Is Third-Party Financing Hurting Your Bottom Line? – Episode 246

Have you done everything you can to make your practice more profitable? 

On this episode of the Dentist Money™ Show, Ryan interviews Dr. Bruce B. Baird, former dentist and founder of The Productive Dentist Academy. If the first step in making smart financial decisions is practice profitability, then you need to understand all of your options for increasing collections. 

Dentists have been trained to use third-party financing, but there are also other financing options worth your consideration. If you could increase your revenues and provide your patients with more choices when it comes to their oral care, would you do it?

 

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Podcast Transcript

Ryan Isaac:
Hey, Dentist Money Show listeners, welcome to another episode. Thanks for joining us today on the show. We have Bruce Baird talking about leaving money on the table in the practice and obviously how that translates down to your savings rate, your investments, your future net worth and your retirement. Is a good one on the show, lots of great information, especially after all the COVID and the shutdown and the cashflow crunch many people felt. Thanks for tuning in. If you have any questions after the show, go ahead and go to dentistadvisers.com, click on book free consultation and schedule a fantastic phone call with one of our very nice and experienced financial advisors. Thanks again for tuning in, enjoy the show.

Announcer:
Consult an advisor or conduct your own due diligence when making financial decisions. General principles discussed during this program do not constitute personal advice. This program is furnished by Dentist Advisors, a registered investment advisor. This is Dentist Money, now here’s your host Ryan Isaac.

Ryan Isaac:
Welcome to the Dentist Money Show where we help dentists make smart financial decisions. I’m your host Ryan Isaac, joined today by I think it’s fair to say living legend, Bruce Baird of a million things. We’ll just say it’s just Bruce Baird, you know who I’m talking about. Bruce, thanks for joining me today. How you doing, man?

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
Great, thanks for having me on. Yeah, a living legend means you’re just really old and you’re still alive so that’s the good part.

Ryan Isaac:
Well hey, there’s probably some more of those credentials, but I’m well, thanks for taking time. You were kind of just telling us that over the last six months or so you had done, say that number again. How many webinars have you guys been doing over this COVID period?

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
We did 58. 58 webinars in a period of about eight weeks during the pandemic from mid-March to about mid-May.

Ryan Isaac:
Wow.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
Until people started going back to work, but it was a pleasure doing it. Obviously dentists were just hanging around the house and we had full audiences. It was fun to be able to communicate during such a tough time and being able to help docs kind of steer the ship right.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, I’m with you. I think that, yeah, it was a cool opportunity, I guess, to just shift and say, “All right, we have the technology and we have people’s attention and people are trying to learn things a lot right now.” And to clarify, did you do a lot of these with, and we’ll get into this, but Compassionate Finance in Productive Dentist Academy or mostly one or the other?

