The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice Of The DSO Industry

🤩 NEW! DSO Declassified with Dr. Roshan Parikh and Bill Neumann.

Two of the DSO Industry’s most trusted and respected names come together on a monthly basis to breakdown industry activities from a totally objective perspective. The two thought-leaders answer audience questions, debunk myths, share insights, uncensored truths, progressive ideas, current strategies, resources, tips, and of course a few laughs.

❓ Send your DSO questions to info@groupdentistrynow.com and Bill and Dr. Ro will answer on the next podcast. Please indicate if you want to remain anonymous.

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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:

Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Group Dentistry Now show. I’m Bill Neumann. So this is the start of a new, regular featured part of our podcast, and we’re going to call it DSO Declassified. So you see I’ve got Roshan Parikh here. He is going to be joining me on each and every one of the DSO Declassifieds. We were brainstorming this at probably a dental show somewhere, and we were probably having a beverage of our choice while we were talking about this. It started off, Ro, I think it was Bill and Ro’s Excellent Adventures, right? That was the title. And then we thought that probably wasn’t professional enough.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

Yeah, I think it would’ve maybe gotten more than just a dental audience. So then we had to put the word DSO in it.

Bill Neumann:

We did. And then if you have another D, Declassified, so it just goes together. So DSO Declassified. And we hope to bring you current events, what we’re seeing out there, where we’re going to be, just our general thoughts on what’s happening in the space and have some fun with this, too. That’s the idea that it’s not going to be super scripted. So that being said, I do want to make sure that everybody knows what Dr. Ro’s up to now. He is just… which I just found this out five minutes before we started to record this, he is not just the president of Dental Bar, but he is the president and CEO of Dental Bar. So love to talk a little bit about the role and responsibility there and then… tell us about Dental Bar.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

So I’m coming to you guys from Manhattan. Dental Bar…

Bill Neumann:

Oh, let’s get the view. Can you do the little view? Can you-

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

Oh, yeah. I just have to… I’ll flip it around.

Bill Neumann:

Yeah, flip it around.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

Yeah. In Manhattan. Pretty cool.

Bill Neumann:

Looks good.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

Concrete jungle. Neat place, obviously. So I think… Dental Bar is, at its core, a really cool name for a dental office. I think every week, somebody in the dental industry asked me if there’s a bar there, and if they could get an old fashioned or a dirty martini, and the answer is no, but the name comes from dry bar, where you can go in quickly to get your hair blown out for an event or something, maybe doesn’t apply to me. Maybe it’s Bill. So, 2019 opened our first location in Chelsea. And the goal was kind of, do hygiene on demand… first walk-in dental office in New York City, but had a dentist on premise, but didn’t do dentistry.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

So you’d come in and you’re, I got some schmutz on my teeth. I need to get this out. I got an interview. I want to get my teeth looking, feeling clean, before a date let’s say, or something, and Dental Bar can take care of those things. Very quickly, we realized that the facility was so nice and the experience was great. You can get a Perrier or a sparkling Seltzer when you walk in. You have heating massaging chairs, you have blankets, you have Netflix, you have all this stuff. Patients started to tell us that well, I know my dentist, I know I need two fillings. I want to get it done here. And there was this… affectionately, there was, a revolt to go the other way.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

And they’re, I got to get my dentistry done here. And so within a few months, we started to add general dentistry NPS… our NPS score runs in the high eighties. And so we were doing dentistry. And then of course like a lot of DSOs out there, you started to add specialty care and you started to add implants and all surgery and endo. So that’s Dental Bar. At its core is the dental office. Now, maybe what’s unique about it is, that it’s in Manhattan. We have four sites right now. Our fifth one opens in less than two months and we’ll have five sites, but they’re street level visibility.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

So when you’re in Manhattan and you have street level visibility, you get a lot of eyeballs. You get a lot of traffic. Walk-in appointments. You have to have all these accoutrements of convenience where there’s QR codes on the door that you can just walk by at night and scan to make an appointment. It’s convenience on steroids, right? We’re open seven days a week, which is very, very unique and Manhattan, I think, especially the money value of time, has maybe one of the highest currency values across the US. And so that’s Dental Bar… really consumer experience meets healthcare experience or consumer healthcare experience elevated to closer to kind of that Amazon level of convenience with a Manhattan white club service twist.

