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On this episode of the Layin' Coin Podcast, Mark and the boys talk about the playoff opener at Atlanta and how Chase Briscoe played playoff spoiler in Darlington. Be sure to like and subscribe!
Check out this great episode live at Las Vegas Coin. Scott and John go over some favorite purchases.
Check out this great episode live at Las Vegas Coin. Scott and John go over some favorite purchases.
On today's episode of the Layin Coin Podcast, the boys talk a little Kansas Speedway and how to not get caught up in these mistakes this weekend. Today's podcast was edited and produced by Mach10 Digital. Find them at Mach10Digital.com.
On this week's episode of the Layin' Coin Podcast, the boys talk about their CASH filled weekend at COTA and who their picks are to dominate the show at Richmond.
On this episode of the Layin' Coin Podcast, the boys get together to figure out what happened at Bristol, COTA preview on who to place your bets on, and more. Be sure to subscribe to our channel, comment and like this video.
Join us for another engaging episode of the Two Sides of a Coin Podcast as we explore a spectrum of topics that'll leave you pondering life's many facets. First off, we're celebrating Bry's birthday, and the gang gets sentimental about the passing of time and the joy of growing older. We even share some heartwarming birthday conversations that you won't want to miss. Is steak too common for a celebratory meal? That's the debate that heats up next as we discuss the merits of this classic dish and ponder whether there's room for culinary adventure on special occasions. Then, we dive into the world of entertainment as we review the Gen V show, now available on Amazon Prime Video. Find out why this sci-fi series has us hooked and wanting more. In a world filled with deadlines and to-do lists, we explore the importance of delegation and trust in both personal and professional relationships. Learn how these key ingredients can lead to success and stronger bonds. Breaking news from the music scene! Frank has finally finished his album, and the surprise collaboration with Drake has us all buzzing. Tune in to get the inside scoop on what to expect from this musical masterpiece. Last but not least, we share our thoughts on the heartwarming film "For All The Dogs." Join us as we review this touching story that's sure to tug at your heartstrings. So, whether you're here for the laughs, insights, or just a good time, don't miss out on this diverse episode of the Two Sides of a Coin Podcast. Subscribe now and join the conversation! Thank you all for listening. If you're new to the podcast please subscribe or tell us what you think about the show. Timestamps: - Happy Birthday to Bry (3:00) - Steak is Common People (14:10) - Gen V show on Amazon Prime Video (43:00) - Delegate and Trust (46:30) - Frank finishes the Album with Drake (54:00) - “For All The Dogs” review (1:22:45) Find us on: website - twosidespodcast.com Instagram & Twitter - @twosidespodcast Facebook - facebook.com/twosidespodcast Youtube - twosidespodcast.com/youtube
Two Sides Podcast is back! This week the team gets into their experience at 50 Cent's Final Lap Tour Performance, will your friendship change if you find out your friend is a “freaky nasty” boy, and lastly is Shannon Sharpe moving like a snake. Listen to this and much more on the Two Sides of a Coin Podcast! Subscribe now! Topics: 50 Cent Concert 25:00 - 50:00 Catching up: Delson: 3:00-10:00 Bryan:10:00-20:00 Frank: 20:00 Thank you all for listening. If you're new to the podcast please subscribe or tell us what you think about the show. Find us on: website - twosidespodcast.com Instagram & Twitter - @twosidespodcast Facebook - facebook.com/twosidespodcast Youtube - twosidespodcast.com/youtube
Two Sides of a Coin Podcast is back again! This week the team gets into their health being on their mind from their based on what happened recently, Frank reflects on the new addition to his family, the Dalai Lama and much much more! Topics: Focus on getting healthy New Kid, New Thoughts (30:00) Emergency NYC, Netflix show (40:00) "Can your partner have had a crush on one of your friends?": (1:01:00) Quick hits: (1:20:22) Kansas bans transgender athletes Super Mario Bros movie breaks opening weekend record Dali Lama controversy Fyre Festival 2 on the way Teacher sets up fight club in Florida Thank you all for listening. If you're new to the podcast please subscribe or tell us what you think about the show. Find us on: website - twosidespodcast.com Instagram & Twitter - @twosidespodcast Facebook - facebook.com/twosidespodcast Youtube - twosidespodcast.com/youtube
Two Sides of a Coin Podcast returns again! This week the team gets into the things they don't tell you about being a homeowner, Delson and Bryan talk about their family time back in their hometown and what that did for them. Frank also introduces the debate regarding a breakup that happened because a Chris Brown concert. This and much much more! Subscribe now! Thank you all for listening. If you're new to the podcast please subscribe or tell us what you think about the show. Find us on: website - twosidespodcast.com Instagram & Twitter - @twosidespodcast Facebook - facebook.com/twosidespodcast Youtube - twosidespodcast.com/youtube
Two Sides of a Coin team is back as we return from a quick hiatus due to some family events that took place for one of our hosts. This week we get caught up, go over the Super Bowl, and the Super Bowl halftime show. Check back with us every week for the latest Two Sides of a Coin Podcast episode! Subscribe now to our YouTube as well at twosidespodcast.com/youtube. Thank you all for listening. If you're new to the podcast please subscribe or tell us what you think about the show. Find us on: website - twosidespodcast.com Instagram & Twitter - @twosidespodcast Facebook - facebook.com/twosidespodcast Youtube - twosidespodcast.com/youtube
This week the Two Sides of a Coin Podcast got into Thanksgiving, Friendsgiving and what they were and thankful that maybe they were not expecting. Also Delson gets into holiday dating and why he now avoids dating at certain times of the year. Topics: - Thanksgiving - Friendsgiving - Unexpected things that we are thankful for (16:00) - Holidays Dating Thank you all for listening. If you're new to the podcast please subscribe or tell us what you think about the show. Find us on: website - twosidespodcast.com Instagram & Twitter - @twosidespodcast Facebook - facebook.com/twosidespodcast Youtube - twosidespodcast.com/youtube
On this episode of the Two Sides of a Coin Podcast, the team catch up and get into the bad string of luck Frank and Delson have been having, car problems being the worst problems (especially in Orlando), and the Kyrie Irving suspension. Check us out for this and much more! Subscribe now! Topics: - Car Problems are the worst problems - Kyrie punished for comments. Quick hits: - Nick Cannon got another kid - Drake and 21 Savage Album - Takeoff passing on and why film those events - Aaron Carter passing - Snoop Dogg says we're dumb Thank you all for listening. If you're new to the podcast please subscribe or tell us what you think about the show. Find us on: website - twosidespodcast.com Instagram & Twitter - @twosidespodcast Facebook - facebook.com/twosidespodcast Youtube - twosidespodcast.com/youtube
@Rorypicks and @SkyboxNASCAR's first podcast. The UN-official NASCAR Playoff Betting Podcast and the super UN-official Podcast of Busch Beer. Little bit of Darlington, little bit of our trip, little bit of errything. These descriptions will hopefully get better. Until then, enjoy.
Is money the root of all evil? Or is it the value exchange currency that could make all of your wildest dreams come true? You know what side I'm on, and my guest today has a powerful mission that I'm truly in awe of. Allegra Moet Brantly is a Founder and CEO of Factora Wealth, and she's on a mission to lead 1 million women to $1 million in net worth. She's setting out to accomplish this through her online course and community that educate and empower women to build real wealth together. A serial entrepreneur, real estate investor, dog lover and Texan since 2017, Allegra is deeply passionate about helping women learn how to invest in financial freedom. She also hosts the Coffee and Coin Podcast.Time Stamps:(0:40) Talking Money(1:25) Why Allegra Loves Money(2:35) What is Factora Wealth?(4:25) Bridging the Financial Education Gap(11:35) Having “Enough” and Financial Ranges(17:00) Allegra's Financial Journey(25:00) The Life of a Billionaire(36:40) Blame(37:50) Where to Find Allegra(40:49) Final ThoughtsListen to Allegra's Podcast Here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/coffee-and-coin-podcast/id1495927266Connect with Allegra: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/factorawealthFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/FactoraWealthAnd Check Out Her Website Here! https://www.factorawealth.com/wealth-circle
Slow news week this week as the guys get into the Boston Celtics advancing to the NBA Finals, a deeper conversation about bullying and the school shooting in Uvalde Texas and went over some of the responses to Delson's poll on his Instagram story. That and much more on this week's episode of the Two Sides of a Coin Podcast. Subscribe, rate and review now! Topics: - Celtics to NBA Finals - Bullying conversation - Memorial Day Weekend - Instagram Cheating Poll Quick Hits: - Ray Liotta died Thank you all for listening. If you're new to the podcast please subscribe or tell us what you think about the show. Find us on: website - twosidespodcast.com Instagram & Twitter - @twosidespodcast Facebook - facebook.com/twosidespodcast Youtube - twosidespodcast.com/youtube
Welcome back to the Two Sides of a Coin Podcast! This week the team gets into dating shows and why people would do that to themselves, taking a look at one's health and taking sometime to visit the churches of Miami... Topics: - Ultimatum — dating shows - Love is Blind Quick Hits: - Cashing Out Rapper convicted of sex trafficing - Florida man: Watches Spiderman 300 times - Kentucky Man: Suing for 450k for his celebrating his birthday - Kindergartener bringing Tequila to school Thank you all for listening. If you're new to the podcast please subscribe or tell us what you think about the show. Find us on: website - twosidespodcast.com Instagram & Twitter - @twosidespodcast Facebook - facebook.com/twosidespodcast Youtube - twosidespodcast.com/youtube
Join the discussion on Facebook! - and connect with Dr. Buchman!TranscriptJonathan VanHorn:Welcome to the Tooth and Coin Podcast where we talk about your adventure of being a dental practice owner. In these episodes, we're going to be talking about problems that you will likely face as a practice owner as well as give an idea about actionable solutions that you can take so that you can get past this problem in your practice. Some of these concepts are really big ones, some of them are very specific. But we hope that these episodes help you along with your journey.Jonathan VanHorn:Now, a very important piece for you to understand is that this is not paid financial advice. This is not paid tax or legal advice. We are not your financial advisors. We are not your CPAs. This is two CPAs talking about informational and educational content to help you along with your journey. It's a very important piece for you to understand.Jonathan VanHorn:Another thing that you need to know is that if you enjoy today's content, join us on the Facebook group. So we've got a Facebook group that is active with dentists that is going to have content talking about what we're talking about today to continue the discussion. Agree with us? Don't agree with us? Have a story to tell? Have something to share? Join us in the Facebook group. If you go to Facebook and you search for Tooth and Coin Podcast, click on it to join it and be able to join us there.Jonathan VanHorn:Finally, if you need some more help, we're developing a list of resources that are going to be centering in around our topics of discussion to be able to help you a little bit more than what the content is doing. So if you'd like access to that whenever it becomes ready, all you have to do is text the word toothandcoin, T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444. Again, that's toothandcoin, all one word, no spaces, to 33444. Reply with your email address and we'll email you instructions on how to get into the Facebook group as well as add you to the list to be able to send you those resources when they're available, and if they're available, we'll go ahead and send them to you as well.Jonathan VanHorn:So onto today's episode. I hope you enjoy.Jonathan VanHorn:Hello, ambitious dentists. Today, I have with us a very, very special guest in addition to my partner in crime, Mr. Joseph Rugger. So today, we are doing something a little bit different, a little bit more fun, that I think you guys are going to enjoy. We are talking with someone who we've been lucky enough to be able to see their entire dental practice journey so far. This person is Dr. Wes Buchman. So Dr. Wes, thank you for coming on today.Wes Buchman:Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me.Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah. So for people that are listening that aren't familiar with dentists in Arkansas, Dr. Wes Buchman has acquired an office. We were lucky enough to be part of that process. We've been able to see all of the success that he's had with that process. So Joseph and I were talking about some really fun ideas for episodes and Joseph thought this would be a good episode for us. So Joseph, why don't you take it away and just talk about what it is you're thinking that people will be able to get out of this conversation?Joseph Rugger:All right. Thanks, Jonathan. Really, really excited to bring you a new episode on the Tooth and Coin Podcast. We're really excited to talk to one of our good friends of Tooth and Coin. This is Dr. Wes Buchman, who is a practicing dentist, solo office in Central Arkansas. So I'm really, really excited to get a chance to come pick Dr. Wes's brain, learn a little bit more about his decision-making process, and all of the things that went into the first couple of years of practice ownership. So we're really, really looking forward to the conversation. Wes, thanks so much for joining us. We're happy to have you on the podcast.Wes Buchman:Yeah. I'm happy to be here.Joseph Rugger:Wes, why don't you walk us through maybe the decision? So you worked as an associate at another practice and there's quite a bit that goes into the decision to start your own business and to go out on your own and hang your own shingle on all those things. As you look back on the last couple of years and on the decision to make the leap into practice ownership, maybe walk us through some of the bigger things that you were thinking, some things that were big turning points for you and walk us through how you made that decision.Wes Buchman:Yeah. First, I was fortunate enough to get out of dental school and have a very good associateship with a successful practice. It couldn't have, at least financially, been a better scenario. It wasn't like I was scraping by or anything like that. So then it really turned into what do I want to be doing for the long-term? My personality is more of I want to do things my way, for better or worse I guess you could say. So I just knew that I wanted to be able to make decisions on my future and not really have somebody be able a) to fire me if they just felt like it or I knew there was a reason people are buying practices and owning practices, and there had to be financial reward there as well. But ultimately, I wanted to be in power of my own destiny instead of at the whim of an owner that wasn't as involved or as concerned with my future as I was.Joseph Rugger:Well, Dr. Wes, I wanted to also ask about the decision to acquire a practice. So as we have folks that are probably listening to this podcast, there are going to be some that are interested in doing a de novo or a scratch start, right? Or they may be interested in doing an acquisition. So I'd be curious on your thoughts on what led you to go down the road of acquisition versus scratch start. Maybe walk us through that decision-making process.Wes Buchman:First of all, doing a scratch start still scares the bejesus out of me. I don't know. People that do that are just on another level, man. Most respect to them for just having so much confidence that they can just bring people in out of thin air. I mean, that scared me so much that I'd rather have a bigger loan and patient flow. So that really wasn't ever a desire for me to do a scratch start. But honestly, when you get out, you don't really know what you want as far as what a practice looks like unless you just have a person... you are a person that has really great vision.Wes Buchman:So for me, it was learning. Listened to plenty of Jonathan's podcasts. I listened to Shared Practices's podcasts. I read as many articles and books and stuff as I could get my hands on to really form an educated opinion on what a good practice was and was not. Then started asking around. I knew that Central Arkansas and really Little Rock was where I was going to practice, so that narrowed it down. Some people will move or look out in the country. That really just wasn't something that I was looking for. So then it was sitting there waiting and going and looking at practices. I probably looked at five or six before I landed on the one I'm in now.Wes Buchman:Just, with all the stuff that you learn before of how many patients do they have, does it seem like it's struggling, is it... looking at their practice numbers, seeing do they have the latest and greatest equipment or is it old, all of these different factors that you guys helped me on and then the knowledge that I had gained from literally just learning and reading everything that I could. You start to figure out what kind of practice you really want, and that's going to be different for everybody. For me, it was important to have a bigger of a practice because I always wanted to have two doctors, me and one other one, or more, but me and one other one in the practice. So I was really looking for bigger practices from the get-go if I could do it. So yeah. Those are probably what made me start going in that direction to come to this practice.Joseph Rugger:All right. That's great. Thanks for that. I want to ask about something that we get a question on on the CPA side regularly. So the question is, hey, there's this piece of equipment that's coming up. My rep is in town, said that I can expense all of it for tax purposes. Should I buy it with cash? Should I use debt to finance it? Can you maybe walk us through, as you're looking... I'm not talking about changing the style of gloves that you wear. Just when you look at some of the bigger purchases and the bigger decisions that you make as a practice owner, certainly on the CPA side, we can always guide you on the tax ramifications and all of those different pieces, but maybe walk us through as a new business owner maybe how you approached some of those bigger decisions and how you made those decisions. If you could maybe walk us through that decision-making process?Wes Buchman:Man, in my opinion, owning a practice is just so many little decisions. It's not one big massive decision, after deciding to buy the practice, of course. So owning the practice is all these little decisions. So for me, it was more of an abstract thing of realizing that I had to question each decision that was made and to seek out as many answers as possible. So just that general statement there has gotten me through a lot of when something would come up or looking at how something was done in the practice, of saying, "Is this the right way to do it? How do we get to the right way to do it?"Wes Buchman:If I don't know, I start asking people. Luckily, our dental community overall is really nice and helpful and understanding. I mean, especially the younger guys that were closer to your age. I have three or four or five fellow dentists that I especially called a lot in the beginning to ask them, "How do you do this? How is this done?" And just try to seek out as many answers as possible. Because at the end of the day, you guys are there to help and then your guys that you know are willing to help. It just makes everything a lot easier if you're willing to seek out some answers.Wes Buchman:The other thing I was glad I really knew was, another kind of abstract thing, of just knowing I was willing to put the work in. I wasn't scared to do it. That's a really big thing I think all practice owners have to realize is there are just people that are not willing or built to take on that type of responsibility and that's fine. If you don't want to do it, then don't do it. But everybody talks about owning a practice, but at the end of the day, if that's not your style, you're going to be miserable doing this thing. We are up here a lot more and taking care of a lot of different stuff. So as far as things that I'm really glad I knew, it's more general knowledge of personality and being willing to go the extra mile to make it right. Because clinically, it splinters in a lot of different stuff of how you want to run your practice, which would be different for everybody.Jonathan VanHorn:Can you give us an example of something specific that you have... maybe you even dealt with it today or in the last month, that you're like, "I didn't really think about me having to do this back when I was thinking of buying a business"?Wes Buchman:Oh, man. The silliest thing would be when I bought the practice... The practice I had before, the staff did basically everything. I was an associate. I was an employee. I walked in, when to work, and left. As the owner, everything falls on you. The silliest thing would be that I have to deal with after I get off with you guys is there is a trap that catches all the stone and stuff, and after it gets full, it gets pretty stinky. I got to go dump that thing out. It's going to be heavy and smelly and miserable for about 30 minutes while I do that. So that's probably the silliest thing.Jonathan VanHorn:Hey, we are pulling the curtain all the way back on this podcast.Joseph Rugger:That's funny.Wes Buchman:Yeah, unless you just got a staff that does everything for you. My staff does so much, don't get me wrong. But that's one of them that the doc before me did himself and so I have acquired that fun task every little bit of time.Joseph Rugger:I want to switch gears a little bit and talk to you about some knowledge pieces. So as you look back over the last couple years of practice ownership, I'd be interested to know what are some things that you knew and you were prepared for, some things that you were really glad that you had spent the time and learned about and you knew about? What are some things that you thought you knew on the front end that you're really, really glad you spent some time learning about?Wes Buchman:Oh, man. Where do you begin? I mean, if you could just generalize it, it'd just be people. If you hadn't been around long enough, you haven't met enough people. So dealing with staff, especially in the beginning, it's going to stress you out because you don't know them that well and you're trying to and there's a lot of personality. Luckily, I didn't have really any turnover at the beginning. Some people retired because they were at retiring age, but I didn't really lose anybody for that nature, so that was awesome. But just figuring people out and dealing with the most random staff requests that put you on the spot. You don't really know what the right answer is in the moment. You got to think about it.Wes Buchman:Or dealing with patients. There are a lot of interesting people out there that you don't really know how to handle at the first. You get your groove with them and hopefully you just don't make them mad at the offset or make them think you're weird. But after you get to know them, you know how to handle them. But man, people by far because you're just... you got to learn how to handle people or they're not going to like coming to your office.Jonathan VanHorn:Talking about people, one of the things that I find really interesting, or at least, I think is interesting, I don't know if everybody else does, I'm assuming other people do, but one of the things that is almost never talked about is whenever a doctor buys a dental practice from another doctor and then they have to go and meet their team for the first time. What was that like, meeting your new team?Jonathan VanHorn:So we've had clients who are like, "You literally cannot even send..." Make sure we're doing this. We don't send anything in the mail because it's going to be the day that I buy it is going to be the day that I walk in. They're going to meet me the day I become the owner, not a day before that, not a day... At no other time are they allowed to hear my name because the doctor wants us to be ultra top CIA secret. Then we have people that are just like, "Yeah, I've been talking about this to this guy for the last two years. I know everybody that's there and they're all my best friends and they know I'm going to be taking over eventually." So what was that dynamic like for you? Then what was it like going and meeting the staff afterwards? Because again, sometimes that's a part of the decision-making process for people. Do I actually like the people? Do I like the employees that are going to be here? Do I really want to buy that? So what was your experience with that piece of it?Wes Buchman:Well, my situation was unique in the fact that I had been a patient at this dental office before, so not many people have that opportunity. So I have known... It was a two doctor practice. They ran them separately. I was the patient of one of them and so I bought both and merged together. Right? So I didn't really know the other staff at all. I really only knew the doctor and kind of one of the assistants because I hadn't been back here since I'd been away at school for a decade. So I knew him already and had a great relationship and they had been at a retiring age for quite some time. So not as much as your second part of your example, but still, they had flirted with the idea of retiring for a long time and so the staff knew something was going to happen at some point. So mentally, it wasn't a surprise to them in that way.Wes Buchman:But we did it kind of down the middle as far as your two examples go because we did send out a letter. The two doctors each wrote a letter to their patients and I wrote a letter that had my picture, all professional photo with my wife and Henry on it, and sent that out with that letter. So that was beneficial overall because it got to give people a chance to see me before they saw me. Some people, I've heard advise against that because you're going to lose patients. You can make an argument for anything.Wes Buchman:So after they announced it to the staff and then right after, it was either the day after or the Monday after, I had lunch with the staff and with those doctors there. So I catered the lunch and just basically gave them my resume beforehand and said, "Let's hang out and we'll run through questions," and did it that way. So I actually had two or three meetings before I really ever started to make sure all questions were answered and everybody was comfortable and I got a feel for if they had any issues or special things going on with them or stuff like that.Joseph Rugger:Talk to us about maybe some of the things that you wish you would have known going into practice ownership that you just had to find out the hard way. Maybe walk us through some of those things that you figured out.Wes Buchman:Oh, man. It's been a couple years. I wish I would have written them down because they did really throw me for a loop because it was just the most random stuff. I just bought the practice. I don't have my office manual in place yet, everything locked down. So it was just...Wes Buchman:One was a lady that was nearing retirement age and she had family stuff that would take her out of the office. So she just asked a very blunt... She's a super sweet lady, but she asked me just a very blunt question of am I going to allow her to take off whenever she wants. It was like, I guess? I don't know. I mean, there's vacation days. I don't really know what you're asking.Wes Buchman:Or there was a lot of questions about what are you going to change? What are you going to keep the same? That's a little bit easier to answer, of stuff that I offer that the other docs didn't and go through that. Most of the stuff, I tried to keep the same as much as possible in the beginning just to make the transition easier. But really, a lot of the questions were specific about certain patients. Because we have a really fun patient base, but there are a lot of quirky people here, which makes it fun honestly. But our patients have been in this practice for a long time. A lot of these patients have been here for 30 years, which is amazing. Because my doc has practiced in this location since '84.Wes Buchman:So a lot of them, the questions were so random, of, well, we got a guy, let's call him Jerry, we got a guy, Jerry. He doesn't like when you do this, that, or the other. So what are you going to do about it? And you're like, "I don't know, man. We'll figure it out." But it's just the most random, specific questions that you... There was no answer for it in my opinion. But we got through it.Wes Buchman:The hardest parts were the meetings after and going through when I did start to change stuff and making sure the staff was onboard with that and comfortable with the changes and answering their concerns and things like that.Jonathan VanHorn:Give us some examples of that. Like what were some of the changes that you felt like you needed to make after you took over the practice?Wes Buchman:This practice, you could just say it was older in general. New equipment hadn't really been bought in quite some time. Still paper charts. The pano machine was still film. That pretty much sums it up to a lot of younger docs. So I knew the way that I practice, and Joseph can attest to our many conversations, I like technology and I like things to be efficient and run smoothly and look good as well. Right? So I knew I-Jonathan VanHorn:The reason you chose that was CPAs, right? Because we love [crosstalk 00:22:49]-Wes Buchman:Exactly, exactly. I look for the best looking dental CPAs.Jonathan VanHorn:Third best in the state of Arkansas right here. yeah.Wes Buchman:So I had learned through all the stuff that I read and my prep on owning a practice was try to start with stuff that will have the highest ROI with the least patient impact or disturbance you could say. I kind of took that to heart, so we changed the phone systems, because we were still sending out postcards in the mail to remind you of your appointments or your need to schedule, and that costs surprisingly a lot of money if you have a lot of patients and we're a two doctor practice. So I was like, "Why don't we just change the phones, do text messages, and save a bunch of money on postage?" Which we did and it was awesome.Wes Buchman:So we moved to Weave. That improved the internet and the phones as well. Because I remember calling right before I started and it sounded like it was raining on the phone. I was like, "What is that sound on this phone?" They were like, "Oh, yeah. It does that every little while and we can't hear the patient, so we just ask them to call back." I was like, "That is unacceptable. This is the silliest thing." So we changed the phones, got Weave.Wes Buchman:We got a new pano machine and I knew I wanted to do endo and end up placing implants, so we got a CPCT machine. Before I bought it, we started looking and these guys with the film pano hadn't really been taking any panos. So buying a CPCT machine that does panos and getting back on a regular schedule doing those with the patients, I mean, it was a no-brainer at that point that the machine would pay for itself in a short amount of time. So those were the first two big ones.Wes Buchman:Then we moved to change the practice management software. We were using SoftDent before and I feel like I was using Windows '94. So we moved to Denticon because, honestly, it was between a few of them and I had used Denticon at my previous job and the office manager that I was stealing from another office, she uses Denticon as well. So it was just a natural fit and so we kind of ran with that. So getting rid of the paper charts, just modernizing the office in general were big ones. So the practice management software was the biggest hurdle because these people have been using paper charts for 30 years, 30-plus years. So that was very difficult to get everybody comfortable and efficient at using modern practice management software.Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah. I find that that usually is a very disruptive change internally for dental practices, but looking back on it, most people are like, "Yeah, that was a necessity. We had to do that at some point-"Wes Buchman:For sure.Jonathan VanHorn:... and think it's a good thing at the end of the day. So that's fantastic. So frame this too, we didn't do this at the beginning, probably to start the conversation off, about how long ago was it that you bought this practice?Wes Buchman:Yeah. We bought it... I started November 4th, my birthday, in 2019. So it was a great birthday to begin. We had worked on it for, I think about, what, five or six months before?Jonathan VanHorn:It was-Wes Buchman:Maybe shorter?Jonathan VanHorn:It was a pretty decent timeframe. I mean, we've had people that will call me and they'll be like, "Yeah, I need someone to help me buy a dental practice," and I'll be like, "Well, when are you trying to close by?" They're like, "Well, today is the 12th. By the 16th?" I'm like, "Well, expectations are not going to be met if you're trying to get [crosstalk 00:27:07]-"Wes Buchman:Yeah. No, but you are... It was longer because I had to wait six months at my previous job. So it was longer than six months.Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah, we had a lot of time to think about it. So in terms of, just framing it of the listeners too, all these changes that have happened, again, this is a two doctor dental practice you bought and now you're the sole owner of a two doctor dental practice. Giving some vagueness to it, just to tell people the success that you've had in this dental practice, I would say you're seeing right now, from when you took over, again, using a wide range here, somewhere between a 30% and 70% growth over that two year period? Because we're not even at two years yet, but about a two year period?Wes Buchman:Right. Yeah, we're definitely tracking to be in that range of increasing in revenue with keeping the staff, adding just one staff since I came on. So we've been able to really get going. That's honestly, these older guys are great dentists. They just haven't had to work as hard as a younger guy does. So we're a little bit hungrier. We want to move a little bit more and work a little bit harder. But we've just made some changes like that and just how we schedule, which has helped with the Denticon being out software, and bringing in our office manager that's just a rockstar. That has helped fuel that growth for sure. So we're on track to be quite a bit bigger than when we started, so we've been really happy with it.Jonathan VanHorn:Well, and I'll just say this, and we mentioned this before the podcast started, I wanted to use wide numbers because we don't want everyone knowing all of what's going on with you. But there are some influencers that are out there that will say they'll have, oh, these giant numbers of growth and giant... like 100% growth year over year and all these other things. We have this unique perspective where we're accountants, we're CPAs, we know a lot of... We just, we can see behind the curtains for some people sometimes. Those numbers aren't always what they seem.Jonathan VanHorn:I hear this from a lot of people actually that are people that are in the industry, that are on the consulting side, and things like that, and I hear people that are listeners that are talking about influencers that are saying, "Oh..." They said they did this, but it was really only this. To the listeners out there, this was not a small practice that was just all of a sudden that grew this amount. This was a significant amount of growth.Jonathan VanHorn:So for you, Dr. Wes, if you were to start this all over again, what would it be that you would look for in a practice? Assuming you didn't buy this one, knowing what you know now, what would it be that you'd be searching for in a practice to buy? It's kind of an odd question because you already... you own this one. But just pretend like you don't own it anymore and you're not allowed to buy this practice again. Given that you've had such success with the practice you've gotten, what would you look for in the new practice?Wes Buchman:Yeah. Man, so every practice for every dentist is going to look different. I know a guy down in Louisiana that bought a smaller practice, but he was almost fee-for-service and so he's kept it really small and has been very successful in that way, so might look different. But for me, if I had to do it again and not this one, looking for bigger of a practice, the better. Because the margins are better. Your room for error is better. You know what I mean? So if you buy a practice that's only grossing 400K, well, the margin's a little bit thinner for error of you being successful and not successful if you buy a 800,000 or a $1,000,000 practice.Wes Buchman:Honestly, one of my thoughts was, "Well, this is a two doctor practice." In ways, one guy ran it pretty tight, so it was kind of a 1.5 doctor practice, you could say. I was like, "At the end of the day, if 20% of the patients leave," because that's what some articles will say, "maybe it'll just shrink and I'll have a great one doctor practice." I had some room to run there. But for me, the bigger, the bigger. The bigger you can muster and get that loan for a bigger practice, it's just going to be better.Wes Buchman:Then not going for a practice with all the newest stuff because they're going to make you pay for it. This practice being older, I got to pick and choose on my own time of what I wanted. So if somebody is the CEREC guru that does all this late and great stuff, I mean, can you match that when you're one to five years out? Probably not. So bigger practice, older equipment that's functional, the better because then you can pick and choose what you want.Wes Buchman:Then probably the last one is see how long their staff has been there. If you have a smaller practice and all the staff is constantly turned over, you're probably not buying a very healthy practice in a lot of ways. This practice was fortunate that people have been here for... The oldest hygienist has been here since like '87 I think and she's still here working for me. I have added one or two people, but most of these people have been here over a decade or more. That just goes to show that people are happy here. Patients have been here for a long time. So just things like that you look for. Because at the end of the day, if a piece of equipment's terrible, you can replace it. It doesn't have to be the newest thing. It can be used. But the more patients, the better. You got to understand your people and what you're doing. You're not going to know everything about them, but you can gather enough information to know if this seems like a happy place or an unhappy place.Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah. So in terms of finding that practice, and this is a bit of a chicken and egg question, so sometimes it can be a bit complicated to answer, but what would you rather have? I mean, because you mentioned the bigger, the better. What would you rather have be bigger, revenue or patient count? So when I'm saying that, let's say that you've got a practice you're buying that's $1,000,000 to buy the practice and it's got 2,500 patients and then you've got another practice that's for sale that's $1,000,000 and it's got, say, 1,100 patients. Of those two, which one would you rather have? Would you probably be, knowing nothing else, be more interested in?Wes Buchman:If both had 1,000,000 in revenue, but one had 2,500 and one had 1,100?Jonathan VanHorn:Mm-hmm (affirmative). Active patients.Wes Buchman:First, I wouldn't believe them because I would double check their hygiene numbers. You taught me that. But, man, what a good question. Because you can make arguments for either one. I probably-Jonathan VanHorn:Because those are the two practices we see come in all the time.Wes Buchman:My gut would say the one with 2,500 because the one that has 1,100, he has probably squeezed every penny he can out of those patients and when you buy it, there's not going to be anything left.Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah. So when I'm talking to people about the practices that I see have the most amount of success, it is that... It's more patient count than it is revenue really.Wes Buchman:Right.Jonathan VanHorn:So whenever someone's looking for a large practice, I always say, "If they've got a lot of patients, there is a lot of opportunity usually just inside of that because of the fact that..." And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with someone who's asking $1,000,000 for a practice that has 2,500 patients, but there is a lot of... With 2,500 patients, a lot of people can do a lot more in revenue than that. Especially a lot of the younger doctors.Jonathan VanHorn:Now, really, when I say that we see this come in a lot of the time, that practice actually doesn't come in... Those two practices don't come in that often. Really what comes in more often is more like $700,000 for each practice and one of those has like 2,000 patients and one of them has like 800. But that's a bit more common of what usually comes into the office. Those $700,000 ones that have the 2,000 patients or whatever it is, those are the ones that, not every time, but historically seem to be they see the growth that you've had in similar amounts because it's just you add new services, you do a newer style of treatment planning than a lot of what the older docs seem to do, and it just seems to grow so much faster.Wes Buchman:Yeah. You bring up a very good point that you have to say to anybody wanting to buy a practice, one of the things I did miss was look for a practice that you can add skills, add services. I mean, that's the quickest and arguably least expensive way to grow your practice immediately, right? If you have a crown and bridge guy, he may have done all the crowns, but he's not doing any of the endo or any of the harder oral surgery or implants, Invisalign. If you can get your training in those things as early as possible, you're going to be so much better off in the long run. You're going to get tired of doing quadrants of composite fill-ins for an hour when you could place an implant for less than an hour and make a significantly more amount of money.Jonathan VanHorn:Oh, yeah. Another question for this is let's assume you go out and you did find another practice that's got, let's say it's that $1,000,000 practice, 2,500 patients and it looks fairly similar to the day that you start... A lot of things go the same way that we just talked about in terms of what you went through buying the practice, meeting, the staff, getting the patients turned over, adding services, things like that. Day one of being the new owner of this new hypothetical pretend practice, what would you do that you've already done today, but do faster? Does that make sense? What learning curves have you overcame by being an owner for a couple of years that you would have implemented faster if you knew how to do it?Wes Buchman:Are we saying clinically or just managing the practice or what do you mean?Jonathan VanHorn:Anything, anything, anything. Whatever you think would have the most impact on getting that practice up and running, and either it be for your quality of life or it be for revenue or it be for income, whatever, patient care. Whatever.Wes Buchman:Yeah. When I first started day one, I tried to meet everybody and I would not have done that again. That's the first little thing. Literally day one, I was trying to meet everybody, every patient in the office, and that was just unsustainable. So we quickly went away from that. I struggle with when to make changes in the offices, like the practice management software or buying stuff or how we did things in treatment plans. You can make arguments either way and if you read enough on this dental space about that, you'll figure that out. But for me, I would have changed more earlier and just... Because the first year of owning a practice is pretty terrible in a lot of ways. You're up here all the time, you're stressed out about everything. I'm more of a just get it over with kind of guy, so I probably would have just changed more in general and hopefully coasted earlier after that. Does that answer your question?Jonathan VanHorn:It does.Wes Buchman:Okay.Jonathan VanHorn:So now I'm going to throw a wrinkle on it though.Wes Buchman:Okay.Jonathan VanHorn:So even though you didn't know what you didn't know and assuming other people that buy a practice for the first time aren't going to have experienced these things, do you think that would have been good advice for you to tell yourself whenever you started? Do you know what I mean? Like would you have screwed it up if you hadn't experienced the change in a slower process? Would you tell the guy next door that's going to be buying a practice, "Hey, start changing the stuff earlier"? Because the common thread if you ask anybody, they're all like, "Give it six months. Give it six months. Don't change anything. Then after six months, then start changing things." I think that's pry the safest advice for most people, especially if they're a first time practice owner. But I would think even if you're a second time practice owner, that probably should be fine to go ahead and start changing the stuff, right?Wes Buchman:I would think so. I think part of that six month buffer is just get your bearings, right? You got a lot going on. But now that I'm on the other side of it, I don't remember that anymore. It's kind of like having your kids. You kind of don't remember all the sleepless nights as vividly as when they first happened. I guess I would still tell them to do it quickly just because in a way, what are you waiting on? I mean, if your staff's onboard... If you're already having staff struggles or you're dealing with some bigger issues, of course, use some judgement and wait. But if things are going well, and this isn't going to turn the practice upside down, like if you're going to just fire half your staff or something, I mean, if you're just making changes, just do it. You're not going to really regret it because you're going to deal with it now or you're going to deal with it later.Wes Buchman:At the end of the day, you want to run your practice the way that you want to run it. You don't want to feel like you're cooking in somebody else's kitchen the whole time. That was a thing for me, was get this thing how I want it so I feel like it's mine and not like I'm borrowing it from the last guy.Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah. I love that answer. I think that's really good advice for everybody that's listening. Is there any other advice that you can think of that you wish you would have known before this whole process started?Wes Buchman:Oh, man. We should have a much longer podcast because we can keep going on this stuff, man.Jonathan VanHorn:I know, right?Wes Buchman:Advice? If you think that you are ready to buy a practice and you find what you think is a good one, and Tooth and Coin will help you do that, that's not an official plug, but it is a plug, do it. You're going to be stressed, fine. But it is, in my opinion, totally worth it to own the practice if that's your desire. Just do it. Make it your own. You'll be happier if you do. Seek out as much help as you possibly can. At the end of the day, I can ask you guys as many questions as I can, I did it a lot at the beginning, and you guys helped. I asked a lot of friends that were dentists that owned practices what they do.Wes Buchman:I went on the message boards and filtered out all the crazy stuff, but tried to find answers there. Because at the end of the day, you don't know that much about business, especially as dentists because we take, what, one hour or so of business classes in dental school. So just don't be afraid to ask questions. Anybody listening, I will be happy to talk to them and run them through more specifics of what we're doing or what we had and answer questions because there's a lot of decisions that are all small that have to be made. Like when do I buy this big thing? When do I buy these small things? What kind of vendors deals are there? How do I compete with the buying power of corporate dentistry? There is a lot of BS that you have to filter through, but the more questions, the better, man, because most of the time, people want you to be successful. So just ask as many questions as you can.Jonathan VanHorn:I love it. So you mentioned a few earlier, but what are some resources for people that are trying to figure this out? You mentioned my old podcast, Start Your Dental Practice, you mentioned Shared Practices, which we're really big fans of those guys. What are some other resources you found helpful? Like any books or any specific forums or anything like that?Wes Buchman:Well, I think the Shared podcasts were going to be the second biggest one. Because they were just so comprehensive. I mean, that podcast was going on forever. So reading all of that, or excuse me, listening to all of that, they hit on so many different topics that you feel like you have a decent idea of what's going on. They're not trying to sell you anything in the podcast at least, so, I mean, it's really beneficial. I'd say if you want to own a practice, that's one of the ones that you should be doing.Wes Buchman:As far as books go, I wish I had a better memory, but I don't have any books on hand. It's been two years. I try to read a lot of books, but I tend to read half of it-Jonathan VanHorn:I see.Wes Buchman:... and put it on the nightstand and then forget about it.Jonathan VanHorn:Me too. Once I started having kids, I stopped being able to actually read books. I don't read books. It's been-Wes Buchman:Oh, yeah. I mean, two pages in and you're asleep.Jonathan VanHorn:I know, right?Wes Buchman:Then internet stuff, Dentaltown is a crazy world if you get into it, but if you read enough, you can start to filter out a lot of the craziness. Then Dental Economics is a really, a great magazine and internet space. Those would probably be the big ones. Then you can find anything on YouTube.Jonathan VanHorn:Do you remember any posters on Dentaltown? Specifically that you saw they had a post, you were like, "I'm going to read this one."Wes Buchman:Oh, man. I need to get back on there and see.Jonathan VanHorn:I haven't been on there in a while either. I should pry be on there more.Wes Buchman:I probably just... I don't want to say any names because I'm probably remembering the crazy ones. I don't want to throw them under the bus.Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah, that's what I would do too, is I'd probably be like, "Which is the one that you like?" And I'd name one off and it'd be the person who like, well, we just found out they went to the looney bin for some reason.Wes Buchman:Yeah, yeah. Right?Jonathan VanHorn:Like mix the name up. Okay, cool.Wes Buchman:Yeah, let's not throw anyone under the bus by accident.Jonathan VanHorn:Sounds good. So Shared Practices is a must. There's Start Your Own Dental Practice, which was the podcast that I had. It's got like 125 hours of content out there. I think that Shared Practices is a little bit more focused on the acquisition process and things like that. So there's definitely episodes of Start Your Dental Practice and I'm sure that people [inaudible 00:47:47] be good. This podcast, the Tooth and Coin Podcast-Wes Buchman:When I-Jonathan VanHorn:... has a lot of business information on it as well. So Dentaltown forums, reaching out to Dr. Wes and your fellow dentists, and yeah. So it seems like a pretty good recap of information places to go whenever you're getting ready for this process, right?Wes Buchman:Yeah. When I get home, I'll see if I have any of those books and I can put it in the podcast notes too, okay? I just can't remember their names.Jonathan VanHorn:Absolutely. Yeah, we'll do that. Cool. Dr. Wes, thanks so much for joining us today. For anyone out there that's listening, if you want to... We'll leave a way for you to be contacted in the show notes of the podcast so that you don't have to put out your information all the way there. Again, thank you so much for being so generous with your time and your knowledge and your experience on this. It's been a pleasure getting to talk to you. We may have you back for another episode to dive a little bit deeper into some of the questions. If anyone has questions that they would have liked to had been talked about on this podcast for Dr. Wes, feel free to let us know and maybe on episode number two, we'll be able to do that. So again, thanks Tooth and Coin listeners, thanks Dr. Wes, and we will see you guys next time. Bye.Wes Buchman:Thank you.Jonathan VanHorn:That's it for today, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Tooth and Coin Podcast. If you are going to be a practice owner or a new practice owner and you're interested in CPA services, head on over to toothandcoin.com where you can check out more about our CPA services. We help out around 250 offices around the country and would love to be able to have the discussion about how we can help your new practice. We do specialize in new practice owners, so people that are about to be the owner of a practice they're acquiring, about to be a owner of a practice they are starting up, or have become an owner in the past five years. That is our specialty. We'd love to be able to talk to you about how we could help you and your services with your tax and accounting services.Jonathan VanHorn:If you enjoyed today's episode, again, go to the Facebook group. Talk to us about what we've talked about. Join in on the discussion. Let's create an environment where we can talk about some of these things so that we can all help each other get through these things together so that this adventure of business ownership is more fun, more productive, and better in the long-term.Jonathan VanHorn:Lastly, if you want access to those resources that we are currently building, just text the word toothandcoin to 33444. That's toothandcoin, no spaces, T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N, to 33444. Reply with your email address. We'll send you instructions to the Facebook group. We'll send you the resources when they're available. We will see you next week.
Two Sides of a Coin Podcast is back this week as we get into what we have been this weekend, high school sweethearts and expectations in relationships. Again, Happy Birthday to Bryan aka Raw Dawg McGraw who turned 32 this weekend… wish him a Happy Birthday! Main Topics: - Bryan's birthday - High school sweetheart - Expectations Quick Hits: - Homicides on the rise - Dave Chappelle Stand Up - Bi-Superman Thank you all for listening. If you're new to the podcast please subscribe or tell us what you think about the show. Find us on: website - twosidespodcast.com Instagram & Twitter - @twosidespodcast Facebook - facebook.com/twosidespodcast Youtube - twosidespodcast.com/youtube
Join the discussion on Facebook!TranscriptJonathan VanHorn:Hey everybody, Jonathan checking in here and just so you know, this is a two part episode. This is the second part of the episode. So if you've not listened to the first part yet, you want to go back and listen to it in the prior weeks. We should have it labeled on the episode title what part one is and part two is, so you should be able to see that in the title of the episode, what episode of episode it is. So thanks.Jonathan VanHorn:Welcome to the Tooth and Coin Podcast, where we talk about your adventure of being a dental practice owner. In these episodes, we're going to be talking about problems that you will likely face as a practice owner, as well as give an idea about actionable solutions that you can take so that you can get past this problem in your practice. Some of these concepts are really big ones. Some of them are very specific, but we hope that these episodes help you along with your journey. Now, a very important piece for you to understand is that this is not paid financial advice. This is not paid tax or legal advice. We are not your financial advisors. We are not your CPAs. This is two CPAs talking about informational and educational content to help you along with your journey. It's a very important piece for you to understand. Another thing that you need to know is if you enjoy today's content, join us on the Facebook group.Jonathan VanHorn:So we've got a Facebook group that is active with dentists that is going to have content talking about what we're talking about today, to continue the discussion. Agree with us, don't agree with us, have a story to tell, have something to share, join us in the Facebook group. If you go to Facebook and you search for Tooth and Coin Podcast, click on it to join it and be able to join us there. Finally, if you need some more help, we're developing a list of resources that are going to be centering around our topics of discussion, to be able to help you a little bit more than what the content is doing. So if you'd like access to that whenever it becomes ready, all you have to do is text the word toothandcoin, T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444.Jonathan VanHorn:Again, that's toothandcoin, all one word, no spaces, to 33444. Reply with your email address and we'll email you instructions on how to get into Facebook group, as well as add you to the list to be able to send you those resources when they're available. And if they're available, we'll go ahead and send them to you as well. So onto today's episode, I hope you enjoy it.Jonathan VanHorn:So let's say that you did all these things, and you can come in, and you can influence these numbers, you've done an amazing job. If you've been able to influence all the expenses and lower them by five to 10%, not five to 10% overall, but five to 10% of the 55%, which would mean that you've moved from 55 cents of every dollar down to maybe two and a half to five pennies extra that you're going to get out of every dollar. And I know of practice owners that spend tens of hours a month trying to do this and trying to reduce these expenses because they want to spend less, so they get to keep more of every dollar that comes in. But to me, that's missing the picture. That's missing the bigger picture because instead of trying to save that five to 10 cents, why not just over on the other side of that table, pour out 100 more pennies in which you could then move 55 cents of those over and keep the 45 cents.Jonathan VanHorn:You could find so many more dollars to dump on that table, if you just worked on increasing capacity, and doing a better job of having patients in, and generating more revenue. That is, in the dental industry, the way the math works, that's so much more of a higher value for the use of your time than going through and making sure every month that I know exactly how much I spent on every glove that came in this office, I know where every one of those nickels went to. The amount of time that, that will take you, and energy, and focus, and effort could be so much better spent on your office to do so much more. And so that's overall why I say budgeting sucks. It's a waste of time because you really only should have to manage your expenses once a year maybe.Jonathan VanHorn:I think that's a better term for it and I think those two terms get conflated inside of a lot of industries. Small business, you don't need to worry about budgeting. The way I explain this to some people is that, I've had clients that have had budgets in the past, and they're like, "Jonathan, we budgeted 10% of our revenue to go to labs and our labs got all the way up to 10% so fast that I told people that I didn't want to take any more big cases because I don't want to do more labs." And I said, "Look, that's completely defeating the purpose."Joseph Rugger:[crosstalk 00:04:52] What's the point?Jonathan VanHorn:That's not... I felt like the woman from that commercial that's like, "This isn't how this works. This is how none of this works." She's trying to explain to her friend how Facebook works and she's putting pictures up on the wall. The way I explain it is, if someone said, "Hey," let's say that an ortho case is worth $5,000 to your office, if someone said, "Hey, I will give you 1,000 ortho cases. That's like $5 million in ortho cases, but I'm going to charge you $3,000.00 per case," and assume there was no other expenses. That's 60% going to labs, that's way over your budget. Would you take that deal? Assuming everything else is the same.Joseph Rugger:Of course you would.Jonathan VanHorn:The obvious answer is probably going to be, "Yeah, I want $2 million," $2 million is fine, but it completely destroys your budget, so that's the reason that the math just doesn't work out in a lot of these smaller practices. Now, the argument is definitely made that when you get larger, when you get to maybe three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, $10 million a year in revenue that if you can save five to 10%, if you can say that five pennies per dollar coming in, in a $10 million office, that's $50,000.00 a year. That's pretty nice, right? Sorry, it's $500,000.00. Is that? Yeah, $500,000.00 a year. That's $500,000.00 a year. That's a lot of money. That's called economy of scales. The larger you get, the more value it brings. And so that's my big argument against budgeting. The last thing that I'll say that is a really important number to keep up with in terms of doing expense management is your credit card processing fees and your insurance reimbursements.Jonathan VanHorn:So credit card processing fees are, I was telling you, Joseph, before we got on the call, we had a client that they were spending something like $30,000.00 a year in credit card fees and they were paying about 3% as an effective rate. The effective rate most people can get to is about 2% and we've hooked them up with a great credit card vendor and they literally are saving $10,000.00 a year by just changing the phone number that, that credit card machine dialed to. And so that was an easy one, so that's why I'm saying you got to make sure that you're keeping up with your expenses and you do need to look at them, but the frequency doesn't have to be every month, every day, every hour, every minute. It can be in bigger pictures and just make sure that you're getting decent deals along the way. Yeah, that's kind of my philosophy and my thoughts on budgeting. What were some of the things that you're thinking about?Joseph Rugger:Well, I always go back to the cost benefit ratio, and as a business owner, is it worth your time, energy, and effort because you don't have an army of financial analysts and accountants inside of your practice to do this. Is it really the best use of your time to do that? And I think the things that you're talking about outside of budgeting, so budgeting, if we use the diminishing returns and then we flip that and say, "What are we going to get exponential returns?" So if we say the lifetime value of one patient is, pick a general number, right? $10,000.00, if we spend time to get an additional one patient, 10 patients, 20 patients, whatever it is, we're talking about exponential returns versus diminishing returns on those kinds of things.Joseph Rugger:And that's something, as we work with new practice owners, they're really, really concerned about get the P&L, and I'm like, "Doc, your top line is zero, I can hand you your expenses, but really where we need to do all of our energy and efforts is on this top line revenue, and get patients in the door, and that kind of thing." I mean, because that's where you're going to have the exponential returns.Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah. And like you said, a lot of it also depends on the goals of the practice. If you're okay with where you are in the world and you're like, "Yeah, we got enough revenue. My service mix is perfect. I never want to increase capacity. I never want to change the amount of crowns I'm doing for a patient. I never want to change, add services," or whatever it may be and you've never done this before, you should do it. Do it once and then if you want to do it every month, do it, but I would challenge you to say that you're probably going to be wasting your time majority of the time you're doing it, other than that first time. I mean, I've literally given a checklist of things that people could do today to optimize expenses and like 99% of you guys that are out there, I guarantee you that's going to be enough.Jonathan VanHorn:So anyway, that's my thoughts on budgeting and things like that. Now, I will say, budgeting is not the same thing as optimizing your cash. It's not the overall thing. It's not a substitute for understanding your cashflow because we've personally seen clients that have had positive results from having intention around and an understanding and monitoring of where their money is going to. And this is on bigger picture things, right? It's not specifically on, well, I got to make sure that I'm only spending 7% of my revenue on supplies this month or else I've done a bad thing. It's more about making sure that the cash flow is staying where it's supposed to be. Right? You work with a lot of clients on this and you do this in your CFO role, so explain a little bit more about that.Joseph Rugger:Well, I think going back to something that we talked about on that personal budgeting is about having intentionality. So the bulk of our clients are small businesses that are what they call flow-through entities, right? So basically all of the income from the practice flows through to their personal tax return and they're required to make estimated tax payments. So one of the things that I think makes a whole, whole lot of sense is to make sure that we're preparing for what we're going to have to pay out in income taxes. So one of the things that I've recommended time and time again to practice owners is, "Hey, let's just open a separate bank account and let's just start saving money for taxes. You're going to have quarterly taxes. They're going to be due at this point in time. We don't know exactly how much those are going to be. We're going to throw some estimates and some projections together and see what it's going to be, but would you rather have that money come out of your practice checking account or would you rather have already saved and been intentional about setting aside some money?"Joseph Rugger:And it may be something where you set aside $5,000.00 a month, or $10,000.00 a month, or check with your tax professional on how much the estimated tax payments are going to be, but setting money aside for income taxes that you're going to have to make at either the state level and the federal level, or just at the federal level, if you don't have state income tax, but saving for taxes, having some money that you set aside and you're intentional about putting that aside. I've got another client that really wants to do some capital expenditures he doesn't want to have any more debt to the practice. He doesn't want to take out notes. He'd rather just save up and pay cash.Joseph Rugger:I'm like, "Okay, well maybe we should open up a bank account and send a percentage of your revenue over to this and it'd be a capital expenditure account," and we start saving a few thousand dollars a month here and there, and all of a sudden we've got enough money set aside that he can pay cash for those things rather than having to finance. And then there's certainly your pros and cons to financing capital equipment and that kind of thing, but this specific client his kind of capacity on whether or not he wanted to use debt to do it, he just said, "I don't want to take out any more debt." So let's save for it, let's be intentional about it.Joseph Rugger:There's lots of different people that are out there that have written quite a bit on all the different ways to handle money inside of a business. Kind of one of the things that I continue to hear and will be a good concept to all of our listeners here is the idea of paying yourself first. So whether that's David Bach telling you to sign up for your company 401k and have money withheld, to the Mike Michalowicz's of the world that say take your profit first, or kind of the Dave Ramsey's that say have an envelope system and save specific amounts for specific things. Everybody in that whole world is like, so let's be intentional about it. So really what we're talking about is rather than it be like a budget, it's just about being intentional with your cashflow. Are you looking at how much cash, extra cash that your practice has produced this month?Joseph Rugger:Okay, we had an additional... Our cash went up in the bank, $10,000.00. Well, what are you going to do with it? You going to take a shareholder distribution? You going to pay off loans? You going to invest that money? Are you going to save up for something else? What are you going to do? So one of the things that we've done with some of our clients is having these cashflow budgeting conversations and I hate to use the word budget in it because that's really not what it is, it's really just a cash management system. It's a way to be intentional about as money comes into the practice, where does it go?Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah, and that's one of the things that is really, even myself, someone who's a CPA and works with financials, and dollars, and cents every day, being a business owner the numbers we just explained to people, the 45 cents of every dollar that comes in, some months that's 30 cents out of every dollar, some months that's 60 cents out of every dollar, some months... It's very, very, very, very rarely that it's every month is exactly 45 cents gets put into your coffers and then you get to do with whatever it is, do whatever you want with it. Sometimes these one time expenses do come up. So of the 45 cents that you set aside to the profit, you might need to allocate five cents of that to go into these rainy day funds, or maybe you've got some big goals in the future and you know that you're going to have to staff up soon or hire an associate soon and you need to get more cash available.Jonathan VanHorn:So maybe we just set aside another five cents for an additional capacity expanding fund, or maybe it's, "Hey, I know I'm going to have a bunch of taxes at the end of the year because I remember Tooth & Coin and them telling me that I'm going to owe. It's August and I think I'm going to owe $50,000.00 come tax time, maybe I should be setting aside some of this money to be able to get $50,000.00 saved up." Intentionality and having a plan for cashflow is very different than budgeting to me, and that's pretty much every CPA firm, if you go to a CPA firm or to a CPA and say, "Hey, can you help me budget?" They're going to do what we talked about in the first part of this conversation. They're going to be like, "Yeah, okay, let's do a forecast. Let's talk about how much revenue you did last year. Let's talk about your expenses last year and we're going to add 5% to this, and 3% to that, and 2% to this, and what are your growths are going to be?" And all these other things.Jonathan VanHorn:They're going to come up with this math formula to be able to keep up with things, but it's very different than what we're talking about now and being intentional with your cashflow. So like you said, profit first system, the pay yourself first, the automatic millionaire idea, the richest man in Babylon, there's tons of different budgeting things that you can do, or not budgeting things, but cashflow optimization and intentional ideas that came about in the past, but to me, it all starts with you have to understand that there's variability in what your income is going to be as a business owner and you have to do your best to understand that variability in terms of the cash that's leftover, which is again, this is a unique problem for a lot of businesses in dentistry, there's typically a good amount of cashflow left over, in a lot of businesses, there's almost no cashflow.Jonathan VanHorn:And in the dental world, when that fluctuates, sometimes it can fluctuate to big numbers. Like last year, we had people that got hundreds of thousands of dollars in government funds.Joseph Rugger:Sitting in the checking account. [crosstalk 00:16:25].Jonathan VanHorn:Exactly, just coming in and they're like, "Well, hey, it's here. I don't really know what to do with it now. Do I take it out? Do I use it? Do I save it? Do I invest it? Do I pay it to my employees? What do I do with it?" It's being intentional with the money, having a plan for it, and just so everyone knows, Joseph is the person who does this in our firm. He helps our clients do this, and come up with plans for this, and find ways to save the money better. And what are some of the lessons that you've learned when it comes to the dental field specifically about coming up with a plan and then following through with it?Joseph Rugger:I think a couple of things kind of resonate with me. One of the things that, I don't know that we talked extensively about it in our personal budgeting, but is lifestyle creep where as more money comes in, magically it just all of a sudden disappears because all of a sudden we've bought new stuff at the office or we've hired new people. So where we may have had free cashflow that was at a certain level before, all of a sudden it's starting to dwindle as far as how much free cashflow it is. And it's not lifestyle creep, I guess you could call it practice scope creep as you have bought nicer stuff and all of those kinds of things, and you are used to taking out that $10,000.00 distribution, or $20,000.00, or $5,000.00, or whatever it is, so you just kind of automatically take that out.Joseph Rugger:All of a sudden the practice has a couple of bad months in a row, and all of a sudden you're looking and you don't have enough cash to pay the bills, and you've got to scramble a little bit. So if you're not taking those variables... As you mentioned, there's just so much variability in this business, as you were making those different decisions, what's it based on? Gut feeling? Like, "Oh, well, if I've got 75k in the practice checking account, that's enough. I'm going to take anything out on top of that." Well, what if your credit card bill with American Express this month is $30,000.00 because you had some big cases, added some new equipment? All that stuff like that $75,000.00, if you have a $30,000.00 outstanding credit card bill, that's not the same as if you don't have an outstanding credit card bill that's coming due in a couple of days and you've got $75,000.00.Joseph Rugger:That's one thing that I've noticed is that kind of we get into some habits and the habits are based on something other than the actual cashflow of the business, whether that's the lifestyle creep, or whether that's the practice scope creep, or if that's just getting used to, oh, I just take out the same amount of money, because that's what I need to pull out of the practice each month. What if you have a month where you totally blow it out of the water and your collections are typically 80k and all of a sudden it's 150k? Do you still take the same amount out? Well, I would say, no. We need to figure out what's going on and have a plan for that. And again, intentionality continues to be kind of a theme that we talk about on our podcast here. We want you to be intentional about pulling money out. "Where did you get that number?" "Oh, I just made it up. I just had a gut feeling." Well, that's not a plan. That's not going to get you from where you're at to where you want to be. We want you to be intentional.Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah, and the other thing that comes up with that variability and the intentionality is that if you figure out three months later that you didn't have enough cash at the time, it's already too late most of the time. I mean, you're in trouble at that point. And so if we're thinking about those percentages we talked about and if you're out there, feel free to use that as your own set up. I'm going to dedicate 15 cents of every dollar to occupancy and other stuff, 25 cents out of every dollar to staff, 15 cents out of every dollar to the supplies and labs, and the other 45 cents of every dollar I'm going to have, let's say, five cents. Again, this is completely dependent on your situation, your goals, and what it is you're trying to do in your business.Jonathan VanHorn:But let's just say for discussion purposes, I'm putting 10 cents of the 45 cents of profit into some type of an investment fund that I'm going to use for the business and investing in the business. And then the other 35 cents, I'm going to pull out whether it be through salaries, wages, payroll taxes, my retirement plan, or distributions, or discretionary expenses that I have inside of the business that is being paid for on my behalf, whether it be travel, or continuing ed, or renting our home, for other reasons like that, that's what that money will be used for. What happens or I've seen happen is that, well, this month we had a pipe bust and we've got a $10,000.00 expense now, all of a sudden, that's going to go into this 10 to 15 cent thing, but there's not 10 or... That one thing costs more than that 10 or 15 cents that's leftover.Jonathan VanHorn:Well, most the time with the variability inside dentistry, a lot of people don't really think about that $10,000.00. Say it's $10,000.00, they pay the expense begrudgingly, little things like that come up throughout the month, every month, but a big thing like that comes up every once in a while and it kind of throws everything out of whack because well, all of a sudden that's a big percentage of this, and a big percentage of that, and it just doesn't work. So what is a way, Joseph, you help people with keeping up with this in an automatic fashion or in a more standardized process to where this type of information can be relayed faster?Joseph Rugger:Well, I think that you can always set percentages. So you mentioned percentages and there's lots of people out there that... I've seen a number of our clients that have opened up multiple bank accounts and that kind of thing. We've done that for a bunch of clients and that's been really successful like, "Okay, so out of every dollar that comes in the practice, we're going to set 10% aside and that's going to be your profit, and we're going to pull that money out of the business. It's going to be a distribution and you're going to live on the remaining 90%. You're going to operate your practice in that way." It's one of those things, it's difficult to make something like that automatic because it's going to be based on a percentage. So up months, down months, we're still using that same, let's just say for example, 10%, or maybe it's 15%, or maybe it's 5%.Joseph Rugger:If we say, "Let's have supplies and labs be its own account." Okay. Well, 15 cents out of every dollar or 15% is going to go to that supplies and labs account. And what that does is that allows you to do bank balance accounting, as simple as that is. So oftentimes what we figured out over the years is that people have a hard time just looking at a profit and loss, or looking at a balance sheet, or looking at a cashflow statement and marrying all that together and understanding. They may say, "Well, I show a profit on my P&L, but I'm out of cash." "Well, that's because you made $30,000.00 principle payment on your loan." "Oh, I didn't think about that. Oh yeah, now I remember that."Joseph Rugger:Or, "Hey, I've got all this extra cash in my account." "Well, that's because you took out an EIDL loan from SBA, so you got $50,000.00." It's all of these different things that come through, so being intentional, and setting percentages, and going along those lines, we found that to be really, really successful. We have some clients that kind of do that themselves and make those kind of things. We've got some that we help out with that process, and see what it looks like, and kind of help them manage that, and make cashflow decisions. And basically, as money comes in... What money comes in is what we need to be spending money on, not just some arbitrary number, not something that's not intentional. So I think it's been successful for the ones that we've helped. Just kind of really just add transparency, I think that's a word that I've heard several clients, "This really helps me understand kind of in a transparent way how my business is doing."Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah, helps you understand where those dollars are going. I mean, what better incentive do you have to look at your spending habits than to realize, hey, there's not enough money in here to pay for this thing? And in dentistry, I find that usually it's pretty easy and... Well, it's not easy to pay for things. The money is technically there in the bank account, but you don't know if that money is available for specifically that thing, or if you're robbing Peter to pay Paul to pay for that thing. And if you're intentional about your dollars, that should come out as a big red flag. So you mentioned like the envelope system as a method, is a lot of what it is, so envelope system, profit first system, they're all kind of the same, but what about frequency? How often do you recommend people be looking at this type of a thing?Joseph Rugger:Yeah, so I think that you've got to be looking at your monthly financials for sure. The folks that we're helping out with kind of this cashflow system, we're looking at it twice a month typically. I've got a couple of clients that want to make sure that we're allocating money appropriately for payroll costs, so we may look at that if they pay every other Friday, we may look at that every two weeks versus just twice a month. So it's basically like it's twice a month, except for the two months in the year that have three payroll Fridays, so we're looking at that. And then I think it's important to on a quarterly basis sit back and say, "Okay, how much cash has the business generated?"Joseph Rugger:Okay, well, we've got an excess balance of X. Okay, well, what are we going to do with that? Are we going to do one of the four things that we can do with money? Are we going to spend it? Are we going to give it? Are we going to save it? Or are we going to pay down debt with it? And having those conversations, I think, quarterly make a whole lot of sense and then kind of reviewing this stuff on a quarterly basis, I think makes a whole lot of sense. And on an annual basis, obviously everybody's going to be concerned about the annual basis because they've got taxes to pay and you kind of get stuck in this catch 22, where you want your business to look really good, but you don't want to pay very much in taxes, so looking at stuff on an annual basis.Joseph Rugger:I had a client that we'd helped out with this cashflow system and he said, "How am I doing?" And I said, "Well, how do you think you're doing?" He said, "Well, I think I'm doing well. I've been pulling X amount of salary in, and we're doing this system where we're taking the profits out of the business, and I'm distributing X amount of dollars." He said, "But I got my tax return the other day and it showed that we had a net operating loss." And I'm like, "Well, how's your cash balance been?" He's like, "Really good." I'm like, "Okay, well, there's a whole lot of complexities that go along with your tax situation that may not necessarily reflect how the cash flows throughout the business." And it may be one of things where we took some accelerated depreciation or something along those lines for some stuff that he had borrowed the money on to do some equipment, that kind of thing, but definitely monthly.Joseph Rugger:And then I think looking at stuff twice a month makes the most sense as well, quarterly for sure, and then annually, just to see how you're doing, look at your goals. What are your goals? Was your goal to do $1.2 million in collections this year? Was your goal to make $400,000.00 take home this year? What was your goal? And then how do we look? If we're looking at it quarterly, and your goal is to make $400,000.00 and you've made $20,000.00 in Q1, maybe we should reevaluate the goal. Maybe we should see what kept us from getting there.Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and this is what I do personally in our business, in Tooth and Coin, is every... I do it every week just because for me it's simple to do. I go in and I know we don't have as many different expense categories as a dental practice does, we have what I call operating expenses, and then we have staff, and then we have profit basically after that. And our operating expenses, I don't go far down talk about the rent for the office space, or for our computers that we buy for people, or all the software that we use, and all the money that we use. It's all a part of the same thing, I just lump it into one big percentage.Jonathan VanHorn:And then I take the staff percentage, which is another percentage. And then I take a percentage for profit and take a percentage for taxes. And every week I just put those in those bank accounts and then I move it from our operating accounts into an interest bearing accounts for the ones that I'm not going to touch for a while. And then if I need those numbers back, I just pull them back. And the power in that is, is if you are facing a payroll run and you don't have enough payroll in there, well, something's happened in terms of your goals. Something's happened in terms of what happened with the cashflow and that means you're forced to physically move that money, which means you're forced at that point to look at it. Did something go wrong? Did we miscalculate something? Are my hours for my employees off? Is my revenue too low? Is the reason the revenue is too low because we're not doing a good job of... Why is that?Jonathan VanHorn:Oh, we have a revenue problem. Oh, we need to be doing a better job of scheduling. And all of a sudden, you're starting to work on these things in your business that are going to start optimizing themselves because you're forced to look at them. And so I love that process and I love the way that it works inside of every business, not just dental practices and things like that. So budgeting sucks, cashflow optimizing is awesome, having a plan for intentionality, for where things go. There's a lot more things we could talk about in terms of this, such as who are the best candidates for this? When should you be doing this in terms of your practice's age? How do you factor in growth? How do you do all these other things? And those things are going to start getting very, very personal in nature and I'm afraid that we're going to miss too many of those people and create generalities where it's actually very specific.Jonathan VanHorn:There's a lot of specifics on who should and shouldn't be doing these different times of their lives, and things like that, and nuances, and things like that. So for those things, I would say that you probably need to reach out to someone like ourselves or someone else who helps with these types of things in order to be able to have this type of help, because we're getting into really big specifics of being specific to your situation. So outside of that, Joseph, is there anything else that you wanted to talk about in terms of these things or anything that we didn't mention about the pitfalls of budgeting, diminishing returns, and then the benefits and boons of doing cashflow optimization, and being intentional with your money?Joseph Rugger:Yeah, no, I think we hit most of them. I think we want you to be intentional with your money. I think that one of the things that I'm always constantly looking at is, am I trying to get a mosquito with a sledgehammer? And if you're going to go out and spend 30 hours a year on budgeting and your top line's $300,000.00, that's hitting a mosquito with a sledgehammer. So keep the cost benefit ratio in mind and certainly it's good to be intentional. It's good to pay attention, but make sure that you're focusing your time on things that are going to give you the most return.Jonathan VanHorn:So yeah, so if you have any other questions or anything like that, feel free to look us up in the Facebook group or make a comment. Talk to us about it. We're happy to talk about this. I think this is the most fun thing about helping small businesses is this kind of stuff. I wish that there was more time in the day to be able to do these types of things. This is not what you're typically going to get in a relationship with a CPA firm. This is not technically in the standard terms of engagement with the CPA firm, which you're normally going to be getting. So these are things that you're going to have to ask additional help for from 99.9% of CPA firms or even just consultants when it comes to this kind of stuff. So just want to put that out there because sometimes we have clients come in, they have an expectation that this is just a part of accounting. This is not an accounting function. It's so far removed from accounting. This is definitely more consulting in nature and it's very specialized.Jonathan VanHorn:So anyway, so thanks again for listening guys and girls, we will see you next time on the Tooth and Coin Podcast. Thanks for joining in. Make sure to subscribe, iTunes, do all those things, like it whenever you see it, and we will see you guys next time. Thanks, Joseph.Joseph Rugger:Bye guys.Jonathan VanHorn:Bye.Jonathan VanHorn:That's it for today, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Tooth and Coin Podcast. If you are going to be a practice owner or a new practice owner, and you're interested in CPA services, head on over to toothandcoin.com where you can check out more about our CPA services. We help out around 250 offices around the country. I would love to be able to have the discussion about how we could help your new practice. We do specialize in new practice owners, so people that are about to be an owner of a practice they're acquiring, about to be an owner of a practice they are starting up, or has become an owner in the past five years. That is our specialty and we'd love to be able to talk to you about how we could help you in your services with your tax and accounting services.Jonathan VanHorn:And if you enjoyed today's episode again, go to the Facebook group. Talk to us about what we've talked about, join in on the discussion, and let's create an environment where we can talk about some of these things so that we can all help each other get through these things together so that this adventure of business ownership is more fun, more productive, and better in the longterm. Lastly, if you want access to those resources that we are currently building, just text the word toothandcoin to 33444, that's toothandcoin, no spaces, T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444, apply with your email address. We'll send you the instructions on the Facebook group. We'll send you the resources when they're available, and we will see you next week.
