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Bill Neumann and guests discuss the DSO Leadership Summit in San Francisco on September 7th and 8th and what to expect. This year, the DSO Leadership Summit has partnered with Group Dentistry Now to navigate the new dental landscape with the top emerging dental groups! Dr. Roshan Parikh, Kimberly Fuller and Jill Hasselmann talk about the newest edition to the event, the Emerging Groups to Watch awards night, as well as attendee favorites like DSO Diagnosis, Show Me The Money, and much more.
There is still time to register for the DSO Leadership Summit. Visit – https://bit.ly/3xqOHWr . Use code GDN2021 to save $50
Questions – email Kimberly Fuller – KFuller@HRforHealth.com
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Our podcast series brings you dental support and emerging dental group practice analysis, conversation, trends, news and events. Listen to leaders in the DSO and emerging dental group space talk about their challenges, successes, and the future of group dentistry. The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry has listeners across North & South America, Australia, Europe, and Asia. If you like our show, tell a friend or a colleague.
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Full Transcript:
Bill Neumann:
I’d like to welcome everyone to the Group Dentistry Now Show, I am Bill Neumann, and thanks everybody for listening in, watching us on YouTube. Without the audience, we wouldn’t have a show. And of course without great guests, you wouldn’t be listening or watching.
Bill Neumann:
So we’ve got three wonderful guests today, and I actually had the pleasure of seeing all three of them at the Dykema Show, which was a great event last week. So we are going to talk about another show that is coming up that we’re happy to be collaborating on, the DSO Leadership Summit.
Bill Neumann:
So first off, some introductions here. We have Kimberly Fuller, she is the event director for the DSO Leadership Summit. We have Jill Hasselmann, she is director of business development for HR for Health. And last, but certainly not least, we have Dr. Roshan Parikh or Dr. Ro, as he is known. He is the chief strategy officer, easy to remember, of DSO Strategy. So welcome everybody.
Kimberly Fuller:
Thanks, Bill. Thanks for having us.
Jill Hasselmann:
Thank you.
Bill Neumann:
So let’s talk about the event that we are working on. It’s going to be a lot of fun. We’ve already got a bunch of DSOs and emerging groups signed up for it. I think we’ve counted around 50 so far. So I’m going to let Kimberly start here. Talk about the event, when it’s going to be, where it’s going to be, and then I can fill in some blanks. Jill can fill in some, and Ro can talk about his part there as well.
Kimberly Fuller:
Yeah, absolutely. I’ll give you the real easy summation. Here we go. So September 7th and 8th, Marriott Marquis, San Francisco, on the 7th there’s a cocktail hour, and then a full day of presentations on the 8th, and another nice networking cocktail hour the night of that. It’s right before the CDA North, the California Dental Association, in case anybody wants to hop over and get more dental show, we can never get enough dental shows, right?
Kimberly Fuller:
But yes, as Bill said, we are expecting probably 300, and we have 50 DSOs signed up and we’ve got some awesome speakers. Everybody on this panel right now is going to be there. So if that’s not enough, we’ve also got Brian Colao, Maria Melone, Josh Gwinn, Eric Nuss, David Pegg, Gary Takacs, Cassie Tallon. There we go. Anyway, lots of amazing people are going to be there up on stage too. So it should be a really good event.
Bill Neumann:
Yeah, and we’re just excited, on that first night, September 7th, we’re going to be hosting, which I’ve been excited, wanted to do for years… So we do an emerging, GDN, Group Dentistry Now, does an “Emerging Groups to Watch” list every year. And finally, we’re actually able to hand out awards and let the emerging groups to watch accept the awards, talk a little bit about their group, thank people, get some accolades and just have a good time.
Bill Neumann:
So that’s going to be really, really cool. So don’t miss that. That is the first night, September 7th. And then of course, we’ll have cocktails and celebrate everybody, and get a chance to meet all these folks that have started these emerging groups, and kind of find out the success behind the group and the people behind the group. And then the 8th is going to be content galore. But of course, we’ve got some other real cool things planned for the 8th as well, but I’m going to let Kim and Jill, and Dr. Ro talk a little bit about the 8th. Jill, do you have anything to add? Go ahead, Kim.
