6:KVGI interview with Rich Allen (Tour De Profit Hour)

Welcome to DSO Secrets. I know what it's like to be an entrepreneur in the dental industry. I've had my ups and downs, just like you. There's so much opportunity to be excited about, but so few resources to get answers. From here on DSO Secrets, we get you those answers so you can change the lives you're meant to bless and achieve your personal success. When I was working as an associate rat at a school, I never imagined I could own these many practices with this amount of support. So thank you. You have helped build my marketing mind

to a whole new level.

You have this natural talent, this unique ability. Hello everyone. This is your fearless host, Emmett Scott. On another episode of DSO Secrets. I had this amazing opportunity just recently to get interviewed on KVGI Radio by a man named Rich Allen. Now, Rich has a really cool mission in that he has seen the statistics around small businesses failing one out of five, not making it more than five years. And he's just made it his mission to bring that down to zero in any way that he can. And so he has a radio show called Tour de Profit, obviously playing off of Tour de France, where he compares businesses in his book and other areas with. With a bicycle and he likes to ride. And so it works well for him to use that in his consulting and explaining how a business really works. Well, our accountant, Mike White referred me over to him to be on his radio show, which. Thank you, Mike, that was really nice of you. And so I wanted to post radio show for this podcast and it opens up. He asks a lot of great questions and I try to be as transparent as possible. So hopefully you'll get something out of it that you can use and see within your own mission to try to grow your DSO in the marketplace. Hope you guys enjoy it.

Joining me in studio today is Emmett Scott. He's the CEO and co founder of the Community Dental Partners. Emmett, thanks for joining me, man.

Thank you so much.

Glad you're here.

Yeah, I'm so impressed with your mission. I mean, I just align with it so much. I strongly believe that the family is critical to communities and entrepreneurs are critical to the economy. And more need to be successful and more need the right principles.

You know, thanks for sharing that and saying that. It is, it is a passion for me and, and it is. I mean, it's true. I mean, we. This economy is, is built now around small businesses. Yeah, it's. It's what makes this economy go and we're in a thriving economy right now. But small businesses are what's making that happen. And we got to make sure that they're solid.

Absolutely.

So that's kind of the deal. So anyway, you know, Mike was on the show not long ago, and. And as we talked to him, we got done. And Mike's a great cpa. I know. He's your cpa, right?

That's right.

He works with several of my clients as well. And we got done, and Mike said, hey, you gotta have this guy on. He's got a great story. And so we connected. You scheduled on the show, and I looked at your background, and I'm going, wow, this guy does have a interesting background.

Nice and eclectic.

It's very eclectic. Right? So take us back and kind of just give us a little bit of who Emmett is. And I know, I know some people, as you walked in, they said, hey, are you the real Emmett?

Yeah.

Well, okay, so you're not the guy that used to carry the football?

No, no, I don't have that level of talent.

Okay.

One look at my physique, you know

that's not true, but that's okay. It's not a bad place to be connected.

So, you know, my background started totally opposite is graduated in accounting, which doesn't align with my personality, but I always heard it was the language of business and the place I needed to start solid. So graduated there, did an internship where I actually did taxes for one season, and that was enough.

And that was.

I was out.

That was your guarantee you would never do that again?

Absolutely. So I went into the financial planning world. The goal there was to have something that was much more dynamic, and I loved helping the customer. But the financial planning world has a lot of sales components associated with it, and I wanted a little bit more intimate relationship rather than, you know, just insurance and mutual funds and so forth. But I did end up building two financial planning firms and transitioning out of those. And I thought, wow, I'm kind of entrepreneurial. I also noticed that my best clients, which were the ones I aligned best with, were entrepreneurs. And a lot of times they were coming to me saying, hey, I want to invest, because I'm burned out on my business and I need to start investing.

I'm going to try something new.

I got to do something different. And I looked at, okay, what could we do with a 401k account or this, that and the other? And what I really saw was, no, what they needed to do is reinvest in themselves and in their business. They were. They were entrepreneurs, but they weren't making the transition to being executives. And that's. That's a transition we don't talk a lot about. But the. The entrepreneur is a hub and spoke system. And to move your company to the next level, a lot of times you have to go to this executive level.

You got to get out of your own way.

Totally, totally. And you got to download all of this knowledge that you have in a way that's scalable for the rest of the team.

Right.

