Innovation, Build Out, Virtual Consults and More with Dr. Weston Spencer DDS

Hey, dental associates and new practice owners. Welcome to the Associates on Fire podcast, powered by Practice cfo. This is the podcast that teaches you what you never learned in dental school, the financial side of dentistry. We cover topics from planning for ownership, buying a practice, to student loans, taxes, and all things financial for the hungry to learn. Dental associate. So let's light it up.

All right, everybody, welcome to another podcast episode of the Associates on Fire. I am thrilled because we got Dr. Weston Spencer in the office today who bought a practice back in 2015, right?

That is right. Yeah. A little over five years.

So I'm still calling you a recent practice owner.

That's fair.

Because the journey continues in practice ownership. And you have a practice down in La Jolla.

Correct.

California, here in San Diego. And a couple themes I think we'll talk about today for everybody listening is the concept of going from good to great because you bought a good practice and now it's converting into a great practice. Talk about buying a practice from a really good, sincere person. You bought a practice from somebody who is a very thoughtful person and then building upon that practice in a way that didn't destroy the goodwill of all those years that he put into the practice, but also making the changes that you envisioned for your practice. And there's always that delicate balance of maintaining that goodwill and the systems, but also changing it for the better, to get current with the times and also to mold to you what your vision is. So a really quick timeline. 2015, you bought the practice, and I knew you at that time. We were talking before you bought that practice. You were associating there.

And it was a four up practice. Fast forward three years later, you open up a satellite office closer to home, which is where I personally have gone to see you. Dr. Spencer is my dentist.

So honored. So honored to have the owner of practice cfo. I have a lot of celebrities in my practice, but you're number one.

I'll take that title.

I don't have that many celebrities, but.

I remember I had first moved down here to San Diego in 2013 14, and met Weston shortly after that. One of the first doctors.

Okay, let's detail this. This story needs to be told. So one day I'm going surfing with somebody that you know, good friend, a mutual friend of ours. This is back in like 2013, maybe 2014ish. And I show up and you're there. It's like 6am we're at Del Mar 15th street, actually. And we introduce ourselves and you say, hey, I'm Wes. I'm like, hey, I'm Wes. Like, oh, Wes, what do you do? Oh, I'm a dental accountant. I'm like, oh, really? I'm a dentist. This is awesome. This is gonna work out so good. And I think we caught a couple of ways, but I was just, like, picking your brain the whole time and thinking to myself, oh, this is gonna be a really good relationship. Here's a good guy. And what turned from there, right? We would meet often, talk a little bit about. And I told you my situation that I was looking at buying this practice from Dr. Lovell. And we spent a lot of time together looking at that practice, which we can get into more detail about. But ultimately you were working for someone else at the time. You hadn't started practice cfo. But this was a good opportunity for us to kind of pair up. I said, look, if you help me individually, I didn't really want to join that other group that you were with. And you kind of led me to the promised land through that first transition. And here we are now. So it's pretty amazing to look back that that's where it all started and what's come from there. I mean, we both accomplished a lot, so it's fun to look back on that.

Let's talk about the early years for a sec. So you were associating in. Was it two practices at the time? They were right next to each other. Right.

I was very fortunate to work with a phenomenal dentist, Dr. Paul Daugherty, who runs an incredible practice, in my opinion, still probably the premier. One of the premier practices in La Jolla in the Village. And I had the opportunity to basically associate for him for almost five years. And while I was with him, I just happened to, through this is a good lesson. Found out about Dr. Lovell's practice through an endodontist in town. So a great source of who's potentially selling would be a specialist, in my opinion. If you know specialists in the area, hey, ask them, who do you think is going to retire? They all kind of talk to each other. So that's how I found out about Dr. Lovell's practice. So I was working for one, met Dr. Lovell at the time, walked in the door. Honestly, just as soon as I heard that he might be selling that day, I walked into his office, met the office manager who was there at the time. She let me talk to Dr. Lovell, shook his hand, asked him if I could take him to lunch. And from there we kind of just spent a lot of time going to lunch together, just talking about what it would be like to work with each other. Figured we had a lot of the same philosophies. And eventually I became his associate first and was working for him about two days, and Dr. Daugherty about two to three days a week.

And I find a lot of times these matchmaking moments occur at the initiative of the buyer. There's a lot of sellers out there who. They're sort of ready to sell, but they just haven't taken that initiative. They haven't gone and spoken with a broker. They don't have a buyer in, you know, in hand. And so they just sort of keep working. They just sort of keep working. But a lot of these people, if you came to them and you said, hey, Doc, are you interested in selling? Well, a lot of them will say, no, not yet. But there are some out there who will be like, well, it's been on my mind. What do you. What are you thinking? Let's go. Let's go do lunch. And sometimes hitting the streets like that can create opportunities that nobody else is going to find easily because everybody's going to the broker list, everybody's asking the supplier. You know, everybody's doing that stuff. But going, you know, really going and opening up more channels is going to be really valuable. And it's like the most important business decision you'll ever make, what practice you're going to buy. So why not create as many options as you can? Then you have the ability to pick and choose the one that's going to be the best fit for you. And the only way you're going to have, I think, a lot of options and unique options is if you try to do things a little bit differently as a buyer and you go outside the normal sort of networking channel to find. To find opportunities for you. So let's talk about him. It was Dr. Lovell. What a great guy. You said, hey, Wes, you know, he hasn't done a valuation, he hasn't engaged a broker, but he is interested. What do I do? I said, well, we need to agree on a price first. If you feel like everything else in that practice fits, then. Now it's just a matter of the finances here. And so what is it worth? So I ran some numbers, and I think I came up with like $550,000.

Yeah. Which, by the way, he didn't have anybody. He had an accountant, but he didn't have anybody that he had talked to about how to do this transition as well. So we were both kind of trying to figure out, and at least we. I Had you to kind of direct us a little bit and like, what should we be looking at? And so you were the one who was telling me what. What reports to get and what to look at. We took it to the bank, too. There were two banks we kind of looked at, I think at the time as bank of America and Citibank. And we didn't have a full valuation until you were able to kind of look at the numbers. And then you came back and said, well, Wes, if this stays, this is going, or this stays, this goes. Here's where we had a low, a medium, and a high of what it would potentially value at, depending on if this practice actually was brokered and went public. And so we gave that to Dr. Lovell, and I was fortunate. And again, we'll always look back at that of how incredible he handled that. We gave him the middle number and said, hey, so this is probably where we should settle out. And he was like, well, that's great, Wes. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to really just take care of the people here, you know, take care of the team members that are going to stay, and I'm going to take the low number. So he ended up taking the low number of the three offers that we basically had there, which right doesn't happen. But it just is a testament to finding the right person, the right time, who was motivated in a certain way. And I often talk with buyers who were saying, like, well, how do you find that right guy? And how do you know if that's the right guy or gal to buy from? And knowing a little bit more about Dr. Love. Well, he was pretty financially set. You know, his wife still had a pretty good job. It wasn't like everything was relying on the close of this deal in order for him to be able to retire comfortably. So I think that makes a big difference in understanding that, like, why is the person selling? If they're selling, they're trying to get out because they got to move or they're injured or other thing. There may be a lot of other factors at play where you're going to maybe pay a little bit more, but this one just happened to work out, you know, in our favor.

