Dr. Jeannie Ju graduated from the University of Southern California (USC) cum laude with a B.S. in Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Studies and a Minor in Natural Sciences. She stayed at USC for an additional four more years to earn her Doctor of Dental Surgery and graduated with honors from the dental school. She also completed an Advanced Education in General Dentistry residency program from the Lutheran Medical Center.
She is member of Omicron Kappa Upsilon Dental Honor society, American Dental Association, Arizona Dental Association, Southern Arizona Dental Association, Pima Dental Study Club and CEREC Doctors. She enjoys reading, watching Jimmy Fallon and spending quality time with her husband and 4 year old son.
http://www.creativesmilesdentistry.net/
VIDEO - DUwHF #991 - Jeanie Ju
AUDIO - DUwHF #981 - Jeanie Ju
Listen on iTunes
Howard Farran: It is just a huge honor for me today to be podcast-interviewing Jeanie Ju from Tucson, Arizona, Shelly Goff and Patrice Bonnell from Phoenix?
Patrice Bonnell: Scottsdale.
Howard Farran: Scottsdale. Were you scared leaving Scottsdale? Coming down to Phoenix where the poor are going to live?
Patrice Bonnell: I knew you were going to bring that full circle.
Howard Farran: Jeanie Ju graduated from the University of Southern California, USC, cum laude with a B.S. - Is that for bullshit or? - in Health Promotion and Disease Prevention Studies and a Minor in Natural Sciences. She stayed at USC for an additional four more years to earn her Doctorate of Dental Surgery and graduated with honors from the dental school. She also completed an Advanced Education in General Dentistry residency program from the Lutheran Medical Center. She is a member of Omicron Kappa Upsilon Dental Honor Society, American Dental Association, Arizona Dental Association, Southern Era Dental Association, Pima Dental Study Club and CEREC Doctors. She enjoys reading, watching Jimmy Fallon and spending quality time with her husband and four-year-old son.
Howard Farran: It's so funny you said you did your advanced education residency in general dentistry at Lutheran Medical Center and that's why no one ever talks about the fact that the third leading cause of death in America- Number one is heart disease, number two is cancer, and number three at over two hundred thousand is (unclear 00:01:32) causes in the healthcare system and the reason the press doesn't go after it is because they're all called Lutheran Medical Center, St Francis Hospital, Sister Mary Aloisha of Minnesota and the news people just- It's hard to throw the Lutheran Medical Center under a bus and they're nonprofit, but it's amazing how incompetent the healthcare system is. Just amazing. So you were born in Santa Ana, California and grew up where?
Jeanie Ju: Amani, California.
Howard Farran: In your journey, how did you end up in Tucson?
Jeanie Ju: I met my husband during residency program. My attending periodontist introduced me to my husband. They were classmates in dental school and it was a Friday afternoon, he was getting a hygiene check by Dr. Choi and there you have it - the love sparks.
Howard Farran: So was he born in Tucson?
Jeanie Ju: No, he's from Korea.
Howard Farran: He was born in Korea?
Jeanie Ju: I came here at age twelve and then he ended up just to work in Albany, New York - that's where I was - and then he was on his way to Tucson and then we did long distance for about a year during my program. Then, somebody had to move; we had a serious relationship, so then I committed to move to Tucson.
Howard Farran: That is so cool, to marry a man whose mother lives on the other side of the world.
Jeanie Ju: Well, she's here too.
Howard Farran: You moved her here? You couldn't have fought her with a lawyer? You should have found the best immigration attorney there is and say, "Cancel that visa." You couldn’t do it? So where does she live?
Jeanie Ju: She lives in Tucson but a good hour away, so that's a good compromise.
Howard Farran: It must be a dilemma because you have a four-year-old son, so you're going to raise him bilingual in Korean or-
Jeanie Ju: He's totally English speaking.
Howard Farran: So he's not gonna teach him Korean?
Jeanie Ju: We speak English to each other.
Howard Farran: It's funny because us living here on the border of Mexico, I'd say most all my Mexican friends are very upset that their mom didn't teach them Spanish. And then the moms always say, "Well, we're in America now. I wanted you to learn the native tongue." And they're always like, "Well, other families, you know..." Are you fluent in Vietnamese?
Jeanie Ju: I’m okay, I'm not fluent.
Howard Farran: Because if you would only speak to him in Vietnamese and he would only speak Korean and then he'd learn English everywhere else and he'd be trilingual.
Jeanie Ju: Well, I went to Vietnamese school and Sunday school - I'm Catholic too - but my brother and I would run away and we’d speak English, your friends speak English, you just kind of lose it, and then now I don't.
Howard Farran: Yeah, you don't speak it, you lose it. I'm so glad you came on the show because I'm actually using you today. I don't know if you know that, but my number one complaint on the magazine for years and the number one complaint on the podcast- I'll never forget. I was lecturing at a New Jersey dental school and this female dental student walked up to me and she had it open to the editorial directors, the deals and they said, "Oh, it's all men." And she flipped the magazine right in my face and walked away. I ran out in the hall and I'm calling the president and I'm going, "Lori, Lori!" I mean, I've never even thought about it. I said, "They're all men and these classes have women." And then I get complaints saying, "Well, how come in the magazine or your podcast, if it's a dentist, it's a man, and if it's a woman, it's a hygienist or two consultants?" And I said, "Do you think I'm not really well aware of this?" So if you were a man and you wanted to be on this show, we're booking into- How late are we booking right now?
Ryan: August.
Howard Farran: August. If you're a woman, today, right now. Right now, as soon as we're done, we'll go. We just got Jeannie McCarran or Jeannie the pediatric dentist…
Ryan: Jeannie MacLean.
Howard Farran: Jeannie Maclean. I'm going to call her Jeannie. She's a pediatric dentist in Glendale. Amazing. Been on the New York Times and some online CE courses, and we finally got her on the board today. So we have an official female dentist on there because a lot of magazines, a lot of places, they have editorial boards, but if you asked those people, they're just a figurehead - they don't do anything. But our editorial board is actually real and you have to do stuff and if you don't do stuff, we kick you off the editorial board and put someone on there.
Howard Farran: I graduated high school before you were born. At that time dentistry was a male profession - so was gynecology. And when I was a freshman in school, our senior class had one woman and we called her man-woman, and I'm not even kidding you. I'm not even kidding because no one really knew, but my class had like a dozen, and now you go into these dental school, they're fifty-fifty. And you know what? You go back to the complaints when I was little, listened to my five sisters and when all the gynecologists were male, and you told him you had pain or whatever, they said, "Quit being hysterical." Hysterical is a Greek word for uterus. That's like you're being a uterus. Now all the gynecologists are women, and I'm predicting the same thing in pediatric dentistry. In the last five years, every dental school I've been in, the pediatric residents, there'll be five or six of them - they're all women. Do you think dentistry is going to be different now that half the graduates are women?
Jeanie Ju: Well, this is all I know, so for me it's normal to see women. It's only when I started working that I realized, "Oh, it's a lot of men." I'm okay with it, but I do think that yes, more women are in the field. It's nice to have women role models and I look up to men the same way too. It never was really an issue for me, but now that I see it, I met these lovely women and I'm like, "Wow, the girl power. It's really good." So, I like it a lot and I like how we're working together equally for sure.
Howard Farran: Oh, I lost so many. I got more hate mail than anything in the world. My granddaughter Taylor is five, and I grew up with five sisters and I saw sexism brutally in my own home. We lived a hundred yards from the Arkansas River and my mom would put me in jeans and I had patches on the outside and I could swim in the river. My sisters were put in dresses. They can only go within ten feet of the edge and if they soiled their dress, they were in trouble. I just thought, "Why can I swim in the river? I mean, what, is my wiener a flotation device? What is the deal?" And then all the presidents are men, all the... And then, I go into healthcare where at the time- When I went to school in '87, all employees in healthcare were women. It wasn't until America lost fifty million manufacturing jobs that you start to see men now going. Like, I got a male dental assistant, I had a male receptionist up front, but you didn't see that in the eighties. You had to lose fifty million jobs for these hospitals to even pass like 3% men. I saw that with the assistants where they get divorced. Well, where did the women go and where do the children go every time when there's a divorce? They go with dad or mom?
Jeanie Ju: I don't know, whatever the court decides.
Shelly Goff: Generally the mom.