And it's tough because entrepreneurs are smart people. They have a lot of intuition. And a lot of times when you're trying to scale, it's almost like you're asking them, so tell me how you breathe, you know, tell me how you did this, how you built this so that we can scale it. And entrepreneurs have a hard time downloading that. So, anyway, I got.

Right. They enjoy it so much.

They do.

And they find that they're so good at it at the startup part.

Yes.

And being involved in everything. And most entrepreneurs can do everything.

They're amazing, right?

They are. But that's what holds them back.

Totally.

And so interesting that you saw that.

I got really passionate about. I saw it in my own businesses where I had failed, and I was lucky enough to have a client who said, yeah, come help me with this. And we ended up being very successful. I started a radio show out in Las Vegas way back when.

No kidding.

And called the Entrepreneur Life and started building out, helping entrepreneurs move from kind of entrepreneur to executive level. Then, just serendipitously, my best friend since the age of two, we had not been hanging out recently, but he called and said, all right, I need help. I need help with my dental practice. I want to build one. He had been working as an associate for another dentist.

Now, meanwhile, you're in Vegas.

I'm in Vegas.

Okay. And he's where?

And he's here in Dallas.

Oh, and he was here in Dallas.

Yeah, in the Dallas area. So I start looking at the space. It's an interesting space. You look at dental kind of as an outside patient, and you say, that seems pretty boring. But from a. From an entrepreneurial perspective, it's a consolidating space. They have a lot of complexity going on right now, as you can imagine, in healthcare with insurance and everything else.

A lot of uncertainty.

Yeah, a lot of uncertainty. They're coming out of school with lots of debt. They have a lot of competition. The competition's not other dentists. It's everything else we want to do except go to the dentist.

Right.

Like, check our Facebook account, those kinds of things. And so they're having to learn a lot of new business skills. And frankly, what a lot are doing now is they're partnering with business people to have and starting to divide out and say, listen, I'll take care of the clinical, you take care of the business, and let's go attack this industry together.

Yeah. Interesting.

And so we set up, Dr. Evans and I, who have been friends, we set up a dental support organization to go out and support dental practices. And we started that seven years ago.

Wow.

Opened up our first practice, 20 employees, and now we have 400 employees and went from 0 to 40 million in revenue. So it has been quite the ride. It has not been a straight up into the right experience. I will say that up front.

Yeah. On the outside it may look that way. Right. I mean, everybody thinks that that's exactly what it is. It's a smooth uphill ride.

Sometimes we just look at each other and we go, now where was this in the business plan?

Yeah, yeah, it's not here. Yeah, it's not here. Well, awesome. So I want, and I want to dive into that because, wow, what a story. But I did notice, and I mean, your background's kind of interesting. You've got five kids.

Five kids. Homeschool all of them.

You homeschool all of them. How old are the kids?

17. Down to nine.

Wow.

First boys and then we finally had a girl.

Wow. Is that when you said, hey, that's it, we're done?

Yeah. All redheads.

Get out of here.

I got a beautiful redheaded wife. And I said, I did the design, she did the color. No paint.

That's awesome. That's cool. Well, you got more than what I got. I don't think I can handle five. That's awesome. Good for you. And here's an interesting thing. I know my wife will be really interested in this, you know, American Sign Language.

I do.

You're fluent in sign language?

I do. I'm lds. So I went on a two year mission and I actually did sign language on that mission. Helped volunteer in deaf schools and I grew up around it. My mom actually owns an interpreting agency. She's also entrepreneurial.

Really.

And so owns the largest interpreting agency in Nevada and Utah. And yeah, so I've, I've just always been around it and tried to serve in that area.

Wow, that's interesting. My wife. My wife knows ASL and she taught high school sign language and does interpreting and has done some courtroom interpreting and

those kinds of things. That's complex.

She loves it. So, you know, she talks with her hands, you know, and I know nobody can see that you're doing that right now, but. Yeah, see, she can't speak without her fingers moving.

Yeah. The little bit of Italian genealogy I have, that's.

It's in there, man. So you've got it all. So, you know, this is. And this is pretty wild because my background's in accounting. Right. So I wouldn't put. I wouldn't put an accounting background with a sign language skill. Right. I mean, those are like two different parts of your brain, right?

Right. Yeah, that's right. One's pretty extrovert, right?

Yeah.

