be all about that single dentist in their one location. Nowadays, I think it seems like everybody's figured out how to play nice. Unless you guys tell me something different here, everybody's playing nice. Meaning, hey, if you want to buy a practice, there are practices out there for sale and you can own. If you want to just be an associate and there's, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. You can find a great gig as an associate and make a great living if you want to own multiple practices. But to your point, George, a lot of times dentists get stuck with I want to own 10 practices and they think that's going to happen in year one. And it just, it just doesn't happen like that. So I'm curious as you in your podcast and in the content that you guys create regularly when you're talking to this dentist who is going to go on this journey of purchasing that first practice, what are some of the key tips and tricks that you're putting in front of them to be thinking about when they're going to buy that first practice?

So I mean, with, with what George was saying of the end in mind, knowing about yourself, how clinical to entrepreneurial am I? Is a big question you have to answer. If you are very clinical and like you're jazzed about clinical ce, then a solo practice, which we defined as a ratio of two hygienists to one doctor, two assistants, that traditional bread and butter practice, you can even do a lot of specialty work in that practice. We call that a super solo. Those types of practices that are a one doctor practice are going to serve you very well. The problem is if you buy a solo or you start a solo and then you realize you're entrepreneurial and you want to have multiple doctors at one location, then the real estate can be a huge limiter. So the number of operatories, the amount of physical space that you have access to. And so we've actually built out a formula for how many operatories you should look at and how to think about sizes of practice. George, do you want to explain that formula?

Yeah. So I think, you know, in general, you know, Ken, you've kind of referred to our framework. Our framework is called Analytics Based Practice Management. And the idea behind it is, you know, first we, we sort of broke down all different types of practices under 5 million in collections in different avatars. And we understood what type of owner succeeds in what type of practice. And then between the avatars, how can you grow a practice from a sol to a productive solo to a profitable group? You know, and what types of stages of growth and challenges with staff and team building are you going to experience? So by the time, you know, we, we encounter a dentist, the goal is that they feel like it's all available and then they get to choose what's best for them using that clinical entrepreneur spectrum Richard talked about. But I think that, you know, to your point about multiple locations, I think what often happens early is someone has clinically oriented success out of their first location and they think that that is, they love the feeling of the, you know, the collections growing. They like the, you know, the feeling of being successful and they think they're ready for another one. And you know, for us, we like to kind of stop the brakes on those types of people and, and show them that, you know, office manager and associate and, you know, productive office while you're not there is sort of a elementary step prior to multiple practices. And I think, you know, that's sort of part of our framework as well, is knowing when you're ready to go to multiple versus. I think people do it before they've gotten to that group practice stage where they're managing a business underneath themselves.

I, I love that perspective for so many reasons. George, thank you. And I want to unpack a little bit further on that.

Please.

Let me just give you some context here. So I get a chance to interact with a lot of members of the DEO and just with lots of people in the community, at the dental community at large. And I love it. It's been around here, this since 2006 and I think if I tried to get out, I couldn't at this point. But the, the interesting thing about what you're talking about there is about a dentist being self aware enough to know who it is that they want to be. And I'm assuming that those dentists don't show up that way initially. I'm assuming you guys are helping them assess that and figure that out about themselves. So I'd love to hear a little bit about that. Like, how do you help them unpack themselves to some degree? And then the other part that's fascinating to me about what you just talked about is if you have a dentist that goes for number two, or maybe I'll say it this way, just recently I was on a coaching, group coaching call with a bunch of people, a bunch of dentists, and they, everybody was sharing because we were just kind of sharing, hey, what part of the country are you in and how many practices are you working with? You know, just to give everybody a little bit of a context. And one person said, I have one and a half practices. And I said, what in the world does that mean? And they said, well, I started a second practice, but it's the hardest, most painful, most gut wrenching thing I've ever done, and I'm failing miserably at it. And it's not even really up and going yet, but I feel like I get some credit for the fact that I'm trying at this point. And it made me stop and realize going from one practice to two, I mean, that's, that's going to be the hardest phase of growth ever, right? Yeah, that's a, that's a doubling. And every one practice after, like, you're never going to grow at that type of a pace. And most likely as an entrepreneur, you're probably the least prepared because if you've only ever had one practice, you don't really know what it's like to have two. Wait a minute. Not there. Every day. I'm not watching over everything. I'm not the one signing every check. I'm not the one, you know, following up with, you know, whatever it is that I'm doing. So I'd love for your perspective on both of those. How do you help a dentist unpack who they, who they are on that spectrum? And then how, how do you, how do you help slow people down to say and get to where they can when they do that second practice? It's not one and a half for a few years while they figure out how to, how to make it happen. Make it happen. Yeah.

