144: Inside Spear: Strategy, AI, and the Future of Dental Education

Welcome everybody to another episode of the Dental Boardroom Podcast. I have Matt Coggins, CEO of Spear Education on this episode, and I'm excited to learn about how Spear's evolving. I've known about Spear my entire career in dentistry. It's always had such a great brand name and a go-to place for education, particularly around the clinical side, but also around the team. And practice management side as well. And I wanted Matt to come on the show and just give us an update. What is happening on the inside of Spear? What's the outlook in the dental industry? And how are you helping dentists stay really sharp as clinicians and dental practice owners on the scene today? Matt, welcome to the show.

Hey Wes, I'm honored to be here. Excited to talk to you.

All right, I've got a list of questions for you, Matt, that I think our listeners would, uh, would love to hear about. We're gonna talk about core missions. What's your focus these days? How has COVID reshaped the way that you deliver education? Talk about some AI, what's happening in the DSO space from your lens out there and how you're servicing that. And then talk a little bit about how, what layers or tiers dentists can access, uh, to be educated. What are the, the service offerings, so to speak? At, uh, at, at Spear. Well, let's dive in. The first question I've got for you, so Spear's been around decades, long, long time. Uh, what is the, let's just start very high level. What is the core mission of Spear today as you would define it and the values that you stand for?

Yeah, it's, uh, I love the question, Wes, and look, the mission hasn't changed since I've been here. I've been here about 3 years. And it's always been to make dentists great dentists or help dentists and their teams achieve great dentistry. That's always at the heart of every decision that we make, right? Like we've looked at different opportunities to, you know, dip our toe or what have you, but it always has to go back to, is this going to make our customers better? Are they going to be able to create better outcomes or desired outcomes for their patients? They're going to become more efficient in doing that, creating just great experiences. all around. But that's, that's, that's, that's what we bleed each and every day, right? Every decision has to drive a better dentist at the end of the day.

Well, question for you. I know a few years back, you got an institutional partner and, so got some, some funding there. Tell me, how has, how did that change? So I think 2022 or so, how has that evolved Spear as an education platform to have now an institutional buyer and owner of Spear Education?

Well, it has been owned by other institutions, so we did obviously have a transfer of ownership in the late 2022, but it was acquired by, by an alternative investor back in 2014. And I said, I would say obviously everyone looks at different things, but I think the market opportunity certainly changed. One bought it well before COVID And online learning really had taken hold. And then, of course, you know, you buy things post-COVID and now it's a lot of it's online and there's a lot more alternatives, right? So I think they both had certain different aspects of how they wanted to achieve the outcomes that they're looking for. But I would say, you know, in the end, we're owned by a great organization called Avista Healthcare Partners. They focus only on healthcare medical services. Medical products. So they know the space, they're deep-rooted in really making sure that these missions are driven around a core of making a dentist, making a doctor better, driving better patient outcomes, etc. And so that's really been their focus and my focus over the last couple years is looking at the market dynamics and saying, hey, there's a couple of things that we need to obviously change for the organization. One is Spiro has historically been this place where good dentists become great dentists. Almost prosthodontic-like. And, and we're— we've actually been trying to push that, that, that, that, that branding away a little bit because it conjures up notions that, uh, that's the only way you're going to learn a $30,000 full mouth restoration, and I don't have those patients. I would challenge most people on that, but you may just not be ready for that. But what we've really been doing over the last couple years is, one, changing our platform to make it much more user-friendly make it much more driven around a standard platform of learning. So I brought in educational folks who understand how to build these platforms, how the learner learns, and how we move somebody not only from good to great, but how do we get you to just be good? Because there's a lot of challenges in the marketplace for early dentists that are saying, hey, I'm going into these, I'm an employee now, I'm not an owner of a practice, I just need to learn how to do the basics and do that in a clinic. And when I have 1 hour patient, um, and it's chaos for many of these younger dentists. And so we've really retooled all of our education. We've built now early learning pathways where even today somebody in school could begin learning our pathways and preparing themselves for the clinic.

