Message Boards
Today's Active Topics Browse Forum Categories My Recent Activity My Messages Private Groups My Marked Threads My Subscriptions
Today's Active Images Today's Active Polls Most Active Topics Global Townie Map Advanced Message Board Search Message Board Terms of Use

Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran
Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran
How to perform dentistry faster, easier, higher in quality and lower in cost. Subscribe to the podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dentistry-uncensored-with-howard-farran/id916907356
Blog By:
howard
howard

1488 Bill Blasing, Executive Director of ADCF, on Charitable Dentistry During a Pandemic : Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran

1488 Bill Blasing, Executive Director of ADCF, on Charitable Dentistry During a Pandemic : Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran

10/28/2020 3:00:00 AM   |   Comments: 1   |   Views: 247
Bill Blasing joined the ADCF as their executive director in 2015, bringing with him years of experience related to operating a business and leading teams effectively. He is not only adept at ensuring the overall business goals of the organization are met, but Bill is skilled in cultivating relationships and opportunities that add value to their charitable clinic family and the patients served around America. In the midst of the pandemic Bill has been spearheading the effort for ADCF to be thought leaders and strategic thinkers, in collaboration with ADCF’s many clinic contacts throughout America, to ensure the highest possible level of safety, for both patients and volunteers, so that the underserved will continue to receive the care that they need post-pandemic and beyond. Donate at https://www.adcf.net

VIDEO - DUwHF #1488 - Bill Blasing


AUDIO - DUwHF #1488 - Bill Blasing


Subscribe to Dentistry Uncensored on Apple Podcasts:  https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dentistry-uncensored-with-howard-farran/id916907356  Subscribe to Dentistry Uncensored on Google Podcasts:  https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2RlbnRhbHRvd24uZmFycmFubWVkaWEubGlic3lucHJvLmNvbS9yc3M

**Please excuse any typos as this was digitally transcribed.

It is just a huge honor for me to be podcast interviewing Bill Blasing the executive director of America’s dentist care foundation for seven years bringing with him years of experience related to operating a business and leading teams effectively bill blazing joined the adcf as their executive director in 2015. he is not only adept at ensuring the overall business goals of the organization are met but bill is skilled in cultivating relationships and opportunities that add value to their charitable clinic family and patients served around America he is responsible for all aspects related to human resources operations budgeting fundraising donor relations in the midst of the pandemic bill is spearheading the effort for adcf to be thought leaders and strategic thinkers in collaboration with adcf's mini clinic contacts throughout America to ensure the highest possible level of safety so that the underserved will continue to receive the care that they need post pandemic and beyond bill is married to his elementary school sweetheart Gina whom he considers his best friend he enjoys cruising in his first car a 1971 Chevelle Malibu which also happens to be the car he courted Gina in during high school the America’s dentist care foundation has helped provide free oral health care to the underserved since 2008 by supplying the dental equipment and associated expertise necessary to assist large-scale weekend clinics for patients in need patients that otherwise would likely not get any oral health care at all adcf has been honored to support clinics as large as 145 chairs as well as smaller scale clinics that serve specific populations such as our nation's veterans since 2003 mission of mercy and other adcf supported clinics have helped more than 250 000 patients and provided over 165 million in free oral health care the America’s dentist care foundation facilitates the delivery of charitable oral oral health care to the underserved man i could read this on and on and on and um i mean um so you're you're mom your mother's a mercy right mission to mercy I’m actually I’m sorry i the mom is a mission of mercy mom so are you the parent company is America’s dentist care foundation adcf that is that the organizer for mission of mercy well for a lot of them yes we didn't start it back in 2000 it was actually started in Virginia uh by a doctor there that basically just wanted to help people get out of pain he saw a need in the community and had a free oral health day in fact in some parts of the country they're called dad which is a dental access day so we've got mom and dad across the country uh we actually got started in it so the folks that founded adcf went to see that clinic uh in subsequent years and then started doing the Kansas mission of mercy and then Oklahoma and Nebraska and it started just kind of proliferating after it was launched in 2000 by several states around the country because they love the idea and so what happened with adcf is three dentists and a layperson whose wife happened to be a dental hygienist that's how he got involved these four guys basically saw a need for really good equipment to be able to be delivered to these different states and it was again it was getting bigger and bigger around the country well these guys were borrowing each equipment from each other in Nebraska and Kansas and you know they were worn out trailers the equipment was jostled around a lot it was it was very rudimentary just because that's the way it was back then and these guys thought you know what this thing's getting bigger and more popular we need to have an entity that does nothing all day but equipment so that all these different states as this thing gets more popular can have equipment they can count on uh the day that that clinic starts you know these these clinics typically help around you know anywhere from 12 to 1600 people in two days so the equipment has to work and these guys in their in their forward thinking uh decided to go and start adcf and that was in 2008. and since then we've been basically kind of what i call the center of the wagon wheel uh that all the different states come to to get this great equipment that's basically dental office quality equipment to take in and set up in big sports arenas and do these large-scale clinics so we've been at it since 2008 and just gotten more and more popular ever since then and what did you say the dad said for you had mom mission of mercy yeah and then dental access day is dad dental access day i i've never heard of that one yeah but how could uh dental access day um how could all the male dentists um just get so involved with dad that we just we just get mom shut down i mean we just uh we just overtake dental access day dental access day yeah yeah i i've never heard of that one that is really really interesting there there are entities out there you know like like the uh there are a lot of philanthropic dental efforts out there so you know a dental access day might be done on on just a friday or it might be a dental access day that's done on a weekend it's just more than one day but they're called different things in different places and that's