Emmet Scott is the CEO of Community Dental Partners, a dental support organization dedicated to helping dentists build thriving practices through operational, financial, and leadership support. He is also a Partner at the Dentist Entrepreneur Organization, where he mentors and connects dental entrepreneurs to scale their businesses effectively. With over 15 years of experience in the dental industry, Emmet has grown a $150 million dental service organization, authored DSO Secrets, and hosts the DEO Growth Secrets Podcast, sharing actionable insights for practice owners.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [04:36] Emmet Scott talks about the factors currently reshaping the dental industry
• [06:00] How post-pandemic challenges are testing dental practice owners more than ever
• [10:27] Shifts in gender dynamics and productivity in dentistry
• [12:27] Why more dentists are moving toward fee-for-service models
• [13:17] The four avatars of dental practice ownership
• [19:15] DEO’s profitability framework and how it helps practice owners optimize revenue and operations
• [25:16] The difference between scaling and launching profits
• [30:34] How profitability leads to more impact and work-life balance for dental entrepreneurs
• [34:54] Emmet’s advice for practice owners

In this episode…

Scaling a dental practice is no small feat. Between navigating industry challenges, managing rising costs, and balancing patient care with profitability, practice owners face countless hurdles. How can dentists build sustainable group practices while minimizing risks and maximizing rewards?

According to Emmet Scott, a seasoned entrepreneur and dental industry expert, the key lies in aligning profitability with operational efficiency. He highlights that many dentists fall into the trap of expanding without systemization, which leads to inefficiencies and financial strain. By focusing on frameworks like the four avatars of practice ownership and the profitability stages, practice owners can assess their current challenges and determine clear steps toward growth. These methods not only streamline operations, but also provide a roadmap for achieving balance between entrepreneurial ambition and sustainable practice management.

In this episode of The Marketing 32 Show, host Brett Allen sits down with Emmet Scott, CEO of Community Dental Partners and Partner at the Dentist Entrepreneur Organization, to discuss actionable strategies for growing group dental practices. Emmet explains the importance of optimizing profitability, navigating post-pandemic industry shifts, and leveraging mentorship to solve complex challenges. He also provides advice on achieving sustainable growth through systemization and strategic risk-taking.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Brett Allen on LinkedIn
• Marketing 32
• Emmet Scott on LinkedIn
• Community Dental Partners
• Dentist Entrepreneur Organization
• DEO’S Growth Secrets Podcast for Dental Organizations
• Jordon Comstock on LinkedIn
• BoomCloud
• DSO Secrets: The Ultimate Guide to Building Your Dental Empire by Emmet Scott
• Alex Hormozi on LinkedIn
• Russell Brunson on LinkedIn
• ClickFunnels Inner Circle

Quotable Moments

• “Entrepreneurship is like the CrossFit of personal development; it exposes your weaknesses and pushes you to improve.”
• “Your business is a caricature of yourself; it reveals your strengths and weaknesses in an exaggerated form.”
• “If you’re successful, the universe rewards you with a bunch more crazy humans to manage.”
• “We were going to have to rethink everything because we needed to solve for profitability in a challenging environment.”
• “Profitability gives me more free time and allows me to have more impact.”

Action Steps

1. Prioritize financial organization: Implement a structured chart of accounts and regularly analyze your profit and loss statements to ensure accurate financial insights. This clarity helps in understanding where your profitability truly stands and addresses the challenge of KPI delusion where you might be in the green without actually making money.
2. Leverage technology and outsourcing: Invest in technology and outsourcing solutions to streamline workflows and reduce costs. This helps mitigate the impact of capped revenues and rising costs, allowing you to maintain or increase profitability.
3. Engage in continuous personal development: Actively seek out mentorship and coaching to develop your skills, overcoming bottlenecks in your business by learning from experts and peers.
4. Understand and adapt to industry changes: Stay informed about industry trends and adapt your practice model accordingly. This awareness enables you to better manage productivity and employee satisfaction in a changing workforce landscape.
5. Focus on profitability stages: Follow the framework of launching, optimizing, duplicating, and scaling profits to strategically grow your business and ensure that each stage of growth is sustainable and profitable.