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
Yeah, we did probably most of them, of the 58 were with Compassionate Finance and Comprehensive Finance. And then probably I did 10 to 12 for PDA. And then we also started doing some online courses for Productive Dentist Academy, which we’re doing now. And they’re going really good. I’m really pleased with the way that people are kind of acclimating to this new, hopefully not normal, but the new thing we got to deal with right now.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, for sure. Well, let’s get into that today. For our audience, kind of just want to point out what we want to get to and help with today are basically two things, but it all kind of falls under this idea of leaving money on the table in the practice, which for our audience and our business, we’re focused on helping dentists make smart financial decisions a lot with personal finance, which means your practice has to produce, it’s got to be profitable, you got to have a good income and then do smart things with it. That’s kind of where we’ll head today but before we dive in, Bruce, how about give us maybe just some background on for anyone who might not know you, which I think is everyone here, give us some background of yourself.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
I’ve been practicing dentistry now for 40 years. And I say 40, I just retired from the hand piece.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay, congrats.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
I’m not retired, but I retired from the hand piece a year ago. And about 17 years ago, I started a company called Productive Dentist Academy and a lot of people are familiar with that. We help dentists become more productive and more profitable and we help them grow in a, I would say, in an organized way where they understand their business and they really understand predictive analytics and how do I look forward to knowing what I’m going to make next month before the month shows up. And not just waiting for the accountant rendition of how it went. And so we teach that and then, and that’s been growing. We’ve got a marketing company, consulting company and a lecture company that’s based out of Anacortes, Washington.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
I’m here in Texas, but that’s where Victoria McMahon is my partner. Lives up there and so she kind of runs the day to day operations. And then 10 years ago, right after the financial collapse of 08 to 10, I was starting to notice that some of our patients weren’t moving forward with treatment like they always had. And I’ve been a direct marketed directly to patients, never really been involved in managed care with PPOs or any of that type stuff. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just, wasn’t around 40 years ago when I started and was able to build a successful fee for service practice, but I noticed people were hanging onto cash and they were hanging onto their money. And my partner, Jeff Booskie, I think he may have met Jeff, but Jeff was asking me a question and it’s kind of what started the whole thing.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
He said, “Hey Bruce, you think we can finance people for ortho if we got 2,000 down?” And I was like, “Well, how much does it cost? What’s what’s our hard cost?” He said, “$420.” And I said, “What do we charge?” He goes, “6,000.” And I went, “Okay, well, I don’t do ortho.” But I was like, “Wow, that’s pretty big margins.” And immediately in my mind, I started thinking I’ve got a $30 CEREC block and I’m charging $1,400 for a crown or 1,200 and I’m letting people leave, out doing treatment. And so that’s kind of what started it and I started looking at, and I’m kind of an Excel spreadsheet nut, I like running business models and all that stuff. And I did it and I literally probably was awake for 72 hours straight. I just could not sleep because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing, which was what banks have known all along is that interest offsets risk. And so that’s what began Compassionate Finance.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
And that was the name of the entire company. We had Comprehensive Finance was what we showed the doctors, the name of the company and then it was Compassionate for patients. Now it’s just Comprehensive Finance, Inc. and we have two products, one, which is Compassionate Finance, which is an in house financing product and another one called Abella, which is an AR, which we’ll talk about some other day. But that’s what I’ve been doing. I love finding solutions to problems. I love finding solutions to things that can help. You brought up the deal about leaving money on the table and when I step back and I look at this and most dentists, the average dentist has about 23% of their time open in their schedule. That was what was in dental economics. I personally believe that it’s probably closer to 50%.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
Why do I say that? Well, because most of the average dentist is doing $425 an hour, which is about $3,400 a day. Well, if you look at the cost of dentistry and that’s not a lot of dentistry in a single day and so what’s the average dentist doing? Well they expand their work into the amount of time that they have. I ask guys, how long does it take?

Ryan Isaac:
Maniter, yeah.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
How long it take you to cut a crown prep? They go, “Oh, 15 minutes.” I go, “Okay.” And their team is shaking their head because they’ll say 32 hours and piddle around because they don’t have another patient. That’s where Compassionate Finance really kind of changes the entire dynamic of how patients, I don’t think we have a shortage of dentists in the country, I think we have a shortage of good financial arrangements. We don’t have an access to care problem, we have an access to decent financial arrangement problem.

Ryan Isaac:
Sure. Yeah. That makes sense. Many good things there. Let’s talk about, really interested in some of the data that you’ve seen, let’s go back 10 years, a little bit when it was new coming out of the financial crisis, what did you notice in maybe the habits of dentists implementing a system like this and patients finally receiving care, not only a practice is growing, but people are getting the healthcare they need for themselves. What did you notice in the early days of that?