why we always say we support mr mercy and other charitable dental clinics because we also support you know like you had mentioned we do a clinic every year a veteran stand down in phoenix Arizona which is a comprehensive care head to toe clinic for veterans and we bring in the equipment to support the dental piece of that so we don't just do the moms we do a lot of other things as well that are that are comprehensive care clinics and we're happy to get those calls so you're the organizer of that one out here in phoenix and the the um where the can where the Arizona state fair is well we bring in the dental part of it we don't organize the whole thing ironically now that you mentioned our board president Kevin Conroy runs that the dental piece of that he does the Arizona mission of mercy and he also does the dental portion of the veterans stand down out there he's very active in this philanthropic dental effort um it's um i don't want to get political or anything like that i don't like to talk about religion politics sex violence but to me um it's bizarre that these veterans came back and had teeth blown out from shrapnel and they're and they don't get dental injury they don't cover dental or brain medical so if they have depression and their teeth missing i mean you would think that would be like two huge things for a veteran yeah is that is that um how could the government not do that well i don't know it's that's the great unanswered question and all of us in the philanthropic world ask that same kind of a question you know it's uh my dad before he passed away volunteered as a as a retired guy he volunteered at the va just to go talk to veterans just to sit in the room and and talk to him he just wanted to help in some way and he had the same you know i had the same discussion uh it's it's we can do better and i think that that's i think we're on the path of doing that we're not there yet but uh you ask a legitimate question that i think a lot of us are asking you know my comptroller Stacy does that she she loves her dog more than i know more than me and probably uh half Arizona uh but she just takes her dog in the nursing home some um one night a week and she just walks around the nursing home and she just says they they just love it and oh yeah that is amazing so um uh you're in which you're based out of Wichita Kansas you're born in Kansas um my mom and uh i think um uh one two my mom and three and my sisters still live there and then the other ones have moved out um I’m concerned has this pandemic really affected you guys and and are you seeing a second wave because my mom um i talked to her this morning and i guess there's a nursing home out in uh Kansas where they have like 67 people and they all tested positive to it and 10 have died how was the how was this pandemic since march to October how has it affected uh volunteer missions like you're doing and do you see um a wave coming back like like the one we uh went through in march and april may well i i don't know about the wave coming back i just i hear the news like everybody else does but um you're right about that you know that that cluster we saw in the Wichita Kansas area and we see them across America we see them on the news all the time but um as far as as our work goes uh kind of two-part answer i think it's affected volunteerism in general regardless of what sector you happen to be in whether it's dental or or any kind of other philanthropic effort just because of the shutdowns but what it's done to adcf specifically in the clinics that we support for example we had for the 2020 schedule we had 30 clinics scheduled which is not uncommon for us we've been growing a little bit every year since i've been here we had 30 clinics scheduled for 2020 had our first four between January and February and everything shut down for that everybody started canceling cancelling canceling it was like a wave that just came over so we had four clinics 26 cancels uh which meant we had to make some some tough decisions about sustainability you know we had to stay open keep the lights on and do what we needed to do number one to stay in business quote unquote because what we do is critical i mean you can't have a clinic without the equipment so we we have no choice but to be here so we put up our fists and did everything we needed to do to try and stay sustainable and be here and we've done that um so you know what those four clinics is we we helped you and just in just those four clinics we helped about 6 000 people with over five million dollars worth of care and that's just four clinics you know and if you think about the average number of patients that we have historically seen which is around the 15 to 1600 range that's about 40 000 people in need that didn't get the care in 2020 because of these clinics all shutting down so that's a lot of people in need and and you know we all heard that after this in the post-pandemic world the need need's gonna be even greater just because people aren't getting the help they need right now so it's gonna it's just i think the wave of need is gonna be larger and what we've tried to do as adcf is plan for the future and try to be as much a part of the solution as we can you know as the equipment people we don't we don't plan the clinics we help in that but the the clinic leadership all over the country does their own planning and fundraising and things like that to get these things going and they make a lot of the unilateral decisions on how they do certain things in certain departments but from the equipment side we've just been trying to plan on how you know how do we help with aerosol mitigation for example that's a big deal you know infection control has always been a big deal in dentistry it's just been the spotlight's just kind of gone from here to here in in this pandemic so we're trying to be as proactive as we can to bring in some kind of intraoral device that's going to help with aerosol mitigation because in these large sports arenas if you're putting up a 100 chair clinic or probably in next year we'll probably do 50 chair clinics because we're going to spread the chairs out further if you're doing these 50 chair clinics it's still a large scale clinic and in a sports arena you know you don't have the kind of hvac systems that in the air purifying systems that you can like you install in a dental office that's just not possible in a hockey rink you know you can't do that so we're trying to all we can chairside to help the the clinicians to have the best kind of aerosol mitigation as possible to help these folks in need because they have nowhere else to go you know there's no such thing as no re it is a riskless endeavor but we're trying to make it as as helpful to the clinicians as possible to keep the infection down and just kind of take the pandemic head on and help people anyway that's kind of what we want to do well good at you man this is um this is just did you ever think in your wildest dreams you'd be uh practicing uh or you'd be living through a pandemic yeah no i mean is that just crazy it was just it was an overnight like i like everybody you know and in the nonprofit world i mean we've been very fortunate to over the years to put some money in reserves that we're able to keep the lights on with but it just literally i got my first email about this the second or third week of march about hey bill