The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry

Group Dentistry Now welcomes Justin Coke, CEO of 7 to 7 Dental & Kevin Gladstone, Director of National Accounts of OrthoFI to discuss orthodontics and adding specialty dentistry to your dental group. Justin and Kevin focus on:

Patient volume & treatment acceptance
Current business conditions
Financing ortho treatment
Ortho business & clinical metrics
Much more

To learn more about OrthoFi’s patient acquisition, RCM and data & analytics solutions visit – https://startmoresmiles.com/

You can reach Kevin Gladstone – kevin.gladstone@orthofi.com

To learn more about 7 to 7 Dental visit – https://www.7to7dental.com/

You can reach Justin Coke – jcoke@7to7dental.com

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Justin Coke of 7 to 7 Dental & Kevin Gladstone of OrthoFI discuss orthodontics. Full Group Dentistry Now DSO Podcast Transcript:

Bill Neumann: Welcome, everyone, to the Group Dentistry Now show. I’m Bill Neumann, and we appreciate you joining us today. We’re going to talk about specialty dental care, and we’ve got a returning guest and a new guest to the show. First off, let’s introduce Justin Koch. Justin is the CEO of 7 to 7 Dental. I was going back through some of the previous articles we’ve done on group dentistry now and 7 to 7 won the Emerging Groups to Watch Award back in 2018. And at the time you had five locations, I believe you started sometime back in 2007. So you’ve been around quite a while as an organization. You are the CEO. You’re also the co-founder of 7 to 7. You’re from Texas, native born. Not a lot of people can claim that for sure. Lubbock, Texas. And again, going through your bio, it’s pretty cool. You were going to go through some of the things you did before you graduated high school. You had a lawn care business and you were a bagger at United Supermarkets and a prep and line cook too. So you had some jobs that most would say weren’t very glamorous before you founded, your co-founded 7to7. It’s great to have you here, Justin. Maybe you can fill in the blank between the bagger and going to become a co-founder at 7to7 and how you made that transition.

Justin Coke: Yeah. So, kind of the reason for that story is I’ve always worked, I’m always kind of entrepreneurial by trade. I’ve always wanted to have my own money, wanted to do my own thing. So I did a little bit of everything growing up, mostly in restaurants. Once I stopped mowing grass, I was mostly in restaurants and it was more on the customer service side. I was a server all through my late years in high school and all through college. My first professional job outside of college, I worked for AT&T. I was an account manager. Did that for about 18 months. Worked for a really bad boss and needed to get out of there. We’d worked for one of their competitors for about four years. It was always in sales. I was one of the top salesmen in the country for the organization I worked for, but recognized pretty quickly that telecommunications wasn’t my calling. So I left that world and moved into medical device, working with neurosurgeons, hospitals primarily, and did that for about three years at the company that I was working for, a small distribution company, and the owner of the company just typically made bad decisions on behalf of everybody but itself and so that wasn’t going to be a good fit for me long term either. I had a friend, still is a friend, really good friend of mine that is a dentist on his own practice, really did not like being the solo, all things to all people, CEO, dentist, you name it, didn’t enjoy that and I was kind of done with where I was. do something different and you kind of looked at me like I was crazy. And I said, I think we should do something in your world. Uh, it seems, it seems like there’s a lot of upside and not a ton of downside in, in dentistry. So I went, took about two weeks for a business plan or a kind of unique model. I hadn’t seen, uh, all my experiences in dentistry up to that point in my life were uh, very traditional Monday through Friday, Monday through Thursday, very, very restrictive hours for the working, uh, working families. And so I said, you know, let’s do something different. Let’s make it, let’s make it exciting. And so I came up with the seven to seven dental auto, which was, uh, seven days a week, Monday through Friday, we’re open seven to seven before work and after, after work and school. And then, uh, Saturdays and Sundays were open nine to five. So, really the kind of the core that we that we opened the business was was a really kind of a unique access to care for working families.

Bill Neumann: And so where do things stand now? What like number of locations? Maybe give us an idea of what a typical practice looks like at 7 to 7.