I have to say I'm a fan of associates or buyers and sellers connecting on a personal level outside of the, you know, their team that's representing them and maybe even meeting together beforehand. If you work together well, great. You already know each other very well, and that can be an opportunity to buy. Strangely, the statistics of associates buying the practice that they're associating, it tends to be a little bit lower. But. And if you don't have that opportunity then going and having like the lunch that you had. But. And the reason why I say this is so important is because a lot of the success is going to be determined by how well you're able to sort of reflect what has been the leadership and the culture and the doctor style in that practice. And doesn't mean you're not going to change things over time. But I just seen a lot of problems where somebody buys a practice that they are just dramatically different as a personality, as a leader, as a communicator and then, then the seller. And so finding that just that sort of realm of compatibility or similarities I think is one of the more important non financial things to look at when you're, when you're buying a practice.

I think though that like every buyer should have checklist of things that they're looking at in the practice. And one of those big glaring boxes should be what is the philosophy of the seller that I'm getting this from? If you're going in cold, you've never worked in that practice before, you're going to need to talk to some team members. Hopefully you have the ability to talk to a team member if he's retiring and the team members know he's selling, to kind of ask them like, hey, you know, how does he diagnose? What kind of things does he like to do? What's the best procedures he does here? Like what is he interested in? And I keep saying he as if they're all male doctors, they're not all guys. But in our situation it was. And I can't tell you how important it is because I see so many doctors that struggle if they don't have the same philosophy or if you know the sellers, it's classic, right? The seller's super conservative and the new buyer kind of has a little bit of pressure to pay off a loan and need to be busy. And so maybe they're not as conservative or don't take the time to gain the trust of the patients first. And then that thing starts to struggle a little bit and they wonder why they're not able to produce as much as the previous doctor was. So I think that's a huge, huge key, is really understanding the philosophy of the seller. Before you really go too far.

All right, I want to talk really quickly about the importance of your office manager. I find in practices that.

They cash flow well, they have good collection level, they Often have a very good office manager or sort of front office person. And I've always been very impressed with Tesha. She helps run the show up there at your front desk. So nice, but also smart, I think, from a business standpoint, in the way that she oversees a lot of the interaction between patients in your office and the way she communicates with them. That was an asset that you inherited when you came into the practice, right? Tesha was in the practice already?

No, she was officially the first person I ever personally hired in my life as a business owner or in any other situation. Never had to hire anybody. And we. Hi now, you know, she started working with us before I bought, but just a couple of months before I bought because we knew that the office manager from the previous doctor was going to retire as soon as he retired or as soon as he sold. So. So we knew we needed somebody. So she spent a month or two in the practice before the transition happened and then has been there ever since.

And what was. So you had actually quite a bit of change then for patients in that sense. New doctor, although he did associate back for a little bit, and then a new front office. So a new face when they walk in. Had Tessa had a background in. In dental?

She did. She hadn't. She hadn't been an office manager, but she kind of like had been like a number two, you know, in that position. So had seen that from a different practice, somebody else had referred her to us, is how we found her. And it was interesting, I think, the advice I gave her, number one for that situation. I said, you are the face. You represent the face. In my practice, when someone walks in the door, I don't get to be there to greet them when they walk in the door. I said, the most important thing I want you to do is when somebody walks in this practice is I want you to stand up, shake their hand, you know, or offer your hand, to shake their hand, which nobody does anymore, unfortunately, with a big old smile on your face, as if you're me, and just say, thank you, welcome to our practice. Like, it's so good. I'm Tesha. I'm so happy to be able to meet you. You know, like, just really make a big deal out of that, out of that. And that was one aspect and a couple other things we talked about. But she did a good job of transitioning that no matter what, she always, always, always took the patient's side, no matter what happened, if the patient complained or anything. We just always did everything we could to save that patient no matter what, I had to write a couple letters in the middle, like if I did something and offended somebody because it was just different than when Dr. Lovell did. I wrote a lot of personal letters in the very beginning. Hey, I'm really sorry that it went this way or there was a miscommunication. I will do everything I can to, to make sure that you're still going to be a patient here for as long as I'm here. And so a lot of that had to happen, but, but I think that that was worth it because we saved a lot of, I mean saved. We kept a lot of the patients, if not all of them. You know.

Kind of a unique location where you, where you practice. The geography is it's sort of tucked away in La Jolla, the village, which is deep. Yeah, you go way down there by the shore and there's basically one road that goes in. It's always pretty crowded to get in. And so it's kind of almost a self contained area. And there's a few general dentists down there and there's some specialists down there. And it's part of almost like this, like this group or club of dentists who all know each other very well. And there's a lot of referring going on there. It's almost like it's isolated and self contained and a lot of the patients are sort of been there a long time and the way they think and sort of view their relationship with their dentist as maybe, maybe unique. How, how did you transition into that or how did you deal with that? Because usually you, you find people don't accept change very easily in a very long established setting that's been that way for a long time. And how have you interacted with the specialists down there? What advice might you have for other associates who are going to be buying into a practice where they're essentially entering this sort of club or network of doctors who have been referring.

That has always been a huge part of my personal practice philosophy is interdisciplinary care. In all honesty, like I, I made a decision even before I became my own, an owner of the practice, that I'd work a lot with people that were better than me at specialty. And like I, when I came out, I loved endo and I love doing endo, but I realized I couldn't do endo as good as, you know, Dr. Javolet next door to me in La Jolla. Same thing with oral surgery, implants.

Those kinds of things. And so for me, I made a decision early that I was going to be the best at the stuff that I really, really love to do. You know, more pros cases, you know, cosmetic cases, full mouth stuff, anything that I was going to be the best. I mean, I spent all my time and money in CE in that zone so I could be really, really good at. And I had really Good, you know, Dr. Daugherty was an amazing mentor for me. He just one of the, I mean, if not the best dentist I ever, you know, have known, and he did quality dentistry and he also practiced like that. So I kind of learned from him that it's critical to have relationships like that. If you go into a practice and you do it all by yourself, right, you better darn well do it at an extremely high level. But guess what? When you first buy a practice, you're. And if you're in your first five years of dentistry, I'm sorry, you're just not that good at doing all of it. I have yet to see anybody in their first five years that can do everything in dentistry at an extremely high level, even if you think you can. And so having reaching out to specialists and creating a very strong network and a give and take referral relationship with them so that you feel supported and that you support them, I think help me drastically. So as soon as I could prove to them that I did do good dentistry, I was seeing cases from them referring to me, you know, and that was, that was a huge pat on the back to me as a young dentist, you know. And so people that I would refer to them, they would say to these patients that were just getting to know me, yeah, doctor, we really like Dr. Spencer. He's great. You stick with him. You know, having that to support you as well is huge. Because if you don't have that, if you do everything yourself.