we're thinking about canceling well so i responded to that and you know your first thought is you know you kind of think well it can't be as bad as we're thinking it's going to be well that was just that open pandora's box and i started like i said getting all the emails and phone calls after that for cancellations and it changes overnight and i think it's going to make us better i mean that's I’m a very optimistic guy anyway and i have I’m not going to let a pandemic or anything else make me stop trying to improve uh as a leader at a non-profit or in the nonprofit entity space we need to take on a leadership role and be as proactive as possible to do what we can to keep this thing going because I’m in it because i want to help people you know and i have no intention of just sitting on my hands and hoping things get better i want to be a part of the solution because if I’m not I’m part of the problem and that's what we're going to do everything we can to do as adcl so um right to the chase money is the answer what's the question um is this how do you get your funding is it all donations is it individual dentist is it dental insurance companies or the Arizona dental society or who where do you get your revenue well we rent our equipment our our we're mostly self-sustained which is terrific we rent our equipment out for a weekend for a fraction of the cost of what it would cost folks to go out and get you know two million dollars worth of stuff which is what we bring in a trailer uh so we rent our equipment out and that helps us pay our bills that's that's our core uh sustainability function right there so it's nice to kind of be self-sustained in that respect but we couldn't do that we couldn't pay the bills and go out and buy expensive equipment and take it in without we get a lot of in-kind donations and cash donations mostly from folks in the dental space we do get some individual contributions but a lot of the folks in the dental space who have a heart to help people especially in the corporate world they may not have the philanthropic arm to do some of the things that they want to do so they've helped folks like adcf so that we can you know take in everything from you know they're all all the big players i i don't want to mention anybody because because i'll forget somebody but all the big players in dentistry are supporting us in some fashion and we are absolutely blessed we every day I’m thankful that these folks come alongside us and help us do what we do because we couldn't do without them but i would think you know that um you know the the average profit margin the fortune 500 is only five percent so i mean when sales drop five or ten percent and you're still paying your rent mortgage equipment build out computer insurance the only thing it's out is profit i mean do you think this will be a very challenging fundraising year for you or or what do you think i think in the next 12 months will be will be a challenge the good news is um a lot of the the funders in the nonprofit space are starting to kind of do some pivoting to focus on how are you handling the pandemic both now and in the future uh post pandemic so there's a lot of focus on that and we have a good story to tell on that in that regard so we haven't done a lot of fundraising this year for obvious reasons we we just didn't feel right about it basically because we feel like we needed to be in business to be asking for donations so we didn't and again we've been blessed enough to have the reserves to keep the lights on but moving forward we're going to be pursuing you know any kind of grantor that we can and fundraising opportunities that we can that we can tell our story to about what we're doing to help people in need in a post-pandemic world because we've been very active at it we just uh we're going to need the help in the future and the folks who have been coming alongside us all these years uh you know when you talk about the profit margins we understand that and we're very sensitive to our corporate partners and that they have a business to run and they have clinicians to take care of and we get all that but they've been very good to us and and so far the commitment is still there so between that and going after funds for non-profits that are are trying to make a difference in a post-pandemic world we think that we'll be successful so you you really are the behind the scenes operations and logistics that pull off i mean you know they they come out here and uh i know in Arizona you have the uh Kevin Conroy the phoenix endodontist and and um you know they're out there and it's just amazing all these dentists go and all that stuff but you're the operation logistics behind it yeah is that a good way of explaining it where you know i i've explained it a couple ways i mentioned the center of the wagon wheel earlier but i've told the story i've kind of compared it to the wheels on the bus you know when you think about a bus has to get somewhere in this in this space that we're in if you think about it from a bus perspective the destination is patient care for the underserved that's where the bus wants to go the folks in the driver's seat of the bus or their clinic leadership that put it all together the folks in the seats are all the volunteers and that's all great to have but that bus isn't going anywhere without the wheels and i call us the wheels on the bus because you can't have a clinic without without the equipment it's just that's that's a very easy fact to embrace but again if you got the wheels on the bus and there's nobody in it the bus is useless too so we all need each other we're all part of this clinic family this effort across the country to get this done but adcf we've historically kind of struggled with uh brand awareness just because we're kind of the roadies you know we're the ones that go in and put the equipment up and crawl under the tables and show volunteers how to hook things up and then when the clinic starts we step back and and just kind of wait and see if anybody needs help with anything you know if a water line goes down or whatever we're just kind of there to help with that but none of us are clinicians none of us are dentists none of us even came from the dental space we're just there to focus solely on the equipment be really good at that so that nobody has to worry about anything when those patients you know start coming in at five in the morning and and who did you start this in 2008 America’s dentist care foundation i didn't uh before really started 2008 adcf yeah yeah adcf started in 2008. 