The Extraction Ep 36: Build Dental Enterprise Value With Strong Operations Teams

yeah we're excited to have you so let's talk about specifically the the erosion i think if you would analyze the questions that i ask and the things that i'm trying to uncover when we do these episodes is what are the one to two things that owners should be focusing on what are the one to two things that most owners are getting wrong? And so most owners, I think, are thinking a lot about revenue.

But from your perspective, what actually separates a growing practice from one that is building real enterprise value?

Gosh, this answer could be This answer could be way more than just a couple of things.

I'll tell you some of the ones that are most prevalent that I'm seeing lately.

So a couple of things, I think number one, especially in the dental space, a lot of people try and kind of overcomplicate how to grow a profitable business.

And what I mean by that is, is, you know, they always want to look at these fancy tools.

This piece of equipment is all of a sudden going to just explode my business, even though my business is struggling with the fundamentals or whatever.

If I bring in this service, then all of a sudden my business is just going to explode.

What we found, and there's nuances to this, but what we found is the most profitable and fastest growing businesses we work with just got really good at the fundamentals.

The business is focused on process.

They understand their KPIs.

They understand their numbers.

They understand the business like the back of their hand.

And I think, and actually this is one of the reasons that TeamCare has been such an amazing tool for us, is I think a lot of people, when it comes to business growth, they always want more and more and more.

more locations, more doctors, more operatories, more all of these things.

And that's why, not that that's the bad thing.

It's a great thing if you already have the fundamentals in check, right? And so what you see sometimes is these practices that have 5, 10, 15, 20 locations, you And the story they tell you is, man, I remember when I was that single location doing 4 million, and I was taking home a million dollars a year, and I make less money now, and I have a whole lot more headaches than I used to.

And it's because they assumed that the fastest way to higher EBITDA or higher growth is always just adding locations.

But if your business isn't running well, you're essentially just stretching across more overhead, meaning your business gets less profitable, but you have more headaches.

So I think the first one would be, and it's not the fanciest or most exciting answer, but the first one would be probably just, you know, it's the fundamentals.

You have to get really, really good at the fundamentals.

The second one that I see come up is probably they underestimate how much time it takes to do this stuff effectively.

So I'll give you an example of, you know, I was talking to a doctor here recently, and he was talking about kind of the stress that he was going through and things like that.

He said, you know, Jordan, I've got all this stuff, but I don't know if my team's following things.

And I said, well, great, you probably are due for... you know, some type of operations director or someone who's a little more talented in that realm.