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
That’s the big thing and it really is swimming upstream, talking to dentists because they’ve been trained pretty much by third party financing. Third party financing, whether it’s Care Credit or whoever they pay most of the consultants out there to be their spokesperson. And even I would lecture from the front of the room and say, “Don’t be the bank,” until I spent a little time when I said, “You know what? I’m not being the bank here. I’m getting my hard cost covered.” I said, “As long as I get a down payment of say 10 to 20%, I’ve covered that cost, now what is my time value worth?” And my time value skyrocketed after Compassionate Finance and I’ve always had a pretty high production per hour numbers, but my ability to be able to help more people really kind of blew up.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
And the thing that I noticed back during that time, dentists had a tough time changing over and saying, “Yes, I think this is a great idea.” But we kept hammering. We kept banging the drums. And today we’ve got several thousand dentists that are doing it and that have been doing it now for 10 years. And so they see the benefits of helping folks. We know that now statistically, if a person has a payment between 80 and $120, they’ve got about a 98% chance of making those payments. Especially if we do auto checking or that type stuff. And most patients in America make monthly payments for just about everything.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, it’s the way we operate. Yeah.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
Yeah, and so and statistically, yes, there are some defaults. If your dentistry is all competing for the same 35 or 40% of patients, which I’m going to call them the prime patients, they’re the ones that actually could get approved for financing. No one’s doing anything for the other 60% except telling them, well if you’ll prepay or we’ll do one crown at a time, which 95 out of a 100 crowns in the US today are done one at a time. Why is that? Because you tell the patient they need five crowns, the total price has got to be $5,000, for example. They say, “What will my insurance cover?” You tell them, “1,500, your portion is going to be 3,500.” And the patient says, “Can we just do one?” Every dentist listening to this podcast.

Ryan Isaac:
Nodding their heads.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
They know, because that’s exactly what they say. And so we’re really not doing favors for those particular patients. I use CERAC as an example, a $30 block, but there are guys that have their crowns made at the lab for 70 or 80. 1,500 of their insurance is just sitting there and they only do one crown. And so insurance ends up paying five, six, 700 bucks and the patient has to come out of pocket with six or 700 to do one crown. Nowadays, I just tell him, “Well, Bob, you could do that, but why don’t we do this? Why don’t we just use your insurance as a down payment?” Now picking up 1,500 cash for something that’s going to take me two hours. That’s 750 an hour cash I’m getting and why not, we’ll do some financing? You can have monthly payments as low as 80 bucks a month. This is for five or $6,000 worth of work. Patients go, “Well, yeah, let’s do that.” They’re not worried about interest rates. They’re really not. These are folks, many of these are subprime.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s just the monthly cashflow that’s the biggest thing, but it comes out doable.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
It is. It becomes affordable for them. We trademarked the term payment worthy. It’s not just about being credit worthy, it’s also payment worthiness and many patients are payment worthy. Now, when I say that and we’ve gotten a lot more statistics. We know default rates of what I call A, B, C, D, and E patients, because the E’s are the worst, the A’s are the best. The A’s and B’s are the ones that the third party financing approve. And when do people, when do banks loan you money? Most of the time, it’s when you don’t need it. And what we found was for people who dropped doing third party financing and just started doing compassionate finance alone, they had a 63% increase in cash payers. What you’re doing is you’re giving somebody the opportunity to work with Care Credit. Care Credit, and 85% of their loans are 12 months interest free so it’s not really a loan.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
And you’re giving up 10% off the top, which happens to be about 35% of your profit to do that. When in fact, 63% if you didn’t give them that option, would have went ahead and paid you cash. You’ve been trained to go, oh, we have interest free financing. We have interest free financing. And that’s exactly what happens. Today we say, we use your insurance as a down payment or your portion might be $500 and we can finance the rest with convenient monthly payments.

Ryan Isaac:
Got it. Man, it’s so fascinating. Let’s go back to what you just said. 63% increase in cash payers. That’s the by not offering the interest free financing for it. Okay.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
Yeah, you won’t hear that from the podium. You just won’t hear it, but it’s the truth. Why do I want to give up 10%, 35% of my profit, just so that somebody who has money can do a 12 month interest loan. It makes so sense. And people say, “Well, I need the cash. My practices on thin.” Your practice is thin for a lot of other reasons, but it’s not thin for that. An example would be one office that worked with us, in a year and a half from the time they started, a year and a half in, they were making more on down payments than they used to produce. They never had cashflow issues.

