Succeeding at the Business of Dentistry with Dr. John Meis – Episode #491

Practice ownership is becoming more challenging than ever before, and it’s not because of clinical issues. Increasing pressures are coming from managing a small business—marketing, team building, and balancing work with a personal life. On this episode of the Dentist Money Show, Ryan and Dr. John Meis, a fourth generation dentist and co-founder of The Team Training Institute, explore how to succeed in the ever changing landscape of dentistry.

 

Show Notes
The Team Training Institute
Book – Cracking the Code

 

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Podcast Transcript

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, so you are coming to us live from where?

Dr. John Meis:
I have in Scottsdale, Arizona right now. Yeah. Both. Yep.

Ryan (00:06.866)
Oh, you are. Is that where you live or that’s where you’re working right now? Okay. Live and work. Are you one of the rare Arizona Scottsdale natives or transplant? Yeah.

Dr. John Meis:
No, I am not. I don’t know that there are any my age, you know. There wasn’t much of a town here until you know the mid-60s when air conditioning came in and the area started to grow. So it was a pretty small area at the time.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, man. Well, thanks for joining us. If you could be so kind as to give us a just an intro about yourself. I, I always find it weird to read a paragraph about someone in front of their face. And I just like to hear their story, you know, and don’t worry about trying to be too concise. I’d love to hear where people came from how, you know, not only who you are, what you do, but how did you end up where you’re at? I’d love to hear it all. I’m sure everyone would.

Dr. John Meis:
All right, sure, sure. The only thing worse than reading it when the person’s there is listening to it when they’re reading it about you. You know, it is, yeah, it is. So my name is John Meese and my dental story starts a long time ago. I’m a fourth generation dentist. So my great grandfather is kind of the beginning of my dental story.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s awkward. I don’t like it man. I don’t like it yet

Dr. John Meis:
and he practiced in Dyersville, Iowa. He, his practice was of course, so one op in his home, as was typical then, it didn’t have a separate dental office. And this would have been around the turn of the century. Yeah. And so he had two sons, both of them became dentists.

Ryan Isaac:
What year would this have been when he’s practicing?

Dr. John Meis:
I have a picture of them all from 1903, as best as I can tell, on the front lawn with the house and the little sign that says office next to it. So it goes back a lot.

Ryan Isaac:
No way. Did by any chance, did any of the equipment stay in the family as like an heirloom or passed down or anything or? Yeah, okay. That’s a long time ago. Wow, very cool.

Dr. John Meis:
Not from that far back. Yeah, not from that far back. But so he had two sons. My grandfather, both of his sons became dentists. My grandfather moved to Sioux City, Iowa and started to practice there in 1923. Some of that equipment is still in the family. My grandfather had three sons, two of them became dentists, and my father had two cents and two dollars and I’m in the dental field and a dentist, practiced for 26 years. And then my daughter now works for one of our companies, she works for the Team Training Institute and she’s the Director of Marketing and Branding.

Ryan Isaac:
Man, what a legacy.

Dr. John Meis:
Yeah, it’s a pretty cool story. So I started, you know, working in my dad’s office, like when I was maybe 11 years old, and I would at first just clean instruments and develop x-rays. So this was still when there was dip tanks, which tells you this goes back a ways. And then when the automatic processors came in, I would develop x-rays, clean instruments, restock the toy bin, make cotton pellets, just whatever needed to be done, just whatever brainless activity was required, I would do that. And I really enjoyed both working with my dad and enjoyed dentistry. I wasn’t sure when I went to college what I was going to do, if I was going to go to medical school or dental school, and I bandied about both and worked in hospitals pretty much all the way through college. So I got a good taste of what the medical field would be like, and I knew what the dental field would be like because I’d seen generations of it. So I decided to go to dental school.

Ryan Isaac:
Curious, especially when there’s generational career in this field, what stood out to you as something that you found appealing, even as a young kid in the practice, do you remember the things that made you feel like you were kind of drawn to the, this industry?

