Can “Dental Moneyball” Up Your Growth Game? – Episode #412

Starting with changes in baseball that were highlighted by “Moneyball”, data-driven analytics have transformed sports. Can dentists learn from this analytics revolution and use data to drive more predictable practice growth? That’s one of the questions Ryan asks George Hariri of Shared Practices and author of “Dental Moneyball” on this episode of the Dentist Money™ Show.

Show notes:
DentalMoneyballTheBook.com

 

 

 

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Podcast Transcript

Ryan Isaac:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another glorious episode of the Dentist Money Show, brought to you by Dentist Advisors, a no commission fee only fiduciary comprehensive financial advisor just for dentist all over the country. Check us out at dentistadvisors.com. Today on the show, it must be Shared Practices Month because I’ve got George Hariri, Dr. George Hariri from Shared Practices, Shared Practices CFO and CIO. Stay tuned for what that means.

Ryan Isaac:
I was talking about a book that they just wrote, he wrote, and it will be coming up very soon, called Dental Moneyball. There’s a couple links at the end of the show for how to download the first 40 pages free, and how to get a copy of the book. We’re talking about how to make big picture, long-term decisions with data and analytics, driven by information and not emotion, and focused on the big picture, not laser-focused on some piece of random strategy, which we tend to do as humans sometimes.

Ryan Isaac:
So, awesome conversation with George. Thanks George, for your time, and all of you, thanks for being here. If you have any questions, go to dentistadvisors.com, click the book free consultation link. We’d love to have a chat with you, answer your money questions, point you in the right direction. Thanks for being here. 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, and I’m here with longtime friend of the show and friend of Dentist Advisors, George Hariri, Shared Practices. What’s up, man? How are you doing? How’s it going?

George Hariri:
How’s it going? Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, yeah, It’s been a log time.

George Hariri:
Oh, man.

Ryan Isaac:
I didn’t even get your tittle. You’re the CFO of Shared Practices, is that correct?

George Hariri:
Yeah, I am. I have two roles. So one is CFO, and that’s more of the day-to-day kind of job, and then I do… I’m the innovative guy probably. We have a lot of innovative people, but for me, that’s definitely something. So I’m a Chief Innovation Officer, and it’s my job to make sure that we are continuing to innovate and we don’t get stuck in our… As you get bigger, you get more stable and it sometimes it’s harder to remain nimble, and so it’s something that I fight against.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay. Since this podcast goes to thousands of small business practice-owning dentists around the country, I’m always interested in how everyone started their… The origin stories of their businesses. So, a lot of… I mean, dude, I feel like this is Shared Practices month on our podcast because I’ve done like two podcasts with Richard recently. I love it. But do a little origin story. Take us back. How did Shared practices begin from your perspective? When did you get involved and what’s that been like to go from those small days to where it’s at now?

George Hariri:
Yeah, it’s crazy. So I’ll give you my origin story. So Richard started the podcast back in 2016, in August, and at the time I was in a small Slack group with five people, and Richard was one of them, and so that’s really how we knew each other. And I had supplied spreadsheets, and I just kind of was a friend of the show, and I guess for those first months. And then he was in the middle of his Army residency and his wife said, “Podcast, family, Army residency, pick two.” And he was…

Ryan Isaac:
He picked Army and podcast.

George Hariri:
He actually got to pick all three because he found a third option, which was find a partner who would do a lot of the work. So, I met Richard and we started talking on the phone. And really, for me, what I was passionate about was building a business on the back of Shared Practices, and Richard was more passionate about creating the content. And so, I think that him and I have always had a little bit of like an influencer-entrepreneur relationship where I’m probably the more pure entrepreneur. I don’t have a lot of influencer in me, and Richard on the other hand, is definitely the influencer of the two of us.

Ryan Isaac:
That’s funny.

George Hariri:
And that’s why you’ve heard him on the show and he’s very social, he goes to all the events. And so, Shared Practices, the journey for us as a company has two very distinct phases. There is the phase before we became a DSO, and that phase, we sold consulting and education, we had services that we offered. And I graduated from dental school in 2018, and then I immediately bought a practice. And I practiced in there all the way up until COVID, and they make you take a month off because of COVID, and it was then that I realized I had a lot more passion for the shared practice side of my life than the being a clinical dentist operating a single practice.