Howard Farran: It's almost always the mom and then my assistants would get child support and their husband didn't want to pay, so they move to Albuquerque or California and then the Arizona child support is like, "Well, he's out of state. There's nothing I can do." Nothing you can do? Hell, if I owe the IRS $10,000, I could go to Brazil and they'd find me. You're never supposed to talk about religion, sex, politics or violence, so my whole life, whenever there was a girl running against a boy, I didn't care if the numbers were flawed, nothing. I just always picked the girl and I did on that last selection. Some of my drinking friends. Oh my God, they were so mad. I took brutal because they're telling me how bad and it's like, Taylor doesn't know. I mean they all lie, cheat and steal. I mean, how do you get a bill passed? You hand them a lot of bills. It's total corruption, so I don't care if they're lying, cheating and stealing. I wanted my five-year-old daughter not to think that you got to be a boy to be the president or you got to be a boy to be a CEO of the Fortune Five Hundred. Ryan, how many of the Fortune Five Hundred are women CEOs right now?
Jeanie Ju: I never let that bother me. I think I was blessed in a good strong family that it was just never an issue. You just go for your dreams and really supportive and a lot of male friends, a lot of male cousins, and we all got on really well. It was never brought up in my family. It was never in my awareness for sure.
Howard Farran: That is cool. That is a healthy functional environment that it wasn't even on your radar.
Jeanie Ju: Yeah, my husband's really supportive and-
Howard Farran: But even in the Catholic church all the priests are men or the popes are male. What is the chance the next pope could be a woman?
Jeanie Ju: Not going happen.
Howard Farran: So how many was it? So out of five hundred CEOs on the Fortune Five Hundred, only twenty seven are girls, zero popes, zero presidents and I don't want my little Taylor to grow up in that world.
Jeanie Ju: But I think it's changing.
Howard Farran: Oh absolutely.
Jeanie Ju: Look at Mother Teresa. She couldn't be a priest, but look at her legacy and what she's done. I didn't let that stop me. So she couldn't get the title of Pope, but she had the title of being Mother Teresa and did many better things than the Pope could do.
Howard Farran: I lectured right up the street from where she was born. We were in Macedonia, Albania... It's three countries and it was so amazingly gorgeous and beautiful. I had so much fun. Another issue that I wanted to get you on though - you're married to a dentist. Now do you work in the same office?
Jeanie Ju: We do.
Howard Farran: So a lot of podcasters- 25% are emailing me, they're still in dental school. The rest are all under thirty. I get maybe one person over fifty a week and I think they only send it to me almost as a joke, like, "Dude, I'm as old as you." I think the smartest you can do a dental school is marry a girl in your class. I mean you look at the women, how many women dentist friends did you have that were in your class and how many of them married a dentist?
Jeanie Ju: Not many.
Howard Farran: But if they didn't marry a dentist, what did they marry? Was it a dentist equivalent, like lawyer, banker, Wall Street?
Jeanie Ju: You know, we were so driven as women that I really didn't think about that. It wasn't like a criteria that I would-
Howard Farran: Because all the economic research shows that in all countries, women marry up, so men have to marry down. A woman dentist will marry a periodontist. A periodontist will marry the hot chick at the Waffle House. So what you have is so many of these dentists marry a woman who stays at home and destroys $10,000 a month in capital. So you do that from twenty-five to sixty-five, that's five million bucks. Whereas if you married a female dentist in your class, she's making ten thousand a month. So, over the next forty years she makes five million. Whereas your wife destroyed five million. That's a gap of ten million. That's a difference of retiring when you're fifty or sixty versus by the time you're divorced twice, they find you dead at the chair. I mean, you just work until your arm falls off in operatory three. But is it challenging to live and work and what advice would you give these young kids in class? Because I'm in the dental school saying, "If you don't marry one of the girls in your class, it's the biggest mistake you'll ever make in your entire life." And so some of them are dating now. They might be commuting to school, listening to this. How long have you guys been married?
Jeanie Ju: Seven years.
Howard Farran: And how long have you been working together?
Jeanie Ju: In the same building? I think a little over a year.
Howard Farran: So any advice, any lessons learned or anything you'd share?
Jeanie Ju: Well, I did have a boyfriend before my husband. I didn't really pick his occupation as my criteria to date him or marry him.
Howard Farran: Right. But you wouldn't have married the cook at the Waffle House.
Jeanie Ju: I want to marry someone on the high value, had good foundation…
Howard Farran: If he had all that and he was the dishwasher at the IHOP, would you have dated him?
Jeanie Ju: Probably not because I have an education.
Howard Farran: Yeah, but if she was hot, every man in law school would. If they said, "That is the most rocking hot dishwasher. The IHOP has ever produced," they marry her.
Jeanie Ju: That's too bad. I have a son and so I'm going to teach my son values that you don't judge a person just on looks. There's more to it, there's more character involved. But then if someone's doing really good and they happen to look good, I think it totally goes well and you don't see someone hot and not feeling good. Do know what I mean? It goes together. You can see if someone's happier or not or living life. That's the way I see it.
Howard Farran: Any lessons learned of…
Jeanie Ju: Husband and wife working together?
Howard Farran: And living together and having a kid together.
Jeanie Ju: You'd like to separate business and personal. It does mesh for sure. We do everything together because I don't have a lot of dental friends because he is my friend and we go to CE courses together, everything, studying together, we did notes together, but then when we get home, I watch Jimmy Fallon, he plays his PC game and you just kind of do your thing-
Howard Farran: What games does he play on the PC?
Jeanie Ju: I don't know. He's actually a bit calm right now playing-
Howard Farran: Minecraft?
Jeanie Ju: I don't think it's Minecraft. It's something else.
Howard Farran: Is he a general dentist or a specialist?
Jeanie Ju: He's GP too.
Howard Farran: So you're two GPs in the same office, and do you have divisions of passion? Like are you going after Invisalign and he's going after implants? You told me he just got back from an implant course? Or are you doing implants and he's doing... Do you do complimentary stuff or do you try not to overlap each other's passion?
Jeanie Ju: We do the same. I think our philosophies are the same, we practice same, we have a competitive, healthy relationship. He looks at my prep, we joke and the patient says, "Your shots are the best shots." We have a lot of fun but we're able to put that aside when you get home and watch movies. We just kind of chill on the couch, we have a puppy now. I don't know it just works out which is I think you respect each other and then you have to have your me time. He does this thing. He used to go to Best Buy or whatever, and he said, "Who likes Costco shopping?" and goes to Costco - I don't like Costco. And then I go to Orangetheory and workout and you just kind of find your balance and respect each other.
Howard Farran: What’s the difference between Orangetheory and CrossFit?
Jeanie Ju: Never been to the CrossFit, so I don't know. Orangetheory is high-interval training and I like it and I like music. It's intense, it's fun.
Howard Farran: There was no good music that came out after 1990. You were born in '81, so by the time you're a teenager, there hasn't been any good music since you were a kid. All the good music came out when I was born.
Jeanie Ju: I like pop music. I like a lot of pop.
Howard Farran: A lot of pop music? I want to tell you about leadership, and you guys should weigh in on this because you're two esteemed practice manager consultants. It's so funny how where there's smoke, there's fire. It was legendary that you don't want to work (unclear 00:17:12) where the doctor's wife's in there. I would look and see it on their side, "Yeah, because the doctor's wife owns half the practice, so she's serious as a heart attack and she's going to make you be accountable and she's going to fire you." When I see the highest net-worth practices, and it doesn't matter if it's dental offices, wheat farm where I grew up in Kansas, if dad was out there on the tractor and mom was at the kitchen table with the calculator and they both work the business, mom was the inside man doing all the books and he was the outside man farming. They were multi millionaires, but the mom was detached and the guy was all alone. They just kind of puddle along, and so whenever the wife is in the practice as the office manager, now it's reverse, so many women dentists, their husband is the office manager, it's just so much more serious. But the complaint, where it actually comes from is just like you do to your parents. Mom says no so you go ask dad, and if dad says no, you go ask mom, and you could pretty well play them off, especially if dad was at work or where they couldn't communicate before the cell phone. For the staff, do you have an org chart? I mean, all the major religions - one God. You can't have thunder and lightening, two Gods, so do you have an org chart? Does the staff think one of you two is top dog and the other one's not or do they think there's two top dogs running the show?