Dr. John Meis:
Yeah, one thing is that you’re directly caring for people. Another thing is you’re getting people out of pain often, particularly my great grandfather and grandfather’s era, a lot of dentistry was pain generated. And then being your own boss and being able to make your own decisions and be very independent, that was attractive to me as well.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, that’s really cool. Tell me a little bit about your own clinical career. I know you had a very large practice, very high producing large practice and then grew many practices. What was that scale and growth like for you? In particular, I guess I’m interested in what made you, what took you from one big high producing profitable place to multiple?

Dr. John Meis:
Yeah, so I got out of dental school in 1986 and bought a dead practice from a bank. The previous dentist three years or so before me had gone out of business. There was just an office sitting there. It had gone back to the bank and so the bank owned this office. I bought it. It was a two-op office. Everything in it was old and crappy, but it was mine. I got it.

Ryan Isaac:
He goes, your old crappy thing now. Yeah, that’s great.

Dr. John Meis:
Yeah, right. We made it a lot less crappy over the years that I had that little office. I think I had it for four or five years, and we made it an awful lot better. But it was kind of a grim start because it was during the depth of the farm depression. And so for those of you who aren’t from that part of the country, it was when commodity prices collapsed.

And so what farmers do is they borrow money from banks, they put the seeds in the ground, they harvest, they sell it, they pay back the loans to the banks. Well, the commodity prices were such that there was gonna be no money. If they were to sell it, they wouldn’t get as much as the loan. They all knew they were going out of business. They would have had to put fuel in, and a lot of expense to take the crops out of the field. So farmers just let the crops there. And so this was the beginning of the end for the family farm. This was the end of the county banks and small two, three location banks in Iowa. That was the end of it. They all went under. And in my little town, the only industry was agriculture. And so I got out of dentistry. I got out of dentistry to help people. And the people where I was had absolutely no money.

I mean, they really didn’t have money. You know, people say today, oh, they don’t have money, but this was different. They really didn’t have any money. Um, so my first year I produced, uh, we kind of fashioned up a third op, but the first year I produced $300,000. Now this was in 86. So it was quite a while ago. Um, and my take home pay that year was $26,000. I did a lot of free dentistry. I produced 300, but gave a lot of it away. because the people needed help and that’s what I was there to do. Unfortunately, the agriculture economy within two or three years was kind of back to normal. And so I had kind of a normal practice at that time, but it was a pretty rough start for sure.

Ryan Isaac:
Man that probably, I can just imagine that cemented maybe your reputation in the community, but also more than just a reputation, what you really, what your intentions really were in that career and for the people that you knew and loved and lived by, that probably really shaped things starting that way.

Dr. John Meis:
I think I enjoyed a really good reputation. A lot of people were very, very grateful and they would show gratitude in their own ways. People were always bringing in food and stuff like that, just a little niceties that they could do. So they were very grateful and it was a very gratifying time for me to be in practice because I bought the practice for $16,000, so I didn’t have a lot of money and had very little school debt as was normal back then. And so for me, I could live on pretty meager wages, but it all worked out well.

Ryan Isaac:
I’m curious, um, I want to get to a lot of team training stuff here, but your story is really cool. Do you have any recollection or stories from like your experience was maybe similar to what your would have been grandfather starting a practice right before the great depression? I think that’s the years you mentioned. Do you have any connection to that? I just imagine he probably was in a similar boat with, you know, friends, family, neighborhood, community, and providing a service that he might not have been paid for awhile.

Dr. John Meis:
Yeah, he passed away when I was eight years old, so we never got to have conversations like this. But I’m sure he was in the same boat. I’m sure people really didn’t have money. I think in the part of the country where I was, this was in Iowa. I think Iowa was much worse during the farm depression than they were during the Great Depression. But nonetheless, I’m sure he had the same experience. And both my uncle and my dad did a lot of free dentistry as well.

Ryan Isaac:
I’m sure. Yeah, I do. That is a very common theme with, with dentists, probably a big upside in the, in the career path to be able to provide a service for people that is so sometimes life changing and to do it for people who can’t afford to do that otherwise, probably very rewarding from, from there. You, uh, I mean, decades of, of clinical work. Um, were you in it or was it? Yeah.