Join the discussion on Facebook!TranscriptJonathan VanHorn:Welcome to the Tooth and Coin Podcast, where we talk about your adventure of being a dental practice owner. In these episodes, we're going to be talking about problems that you will likely face as a practice owner, as well as give an idea about actionable solutions that you can take so that you can get past this problem in your practice. Some of these concepts are really big ones, some of them are very specific, but we hope that these episodes help you along with your journey. Now, a very important piece for you to understand is that this is not paid financial advice. This is not paid tax or legal advice. We are not your financial advisors. We are not your CPAs. This is two CPAs talking about informational and educational content to help you along with your journey. It's a very important piece for you to understand.Jonathan VanHorn:Another thing that you need to know is, if you enjoy today's content, join us on the Facebook group. So we've got a Facebook group that is active with dentists, that is going to have content talking about what we're talking about today, to continue the discussion. Agree with us, don't agree with us, have a story to tell, have something to share? Join us in the Facebook group. If you go to Facebook and you search for Tooth and Coin Podcast, click on it to join it and be able to join us there. Finally, if you need some more help, we're developing a list of resources that are going to be centering around our topics of discussion, to be able to help you a little bit more than what the content is doing. So if you'd like access to that, whenever it becomes ready, all you have to do is text the word toothandcoin, T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444. Again, that's toothandcoin, all one word, no spaces, to 33444.Jonathan VanHorn:Reply with your email address, and we'll email you instructions on how to get into the Facebook group, as well as add you to the list, to be able to send you those resources when they're available. And if they're available, we'll go ahead and send them to you as well. So onto today's episode, hope you enjoy it. Hello ambitious dentist. Welcome to the episode that I'm probably going to call, Why Budgeting is a Waste of Time. It's a topic that I think is going to be confusing to some, why a CPA or an accounting person would talk about that, especially considering our last episode, we talked about how important it is to do on a personal level. But this episode, we're going to talk about the budgeting of a business. And specifically in general, single-office owned dental practices, usually doing what an average dental practice would do, which is somewhere around a million dollars a year in revenue, maybe enough where it's two or $3 million a year in revenue. And we're talking about that.Jonathan VanHorn:So I've got Joseph with me obviously. Joseph has a lot of history of doing this as a CFO in the prosthetics company that he worked for before he joined us at Tooth and Coin. And we're going to just talk about it, and what our thoughts are about budgeting, some of the pitfalls of it, some of the benefits of it, and then maybe some alternatives that people should be thinking about as well. So, yeah. So welcome to the episode.Joseph Rugger:Yeah. Thanks for a good intro there, Jonathan. I think probably what would be worth it to just talk about first at a high level is, what is budgeting and who typically does it. So you guys may or may not be familiar with all the different stuff that's out there, but typically budgeting really has to do with trying to make a plan for where your money's going to go. And one of the things that budgeting is, is going to work off of a forecast. And that's something that can be really difficult to tie down and pin down in different organizations, different industries. So, your typical business that is, let's say $10 million or more in revenue, typically has a team of accountants. They've got people that are maybe a CFO, maybe they've got a controller, maybe they've got an AP clerk, maybe they've got somebody that's in charge of AR. They may have somebody specifically in charge of budgeting, somebody that actually has a season of their life that they call budget season.Joseph Rugger:So if we ran a calendar year budget, this person may start sitting down and making the budget out in September, and then spending time in October and then reprioritizing in November and then in December. So as I described this big, robust accounting and finance department, that typically doesn't happen until you get pretty far along in revenue. And you may hit that at $2 million and you need those people, or $5 million or $10 million. But typically it's until you get to that really big growth stage where you've got to have multiple people that are running your accounting and finance. And as you mentioned, Jonathan, if we say that the typical dental office has a million dollars in gross receipts or in revenue, they're probably not going to have a team of five accountants that they've got full-time employed.Joseph Rugger:They're not going to pay 60, 70, 80, $100,000 for a controller or a CFO, and then an AP clerk or all that kind of stuff. So from a corporate level perspective, if you've got enough resources and you've got enough people and you got a big team, it can make some sense to do some budgeting. But one of the things that I wanted to get your thoughts on is, when you're looking at a typical dental practice that does 500, a million, 1.5, $2 million, what are your thoughts, Jonathan, in general on, as we talk about... One of the things they taught us in Accounting 101 was the cost benefit ratio. How much is whatever it is that we're going to do, going to cost versus what's going to be the implied benefit? So maybe talk to us a little bit about your experience in talking to practice owners across the country, and what people's maybe conceptions or misconceptions are of budgeting and how useful it is in this industry.Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah, absolutely. And I think a good way to do that is to... And I know it's hard to do on an audio thing, but to talk through the math of it a little bit. The companies that you're mentioning that do the budgeting, they're much larger, they're typically operating under a very slim profit margin. So when I'm talking about profit margin, I'm saying that for every dollar that comes into those bigger businesses that are not dental practice in the medical industry, they're hoping to be able to capture as profit of every dollar, of every 100 pennies that come through, a lot of them are hoping to catch maybe five to 15 cents per dollar that comes in. And it fluctuates a lot. There's a lot of variables that come into play, and there's a lot of meticulous effort that goes into finding that five to 15 cents per dollar that comes through.Jonathan VanHorn:Now in dentistry, the math of that is just very different. So if you're a big company and you've got, let's say 90 cents out of every dollar going to some type of expenses associated with generating that revenue, then you've got to be really careful. And you've got to know exactly where every dollar is going and minimizing that number as much as possible. Because if you're at 90 cents on a dollar and you're going to reduce your total spend by 5%, or let's call it 10% since the math's easier to illustrate, you were at 90 cents a dollar, now you're at 81 cents a dollar. Your profit margin went from 10 cents a dollar to 19 cents a dollar. That's almost double in profitability. That's a big, big, big difference. And when we talk about all those variabilities that come into play in those bigger businesses, there's a lot of little things that you can sometimes influence that will help get you across the board, for example, if you have a different supplier.Jonathan VanHorn:If you're manufacturing things, and you can find someone who is giving you your supplies at a much lower rate, your supplies could be 40% of that total dollar that went out, the 90 cents that got reduced to 81, that could be 40 cents of every dollar going towards the supplies. And if you can reduce that and find better people, it makes a lot of sense on why you'd have somebody ahead of budgeting. And it's a decent management tool too, for having multiple layers of management, having a bunch of different people that have a bunch of different responsibilities inside of your business.Jonathan VanHorn:You pointed out, Joseph, in dentistry, in single-office dentist practices. You don't definitely have very many middle layers of management so to speak. In a dental practice, it's a pretty reasonable estimate that people can get from every dollar of revenue that comes in, it's pretty reasonable for an average-sized owned practice to beginning to keep somewhere between 40 and 50 cents of every dollar that comes in, and having that be coming back to the owner as earnings or cashflow, so to speak. So when you think about that, you're comparing big business, five to 10, 15% margins versus dentistry, single-office owner, 40 to 50% margins. If you can reduce 5% of your expenses or 10% of your expenses, you're only going to add another 5%, which is only another 10% increase your profitability. Sounds great, but the question is how much effort is being put forth and what could you be doing instead of spending the time trying to find the 10%, how much effort does it take to lower your cost by 10% compared to just increasing your revenue by a very small amount?Jonathan VanHorn:So in terms of how I view it with dental practices, there's this concept called diminishing returns, which means that after you've done something once, the next time that you do it, it doesn't generate as much of a benefit. And what we used to do as a CPA firm is, we'd have clients that say, "Hey, we want you to give us a budget. We want you to help us keep up with it. We want you to talk to us about it every month and to see how we did with that budget and things like that. So that we can be better steward of our money and making sure that we're spending the least amount of money as we can." Purely from an accounting standpoint. So, we kept up with how much they paid in supplies, we kept up how much they pay in labs and staffing costs and occupancy and things like that.Jonathan VanHorn:And if those numbers were too high, then the result's called a variance. And then we had to try and figure out how to affect that variance. In dentistry, what we found was that no matter what the variance was, there was always a reason why the variance was there. It was very rare that it was like, "Oh, it's because we double paid this vendor and we got to get a refund," without even the vendor saying, "Oh, by the way, you double play at us." So, the way that I tell dentists is this, is that you need to have an understanding of how you're spending your money. You need to make sure you're not getting basically screwed in terms of having really high costs for certain things. And you need to make sure that you're keeping up with who you're paying your money to.Jonathan VanHorn:But my argument is that I think that you really only have to do this maybe once a year. And I think the first year that you do this is going to be the highest value year that you ever do it. And then every year after that is the diminishing returns. I don't think that this exercise should take you... It definitely shouldn't take you more than probably a half of a day, probably after the first time you do it, it probably shouldn't take you more than an hour a year to do this. And the problem with budgeting is, that's not how budgeting works. If you're actually budgeting, and you're setting up these parameters, you're trying... Like you said, you have to forecast what your revenue could potentially be. So you have to have an understanding of your new-patient metrics, you have to have an understanding of your dollar per rep, dollar per patient coming in per visit.Jonathan VanHorn:You have to have an understanding of your cancellation rates, your occupancy rates in terms of your utilization of your chair time. There's so many things that you have to understand to be able to appropriately forecast revenue, and then go in and say, "Okay. Well, we're going to do this many of this procedure. And this procedure takes up this much cost per lab. And so we have to forecast that expense out, and everything with that." And at the end of the day, for a dental practice is doing these things, what value is that? Why would you want to do that? I would make the argument, if you're actually budgeting and you're doing what a actual budget in a small business needs to have, you're likely paying a professional quite a bit of money.Jonathan VanHorn:I would say at least $1,000 a year, maybe upwards to two or $3,000 a year, just to do the tracking of everything. That's not even to do the forecast for you, that's just the tracking. And you're probably going to be spending anywhere from 10 to 30 hours a year on this. And what are you going to be getting out of that compared to what you could have been putting that time into instead? So to me, that's where the real question lies. I mean, is that a good explanation of what we see in this industry, Joseph?Joseph Rugger:Yeah, I think so. And I want to go back to the margins that you mentioned. So, a typical business may be anywhere in the five to 15% margin. And I'm sure that everybody in our audience has heard about the different varying governmental budgets, right? So whenever we look at what the tax base is for my hometown of wherever I live, they've got a really good idea of how much they're going to have in tax revenue. They have really sophisticated pieces. So, that's why they're able to really focus on the expense side because they don't really have a whole lot of control over the revenue side.Joseph Rugger:So if you don't mind, Jonathan, maybe walk us through... You mentioned that the profit margin of dentistry is somewhere in the 40 to 50% range of every dollar that comes in, that that's going to be profit. Maybe walk us through maybe the bigger chunks of that and how that looks. And then maybe, let's just run a couple of quick numbers on, if we spent our time getting one new patient, what that looks like, versus how much we maybe even save, and to shave off a percentage point. So maybe walk us through how we get from 100% to 40 to 50%, and then what the returns would be like if we're able to really shimmy some costs off.Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah, absolutely. So if you take the big picture of... And again, the way that people should be perceiving this, or creating an image in your head if you're a visual learner, literally think you're sitting down at the kitchen table with your grandmother, she's teaching you about money and she's got 100 pennies sitting in front of you, and it's talking to you about, "This is what 100% looks like. Each penny is percent." Those represent every dollar that are coming into your dental practice. If we're saying that you get to keep 40 to 50 cents of every dollar that comes in, that means you're spending between 50 and 60 cents per dollar that comes in to generate said revenue. Now, obviously the caveat to this is, this is based off of a single-office owner practice doing about a million dollars a year in revenue, doesn't have an associate, usually it's just one doctor. The numbers change a bit depending on where you are in the country and all these other things, but that's a pretty general good generalization.Jonathan VanHorn:It also does... If you're in a startup, obviously of those 100 pennies, almost all 100 pennies are going to be coming out every month because you're spending that on different things. It's dependent on your age and a bunch of different things. So a standard practice, 50 to 60 cents of every dollar is coming out and going to expenses. Usually for a good average number to come up with is, of that, let's cut it in the middle of that 55%. So I said 50 to 60, let's say 55 cents of every dollar is going out, the owner is going to keep 45 cents of every dollar.Jonathan VanHorn:You've separated 45 cents on one side of the table, you've got 55 cents on the other side of the table. Now of that 55 cents that are expenses, about 15% is a pretty good number for a lot of dental practice to have that will be allocated towards supplies and labs. So you've got your supply costs for all of the things that you use up throughout the day. If your lab fees, whenever you have a case, and you've got to send something out to the lab for that case and have it sent back, that's a lab fee. Obviously some practices have more, some practice have less than that, because some people do things like implants, some people do things like Invisalign, some people don't. And so some people just only do fillings all day long, I guess.Jonathan VanHorn:So it's depending on the practice, but a good standard number is to save 15%. So of the 55 cents in expenses, you'd separate 15 of those out, and now you got 40 cents left for your other expenses. Of those of that 40 cents, typically 25 cents of that goes to your staff. So now you had 40, you separate that out, now you've got 15, because 25 cents of that is going to your staff. Now you've got 15 cents leftover. And that usually is going to be to pay for things like your rent, things like maybe some type of loan payments. The assumption of the 55% is usually that loans are not included in that. We'd have clients that like to have that included in terms of their numbers, but in general, that does not include that. But it goes to things like utilities. It goes into things like advertising.Jonathan VanHorn:It goes into things like just a general occupancy expenses, office supplies, things like that. It's little things like that. We have some clients, they'll spend 10% of their revenue in rent just because of the area of the country that they're in. So that takes up a big percentage of it. [crosstalk 00:17:44].Joseph Rugger:Or like in California and New York, yeah.Jonathan VanHorn:Exactly. So that last 15 cents is really where it's highly dependent on your situation. We find that that 15 cents over there, the last 15 cents, not the 15 cents for supplies and labs, that last 15 cents is usually very practice specific and usually cannot be that influenced very much. Usually that's just what a lot of people have to call their fixed cost, so to speak, on a monthly basis. So that's a very static number. So the other two numbers that we might be able to influence are our staff and then our supplies and lab. That's all that's really left. I can make an argument that in the fixed ones, the advertising expense, that number goes up and down a bunch, depending on what the goals of the practice are. But in general, that's usually a pretty standard amount. And there's things we can talk about in terms of what you should do for that as efficient business owner, but not really in terms of a budgeting piece.Jonathan VanHorn:So everything in that context, we've got really 40 cents of every dollar we might be able to influence in some ways. And really at that point, it's not really budgeting, because your employees are going to... I think most business owners want to pay their employees more, because if they're paying the more, that means that they're doing more for them and probably generating a better return on their dollars. But that doesn't mean you can just have people wasting hours there. So you have to have make sure your schedule is efficient. But it's another one of those things that, if you think about the context of this, I'm talking about the 25 pennies that are sent off to the side in the staffing column, and think about that for a second, if that number goes up, what should be occurring if that number goes up? Joseph, what would you think should be occurring if that number is going up?Joseph Rugger:I would hope that if our staff costs go up, so to are our revenues, right? Hopefully we've-Jonathan VanHorn:Precisely.Joseph Rugger:... hired people, added hours, increased salaries, added bonuses because as a factor of, or because of an increase in top line revenue.Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah, exactly. So absent and efficient scheduling of people's work time, them working more is actually a good thing because it should be influencing an extra 75 cents return on that 25 cents of expenses. Now, again, I've got 75 cents, some of that's going to those other categories, but it's generating more dollars, so you're willing to accept that. So again, that's absent, inefficient scheduling for your staff and their hours. Now we've had clients that have had really bad overtime, that had a lot of employees that just, they just always have overtime. In those types of situation, yes, that that could be fixed, but I wouldn't really call that budgeting so to speak. I wouldn't say that's what... In the context of what we're talking about, what actually budgeting is. The last part of the other 15%, staffing or supplies and labs. I can think on very few examples of where I've ever had a client say, "Hey, we were able to really reduce our costs in supplies this month." Now, you have to make sure, again, like I said earlier, that you're not paying out the nose for staff costs, or for supply cost.Jonathan VanHorn:You have to make sure that you're not paying out the nose for labs, but there's some people that want to pay out the nose for labs. There's a lot of people I'll talk to that are like, "Yeah, my guy costs 200 bucks a crown. And I love him because he's amazing at it. He does the highest quality possible." And some people that are like, "Yeah, I want to pay $70 for a crown, for my lab." And that's very much a personal preference, but you should be hopefully, in an efficient market, the $200 you're spending on that crown should be hopefully being able to allow you to charge a little bit more for the work for that crown. Anyway, so that's how the buckets work out in terms of everything. So to recap that, of the 55 cents in this hypothetical practice, in an average practice, 15 cents is going to supplies and labs, 25 cents is going to staff, and 15 cents is going to occupancy, advertising, consulting, professional services, the things that people typically pay for. And then the other 45 cents is profit.Joseph Rugger:Yeah. So when we talk about diminishing returns, really what we're talking about is that spending four to five hours in year one, you might get some benefit out of doing some budgeting and doing some forecasts. Year two, year three, year four, after we've dug in and looked at some stuff, we're probably looking at less than an hour a year, if we want to do that. So if what we're saying, Jonathan, is that budgeting and forecasting is a diminishing-return game for the dentist, if someone came to you and asked, "Okay, what should I be doing instead? Budgeting is not a good use of my time. Where would be a better use of my time if I'm going to work 'on the business' instead of in the business?" And you're telling me that budgeting and this forecasting probably doesn't have the cost-benefit ratio, where do you think the biggest returns would be?Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah. So just to clarify that, yeah, in terms of budgeting and forecasting, I think if you're actually doing budgeting and forecasting, you're probably looking at an investment of at least 30 hours a year from you and your management team, and thousands of dollars to probably accountants and consultants and people like that. The better use of your time is the thing that we were talking about now, is taking a look at those different segments of your business, just analyzing to see if you're being effective in the way that you're spending that money. So to run down that list, starting with supplies and labs first, make sure that you're not having a whole lot of waste when it comes to your supplies. Make sure that your practice has a good policy of making sure we don't throw away $30 worth of supplies every day. We need to make sure that we have a staff that doesn't take home a whole bunch of supplies every day.Jonathan VanHorn:If you can do that, and then you're making sure that you're maybe once a year looking up the prices of the things that you pay the most for out of your practice. The number of supplies that you actually have, how many of those go to waste, how much gets thrown away, how much just expires, because it's a medical industry, so you have things to expire. And just be effective in the use of supplies, make sure that they don't walk out the door. And finally, make sure that you're paying competitive amounts for those things. You can do this very quickly. Larger offices has an assistant that's ahead of buying supplies for the practice. And one of the things that they tell them to do is just, "Hey, once every few months make sure that we're not paying out the nose for something that... For the prices."Jonathan VanHorn:I mean, typically the person will, if they've bought these burs every month for two years, and then all of a sudden they notice the bur price is up 50%, they're now more, "Hey, maybe I can go buy those somewhere else and get a little bit better deal for it." So that's really the best way to do it. From the labs, it's the same thing, make sure that we're not having a whole bunch of redos. So we're having to pay the fee over again, because we didn't send the right stuff to the lab. Make sure we have a well-trained staff to make sure that those labs are being done... That we're needing the labs. Make sure that we're billing the patient for the services that we do. And also, make sure that the fees are competitive. I mean, like I mentioned, some people, their lab is their lab. They ain't going anywhere else.Jonathan VanHorn:And if that's the case, that's fine, but it doesn't hurt to ask that lab like, "Hey, by the way, you're charging me $200 a crown. The competitor down the street's charging $85 a crown. Can you maybe help me out a little bit with this? Or is there anything that you can do to affect these prices, or that we can do better as a company when we send them to you to lower your costs so we can get a little bit closer on the fees?" Because I guarantee you, in today's day and age, those lab people are probably aware that guy down the street is charging that. And if they say no, "If you want the service that you're getting now, you got to pay me that fee," that is there right. And if you like that lab, you should continue paying it. But that's completely up to you, and you're going to understand that your costs are going to be a little bit higher. So we just talked about the 15% that are supplies and labs.Jonathan VanHorn:I just want to point out, if you can save 20% on your supplies and labs on a yearly basis, which is a big number, saving 20% is a lot, you're really only affecting those pennies. You're finding three pennies, that's what you're finding. But if you're finding 20%, I guarantee you, you're not going to find 20% every month. That's the diminishing returns part that we're talking about. If you did this exercise every month, you're not going to find 20% every time, which is three pennies. If there's waste or inefficiencies going on, you will likely almost immediately find those three pennies. And then every month after that, it's just going to stay the same. You're not going to find more pennies after that. So to the staffing part, I already talked about it a little bit, just make sure you're scheduling your people effectively.Jonathan VanHorn:Make sure that people aren't just standing around doing nothing for no reason. Make sure that we have patients that are being scheduled efficiently to be able to come in, and utilize that capacity so that we're generating revenue whenever we're incurring that expense. I'm not a scheduling guru, I don't know anything about the, "This is how you get to the minute of everything or whatever it may be." But watch out for areas of waste, which is things, like I said, having people just be up there whenever they don't have to be up there, make sure people are clocking out for their lunch, make sure that people are not putting in overtime if it's not needed. You do those things, you'll typically be okay. The last piece is the everything-else bucket, which is a bit more complex, but I can tell you the highlights. In today's day and age, you're probably not going to be like, "Hey, by the way, Mr. Landlord, I'm only going to pay you $500 less than what I was paying you a month ago." That's probably not going to work.Jonathan VanHorn:They're probably not going to be okay with that. So you can't really do a whole bunch about rent, which is the biggest chunk of that 15 pennies that are left over for most of our clients. Now if you own your own practice on your own location, you should still be allocating a fair rent rate to yourself, just for tax purposes and for arm's length rules and things like that. But you still can't do a whole lot about that number, even if that's the case, even if you own the real estate free and clear. So what's left after that is typically things like utilities, which I mean again, when talking about diminishing returns, most places don't have a whole lot of places you can go to find electricity. Most places don't have a whole lot of places you're going to find water. Just make sure you're not wasting it. If you got those things, those switches that turn off when you walk out... The sensors that turn the lights off when you walk out of the room, that's about as good as you can do.Jonathan VanHorn:You're not going to find 20% of those leftover. So of that 15 cents that was leftover, let's say that there's maybe six cents left after doing all of these things that are just normal things. What you have left is usually something like advertising, office expenses and things like that. And we have some practices, they don't spend anything in advertising. And so what I'll tell people to do is, think of advertising as an investment in your business. And just like any other investment, you want to make sure that that investment is reaping its rewards, having a return. So you should be aware of what your advertising is generating in new patients. And you should also be aware of how much those new patients are generating in revenue so that you can understand if, "Hey, if I'm spending $5,000 a month in advertising, am I getting $5,000 of value every month?"Jonathan VanHorn:If you are, then that may or may not be what your goals are for that advertising, and what your goals are for your business as a whole. But I can tell you, there are people out there that would spend $5,000 in advertising every month if that meant that they got one patient in a month, because it's worth it to them. They're growing a practice, and that patient could be worth 10 to $20,000 depending on that practice. So that's a good return to them and they're fine with it. It may not be for you in what your goals are for your practice and what your utilization is in your office. Because if you're a practice it's cram packed and you have no more room for more patients, and it's three months before somebody can get in, why are you paying for advertising? You don't really need a whole lot... I mean, you're set, unless you have an internal goal of growing, which means you have to expand your capacity, so that you can then generate more patients in to service that capacity.Jonathan VanHorn:So that last 10 to 15 cents that's leftover, again, you could spend a Herculean amount of effort on that 10 to 15 cents that's leftover to try and reduce it by maybe 10%, and you're going to find one and a half pennies basically. And again, you're going to do this one time a year, and that's typically all you're going to need. Now, the advertising, well, I can make an agreement, you can do that more frequently. The employee piece, that's just good management and understanding your management, it's not budgeting. It's just making sure that you're not wasting your money in that regard. And so let's say that you did all these things and you can come in, you can influence these numbers, you've done an amazing job if you've been able to influence all these expenses and lower them by five to 10%. Not five to 10% overall, but five to 10% of the 55%, which would mean that you've moved from 55 cents of every dollar down to maybe two and a half to five pennies extra that you're going to get out of every dollar.Jonathan VanHorn:And I know of practice owners that spend tens of hours a month trying to do this, and trying to reduce these expenses, because they want to spend less so they can keep more of every dollar that comes in. But to me, that's missing the picture. That's missing the bigger picture, because instead of trying to save that five to 10 cents, why not just, around the other side of that table, pour out 100 more pennies in which you could then move 55 cents of those over and keep the 45 cents. Hey, everybody, Jonathan checking in really quick here. This episode got a little long, so we cut it into multiple pieces. This is episode one. You can find episode two next week or in the following weeks. So make sure that if you listen to this episode, you listen to the other episode as well so you have the full context around everything that's going on. Thanks for tuning in. And we will see you next time.Jonathan VanHorn:That's it for today guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Tooth and Coin Podcast. If you are going to be a practice owner, or a new practice owner, and you're interested in CPA services, head on over to toothandcoin.com, you can check out more about our CPA services. We help out around 250 offices around the country. I would love to be able to have the discussion about how we could help your new practice. We do specialize in new practice owners, so people that are about to be an owner of a practice they're acquiring, about to be an owner of a practice they're starting up. Or has become an owner in the past five years. That is our specialty. We'd love to be able to talk to you about how we could help you in your services with your tax and accounting services.Jonathan VanHorn:And if you enjoy today's episode, again, go to the Facebook group. Talk to us about what we've talked about, join in on the discussion. And let's create an environment where we can talk about some of these things so that we can all help each other get through these things together so that this adventure of business ownership is more fun, more productive, and better in the longterm. Lastly, if you want access to those resources that we are currently building, just text the word toothandcoin to 33444. That's toothandcoin, no spaces, T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444. Reply with your email address, we'll send you instructions on the Facebook group, we'll send you the resources when they're available. And we will see you next week.