Who'S to back you up, you know, and things are going to happen, something's going to fail, and then you're going to have to go to the specialist anyway at some point. So you might as well, especially early on while you're gaining that education, to become really, really proficient at those things that you want to do. Build strong, strong specialist relationships.

That has truly been one of the key components to my success in, in a town especially like La Jolla, because they're great specialists. You know, we got La Jolla oral surgeries right there. We've got great orthodontists. Dr. Javolet has been a fantastic endodontist, great periodontist. We've got Dr. Nordland in town. Dr. Loftus was right close to us. He just Moved outside of it. And I'm missing some others for sure. But. But. But those are the people that I've really relied on closely to. To.

For.

To take good care of the patients that I refer out so that they have a good experience. But I've had patients come back to me from them saying they had an incredible experience, or new patients that have come because they've referred those to me, so that. That can't be overlooked.

What do you think would have happened had you gone in there, tried to immediately keep everything in house, or approach the patients dramatically differently and tried to maybe.

I don't know, press a little too hard with the patients or demanded a lot out of your staff, Maybe too early or maybe too abruptly. What would happen in that type of setting?

What I always say is there's kind of a trust and awareness that you have to build with patients in order to have good case acceptance, right? Patients are either gonna say yes or no when you present them the opportunity. Say, for example, a crown. And if you don't have a high level of trust and a high level of awareness, or if that patient doesn't have the high level of trust and awareness, then the likelihood that you get them to say yes to that treatment is gonna be pretty low. And so when you take that stand where, you know, it's. It's kind of all or nothing and we got to do this right now or else kind of thing, that trust level is really hard to build. It can come across wrong. That doesn't say that you can't do it that way. And some people are good at that, but the vast majority, again, while you're young and you're learning your way here, and you just took over a new practice, in my opinion, the number one thing is to build trust with a patient. And trust oftentimes just takes time to build, right? Think of this. If you blow that patient out of the water with some big treatment plan, and it's like, hey, all or nothing. And if they leave, they're gone. You have no opportunity to ever recoup that. But what's the value of a patient over 10 years? How much money is a patient worth over a period of time? So you may not get it today, or you may not get it in six months, but there's a high likelihood if that person stays in your practice and you build trust, you. You're gonna get that in year one, two, three, and four, right? So you're saying goodbye to all that future profit by pushing them out the door and not spending the Time gaining the trust. That's old school, conservative. And I know there's a lot of, you know, courses you can take and other things to gain case acceptance and all these things. To me, I always tell people it has, being successful in dentistry has absolutely nothing to do with teeth. It just doesn't have anything to do with teeth. It's expected if you're going to be a good dentist, it's expected you have skills. So that's why we go to ce, we put in the money. You have to be CE junkie early on to learn good dentistry. But to be, to run a dental business and to keep patients and to provide good customer service, that has nothing to do with teeth. It just doesn't. Right. It's the opposite of that. It's gaining trust. It's learning about your customers and what they want and what they like and then delivering an incredible experience while they're there. It just happens to be that what you do during that experience is deliver dentistry to them. You know what I mean? But you're creating something different than everybody else around you and that's why they come back to you. So you have to get in the mindset of, yeah, I'm going to be a good dentist. It's expected that you're a good dentist if you want people to stick around. But what you need to work on is the other side of it, right? The non dental stuff.

And I want to, I want to build on this. A lot of dentists are concerned, young dentist associates and you've probably seen this and maybe felt some of this yourself. You come out of dental school and you are loaded with student loans. You got 5, 6, $700,000 of student loans. If you're a specialist, you might have more than that. And you're on an IDR program, an income driven repayment program, IBR repay. And you're following my timeline, which I hope everybody listens, has followed my timeline of events in the life of an associate where you sort of go through a series of steps and until your, your student loans are finally refinanced into private. And for you, we've set up recently a 401k plan and that's being funded which happens before refinancing a student loan into, into a private, in my, in my plan. So you're following that timeline just great. But I, I want to say the numbers have been reflective of some really good things in your practice. And if you don't mind, I'm just going to share a few of those numbers, top line numbers. When you bought the practice and your first full year, I believe was 2015.

Yeah, I took over end of 2014. So my first full year was 2015.

And you collected $944,000 that first year, which was higher than what it was collecting in the year before that.

Six low seven.

So even in that first year we bumped it pretty nicely. We. I mean you bumped it pretty nicely and you had a 33%.

And you told me, Wes, in that year, Dr. Spencer, if you could just do $1 million a year, man, you're going to be cruising.

You know I'm always pushing you. So now fast forward. Million dollars. We blow by that. We do 2019 collections of 1.703 million with a very similar profit margin percentage. We had about a 31% profit margin on that. And that's not very long. Going from 944,000 to 1.7 million.

That's a specialty, by the way. I always like no specialty. There is no specialty going on in my practice.

Yep.

Last time I did an endo was 2015.

So now we fast forward and we're going to talk about your relocation within your same building from what, the third floor down to the first floor, whatever that was. And you built out your ops. This was sort of a step of faith because when you're doing 1.7 million nut and bolt dentistry in a 4 op practice, you are using your space and you're just busting.

Yeah, it was tight. It was hard to take on emergencies at that point. And when you're doing those numbers too, you're thinking, okay, it's time to consider having associate. You know that's kind of right in that.

Yeah.

Like to me, four ops with 1.5 or just above there, you're probably in the range of like you could probably start using associate. Right?

Yep. And so we go downstairs and now you have a beautiful office. There's debt associated with that. You and I know that, which I was terrified of. And nobody wants to take on more debt. But it's really important to understand the difference between debt, that is for something that's going to appreciate in value over time and produce a return on that, and consumer debt, which is something that loses value over time. And if it's a sort of a, say collateralized, but more of like an asset based debt where you're in this case you're doing a build out and we feel confident that we're going to get a return on that, then that's a good thing. And your numbers are showing that. So we're just coming out of COVID Mm. Covid hit basically March through May, May, June, sort of the hardest months. Now, what have you collected, top line, over the past three months?