Jeanie Ju: Two top dogs. I like the business part of it, so I do a lot of the business part, but we make it an effort to be on the same page. Everybody, including my husband and me, because you're right, and the same thing translates to my son. I see my staff is my kids, helping me be a better parent for sure when my son become a teenager, but yeah, you have to make sure in the same page, so our setups are universal now and I'd be practicing and using the same amount of time. It's x amount of time for prep, it should be the same for him (unclear 00:19:16) so that you can't confuse the staff and it's exactly the same.
Howard Farran: This is Dentistry Uncensored so I'll go right to the bottom of the nightmare. Whenever you talk to your group practice, you can get them to agree on a lot of things, but the bottom of the barrel where no one will agree is burs. I've talked to CEOs, DSOs at eight hundred offices and the bur thing is insanity, and the assistants cry because you got to get up and leave the room or for, or you take off your gloves or you have to open a drawer with your hand. Have you agreed on the same burs for a prep?
Jeanie Ju: He's more picky than I am. I'm very easy going, I just do whatever works.
Howard Farran: How many burs do you need and many burs does your husband need?
Jeanie Ju: Shoot, I don't even know. I just say, "Just give me something that does what I need to do." I'm very chill. I just need a couple burs and I'm good.
Howard Farran: I think for a filling or a crown or a root canal, it should be the little round five (unclear 00:20:13), and I believe if you need more than five burs to do a crown, you need a therapist. What I'm trying to tell the bur companies is - we podcast some companies that make burs - that I'm hearing the assistant's pain. Imagine you get on a Southwest Airlines flight and you take off and the co-pilot says, "Oh, I need this." Oh shit, we've got to turn around. We've got to go back. So every time that assistant gets up and leaves the room, she's mad. She's driving up your supply costs, she's taking off her gloves, all those things like that. Southwest Airlines has the lowest cost. The only secret to lower price, lower costs, and it's because they only fly seven thirty seven and then you go to US Air and they got seven, twenty seven, thirty seven, forty seven, fifty seven, air buses, L ten elevens... US Air had a plane fall out of the sky every year for eight years in a row. No one's ever died on Southwest Airlines because they fly one plane.
Howard Farran: Every operatory should be the same. If I go into an operatory, I should turn there, room three, boom, boom. That way everybody's faster, efficient, and then if you could just squeeze one more filling in that day because everybody is so efficient, that was nothing but net, you already paid your bills. And then when you tell the doctors - that's the bottom of the insanity - you say, "Okay, you can only pick five burs and they can't do it." So I tell the manufacturers they should get a bur dispenser, because the assistant is the one going crazy and you should just have the setup with the little (unclear 00:21:43) and then the doc can go to central sterilization. They need to be single-dispense (unclear 00:21:47), and he just goes, "Ding ding ding ding," here's seven or eight or if he's on medication, maybe twelve, thirteen.
Jeanie Ju: It stems from the doctor, top down. The doctor needs to understand these problems or these complaints of the staff, and you got to give and take, you got to compromise, can't be too stuck in your ways. This is what happens, the chaos. So then I know this as their boss, so then I learned to just give a little bit. It's not a big deal to me.
Howard Farran: From a leadership point of view. Do you do morning huddles? Do you do staff meetings?
Jeanie Ju: We do morning huddles, every day on the dot seven o five. Our first patient is seven thirty. With their help, we implemented team meetings, so we have it once a month. When they first came, it was like an eight-hour meeting to just get everyone the same page, implement systems and now they did most of the talking, then I started doing most of the talking. They trained me to be a leader, to run the meeting and now it's my staff who's doing the talking and they're coming up and see, "Okay, how can we improve?" and they're coming with ideas, topics to talk (unclear 00:22:58) solution so we come together as a team to find solutions. It's amazing just to sit and watch this happening.
Howard Farran: So, how long have you been with Dental Management Innovation Coaching? You're in my backyard. How long have you guys been doing this?
Shelly Goff: Almost twenty five years.
Howard Farran: You guys are stellar, really, you guys are amazing. I highly recommend you guys. What states do you work in? Where do you go?
Shelly Goff: We try to stay here in the southwest area. We like the heat.
Howard Farran: (unclear 00:23:26) I always saw the greatest labs, like Lord's Dental Studio, all their businesses was out of Wisconsin. Green, all their business out of Arkansas. Then you see another business model like, um, um, like Glidewell where it's 5%, but it's scattered all over and I always thought those labs and consultants have said, "You know what, there's six thousand-" How many dentists are in Arizona?
Jeanie Ju: Over four thousand?
Howard Farran: There's six thousand dentists in Arizona. If you got to take clients in Maine and Canada, something's wrong. You've been crushing our backyard for years, but I'm always trying to be a leader to the dentist and the fact that they're always naturally gravitated to shiny objects, lasers and bone grafting, and I get that because I love all this stuff. I've got a CEREC machine. I just don't want to tell anybody. I bought every laser known to man, but those are toys that you put- Your four year old, you put him in the bathtub with no toys, he'll be out in three seconds. If you put a bunch of trucks and crap in there, he'll stay in there until his fingers are all squiggly. I like toys, but when your house is on fire, you don't go to a bone grafting convention and I think one of the reasons they like going to (unclear 00:24:47) and Spear and Pankey, actually the biggest part of it, they get to fly out of their city and leave the whole nightmare behind like a Netflix movie, just not get interrupted by staff and reality and just get immersed into occlusion. And their office is complete chaos and I always tell them, "You got to get your house in order. You got to get poised for growth."
Howard Farran: And the only return on investment that's guaranteed is a dental office consultant. Not that I'm going to place implants. They'll get an implant and they'll go buy a hundred thousand CBCT. They'll fly all the way to the Dominican Republic. They'll drop fifty grand, there'll be two hundred thousand down before they even do one implant. And it's like, "OKay look, I can have a periodontist come to your office, place your implants for 50%, no debt, no nothing, and then you go get a consultant."
Shelly Goff: Howard, if they don't know how to talk to the patient about what they love and know and do, how are they even going to even tell the patients they offer that? It's a lot about even helping them understand themselves, so they can get to that point.
Howard Farran: Why do you think they don't do it? Every dentist I know that collects $2,000,000 to 5,000,000 a year, they did- Well, all the ones I know that did two million, they all use consultants. You say, "Did you ever use a consultant?" They're like, "It's all I use." And if they're my age, they use five different people because everyone came in and showed them something. Now all the ones that get to four to five million, they use M&A activity which is- Wall Street loves it and dentists haven't caught on. You're in Tucson and some old man gets ready to retire across the street, and then I go in and figure out what does it cost you to advertise and market to get a new person in here? And usually it's at least $150 a person. And then this guy's got two thousand active charts, you go two thousand times a hundred and fifty and you say, "Why don't you buy his practice and move it into your office?" "I don't want to do that. I want to get a Facebook ad."
Howard Farran: So now this old man who's been winding down and his last patient, he had a cane and a walker, and then some young baby like you walks in, all energetic, enthusiastic. So that little almost dead dog across the street. Now a baby, tyrannosaurus rex moves in and just kicks- Especially in small towns, they'll say, "Okay, you're in a town of two thousand. There's four offices. Old Man McGregor is going to die and he's got his practice up for sale." Your options are buy it, you get all the patients and you went from four to three or switch out the eighty year old with a thirty year old, then tell me how that's working for you. Every dentist I know that got to four to five million and was literally netting a million a year, they did M&A activity and they did them within five miles of their office. It's one of those things that are necessary. So how long have you used this consulting firm?
Jeanie Ju: Almost two years?
Howard Farran: Do you think it's been a return on investment?
Jeanie Ju: Yes. Personally, mentally, spiritually, physically, all the above. I hit a low point. I didn't know. They don't teach you this in school.
Howard Farran: You hit a low point?
Jeanie Ju: I did. I worked for corporate, hated it, just knew it wasn't me.
Howard Farran: Which one?
Jeanie Ju: I don't want to say.
Howard Farran: It's Dentistry Uncensored. Just write it down. I won't show, I won't say. I'm just curious.
Jeanie Ju: All of them. Western Dental, (unclear 00:28:22) Pacific, did a little bit... My longest stint was at Gentle Dental.
Howard Farran: In Arizona or California?
