Message Boards
Today's Active Topics Today's Active Cases Browse Forum Categories My Recent Activity My Messages Private Groups My Marked Threads My Subscriptions
Today's Active Images Today's Active Polls Most Active Topics Global Townie Map Advanced Message Board Search Message Board Terms of Use

Corporate Profile: Mercer Advisors Thomas Giacobbi, DDS, FAGD Editorial Director, Dentaltown Magazine

More by this author (317)
From left: Alan Johnson, Vice President of Professional Services, Eastern Region; Deb Atwater, CFO and Human Resources Manager; Gene Dongieux, Chief Investment Officer and Executive Vice President; Ralph Ujano, Executive Vice President of Professional Services; Bryan Duncan, Vice President of Professional Services, Western Region; Dave Barton, President and Chief Executive Officer; Gene Werner, Vice President of Business Development; Scott Kvancz, Vice President of Transitions and General Counsel; Tim Quinlan, Vice President of Sales and Marketing; and Chris Weill, Vice President of Operations.

by Thomas Giacobbi, DDS, FAGD
Editorial Director, Dentaltown Magazine

Frequently recognized in the dental profession as a transition or financial planning specialist, Mercer Advisors has recently developed a one-stop solution to the business of your practice and your life. A sophisticated software program called OnTrack® allows dentists to track their progress and set objectives to reach the ultimate goal of financial independence. I recently interviewed Mercer Advisors President and CEO David Barton about the economy, transitions and a comprehensive program they call 360° Planning™. Barton joined Mercer Advisors in April 2000 as general counsel after a successful run as a trial attorney at a prestigious law firm in Santa Barbara. He moved up the ranks as chief operating officer before he was named president in November 2004 and CEO was added to his title in June 2008.

In broad terms, what are the categories of services provided by Mercer Advisors?
Barton: First we are a professional service organization. We principally provide financial planning, investment management and dental practice consulting. We do transitions consulting and associate dentist placement services. We also create business plans for dental practices and monitor those business plans on a real time basis using our proprietary software known as OnTrack.

I’m a dentist, and to me a transition means I’m getting ready for retirement. In the world of Mercer Advisors, what is a transition?
Barton: A transition is a strategy for growth and freedom. For many doctors, their income and capacity to grow is limited by the number of hours they work in the practice. We find that these practices eventually plateau, not because there is no more opportunity, but because there is no more capacity. By “transitioning in” an additional doctor, the practice can grow while achieving lower overhead through economies of scale. The net result is significantly improved compensation and increased freedom for the senior doctor and an excellent opportunity for the younger doctor to enter an established and successful practice.

Is the selling dentist typically selling half and sticking around the practice?
Barton: It depends on the size of the practice, the financial situation and the particular objectives of the practice owner, but depending on their time horizon, we might say, “Let’s bring an associate into your practice, create a structured buy-in, where that associate will buy 50 percent of a practice over a period of two to three years, and you’ll retain 50 percent of the practice until you’re ready to retire. At that point, if you wanted to continue to practice dentistry, you might work a reduced schedule as an employee of the practice.”

We’ll often structure laddered buy-ins, which are win-win for both the senior dentist and the associate dentist who usually has a mountain of debt and lacks the means for a down payment.

Please help me understand the size of your firm. What are some key numbers?
Barton: Most people don’t know that Mercer Advisors is the largest professional services firm in dentistry. We have more than 100 Certified Financial Planners, CPAs, attorneys, MBAs, transitions and dental practice consulting experts. We have approximately 250 employees nationwide. We have nine branch offices sprinkled throughout the country and we have 22 different client service teams, which are basically a comprehensive mix of different professionals, allowing us to provide all these various services through a total solution methodology.

In total, we have more than 3,300 clients located across the nation, and just recently Forbes.com recognized us among the top 10 largest registered fee-only investment advisors in the United States, presently managing more than $2.7 billion for our clients, putting us in the top one percent of more than 20,000 registered investment advisors in the United States.

At the end of 2008 you launched a new service called 360° Planning. How is this different from the services you provided in the past?
Barton: Basically what we did in the past was provide our services cafeteria style and people would just choose options like business planning or financial planning. Our clients kept coming back and saying, “It’s great but what we are really looking for is a comprehensive service. Give me a single-service solution.” We took that to heart. 360° Planning is a service designed to amplify and support the vision of the practice owner that incorporates the very best elements of what we do into a single service solution. It provides business planning, financial planning and practice development. All of this is supported by our brand new, state-of-the-art executive dashboard called “OnTrack,” which, in real time, tracks the profitable behaviors of the practice.