Justin Coke: So we’re, our practices are a little bit larger. So our smallest is about 10 ops. Our, our largest is 23 chairs that, that includes six ortho ortho bay. Um, but we’ve got, you know, somewhere, say somewhere in the neighborhood, about 90, uh, 95 operatories across San Antonio. And then it includes nine offices. Um, and so we’ve got two more in the pipeline that will be opening one in January, one in February. pretty aggressive growth plan over the next 30 months. I think we’re planning to scale to about nine or 10 more offices, with two of those being multi-specialty, but with the expectation of orthodontics being in all of our offices.

Bill Neumann: Great. We’re going to talk about ortho today for sure. Welcome back, Kevin. It’s great to have you back. Is this your second or third time on the podcast? Might be the third.

Kevin Gladstone: It might be. It’s always such a good time, Bill. So that’s why I come back.

Bill Neumann: Yeah, great. Well, it is great to have you back. It has been a little while. You’re the Director of National Accounts for OrthoPhi, but you have a long background in the dental industry. You’ve been in the industry for 17, 18 years. You were at Dentsply Sirona for quite a while, and you spent at least a decade working with group practices and DSOs when you were at Dentsply Sirona. And when did you come over to OrthoPhi And you’ve always been kind of handling the national council, but how many years have you been OrthoPHI?

Kevin Gladstone: So it’s been two and a half years since I moved from Densply, Sorona to OrthoPHI. And even in that time in the local space and more recently taking over and adding the director of sales role to that over the last three or four months, as a matter of fact.

Bill Neumann: OK, so you are. Yeah. All right. So you’re doing a lot more there now. And you also have you’re in charge of sales for Bella, Accept Care and Ortho Phi Solutions. Would you mind a couple of minutes like on each one of those solutions, just so the audience may be familiar with one or a couple of them, but probably not all of them.

Kevin Gladstone: Yeah, so OrthoPhy is the parent company. And OrthoPhy started more than a decade ago with the idea that it was going to combine really forward-thinking orthodontists and orthodontic practices to patients seeking that great quality care. So it started off as a way to start more cases in ortho and to help mold the administrative services. out of care. And over the years through acquisition, it added brands such as OrthoBank, which is at the time was its largest competitor in the patient AR automation space. And around that same time, OrthoFi acquired a company called Comprehensive Finance, and that added products like Compassionate Finance, which is in-office financing for dental practices. as well as Abella, which a lot of people in the DSO world know. And Abella is a product that identifies outstanding patient AR after insurance closes and automates the process to go out and make it more convenient for patients.

Bill Neumann: Thanks, Kevin. And the one thing I didn’t mention is on the personal side of things, Kevin is heavily involved in sports, youth sports. You do a lot of volunteer work and you have four kiddos to keep you busy. And he’s based in Cleveland, Ohio. So thanks for being back on this, Kevin.

Kevin Gladstone: Yep. Thanks for having me.

Bill Neumann: Great. So let’s get into the Q&A here. We’ll start with you, Justin. What are you seeing at the practice level? And maybe if we can compare Q1 of 2024 to we’re now in Q4, any differences as far as patient volume? What are the business conditions? What does treatment acceptance look like? Is there a difference?

Justin Coke: So we’ve not actually seen any slowdown since the beginning of this year. Uh, you know, I, I attend a lot of DSO conferences, so I want to keep my finger on the pulse of what’s happening. And I, and I hear a lot of, uh, a lot of issues of, uh, volume dropping, especially in orthodontics or specialty work. Uh, we’ve just not seen that. Um, one of the things that’s kind of unique is that, um, when things get tight, typically, uh, especially, and I know we’ve still got low unemployment when, but when when people get more kind of nervous about their jobs, they tend to not take off to go for those basic appointments at a dental practice any longer. And so we kind of fix that by not making them take off. So we’ve always done pretty good. We, we opened our organization in 2008, which is kind of laughable. And September of 2008 was the really fun time for all of us. And we really, we actually grew during that time when so many practices were kind of faltering. So, I’ve not personally seen anything. We look at our numbers very closely every single day and our patient volume is the same. Actually, our specialty work has started to increase.

Bill Neumann: That’s great news. How about you, Kevin? Overall, I mean, is 7 to 7 maybe a bit of an outlier? Like, what are you hearing from other customers?

