The Blueprint for a $15M Retirement Trajectory

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, it's been so long since you've graced us with your presence. You've been traveling, as always.

Casey Hiers:
The show goes on without me? You guys have been recording?.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
I mean, they've been some of our best-received podcasts ever.

Casey Hiers:
Getting humbled.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
But with you being here and bringing us down, I decided to bring someone else in here to help bring us back up. Today we've got Stacy Phillips. He's a CFP, which is a certified financial planner, and he's the director of financial planning for Four Quadrants Advisory. Stacy, how are you?

Stacy Phillips:
Good afternoon, gentlemen. Great to be here.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Usually, you come in here to give me a hard time, but now you're in here, and I'm making your work.

Stacy Phillips:
Absolutely. Happy to do it.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Happy to do it.

Casey Hiers:
Stacy, thanks for wearing a nice dark suit and a pocket square. Jarrod looks like he's about to fly off to Miami.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
I wish.

Casey Hiers:
What is this, teal?

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah, it's a nice sea foam green.

Casey Hiers:
Got a teal suit with some purple.

Stacy Phillips:
Miami Vice.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah. Crockett and Tubbs' action.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
I'm really hoping to get down there and just splash some waves, make some damage.

Casey Hiers:
It's a sharp suit, but had to make that comment.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
It's loud. Yeah. Especially for where we are.

Casey Hiers:
Well, before you fly off to Miami to go-

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Gallivant.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah, gallivant. We cover a lot of good topics on this, right? A lot of tax, a lot of our events, what we cover, challenges in dentistry. Today, we wanted to do a little bit of a different angle. And what happens behind the curtain? Once somebody spends a few years or a few decades trying to lower overhead and make more money and save more money, do all those things.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
On their own.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah. Once they're like, hmm, and then they engage in a process, maybe they intend our event, or they get a big tax surprise, and they Google dental accounting, and however they get in touch with us.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
And sometimes those people might just be wondering what the magic bullet is. How do I plug this one thing in to do all that?

Casey Hiers:
Yeah. A handful of times a year, they reflect, and they're like, "I'm frustrated. Is there anything better out there?" So once somebody engages, goes through our process, becomes a client, we're going to get into what happens after that. What's that client experience? Because Stacy, you then pick up the torch there, and once I weed out people and we bring people in and can show we can help them. Once they come in here, I hand them off, and you take them.

Stacy Phillips:
Absolutely.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
And you pop in sometimes for the fun parts when they come to their meetings and things like that.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Oh, yeah. I like to look at client achievements and see how people have done over the years. So ultimately, going through our process, we're told a lot, wow, I've learned more just vetting than I've ever known about my practice, my taxes, my finances. But that's like the table of contents. 100%. Stacy, when you and your team, when they come in here, number one, they're flying into Indianapolis, Indiana. A lot of people have they been here before?

Stacy Phillips:
Negative. The majority have not.

Casey Hiers:
And they actually joke like, "Where's Indiana?"

Stacy Phillips:
Yeah.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
They're also super surprised by how nice our airport is.

Stacy Phillips:
Absolutely. They're thinking cornfields and a small city, but a little better experience when they come into Indianapolis International.

Casey Hiers:
But ultimately, Stacy, once they're in here and again, feeling a little vulnerable because we know a lot about them and we've also offered to work with them because we have big expectations of ourself to deliver on results. But just kind of walk our listeners through. Once they've had that journey and decide I've got to master the financial side of things, then what?

Stacy Phillips:
Well, it's interesting because it kind of starts with the whole process and how our process is different than what they've experienced in the past. Obviously, one of our deals is bringing everything together. A typical relationship, you have an accountant, you have a financial advisor, you might have a business advisor. None of those people talks, and it's very difficult to get things done. Accounting may be done on a quarterly or annual basis. Here it's done monthly. Totally different process when you come here versus what they're used to. It's much better because everybody talks here. We know exactly what's going on with all the different parts at any given time, and it helps us get things done much easier and much quicker.

Casey Hiers:
So once they're walked into the conference room, and I say my pleasantries or Jarrod or whomever, what happens in that meeting?

Stacy Phillips:
Well, let me ask you a question. So if we're thinking about the general world of financial services here, and you go meet with your financial advisor, how long do you think that meeting might last?

Casey Hiers:
Traditionally, once or twice a year for an hour or two, max.

