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Howard:
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It is a huge, huge honor today to be talking to Andy Jensen, who's the man from Curve Dental, and I just ... How are you doing, Andy?
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Andy:
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How am I doing? Super, this is a great opportunity, I appreciate it.
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Howard:
|
I know your real age. How do you look so young at that ... I'm not going to say your age, maybe your embarrassed by it. God, man you look like your 30 at most.
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Andy:
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It's the, you know, this mountain living, good air, I guess.
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Howard:
|
The good mountain living.
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Andy:
|
Yeah.
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Howard:
|
The reason I wanted you to do this is because I still think that a lot of dentist they ... Humans are territorial, so they want their server and their ranch. It's the old farm mentality. You want to make your own butter. You want your own chicken, pigs, corn, the whole 9 yards. I like the analogy of ... I read a book once, I forgot what it was called, but it basically talked about [client 00:00:58] computing verses electricity. When they started electricity, everybody owned their own burners, and if you want electricity you were shoveling coal and firewood around the clock and hiring these cheap immigrant Irish people like me to shovel coal. Then there was a man named Tesla who said, "You know what, instead of direct current, let's do alternating current and let's have a central, cloud-based facility where you can get out of the coal and firewood industry, and we'll just run the line to your house and we can do the whole city." That met a lot of resistance. Edison didn't see that vision. Is that correct?
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Andy:
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I believe, yeah. Tesla had a handle on that one.
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Howard:
|
Yeah, so right now, I always thought it was strange when you look at these franchises that every franchise should be operating, working on their businesses and their customers, but they're having to install computers and do backups, and put up firewalls, and get hacked into, and it just doesn't make any sense. I mean, I would think a franchise should centralize all of their computing, and all their franchisees should just have dummy terminals. Is that Curve Dental is all about? Is it all about cloud-based computing so your dental office has "dummy terminals"? Are they dummy terminals? Explain the technical side of what your unique selling proposition was.
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Andy:
|
Yeah, it's on the cloud, so the doctor's patient data is not sitting anywhere in the practice which is a key when it comes to security, and you've already talked about data backup. I mean, if your data is not local, you don't need to worry about that backup. It's more secure, and it's backed up. With Curve Dental, it's backed up every second, it's being backed up. You talked about, you know, electricity. In order for a doctor to have their own electricity, generator, all that type of stuff is very extensive. If you were to try to duplicate the type of security and infrastructure that we have, time would cost millions of dollars to do that, but because we've already spent that money, we can relay that cost across all of customers, and everyone's just paying a monthly subscription for that same security.
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Howard:
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It's an emotional deal. I mean, every rancher wants to have his own chickens and pigs or corn. Tell them their day to day lives are already on the cloud. When you log onto your Facebook page, that information is not in your phone or computer. It's not like YouTube, Gmail. Talk about where they're already living on the cloud and don't know.
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Andy:
|
Let's hit it where it really hurts, and that's the wallet, right? Everyone that I know of is banking online. They're not going to take their dollars and shove it underneath a mattress, correct? I can understand why you want to have your own chickens and stuff, but when it comes to money, you're not shoving dollars underneath your mattress. Why don't you do that? Because the bank is better, is more capable of keeping those dollars safe than you are. The same with data because or our infrastructure because of the back up because of all these things, we're more capable of keeping that data safe than having it sitting in a server in a broom closet next to the mop.
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Howard:
|
You're up their in Orem, Utah, and in Provo, Utah is the god of dentistry where all good, obedient dentists like me make our pilgrimage there. I think I went there a dozen times with Mike [inaudible 00:04:23] for everyone of Gordon's two-day courses, and up the street is where Dentrix was started. You were what, 16 years with Dentrix? What made you leave the security of big, old mother ship Dentrix which has got to be the market leader? Is it not? Don't most dental offices have Dentrix? It's owned by Henry Schein. What made you leave the mother ship and all that security and safety to go start Curve Dental?
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Andy:
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First of all, Henry Schein is a great company to work for. They take care of their employees, and I had a wonderful time there. I started working for a small company called Dentrix Dental Systems in 1992, I believe. They had 225 customers, and I helped to build that brand into a powerhouse. They've got, I don't know 25, 30000 customers now, but I had an opportunity to leave. I did, and after I left I was contacted by one of the principals at Dentrix, a gentleman by the name of Jim Pack who said, "You need to go check out this company called Curve Dental." I went ...
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Howard:
|
Who was that guy? Jim who?
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Andy:
|
Jim Pack.
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Howard:
|
P-A-C-K?
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Andy:
|
P-A-C-K.
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Howard:
|
Was he from Dentrix and had gone to Curve before you?
