Mark Murphy is the Chief Executive Officer of Northeast Private Client Group headquartered in Roseland, NJ. He holds a B.S. in Finance from Indiana University; The Chartered Life Underwriter® (CLU®) and Chartered Financial Consultant® (ChFC®) professional designations of the American College as well as the NFLPA Registered Player Financial Advisor designation.
For over 30 years, Mark has been a thought leader in the area of building real and multi-generational wealth for his clients entitling him to much acclaim in the financial industry. He and his team provide strategic planning and financial engineering to closely held businesses, mid-size companies with a concentration in dental practices.
A sought-after speaker, he has addressed the main stage at Siro World, has spoken to the California Dental Association, as well as many other industry meetings all over the country. He is currently the senior advisor to over 500 dental groups nationwide.
He is on the board of Fortune Management one of the largest dental coaching firms in the country and is in the process of authoring a book with Fortune CEO, Bernie Stolz on mergers and acquisitions in the dental space.
http://www.northeastprivate.com/
VIDEO - DUwHF #965 - Mark Murphy
AUDIO - DUwHF #965 - Mark Murphy
Howard: It's just a huge honor for me today to be podcast interviewing Mark Murphy, who is the chief executive officer of Northeast Private Client Group, headquartered in Roseland, New Jersey. He holds a B.S. in Finance from Indiana University, the Chartered Life Underwriter and Chartered Financial Consultant Professional Designations of the American College, as well as the NFLPA Registered Player Financial Advisor Designation. For over thirty years, Mark has been a thought leader in the area of building real and multi-generational wealth for his clients, entitling him to much acclaim in the financial industry. He and his team provide strategic planning and financial engineering to closely held businesses, mid-sized companies with a concentration in dental practices. A sought-after speaker, he has addressed the mainstage of Sierra World, has spoken to the California Dental Association as well as many other industry meetings all over the country. He is currently the senior advisor to over five hundred dental groups nationwide and is adding probably four or five new dentists a week.
He is on the board of Fortune Management, one of the largest dental coaching firms in the country and is in the process of authoring a book with Fortune CEO Bernie Stoltz on mergers and acquisitions that illustrates… You tell Bernie I've been trying to get him on the show for two years. So Mark will be speaking to us today about the state of the dental industry. So Mark, great to have you on the show. And I have to give a shout out to Mark Dykeman of Asteto Dental Labs in New Jersey. In Maplewood, New Jersey. Great friend of mine. I've known him for thirty years and he was the one who told me, "Dude, you have to get Mark Murphy on this show." And since I'm a 100% Irish, I thought I just had to do it for the Irish tribe. Right?
Mark: I think it's great. It's great to have a fellow Irishman.
Howard: So how can you have an investment advisor whose name is Murphy when Murphy's Law is that if it can go wrong, it will? Do you need to change your name to Mick Murphy or Anti Murphy?
Mark: It seemed to work so far, Howard. So I think we're going to roll with what we've got to get going so far. But I think that the idea to me is philosophically, what's different is that when you go to the various wirehouses or the insurance companies or the banks or the CPAs, their concept of creating wealth, doesn't seem to work for most people. And I think that in our strategy… I've said something probably for thirty years and I've said the following: money markets, CD's, IRA's, 401k's, stocks, bonds, mutual funds, blah, blah, blah. Most of our clients have some or all those assets. Most of our clients will have some or all those assets all their life. But at best they are inflation-adjusted holding tanks. If Bill Gates was on this podcast with us he wouldn't say I'm worth $89,000,000,000 based on my 401k or my mutual funds. `
There's really only three ways to create wealth and that's either investing in your business or some other operating company, it's investing in real estate, and it's financing deals. I'll leave out divorce and inheritance. So the idea to me is if a doctor has only $1 to invest. Although I manage an awful lot of money in the market, we do a lot of financing, we do a lot of insurance, we're involved in a lot of different financial products. But if that doctor has $1 to invest, the first place we're always going to look is to invest it in himself or herself because the best investments entrepreneurs make is when they invest in themselves.
Howard: The three ways were: invest in yourself, invest in... What were those two and three?
Mark: Invest in your business or some other operating company. Invest in real estate finance deals. Get on the financing transaction part, the private equity part. Getting involved in investing in various entities, companies, et cetera.
Howard: Well, you know, it's funny because all the investment advisors will say, well, you need to diversify all your money into twenty, forty, fifty different stocks. You have an index fund. But every billionaire owns only one stock. Bill Gates owns all Microsoft. Warren Buffet owns all Berkshire Hathaway. Steve Jobs... Andy Grove owned all Intel. So the people that go to nine zeros, they have invested all their money in themselves. They weren't diversified.
Mark: But I think, to a point, we're saying the same thing because the first place I'm going to look for that dental entrepreneur is to invest in themselves and to grow their dental entity or some related business as fat or as big as it can go where they have control and they are in charge. It's something that they're often national experts in or have dedicated their life to being an expert in that in dentistry.
But I think at some point you get to a place where you want to diversify in other things. Bill Gates has other money other than in Microsoft, but he may not have had it early in his career.
Howard: He just bought twenty thousand acres off the suburb of Phoenix. Did you hear about that? It was the largest land parcel that you could buy in Phoenix. No one knows really what he's going to do with it. We've had Grant Cardone on the show twice. My son Gregory is the biggest Grant Cardone fan. So how did you fall into real estate and once you're in real estate, how did you fall in bed with five-hundred dentists? Talk about your journey.
Mark: I said real estate may be a very small piece of what we do. I think at the end of the day, to me, in its simplest form, I would say I'll take you through our model. But first is, when we... Howard, you and I are the same age, so when we came into dentistry or we came into business, I thought dentistry was pretty sleepy in the sense that it was a business that the idea was to be open four days a week, maybe six, seven, eight hours a day and you make a nice paycheck and you go home. And then the corporate dental folks came in and they were open twenty-four/seven with lots of hours and lots of other things that were there. So one of the things that we try to do is try to teach our clients to become those anti-corporate corporate dentists.
Take some of the best ideas that corporate dentistry has and to try to take some of their best ideas, but make sure we keep the culture and the caring and the kindness and the personal touch. And I think because culture can incorporate corporations for lunch, if they really work hard at doing it. And I also believe there's room... I'm not anti-corporate dental. I'm not anti-corporate dental. I think there's room for everybody in the marketplace.
Howard: So what are some of the corporate models best ideas that you're teaching your clients?