Bill Neumann:

Pretty cool. Good stuff. Definitely different. I’m sure you’re going to learn a lot from it. And I think there are some other DSOs and groups out there that maybe can take some best practices assuming it works in their particular geography. And speaking of geography, you’re doing something pretty interesting with… you live in Atlanta, but you’re also spending quite a bit of time in New York. So how’s that working out?

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

Yeah, I’m half of the time here, half of the time… more than half of the time in Atlanta, the other half of the time on a plane. I think I’m in the sixties for flight legs flown, which is not a badge of honor. But I think that when you look at the way that flights are today, it’s… I don’t know, a friend of mine years ago worked in New York and I asked him… private equity guy. And I was, where do you live? He’s, I live just two hours outside of New York. And I’m, hah, maybe he lives in Westchester County. Maybe he lives here. Maybe he lives in Jersey by the beach. He lived in Florida. And that’s what he was… I’m two hours away by plane. So I don’t actually say this, but maybe I should have. I’m just 90 minutes outside of New York, because that’s how long it takes me on Monday mornings at 6:00 AM to commute up here.

Bill Neumann:

That’s a great point. So pretty cool stuff. Well, let’s see. So let’s kind of get back to the focus of this new featured part of the Group Dentistry Now show. So again, DSO Declassified. So what Ro and I are going to try and do here is keep everybody up to date on what’s happening in the space and there’s a lot going on. And of course, this being our first show, we have a lot to talk about.

Bill Neumann:

So maybe we start with what… some of the events. I think the last time you and I… and we normally see each other quite a bit, but it’s been a little while. I think it was ADSO. So we’re going back… gosh, is that almost three months now? I guess so. So that was the beginning of April. So a lot of meetings are back, right? We all know this. There’s been quite a few and there are more DSO meetings than ever before. So I know ADSO was really, in my opinion, a great meeting. They did a great job. I think they expected 850 people and they had what, over 1100. So really well attended. Austin’s a great town. Lot going on there. What did you think of the meeting?

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

I thought it was a great meeting. Now you’re seeing this… never seen before, mammoth hotels that are all selling out so the demand must be there. Austin is a great town. I had some barbecue at Lambert’s. We got to see the Spazmatics, which was cool. Yeah, again… see them again at Dykema. The meeting was great… having a big room full of vendors was neat. Revere Partners… Jeremy Krell, had kind of that tech alley and a technology room with kind of emerging technology. That was cool. Going to DSO meetings, I think about, being in Chicago and going to the mid-winter compared to going to ADSO meeting. I mean it’s night and day.

Bill Neumann:

Yep. Totally. It’s one of those things where you talk to people that are used to the greater New Yorks and the Chicago mid winters and those meetings, and then you tell them what ADSO meeting’s like. Of course, they can’t… it’s very hard for them to imagine. First off, the vendors are for the most part are totally different. So it’s very service or technology oriented versus product centric. It’s not clinical products for the most part and it’s mostly everything else and

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

Technology companies.

Bill Neumann:

So the vendors are different, the attendees are different, the vibe’s different. So it’s just… it’s pretty interesting. So there was that event and then you were… I think you were off in Lichtenstein for a global meeting of sorts. Tell us about that.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

I was lucky enough to be the only US DSO thanks to Ivoclar. I was at Ivoclar’s global headquarters in Lichtenstein meeting with European DSO clinic directors from all around UK, EU, and I think there were 25 or so clinical directors that represented close to north of 2000 offices. It was really neat. Lichtenstein is its own country and has more cows than people. I think they award 42… they have a lottery system. They have 42 citizenships that they award a year through an application process. So I don’t think that I’m going to become a citizen there anytime soon, but I got to visit and it’s beautiful. Going to Lichtenstein is a really neat experience. Working with these European clinical directors at Ivoclar, and their facility is beautiful.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