Well, without getting too in detail, let's just say that on my normal average, where we would probably, you know, to get to 1.7. Right. Like an average month is right around like one. Yeah, 1 30ish, 135, give or take a little bit between everything, you know, and then. And keep in mind that 1.7 was between two locations. Right. So I was doing all of that out of two locations. So Covid hits, and I didn't want to. And I still haven't gone back to my second location because it's really small. It's in the heart of Rancho Santa Fe. Very small satellite space, no walls. It's actually an orthodontic space that I sublease a day to two days a week just before COVID hit. And we haven't gone back since. So I was nervous was I going to be able to handle, you know, out of La Jolla, what I was doing in a two practice, you know, monthly production. And we've blown way past that. I mean, and I know that everybody has had good months, June and July, for probably everybody in San Diego probably was good. There was a lot of hygiene to catch up on, a lot of. Lot of broken teeth from, you know, stress of COVID and all that stuff. But we had an average August, and then we just. Again, just an increase in like, what, like, 30% increase again in September, and. And that's from not even. I mean, yeah, we've had some big cases in there, but just having the room and the team to back you up, to be able to produce that, you know, like, has been incredible. Like, I actually have the space. Somebody calls the day before, and we can squeeze them in the next day. Because I used to only be able to run two columns, and now I can effectively run three columns at least without being overwhelmed. Because we still want to create a good experience, right? We don't want people waiting and all that other stuff. But I can still squeeze it in. I got the. I got the assistant to support me, and I've got the room to put them in. And we can bounce in. We could diagnose something. We can get it on the schedule. Whether that day. I don't. I don't often do a ton of same day. It's really hard for me to do same day because I already stacked in a day. If I have a productive Day going, I'm not going to wait, make everybody else wait. That's going to pay a fee for service fee just to sit there and wait while I squeeze in an extra crown, you know. But I can usually get them in within a couple of days and we're off and running. So.

Like I said, remember, I was terrified of debt. And if I could make this comment too, that I always like sharing, I told a good friend of mine and partner, Dr. Landon Libby, who I greatly respect and enjoy working closely with. And right before we opened, this was in January of this year, we just finished the space, about to move down. I told him how stressed I was about all the debt. And he said, wes, like, stop worrying about it, man. You got seven ops now. You're going to kill it. It's going to be. I'm like, I don't know, it's going to be crazy. It's so hard. And I said, you know what? Actually what the good news is we have. Dentistry has never experienced a scenario where your production goes to zero. We have up and down months, right? I'll go up 30%, down 30% just because of September, people going back to school, that kind of thing. But never have we experienced the time when you close your office. And I said that out loud in January, and I made that joke for like a couple of weeks. And then guess what happened in March. Like complete and utter shutdown, right? For two months, with the exception of a couple of emergencies. So I feel like I jinxed the whole industry in a way. Like, it was kind of my fault. So to be honest, if you're disappointed, then just give me a call. But. But yeah. So that being said, you and I, we looked at the numbers, we looked at what I was doing in four chairs. It made sense. Let's go to seven. Everything was pointing upwards, right? It would give us the room we needed and we could breathe a little bit more. Yeah, we were taking on more debt. I'd have a few thousand dollars more in overhead, fixed overhead. But what that translated to multiple chairs, extra to increase hygiene and increase my production. I mean, I would never look back now. It's been awesome. And I know there's a long way to go, but, man, I'm so glad I have the room to breathe and to actually do what we want to do.

Now, I could say comfortably that you are on track to now in your new space to do over $2 million a year, where five years ago we were just talking about breaking a million dollars a year. Now you mentioned team in There, you said my space and my team as a.

As your team grows, as your practice grows, leadership and culture becomes increasingly more important. And I like to bring this up in almost all of my podcasts because all those practices that have broken through to a different level, they've been able to figure that out, how to apply leadership in a way that motivates everybody to have a sense of purpose and a culture that everyone is excited about. What have you done in your practice and with your team to create that experience for them?

That's a great question.

I credit a good friend of mine, now I consider a good friend, and she works in town here. She actually worked with you. Deb Etros, right? Practice consultant. And we brought her in for a few months and had her. I just wanted somebody to kind of. We were a couple years in to owning, you know, I just wanted to make sure I was on the right track, am I doing things right? I'd never had a practice consultant. The best thing I had next to a practice consultant was probably you giving me advice on how to, like, you know, run numbers and keep an eye on things. But you and I don't talk a lot about culture when we meet, right? So Deb came in and she said, you know, you should really consider joining Crown Council. And I said, I know of Crown Council. I know Stuart Anderson, the Anderson. You know, Greg Anderson and Steve Anderson are the founders, and Stuart is their son. I went to high school with Stuart Anderson, and so I knew of the Crown council. I knew Dr. Libby was a big Crown Council guy. And I always felt like it was this big hoorah. Let's stand up and like, let's do dances together, and it's gonna make everything better. And I was always against that for some reason. Like, I was just uncomfortable with that. And so that was in my mind. And then fast forward a year later. I continued to have, like, I think 27, maybe into 2018, was having great years. I was producing a ton of dentistry and our numbers were going up. But I had this feeling like my team, like, I'm focusing. I'm putting so much money into CE to making me a better dentist, you know, so that I can produce more. And I was like, that's not how you get to the next level. Like, now I've done what I needed to do, and I need to keep being a good dentist. But if you want to go to the next level, then you have to have a team that loves working together, that supports you and supports each other, and the natural byproduct of that team. Having a good culture is just productivity. It comes naturally out of that. And so I was like, you know what? It's time. Like, let's. And so I went searching for, you know, how do I build a good culture in my practice? And kind of Crown Council came right up to the front of that again for me. So I reached back out to Stuart, I talked to Landon. I even told Deb I was going to go do it. We joined Crown Council. I took my team to their annual event, and it was exactly what I was looking for as part of a team, in all honesty. Like, I started getting tools and I started defining culture. We actually started having meetings now where we talked about the culture, we talked about our mission statement, we talked about those things to define the why of what we do. Then we started putting it down and talking about it more. And naturally, out of that, the culture improved. You know, are we perfect? Absolutely not. And I dare you to find a practice that can run a perfect day. Every single day. There's too many people, there's too many personalities. It happens. Like, you break down, but because you've been working on that culture, like, you have tools to try to fix that, and you're willing to, like, be honest with each other and say, hey, I'm sorry. Like, I made a mistake today, and I had to do. I had actually do that very recently in my practice, where I kind of finally broke down. I had some news about how we were going to be, you know, with employment, who was going to be able to work and when. And I finally felt like I had the. I had all the team members I had in the right place. And it was. Taken me a year to get there. And then a team member came and said, look, like I can't work this many days. Like, she was actually physically unable to do it. And I. Instead of, like, being like, yeah, like, we're gonna be okay, everything, I was like, I kinda. Not in a terrible way, but I kind of lost it, you know, I was just so frustrated. I was like, I've worked so hard to get us where we are in terms of being able to support each other and do it. And now I have to go back to the drawing board. And after that day, because of how I reacted, I had to apologize to that person and be honest with them and say, look, I'm so sorry that I came at that the wrong way. I was frustrated with the situation, and it came across like I was frustrated with you, and, you know, it's not your fault, you know, that this happened. And so I think, again, because of how much time we've put in to work on that, like, I was able to quickly recognize that, like, something's out of place. Let's fix this and let's go, boy. Instead of just ignoring it, right. We try to create a culture by design. Instead of, if you don't work on it, your culture is just going to become a certain way by default. And if it becomes a certain way by default, that's usually not a good culture. And so you have to work on it. Crown Council is just my solution to how to get there. There's so many other things out there, but I think also as an owner, spending a lot of time doing podcasts on leadership, books on leadership, you know, running businesses, all that stuff. We talked a little bit about this before, but my two favorite books.