Mark: We like our clients to get paid in four ways. We like tem to get paid as the landlord when possible. We like our doctors to get paid as a doctor. We also like them to get paid as the CEO and the owner of the company. And by the way...
Howard: That's three ways. Get paid as the landlord, dentist, CEO, and owner. Oh, the owner is fourth.
Mark: So my argument is after you get paid as the landlord and as the doctor, if you're not putting a minimum of 20% …and our best clients are putting maybe thirty or 35% to the bottom line…you really don't have a business. You've bought yourself a job. So one of the things we do is to try to help those dentists to have businesses so that in theory, if they never turned the handpiece - and we have some clients that want to turn a handpiece twenty four hours a day, seven days a week - some don't want to turn a hand piece at all. And everybody else is in between. My argument is if they hired a quality superstar associate to do that doctor work, they would still put twenty to 35% to the bottom line and keep those margins as they grow. Now you've got a real business.
Howard: So you're really a practice management consulting firm?
Mark: I would say more I'm a macro-manager. Meaning that the idea to me is that ultimately, we do a lot of this work, but I think ultimately is that every one of our doctors has somewhere between five and fifteen micro-managers. They do different than an accountant, an attorney, a stock broker, an insurance agent, a consultant, etc., etc., etc. What we do is most of these folks don't know each other. So what we're trying to do is create all the micro-managers. If they've got good people, we'll have them work harder and more efficiently for the client. And if they got some folks that are really not up to par, we'll help get them replaced. I think one of the things you want, if you want to be an extraordinary business, I think you not only have to have an extraordinary team in your office, but you've got to assemble a power team outside your office. And you've got to have really good people with state-of-the-art advice, which is one of the things I love about you and your podcast. You're giving these doctors access to great information so that they could do it for themselves.
Howard: In the last thirty years, it seems like all the dentists I knew thirty years ago that took a hundred hours or more CE every year. They really rose to the top. And so I was looking at their commute time. They work fifty weeks a year, five days a week. That's two hundred and fifty days a week they're commuting an hour to work. An hour home. So I thought, let's multitask. While you're driving or on the Stairmaster, let's listen to... Because the more ideas and energy and good Karma we can put in their head, they'll make better decisions because the opposite of that is not knowing what to do. Burnout, disease, depression…they fall off the wagon. Corporate says that now fifteen to 20% of all the dentists are working for them and then in ten years it'll be half. Do you buy that or not?
Mark: I think that's the general trend, but I think like anything, if you can create value, it's pretty easy to figure out how to get paid. And I think there'll be room in this country for all people who are running good businesses and providing value and service to their clients. I think the ones that continue to sort of have a problem are sort of not willing to change as the industry changed. I think they may be commoditized out of the business, but I think there'll be room. I don't think it will be all corporate. I don't think it'd be all the way it looks now. It'll be involved. And I think one of the things we try to do is make sure that our clients have access to information that allows them to not only be on the curve of what's happening now, but to try to anticipate where that business is going in three months or six months or a year.
Howard: See my red flags on DSO and I have podcasts at all the major presence [inaudible 00:10:27]. Rick Workman of Heartland and Steve Torn at Pacific Dental and a bunch of them. But to me they just buy sales. They see a million dollar practice, they buy it. So now they say, “Oh, I've got a million dollars in sales.” Yes, but you also got a million dollars in debt. And then they go buy another dental office and they say, “Now we're up to two million. We doubled our sales.” So is your balance sheet. And that's why none of them can go public. If this was really an awesome business, these DSOs, they'd be publicly traded on Nasdaq. How come none of them can go public?
Mark: Well I think at the end of the day they're still mostly trading time for dollars, and that's why I feel it's so critical to make sure our clients are putting 20% of the bottom line or more after everybody gets paid, including them as the doctors. Because if not, there's no EBITDA there. I know you're familiar with the term EBITDA. It's basically the earnings of the company. For folks that don't have an accounting background, a finance background like you do. And I think at the end of the day that's what they're buying. That's when you can start to get multiples from public companies, but the private equity companies. There have been some pretty big sales. But I think that...
Howard: But they just flip it from a private equity venture capital fund that's in the five-to-ten million range. And when they write out for five years, they flip it to someone who's in the twenty-five to $50,000,000 range. Then some of the very biggest ones, they'll just flip it to the... But most of these venture capitals, their end game is to do an IPO and no one has been able to do an IPO in dentistry. So doesn't that red flag you that it's a debt-ridden capital intensive business that basically buys earnings?
Mark: I think there's been a lot of what I'll call these "roll ups" have gone in various industries for my entire career. Some of them have worked. Many of them are not. But I'll give an example. I've been doing some consulting with some corporate dental folks. To give you an example of insurance companies that are looking to...they have money to invest and they want to get returns. Right now, if you want to put money in a CD, in a bank or a bond, you might be lucky to get one or 2%. These corporate entities or any of these big insurance conglomerates, as an example, are buying up dental practices because they think at a minimum they can get returns in the mid-teens, maybe even in the mid 20%.
Mark: And that's beating the returns they're getting in fixed income, in bonds and other vehicles. It diversifies their portfolio and gives them asymmetrical [inaudible 00:13:05].
Howard: But do you really think they'll get that return? Because what I see in DSOs is that you're talking about your clients, she'll be able to drop 20% to the bottom line and EBITDA earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization. But that 20% from the dental office usually is eaten up at corporate headquarters. But after corporates fed fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, 17%, what's going to be left for the insurance companies? They're going to be back to a CD rate, aren't they?
Mark: I think most that have been run well are getting mid-teens or better. But again, I would say although we do work in corporate consulting and I think there's room for everybody, most of our work had been in the folks that have one, two, three, four, five practices that are entrepreneurs that are really focusing on one mission or more.
Howard: Exactly. That's what I've been saying for ten years is that when you're in a town... Say you're in a town of a hundred thousand, two hundred, three hundred thousand. The scales of economy to go from one location down on the south side to put another office in north, east, west, now we can have a new layer of management where we have someone doing insurance and HR and legal and marketing and SEO. I get that. I've lectured to groups like that all over the United States where I see the red flag is then when there's another layer, a second layer of management headquartered somewhere. These regional plays are very entrepreneurial, very profitable. They're kicking ass, but for them to feed a headquarters that wants another ten, 15% off the top, that headquarters doesn't add value to that regional level. And I think after that second layer management headquarters takes their cut, there's not really going to be room for any insurance companies to get mid-teens or twenties. I don't see that at all, but you're right.