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Andy:
|
Yeah, he had left Dentrix a few years prior to my leaving the company, and then he had ran into the founder of Curve Dental, a young man by the name of Matt Doherty who was looking for someone to run the company. Matt was 21 years old at the time and needed an experienced CEO to actually run the company. After I left Dentrix, Jim Pack called me and said, "Would you like to come and check this out?", and I did, and saw some really, really exciting things. Number one of those being the cloud because quite frankly when I was at Dentrix, we had conversations about moving Dentrix to the cloud, but there were a lot of challenges and obstacles to doing that. Moving to Curve Dental, joining Curve Dental provided an opportunity to build a new brand in dentistry with dental software specifically on the cloud.
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Howard:
|
If I may [inaudible 00:06:44] a real world example of what you just said of my favorite, I got an MBA from ASU, my favorite, I love economics probably as much as dentistry, but you know it was Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian economist who came up with creative destructionism. He said, "You're never going to have progress if you don't spend your time destroying old infrastructures to build anew." America is the most creative destruction. If you look at the 1950 S&P 500, only 12% of those companies are still in existence today. From 1950 to 2015, that's just 65 years, we destroyed 88% of the fortune 500 which means we have the healthiest economy. That's what biology does. I mean, I'm going to die and be replaced with my granddaughter who's 3 and doesn't know what country she lives in. That's the better model. These older companies, it's harder to change them. They always get ran over from behind because you can't ... and everybody should revisit their own business model and say, "How am I going to get ran over from behind?" Or as in my favorite book by Andy Grove, "Only the paranoid survive." You got to spend more time looking in the rear view mirror than you do out your windshield because if your only staring out windshield, you're going to get smeared from behind. Dentrix wouldn't go cloud and you did.
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Andy:
|
Yeah. They had talked about it many times. I had been at many meetings at Dentrix where we had challenges with, we had to get an upgrade app to all of our customers, sending a physical disc to everyone of our customers would cost 100's of 1,000's of dollars. That problem is completely solved when you're on the cloud because it's a click of the mouse and all of our customers have that upgrade instantly. Dr. Farran, you were one, maybe 3 years ago, you said in DentalTown Magazine, you said, "Any company who is not looking at building on the cloud now is at risk of losing their market share." I don't know if that's true yet, but I believe it will be true if not this year, next year. I'm sure that Dentrix, practices using Dentrix, Eaglesoft, all of these client-server applications, those doctors are looking at the cloud. They're on the cloud every day, and they're thinking, "If I'm on the cloud at home, why am I not on the cloud at work?" DPR recently did a survey, 47%, almost half of all of the respondents said that they would be on the cloud in 3 years. There's a big migration. It probably started last year, and you have a migration of doctors moving from Windows, from client-server, to the cloud. In 4 years, 65% are going to be on the cloud.
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Howard:
|
In 1950, average overhead in a dental office was under 50%, and in 2015 it was over 65%, so we've gone up 15%. When you look at dentist's overhead sheets, and I've looked a gazillion of them, you're always paying all this money for IT people, for hardware, something happens, the backup. How many dentists have you heard that their computer crashed, went to get the backup, and the backup was saving the C drive, and it was supposed to save the D drive. Talk about nightmares about backups because when you sit there and talk about, "Well, if your dental office is burned down ..." that doesn't make sense. I don't think any dentist wakes up at night and worries about his dental office burning down or getting hit by a meteorite or by lightning. What are real world, daily stories you've heard of people losing their data. What have you heard?
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Andy:
|
Interesting thing, if you get on our website, we actually keep a collection of horror stories.
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Howard:
|
No way, do you really?
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Andy:
|
Yes, we keep a collection, and any doctor can contribute, so you can find it there. Two things, the number one reason, I have doctors call in, and they go, "All right, my server crashed, I'm not doing this anymore. I'm getting that server out of my practice. It's a pain in the butt. There are zip up requirements and security rules that I don't want to deal with, all those types of things." Yes, I don't want to have to deal with a backup that may or may not restore. Some IT guys say that you're really rolling the dice when it comes to restoring your backup, 50/50. 50% it's going to make it, 50% are like you said, are backing up the C drive.
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|
The other one, think about theft, though. Theft is another reason why the cloud makes a lot of sense. We had doctor in Vancouver, went to work in the morning and the door was jimmied open. He walks in, all his computers are gone, gone, but it's, you know, there's an emotional response there. He called his wife. His wife brought down the laptop, and they were able to see all their patients for the day. They didn't have to cancel any appointments. How much production did he save for a day or 2 or 3? He saved it all. He didn't have to worry about that HIPPA concern. He didn't have to tell his customers, his patients that "Hey, yeah, some creepy guy has all of your data." He didn't have to worry about that either.
