Emmet Scott on the Entrepreneurial Mindset That Brings in $150 Million in Revenue

If you look at all business industries, and this is probably some empathy for your entrepreneur dentists out there and every dentist owner. But if you look at a factory, the reality is there's kind of humans at the top, but then it turns into like robot manufacturing and the product itself is a tangible item. If you go to a service industry like your lawyers, accountants, etc. You've got people at the top, you got people producing, but then it's a tax return, it's an estate plan, etc. You, it's only healthcare that you have humans at the top, humans delivering the service and humans are the product.

All right, welcome back to the Dental Economist show with me, Mike Huffaker. Before we dive in today, just a quick reminder, if you're enjoying the show, be sure to like, subscribe, Leave a review. Your support means a lot and it helps us bring insights to growth minded dental professionals everywhere. Today I am very excited to welcome Emmett Scott, a leading voice in dental entrepreneurship and in the dental industry as a whole. Emmett is the CEO of the Dentist Entrepreneur organization, better known as deo, co founder of Community Dental Partners, host of the DEO Growth Secrets podcast, and author of the bestselling book DSO Secrets, the ultimate guide to building your dental empire. So involved in just a few things. Emmett, super excited to have you on the show. How is everything going?

It's going awesome. Great to be here and man love the dental industry. As you were reading through that, I was thinking back, this all started because my best friend from the age of two who's a dentist said, I'm an associate. I'd like to open up my own practice. Do you think you could help me out? And I was like, sure, happy to. At the time. I had a radio show called the Entrepreneur Life and I was just helping entrepreneurs scale to the executive level. I realized like, there was a ton of resources out there to be an entrepreneur, but not a lot to be an executive. Anyway, long story short, that's what sucked me in. And 70 practices later, 150 million in revenue, we had gone a little bit deeper into dental than I think I was or he was imagining when we first set out. So.

No, that's. That's awesome. Let's talk about that a little bit more, actually. So, so when was that?

That was 2010.

Okay.

And yeah, he just really wanted to open his first practice. He was a great clinician. He has seven kids, fluent in Spanish and so he really, he was in Texas and he really wanted to help and had been serving in like the pediatric Medicaid market. And so that's where we started. When I first looked at dentistry, you know, from the eyes of like a consumer, I'm like, hey, just so you know, like, everyone hates your industry. Like we, we literally have terms in English when we're describing pain in our life. We say it's like getting a root canal. It's like pulling teeth. Like, we use your industry to say that our life sucks, you know. And so I said, marketing wise, this is not like people lining up for iPhones. If you really want to do this, like, I would do it kind of different than everyone else. So we ended up doing a practice where we put a movie theater and a play gym right in the front. We built it all around this, this mascot, Charlie the Chipmunk. By the way, since I have like six kids, he has seven, we were able to use them as like our, as our focus group. And like the boys really liked dragons, but we were imagining like seven foot dragon coming out. Like that wouldn't be good. The girls loved bunnies and we're like, ah, the boys are going to beat up the bunny. And so chipmunks for whatever was like this perfect gender neutral. And then we made him a wizard and stuff. We built the whole practice so that it had like this whole story theme. We actually had an artist come in. Now once we started scaling, we had wallpaper made that did it. But she hand painted like the whole story of Charlie the Chipmunk in each operatory. And we had it where the kids got called back as prince or princess. They got gold coins along the way. And then at the end we crowned them for their bravery and dentistry. And they got, you know, do you have any money? And they got to spend their money. They got a balloon, a sticker, all this stuff. And I just marketed the heck out of it to like local radio. Like, we're doing dentistry differently anyway. We had a thousand patients the first three weeks. So we were just like off to the races and might be onto something there. Yeah. So I was like, hey, we should do a second one. And he's like, I don't know how to do that. And I was like, well, that I know how to do. I don't know how to do the clinical. Can you scale the clinical? So anyway, that's really how I got born. And like in nine months we had three locations all doing like 4 or 5 million bucks. So it was like, okay, wow. It was at that point, I'll just real quick, I did say, hey, do you know what these DSOs are because I hear they're really. This is 2010. I hear they're really evil, and I want to make sure we don't do that, you know?

That's right. That's right.

And so that was kind of a interesting moment where I had to, like, dig in. I'm like, like it on paper when I say dental support organization. I think that's what I'm doing. Doing with you, but I don't want to do it the evil way. So I actually started a podcast because I had had a radio show, so I thought it would be an interesting one called DSO Secrets. I'll just tell you, Mike, the only reason was, number one, so I could share what I was doing to see if I was doing anything wrong. And then, number two, it allowed me to interview people. So kind of like this, like, you can call anybody and like, hey, you want to be on my podcast? So I was like, hey, do you want to? And I just started interviewing, like, large DSOs, small ones, individual dentists, people in the marketplace. I mean, anything I could mostly to just figure out, like, what's the right way to do this. I did realize, like, it matters about, like, what culture you build and autonomy of the clinicians and all that stuff. So there was a right way to do it, but. And then I ended up taking all that info and kind of put it in a book called DSO Secrets. Anyway, that's how I got into it all, so just trying to figure it out, you know, so you.