Jeanie Ju: Gentle Dental, they have it in Arizona.
Howard Farran: They have in Phoenix or Tuscon (unclear 00:28:34)?
Shelly Goff: They have lots.
Howard Farran: Who's the CEO of Gentle Dental?
Jeanie Ju: Who knows? I don’t know.
Howard Farran: But you know what? I'm glad you say this because there's a reality distortion in the dental schools because old man McGregor is gonna sell his office. He's not in the dental schools, but these DSOs keep going to the dental school, and say, "Oh, the sky is falling, we're going to take half the market and the best thing you can do is work for me." It's like, "Dude, the average dentist doesn't even stay in a DSO for- It's between one and two years." Heartland keeps them the longest at about two and everybody else's closer to one. If DSO is so great, then how come all your classmates who graduated five years ago aren't working there, why do they all work there and quit and then say it put you in a mental funk or is that what you said?
Jeanie Ju: Very negative environment, very catty and not supportive at all. There's no growth. You want to do endo or whatever, but they hire specialists and they pressure you to refer to them because that's production for them.
Howard Farran: The PPOs pay a higher fee if the endodontist does it. So if I own a corporate-
Jeanie Ju: (unclear 00:29:43) you said anything. I mean, you worked long days…
Howard Farran: Right, but within the deal the PPOs will pay an endodontist 30% more for the same thing. So they want to do that.
Jeanie Ju: I worked in an environment where they put you on a whiteboard and you're ranked by production. You're either in the red zone or the green zone. I told the manager I was in the red zone. Sometimes in the green and sometimes in the red. It just doesn't motivate me. She used to get mad, and they're like, "What does?" I'm just like, "Just being supportive and appreciative." It's the system. The people are very nice, made a lot of good friends, and it's not the people, it's the system. It's too bad the CEO, the trickle down effect... I don't know, maybe one of my goals one day is to be that CEO for DSO to help women like me who've graduated from school and like, "I don't know. I don't know if I want to own a business yet. I don't know and want to have a baby and be at home and do that." You know what I mean? And then you work there and it's like, oh my gosh, it's not what you thought. There's no gloves sometimes, there's no burs. You go to this big old convention, it's great. You have a motivational speaker and all these reps come and can't even order anything. It was just a big old joke to me. It's not congruent and you have a mission statement which is stupid, so I had to get out and I had an anxiety attack towards the end. At that time I had just met them. They helped me get out. I begged them, say, "Please get me out. I just can't work in this environment."
Howard Farran: Get you out of the corporate?
Jeanie Ju: Yeah.
Howard Farran: So you hired a consultant while you were at corporate to get you out of corporate?
Jeanie Ju: My story's unique in the sense that I bought an existing practice, I lacked the confidence to be the main doctor. My husband was the main doctor first so he was there. I was a part-time doctor behind the scenes trying to manage the office.
Howard: In Tucson?
Jeanie: Think of me as the wife of the husband doctor. You know, some husband doctors are working, but the wife has her own job, but then behind the scenes she kind of helps the office. I was that. I just thought that I can't do it. I just need to have that supplementary income and it just sucks so bad. You know, you brought that negative energy home. I just felt stressed at home. I just had a baby and I felt like I wasn't there for my son and then I met them and I just knew they were helping you so much and then finally I got out. They encouraged me to buy another practice, and I was like, "Really? Another practice?" (unclear 00:32:02) do it again and merge them two in and here I am.
Howard Farran: So, you've already done M&A activity.
Shelly Goff: She has.
Howard Farran: You bought two practices and merged them together.
Patrice Bonnell: In under a year, she's grown so much, you need to expand even more.
Jeanie Ju: I need more space. I need more operatories now.
Howard Farran: Did you move one into the other?
Jeanie Ju: Yes. They were just point three miles away.
Patrice Bonnell: And remodeled and expanded.
Howard Farran: Nice, so how many ops you have now?
Jeanie Ju: Seven, so four doctor operatories and three hygienists. Running out of space, we need more space.
Howard Farran: No you're not. You just think you are, but you're not running out of space. You know why? Because there's a hundred and sixty-eight hours in a week and the average doctors’ open thirty-two hours a week, which is 19% of the week. And then if you read the research from the Federal Reserve, which has more PHD economists on staff than any institution in the world, they have like three thousand PHD economists and they always come out with amazing research that would never interest Fox News or CNN or MSNBC, but they show that America’s got three hundred and thirty-five million people, a hundred and fifty million are in the workforce and a hundred million of them out of a hundred and fifty million cannot leave Monday through Friday, eight to five. My son's a welder. I have to go clean his teeth after hours. So you start thinking. You have seven operatories closed down for basically 81% of the week, and people say, "Oh, I need another office." Then I say, "How many people call your office that aren't in your practice management system after you close at five and open the next day?" And they say, "None of the practice management systems are connected to your phone." When someone tells me they like Dentrix, my next question is, "Do you have a head injury or did your mom drop you or were you a hydrocephalic child, because …
Shelly Goff: Why do you say that?
Howard Farran: Because number one, Dentrix and Eaglesoft they don't hook up to your accounting system. When I was ten years old, my dad owned Sonics. The cash registers are made by National Cash Register, they got swallowed up by IBM. There was more practice management. Like when the meat man delivered fifty boxes of meat, he entered it into the cash register. All your sales - cash register, the payroll entered into the cash register. You could pull out a little roll of paper at anytime and say, my dad said, "Okay today, our food costs were 31%, our marketing is 4%, labor... So we collected $2,000 and I made $412 net income." No dentist has any of those tools. So when someone calls your office, you can leave Friday at noon and come back Monday and say eighteen people called your office, and twelve of them were not in your patient deal. Your staff. You don't do payroll. It's your number one cost is payroll. 25% payroll, 10% lab, 6% supplies, 5%... Compare the management information system that Dentrix and Eaglesoft- Here's Mcdonald's. I'm twenty-four years old. It's nine o'clock on a Wednesday night. A fax machine says, "Hey manager, who's twenty-seven years old, managing a $3,000,000 business that will earn a 14% net income." It'll say, "It's Wednesday at nine. We closed at midnight. We're supposed to do 19% crew labor. You got three cooks logged in, send one of them home. You got three receptionists logged in. Don't send Amy home, she always comes up long. Send Rochelle home, she always comes up short. I don't understand why you're using six hundred and forty cups today, but you've only sold six hundred and thirty-five drinks. So some of the employees are using a cup, tell them to use something else, the Dixie Cup, the cups we buy from Mcdonald's are fifteen- You know what I mean? They have a management information system. Then you go to meet a doctor, a dentist who knows everything in geometry and trig, can do calculus, configure the velocity of a rocket going to the moon, and you say, "What's your labor today?" Look at the website (unclear 00:36:19). The average website, one hundred people land on your website for three to call. Your practice management system doesn't even tell you that.
Howard Farran: The three that call, how many does it take to convert to come in? Well, the average three people have to call before you were (unclear 00:36:34) one. It doesn't track that. How come it doesn't tell you at the end of the day, "Twelve people called your office." A lot of marketing you see outside of healthcare, "If you're a new customer, call this number. If you're an existing customer, call this number." And then it's like, well we're on Dentrix and Eaglesoft. We just drink Listerine all day and we don't give a shit what number you call, send us the telegraph. Then it would say, thirteen people called your office that are not in your practice management information system and only three scheduled for appointment. Well if you're the doctor, you say, "Give me those twelve names and numbers," and your receptionist can say, "Hey Sherie called, she talked to me for like five or ten minutes, but she didn't make an appointment." That's about an hour ago, and you're in between patients, you're walking the floor. Let me call her. "Sherie, Dr. Howard Farran. I've been the dentist here thirty years. Valerie said you called and had a bunch of questions and she says that maybe you want to talk to the doctor. What's going on?" And then you got another chance at a conversion. If Dentrix was doing anything right, why did a dozen other companies spawn up around them doing other stuff? How many companies can you think of just in Utah alone. Just in Utah alone, that should have all been in the Dentrix software.
Jeanie Ju: How many companies?
Howard Farran: Yeah, how many companies just in Utah, because that's where Dentrix. It's in Provo, Utah. So how many companies started basically making software to cover all the missing gaps of Dentrix?
Shelly Goff: You've got the PracticeWorks, you've got the Eaglesoft, you've got the…
Patrice Bonnell: Oh my gosh, so many. On marketing, on SEO, on everything.
