Create Your Own Cinderella Story: Building Your Dental Practice Beyond the Buzzer

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, how are you today?

Casey Hiers:
I'm doing well.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
I've heard you had an amazing weekend recently. Not only is it the end of February and we had some nice weather, but you've been doing some really fun assistant coaching with one of your daughter's basketball teams.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah, assistant coach for my 6-year-old and my 10-year-old, little rec league. It's a lot of fun. I like to help with technique and general spirit and encouragement. I don't want to have to email parents and do all that crap. So assistant coach is excellent, having a lot of fun. My one daughter knocked out another girl's tooth. The other girl learned an important lesson on don't lean in on defense or you might catch one. It's been a lot of fun.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
And it's nice being an assistant coach. I did a little bit of that with my son as well, but it's the irateness from parents are less on you and more on the actual head coach.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
So if there's any other issues, they're yelling at them and I'm just like, "I'm here helping with the water bottles. I don't know."

Casey Hiers:
Yeah, well, the rec leagues are socialist anyway. Everybody gets equal playing time.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
That's right.

Casey Hiers:
If I was head coach, I'd have a hard time in the back half of the season playing people that don't know which way to run, but I guess I'm just kind of a jerk.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Kind of?

Casey Hiers:
I give them a lot of encouragement and a lot of teaching and training, but by the end of the year, it's like, "All right, I can't keep telling you to, we're on offense or defense." So that's... No, it's fun.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
And going from basketball, children's basketball in that way, in the rec leagues, we do a really fun thing every March. Our CEO, our founder Jason Smith, does this really fun thing for the entire company where we celebrate March Madness, like the first day of the-

Casey Hiers:
For those who celebrate, yes, happy March Madness.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Exactly. If that's part of your path. And so going from basketball to basketball, it's not every year, but there's always a year here or there where some smaller school or a school that was not expected to really go that far do.

Casey Hiers:
A Cinderella story.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
A what now?

Casey Hiers:
A Cinderella story.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
A Cinderella story, yes. The Russell Crowe movie. Correlating that in a way to practices and dentists, in your experience, what would you equate a Cinderella story to with a practice?

Casey Hiers:
Well, unfortunately, a lot of Cinderella stories recently have involved a Cinderella team beating Purdue and then going on, at Florida Atlantic University a couple of years ago comes to mind, people going to the final four that shouldn't, and Purdue got upset. That's just me being whiney.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah. If you want to talk about Cinderella stories or those who achieve more than they thought, I mean, there is a correlation with practice owners having a practice. Write your own Cinderella story. What does that look like? So many practice owners try to tell me, "Dentistry's dying." Or, "It can't be done." Or this, that, and it. Well, a lot of your peers are doing it, so that's an excuse to enable you for mediocrity versus, "All right, I might be a smaller school or a smaller practice, but if I do the right things, you can still have amazing results."

Jarrod Bridgeman:
If you have a strong playbook.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah, yeah. No, there's a lot of factors that go into it, but that's part of it.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
I mean, looking at any sport, any team going, even to musicians, to art, to sports, to any of that, natural talent and knowledge will only get you so far. There's always practice, things to learn. Again, I mentioned the playbook, and if you are operating off of a book that's 20 years old, 30 years old, maybe you're not acclimating to the current weather. I'm mixing a lot of metaphors here.

Casey Hiers:
Well, I'll use another metaphor, because yours took me down a journey. Mike Tyson, dude could throw a punch.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yep.

Casey Hiers:
Couldn't handle money. He was a bank, he lost $300 million. He monetized something, but then screwed it up. And again, that-

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Well, his new business model has taken off pretty high.

Casey Hiers:
I see what you did there.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah,

Casey Hiers:
Yeah. No, but there's a lot of practice owners. They produce great dentistry, but they're like Mike Tyson. And everybody's like, "Ooh, Mike Tyson, you're amazing."

Jarrod Bridgeman:
This dentist and Tyson are both good at knocking out teeth, plus the money part.

Casey Hiers:
Well, yeah, and going back to the Cinderella story, I can't tell you how many clients, we know all their information, we know their journey. I mean, I just wrote down some notes on, call it a Cinderella story, but practice owners who came in here, we had one making 120. Was being paid like it was a part-time hobby considering what the production and collections were. Now they make 400.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Wow.