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Howard:
|
Oh my god, you just reminded me of a story, sorry to interrupt, but I got to tell you this story. When I first opened my dental office, 4 or 5 years into it, my security went off in the middle of the night, and when the security alarm went off, the company would call my house, and they told me that my alarm had gone off. I had 4 young kids and a wife and jumped in my car and drove down there. I got there, the door was opened. I don't know what happened.
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I couldn't find anything going on, but the police showed up right behind me. This old police officer said, "Dude, are you married?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "You got any babies?" "Yeah." He said, "You ever come down here again," he goes, "Why are you going to get shot for a bunch of idiots stealing your computers. You don't ever do that. You walked in a dental office with no weapon. That's what we're here for." He goes, "If you got 4 kids, I want you to uninstall that stupid security alarm because you need to stay in bed with those 4 kids. You don't need to be down here in the middle of the night in Phoenix, Arizona which is just bat-shit crazy world. I mean it's crazy out here." I did. I told the security people, just call the police, do not call me because I'm so dumb, I'll go down there.
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|
If someone said to you, "Andy, I'm on Dentrix. I'm with Schein. I'm on Eaglesoft owned by Patterson. I'm on SoftDent which is owned by a different person every 49 minutes. Why should I switch to Curve?" I've been on SoftDent since 1987 until now, I'm still on SoftDent. You know, it was bought by an Atlanta company. I think it's owned by a company that owns [inaudible 00:13:32], now Care Stream, it's always someone different. Do people switch to Curve Dental just because it's the cloud based play. Is that your unique selling proposition? Is that what you guys are all about?
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Andy:
|
It's definitely a unique selling proposition when they're looking at a client-server stuff, right? If you're moving from Dentrix to Eaglesoft, that's a lateral move. I don't understand the advantages. If you move from Dentrix to Eaglesoft, you may gain some features, but you're going to lose some too, that's for sure. What is the advantage to moving from one client system to another. There is none really, but if you move from client-server to the cloud, there are a number of benefits that you're going to immediately enjoy, and that has to do with all of the things we've already talked about. No server, data securities, better data backup, you never have to worry about that. The upgrades, you never have to install upgrades, they just appear automatically. What about data accessibility. There's a thing about, there's emphasis these days on work style. These younger doctors, "I want to work from the coffee shop. I want to work from home in bed." I mean, if you're on the cloud, that's a natural extension, natural advantage of the cloud is being able to access your data whenever from wherever. All you need is a computer with internet access, and bam, you have access to your data in the user experience that you would at work. Those are the advantages.
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Howard:
|
You know, another advantage of working from anywhere is that old 80/20 rule. About 20% of humans just naturally love to work. The non-workers call us workaholics, but you know, if you want to sit at home and watch Jerry Springer, I mean, how many football games can you watch on Sunday, but I've noticed, I've heard so many stories that when the whole staff has access to the dental office [management 00:15:28] information software, a lot of time the receptionist are the office manager on a Sunday night logs on work. You're not even paying her, and she's logging on and crunching an insurance aging report or doing this or that. I've always had my staff been able to dial into my computer because they just ... It's the same, I'd say about 7 employees out of my 55 that they're just like me. They're just born to work. Being able to have your team just sit they are and be wondering, "I wonder what will happen to Andy Jensen? I wonder if his insurance paid? I wonder if he came in?" Just to sit down while they're thinking about it and log on just they would be checking Facebook or checking Pinterest or whatever, and you'll log on and do work. I think it's amazing.
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Andy:
|
You know, this lifestyle thing. The cloud allows you to spend more time with what's important to you. For example, I know there's a lot more woman are entering the dental profession as doctors. Many of these women are also trying to balance family, being a mother, and having a family with running a full-time practice. If you're on the cloud, as an example, you can leave at 5 o'clock or 4 o'clock, be home with the kids, take care of the kids, put kids to bed, and then after that time, you can log in and finish up charts or do whatever it is you need to do. It allows you to mold your lifestyle around your work style.
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Howard:
|
Yeah, but the better advice would be just to not get married and don't ever have children. Wouldn't you say that Andy? I mean, think of how much more time and money you'd have if you never made those 2 critical mistakes of getting married and having children. I say that when my son Ryan is looking at me. In economics, they taught us at MBA school that price is always the biggest factor. What's the price that Curve Dental ... and by the way, when I do these podcasts, Andy's not paying me. This isn't a commercial. I just, I always figure, I'm real, I'm a real dentist, I'm curious. You could be curious too. Nobody pays to get on the Howard, my podcast, there's no money changing hands. This is just intellectual curiosity, but how much is Curve Dental, and is the entrance price, would that be the same for Dentrix, Eaglesoft, and SoftDent. I mean are we talking even Steven or do you have to pay a lump? Is it a monthly subscription fee? How's the price work?
