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This Dental Specific Podcast is dedicated to the Dental "Entrepreneur" Michael Dinsio, Founder of Next Level Consultants, delivers #TRUTH when starting up a dental practice. From the very first step to getting the keys of a dental practice, Michael shares his raw & unscripted playbook with you. Not only does this podcast provide you with "What To Do" but more importantly "What Not To Do". With over over 15 years of experience & over 150 past clients, Michael delivers an educational and informative program in a real and genuine way. Start w/ Episode 01 - as we go through a STEP by STEP process.
00:09
Startup Unscripted, the questions you have with the truths you need to hear. Now your host, Michael Dinsio. All right, all right, let's get into this. my name is Mike Dinsio with Next Level Consultants, the founder of Next Level Consultants. You guys all know who I am, but this is another episode of Dental Startup Unscripted.
00:36
part of the Encore series. So for those of you that don't know what I'm talking about, the Encore series, the whole first season was about how to do a startup, literally from start to finish. We had 20 some interviews. We started all the way at the top, Vision, and worked our way through all the way to grand opening and opening day. And then we shut down season one, but back by popular demand, I suppose.
01:05
We started an Encore series and this is part of that. So I'm super excited about introducing this interview today because it's something that us at Next Level utilize quite a bit and believe in pretty passionate about. let's without further ado, let's just get right into it. So I've got Paul Lowry on the other side of this screen. How you doing Paul? Nice to see your face.
01:34
Yeah, good to see you. Paul is the co-founder of DentalMenu and it is a membership-based plan program that helps doctors put a super smart and easy membership plan in place. Now, I know there's a lot of options out there in this department. Next Level definitely utilizes DentalMenu quite a bit. And so we can kind of get into some nitty gritty, but for a startup, since
02:03
the name of our podcast, Paul, is Startup Unscripted. We're going to focus on what is a membership plan and how to utilize it from a startup's perspective. But let's just time out and back up here. Paul, give us a two minute who you are, what you do, and I guess a two minute elevator pitch, I suppose.
02:26
So yeah, we dental menu is a software platform that will enable you to create a menu of services that essentially you can sell to your uninsured patients. And that's what it does. It helps you, it will automate all the payments, keep track of the benefits with the eligibility and connect when those are eligible and then connect those to the providers that do the services is what the software does. But really the benefit
02:52
from the practice standpoint is you're trying to get- Don't steal the thunder, Paul. We're gonna get into that. Okay, all right. That's what it is. Yeah, this is great. is good. You're getting right into it. Let's actually start with that first question is what is a membership plan? I think a lot of people know, but let's just get the obvious out of the way. So membership plan, you described it as an option or a convenient way
03:23
to basically get uninsured patients in the door, right? So, but maybe get a little bit more technical. Sure. So I mean, if you're getting credentialed, you're bringing on PPO insurances, let's just look at dental insurance. Dental insurance isn't really insurance, it's a prepaid benefit, right? If you have dental insurance, a patient's getting an exam, they're getting a cleaning every six months, they're getting a set of annual x-rays.
03:48
they're getting a discounted fee off your UCR, you you're probably going to write off 40 % or so of your fee with insurance companies. And then there might be a thousand or $1,500 towards treatment. But let's say somebody's got a PPO plan. come in, they have a $6,000 full mouth restoration because they went through cancer or something like that. It doesn't pay like insurance would. It'll pay up to $1,500 and they have all their little workarounds. The problem is,
04:17
is outside of insurance, about 50 % of the US population does not have dental insurance. And so a membership plan, we can't call it insurance because it's not, but you're able to offer similar services in a membership style plan to keep them active and connected to your practice. you know, typical patients that don't have dental insurance, they wait until something hurts, and then they come in and you do treatment on them. And then they go out the back door.
04:46
One of the scenarios I like to use, at least for me, is a good visual. If you think about a caveman and you think about how he gets his food, right? I mean, he looks for an animal, he chases after him, he hits it over the head, he cleans it, he comes back, he cooks it up. And then after that, he's good until the next day or two. And then what does he have to do? He's got to go find it again. Scott Martinow with Infusionsoft kind of came up with that. So...
