He Killed His Own Business

0:00Okay. Now I'm not comfortable. Okay. My office is shut, and it's hemorrhaging money. My teaching business is shut and hemorrhaging money. Yeah. I can't deliver the training. What the hell am I gonna do? And so I sat there for five days no. Seven days. From the March 5 until the twelfth of twelfth of March. Sat at home, everything's shut, felt sad and depressed, and, you know, sitting there sucking my thumb. And then I said, okay. Enough of this. I'm either gonna go big or go listening to the Foundation Dental podcast, strategic conversations for dentists and leaders building long term value in dentistry. I'm doctor Jim Arnold. Let's get into today's conversation. Today's guest is one of the most innovative minds in modern dental education.

0:44Doctor Lincoln Harris is the founder and CEO of Ripe Global, a company that's redefining how dentists learn about simulation, technology, and competency based education. From practicing in a small town in Coastal Australia to building a platform used by thousands of clinicians around the world, Lincoln has challenged nearly every assumption about continuing education. If you've ever wondered what the future of dental learning looks like or how better training translates into better patient care and stronger practices, then this conversation is for you. Hey, man. It's good to see you, Lincoln. Hey. Thank you so much for having me. And I think we're post we're in the post educational world, so ask me about that later.

1:21Oh, man. I can't wait to hear about that. You sound like a futurist now. Yes. I need to I need to wear Hawaiian shirts or something more eccentric. You know? I need to grow a goatee and have some sort of more eccentric ears. Hey, man. I it wouldn't it wouldn't surprise me next time I see you if you've got, like, you know, a ZZ top, you know, beard going and the the whole vibe. I just thought I just saw you in Chicago last week for ADSL. Was that a good meeting for you? Yeah. We we had some good meetings there. And, look, we we don't turn up to everything. But, certainly, if you're at a DSO meeting, there's a good chance we'll be there. Like, I'm going to one in The UK in a couple days' time. So Yeah. Yeah. We I mean, we've our focus is is North America or, yeah, Northern Hemisphere, but more specifically North America.

2:06But we currently work across 35 countries, so I get around a bit. Wow. You do. Yeah. Well, I mean, every time I I see you, you're going somewhere else, and I I never know what time zone you're in. But you're I you're in England right now. Right? In London? I am in London right now. And I went to like, I'm not a big enough tennis fan to go to Wimbledon myself, but if someone else would buy me tickets, I'll definitely go. I could it was I've actually never been to a profession like, you know, America is the land of opportunity. In a year and a half, I have been an American, but the things that have happened like, I tell people I've had more opportunity in one year in America than the entire rest of my career.

2:44It's like bonkers. So and that one of the things that come out of that is that someone invited me to go to Wimbledon with them. I've never seen a tennis match, like, besides my friends playing in the backyard. I've never seen a tennis match in my entire life. So the very first This one one is Wimbledon. Okay. Row a on court one at Wimbledon. So, you know, unfortunately, Bruins now, there's not there's not much up from here. Yeah. Everything else is definitely a step backwards. You know, that's been on my bucket list for a long time. My wife and I have been talking about doing the Wimbledon Tour de France, kind of, you know, double double feature one of these days. But you you got to do it already. Good for you, man.

3:19That's awesome. Yeah. Well, good things happen in America. So Yeah. Well, you know, you mentioned that. I met you a couple years ago at Daikama, and I was pretty blown away by your vision two years ago. Little did I know it would turn into what it is now, you know, because people talk a good game, but you've actually, like, delivered on that. But I think a year ago, you you actually stumbled into my dining room and had had dinner here at my house with a a bunch of other dentists, and you said exactly that. I think you had just moved to, to Colorado within maybe the last six months, and you made that exact comment about how this is the land of opportunity, and we should all be grateful to be here. Yeah.

3:56Well, I think if you're born here, you don't understand how much easier it is to do things in America than the rest of the world when you think about the rest of the world here. It's definitely true. And now, obviously, I'm not maybe representative of the average person. I don't know. Maybe I am. But the if you're an energetic, ambitious, and driven person and you want to build something, there's still nowhere else that's even close. Like, you know, if you look at America's American history is very traumatic. It's not a smooth and tidy history. Most countries in the world have had less traumas. But, you know, I wouldn't say it's always a functional country. It's like, you know, mild it's like a it's like a large extended dysfunctional Italian family or something.

4:37It's like, you gotta get some hate mail now. Like, that's so racist or something. But you know what I mean? Like, it it you know, you're all fighting all the time about a whole bunch of stuff. Despite all that, or maybe because of that, who knows, the ability to build things in America is unsurpassed anywhere in the world by by several orders of magnitude. So if you're born here, be grateful. Say thanks. You know, let's go back to the beginning though. You know, you grew up in Australia. How did that impact you? You know, like the the entrepreneur and the the dentist that you became from that background. Actually, being in Australia is super important to what I do now because I mean, there's some aspects some aspects of life you need to be a little bit messed up to be ambitious.

5:20So ambitious people are often trying to compensate for some childhood trauma of not feeling enough, whatever it is. Okay? So in fact, one of my investors called me up and said, why do you do this? And I gave him, like, a nice canned answer, and then he said, no. That's nonsense. Tell me a real answer. And he kept pushing and pushing and pushing. I finally said, look. Like, when I was a kid, my dad has never said that he's proud of me or that he loves me. I'm sure he is, and he does. He's just never been able to say it because he's of a generation. Who knows why? You know, I haven't had time to do psychology on him. Anyways, this investigator, that's perfect. He says, I'll put the money in right now. Like, I needed to know it's a bit and he is and I was a bit messed up because, like but it's that type of mess up.

6:00But so so that's probably, like, why am I so driven? You know, my parents went bankrupt when I was about 10. Anybody who's ever seen enough of my presentations will see the one where I show the truck taking away everything that we owned. You know, growing up in a farming area when you were poor and bankrupt and couldn't have shoes like other people. You couldn't go on vacations like other people. You, you know, just lived in a house with no paint, an outside toilet. Just stuff like that. Like, that that that gives you a hunger to be more, to do more. And strangely for me, because in Western countries, when you go bankrupt, you very rarely go hungry. K. You big difference between, like, famine in some Sub Saharan country and being poor in a first world western country.

6:47Like, I think if you're on welfare in America or Australia, you're still in the top 1% of the world's population. So, yeah, so that that was like why am I driven, but why am I doing the type of education, training, and multidisciplinary work that I do? That's also because where I lived, unlike most of America, there was not a specialist on every street corner. We had no specialists within four hours drive except in orthodontics. Wow. That's crazy. So you were really remote then. That had a huge impact on how you started practicing as a young dentist. In Australia, that's not really remote. In America, the American equivalent of really remote is about two hours by Cessna from Anchorage into the wilderness.

7:36Like, Alaska's the only place Alaska's the only place in America that felt a bit like Outback Australia even though was cold with mountains instead of hot with deserts. So right. The best way to think of it is that Australia is the same size as the 48 states, but it has the same population and economy as Los Angeles. Unbelievable. Wow. That is that is sparsely populated, very large landmass. Wow. Right. Yeah. Yep. So and then, you don't realize this when you live there, but the best example of it is I fly across America very frequently as you well know. And when you look down at night in America, you always see lights. Mhmm. When you look down flying across Australia, most of the time, you see blackness.

8:18You might see a little tiny dot off on the horizon somewhere, but most of time when you're flying at night, you just see blackness because there's nothing down there. So how did that affect me? The first problem was that I had to learn specialist skills because if I didn't, the patient lost their teeth. Right. Was was that pretty typical of of dentists in Australia? I mean, did you have contemporaries who were the same way? They just, by necessity, kind of tried learned all the specialties so they could provide the services? To a certain level in the town we were in, yes. So, like, the main town where I lived was called Bundaberg. It's really only famous for rum. And in Australia, it's famous for rum and ginger beer.

9:01And that's it. Like, basically, either cariogenic foodstuffs or alcoholic food stuffs. So perfect for dentists, actually, in both sides. Right. Right for business. And for after afterwards. Yeah. Yeah. You know, your your average high functioning alcoholic dentist, I it's a sense of humor It's not for everyone. So the there was, I think, more implant dentists per capita in this small town of 50,000 people than in most other parts of the state, at least. And the state of Queensland is, like, two and a half times the size of Texas, so it's a pretty big state. Not a lot of people. So but more to the point, things like like, if you needed a rehabilitation, the nearest prosthodontist was three and a half hours' drop.

9:44If you needed high level endodontic treatment with a cast, coast removed retreatment, the nearest endodontist was three and a half to four hours away. If you need it but when I started, no one did soft tissue grafts, not even the specialists. Like, back in I started my practice in 2000. I started running ski conferences at Whistler and Vale and then some luxury ones in Tuscany 2006. And at the same time, I went on Dentletown. Now on Dentletown, I can remember Danny Melka. K? Besides the fact he's usually having a fight with someone, but in between having a fight with someone, he would produce these incredible incredibly documented perio proz cases with Howard Chaslin. And I this blew me away. I've never seen anything like So I actually started sending some cases to the periodontist.

10:31And the periodontist clearly had done almost those soft tissue grafts in his life. So the first few failed. And, yeah, I don't think they were trained to do surgical perio much back in Australia in those days. I'm sure not. So I said to myself, I can't do worse. Like, I can't do worse than a failed soft tissue graft. But I didn't have time to go visit Danny and do his whole course on soft tissue grafts. So I just looked at all his pictures online, and then I did one. And it worked. And it's still there to this day. Like, it's like No kidding. Twenty years that soft tissue graft has been there. And if you know anything about soft tissue grafts, they're the only things that don't wear out in dentistry. So that was really the start of me moving deeply into specialist courses was being on Dental Town.

11:13So, essentially, online learning has been essential to my DNA since Move. 2006. Started the practice 2000. 2006, I came to America, did a high level veneer course where I brought a patient, and then that taught me Lincoln, which one did you go to? I always hesitate to say because it has a bit of baggage, but I went to LVI. Okay. I I I took a couple courses there. I it's a I had a great experience. Yeah. Like, the actual live patient training, if you were diligent, was excellent. If you were a bit sloppy, then they also gave you an excuse to be a high volume sloppy dentist. I use the word sloppy as in, you know, not putting much effort in. But that what I learned from that is I spent 9,000 US dollars on the course.

11:57It was a fair bit back then. It was 2,006. I spent about 5 or $6,000 on bringing myself and my patient to America twice. I spent a bunch of money on flights, on accommodation and car rental. Mhmm. I had to pay the lab bill as well because it was like my patient was my treatment coordinator. So it cost me in $2,006 about 20,000 US dollars or about 32,000 Australian dollars. Yeah. That is a huge, huge investment. My god. And you start looking at that and thinking, man, like, how many more courses do I really wanna go take there because I'm gonna be a $100,000 in before you know it? Yeah. Well, the thing I learned out of that is that if you do good hands on training, your income can go up a lot. So my income went up.

12:47My gross revenue went up $300,000, which at the time was, like, 50%. So it went up 50% in the next twelve months. Then getting that. Yeah. And so that's when I after that, I said, I'm not doing any course that's less than two days or $2,000. It was, like, my rule. If it wasn't hands on, at least two days and at least $2,000, I wouldn't go because everything I've been to that was cheaper wasn't worth doing. Good good point. Yeah. You go to a conference. Like, when do you go to a conference and your income goes up 50%? Yeah. Like, never. Yeah. Exactly. There's so much there's so much to be said for that, you know, kind of access when when you're one on one or in a small group like that. You just get so much more value out of it because you can ask all those questions and you get that personal attention from whoever is teaching.

13:30Yeah. And just it taught me because it's not inherent. Like and this is where a lot of DSOs struggle. It's not inherently obvious that clinical skills can lift your income so dramatically. Like, so my income when I finished like, if I was working full time when I finished, I would have personally besides my associates, I would have personally billed nearly $4,000,000 a year. And because I had so many associates covering all the overhead, I would have, like, had to take home. And so, like, part of what allows us to work with people in a business sense is that I understand if I can drive clinical performance at a very high level with advanced procedures, it increases the income of the dentist dramatically.

14:10Dramatically. Mhmm. Like, you can triple it, quadruple it if you get the right procedure mix. So that is very important now when we're dealing with people who are business people going. Like, you can actually increase your top line a lot without having more dentists or more chairs. Mhmm. So that was a big part of my growth. And then over time, we became multidisciplinary. So in my I still have an office in Australia, and in that office, if you want to work there, you have to commit to learning full mouth rehabilitation, implantology, and orthodontics. So every person has to learn all three because it's like the holy triumph. Dude, that's phenomenal. I mean, that that puts him in a position to provide just about anything a patient could possibly want.