George Hariri:
And so, I actually made the decision over COVID, I was like, “Look, everyone right now is not looking for a dentist, and everyone’s firing their dentist, and I’ll do the opposite thing, and I’ll hire somebody to replace me full-time so that I can be full-time whatever I’m doing at Shared Practices and have the practice have two full-time associates.” I was newly divorced, so my living expenses were pretty small, and I was like, “Alright, well, this is the time to make a shift in my life.” And so that was… COVID was really the month off of not practicing clinically that I realized that that was the path for me.

George Hariri:
So I made a big shift in my career, and then a Shared Practices group began. It was an idea at first. We were like, “Hey, we have a lot of expertise in practice management. We’re pretty good at operating practices, and we have this whole consulting division that’s helping people grow their offices. Maybe we can own these practices ourselves.” And that’s sort of been, January of 2022 was when we officially wrapped up the paperwork, but we spent the entire year of ’21 becoming a DSO, and that was an expensive and painful process. And then 2022, we’re a DSO. We opened up 10 locations last year, then we ended the year with 18, and then this year we’re opening up 22, and we’re gonna sell three of them. So we’ll end the year with around 37 locations this year.

Ryan Isaac:
How busy is the education side of things still?

George Hariri:
Yeah, so it’s funny, the consulting and education, it used to be our entire business, and now it’s like 5% of our business, so.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh, wow.

George Hariri:
We’re highly… 95% of our revenue comes from patients, and then 5% comes from dentists with the services that we offer. We offer a lot of services, but it’s just, there’s just an extra degree of scale when you own the practice as opposed to when you get a small fee to help someone run theirs.

Ryan Isaac:
As the Chief Innovation Officer, if I said that right, what worries you about not innovating? Just in the space now that 95% of the business is practice-based in the DSO, what worries you about innovating?

George Hariri:
For me, I’m really big on diversification within dental. So I feel like if you ask, what is our core expertise? Our core expertise is dental practice management, and that has a lot of different avenues. And I think when… Like for example, dentures and implants practices right now is the majority of our growing itch. We’re spending a lot of our time and effort and money opening new locations, managing our dentures and implants practices, building out clinical education for our doctors. It’s a big part of what we do. And for me, I wanna make sure that isn’t all of what we do. I wanna make sure that we are utilizing all of our expertise to grow a diverse business that is more stable.

George Hariri:
I’m a CFO, right? So it’s like, for me, I like diversification, I like stable revenue streams, I like a lot of different parts of that. And so, we’re just now experimenting with our second practice model, which I’m really excited about. It’s been sort of something I’ve been waiting for for since 2021 to launch. So this is a second concept that we’re gonna be releasing, so we have a couple of locations that we’re gonna be opening of, it’s called Twilight Dental. So it’ll be, it’s an emergency-based model, and it’ll be opening up in Reno and Louisville, hopefully pretty soon here by the end of the year. And that’s gonna… That for me is I think the innovation piece.

George Hariri:
It’s like, we had success with one model and we’re growing that model, and can we have success with another type of dental business model, where we can… And we’re always looking for those opportunities in the dental market that are underserved, or opportunities that really lend itself well to the sort of vertically integrated. You have like call center, project management team, regional management, everything is kind of all the same, it makes it easier to operate, so that’s something that I’m working on. And then, again, we’re always rolling out new services, so we’re experimenting with insurance services to start offering practices insurance verification and claim submission and all that kind of stuff on the back end, that’s something we’re beta testing right now.

George Hariri:
So, I kind of have these two very distinct jobs, one is like, it’s my job to be responsible financially, and then it’s also my job to experiment. So what ends up happening is I experiment cheaply, and it’s like, I think it’s ultimately a good thing, ’cause you’ll see companies blow so much money in R&D, and I don’t think we’ll ever do that. I was originally our CEO before Richard took that role back, and the switch from dentist CEO, kind of founder entrepreneur to CFO was a really… That was a year of a very, very challenging. And everyone I would… Not everyone, but the bank that we were working with, they didn’t really believe in my ability to be a CFO, so that kind of made it challenging.

George Hariri:
And it was a lot of self-education and studying and understanding things, and I made incorrect decisions on hiring accountants, I made all kinds of mistakes. But it’s been a year and a half now that I’ve been in the job, and I feel comfortable and I honestly feel more like a financial person than a dentist, which isn’t what I was expecting, but there it is.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, like rewind five years ago and tell yourself, this is where you’d be and you’d be like, “I don’t believe that. That seems crazy.”

George Hariri:
Yeah, they say the average person has seven jobs in their life, and…

Ryan Isaac:
I believe that.