Dr. John Meis:
So, yep. So I sold that practice, bought my dad’s practice. He retired, then later on bought my uncle’s practice. Merged those together, just built a big office. We had 21 ops. And we were doing about, we’re collecting just under $6 million. Again, this is in the 90s, 2000. So it was, we were doing really, really well.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, wow, it’s huge.

Dr. John Meis:
And I never had really thought about doing multiples. My mindset at the time was just figure out how to produce more. You know, and I’d get an associate which allowed me more time to produce more.

Ryan Isaac:
Just more chairs, expand, get more room, more providers.

Dr. John Meis:
But the main goal was for me to be as productive as I possibly could. So I got a lot of clinical training, IV sedation, implant surgery, grafting, all that stuff. And again, this was rather uncommon at that time, much more common now. But it was really a great way to practice. I became personally very, very productive. The office became very productive. I’m not suggesting that this is the only style of practice. If I were to do it over again, I wouldn’t have done this. But along the way, I met Dr. Wayne Mortenson, who was the founder of Mortenson Dental Partners. At the time, he had 16 dental practices. When I first met him and I walked up to him. He spoke at a meeting that I was at and I just loved his values and his philosophy. I walked up to him and I asked him, would you be my mentor? He didn’t know me from Adam. He looked at me funny and I said, well, I promise I won’t bug you. I won’t call you unless I have a really good question. And I didn’t call him until I had a really good question. And that sparked a mentor-mentee relationship and later a friendship and later we became partners. So what I learned from him was instrumental in thinking differently about dentistry and the business of dentistry.

Ryan Isaac:
That’s what I was going to ask is, do you remember seeking him out as a mentor? What that meant to you at that time? What did it mean to say someone’s going to be my mentor? What did you, do you remember what you expected from him or wanted?

Dr. John Meis:
Yeah, well, what I expected from him was really to be able to call him and ask him a question. So I was following, he was very, very generous with me, has always been very generous with me. And he gave me his login and password to the practice management system, the in-house practice management system. So I could see what they were doing. I could see what they were making. And this is so dumb, and I hate to admit it, but I knew how much of the company he owned, and I knew how much the company was making. So I knew how much money he was making, right? I could do the calculation by little bits and pieces of information. And it probably wasn’t perfect, but it was pretty close. Well, I was making pretty close to what he was making. He was making more. But I was making pretty close to what he was making. So I thought, you know, I’m kind of a competitive dude and I thought I’m gonna catch him.

So I’m out, we’re out of capacity in my office, we’re expanding as fast as we can, we’re getting people in as fast as we can, we’re growing. At the same time, he’s adding offices. He’s acquiring offices, he starts some. Go down three years later, I’m burnt, I’m working so hard, so many hours, taking so few days off. Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Just chasing your mentor down. He doesn’t even know. Yeah.

Dr. John Meis:
He doesn’t even know. And so then I look at it, and now he’s making multiples of what I’m making, and he’s at the chair one day a week. He worked hard, but he wasn’t doing clinical dentistry. And so today I would do it differently than I did then, and it’s much more common that it’s done that way now.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, that’s an amazing, did he ever eventually know that you were chasing him around like that? Okay, yeah, that’d be good, yeah. That’s really cool.

Dr. John Meis:
Oh yeah, I told him. So when I looked at it, I realized how far he had gotten ahead of me and how fast he was getting, you know, more and more ahead of me. It was, yeah, I had to definitely admit that he had beaten me by a lot.

Ryan Isaac:
I’m curious, we talk a lot with our audience and our clients about the why behind financial decisions, career decisions. Do you remember what motivated you about wanting to have more money, grow your wealth, have many multiples and there’s no right or wrong reason for anybody. But do you remember what your motivations were for wanting more and bigger?