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Marketing 32, the only dental marketing agency with the Practice Impact Formula™ for predictable growth without financial risk.

With a focus on new patient generation, addressing missed opportunities, and expert scheduling, Marketing 32 has helped over 170 practices in the US, Canada, and Australia. Grow in 30 days, or you don’t pay — it’s that simple.

To learn more, visit marketing32.com and schedule a 15-minute discovery call. If you’re a visionary practice ready for impact, Marketing 32 is ready to help you grow!

Episode Transcript:

Intro 00:13

You are listening to The Marketing 32 Show with your host Brett Allen.

Brett Allen 00:18

Welcome to The Marketing 32 Show. This is Brett Allen. I’m your host, where we connect leading dentists and dental influencers, industry experts. We uncover the latest strategies, insights, and innovations that help dental practices grow and thrive. I’m excited for today’s episode. Before we get into who our guest is, I just want to tell you that we are super excited to have a future episode coming out with Jordon Comstock. He is the king of patient memberships. So if you do any kind of patient membership programs, go check out their website at boomcloud.com. They have a really cool software that helps you implement that track that, sell membership programs in your practice. But today I’m super excited to welcome a rock star in the dental space. Emmet Scott. Emmet, your reputation precedes you. You are a phenomenal entrepreneur, not just in the dental space, but in entrepreneurship in general. You’re a Co-founder and CEO of Community Dental Partners. You started the DEO’S Growth Secrets Podcast, Co-founder at the DEO, the Dentist Entrepreneur Organization where you have a huge community of so many dentists that are growing group practices and focusing on transferring from being clinician to practice owner. You provide resources, coaching, share your knowledge from growing $100 million DSO. It’s just super exciting to have you here on the show today. Emmet, thank you for coming on.

Emmet Scott 01:47

Yeah. Thank you. Thrilled to be here. I love the title of entrepreneurship. Other than like, father and husband, like, that’s one of my favorite titles. I feel like it’s what makes the world go round. So, you know, one of the things I love about Dentist Entrepreneur Organization is that term entrepreneur. Like we’re the ones in the ring. And I have a lot of respect for those in the dental ring because I have been in lots of different industries. Of course, about 15 years ago I started with my best friend, you know, helping him with his first dental practice. Then I said, what if we did another one? What if we did another one? 70-plus locations later, 1,300 employees, $150 million in revenue. You know, we’re like, okay, there we go. So that’s kind of entrepreneurship. But I really respect how difficult each step is because if you’re successful, the universe rewards you with a bunch more crazy humans to manage. And that really pushes on your leadership skills. You know that’s true.

Brett Allen 02:47

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, thank you for coming on. I think there’s so much in the entrepreneurship space. I mean, it really, before I even got into starting my own thing, I didn’t realize how much of a road.

Brett Allen 02:59

Like a challenge it would be in self-development. Like that is really what entrepreneurship comes down to is like it exposes all of your weaknesses and where you need to be better because you really you’re the bottleneck in your own business. So, well.

Emmet Scott 03:16

Your business is like a caricature of yourself. You know, if you’ve ever gone to one of those like fairs or parks where they do the caricature like blow up the different features of yourself, you know, your business is going to reveal your strengths and weaknesses. And I’ve often said entrepreneurship is like the CrossFit of personal development. You’re like, okay, I finally got the clean and jerk down. They’re like, well, what about handstand push ups? You know, it’s like, well, what about finance? Well, what about it? What about your marketing strategy? What about your HR? You know, what about if an employee does this, what are you going to do? And it really pushes that personal development. This is why I love being in DEO. because you’re in the room with like, everybody who’s interested in personal development at a very high, intense level.

Brett Allen 04:05

Well that’s awesome. I want to dig deeper on the deal. We’re going to get to that and the cool resources, events, all the cool stuff you’re doing there for your members there. But before we do, let’s jump into the state of the dental market right now. There’s been a lot of different things happening over the years as group practices. DEOs kind of really come in. The economy, election year, like what’s going on? What are you seeing on your side when it comes to the industry and dentistry specifically?