George Hariri:
So I think I’ve kind of worked my way through several of…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, I believe that. So, we’re gonna talk about the book today, but before we get into that, ’cause this probably leads into it, if it doesn’t, sorry for the tangent, but I just wanted to get your take on how the dental industry is different than it was, say, 10 years ago.

George Hariri:
Oh, gosh.

Ryan Isaac:
You could even talk about five years ago. We’re gonna talk… The book, Dental Moneyball, right? That’s the Title. Okay.

George Hariri:
Yep.

Ryan Isaac:
This is just my opinion, my observation, but there’s just such a different emphasis in the dental world on numbers, metrics, finances and business savvy than there was years ago, especially like a full generation ago. It used to just be, set up shop, have four good chairs, be a good person in the community, and you’ve got a 30-year career that no one will ever take from you. And now, that stuff counts, but there’s just so many other things you have to be able to do well as an owner. So, I’m just curious, before we get into the book, what have you seen change? What do you think is so different now in the industry?

George Hariri:
Yeah, I mean, I feel like I’ve been in dental since the beginning of dental school. So for me, that’s almost 10 years ago. And I remember when I started school, they were talking about how consolidation, everyone was saying it’s gonna be about 50/50, 50 corporate owned, 50 private owned. And, I mean, I was at a conference last year and the guy on stage was saying it’s gonna be 85 corporate, 15 private. And it’s like, that to me is the change. In the last 10 years, it’s been, consolidation I think is happening faster each year, and also, they’re getting more sophisticated.

George Hariri:
The PE firms that are acquiring these portfolio companies are getting much more sophisticated. There’s much more of an emphasis on same store growth. So I feel like there’s like, there was the golden age of dentistry, you call it ’70s, ’80s. Yeah, I would call it. That’s the hang a shingle and make a good income. And then…

Ryan Isaac:
Well, I swear some of those people made more money from the buildings they owned in the ’70s, ’80, and ’90s than their career in dentistry.

George Hariri:
So I put an offer on a practice. I didn’t end up buying this office, but in the book, there’s a case study, I do five real case studies, and one of them is the person who actually bought this office, but I was trying to buy it first. And I put, it was $3.9 million, and it was $1.9 for the practice, and like… It was $1.9 for the building and $1.8 for the practice. And it was like, in a lot of these deals, the building is I think just as big of an asset as the practice. But nonetheless, I felt like… And then there was this period where it was like, okay, dentists were starting to advertise and they were starting to commercialize a bit, they were starting to focus on websites…

Ryan Isaac:
Which is really taboo, right? Advertising as a dentist, and marketing was just so not cool.

George Hariri:
And I would say that was like the last 20 years. Like 20-10 years ago, that was where it was at. And now, I think with the rate of consolidation and the rate of corporate competition, it’s harder and harder for that private practice owning dentist to compete because you have insurance costs are getting cut, you have inflation rising costs, and you have… It’s just, I think, this is the hardest time that the private dentist has ever had. And when we… I think someone asked me, “Well, why did Shared Practices become a DSO?” Well, I’ll tell you exactly the moment where this decision was made.

George Hariri:
I was sitting in a conference and I was hearing about consolidation and the rate of money coming into dentistry. And I’m a second generation dentist, and so for me, I don’t love everything that happens. My big, big pet peeve is the financial engineering of duct-taping practices together and flipping them for more money, and putting a bunch of debt on them that they can’t support in these deals. And it just, to me, it’s like, well, is this best for the patient? Is this best for the dentist? Is this best for the team members? And it’s like, I don’t always think so.

George Hariri:
And that was where I was like, okay, I could sit there and go post on Dental Town and write about it and complain like a lot of people do, or I could try to do something about it. And so I think that was where I felt like at Shared Practices, we have an audience of dentists who look at us as an example, and I wanted to set an example for, I’m gonna do this and I’m gonna do it in a way that I think is the right way that builds value. You build value for patients, you build value for team members, and you build value for doctors, so that you’re not duck-taping things together and getting a higher price point by selling it, and it’s like, that’s not the part of the business I’m passionate about.

George Hariri:
I’m passionate about, okay, consolidation is gonna happen. Realistically now, it looks like dentistry is gonna be like banking. It’s just gonna keep consolidating until there’s three or four. That’s probably the way this is gonna go over the next 50 years, and I wanna be one of the ones that set an example for a way that it can be done well. And I think that there’s just so much stuff that happens that I don’t support in that space, and I think that that can be hard for me sometimes, and I just try to put forward an example that I’m proud of.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Can you play devil’s advocate a little bit and tell everyone how you think a private practice non-corporate dentists will survive?