Kevin Gladstone: Yeah, I would say 7 to 7, Justice Group is more of an outlier, especially when it comes to orthotics. get some of the metrics that have been shown over the last really three years at this point. Ortho, even heading into the back half of this year, has been on a year-over-year decline. for the last three years, which is unprecedented. You know, Ortho is that resilient business that, you know, really through any sort of difficult economic times, made the same sort of growth. But the last couple of years, coming out of COVID, it was spectacular. And then subsequent years since, it started to become more challenging. And we can kind of get into that, I’m sure, as we talk later on, but it’s been a more challenging environment for orthodontic practices the last couple years.

Bill Neumann: Maybe to Justin’s point, it has something to do with the hours that you operate, the ability for someone to know, access that type of care, you know, when they don’t have to take off from work. So, I think your model certainly makes a lot of sense. And where I think a lot of the DSOs maybe have opened up their hours a bit more, I still don’t know if many are doing, you know, quite what you’re doing, especially on the weekends. I mean, you’ve got incredible hours. So, All right. This is good stuff here. Let’s talk about this focus. And again, when things were great and interest rates were low, groups were buying their growth, right? They were out acquiring practices and everybody looked like a genius. Interest rates go up. Now, all of a sudden, everybody is focused on same-store growth, which theoretically, they probably should have been all along, but a lot of them weren’t. So when it comes to specialty as a way to improve that same store growth, let’s talk a little bit about that. And I know Justin, you’ve always had that orthodontic presence. So this is more growing what you already have, but maybe talk about specialty and how you’re able to continue to grow through offering those types of services.

Justin Coke: So I think it was, So orthodontics was not always in our DNA. We, we didn’t start out, uh, providing orthodontics and it happened sometime around 2013 for us. And it was primarily GP driven at the time. And my partner and I decided that, um, that model wasn’t great as, as the, I guess the tenure of an average associate can sometimes be less than the treatment model. And so we found ourselves with, you know, a lot of, uh, patients that needed to be in care and not always finding the right GP to take that over. So we decided pretty early on that we wanted to make our model orthodontic or orthodontist base. So we have orthodontists that work in our organization, but we always found that ortho was a nice, uh, it was never a huge piece of our revenue, probably about seven to 10%. And that’s increasing dramatically since we’ve since we’ve partnered with ortho by, but. One of the things that we love about orthodontics is it’s a very sticky product for family members. So when kids are an ortho, the whole family’s going to be coming to your practice for, you know, 18, 24 months. And then usually you’re bringing on another child. Then many times the parents, after the kids are outside, they want to be an ortho. So it’s a, it’s a great stickiness for your practice, for all of your, you know, your hygiene and restorative for the entire family as well. And then as far as other specialty goes, we find that patients just really don’t want to leave. They want us to be able to do everything. They want us to be the entire dental ecosystem. So over the last few years, we’ve added oral surgery and endodontics with specialists in our organization. Obviously they’re not working the same hours that our GP practices are, but I think it’s important to really start to kind of see what it is that your patients are asking for. And then if you’re able to give it to them, do it.

Bill Neumann: So just so I have this clear, because I thought you had ortho from the beginning, but from 2008 to 2013, really, you didn’t. You were GP focused. You added in ortho around 2013. And so you’ve got this stickiness, as you call it. You’ve got the family coming in, probably bringing in another child that’s coming in for ortho. And so from bringing ortho in, you’ve actually saw the opportunity to add other specialties on top of that. So that’s great. Did I get that right?

Justin Coke: That’s correct.

Bill Neumann: Okay. And then from adding in ortho, what was the next? You mentioned oral surgery. So that seemed to be the next natural specialty to kind of layer in there?

Justin Coke: So we did oral surgery and endodontics about the same time. So we’ve got a lot of GPs that provide oral surgery services and endodontic services. But there’s, you know, there’s a point in which even the best GP kind of gets over their skis and needs a little help. And, and I, and I think that it allows our, it allows our GPs to feel comfortable and say, Hey, you know, I’m going to do what I, what I can do. But at the end of the day, I’m going to give the patient the best experience. And many times that’s going to be going to a specialist. And then it makes it easy for the patient because they’re not having to leave the office that they’re comfortable with.

Bill Neumann: So, you also mentioned, you know, listen to what your customers are asking for. So, it may not be ortho. In your case, it was. So, ortho was the first specialty that you added in. I mean, traditionally, is that what you’ve seen maybe with other DSOs, peers of yours out there that they start off GP, that’s kind of the first specialty or does it really vary?