Join the discussion on Facebook!TranscriptJonathan VanHorn:Hey everybody, Jonathan checking in here. And just so you know, this is a two-part episode. This is the second part of the episode. So if you've not listened to the first part yet, you want to go back and listen to it in the prior ways. We should have it labeled on the episode title, what part one is and part two is. So you should be able to listen to that in the ... See that in the title of the episode, what episode of episode it is. So thanks.Jonathan VanHorn:Welcome to the Tooth and Coin Podcast, where we talk about your adventure of being a dental practice owner. In these episodes, we're going to be talking about problems that you will likely face as a practice owner, as well as give an idea about actionable solutions that you can take so that you can get past this problem in your practice. Some of these concepts are really big ones. Some of them are very specific, but we hope that these episodes help you along with your journey. Now, a very important piece for you to understand is that this is not paid financial advice. This is not paid tax or legal advice. We are not your financial advisors. We are not your CPAs. This is two CPAs talking about informational and educational content to help you along with your journey. It's a very important piece for you to understand.Jonathan VanHorn:Another thing that you need to know is if you enjoyed today's content, join us on the Facebook group. We've got a Facebook group that is active with Dennis that is going to have content talking about what we're talking about today, to continue the discussion. Agree with us. Don't agree with us. Have a story to tell. Have something to share. Join us in the Facebook group. If you go to Facebook and you search for Tooth and Coin Podcast, click on it to join it and be able to join us there. Finally, if you need some more help, we're developing a list of resources that are going to be centering it around our topics of discussion, to be able to help you a little bit more than what the content is doing. So if you'd like access to that, whenever it becomes ready, all you have to do is text the word ToothandCoin, T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444. Again, that's ToothandCoin, all one word, no spaces, to 33444, reply with your email address. And we'll email you instructions on how to get into the Facebook group, as well as add you list to be able to send you those resources when they're available. And if they're available, we'll go ahead and send them to you as well.Jonathan VanHorn:On to today's episode. Hope you enjoy it. How does someone define their intention? Because at the end of the day, we're doing budgeting for a reason. How does someone define their own intention? You have to have an intention, but what is intention for someone like us? What's the purpose of all this?Joseph Rugger:Sure. Well, I'll give you a couple of quotes from a couple of authors. One of the ones that I like to quote is Stephen Covey, who wrote The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And he said that we need to begin with the end in mind. That's one thing that I'll throw out. And then cautiously, I'll say the next quote is from a guy named Dave Ramsey, who has a tendency to get people all up in arms one way or the other. He has like this cult-like following. And then a lot of people don't like him. Anyways, he said that a budget is about you telling your money what to do, rather than it telling you what to do. So I think that's probably part of my thoughts on intention is, like beginning with the end in mind.Joseph Rugger:So, what is it that is the goal? That's probably a big, lofty thing to think about, well, where do you want to be in 40 years? I don't know. I just need to make sure that the kids get fed, put to bed, make it to school, they make A's and B's and everybody stays happy. So I think that you've got to think kind of long-term. So like maybe part of your long-term plan is that you want to have a vacation home. All right. Well, let's be intentional about that. We don't just wake up one day with a vacation home and an extra mortgage or pay cash for it. We got to put things in motion to help out with that. I think when I talk about intention, I talk about begin with the end in mind, like, what are some shorter range goals?Joseph Rugger:There are going to be some of our clients and some of the people listen to this that may have the short range goal of getting out of credit card debt. They ran up really large amounts of credit card debt. They're getting the practice started or getting through dental school or any of those things. That may be a big thing for them. There are some people that at 22 years old, they find out about an IRA and they want to save every penny they can for retirement so that they don't have to work until they're at whatever age. I think that beginning with the end in mind and just kind of thinking about what are some of your shorter term goals and some longer term goals.Joseph Rugger:Let's say that this idea of having an emergency fund is something that you've never thought of or you've thought about it, heard it was a good idea, but you've never set one up. So then the question to me is, okay, well, what do you want to define as an emergency fund? One month, three months, six months, 12 months? Whatever that emergency fund may be. Okay. Well, let's just say, just to use easy numbers, let's say that I've decided and determined through my own individual thoughts that $10,000 is what I need for an emergency fund. Okay. May sound like a lot. May not sound like a lot to others. Just to use it as an example. And I say, "You know what, within the next year, I really would like to have a $10,000 emergency fund." Okay. So let's back that up. All right.Joseph Rugger:So if we've got a year from now, how much do we need to save every single month? Well, 12 months, $10,000, whatever that is 8, $900 a month. So how do we be intentional about making sure that our budget and our money that's coming in, money that's going out, that we've got an extra eight or $900 a month that we can save to that emergency fund to get there? So I like short term goals. I like long-term goals. I like looking at the big picture and beginning with the end in mind and telling your money what to do. Because if you don't, if it just kind of flies in and flies out, one of the things that you mentioned, John, and I'd be interested kind of in your thoughts on this, when you brought it up, you brought up a life creep or lifestyle creep. So for people that may or may not understand what that term is, maybe kind of expand upon that for the people that are listening.Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah. So lifestyle creep is just whenever you're spending whatever you have. You live your life according to what you can afford. And then when you start making more money, you can afford more so you start doing more living than you are saving. So it's something that is very common inside of the dental industry. It's common in all industries where you have an increased amount of income very quickly, compared to what you had beforehand. It's just something that you have to be very aware of and you have to be prepared for and you have to actively fight against.Jonathan VanHorn:To touch on your point, the way that I did it, the reason I started doing the budgeting was because I'm a person that is very hard to define goals with because it kind of goes all over the place. So what I did is I said, I said, "Okay, here's what I want my life to look like in 10 years." And I actually pulled it up on my phone. It was in 2016 when I wrote it down the first time. And I separated the what in my life to look like from a monetary standpoint, from a work standpoint, and then from a relationship standpoint. And I found it was much easier for me to start budgeting if I did more than just the dollars amount parts of it, because to me, the numbers were important, but it was the other things that ended up making the exercise of budgeting more important, because I knew that if I didn't have the monetary element of it, that those other goals would be at much higher risk because of my lifestyle at the time.Jonathan VanHorn:I want my lifestyle to be a certain way. In order for my lifestyle to be a certain way, I know I need to have at least some type of these funds. And then that allowed me to then pull it back and be like, "Well, okay, if that's my goal in 10 years, what do I need to accomplish in five years? What do I need to accomplish in a year? And how do I get started on that now?" So that helped me with my intentionality, is writing down those goals, again, those monetary, relationships and work, how do I want that all three ... What are my goals for all of those things. What do I want to achieve also was in there. So that helped me with my intentionality as well. So I wanted to touch on that really quick.Jonathan VanHorn:But in terms of lifestyle creep, if budgeting is a way to hold yourself accountable, then that doesn't happen in my mind, because you can tell very quickly is my spending higher just because I have things that I want or is it because of things that I need. And this is something that is, I hope my wife never listens to this, but I've talked to her a bunch of times about what is want versus need. And we've had many arguments on what we need versus what we want. And it's something that, budgeting will allow you to do that. Whenever I'll look over that list of expenses every month, I kind of think of them as like subscriptions. How much am I spending on subscriptions to everything? Because when I think about it in those terms, it helps me decide like, here's what I'm going to stop the subscription of, or here's where I can lower the cost of the subscription in this way to be able to optimize this spend in a better pattern in some way.Jonathan VanHorn:So in terms of that budgeting, I guess if I'm putting a better, bigger bow on it, to me, budgeting is a component of goal setting in your personal life for the longer term aspect of it. So when you're being intentional with these things, and this is one of those things that someone could construe this as financial planning, talk to your financial planner about these types of things, I would say. These would be things that we would be able to have a conversation with you about, I would assume. And if you're having problems quantifying like a dollar amount and things like that, I think financial planner could probably help you with getting that number idea started. Your CPA might be a financial planner, but if your CPA is not a financial planner, this is not what CPAs typically do.Jonathan VanHorn:I want to just make sure that that's said just so that expectation is ... Your CPA may have some things to say about this, but this is 100% a financial planning thing that gets done here. So Joseph, if we came back to you, whenever you're being intentional with us, you're trying to find a home for all the money that's coming in and you're trying to put your money to work in the way that you want to be put to work. What are the components of that? We've talked about spending money, we've talked about income. How do you do something like that? I mean, is it ... Because debt is basically negative money. There's all different types of debt. Someone's decided, okay, I'm going to set goals. I'm going to be intentional. I'm going to budget. What do I do next? We talked about categorizing expenses and monthly expenses and variable and things like that. What about things like that? How does that go into this whole spectrum of budgeting?Joseph Rugger:Yeah. Good question. I think that you probably have heard the terms like good debt and bad debt. And this is going to be an oversimplification, but any kind of consumer debt, like money that you didn't really save up for it. And like all of a sudden I owe a whole bunch of money, that's consumer debt. Something like a credit card, like, oh, I ran up a $25,000 worth of credit cards and I can't pay it off. That's a consumer debt. I think that most people would classify that as bad debt. If you look at things that are typically classified as good debt, it would be in things that are going to have a higher return for you. So whenever you look at hopefully when you buy a home, you purchase the home for X amount of money. And between now and 30 years from now, the value of that home has increased. That would be a good debt. We have an increasing asset that's going to increase in value.Joseph Rugger:When we talk about the idea of you getting a chance to go to a school and have a higher education, you're investing money that you're going to get some future return, we hope so, from that education. So if you went to dental school, you know that that was very, very expensive. But as a result of taking on that debt, you have the ability to go out and earn a good living for you and your family or your future family. We're looking at business debt. We talk about our practice owners that are out there that they have a wing and a prayer and they start a practice from scratch, or they buy an existing practice. They oftentimes have to use debt to leverage themselves.Joseph Rugger:But hopefully what that's going to do is that's going to be an increasing value asset that's out there. So kind of where does debt fit in to this whole kind of budgeting piece? So you've got, again, your fixed expenses and your variable expenses. If you've got a payment on a piece of debt, that's going to be fixed. And then what you've got to decide is, do I want to get more aggressive in paying off this debt or do I want to do something different with this money each month? There's lots of different people that would tell you something different, but one of the things about debt is that it has a very emotional ring to it. And a lot of us have some kind of deep seated emotion around debt.Joseph Rugger:Maybe our parents constantly were living paycheck to paycheck or maybe our parents declared bankruptcy because they were had too much debt. If that happened to you in your formative years, then you're going to have a very different outlook in debt and if your parents were in the flipping a real estate. They're in flipping a real estate and they're constantly kind of back and forth and signing up for loans, you're going to have a very different emotional piece to debt. So I'd say that it certainly is different for each individual person. What I want you to do is be intentional with the money that's coming in so that if early debt pay down is your goal, then you've got money to do that. If instead of paying down debt early, you want to invest that money, or you want to save it to an emergency fund, or you want to save it for a car, or you want to do anything else, or you want to spend it, have a big blowout for your kids' summer birthday party, I just want you to be intentional about it.Joseph Rugger:So I think that debt has just a lot of very, very emotional ties to it for everybody. That's just a little bit different. So if early debt pay down is something that's part of your goal that you've determined with your financial planner, then I think that that's a good path to go down. If you want to kind of make the difference between good debt and bad debt. I mean, I don't think there's anybody that would tell you that it's a good idea to carry credit card debt at 24.5% interest. If you've got this big, huge, credit card balance, I think that most people would classify that as bad debt. So be intentional about living within your means.Joseph Rugger:There's only one way that you're going to get to the place where you're going to have freedom from having to work every day, if that's part of your goals. Maybe some people want to work until they can't work anymore. That may be part of it. I think most of our listeners probably at some point want to retire and put the handpiece down. Only way you're going to do that is if you spend less than you make. Pretty simple.Jonathan VanHorn:So what about the people that make money and there's no money leftover? They pay the minimum payments. They pay for all the necessities. And it's just barely getting, maybe they can save 1,000 bucks a month more than what they're spending. What are the solutions for them? What can they do?Joseph Rugger:Increase income, decrease expenses. I mean, as simplified as that is, that's really your two options. Go out and make more money or spend less. Where do we go for that? Where can you make extra money if that's what you want to do? If you're already working 85 hours a week and you're emotionally drained and you don't have anything left over for your family when you get home, working more hours is probably not the best solution. I think that to get a chance to go through expenses and see what's going on there, you may or may not be in too big of a house and too nice a house. You may or may not need to have a $60,000 car. You may could do just fine with a $15,000 car. So increase income decrease expenses, and where can that come from?Joseph Rugger:For most of the people that are going to listen to our podcast, if they want to change their equation that you just mentioned, it's going to be through a practice ownership that they own, that they're going to become more profitable as a business, which is one of the things that we hope you start out at a certain level and you hope that you invest your blood, sweat, and tears into this practice and it grows over time and it makes more money. There certainly are always expenses to cut. There's always additional side gigs to try and to do, but at the end of the day, if you can increase the value of the business and the cashflow of the business that you're pouring everything that you got into, I think that's probably going to be a big chunk of the things that the people that listen to this podcast will be able to do.Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah. It's hard sometimes to think about it in those terms of we'd love to be able to ... Well, we can do without Netflix and we'll save that $12 a month, all of our problems are solved. Wouldn't that be nice if that was all it took for all those problems to be solved? In terms of the dentists that I speak to almost every day, I see more and more are searching for that mix of lifestyle and financial independence. There's a term that I've heard called FIRE, Financial Independence Retire Early. And I think that's what that stands for. And I speak to more and more young dentists that are trying to reach that type of a lifestyle eventually. And I don't know.Jonathan VanHorn:And again, I'm not a financial planner at all by any shape, form or fashion, but I don't know the best way to reach FIPE for a dentist. I don't know if it is to keep seeking it out as an associate and just have the steady income or if it is to take on a lot more debt early on and to increase your earnings potential. It sure seems like based off of the clients that we have, that it's the latter. It's get your own business, increase your income capacity and a lot of those expenses and the Y that I was talking about before, not the W-H-Y, but like Y as in the variable and the spend, those numbers shrink down so much compared to your X. There's a lot of Z left over.Jonathan VanHorn:And this is anecdotal because I speak to people from all over the country. And I would say like an average associate pay for a GP is somewhere between 130 and $170,000 a year. And depending on the location of the practice that you're in, I would say that for a dental practice ... For that same associate owning a business is not easy, but many, many, many dentists can get to a double that average in take home income with what is perceived to be a small amount of effort compared to the associate gig. It sure is a lot more simple to, if you've got $10,000 of expenses a month, to pay for those expenses with $20,000 a month of income, compared to $11,000 a month in income. It's just a lot simpler to do that.Jonathan VanHorn:And then there's also the people that do even better than that, and you get to 3, 4, 5, 6, $700,000 of income and they all seem to be able to pay off their debts pretty quickly and then get to that financial independence pretty quickly as well. So I think that kind of depends on the person, of what they want to do. So we talked mostly in this episode or almost exclusively in this episode about the personal side and with the assumption that you're going to have a good understanding of how much money is coming in from a dollars and cents perspective, just on the personal side. So with that note, what do you tell people that have a variable amount of income coming in?Joseph Rugger:Well, I think that with a variable amount of income that's coming in, I think you've got to make adjustments to what you would call your cash cushion. If your monthly spend and your personal checking account is, I don't know, $8,000, just to use an easy number, we'd probably need ... If I were to say you need to have X amount of dollars in cash cushion in your account, somebody that's got variable income probably need to have a little bit more kind of in cushion so that we can ride those ups and ride those downs. I mean, you're always going to have your fixed expenses. We mentioned kind of your mortgage payment, your debt payment, lights, water, utility, X amount of dollars kind of as a baseline for food and clothing, that kind of thing. So those are things that as money comes in, those things all get taken care of first.Joseph Rugger:And then it's all of the extras or we were talking about the needs versus the wants. The wants come after the needs are met, kind of in that specific order. So I think that's probably the biggest thing that I would talk about, is just understanding like how much cash cushion do we need to have in the personal checking account to ride the highs and the lows. And then how do we make sure that we take care of the fixed things first, the kind of normal, regular routine, monthly pieces that you have. And then we make sure that the wants or the wants happen in the months in which we have more income than the months that are pretty skimpy on income.Jonathan VanHorn:Makes a lot of sense. The income being variable usually also comes from the business side of things. If you own a business, you can have a wage and you can have like a guaranteed payment or guaranteed draw or just like an automatic transfer of funds. It's a certain amount every month for your business or your personal account. But some months there may not be enough cash in the business to do that. So that's when the real variability can come into play and hopefully if you have a lot of success, that number, that variable is because it's a lot more every month that's coming in and then hopefully we'll have an intention of where that money can go to. Can you recap for us budgeting as a whole, the steps someone should take, if they've not done budgeting before, that is most likely to lead them to getting to the point of actually doing this exercise?Joseph Rugger:Budgeting is about understanding how much money comes in every month and how much money goes out every month and trying to be intentional about that so that you can begin with the end in mind, have short-term, long-term goals and make sure that you're meeting those goals at a high level. Some of the specific tools that we talked about, the simplest and easiest one is to figure out and pull out a bank statement and look and see how much cash came in, how much cash came out, pull three or four months worth of them and you'll get a pretty good idea of what's going on with your cashflow. There are lots of different tools that are out there to help you figure that out. You mentioned Mint. I've used Mint in the past. Probably a lot of people have heard of or are familiar with Mint and certainly has some positives and negatives along with that. Microsoft Excel is kind of my tried and true piece about that.Joseph Rugger:But I think just beginning to understand your financial picture as it comes in to make sure that life creep is not something that takes over and up-ends your stuff. I think those are kind of some of the top of mind things that I would have to chat about. Where's your money going? How intentional are you? Do you have a plan? Do you have a financial planner that's helping you get from where you're at to where you want to go? What's that look like? Are you tracking progress over time? Are there technology tools that are out there that can help you do that? I think those are all kind of different places to start. Pull out your credit card statement. You want to know where your money's going every month? Pull out your credit card statement and see. You mentioned subscriptions. We're kind of in this section of our economy right now where almost everything has moved to some sort of a subscription base, whether that's getting your news every month or getting your entertainment or-Jonathan VanHorn:Paying for your CPA.Joseph Rugger:Paying for your CPA. Right. All of these different pieces are all based on a subscription. You want to know where your money's going? Pull out your stuff and see. And as you mentioned, Jonathan, maybe you use it, maybe you don't. Do you use Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, whatever the new discovery channel was? I forget, I saw that the other day that came out. Do you use all of those things? If you use them? Great. Is it worth it? Yeah. If you don't use it, is it worth it? Well, no, of course not. I think those are some pretty simple, basic places to start. And just start having conversations internally about it. If you're married, have it with your spouse and get on the same page and talk about intentionality and all these different pieces. That's kind of where I would start. What are your thoughts there?Jonathan VanHorn:I agree with everything you said. The one thing I would add is I would add preset when you're going to do this. If you're thinking about doing this right now, put on your calendar when the first time you're going to dedicate to doing this. It's incredibly hard for me as a person, I own a business, have three small kids. And like I said, we used to do it every Sunday night at like 8:30. Well, one of our kids, they don't sleep very well. So sometimes it's 10 o'clock before we even get away from kids at night. Those Sunday nights, sometimes that's we get behind on doing it. But if we're available at that time, that's the time that we're going to do it. So preset some time. Preset some regularity to it so that you can have some discipline and just knowing that, hey, this is what I'm going to do at this time. I promise you, you can DVR that episode of ... I don't even watch. Lost. I don't know. I don't know how long it's been since Lost has been out there-Joseph Rugger:That was like 10 years ago, dude.Jonathan VanHorn:Exactly.Joseph Rugger:How about Yellowstone? Yellowstone's going to come out soon.Jonathan VanHorn:Yellowstone. Everything else is on the streaming. So it's not like you have to be watching ABC, watching America's funniest home videos at night with Alfonso Ribeiro. I mean, you can find that time to do that. The other thing I would say is be reminded of the big picture consistently, whenever you do this. You don't have to do it every time. I find that when I pull out that list of, like I said, it's still on my phone from 2016. It's just in my notes, on my iPhone of everything that I wanted. Because it helps you remember why you're doing it. And then also have some way of visualizing if you're hitting those goals or not.Jonathan VanHorn:So whether it be if your goal is to get out of debt, make sure that you have something that says, "This is how much debt we have right now." If you do this once a month, if you do it every week, whenever you pull it up, make sure that's all in the thing that you're tracking. This is how much debt that we currently have. Are we making strides towards getting it gone getting it over? I think those are the things that will help with that intentionality that you're talking about. Or is it a more defined way of looking at that intentionality and a little bit of a hack on how to be disciplined to do it because that's the hardest thing for me, is to have the discipline to continually do it over and over again. Because there'll be stretches where I just won't do it for two months, three months, four months, five months. But I know for me personally, the longer I don't do it, the more stress it builds up for me. And then I go and do it. I'm like, oh, okay, yes. We're still doing. We haven't changed much.Jonathan VanHorn:My wife and I are not very extravagant people that go and do a whole lot of extra stuff. So it's not super hard for us to stay within those bounds of what it is. And over the last couple of years I've taught, I'll go in there, I'll be in the lab, so to speak, catching up and things like. April, whenever we talk about it and I'll say, "Well, yeah, we're fine. There's no issues. It's just, I want to make sure that nothing crazy is going on or something like that." But anyway, so that'd be my only thing to add, is create discipline around it by creating regularity, which is by prescheduling what it's going to be. And then be reminded of the big picture very consistently so you can know if you're on track or not, if something changes. Those are things you said, but just more specific ways of going about it. And the tool that I was talking about earlier was Clarity Money as well. I think it's a really good one that some people could use as well, too. So yeah, so I think that was a pretty, without being hyper specific to any case other than our own, is a pretty good overarching class on personal budgeting. Is there any other points or pieces that we need to discuss in that?Joseph Rugger:I think we got it, man. I think it's great.Jonathan VanHorn:Guys, if you are interested in talking more about budgeting, this is something that we do pretty regularly. If you want to share, if you've got a budgeting hack or something that you use to budget regularly, or if you just have a really cool way of doing it, make sure to go into the Facebook group, make a post about it. Tell us about it. We'd love to add that to our repertoire too. Appreciate everyone tuning in. This has been a fun episode. We're going to have another episode about business budgeting, which is a complete ... Well, a lot of people can play the tune to the same thing. They are completely different and there's different reasons of doing it, there's different methods of doing it and there's different purposes of doing it. So that's going to be a different episode. This is probably the second episode of this personal budgeting content. And we will see you guys in the next one. See you, Joseph.Joseph Rugger:Bye guys.Jonathan VanHorn:That's it for today, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Tooth and Coin Podcast. If you are going to be a practice owner or a new practice owner and you're interested in CPA services, head on over to ToothandCoin.com, where you can check out more about our CPA services. We have around 250 offices around the country and we'd love to be able to have the discussion about how we could help your new practice. We do specialize in new practice owners. So people that are about to be an owner of a practice they're requiring, about to be an owner of a practice they are starting up or has become an owner in the past five years. That is our specialty. We'd love to be able to talk to you about how we could help you in your services with your tax and accounting services.Jonathan VanHorn:And if you enjoyed today's episode, again, go to the Facebook group. Talk to us about what we've talked about, join in on the discussion and let's create an environment where we can talk about some of these things so that we can all help each other get through these things together so that this adventure of business ownership is more fun, more productive and better in the long term. Lastly, if you want access to those resources that we are currently building, just text the word ToothandCoin to 33444. That's ToothandCoin, no spaces. T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444. Apply with your email address. We're sending instructions in the Facebook group. We'll send you the resources when they're available and we will see you next week.