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Andy:
|
It's a monthly subscription fee, and whether it's more or less than what you're paying now for Dentrix and Eaglesoft depends on the doctor. To get onto Curve, we have the same upstart cost that you might find anywhere else. There's conversion services that we need to do, there's training, then there's some implementation things that we need to do, configuration. There's an upfront fee. It ranges on what your needs are, but after that we have 4 packages. The first package starts at $350 per month for a one-doctor practice, and then you can work your way up.
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Howard:
|
What percent of practices would you say are one doc these days?
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Andy:
|
Our customers, that's pretty much our bread and butter, but we do have, we have a good number of practices with 3, 4 doctors in multiple locations as well.
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Howard:
|
Still a majority. Would you say 75% one doctor are your customers?
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Andy:
|
Easily.
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Howard:
|
Maybe 85?
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Andy:
|
Maybe 76.
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Howard:
|
Yeah, still 3 out 4.
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Andy:
|
Yes.
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Howard:
|
Dentistry is still a [cottage 00:19:14] industry, isn't it. It's still. I mean, I think it's funny how you guys go to Wichita, Kansas and like Heartland will come in and open one corporate dentistry, and the other 400 dentists all just freak out. You just look at the percentages. These guys are 1% of the reality and 99% of the noise, you know what I mean?
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Andy:
|
Sure.
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Howard:
|
Dentistry is still a solo preconditioning ...
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Andy:
|
It is, but that noise is getting louder. I mean the number of doctors, the number of organizations that are contacting us about multiple locations is certainly growing, and it's exciting thing to be with, to work with too.
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Howard:
|
Go through your 4 packages. The first one-doc $350 a month. You said there was a 2, a 3, and a 4.
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Andy:
|
Yeah, so basic package is front office, back office needs, support, those types of things. We also offer a package doctors want, that automated deployment reminder system. You know email and text. We can offer that. That's additional package. If a doctor wants to use our native digital imaging capabilities, we have another package for that, and if they want the whole thing, we have what we call the Curve Superhero Package, and they can have that too.
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|
Howard:
|
How much is that?
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|
Andy:
|
Curve's Superhero Package starts at $600 per month.
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|
Howard:
|
When you use the word native, native what?
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|
Andy:
|
Native digital imaging.
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Howard:
|
Okay, assume that no one knows what that means.
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Andy:
|
Yeah.
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Howard:
|
What is native digital imaging?
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Andy:
|
We use Dentrix or Patterson as an example. If you want to have digital imaging as part of your management software, that's something else you have to install. That's something else that has to be maintained. With us, it's just a click of the mouse, and now you're taking images. There's nothing else to install. There's nothing else to worry about. It's there. It's part of the management system. It's just like clicking from the chart to billing.
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Howard:
|
You have a bridge then.
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Andy:
|
It's not a bridge. It's native. It's part of the software.
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Howard:
|
That's opposite of what a bridge is, huh.
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Andy:
|
Yeah, so there is not bridging, there's no integration. It's there.
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Howard:
|
I always hated on mine, when I want to pull up an x-ray it takes a while. I mean, you sit there waiting to pull up the x-rays, the digital x-rays.
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Andy:
|
That's with the server, right?
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Howard:
|
Yeah, yeah.
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Andy:
|
I hear that from doctors all the time, "So, if you're in the internet, it must be slow to bring up an x-ray." You just gave me a great example of sometimes ... I was on Dentrix at a trade show, I tried to bring up an x-ray and it would take a [inaudible 00:22:00] seconds to come up. I really don't see any differences there. The neat thing about our imaging software, and it's unique to Curve is that you can plug and play almost any of the most popular digital x-ray sensors, and we capture that image directly to the cloud. It's not being stored on your hard drive and then uploaded or night or whenever. It's instantaneously uploaded right to the cloud.
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Howard:
|
Okay, but the 4000-pound elephant in the room is these new CBCT's. I mean these are enormously huge files. How does that work?
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Andy:
|
They also, when you buy one of those things, you also buy a server that comes with it because a server is required.
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Howard:
|
You would save those in your office.
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Andy:
|
Yeah, there so massive that you can't, it just doesn't make sense right now.
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Howard:
|
You think that'll change. I've also read that, I just read in a good source in the United States between like 7 and 9 PM like 70% of the internet is consumed just by Netflix movies be thrown across the internet. Did you read that? Is that true?
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Andy:
|
It's got to be true because in my house, I only have 2 daughters living in the home now, and yes, that is true. Netflix is taking up all my bandwidth.
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Howard:
|
How many children do you have?
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Andy:
|
5 that I know of.