Mark: I think you've seen it. You've seen it. And by the way, it's got to be through cost efficiencies and other things whether that proves out to be the fact or not. But for, let's call it the smaller, let's call it ten locations, five locations, all the way down to one location. My argument is one of the reasons that we've got this book coming out on mergers and acquisitions in the dental space and has been one of our go-to moves is because it's very simple economics. At the end of the day, if we can get two practices to work together at one location, one set of fixed costs, that's how you get profitability. And so the idea, if you've got two $1,000,000 practices and we can help merge them together, that's how we get that. Even if, not to 20%, but sometimes to thirty or 35%. And then I think you'll go to the practice management companies.
You mentioned Bernie Stoltz and Fortune. They've been a secret weapon for me for seventeen or eighteen years because then they can go in and we can do a merger and they can come in and do the following things: They can increase the patient reactivation from that practice that sold. They can do more advanced dentistry because sometimes maybe the doctor that's selling might not be doing advanced dental procedures like Endo or Ortho or Invisalign or implants or those sorts of things. Maybe they can leverage the higher volume and get higher reimbursements from insurance companies. Maybe they can put a hygiene mastery program together and get their hygiene on steroids. Those are four or five examples of a couple of dozen that you can then take that practice and those two practices and not only have a linear merger but turbo charge both those practices so that you can then get to the kind of numbers that we've talked about where everybody's making a lot of money. And that's how those doctors are creating wealth.
Howard: Now, when those locations, when those groups negotiate for higher reimbursement from PPOs, does that happen in urban or does that just happen in rural?
Mark: Well I think it happens everywhere. I mean there's a lot of good firms out there. There was a firm I've worked closely with - I work with a few of them - but there's a firm in Atlanta called Practice Quotient. A guy named Patrick O'Rourke...
Howard: Practice Quotient?
Mark: Practice Quotient out of Atlanta. And one of the interesting things about Patrick O'Rourke is they've worked with an awful lot of our clients at doing two things: helping them put together a thoughtful strategy to increase reimbursements from the insurance companies, but to also make sure that we view insurance as a form of marketing. Now we don't want our clients to be Groupon where they're 50% off every day. But to put together a thoughtful strategy where they're able to do proper treatment and proper planning, give the standard of care that's appropriate, but also get paid a fair amount of money to do that. And so groups like that had been very helpful. You know, that's one of several that really helped us in that area.
Howard: But that's your recommended one, on PPO participation, negotiate your fees?
Mark: And putting together a thoughtful strategy. Because remember, insurance companies are not out there waking up every day trying to pay our doctors more money. They're trying to do the opposite. They're trying to pay him less. So what we're trying to do is be on the cutting edge so that we can not only survive but also thrive [when possible 00:18:12].
Howard: I would just say one thing on that. I want to go back to two things. As far as that, back to the billionaires, when Sam Walton had multiple Myeloma, he would get his private jet and fly from Bentonville, Arkansas to Huston, get his chemo and radiation and fly back and go right back to work. And when that guy actually died, they found him dead at his desk. He loved his job. France's President Metron found dead at desk. All these billionaires. I mean, Steve Jobs is working until he couldn't do anymore. The other thing: billionaires not only invest all their money in themselves, but they love what they do. So it's just an attitude. Why do you hate molar endo? Maybe because molar endo beats [inaudible 00:18:54] maybe you should just try to get good at it.
Maybe you should take every damn course on molar endo till you just master it. Make root canals your bitch. Get so damn good that you love it. It's just an attitude. And my role model that made me become a dentist, my next-door neighbor, Kenny Anderson, he just celebrated his fiftieth anniversary at his dental office. And he works...I'm not going to say how old he is but I'm fifty-five so do the math, but he still goes in and works just six AM to noon, Monday through Thursday. What he makes on six AM to noon, Monday through Thursday is more than every other retired dentist is making off their pensions. And then he goes straight to the golf course and drinks his beer and plays golf and I mean it's a low life. So find out why you are burned out because it concerns me when dentists are thirty five or forty and they're already counting down to retire.
Dude, that's not real. Fix it while you're burnt out. But I want to go back to M-and-A activity: mergers and acquisition. 100% of all the dentists I know that built a three, four, $5,000,000 practice that I know personally, they'd be in a small town. Say there's seven dentists. In most towns when the old man across the street retires, you're old and he sells it to some young high-energy, twenty-five-year-old that's going to go visit all the schools and be in the parade and network and do everything. And these guys say, "I don't want that old guy to sell to some twenty-five-year-old," so they would buy that practice and move them in there. So there used to be five offices in this town. So now there's only four and then five years later and another one would retire and he'd buy that. Now there's only three. And my gosh, why? Then I ask the dentist, how much does a new patient cost you per head. You know, when you start looking and drilling down Facebook ad, Google ad words, direct mail, the low hanging fruit... They're paying $150 a head minimum for a new patient. And a lot of times they can buy that old man's practice across the street for $100, $125 for every active patient. Why do you think there's so little merger and acquisition activity in dentistry when Wall Street's filled to the rim with it?
Mark: By the way, that's what I spend in my dental work. I just spent 50% of my time working on mergers and acquisitions. And by the way, I think, Howard, it's even bigger than that. It's not just the fifty-five, sixty-five, seventy-five-year-old guys who are selling their practice. It's that mother that just had the fourth child. It's the father whose wife got transferred to another state and had to sell the practice. But it's also two other things. If you know, because of the cost of running a dental practice, you have some very good doctors who have four, five, six, $700,000 practices, but with rented salaries and overhead it eats them up and they're not earning a lot of money. They'd be much better off merging into another opportunity and they'd be able to increase their income exponentially and get paid for what they've done.
The other thing you will also see is that I see a lot of people looking to sell their practice six months or a year or two before they're going to retire. My suggestion is that the best transitions and transactions we've done is when you get a doctor for five, six years from their practice - when the practice is peaking - because what happens is they start to get a little older. They slow down. They take a little more time off and when they travel, play little more golf, etc., etc., and by the time they're ready to sell the practice, the practice is atrophy and the value is worth less to the to the buyer and it's also worth less to them. I'd love nothing better for them to come in, sell the business or have some kind of liquidation strategy, but then have that doctor come in and work together, whether you want to call it as partners or call it associates. Or work together and let that selling doctor work with the dignity that they want on their patients or even new patients as hard or as little as they want for the rest of their career.
