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Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran
Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran
How to perform dentistry faster, easier, higher in quality and lower in cost. Subscribe to the podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dentistry-uncensored-with-howard-farran/id916907356
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1498 Ali Jhaver, CEO of Adit, on Attracting and Retaining Patients : Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran

1498 Ali Jhaver, CEO of Adit, on Attracting and Retaining Patients : Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran

11/11/2020 4:00:00 AM   |   Comments: 0   |   Views: 510
Ali Jhaver is the CEO of Adit, a full service marketing firm that provides turn-key solutions to practices looking to gain more qualified leads, build brand recognition, and prosper financially.


VIDEO - DUwHF #1498 - Ali Jhaver


AUDIO - DUwHF #1498 - Ali Jhaver


Subscribe to Dentistry Uncensored on Apple Podcasts:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dentistry-uncensored-with-howard-farran/id916907356  Subscribe to Dentistry Uncensored on Google Podcasts:  https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2RlbnRhbHRvd24uZmFycmFubWVkaWEubGlic3lucHJvLmNvbS9yc3M

*Please excuse any typos as this was digitally transcribed.

It is just a huge honor for me today to bring back for a second time something i almost never do Mohammed Ali Jhaver the CEO of ADIT he joined me two years back to discuss their pan patient booking guarantee he talked about how add it and that name comes added from advertising technology ad for advertising i.t for technology guarantees results for dental practices looking to grow their practices using online marketing since then it seems added has grown a lot is now offering dental providers with an all-in-one practice growth platform that goes along with the marketing and it now centralizes the entire patient journey from online marketing to integrated scheduling patient communication and patient reactivation this is not an advertising he didn't pay how much did you pay me to come on the show today actually uh the check is going to be in your mail because you live two hours from four of my sixth grandchildren you're in Houston there in Beeville so if you start getting letters from the irs saying uh why are you doing so many business trips to uh Beeville I’m gonna say uh talk to Ali by the by the way um i love your name more than anything because it's Muhammad Ali one of my biggest school childhood heroes of all time and i live in phoenix he he when he um he left lived the last decades of his life right here in town and you dropped the Muhammad part and i thought my gosh i mean to have a name Muhammad Ali and not go by how come you don't go by Muhammad Ali how come you go by Ali yeah no so you know first of all thank you for having me on the show dr Freda i really appreciate that um yeah so i you know when i grew up a lot of uh teachers and you know whenever they do roll call and they call they call out your name when they pronounce Muhammad Ali when it's together a lot of times have a hard time pronouncing it and so i was finding it that people had a very difficult time pronouncing my name and just to make it easier for people which i know sounds ridiculous i just dropped Muhammad and it's just Ali and so um i find it easier do they have a hard time saying Muhammad if it's not with Ali like if it's with all these same Muhammad Ali but you take it with the ollie right like a lot of times people would kind of pronounce as Muhammad Ali or like something like that like it would do they would read it as it's as it's written you know and it's it's sometimes difficult for people so um not to mention every time i talk to anybody the first thing they want to talk about is Muhammad Ali like the boxer and it's almost every single time an icebreaker you grow up with that icebreaker in every new conversation you're obvious you know you tend to be like oh you know i just want to not talk about that once in a while and so but it's you know it is what it is um but yeah it's all it's in every new conversation Muhammad Ali is is always a talking point and then i had to do it again to you i even even now i had to do it again to you i haven't done it for a while so it's great you know the the reason i brought you on the show is because um um had you come back is because the uh the marketing is um you know you know they're down 38 percent and my gosh um if you got a lot of old customers and they're afraid of catching kovid i mean um i totally get the fact if you're 30 and under that you know this doesn't concern you uh but if you're 65 and over uh you know it concerns you and those are the people that need all the dental work i mean if you got to practice with a lot of perio and implants and full mouth reconstruction it's not 30 year old yoga instructors you know it's old people um and they're scared and they're not coming in so i thought well if a bunch of people are falling off your schedule um you show up your advertising and the reason i wanted you to come back on because uh I’m afraid to ask but you remember the the last um stock market 94 to the y2k that bubble yeah and that popped in in 2000 I’m afraid to ask but how old were you in 2000 so i was actually 11 years old oh thanks for ruining my day but um what Michael dell showed the world it blew my mind i mean i had an MBA at the time blew my mind when the economy crashed he didn't double he didn't triple he quadrupled dell's advertising with this campaign called um you got Adele or a kid you got a dell do you remember that uh campaign and uh he maintained his numbers because he did a four-fold increase in marketing so then you start looking at the the dental numbers and the ada versus saying that you know we're down about uh 38 or 30 percent and then um um you use a lot of mixed numbers because i just uh podcasted the uh um CEO of septicane because he does 90 85 90 of the world's um anesthesia i can't do a filling on a tooth if i don't numb it up and he says he's actually back to uh mainline and he says that everybody's saying it's 30 down because when you are closed for two months like i was we had to close from uh st patrick's day to uh cinco de mayo there's only there's only 12 months a year so 2 out of 12 right you got to be down 16 because you had two donuts um and some of the dso people say they're back to numbers but a lot of them are trying to uh impress wall street or other people or whatever but right um right but now there's people uh saying that we're down 38 so i wanted to do a Michael dell thing and ask you point blank do you think these dentists can market their way out of this downturn well actually now that you mention it um so if you look at google trends so google openly publishes their trends for what you know what at what frequency are specific keywords being searched so actually with the exception of the lockdown of course in march April the amount of people that are looking for dentist the word dentist near me Invisalign implants these terms are actually being searched more today than they were being searched this time last year that means more people right now are looking for a dentist it's not to say that you know people you know patients are down because of you know dentistry being dead or p not people not looking for dentists most of the dentists that are having empty schedules are having a hard time filling up their schedules are having a hard time because their hygiene is out of the picture right so they're used to having a hygiene situation go on and in that lockdown in march April essentially what happened was they had a big backlog that kind of kicked in in July august and so what happened in September October November a lot of that hygiene the six-month recall kind of fell off the map and because of that that's why a lot of people have empty schedules it's not because they're not acquiring new patients more so as they're not doing a good job of reactivating their existing patients or getting their patients back in and so that's kind of what we found at it is that um actually people are more people are looking for dentists and so i I’m kind of with you know dell on that you gotta go more aggressive and when things get tough and and and another uh theme setup i want to talk about before you start talking is um is basically how um you know I’m always saying that dentistry and they they market to get patients in the front door and they got the back door wide open and you know i I’ve been harping on this forever because um i always did an exit interview on the last dentist on the new patient um so i mean we'd start on the phone like we know and they say yeah um I’d like to schedule a new patient oh did you just move to phoenix where did you move from and if they said yeah we moved from Beeville Texas we'd say well did you like your dentist there i mean if you went back home would you stay there and they'd either say yes or no and if they said no um we we would write it down because we had a pad called getting to yes this is before computers it was a prescription pad and it's called getting to yes and what are they asking for and it was the the low-hanging fruit was you know um they weren't open evenings and weekends they didn't take the insurance um um blah blah blah blah but some of it was easily fixable like he didn't have laughing gas i don't know why you think you have to have laughing yes but i have friends in this town who are endodontists they only do root canals and they don't have endodontists and it's like dude i mean even if you were 99 right i mean for one out of 100 people in the 3.8 million metro don't you think you would get it for just just that those um it's just amazing uh anyway i can't find my chart uh but but basically um 80 20 rule and so eighty percent of the efforts drive or twenty percent of the efforts drive eighty percent of traffic right so laughing gas is not in the eighty percent of your traffic is where it's coming from and so i think if a dentist just focuses on that recall as well as reactivating patients that have kind of not come in for eight or nine months they'd see better traction um in their schedules for sure so um so let's go through the i want to go through the patient journey in your lingo because you know I’ve had you on the show before so i kind of know how you think and uh um yeah bold head of years we're probably related somehow I’m not quite sure but we have to be but you always talk about the patient journey related to discovery acquisition engagement and retention let's go through that and tell my homies if you think they're doing good and how they could do better so to kind of you know summarize you know first of all this is the second time I’m on the show and thank you so much for having me two times and i kind of want to walk you through the journey of how it's evolved since then and how it affects those four journeys in in the patient experience so when i first you know we talked two years ago we strictly focused on online marketing and that consisted of you know getting patients for dennis and many times marketing was very scary for dennis it was the unknown and so we kind of came in and offered this guarantee where we would you know listen to the calls track the scheduled appointments and until we didn't show a certain amount of patient's book we wouldn't charge our fees and so that's why it's called a patient booking guarantee addict grew a lot since then very much thank you to you um because a lot of people heard of us through dental town and so we've had many customers i think we scaled from having 50 to 80 customers then to about 750 today and so through the time that I’ve worked with so many dentists i mean you talk to dennis all day you go to conferences you talk in groups and sessions you come and learn so many problems that dentists are having in their practice and most of that was associated to this patient journey we can get someone to book an appointment but you know making sure that that patient had a proper you know a very easy way to scheduling into the schedule so at it we kind of revolutionize the entire journey focusing on the full picture so we offer the online marketing right which is your website your seo building your reviews for the acquisition side so when someone sorry for the discovery site so when someone goes online they look for a dentist your website your reviews your ads that's what show like your social media presence and things like that then we focus on the acquisition side which was we introduced scheduling which allow you know we integrate with some of your pr you know popular practice management software like dentrix eaglesoft open dental and essentially allow patients to book based on real-time availability they can actually book an appointment based on the availability that you have in your schedule it populates directly into your software so that makes it easy for us to schedule appointments based on real-time availability when that appointment is booked we introduce a texting software that would give that patient a text message confirmation saying hey this appointment's been booked we introduce patient forms which allows them to do their covet screening right from their phone from that text message right and then they get reminders for the text message and you have an entire texting dashboard where you can text that patient all the way to the time they show up and of course more and then of course we you know kept focusing on that patient journey from in the engagement process which included you know your your your voice mean talking with customers call tracking phones communication like i said the texting the reminders and all of that into eventually when the patient checked out reactivating that patient in six months via emails via recalls and and things like that and basically circling that patient right back into acquisition engagement reactivation so the journey as you said was for us as discovery acquisition engagement and then retention and reactivation so we kind of said it was discovery acquisition engagement retention reactivation is the word we use for the last one so reaction retention not retention but reactivation reactivation exactly and so right now with this pandemic essentially because of April march April may that reactivation and many of our practices are dead because revenues are down patient practices are not spending and they're not doubling down like dealt like dell did right and so they're not advertising um and they're it's not that they're not booking patients because people are not looking for a dentist but because their reactivation is dead and so um patients are all that you know that funnel and so now you have to use things like mass texting and email campaigns to get these people back into your practice um we recently had a had a practice out in denver colorado they sent out a text message to all their patients and booked 220 patients in one week it's not that you know the patients are sitting in their patient you know in their in their patient database they just need to reactivate them and so um that's a very critical part right now to that patient journey that a lot of dental practices are missing out on so just in um other people's you know so you you call it the four stages