Join the discussion on Facebook!TranscriptJonathan VanHorn:Welcome to the Tooth and Coin Podcast, where we talk about your adventure of being a dental practice owner. In these episodes, we're going to be talking about problems that you will likely face as a practice owner, as well as give an idea about actionable solutions that you can take so that you can get past this problem in your practice. Some of these concepts are really big ones, some of them are very specific, but we hope that these episodes help you along with your journey. Now, a very important piece for you to understand is that this is not paid financial advice. This is not paid tax or legal advice. We are not your financial advisors. We are not your CPAs. This is two CPAs talking about informational and educational content to help you along with your journey. It's a very important piece for you to understand.Jonathan VanHorn:Another thing that you need to know is if you enjoy today's content, join us on the Facebook group. So we've got a Facebook group, that is active with Dennis, that is going to have content talking about what we're talking about today, to continue the discussion. Agree with us, don't agree with us, have a story to tell, have something to share, join us in the Facebook group. If you go to Facebook and you search for Tooth and Coin Podcast, click on it to join it and be able to join us there. Finally, if you need some more help, we're developing a list of resources that we're going to be centering it around our topics of discussion, to be able to help you a little bit more than what the content is doing.Jonathan VanHorn:So if you'd like access to that, whenever it becomes ready, all you have to do is text the word toothandcoin T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444. Again, that's toothandcoin, all one word, no spaces, to 33444. Reply with your email address, and we'll email you instructions on how to get into the Facebook group, as well as add you to the list, to be able to send you those resources when they're available. And if they're available, we'll go ahead and send them to you as well. So on to today's episode, hope you enjoy it.Jonathan VanHorn:Hello, ambitious dentist. Today, we're going to be talking about a topic that is, you know, some people that could even maybe think is a little bit controversial. It's one that is not everyone's most favorite thing to do. For Joseph and I, being CPAs and in the financial world, it's pretty fun. It's a fun game to play. And we're talking about today, budgeting. So the big problem surrounding budgeting is that you typically do budgeting as a response to something else. And the problem that is being responded to, for budgeting, is that as a dentist, you typically have a pretty good amount of income, potential earning capacity, in your lifetime, in your professional career. And with that additional income can sometimes come life scope creep.Jonathan VanHorn:You've got a lot of responsibilities. You may have some extra debt coming in and you don't really know what to do with that income. And so today's episode, we're going to be talking about the personal side of budgeting for your personal income, and then we're going to have a follow-up up, so that's going to be talking about business budgeting, which is our two completely separate topics. Just as a reminder, since this is, I think of all the episodes that we've done so far, this one could be the most easily confused to be financial advice. This is not financial advice. This is two CPAs talking about personal financial budgeting, and just talking about some of the things that we do in our personal lives, and things we've seen other clients do as well.Jonathan VanHorn:So Joseph is a master of budgeting. I budget myself, but it's not nearly as robust and as sophisticated as how Joseph does his. Ever since I've met Joseph, the first time, I think he talked to me like, "Hey, have you ever tried to do budgeting?" And so he's been really, really deep in this world for a long time. So Joseph talk to us about budgeting and for definition purposes, let's assume no one has ever heard of the term budgeting before. What is budgeting and how does it help address the problem that we outlined?Joseph Rugger:Yeah. Great question. So we're talking about the B word. We're going to have people that are going to go search for our podcast, and they're going to say that we're doing an episode on budgeting, and they're immediately going to not listen to it. They're going to skip this one and go to the other ones because budget has a tendency to be a bad word. So some initial feeling. So one of the things that I always like to talk about when we talk about money is, money is amoral. Money is not good. It's not evil. It's not any of that stuff. Money is just a tool, just like anything else that you can use for anything that you want. So at a high level, whenever we hear budgeting, we think that means control. Somebody, somewhere is going to control my money and we get very emotional about it.Joseph Rugger:And one of the things that we try to do as CPAs is we try to remove the emotion out of it as much as we can. So knowing that this is your livelihood, knowing that this is everything that's going on, this is your hopes and your dreams, your blood, sweat, and tears, everything that you've poured into this business, into your career, into your life, we want to try to remove as much emotion as we can. So I think that probably one of the first things that I would say about budgeting, in general, is that budgeting is about being intentional. And what we want you to do is we want you to be intentional with your money, whether we're talking about on the personal side, or on the business side, which we'll get to in a later episode, we want you to be intentional with your money.Joseph Rugger:So at a high level, budgeting is about how much money is coming in, and how much of that money is going to go out, and who gets that money, and where does it go. So very simply, if I have income of 100 bucks in a month and $95 of it goes out the door, my checking account balance increases by $5, right? So where did that $95 go? Maybe a part of it was a tithe or some sort of charitable giving. Maybe it was some sort of a savings that you're putting money into a savings account or an investment account. Maybe that's going towards paying your house payment, paying your car payment, paying your utilities, paying for your kids' school, paying for groceries. They're all of these different categories that we have in the budgeting world. So at a high level, a budget is about how much money is coming in, and then how much is going out, and then sticking to that, or not sticking to that, and making choices along the way.Joseph Rugger:So whenever we say budgeting, Jonathan, what are your thoughts? Do you get that squirmy, "Man, that sounds like somebody is going to control me. I hate that word. It's a bad word." What are some of your thoughts? You're a CPA, but we're still emotional. We're still emotional as CPAs about our own money.Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah. So the budgeting side of things to me is always, I guess, I just initially will sometimes get frustration when I think about budgeting. And the reason is because I like to plan, and I like to have a path, and budgeting, a lot of the time, ends up not going the way you planned. Little things come up and things like that. And it requires a lot of discipline. So sometimes that can be frustration, especially whenever you have more than one person that's in your family home, that you can sit down with them, and come up with a plan, and it only takes one person to make that plan go one way or the other. So I do get a little frustration when I think about budgeting.Jonathan VanHorn:And I think the other frustration comes from the fact that you got to do it. It's one of those things that you if you know enough about it you know it's important, but it's very easy to neglect it. It's very easy to just not really try and worry about it too much because of the amount of effort that has to go into it compared to what you can perceivably get out of it. So yeah. So frustration is probably what I think of when I think of budgeting in and of itself. But again, it's a necessary thing to do, especially on the personal side. We'll get into the business side of it in another episode, but from the personal side, yeah. It's just one of those things that if you're not managing where the money's going to, it just gets so easy for it to just go this way, that way, and everywhere in between. So I'm happy to share how I do my budgeting, but I would love to hear how you like to approach budgeting or how you have to approach budgeting for people that have never done it before.Joseph Rugger:Yeah, sure. So couple of things. So there's lots of different resources that are out there. There's lots of different authors that have written on this topic. I think it'd be worthwhile for me to share a couple of people that have been influential, just helping me shape the way that I look at money, and how it flows, and that kind of thing. Some of these names are probably dirty names in your household. Some of them you may hear and be like, "Oh man, that person's an idiot. I don't like them." But these are just people that I've read. One of the great things about growing up and becoming an adult, when you're a young child and you go to school, you learn this is the way it is, like the world is round. It's not flat. It's very zero and one, very right or wrong.Jonathan VanHorn:There are people that disagree with you, even today, unfortunately, about that being round.Joseph Rugger:Fair enough. Fair enough. Fair enough. But that's just the way our education system works. And then, when you get out, and on your own, and start learning things, you realize that everybody has a different perspective and a different way of looking at things. So there is no right or wrong answer with a ton of stuff. So I'm going to mention a couple of authors that have been influential in my life as I've read the stuff that they've put out, but it's their perspective. It's the way that they look at things. And it has helped shape my perspective on a bunch of different things inside of my life. So some of the names you'll recognize, I'm sure you probably will, and one of them was Dave Ramsey. He was one of the first ones that I started to learn about money and how it works.Joseph Rugger:I really like Ramit Sethi. He wrote a book called I Will Teach You To Be Rich. I really like David Bach who wrote The Automatic Millionaire. Dave Ramsey book is the Financial Peace. Financial Peace University has a class out there. Robert Kiyosaki wrote Rich Dad Poor Dad, which is also a really good resource and a good thing. So I've read, and learned a lot, and put a bunch of these things, in general, in place in my life to figure that out. So whenever I look at "budgeting," it's more of an art than a science. I mean, there is some science to it, but there's a lot of different things that happen. Life happens, right? Things happen in the course of a given month, and to me, budgeting is about having a plan where you can be prepared for different things.Joseph Rugger:So something as simple as having an emergency fund is something that I'm sure is familiar to all of our guests now. How much and where should it be and all this stuff. We're not going to get into all of that because that's not really what we're talking about, but being intentional with your money and making sure that you've got different perspectives on stuff. So I'm old school. I'm probably older than a good chunk of the people that listen to us. So I didn't grow up with all of the fancy tools that are out there now. To me, Excel was one of the first big pieces of software that I learned how to use, right? I didn't grow up with mint.com, and an apple iPhone, and all of these things. I remember getting my first flip phone when I was 16-years-old, we had allotted time of 15 minutes a month.Joseph Rugger:That was the max, emergencies only. So I predate myself a little bit. So Excel is where I live as an accountant. I love Excel. So I have an Excel spreadsheet, and I sit down, before the month begins, and I'm not like our current level of clients to where income is variable. So I've got a pretty good idea, not down to the penny, but I've got a pretty good idea of, let's just say within five to 10% either way, of how much money's coming in. And a practice owner, their income can be so variable within the practice, and within their W-2 wage, and their production, and all this stuff. So one of the things that I'm going to start with is I'm going to start with top line income and I've got a pretty good idea of where that is.Joseph Rugger:Now, if you don't have an idea, you can certainly look at six months worth of history and figure out. And then, there are things that are inside my personal household that are fixed expenses. Things that I know are going to come out every single month, something as simple as a mortgage payment, right? I know the mortgage is going to come out. I know what day of the month it's going to come out. It's the same exact amount every month. So that's a fixed expense, right? There are other expenses that are variable expenses. How many times are we going to go out to eat this month? That's variable. How much is the grocery bill going to be? That's variable. Are we going to take a vacation? Are we going to buy plane tickets? Are we going to buy a hotel room? Those are all variable expenses.Joseph Rugger:So understanding the difference between fixed expenses and variable expenses, I think is important. And the other thing that I would also say that is inside my Excel spreadsheet, Jonathan, I'm tracking every single dollar that goes on our credit card, every single dollar that goes on our debit card, every single money that comes out for this. I'm monitoring our balances on all of our different things, and I'm updating it daily, and I've got a scheduled net worth out, and we've got all of this different stuff. And I would imagine, as I describe these things, probably gives you some heartburn, and even though you're a CPA, I know you're just such a tech guy. So this is like the basics. I feel like I've got a stone and chisel out and I've got my little Excel spreadsheet that's tracking my money as it comes in and out. What are some things that resonate with you there that you guys do, personally, when you look at something like this?Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah. So for me, there's the way I used to do it and then there's the way I do it now. The way I used to do it was pretty similar to what you do. I used mint.com to aggregate the data coming through, in terms of what our spend was and things like that. At one point I used accounting software, which was like QuickBooks Online and Xero. I actually had a complete P and L and balance sheet set up for myself or my family. So that can tell what our net worth was, the balance sheet, and see our income spend. I'll have a budget add-on built into it and things like that. And those things for me, the way that I work, and the way I'm wired, they really only lasted probably six to nine months at a time.Jonathan VanHorn:And I would probably just... something would happen and I'd be like, "I don't have the ability or time to do this right now. So I'm going to put it off." And then what happens is we put it off for too long, then it just gets to be where it's such a big mole hill to get over. I was just like, "I don't want to do this." What happened, happened. I can't change what happened at this point. So I'm not even going to worry about logging the transactions and doing all these other types of things. So I've used Clarity Money, which is an app through I believe Wells Fargo. That is a really good one, too. I really enjoyed that one. That one was probably the most automated and the best aggregator of everything that I've used and was all done in your phone.Jonathan VanHorn:And even that, even as simple as that, I stopped using it just because I've eventually got to a point where I was like, "Oh, there's so many things going on with this." That it ended up not being what I... It didn't do exactly what I wanted it to do every time, so I got tired of messing with the nuances of it. And so now, what I do is I use a spreadsheet, and I have different categories of what I do, and what it is. And like you said, you have your, I labeled it as monthly expenses. I have a monthly amount of money I'm going to spend, whether it be through mortgage, or my kids' school, or health insurance, or utilities, or car payment, or whatever it may be. They're the knowns.Jonathan VanHorn:I know we're going to spend this much money on these things, and that's our monthly dollar amount. And let's say, "Okay, well, this is our monthly dollar amount on this." And then, I have our variables, like you said, our meals, how much are we going to spend on gas? How much are we going to do on these other things? And I just lump those into a big category of all the variables, if we could spend less than this amount. I honestly don't even at this point track if we hit those things or not. It's just an internal thing in my head I can try to keep up with. There's also just the one-time things that just come up, like something happened with the roof, or something happened with this, or something happened with that.Jonathan VanHorn:And then we'll use our other personal funds to take care of it. So whenever we were doing the other things, the purpose of that, to me, was for us to build up our cash reserve, so we could withstand some little things here and there. Luckily, we'd done it for long enough that we'd saved enough where we have a six to 12-month saving account. So we over-fund that already. The one-time expenses don't... I don't think we've ever had a $10,000 one-time expense. Hopefully, that never changes. But funded that up pretty quickly after that. That is how we currently do our budgeting, so I don't go in and look at every single line item detail.Jonathan VanHorn:I almost never look at every line item detail. I usually just look at the total amount we spent in a month, compare that to the here's our monthly definite amount. Whatever's the difference of those two things must be the variables. Is that number super high? If so, then why? Do we need to change something about what we're doing? If there's nothing we could do, then I'm just content with it to be honest with you. So that's how I currently do it. And I probably do that once every couple of months. I don't do it enough. I would say the most effective time we have when we were budgeting was whenever my wife and I would carve off 45 minutes every Sunday night, before the week began, to talk about what was going to happen over the course of the week. But three kids sometimes... At some point we didn't even have Sunday nights to do that with, so.Jonathan VanHorn:So how do you do budgeting? What do you recommend people do in terms of that? Because I'm sure my history with it is similar to a bunch of different people's paths with budgeting, but what do you do? What do you recommend? Things like that.Joseph Rugger:Sure. Sure. So I think that in general, I want to use the word intentional a lot in this podcast episode, because I think it's important, especially when we're talking about money. I want you to be intentional with your money. I think the other thing that you need to do is you need to be consistent with it. So Jonathan just described like, "Oh, well, we used to do this and we kind of do this. And on our own, we look at it every couple of months." The more complex that you make anything in life, the less the chances are that you're going to be able to stick with it. So if I say, "An Excel spreadsheet," I've already lost half of you. You're like, "I don't even know how to use Excel. That's for accountants." I've already lost half of you. The other half of you are like, "Oh, I think I've heard of Mint before. I've used that before. I know how that works. It's a data aggregator, right?"Joseph Rugger:So I think, in general, we want you to be intentional with the different stuff that you have. I want you to figure something out that you can stick with. And it may be the end thing that Jonathan ended with there, which is we just have this number that we need to spend and go through every single month. And if it's more than that, we know that we've got an issue. If it's less than that, then we know that we're in good shape. So just having just, in general, how much money went out of your bank account. That's a simple, simple thing. If you have one bank account that all your money comes in and out of, it's very, very simple.Joseph Rugger:What was the beginning balance on that checking statement? And what was the ending balance? And what was the Delta there? What was the change there? So I think that that's probably a good first place to start is understanding are you increasing your cash each month? Are you decreasing your cash each month? What's something simple that you can stick with? What's some things that you can be intentional about? So one of the things, I mentioned, David Bach, The Automatic Millionaire, one of the things he talks about is that how in the history of the United States, the most successful saving program we've ever had has been the 401k, right? So that's an automatic deduction from your paycheck. So that may or may not apply to all of our listeners here, but if it's on you to remember at the end of the month to write a check, to send it to a retirement account, that may or may not be something that you can stay consistent with, and stay intentional with.Joseph Rugger:But if it's an automatic paycheck deduction, then it's out of sight, out of mind. So I'm not here sitting here saying that you need to save for a year and a half or none of that stuff, what I'm saying is what are the systems that you can set up? What are some things that you can put in place that you can be intentional about your money, something that you can stick with? I have good friends that are interested in making sure that they do a certain amount in charitable deductions each month. And I say, "Okay, well, when do you get paid?" "Well, I get paid every other Friday." "Okay. Well, why don't you set up an automatic donation to that charity every other Friday? They draft money out of your account the same day that your payroll comes through."Joseph Rugger:So again, if charitable donations is your thing and that's one of the things you want to do, be intentional about it. So this is how much I want to do every two weeks, or every 15th and 30th, or on the first of every month, or the 10th of every month, or any of that stuff. It's like on your mortgage payment, do you have the... And this is probably going to sound silly to a lot of our listeners at this point, but 10 years ago, there were tons of people that would sit down, and they would write a check, and they would mail a check to the mortgage company, right? So how do you remember? "Oh, well, I got my paper statement in the mail." Well, now it probably comes via email. A lot of you probably have it set up on auto-draft.Joseph Rugger:So what are the different systems that you can set up to set yourself up for success? Whether it be with how much you're spending on meals, entertainment, or travel, or if it's something like how much is my house payment? And what day of the month does that come out? Or how much is going to... We've mentioned a couple of times in emergency funds, how much do I need to have in an emergency fund? Well, I'm not here to tell you how much needs to be in there. What I'm telling you is you need to have an emergency fund. How much, that's really up to you and your comfort level. So how are you going to set up systems in place to have an emergency fund, right? The other thing that I would say is there are things that qualify as an emergency. Back to school shopping for the kids is not an emergency. Christmas presents are not an emergency.Joseph Rugger:Those are things that you need to be intentional about throughout the course of the year, throughout the course of November, December, or July and August, when it's time to go back to school shopping. If we're going to spend $1,000 on back to school clothes for the kids, we can't also spend X amount of dollars on vacations or eating out. All of these things, money comes in, money goes out. It's a zero-sum game. If you're looking at it from a budgeting perspective, I just want you to be intentional about it. I think that's probably my thing there. So Jonathan, I would say, what systems can you set up? What are some things that you can stick to? And what are some things that you can be super intentional about? What are your thoughts there?Jonathan VanHorn:Do you recommend people do the automatic payments to things like with the mortgage and even credit cards can set up automatic payments now? For me, personally, it's all set up whenever I get a medical bill in that can't be paid online, I get frustrated because I'm like, "Oh, I got to find a checkbook somewhere in my house to write one of these archaic notes to someone." So everything I do is done... And also, if it's not done automatically, then I have a chance of not paying it. So do you recommend people do that or are you asking for the intentionality of the payment to be missed if you do it that way? I don't know if intentionality is the word.Joseph Rugger:Yeah, good question. So I think I got to be careful about this because everybody's going to come at this thing from a different perspective. There are going to be some people that are going to listen to this that have $500 in their personal checking account and they're going to live paycheck to paycheck. There are going to be some people that are listening to this that keep $100,000 cushion in their personal checking account. So I think that you got to approach each situation a little differently. So I think, that in general, I think that what is the "cushion" that you have inside of your personal checking account? So some people may be comfortable with a thousand bucks, 5,000 bucks, $25,000, 50,000. Everybody's going to have a different comfort level of what they've got.Joseph Rugger:What I don't want you to do is I don't want you to say, "Oh, these guys told me I needed to automate everything, so I set my credit card on auto-pay." And then, all of a sudden, you ran up a $35,000 credit card bill, and you didn't have $35,000 in your checking account when the auto-pay came through. So I think that that's one of the things that we got to be careful in just saying, "Oh, set everything up on auto-pay." I love auto-pay. I have auto-pay for a lot of things, but I don't have it on everything. I think that you need to figure out what makes the most sense for you to have on auto-pay and you need to just make sure that you've got that squared away. So some people might say, "Oh, I have my credit card on auto-pay."Joseph Rugger:And they send me an email that says, "Hey, by the way, your bill is due. It's due on this day, you're going to get an auto-draft on this day." And they're just like, "Oh, okay, great." And they'd go say, okay, well, however much the bill is, 10,000, 20,000, whatever. And like, "I'm going to make sure that that money is in my checking account." And that kind of thing. So I'd proceed with caution on what all you set up on auto-pay. So there's simple stuff like your utility bill, your gas bill, and your water bill, and your electric bill. I would imagine that most of the people that are listening to this podcast are not living on $50 in their checking account, right? If I talked to my 21-year-old college brother, he probably needs to make sure he actually writes the check for his utility bill and make sure that the money is actually in the account.Joseph Rugger:But some of the smaller stuff like that... I like being intentional about charitable giving, the mortgage payment's a really, really important payment that you don't want to miss, and have fees, and associated with that. The credit card payments are something that gets a little dicey because that changes every single month, right? I've never had two months in a row where all of the expenses go on the credit card and it's the same exact amount. It's going to vary widely based on what all's going on. It's like, we're in the middle of the summer right now, so there's going to be stuff about going to the lake, and stuff about going to the beach, and hotels, and airfare, and like all that different stuff. And we're not doing a whole lot of traveling in February, right?Joseph Rugger:We're hunkered down because the ice was coming and the snow's coming. It's like, every single month is different. May, tons of people get married in May or graduate in May. It's like, we're going to have graduation gifts, and we're going to have wedding gifts, and we're going to have all that different stuff, right? It's like, what month is your child's birthday? Are you going to have a big, huge blowout and have the big jump jump out at the house? You going to have the DJ come and DJ the kid's birthday party? So I'd proceed with caution on setting up some of the bigger stuff, I guess, for automatic payments, and just be intentional about that. Does that make sense? This is me dancing around the question, but for the most part I think it really depends [crosstalk 00:27:12].Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah, I completely understand what you're saying. So in terms of the... We touched on credit card debt, but what about just debt in general? So you said the first step is to have intention. I guess, before we talk about that, how does someone define their intention? Because at the end of the day, we're doing budgeting for a reason. And how does someone define their own intention? You have to have an intention, but what is intention for someone like this? What's the purpose of all this? Hey, everybody, Jonathan checking in really quick here, this episode got a little long, so we cut it into multiple pieces. This is episode one. You can find episode two next week, or in the following weeks. So make sure that if you listen to this episode, you listen to the other episode as well, so you have the full context around everything that's going on. Thanks for tuning in and we will see you next time.Jonathan VanHorn:That's it for today, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode of The Tooth and Coin Podcast. If you are going to be a practice owner, or a new practice owner, and you're interested in CPA services, head on over to toothandcoin.com where you can check out more about our CPA services. We have around 250 offices around the country. We would love to be able to have the discussion about how we could help your new practice. We do specialize in new practice owners. So people that are about to be an owner of a practice that are inquiring, that are about to be an owner of a practice they are starting up, or has become an owner in the past five years, that is our specialty. I would love to be able to talk to you about how we could help you in your services with your tax and accounting services. And if you enjoyed today's episode, again, go to the Facebook group.Jonathan VanHorn:Talk to us about what we've talked about, join in on the discussion, and let's create an environment where we can talk about some of these things, so that we can all help each other get through these things together, so that this adventure of business ownership is more fun, more productive, and better in the longterm. Lastly, if you want access to those resources that we are currently building, just text the word toothandcoin to 33444. That's toothandcoin, no spaces, T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444, reply with your email address. We'll send you instructions in the Facebook group. We'll send you the resources when they're available and we will see you next week.
Two Sides of a Coin Podcast is back for episode 100 with the whole team. This week we get into discounts on the first date, Drake's latest album “Certified Lover Boy,” And how Donda compares to it and much more! Topics: Magical Dining on the 1st date CLB and Donda Tex's abortion law Quick Hits: Scott Disick's weird DM Police thrown off the trail Joe Rogan gets Covid-19 Peppa vs Kanye Thank you all for listening. If you're new to the podcast please subscribe or tell us what you think about the show. Find us on: website - twosidespodcast.com Instagram & Twitter - @twosidespodcast Facebook - facebook.com/twosidespodcast Youtube - twosidespodcast.com/youtube
Resource: How to Buy a Dental Practice Resource: Selling Your Dental PracticeFor More on Brian Hanks, visit: https://www.dentalbuyeradvocates.com/ and/or https://dentaltransitioncoaching.com/ Join the discussion on Facebook!TranscriptJonathan VanHorn:Welcome to the Tooth and Coin Podcast, where we talk about your adventure of being a dental practice owner. In these episodes, we're going to be talking about problems that you will likely face as a practice owner, as well as give an idea about actionable solutions that you can take so that you can get past this problem in your practice. Some of these concepts are really big ones, some of them are very specific, but we hope that these episodes help you along with your journey.Jonathan VanHorn:Now, a very important piece for you to understand is that this is not paid financial advice. This is not paid tax or legal advice. We are not your financial advisors, we are not your CPAs. This is two CPAs talking about informational and educational content to help you along with your journey. A very important piece for you to understand. Another thing that you need to know is if you enjoy today's content, join us on the Facebook group. We've got a Facebook group that is active with dentists that is going to have content talking about what we're talking about today, to continue the discussion. Agree with us, don't agree with us, have a story to tell, have something to share? Join us in the Facebook group. If you go to Facebook and you search for Tooth and Coin Podcast, click on it to join it, and be able to join us there.Jonathan VanHorn:Finally, if you need some more help, we're developing a list of resources that are going to be centering around our topics of discussion, to be able to help you a little bit more than what the content is doing. If you'd like access to that, whenever it becomes ready, all you have to do is text the word toothandcoin, T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444. Again, that's toothandcoin, all one word, no spaces, to 33444. Reply with your email address and we'll email you instructions on how to get into the Facebook group, as well add you to the list to be able to send you those resources when they're available. If they're available, we'll go ahead and send them to you as well. On to today's episode, hope you enjoy it.Jonathan VanHorn:Hello, ambitious dentists, today we're going to be talking about something that not a lot of you probably have considered in terms of a way to optimize your life and your business. I'm your host, Jonathan VanHorn, I've got Joseph Rugger with me as always and today we actually have a guest. We have Brian Hanks with us. Brian is a fantastic person inside the dental industry. I speak this whole heartedly. There's not a lot of the times that I connect with people inside of the industry, and you just know that they're doing things for the right reason, they're there to help. And Brian is one of those guys. He helps a lot of practice owners, or about to be practice owners, as well as people transitioning out of practices, make the right decisions in making that big life choice. Brian's really good at it. Brian, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.Brian Hanks:Thrilled to be here, thank you.Jonathan VanHorn:Awesome. Brian, like I said, I mentioned he is the person that helps people buy and sell practices and helps make those transitions be successful. The problem we're going to talk about today is how to maximize that value of the dental practice that you're going to be running and owning. People sometimes just come up one day and say like, "Hey, it's time to sell," and they don't do a whole lot of planning that goes around it. You plan around everything else. A lot of people will plan their meals for the week. They'll plan on where they're going to send their kids to school, they'll plan on so many things. When it comes to something that's a pretty big deal, selling your business, they don't really seem to plan a whole lot about it. Talk to us about this problem, and why it's a problem, Brian.Brian Hanks:There's a psychological block there and I can understand it. You've worked really hard to be a CPA and a financial advisor, and Joseph, all of these skills that you have. Think about a dentist, eight years at least of graduate school, probably a specialty, all the CE you've taken. The thought of selling a practice is a major mental hurdle. Hanging up the hand piece, how you introduce yourself at parties is, "Hi, I'm a dentist," that's your identity. To think about selling the business, which by the way, probably cost you at least hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe millions of dollars to buy, that's a big mental hurdle for a lot of people. People don't plan for it and there are a lot of misconceptions around that.Brian Hanks:Even if say you're the dentists in their late 30s and selling your practice, even close to your horizon, the principles that we're going to talk about in this episode are applicable to those folks too, because ultimately how you sell your practice has a lot to do with how you run your practice. If you run your practice effectively, you're going to be able to sell your practice a lot easier, a lot better, a lot higher prices, all of those things we're going to get into. But yeah, this is useful information for every dentist in every stage of their career regardless if they're selling their business in the next 12 months.Jonathan VanHorn:In terms of this type of a problem, if you're talking about a 20% difference in the value of a practice, you're talking about a house worth of difference. You're talking about a lot of money. It makes a big difference. Is that a reasonable number to be able to affect the value of a business? Can you make a business 20% more valuable?Brian Hanks:Absolutely, but it's not easy. It's simple, but not easy. Let's talk about some of the misconceptions around how selling the business works and the value piece of things for a second. I've got three points that I want to cover, Jonathan and Joseph.Brian Hanks:The first is you really do need to understand how valuations work. We're not going to give a valuation clinic here, but I want to give the listeners something to really hang their hat on beyond some of the simple calculations that are out there that are frankly, just wrong. The second point we're going to talk about is how to sell at the right time. We'll spend a little bit of time on that, and then thinking through your options on how to sell your business is really helpful. Not just who you sell to, but who you have help sell your practice can make a huge difference.Brian Hanks:Yeah, all of those things put together, I would say in a lot of cases can make an even bigger than 20%, 30%, 40% difference in the ultimate sales price of the practice. Then just for background, Jonathan, what I do in my business, I've done transitions, experts, helped buyers and sellers. I've literally written the books on buying and selling a dental practice. In fact, I'm so boring, I came from the accounting world, I titled the books, How to Buy a Dental Practice and Selling Your Dental Practice. I have no creativity, all I do is this stuff all day long. I've helped hundreds of dentists all around the country do this. I'm happy and thrilled to be here and share some of this advice. Should we talk a little bit about valuations?Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah, absolutely. The one that we always seem to get is, Brian, I and Joseph were talking about this, about someone that we had a shared conversation with. It was like 90% of the revenue was what the value was. That's all it is. So are you telling me that that is not an appropriate valuation technique? That's not how you valuate?Brian Hanks:I am telling you that. Yes, absolutely. So every comment on Dentaltown every comment in the Facebook forums that people are on, where they do the mental math. Okay. So my practice collects a million dollars. I heard the average is insert number, right? And there's always this wild 65, 75, 90. I don't know, I do know where they hear the numbers, and then they just apply that basic math to their own practice. By the way, every dentist, of course, lives in Lake Wobegon where everybody's above average. They're always a better driver than everybody, and more attractive than everybody. So everybody's practice of course is above average. So they're not thinking, "Well, the average dental practice sells for 75% of collections and mine's a little below average so maybe I should sell it for 70%."Brian Hanks:Every single dentist I talk to says, "Well, if the average is 75, then I want to be 80. Then I want to be 85." Yeah, it is the shorthand. It's useful. Maybe you sit down with Joseph and you have a financial planning discussion in your thirties and you say, "All right, if you're collecting a million dollars, let's put in a value of your business at 65% of collections." Okay, that's useful at that point in your career. But when it's actually time to sell your business, that is not how you value. That is not how evaluation experts, that is not how I value business. That's not how brokers value business. That's not how accountants valuate business and a lot more goes into it. So it is more than just a formula. Let me give you a couple things that are really important to know.Brian Hanks:The first is that values of businesses are generally built on three years' worth of data. Okay. So they're going to look backwards in time over the last three years, as a way to say, a buyer's going to say, "I don't know what I'm going to be able to do as the business owner, but the best predictor of my future performance is the past performance of this practice. And the past performance of this practice that we're going to use as the window of time to look at as the last three years." And most reputable valuators, whoever they may be, are going to actually weight those values. They're going to say, "All right, last year is times three, two years ago is times two, and three years ago was times one. We're going to add all those numbers up and we're going to divide by six to get an average revenue number at an average profit number," whatever the method is that we're looking at.Brian Hanks:They're going to look backwards in time over the last three years weighting the last year as the most important of those. Jonathan, that's really important because I know a lot of dentists who say, "Man, all right, 2020 sucked because of COVID." Or, "2019, I got sick for three, four months." But, "Man in 2018, I collected 1.1 million. That's my mental high watermark. That's what I'm going to go off of my evaluation. My business is a $1.1 million business." And the buyer standing here in 2021 saying, "That's great, good job in 2018, but I'm looking at the business today." So I think the first thing to realize is, it's a backwards look in time over the last three years. Does that make sense?Jonathan VanHorn:Yeah, it does. So obviously 2020 is a unique year. I tell, I've been on calls with some people and this once in a hundred year things sometimes makes the rules a little bit shaky in terms of what you're doing. Because let's think about the reason why we weigh, the reason you weigh the last year is because it's the most recent year and the most likely to repeat itself rather than that one three years ago, if revenue's declining, revenue is just not going to just automatically go back up. The reason you wait is because it's the most likely to reoccur because the most recent in time. However, it's not likely we're going to have another once in a hundred year pandemic this year.Joseph Rugger:We hope not. We all hope not.Jonathan VanHorn:I mean, assumably right. So, yeah. So how have you found that? What do you, how do you find that pandemic? Do you think that changes things?Brian Hanks:It can, but it hasn't in most cases. There are ways to account for a pandemic in evaluation methodology. And in shorthand, we could go into the nitty-gritty details if you really want to, but in shorthand, what most people are doing is they're looking at the practice in Q4 of 2020, Q1 2021. And they're looking at the average production on a monthly or quarterly basis. And they're saying, "Hey, are we back? Is the practice back to where it was pre pandemic?" And if the answer is yes, then for all intents and purposes, we're not ignoring the pandemic, but we are discounting and kind of taking that into account in the numbers. So sellers, in most cases, aren't being penalized, but in some cases, the answer is to the question of, "Is the practice back?" Is no, the practice is not back. The pandemic killed the business, not necessarily outright, but absolutely knocked 20, 30, 40% of collections, production, active patient base, whatever it is. Anyway, there's a lot of things that could have happened. And so in some cases, yeah, the pandemic did hit.Jonathan VanHorn:And we could go into a really defined theory of what a defined risk profile is associated with the public perception of what COVID is and the dental practice and what percentage of patients will be less likely to come back in. And you can get super, super, super granular in this type of analysis. I do typically say, when people are talking about buying businesses, the price should be indicative of the risk that you're taking on when you're buying this business. Our risk profile today looks very different than it did eight months ago, or 10 months ago, 12 months ago. 12 months ago, risk profiles were through the roof because nobody really knew what was going to happen. Right? So, you start with this weighting and where do you go from there? Do you just take 90% of that? And that's all you do?Brian Hanks:Yeah. So one methodology is to do that. Is to look at the comparable practice sales in a specific geography and apply a multiplier. And that is a legitimate way to look at a practice value. Now it's more than looking at nationwide averages or looking at my specialty average and things like that. So you do have to apply some logic, but yeah, you're looking at averages. It's kind of like selling a house. You're looking at comps in your neighborhood and using that as one of two major methods to value the business. And by the way, sellers tend to favor that model because it's easy, right? Sellers tend not to be the type of clients that are working with good dental CPAs, like Tooth and Coin, then they don't know their overhead. And so the only number they do know is their collections, right?Brian Hanks:And so that's the easiest way they can get to a value in their head, but I'll tell you the second way that most people, that most reputable valuators value businesses is they actually look at the profit, right? How much take home pay is the owner of the business keeping after paying the normal and typical expenses of a dental practice? Staff, rents, supplies, labs, et cetera, and so forth. And by the way, that number profit is different than what goes on my 1120S or my tax return. Profit is not including things like depreciation and interest and the owner's compensation and those things, right? Profit is literally how much does the owner benefit from the business. Now, buyers. Buyers care a lot more about that number, right? We could have two practices collecting a million dollars, one with typical overhead of somewhere around 600,000 meaning the owners keeping 400. Or you could have one with high overhead where the overheads 800,000, the owners only keeping 200,000.Brian Hanks:Well, which one is the buyer going to like more? They're both billion dollar practices. And a lot of sellers are going to think in their head that those businesses could be valued very similarly. But from the buyer's perspective, they're looking at these two, they're going, one's going to put 400 in my pocket. The other's going to put 200 in my pocket. I'd like the 400 one please. Right? And so without going into the details, and it is similarly weighted, it's looked over the last three years, but the profit methodology is the second way that you value most businesses. And it's the way that buyers care a lot about. Can I add one just side note to this that comes up a lot when I'm talking to sellers? Equipment purchases, almost never, ever, I'm going to pause here for effect, never. Factor into evaluations. I say almost because there can be some asterisks type scenarios, but I just hear a lot of sellers say, all right, Brian, 75% the last year plus hey, three years ago I bought a 3D panel and it costs me a $100,000. And I really want to add that in to my-" I'm going, geez. Sorry, sorry, doc. Good for you. I'm glad you bought that equipment, way to keep up. That's just, outside of a few specialty situations, you buying equipment for your business to keep it up and keep it going and keep it current isn't going to affect the value of your business outside of a few special cases.Jonathan VanHorn:It's kind of helps be a selling point for someone looking at different practices like, oh, this one's got the nice equipment. So maybe I should, that one would be a better one for you to buy. I wouldn't have to do as much upkeep of yeah. We've seen that a lot or like yeah. It wants me to take over the loan payments or he still owes $80,000 for this. He wants to increase the value by 80,000.Brian Hanks:Yeah. I want to sell my house and I want to live rent free in the basement too. And I'd love for this, the buyers to make me breakfast every morning. It's just not realistic. Right?Brian Hanks:Yeah, exactly. So cool. So, you're going to get an understanding of how a practice is valued. If it was your choice of those two methods, which one would you be more likely to be utilizing in terms of what the actual value of a practice is?Brian Hanks:Profit, all the way. Although most valuations, final evaluations, will do a mix of the two. Okay. So it's not an either/or. You're going to look at both and you're going to weight 50/50 on the two methodologies. You might do 60, 40, something like that. But if I'm buying the business, I'm going to look more at the profit. And by the way, the banks who are lending the money for the buyer to be able to afford to buy your practice, they're looking at cashflow, which is just another way to say profit. So the banks are looking at the profit methodology too. So of the two that's the far better way to look at value in business. Which is, by the way, you're a professional podcaster, that's an excellent segue into the second point of settling at the right time. Can I talk a little bit about that?Jonathan VanHorn:That's where I was going with it. Yeah, I was moving into, what is it, if you have an understanding of the value now, then what is it that you. How do know when to sell? Cause I actually had a conversation at lunch with someone and they were another service-based business person. And I was