Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Jonathan Miller: Key Mistakes
147 Plays2 years ago
Meet Jonathan Miller, the financial mentor for your dental dreams! Since 2016, he's guided nearly sixty first-time owners towards their dream dental practice. In this week’s episode of Dental fuel, Jonathan unveils the crucial first steps and dissects the common pitfalls new dentists must avoid. Don't miss out on this wealth of wisdom!
Key Takeaways:
- Dentists should know where to start when it comes to practice ownership and have a clear time horizon in mind.
- Real-world experience and education can be valuable before making the decision to start or buy a practice.
- Practice ownership is not for everyone, and dentists should consider their personal life and goals before diving in.
About Jonathan:
Jonathan spent almost 10 years with one of the largest dental-specific lenders in the country. His focus was helping dentists evaluate their first practice purchase or through help with obtaining the right project financing for a scratch start-up. During that time he helped open over 200 new “De Novo” dental offices and performed as a project manager and financial analyst for first-time practice buyers. In total he has helped close to a thousand doctors all over the country find their first practice to purchase or start their first practice. As a result of his reputation and relationships, he was invited to speak year after year to some of the top dental schools in the country like UCLA, Loma Linda, Western University as well as the University of Pennsylvania and Temple.
It was his passion for first-time owners that led Jonathan to leave corporate banking and follow his passion to help those to seek accurate information instead of affirmation. Since 2016 he has helped close to sixty first-time owners buy or start their optimal practice. He even wrote a book titled “Don’t Sweat the Startup." As an advocate, Jonathan can show doctors the path toward practice ownership while minimizing their risk and taking away the fear of the unknown. With the help of his relationships in the industry, he can show doctors how to grow their practice and build their brand while maximizing their return on investment.
Connect with Ignitedds: @ignitedds
Connect with Jonathan Miller: @startyou_practice
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Dental Fuel Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Dental Fuel, the podcast that focuses on what no one else is talking about. Mistakes. The dental world is full of before and afters and no one is talking about the middle. Dental Fuel brings you the unspoken in between.
Meet Jonathan Miller: Key Mistakes & Insights
00:00:14
Speaker
We are excited to have Jonathan Miller. Jonathan will be sharing mistakes he has seen in the industry. In this first episode, Jonathan shares key mistakes he has seen dentists make and a little bit about startup acquisitions.
00:00:27
Speaker
Jonathan Miller, welcome to Dental Fuel. How are you doing today?
The Energy of In-Person Events
00:00:31
Speaker
I'm doing great. Thanks. We are live at the Ignite DDS retreat in Atlanta, Georgia. Super excited to be connecting with you here. How are things? How is your flight? I mean, things are great. You're not supposed to say happy to be here, but I really am happy to be here because people start thinking, well, what's the alternative? I'm happy to be here. The truth is that I'm just grateful to be back and be in person.
00:00:53
Speaker
you know, get to see people again. This stuff gives me juice, gives me energy. So yeah, stoked to be here. Wish it wasn't raining outside. Take some rain back home with you. We've imitated the really good lighting, so that helps. That's right. Jonathan, tell our listeners a little bit
Jonathan's Career Journey in Dental Industry
00:01:09
Speaker
about yourself.
00:01:09
Speaker
Yeah, so, gosh, I've been now in the dental game since 2007. So you can do the math on that because I'm going to age myself. And I started out in lending, where I did nothing but work for one of the largest banks in the country doing nothing but lending to dentists. And that was whether they were going to start their first practice or buy their first practice. And I did that east-west coast and kind of everywhere in between.
00:01:31
Speaker
And then through that process, the company moved me in and out around the country, then I ended up in California. And once I got there, I called my family who's all from Ohio and said, hey guys, this is it for me. And if you want to visit, come out as many times as you want, but I don't think I'm coming back to Ohio anytime soon. And at that point, at about my 10 year anniversary on the lending side,
00:01:53
Speaker
I probably found myself in the same position where a doctor might find themselves, you know, young and career going, oh, corporate gig is not really my gig.
Starting or Buying a Practice: Essential Advice
00:02:03
Speaker
And so, you know, to be honest with you, in the banking world, it became a lot of red tape, bureaucracy, stuff like that. And so I found myself having a lot of conversations with doctors on how to start or buy their first practice.
00:02:14
Speaker
And ironically enough, I would have to tell doctors, hey, look, if you tell anybody all the stuff that I'm about to tell you, I'm just going to deny it, because I'm not really supposed to do this as I'm wearing a bank name tag, right, or badge. But this is the truth. You need to talk to this person, stay away from this person, and then say these things, and then go do these things.