Dr. John Meis:
I do, yeah, I do. I, about the same time as my daughter was born, so I was 20, almost 29 years old, I developed cardiomyopathy, which is a autoimmune disease of the heart, which typically advances and leads to heart failure, heart transplant or heart failure or death, you know, one of those, one of those three is gonna happen. And so I was young, I had less than zero money, and I had a wife and children, and I just really needed to get some financial security. So it stopped, kind of miraculously it stopped, and that was, you know, thirty, thirty-five years ago. And so very fortunate that it did. But I didn’t know if it was going to come back, still don’t. So I really wanted to get to a point of some financial security as quickly as I could. And the path I took was to build my clinical tool belt, which was helpful. That’s not the only path but that was the path that I took. At the time, I didn’t understand, I didn’t understand really the difference between income and net worth. And so I was trying to drive my income up. And of course, if I had used that same focus to drive my net worth up by…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, big difference. Yeah.

Dr. John Meis:
If I had started investing in other dental practices earlier, I would have been way, way ahead of what I did. So I take, you know, for most people, their pathway is to save a certain percentage of their income and give it to somebody to invest for them. But there’s a lot of leakage along that path and more with some advisors than with others. And if I had figured out, well, I can grow my net worth without really growing my income very much, I would have gotten there a lot faster. It would have been a lot easier. Yes. Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, by investing in the businesses and growing. And so from there, that led you on a path of how many years of growing those businesses until the exit.

Dr. John Meis:
Yeah, so I joined Mortenson in 2011. So I, we, Mortenson Dental Partners and my company created a partnership. So it was a 50-50 JV. We grew that to 13 locations in Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota. I joined the executive team of Mortenson at that time and became their Chief Development Officer at first. And then a few years later, I became the president of the dental practice side of the company. So during that time, we went from 50 locations to 120 over six years.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay, 50 to 120 over six years and this was in the 2011 range is when that began.

Dr. John Meis:
Yep. I left there in 2017.

Ryan Isaac:
I’m trying to just put my mind back to that time, very different from, um, capital raising financial standpoint than it is today with DSO growth. Yeah.

Dr. John Meis:
Yeah, so we didn’t go the private equity route. We had a minority partner that was private equity backed. But we grew the company by the investment of doctors. So the doctors kept putting money in. And we partnered with, more accurately, various groups around the country. And they’ve all kind of merged into one company. Since i’ve left there but uh so now i think they’re up to a hundred and four hundred and thirty eight practices something like that yeah

Ryan Isaac:
Very cool. So do you do any clinical practice these days?

Dr. John Meis:
Yeah, I haven’t practiced since 2011. Yeah. Yeah, it’s been quite a while now.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay, oh, okay. Yeah, all right. Do you do you have the itch for it? I mean, it’s just like so ingrained in you for so long

Dr. John Meis:
I really enjoyed practicing. I really, I thought it was mostly fun, not all fun as every dentist knows, but I thought it was mostly fun and I really enjoyed working with small teams really closely with smaller teams. You know, my practice had, I think, 35 employees, 36, something like that. And working with smaller teams is, you know, that was, there was something very special about it. And when I stopped practicing, I missed it a lot. And I still have the itch, but I’ve been out of it so long now. I’d be a little, I wouldn’t be, I’d have to go back and do some kind of training. Yeah, I really would. It’s been a while.

Ryan Isaac:
A little bit of training. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And so the path to where you’re at today, maybe talk a little bit about where you are today, what you do, very big organization, and what led you there from that part of your life.

Dr. John Meis:
Yeah. So while I was still practicing, I put together a group of people, of dentists that were much more successful than I was. And we got together on the phone every month and we would have a topic and we everyone would exhaust their knowledge on that topic. And that and I was doing it just to learn from these people because they were all doing better than I was. And so I, it was, yeah, that’s exactly what it was. We called it the elite mastermind group and yep.

Ryan Isaac:
Just like a big phone mastermind group. Yeah. Cool. Okay. All right.

Dr. John Meis:
and the group was, they were all very successful, but they had different ways in there that they were successful. So there was a lot of ways to skin a cat and we had a lot of those ways represented in that group. Well, I started to take what I was learning from them and package it. And then I began to show them back what I was learning. And when people are really talented, they don’t necessarily know how they’re talented or what their talent is. When you feed back to them what’s very unique about their practice, they’re like, oh, yeah, everybody doesn’t do that. They have no idea. Yeah. That group encouraged me to go out and teach this to other people. That was the start of a company called Apogee.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, they’re surprised. It’s natural to them. Yeah

Dr. John Meis:
And along the way with that, one of our clients had used a hygiene coach named Wendy Briggs. So I had Wendy come into my office, had the usual, typical, huge jump in hygiene day one after she was gone day one. And so we had so many clients together.