And then in accounting school, we always joke that an extrovert accountant was someone who looked at your shoes instead of their own.

Right, Exactly.

It's a different world.

Wow. So, okay, so you're kind of a unique bird. And your partner, what's his name?

Dr. Evans. Chad Evans.

Okay, Dr. Evans. So, boyhood friends.

Yeah.

And so tell us about that conversation about coming back together. Because a lot of times there are a lot of people, I know a lot of guys or gals who have an idea for a business, and they may have somebody they want to work with, but they're maybe worried about doing that with their best friend.

Absolutely.

And it's. I mean, it's a risky proposition to go into business together. Yeah, right. Friendship may get damaged in the process. Tell me how you guys did it, because you've done it successfully.

Yeah, I've kind of gone, you know, zig versus zag on the family and friend thing. I've always felt comfortable with it. Now you have to have the personality for it, because I say, I feel very comfortable hiring friends and family, but you have to feel comfortable firing friends and family to be able to do that.

That's hard.

It has to be that kind of relationship. But, you know, when he called, he was just looking for some help on that initial practice. And, you know, how do I organize and automate and eventually make it a passive income stream? And that's a different level of thinking than just, I want to open something up and work in it the rest of my life. And as we started to organize and look at the industry, I said, hey, Chad, you want to do more kids and pediatrics? Let's go for an experience here. Because, frankly, there is nothing fun in dentistry. I looked and said, how are we going to market that? Oh, that's not fun. You know, how do you market a root canal or a filling, especially for kids? So we ended up building a dental practice all, you know, first in our heads, and then we did it which had a movie theater, a play gym. We called the kids back as prince or princess and really them part of a story. So when they went to the X ray room, it said, once upon a time, there was a chipmunk named Charlie. And it started them down this kind of side story around a chipmunk who was brave. And they would get gold coins along the way. So we tried again, make an experience distracting from dentistry. And then at the end of their experience, they get crowned. They sit on a throne. And we say, for your bravery and dentistry, we now crown you king or queen of Smile Magic. And everyone claps. And then we say, now do you have any money? And of course they have the gold coin, so they get to spend it. We give them a balloon, we get a sticker. Mom gets a sticker because she's freaked out the whole time. And this is amazing. Mom of Smile Magic. And we built that.

Now, you guys obviously sat down and talked all about this.

Oh, man. Lots of talking, lots of talking. And it was really around the patient experience. What does that need to look like? And then we talked a ton about the employee experience. And those were kind of the two customers, right? The doctor and the staff. What does that need to look like? And Dr. Evans at that point said, this is going to be bigger than something I can do on my own. What if we did this together? And I always say, my secret sauce is I found a humble dentist.

And so that's true.

That's what started the relationship, is we each found kind of our lanes and how we're going to support. There's nothing on the clinical side I could support and do well. And he knew that side so well. And so it's just. It's been an awesome partner, you know?

But, Emmett, I want to. I want to pause on your. On the thought that you guys had that there were two places where it was important that you focused, and that was on the customer experience and on the employee experience.

Absolutely.

To me, I mean, look, if there's anybody listening that's kind of in their business today. Ask yourself the question, have you spent time thinking about what you want that customer experience to be? As you said, the story that goes on in their head. Because everybody's playing a story one way or the other. It's either a fairy tale or it's a nightmare. Right. It's one of the two. And then the same thing's going on with your employees.

Yes.

And that was so clever. How did you guys. How did you come to know that that was where you ought to start lots of pain.

I have outran my team before and I've done it wrong so many times before that you quickly start to learn that if you're going to do something of scale, it's going to be with a team. It's not going to be on your own.

Yeah, that's awesome, man. What a great setup. Look we've got. We're gonna have to take a break and hear from our sponsors, but then we're gonna come back. Emmett and I want you to kind of, kind of fast forward me forward with me from concept and idea to kind of the scale that you guys have created. Okay. Can we do that when we come back?

Sounds awesome.

Awesome. So we'll be right back after this break with Emmett Scott. He's the CEO and co founder of Community Dental Partners. We'll be right back with Emmett after this break.

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Someone you should know. A program about people you know and even more that you don't. Hosted by Stuart Sachs. You will meet community leaders, movers and shakers, the people who make a difference. Fridays at 10am Someone you should know.

Welcome back. Small business owners are truly unsung heroes

who are the backbone of our free enterprise system.