Emmet Scott 04:36

Yeah. I have an interesting perspective because, you know, started 15 years ago scaling. Started writing DSO Secrets, that book. Then I did the podcast that gave me access to a lot of conversations that were interesting as I was growing. Being part of DEO, you know, 270 members, I’m hearing from them all the time. And then, right during COVID, I was asked to be president of Adso, which is the largest groups, you know, tends to be the billion dollar groups, etc., and ended up doing that for three years, right, during all that COVID period. So I just say all of that because I’m in an interesting spot to kind of watch this industry develop, you know, built a lot of ties between Adso and Ada. Actually, it was during that time that it kind of healed and it wasn’t such the war and fight between them, but more like we all need to work together to protect this industry, i.e. we’re essential. You know, all of that was going down around that time. I would say what is interesting is as hard as like COVID is because it’s an interesting benchmark for anyone who is a business owner, especially in healthcare. Post-COVID, it’s been harder and I don’t think anyone during COVID said once this is over, it’ll really get hard.

Brett Allen 05:57

Yeah. What do you think? Why? Why is that? What do you think?

Emmet Scott 06:00

Yeah. Let me give a couple perspectives that I think maybe these factors we could bucketize. And it’s probably more minutia than this, but. Number one, dentistry has always been kind of respected as being recession proof. You know, whether you’re an investor or even if you’ve been in the industry, you’re like, we’re recession proof to some degree. We’ve never been tested on being inflation proof. And I think what this proved is we’re not. So when inflation happens, you know, my son was working at Home Depot post-COVID and he kept getting like these dollar hour raises like every month or so, which he didn’t deserve at all. But they were trying to retain employees. And all they would do is just walk over to the wood section and slap another price on that so they could cover all that expense. What did we do in dental with PPO, Medicaid, whatever. I mean, unless you were fee for service and service and you could somehow do that. You were now had capped revenue but inflationary labour, inflationary supplies, etc. So you just saw margins get squeezed. So very unique in healthcare versus other industries. You know Apple had no problem. They just raised the price on Macs and phones and so forth. But tons of problems in healthcare. So I would say inflation is the obvious one. Number one. Number two I think is a little more nuanced. But mental health became much more critical. We have a mental health load that’s happening unlike any time in history. I think obviously, COVID made us all sit back and say, what do we want from our life at every level, by the way? We talk about it like the employee turnover level, but we had more CEOs that were leaving the industry, not just dentistry, but like at publicly traded companies, you know, CEOs were retiring faster than ever. And so definitely there was this human experience of like, what is important? We have social media coming in and it’s putting a certain load on. We’ve got an aging baby boomer population, which is one of the largest populations. So now your Gen Xers are having to take care of baby boomers. So every level is filling some level of mental health load and kind of redefining their work life balance in a way that, you know, we’ve just never done to this extent. And so that’s fine. I think it’s actually good human development, really hard on business owners because capitalism is kind of one track mind. You know, capitalism says really excited for you to show up to work and work as many hours as you want. Right. And in dentistry too. On top of that, we got a lot of momentum, frankly, from Dennis with student loans. Well, what got frozen for three years during COVID as student loan payments. So everyone got to step back and go, do I want to work that much? How do I want to work? Which again, personal decision, but the impact on the business and profitability while inflation is coming up? I mean, it tested I don’t care whether you were a billion or you were one single location. Everybody was getting tested. We have 1,300 employees. So imagine every dollar that we needed to increase, which it was really about $3 that I think a lot of people had to move. Some of us 5 or 10. But every dollar on a thousand employees is $2 million of lost net income.

Brett Allen 09:36

Oh, wow. So you moved $3.

Emmet Scott 09:38

You just see $6 million just disappear overnight. So it wasn’t like, if you’re big, it’s easier. You know, you just lost more.

Brett Allen 09:46

Yeah. Yeah.

Emmet Scott 09:47

Right. So I think inflation kind of like gas prices moving up moves us towards electric. Inflation is moving us towards technology. It’s moving us towards outsourcing solutions. It’s moving us towards innovations on workflow and streamlining activity. Less R&D, more focused on operations. Right. So that was a huge impact. And then one that doesn’t get talked about a lot is right. During all this, we crossed a threshold where more women were graduating as dentists than men.

