When Courage Counts: Why Avoiding Problems Costs Dentists Big

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, good afternoon. How are you?

Casey Hiers:
Good.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
You were out of town just a couple days ago.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah, I got down to Florida.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah. You were down to Tampa presenting some of our wise wisdom that we provide. How was it? How was your trip?

Casey Hiers:
That was good. Nice city. Great venue. You know you're at a good Italian place when the guy comes in dressed to the nines on his 30th cup of espresso, reeking of coffee, introducing himself, and the place was his grandfather's name. I mean, the heart. It was a really cool spot.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
I saw some pictures that you'd sent back to me, and it looked awesome. The food sounded amazing.

Casey Hiers:
There was a Tampa Bay Lightning game too that night. When we went to set up, the bar was hopping early.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah, Nice. While you were down there and while you're not just at Tampa, you've been... We talk about this all the time. You're all over the country. You go to a lot of events. We host a lot of events. What is a common theme or fact you're finding with, let's say, someone who's maybe upper middle age, maybe in their mid-fifties? What's a common theme you're starting to see out there?

Casey Hiers:
I'm just going to go for the jugular on this.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Okay.

Casey Hiers:
It goes from, this is fun tasting bourbon, and this is a cool restaurant to, that was good information to one-on-one conversation. My wife's going to divorce me. I am going to go bankrupt. Dentistry's curse word, curse word, curse word. I don't know how this happened. I quickly go from a subject matter expert to almost a psychiatrist.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Well, and would you say even 30 minutes prior to this opening up, most of these guys and gals are saying that everything's fine.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah. I mean, that's human nature. Holding your cards close to the vest. You don't want anybody to detect weakness.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
I don't want to complain, but here I go. That's how I usually start my conversations.

Casey Hiers:
The words in dentistry specifically, we were talking briefly, chickens coming home to roost, and in dentistry, a lot of things in life, but you can address them early on in life and set yourself up, or you can neglect them and then look up and find yourself in your fifties, and you're like, oh, oh. And we'll get into what that oh oh means.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Right. And this is something that I feel like most people can relate to on some path of some sort. Personally me, there's probably quite a few decisions in my mid twenties, college age, and twenties that took me years to recover from in terms of college, credit card, things like that.

Casey Hiers:
I'm off the clock with psychiatrists. But yeah, no, it can go with diet, weight loss, working out, money, handling money. There's a lot of places it can go, but ultimately, chickens coming home to roost. That's probably what this comes down to, right? As a practice owner, you can enjoy dentistry and ignore everything else, and ignorance is bliss, but at some point, you're going to look up and go, huh, I don't want to be 80 practicing.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Still working.

Casey Hiers:
Or 70.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
How often have you been seeing that happen? More than you'd like?

Casey Hiers:
Well, what I like's not relevant, but it's disheartening and frustrating when I hear more and more of these stories. Right.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
I think what's disheartening about it, too, is the average person sees dentists as being successful people with money. They make money and to see them still working at 70, 80.

Casey Hiers:
But yeah, what's the origin of chickens coming home to roost? I use that word. I know the context of it, but I like to know the origin of things.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
All right, and this is right off the top of my head. I didn't have to Google search this or anything. It comes from an author, Robert Southey. He wrote that and introduced that phrase in a poem from 1810. The phrase is, curses are like young chickens. They always come home to roost.

Casey Hiers:
Hmm.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah.

Casey Hiers:
So what's roost? But yeah, coming back to this, I think that ultimately having the courage to get things right early, and this is all coming from, again, what conversations I have when I'm out and about. Spoiler alert. A lot of the things we talk about they're things that practice owners tell me across the country. I'm talking to [inaudible 00:04:38].

Jarrod Bridgeman:
So it doesn't matter what area you're from.

Casey Hiers:
Oh my gosh, that's a whole other thing, right? People overvalue, well, you don't understand. I live here. 80% of the geography we go to it's the most unique geography ever.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah. Yeah.