14:51And when you're in the area that you're in, I mean, you've got that that opportunity to be that one stop shop for every patient in your town. Yeah. Yeah. And what's, I think, not always understood is that a specialist might be able to do each one of those procedures better and faster than a general dentist. But for an anxious patient, they can't like, an anxious patient doesn't want to go to three different people. It's very difficult for an anxious patient to go to one dentist and then go through that same trauma again and again. Once they have that established relationship, they feel comfortable. It's like you you've got a good thing going. And then all of sudden, wait. Wait. What? You can't do that?

15:30I have to go I have to do this again? Oh my god. And then they may or may not do it. Yeah. Yeah. And also, like, the anxious patients often don't go to the dentist for ten or twenty years, so they're also the most profitable patients because they've had the most problems to fix all at once.

15:48Like, when they finally give you trust, they go, right. I got twenty twenty years of damage. Like, I got teeth missing. I got teeth broken. I got root canals. I got pus. I got everything. Okay. Now I finally trust someone. Fix it all. And there's often because they're so anxious, they're also not price sensitive. Yeah. That's right. They're not gonna price They're motivated. They either wanna get out of pain or they want things to look better. They want things to function better. And once they get past that fear part, it's like, holy cow. This is a whole new world. Let's go. And and, you know, it's funny. When I, when I started doing sedation, you know, whatever year that was, it it changed everything for me too.

16:24Because all of a sudden, you know, I was keeping everybody in, and, you know, within a couple of appointments, they didn't even need the sedation anymore. But it was just that was the access that they needed to to remove that fear. That's right. Yeah. It's it's funny when I hear people say I wanna treat good patients. You go, what's your good power? They come every six months, and they brush their teeth, and floss. And I go, well, that's like a terrible patient. You know? It's like, I want to be an oncologist for people who don't have cancer. If I'm an oncologist, I want the patients who are dying, not the ones who are living. Like, know, there's not a big reason to do oncology if someone's healthy. And it's the same with it.

17:03And so this is some interesting, like, getting both myself going through this journey of learning to not be judgmental Mhmm. So helping other dentists do the same. So you can't be a great dentist if you are judgmental and you're projecting yourself onto the patient. So the the psychology of being a great dentist is very complex, not well understood. So that's you know, it's taken a long time to learn that, but we spend a lot of time basically being psychologist for dentists. You know, as as busy as you are with travel and building this, you know, global juggernaut, I'm gonna call it, I do still do me chairside. I mean, that's gonna be difficult living in Colorado now, but you you kinda manage manage the practice from afar.

17:45You have managers there taking care of things. Yeah. I have a I have a very good office manager in Australia and Mhmm. Just a group of dentists. And, you know, it's I don't practice chairside because I can't. So to practice in America, I would need to go and study a two year degree, like one of those transition degrees. I ain't got time for that. You know? Oh my god. Can you imagine? Also because doing clinical work when you're trying to be a founder executive of what is essentially a tech platform is difficult because the mindset of being a clinician is not better or worse.

18:22It's just a 180 degree opposite of being an executive. So Yeah. As a dentist, you want to be very, very narrowly focused on the very highest level of personal perfect perfectionism on a very small thing.

18:40Mhmm. And as a dentist, the more you calm and shut down your emotional sensitivity, the better you can do, particularly in surgery. Because if you're sensitive to an anxious patient's emotions, it makes you anxious and they're anxious and everyone's anxious, and next thing, it's a disaster. So as a dentist, you know, you narrow your focus, you shut off your emotions, and you are tunnel visioned on a tiny little thing. And that does not work as an executive of the last team of people. Interesting. Exactly. Well, you nailed it. I I've never thought about it in that light. But, I mean, beyond just not having time to do both, it is a completely different focus. Yeah. And, also, there's a because the mindset is so different, there's actually a massive switching cost.

19:22So the it it would take me one full day to fully transition from my dentist mind to my executive mind. So if I worked three days a week, and there was one day where I was working, but, like, first of all, dentistry, there's very different level of intensity between dentistry and executive life. So executives so they're both kind of equally tiring but in different ways. Executive life, you work much longer hours and often more days a week. So it's very common for executives to work six days a week, you know, maybe Sunday afternoon, a little bit of Friday night, Saturday morning, whatever. They were at conferences. And then often their day start at seven in the morning and go till nine at night. Sure.

20:05Dentists don't usually do those hours because you can't. Like, that dentistry, you burn your energy much more quickly. So if I'm doing if I'm doing, like, all on fours, I'm gonna be, like, cooked by seven hours. You know, seven hours of all on fours, I'm tired, and I'm done. Yep. So it's more intense when you're doing it, and you do it for less hours. And so, like, the so to switch from one to the other, I found if you go from two days a week as a dentist to zero days, your executive time doesn't go from, you know, three days to five. It goes from two days to five. Yeah. Oh, man. You know, you you are absolutely right, Lincoln, because, I mean, I think back to when I was a young dentist and practicing, say, thirty six hours a week.

20:51I always used to say, I might as well be practicing sixty hours a week for the level of exhaustion I have, you know, physically, mentally. All the conversations that you would have every single day you come home and you don't wanna have another conversation. But now, you know, I stopped practicing six years ago. Now in my executive functions, the things that I can do, I can throw down an eighty hour week, you know, without blinking. And I'm not as exhausted as I was from a, say, a thirty hour, clinical week. Yeah. The flip side is that when you're at a conference and you've done, you know, eight in the morning and then you've gone out for a few drinks with some people, and then you've gone to dinner.

21:27And then it's, like, 09:45PM or 11PM, and you really must do that email before tomorrow. That's pretty tiring. You're sitting there at midnight sending an email. So it's it's I'm not saying that one is harder than the other. I'm saying that to flip backwards and forwards between being a clinical dentist and an executive is actually quite difficult. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. You know, looking at at training, you know, just in dentistry at large, obviously, the pandemic flipped things on their heads. You've got several years of graduates who didn't get a lot of, you know, clinical training. You know, obviously, that's a a little bit of a I mean, that's a a blip. It's maybe that's not common. But if you were to, like, to redesign a dental school, like, just starting today from the ground up, what would you keep?

22:13What would you throw away? What would you do completely differently? So I would take a dental school from a very western style of education to a very eastern style. So eastern style training, you get taught skill before you get taught understanding. In western style education, we get taught understanding before we get taught skill. Okay? So an example of this is at dental school, you have to do a lot of theory before they let you pick up a handpiece, even on a plastic tooth. Now I have proven over and over again that I can train a clean skinned civilian to cut crowns faster than I can train a dentist. Wow. So now is this because dentists are unskilled? No. It's because dentists have so much knowledge, the knowledge interferes with the technical training.

22:58Now there's two there's, like, three things you're learning as a dentist. One is just knowledge. You need a lot of knowledge. I understand that. The second is a pure hands on hand eye coordination technical skill, like playing the piano. Okay? So there is no way to develop a hand skill without repetitions, and you don't need to understand the repetitions to build the skill. So, like, in music, I used to do a thing. I don't know if you ever like music, but there's a thing in, like, learning the piano called Henon exercises. They're just like they're kinda like fancy scales. You just go up and down and up and down and up and down, and it it's not nice to listen to. It's not a song. It's a repetitive boring exercise that is designed to teach you to move your fingers over the keyboard very quickly and to do, like, the transitions from thumb to you know, you got three notes, and then you run out of fingers.

23:48You have to flick your thumb thumb over and grab the notes again, you got five, and then you yeah. You get the point. So and then similarly with, like, flying a plane, the very first flight that almost everyone does who learns to fly is what's called a trial introductory flight. So you get in the plan, you go up in the sky, and then the pilot says, here, drive the plane for a bit. Okay? Because flying flying up in the sky is pretty easy. Like, anyone can more or less do it. It's not elegant. I'm not gonna run into anything. You're probably not gonna see a lot of other planes around, especially if you're in Australia, I guess. Yeah. I mean, air traffic is pretty it's very hard to run into another plane compared to another car.

24:25Like Right. Yeah. Three-dimensional space tends to you know, like, in America, there's, like, don't know, how many there's probably, what, 100,000,000 cars driving around every day. There's less there's probably at most there's probably at most a couple thousand. There's probably, like, 5,000 planes flying around The US at any given time, and they're in three-dimensional space. So you're likely gonna run against someone even if you got your eyes closed. It's pretty slim. So you aren't taught the skills practically at the same time as you're learning the theory, and you you you drill the skills. And I know maybe another example is, like, I haven't been in the Marine Corps, but if you join the Marine Corps, you go through boot camp, and then you go through, you know, initial training.

25:07And as part of your initial training, they teach you things that are count that don't seem related. Like, why do they teach you to polish your boots and make your bed? It's a they're teaching attention to detail. Mhmm. So if I was to design a dental school, I would make the dental students sit down in the sim lab or whatever. I mean, there's bunch of other things. I'm not gonna tell her because I actually would like to build a dental school. I'm not ready to raise the capital. Don't give everybody else a playbook, man. This is this is your playbook. Yeah. There's a bunch of things I won't tell you about. But if I was to redesign dental school, I'd let the dental students sit in the sim lab for one to two months right at the start and cut hundreds and hundreds of teeth until they you can train a civilian to do a nice crown prep in about one day if they're not overwhelmed with knowledge.

25:55Wow. Dude, that's huge. I think back to my first semester of dental school. You are. You're just getting bombarded with so much stuff, and it's overwhelming, and twenty six credit hours and all these things. And you're learning in the lab to cut teeth. I've told this story before, but my first semester, man, operative lab, I was awful. Like, I didn't have like, I never had played a musical instrument. I did not have that that hand eye coordination down. But I tell you what, Christmas break, I got tired of not being good at it. And I literally, in about three days, I did that. I mean, I cut a hundred teeth. I did all those things. And, you know, second semester, you know, I was number two in my class. And so you're right.

26:34It's a it's a skill that can be learned through repetition. Yeah. And actually, one of the drawbacks with modern dental schooling is that skill is actually seen as much less important than intellectual the intellectual side of dentistry. So No. No. And you'll hear people say things like, you don't wanna be like, you know, a monkey could do a crown. This is not true. A monkey couldn't do a crown. Not yet. No. I mean, you maybe you get a robot to do it soon, but Yeah. Right. The intellectual side is much more heavily valued because I don't know, actually. It's like all these people go, oh, I wanna be a physician of the mouth. Like, it's like saying, I don't want to do procedures, but I've entered a procedural profession.

27:16It's like, I want to be a physician of orthopedics. Like, that's dumb. You know? It's like it's like, this is a surgical profession. If you don't like surgery, go do physio physical therapy or something. This is this is a a surgical profession. We cut stuff. If you don't wanna cut, then maybe go do something else. So, yeah, that if I did dental school, I'd make them learn all the skills before I taught them any knowledge because Yeah. People learn the skill faster if they don't have much knowledge. You know, you you mentioned that a lot, you know, kinda comparing dentistry to aviation and how the training is and everything. I've heard you say, you know, if if if pilots got trained like dentists, they'd be crashing a lot of planes.

27:54Right? Yeah. They'd all be dead. Like like, you think about I think that I did, like, I think seventeen or eighteen hours of flying before I had to go solo. So I do a flight on my own, which is just a circuit. You basically take off going in a circle and landing it. We would have spent a bunch of hours flying, and then we spent probably five or six hours just repeating landings and takeoffs over and over again. Yeah. It is. Okay. You just come in. You land. Full power takeoffs that go around. Like, when a plane does it for you now, like it's United Airlines, does it go around, you get excited because you know you nearly crashed into something. So but, yeah, we just practiced that again and again and again, and then one day the instructor said, okay.

28:33You're good. He hopped out. And, of course but you don't get to do, a three hour class two when you're a pilot because if you fly a plane too slowly, it crashes. You know, the wings can only go so slow. So you have to fly at full speed the very first time you fly. And in fact, you fly faster than usual because you take the heavy instructor out. And in little planes, the plane takes off about a 100 yards quicker. So it's like the fastest it's the fastest circuit you've ever done is the first one where there's no instructor. It's like, oh my god. It's happening so quickly. So but but probably the the more important thing I learned from aviation is a thing called human factors. So you study aviation psychology very deeply.