Stacy Phillips:
So yeah, when you come in here, obviously, we tell clients ahead of time what to expect, but this is like an all-day deal here. So they're going to meet with accounting for up to an hour. The planning team for another three to four hours covering both business and personal. So this can be a five-hour meeting, which is just a totally different realm than what they're used to in the past. And it gives us obviously the opportunity to really, like we talked about earlier, overturning every stone and leaving nothing to chance.

Casey Hiers:
It's interesting sometimes when they come out of just the accounting part, where they get it in the personal and the practice and businesses, maybe they own the building, LLCs, whatever, I'll pop in, and they're like, "Wow, that was amazing." And I'm like, "Oh yeah, the main event hasn't even happened yet." That's just tax and accounting.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
I wanted to ask, Stacy, from your perspective, when a new client has come in, this is really their very first annual meeting they're having with us. In terms of attitude or the face they present, when they first show up, walk in the doors 9:00 AM versus leaving and going to and having lunch with your folks, what's that progression? How do they seem at the beginning and at the end?

Stacy Phillips:
A lot of people are apprehensive on the front end, obviously. Some are just flat out nervous. They're very vulnerable. They're telling us all the skeletons in the closet, you might call it, of the practice and things that have gone wrong in the past that we're trying to fix. And then they come in here, and we sit down, we do our introductions, so they get to know everybody, and then I'll ask the client, "Okay, why are we sitting here today?" The ultimate answer is because there's a better way to do things, and that's what we're going to help them do.

Casey Hiers:
To your point, a little vulnerable, little exposed, not in a bad way, but the expectations are also high. They're like, "Well, I'm paying this money. Is this going to hurt? Is this going to be hard? What am I going to have to do? How often do we have them change the way they practice dentistry, Stacy?

Stacy Phillips:
Pretty much never.

Casey Hiers:
Zero.

Stacy Phillips:
They know how to do dentistry better than we do. We know how to run the business better behind the curtain.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
I might be jumping ahead here, but after, let's just say the end of that first meeting, you're going to lunch. How has their attitude changed that first day from being nervous, maybe being timid, being vulnerable, maybe being scared of ... Some people, I think sometimes come expecting for us to dog them and tell them how wrong they're doing things. That's not really what we do. What's it like when we finally come back out of that room, we're about to hop in the sprinter and go to a really nice lunch?

Stacy Phillips:
I would kind of portray that as relief. Ultimately, they feel relief knowing that when they see the detail that we go into going through their stuff and the business and personal both, it provides relief for them knowing that, yeah, these guys really know what they're doing, and we have a really good plan. The big thing coming here as a client is, are you coachable? It's one thing to say you can change. It's another to actually put that into motion.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
How many people say they're coachable and are?

Casey Hiers:
That's one of the things I have to really emphasize in our process, is trying to root out people who ... Some are just very straightforward. They're like, no, I'm not. Others are, others there's different degrees of it.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
It kind of reminds me of when you're hiring and running interviews, and you ask people how they take feedback. Everybody says they're good at it. If you ask anybody around here, apparently, I get defensive. So you know what I mean? For me, and that's why you're so good at what you do, Casey, is kind of really sussing that and feeling that out.

Casey Hiers:
Well, what we'd like to say is we try to implement 80 or 90% of what we advise on to take work and stress off our clients' plates. But if you're only going to take 50 or 60% of our advice, don't pay us to not take our advice. And so I'm doing it because, number one, I want to understand we have the right mindset and personalities in here, achievers who want to get better. And within reason, if somebody can show them a better way, they're willing to do it versus fight you on everything. That's one of the biggest things we have to really screen for because boy, we don't miss on many, but typically that coachability or ability to want to change, and it's easier for somebody to go, "Well, I've tried to fix this for 20 years. It's just not possible." That makes you feel better psychologically.
Here, we can find a profitable path that's going to be different for everybody and custom, but just people being able to go, "All right, you're the experts. Educate me." Are you more of a dictator, or are you an educator who then implements and executes?

Stacy Phillips:
We're definitely educators because it's hard to make a change if we don't explain the why of what we're trying to accomplish. And so we spend a lot of time educating the clients on what we do and why we do it the way we do it.

Casey Hiers:
That tends to put them at ease, right?

Stacy Phillips:
Absolutely.

Casey Hiers:
So many of the people we've worked with they paid a lot of money in the past to consultants, and it was just grown. You got to grow, and there's growth and profitable growth, but ultimately, they don't get a lot of the why behind it. Your team does a good job of painting the picture. Here's option A, here's option B, here's the pros, here's the cons, here's money back in your pocket, but there's not one way to profitability. Speak to that a little bit, right? Fee-for-service practices, insurance-driven practices, big, medium, small, like the customization.

