79: Dental Practice Embezzlement: The Threat You Don't See Coming — An Interview with David Harris, CEO of Prosperident, a Dental Embezzlement Investigation Firm

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 right out of 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. Happy day to you and welcome to another episode of DSO Secrets. I am Ken Kaufman, your host today, filling in for the illustrious Emmett Scott. Now, I'm thrilled and excited to introduce today's guest, David Harris. He is a cpa, a certified fraud examiner, and he is known as dentistry's embezzlement expert. And he actually recently published a book on this subject, which we're going to reference throughout the interview. He founded Prosperident in 1989 and has grown it into the world's largest dental embezzlement investigation firm. David, thank you for joining the show today.

Thanks, Ken. I'm thrilled to be here with you.

Now, I do have a confession to make. I'm a little bit nerdy and geeky around things like this, and I did read your book cover to cover. I liked it so much, I shared it with other people in our organization and I'm not sure that they've all read it cover to cover yet. But we have implemented some of the concepts and principles and we've shared them internally. And David, you've come and visited our organization before at Community Dental Partners in the past. We just, we look up to you and appreciate the services that you're providing the dental industry. I wanted to get started off here with right at the beginning of the book. I love how you tell the story about how you just kind of accidentally fell into this line of work and career and, you know, ultimately entrepreneurship and building a business around this. Would you mind sharing with the listeners that story of how you, how you got started into dental embezzlement and fraud investigation?

Sure. Well, it started when the phone call came to my house and there was nothing I could do about it. This was from my high school's principal to my parents. And basically the upshot was that it was time that the school and I stopped wasting each other's time. So suddenly, at the age of 16, I found myself free and easy and Got into some trouble fairly quickly and the police were visiting the house with some frequency. And finally I had to make a choice. And the choice was green or orange, orange being what you wear in prison. And green is the color of the army. So orange didn't really fit my complexion. So I chose green.

Good choice. We're glad you chose green.

Well, so am I. And after about four months there, it was kind of like somebody flicked on the light. All of a sudden everything made sense. And from there I had a terrific career progression. I ended up moving up quite far in rank, getting a taxpayer funded education. Eventually I left the army. I went to work for a bank. I lasted there about four years and I got really tired of just watching them make the same mistakes over and over again. So I was sitting at home trying hard not to think about my future when the phone rang. And it was a guy who I had been in high school with in my brief visit there, because I, I made it about halfway through my, my sophomore year. Anyway, this guy was now a dentist. And the purpose of his call was that he said that I think my receptionist is stealing from me and I just don't have anybody else to call. So his timing was perfect. This was August of 1989, which is before there was such a thing as a PBR and there was nothing good on tv. So I said, okay, no problem. I'll meet you tonight at your practice after it closes. So I went over to his office. This was before practice is computerized. So it was the old pegboard system that preceded computerized practice management software. And it wasn't that complicated. I figured out what she was doing fairly quickly. My friend asked me to come back in the next morning to help him fire this woman because he didn't want to face that job alone. And I helped with that. I walked away with a vague promise by him to buy me dinner. That I will point out, has never materialized. And I just didn't think much more of it. You know, that was kind of interesting, but I certainly didn't see a career for myself. Two weeks later, lightning struck. And what happened was I was going into my own dentist office for a scheduled appointment and I had my hand on his front door and I was about to go in when I looked through the glass. And sitting at his front desk was the same woman I helped fire at the other practice two weeks ago. So I spun around quickly, hoping she didn't see me. I probably said a couple of times things I wouldn't repeat in polite company. And I ran to the nearest payphone, because in 1989 his cell phone was like the size of a briefcase. And called the practice and got put through on a bit of a pretext and got the doctor on the phone, told him about the time bomb that was ticking away at his front desk. And he hired me. And by the time I finished his work, the local rep from Henry Schein had realized that somebody was doing this and had a couple of other clients who needed it. And so away I went. So that's how I got started. I had no business plan, I had no name to call myself. I had nothing. And suddenly I was in business. Well, we're now 31 years later and our staff is now about 25 people. And you know, we're a much more professional, much less thrown together organization than the way it started.