Next year, they celebrate 100 years of Ivoclar. They’ll move into their new headquarters, which maybe is more beautiful, but every window is a painting. And the technology that they have there is phenomenal. Sitting with the European guys, it’s a lot of neat collaboration. European DSOs continue to grow. I think that when you’re talking about technology with European DSOs… and even insurance reimbursement is different, European technology and kind of DSOs maybe is five years behind us. There was a really a great group that was there that was talking about a call center that they have and kind of using a CRM like Salesforce to kind of track people through treatment and make sure that they stay on board. And they’re, we have all these folks making all these calls a day and then I, because I can’t help myself, raised my hand and I’m, you just leave voicemails? What are you guys doing?

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

And I’m, we’re rolling out a platform where patients will get a text message and click the text, verify it’s them, and then they get to schedule in real time their appointments for whether it’s an overdue cleaning, whether it’s fillings, whether it’s a crown. And it writes back to our system and we’ll give them a calendar link and I’m… so that’s an example of something where I don’t know if that’s universal convenience. It’s not necessarily just Manhattan. That’s universal convenience. And I think that over there, they’re doing… some of the things they’re doing up today, but some for DSOs today. But I think some of it’s, they’re doing things that we were doing maybe in 2015, 2016.

Bill Neumann:

Oh, that’s pretty interesting. I don’t know why… I would’ve thought it would almost be the opposite over there in Europe, but I guess when it comes to the technology side of things, it’s not yet, so.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. But just great folks. I was pleasantly surprised at how interested they are in the US and kind of, M&A activity, technology, what we’re up to. And I started to… I didn’t realize how many great friends that I would make there. There’s actually… I could think of a… there’s a German urgent care or ADSO that does a lot of urgent care. They’re open 24 hours a day. And I was, wow. There’s just some neat things, a lot of share… I was surprised at over there, how much sharing people give. They’re just, Hey, open the hood, take a look at this, tell me what you think. And they’re doing it with their own competitors/friends, but it’s a lot of sharing. And I think that was definitely a pleasant distinction. They were just not kind of holding their cards like this. They’re, oh, yeah, I’ll share this, I’ll share this.

Bill Neumann:

I think there might have been more of that. And maybe that’s why they’re five years behind us, because I would say maybe seven or eight or 10 years ago, I heard that a lot more, that there was more sharing that goes on. Not that there isn’t sharing that goes on, but you’re right. There’s a lot more competition now in the US. There just is. There’s so many platforms. I’m going to put a pin in the M&A and we’re going to get back to that, because I want to talk about M&A in the US in general. And then what we think the recession… whether we’re going to be, we’re in one, we’re going to be in one. Things are tougher, for sure. So we can say, we’re not in one. We can say we’re in one, we know there’s a lot of inflation, so there’s certainly pressure on… cost of borrowing has gone up quite a bit.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

That’s right. Before we talk about that, I was going to ask you where have you been? I know that you’ve been doing some speaking and traveling and not often that I get to interview somebody and get to interview you.

Bill Neumann:

I’ve been doing a little bit. After ADSO, I took a little bit of a break and then I was out playing… Mecca had their national sales meeting. So I went to Chicago and talked to their US sales team. Great group there, speaking of technology, and they’ve had a ton of growth. In the DSO space in particular, they’ve got a super solid group practice DSO team there. I was in Tampa, one of my favorite cities in Florida, and was there for the AMPLIFY conference. And they did a great job for… so SIMPLIFY put on AMPLIFY, which was really geared to let’s say, emerging groups. So you had a lot of people that had 2, 3, 10 locations, right around there, and some great technology focused content. They had a couple really cool segments on AI and different technologies that are being used. Some great speakers. And then they had a cruise and we handed out DSO influencer awards. So it was quite fun. I think I had a couple hundred attendees there. So it was a nice turnout for the first time.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

Very nice. You got to wear a tux?