So the funny thing is our podcast has attracted an entrepreneurial type dentist. So someone who is ownership oriented. You know, if they're listening to shared practices and they are like all clinical and not interested in owning, it doesn't really make sense. So we've attracted that entrepreneurial type dentist. On average. I have a theory that most dentists are pretty well served by that solo practice. Of the two hygienists, one doctor Bread and Butter Practice, even if, you know, they're doing those specialty procedures. And the problem is, is that all of our listeners have heard George's journey, which is the multi doctor in one practice journey. And that has kind of been set up as an ideal because there are so many advantages if you can get past that growth hump and get to the other side of having multiple doctors in one office. The economies of scale, the culture, the leadership, the structure, the systems. So, but we've had this debate of, like, who do we serve more? And our framework has solved that of, like, we're going to serve all of these people. But I'm also cognizant. I don't want to bias people and like, say, hey, the entrepreneurial way is the best way. It's like, here's the different ways. But George, I mean, how do you help people unpack where they are on that spectrum?

Yeah, I think that, you know, when we do seminars, you know, one of the things that we walk through is each avatar what there is to really enjoy about it and what the challenges are. And I think that as someone listens to that, you know, there's going to be two things. They're going to gravitate towards the good of certain models and then they're going to see how much they are willing to deal with the problems that present. Right. And I think the easiest way to kind of give a quick answer is like, pick your problems because, you know, if you like what you do on the worst day, then, like, then, you know, you're in the right place and, you know, for the solo, you always say, like, do you like clinically oriented problems? Do you like the, you know, the challenge of needing to grow clinically to provide a larger skill set of procedures to your patients? Or do you want the challenge of, you know, tripling the size of your team as you go from one to three locations and the, you know, the staff turnover and the drama that causes that and, you know, all the things that come with scaling people, you know, and what problems do you want? Which ones do you think you're better suited to solve and which ones do you think you know, will make your days seem less miserable when it's not going well? You know, and I think that, that, you know, I hope that between, you know, you don't want to ever tell someone what's best for them. Right. You always hope that you can just provide sort of the information for them to internally become more aware of what is best for who they are.

Well, and I love the framework of pick your Problems because I mean we can look at it as small team clinical problems. Like I like having very, you know, direct relationships with all my team members, highly trained. I've got clinical problems, I've got patient problems. The, the larger practice now you've got kind of big team problems of multiple people in the office. You're dealing with team leads, you're dealing with more kind of chaos, more stress, more building of your practice. And then when you're at multi practice, you've got managing doctor problems. So do I, do I like retracting, retaining, managing turnover? You know, all of the challenges that come with trying to create an organization for doctors. You know, those are three different scales of problems and they're a whole different set of problems each level and you got to pick which ones you like.

Yeah, it's great, it's a great frame. And I, I mean I know some that are up to five locations and I think they wish they were back to just one because there are just things they've learned about themselves in the process. I think they were even fairly self aware of what their skills were and what they wanted to do, but they still had aspirations. Right. And they thought that was the best way to grow. And so I think ultimately being true to ourselves, to the things that we enjoy the most. And then sometimes you might get to a place too where you decide, I want to go tackle those doctor problems, those associate doctor problems in these, you know, multiple locations. But I don't want to do that day to day. I'm going to hire somebody who's going to take on, you know, the majority of that because I'm going to focus in, you know, these other areas. But that requires a certain level of scale before you can get to the place where you start hiring other, other leaders and other managers that help solve other problems.

Well, and, and George, it looks like you've got one more comment, but we'll circle back after this to the. How do you slow on, on pushing back on going to that second location and third location? Too soon? But what, what were your other thoughts, George?

