Strategy, AI, and the Future of Dental Education

In this episode of The Dental Boardroom Podcast, host Wes Read talks with Matt Coggin about how dental education is evolving in today’s fast-changing healthcare landscape. They explore how dentists can stay competitive through continuous learning, team training, and effective communication, while navigating challenges like staff turnover, AI integration, and the rise of DSOs. The episode highlights practical strategies for improving clinical skills, patient care, and overall practice performance.

Key Topics Covered

• Evolution of dental education and continuous learning
• Training pathways for early-career dentists
• Blended learning: online modules + hands-on workshops
• Importance of training the full dental team
• Enhancing patient communication for higher case acceptance
• Integrating AI into dental practice
• Addressing staff turnover and operational consistency
• Impact of DSOs and private equity on dentistry

Key Takeaways

1. Continuous Learning Is Essential: Ongoing education improves both clinical skills and patient outcomes.
   
2. Support for Early-Career Dentists: Structured training helps new dentists gain confidence in procedures and decision-making.
   
3. Blended Learning Works Best: Combining online modules, workshops, and coaching reinforces knowledge and practical application.
   
4. Team Alignment Matters: Training the entire dental team ensures consistent patient experiences and smoother operations.
   
5. Communication Drives Growth: Clear patient communication increases trust, case acceptance, and overall practice success.
   
6. AI Is Emerging in Dentistry: Tools can assist diagnostics and treatment planning, but must be integrated thoughtfully.
   
7. Staff Turnover Requires Planning: Structured onboarding and ongoing training help maintain efficiency despite staffing changes.
   
8. DSOs and Private Equity Influence Practices: Scalable education systems are key for multi-location or corporate-backed practices.

Transcript

Wes Read:  Welcome everybody to another episode of the Dental Boardroom podcast. I have Matt Coggin, CEO of Spear Education on this episode, and I'm excited to learn about how spear's evolving. I've known about Spear my entire career in dentistry. It's always had such a great brand name and a go-to place for education, particularly around the clinical side, but also around the team and practice management side as well.

And I wanted, um, Matt to come. On the show and just give us an update. What is happening on the inside of Spear? What's the outlook in the dental industry, and how are you helping dentists stay, uh, really sharp as clinicians and dental practice owners, uh, on the scene today. Matt, welcome to the show.

Hey, Wes, I'm, I'm honored to be here.

Excited to, to talk to you.

All right. I've got a list of questions for you, Matt, that I think our listeners would, uh, would love to hear about. We're gonna talk about core missions. What's your focus these days? How has COVID reshaped the way that you deliver education? Talk about some ai, what's happening in the DSO space from your lens out there and how you're servicing that.

And then talk a little bit about how. What layers or tier dentists can access, uh, to be educated? What are the, the service offerings, so to speak, at, uh, at at Spear? Well, let's dive in. The first question I've got for you, so Spear's been around decades long, long time. Uh, what is the, let's just start very high level.

What is the core mission of Spear Today, as you would define it, and the values that you stand for?

Yeah, it's, uh, I love the question, Wes. And look, the mission hasn't changed since I've been here. I've been here about three years, and it's always been to make dentists, great dentists or help dentists and their teams achieve great dentistry.

That's always at the heart of every decision that we make, right? Like we, we've looked at different opportunities to, to, you know, dip our toe or what have you. But it always has to go back to, is this going to make our customers better? Are they gonna be able to create better outcomes or desired outcomes for their patients?

Are they gonna become more efficient in doing that, creating just great experiences, um, all around. But that's, that's, that's, that's what we bleed each and every day, right? Every decision has to drive a better dentist at the end of the day.

Well question for you. I know a few years back, uh, you got an institutional partner and, uh, so got some, some funding there.

Tell me, how has, how did that change? So I think 2022 or so. Mm-hmm. Um, how has that evolved spear as an education platform to have now an institutional buyer and owner of Spear education?

Well, it has been, um, owned by Avera, other institutions. So we did obviously have a transfer of, of ownership in the late 2022, but it was acquired by, um.

By, uh, an alternative investor back in 2014. And I said, I would say, um, obviously everyone looks at different things, but I think the market opportunity certainly changed. One bought it well, well before COVID and online learning really had taken hold. And then of course, you know, you've, you buy things post COVID and now it's a lot of it's online.

Um, and there's a lot more alternatives, right? So, um, I think they both had certain different aspects of how they wanted to, to, uh, to achieve the outcomes that they're looking for. Um, but I would say, you know, in the end we're, we're owned by a great organization called the Vista Healthcare. Uh, partners, they focus only on healthcare, medical services, medical products.

Um, so they know the space. They're deep rooted in really making sure that these missions are driven around a core of making a dentist, making a doctor better. Um, driving better patient outcomes, et cetera. And so that's really been their focus. Um, and my focus over the last couple years is looking at the market dynamics and saying, Hey, there's a couple of things that we need to obviously, um.

Change for the organization. One is Spiro has just historically been this place where good dentists become great dentists, almost prosthodontic like, and, and we are, we've actually been trying to push that, that, that, that, that branding away a little bit because it, it conjures up notions that, oh, that's only way you're gonna learn a $30,000 full mouth restoration.