05:13
What's the most important invention or what's most impactful for the caveman? You know, is it fire? Is it the wheel? What is it? Refrigerator. Refrigerator? You're pretty close. Store the meat. But no, did I steal your thunder? Go. like there's no, come on, Mike. There's no bridges in caveman times. Hey, hey, you know, what is it then? It's the fence. Because he into agriculture and he's raising his hogs and he's raising his cows and he's
05:43
farming is corn and he's farming things and then harvest is naturally timed. Keeping it sticky, keeping it sticky. to bring that back to dentistry, if you're constantly chasing treatment and relying on emergency exams and all of those kinds of things, it gets really expensive. You you're going to dump a ton of money into the lead funnel just to get that that treatment and then you're gonna have to go back to the top of the lead funnel again. But if you think of your hygiene department as farming,
06:12
and you can get consistent patients coming through hygiene, then the production is going to become natural because you're, get hundreds of patients visiting you regularly for preventive care, exams, cleaning, x-rays, then the treatment is going to come naturally. They're going to know like, and trust you versus forcing, know, like, Oh crap, we got to make payroll. If I don't get 15,000 this month more in treatment, I messed like, what do I do? I can't make my payments. That's not fun. And so the problem with
06:41
you know, dental insurance acts as a fence, right? It gives them a prepaid benefit. It gives them a reason to pre-appoint and to come back. It helps them accept treatment. What about your your holy grail of your fee for service patients that everybody wants more of? What are you doing for them? What kind of fence did you create for them to be able to corral them and keep them into your practice so you can grow that side of your business? That's what your membership plan should be doing. I love that fence analogy. I'm going to use that. OK, can I do it? So
07:10
That's so good. Cause I always say like everybody has something that they are loyal to. Like I try, you know, next level, we've got clients all over the country. I think last time I checked her at 13 states. So I'm traveling a lot. So I'm loyal to one particular airline, maybe two, if the one airline is not getting it done. Yeah. But I'm really loyal to Marriott, right?
07:39
Just because they're everywhere, they've got a decent rewards program. I know what that looks like, you know? every Costco is another option. Starbucks, we've all got the Starbucks app on our phones. That membership makes you feel sticky. And so what you just described as the fence is what I call, you're trying to create that loyalty in your patient base. And this is probably the best way.
08:08
to do that other than just customer experience. But this is a way to create loyalty from a financial perspective, not just a customer relationship feeling. So if you're doing both, you're nailing it. So, okay, so I love that. Okay, so yeah. I do want to bring up, I mean, you brought up Costco and stuff. So everyone knows the best patient, know, best way to grow a practice is referrals, referrals, referrals.
08:36
And it's crazy because if you analyze what products you actively refer, I know a ton of dentists and there's very few times where I go out of my way. I know a lot of good dentists, but I don't actively go out of my way so much to refer. I'm still very reactive. Like if you came and you're like, Hey Paul, I'm moving to this city. Do you know any dentists? Well, sure. I'll refer somebody to you, but I don't, I don't go out of my way. Whereas if you can get patients to be passionate about something,
09:06
You know, I always referred to raving fans. I mean, yeah, how are you to get them? So, so when you don't, when you have a good membership program, it's a lot easier to refer and say, Oh, Hey, you're self-employed. You don't have dental insurance. So I go here, I get this great deal. I get these rewards. This is really helpful for me. It's a lot easier to facilitate a referral because you're referring a specific way to access care versus just, you know, Hey, you should go to this dentist. Well, what does it cost? I don't know. Just make an appointment and show up and like,
09:35
I don't know if it's hundreds of dollars. I don't know, but just call him. He's awesome. You know, it's vague. It's harder to refer. It's a good way of putting it. Folks, for those of you that follow the podcast and listen to the last Encore episode, we talked about ground marketing and the membership plan was a way that you could approach small businesses to utilize a membership plan. So we talked a lot about that, but
10:05
One thing that my startups, I challenge them to do is to think outside the box and do what other dentists aren't doing in the area. Before we kind of get to like how to utilize this, let's talk about first, so I'm jumping the gun. Let's start out first with how to set it up. Because setting it up, I think there's a lot of pitfalls in how to set it up. There's so many different companies that do these membership plans, but
10:35
What I like about your company is that you advise them on how to set it up properly and we align there. So what's the best way to set this program up? I mean, you could do it in-house and we could talk about that pitfall later. But go ahead, take it from there. What's the best way to set that up? So the best way is think about your patients, think about what services do they need on a regular basis? Exams, cleanings, x-rays, maybe.