29:15It's part of every curriculum even for a basic a basic pilot's license, you study human factors. And human factors were learned largely in World War one when they invented planes that started shooting each other. And so they had this problem in World War one that it actually the whole field is called human factors and ergonomics. The two go together. So what I discovered is when you're relaxed, it's very easy to do something. So if you learn something when you're relaxed, okay. You can do it. When you get stressed, you lose about 85% of your cognitive function. And so if you can only just do something when you're relaxed, you actually can't do it when you're stressed. So why does the Marine Corps make you strip the rifle down and put it back together and practice undoing a jammed, you know, bolt again and again and again until it's so boring and predictable and automatic in your brain.

30:10It's because if you like, I can teach anyone to strip a rustle down and put it back together once. Like, you just do one repetition. They go, oh, I can do it. And they're sitting there fiddling around. If you start firing a machine gun over their head, most people will no longer be able to accomplish whatever task they're doing. Like, if I say that, hey. Hey, Jim. You've got the weed eater out. You're doing your nice edges around the lawn. I'm just gonna sit here and quietly fire a 50 caliber machine gun one foot above your head. Just ignore me. It's perfectly safe. We've got it set so it can't hit you. You will find cutting a straight line really, really difficult with your b bit. I think you're right. I I'm not gonna try it, but I I think you might be onto something there.

30:51Yeah. I mean, we came down with Timothy Camp, and Timothy Camp has more guns than the average gun store. So we could all actually try this if you want to. But, anyway, you just take my word for it. If someone's shooting at you, it can be very difficult to do basic tasks. So cognitively, just being under stress, like, obviously, not that much stress in everyday life, that's gonna have a huge impact on you whether you're flying a plane or trying to cut a tooth. Yeah. And the thing to ask yourself is do a lot of dentists find dentistry stressful, particularly when it all starts going wrong? And the answer, of course, is yes. So when you're treating a patient and it's all smooth sailing, then fine. It's easy.

31:29Okay? And you learn you go to a course. Right? You go to a course and they go, right. We're gonna teach you how to do onlays for this new milling machine, and you cut one onlay prep. Like, you do a lecture in the morning. They go, right. This is how you break the contacts. Okay? So you'll sit there and break the contacts, and then you have morning tea because it was exhausting. Okay? And then you have, like, the next lecture is this is how you do occlusal reduction. And you go home and I mean, you go back to the sim lab and you do occlusal reduction. Now you've taken half a day to do two thirds of a prep. Okay? And now you're tired so you have to have afternoon tea. Okay? And then you finish off the prep. So after twelve or eight hours and three meals, you have now done successfully one prep on a plastic tooth in a patient with no saliva, no anesthetic, no gag reflex, and didn't say I hate you the moment they met you.

32:17And it cost you $9,000 And there was nothing about that that trained you to do that. So when we teach, we teach them in their office, and we ship the mannequins to their office because we want to follow human factor principles, which is under stress, you lose your ability. So you have to train people until it's automatic. Mhmm. Mhmm. So when they're stressed, they can still do it because they don't have to actually have to think. So if we're teaching all eyes, we want them, first of all, to be an environment that looks like the operatory, and there's nowhere like that except your operatory. And then number two, we want to do massive repetitions so that it becomes automatic. Now some dentists rebel against this because they're like, it's not intellectual and I'm, you know, I'm a big deal and why do I have to learn preps?

32:59Putting aside that every person who stands up on stage to teach high level dentistry still practices. Mhmm. How did they get those beautiful pictures of the prep? Because they still sit there on a Saturday sometimes to practice it. That's right. Then how do you simulate an actual workday? Well, you know, we don't generally stop for morning tea because we don't, you know, we're not shipping that with the mannequins. The dentist's sitting there in the class. They're in their same operatory as usual, same bur, same handpiece, same everything, same chair, same visuals. And they got one of our mannequins on the chair, and they join a class. And then we go, right. You're prep the crown. Now do it again. Now do it again.

33:35Do it 20 times. And after 20 times in a single day, most dentists improve their quality more than they lift their skills more than in all dental schools. Mhmm. Absolutely. You know, I thinking back to March 2020, you know, start of the pandemic. Obviously, that changed the world forever, but it changed your life forever. And I know that that was kind of I know you've already been teaching, but in terms of changing things over from live courses to, you know, this global digital platform, like, practically overnight.

34:06Like, walk walk us through, like, those those first few weeks, you know, when you and your brother started talking about this. Yeah. Well, originally, the teaching business was me. So I we were so successful at teaching traditional hands on. We were sold out twelve months in advance. Wow. So in in September 2019, the whole of 2020 was sold out, which was terrific in 2019. It was a terrible idea in 2020. So so I was on my second hands on class of the year already. We were so organized. It was, like, 03/05/2020. You know, we there's this virus thing. It's probably gonna be like swine flu all blow over in, like, six weeks, and everyone's over overcooking it. And we flew out of Sydney after this hands on course, and the border closed the next day.

34:54So you could no longer fly between states of Australia, and you could no longer fly into you could fly out of Australia, but if you tried to get back, had to go through two weeks of quarantine. Yeah. And you had to get special permission. So we basically and then dental practices were shut. So now my practice was shut. My I had, like, nearly two million dollars of presold courses that were shut that I couldn't deliver. I had been visiting different places around the world thinking I was ready to expand globally, and I was about to start building training facilities in multiple countries, but I was too I was too comfortable to go through the pain of scaling.

35:33So what happened was I I kinda had the desire to scale, but didn't really wanna go through the pain and suffering. Well, mean, that's a big deal. I mean, like, actually building, you know, clinics in different countries while you're doing all the things that you're doing at home. I mean, that would have been extraordinarily difficult. Yeah. I mean, probably not as difficult as what I'm doing now, but it it I'd already sourced an office space in in in Prague, in Colorado. I was gonna have, you know, training, etcetera, in the middle of America, one in the middle of Europe, one in Asia Pacific starting there. And so that was in my mind already, but, you know, I was earning a lot of money, and I was comfortable.

36:12And it's like, do I really wanna go through all this? It's like a lot of pain and suffering. So and then, of course, okay. Now I'm not comfortable. Okay. My office is shot, and it's hemorrhaging money. My teaching business is shut and hemorrhaging money. Yeah. I can't deliver the training. What the hell am I gonna do? And so I sat there for five days no. Seven days. From the March 5 until the twelfth of twelfth of March. Sat at home, everything's shut, felt sad and depressed and, you know, sitting there sucking my thumb. And then I said, okay. Enough of this. I'm either gonna go big or go home. So I went back to work, and I said, guys, I'm gonna go big or go home. Who's who wants who wants to be on this ride?

36:49And so we transitioned that day, basically, one week into COVID. We decided to disrupt our own business. That means you essentially kill your original business to pivot to a new innovation. Dude, that's that's a big deal. I mean, how how did you make that decision just one week into this this shutdown? I mean, what didn't part of you think, oh, you know what? It's all gonna open up again in a month or two, and we'll be back to business as usual? I mean, that's a big pivot in a short period of time. The way I saw it was if this shutdown continued because, obviously, you don't know how long it's gonna shut down. Mhmm. If this shutdown continues, I can't deliver all of the courses. I don't have the money to give back all the deposits.

37:34My practice, which normally subsidize like, I had two business that normally subsidize whichever one was doing great, we subsidize the other one. Sure. Both of them were done. So I basically sat there and thought, well, if I do nothing, I'll probably get bankrupt. So if I do something, you know, might go bankrupt or might not. So but I certainly wasn't gonna just sit there and do nothing. So, yeah, we decided right there one weekend, we will pivot this whole business to a cloud delivered training system somehow. And the first business plan, as you know, if you built, like, some sort of innovation business, The first business plan and the actual business, they know Yeah. This one's like a work of fiction.

38:13Okay. You pull this one off your backside, and you go, hey. It's a great idea. And then, like, you know, it's five years later, you go, oh my god. What was I thinking? So the first business plan was we would have those same three facilities, you know, Prague, Denver, Sydney, and we'd have all the theory online. And what happened was six months went by, and everything's still shut. So September. Right? Okay? And the cash cash balances go we raised some capital, but in hindsight so as you probably know, more venture capital gets deployed in the Bay Area Of California than the entire rest of the world combined.

38:50It's, like, over 50%. Yeah. Yeah. And, like, 90 85 or 90% of all venture capital in the entire world is deployed in America. Is that right? I didn't know it was that high. Yeah. It's like it's like crazy to think that and the venture capital market in the town of 4,000 people in Coastal Queensland is actually very small. Really? I'm so sorry. Yes. Shocking news. No way. So I I had no idea. I mean, I I didn't even know what a seed, a series a, series b, all this. I had no idea. I had no idea what a term sheet was. Never heard of one. Didn't know what a shareholders or stockholders agreement or bylaws. No idea about any of this. I said, we'll figure it out. We're gonna raise capital. I had a friend who'd raise capital.

39:40That was the total extent I knew of it. I knew the word, and then he'd done it, and it seemed pretty cool. What I learned later is the story people tell you and the reality are not always the same. So later, I like, I was gonna do Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Later on later on, he said it was so goddamn hard, and then, you know, it was, like, horrifically painful. You know, you get rejected a 100 times for every invest all this stuff. Okay. So Yeah. Right. I if I'd known all that, I might not have done it. So I was I was blissfully ignorant. I was just gonna say, hey, god. You didn't know that. You just kept going, man. Yes. Oh my god. Like, I can't tell all the stories on here, but oh. Yeah. You know, next time next time, we'll do this at, like, 09:00 in the evening, have a cocktail or two, you know, loosen up the tongue a little bit.

40:26So I wanna hear the rest of it too, man. Yeah. Maybe enough n d I NDAs of, like so anyway yeah. So that was the start. And, yeah, so by September, we're basically going, if we don't we can't travel still six months later. But people are starting to really clamor for refund. Of course. If we don't find a way to deliver this training, we are gonna go bankrupt for sure. So I'm not saying that everyone should, like, rely on nearly bankrupt to generate innovation. I'm just saying that What what the the necessity is the mother of innovation or something like that? Yeah. I mean, what you can you can make hard decisions when your back is against the wall that you would normally avoid. I hear you now. So we were basically sitting there.

41:17We said, look. We need to if if we posed the question, was actually my cofounder who posed this. If no one could ever travel again, how do you teach a hand skill based procedure? So that was the idea. We had this big workshop. We went through VR. Okay. Like, first everyone, as soon as you say this, oh, you're gonna have VR and haptic feedback. Yeah. So we thought of that. And then we decided most people wouldn't pay a million dollars for a course. So that probably No. I yeah. You you might be right. I I'm not sure there's a big market for that. But Yeah. I think price elasticity says most courses like tap out, you know, below a $100,000. So unless they're a degree. But it's a great idea anyway. So then, you know, we got all of these manufacturers from all over the world.

42:05We had, like, hundreds of samples just, like, from everywhere. Had them all laid out. We tried them all, and the quality versus the price and handpieces and blah blah blah. Within about two weeks, we had some type of system that we could manufacture. And then but that's that's not the hard part. The hard part is how do you actually make it work as a class? Yeah. Right. Like, you know, we started out with, like, cameras mounted on the head, but, like, you you can't get high enough quality unless it's a $5,000 camera. And the the trick with technology is it has to be good or better than the current thing, but it also has to be cheap. Like, you can't have like, if an iPhone was $10,000, you're not gonna use it.

42:47Yeah. And when iPhones came out, they were like I think they're more expensive than other things, but they weren't, like, hideously more expensive. So that's the balance is how do you deliver a great experience, really, really powerful, life changing skill development, and do it at a lower cost than current methods. And that's yeah. So that was September. We ran a course. We sold about a million dollars of that course in the first few months. No kidding. This is in 2020. This is still during the shutdown in Australia. Yeah. Took us two week it took us two months to develop this the platform, platform, like like the the the Manikin system, get it working. We had, like, a Frankenstein platform. We had, like, Zoom attached to HubSpot CRM attached to Loom.

43:31Like like, you just join about and people are doing it now. Like, I see people now trying to build online things. They're, like, doing the same thing. I go you go, like, it reminds me of the good old days. Join, like, three or four plat the problem with that is you don't own any of the data. Right. So what did you do? I mean, did you build your own platform? Yeah. Yeah. So Zach, I'm not really I'm not all that familiar with it. Tell me about that. That's that's a nice, huge endeavor. Yeah. So got the mannequins going. I got the courses going. We sold the education. We ran it, and then, like, it it was good. We realized that it could be more. So then I sort of tried to have one foot in the CEO role and one foot in clinical dentistry because I didn't wanna give up the safety of clinical dentistry.