Kimberly Fuller:
No, I was just going to say. Back to the awards for one second. We are so excited about those. And I think that this is kind of a new thing in the DSO summit world. And so these groups are really excited to get their awards and I think it’s going to be really fun. We’re going to be up in the top of the Marquis in this beautiful lounge room. And my latest idea is that I think that we should, if people want to get super dressed up, they can do that. So it will be our own red carpet, and that’s pretty cool.
Dr. Roshan Parikh:
I’ll wear some tails.
Bill Neumann:
Yeah, do you have a tuxedo, Dr. Ro?
Dr. Roshan Parikh:
I do. I will… 75% chance it fits, but I think [inaudible 00:04:40].
Kimberly Fuller:
More of a question though, is it powder blue?
Dr. Roshan Parikh:
It’s either powder blue or white.
Kimberly Fuller:
Excellent. All right, you’ll be admitted.
Bill Neumann:
That’s good. Yeah. It’s going to be a lot of fun. And to Kimberly’s point about where it’s going to be. So the top floor of the Marquis, I mean this bar has a spectacular view of San Francisco, the bridges, it’s really a cool place. We’ve got the entire floor really for this event. So we’re super excited, plenty of room for social distancing, so no issues there. And Kimberly can talk a little bit about that as well.
Kimberly Fuller:
Sure, absolutely. Yeah, Jill and I were there just last week. Yeah, Jill, tell them a little about how much room we have.
Jill Hasselmann:
Yeah. There is, even without social distancing, we could probably double the size of the event, but we do want to keep it intimate. And as Bill mentioned, we’re going to talk a little bit more about the 8th and the agenda there, and you’ll kind of get the feel of why we want to keep it the size that we are, but with the 250, 300, plenty of room for social distancing and, again, still having fun, being able to attend the cocktail hour, and be able to mingle a safe way. So we’re very excited about it.
Kimberly Fuller:
Yeah.
Bill Neumann:
Yeah, Kimberly, it’s a wonderful-
Dr. Roshan Parikh:
I would say, like-
Bill Neumann:
Go ahead, Ro.
Dr. Roshan Parikh:
I was just going to say, last week being live at Dykema in Denver, I mean, they did a great job of organizing and planning, but it was just like, I think it’s almost, it was more magnified the amount of energy that you had from being live at the event and being able to fist bump, or do something, it was just, it was a lot of neat energy and probably just more magnified because of 2020. And so I think this event is going to be pretty exciting.
Bill Neumann:
Yeah, absolutely. Kimberly, why don’t you run through the history, I mean, this DSL Leadership Summit has been going on for quite a while. And so let’s talk about how it started. It was your brain child, right?
Kimberly Fuller:
Yeah. It definitely, me and some others, but I was working at 1-800-DENTISTS for a long time and we had a lot of DSO clients. And so we would bring them out to… Actually, they loved the call center because it was the biggest call center in North America. And a lot of DSOs interested in call centers, so we’d bring them out, have them get on calls with our operators, and then we’re like, well, if they’re here, we should also do some segments and stuff. And so it just kind of kept growing and getting bigger and bigger. And we’re now in the sixth year, and now we’re just, it’s really its own thing. We were in a hotel last time with, just all the kind of regular event stuff, but a bunch of us moved from 1-800-DENTISTS over to HR for Health, where we’re based now, and so the summit just kind of came along with us, and this new iteration… Actually, it’s kind of a nice home for it because HR is a pretty big pain point right now with DSOs.
Kimberly Fuller:
So we’re kind of excited that HR for Health has a lot of good stuff to talk about during the 8th. We, in terms of like what makes our summit different, we did talk about Dykema was really big this year. We’re a little more intimate, which I think helps with networking. Our content, we gear towards small to mid-sized groups.
Kimberly Fuller:
And one of the things we’ve always wanted is for them to feel comfortable. I think that some of these DSO summits have gotten a little bit intimidating for those. How do you talk to them? How do you talk to the person with 600 groups? And how do your three groups… How can you, how do you compare?
