Back to Life, Back to Reality in a Post-COVID World

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. This is Casey Hiers, back at the Millionaire Dentist podcast, in studio with co-host, Jarrod Bridgeman.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Casey, happy New Year. How are you?

Casey Hiers:
Happy New Year. The break was great, Christmas was great. Friends, family, rest, relaxation, fun, you name it.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
It was all there. And then we came back, we've had a couple of days back in the office, and then we've had about a foot of snow hammer us in the last day and a half.

Casey Hiers:
This polar vortex was supposed to be a lot worse than it really was. Is that called fear porn?

Jarrod Bridgeman:
I think so.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah. It's manageable.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
I'm not familiar as much with the fear part.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah. Well, that's a different podcast for different listeners. Your pseudo name. Anyway, what'd we get, four or five inches maybe?

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah, yeah. A couple areas, it may have drifted to be a little higher, but I know the further south in Indiana you went, the worse it got.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah.

Casey Hiers:
My snow blower did not complete the task today, so I had to manually shovel, which I just, "Are you kidding me?"

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Did you do it in your suit?

Casey Hiers:
No.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
No? Okay.

Casey Hiers:
I had a proper ski attire on.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Nice. Nice.

Casey Hiers:
And then I could feel my heart pounding out of my chest, and I'm trying to get this done as quickly as possible. And I remember old people have heart attacks doing it, and I might be on the younger side of getting old. Neither here nor there.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Are you going to go help some of your elderly neighbors?

Casey Hiers:
Of course. With my blower, 'cause it's a light, fluffy snow, so I should have just got the blower out and just-

Jarrod Bridgeman:
It's a nice pack in place now.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah, that wet stuff is no joke.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Casey, I wanted to point this out real quick before we jump into any other topics. One of our last podcasts before the end of the year, we talked about the BLI, the benefits of ownership stuff, whatever.

Casey Hiers:
An IRS demand.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yes.

Casey Hiers:
For a business owner.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
So, that has been delayed. I believe it's in litigation right now. So, the new due date has been moved, and I believe Steve Levy told me that was on January 13th, but make sure to talk to your accountant, your CPA, or if it has not been done yet, double check with that. And make sure you're going to an actual government website. My wife has her own LLC and was trying to update it and it was trying to charge you $300, and I was like, "Nope, it's free."

Casey Hiers:
Yikes.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
So make sure, if you're on any site that's trying to charge you for this, don't, get off that.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah, no, that makes sense. Coming back today, I should have been jamming to a song from 1989 by the band, Soul II Soul, Back to Life, Back to Reality. Do you remember that?

Jarrod Bridgeman:
I do remember that. Could you sing a couple bars for me though?

Casey Hiers:
I was going to ask that you belted it out. Neither one of us can sing.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Back to life, back to reality.

Casey Hiers:
Back to reality, right?

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yes.

Casey Hiers:
And for a lot of people, coming back after the New Year, it kind of feels like that. Our podcast, I think could probably be titled this because there's another side, especially in dentistry, that this is hitting really hard right now.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
You mean besides coming back, having patients having to actually do work again?

Casey Hiers:
I mean, dentistry is a full-time job, being a business owner is tough. Obviously, pandemic in the rearview mirror so far. Hopefully we don't see it again and never do. That being said, with PPP and EIDL and the HHS stimulus, the last couple of years there have been 100, 200, 300, $400,000 that a lot of practice owners have enjoyed, and now that's dwindled away, back to life, back to reality. Now there's inflation, everything costs more, employees want more money, and they don't have this buffer. It was almost like an artificial buffer that hid maybe some issues in a practice.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
And it was the first couple of years of the pandemic, but that did have a couple of years of lasting ramifications there and bonuses and things like that. But as we're on the tail end of this, it's a brand new year. In your mind, Casey, why are people dwindling on this? What happened to that?