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Howard:
|
5 that you know of, and how many boys and girls?
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Andy:
|
My oldest is a son, and then I got 4 girls.
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Howard:
|
Who do you think causes more trouble, my 4 boys or your 4 girls? I have no hair left and you look 10 years younger than me, so girls must be easier to raise.
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Andy:
|
The juries still out, but so far it's been girls have been great. Boy's doing great too.
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|
Howard:
|
Right on. What else did you want to talk about. I mean, is there anything else you wanted to talk about?
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|
Andy:
|
I think that we talked about, you know, I just want to stress that from my perspective, I see what doctors are interested, and I just see this migration from client-server to cloud. It's happening, and any doctor that thinks they need to stay with client-server and they're spending money ... I mean look, if you're buying a client-server system these days, one of the big 3, you're spending anywhere from 10 to 12 thousand dollars on software that is decades old. Why would you spend dollars on software that is outdated? The current technology platform is the cloud. Dr. Farran, if you were to start a software company tomorrow, you would not make that software something that has to be installed. It would be cloud-based, and that's what I mean by current technology platform. It's the cloud. Dentrix and Eaglesoft for these guys, I'm sure they're working on the cloud, they're working on something, but they have their best developers are now focused on the cloud. How much time are they really focusing on their client-server software? They're not. That's not a good business bet to be putting more resources into technology that's decades old. You want to put those dollars into something that's new and which is current, and that's the cloud. We've been there for 10 years, 11 now.
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|
Howard:
|
I want to ask some other ... They say success is related to how many uncomfortable questions you want to ask. When I go into these dental schools, you know, 15 years ago, it was all Microsoft. You go into these dental schools, everyone of those kids is on Apple. You're talking to a lot of dental students right now, most of the fans of my show are under 30, what if you're a big Apple fan?
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|
Andy:
|
It doesn't matter. Again, it's a web-based application, so it doesn't matter if it's Apple, PC, it doesn't matter. You can have a mix in your practice. You could have PC in the operatories, Mac's at the front desk and in the office. It doesn't matter.
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|
Howard:
|
Because it's on the cloud, Curve Dental doesn't matter if it's a PC or a Apple.
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|
Andy:
|
No we are ...
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|
Howard:
|
Do you have to buy the special Apples that run both Microsoft and Apple?
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|
Andy:
|
No, no.
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|
Howard:
|
It's just straight Apple because you know what I'm talking about, there's Apple computers where you can toggle back and forth between Microsoft and Apple, right?
|
|
Andy:
|
Yes.
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|
Howard:
|
You don't need that.
|
|
Andy:
|
You don't need that. Look, you can ... All you need is Google Chrome which is, you can install it on a Mac and you can install it on a PC. The catch here is not with our software. The catch is how many different digital x-ray sensors on the market have a true Apple driver? That's the restrictions here, and as to my knowledge, I think there's only one sensor out there that has a true Mac-compatible driver.
|
|
Howard:
|
What's that?
|
|
Andy:
|
It's the pro-sensor.
|
|
Howard:
|
From who?
|
|
Andy:
|
I knew you were going to ask me that, and I can't remember.
|
|
Howard:
|
It's pro-sensor.
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|
Andy:
|
Yes.
|
|
Howard:
|
Oh. What percent of your clients under 30 are using Curve on Apple, would you guess?
|
|
Andy:
|
Wow, I would think that a third of our customers are probably 100% Mac based, and there's a certain percentage that are probably mixed. Most of them are PC.
|
|
Howard:
|
I would have never known that. That's why I do these podcasts. I look at podcasts, you know, when I was little, my mom cruel and tortured me into piano lessons and I used to hate them, and now I love podcasts because it's really my version of a piano lesson you love. Every day I get to spend an hour talking to some smart dude like you and learn so much. The other 4000-pound gorilla, and you know this is a big issue of mine always is these dentists, they buy this practice-management software, but it doesn't do payables, receivables, it doesn't do payroll, and then they're accepting PPO's or accepting 10 different fee schedules, and you're getting paid 10 different prices. They don't even know what their costs. How come the staff doesn't clock in and clock out? How come when they send out PPO fee schedules you don't enter all your fees? It says, "Hey Andy, you [inaudible 00:28:35]", and call me Howard by the way, not Dr. Farran, "Andy, we're paying you 880," is about the average PPO price for a crown, "and the schedule says you spent an hour-and-a-half doing that crown, ad we divided out all your expenses by an hour-and-a-half, and they cost you 480 to do this 880 ..." How much further down the road until a dentist knows their cost?
|
|
Andy:
|
How much further down the road? You know ...
