The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry

Ranked the #1 DSO Podcast!

Welcome to The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry!

In this episode Dr. Layla Lohmann, Co-founder and Clinical Director of Apex Dental Partners, and Dr. David Rice, Founder of IgniteDDS discuss:

The evolution of Apex Dental Partners since their recognition as a 2019 Emerging Group to Watch.

Dr. Lohmann shares her journey in the dental field, the importance of education, and the innovative Catalyst program designed to enhance professional development and combat burnout among dental providers. She shares that at the DSO, over six months, 13 providers experienced a 10% increase in personal production. Additionally, two multi-doctor practices—a two-doctor and a three-doctor practice—collectively grew their production by $1.6 million during the same period, driven by the full team’s commitment.

Dr. Rice discusses the strategic partnership with Apex and Ivoclar, highlighting the impressive growth achieved by participating practices. With insights on balancing clinical excellence with business growth, this episode is packed with valuable information for dental professionals looking to elevate their group practices.

Key Topics:

The growth and evolution of Apex Dental Partners
How the Catalyst program has increased the DSO’s production by 10%
Strategies for improving patient care and treatment acceptance
The importance of partnerships in the dental industry

Don’t forget to subscribe to our channel for more insights into the DSO industry and to stay updated on the latest news and events.

Connect with our guests:

Dr. Layla Lohmann: Apex Dental Partners | Email: drlohmann@dallasdental.com | Cell: 405-414-1083 | https://apexdp.com
Dr. David Rice: IgniteDDS | Email: david.rice@ignitedds.com | Cell: 716-912-7970 | https://ignitedds.com/

Sponsored by:
Ivoclar – For more information, contact Sean Finn at sean.finn@ivoclar.com. Visit www.Ivoclar.com

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DSO podcast transcript:

Welcome to the Group Dentistry Now show, the voice of the DSO industry. Join us as we talk with industry leaders about their challenges, successes, and the future of group dentistry. With over 200 episodes and listeners in over 100 countries, we’re proud to be ranked the number one DSO podcast. For the latest DSO news, analysis, and events, and to subscribe to our DSO weekly e-newsletter, visit groupdentistrynow.com. We hope you enjoyed today’s show.

Bill Neumann: Welcome, everyone, to the Group Dentistry Now show. I am Bill Neumann, and as always, we appreciate you watching us, or maybe you’re listening to us. But however you consume our content, we really appreciate it, whether you’re watching us on YouTube, on the groupdentistrynow.com website, or maybe you’re listening to us on Spotify, Apple, or Google. Thanks for checking in. And we always, just so much fun, and I learned so much from these conversations, and I’m sure this is going to be one of those podcasts. So, we’ve got a returning guest and somebody new to the show. However, the last name may ring a bell. So, we have Dr. Layla Lohmann, who is the co-founder and clinical director of Apex Dental Partners. Layla, thanks for being here.

Dr. Layla Lohmann: Thanks for having me, Bill. I really appreciate it. Sorry.

Bill Neumann: That’s OK. Go ahead. You’re going to say something. Maybe it was about that last name.

Dr. Layla Lohmann: I was going to say the last name. My husband knows Bill from a few years ago, and I appreciate you bringing me back on.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, that’s great. And so I guess we’ll talk about it now. So her husband, David Lohman, is the CEO of Apex. And he was on the podcast eons ago, 2021. Yeah, it was 2021 he was on. And then The other thing is Apex Dental Partners was a 2019 Emerging Groups to Watch winner. So we’ve been doing these awards once a year. And so if we go way back to 2019, so I’m going to ask Layla in a couple of minutes to fill us in on all the changes since 2020 and certainly 2019 when they won the award. I’m sure there’s been a bit of growth since then. So thanks for being here, Layla.

Dr. Layla Lohmann: Thank you.

Bill Neumann: And then we have returning Dr. David Rice. He is the founder of Ignite DDS. And David, we had a great conversation. It wasn’t quite as long ago as the conversation we had with David. It was, it’s 2024 though. It’s probably six months at least. And it’s great to have you back on. And I will say it was one of our most downloaded podcasts of the year. So thanks. Hopefully, I’m gonna guess this is gonna be the same way. So thanks for being back on.

Dr. David Rice: Yeah, thanks for having me. I’m guessing that was because of you and Lenita. I felt like, you know, the third wheel, but it’s good to be there.