By the way, you talk about the "why." It's amazing to me how many mergers and acquisitions I've done with a guy who said, "You know what, I want to stand for a year or two and then I want to retire," but instead of working four and a half days a week, we have him work two days a week and we reenergize him with some of our strategies and they say, "Would you mind? I'm having a good time here. I'm making some money, how about if I work another five years, would that be okay with you?" We go, "That's great. Who better to work on your patients who've trusted you for twenty or thirty years, than you?" Of course, let's make that happen. And so it's flexible so that [inaudible 00:23:30] it can do better.
Howard: What percent of millionaires in the United States do you think made their money in real estate?
Mark: I think most of them made it. I think most of the people made their money. And again, this is anecdotal. I don't have the research in front of me.
Howard: Can you Google that? See if you can find something. What percent of Americans made their millions in real estate?
Mark: My anecdotal research is they made their money from their business and their cashflow from the business, and then they took that cash flow and they invested into income and producing real estate.
Howard: With Amazon, now that Jeff Bezos is the richest man in America worth $105,000,000,000, so much retail space... Every city I go to, when I talked to a dentist and he's in [inaudible 00:24:10] he says, “You know, ten years ago it was a grocery store or a Walgreen's, a bank, and all these shops and now half the shops are gone.” Do you think real estate is going to be different going forward? You and I are both fifty-five. Everything we knew about real estate; do you think that's going to be against this? Because going forward, Amazon's going to be delivering everything in a package via drone or do you think there's still life left in commercial real estate?
Mark: Dentistry is changing radically. So is real estate. So is everything. And it's happening a lot faster with changes. People are still going to have to live someplace. The other thing, too, is that there are still going to be brick and mortar places that you're going to do work. You're going to do work in places like dental offices. I realize that in the commercial space there's an awful lot of people working out of their home and so the commercial real estate is going to be contracting. But I think in terms of residential real estate it's still going to be there and people are going to still need to go to a dental office more often than not to get their dental work done. So part of the real estate piece with dentists is owning your own practice allows you to do a lot of things that are…let's call it tax plays: use of money. Efficiency money kind of moves, depreciation, those sorts of things. Efficiency moves.
And I think that at the end of the day, that in the long-term it'll either sell that building to the successor doctor or better yet have the successor doctor sign a long-term lease on the building so they can get to some guaranteed income, which kind of leads me into two things. I believe in my world, and we learned this from Tom Hegna, I believe that there were only two asset classes. Obviously you know, we're taking a little bit of an alliteration or a little bit of a hyperbole with it, but there's dozens of sub-classes with each and we like to refer to that as paychecks and playchecks.
So the idea is that when we sit with a doctor, what we want to do is help them with the phase one. Let's set up a series of either guaranteed or highly reliable streams of income. They can replace their income as a doctor going forward. And I think once we've done that, whether they retire or not, there's an incredible amount of power in knowing that if I retired, I got those series of assets that will give me that guaranteed or highly reliable stream of income to a place by business.
The second theory is, we call it paychecks or free capital. Even the folks that get the paychecks handled, oftentimes they have no free capital, Howard, because those assets have to wheeze and huff and puff and work so hard just to produce the income. So the second thing we want to do is we want to end up with a series of assets we'll call play checks or free capital where we can spend it, we can give it away, we can do whatever the heck we want with it, but the important thing is it will not be responsible for producing income for their family.
And that's true financial freedom. It could be for planned obsolescence, it could be for anything they want to do. It could be a legacy or a life of significance. That's true financial freedom. But then there's one more level. There's one more level for doctors. And I think you hit on it with the "why" or the doctors or your friend. You mentioned that Dr. Anderson who still works six hours a day and loves his practice. There is not only the financial aspect of dentistry, there is the emotional aspect. I know in my business I feel so proud of the amount of people who will pay their mortgage and send their kids to college because of what I've created. And those people become certainly, if not family, they’re friends. And then all the clients and patients that they work with, there's an emotional component to it.
But from a financial standpoint, if we can teach our doctors to get paid, not for what they do, but for what they know, we don't want them to be business operators, we want them to be business owners. And so if we can have them own either a 100% or a piece of their practice, so they have earned income long beyond their usefulness chairside. So as an example, if they could produce 50% of their expenses with earned income by the ownership of the practice, that means the rest of their portfolio only has to produce the other 50%. If we can produce 100% of their income, then they never have to touch their portfolio other than required minimum distributions. And they never touched that money in scrolling. And in the best world, they're producing more than they're spending. And so there are people in their sixties, seventies and eighties that are not only not draining their assets, they're actually contributing to saving money.
That's how dentists create multi-generational wealth.
Howard: Now are you on Twitter also?
Mark: I am. I'm on Facebook, you know, as I said, in being in such a regulated business, we are actually as a firm. We as a firm have a big initiative. That's one of our three big initiatives to get out there in a big way. I primarily used Facebook and those things as a way for my eighty-eight-year-old grandparents to be able to see pictures of their grandkids playing sports. But I think we're using it in a more strategic way going forward.
Howard: I guess one of the most common questions these young dentists asked, and it's what I crossed when I got to school, they say, "Okay, I'm going back to Parsons, Kansas. I came out here to Ahwatukee. I'm 25 years old. It doesn't make sense to rent from twenty-five to sixty-five, forty years around. So a lot of dentists always say, “Should I rent or should I own the land and building?” And some people say, “Well dude, you're already $350,000 in student loans. You're already buying a practice for seven-hundred-fifty. So now you're a million dollars in debt. Why would you add another three, four, or $500,000 of debt picking up all [inaudible 00:29:49] building. Why don't you just buy his practice and then rent from the selling dentist?” So obviously the selling dentist, in real estate, their number one risk is you don't have a tenant. So if you were going to buy real estate property and you knew it was going to be 100% leased out, that's almost like a treasury bill, a government bond. It's so safe. So there's pros and cons. So should this young dentist with $350,000 student loans, who just bought a $750,000 practice, should he also try to borrow the money to buy the land and building or should he lease and get his debt under control?
Mark: Well, again, I think there's no one-size-fits-all answer. But if you're giving a general answer to that question, the answer to me is: when possible, when it makes sense, we'd like to see our doctors own the real estate. When we wouldn't like to see them own the real estate as an example: if that practice is a three chair facility and we think within two or three years we're going to be at an eight to ten chair facility, we may rent it in the short term. But if that facility is going to handle this for the long term, you know what's great, and I know you're well aware of it. There's at least a dozen practice solutions banks around the country that as long as the doctor occupies more than 51% of the space, they'll give a 100% financing to a doctorate decent credit.
Howard: Is this one company or multiple companies?