Brett Allen 10:24

Right, right. I saw that statistic lately.

Emmet Scott 10:27

We went from an industry that was primarily, you know, men. And then we moved over to women. Now women’s productivity is about 80% of men’s in dentistry. And it’s not because of laziness. It’s because men get to be a lot more focused and they don’t have to take care of their kids. Like women have to. And they don’t have to take care of, you know, maternity. All of those things primarily. So again, capitalism lives on, Like being focused on one activity all the time. So you have all these forces kind of coming together. And so your revenue is capped. Productivity for the most part is moving down and costs are moving up. And so you’re just racing towards how do I retain some level of profitability. In fact, Ada said that the difference between being an associate and being an owner, this was about 2 or 3 years ago, had moved to a difference of income of 7%.

Brett Allen 11:28

Oh, wow.

Emmet Scott 11:29

In other words, if you said, hey, I’m an associate, I think I want to be an owner, you got a 7% raise. Yeah. With all the burdens that.

Brett Allen 11:38

You take on. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

Emmet Scott 11:41

A lot of headaches. So that gap to I think people started to question again, mental health. Is this really worth it? And how do I get in a room where we can all talk about this support and then start moving on the innovation as quickly as possible. Yeah, because we were going to have to rethink everything.

Brett Allen 12:00

Is that why you think, at least from my standpoint, we’re getting a lot more practice owners coming our way who are fee for service and they’re ditching the insurance model. Do you think that’s also part of, you know, all of these things that are boiling to the surface, making it much harder? Compound that with how insurance companies are burdening the industry. They’re you know, they’re making that transition to fee for service.

Emmet Scott 12:27

Yeah, absolutely. It’s one of the levers that you have to be looking at, because if you can move revenue up, it helps. Revenue covers a lot of sins. Yeah, right. You don’t have to be as great of an operator the higher your revenue is. And frankly, the industry really benefited from that. You know, way back 80s, 90s, early 2000. And one of the things that’s happened is we’ve had to get better at being business owners. We’ve had to learn finance, marketing, you know, operations, HR much more than we did in the past, that’s for sure. Yeah.

Brett Allen 13:04

Well, let’s talk about that a little bit more. You mentioned the four avatars of practice ownership. Let’s dig into that. What are those four avatars?

Emmet Scott 13:17

What we’ve noticed, because we get, you know, such a large swath of the industry that we’re looking at and the entrepreneur side, we’ve kind of had to divide out so that we knew how to support them. What is the different groupings within the industry? And the x, y axis that we use, as we say, are they in revenue momentum okay or not? You know, and the way that shows up is I need more patience or I don’t, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now for those who are like, I can’t imagine not needing more patience, imagine I’ll use an extreme example. But imagine you have a practice in Montana, and you’re kind of the only one there in a pretty large town, and you’re seven months out on hygiene appointments. Yeah, you’re in revenue momentum. Okay. Yeah. But where you’re lacking is on the executive bandwidth. On operational bandwidth. Right. And so you’re either high operational bandwidth or low operational bandwidth. So if you take that on an x y axis, somebody who let’s call them low on revenue momentum and low on operational bandwidth, well, that’s someone who’s probably in the chair trying to get their practice going right. We call those the builders. Like they are, you know, in the thick of it every day. And they need a lot of support to try to get revenue up and going to try to learn how to even like run an office manager if they can afford one. And what does that look like? How do they work with their staff? They have very limited amount of time. Like time is precious to them. So at DEO, at least we know we have to almost like, you know, spoon feed exactly what to do to help them get to that place. Because what we’re trying to do is move them from that builder to what we call a high producer. So high producer would be someone who’s in high revenue momentum, but they still have low operational bandwidth. They might have an office manager. But again, if you’re seven months out on hygiene or something like that, you’re trying to hire a hygienist. You don’t have enough chairs. You’re trying to know, how do I grow from here? I kind of want to get to the next level. I’m the one kind of producing everything in our practice, which you have to be really careful of because your expenses can start really inflating in that and you don’t even know it. But, you know, you might be producing by yourself. Million and a half, $2 million. But you start to think to yourself, this is not a long term game. Like, I can’t do this for 20 years, you know? Right. And if I do, what is the end result? I still have to, like, someday exit. I need to, like, build a business here. Not just like a high producing job.