2000 in wichita in wichita yeah wow yeah there we were we had two Kansas dentists one nebraska dentist and then another gentleman who lives in Kansas who was our first executive director bruce bergstrom bruce is pretty well known in the dental space just because of his work starting this thing and he worked tirelessly uh he and the other three dentists to they put a lot of their own personal blood sweat tears money everything into this thing to get it off the ground and keep it going and um bruce was even honored at the ada one year with a special award and he deserved it uh so these guys you know i take it kind of personally to keep this thing going and keep it growing and more and more successful as in honor of those four guys as well as in honor of all the patients in need you know that we can't shut down we just can't and we won't if i haven't understood it anyway wow so um what could my homies listening to you right now there's dentists listening to you from Kansas to kathmandu how um they're listening to you right now what could they do to help you well the the thing that we could use the most as a nonprofit obviously is if if people would be generous enough to go to our website and donate we we can always use the funding not just now but moving into the future to help us remain sustainable like any other non-profit that's an easy ask because that's that's what we need adcf.net you can play donate buttons right at the top in the middle so that's obviously how you could help adcf specifically but as far as talking to the dentists out there and especially i like to to address the younger generation of dentists coming up um volunteer in your city or close to your city try and find a go to your go to your dental association your state's dental association website see if they have a mission of mercy or philanthropic effort like a mom and volunteer and what I’m what I’m encouraging all the younger dentists to do is kind of get arm in arm with a leader and co-lead for a year or two and then start taking it over because like i've said many times a lot of the these things have been going on for 10 15 years and the leadership loves what they do but they're getting kind of tired because that's a it's a it takes a lot to do this it takes you know a year 18 months to plan one of these things so what the dentist can do is get involved in their local area you know i always say just make a difference in your own little corner of the world and the whole world will be brighter do that but as far as helping adcf specifically because we're the roadies behind the curtain and nobody really sees us much to help us specifically we would love to have people just go to our website and donate to our general fund that would be a big help to us well i am going to uh help you do that I’m going to push something out but i i want to um i want to say i don't know if this right please help mom and dad missions of mercy mlm and dental access day dad by donating to America’s dentist care foundation um with um um adc adcf.net forward slash donate excellent yeah thanks is that good but but is that is that okay with the mom and dad thing i just think it's funny yeah and uh uh most people don't laugh at my jokes but i thought that was a pretty good one um but yeah um so um i mean have you ever experienced what happens uh to donations i mean from um you know the time you've been in it what what happens during a downturn like like you know like um i lived through well i was born in 62 do you remember the 62 the um they called it the economic um the stock market flash it was a flash crash uh it was a um and then i graduated high school and bishop carroll have you heard of bishop carol in which um 1980 interest rates were in interest rates were 21 unemployment and um was uh double digit for unemployment inflation and then we had of course the 87 black monday and then we had um the y2k in march 2000. we had lehman's day so go back to leemon's day when that was our last downward um cycle uh 10 years ago how did that affect donations and charity in general in dentistry well i wasn't i wasn't in this role back at that time um you know in talking to i talked to a lot of dentists that have been at this for a while especially in the philanthropic world uh it ebbs and flows you know sometimes in a downturn you know it's it's kind of that buy low sell high mentality you know warren buffett made a lot of his money when everything was was crappy in the stock market and he bought when things were cheap and it made him very successful so you know in a downturn sometimes people are more apt to give you know they may not they it's just because they see the need around them so you know a heart can be touched with with any small story and i think that you know i don't know what happened during the lehman time but i've seen kind of a little bit of that right now with us you know that talk about a downturn i mean everything's downturned from our health to our finances at this point but uh people have reached out and actually written us checks just randomly to our general funds so i think it's easy to assume that a lot of the donations will might go down and i think overall that's probably true but there are those rays of light that come in occasionally that kind of uh you know they're encouraging they're encouraging to me they're encouraging to uh my board of directors and it really helps us to say okay let's get up tomorrow and do some more of this um can i read some of your um your supporters your partners yeah i mean you got a my gosh you got a platinum sparta shout out to uh henry shine is in there uh i gotta tell you one thing about the henry shine that you know that's stan bergman and twice in my life i got that flat head where you hit your head i can't believe where you're doing uh okay so i'll give you an example one of them um we flew to this big city stay in a hotel the next day drive like two hours to a base of a mountain and we literally had to walk up the last like i don't know two or three hours i mean it was horrible and um and we get there and there's just like this beautiful dental clinic with like six chairs and we're just like where's that like a movie it was in a movie you wouldn't even believed it and um and it was it was stan bergman built that and uh henry shine and then it happened again in um tanzania um africa but anyway i i got the funniest youtube i post on youtube but i i was at this um this uh it was an orphanage in tanzania and i told him that the man who built all this was my friend and on my phone um why don't we um tell them thank you and they're all listening they're all you know they're all look like you know they're you know three foot tall or whatever the little kids and so i hit play and they started singing happy birthday like happy birds and i was like that was i that was as much english as i knew but i said it just i said i told them to tell you thanks and they they sent me a happy birthday but i mean so so um stan i i have you met stan bergman um i i don't have you not yet not yet i always i always wonder where that comes from i mean it's it's a burning mission with inside that guy he was born in south africa yeah and he's just uh my guy he's friends and then so metrics so solmatec so medics so medics okay pronounce that wrong so uh um and and tell us about somatics well they you know it's still medics ironically it's a good plug for them they just got another patent on this amalgam separation system that they've invented uh we use their amalgam separator filters on our vacuums we use the air technique vacuums uh these big huge double motor vacuums and we use the selmatics amalgam separators on there so that and they have donated those to us 100 donated we get some things at a discount which we really appreciate we get some things completely donated and that's one of them is the soul medics uh the amalgam separators and also you know again i could go on forever with all these folks but henry shine you know the uh the sterilization pouches we we have to have those you know and they're and they'd be pricey to get them at the bulk we need them henry shine donates those to us specifically to adcf and that's what i mean about you know a