Mark: Multiple companies do it. And what's great about that, and you'll learn, the doctor will say to me, if they're smart, they'll say, well, wouldn't buy borrowing a 100% of this mortgage on this property, wouldn't that be a lot more expensive and higher than what the rent on the building is? I would say to them two things. One is that if they're sharp on the tax side, one of the things we teach our doctors to do is do a cost segregation study on the building so that instead of depreciating the building over thirty-nine and a half years, they can depreciate it over ten or accelerate it over ten and pay less income tax so that we can bring the delta down and they may even pay less in some cases than they went on the rent? And you know what happens with every payment, Howard, they own a little bit more of the building and if they have a twenty year note or a twenty-five year note at the end of that period of time, they've got a building that's free and clear. And we know what happens if you rent the building at the end of twenty or twenty-five years, you not only probably had increased rent all those years, but you have the insight of a donor. There you've got a free and clear building and you've got some tax advantages there and then you've got to build in to either sell or to rent out to the success of practice. So I think that's an important part of the wealth strategy.
Howard: And what I like about owning the building and owning their own home is that it's...you know, money is so emotional. I look at every income category they never have an earnings problem. They always have a spending problem. I remember when one of the richest men in Phoenix, Arizona...who was that? Charles Keating. Remember the game Five Scandal that involved [inaudible 00:32:41] and the older [Guy Glen 00:32:43] and all that stuff. I mean when he went under, everybody was looking for his money but he owned islands and yachts and boats and jets and helicopters and everybody was amazed. The guy didn't have a dollar saved. So I look at dentists and the weirdest thing about dentists, physicians and lawyers is when you look at their income, if they were from any other non-egotistical group, they'd buy a modern house, but I'm a doctor. I'm going to buy the mansion. And you know, normal people on vacation, they go camp out at the lake, but the dentist has to get in a jet and fly to Hawaii, you know? They eat out too much and even when they eat out, you always hear dentists, especially dentists' stay-home trophy wives. They say, "I don't like to eat at chain restaurants." And then you start digging into her past. She comes from nothing. You could write a resume on a paperclip. It's like, well, how did you come from nothing but now all of a sudden you're too good to eat at a chain restaurant? They can't eat... So they eat at nicer restaurants. They buy bigger houses. They buy bigger cars. They can't get the old Toyota. What's the mid-class Toyota Cruiser? They buy the Lexus. So they overspend on every single category. Cars, houses, vacations, eating out, and they all have spending problems. So when you own your own building and you own your own mortgage, you have to make that payment. So it's forced savings and then you can only throw away all your money down the toilet. You have less money to flush down the toilet. So do you think owning your own land and building is a forced savings account? Because what percent of that money is emotional?
Mark: Money is never math. It's always psychological. I think you're spot on. I think in general, I'd love our clients to own the building. It's for savings, but it's also a tax play and it's a wealth play. But I'll give you a couple of other things, that if I'm a great financial advisor or a great financial coach, Howard, here's some things that we want to talk about. I think you touched on a few of them. Rule number one is we've got to teach our clients to live within their means. The second thing is there's only three things you can do with your money. You can save it, you can pay your bills, and you could spend like a drunken sailor. If you do it in any other order, there's not any money to save. So we try to coach our clients to put away at least 15% or more of their gross earnings off the top and then they pay their bills and then whatever's left they can spend. But a minimum of 15%.
Howard: You think they should save 15% of net?
Mark: Gross. Gross income. Not gross collections. Gross personal income.
Howard: Gross personal income. In your estimation, in your guesstimate-zation, what do you think of their... Right now there's two-hundred-eleven-thousand dentists in America... That's two-hundred-eleven-thousand Americans alive with a license to practice dentistry. We know there's a hundred and fifty thousand general dentists who work thirty-two hours a week or more. Thirty-thousand specialists who work thirty-two hours a week or more. Of those one-hundred-eighty-thousand, what percent of them do you think save 15% a month of gross?
Mark: Well it would be a very small number, but if I was taking a guess it would be well under 10%, maybe 5% or less.
Howard: And what do you think the average is?
Mark: I would bet that a third or more have negative savings. It might be putting some money in a 401k, but they're running up their lines of credit and debt.
Howard: And how many of them live in a mansion?
Mark: An awful lot of them [have 00:36:22] been.
Howard: [How many of them 00:36:23] drive a high-end car?
Mark: Yes. Take nice vacations, send their kids to good schools. Very few of them are creating real wealth. And almost none of them are creating multi-generational wealth. So that's part of the thing. Live within your means. Pay yourself first. Protection first, not only from death and disability, but lawsuit and creditor protection. That's why firms like HR For Health, ensuring having a turn key HR program or those types of programs are great for you.
You also brought a couple other things up that are jumping out at me. One is, did you know, Howard, that the average doctor or the average American spends more time planning their family vacation than they do on their personal finances? I teach every one of our doctors to hire themselves as their own CFO. In my company, we've got a CFO. Every major company has a CFO. I want our docs to hire themselves as their own PFO, their own personal financial officer. Their own chief financial officer. [inaudible 00:37:17] And beyond that, you also hit on one other thing that's one of my sticking points or one that really rubs me wrong. Its liquidity, liquidity, liquidity. So many docs have assets in their practices. You said they've got real estate, they've got money in pension plans, which you really can't touch without penalties or taxes. The ideas for both emergencies and opportunities, you want your clients to have, liquidity, liquidity, liquidity. The best deals I've ever made was when I had cash and the other person needed cash for both either opportunities or emergencies. Remember our number one job is to make sure that emotion never trumps logic, and so when people don't have liquidity are forced to make difficult decisions, that's when they always make wrong decisions. People with liquidity give themselves a chance to make good long logical decisions.
Howard: Like they say, don't let your money get too far from cash. If you had $100,000 in Amazon stock, you could liquidate that position in a minute, but when you have that really nice cabin two hours away out in the woods and you say it's worth $1,000,000, yes, but put it up for sale. How long will it take to turn that cabin into liquid cash? A year? Two years? I know dentists who put their go-away cabin up for sale. They haven't even had an offer or anyone look at it in three or four years. So yes, liquidity is a huge hill.
Two questions. You mentioned multi-generational wealth. First of all, I bet a lot of my homies understand. You got to remember, people who are our age, fifty-five, aren't listening to podcasts. Every dentist that I go drinking with in Phoenix, if I put a gun to their head and say, "Download a podcast right now," I'd have to shoot all my friends. They wouldn't even know how to do it. They're young and they probably never heard of multi-generational wealth before. And then a common question on retirement is, how much money do I have to have saved up before I can retire? Are there any rules of thumb? And then if I have to have this much saved up to retire and live off that, how does that affect multi-generational wealth? So that's a lot. Can you rant on about all that?
