Spring is in the air. It's that time of year when temperatures can fluctuate 40 degrees in a day. It's also that time of year when people open their windows and do some deep cleaning. In this episode, Casey and Jarrod discuss spring cleaning and how that relates to your practice finances.
Announcer:
Hello, everyone. Welcome to The Millionaire Dentist Podcast brought to you by Four Quadrants Advisory. On this podcast, we break down the world of dentistry, finances, and business practices to help you become the millionaire dentist you deserve to be. Please be advised, we do speak with an honest tongue and may not be safe for work.
Casey Hiers:
Hello and welcome to The Millionaire Dentist Podcast. I'm in studio with co-host Jarrod Bridgeman.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
Hey, Casey. How are you?
Casey Hiers:
Doing well. Thank you, sir. What do you want to talk about today?
Jarrod Bridgeman:
Oh, man, you know what? I spent some time last night cleaning the heck out of my place. I realized I hadn't vacuumed a couple rooms in a while, and I was like, "Oh." And I started vacuuming. It's one of those Dyson's where you can see what's inside, and I was like, "Oh God, I am disgusting. I'm a disgusting human being." So, that's not really what I want to talk about. But I thought I'd bring that up just because why not.
Casey Hiers:
Spring-cleaning?
Jarrod Bridgeman:
Right.
Casey Hiers:
I like that. And I had mentioned I actually... Last evening with the more daylight and nice temperatures, I spent a couple hours cleaning up my garage.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah. Nice.
Casey Hiers:
And as I walked in today, I had a vision of how to tie this into dentists, our listeners, their practices.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
Because a lot of them have a garage, right?
Casey Hiers:
Well, my garage is going to be the metaphor for-
Jarrod Bridgeman:
"Oh."
Casey Hiers:
... their dental practice.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
Got it.
Casey Hiers:
All right. There's the foundation.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
All right.
Casey Hiers:
So, let me give you the quick and dirty pun intended on my garage, right? Garage, nice epoxy floors, have cabinetry. It's a lovely garage to which one of my buddies made fun and said, "Wow. Do you spend a lot of time in your garage?" Anyway, and so, I go through my day-to-day, and I pull my car in and out and I'm like, "Yeah. It's a great garage. It's great. It's fine. Maybe I need to pick a thing up here or there, but it's great." Well, yesterday, I took everything out of the garage and two hours later, it's unbelievable. I found things in my garage that I was looking for that I didn't know where they were, some tools. Also found a dead mouse in a trap in the corner. Didn't know that was there. I thought it was just going to be a quick brooming of the floor. Yeah.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
It's a good thing you got that mouse out of there with the temperature getting warmer.
Casey Hiers:
Yeah. That thing would've cooked and started distinct. And bear with me, listeners, we're going to tie this in. So, then I go to sweep the floor and there's lots of dust, and then, I like, "You know what? I'm going to do it again." And then, I got out the Shop-vac and I vacuumed, and it was incredible like you said, how much debris and things came. Then, with the epoxy, I just threw a bunch of water and started squeezing it. It was black. And so, I mean, I went through and did all of that, cleaned everything up.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
How long did you say that this all took to you?
Casey Hiers:
It took two hours. My lower back is killing me.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
Oh, that's why you asked for that massage earlier.
Casey Hiers:
Wah. But it hit me. Great garage, great epoxy. So, many practice owners. Their practice is... It's a beautiful practice. They've got high-tech equipment, state-of-the-art equipment, and they're going through their day-to-day and they're treating patients and they're doing their thing, and they feel like everything's pretty good.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
They're still functionally fine. They're still doing their work.
Casey Hiers:
Yeah.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah.
Casey Hiers:
I looked at my garage, great garage. But with practice owners, if you take a deep dive in a forensic look like we do for folks that go through just our vetting process, it's incredible what we find, right? So-
Jarrod Bridgeman:
Let me ask you. Let's compare it to the dead mouse. What is a negative thing that... Let's say a dentist or a practice owner is doing some deep cleaning in terms of their finances and their practice. What's a negative thing that can be found?
Casey Hiers:
I'd say some common ones would be their tax management situation is abhorrent and with potential IRS red flags, or we'll go back and look at previous year's taxes and go, "Hey, we're going to amend these if you're a client, because we found anywhere between $5 to $38,000 in past tax returns that were done incorrectly, that there was money that our new clients ended up getting.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
Would that be something also like a shareholder loan too?
Casey Hiers:
Oh, the dead mouse and a shareholder loan. Yeah.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
Okay.
Casey Hiers:
Yeah. But a lot of times we'll find, again, the financials are off the QuickBooks, The taxes. They don't tie together. When those things don't tie in together, that's a huge problem.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
All right. So, that's some of the negatives that can be found. Did anything positive come out? Besides just having a nice clean garage, were there any positives that came out from cleaning the garage and how that can be?
Casey Hiers:
Well, I found out how much more space I had when I actually pull it. Yeah, I think that can compare to sometimes practice owners find that their capacity, they don't have to work any harder to make more and save more and have lower overhead. That's what our clients enjoy. So, when I pulled everything out and cleaned it up and put it back together, and yeah, there's a water table that the trash man took today, and there's a lot of stuff I threw away.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
So, it's a lot of organizing and making your space more efficient with the space you have?