Kimberly Fuller:
So we really try to be as knowledge, just open, kind of just open the kimono, that was… When we first put it on, we actually had, Rick Workman was like our speaker, and he just came up and started just talking and told everything about how we did it. And people were like, “Oh, wow. I didn’t think he was going to actually give us that knowledge.” So that’s kind of how we’ve always tried to differentiate, just let’s be open, let’s share knowledge, have lots of networking, meet good people. Yeah, so let’s see, what else. And then, Jill, I wanted… Jill and I have been also working on making the agenda and the content different. So I’d love, why don’t you tell them-
Jill Hasselmann:
Yeah, that’s our child within the child. That is the [inaudible 00:09:31] of it. Yeah, we really feel that, we all on this call and we know a lot of you travel all around to different shows and hear a lot of different speakers. And it’s really important for us that this agenda and this content is unique. It’s something that you haven’t really heard before. Whether the concept itself is something you’ve heard, the way that we are going to talk about it, the take we take on it, is going to be different.
Jill Hasselmann:
And specifically, we want the people in this room to walk away with something that they feel is actionable, or a different idea, or a different angle that they can take to a problem that they’re facing each day. And so one thing that we like to do, whether it’s nice to the speakers or not, is we kind of pit them against each other, “Give us different ideas, we do not want you to pair each other. It’s actually better if you disagree.” So that you can see the different angles, because there is not one right way to do anything within our businesses. It’s how it works for us. So we’re really passionate about making it very unique and different, but also something that is helpful to you. And it’s not just a day of, okay, great. This is reaffirming what I’m doing. We want you to walk away with, okay, maybe I can shake this up a little bit.
Dr. Roshan Parikh:
Yeah. And there’s something around like… steel sharpens steel. When you have ideas that are competing and folks that have had different experiences, hopefully, the steel sharpens steel and you end up with a better outcome, better end result.
Bill Neumann:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, just to give my testimonial, because I attended the DSL Leadership Summit for the first time in 2019, and I… First off, intimate, was great. It was like perfect size. And I thought the content was really solid. It was different. It’s not the same speakers that you typically see, which is good, I thought relatable. It was, Hey, people that had four or five, 10, 15 locations. If you’re starting out and you have two or three locations, much more relatable than somebody that has 1000 locations. Right? Just a bit of a leap. So I really liked that the DSO diagnosis, which I know we’re going to talk about, was my favorite segment. And I know Dr. Ro is going to be involved in that, and I’m going to be involved, so really excited to talk about that, just some of the new things that you’ve added.
Bill Neumann:
So I just came out of this and I go, wow, first, I got to meet all these people that I didn’t even… Like these groups, 10, 15 groups that I had never heard of before. And I’m like, gee, I didn’t think I knew all the groups out there, but I thought I would know more than I did. And I’m like, this is great from a networking perspective.
Bill Neumann:
So I just came out of it just going, wow. So much I learned, so many new people that I met. And also kind of to the point that Kimberly talked about, I think Jill mentioned it too, is, Hey, you can take like two or three things that are actionable, that you can take back to the group on Monday and implement them. It’s not going back and going, “Gosh, I went to an event and I met a bunch of great people and probably had some cocktails, but can I use any of this content?” So the goal here is actionable. Right? So what do you want to talk about next? You want to get into the agenda? Or did we miss anything that we want to…
Kimberly Fuller:
Yeah. Let’s get in. We want to tell you what we’re going to do.
Jill Hasselmann:
We’re excited about the agenda.
Bill Neumann:
All right, so Jill and Kimberly, I’ll let you start off with the agenda.
Kimberly Fuller:
Well, you’ve just talked about DSO diagnosis, so let’s go there first. Why not?
Bill Neumann:
Okay, sounds good.
Kimberly Fuller:
Yeah, this was… Actually, this was a fun idea. It stemmed from me watching Shark Tank and going, how come… I want to have an actual conversation with the people who are doing this. And so, we decided to get three DSOs who have some things that they’re struggling with and let’s bring them on stage and put them with these industry experts in their own field, and let them talk about it. And so it really was, it felt a little magical. So we’ll be recreating it. Dr. Ro is going to be up on the panel, talking from an operational standpoint-
Bill Neumann:
He can talk about a lot more than just that, but yeah.
Kimberly Fuller:
Well, yeah.