Ryan Isaac:
That’s crazy. Yeah.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
And when you’re in marketing and I know a lot of your clients market their practice and their business, if you’re marketing to a 100 people and they all come in and you can only have options for the top 35%, you’re wasting on these 60. And so that’s the opportunity to help people and what we call doing good while doing good. You can actually create revenue in your new company, your finance company, which is yours. It’s your paper. All that Compassionate Finance does is works the collection process.

Ryan Isaac:
Logistics of it.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
Yep, the logistics, the software and all of that. And the patient chooses their payment options. And it’s a nice way of doing business. And what we find is the pandemic proofing of your dental practice. How’s that? Oh, we’ve got a lot of dentists that we’re bringing in 35, 45, 50,000 a month during the pandemic and we’ve had them on these webinars saying, “Gosh, I don’t know what I would have done without that revenue coming in.”

Ryan Isaac:
Interesting.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
Just looking at recent numbers, we know that if the average dentist is probably making 15 grand a month, 15 to 18,000 a month. If they wanted to double that without doing anything different, except helping a few people in their open time. Literally, if somebody is making 15,000 and they start doing 15,000 Compassionate Finance, average note interest about 15%, 39 months average, they’ll be making in their little new company they have, their little finance company, they’ll be making 15 to 17,000 in three years on work they’ve already done. You doubled your revenue. That allows them to have money to pay off student loans. It allows them to have money to invest. To invest in their 401(k), to invest in undervalued real estate.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
Because there’s two parts to this. Not only is the monthly revenue coming in, but you also have the asset of a portfolio of paper that you own. That portfolio has extreme value. It’s short duration, it’s very high yield. And we’re in the process now of working with several people and so if somebody needed cash, they could get it. But the other thing, the monthly payments and this amount of revenue coming in, we’ve had guys buy an airplane. We’ve had people pay off their home. We’ve had people obviously pay off student debt, but it’s all done by helping just four or five people a month, a very small amount of time.

Ryan Isaac:
As you’ve listened to our podcast, maybe there’s a question about your finances you’ve wanted to ask. It’s easy to get an answer, all you do is just pick up that phone, give us a call at (833) DDS-PLAN to set up a consultation. Or if you don’t want to call us, you can just go to the website at dentistadvisers.com, click the book free consultation button and set it up. It’s free. Do it today.

Ryan Isaac:
What have you seen? What holds someone back from implementing this? Or keeps them from being able to pull it off?

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
Well, it’s a great question, Ryan. There’s basically three main reasons. The reason people haven’t done their own financing, number one, they didn’t know how. They just didn’t know what the rules and regulations are. And even people, I worry a little bit, oh yeah, we do our own financing. I worry a little bit. Are they following Fed? And are they following state guidelines? Because that can be pretty serious penalties. We went through and we solved that issue because we work with attorneys and we know the changes in every single state.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
The second reason was we were told from the front of the room, not to be the banker. Don’t be the bank. Don’t be the banker. You don’t know what you’re doing and let us be the bank. Well, and I used to say that from the front of the room, I don’t say that. I said, “You want to be the bank.” That’s why banks have big giant buildings in all these major cities, they know what they’re doing.

Ryan Isaac:
They know what they’re doing. Yeah, good call.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
They know what they’re doing and it seems to work for them.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
The third thing, which is the greatest hindrance is they say, “Well, what if they don’t pay me? I’ve done this work and what if they don’t pay me? By golly, I expect to be paid for the work I do and everything else.” Well, I don’t worry about it. And the reason I don’t is because the interest off the people who pay, offsets the people who don’t pay. I’ll give you an example. We know that an E patient who actually is below a 540 credit score, they default at around and this is not a static number. This is a number that fluctuates but you’re looking at around a 17 and a half to an 18% default. One out of five. Now, if I’ve had people say, “Well, I don’t ever want to do these.” I go, “Wait a minute. Let’s talk. That means you have 82% that are paying full term at 17.9% interest.” At least in 38 states. Other states you can’t, but still it’s offsetting. If you just get your financial calculator out, figure that out, I don’t worry about those that don’t pay.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s like a casino worrying about people who win. You’re like, why are you worried about that overall?