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And we do a great job of blending that education so you can learn online, but we also think live workshops are really important where you have somebody over your shoulder inspecting, looking at you, coaching you. But we, we, we sort of envelope that in a full experience of you learning and then your team with you learning so that we can manage the change management for you. And I would say that's really been, I'll call it our sizzle, is why somebody's gonna choose Spear is one, we have learning pathways for everyone now, a very structured coursework for you, but we also have it for the team members that you're with, which is oftentimes where the rubber meets the road, right? I could go learn something. Whether it's on a weekend or doing an online course. But now I have to go back and my dental assistant needs to understand, what am I supposed to do? What's the conversation like with the patient? So we're really thoughtful in how we're building all of this. And I'm really excited about the things that we're deploying in the last 2 months. And we're still building more, whether it's hygiene content, clear aligner content, just better ways for earlier dentists to understand how to communicate to their patients. How to create standard procedures or clinical procedures across the practice so that everyone's on the same page. So we're really building an overall platform that's not just for the dentist, it's for the whole office. So we're really excited about that. So we've been pulling all of that together and that's in response to the fact that you have a lot more people learning outside of a workshop. And you also have a lot of people who are coming out of dental school who, you know, they just aren't as, prepared for the clinic as maybe they were 20 years ago. And that's just, you know, the sign of the times.

If you were to sort of draw a bell curve of your, of your dentists who subscribe to some element of your program, where would you find is the most kind of the most dense area in that bell curve, maybe around their career from a starting new associate out of dental school? To as an associate for a few years, maybe working at a DSO, to being a private practice owner, and then to nearing the latter part of their career. Where do you find people entering the Spear Education arena most frequently?

Yeah, so it's a great question. So because we're in sort of this middle of this transition, we're still highly indexed to probably folks that are 10 years or more in their career. Because we've rebuilt everything, we've certainly been accelerating the onboarding of a lot of newer dentists. So really in the last, look, we have 17,000 members. That's what we've had, let's say, coming into the end of last year. In the last 2 months, we've added 2,000 new customers, which is significant, right? We're bringing on about 1,000 new customers a month. A little over that. And most of them are indexed more towards, hey, I'm in that 0 to 5 range because I can go get online content anywhere. So where historically the online providers where I could go get CE, which that's a requirement, right? It's compulsory. They have to go get it. We don't, we think that's the cherry on the top where we wanna say is, no, we wanna teach you how to develop to be a better dentist, right? We're gonna give you the tools and your team the tools to go in 6 months, be able to do more restorative work where you're confident and you create a better outcome in a time that's appropriate for the practice, right? Because most of these dentists, if you gave them 2 hours to go do a crown and that requires the prep and the scanning and all the other things, they'd probably be okay. The problem is most practices aren't setting up their practices to accommodate an early dentist and give them 2 hours per patient. It creates havoc on hygiene and everything else. So that's really what we're doing. So you're starting to see a massive influx of these early dentists start to go through our curriculum. And we've now also included coursework for them live where it complements what they're doing. So they come in and now we're going to really teach you how to take those preps to a completely different place and do them in. And we're going to shave 15 minutes off your preps now because we think this is how fast you should do a procedure. The same thing with— we work closely with partners. We do a lot with chairside technologies. Well, instead of it taking you 3 hours, we're going to show you how to do it in 90 minutes. And here's the key, and this is how you keep the schedule working for you. So we've, we've really honed this craft over years, and now we're complementing, pulling it all together. And I think you're starting to see that in the results, right, where you're starting to see a lot of newer people coming in. And the interesting thing is, because our platform now is 24/7, it's always on. Right? So you are engaging it at all times through these standard platforms. We bring on more customers in the middle of the night than we do during the day, which makes sense because the dentists are actually looking at saying, hey, I have something tomorrow I need to get better at, and they start going through our— and we can see what they're going through, and we— the, the recommendation engines within the platform now give them next thing, the next thing, the next thing in a very structured way to accelerate that learning. So I think for the earlier dentists now, they are used to that type of learning because they've learned, they've grown up in the digital age. So I tend to think if we go another year, we'll probably be split 50/50. My expectation is we'll probably have 15,000 customers that are over 10 years and 15,000 customers that'll be in that 0 to 5, maybe 0 to 10 range.