And I don't have those patients. I would challenge most people on that, but you may just not be ready for that. But what we've really been doing over the last couple years is one changing. Our platform to make it much more user friendly, make it much more driven around a standard platform of learning. So I brought in educational folks who understand how to build these platforms, how the learner learns, and how we move somebody not only from good to Great, but how do we get you to just be good.

Because there's a lot of challenges in the marketplace for early dentists that are saying, Hey, I'm going into these. I'm an employee now. I'm not an owner of a practice. I just need to learn how to do the basics and do that in a clinic and when I have one hour per patient. Um, and it's chaos for many of these younger dentists.

And so we've really retooled all of our education. We've built now early learning PA pathways where even today. Somebody in school could begin learning our pathways and preparing themselves for the clinic. And we do a great job of blending that education. So you could learn online, but we also think live workshops are really important where you have somebody over your shoulder inspecting, looking at you, coaching you.

Um, but we, we, we sort of envelope that in a full experience of you learning and then your team with you learning so that we can manage the change management for you. And I would say that's really been, I'll call it our sizzle. Is why somebody's gonna choose Spear is one. We have learning pathways for everyone.

Now, a very structured coursework for you, but we also have it for the team members that you're with, which is oftentimes where the rubber meets the road, right? I could go learn something, whether it's on a weekend or doing an online course, but now I have to go back and my dental assistant needs to understand.

What am I supposed to do? What's the conversation like with the patient? So we're really thoughtful in how we're building all of this and, and I'm really excited about the things that we're deploying in the last two months. Um, and we're still building more, whether it's hygiene content, clear aligner content, um, just better ways for earlier dentists to understand how to communicate to their patients, how to create standard procedures or clinical procedures across the practice so that everyone's on the same page.

Um, so we're really building an an overall platform that's not just for the dentist, it's for the whole office. Um, so we're really excited about that. So we've been pulling all of that together, and that's in response to the fact that you have a lot more people learning outside of, uh, of a workshop. And, um, you also have a lot of people who are coming out of dental school who, you know, they just aren't as prepared for the clinic as maybe they were 20 years ago.

Um, and that's just, you know, the sign of the times.

If you were to sort of draw a bell curve of your. Um, of, of your dentist who, who subscribed to some element of your program, where would you find is the most? Kind of the, the, the most dense area in that bell curve, maybe around their career from a, from a starting new associate at a, at a dental school to, uh, as an associate for a few years, maybe working at A DSO to being a private practice owner.

Uh, and then to nearing, uh, the latter part of their career. Where do you find, uh, people. Entering the spear, uh, education arena most frequently.

Yeah, so it's, it is a great question. So because we're in sort of this middle of this transition, we're still highly indexed to probably folks that are 10 years or more in their career because we've rebuilt everything.

We've certainly been accelerating the onboarding of a lot of newer dentists. So really in the last. Look, we have 17,000 members. That's what we've had, let's say coming into the end of last year. In the last two months, we've added 2000 new customers, um, which is significant. Wow. Right. We're, we're, we're, we're bringing on about a thousand new customers a month.

Um, a little over that. And, um, and most of them are indexed more towards, Hey, I'm in that zero to five range because I, I can go get online content anyway. So where historically the online providers where I could go get ce, which that's a requirement, right? It's compulsory. They have to go get it. We don't.

We think that's the cherry on the top. Where we wanna say is No, we want to teach you how to. Develop to be a better dentist, right? We're gonna give you the tools and your team, the tools to go in six months, be able to do more restorative work where you're confident and you create a better outcome in a time that's a, that's appropriate for the practice, right?

Because most of these dentists, if you gave them two hours to go do a crown, and that requires the prep and the scanning and all the other things. Um, they'd probably be okay. The problem is most practices aren't setting up their practices to accommodate an early dentist and give them two hours per patient.

It creates havoc on hygiene and everything else. So that's really what we're doing. So you're starting to see. A massive influx of these early dentists start to go through our curriculum and we've now also included coursework for them live where it compliments what they're doing. So they come in and now we're gonna really teach you how to take those preps to a completely different place and do 'em in, and we're gonna shave.

15 minutes off your preps now because we think this is how fast you should do a procedure. Um, the same thing with, uh, we, we work closely with partners. We do a lot with chairside technologies. Well, instead of it taking you three hours, we're gonna show you how to do it in 90 minutes. And here's the key, and this is how you keep the schedule working for you.

Um, so we've, we've really honed this craft over years and now we're compliment pulling it all together. And I think you're starting to see that in the results, right? Where you're starting to see a lot of newer people coming in. And the interesting thing is, 'cause our platform now is 24 7, it's always on, right?

So you are engaging it at all times through these standard platforms. We bring on more customers in the middle of the night than we do during today, which makes sense because the dentists are actually looking at saying, Hey, I have something tomorrow I need to get better at. And they start going through our, and we could see what they're going through and we, the, the, the recommendation engines within the platform now give them next thing, the next thing, the next thing in a very structured way to accelerate that learning.

