235: Why Being the Top Producer in Your Growing Dental Practice Is a Red Flag

One of the biggest problems that I have is that I'm still the top producer in the company with a dozen dentists. And so what do I do to be a better leader when I'm at $4.5 million a year this year? And so what am I going to do? How do I become a better leader when everyone wants to see me?

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 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, and welcome to another episode of DEO Grow Secrets. I'm your fearless host, Emmett Scott. And today for our thriving leaders call, we have Dr. Ben Oppenheimer. Ben, so good to have you here, my friend. I'm going to go through your a little bit of your bio, and then I got some questions for you. But. A leading expert in many dental implants and a fellow of the International Congress of Oral Implantologists, a graduate of the University at Buffalo School of Dental Medicine, trained thousands of dentists worldwide and consults for major dental companies including 3M ESPE and Stern Gold, based in Buffalo, New York. Also, Ben provides comprehensive dental care focusing on implant treatment for those who are DEO members here. Ben has now six locations doing well over $10 million. We'll just kind of leave it at that. And he's just an awesome guy. So, Ben, thanks for being on. I'd love to hear a little bit about your journey. Just like how you started and decided, I'm gonna open a practice and then like, oh, my gosh, I got six practices and chaos here, so.

Well, it's now seven, but yes.

Oh, okay. Sorry. That was. That was yesterday.

Seven. Yeah, it was yesterday. Literally two weeks ago. The seventh practice has 28 dental chairs. Oh, my. This is my mini hospital. And that's where I'm based out of. But I always love. First of all, thank you so much to you and DEO and everybody, because I probably know a bunch of you on here and I've met you, I've shook your hands, and you've helped me and. So vulnerable. Absolutely. Crushing it or getting crushed. I would just lean to getting crushed in that. And I think I really want to make sure that everybody knows that I don't want to tout Any brilliance here. I want to tell you my journey and be helpful to you and hopefully you get a pearl or two and the mistakes that I've made, you can avoid. I see that my coach Jordan is here on the call. Thank you very much, Jordan, for all of your help and assistance with my team. We'll probably talk a lot about that. I imagine, Emmett, but my journey started when I was a child because I'm a third generation dentist and I call that the unfair advantage. Imagine if you started your career at 5 years old, sitting around the table and just hearing things, right? Just the way that the talk is around the table. They're talking a little bit about the difficult patient or whatever it may be and then you hearing things like, well, the marketing component and the phones were ringing when we ran this ad and all this stuff. So it was basically inevitable that I was going to open up a lot of practices. So, you know, dentistry got boring really fast for me. After a few years, you just jump into implant dentistry from general practice. Then the rest of my life is about mastering communication to close more cases. And that's, that's basically it. So communication is now essentially all I work on, whether it's with my team or with my patients. Learning from Jordan, learning from you, Emmett, you know, understanding the DEO and then, yeah, all the little fancy shiny things that I have to avert my eyes from so I don't get distracted from the, the main game. But yeah, that's, that's me. So you start when you're 13, you commit to being a dentist and every summer you work hard and starts by sweeping the floors and then you end up graduating and getting started. And my first week in practice, I placed a dental implant. Didn't really know what I was doing. It felt so fast and easy. I just was like, wow, if it's that easy, then that's it. It was within two weeks that I was an implant dentist with no, no fellowship or program after, after dental school. Just getting into it and then so I kind of fell in that trap and actually would probably get to it a little bit too. But the, one of the biggest problems that I have is that I'm still the top producer in the company with a dozen dentists. And so what do I do to be a better leader when I'm, I'm at. I dropped a little bit. I'm about four and a half million dollars a year this year in revenue for me, right. And so what am I going to do? How do I become a better leader when everyone wants to see me. So there's a struggle there and maybe a cautionary tale for the future leaders here on this call. And how do you scale? Well, you know, duplicating yourself is a challenge when it comes with technical skills as well. Right.