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
Exactly. That’s exactly. And so what we have are docs now, and you have your entire dashboard a lot. You can look at your dashboard daily. We now have an app that we’re just finishing that will have your dashboard on it. Anytime you wanted to look, they say, your team, what’s funny is, you may have a default, may have two, but you got 50 contracts out there that paying interest. And you get these two and I’ve had dentists go, “I’ve had two, I’m quitting. I don’t want to do this anymore.” And I go, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s step off the cliff. Let’s look at your pie graph.”

Ryan Isaac:
The whole thing. Yeah.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
And do you realize that you’re making 109% of your usual customer outflow? And they go, “Huh?” I go, “Yeah, you’re making 109%.” And so they go, “Oh, oh, I see.” And so, but it’s a communication barrier because most dentists just don’t have the business background. But once they start understanding it, they go crazy with it. And most important to me is now we’re helping those patients that need help. We have docs that are doing all on fours, all on sixes. And I tell them, “Okay, you’re going to do one loan and it’s not a loan because you’re not putting cash up. They’re paying 20% down. That’s covering all your hard costs. What you’re doing is you’re decided you’re going to invest time. And if you’re only going to do one loan for 40 grand or 30 grand, you’re at risk because if all your other loans are at 3,000, if this one at 40 defaults, that doesn’t look good on your numbers.”

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
What I tell them is, if you love doing all on fours and all on six and all that, then you want to do multiple, multiple loans of that size. Why? Because we know interest offsets risk. And so we got guys that have 15 or 20 $40,000 notes yet, but they have somebody default, we have to go, “Hey, look at your pie graph and look at your stuff.” Okay. I got it. I feel better. And that’s really where we’re looking.

Ryan Isaac:
If someone’s listening to this and they maybe fall in one of those three categories of to recap, you said, people often are wondering, I don’t know how, or I was told not to be the bank or what if they don’t pay? They have this fear, what are some metrics? I assume you guys go, you’re able to go in and kind of look at metrics and say, “You would be a great candidate or, maybe it wouldn’t be a good fit here.” What are some of those early logistics you guys go through in a process to help someone figure that out if it’s going to work out?

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
The interesting part is we have to have the team educated and we’re doing a lot of education with the team so they understand the concept. The dentists will sign up and then hand it to me and they go, “Well, they didn’t pay. We don’t like this.” No, wait a minute. They are paying, this is a long game. This is what you guys teach. We’re going to invest a certain amount every month. This is how we’re going to do it.

Ryan Isaac:
Consistent. Look at the longterm. Yeah, have some patience.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
And we’ve got guys who, we know statistically that A’s very rarely default. One half of 1%. We know that E’s default at 18. We know that our total default rate is somewhere around 11, 11 and a half percent. But even the people who default, paid your down payment and paid an average different, but anywhere from seven to 14 months of payments before they defaulted. In many cases you’ve already made your money.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
I’ll give you a good example. If an E patient comes in and let’s just say we did $9,000 worth of work, they put 2,000 down so it’s 7,000 bucks and their payments, they wanted them as low as possible, which meant 60 months. They’re not going to pay you $7,000 over 60 months. They’re going to pay you 10,800. Now that extra 3,300 or 3,800, that goes to anybody else that’s not going to pay you. It really is, it’s intuitive when you understand the metrics. It’s very counterintuitive when you don’t really understand finance. That’s been the biggest barrier. But what I love is now the thought process. If you want to double your revenue over a period of the next three years, just do however much that is, your net. Just do that much compassionate finance. And if you’re doing that, you’re going to be, you’ll be loving life in three years because now you’ve just recession proofed and pandemic proofed your business.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Let’s talk about that for a minute. This is kind of that leave money on the table concept. And I didn’t tell you to prepare for this so it’s okay if you’re like, ah, here’s some top of the head statistics. But any statistics that you can share on maybe the growth of total revenue or collections or profitability or income, kind of that bottom line stuff for dentists that have implemented these things.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
Yeah. Well, when a dentist can go from, again, the average dentist doing 425 an hour can now start to do, instead of one crown, they’re doing five, and 95% are one crown at a time, now they’re doing five crowns at a time, your productivity can be exponential. Meaning we’ve got docs now that are doing well over a 1,000 an hour, 1,200 an hour, 1,400.