So I think for the earlier dentists now, they are used to that type of learning. Um, because they've learned that they've grown up in the digital age. So I, I tend to think if we go another year, we'll probably be split 50 50. My expectation is we'll probably have 15,000 customers that are over 10 years and 15,000 customers.

That'll be. In that zero to five, maybe zero to 10 range.

I would say the, the smart move, as I look at your different tiers, which I want to get to near the end of the, the, the, the episode, uh, there are tiers that are really easy to access for a younger dentist who's maybe is just filling a lot of financial burden.

Student loans just is trying to get their, their feet planted in the industry outta school. And you give them some. Extremely low cost options to start getting access to high quality education, uh, online through some of your more limited tiers. And it's almost like you've created a, an evolution that can map to the career path of a dentist as they go from associate to to to owner.

And then an owner to a larger practice owner and maybe a multiple practice owner. And you've, you've created a roadmap there that that can align with where they are. And I think that, uh, that's very valuable for the dental industry to, to have that. Um, I mean, and I wanna dwell a little bit longer on how.

COVID just sort of dropped a, a bomb on how people, uh, work logistically. Now in a dental office, obviously they're going to a dental office. So, but, but talking about the education, uh, a couple thoughts on this. You know, for me, I, before COVID, I had everybody here in my office. And now I have about 30 to 40% of people here in my office, and then people are spread out and I've, but we've completely revamped and focused on our processes and our technology.

So we have a process in SOP for virtually everything. It's delineated step by step. We've had. Consultants come in to really swim lane these out, uh, these processes out. So we have clear, uh, understanding across the company how certain procedures are done. And it's allowed us to work, uh, remotely like this while still maintaining a good quality.

In some ways, it made us, uh, I think elevate the quality because we are so focused on consistent outcomes every time through our tax, accounting, payroll, investment, and financial planning lines. Uh, so let's talk about, uh, you a little bit more. Are you finding that dentists, and maybe this is different based on age demographics, but are you finding that younger dentists are just less likely to travel to Scottsdale to do workshops and they're doing most of their learning online?

In other words, has there been a migration away from the workshop into the online learning, or is the workshop still really valuable? And one thing I want to add to that question is. Like, when I try to learn something, I like, I, I've tried to learn tennis and I've tried to learn surfing. I watch a lot of YouTube videos.

Mm-hmm. And they are, they are helpful for learning techniques. Yeah. And, and stance and positioning and, and all of that. But at the end of the day, actually on court or out on, you know, on the, on the break, uh, that's where I really, really learn. And it's like my, my kids in their math class, I always tell 'em.

Don't read. You don't need to read the material as much. Just go do problem after problem after problem after problem. And that is the fastest way to start to master the material. Are you finding that dentists are still willing to travel in order to have that hands-on real experience as opposed to online?

I would say yes, but I do think most dentists, and this is across the gamut, right, whether it's young or older, I think they've certainly gotten to the point where they've gone to a lot of workshops or gone to places and said, Hey, I didn't really use much of it. It was interesting. But I didn't get to do much of it.

Right? And so I do think the first question, and oftentimes our biggest pushback if you talk to our sales representatives when someone calls, is, I don't know if this is gonna be worth it for me right now. Why? Because I need something I could deploy on Monday. Right. Um, right. I don't wanna do something where it's gonna take me six months to start making changes, but also knowing the complexity of change isn't just the dentist, it's the team that's sitting in that dental office as well.

So I would say that there's not an aversion to go workshop, but there's certainly a lot more questions about, well, what am I gonna learn? Can you get really specific? So our sales. Personnel have had to be exceptionally trained on all the nuances of all the different products we talk about and the techniques and what have you, because we get a lot of questions because there are folks that are a little bit hesitant to make the investment to travel because they want to make sure that they're gonna do something with it.

Um, and that was really where, uh, a big change for us is. We think a really important thing to learning is, there's a couple things. One. It's gotta be a standard platform. It has to be standard. If I go through or to someone, they have to go through the same thing. 'cause then it's measurable. I know if it works or not, right?

So you've gotta make it standard. Um, it's gotta be frequent because I know I could go to a course, whether it's online or not, but I'm gonna forget 50% by the next day. I, you know, my brain wanders and I feel like I'm a fairly intelligent person. So how do you put things in front of me frequently through that journey so that it reminds me and I can begin?

Figuring out how to incorporate it. And then lastly, I do think it's this blended side where there is points where, hey, let's get side by side with you and really inspect what you're doing. Because there's a lot of things that go wrong in dentistry, right? Like if you talk to a lab, a lab's, like, look, I made a good crown based off of what I saw.

Um, the fact that it's leaking is that could be your prep. It could be a lot of things. So like those, sometimes you just need somebody sitting there and not one of our courses. Restorative design sells out all the time because it's dentists learning how to just prep crowns. That's they, they geek out on this.

And to me, I'm like, this is the most humdrum thing. Like, don't they wanna learn like implants or something? No. They wanna know the basics 'cause they need to know how to do this efficiently. So I do think there's, there's if, if you've, if you've built the experience right, they'll know when to go to workshop and they feel much better about making that investment because the investment isn't about spending money on the workshop and travel.