44:15And then 2024 became obvious that I had to be a full time CEO. So I quit clinical dentistry 2024. Oh, okay. And then we worked out. We needed software that was our own, and we needed software that's purpose built for teaching procedures at global scale, and you can't buy any. No one makes it. So you what you do is you get, like, structured course program like Canvas. It's designed for universities, and then you get, you know, something like Kajabi. It's designed to run video libraries. And then you get a CRM to sit underneath it. It kinda, like, does all the single sign on and patient the customers' names. And then you get Loom, and you get, you know, Zoom. Got You all this stuff, and you just, like, join it all together.

44:58It doesn't work properly. You don't only need the data. Mhmm. So 2024, I said, okay. We need to build our own, and everyone was arming and arming and all. We should plan and, like like, people people find when people don't want to do something because it's scary, they very rarely say, I don't want to do this because it's scary. They will use words like, we're gonna follow a correct procedure. We need to do a strategic plan. Like, marketing person who came up with a strategic plan, it was always nonsense. People who just got in and started doing stuff always did better. And then you have all these excuses, and finally, I said, look. I want you to start, and I want this turned around in three months. And then they built it.

45:37Took Gong Who built it? Who did you work with to do that? We had we already had, like we had, like, four or five software engineers and stuff. Okay. Nice. So, like, they were building our Frankenstein platform, which we kinda build a little bit of software on the top of a CRM on the top of all this other stuff and all Frankenstein together. But you would never ever gonna turn that into a nice to use platform because we didn't own we owned like, it was and we couldn't control the cost. Mhmm. It's all APIs. Mhmm. So, yeah, we just said to the engineers, I want you to build our own platform. Now I had no idea about software. I didn't realize what you probably should do. You'll see a trend here. So I just said, I want this done by, like, March next year.

46:18Okay? So then he got in, it was really late. And then it was absolutely shit. Oh my god. So and then we tried to, like, make it a bit better. It was just such a struggle. Anyway, we have now got this massive reengineering project going on. Because, like and then having talked to software people, they say you should get your MVP running because the only way to know what it should be is to start using it. Minimal minimal viable product. Right? Yeah. For anybody who's been testing like one VP is. Yeah. Yeah. You build something so that you one. You may have plans for the iPhone 20, but start with the iPhone one so you can get up and running and then start to iterate after that. Yeah. I mean, iPhone one was a pretty sophisticated development.

47:04And to be fair, Apple had significantly more resources than us at the time. So but, yeah, like like, when Apple did the service thing, like, the Apple two e was probably, yeah, more equivalent. Or, actually, there was some stuff they did before that. So build something. Put it out there, maybe not with everyone. Put it out there with some customers, and then fix it because you won't know what to And if you try and get it perfect first run, it's so incredibly expensive and slow. Yeah. Done is better than perfect because you get it out there and get it going, and then you can make improvements from there as opposed to thinking you're doing it all perfectly. And then you get out there, and guess what? It's not perfect.

47:44You're still gonna have to, you know, iterate and and fix things. Yeah. So, like, we're doing tremendous you know, we're spending more per month. We're spending probably, like, five times per month what we were a year ago on the software. I I can see it speak, but we wouldn't know what to have fixed and built if we didn't have something there. Like, the software itself is, like, reasonable. It just a lot of that really basic engineering, I don't didn't know this about. But with software, software, there's there's a a lot lot of of very very boring boring stuff. Stuff. It's It's like like the foundation of your house. No one cares about it until your house goes down. So Right. It's like boring foundational stuff so that the pretty bit that you can see runs smoothly, doesn't get data leakage from one group to another, doesn't defy any regulations, doesn't crash, you know, stuff like that.

48:33So so that's going on now. And then the hardware engineering is also underway. So we we're now building Manic specifically for the use case, not reconfiguring ones that are designed for technical use case. We're building ones that are specifically designed for our usage where, you they're designed to sit on their chair, they're designed to connect to our software, And then over time, they're designed to give feedback without necessarily having a dentist in the loop.

48:59So yeah. You know what's cool about this to me, Lincoln, is just that, obviously, there's there's a lot of moving parts. There are a lot of things that you didn't know how to do, but you kinda figured it out. You've sort of been zigzagging to this point. But look, man. You launched the damn thing and sold a million dollars of education immediately, and you started using it successfully. And the exciting thing is looking at where you're at today and looking at where you're going from here. You know, you're not resting on your laurels saying, hey. We got something that's working. You know, dentists love it. DSOs love it. No, man. It's good, but it can be better and it's going to be better. And that I mean, I yeah.

49:34Well, like, we're about to launch new mannequin, new software, and a whole bunch of new courses that are designed just for DSOs. I mean, our DSO like, May, June May, June this year, we were up 1100% on last year. Yeah. Eleven eleven times the revenue. So, I mean, obviously, to be fair, before we went to Daikama last year, our DSO revenue was pretty small. But Mhmm. But nonetheless, like, DSO revenue or corporate revenue, which is really our competitive edge is we do best in scale dentistry. Well, look I can't compete if you wanna run like a thing in your house with wine, I can't compete with that. Hey, man. Like, don't don't knock it. Don't knock it till you try it. You never know. Yeah. Next time next time, we'll have a mannequin here, and we'll, you know, we'll we'll play around with that a little bit.

50:21Yeah. It'd be like, Jim and me holding the mannequin up feeding the client. No. I mean, I I look at this though and, you I think you hit the nail on the head. I mean, obviously, anytime you have a dentist, you know, buy something or sign up for something, it's awesome. And it's great. You can create value. Can do better work and all that sort of thing. And so every dentist in the world should be signing up and taking courses and doing this. But when you wanna scale quickly as a business, it's great to have DSOs that are adding a 100 or 500 or a thousand practices or 2,000 dentists or whatever it is. That's amazing. But to your point, you are also able to iterate more quickly. You're able to test different things out and pivot more quickly.

51:00And by the way, DSOs are more business minded than the average dentist out there. So they see that and they say, woah. You're guaranteeing $100 per hour in increased, you know, production? Holy crap. You start to look at that from an enterprise value standpoint, and those numbers are just massive. So why wouldn't any group sign up with you? I mean, it's just it's it's inevitable. Yeah. And and also they can't scale training. So, like, there's a couple things that the internal team need to focus on really strongly because we see, like, we see inside seventeen, eighteen of the world's biggest DSOs now. And so we actually get very strong visibility, maybe as much or more than anyone else of what's actually happening both at the C Suite and at the actual base level because we see the dentist in their office, and we also see the c suite, what they're saying.

51:52And there's you know, sometimes they're aligned and quite frequently, there's a bit of a mismatch between the two. Oh my god. Tell me about it. And I spent a year in that that middle ground, you know, trying to translate what the c suite is saying to the boots on the ground. And they're like, what the hell are they even talking about? Why are they doing this to us? Whereas that they have no idea what they're talking about. And, you know, to be in the middle of that and try to translate for both sides is not an easy task, is it? No. It's I think that what's interesting is I mean, we help we help with that. It's not our core business to help operationally, but actually, go back to something you said earlier.

52:29You said earlier, anyone that if they sell something, buy something. It is true. And we we didn't realize this until we were pitching to invest and we thought, oh, yeah. Actually, you can't sell anything in dentistry without training. We actually sit at the center of financial performance, implementation of any new procedure, equipment, or consumable, patient outcomes, and dentist income and satisfaction. So it's a pretty powerful position sitting there. Like, DSOs are not the majority of practices yet, but the consolidation of single dental offices into large dental groups is the fastest growing area of health care in the world right now.

53:11Is nothing growing by staff. 3030% right now ish? It's about it depends on the country. It's about 38%, but it's growing 17% compounding annual growth. Wow. So there's nothing in the world growing like DSOs. Mhmm. What this means is that right now, you you have a group that had, like, 50 practices last year, now they have a 120. And suddenly, they need to go from training, you know, a 120 dentists to training 340. Or where even if you break them into cohorts of 50, where do you send 50 dentists? There's not there's not really a training organization, any of the old institutes. Yeah. They don't they can't take that volume of people, and also, it's too expensive. Like, no one wants to like, it's not just too expensive.

53:58It's too much of a pain. Like, you basically need a full time travel agent just to deal with the logistics. Of course. And it I mean, it's gonna cost millions of dollars to do all of that. You know? And and that's that's a tough pill to swallow at scale. Yeah. And and also, it's worse because none of the big institutes were built to look after large numbers of dentists employed by a single group that has its own particular characteristics. Mhmm. So they were built for individual dentists and individual officers who have a different mindset and particularly owners who have a lot of influence over the office. So they were built for a different market. Mhmm. And they can't scale, and they're expensive. And worst of all, people who send their dentist to them, the dentist come back and say, didn't get a result.

54:44Right. The CFO saw no difference. And so you you know, as you pointed out, they're sophistic they're financially sophisticated. Mhmm. And they yes. They're not getting a result. They don't spend the money. Particularly, you got a private equity who wants to cut costs everywhere. Yeah. Hey. You know, well, we got this line. We spent, you know, a million bucks on it last year, and it made no difference to the income. So hard to justify that again. Whereas our focus on not just our focus is on the outcome, not on the process. So education is a process. We're not interested in the process. We're interested in the in the outcome. And so And, you know, I did some research, leading up to this just because I wanted to know more about what you're doing and, you know, hopefully, ask better questions.

55:31But one of the the numbers that I stumbled upon was it's like, I think, $5,500 or something like that, but a $100 an hour guaranteed in increased production. I mean, you're talking about, like, making that up within a couple of weeks. You know? Whatever the investment is, you've just crossed that threshold within a couple of weeks. And after that, it's all just profit and better care and better quality of life for everybody. I mean, that's extraordinary. There's not many things you can invest in where you get paid back within a couple of weeks and then continue to grow and make more money beyond that. Yeah. I mean, it takes a little bit of time to ramp up. We guarantee a $100 an hour, like, on it's on one product.

56:11So the dental associate productivity pass up course. Mhmm. They've got enough data on the other courses that we're rolling out. Like, we're rolling out endo. We're rolling out basic extractions and surgery. We're rolling out a few other things. But Mhmm. We yeah. We're rolling those things out. But the one that we actually have the data on where we can guarantee it is this one. And the DAP course, we call it. And it takes we guarantee the $100 an hour uplift within a hundred and twenty days. Okay. The lowest return on investment we've got on that course so far is 22 times in the first year. It's absolutely extraordinary. Tell tell me about that. What is that program? The highest return on investment we've got is 51 times.

56:53Between twenty two and fifty one times. What the hell else can you do in this world and get that kind of return on investment? That's incredible. Yeah. I don't I don't think much. So there's there's four parts to that. And remember that we refine this. I think you and I were talking before we started this. We iterate very quickly because we're working with so many groups. Mhmm. We can test something. And it's not just like we're working with more large DSOs than anyone else, but we're also running multiple cohorts at different stages. You know, like, we ran last year a 165 hands on courses. In the next year, we'll run 350 hands on courses. She says it's a course a day. Unbelievable. Seven a weekend. So across like, you know, you might be running, like, five across America and one in Europe or something.

57:42Mhmm. Sure. Don't even know now. I have to actually look it up. I don't because I'm not teaching them quite regularly. It's nice to have, you know, a team that you can rely on to to do those things as you continue to travel and and and grow the business. Yeah. So we we can test things and go, oh, we think that could work better if we do this. So then we can, like, two weeks later, we're starting a new thing so we can test it on the next cohort. We go, oh, no. That was terrible. Okay. Let's go back to this other thing. And so you just constantly refine. So we're probably refining the training at about 20 or 30 times the speed of anyone else just because this the number of repetitions we we are running of the training.

58:19But the thing that with the DAPA course, which is suitable for a DSO that's got a lot of general dentists who particularly younger ones. It starts out with communication. We call it rapid efficient treatment planning. It's basically a cross between a psychology course for dentists and how to sell and also some clinical stuff. It's like real world. The real world is not just one thing. The real world is, you know, you have to have clinical knowledge, you have to have decision making, have to have leadership, you have to have communication skills, you have to deal with all of your psychological weirdness that you develop in dental school and before, and then also be able to talk about money. Mhmm. That's So what real world drink planning is, and that's why most courses don't fix it because they focus on the clinical bit Mhmm.

59:00Or they focus on the communication bit. They don't focus on the clinical, the communication, how to make a decision when you're not sure, how to look someone in the eye and say that'll cost $27,000 without telling you know, and and that's the that's the thing about dentistry.

