209: Cut Costs, Not Quality: Secrets from VOCO Experts

Nobody's getting into dentistry thinking, I'm going to use the cheapest materials I can. What I find is they want the highest quality product they can at a fair price.

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, PODC for dental organizations. Now let's get started.

All right. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of DEO's Growth Secrets podcast. I am Jake Poole, the CEO of the DEO, and with me today is Gregory Connell, director of Clinical education for Voco America, and Brian Curley, also director but of Strategic markets for Voco. So Voco being a supply company inside the dental space, and we're going to dig deep into supplies, cost cutting, change management and all the things that, you know, it's a really important part of this industry and running a dental group that we kind of have to nail. So Gregor, anything else you'd add about yourself or what you do?

Well, I'm new to the game. I've been doing this for 35 years, not, not exclusively with Voco, but a quarter of a century with Voco, which is as Brian will talk about in a couple minutes. It's an older company, it's, you know, it's fifth decade. But what I do is clinical solutions to clinical problems. And it doesn't matter if you're a single wet finger dentist or you're part of a large DSO chain. And my niche is offering solutions to those problems, which ends up being priceless for most of the users and user the adopters. So in the DSO space, I'm here to try and support and help transitions from one material to another and give a clinical background as to why it happens. So that's kind of what I do

well, I mean, I love that because we kind of have this thing inside the DEO where we talk a lot about, you know, it looks good on a spreadsheet, right? So you run this like analysis. You're like, oh, with supplies, fine, you know, save some money. And then we get to the humans and then that's where the spreadsheet doesn't always match up with reality. And so it sounds like you're there to make sure that the spreadsheet and the humans, like that makes sense. Right. Like what you're trying to do with your supply cost and controlling them and reducing them actually happens on the ground level. So I can't wait to dig into that. And then Brian, how about you a little bit more about what you do and what, how you know.

Yeah, sure.

Thanks Jake. Thanks for having me. I'm Brian Curley, I am the director of strategic markets here at Voco. I've only been in the industry for about 18 plus years, so I'm a junior here to Gregor. But prior to in the industry I started out as a sales rep in New York. I became the Northeast regional sales manager and for the past year plus I've been in this current role. And in this role I work alongside six regional special market account managers here at Voco. And together we work with the small emerging groups all the way up to the national boys, the big guys. And together we just try and help them grow, prosper. And so it's an enjoying, challenging field.

Totally. It's always a hot topic. And Brian, you're telling me some cool stuff about Voco. You know, kind of a unique company, been around for a long time. Any you want to give everyone a background on a quick background on Voco?

Yeah.

So Volko is a German based company. We are actually a family owned company as well that we've been developing and producing innovative dental materials. We're, we're in our 43rd year now, so we're sold in 122 countries around the world. We're one of the largest manufacturers in Germany. You know, being family run, we have the advantage of not having to answer to shareholders. We're very customer centric. We try to listen and respond to customer needs and really offer solutions to the everyday. Wet finger dentists. We can say that we manufacture almost every product we sell. Not everybody in this industry, especially some of the bigger guys, can say that. And being in control of everything from the raw ingredients all the way through packaging, it makes us efficient, productive. It also allows us to produce materials that offer the clinician consistent high quality at a competitive price.

Well, I mean you've kind of already touched on the big thing when people talk about supplies. You know, there's kind of a, you may have maybe a trend in the past few years because of the economy where that's been kind of under a microscope and people are really looking at how to, how to save supply costs and how to get the most efficient kind of balance between quality and saving costs and implementation there. So how do you guys. Maybe I'll start with You, Brian, then go to regular there. How does Voco kind of think about, you know, saving costs and supplies and that balance between quality and cost and how to, how to think about that?

Yeah, no, I mean, cost is, is, it's certainly a factor. Right. At some point it's coming up and I think the big thing is they want quality first. If the quality is not there, it doesn't matter what the price is. They're not willing to, to invest. And nobody's getting into dentistry thinking, I'm going to use the cheapest materials I can. What I find is they want the highest quality product they can at a fair price. And with us, with, with vocal, again, being family oriented, not having shareholders to worry about, when, when you look at our, our pricing structure, it's very competitive. Recently I spoke with, I was sitting down with one of the, the big national groups and the procurement woman, procurement officer looked me right across from me and said, you know, vocals, their pricing is always very good. And so when you have the national, the big guys saying that to you, I think that makes us a little unique because speaking to some of my peers in the industry, that's not the, that's not always the case.