Howard Farran: I actually made a list. That's how pissed off I am. I am because I went down to Provo twelve times. You know where Eaglesoft is? It's in Effingham, Illinois. I flew to Effingham on my own dime to talk to these people and it was like talking to a wall. It's just crazy. So, here we are in Provo, Utah, where Dentrix started up and these are the companies that have Dentrix. Was ran by anybody with half a vision. You also have BoomCloud Dental Membership software, you have the CAO Group, you have Cottonwood Orthogonal, Curve Dental for on the cloud, Dental ATM, Dental Intel, Dental Marketing dot net, all up the street from Henry Schein. You have Jive Communications, MAXTax, My Social Practice, ORTEC, OrthoSelect, Podium, Prosper Healthcare Lending, WaveOrtho, Weave... Why do you have Weave and Podium on the same street? That's why I switched to Open Dental along with most people on Dentaltown.
Howard Farran: You can tell Open Dental is the only one that doesn't advertise and it's not that it does everything we want. It's just that the CEO came on this show and says- You know, Nathan Sparks. It was started by his brother who's a dentist, Jordan Sparks, and Nathan said, "I hear you and that's why we're open." You know why his brother Jordan started the company? Because he had Dentrix and he wanted to export all of his patients names and addresses for labels and he did some programming in college and he realized not only could he not do it, but someone went in there and fortified walls to purposely make sure he couldn't. So he called them and said, "You guys actually went in there and went out of your way to make sure I couldn't export." And he goes, "Yeah, because that's our data." He goes, "My patients and addresses and phone is your data?" He was so pissed he started Open Dental and I'm supporting the movement because you have all your accounting over here on Peachtree or Quicken or QuickBooks Pro, or the one that Microsoft bought and then you have all your patient information and then you have your phone, which is now all moving digital. It's coming down a cable wire. So we're at the verge- All the pieces are there to have a practice management information system so that a droid- And now you have artificial intelligence with machine learning. So this could be completely fixed in an hour if anybody knew, well we're in LA and we need to go to Phoenix. We need to put all these pieces together and build a management information system, but what you have is you have Dentrix and Eaglesoft and Phoenix saying, "Where are we? Where are we?" while dozens of companies sprout up all around them trying to put all the pieces together.
Howard Farran: And they invited me to their users conference. Yeah, and I went, I'm like, "Why are they inviting me? Well maybe this is a gesture. Maybe that's an olive branch." No, they were so dumb, they didn't even know my thoughts on them. It was like straight out of a sci-fi movie. The guy opens up the deal with, "85% of our software's never used." I said, "But don't you realize that it's a problem?" When you go to the Marriott or Hertz Rent a Car, the receptionist only has to do like seven things to check in and she can't go from two to three to four. She has to go in order. By putting five thousand million features on there, that 85%'s never used. That just gave her star eyes and she's all confused. And I told that to Open Dental. The first thing I told Nathan was, "The first thing we got to do is be able to close out all this shit that is confusing and no one ever uses so that we can get a process and you can say, this is Jeanie Ju's processing bill. The first thing we ask when they call is this, and you can't fill in the second square until you answered the first square. This is how we check them in, here's how we answer our phone call, here's how we check them out." Yet, I mean Hertz Rent a Car, that whole thing is on an iPhone. What's the miles? What is your last name? You know what I mean? Just a few data points and then ii prints out a receipt and you're gone right out of the airport.
Howard Farran: I think dental consultants are going to be around for at least, from the numbers side, at least another decade before we can get all these parts together. But imagine the next generation when all the pieces are together with artificial intelligence, your iPhone will be telling you all day long, "Hey, someone just called Valerie, talk to her for twenty minutes and asked three times if she can be seen today and didn't schedule, and you've got an opening at two." So now you go call. So what are you passionate about on the clinical side? You said you were more passionate on the business side. Anything got you passionate clinically?
Jeanie Ju: I like crowns. Feel like I could do them with my eyes closed. I think they're fun. That's about it.
Howard Farran: So that's your favorite? Crowns? Are you (unclear 00:45:46) or send them to the lab?
Jeanie Ju: I just learned CEREC, so I'm doing a mixture of both.
Howard Farran: So you have a CEREC.
Jeanie Ju: It was acquired in the first practice. The previous doctor had it.
Howard Farran: What do you think of it?
Jeanie Ju: I love it sometimes and I hate it sometimes. When I worked for Pacific, it was forced upon me. You had to do it and you're a baby graduating school and then they make you do it and you have to produce, so I had a bad start with it and now after two years then I'm like, okay, now I can focus. So I wasn't like the other doctor. I didn't like the gadgets and thought that was going to (unclear 00:44:19). I just knew without them telling me that wasn't the way to do it, so I worked on myself first, got my business in check, in place, got the people (unclear 00:44:29), the systems, then now I'm focusing on clinicals. I just did simple dentistry just like I did in corporate.
Howard Farran: What's the pros and cons of taking a $17 Impregum impression - and you're in Tucson so there's labs everywhere. You can send up the street for that - versus buying a CAD/CAM or like Three M, they sell Impregum, which cost me about seventeen bucks an impression. They also sell a $17,000 oral scanner. What's Three M's oral scanner called? True doubt? True definition. What's the pros and cons of doing an impression up the street in Tucson or making it yourself?
Jeanie Ju: Pros and cons? Creature of comfort. I liked taking impressions just because I'm used to it. I can get good results, but then I liked CEREC because it's technology. It's the way of the future. I think everyone's moving towards that way. I can control my lab in terms of how I want the design. It makes me a better clinician, learn how to prep better. I think it's great and everyone does. It's just you can see this is your work. It's not just some stone model and blaming the lab, whatever. You have more accountability in yourself as a doctor, and if I can't happen to do at that same time, you can just temporize it and come back. But I think it makes me better because you learn all the processes, just like when you were in school, you learn every little step-
Shelly Goff: Did you throw your pen at me again?
Jeanie Ju: You meet doctors, I think it's like politics. Certain doctors, they really love it, and then you got the people who were really against it because it's a lot of money and it's true.
Howard Farran: NASCAR, you know who's supporting them. It has all the patches on them. How many people in social media are actually paid for on the circuit lecture? It's their job, but they don't. They don't lecture in an (unclear 00:46:21) suit saying, "This entire seminar is brought to you by Serona." They're like, "I'm your homie too." No, you make your money treating patients, how many of them make their money selling, teaching, training CEREC. I think it all comes down to number one, if you're passionate and you love doing that, but when you said the key to quality though, what you said and came out as you said, "C", and the fastest way to increase your quality is everybody with wet hands gets loupes. I've gone to so many dental offices where the dentist doesn't wear loupes or the dentist wears loupes but the assistant, the hygienist doesn't.
Howard Farran: If everybody goes to three and a half magnification, you're three and half times better. What I love the most about my CEREC is you would scan those preps and you'd see their prep 40 times larger and that added a few burs to my bur block and cutting burs, some other things, soft flex desk, hitting them, things like that. Same thing with my endodontist friends. My endodontist friends, they got a microscope. They're usually only use it about at eight, and most of them only swing it over for the final film, and they'll say, "I swing over every molar before I obturate and one time a day." I'm like, "Woah." Sometimes it can be they missed the canal or sometimes they're already at fill and this one canal still has sludge clear down the side of it.
Howard Farran: Same thing with taking the x-rays. When I got out of school, you had this little one inch Kodak film and the view boxes was big, so all this lights constricting your retinas to like pin holes while you're trying to look and have him dilated and see an x-ray. So to have that x-ray real big…
Jeanie Ju: I love it.
Howard Farran: Yeah, I think when you're a talking monkey and the only thing we have is eyes and opposing thumb, I mean we don't have much else. I don't know if there's thumb transplants, but you could definitely magnification. So that's the best thing.
Jeanie Ju: Oh yeah. I think it makes you a better doctor for sure. I wear loupes, I have a light, it's great.
Howard Farran: You have a light on your head?
Jeanie Ju: Yeah, or a (unclear 00:48:31). It's attached to my glasses.
Howard Farran: So it's attached to-
Jeanie Ju: My glasses, on the frame.
Howard Farran: Does the weight bother you? Does the weight bother your neck?
Jeanie Ju: No.
