![](https://www.groupdentistrynow.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/PK-DB-5297929-110124_GDN_NOV.gif")
Dr. George Hariri, Co-Founder & CFO of Shared Practices, joins the GDN Show. We have a great conversation, including:
➡️ Shared Practices journey from podcast to DSO
➡️ Advantages of a remote DSO
➡️ Private equity’s prominence in the DSO space
➡️ Dental industry trends and the DSO landscape
Listen to the Shared Practices podcast – https://www.sharedpractices.com/podca…
If you like our show, please give us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review on iTunes https://apple.co/2Nejsfa and a 👍 on YouTube.
Choose your favorite listening app below and subscribe today so you don’t miss an episode! Full transcript is also provided below.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
Full Transcript:
Bill Neumann:
Hey, I’d like to welcome everybody back to the group Dentistry Now show. My name is Bill Newman. Thanks for being here today. Whether you’re listening in or you’re watching us on YouTube, we appreciate your support and we are now over 100 episodes, so that’s pretty cool. Something that I begrudgingly got into several years ago has been a lot of fun. Get to talk to a lot of great people and just learn a lot. So hopefully as an audience you’re learning a lot too. So got a special guest here today and actually kind of interesting and I’m a little nervous because he’s a fellow podcaster, so I’m sure he is going to give me a grade at the end. And if it’s not good, just don’t… I’m going it edit out.
Dr. George Hariri:
I’ll give you the grade off air. I’ll wait till we hang up to tell you how you did that.
Bill Neumann:
That sounds good. Because if it’s a low grade, I’m going to edit it out anyway and you’ll probably hear my voiceover say A+.
Dr. George Hariri:
You could beep me out if I give you an F.
Bill Neumann:
We have Dr. George Hariri here. So George, welcome to the group Dentistry Now show. Appreciate it.
Dr. George Hariri:
Thanks Bill. Really, really happy to be on and excited to talk DSO today.
Bill Neumann:
So George is interesting because he’s a dentist but also the CFO for a company that he co-founded. So normally you don’t hear dentist and CFO together.
Dr. George Hariri:
No.
Bill Neumann:
So I’d love to find out a little bit about your background and do you have a finance background as well as being a clinician?
Dr. George Hariri:
I might as well just tell the story from the beginning, and I think it might be easier because I kind of rounded about my way into this role. So the story really starts back in August of 2016 with shared practices. So that’s when our founder and CEO, Richard Lowe, he uploaded the first episode of the Shared Practices Podcast.
Dr. George Hariri:
And his thesis for the show was to create a Netflix season type format for walking somebody through the idea of becoming a practice owner all the way through is practice ownership for me, season one. To how to do an acquisition, season two. Do a de novo season three, leadership, staff, marketing, growth. And so over the course of seasons years on this show, Richard kind of started this idea and we all kind of piggybacked onto it of creating a resource for the young dentist out there who’s interested in practice ownership.
Dr. George Hariri:
And the irony of this is it was kind of as young dentists, so everyone in our company, we have six partners now are between a 2015 grad and an ’18 grad. And we set out to teach dentists how to run practices efficiently so that they can compete with DSOs. And eventually we became one, but that wasn’t ever the initial intention. So the podcast is really what started it all. So I think do you have any questions about that or anything about our show and then we can keep going through.
Bill Neumann:
Well we talked about this just before we started to record and I said the journey from podcast to DSO is one I don’t think anybody else has done yet. So that’s very cool. So obviously a bunch of steps in between the podcast and the DSO.
Dr. George Hariri:
Yeah, so about seven months in, Richard was doing it all by himself and then he asked me to join him because the workload had gotten to be a bit much with running a show and he was doing an army residency at the time and I was only a third year dental student. So I’m a third year dental student and I jump on the show and our first foray into monetization and trying to build a business was online courses.
Dr. George Hariri:
And so we built online courses for dentists and then we added a second service which was consulting services. So we sort of innovated on a philosophy that we call analytics-based practice management and we built a department of former office managers to coach our audience who are now practice owners because we’ve been doing this for a few years. And really the first kind of big step for us was becoming a consulting company and now we have close to 100 clients, we have eight coaches.
Dr. George Hariri:
And so we’ve sort of built a fairly modestly sized coaching company and me and one of the dentist friends of mine were at this DSO summit who’s one of the events to talk about future trends in dentistry. And they talked about the rate of consolidation and the market share of DSOs right now and the market share in the future. And they talked about a lot of the infrastructure that’s required to have a DSO, a lot of things like regional management, online education for training your teams and doctors. And I think the one thing that was very clear was the strength of a DSO was built on the back of the doctors that are in the DSO. And so sitting in the seminar, it sort just kind of appeared to me that the infrastructure we have in our company is not all that far off from being the backend MSO sort of infrastructure to hold practices together that we own and operate.