59:15I mean, there's so many complex skill sets that you really have to master in order to truly be successful and provide great care and run a a great business and all that sort of thing. And, unfortunately, we don't really learn most of those skills in dental school. And, and so to have access to a program and a process where you can kinda get all of that and not like you can get this and then get this and get this. You get it all together combined into one program, and I think that's that's brilliant. Love it. Yeah. Yeah. So we the DAPA course, we run that two days of treatment planning. That's the only thing that we run globally that's in person. Mhmm. Because it's not that expensive to run a seminar style workshop.

59:54We have enough different teachers around the world that we can scale that pretty easily, and you can't teach body language and voice control and how to look someone in the eye online. It's impossible. So so starts with that. Then we do crown prep training just on back teeth, and we do cosmetic anterior crowns on front teeth. So it's, four days of that. And then we do monthly check-in calls that run for twelve months because we found dentistry is interesting in every other many other professions. Like, I got this actually got this idea from the I know dentists never wanna be like car salespeople, but my next door neighbor is the general manager of a massive car dealership. He's saying, yeah. We do, like, weekly training.

1:00:36I go, wow. That's incredible. Like, we teach a dentist communication skills once and expect them to be good for the rest of their life. And anyone who's ever done any sort of sales training, and dentists sell whether they think they do or not Right. Gets constant mentoring and training on this, like, weekly. Yeah. So with this now, we build in twelve months of monthly check ins. Mhmm. And we're also just about to release within the platform weekly, like, motivational weekly snippets, you know, like, minutes just to remind you of some of the key things that we talk. Mhmm. So this is a lot more than just online education. I mean, you you're developing a whole community here. We're developing a community, though.

1:01:19Like, obviously, it we we go to a group and go, do you want this? It's gonna generate these results. So it becomes a subscription. And we when we do that, the results are extraordinary. But that that's the and then on top of that, we work very closely with the groups on the change management process of implementing this. Because if you don't implement it right, it will never work. So if if people have ever run education that didn't work, because the change management is not right. The skills training is not right. It's not combined with communication skills and a whole bunch of other things. And we have learned that because we are guaranteeing a result, And so if we're not getting results you know? And then on top of that, we go into the group and constantly check-in with all the dentists, and that provides us operational insights, and we collate all that intelligence and feed it back to the c suite and go, by the way, did you know in clinic twenty seven, Mhmm.

1:02:11They haven't had a dental assistant for the dentist for the last two weeks, and that's probably why your production's down. Man. Yeah. It and it's funny. It's it's interesting how sometimes you can deliver that news in. They don't do anything about it anyway. But if they don't have that data, if they don't understand what's going on, you know, then they're not likely to do anything about it. So you're not just getting them trained up. You're giving them some of those operational insights that they may be a little bit far away from and and may not have known what's really going on. Yeah. I think that often they don't know. Mhmm. Like, they often can fix these things pretty quickly once we tell them. Sure.

1:02:44Because, obviously, we go we're not gonna do a guarantee on the production if you don't provide your dentist with a dental assistant. So Mhmm. Reason why your production. What I've learned from this process is that when you wanna fix practices in a DSO, you don't fix all the practices at once. You just, like, fix one. Just get one going nicely, then do the next one and the next one. Because when you try and fix everything a little bit all the time, like with change management, if you implement everything a little bit all the time across everything, you get zero result at all. Yeah. So you wanna concentrate your focus on that one, get proof of concept. Well and then you get buy in from all the other constituents.

1:03:25Yeah. So in technology adoption, they call it the wedge. Mhmm. So there's actually no difference between viral technology adoption and managing a DSL at scale. It's the same thing. How do you get a whole bunch of people to adopt something? It's a it's an adoption curve. So adoption curves tend to be flat until they hit fifteen, eighteen percent, and then they go vertical, and then they slow off at 85%. So, like, DSOs are an adoption curve. So DSOs are growing like crazy because it's more than 15% and less than 85%. Once DSOs get to 85% of the market, they'll really slow down. So anyone who wants to build one, you've got between now at 38% until the time it hits about 70%, and then it's gonna get hard. So Yeah.

1:04:05I was gonna say, I think I think we'll get to about 70%. I think beyond that, it's gonna be it's gonna be tough because you got you've got dentists who have either dug in their heels. There's no way I'm ever gonna be a part of that or just have a lot of practices that aren't aren't attractive. You know, they're not attractive purchases. So 'll be interesting to see what happens when we get to that, you know, 75%, and where do they go from there? And then is it all vertical growth because you don't have more acquisitions to make? Yeah. I mean, one of the things that's interesting is that organic growth is often the most technically difficult to achieve, but it's by far the most profitable. Oh, absolutely.

1:04:38And that's what you're providing, you know, exactly the right product and service at exactly the right time. That's that's pretty cool, man. I'm really I'm really excited for you having having done what you've done to this point and looking ahead. And, you know, I I have no doubt what you'll continue to to change and improve upon. Yeah. Look. To be honest, Jim, it's also fun. Like, I I wouldn't say it was fun. It wasn't fun for some years. Like, actually it's like dentistry. So, you know, when you start out as a dentist, it's not actually that fun because you're hopeless and your patients are nasty and they can't afford it. You get the worst patients. Like, your first year, you get, like, the lady who comes in and says the last 27 dentures when they go she has a bag of dentures, and you're like a 23 year old.

1:05:19You wouldn't know a denture if it hit you in the face. And you go, oh, yeah. And you puff your chest out, and, you know, 150 adjustments later Oh, God. What a nightmare. What a nightmare. Seriously, man. I I think I think about four years out of dental school is when I decide, you know what? There's a lot of other stuff I enjoy doing a lot more, and dentures is gonna go to my associates. So they they can be really good at that, and they don't have to think about it anymore. Yeah. I mean, dentures are tough at the price point. They're mostly done at. Yeah. You wanna if wanna, like, enjoy dentures, you gotta, like, move outside of insurance. You just gotta keep things thousand dollars an arch, and you're gonna be really damn good at it.

1:05:57Right? Yeah. You increase the price of most most people who say I don't like a procedure, you go, do you not like the procedure? You just don't like the price. Like Yeah. You go, I don't like doing I don't like doing distal occlusal restorations on an upper left second molar. Okay. But what if it was $850? Oh, well, then I like it. Okay. So No. It when I used to, I used to teach with David Hornbrook back in the day, one of the things that we really taught was, look, charge a fee that means that you will never ever need to compromise ever. It means that you're going to be happy with whatever you're bringing in for the time that this procedure takes. And guess what? If you have to redo it, you're not gonna complain about it.

1:06:38And and if you have a difficult patient, you're not gonna complain about it because your fee is at a point where, you know, you can do your best work and not have any regrets about it. Yeah. No regrets. But the the the difficulty with that in scale dentistry is that the bigger you get, the closer you must become to average. K? Wait. Like, what about that? Yeah. The average is for you know, average is a standard deviation. Okay? It's like the middle of the standard deviation is, you know, middle of the bell curve is the average, and then you got a standard deviation and more standard. Okay? So if you're a single office, it's very easy to be one or two standard deviations above everyone else in cost. Sure.

1:07:19But if you have a thousand offices like that, you are now the average cost. Mhmm. Okay? Or if you got 10,000 offices, how many offices? So you got a 100,000 offices, now you are the average cost of the procedure. Now if you have an average cost of a procedure that's very high across the whole nation, guess what you can do to immediately grab massive market share? Drop the price. So if you have the average price, first of all, if you move it up, now it's like two standard deviation, but you're so big. You are now the average. So now that's the middle of the belt, and there's a lot of room below that to come in and compete. And so at at an individual office level, that works because you can be an individual, very high performing office.

1:08:03Yeah. But it doesn't work at scale because you actually just can't be there's nowhere in life where someone scales to so big that they start to affect the average Yeah. With Right. Well, you can't be above average cost when you are the average. You know, what's what's interesting about this conversation and and the direction it's going in, I mean, you're really talking about adjusting your own fee schedules, which indicates your fee for service. You're not signed up to every, you know, PPO plan out there and everything like that. And I'll say this, my entire career, I was fee for service. And I used to say, back to your car car salesman thing, I used to say, I would rather sell used cars than give 40% every dollar I make to an insurance company.

1:08:48I mean, screw that. I mean, talk about a situation where I'm feel undervalued and feel like I'm not, producing enough, not making enough, feel like I don't have enough time with patients and all that sort of thing. You know, that's really one of the things that I teach. It's it's really about fee for service practice and what what that what you need to do to actually do that successfully and then the freedom it gives you to set your own fees and to, you know, be autonomous in terms of how you run your business.

1:09:14So I was fee for service too. Mhmm. So I understand that world of, like, completely independent of any insurance fees. But I also know that if I wanted to have 4,000 offices Yeah. I'm probably gonna struggle to maintain that level of ideological purity because it's just hard. And also, I mean, yeah, if you look across America, there are very high end businesses for sure. Mhmm. Like, America has very wide standard deviations of everything. This is like when you when you live outside of America, no one really like like, people go Americans are dumb because they don't know about the rest of world. But also, the rest of world is kinda dumb because most actually people outside of America don't understand America at all.

1:09:57Yeah. I mean, you got a bell curve there too. You know? You've got you have both extremes, you got most of us somewhere in the middle. I agree. Yeah. But I think, like, in Australia, the bell curve is not stretched as much. Mhmm. Like, an example of that is, yeah, in America, you can have quite poor people, and there's, like there's also a particular lower middle class section of the population that really have a bad, Like, they're not poor enough to get any Medicaid and stuff, and they're not rich enough to afford good insurance.

1:10:26And they're in this, like, terrible dead zone between those two where it's awful. And if I was going to be in that position, I'd rather live in a lot of other countries in America. It's true. But you also have, like, a good example is looking at the yachts at Palm Beach. You get a distorted view because yeah. That's not even that that yacht's not that big. And then you go, holy hell. That that yacht's like 75 feet long. It just doesn't look big because the one behind it's a 110 feet. Okay? And you you it has, like or, like, you drive along next to John Wayne Airport. It's like a mile of private jets. Right. It's like like, it's so many g six fifties that you don't even under like, you don't sit there and go, that's actually, like, a massive plane to drive around privately, but there's just, like, hundreds of them.

1:11:13Right. So you get this distorted view that private jets are kinda normal, and everyone has one, which is not true. So that's what I mean by there's a big standard deviation. Like Sure. Like, you don't have the just incredible variation in many other countries. Yeah. Like, you have you have have entire segments of the population that are devoted to jacked up pickup trucks driving through mud. They'd like there's like probably hundreds of millions of dollars of sponsorship that go into somewhere in Southern state driving a jacked up pickup truck through the mud with beer or something. Like like, it's a whole industry. Sure. Yeah. Just for one thing. It's crazy. It's crazy. It's great. I love it. You know, when you when you look at, like, I mean, what what you're doing, like, this rapid effective treatment planning, like, is that why is this such a problem for so many dentists?

1:12:08I mean, like, you could be out for ten, fifteen, twenty years and still have trouble treatment planning. Like, why is that? And what what do you do differently that makes, you know, makes it easy for them to remove the needle? It's difficult because it's not a simple it's a simple problem, but it's not an easy one. Okay? Like, it's simple that if you act with confidence, you communicate clearly, you don't get weird about the money, people will just say yes to stuff. Very good. Because to do that, you have to have you can't sell procedures you can't do. So you kinda have to have clinical ability. But you can't get good at stuff if you can't sell it. So you're kinda trapped in this, like, weird zone where you can't sell it because you're no good at talking about it, and you're not good at talking about it because you can't sell it.

1:12:50So that that's problem number one. Problem number two, dentists have the type of people who are drawn to dentistry. A large proportion of dentists are neurodivergent, so higher than the average population. I think we're very It probably includes me. I haven't been diagnosed. I have as well. Yep. So that's one of it. And then secondly, you know, the way we're taught to get into dental school is, like, through fear of failure, perfectionism, get good marks, never make an a minus. Mhmm. So that teaches you a lot of skills that are bad for being a dentist, but good for getting into dentistry. Most dentists have all these psychological barriers fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of money, fear of getting sued, fear of blah blah blah.

1:13:31All these fears and they don't So know they have the reason it's such a difficult thing to teach is because you need to understand the psychology of dentists. You actually need to understand the procedures, so you have to be multidisciplinary. You have to understand the business side. You have to understand how to talk about money. You need to understand leadership skills. There's so many components to this that are not easy or obvious. It's interesting. Some people have, like, certain pieces of that, you know, or are better at that than others. But but we all have blind spots, we all have shortcomings. And so to standardize that, to to teach that and train that is I mean, I think that we can all benefit from that to some degree.