I'm not gonna be practicing. And so, you know, so for a lot of our practices. The challenge is, well, the associate is struggling just to earn, you know, whatever it is they're trying to earn in a daily fashion, right? Because. There's chaos in a dental practice. For those that are a little bit more tenured, oftentimes their challenge is, look, I can't even pull away because I've had so much turnover.

Um, I'm always bringing on new employees here. My practice isn't running as efficiently as it it is, and we all know there's some softness in the consumer, especially with more complex procedures. I have a hard time getting away because my associate just doesn't produce enough in a debt yet. So like, so for us, like we focused in on how do we go solve that problem, whether it's a dentist, just trying to figure out how do I bring on an associate to the associate, how do I become more productive?

How do I make my employees more productive, drive employee retention, et cetera. So I think all of that is really important. 'cause that goes into the buying journey, right? Those are the decisions and the questions they're asking themselves. Well, is now the time, like, should I be doing this? So, so for us, like for Spear, our focus is blend the education, but do it across the team.

And then make sure that we help in the change management and the implementation of that change because we know we've got the standard approach to do it, right. We've worked with thousands of dentists to know how do we begin doing these things? Um, what do you need to do on Monday? Right? If you want to be better on Monday.

Um, but I know that's a long-winded way of responding to like, are dentists still eager to get to campus? They are. They love hanging out with dentists. They do geek out. Um, I learned early on here dentists just love talking to dentists. Um, and so that's our goal. Blend the education with themselves and their team.

Put them into small community of learning, whether it's through our study club or our virtual clubs. And then we layer a service level to really self-drive that change management and that ongoing training in these practices if needed. That would be that, uh, you know, our navigator product is really a lot more hands-on.

Like, Hey, we're gonna push things through because we can see signals, things aren't working the way they should, and that happens, here's what we need to do next. And you really become the defacto coach or head of training for that small business, that dental practice, um, which I think is really important for, for everything that's going on today.

And, um, and again, you, it tucked into that, that question that you had there was really how COVID changed things. And I think COVID certainly changed a lot in the sense that, hey, there was a lot more online access. So more affordable or accessible types of places to learn. But I tend to think that the thing that COVID really did, and maybe it was pre COVID and it sort of accelerated in the middle of COVID, is there's amount of amalgamation, there's a lot of consolidation that happened in the dental practice.

So dentists expanded, whether it was just knocking walls down and building more operatories or buying practices, and they had a lot more employees. And there's a lot more turnover post COVID, right? There's just a lot of associate turnover, a lot of hygiene, turnover, a lot of dental assistant office manager turnover.

Our platform. You wanna have a membership with Spear because we help you with that. We will onboard those folks for you rapidly. Do a standard playbook, which most offices don't have. You spoke about that earlier. You building the standard playbook, documented processes so people know the next person coming in knows exactly what to do, because there's a lot of little things that fall apart in a business that you just, how come no one did this?

Sally did that, or Bill did that and he left. I didn't know he did that. We never documented, okay, well we gotta figure this out. So that's where we're really trying to accelerate everything we do, and we're paying very close attention to those little details. We're not a hundred percent there, but when you look at, I, I tend to tell my team all the time, I want members to tell us that we are peace of mind to them.

If I'm a dentist that owns the practice. If I'm a chief dental officer running many different practices, if I'm an associate, like in the end you're all a little bit of a CEO, how do you get a de facto head of training or a platform that drives standard programs to accelerate onboarding, fine tuning skills, implementation, um, you know, across many different procedures or patient conversations.

How do we do that in a very thoughtful way? When folks are trying to learn all these things, and oftentimes they're trying to learn it in the middle of the night. Or in the middle of the day, 'cause I'm gonna do my lunch and I'll go through something. How do we pack it into that so it becomes really impactful and comes with a strong ROI.

So how do you define yourself relative to a practice management? Consultant, they're both around education practice management. Consultants tend to be in the office, although they'll do a lot of coaching remotely as well. Are you a practice management consultant, but bundled into your array of services, or is practice management co consulting a compliment to what you do?

I think it's a compliment. We, we oftentimes, people will say, oh, you like, and we even utilize that term, right? It's probably just the overused vernacular about practice management. Just trying to think of the halo of things you do.

Yep.

We focus on the clinical side. We're probably, you could ask us and give a sense of like, if you have navigator membership, we attach a practice growth partner to you who has spent time in practice management and consulting.

But we don't call them consultants. Like, we'll, we can give you some recommendations if you want to talk to them about your fee structures or. Usually your customary rates within your area. 'cause we have benchmarks, but that's not what we do, right? We're not gonna come in and implement, um, your practice management software or, um, or go through the bookkeeping of you.

We focus on the clinical side where we think it's the most important. If you can nail that, everything else falls into place. Meaning, you know how to do a procedure efficiently and get a great outcome. That's gonna drive a high net promoter for you. You're gonna get more done. We're gonna teach you how to have the conversations with the patient and ultimately be able to get paid on that stuff.

All those other tools are great point solutions or solutions or practice management solutions, and we love to partner with those folks. Um, like we love it when a practice consultant says, Hey, look, I'm in the practice. These dental associates or these dentists need something at night because that's when they're going home and trying to learn.

