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VIDEO - DUwHF #911 - Sean Crabtree
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AUDIO - DUwHF #911 - Sean Crabtree
Sean Crabtree is a media personality, podcast host, international speaker and published author. After earning his BBA in 1991 he began a career in the start-up and build-out of what has become one of the largest telecommunication companies in the world. In early 1998, Sean left the corporate arena and has since founded or co-founded eight successful companies and conducted hundreds of dental training programs all across the United States, Western Canada and the Caribbean. Sean founded the Crabtree Group with a single vision in mind. To help dentists succeed by business and management acumen rather than trial and error over time.
www.thecrabtreegroup.com
Howard: It is just a huge honor for me today to be in podcast interviewing Sean Crabtree of the crabtreegroup.com. He's a media personality, podcast host, international speaker and published author. After earning his BBA in 1991 he began a career in the startup and build out of what has become one of the largest telecommunication companies in the world. In early 1998 Sean left the corporate arena and has since founded or co-founded eight successful company and conducted hundreds of dental training programs all across the United States, Western Canada and the Caribbean. Sean founded the Crabtree Group with a single vision in mind to help dentist succeed by Business and Management acumen rather than trial and error. So Sean are you trying to tell me that dentistry is a business?
Sean: Unfortunately for some, I know that's a shocker, it is absolutely a business. You know this Howard the things that you're doing on your channel, and all the things that you're trying to teach these young guys out there, dentistry is absolutely a business and that's probably one of the first things that these guys need to understand right out of the shoot.
Howard: So how do you go for telecommunications in dentistry? Tell us about your journey of how you ended up in dentistry.
Sean: I'm an old guy, you and I were talking about this a moment ago, I'm an old guy. I started out in telecommunications before they called it telecommunications, they called it cellular telephony back then. As a matter of fact, this is so long ago Howard, that when you dialed six one one you get Susan at my office and at 8:30 she went home to the kids, so that's how long ago it was. This was in the late 80's and the early 90's. As the industry changed and so forth it went to different distribution channels and I became a corporate trainer for sales and quality movement for a Tri-State area in Tennessee. The thing that I discovered is the concept of sales that I was training these twenty something guys on, they already knew the most basic concepts; nobody buys on price, it's all based on value, how do you create value, all of those things. In dentistry that was unheard of. So for a young guy, 10 years out of college, that was a really enticing opportunity to bring something that previous to that I thought- when I started with the company, it was called Cellular One. We were owned by a group of attorneys out of New Jersey. I don't know if you know how old all that worked, it was based on a spectrum buyout and so forth. So we became a franchise of the Cellular One organization and then of course we get bought out, and we get bought out, and we get bought out and it got to the point where we were just completely corporatized. I mean when I first started there were six of us, we made all the decisions, and like I said Susan was customer care in my office and then it became just completely corporatized to the point that when I left it was GT-Mobile Net and about a week after that they were bought by Verizon. When I started there were six of us, when I left GT-Mobile Net there were six hundred ninety five thousand employees worldwide and it was just completely corporatized. Anyway that was very exciting for me to bring this concept that I thought everybody knew, I mean every all these people that I would interact with all knew these concepts, when I got to dentistry it was just brand new.
Howard: How did you pick dentistry out of all the industries?
Sean: Well because of that really. Not to pick on dentistry but health care in general I think that's a good point. Health care in general I think is behind when it comes to the concept of- we call it treatment acceptance in other areas they call it sales. Dentistry is behind in terms of how to create value. I'll tell you a quick story, years ago through a client of mine, the practice management guys at the University of Nebraska Omaha called me come in and speak to their fourth year urology guys. This is interesting group of people Howard, but at any rate they hired me to come in and speak, this is before Obamacare and all this other stuff. They hired me to come in and speak and of course they knew what I was about, they knew through my client what it is that we do and so forth. So I was probably halfway through my presentation and I could just tell I was talking about marketing, sales and this concept of creating value with patients and treatment acceptance and these guys were just giving me these wrinkled up noses. Finally right in the middle I stopped and said, "Guys I don't understand. Is there a problem with what I'm saying?”
And immediately everybody in the room turned and looked to the guy in the back of the room, the old guy with the gray hair. He said, "Sean, as urologists we don't consider ourselves in sales and certainly we're above the concept of business and marketing" and I just didn't know what to think about that. They were looking at this as this is not who they are, this is not what they do, they didn't look at themselves as marketing to general practitioners and so forth. Of course if you fast forward then you see that in my opinion medicine is way behind dentistry even because these guys, they I just have completely given up all authority to the insurance companies and then of course you see what happens. Not to get political, but there for a while I was thinking that dentistry was going to be in the crosshairs as well, who knows, it may be down the road. There's an article on the Wall Street Journal several years ago, I don't know if you read this article, but it started on the front page. This is back when The Journal was wide not narrow. The article was basically for the first time in the history of the American Dental Association, the American Medical Association, the median income of a general dentist was twenty five thousand hours higher than the median income of a general practitioner in medicine. They attributed it to the fact, you know, people like me and the fact that the majority of dentists understand that they're in business and they need to take authority and control over creating value and it's not about just relinquishing everything to the insurance companies. We're a little long on an answer, I don't even know what your question but I love to talk as you can tell.
Howard: Well the two sickest, unhealthy industries in America and really around the world is always government and health care. I'm proud of the dentists because the dentists, the vets and the Chiropractors, are significantly more sophisticated than the physicians. I'll give you an example. So I like to work with the physicians and when I got to print out just a few weeks ago of all the physicians in my area and I want to go to lunch with, like each one of them, and I'd say 80% of their dental websites didn't even have an email address or a contact form. So I had to send my assistant Rebecca in person, in her car, it took her three days to drive around all these doctors offices and give out my business card and say, "Hey, Howard wants to go to lunch or dinner with you" or whatever. I mean just crazy, but you know, you come to where I am in Phoenix all the dentists, chiropractors, vets, commercial locations, you can see their sign from the road. The physicians, oh my God, it's just completely insane. In fact when Bill Clinton was president he was saying he wanted to add a hundred thousand police officers to the streets. I read in this long letter saying, "Oh my god, talk about a waste of time” you need to get a hundred thousand people in government to get their MBA. If that was the mandate to get a hundred thousand career government employees to get their MBA, the economy would be so much better, there'd be so much less poverty and crime. It's crazy.