of dental the four stages of the dental patient journey on because i know back in the day some people call the six stages awareness engagement decision service loyalty act you know there's all kinds of but um would it be fair to call the four stages of the dental patient journey are discovery acquisition engagement and reaction reactivation and reactivation all right yeah discovery is like getting found right so when someone looks up dennis hear me on search results do they actually see you if they see you what are your reviews um are you running any kind of promotions do you offer right now i heard and i read an article on yahoo finance that Invisalign treatments are at an all-time high right now because people are getting cosmetic procedures done while they're sitting work from home so it's like if someone's looking for Invisalign are you or do you have anything about Invisalign do you have a promotion do you have content before after stuff like that right and so making sure you have the right things showing online for patients to find so discovery is key acquisition consists of making sure that your scheduling is on point right so a lot of times you know practices are not very good at answering phone calls um they don't have the right coaching like you know giving multiple time availability in their schedule and doing things like that and so we kind of focus on coaching your front desk and automating your scheduling um and that's that acquisition piece and then of course engagement well okay let's so so what's the shortest way to say discover discoveries about getting found online right exactly and so acquisition is about getting them to book an appointment getting them to book an appointment yeah um is that could that be also a closing i mean some right some receptionists they just they don't close they don't close yeah i mean you could have an hour-long conversation with them and they'd still never ask you uh to come in we have a lot of horror stories that we we here at it and you know our customer success team works really hard to kind of coach our customers on what they can improve on so we have this technology that kind of screens through all your calls and and kind of finds cue points on on which appointments don't book and so our our success team kind of goes in listens to these calls and finds out certain things your staff can improve on um you know the other day uh we had um we had a dentist pick up a phone call after hours and they were so rude to the patient the patient needed to reschedule their appointment and the dentist was upset at that patient because they had to reschedule straight up said you know what don't even show up things like that we've seen horror stories in these conversations we've seen front desk pick up the phone call like they're picking up their cell phone hey who is this instead of saying hi this is so and so dentistry how can i help you you know and so um simple things like you know being knowledgeable about the subject matter hey how much you charge for crowns okay well what's the problem what kind of pain are you experiencing that you need a crown oh well this is what I’m experiencing what do i do for xyz and so there's a lot of a lot of improvements that a lot of times dentists you know they're so busy in their operatory working their patients that they don't have an opportunity to to coach their front staff on how do you actually pick up the phone how do you answer that call how do you make that person feel comfortable and how do you convert them into an actual booking on your calendar right and so at it kind of steps in here and focuses on that part of the journey and and and tries to get your stuff to become better and so and we guarantee it because if you don't book the patience um at it doesn't charge you anything so you know your your front desk's performance is heavily we're heavily dependent on that and so we absolutely focus on on improving um that part of the the patient journey so okay you want to go through them all then i'll come back with all my uh follow-up questions or uh I’m a little uh I’m a little slow no no no if I’m going too fast please no no no no no I’m just I’m just uh anal I’m just more into the details i mean the devil's in the details always it's for sure absolutely but um so you did uh discovery you talked about acquisition so next is engagement and or and um reactivation right and engagement's a pretty big piece right so adam came out with this really cool software so it's an all-in-one software right so in this one platform you can text your patients you can send them reminders we have a phone system that's coming out in january so essentially your phone lines would run through at it you know it's a voice over iep system so like when a patient calls you can kind of see who's calling in you know what's their information when's their next appointment do you have any siblings that haven't scheduled an appointment do you have upcoming birthday you know all these things about the patient you can kind of engage with them you can text with them you can set up all your communication to go efficiently to that patient and so we kind of set that up for you without it and so that whole process is within our platform as well so essentially a a dental office should have everything in this one platform from you know the the discovery the acquisition the engagement and the reactivation and so we kind of bring all that piece together in the engagement part as well so that's kind of what we do there a big part right now in in this entire covid shenanigan is the it's patient forms right pre-screening touchless check-ins and things like that so we kind of covered that in our platform as well as part of the engagement process right like how does your how does your patient fill out their callback pre-screening forms how do they fill out the new patient forms how do you manage that form when you're when you're you know when you're when you're treating them and how do you see what they filled out for their medical history and things like that is it all paper based or are you running digital all that's digital within the added platform so we kind of centralize all of that into our platform so you can kind of get an idea or you know centralize everything into one one place for your stuff and so um that's kind of what we do with the engagement point and then um comes the the reactivation so any questions for the engagement doctor oh my god i got so many questions no um um yeah no no go ahead go go next okay so the reactivation part of that is the emails and um you know getting that patient to come back in when they're due for their next cleaning or they're due for their recall if they're due for any kind of any kind of follow-up treatment so getting that patient back into your schedule um it helps you with the same platform with all of the emails and and text message reminders and so we kind of do all that in one place and so it's it's really been a full circle approach right like we were really good at getting patients to practices but they were having so many more problems and they were having to hire five different softwares to do you know essentially take care of their practice so we really work to kind of centralize all of this and i know it's a lot but you know running a dental office isn't simple right so we kind of help with that entire process from the beginning to end well to tell you how difficult it is i mean like say on dental town from from 1999 to before the pandemic we always had a free classified ads with about 1 000 dentists selling their practice and about 4 000 um help wanted jobs for dennis associates and now it's 2000 dentists selling their practice and only 1 000 jobs available so basically all the dentists over 60 you know that i never divorced and uh they uh they just said you know I’m not dealing with this I’m cashing out I’m selling it I’m out of here and then the um with the decrease in demand the uh private practice dentist let their associates go they you know if you're down 30 38 you certainly don't need to have an associate especially if you have a guaranteed minimum base which you have to have if you're visible because uh you know they we've already seen this scenario play out with uh mechanics and plumbers where you know they only pay him straight commission and then the guy's got a family to feed and starts telling grandma that he can't fix her air conditioner needs a new one and so so you can't pay someone a guaranteed base pay of four or five six hundred a day when you're down thirty percent so my gosh it's it's tough times out there and uh and so if you open up your practice you're down a third you know old school howie first thing i go back to is Michael dell whose dad was an orthodontist did you know that right yeah no i did not know that and his brother was an ophthalmologist and i i met him at the tda way back in the day but while i was just starting to get going i think i i think uh dell went public i think in 94 and i was lecturing i think a td in like 90. and um he tell he told the story we were laughing so hard we were crying because you know here's this you know orthodontist and his son's going to be an ophthalmologist and here Michael drops out of college in six weeks comes with all stuff his dad's like what the hell and why did you quit he goes with that i i met all my teachers and every one of them was an idiot uh can i move into the garage and start a business and he says he claims that him and his wife cried themselves to sleep that night because they never knew what they were going to do with that boy and i guess that's what it's like raising a billionaire but um you know so my first instinct is if you're down 30 percent dude you gotta you gotta start act like you're running for mayor i mean by the way this is being um we're taping this on election day that i got my sticker on the uh right and I’m so uh um i don't wanna go there because you know as an american every election I’ve ever voted in my entire life is like deciding if you want to die from heart disease or cancer uh sir would you like your leg amputated above or below the knee yeah i can't believe with 331 million people you think I’d be picking between batman robin and wonder woman and it's always you know like seriously that's that's our only choices uh but um but um on but again um you know we have this pandemic and we might be having a big pandemic economic contraction um I’ve seen a contraction about every 10 years we were due one a year before this pandemic and the pandemic's only making it much worse so i i seriously think it's going to be equally rough sailing all for the next 2021 there's not going to be some miracle vaccine in january and we're all back to normal so it's going to be a long adjustment period i think the new normal is going to be at least um all of 2021. and in fact the most optimistic smart people i know in economics um are saying as good as it can get maybe dentistry will be down 20 next year um if you're thinking it's down 38 it's going to close the year at 38 let's round that to 40. um right and then next year's gonna be down 20. um they're gonna have two years and if you're um and i was talking about election because you know to me marketing is just getting out and running for mayor i mean what do these people do running for mayor i mean they get impressive flash i went to every house on saturday and sunday and and knocked on the door and shook hands and yeah two out of three people thought it was absolutely weird and strange and didn't like it and gave me bad body language but I’m not going to let them mess with my mission because the one out of third is standing there in his underwear at the door going well you know and i got my flashlight out and and um direct mail um I’m scared about yuppies and millennials because um they call junk mail junk and think it should be legal i get it they're on instagram they they grew up with a they were born with an iphone in their hand but when you got an implant practice case I’m not sure all the 60 70 80 year old grandmas that need implants and bridges are on snapchat and instagram I’m pretty sure i don't know that's the most likely I’m sorry but my mom's on facebook more than i am and so my mom's on social media more than i am and and i mean she's 70 years old so i mean i feel like these these i mean you'd be surprised these people in their 60s and 70s are spending more time on social media than your average millennial which I’m a millennial so i know exactly what you're talking about and and i don't know i feel like well then I’m going to point blank ask you do you think direct i mean we both agree can we all agree that yellow pages are dead yeah for sure yellow i mean that's it's beyonce so so that's that that's completely dead that that's the vcr i get it that's the eight track i get it but yeah direct mail do you think i like direct mail yeah i always recommend direct mail see direct mail works depending on where you're located it really really does um especially suburbia suburban it's also about how you run your direct mail right like if you're running a promotion on there that's like it's like you know when you used to get like my mom used to get like a a packet of coupons right i mean if they didn't have coupons in that packet she wouldn't cut them out and like go to the store with a coupon right the coupon was what got her to look through that whole packet or the newspaper and same thing here when you're running mailers if you don't have a good promotion to kind of pull that patient from their you know or stop them from throwing it in the trash they're not going to respond and so everything's got to have a hook you know what i mean in advertising you got to have a hook like what gets you in and so every campaign every successful campaign the dell campaign you said it yourself you were trying to remember what the what the what the you know what the what the wording was but it's it's you got to have a hook so yeah yeah we actually recommend a new patient exam which is super controversial with most most dentists that we speak with because they all are like hey i run a high-end dentistry i don't want to run a new patient exam and we almost always say hey you got to get a hook i mean regardless of what that patient is making you got to throw out a new patient exam to get that patient in and so the same thing goes for your mailers for sure have you have you tried anything else besides that well that campaign was called uh uh i would just wanted to say that dude you're getting Adele um gosh um yeah like say all the other people um remember that show um right and the guy the guy that did it became uh famous ben curtis because i mean when some when some billionaire uh put your face on the tv 80 gazillion times i mean he actually uh he actually became a famous guy in and of itself uh some kid from uh Tennessee uh but um so so you're talking about okay so in the old school you said a hook um you know they called it a an economic incentive and i remember when i started um my practices in 87 i mean um as advertising all new so let's go back a little bit before that um it was illegal for physicians dentists and and uh lawyers to advertise all the way up to 1973 and it was two lawyers from right here in Tucson Arizona 90 miles down the street that said dude it's free speech and they went all the way to supreme