I don't work at nine 30 at night for all of my practices. We are on at nine 30 at night. You know, so it becomes a nice complimentary add or, uh, adjacency to what they're trying to do, because we just wanna make them better clinicians. And to be better clinicians, you need to be able to have good conversations with your patients.

You've gotta know how to do the procedures, um, and get the desired outcomes. But you also have to be able to have the conversations. And I talk through like the office manager, the treatment coordinator, how do I get somebody to pay for this and say yes to this? Like this is all the stuff we work on. And I know there is obviously some cross-referencing or some overlap between like a practice management consultant, um, but we're not consultants.

That's not what we're trying to do. Um, we're not gonna deploy people into the practice. We basically set them up to say you need a head of training. Because the closest we can get to where it could be construed as consultancy is our navigator membership, which is you get all of these things including dental intelligence, where now we can see your data.

We have a growth partner attached to it. Monitoring your practice to make sure that the things we're trying to do based on your goals we're achieving. And we push education across different groups in the practice. Um, but you could look at that as having a head of training. Like I tend to say to many dentists, the difference between me being a CEO and them, I have an a group of MBAs around me who are making lots of decisions, and one of them is I have somebody who focuses solely on training my employees.

For change and all these dentists don't have that, most of 'em aren't willing to spend $150,000 a year to have somebody focused in that area. Right? Like, well, that's what navigator really should be thought of is that's, um, that's an agent or a, a membership, but I'm gonna pay well below what the rate of hiring, somebody would be hiring.

But they're monitoring everything I'm doing and giving me recommendations on what we can do, um, based off of the goals that I've set for my practice or myself. Um, so

safe to say Mo, most of spear is occurring. Most of spear's benefit and value is occurring inside of the operatory around the clinical side and the, and the patient communication side.

Some outside, especially if you're getting involved in like dental intel, statistics and front office stuff, but most of it's happening inside of the operatories. That is safe way of viewing it.

That is what it, it's always what, whenever you're interacting with the patient is likely what we're mostly focused on.

Or maybe your laboratory, I guess, but,

well, let's now pivot into AI and how is, how AI has inserted itself in the training programs at Spear? What specifically is Spear doing to deploy AI in its training modules?

Yeah, so we, we do, we've just announced a partnership recently with Overjet. So when we think of like how dentists are viewing ai.

Um, we are very focused on obviously that discussion point of going from diagnosis, the treatment planning to the patient acceptance conversations. Um, so we've now implemented that as a tool and it's a, it's a, a very good partnership that we've, we've begun, um. Overall, our whole business is supported through AI because we're gonna go global here.

Um, so we need to translate things quickly. So a lot of our video content, our platform has been built on ai. So we've utilized all these tools, but I don't think dentists care about that. What they care about is, hey, like, what's the next thing I need to learn? And in the future would be is it in the language that I know how to speak?

Right? Um. But, but I do think as we, as more tools go out there, uh, or produced specifically for dentistry beyond just diagnostics, we certainly need to figure out how we can incorporate that into our TR treatment planning or our learning platforms. Because like I tell Overjet, we're not gonna teach anybody how to use the Overjet buttons.

That's what Overjet does. What we're gonna teach somebody is how do you go take. A dentist now can see diagnostic and have a conversation. How do we ex, you know, supercharge that conversation? But how do we get them doing the right dentistry? Because in the end, all of these tools need to create an ROI and drive compliance across the platform, right?

Whether it's the DSOs, we know there's oftentimes low compliance. Why turnover training is all, you know, tends to be a little bit more fragmented. We standardize all that, so we're gonna incorporate that tool. Into our learning. So you can see how that fits. And again, it's part of your toolkit to driving case, acceptances, driving the, you know, the, the overall outcome.

Um, so we're very focused on that. It's actually a question we get quite often. Um, but I think as these tools transform and treatment planning transforms with a lot more digitization will. Certainly, hopefully be on the, on the, the leading cusp of, or the leading edge of, of driving all of that into our, our, our platforms.

Um, so hopefully that answered your question. Well, Les.

Alright. It does. Let's pivot over to the DSO space. You've been in this industry, uh, for a long time. I think you were at, uh, dent Supply Serona before this. Mm-hmm. How long, how long have you been in. In the dental space, Matt,

in the dentistry, as I, I mostly define it as usually about seven years at this point in time, beginning 2019, um, where I really had to lean into working with the dentist or whatever the case is.

Um, but, but yeah, my time at Dent Weiser has certainly prepared me for the role that I'm sitting and actually, which led me to go after. Um, this role when it became available.

Yeah, and I think with your background, you're pretty intimate in institutional money, private equity, that space, which has been, uh, the kind of the, the wind behind the sails of the emergence of DSOs.

Uh, today there are, uh, some DSOs that sort of bootstrap it without pe money, at least to start. Although typically, eventually to have a true inflection point, they need to incorporate outside PE money. So PE is a huge factor in the DSO space. It's an area that you know quite well and I, that trend is probably going to continue.