Stacy Phillips:
Absolutely. I mean, every practice is different. So everyone's plan is different. They have different goals, and we have different visions for what their practice can be and we'll ask the client what their vision is for their practice and personal life, for that matter, and kind of go from there and mold that into what we think and then kind of get everybody on the same team and with the same vision and then move forward from there.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
When you ask them, how often have they worked with somebody else or some other company that just has a cookie-cutter template that may not be at all what they want?

Stacy Phillips:
Very often, they've maybe experienced other firms that do similar things to what we do. I would tell you the difference is those firms may develop a comprehensive plan, and then they will hand that to you and say, "Here's your plan for the next year, go work on that." The difference here is we try to take 80% of things off of their plate and do those things for them on their behalf, and it makes their life a lot easier when we're able to do that.

Casey Hiers:
Give us an example.

Stacy Phillips:
Prime example, but you're in the practice, and you want to buy a large piece of equipment, you're looking for financing, maybe the company does not offer good financing, and then we'll go out and seek different banks, talk to all of them, find out who has the best deal or the best structure that we're looking for. We already have all the client's information on hand, so we provide all of that. They don't have to do anything basically, and they'll show up at the end, sign the paperwork. So it makes their life very easy. They don't have to waste time talking to banks. We handle that for them.

Casey Hiers:
Talk about the decision-making aspect of things because practice owners, again, sort of on their own or piecemealing an old team, when it comes to decisions, they have to a lot of times, go on instinct or best judgment. That can be a variety of areas, right? Should I buy real estate? Should I buy another practice? Should I drop an insurance? But talk to them about not just talk to our listeners about not just educating them, but the decision-making, big and small, that we help with.

Stacy Phillips:
It really comes down to communication because when somebody comes on board, we tell them, look, you don't have to do everything we tell you to do. But if you take about 80 to 90% of our advice, and especially anytime there's a really big item, if we can all be on the same page there, that's what really makes the difference. And it gets back to the communication and just talking through everything and explaining why we're saying this is the best option and how we get there.

Casey Hiers:
Let's zoom in a little bit. Let's talk results and impact because ultimately, we're doing a lot of things for our clients. What is the true impact when somebody maybe finally waves the white flag and just puts the ego away and says, "I need to be a better steward of my practice and my talents because I'm not making the money, saving the money." Talk about impact.

Stacy Phillips:
The impact is huge. When this is done properly and someone's coachable, we get a lot of comments that this was the best decision I've ever made. I wish I'd found you guys 10 years earlier, and we continue to find people that wish they had found us sooner.

Casey Hiers:
From that I look at on the front end, I mean, I talk to a lot of practice owners who they're tracking or trending for maybe a retirement of three and a half to call it $7 million. It's a big, big variety there, big, but that's probably hits 80% or so. Talk about somebody who's maybe on track for four million or somebody who's on track for eight million. What have you seen our impact for each of those scenarios be?

Stacy Phillips:
Yeah. When we hit the impact stuff from the original consult and re-discuss that, people just can't believe that there's potential for them to get to that number. But when you get as detailed as we do, and this is a long-term deal, somebody comes in, maybe they're on pace for three or four million at retirement, and a lot of times we'll see a 15 to $20 million number because there's so much available there if it's done the right way.

Casey Hiers:
Now, those are a lot of times people that find us in their mid to late 30s and early 40s, when there's more time, number one, to make less mistakes getting into just some examples, because these can go good, but a lot of times we see people who have tried crypto and real estate and all these wonky investments. They've tried everything and made mistakes. If we get people early enough, number one, we eliminate the mistakes.

Number two, when you start lowering overhead and improving cash flow and sourcing more money to invest, and as good as we are at investing, that's when you get those big numbers. And we've had people who ... Let me revert. I've had people who said, "Well, that's a big number." Well, after about six or seven years, I'll talk with them at lunch, and they're like, "Casey, some of the numbers you said earlier on, I just wanted better taxes and a little better cash flow. I thought you were drinking the juice."

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Well, and as we were kind of saying, when you ask them maybe what their wishlist is, what they're going for, maybe they're more excited about retiring at 50, and maybe they won't have 20 million, maybe they'll have 15, but they're looking more forward to early retirement. So that's kind of where you guys come in when you ask them, "What is your goal? What are you hoping to do?"