That's an amazing story. Again, hearing you tell it even brings it to life from the way that you wrote it in the book. It's fantastic. And the amazing thing is in the world, when there's a void where value is needed and there's a void, as soon as somebody fills in and steps in and starts to fill that void, all of a sudden others are going to come on. Right. And so you had a business on your hands before you really knew it. And you know, dentistry is only about $120 billion industry here in the United States. And then when you add on globally, that probably could almost double the size of it when you look globally. And so there's a lot of opportunity here. We'll talk about some of that here as we go. And I want to make one thing very clear before I go further with listeners. And David, I appreciate that you brought this up in your book early and you referen it a few different times. And it's the fact that you have to draw this fine line between educating practice owners, DSO executives, anyone that's involved in helping to try to run a practice or manage a practice or provide services to a practice. There's this fine line between educating them about fraud and embezzlement, but then being careful to not over educate those who may be bad actors or potentially bad actors or on the road to becoming a bad actor. So could you maybe talk about and how you draw that fine line not just through the book, but even, you know, because I know you're active on the speaking circuit throughout the dental industry and so on.

Absolutely. And actually, Ken, we have a very detailed policy on this. We divide venues into a couple of different categories. So we either have what we think of as A controlled audience or an uncontrolled audience. An example of a controlled audience might be speaking at the Adso or, you know, at the Academy of Dental Group Practice or something like that, where the door is closed and who's in the room is known. And in those cases we'll be very candid about things like methodologies. Then we have uncontrolled audiences. And the book would be an example, because I ultimately can't control who buys the book. And for that matter, I really have no control over who's listening to this podcast. So when we're in an uncontrolled venue, then we will not talk about methodologies. There are a lot of other things that I'm happy to speak on, but we won't talk about how they do it or how they conceal it or how they teach your practice management software to lie.

Outstanding. Thank you for clarifying that. I know that would be a concern potentially of those listening in and but warning to those who potentially are thinking about bad actors that there's still a lot of good education that's coming the way of their practice owners.

And if you're an embezzler and you're listening, you know, you may as well give up now because I'm just not going to give you anything. Good.

Perfect. But please, like the podcast. I'm kidding. So I realized that, you know, your organization and the way that you write the book, it's very focused on that individual practice owner and our listener base are sometimes they don't even own a practice yet, or they're in the process of owning one practice, or maybe they're thinking about growing to a second practice all the way up to. We have folks who listen into this podcast who are part of supporting well over 100 practices. And so could you maybe take the ideas and concepts or explain to us how, how can what happens in one doctor practice where that doctor is the owner and they're involved in touching everything that's happening in that practice every day? And how do DSOs need to be thinking about dental embezzlement and fraud? Maybe differently than that one doctor practice where they're the owner and touching everything during the day. And what risks do you see around the DSO space or group practice emerging? DSO space?

That's a tremendous question. Embezzlement in a solo practice happens because the thief is able to size up the control system that's in place and find a way around it. And one thing that will probably surprise some of your listeners is that it is a much more adaptive kind of interactive process than people believe. In other words, a lot of people, when they think about this problem, have a very simplified view of how the embezzler thinks. And from kind of daily contact with these people, we know that it's much more, as I say, interactive than that. So embezzlers seek out the weaknesses in their system. That's true whether they're functioning in an owner operator practice or in office number 98 of a big DSO. The basic process is the same in some ways. There's more opportunity in an individual practice simply because a lot of the dentists who own practices are, I think I can describe them as reluctant business owners. You know, they're clinicians first and business owners second. And they find the job of running the practice and performing a little bit of internal audit far more tedious than what they consider to be their real job, which is giving people great smiles. When you move from that to a dso, you suddenly move to a case where the management view themselves as business people first. And the clinical part is important, but not necessarily their focus. So you get to a situation where they tend to be more willing to pay attention to certain problems than an owner operator. On the other hand, they lose some things. You know, you can sit there with a day end report and an individual practice owner and they can go through it and say, yes, I did that filling. Yes, I did that filling. No, that was a for service filling. And it's only billed here as a three service. I mean, they can look at the report and, and see what's wrong with it when you move to a dso. Now, typically the people doing the work and the people owning the DSO are different. Or if it's kind of an ownership model, the people who are doing the work are very much minority owners. So the majority owners, the controlling shareholders, if you like, are remote from the day to day goings on in an individual practice. And some of that scrutiny that an individual owner operator can bring is a lot harder to do in a DSO. The other thing is a lot of DSOs have centralized various functions. So accounts receivable tends not to be done in individual practices anymore. It's been aggregated and recall and accounts payable and so on. So now you've introduced extra layer of activity and embezzlers will sometimes find opportunity there that just wouldn't exist in a solo practice. So if I work in the payroll department of a dso, do I have an opportunity to tamper with payroll? The final thing, Ken, is that