Ryan Isaac:
Wendy, I’ve known Wendy for a long time, yeah. Yeah, cool.

Dr. John Meis:
And I didn’t really have the hygiene side of dentistry quite figured out yet and she didn’t have the business and clinical side figured out either. So we thought, well, why don’t we just put our, put our companies together and, and move forward. And so that’s what, when we did that, we named it the team training Institute. And that was in about 2009 or 10, I think. So it’s just before I went to Mortenson. So it was kind of a side gig for me for a long time until, until I left Mortenson. And then it’s been a full-time gig and we’ve grown dramatically. We’ve grown six times.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Very. If you, if you have, what’s the elevator pitch for, um, the mission of the team training Institute.

Dr. John Meis:
Or 6x over that. The mission of the Team Training Institute is to support dentists and their teams as they improve the dental health of the world.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. And the focus would be on the larger whole of the practice, the teams, the processes, the systems, the health of how those interact and work together.

Dr. John Meis:
Exactly right. So it’s, you know, success comes. It’s nice to have talented people. If I had a choice between talented people and great systems, I’d pick great systems any day. Yeah. And so that’s what we do. We help practices go from where they are to having well-developed systems. And they just, they just grow very, very rapidly.

Ryan Isaac:
Systems all day, yeah.

Dr. John Meis:
And something that’s unique about us is that when we take in a client, we don’t take everybody. There are certain types of people that we know are going to do really well, and there are certain types of people we know that aren’t. And I’m sure it’s the same with you guys when you’re thinking about working with people. You want a certain kind of person and a certain kind of situation. So when we work with somebody, the first thing that we do is we dig into their data. So we do a lot of polling of the team and interviews of the team. So we get a really good idea of what’s going in the practice from the doctor’s perspective, from the team’s perspective, and then what’s the data showing us. And from that, we can figure out where the low hanging fruit is. So we don’t, most consulting companies say, here, you go do this, that’s step one. And then all you do this, that’s step two. We don’t do that. We figure out for, I mean everybody in those groups, they all do this first, they do this second. We figure out that’s.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s like they diagnose before any exams or any X-rays or yeah, right. Yeah.

Dr. John Meis:
Exactly, exactly. And of course it’s more clinically, it’s more business efficient to do it that way. However, the speed at which practices improve is impeded by that. If you can tell them the first place to start, where is the low hanging fruit? Where is there going to be a big impact and it’s going to be really easy to do? And just focus on those things, you know, high impact, easy to do. And as they do that, the practice grows and most of the practices that work with us, they run out of capacity relatively quickly. And that creates a whole other set of issues that we help them with as well.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, man, what a cool journey. I’m curious as you’re talking about this, it seems like more than ever because of a few different reasons that there’s a lot of pressure, maybe more than there’s ever been on the dental practice owner to not only provide excellent clinical care, but to actually build a good business environment. Pressure from corporations who do it well and efficiently, pressure from the labor market, people wanting more money and a better job environment to work at, people leaving the market, having a hard time hiring. That makes me curious about some of the main hot topics that people are coming to you with these days. I’m curious what those are. And I’m also curious have those have changed over the last few years.

Dr. John Meis:
Yeah, certainly post-COVID with the reduction in the dental workforce, certainly that has had a major impact. And that’s one of the things that people come to us with help with is, how do we recruit and maintain team members? And so I guess that would probably be number one. Number two would probably be, and this is kind of a general word, but office chaos. No systems, everybody’s kind of doing their own thing. Nothing quite fits together, right? That creates conflict with the team. The team goes to the doctor with the conflict.

So that’s probably number two. And at one time it was patient flow was you know the biggest issue. We don’t see that very often anymore. It’s so fast to fix when somebody comes in with that problem it’s like oh hallelujah because that’s a whole lot easier to fix than an office that’s too full, too many patients, too many people, not enough ops, not enough doctors, not enough team. So patient flow is easy to get.