11:04
fluoride, access to emergency service, nitrous, things like that. So list what you think patients need from a preventive standpoint on a regular basis. And then put those in one column in a spreadsheet. And then in the other column next to it, list your UCRs. And then in the third column, list what you actually wanna be paid when you do those services. you your average PPO insurance is gonna pay you, I don't know, $80 for a cleaning.
11:33
Well, you need to determine what do you actually want to be paid for services that are included in your membership plan. And that's where people, too many doctors, they just throw darts like, what, 24. And it's like, well, okay, is that profitable? You making money, you're not making money. So once you do that, just for simplicity reasons, if you needed $60 for a cleaning every six months and you $60 for an exam,
12:00
and you wanted $60 for x-rays and they're giving them every six months, you'd have to charge $30 a month, know, 30 times six, that's 180, that's what you'd get paid when those services are essentially rendered. So that's the best way to set it up as well as thinking about is there additional services that patients would want to customize their plans. If you think of pricing, if you take a swath of hundred patients, and we did this, you throw...
12:26
It doesn't matter what the price point is. Let's say you take a hundred patients, you say $30. You're to have a percentage of them that say, well, that's too expensive. And you're going to have a percentage of them that say, Oh, I would have spent more and you know, everywhere in between. so you want to have a few different price points so that you can really service a wide range of patients. And if you have a lot of our offices, they'll do like a premium upgrade for 20 or 30 bucks a month. That includes nitrous and urgency exams, fluoride.
12:56
access to Pano and ConeBeam, things like this, bleaching, those kinds of things. And there's about a third of patients that'll buy that premium upgrade. Now you're getting another 20 bucks a month from those patients, but you didn't price out your other 80%. So the best thing to do is think about the services. If you've already started your practice, one of the things I implore you to do is get your team involved with the setup. Sit down with your front desk, sit down with your hygienist.
13:24
and ask them like, Hey, what do patients need? Most hygienists will say, well, some of them need perio maintenance. How are we going to have them access perio maintenance? And then you'll, create, you know, a perio plan. But if your hygienist suggested it, she's going to be a lot more inclined to support it. So get your team involved. There's nothing magical. It's more, here's the services that we offer. Here's what we do well. And let's create some sort of a residual recurring revenue so they can access those services in an affordable way.
13:55
I love that advice, of getting them involved. You always want to manage with transparency. It's shocking to me when we walk into practices as consultants and the doctor is so fearful of sharing with their team. I have no idea why. It's like these aren't secrets. Like how much money we made, how many new patients, how much things cost.
14:24
this is important stuff for the whole team to know. And so, yeah, I love the incorporating them because as consultants, we come in and we tell people what to do. Nobody's gonna listen. You can't come in and tell you what to do. You're gonna be like, oh God, is another consultant, right? But if I came in and said, okay, folks, here's our problem. You guys are doing it this way. Here's the breakdown. What are some ideas?
14:55
I know what the idea, I know what the answers are. I know exactly what they should do, but when they come up with the solution, it's their idea. So I love that suggestion. When we do our onboarding meetings, if the doctor and a team member are there, those offices do the best. Because if your front desk isn't behind it, she hates it for whatever reason, she thinks it's not the best deal. I had one.
15:21
We had one where we set up and they didn't sell anybody, they didn't sell anybody, they didn't sell anybody. So I went in there and was like, hey, what is going on? And the back office, the hygienist was like, well, I just don't think this is a very good deal for the patient. So, you know, it's a better deal for them to go and get this discount insurance plan than to buy our own membership plan. It's like, well, okay, well, that's a real issue. Let's talk about that. Let's fix that. You know, if they don't think it's a good value for whatever reason, patients are gonna trust that.
15:50
Yeah. They're not going to sell it. Yeah. Okay. So now that we just taught them how to set it up themselves and not use your service, Paul, because they could do that. Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Here's how you price it. This is how you manage it. Get your team involved. A lot of doctors do that, by the way. So let's talk about some pitfalls because I do not, I'll repeat, I do not suggest you manage this stuff in-house. let's talk why.