it's

probably safe to say that almost every DSO is continually in transition. So if you look at how they start, you have somebody who's a really good dentist and people like them, and they're magnetic and they run one practice really well, and then they say to themselves, okay, well, if it worked for one practice, you know, it'll work for two. And they go to two practices and then five and then 20 and so on. And of course, systems are almost always trying to catch up with growth. In other words, people are running a 20 practice operation on the systems that worked pretty well for five, and there's a mismatch there. And that mismatch creates an opportunity.

Thank you. That's. I really appreciate taking time to call out some of those differences. And definitely, as DSOs are growing and scaling, this can be a part of the business that's overlooked, not considered or thought about until sometimes it's just, you know, way, way too late. I wanted to go, and I'm going to jump to chapter 10 of your book here for a minute, and I want in that chapter, you talk about this process of daily and monthly reconciliations, balancing the books, activities all around, you know, reduce, or how these activities can help reduce the risk of fraud. So can you talk about, how do you see dsos? What would this look like in a DSO if you were to list out what are some best practices that a DSO should be thinking about that they could be doing on a regular basis to reduce some of this risk in their organization?

Terrific question. There are two ways that people steal. The first way is that if they sense that the reconciliation process is incomplete or not done at all, what that gives the thief the latitude to do is to steal money without needing to tamper with individual patient accounts. In other words, if the practice management software for allocation says that there should be $6,700 going into the bank today, And I think that nobody's really watching that but me. Let's say that I'm the site manager. You know, if I can get away with only depositing $6,200, that's exactly what I'm going to do. On the other hand, if I think the reconciliation process has integrity now, I can still steal, but it becomes more complex. And now I need to find a way to convince the software to under report the amount that should be deposited. In other words, $6700 really came in to the practice, but I want the software to tell head office that it was only 6,200. So the takeaway from that, Ken, is this. If you don't do a good, thorough Practice by practice, reconciliation every day. You make it easy to steal.

Great.

If you do reconcile properly. And I'll talk in a second about what that might mean if you do reconcile properly, you can be stolen from still, but you've made it a lot harder and you've kind of weeded out the low end of the people who might steal from you. So in long winded answer to your question, the important thing for a DSO to think about is we need to be able to access individual practice software to get reports. And a lot of DSOs use open dental because they can write the bridging software that will aggregate. But if you're using something else, and I think my nightmare if I were running a DSO would be to have five different practice management softwares happening in different locations, which is not uncommon if you're growing by acquisition. But you know, I need to have independent access to that software. In other words, I should not rely on somebody from the practice to generate reports and say, upload them to a shared folder like onedrive or, or Dropbox or something like that. I need to be able to independently access this stuff, generate reports and confirm that the financial activity that actually happened corresponded to the reports.

So David, do you think that a DSO that does have practices on different systems, do you think that increases their risk in any way or so long as they've got people who can log in and download those reports, you don't really see an increase in risk.

I think it increases the workload that's required to manage risk.

So you can still get minimizing the cost to mitigate risk and getting the full benefit.

Yeah, I mean you can still get the same information. It's just that if you're, if you're all on one software, and I mentioned open dental simply because that seems to be the first choice of a lot of DSOs. You know, there's lots of other good software out there, but if you have a platform where the information from individual practices can get properly conveyed to head office and aggregated, that's a lot easier to function with. But you can, you can still get the same information out of kind of a diverse array of practice management softwares. It's just that you now have to put some, put some dollars and people on the problem.