Bill Neumann: You have a little bit of a social media following, so I think we’ll just dump this up over the chart. Thanks for being here. Dr. Lohmann, why don’t we start with you a little bit about, you know, your background and what led you to being the co-founder of Apex Dental Partners?

Dr. Layla Lohmann: Yeah, so I became co-founder. We started the company in 2014 and Apex Dental Partners is a dental organization based in Dallas, Texas. We support practices, a network of practices across eight states. And we support 52 practices, which about 110 providers. And we focus on partnering with great people. So that’s what Apex does. And we’ve grown from 2019. And the Catalyst program stemmed from my own learning journey. After the pandemic, a lot of things happened in every practice. And I decided to figure out what type of health care professional I wanted to be. And it was about four years ago I decided to be the primary care provider of the oral cavity, which means discussing prevention. And then I have noted from that four-year journey and my leadership journey from graduating from Guiding Leaders, Glidewell’s professional program two years ago, that I can make it profitable by delivering excellent patient care and addressing my patient promises. And it just all aligned. And then the Catalyst program came to fruition in 2024, where we enlisted David Rice’s help. So that’s where APEX is going, education, development, and getting our professionals, personal and professional development to avoid burnout.

Bill Neumann: As I read through your bio here, Dr. Lalman, you do really focus a lot on education and it seems like every quote you have here, and it’s interesting because you hear favorite quotes and a lot of times you’ve heard them and it’s like everybody kind of references the same, but you’ve got one here from Ben Franklin who is probably the most quoted individual ever, but I’ve never heard this one. Tell me I forget, teach me I may remember, but involve me and I learn. So pretty interesting. And we’re going to talk a lot about education and partnerships here. David, I know most people know who you are, but there are probably some that either need a refresher or maybe they miss the podcast that you’re on or just happen to be new to the dental industry. So we’re going to assume that there’s like two people that don’t know who you are.

Dr. David Rice: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. So if if we’ve never met before, either virtually in person, I am a dentist of. 30 years I don’t like to say that too many times out loud, but 30 years I love what I do. We’ve had four practices of my own and we grew this little community called Ignite DDS from a couple people hanging around at a table to a network that reaches about 3 1⁄2 million. dental pros every single month all around the globe and you know our focus today really is working with people like Leila, practices like Apex, people who like see a bigger vision and understand there’s something else out there for them than maybe what they’ve been told or are experiencing in the moment.

Bill Neumann: Excellent. So we’re going to focus in on education. And I just want to, if you’re watching this, you see Ivoclar logo right at the bottom there. So Ivoclar has really been integral in this partnership program, the education, part of the curriculum we can talk about. But thanks Ivoclar for sponsoring this. I don’t want to forget them. So even though there’s not somebody from Ivoclar here, Um, they, they were the ones that put all this together and we wouldn’t be able to have this conversation without their support. So let’s talk a bit about this training program. And again, talked about the partnership with Ivaclar and of course, Ignite DDS, but Dr. Luhmann, you know, what really, you kind of do things a little differently at Apex. And so what, what, what was the catalyst behind putting together a programming?

Dr. Layla Lohmann: Again, I’ll start off by saying it was my own learning journey. I’ve been practicing for almost 14 years. And I started realizing that I felt sometimes pressure to convince my patients, sometimes to convince my team members. And honestly, sometimes it was me. Did I not believe in the science? Did I not trust or believe in what I’m using? Um, so my, the journey itself came from my own six month program. So I graduated from guiding leaders, uh, Glidewell dental program for professional development and personal development. And from there, it speared such a freeing and empowering. professional life for me, which then led into my personal life, which was amazing. And I thought to myself, why are we not providing this for every single provider in our practice? And, you know, it was unfounded because if you don’t have an ROI immediately, your leadership team in a DSO or a dental organization is going to say, I don’t really trust and believe you’re going to give me an ROI. So I had to go out and secure strategic partners like Ivoclar and Glidewell to help support me in this initiative because I could not fund it myself. And so I thought to myself, how do I build value for both people? Sustainable growth in a business and for those vendors that we use. If we all do our patient promises, everyone also starts restoring more, producing more, which then uses more products, which aligns with Our mission at Apex is serving others and changing lives, and I just needed help with vendor support. So it started off as I got through it. I saw the professional growth and personal growth, and I wanted to provide that with our doctors. And so I aligned myself with people such as David Rice and other strategic partners like Avocard to help this come to life. And it wouldn’t have happened without them.