Back to healthcare and sales, it's sad because when you look at the insurance data for every one hundred filled cavities diagnosed, the dentist only draw fill and bill 38. I think that you are not a good dentist if only one out of three of your patient sgets their cavity fixed. Back to these urologists, if you can't convince grandpa to get this treatment you're not helping him and if you just say, "You need blah blah blah blah blah" and two out of three people don't go with the treatment, you're not a good physician. You're not a good urologist. I've seen so many medical dental buildings where there are seven dentists in there and six of them are doing seven hundred and fifty taking home one seventy five and then one guy in there is doing a million three taking home three hundred. The only difference is they have the same number of ops and charts and everything and just one guy can convince two out of three patients to get their cavity fixed and everybody else is getting one out of three fixed and then they want to go to these CE courses that teach them how to do fillings. I'm like, "Dude, you'd be a better dentist if you just removed all the decay, and packed them with butter." So sales is a four letter word in demonstrating, how do you break that?
Sean: Now the good news is I've seen it change. I've been doing this for twenty years and when I first started I couldn't even use the word sales. I had to get creative to find a different word to be able to use because people would just get so turned off. I think my experience is still bad, don't get me wrong. I was speaking in Kansas City recently and I always ask permission. If this is going to shock you let me know right now. If I use the word sales and that's going to shock you, let me know right now. Early on I would ask those things and people would go, "Oh yeah that's freaking me out." Now at least they don't say anything. I can still tell it's there, but they don't say anything. I think the education has changed and you're doing a tremendous amount of work. You've been at this for a lot of years and everything that you're doing is definitely one of the things that- you guys had asked me early on is what advice would I have for young dentists? It's totally make use of guys like you and all this free content out there to understand that maybe they need to have a paradigm shift.
Dentistry is a business. I will tell you a quick story. Probably fifteen years ago, I was speaking in Mississippi. I wouldn't tell that story on your show unless it had been that long ago. There were probably eight hundred and fifty doctors in the room and in the front of the room I was trying to get them to understand that the clinical aspects of your dentistry only make up about 25% of your success.
And there was a guy, it was all the way in the very back of the room like right in the corner of the aisle, so I can't see him right there. He raised his hand in a very back of the room. He says, "I don't agree with this at all. I mean I've got the best hands in the state of Mississippi." Of course when he said that every doctor in the room turned around and looked at him because that was a pretty bold statement.
But I asked him in front of the room, "Why did you get into the dentistry?" I'm not making this up. He said, "I got into dentistry because I'm really good with my hands, I've never enjoyed people. I knew I could make a lot of money in dentistry and that's why I got into dentistry because of my hands.”
Howard: He should have been a carpenter.
Sean: That's exactly right.
Howard: Should have told him Jesus was a carpenter, why don't you go work in construction? Yeah.
Sean: The unfortunate part is I tried to work with him and he didn't make it. He actually got out of dentistry.
Howard: Well you work in a tough neighborhood. You're living in Tennessee, you're lecturing in Kansas City or Mississippi, that's conservative...
Sean: Listen I'm in New York, Chicago. There's no doubt we're in Alabama. I've worked with clients in Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Barbados, Nassau, all over the US and outside of the US. The funny thing is, and this is not going to surprise you at all but maybe surprise some of your listeners, the thing that we hear is ‘that stuff may work with Sean in Florida but this is New York, this is Manhattan. This is a blue collar town or vice versa. That may work in Canada, but this is America. That may work in America, this is Canada.’ The thing I've learned is that you can have whatever it is that you want, you just have to be willing to get past what's going on in your head, you have to be willing to get past. Unfortunately I think in dental school, as you and I have talked this way ahead a lot of medical situations, but these guys were not given what they need to be able to run a business.
I tell you what, Michael Gerber. I got lots of heroes and Gerber is certainly one of those guys. He's made himself a fortune on the whole series of the E-Myth. You probably know all about that but one of the things he says is America is the greatest country on earth. Anybody who really enjoys making great Italian food can open a restaurant. The problem is, according to the SBA, about 68% of those businesses are living literally a couple of paychecks away from losing it because at the end of the day the guy who open the Italian restaurant really open it for one reason because he enjoyed making Italian food and that's not what runs a business. Making great Italian food doesn't run a business and being great at dentistry, unfortunately, doesn't make you a successful dental business. So that's why I always start out with number one you are in business and the quicker you come to that realization then you can go to some of the other stuff. I believe that your dental practice is not your job, your dental practice is your vehicle to get you what it is that you want. That's the vehicle that can create for you the income and it's a wonderful income in dentistry. A dentist had the ability to make a tremendous income and they should because of what they do. But you can have your income, you can still be in a position to manage your time and not have just crumbs leftover for your wife and your kids. I mean you can have whatever it is that you want in dentistry but you have to realize I'm in business and my skills are not going to get me the success that I need, unfortunately. I'll tell you one more story, real quick. I had a young doctor contacted me, this has been several months ago, he had talked to somebody who I'd worked with for many years and he was just down in the dumps. This young guy said, "When I was a fourth year dental student I did all my research, I would go travel to these places on my own dime because I wanted to find exactly the right practice for me to get into when I'm at that point." He found a place in a small town, this doctor was extremely successful, very well-known and the young guy was struggling bad. He had bothered about six months previous to calling me and he said, "I don't understand. I did all of my homework, I did all my research. Everybody in this town loves this doctor by all accounts he's successful and I spent the last six months of my time redoing what I think is really bad in dentistry, I'm not making any money. I'm not getting the reputation that this guy's getting." Now of course that's the other side of the coin, but the only point I'm trying to make is if you're great clinically or if you're not great clinically you can be successful without being great clinically, unfortunately, and you can be terribly unsuccessful and still be great clinically, unfortunately.