Great. So the next question I want to ask, I want to start by sharing with you what I felt like was my favorite quote from the book. I literally picked it up and copied it and put it in my notes for today to read to everybody and share. I love this phrase. And statement, because in all my conversations, interactions with you, you're a direct person. You've got that amazingly funny, dry sense of humor, and you love to just kind of hit the point, hit that nail right on the head. I'm going to share the quote, and then I want you to talk about why you feel like that quote's true. And then if you could dovetail that into this fraud triangle that you spell out in the book and you go through and talk about. Because I think it dovetails really nicely into it. And I'd love for the audience to understand your thinking about that fraud triangle that creates that perfect environment for somebody to take advantage of the organization. So here's the quote. This is. I'm quoting the famous David Harris, who's here with us. He says, if you do not think you are at risk of becoming a fraud victim, then you're likely at risk of becoming a fraud victim. Tell us why, why you said that and how that all dovetails into that fraud triangle

that really hits something squarely on the head. When we talk about DSOs, when I talk to groups of DSO people, Ken, one of the things I say is the biggest danger to you is hubris, meaning overconfidence. A lot of DSOs, especially the really big ones, kind of have the mentality that we're big, therefore we must be smart. And that's dangerous here. Thieves are incredibly creative.

And,

you know, to think that simply because we have a good accounting department and that department, you know, makes sure that we reconcile every practice we own every day to the penny, and therefore, anything, therefore nothing can't be happening to us is dangerous. It. It absolutely can. And we have seen over 300 different ways for practices to be embezzled. So there are lots and lots and lots of ways to do it. And it's totally possible to do even when reconciliation is done and is done properly. So in terms of the triangle that you mentioned, for the benefit of the listeners, there was a criminologist who

wrote

a lot in the 1950s and 1960s that has really shaped how we think about white collar crime. And his name was Donald Cressy. And Cressy hypothesized that there are three preconditions to economic crime, which, of course, embezzlement is a subset. He said that, first of all, the thief must be under pressure. So sometimes it's financial pressure. You know, maybe this person is two months behind in their mortgage and they're about to be thrown out of their house. Sometimes it's emotional. They maybe have watched all their friends who open businesses and are entrepreneurs moving ahead more quickly than they are. You know, maybe it's a spouse who's. Who's pressuring them to sort of improve the family's economic circumstance. But it starts with pressure. The second ingredient is called opportunity. And what I'll just gently tell your audience is if I work in a dso, I have various opportunities. And the third ingredient is rationalization. And rationalization happens when I say to myself, you know, I know that I've been told since I was 2 years old that it's wrong to take other people's things, but in this particular circumstance, it's okay, because. And then they will give some justification for breaking what they know is kind of a fundamental rule of civilized human behavior. When we look at pressure, opportunity, and rationalization in the DSO concept, pressure relates to the individual employee. It has nothing to do with the environment in which they work. For the most part, opportunity is the one where I think a lot of DSOs underestimate their exposure. And then there's rationalization. And I'll ask you, Ken, if I work for a solo operator and I work 50ft away from her all day and she signs my paycheck versus I work for something that I perceive to be this big monolithic entity, and I've maybe never even met the owner or the owner's Wall street money, in which case, is it easier for me to rationalize stealing?

Yeah, it's a fair question. And you're right. It starts to point toward regardless of how amazing the culture is and everything that's done that rationalization and everything that's done to help the employee feel included and connected to the vision and where the organization is going and what it's growing to, the bigger it is and the more removed they are from who they view as the owners are, whose pocket it's coming out of, it could be a little easier to rationalize.

It absolutely is. And criminologists will talk about this concept of victimless crime, where the crime is committed against what the criminal perceives to be a big, wealthy entity. And, you know, nobody feels bad when the IRS sends them too much money by mistake. You know, nobody who I know is really in a big rush to correct that. Or, you know, some. Some big insurance company, Delta Dental. If Delta ends up making an error in your favor, I know very few people who are going to feel really bad about that. So most DSOs are somewhere in the middle. But rationalization is easier. And the other problem that every dental practice suffers from and I don't think DSOs are immune either, is that staff typically considerably overestimate how much the profitability the practice really has, whether it's a solo practice or a hundred office dso, I think for the most part, staff think that it makes far more money than it does. You know, they tend to equate gross revenue with net income and they sort of forget about overhead, even though they're part of it.

That's so true that gross to net dialogue. They might see a dental practice that is collecting $100,000 a month and think to themselves, wow, this place is rich. But by the time you get through paying the wages that are due, the associate doctor, if there's one in place, hygienist, all your other operating costs, utilities, marketing costs, everything to make the practice go, there's generally not a lot left over. But for an employee who's never been taught or trained what a P and L is and how that works and what's really left, at the end of the day, they're left to believe, oh, well, there's $100,000 here.