Casey Hiers:
I could almost pivot into, you get an inheritance, right? You get a long-lost uncle and he says, "Hey, you were a great nephew, and you didn't know it, but I had some money and here's half a million bucks." Well, if you take that influx of cash and just treat it as, "Everything's great," and you just really enjoy that, that's wonderful.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Sure.

Casey Hiers:
Let's say you had that.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
That be great.

Casey Hiers:
Let's talk about the things you would go by. You'd have a big chain, a nice car.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah, yeah. Some big rims.

Casey Hiers:
Oh, it just goes on and on.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
They spin.

Casey Hiers:
But if you don't think through, "Okay, how is my practice healthy? Are my personal finances healthy?" And integrate that into-

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Could it have given owners a false sense of that they were doing really well?

Casey Hiers:
It was a nice cushion.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
When they may not have been.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah. And it was needed. Listen, a lot of geographies that couldn't be opened, it was needed. But boy, we did talk to a lot of people, where that 250, $300,000 that, pop, comes into the account, that feels pretty good.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah.

Casey Hiers:
And you can almost-

Jarrod Bridgeman:
And it was forgiven.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah. And you can almost start to have a mystification that, "Well, my accounts are good, so everything must be okay."

Jarrod Bridgeman:
And sometimes when you think the good times are good, you don't imagine them ever ending.

Casey Hiers:
Well put. And then all of a sudden, it does dwindle away a little bit again.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
And again, as you said, one of the major issues of the past year or more has been inflation and how that's been kind of skyrocketing. And that is not only affecting how much you pay for your supplies, how much your electricity is in the building and all that stuff. And then you've got your employees who are feeling interest rates and things in terms of their own cost of groceries, rent. And so they're asking and needing and wanting more money. So everybody's being put over the coals of this.

Casey Hiers:
It's almost the perfect storm, where now people again are looking up going, "Well, shoot, my insurance adjustments are still high. My overheads high. There's some cash flow pinches. I'm feeling it in the practice. I'm feeling it at home." And the alarm goes off. People get frustrated and it's, well, one of the reasons is why we're doing this podcast.
Some of those things were an artificial cushion or pacification, right? Like a pacifier. Like, "Okay, this feels good. Everything's okay." Where again, we're about root causes, and root causes of personal cash flow, frustrations and practice, high overhead. If you don't get to the root cause, different circumstances are just going to delay or disguise it. It's not going to solve anything.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
And that's something, hopefully you have your own team. If you don't, this is a lot of hats to wear, a lot of things to look through and try and sift through and understand. But a starting point, if you've not done this yet, is if you need to come up with a very clear cost breakdown, what are you spending your money on? Is it not just supplies, not just marketing, break it down and realize, "Hey, I'm high here. I'm low here."

Casey Hiers:
I talk to, in essence, two types of practice owners. One practice owner, they don't really know their numbers and they know they don't know their numbers. The other practice owner, they do know some of their numbers. The common denominator is they both have the same frustrations and they're not sure how to solve the problem. They're not sure how to move the needle. They're not sure how to get from point A to point B. And again, some of the EIDL, PPP and HSS stimulus has simply put a band-aid on the problem, disguised the problem.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Well, and that's a good way to put it, because a band-aid is temporary. It was always meant to be a temporary fix.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah. And you want to rip off the bandage and it's all healed perfectly Well, sometimes it's not.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Sometimes it's festered, it's oozing.

Casey Hiers:
In fact, Hey, I was going to say infection. You got a little more graphic. That's-

Jarrod Bridgeman:
It's just running down your arm. It's the whole thing.

Casey Hiers:
Our listeners will now remember this a little better, I guess. But ultimately, this podcast is a springboard for a couple of things. Number one, to provide the dental community some needed information. We bring on subject matter experts from in-house here, just like you mentioned at the top, the BOI. And we want to help people that way. But this is a springboard to get better. And again, having a conversation with Four Quadrants Advisory, you walk away with some complimentary information or it changes your life. Either way, you're going to be better.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
There's no bad to this. There's no negative.