Brett Allen 16:12

Right, right, right.

Emmet Scott 16:14

Then we have individuals that they’ve gone out. They’ve bought a couple practices. Maybe they have one that’s really producing. Well, they’ve figured out how to hire an associate. They’re at, you know, 3 or 4 locations, but those 3 or 4 locations aren’t doing well. So they got kind of one funding the other, and they’re trying to figure out they’re like, oh, man, I’m brilliant at business. Oh crap, I suck at business. You know, we’ve all been through that where we’re like, you think you figured it out? And then you realize you didn’t. And we call those the Pathfinders, right? Like they’re redesigning who they want to be and where they’re missing. Because they have 3 or 4 locations, they may have some operational bandwidth. They may have a regional or an ops director or an office manager who’s really strong. That’s kind of helping them manage that. But they’re missing on the revenue side. You know, you probably see some of those with Marketing 32. They’re like, can you fix these practices for me? Yep.

Brett Allen 17:12

And they’ve got one that’s their bread and butter. That’s basically funding the others as they’re figuring out how to do all that.

Emmet Scott 17:20

Yeah. And if it’s their high producer one that they’re in, they’re starting to get pretty burned out too. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And so we have a whole methodology to assess those and help them. And then, you know, quadrant four is what we call our empire builder. So they’re high revenue, high operational. But like you and I, you know, if your business is growing, it’s broken.

Brett Allen 17:44

Yeah.

Emmet Scott 17:44

Always right. It’s just always broken. So it’s not like once you become an empire builder, you’re kind of done. Now you’re going, Okay, what does it mean to do 10 million in revenue? What does it mean to do 15 million? 20 million? You know, each of those have their own steps. Or, you know, we might have somebody who has a single location doing 10 million and they’re like, all right, we are getting to a point where we need a second location if we want to keep growing. And so each of those kind of have their own methodology. But I found that, you know, people can pretty quickly bucketize themselves in one of those quadrants of like, is this a revenue problem or an ops problem or both? Or, you know, entrepreneurs really only fear two things: failure and success. So empire builders who are like, man, I’ve got a ton of opportunity, but how do I consume it without going bankrupt?

Brett Allen 18:38

Yeah, yeah, that’s — I imagine working with each one of those quadrants, those four avatars is really interesting to kind of see in the journey where they’re at and what they need. So let’s go deeper on the DEO and what you guys have created there to help serve this market of dentists who are the entrepreneurial minded dentists. So tell us more.

Emmet Scott 19:04

Give everybody like a nugget that would just like help them not make like half the mistakes you make as an entrepreneur.

Brett Allen 19:12

Yeah, yeah. Go, go. What you got?

Emmet Scott 19:15

All right. I’m going to give them one of our frameworks that we teach right out of the gate. It’s called the profitability stages. Okay. So imagine that building a business in any industry. But we’re going to focus on dentistry. You’re working through different stages. And the ultimate stage is passive profitability. Right. Right. Sitting on the beach in check. Right. Exactly. Really I define passive profitability as I can do what I want, when I want, how I want to, because most entrepreneurs don’t actually want to retire. Retirement means be put out of service, right? But there’s definitely things they want to retire from doing. Like, I don’t want to have to do, you know, doctor pay anymore. I don’t want to have to do HR elements anymore. So how do you get to that place where you’re really just doing your unique ability, your capability? Right. Yeah. But to get there, you have to go through the other stages. So stage one is what we call launching profits. That’s basically getting started. You’re not at break even or you’re just trying to get to break even. You’re trying to get where revenue expenses equals zero or maybe a little bit more. Right. And that’s the launching profit activity. And I’m going to come back to that one because it’s actually a trap that a lot of entrepreneurs fall into. But it’s where you all, everybody has to start. The next stage is called optimizing profits. And the way we define that is a practice is trying to get to 20% profitability. And I’ll give one caveat here is you need to do that while calculating. If you’re the dentist owner. While calculating your income as an associate equivalent. Okay, so let’s say someone comes to me and says, Emmet, I’m doing better than 20%. I’m at 30% profitability. Okay. I’m like, oh, fabulous. So if you hired an associate to replace you tomorrow and you had to pay them 30% of production collections, whatever, what would be your profit? And they go, oh, well, it’d be zero, right? Well that’s right. So our 20% is on passive income. Okay. That’s what we’re measuring. And so if someone says oh I’m at 40% okay then if you haven’t calculated that then you’re really probably at ten, you know. Right. Again depending on what you need to pay a dentist. So we’re very strict on helping people organize their chart of accounts and their PNL now so that they can see exactly where they’re at. A lot of people come in, business owners come in. And what I call KPI delusion. They’ve instituted one of these KPI softwares, which is fine, but it’s not tied to a PNL outcome. And the way you know, this is true because they’re like, man, we hit green. I paid everyone a bonus and I’m losing money.