Bill Neumann: Leila, what type of training and education is this? Is this just strictly clinical training? Talk a little bit about what type of training and then who at the organization is receiving the training.

Dr. Layla Lohmann: So David will go into detail, but it dives into business strategies, best practices of what we’ve learned over the last 10 years of what works and doesn’t work, and that we are constantly looking at new innovations, new products to bring to our practices. It’s our doctors who receive this initially, but we have seen how team member integration is so important. So this next year, we’re bringing in the leadership team, which is our business managers and our doctors. And then I’m hoping in 2026, we bring in our team members. But it’s leadership, self-awareness, understanding your role and how it impacts others versus training you to correct other people. And that was through the leadership that we provided. So leadership, business, strategies, and we do sprinkle in clinical. So there is definitely clinical involved, but we’re taught to be restorative doctors. We’re trying to teach them how to be healthcare providers in prevention. That’s where it’s leading to.

Bill Neumann: Excellent. David, can you talk a little bit about Ignite DDS’s role putting this program together and your role specifically?

Dr. David Rice: Sure. So, you know, I think what most of your listeners really want to hear probably is the strategic side of this. And I’ll add a little color to what Leila said later on as well. But, you know, we came in along with Ivaclar and said, OK, there’s three Facets that we have to be excellent at in a practice today. We have to we have to have strong people So, you know, we kind of came to apex they had great people already But we we needed to kind of harness Those people and level them up and then I think where we really truly all united was on process and how to focus on the right processes. So what was working for Apex already? What could get even better than it was working in the past? And then to Layla’s point, we started this off with The Dentist, which I loved, and then we incorporated in their office managers, their OBMs, and then their regional business managers, really with the concept of train the trainer. I mean, you want to bring somebody like myself and Ibaclar and partner so you can get better faster but you really don’t want me around for the long haul. You want to be able to have your own leadership with your own practice and that’s one of the things that I really admire about Apex at large and it clearly it stems from Layla’s vision because they’re remarkably different from most folks they get to work with. So we had people, we had process and then of course we had to add production. And what I love about Layla’s vision is it’s really in alignment with how we teach practices, you know, all over North America. Production isn’t the number. Production is our diagnostic ability. Production is the treatment we deliver. Production is the core pieces of tech that need to go in there. And when we have all those elements and we focus on oral health and we connect that to systemic health, then our patients win, our practice wins, our profits skyrocket. And Layla, like some of the numbers we’ve reached together in like this teeny little six months period of time like blow me away. And you have to tell Bill what you told me the other day, because I knew we had done well, but I was shocked myself on how well.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, that’s great. Yeah. So let’s talk about how this program does help Apex move the needle.

Dr. Layla Lohmann: Um, so I’m proud to say first that there was 13 providers and on average, those 13 providers over six months grew 10% in their own personal production. So that was the first number that I got. And then recently from my husband, who was very proud of our initiative, he let me know that two of our practices, which are multi-doctor practices and all the doctors in the practice. So one is a two doctor practice and one is a three doctor practice. And those doctors who invested themselves, so the whole team came, meaning both doctors, those doctors grew in production together $1.6 million in production in six months.

Bill Neumann: Okay. Wow. That’s mad. So David, is this common? I mean, this seems pretty spectacular growth in six months, 13 docs, 1.6 million.

Dr. Layla Lohmann: Well, it’s actually five doctors grew by about six million. The total cohort grew 10% of their own personal production. So it’s actually even better numbers.

Bill Neumann: Wow. Incredible.

Dr. David Rice: Yeah, you know, I would say it of course percentages vary from group to group that we work with. I think, you know, you mentioned a Ben Franklin quote that was one of Layla’s but one you hadn’t heard. You guys have probably at some point heard the quotes, you know, what got you here won’t get you there. I think normally when we walk into a group, we have to help that group leadership understand where where is first. What helped us grow so quickly with Layla and her doctors is Layla was crystal clear with the where the vision was super strong. So I think we grew them faster together than we normally would. Normally, I would say if we come to work with you, you can hit over a million dollars easy in 10 months and 12 months. But to do it in six months was a lot was really Laila knew where Apex needed to go. You know, David CEO knew where Apex needed to go. So that was a big help. But I think the other thing that really helped them succeed and helped us do what we did is They weren’t afraid to get out of the box when I know a lot of groups for name a multitude of reasons why people don’t want an outsider or outsiders coming in, sort of getting behind the curtain. We worked really hard at building trust. and that trust just keeps growing. And it’s a combination of Layla’s vision, the trust, and then yeah, her docs, they showed up and did the work. So those numbers are very real when we deep dive together.