Howard: Absolutely, and when you walk into your dental office back there in the break room talking to them, they got their mail and they get these letters from like a real estate agent behind the real estate agent has a CA and a SSD and blah blah blah blah, and I asked the dentist, "Do you know what any of that means?" They don't know what they are mean. I said, "Well let your guard it says DMD, MAGD, DI, COI, it's just bullshit." And then you go to your website and you have all this alphabet soup behind your name, nobody knows what the shit it even is and then your picture looks like a mugshot off of a police station. Where's your 2 minute YouTube video where you are making me feel something? Like "Hey come on down to Sean Crabtree's dental office in Winchester, Tennessee. We're just an hour south of Nashville and I swear I know you're afraid of the dentist, but that's why with the dental school. I know you're afraid of the cost and that's why Valerie up front will just make it all, she'll help you with payments.” They just want to go chase more alphabet soup crap behind their name and get their diplomat and who gives a shit and it doesn't affect their business.
Sean: Well and again as a young dentist the number one thing you can do is take advantage of Howard Farran and listen to the experiences coming through that microphone.
Howard: Well tell us though, you're lecturing, consulting from coast to coast. The person listening you right now is by themselves in a car on a hour commute to work and she's wondering like what are the problems out there. Tell us when you're getting calls for help, what are the top three? What's the number one category, what would be second, what would be third or fourth? What are you hearing out in the field?
Sean: That's a really good question. Okay, the number one thing I get is, great example. I had an office, this particular office was in Missouri, just contacted me, "If we just had more new patients, Man, our business would grow like crazy." "Well, so let me ask you what you're doing?" "We're doing about $1.6 million." "Okay, so how many new patients are you seeing in a month?" "Ninety." Ninety new patients a month, you are doing $1.6 million dollars, holy crap. Now you don't have to be in dentistry for really long to understand, if you're seeing ninety new patients a month you do $1.6 million hours you don't have a new patient problem, you've got a value problem. That is probably the number one challenge that we see. Now I understand what the challenge is and it's not completely limited to dentistry. I think there are other small businesses in America who don't understand the concept of how to create value, this is true for attorneys and CPAs across the board.
You’ve got to understand that most basic concept; we as human beings -- you and I, Howard and everybody listening to this -- we buy everything based on our perception of what the value is. Now we justify it on logical things. Maybe we justify it because we think we get a good deal, we justify it because of safety or logic or whatever, but we buy what we see value in. So the concept of learning to create value is really really important. Unfortunately, it's a snowball effect because if I'm in dentistry or CPA or attorney whatever it is, if I don't understand the concept of creating value and I present my treatment plan and the patient, because they don't see value, the immediate response is 'what does my insurance cover or how much does that cost?'
Then over time and getting beat over the head with that concept that brick called 'I can't afford it' or whatever it is, then you start to retract a little bit and now you get a whole different set of problems because you're not presenting the entire treatment plan. You don't understand the concept device, so now you're presenting the first step, well now you are snowballing the whole thing because every time that the patient comes in they're getting nickles and dimes, not to mention the whole concept of patient care and all that other stuff. So I think probably the number one thing is I have to understand the concept of why we as human beings not just patients by anything and I have to understand that as a dentist my responsibility is to create value and have that patient understand the value. To be able to do that I get to find out what is it that they want emotionally, where is it that they want to go and then I can show them how my treatment plan, which is an entire comprehensive treatment plan, is going to get them where it is that they want to go. That is probably the number one thing.
Howard: Can I grab right there on one thing? If you've been listening to my show I think there's like nine hundred episodes, if you've been listening to my show, if you've only listened to it ten times you already know what I'm going to say. Did you hear what he just said? He said a dentist called him was doing one point six million. This is what I call the consultant bias because the average dental office only does seven hundred and fifty, but if you talk to consultants and say 'What does the average general earns?' 'I don't know, one to two million.' That's because people who use consultants are the big dogs and if I went and got the average revenue of everybody who buys all this high technology stuff and gets all this alphabet soup crap behind their name, they only do seven fifty. But every single dentist I know that does between two and four million dollars a year, by the time they're my age - 55 - they've used a half dozen consultants because they know the return on investment of a consultant is the number one thing. They get their house poised and when they go buy a CBCT or Chairside milling or whatever they pay cash.
Sean: Exactly.
Howard: They are at the convention, they hand them their American Express. You can see there, in America only 10% of the cars, 10% of the houses are bought in cash. And you go on those convention floor only about 10% of those CBCTs, CAD/CAMs, or whatever are bought on an American Express card. You get your house in order first, I mean it's just a no brainer. So what was number two?
Sean: Well and just to add on what you're saying, not only are those guys in the top. Seven hundred thousand is the average, I don't know what the average for overhead is.
Howard: Sixty five.
Sean: Oh, I was going to say higher than that actually. A lot of the guys that first come to us, their overhead is in the seventy plus percentile unfortunately. We try to get that down to below 55%. It's not uncommon for us to see a 50% or 48% overhead.
Howard: Holy moly. Well let's just stop there. My homies are listening, their ears are perked up. Their ear just not the rear view mirror over five degrees. How do you get overhead down from seventy to fifty five? Because there's only two ways to do it. If all my rent, mortgage, equipment, labor lab supply, if all that is a dollar a month and I do a dollar a month in sales I have 100% overhead. If I get my sales the $2, my average is 50%. So do you get it from seventy to fifty five by increasing revenue or do you do it the other way? Say well you only got a dollar revenue in dollars expenses, let's get the expenses down cut in half. So do you do it by growing revenue or cutting cost?