Howard Farran: You still good? So you have the battery pack in your pocket?
Jeanie Ju: Yeah.
Howard Farran: And does your husband wear that too?
Jeanie Ju: Yes, he does.
Howard Farran: So, do you still have an overhead light?
Jeanie Ju: We do for the assistants, but I don't need it, because (unclear 00:48:58).
Howard Farran: That's the strangest thing about dental assistants. The reason I like the headlight is because if you ask for more light, a 100% of all dental assistants first take all the light away and then focuses. It's like, "I didn't say I want to go into complete darkness, and then more light. I just said more light. Can we just go from what we have now to a little more?" But they're like, "No, that's not how it works. First you lose everything, and then I bring it back." So that headlight is a pretty cool, and Jay Resnick- There's actually a light company and recording company in Scottsdale by the Scottsdale Center. It's a new age where dentists are wearing the lights, but they're doing the video recording, and Jay Resnick, I forgot the name of the company, their receptionist is Jenna Farmer. I know Jenna and Jay Resnick... I'm trying to get the CEO on there because a lot of dentists are having fun with that because what dentists have found out on their websites is that-
Speaker 5: LoupeCam. Jenna Farmer (unclear 00:50:04).
Howard Farran: L-O-U-P-E-C-A-M?
Speaker 5: (unclear 00:50:08).
Howard Farran: Yeah, because what these dentists are finding out is that- When I was little, only rich people flew in airplanes. Everybody even dressed up. I mean, when you went to fly, men were in tights and suits and briefcases and women- I mean, it was like going to church. Well now, with Southwest Airlines, any hillbilly from Kansas born in a barn's flying in a plane. So these consumers are getting on the internet and when they're going to offices they're seeing pictures of their own work, videos of their own work where it says, "This is my own work," and what's really weird about that is there is a dentist (unclear 00:50:47) and he's doing these big huge cases and his patients are flying in from these other cities around Missouri and Iowa and Kansas and they're leaving towns, of their best friends that they met, where they're getting their diplomat in the International Congress (unclear 00:51:03), and they're like, "Oh my God, you just left Wichita to come to Kansas City," and this guy's mentor lives in Wichita. But then you go to the website and it says, "Oh, doctor, this alphabet soup bullshit, looks like his mugshot when he had his DUI arrest..." and you're the consumer. In fact, I think one of the most interesting things to do to dentists, things to screw a dentists is when they go into (unclear 00:51:27) say, "Let me call your office and I'll call the office and it'll go to voicemail." He's like, "Goddamn, I just left my office two minutes ago."
Shelly Goff: That's cruel, that's just cruel.
Howard Farran: And then I'll say, "Will you please call me back? I just moved to Phoenix. I got a broken tooth. Will you please call me back, I'm going to give you my cell phone number." And then we go to lunch for an hour and in an hour, I just called your office, told them I broke a tooth, just moved to Phoenix, she still hasn't called me back. And the waiters, "What would you like eat?" He's like, "Double gin and tonic, side of heroin and some Fentanyl." And then another one to do that's amazing, I'll speak to the dentist and say, "Tell me about your practice. What do you like to do the most?" They'll tell you, and then I'll go to their website. It's like, "Really? So you have your diplomat and implants, you want to build your implant practice, that's your most passion. I'm on your website. It doesn't even mention it."
Howard Farran: What's really neat also is to know your market. I think one of the best things you should do for your website- Because the website right now is one of the lowest hanging fruits. You have a hundred people landing on your page for three to call and three have to call for one to come in and the close rate is 30% on just restorative dentistry. So three people have to come in that need a filling or a crown for you to do one. So to do your filling, three had to come in. For three to come in, nine had to call. For nine to have to call, a thousand had to land on your website. I mean, you fix anything on that funnel, you went the average dentist collecting seven-fifty, taking home one seventy-five, to now a million and a half, taking home three fifty, and one of the things on the website is you go from a still picture to a youtube video and the market is afraid of two things, fear of pain, fear of cost. So you can go to my website and the first one is fear of pain and it's me for a minute on YouTube, the next one's fear of cost (unclear 00:53:26) twenty years talking about all the financial stuff. Anything on that funnel you fix. So what else are you passionate about? You love crowns and you love the business…
Jeanie Ju: I love the business a lot.
Howard Farran: And you love using the consultants?
Jeanie Ju: Love them, never want them to leave me.
Howard Farran: Most people think I would have a consultant come in, fix the office and then be on their way, but you said you've been with them two years?
Jeanie Ju: Two years. Personal growth. I still feel like I'm a baby and there's so much more potential out there, you want to make a bigger impact.
Howard Farran: Well you are a baby. I'm fifty-five. I have grandchildren older than you. No. I'm just kidding.
Patrice Bonnell: And her team has expanded. It's tripled in two years.
Howard Farran: Wow.
Patrice Bonnell: And her practice has tripled in two years, so along with that growth, she is so busy with clinical, with running the business and creating mini CEOs in every single department, and then team members go to the CEOs, the CEOs come to her. What makes Jeanie so successful is that she makes a decision, she makes it quickly, and then she always takes action, always follows through, and that's where we see so many dentists who just never get past that million dollar mark because of indecision or not taking action or not reverse engineering how to take action. And she does, and she does it just like that.
Howard Farran: You know, Jeanie Ju, you remind me of another female Jewish dentist. When I got in town, I graduated 87, was born in (inaudible 55.09) I think I was twenty-four years old. I think I turned twenty-five three or four months after I graduated and it was taking my office four months to build and I got to open up September 21st, and so just last September 21st was my thirty year anniversary. I was looking for a job and I didn't know what associate would hire me down in Ahwatukee because I'm going to go across the street. So I was in other parts of town it was I was talking to (unclear 00:55:33). Anyway, turns out, long story short, during World War II, a lot of German Jewish dentists fled Nazi Germany, and when they came here they wouldn't give them a dental license, which makes sense because I mean Germany makes cars like Mercedes and Volvo and we make the Chevy and the Ford so obviously, they're a third world country.
Howard Farran: So she went and got an attorney and she said, "Can I sue and get my license because I'm from Germany and we have the best lab technicians. I mean, our lab schools are six years long and here's this shitty labs and this shitty country in this shitty dental schools." They said, "No, you can't, it's tribal, but you can own a dental office because you are a licensed dentist and per the statute of Arizona, you could own a dental office." So it forced her to go no clinical, and she said she cried and cried and cried and cried, but she realized she didn't have the money or time to go back to dental school and she just came here and children and all that, stuff like that. So she opened an office. It was the best thing that ever happened to her because since she couldn't do clinical, she had to work on her business full-time, by the time I hooked up with her, if she wasn't eighty-five, she was a hundred and eighty-five. And you knew she was right-handed because her lipstick started here and it went up to like this cheekbone and then slid down at her side. She had a driver and she had four offices and they were all doing two and a half million a year in the eighties. That was a $10,000,000 business and it was her own mojo. She had a driver and she just drive from one to one. It kept her going.
Howard Farran: There's a big lawsuit right now that everybody's talking about with that pediatric dentist in Florida. My first thought is, "Dude, you shouldn't be a dentist at eighty." I mean like Sheriff Joe. These young kids don't realize what we saw this was Reagan. When he's eighty and he was forgetting and all this stuff. And you're like, "He's lying or-" No, no, he's eighty! If he doesn't have dementia, how many are in pre-dementia or pre-Alzheimer's and people with Reagan, I remember when I was in college, saying, "Oh, he's lying," and you find out later, no, he's real old and eventually had full-blown Alzheimer's.
Howard Farran: I'm fifty-five. I couldn't imagine being a dentist at eighty. You don't even realize how much better you see and your and your eye-hand coordination is in your thirties versus your fifties. So eventually, you need to just be cerebral. Eventually you're going to need to own a dental office and not drill, fill and bill, and this lady was forced to do it when she was young and she said, "I cried for years and now I look back and it was the single best thing that happened to me," because anybody can drill, fill and bill and China just placed its first implant with a robot. Did you see that? They had a CBCT connected up to a robotic arm, so they had it in all real-time, and that little robot arm went in there, drilled the holes…
Jeanie Ju: That's pretty cool.
