60: Insourcing vs Outsourcing with JW Oliver

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of DSO Secrets. I'm your fearless host, Emmett Scott, and I am so excited for our guest today, JW Oliver, managing partner of Support dds. Jw, thank you for being on the show today.

You bet, Emmett. I'm glad to be here. Excited to hear more about what's going on. I listen to the podcast, and even though not a lot of dentists, it's great information as well.

Well, thanks for being on. You know, we try to give our listeners kind of two things. One is I try to pontificate on anything that I'm figuring out. Overcoming a CEO and just being in the space talking to other CEOs, other dentist owners, and then we try to bring them resources, individuals like yourself who are really figuring out how to help them overcome some of these. So I'm excited to have you to talk through common problems you're seeing. And you've been in this dentistry space for quite some time now, right? I mean, tell us a little bit about your history.

Yeah, I've been in the dental equipment or the dental industry since 1986, all the way right out of. Fresh out of university. So I've been involved with it. And then just a few years ago, I was introduced to the potential to open a business outside of the US and this is where it all kind of came into play. So here I am in the outsourcing insourcing space of dental, and that's how we got to know each other as well.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, let's talk about outsourcing. Insourcing. So what would be the difference between those two? Just going right into it.

Yeah. Well, outsourcing is where you would hire an outsourcing operation or organization not affiliated with your company who would perform specific tasks that could be just answering your phone or rerouting calls or taking messages or even building websites, things of that nature. Insourcing, on the other hand, is more of a business practice performed within your organization and your infrastructure. What we're able to do is take those projects, those tasks that are sorted out to various companies and bring those into your company. So insourcing is definitely a better fit for what we're doing than actual outsourcing.

What do you think is the pros and cons of outsourcing versus insourcing? What do you get out of outsourcing that you don't get with insourcing? And what do you get with insourcing?

Well, yeah, I think outsourcing, you have a little less control. You're typically buying a specific task or a specific function within your organization and you're placing that with another company. You'd be involved with the training of that and possibly even the management and oversight of that. But you're truly outsourcing a specific task. We're insourcing. That's probably the biggest part for us to get across is that you're responsible for the training, you're responsible for the daily management of that person's work. However, we're going to manage all the back office functions as well.

So, I mean, if we zoomed out and didn't care where people were, because sometimes we overcomplicate it by making geography part of the conversation, which in reality, in today's world, geography is becoming less and less of a barrier. Outsourcing is really just using any kind of vendor solution where they have a process or system.

Right.

And you're outsourcing because they're in another country or they're in another state. And so you're not doing it maybe within your four walls or even your support center type walls. You're outsourcing it, but you're utilizing. To your point, you don't have as much control because you're utilizing their process and service. If they've got a call center, they probably have somewhat of a scripting process. If they have a billing center, they have a process that they're doing that you might be able to tweak it, but you're getting quote unquote trained individuals that are following a specific system. And that can be hard for some companies because if you have really specific ways that you want things done, then outsourcing that and trying to tweak their system can become somewhat of a mess. Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, I think what you hit on is flexibility. We've had a lot of customers who start with us, and they may be doing a specific task, let's just say the insurance verification piece, and they Want them to. We had one just recently wanted them to answer the phone outside of normal hours or while they were on their lunch hour, extended hours. And so it's the flexibility in my mind that you're able to utilize that resource which really becomes part of your team, a team member on your group that you can utilize for either a specific and very targeted task or expand that so they can do multiple tasks. And you're right, Emmett. I mean, the people are really already using outsourcing today. We have people that may have an office in Dallas, Texas, but they've got employees working in Phoenix and New York and even out of the country that are full time employees. And most people don't even realize where they're working from. So it sounds complicated, but it's not complicated.

Yeah, insourcing, then you're really hiring them on your team. They're an individual. And your company support, DDS really sources those individuals from a geography. Right. And then they're part of the team, they're attending trainings, things like that. Is that what insourcing looks like?