And yeah, and the other thing that they don't necessarily grasp is the level of business risk that's being assumed. And, you know, I think that came home to a lot of your audience in the past couple of months. And listening to this after the fact, we're talking early in July of 2020, right after the COVID crisis, and you know, there were a whole lot of employees who were still getting paid by somebody, whether it was the DSO or the government through all that. And there were a whole lot of owners who were probably sweating bullets.

That's right.

So, you know, it's. The dollars of profitability aren't necessarily even the best, the best measurement. I mean, you also have to relate that to the level of risk.

That's right. Well, because at the highest level, an owner of any business at any point in time could decide to not be invested in that business anymore and go and invest in a different business which would have its own set of risk criteria. And generally speaking, the level of risk you want to expose your money to, you would expect a higher and higher return, the more risk you're exposing yourself to. That's investment theory 101. But when I'm working in a dental practice and there's just all these things going on, that isn't necessarily top of mind. So I want to jump back on the fraud triangle. So you've literally been in thousands of dental practices between you and your team and worked with thousands of providers how often when you're called in or when you're doing some consulting or some type of engagement and you find embezzlement or fraud, how often are all three legs of the triangle existent?

Every single time.

Without fail.

Without fail. Now, I don't think we can turn it around the other way. In other words, we can't say if those three ingredients are there, that absolutely, positively, embezzlement will happen. But it really can't happen without those three things.

There's one other part I want to reference from the book, and then we'll wrap this. This episode up with a few. A few things I think the listeners will really enjoy as well. But you talk about this concept of I'm from a small town, and you categorize there are a bunch of lies that dental owners and DSO leaders are telling themselves when they say, I'm from a small town, that doesn't happen to people like me. Those things don't happen here. And some of the justifications I think they've made, some of it being the hubris that you mentioned around that quote of if you do not think you're at risk of becoming a fraud victim, then you're likely at risk of being a fraud. Could you maybe talk about some of those lies and especially some of the lies you see maybe circling in the heads of DSO executives, leaders, owners?

Absolutely. So to give the background of the small town, what I was talking about was when I talk to practice owners about embezzlement, a lot of them want to say something to me that tells me that they believe they're safe. And the one that Ken quoted was, you know, I practice in a small town, and really, embezzlement is an urban problem where, you know, you end up hiring people that you don't really know. But in my small town, most of the staff who work for me started as my patients, you know, and conceivably their parents started as my patients. So, yeah, it's. Nobody loves to spend all day worrying about the risks that they face. So they tend to come up with some arbitrary rules. And another one that we hear sometimes from practice owners is I'm an orthodontist. And really, embezzlement is a problem that afflicts general dentists, but we're pretty safe from it. Or my staff have been with me for a long time, or we have a really good accountant who goes over our books at the end of the year very carefully. Those are the kinds of things people will latch onto to tell themselves they're safe from this and none of those things are true. We have seen some outrageous embezzlements in small towns from longtime employees. We have seen situations in group practices where one doctor steals from another. We have seen spouses embezzling from practice owners, usually as an antecedent to divorce. But that might be a whole topic for a different show.

Absolutely.

But embezzlement happens for one really basic reason. Somebody who works in a practice wakes up one morning and they decide that that's the day they're going to steal. And embezzlement is a very selfish crime, Ken, in the sense that it has a lot to do with the thief circumstance and they give very little thought to who they might be harming or, you know, what, what kind of damage they might cause by this. So it's, it's kind of ego driven in a lot of cases. And you know, they're the rules that people give me all relate to their situation and not the embezzlers. In other words, no would be embezzler says, well, I'd like to steal, but I live in a really small town so I can't. I mean that just is not remotely how they think.

Great point. It's really helpful. So I want to have you hit Dave, because we our listeners now maybe, you know, they got some things going through their mind or maybe they're thinking about checking some things. What would be, you know, the one or two or three recommendations you'd give to those listening of like some actual action items they could take away to go and figure out where they're at as an organization and figure out how they might be able to improve their situation Again, because in many ways, if they are taking steps to make embezzlement more difficult for employees, in some ways they're protecting their employees because I've always operated under this presumption. I think you'll agree with this, David, and it is that locks exist to keep honest people honest. Meaning if you put the controls and you put those things in place, it will help motivate people to remain honest and not feel tempted when there's something is not locked. Over time, if that safe is not locked and you know there's a lot of money in it and you look at it every day and then you know, you have the three sides of that triangle all kind of come together and it's beautiful trifecta format, that temptation becomes too great to steal. So I'd be interested in what you would tell our listeners to do to help protect themselves and their employees from that temptation of engaging in this type of illegal behavior.