I would say this, the smart move as I look at your different tiers, which I want to get to near the end of the, the, the episode, uh, there are tiers that are really easy to access for a younger dentist who's maybe is just feeling a lot of financial burden from student loans, just is trying to get their, their feet planted in the industry out of school. And you give them some extremely low cost options to start getting access to high quality education online through some of your more limited tiers. And it's almost like you've created an evolution that can map to the career path of a dentist as they go from associate to owner, and then an owner to a larger practice owner and maybe a multiple practice owner. And you've created a roadmap there that can align with where they are. And I think that that's very valuable for the dental industry to have that. I mean, I want to dwell a little bit longer on how COVID just sort of dropped a bomb on how people work logistically. Now, in a dental office, obviously they're going to a dental office. So, but, but talking about the education, a couple thoughts on this. You know, for me, I, before COVID I had everybody here in my office, and now I have about 30 to 40% of people here in my office, and then people are spread out. And I've, but we've completely revamped and focused on our processes and our technology. So we have a process, an SOP for virtually everything. It's delineated step by step. We've had consultants come in to really swim lane these out, these processes out. So we have clear understanding across the company how certain procedures are done, and it's allowed us to work remotely like this while still maintaining a good quality. In some ways it made us, uh, I think elevate the quality because we are so focused on consistent outcomes every time through our tax, accounting, payroll, investment, and financial planning lines. Uh, so let's talk about, uh, you a little bit more. Are you finding that dentists, and maybe this is different based on age demographics, but are you finding that younger dentists are just less likely to travel to Scottsdale to do workshops and they're doing most of their learning online? In other words, has there been a migration away from the workshop into the online learning or is the workshop still really valuable? And one thing I want to add to that question is like when I try to learn something, I like, I've tried to learn tennis and I've tried to learn surfing. I watch a lot of YouTube videos and they are, they are helpful for learning techniques. And stance and positioning and all of that. But at the end of the day, actually on court or out on the break, that's where I really learn. And it's like my kids in their math class. I always tell them, don't read. You don't need to read the material as much. Just go do problem after problem after problem after problem. And that is the fastest way to start to master the material. Are you finding that dentists are still willing to travel in order to have that hands-on real experience as opposed to online these days?

I would say yes, but I do think most dentists, and this is across the gamut, right? Whether it's young or older, I think they've certainly gotten to the point where they've gone to a lot of workshops or gone to places and said, hey, I didn't really use much of it. It was interesting, but I didn't get to do much of it, right? And so I do think the first question, and oftentimes our biggest pushback if you talk to our sales representatives when someone calls is, I don't know if this is going to be worth it for me right now. Why? Because I need something I could deploy on Monday, right? Right. I don't want to do something where it's going to take me 6 months to start making changes. But also knowing the complexity of change isn't just the dentist, it's the team that's sitting in that dental office as well. So I would say that there's not an aversion to go workshop, but there's certainly a lot more questions about, well, what am I going to learn? Can you get really specific? Specific. So our sales personnel have had to be exceptionally trained on all the nuances of all the different products we talk about and the techniques and what have you, because we get a lot of questions because there are folks that are a little bit hesitant to make the investment to travel because they want to make sure that they're going to do something with it. Um, and that was really where a big change for us is we think a really important thing to learning is there's a couple of things. One, it's got to be a standard platform. It has to be standard. If I go through or someone, they have to go through the same thing because then it's measurable. I know if it works or not, right? So you've got to make it standard. It's got to be frequent because I know I could go to a course, whether it's online or not, but I'm going to forget 50% by the next day. Yeah, my brain wanders and I feel like I'm a fairly intelligent person. So how do you put things in front of me frequently through that journey so that it reminds me and I can begin figuring out how to incorporate it. And then lastly, I do think it's this blended side where there is points where, hey, let's get side by side with you and really inspect what you're doing because there's a lot of things that go wrong in dentistry, right? Like if you talk to a lab, a lab's like, look, I made a good crown based off of what I saw. The fact that it's leaking is that could be your prep. It could be a lot of things. So like those, sometimes you just need somebody sitting there. And one of our courses, Restorative Design, sells out all the time because it's dentists learning how to just prep crowns. That's— they geek out on this. And to me, I'm like, this is the most humdrum thing. Like, don't they want to learn like implants or something? No, they want to know the basics because they need to know how to do this efficiently. So I do think there's— if you've built the experience right, they'll know when to go to workshop and they feel much better about making that investment because the investment isn't about spending money on the workshop and travel. I'm not going to be practicing. And so, you know, so for a lot of our practices, the challenge is, well, the associate is struggling just to earn, you know, whatever it is they're trying to earn in a daily fashion, right? Because there's chaos in a dental practice. For those that are a little bit more tenured, oftentimes their challenge is, look, I can't even pull away because I've had so much turnover. I'm always bringing on new employees here. My practice isn't running as efficiently as it is. And we all know there's some softness in the consumer, especially with more complex procedures. I have a hard time getting away because my associate just doesn't produce enough in a day yet. So like, so for us, like we focused in on how do we go solve that problem? Whether it's a dentist just trying to figure out how do I bring on an associate, to the associate, how do I become more productive? How do I make my employees more productive, drive employee retention, et cetera? So I think all of that is really important because that goes into the buying journey, right? Those are the decisions and the questions they're asking themselves. Well, is now the time? Like, should I be doing this? So, so for us, like for Spear, our focus is blend the education, but do it across the team and then make sure that we help in the change management and the implementation of that change because we know we've got the standard approach to do it, right? We've worked with thousands of dentists. To know how do we begin doing these things? What do you need to do on Monday, right? If you wanna be better on Monday. But I know that's a long-winded way of responding to like, are dentists still eager to get to campus? They are, they love hanging out with dentists, they do geek out. I learned early on here, dentists just love talking to dentists. And so that's our goal, blend the education with themselves and their team, put them into small community of learning, whether it's through our study club or our virtual clubs, And then we layer a service level to really self-drive that change management and that ongoing training in these practices if needed. That would be that, you know, our Navigator product is really a lot more hands-on, like, hey, we're gonna push things through because we could see signals things aren't working the way they should. And that happens, here's what we need to do next. And you really become the de facto coach or head of training for that small business, that dental practice, which I think is really important for everything that's going on today. And, and again, you tucked into that, that question that you had there was really how COVID changed things. And I think COVID certainly changed a lot in the sense that, hey, there was a lot more online access, so more affordable or accessible types of places to learn. But I tend to think that the thing that COVID really did, and maybe it was pre-COVID and it sort of accelerated in the middle of COVID is there's a lot of amalgamation, there's a lot of consolidation that happened in the dental practice. So Dentists expanded, whether it was just knocking walls down and building more operatories or buying practices, and they had a lot more employees. And there's a lot more turnover post-COVID, right? There's just a lot of associate turnover, a lot of hygiene turnover, a lot of dental assistants, office manager turnover. Our platform, you want to have a membership with Spear because we help you with that. We will onboard those folks for you rapidly. Through a standard playbook, which most offices don't have. You spoke about that earlier, you building the standard playbook, documented processes so people know, the next person coming in knows exactly what to do. Because there's a lot of little things that fall apart in a business that you just, how come no one did this? Well, Sally did that or Bill did that and he left. I didn't know he did that. We never documented. Okay, well, we got to figure this out. So that's where we're really trying to accelerate everything we do. And we're paying very close attention to those little details. We're not 100% there, but when you look at, I, I tend to tell my team all the time, I want members to tell us that we're peace of mind to them. If I'm a dentist that owns the practice, if I'm a chief dental officer running many different practices, if I'm an associate, like in the end, you're all a little bit of a CEO. How do you get a de facto head of training or a platform that drives standard programs to accelerate onboarding, fine-tuning skills, implementation, you know, across many different procedures or patient conversations. How do we do that in a very thoughtful way when folks are trying to learn all these things? And oftentimes they're trying to learn it in the middle of the night.

