184: Student Loan Repayments: What it Means for You as a Dental Leader

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of DEO Grow Secrets. I'm your fearless host, Emmett Scott, and today I'm going to bring you a recording of a webinar episode I did with Jake Poole, the CEO of the Dentist Entrepreneur organization. All around student loans and the repayment process and the impact that's going to have on staff, on associates, on patients, and what opportunities you have as dentist owners and leaders in this marketplace. So enjoy this show. 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. And thrive. Welcome to DEO's Growth Secrets podcast for dental organizations. Now let's get started.

Welcome, everybody. Welcome. Welcome. We are ready and live to talk today about student loans and a very large change that's happened in our industry. So we're going to make sure, as do members, that you're completely prepared, and not only prepared ahead of the game when it comes to what's the latest trends in the industry. So today we're going to talk about how student loan repayments will impact the dental industry. So with me, I have Emmett Scott. Emmett is our chief coach and I am the CEO of the deal. So, Emmett, welcome. And anything you want to give on your background?

No, I just say this is really interesting to me. One thing, I guess one thing I could say is that, you know, Having grown to 1300 employees and 77 locations, we had enough data to see how student loans impacted doctor production. So really fascinating to have them completely offline for so many years. Now coming back online and seeing what that. Just discussing what that impact's going to be, I think it's going to be huge.

Yeah, you know, you're right, Emma. Before 2020, which we all know is crazy, we talked about loan repayments for, for, for associates and recruiting all the time, and that kind of went on a freeze. And so I love that we are probably the first folks here, some of the first folks here to talk about this again, because it is a, a huge part of running a dental organization. Also, Emmett, just, just so everyone knows, Emmett has been through the trenches here. Started with, I think, zero revenue.

Right.

One location, Emmett built up to 120 million. How many locations, Emmett, were you, Were you at?

Yeah, 77 locations. 150 million.

Yeah, 150 million. So eminent has been through it and myself, we have helped network and build a community for over, gosh, thousands of dental groups by now. We've, we've touched and educated in some way. So we have seen a lot. And we're going to teach you today how you can be prepared for this big change. So let's go into it. Number one, what's happening? So, Emmett, this is the federal student aid homepage. Right now, the prepare for your student loan payments to restart. So Emmett, what's going on right now?

Well, I want to tell a little bit of a story just to step back and think about this. I want you to imagine, and maybe some of you are going through this, but I want to want you to imagine that you've been going through school, let's call it four to eight years, and during that period of time you were able to borrow money and live and pay for things, et cetera, and really didn't have to work a ton and you finished school and then you didn't have to pay anything back. In fact, from what you could tell in the news, you might never have to have paid it back. Right. It was all going to maybe be forgiven, which would be freaking awesome. So you definitely weren't out there trying to accelerate payments and money was kind of flowing in, let's call it pretty easily. You were getting payments from the government. It just felt like cash was flowing very well. I want you to think about what financial decisions you would make if that was the scenario. You know, what would you do as far as your car buying purchases? What would you do as far as home buying purchases? How aggressive would you be in maybe buying a new business or taking out additional debt or where you might want to live and what lifestyle you want. Right. And so that's been the real life scenario for the majority of individuals who've graduated in the last three years, for sure. For our associates and the impact on the economy. I'm really excited to talk about and how the change in this is going to make a big change. Now imagine that today someone says, hey, it's time to pay everything back. The forgiveness never happened, right? Just been kind of accumulation of debt. And you know, we'll go first into associates here in a minute, but for many of them, their payments are several thousand dollars. I mean, this is not a small deal. And for others, on average, they say for the average payment for people is $500. So just to put that in perspective, I want you to think how big the economy grew by everyone getting a $1,200, check. Now, I want you to imagine everyone having to pay $6,000 back, not just this year, but every year going forward. What change is that going to make? So those are some of the stuff we're going to talk about. But that's what's happening, Jay. And you know, if, if we can all, for us old people, if we can zoom back, your first three years out of school is your entire career. Like, that's life as you knew it. And so again, you've made purchases, you've come up with budgets, and all of a sudden someone came walking in and said, never mind, you owe us $300,000, $500,000, $50,000, whatever it might be. So that's what's going on. And the question is, is what's the impact on dental going to be and what's the opportunity?