Mark: Absolutely. Multi-generational wealth, to me, is...I'll go back to my analogy of paychecks. Paychecks replaces the income that you have going to work every day, and that's the first thing we do. The second thing is play checks to have free capital to be able to have money to spend, giveaway, saved, whatever you want and then you're truly a financial freedom. But the idea is that we teach our doctors to have earned income by keeping some or all of their practice so they've earned income even if they're no longer a chair side wet finger dentist so that they're no longer not draining your assets in retirement, which most people do, but actually not savers. When they die, there'll be a lot of money to pass onto the kids and the grandkids, and that's how they create multi-generational wealth. Remember, when you sell your practice, even for a lot of money, over time it looks like you're on fixed income. When you have earned income coming in well beyond normal retirement age or for the rest of your life. That's the way to created multi-generational wealth.
And the second part of that question was, I'll go back to my paycheck. People always ask me the number they should have to retire and my argument is a little bit different. It's not just the asset value, it's the income that you can get from it. So ultimately, the idea to me is, the interest you want to have as much as possible and you want to make decisions that are thoughtful decisions like a scale to weigh financial decisions. So ultimately, I don't really like it as an asset number or something you need [inaudible 00:41:00] three million or five million or ten million or twenty million. I'm saying what I try to do is sit with our clients and try to figure out how much income they're going to need to live the life they want and then try to gather both the assets and the guaranteed streams or liable streams of income to replace that income. And then they're in a position where they can retire.
Howard: So when you talk about multi-generational wealth, you got two boys, I got four boys. A lot of dentists, they look at people like Paris Hilton and they say, "Do you really even believe in multigenerational?” My dad wouldn't give me a dime for college. He paid for my sister's college but not me because if I pay for you to go to college, you're going to go up there and drink beer and chase women. You won't take it seriously. So I had to do it all on working and student loans and all that stuff and graduated $87,000 in student loans. Do you wonder if giving your children money will ruin them? Like Paris Hilton? Or do you personally believe in multi-generational wealth? I know boomers and millennials, we're all different in our thinking.
Mark: Here's my experience from doing this [inaudible 00:42:10] doing this and seeing people through the life cycles is I've got a group of clients that want to give everything to the kids and grandkids and give them a better life than they had. And they believe it's part of their legacy. I have another group who want to make sure the kids are not denied the ability to fight and scramble and make it on their own because the joy is the chase, not having money. But having said that, when they see their own mortality and they get a choice to either give it to the government or give it to somebody else or give it to their kids. We always say, which relative do you like better, your Uncle Sam or your children? Ultimately, a lot of them on their deathbed or when they see their own mortality move that money to their kids.
And I think the other thing, too, is that ultimately you want kids that are hardworking. One of the disagreements I have: people always want their kids to be happy and I want my kids to be happy like every other parent. But I think that's their responsibility. I think what my responsibility is for them to be hard working and thoughtful and respectful and stand-up citizens. And that's my job as a parent and if I've done that, I've been successful in this life.
Howard: Did you write all that down, Ryan? I hope Ryan's taking notes there. You know what, I can't put my four boys in the will because if I did and they found out they'd all kill me tonight. So for survival reasons I just can't do that. My gosh. So tell us about you and Bernie. Do you do much with Bernie Stoltz?
Mark: We have. As I said, not normally a very close friend over time. But they were certainly an important part of our business and our ascent into dentistry because they were somebody that, on a reliable basis, we could bring in and literally put, as I said, thirty, fifty, 60% more to the bottom line for our clients, which freed up the cash flow for us to do all the financial things we wanted to do. And then I think, ultimately, one of the things that where Bernie and I sort of had a synergy and I was doing as I - as you know, I'm an NFL registered player financial advisor - and I told you that Sports Illustrated did that article where 81% of all professional athletes are either bankrupt or in severe financial distress within two years of retirement. And what bugged me is most of those guys have a three-and-a-half-year career with non-guaranteed contracts.
In dentistry, there's almost a 100% employment in dentistry. Virtually anybody who wants a job in dentistry can have it. And their careers aren't three-and-a-half years. They're ten years, twenty years, thirty years, forty years, fifty years, sometimes beyond. There was absolutely no reason with the technology out there, Howard, that people, not everybody can create multi-generational wealth, but everybody should be able to be in a position that they can retire comfortably with dignity and in the style that they're accustomed to. And if they have those types of careers. There's no reason for it whatsoever. And I think it's as an industry, I know somebody who is a beacon of this industry. One of the gifts that I want to give back, and I know you do, is I remember when we want to make sure every doctor, but every hygienist and dental assistant and insurance person, your front desk person has the opportunity to have the financial success they deserve because they're going to have a twenty, thirty, forty year career, not a three-and-a-half year career and that's where Bernie and I connected because that's his mission as well.
Howard: You know what my legacy is? You know what I want them to say when I die? I only want them to say one thing. "Damn, he lived a long time. I can't believe he lived that long." That's all I want. Well you tell Bernie Stoltz... Now Fortune management, that's Tony Robbins' group, right?
Mark: Tony was involved in the founding of that company.
Howard: So ask Bernie Stoltz why I've had Tony Robbins on the show, but not him. Does that make any sense? I got the man, Tony. How cool was that to get Tony Robbins to come on your show? I've also had Brett Cardone to come on twice.
Mark: Have you asked Bernie to come?
Howard: Yes, you know what? I emailed him. But see, the only thing that I'm number one at in dentistry is spamming people. I've emailed all the dentists two times a night since 1998. So many of them have right-clicked. All I got to do is catch you in one bad mood and you right click. So I figure a lot of guys don't return... That howard@dentaltown.com's probably already flagged for spam or something.
Mark: I would say, I promise you I'll do my best to try to get Patrick and Bernie on your show. And by the way, there's one other person in that Fortune world that I think you want to talk to is Jennifer Serravallo, their chief strategy officer. I think that one of the great things about working at Fortune and working with both Bernie and Jennifer is...
Howard: Spell Jennifer's name...
Mark: Jennifer. Jennifer Serravallo.
Howard: Is that [inaudible 00:46:56]?