16:18
I'm sure you get that a lot. Like, wouldn't I just come up with $450 a annual fee and manage this in-house? Why do I need you? Why do I cut you in, right? Yeah. Yeah, sure. Yeah. I I usually tell people, well, yeah, if all you're going to do is offer a really simple plan that you're mainly using as a discount on services. It goes back to that fence analogy, right?
16:44
What we see with the do it yourself for plans is most of them are sold on treatment acceptance. Hey, Mike, you got a treatment plan for four grand. We can give you 20 percent off your treatment if you sign up for in-house plan. It's three hundred fifty dollars. You're like, OK, yeah, let's do it. You sign up. But we looked at two hundred fifty thousand patients across several offices. They all had membership plans and we looked at new patients that came through the practice. We fast forwarded five years.
17:12
to see how many of them are still active in the practice. Only 12 % of uninsured patients were still active in the practices that had been generated after five years. These guys all had do it yourself membership plans. This was before we started DentalMenu. Okay, wait, what is it today? What is it today in comparison with DentalMenu? With DentalMenu? I don't know. We haven't even run it. We should run it on those same practices. Yeah, you can't throw that out. You can't throw that out. We got to run that and see. To be continued.
17:42
Okay, so where did they mess up? Was it that they only offered annual fees and not a monthly fee? they like... So annual fees are really tough. What happens is patients buy them. So, you know, let's say me and my wife and three kids, let's say it's a thousand dollars to sign up for the membership plan. I can tell you right now that I'll sign up for one year, but when I'm due for renewal, I don't go back right at day 366. I don't want to come up with another thousand dollars. Nothing hurts.
18:11
I'm fine. And so whenever we've analyzed the annual plans, there's big lapses in renewals. And when team members are honest, we're like, hey, tell us about the renewal process. None of them reach out. No front desk is going to proactively call to try to renew a membership plan. They're going to wait until that patient comes back in and be like, hey, Mike, your membership plan lapsed. You need to re-sign up. OK, I'll do it.
18:38
Annual is really bad that way. The other problem is there's no money left for treatment when you charge annually. If you charge me $1,200 and then you say my kids have $600 worth of work, it's like, I'm going to wait three, four, five months because I'm out of money. And that's smart. I never even thought about that. You're competing against your treatment plans. Yeah, for sure. So annual is really tough that way. you present, we're big on, we'll let the patient choose, offer annual, sure, but offer
19:08
offer monthly as well. Here's the other thing with annual versus monthly. The difference between 25 a month and 29 a month or 32 a month doesn't really affect sales, but the difference between $250 or $300 annually or $400 annually does affect sales. So you're actually able to make a lot more money on the monthlies than you would on the annuals. Psychology. Yeah, for sure. Plus we live, like most people,
19:36
There's a reason why all other insurances, health insurance, auto insurance, dental insurance, they all charge monthly, Amazon, Netflix, like everything you're doing in your life just about runs on monthly payments and people are used to that. The challenge is, so the annual payments, you get your money upfront and it's way easier to input that revenue into your ledger in the practice management software.
20:04
So it is easier for the team and it's easier for the doctors to manage an annual payment. When you move to monthly payments, if you're not using a third party service, you're chasing all these monthly payments all the time. You're having to charge 200 different credit cards. Is it PCI compliant? Where do you store those things? mean, it opens up all kinds of doors. And then our competitors, a lot of them do a really good job on the monthly payments, like processing those each month.
20:32
which we do as well. But where you really start to get mixed up is trying to track the benefit usage in your practice management software and accounting properly for those payments. So let me tell you what I mean by that, Mike. If you have 25 a month coming in, 25 a month, but there's no services rendered that day, where in the heck do you put that payment? Where does it go? What do you do with it?