Casey Hiers:
But again, there are unique challenges everywhere. Tackling what those challenges are is the point of this. And it really comes down to courage. I was talking to a specialist, doing well, makes a lot of money, didn't really want to do their own practice. So was an associate making good money, had the opportunity to become partner. Sure, why not? Well, now they look up again, they're in their fifties. The older specialists there's no exit plan. They're not producing. The one I talked to is frustrated, and they literally just said, "I didn't have the courage to do what I should have done. I needed to outline what the partnership looked like, understand when their end date is, really get clear on that stuff." But by nature, a lot of you all listening are non-confrontational, right? You treat patients that, hopefully, it's a low percentage, but a lot of them have dreams of headbutting them. But you have to be nice to them. And so you're non-confrontational by nature.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
And this is, a lot of things we talk about here, we have answers that come from data and stuff, but a lot of things that people feel or write their feelings, their emotions, and so sometimes they don't have the courage to speak up when they should have, and the longer they wait, it's almost the worst it feels.

Casey Hiers:
Well, that's the message. Have courage, have strategy. Listen, when that happens, most of the podcasts that we talk about, you can have some of those results. You can have financial freedom in your fifties. You can call your shot, you can retire if you want to, but when you don't have to practice, you enjoy it. So then you back off a few days.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Right.

Casey Hiers:
Again, if you practice dentistry with no plan, no strategy, no courage, no vision, and you just kind of put your head in the sand with the business side of it, you're going to look up in your fifties, and it's going to be frustrating. And I get frustrated for them when I hear this, and they even tell me what the answer was. When I was 35 or 40, I should have taken this more seriously. I should have gotten fill-in-the-blank. Besides the clinical, all the stressors you all have. If I would've addressed that head-on and just done a better job, I wouldn't have been in this position. But hearing a specialist makes a lot of money, but they were still frustrated because there's a lot of dentists that, if they made what they person made, they would think they would have no frustrations. Guess what? You trade one set in for another.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Correct. We've been kind of focusing on partnerships for most of this podcast, but are there any other specific or broad categories that chickens may be coming home to roost for a dentist or a practice owner?

Casey Hiers:
Yeah. Having the courage and strategy to address overhead.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Overhead, yeah.

Casey Hiers:
How about insurance? Insurance reimbursements? All of a sudden, you look up, you haven't addressed it. You're practicing a lot. Your 30%, 35% insurance adjustments, you feel trapped. You feel stuck.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
What about staff? Maybe having that, maybe you inherited a staff member who's been with the practice forever, and they're old and maybe not performing as well as they should anymore, and making way too much money?

Casey Hiers:
That's probably easier for practice owners.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah. Okay.

Casey Hiers:
But yeah, I mean, there's addition by subtraction. If you have a bad culture, get rid of somebody. I mean, that's more like a practice management sort of, from our perspective. Obviously, if somebody has a problem, get rid of them. But high overhead, high insurance adjustments, retirement, partnership. Let's say you have a partnership. If you don't have a plan, a strategy, you have clear communication and address these things, practicing dentistry, that joy is going to fade because these things are going to just overwhelm with stress. And so just talking to this person, they knew it, but they were asking for help at this point, and I gave them, again, not knowing their situation. I don't give specific advice. But I said, you might want to meet with them and have a big person conversation.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Time to put on the big boy pants.

Casey Hiers:
And understand when is the exit strategy, what that looks like? There is some frustration here with lack of production, and you're getting paid extra money to do the administrative things, and because you're the senior partner, they got a pretty good deal. They're not producing as much. And so again, it's just when we present, when we do podcasts, I just try to encourage people, what are your challenges, and what are you going to do to fix them?

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Right. And I get that some people may be afraid to even think about it, but things aren't going to get fixed.

Casey Hiers:
It's uncomfortable.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah.

Casey Hiers:
And that's where corporate dentistry and DSOs have sort of, and that's going away. People were like, well, in 2018, they were going to offer me X multiples. Cute. That money's drying up. And we heard another statistic that a lot of times, when some of the promises, oh, it's all going to be centralized. You don't have to deal with any of that stuff. About 20% of it actually gets taken over and centralized a lot of time. And that's a whole other topic. But I guess my point is being able to sell out to DSOs and corporate dentistry was sort of that Hail Mary bailout that some practice owners have had in the past. It's still there from time to time or different opportunities, but ultimately, again...

Jarrod Bridgeman:
You wouldn't put all your eggs in that basket.