Bill Neumann: So what the audience is gonna wanna know how to do this. If they can get results like this, I would think that they’d be happy to bring in an outside if we’re going to get results like this. And maybe sometimes that’s what it takes, in some cases, to bring somebody, you know, that maybe doesn’t, you know, look at things as certain. You kind of get a little bit of tunnel vision sometimes when you’re working in an organization. To get different perspective can really help. So, David, maybe a little bit more on why you think this was so successful and how it, how it all came together. I mean, Layla talked a little bit about putting it together and really being in, in order to do some, an initiative like this, you couldn’t do it as an organization on your own. You needed outside partners. So you went to Dr. Rice and Ivoclar and Glidewell and some others. So David, you talk a little bit about the process behind it, how you kind of get things started.

Dr. David Rice: Sure, you know the best thing to do when you when you look in the mirror one day and you realize like you know what? Damn it, I do deserve better. Take a step so you know you can reach out to myself. You know, I’m guessing we’re going to have how to contact me in the show knows, but but reach out and understand that you know we as ignite DDS don’t come alone. We bring great partners like I have a car with us. everywhere we go so we can have that 360 approach and gain financial control and systems control and clinical control like all the elements that we really need so the first thing to do is just take a step you know send me an email shoot me a call send me a text message and then we’ll do exactly what we did With Layla and leadership team and Layla, you can speak to that like we we spent countless hours together before we actually began mapping this whole process out. So it was very customized. It was exactly what apex wanted. You know, just seasoned with all the things we know it ignite that drive success. That’s, you know, both sustainable and really worth investing your time in.

Bill Neumann: Dr. Lonie, how would you know Ivaclar and Glidewell would be the right partners? I mean, I think it’s one of these things, I do a lot of these podcasts, we work with a lot of different vendors out there, manufacturers, and the industry is, and as a clinician, you’re inundated with product offerings. And to a large degree, clinical solutions have all evolved to the point where they’re all pretty darn good for the most part. And so why Ivaclar? And yeah, and then of course, you can talk a little bit about, you know, Dr. Rice and their Ignite and why you partnered with that.

Dr. Layla Lohmann: Well, one thing I’ll say before I say why I have a car is I think every dental organization who’s thinking about doing a program like this First of all, congratulations on taking the next step to success, but I would leverage the current vendors you’re using so I have a car to me was somebody who is willing to take a risk on us. We weren’t using them as much as other products but they when they heard my vision and he said this is something we’re interested in because Because that’s what their mission is. They were aligned in both of our missions. So I believe alignment to making sure that you both are in a true partnership where you understand what does growth look like? One of the questions I asked each of my vendor supporters was, what does success look like to you in this program? So I could know what type of partner I needed to be. And then it held us both accountable. And so one of them would say something like, we want to see growth. And to me, that’s not a measurable data point. So I said, can you give me a number you and your leadership team would like to see with growth? So we did, to Dr. Rice’s point, we’ve investigated a whole lot before I had to make this program a success. But there are a lot of options out there. And so to me, Ivoclar cared about people, cared about the process, cared about teaching. how to use the process the right way, and understanding, like, Sean from Ivoclar was like, hey, this is a three-year project for us, and no one would do that with me. Like, a three-year project, people want things now, and people don’t see sustainable results with now. And so what has to change is the provider’s awareness to what is my impact now, and then the other part set into place, and that’s where we brought Dr. Rice in. He has an incredible way to speak to people, engage our adopters. Honestly, engaging people is his superpower. It’s been great because he was already a speaker with the company that was aligning with us. I don’t know if that answered your question.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, it sure does. And I’ll turn over the next question to Dr. Rice. Based on your experience with this partnership, the collaboration, we’ve got a lot of DSOs, all different shapes and sizes that listen and watch this podcast. We’ve got some emerging groups and some that may have some type of educational programs in place. Although what is shocking is I find a lot of them don’t. And even the larger groups, don’t seem to have anything or it’s not super successful for various reasons. So there would be a lot of people that are interested in what are some of the biggest opportunities for growth when you put together a program like this? And then I think the implementation side of things, like How do we do this? Because it sounds great. We know our clinicians are going to, you know, they’re going to love something like this. They’re in a lot of cases, they’re asking probably for something like this, and they don’t know how to start. And then how do we implement? So I know it’s like set three questions there, but opportunities and implementation, maybe we can stick the toe.