court and they overturned it so they overturned it in 73 but the culture was already set in stone and when i got 87 you think 15 years later they would have figured out but just a few people had figured it out and when i opened up i had a full page ad in the yellow pages and all the negatives about it were from dentists i mean they'd snare man i can't believe you're doing that i mean if you if you had prostate cancer would you find an oncologist out of the yellow pages I’m like and I’m just sitting there thinking god i hope you keep these thoughts going for another 20 years and then when everybody realized how obvious it was it became it became useless um you know it was just it was not a return on investment and um so then um economic incentive it's the same thing um you know this keeps going around and around you know um some people are doing a 99 new patient exam cleaning exam and x-rays right then some people would bait and switch that and say oh well that's for bitewings but you need a fmx and a pano and then but would you say um the hook is definitely an economic incentive that price matters and if your advertising piece doesn't have an economic incentive a deal um because some dentists just want to go out there and tell them that they got their fagd their magd they're all all right stuff like that and you got to realize that when when you see the real estate ads i mean the real estate ads got like 29 letters behind it it doesn't mean anything to me it might as well be you know um you know some transcript i mean it means nothing and and when i in this true story i cannot believe this happened to me but i was so proud when i got my fagd uh that i put on my chart and i put all of the office you know i earned my mafigd and the the first person that ever said anything was about an 80 year old lady and she goes i see you're a [ __ ] and I’m like oh my god real house i mean so they they don't know any so if what I’m trying to say is if you just try to brand that hey I’m all that in a bag of chips right is that what does that work or is it really more an economic incentive so what i tell my patients right now is like where you go to school and your degree absolutely means nothing like right now to a person that looks for a dentist online they could go to you even if you didn't have a degree so long as you have the reviews like that star rating on yelp and google matters more to that patient than where you went to school you know my sister's an optometrist and you know when you go into her office she'll have all of her certificates on her wall and I’m just thinking like that's great and everything but that patient's probably never going to read it and two they're never even going to look it up before they book that appointment and so that's all great and everything but today patients don't understand you got to speak their language right um as for economic incentive it's totally i would add one thing to what you said um you know i got another story for that i had my degree up there and you know when i brought it down because after the first year or two the only three people that looked at the degree and figured out that i went to umkc dental school that this their comment you went to umkc dental school and I’m thinking they're going to think wow that's a really good school and that's awesome Kansas doesn't have middle school and they go my sister's roommate's cousin's brother went to um Casey and I’m like well howdy freaking hell you know i mean so you're right no no no one now it that now that it's not same in medicine when you go to the emergency room no one cares what degree you went but lawyers it's their whole culture it's their whole pedigree so if if i was coaching a young kid i want to go to law school I’d say yeah do anything to get to the best brand name because since everything they do is insane anyway they they just have to rely on their their brand but what were you saying foreign with that stupid story ask for no no it's great no it's a very valid point um economic incentive wise it really depends on where you're located so we have customers that are in canada and alberta we have some customers in Massachusetts depending on where you're located you can't always run the promotions that you just mentioned right like a new patient exam um but really because even the states have i knew a lot of other countries that i i never felt so sick in my life was when i came out the 30-day dental nba it was in 98 and you know selling it all around the world and and people were doing what i said and then got arrested in Hong Kong didn't know that was illegal another one was i think two were from Romania and and i thought it was just in other countries this was out of line but but it but inside the united states is there much variance of what's legal for the 50 states no there's not a lot um there's there's sometimes the insurances do frown upon running a new patient exam if you're in some of the states in the northeast but there isn't anything that's like illegal in means of the ada um you do have to charge your co-pays right so if you have a copay for a procedure you definitely need to charge that so if if your promotion at any time infringes on that you might have some problems right and so that's the that's the only thing to keep in mind um but you know sometimes practices don't want to run an incentive and so there's two just two ways to go here so first you have things like you know free teeth whitening for life i actually have a practice that's not too far from where I’m located in pearland and they run a free practice free teeth whitening for life and they get a lot of patience from that um i see other people run promotions on free consultations invisaligns you know braces when you're when you're advertising braces it comes really well when you advertise it on a cost per month so hey brace is 80 per month and so having a hook that gets patients in is very very key like you mentioned sometimes they'll do a new patient exam and that patient comes in and they're like oh well this is only you know for this x-ray and you need a full x-ray that's going to be this amount and that definitely you know burns the patient a little bit but what we've seen you know when you when you compare yourself to some of the biggest dsos and I’m and added advertisers for a couple of dsls that are pretty large and we've seen that people who practices that offer promotions regardless of what their furniture looks like regardless of where they went to school regardless of how much money they put into their practice or their doctors they generate more revenue per patient because their systems processes are proficient it has nothing to do with the dentist has nothing to do with the practice and the chandelier in the front and so I’ve come to realize so a lot of practices we'll speak to they'll be going up against an aspen dental or you know a castle dental and they'll be like oh but they're not great quality they don't do good work you know I’m you know i ran my own practice they're generating more revenue per patient dr fran than that dentist usually is and that's because it doesn't have to do with the promotion it doesn't have to do with you know your chandelier it has to do with your processes your treatment coordinator your ability to diagnose and and and present your treatment plan and so um we just want to give our dentist a chance to give their treatment plan as many patients as possible and so we really really focus on getting a really good hook and getting patients into the practice so i just want to uh remind everybody um because we got a lot of kids watching the show i mean it's uh you know a fourth of march dylan did on kindergarten school and they might not know what a dental co-payment is they don't they never thought about it that was illegal but it is highly illegal um it's because you know like um we talk about uh insurance is an actuarial risk analysis versus moral hazard i mean so i remember when france um you know their best idea was that if you uh a national program that if you had lower back pain where you were two couldn't work um that your old employer had to give you eighty percent of your regular pay until and out of nowhere 10 of all the French people all of a sudden had so much lower back pain that they could no longer work okay so that's why we always say that the patient has skinny to this day France they still haven't figured out they don't have um co-payments in their socialized medicine and you know they talk about the benefits you know Canadians will say well my grandma had a bypass didn't cost her a nickel so so what do you what are you trying to say are you trying to say to throw away all economics price doesn't matter co-payments don't matter I’m pretty sure 200 years of economic research has proved that to be a real thing whether you like it or not but they all run deficits they all run budget deficits right and when you when you make someone i mean why should i pay a hundred percent for your artificial needs if you're not gonna pay ten percent and and i would i would actually be happy with five percent and that would just make them look at the bill so you get rid of fraud but when they when they actuarial risk how much this insurance can it cost like say a crown they they did a 100 coverage for a clean exam and x-rays 80 fillings in endo because you know um whatever but when it comes to a luxury like a crown a root canal whatever they only cover half and um and when you start waving those co-payments their math goes weird their claims go too high they under-bid it they lose money and dentists go to jail and let me clarify that about going to jail when you do that within your state it's usually two people who live in the same state they don't want to they don't want to have you know a feud going on the rest of their life it's usually just a legal thing or gentleman's whatever but when that crosses the state line now they bring in the feds and that's how they brought down al capone was male fraud they couldn't get him on all the people he murdered but they got it they packed him away on mel fraud and they do the same thing with dennis and that's why you never do business with the mafia you would never do business with al Capone and you don't do business with Medicaid or Medicare because you know if they find any mistake they're going to kidnap you and put you in a cage and they're completely psychotically insane and then the the guy the lawyer just got out of school they put gets you in jail makes the newspaper he'll get promoted his goal is to someday be the attorney general you know what i mean right so you know so i only do business with people who don't believe in kidnapping and that i i think that's a bare minimum like you know if you're if you're kind of into that kidnapping thing i just you know there's eight billion people to be a friend with um so the insurance saying but i wouldn't i want to hold your feet to the insurance because i thought groupon was a race the bottom sometimes these doctors just start getting into coupons um the person only came in for the exam and x-rays because it was 99 and then and then when you go back to your regular fee at 250 they're on to the next coupon do you think groupon built a culture of the race to the bottom or do you think it yes you do so let's talk about it so google was still a thing well i was all up for the mailers right so I’m not trying to say I’m biased or anything so I’m all up for what works groupons don't work and the reason groupon doesn't work is because your chart so first of all 95 of patients that come to a practice come from within a three to five mile radius okay say that again I’m a slow note taker 95 of patients that come to a practice come from a three to five mile radius okay so if they're coming from a three to five mile radius the problem with groupon is that the type of demographic that you're attracting to that platform are people who are looking for a promotion when you're advertising for a dentist right when someone's looking for a dentist in their area they're looking for a dentist people on groupon are looking for a promotion very different mindset what's the intent of the buyer so the intent of the buyer is to just get a promotion they're going to drive cross-country they're going to drive all over town just to come to you and maximize that promotion and that's what the problem with groupon is see like i mentioned earlier practices don't make like you said it right you you acquire a patient you let them out the back door the idea for marketing and advertising is not to just get the patient in and make money on that first treatment it's to reactivate them and manage your hygiene right get them in every six months and so with the groupons those patients never come back because they drove too far for that promotion and now when you're trying to get them back because 95 of patients not willing to drive more than three to five miles you're never going to get them back into your practice and so it's just you're targeting the right i mean the wrong personnel um and so we we don't recommend groupon we don't have a single customer and 800 customers that can happily tell us groupon works i have customers that vouch for yelp i have customers who vouch for obviously google facebook i have people to launch for mailers i have people vouch for you know local publications billboards tv ads radio ads everything I’ve never seen a successful practice with groupon well that's uh i mean how much more um do they need to know you you've never seen one by the way if you're another um some dentists might be thinking um um why did howard bring him on the second time uh to tell you how um successful this guy is one easy way to check with the company um a lot of times i'll get a promotion to email something and i'll go look them up on linkedin and they have one employee um you have 315 employees i have 50. you're if I’m a bag of chips you're six bags of uh not at all but you you said when you first came on the show uh two years ago um how many um let me see where i wrote that down um um how many um did you say you had when you first came on the show and then how many do you have now about two and a half years we probably had somewhere around a hundred hundred customers about 70 to maybe 150 customers um so in about two and a half years we've grown quite quite and you actually i i came on downtown two and a half years ago so it's actually a little bit longer than that and so um so we've grown quite a bit i mean how many customers you have today how many how many dental clients we have about we're somewhere around 800 customers um wow you know yeah and and what makes you know at it and i haven't even talked about our best selling point so the thing about added is you know we're not we're not we're not invested by any publicly traded company um you'll notice that you know when you work with other companies a lot of times that they're sorry not publicly traded they're not invested by a vc fund or a private equity company we haven't raised any kind of crazy money at it it's simply because we're we're more owned by the people working at it and so we're very small in that respect so even though we have 300 employees we're not funded um we don't have to you know fit any shareholders expectations we're all about helping the dental office grow we're all about practice growth