My one favorite book in terms of culture that I would say that I recommend to every person who joins my practice.

Hug your customer.

Hug your customer at this time, right?

Yeah.

Hug your customers. Such a good book in terms of, like, the type of culture you want to create and how you and how you interact with your team and how you interact with your customers. Hug your customers.

Number one, by the way, on that. We ended up reading it as a company ourselves after you gave that recommendation, and we met as a group and spoke about it. Just the. You can. You can almost never go too far to really connect with the. With, in my case, a client, are you a patient? And.

Make them feel like they're the king or the queen? And a lot of that is what hug your customer is, is really knowing them and going beyond what your normal service provider might do to make them feel so welcomed and taken care of.

Yeah. Correct. So, yeah. So hopefully that kind of paints a picture of how important that part is. But now I feel like, look, fast forward two years to where I made that decision to join Crown Council and focus on the culture, my practice. And again, we continue to just grow from there. Right. And I have people that want to work with me, you know, that want to be there. We spend so much time together. You have to have people that are willing to just go and do. And even though you're going to make a mistake or you're going to sometimes be frustrated, you're going to quickly learn from that and overcome it. And let's come back and do another day. Because man, dentistry is a grind, right? Dentistry is such a grind every single day. There's a lot going on, man. You better love doing it and you better Love the people you're working with. Otherwise, it's like I can't imagine doing it the other way around.

It's cool to interview people like you, Dr. Spencer and Landon Libby, we had in on our last show as well. And some of these doctors who have been able to create remarkable practice in spite of the influences or the forces that are on the industry. And a lot of associates are coming out of school with all that student loans, all the student loans, and they're feeling uncertain about their ability to locate a practice and grow and run a practice that is going to help not only pay for their student loans, but also pay for their future selves and become financial independent and cover their budget today. And something they love, that they love going to work every day.

But you guys have been able to sort of pull this off, especially in an area like Southern California where it's very saturated. You got a lot, you just got a lot of dentists. And the insurance companies have an incredibly strong grip down here. And so being really profitable is a tall order. Should associates fear ownership? Should they just go work for a large dental corporation and know that there's going to be a very predictable, safe income there, but they underneath they would still like to own. What's your advice to them around overcoming that fear?

Early on, I do not fear group dentistry early on. That's what I mean. I start, I got my start, you know, the first two years I worked for Pacific Dental. And in all honesty, you just need to work out the kinks. You need to be in front of as many patients as possible, talking, learning from how you talk to patients and building confidence in dentistry. So don't be afraid of that. Sometimes you can get way more opportunities to practice a lot of dentistry in those situations early on, if that's not the right fit for you, and it's not, it wasn't the right fit for me. But I have great colleagues of mine that love working for pissed, have a dental or other groups or other partnerships type models, right, that really get a lot from that and enjoy that. So there's something for everybody, I think, in dentistry. So you really got to analyze for yourself. If you have that ownership, entrepreneurship mentality and you have that drive to create something, you're going to probably go out and look for practice like we already talked about. And then over time, you're going to brand that practice to become you and your team. So do you want to do that right? If you really, really love that part of it? And I didn't realize how much I love that part of it until, you know, as it grew. And I knew I wanted to, but I didn't know how much I'd love that part of it until later. So you got to have a little bit of desire. If it's not there, then by all means, no. Because owning a dental office is insane. Besides just doing the practice of dentistry eight hours a day, you only get to own the practice in the off hours, right? Or in the few minutes you have between patients is when you get to sit down and think about your HR and think about the marketing and think about the payroll that's coming up and think about the raises or the firings or all that other stuff that goes along with it. And so if you don't love that part, then I would say no. And I would say that there's a third option out there now, right? To me, there's the corporate classic big dental DSO model. There's private practice, and I think right in the middle there now there's eking out some space for these partnership models, right, where.

You can still have all the benefits of private practice. You can own and benefit from that and then potentially a sale of your practice down the road. But you can work with groups that are providing capital, that are providing marketing, that are providing some of the back office services to take a little bit of that off your plate. And instead of just full ownership, it's more of like a practice partnership model where both the group and the individual dentists at some point down the road are going to benefit from, you know, the sale of your individual practice or a group of practices. But I think there's some middle ground that's developing that we're going to see a lot of over the next five to 10 years that I'm kind of excited about because then there's. There's not just the either or. In my opinion, that's a gosh, that's.

A good topic to maybe delve in just for a minute or two. The reason why, as the numbers person, I look at numbers a lot. The large dental organizations are able to reduce their overhead as a percentage of their collections by 30, 40% compared to what a private practice owner is able to sort of pay on their expenses. Just those economies of scale, your ability to negotiate on everything, your ability to centralize everything, your ability to use people and staff to accomplish more, you just get all of those huge benefits that private equity and sort of a lot of Wall street sort of sees that is, you know, the people in suits are, they're seeing that here's an industry where cash flows are still really good and it's run by people who have zero business training on. What if we go in and we capitalize on that? And what's going to be our return on investment? Well, their return on investment is pretty dang good, which is why there's been such a massive trend on this, and we've spoken about this in other podcasts as well. But is there a middle ground? I'd say not only are you right, I think it's inevitable that a middle ground is going to form because you will. When I say you, I mean the private doctor. The private practice is going to increasingly.