Justin Coke: So, the groups that I run with, they don’t they don’t typically have a lot of in-house specialty. This is kind of, it’s not unique to seven at seven, but the guys that I’m friends with, most of those guys are, they’re kind of a decathedox. They, they learn how to do a lot of this stuff on their own and they, they will take a lot, probably 90% of it in house, but they will refer out a little bit. But the, for us, uh, being an associate driven model, not a, not a practice owner driven model, um, you know, We have a lot of early career dentists at workforce and they’re just not ready for that stuff and, and making it easier for our patients to allow them to get those services done while being in an environment that they’re comfortable with, not having to go somewhere else, learn a new team, fill out new paperwork, new documents, you know, insurance verification, all of the nonsense that comes with finding yourself in a new provider’s place. They don’t have to do that anymore.

Bill Neumann: So Justin, you’ve recently partnered with OrthoPhy. Can you talk a little bit about that process? First of all, what was the reason? Were you using another solution? Were you noticing that maybe patients were having trouble with paying for orthodontic treatment? And maybe that’s changed in the past couple of years. We certainly know that groceries have become more expensive, so maybe they’re looking for more creative ways to pay for ortho treatment. Maybe talk a little bit about the why behind partnering with Ortho Phi and how that’s worked out.

Justin Coke: So Kevin’s in the position he’s in for a reason. He’ll find you. He’ll track you down and he’ll tell you about Ortho Phi. I didn’t even know what Ortho Phi was. And he, he found me at a, at a DSO conference that we were at. And I was like, I’m not really interested. Um, I don’t really feel like the bank for, you know, thousands of customers, it seems pretty risky. And he’s like, just give me 20 minutes, you know, maybe not here, but just do, just do a call with me next week. And so he ended, he introduced me to the ortho fine model and it made a lot of sense to me. It was actually something we wanted to be able to do, which was offer more attractive payment options. But. Because we’re a GP model, we don’t really have the, the know-how or the bandwidth, if you will. We’re not, we’re not an ortho office, so everybody doesn’t run the same. It’s not like monthly payments, just an office. So we didn’t really have the bandwidth that I don’t have a, I’ve got a billing department, but I certainly don’t have people that are aggressive collections people. When, when people aren’t making their payments and ortho fi made a lot of sense to me because we’re, we’re not competing against other GP practices for orthodontics. We’re competing against orthodontists that traditionally have made Uh, financing ortho, very, very simple for their customers. It’s like, Oh, it’s 200 bucks a month, you know, a hundred bucks down, 200 bucks down, whatever it is, which makes it very easy for a parent that’s looking at it. Gone. Okay. I got three kids got to go through ortho pretty soon. Uh, and I can’t come up with $15,000. And so this makes it real easy. We were using traditional, uh, financing partners, care credit, uh, you name it. And that’s great. If somebody can get approved for that, but you know, the majority of the people that attempt to get that, they don’t either get some or nothing. They don’t get enough to actually cover the entire patient portion. Then it became very challenging. Our, our ortho starts are relatively low for the number of patients that we see in a, in a year throughout our offices. And it’s quite frustrating. And we implemented ortho fly June of This year completely took a while to get it ramped up. There’s a lot of back end that has to happen, but it was, it was a kind of game changing for us while we immediately saw the response from our patients to be.

Bill Neumann: Thanks, Justin. And yep, I do see Kevin at all the DSO meetings. He definitely, he’s out there and talking to everybody. But it’s great that, you know, that’s great feedback because I think if you don’t know who Ortho Phi is or the way they work with their partners, you may consider them similar to, like you mentioned, a care credit or some other organization out there. So, Kevin, maybe let’s talk about the differences and how you partner with DSOs, whether they’re ortho-specific or whether they’re GP offering orthodontic services.

Kevin Gladstone: Sure. So, typically, orthodontic practices, like Justin said, they have a process in place and they’re moving along, starting patients, and they’re offering very flexible financial terms. When you shift over to the DSO, you typically find The first is that they’re often not familiar with orthodontics, at least not in the traditional sense, where they attempt to maybe run ortho as the same way they ran GP. So they’re not necessarily offering in-office financing, or they’re not comfortable offering in-office financing. Maybe like Justin, you’re more comfortable offering third-party financing. So what OrthoFi does is it kind of comes in and becomes a process and a scalable to onboard patients, to present very flexible financial terms, to manage all the insurance and patient AR, and to ultimately start more cases in a responsible manner. So you can drive same-store revenue and build more same-store, same-start cash. So we call that, we think of payment or driving more cash flow to the practice. Those are kind of the things that co-ferentiates OrthoFi. from any other platform out there that most DSOs are using.