Yeah, so I think that there's, with multi practice from my perspective, you know, there's a real no man land zone of number of practices where you don't have enough, you know, infrastructure, you don't have enough practices to be able to build the type of infrastructure you need to properly support those practices. Right. So I think that, you know, entering multiple locations, we tell this to our, our doctors all the time is you know, really we try to push them to grow within that single site as much as possible. Because once you get out of that single site, you are in an unsustainable situation for a number of locations. I mean, at, you know, 4 to 5, maybe you get your regional manager and that's a significant, you know, offload. But then, you know, you still have four or five doctors that you're managing, you know, so that's a significant, you know, toll that the owner is carrying. So, you know, getting to that 8 to 10 to 12 locations. You know, once, once you get past that point, then you're growing a group that has a lot of people in place that are, you know, operating the group. But before then, you're stuck in the no man's land and it's kind of hard to undo some of those decisions. Right? You're selling practices to get back down to one if you're unhappy with that. So I, I again, I think that, you know, we have been very upfront with our audience saying, yeah, yes, we're doing it, but it does have these problems. And I do think there is a very strong no Man's land of two to five locations for sure, where you don't really want to get stuck in that range for too long because it's not a very fun one, in my opinion.

It's a great way to describe it, the no Man's land, because it's not just about practice growth there, but you run into a no man's land in terms of financing, often because you hit up against a ceiling or a wall and you hit up against a recruiting ceiling because there's a point where you start to kind of grind down and you can't just hire the few friends that you had out of dental school and then, you know, get referrals back from your dental school. You're like, I actually need more dentists than that. And so my small little network here isn't going to work anymore. And so you just start hitting ceilings all over the place and it requires you, you to build the infrastructure. And I appreciate that, George, because I know you guys have gone through some of this and appreciate how hard it is to do and then some, some of the benefits and rewards once you, once you make the investment. Although it's a little bit of white knuckle on the steering wheel as you're making those investments, thinking, whoa, wait a second, I have more practices than I've ever had and I'm making less money here, but I'm reinvesting here for the future and for the growth. Right?

Yeah, well, I Also love to do the exercise of would you rather have I met a doctor recently at a DEO event who had three three OP practices, maybe one of them had four ops. Would you rather have three three OP practices or one nine op practice with three doctors in one location? You think about the economies of scale, the rent, the profitability, the infrastructure, the leadership, the, the systems that you know actually transfer is night and day. And so that, that is our, like we said, the thing that we push doctors towards is do the one large multi doctor location first and you might find that you have both more money, more problems than you thought you would ever have and you're good to go. You don't need that second or third location or if you are still drinking the multi practice Kool Aid then at that point you can replace yourself clinically, you can replace your leadership at that practice and you can focus and give the time and attention and support that the other practices are going to require.

So Ken, I want to hear your thoughts on this. You know in America there's roughly 180,000 dental offices and if you take, you know, the top five DSOs, you might get to, you're for sure less than 10,000 practices, right? Or the first top ten, you're for sure less than ten thousand practices, I believe. So you know, the vast majority of the DSO consolidation and likely, you know, future of the DSO space is in that mid to like that, that mid sized dso, you know, in number of them is really going to be the growing sector. Right. So you know, what are your thoughts? Because I think that the, the industry is going to have a spectrum of, of operators and there is going to be that entrepreneurial dentist that is in abundance throughout the industry that does have that mid sized DSO that they own and operate. And so it's interesting to kind of talk about, you know, the landscape moving forward is like decentralized in like these mid sized DSOs with some bigger ones and then there's the private arm, you know. So I'm kind of curious to hear your thoughts from DL. You probably have a very unique perspective on this.

Yeah, I'd be, I will share something on that. There's just one point I want to make about really optimizing that single practice that I want to highlight. And it is, there's a great book written, it's called Nail it and Scale it. And the whole concept was when you're starting a business, building a business, you really need to nail down that problem you're solving for that customer or in our world, right. The the ways that we're solving problems for patients and really get your system and your process dialed in and honed in and then scale from there. And so what I love about the model of have one practice and just really build it out and make it amazing is you, you're building a footprint to be able to scale once you get that built up and organized and functioning in a certain way. I've seen companies that try to scale too fast and they're scaling crap because that first practice didn't take the time to really build out the processes and systems to think about. Hey, if I had a second or third practice, how would I describe to them how to do this function? How would I describe to them what the front desk person does? How would I describe to them what these things are? And so part of building that one practice, maybe some of your doctors say, I only want the one practice ever, but even if they say I want multiple at some point, I still would say follow your path of just make the most amazing practice. And now when you scale, you're going to scale something that works and that is amazing and has process and system to it, as opposed to that person, I told you, that is at one and a half locations because she's having to go back and redefine everything in that first practice and then try to implement it in this startup. Does that make sense?