It's fascinating. I love the saying that the weakness is the overuse of your strengths. And as you do hone in, I think for many here, being great clinicians is their strength and continuing to push on that capability and get better and better and more CE and more production, et cetera. And then to your point, Ben, one day you kind of bring your head up and go, man, the biggest liability is that I'm such a big part of this production. If I'm going to produce or create a passive income company here, I'm going to have to kind of figure out how to untangle this. And I think what makes it more difficult, you know, I talk about the two chasms. One is going from clinician to entrepreneur, and that one, of course, everyone here has crossed that chasm. There's a little bit more excitement, dopamine anxiety associated with that. That drives us across that. And then getting to that next level of executive can be much more challenging because now I'm an A student here as both a clinician and business owner, and being an F student over here as an executive, it's just totally different skill set. So I'm going to go right into the vulnerability side. And like, what lesson do you think has been the hard way? You know, what lesson? Like, school of hard knocks, where you're like, I was confident that I was going to crush it here and, you know, maybe just even go down to the principal basis. But what hasn't played out how you

thought, okay, that's a really good one. I, I think that if you're really great in clinical dentistry, imagining that, number one, you can hire somebody and they can help to replace you, even in a proportionate share, because even your, even your communication style with your patients is a huge skill set that you've learned. If you're in on this call, what you're saying is that I've mastered something and you know exactly what to do. And it's not about necessarily doing the dentistry. It can be really tricky to translate that to the next person. And I was always an entrepreneur, so my leap from, you know, being a dentist to being an entrepreneur was nothing. That's. That was ingrained in me. But being an entrepreneur to being a leader of an organization, and then maybe the next step would be a responsible fiduciary. Or an executive of a, of a company. Right. Even if you're the only investor. That's a totally different leap. That's a huge leap. How do you lead people, how do you find, hire and lead people to be the type of people that will help to duplicate themselves in your image. Right. Or at least in the image of the vision that you're creating? Very difficult. I'm still absolutely struggling with that. And once I think that that's broken, then you end up in a totally different place. You're in a place where you have now that's the mailbox money like you said, like the passive income. Right. So. But you're still there to provide that leadership and that guidance and dentistry. I think it's quite hard. There's a lot of interactions, there's a lot of different processes and systems. It's I, I like to split up this kind of like these categories. Like what business am I going to get in next? Well, I'm in B2C right now. Business to consumer service and then there's business to consumer products that I could be in. Then there's business to business service and then there's business to business product. And so I'm thinking along the spectrum of where what is the most difficult, I mean be to business to consumer service is a very hands on type of environment. I don't, you, you have to duplicate people, processes, systems and service levels for people. I mean, I think that we're in one of the most difficult fields to manage a scalable business. And I mean, do you think I'm out of, out of my mind here Emmett, or am I on track? No, no.

You know, having coached in a lot of different industries, one way to frame this is if you think about manufacturing, you have people at the top level and then you typically now have some kind of robotic capability that's working on a, on a, you know, physical product here. Right. If you look at a typical service business, let's take law firms, etc. You've got people, you've got people in middle management and then they're delivering a physical tax return, estate plan, whatever. When you're in health care, it's people with people with the product being people. Right. And so you've got the most complex, it's like a multiplier of complexity which really what it is is it's a multiplier of leadership skill set requirement. And I think when you combine that with what you're saying Ben, where it's like as an entrepreneur, I'm really good at seeing a problem, solving a problem. As an executive, I see a problem. I organize that against all the other problems that I might have. I then work with my team to see if they can see the problem. I collaborate with it. Like, that's the executive role. And most of us are terrible at that. You know, it's just such a different skill set. And for a lot of us, too, as executives, we don't have to be super. I mean, I'm sorry, as entrepreneurs, we don't have to be super patient. We see a problem, we. We fix a problem. I want to learn how to do implants. I go do my ces. I go start doing that. I start, you know, but if I want to now scale associates now, I have to have dramatic amount of patience. I have to be able to operationalize all my intuition. It's just such a different skill set. And, I mean, clearly, Ben, you have some level of that. You don't get to, you know, seven locations without having to do that. I'm curious how your leadership style has evolved. And of course, this is a constant fight for all of us to put down the dopamine that always just wants to go after the shiny, to put down the anxiety and to really be more organized and. And more thoughtful and focused. How has your leadership style evolved in your organization from where you were? If I saw the bend from 10 years ago.