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Or in the middle of the day, because I'm going to do my lunch and I'll go through something. How do we pack it into that so it becomes really impactful and comes with a strong ROI?

So how do you define yourself relative to a practice management consultant? They're both around education, practice management consultants. Tend to be in the office, although they'll do a lot of coaching remotely as well. Are you a practice management consultant, but bundled into your array of services, or is practice management consulting a complement to what you do?

I think it's a complement. We oftentimes, people will say, oh, you like, and we even utilize that term, right? It's probably just the overused vernacular about practice management, just trying to think of the halo of things you do. We focus on the clinical side, right? We're probably— you could ask us and give a sense of like, if you have Navigator membership, we attach a practice growth partner to you who has spent time in practice management and consulting, but we don't call them consultants. Like, we'll— we can give you some recommendations if you want to talk to them about your fee structures or usually your customary rates within your area because we have benchmarks, but that's not what we do, right? We're not going to come in and implement your practice management software or, or go through the bookkeeping of you. We focus on the clinical side where we think it's the most important. If you can nail that, everything else falls into place, meaning you know how to do a procedure efficiently and get a great outcome. That's going to drive a high net promoter for you. You're going to get more done. We're going to teach you how to have the conversations with the patient and ultimately be able to get paid on that stuff. Stuff. All those other tools are great point solutions or solutions or practice management solutions, and we love to partner with those folks. Um, like, we love it when a practice consultant says, hey, look, I'm in the practice, but these dental associates or these dentists need something at night because that's when they're going home and trying to learn. I don't work at 9:30 at night for all of my practices. We are on at 9:30 at night, you know. So it becomes a nice complementary add or adjacency to what they're trying to do, because we just want to make them better clinicians. And to be better clinicians, you need to be able to have good conversations with your patients. You've got to know how to do the procedures and get the desired outcomes, but you also have to be able to have the conversations. And I talk through, like, the office manager, the treatment coordinator— how do I get somebody to pay for this and say yes to this? Like, this is all the stuff we work on. And I know there is obviously some cross-referencing or some overlap between, like, a practice management consultant. But we're not consultants. That's not what we're trying to do. We're not going to deploy people into the practice. We basically set them up to say, you need a head of training, right? Because the closest we can get to where it could be construed as consultancy is our Navigator membership, which is You get all of these things, including dental intelligence, where now we can see your data. We have a growth partner attached to it monitoring your practice to make sure that the things we're trying to do based on your goals we're achieving. And we push education across different groups in the practice. But you can look at that as having a head of training. Like I tend to say to many dentists, the difference between me being a CEO and them, I have a group of MBAs around me who are making lots of decisions. And one of them is I have somebody who focuses solely on training my employees for change and all these. Dentists don't have that. Most of them aren't willing to spend $150,000 a year to have somebody focused in that area, right? Like, well, that's what Navigator really should be thought of is that's an agent or a membership, but I'm going to pay well below what the rate of hiring somebody would be. But they're monitoring everything I'm doing and giving me recommendations on what we can do. based off of the goals that I've set for my practice or myself.