Dr. George Hariri:
So that was in the end of 2020, so that was the late 2020. And so we spent the year of 2021 building a group platform, which is essentially taking independent dental entrepreneurs and merging us together to be one large group so that we can skip a few steps in the banking world and go up to the mid-market banking products that could allow us to grow without needing a private equity company.
Dr. George Hariri:
So we combined six partners, 10 practices, and we did our group platform at the end of 2021. We ended up selling two of those practices off because they weren’t long term fits. And then this year we’ve opened up five locations so far and we have about three to five more before the end of the year that we’ll be opening. And our niche in the DSO world is a dentures and implants model. So one of our partners opened this dentures and implants practice in Memphis and showed this surgery only model where you don’t have hygiene. And what it allowed a dentist to do is make a lot… It’s a high fee surgery.
Dr. George Hariri:
And what we’ve essentially done is created an offering for dentist in our audience to join us on our team and become doctors in our DSO. And our whole kind of message to them is we’ve taught you how to do private practice and that’s always an option for you and we’re here to help you with that. And we have our resources, our education, our coaching, and we have an opportunity on our end that we think out does private practice as a typical GP and we’re training GPs on how to do these surgeries and opening locations around the country for our dentures and implants model. So we’re, I guess that’s kind of the story. I don’t know how to say that with less words.
Bill Neumann:
Yeah, no, that’s really cool. So you still have that consulting coaching side of the business and the docs that are part of that, they can just stay over there and do their own thing and learn from you all. But if the model, the dentures and implants model surgery, no hygiene makes more sense to them, then they can actually partner up with you. So you have original partners, you said you’re opening up five locations or you opened up five additional locations. Are these all de novos so the original partners are there and you just continue to open up?
Dr. George Hariri:
So we formed a six way partnership. So we have six partners, six dentists, and we are the C-suite of the company and so we had to fill in different roles. And somebody needed to be a CFO and I have a minor in math from college. So for me, quantitative reasoning and analytics based decision making is very much up my alley. What I’ve had to learn is accounting. It’s like extremely technical and one of us had to do it.
Bill Neumann:
Rules that don’t always make sense and a lot of assumptions.
Dr. George Hariri:
And I think initially it was a high learning curve and now we have two CPAs that work for us and so I have people to translate for me. But being a dentist operator, former operations person in the finance role has really helped me see it from both sides. And I think that it lends for better long-term decision making, I think even though I might not have a formal finance background. I think I can pick up the concepts that I need to, but I also understand operations thoroughly. And so it’s not traditional, but I don’t think anything about our company is traditional.
Bill Neumann:
It’s not a bad thing. So you’re CFO so tell me some of the positions that the other partners are as well. You have a CEO obviously, but what else?
Dr. George Hariri:
So I’ll walk you through the six partners and what each one of them does.
Bill Neumann:
That’d be great.
Dr. George Hariri:
So Richard Lowe was the one that hit publish of our podcast first time. He’s our CEO. And his main role is external outreach. So he’s very much our audience facing leader. So anytime we’re talking to dentists, we’re trying to do those things, Richard is kind of the face of our company as we are private dentist services our coaching, and then we offer buyer representation services like due diligence. We offer legal services. And we’re going to continue to build out our list of services. As our DSO grows, we have more people in house and we can begin offering more things. So Richard is really the head of the snake. And Alex Sharp the second I would mention here he’s our president and he’s our internal leader. So our internal team views him as the person that go to for the top of the command.
Dr. George Hariri:
And so that really helps with internal culture. We’re a completely remote company with over 100 employees, so imagine the challenges of culture building. Those are the types of things that we put on Alex’s broad shoulders because of his experience as a general practitioner building a large practice with one of the best cultures I’ve ever seen. So that’s our president, I’m our CFO, I’ve kind of already brought me up. My jobs are really, future direction is very much up my alley. I was the initial CEO and primary visionary of the company and so I very much am… My hands, are in future directions where we’re going. And also capital allocation. Those are probably my two biggest kind of roles. Matt Garino, that’s the one you talked to who introduced us, that’s our coo, he just has his hands in everything. I mean everything goes through him on the day to day.