Bill Neumann:

Well, a faux tux. So it’s a suit that I have that’s grayish black, but I do put the bow tie on. So everybody thinks it’s a tux, but it’s not.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

Got it. Got it. Nice. That’s great.

Bill Neumann:

That’s the hack. I don’t do enough of those to actually own a tux. So just get a bow tie and have a gray suit and you’re in good shape. Nobody will know the difference.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

Nice. I got on my list of things to do, learn how to tie a bow tie. I just have some bow ties and they’re tied. And if they untie, I have to walk over to a men’s shop. I’ve watched the videos. It’s tough if you’re not doing it all the time.

Bill Neumann:

It’s a skill and yeah, I guess I’ll let the secret out that I don’t tie that bow tie either.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

Oh, man.

Bill Neumann:

I’ve never… I know there are YouTube videos and then I think I looked at one and said, no, I’m not going to do this.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

This is turning into Oprah Winfrey expose now.

Bill Neumann:

A little bit.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

We’ll bring it back. We’ll bring it back.

Bill Neumann:

Yeah, that sounds good. As far as other meetings going on, there’s The Dental Festival. I’m going to be down there in Nashville. That’s coming up soon. That may be before or after this podcast gets out there, but I’m excited to see that event. Anything else that you’ve been checking out or any others that you’re going to be attending? I know DICOM is coming up.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

DICOM is coming up. We’ll have… so for our Dental Bar team, that’s kind of going to their first DSO conference.

Bill Neumann:

Oh, really.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

I think the first lesson that they learned is if you didn’t book it early, you can’t stay at that hotel because the Gaylord is sold out.

Bill Neumann:

And that’s a big hotel.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

It is. People go there for staycations in Colorado or drive in from other cities, other states. I’ll be there. I’m excited for it. I kind of look at that conference as numbers, metrics wise. There’s a lot of… there’s more sound there than noise. And so I pick up some of those stats. So, when somebody’s, all right, where is the industry? And where’s it going in terms of consolidation percents and things, I pay a lot of attention to the lectures there. I think they have some great content, but we’ll be there. I’m guessing it will… it has to be at 1100. It’ll maybe surpass ADSO.

Bill Neumann:

So I’m thinking… I think last year it was 1300. So my guess is Brian is going to absolutely outdo that, so I don’t know what the room or the fire marshal says can be in that room, but I’m thinking if he could get 1500 that’s that would be… and I’m sure it can happen for… and one thing I want to make sure… I don’t think I mentioned it was, I also had the chance to speak at Henry Schein Medical National Sales Meeting.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

Very cool.

Bill Neumann:

I didn’t mention that, did I?

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

No.

Bill Neumann:

So that was pretty cool. I got that to talk to their multi site and their national DSO teams and I know Henry Schein invested quite a bit of money in education for their special markets, their multi site, their national team, and just great to see we’ve got a lot of veterans there and they’ve got a lot of newbies, so to speak, in the DSO space, but just a lot of excitement. So that was quite a bit of fun. I ended up closing out their event for them. So I didn’t put myself in the best position because they were probably all ready to kind of hit the bar, but they were nice enough, kind enough, to listen to me. So that was pretty cool.