Yeah. And we can even go back to 20. Right. Because I started as an entrepreneur in my. In my office, and it was my way, and I was micromanaging everything, and it was very important for me to, you know, be the controller of the knobs in the. In the company. Turning up a little, turning down a little, making sure that everything was all tidy and clean and doing it exactly our way, which is actually a really good start. If you're going to build a framework for something, you know exactly what you want for the future. But what ends up happening is that you. You can also take all of those four people that you have in your team at that time out to lunch, out to dinner, treat them well, make them feel like, you know, this is a great work environment. You are the controller of that culture. You may not even think about it that early on. You're creating culture, but that's it. Now translating it to leading people that have to lead the teams that are outside of your orbit. Your specific environment that you're operating in is a different skill set. Some of the changes that I made was I needed to let things go, you know, and. And luckily, as I'm also self funded, right, through banking relationships and all this. I have no other investors, no other partners yet. But I think that one of my struggles is that I probably need to find some partnership soon. Either way, as I'm, as I'm going through this journey, I'm recognizing things that are really important. Like, I have to be a little bit more patient with some people. Everybody's not like me. Everybody doesn't have the same personality traits. I have to understand them. And again, going back to that initial comment, communication, learning communication is super important. Learning negotiation styles, never split the difference. Reading all these books, listening to these podcasts, really just doing a deep dive. Like whenever I'm struggling, I'll just be like, all right, well, I clearly don't have a skill set that I need and I need to go and dive in and figure it out. So I get an audio book and that's all the things that I listened to in the car for that week. And now I've read a book and so hundreds of books, maybe more, you know.

Yeah, I, I love what you're, what you keep alluding to, which is a lot of times I'll see entrepreneurs, ironically, because they're very ambitious, fall into this victim martyr kind of scripting. And it's very easy to do, to say there's just no good people in the world or they're just terrible, etc. And what I hear you keep coming back to is I'm just not good enough yet. Like, I just am messing skill sets. You're very, you're like, man implants. That was easy for me. Now, that's not going to be true for everyone here, but for you, that came natural. What can happen is people can lean a little too much on their strengths and then think that everybody else is the pro. You know, if I'm so good at implants, I must be good at everything. And I love your humility of like, yeah, I'm good there. And all these other things. You know, I'm an F student and which is really powerful. I'm wondering, I want to go back to like that first associate, you know, and each of these associates. When you can produce the level you can, how do you emotionally tolerate. And this isn't, you know, putting down how great your other associates are. I'm sure they are, but I doubt that they're all doing, you know, three, $4 million each. That would be fabulous, I'm sure. But how did you tolerate the fact that they were not as good as you?