Casey Hiers:
If you're a practice owner, you need to get these things right. And it's so beautiful when they do. And when they don't, it's so ugly. That's really the difference. We could pull a 38-year-old client, and then we could pull somebody who maybe found us, and they're 54. And it's incredible what is possible when you get this right. But the first step is, I'm not going to accept mediocrity. I'm not going to accept this. I'm going to address it head-on. It's really neat that as a firm, we are just working with more and more. They come to us successful, they're already making a million, and we get them to make two. That happens. They're already making six, we get them to a million.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Well, and that's all because they had the courage to pick up that phone.

Casey Hiers:
Something. Right? So that if you're 38 and you get a big tax surprise and it pisses you off enough to then go make some changes. Actually, that tax surprise was a blessing because if that didn't happen at 38, you'd probably look up and be 55 and go, huh.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yep. And it's crazy to me too. It's like, yeah, seeing that tax surprise and how we've been able to help our clients fix those situations when they get onboarded, that's really just a small piece of the puzzle. That's not even where the big money comes from.

Casey Hiers:
Well, I'm teaching my young daughters when we don't lie. And if you lie, typically it's not just one lie, then you have to have another lie, and you keep covering it up. Next thing you know, you've got 19 lies. You can't keep track of them all, and you're sick to your stomach. Well, this is kind of the same thing. This stuff gets out of control, all of it. And again, if you don't have the courage, it's going to hit you.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
It's even worse because you're lying to yourself.

Casey Hiers:
Do you want to address it when you're forced to?

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah.

Casey Hiers:
Or do you want to address it when you are in control of it? But yeah.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
If someone wanted to maybe hear a little bit more on this, what should they do? Should they maybe come see you speak at an event?

Casey Hiers:
Well, it's interesting. A lot of people have been reaching out. It's like, we record this, and we have fun and just share real-life experiences from practice owners and dentists around the country. But more and more people are like, "Hey, man, been listening to your podcast. I'd like to talk." So that actually-

Jarrod Bridgeman:
And I know they've been saying stuff like I hear that Jarrod guy. He sounds like he's really handsome. That's a big one.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah, you carry the whole thing. But my point is, eventually, when people can get exposed to information enough, it's all about timing, the right time to make a change, to do something different. When's the right time to go start working out? Well, it was yesterday. But if you're not going to do it and be excited about it, then...

Jarrod Bridgeman:
That's right. And so it may not be the right time for us to be able to work with you because we don't work with everybody, but reaching out isn't going to hurt anything. You're still going to get some information. You're still going to find things out.

Casey Hiers:
Educate yourself. You attend the course on our website. You can educate yourself.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
It might just get your wheels turned and maybe thinking, oh, maybe my standard CPA that I have is not really doing quite a bang-up job.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah. Timing's everything. Just talk to somebody today. They've got a lot going on.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
They've got it all going on.

Casey Hiers:
But yeah, again, the chickens come home to roost.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
That's right. Just like curses.

Casey Hiers:
It can be on your time, or it can be on...

Jarrod Bridgeman:
The chickens' time.

Casey Hiers:
There you go.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Casey, here within the next two months, we're going to be doing a bunch more events. We're going to be in Nashville, Tennessee, for a bourbon tasting, which is pretty exciting.

Casey Hiers:
And we're doing a brunch in Denver or Boulder or somewhere.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
Yeah, so we're going to be doing-

Casey Hiers:
So we're not just about bourbon.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
That's right.

Casey Hiers:
I mean, listen, you don't have to touch a drop if you don't want to touch a drop.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
So in April, we will be in Colorado, we're going to be in Denver, and we're going to be in Boulder. We're doing a bourbon tasting in Denver. We're doing a brunch in Boulder.

Casey Hiers:
Yeah, the brunch is crushing it right now. I think some people are like, I want to learn about overhead and taxes, but I don't need the burn of bourbon down my throat.

Jarrod Bridgeman:
That's right. I'll take some mimosa instead. If you're interested in checking out those events, please go to fourquadrantsadvisory.com/events. Whatever platform you're listening to this podcast on, please rate us and review us. Preferably, the higher, the better, but things like that do help us spread the good word out there for everybody else. So thank you, Casey, and thank you, the audience.

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 Dentists 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.