1:14:08Yeah. I mean, rapid efficient treatment planning is it doesn't matter how advanced the dentist is. They actually, the more advanced the dentist is, the bigger the uplift from that particular course. Yeah. So, like, you know, have one dentist who went from, like, £1,200 an hour in The UK to, like, £3,500. It's like you went from $1,500 per hour to, like, over $4,000 an hour. Well, yeah, the skill set and the demand was there. You just had to figure out how to, you know, turn the knob and, you know, open up the floodgates. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So the this is why, like, most of the time, we can help train dentists within a group much more effective internal people because this is, like, twenty years of cumulative trial and error on how do you get a dentist to perform.

1:14:53Mhmm. We started running courses in Whistler Blackcomb on implants and cosmetics in 2006. So we've been you know, myself and my companies have been associated with performance based training Good. For twenty years across and because I was in Australia, was always focused internationally. So I've been working internationally in performance based training for twenty years. So tell me this. I mean, I my my real experience is with American American dentists, obviously, and a little bit with foreign dentists. But how is it different? What's the mentality like here for a dentist versus somebody in Australia or somebody in Europe? I mean, the same concepts apply across the board, but in terms of what maybe I have as an American dentist than a dentist London doesn't have or or vice versa?

1:15:46I think there's three big differences with American dentists. So American dentists are all older when they graduate, and they're more commercially minded because they all graduate with a massive loan. Yeah. So most countries in the world, you either graduate with a much smaller loan, like a quarter the size, or you graduate with no loan at all. So you'll see in say, an example would be if you go online, you'll see some European dentists, and it's like they're an artist. Mhmm. Like, you just go, how like how did you develop such artistic dental school? It's because they graduated with no debt. Like, when you graduate in America, if you don't make money, you're gonna go bankrupt basically immediately.

1:16:21As we discussed earlier, that's a very motivating factor. That's and you can't discharge you can't discharge student debt through bankruptcy. Mhmm. Mhmm. It's like, it's not even just that you go bankrupt. You go bankrupt, you still got debt. So so that's the first thing is American debtors are more mature when they graduate. They're often married, not always, but often, much more commonly than other countries because they're at least you know, a dental degree in most countries is five years. Here, it's four years, but after you've done three or four years of college, so you're eight years in, so you're older. You're more mature. You're more commercially minded. The flip side is you have less ability to learn high level skill sets.

1:17:02I mean, like elegant cosmetics and the highest level of soft tissue manipulation running. You it's harder to learn that because you have to make money. Yeah. Yeah. You can't take the time to just really obsess over every little detail. And, yeah, I I can see that. Yeah. And then ideologically, American dentists are more willing to do procedures. So it's almost like dentistry is a little bit like the developer versus the environmentalist. Okay? The environmentalist wants nothing built ever because they're just like nature. Okay? The developer doesn't see a forest that wouldn't look better as a 10 story building. Okay? And so now the reason this is interesting is if you go to and what's funny about this is we often say the Europeans as being more environmental, but they've also more heavily developed their nations than America.

1:17:56Like, I was just in Yellowstone. The Grand Tetons, Mhmm. Zero development there. Because there's like a road about 20 miles away, and that's it. If you're on the Coast Of California, there's certain areas like Carmel And Big Sur National Park where there is no development except the road. Mhmm. So when you're on that area, you go, wow. This is natural. It's beautiful. Just the road. That's it. Like, minimally invasive development. Mhmm. But then when you're on the Amalfi Coast, no one sits there and goes, I hate this. It should all be bulldozed and turned back to nature. The reason the Amalfi Coast is beautiful is it's fully developed, like, all the way up the cliffside. Yeah. It's beautiful. Spectacular. Oh, man.

1:18:35Yeah. So dentistry often is, like, very ideological where it's, you know, I think teeth should never be developed because I'm an an environmentalist, you know, or I every you know, I never saw a set of teeth that didn't look better with 38 veneers.

1:18:52And the truth is it depends on the customer of it and that somewhere in you know, it depends on the patient. Like, some patients, I'm gonna veneer all their teeth even though there's not much wrong with them because that particular patient, it's the right thing for them for a whole bunch of reasons. And another patient with exactly the same teeth, I'm gonna do nothing at all because Yeah. It's not. So that's the biggest difference. American dentists are more willing to do more stuff earlier in their life, but it takes longer to build. If you want to do the highest level of elegant aesthetics, it's often harder to learn that as early because you gotta make money. Otherwise, you gotta cut pet your laps.

1:19:28So Hey. Let's let's pivot into AI a little bit. You know, I mean, obviously, everybody's got a new AI platform. Everybody's doing something, and there are a lot of really amazing things going on. And, of course, competition, I think, lends itself to greater advances, and and every platform just gets better and better and better. So, like, when you look at some of these AI things out there, what do you think what are the things that genuinely, like, improve clinical care versus the things that you think, man, Dennis better, like, kinda watch out or maybe take a step back, be more cautious about?

1:19:59Yeah. So there's, like, real three there's really three stages in generating revenue in a practice. There's, like, the funnel, which is, like, lead generation, lead capture, and bringing the patient in the door. Okay? Then you've got post care, follow-up, recall, making sure we don't lose it, making sure we actually get paid revenue cycle management. That's the back end. So you got front end and the back end. You got the funnel leading in, and you got the jet exhaust out the back end. In the middle, like in the throat of the rocket or the, you know, core of the jet or the bottleneck, you have clinical delivery. Mhmm. You know? So the clinical delivery is the choke point because no revenue is generated unless clinical services are delivered.

1:20:37So the hygienist and the dentist are the biggest choke point. So Mhmm. So when you wanna think about AI, the first thing you wanna think about is which part of these three steps is the AI? Is it delivering on the front end, like driving air into the jet engine, or is it delivering on the back end, which is, you know, the exhaust coming out, or is it helping the dentist at the choke point? Now if the operations of your business, the two most important things for generating revenue is morale, that's number one. Because the single biggest way to kill a DSO of any size is dentist churn. So that's Absolutely. If you lose a dentist, you lose, like, a 150 to $400,000 to your EBITDA that year. So thing number one is, are your basics working?

1:21:25So that means your clinics work. They have functioning equipment. The dentist, the the this team are well trained. You have sufficient staff. The phone gets answered, all of that. Like, there's not water leaking through the roof. I actually like, I know a clinic that had a mouse plague. Like, you can't get production when there's, like, mice running everywhere, you gotta shut the practice down and, like so, like, no mice, no leaks in the roof. You actually have dental equipment in your dental office. The basics. And you have dentists who have high morale and are proud to work there. Yep. If you have those two things if you don't have those things and you add AI, you will make the AI look bad. Yes. Yes. Thank you.

1:22:10Exactly. It uncovers what you are. And it makes you more of whatever that is, I think, in a lot of ways. Yeah. Like, what's the point of pushing more air in the front of a jet engine that's broken? Like Like, you gotta have the engine spinning, then you can push more air in. So, like, pushing more leads into often, if the people are not generating decent treatment plans or they're not generating sufficiently high acceptance rates Mhmm. Then the then the treatment plans like, doing all this marketing AI lead capture phone systems, all this stuff. Basically, what you're trying to do is going out out treatment, our revenue accepted is so poor, we just gotta try and push more patients in so that they can have a terrible acceptance rate of more people.

1:22:59And nothing worse than that to create I mean, talk about creating bad morale when you've got, like, a thousand new patients coming in and you're converting very few. So you're increasing your your stress and the burden on the front office, on the clinical team while converting even less. And so there's no better way to, you know, piss people off and make people not wanna work there than all that. Yeah. So so if you have those two parts running and we're running a whole workshop on this at Daikama. I don't know whether this will come out before then. It'll probably come out after. But there's a whole workshop that I'm running with the chief medical officer of Colosseum, Fazila Repani. And Oh, excellent.

1:23:37She's sharp. Yeah. And so we will run this workshop on, like, what of all the things in your business, what are the one or two things that you can focus on that will generate the biggest returns? They are always, do your clinics work operationally, and do your dentist have morale, and are they proud to work there? If that's a yes, then adding Pearl AI or Overjet or Vidyo, they will make a huge difference. Okay? If you add something like, you know, Patient Prism on the front end to improve the quality or putting in a, you know, AI driven call center so that you can have very highly trained people, that will be excellent.

1:24:16But you'll notice there's, like, still highly trained people. And then you put revenue cycle management, you know, Google review capture, all these AI tools. AI tools apply applied to a well functioning group dramatically enhance results. Mhmm. Absolutely. Tools applied to a broken group make the AI look bad. Interesting. So I I know you just you partnered with Pearl not too long ago. What what does that partnership make possible for you now with with what you're doing moving forward? Chief dental officer of Pearl came to one of our rapid efficient training plannings, which, you know, we're talking about case acceptance for two days. Mhmm. Yeah. Then she says she says, wow. This is amazing. Right? Because the thing is, people often the AI shows some things, and then they kinda they don't know how to talk about it.

1:25:00So you still like, it's excellent to have tools to help visualize things for the patient. Yeah. You still need like, you know, I love photographs. I love AI. You know, the AI putting in, the little pink dots and stuff. They roll over things. I love the cone beams, the, you know, implant planning tools, all that You know? The three d design software that can show them the smile before and after in about two minutes of the scan. All great. But you could have two dentists and two hygienists and two treatment coordinators with the same pictures, and one of them might generate five times as much work. Right. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Isn't that interesting? I mean, that just goes back to your point where I mean, give give somebody all of the tools in the world.

1:25:44But if they don't have the skill sets to really utilize them, then it's just kind of a a waste a waste of everybody's time and money. Yeah. And so one of the things what's happening to us now is a lot of vendors, so people who manufacture products, manufacture implants tools, all sorts of things, and lots of SaaS products and lots of all sorts of things are coming to us.

1:26:06You know, consumable manufacturers coming to us and going, can you help us build training to improve the app? Like, basically, improve the cost effectiveness of our programs. And Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, the total addressable market on our business is about a $125,000,000,000. So, you know, we are we are a long the way. Engine. It's like, what do you want driving in and what do you want coming out? You're the damn engine. And without the engine working at high efficiency, then the rest of it just it's it's pointless. Yeah. Yeah. I think that you know, I'm very excited for our business. Like, because Mhmm. We there's just so many like, when you just come it's a platform for teaching a skill, and teaching skills at large scale is just such a hugely effective thing.

1:26:53It's not even like we started with dentists. You know? People now want us to train their dental assistants, us to train the hygienists, want us train the treatment coordinates. I got an orthodontic group. They said, we just want you to train every level of case acceptance. Yeah. So I've built, like, this new program. I haven't I haven't decided on names like the case acceptance king or some nonsense, but it will be like a comprehensive case acceptance. Not even training, just like constant mentoring package subscription where we deal with, you know, the people on the phones, the people at front office, the Yep. Treatment coordinators, the dental assistants, the hygienists, the the dentists themselves, like, level of that.

1:27:30Yeah. I haven't worked out what the return on investment will be because orthodontics is different. Like orthodontics, the ticket size is the same. It's just the case acceptance is different. Mhmm. But, yeah, I think I think we can we'll be able make big difference. Team is is such a big part of the process. You know, the dentist can be phenomenal, but if you have breaks in that chain of communication and that patient experience, well, guess what? Things things aren't gonna happen then either. And so having a team that's really cohesive and has some of those same skills and everybody's in a position to succeed and provide the patient what they need, you know, then you can you can really take off. So, you know, when I look at that, the whole the thing you said, what, a $125,000,000,000 market?

1:28:12Well, hey, man. There are, like, 4,000,000 4,600,000 dentists around the world. I mean, Ripe Global is in a position to to help, you know, the majority of those. I mean, you know, to take that to scale, that's a that's a crazy thing. You're gonna have to hire a few extra people, I think. But I I know I think we might we might end up with several thousand at some point. But the I know. Right? Right? I mean, you've gotta you already have a team around the world. I mean, you've got clinicians around the world teaching these courses every weekend, which is extraordinary. Yeah. I mean, like, also, we have we have over one million hours of video training data of dentists being trying to do procedures. I don't think anyone else has even comes close to that.

1:28:54So Mhmm. You know, like, if you want to build a machine learning model on how yeah. On feedback on whatever, we have we have huge ads data. So Mhmm. The but also, like, you know, I've had requests from other health care verticals. I'm building the same thing so that I don't have the I don't yet have the bandwidth. Yeah. You know, where our wedge is DSOs. We should nail DSOs, you know, then we will move to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. Mhmm. And we'll move outside of dentistry, and then we'll probably move outside of health care. And so that the wedge right now you know? And we like, interestingly, investors are coming more and more frequently. Like, know, I used to have to beg for investors, and now I get, like, both the little ones and then the investment bankers and the, you know, private equity all circling like vultures.