I'm still not tolerant of it, Emmett. I mean, honestly, I. I don't. I don't understand it in a lot of ways, but I. I've allowed myself to understand that everyone's different and everyone has their abilities and that the. You know, going back to the. I guess the main theme of. Of this call is, you know, what. What are these changes that we do in order to understand how to grow as a leader over time? It's to appreciate people's abilities. I think is. Is one of the big ones. And so I don't want to be tolerant of it. And so what I did was I started to craft unique things like a internal fellowship program where I'm going to teach and train them, I'm going to work with them, I'm going to make them better. You know, you're not. And if you look at it in the opposite lens, it's. You're not good enough. Right? So that's a really hard. It's a. It's a really hard thing for me to get away from because it's basically me giving up on someone and saying, this is so easy for me. You know, God, I can. I can help you if you'd only listen more carefully. And so I still go on one Saturday a month, and I host a fellowship program where I'll do either a simple implant case, vertical dimension change with the prosthetic case, something that is more complicated, full arch cases. We have one of our doctors that's doing zygomatic implants that, you know, does these cases, and they're observing all this stuff. And even the simple stuff, like the communication stuff, some people will never understand that. So being able to tolerate that. And I think maybe I misspoke when I said I'm still not there. But I know that I need to be there. I know I need to be in a place where I recognize what that person's value is to the organization and celebrate that with them instead of trying to put them into a box where I want them. Because there is a value for everybody. And I like being the person that puts the puzzles together for them. I like to be the person that's the connector for them. That's what I kind of tout myself when I'm doing my interviews with the doctor. I can help you to achieve your goals. Our company can help you to achieve your goals, make sure that we are clear on what those goals are. And I'll put a path together for you to allow for you to integrate properly with our group. Because, I mean, 99 out of a hundred, maybe dentists are they. They want to do well. They just don't understand exactly what that means to them. So even helping them to script what their life can look like, these things are value propositions that I, I don't believe that many corporations, we'll call it, are doing not. Maybe these members, because all of you are probably thinking this, how do they fit into our organization? This is a great person. This is a nice person, dentist or otherwise. Right?

I think that last part is exactly right. So it's like. So the. I'll just go back to some of the jargon here. I think the most intolerant are dentists who are like, there's no good associates out there because no one's as good as me. Or I had an associate once and it didn't work out. It's like I dated a girl in junior high, so. And it didn't work out, so I'll never date again. You know, like, that's the intolerant kind of part, I think. Too apathetic, right? It's like, yeah, just come in, do whatever you want, right? And I think somehow being in that tolerant developer is true leadership, where you're like, hey, I can appreciate where you're at. And I also know I want to leave you better than I found you. Right. I know that you're interested because you're human, you're interested in being developed. And really my task is to figure out what is the path of development to create for you. The most important position in any of your groups is the chief dental officer, right? That is the individual developing out the product. And what's tough is the better you are at something, the harder it is sometimes to be the mentor and trainer. You guys have seen this, by the way, with like individuals who were really great dental assistants and you tried to make them like the office manager and they just wanted to go around say, everybody just work harder, you know, because they just, it came so naturally as an A type personality. They actually weren't really great development people. So I think what you've said, Ben, is, is super helpful for a lot of us, which is you're constantly working on what is the next step that I need to put in front of them. I think of it like candy crush, you know, it's like, swipe here. Congratulations, you won. You know, swipe, swipe. You know, they just kind of build on themselves so that people feel successful and so you accept them where they're at and then you keep building like the next rung in the ladder. To get em to the next. I mean clearly, just from what you're saying, some of your dentists are now crushing it when their clinical capability as well.

Right. One, one of the dentists celebrated his 10 year anniversary today and we sent him down, you know, a couple of years ago to learn how to place the zygomatic implants. Cause you have a pension for it and paid for that. And you know, you, you want, you want those types of guys to be your partners or gals to be your partners. But you know, my, I, I guess ultimately you're 100% right in the way that you kind of reframed that. Because that's, that's exactly how I feel I want to be when they're done with their career. I want them to look back and like call me or write a note or something that says the best decision I ever made was joining concierge dental group and having you as my mentor or my leader. And I think that's kind of like the message that I would send is that's what my hope is. And I want to help to serve them in that way. Being a connector, putting those puzzle pieces together for them. Just like my family did for me years ago when I was five and just started thinking about, you know, wow, my grandfather is a dentist, you know, and, and what does that mean? And that's kind of cool. And what, what, you know, all of that. And so how do I put those pieces together? And also that allows you to kind of skip steps too in the way like, like I was describing earlier, you get a, you get a little push from behind. So you know, I mean, I'm not going to say that I had a lot easier, but I had a lot more clarity earlier on, you know, that was, that's for sure.