Brett Allen 22:15

Yep. Yeah, right. Yeah.

Emmet Scott 22:18

And that’s simply how or I’m paying it out of my production or whatever. And that’s simply happening because the kite doesn’t have a string on it. Right? It’s not tied back to the PNL. If you get the chart of accounts organized correctly, you can really see with clarity, you know, where is that profitability? Where do bonuses need to kick in? Where is my break even point? Where can I do equity? All of those things are right there in the PNL. So I want to get to the optimize that leads me to the next stage, which is duplicating Profits. Duplicating is not opening another location, it’s duplicating at the associate or hygienist level.

Brett Allen 22:56

Okay.

Emmet Scott 22:58

So I’m duplicating myself if I’m a dentist owner.

Brett Allen 23:02

Got it.

Emmet Scott 23:02

Now this is like the really cool nugget, okay. Duplicating has more profitability than scaling. Scaling is going to be the next stage where I open another location. Right? But if you think about it this way, if I have my practice, the first dentist pays all the overhead. They pay the rent, they pay the office manager, they pay the assistants, all of those things. The second dentist comes in and you have to pay the dentist. All right. So let’s call that 30%. You have to pay supplies. Lab, you know, hygienist whatever. Right there. I call those the cost of goods section. Most of the time, 50% of the dollar still makes it out alive. All right. So it goes to show that 50% goes right to the bottom line right.

Brett Allen 23:57

Yeah. Right.

Emmet Scott 23:58

So second associate. Third associate. I mean, some people would argue, well, I did have to hire an assistant. All right. Great. But it still comes out to about 50%. Makes it right to the bottom line. You can’t do that with a second location. What a second location really is, is an establishment of more overhead again. And business really comes down to establishing overhead and then cramming as much income as you can through that overhead.

Brett Allen 24:25

Right, right. Your operating expense. Yeah. Yeah.

Emmet Scott 24:28

So oftentimes what happens is entrepreneurs in our dopamine and our excitement for new etc. is that we look at here’s the language I’ll hear emit I found this practice. It’s a great deal.

Brett Allen 24:41

It’s a gold mine.

Emmet Scott 24:42

Yeah. Yeah. And what they’re typically looking at is the transaction price not the ongoing profitability, right? I can get this for $50,000, $80,000, $150,000. I can get it for just taking over the lease. Right? Right. And what we help them look at is just beyond that. What’s it going to cost? What is the profitability?

Brett Allen 25:02

Right. It’s like that uninformed optimism. Right. It’s like, oh, I see this really cool thing from a price tag standpoint, but you don’t see all these other costs that are going to be coming after you make that acquisition. Yeah.