lot of folks will donate to a specific state's mission of mercy which is great but oftentimes adcf gets forgotten in that mix because again we're behind the curtain and people don't realize we need some help as well to go out and do this 30 times around the country and shine was one of the early ones uh steve kess i met steve when i was probably 30 days into this job and um he was he's a big fan and and getting to know him has been a real joy for me and cheyenne's been a big help ever since you know you seem so smart i would have assumed you went to ku instead of k-state but i mean you just uh well that's why I’m so smart cause i went to k-state's ku and then um and then um cross tax crosstalks um big supporter um yup so what what do they do well they help us with spore vials for tests that we put inside of the you know you have to do a spore test before you get rolling with the sterilizers and they donate those to us so and that's what i meant earlier by every little thing that you wouldn't even think of oh yeah you know unless you're in this every day these are now they're orders and now they're part of the hugh freddy group they got rolled in they got merged and acquired by uh uh hugh freedy yeah and you free helps us too separately so all the big players like i said all the big players are on board with us and they've been very very generous yeah and you got dense fly serona um um you even got the uh the church of jesus christ the latter day saints that that surprised me because i think that's something that you know you donate to the church and now here's the church donating to this um yeah is that very common to have churches like um no not really but here's how that relationship started they have a volunteer army basically is what i call it it's called just serve at justserved.org it's the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints volunteer army and these folks were actually volunteering at a california the cda cares event in california when i first got started they've been doing it for a long time but i first met these folks back in about 2015 or 16. and i met one of the folks that was in charge of the group that went in to volunteer at cba cares and he said bill we want to help you nationwide and we don't want to help the mission of mercy we want to do it through you because you get again you guys are the center of the wagon wheel how can we connect with adcf to be able to not only help you but to help the mission of mercy effort around the country and that's how we got the relationship started with them so they they not only helping at different clinics but they also help adcl specifically through their grant program and they've helped us buy some some significant amounts of equipment with the grants that they've been generous enough to to donate to us wow that is uh very very amazing and um and then you got a septico yeah nsk uh paradise dental technologies acetone adag delta dental of Wisconsin so um premier dental um my gosh i mean yeah i mean that that really speaks volumes that you have so much support from so many people um and and where do you think their support uh comes from i mean where where do you think um what drives uh these companies like um um that we just been mentioned what drives them to be a part of this do you think well everyone i talk to with these companies they have a heart to help people like and like i said it's oftentimes in a corporate setting there just may not be that avenue as broadly you know a larger corporation like a like a shiner patterson or these these larger corporations and supply all of them they they have a few more opportunities to have separate departments that might pursue that kind of thing but even if that's not the case every one of them has a heart to help people and i think it says a lot for them that they want to proactively reach out and help us out and some of these folks were helping us before i came on board some came on board after i came on board but they just want to help people and they enjoy being able to donate their either their funds or their or their discounts however they donate i think that they are confident enough in us which i think says a lot for adcf and our staff here and not just me and my staff but the folks who put this together before us i think they're confident enough in the work that we do and the diligence with which we do it that they have no problem donating to us once they get to know who we are because we're good at it i mean my staff's fantastic at doing this when you know it's kind of a joke that i've had with some of the clinicians on the clinic floors before you know we send two guys with each trailer to every clinic oftentimes they're just sitting in a chair at a table with a big banner up so they know where we are if they need us and they don't get to do that much oftentimes during the weekend and you know the joke i always have is if my guys are sitting on their butts that's good for you that means everything's working perfectly if they have to be up and fixing things all the time that's a problem that causes problems with patient flow it frustrates people you know so so it says a lot for our equipment to come in and work great and my guys not to be busy all weekend because it works so well and when corporate partners see that kind of thing and they hear about that kind of thing and they get to hear our story they're happy to come on board because they trust what we do and they trust that their resources are going to the right people yeah reputation's everything and it's a very small industry too isn't it yeah i mean you um i always call dentistry the hotel california because um you can check in but you never leave i mean you go to these conventions and uh uh maybe this guy was an ultra dead for five years and now he's over at 3m or whatever but um yeah it seems like when people enter dentistry uh they they don't tend to leave yeah i see that a lot i see it a lot i have contacts at many many companies that have been at other companies that i also have contacts at so you know i heard when i first came on board in 2015 that the dental uh the dental sector is just like a big family everybody knows everybody and I’m learning that i've been at this like you know going into my seventh year almost here and um i see that all the time people people know people know people and that's that's great in a non-profit sector especially you know networking is is a big deal i need to go out and see people and tell our story so when i can talk to this person who knows this person over at this company and they've been in the dental space for 30 years it makes my job a little easier so i i certainly appreciate the tight-knitness of this sector um my um the the delta um people that i talk to they think that during this pandemic 40 million americans with dental benefits have lost their job and we've always known for 30 years that you know if you want more of something uh subsidize it and when your employer the government subsidizes the dental visit you're going to get more of it and if you want less of it then raise the price tax it or regulate it and you'll get less so don't you think if 40 if 40 million people lost their jobs with dental benefit do you think that's going to drastically increase the demand for homelessness volunteer services yeah people that are desperate absolutely like i said earlier i already