You got to pressure test your ideas through conversations on the podcast.

And.

And to. To some degree, what were some of the things that were surprising to you that you maybe thought were the right way of doing things that ended up being the wrong way?

Well, right out of the gate, I was really interested in why clinicians were so concerned, because, again, dental support organization sounds like taking care of kittens. Like, it doesn't sound evil on its own. So in interviewing people, what I found was there was this tension that was really interesting between autonomy and mentorship. So on one side, the clinician would say, I really want to make sure I have autonomy, which makes sense. Like, I don't want my heart surgeon to be told whether they should be doing surgery on me or not. You know, like, I want them to have autonomy. On the other side, though, clinicians really wanted mentorship. They didn't want to be on their own. They wanted to be with other clinicians and working with them along the way. So I think I quickly realized, like, if you can strike that balance, if you can Be really clear too, up front of like, hey, here's the standard of care driven by our clinicians. Do you want to be a part of that or do you not? Like, if you're doing pediatric, you can't have a dentist who takes three hours to do a fill. You know, I mean, it's just so. It's like there is a standard of care. It just has to be driven by a clinical leader. And so that was number one that I thought, okay, that's how you thread that needle. You have clinical leadership. You get. You're really clear upfront on what's best for the patient, and you provide mentorship to the doctors, and they can opt in and opt out. The. The other thing that I uncovered quickly is there was a misconception that private equity was coming in and, like, taking over dental practices. I. I still hear this today. The interesting part is that's not at all what's really happening. What's happening is entrepreneurial dentists are trying to figure out how to have a bigger impact. They run out of money from banks, they need private equity. And what I realized was dentists are very in control of this. Like, this idea that the dentist is a victim of it at all just isn't true. That might not be popular, but if you, if you double click on everything. And I like that story actually better because I don't like thinking of dentists as victims. I don't think they are. I don't think you go through eight years of schooling, become a clinician, and then somehow you're an idiot and you're being, you know, bedoozled by everyone. I just didn't find that to be true. And so I. I found that anyone who kind of ran with that story, and, you know, for a short time, Ada kind of ran with that story, it did not play out well because the entrepreneur dentists felt ostracized and so they. You know, I was actually Adso president, right, during COVID Did a lot of outreach with Ada, and I think we're very much on the same page. Like, they want to support entrepreneurial dentists and so forth. But, yeah, I think those are a couple of things that were like aha's for me. And at the end of the day, what's really cool about this whole thing, like, with what's happening in the industry, it really is choose your own adventure for Dennis. Like, they get to choose whether to do something on their own, whether to go with one of these dss. And there's so many different support. I Mean, there's name changes, like, I'm a dpo, I'm a dmo, I'm a dio, I'm an invisible dso, right? Really underneath it, they're similar. Where they're different is like, maybe culturally, the way they support, et cetera, which I think is cool. And you can see it like, dentists get to choose, and capitalism still works. And people can say, I don't want to work here, I want to work there. There's no, like, indentured servitude. Right. You're not stuck.

That's a good way to look at it. I like, from the very beginning, you were like, well, service organization sounds like maybe the thing that we actually should be doing. Like, these are all the words are the. Are the right words to be using. Kind of speaks to the nuance as well, with how people execute. And you already identified, you know, culture really matters and what somebody's doing. When you were launching Community Dental Partners, did you ever have a notion that would grow to where it grew? It sounded like the first practice became successful, and you're like, let's do another. Was there at some point where you said, well, now we have this goal of being X or Y, and how did that kind of mature and grow as the business grew?

So just to back up to and maybe put a pin on that last point, I also found that the moment a dentist hires an associate, whether they like it or not, there's some form of a dso. And what I mean by that is, like, that associate does not want to do payroll. That associate does not want to do tech, does not want to do hr, does not want to do collections, RCM processes. So as a dentist owner, the moment you want to have any bigger impact than just what you can do clinically, you have to build out. I mean, even if that's like the office manager is your dso, you are supporting another clinician. They are not expecting to do that stuff. So, again, I think this starts way earlier than people think. I don't think it's about having 50 locations or 10 locations or a thousand. I think the moment you want to have a bigger impact than you can do on your own, you have to step into some level of support and leadership. I mean, that is leadership. Right? So, you know, back to your question. No, the plan was to do one location, help him out, and then it was like, oh, there's a huge need here. Yeah, we should do a second one. Oh, my goodness, we should do a third one. And it was kind of like the way you have kids. It was just kind of one at a time. And then at some point you're like, wow, we have a lot of kids. So. But. And then you kind of get into this. This virtue cycle, if you will, if you're like, well, we have this many locations. We really should probably like, build this infrastructure to support them better. And then you're like, well, now that we have this infrastructure, we should probably, you know. And so you just kind of patiently move it along. And, you know, for us, over 15 years, we were kind of. It ended up being. We were adding about $10 million of more services until we were seeing half a million patients, patient visits a year, and, you know, 1300 employees, and you're like, wow, we have a lot of kids.