like, if someone said to you today you can sell your business for two times what you make in a year. Like it'd be kind of hard to do it cause you'd just work for two more years. But so how do you time this? Like how do you figure out when it's going to be? Because it could be two years, four years, five years of earnings that you're basically signing this business for. Actually take taxes out and maybe it's back down to two or three, whatever it may be. So like how do you figure out this timing element of it?Brian Hanks:So the timing has to be a life decision that you make with advisors. Okay. If it is solely based on money, I'll give you the formula on how to maximize the value based on just numbers. But I got to say, that a precursor to discussion around anything numbers based has to be qualitative decisions. Like are you ready? Do you have something to retire to? Are you not? Are you just financially ready? But are you psychologically ready? You're logistically ready. All of those things. But let's assume those for a minute. By the way, that's a major assumption that someone is qualitatively ready. If that is a check mark in your ledger, the right time to sell your business is going to be, if you want to maximize the value of your business, it's going to be to think about a few things first.Brian Hanks:You can't take your foot off the gas in the practice in either the revenue or the expenses. So collections by the way, kiss of death. Okay. If you are a bank underwriter who looks at nothing but dental practice, PNLs, and tax returns all day long. For a living, you look at the financial results of dental practices, bank underwriters, and then to decide whether or not to give buyers money to buy your business. The very first thing that bank underwriter looks at is the collections trend. Are collections going up or collections going down? Now, if you're the typical seller, right? You've had that conversation with Jonathan, you're thinking, all right, Joseph tell me if I'm ready to retire? And Joseph says you're close, but you got to wait. And so mentally that dentist is thinking, man, I'm close, sweet.Brian Hanks:Instead of four weeks of vacation this year, it's going to be six. Then it's going to be eight and it's going to be 12 the year after. And you see a corresponding dip in the collections, very reasonable, right? A very understandable dip in collections. But when we talked about how you value a business, we're looking at the last three years and the last year is the one that's the most important. And so that practice with the declining collections now looks a lot riskier on paper and the seller is having that mental head space issue where they're saying, "yeah, but three years ago it collected 1.1. And then I know last year was only 800, but really it's a 1.1 business. Right?" And so it's just hard to get to that psychology piece. So if you can keep your foot on the gas and keep collections at least steady, if you can keep collections rising two, three, five percent, whatever that number is? You just maximize the value of your business. Almost guaranteed.Brian Hanks:We'll talk about profit here in just a second. The rising collections is a sign that a business owner is engaged. It's a sign that everything else in the practice is probably working correctly. So let's talk about profit a little bit. Same deal. And it's just the corollary to collections. If the overhead is rising, that's tough. Here's what happens with a lot of sellers. I get in a conversation. I'm like, hey tell me about [inaudible 00:22:08] your overhead is 67%. The average practice overhead is something like 60 to 61% what's going on? Oh, well, Brian it actually was 61%, two years ago, but my hygienists al ask for raises. We had to add the health insurance. There are all these things and I just, it wasn't worth it to me to say no.Brian Hanks:So I just said yes to everything. And I haven't been really fighting the equipment rep and the supply rep on bills like I should and pricing things out. And that overhead has crept up. Right? And so it's the same situation as collections. Their foot has to come off the gas on the business operation side. They haven't been watching the expenses. So having somebody good that's a great dental CPA, great dental financial advisor to kind of keep your feet to the fire in that area is going to be really valuable to help you maximize the value of business.Joseph Rugger:How often do you find that? How often you find that the sellers are really, really tracking that stuff, or are they taking the mental vacation as they're starting to check out?Brian Hanks:Less than 10% of the owners I see are tracking that in any kind of way, shape, or form. 90% don't have any idea.Jonathan VanHorn:Definitely. And the another piece of that is if you're not doing that, there are times when you need to sell your practice and you weren't thinking of those things. This kind of comes up. Like maybe you have a family illness or you have something happening to you personally from a health perspective. And if you haven't been doing this, then all of a sudden you've just cost yourself all this money. Let's use a broad assumption that we're talking about a practice that could sell for a million dollars if everything was highly finely tuned. Whereas if you were just kind of resting by your laurels, it could be, you might be costing yourself a couple hundred grand, right? The profitability of your business is more than just your lifestyle.Jonathan VanHorn:Sometimes it's also going to be your exit ticket. So why would you not be taking care of that? So let's assume that someone's made the decision that they're going to try and sell the business at some point in the near future. What is the near future for you in terms of making this decision and you mentioned keeping your foot on the gas pedal in terms of revenue and making sure your expenses don't get out of control. Because, like I said, you see it all the time where you talk to the dentist, they're like, yeah, revenue was 900,000, then it was 800,000, then it was 750 and then it was 700 and now 650. But he just says this because he only works three days a week now. There's a reason that he does that. Would that person have been better off just selling it back whenever it was 900? Or what is the best answer for those types of things, in terms of time?Brian Hanks:I don't think there is one. So mathematically, that seller that's now at 650 where they used to be a 900? Okay. Yeah. Could they have sold their practice back in 900 and gotten a higher multiple and sold for a higher sticker price? Yes. But they've made money those three, four years they kind of hung on and, and it maybe increased the quality of their life as a business owner. So I'm not going to say that there is a right time, because as you guys know, the real money in dentistry isn't made buying and selling dental practices. These aren't stocks and bonds, right? The real money in dentistry is the income from the ownership. That income stream, year in, year out. So if your goal is to go play golf someday with a bunch of other dentists and show that you got the biggest multiple on your dental practice? Well then yeah, make sure you sell at peak collections, peak profitability.Brian Hanks:But if your goal is to make as much money as possible, it might be a different time. Just realize that there is a cost to that. And the cost comes in both the multiple that you get for your business and the type of buyer that's actually going to be interested. and how easy it is to find that buyer and, and how easy it is to transfer that business. You might have to carry part of the note because the bank isn't looking at you as risk-free as they might have otherwise. So just realize that there are some potential costs that can be mitigated with how you sell your business.Brian Hanks:So let's talk a little bit about that. Cause there are some options, right? And a lot of dentists. So let's talk through kind of, there's a two-prong decision here. So they say a seller, an owner of a business, dental business is thinking, all right, I think I might want to sell my business. They have to make two decisions. The first these days is DSO or private buyer. Okay. And I'm just going to just, well, let's hit this quickly because there are a lot of misconceptions we could have. I'm sure several episodes on DSOs versus selling to a private buyer. But let me just say mathematically, it is not as simple as I can sell to a private buyer for 75% of collections. And I can sell to a DSO for a hundred percent of collections. It's not that simple. There are handcuffs that come with DSO offers. You're not going to have control over your career. You may not get the payout. You're going to have to hit massive production targets in your last two years of ownership when, by the way, you don't own the business anymore. So it's not as simple.Brian Hanks:And I have a bias towards the private buyers and owners cause I like private dentistry, but DSOs could be right for someone. So let's assume that decision is made. The next decision the dentist has to make is, okay, am I going to use someone to help me sell my business? Or am I going to try to do it myself? And that tends to be the decision point. And there's a mistake here. So dentists are making a common mistake thinking there are only two options. In their mind, there are two options: broker, who's going to take 10% or sell it myself. And I'm here to tell you that there is a growing third option, okay? And by the way, not every broker's still charging 10%. So keep that in mind. There's a growing third option. I call them in my book, Selling Your Dental Practice, I call them seller's coaches, but they go by different titles and they're nationwide firms that help with dental transitions on a nationwide basis instead of being a very geographic centered kind of broker for your area. I'm the broker for Georgia. I'm the broker for Washington state, right? So seller's coaches are doing dental transitions. They're doing as much, if not more value in a lot of cases, than brokers at a significant discount to the typical broker's fee. It comes at a little bit of cost, right? They don't know your individual streets and some of the geography as well as a local broker might. They can't physically walk buyers through the practice like a local broker might be able to do. But aside from those two things, in this day and age, here we are in 2021, a lot of life is on Zoom, right?Brian Hanks:A lot of life is pictures and all of those things. That sellers coach option at a lower price point is becoming a lot more attractive. And those seller coaches, they have to step up their game, right? They have to have amazing listing documents. They have to be really good at finding buyers. All things that they tend to be better at than brokers. And so anyway, so I just want to make people aware that selling it yourself, by the way, could be an option with an attorney, of course, like always pick an attorney. And a broker is a great option too, if that's the way you want to go, but there's a third option for folks. So don't assume it's just between buyer, like a DSO is going to get you more money. And then don't assume that your choice is a 10% fee or muddle through this myself. That's not necessarily true.Jonathan VanHorn:Great options. And I completely agree. There's a lot of middle ground cause you'll get the people that will call us and a lot of people, they never bought a business before and they're like, I need someone who's going to do complete due diligence, top to bottom, on this dental practice acquisition. And I don't think you know what those words mean whenever you're saying them to me, cause in our world and the CPA world, due diligence on immersion and acquisition means something way different than what you're talking about in terms of buying of this business. Like I'm not going to go look at the seller's bank accounts and look at their transactions coming in and out and then trace them back to the insurance plan or anything like that.Jonathan VanHorn:That's not what we do. So I completely understand. There's middle grounds. Like what is it that you actually need in this type of a transaction, right? Like what is it you actually need? So completely get that. So cool. So we have covered a general understanding of how valuations work in this world. We've talked about the timing of getting these things in line. We talked about the different options you have when you try to sell your business. So what, in addition to the things, we could probably talk about any one of those three subjects for at least an hour a piece, but we try and keep the episodes shorter in nature so that we can get the high impact things in. And we've talked about how to affect your selling price by a hundred, $200,000 and that if you can keep the revenue growing, keep the expenses going down, your profit will get larger, your collections will get larger.Jonathan VanHorn:And if you think about it in terms of if your profit level is, if you're looking for two times your profit in a year or three times your profit in the year, for every penny that you save, or every dollar that you save, it's going to be $2 or $3 more, you'll get your sell price. So there's a lot of really important numbers of things that we talked about in today's episode. So anything else that we didn't talk about that you think would be an important point for us to end on?Brian Hanks:If you're a buyer, a great resource and I'm going to plug my books, is just How to Buy a Dental Practice. You can buy it on Amazon, or if you go to dentalbuyeradvocates.com/book, I'll set you an author copy at just the cost of printing and shipping. Same deal if you're a seller. Selling Your Dental Practice is the title. It's available on Amazon in all the formats. And you can go to dentaltransitioncoaching.com/book. And I think we're going to put those in the show notes for folks.Jonathan VanHorn:Absolutely. So Brian, we appreciate your time. Appreciate you being a friend of Tooth and Coin, and the podcast, and we look forward to working with you in the future.Joseph Rugger:Thanks, Brian.Brian Hanks:Thanks.Jonathan VanHorn:That's it for today, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Tooth and Coin podcast. If you are going to be a practice owner or a new practice owner, and you're interested in CPA services, head on over to toothandcoin.com. Where can check out more about our CPA services. We help out around 250 offices around the country. Would love to be able to have the discussion about how we could help your new practice. We do specialize in new practice owners. So people that are about to be an owner of a practice they're acquiring, about to be an owner of a practice they are starting up, or has become an owner in the past five years.Jonathan VanHorn:That is our specialty. And we'd love to be able to talk to you about how we could help you in your services with your tax and accounting services. Oh, and if you enjoyed today's episode again, go to the Facebook group. Talk to us about what we've talked about, join in on the discussion and let's create an environment where we can talk about some of these things so that we can all help each other get through these things together so that this adventure of business ownership is more fun, more productive, and better in the longterm. Lastly, if you want access to those resources that we are currently building, just text them word tooth and coin 233444. That's tooth and coin, no spaces. T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444. Reply with your email address. We'll send you instructions in the Facebook group. We'll send you the resources when they're available and we will see you next week.
Join the discussion on Facebook!TranscriptJonathan:Hey guys. This is the third episode in the series. If you've not listened to the first two episodes, make sure you go back in time to check those out first. It should be in the title of the episode which part in the series it is, so make sure you go back and check those out so that you have a full understanding of what it is we're talking about today. I just want to jump in here real quick and let you know that. We'll see you next time.Jonathan:Welcome to the Tooth and Coin Podcast, where we talk about your adventure of being a dental practice owner. In these episodes, we're going to be talking about problems that you will likely face as a practice owner, as well as give an idea about actionable solutions that you can take so that you can get past this problem in your practice. Some of these concepts are really big ones, some of them are very specific, but we hope that these episodes help you along with your journey. Now, a very important piece for you to understand is that this is not paid financial advice, this is not paid tax or legal advice. We are not your financial advisors. We are not your CPAs. This is two CPAs talking about informational and educational content to help you along with your journey. It's a very important piece for you to understand.Jonathan:Another thing that you need to know is if you enjoy today's content, join us on the Facebook group. We've got a Facebook group that is active with dentists that is going to have content talking about what we're talking about today. To continue the discussion, agree with us, don't agree with us, have a story to tell, have something to share, join us in the Facebook group. If you go to Facebook and you search for Tooth and Coin Podcast, click on it to join it and be able to join us there. Finally, if you need some more help, we're developing a list of resources that are going to be centering it around our topics of discussion to be able to help you a little bit more than what the content is doing.Jonathan:So if you'd like access to that, whenever it becomes ready, all you have to do is text the word tooth and coin, T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N, to 33444. Again, that's tooth and coin, all one word, no spaces, to 33444. Reply with your email address and we'll email you instructions on how to get into a Facebook group, as well as add you to lists to be able to send you those resources when they're available. And if they're available, we'll go ahead and send them to you, as well. On to today's episode. I hope you enjoy it.Jonathan:So we give that number to our clients every month. Here's what your breakeven point is so that they can have the context of, Well, I want to make $30,000, my break even point is $45,000. I've got to be producing $75,000, right now my average is $55,000. I got a lot of work to do. They know they got to influence it. They're not going to be surprised when they don't have $30,000 at the end of the month. They're going to know what that is. So, what about you in terms of breakeven point, things like that, what are some of the things that you like to use a breakeven point in order to be able to use in terms of management and goal setting and things that.Joseph:So I think it's probably important that we talk about the things that go into that break even point. It is a few additions to the calculator and a subtraction. When we look at a break even point, what was all of the costs involved from your P and L for the month? What was your total cost to operate? Then we're going to add back those owner's discretionary expenses, like the owner's wages. We're going to add that back. We're going to add back depreciation and amortization because those are paper entries that go on. And then we're also going to subtract out and say how much were your principal payments on your debt to get to your break even point. Those breakeven points, I find that to be most useful in determining how much cash you need to keep in practice.Jonathan:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Joseph:If I'm looking at a client that has a breakeven point of a $100,000 and they have $700,000 in their business checking account, I'd say you've probably got a little bit too much cash in your practice, it's not working for you. What you do with that cash, there's a lot of things, call your financial advisor and talk to them about that. But, if we've got a client that has a $100,000 breakeven point and their cash in the bank is $50,000, it's Look, we probably should slow down this owner's withdrawals. We probably should slow down all these different things. We need to get the cash to a point where you can sleep well at night, that you've got the liquidity to be able to operate.Joseph:And when we look at that ratio, your breakeven point to the cash in the bank, again, it's very similar to what we were talking about with the balance sheet and looking at their current assets divided by current liabilities. It's not the same exact number, but it's the same concept, how many weeks worth of cash that you have to operate. So if the spicket of income gets turned off today, how long can you operate? Can you operate for a month?Jonathan:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Jonathan:Can you operate for a week? Can you operate for six months, eight months, 10 months, 12 months? So those are the things that I like to talk to practice owners about. And we get the question all the time, how much cash do we keep in the practice checking account? And a lot of that has to do with the comfort level of the practice owner.Jonathan:There are some practice owners that want to empty the checking account out every month and take all that money home. There's some practice owners that say, Hey, I really want to make sure that I keep a $100,000 or $150,000 or $50,000. That number is different, that level of cash and comfort is different for everybody. The thing that I like about the breakeven point is it takes the emotion out of it and it just says, Here's how much it costs to operate your practice, period.Jonathan:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Joseph:Now we can figure out what you want to keep cash wise on hand with that.Jonathan:Completely agree. Honestly, I think that's probably one of the biggest comfort levels you can get as a business owner is to reach that cash goal. Because once you've hit that point, at that point, you can just optimize because and really work towards those goals. I really like using the breakeven point as a goal standard, too. Let's say that I have a personal income goal of $40,000 a month. We'll our average breakeven point is $50,000 a month. Again, we give our break even point to our clients each month. We also give a rolling quarterly average as well as we give a year to date average so that people can understand really kind of how's that breakeven point trending, where's my average, like what is the number that it looks like, so you can have a bit of normalization to that number as well.Jonathan:You have a little bit of a, of a plus or minus on there. Let's say a $50,000 breakeven point's the number that you've been averaging, a fairly consistent number, because obviously things go come up and down. Things will happen that create one time expenses. But, knowing that breakeven point by heart, knowing it's $50,000, if I want to make $40,000, then I know I got to be at $90,000 a month in collections. I know that has to happen. And if I know that we're going to be open 18 days out of the month, the quick math is `that's $5,000 a day.Jonathan:Let's see, $9,000 divided 18, $5,000 a day, yes. My almost a minor in math still works. So, $5,000 a day is what you got to get to in order to be able to hit $9,000 in collections. And all of a sudden, a number quantitative number that we can use in terms of the inside of the practice to quantify what it is we need to be bringing in. And we were to be able to set some type of a standard. If I know right now we're averaging $4,200 a day, I know that number has to change. I have to get an extra a hundred dollars a day in there. If I have that $5,000 a day number in my head, what I would tell people to do is break it into two segments. Break that into hygiene and break the into doctor production collection.Jonathan:Hygiene is usually a little bit easier for people to calculate on because it seems to be pretty standard. Over time, there's a normalization of hygiene revenue it seems like because there's just not a whole lot of extra services that get added into hygiene. You have a prophy and you have x-rays and you have, fluoride, maybe you have some perio treatment or something like that, if your practice is doing that. And, but overall, that revenue is fairly consistent from a hygiene perspective. So, let's say that you got two people there everyday doing hygiene, and you know that your hygiene's going to be somewhere around $1,800 a day in collections coming from your hygiene department. Every practice is going to be a little bit different, but what they do or don't do it in this terms of those numbers.Jonathan:So that gives you $1,800 a day, $900 a hygienist, goal. And it gives you a $3,200 doctor production in a day. And so that allows you to then say, Okay, if my goal is $3,200 in a day, what does that look like in terms of what I am commonly doing in terms of production? Is that two crowns a day, plus some exams and plus other things? What is that number, to you, as a dentist, as a practice? And there's that one new ortho case a day? What is that number? And that gives you a lot of power to set some type of a goal. And once you have those goals set, you can then bring your team in. And again, this is the reason to circle back to the part about having good staff is you want to have a team to be able to help you reach those different production roles.Jonathan:And that's where you start the training, you can start working on those different things. And I think it's a good starting point for allowing you to be able to come up with what you need to do in terms of what the production does. And again, that's just one use of the breakeven point. If I was a business owner, I would always know my breakeven point. Well, I say that, I am a business owner, I do know my breakeven point.Jonathan:But, for all my clients, I urge you to understand your breakeven point because there's a lot of power in that number from in a bunch of different aspects. I wish the breakeven point was just a standard financial statement number. But even though it's really important, to me, it's probably the most powerful number that you get from your financial statements, just not on your financial statement. It's not there. You have to calculate, you have to know what you're looking for in order to be able to look for it. So, to me, the breakeven points of like a magic number almost that everyone should know. So, that's the breaking point. Is there anything else on the P and L that you want to talk about because that went pretty in-depth on the P and L.Joseph:I like to look for trends, I like to see if things look out of whack, I like to look at measures of our percentages over time. I think that those are going to help tell the story as your practice grows or as your practice shrinks. It may be one of those things that you grew too fast, you have too much stuff going on, too much expenses, you hired a couple of associates and you're Man, I need to go back to just being a single practice owner. Those percentages will help you understand kind of what the story is and evens things out over time. So, those are the big things that I'm looking at, for sure.Jonathan:Yeah, same here. So let's move on to the last one. And Joseph and I talked about this financial statement before the call, and I said, You'd probably be surprised by my answer or this one. The last one was the statement of cash flow. And in terms of the statement of cashflow, what is it that you're looking for when you're analyzing the statement of cashflow?Joseph:So, the beginning number of the statement of cash flows is what was your cash in the bank, minus your credit cards, at the beginning of the month. The bottom number on the cash flows is what is that number at the end of the month? The statement of cash flows tells you how you got from your beginning balance to your ending balance. So, there are a couple of different things that go into how we got from A to B. The simplest, easiest way, and I'm not going to use the accounting technical term is number one is what was the profit? What was the net profit of business? And then we're going to add back non-cash expenses, depreciation, amortization, add those things back. And then we're going to subtract out, did we buy any assets this month, cash assets?Joseph:And then we're going to also subtract out and we're going to say, How much did we pay in principal payments our debt? So,, how do we get in cash in the bank from X to Y? So when I'm looking at the statement of cash flows...Also, how much did we take out owner's distributions? That's another pretty key component. When I'm looking at the statement of cash flows, first thing I'm looking for is Did the cash go up or down over the period? And then the next question is Why? As I'm looking at that, and then I also look at that ending cash balance and I'm looking at that breakeven point and seeing whether or not we're in good shape or not. If the ending cash balance is still seven times your breakeven point, it doesn't matter that cash went down $10,000, $5,000, whatever it is.Joseph:That's not a statement of alarm. I also am looking at the cashflow statement because we have a lot of owners that are saying, Hey, look, I'm not paying myself a salary. I'm a schedule C filer. How much can I afford to pay myself? And that's one of the first places that I go and kind of direct them at is to say, Well, let's look at your cashflow statement. Let's see how much cash was produced in the practice last month versus how much came out, let's look at that. I like to look at whether the cash increased or decreased and why and then I try to figure out how much was taken out in owner's distributions and was it enough or too much or that kind of thing in order to figure out where the cash balance is compared to the breakeven point.Joseph:So, those are some of the things that I'm looking for. If cash went down by $10,000, but that's because we paid off our line of credit, that's not a bad thing. If cash went up a $100,000 and it's because we took out a 50% interest, hard lender that's a bad thing. So, how did we get from cash in the bank at the beginning to the end and what makes up all of those different pieces? Obviously, loans are a big part of practice ownership, but if you're taking out a loan in that kind of a way where you're just desperate for cash and you've got to take it out at a really, really high interest rate, that's not something to celebrate because your cash went up because you took out a cash advance on your credit card.Joseph:That's not a good thing. So, cash at the beginning, cash at the end. And then how do we get there? What are those kind of bigger key components? Hopefully you run a net profit for the month, hopefully you took out some sort of an owner's distribution. You probably had some sort of a payment on your line of credit and you may or may not have bought a new asset inside the practice. So, those are like the high level things that I'm looking at. And just to make sure that it makes sense over time. And then comparing that to back to your breakeven point and why it's so important, comparing that back to your breakeven point and seeing what the cash looks like. How about for you? What are you looking for in a statement of cash flows?Jonathan:The first thing that I look at statement of cash flows again, if it's internally prepared by our firm, then I'm actually looking at it. If it's externally prepared, I usually just throw it in the trash because I know it's probably not going to be prepared well. Statement of cash flows is one of the most complicated financial statements to create, for some reason. I think that the reason is because most bookkeepers and most CPAs do not have any need for a statement of cashflow whatsoever, ever, when they're preparing a tax return. You do not need one for a tax return, at all. And so I think that most people just ignore it, they basically just hit the print button on their financial statements and statement of cashflow pops out and they give it to the people and they get along with it.Jonathan:I think that's what the standard is for most statement of cash flows. If it's internally prepared, I know it will be done well, I know that with the software that we use, the way we have it set up, it's going to give us what we need. If I'm looking at a statement of cashflow, like you said, the way the statement of cashflow is set up is a three prong approach as grouped beginning balance, plus or minus operating expenses plus or minus investing activities, plus or minus financing activities and the end is what your cash balance is going to be and there's going to be a delta between the beginning and the end to see where that money went to. If you don't normalize that, that number is going to be worthless, it's not going to make any difference at all, because you may as well have just looked at your bank statement because your bank statement has at the beginning of the month, how much cash is in there, has the deposits, has the expense, and it has an ending balance. Bank statement says the same exact thing. But in the statement of cashflow, it groups things into logical ways to be able to tell what's going on. Yes, the times when I would look at the statement of cashflow, or whenever I'm looking at a year end analysis to say... If I have client saying What happened to my cash? Statement of cashflow is where you typically tell them where the cash went to. You do a rolling number of showing them, Okay, well, beginning of the year you had this much cash you got this much in loans, you pay this much loans back, you took it out this much in extra whatever, and distributions, here's what you paid yourself and here's where your cash went to and that's the rolling number.Jonathan:That's the standard for small CPA firms or when you have small business clients, you have to do that almost every year for most clients, whenever you're a small CPA firm. For us, we don't do that because we do that every month. We do it in a customized way to show people three things. Number one is cash profit. Number two is what your cash profit versus your tax profit is. So, your cash profit is not what ends up on your statement of cash flow but we use that number to help us calculate what the cash profit is. We have to do those add backs, just like we did with the normalization of the income statement. And by the way, this is probably episode 12 now for the time of the cashflow. You have to normalize that to be able to say what happened to your money.Jonathan:I skipped over the third one which is what is your tax profit versus your cash profit? Because those two numbers are very different. And people get those really confused. We talked about on the financial statements, what's at the bottom doesn't make a whole lot of difference because it could be that the owner paid themselves something or another. Cash profits, the same thing. Your cash profit is not going to be anywhere on your financial statements, you got to calculate it in order for it to be reality. And you've got to normalize that cash profit. You find out what your cash profit is so you know how your business is doing, your tax profits really just there so you can kind of understand how much you've made from the IRS's eyes. So you kind of have an idea of what we will be paying taxes on at the end of the year.Jonathan:That's really the only use for the tax profit number. So, we use the cash profit for that purpose, which is derived from a bunch of different metrics inside of the statement of cashflow. We do utilize it because we also have things like the financing activities is the paying of the debt down and things like that. And they always get, even I get them confused. I don't remember the rules because the software does it for us all the time now. I think technically when you take out debt, it's an investing activity, but to repay it back to financing activity or something like that. Or maybe it's the assets go into the investing and then... It gets real complicated, real fast.Jonathan:There's a real reason why we don't look at it again because we never use it. The only time I'll ever use it is when I'm helping someone to understand what happened to their cash. And then you go in and if it's a well done set of financials, those numbers will roll the right way. If there's a bunch of journal entries done to dodo accounting every month, which is what a lot of firms do, the cashflow statement will not work because the journal entries will not be reflected appropriately inside of the table cashflow almost ever. So to answer the question again, the three things I look at is what is the actual cash profit and then what is the delta of cash? And then what does that versus tax profit?Jonathan:Those are the things that I look at a statement. They're not technically on the statement of cashflow, but that's what I look for when I'm using a statement of cashflow, in the grand picture of things. I think I had a client asked me, actually asked me this one time of, What's the standard that should be going into my investing activities inside of the statement of cashflow? Because they were really studious and they heard about statement of cashflow and they'd read some type of book that had said that there was a really important number that nobody talks about or whatever it is. There is no standard for that. In a small service-based business, it's very much what you're doing, not versus what other people are doing.Jonathan:And the ways and means that you get to those things, that isn't something you can normalize. I've used the term normalized too many times. It's not something that you can aggregate and then make an average of and have it be a meaningful number for anyone, I don't believe. Because there's so many different variables that go into it in such as what type of practice it is, what type of patients you have, how old is your practice, what's your production capabilities as a dentist. There's just so many different things that go into that, that it's a fool's errand to try and figure out is my investing activities, I'm assuming cashflow, optimal comparatively to the other practices that are out there, does doesn't exist. And help us, please, if there is a study out there that says that there's some averages that you should be looking at in dental practices, because I can only imagine what type of data they have. That, to me, is the statement of cashflow. So is there anything else that you wanted to add for that topic?Joseph:Back to that question that I got when I sat down and interviewed for a finance job. The guys told me his favorite financial statement was the cashflow statement and he was a private equity investor, so basically he wanted to know how much cash he could skim out of the business... Not skim out of the business, but he could strip out of the business -Jonathan:Sure.Joseph:In owner's distributions every single month. So, the cashflow statement told him everything he needed to know. Did they make a profit or not, add back depreciation, amortization? What were the loan paybacks? And then that's the cash I can then take out because that was the net change in cash over the point in time. I always struggled with cashflow statement whenever I was coming up through the ranks in CPA land and in accounting land. Balance sheet income statement always made the most sense, but I always got confused. You're talking about this financing versus investing. At the end of the day, the cashflow statement is trying to tell you, where does your cash go?Jonathan:Mm-hmm (affirmative).Joseph:Did it go up or down and why.Jonathan:Yep.Joseph:That's what you need to glean off your financial statement of cash flows.Jonathan:Yep, absolutely. And it's there, you just got to know how to read it. And that's another reason why tell dentists to not spend them a lot of time on that because context is so important. And if you don't fully understand the full set of financials in your industry specifically, you really just can't read a book to tell you how to read a statement of cashflow. It's not going to bear fruit. So to me, hopefully you got good advice and people are painting a picture for you rather than you having to know all the ins and outs of the different elements of financial analysis to be able to divine how these numbers are doing. Those are the financial statements.Jonathan:WE've touched over things, believe it or not. Even though we've talked a lot about the financial statements, we've just touched over the things. There's a lot more nuance that goes into the creation of these things. And, it's almost an art, in a way, of the start to finish creation of them and setting them up in a way in which can be analyzed appropriately. And that was something that I struggled with really heavily on when we started our firm was I wanted to teach everyone how to read their financials. That was my goal in life because I was Man, I want to teach them how to be... they're going to, they're going to be putting people at Goldman Sachs to shame because they're going to be able to know how to read the financials.Jonathan:And I quickly realized that there's no reason to do that. Just tell them what they need, show them what they need. And so what we do in our firm is we definitely take those financials and we paint a tapestry of the important numbers. A good set of financials can be six to seven pages along of data per period. And if you do that over a course of a year, you got a hundred some odd pages of data. What we do for our clients every month is we set up all that information by a single page report that lets people understand really well The answer to four questions, which is how profitable are we? How well did we spend our money? How much cash should we make? And where did that cash go to?Jonathan:But that's our goals with our financial analysis to give to our clients every month. And then we help people, if they don't understand what the numbers say, we teach them, we tell them how to read it and show them what happens. And then if they have any questions about the results, they ask us and we can give them our input from viewing that over 250 times a month. That's the way that we've approached this challenge and approached the problem of that there's not a whole lot of education out there about what are on the financial statements. And I'll be honest. I don't really think that there's, I don't know... I'm torn on this one at this point because my thinking has evolved so much over the past 10 years. Would you spend time if you a dentist going and taking a course, a three hour college course about how to analyze financial statements?Joseph:I wouldn't. I don't think it'd be a good use of your time. I think that if you've got a good CPA or a good accountant that can help you understand your financial statements then you can see what's going on month to month and tell you everything you need to know. I think a three hour course... Because it's not going to be relevant. The same metrics that they're going to teach in that they're going to talk about some of these higher level concepts, like the debt to income ratio or the assets to liabilities, or the current ratio. They're going to talk about a couple of those things. They're not going to say, Here's what your supplies and labs need to be each month. They're going to say, Well, this is a typical in your industry how much your overhead should be. If we're a construction business, we've got more going on materials than you do in a dental, right?Jonathan:And then there's also the different the cost to completion method or, what's the other one? There's another construction one. I can't remember it off the top of my head.Joseph:I mean, if you really want to learn this at a high level, go figure out your favorite publicly traded corporation, go figure out when their earnings call is, look at their financial statements and listen to the executives talk about what's going on inside of those businesses. I think that would be a lot better use of your time. If you really love Apple computers, figure out when Apple's earnings call is and go sit on their earnings call or listen to a replay of it and have them walk you through their financial statements. You get a lot more out of that because it's a business that you know and understand. Or any of these publicly traded companies that are in the dental space. They'll talk to you about what's going on in the industry. Those would be a lot better use of your time than taking a college class.Jonathan:I agree. And the other thing that's really important, closing thoughts, is that the financial statements, they tell you what happened from a financial perspective, they don't tell you everything about your business. Like I told you at the beginning of the conversation that there's people out there that thinks that the financials have everything in there and they don't. Like I said, they don't show you a measure of capacity. They don't show you new patient inflows. They don't show you your production per day. They don't show you your open chair time. They don't show you how many patients are coming in, being rescheduled for your hygiene every month or every day. Those are important numbers to know if you're a practice owner, but they're not on your financials. And no amount of financial analysis is going to give you any of those numbers unless you bridge the gap between practice management and financial numbers.Jonathan:And what we tell people is that we are CPAs. And I know there's a lot of blurring of the lines of what CPAs do and don't do, but for us, we're CPAs. We handle financial analysis and we help you with financial analysis. Practice management analysis should be done by practice management consultants. We are not practice management consultants. I know that there's a lot of blurring of the lines in the dental industry for what is a practice management consultant or not. And, yeah, we know a lot about the numbers, but I don't know your hygienist, I don't know your office manager. I don't know your management style. I don't know what type of patients you have every day. I don't know how you like to turn patients over. I don't know how you like to have your tools set up and how efficient that makes your assistant.Jonathan:I'm not going to tell you how to do those things. I've never been a dentist before. I can tell you how to be a leader and things like that, but I'm not going to be able to give you that practice management information. And so to me, in terms of the best financial advice I can give someone is to pay a practice management consultant for that time that you're spending, because you were paying a CPA, you're paying $200, $300, $400, $500 an hour for this advice. And if you have a CPA doing this for you, more than likely, all they're going to find is problems. Probably not going to have any solutions, probably it's going to be problems are going to find. So rather than paying them somewhere between $200, $500 an hour for someone to find problems, pay a practice management consultant between $100 and $200 an hour to find the problems and give you the solutions. Much better use of your money, so to speak.Jonathan:So financial numbers can help you look for areas of focus, but they're not going to be giving you hard, cold facts that this is optimal performance. That's not how financials work, unfortunately. That's a big misconception, too. And I think there's a lot of people out there that they get into this game because business is a game in a way. And they think that If I optimize the financials, I'm going to win this game. And it's not the financials. It's really the people that you got to optimize. It's really the performance that you got to... Practice management. It's a different game, it's a different thing. I want to make sure that I'm putting that out there that financial analysis does one thing, practice analysis, practice management analysis does a whole nother thing. It's a whole other ball game. Any other closing thoughts you have, Joseph?Joseph:Well said, Jonathan. And ditto those things that you said. Financial statements can tell the story, but they don't tell the whole story. They can give you a glimpse of where you're at and where you've been. That's the other thing about financial statements is they're always going to be backwards looking. I had this conversation with one of our clients a couple of weeks ago. Inherently, they are talking about what happened in the past. It doesn't tell you what's going on in your practice today, what's on the schedule for next week. Those are not going to come out of your financials. They're always going to be backwards looking. So the challenge is to marry the two. Come up with what your goals are, figure out what you did in the past and figure out what your future needs to look like to get to the place you want to get to. And I think that's where the beauty is.Jonathan:Exactly. I agree. It's been a fun set of episodes. Hopefully you've gotten a lot of value out of this, listeners. If you have any questions about this, obviously, we talked about this too much already to our loved ones, and they don't want to hear about it. So if you want to come over to the Facebook group and chat about financial statement analysis, we'll be there and talking about it. Maybe if you had some type of a really interesting number you found in your practice or you've had a way that you've been able to affect your numbers we'd love to have you over in the group and be able to hear about it. Or if you have any questions about what your numbers mean, we can maybe give you some context around that in terms from a financial analysis perspective. We appreciate you listening in. Hope you've had fun and we will see you next time.Joseph:Bye, guys.Jonathan:That's it for today, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Tooth and Coin podcast. If you are going to be a practice owner or a new practice owner, and you're interested in CPA services, head on over to toothandcoin.com where you can check out more about our CPA services. We help out around 250 offices around the country and would love to be able to have the discussion about how we could help your new practice. We do specialize in new practice owners, so people that are about to be an owner of a practice they're requiring, about to be an owner of a practice they are starting up or has become an owner in the past five years. That is our specialty. We'd love to be able to talk to you about how we could help you in your services with your tax and accounting services.Jonathan:And if you enjoy today's episode, again, go to the Facebook group. Talk to us about what we've talked about, join in on the discussion, and let's create an environment where we can talk about some of these things so that we can all help each other get through these things together so that this adventure of business ownership is more fun, more productive, and better in the longterm. Lastly, if you want access to those resources that we are currently building, just text the word Tooth and Coin to 33444. That's tooth and coin, no spaces. T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444. Apply with your email address. We'll send you the instructions to the Facebook group. We'll send you the resources when they're available and we will see you next week.