Dr. Roshan Parikh:
Can I be Mr. Wonderful? I don’t want to be…
Kimberly Fuller:
You’ll be Mr. Wonderful. Who do you want to be, Bill? You’re the moderator.
Bill Neumann:
I’m the moderator. I’ll be Alex Trebek, although maybe I can’t do that, right? I know Ro shot that down, when I say, can I be Alex Trebek-
Dr. Roshan Parikh:
Nah.
Bill Neumann:
Nobody can be Alex Trebek. I’ll be the moderator.
Dr. Roshan Parikh:
[inaudible 00:14:09].
Bill Neumann:
Okay, I’ll go with that.
Kimberly Fuller:
Okay, all right. We have Ali Oromchian, who is the CEO of HR for Health and is also a lawyer. So he comes from legal and HR experience. And then we have Maria Malone from financial and consultative background. And we have already, we’ve got a couple of groups that are doing it, but as always, if you’re a DSO who would be interested in coming up on that panel, you can hit me up. I’m sure Bill will have my information under here somewhere, but KFuller@hrforhealth.com. We are looking for a couple more DSOs to bring up on stage and you get free advice. Maybe we shouldn’t say advice… Free discussion from like minded people about how to keep scaling, keep growing. [crosstalk 00:15:06].
Bill Neumann:
And it’s great exposure, too.
Kimberly Fuller:
Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Roshan Parikh:
There’s some like-
Jill Hasselmann:
And what I thought was great about last year’s panel too, is that the DSOs on stage ended up kind of helping each other and talking each other through things, as well as the panel, which kind of goes back to this, we want it to be a safe environment, and people might be struggling in different areas that you’re not, and that you can help with and vice versa. So it’s a nice, like Kim says, little magic of collaboration up there.
Dr. Roshan Parikh:
I was going to say, yeah this pan… I mean, I’m excited about this. And I think that some of it is advice, but I almost think that a lot of times when you have experience and from the experience you have wisdom, you’re like, it’s like the Buffet quote of like, “It’s good to learn from your experience. It’s better and cheaper to learn from somebody else’s.” And so some of that is just, “Hey, these are the mistakes that I’ve made. Now I have wisdom from these mistakes. Don’t make these mistakes. You might make other ones, but hopefully you don’t make these.”
Jill Hasselmann:
Exactly, I love that.
Bill Neumann:
Absolutely. So we have two DSOs already, emerging groups, that will sit up there and share some of their struggles and the experts will talk to them. So maybe a couple others that would be interested?
Jill Hasselmann:
Yeah, absolutely.
Bill Neumann:
Okay. And Kimberly, what’s your email address again?
Kimberly Fuller:
KFuller, K-F-U-L-L-E-R@hrforhealth.com.
Bill Neumann:
Okay. We’ll have it in the show notes too, for sure.
Kimberly Fuller:
Yeah. Awesome. So that’s one segment, and then I’m going to let Jill take over. There’s two other new segments that we are really super excited about. We have HR as a profit center and then also a culture by the numbers. So give us a little high level on that, Jill.
Jill Hasselmann:
Yeah. So HR, as Kim mentioned, and we all know, has been a very hot topic in the last 18 months, as groups have been navigating through COVID, and something that we’ve always really believed and we felt needed to be shared with this community, is how HR can actually be looked at as your profit center. How can it actually be making your business money? And so this segment is going to be going through really different formulas for you to take back to your practice and look at, okay, how much is this really costing me? And it’s on a lot of different levels. So we’re looking at the administration side of, truly, how long is it taking your team or yourself to do certain things? And how much is that really costing you, versus how much can it save you by automating a lot of those aspects?
Jill Hasselmann:
Another piece is, we have done a lot of case studies, as Kim mentioned, our CEO is an attorney. And so we have been able to have access to numbers of lawsuits that have come to the law firm. For example, I was just looking at a case study the other day. A lawsuit came into the law firm for about $495,000. And due to, and we will show you these items, because they had an employee handbook, because they had a certain time clock, which was HR for Health time clock, because they had certain documents, we can show how we were able to get that lawsuit down to $90,000.