Yeah, so I'm hearing, Emmett, there's kind of two buckets. There's folks that finished dental school before all the madness in 2020 who are used to payments, and then there's folks who, who finished since then and are never, have never even had any payments. So imagine never having had a payment yet. What? And that, that we know human nature, even though we kind of know these, these changes probably coming down the road, most people don't plan that far ahead. And we're not making financial decisions with that in mind. Even though it was clear it was coming, they probably were not making those decisions.

I mean, we have Griff on here, who's from Canada, so they're probably smarter. But Americans, by nature, we tend to spend our entire paycheck. Right. So when that expense isn't there, then we're spending it, we're borrowing against it. You know, we're expanding, we're growing. New home, new car, new business, et cetera. And I would say, Jake, even those who were used to paying it again, got a pretty big message that it might all be forgiven, that they shouldn't really worry about it. And human nature, it's like, sounds great. You know, let me go make some financial decisions. As if that. If that wasn't true. So now we have to decide what's going to happen now that it's back in play.

That's right. And so October is when these payments are starting. So it's very, very timely. There's probably folks who haven't even started paying back yet. So we're very early in this, and we have a chance to get ahead of it.

Yeah.

All right, so let's go in here, Emmett. The first place we're going to talk about where this is going to impact you as a dental company, as a dental leader, is the impact on your actual associates. So Emmett, do you want to kind of go into this? Yeah.

So these are associates again have had, you know, typically you're going to have three to five hundred thousand dollars student loans. So as Jake started in the beginning, when was the last time you talked with your associates? This might be a really interesting conversation to connect with them about is what is their plan around these payments. And I think one of the things that we noticed at RDSO in having so many associates is that their care per visit, their production dropped off as soon as they paid off their student loans. For whatever reason. Standard of care changed after student loan payments. Well, we never saw the opposite happen. But my assumption is, is that dentists now with a new payment somewhere around 1,000 to $3,000 a month, are going to be looking for new strategies to be able to pay this off. Now the first one might be they just kind of do human nature and say, hey, you need to pay me more money. But I think we've probably maxed that out as much as we can. And so there's going to be a motivation, I think, in a movement towards practices that are high revenue producing. And I think a lot of practices have been hurt by the lack of student loan payment in the fact that dentists and associates have, have had a preference towards going towards big cities. I know like in Texas, they're more interested now in Austin or Houston or Dallas and those rural towns where maybe they could make 400, 500,000. Just what wasn't as interesting, which was really fascinating to watch how fast that switched once the student loan payments were turned off. And I wonder if it doesn't flip the other way. So we'll talk a little bit more about what the opportunity there might be. But I think being aware that these associates are going to have a thousand to $3,000 payments now we need to give a disclosure, Jake, that we should have done in the beginning. None of what we say, by the way, is legal or tax advice. So we'll just put that out there. But, but we are, you know, I think financially there's just going to be a huge weight on these associates that they're going to try to be navigating and wanting to increase their, their productivity. So I think there's some interesting conversations with them around this.

So I just want to highlight. Yeah, and a really important point that you said that you had some data in your past dental company that Once, I don't know if one makes everyone caught that because it's very important. Once loans got paid off, you saw a statistical, statistically relevant drop in production. Can you talk a little bit more, more about that?

Yeah, I would say it's somewhere around 10 to 15% in care per visit would drop off. Like I could literally just pick up the phone, call them and say, hey, congratulations on paying off your student loans. So there's definitely a motivation and having that extra payment. One of the things that I think would be important and a value you could bring into associates is they're going to be looking for different ways to make these payments. One thing they have to be careful of is I know a lot of them are using the 10 or 20 year kind of payment solution based on income and what happens at the end of that, and we'll call it after 20 years, the then it's forgiven. And so they say, you know what I'm just going to budget in this thousand, two thousand, three thousand a month, some of them as high as $5,000. And then at the end it will be forgiven. I think something they need to be aware of is when anytime a loan is forgiven, the IRS sees that as income. So if you get $500,000 forgiven that year, let's say at 40% tax rate, you know, you're going to have 200,000 in IRS payments due in one year. So it's not going to be quite the gift. In fact, just generally with all of this talk about loan forgiveness, I think people don't realize that that's a taxable event. So things like that, that you can really connect with your associates and help them understand financially what's going on here and what some of the best solutions are. I think we're also at an interesting place where refinancing of loans is not going to be a great solution because interest rates have moved up where before there might have been some movement there to refinance these loans. And I don't know that most associates and I think just generally a lot of these loans over the last three years have been sold to different companies. And so there's a question of do people even know who to pay? So there's going to be just a general, a little bit of chaos in all of this. There is this 12 months kind of. And what it is, is basically if you don't make payments, I don't know if you want to like push this out to everyone, but this is what I read is that if you don't make payments for the next 12 months. It won't hurt your credit, but interest will be accruing. So that's kind of the time period for people to try to get this figured out is over the next 12 months.