Sean: Absolutely by growing revenue, but growing revenue is also a concept of managing time. If I'm a dentist I have to understand that my chair time is much like a hotel. If I'm the Renaissance Marriott and I don't have room 102 filled for September 20th, 2017, if that's gone I never get it back, it's gone forever. So for me it's never about cutting overhead. Certainly I would want you to manage the overhead, but it's never about cutting salaries. I think it's probably the other way around in a lot of cases. I think there's opportunity for solving increases but that's a whole another conversation. It's all about increasing revenue. It's about managing time and revenue and let's take this one concept a treatment acceptance. If I had to bring a patient in five times to get the treatment completed and it's a diagnosis every single time, forget all the downside of the patient being nickel and dimed to death and all of that. The other side of it is my chair time is worth less. Now if I present comprehensive dentistry, I have my patients see value in that comprehensive dentistry, they accept that comprehensive dentistry, we get it all done in one visit. All of a sudden the time is worth much more, tremendously much more. I had a client in Michigan, in an economically depressed area of Michigan, it's in Warren, Michigan. I've been working with him for maybe 15 years, 14 years something like that. The interesting thing was, and this was what I was going to go with with number two, he didn't hire me to grow his business. He hired me because the people on his team were not on the same page. He had already gotten rid of the entire team once before which I wouldn't recommend, but he had already done that before he hired me. Had a whole new set of people there, a whole new team and it was going south again. These guys were not coming together, all of it was coming back to him and he was getting sick of it. He hired me to get these guys on the same page.
The interesting thing happened is that when we first started working together and we started creating this concept where everybody on the team has an area of responsibility and the doctor has given them the authority to make decisions. We have game plans and we're all supporting a common vision. Now all of a sudden in fourteen months, this was not the goal, he grew nearly a million dollars. Grew nearly a million dollars in Warren, Michigan in fourteen months. That wasn't the goal, it was actually what happened or the result of the concept of getting these guys together on the same page. It is not uncommon. We're about to run into fourth quarter of the year, it is not uncommon that in November, late October, maybe early December our clients will come to us and say, "You know, my accountant is just really excited about the growth that we're having and he's perplexed because he doesn't see an increase in marketing expenditures. He sees a decrease in terms of days worked. He doesn't see an increase in labor costs, so he can't see how it is that we've grown this thing so that the overhead is where it is and the profitability is where it is." And unfortunately that's the way you do it, it's based on the concept of being clear about where it is you're trying to go, having the people on your team have areas of responsibility and accountability but also authority to be able to make decisions. That's when all of a sudden one plus one doesn't equal two, one plus one can equal four. So you're able to grow your profitability which makes the overhead look lower.
Howard: Well all humans are their own worst enemy. So many famous people said it's easier to conquer another country than it is your own self, they have self limiting beliefs. You see it all day long where they just say, "Well when you come in, today we're going to do the two fillings on the right side and then we'll have you come back and do the two fillings on the left side." And right next door, the oral surgeon that pulls all four wisdom teeth all day, eight times a day, five days a week for 40 years, same day dentistry. You haven't even looked at your schedule and someone just needs a filling or crown, when you're doing the hygiene exam “would you like to do that today?” And then they'll say, "Oh I can't because all my rooms are filled, I don't have an extra room.” Well solve that problem." You'll say, "Well I have a patient coming in in ten minutes” and that room is set up they don't have another room. So they have about the door and then their session doesn't show up. I mean they don't even have capacity, they don't understand their cost. The ADA, the American Dental Association, says over around 65% on average. So if one third; 35% goes to a dentist, 25% goes to staff, 10% lab, 6% supplies, 5% rent, 3% marketing, and what are they waiting for? A freaking operatory which isn't even big enough to make the P&L sheets or does a line item.
If they just got capacity, so they always had at least one room that no one even sat in one time a day, just keep adding operatories. And another thing you say why don't have time to do the filling. Well yeah because you got to pick up the patient and move them another room, why don't you tell the hygienist to go start her patient in the next room. They'll say, "Oh that room doesn't have a cavitron." Well fix that. Every airplane at Southwest Airlines is exactly identical and then I go on these dental offices they can't even add a $100 filling to do it right now. Knock it out in five minutes so mum doesn't even have to come back because the hygienist can only do a cleaning in room one. In fact many of them, psychologically can't even fathom doing a cleaning in another room because they're platonically married to an archaic object. Then they ask the receptionist, "What is your title?" "Front desk." "I was named after a piece of furniture, my name is room one." So she's a piece of furniture and I’m room one and I couldn't imagine doing a cleaning in room two. So many self limiting beliefs. So what would be number three? So recap, what was number one?
Sean: This concept of creating value is number one. Number two in my view is getting your people on the same page and of course that's a shortcut way of saying. This is going to sound like I'm picking on dentists, I'm not. These guys get out of school and have zero training on the concepts of leadership or communication or any of that kind of thing. There are lots of great people in dentistry. Lots of very caring people in dentistry and unfortunately the doctors don't give them the authority to be able to have their voice heard. Nobody knows what's going on in the hygiene department like the hygienist. Nobody knows what's going on at the front desk like the receptionist. So giving those guys the authority, I think it was Deming who said that the person who's closest to the end users should have the authority to be able to make decisions in those areas and that's a huge piece of it. Getting them aligned behind where it is that we're trying to go, who is it, how is it, what is it that we're trying to be, getting them aligned behind that and then giving them the authority, responsibility, and then hold them accountable for coming up with plans to be able to support that so that all areas of the practice are sort of cylinders firing on the same engine.
Howard: You say that but when I asked a hundred dentists, "What is the most stressful part of your life?" They always say the staff. So how do you get this guy had the personality to sit in the library and get A's in calculus and biochemistry to now be this? I mean they're listening you're saying, "Man, you're tall, handsome, charismatic, you've got this personality. Hell yeah it's easy for you, but dude you didn't get a 4.0 in calculus. I'm a library nerd geek who sat in the library." How do you get that personality to be a charismatic, people person, selling dentistry and leading a team? Because when you go into dental office I swear to God after they're done with their root canal, every single time, they walk back to their private office and shut the door. And then when I watch every single sporting event like basketball, soccer, football, the coaches engage. He's on the sideline, he's totally up front. And that dentist, when I get down on the patient I'll check him out because I want to see who's in the waiting room, I'm talking to the people, I'm cutting jokes. If I'm running late, I own it, I apologize with the patients.