Dr. David Rice: Sure, so I think we have to shrink the change for people and if we if we shrink it to you’ve heard me say this a few times already like the people element, the process element and the production element. I think if you’re a group that’s really ready to dive in, then dive in the deep end of the pool. If you’re not, then what I would recommend to you is Take advantage of the partnerships that we have and start by bringing. It doesn’t have to be me. There’s there’s there’s great people in our industry, but if it was going to be, you know our team at ignite like bring us in for a day. And the greatest opportunity I think is that as good as we all are, we all get instantly more intelligent the moment we walk out our door, we hop on a plane, and we’re working with other people than our team. So it’s kind of like parenting and your child comes home after the neighbor told them the exact same thing that you’ve been telling them for the last five years and all of a sudden it’s brilliance. So the opportunity is bringing somebody in from the outside who has the skill sets that would improve your people, your process, and then drive, you know, production growth from you. I think that’s the opportunity. And then the real where the rubber really meets the road on stuff like this. is accountability and what I love about what Layla and Apex have done with Catalyst is they have given you know all of us the opportunity to hold her team accountable on a one-on-one level and then sort of bring that accountability to them as leadership so they don’t have to shoulder the load But they did have to trust my team at Ignite to be able to do that. And that is a trust that never goes without notice. Because then we can consistently get with people on the team, the doctors, the office business managers, the regional business manager, and say, hey, we promised to do this in this timeline. We got it done. Great. We didn’t get it done. What happened? How do we do it? The recipe is the recipe, but the work is the work.

Bill Neumann: Let’s talk about Dr. Lohmann balancing business growth with high clinical standards in patient care, because you’re probably wrestling on the patient care, high clinical standards side of things. And David may be looking at the numbers a little bit more. So how do you balance that? And did the Catalyst program, how does that kind of help with that balance?

Dr. Layla Lohmann: Yeah. It’s actually, isn’t that the perfect question, right? How do you balance it all? I think to your point, and if I don’t answer it, just chime in a minute, but I think I didn’t realize my impact as a provider. I have been a preventative doctor and I would consider myself a conservative doctor for 14 years. And I started realizing conservative means not don’t not treat. The conservative means having those crucial conversations with patients to reduce their economic burden long term. I used to think about it like, if they don’t do this right now, I’ll fix it when it’s a problem, because that’s what conservative looked like to me. But through the leadership and development, so my own program, well, Guiding Leaders, and then I was a participant in our Catalyst program, even though I put it on last year so I could feel what it’d be like to our doctors. It actually reduced the pressure to have to convince patients. I used to hate the word selling. Ask David Lohman. I would hate when someone said that. He then put it back to me as Aren’t you always educating somebody? And if you want to buy in, isn’t that selling like for them to understand their oral disease? And it took it to a way where it made me feel uncomfortable, but I started realizing that my case acceptance in my business should reflect my care and not the opposite where it devalued me. And so through leadership and development and the process that we did, It was understanding my role, because I would blame my team member for not doing things, or I might blame the support office for not doing something. And really, it was my communication. So I learned how to communicate because I understood my style, and I learned how to adapt my style to be more effective. And I only did that because I went through programs like this because that personal development will bleed through my personal professional life. So you saw that through my leadership development, my business followed because patients started accepting their care that I prescribed more often. So you can see in the last three years, my case acceptance went from like 22%, which was very hard for me to hear as somebody who loves preventative dentistry. to close to 50% now. And I feel less pressure doing dentistry. But the business is aligned and my team is more involved. So hopefully that answers your question. But I want to answer that implementation part. For organizations looking to develop this, I ask you to ask yourself, are you ready to do the work? Because you have to help keep yourself accountable in order for your doctors to want to keep themselves accountable. And I think that’s a little bit of the piece that David was saying, David Rice, not Lohman, was I live in both worlds. I’m practicing clinician three days a week and I also am in the organization. So I’m able to help my doctors understand that like you can do it. I have four years of data to show.