Need to. Need to get an advantage that they don't have to stay really competitive. I mean, across sort of on average, you're always going to have the doctor like you've been able to. You're always going to have the doctor who's been able to succeed without attaching themselves to any other organization, meaning any other sort of supporting organization or, you know, or even consultants or a big dso. You're going to find those people who can just make their way to success, and that's okay. And they're going to put a lot of effort into it. And they're the type of people are going to work on Saturdays and stay late and get up early and all that stuff. But I think for a lot of dentists who have gone through all those years of school, they kind of want to enjoy life a little bit. A middle ground could be the option there. The concept of a supported doctor, you've probably heard of that concept, right? In the. In the big DSOs, you have supported doctors. Supported doctors, really, the doctors working in the practice that is indirectly sort of owned or controlled by the dso. Well, that term supported doctors, I've found, means a whole lot of things. In one case, it truly is a doctor that's being supported by an outside company handling HR and marketing and centralizing a lot of that stuff. In other cases I see supported doctor is it borderlines being controlled at doctor. And so there's a continuum there of what it means to be a supported doctor. And I think that there will be a space that's likely going to create in time where there will be support that is a legitimate support to a private practice owner without stripping that private practice owner of their ability to manage the culture and their team and, you know, their hours and the way they do dentistry and all that stuff that they still, I believe most dentists still want to have that autonomy over that. And so the, the. I think the bad name of DSO only comes in place when sort of that's really encroached upon and doctors become sort of robots told exactly what to do and how to do. And a lot of times they're not feeling comfortable with that and, and that, that it doesn't have to be that way. The concept of outsourcing a lot of these administrative functions happens across many different industries. It's just sort of late to the game with dental industry, interestingly. So I think that that's going to still happen and I, and I hope that happens in a way where dentists are able to feel like they are being supported rather than, rather than controlled. And I think that's going to accommodate a lot of associates who want to be in that space. And I even think that financially it's not a bad idea because a lot of doctors think if I don't own my practice, there goes my retirement. Because all that equity in my practice when I sell for $800,000, a million dollars, a million two, whatever that is, that's gone, I'm not going to be able to retire because now it's sort of, I'll say this hybrid ownership or somebody else is owning the practice. And you're going to see different forms, formats of ownership. You're going to see dozens and dozens of new formats of way, ways that DSOs and doctors sort of organize their equity arrangement between them over time. But I can tell you that if you're able to earn a little bit more per year and set a little bit more away in retirement accounts over a 25 year period, you're going to have way more than what you would have selling the equity of your practice. Now it almost sounds like I'm sponsoring the dso. I don't mean to sound like I'm sponsoring it, but I've had to sort of step back myself, who always looked at DSO as a four letter word, even though it's three letters and saying the evil empire and step back and say hold on. There's actually a positive evolution that has the potential here. If it sort of emerges and doctors handle it the right way. And you know, the business people are willing to sort of work with the doctors on finding a model that really makes everybody happy. And it's happening in some of these DSOs right now. Some of them are happening already.

I think that if you're considering those kinds of things, I don't know how many, I mean, most of the people listening right now are probably associates or potential associates. Right? I don't know how many sellers are listening to this right now, but let's put yourself in the seller's shoe who's five years away from selling, right? And you just said you got a million dollar practice, you're hoping to get a million dollars for it. And if you're 60 years old, like that million dollars isn't going to go very long, especially if you're a healthy 60 year old guy.

Well, especially when you pay your brokerage commission, you pay your remaining debt on the, on the most recent CAD cam you bought and then you pay your taxes, you're walking away with 5, $600,000.

Right? So there are, I think there's models out there where if you're, if you're an associate and you're thinking about the future of dentistry and you're saying, well, you know, it doesn't make sense to join, you know, one of these hybrid models soon. You think about it, if you can make a good income and if you don't want to stress about, you know, the HR side of things and the marketing and all that other stuff, and you can get support from that end and still participate in upside at the end in equity sale of a practice, which a lot of these newer hybrid models provide, then you're getting the best of both worlds. You can put away money, you can make a good income and you get to participate in the upside sale of a practice down the road. Whereas a normal guy who goes and sells his practice at the end of his career, you know, makes on a million dollar practice maybe $800,000 on the sale, he would make a lot more. If you're part of a bigger group, it's just, that's the, that's the economies of scale that you just talked about. It just works out because when you're part of a multi group function, it's worth way, way, way more than just your practice alone. And people know that, which is why they're creating it and they're trying to find ways to, you know, get doctors or dentists like myself excited about those kinds of things because there's more opportunity to make more money from the sale of your practice. If, if you find the other, the other caveat to that is just as important. The culture of your practice is the culture of that DSO or that group would be because there's different cultures, you know, and I've been in some and learned about others and there's definitely different cultures and different ones that, you know, some might be attractive and not so attractive.

The one, the one word of warning I'll put out there is that there are large groups, DSO practices that. Well, let me rephrase that. The distribution of equity, and I don't necessarily mean literal equity, but the distribution of fairness between the supporting organization and the supported dentist comes in so many formats and in many cases it's disadvantaging one over the other and it's usually disadvantaging the one who doesn't understand really the numbers and the deal. And some things might sound great. Oh, I don't have to deal with, you know, HR as much or, you know, I don't have to do these things. They're going to handle all that. That might sound great and that, that is great, but it's got, it needs to be a fair arrangement. So my only word of warning there is to make sure that you have somebody who understands, I think dental, understands a dental P and L and balance sheet, understands dental practice equity. There's. There are some great competitors, slash counterparts, slash friends of ours who would also do excellent in this, but just a standard CPA who has, I don't know, five dentists just isn't going to be able to know how to analyze that deal. They're just not going to be. So you need to go to others. Kane Waters down in Texas, Practice Financial Group up in Oregon, Thomas Werrick Dahl up in Northern California. Back east, there's some. There's a lot of really good companies out there that I think understand this landscape and can help you analyze that deal to see if it's going to make sense or, or not. We don't work.

We really don't work with any DSOs right now. We're all the private practice, I think practice CFO may add an institutional arm at some point to be able to support that. Because I do think there's going to be emerging more and more need in that space for sort of a hybrid of kind of business people and the dentist to come together and create some synergies there. But anyways, just make sure that somebody really understands the deal and that you understand each of those layers of that deal because they're never that simple to understand. They're never that simple to understand. All right, let me ask you about the concept of virtual Smile consults. Right now we're coming out of a period where we've, as I said, we've crossed the Rubicon as a society where now we are so comfortable doing things remotely that before we weren't. That Covid has forced us to sort of cross that bridge and now we're willing to do things that, you know, we weren't before. Virtual Smile Consult is where you're basically getting somebody's image of their teeth and remotely doing sort of a virtual meeting or a zoom meeting, and then you're able to recommend a treatment plan for that for that person without ever having met them.

Yeah.

Now, you were doing this before COVID even started, right?

Correct.

How is that? How. How much of a factor has that been in your practice, and how much of a factor do you think it's going to continue to be going forward?

I can honestly say that being a member of Smile Virtual. So not virtual. Smile Virtual, to be clear, founded by Dr. Brian Harris out of Arizona, has made a massive impact in the overall.

Vision that I've had for my practice and where I've been able to go from two years ago, when I met Brian and started with Smile Virtual, to where I am today and.