Stacy Phillips:
And a lot of times, that changes over time, what their goal is. We tell people, "Look, our goal is to give you as many options as soon as possible." But to your point, Jarrod, what they want when they come on board may change over the years, and they may say, "Okay, I want to retire earlier." So that happens a lot, and because we do such a good job of helping them along the way, they have that option a lot of times of calling it quits sooner.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
What's our record for earliest retiree?

Stacy Phillips:
Well, our current record is age 49, and that, interestingly enough, was not a huge producer. It was just a very well-run practice, ran low overhead, made great decisions, and pretty much followed everything we told them.

Casey Hiers:
Was a client of Four Quadrants for two decades. And it not only goes to the upside of, again, what's possible, but all the mistakes that practice owners make, and sometimes it takes those mistakes for them to realize it. But then again, we don't change the way you practice, but then sometimes, well, what all do I have to do? I mean, client tasks are basically write checks, enter payroll and daily deposits, and send invoices, but what do these clients have to do to in many cases, double their income, triple their retirement savings, and double or triple what they're on track for when they go to retire? What do they need to do?

Stacy Phillips:
The biggest thing they need to do is follow Casey's rule, the $5,000 rule. So anytime they're going to spend more than $5,000 business or personal, just reach out to us, tell us what you're thinking, what do you want to do, and we will help them consider their entire financial universe and make the decision based on that as to how we go about doing that. And that's the biggest thing. Everybody comes in, and they're like, "Well, how does all this work? How do you produce these results?" And I'll tell them, "Look, I don't have a magic wand I wave and all of a sudden we fix all your problems." The reality is it's a collection of small decisions over time that add up to the results.

Casey Hiers:
We can't produce dentistry. They've got to produce dentistry. They've got to be coachable and basically follow most of our advice. We have the luxury of having lots of people to see their journey, but it's not that hard. But what is hard is for number one, people to admit, well, I haven't figured this out. Somebody else can. Number two, to have the trust. And again, just be protected from yourself sometimes. How many practices do we have where it's like, just don't screw it up now? We've got you set up. Now we're your insurance policy to make sure you don't mess it up. Because you mentioned long-term, we work with people throughout their career. It's not practice management.

Stacy Phillips:
Unfortunately, we've had clients in the past that thought they had it figured out and decided not to stay with the firm. And then a couple of years later, they come knocking and realize they made a mistake, and we have several of those on board now that are back with us, and they're said, "We're never leaving again. We understand the importance of working with you."

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Stacy, what would you say would be the biggest common factor for people who may have flunked out of 4Q University?

Stacy Phillips:
The common factor of people that don't work out well here is they don't communicate, and they're unwilling to be coachable and change the way things are done.

Casey Hiers:
And we also can't, like, if somebody gets divorced, we're not marriage counselors, we can't help with that, like emotional instability, sometimes we can't help that.

Stacy Phillips:
And of course, we joke about that. We do everything except marriage counseling. And then one year, we had a gentleman asked, "Well, can you help me with my golf game?" And then somebody made the comment, "Well, Stacy used to be a golf bro. I think we can handle that."

Casey Hiers:
Yeah, we've got a lot of single-digit handicaps here that was the joke, and actually, we probably could help you with the golf swing. But no, it's easier for Stacy and I to look at things on paper and be like, "This is just such a no-brainer." I get the opportunity to go speak with these folks who come, and they're just, "Well, I just don't understand. How is this possible? How's it possible?"

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Does that come maybe from the clinical mind that they have, needing to kind of see something tangible?

Casey Hiers:
That's a good question. No, that's a good question. I mean, the black and white. People's minds go to, "Oh, well, sure, if I just fired an employee and use bad supplies, then I would have plenty of money." Well, number one, no, you wouldn't. And number two, that's not the secret sauce at all. And unfortunately, when people don't have the experience of improving their practice, normally their trends are up, down, and all around. It's easier to say it's not possible versus, no, I can delegate. And I've said this many times. The wealthiest people are those who can monetize a skill, and then those things that they're not trained in delegate to those who are. That's really the secret sauce for success in the business world.

But so many high achievers in the worldview of a dentist who solves problems for patients, they really have a hard time doing that, or they love investing, right? Rappers want to be basketball players, and basketball players want to be rappers. I talk to so many dentists and specialists who they want to be a day trader. They have a hard time relinquishing the investing. Talk to that a little bit, Stacy.