We start with what the client’s needs are. What is an ideal practice for you? What is the ideal gross production for you? And how does that support your personal financial plan and economic freedom game plan? How many kids will be going to college, when do you want to retire – all of those different topics that are important both in and out of dentistry. By taking an integrated 360° approach, we can balance and support our clients’ current goals and needs with a long-term strategy to help them achieve financial freedom.

Tell me how your OnTrack software can integrate practice management software data and data form Quickbooks or similar programs.
Barton: OnTrack is our state-of-the-art executive dashboard that, in real time, tracks the profitable behaviors of the practice. We see the same screen that the client is seeing and we can walk them through upwards of 326 different key performance indicators and focus on those that will contribute the most to practice growth.

It is also linked up to Quickbooks. In effect what we have done is build a uniform chart of accounts that our clients use in Quickbooks. We have the same standard for every single client and something that can be uniformly applied. The software was five years in development and at a cost of about $10 million. It is not dependent upon the practice management software you have. The unique thing about OnTrack is that it measures behaviors of the chairside assistant, hygienist, associate dentist and senior dentist that roll up and produce the results inside of the practice. We are not measuring results but what behaviors produced those results; by measuring, monitoring and managing those behaviors, our clients produce greater results.

Is that behavioral data input by the office personnel?
Barton: Everything is input by drop-down menu. For every patient that comes in, you can click through an entire patient file through our screen in less than one minute. It is very easy. Other systems do not track behaviors, which is why ours is unique. Everything is measured by easy-to-read sliders.

Describe the guarantee that is provided to doctors that participate in 360° Planning. Does this guarantee apply to each year they are in the program?
Barton: The 360° Planning service includes a full day of comprehensive financial planning, a four-day onsite practice analysis completed by our seasoned and most mature consultants, doing complete vetting of baseline information within the practice top to bottom; making sure we have every single data point within that practice. It also includes OnTrack training for the team and an initial gap analysis and is supported by monthly coaching. There is a 40 percent return on investment guarantee every year a doctor is in the service.



Mercer Advisors has recently been involved in its own transition. Please describe the process and your new partner.
Barton: My predecessor, Imtiaz Manji, and I partnered to run the company when I was president and he was CEO. For years we had been working to “institutionalize” Mercer Advisors such that when the day came for our founders to retire or reduce their corporate commitments, we could make a successful transition to the next generation of leaders and break free of the founders trap. I have to say that our “modern” founders, Imtiaz Manji, Howard Rochestie, Dr. Glen Wysel and Gene Dongieux built an excellent company while creating a road map for careful and methodical succession planning. Once we had the succession plan in place we then looked to bring in the “right partner” to help better capitalize our company and help fund our next generation of ideas and growth.

After thorough investigation and due diligence, we selected Lovell Minnick Partners (LMP) as our new private equity partners. I had the good fortune of leading the negotiation of that transaction and I can personally attest to the extraordinary good character of the principals of LMP and of the organization as a whole. They believe in Mercer Advisors, and they fully support our management team and our corporate vision. They are wonderful partners. Today LMP owns approximately 60 percent of Mercer Advisors and our modern founders, myself and our employees own the balance.

So you and the “modern” founders are still principle shareholders in the company?
Barton: Absolutely. We all support and believe in Mercer Advisors and our mission to comprehensively service the needs of our clients, so our founders still remain engaged with Mercer Advisors. Gene Dongieux continues in his role as chief investment officer and managing our investment operations. Howard Rochestie continues in his role as a speaker for Mercer Advisors and lectors across the nation. Imtiaz Manji is the CEO of the Scottsdale Center for Dentistry, but continues to present our nationally recognized “Leadership” and “Transitions” workshops, and Dr. Glen Wysel remains a close liaison to Mercer Advisors and is now the president of the Scottsdale Center for Dentistry.

How do you respond to the misconceptions out there that the services provided by Mercer Advisors are only for top tier practices?
Barton: Since the launch of 360° Planning, our marketing message has changed. People saw us as a boutique firm that specialized in well-to-do dentists. 360° Planning is a service that is right for every dentist. Like every other business, every practice should have a business plan, a financial plan and a budget, and every dentist should be clear about how he or she will reach financial freedom. We wanted to amplify our message and reach a wider audience and we believe 360° Planning does that.

When it comes to practice and personal finances, what are some of the biggest mistakes
dentists make?
Barton: Failing to plan or thinking they can deal with it tomorrow. The reality is less than five percent of dentists out there today will retire at the lifestyle they want.