Yeah, I think you're.

Yeah, yeah.

I love it. Emma. I think. I think your chaos is correct. He's here. A few different situations. Would love to hear some more here. Throw it. Throw in the chat here. But Pierre says no mention of it from his associates. Lissandra said, our associate was telling me his loans were going to be close to 6k, but he was told to start. Yeah, we got it. There we go. Oh, yeah, there you go. And. And then I. So, Jordan, awesome. Anything you say, Jordan. You want to add your two. Your thoughts here? You've heard a cool member say that.

Yeah, I think that piece about taxes, Emmett, with you know, that being a piece of income that then they're going to have to pay back that following year is a huge piece that people maybe are not aware of or thinking of. You know, kind of back to that human nature of like that's a later issue.

That's for future meeting.

And you see this, this one from Lissandra saying it's going to be 6,000. I'm guessing 6,000amonth and you didn't have to start paying for another year. That's probably that 12 months. But the interest is going to increase during that time, which is going to roll into, you know, if it is ever forgiven at that 20 year mark, that's even more in taxes. And by the way, taxes are not something that you can get forgiven and they are due immediately. So that's something that you got to be really careful of. And I think there's a huge opportunity to start talking to associates about this and get them educated. You know, I was working with my son who's been out of school about three years. He didn't happen to have any student loans. He's not a dentist, but he's looking at buying a house right now. And he just doesn't know. There's just so much that when I was that age, you just don't know. You don't know. You don't know who FICA is. You don't know Medicare is. You don't know, you know what an HOA is, and you don't know anything about a loan, forgiveness, etc. You're just kind of following what you might hear, what your friends told you. So I think there's a huge opportunity for leadership with associates here.

I love it. So I did. Yeah. So give. Hello, welcome. Welcome, my friend. Give here, give. I don't know if you have your volume, but we'd love to hear. I know you have quite a few associates you're working with. Are you having these conversations? What are you hearing?

No, I haven't, but you've inspired me to do so. And this loan could. Forgiveness, you're right. You know, when you're forgiven a debt, you know you have taxes to pay. And that, that's, that's a good point. Awesome.

Perfect.

Dentists got really disappointed when they realized that even if there was going to be loan forgiveness, which it all got shut down, it was only going to be for people making under 120, 150,000. So they didn't qualify most of them anyway, and it was only going to be up to 10, 15,000, which was nothing. So all that being said, I think when I heard this is how interesting it is to me, this is, is when there was that talk about loan forgiveness. Literally large DSO groups were struggling because Dennis said, if my loans are forgiven, I now only want to work four days a week. I mean, it was changing mindset that intensely. And that's the only reason I wanted to bring this up and have this call is I think as leaders, we need to know that that's about to swing the other way. And we're in a great position here to be helpful and, and to lead through this.

So, yeah, especially when, you know, we're trying to provide our providers, associates value and prepare them. This is a kind of something you can provide them. Is being ahead of the game here, opening these conversations for them if they're not even thinking about it themselves. So amazing. Em, anything else on how it's going

to affect associates at the end? I'm going to talk about some strategies that I think owners can use. Let's move to the next one, which is staffing. Quick interruption to your podcast, Oversee everything,