That's exactly right. So we actually let our customers select who they want to have work with them. So rather than just saying, okay, we've got this one person or these five people that are going to work in your pool of players and maybe it's going to be a rotate. And the difference in what we have is that you actually get to interview, do a video conference and maybe you use three or four people and you select the person you want to work on your team. So it's very personable rather than just a set of resources that you're using in a pool.

Okay. So you're doing an HR kind of funnel, getting some initial resumes around the job description that's needed and then doing some kind of initial filter before handing those off.

Yeah, right. I think in the dental sphere the basic things are like the insurance verification, the scheduling, maybe the unscheduled treatment plan. So we'll ask the office, you know, what are they looking for? And it could be even accounting. We've got some accounting management styles and even some bookkeepers or payroll processing. So we'll determine what it is they're looking for. We'll get a set of criteria that they have. We'll then source resumes for them or as they say, overseas CVs, and we'll resource those for them, we'll send them to them, set up a video conference, and usually through Zoom or Ringcentral or one of the programs, and then they'll Actually go through the interview process, ask them a question, see if they're a good fit and then make the hire based on that information.

Okay, great. And where do you in source from? What are the countries or location or place that support DDS primarily pulls from?

Yeah, we're based out of Zimbabwe, Africa and that is actually right above South Africa. So if you went to the bottom of that continent and came up, we would be just bordering on South Africa. We're based in Harare, which is the main capital. It's country's about 11 million people. There's 3 million people living in the metroplex there, if you will, of Harare. And so the benefit that we, the reason we selected there, my partner is actually from Zimbabwe, but the reason we selected there was their English. English is not only their first language, but you got to imagine I always say that you're speaking to the Queen. It sounds like you're speaking to someone from London. So they have this very nice, easy to handle accent. And that was the primary reason. But then above that, if you take the 54 countries located in Africa, Zimbabwe ranks either 1 or 2 depending on which one you're looking at for university educated staffing. So really almost everybody that we have working in our office there in Harare has a university education. So you could compare that to somebody here that's coming out with a four year education at University of Texas or wherever. So it's very similar that you're getting that skill set.

As you put out opportunities. Do you find that you get a lot of applicants? What's kind of the employment unemployment rate and what's the opportunity there?

Well, I was quite surprised when I got into this a couple of years ago, but the unemployment rate there is 8,0. So that's 80% and it's kind of hard to imagine. So you have this high unemployment rate. But with parents, the number one thing they want to do is get their kids educated. They know that's their only hope, that's their only salvation to really be able to move on to the next level. So they make sure they give them an education, put them through that four years of university education. And that's why we end up with a really good pool. So for one particular applicant or one particular position, we may end up with six or seven hundred resumes for that as well. Now the dental is a little bit different because we specialize through support DDS specifically on the dental side, we keep about 10 to 15 trained at all time through our dental training program. It's just a short Two week program they go through but it gives them a good overview of the four main practice, you know, open dental, legal, soft practice works and different primary practice management softwares. And then they'll learn the basic skills for customer service, insurance verification, unscheduled treatments

and how to work.

And then they're managed by a team leader that has experience in that as well. So yeah, so we not only keep some trained specifically for the dental industry, but we also have a good pool to resource from if we need to look at it or social media or web design, things of that nature.

That's really helpful to you. Is there a reason Zimbabwe? It sounds like your partner was from there. I know lots of fellow CEOs are utilizing resources in India and Philippines. Is there something unique about Zimbabwe versus there or.

Yeah, I think there was two factors. Number one was the education rate. It was definitely was a God thing that we were hooked up with. My partner because being in Zimbabwe, he obviously has a very good understanding of the environment, the economic situation as well as the business acumen, what it took to get started and the difference, the primary difference, I would say when you look at like India, the Philippines, where you have the biggest outsourcing, those wages have actually began to rise. So you're seeing not only an uptick in the cost of wages there, but there's a lot of competition. A lot of those positions have become hard to fill as well. Philippines as an example is completely saturated and there's a lot of shifting of a team from one company to the next. But I think the biggest aspect was the English. These other countries do a great job, but with what we do and what we have, we're able to. I think a lot of people are surprised when they hear the word outsourcing or insourcing. And then we put them on the speaker and the video conference with one of our team members and they realized, wow, these people speak perfect English and better English than my old southern accent. So it helps a bunch.