Emmet Scott 25:16

Yeah. Which are called the working capital costs, which, you know, if you start to include those in, you just make more informed decisions. And really being a CEO is about allocating resources for a better return on investment. That’s really what the top CEOs know how to do, is they know how to prioritize all the different opportunities that they have and then insert their resources, whether that’s where do I, my office manager, spend their time? Ops director spend their time? Where do I spend the time that gets the highest return on return on investment. That’s really our role as a CEO, and it takes a different skill set than what it took as an entrepreneur to take risk, see opportunity. All of those things, there’s a new maturity to it. So then the next stage is I want to scale. Like if I’ve maximized out of practice, I run into a facility constraint, can’t add another chair or I’ve hit my total addressable market, my Tam for that area. Then it’s time to open another location, establish another set of overhead, do the same thing. The trick here, this is the another nugget is it needs to be a copy and paste activity. Okay. And where entrepreneurs fall into a trap is they tell me they’re scaling when really what they’re doing is going back and launching profits again.

Brett Allen 26:36

New businesses.

Emmet Scott 26:37

If someone comes in and says, I’ve got four locations one’s perio, one’s ortho, one’s in this town, one’s doing this. What I know is they’re not making any money. Yeah. You know, because they’re not an In-N-Out Burger with four locations franchising it.

Brett Allen 26:54

Yeah.

Emmet Scott 26:55

They’re an In-N-Out Burger with a taco truck with a pizza, you know, restaurant, etc. and they’re like, well, I’m a restauranteur. I know how to get food and supplies and hire people, but they can’t get any leverage on systems. And so typically on top of that, this is our pathfinders. They’ll have an ops person. They’ll either have high turnover there or they’re having to pay them quite a bit of money because that person is having to manage so much different types of complexity. The net net result is you’re not making money.

Brett Allen 27:29

Yeah. Wow. That’s you guys. That’s a ton of gold right there. Just from a framework standpoint, to help you visualize what you were talking about with, you know, stages of ownership. Also like the type of entrepreneur you’re at, like where you’re at on that. That’s awesome.

Emmet Scott 27:46

I imagine I’ll give you a common one like, this is really applicable. Most pediatric dentists add ortho, which is a launching profit activity, and then they lose money in it for years and years and years.

Brett Allen 27:59

Oh interesting. Because they see the opportunities like, hey, I can just bolt this on. I’ve got the patient base for it, but it ends up being a different business model.

Emmet Scott 28:08

You’ve got an orthodontist who isn’t a percent of income. You’ve got an entirely different pay structure that’s really like a used car, you know, financing scheme. And you have to be able to manage a case over a period of six, 12, 18, 24 months against a financial model that is totally different than running pediatric dentistry.

Brett Allen 28:36

Well, and I can see the appeal of it, too. Not only do you have these, you know, these patients that need that care, but you also see all these other group practices doing that where you’ve got a pediatric and an ortho bolted together. Right. And so it’s like, hey, I’m just going to do that. But again, that uninformed optimism of like, hey, there’s some things we need to consider if we’re going to do this.

Emmet Scott 28:59

Yeah, that’s really the key there. Brett is like, there’s things we need to consider. We’re doing a different business model, right? Do I have the resources? Do I have an ortho director who’s really going to drive this, or am I just going to kind of hope it works out as I refer patients over there? And I hope it just kind of self manages itself. Right. Just two different approaches. That’s the key. Like that one framework. Every time I’m launching profits, I know I need to build an entire structure to make sure that that business is then ran well versus scaling. I’m taking a copying and paste, and I know I could take my dental assistant from this practice, move it over to a different one, and it’s just the same thing, right? Yeah. So that’s the big difference to be able to litmus test that. Well, I think we just saved people like millions of dollars of mistakes.

Brett Allen 29:54

Oh my gosh, so much pain and headache. And you talk about mental health. I mean, ooh, opening another business is definitely an endeavor. You got to do it the right way. So guys go to the DEO. If you haven’t heard of them check them out. I’m going to give you their website real quick. deodentalgroup.com. Yeah that they have events. They have resources. They have coaches. They’re doing all kinds of things to help the entrepreneurial minded dentist just scratch that itch of doing the next thing, getting that dopamine hit right. So one last question before we go.