Bill Neumann:

So yeah, DICOM will be the next one. And I’m thinking that it’s going to be a really good event. I’m curious to hear… I’m sure the discussion, there’s going to be several around the implications of the economy that we find ourselves in. A lot of spending… some of it was tied to COVID. Some of it has just been something we’ve been doing as a country for a long time, is printing a lot of money. And now we’re, unfortunately, I think, seeing the ramifications of all that, and inflation’s been completely crazy, if anybody’s done any grocery shopping or had to put gas in their cars it’s affecting everyone, especially people that are on fixed incomes, people that are minimum wage employees when the cost of transportation doubles in a year, if you even have a vehicle, then it’s very impactful. And the cost of food, I don’t know, it’s really pretty incredible.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

I agree. I think the gas utilization is down, eight, 10%. And when you’re talking about summer, and families taking trips, here in New York, people are, okay, I’m going to go to the beach and maybe go to Jersey shore and go to some of those beaches. But some people are thinking of even foregoing trips like that. Not necessarily just because of gas, but just because prices of everything else when you’re there for family of four, let’s say, it just gets to be out of people’s ballpark. It’s a strange, strange time and there still continues to be some demand for cars. There’s a shortage or there’s vehicles are selling for sticker over ask. My own dealer in Atlanta sent me an email or sent probably everybody an email was, Hey, we want to buy your car.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

And I’m, it’s two years old, but they’re… to be able to say those things is… and maybe this is just the beginning, but I definitely compared to maybe when we were in a recession 2008, 2009, maybe this feels similar. But the thing that feels different to me is just that the news and how many screens we have and how much news we get fed is, I can’t even imagine how many tens of magnitude it is that it’s different from them. So it’s in your face, whether or not you choose to listen or you want to hear it, or you don’t want to see it. No matter what you do, you could be on a sports network or watching the food network, they’ll talk about recession. I think that’s the part here that makes it seem, it’s just at this boiling point.

Bill Neumann:

Yep, totally. And I don’t know if… I think it’s too soon to say how it’s going to affect the DSO space and dentistry in general. You can kind of look at it simply, right? So you’ve got the patients have less money to spend on healthcare because… especially patients that are in middle class, lower middle class, because they’re spending it on transportation and food and things, or they want to go on that vacation that they weren’t able to take for two years. And I was darn it, I’m going to go on that vacation, because I wasn’t able to do that. So COVID has definitely had some interesting effects. So patient wise, I could see a slow down, I don’t know, but you could see some patients maybe skipping an appointment here or there maybe not necessarily investing in their oral health, like they might have, if things… if inflation wasn’t quite where it was.

Bill Neumann:

And then on the practice side, on the M&A side of things again, we try and track the deals that occur monthly. And I will say, the past couple months have been insane. So there’s been a ton of activity. So now we’re seeing it slow down a little bit, what we track, but is it just the normalization? So were things just really kind of overheated from 2021 where people couldn’t close, there was some concerns about capital gains tax increases that never materialized. So I’m not really sure what to make of it yet. I think we’ll have… maybe the next one we do, we can talk a little bit more about it. I have heard a couple of deals… talked to somebody yesterday that’s heavily involved in M&A, and she was telling me that there are four deals, smaller emerging groups, that are waiting now to sell because the valuation maybe isn’t there. And of course, could be that the top was two months ago. And that was the top. So I don’t know what… any thoughts around that?

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

I think that, well, on the kind of macroeconomic recession change, in 2008, 2009, we saw dentistry is pretty resilient and recession resistant. People still need crowns and root canals and fillings and kids get braces. It’s not like when I was growing up that that was a luxury. Now it’s standard operating procedure, but maybe we started a $75,000 case here at Dental Bar in New York. Maybe those $75,000 cases are going, the cosmetic implant combo cases are going to be, all right, I’ll do the implants, because I want function, but I’m going to kind of hold off on the 20 units of porcelain and just kind of see what happens. So maybe on the elective side, maybe there’ll be a little bit of slow down and similar to what happened in 2008, 2009, but routine care, I think, and kind of indirect restorative care, endo, OS, continue to be what it is.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

On the M&A side, I know… I think yesterday, the old Western Dental, which is, rebranded Sonrava Health, they finished their acquisition of Mid-Atlantic Dental Partners here, and they’re 572 offices now in 20 states. That’s a big one, but I think that if you’re a consolidator and you have to put money to work and you’re going to continue to buy offices, those guys are going to continue to buy offices. They don’t have to, but they have to. But if you’re a group that has a 10, 20 location group yourself, and you’re, should I sell now? Or should I just continue to run a good business and optimize and wait, maybe those guys are going to wait. Maybe sellers will wait, but buyers will probably continue to buy.