I have a lot of thoughts. On this and what may happen when the music stops, which I think it will at some point, and the gunpowder dries up when the economy falls and the PE swings back and forth in their sort of, uh, appetite for acquisitions. And it's been very strong. It's been a very strong appetite for some time now.

Nobody quite knows where it's gonna. Sort of find its equilibrium between the private and the institutional DSO space. I've seen a lot of different statistics. The one I looked up this past week on the, um, I think the, the A DA Health Institute said 16% of all practices are institutionally owned these days.

That felt a little a light. From my experience, I feel like it's closer to 25%, but I could be wrong on that. But, um, I mean setting, setting the, the trends aside, it's clearly a presence in the industry and will continue to be, and maybe even incrementally more as time goes on. How is spear. Adapting to the institutional model, is it something that you're targeting, uh, specifically, or do you still focus mostly on the private practice owner?

No, we, we are targeting, we really target at the dentist. So we're somewhat agnostic. Do we go after the DSOs? Like we obviously have an enterprise group that talks to them, but we mainly say, look, if we could create a great product, a training and development tool for dentists and their teams, whether you're a DSO or an independent practice, you're going to want to participate.

Um, so we're somewhat agnostic to that. I do think when we tend to talk to the DSOs, the pain points that we're trying to really solve. Emulate through the halls of all those DSOs, right? Because we are trying to create a standard training and development platform that's an ongoing team, you know, partner or membership.

So it's not a six month sprint or anything like that, right? It's like there's always gonna be change and we're gonna help manage that change with you, that onboarding of an employee or what have you. And these are the things that resonate very well with these DSOs because they amalgamated during a very low interest rate environment and everyone knew that was a great investment.

Plan, right? I could buy something at 12, do some things, sell it at a minimum of 12. Well now it's not selling at 12 anymore. Interest rates are higher, right? It's harder. Cash burn is higher. They're trying to drive same store growth more than they ever have. And then at the same time, you have 30% turnover of high, of dental associates.

So how do you grow any business when your lead, you know, sales group, let's call it, um, is, is turning over at that frequency. So our goal is to, to how do we slow that attrition? How do we create a better environment? And the best way to do that is creating, creating a good, or putting a good investment in training and development.

They all have their tools, but the one thing I'm often shocked by is it's still highly fragmented. There's a few of them out there that have done amazingly well, and we know them. They've been sourced everything they owned and control the end to end. Even. They come to us in some types of edge cases. But I think for the mass, it's like, look, we need something quickly to onboard somebody.

So our value proposition, oftentimes our claim is, Hey. For an early dentist, again, whether they're in an independent practice or they're at A DSO, how do we get that doctor generating $2,800 of production a day? Well, we're gonna start because we have to get them to do the basic restorative work. Well, they've gotta know when to do composites, when to do crowns, and how do we two x that, three x that actually just looking at data from one of our large partners and we're showing a 64 increase or 64% increase in crown production.

Since going through the platform, that change is only in a matter of months.

Mm-hmm.

So we want to continue to drive that, but that's what we want to go do. And then we want to expand you into other areas. And we have a lot of hygiene content as well to drive a much higher efficient hygiene department, but creating sort of co-therapy with the dentist, driving more patients into the dental chair, all of these things are really important and I think that is something that the DSOs would, are very interested in.

We had a lot of discussions over the last few weeks with them. In fact, uh, around, around that matter.

Yeah. Here's a, here's a question I think is, I believe this is a very important question. As dentists get more experience and there's more of a, a delta from the time they get outta school to the present day, um, they become, um.

Uh, the most of them get their clinical skills to a pretty good place. Mm-hmm. There will always be some disparity in, in talent and, and clinical skill sets across dentists, but they typically get to a place where they're doing a pretty good job. But what I found, what, where I fi find more disparity in the effectiveness of the dentist is on the soft side of dentistry, which is, uh, how they communicate communication.

I, I, I emphasize this to my clients. I just cannot expl, I can't overstate. How valuable, good, clear, crisp communication is to their patients to get them to understand why they need to accept a certain case that you're presenting to them and those dentists who learn how to communicate effectively, even if they're not the better clinician.

I have no idea because I don't measure that. Tend to be the ones who have higher production and better cash flow, and they're paying off their debt, they're accelerating their financial independence faster, which is what I exist for, all of that stuff. So my, my job always starts when the dollar hits the bank account, but I notice more dollars are hitting bank accounts and doctors that I find to be really good communicators and leaders.

How does Spear get involved in that soft side of, of dentistry?

Yeah, look, it's the old adage, right? Uh, doctors with good bedside matter dentists with good chairside matter are probably gonna be the most successful and the happiest. Um, and maybe it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, but way we help is actually when you're part of a, um, when you get our practice membership, which is about $270 a month.

Um. We have content and actually video capabilities for almost every procedure. And what we always recommend doctors is do make your team view these. And now we have the platform that measures the usage of all those things. So you could score your team about or understand, hey, have they gone through all these tools?

And the goal there is to drive a similar lexicon because what happens in dentistry, and most dentists don't realize they're in a consumer business. It's not a managed care business like you would see in medicine. Yes, there's some opportunities to access managed care, Delta dentals, et cetera, et cetera.