Ryan Isaac:
Which makes more sense for the skillset and the business of dentistry to be able to pull that off. That should be happening.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
Should be.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s the access to capital, access to financing on the patient’s end that prevents that, like you said earlier.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
That’s what prevents it. And out of all the times I’ve told a patient, “Bob, you don’t want to do this. Why don’t we just do all five of them at one time, I’ll give you a pill. You can sleep. We’ll use your insurance as a down payment and we’ll give you 80 month dollar a month payments.” I have never had a patient say no. Ever. They just don’t say no.

Ryan Isaac:
You’re talking about their health. You’re talking about oftentimes pain and suffering they’re feeling anyway. They don’t want to wait four years to alleviate that and fix the problem the right way.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
And most people when they’re faced with that dire situation where they can’t afford, it’s cash up front or it’s you didn’t qualify, sorry, you didn’t qualify for bank financing, well we could do one every year and use your insurance. You’re not doing anybody any favors because by the time you get to year four, it’s turned into an extraction and graft and an implant and the costs just continue to go up.

Ryan Isaac:
Worse.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
Whereas I would much rather help people. And through doing that, we’ve created a revenue source for our own practice that is unmatched. You can create more wealth in dentistry by doing this than you ever imagined before. Ever imagined before. We have docs that have 1,800,000 in paper, that people are paying them. They don’t care. I tell you, if they want to go on vacation for three weeks, I’m going on vacation for three weeks. They’re not worried about the team overhead and that kind of stuff now.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Being physically there to produce or losing out on it, if you’re going.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
That’s right. And that’s why the average dentist, most dentists have never taken more than one week at a time off. That’s it. And you go across the country, that’s just what happens because I can’t leave. I’ve got all this overhead. The bigger your practice, the harder it is. Well, we had one doc in northern Florida, good friend of mine, he did over $840,000 worth of compassionate finance in one year. It happened to be the year before he retired. He then took all of his paper, sold the practice, took his paper with him, retired in West Palm for four years, never touched his retirement money. Just used the monies coming in.

Ryan Isaac:
That’s a huge deal. It’s funny you mention that. I think the ability to add more longevity to income is maybe one of the greatest underutilized financial planning tools that exists and investment return tools. Because the longer you can let things go, the better off you are. That’s brilliant. And as you’re saying this and you’re talking about a typical normal life where the dentist wants more cashflow to be able to go on vacation, we’re in August 2020, anyone listening in the future is going, “Oh I remember 2020,” because now we’re talking about a situation we’ve seen something new in dentistry, in the economy that didn’t exist before in terms of what could happen to a dental practice. What are the reasons you might need liquidity? Now we just added one we never thought of before.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
Huge.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, my wheels are turning. I’m just thinking, man, there’s a lot of practices listening right now that should be thinking immediately, if this happens again, liquidity is just, and I can’t rely that the government’s just going to print more money for us every single time. I got to do this myself.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
Being able to help people to me, that’s why I started the company because I saw people not being able to do the dentistry. And I felt like I knew what the statistics would be just intuitively. Truth is, I didn’t. I didn’t know that it was going to be 17 and a half percent default or 18%. I thought it might be 25. I thought it might be 30. Truth is it can be 30 and you still make money. And the lower, obviously an A, I know they don’t default very often, but when we have this combined measure, maybe 11 to 12% default, that’s nothing when you’re getting interest. It just is nothing. And so we’ve been able to watch dentists and I think the really important thing is the stress that dentists have in their business, it’s tough. Dentistry’s tough business.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
And you guys deal with this on a daily basis, but to have the dentist be able to take care of the student debt with the monthly payments that are coming in. Now that’s off the table. Take care of his, wow I want to do my 401(k). easy. I’m now investing in a 401(k). Now you guys, which I love how you go month by month, doing different highlights or focus. You can help them guide that 14,000 a month or 18,000 a month or whatever it is into the right places for their long term success. The earlier they start the better it is. And so I think, yeah, you have few people don’t pay. I would send them a letter and say, “Bob, I know you’re having some difficult times. God bless you guys. I’m still your dentist. I’m wiping this clean. You don’t owe me a penny. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.” I did that. We’ve had five defaults out of 1.4 million.