Stacy Phillips:
That is a tough one. A lot of people kind of toy with investing, and they want to keep doing that. Our goal is to take that off of their hands. We've got multiple qualified people here, registered investment advisors, certified financial planners, to handle the investments. Obviously, you have a long track record of doing that for clients successfully, and we enjoy doing it, and obviously, we keep them informed as to what we're doing, and we've had some really great results here recently, and it's just fun to see, and people really appreciate it.

Casey Hiers:
Well, I mean, if somebody needs their tooth extracted, Jarrod, let's say you need a tooth extracted. You could go get some pliers and rip the tooth out, or you could go to somebody who's trained in it, and your experience would be better and all of that, but-

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Or just suffer for life.

Casey Hiers:
So many practice owners would almost rather just, it can't be done and suffer, and complain than actually fix it.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Because them complaining at least is some power they can control.

Stacy Phillips:
Yeah. This leads me to another point that I think is important to mention. A lot of clients come on board, and they are so worried about paying debt, and we kind of turn the tables on them. They'll come in where, on their hierarchy, debt is first and then savings is last. And we kind of flip that to savings first and then once everything else is taken care of, then debt's the last thing because why would you pay off low-interest debt when you can put that money in the market and make three to four times? It just doesn't make any sense. So it's changing people's mindset and showing them the actual numbers behind those decisions.

Casey Hiers:
Through the education, and yeah, overhead's so hard to trim. And this came to me, right? At home, let's say somebody's trying to lower overhead at home, let's trim some things. Well, I could not pay my heating bill. A lot of times, people think, "Oh, I'll use bad supplies or fire an employee." Well, in the winter, that's going to be devastating to me and my family that I decided to trim that. Now, if I trimmed going and playing world-class golf courses or five gym memberships, well, those are probably smart areas to trim. Weird analogy, but I think that kind of aligns where so many times people think they've got, "Well, I can't cut. I've got to have heat. I've got to have good employees and good supplies." Yes, we agree. We're not trying to get you to do that. But man, when you look at five dozen different areas and get 80% of those better, like you said, it's chipping away at it.

Stacy Phillips:
I want to get back to kind of the client experience part of it. And a big part of what we do here is involving the spouse and all of the communications and the meetings. We feel that's very important for everybody to be on the same page, that they're not used to that. That's something new. Every year, they will come to our office here in Carmel, and we'll do our four to five-hour meeting. To us, it's not just a meeting, it's an experience. You're getting picked up at the airport by a limo service or our professional chauffeur. We put you up at one of the nicest hotels in the country on the north side of Indianapolis. We send our driver over in the morning to pick you up. Come back to the office here, do our four-to-five-hour meeting, and then we'll take everybody out to a really, really nice lunch.

Sometimes clients will stay over an extra night and kind of enjoy the city. Sometimes they're flying out that evening. We'll take them back to the airport, and it really becomes like an experience for them. It's not just about the meeting. To us, going to lunch and breaking bread and getting to know the client is just as important as the business and personal meetings that we do earlier.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah. It's a really good balance of let's do the heavy lifting and get the job done to deliver for our clients, but then let's also have that relationship and the respect is different when you prove the results and then care about them and want to spend time with them, versus so many of these traditional dental consultants or practice managers, it's-

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Try to be your buddy first.

Casey Hiers:
Let's be best friends, and then people are underwhelmed. Relationship grows with results. And here we have incredibly deep relationships because we deliver results. That is so unique because most of the time it's the opposite.

Stacy Phillips:
When you come in for year two, there's a whole new section of the plan that's titled Achievements. And we'll discuss what happened over the last year, what did we accomplish and, what were their goals and did we hit all those? So it's a really fun process.

Casey Hiers:
It's interesting how accustomed some people get, like year one and two, or say year one and then like year six, and literally they went from making 300 to 550. They went from saving 50 to 200. They're on track for many, many, many, millions more. It's almost like they forget about the early days. Stacy, thank you for giving us a little peek behind the curtain.

Stacy Phillips:
And I love talking about the overall process because it's so much different than what people are used to, and they really enjoy it.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Stacy, I'm sure you know this, but sometimes the very first step to even getting in the door here or getting on the phone call is to come and see us at one of our speaking events that Casey and his team host.

Stacy Phillips:
Absolutely. I hear they have some really good bourbon, some nice steaks, and some really good CE as well.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Folks, if you want to check out where we will be next, go to fourquadrantsadvisory.com/events. And I know we're going to be in Cincinnati. We're going to be in Columbus, Ohio, Carmel, Indiana. We're going to be in Ann Arbor. So there's a lot of really cool places and events and things and exciting restaurants. Thank you, folks.

Casey Hiers:
Thank you.

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.