But those things, as we know, are more coupons. Right? Right. They don't drive all of the purchase decisions. That's the marketability of the practice to some degree. Um, but there is always an a conversation about discretionary income or what have you, and you have to be able to have a good conversation.

But the thing, because I bring up this consumer. Aspect of it, and this is where I've really spent a lot of my career, is trying to understand how do you get a patient to accept a larger case? And, and the reason is, is oftentimes to your point is in the conversation you're having with them. And one of the things that quickly happens in dentistry as a patient has the dental assistant sometimes sitting next to them and they ask their advice, they talk to the dentist, then they talk to the treatment coordinator.

If they all have different conversations or say things differently, it immediately builds distrust with. The buyer, the patient, I don't call them a patient unless their mouth is being worked on. They're a consumer sitting in that chair.

Mm-hmm.

And so they're trying to figure out, well, do I wanna do this?

Is this important? And we all know the access to this thing when they get in a car. So they're gonna look, Hey, is this a fair price? Like, am I gonna get ripped off? You have to be able to have a good conversation. And that's where our videos have been designed to really gun one, give the visualization the patient needs.

So we always encourage 'em. Use these when you're talking to the patient, it immediately gives them, and you could send it to them. You could send it to their iPhone or, or, or, or their email or their text. So when they go home and they have to talk to this significant other, or they're in that purchasing journey because they didn't say yes to you chair side, like can they see the tool and how it drives clinical need for them?

And so we owe, that's some of the things that I often tell our customers. Like I'm so amazed that you're under utilizing. We have hundreds of procedures that you could be putting in front of folks and helping you in these conversations. And if anything, use it to train up your team. So you all say the same thing, because the minute a dental assistant or a treatment coordinator or a dentist is something remotely different, it immediately builds a distrust.

Or skepticism, and I'll give you a simple example. I was observing years ago a hygienist getting frustrated with her dentist because she said, Hey, I have the patient ready to do it, and then he comes in and he starts saying things like, oh, it's only a little bit of bleeding here, blah, blah, blah. That little bit sound made it seem as if that procedure was no longer important and it would drive her crazy.

Those are the things we need to harmonize. From an education or from a discussion point, because every touch point that patient has, even when they walk before they walked into your practice, if it doesn't have a harm harmony to it, the patient isn't going to convert at the level you want to convert. Um, and that's just consumer businesses.

That's what they focus a lot on. We always hear of all the data that they stare at. It's ultimately to drive that bump in conversion. We believe we will be a significant aid or tool to the dentist to help drive that conversion. How do we take your chair side opportunities from 12% to 20%, or, or case acceptances I should say.

Um, and this has greatly gone down in the last 20 years because patients and have more, or consumers have more access to data. Is this a good dentist? Are their fees too high? Is someone doing it less expensive? And believe me, they don't go to another alternative. They just don't show back up to the practice yet.

They'll come back a year from now, and if they don't hear the same conversation, well, I guess it wasn't that important. So that's the stuff we're really trying to drive as a continuum of care through our treatment planning, philosophies and training.

So do some of your modules or workshops then go over what to say almost scripting level or sales, um, uh, concepts, uh, and that specifically around the, the non.

A tangible clinical, but more on the soft communication skills. Do you have modules on those?

We do have modules. We have customer success teams for any membership that will work on those things with you as well. Um, I wouldn't say every module has that because it would be a really busy module. Um, because sometimes I'm just trying to learn a clinical skill.

If it always converted into, Hey, let's have the soft training, right? Soft skills training. But there's different places, and again, we have a pretty volumous content that, that we're now trying to integrate together, so you know that, hey, you've gone through this. Hey, watch this module now on the discussions you need to have.

Oh, and by the way, here's a patient educational video that you could accompany your discussions and send it to the patient. When they go home, um, or give it to 'em beforehand, whatever, um, everyone, and we're still trying to drive that formula of what drives the most success. Um, but I do think I brought in some really, really talented people.

We got a biz, you know, or BizOps and data science group that's staring at data. We'll eventually nail this so that we have the complete formula. How do we sort of two x three x your production, um, in case acceptances?

Well, if, uh, if our listeners, your listener, if you're a client of practice, CFO, and really any dentist, I, I just want to share anecdotally what I notice.

As we talk with doctors every single day and we look at their p and ls every single day, and we do tax returns, and we do financial forecasts, and we see people's net worth and their progress toward financial independence. This all relates in one financial ecosystem, and what I notice is dentists who have this, uh, almost impressive ability to convey an idea of value and convey value tend to be the ones who have a stronger p and l.

And those who have a stronger p and l, as long as they have a decent uh, uh, sort of consumption, uh, level in their personal life, tend to be the ones putting more into savings and investments or real estate stock market 4 0 1 Ks and they are building that platform for financial independence. And so I just wanna elevate that one as a.

A huge differentiator in those dentists that I find financially successful versus those who are always just trying to keep their, their head above water. And we've seen and worked with a lot of both of them. So that's a big concept for me. The last thing I want to end off on is, uh. Is sell yourself a little bit here, Matt.