So you're not out judging. What do you think? Is there requirements for a company to be able to do this? I mean there are some technology. If you're going to in source quote, unquote, someone on your team, you need them to feel part of that team. Right? So I mean, I guess in theory you could do this over a phone with the conference call, et cetera, but ideal would be to have some kind of video conferencing capability.

Oh yeah, absolutely. And that technology is pretty readily available as you know, for anyone at a reasonable or free cost. The biggest aspect or biggest hurdle I would say that we overcome is the training. We do give them a basic understanding, but we have to let dental practices, whether it's multiple practices or whether it's just the single dental office, that it requires some training. We recommend one hour every morning for the first two to three weeks for you to set the understanding of what they need. You know, Emmett, it's no different than if you brought somebody into your office here and locally you can't put them at a desk and just expect they're just gonna run with it. There's gonna be some one on one, some hand on hand training. And so that's what we have to biggest obstacle. We probably have to jump over kw.

I think you just disappointed a lot of our listeners that you just told them they have to start training their employees.

No magic. No magic.

And how often, especially early on, where you just hire someone and say, all right, training's begun, here's patient number one. You know, so. But yeah, this is.

Why don't you understand how to do this? I don't understand.

Yeah, you've been here for an hour. Okay, great. So you do need to set up some kind of cadence to train these individuals and think of them as part of your team. So no different than if one of your team members said, hey, I'm moving to X state and I'd like to keep working virtually. Right. You need to set up all the technology now, Internet and speeds and everything else. You're able to achieve that, to be able to have video conferencing and logging into practice management softwares and all that. You can, you can do that?

Yeah. We've got tremendous security protocols. I might add that when they go through the training, all of our team members get HIPAA certified. So they do go through a little course. Our Internet is second to none. We've got triple redundancy on our incoming feeds. We've got one from South Africa, one that comes from the north and one even from Australia. So we've got real good structure in place. And then we do give everybody an ample amount to carry on a video conference as well should they need to. Now if they get into multiple, where they're needing high end, eight or 10 or 12 people, then we may have to up the allottable amount of megabytes as well.

You're able to do that?

Yeah, absolutely.

Give us an idea. If people are like, wow, this sounds really cool. But on a practical basis, where are your customers coming to you from? Is it one location or 100 locations or where is the kind of the break points where you're seeing, you know, the need just to give us some kind of ideas of case study here.

Yeah, I mean we, we've got, I would say probably still our bread and butter. Is that that single office where, well I say single office one to three, where they're managing one, maybe a couple of remote offices and, and that, that's where we've been able to take a lot of those front desk staff. You know, we say it's elevating your team because you have your front desk who is constantly having to handle not only the incoming patients, maybe the checking out of the patients, but they're also still having to be on the phone answering the scheduling, the insurance verification, maybe having to make follow up calls. So we believe that it not only elevates your current team and you can do this within a single practice or you can do it within multiple practices. We're now Emmett, we've been in the business a couple of years under our corporate name, which is Global BP Solutions. But the support DDS emerged after some beta tests with a few dentists and for the last year we've marketed it as a support DDS and it's quite frankly is our biggest growing and our largest book of business. And we've got over 100 dental offices that are now being supported through our services and it's continuing to grow each month. So we think we've got a real good service for even whether it's a small practitioner or if you're running 60 or 80 offices already.

And what kind of tasks are they typically trying to insource?