Mark: You'll have to ask her. But I think that at the end of the day, what's amazing about working with that company is they're not only spending time trying to answer their doctor's concerns now, they're trying to anticipate where dentistry is going and what those doctors are going to be asking six months or a year from now. And what's so exciting about being part of Fortune is probably half the stuff that we're going to be talking about next year hasn't even been created so far.
I think in this world, I put out a lot and I do a lot of writing. I put it on proprietary material until a lot of people say, "Well, why don't you come on shows like this or give lectures or write books on the stuff you do? Don't you want to keep your information proprietary?" And I say the exact opposite. Two things happened. One, I want to share it with everybody. So if other advisors or other people steal my stuff, that's helping more people. I've done a better job. But the other thing it also does, Howard, is it challenges me to create more material. Everyday. I've been doing this for thirty-three years...every day in our company, I'm trying to create a company in 2018 that would put our 2017 company out of business. That's how I think the best get better. And that's what we want for our clients too.
Howard: Who's my favorite comedian? Louis C. K.? That was his claim to fame. Louis C. K. said what he did, he didn't care if anybody stole his jokes or whatever because what he did on this one is December 31st, that was the end of that presentation. And the next year it had to be all new jokes. And he said that discipline of never repeating a joke until the next year, all new material, that's how he solved people stealing his jokes. And he said that forced discipline. He says there's comedians out there that have been on circuit for ten years using the same damn jokes. They wonder why they're not getting anywhere. And so he threw everything away.
Mark: Ultimately, where I think we are all in the same business is that as long as...in our business we call them clients, in the dental world they call them patients...but as long as the people we work with are people and as long as the patients are people, we're not in the dental business or the financial services business or whatever business you're in. We're in the ‘people’ business. Ultimately, that's the business we're in. When you take care of people and you can add a lot of value it's very easy to figure out how to get paid and how to make people's lives better. And that's why I was happy to do it. In fact, the only reason I did this podcast, Howard, was to get that message out and because I'm going to convince you to take me drinking with you in Arizona. I'll come out and drink with you.
Howard: Awesome! How often do you come out to Arizona?
Mark: I was just out there last week. But I get out three or four times a year. And in fact, I'll take you out to drink.
Howard: Oh my gosh, we should've done it. We've got a home studio. Ryan took our dining room table. We thought since we were bachelors for the last decade and we've never used a dining room table once, we just turned it into a podcast studio.
Mark: [inaudible 00:49:49] face for radio so it wouldn't have mattered.
Howard: So you talked about recharging your practice: patient reactivation. That's genius. Start doing more advanced dental procedure, whether that be Invisalign or Molar Endo or placing implants or sleep apnea or whatever...higher reimbursements, negotiating that with Patrick at work, hygienists on steroids... Fortune Management is known for their hygiene program. Do you know anything about that? Or can you talk about that?
Mark: Yes, that's been, again, one of the divisions of Fortune. It's been a secret weapon for me because what happens is they go in, they get that hygiene program, put it on steroids, which becomes a big profit center for the doctors. But as you know, there's going to be $2 of dentistry done for every dollar of hygiene, so it gets the front of the house busy. It gets the back of the house busy, too. And so that's one of many ways that really help doctors to create more wealth and more profit and help more people.
Howard: You know, I got a hygienist on steroids, but that's a transgender thing. That's a whole different issue...another podcast. And the patient reactivation - I always tell dentists that there's seven and a half billion people on Earth. Who was the most likely person to come to your office? Someone who's already been in your office! So what are you doing in the patient reactivation space?
Mark: To me, I've read studies that says it's seventeen times easier to reconnect with an existing client than it is to find a new client.
Howard: Absolutely!
Mark: And so the idea to me is... And by the way, you know what's crazy about that? I've read studies that the national average of patient reactivation in a typical practice is thirty to 50%. I know there's a couple of practices - rehab - that are at 98%, but even if you can go from 50% to sixty or seventy, the amount of new patients that come in, it will be almost transformational to practice. And what's great about this, Howard, it's not just one thing, it's a series of dozens of things and just executing them flawlessly and elegantly. And all the sudden we've got doctors that are no longer just wet finger dentists. They are doctors that are business owners, they are entrepreneurs and they're folks who are creating tremendous wealth for themselves and their families.
Howard: But you know, one of the things that's most - I only got you on for four more minutes, I've got to talk faster - one of the things that shows that dentistry is a cottage industry where nobody has 1% of the market. Whereas four airlines fly 80% of Americans domestically. When you walk into a Kroger or Walmart, nine companies created 80% of all their [inaudible 00:52:24] items. Dentists are always old school. They always want new patients, they never talk about reactivating old patients and it's so weird to talk about the new patient experience as if every patient experience shouldn't be amazing. But when you look at the Fortune 500, Southwest Airlines doesn't want any new patients. They don't advertise for new patients. They have loyalty programs. Chase has loyalty programs. Banks have their credit card programs.
Dentists, you'll meet a dentist in a town of five thousand and he's practiced there forty hours a week from age twenty-five to sixty-five. You say, "Dude, what do you need?" He goes, "I need new patients." I'm like, dude you've seen everybody in the county twice. It never dawns on them that they should get their house in order for amazing customer service, amazing operations and logistics. They always want to solve their problems. When they're looking at consultants or things like that, one of the first things they say, “Well, I know I can solve all my problems if I could just get ten or fifteen more new patients a month.” What would you say to the dentist who called in and said, you know what I really need Mark? What I need more than anything is I need more new patients. And then what would you say to the sophisticated dentist who was a really [inaudible 00:53:43] and say, Mark, what could I do to be better at retaining customers for life - patient loyalty programs? Let's talk with the guy who’s not so bright. What if he said to you, "How do I get more new patients?" What would you tell him?
Mark: One of the things I think Fortune does so well is they ask the "why" question. Meaning, I think before you can figure out what you want to do with your business, I think both the doctor and the team have to figure why it's important, what they're doing. Why are they doing this? It's not just to chase money because if you're just chasing money, there's never enough. You have to understand why you're doing what you're doing. And I think at the end of the day, it's not that the doctors are old school, just old school in their own way. I think at the end of the day, they just have not assembled themselves a power team that can lay things out for them in a way that they can see where they're kind of stuck. Remember, if you have a scarce mentality, Howard, you can only focus on what is. If you can have an abundant mentality, you can then focus on what possibilities could be. I think once they see that and then they see there's a plan that you can reverse engineer it, it's not going to turn their life upside down. It's going to be something that makes sense, is consistent with how they believe in standard of treatment, or how they like their lives to be. All of a sudden everything becomes possible. It's not unusual to see somebody that we work with over time have a ten-X multiple on their income. I'm not saying it happens every time, but I'm saying it's not uncommon to see a doctor that was kind of stuck in that mindset you just described, then was making two or $300,000 a year and ten years later they're making two or $3,000,000 a year and having more fun than they've ever had in dentistry. Enjoying their career, enjoying their business, and having transformed their life. I can't tell you how many people have named their boats or their houses or even their children after me from some of the work we've done.