Bill Neumann: Well, thank you. That’s great. Thanks. Thanks for the input on the implementation side of things. It’s one of those huge challenge for, I think, beyond dentistry, just for people in general. We have ideas and it’s really the execution, the implementation. So you can have brilliant ideas, a brilliant educational program, but it’s like, how do you actually implement that? I think that’s really the key to success. And David, do you have any input on that? Because I think Leila was talking about when it comes to, and she touched on treatment acceptance, which is a huge challenge in the industry. And I think, yes, sometimes clinicians feel like they’re salespeople, they don’t want to be salespeople. You talked about conservative dentistry, and you’re right. It’s like, okay, well, trying to save them money, so maybe we could do this later. But however, if we put it off till later, it’s actually going to cause potentially more problems that cost you more money. So I think that that’s it. Do you do you find that, David, that that’s pretty common with organizations that you work with and clinicians?

Dr. David Rice: I do. You know, I tend to see when we walk in the door, I think I tend to see extremes. We either see dentists and teams who are under-diagnosing and under-treating or, and this is gonna be hard to hear but it’s the truth, they’re over-diagnosing and they’re over-treating. I think what, yeah, what, finding that happy space in the medium where we’re not selling, we’re really just presenting, but we’re presenting in a manner that patients can really understand so we learn to speak their language and patients come to us Um, you know, with a very individual mindset, you know, they, they’ve been feeding their brain, just like we feed our brains all day, every day. So we’ve got to, we’ve got to understand each individual who sits in our chair, be able to communicate with them in a language they understand yet. When we start talking about. a practice we have to have process for that so we don’t miss a beat so we so we don’t just master 10 of the population or 15 of the population we master 100 of the population because you know we tend to see practices do well with a certain patient persona and not well with so many others so we need process to understand human behavior. That’s a lot of what we’ve worked with with Layla’s team. It’s a lot of what Layla’s personal journey and leadership is. It’s understanding yourself first, understanding who’s on your team, how to maximize each other’s inherent strengths, how to get better together, and then how to translate that to the patient world. So the tens, you know, talk about groups, hundreds of thousands of dollars you’re spending on marketing to make your phone ring or get somebody to click on your website actually convert to not just somebody who’s sitting in your chair, but somebody who’s sitting in your chair saying yes to complete care. And that’s, you know, Leila, that’s something I super admire. about the leadership you brought in your in your vision for this, because it’s it’s not what I see most often, and I don’t think it’s because people are bad people. I think they just haven’t learned a lot of the lessons to show them how to be highly profitable while delivering optimal care. And it’s, you know, full circle. One of the reasons I love Ivaclar so much is like that’s their focus. So they’ve you know, they’re They’re so woven into the fabric of many things that we do because common belief system and how we treat people and get them to the best place.

Bill Neumann: I’m going to try and wrap this podcast up with a couple of final questions. First off, I’d love to get any final thoughts from both of you. But then also, if we’re in early 2025, so both you, Leila, and David, Let us know what’s going on in your organizations, what you have planned for the rest of the year. It’s a relatively new year, so everybody has plans and an outlook, and everybody tends to be very optimistic. We’d love to get some optimism here, too, for the industry that’s been Yeah, kind of a little slow lately, let’s say. Dentistry for the past couple of years has just kind of been, and I think inflation and some things like that have kind of slowed things down. I’m optimistic this year and so I’d love to get some optimistic words. What are your plans for 2025 and any final thoughts? So, Laila, why don’t we start with you first?

Dr. Layla Lohmann: Yeah. One of my final thoughts is from two sides. One, from a clinician standpoint, conservative dentistry can be proactive. We know our patients are never going to be 100% compliant, so we’re great restorative doctors. So I invite everyone who’s the dentist to become a primary care provider of the oral cavity and talk about prevention. There’s new non-innovative products on the market. So look and trust in the science. And if you don’t trust in the science, ask better questions instead of putting up roadblocks. So that’s the clinician standpoint. And from the dental organization standpoint, I honestly just want to return for our company better results from last year to implement better, not better, more refined process from cohort number one to cohort number two. David’s being more integrated into this year and so we’re gonna see where we can tweak some of the processes with the program and hopefully start building separate group programs for the team members, for those Catalyst doctors, because it’s Apex Catalyst program, for those Catalyst doctors, for their team members to get the same kind of awareness and communication help that our providers are having this year.