How much that has shaped the brand of my practice. When I met Brian, he was a massive kol. Still is a massive KOL for Kay VO Kerr.

What's kol?

Key Opinion leader.

Thank you.

And I was starting to do a little bit of speaking for Cavo Kerr. So at one point they said, meet this Brian Harris guy. Like, he's great. He's so good. Like, he's the best on the circuit. Okay, great. So I go meet. He happened to be in San Diego. I met Brian and he was just literally just beta testing with a couple of doctors this Smile Virtual platform that he created. He just decided I should connect with my patients before they ever come to the office and just do like a little. We used to use loom video through Google to do it. And he's like, I got so many patients, you know, seeking me out for this kind of thing. I'm going to teach you how to do it. We're going to beta test it, and then we're going to run it out. So I was one of his first. Dorfman was in la, was doing it. I was doing it. Landon Libby was quick on it in San Diego. Jeff Gray was quick on it. His brother Scott Harris was quick on it. There was a couple others just early on started trying it. Right. And in the beginning, all we did was replicate Brian. Whatever he was saying or doing, we just did what Brian did because Brian was like, just blowing up.

And along the way, he taught me something about it called social proofing. Your practice. Now I hate social media. The idea and the act of social media, because while I have to put myself out there and do things. I'm kind of introverted when it comes to that. Like, I'm very uncomfortable putting myself out there on Instagram or Facebook to like, say, hey, look at me. This is what I do. Come to see me because of this, it almost feels like you're bragging, right? But if you don't, he taught me, if you don't do that, nobody knows what you're doing. And the entire world is going that way. So you're missing massive opportunity for people to get eyes on your practice. And especially if you want to become the kind of practice that I wanted to become, which is more focused on cosmetic dentistry and have fun doing it. How's anybody going to know you're good at cosmetic dentistry if you don't show them? They'll never know until they walk through your door and maybe see the picture of somebody smiling at them.

Right?

You can't wait for that. You got to get way in front of it, right? So I started using Instagram two years ago to social proof my practice. Make Instagram be. Basically, if you're walking down the street and you're looking inside a business, like it's the glass window that you're looking in. Do I want to go into that place? Do I want to shop there? And if I do, like, what am I going to get when I shop there? Like, you should know when you walk by a store, when you look in the Apple Store and it's glass and everything's nice and set side and there's. It's nicely organized. You can see just from the window where the, where you know, the watches are and where the computers are, when the iPads are. Right before you ever even walk in the door, you can see what it looks like. And that's what Instagram is for your business. What does this dentist do? Does he take pictures with his patients that just say, hey, I have white teeth today, or does you see the people, the people's lives that you've changed because you did cosmetic dentistry on them? Right. There's a difference there. I'm a cosmetic dentist, but what I ultimately do is build confidence, help people smile more. I help people be happier because they're happier with how they feel about themselves. That's what I'm selling, right? So I didn't understand that about dentistry until Brian was doing it and said, stop change. Stop spending all your money on.

You know, pay per click ads. Start focusing on Instagram, social media and building your brand and how you're going to connect with them once you have Their interest, give them a way to connect with you right away. And that's what Smile Virtual is. Smile Virtual gives them a chance to just click a button, send a selfie, say, hey, I want to fix these teeth and this teeth. I get it. I respond hopefully, as soon as possible, within a day or two of a virtual recording of me, you know, talking about them. What I see, not perfect exactly. We don't know until we see them in person. But I give them an idea of what I'm thinking, give them a suggestion of what I might be doing. I show them a couple of cases that are just like theirs that I've done before that were successful, and I tell them exactly how much it's going to cost. That's the other thing about dentistry is like, everyone's so afraid to talk about how much dentistry is going to cost, right? Well, what happens when I tell them it's going to cost $18,000 to do 10 upper veneers? Right? They're just going to walk away. Well, that's not true. I had a 18 year old. No, not 18. She was 19, 20 by the time she came in to see me. But when she started connecting with me, she was about 18 and she started following me on Instagram, said she wanted to do this, all this stuff. I thought this girl was never going to come in and do anything. And then when the timing is right, when she was in the right position to be able to do it, she showed up, she paid in full for 10 upper veneers, you know, and I would have never had that opportunity had I not had something on social media to show that the type of dentistry I do would work for her. You know, so completely changed. I'm literally had another. I felt confident going into my space of seven chairs and making it look a certain way because I knew the brand that I was posting about.

Like, if you came in to see me in my old space, you would see me online. And then you come in here and be like, I hope this guy does good dentistry.

This is the same guy. Yeah.

And then you'd beat me. It's like, yeah, he looks the same, but the office didn't look that way. And now my office does look that way and it backs it up. And I feel even more confident of who I am and what I do and what I, what I post about. So, long story short, Smile Virtue has made a massive influence on my practice and who I am and the confidence I have in myself to practice that kind of dentistry. I absolutely love it. And some months I get a lot of leads, and some months I get a couple of leads. Not every lead I get shows up in my practice. But guess what? The patient who shows up in my practice after going through Smile Virtual and getting my virtual consult basically pays or figures out a way to pay by the time I do in their dentistry. So it's a win win, right? You give a little your time. Oh, yeah. And they're all the cases that I want to be doing in that.

So that's the first time I brought that up on a podcast. And I actually didn't know how much of an influence. Influence it was in your practice, but I, I could, I could see that becoming more of a trend in dental practices. I think there's a real value to that. All right, my last question for you is this. Dr. Spencer, you have five children. How have you, how have you done all of this with five children? What's your advice to those young associates who have kids, likely going to have some more kids? How do they get through it? Keep their marriage intact and balance and still be, you know, a good father or mother?

I. Well, first of all, I'm the first to say I'm not perfect at it. I have a very hard time balancing, you know, and it, and it does put stress. And every time you add a kid, it just adds that much more stress to your life. Although I can't imagine life without it like that. Right. Like when I go home and I get to leave work at home and I get to go home and do home. That's one. That's rule number one for me of what I've tried to do, especially in the last couple years since we've had baby number five, is when I'm at home, do the home thing, right? Like you have to put your phone away, you have to sit down, you have to be dad, or you have to be husband. When I'm at work, I do the work thing, right? And I try not to let it overlap too much.