Bill Neumann:

That’s a great point. As I kind of go through the latest news that has been covered in the space, the Sonrava was really kind a pretty, pretty big deal.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

Yeah.

Bill Neumann:

It’s almost… it’s one of those things, and I’ve heard this before, where if you have some smaller groups that were built, maybe some larger ones too, where they were just in acquisition mode. And so they weren’t necessarily… they were growing beyond the support that they were providing. So it was just about growth, maybe buying some practices that weren’t necessarily the right fit for the sake of the growth. And so now you’re at a point where do you pause? And you fix up some of these practices, you integrate them, right, to create some more value, because now’s the time to do that since the cost of buying everything has become much more expensive. So I’m just wondering if that’s going to happen.

Bill Neumann:

I talked to Dee Fisher when I was at AMPLIFY, and she works with a lot of organizations and she said one thing that she finds is, there are a lot of DSOs out there that maybe have 50% of the practices are really just performing super well. And then the other 50% aren’t. And so do you fix those up, because again, there was this… almost everybody was wanting to grow and you do it through acquisitions… maybe some of the acquisitions weren’t the best. And so I don’t know. Have you seen or heard that?

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

Yeah. I think that growth, buying practices and aggregating them is that… the question is always, is that a growth strategy or is that just financial arbitrage strategy? And so I think that what really drives value is going to be not how many offices you have, but it’s kind of like, if you’re a DSO and you’re in the business of value creation, it’ll be, okay, you bought X, Y, Z offices at these times. What are they doing now? What’s the same source sales growth, are you truly a DSO that’s adding value? And I think, to your point, if you acquired some offices and you were in hyper growth mode, acquisition inorganically, then I think you have to fix some of those up to be able to make the whole portfolio shine.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

And I think that people are… DSOs are obviously smart folks, smarter than me. They’re in the business of just not buying things just to aggregate them and the ones that are, there’s just so many good DSOs out there that it’s just easy to find the ones that aren’t. It’s not… now it’s not rocket science. Maybe five, six years ago, you’d be, oh, DSOs are cool. There aren’t that many, there aren’t this… I mean three digits of private equity backed deal. So you’re going to be… you’re going to find those. It’s easy to find those.

Bill Neumann:

It’s a great point. I think DSO DataCONNECT, their numbers are over 2000 platforms in North America. So that being three locations, up to Heartland. So yeah, there’s a lot out there and again, three is different than Heartland, but it’s just the private equity, it’s over a hundred now, right?

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

Yeah,.

Bill Neumann:

Just a couple of things before… because I think this is a great start, right?

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

Yeah.

Bill Neumann:

This is definitely good stuff here. I think you want to… do you want to cover a couple other news stories? One thing that was pretty interesting was the donation that Rick Workman and his wife provided to High Point University for their dental school.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

I saw that. It’s so… it’s awesome. I was talking to some of the Schein folks at a lunch a few weeks back, and they were saying that High Point is really striving to want to do dental education a little bit differently… maybe kind of be more with today’s times. And I think that that shows you what dentistry has given Dr. Workman so much and it’s being able to have the ability, but then also putting your name on those things. And it’s really… need to see.

Bill Neumann:

Yeah, it was $32 million for a new dental school. So from a business perspective, it makes a lot of sense. So I think… and in North Carolina, which is super interesting, one of the toughest places, if not the toughest state, to create a DSO legal structure.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

And growing needs out there, in terms of population influx, headquarters influx, and Apple’s building a facility there.

Bill Neumann:

Yep. Align Technology. They moved from San Jose… or at least I shouldn’t say they moved, but they have their Raleigh location, which they do a lot of their training. I don’t know if that’s their HQ, but Align is there now, as well. So you’re right. A lot of people from whether it’s the Northeast or from the West Coast are moving to North Carolina.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

Yeah.