Bill Neumann: Thanks, Dr. Laman. And Dr. Rice?

Dr. David Rice: Sure. So, optimism piece, first of all, is you can do this. You know, we’re, we’re, we’re, we, You know, lately kind of, you know, I’m very kindly and jokingly joked about like superpower and connecting with people and influencing people, but. We don’t have anything any more special than you do, so if you’re watching this or you’re listening to this, this is absolutely in your grasp. You just have to take a step and want it and then do the work it requires on the fun side of what ignites doing this year. is we’re working with 35 different, some individual practices and then some group practices, and really our goal is to mirror the results we’ve had with Layla’s team and practices. with each of those 35. We’re bringing about 21 day programs to the group industry as well. We’ve got six of them left. We are crazy planners on our side. If that’s something you’re interested in and you’re not a jump into the deep end of the pool, you need to tiptoe in, that’s a great place to start. I highly encourage you to take a step. Whatever that step is for you that feels good, take that step. And once you take it, what I know is going to happen is you’re going to realize that there’s a much bigger leap for you moving forward. You just didn’t know it was possible until you take that first one. So you got to just do it.

Bill Neumann: That’s great. That is nice and optimistic too. I definitely appreciate that. Dr. Rice, if people want to connect with you, and we’ll make sure we drop both your LinkedIn handle and I’ll see yours, Layla, in the show notes, but beyond LinkedIn, can you shout out your website and any other ways that are really good ways to connect with you or find out more about what you’re doing at Ignite DDS?

Dr. David Rice: Sure, so the website is just ignitedds.com. You can also reach out to my email, it’s my name, it’s david.rice at ignitedds.com. And you’re going to think I’m crazy, Bill, but I’ve done this for 30 years with every patient and every team I’ve ever worked with. My cell phone number is 716-912-7970. Layla can attest like I love you winning even more than I love like the wins we had in my own practice where our whole team is all in. So text, email, call, do whatever is easiest for you. We’ll get back to you within 24 hours for sure.

Bill Neumann: Excellent. Thank you so much. And Leila, people want to find out more about Apex Dental Partners or they want to reach out to you and find out more about, maybe they want to come work at Apex and may have, Hey, the Catalyst sounds great. How do I, how do I get involved? Or maybe they have a practice that they may want to potentially partner up with you and the Apex Dental Partners team and how would they do so?

Dr. Layla Lohmann: No, I appreciate that. And I don’t know if I got the optimistic side, but if you’ve seen me smiling the whole time, this is my optimism. It just naturally comes out. If you want to learn more about Apex Dental Partners, we’d like you to go to ApexDP, ApexDental, D, P as in partner, dot com. And one of our team members will reach out to you. But my personal thing is Dr. Dr. Lohmann, L-O-H-M-A-N-N, at DallasDental.com. Happy to share and talk to anybody. And like David Rice, I give my cell phone out to everybody. My cell phone is 405-414-1083. I invite you to take the first step in learning more about what you can do in the dental industry. But honestly, my personal mission is making a difference in your life because that impacts everybody beyond you. And so if you need anything, let us know. I’m excited about the next cohort with David Rice, and hopefully we’ll be back next year to share how well it went.

Bill Neumann: Well, it’s going well so far, that’s for sure. And thank you for wrapping that up so nicely. And we’d also like to thank Ivoclar for sponsoring this podcast and also being part of the Catalyst program with both Ignite DDS and, of course, Apex Dental Partners. So, if you want to find out more about Ivaclar, you can reach out to seanfinn at ivaclar.com. So, it’s sean, S-E-A-N dot finn, F-I-N-N at ivaclar.com. Yeah, that’s it for today. I mean, I’m gonna drop all that information in the show notes. Cell phone numbers, cell phone numbers. It’s the first time I think I’ve had two cell phone numbers. Sometimes I’ll get one, but both of you gave them out. Wonderful, I love it. So you can communicate with Layla or David any way you feel like you’d like to. LinkedIn, email, cell phone number, you name it, or go to the website. So until next time, I’m Bill Luman, this is the Group Dentistry Now show and we appreciate you tuning in.

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