Yeah, totally.

So the way that I think about consolidation just in general is we have to back up and say consolidation has happened in a lot of other industries before it started in dental, it happened in most broadly across the health care world. But I'd say even better to look at is banking. And we even have some very recent painful experiences that would help, that are going to help me explain this. But I very often will have somebody that's just out of dental school maybe a couple of years and they're going to get their first practice and they're just nervous that they're going to miss out on the consolidation that's happening in dentistry. And I sit back and I say, you know what? Banking has been around for a long time and guess what? It's still consolidating. You still see small community banks popping up, doing a great job, taking care of their customers and then getting gobbled up by a regional or, you know, maybe sort of a mid tier bank. And then you see massive consolidation happening up at the top. Right? There's a reason why it's called JP Morgan Chase. And then all the other banks that have ever been consolidated into it, they're the largest bank, what is it like three and a half trillion in assets or, you know, whatever. But there is always room for somebody who wants to show up in the marketplace and add value to the patients. There is always room even if you say, well, it's crowded. Well, Pacific Dental has, you know, five dental practices within a 10 mile ring of where I want to go or I want to do this and I want to do that. There is always room for somebody who wants to show up and add value to the community and to, you know, deliver a great service and great treatments to their patients. That's how I think about it at a high level.

George that's awesome. I don't have much to add there. Richard.

Well, I would also say there are those who are consolidating just via acquisition and not really changing or tweaking or scaling. I think there are some issues with consolidation of people just putting practices together for the sake of being bigger and adding especially when private equity gets into the hey, we have to add this many practices and this much EBITDA to our organization so that we can turn around, flip it to the next private equity group and numbers of EBITDA being added versus the quality of the EBITDA and the quality of the practices and the growth and the actual building of a better organization. That's where I think some of the challenges of consolidation come from. And I think that over time we're going to see some of these and we've seen, I mean in Indiana we had a DSO here that went belly up that, you know, they, they had to close their doors and shut a bunch of locations all at once. And so I, I think the, the danger is that it is done poorly. The thing that's been really nice being part of the DEO is to be part of an organization full of really vision, purpose driven groups where like the, the owners, the operators of these, of these groups really care about the experience of the doctor, of the patient, of the team member and, and aren't just there to like, hey, let's consolidate in private equity and peace and, and they're trying to build companies, they're trying to build organizations. I, I think that's where you can do a lot of good with a dental company that is able to scale versus doing harm in the process of consolidating and flipping.

That's right. You're always going to have those who are focused more on financial engineering than they are the true value being added to the marketplace. And I'll give you an example. Let's Say I build my first practice and then I end up buying four more. And through that process, my first practice is mine. I know it well. The other four I don't really know. And I don't really do anything to make anything consistent amongst the five practices. I know how to run this one. I don't really know how to run the other four. There are other people that are doing it. The challenge you have with that scenario is if you don't put any system or process together, if you don't put system and process in place to bring everything together and to create some levers that you can pull to run the business, you don't have a business at that point. You have five disparate businesses, and if one of them struggling, you have to, like, go in and learn that whole business and figure out how to make it better. The point of having multiple locations should be there's some consistency between them. And I have an operating mechanism that allows me, when one practice is struggling, to quickly diagnose and solve. And without doing that, all you have is a bunch of businesses that are cobbled together under the guise of, hey, I, this is my group of dental practices. But you really don't have any operating efficiency or any operating leverage to any of them, because every step you take, everything you try to do that's different is this Herculean lift to try to accomplish. And so back to your point, Richard. When building out a group of practices, the highest value add way to do it is to have a lot of consistency between them. It doesn't necessarily mean they have to have the same brand. They can be branded differently, if that makes sense in your market or those sorts of things. But you want consistency that allows you as an operator to say, oh, we're seeing some challenges over here. Here's how we jump in, and here's how we fix that. And we jump in, we fix it. Or you know what? Now we've gotten this to this place with these five practices where we're here, but now if we add these extra treatment modalities, we're going to be able to help all these practices go up to this next level. And implementing them is not this Herculean task. It's a simple process because the team, the process, the system, everybody trusts each other and everybody's going to, you know, play along with how that works. Because we know in dentistry in general, and especially when running a dental practice, it's all about winning hearts and minds every day, every employee, every doctor, everybody being aligned on the same page, going the same direction. If there is just one team member rowing against us, it is slowing us down, it's causing friction, it's causing challenges and not making us what we can be and so are as good as we can be. So that's how I come back to the consolidation and I appreciate you, George, bringing that up that sometimes putting people are buying and putting things together, but they're not really together, so to speak. It's again, just, just a viewpoint. From my perspective, you have a legitimate business when there is a consistent theme and process that's followed by all and there are literally levers in the business that you can pull when challenges occur to either improve or to implement new initiatives. Does that make sense?