So was there a point for you when you kind of had some epiphany that, like, I'm going to spend a lot of time in this industry like this? Actually, I have a lot of passion for this industry, for dentistry. You know, when you first started, you were kind of like, hey, here's. Here's the industry that people have drawn analogies to, that we use expressions related to pain. And like, you know, there's all these challenges with it. I think a lot of us that got into dental were a little surprised with, you know, how taken we got with the industry over time. Was there any kind of moments for you where you were like, this actually. Actually is a special place to be or that kind of caused you to recognize, like, this is where I want to spend my time?

It was interesting. Before I started in dental, I knew I wanted to go over into healthcare for a really weird reason, because it's the most complex. And if you look at all business industries, and this is probably some empathy for your entrepreneur dentists out there and every dentist owner. But if you look at a factory, the reality is there's kind of humans at the top. But then it turns into, like, robot manufacturing. And the product itself is, you know, a tangible item, car, whatever, a little product trinket. If you go to a service industry, like your lawyers, you know, accountants, et cetera, you've got people at the top. You got people producing, but then it's a tax return, it's, you know, an estate plan, et cetera. It's only healthcare that you have humans at the top, humans delivering the service, and humans are the product. You know, they are part of this. And that's really. When you add humans to anything, it's like exponential complexity. And so I think every entrepreneur out there is really into personal Development. I think that's why they're in. Entrepreneurship is like the ultimate crossfit of personal development. You're like, I can do, you know, overhead presses and they're like, okay, great. Can you do handstand push ups now? You know, like business just pushes you. And I think dentistry is one of the most complex. I think it's actually more complex than a lot of other healthcare generally, partly because it's not fully built out. It doesn't have the same infrastructure on the business side. And so, yeah, I have a lot of empathy and a lot of respect for entrepreneur dentists and their teams because what they're doing and the impact they're trying to have is complex. And there's a lot of moving parts. Like when someone says, I want to get out of the chair, they think of that like a light switch. Like, I'm in the chair, I want to get out. Getting out of the chair means you're dropping into five different industries. Now you're into marketing, operations, hr, compliance, tech, you know, finance, et cetera. And so it's kind of frying pan into the fire.

Now, before you got into dental, you said you were coaching entrepreneurs just in another space. Then your friend calls you launch community dental partners, becomes this huge success, and you found your way still to coaching and helping others. How do you think about, you know, your, your time as being an operator and you're still an operator with the, with the do, and how does that kind of resonate with what you have internally, which seems to be a drive to teach and mentor and coach others?

Yeah, I think, I think all entrepreneurs kind of get to that point where they realize the job of leadership is how well you can influence another human being. Like, you can only do so much. I mean, if there's a skill set that's kind of the meta skill that all of us are learning, it is how do we influence each other to do well, to do good. And you know, in the beginning, as an entrepreneur, if you kind of look at the stages of growth and we can kind of get into how DEO thinks about this as well. But everyone starts off as some kind of professional or technician, whether it's in construction industry or a dentist, it's the same. If you're really good at that, customers come to you like, wow, you're really good at this, right? And then what ends up happening is you're like, oh, well, maybe I should have a business around this, or maybe I should expand my business and you kind of start stepping into this entrepreneurial world. Where you're working really hard, you're really smart, you're kind of the smartest one in the room. And it's a hub and spoke system where everyone's kind of coming to you. And it's kind of cool because like this need to be needed is really high, you know, and a lot of dopamine hits a lot of like problem solve, problem solve. And so that's cool. It develops you quite a bit and then it starts breaking down because if you're good at that, the world rewards you with like more humans to manage, you know, and then you realize like that entrepreneur skill set isn't good enough and you actually have to move from. So you went from like clinician to entrepreneur and now you have to move from entrepreneur to executive. And that's a big jump. There's three things that I found to make that jump. Number one, your understanding of financials has to go up exponentially. It's amazing how many dentists who come into do, I'd say the majority, if not all come in and they're running a multi million dollar business at this point. I mean if you're doing a million, 2 million single practice, or you're one of our groups that's doing 10, 50 million and you say to them, awesome, let's pull up your financials. Well, you know, my accountant's busy right now doing tax returns, which by the way, accounts make so much money off tax returns, they usually aren't a good place to have your books done, okay. Because they're always going to be delay. So getting your financials done accurately is really big deal for us. And we have a specific way we organize the chart of accounts so that people can see real clear where their gross profit is, where their net income is. That part gives you so much capability and leverage. I think because we took so much risk as an entrepreneur, we actually think we have to stay in this place of risk and work off of our intuition. And it's not true. It actually becomes business growth actually becomes very mathematical after you've taken that initial risk. Even if you're just a single practice, you can mathematically scale from there. But most people are stressed out because they don't have the data they need to make the decision. They're still trying to do it off the entrepreneur way of cut. And they're like, can I give a raise? Can I, how do I do bonuses? And. Or they'll layer in like a, a KPI solution, your dental intels, your Jarvis, your practice by number, whatever, and they're in a place, what I call KPI Delusion, where it's like they have the KPI, but it actually doesn't tie to a P and L anywhere. So it's like they hit green. I gave them a bonus. I'm still losing money. You know, like, you see this interesting cycle there. So the number one skill set we teach is how do I organize? How do I read my P and L so I can lower the stress? At that moment, boom, stress goes down because everything becomes logical. Number two, you have to organize your projects. So as an entrepreneur, like, I see a problem, I fix a problem. See a problem, fix a problem. It does not work on scale. So I have a little acronym that I teach, which is called I dope. Like, not I actually dope, but I dope. So I is every one of your ideas, everything you see as a problem or opportunity needs to be documented, then organized. I e scoped out. So if I say, hey, I really need to fix my website, do I mean, like, I need to put online scheduling or like rebranding? What do I mean by that? So organized and then prioritize. That by far is the most critical part. So most entrepreneurs who are overwhelmed right now, if you ask them, so what do you have going on? They just, yeah, so much. That's not using constraint theory. The best CEOs and all the studies by McKinsey, Bain, et cetera, have one skill set. They do really well. They make investments. So they know the roi and they go, yes, as a company, we could be doing these 400 things. We're going to do these two well because they have the highest return on investment. You can do that on a single practice. You just have to be organized. So I dope. Every idea needs to be documented, organized, prioritized, then executed. On most entrepreneurs go, idea, execute, idea execute, burn out their team, increase turnover. Feel like, man, I'm talking about this stuff all the time. No one's really doing it. All of that cultural issues is entrepreneurial energy. And it's like, it got me here, but it just won't get me to the next level.