Bill Neumann: Let’s stay on you, Kevin, for a second here. You kind of mentioned a couple of things to pay attention to. What are those primary metrics? You may have mentioned some of those from a business perspective that DSOs should be paying attention to when it comes to orthodontics.

Kevin Gladstone: So the two most common that I hear these days are case starts or revenue growth. and cash flow. So those are certainly the two to look at right out of the gates. The one that probably pops up more frequently with DSOs and others is delinquency rates. So when you’re taking on some risk as far as offering in-office financing, certainly patient AR rises to the top. And so that’s a metric they should look at. But I think one of the key metrics that a lot of DSOs miss is Think about that as when the patient’s in the practice, what are you doing at the practice to make your orthotic services the most attractive to the patient so they can sign that contract today? Because if they leave your office without signing that contract today, the likelihood of starting that case goes down dramatically. So I would suggest to cash flow, case parts, and patient AR, a really key metric is your same day starts.

Bill Neumann: Great. That’s great information. Justin, on the clinical side, can you discuss metrics that you look at at 7 to 7?

Justin Coke: On the, the number one thing that we look at is hygiene rates. You know, a lot of practices don’t, you know, especially doctors, they don’t, they don’t look at hygiene as the reason for the work that they do. You look at hygiene checks, almost an interference to their clinical day. But for me, it is the driver of everything that we do because that’s the thing that people come back to the dentist for. Nobody comes back in with the expectation of getting clinical work done. The clinical work is found. during that examination process that happens because the patient came in for their semi-annual cleaning. And so what I’m looking at, what we’re tracking is, are we growing that hygiene department every six months? Are we growing that year over year or is it stagnant? If it’s stagnant, we start to look at what’s going on. Obviously when we open new offices within similar geographic areas, we’re going to have a little bit of attrition for those patients moving to the new space. But overall we’re looking for, for year over year growth in hygiene because that immediately affects our restorative numbers, it affects our hygiene, our orthodontic referrals, our oral surgery and endodontic referrals at the same time. So if there’s one thing that I’m looking at about anything else, it’s that right there.

Bill Neumann: So as maybe a new organization is bringing in orthodontic services, can you discuss maybe any things they should kind of look out for, maybe some mistakes that are made early on? So you’re doing GP, you want to bring in ortho, maybe we can prevent some challenges that maybe 7 to 7 has had or just in general. So we could start with you, Justin.

Justin Coke: So this is a great question. I love this one because Orthodontics can be, uh, it’s real sexy, shiny, and you know, it’s, it’s five, 6,000 bucks at a time. Um, and a lot of practices forget that you’ve got 18 months to earn that money. You don’t get $5,000 today. You don’t get $6,000. So you gotta, you gotta earn that money over 18 months. And that means you’ve got 18 months of, of appointments of every single start that you have. And if you have a relatively small practice or you don’t have capacity, your orthodontic department will overrun everything else that you do. And you have to, you have to keep orthodontics very consolidated and it, and you have to stay within the rules that you create to manage your orthodontic team or your orthodontic care with the rest of the care that you are providing to your community. So basically what I’m saying is orthodontics, as wonderful as it is for your, for your practice and your community, it can actually overrun your GP practice if you’re not careful.

Bill Neumann: Kevin, anything you’d like to add to that?

Kevin Gladstone: I, what I would say is I think maybe to add on what Justin’s mentioning there is you have to have systems and processes to support the orthodontic care that you’re going to offer your patients. It’s not just a matter of, you know, kind of turning on the switch and or offer orthodontic services. You know, there are, if you have great systems and great processes, or if you outsource those systems and processes to a partner that knows what they’re doing, you can be very successful, but without the wrong

Bill Neumann: I think Kevin might have froze up there a little bit, but we got you back. That’s good. So for anybody that’s already, so that’s great. So that’s people bringing in orthodontic services for the first time. How about you’re already delivering the services, any challenges there? You talk a little bit about maybe how OrthoPHY helps groups out that have already been, I mean, similar to what Justin was doing, right? You were already offering ortho services and really helped them turn things around there as far as giving them patients options that maybe didn’t exist before from financing side of things. But Kevin, talk a little bit about that. Do you have groups that reach out to you that are already offering ortho, maybe starts are down and they’re concerned about that?