Casey Hiers:
Yeah, and not your literal space in your practice, but almost the capacity. And so, I'm not going to do anything different when I pull in and out of my garage, and how I use my garage now that it's great and clean. But now it's just so much better for a practice owner getting a deep dive, almost a spring-cleaning of having somebody looking at all the structures and financials and tax.
Most often, there are things that we find good and bad.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
Well, in terms of the good, it's like every winter, I might grab my winter jacket and put it on for the first time in eight months, and I found $10 in my pocket.
Casey Hiers:
Boom.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
Is there any cases like that where something positive like money's been found?
Casey Hiers:
Yeah, yeah. And when we go back and look at those taxes, like I said, we've found anywhere from $5,000 to $38,000 in previous tax returns that were just flat out not done well. Having a forensic dental accountant, CPAs doing your taxes. You have finding the metaphorical $10. Yeah. We have found significant monies. We even had a specialist fairly successful into the career, had a lot of assets and liquid assets, but I believe we found like $900,000 in an account that they didn't even know that they had, which sounds crazy, but it's all relative numbers-wise. $10 in the coat pocket. $900,000, and again, doing the spring cleaning-
Jarrod Bridgeman:
I mean, that 10 bucks got me quite a bit of Taco Bell.
Casey Hiers:
I thought you were a Condado guy.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
I like that too.
Casey Hiers:
Yeah. More quantity. But yeah, the spring-cleaning aspect of... A lot of times we talk about, and we're going to have some more experts come on. We like to give a variety of topics on this podcast, but the spring-cleaning, so many practice owners that there's good and bad, but they just need to have somebody help them with doing an inventory. And that's ultimately what we do. But again, if I looked at it through the lens of "Wow, it's great. My garage is better than most." That's what dentists do. That's what specialists do. I'm doing better than most, so my-
Jarrod Bridgeman:
But not knowing there's a dirty rat involved.
Casey Hiers:
It was a cute little mouse. I showed my two girls because I go, "This is why daddy says keep the doors shut in the garage and don't just leave it open." So, it was like a little science project showing them the dead mouse. Well, I actually felt bad. My allergies kicked in with all the dust, and I was sneezing. Unfortunately, I kept my wife up all night and not for fun reason, but because I was sneezing-
Jarrod Bridgeman:
Uncontrollably.
Casey Hiers:
... all night. Yeah. With all the dust and things of that nature.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
And that makes it. That can prove some stuff too which is if you are not taking care of your business and keeping things on the up and up and clean, it could cause health problems to the practice.
Casey Hiers:
Listen, for practice owners, eventually, it's going to catch up to you at some point, and unfortunately, a lot of times, it doesn't catch up beginning their financial house in order until theirs in their 60s or God forbid their 70s. And ultimately, it's going to catch up to you.
We're talking to a lot of folks through all of our outreaches and education, and heck, even this podcast who in their 30s, they're saying, "Hey, I've got a fee for service. $1.4 million practice. I don't want to wait. I don't want to screw up. Can you guys just get me on that path?" Those people can retire at 50 with eight digits.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
A lot of the time these people will either speak to you on the phone or speak to you in person. Are there some events you're going to be at any time soon where someone can come into speak to you?
Casey Hiers:
Yeah. There's a lot of them. We're doing the Georgia state meeting. We're doing the Florida state meeting. What we got? Top golf end of April. Nice northern suburb of Dallas up in the colony.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
Right. We're also going to be in El Segundo in California in May. May 12th.
Casey Hiers:
Yeah, that's right.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah.
Casey Hiers:
Going West Coast.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
That's right.
Casey Hiers:
I lived out in Hermosa Beach, California first time.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
Was it nice?
Casey Hiers:
It'll be good to get back there. It's interesting. The top golf that we're going to be presenting CE at and having fun at used to be a small executive par-3 golf course that I used to go-
Jarrod Bridgeman:
Wow.
Casey Hiers:
... hack around at so-
Jarrod Bridgeman:
That's awesome. That's awesome.
Casey Hiers:
... neither here nor there, but yeah, there's lots of opportunities for practice owners. We exhibited some large shows as well. People find us, and they go, "Wow. Didn't know you guys could do this?" And six weeks later, they're now finding $8,000 in unfound taxes refunds that they should have gotten.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
Nice. Yeah. So, go to fourquadrantsadvisory.com/events to check out everything we're doing. We're going to be adding more and more things all the time. I really want everybody to come out and see us and come visit our booths and things like that.
Casey, I really want to thank you for your time, and thanks for cleaning your garage.
Casey Hiers:
Amen.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah. So, every time I come visit, it'll be nice now.
Casey Hiers:
You're going to love it.
Jarrod Bridgeman:
That's right. Thanks.
Announcer:
That's all the time we have today. Thank you to our guests for their insight and for sharing some really great information. And thank you to you, the listener for tuning in. The Millionaire Dentist Podcast is brought to you by Four Quadrants Advisory. To see if they might be a good fit for you and your practice, go on over to fourquadrantsadvisory.com and see why year after year, they retain over 95% of their clients.
Thank you again for joining us, and we'll see you next time.