So it becomes a mechanism for you to ruthlessly prioritize the 20% that really, really drive your. Your business.

Yeah. When someone says, like, I want to do strategic planning most of the time, as entrepreneurs, we think of that as like innovation. Like, I got these cool ideas. I want to do strategic planning. I got. I'm going to come up with the next iPhone. The best executives. Strategic planning is. No, no, no. We have tons of ideas. Strategic is prioritize those ideas. So which ones are we actually going to kill or not do or let the fire burn? That takes a lot more maturity. Like, my AR suck. But we're not going to work on that right now because this is more important. You know, like, that's a lot harder to do. It just happens to work better.

I also appreciate. I was looking through some of your podcast library before we had this call, and I think it was maybe your podcast 1520, maybe 25, but it was about Ido. And so, you know, you've found a framework that's super effective and a way of communicating to help others also implement it, and you stick with it, which I think is super important, because so many people jump from one new thing to the next new thing to the next new thing and have a really hard time identifying, like, hey, this is actually incredibly effective. Let me just. Again, it's kind of the issue of focus. Let me focus on this.

Which I know.

Which I know works.

It's tough because the dopamine really loves new stuff, you know, the new shiny. And let's be honest, to move. Let's say you were an associate and you took the dramatic risk of becoming an owner, and you got rewarded for that by your practice doing well. You've kind of hardwired now this thing of, oh, I just need to keep taking dramatic risks, right? Like, oh, if this isn't working, I know what I should do. I'll add six specialties to the group, you know, or whatever. Versus, like, oh, well, maybe I need to, like, operationally just get better. Maybe I need to be a little more patient. Maybe I need to articulate better with my team. Which, by the way, that's number three is being able to lead others is its own skill set. And it's not an entrepreneurial skill set, by the way. Entrepreneur skill set is to, like, inspire others. Like, that's cool. That sounds awesome, right? Until you're doing that a lot, and then your team's like, you suck. I hate that you keep coming up with ideas. They don't say that to your face. They say that behind the scenes, like, oh, here's Emmett again with his new brilliant idea. You know, so. Or they. Or even worse, what happens is like, okay, I know Emmett asked me to do this, but if I wait till next Tuesday, he'll have a new idea so I actually don't have to execute ever. You can train your team not to execute because you're just constantly coming up with new ideas, Right?

Definitely been guilty of that before.

Yeah, all of us have done it. That's it. That's how we know. So how do you break those three skills?

You know, how do you, how do you break that approach? Like what, what are some of the, the keys to doing that differently? I guess I. Dope is probably one of them.

It is. I mean, I sound like a broken record because I come back to it so often. But if I can document things and then align my team around those and around what they're doing, et cetera, and we can get clear on scope. Most things aren't getting executed on because people don't feel the confidence that, number one, they really understand what you mean. And number two, that you're going to have any follow through to hold them accountable to it or that you really feel like it's important. I mean, people don't want to waste their time. And so what happens when someone, like when you first hire them, they like hear you and they're excited and they go work on some and you never talk about it again until like six months later. And then you're like, hey, where are we at on this? But you've talked about 400 things between now and then. And so I'll hear entrepreneurs, they'll be like, I've been talking to them about this for six months. And I remind them talking is not project management. Like talking is not leadership, you know, So I listen for things that I say too that just kind of expose my immaturity in my leadership, you know, I mean, my dopamine wants the new thing and to do new things all the time as well. And so things like this start to hold me accountable. It's kind of like the third party in the room. Because now my team could be like, emmett, that's an awesome idea. They'll document it because that validates me. And they'll be like, so tell us a little more about this. And I'll tell them all that and they'll organize it like, okay, he means this. And then they ask this magic question, so when are you thinking to get this done? Right now. Since I only talk in present urgent tense, everything sounds like tomorrow, you know, or yesterday. And so they know to ignore how I'm talking about it because it's all excitement. But oftentimes I'll be like, oh like six months from now. Oh like a year from now, like, okay, great. You know, it just goes right there. If I do say like, I think we got to do this now, then they get to say to me, awesome, we're going to move this as number two. Let's just pretend that means number two is going to become number three. Number three, are you cool that these things are not going to get resources and not going to get done? So now I have to decide on opportunity costs. Knowing that the team's been working on it, knowing they've invested x amount of. And sometimes it is like it should be reprioritized. Something is moving up, but it just brings, as you can imagine, just more maturity, more alignment to the entire thing. I still get to act kind of as an entrepreneur and be excited about stuff. But then when it slams against that IDO sheet, we call it our project and prioritization worksheet. When it slams against that, it grows up very quickly and it either gets pushed to the bottom or it has to replace something else. And guess what? The team's actually cool with me replacing stuff as long as I'm not going to come back and be like, so where are we at on this? They're like, I won't do that because they've already held me accountable that that thing's getting dropped and all the time and resources they put into that. I don't think we realize how much labor we waste. And I think once you kind of have the aha, like how much your fun dopamine ideas are wasting dollar amounts, it's kind of like you're building a red car and like halfway through you're like, nevermind, let's go yellow trucks. And then you're like, never mind, let's go blue motorcycles. If you could see the storage unit of all your half done stuff that your team has like tried to work out, you quickly start going, yeah, I'm going to take one thing at a time here.