Casey Hiers:
I mean, that's a big deal. People coming in making 200,000 in dentistry now making 400. We've had somebody making 550, maybe not a Cinderella story, but now they're making 960. We've had somebody making a million, now they're making 2.25 million, and so some of those aren't maybe Cinderella stories, but those are big numbers.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
And just imagine listeners out there. You may be in some of these boats where you're making one, two and you're wishing you were making more, hoping you were making more and you know based upon your collections that you should potentially be making more. It makes me just think of going back in the day in high school and early in college when I was working part-time jobs just to be able to afford beer and how excited I would be to get a 50 cent raise, and that's an extra 20 bucks a week versus quadrupling from 100K to 400K.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah, no, people have a lot of head trash and they have reasons why they're underachieving and if they continue to buy into that, then it just gives themselves an excuse to kick the can down the road, and again, a lot of sayings and analogies in this, but it's incredible. Boring is sexy. How many 1.1 million practices, but people are making 385 and saving 150 and their overhead's really low and they have a great practice. They're like Butler, Butler went to the final game twice recently. If you-

Jarrod Bridgeman:
And that's in Indiana, right?

Casey Hiers:
Yeah, small school. I mean, for all those, they should... But they made it to the Final Four. They didn't have excuses, all the attributes in athletics into life. But there's a lot of practices out there, don't buy into your excuses. You can be Cinderella story or just-

Jarrod Bridgeman:
A success story.

Casey Hiers:
Getting to the next level. And I mean, I broke it out. Insurance adjustments. I've had people come in here with 40% insurance adjustments. We look back after five years, now they're 22% insurance adjustments. We're going from 30 to 18 or going from 15% to a fee for service. Wherever you're at, what's the next step? But if you keep improving, all of a sudden you're in the final game of the Final Four as a Cinderella story, you look back, but you can't put your head in the sand with these things.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Again, our founder, bringing him back up, he made a really good statement. I overheard him say yesterday, which is, "You got 70% you got to look forward and 30% looking back." Like, yeah, you've got to make sure you are working on and correcting the things that are not where they should be, but don't focus too much on what's behind you.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah, and some people are paralyzed by it. They've had high insurance adjustments, high overhead, their income hasn't been great for so long that they just focus on that part instead of, "No, enough is enough. How can it be better?" Sometimes it's addition by subtraction. Maybe it is getting rid of some bad people on your staff. Everybody's so scared because everybody's understaffed, understaffed. It's like, okay, what's the consequence of having the wrong people?

Jarrod Bridgeman:
And tying all that together, we've kind of mentioned collections, we've mentioned insurance, we've mentioned all these things and including how much income is increased for our owners. Another interesting benchmark that sometimes people just push too far out of their head is, when should I retire? When can't I retire? Depending on the field you're in, you're looking at 60, 65, 70 or plus, and then you find yourself greeting at Walmart.

Casey Hiers:
Well, we're aligned here. I actually wrote down five different examples of people that I know when they were thinking they wanted to retire versus when they are going to retire because they got all this right. They got the business side of their practice right and got the money right. People coming in and, "Well, I'm going to retire at 65." They end up retiring at 60, again, with our help, with professional expertise and all these areas that matter so much getting it right.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Not only retiring early, but with more money than they would've had.

Casey Hiers:
Well, yeah, I mean, the idea is that they're retiring this many years early with significantly more money, but going from 62, "No, I'm going to retire at 58." Or 58, retire at 52. We've had multiple people retire at 50, at 50, and they worked with us for their career, they retired at 50. The person next to them, same dental class, tried to do it themselves, tried to figure it out with a broken team, meaning not under the same roof, and they're going to have to practice at least another 10 or 15 years. What was the difference?

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Getting that-

Casey Hiers:
Getting this shit right. And then people go-

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Getting out of the defensive [inaudible 00:09:25].

Casey Hiers:
"Well, how? That sounds so great to make more money. But how, how, how, how, how?" When a Cinderella team goes to the Final Four or overachieves, what attributes do you hear? Well, they worked hard. They believed in each other. They had passion. That's the press line. If you go back and look at all the early morning training sessions and watching film and working in the weight room and working on your technique and all those things, that doesn't get listed. That's part of the journey.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
That's boring.