Join the discussion on Facebook!TranscriptJonathan:Welcome to the Tooth and Coin Podcast, where we talk about your adventure of being a dental practice owner. In these episodes, we're going to be talking about problems that you will likely face as a practice owner, as well as give an idea about actionable solutions that you can take so that you can get past this problem in your practice. Some of these concepts are really big ones. Some of them are very specific, but we hope that these episodes help you along with your journey. Now a very important piece for you to understand is that this is not paid financial advice. This is not paid tax or legal advice. We are not your financial advisors. We are not your CPAs. This is two CPAs talking about informational and educational content to help you along with your journey. It's a very important piece for you to understand.Jonathan:Another thing that you need to know is, if you enjoy today's content, join us on the Facebook group. So we've got a Facebook group that is active with dentists, that is going to have content talking about what we're talking about today, to continue the discussion. Agree with us, don't agree with us, have a story to tell, have something to share, join us in the Facebook group. If you go to Facebook, and you search for Tooth and Coin podcast, click on it to join it, and be able to join us there.Jonathan:Finally, if you need some more help, we're developing a list of resources that are going to be centering in around our topics of discussion, to be able to help you a little bit more than what the content is doing. So if you'd like access to that whenever it becomes ready, all you have to do is text the word toothandcoin T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444. Again, that's toothandcoin, all one word, no spaces, to 33444. Reply with your email address, and we'll email you instructions on how to get into the Facebook group, as well as add you to the list, to be able to send you those resources when they're available. And if they're available, we'll go ahead and send them to you as well.Jonathan:So on to today's episode. I hope you enjoy it.Jonathan:Hello, ambitious dentist. Welcome back to the Tooth and Coin podcast. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about a leadership topic that is one that is just not really talked about very often. And that is how to keep your team engaged when trying to reach the goals that your practice has set. You want to make this seem like some really big, fun, exciting, giant topic, and it is fun and exciting, but at the end of the day, it comes down to engaging with your employees and communicating to your employees and having a feedback between yourself and your employees, so that you can tell them how they're progressing and keeping them engaged with the goals that you've set as a business, as a practice, so that you can actually move forward as a team, keep everybody rowing in the right direction, so to speak.Jonathan:So I'm going to be interviewing Joseph about this topic. Joseph is the leadership guru in our company. So I'm going to be asking him the questions, and he's going to be helping us out with this. So Joseph, let's start with that. Let's start with, number one, why is it important for us to be having these discussions with our employees, and how does that typically look in terms of how these communications are set up?Joseph:Yeah, great question. So I think that, in general, one of the things that is difficult in leadership is to give constant, sincere, appropriate feedback to your team. And one of the things is, as human beings, we just don't like to engage in anything that might be challenging. There's a very small fraction of the population that likes to fight, but that's far and few between. And by the time we're professionals, especially practicing at this level, especially getting a chance to engage and have a team of five or 10 or 20 or however big your practice is and the number of team members, we just like to avoid confrontation. And it feels like anytime that we've got to address anything with our team, it's going to be confrontational in nature.Joseph:And I would say that, while some things are confrontational and may not be the best thing, if you do it in the right way, it can help you achieve your goals as a practice. It can help you achieve your goals as a team member because one of the things that they've found, as they've studied employees and employee engagement, is that a lot of people, when they're disengaged at work, they're a fraction of the way productive as they would be if they were fully engaged. And if you poll your employees, one of the things that they would say is I get no feedback.Joseph:I think the cliche word that we use all the time in our society now is communication. Well, we just don't have good communication at our office. Well, if you look at why don't you like your boss? Well, we just don't communicate very well and that kind of thing. So I think that that's kind of the framework to start from is your team members want feedback. They need feedback. And if you avoid that because you're afraid that it's going to be uncomfortable, what that will eventually lead to is that will eventually lead to employees and team members that are disengaged, they're burnt out, and the big question, mark, Jonathan, is that they're left guessing, how am I doing? Am I doing okay? Am I not doing okay? How is the team doing? How are we progressing in our goals? And they're left to guess.Joseph:And there certainly are lots of people that, whenever they start playing the guessing game, they're very positive, optimistic, and they say, "Well, I haven't heard anything, so no news is good news." And then there's a percentage of people that say, "Oh my goodness, I haven't heard anything. That must mean that they don't like me and that I'm not doing a good job. Well, if I'm not doing a good job, that means that the practice isn't doing well, so that means we're probably going to go bankrupt. And I saw that thing the other day that made me think that the practice is getting ready to close, and we're all about to get fired." And then they start making up all these stories in their head because they just don't know.Joseph:So one of the things that we're going to talk through here is to just give you some tools and some things to think about in terms of how do we keep employees engaged, how do we keep them motivated, and how do we create consistent, constant feedback that is respectful? I would not ever encourage you to be disrespectful with your teammates and the team that you're leading, that you get the privilege to lead. I think that's one of the things we lose a lot is this concept of it's a privilege to lead people and to lead an organization. So I mean, what are some of your thoughts, kind of whenever we kind of bounce some of those things out?Jonathan:Yeah. So you did a really good job of outlining, and I mean, to me, there's a big problem that's as a part of all of this and, number one, I think the root of the problem is that employee engagement and any type of engagement in today's society is really hard to become active. It's hard to actively engage with other people and from a lot of different elements. And I could probably go down a rabbit trail of talking about social media and people's attention being numbed and all these other things that are out there.Jonathan:But at the end of the day, what we're talking about is employee engagement, and if you think about the fact that a lot of dental practices face a very real problem, which is turnover, I really wonder, if they had really effective leadership in all of these practices, if turnover would be helped a bit. And the way that you get about doing that seems to me to be have actively engaged employees that enjoy their job, enjoy what they're doing, and one of the ways to do that is keep them engaged and have them have some type of sense of accomplishment and have some sense of purpose inside of their position.Jonathan:I can already hear kind of the counterpoints to this in my head, which is, well, none of my employees want to be engaged. We just can't find those types of employees and things like that. And there's a real chicken and egg question that comes in there, as what comes first, the leadership or the engagement? And then it could also just be is it an issue in the hiring process and things like that. So for purposes of this discussion, we're going to assume that you have a strong hiring process to where you've weeded out the people that don't want to be actively engaged, and so if you feel like you're in an office that doesn't have those types of employees, just hear us out. You're still going to learn a lot about this process and ways to go about this.Jonathan:So this is something that I have struggled with, and we have great employees at our company, at Tooth & Coin. And that's because I am not, we're probably going to beat this word to death today, me not being a very engaging person on a lot of senses is we have to actively work at this. And this is something that we've been intentional about over the last 12 to 18 months at Tooth & Coin is trying to have more of these types of discussions amongst leadership, as well as with employees, about what it is we're planning on doing.Jonathan:So let's start with how do you set some type of a goal for the whole team to be a part of, and then how do you check in with it? And if you want to talk about how we did, or if you want to talk about the best ways to do it, go ahead.Joseph:Sure. Well, I think that a lot of things in leadership and a lot of things, when we talk about goal setting, they need to have some sort of a why behind it. So at the end of the day, the audience that's listening to this probably, probably work in a for-profit business. So we could say, at a high level, that we need to just set goals that make sure that we are ultra profitable, that we maximize our profitability, and we maximize the amount of cash that we take home. I can also make an argument that says that nonprofit organizations have to run at a operating surplus rather than deficit, no margin, no mission, something that I've heard before. So I think that that is certainly part of it.Joseph:So as I just gave you a kind of a buzz phrase that I learned a couple of years ago, no margin, no mission, if we're running a net operating loss, then we're not going to be able to pay our people, and we're not going to be able to pay them well. We're not going to be able to invest in IT upgrades, or we're not going to be able to invest in clinical upgrades or clinical staff or continuing education and those kinds of things. So if we're not profitable, at the end of the day, we're not going to be able to do the bigger thing that we all decided to get into this business for, and that's that we want to help people. You want to help people with your very specific skillset that you paid quite a bit of money to obtain that skill set. At the end of the day, we want to help people and help people feel better about themselves, about their smile, about their level of self confidence, even if it's a pain thing, help them get through these specific pains.Joseph:I mean, I have some root canals done several years ago. I think I told you that story. I was in pain, and I was so thankful that the dentist was able to perform these two root canals for me. It cost a fortune, right? Because dentistry is expensive. It cost a fortune at the time. But at that point in time, I was able to get help from these folks. So I think that a couple of things, whenever we're talking about goal setting, I think it needs to fit into those two different pieces. How do we continue to remain profitable so that we can do the things that we want to do inside the office clinically, so that me, as a business owner, I'm able to get a return on my investment, my time, energy, and effort, how do I support my family?Joseph:But it's also got to boil back down to the why behind what it is. So if we were to poll our audience, and we were to say, is the reason that you want people coming in for six-month hygiene checks, is the only reason for profit? No. There's a big, huge benefit that comes with having your teeth examined and clean and having a hygiene visit. We can identify problems earlier. We can help people sooner. We can eliminate a lot of this stuff on down the road. So I think that, when we look at the things that are most important, it does certainly have to do with profitability, but that can't be the only thing. That can't be the only reason that it is that we're doing what we're doing is for profit and for bottom line.Joseph:But that's important. I can't underestimate the importance of that. And again, no margin, no mission. We could go run a volunteer clinic and not pay anybody anything and do all of that stuff, and then how would you feed your family? How would your team members feed their family? So we've got to have some sort of a profit motive, but we've got to also focus it back to the why. So we're going to have these goals. They may be subjective in nature. They may be objective in nature.Joseph:So my dad works in retail and has run retail stores his whole professional career. One of the things that's a metric or a goal that they have is a customer service score. So let's boil down to a customer service score and net promoter score or your Google reviews or any of these other things that come out as part of running a dental practice. Why is it that we want to have good customer service scores? Well, there's a couple of reasons, right? If you have an unsatisfied customer, they're not going to come back. So that's the financial reason, right? But at the end of the day, do we really want to run a business that people are mad at us and think that we're just taking their money from them and not helping them? That doesn't factor into the why that we became dentists or CPAs or to run a retail store.Jonathan:You got to get that patient engagement, right? We got to move the engagement away from the employee, as well as have it be to the patient because it's hard. I mean, it's easy for the dentist to make an engagement with the patient. It's sometimes hard for the dentist or the owner to make sure that the employee engages with that person as well and has a reason to do that.Jonathan:And we've talked about social good being tied into being a business, in a prior episode, and I love that. And I can think of almost no better types of businesses to have social goods associated with their business, other than medical. Now, sometimes social goods can be a bit divisive in some ways, and some people may like one social good or another social good, but most people, in general, are going to be happy to be a part of something that is doing that.Jonathan:So, yeah, I completely completely agree with that. So let's assume that you've got your goal that you've decided to make, and we can probably do a whole episode on setting goals as well. And let's talk about now how we are going to engage with those employees, to make sure that that goal is not being forgotten about and that the engagement continues on because this is something that I had ... I think, Joseph, you may have ... I think it was you actually. You, at one point, said to me, "What is it that we're doing here every day? Because I know we're doing CPA services at Tooth & Coin, but why are we doing what we're doing?Jonathan:And it was one of those things that it was in my head, I'd talked about it in the past, and it had just been so long since I'd brought it out at a meeting or talked about it or whatever it was is that people had forgotten about it. And even though it was the same people, that we didn't have staff turnover, it was just one of those things. It was just it had to be re-communicated, over and over and over again. So, Joseph, how do you do that? How does someone do a better job of keeping that goal in the front of people's minds and helping people along the way of reaching that goal?Joseph:Sure. I remember when I was a kid, and I was learning different stuff about spelling and all the different facts and stuff, and my mom made flashcards so that she could help me study all this stuff. And one of the things that always stuck with me is that repetition strengthens and confirms. So I think, first and foremost, is we've got to remind people why we're here. So I don't know that that needs to be something that we plaster all over the wall and the website, which those things are fine, well, and good, and I would encourage you to think about all those different things. What's the mission of the business? What's the vision of what we're trying to do, the mission of the practice? Maybe it's to create healthy smiles.Joseph:I live in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, and there are a number of kind of the big, corporate people that are out there. And there's one corporate group that is out to make sexy teeth, and there's another one, I will make you have a sexy smile or whatever. That's a big part of their marketing push. Right, wrong, or indifferent, I'm not here to judge that. It stuck with me, so it's got some stickiness in there, effectiveness. There's another company in town that says, "We make healthy teeth." Healthy teeth first, before we make them sexy, is kind of the innuendo.Joseph:So I think when we go back to repetition strengthens and confirms, so back to your back to your illustration, if one of the things that we're trying to do as a firm is we want to be their CPA from the time that they get into practice ownership until the time that they retire, if we wrote that down one time and said that at one meeting, two years ago, that is out of sight, out of mind. So at whatever point it becomes relevant, whenever it's timely, whenever it is appropriate, we need to be reminding people of what it is that we're here to do.Joseph:Now, it's not every morning that we stand and do the pledge of allegiance, and we sit and make a pledge to the vision and mission statement, straight out of Office Space or something like that, right? It's not about that. It's about just getting a chance to remind people why we're here. So annual company meetings are a good time to do that. There are a lot of offices that have a holiday party, where there's a couple of speeches and that kind of thing, and then quarterly is another time that people can do it and kind of remind people of why it is that we're here.Joseph:Because it's really easy, whenever you're sitting in the weeds, and you're just work, work, work, and you're getting through, and you've got the patient call list, and you're collecting on the AR, and you're trying to get Ms. Jones scheduled, and we're trying to verify insurance, and we're trying to get a case acceptance rate, and we're trying to get call backs, there's all this stuff, and sometimes, we get so busy in the weeds that we forget to take a larger picture view. So I would say, first and foremost, repetition strengthens and confirms. It's important that we continue to do that in a way that is sincere and appropriate. I think that's kind of first and foremost. What are your thoughts on that? I pledge allegiance to Tooth & Coin, the CPA firm, who's going to be awesome for the time that we're all here.Jonathan:Yeah, so that's, if I had my way, we ... And honestly, it's funny because I joke about it, but I can see now why they do it. So when you're in college, in business, you learn about all of these different cultures of business, and I think Japan actually does that in a lot of their businesses. The lifestyle of person who works in a lot of Japanese businesses is that they do pledge of allegiance to their company. They thank their company, every day, for letting their lives be a part of that, and they work insane hours. In Japan, I think there's actual places where you can rent out a place to take a nap, just so you don't have to go home, and you can keep working.Jonathan:So that's the more dramatic version of it, but yeah. And this is something that I still struggle with because I'm not, I don't know, a fluffy kind of guy, in terms of how I talk to people. I'm not big on talking about feelings, or I don't even have ... I'll just do spirit hands. I don't know how else to say it. So communicating things that are big picture about how we want to help our dentist not have to worry about the tax world, even though it can be really scary, and we know that our dental clients don't know a whole lot about it. We want to be that strong arm that helps them through those pieces, to where they're comfortable knowing they're not going to be ever spending in their taxes. They know it's going to be well-prepared and taken care of. And I want them to be able to understand how their business is doing. And I can say those things on a podcast when I'm talking to the people that are performing those services.Jonathan:Sometimes, if you say that same thing, over and over and over again, me, personally, I get the fear that I'm going to be almost saying that what they're ... I'm trying to convince them that what they are doing is what they were doing, and if I say it too many times, I'm going to be shoving it down their throats too much. And even though we have such a great team here that I know that's not an issue, the communication of that is important because it's really easy to lose the trees from the forest whenever you're trying to figure out where you're going in this path and this way.Jonathan:So for the dental clients out there, the dentists that are out there that have set this goal, they've shared it with their team, I mean, what is the frequency? How often do you say this? I mean, I think that we've set up a system where we have an annual, we have a whole day annual meeting, and then we have quarterly check-ins. We have annual calibrations with our teammates. We have a weekly check-in with your leadership person. What type of frequency would you think is right? I mean, is there a universal one, or is it more dependent on style and communication and personalities and things like that? Or what are your thoughts on that, on a broad level?Joseph:Sure. Well, I'm sure some people are sitting and listening, thinking, man, that sounds all well and good, Jonathan, but I just don't have the time. Like you said this, and you say all this stuff. And that's great, if I had 36 hours in the day, but I've only got 24 hours in the day. I've only got X amount of days that I'm chairside, and how much time am I going to spend kind of having the CEO day or having the CEO half-day or even doing that after hours. I don't have time for all of this. So I guess, first and foremost, my encouragement would be that you've got to start somewhere. So if I come out and say that this needs to happen daily, weekly, quarterly, if you hear Jonathan say, "Well, you need to check in with your team weekly," and you have never done a check-in with your team before, that would probably sound very overwhelming and very onerous. And then you would just kind of get discouraged and decide, I don't have time for that.Joseph:So first and foremost, I would say we need to get started. You're going to have some place to start. So there certainly is, and I'm telling my team all this, all the time, is there are lots of different things that I would call best practice. And then there kind of ends up where reality is going to set and going to be. So I can give you lots of different things. I think that just at a bare minimum, you've got to sit down with your team and talk to them individually at least annually, at bare minimum, no matter what happens. If it's been years since you've done a performance review with any of your team, now's the time. We need to have an annual performance review.Joseph:And there's lots of different stuff. We could probably spend two or three episodes on how to structure a performance review. But there's a lot of different things that are in there, so going back to the company goals, if we've got practice goals, I would say, as far as frequency goes, I think that you run the risk of, in December or January, you sit down, and you make these company goals, these team goals, these practice goals, and then you don't tell anybody, all year long, how we're doing on those goals. And then all of the sudden, it comes December time, you get the email from your CPA that says, "Hey, if you have any year-end payrolls, now's the time." And you sit, and you scramble, and you say, "Oh man, I want to get that tax deduction this year, so I'm going to run a bonus." And then you just randomly give people a bonus, and it's $500, $1000, $100, and they have no idea, where did that number come from? How did you get to that number?Joseph:And be like, "Oh, yeah. Well, we had a great year this year, so here's your $1000 or $500 or whatever it is." And essentially, what we've done, and I grew up playing sports, and I know you did too, Jonathan, is we've asked people to go out and compete and play really, really hard, and we never showed them the scoreboard. Not one time did we say, "Here's how we're doing." We just said, blindly, at the end of the year, January, December, whenever it is that you pay your, quote, year-end bonus out, or you look at those company goals like, oh, we either hit them or we didn't. And we've asked them to play their hearts out and give them everything that they got with no scoreboard.Joseph:And I think that that's providing your employees a disservice, your team members a disservice. So my recommendation, my best practice is to definitely give your team an update on how you're doing on your goals quarterly, and at a minimum, they need to hear from you twice a year. Because at least twice a year, we can have an idea, and we can recalibrate, and we can say, "Okay, well, we've noticed that the cancellation rate is higher than what our goal was, that more people are canceling and not showing up, and we're having a bunch of empty chair time." If you're only waiting and looking at that once a year, then you don't have any time to pivot or to adjust or to come up with different ways to have your team help you problem solve those things.Joseph:So my recommendation is to at least give your team a quarterly update. I know that that's something that we, as a firm, have implemented this year is to kind of do a quarterly update on how we're doing on the different team goals that we've set and practice goals that we've set. So that would be what I would call best practice. You can certainly do it monthly. I think as the owner of the practice, if you have a practice manager, an office manager, or somebody that's helping you do that, look at those things monthly. If it makes sense, and you're looking at patient count stuff, that's certainly something you can look at weekly like, that we're talking about big team goals, things that people can really wrap their arms around and understand, you need to be communicating quarterly with your team how we're doing on the team goals, and what are we're seeing?Joseph:So if you were to come out and have practice goals that you set in January of 2020, we have this global pandemic that hits, dental offices are shut down across the globe for a good chunk of March, we would say, "Well, we didn't hit our quarterly goal for Q1 of 2020. Here are the reasons. It's because we were shut down for eight weeks. It was because we did emergency only." And all of the sudden, we're able to kind of add some color around what's going on. One of the things that I've noticed is that the first quarter of 2021 has been really, really good for a lot of the practices that we help. Okay, well, what's going on there? Let's add some color to all of those different pieces.Joseph:So I'd say, at a minimum, you need to communicate that stuff quarterly. You, as the business owner, need to be looking at it at least monthly. And then if you've got folks that you can communicate on your team, that can help you reach your goals, as frequently as you can, looking at those, if that's even weekly or if that's monthly. But I would say, at a minimum, you definitely want to look at it monthly, and you need to communicate with your team at least quarterly. At a bare minimum, I'd say twice a year.Jonathan:Hey, everybody. Jonathan, checking in really quick here. This episode got a little long, so we cut it into multiple pieces. This is episode one. You can find episode two next week or in the following weeks. So make sure that, if you listen to this episode, you listen to the other episode as well, so you have the full context around everything that's going on. Thanks for tuning in, and we will see you next time.Jonathan:That's it for today, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Tooth & Coin podcast. If you are going to be a practice owner or a new practice owner, and you're interested in CPA services, head on over to toothandcoin.com, where you can check out more about our CPA services. We help out around 250 offices around the country and would love to be able to have the discussion about how we could help your new practice.Jonathan:We do specialize in new practice owners, so people that are about to be an owner of a practice they're acquiring, about to be an owner of a practice they are starting up, or has become an owner in the past five years. That is our specialty. We'd love to be able to talk to you about how we could help you in your services, with your tax and accounting services.Jonathan:And if you enjoyed today's episode, again, go to the Facebook group, talk to us about what we've talked about, join in on the discussion, and let's create an environment where we can talk about some of these things so that we can all help each other get through these things together, so that this adventure of business ownership is more fun, more productive, and better in the longterm.Jonathan:Lastly, if you want access to those resources that we are currently building, just text the word toothandcoin to 33444. That's toothandcoin, no spaces, T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N, to 33444. Reply with your email address, and we'll send you an instruction to the Facebook group. We'll send you the resources when they're available. And we will see you next week.