Yeah, I'm gonna steal. Talking is not project management because that one, that one hits home as well. It's, it's so easy to sit there and go like, how did this person, why are they not executing on the things that we've talked about so much without providing any direction, guidance, accountability and you know, clear expectations setting to go along with that. So I think that's, that's, that's a brilliant way of thinking about it that I think we, we definitely get caught up on. Now let's talk about DEO a little bit. What is the ideal profile of somebody that would get the most benefit out of a DEO event or joining the deo?

Yeah. So let me talk a little bit about what the platform is kind of where it came from and where it's evolved to. So you know, during actually those early years where there really wasn't a home for entrepreneur Dennis, you know, you had frankly ADA on one side and Adso is kind of the big guys, you know, so there really wasn't a place DEO kind of came from that Jake Poole started to put these communities together of entrepreneurs. I started getting involved really as a member at that time, and was just thankful to be in a room with other entrepreneurs. And it's so powerful. And then once I left cdp, I came full time over to do, ended up buying half of the company. And I was like, jake, this community's awesome. But we're post Covid now and like, life's gotten hard, really hard, and we need like coaches in here. And so I was like, how cool would it be if a new member joined and they got hooked up with a mentor who was like 10x where they were at and they could meet with them every other week and just chat with them, work through strategic things, decide what's most important, like with someone who's looked around the corner. And that's really what we built last year. And it's been amazing. Our members have loved it, and it's also allowed us to grow. We're growing at three times the rate we were previously. So now we have 400 organizations representing almost 3 billion in revenue between everybody and about 1600 locations between each of them. And they really. We have about 25% of our members who are doing under $2 million in revenue. Single practice, looking to add an associate, you know, just at that beginning stages. Kind of call them our builders. You know, they're just building that out, figuring out how to have an office manager, what they should say to them, you know, those kind of things. So that's actually a pretty good portion of DEO. We have about 25% are in that 2 to 5 million, you know, that second location. Or maybe they're like, you know, they've got the 12, 15, 20 ops kind of practices. They got multiple specialties in there. We've got some, some groups that are doing 10 million, 50 million out of a single location. So it isn't like one size fits all at all. We're really just helping with these principles so they can have the impact they want in their commun. About 25% are that 5 to 10 million and then about a fourth or over that 10 million and they go all the way up to 150, 300 million. So that, that's groups a pretty broad range. And yeah, it's, it's been awesome. We provide coaching, so everybody gets a coach. Even if you're at 100 million, you're getting a coach, you know, of somebody who's. Who's bigger than you and looked around the corner. Because as much as you think there's problems at 100 million, too, you know, that you've never taken on or even thought about before. I remember the moment when I was like, wait, so if we're having a half a million visits, if, like, 0.1% goes bad, that's still like, 500 lawsuits or something, like, you know what I mean? It was like, we have to have things so buttoned down. So anyway, yeah, so everybody gets a coach, mentor, and then you get access to our community, which we've been on WhatsApp. And we actually just moved over to our own DEO app now, our own platform. And it's got incredible spaces in there. People are loading content all the time. The thing that I think makes DEO really unique is we don't feel like we're competing against each other. We feel like we're competing against, like, the rest of the world, you know, the macroeconomic issues. You know, 50% of people don't even go to the dentist. So, like, if we could just solve that, we'd double the entire industry. Right. I think what makes DEO unique is you've got these very ambitious individuals who are super vulnerable, which is a weird combo. And you get it at kind of every level. And so, yeah, they're like sharing checklists with each other. Of course we have our own trainings and content, but, you know, we've got people who are like, hey, I'm specializing in implants, and I want to go really deep on something. We have a whole room for that, that people are chatting and sharing and things like that. So. And then we have our live events that you mentioned, which that live event used to be open to the public, to be honest. We've just gotten so big. We're just focusing now on members, but members are bringing their teams. We've added COO services now. So, like, for some of our members, they're like, this is awesome. I'm learning a ton. Can you just come on site and, like, implement this for me? So now we're doing that. Our members love that, obviously, because you can just move faster. And then we started doing bookkeeping, cfo, finance. So people were not getting their books correct. And, you know, at some point, you just got to say, enough said. No. So we just went ahead and said, we'll just build out that service. We also have several industry partners that will do stuff for you, for you as well. So anyway, yeah, that's DEO today. All entrepreneurs. I mean if I can do a shameless plug if somebody wants to go check it out, deodentalgroup.com and yeah, and you can talk to one of our team members to see if it's the right fit for you. But I'd say if you're trying to do something bigger than you feel like you can do on your own, like if you'd like to be part of a community or like to have somebody help you out, we're month to month too. Like there's no contra. So it's like if you ever want to quit, you just quit. You know, everything we do is month to month. So it's like we have to bring value all the time as entrepreneurs. Right? So yeah, but it's gone really good. We've, we've loved it and it's, it's having that network effect at this point because we have over 25 coaches. We have some that are just amazing at treatment coordination. We have some who understand the finance deeply, operations. We have a hygienist who was, she was VP of Ops and they went from four locations to 200. Like you just get to chat with her and say how did you do that? You know, so yeah, some cool stuff. Yeah.