Sean: And it’s okay when you do that too, right?
Howard: Yeah, with the patient I'm saying, "I'm sorry. Harold, he only comes in when he's in pain and he showed up at my door today. Don't be mad at me, you should beat up Harold right now." And Harold is waving his hand like sorry, but they're not like that. They're hiding in their office with the door shut.
Sean: Yeah. In an ideal world everything you say is true, but I don't think all of that is necessary. I don't think you have to be a charismatic guy. I think it helps and obviously if you can be like you and do that kind of thing, there's no doubt about that. To me I think it's much more about just putting your heart out there, communicating openly. I don't think you have to be a tall charismatic guy to be successful in business, but I do think you have to be willing to put your heart out there. If you are going back there and closing the door and shut yourself off from the world until the next patient, you're missing the opportunities to grow your business. There's no doubt about it. I can tell you something else too. A lot of these guys who are not gregarious let's say, you know what? A lot of times they get people on their team who are and that's okay. Give them the authority to be that and let's create this culture where you can be the guy that maybe doesn't have and I've had a lot of those guys. I’ve had a lot of those guys who maybe don't have the best, shall we say bedside manner, but they know their stuff clinically and so forth. Well listen, there's nothing wrong with putting you in a position where your patients are making relationships with your team. You're the guy who's making the diagnosis and solving their problems and tying that to where it is that they want to go emotionally. Have them see value in that and then you go to the next patient, but the relationships are all based on your team. I'm not saying that's ideal, but I'm saying that works and you have the opportunity to do that but you have to be able to give authority up and that is a whole different. I know that you ran into that too.
Howard: You got a delegate and humans are by their hardwired to be controlling. You're going to survive better if you control your environment, so they're hardwired at birth to be controlling and they can be very controlling. It's one of the top reasons people are dysfunctional is controlling. But you know what? You just said is opposites the track and you see it all the time like you could walk in dental offices where the introvert geek hires a bunch introvert geeks because like likes like and he's familiar with that. But you look in sports, if I'm the Carolina Panthers I don't need a quarterback. I've already got Cam Newton. I'm going to look for what I need and I see it with ethnic dentists. Say they were born in India, right here in my town. You go into some offices and you literally think you went through a door and you're in New Delhi. Everybody's in there from India, everybody's got broken English and everything. You're just like 'Wow' and then you go into other Indian dentist centers, say West Phoenix where it's heavily Hispanic, and you walk in there and the only Indian in the office is the dentist and everybody in there is bilingual speaking Spanish.
So yeah, if you can lead five ducks to a pond and you can't sell a heater to an Eskimo, you need to hire staff that can compensate you. If you're the visionary, well you don't need another visionary, you need someone in an operations logistics. If you already know I'm going to lead Phoenix and drive to your place in Winchester, Tennessee I don't need another visionary to tell me where I'm going to drive, I already know that. Many people are going to say are we going to fly, drive a bus, are we going to walk, take a train, I need logistics people.
Sean: We should hire our staff like we choose our spouses. If you think about that, as you said opposites attract. I saw a psychologist once who said that we marry people not because of their strengths but because of our own weaknesses. So if you look at your spouse nine times out of ten, they bring something to the table in terms of their strengths that you have weaknesses. We should manage and hire people in the same way. The worst thing you can do is have a whole bunch of people who are just like you. It doesn't matter what your personality style is if everybody on the team is just like. You you're limiting yourself, there's no doubt about that.
So first of all it's about creating value. Secondly it's about getting a team of people who are clearly aligned behind a vision. You as the dentist figure it out where it is that you want to be, get your staffs input for that. Who is it, how is it, what is it, where is it that they want to be. Give them a reason that's bigger than a paycheck or patients to come in and get them aligned behind that and then give them responsibility and then give them authority and then hold them accountable for come with the table plans about what they think needs to happen. If you can lead that -- as you said that there's a strong desire to lead, you can still lead that -- but allow them to come to the table with their ideas because they're closest to the situations. So getting your team aligned behind that is probably the second biggest thing. The third biggest thing, real quick and this is a big one.
You've talked about it before. This is a big one. Every time I cut a video on this, I get somebody who challenged me on this. You have got to be as easy to do business with as who you're competing against. I got to realize in dentistry I'm not competing against other dentists, I'm competing against other competition, other stores, other businesses who are after the same discretionary dollars that I'm at. So what I say all the time is you've got to be as easy to do business with as buying a giant flat screen TV. Here's the challenge, Howard. There are plenty of people who woke up before the Mayweather fight and they said, "You know what? I have an eye on that big 4K flat screen ultra thin TV whatever for the man in cave and the fight is just coming up this weekend. Man, today is the day I’m going to go buy that flat screen TV." And they walk into the big box store, they sign their name and they walk out with the giant TV. Very few people wake up in the morning and go, "You know what? I have been dying to get that root canal, that implant, fill in the blank done, and today baby is the day." Very few people do that. We have to become as easy to do business with financially as those that we're competing against.
So the concept of third party financing I think is the greatest gift that has ever been given to dentistry. I don't understand why it's not utilized more, I don't understand why dentists are not absolutely just clamor for that. I'm sure there was the time in dentistry where the dentist goal was to maybe have as many people as possible, pay them $20 a month that whatever the situation is. You don't have to do that. You don't have to be that. I was speaking at Michigan or maybe it was in the midwinter, not long ago. I always try to listen to some of the other speakers. There was a finance guy there that I popped my head in and I caught him right as he was opening this sentence. He said, "Do you have any idea what the top three lenders in the United States of America are?" In other words in terms of priority who is owed the most money.