Kevin Gladstone: We do. There’s really three reasons why groups reach out to us. The first one is that starts are down. They’re trying to figure out why that might be the case. And certainly OrthoPHY can help reinvigorate same-store sales growth. by offering more flexible terms, but within the business rules of the practice. So keeping the practice very, while being very flexible for patients. So yes, we can offer support there. The other place we help practices that offer orthodontic services already is just in their processes and systems. So a lot of groups, you know, when they start to, when they’re offering ortho services and they start to get to a certain size, and Justin mentioned this, they kind of, the ortho starts to overwhelm their day-to-day model. It’s usually because they don’t have good systems and processes. So we come in and offer the systems and processes specifically for patient AR and insurance AR. So I got to help get them back on track. That’s the reason that typically groups reach out to us is because they don’t have a good staff member that is handling the care or the services they’re offering. So, you know, we kind of become that support mechanism on the patient insurance AR side to help them grow and scale and really go beyond what they were even doing before.

Bill Neumann: Again, Justin, you mentioned it before, but you recently partnered with OrthoPhi, and you’ve seen, you know, dramatic changes already. Can you talk a little bit about some of those results?

Justin Coke: Yeah. So, we have, we probably have increased our pace starts by about 70%, which you probably ask yourself, were you guys doing anything before? But like I said, it’s pretty dramatic how much the the monthly payments were, were crucial to, I mean, we, you know, we never were at a loss for, for consult because we’re, we’re very large, very large organization in our city. We have, you know, see tens of thousands of hygiene patients every single year. And that just leads to natural orthodontic referrals. And it doesn’t matter how many referrals you have, your patients can’t afford it and, or can’t get approval for, for traditional, you know, dental financing. And we found that to be the case. So another thing that we worked with OrthoFi was kind of streamlining our pricing model because we had different prices for bracket and wire and Invisalign and let’s get stuff. So they really kind of helped us streamline that. So now we’re, we’ve got more normalization across the platforms because one of the things we’re trying to do is increase the Invisalign footprint in our organization because it requires fewer visits. Um, we like, we really like their technology patients like it. Uh, but the visit count is, you know, the, every time somebody is in a chair, it’s the most expensive thing to do with them. And so the, the fewer visits. And so we, or if I work with us again, say, Hey, let’s, let’s normalize your pricing so that you’re not giving a patient one more reason to go with bracket and wire. Visalign is the direction that most people want, and that’s where you want them to go as well. So that just, and it’s just a loan has increased our revenue because Now there’s no, there’s, there’s no lowering of fees for a bracket and wire, which actually takes more chair time. Patients are accepting Invisalign more readily and orthodontics as a whole more readily. And so our revenue is, is more than doubled in orthodontics since we, since we partnered with OrthoPHY.

Bill Neumann: Well, thank you, Justin. That’s great to hear. Kevin, I expect you’re going to be getting some emails and some phone calls after this. You might not have to chase as many people down like you did, Justin, after this podcast with those results. So I’m going to ask Justin this. As far as 2025 goes, you mentioned it early when we first started things out that You’re going to be opening up, you’ve got a practice in January, I think you mentioned that you’re going to be opening up. Are you de novo acquisition, a combination of the two? And then I think you mentioned two in 2025. So what does 25 look for you? It looked like for seven to seven. And then maybe, you know, are there any tools out there that you’re looking at? Whether it’s to support patients, practices? Talk about 25. I think people are curious. We’re, you know, in Q4, beginning Q4 of 2024.