So safe to say most of SPEAR is occurring— most of SPEAR's benefit and value is occurring inside of the operatory around the clinical side and the patient communication side. Some outside, especially if you're getting involved in like dental intel statistics and front office stuff, but most of it's happening inside of the operatory. Is that a safe way of viewing it?

That is. It's always whenever you're interacting with the patient is likely where mostly focused on, or maybe your laboratory, I guess.

But, well, let's now pivot into AI and how is, how AI has inserted itself in the training programs at Spear. What specifically is Spear doing to deploy AI in its training modules?

Yeah, so we, we do, we've just announced a partnership recently with Overjet. So when we think of like what, how dentists are viewing AI, We are very focused on obviously that discussion point of going from diagnosis to the treatment planning to the patient acceptance conversations. So we've now implemented that as a tool and it's a very good partnership that we've begun. Overall, our whole business is supported through AI because we're going to go global here. So we need to translate things quickly. So a lot of our video content, our platform has been built on AI. So we've utilized all these tools, but I don't think I don't think dentists care about that. What they care about is, hey, like, what's the next thing I need to learn? And in the future, it'll be, is it in the language that I know how to speak, right? But I do think as more tools go out there or produced specifically for dentistry beyond just diagnostics, we certainly need to figure out how we can incorporate that into our treatment planning or our learning platforms. Because like I tell Overjet, we're not going to teach anybody how to use the Overjet buttons. That's what Overjet does. What we're going to teach somebody is how do you go take a dentist now can see diagnostic and have a conversation? How do we, you know, supercharge that conversation? But how do we get them doing the right dentistry? Because in the end, all of these tools need to create an ROI and drive compliance across the platform, right? Whether it's the DSOs, we know there's oftentimes low compliance. Why? Turnover. Training is all, you know, tends to be a little bit more fragmented. We standardize all that. So we're going to incorporate that tool into our learning so you can see how that fits. And again, it's part of your toolkit to driving case acceptances, driving the overall outcome. So we're very focused on that. It's actually a question we get quite often. But I think as these tools transform and treatment planning transforms with a lot more digitization, we'll certainly hopefully be on the leading cusp of or the leading edge of driving all of that into our platforms. So hopefully that answered your question well, Wes.

All right, it does. Let's pivot over to the DSO space. You've been in this industry for a long time. I think you were at Dent Supply Sirona before this. How long have you been in the dental space, Matt?

In the dentistry as I mostly define it is usually about 7 years at this point in time, beginning 2019. Where I really had to lean into working with the dentists or whatever the case is. But, but, you know, my time at Dentsply Sirona certainly prepared me for the role that I'm sitting in, actually, which led me to go after this role when it became available.

Yeah. And I think with your background, you're pretty intimate in institutional money, private equity, that space, which has been the kind of the wind behind the sails of the emergence of DSOs. Today, there are some DSOs that sort of bootstrap it without PE money, at least to start, although typically eventually to have a true inflection point, they need to incorporate outside PE money. So PE is a huge factor in the DSO space. It's an area that you know quite well, and that trend is probably going to continue. I have a lot of thoughts on this. And what may happen when the music stops, which I think it will at some point, and the gunpowder dries up when the economy falls and PE swings back and forth in their sort of appetite for acquisitions. And it's been very strong. It's been a very strong appetite for some time now. Nobody quite knows where it's going to sort of find its equilibrium between the private and the institutional DSO space. I've seen a lot of different statistics. The one I looked up this past week on the, um, I think the ADA Health Institute said 16% of all practices are institutionally owned these days. That felt a little light from my experience. I feel like it's closer to 25%, but I could be wrong on that. But, um, I mean, setting, setting the trends aside, it's clearly a presence in the industry and will continue to be, and maybe even incrementally more. As time goes on. How is Spear adapting to the institutional model? Is it something that you're targeting, uh, specifically, or do you still focus mostly on the private practice owner?