Casey Hiers:
The people that want to be stinking rich have to get this right. There's no way around it. You can sell your practice and go be an associate.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Sure.

Casey Hiers:
Or you can run a shitty practice for decades and be okay.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Sure.

Casey Hiers:
And what one person told me is, "Well, my whole life, I've never just been, okay, I've been exceptional. Why am I settling for just okay now?" And I respect the practice owner that has that realization versus the one that just says, "Well, I'm going to keep practicing dentistry and it should all just work out." And I've said this dozens of times. The most sad calls are the people in their 60s that have been great dentists, had a great chair side manner, adored by their patients, produced great dentistry, and don't have much to show up for.

They've lived the life of a successful dentist, but their savings aren't great. Yeah, they're overheads high. And again, you got to choose your heart. You can address it and fix it, or you can wake up and be practicing longer than you want. But the main point of today is 2025, there's a lot of optimism, there's a lot of good, there's a lot of bad. Wherever you are, what side of the, we're not getting political, whatever side of the aisle you're on, there's always a rejuvenation in a new year. Right?

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yep, yep.

Casey Hiers:
And positive outlook. But a lot of practice owners are looking up going, "Well, shoot, I just gave my employees a raise and now cash flow's tight. What do I do?" It comes back to cash flow in the practice and getting it healthy. And if there's three of you being a practice owner, one practice owner, but what's 24 times 3?

Jarrod Bridgeman:
24 times 3 is 48, plus another one, 76.

Casey Hiers:
72.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
72. Damn it, I was close.

Casey Hiers:
If you have 72 hours in a day, which none of us do, then you can probably-

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Oh, that's a way to put it. It's only three days.

Casey Hiers:
You can probably get this right, but you don't. And ultimately, it just comes down to, "Well, why is this happening?" Well, some of this money that was out there, rightfully so that was captured, gave people a false sense of security while not improving in the areas that they need to be improved in. Again, they wake up, they look up, 2025, inflation, employees, more money. Where's it going to come from? And typically, opening two or three more practices all around town isn't the answer.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
That's not going to do it.

Casey Hiers:
If your overhead's 80%, let's go ahead and take this beautiful business model of 80% overhead and just multiply that by three and then... Sorry, if there's no strategy, you're going to look up and go, "What did I just do?"

Jarrod Bridgeman:
"Whoops."

Casey Hiers:
"What did I just do?"

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Casey, it's the start of the new year. As you said, everybody's optimistic, for the most part. We're all excited. I'm really stoked for all of the events we're doing this year. We are going out, we're visiting more places than we ever have I think in the history of our company this year. We've really ramped this up.

Casey Hiers:
We're going to spread the good word.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yes. This month alone in January, we're going to be in Fort Myers, we're going to be in Jacksonville, we're going to be in Boston for the Yankee Dental Congress. You'll be presenting there.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah, we've got a two-hour presentation. We have a social, we exhibit. We want to meet as many people as possible to find... We'll talk to 300 people, and just in Boston, and we'd like to find one or two that maybe we can help.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
That's right.

Casey Hiers:
We can't help everybody, Jarrod.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Can you help me? Go to fourquadrantsadvisory.com/events. I'm adding new ones all the time. We're going to be in Henderson, Nevada. We're going to be in Scottsdale, Arizona. We're going to be in Birmingham, Alabama, Shreveport, Louisiana are all the ones that we've got already launched.

Casey Hiers:
The Hinman.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
The Hinman. You're going to be presenting there as well.

Casey Hiers:
Correct.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
That's exciting. Casey, thank you so much for coming in today, braving the weather. I really do like your snowshoes.

Casey Hiers:
Thank you.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
I need a pair for myself.

Casey Hiers:
Back to life.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Back to life.

Casey Hiers:
Back to reality.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Back to reality. Soul II Soul.

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.