When I put on the virtual consult hat, I try to again, do that thing for that 20 minutes or whatever I have, you know, whatever you have in front of you, go all in on that one thing. When it's time to do that one thing, that's one thing you got to do. When you constantly try to overlap and over balance, it's really, really hard to find a balance for one. Number two, I don't think my wife would even notice that I'm doing this. But honestly, we had an interesting talk about a year and a half ago. And she kind of was, like, straightforward with me. And she was like, look, like you put all this time into, like, being a good business owner and all this stuff, like, sometimes you need to put time into being a good husband and father. You know, like I was. And what struck me is I listened to so many podcasts about dentistry and about leadership and about these things. I didn't have one podcast about how to listen to your spouse or one podcast about how to be a good dad. I just thought that that, like, was happening for me, that I was just like dad of the year just because I showed up. It wasn't like I needed to do better at that. Right? So number two was I started downloading podcasts where I could learn from people who've either made mistakes, right, about being a dad and what I could learn from those or other good tools of being just a good communicator at home and try to be better at that. So that's definitely number two. I would say your podcast should be filled with dentistry. To me, leadership and then how to be a good, you know, husband, father is good. And then, you know, finally, just. God, I mean, honestly, it is what it is. There's my other favorite book that I'm going to plug on here is a book by a guy named Trevor Moawad. Moowad, I don't know how to pronounce his name. He is the mind coach for Russell Wilson and many, many other colleges. He's worked for Alabama, he's worked for lot of other colleges, a lot of the professional teams, a lot of individuals. He teaches you how to focus and how to, like, stay neutral. And the name of his book is called It Takes what It Takes. And that's kind of been my mantra for about a year. It takes what it takes. It is what it is. And there is no getting around the hard work and the time that it takes to put in. To be successful at something, it costs in order to be successful at business. It costs debt, it costs in time, it costs in personality, it costs in effort, right? It takes what it takes to be a successful business owner. There is no skirting it, there's no shortcuts, there's nothing around it. And he teaches a lot of good principles on how to keep your mindset on understanding what. What it does actually take. And that's the same thing at home. To me, it takes what it takes. I get five kids. Takes a lot out on us, in all honesty, and we don't do it perfectly. But you try to find ways to put in that time and to stay focused again. I would say the number one thing for me is like, if I catch myself on that phone, it's like.

Is my phone my kid or are my kids my kid? You know what I mean? That phone's got to be gone in order for my kids to see that that's what I'm there, that I'm there for them. So, like I said, I don't have the perfect answer, but those are some of the things that go inside my head of how to at least try to pull it off amongst the whole thing. But I, I guess to, to say to somebody who has one kid and is like, stressed out, well, try five and you get even more. But it's still doable, right? We're still, we're still growing business and we're still, you know, I'm still married and I still have five kids, and I'm still trying every day to, to, to be better at it. And I'm not perfect at it, but I certainly try hard.

It's a thought. I have, I have three kids, so. And you know, with practice, cfo, that's kept me really busy. That was a startup, very busy. But there's one of the most influential TED talks, which maybe you've seen it, I'm sure you have. It's called the Golden Circle by a guy named Simon Sinek. You ever heard of that one?

Well, not, I don't know about Golden Circle, but I read all the Simon Sinek stuff.

And in the circle, in the very center of the circle, you have why. The second circle around that is how. And the final circle is what. And we. So commonly as, as people in both our personal or professional lives, we're sort of describing, or we'll talk about business. You know, we describe to a patient or a client what it is that we do. Here's what we do. I do this, this, this, and this. And here's how, you know, here's how we're going to do it. And oftentimes you never even get to the why. He emphasizes that the companies that have made a dramatic impact in their industries and people have led change, they always started with the why. It was always about a reason, an underlying deep reason. And once that is in place, then maybe you can talk about the high, about the what and the how. And frankly, most people don't even care how their iPhone works. You know, the what's inside of it does. It doesn't even matter. But it's about the why. And I think about as leadership, both in the home and at your practices, you only have so much time. Time with the people that are under, I won't say underneath you, but the people that you are leading, the people that are part of your organization or the people that are part of your family. You only have so much time to create the behavior that produces a desired outcome or that produces success. And how you communicate, what you communicate is ultimately what drives, how effective you can be in. In that outcome. And because your time is limited, you better be very, very specific about what you say and how you say it. But I believe that even with a little bit of time, whether that's at home because you got a busy week or whatever at work, because, you know, you just don't have. You don't have 24 hours in a day to be at work. How you use that time to drive communication, which then drives change, is, I think, a very, very important aspect of a true leader. And true leaders know how to use their time. I've heard it called their interstitial time, I think was the word, which is all those little gaps in between. How do you use those to maximize your output toward a given target? And focusing on your why and driving everybody to think about that will in turn cause them to behave in a way that matches the why. And you didn't have to describe everything. You didn't have to lay it out A through Z, what they have to do. You just laid out what is the vision and the why. And you gave them the freedom. You told them they need to own it. You sort of come back and create some accountability. You coach them and all that stuff, and you lift them up, and that's what great leaders can do. Weston, I think you're a great leader. You've always been a good friend and a great client and somebody I've enjoyed being around all these years and look forward to years ahead. Thank you. Thank you for being a part of our.

And if I could say one thing, like I said, it's just been absolutely so fun to see where you are today. Like, think about that. If we fat. If we go back five, six years, where we were first time we met, you were in some little space, right? You and Richard Abara. Yeah. I mean, tiny little office. And look where you are. We're sitting here, we're doing a podcast together. You have how many clients is practice cfo? Because it's okay to share that. How many clients do you guys have here now?

300 dentists. That's been a while.

It's been six years. Five years.

Yeah, but that's. To me, that's incredible for how much service you guys give and how much detail you guys put into each client. That. That's incredible. For one, the space that you've built here that we're doing this in is awesome. So I think you deserve a lot of credit and your team deserve a lot of credit for how far you've come. You built something incredible, man. I mean, that's. And something you should be really, really proud of. So I hope that those who are listening to us. Yeah, you gave some, you know, advice on people to search for. For good accountants. But, you know, like I said, I'm a little bit biased here, but, like, you guys have done an incredible job, and it's always just fun to reflect a little bit on that. Right. And see how far you've come. And we're. We're still super young. We got plenty of years to accomplish a lot more. So I'm excited to give us another five years and see what we can do with five more years.

Appreciate that, Weston. Really do. You know, and I'll just say, for associates, this is who this program is really dedicated toward. Is. This is the first time where I've been able to sort of. Because we have four other CFO advisors now we're actually about to hire two sort of supporting co CFO advisors. It's the first time that I've been able to sort of step back and say, how can I take this sort of education I've gone through in working with all of these dentists and representing so many buyers and all these transitions and partnership formations and taxes and cash flow and student loans, all this stuff, how can I try to package this up and give it back to associates? These young associates who are facing, you know, some mountains that they have to climb, try to make that mount a little less steep for them. And that's why the thing I'm most excited about right now is the Associates on Fire program. Our videos, we have online, these podcasts, we have downloadable resources. We're doing a monthly fireside on the first Tuesday evening of every month so people can come in and ask questions about their specific situation. And it, you know, it's all at no cost, and I hope it's a great support to people. So, Weston, thank you again for being on the program. We'll do it again another time.