Uh, let's talk about your tiers. You have five tier membership tiers. Mm-hmm. At the lowest level is discover. And Discover On your website says $83 a month. And, uh, sorry, that's zero. That one's it's very free. Yeah, that one's free. So preview clinical courses and sample learning paths before choosing a membership.

Uh, so that's kind of a, a little, a teaser. And then you get in the individual where you have $83 a month and you're adding clinical skills and meet CE requirements, things like that. Then you move into practice, which is role-based learning and ce. So this is, I think, where you're getting into the, the real meat of, of the, of the, the value proposition.

Mm-hmm. But then you move up. Uh, and by the way, that one practices where there's a little more team involvement, right? Then you move up to the fourth tier. That's faculty club, unparalleled access to world class clinicians. And then lastly is navigator, where there's almost a coaching and, and practice management element, uh, to that, even though it's not necessarily a PM consultant, there's certainly are some, uh, layers to that.

Uh, go ahead and elaborate on that. And what do you recommend for dentists at different uh. Junctures of their career.

Yeah. Listen, I would tell everyone today, go open up a Discover membership and just trial, test it. See what, see if you like the content. Um. You don't get access to everything, right? You don't have access to the suite of patient ed videos or team-based, role-based types of training, um, and other things.

Um, but at least you could see what it is you have, right? We're, we're always continuing to tinker with that. Um, but I would at minimum, if you're somebody who's in dental school, just out of dental school, early in your career, get yourself an individual membership. If your focus is to drive more crowns, get yourself an individual membership.

I do think eventually you'll be wowed. Buy what it is and move into a practice membership because whether you're a dental associate and we have these conversation all the time, well, I don't own the practice, but realize in order to drive your production, you need that hygienist and dental assistant working with you.

And regardless of whether you own the practice or not, it's still a team, right? Every business is a team, and so it's worth the investment for two 70 or two 60, whatever it is a month. Um, that's lower than I think a lifetime gym membership. My wife just told me the membership is like four 50. I was like, what, what, what?

What's going on here? But anyway, um. But anyway, this is an investment in growing your business, right? That's a, it's a real investment. It's not just getting CE courses and then to your point, when you get to Navigator, that's really where we can really lean in on a service model to really drive the efficiency for you on what's going on, what's falling apart.

Who's not doing what? Here's what we need to do. Um, and we really are much more game planning as if we were an employee of your practice, of what we think you need to do. So whether it's trying to implement patient educational into your discussion points, most employees would push back and say, I don't have time for this.

Well, we have to figure out because this is a conversion issue. I want to do more crowns, or I want to do more restorative work, or I want the hygienist to do more scaling pls, whatever the case might be. We need to implement it because there's an outcome on the other side that we want to go get. Um, well, how do we drive that change?

How do we drive that education? So, so again, we, we, we are, we're across the gamut, as you said, Wes, and the goal is to really. We really believe become the learning management system for dentistry. We really believe what dentistry needs is a standard platform to learn from. Every employee needs a standard approach to learning and developing, and it needs to be ongoing and it needs to be AC accessible at all times.

And I always, I'm laughing now because as we turned on our new platform, the majority of activity is happening in the middle of the evening. I wake up, and I'll give you a for instance. Yesterday we had 18 new customers coming in. Up to 4:00 PM Yesterday when I woke up the next morning we had 40 something new customers.

They're coming in at night because the dentist, that's when they have time torn. The hygienists tend to come in at late at the day, meaning four or five o'clock or noontime. Right. So we we're able to compliment that. If I was to show up to your practice, I would never be able to do all of those things at the time you want.

And I just think it's, it's a better tool to help drive this for you. 'cause we meet everybody where they need to be met. Right. And, and I think in the end, if we could create that standard platform that's driving frequent con conversations or development pathways, um, we're gonna drive great outcomes for everybody.

Whether that's reducing your employee, you know, um, turnover or improving employee retention. I think creating higher case acceptances or outcomes, um, driving better, obviously clinical outcomes. Um, we really believe, you know, if, if that's what you're looking for, that's why you want to come to spear.

Well, I think, uh, Benjamin Franklin, don't quote me on this, but I think he said the best education one can make is education in oneself.

Mm-hmm. And Spear offers a great, I I I love that you use the term learning management system for you dentists who have never heard of that term before, it is, it is the platform that creates consistency and, and speed. In learning a specific, uh, thing, and we all have them. We all need to learn. I love those dentists who are avidly trying to learn and improve themselves, and those doctors who learn how to do larger cases.

Uh, or, or, or, and, or be more efficient on your nut and bolt dentistry around crowns and, and all of that is sort of what it's required to compete effectively today. It's a very competitive landscape in dental these days. Very different than say, 30 years ago. And, uh, so I encourage all dentists to, uh, go on to spear, look at their different options.

Uh, have a system where every time you have a new employee, you're able to quickly get them trained up. Spirit can be that learning. Partner to help that happen. And I think it's definitely worth that investment in, in doing that. I do view Spear as an investment and not a, not, you know, not a commodity cost on the p and l.

I can't elevate that enough. So, um, Matt, thank you for joining the program.

No, I had a blast. It was, uh, it was great talking with you, Wes. I, uh, I appreciate the time.

Alright, take care.

Alright, you too.