Without them, our economy would be a wreck, job growth would be impossible, and innovation and forward progress would be stifled. Once again, your host of the Tour to Profit Hour, Rich Allen.

Welcome back. We're in studio with Emmett Scott. He's the CEO and co founder of Community Dental Partners. And we've been spending some time just learning Emmett's background. It's pretty amazing, right? Accounting background. He's a serial entrepreneur. He's financial expert, no sign language, has five redheaded kids. I mean, dude, you've got it all.

I'm trying.

You got the whole deal. And I appreciate that. Look, you're not the talent in this. I appreciate. It's your wife that's really the talent.

She did most of the work on that.

Yeah, yeah. You're just, you just happen to be in the area.

That's right. That's right.

So you were telling us about the, you know, I love just the concept of sitting down and just talking about what you want the customer experience to be and what you want the employee experience to be. Kind of in concept before you even open the doors to your business, to the dental practice.

Yeah, just trying to map it out, you know. You know, once you start the business, the plan starts to fall apart.

Right. Somebody smacks you in the face and all of a sudden the plan goes sideways.

Totally. You've got this great vision and there's such a fun part when you're buying the URL and doing all of those things where it is concept. But you do try to map out as much as you can ahead of time, ideally, so that as soon as it goes off track, you can look back and say, okay, why did it go off track? What did I not do? And, and you're not concerned that it went off track. You're more concerned on what do I need to learn next, you know, and so anyway, we did try to map that out as much as possible and said, okay, we really want to make a difference in these employees lives, and we're going to hire a lot of people right out of high school or right out of some certification program. We're also going to have this doctor. And when we looked at the health care system in general, one of the issues that we were concerned about is that you do get a very educated doctor, and you get a lot of codependent, wonderful staff who want to please them. And what ends up happening is you get this really weird relationship with a lot of ego and a lot of codependence. And we didn't want that to happen. We wanted a team that was really going to work well together, and we wanted doctors who were humble enough to work with their team. So one thing we did early on, as we said and when we hired the doctors, we said, just so you know, the staff can fire you at any time.

I love that. I love that.

Now, we didn't technically say, you fired,

you know, but conceptually that's a great idea.

It filtered through dentists immediately who said, there's no way I'm gonna work under that environment. And then those who said, bring it on. They're gonna love me and I'm gonna love them. And so immediately we just had a different culture, you know, day one. So there were things like that that we really tried to be thoughtful about. You know, another one was we had nine pillars. One is gratitude. But we said, how are we going to have gratitude? You know, you can say it's a pillar, and this is one of my values and virtues. But, like, how are you going to really have that in the workplace? So one of the things we did is we set up a board and we just had sticky notes, and everyone during the week could write down something they were thankful for about someone else. You know, thank you for helping me with that patient.

Thank you for helping find them, doing. Catch them doing something.

Right, right. And they'd write their name on the front with the, you know, kind of gratitude statement, and then they'd write their name on the back. And then we pulled those down each week, stuck them in a bag. And for staff meeting on a weekly basis, we called it food for thought. We would pull one out as a lottery type thing, a raffle. And we gave away a gift card both to the person who gave it and the person who got it. So you could. You could kind of win two ways, right? Well, it drove a culture of grat. People were kind of on their toes looking for, how are my teammates Helping me. And yeah, it was partly driven by one of that Starbucks card or, you know, that Chick Fil A card, but it took on a life of its own around gratitude and birthdays and everything else.

And it just feeds on itself.

It does. And when you have a good culture, a lot of other things, a lot of other noise starts to go away.

You know, it's clear you've been down this road a few times and you obviously have worked with entrepreneurs in the past. You're talking about some of the things that are foundational to having a business. Right? You got to worry about the customer, you got to worry about your employees. Culture is the bedrock. Everything works or doesn't work based on the culture you create.

And it's painful because a business is a caricature of yourself.

Yeah, isn't that scary thought Boy, Pause on that one for a moment.

You know, like, I look at our P and L and we spend a lot on food. All right, well, that's a caricature of me. I like food. We do a lot of food things. Right?

All right, I'm making a note of that one. I'm going to use that. There are going to be a few people listening here. They're going to hear me say that again. And I'm going to say, look, what's happening is just a caricature of you.

It's so painful, but it is so true.