Okay, number one was obviously banking and lending institutions are owed the most money. Number two was Motor Credit; Honda Motor Credit, Ford Motor Credit, these kinds of things. Number three were dentists, the dentists. Dentist in the U.S. are the number three owed people businesses in the country. There's no reason for that. There's no reason under the sun not to mention the fact that when your patients owe you money that prevents the next step in the process from happening. There's care credit, there's LendingClub, there's Wells Fargo, there's Citihealth, the list goes on. At any given time there are fifteen companies out there that are clamoring. There's a great one out there called green sky that has just come on the scene. Man, they are making major headway. There are plenty of companies just at the point that is out there that are eager to make dentistry affordable for your patients. Why in the world would you try to collect even a thousand dollars from your patient when all they have to do is sign their name, just like they would if they were buying a flat screen television. There's just no reason for it. It's good for the patient, it's good for the team, it's good for your bottom line profitability. There's no reason not to not only embrace third party financing, but make it a starting point. I walked into some of these offices that we're just starting to work with or maybe they have us in to do analysis and they get $385,000 in accounts receivable. There's just no reason for that. A lot of guys are doing this in-house thing where they're financing in house, my question will be why? If you've got fifteen companies that are itching, clamoring, and chomping at the bit to offer financing to your patients they've got recourse, that's their business. Why in the world would you extend yourself in that scenario?
I know what you’re thinking, some of these guys who are listening going to go, "Well because maybe the patients don't have credits." Well then fix that, go get a higher level of clientele or figure out your marketing strategy or bring in cosigners, focus on it. There's no reason that in 2017 you have to be putting yourself out there, so you get half a million dollars that's owed to you. Can you imagine another business that operates with half a million dollars that's owed to him? It just doesn't happen. There's no reason for it, you got to be as easy to do business with as buying a flat screen television. I didn't mean to get carried away on that one, Howard but that the number three biggest missed opportunity that we see.
Howard: I want to switch to operation logistics for a second. There's someone listening right now, she's driving to work, she's working as an associate somewhere, she's going to do a De Novo startup practice. What Practice Management Software do you recommend?
Sean: Boy, that's a good question. I don't know. Probably there's one that I recommend that maybe you've never heard of, but I can tell you maybe the better answer would be.
Howard: What's the one is that?
Sean: I don't know if I want to say that just yet. You put me on the spot here, Howard. I don't know if I want to release that.
Howard: Yeah, do it, do it. It's Dentistry Uncensored.
Sean: There is a software called Edison that is in my 20 years of working in dentistry it is the only software that I've seen that approaches dentistry from a business perspective. It's called Edison and everything about it is designed with dental business acumen in mind. You speak of the big ones that you see, Softden. What's some other ones? Easy Dental. What do you guys use, Howard?
Howard: Open Dental.
Sean: Open Dental? There's a bunch out there, the challenges that I've seen with a lot of these things is they're not laid out in a business way. For example if I walk into a practice and I say let's take a look at your -- we just mentioned the accounts receivable-- let me take a look at your accounts receivable, so they print out a report and there's, whatever, forty pages. In the last page it has a breakdown and it says, "Okay total owed is - whatever - $68,000." And you go back and you look at over thirty, over sixty, over ninety. Over sixty is a -$40,000, over ninety is a negative number. Well you and I both know you can't have a negative accounts receivable. You have accounts payable and you have accounts receivable. So what they're doing is they take account to see when they go, "Okay, you get this many patients that have credits, you have this many patients that owe you money, so the nett is this." Well that doesn't tell you accounts receivable that tells you what the nett dollars are. If you want to know what your accounts receivable are, you need to know what are the patients that owe you money. That's just one example. That's kind of been a major major pet peeve of mine over the years because when I come in and I'm analyzing an office and I print out the AR report even if some of the softwares allow you to pull out any dollars that are negative.
Howard: What's the website?
Sean: I really don't. I don't know that these guys are out there in a public way yet. It was developed by a group out of Missouri. I don't know that they're out in a very public way. As a matter of fact you may get me in all kinds of trouble, Howard.
Howard: Is it a dentist in Missouri?
Sean: It's a company called Goetze Dental.
Howard: Goetze, oh. They sell supplies in the Midwest like Omaha, Kansas City, St. Louis.
Sean: They are in about nine states, they're not simply a supply company but yeah they've developed a really good software.
Howard: What do you mean they're not simply a supply company?
Sean: They take a consultative approach and we're working closely with those guys. I really like what it is that they have going on.
Howard: They are headquartered out in the Kansas City, right?
Sean: Right, at the Kansas City.
Howard: That's where I went to dental school.
Sean: Is that right?
Howard: Yeah, I love Kansas City. My God.
Sean: I love the city too and I love those guys at Goetze. I did not ask their permission, so you may have me in a lot of trouble here, Howard.
Howard: That's a family business, right?
Sean: It is a family business. How do we get on this? You get me in all kinds of trouble
Howard: No, no, no.
Sean: You got us uncensored, no kidding here. I teach (inaudible 00:50:53), Howard.
Howard: I think it's like a hundred year old family business, isn't it?
Sean: Over a hundred years.
Howard: So who's the leader of the pack now? What generation is it on?
Sean: Don Brunker and his son Ben Brunker is I think fifth generation.
Howard: Don Brunker, B R U N K E R?
Sean: Yep.
Howard: He's the CEO right now?
Sean: Yep.
Howard: Fifth generation and his son's name was what?
Sean: I think Don is fourth and I think Ben is is fifth. Yeah.
Howard: Ben Brunker, B R U N K E R?
Sean: Yes.
Howard: So they're acting more and consultive now you say?
Sean: Yeah. They really get some of the concepts that you're talking about. They understand that it's not about dollars and cents in terms of a nickel or two and on cotton rolls. They understand their role. You can't be in business over a hundred years, right? Unless you understand some things that a lot of folks don't understand and those guys really get that. Their role is to help the doctors be the very best that they can be and so they see themselves not as a sales rep for supplies, but they see themselves more as strategists for their dental clients.