You raised an interesting issue, and it's one that's been debated hotly for a long time. Is embezzlement a crime of opportunity or not? And by a crime of opportunity, I mean an impulsive crime.

Mm.

If it is, then what you just said is perfect. You know, all we need to do is make the practice a more difficult target, and we should reduce embezzlement. Mm. I tend to believe that embezzlement is a much more premeditated crime. And the thing about a premeditated crime is, again, I'm going to start by studying my adversary, which in this case is the. The DSO owner. And I'm going to understand the systems that they have in place, and I'm going to look for the weaknesses, and they're. They're almost always there somewhere, and I'll exploit those weaknesses. You know, the hard target kind of approach, I think has been taken from other types of crime, like burglary. So if I'm walking down your street and my plan is to rob your house, I get to the front door and I hear the Doberman barking inside, or I see the alarm sticker or the NRA Life member sticker on the door. The question is, what do I do next? Do I give up my plan to rob houses and go home and join the church choir, or do I just go to your neighbor's house, and if it looks a little less defended, then I go in and steal your neighbor's stuff? In other words, the basic premise of the hard target kind of approach is we can divert crime to some other entity. And that's true in burglary, because a burglar really has no particular attachment to a house. It's a little more complicated in an embezzlement scenario, because if I work for your DSO and you thwart the first couple of ways that I think of to steal from you, that's probably not going to encourage me to quit my job with you, go find a job with another dental organization, and start accumulating the knowledge that I'm going to need to steal. My workaround is far more likely going to be, okay, so those first three ways to steal from Ken Kaufman's DSO didn't work. What's approach number four and five and six? Hmm. In. In other words, if. If the factors are in place and if I've decided I'm going to steal from you, then I'm looking for an outlet, and the fact that you have a lock on the safe isn't going to Send me to the church choir.

That's a great point.

And I know that's probably a more cynical view of the world than. Than a lot of your audience.

Hey, but you.

You was born with.

But we want you to bring that to us because you see it every day and you know, that risk every day. And it's helpful because we like to live in our, you know, growth and take over the world mentality sometimes, and we forget there are some of these dark corners where bad things can and will and have and are happening. You brought up one other point I've just got to bring up that I just remembered from the book. And one of the. I think it was in maybe one of the lies section. I can't remember exactly, but it was about, oh, I can trust my employees. They've been with me for a long time. But you, you know, they've been with me for five years. You know, he's been my practice manager for the last five years, or she's been my assistant and FA for the last five years. But in your book, you said there seemed to be a correlation between the amount of time an employee has been with you in your organization, the likelihood of them doing something, you know, that we're talking about here in today's show. Can you maybe just comment on that briefly, how that works?

Absolutely. I'm not sure it changes the probability that they'll steal.

Okay, maybe I didn't mean to miss.

What does change, though, is the dollars they get away with.

Okay. Okay.

And I'll give you some basic numbers from our case files. The average amount that somebody embezzles in a dental practice to the point where they get caught is about $109,000.

Wow.

However, if you look at employees who have been there 10 or more years when they start stealing, the average is $173,000. Interesting. More senior, more trusted employees have more opportunities. They function under less oversight because you trust them. And when you think about the way that humans address the concept of trust, it's kind of interesting. I mean, when you meet somebody for the first time, what goes through your mind a little bit is, well, you know, does this look like somebody I can trust? And if the answer to that is yes, you lock it up. And you never, ever revisit that unless they do something manifestly terrible that makes you want to rethink it. But for the most part, you know, you shake hands with somebody, you decide you like them, and your evaluative sense kind of disappears right there and never comes back. Whereas I, the Cynic. And just so your audience knows, we cynics refer to ourselves as realists. I, as the cynic, think that trust needs to be a little bit of a fluid concept. In other words, it's one that needs to be reevaluated, not simply decided initially and, and never thought of again.