Yeah, I love kind of highlighting that as well because, you know, when it gets like really highly cost conscious and I think people can sometimes lose sight of what quality actually is. My dad always said, you know, buy cheap, buy twice kind of thing. So, Gregor, I'm curious from your perspective. If I'm a dentist with three offices and I'm like, I gotta change, I'm going to evaluate changing spots. What are some of the, what are some of the things that happen when you actually go to only, you know, only cost, only sheet and what are the same, like, you probably heard some horror stories. You probably heard all kinds of stuff. What happens when you do that?

Yeah, over the last three decades, I've seen lots of. There's only one way, I always say this. There's only one way to do every dental procedure correctly, but there's hundreds of ways to screw it up every day. And, and sometimes it's clinical, sometimes it's interaction materials, sometimes it's a low quality product that comes in at a good price and will make it work in our hands because we're a skilled clinician. But there's only so many things you can do. You know, you can put a pig on lip, you can put a lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig. And when it comes to dentistry, where I found over the last few years is that Voco has been very, very proactive in our design and R and D to the point where I do a lecture where we talk about the emergence of poly functional materials. So that sounds like you're just talking about a bunch of materials. But a polyfunctional material is a material that does more than one thing. And the reason we breathe and live those things is because that is a driving force to saving money. Because when you've got, say, a flowable that you normally put under a Class 1 or Class 2, and everybody does, and they have for decades, what would happen if you use that flowable underneath the glass one, underneath the glass two, and then also used it for your attachments? Because now you're doing Invisalign or some kind of alignment therapy. Instead of buying another product for your alignment material, you're actually using the same flow where you would use in a regular, everyday direct resin. So these poly functional aspects, where it takes on more roles than traditional, is something that we are quite proud of. We've quite a few materials that fit in that category, which is a developing group, actually a developing category in industry. Adhesives, another great, A great choice. There are a lot of clinicians who've been listening tonight that have more than one adhesive system in their office right now. Last study we did, over 82% on the survey had more than one adhesive system in their office. And you could do everything with one adhesive system if you've got the right system in house. The universal adhesives that are that we offer, for example, you can do chairside repairs. So when it comes to costs like lab fees, where you have to send out to have something repaired or fixed and brought back in again, that's down chair time. You don't have to do that if you're using a universal. You don't need a special primer. You can do it right there at the chair, fix a pfm, fix a zirconia, fix a ceramic and have that patient out in one visit. So those sort of things, they're sort of intangible. You don't realize you're actually saving money until you actually know what they do for you and then you can see where it is.

So you're saving money in process and time, which you know, when you look at the. The P and L line item, it won't show up in this lab. Cost. Also the happiness of your team. And then you have happy doctors less likely to leave and a lot of downstream effects when you're making choices based on quality that are hard to calculate, almost.

My understanding in this space is that there's a high level of turnover in some areas from a clinical side. And it's not so much from clinical burnout as it may be the fact that some of the clinicians don't actually have control or input over what the C Suite is doing. So the C Suite, you know, Brian and I were talking about this other day, somebody makes a great deal with Voco, they get all these products dropped on a formulary, and the C Suite's doing high fives and having sacky bombs. And then you've got, you know, maybe 20 offices where you've got clinicians going, what is this? Why am I using this? I don't like this. Hey, listen, can we just use the discretionary spend? Don't tell anybody. I'll just keep using what I want to use. That is problematic. And if you try and stamp on that and push everybody in that. That round peg into that square hole, eventually people leave out of frustration. So getting them on board with the materials helps with their clinical confidence. And also that confidence gives them comfort that they're giving them a quality service to their patients. And that takes one of those niggly little things away from the DSO employee that may help with their framework and their mental framework and where they actually enjoy working more. So lots of things a little off the beam.

No, I think that's perfect. I mean, the supply. So from what we work with our members and people in the industry, a lot of times working on the P and L or trying to show them how to reduce costs. But a lot of these discussions are very nuanced, and it's a much bigger discussion than just like, you know, like I said, the spreadsheet going down, this is what it should be. And then you go into real life, and then, you know, the real takeaway there was the executives doing stocky bombs. I mean, we got to work on that. I think that's really what it should be for everybody.

I think it should just be the C Suite.

That's right.

That's traded around with the products as well.

That's right. So just add on that, you know, this idea of kind of evaluating quality with your kind of cost management and balancing those things.

Yeah, Like Gregor talked about, he brought up the bonding, the adhesive system. Right. It's. And the fact that most offices have between two or three different ones in there.

If you.