So it's a, a community that offers coaching, mentorship and is full of like minded individuals. So there's just the ability to really kind of share amongst themselves as well as receive all this benefit with these different kind of functional specific services that are also offered as part of the membership. I love that the app idea is cool. What kind of went into having you all decide that you were going to take that path versus use one of the third party apps that were just kind of publicly available?

Well, we started with Facebook way back and that worked really well for a while until it didn't. And then we went to WhatsApp and just started creating all these communities in WhatsApp and that's where we actually currently are. And then just this month, like actually just a week ago, we have been working on building out our own app. We just wanted a place where everything was centralized on a mobile device and you could watch videos and stuff while you were working out at the gym rather than having to, you know, go to all these different places. So just making it so much easier. Also on a lot of those, those platforms, you can't see the member. Like you can see phone numbers and Stuff. But now with our app, like, someone can fill out, like, here's where I'm at. And it's got AI built into it where it will match up members. Like, it gives you this nice visual of, like, here's who's around you, here's who's doing similar specialties as you, and you can just chat with each other. We do a lot of, like, meetups, virtual meetups. So we'll do one just around marketing or just around, like I said, implants, pedo, the Texas group, the California group, whatever. And so with the app, we can just drop the meetup link right there. People can jump on, chat with each other that night or whatever else. So just so much easier. The other thing that's included in your membership is your whole team, your team leadership. I wouldn't have your whole team, but they can come to our Thursday training sessions for teams, and it's just open office hour with our COO coaches. And so they can be like, hey, I got this HR issue. Hey, I've got this front desk checklist issue. You know, and. And then in the app, your team can go in there and chat with them too. So, yeah, we're just. We're just thinking through all the problems we all have and, like, how do we solve that? How do we solve that?

You know, I would imagine then with the group as it's comprised with your members today, they span a lot of different practice sizes, practice specialties. So probably also many different goals. Is there. You know, we talked about at the very beginning, the Dental Service Organization, or dso. Are there folks that kind of come in with an intent where they're like, we actually want to be a scaler and grow large where others are like, hey, look, we want to build a really great practice that's local, community driven, maybe three or four practices. We're not seeking to be, you know, the next heartland, but, you know, we just want. And do you have kind of a blend of both, or is there a predominant kind of desire to be one or the other, you know, within the organization?

Total blend, for sure. And the interesting part is the underlying principles are actually the same, you know, because if you say, I just really want to have a huge impact in my community, usually you're like, and I, I need to hire another associate, Right? So if we go back to what I said at the beginning, like, you're basically a DSO at that point, because you're like, how do I attract an associate? How do I make sure that they stay and we don't have turnover and how's the payroll and the incentives gonna work around this? And now my team got a little bit bigger because I have an associate and if you're good at that, you get a second associate. By the way, one of our sayings in DEO is two doctors makes more money than two locations. Right. So if you go through the math on this, on the P and L, at the end of the day, every new doctor adds about 50% profitability falls to the bottom line. So when we organize like their cost of goods section versus their fixed cost section, so we're actually really big. If someone says I want 10 locations and they're at two, we're going to take them through our profitability stages and you go from launching profits where you're not making money to optimizing profits. So we're going to look at their two locations first and make sure we've optimized those and done all the duplication of associates hygiene. We need to there as much as possible because that profitability, that efficiency, one, it's just better for the community, but two, it'll drive more cash flow for you to be able to scale. We do have members who come in and I'm sure you have friends like this who like they've opened up four or five, one or two are funding the rest of them. Right. And it's spread thin. And so we sometimes we're helping them sell off the ones that aren't working and get more right size. Because at the end of the day this isn't like a chest pound. How many locations, Right. I mean, if we really want to take it from an entrepreneur executive perspective, the fifth stage of our profit stages is passive profits. You don't have passive profits by having a bunch of locations that are breaking even and sucking up all your time and have high turnover and you know, so we're interested in building out the quality of each one and helping them avoid a lot of mistakes we've already done. You know, like I'm just going to add ortho, it'll be easy. You know, those kind of things we can help them navigate. Like if you're going to do it, here's how you have to do it and maybe you shouldn't.