Ryan Isaac:
In these circumstances, do you find people reaching out for help more as they’re growing and having success or more when they’re struggling and not knowing why they’re struggling?

Dr. John Meis:
Yeah, almost, I would say 80% of the clients that we have are doing very well when they come to us. Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay, yeah, they’re wondering what is the next step? How do you get over this current hurdle and keep going?

Dr. John Meis:
Yeah, exactly. We do have some that are struggling when they come in, but often the strugglers are embarrassed about not doing well when they see other people doing well, and so they don’t necessarily seek out help. They also, they can’t quite figure out the investment and what the return is going to be. They can’t believe the return because they’ve been trying so hard to improve it and it hasn’t improved it. So they can’t see how someone else is going to come in and show them how to do it slightly differently and get a much, much better result. So it’s hard for them to think through that.

Ryan Isaac:
Do you, having been in all of the seats and seen it for generations, do you think it’s a common issue just with the nature of dentistry and the whole career and educational path is clinical focus as it should be, but more than ever, there’s just such a huge business component that is, I mean, you know, it’s just not part of the training and education. You see that being a big issue.

Dr. John Meis:
Yep. Well, it never was. But the environment when I got out of school was very different. There was no PPO’s. The insurance companies would pay a little bit, the patients had to pay the rest. That’s what insurance was like. There wasn’t this high debt load coming out of dental school like there is today. And the offices of, when I got out of school, there was no technology, right? I mean, this is, personal computers were still rare. And so, you know, it’s just really hard to imagine how much easier it was than today. So today we have now declining reimbursement, we have increasing costs, we have inflationary costs, we have employment inflation. And, you know, I just need to remember that even with the added cost of the last couple of years where pay rates for employees has gone up.

It still hasn’t kept pace with inflation. So in real dollars, team members aren’t really making anymore. So doctors need to remember that. Team members need to remember that doctors aren’t making anymore. Doctors are making less than they used to, and inflation adjusted much less than they used. Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Producing more, making less. Yeah. But it’s always the rich doctor with the nice car in the parking lot. Give me more money, right?

Dr. John Meis:
And so, you know, there are team members that kind of think that way. Most don’t, but there are some. Luckily, most people realize that doctor went to school and put a lot of hard work into it starting in, you know, high school and had to pass boards and had to get an office and it’s taken a lot of risk along the way. So most team members understand that. There’s a few stinkers out there that we run into now and then, but most of them just think, yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, we find them everywhere. They’re all over the place. You said something earlier. I’m curious about their characteristics of people who make good candidates for learning and, uh, excelling, improving their businesses. And then there’s some personality traits or habits that aren’t. I’m curious if you want to talk about what some of those might be.

Dr. John Meis:
Sure. Yeah. So the main trait that we look for is someone who would agree with this statement. And the statement comes from John Wooden, who was a great basketball coach at UCLA. He said, it’s what you learn after you think you know it all that matters. Right? So people who think they know it all and are curious and do very, very well with this. People who think they know it all and aren’t curious, you know, when they’re struggling and they wanna do better, and they keep doing it the same way over and over again and expecting it to be better, and aren’t open to making some minor changes. So that would be one thing. Second thing would be if a doctor does not care to lead the practice. The practice, if the doctor doesn’t lead the practice. That’s not going to end well. So by leading the practice, but by meaning that, I mean building a culture, first of all, so mission, vision, values, having those things set out in place, having a strategic plan, following that plan, from that strategic plan creating goals, and making those goals relevant to the team, figuring out how we’re going to

Ryan Isaac:
Can you expand on that? What do you mean by that?

Dr. John Meis:
How we’re going to achieve those goals, getting the right people on the bus and the wrong people off. Those are the things that leaders need to do if they’re going to grow a great organization. I don’t care what business it is, it’s the same.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, same traits. I’m curious about that just from, it seems like there’s a lot of really great dentists who reach a certain plateau of success with their teams in production of businesses, but they don’t, by nature, possess those characteristics. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way, I just mean it’s not of interest to them. Doing those things because that’s a different role than the clinical side. Any message to doctors who find themselves in that position. They love their team, they love their patients, they love their business, they love the art of dentistry, but they know those aren’t things that even interest them, let alone coming up and creating and holding everyone accountable to them. How do those people succeed if they do or at least still curious? Maybe that’s the key.