and so you know we we've really taken this full circle instead of looking at what is our bottom line what's our pnl how much money are we making our focus has always been on how are we helping the dental office and that's why we came out with this entire platform recently we started offering because of covid we actually offer any one of our modules completely free of charge that means a dental office can come and sign up but at it that's why we're getting more customers so i don't even know the frequency amount because every day we get about ten five to ten practices that'll sign up for our free program and basically you can come in and use our reviews um software you can come in and use our patient form software you can use our reminder software you can use our email platform you can use any one of our software's free of charge no questions asked no contracts no commitments nothing and so we give a lot of practices these little tools to help them grow to get them through covid to help them get out you know overcome that 38 right and if they see value in what we do then they can upgrade our whole platform is 99 bucks a month dr karan the whole thing the whole thing so okay okay but first of all if I’m on your website which i am right now which is additive.com if you're driving the monomic device ad advertising it it um technology advertising technology but where would you find that um economic incentive where you get a free thing for so do you see the pricing on the menu well should i go to dental first on your vertical dental yeah so we focus on dental eighty-five percent of our customers are dental offices but if you see on our menu there's a pricing option so you just click on that okay now you gotta see how dumb i am in real time okay i got pricing okay pricing promotion val until November 30. yes no contracts no set up charges money back guarantee so is that for no contracts for the promotion or no contracts ever so it's no contracts for the promotion when you sign up for our technology platform so if you use any of our products so you'll notice we'll have products listed there and you can use any one of those products completely free okay let's go through them first one is positive positive positive positive yeah it's our review software so we get you reviews with positive it's pronounced spelled p-o-z-a-t-i-v-e um and so that's that's that's the review that's the review software then you have the online scheduling wait you're you're too fast for this old man i think I’m sorry I’m sorry how how old are you what year are you born in I’m I’m born in 89 I’m 31 years old okay so you're my eric my Eric was born in 89 Eric chill Eric chill i sometimes have to hold his cheeks and just say chill on okay so you were saying earlier about um um yelp reviews whatever whatever um again i i can't be a fake person i can't be someone I’m not i mean I’ve never seen anybody do a yelp review i couldn't imagine uh going to a restaurant and looking online to see if some stranger likes the salad um you know i mean i i don't know but um on these online reviews is that a an age saying I’m 58 uh you're you and Eric are 31 i mean do 58 year olds use yelp and online reviews and if so what went wrong in their life to compare i don't go to a restaurant if they don't have four stars on yelp and so what about your mom on facebook well my mom's on facebook too right so my mom and dad they all look at reviews all the time and so um yeah absolutely reviews are huge right now it's i mean yeah i know they're huge but I’m just thinking to me it seems like they're huge with the millennials and they're huge and the yuppie big city crowds but i just can't see it being huge in parsons kansas or Beeville Texas when i was in Beeville Texas the first time i went to went there when my gran when Eric moved his family down there i was so curious what Beeville was named after and I’m like in the grocery store h-e-b grocery if you heard that h-e-b yeah yeah atv is a huge grocery shop and I’m uh and I’m in [ __ ] i must ask to every person in the store that we pass in the aisle um hey who what's Beeville named after and everybody's like i have no idea so but anyway so i um it to me it just seems like a millennial yuppie thing in san fran and Manhattan it just doesn't seem like a Beeville Texas thing but you're saying it is it's definitely for sure 100 yeah reviews are read definitely more by millennials like to the t where they're reading exact reviews you know i mean I’ve read some horror story reviews on on these reviews by the way it's crazy um but older people will definitely read your reviews but not so much as on a granular level to just look at what is your favorite i already know my homies um they're they're snowflakes man i mean they they are even dentists or snowflakes god my gosh sometimes um dentists will post a picture like me and they'll say ah you should have gave a warning not safe for work dude you're a surgeon you're you're a surgeon they they i mean police officers they see people running over in cars fire trucks or using jacks emergency rooms or sewing people's heads back on and good lord you're on a website and you want to not safe for work i mean I’m not talking about a b2c website i mean this is just dentists i i thought you did the blood thing but i guess not um i mean they're um and and so with someone will tell him i went to dr good and he should change his name to dr horrible and that they have a meltdown right like are you kidding me who gives you i mean first of all a hundred and ten billion humans have already come and died that we don't even know their name um and there's only eight billion alive today and you won't meet eight 7.9 billion of them how could you give a flying rat's ass what some online guy said but okay so they're gonna have a meltdown so all right how would you talk them off the ledge they're on the ledge they're ready to jump you know um how do you find the reviews right it's a bad one a big reason why amazon's as big as they are dr fran is because their reviews are legitimate like you go on a product and you can you can really know if a product's good or not based on the reviews and because of that a lot of people are willing to take the leap of faith and buy on amazon and so reviews are huge any demographic when you get a bad review and we we really hear them like i mean I’ve heard some serious horror stories the first thing i do is i tell them reach out to the patient call that patient and first talk to them about what happened what went wrong and how you know how you can amicably solve that without you know that patient you know with that patient possibly removing the review it's absolutely worth it to get that review removed because that one review everyone reads it i mean it's especially if it reads really bad okay we'll tell them what a bad review is because everybody's got a different idea bad i mean i mean sometimes dentists are you know caught uh buying a drugs downtown in the middle of night uh you know what is a bad review i mean I’ve I’ve read some reviews where you know patients will complain that you know the patient messed up they pulled out the wrong tooth they'll show pictures of them bleeding without swelling I’ve had I’ve read you know reviews where they're like you know they move patients like cattle no no attention given whatsoever I’ve had I’ve had I’ve had situations where you know um the patient was the doctor was rude very aggressive um and then I’ve you know got a lot of complaints about front desk staff you know just not on top of their game long wait times you know just not messing things up and stuff like that so there's there's multiple levels of where things can go wrong when it goes wrong i always recommend reaching out to that patient talking to them trying to get a result amicably if that doesn't work you want to flag it on google to see if maybe they did something like mention an employee's name or do something that would infringe on google or yelp's policies and try to get google or yelp to remove it that works sometimes they've actually been successful we've been successful doing that um then there are some situations where you're just kind of like you know you just have to it's just a really bad review and you need to respond to it and they're not going to remove it and you can you know not to get into an online argument with that patient but just to try to unlikely show the world that hey you're very sorry about that experience and you want to work it out with that patient if they reach out to you and so um and how you've learned from that and what you look to improve so those are the ways you don't want to get into an argument online that's never healthy um and so but bad reviews is the name of the game like i mean everybody messes up everybody has mistakes added included you know we've had our growing pains every company has growing pains every company has their problems i mean everybody and so it's not the end of the world when you have a bad review right okay but I’m gonna go back because you said you paused and you said well amazon reviews are actually legitimate so okay so that's positive what's the other side of the equal sign that that means obviously someone's reviews aren't actually legitimate or you wouldn't call that out who who's the unlegitimate or the illegitimate uh bastard child reviews it's like galileo do you know what galileo's last name is no i don't what is this awesome galileo of delhi um when they didn't have a last name they were they were orphans so um which you know the religious people call bastards but yeah so yeah so if you didn't have a last name you just had a first name and you were like I’d be howard of phoenix and you'd be uh you know you'd be um Ali of Houston and uh so um yeah so anyway so who's the illegitimate um galileo of reviews so like sometimes what will happen is many many websites that sell products by themselves they'll kind of inflate those reviews right so like if i go to buy a pair of shoes for example and i want to buy them on on amazon and if i go to the original manufacturer's site there might be negative reviews that they've received but they remove it from their platform so you only see the positive reviews right versus on amazon you'll see both the two stars the three stars the one star the five star everything and so because it's legitimate no one's fluffing the numbers it feels real that's another reason why yelp is so popular so doctors hate yelp by the way i i don't know a single customer yeah one yeah one out of ten practice will say i hate yelp and the reason they hate yelp is because they'll get someone to leave a review they'll get ten people to leave a review and none of them will count right and one person leaves a bad review and it's sitting right there at the top and it's because yelp's algorithm is so strict that you know they really filter out a lot of the reviews that come in and that's when you go to look for a restaurant someone said four stars you know they're good because it's so hard to get that rating you know and so the legitimacy of the medium really makes a difference and google's definitely improved a lot um for sure and so you know with positive we're trying to help you and obviously get reviews on google yelp and facebook as well as well as like health grades rate md and other mediums as well so i always tell dennis when they're panicking that you know if they ever get a really bad negative one-star review remember the milky way only got a one-star review right 85 of all the planets are binary stars but not our lonely bastard illegitimate uh son it only has uh one star review um one son right but i did read one time um where dennis was talking to a patient and called her up with a one-star review and she actually thought one star was the best i mean i mean because that sounds more normal to me i mean you know you look at one sun you don't look at two stars you look at one i would think one star named our son would be pretty damn good i haven't heard of that one yeah she never heard that have you organized these reviews to where you could say you know the 80 20 world they break out a percent wise right you fall into these categories do you have that well the way well see 80 like there's two types of practices and i don't know if this answers your question but i'll mention anyway so a lot of practices are like hey i want to specifically ask the patients that are you know that i know are going to leave me a good review to leave me a good review and then I’m gonna manually ask them and those practices don't get anywhere because the dentist gets busy and they forget to ask for reviews then there are those offices that just set it up on automatic and it automatically texts the patient when their appointment is completed asking them for a review using positive right and so they get this text message that says hey thank you for visiting so-and-so dentistry please leave us a route and it goes out automatically the moment you mark the appointment complete in your in your practice management software the problem with this obviously is dennis freak out because they're afraid they're going to get negative reviews but it's an 80 20 rule right so even if you know 80 and hopefully in in your case it's a 95 rule then 95 of your patients would be happy to give you a good review so it's a volume game even if you got 4.5 stars you if you got 150 250 500 reviews it means so much much more than having 25 reviews at a five star rating do you see what I’m saying and so we we really advocate for for just setting up automatic get as many reviews as possible you might get a couple bad ones in but in this case hopefully 90 95 of them will be positive and you'll have a 4.5 to 4.75 star rating so that's kind of our goal okay now this uh this um promotion it says valid until November 30th it's already uh November three so I’m gonna scale that ten days so this is they have this only good till November 30th now I’m asking you because my cynical bastard mind's thinking um yeah you know you're having a labor day sell fourth of July cell even though you try to celebrate Eric they'll sell you the same truck they're gonna sell you this same f-150 on July 5th dude they're just trying to create a panic to get you close so is that more but just trying to create a crisis to get doc to say well better do it right now and then disseminate the next month you'll extend it to december 30th right well i did say you have to have a hook right so um a big we we do what we preach so um we definitely want to create some kind of time time sensitive move right so that that's for sure you know last time i met with you two and a half years ago our promotion at that time was we offered a free 30-day trial on our marketing so you could try out our marketing 30 days free of charge that was a really cool promotion back then i still get calls from practices that are trying to get that promotion two year two years later and so promotions change they change all the time and so we just came out with this program in august oh sorry September 1st so we've been returning to September October and now this is our third month things change so fast you know i understand practices are going through troubles we have voice over ip coming out in january that's going to change our rates a lot so for right now this promotion is only valid until November 30th just because things