If you look at the cost, a gallon of bonding agents, somewhere over $100,000, there's a lot of waste involved. Right. And there's, there's an opportunity there with our Futurabond being a single dose delivery system that it could serve as one bonding agent for all your needs. Again, a unique product. We also have a cement that's one that could be one cement for all your needs, including veneers. And everybody always seems to be looking for a veneer cement. So the fact is we can really streamline products if the office is in line. You know, obviously you brought up an example of a three office group. I think that's a lot more likely to adopt something like that than an office with 30, 40 locations. But we could help them too in terms of just less waste and being more efficient. And that's there's value there as well as there's a, there's an initial cost savings with our products and acquisition cost savings.

Is that really, is that really $100,000 for a gallon of it is.

I, in my lectures, I actually show a slide and I walk everybody through the mathematics and it's actually a 3 MSP product, which is like $154 a bottle. There's 6 milliliters in the bottle. And we just look at that as dentists and go, yeah, I need that. Like, I use that every single day. So you take the $154, you divide it by six and now you've got, it's like $26amilliliter. Now to turn a milliliter into a gallon, you've got to multiply it by 3,728. So then it comes down to $99,868.40 a gallon. And you thought cone beam was expensive. Bonding agent is liquid gold. And whenever you watch, look over your shoulder to watch an assistant who's dispensing it. Sometimes it's like 1, 2, 3, 4 drops. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 drops. It's cheaper sometimes to get rid of that person and actually hire someone else than to have them continue to destroy this liquid gold. So those kind of things are. People don't realize that. They just don't realize that.

Yeah, we just created some trauma. For any doctor that sees this spilling on the floor now.

Oh, wow. Absolutely, Absolutely.

Which is a good thing. We're saving them. We're saving them money. I think that's a good thing to be looking out for. Wow, that's fascinating. So what are some of the things that are coming down the pipeline? Like what do you guys see as the future of supplies? Or how are you thinking about innovation and what's new, what's new now and what's kind of, I mean you mentioned that the multi use materials. Anything else come to mind?

I mean that's, I mean if I go back, maybe even just the last three years for your listeners, even four years, say go back to 2020, even 2019. There has been a movement within the industry to, in the restorative sphere anyway to go to single shades. So a lot of manufacturers have come out with single shade composites that match a broad spectrum. And the timing for that was quite fortuitous because as we rolled out of COVID clinicians were going back to their practice after six months. They having the doors closed and going, well that's garbage, that's garbage, that's garbage. And they're crying as they're throwing this material that's expired in the garbage. And then they've got to open up their wallet with no revenue stream for the last six months and start buying all over again. And you never want to be caught short. But not having you've got your usual suspect, so to speak, the shade you always use and most of your patients fit them. But every once in a while you got an outlier. So you have to bank on a couple of products, a couple of shades in the restorative sphere that you might need. And the day you don't have it is the day you make do with what you've got and you don't feel good about that. And really the patient doesn't know any better, but you don't feel good about it. So the single shade concept really allows clinicians to have. And when you go to the DSO and start scaling this thing out, you've now got 20 offices that buy one SKU, right? And it's one shade of a restorative that will meet every single shade for every single patient that walks through each one of those 20 offices. That's a great way to streamline your efficiency. Now that has become very popular and we're in that space also. We've been in it for quite a long time actually. So those are the kind of things that Voco brings to the table. Now we do have, I got wind just recently that we've got about another four or five new products coming out next year at the IDS show. I have a sense of what a couple of them are, but at this point everything's under lock and key. But we'll see what happens. You know, we have enough that we can offer most esos right now that we can put a fairly major Stamp on their efficiencies and their productivity and their performance just with what we have right now.

Yeah, I love how you really, a lot of this is revolving around efficiency and making, making the process and the flow much easier for clinicians that are obviously getting, you know, this is chaotic in the office and so any little second there. Brian, anything you'd add as far as kind of once, you know, innovation, what's coming down the pipeline, what's, what's trending now, what things you're hearing out in the marketplace?

What I see when I talk to procurement officers or owner operators is they want value add. Right. It's of course the price has to be in the ballpark. Right. It can't be too high or what have you, but provided that you're in the ballpark from a price, they're interested in what else you can offer and help them grow. And for us, what we've done is we have a vocal learning site where you can go on there right now and look at nine upcoming webinars that we're going to be doing with CE. We have 210 on demand classes available for you. We have 15 product tutorials. When we, when we bring on a new group, we try and look to customize an onboarding educational event with One of our KOLs, someone like Gregor, or we have a doctor on staff as well. Like, he's going as an example, he's going to a group this weekend, he's leaving tomorrow to speak to, they're having a hygiene summit and he's going to be presenting a course called Breaking through the Dental Benefit Code Ceiling. And the objective of that course is to understand how procedures like desensitizing dental creams and varnishes can drive profitability for your practice. You're going to learn strategies to optimize dental benefit codes for improved financial outcomes. So it's not just about, hey, buy our materials, it's we want to help you be able to deliver those to the end user. And you know, we try to provide, if you guys can provide an audience of a DSO can provide an audience for us, we can create a fun learning environment for them that's going to allow the, you know, the, the office staff to go from feeling like they have to use these products to wanting to use these products.