Howard: Yeah and it's amazing how you've got Patterson and Schein which are publicly traded and then you have these family deals like Benco is third generation family owned Goetze's. Well the account Ben it's fifth generation in family. And then Burkhart that's another American story, the daughter there is fourth generation. Have you met her?
Sean: No, I haven't.
Howard: What's amazing is how all of them, every single one of those Patterson and Schein begged them both to buy them. They remind me of In and Out burger. In and Out burger has been asked by every corporate restaurant group whether it be Yum! that owns all these categories and they say, "Man, you only have eleven hundred stores. You're basically just in California, Arizona, and the West Coast. Let us buy you and we'll roll you out the 50 states." And they go, "You know what? I don't trust that you'll keep the vision. I don't trust the Wall Street. I don't want this false god where if I miss my earnings per share by a penny, you're going to beat me up. So I've got to cut back on quality products and quality organic, locally grown produce. I don't want to. I wasn't born to worship the gods of Wall Street where if I don't give them every single penny they demand, they're going to slaughter me." What also bothers me is the Fortune 500 only employs 17% of America and they get about 99% of all the business press and the other 83% work for mom and pop family business and we're the absolute backbone of every economy, of every country going back to the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids, but they only want to talk about Apple and Uber and all these bullshit companies. I'll tell you what if you are a Ph.D. economist you got to say, "Would you like the Fortune 500 to do 10% better in small family business do 10% worse or do you want that reverse?" They'll always say, "I want the family business to do the best. That's the backbone of the economy."
Sean: That is the backbone of America.
Howard: The average company in America has less than 25 employees. In fact a dental office is pretty much the perfect median mode size of business in America. That day in dental office you're consulting with that's the average company of America, not General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Apple and Xerox, and GE all these Japanese...
Sean: Way more people than anybody else in America.
Howard: Yeah and if they pick up 10% gains in employment there, my God, you have 0% unemployment. It's crazy.
Sean: That's exactly right.
Howard: So you like the practice management software from Goetze Dental?
Sean: Edison, I love it.
Howard: And it's called Edison and they own that locked box and sterile and own the programmers and all that stuff?
Howard: It's theirs and it's the only software that I've run across in the twenty years that I've been doing this that is built specifically with the business acumen in mind.
Howard: Are you are you friends with Don Brunker?
Sean: I am.
Howard: Well tell him to get his kids to city by on my show and the podcast and tell everybody-- I probably haven't seen him for 10 years. He had me come lectured all of his groups a couple times, it was like five city tour. I think back in like and 1993 and again in like 2000, but tell him to come on the show and talk about Edison.
Sean: I will absolutely do that.
Howard: But I don't like the name Edison because Edison didn't take ten thousand attempts to make the light bulb. Well you have to be on version ten thousand point one before it works.
Sean: These guys have been at it a lot of years. I'll let the cat out of the bag here with you, Howard.
Howard: And I can tell you another thing. I've had five programmers since 1998, so it's coming up 19 years, and watching the journey of programmers, the tools that programmers have they can program ten times faster today.
Sean: Oh yeah, there's no doubt.
Howard: Twenty years ago.
Sean: (Inaudible 00:56:52) snap of a finger, literally
Howard: Yeah, I would like to talk to them about this because I have some serious feedback on Practice Manual software. One being that operational logistics, you're going to Hertz Rent-A-Car and return your car. They've got a handheld deal and they can check my car in five steps, five minutes. You go into the Hilton, there's like seven things they asked, they hook in. You get on a piece of crap software like Dentrix or Eaglesoft or SoftDent or all of them, that poor receptionist opens up the window and there's like forty thousand million trillion features. So it's overwhelmed, so then she misses the three crucial steps. They need to have X out box, you decide how you're going. When someone calls what you're going to ask and do, and then when they check in what you're going to ask and do, and when they check out what you're going to ask can do, and then close out all the other shit. And it's got to be connected with the phone so that when you call me up, it pulls up. Sean Crabtree from the crabtreegroup.com, Winchester, Tennessee. "Hi Sean, how are you?" Not like x-ing out of all this crap and trying to find it. And then those consultants will tell you that when you go into a dental office run the report generator, about 83% of all the software has never been used once. That is a huge ball in chain negative and then I run the report to see who you were referred by and she forgot that step. I'm trying to measure return on investment on my marketing and that was the one step she missed because it's asking all this bullshit that I don't want.
So it's too much and I think the Dental Practice Manager Software is the most ripe for a complete disruption where that damn software could fit on my iPhone and an iPad and get rid of all those damn terminals. You just sit there with your iPad and their touchscreen, bing bing bing bing bing. You could reprogram what you need in a fraction of the time, make a faster easier lower costs. higher quality. Keep it simple, stupid. Get rid of every single thing and then I think for marketing purposes what they should do is they should hook up with you and say, "Okay if you're a consultant of Sean Crabtree, then click here” and it'll set up the format for his operation logistics. But if your favorite consultant is Suzie Q, well then click that. So then those people would come in the office and say, "Okay to do this right I need this." What about dashboards, do you have any dashboards that you like
Sean: There are several out there. To be honest with you I've not found one that I'm super impressed with. But now back to Edison that you were just talking about. These guys, again, they've been in business for over 100 years. These guys have put the time into that thing and they're open enough to hear some suggestions and they're flexible enough to be able to make changes which is something that you don't get with the other guys as well. Unfortunately when we run reports we have to run two or sometimes three report. You cross-reference them just to figure out what the heck is going on and like you said it's just too much. I don't have a particular dashboard that I think things are certainly moving in the industry that way. We're kind of working on maybe creating our own dashboard that will be specific to what it is that we're looking for.
Howard: I came out with my own.
Sean: Did you?