The bread and butter stuff as I mentioned, has been the insurance verification, the scheduling of patients, unscheduled treatment plans. Hygiene recare has been a big one. We've got a lot of bookkeeping, accounting, we've got a few people that have ventured into the website, social media design phase of IT and a number of companies that are looking at our IT support. There's a lot of high level IT support, so it's been varied. But that bread and butter is that insurance verification, scheduling and hygiene recare is really where most of our offices have been able to offload that work so that their team can focus on what they need to focus on.

And really anything, I mean billing team credentialing, anything that someone could do remotely, whether that's down in another city, they could do from there, Correct?

Yeah, that's exactly right. That's exactly at a fraction of the cost. I think that's the point that drives home most practices, whether it's an individual or whether it's multiple practices, is looking to keep their overhead at a certain point or a certain percentage, as you know, and everybody here knows. And our fees are running about 1,250 to $1,500 a month. That's a flat fee. We don't do any long term contracts. We keep that. If you're not happy with us, we sure wouldn't want to be a part of what you're doing. And we think that we offer great customer service and great teams for your, your offices as well. But we don't want there to be any catches in it going forward.

So if a team member, you know, I do my interviews, you know, I interviewed three or four, I hire one of them. You said I'm paying somewhere between 1,250amonth to $1,500 a month. That's all in, right? With burden and everything else tax, there's no other fee that I pay you. And let's say I'm a couple weeks in and I'm like, whoa, I made the wrong. I chose the right. They interviewed well, bad skill set. How does that work? Do I say, hey, you're fired or how do I process that?

Yeah, that's actually happened on one or two occasions where we've hired somebody. It just wasn't a good fit. And on both the times that it actually happened, we were just able to provide them with a new team member that came in and replaced them. So that's been an easy fix. Now we've had a couple that, you know, when you really look in retrospect, that didn't put in the training that needed to and it was not a good fit for them. You got to be able to put in that training, but that's been way less than 1%. It's been a real hit from most offices. Again, if they'll allocate that time to do it. You know, the biggest thing a lot of people ask is when do they work? Because there is a six or seven hour depending on the time of year, time difference, but they're working the same hours as you. If you want them to come in at 8 o' clock and work till 5 or 7 in the morning till 4, they do work a 40 hour week. Again, it's the same person. You've interviewed them and they're dedicated to your office only. So they're not working for multiple locations or multiple clients as well.

Okay, yeah, they're my quote unquote employee.

Right, that's right, that's right.

Source Solution. So kind of going back though to this hiring firing process. Am I taking care of that as my hr. Do you have someone on the HR side? Do I call your HR person? How does all that work?

Yeah, so we've got what we call an arm. Arm, it's an account resource manager and it's your liaison between your team there. Each arm has 20 to 25 customers and so if you had Jenny and she's just not working out for your office, we would ask you just to contact your arm, contact me or any of our salespeople, and we'll handle it from our side. So it really makes it easy from an HR perspective. You're not having the, well, not only you're not having all the matching payroll and FICA and everything else that goes along with hiring or the physical workspace, benefits, health insurance, but we do handle the HR function, which is the initial interview, initial hire, placement. And yeah, if we've got to have a termination, then we'll handle that as well.

And then if I say, hey, I really liked candidate number two though as well, you know, if they're still available, you guys can spin that person back up for me or say, hey Emmett, sorry Jenny, didn't work out. Here's three more resumes. You know, let's get on and get the next one hired.

Yep, that's right. Yeah, we would try to. And our process is pretty quick. You know, Emmett, if you said to me today, hey, we're needing somebody in our office to handle some back office work, whether that's accounting or one of the verification processes, we can usually interview within two to three days. And within a week we can have that person up and running and integrated into your office and then it goes back on to you to do the training and to do the follow up as well.

Yeah, you've hit on that a few times. I think it's a really good point, which is this isn't some kind of magical wand where, you know, I've hired a team member that's not going to need any contact from us or any kind of cadence or meeting schedule. I mean, at the end of the day there's still a team member that needs to be part of the fold. So I either need to have some kind of manager director that's bought into this and who is driving those huddles and everything else, or I need to be owning that on a consistent basis, but sticking them over on an island and expecting results, it doesn't work in America and it doesn't work in Zimbabwe.