Bill Neumann:

Yep. I thought the Peak Dental Services story was pretty interesting, where they’re offering ownership for their hygiene team. What a great idea. Why hasn’t anybody thought of this before?

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

Yeah, that was awesome. A AJ Peak is a… I mean he’s sharp. And so that was a neat strategy. Hygienist are, I mean, the most trusted men and women in a dental office. So, why not? You want recruitment potential and retainment potential. Why not make them owners? They drive so much in a dental practice. That was awesome to see.

Bill Neumann:

And I think the only other thing I wanted to mention on the news front that I see here this is, this just came out, was DCA, Dental Care Alliance. And they have their specialty support division, which they’ve built out. And so that to me is, you start to see this investment by groups on the support side. So they’re really trying to get… and they’re focused on specialty. We know that specialty really just, especially after COVID, we saw the explosion of specialty only oral surgery, DSOs and endodontic DSOs. Pedo and ortho were strong before that, but… and I think you see some of these bigger multi-specialty groups now realizing that that needs to be focused on and there’s importance to that.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

I think traveling specialists, there’s a whole bunch of them, but, look at an oral surgeon. My little cousin is doing oral surgery fellowship here at Columbia. And you look at oral surgeons specifically. As much as there are traveling oral surgeons, their home really wants to be in an oral surgery facility and they want somebody like DCA or others, creating this hub and spoke model where they have specialty groups that are within hubs or cities that they already have a mass of offices in. And it’s being able to give the specialist a home, that’s truly a home, without kind of being more of a rotating home, but specialty care, and general dentistry obviously have gone hand in for years. And I think that now they’re, Hey, we should just own both.

Bill Neumann:

So as we try to wrap this first episode up, of DSO Declassified, anything that you feel, we missed? I think the idea is, look for us at Dykema… we’ll be there, and we want to make sure we get this podcast out before that. So you all’s, whether you’re listening to this or you’re watching… you should watch this, because you get a chance to see Ro’s view out the window, which is pretty cool. So it’s probably really worth a watch. But Ro, is there anything else you want to… I think we talked about maybe bringing some people into this show whether it’s somebody on the HR side to give us that perspective, or on the M&A side or whatever… from time to time, I think we want to do that.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

I think that’s right. We’ll be at some of these conferences. We’ll be at Dykema, and then probably more just feedback is important. If there’s things that were angles or topics that we want to cover, I’m sure that in our networks we know somebody who’s the expert on retention or recruitment or whatever it is. And then we can bring them on to help educate and have fun at the same time.

Bill Neumann:

Yeah, that’s the whole idea. Well thanks. So for everybody listening in to our first episode, hopefully it’s something that you’re happy to be a part of. So we’ve been tossing this idea around for quite a while. Bet you it’s been six months now, so we’re finally doing it. We’re committed to doing it on a regular basis. So yeah, the feedback, to Ro’s point, is super important to us, but we’ll leave it at that. Thanks everybody. This is DSO Declassified, part of the Group Dentistry Now Show. We have Dr. Roshan Parikh. Ro, how can they get in touch with you if anybody wants to ping you, what’s the best way to do that?

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

I’m probably terrible at social media. I think I do a decent job at LinkedIn. That’s my-

Bill Neumann:

He does. You definitely do a good job.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

LinkedIn is pretty good. I don’t even think I’m three digits in terms of Twitter followers. So there’s no tweet. I don’t even know if I have the app anymore on my phone.

Bill Neumann:

It’s probably not a bad thing. So look for Ro on LinkedIn and reach out to him there. Or you can ping us and we’ll get you in touch with Ro. You can find me on LinkedIn as well, or it’s bill@groupdentistryow.com.

Dr. Roshan Parikh:

Awesome.

Bill Neumann:

Awesome. Thanks everybody. Until next time… hope to see everybody at a show coming up or you can find us on DSO Declassified.