Dr. George Hariri:
So he’s extremely valuable. Austin Davis and that’s our chief dental officer. So he’s the one that innovated the dentures and implants model. He’s the one that opened the first one. And so he’s in charge of a lot of the build out internally of the operations to support as many practices and our growth rate and all of those things. And then finally Matt Ford, he’s sort of head of business development internally and he’s scouting new locations, scouting doctors. He’s the one that allows us to open locations at the rate that we do. So that’s the team of six.
Bill Neumann:
That’s excellent. So you mentioned being remote, so all of your what, 100 plus employees, is that what you had mentioned were-
Dr. George Hariri:
I don’t know how many, honestly. We were joking about it the other day that we need to get a total on that.
Bill Neumann:
And I guess some of that stemmed from CVID. When you kind of started everything, everybody was remote anyway. Any plans that bring people in or is that working pretty well and you going to keep at it?
Dr. George Hariri:
No, I think the remoteness of our company is one of our biggest strengths. I mean we can hire people so fast. I mean we hire people in two to three days most times for central positions because of the fact that we can look at the entire country as an option. And I mean, anytime you’re growing a business, you pick your challenges. And for us, we want to pick the challenge of culture internally because that’s in our hands. That’s something we can control and that’s something that we can be the decider of our outcome. Versus going in person or having people in a local facility. Hiring becomes a much bigger challenge. And with the trend, hiring isn’t going to get any easier in the future. So we want to be able to put the growth of our organization in our own hands. We’re fully remote as many positions as possible. The only people that are on site are at dental offices.
Bill Neumann:
So you’re going to stick with remote. Makes a ton of sense. You mentioned that the six partners, are they scattered around the country? What does that look like?
Dr. George Hariri:
Yeah, so I’m in Arizona and one of our partners is in Arkansas, Indiana, Memphis, South Dakota, New York.
Bill Neumann:
And so as you start to add potential, not partners but practices and you’re bringing maybe some that were being coached and they’re coming over to be part of the DSO. Do you strategically look at markets that you already have and you kind of want to expand in those markets? So you’re almost like, you’re in Memphis, so let’s focus in Memphis and New York and have those partners almost mentor in those areas.
Dr. George Hariri:
The first time before we formed our partnership, I got a call from Austin Davis, the one who started the model in Memphis. And he was telling me about it and two weeks later I was on an airplane to go check it out because it sounded so interesting. And four months after that we opened up the first location in Phoenix. Because Phoenix at the time it is our headquarters. Our headquarters is in Phoenix, we do have a headquarters. We teach dentist out of our learning facility there. So we are somewhat local to Phoenix, but it’s not the large percentage of our central staff live in Phoenix. And so we opened the first location called Dally Dentures and implants to test the model for national growth in Phoenix. And then we said, okay, we want to go to the best markets for this model nationwide and open remote locations wherever they are, but we’re not sure how that’s going to go, so let’s test opening one more semi-remote.
Dr. George Hariri:
So we went two hours to North Prescott, Arizona and we opened up Prescott dentures and implants to test the process of opening up a practice without anyone stepping foot in it. And so we opened up Prescott and then we learned some things, every time you do this you learn things, you get better. And then the next round we opened up four at the same time in Little Rock, Atlanta, Louisville and Reno. So that was our first foray into exploring different markets to see which markets do better than others. Complete remote opening across the country. And the one that we’ve opened now is Denver, and then by the end of the year we should have Chatanooga, Birmingham, Omaha, and maybe a couple others. So we’re just going where we think there’s a good fit between real estate opportunity, doctor and market demographics.
Bill Neumann:
Okay. Wow. Some aggressive goals and you’re not just sticking to one area for sure.
Dr. George Hariri:
No.
Bill Neumann:
Yeah, that sounds great. All right, so if an audience member, dentist is listening to this right now, or watching it and they happen to be interested in maybe becoming a part of shared practices. What does it look like as far as the coaching opportunity first? So a lot of people come in to be coached to the consulting. And what do they get? So you talked about the education, I’m assuming there’s clinical education. Is there business education as well?
Dr. George Hariri:
It’s actually only business education. No clinical education. We view ourselves as a non-clinical company when it comes to dentist mentorship and leadership. We are all dentists, all of the partners are dentists, and we have the philosophy that dentists are to make the decision on clinical decisions and that’s their role. And we try to stay out of that. So we’re much more non-clinical, but usually there’s no crossover between a client and a partner doctor or a doctor at a location.
Dr. George Hariri:
Because usually clients are people that own their own practices and we’re not in the business of acquiring. So we don’t acquire existing locations, we’re doing our own de novos. So we usually get someone at that pre ownership stage where they’re deciding do I acquire my own practice or do I form a partnership and do I join just shared practices to be a partner doc?