know that at least an average of at least 40 000 people did not get help in 2020 because of the 26 clinics that we get cancelled that's just the folks that we would typically expect to see now you add on top of that the folks that have lost their dental insurance um you know I’m an example of that i've told this story before i was unemployed for a year at one point in my career history i barely left the house i didn't go to i didn't go to a doctor i didn't go to a dentist i was in that I’m i was in that funk that a lot of people are in right now where i was putting out resume after resume after resume and getting zero response i wasn't even getting an email back saying no thank you i was getting nothing and so i know what that does to a person's psyche and to them emotionally and mentally and physically and spiritually everything and i didn't go out and spend one nickel on anything because i didn't know what my future held so multiply that times these millions of folks across the country that have been hit by this thing like i said earlier we can't close we will not close we're gonna do everything in our power to help everybody we can the best way we can because the need is not only there it's now expanded exponentially so in the next two three years we're probably going to see some folks we didn't wouldn't have typically seen before wow that's uh um and and we we don't know how much worse it's gonna get i mean we say we're halfway through it but nobody can uh read the uh the future um so um i i think this has been um incredibly uh informative um uh i i think a lot of people um it was kind of like um with when they did the affordable health care act um the people started calling it obamacare and it seems like every it seemed like if i had five conversations on it they'd say you know like they weren't for obamacare they were against her something i'd say well but you but you're on access i mean you you're an accident they they had no idea that the state medicaid was called access and and it was such a branding nightmare i mean everyone knows their grandmother is on medicare it's one program it's federally everybody knows the brand but then when they did the each state has its own medicaid and then um but it's called you know access called all these things i mean it's just a branding nightmare um i i didn't i thought you i i was confused is he mission of mercy or is he America’s uh dennis care um do you think you have that same issue where you want to that you want to go with one brand or is it just you're helping so many different people you're the roadies behind the scene yeah well kind of a little of both actually we have you know we we've been so enmeshed with the mom branding over the years in fact our name when we first got started in 2008 was a mom America’s mission of mercy uh some of the folks who used to use us back then still call us a mom when we show up even though our our logo and name has changed and has been for a long time now so we're we've been very enmeshed with that name and from a branding perspective it's funny you mentioned that because i've had this discussion with my board too it's important for us to have our own standalone branding so that people understand whether it's mom or dad or a comprehensive care clinic with you know let's just take seattle king county clinic for example we go to seattle we've been going there for several years at the big king county clinic there in their coliseum they aren't called mom they aren't called dad they're called the king county clinic seattle king county clinic so for us to have our own branding apart from the mom and the dad is important to us because we do so much more than just that but like one of my board members has said you know you walk into an elevator at a dental conference and say the word mom people know what you mean immediately you say adcf and people go huh so in a way it's good to be enmeshed with that but in another way it's it's important to us to have our own standalone branding and for people to understand that we need the help as a non-profit as much as any individual clinic around the country needs the help so i've actually had you know i've had a conversation before with a corporate potential corporate partner who once they had their internal meeting after meeting me they said you know what bill we love what you do we didn't know that you guys just did that we think that's great but we're already giving to xyz mission of mercy and the committee feels like that would be kind of double dipping into our philanthropic give if we give to them and give to you so we're going to keep giving to them so thanks but no thanks we've had that discussion with people before so yes we want to we want to have our own standalone branding we're proud to be associated with mom and dad and everything else but as America’s dentist care foundation we we need people to understand we're doing everything we can to help people understand we are the wheels on the bus and we need our own individual help and we we think it's if somebody wants to give money to a missionary mercy effort in any given state that's terrific and we always encourage that but we need the help as a non-profit because we're bringing in two million dollars of equipment on each trailer and that's an expensive endeavor so any help that we can get as a standalone entity as a stand-alone thought process to a giver we would absolutely love that because we will make that matter whatever they give to us we will make that matter all around America a lot of people get help by people helping adcf to go do what we do and do you consider yourself a medicaid welfare issue company i mean does that fall i mean generally speaking um or do you see it more as a charity or it's it's it's it's a charity i mean what we do is we help folks i mean the people that show up at these clinics there are no there are no criteria you don't have to show an iv to walk into one of these mission emergency clinics you just get in line well in the future you probably won't get in line because that's going to change with the pandemic but we see all kinds of patients whether medicare medicaid whatever but for adcf specifically we aren't really attached to a particular um engine that gets people the care we just we just focus on basically making sure we have the best equipment possible to go to these philanthropic efforts wherever we can you know and you know a great example of that is the seattle king county clinic they called us wanting to do this comprehensive care clinic but they needed somebody that they could count on for the dental piece of it that's why they called us and we've been doing it ever since so we aren't really we don't really see ourselves as a medicare medicaid type of organization we're just an organization that wants to help people in need by showing up to support a clinic that's doing that and another question i've got um under charity they usually falls under charitable or missionary meaning uh ones related to a church one's not related church would you consider yours more admission a missionary dentistry or charitable dentistry well adcf's a charitable dentistry for sure terrible dentistry yeah yeah mission of mercy was just a name that was used when it first got started back in 2000 so the word mission sometimes has that connotation which is okay with me i happen to be a believer anyway so as