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now back to the episode. And obviously you can talk to your staff about this, but I actually want to take a, maybe a bigger view that, that I think is interesting around this. If people don't have student loan payments and they had this money coming in from the government, they have extra discretionary income or where did they spend it? And the most common answer or easiest answer is in retail environments. Well, what retail environments? Target, Macy's, McDonald's. Now, what's interesting about that, I mean, okay, great. You know what's interesting is most of us, if I said, who was your biggest competitor over the last 24 months for staffing? You would say, Target, Macy's, McDonald's. You know, especially McDonald's with their big bonuses and everything else. Well, where did that come from? I mean, yes, McDonald's increased their price a little bit, but it was volume. They have so much volume coming through. Why was there all of a sudden all this volume? Well, if the. If Americans in general had an extra $500 a month and we're all working our tails off or feel like we are and we're overwhelmed and all those things, we're going out to eat more. And so with that volume, McDonald's was naturally able to feed that much like we felt right after Covid, like, all we need is staffing. All I need is staffing. I've got enough customers. I just need staffing. Here's what's interesting to me. Target, Macy's, retail providers, their CEOs just came out and said, we're going to have a bad fourth quarter. Why are they going to have a bad fourth quarter? Because the Americans just got $500 a month taken out of their discretionary income.

Exactly.

Well, what's the down. What's the downstream effect of that? Downstream effect as volume goes down on retail and volume goes down on restaurant consumption. I think everyone here has probably had that conversation in the last 30, 60 days. Like, okay, where's my budget? What are we doing? Should I spend on that? Etc. And so if volume goes down, staffing has to go down. Now, I don't think that necessarily there will be a huge wage decrease. I think inflation has been eating at some of that, but I think people are going to say, Target, Macy going to say, we don't need this many people anymore. We don't have that many customers coming in, we're going to see a dip in overall retail. Why do I think that's interesting? Because before COVID there was always an opportunity to go to retail and say, hey, would you like to come to health care? It's safer during recessions. It's more of a career than working at McDonald's. And it was weird, but that all flipped Post Covid. Post Covid. It was like, healthcare is really complicated and you could get sick and die and you got all these OSHA and masks and everything else. I'm going to go over here to McDonald's, because that sounds way simpler. And they're paying the same amount. Right. And I think we're going to see that flip it back. I think we're going to see staffing. Now, this doesn't solve our hygienist problem overnight. That's a different issue. But it does start to solve some of our front desk. It solves our opportunity to train dental assistants. I think all of that's going to start opening up. And I think what's interesting about having this call is if we can have that mindset, if we can have our heads on a swivel and start preparing our businesses for that, we can start having our office managers and our teams start doing interviews. I know on the tech side they've been doing tons of layoffs this year, very quietly, but very aggressively. And I think the same thing's about to happen on the retail front. So that one, I think is going to be interesting to watch on staffing.

Yeah, you know, I mean, I don't, I don't think you go into this too, too much in the future here, but I think patients as well, if patients discretionary income is going down. This, this is a very multifaceted thing. I think it's, you know, what we're discovering here is it potentially could affect a lot of. We talk about, I don't know if anyone's had the feeling of why does a workforce still feel like there's not enough people working? And this, this might be that last. There's, you know, like seven or eight different paper cuts that happened during COVID that kind of got reinstalled, you know, to get people back to work. This is probably that last one that, that turns it back to, you know, that workforce where it needs to be. So, so yeah, a lot of factors here, Emmett.

Discretion, already had. I, I think this honestly is going to be a straw that breaks the camel's back because all of us have felt housing prices, rental prices, food prices, everything's but gas prices, electricity. It's just crazy how much in 24 months has just eaten up more of our discretionary income. And just imagine if you're one of those individuals, especially just graduating the last three years or so, that all of a sudden this extra payment comes on. I don't care if you're a dentist or anyone else, it's going to change your spending behavior and it's going to change how you think about your career. And again, I think there's an opportunity in healthcare around this and how we think about it.