i mean I’ve come to realize move too fast in our industry and so we don't really know where what we're going to be doing in december so what i don't understand though um like i have dentists that call our office and ask if we have a 1 800 number saying call us back I’m like what an ass i mean you want me to talk to you and pay for the phone tattoo for free and pay for the damn phone call i mean what a chiba i tell everybody in dentistry get rid of your 1-800 numbers because if the bastard's that cheap you don't even want to know his name and I’m looking at your full motto is 99 a month i mean my god you could have a kool-aid stand one Sunday a month and be able to afford it who the hell looks at 99 dollars i mean i think in chunks and the smallest chunk i can think in is like five grand i mean so so does um a free module for a month versus the 99 max does that really have an impact it's huge so i told you about five to ten people signed up per day for the free right but we were noticing between 30 to 50 of those people who sign up at some point upgrade to the 99 within 30 to 45 days reason for that is because the next vendor that does anything of what we do usually not all of what we do usually charges somewhere between 400 or at least 300 to 600 so we're substantially cheaper and the reason we're cheaper is because we want you to use our platform we want you to check it out if you like it we want you to trust us to build your website and to do your online marketing and so that's the third package and so that's kind of where and we're successful as you you know we have we've had all of this the third package is the 99 a month you get the platform but the third package is is to do your marketing exactly and how much of that how much of that third package is the coin like if i give you five grand how much does that is for actually buying the advertising on facebook and printing emails and all that versus just you know the cost of you know your cost our added fees range anywhere between six hundred to a thousand dollars um you can actually look up at it on dental town and we've had the same rates that we charged three years ago and there's doctors who talked about it so you're more than welcome to look it up um it's on dental towns openly published um so we charge anywhere from 600 to 1200 depending on which package you choose um but we're we're all about um you know we're one of the most cost effective solutions in the industry and and we take big pride in that and so like i said we're not we're not public we're not funded by any vc or private equity fund so when we when you join at it so like if you joined us two and a half years ago all the technology platforms dr front that we talked about today would be absolutely free to you so we're just doing it you know we're just trying to help you grow so we're coming out with voice over ip in january we're coming out with many other technology things next year and so all these things are usually included and we're doing it for practices so that they trust that it they use at it they you know help their practice grow in this difficult time and and if they if they choose they can choose at it for for growing their practice with online marketing uh first of all you don't have to call me uh dr Farran you can call me uh Howard or Horsham each other which is everyone uh uh works best but i want to ask you about your emotions I’m how do you in Dentaltown um and remember when i look at Dentaltown you know i the last time i took a 500 level masters course in statistics was just 99 you know and the reason the telephone numbers will if you think we should go do this call it one nine hundred this and if you think bad nine of them and they they did this for a long time they thought they had a bunch of data they found out that you know on statistics how you pick your sample size is more important than the size of your sample and the people calling in are such freaking outliers well you know the person who owns um on facebook um his dad's a dentist ed Zuckerberg and he's been on the show three times and we've talked a link about this but only one percent on any social media platform i don't care if it's facebook instagram twitter linkedin and donaldtown one percent start all the conversations and just nine percent engage them like yeah i agree disagree 90 say nothing so like going to facebook i got 300 000 followers on facebook but i by the way a lot of people say blah blah blah i had to give something up when the plot in the um when the pandemic hit and sorry to my 300 000 followers on facebook but that that was just an easy edit um but so on a social media platform it's the outliers it's kind of like when you watch a new show they're getting two people debate he's yelling for it and she's slapping the desk you know so they're never normal but how do you personally take a bad review on dental town when someone says um no good um how do you deal with that so i didn't you know you know hit that um so added has definitely had its growing pains like i mean you have to understand going a business from 100 to 800 customers going from not just doing marketing to introducing a lot of technology i mean that's no joke and doing all that without funding is extremely difficult there's a lot of people on our team that are extremely talented have worked extremely hard have had to go through growing pains made mistakes made improvements and things like that and so unfortunately we've had you know customers that you know experienced that had some bad experiences with our product we didn't do what we promised and so i always reach out to those customers anytime a customer exit added i almost always reach out to them and talk about what went wrong and i try to see what i can do to improve i always come back to say hey you know try us out for a few months free of charge let me earn your trust back and so um you know we we've definitely had customers upset we've definitely had customers with any product in any software um or any growing company right everybody's had an upset patient and so not to say that we haven't had upset patients or customers in this case but we definitely work to reach out to them and see if we can improve what we did wrong um how we can improve from that bad experience and when they leave us a bad review on google it's something that you know it definitely hurts you know because we work really hard we work really hard on our product and it definitely hits deep and someone leaves you a bad review just as you mentioned for your doctors right and so um but you know at the end of the day we know what we're doing we know what we're about we know the value and impact we're not just making our dentist but in their patients as well and so we feel good about what we do and we work hard every single day and that's what matters most to us but did it did it like make you sad did it hurt your feelings it doesn't definitely hurts absolutely every single one of them every sentence hurts for sure because you work so hard right so if your patient leaves you a bad review the doctor isn't just upset about the patient they're upset because they care right like they work so hard for their reputation to be a good dentist to provide proper care and treatment the same way goes for us we work really hard right we work really hard to build our products we you know there's a lot of stuff that goes on behind the curtains and so when you get that bad review you just can't you can't it's tough and so we definitely take it to heart so i don't know why I’m not hardwired that way i think it's because i me i think it comes back to uh catholic school you know you couldn't do a book report until you did an author search and you know if you wrote this uh you know you said uh I’m gonna do it on mars and you got this book and it turned out that she works for mars candy i mean it's you know the nuns always beated your head and they did it all the way through Sacramento saint patrick's bishop all the way to crate the Jesuits like dude if you're going to spend two hours on this paper I’d rather you spend an hour and a half on the author search in 30 minutes just make sure you get right so when i see review i mean i don't know you from Adam and you might be batshit crazy that's why i was really excited when google was saying online to be reviews because just go you know i tell people you know bring it back to your home that's where you spend all your time how you one third of your life's here damn bad another 30 lives in your own house imagine sitting around the thanksgiving table for thanksgiving and this aunt said that exact review versus this aunt well one of them just listened to her talk you know she's freaking nuts and if i could see the person I’d have more body language to find out is this guy carry himself well as he present himself so i listen to this guy but for all you know it's some guy that's living behind a dumpster and and you know it's just you know i mean i i think i think it's um in my opinion um i think 25 of the planet is batshit crazy it's one in four and and if you don't believe me then i want you to invite me to your house for thanksgiving and i will i will write down which one of your crazy aunts are insane so if one-fourth of your family reunion is insane uh so i i need to know um you know who you are so since i don't know who you are uh the last thing I’m gonna do is lose sleepover but so but remember so on dental down when some guy starts screaming something well number one that's one guy and if you got 300 clients i would assume you're going to piss off some of them you know what i mean right right right absolutely you're going to always have upset customers and and a lot of them are upset for different reasons everyone has their own goals propagandas and and who knows what's going on right so everyone there's definitely going to be those who are loud for no reason as I’m sure you haven't you know every dentist has in their practice and so the worst is when you don't even know them right it's just a competitor that's just trolling your patients right or just writing negative reviews those are the worst and so you can't let it you can't let it hit deep you just got to move on right and so right but we're fortunate to have many happy customers and that's what matters most we have a lot of customers that are bad for us and so i mean we we know we make an impact so you just gotta you know you have your patients that are happy with what you do and you just remember that and you and you move forward all right so um so then what um um should we should we go to uh is there any threads you want to talk about because so this is the other reason um i want you to to in your head um realize the difference between dental town and all the other social media platforms facebook twitter linkedin all that kind of stuff like that is the other ones are they only have one revenue model they're selling you ads and they're trying to engage you and keep you on there a long time and that's why they do that last in first out it's trying to engage you and then on news if it bleeds at least i read a um great study that 88 of all the bills in the u.s congress that were signed by the congress the senate approved went into law 88 from 1950 to 2020 for 70 years 88 were never mentioned in the press people they they just they there's just a few subjects where you start talking about it you're banging the tv and throwing bananas at the screen and that's what they want well on dental town it's actually for knowledge like if you go to the jet propulsion laboratory at Arizona state university they use the exact same message board format i do they do it at every place of science when i go the CDC they're not on facebook they're on a message board format because i can go in and type add it and even though we have um um we have a six million post from 257 000 people i can pull up every thread that ever mentioned you so it develops into your FAQ because 90 aren't ever going to post and usually after a while there's nothing else anybody can say about something and it goes away because you know we're hoping that you're going there to learn something not just to mentally masturbate and be entertained for an hour you know go to all you got plenty of platforms to do that right so um but are there any threads that you um think are fair and good and that you like on about added or well i mean doctor friend mine is this is Howard come on they're all good they're all good forms and strings you can more than welcome to look us up we're a fully transparent company no matter what you read we just ask that you give us a chance to talk you know talk to add it um there's going to be a couple people who leave you bad reviews without a doubt and our industry is pretty ruthless like our competitors they'll they'll they'll attack us before our possible customers so 90 of the people that say anything negative about it are usually our competitors which is pretty hilarious that includes any names you can share on dentistry uncensored I’m not gonna do that I’m gonna let them attack me we're not gonna attack them but the point is that they there many of them do that and to be honest i don't remember their names because we focus less on our competition and more on our customers right and so um but not just on dental town i mean any kind of form you go on online like a lot of our competitors will just you know trash us because obviously you know they're there but see i think that's a good thing because they don't even know where the phrase came from this is how powerful it is i thought i grew up my dad was telling me it was pt barnum um everything's attributed to uh um oh who's the uh um who's the american folklore guy with the uh the dog and the hook um um but anyway um benjamin frank everybody said i don't care what you say about me just get my name right and you know I’d I’d rather everybody be badmouthing dental town than dentistry today general products report data you know i mean there's 40 dental publications in the united states so i would actually rather in fact if i could do something where they could only trash talk dental town I’d have the biggest brand mark twain right i mean it's attributed to everyone because everybody use it because it's so true i don't care what you say about me just get my name right and in movies they always the movie formed i heard oliver stone talk about well i mean a good guy a hero and a villain and you remember the joker i don't think anybody forgot the joker and uh but um so yeah um Howard i want to mention one thing the one thing i like about dental town is that you don't fabricate the content so it's crazy and i shouldn't say this but since we're talking about I’m gonna mention anyways so in some of these other forums they actually fabricate the content let me give you an example of what I’m talking about so what see when when they will literally have a vendor or a dentist post something on behalf of the vendor and then have an entire fabricated list of comments messages and things circulate that post to advocate that brand which is sponsoring that forum and or you know facebook group and so that's how they're leveraging that you know that's their form of advertising it's like you know how you on facebook you have sponsored content you know when you go down your news feed and you see sponsored ads imagine seeing posts that don't