Jill Hasselmann:
So while it was still 90,000, it’s way better than 495,000. And so we’re, again, going to show those formulas onstage and show you how you can really look at HR as not a burden on your business, but really how it can make you money. So that’s a really exciting segment. Again, open kimono. We want to give you the information of, there’s no secret here, of how you can look at this to make you some money.
Jill Hasselmann:
And the other one that we’re really excited about that I will be moderating is looking at culture as a way to actually bring more evaluation to the business. So we’ve started to see some private equity and some people that are dabbling in this subject, but we really haven’t seen anyone say anything other than, “Culture’s important, and yes, I kind of look at it.” And this segment is going to really dive deep with Josh Gwinn. He is a fantastic speaker, and he’s truly walking the walk where he uses culture. And he has, again, a formula that we’re going to share. It’s not just retention. It’s not just turnover, that’s part of it. But there’s other aspects of what makes up culture in a business.
Jill Hasselmann:
And he uses that when he’s going to buy practices. And actually, he’ll say, “Yeah, this is one to two times more than I would be willing to pay because the culture is really strong, or one to two times less.” So again, we want you to walk away with that tangible evidence of, this can really bring your business up, or you might be losing out when you’re ready to sell, or make a purchase. You might be purchasing a practice for more than it’s actually worth because you’re not looking at the culture. So we’re really excited about these new segments and, again, getting into the nitty gritty so that you can see these formulas and apply them to your day to day.
Bill Neumann:
Excellent.
Kimberly Fuller:
Yeah. Josh Gwinn and Rashed Din, who’s been a great, he’s done the summit before and he actually brought this to us as like, he was like, “We need to talk more about this.” We’re like, “You know what, you’re right, let’s do that.” So that one will be good. Ro is going to actually be leading up a finance panel. So yeah, I mean, you can’t have a summit without that, right?
Dr. Roshan Parikh:
Right. Yeah. Finance, accounting, very, very important. I mean, I think that when you think about financing and scaling, even me personally, when I was buying one practice at a time, every single time, and this is 2010, but it’s like every single time I had to ask for permission and put together a set of documents and do this, and it was big exercise. And so I think that now, when you’re looking to scale, there’s the ability to have more of a ceiling number and share your growth plans so that banks can be more aligned to what you want to do long-term, so it’s not an exercise of just one step, and go through this process and second purchase, go through this process. So I think there’s definitely, from 2010 to now, there are much better mousetraps than I had. So it’s exciting.
Kimberly Fuller:
Awesome. Yeah.
Bill Neumann:
Looking forward to that and then the panel there. What about this marketing match-up?
Kimberly Fuller:
Oh, wow.
Jill Hasselmann:
We are so excited about this one, too.
Bill Neumann:
We’re trying to have fun. This is going to be fun. This is not just going to be boring DSO stuff, this is going to be, we’re going to make it all fun, even the finance side. Let’s talk about market-
Kimberly Fuller:
We’ll do our best. But yeah, the marketing match-up I’m really excited about. We’re going to do this for the first time in a game show style. So I’m going to moderate this one. We’re going to have three amazing marketers from different… One DSO marketer, one kind of runs a marketing company for DSOs, one has a DSL marketing product. And we’re going to ask questions kind of around the [inaudible 00:22:20] style. They’re going to have to buzz in, they’ve got a minute for their answers.
Kimberly Fuller:
And then at the end, we’ll have an awesome app for the event and the audience can vote it on who gave them the most interesting information. So we’ve got some great minds up there and they’re willing to be ranked, which is very nice of them. But yeah, so that should be a… Look, there’s so many tips on marketing, but there’s also so many different ways to think about it. And I feel like this is going to be like rapid fire. Have you ever thought of this? Have you ever thought of this? Have you ever thought of this? And yeah. So that’s the marketing match-up, Master Marketers Match-up.
Bill Neumann:
There we go. And so, continuing with the fun, we have added something to the end of the event. So you want to make sure you stick around and then hopefully you go on to CDA North. But even if you’re not, you need to stay a little bit longer. Let’s talk a little bit about what we have planned.
Kimberly Fuller:
Sure. Let’s see… I’m trying to, what’s our amazing… The sampling soiree, that’s it. We added some fun networking and we’ve got, I should also have been mentioning this the whole time. We’ve got some really, really amazing sponsors who are helping us with this event. So I’m not going to list all of them. There’s a lot, but we’ll make sure to give them all lots of nice shout outs.