One of the other things I hear in your mindset is that move for where you go, my patient is my customer and then you say my associate is my customer and the patient is the customer of my customer. Right. And so that I think you were talking about kind of the B2C, the business to consumer versus the B2B and the, the, the other business owner, so to speak, or business associate is, is your associate. And how do I put myself in a place where I'm constantly helping them develop? Okay, I want to pivot because I know you're into some of the technology here. I'd love to hear what technology you, you're into, what you're liking right now, what you've done in the past, what

you're excited about, oh, boy, how many hours do we have? Four or five? The one thing just to finish that topic and then we'll get into this, if you don't mind, is a thing that I learned from you and the DEO is that your customer is your dentist or your hygienist or really your team. Because as a dental service organization, we'll call it in training to some degree, right, you're really thinking more, you're pivoting more about how are you going to satisfy your team members because they, they give you more headaches than your patients do. And so I know that many of you are, are still in the chair like me. And, you know, it's hard to give up. And then that, again, that trade off is so hard. But thinking like that was a real big mindset shift, and I owe that to the deo, helping me to understand that my customer really is not my patient anymore. My customer is my dentist, is my hygienist, is my manager, is my leadership team. These are essentially the people that I serve. And then they're supposed to then serve the person that pays for services, which is a customer of really someone else. But it's your organization's customer. But your customer as a leader is definitely team members for sure.

And it can be tricky because you're kind of like, well, the patient, though is like paying me money through the insurance or whatever, but I'm paying these people. They should do whatever I want. And it just, it would be nice if the accounting put the people over on the balance sheet as an asset, you know, versus, like all the equipment's over there, which is depreciating like crazy. But the truth is, is those are the revenue generators, if you will, if you're going to ever do this on scale. They are the.

Yeah, no and no. That's a really good point. I mean, you have to think about, and you would know better than anyone probably on this call, you have to think about your financial position with respect to your assets. And your assets are hugely the people. And so investing in human capital and trying to now tether them to the environment in some way, I mean, this is, this is another part of the skill set we. This wasn't supposed to be a finance call, was it? But the idea surrounding how we get human beings to really make investments in not only themselves, but through. In the organization and keep them so that they don't. They don't leave, still very challenging. Which is why I'm also associated and still working hard with my coach in this group. But Technology. I mean, I mean we cannot talk about technology without starting with AI Now, I mean, the current administration, what are

you testing out right now? Is there anything you're kind of on the fringe of like beta testing for all of us so you can tell us whether it works or not?

Yeah, I'll tell you some of the mistakes I made with AI and then I'll tell you where I'm going to land on this. But let me start with this and we'll do AI in a second. Many, many years ago, over a decade ago, I got involved with intraoral scanning and I hated the connection that Sarek had with an integrated mill. I didn't really understand why they had to charge for this package. But it is really hard because I owned a lab and there is all kinds of titrations and testing. You need, you know, machining guys to tweak all of these settings to get all this stuff perfectly right. So it really, we're onto something. But it just didn't feel good to me because I don't like anyone to have control over me. You know, if you're an entrepreneur, you want to see where the advantage is. You want to figure out where the 10x return is or more. And you know, all of that technology from intraoral scans to the final, it's very helpful and valuable to me and I've been doing a lot of appreciating of new materials in that space and helping to understand how to make workflows better with less machines and equipment. So let's give an example.

What are you playing, what are you playing with right now?