00:02:32
Speaker
then your project is going to go really smooth. And doctors are like, Oh my gosh, that's so helpful. Thank you so much. I was asking people and no one was giving me like this and then this and then this. So that's awesome. And of course I'd always, they'd always laugh and I'd say, but if you tell anybody, I told you this, I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. I don't know who you are. We never met before stuff like that.
00:02:48
Speaker
Um, and then I just said, you know, gosh, I would really love to just do that mostly day in, day out. Uh, and so now that's what I get to do. So I left the banking gig, uh, like I said, almost 10 years in, um, and started helping doctors started by their first practice now for since 2016. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. So again, I've been doing it a little while. Do you have any other connection to the world of dentistry?
00:03:12
Speaker
You mean like family members, friends, et cetera? I mean, my wife's in the game. She's not a dentist. But coming out of my family or anything like that, nope, not at all. So you kind of just landed into it. Landed into it. And then today, though, being in it as long as I have, my phone is just full of dental people, industry people, dentists, you name it. You've been around it so long. And all my friends and family call me with any dental questions I have, even stuff that I'm like, you should probably call your doctor and have that looked at. I don't know. Don't send me a photo of your tooth. I don't know what that is. But I have somebody you can call. I usually know a dentist in just about every
00:03:46
Speaker
Well, Jonathan here at Dental Fuel, we are committed to telling our listeners about different clinicians' mistakes and learning from those mistakes and growing from
Common Mistakes in Dental Practice
00:03:55
Speaker
them. Now you're not a clinician yourself, but I'm sure you have seen many clinicians make a ton of mistakes along the way. So I'm super excited to share your perspective with our listeners about some of these mistakes. But from your perspective, what are some key mistakes that you have seen many clinicians make across the board?
00:04:05
Speaker
major metro area in the country or somebody that does even in rural America.
00:04:14
Speaker
So staying in that theme of going to the path startup acquisition route, etc. Most of the time, you know, we hear all this advice and guidance on like, okay, begin with the end in mind, and where do you want it to be? And how do you want it to go? And I'm not saying that that's wrong. But usually, like anything else, if I was to say, Hey,
00:04:30
Speaker
Well, let's talk about dental school. And you want to go to dental school. And it began with the end of mine. You want to graduate. You want to graduate with honors. And maybe you want to graduate with honors and have a great job. OK, cool. You know what that looks like. But what's the first step to getting into dental school? That's where you've got to start. Because sometimes that first step doesn't just happen overnight. It may take you six months to complete step one, and then two months for step two, and then maybe another six months for step three, et cetera. So not knowing where to start is usually the number one thing holding doctors back from becoming an owner.
00:04:58
Speaker
And to be honest with you, when you look around at the landscape, everybody starts to talk about, well, let's begin with the end in mind and reverse it. I think that you need to know what you want this thing to look like when you get there so that you're not always chasing something, but you really got to know where is the
First Steps to Practice Ownership
00:05:14
Speaker
starting point.
00:05:14
Speaker
Where's the jump off? What's the first step I have to take to go getting that thing done? And if the first step takes you 30 seconds, hey, great. Awesome. Step one's done. But like all human beings, we're hardwired to want to cross stuff off the list. And I find that very, very true in dental. Oh, for sure. And then you also have this analysis paralysis thing. And so that also can keep you away from that first step for a while. I find a lot of dentists are very much
00:05:36
Speaker
As you're trained to look in millimeter pockets all day, it's like, OK, then I analyze all the steps in millimeter segments, and then I never take one. So knowing where to take that first step I think also helps build confidence that, hey, I am on the right path.
00:05:49
Speaker
You bring up something really key. I feel like, you know, when you know that you want to go into dental school, there are X amount of steps that you have to take. You're in dental school. You have to check off so many boxes to get through and graduate. But then after that, you're like, okay, well, I don't know what's next because so much of going into practice, owning your own practice is not taught in dental school.
Balancing Life and Practice Ownership
00:06:09
Speaker
So what are those first steps?
00:06:12
Speaker
Well, so I think the first step is to decide, do you want to start or buy? And also it's okay if you say, you know what, practice ownership may not be for me. Now, I will tell you, day one out of dental school, it's probably too soon to say, because I've definitely met some overconfident folks that are like, well, I'm going to do a startup all day, every day. And then if you really were to lay out the map and say, here's what the next 10 years looks like,
00:06:33
Speaker
A lot of them are going to go, I'm not cut out for that, except they don't know that until, uh-oh, they're already in it. And then it's like, uh, you know, because I've definitely met doctors before that while the default rate technically fill your rate on dental offices is insanely low, it doesn't necessarily mean that everybody's a wild success. I know a lot of docs that are just barely breaking even, kind of treading water, you know, four or five, six years in, and that doesn't make you feel good. In fact, it makes you feel like maybe I made a mistake and maybe I should sell this thing. And so if you sold your practice four or five, six years in,
00:07:02
Speaker
You're not a failure. I'm not saying that, but you're also not in that statistic of default either. So technically you didn't default, but
Understanding the 'Time Horizon' in Dentistry
00:07:09
Speaker
did you really get to that end in mind scenario that you had? Of course not. You didn't do this to sell your practice four or five years in. So I think that it's important to kind of look and say, okay, well, today I might want to do a startup fresh out of dental school. Maybe I'm just sick of being a student, sick of this or that, the other taking orders from someone else, so to speak.