Join the discussion on Facebook!Jonathan:Welcome to the Tooth & Coin Podcast, where we talk about your adventure of being a dental practice owner. In these episodes, we're going to be talking about problems that you will likely face as a practice owner, as well as give an idea about actionable solutions that you can take so that you can get past this problem in your practice. Some of these concepts are really big ones, some of them are very specific, but we hope that these episodes help you along with your journey.Jonathan:Now, a very important piece for you to understand is that this is not paid financial advice. This is not paid tax or legal advice. We are not your financial advisors, we are not your CPAs. This is two CPAs talking about informational and educational content to help you along with your journey. It's a very important piece for you to understand.Jonathan:Another thing that you need to know is if you enjoy today's content, join us on the Facebook group. So, we've got a Facebook group that is active with Dennis that is going to have content talking about what we're talking about today, to continue the discussion. Agree with us, don't agree with us, have a story to tell, have something to share? Join us in the Facebook group. If you go to Facebook and you search for Tooth & Coin Podcast, click on it to join it, and be able to join us there.Jonathan:Finally, if you need some more help, we're developing a list of resources that are going to be centering in and around our topics of discussion, to be able to help you a little bit more than what the content is doing. So, if you'd like access to that whenever it becomes ready, all you have to do is text the word "toothandcoin," T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N, to 33444. And that's "toothandcoin," all one word, no spaces, to 33444. Reply with your email address, and we'll email you instructions on how to get into the Facebook group, as well as add you to lists to be able to send you those resources when they're available. And if they're available, we'll go ahead and send them to you, as well. So onto today's episode, hope you enjoy it.Jonathan:Hello, ambitious dentists. So it is the Tooth & Coin podcast, episode number one, and we are here to discuss this new podcast learning experience that we're going to be creating and developing, and to be honest with you, learning a little bit more about the business of dentistry with everyone that is listening in. I have with myself, Mr. Joseph Rugger, who is a team member with Tooth & Coin, a long time friend of mine as well. Joseph, why don't you tell everybody about yourself, about your experience in the accounting and the dental world, the medical world?Joseph:Yeah, sure, absolutely. So, I always get a chance to tell my story and I get a chance to tell some funny parts of it and some fun sections of it, so hopefully that's of interest to your group. So, I grew up playing competitive baseball and ended up getting a chance to play college baseball at a small school in Batesville, Arkansas called Lyon College.Joseph:Ended up finishing three majors at Lyon: accounting, economics and finance. So, members and money are born and bred into me and formally educated. My first job out of college, I got a chance to go work for my collegiate fraternity, so my job for a year was to travel the country and hang out with college kids. It was a rough job, but somebody had to do it. I ended up doing that for about a year. I always tell people that my salary at the time was $17,000 a year, and I figured out that I was too smart to not make any money.Joseph:So, I went to grad school at IU Indianapolis and did a Master's of Professional Accounting there. Spent about two years working in public accounting in the Indianapolis, Indiana area. Worked for a top 50 CPA firm out of Carmel Indiana, and it was May... I think it was May. And I was still getting up, going to work, and I'd parked my car outside and I was scraping ice off my windshield, well into May living in Indiana, and a buddy of mine called me, and my friends of course, back home in Arkansas were all going to the lake in May and doing things outdoors and hiking, and here I was, scraping ice off my windshield well into May.Joseph:Anyways, so, buddy of mine, his parents owned a prosthetics company and he called me in the middle of the end of busy season in the accounting world. And he said, "Hey, our controller just left. Do you have any interest in coming to work for us in the prosthetics business?" And I said, "Absolutely, would love to come visit with you." And I got a chance to work in the prosthetics business for a company in northeast Arkansas for about 12 years, spent a couple of years as the controller and spent the bulk of my time there as the director of finance and administration, which is a fancy way of saying the CFO and the COO.Joseph:We got a chance to do all kinds of crazy fun stuff. We had four locations when I started there. After I'd been there for a little while, we divested two of our locations, so we went from four locations in two states to two locations, and then over the course of the next 10 years, we opened up a number of new branches, expanded into another state, and by the time I left, we had eight locations across two states, had about 75 employees. Did a whole bunch of work for folks. We ended up seeing about 10,000 patients a year as far as delivered services.Joseph:So, we got a chance to really head up the finance arm, got a chance to really understand the medical billing side. We used HCPCS codes in the prosthetics business, and got a chance to see and learn ICD-9, and then that became ICD-10, and everything in between, and got a chance to understand the difference between a usual and customary fee, or a UCR fee and allowed fee. I was having a conversation the other day with somebody about how to measure your revenue, but got a chance to spend 12 years in the prosthetics business.Joseph:And then, actually, just got reminded on LinkedIn the other day that it's my three-year anniversary at Tooth & Coin. I had all these people say, "Hey, congrats on your work anniversary." And I'm like, "What in the world are they talking about?" Sure enough, February was my three-year anniversary at Tooth & Coin.Jonathan:My wife can tell you that dates are the things that I forget the most. So, I was not one of the people that congratulated you. So that's on mem though. So it's a little dirty laundry for the listeners there. So, cool. So you were in the medical industry. For the listeners, what would be the equivalent of a small to mid-size DSO pro office, somewhere that had eight to 10 locations doing somewhere in the eight figure range of revenue? Is that about accurate?Joseph:I'd say that's pretty close. Yeah. Yeah.Jonathan:Yeah. So, that's what you did in terms of a CFO type role. By the way, one of the episodes that we're definitely going to record is, what is a CFO and what do they do? Because I get a lot of calls about that and I try to explain it, and I'd love to hear what a CFO actually does compared to what I think that they do, since I've never actually been the CFO of somewhere.Joseph:Sure.Jonathan:So, cool. So you're a CFO and you've been at Tooth & Coin for three years now. What else is relevant in terms of your accounting, CPA, financial background?Joseph:Well, I think it's always interesting for me to tell people how I ended up working for you at Tooth & Coin. I think that's always an interesting story. So, I moved to the Dallas, Fort Worth area a couple of years ago, and I was interviewing for a couple of different jobs and working with recruiters. And I ended up getting a call from a recruiter to talk to them about being the CFO for a big dental services organization, or DSO, here in the metroplex.Joseph:I think they had about 80 or 90 offices across Dallas and throughout north Texas. And anyways, Jonathan, you and I have been friends for a number of years, randomly sat next to each other at a continuing education in Little Rock, and struck up a conversation and became friends. That was what? 15 years ago, I think.Jonathan:Yeah.Joseph:But anyways, we'd stayed in touch and stayed friends over the years. So, I had this interview coming up with this DSO and I thought to myself, "Who do I know that I can pick their brain about the different stuff that I need to study and prepare for this interview?" So I called you and reached out to you and said, "Hey, I've got this interview coming up. Would you be willing to share some stuff?" Anyways, and we started talking and you told me... a couple of days later you were like, "Man, if he's interested in making a move, maybe he should come to work for us."Joseph:So that started that conversation. So, been with you at Tooth & Coin for the last three years. Got a chance to do all kinds of really, really cool stuff inside the CPA profession on both the professional level and also on the volunteer level. Education is something that is near and dear to my heart, so I've done continuing professional education and taught continuing education across the country for both the AICPA, and I think I'm up to 16 different states across the U.S. that I've taught in.Joseph:I've taught in two foreign countries. I got a call from the AICPA and they said, "Hey, do you have time on your calendar to come teach in the Caymans?" And I said, "You know what? Something just opened up. I do have time to do that."Jonathan:"I think I can make that work."Joseph:Yeah. Yeah. I got another call to say, "Would you like to come speak at The Bahamas Institute of Chartered Accountants?" And I said, "Absolutely. I think that would be good." So, I've gotten the chance to teach and coach at the CPA level and certainly with lots of other entrepreneurs across the dental industry and across a number of other industries, and I really, really enjoy the educational part of what we do, because... Warren Buffett, I think, said it best, that accounting is the language of business and it's up to us to figure out what the story is.Joseph:The numbers do tell a story, and we've got to figure out, number one, make sure the numbers are right, but number two is to figure out what story that's telling. And one of the things that I'm passionate about is I really, really want to help small businesses grow and succeed. That's something that I figured out early on in my education, is that as an accountant, we're going to have that ability, and I'm trying to simplify that even more, Jonathan. And what I really want to tell them is, "I want to help you win with money," which I think is near and dear to our hearts as CPAs.Joseph:So, I've gotten a chance to travel quite a bit. I've been to, I think, 30 countries or something like that, been to all 50 states, hope to come visit your state, whoever you guys are that are out listening, and come hang out, teach some stuff, and that kind of thing. So I think that's all certainly relevant to our discussion here. At this juncture, I'm getting ready to become the chair-elect of the Arkansas Society of CPAs.Joseph:It's a volunteer organization that I've been a part of since I became a licensed CPA, and we're doing lots of great stuff inside the Arkansas Society, and to get a chance to share that's an honor. I was telling you this the other day, I'll be the youngest chair in the history of the Arkansas CPA Society, which is a really, really great honor for me to have.Jonathan:Another honor that you had recently bestowed upon you was the AICPA Young CPA Leader of the Year Award? Did I get the title right of that?Joseph:Yeah, so that was really cool. It's funny. My wife was kidding with me the other day. She was like, "Are we still young?" I was like, "Yes, we are still considered young." But it's the AICPA Young CPA of the Year in honor of a guy named [Maximum McColloughby 00:11:20], and it was named in his honor. And it's an award that sets out to recognize volunteerism in the profession, who's helping capital markets and who's helping the profession move forward from every angle, both from a professionalism standpoint to a volunteer to, what kind of impact are we making inside of our communities?Joseph:So, I was awarded that in the middle of a global pandemic and we were supposed to go to Las Vegas for this big convention. And of course, all that got canceled, and we ended up having... the AICPA did a great job, and we ended up having a really cool virtual ceremony that went out on Facebook live that you could go check out where I got a chance to come talk about volunteerism and what it means to me and hear some of my friends talk about the profession and the awards and all that stuff. But yeah, that was a big honor that I got from the AICPA.Jonathan:Really was. And just for people that are listening, that's the equivalent of the ADA giving out a Young Dentist Leader Award, and they only give it out to one person a year. It's not like the thing that you get in high school where you get to sign up for the who's who-Joseph:Who's who.Jonathan:and pay some money to be a part of it. It's a big deal, and we're really proud of you for it for be able to do that. So, cool. So, for anyone who has not listened to Start Your Dental Practice or is not aware of Tooth & Coin, my name is Jonathan van Horn. I am the CPA and the owner of Tooth & Coin, which is a CPA firm. We are located in Arkansas, but we help dentists everywhere in the country in the United States. We have clients in just about every state. We have around 250 offices we help out.Jonathan:And our mission is to help bridge the gap between you being a successful dentist and you being a successful entrepreneur. We do that in ways that we can help. We try to not venture outside of the realms of the things that we don't know how to do. We find that a lot of people make the mistake of trying to get their hands in too many cookie jars. We've learned through experience that the best way to help our clients is to give them the advice that we know the most about, and that is the accounting, tax, and business financial world, so to speak.Jonathan:And from a numbers perspective, that does mean a lot of things. And what we hope to do on this podcast is talk about a little bit about those things and help solve some of the problems that are out there in the industry that seems to stem from the fact that most dentists spend about 15,000 hours learning how to become a dentist and almost zero hours learning how to be a business owner.Jonathan:So, this podcast is hopefully going to be informative and help a bit with that problem. So, a little bit more about me. I was driven to the CPA world from a young age. I was from a small business family. My parents owned a small business, my grandparents owned a small business. My parents owned a furniture store, my grandparents owned a manufacturing company. And whenever I was in the eighth grade, my parents sat us down in the living room.Jonathan:My dad sat down on the fireplace, and he said to us, "Jonathan," and my sister and my mom. "The business had failed. We are going through bankruptcy. We're going to have to sell the house. We're going to have to move away from our family home that we lived in since I was born, and leave the place that I had known and grown up and loved."Jonathan:And so we had to move halfway across the state from one Arkansas town to a more rural Arkansas town, and if you think that you live in a rural place, I went from a town of about 25,000 people to about 8,000 people, and moved out of a four bedroom, two bath house that was in a pretty nice area to a two bedroom, one bath apartment that was in an area that wasn't the best. And it was a really rough time for my family.Jonathan:And my dad always said, "Jonathan, the reason that the business failed wasn't because the business wasn't working. It was because I didn't keep up with the numbers. I didn't know about the business side." My dad was the sales and marketing person. He was not the business guy. He was the person that made the sales happen, made the revenue come in, but he didn't ever keep up with the business side of things, the financial side of things.Jonathan:He'd actually relied a lot on my grandfather, the one who owned the manufacturing company, to do those things. But unfortunately, my grandfather died about... I guess it was at this point almost 35 years ago. So, he wasn't around very long to help out with that furniture store. And my dad always said if he had had somebody there that could have kept an eye on the numbers, could have kept an eye on how the business was doing from a business standpoint, that we would have been okay, the business would have survived.Jonathan:It went through a bit of a hard time, but we would have made it out of there if he just had a better eye on the numbers and a better eye on the business side of things. So, he always said that. He even says that today still. Actually, we had a discussion about this about a month ago, and he's still saying the same thing about coulda, woulda, shoulda stuff.Jonathan:So, I grew up thinking that that's what CPAs did, because that was what my dad said CPAs did. And I went into school and I got real close to becoming a math professor. So, a big fan of numbers. Always enjoyed math as a subject and had way too much nerdy fun with it, but did end up going the route of CPA, much like Joseph said. He wanted to make some money in the world. So I figured being a teacher was probably not the best way to make money in the world. So I thought, "Let's go with the CPA route," and also I could also be able to help a lot more people. When I got out into the CPO world, very quickly found out that's not actually what CPAs do, as I find a lot of people are surprised about.Jonathan:CPAs don't typically really help with businesses. The CPA industry was created around compliance. It was created around making sure that you filed and paid your taxes so that you don't pay penalties and interest or go to jail. We call that compliance in our industry, and I didn't want to do just compliance. I wanted to do more. So, after working for five or 10 years in the public space, helping out people with compliance, I said, "Enough is enough. I'm going to go and start this new business." And that is how Tooth & Coin was born, and our mission statement of helping dentist bridge that gap of being a successful clinician with being a successful entrepreneur was born.Jonathan:So, that's the story of Tooth & Coin, my personal story of how I became a CPA, why I became a CPA, and just a little bit more into the mind of who it is that's talking to you through these things. There is a podcast out there that you can go and listen to. It's called Start Your Dental Practice. Our CPA firm does specialize in new practice owners, so we have about 250 offices we help out with as of today, which is the beginning of 2021, and over 200 of those were new practice owners whenever they came on with us and our firm.Jonathan:So if you're a new practice owner, someone who's within five years of ownership, we'd love to be able to talk to you about how we can help you out with your dental practice as well. But to this podcast, the Tooth & Coin podcast, what are we here for? Why are we doing this? Why are we talking today? The purpose is fairly simple. I discussed it briefly before I went with my intro is that there are a lot of problems that need to be faced inside of the dental industry and a lot of the lessons that need to be taught to people in terms of what business is and how to approach it.Jonathan:There's a lot of confusion around a lot of different subject matter, and who better to talk to you guys about those things than a couple of guys that have experience running a CPA firm that helps out 250 offices around the country, someone who acted as a CFO for 12 years for a very big medical organization, and has helped lots of our clients right now that are dentists, help get their way through the business of dentistry and be able to talk about the things that we know how to talk about?Jonathan:So, the purpose of the podcast is that. We're going to be highlighting problems, we're going to be talking about the solutions to those problems, and we're going to be trying to give you resources around ways to be able to solve those problems. I think one thing that Joseph and I do not want this podcast to turn into, just for full expectations for you so that you guys can hold us accountable is, we don't want this podcast to just be informational only.Jonathan:We want this podcast to be actionable. We want it to be something that you can execute based off of. We want it to actually solve problems, not just highlight them. Anytime you do any type of content, it's hard to sometimes bridge the gap between educational, entertainment, and action. And we're going to do our best to focus on highlighting the problems, and then giving you the solutions and giving you the resources to be able to take action on those solutions. So to me, that's the reason for the podcast. Joseph, what are some of the things you're wanting to solve with this podcast, as well?Joseph:I think at a high level, Jonathan, you and I, we've got just such varied and similar experience of the business of healthcare here, and as we sit back and think... I'm as guilty as anybody else. I think everybody knows the stuff that's in my head, and as we have new team members come on, as we have new dentists come on, I find that there's a whole lot of stuff that's inside my head that not everybody knows, that everybody's not read all the books that I've read.Joseph:They haven't listened to all the same stuff that I have. And I forget that. So, I look forward to getting a chance to just really share some insights and some things that we see, and some things that each individual listener can take home with them and can digest and see how does it apply to their individual practice, their individual situation? So we've got all this knowledge and expertise. We want to put it out into the world. We want to help you build a better business, a better practice, a better life, eventually. That's really what we're trying to do, here. We're trying to help you reach your entrepreneurial dreams and goals and help you with all those things.Jonathan:Yeah, exactly. And another important piece of all of it is, I find a lot of the times, when a client asks us a question, there is the book answer, and then there's the contextual answer. And I feel like we're in a unique position to be able to give a lot of context around some of these, about how to approach the book solution versus the real life solution of what we've seen happen. Other things that we're going to be looking to do with this podcast...Jonathan:So, we're going to be looking to have this be an engagement platform with other dentists that are out there in terms of ways that you guys have solved the problems we're talking about. So, this isn't only about us sharing what we know. It's also about you sharing what you know` with the rest of the people that are out there so that we can all have a prosperous and full lives, so that we can all do better.Jonathan:We all can live a life of abundance, and there's always information that can be shared. And so, we're going to be having ability to grow a community out of this podcast, and we're also going to be using real life questions from real life dentists that are having these real life problems, and talk about ways that could potentially have solutions, things that could be answered. We're going to be literally pulling questions from clients of ours, of course, with permission from the client, or have it be anonymous.Jonathan:We'll be pulling real questions that clients are having so that we can answer those things, because if our clients are asking those questions of us, I know that the people that are listening are probably having those same questions. They need to be answered by somebody. And hopefully, we can give that answer and be a resource to the industry. So, that's the problem that we're trying to solve. That's how we're going to try and solve it. Is there anything that else you wanted to add, Joseph, in terms of what we're trying to do here with the podcast?Joseph:I'm looking forward to going on this journey with you, Jonathan. You and I have been friends for a long time, and we both have two things that are inherent in us: we want to serve and help other people, and we want to educate. I'm looking forward to doing both of that to our audience, with our audience.Jonathan:Absolutely. So, to give some of our audience members some ideas of the different topics we're going to be approaching whenever we come down in these episodes, some of the topics that we've already highlighted that we want to talk about. Understanding the business model of dentistry. We want you to know how much cash do you really need to have in your business. How to pay less in taxes while your net worth is more important than you think and why it matters. What's a dental practice's true value?Jonathan:Fixed versus variable expenses and your breakeven point. Analyzing your overhead. Staffing percentages, personal finance. Recurring charges, and do you actually use them? The purpose of continuing education. How to understand your financial statements, and why it's also a total waste of time. How to manage expectations whenever it comes to leadership. How to lead people. How to handle turnover in your office. Training protocols. Crucial conversations. Understanding what your sales and production actually mean in your office. Understanding how to handle new patients and how to measure your growth and how to measure your marketing expenses and calculate your ROIs.Jonathan:And just tons of more things that we're going to try and talk about. Those are the ones that we've literally just brainstormed off the top of our heads over the course of a few conversations that we could give full and really good information on, as between Joseph and myself. For areas where we are not expert subject matters... or subject matter experts, rather, we plan on reaching out to the industry and finding the best people to be able to talk to you about those subjects.Jonathan:So for example, we will not be talking to you about how to increase your hygiene revenue. That's not something that we're going to be talking about because neither Joseph or I has ever had to talk to a hygienist and tell them how to do their job. Now, we could have a conversation about how to talk to an employee and how to manage an expectation, but we're not going to talk to you and say, "Hey, this person needs to be doing... 30% of their patients need to be receiving fluoride treatment, because that's an industry standard."Jonathan:Now, I can tell you that may be an industry standard, but how you go from where you are today to that standard is anyone's guess for Joseph and I. And so we're going to have somebody on that's going to be able to actually answer that question and give you some guidance and help you with those things. So, that is what we'll be doing in terms of the episode breakdown. Again, the current format that we're we're working with is, highlight the problem, talk about the solution, and then give resources.Jonathan:That's what our content's going to be about. We're going to try and keep our episodes somewhere in the 20-to-30 minute range. We don't want you to have to devote a full hour of your day just to listen to our podcast. That is giving us some accountability to keep the episodes on point and not to go down too many rabbit trails in terms of conversation, and so that we can really make the time that you're giving to us and putting us in your ears to be as high-value as possible.Jonathan:So, that is our plans with Tooth & Coin podcast. We hope to have you guys on the journey with us, and if you would, make sure to follow us on all the social media, and we will see you on the next episode.Jonathan:That's it for today, guys. I hope you enjoyed this episode of the Tooth & Coin podcast. If you are going to be a practice owner or a new practice owner, and you're interested in CPA services, head on over to toothandcoin.com, where you can check out more about our CPA services. We help out around 250 offices around the country. I would love to be able to have the discussion about how we could help your new practice.Jonathan:We do specialize in new practice owners, so people that are about to be an owner of a practice they're acquiring, about to be an owner of a practice they are starting up, or has become an owner in the past five years. That is our specialty. We'd love to be able to talk to you about how we could help you in your services with your tax and accounting services.Jonathan:And if you enjoyed today's episode, again, go to the Facebook group, talk to us about what we've talked about, join in on the discussion, and let's create an environment where we can talk about some of these things so that we can all help each other get through these things together so that this adventure of business ownership is more fun, more productive, and better in the longterm.Jonathan:Lastly, if you want access to those resources that we are currently building, just text the word "toothandcoin" to 33444, that's "toothandcoin," no spaces, T-O-O-T-H-A-N-D-C-O-I-N to 33444. Reply with your email address, and we'll send you the instructions on the Facebook group. We'll send you the resources when they're available, and we will see you next week.
Ep. 27: Seasides Very Own by 2 Coin Podcast
Radical self-responsibility. Actively choosing differently. Shedding old patterns that are wrapped in victim mindset. It’s uncomfortable and it’s necessary for living an empowered life of your making, and that’s what Allegra Brantly and Kelli are diving into today. They explore childhood wounding, codependency, blending tough love with being held, their relationships with alcohol, and building real wealth as a woman. Today on The Kelli Show: * Self-sabotage & perpetuation of the victim mindset * Infusing being held with tough love & honesty * Transmuting childhood wounding through physical touch * Consciously deciding to bring a child into this world * Shattering of identity and codependency * Diversity of thought & ability to hear differing opinions * Empowered money management This show is supported by: * Grüvi | You can order Grüvi online at www.getgruvi.com ( http://www.getgruvi.com/ ). Use code “KELLIT” to save 15% off online. (U.S Only) * BetterHelp | This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you are struggling, please go to ( trybetterhelp.com/kelli ( http://trybetterhelp.com/kelli ) ) and receive 10% off your first month. Follow Allegra: * Instagram: @ambrantly ( https://www.instagram.com/ambrantly/?hl=en ) * Website: factorawealth.com ( https://www.factorawealth.com/ ) * Podcast: Coffee and Coin Podcast ( https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/coffee-and-coin-podcast/id1495927266 ) Resources: * Referenced book: A Happy Pocket Full of Money ( https://www.amazon.com/Happy-Pocket-Money-Expanded-Study/dp/1571747362 ) * Join The Onyx ( https://www.patreon.com/join/thekellishow? ) , our new private community. Click here ( http://soulfireproductionsco.com/giveaway-the-kelli-show/ ) to submit your review for The Kelli Show, and receive access to Kelli’s secret Spotify playlist! This show is produced by Soulfire Productions ( http://soulfireproductionsco.com/ )
Finally we got everyone back this week as the Two Sides of a Coin Podcast gets into Day Light Savings BS, Vaccine Passports, Salt Bae feeding people and much more! Topics: -Catching up with Bryan and Joe - Day Light Savings - Vaccine Passports - Salt Bae feeding people (1:30:00) Quick Hits: - Arkansas competting with Florida - Panda Express adds stripping to training - Netflix sharing coming to an end - Uber Girl gets arrested - Papa John gets N Word Rehab - Kirk Franklin gets outted - Nas gets his first Grammy Thank you all for listening. If you're new to the podcast please subscribe or tell us what you think about the show. Find us on: website - twosidespodcast.com Instagram & Twitter - @twosidespodcast Facebook - facebook.com/twosidespodcast Youtube - twosidespodcast.com/youtube Thank you all for listening. If you're new to the podcast please subscribe or tell us what you think about the show. Find us on: website - twosidespodcast.com Instagram & Twitter - @twosidespodcast Facebook - facebook.com/twosidespodcast Youtube - twosidespodcast.com/youtube
Welcome back to the Two Sides of a Coin Podcast! Topics this week: - People heavily on social media (19:00) Quick Hits: - Company lay offs (42:00) - Trump Caught COVID-19 (46:00) - The Florida Story of the Week (49:00) - American Murder The Family Next Door (57:00) Thank you all for listening and subscribe now!
We examine the parable of the Lost Coin through the lens of our own lost-ness, the ease of which we can become lost in today's world and that it is always worth rejoicing in finding the one who is lost.
Our first major milestone... the 50th episode of the Two Sides of a Coin Podcast! A huge thank you to everyone that has stuck with us through all the delays and changes in our show. We would probably still do this without you. :) We are excited to see what the next 50 will bring. Major Topics: - The new Buffet Structure - Delson is turning 29 - And Surviving Corona Quick Hits: - NBA restart - Lil Boosie buys prosititute for son - Jeff Bezos may become 1st Trillionaire - Lysol on chicken Thank you again for listening.
In this weeks episode we discuss the importance of cultural awareness when visiting new countries and regions. We talk about advice we would give others when choosing to visit a foreign place, as well as our own experiences traveling back and forth to our own motherlands. Enjoy another great episode brought to you by 2 Coin Podcast!
Ep. 3: Moment of Silence by 2 Coin Podcast
Join us for the latest episode of 2 Coin Podcast where we breakdown our own family traditions during thanksgiving as well as get into the usual music and sports discussions. We get into YBN Corde, YNW Melly's new project, The Game's album cover antics and much much more. LISTEN! SHARE! SUBSCRIBE!
A Good Honest Conversation Never Hurt Anyone! FOLS FOREVER & MR VANS are back in the studio for another epic episode with the help of special guest Mikky Wisperz from the 2 Sides 1 Coin Podcast. The conversation starts off centered around Goldlink and his Instagram rant aimed at the Grammys which is what then leads to the discussion regarding nominations and winners of the past and who we think will walk away with the best Rap album category. We then get into whats been on everyone's lips since last week, Rapman finally releases highly anticipated movie, Blue Story. Since it's release, there has been alot of backclash which the boys unpack and urge listeners to continue supporting. We also touch on George The Poet turning down an OBE, new music conversation plus more! Dont forget to get involved in the conversation and use the #OFFTHECUFFPOD Subscribe to our Youtube Channel: Off The Cuff Podcast Tickets to our live show still available here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/off-the-cuff-podcast-live-tickets-80587325861 Socials: @OFFTHECUFFPOD @mrvans7 @folsforever @MikkyWisperz @2sides1coin_ Shot and edited by @LveS0sa
The Fall Movie Preview features a special guest, Tyler Smith from the very cool movie review website and podcast Battleship Pretension. Tyler gives details and recommendations on the best movies coming out this fall, including Joker, The Lighthouse, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Knives Out, The Irishman, Won't You Be My Neighbor, Uncut Gems, Richard Jewell, Marriage Story and The Report. Plus, Steve guests on the new episode of the Three Sides of the Coin Podcast!
This is a special episode of the Two Sides of a Coin Podcast as the team is celebrating a big day for some close friends in an unfamiliar place. First episode recorded outside of the home studio but for good reason so listen to find out why. The squad goes over what they are up to this weekend, what they are celebrating and introduce some people that slid by the show, someone on the podcast needs AA and they talk about rough nights out Downtown. Thank you all for the support... Subscribe rate and review!
Tommy Sommers says "Photography is my true passion. I find the artistic angle the most appealing part of it. Going for the most unique and beautiful photos are always the goal for me. That's what makes your event come to life by creating memorable moments that are unique" and if you have ever seen his concert photos, he nails it! He is also part of the Three Sides of the Coin Podcast which is a KISS talk show featuring Michael Brandvold, Tommy Sommers, Mark Cicchini and Lisa Martini
Back from Delson's birthday trip to the beach the guys bring you a short but sweet podcast. We have some changes coming in June to try to revamp and reorganize to bring you guy the best content we can. Most importantly we have some schedule changes next month be we have some other announcements coming in the near future! John Wick is the best action movie of our generation and much more this week, Kwahi vs. Lebron as best player in the league and most importantly Bacon vs. Canadian Bacon. Quick Hits: Dominican Hooper with no shoes NBA Finals Predictions Tyler, The Creator's number 1 album Sonic The Hedgehog gets a redesign Da Baby is nobody to fuck with Lil Pump is dumb as hell This week on episode 20 of the Two Sides of a Coin Podcast, ENJOY!
This is Part one of a special 2 part episode of the Shockwaves Skullsessions Podcast featuring two top music podcasters: Chris Akin, cohost of the Classic Metal Show and self-published book author, and Michael Brandvold, music marketing guru and host of the 3 Sides of The Coin Podcast and The Music Business Weekly Podcast. Chris, Michael and Skullsessions host Bob Nalbandian carry out a deep discussion on how to succeed in today’s music industry.
Part Two of this Shockwaves Skullsessions 2-part Special Podcast is the continuation of this compelling chat with Chris Akin, cohost of the Classic Metal Show and self-published book author, and Michael Brandvold, music marketing guru and host of the 3 Sides of The Coin Podcast and The Music Business Weekly Podcast. In part two, Chris, Michael and Skullsessions host Bob Nalbandian resume the discussion on today’s music industry pertaining to social media marketing and new techniques to succeed in the business.
In an uneventful piece the guys at the Two Sides of a Coin Podcast go over what happened with Chris Brown's arrest in Paris, briefly on how anime is now trickling into the culture, how sensitivity would have not allowed some of the shows we grew up with to even exist and much more! Anime trickling into the culture - (5:10) Frank joins the Gym - (11:45) Our Childhood shows wouldn't flourish in today's climate - (25:00) We respond to @albidamned - (29:15) "Happy Wife Happy Life" is a myth (34:20) Gucci Mane allegedly shorting his kid on the child support (44:00) Fyre has people in some pretty tough spots. (52:00) Context flips the controversial Native American vs MAGA Hat kid video (55:20) Chris Brown rape scandal (1:06:00)
Welcome to the Two Sides of a Coin Podcast, where two guys living very different lives join weekly to give you one thing, great content. This is our introduction to what lead us here and what to expect from here on out. Being that we have done podcasts in the past and some may wonder where we went, why we went, and what we have been doing since. All those things are address within this epsiode. Whether you like it or not we are here to stay this time so expect 2019 to have a year just starting some great content with big laughs for everyone.
A Good Honest Conversation Never Hurt Anyone! The pod bros FOLS FOREVER & MR VANS are back for another episode, this time joined by Dee Apples (2 Sides 1 Coin Podcast) & Pam (Food Club Ldn)to chime in on the topics of this week including the never-ending pettiness of 50 Cent. Round 78 of Cardi vs Nicki Minaj - are we over it? Who are you siding with? Also discussed dating culture alongside Pam's online blog Food Club Ldn. Please make sure you rate, review, subscribe and leave us a comment. For all enquiries, topics and dilemmas ‘offthecuff24@hotmail.com’ Don’t forget to get involved in the conversation and use #OFFTHECUFFPOD Twitter/Instagram: @OFFTHECUFFPOD @folsforever @mrvans7 @MsPiink/Pamldn (foodclubldn) @DeeApple/deeapples (2sides1coin_)
This special bonus episode is a short conversation with another passionate rock music lover, Mark Cicchini from Three Sides of the Coin Podcast (an all KISS Podcast). Mark has proven to be as passionate about classic rockers putting out new music as Tuck and I are. I got to spend a few minutes with him at the Kiss Indianapolis KISS Expo to discuss our passion for new music. Special thanks to Mark for sitting down with me.
Facebook+Uber+Braintree, what are they up to? Apple Pay and Samsung enter China partner China Union Pay, Target's rumored new Wallet App using NFC, Global Payments acquires Heartland Payment systems, Pinterest Buyable pins now come with price tracking, plus new segments in our show!
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