21:02
It's like, well. That's every front office's nightmare with a membership plan. Correct. Yeah. And being responsible for collecting it. I mean, that's problem one. Yes. And problem two is how do I post it? How am I reconciling all this? Yep. Exactly right. So we really help a lot with the back end with our reports. One of the things that's really that we do that's different than anybody else is
21:31
You walk that patient out in your practice management software. We do have integrations with Open Dental, Dentrix and Eagle Soft. But even if you don't have the integration, you actually will check the patient out in the dental menu software. And what's so cool about that is we're able to keep track of usage and profitability in the plans based off of how much revenue you collected, but then what was actually used. If you think about an insurance company,
21:59
The revenue that they get is what? It's the premiums, right? Patients are paying premiums. That's their revenue. What are their expenses? Their claims, right? The expenses for an insurance company are claims. Every time they have to pay out on a claim, that's an expense. So what do they do? They try to maximize premiums and then they try to minimize claims. Now we're not trying to get claims minimized.
22:24
But what you do want to track is how much revenue did you bring in for those preventive services? What was the usage and essentially the payout to yourself so that you know if you're making or losing money and the software that we have keeps track of all that. So I can show you, hey, look, here's how much money you brought in. Here's what the usage was. Here's how much you made on the bottom line, which translates into, of course, increased practice value as well. It's cashflow and you're able to get.
22:52
a multiple when you sell on that, but you're able to track all those data points. If an office can successfully, because it's kind of difficult to have this conversation with a patient, but not really. Us dental people, we always talk about dental stuff all day long, and we know what the hell we're talking about. But you talk to a patient, they don't know how any of this works. They're just scared to death if someone says out of network, they just go,
23:21
running for the hills, have no idea what that means. And so I guess what I'm saying is, be careful about that sales pitch, even though it's probably one of the best ones for membership. If you can somehow communicate to a patient that 100 % of what you put into this is what you get out, however you say that, you're gonna put in $400 into this plan, you're gonna get $400 worth of value. If you go with Delta...
23:48
They're probably gonna get $800 worth of value. I mean, it's probably double or triple when you look at your UCRs. Yeah. I guess what I'm saying though is if you sign up with XYZ Insurance Company, you're gonna put whatever, $400 in. You might only get $200 of value back. anyways. Do you know what? 40 cents of every dollar that goes into dental insurance stays with the insurance company. Oh my God.
24:16
So could you not set up, if you're cutting out 40 % of the overhead of an insurance company, certainly you could offer a pretty cool product where consumers and patients are paying you directly. Well, yeah, you should structure something. The other reason not to do it yourself. I mean, you know, I just did a podcast the other day about does your membership plan suck? Frankly, the do it yourselfers are not great products. You know, there's the reason where dental menu is if you went into a restaurant,
24:45
and there was no menu, there was nothing there. It was like, hey, I think I want to get steak. Oh, we don't offer that. What do you offer? Well, I don't know. Let me take a look and I'll tell you what we offer and I'll tell you how much it's going to cost. And you're like, that was unpleasant. Yeah. No, I like the way you can add on and have different packages and have an annual versus six month versus monthly with you guys.
25:13
It's so flexible with you guys. I mean, there's a hundred ways you could set this up that's unique to each office using your product. The rewards are pretty dang cool when you talk about retention and stuff. That's really unique as well. Offer a reward program. get some rewards every time they get that cleaning so that down the road treatment acceptance goes up. Those referrals go up. instead of always discounting, imagine like, hey, Mike, tell you what, you've got $300 built up in rewards.
25:42
If you wanna get these veneers done, this full mouth $6,000 case, which has really high margins, will double your rewards towards that treatment. Instead of discounting it to close the deal, double the rewards, it's a lot more powerful. Totally, totally. Okay, so we're kind of towards the end, but one of the most important things that we should talk about in this episode is how to utilize this program. We've been talking about it, you just threw out a great little tidbit of how to.
26:11
how to sell it or how to leverage a program like this. But I always talk about marketing. And that's what we talked about last episode is like getting super creative with how you can leverage your membership plan in the community. mean, the thing that I heard you say for very beginning of episode, which I didn't know actually 50 % of people don't have dental insurance. That's nuts.
26:40
Yeah. heard another statistic that 44 % of patients did not see their dentists in the last 12 months. So that it's pretty close by the way, 50 and 44. It's pretty close. most practices you talk to are what 80, 90 %? Yeah. It's driven. Yeah, there you go. So why is that? why do you think, just rhetorically, know, why would
27:08
Why would your practice month after month, year after year become more and more insurance driven versus all these patients that don't have dental insurance?