Justin Coke: So I’ll start the, I’ll start it off with answering our model. So we, we’ve been exclusively DeNovo to this point and the models work well for us. Part of the reason that we don’t have hundreds of practices under our belt. We’ve got nine heading into 11. We grow them pretty thoughtfully. Um, we, we, we’ve taken on over the years, very, very little debt. We pay for our, we pay for it with cash as we go. And, but I do have plans for. We’ve already got the leases done, pretty much site plans done, working on permits for two offices. One that should open in January, one that will open shortly after in February. And then we also have plans to finalize all the structuring for our molten specialty. It’ll be multi specialty minus orthodontics because we’re keeping ortho at the practice level. And so we’ll have a molten specialty, which will be housing oral surgery, uh, endodontics and periodontics. And, um, I know it’s a pretty busy year, but next year we’re going to kind of double down and go a little bit bigger. We’re 26, but 25 is, is a, is a big year for us. We’re excited about the things that are coming. Like I said, we haven’t seen any downturn. I, you know, I’m going to be optimistic and say, we’ll go through the end of the year with that same, with that same hopes. But, uh, you know, as far as, as far as systems in place, we, I’m a technology kind of junkie. I love things that are going to help us run our business and patient and employee experience better. Um, if we can, if we can automate a lot of stuff, which Kevin’s team does that. We’re working with a group called aura to practice management software. Um, we’re getting ready to deploy that across our network, which isn’t going to be fun, but it’s going to be, uh, it’s going to be pretty exciting and necessary for our continued growth, but it automates a lot of stuff. Let’s smart people do smart things instead of entering stuff into a system, which is why I really enjoyed ortho five. They give us great reporting, take a lot of the work off of our team and, and at the end of the day, They give our patients exactly what they want, which is flexible, affordable ways to get their services that they want done. Especially when you’re talking about their kids, they want to be able to do it, but a lot of people just can’t, you know, come out of pocket for that. So we’re always looking at ways to make our patient experience better, whether it be through automation, streamlining their appointments or making it affordable. We’re always looking at new, new options.

Bill Neumann: Great. And Justin, just in case anybody wants to find out more about 7 to 7 or they want to reach out to you, what’s the best way to do that?

Justin Coke: So our website’s 7to7dental.com and my email is jcoke at 7to7dental.com.

Bill Neumann: Excellent. We’ll drop the URL and the email address in the show notes. Thank you, Justin. Kevin, we’ll finish with you. What does 2025 look like for OrthoPHY and how can people get in touch with you to find out how they can get the results that 7 to 7 has had in a relatively short period of time when it comes to ortho?

Kevin Gladstone: And so, you know, we’re operating under the assumption that the market’s going to kind of continue at the rate that it is currently. So certainly challenging, which means practices should think about being even more affordable in terms of the way that they offer financing to patients to get those case starts. But we have three pretty exciting changes to, or maybe additions to the platform coming up over the next several months and into 2025. The first one is we’re actually going to offer third-party financing alongside in-office financing for practices on the platform starting next year. We do it in a really innovative way because we know that third-party financing is important to drive cash flow, specifically for DSOs these days. So third-party financing sometime early next year. The other thing we’re going to offer is the opportunity for practices to pass along credit card fees to patients if that’s something they want to do. So surcharging will be an option. And then we’re launching, which is really exciting, is what we call IMAX. And that’s an opportunity to trying to reduce the in-network discounts that often come as part of being in-network with different carriers. And what that enables practices to do is to shift some of the burden, the financial burden away from the practice and that those fees that typically you would have to discount to be a member of, now you’re going to be able to do that in a much more thoughtful way.

Bill Neumann: It’s great. And Kevin, people want to get in touch with you. How do they do so?

Kevin Gladstone: So I’m going to offer my cell phone to at the risk of just getting bombarded with with all these text messages and phone calls. But you certainly get in touch with me at Kevin Gladstone at Ortho Phi Dotcom. And feel free to give me a call at six to six three one nine five four one five. It’s a California number. The guy at heart, so that’s a back from my days on the West Coast, now transplant back in Ohio.

Bill Neumann: There you go. Well, great. Well, thank you, Kevin. And thank you, Justin. Great conversation. A lot of opportunity in ortho if you do it the right way. So reach out to Kevin. And of course, Justin was kind enough to offer up his email address, too, if you kind of want to find out what they’re doing on the specialty side of things. In general, you can do that. Thanks everybody for watching us today. This is the Group Dentistry Now Show and until next time, I’m Bill Neumann. Appreciate it. Thanks guys.

Justin Coke: Thanks Bill. Appreciate you having us.

Kevin Gladstone: Thanks Justin.