Dr. George Hariri:
And for us, we view as their decision and we offer solutions for both. So we can help you buy a practice. And then once you buy a practice, we have one of our coaches who will… Essentially, so our product on the coaching side is called analytics based practice management. And it’s a trained coach looking at analytics dashboards to figure out the buttons to grow a practice.
Dr. George Hariri:
And then working with the local team on site, the office manager, the staff to get the changes in place needed to actually grow the practice. What we found is in our first foray at this dealing directly with the dentist, they were becoming our bottleneck. And so now we talk to the dentist, we get the plan approved, and then we go straight to the staff to pull it off because we don’t want the dentist in our way.
Dr. George Hariri:
So in the course of all of our clients, we average about 40% per year of internal growth so far. So our whole consulting philosophy is same store growth using analytics based principles. And kind of like Moneyball stuff, things that you might not have thought were good ideas, but analytically make a lot of sense, like opening hygiene capacity more than people might think, different items like that. So that’s the consulting side, but that’s after a private dentist is in practice ownership. Usually if you’re in practice ownership, you’re not going to leave that to be a doc in one of our dentures and implants locations.
Bill Neumann:
Right. So you really, you’ve got some people coming in before they say, should I start my own practice or by my own practice or possibly partner with you.
Dr. George Hariri:
And they’re looking at their prospects of what does ownership on my own look like versus what does ownership with shared practices look like?
Bill Neumann:
Yep. And you get the message out through the podcast, is that originally how you get the messaging out? I mean it seems like just looking at the website, super young crowd. I mean like you mentioned everybody there is very, very young. Haven’t been in practice a ton of years, so you’ve got that and now remote, which fits with the young vibe, what people want. People find you from the… Do you have relationships with any of the dental schools out there? What does that look like?
Dr. George Hariri:
Are you talking about for docs for our dentures implants locations or clients for our consulting?
Bill Neumann:
Yeah, I mean I would say probably for the docs. How do they find out about you? The ones that could be potentially part of the DSO?
Dr. George Hariri:
We use our audience for both. So our audience is very privy to the fact that we are our own DSO that’s opening up dentures and implants locations and they know that we offer GP consulting. So we use the audience for both. I mean we get clients from our audience all the time. We get our drip of clients from our audience, our podcast. It’s been around for six years and I think on iTunes we have more five star reviews in any other dental podcast. So it’s kind of grown that way.
Dr. George Hariri:
And on the DSO side, we announce it on our podcast, we have our docs on the show, they talk about their experience working with us. And I think that that’s found… But I mean I’d be lying to you if I said that finding doctors for our practices is not number one, two, and three on our list of things that we’re trying to become more efficient and find better ways of doing. Because every DSO has that problem.
Bill Neumann:
Sure, yeah, it’s not just… I mean you don’t have the hygiene problem, but yeah, it’s not just dentist, it’s anybody in a dental practice, unfortunately. So super, super interesting. What do you think about… Because I’m curious, you are certainly not a traditional DSO by any stretch of the imagination. So how do you feel like now being in the DSO industry quotes around it, what does that mean? How do you feel? How do you fell you fit in? I mean, you certainly stand out as a different model that would be very appealing for a certain segment of the dentists out there, but what are your thoughts on the industry now that you’re kind of in it so to speak, and where do you think it’s headed? I mean, we talked a lot about the consolidation, you found out about that going to a DSO meeting, you heard about it.
Dr. George Hariri:
Yeah, I mean we’re not in the acquisition space for a reason. I think that I have a lot of issues with the way the DSO space is currently operated, to be honest. And we set out to do it differently. And that’s why we are very different. Because there were certain things we didn’t like and we wanted to go out and do it in a way that we were proud of. And so I think the biggest things I don’t like is just the unsustainable allocation of capital.
Dr. George Hariri:
I mean, you have people paying multiples for practices that it’s going to be hard to return a… It’s going to be hard to generate a return on that investment the honest way other than flipping it to the greater fool on the next transaction. And so I think that that’s happening in our DSO space right now is the rate of consolidation is everyone’s just grabbing market share.
Dr. George Hariri:
But I don’t, as a dentist, don’t love the way that it happens right now in my industry. And so I think that the next wave of DSOs that do well are the ones that form long-term partnerships with dentists. And can form a sustainable organization. And I think that that is where we’re focusing our time and effort is how can we build something that lasts? Because I would argue that a lot of the things that are being built right now may not last as well as you might think.