Because if you find somebody who themselves has kind of got a Eeyore type of attitude or kind of glass half empty kind of attitude, you see that pervasive in the organization.

Yes, totally.

Right. And so, yeah, people do take on your behavior characteristics.

You know, when we wake up in the morning, we just kind of see ourselves as a regular Joe and we're just trying our best and. But everyone else in the organization, they look to us as a leader and they cue off of our emotions. And anyway, it's again, the awesome part about a business that I love because it's always reflecting back places I need to improve and get better. And also it can be painful.

So I want to know this, Emmett, because like we said earlier, right, you have this plan, it all works great until all of a sudden you start to put it in place. And then all of a sudden, like you said, you say, well, where was that in the plan? Right? It wasn't. So how much, though, how much of the plan that you guys had talked about conceptually, how much of that became reality and what parts did you have to morph or change?

You know, a lot of Things changed. So let me give just some pain points so it's not all roses. And everyone knows that that'll just make

you be human like the rest of us. Right. That bring you down to our level. So thank you for that.

So, you know a good dental practice, if they can get up to, I don't know, 200, 300 patients a month, that's pretty good, pretty solid. Yeah, 400 is amazing. Our first three weeks we saw 800 new patients, which you go, holy smokes. Congratulations, that's awesome. So they really aligned with the patient experience. We started to move quick.

That's a lot of crowns, by the way, if you're king and if you're putting crowns on queens and princes.

And we were, and we were giving out pizza and everything else, you know, Domino's and all of them loved us. You know, we were the largest order. So. So we quickly got other investors to, to help us open up two more dental practices within the same year. And we were feeling, feeling awesome. Except here's a problem in a consolidating industry, it doesn't have the right tools available dental was built for individual practices, not for multi location enterprise solutions. So now I had investors, but I had dental software that couldn't even run an AR report. I couldn't get them P and ls and pretty soon they thought I was stealing money from them because I wasn't providing them clarity. And I get it, they were frustrated.

You couldn't consolidate the different locations.

Yeah. And I couldn't even give them clarity on the practices they were investing in. It was going so fast and hard that they said, man, do we need to get lawyers involved, we need to get auditors. So it went from this really exciting experience to really painful quickly. And the amount of investment I needed to put into technology.

Right.

Started a technology company inside of this company. And the accounting side, the financial side just kind of became the new focus. We were building businesses within businesses, trying to, trying to get to a place where we could be aligned with our investors. So now I've got my customer I'm taking care of, I've got my employees I need to take care of and my clinical staff. And now I've got investors, I've got a lot of customers and some are happy and some are not happy at all. You know, and customers were now, wait times were getting really long. And so customers were frustrated with that. And so, you know, I always jokingly say we only fear two things as entrepreneurs, failure and success. Because they're both equally painful. I mean, One's a lot funner than the other, but they're both.

Yeah, maybe. Yeah. More fun in one sense. But then you feel more anxiety around the commitment that you've made.

Absolutely.

Right. So, I mean, you're right. The joy of the win tends to go away when you hit that hyper growth type. I mean, you think about companies that do go through those like you did. I mean, that's massive growth. And you have to get so involved in so many other aspects of the business. You tend to take your eye off of the customer and the employee because now you're dealing with stuff.

Right. And the operational piece starts bubbling up. Right. And now you're trying to systemize things and technology and so forth.

Great. We're scaring everybody out of here. Nobody's going to do this. Actually, most people are going. That's right. That's right. That's exactly what I'm dealing with. Right. I had a good idea, I had a great concept and then as it became reality, other things took my attention, took my focus. So how did you do that? How did you kind of come back in alignment on that?

Well, let me tell you first, it got worse before it got better.

Okay, got it. Okay, good.

So we were growing so quickly that in healthcare we were taking Medicaid as well, especially around pediatric. There's a lot of kids that have Medicaid insurance. And we were really excited about servicing that area because a lot of dentists and doctors just don't want to be in that space. And we had figured out a model that worked for both sides. We were profitable and we were able to provide them this amazing experience that usually they're not getting with that insurance. Well, the government at that time looked across the dental space and said, we see this area growing too quickly. We are going to do a huge audit of everyone who's growing fast. We were brand new.

Wow.