Well, the, the, the, the architecture that I like to use is, is whatever the best of breed is. And I still think it's the three shape environment. But what I try to do is full arch cases without having to use photogrammetry and working with labs that use alternative materials instead of zirconia for full arch cases. So that's a really big one. But this relies on you to make connections with all kinds of unique kind of individuals. But keeping it simple, intraoral scan and making sure your laboratory technicians understand where the settings are. I don't use any models and anything. We call it the plot factor. You take a crown and it plops right in. So you have no adjustment time, no nothing. Same with screw retained crowns for implants. Same with bringes. You just want plot factor. Some of you probably have experienced this because it's not that it's that unique, but working hard to make sure it happens every time means Talking to your lab technicians and making sure they know when something didn't work right. And then the, the discussion is, was it your records or was it our design? And so we're getting back into dentistry a little bit here, which is maybe off topic, but making sure that your, if your team members are doing the same thing. So what do your dentists need to do? They need to be accountable to hold the lab accountable for any tweaks that they have to make that can decrease their efficiency while in the, in the office. They need to figure out ways where they can spend less chair time so that they can have more patients per hour, more patients per day. And so I think that that's the, that's a really powerful part of digital dentistry and being able to have your team members be able to sell cases that they're, they would normally be uncomfortable with using traditional methodologies with wax ups and, and all of these things. Being able to deliver a case that they know will be delivered properly so no contact changes. I mean you've probably seen these all with these guys that have in house labs where the, the guys still are layering porcelain on this. I mean they're doing it for them. This is the digital realm version of a ultra high end Manhattan style clinic that we just can't generally afford and is not scalable. Is not scalable 100% okay. That is not a scalable opportunity going from Manhattan to Dubai to take care of the kings and queens of all over the country. We don't do that. That's not what we're here on DL for. But still value and understanding that digital can get you there so long as there's a lot of coordination. So, you know, I asked my dentists, have you had a problem with your dental crowns? Yes. Have you talked to the technician who did it? No. Why not? Well, I just made the adjustment and that's fine. That's costing you all money right now. You know, talking to them about making sure that they're building a relationship because their technicians also want feedback and they say, ah, Dr. X will tolerate slop. That's okay. We'll just, I can do this one real fast. I don't have to check the contacts. We'll let him adjust. It happens all the time. And you know, it's a, it's a point of contention for me because that's, that's my money, that's my efficiency.

Is this a, this is a cultural thing for you that you'll build out as a skill set for your clinicians is how to communicate with the lab.

Absolutely, 100%. Everybody knows that. That's a pet peeve of mine. If the lab doesn't do it exactly right, you call them and you spend time on the phone with them, and then what happens is you have to spend less time on the phone with them. Even if they get five out of ten of the crowns. Perfect. Then you're in a good shape. And then when you get nine out of ten, then you're on cloud nine, because then you have no adjustments. You don't even have to do any work. Your assistants can do most of the stuff. And then you come in there and, you know, squirt something on it and be done.

Yeah, those kind of things, those little nuggets there are super helpful because that's an element of leadership. Right. An element of development, level of system. It's amazing how many millions of dollars all of us have on the table from a conversation we're avoiding. Right. Whether it's with the X ray tech, an office manager, a lab, in this situation, because those are some of the scariest things to do. And, and so that's. That's a really cool takeaway, Ben. All right. Anything on the. Oh, go ahead.

Yeah, no, people think. I, I think that that's another thing. It's a personal personality trait of mine. I'm. I'm not scared to tell somebody how it is, but they don't like the way that I say it. I have to do better being able to translate and communicate my ideas. So when I say it, it doesn't come across because I don't have enough time to explain to them exactly what they're doing wrong. I just want to tell them they're doing something wrong, go back and fix it, tell me what you think it is, and I'll let you know if it was. It was the right idea or not, you know, And. And I, I'm still working on how to soften that edge because I'm rushing. I've. I've got, you know, my brain is spinning like many of yours all the time. You don't have the time to, you know, hand hold a dental technician that you're paying essentially to do, you know, this type of work. So. Yeah, softening that.

Have you, have you started using AI for this yet?

You know, I. On my. On my home screen of my phone, I have all these widgets up here, and one of them is ChatGPT. That's my best friend, you know, that's the.