So it's really about laying or building a strong foundation and ensuring that you can, you can build on top of that. I'd be curious. This is kind of an aside question, but I know you've seen organizations formed in a variety of different ways and there's lots of different structures that people in the industry pursue? I've been seeing more and more kind of either interest or even, you know, formulations of kind of an associated group of doctors. There might be four or five that are kind of in the same area that kind of want to become under the same sort of umbrella and almost create their own group where they were all kind of independent before, almost in a way where they do things as like a democracy. And I'm just kind of curious, like, what. What's your perspective on. On that approach? Do you see? Do you believe that it can be successful? Are there kind of pitfalls that you should watch out for if you were going to kind of pursue that route? And have you heard people kind of discussing that within the organization?

Yeah. Whether you're going to join with somebody else, add an associate, start a dso, you have to ask yourself, what problem am I trying to solve or what opportunity am I trying to capture here? I think where those don't work and they actually did in the past, where they don't work today is the thought process. Whether people articulate this is like, if we can kind of just duct tape and bell wire ourselves together, maybe some sucker PE firm will pay a bunch of money for us. And it kind of did play out sometimes. And, you know, dentists are very worried about PE firms taking advantage of them. I would say there's more dentists who've taken advantage of PE firms than the other way around. And because the dentists are in the control seat here and the power. So I think if your thought is, like, what if we just all got together and then maybe we could go raise some money? I don't think that's playing out anymore. I think that you have to decide, like, what problem are we solving, all getting together? Because now I got a bunch of humans in the room that all have to make a decision what who's going to lead? Where are we going to standardize this? Like, no one's going to buy just a group of guys and gals who got together. They would want a platform that they're going to be able to scale. And that means there has to be leadership and there has to be structure and systems to that. So I say if somebody's really interested in and that's what they're trying to achieve, then that's great, you know, but it's going to be a heavy lift if they're looking to, like, what if we got together and we were able to purchase things cheaper? There's a simpler path for that Now. So with GPOs like DEO you can imagine when you have members, 3 billion in revenue. Like we can negotiate for those members now in a way that no one, like just join DEO and we'll get you the better price, you know, so you don't, you don't even have to do that complexity anymore. And the things you can negotiate at size is incredible. It does make immediately like our whole goal is when someone joins deo, can we just pay for their entire membership and then get everything else for free just because of the savings that they're getting, you know, off of those things?

So no, I think that's, I think it's well said the, the diligence as well that I think private equity will be performing on potential investments is probably going to continue to the bar will continue to raise to a higher level because of some of the, you know, challenges that have taken place over the past three or four years where some of these platforms didn't return the return on investment that the groups initially thought that they would.

Well, and everyone's getting heavily educated post Covid because we always said dentistry was recession proof, we never said it was inflation proof. And so there's something interesting. When you hold revenue Constant, I. E. PPO, Medicaid, whatever, insurance plan, and you raise expenses, I.e. labor costs and supplies, et cetera, moving up, there's only one place for margins to go and that is less. And you have to get much more innovated and capable to run a good business. And I think that's been a wake up call of like before, frankly. Hang a shingle, do good clinical, you're going to be fine. Now you could go bankrupt. You know, like, there are real issues and you have to manage the business as a business today or you will not survive. The labor costs will catch up with you. And you know, we've got members who, when they join, they're like, man, I feel burned out. I already know what's happening. Mathematically, they're making less as an owner than they would as an associate in their own business. And I just quickly can show them that. And then we start fixing that and it's like, I'm not burned out anymore. I'm making passive income. You know, it makes a big difference. I was talking to one law firm and he usually says he, this is a big law firm, has about six lawsuits between partners each year. Last year he had 60. All right, so if you want to know the impact of having lower margins on the infrastructure, and some of those are private equity, some of those are guys who got together Whatever it is, but it doesn't play out well for anybody when the business isn't running well.

Where do you go to learn? So, you know, you're. You seem to be somebody that has a culture of continuous learning, an internal culture of that. In fact, a quick story, I think, and you might remember this different than me, but when I first joined Planet dds, my first dental conference, I believe was Adso. And it was right before COVID And it must have been like November, December. It was, it was that event. There was a breakout session. I think it was you and Dr. Ahmed doing a breakout session. Is that, do you recall that?

Is that I became president soon after that, so hopefully it was a halfway decent.

No, it was good.

And I.

You were sharing some books and I think one of the ones that you shared was Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink, which is one of my favorite leadership books of all time.

Yeah.

And so, yeah, you know, where, where do you go to continue growing? I know you like reading books, but you know, what, what is your approach to making sure that you remain relevant and can continue to coach folks and add value?