27:18
Why, Paul? Yeah, I mean, you know, just when you stop and think about it, that's pre-appointing someone with dental insurance is pretty easy because they've got a benefit and so they pre-appoint. Getting them to use the benefits is a lot easier than convincing somebody it doesn't have any kind of benefit. So when you talk about marketing, it's all about attracting patients, getting them to schedule, getting them to accept treatment, getting them to back into re-care and building your practice long-term. so...
27:45
new patient calls within the first 60 seconds, do you accept my insurance? And if the answer is yes, that call now is driven by insurance. What do you get? And all this stuff, they know what to do. Your front desk knows what to do. If patients don't have insurance the first 60 seconds, what's going to come up? How much does it cost? Well, I don't know. It depends. Like, well, let me see. I don't know. Well, $299. So then what?
28:13
What starts and everybody else is doing marketing does is I say, well, let's do a whole bunch of free exam x-rays. Let's do $99 new patient specials. Well, what happens when they come in? We just, have a call that's super funny where a patient calls, yeah, I'm new to the area. How much is an exam cleaning x-rays? Well, we got a new patient special. It's $99. And she's like, okay, doesn't schedule hangs up. She calls back 60 seconds later and says, well, hey, how much is it after the new patient special?
28:42
Like, you know, I that's the patient you want. I'm looking for a long-term solution. What does it cost afterwards? It's like a five minute painful call where they're like, we don't know. And the patient's like, do I need, well, do I have to get x-rays every time? Do I have to get, it's just dumb instead of like, Hey, we've got the perfect solution. love patients without insurance. We can see you and take care of all your exams, x-rays, cleanings that are needed. It's 25 bucks a month. You can cancel if you ever want to cancel, but let's get you going and keep you healthy for the long term.
29:11
long-term. Anything that's going to flip the script and get people off of what their automatic is. And that is a tool or feather in your cap that whatever you want to say that that's what you can use to flip the script a bit. So these patients are programmed and we're consumers every single day. We know exactly what to say that salespeople don't want to hear.
29:39
We've been practicing our whole entire lives. So that's a patient that knew exactly how to corner people. And frankly, the person that just communicated the clearest was confident in what they were delivering and had something different, won that patient for life. And so we can get into front office caliber folks that don't really know how to pick up the phone.
30:07
We can talk about that in a different episode, but the dental menu, the software, the product, the service in itself changes the game so that your front office person, although may not be as skilled as you want them to be, at least they have an, you have an answer for them now that they can just use. That they can just use. So- Get them into your farm and your fence. Get them in the fence, hashtag fence. Paul.
30:37
Closing, we just hit all my five points. Closing this bad boy down. mean, if I had a dental practice, I would have this. I do get a lot of the monthly thing where, actually this is a great point to end with. doctors aren't the best business people. I think they know that. I don't think I'm saying something that they don't know. Some it comes naturally to.
31:07
It doesn't. And I get a lot of docs that get really afraid of what that first six month relationship looks like with the patient and the money and the overhead, especially startup. Yeah. Especially startup in how do I make this pencil? If I'm going to give them a $35 a month and the first month they come in, they're only getting charged 35. I've got overhead. I've got a new practice, dental assistants and hygienists and
31:36
It's expensive. And so if I'm only going to collect 35 and what if they leave me next month? Like that's an issue. So walk us through the mentality of why this makes sense because it does folks, it does period. of story. Paul, you're probably going to be able to say it better than I can. go for it. So the first thing you can think about is utilizing some sort of an enrollment fee when they first sign up and they get all those services that day.
32:05
So again, most offices, they'll do a $99 exam cleaning X-ray special or something along those lines. So if you have a, a $50 enrollment fee and then the first month's 25 or 29 bucks, well now you're collecting 79 bucks, at least enough to offset some of your overhead and your hygiene time. So I would encourage you to charge probably, you know, in the neighborhood of 25 to $75 for an enrollment fee. It's still a great deal for the patient. Cause it's like, hey,
32:33
You either spend $229 today for the exam clean x-rays, or you can join our membership. You only have to pay $75 today and you're set up for long-term care and you'll get another cleaning in six months and you'll get the rewards and all that. So that's one way to do it. The other thing is if you look at any business, so our business, we're a SaaS company. You look at any software, dentists are on tons of softwares and SaaS is in their pain and everything. Why?