00:07:25
Speaker
But I think pressing pause and saying, okay, what does my personal life look like? Because the one thing I know for a fact, and maybe this is a mistake, if you will, and not making the connection is, and that is, you gotta make the connection. You cannot have an awesome personal life and have a crappy professional life. You just can't do it. Now, you can have an awesome professional life and have a crappy personal life all day long. Happens to a lot of people. But if you have a crappy professional life, 99.9% of the time, because I try and stay away from always and never,
00:07:55
Speaker
So almost always you're going to have a pretty crappy personal life as well. And so I think that taking a second pressing pause and saying, okay, well, what are my options? What do I really want to do? And understanding like, Hey, look, maybe the first step is just going and getting a job and starting to, you know, make a living, earn an income and seeing what the business of dentistry is really about. I'm not one of these people that is.
00:08:16
Speaker
anti-DSOs. Of course, I think that they have their place in the market. I'm not in love with them. In fact, one of my mantras is to protect the private practitioner and preserve the private practice model. But with that being said, when you come out of dental school, going down the DSO path is not a bad route.
00:08:33
Speaker
throwing you in the deep end a little bit and saying, hey, you need to figure it out. It's how some of us learn best. So, you know, I, perhaps that's the first step. If I really had to give you like, Hey, step one, go out and start seeing what the world of dentistry looks like. And if you go into a private practice and you don't go to the DSR out, Hey, great.
00:08:49
Speaker
I would tell you to go get as much real world education as you can, because you get so much clinical stuff that anybody who's been out of school and been out for one or two years realizes, yeah, this wasn't talked about in any dental school curriculum whatsoever. So that real world education can be a massive accelerator on your plan, whatever it is. I would even say, go GPR, then work at a DSO for a little while. And if you can find a great private practice to go into, go do that for a little while.
00:09:16
Speaker
If you start your practice three, four, five years down the road, no harm in that. Nobody's going to fault you for that. There is a point where you can become stale, if you will, in your career where like banks and people are going, well, wait a minute, you've been out of the game now, you know, out of dental school for 10 years. Why do you want to start now? That looks a little odd, but I think until you hit, you know, much later in your career, would you hit that? Would you kind of hit that red flag or that bump in the road or anybody goes, well, why? You know, up until somewhere between year seven and 10, you'll be fine.
00:09:46
Speaker
So you would say between seven and 10 is that golden number? I would say, you know, by somewhere between seven and 10 you become stale. Well, what would be the golden number for somebody to go in? Gosh, everybody learns at different paces. But I would say, you know, definitely go two years out of school, do a residency program, whichever version you like, AGD, GPR, whichever version, then go work in the real world, if you will, and then say, okay, now I'm ready to figure out what my next steps are. And you might have some version of,
00:10:15
Speaker
I don't really want to be a practice owner a hundred percent, but maybe I can find a partnership track. Maybe I can find some version of partnership through one of these kind of, there's these like interesting DSO models that are coming out. And so that might be for you because the first thing I would tell you, one of the mistakes is practice ownership is not for everybody. It's just not.
00:10:32
Speaker
And the great thing about dentistry is you'll always be highly, highly employable because you're highly skilled individuals. But again, to go into debt towards buying a practice or starting and then having to sell in four or five years didn't do anybody any favors. This is kind of a swing and a miss.
00:10:48
Speaker
I think I asked that golden number question because again, it's that checkbox mentality. And again, we're not taught that. And I think that it's important for listeners, especially if they're just coming out of dental school to know, to keep that in the back of their mind to say, Hey, I'm going to give myself a goal of maybe
00:11:05
Speaker
doing a residency AGD GPR for a year, practicing four or five years, and seeing what's around and starting to work towards that goal and not leaving it on the back burner and getting to it at the 10-year mark where it may not be favorable for that person. Yeah. Time horizon. Time horizon is a phrase that
00:11:24
Speaker
Everybody should start adopting. Every young person in careers should start adopting. And to explain time horizon very simply, if you, anybody listening, if you have little ones, it's very applicable. I have two little boys. And so today they're five and three, but when I had my first born, he walked early, talked early, kind of started at 10 months in, was walking, talking just out of nowhere.