I find a lot of entrepreneurs, we're ferocious learners. We are. We, we'd like to continue to have like our minds blown a little bit, you know, and think of things differently. And you know, we, we like it when we get a little shock, like, oh, wow, I never thought of it that way, you know, like, oh, if I could organize and especially when it helps us simplify frameworks down too, like, oh, I could organize the world that way and a lot of my problems would be more simplified, you know, so always been passionate about that. Always spent a lot of money on coaching, but I consume the free stuff too. Like, I love podcasts. You know, right now I've been listening to like all in podcasts way too much. But I love that podcast. Yeah, it's just, it's so good. Probably half the world is right now, like direct coaching. This year I went with Alex Hermosi and had a one day session with him. By the way, one day was a hundred thousand bucks. So in case you want to know what it's like with one day and it was worth it. But you can consume a ton of his stuff. He's so generous like just YouTube and, and stuff. And so, yeah, just constantly looking for like, where's my mindset off working with and coaching this many members and coaches, like entrepreneurs in the space. Gives you so much feedback and so much pattern recognition to be able to see what's working and what's not, it's insane. Like that's probably the place I'm getting the most coaching because I can see so quickly. And then you turn around and share that with the members. We have an entire L&D department that's just taking the wisdom that our coaches extract and organizing that into trainings. And it's fabulous. It's cool to have like somebody you can go to. It's even better when it's like they've taken that and memorialized it in a way everybody can watch it. And then people get feedback and it gets improved, you know. And so right now we're just like in this incredible learning curve from our members just taking things to the next level. And I think, you know an expert when they can make it simple, right? Like the, the whole saying, like, I would have written a shorter letter if I have more time. I'm constantly working on like, okay, so what's the three principles to move from entrepreneur exam? I, I know there's 25, but like if I could get three down, would that solve like 22 of them? You know, and so stuff like that, I'm just, I love it. I'm really passionate about it, as you can tell, so.

Well, last question for you and really appreciate your time. When you're looking at the industry as a whole and you've been a part of dental now since 2010, so 15 years, what are the things that still make you excited or that you are bullish on the industry?

There's unlimited potential. So like one of the concerns is, hey, these DSOs are going to roll everything up and then there won't be anything left and no place for me to play. And the reality is you can look at other consolidated industries like banking and I'm out in Crumb, Texas and there's like four regional banks out here, you know, so no matter what industry it is, if you can bring a unique product or bring something a little bit better, the customers don't know what DSO or corporate or any of that stuff. They know how they felt when they can't. They know what convenience is. They do know that Amazon has taught us well. So I think I'm passionate because there's still so much to do to make the industry better. And what a cool industry, you know, like you're literally helping people smile. Like as cliche as that is, having been at the pediatric level and watching kids lives change. Where they could consume vegetables before it hurt too much, where they could smile and their teachers perceived them differently, they could smile and they interviewed better. Like those are the type of things and there's plenty of that happening at the adult level. Of course we know like the systemic health piece as well remove. So like it's not only a, an interesting business that's very complicated to figure out and so that's engaging. But like the end product is amazing for the human race. Right. And the reality is as long as we still have humans consuming carbohydrates, we're going to have a need here. And then there's the aesthetic component and everything else. So it makes me excited. And then to work with entrepreneurs, I am very empathetic that most of the world thinks that dentists are rich and life's easy for them and nothing hard is going on. And I'm you know, under the covers with more like, hey, I know how hard it is and I know no one really appreciates what you're trying to deal with and that's a cool place to be. And then just to be in a room with a bunch of others who are like, hey dude, I gotcha. Hey, we're here for you. Hey, I know you're managing your kids at home as a mom on top of trying to do these things. Like how can we make that all work? How can we define success bigger than, you know, just this financial outcome or this practice or something like that?

Emmett, where can people find yourself? The deo? When's the next event? Share, share all the info real quick with us.

Do dental group.com go there? I think it's called like a growth accelerator call. You can schedule and just, you know, steal all the information from one of our team members. They'll give you everything that we're doing. You can see if it's a good fit for you. And like I said, it's month to month. We even give like a 90 day back guarantee. So like if you're like, oh this isn't for me, give you all your money back. So we try to make it as low risk, like we need to bring value. Our next event is June 12th through the 14th, so if you join now, you can come to that event. We're going to be focusing a lot around labor and what is the right labor codes for practice sizes, like how many of front desk and what should my cost be and so forth and then pay bands and pathways. So like if I have a front desk person and they've been what is the right dollar amounts, I'm supposed to be paying for these different positions. So we're going to do a lot about that around that you're going to break out in your masterminds with your tribe coach which is always so cool. If you bring team they get to break out with the fractional CEO coaches, Ryan Leakes, who if you look him up on Instagram, he wrote a book on how to deal with complicated people. He's our keynote speaker which is awesome. We're doing a breakout just with our AI partners. Just around what's happening with AI within dental. That's actually a pre event workshop that you get. So yeah, all of this is included. You get a free if you're a member you get a free ticket to the event and then you can bring as many team as you want. We just try to cover costs on that. Awesome.

Very cool. Thank you so much for joining. Really enjoyed the conversation.

Thank you so much, Mike.

The Dental Economist show is brought to you by Planet dds. To find out more about how cloud based dental software by Planet DDS helps unleash dentists and their staff to focus on patient care, visit www.planetdds.com. stay tuned for upcoming episodes by following wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening, Sam.