|
|
Howard:
|
You got Quicken online. That's in the cloud. These dentists are already cloud-based Quicken. I called Quicken. They said they have crack teams that specialized in merging their Quicken with different verticals, whether it be Hertz, Rent-A-Car, or whatever. How much longer until these dentists can look at fee schedule and know their cost?
|
|
Andy:
|
That's a great ... This is awesome Dr. Farran because ...
|
|
Howard:
|
Now I'm back to Dr. Farran. I've gone from Howard, that little shit.
|
|
Andy:
|
I think we're going to have an integration with Quicken. I think the boys in the development team are going to hate me for this, but if we're going to have an integration with Quicken before probably Q2 of this year.
|
|
Howard:
|
Are you serious?
|
|
Andy:
|
Yeah. All your receivables and all of that information is going to be shared with the doctors account with Quicken automatically, and that'll be pretty awesome. That's one step. The second step is like you said, time clocks. That is something that we need to tackle and something that our customers are asking for. It's a process. We're going to get there.
|
|
Howard:
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That is the best news I've heard in 2016, I mean because Andy, you can talk to every consultant on earth, they'll all tell you that humans that think that it's best to work hard and work really hard. They don't know their costs, so they'll go in there, and they're taking 10 PPO's, and they'll cancel 3, and then they'll cancel the cost of the lab supplies and all that stuff, and their production will go down, and their net income will go up. The dentists, they don't know. They'll have a hygienist, and they'll say, "I think I may need a second one." I say, "Okay, well your hygienist Shirley just did a cleaning, exam, and x-ray for 100 bucks. What was your break even point?" They go, "I have no idea." I go, "Then how do you know you want 2?" I can go into dental offices and show them how many hygienists they would have to have to go bankrupt because they have no idea they're running their hygiene at a loss. They say, "Well, my gut feeling is it's profitable." I go, "Well, your guts are filled with fecal matter. What does your fat belly filled with fecal matter have to do with your costs?" They don't know.
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They would look at those PPO's, and they would clean up the industry because if dentists start saying, "Okay, to do this, I have to drop composite, do amalgam. I'd do this. I got to do these things." They make a decision not to do it, it'll clean up the difference between a Chevy and a Mercedes. Whereas right now, they're making a Chevy, a Pontiac, an Olds, a Buick, and a Cadillac, and their overhead is somewhere in the middles, so they're taking profit dollars for the Mercedes to subsidize the Chevy's they're doing at a loss when in reality the dental market should line up as, "I'm a low-cost Chevy clinic, and I'm a mid-priced Oldsmobile, and I'm a high-cost Mercedes."
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Right now you just have peanut butter and jelly accounting because no one will merge their data with Quicken online so they can get a fee schedule. If you took that time of the schedule, the number of operatories, the hours you're open, the staff all clocking in and clocking out, I mean, I think if someone really focused on this, within a year or 2 a dentist could look at his [inaudible 00:32:14] and say, "Wow, I do a composite for 250 and I only make 12 bucks. If raise the price to 262 I double my profit on a composite." The PPO comes back and says, "Oh, we just lowered your composite fee 12 bucks", he's like, "Okay, well then I got to do this faster or I got to switch to amalgam or I got to drop your plan", but right now we have Stevie Wonder accounting. Actually, it's more like Ray Charles accounting.
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Andy:
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Dr. Farran, you and I had this conversation in Las Vegas probably 10, 12 years ago at lunch, and I know that this is a favorite topic of yours is merging that data together. You know, I was with Dentrix back then, and yeah, but anyway, that's where we're at now, and by Q2, somewhere in Q2 we should have that integration completed, and it'll be exciting.
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Howard:
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I'll tell you what, if you do that, I would be your biggest marketing guy. I will write columns on that. I will post it everywhere because I just want my homeys to be happy and healthy. There's 1 to 3 suicides a year just in Phoenix, Arizona. Talk to anybody about a suicide or a divorce, it's the big 3, a third of it's money, a third of it's sex, and a third of it's substance abuse. These guys are so stressed out because they work so hard, and then the account calls them up and says, "You owe the IRS 52,000." They're like, "Dude, I don't have 52 cents, how could this be?" It's simply because they don't know their costs. I'm lucky because I got just big enough where back in 2000 I had my full-time comptroller pulling all this data in excel. I get it done for me, but they're not big enough for that critical mass. If you've got a 5-person dental office, you're not big enough to have an HR director or a marketing director or a comptroller. They got to wear too many hats, and I think the comptroller hat can be automated.
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Andy:
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Yes, absolutely.
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Howard:
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Any other topics you want to talk about?
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Andy:
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I think that maybe, we're not the only kid on the cloud block. Maybe that's something we should talk about is who else is on the cloud and why ...
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Howard:
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Who else is on the cloud?