George Hariri:
Yeah, this is why I wrote the book.

Ryan Isaac:
Well, then let’s start. Okay, well, cool. All right.

George Hariri:
Yeah, so this is why. Like for me, Shared Practices, we intentionally try to ride both sides of the fence. We don’t wanna ever be all DSO or we’re all private dentists. We wanna be whatever… We are for whatever. I think that there’s always gonna be need on the private dentist side. And I think the one thing a private dentist can offer that a corporate group cannot is long-term stability of the doctor-patient relationship. That is the unique selling proposition that private dentists have, is I’m not going anywhere. And also, I can say this from myself as somebody who operates a DSO, a private practice owning dentist can operate a much tighter ship than somebody who owns many practices can.

George Hariri:
Because you are there as the owner operator who caress, who is invested in the success of the practice, and you are there. The onsite leader who has full ownership over the business, that can’t be replaced. And I think that the single-site performance is something that I think the bigger DSO struggle with, and I think that the single site performance is where the private dentist really can succeed. And so, I’m curious. So if I use the word Dental Moneyball, Richard kind of gives… He’s not a sports guy. I’m a big sports person. And so, like the title Moneyball, every time he says we talk about it, he’s like, you need to start with what Moneyball is and what it means. So, how familiar are you with Moneyball the movie, or the book, or anything?

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, I love both of those, and I’ll always just think about Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill RFPs getting dragged in social media right now. But, yeah, the movie, both so good. But why don’t you explain it? Richard’s probably right. For those… I will say, I’m like not… I wouldn’t be considered big sports guy either. I sit in team meetings and there’s a lot of data and recent statistics that I don’t know what they’re talking about. So, for those who don’t.

George Hariri:
Yeah, so Moneyball is essentially the concept of using data to gain an edge. That’s really the whole thing. ‘Cause sports is a competition. You’re in a closed league. It started in baseball, so you have 30 whatever games in the league, and Moneyball is like, “Okay, how can I use advanced analytics?” And the computer age allowed us to process data in ways that we couldn’t before, and then this allowed teams to get an extra layer of insight. And so, Moneyball is like, “Okay, well, how can I use all of this data to win?” That’s the whole game. And so that’s really what the book is, the book is really for the dentist, the private dentists out there who are operating their own practices, how can you use data to gain an advantage to operate the best practice possible, facing all the challenges that you’re facing in the modern day.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay. Can I ask you a question in that, just in that point? Our company was built on the same kind of principle and financial planning, which is using data and analytics to make smarter financial decisions and avoid bad ones, but it does seem like there’s not a shortage of data points in a dentist life, right? And so, what’s the actual issue? It’s not really a lack of data…

George Hariri:
It’s a lack of understanding.

Ryan Isaac:
But dentists typically don’t engage, yeah, they don’t engage with it typically.

George Hariri:
So the Harvard Business Review did a study and they looked at essentially business intelligence across the industry, and they compared it to sports, and they talked about how businesses are quite behind in the adoption of effective KPIs.

Ryan Isaac:
Interesting.

George Hariri:
And what you’re saying is correct. I feel like sometimes I get a little annoyed when I see like someone thinks that an analytics-based philosophy is the same thing as the five KPIs that matter, like a blog post or something, and it’s like, Okay, these five things are what I need to look at.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, then that’s it.

George Hariri:
Yeah, well, it’s like, well, hold on. An analytics-based approach is customized to the practice. So each practice has their own top five KPIs that matter to them, but you can’t blanket statement, these are the five most important things for everybody.

Ryan Isaac:
That sounds like, in Twitter, “The five KPIs that matter, a thread.”

George Hariri:
Yeah, exactly, right? It’s like, okay, you read this and now you know how to use Dental Moneyball. It’s like, that’s not really it. And I feel like if you look at sports, I’ll use, basketball is a great example. So basketball pre-data was the mid-range jump shot, the responsible two-point jumper. You don’t take irresponsible threes. But then Daryl Morey comes around and he looks at data and he’s like, “Well, the three-pointer is worth 50% more points, so maybe I don’t have to make it as often for it to make more sense to take them.”