I think there's a massive opportunity. And so I think the takeaway here is, again, there's been a lot of changes, a lot of chaos in the past three or four years. I can tell you if you've been in the DEO for that amount of time, we just move forward, we stay ahead and things work out right. So this is what we're doing is we're keeping you ahead. There's nothing to freak out about, there's nothing crazy. If you stay informed, that's half the battle. And, and a lot of it will. Will. Will naturally take. Take course. So. So, I mean, I think another takeaway here is have conversations with your staff, with your team, see where they're at and who's. Who's affected with it. I know a lot of. A lot of my friends and family, or if I didn't even know, but they actually do have loans that you know and we don't talk about it. But yeah, this is going to affect

a lot of people, I think too. And this is just amongst leaders, we have a little bit of ptsd, if you will, if that's the proper term of we have to keep whoever we have because there's no staff out there, we have to tolerate. Our cultures have probably disintegrated just a little bit, maybe some more than others. And I think we need to step back and say, I think it's time for us to upgrade our culture again. I think it's time to get back to the level of focus and the level of kindness, whatever it might be, alignment as a team that we might have lost a little bit post Covid because of the need to just try to take anybody we can in. I think we're going to have an opportunity to right size some of that. So, you know, one of the things I would encourage you, if you don't have a regular cadence around interviewing people, it would be good to just do that. Not because you're necessarily going to hire someone tomorrow, but just to start seeing what's available now in the workforce and what those opportunities are.

Awesome. So these are just kind of guesses, right? Maybe, maybe associates are going to be working more, maybe there's going to be some additional motivation there, maybe there's going to be less discretionary income, maybe that's going to affect patients. But if, again, if you're a good marketer and you're a lot of most DO members are successful practices, you're going to be fine there. Maybe your staff is going to be a little bit more motivated to work so that's kind of some ways to open up those conversations. So let's go into the third place, Emmett, if you're, if you're ready, which is the impact on the owners and founders.

Yeah. So there's going to be some really interesting opportunity. I think it falls into a couple areas. One is recruiting, and I mentioned one of those is I would start a cadence on the staffing, just interview what workforce is coming online here. Number two, I think that many of you have talked to me about equity solutions for your dentist partners and you might be able to step back a little bit from that and talk about loan repayment solutions with them. That ties them in very well. One of the programs that we had at CDP have at CDP is that a dentist would sign a longer contract and we would go ahead and make payments towards their student loans. And we would just come up with a budget. If it's $500, $1,000 a month, whatever is approved, $250, whatever it is. A couple things I thought was interesting when we did this. Those dollars are more meaningful than a regular dollar. There's something about putting in a benefit, a program where you're providing them a payoff of that weight of the student loan. So. And then what we would do in the contract is we would say if you leave early, then you need to pay us back for those student loans. So it was that golden handcuffs, if you will. And people love it, Absolutely love it. We used it specifically for maybe our harder to recruit areas as just an extra bump. So instead of giving extra percentages of production, we would have the student loan repayment. It was great on the recruiting front. Still is. And so I think it kind of died in that three year period there because people are like, student loans. What? Student loans. But now I think all that starts coming back online here as you start making those payments. Yeah. I have a question, Emmett. I like the idea. Except for those doctors that you want to fire. And so you make that promise to them and you're not going to ask them for the repayment if you fire them. How do you, how do you work out with that? Yeah, you can always be more generous. Right. So to the extent it benefits you and you say, hey, this, this relationship isn't really working and you let them go, you can always not recoup the dollars if you don't want to. You could write into the contract that if you were ever let go that you would need to pay them back. But it's really for something where you want to hold on. It's Probably a situation where it's either a hard to reach location you're having a hard time recruiting for and you want to give a little extra spiff there, or it's for a doctor who says, hey, I've been here for a while, or, man, I love it here, but I kind of need something else. You could say, well, what if we did this? What if we gave you a little extra towards your student loans? I think you'd be surprised how many of them, like, oh, wow, that'd be awesome.

Yeah, it might. It might take a little bit, I think, for that pain to come back. So back in. I mean, you're totally right. I meant 2017, 2018, 2019. Inside the deal, we had many people on stage talking about doctor recruiting and these student. These loan repayment programs were a significant competitive edge that some of the larger groups were starting to used to recruit doctors. That's gone quiet because, you know, the payments were so painful back then. It won't be long before they're painful again. And that method is going to be another recruiting strategy.