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Andy:
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Low and behold, there are some other companies on the cloud. You've get Dentrix introduced something just a few years ago.
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Howard:
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Is that Dentrix Enterprise?
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Andy:
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It's called Dentrix Ascend. We call it something, but I can't tell you what that is. You've got a company out in southern California, Planet DDS. They've been around for just as long as we have, and a few newbies on the east coast that are just barely coming online. Competition is good and bad. In our case, we like it because it means that there's more people talking about the cloud and the advantages and why you need to be there, so we like that. We like that.
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Howard:
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It's healthy. I've been known to say. I tell these young dentists that. You know, I opened up 28 years ago. I was so excited to meet the dentists in my town, across the street because we're all in this together, and half the doors were like slammed in my face because they didn't want any competition, and the other half were like, "Oh yeah, we are buddies", and we'd go eat a cheeseburger and watch a football game. Now 28 years later, guess who the millionaires are.
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Andy:
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Yes.
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Howard:
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The other guys were, they didn't realize that we're all in this together, and we compete against TV's and iPhones and trips to Disneyland. The ones that always had their open-door policy and embraced competition and joined their trade associations, went to conventions and sang Kumbaya, they always ... I think in hope, growth, and abundancy, not fear and scarcity. Competition is very good for every industry.
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Andy:
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Absolutely. For a long time we we are that single voice calling through the wilderness, if you may, that was talking about, move to the cloud, move to the cloud, and you know, look, 10 years ago or even when I first started with the company in 2009, end of 2009, when I started blogging about the cloud, I had companies shaking their head and go, "The cloud, it's not going to happen, it's not going to happen." A lot of people said, "The cloud, yes, it's definitely the future. It's definitely where we're going." I disagree. The future is now. We can't say the cloud is the future. The cloud is now. We're way down the path of going to the cloud.
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Howard:
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You and I are both visionaries because I flew Effingham, Illinois 20 year ago asking them to merge with accounting software. I flew to Provo. Who was that founder up there? It was Larry Gibson?
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Andy:
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Correct.
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Howard:
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I told Larry when I was with Gordon, I flew to Melville, New York talked to Stan Bergman after they bough Schein. I mean, I am not going away. I know my homeys. They don't know their costs. I walk in their dental office, they don't know, and I see the stress all over their face, and then they hire these $30,000 accountants or consultants, and a consultant goes in there, they can't put together the information. It would literally take a week for a CPA to go in there and figure out all your costs. Go ask your accountant, "I just did an MOD composite for 250, tell me what my net income was, my return on asset, my return equity on it." They couldn't figure it out. The data, it's too many places. It's in paper. It's in filed taxes. They can't do it, and I know that will be the singular most important thing for the health of this industry is to get them to know their costs and to somehow try to get control on the expense of these new dental schools.
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I mean, they're just ... If they're going to open up another dental schools, well all you got to do to do is go to India or Brazil and see what happens when you open a dental school on every corner because desperate people do desperate things, and a healthy industry needs to have a managed supply and demand, and I know a lot of libertarians don't believe that, but there's really no evidence ... We'll go back to railroads, when the railroads started everybody was laying a different track width, and finally the government stepped in and created standards, and said, "No, we're going to have one rail width", and they picked the roman chariot because when you go bankrupt, they want someone else's railroad to fit on yours. Imagine electricity if it wasn't managed, if every house was wired for a different, you know 110, 112, 220, 228. Standards create wealth, and I look back in history. I see zero evidence of unfettered, free trade building wealth. It actually brings chaos. It's managed competition. There needs to be standards.
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They need to control the number of dental schools opening up, and you guys are going to be total visionaries. We talked about this a decade ago, if you merge this with the accounting software online, and this dentist, she can sit down and look at her reports and know exactly what her costs are for every procedure she does, she will make wiser, smarter, faster decisions.
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Andy:
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You know, when we have it done, Dr. Farran, I'll give you a call, and maybe we'll fly down to Phoenix to show you how it works.
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Howard:
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You're just not going to call me Howard, are you? I'm sure you have family down here because I've lived in Phoenix since 1987, and about a third of this town has roots in Utah. Seriously, I think 1 out of every 3 of my friends has an uncle, cousin, mom, dad, relative in Utah.
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Andy:
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In this case, my son-in-law does have roots in Phoenix, but I don't, so I guess that counts.
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Howard:
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You said your son-in-law?
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Andy:
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Yeah.