George Hariri:
So, in the book, we have what’s called the dental three-pointer, and it’s the same thing. It’s something that, the industry standard look at the dental practice might see, in this example, hygiene, they’re like, “Okay, well, then the safe strategy for hygiene is to minimize openings, make sure you’re profitable and focus on hygiene profitability.” And if you look at the industry of advice around hygiene, you’re gonna see a lot of focus on hygiene profitability as the primary objective. And Dental MoneyBall is, “Okay, well, let’s take a step back and let’s say, ‘Okay, well, how do we look at a hygiene exam differently?'” And so we look at a hygiene exam by looking at the total revenue impact of the appointment.

George Hariri:
So we look at, okay, how much is production? That’s what everyone else looks at, how much hygiene production do you get. We look at that. We also count the exam fee, so we look at the exam fee. And then we also look at very similar to you would look at expected points per attempt, we look at how much on average are we scheduling for every hygiene exam? So when I did this in my practice at Arrowhead Family Dentistry, I was like, okay, well, it turns out we were getting more average scheduled treatment. It was $220 of average scheduled treatment every time I walked into an exam room, and that was more than the production and more than the production plus the exam.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh, interesting.

George Hariri:
So it actually turned out, the largest source of value from the visit was the scheduled treatment, not the hygiene production or the exam. So that’s like the Moneyball approach. If we’re looking at data, we’re getting a different conclusion, and then now how do we use that to win? And that’s…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, that’s the key, right? How do you get someone to engage in that kind of information and then do something with it?

George Hariri:
Yeah, and that’s where we actually have a model and a philosophy that opens the hygiene schedule. So we actually intentionally have a lot of openings in hygiene with the idea in mind of there’s a lot of benefits. So one, you’re gonna have more of that scheduled treatment, so same month revenue will go up, but then also, when you re-appoint someone forward, you now have added another patient to your long-term pool of patients in your practice.

George Hariri:
And so, what we found is shooting the dental three-pointer, as we call it in the book, is this data-driven different strategy from what everyone else thinks is the best way to do something that allows us to grow practices faster, have honestly a bigger clinical team, which is a better lifestyle, increase people’s incomes and grow practice and allows them to go from maybe a solo dentist who doesn’t have an associate, to having enough patients to having an associate after 9-12 months.

George Hariri:
And so that’s the type of thing that we’ve been experimenting with. We look at every part of the practice to say, okay, how are these parts of the practice connected? How is the way you answer the phone connected to the way that you collect treatment? It’s all connected and there’s data around everything. So we took the time to understand the implications of the different parts of the practice working with each other, and how do we optimize for what the owner wants.

Ryan Isaac:
What made you distill this down into a book? I mean, you guys have been experimenting with these kind of techniques and data points for a long time, but why the book?

George Hariri:
Yeah, so we’ve been experimenting since 2020, and so we’ve been gathering client data and testing different things, and then we teach a two-day course called Analytics-Based Practice Management. So it’s a 14-hour course where we go to go through all of our findings and our philosophy and all of the things. And we feel like this really helps people. Our average client growth year over year has been fairly high. We average around 38% collections growth across all of our clients year over year, and so we feel like we wanna make it more accessible. So, at the beginning of 2022, when I took on this new role, Richard told me, he’s like, “Hey, let’s write a book outlining our analytics-based practice management philosophy.”

Ryan Isaac:
And by let’s he meant you.

George Hariri:
Yeah, let’s as in, “You do it, and I’ll write the forward and then we’ll publish it.”

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, I like it.

George Hariri:
And so, well, I was looking for a project, so I was happy to take it on.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, cool.

George Hariri:
And I think that it goes to… I really believe in, I think any time you write a book, there has to be a strong motivation, and in the book I write about, my first year of ownership, I didn’t really understand what was happening in my practice, and I was going on the Internet and I was looking up tips and I was trying them out. And it turns out, so this is kind of a part of the introduction of the book, but I bloated my practice expenses. So my first six months, I made good money, in my second six months, I literally worked for free as a dentist for four days a week. And so it’s like you’re working four days because a dentist, I have this practice management podcast yet I’m making no money. It wasn’t a good time in my life.

George Hariri:
And I just really can relate to that frustration of, I’m trying things and nothing is working, and I needed to either fire team members or grow my practice, and I wasn’t really willing to fire good people, so I just wasn’t making money and I was working and that was what I was more okay with. But if you look at how much money dentists spend trying to grow their practice, buying cone beams, taking courses, buying the materials, and it’s like, it’s not that hard. When you understand what to do, it’s actually much easier than people might think.