Dr. John Meis:
Yeah, so very few people get very successful without those qualities, but some do. Be their work ethic, be their charismatic personality, be their being in a market that’s not competitive, you know, there’s things that will get people there. And so for doctors that just want to do teeth, just want to fix teeth, and they’re hitting all their financial goals by just fixing teeth, you know, that’s a great employee dentist. You know, find someone who’s going to take care of all the other stuff that you don’t want to take care of. And that way, you get the best of both worlds. I was just in a practice on last Friday.

And that was the situation. The doctor was in his late 50s. He’s got about three more years he wants to work. He’s starting to fall behind on technology. He’s had some team turnover and he’s just like, oh man, I just want to, just for the next three years, I just want to fix teeth. So I own a group of practices as well. And so we’re gonna talk about how we might work together and that practice might be added to my group.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, it’s a good candidate for that situation. Is it possible to introduce someone into that? And let’s assuming the dentist isn’t the person to take that next leadership step, is it possible to introduce a person that’s not a dentist? I mean, can an office business manager type role fill that gap?

Dr. John Meis:
They can, it’s better. So the dentist has to provide the clinical leadership, right? So this is the material we’re gonna do, these are the techniques we’re gonna use, this is the instruments, they’ve gotta decide that. Yep, but you can hire someone to do more of the management stuff and certainly would recommend people do that. We’ve got multiple paths for development of office managers so that we can take somebody who’s not create them to be functional, and that’s superb, but functional, and then we’ve got other things that help them on their career path as the practice grows. This role is one of the most important in a practice as during some points in its growth curve. Early on, probably not necessary. But once you get more than seven, eight, nine employees, it’s time and now you can start giving away some of that stuff. I want this to be spending as much of their work time doing dentistry as is humanly possible and not doing anything else, right? So, you know, we have dentists in our group that are producing 16, 18, 2200 bucks an hour. I don’t want them licking envelopes and they won’t get to $2,200 an hour if they’re licking envelopes.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Thanks for sharing that. I think that’s, um, that’s an interesting environmental. I’ve been in this career for 15 years and even in that time, I’ve seen a lot of things change in that the business, the, I guess the pressure of the business side of dentistry has changed just dramatically it, even in my career. Um, someone who was just a good clinician with a good, uh, corner location could just do that for their whole career, but it feels very different these days to run a business that has nothing to do with the clinical side of the dentistry. And that’s just, it seems foreign to the industry and very new and tricky to figure out.

Dr. John Meis:
Yeah. Well, I think that’s why you see dentists early in their career and even mid-career going to selling out to DSOs. For the early ones, back in the day, the people who did that came out pretty good. Today, it’s a lot more iffy now we’re working with a practice that he sold to a DSO. He took 30 percent of the sales price in cash, 70 percent in the parent company stock. The parent company went bankrupt. He now doesn’t own his practice. He can’t buy it back with the money that he got, because he didn’t get all the money. It’s risky.

Ryan Isaac:
No, huh. Yeah, I’ve seen that multiple times now, too.

Dr. John Meis:
Earlier in your career, you’re selling the profits of the business forever. You’re going to get all the money, maybe it’d be nice if you got all the money day one, that’d be a lot safer, but none of these companies really do it that way. For a variety of reasons and a variety of good reasons, for both sides. But now those profits are gone forever. You’ve got the money, but the profits are gone forever.

Ryan Isaac:
Yep. I think that’s the in our, in our team, we, we probably field at least one question about a DSO offer per week among our advisors, probably more these days. And the main struggle from that, like 40s to early 50s crowd is just that, man, do I really give this up for, for a long time in the late 50s, early 60s crowd? It’s a lot of it’s a no brainer, you know, top dollar and a good deal, but that’s tough to, um, to do. I’m curious, um, maybe to round this out for now. I’d like to do this again, by the way. Um, there’s some other questions, other topics I think we could do a whole episode on we should in the future, but I’m curious, you know, in this year for people listening, what kind of questions would someone be asking that would make them a good candidate for some help to get to the next level? Or what kind of like situations might they be facing those who are listening that they might say, oh, you know what, it’s time to reach out for some different help that I can’t do on my own anymore.