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Howard:
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You do have roots, you see, but yeah, Andy, come on down. When you get this, come down, demo it, and my team, you can, when you lay this out, I'll give you my comptroller, my office manager, and my time to as many hours as you need to show you what we're doing and what we need to do, and man. Just call us. You go into Intel and ask them "How much ..." Watch Shark Tank, what's the first question out of their mouth, "What are you selling this for?" "12 bucks." "What does it cost you to make it?" Not one dentist could go on Shark Tank, as Mark Cuban would say, "Oh you sell a filling for 250, what's your cost?" They're like, "I have no idea." You know?
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Andy:
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That's true.
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Howard:
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Not one dentist could pass Shark Tank, you know, the industry is misinformed.
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Andy:
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That's correct.
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Howard:
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Anything else you want to talk about?
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Andy:
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Well, yes. Look, I think this is a great opportunity to plug my new book.
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Howard:
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Awesome, did you write a new book?
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Andy:
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I am almost done, and we publish on Amazon, and it's called How to Build the Killer Practice on the Cloud.
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Howard:
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That's by Andy Jensen?
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Andy:
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Yes.
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Howard:
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You heard it first on Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran, did I hear this as breaking news on my show?
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Andy:
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It's breaking news because frankly I still got to finish the last part, and then we'll get it on Amazon, and we'll be done.
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Howard:
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Well, I tell you what, when you're done, you get the jpeg image of the book, the link to it on Amazon, you email it to me, howard@dentaltown.com, and I'll buy it, read it, do a review, and put it on DentalTown and all my social media deals, and it'll be, I'll put it in front of 300,000 dentists.
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Andy:
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I'll take up on that. If there's anyone who wants an advanced copy, don't want to wait for Amazon, they can just contact me, I'd be happy to send them something.
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Howard:
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How do they contact you?
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Andy:
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They can reach me at Andy.Jensen@CurveDental.com. Jensen is with E's, true Scandinavian.
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Howard:
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J-E-N-S-E-N?
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Andy:
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Correct.
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Howard:
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Scandinavia is 5 countries. What is it? It's Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, and what's the 5th one? Is it Greenland?
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Andy:
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I don't know.
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Howard:
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Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway.
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Andy:
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Oh, I guess, yeah, absolutely, Norway.
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Howard:
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Norway, when you're Scandinavian which one were you? Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden or Finland?
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Andy:
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Danish.
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Howard:
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Denmark.
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Andy:
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Yup.
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Howard:
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I have to say that it's so funny that I've been to 50 countries lecturing to dentists, and I think Scandinavia is the most advanced society in the world, and there's nothing more hilarious to listen to some hillbilly from Kansas at my own family reunion talking about the damn socialists and socialized medicine and those damn Scandinavians. I'm like, "Dude, that's like, they're living like 100 years in the future from your hillbilly ass in Parsons, Kansas." I do, I think if they could move Scandinavia down to Phoenix, Arizona latitude, my god. I mean, I wouldn't want to live there because it's only light there like 4 hours a day during the winter.
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Andy:
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Maybe that's why they're so advanced because they got plenty of time to think about stuff because it's too cold to go outside.
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Howard:
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It's actually true. I went to [Cratan 00:43:22] for undergrad, and I always said it was the best university in the world because 100 times me and my 4 buddies that are now dentists, we'd look out the window, and it was so overcast, freezing cold sleet, we'd just decide, "Oh might as well stay in and study." In Scandinavia, it's a double curse because during the winter most dentist say the best thing to do is work 6, 10 hour days and just crank. Then when it warms up and you have this beautiful July and August, and tourists like me want to go there, almost nothing is open because everybody just takes off. I mean the parks are just covered with people laying out and playing Frisbee. You go to restaurants and like half of them are closed, and the ones that are open only have like 2 staff member working. You can't get anybody to work in Denmark in July. It's an amazing country. I just love that place. The obvious question is where does the name Curve Dental come from? Is it a curve ball, is it a soft ball term? Are you throwing them a curve ball with the cloud.
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Andy:
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Trying to definitely throw in the profession a curve. The folklore is when they were looking for a name for the company, they needed to find something that was going to be unique, but also descriptive of what they were doing, and Curve made sense. It was a unique name, Curve, but at the same time, they're going in a different direction. They're curving around the status quo, I guess.
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Howard:
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Okay. Anything else, or is that a wrap?
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Andy:
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I sure appreciate being invited to talk to you. It's always a pleasure.
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Howard:
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What was the name of your book, one more time?
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Andy:
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How to Build the Killer Practice on the Cloud.
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Howard:
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You can get that at CurveDental.com. C-U-R-V-E dental.com or email Andy.Jensen, J-E-N-S-E-N @ curvedental.com. Andy, I've known you for a decade or more, and I think you're a legend, I think you're very smart. No, I do. My friends in the industry think you're just one of the smartest guys in the industry. Thank you so much for spending time with me today.
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Andy:
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It was a pleasure, thank you very much.
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