Emmet Scott 30:34

What it is Brett. It’s about getting profitable. You know, I mean, if you said what’s the core focus? Profitability gives me more free time and allows me to have more impact. And those are the things that none of our members are like. Business is the most important thing in my life, and I don’t care about my family, my kids. I have six kids, right? Everybody’s trying to figure out this balance to measure success. We call it thriving. You know, we now have 270 organizations. It represents about 1300 practices, almost $3 billion in revenue. And to be in a room like that, right, where individuals are all trying to solve for this, we have a WhatsApp group where they can chat with each other in real time and ask questions. We have it broken out by office manager, pediatric dentist, orthodontist, right? So they’re able to iterate with one another so much faster than an individual, just kind of on their own. You know, even with ChatGPT, it’s faster to have, you know, other people who are entrepreneurs that you can bounce ideas off of.

Brett Allen 31:46

Oh, and I can certainly attest to that. I mean, I think looking back on all the different mentors I’ve worked with, coaching programs, investing in myself has been the single most best thing I could have done from not only self-development personally, but also from a business standpoint like my career, rubbing shoulders with those who are just at that next step ahead of where I’m at. It makes so much difference. So I just made.

Emmet Scott 32:14

My largest investment in coaching I think I ever have. $100,000 for a day.

Brett Allen 32:21

Whoa. Okay.

Emmet Scott 32:22

Yeah, but it’s with Alex Hormozi. So if you’ve watched Alex on. Yeah, he’s just incredible. There’s nine more of us in the room together that day, so he’ll make a million bucks that day. That’s awesome. And it’s well worth it. He’s the return on investment.

Brett Allen 32:39

Yeah. I’m excited for you to do that. I know, Alex, we’ve rubbed shoulders a few times when we were together with Russell Brunson and the Clickfunnels World Inner Circle program. He is just — he’s brilliant. His way he thinks and sees things is great. I’m excited for you to do that.

Emmet Scott 32:58

Brett, can I tell one more thing about you real quick? Okay. We just launched this six months ago. I was able to figure out how to take executives and DSO owners who are everywhere from 10 million, 20 million, 150 million, even some at 300 million. And connect them with our members as mentors. Oh, wow. So every now when you join DEO, this just launched last year, you get to meet with a mentor every other week. You get put in a tribe where you mastermind with them, but the leverage is huge. Like, you get to take them on a platter and say, here’s my problems, help me to. That’s awesome. And and so and if that if for some reason that executive or owner can’t solve the, the issue, then you can do what we call an expert call, which is basically meet with any of the other 15 coaches that we have on the platform, so that there isn’t a problem at this point that we can’t solve.

Brett Allen 34:04

That sounds amazing. You guys take Emmet up on this offer here. I’ve heard so many great things from people who are in the program. Even the coaches in the program. It’s really what you’re doing. Emmet is so valuable for the industry. And thank you. Thank you for your time today. Real quick, before we go, do you have just one? Like, if you could condense down all your knowledge around dentistry, ownership and entrepreneurship, all of that. Is there one big domino that if you push that domino over as a practice owner, would make the, you know, if you could boil that down into some concept. What would that be? What would that advice be? That one thing to focus on.

Emmet Scott 34:54

Take risk one time. You know, as an entrepreneur you took a big risk. You went out and did something that very few people are willing to do. But your brain thinks that because of the success that does come from that initially, that the way to solve all the future problems is to take more risk and more risk and more risk. And so we developed out a framework called Idope, where every idea gets documented, organized, prioritized, prioritized by return on investment and then executed on. It creates team alignment, it creates synergy, and it reduces the noise and the risk associated with you taking action. And so that’s probably my biggest takeaway. It came from a lot of pain of me, you know, being very dopamine addicted and thinking the next shiny object was the solution to my problems, rather than kind of the boring systemization was the solution. And so I think we’ve kind of magically put those things together where the entrepreneur can go out there, have huge impact, crush it, make more profitability, but lower their overall stress and risk. And that’s ideal.

Brett Allen 36:10

That is a great nugget. Thank you. Thank you again. I think that’s a wrap for today guys. Go check out deodentalgroup.com. You can learn more about all the things there. Emmet thank you again so much for your time today and all the wisdom and value you’ve shared with us on The Marketing 32 Show.

Emmet Scott 36:29

Great to be with you.

Brett Allen 36:31

All right. We’ll see you guys catch you on the next one. Take care.