George Hariri:
So, it’s just about like, I just wanna help people solve this annoying problem of not understanding why practices perform the way they do, and also helping people get the type of life that they want. Ultimately, something we believe is that our practice is a vehicle for your life, and it should… There’s that work-life harmony. Like your personal life should be bleeding into your professional life and that works back into your personal life. And so I think I looked at just impact, like if this was accessible and people could read it and gather information from it, then I’d feel like I’m doing something good, and that was worth it.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, let me ask you about that lifestyle. I’ve heard of work-life integration, whatever. I’m a big fan of that. I like that too. Do you think that expectation has even changed probably since COVID in the dental world? It used to be like, “Hey, if I can have a career where I worked four days a week, maybe even three, and make good dentist money, I’m good.” But now I hear a lot of, I’m sure you do too, even that three or four day work schedule is starting to feel a little bit like they’re a little chained to the practice. They can’t get away, they can’t take impromptu vacations. Is the lifestyle expectation in dentistry for a dentist changing too, or what they want for freedom and flexibility?

George Hariri:
Yeah. So I think this next generation of dentists, the younger dentists, and this is not…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, it’s the kids, man. It’s always the kids just messing everything. I’m just kidding.

George Hariri:
Well, it’s not even like dentists.

Ryan Isaac:
I like it.

George Hariri:
It’s this younger generation of…

Ryan Isaac:
Totally.

George Hariri:
Person of the workforce is somebody who prioritizes more their happiness than their income.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, I love it. That’s so great. Yeah, finally.

George Hariri:
And that’s new, right?

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, it is new.

George Hariri:
We haven’t really seen that before. So I do think, and I think that one thing is, for me, there was two worlds where I could have… If I had a smaller practice, I couldn’t have done what I did, of hiring another dentist to replace me so I could focus on Shared Practices. And that’s sort of what I’ve noticed a lot, is like that dentists practicing by themselves, yes, you can close the office and go on vacation, but you have to close the office to go on vacation versus if you have an associate…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, you have to shut everyone down. Yeah.

George Hariri:
You can have them there and at least you’re breaking even when you’re gone, and so then it’s not as big of a cost and it’s not as big of a burden to leave. And I think that there’s a big… I noticed that in my career when I went from working four days a week to three days a week, that was a really big difference because all of a sudden I had more days off than I had on. And, so I just, I find that there’s a lot of qualitative benefits that come with a larger business that’s more…

George Hariri:
One thing we talk about a lot in the book is infrastructure, like having an office manager and some protocols that your office operates on so that it’s not… Again, breaking that shackle between the owner and the office, and I think that all of those things play into exactly what you’re saying, is that lifestyle is becoming more and more important and people are willing to trade income for that.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, I think that’s true. And you’re right, it’s a generational thing. It will change the workforce forever, just like generations ago did when they did things in a very corporate, kind of you work for one place for 50 years kind of situation, and it’ll change things. But I do notice that in dentistry, and it does seem like you can’t have both. You can’t have the flexibility and the old model of dentistry at the same time. They don’t co-exist together. So you have to decide which one you wanna deal with and which one you don’t wanna deal with most, and build towards that.

Ryan Isaac:
In the book, I’m wondering, as I’m hearing this, it’s a lot of data and analytics information. Are there softwares that people need to follow along, or is this accessible stuff everyone can get their hands on?

George Hariri:
Yeah, so the book really focuses on what are the takeaways from all the data, right? Know who my audience is. My audience is dentists. We’re not gonna… There’s some graphs and stuff, but the majority of the book is best practices using a data-driven approach, which are much different than best practices without a data-driven approach. A lot of the things that I talk about in the book are maybe controversial in the practice management space. I’m not here to make friends. I’m here to give what I think is the best information, and if I’m contrary to what people have heard before, then that is what it is.

Ryan Isaac:
Do you mind sharing some of those hot takes? Like give me one?

George Hariri:
I mean, the hygiene one for sure is a hot take. Telling people to open up their hygiene schedule is very counter to the industry standard. The other thing that I say, I go against the notion that I think that there’s a notion in our practice management space right now of schedule to your goal, or like you have a scheduling system, and that’s supposed to make you more productive. I disagree with that, and I kind of outline my reasons in the book. I talk about the things that I think push productivity much more than that, mainly being diagnosis, case acceptance, I think are a much bigger deal, and I think maybe at the end, scheduling can do something, but I think for most people, it’s not where they should be focusing.