I love it for softening. So I'll Be like, hey, I'm really frustrated with this. I need to have this, this conversation. Can you help me role play through it?

It's so good.

Yeah. All right, where else are you using AI? Where do you like AI?

Yeah. So AI, mean, right now I want to see it in robotics, but we're not going to talk about that because there's nothing real to really talk about yet. But it's got to replace human beings. And I was just featured on someone's Instagram feed or YouTube or something where I was talking to them. And the concept of AI should be this in my mind and my kind of my heart. All of the things that you keep asking your people to do that are repetitive tasks that they don't want to do, that you know are not creative, that you can't imagine doing yourself, because it's a hundred times the same version of this phone call to get a patient in, call back this patient. That's what, that's what AI should be doing. All the creative stuff and the fun stuff and the human interactions, that's what human beings should be doing. By, by being a credible and a capable workspace that integrates AI in some way in your, in your business units is going to allow for your team to think that you appreciate them more. It doesn't take away jobs. It takes away the. I was about to say something wrong, but the crummiest jobs, right? It's the worst thing that you're, that you do. It's the thing that nobody wants to do. It's the thing that people hate doing, that you keep asking them to do because you know it's the right thing to do. And if only we could rewind the clock 50 years, maybe it would be the normal thing that people do. But nowadays people don't want to do that. They want to have things automated. So phone calls, anything with texts or messaging, things that like you're saying about utilizing it for, in that way. I mean, even just if you start simple and just say, I'm going to commit to using ChatGPT when I have a question at any point in the day, I'm going to use that. Instead of call my lawyer, call my accountant, call my friend, call my partner, call my somebody, call that person, the AI person that you have on the other side. Starting there is a good way to get your mind thinking, where do I go when I have a question about anything? And, and then you'll see what, what it is. And incidentally, if you get a paid version, it starts to know you and I think that even though we can't see the algorithms behind the scenes, it, it's remembering previous conversations and helping you to grow on those. So it's actually quite good. I mean, if you've ever used Siri, it doesn't know anything about, about what happened with the last thing that you asked it, you know, so don't use that. But these, these generative pre trained models, that's GPT generative pre trained models are starting to build a file on you, good or bad, and they're understanding your relationship with it. That's, that's a really good and important way to start. And then, yeah, chart notes, whatever. There's all kinds of different tools and things, but a lot of the tools aren't there yet in my opinion because of the types of integrations. Do you want to talk about that for a minute?

Well, I think here's the bottom line is every 12 months it gets 10x better. So if you don't like it today, we'll just wait till next month. And we're on this really fun curve right now. I actually feel after our last event, seeing the 80 innovation partners, as I call them, that were there at the different vendors and I felt the most hope around what's coming because as this labor cost has moved up and frankly our team members, they want to work at the highest level too. And I love what you said there, Ben. They don't want to be doing those repetitive tasks. I see a light here at the end of this tunnel that's coming. And I think every one of our events we're just going to see these innovation partners, which I love because these vendors are investing real dollars into solving problems for me, which I love. And they're solving some front desk problems or solving some insurance coordination, some RCM issues, collections, etc. And as they get better and better, they're just going to drive down these costs and then I'm able to be able to pay my people a wage with all of this, you know, inflation that's happening, but less people than before. One question that did come in is can you kind of talk about labs? Would you suggest, you know, everyone center themselves around a lab for their practice or group of practices to build a more intimate relationship, to have that accountability, to have that consistency. And what do you do when you have dentists who are like, well, I want to use this lab or I want to do that?

Yeah, that's tough. You know, in my contracts with my doctors, I used to say like, you're, this is the lab that we pay and we pay 100% for it. And you can choose any other lab that you want and pay 100% yourself.

So it's a nice way to give them choice, you know.

