And I'm curious to also know, what are you most excited about when it comes to dentistry right now, and what makes you nervous about the industry?

I think, uh, on the, on the excited side, um, I think the, uh, the introduction of, uh, AI capabilities is, uh, very exciting, and I think we're only in the very earliest chapters of, of that trend.

Clearly, there's been a lot of, uh, focus on developing AI-driven clinical tools, um, and that, a lot of that has been, uh, where the early adoption has, has been occurring.

But we're beginning to see, um, agentic-driven applications where AI is answering phones, scheduling appointments, managing patient follow-up, working, uh, uh, a- as the, uh, point of interface with, uh, uh, the insurance, uh, payers in, in the background.

So there are a lot of evolving efficiencies, um, that are, uh, I think coming down the pipe, and it's gonna be exciting to see how that plays out.

In, in terms of things that, uh, um, I'm, I'm potentially nervous about, I think is gonna be, A, how effectively, uh, folks at, at the individual practice level are, are able to adopt, uh, uh, those tools.

I also am-- I think that we're on the cusp of kind of a changing environment relative to how the third-party payers are, uh, um, gonna continue to evolve.

Uh, what will the most effective healthcare leaders need to be successful in the next two to three years?

What's your outlook on where the market is headed there?

Sure.

Well, you know, I think if you have paid any attention historically to what happens in the private equity world, sort of the evolution of what I think is happening in the DSO environment is pretty consistent.

You see early stages of consolidation that's funded by institutional investors and private equity is that it's driven very much by arbitrage and scaling at a fairly rapid pace.

And that really reflected what went on in the DSO world for the better part of the last decade.

You know, all the emphasis was on grow, grow, grow.

And then as both the cost of capital raised rose with the increase in interest rates and the impact on the balance sheets, now we're seeing that there's kind of a maturation in my view of the DSO world in that there's a much greater emphasis on the ability to operationally drive year-over-year growth at the individual practice level.

And I'm curious to also know, what are you most excited about when it comes to dentistry right now, and what makes you nervous about the industry?