There's nothing better to see somebody just cry and hug you and have their spouse hug you and the kids call your Uncle Mark even though I never met them, just because of the work we've done. And so the idea - that's the business. That's the payoff. I can't believe they pay me to do this, Howard. I would do it for free.
Howard: That is nice. And you know, back to that scarcity and abundancy, a lot of dentists are afraid to do advanced dental procedures because they think that if they started Invisalign, their orthodontists [inaudible 56:08], or if they started placing implants [inaudible 00:56:10] oral surgeon, periodontist [inaudible 00:56:12]. I guarantee you, you need to surround yourself with people who think in abundance. The greatest oral surgeons and endodontists and periodontist, they love their field and would love to show you everything. And they don't think in fear and scarcity and they have no problem. I know that most of the orthodontists, if a general dentist starts doing Invisalign, they sneer at them at the local study club meeting and make them feel…they're trying to use shame and guilt, like "that's my space."
Every orthodontist I know that says, "Hey, you guys want to start doing some Invisalign every Thursday night after hours? We close at five. Bring in your Invisalign cases. I'll provide some beers or whatever and we'll sit down and teach them." And then what happened? Those general dentists who are trying to use some Invisalign, guess who they started referring all their Ortho to? Their class twos or class threes. They're complicated cases. Not to mention that a lot of general dentists started doing implants or some new sleep apnea or whatever. But three or four years later, burn out and say I really don't like sleep apnea or Invisalign or placing the implants or whatever. And then who gets all their business?
That specialist who thought in hope, growth, and abundancy. Not the specialist who thought in scarcity. When you want to learn implants, why are you flying all the way to a foreign country and the Dominican Republic to learn how to place implants when one of the greatest implantologists is in your zip code? He's a periodontist. She's an oral surgeon. Why don't you go ask her and if she says, "Well, no, I don't want to teach you that. That's my business." Then that's an awesome encounter because now you can check her off for the rest of your life thinking they're just a scared monkey who thinks in scarcity. You're the summation of the people you hang around with all the time and you need to be going to Zip's or Brad's place or all the other alcoholic places in Ahwatukee and hanging out with dentists. If you don't think it [inaudible 00:58:01], because my homies in Ahwatukee, we think so much of each other. We put them on our call for emergency patients. Most dentists would never roll their calls over to the dentist across the street, not the ones thinking in fear. So think in hope, growth, and abundancy and that comes from...who was that guy who wrote that...Stephen Covey, "The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People," who died in Utah in a mountain bike accident. He fell off his mountain bike and bumped his head.
Mark: Well I think if you want to see your life in the next ten years, it's two things. It's the books you read and it's the people you hang out with. I think that's always been our mantra. And I also think though, that just to add to your last comment is whether they get the training in a very thoughtful sort of creative way like you described or from a course. In what I'm hearing, my doctors say to me is that after they've taken that course and they started to do some implants, they say there was a lot of other procedures they do every day that are a lot harder than the implants once they've had the training and the confidence and the capability to be able to do that.
I also think they have to face facts in that there's a convergence in this business. People want that dentistry. They want it cheaper, faster, and they want it more affordable. And I think the idea is that in the old school world, let's call it a specialist like a periodontist, who worked and wined and dined at the study clubs to get all the general dentists to send them business. I think in the future either periodontists are going to own general practices or they're going to work for a general dentist. It's not going to work that way going forward. I know I only got a minute with you, but I think...
Howard: No, you go into overtime. You're a legend.
Mark: Could you call my mother and tell her that? I would appreciate that. But I think the idea to me is, I think what clients want, is they want three things. I think what they want is they want some direction and they want a clear path along the journey. I think that if you give a dentist a clear path along the journey, they will be with you. The second thing I think they want is a little creativity. Some of it's very simple, some of it's sophisticated, but it's what I'll call "mom and apple pie stuff." No scams, no schemes, no under the table, everything that's above board that could be in the newspaper every day. And I think the third thing is, they want companionship and they want somebody that's going to be there every step along the way on the journey. And I think that's what the doctor should expect from the people that they're working with and that's what we hope to provide them and provide that "wow" experience.
Howard: And that's why we created Dentaltown in '98. When I saw the internet come out, I said “This is what can connect to these one out of two thousand Americans who call themselves dentists.” With Dentaltown, no dentists will ever have to practice solo again. And they absolutely loved it. That was their first connection with social media. That was years before... We were '98. Facebook was 2004. We've been connecting dentists because you're right, they want that companionship. When I look back at all the time I spent at Pankey and Spear and Dawson and Kois and Ross, and earning my FAGD, MAGD, and Diplomat in the International Congress of Implantology. Looking back at it, the knowledge was 20%, but meeting these companions that would be your friends for life. These dentists…and they weren't the dentist who hated dentistry, the sky is falling, and staying home watching ESPN. These are the dentists who wanted to learn more. So you're sitting at a table. And I remember sitting at an implant [inaudible 01:01:40] weekends, but at lunch and dinner and at night, they might have switched to endo or root canals or practice management or investing and all those things like that. And just finding these upbeat, positive, smart people who are going for it and surrounding yourself with them. Putting that positive energy into your head - that is priceless as opposed to hanging out with some negative nelly that thinks the sky's always falling.
Mark: One thing I just would offer, and I don't know if it's appropriate or not, we talked about mergers and acquisitions. I've got some white papers I've written on mergers and acquisitions and we've got our book, probably be out in about the next sixty or ninety days on mergers and acquisitions. If anybody of your listeners or subscribers want a copy of that, they could certainly call Maureen Motherway at my office and get a copy anytime they'd like.
Howard: Alright. And when you get that book, send it to me. I'll post it on Dentaltown and I'll push it on all the social medias and we'll really push that and get everybody reading your book. I want to thank you, Mark Murphy. Thank you so much for all that you've done for dentistry for so many years. You've been helping dentists for so long. Congratulations on having five-hundred dentists. I hope you get some new dentists from coming on the show today. Thank you for all you've done and I hope you have a rocking hot day.
Mark: Howard, you are the best. Thank you so much.