George Hariri:
But I go back to like what I did. I was an owner who had a practice that grew very quickly and then tanked and I took on a lot of expenses, and I didn’t know why my practice tanked, and I didn’t know what to do to get it to grow back to where it was before. And so I looked at my… I went to these courses, I got these checklists, and I started implementing checklists to in my practice and had people, like roles and responsibilities were very clear. And I think the biggest thing is, I think that there’s missing clarity. So when you go on Facebook and there’s a post talking about the best warm scented towel to use for all of your hygiene patients, it’s like, “Well, what is that doing? What result is that having, and how is that gonna get you to where you wanna go? And I think that…

Ryan Isaac:
It’s a too small picture. It’s too laser-focused on something that might not even have any direct effect to outcomes you even want.

George Hariri:
And I think that that’s what dentists spend most of their time doing, is these things that aren’t leading to the true effects. And so in the book we talk about it, is that every practice has a unique bottleneck, and it’s that bottleneck that is preventing it from growing. And if you don’t use a data-driven approach to identify that bottleneck, anything you do in your practice is gonna be limited by it’s…

Ryan Isaac:
You wanna spin your wheels.

George Hariri:
Yeah, and so I think that that’s what happens, is I think the industry standard way of teaching practice management is, these are the best practices, this is the way to answer the phone, this is the way to do this, this is the way to do that, this is… And they’re all how to’s, and it’s like, but what should I be doing? And I think that we focus much more on like, you only can do one thing per department in our philosophy, so we focus on one change in hygiene, one change for the dental assistants, one change for the front desk, and it’s our belief that what they do is where we wanna be spending our time.

George Hariri:
Like what are we gonna focus on for our dental assistants? What are we gonna be focusing on for a hygienist? What are we gonna be focusing on at the front? And those are custom to that practice, custom to the owner’s goals, and custom to their specific KPIs at the office level. And I think that that isn’t really what’s being taught right now. What’s being taught is, this is the best way to do this, this is the best way to do that.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, here’s the standard practice, implement this across the board and get it done. Alright, you can wrap with where people can find the book, but what should a reasonable expectation be when people get the book and read it? They read it and then how would that play out in let’s say the next quarter of their business life?

George Hariri:
I love that. So a realistic expectation is that you will think about your practice in a new way. That is like the most realistic…

Ryan Isaac:
Okay, cool. It’ll change your mindset.

George Hariri:
Yeah, it’ll just change the way you see things.

Ryan Isaac:
Cool. Cool.

George Hariri:
Now, where can you get the book? This is a frustrating story.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh, I heard about this. Yeah, crazy.

George Hariri:
Yeah, so Richard told you?

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Gosh, man.

George Hariri:
Yeah, so long story short, dentalmoneyballbook.com is the website that we have, but when you…

Ryan Isaac:
Dentalmoneyballbook.com. Okay.

George Hariri:
Yeah, dentalmoneyball.com was taken. I don’t know who has that, but we couldn’t get it. So dentalmoneyballbook.com. But so when we went to… I wrote a first version of this and I didn’t like it. So then I hired Scribe. They were the ones who wrote Goggins, they wrote Goggins’ book, Can’t Hurt Me. They’ve done a lot of really good books, and I was like, “You know what, I want a really high-end book.” So we hired them. It’s quite expensive. We did it, and I spent months writing this with them, and then me and this professional author got to a second version. And then internally, with our key opinion leaders at Shared Practices, we went and got a third version. So then we’re finally done, three versions of the book, I am so ready to stamp this thing, and then the publisher goes bankrupt. And so the publisher goes out of business, and so I’m like…

Ryan Isaac:
Like, what? Come on.

George Hariri:
I’m Like, “What the… Are you kidding me?” So then I just got all my project files from them, and we got to figure out a new solution.

Ryan Isaac:
Gosh, man.

George Hariri:
They gave me a timeline that’s not acceptable to me on when they can do it. They went from a staff of 130 to a staff of 25.

Ryan Isaac:
Jeez. Okay.

George Hariri:
And so they’re being acquired by a new company. Long story short, we’ll be publishing it a different way, and so dentalmoneyballbook.com is where we’re giving away the first 40 pages for free in a PDF format.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay. I saw that.

George Hariri:
So, anyone can download that, and then on there, you’ll be on our email list and then we’ll send you an update when we have it live and ready.