But we were growing fast. And this was right when Obamacare had just rolled out. And if you remember, it was going to be funded on capturing all the fraud, waste and abuse dollars. So the states had just gotten these new bills, but they didn't have them fully baked out. So they went to the dental industry and they took all the big players and fast growing and they put us on payment hold. They were able to freeze without any due process because the bill hadn't been. They were able to freeze all of our accounts.

Really.

And, but.

And you're doing a lot of business there.

We're doing a lot of business and we can't stop doing the Business. Because there's other laws that say you can't abandon your patients. So now I have no revenue coming in, but I have thousands at this point, 50 thousands of patients.

Wow. Yeah. That gets worse.

It got really bad. And if you've ever had the government coming after you, that's, you know, there's nothing that feels more overwhelming and intimidating than that.

Right. And they'll have total lack of control.

Yeah. Nine attorneys in there, literally half of them asleep. And it was just. It was the weirdest thing. I would always turn again, where was this in the business plan?

Right.

But also, like, man, only. If only we were in America. Right. Then we could have due process and it wouldn't work this way. Now, eventually, ironically, that agency got caught with doing fraud of their own, and all the leadership got terminated. They didn't come back and ever say, we're sorry to us, we settled it. It just becomes a financial. You lose all principle and you're just become financially oriented. Like, okay, what do we need to do to make this go.

Just go away?

And we. And we work through it, you know, but it was.

But you survived.

We survived. A lot of people ended up filing bankruptcy through it. But, man, I just. I just want to say it's never a straight line if you're successful. It's not a straight line. If you struggle, it's not a straight line.

You kind of just have to. Yeah. You just have to come prepared for that. Right.

You do.

And you got to be committed. It sounds like you guys were so committed to your. To your purpose, to what you were about, that you weren't going to let that take you down.

You have to, or you'll give up. Trust me. You'll give up.

Right. Because it's easier.

Yeah. I'm out. Let somebody else take care of this. Wow. But we had just too many employees and too many patients. So anyway, that's. You know, I would love to say that's the end of it, but that was probably the worst of it.

Sure.

And then now it feels. Of course, after something like that, everything feels easier.

I mean. Yeah. Hit me on the head and then doesn't hurt my arm.

Right, Exactly. Right, exactly. Normal staff issues now are no big deal.

No big deal. So. Yeah. So that's. Look, that's. That's a great story. And that's. But that's reality, right? You guys were fighting on many fronts, and then all of a sudden, to have an agency come in and engage in your business in a. In a way that wasn't helpful. Yeah. Wow.

Yes. But it sounds like every entrepreneur has some version of that story. You know, it might not be quite that dramatic. It might be, you know, an accountant who was taking money or, you know, a staff member. It might be everybody's got something they've got to navigate through at some point. You know, that's just. You got to be ready for it.

But now you're. So you've got. Now give me. Give me the size and scope of the enterprise today.

Yeah. So we're supporting 20 dental practices throughout the state of Texas all the way from El Paso and down to Kingsville and Beaumont area, you know, Harvey and Floods.

Right. Not. Not in the plan yet.

Not in the plan. And then of course, the DFW area as well.

So, okay, so they all. They now use your services or you, you consult with them, you help them run their practice.

That's right. So Dr. Evans actually owns the practices, the majority of them. Or we partner with other doctors who own the practice, and then we'll set up a management agreement with them to take all of the business pieces off

of their place so that way the dentist can come in and just simply give good dental care.

That's right. And a lot of dentists have great missions they're accomplishing. And so they want multiple practices, but they need a platform to be able to scale it. They don't want to work through the software issues I've worked through. You know, we built call centers and everything else. They don't want to do that. They want to build out three, five, 10 practices. And so we've provided a platform now for dentists to be able to do that. So whether they just want to practice dentistry or they want to open up multiple practices, they need help managing everything from the associates staff, technology, etc. We're kind of that full service platform.

That's cool. That's cool. Awesome. Well, Emmett, look, we got to take one more break to hear from our sponsors, then we'll come back. And now I want to give us a little bit of a snapshot of the future and perhaps maybe some of the nuggets of advice that you would give to folks who are maybe either in the situation that you've been in or are contemplating it. Fair enough.

Absolutely.