a christian guy every day i get out of bed as a mission but adcf as a standalone entity uh is just a terrible organization that's trying to help anybody that needs it very very good um um yeah my sister's uh uh my two other sisters are nuns in wichita where you are one went to capen and um um one went to uh bishop carroll and uh but anyway but we're sold when um when they went to cape and um the all-girls school was over where bishop carroll is and the the cape and ones but uh uh yeah they always um it's funny whenever you do a dental church mission deal it's like uh um my god they're they're the most brutal exhausting days in the world i mean they're just brutal but i think it makes everybody um feel good and what i want to tell the dentist is this i was advised to do this um by a good mentor of mine jerome smith uh jerry in uh in lafayette louisiana and down new orleans and um first time he invited me to a mission um it was uh it was like dude you don't understand i own a dental office I’m married i have four kids i mean i i i can't do it and the reason it's so good is because everything is relative and you think you're all stressed out of your mind and you think your overhead's too high and you think you have all these problems and then you go spend the day with people who make your problems look like first world problems uh you know um i mean just uh crazy and you know with even with the grandkids i mean i watched a meltdown over the weekend and it was because i um her laptop uh wouldn't fire up and I’m like and i was trying to explain to her that you know that well i just told her i said uh two out of every three kids on earth don't have a laptop so you know this would not be a problem and what i thought it was really really good for so many dentists is if you if you're stressed um you know when we were podcasting the president ada i was trying to talk about pandemic things and and um kathleen was trying to steer me back to that that there's a suicide problem i mean dennis were um and you believe these suicides are just bizarre i mean okay so it's a dentist had a great practice had a great family had a great kids everything's good but closing down two months and missing some bills and and all this the next thing you know is he goes out and kills himself and it's like holy moly there's people living behind dumpsters and you look at your life and for me and then here's the other thing i can't figure out i call it the giggle factor i mean you go to these places and they they smile and they laugh and they giggle more in the middle of nowhere uh jungles and and all this and and then i could compare that to i mean if you've ever lectured i have in uh um seoul uh korea japan germany new york i mean compare those people to the people of kathmandu and tanzania i mean when i was in brazil uh the kids didn't have the money for their favorite jersey so they just had a black piece of charcoal coal like like you charcoal hamburgers on and they would just write the number on their bare skin and those people laugh and giggle more than americans and koreans and japanese any day in fact i always wanted to write a book called the giggle factor and my gosh i think what you're doing is so great for your target audience the people in need but i actually think it's as equal to as great to the providers because my homies they they they need a reality check and there's no better reality check than canceling the day at the office or going out of the country or going down to a mission and realize that i know you got a lot of problems doc but you're not the most you know you're not going to get the poorest 1 billion people on earth to get out of violin and start playing a song for for doc and um and it's just um it's just a great thing that you do and it's a great reality check and i think um i think a lot of dentists that are suffering from anxiety depression and starting to treat it themselves by drinking or drugging or whatever they're doing um sometimes you just need a break and you just need to get out of there and i recommend um oh my god a mission i mean oh my gosh i mean you go there and you're just like how do these people survive and then after you spend three or four days with them you're like these are like the laughingst funniest happiest people i've ever seen yeah then you go back to i i remember i got i got knocked to the ground i i've been i've been knocked to the ground trying to get on subway because I’m in you know I’m amateur i grew up which I’m not used to getting on trains uh by uh like a 60 year old korean lady in seoul another one in japan i mean i mean they're just not having fun they're stressed out of their mind and maybe if you just go spend a day with the have-nots you're gonna realize that um we we create a lot of the stress in our own minds and people just gotta relax lighten up have fun and i know these are really tough times in America i mean we got a pandemic do you need anything else we got an election we got all these things coming at us and a lot of people are at their wit's end but I’m like uh you know think of the bright side i'd rather be fighting a virus than world war ii fighting humans on another team in a different uniform i mean i would rather be killed by a virus than uh some some guy in an army that's looking right at the same species and shooting it i mean so so it could be a lot worse and of course it could be a lot better but that's that's what life is two steps forward one step back but um bill blazing executive director America’s dento's care foundation um my gosh send him um so if you just go um to um if you just go to his website he said it right there let me go back here it's adcf America’s dental care foundation.net uh there's a big old donate button I’m gonna push that on social media um i have to admit i um i've never done paypal before i don't know if that's a 58 year old thing um is the paypal does everybody kind of do that or is that a younger thing is that what millennials do no it's easy to give online you just put you just plug in a credit card basically and we don't keep that information anywhere at all it just it's a one-time deal and it's just like paying anything on online with a credit card oh so paypal is just like using your credit card yeah yeah and there are notices on there for people who might just check our address is on there too and they can just they can just send it to our office and general donate general donation fund and and we'll take it from there and we'll make sure everybody gets an acknowledgement so they'll have that for their taxes and they can know what kind of help they're giving people um yeah and that i i learned something on my own show i had no idea that paypal was just like that you could do i thought you had to set up an account and be uh a paypal person or whatever so you're on the um you're on the east side of town you're on the cape inside not the bishop carroll side right yeah we're out off 96 highway and and uh webb road basically in wichita so we're right off the highway all right have you ever seen the company key construction what's that have you seen the company key construction yeah that's all all family all right yeah all family roles small world well hey i will um i will push this out um and then also do you have a monthly program or a um or is it just a one-time program no people can can set up to pay us just basically