Totally. Yeah. And you know, I think that, you know, the piece that you were talking about was, you know, cohesive company wide culture. Right. Can you create a cohesive identity across all of your locations? Right. And I think that's the biggest challenge. And also that's when you become, you know, that you've outgrown the duct taping of practices together. You've created, you know, an entity that

has true value and you're always going to hit that challenge too.

Right.

When if you're in acquisition mode, creating a consistent culture is super hard.

Yeah.

Because you're buying something that's a different culture than yours. I don't care how much the core values on the wall line up between each other. The other business just was run differently and orchestrated differently. And so bringing those together is hard. And that's why there's, in the first year of an acquisition you generally see and hear about most of the teammates turned over, most the doctors turned over. Because there's just sort of a shaking out and a truth about what is the culture and how are they really going to come together and work together and mesh together. Richard, I know you had a couple of thoughts on this.

Well, it's kind of funny. I just had a light bulb moment as a, as a company for single site ownership. We have always had, and we still have a slight acquisition bias. You know, we, we think it's just a, such a safe move to buy a healthy practice and be the owner operator. But I've just realized the light bulb I've had is that I, I definitely have in, in terms of the DSO side of things, a startup bias of.

No, totally.

If you're going to build a, a multi practice company having control over who you bring into your organization from day one, the culture, the systems, how you scale things, how you build things from the Ground up gives you so much more control of what you just said, but I've never realized that. Oh, okay. I've got a single site acquisition bias and I've got a multi site startup bias and that's just kind of come to light in our conversation today.

Yeah, I see it and it makes perfect sense to me. I'm, I'm a startup bias for sure, if you can't tell. And it's primarily because the Herculean lift to try to get those affiliations into a system and a process generally means you've, there's a lot of turnover that occurs and there's a lot of investment that has to take place after you just spent a lot of money acquiring that practice. Except for the first one. The first one, I like the idea of, hey, this is how I'm going to jump into ownership and I'm going to turn this office into mine. And that from that perspective, I think that makes sense. And you're going to build your own culture and may need to, you know, turn some people over or whatever, but that's giving you that, that start to get going. But I prefer the de novo model or the startup after that.

I think, you know, to your point, right. The owner operator, acquiring a location and being boots on the ground for a period of time is very different thing. Right. Because then they're essentially creating their own culture at the office. Right. They're not really inheriting much, but it's, it's when you're not there and you're acquiring some behavior that has been happening and it'll continue to happen. And you know, I, I think about, you know, we, we, we don't like Dr. Turnover, but acquiring a location and turning over a key doctor that was carrying it, you know, prior to sale. Right. That sounds even worse than losing a location, losing a doctor from a de novo that we started and you know, is doing well. So I think that there's, there's, you know, yeah, there's a lot of challenges to grow through acquisition at a group level, but yet somehow that seems to be the most prevalent way that groups grow.

Very nice. So guys, we're starting to run out of time, but I, I want to have each of you share kind of your top three learnings that you've had as you've gone into group practice. Ownership through affiliation, through startup de novos, all of that. If you were to think about like the top three things that you've learned in that process that you feel like our listeners could benefit from.

George, how would you Characterize those three.

Okay.

Yeah.