Howard Farran: Yeah, so we are within one generation of- You won't buy a CEREC machine. You'll put a device in the quadrant, it'll mill the tooth, it'll fill it. CEREC right now, (unclear 00:58:56) CEREC machine. It won't be long and they'll be selling droids and you'll fire staff and replace them with R two D two and C three PO. But the only thing that they won't be able to do still is have the visionary, the ownership, the leadership where are we going with all this.
Jeanie Ju: I think that's great to run it from the outside.
Howard Farran: When you sit and draw all day long, that's great if you love it, and I love it. I'd rather pull four wisdom teeth and go out to dinner with anybody I can think of. I get that, but it's not scalable. It's not scalable, and the reason I never did the DSO model is because I said, "Yeah, you can go find great locations and great advertising. You can do all this great stuff, but the product, at the end of the day, is a dentist. The staff can get him here, the office is hot..." My favorite analogy of that is the Cleveland Browns. Look at the Cleveland Browns who didn't win a game versus the Patriots. The Cleveland Browns, they got an A in social media, location, hell they were in a monopoly in Cleveland. Cleveland's where the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is. It's on the lake. Their uniforms. Those are nicer uniforms than anything UFA, ASU or The Cardinals. I mean, they did everything right and didn't win a game. Why? Because they didn't have the right people, players and coaches.
Howard Farran: If you get the right people in a dental office, I don't care if you have ugly uniforms in the wrong city with too much competition. So, you can do everything wrong and if you have the right people, you're crushing it. So I could stamp out everything the Cleveland Browns had, but I couldn't find all the star players and every time I found a star player, it's like, "Well, does that person want to work for me?" Usually my star players seven to ten years, what do they do? They want their own place. So the only thing I learned from that is if you get them on the young coming out, your star players all go to private practice and the ones that stay aren't a star player.
Howard Farran: So what you do is you get the star players who ran the curb from thirty to fifty. In Phoenix we're lucky because people just like, the last kid goes away to school and they're in North Dakota, they're in Minnesota, they're in Canada, and they go, "I just want to live in Arizona." So all my ten year, all-star veterans were on the last ten years, the fifty-five to sixty-five. All the all-stars that I hired at twenty-five, they were all in their own practice within seven years.
Jeanie Ju: I don't know. It's something you have to consider.
Howard Farran: It's very scalable.
Jeanie Ju: They asked me if I ever want to hire an associate?
Patrice Bonnell: Bring an associate in, because you're at five days a week. You guys are at your max.
Howard Farran: And you need measurements. Who's calling your office? So, secrets from DSOs. They get A's in business, they get the right locations, they get the right funding, they got fast growth. They do so many things right. The only thing they can't do right is find someone like you to work for them from twenty-five to sixty-five. So at the end of the day, they're the Cleveland Browns and if they were doing it right, they wouldn't be trying to sell it to a venture capitalist. They'd be doing an IPO.
Jeanie Ju: I met the CFO. I asked him-
Howard Farran: CFO or CEO?
Jeanie Ju: CFO. He came by.
Howard Farran: Of what company?
Jeanie Ju: Gentle Dental. And I told him I watch Shark Tank, and I like reading books about business and he was so shocked that I would be interested in it. That just tells you a little bit about their mindset or whatever ideas they have about dentists they hire.
Howard Farran: Well, think of all the batshit crazy companies that are publicly traded, and not one dental company is, because all it is is a roll up. And all a roll up is that they're buying (unclear 01:02:57). So I go get a $10,000,000 line of credit, I buy ten offices for a million each and I come back on Shark Tank and say, "Hey, I went from zero to ten million." They like, "Great, well how long will it be for you to give me back my ten million?" And then one of us are going, "Oh, well that's not why we're here. We're here for another ten million to buy ten more offices." Then he comes back and said, "Now we're doing twenty million." "Yeah, your debt is twenty million. So when will you pay back my twenty million and double my money?" "Oh, that's not why we're here. We want another ten million." So they're just buying earnings and this is what the original was.
Howard Farran: Orthodontic Centers of America, completely collapsed. Wall Street wouldn't touch this with a ten-foot pole, but they convinced everyone in dental school that that's where the whole market is going. Snapchat went public, Twitter went public, but not a DSO? Really? Everybody has a mouth. Every human has to have a dentist eventually. I don't care if it's just for an extraction. My oldest son Eric never downloaded Facebook one time for one second, but Facebook can go an IPO, but supply and demand in dentistry, a 100% of all humans will need a dentist but not Facebook or Snapchat or Twitter. So, there may be a business model, but then I think if there is, it's going to be more in the lines of law firms where after five years you're a partner, but see no one's offering that-
Patrice Bonnell: But you really don't even have a say because you don't have enough of the partnership-
Howard Farran: You mean for the lawyers?
Patrice Bonnell: Yeah, you're still an employee. There's no decision making and it's great if you do not want to manage people, but if you want to excel, if you want to be making more money, if you want to design your own business model within the business, you need your own practice.
Howard Farran: Obviously in 2018- I don't know what's going to be here in fifty or a hundred years. God, I got out of school. I look at so many major markets I missed. I was a freshman at Creighton and guess who lectured at our business class? From Omaha, Warren Buffet, who was great friends with my sixty-five-year-old long, white-haired Italian with a ponytail business teacher, and they were just lovers. I remember I was all caught up in the Nifty Fifty, in high-tech and Xerox and Kodak, and here's this old man talking about these (unclear 01:05:27) candy in a furniture store, and I'm like, "Are you in Kodak or Xerox?" "No, I don't understand Kodak or Xerox. If you can't take a five-by-seven index card and write with a number two pencil and explain to me how you make money on one card, I'm not buying your stock." And I wrote it down like "This guy, he's dumber than a rock." If I would have dropped out at Creighton and gave that tuition just for that semester to Warren Buffet and then went and got a job at the IHOP, I'd be a multi-millionaire. I remember when Dave (unclear 01:05:57)- I was in nine fifteen, in my room with a Joe (unclear 01:06:01) who was an endodontist in Paradise Valley who died a couple years ago - he went early of and that was sad - and Dave (unclear 01:06:10) comes in and he just bought this from Tandy store, so it was a computer, and he's all excited. Came in and there's like ten of us in this room, and he's demo-ing this laptop and we're all trying not to laugh and we're all pre-dental and he leaves the room and he was a computer major and he was studying FORTRAN and COBOL and BASIC and he left the room, and we just all die laughing, "What an idiot. There's a dental school, a med school and law school and he's got that stupid little thing? That is going nowhere." That was just the biggest thing…
Howard Farran: So, I have no idea where it's at, where it's going, but I know that if there is a DSO model that will work, we don't have it now, and part of the litmus test is that you could go to Mark Cuban on Shark Tank, get a million dollars, buy a dental office and Mark would get his money back in a year or two while that million dollar dental office grew to ten million, then to four million, then to eight million, then to, you know. That business model does not exist, period.
Howard Farran: You've already married to dentist. Good for you. That's awesome. You already did M&A activity. You already hired a consultant. I mean, you're just coming out of the school and knocking everything over perfectly. What's your next big move? Where do you want to see yourself in five, ten, fifteen years?
Jeanie Ju: I want to do what they kind of do - help other dentists. I wish someone was there for me when I graduated. If someone was there the day of the graduation ceremony and said, "Hey, this is what it's going to be like," because you just don't know. It's all clinical. (unclear 01:07:48) in school, right? Then you get your first job, I cried because it just sucked. You know they were AGD but I got a little glimpse of it. It was mostly clinics; it wasn't a real private practice, and then one doctor told me to kill myself. He said, "Just shoot yourself. You owe too much money." You know, you got some negative stuff and we'd got to Arizona and I got a job-
Howard Farran: That's actually illegal. It's illegal to tell someone to kill themselves. Did you know that?
Jeanie Ju: No, I didn't know that.
Howard Farran: Yeah, that one girl told her boyfriend to kill himself and they had it on text. She's in jail now.
Jeanie Ju: That was a couple years ago. You don't have that support system. I didn't know who to reach out to. You didn't have any role models or anything like that, and then just kind of did on my own and hit rock-bottom. Reached out for help, reached out to my broker, the one that helped me find my first practice and then-
Howard Farran: Here in Arizona? Who was that?
Jeanie Ju: Chad Flake.
Howard Farran: Never met Chad Flake. You know what AFTCO stands for?
Jeanie Ju: No.