Kimberly Fuller:
And because of some of our amazing sponsors, we’re adding a second night cocktail hour and sampling. So, we’re up in Northern California, so there’s lots of good wine, lots of good beer. I know Bill’s a beer man. And we wanted to make sure, we have the wine there, but what about beer too? So we’re going to bring out tasting stations and then wine and beer pairings to go with them. And that’ll also be lots of time for you to talk to all of these amazing exhibitors and these sponsors, and make sure that you know what they have got going, because they’ve all got some really helpful DSO products for everybody there.
Bill Neumann:
Yeah. And I think after being in a lockdown for as long as we have and not really being out and about, it will be nice to just enjoy ourselves, have some fun, learn. And like we said, the goal is to have some actionable takeaways that, you come back feeling good and you’re able to apply them on a Monday, at your DSO and you come back next year.
Kimberly Fuller:
That’s the idea. Yeah, I mean, I think we’ve given them a good sampling of what we’ve got going on. You can go to HRforHealth.com, that’s H-R F-O-R H-E-A-L-T-H.com/dsosummit and get registered. And if you have any questions, again, I gave my email before, but you can always reach out to me with questions, concerns. I think we’ve addressed, we’re going to be as safe as we can be, as we need to be. The one thing that gives me a lot of breathing room is just that, yes, we have big spaces. So if people want to social distance, they are going to be able to do that no matter what. So I think that you can feel like this is going to be a good event that you don’t have to be scared to come to.
Bill Neumann:
Yep. So it’s Francisco Marriott Marquis, the 7th and 8th of September, CDA North is right after that. So great timing. The room rates are very reasonable. So I mean, just in San Francisco, sometimes people go, oh, expensive. It’s not this year. So this is the year-
Kimberly Fuller:
We managed to get that rate during the middle of COVID. So, 179 for your hotel room in San Francisco. How’s that?
Bill Neumann:
And it’s a great hotel for sure. And right across the street from the convention center where the CDA will be. So you can just kind of hop right over afterwards and… Let’s see, there’s a discount code, too. Right? So if people-
Kimberly Fuller:
Oh yeah. DSO discount, that’ll get you $50 off of registration.
Bill Neumann:
Right. And you mentioned HR for Health, what was the website again? HR for Health/…
Kimberly Fuller:
HRforhealth.com/dsosummit.
Bill Neumann:
Okay. Or you can go to group dentistrynow.com and in the events section click, we’ve got a banner ad, you’ll be able to get there and find it, make sure you use the discount code. Any final remarks, Dr. Ro, we’ll see you there soon as well. And we appreciate your participation.
Dr. Roshan Parikh:
Yeah, no, I’m excited to be a part of it. And again, just coming off of Dykema, just continue the momentum and sharing different experiences and meeting… To Bill’s earlier point, just meeting new DSOs that you’re like, huh? You’re where? You’re how many locations? Wow. That’s awesome. It’s just, I mean, for me as a dentist and a DSO guy, it’s like, it makes me really happy, how many groups there are. Yeah.
Bill Neumann:
It’s exciting. Yeah. Jill, any final words?
Jill Hasselmann:
No, I think, we summed it up throughout. We’re really excited to see everyone. I think that this is going to be, we’re piggybacking on CDA and we know that that’s definitely going to be a great event. And so there’s no reason why not to come a couple days early and get some more education because we’ve been lacking it for the last year and a half. And it’s really fun to be in person. So we’re excited to see everyone.
Bill Neumann:
Absolutely. All right. Well with that, I think we’re going to sign off here. Thanks everybody for listening in, watching us. And we hope to see you in person on the 7th and 8th of September in San Francisco. We’ve got a lot of fun education lined up for you. So again, groupdentistrynow.com, go to the events section, there’s the discount code.
Bill Neumann:
Thank you, Kimberly Fuller, thanks, Jill Hasselmann and thank you, Dr. Ro. We’ll see all of you in person in San Francisco soon. Until the next time, I’m Bill Neumann, and this is the Group Dentistry Now Show.