We had a doctor asking, let's say he was at 30%, he wanted 35%. And he said, I've been here for a while. He was a great producer. And we said, hey, listen, it's not something we can do right now, but what if we put $1,000 towards your student loan? Which I think was like a 1% increase. He's like, you guys would do that. Absolutely right. And so again, it reminded me the same reason we have benefits. Generally, it's a dollar at the end of the day on the P and L, it's expenses out, whether it's health care or PTO or whatever else. But there are differences in how we think about those dollars. And so I think with this coming back online, we as leaders should be smart and say, oh, this would be a great way to add a benefit to the right. Doctors love it. Jordan, did you have something? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We've got some awesome questions rolling in the chat. Dr. Alberto is asking, is that paying of the student loans for your associates, is that tax deductible for the business, or is that added to their payroll and they pay for it? Andy's wanting to know how much you would pay towards that. Which, Emmett, I know you just said even a thousand dollars was super helpful to those members. What do you think about that?

Yeah. So on the tax side, frankly, it acts as just additional income. You're just kind of earmarking it on the payroll there. So they're Going to have to pay taxes. It is absolutely tax deductible for you as a business because it's an expense to you. There are some student loan repayment solutions out there that will kind of tie in and make that streamline. So you're directly paying towards their student loan, but just earmarking it. I'll give you another one that has nothing to do with student loans. We did a Tesla program. If a dentist was with us for five years, we bought them a Tesla. What we really did ultimately was we gave them an additional income for a vehicle and then had them take a picture on their new vehicle and everything else. So this has that same flare to it, right. Of, hey, here's somebody who cares enough about me to get this burden, this monkey off of my back. But anyway, yes, you would just add it to their payroll. I'd work with your HR payroll people to figure out, maybe even, you know, accountant. And we can come up with a couple different things. We could share in the WhatsApp group, too, on, on ways people are doing this.

Awesome.

And I would start off how much. I would start off as low as. As you could get value. So, like, if someone perceived value at $200, you know, dollars, something like that. This is where, starting with Jake's initial question, finding out, hey, how are you feeling about this? Is this coming down the pipe, et cetera, and then, yeah, $500, $1,000. I mean, that's an extra 12,000. Think about this, though. If, if they're doing 100,000amonth and you're, you know, in production and you pay $1,000, what is that? Is that 1%? So you gave them an extra 1%, so something like that.

Yeah. It's the emotional aspect again. We haven't talked about it in three or four years, but dental, student. Dental student loans is a giant topic that was starting to crush the industry in a way. And it's logical to think that kind of just starts to come back up. Right. That topic is going to be hot here in the next six to 12 months.

So, number one, start recruiting again. Just generally, I think if you haven't, if you've kind of felt frozen on some of those things, I get more aggressive on staffing. Number two, start thinking creatively. Instead of giving up equity or something else or more percentage or bonus, look at maybe integrating this into your associate contracts. And then number three is kind of a way bigger picture, which is you have dentists who have bought locations. Those locations have done okay. This student loan repayment piece is going to crush them and they are going to need help. So for those of you who might be looking for an acquisition opportunity, can you imagine, for example, this associate who has 6,000amonth, if you were a dentist who bought a dental practice thinking you didn't have that 6,000amonth and that dental practice was taking a little longer to get online, get going, et cetera, and all of a sudden you had an additional 6,000amonth, you're going to need help. So for those who might be looking for acquisition opportunities, I think those onesie2z practices with these student loan payments coming in might be an acquisition opportunity. If you are one of those dentists who are like, oh yeah, I'm the one that bought a dental practice, it's not like crushing it. And this student loan thing is going to be difficult. I think you need to sit down on your P and L and figure out where do you need to cut expenses and strategic projects that you might have been really excited about that you were investing money in. You might need to pull back and just hold off and make sure that this gets budgeted in and you've got, you do have that 12 month grace period here where we can kind of figure it out. If you need to, you can set up. And you know, I'm happy Chris Foy on our team is happy to walk through your P. Ls with you to help you out on some of this stuff. But yeah, it's going to open up some interesting opportunities. You're going to see again a flight of dentists wanting to get to high revenue practices and you're going to see practices that are kind of lower revenue, maybe with dentists who have these student loan payments really struggling.

So, Amit, we have another question. I wanted to make sure that Jordan was helping the answer there too, which is from the Sandra, what did the long term contracts look like? How long do you believe is an adequate term?