No, we, we are targeting— we really target at the dentist, so we're somewhat agnostic. Do we go after the DSOs? Like, we obviously have an enterprise group that talks to them, but we mainly say, look, if we could create a great product, a training and development tool for dentists and their teams. Whether you're a DSO or an independent practice, you're going to want to participate. Um, so we're somewhat agnostic to that. I do think when we tend to talk to the DSOs, the pain points that we're trying to really solve emulate through the halls of all those DSOs, right? Because we are trying to create a standard training and development platform that's an ongoing, you know, partner or membership So it's not a 6-month sprint or anything like that, right? It's like there's always going to be change and we're going to help manage that change with you, that onboarding of an employee or what have you. And these are the things that resonate very well with these DSOs because they amalgamated during a very low interest rate environment and everyone knew that was a great investment plan, right? I could buy something at 12, do some things, sell it at a minimum of 12. Well, now it's not selling at 12 anymore. Anymore. Interest rates are higher, right? It's harder. Cash burn is higher. They're trying to drive same-store growth more than they ever have. And then at the same time, you have 30% turnover of dental associates. So how do you grow any business when your lead, your sales group, let's call it, is turning over at that frequency? So our goal is to, how do we slow that attrition? How do we create a better environment? And the best way to do that is creating a good or putting a good investment in training and development. They all have their tools, but the one thing I'm often shocked by is it's still highly fragmented. There's a few of them out there that have done amazingly well, and we know them. They've insourced everything. They own and control the end-to-end. Even they come to us in some types of edge cases. But I think for the mass, it's like, look, we need something quickly to onboard somebody. So our value proposition, oftentimes our claim is, hey, for an early dentist, again, whether they're in an independent practice or they're at a DSO, How do we get that doctor generating $2,800 of production a day? Well, we're going to start because we have to get them to do the basic restorative work well. They've got to know when to do composites, when to do crowns, and how do we 2x that, 3x that? I actually just looking at data from one of our large partners and we're showing a 64% increase in crown production since going through the platform. That change is only in a matter of months. So we want to continue to drive that, but that's what we want to go do. And then we want to expand you into other areas. And we have a lot of hygiene content as well to drive a much more higher efficient hygiene department, but creating sort of co-therapy with the dentist, driving more patients into the dental chair. All of these things are really important. And I think that is something that the DSOs are very interested in. We had a lot of discussions over the last few weeks with them, in fact, around that matter.

Yeah, here's a Here's a question I think is, I believe this is a very important question. As dentists get more experience and there's more of a, a delta from the time they get outta school to the present day, um, they become, um, uh, most of them get their clinical skills to a pretty good place. There will always be some disparity in, in talent and, and clinical skill sets. Across dentists, but they typically get to a place where they're doing a pretty good job. But what I found, what, where I find more disparity in the effectiveness of the dentist is on the soft side of dentistry, which is how they communicate. Communication. I emphasize this to my clients. I just cannot explain, I can't overstate how valuable good, clear, crisp communication is to their patients to get them to understand why they need to accept a certain case that you're presenting to them. And those dentists who learn how to communicate effectively, even if they're not the better clinician, I have no idea because I don't measure that, tend to be the ones who have higher production and, uh, better cash flow, and they're paying off their debt. They're accelerating their financial independence faster, which is what I exist for. All of that stuff. So my, my job always starts when the dollar hits the bank account, but I notice more dollars are hitting bank accounts in doctors that I find to be really good communicators and leaders. How does Spear get involved in that soft side of dentistry?