through their account they can do that through our website too on that on that same paypal thing i think these folks that are doing it right now we have some individuals doing it that maybe they're maybe they're paypal okay there it is it says make this a monthly donation and i just wanna i just wanna give one business story um so everybody knows procter and gamble right do you know what you know um they were the first really billionaire companies in the last 1880s do you know why what their business model was why they became billionaires you see it in dentistry i um i got a school in 87 and there were these lasers being sold for fifty thousand dollars and after they sold a thousand of these fifty thousand dollar lasers um it went out of business and i thought wow that is so bizarre and that's what procter and gamble noticed that happened in America all from 1800 to 1880 he says what would happen is a company would uh a guy would borrows money and he'd buy all the ingredients for all this soap and he'd build all the soap he could and then he go around selling everybody a gunny sack of soap and all that kind of stuff and then he realized nobody in parsons Kansas needs soap anymore everybody bought a gunny sack full of soap and they wouldn't cash flow to their next without a soap and at procter and gamble realized the problem was the packaging and the amount so they said what we're gonna do is we're gonna start a soap company and and we're gonna later do other things toothpaste or whatever but we will only sell you a month's supply because we pay our rent monthly our bills monthly our payroll monthly our electric bill monthly and as soon as they started getting people buying each month they had cash flow as soon as they had a couple years of cash flow um in ohio they went to the big old bank there and the bank loaned them millions of dollars because they had this steady stream of income so when you donate to wikipedia when you donate to America’s dental care foundation um i would rather you give him ten dollars a month into perpetuity and give him a hundred dollars and then and then bill thinks oh we got some money and then next month it doesn't show up it doesn't show up it doesn't show up and um cash flow purposes is just think of procter and gamble and by the way the other thing about procter gamble they were the first guy um to actually write a practice management deal they wrote the dupont formula and i want to show you and i want to um i'll mention that just to show you the importance of the depart formula that if you really love a charity it's kind of like church the reason churches can grow so well is because you donate every week every week you go to church they pass the basket but a one-time donation but the dupont formula was really easy it was profit margin times turnover times leverage think about that so profit margins net income over sales say you have sales of a dollar and you net a dime so you have a ten percent profit margin but that doesn't tell you anything i don't know anything about your business so it's times turnover the asset time sell so let's say my sales were a dollar and i made a dime but to make that dollar sales what did i have to buy i had to buy a dental office what was that was that ten dollar an asset um so if i buy a dental office for a dollar and it does a dollar in sales then my 10 net profit margin um is also my 10 return on asset but if i borrowed that dollar at the bank and i only had a dime into it and i borrowed the dollar my equity would be a dime but my asset would be a dollar so I’m leveraged tenfold so the dupont formula is net income over sales profit margin times sales over asset which is turnover times assets over equity so it's your profit margin times your return on asset times your return on equity and again again again again 32 years of doing this i'll go into any dental office his hygienist just does a cleaning salmon x-ray walks out and i say hey doc your hygienist who's been here a decade just did a standard cleaning exam and x-rays did you net five dollars and 12 cents or did you lose 12 bucks they never know and then and then they'll say oh last year my overhead was 65 percent that didn't tell me anything what was your return on asset how much money is invested in this and what was your return i guarantee you you know how many dentists would make more money if they sold their entire land building and office to heartland and then just put it into the a savings account and then you'd at least have a guaranteed return on asset and then and then roi my dad told me a dozen times my dad had five sonic drive-ins in wichita you ever that's how i cut my teeth um he was the first sony drive-in franchise in wichita Kansas cool and um and then we then we put one in uh um kearney nebraska abilene Kansas childress texas and uh louisville kentucky and the five in wichita were so good because that's where his team was but you know in his mind he wanted to go national so he went north to um childress uh or south to children's texas and north to uh carney nebraska and east to louisville and those were his disasters because his management team was in wichita and we could hit all five stores we could do everything so when you're when you're um so when you're adding other uh locations you know they should all be very very close to each other but um that dupont farmer i still have never met a dentist in my life other than the billionaire rick rick workman who owns harlan he could tell me but I’m talking about not the dso captains but i'll just say yeah you've been a dentist for 20 years can you tell me your return on asset from any of those years or your return on equity no and that's why I’m telling you if you don't know this stuff you're going to help them a lot more by making a ten dollar monthly donation so he can start budgeting and planning and forecasting um a one-time lump sum doesn't do anything you need cash flow but thank you so much bill blazing were you named after blazing saddles no it's just it's an old german name so is it a german name blazing yeah that's that's what i've been told anyway from my family but it's filled with an s so a lot of people say blazing or blossing or you know butcher it but it's always been pronounced blazing and uh obviously you're wearing a wig right i mean that is that is too perfect of hair uh to be natural so photoshopped so um bill blazing America’s dental care foundation please go to them and donate an amount of money that's monthly and uh i'll do everything i can at my end to help you raise some money thank you so much howard it's been a pleasure talking to you i appreciate you having me on and your promotion and support all right have a rocking good day you too take care
Category: Public Health
You must be logged in to view comments.
Total Blog Activity
157
Total Bloggers
4,069
Total Blog Posts
2,085
Total Podcasts
1,685
Total Videos
Sponsors
Site Menu
Message Boards Articles Continuing Education Podcasts Blogs Classifieds News Events Townie® Poll Ebooks Townie Choice Awards
Company Info
Contact Us Advertise With Us Howard Farran DDS, MBA Policies and Agreements
Site Help
Sally Gross, Member Services Specialist
Phone: +1-480-445-9710
Email: sally@farranmedia.com
©2023 Hygienetown, a division of Farran Media • All Rights Reserved
9633 S. 48th Street Suite 200 • Phoenix, AZ 85044 • Phone:+1-480-598-0001 • Fax:+1-480-598-3450