Dr. John Meis:
So several things. Number one, if you feel like your practice is in some state of chaos, we’re a good option to help you with that. For those of you who don’t feel you’re in chaos, if you lost one key team member and you would be in chaos, you’re in chaos. That group is kind of a no-brainer for us. Most of our practices are, I should say most, but a lot of our practices, more than half, I guess it is most, are bigger practices than that. And so they are struggling with profitability, so they’re struggling being productive enough to have a profit from the business at the end of the day. And so we know the three things that every practice location needs to have to be successful. They’ve got to have patient flow. They’ve got to have case acceptance. And they have to be able to deliver efficiently. So we can show even very, very productive practices how to become more efficient, how to right size their patient flow, how to increase their case acceptance, and how to improve on clinical efficiency.

Ryan Isaac:
It might be too hard to say this because a lot of situations vary based on the nature of the practice, but are there any benchmarks you’d like to give on what constitutes healthy or unhealthy profit?

Dr. John Meis:
Well, that there is some I consider to be healthier when there isn’t any. And so most dentists don’t think of having to pay themselves as a provider. Right. So when they look at their take-home pay, they think of that as their profit. Well, it’s really not. It’s really pay for themselves as a provider and maybe profit, maybe not. And it’s not uncommon for a single doctor practice as a business to not be profitable. If they had to hire someone to do their work, they’d be in the red. Once you understand that, so then when it comes to what’s healthy profit, if we have adequate capital reserves and we’re hitting 15-16 percent, once everybody’s paid, all the bills are paid, everything’s done the dentists doing the work. That’s operating really well. You look at the big boys and we do work for big DSOs. Our biggest client has over 1,800 locations. When you look at them, they would love to have 16% as a company. They’re not anywhere near that. And they’re going down just like the rest of us are going down as well, as far as net profit percentage. Yep.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, inflation and the cost of everything. Any parting words you would like to leave our audience with and where to find you guys?

Dr. John Meis:
Sure. So parting words is, we love to help practices grow. And we love to break the myth in people’s heads that producing more, collecting more, making more money means more hard work, more stress, more difficulty. Those two things are not equated. And I could show you 150 dentists who will say, I thought it was going to be connected and it’s not. They’re working less, they’re making more, they have less stress. So, so just that would be my parting words. Bigger is not harder, bigger is easier. And if you do it right, and if you have the right support. So the second thing, if people want to reach out to us, they can go to the tti.com. You can look around and learn a little bit more about us. And there’s multiple options on how to get ahold of us there. You can get some free materials. I’m pretty sure you can download a book for free and Wendy and I have, between the two of us have three Amazon number one bestselling books in the dental category.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, I actually, I’m glad you just brought that up. You, there’s a new one from you, correct? Uh, that was pretty recent. Okay. Do you want to talk about that a little bit here?

Dr. John Meis:
Yep, Cracking the Code. Yeah, it was really when I, it was things that I learned in the group dental space. Things that I wish I would have known when I was a single practitioner, wish I would have known when I was an early multiple location. It’s a collection of ideas and thoughts that I wish I had known when. I didn’t understand it at the time, but sense of crack the code, hence the name.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, okay. We’ll, we can link all these things to when these episodes come out and, and links to the book and links to the website. Um, John, thanks for, thanks for doing this. It was really great to connect. I have so many questions, other avenues we can take this. So I would love to do this again sometime in the future.

Dr. John Meis:
Yeah, that’d be great.  Yeah, I would too. I would too. You have a great podcast, so many interesting guests. I’m grateful to be among them. So thank you for inviting me.

Ryan Isaac:
Thank you very much. I know that our audience will find this very helpful. So John, thanks for being here. Thanks to all of you for listening and we’ll catch you next time. Bye bye now.

Dr. John Meis:
Thanks everybody.

Practice Management