Howard Farran: Alan F Thornberg and he wanted to have a son, Alan Jr., but she turned out to be a girl so her name is Alana. His daughter's Alana, but AFTCO, he sold more dental offices than anybody that ever lived in America. So you called your broker from AFTCO?
Jeanie Ju: I played the victim card, I said, "This sucks. You got me this practice here, everything is going wrong, the staff hates me, I'm not making money, yada yada yada," and then he helped me reach out to Patrice and Shelly and this is what happened, and I just realized, "Oh, this is what it can be. They helped me see what life could be and I want to do the same. I want to pay it forward to someone who's in dental school and just doesn't know. My cousins, ex-girlfriend, she's in dental school and the brothers, the girlfriend's in dental school too. I just want to be there for them when they graduate and like-
Howard Farran: In Arizona?
Jeanie Ju: No, they're in Louisiana, but just to be a mentor for somebody. like you can just call me up. I don't mind just talking to someone and say, "This is what's going to be like," help guide them. But then you graduate, and you think you're the bomb, right? You know everything. You don't want to hear it. But they gave me skills to get past that, to help guide that person to think, so you're not just telling them what to do, what to expect, but they'll at least be more aware of (unclear 01:10:04) who does happen like, give them critical thinking skills, problem solving, things like that. And then that's a thing that's rewarding for me for sure.
Howard Farran: So what is it about you where you can raise your hand? Actually, I see it more with just women. I'll never forget when I was about ten, we had a station wagon and we drove from Wichita to Disneyland all the way to California and me and my five sisters, we put all the things down the back, we all sat around and played monopoly the whole way. My mom and dad were up there with the case of old Milwaukee, drinking the beer and throwing them out the windows.
Shelly Goff: The good old days.
Howard Farran: I'll never forget when daddy just lost it because, he was so lost in LA. It was like we should all just blow up the car, but he wouldn't stop and ask for help. He finally did when mom- It was one of the only times I've ever seen my mom lose it and he finally pulled up. But I remember just sitting there thinking as a little kid, "Why would you rather just drive around in circles for an hour? That guy there pumping gas lives here. I bet someone's asked him where Disneyland is before." Why do you think girls are so more likely- Well, let me ask you this. What percent of your clients are now female versus male than it was when you started twenty-five years ago?
Patrice Bonnell: Twenty-five years ago, we didn't have female clients. We just didn't, it's just-
Howard Farran: What percent of your clients are men now?
Patrice Bonnell: 90%.
Howard Farran: 90% are men? Well, that makes me feel good, because men in general have a hard time with their emotions. I always thought a lot of men don't get consultants because the consultants are women and they don't want you to come in and say, "Oh, you're not a man. You're a disaster." When you see a man driving down the street with a big old Mercedes-Benz or a big old truck, what's the first thing you're thinking?
Shelly Goff: Compensation.
Howard Farran: Compensation, you know what I mean? If you're all that and a bag of chips, you don't need a Rolex watch and a brand new Mercedes-Benz. There's something missing. What in your journey made you realize, "I don't really like the way I'm feeling. I don't like where I'm at. I want help," and then get it.
Jeanie Ju: I love sports a lot. You can only be so good unless you have a good coach, and that's my analogy. I love tennis. (unclear 01:12:34) and he was doing good and he wasn't doing good and the commentary was talking about coaches and all that, and that's huge. It just clicked for me. You have to have help, unless this now is how it should be, I got to find a way to get myself with somebody who knows what they're doing.
Howard Farran: And how can my homies contact you guys?
Patrice Bonnell: You can go to the website, DMI Coaching dot com and we've got a online practice assessment that somebody can fill out or just contact us on there.
Howard Farran: DMI stands for?
Patrice Bonnell: Dental Management Innovation.
Howard Farran: And how much does something like this cost?
Patrice Bonnell: It depends on what you need. I can't really even give you a price. We worked with a lot of clients in Arizona, we also work with clients nationally.
Howard Farran: You know when I started my office, every time I hired a consultant- My first consultant back in '87- You remember Sally McKenzie?
Patrice Bonnell: Oh yeah.
Shelly Goff: Yes.
Howard Farran: I was mad at her at dinner because she wouldn't quit her job and work for me.
Patrice Bonnell: We get offered that a lot.
Howard Farran: The next one that came was one of Arizona's best, Sandy Wilkinson. Do you remember Sandy?
Patrice Bonnell: Oh, I do, yes.
Howard Farran: We went out for two or three hours. She said, "Okay, how about I'll work here one day a week, see how it goes for a month," and I'm just like, "I don't want a consultant. I want to find the best damn consultant and hire them." That's how important it is. We're out of time, but I just want to say, tennis is your favorite sport?
Jeanie Ju: I like tennis a lot, love tennis.
Howard Farran: I went to the brand new billion-dollar human rights museum. I think it was Winnipeg, Manitoba, which is actually one thousand miles straight north of here, and it's the most gorgeous drive in the world. I mean, it's like, "Wow." I never fly there, just drIve it. When you went in there, you knew all the big stories. You knew the plight of the American Indians, slavery and the holocaust, but it was the female sports that blew my mind the most. Like you said tennis and the first thing that I thought of: Billie Jean King. When she used to play in cities, people would think, "She's not a girl. She's too good. She's a man," and they would arrest her and take her clothes off and be examining her like, "Oh, she really is a girl," because I mean she was a lesbian, she was manly-looking and she was slaughtering all the women. So the conspiracy back then: Well, she's got a weiner. And then after all that, then she had to go play and she's like, "I was just raped," I mean psychologically raped and shredded, and now she's got to go out there and do her best game.
Howard Farran: But the craziest one that shows how dumb people are- There was this one woman who would always run the Boston Marathon. It's men only and I'm Irish and Boston's all Irish and the pictures of these six fat Irish probably drinking drunk cops and then they chased her down, body slammed her, arrest her, the whole nine yards, and she'd say, "I'll see you next year." Six years of that, finally the city of Boston was tired of it like, "Why are six fat Irish cops chasing this fast running gazelle? Why do you need a weiner to be in the-" And I saw this growing up. I was very sensitive to this because I saw my five sisters did not have the same opportunity that I did inside my own house, and then you go to church, they went to the nunnery, they couldn't be a priest or a pope. My mom always told me since I was six years old, her whole dream for me, it's like, "Howie, you can do it. You're smart enough. You can be the first American pope. All the popes are Italians. You're going to be the first American pope." And I'm like, "Yeah, God save the church. I'm going to be a dentist."
Howard Farran: The point I'm making is right now it's so easy to realize that the holocaust was so insane and slavery and Billie Jean King... Even if you thought that was true, you wouldn't pull someone's pants off. So, all that stuff looks so ridiculous today, but you don't see it in your own self how you're stressed, you're not in touch with your feelings, you're not intuitive, and I swear to God, the reason you like to go to these institutes is cause you want to leave everything behind - the family, the kids, the wife. You just want to get on an airplane. As soon as you see your town disappear, you're like, to the waitress, "Bring me a drink," and then you get there and you meet guys and you just escape. If you want to escape, you know what you should do? You should do a Netflix movie and then hire a consultant and you should ask your consultant, "Why do I want to leave town? Why do I not want to go to work?" You should be wanting to run twenty red lights on the way to work, and when you're waiting there and you're hitting the alarm clock and you're saying, "I don't want to go to work," dude, that's not dentistry. If you don't get high of getting someone out of pain, a cosmetic deal, breaking a tooth, a denture, that broken or bathroom (unclear 01:17:44) she has a whole house full of company and she doesn't and I tell her, "Just cover your mouth, run for your car. I'll be there before you." Those are some of the biggest referrals I've ever had in my life. Meeting some grandma at my dental office.
Shelly Goff: You're the hero.
Howard Farran: I met one at Thanksgiving, the whole household, she goes through her deal, breaks her denture and that's why I like to cross-train. I mean, I don't want to make my own dentures, but I want to be able to do it if I have to. Ryan's telling me to shut up and go home, but thank you so much for being a role model, being transparent, being a leader, sharing your story, and thank you so much for, I mean, I know so many of your clients for years. Thank you for all you do for dentistry. I want to live another ten years just to see where you're at because it's going to be fun to watch you.
Jeanie Ju: Thank you so much, I appreciate it.
Howard Farran: All right. Have a rocking hot day.