1:29:42I'm not ready Of course. Not ready for a series a. We're just finishing off our see that the, you know, the series a will probably come later this year or early next year. Yeah, they're all they're all circling already. I've got multiple companies going, hey. When you're ready, come and talk to us. You know, we wanna put a check-in, you know, 5,000,000 in the next whatever. I mean, you get a I think you have a multibillion dollar future, and, you know, it's a good problem to have to have people interested in being a part of that future. You know, when you look at recruiting, like, educators around the world, like, what are the biggest qualities you look for in them beyond just, like, credentials? Like, what are you what are you looking for in an educator?

1:30:22We actually don't. We often don't look at credentials. Like, even the teacher specialist procedure Mhmm. We're less interested in so the number one thing is there's a there's a type of character in some people where you can just go, that person has the courage to stand up in front of people and promote excellence, promote quality, promote dentistry, and promote themselves.

1:30:45They have to be willing to promote themselves because you can't actually help people if you're not willing to be known. Because that's number one is is cut this level of ambition, we can kinda pick it up. I Mhmm. Kinda know when I see it. You have to be good speakers. We can train public speaking, but if you don't wanna be a good public speaker, I can't help you because speaking to camera is even more difficult than speaking to an audience. I agree. 100%. Yeah. And then a willingness to fail and be constant get constant grinding feedback. Like, being a teacher is difficult. You know? Being a teacher when you start is easy, but then later on in life, when you stand up in front of an audience and then someone comes up and says your presentation was shit, like, that's pretty painful.

1:31:25So the ability to dust yourself off and go again in teaching is pretty hard. But it's some point someone will tell you that you're a terrible teacher, and that's tough to get over. So Yeah. Yeah. They're the things like we want them generally young and ambitious, basically. If you're young and ambitious and you're willing to learn, that's number one thing. If you're a traditional teacher, we find that if someone's been teaching with traditional methods for twenty years, it can be pretty hard to retrain them. Yeah. Not impossible. No. Absolutely. I mean, look, you you develop certain methodologies and, you know, philosophies that that work for a long period of time. But, you things change. Things change over the years, and, it's it's good to have a fresh perspective and kinda be up to date on all of the latest and greatest things.

1:32:11And and looking at that, I mean, like, this international community you've built, you've gotta be picking up, like, little nuances and different things in in different countries in different places. Right? I mean, like, even Colosseum. They're doing some incredible things, I know, across Europe. I I mean, what what are you learning? What surprised you the most from building this international community? Two things that surprised you. First one is when you deal with scale, it's just it's a completely different problem than dealing with an individual dentist. So that's the first thing. That the second thing there's a few things. Like, American dentists are richer ahead of spending power that's significantly ahead of almost all of the rest of the world, and it takes a while to get used to that.

1:32:53So if you're an American dentist, they'll all carry on like they're poor because they had student debt. The average American dentist can spend. Here's a statistic. American dentists, I forget what there's like about 200,000 of them or something. What do say? It's 4,000,000. They're they're like 5% of the dental population, but they account for 55% or 60% of the spending power. Wow. That's incredible. I you know, I I guess it doesn't surprise me. I think back to, like, o one to o five, Lincoln, when I decided, like, I needed to get educated, and I went crazy. I went to every continuum. I went to every conference. I went to every, you know, practice management thing. And, dude, I was spending over a $100,000 a year on educating myself and my team, probably up to 200,000 a couple of those years.

1:33:38And and it was just this hunger. It was available. We had the cash flow, and it was this hunger. I mean, we did wage more than we should have, of course. But but I do see that. I see that in a lot of American dentists. And and it the money almost doesn't even matter if if it's something they really wanna learn. Yeah. I mean, it always matters, but the I think it's not easy to understand how much more you earn as an American dentist because you don't feel it. Like, you graduate, you feel poor, you got a big debt, and, you know, it takes you a while to get going. And then once you're going, you're kind of still paying your debts down. And by the time you have paid your debts down, you're really crushing it.

1:34:11You've got that mindset of frugality, so you're never quite clear. You know, it's like people who went through the Great Depression never quite forget feeling hungry, and so they have, like, seven chest freezers full of meat and, you know, 900 jars of pickles in there. Yeah. Right. Right. You know? So you know who you are, you guilty people. So so that that's one thing that's different. And the the these little things that surprise you, these are not, like, good or bad. They're just different. Like, I went to a country recently in the Baltics and talked do rapid efficient trick play. They had never had a lecture that wasn't clinically focused in their entire lives. Wow. Wow. That's kinda nervous to have me because I knew that I'm, like, you know, like, the first one of the first things I say is who here sells dentistry?

1:35:01And, like, usually, in any room in the world, 20% of dentists put their hands up and go, I sell dentistry. Mhmm. And then I go, who here works for free? Okay? And no one puts their hand, you know, no one puts their hand up. They all get paid. And I go, the definition of a sale is the exchange of a good or service for money. So who let's try again. Who here sells dentistry? And then a 100% of people put their hand up. Because it's not everyone in every dentist in the world hates the idea of selling, but what they actually mean is selling poorly because you only feel like you're being sold to when the salesperson is bad. Mhmm. If the salesperson is really trained, really well skilled, and really sophisticated, you actually never feel the fact that they're selling to you.

1:35:45Because, like, you know, excellent sales is understanding the customer, asking them enough questions that they feel understood. Mhmm. Good. Finding a solution to their problem, focusing on their long term benefit, not yours, telling the truth, and delivering on follow through. Mhmm. Now all those things, no one if I say to you, you should be a dentist who tells the truth, follows through on what you said, delivers an excellent solution to the problem, actually finds out what the problem is, and make sure the customer feels understood and well cared for, would that be terrible?

1:36:17And zero percent of dentists think that that's a terrible idea. And that that is actually what a good salesperson looks like. Man. And and you're just flipping the switch for a lot of people who've never been exposed to that kind of mentality. I mean, countries that haven't been exposed to that mentality in terms of the industry there. So, boy, that that is a a very broad playing field. And and changing the mentality, changing the the thought around dentistry and business, and and and let's be honest, doing more good for more people when you run it as a business and you have profits that will help help you get the technology, help you, you know, retain the best team, help you get the education, and all those things.

1:36:58So what a what a cool thing for you to be a part of, you know, sort of changing that whole mentality. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting in this particular cut trick that the the first week afterwards, they just went like it was like an explosion. You know? This this lady one of the dentists said to me, she said, I did like three ceramic restorations in the entire last year. Now that means some patients are not getting the best treatment because there are a lot of patients where, you know, if they've got three cusps off and they've got a massive MOD amalgam, they actually need a ceramic restoration. I don't care whether it's a crown, an onlayer, a cronlayer, croissant. I couldn't give care less. It should be ceramic or metal.

1:37:35It should not be plastic. I'm sure. And so she said, I've diagnosed 20 had diagnosed and had accepted 20 restorations in one week. So it's like almost a time change your life? Yeah. She says this has, changed my life. Then another one said I said to this the patient said, can you fix my teeth? I said, well, if you wanna fix your teeth, gonna cost, like, €27,000. The patient says, okay. Well, what have I gotta do? She says, I can't believe it. I've never said such a big number in my entire life. Wow. Wow. Lincoln, to to be a part of that and, like, to hear these kinds of results. I mean, obviously, it's great because you get these awesome testimonials and other people are gonna buy in and everything. But just on a personal level, to help someone who is then by extension gonna help thousands of patients.

1:38:21I mean, that's a that's a pretty big lever, I mean, on the global scale that you're able to, you know, really affect change. Yeah. I mean, the best part about it, Jim, is when someone says to me, like, I was gonna quit dentistry last week, and now I'm enjoying it. Like, to see that to see a life change like that. Someone who said, I hated dentistry. It was so stressful. And now, you know, the crown prep just come out like that. Mhmm. I'm actually enjoying it again. That that's the best part. Yeah. You work with a lot of individual practices and then, you know, obviously, DSOs, like you said, and that's just gonna accelerate from here. You know, do they have pretty much the same underlying problems and challenges, or do do they take a a a vastly different approach?

1:39:02You know? DSOs are often at different stages. So, you know, you got the stage where there's, like, three groups of 10 practices that have just joined together. They're just, like, getting going. So that's, a different stage. Mhmm. You know, you got someone who's, like, at 60 practices, and now they're bringing in private equity. That's a different stage. You got someone who's at 400 practices. The private equity's been wiped out. The bank owns the practice practices. That's a different stage. You got someone who's at a thousand practices. They got a big, solid, long term partner, and they're just accelerating. They got their systems in a row, and they know what they put out and what they're not. They're in a different stage.

1:39:38And then you got, like, Heartland's at a different stage. You know, they're so so first of all, what they need differs to the by stage. Secondly, they have all grown in different ways, so they're not the same. Like, you got, you know, some groups that are all de novos, and then you got some groups that are roll ups, and then you got some groups that are roll ups where they keep the name on the practice, and you got some that are de novos and roll ups where they change the name and all have the same name. So that's different. And then but their their core underlying there's like a shopping list of problems, but DSOs don't have all of them out of that shopping list. Their problems sit within that common list.

1:40:17So it might be, like, 15 things, and everyone has some some some of the things on that list. Mhmm. So with experience, you start to recognize the same patterns over and over again. Mhmm. That makes sense. So hey, man. You've given me a ton of your time here. I do have a few more questions if you got a little more time. Hey. Yeah. Go for it. Go for Cool, man. I'm enjoying conversation. I'm I'm learning a lot, and I know, anybody watching this is also learning a lot. And I think there's value in in continuing that because a few of the questions, think, really I think they'll they'll illuminate things even more. But when you when you look at your life as an entrepreneur, I mean, obviously, there's a lot of different skill sets that you have to have.

1:40:55A You lot of different moving parts. And like you said, from the beginning, you had this one vision and it's really morphed into something entirely different, which is pretty exciting. But what's been the biggest challenge? Is it the the technology? Is it building the team or, like, becoming a better leader? Yes. All of it. Yeah, man. It's been a time of the day. Right? Like, when you so for people who are starting out trying to build a platform, the first thing is, like, if you got a there's a very fine line between a revolutionary idea that's gonna change the world and a really stupid idea. It's hard to tell the difference. Yeah. That's problem number one. So that's problem number one. So if you if you try to, like, flog a dead horse, as we would say in Australia, or, you know, resurrect a dead idea, then that's you should give up.

1:41:45Mhmm. However, if you do have a good idea, you will only survive by the barest margins, and you should never give up. So the number one thing for success is just don't give up. Mhmm. Yeah. That's number one. And the second one is you often have to commit to doing things even though you're not a 100% sure how you will do it nor how you will fund it. Mhmm. Okay. So when I brought on when I brought on my chief operating officer, I couldn't really afford him. Was like the first time I'd employed someone with such a large salary, like like, compared to what I'd been used to in dentistry. You know, in dentistry, you have the dentist, but then everyone else is significantly less expensive than a chief operating officer.

1:42:28Mhmm. So bringing in this, like, you know, what I thought was a pretty expensive person at the time, you know, the question was how do you afford it? I go, well, I don't really know. Like, I'll figure it out. So that that idea that you don't always get is a small number of businesses. Like, I have a friend who raised $10,000,000 in his seed fund before he basically committed to anything. And Wow. Good good for him. That's from most must have had a hell of an idea. I mean No. Just like a hell of a connection. It just happens to have a really good connection. And so Yeah. But most people who start, they start with little bits of money and so on. So the hardest part is not giving up when, like, there's you know, right now, we're, like, going great.

1:43:12Like, we're crushing it with the results. We're growing like crazy. You know, like, it's you know, there's a our whole business is, like, up 50%. The power power engines have grown. So, like, growing it over a 100% a year and recently over a thousand percent a year. And so that it's great now, but to get to this point, you know, I had to move countries. Had to sell my house to buy out a cofounder. I had to give up clinical practice. You know, doing immigration is difficult. You arrive in America. You don't have a credit score, so you can't get a credit card can't get a car. You can hardly even get, like, Internet for your office. So so those things are all really difficult. Doing technology when you're not actually an engineer is tricky because you don't know whether they're good or not for a while.