have the word sponsored on them you wouldn't even know that they were advertising that can technically be illegal the best thing about dental town is you don't fabricate it right so if someone say something bad about it you don't do anything if someone says good something good about it you also don't say anything unless you're a competitor of course but if it's a customers or whatever you don't fabricate any of the content you don't create posts to talk about you know abc product and then fabricate 15 users coming in and mentioning oh i love this product and so i got to say that's the best thing about dental town is is you can you can believe what you read right versus some of these other forums there's a lot of there's a lot of shady business going on so right all right i'll mention that well thanks as i if i would be accused of anything it'd be that it's it's an honest format i mean and it is i mean it's there i mean if i i don't want you gonna go spend a hundred and forty five thousand dollars on a on a millennial technology laser for lenape if you if if all the periodontists don't believe it or not so you need to find the periodontist you need to and and the devil's always in the details it's not nothing's just all good and all bad nothing could be good if it wasn't also bad that's the universe i mean the universe i mean it's like everybody always talks about the black hole okay um well where's the white hole probably the other side uh shooting stuff out of it so um yeah you can't you can't get to the good unless you experience the bad right so you can't you can't build the good until you experience the failures and problems and stuff like that so i mean i'll tell you one thing about it we're not failing because we're not trying that's for sure that's for sure and so we're always trying and so we'll we'll get we'll face hardships and we'll mess up but we're definitely trying and that's the goal and so and that's the case across the board well to be 31 years old with 300 employees dude don't quit being hard on yourself you're crushing it and I’m so damn proud of you thank you very much thank you we have a very very talented team yeah but who who found that team well yeah i mean it definitely me but you know we like i said we you're only as good as as as the people that support you and so i have a lot of support from a lot of talented people um i mean they work really really hard and we always have the discussion on our place because you know we'll we'll disagree and then i always tell people i say well you know you haven't been here 20 years because i micromanage you and right and lift line your show i i you already know i trust you i mean we trust each other you wouldn't have stayed with me 20 years and i wouldn't have stayed with you 20 years we trust each other my only job is so you just know my opinion I’m just one light point but this is your full-time job and this is my I’m hearing about it in a one-hour meeting so you know just uh you know do your own thing and i trust you and uh [ __ ] happens and successful man fall down seven times get up eight and you're named after Muhammad Ali who said that all champions learn how to get up off the mat and when you get your butt knocked out and you're laying on the mat all that Muhammad Ali found a way to get back to his feet and everybody else finds an excuse to give up and and the success is that it's get knocked out on your back seven times get up eight life's a journey and um you just keep coming up with an enthusiastic enthusiastic reason to keep running into the next operatory to meet the next dental patient nightmare for sure who never brushed never floss doesn't give a crap about their teeth and and you you fix the crown and she says she doesn't think it matches and all you can see is a liver spot on her forehead the size of a 25 cent piece so you know but you just got to get all fired up and run back in that room and fat enthusiastically to meet the next crazy person absolutely you can never give up you just gotta keep working right and eventually something's gonna give something's gonna give so we're all about that here and so especially in advertising because you know many times you advertise and market and things go wrong things fail certain things aren't working and you just got to keep problem solving and so i mean we leave we live eat and breathe and if you had no problems you actually would stop learning anything you you don't you learn the damn thing okay so let's go on then um so i just get my mind back on track to get started you get one module of something free for a month and the modules were no no no the module is free for life it's completely free to the practice for life you can use for life so any product you use it at it it's completely free whether that be the review software whether that be patient okay so you're gonna pick one for free positive patient forms online scheduling engage email campaigns telemed um you covered positive patient forms that a big deal like digital forms so you know introducing digital forms is huge in the covetera because you you can't i gotta have touchless check-in like the pre-kobit screening forms new patient forms all that it's digital at it it's free there's no strings attached you just come in we set you up and you use it completely free of charge online scheduling where books based on your real-time availability engages the texting into recall and so any texting recall things like that telemed is our is our is our tele dentistry software where you can do virtual care through videos so any of these offers completely free of charge for life we just introduce you to come check out our platform right and so use our platform if you like it consider getting the whole thing for just 99 bucks a month okay i want to ask you some more on detailed questions because that's uh i think all the really great companies are with attention to detail but so many times in a denison's medium i always click into the the link to see you know just who am i talking to young whatever and so many of them over half the website comes up your connection is not private attackers might be trying to steal your information um um i mean and it says that it doesn't have a net er underscore certificate error certificate authority invalid or whatever whatever um so what are patients gonna do because are they gonna um what happens when they go to your website and that's what i see on half the websites is that what you're seeing i mean do you have you noticed that it doesn't happen too often um it's really rare nowadays but it has to do with the ssl certificate on your website expiring so usually what happens is when you buy a domain you get an ssl certificate which is like a little thing that that just it's like a lock icon when you're on safari or on an iphone it's like a lock icon next to the url so when that expires because it renews every year sometimes you don't put an auto renewal it can expire so that just creates a secure ip address connection with the user so and just to skip all the technical jargon you just have to go to whoever your registrar is if it's godaddy or hostgator or something like that you just have to renew that that certificate and it's like seven or eight bucks a month or 10 bucks a month and or a year actually 10 bucks a year or something like that and you just renew that and it'll go away okay um and um okay so we talked about the first two let's go to online scheduling um you know i mean the first time i ever talked to somebody about that i was on a podcast like four years ago um is that and the dentist's first response was well man i don't want somebody to schedule it two o'clock how is online scheduling um going how was that going along it's definitely grown a lot um you know being able to schedule based on real-time availability is huge uh Howard it's it's you know being we we set it up to where you can customize everything if you are specifically only accepting new patients in a specific arbitrary or with a specific provider or at specific times of the day we fully customize our software to meet your needs with dentrix open dental eagle soft you know clear den and some of these other softwares and so we're we're all about customizing that for you but the best part about it is when that patient we've seen an increase in conversion rates on websites when that schedule availability is there and it works extremely well when it's tagged along with text message confirmations so what happens is they go on your website they schedule an actual time which is super cool first of all it's like booking an airline ticket which is you know can you imagine not doing that online and so you schedule an appointment online and then you automatically get a text message confirmation saying hey your appointment's been confirmed for this time like that's super cool right like patients love that it just it makes it super easy nobody wants a call and you can even collect their insurance information and all those kinds of things so that there's no hurdles in getting them in and and and seeing them and so we really automate that process as much as we can to save the front desk time you know and it's really really effective for a lot of our practices okay so another attention to detail about um um you know they're they're coming out of school um maybe they were working on dso they usually change jobs every year and the majority don't work in dsls i mean heartland has a thousand offices right there's a hundred and fifty thousand general dentists that work 32 hours a week or more and another 30 000 specialists no one even has one percent smart so they're most likely if they're five years out of school they've had five jobs they're all with private practice um and um they want to pick their practice management system and dentrix is the market leader because owned by shine and they have half the market then number two b patterson without eagle soft um but um what is if they asked you um which one works best for you know um sharing data with like another platform and merging now are you do you not want to answer because channel conflict yeah i understand i mean that'd be like that'd be like me going to your dental office if you could just pick working on men or women which one would you gladly get right he said I’d gear it all the men well if all the male patients in your town heard that right so is it is it two-channel conflict-y for you to answer that well i'll lose a couple of connections if i say anything on this call i'll put it that way um so bad that if you like it that should be a really huge red flag that you don't comprehend something because if you i mean any high-tech company doing anything move to open dental because it's open that's you know and i don't get anything from open dental in fact they don't even advertise anywhere because too many people are trying to get onto open dental and they can't ramp up employees fast stuff that's why when i tried to get him to become my podcast he didn't do it for like two years he said you know well the last thing i need is a surge of new customers and the other ones are buying advertising everywhere it's just because it's open it's just because it's open and uh i was with soft temp for 30 years because when i got out kodak and soft that was the biggest thing there was but my gosh open dental you can have your um 12 year old grandchild get in there and try to hook something up or you know it's open so um you probably couldn't say i i said it for you i don't know if you agree with any of that or disagree well i don't so i mean i know quite a bit about practice management software's but i don't actually use one right like i don't use it on a day to day like a practice does so i don't i can't say which one's the best for whatever reason um and more importantly like you know we have practices that use all of them and so we integrate with all of them we we try to do as much as we can for them and so i don't know if I’m the best resource to give you an answer for that plus if i did by any chance I’d probably you know upset a lot of these companies because we do partner with um you know a lot of these companies that you know produce these software's like shine and patterson and stuff like that next time you talk to those two guys yeah absolutely next time you talk to him tell him i said they suck okay it was an online review i'll tell them to watch this video no i i i actually went down there to their head i flew my own butt down to Effingham Illinois just to tell him in person what i thought of his deal because it's not about me it's about he's hurting the industry with all the [ __ ] i mean uh i mean they tell you well 85 of the software we write has never even been used you go to the report general look at that up okay so that's why the the receptionist center doesn't know how to use the software because 85 of the [ __ ] no one uses anyway i mean you wouldn't go to her to rent a car and say hey when someone wants to check in their car here's 8 000 things you could ask them uh i just want to know the mileage and the gas gauge oh you're talking about operations and logistics crazy stupid fool you um they they they i told them well just set up a deal so you can close that function so i can reduce 4 000 buttons down to eight i even suggested why don't you get the biggest consultant out there like sandy pardue and have the sandy pardou version of it where she'll take out everything she they won't do anything they i mean they don't even try you know and this this encompasses all the ee charts not just dead tricks and these but you know i just came to realize literally four weeks ago so one of my really good friends he's a dentist and we were just talking one day and he was and i showed and you know he he was telling me that it's really hard for him to see the software how many patients he recommended crowns to but didn't actually convert into doing a treatment right so these are basically unscheduled crowns like there's no like it's too complicated for them to go and create a schedule for patients they recently you know recommended a treatment for and then to follow up on those patients right getting a dashboard to see hey which of my patients are showing today and how many of their siblings are unscheduled right how many patients are showing today and of my patients today how many that have you know specifically like a macro schematic right how many of these patients that came in today did they schedule a hygiene six months from today you know there's so many like these data points that are not easy to get in these softwares it's crazy so added actually recently two months ago started building these dashboards so in about january February we're going to be coming out with a new new module and an added platform and we haven't published this on our website it's going to be called practice analytics and it's actually going to show dennis these lists of patients like hey these are all your unscheduled crowns these are all your patients that you saw today that didn't schedule the next appointment and a lot of cool data points like that so that you can use mass texting and email campaigns to get these patients back in and so um let me put it this way the more mistakes these practices these these softwares make the more opportunities we have to add value to our dentist and so we're constantly working to add value and and