Yeah, it's like you get, you get a choice. Either I'll do everything if you follow my instructions, or you can do everything if you don't. I. When I was in dental school and again, remember my multi generational background, I was introduced to a lab technician. I didn't know how to set up teeth in my denture. And my final. I had to go in and I said, hey, I really want to learn how to set up a denture. A technician was sitting right next to me that's done it, you know, smelled like he had smoked 50 cigarettes. Just before I walked in to the place and I sat down, I said, I'd really like to do it. Would you mind showing me how to do it? And he said, no, but if you go buy me a six pack, I'll have it set up before you get back. And so lab relationships are about like human relationships. I'm not saying that's a good idea or a bad idea. What I'm suggesting is that you, you meet people, you talk to people, you, you honor them and they honor you back. If you want to have a specific type of cutback on your crowns for, for contacts and all of that, it's not just about filling out a piece of paper and sending it into a large laboratory or a small laboratory. You gotta, you know, be communicating with them and building individual relationships. I think, I think especially the more complicated the cases you're doing, the more important that is, you know, have them sponsor a lunch, you go to their place and all of that. But, you know, that's. That to me is a pretty straightforward relationship. It's just the way that you want. You're setting a standard by building a relationship with somebody that has a standard that they can set with you. So you'll be able to tell whether or not that's the right person by just simple communication.

Simple call Ben. There's been a natural theme to this, and I really appreciate it, which is, at the end of the day, you've got to nail it on the clinical patient side. You got to push yourself as far as you can to really take care of the patient. And then you have to realize that that's just the commodity of your product and then turn around and work on your leadership skills just constantly. And that's been the theme that you keep hitting on. And I really love that because I think that is the formula to scale, if we put it in two buckets, is take care of customer number one the best you can, and then turn around and take care of customer number two the best you can. And just know that it's going to be a, a personal development game which all of us are signed up for. I mean, if you think about business, it's the ultimate CrossFit personal development. Just when you think you're like, look at my overhead press, and it's like, all right, let's see your handstand push ups, you know, so there's just always something more to figure out. What would you say to maybe members who are new to deo? They're just kind of getting into the community, you know, single practice. They've been doing this for a long time and they're like, you know, I just don't know, is, is this worth it? Do I keep with these people? I've already done so many things. Is this really going to give me my breakout?

If you're open and you like sharing, especially you want to find a safe place to share failures with, your most profitable investment will be with the DEO of anything else that you invest in in your entire dental career besides maybe a telephone or a handpiece.

All right, there it is. It's awesome. Thanks, my friend. Anything else you want to leave for anyone? Really appreciate having you on today. Thanks for being so open and vulnerable on this.

Yeah, I mean, I will say this about AI because I didn't get to it because I was discussing chat.

Yeah, please.

I've worked with a lot of companies that try really hard to integrate like a call to a appointment in your schedule. And what I want to say is this. You don't really need that. You need a call to a lead that needs to be called back. So you get to reduce the workload by your front office team by a hundred or a thousand, or we'll call it infinity, because they can just keep calling and then you get lots of leads. So don't worry so much about making sure that your schedule can integrate with the AI companies algorithms that allow it to happen. Find somebody that can just get interested people from your own book of business, not even new books, because they can call them every day forever, and then you'll have those leads. So I can help with people finding those things. But that's where I found the sweet spot is, and that's working better for me than any AI integration that I've chosen so far. Keep it simple, Ben.

Thanks for being on this podcast today, my friend. I appreciate it. Just to kind of close it out for those who are members of deo, we do have the revenue intensive coming up. I'm so freaking excited about this. We've got Tony Lepanto, who's former vice president of sales at ClearChoice, now full time at Do Building out our treatment closing academy. She's going to be talking about crushing sales and how to unleash AI around some of this. We're going to have some great masterminds. Make sure you get registered, book your hotel. We do have 50% off so like use our QR code because it is 50% off versus going through the website, the JW out here in Dallas. That's October 9th through the 11th. Ben, thank you again for being on. Until next time, keep smiling. 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 sources 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.