32:59
don't all these other businesses put up a barrier and say, I'm really worried that I'm going to get stiffed. It's because it pencils out where if you take 100 patients and five of them do that to you, but you went on 95 of them, instead what dentists tend to do is they put up a barrier for all 100. Well, let's put up a barrier for all of our patients, even the ones that could be really good and make it really difficult to access care.
33:26
because we're worried about these five that may stiff us. Well, my opinion is why don't you charge $2 more per month on your 95 and that'll more than cover your little bit. Everybody deals with theft and loss. And I mean, we have receivables. I'll put in $5,000 worth of work and I don't always get paid, but generally speaking I do. And that just has to be put into my pricing model. I've got to charge enough to account for losses, to account for employees that don't.
33:56
perform to account for, you know, unexpected things that happen. You do the same thing with your business. So it's all about pricing and building and getting the right mentality. The membership plan is almost like a business within a business, but don't create barriers for all of your patients because of the few weirdos that don't pay you, you know? So I... It reminds me of the banking world. Everybody knows that I left.
34:24
lenders every single year set aside millions of dollars, set aside in what they would call a fund, a loss fund of some sort, just expecting people to default. I mean, it's just probability, it's numbers. so that's what reminds me. But we're at about a 4 % default rate. call it the bonehead rate. 4 % is nothing. 4 % is nothing.
34:54
back to consulting, we always walk into practices and what's the problems? Let's talk about the problems. And then they give us all the problems. Once you really skinny down on that particular problem, like, how often does this happen? Well, it happened last week. When was the last time it happened? Six months ago. It's like, okay, that's not a major problem. Let's put in a solution that works for 90 % of the time or 85 % of the time.
35:22
And if 15 % of the time it doesn't work, it doesn't mean that the system's broke. It just means that we've got to handle 15 % of chaos. So you're 100 % right. You do what's best for the greater good. There's always going to be the boneheads, like you said. don't let it, don't let it jade you. I, one of the things I respect Dentists a lot. I think, I think when you, and maybe I'm off, but I've talked to some dentists, when you're doing something in someone's mouth, it's very personal. so when they don't pay you, it feels,
35:52
I would think it feels very personal, you know, it's like, hey, you know what, Mike, you suck and I'm going to slap you across the face and then I'm going to stiff you for your time that you did, you know, right there. doesn't it would it does feel very personal. So, dentists, I've seen him where they make an emotional decision, even though the system isn't broken, but it but it ticks you off. mean, it is personal and you pour your your lifeblood into something and people basically take advantage of you and spit on it like spit on you.
36:20
Literally. We're talking about dentists. But don't let that affect you. You gotta separate that emotion. Otherwise you're gonna make decisions where you end up with a poor membership plan that your front desk loves because she doesn't ever have to do anything and you've never been stiffed on it but you have 15 members and you don't ever make money. It's like, well, it doesn't really help you long term. You're still a caveman. Ha, caveman. Full circle. Well, Paul, listen.
36:50
I've never been a long episode podcast guy, but we got going here and we had a great conversation. think big picture folks, you need a membership plan. Established doctor, acquisition startup, you do because it gives your patients more options and this.
37:12
it's proven that more financial arrangement options, the more successful you'll be and patients will do more dentistry. It's just facts. So there's probably no better group than DentalMenu. So look below. We've got all of our links and stuff for Paul and DentalMenu below. And I encourage you to reach out to them directly. They've got a lot of cool things that we didn't touch on with the portal and online stuff and how you can
37:41
go into the practice management software and mine for opportunities. there's all kinds of cool stuff they're doing. But just as a baseline here for today, if you don't have a membership plan, get on one. And for Pete's sakes, don't try to do it yourself. So that being said, Paul, last minute comments before we sign off. No, appreciate it. Thanks. No, you guys are great. You guys are great partners. So thanks, Paul.
38:09
We'll catch up soon and I guess with that being said, make sure to check out season two's acquisition uncensored. We're deep diving into acquisitions just like we did startups and we're having fun on the other side of this. So check us out over there. All right guys, take care. Talk to you soon.
38:32
Thanks for listening. Tune in next week for another truth-filled episode of Startup Unscripted.