Well, it's interesting you mentioned about having your team buy into it. I think there's no doubt either the office manager or typically the doctor, he's really interested in our products and services and then he turns it over to someone in his office. Well, they feel threatened by this and they're like, oh my gosh, we're gonna be outsourcing, insourcing all of our products and that's not the case. We're not trying to replace any staff, we're not trying to, to move people along and make a substitution. So you mentioned something that's important. They have to buy into it. If they can get their team to buy into it, then it's just a win win, no doubt about it.

Yeah. From previous experience in other industries where I've seen insourcing, outsourcing type solutions, one thing I'll just put out there for listeners who happen to be team members as well, is the more you embrace this and can lead through it, oftentimes the opposite is what happens, which is the doctors, the owners start to say, hey, let's go to Frank or let's go to Susie here. She really knows how to drive this in source solution. Oftentimes if you're bringing costs down in one place, it opens up the door for you to have raises on your side. I've seen that many times. It's fascinating to watch people with a scarcity mindset work themselves right out of a job that they didn't need to. And those with an abundance mindset see themselves elevated to lead another group of people forward.

That's that kind of, that protection, protection mentality. I'm going to protect everything I do. But typically you're protecting a lot of tasks that your doctor or your management didn't want you to do in the first place. You're just doing them and they need to be offloaded to someone else on the team.

Yeah, that's excellent. Well, anything else that you think would be important for our listeners? Just resources, tools or things about your, your services that you think would be meaningful to them?

Well, I do think there's one big point and I know we've talked on it in some meetings in the past, but ours is, I want to say that ours is a ministry as well. When you've got a country that has 80% unemployment, very low paid wages, but yet you have a desire for them, and this is a Christian community as well, you've got about 96% of them confessed as Christians and they really want to lift and try to do better for themselves and their community. So we call it a win, win, win. It's a win for the person receiving the new team member for the dental office. It's a win for the person that gets the job. And then my partner and I have committed to giving 51% of our profits back to different ministries and locations. So we work with. When we were there last time, I took a couple of docs over with us. Just a couple of weeks ago we were able to go work with mothers who had handicapped children. Most of them had cerebral palsy. And there, there's no internal support for these people. There's nothing for them to be able to reach out to for government assistance. So they're actually looked on as outcasts. Like the children must be possessed or demonized because something's wrong with them. So we're turning around and really helping the communities. Helping. We helped with the cancer walk in Zimbabwe this last weekend. We worked with a company called Global Action. So I think it's important to understand why we do what we do. Not just what we do is that we really see that this is a ministry and for us to help those who need a little hand up as well.

Jw, thank you for bringing that up. Having the bigger why is always awesome

and I apologize, I should have made that the first comment.

No, no, no, it's good. It's actually a great one to end on too. And a good reminder for all of us is you got to have a bigger why of value that you're bringing. So I like having that third win.

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, we do too. We love it.

Alright, so if our listeners are interested and want to kind of see if this is a good fit for them. Some it will be, some it won't be. Give us some contact info. Where's the best place to reach you or to find out more info?

Yeah, you can just go directly to our website. It's supportdds.com you can reach out to us through our contact there. We got numbers. You can call and speak to any of our salespeople and call me direct. My number is 940-704-8774. If you're really interested and want to talk about it, shoot me a text. I'd be glad to take the time to talk to you about it as well.

Awesome. The website again, supportdds.com okay, awesome. Well JW, thank you so much. You're also active on our Facebook page at DSO Secrets, so appreciate your comments there as well. So if people have additional questions, they can come there as well and ask. So appreciate your time today.

Oh, thank you. It's an honor to be on here and tell our story a little bit. We appreciate it.

All right, everybody. So if you want more information, go to those contact info or come over on our website at DSO Secrets. And until next time, keep smiling.

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