So we'll do it right after this break. We'll be right back with Emmett Scott. He's a CEO and co founder of Community Dental Partners. We'll be right back with Emmett after this break. Welcome back. We're in studio with Emmett Scott. He's the CEO and co Founder of Community Dental Partners. And honestly, this has been fascinating because Emmett, you've been talking about stuff that I think is so fundamental to making small business work. Right. You talked about the customer experience, you talked about the employee experience. I love the idea that to keep people humble, that conceptually the staff can fire a dentist. That's powerful. In fact, I oftentimes tell folks that that's when you hire somebody. One of the concepts is when you bring them on, you say, look, your first 90 days is going to be your orientation period. And during that first 90 days, I want you to give us your best, your absolute best. And anybody on the team can recommend that you not stay with us. Right. So you give everybody for. And then they'll go around and they'll spend the first 90 days making friends with everybody. And after they've done that for 90 days, they're in a routine and a habit. Right.

Interesting idea.

And it works. And so, I mean, so I love that you do that with the dentist. That's powerful. I love that. And your pillars of just culture that you have, your nine pillars that you have. And I love your gratitude statements that you do. So just a way to catch. Let people identify what others on the team are doing to help them. It's always better to catch people doing things right rather than catch people doing things wrong. We can find people doing things wrong all the time, easy.

There's only humans running around. Right?

Right. It's just us. And so if that's what we look for, that's what we'll see. But if we look for good, we'll find good and it'll breed more good.

Absolutely.

So that's awesome. So, okay, so you went through. You've kind of given us a little bit of the highs and lows and that kind of give us a picture kind of. Where does this, where do you see this now that you're in this and you, you've kind of mastered this in the dental community, where do you see this going? What do you see next for you guys?

Yeah. So for us, overcoming each of those challenges just built a stronger organization. Figuring out how we were going to get really good P&Ls that pull out an accounting term. We wanted them accrual based and we wanted them real time and all of those things. And then getting all the technology so that I could have the business metrics and real time metrics that required a programming team and software, etc. We built our own CRM system so that we could have a better patient experience and follow up with them better then the call center. And dividing out the call center into all the different patient experiences there that we wanted to have so that it. It didn't feel like a call center. It felt like something that was patient oriented. There was compliance. We had to build out. Of course, you get to 400 employees, you got to have an HR system, et cetera. So now it's really around taking that to more customers, first off, to more dentists. So we have dentists internally who've worked with us as associates who now say, I get how this works. I love it. I want to go own my own practice, but I want it with this platform.

Right.

So now we're helping them open up dental practices throughout the state. And then we have others who. They have dental practices and they say, it's time for me to transition out. Maybe I have too many. Maybe it's just that time as far as ages and stages, or I've got these dental practices and I'm stuck. You know, I built three. I thought I was going to take over the world. And this is hard. And man, I can agree with that. And so we're partnering with them in order to help them fulfill their mission. So we've got several stages where you can kind of see the dentist is our customer. Helping them open up practices, helping them to transition out of practices that they're ready to be done with. But they want it, you know, they don't want that hole in the community to get created.

Right.

And then those who want to expand to more practices. So that's where we're going now. And we're. We're on the road to that.

So that's awesome.

Multiple practices this year and next. Already starting to line up.

Wow, that's awesome. That's exciting.

It's fun to play in a space too, where we're changing people's smile. Right? Like, that's. How cool is that?

Yeah, that's even. Yeah, that just. That's like icing on the cake, Right. Because it's not like you're in something that really doesn't matter.

Right.

You're doing it in an industry that

really does matter, especially pediatric. I don't think that we know. Especially if you're in that middle to upper income, you may not fully appreciate this, but a lot of people don't have the oral health understanding that we have. And I think all of us can relate to the fact that when our smile doesn't feel right, then we start closing down our face. Right. And you think about that around a Child too one, if they have pain, they're not gonna pay attention. Well, in school they're not going to eat vegetables because they're too hard on them. So they're gonna go to more processed food and everyone's going to start seeing them as someone who doesn't smile. So for me, kind of at the base of all of this is when we take a child and we give them confidence around the smile, we're changing the trajectory of their life. They're gonna interview better in their next job. The teachers are gonna see them differently. And this happens for adults too. So anyway, I just have to put.

No, that's good. Thanks for that plug. Because, you know, you're right. If you're from a well to do family, you don't think about it because it's just a natural part of your routine. I've got 11 brothers and sisters and I grew up poor. I knew that that wasn't the case. Right. If something happened to your teeth when I was growing up, there was one simple solution. Pull it right.