so we we we look for that opportunity can i can i give you a better idea right uh this is a better idea um why don't you just go for the whole touchdown i mean the the problem you need a dashboard is because the dentist all have their accounting and uh quickbooks online they do their taxes from turbotax and then and then they got all this data over here and someone just needs to connect all three of those i mean imagine imagine this i i I’m um the dentist doesn't know any other numbers um you go you into a dental office and you say um to the doc how much do you charge for an mod composite let's say uh 250 you're like dude um okay you how many ppo plans you sign up for i think we're on four okay well you're on 12 ppo plans and you get paid between 110 to 230. so the 250 you just told me doesn't even exist in your little bubble and in in if you were making um 50 overhead at 250 well then you'd be doing it for free at 125 and indeed you signed up for several plans to do these at 125. so how about i go to schedule um Ali for a mod composite and it's hooked up to my accounting in my overhead it knows my variable cost that goes up and down with the number of employees i see of labor lab supplies versus the fixed costs i pay monthly whether you see one paste or none rent mortgage equipment and i schedule an hour and it goes to red and says lose two hundred dollars so she shortened it to a half hour and it's like you just made four dollars she moves it to 20 minutes and now you're making making a 50 bucks or something you know um they just don't have any knowledge of what they're doing do you think how long will it be why doesn't um why doesn't quicken our turbo tax why aren't they starting in division to go hook up to all these lately you go to your friend who does auto transmission same dilemma dentistry has every small business I’ve ever been same damn thing how could quicken and turbo tax not know this well you know the problem is is that dentistry turbo tax is first of all hitting a huge industry they're not just doing dentists right and and the reason why nobody comes into industry and to put this out there you know these vendors that provide these practice management softwares they integrate into all these dental offices data right they get all this patient data and they protect that data vendors have a very hard time getting in because these people cut like you know create bridges around them from allowing these third-party people to get in so quicken doesn't integrate with your practice management software they can't give you that data you know they like these like it's so hard for other people to get in and that's that's why open dental has blown up so much not to start advertising openneto but they've gone up because like you said they're open so they let everyone in versus these other providers other you know pms and ehrs they really restrict that that incoming uh connection and so and then you know i mean honestly speaking dentistry doesn't have enough innovators in it and the moment an innovator does come into dentistry an equity fund private equity vc fund comes in and starts thinking how can i make hundreds of millions of dollars and i can only do that if i also go and tackle med spas and accountants and lawyers and and and and medical you know cardiologists and primary physicians and all of that so like you're in dentistry you have the small innovator who doesn't have the funds and the means to innovate then you have the serial innovator who then gets bought out by a bigger company that has bigger aspirations outside of dentistry so right now what's happening is you have all these people that are that are that are using their connections and their softwares to go outside of dentistry instead of building more and more better solutions within dentistry do you see what I’m saying and that's kind of that's the whole problem i don't want to call out any of my competitors but like a lot of these companies that have got so much funding are now going outside of dentistry and they're going outside of dentistry because that's where the money is at right and they got to pay the shareholder the shareholders got to see that 10 15x roi a big reason why we never look for funding is because we're not i mean the money is great and everything but we enjoy the thrill of building amazing solutions you know like building a product that works well i gotta i gotta i gotta brag one we've gone over an hour but i gotta make one little bragging thing is um same thing in 1998 when i got the idea i was going to do dental town it was all for selfish reasons i wanted to be able to talk to another dentist because you know you come home everyone that loves you if i told my dad how stressed i was about a root canal and i think i messed it up right you just say oh well I’m going to say a prayer for that if i tell my mom she'd say rosary everybody that loved me was just going to do something i wanted to talk to a dentist and so we started this i did all of this by my own cash at my dental office and some companies i don't want to mention any names like dental exchange and others raised 20 million dollars in venture capital there was like 20 guys who raised millions with dental exchange i think raising the most and none of them made it except the dumb one the one short fat bald guy in phoenix because I’m like we're just gonna do it slow focused very targeted which was me i was made the whole damn thing for what i needed which was it's going to be hard to sleep tonight because did i just hurt a patient you know what i mean and i all i wanted was to send a message on deal but i want to can you still save for some overtime because i haven't got to all my questions okay okay um we're in the middle of the pandemic so telemeds i mean it's it's every third word is telemed telemed and that's one of your free deals um a lot of people are saying um that telemed is for physicians because nine out of 10 physicians are never gonna do surgery just like just like lawyers only three percent of lawyers have ever done a case in front of a jury right and and they're saying dude we work in a operatory we do surgery all day in fact if you just lose one eye you get disability so telemed is for medicine not dentistry is that true or false so it depends on what you're trying to use telemed for so you know if you're in dentistry you're right I’m so we we've actually had case studies with it so we've had like hundreds of customers right so when colby hit a lot of them were like hey dude i want to put telemed on my website they can book a virtual consultation on my website did not work by the way it completely failed because the money in the sorry i don't want to speak financial but the way a dentist makes money is either via hygiene or treatment right both are not an option in teledentistry but what is is re-care so like your follow-up right so like let's say you do an implant and then you need a follow-up the next day and that patient's you know like you want to kind of fall with the patient or there's kind of swelling or anything like that instead of having to come in on a weekend or a week night you can quickly video conference that patient talk to them provide care solve their problem and then move on do you see what I’m saying and so but teledentistry is really big for a lot of our competitors because like you said it's huge in the medical industry right and so those people make a lot of money in those other industries that are heavily pushing video company now I’m not saying video conferencing doesn't work it doesn't work for new patients it doesn't work for your original hygiene and treatment it works for your re-care and following up with patients on a weekend or a weekday or after their treatment in the evenings and stuff like that so you're saying income producers uh in the office are dentists and hygienists and income producers are dentists and hygienists um and um everyone else um is support staff right or what do you call them what I’m saying is a dentist essentially makes the bulk of the revenue from either hygiene meaning patients who come back every six months and eventually do any kind of treatment right so diagnose and treat that's essentially that you know majority of dental offices make the bulk of their 80 20 rule right so 80 of your revenue comes from you know all your treatments and so to get treatments you need an active hygiene you need patients coming in constantly for six month cleanings because then when they have a problem you get you know you you provide that treatment and so the treatment coordinator is everything in an office the office manager is usually the treatment coordinator many times and so that person is really important obviously the dentist is so important presentation and everything and um everybody else would definitely be support staff for getting those patients back in making them feel happy and hopefully doing treatment and it's so tough because i want to be politically creative i hate calling the front desk a receptionist because some of them don't like that i don't like it right right i you know i mean who would who would what is your career i was named after a piece of furniture I’m the front desk and my sister her name is barstool i mean uh right um but here's all i want to keep beating into everyone's mind about hygiene capacity you got to know your numbers so if a hygiene if there's 52 weeks in a year let's just make a 50 give her two weeks vacation um let's say she works monday through friday eight to five for an easy 40 hours a week even though you know the average genesis 32 hours a week but easy math um let's get rid of all perio all that stuff just a full-time hygienist who works 40 hours a week 50 weeks a year could see a thousand people twice a year well if you divide that by 20 new patients a month you should be adding a hygienist every 4.2 years 25 new patients a month every two years my gosh what do you say the average dentist new patient is per month um so the average so 70 so on average a dentist that works with addict gets anywhere between 25 to 35 patients from online alone okay so okay so if you're getting 35 that means every two and a half year you should add a hygienist so you're in dental school you know your mom you know your mom she's got a dental office she's had practice for 30 years she's had the same damn hygienist for 30 years they're always in room one they're never creative enough to just even think about putting her in room two and and then your mom tells you she's gotten 25 new patients a month for 30 years and they're every time she has 25 new ones 25 have to leave or you would have to have another dentist and 25 to 35 is just online that doesn't include people who come from referrals that doesn't include people who come from like insurance people come from other forms of advertising so when you get a bad review i mean first of all before you go going crazy on yourself i mean my god i mean if you haven't increased your hygiene capacity in 10 years well you haven't kept anyone over than a new patient for 10 years so uh my gosh you're already you just just look up your new patient numbers and that's how many you're losing so maybe this bad online review is just a window to a much greater problem again when i go to um small towns and stuff and i meet make some dentists as old as i am and i'll say dude if you have one thing right now what would it be oh man new patients I’m like dude you've you're in a town of 5 000 you've seen 25 new people a month for 40 years in this town you've had to piss off everyone in the county by now so there's a front door back door i always like that picture of hoover dam that's what happens when a river practices retention so i think patient reta you know and then i look at dentistry they're always want to do a bunch of marketing to get new patients no sophisticated player like chase or uh um southwest airlines it's about retention they're like oh well let's pop this card and every five cards the free round trip everybody oh use my credit card and earn these points no one's trying to get a new patient i mean do you think walmart southwest airlines and chase there's anyone out there that haven't tried one they're trying to retain them and then you look at all the cottage industries we're not we're not a single player has one percent of the market there's no leadership in the market and it's always this new patient stuff so my holding your feet to the fire how can your company help how can at it help with my patient retention it's all about reactivation and so that's that's exactly my point and so you said it best at the very beginning right you get 10 patients and eight go out the back door and now you're trying to get 10 more patients right and so it's all about how do you reactivate that patient and since first how do you take care of them when they come in make sure it's you know easy to come in make sure you take care of your patients get good reviews and and push all that out and then reactivate them in 30 in six months if they don't reactivate like you know you you know how many new patients you got but the question is how much do your practices know how many patients they lost no software gives you that data howard you can't go an open dental or in indentrix or an eaglesoft and be like okay this is how many patients i lost without building some complex report and so my question is how many patients are you losing right and these practices are losing so many patients and up until two months i didn't even know they couldn't see that data i just learned that so we're actually building that now to show them that but more importantly we build the tools to help you reactivate those patients right if you if a patient goes six months or eight months without booking their appointment we've built the software is there to kind of get those patients back in and so we coach our practices to do that because that like you said 70 to 80 percent of the revenue that comes into a dental office howard doesn't come from new patients it comes from existing patients so that means that you know you can keep acquiring 20 of new patients all the time but if you're even losing one-fifth of your existing patients all those new patients are completely just getting wiped out and let me and let me um you're worried about um you're worried about a channel conflict you don't want to piss off some of your partners i own a media company and my there might seems like something yeah there there's howard he's there he is praising someone who's never advertised with us and then bad-mouthing our favorite customers i mean they they have that we stopped the list at one million dollars Pete yeah Pete jansky had a list of one million dollars advertisers were something i said at the lecture my own podcast or whatever the hell he goes yeah yeah that's her motto here we we go out and get and establish a relationship then dumbass Howard and I’m like dude I’m telling the truth I’m just telling the truth right and you're not going to saw me do it but i like to piss off my own listeners too and dentists don't know that they're entitled lazy and the first red flag is and not only do you not know your numbers because you don't even know that all the patients never came back and all you got to do is look at the fact that you have one hygienist named betty with a bell around her neck in room one for 20 years to prove it