Howard: Yeah. It's just one of those easy sketch deals with those two buttons. I used to do the most marvelous paintings on Easy Sketch and then we had earthquake at four and I erased all my paintings. I love that Edison, so did Henry Ford. Henry Ford actually bought Edison's house and moved it brick by brick to the Henry Ford Museum. I love Edison's quote on "I haven't failed. I just found ten thousand ways that won't work." His other quote; "Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up." And then his other one, "When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this; you haven't." I'm telling you that when you're 55 and you've raised four kids and now you've got grandchildren, you've been working with dentists for 30 years, the number one enemy is the demons that live between your ears. You have all these self-limiting beliefs and you keep saying that you could never do this and you can never do that.
You can never place them, you can't plant a root canal, you could never tell that hygienists what your role. I mean you just get up in the morning and have Conor McGregor are both beating the shit out of you. Conor McGregor's your right ear and Mayweather is your left ear and you just beat the crap out of yourself all day long telling yourself that.
Sean: That's right.
Howard: By the way did you watch the last fight the Canelo and Triple-G?
Sean: I didn't see that. Boy, the social media is a fire with that thing. I understand that people weren't happy with the outcome of that.
Howard: You know what? I have to tell you, setting on a chair aside on some of those fights and at the Arizona Cardinals stuff. So when you're on TV you see a tap or a jab, but when you're within ten feet out of that ring, it might have sounded like a baseball bat hitting a heavy bag. Like if you go to the Arizona Cardinals game and sit in the first couple rows and you're right at the line of scrimmage, it sounds like a car wreck on every play. So that lady might have been hearing every time you hit me is like 'Bow' and every time I hit you there was no sound. So sound is a big deal. They also are hearing the conversations in the corners like, "Dude, you just lost that round. What's wrong with you?”
Well if she just hears the coach say you just lost that round and then every time the other guy hit you as tough,. S sitting there watching that on a big screen TV, a thousand miles away from the fight, is a totally different experience. So I want to ask you a final question, I can't believe we went over and our, Man. I could talk to you for forty days and forty nights.
Sean: I can do the same, Howard. I wish I was there with you in person.
Howard: Oh let's plug your podcast. Have you started your podcast or do you have any episodes out?
Sean: We've got a couple that should be out here in the next month.
Howard: Okay. What is it called?
Sean: It's called Dental Profits.
Howard: And is profit P, spelling the prophet of Bible or is it P R O F I T or P R O P H E T?
Sean: It's P R O F I T and my business partner and I would be the PATT. We would be the dental profits, but it's all about how to get you with happier clients, better results, and making more money. Unfortunately that making more money concept is something that a lot of dentists are not really focused on. Maybe because of what you said I mean there's a lot looming beliefs out there, there's a lot of people who are beating themselves up for no reason. This show is really all about getting you to the point where you can understand, it's not nearly as difficult as you think and you deserve it, doggone it, you just got to get out of your head.
Howard: So your website is thecrabtreegroup.com. This is dentistry uncensored, so how much is your services? If I'm listening to you and I’m saying, I want you to come out and help me. First of all how do they contact you?
Sean: The best way to do it is to go to our website, thecrabtreegroup.com, and of course we get all sorts of ways that you can work with us. We work with very few people, one on one. We never have more than about forty dentists that we're working with in any one time, but we've got all sorts of ways that you connect. We have different levels of engagement with us in terms of coursework that we have coming out and hope to have my book released here not too long from now.
Howard: What's your book called?
Sean: We're still working on that.
Howard: Well I'm writing a new book. You know How to Win Friends and Influence People?
Sean: Right.
Howard: I'm going to call mine How to Treat People by Ted Bundy. I thought I'd do the opposite of it, teach you what not to do.
Sean: We're thinking of calling it a 'Price Has No Value but Value Is Priceless.’
Howard: Nice, but how much does it cost to use you as a client service?
Sean: In terms of the full blown program?
Howard: Yeah.
Sean: It really just depends on what's going on. We have where is it you want to be and where it is that you currently are and where it is that you want to go. We get guys that will engage with us anywhere from a thousand to seven thousand dollars a month, it really just depends.
Howard: Depends on what you're trying to solve?
Sean: Well it depends on where they are and where it is that they want to be.
Howard: Okay.
Sean: You mentioned a great point, the average dentist in the U.S. is producing about seven hundred thousand and that status has been around for a few years. That's unfortunately. But that doesn't mean that there are not plenty of guys out there that are doing. We're going to single doctor practices doing about two point six million. I've got a practice in Texas that his goal was to take a week off a month. So since we've been working together for about six years and so every month he goes down on the Keys, he works twelve days a month and he would do about two million dollars a year.
Howard: Oh Man, the Keys has just got wiped out.
Sean: Yeah, he was actually really lucky. It was one of those things, Man. His house was okay, but in his neighborhood the whole thing was just demolished and unfortunately his family all has second homes in that neighborhood. He told me his jet skis were not there anymore, you know dock has just upside down. But the interesting thing was none of his windows were even blown out. The place was flooded on the bottom floor but the windows were still intact.
Howard: Yeah, those storms are weird. I remember growing up in Kansas you'd see a tornado. Sometimes a tornado go through some small town and look like a lawnmower went through and then other times you go over a town and one house is perfectly normal and the house on every side of it it looks like it was blown out by the bomb. Wind is so weird. But hey, shout out to all the the dentists in Houston, Orlando, Miami, Florida, the Keys, tough spots, hanging in there guys. Hey Sean, love you to death, been a big fan of yours for years. Get Don, Brunker to come on and talk about Edison and thanks for all of you do for dentistry. When you come out with your new book, E-mail me the jpeg and all that stuff. We'll do a review on it and I'll post it on Dentaltown. If you're shy to post on Dentaltown just say, "Howard, made me do it." And then they'll all feel sorry for you.
Sean: Howard listen, I want you to know what you're doing for these young guys out there and the things that you're preaching they need to listen. I think you're creating a paradigm shift for a lot of people and it's been a real honor to be with you. I want you to know that.
Howard: Thanks a lot, Man. Now I got to go to my second job as a Chippendale dancer so I'll have to talk to you later. Have a rocking hot day.