Exactly.

And then over time, your teeth did what your teeth normally do and that's. They move into the space that's open.

That's exactly right.

And I mean, that's, you know, the cripes, that was our experience growing up. And you're right. I mean, it does, it, it influences everything. Your self confidence, your. I mean, how you feel about yourself, you know, everybody, you know, kids, other kids make fun of you and cripes, that happens to more kids than you know.

I think it's a larger. Well, let me just say that early childhood caries. Caries is the technical word for cavities. So bacteria in the mouth is now the largest childhood disease in America.

Really.

And so, you know, at the base, I think, of every entrepreneur's mission, you need to feel like you're changing the world. Right. And so for us, it's not just supporting dentists and helping them have this great life though we think that's awesome too. It's not just helping the staff though. We think that's awesome too. But at this patient level, to be able to make a difference, that's the largest childhood disease. And to help adults feel confidence at a new level, like, that's pretty cool.

You know, thanks for taking it there, Emmett. You know, there's, there is something. This is more than just a financial win.

Has to be.

Didn't know what that was for you, so thanks for sharing it because I think that's what makes you not willing to quit.

That's right.

You Know that's what I mean. One, you gotta have it. You gotta know what you want to accomplish, but you gotta know why you're doing it.

That's right.

And it's the fundamental why that's there. So thanks for. I didn't, I didn't expect that to come out of the conversation, but honestly, you've hit on so many of the fundamentals that exist in small business today. Perfect, perfect illustration. So do this for me because we only got about a minute or two left, but give us your. I mean, if you were to give one piece of advice, you've been around the block now you've done this with. You see people making mistakes. What's one thing you would tell our, our business owner listeners today? That you'd say, look, if I, if I were to leave you with one thing, one thought, it'd be this.

Okay, this is going to seem random, but it's just, it's the thing that's helped me is look at yourself and the amount of pressure and noise you have in your life. I don't think entrepreneurs respect enough how many things they're truly managing in their life. And if they look at successful people, they'll see patterns that they're doing that are really kind of subculture things that allow them to be emotionally available for the most important things. So, for example, setting up so that your clothes are all the same for the week. Okay. When I get up in the morning, I have so many important decisions to make. I can't be wasting any of my emotion around, do I have clean clothes? Are they ready? What do I want to wear, et cetera. I need to have that set out and ready. I've got entrepreneur friends who've marked all their light switches because they don't want to spend any emotional energy on deciding, is this the fan or is this the light? You know, there are little things in our life that, see when I look at going in for the day, you have that many people counting on you, the stuff that bubbles up to me is just going to be the biggest, hardest, emotionally draining stuff. I've got to do that. And then I got to come home and be available for my wife and five kids. So everything else is noise that I need to start eliminating. And it can sometimes feel a little prima donna. But the reality is, as an entrepreneur, you need to start respecting yourself that way. You need to start thinking about your body that way as well, so that you can show up emotionally for all these different things that are most important.

I love that. I love that. Thanks for sharing that. Random but awesome. I love awesome random. So how do people connect with you? They want to get a hold of you or want to find out more about community dental partners. How would they do?

Okay, so for the few dentists that might be out there, I have two podcasts, DSO Secrets and two Minds of a Dentist. So they can get on itunes or whatever they're using for podcasts. They can email me at escott for emmett scott escottp.dental and honestly, if someone wants just to text me 9402221610 feel free to text me. If you're an entrepreneur out there and you just have questions, like some thoughts, you know, random thoughts.

Yeah, perfect.

I'm happy to. I'm happy to share. So I hope you all really enjoyed that interview. As you can see, I tried to be as transparent as possible possible. The time went by quickly, but tried to share both the ups and downs of building a DSO and some of the challenges that we faced. If you have any additional questions or you just want to join our listener community, go to DSO Secrets Facebook page. We have a private Facebook page and you can go in there, see the new episodes as they get posted, ask questions, see what other fellow dentists and business people within this space are asking questions around. So again, hope you got something out of it. And until next time, keep smiling. Thank you for listening to DSO Secrets. Join our community on Facebook @DSO Secrets and get answers and resources to some of your most challenging questions. If you want to get a copy of the 7 Secrets of NEDSO, go to our website at dsosecrets.com and we will get that emailed to you. Remember, don't go at this alone. Let us be your team while you build your team.