but the same dentist won't even do his damn hygiene so he'll get a cancellation and someone will call himself oh my gosh is there any way to get my teeth clean today they're not gonna go ass dr lazy entitled and it's like it's like you know what maybe you're going back to do a cleaning that's how you build a practice the doc did the cleaning but then humans the only thing every one of them can get right is they can um it's a they can justify anything if there's just one skill a human can do they can justify anything and there's only one thing they all believe in you know what um like there's 1100 different gods do you know the only thing all humans believe in the us dollar the us dollar I’m serious i mean they'll be they might hate America’s guts and want to shut down the whole country but they still only want to hold the us dollar and I’m telling you doc that um my gosh doing your own hygiene so you're going to say oh they don't want me to do it okay say whatever you want but the bottom line is um if you get a cancellation and you can't do a cleaning you're a prima donna and your overhead is over 65 guaranteed 100 and you're setting a bad example for your team that well doc draws a line i mean he's not going to go out of his way to do a cleaning when in fact we have two hygienists that have done it for 20 years how can you be above a job when you work in the same building with two other people that have that job well Howard the best way to understand this is and you know my my vp of revenue josh actually had this really good slogan he mentioned from someone else i don't know where he got it from but you can't manage what you can't measure right right so if you have a hygienist do you know what their diagnose rate is do you know at what rate are they diagnosing patients for treatment at what rate is that treatment being accepted do we have those numbers on your staff so you have this hygienist for 20 years but do you know at what rate are they diagnosing patients for treatment and at what rate is that treatment being accepted right you don't have that data either and no software gives you that you have to pay more money to more vendors to get these kinds of softwares and and or you have to run a very intricate report in one of these softwares and it's so difficult to see these kinds of data points and so that's why right so the dentist is all day working in the in the operatory and doing all these things and at the end of the day numbers don't lie and they're just hamsters and wheels just going round and round and round not able to see these data points by stepping out and looking at the macro and and so we've realized this and we realize that it's all a money making machine so we're like you know what let's just fix let's just provide the solution to our dentist and our dentist will see growth and they'll be happy and and that's what it's about right and so that's kind of why we keep coming up with these solutions to add you know and giving it out for free because we're like dude this should be free you know it should be how can you do what you do if you don't have this kind of data and so how can you manage a hygienist if you don't know at what rate they're producing treatment yeah I’m gonna I’m gonna send you a link and it's called um dds doing hygiene under dental practice management and uh my gosh it's a uh um you you should um you should look at these guys and and what they think and maybe you can help them here because um doing your own hygiene and also um um who's the guy you found founded citibank um what was that guy's name the sergeant Steve bank how wail um whatever um they they always ask him when he got older he says you know how did you how did some dumbass boy from Brooklyn um build Citibank how did you get that he goes well i was lucky he goes i i i was born up the street and i got a job there and i started in the mail room and the difference between all the other ceos who came from other companies and didn't do a damn thing he said i was just curious so like when i got a job he says the reason i stayed in banking because i got this first job and it was in a um i was in a bank and i just asked the branch manager i just asked him one thing i said well when i write a check at the store for ten dollars how does it get back to the bank and how do you get the ten dollars in that grocery store he said not one person could do it so every time a branch manager regional manager he said well does anybody know how this company works and they go well i don't know i mean so there's like a check clearing house he's okay where's the check clearing house and then he went and visited there and slowly from 16 to 26 to 36 and now he's on the high management deal and then when he gets to the top he knew the details of how everything was unconnected at a time when everything was going digital and computerized and like voting today i mean i'll never forget from 94 to 2000 um you know no one saw that crash coming because um they didn't realize that everybody was making all that investment for y2k and then y2k came and it didn't we're all prepared well we were done so it's time to start doing other things so the sales were zero for january February then march came to collapse thus dell had to quadruple his advertising um but everybody was hoping well great because who could fill this void in Keynesian economics is when free enterprise can't deliver the government can that's why to get out of world war ii we're building hoover dam and all these projects just to get the machine going and everybody thought well the government they'll digitize so today I’m voting I’m 58 I’ve lived here 32 years and and it's showing that i do not have a home I’m like what the hell i don't have a home no it says you live in your dental office and you can't live in a dental office or a commercial property to vote in Arizona you have to live in a residence i said well obviously i don't live in my dental office obviously you've been to my practice i know dr Fran but i i have to have the deal and so i told her my address and she said well i have to have proof so I’m like on the phone calling my comptroller to take pictures of [ __ ] on her iphone and and send it to me and it's just like it's like the government i mean my god they're so insane and even voting they say they want to get out the vote if they wanted to get out the vote I’m pretty sure there'd be an app on my phone and I’m pretty sure it's got voice authentication face record deal the phone's always with you and what did they need they needed my driver's license which is good till I’m like 180 and and and a piece of paper that had my addre i mean it's just like you can't fix stupid then that's why if you're young i don't care how this election turns out i don't care who the frick wins um every president in my lifetime has been worse than the one before it's been a downward trend and the next guy i swear to god it'd only take four to eight years and you'll wish the last guy was in and uh so um government is the problem it's never the solution just like just like you doc um there's no magic bullets there's no silver bullets you know what it is it's attracting a good team and here's the other messed up thing about management when i find the right person on the team i don't have to do anything and they're there 20 years later and i look like a great manager but if you're not good and i got a micromanager i gotta stay on topy and all that stuff i put a lot of time and effort and i still look like crap because you're crap so the manager's dilemma it's like it's like my job my job is did i find the best quarterback for the football team and if i did what I’m going to go down there fat ass howie and show them how to throw a pass and catch a ball i mean come on you don't and when you need a consultant you know what you know when what the first consultant i ever had was you know who it was no who was it it was the most famous soft dent trainer for all of arizona i had this management information system yeah well sandy's he's he's he's the best trainer she knows more than anybody so uh sandy called me and said well here's dale here's the hour and i said sandy i don't want you for an hour i want to hire you no you can't because i own my own business and blah blah i said well what's the best money you ever made in a year okay well give your what kind of raise would you like i said will you work for me for that she goes god i guess i didn't i didn't think anybody ever say that and the people go work at at aspen in heartland or whatever right and they go set up their own office and you know they try to find a dental assistant that will work for a dollar an hour that is some you know some crack house and I’m like okay you worked at heartland they have a thousand office who was the best office manager in arizona who was the regional director of Arizona you couldn't get those one of them too and that's my last and final question because i know you're thinking is this guy ever gonna shut up but no i always i always tell people that you know if it's an intellectual cerebral answer the dsos always jump first the dentists are always emotional traditional or whatever right um so my question to you is let's keep this [ __ ] real um what percent of your business is uh have you attracted any dsos have any dsos like you what you're doing yeah absolutely so we have a couple of dsls um one in Arizona one in the northeast um what's the one in Arizona um i can't i can't mention that name but there you go can you email or text me email me power it down or set us up she will they will love to meet you well then i'll do her as a follow-up to you to keep it going and let me tell you something because because i get a lot of pushback that I’m just supposed to toe the party line in dsos or evil and be against first of all shut up number two i got 6 000 kids that just went out of dental school and they ain't got a job and guess who's the only people hiring dsos yeah and when i was little it was only the army navy air force indian public health if you're hiring my homies straight out of dental school which i won't do because I’ve done it before my god the first hundred fillings you've done you know god that's it's horrible but someone's gotta be that guy but the dsos are delivering when it's down and i think a lot of kids are going to have a whole different view of the guy who hired them and that and then i'll look at dennis i'll say how you close Thursday at five and you don't open until Monday today from Thursday five Friday Saturday how many people call your office with an emergency because i know the other end of the number is eight and a half out of every 100 people that show up at the emergency room have a no dental odontogenic origin problem because you're unlisted and closed why you've already paid all your fixed costs why don't you just have her in there with a one person because one toothache would be a root canal built in crown for two grand we've already made money bingo right so we break even with one two thing you want to do that nuts sounds like a pain in the ass okay then don't bad mouth the doss that do it and gave her a job exactly and and then and then last is look at cars it's everything from a 300 000 ferrari down to a go-kart moped i mean look at houses everything from a mansion three bedroom studio apartment trailer to me who lives in a van down by the river so you always have market segmentation it always the price divides on price and service and dentistry is not going to be all one thing to eight billion people it's gonna have many different price points many different features and uh so um your way is not always the right way uh the market has a voice too and it'll speak but um but what do you um what do you think the dso in Arizona or the dsos period what do you think they like about um your software so you know see and to address that question you mentioned very well the dsos are hiring the dsos are growing versus the individual practices or not right and the reason is because and what i mentioned earlier it's all about your systems and processes right these dsos have the proficient processes in place the software's in place to be able to reactivate those patients whereas smaller practices you know they don't set up their processes they are lucky that their patients just come every six months their hygiene runs and everything runs fluently the moment that system breaks they don't have a means to go back and reactivate those patients and and and they get scared revenue goes down they pull back the horses they stop spending on advertising when they should be spending i mean the big reason dss are doing so well is because it's actually cheaper to advertise today than it was this time last year because all the dentists have pulled back right and so it's it's it's just a matter of having your systems processes in place to where you can be confident in your practice confident in your in your business and confidently go forward and when you can confidently go forward you have the right people the right staff the right office managers and you can take that leap of faith then and only then can you go in and attract and keep growing you know and so i just got to say dsos love our products because it establishes their systems and processes they're the most pickiest they're the most particular they're the most specific about how everything specifically works for them because they got their processes down you know and so it helps when a dentist steps out of their operatory and understands the actual dentistry and builds the processes around it you know and and and those are usually the ones that are not just individual dental offices but those are usually the multi locations the three locations the five locations the 15 locations the 50 locations and so those people are the ones who invest so much more time in the operations and management and personnel so that's all right I’m looking i don't think i have any more questions uh my gosh you're amazing did i not ask anything that you were uh thinking i would bring no no no this was a great conversation howard thank you so much i really appreciate you having me on twice and and this is a really good conversation i had a lot of fun um and and thank you so much for having me i hope i added value and gave you some insights i definitely learned a lot from you so so thank you so much okay well hey I’m uh I’m visiting my grandkids a lot so maybe uh someday uh we'll have a beer in Houston and be or or b will be bill is that right yeah Beeville yeah well i don't know but uh they uh we haven't they they've never asked me to take him into uh Houston they always ask me to take him to the gulf gulf coast the gulf coast they just you know kids and water and fish and all that stuff but uh god dang i love that place i don't know if it's the bias of four grandkids out there or what but every time i go there I’m thinking okay you know one time you're gonna come here you're not gonna go back but hey thanks so much uh for coming on the show and helping my homies during these really tough times uh they're they're down to third and you're fighting damn hard uh to get them back thank you for doing for everything you do and for dentistry thanks for coming back on the show again thank you so much Howard i really appreciate it thank you so much you
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