Financial firms have been under fire with the most recent economic crisis. How can dentists “rest easy” when their money is with Mercer Advisors?
Barton: We only deal in institutional class funds. If you are going to go out into the marketplace and buy a particular portfolio or particular index fund, you are going to pay a certain rate for that as an individual. Because Mercer Advisors presently manages more than $2.7 billion we have buying power, we can go to the largest funds in the world, demand the very best prices with little or no load fees and demand the very best products that people at the street level don’t have access to. We can pass that along to our dental clientele. We use what we call the modern portfolio theory, that is, we don’t react to market volatility, we have a scientific approach to investing and that, over time, a well and balanced portfolio will produce a return. Dentists don’t have to worry about trades or hiccups along the way. Utilizing this approach, our most popular portfolio out produced the S&P 500 by more than 50 percent when looking at the 10 year period from June 1, 1999, through May 31, 2009*.



One of the goals at Mercer Advisors is to help dentists reach financial freedom. What advice would you give a dentist reading this interview?
Barton: Don’t put it off a single day. It doesn’t matter how old you are; if you are 62, start today. The best advice any financial planner could give any individual is to start sooner rather than later. The power of geometric progression is on your side at an earlier age, it begins to run away from you at later dates. If someone comes to us at age 55 with $200,000 in savings and says, “I want to retire at age 65,” he has given us a 10-year time horizon, so what we do is vision casting. We’ll ask, “How do you want to retire? What kind of lifestyle do you want to live in during retirement?” Then we put real numbers into that equation and we adjust for inflation. We have to plan on living 95 years. If you retire at 65, that money has to last 30 years. Some people have no hope of meeting that vision unless they change their behaviors inside their economic engine – their dental practice.

What do you see going forward for the dental marketplace in general?
Barton: Obviously we are living in challenging times and I see economic stagnation continuing well into 2010 even though we might technically climb out of our recession by the end of this year. Now, more than ever, practice owners must pay attention to their bottom lines. There is only so much overhead you can cut, so dentists need to optimize their practices in order to maintain profitability. This is especially true at this time when discretionary dental care spending is declining.

How does Mercer Advisors intend to meet the ever changing and growing needs of dentists?
Barton: Although dentists are experts in creating great margins in their patient’s mouths, they generally require help in maintaining the “right” margins in their practice. At Mercer Advisors we help our dental clients focus on those key performance areas that drive production and practice profitability.

Because we specialize in creating business plans that are monitored, measured and managed using the OnTrack software, our trained professionals help our clients course correct in real time so they don’t fall behind in attaining their goals.

We know how hard “catch-up” is and with this approach we are able to help our clients stay on top of their business and avoid rear-view mirror planning. Like every successful business, practice owners need an annual business plan and budget that is regularly monitored, with appropriate real-time course correction to ensure success. Our services at Mercer Advisors are geared toward helping dentists have that plan for their life, their practice and their finances, because we know that failing to plan is a plan for failure.

For more information about Mercer Advisors, please visit www.merceradvisors.com,
or call 877-693-6075.

[*Legal Disclaimer: From June 1, 1999 through May 31, 2009 the S & P 500 cumulative return was -20.30%. S & P 500 returns from Bloomberg. The index returns portrayed do not reflect the deduction of management, administrative, and transactional costs, thus index returns are higher than an actual investor would have received. For that same period, Mercer Advisors, Inc., 100.35.3 portfolio returned 33.14%. Data generated internally supported by returns from Bloomberg. Such portfolio represents quarterly rebalancing and reinvestment of all estimated earnings, less 1.10% advisory fees, 0.10% estimated trading costs, and mutual fund internal administrative and management fees. The Mercer Advisors Portfolio 100.35.3 invests entirely in equity securities including stocks of smaller companies and stocks of non-US companies. The portfolio may not be appropriate for all investors. As always, investments entail risk and may lose value. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. Mercer Advisors, Inc., is not a registered investment advisory firm but is the parent company of Mercer Global Advisors, Inc., which is registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission. All investment-related services are rendered through Mercer Global Advisors, Inc.]
Dentaltown Magazine
September 2025
Dentaltown Magazine September 2025 Read Current Issue Read Archived Issues
Sponsors
Townie Perks
Townie® Poll
Who or what do you turn to for most financial advice regarding your practice?
  
Site Menu
Message Boards Magazine Continuing Education Podcasts Blogs Classifieds Dental News Events Townie® Poll Ebooks Townie Choice Awards
Company Info
Contact Us Advertise With Us Howard Farran DDS, MBA Policies and Agreements
Site Help
Sally Gross, Member Services Specialist
Phone: +1-480-445-9710
Email: sally@farranmedia.com
©2025 Dentaltown, a division of Farran Media • All Rights Reserved
9633 S. 48th Street Suite 200 • Phoenix, AZ 85044 • Phone:+1-480-598-0001 • Fax:+1-480-598-3450