Yeah, so I see this, you know, Jordan saying two to three years. I, I think absolutely, you know, this is to extend us past that 12 month contract that became so common. And if you can push out to that three year piece, I think absolutely, if you can go longer than that, I mean, in essence you're saying, hey, every year you're with us, we're going to make these payments to your student loan. Those student loans are 20 years, so not that you're going to get them in a 20 year contract probably if you do, by the way, tell us how you did it. But I think you can push this a Little bit. I think that they might be interested in like, okay, five years might actually be smart because now they're framing you differently. They're framing you as a solution, not necessarily for the rest of their life, but if you're a high income opportunity and you're helping pay their student loans, then it's like, yeah, let's push through this for a few years and get these student loans paid down. We had a lot of dentists who would come to us and say, I'm willing to go to Timbuktu, Texas here because I can make four or five hundred thousand a year and I'm just going to knock out my student loans. And then once that's done, I'm going to move on and I'm going to develop out some incredible clinical capability as well. And I think we're going to see more of that come back online.

All right, any other questions? The chat. We're just going to, we're going to kind of just recap again, Emmett, we talked about a lot of next actions that were kind of just bring it down. If you looking for just a few quick, easy ones, we're going to talk about that and then we're going to answer any final questions that you all have. So, yeah, let's just talk about what to do from here. And I'll preface it with we've talked about a lot. You know, there's a lot of things and one thing inside the deal that we're not going to do is we're not going to, we're going to make sure you don't get overwhelmed. So a part of what we want to do is just bring you clarity. And after these kind of calls, after we're keeping you informed, you want to be informed, right? That's step one. You want to be educated, you want to be informed. The opposite of that is not being informed. So we definitely have to keep you informed and we want to get really clear about what, what is important to take action on and what you can defer or let play out. Right. So you don't, we don't need you to go and make 9 million changes for tonight. We want you to be informed. And then, Emmett, talk about a couple things, maybe open up some conversations, open up conversations with your associates, open up conversations with your staff and then consider some of those strategies that you just mentioned. Emmett. So, so what else would you add here is if you're on the call and trying to figure out where to

go from here, there's a couple questions in the chat here. I can go ahead and address the 1099. I think that one's a little tough. You know, there's probably a way, but if you call it a benefit, benefits are for employees. You could get that person reclassified as a W2 and all of a sudden have to pay all their taxes. So I would not race in on my 1099 associates. I would hold off. Or you could just say, hey, we're going to give you a bump. I would encourage you to use that to reach your student loans. But you can't, you can't direct that the same way you can with the W2 environment. What's your advice? To include separation at the wishes of either party. Always. Always. You know, and 90 days, 120 days, you know, depending on what your recruiting cycle is, I, I think is very appropriate. And again it kind of depends on your market and how hard it is to recruit on whether that, you know, says hey, if, if we do have to let you go, then some of this is going to have to get paid back or no, you know, if we initiate letting you go, then it's over and we'll call it good. Right. But absolutely, I'd always have some kind of out. Now the thing is, is by having an out, it's a two way street though because you say you have a three year contract with a four month notice. the end of the day it's a four month contract. Right. So I mean, I don't know another way around that because I need to be able to get rid of them if it's not. This is healthcare, this is really important. Taking care of your patients. If it's not going well, you need to have a way to do that. I have not been able to convince a dentist that I get the four month out, but they have to sign the four year if anyone figures that out. But so anyway, I think you just got to do what's best for your business and your recruiting model.

Other questions in the chat and anything else you want to kind of prepare their minds, our members minds as they're leaving this call. First of all not to be overwhelmed and then second, where they should be

thinking it's so it's so cool to be proactive. I think we're going to be in a place where we're already thinking about this, we're already different. Even me talking through this different mindset than an hour ago when we came in here. And so I think we can now take a proactive stance. We can do this tomorrow, we could do this in a week, we could do this in a month. We can do this in three months. But it's not going to be something that we're all going. Wait, what's happening? Oh, I didn't even know. We know now, right? And when people are like, hey, why do you think staffing's getting easier? You're like, I might know one of the reasons that that's happening. Or, man, you know, we're trying to get a doctor to this place. Do you have any good ideas for that? You know, do we give them equity? What do we do there? You got a cool idea now that you can take? Or, hey, did you hear about that practice down the street? I thought they were doing well, but that doctor's open to selling now, so those kind of things are going to just have more context for you. 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 group 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.