00:11:43
Speaker
Wow, we had our second child, we assumed while he's seeing older brother, he's going to walk, talk early, do all this stuff. And he didn't. And so then 12 months, we're like, oh, oh, oh, we're starting to get worried. 13, 14 months, well, we're getting to get nervous, we're calling the doctor, we're having him looked at whatever, and the doctor's like, he's 14 months, he's fine. Nothing to worry about. Like zero problem whatsoever. Give it a second. And so it hit me like when our first born started walking, while he walked early, he definitely
00:12:11
Speaker
In the beginning, like all of us stood up, fell down, stood up, fell down, and then started stood up, held onto something, took two steps, fell down. Okay, great. You know, my point is, is that if he did that and we, you know, this is our only child and we didn't know any better, we wouldn't go, I guess he's not walking. He stood up and fell down. Like, well, just not, just not for him. Walking is not for him. We wouldn't do that because we know there's a time horizon at which, Hey, he's good. And there's a time horizon at which, Hey, we need to go. We need to get help. We need to get whatever we need to ask and ask for. We need to go down that path.
00:12:41
Speaker
And we just certainly weren't there yet. And so it was funny because I didn't realize that though until our second born, when he didn't go as quickly, it was like, uh-oh, there must be something wrong. And the doctor's like, you're fine. Look, if 24 months rolls around, give us a call. And even then, she might say, 24 months, are they showing signs here and here and here? OK, great. At 36 months, give us a call. There's a time horizon to this stuff. And so some of this is just about,
00:13:07
Speaker
Understanding that there's a time horizon and that time horizon is different for all of us. We are at our own pace and life happens, right? So giving yourself time horizon and saying, okay, by this point. And it's not to say, oh, I have to do this by this time. That is not time horizon. It's understanding that, hey, it's okay if it takes a little longer, especially if it's at your pace and you're doing it the right way for you.
00:13:27
Speaker
because one of the things I believe is there isn't any one way to go down practice ownership path and there isn't any one way to make a practice successful because I've seen it done a bunch of different ways and I mean that wholeheartedly all the way down to like I know doctors that are taking nothing but HMOs and medicaids and they're massively profitable they don't have a money care in the world and I know other doctors that are like well I'm all fee for service but I can barely pay the bills and it's like okay and it's
00:13:52
Speaker
to each their own, as they say, but I've seen both models be massively successful. I've seen both models struggle. I've seen doctors do all
Models of Practice Ownership & Mentorship
00:13:58
Speaker
these different versions of ownership route. And so I don't have any, like, there's only one way to do it. I think that if you have an idea on how to do it, you need to have somebody in your corner to say, hey, that can work as long as you follow these guidelines. And you also need to have somebody say, hey, that's a bit crazy. And if you want to go down crazy path, great, cool, but just know that you're on the crazy path part, you're on the,
00:14:19
Speaker
You know, you're on the Howard Schultz Starbucks path. No one's going to pay $5 for coffee. What do you get declined by like 200 and some banks, et cetera? That was the crazy path. Now, if somebody said, hey, you're going to get declined by 240 banks and somewhere around 241 or 42 is when they're going to say, yes, what do you do? You just fastest route to get by 241 knows because at 242, I'm going to get a yes.
00:14:41
Speaker
If he didn't have that commitment and say, well, those guys didn't, 240 people didn't know what they were talking about. I'm going to keep going. Thank goodness he did, I guess. Cause I'm I've got a Starbucks sitting here off camera. I'm I'm always there. Right. But my point is, is that somewhere he either had the conviction or somebody said, Hey, you're on the crazy path. And this is what that looks like. You're going to hear no a heck of a lot. It's all good. Cause you're going to get to that. Yes. Right. Problem is a lot of us don't realize it. We don't know what path we're on or what the time horizon should look like. And.
00:15:09
Speaker
I think some people take that time horizon and say, oh, that means I need to achieve this by this is not what that means. Your analogy with your sons is so good.
Conclusion & Connecting with Jonathan Miller
00:15:17
Speaker
Um, in dentistry, imposter syndrome is so, so real and seeing others, you know, living their own journey, getting to their goals sooner than maybe you are can be really tough. You may, you may think that you miss the boat because you're not there. You're not on the same page as them. So that can be really, really difficult.
00:15:35
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Dental Fuel. If you would like to connect with Jonathan, you can find him on Instagram at Start Your Underscore Practice. Jonathan is also leading the IgniteDDS Dental Business Mastermind that's starting this month. This course will provide you the steps that you need to build the practice of your dreams. You gotta check it out. Check out the show notes for more information. If you'd like to connect with IgniteDDS, you can find Ignite on Instagram at IgniteDDS.
00:16:02
Speaker
and you can find me on Instagram at tesmaestas.dds. We will be back next week with another episode.