Yeah, look, it's the old adage, right? Doctors with good bedside manner, dentists with good chairside matter are probably going to be the most successful and the happiest. And maybe it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. But way we help is actually when you're part of a, when you get our practice membership, which is about $270 a month, we have content and actually video capabilities for almost every procedure. And what we always recommend doctors is do make your team view these. And now we have the platform that measures the usage of all those things. So you could score your team about or understand, hey, have they gone through all these tools? And the goal there is to drive a similar Alexa Because what happens in dentistry, and most dentists don't realize, they're in a consumer business. It's not a managed care business like you would see in medicine. Yes, there's some opportunities to access managed care, DeltaDentals, et cetera, et cetera. But those things, as we know, are more coupons, right? Right. They don't drive all of the purchase decisions. That's the marketability of the practice to some degree. But there is always a conversation about discretionary income or what have you. And you have to be able to have a good conversation. But the thing, because I bring up this consumer aspect of it, and this is where I've really spent a lot of my career, is trying to understand how do you get a patient to accept a larger case? And the reason is oftentimes, to your point, is in the conversation you're having with them. And one of the things that quickly happens in dentistry as a patient has the dental assistant sometimes sitting next to them and they ask their advice, They talk to the dentist, then they talk to the treatment coordinator. If they all have different conversations or say things differently, it immediately builds distrust with the buyer, the patient. I don't call them a patient unless their mouth is being worked on. They're a consumer sitting in that chair. And so they're trying to figure out, well, do I want to do this? Is this important? And we all know the access to this thing when they get in the car. So they're going to look, hey, is this a fair price? Like, am I going to get ripped off? Well, you have to be able to have a good conversation, and that's where our videos have been designed to really, one, give the visualization the patient needs. So we always encourage them, use these when you're talking to the patient. It immediately gives them, and you could send it to them, you could send it to their iPhone or their email or their text. So when they go home and they have to talk to this significant other, or they're in that purchasing journey because they didn't say yes to you chairside, like, can they see the tool and how it drives clinical need for them. And so we— oh, that's some of the things that I often tell our customers, like, I'm so amazed that you're underutilizing it. We have hundreds of procedures that you could be putting in front of folks and helping you in these conversations. And if anything, use it to train up your team so you all say the same thing, because the minute a dental assistant or a treatment coordinator or a dentist says something remotely different it immediately builds a distrust or skepticism. And I'll give you a simple example. I was observing years ago a hygienist getting frustrated with her dentist because she said, hey, I have the patient ready to do it. And then he comes in and he starts saying things like, oh, it's only a little bit of bleeding here, blah, blah, blah. That little bit sound made it seem as if that procedure was no longer important and it would drive her crazy. Those are the things we need to harmonize from an education or from a discussion point, because every touchpoint that patient has, even when they walk— before they've walked into your practice, if it doesn't have a harmony to it, the patient isn't going to convert at the level you want to convert. And that's just consumer businesses. That's what they focus a lot on. We always hear of all the data that they stare at. It's ultimately to drive that bump in conversion. We believe we will be a significant aid or tool to the dentist to help drive that conversion? How do we take your chairside opportunities from 12% to 20%? Or case acceptance, as I should say. And this has greatly gone down in the last 20 years because patients have more, or consumers have more access to data. Is this a good dentist? Are their fees too high? Is someone doing it less expensive? And believe me, they don't go to another alternative. They just don't show back up to the practice yet. They'll come back a year from now. And if they don't hear the same conversation, well, I guess it wasn't that important. So that's the stuff we're really trying to drive as a continuum of care through our treatment planning philosophies and training.

So do some of your modules or workshops then go over what to say, almost scripting level or sales concepts, and that's specifically around the non-tangible clinical, but more on the soft communication skills, you have modules on those?

We do have modules. We have customer success teams for any membership that will work on those things with you as well. I wouldn't say every module has that because it would be a really busy module because sometimes I'm just trying to learn a clinical skill. If it always converted into, hey, let's have the soft training, soft skills training, but there's different places. And again, we have a pretty voluminous content that we're now trying to integrate together. So you know that, hey, you've gone through this, hey, watch this module now on the discussions you need to have. Oh, and by the way, here's a patient educational video that you could accompany your discussions and send it to the patient when they go home or give it to them beforehand, whatever. Everyone— we're still trying to drive that formula of what drives the most success. But I do think I brought in some really, really talented people. We got a biz, you know, our biz ops and data science group that's staring at data. We'll eventually nail this so that we have the complete formula. How do we sort of 2x, 3x your production in case acceptances?

Well, if our listeners, you listener, if you're a client of Practice CFO and really any dentist, I just want to share anecdotally what I notice as we talk with doctors every single day and we look at their P&Ls every single day and we do tax returns and we do financial forecasts and we see people's net worth and their progress toward financial independence. This all relates in one financial ecosystem. And what I notice is dentists who have this, uh, almost impressive ability to convey an idea of value and convey value tend to be the ones who have a stronger P&L. And those who have a stronger P&L, as long as they have a decent, uh, sort of consumption, uh, level in their personal life, tend to be the ones putting more into savings and investments or real estate, stock market, 401(k)s, and they are building that platform for financial independence. And so I just want to elevate that one as a huge differentiator in those dentists that I find financially successful versus those who are always just trying to keep their, their head above water. And we've seen and worked with a lot of both of them. So that's a big concept for me. The last thing I wanna end off on is, uh, is sell yourself a little bit here, Matt. Let's talk about your tiers. You have 5 tier membership tiers. At the lowest level is Discover, and Discover on your website says $83 a month. And, uh, sorry, that's zero. That one's free. It's very free. Yeah, that one's free. So preview clinical courses and sample learning paths before choosing a membership. Uh, so that's kind of a, a little, uh, teaser. And then you get in the individual where you have $83 a month and you're adding clinical skills and meet CE requirements, things like that. Then you move into practice, which is role-based learning and CE. So this is, I think, where you're getting into the, the real meat of, of the, of the, the value proposition. But then you move up and, uh, and by the way, that one practice is where there's a little more team involvement. Then you move up to the fourth tier, that's Faculty Club. Unparalleled access to world-class clinicians. And then lastly is Navigator, where there's almost a coaching and, and practice management element, uh, to that. Even though it's not necessarily a PM consultant, there certainly are some, uh, layers to that. Uh, go ahead and elaborate on that. And what do you recommend for dentists at different, uh, junctures of their career?