That's great perspective. Thank you. And our listeners are going to get so much value from this discussion. Thank you, David. We're now introducing something new in the DSS Secrets podcast. So you're our first guinea pig on this, David, and it is what I'm calling the lightning round. So we've got a series of just a few questions, relatively quick answers. We're going to blow through these and then we'll wrap the episode up. What are you currently working on, David?

We are implementing a new project management software in our organization called wrike. And you know, what we do has a somewhat repetitive nature and we want to make sure that we get the steps right and the sequencing right. So we've implemented that software and we're just kind of working it through now.

Fantastic. We've just done something as well in our organization. We ended up going with Monday.com and we're pretty excited and thrilled with it. I'm not familiar with yours. We'll probably have to take a look and check it out. Not your software meeting. I'm just referencing the one that you guys chose to use for your project management.

Certainly.

All right. What are you most proud of?

My son. He's an 18 year old guy about to start college.

Did he make it through high school, by the way, or did he follow in dad's steps?

One of the things I'm most proud of is that he's very little like me. He took the, the school's top award for athletics, academics and leadership.

Oh, wow.

So not remotely like me in that way. So he's off to play college basketball in the fall. He's a great athlete, a good student, and he's got some empathy and some people skills, so I'm very proud of him.

Good for you. Yeah, and deservedly so. Well done on that favorite sports team.

Well, the answer was his high school basketball team. But I guess if we're, if we're talking all sports, I'm gonna give it to the Toronto Raptors.

All right. All right. And what college is he playing at? Just so we can watch for Harris out there on the floor.

He's gonna be in Canada, which is where I live and where our head office is, and he'll be going to The University of Waterloo in Ontario.

Very nice. Congratulations. All right. Favorite hobby?

Like to cycle.

All right. Road bike.

I have a road bike and a cyclocross and a mountain bike and I like them all.

Very nice. I have road bike and I just actually bought a mountain bike. So I've gone to, you know, I'm out of the singular bike ownership world. I've gone into the dual ownership. So I still have to catch up with you. There's favorite app that you use on your phone,

it's TripIt. It keeps track of travel stuff. You know when you, when you book just about anything online, you just forward the confirmation email to TripIt and it will take it and build itineraries for you. And if you, if you travel a lot, it is a fantastic app.

That's awesome. I know I used that in the past. I've gotten away from it.

I should re look that up again if you, I travel, I think had 109 airplane rides last year and you know, you're trying to remember like you know, who did I rent my car from this time and stuff and trip. It's just wonderful for that.

That's when you're waking up in the morning and you can't even remember what city you're in, let alone what hotel you're in.

Yeah.

And the last lightning round question. What is your favorite spreadsheet function?

Oh, it is called Benford's Law and it's a, it's, it's a test that is designed to tell whether a series of numbers is random or contrived.

Outstanding. So that's an application you drop into Excel and you can run it.

Yeah, it's a, it's, it's a built in function. You can, you can run a Binford test on, on a series of numbers and it will give you the probability that they're, that they're random or generated some other way.

Very nice. I'm sure that's helped in your profession a great deal. I love it.

We use that a bit.

So in wrapping up David Parting final advice for DSOs and group practice owners and aspiring group practice owners.

Yeah. I will quote Ronald Reagan, the great communicator Trust, then verify.

I love it. And David, if listeners want to get a copy of your book, which I fully endorse, I've read it. Like I said, I've shared it with folks in my organization. If people want to get a copy of that, where would they go? How can they find it?

It's available on Amazon. It's called Dental. The Art of Theft and the Science of Control. But if you just go onto Amazon and search Dental embezzlement, it'll come right up. If they want to reach me, they can do that either our toll free number, which is 888-398-2327 so 888-398-2327 or they're welcome to email me. And once they hear it, they shouldn't have any trouble remembering the email. It's David. And our website is the same domain, www.dentalembezzlement.com.

i'm imagining there wasn't a big line ofpeople for that.com domain.

Well, we do have four or five competitors. They're all considerably smaller than we are. But yeah, I'm sure some of them were kind of wishing they got there first.

Very nice. Well done David. Thank you so much for joining today. I hope all of our listeners have found some of the same value level of value I've found from this discussion. Hopefully it's opened some of our minds to things that we need to think about to better protect our businesses and help protect our employees. Many, many thanks to you for joining. This is a wrap on Dental Embezzlement with David Harris. Happy Foreign.

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