9: Industry Mashups

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Welcome everyone, this is your fearless host, Emmett Scott. And I'm thrilled to have you on another episode of DSO Secrets. Today's topic is probably one of my favorites. Something that I think about constantly and it might be unique to just how I organize business and think about the world. And I call it industry mashups. It's really the thought process and ability to steal the best ideas from other industries and pull them into the dental and DSO space. As you look at other industries, they really have their own business specialties, these capabilities that they've developed over time in their industry that we don't completely have in the dental and DSO space, but we can leverage off of what they've already developed out their thought processes, their jargon, their systems, their organizations, and we can steal those and bring them over into our business model. So I'm gonna go through four different industries that have really influenced me, maybe give you a couple books that I thought were helpful along the way and just different jargon and maybe this will spur some thinking if you've worked ever in other industries or you have family members who have where you can take some of their best knowledge and pull it into your business model as well. So industry number one, let's start with real estate. So the real estate guys are one of their favorite words is opm, other people's money. They are always thinking of ways of how to finance deals to create a win win and how to use other people's money in such a way that those people can get a return on their investment. And the real estate guy can make an investment into the property, whether he's holding it long term or flipping it or whatever. But all of their conferences and conversations typically revolve around how to finance deals well. And many in that industry also have a very long term perspective, especially if they're in the commercial space. And so they can influence you by starting to look a little longer term. And what's the right way to buy something correctly day one and then think, think long term on that investment. They're also really good at utilizing debt and knowing what's the different costs and hurdle rates and fees that they can pay in the debt and still maximize their asset. Robert Kiyosaki is kind of one of the, one of the guys who plays a lot in the real estate space. You've probably heard of his books and series around Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I love those books. I, I, they're fairly simple, but they're really easy to consume and they, they give you a lot of valuable perspective on how to create passive income. And I think that's something else that the real estate guys really think about as they understand that anybody can go out there with, with enough ambition and, and make money. But to create passive income is a different skill set. You know that that first thousand dollars that you make that is completely off of a system or an asset that you've purchased and it's flowing in not because you're going in and spending a certain amount of time, but it's flowing in independent. The real estate guys really understand that and they emphasize that. So that's my shout out to the, to the real estate guys and some of the ideas that, that I've taken from there in the DSO space. Number two, manufacturing. Now manufacturing you might think of as a very old industry, which it is, but because of that they've developed out these really great capabilities and skill sets. It's an industry that's been totally commoditized and it has very, very tight margins. I mean these guys know and measure everything. Metrics are everything to them. They oftentimes are working on tight margins of a half or 1% and they're just hoping that volume overcomes how tight their margins are. They're also very focused on how to protect and maintain their assets. They have to have a schedule around all their machinery and ensuring those assets are taken care of. And I've, I've pulled that concept when I think about my people as assets. What is it that I am doing to ensure that I'm protecting and maintaining my assets? Now one of my favorite books around this is written by Eli Goldratt. It's called the Goal. This is probably one of my favorite books in business in general. And I know a lot of people like E. Math by Michael Gerber and that's a great book. But the Goal I have utilized way more. And it's really how do you analyze systems and processes to figure out where the true Bottlenecks are there's so many things that you can work on. There's things you can work on personally, there's things you can work on professionally, things within your practice, things within your DSOs. But how do you prioritize those and what should be worked on next? What is going to create the best, best throughput, the highest output? This is something that in the man manufacturing space, they have to be very good at. They're also really good at working with multiple vendors, you know, just in time. Concepts of making sure they don't have too much inventory, but always have enough inventory to meet customer demand. So that's my shout out to manufacturing. I really respect everyone who plays in that space and I think that there's a lot of great ideas to bring over into the DSO space. Okay, next one is online marketers. And I've talked about online marketers from a perspective of what they do and really defining their customers. I talked about this on a previous podcast and that really is probably their core capability is they, they have this empathy and this intensity around really understanding how their customers think. Now because they're playing online, they're able to test different visuals, different copy. They really know how to, to utilize good wording. And it's called copy copywriting, to influence people to take action. And they have to do this without being in front of them. They have to do it through the visuals or through a video or through their long writing. If any of you have seen those sales letters that they create and they do a lot of ab testing, they never think of themselves as doing one thing and then they're done with their customer. They're constantly saying, well, what could be better? How could I make this customer experience less friction, have less friction in it and make it easier for them to buy? Wow, there's so much from that that we can take, right? They've really made marketing and sales a science. They've also shown us the importance of authenticity. You know, online marketing got away from really larger broadcast marketing. Larger broadcast marketing was very clean, very, we call it professionally done. Online marketers didn't have that kind of money and capability. And so they started reaching out to people just through, you know, Facebook live videos and YouTube of course, being one of the first. And they found that people were really drawn to authenticity. So there's a lot we can learn through the online marketers to go out there, take some risks and be authentic and the right customers will come to you. So there's online marketing. Last one I would say, is it in general I mean this industry is on the opposite end of manufacturing. They are constantly dealing with the speed of innovation. If you have any industry that's constantly figuring out how do we systemize, organize the reality that we could be doing anything. I mean if you're a programmer today, you could be working on the next Uber, you could be working on the next online this or online that, or automate this system. And now with two 3D printing and robotics starting to integrate in like there's so many fields you can do. And so when you think about those different business models, their biggest challenge is not, you know, well what, what can we do? But more around what should we be focused on? And not just broadly as they decide on their product or, or what their business model is going to be, but internally, every day they have to decide what is the highest and best use we should be working on. So they've created project management processes like Agile and waterfall. And these things help when you're a fast moving company to know how to organize and stay on track, to not become too add where you're spending your time and resources in a lot of different shiny projects, but not getting the ROI and return on what you're looking for from those because you're not executing fully. And there's a lot of companies that struggle with that. So it's really good and the development space is really good about how to stay focused. They also have this concept called minimum viable Product MVP that creating something should, when you're creating something new, it should reach a minimum standard where users and customers can start to utilize it. But then you should iterate from there. You should get customer feedback. They're not ones to say let's do a 10 year plan and build out this perfect software. Because by the time they're done building out that perfect software, one, they may have missed a mark with the user. And number two, the whole world's changed in 10 years for them. The whole world changes every 12 months to two years for them. So they have to be very quick, very agile in being able to deliver products, but at the same time stay focused. So when you start to mash up the capabilities of real estate and how to finance deals and how to utilize the money and the team around you to create passive income. When you take from manufacturing and the tight margins that they work off of and their systems and processes that they have to constantly analyze to make better and more efficient so they can squeeze out the next piece of margin that might exist. And the online marketers who are so sensitive to their customer and constantly iterating and figuring out how can I make this customer experience better and then it which is moving so quickly and yet has to stay focused in their innovation and their automation and all the capabilities that exist there. This is the most awesome mashup to take from these and then bring this over into this very new space called DSO and say where are areas from each of these that we can be better with our customer experience, that we can be more systemized, that we can move more quickly but also stay focused and how should we be organizing and financing our deals to ensure the best win win for everyone involved? So there's industry mashups. If you all have any questions or thoughts, I'd love to hear them on our private Facebook page. For listeners DSO Secrets search that. Come join us and until next time, keep smiling.

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