I think, you know, number one for me is the quality of your organization is the quality of its doctors. Right. I think that, that, you know, you, you think about processes and those are the things that are scalable. But at the end of the day, you can't ever escape the fact that, you know, the doctor is the thing that makes the business go. And so I think that's probably been something that's been a, A great lesson for us. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, you have to be okay learning by doing. At times, you know, you're, you're as. You can only consume and learn so much without having attempted something. And then once you make the attempt, then, you know, you, you kind of, you're forced to learn all those things. And then, you know, I. The business throws challenges at you that you didn't never anticipate or expect. And I think you must be prepared to enjoy those challenges because that's the thing you're dealing with on the most regular and consistent basis. And so again, I'll go back to that other thing of pick your problems.

Yeah. Picking the. Knowing that if you're going to start owning multiple practices, your primary problems that you've got to be solving on, on the daily almost is these business challenges that come up.

Yeah.

Yep.

On, on my side, those are great. I, I would say something unique that we didn't really get to talk about much today. There's six partners that own shared practices. And having six dental entrepreneurial partners has been an incredible experience. We've been very fortunate. We've gotten a lot of alignment. The podcast brought us together and so we've got very kind of motivated, driven partners who are all on the same page. And the thing that's been amazing, and this doesn't have to be a partner, but this can be someone that you bring into your organization at a high level that's talented, is, you know, find people who, going back to pick your problems who enjoy different problems than you do. So, you know, if, if the things that are intolerable for you about running a group, if you can find someone who like, kind of likes those challenges and enjoys those things, it makes the journey a whole lot easier. And, and on the, on the flip side, if you're going to be doing this, you got to know why and you got to be able to find fulfillment in your group. And so for me, you know, I. Managing doctors is super stressful and I care a lot about our doctors, but I also get a lot of fulfillment out of Serving. Okay. How can I make the experience of this doctor, this team member, this patient, better at each office? And so for me that's a driving factor. And for a different partner it might be opening new locations and finding new spaces and doing build outs. And so for me it's see, see what your fulfillment and what area like sources you the most in your organization and then the areas that are the hardest for you, see if you can find other people, whether those are key team members or partners who can find fulfillment from the challenges that you don't want. So I think that's a couple of my top three mixed in there, but that's what I'm going with.

That's awesome.

Very good.

Thank you. That's amazing. So are we gonna see each other soon? Are you guys coming to the growth summit in the.

I'm there. It's on, it's on, on the calendar for me.

Awesome. I, I will not be. Richard is the, the attender of conferences in our company, so he will be there.

I, I love it. I, I could, if, if it weren't for the travel and the family, you know, I could be at a conference every other weekend and, and get a lot out of it.

So yeah, I think there's going to be a lot of juice out of, out of this upcoming one. I'm excited about it. We'll have to make sure to connect there. Richard and George, can't thank you guys enough for being on the episode today and. Yeah. Any parting words, Any thoughts? Just as you're thinking about all those dentists and entrepreneurs that are out there trying to figure out how to carve their way in this world. Any parting comments?

I do actually have a request, actually. George has written a book called Dental Moneyball that is coming out this summer. That is our framework in a book. And would it be possible to talk about this again when the book is out and live, do you think we could come back on the show?

Absolutely. I, but then I just have one condition. I need a signed copy.

Done.

Awesome.

Well, I was going to say that I'm a second generation dentist and part of that purpose driven component that Richard was talking about for me is feeling like I'm doing what's best for an industry that I care about a lot. And can I look at someone like yourself who is a non dentist, I'm assuming, Right?

Correct.

But when you talk, you talk. You speak of core values, you speak of culture, you speak of taking care of patients and providing value to the marketplace. And, and you know, if our industry is filled with people like you, then I think we're in a pretty good spot because, you know, I think that you've come into a field that hasn't been yours, but have treated it with the respect that I think it deserves. So I've been very happy to have this conversation. And, you know, I feel, I feel really good about what you're doing, too.

Thank you, George. I appreciate that feedback. Well, many, many thanks to all of our listeners who joined today. This is all things on perfecting that first practice and then deciding if it becomes the template to grow more practices like it or just continue to grow yourself and grow your team within that one practice. Happy day.

Thank you for listening to deo's Growth Secrets podcast for dental organizations. Continue the conversation on our Facebook group and meet other dental leaders. Get questions answered and the strategies you need to succeed. Plus, we have some free resources for you right there on the Facebook page. Remember, you're not alone. Let's do this together. Join DEO's Growth Secrets Group on Facebook. And until next time, keep smiling.