Yeah, listen, I would tell everyone today go open up a Discover membership and just trial test it. See what— see if you like the content. Um, you don't get access to everything, right? You don't have access to the suite of patient ed videos or team-based, role-based types of training, um, and other things. Um, but at least you could see what it is you have, right? We're, we're always continuing to tinker with that. Um, but I would, at minimum, if you're somebody who's in dental school, just out of dental school, early in your career, get yourself an individual membership. If your focus is to drive more crowns, get yourself an individual membership. I do think eventually you will be wowed by what it is and move into a practice membership because whether you're a dental associate, we have these conversations all the time, well, I don't own the practice, but realize in order to drive your production, you need that hygienist and dental assistant working with you, right? And regardless of whether you own the practice or not, it's still a team, right? Every business is a team. And so it's worth the investment for $270 or $260, whatever it is a month. That's lower than I think a lifetime gym membership. My wife just told me the membership is like $450. I was like, what? What's going on here? But anyway, but anyway, this is an investment in growing your business, right? That's a— it's a real investment. It's not just getting CE courses. And then to your point, when you get to Navigator, that's really where we can really lean in on a service model to really drive the efficiency for you. For you on what's going on, what's falling apart, who's not doing what, here's what we need to do. And we really are much more game planning as if we were an employee of your practice of what we think you need to do. So whether it's trying to implement patient educational into your discussion points, most employees would push back and say, I don't have time for this. Well, we have to figure out because this is a conversion issue. I want to do more crowns or I want to do more restorative work or I want the hygienist to do more scaling and root planings. Whatever the case might be, we need to implement it because there's an outcome on the other side that we want to go get. Well, how do we drive that change? How do we drive that education? So again, we're across the gamut, as you said, Wes, and the goal is to really, we really believe, become the learning management system for dentistry. We really believe what dentistry needs is a standard platform to learn from. Every employee needs a standard approach to learning and developing. And it needs to be ongoing and it needs to be accessible at all times. And I always, I'm laughing now because as we turned on our new platform, the majority of activity is happening in the middle of the evening. I wake up and I'll give you a, for instance, yesterday we had 18 new customers coming in up to 4 PM yesterday. When I woke up the next morning, we had 40-something new customers. They're coming in at night because the dentist, that's when they have time to work. The hygienists tend to come in late in the day, meaning 4 or 5 o'clock or noontime, right? So we're able to complement that. If I was to show up to your practice, I would never be able to do all those things at the time you want. And I just think it's a better tool to help drive this for you because we meet everybody where they need to be met, right? And I think in the end, if we could create that standard platform that's driving frequent conversations or development pathways, we're going to drive great outcomes for everybody. Whether that's reducing your employee turnover or improving employee retention, I think creating higher case acceptances or outcomes, driving better, obviously, clinical outcomes. We really believe if that's what you're looking for, that's why you want to come to Spear.

Well, I think Benjamin Franklin— don't quote me on this— but I think he said the best education one can make is education in oneself. And Spear offers a great— I love that you use the term learning management system. For you dentists who have never heard of that term before, it is the platform that creates consistency and speed in learning a specific thing. And we all have them. We all need to learn. I love those dentists who are avidly trying to learn and improve themselves, and those doctors who learn how to do larger cases. or, or, and, or be more efficient on your nut and bolt dentistry around crowns and, and all of that is sort of what it's required to compete effectively today. It's a very competitive landscape in dental these days, very different than say 30 years ago. And, uh, so I encourage all dentists to, uh, go on to Spear, look at their different options, uh, have a system where every time you have a new employee, you're able to quickly get them trained up. Spear can be that learning partner to help that happen. And I think it's definitely worth that investment in, in doing that. I do view Spear as an investment and not a, not, you know, not a commodity cost on the P&L. I can't elevate that enough. So, um, Matt, thank you for joining the program.

No, I had a blast. It was, it was great talking with you, Wes. I, uh, I appreciate the time.

All right. Take care.

All right. You too.