Ryan Isaac:
Cool. So just go there and download the first 40 pages, get on the email list, be notified when the book is ready. Yeah, I love that. I like that you said, it’ll change your mindset, and something you said before that is, I think it’s probably just a human trait, but the way you were talking about scented towels that they use in hygiene, like this very nuance specific thing as like the thing, people behave that way with finances and investments too.

George Hariri:
Oh really?

Ryan Isaac:
They’re laser-focused on some esoteric or really specific investment idea, as if that’s the thing to solve the whole issue in their entire financial lives, which is so big and so complex. And you actually don’t know what the strategy is supposed to be unless you have data. Unless you have a big picture told by data first, you don’t know what strategy to implement. But people do this. They just laser-focus on some end game strategy, and sometimes you’re just left wondering like, why are we fixated on that thing? Like picking that stock or that crypto or that piece of real estate, or taxing, or whatever, why are we focused on that, man?

George Hariri:
That’s a great analogy. I think about whenever I hear about a stock in the public, that’s like the worst time possible to buy that stock because that is when everyone is buying that stock.

Ryan Isaac:
If you heard about it, yeah. Let it go, man.

George Hariri:
But it’s like, the person that follows that just kind of carousel of different advice is always gonna be spinning their wheels.

Ryan Isaac:
True. I think it’s just human behavior. We want results. We wanna get to the results as quickly as possible. We’re not patient. We’re not a patient species. So anyway, and the other thing I like about your approach, the way you guys educate, is there’s data, there’s information, there’s how to, but so often it just takes like a third party to make you get anything done. Therapy is like that, coaching is like that, financial advice is like that, marketing, consulting, gym memberships, personal trainers. We as humans, just, it’s not that the things are technically super complex to do. It’s just we have a hard time sticking to them, and it takes sometimes a third party, unemotionally involved to help us do that, and you get a really good philosophy on that, so.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay, so dentalmoneyballbook.com, download the first 40 pages for free, and then be notified when the book comes out. Where can they find Shared Practices? You guys have events we’re doing with you guys this fall coming up. Where can they find Shared Practices info?

George Hariri:
Oh, I would just go to sharedpractices.com.

Ryan Isaac:
This is Richard’s realm.

George Hariri:
Yeah, I am not the promoter of this.

Ryan Isaac:
You’re like, “I don’t know, dude. Wanna talk about a PNL?”

George Hariri:
Yeah, for me, I feel like…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, sharedpractices.com.

George Hariri:
Yeah, sharedpractices.com. We do a lot of different things for a lot of different people.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, I like that. Yeah, you do. Yeah. Man, well, thanks for coming and talking about the book. I’m excited. Sorry about the publisher issues, but I’m sure it’ll get worked out soon and I’m excited to read a copy.

George Hariri:
Yeah, I think for us, that was an opportunity to do something different and better, so.

Ryan Isaac:
I will pre-order it as soon as it’s available.

George Hariri:
Thanks, Ryan. And I look forward to hearing your take. So, I wanna hear your thoughts.

Ryan Isaac:
I’d love to. Hey, let’s do a follow-up. As soon as the book’s out, I’ll read it and then… Actually, can you have Richard do an audio book narration? Would he do that?

George Hariri:
So, I’m actually gonna be doing that.

Ryan Isaac:
Are you gonna do it? Cool.

George Hariri:
Yeah, Richard was like, “Don’t do the audio book. Your voice isn’t good for the audio book.”

Ryan Isaac:
What? Shoot, man. This is harsh.

George Hariri:
And I was talking about it in one of our podcasts, and then everyone was chiming in, like listeners, we have a little submission form, and they were like, “No, no, we want you to do the book.

Ryan Isaac:
For sure, do it.

George Hariri:
And so I’m like, “I’m doing it.” Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
I like when author, I don’t care if they’re professional narrators, I like when authors read their own books for the most part. It adds just some different character and depth and context to it. So, for sure, do that. But I will read it and then let’s do a follow up podcast.

George Hariri:
Just send me your address and I will send you a book. Okay?

Ryan Isaac:
Okay. Sick. Okay, let’s do that and then let’s do a follow-up when it comes up.

George Hariri:
That sounds great, Ryan.

Ryan Isaac:
I love it.

George Hariri:
I look forward to it. Thanks for having me on.

Ryan Isaac:
Thanks, George. Thanks Shared Practices. As always, if you have any question for us, go to dentistadvisors.com, and we’ll catch you next time on another episode of the Dentist Money Show. Take care now. Bye-bye.

Practice Management