Casey Hiers:
But here, yeah, I'm giving a lot of highlights. How do you get there? Good Lord, there's 50 things a quarter we do for practice owners, and when that starts to add up and then you go, "Oh, I'm retiring early. Well, I love dentistry and I had a good team." Yeah, that's true, but there's a lot more that goes into it. There's not a magic bullet for the how, and I had to get that out. I'll put my soap box away.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Well see, it ties into the boring is sexy, and I jokingly said, "Oh, that's boring." But it's the boring things like that that-

Casey Hiers:
Consistent.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Consistent [inaudible 00:10:21] difference.

Casey Hiers:
Boring is a synonym for consistent in this-

Jarrod Bridgeman:
In this situation.

Casey Hiers:
In this situation.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Looking at all of that, actually, you know what? I wanted to ask you, how many times have you spoken to somebody at a conference or an event who were misguided on how early they thought they could retire? "Oh, yeah, I'll be until like 68."

Casey Hiers:
A lot of dentists are told what they want to hear from everybody, but when the people handling your money and your future tell you, "You're going to be fine. You're going to be fine. You're going to be fine. You're okay. You're okay. You're great. I'm not worried about you." Again, we've said this before, what does that mean? Compared to what? Because our clients are in the top 1% of dentists, not 1% of the country with financial achievements. That's where you should want to be. "I want to be at the top of my field." Well, you can be at the top of dentistry and not have any money.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
100%.

Casey Hiers:
I guess that's true with athletes when they blow it all and go bankrupt, but the idea is that you're good at dentistry, but you've got to be good at these other things too. If you're just a good shooter, "Oh, you should be able to be a basketball player." Well, if you don't play defense and you don't know the game and understand all the nuance, your great shooting then gets minimized in the grand picture. Great dentists, their skill set sometimes will be minimized in their own head because it's not coming through with money and cash flow, and that's frustrating, and they get lonely and then they get bitter, and then-

Jarrod Bridgeman:
And then it just seeps out from there and it becomes this wicked cycle with self-fulfilling prophecies of, "It's never going to happen. It's never going to work." And then it's not going to work because you haven't tried anything.

Casey Hiers:
And again, this is people, yeah, sure, if your overhead's 90%, you're not making any money, that's tough. But there's a lot of people doing pretty well, but they should be doing better. Think about all those teams that get predicted to go to the Final four and get knocked out in the first couple rounds, and that's [inaudible 00:12:13].

Jarrod Bridgeman:
It's sad for them, but it's one of those things that it could be a very big wake up call for the team and the coach.

Casey Hiers:
And a lot of these practices, they should be a Final four caliber practice, but they're not. Well, why is that? Get on the road to fixing it. Don't just live in your excuses.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Speaking of getting on the road, Casey, you and your team will be getting on the road almost on a weekly basis at this point. I know you're going to be presenting at the Hinman, the Thomas Hinman dental meeting this year, the night before the entire event kicks off on a Wednesday night. We were going to be having a fun just social for dentists and practice owners out there.

Casey Hiers:
Badass Place in Buckhead, which is a nice suburb north of Atlanta. We just rented out a private room. We're going to have seafood towers and carving stations and urban tasting-

Jarrod Bridgeman:
[inaudible 00:12:54] And drinks.

Casey Hiers:
And it's a nice time.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
And it's a-

Casey Hiers:
I talk for like, 10 minutes. It's mostly fun. People will hear some things they haven't heard before and have some opportunities, but it's a great time.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
It'll be much more leisure socially in terms of small conversations.

Casey Hiers:
It's not a formal classroom setting. We're going to do that on Thursday and present for two hours and get into continuing education, but no, we get a nice event on that Wednesday. If you're in the area, come by.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
So make sure to go to fourquadrantsadvisory.com/events. We're going to be in Louisville, we're going to be in Lexington, again, Atlanta for the night prior to the Hinman while presenting at the Hinman itself.

Casey Hiers:
Upstate New York.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yep. We're going to be in Syracuse. We're going to be in Williamsville, which is a part of Buffalo, New York. We're also going to be in Wheeling, which is a part of Chicago and Springfield, Illinois as well. So please go on there if you know you need help. If you know you've got, you're almost there, or if you know somebody who could really use a wake up call with this kind of stuff, register and show up. If you don't register, if you don't show up, you can't change things.

Casey Hiers:
Thanks.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
All right. Thanks, Casey.

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.