Yeah, I mean, I think, yes. I don't know if it's a trend, but it's definitely a reality now, which is a lot of nature of dentists, dental groups or larger dental offices is that it's the dentist is the leader and they're in the chair and so they have to be the leader and in the chair. And so what they're finding is they need support, right? They can't do everything. And so, you know, we do see a lot of the larger dental offices, some multi location that are looking for more support. How can you take stuff off of their plate? And it sounds like, you know, to purchase supplies is one thing, but to have them implemented and to be used in a systematic, smooth way is another thing. Let's talk about change management then. So as you're kind of trying to get people to change their, their behaviors, right. It's hard in any human situation. So Gregor, you know, this is one of the things you specialize in is when you do kind of change supplies or change products, you help your clients implement that. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Correct. So probably the last one, it was a couple months ago with a large group in the Midwest where they pulled all the providers together. So there were probably about 28 providers in that room and then some expanded functions and some hygienists. And what we did there was, we looked at what their formulary was and said these are the products that your owner has made the decision to implement. Some of you will probably have some resistance to these products. And I totally understand that here. So these decisions were not made in a vacuum financially, they were made. But let me tell you clinically why they were made and how each of these products will impact your clinical efficiency and the performance of what you do, as well as the outcome for your clients. And there's no marketing in it at all. It's all, it's all clinical solutions driven. So we would find a location, usually in a hotel. We'll have a, we'll have a breakfast brought in, we might even have a lunch for them, but it might be a full morning session where we've got three hours with a break. And it's geared specifically to what they are using or about to use. Because again, as I said before, that clinical onboarding, that establishing that clinical competence, that the right decision has been made by the owner, the C suite, whoever it may be, that's paramount to your machine running properly. For a DSO to be profitable, everybody has to be on board. And when you consider the players that are playing on the field are actually the wet finger dentists, they need to know what your game plan is and they need to know why you did what you did. And that's what I do. Not from a marketing side, but from this is how you apply it. Here's the caveats, here's the Achilles heel. Avoid this, do this, do that, and everything will be rosy. And that comfort, that warm and fuzzy feeling that they get. And it's an open forum, they can ask whatever questions they want. They can challenge me anytime they want, and we'll walk through it. And that makes people walk away at the end of the day going, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I'm glad we've got that. I'm going to try that. I can't wait to try that. You know, that makes total sense now. And I had that problem, but I didn't know I had that problem until he told me I had that problem. And that actually solves it. What a cool idea. So that's kind of what I do.

Yeah, I mean, the, the kind of overcoming, getting the buy in and overcoming resistance is the key to all this. It's, it's interesting, Brian. I, you know, I, I see the key to this whole system really is what Gregor does on the ground floor. Right. And it doesn't work unless the integration happens. You'll just have a bunch of employees that are a little disgruntled or a bunch of team members, associates. So if you don't do that hard work, it doesn't matter at all. Anything additional, Brian, as you leave with somebody listening who's, you know, got a few locations and it's always, always kind of thinking about their supply situation, anything you would leave them with. Any thoughts?

I think the best thing is to educate yourself. Right. To get it. To talk to as many people as possible. Because by doing so, I think you're going to see you have, you have options. There's a lot of opportunity out there. And there's a lot of products, particularly here at Voco, that could help you run your business more profitably. And again, it's about the products and about price, but there's also the quality as well as the support behind the products. You deserve to have all of it and not just the lowest price. And, and that's where I think vocal can really help you.

Yeah.

There's one thing that we talk about inside the do is this idea of like, you know, where the, the closest point to where the product is delivered, which is. Which is the dentist. Right? The dentist and the patient interacting is the, the whole business is based on that. And so when you can spend a lot of time and making sure that's going well and that the people delivering the dentists are, are happy, you're in a way better spot to have a good business. We should focus a lot on that particular interaction. So we appreciate what you all have done. Congratulations to Voco for being around for a good while. For the for the 18 years experience, being the least amount of experience in the room here, that says a lot about what you guys bring to the table. And you know, for supplies being an industry that's been around for so long, there is change. You know, it is kind of evolving and changing. I think it comes up all the time in the folks that we talk to. So thanks so much for the work you guys do and get a hold of Voco if you are interested in just learning a little bit more about what's out there and the supply side.

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