Ryan Isaac:
Wow.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
We’ve done good. But those five people out of those five, three of them brought money in and paid it off. Even though I told them they don’t owe us. And so I don’t worry about it. I’m not trying to pinch, I’m not stepping over the old deal about stepping over dollars to pick up pennies.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. That’s really good insight. One of the main metrics that we feel is maybe one of the most important indicators of someone’s financial health and health in where they’re headed in the future is their savings rate. And someone who’s floating in a 10 or 12 savings rate, that’s not enough. To be able double that, doing the same amount of dentistry they would do anyway. That is a future changing decision and implementation in the practice. And honestly, to me, for most dentists, for the average dentists out there, there’s no better place to implement higher investment rate, add more risk to your life in terms of investing in your practice. There’s no better place to do it.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
Don’t go buy a Taco Bueno and think you’re going to make more money.

Ryan Isaac:
In dentistry, no.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
Dentistry is like having your own ATM machine. Now if you can help people, remember I’m not doing a loan, I’m getting the hard costs covered. What I’m doing is investing my time, helping somebody and my time value goes up exponentially and truth is, very rarely will ever find anybody that will say, “I want to go back.” In fact, I can’t say I’ve ever had anybody now. I’m doing a 1,000 an hour now, I think I really want to go back to 450 or 500.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, because they’re not producing more because they open another location or they increase their hours and made their schedule worse. They’re just being more efficient and they’re helping more people in the process, which is great. Bruce, thanks for taking all this time. At this point, after what we’ve seen in 2020, it’s more important than ever to help everyone figure out how to increase productivity, efficiency and liquidity. And it’s just such a big deal. Where can people find you? Where can they reach out, learn more about this stuff and consider implementing it in their own practice?

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
You could go to compassionatefinance.com and that will give you all the info you need. There’s testimonials, there’s all that stuff. And we actually have, this is kind of cool. We let you get started. We used to have, well, we still have, but we’ve waved it, a $1,500 setup fee to set up all the stuff for you. We don’t have that at all anymore. During this pandemic, we’ve completely waived that. We have $199 a month, which is basically you can run all the credit checks you want. We’ve waived that. Literally there’s no real cost for 90 days. We give you 90 days to try it. See if you like it with no obligation. If you start doing loans, we take a little piece of that interest that you’re being paid to offset those costs. It’s not even coming out of your own pocket at that point. We’ve signed up more people in the last three and a half months and we did all of last year.

Ryan Isaac:
That’s awesome. Well, thanks for doing that. Funny, honorable mention, as we close this out, we’re doing this over Zoom, but the last time I saw you was in a smoky cigar room in a steakhouse in Texas, which was a little better than the Zoom call. Hopefully we get back to that again soon.

Dr. Bruce B. Baird:
I hope so too. I can’t wait to see you guys.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Thanks Bruce. Appreciate it. Thanks for spending the time. Thanks everyone for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed the episode, it was really great and we’ll catch you next time. Carry on.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay, my thanks to Bruce for joining on the show today, that was a pretty action packed episode. A lot of good information there and just a new way to think about being more efficient in the practice. If you have any questions for us about how all this might operate in your practice, but more importantly, how it translates to your personal financial situation, which is the bottom line of everything, give us a call, (833) DDS-PLAN, or go to dentistadvisors.com, click on book free consultation, chat with one of our very friendly and experienced financial advisors today. We’d love to hear from you. Thanks again for tuning in and for all the support. We’ll catch you next time.

 

 

Practice Management