1:43:58Yeah. Absolutely. But you're you're essentially juggling, like, five chainsaws. So it just depends which one you're catching at the time. Risk of cutting your hand off, like, oh, it's the, you know, HR complaint chainsaw. It's coming down. It really took that off. And then you throw that one back up, and it's like the oh, now we got now now we're running out of money. We need to get more investors. So it's like it's just a constant juggle. It is pretty exciting. Yeah. Definitely, man. Yeah. I you know, I had to laugh earlier. You said something about being neurodivergent, and I I am too. And, you know, one of the things that success brings is more opportunities and more distractions and all of that sort of thing.

1:44:39And I'm dealing with that, like, daily, weekly, monthly, and it's it's really hard to kind of figure out, like, what what do you what do you do and what do you decide not to build when you got all these amazing ideas? Yeah. So, I mean, it's it's bad enough when you're entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs have to spend so prioritization is not so much what you choose to do. It's what you choose not to do. K. So you can probably do three things a day, and your list of things you want to do is probably 15. Yeah. So so, like, a lot of people say to me, oh, I didn't finish my list. I go, that's good. Like, if you finish your list, either your list is too small or you're not prioritizing. You know, you don't have the important thing.

1:45:18So you're prioritizing each day. A lot of that is, okay. I'm gonna do the first one thing, and I'm gonna do the second thing, and maybe the third thing. And then all the rest of the list, I'm not going to get to because I'm prioritizing what's important. So the way I focus you know, my business is kind of simple. I need to grow revenue in the things that are growing well. Otherwise, I can't grow the valuation of the business to raise more capital. No. That's good. I also can't grow profitability. Mhmm. I need to drive my hardware engineering ahead faster and faster so no one can catch up because we have a five year head start, and no one's even close. And I need to push my software engineering ahead to create a platform, which soon, there'll be base levels of it that we will let everyone in dentistry use for free.

1:46:07I see. And, you know, we need to make that really beautiful to use and really cool. And so so that's really I only got three things to worry about. Like, yes, there's a whole bunch of other verticals we can go into. There's desire. There's demand. People want it. People need it. Mhmm. I can't do them without more resources. Yeah. Okay? How do I get more resources? I need either capital or I need sales. And to get capital, I need sales. Okay? So it's kinda like, to scale our business and to make the valuation a multibillion dollar business, it needs to be a platform, not a teaching company. Mhmm. So how do we make a platform that useful for everyone in the world to teach with? We need excellent hardware. We need excellent software.

1:46:47How do we fund that? We need to keep going to sales. What's the easiest place for us to do sales? Right now, it's scaled dental organizations, which are DSOs, manufacturers, and a few other things. So Okay. Like, if you keep if you if the reality is nothing focuses your mind like a cash burn. Mhmm. Yeah. No no doubt about that. Yeah. It's like, what what is going to keep generating revenue, driving it up so that it can support the cash burn that, by the way, is increasing because of all the new things and how we're expanding out there.

1:47:22I mean, to go global, that's a that's a pretty big that is a a very daunting task and a very ambitious task, and it requires revenue. So it seems to me like you you've done it the right way. I mean, the hardest thing, I think, sometimes in in growth is making sure infrastructure keeps up with that growth. You know? And as you're raising capital and you're growing your team and you're, you know, getting in with more DSOs and things like that, it just seems like from the outside looking in, I'm sure it's always looks a lot more smooth than it is, but it seems like you're doing a pretty good job with that. Yeah. Like, all businesses are like that. You just accept the fact that on the outside, they look like an absolute dogma.

1:47:57On the inside, it's like duct tape and a, you know, a wire coat hanger and Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. But but, you know, we like and also, it's good to stop sometimes and go, look at what we've done. Mhmm. I'll give you an example. So end of twenty twenty four, I'm sitting there going, I need to sorry. I need you. I need you to move to America. So I need to move to America. Probably mid twenty four, actually. I said, I need to move to America. I need better hardware. I need better software. And it just wasn't going anywhere. And I just said, guys, we are just gonna start. I go, well, how are we gonna fund it? I said, I don't know. Just start doing it. What I've learned is that the more progress and rapid growth in every area, like, it doesn't mean just revenue.

1:48:38I mean, like, wow. They got new software coming out. Oh, they got AI, you know, feedback loops. And, oh, wow. They got new hardware, and they signed up, you know, almost there's, like, two really big DSOs in the Northern Hemisphere we haven't signed yet. We've got just about everything else. And so once people see the momentum, then it's very easy. So, like, I've had, like, I get investors now. Everything from individual dentists, you know, they wanna cut a 1 or $200,000 check, which is super important in the early stages because it they're fast, make quick investments and so on. Yeah. To, like, all the people who are now going, right. We're ready. Like, when you are a big want a big check, blah blah blah, we're ready for you.

1:49:15Yeah. So that momentum that, like, that offers of investors coming in. And, you know, just as an aside, if you are a general dentist or, you know, someone associated with dentistry who wants to do, you know, between a fifty and two hundred thousand dollar check, you probably only got about another six months to get that in before it's like, you know, 2 to $5,000,000 checks or 10 to 15.

1:49:35Good to know. Good to know. And it's look. It's nice to have some grassroots investors. It's nice to have Dennis involved in a platform that, you know, is is reshaping the industry. I think I think that's fantastic. Yeah. Like, that like, that opportunity is gonna close. Yeah. So I think the most important thing and the most difficult is you have to have courage because it just often you often have to make decisions where you don't have certainty. You don't a 100% know how you're going to do it. Mhmm. You've got all these people telling you you're not an expert in the field. You don't know what you're doing. But the thing that's cool about America is that it's more encouraging to do things here than anywhere else.

1:50:15So in the rest of the world, you gotta look. I wanna build like, you basically said, hey. It sounds like you've got a multibillion dollar idea. I agree. We do. If I say that in Australia or, you know, many other countries, I gotta say, you're crazy. That'll never happen. Because the fear in those countries is if we support you and you don't achieve it, we might feel bad. Interesting. It's just a totally different mentality. You know? That that's I I that's not something I really thought about. So, like Whereas, yeah, in America, they go, right. That sounds cool. My cousin's uncle is like a venture capital fund going and talking. Here's his number. They connect you. Yeah. Like, I just had this major dental player just round up a whole bunch of investors for me.

1:50:54He's like, oh, yeah. Talk to this guy. You know? You know, it's, like, two weeks. I talked to this guy, cuts a check. Boom. It's, like, crazy. That's like, America's special. So tell me tell me something about Lincoln Harris that most of the people watching right now don't don't know yet. Well, most of you probably don't know that I didn't wear shoes to school until grade six. Wow. No, shit. That's crazy. I mean, you did mention, you know, your your humble beginnings, you know, and and, you know, your family going bankrupt and all that sort of thing. But literally, until sixth grade? Yeah. Well, not because we couldn't afford it. It's just because no one did. The whole school. Like, the whole school, no one wore shoes.

1:51:30So like and to this day, what's funny is to this day, I hate wearing shoes because it makes my feet feel hot. I think it was actually don't wear them. So I was thinking, oh, my feet are hot. So, like, always I take my shoes off. For early part of my teaching career, I used to take them off on stage. I just, like, walk around in my socks because I hated wearing shoes. But, anyway, I'm trying to be more trying to be more sophisticated these days. So Yeah, man. I have no idea. I learned to drive a car when I was six. Seem a little young. Yeah. Not on the road. It was illegal. But I rent we had a farm. So you drive around the farm. I was six. You look underneath the steering wheel and over the dashboard because you couldn't yeah.

1:52:11Nice. Wasn't full enough. So yeah. I should stop I should stop exposing things because you're all thinking I'm a country country country, which is actually true. I already knew that. Yeah. You I mean, you you share a story about the sauna in in Finland recently. You know, I I I know a little bit about you, man. So, hey, man. When you look at you look at the next generation of dentists, like, what gives you the most optimism and what concerns you the most moving forward in the as an industry? Look. So the first thing is that old guys like us like to complain about the new generation and how things were better in our day and blah blah blah. In nature. Actually, you look through history Yeah. Like, there's records of Plato complaining about young so peep old people have been complaining about young people for at least three to four thousand years.

1:52:55Sure. But, like, if you look at the Olympics, the current generation are the fastest, strongest, most accurate, most precise, like, across every sporting field. So so we have this, like, dichotomy where we think, oh, young people are lazy and blah blah blah, and yet, like, the Olympics are the best ever. So I see dentists now. I'm optimistic because dentists now are learning more advanced procedures better with better skills and better technology than ever before because they can go like, when you and I were at school, how many soft tissue grafts did you see when you were at dental school?

1:53:30Probably zero. Zero. Yep. Didn't even know they could be done. Mhmm. Now they graduate, and they're surrounded by social media showing them the very latest and greatest of everything that's possible. So they know what's possible. So that's a great bit. The difficult bit is that the amount of mental health stress from knowing how good a dentist can be and how good you are right now and not understanding the twenty five years of pain and suffering to get from where you are now and to where like, you you you don't when you're sitting in a lecture and you got some Italian in elegant clothing showing you something that's beyond belief.

1:54:11Or, you know, my friend Ricardo Kern from Curitiba in Southern Brazil, he'll come in. He'll show a case. It's like nine millimeters of recession. The ridge is gone. You say that's impossible. Next thing, he's rebuilt the entire ridge. He's got the tissue back, and it's looking gorgeous. Mhmm. And the level of discipline that has gone into that, Skip, like the self discipline and the just effort and the pain and the delayed gratification, you know, like earning so little money.

1:54:41When I met him, he was charging, like, $600 a day to speak. I don't know what it is now. It's probably, you know, 10 you know, it might be 10,000. I don't what it is. Like, he's one of the speakers. But, like, the delayed gratification. And so you can't you can't see that when you're watching a lecture. But at worst, you can't feel it. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, we all have our own our own paths to walk, and they're all a little bit different. But, you know, I think that one of the great things about our industry that I've always thought, you know, even when I was a young dentist is there's always somebody out there doing the thing that you wanna do. You know? If it's been done, it can be done. You just gotta get in the right room.

1:55:17You gotta be with people who are doing or have done what you wanna do. And that just makes makes dentistry a profession where anything's possible. And, you know, I love I love that you're making so much more possible from, you know, the comfort of your own, you know, dental practice and dental operatory. You know, whether you're a thousand practice group or a single dentist, you know, in Southern Indiana, you know, who wants to learn how to, you know, do better dentistry. So Yeah. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. Look. It's not just because we do it in it's not just to try and make it less expensive or to make it cheaper or to make it, you know, comfortable. You don't have to travel. It's actually just better. Like, if you wanna if you wanna learn to fly a plane in a simulator, the simulator should look like the plane.

1:56:03Yeah. Right. Like, you don't wanna go to the supermarket. You got that little, like, know, put put $1 in the machine and you got, like, the little fake plane. That's not gonna do. Okay? Doesn't look anything like and so if you want to learn to do a procedure, going to a Hilton Garden Inn and practicing the procedure on a typodont on a on a tabletop with no water spray because you can't have water spray in a hotel because it makes a mess Yeah.

1:56:26Doesn't really teach you. It's like it's like reading a book and then going, okay. Now go and fly the plane. Like, it's not a simulation. So so the big reason why we do it is because it's better at skills. It's not always better at fun. Like, if you wanna have a lot of fun, sure, go to the Chicago Midwinter and go and get drunk at night, have a giant pie. Whatever. Okay? But if you wanna build a skill, that is not the place to do it. Right. Absolutely. Hey, man. When we're sitting down ten years from now, like, having a great bottle of wine, you know, what will have had to happen over those ten years to feel like, you know, you've really had a huge impact and changed dentistry? I think by then, every dentist in the world will buy a Ripe Global Medicin when they graduate and log into our platform.

1:57:08And absolutely everyone will be logged in. Man, it doesn't get any bigger than that. Every dentist in the world. I love the ambition. I love the vision. And I love that you just spent two hours talking with us about all of this. We could go for another two hours really easily. But hey, man. I really appreciate you sharing the story and of your vision for the future. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it. No. It is my pleasure, man. Look forward to the next conversation. Definitely see a Dykema in a couple of weeks. But, hey, anybody listening today who feels like they got some value out of this, you know, look up Lincoln. He's, all over social media, ripeglobal.com, changing the industry.

1:57:49And if you got anything out of this podcast, you know, please share it with your colleagues and friends, and we'll see you again next time. Awesome. Thank you. This has been the Foundation Dental podcast. If this conversation was valuable, share it with a colleague who's building something meaningful. For more leadership resources, visit foundationdentalalliance.com.