Bill Neumann:
Yeah, I mean there’s been… When money’s cheap and you can continue to do these types of things, I think as far as borrowing and being able to acquire practices. But there are a lot of… We talk about same store sales. So that’s something that… So you can either grow by acquisition, but at some point you have to figure out first off, what did you buy? Is there value in it? And then how do you continue to grow the practices that you acquired?
Bill Neumann:
Because there’s a certain segment of dental practices out there that aren’t very appealing for a buyer. So there is this feeding frenzy at the top, those five plus operatories, a million and above in production. And so the valuations on these have been extremely high and just really interesting to see where does that… Again, when money’s cheap and the economy’s cooking along, you don’t really have to worry about that. From a borrowing perspective. Now I think strategy’s going to change. And so again, you don’t have to worry about that. You’re doing all de novos, you got your partners. If I am a doc that comes in, not a partner, and hey, I would like to work for your DSO, is there a pathway to partnership that way? Is there equity involved or what does that look like?
Dr. George Hariri:
When is this getting released?
Bill Neumann:
This is getting released I would say in the next couple of weeks.
Dr. George Hariri:
So we are about to roll out an equity program with our partners, so with our doctors at their locations. So the details of that are something that I’m about to talk about. We had this initial setup that we’ve come back and redone. So our initial setup was giving them stock based on how their location performed.
Dr. George Hariri:
And what we found is it didn’t resonate with our doctor. So we went back to the drawing table and we redid our partner portfolio and what we’re offering. So the way it works is, you walk in and you’re a seat doctor at one of these locations and you open up a location with us as the location grows, we have these benchmarks and when you hit those benchmarks in total revenue for a calendar year, you get equity in the location.
Dr. George Hariri:
So you get equity at the practice level with growth of the practice over time. So it’s essentially earning equity through the performance of the location and then that equity is now yours to distribute, sell, do what you want with it. And we have these benchmarks of what always needs to be dentist owned. So once it’s earned, it must remain dentist owned. And in a case of an event, we have a certain amount that can be included in that event, but we really try to protect the long term health of the enterprise.
Bill Neumann:
Okay. Well I’ll let you know exactly when we publish this so we don’t publish this before you announce it to everybody.
Dr. George Hariri:
That’s fine. You could go for it. I didn’t say anything that I would unsay, so go ahead.
Bill Neumann:
That’s great. All right. Well, so that’s interesting and I think we see in the industry anyway, from what I’m seeing as that a lot of interest in having equity at the practice level. Because there’s a ton of control there I can control that I might not be able to control if I get some equity at the top co level, right? Well, there’s 300 locations. But I do, my practice is… It’s going to be tough to influence all 300, the growth of 300 practices.
Bill Neumann:
So anything else, I mean we talked about the advantages of that being a remotely managed DSO. Again, I’m thinking back, I don’t know that there are any that are remotely managed. Of course, yours was maybe a bit of the timing of when you launched. You almost had to be remotely managed at that point because almost everybody was. There maybe some that have that hybrid where some are coming into the office a certain amount and also working from home. And then I’m sure there are some that are back 100%. What else do you feel that you’re doing that’s maybe different than some other DSOs that are out there?
Dr. George Hariri:
I think it’s just our rate of growth. This calendar year we will have opened as many locations as we had prior. And I think that in the next year we plan on opening 20. And so it’s just the doubling of size in two consecutive years of the number of locations you have, being completely self-funded is… We’re not private equity. Our cap table is us. And I think that it was very important to us that we were able to remain debt only financed. Because it gives us the freedom to do what we think is best.
Dr. George Hariri:
And I would like us to be an example down the road, several years from now as a way for dentists to hold on to their ownership longer. And a way to be in control of the growth and the fruition of their organizations. And so I think that our sense of autonomy, our rate of growth, our remote structure are trying to solve digitally a lot of problems that DSOs have, trying to solve them in a sustainable way that’s scalable.
Dr. George Hariri:
I think a lot of those things make us unique. And I think the fact that we repurpose our internal infrastructure to provide dentists services. We’re able to provide better services to our clients over time because we have our DSO, because we have the regulatory requirements, we have to have the accounting group internally, we have all of these things. That allows us to then provide better services to our private dentist clients.
Dr. George Hariri:
And so I think that the repurposing of internal is probably unique. The remoteness of our company is definitely unique. I mean that one we picked up when we were building a coaching department, we put out ads locally and we found two or three candidates and then we put out an ad nationally and we found 100 candidates. And so we thought, okay, well maybe we should just find a way to make this work remotely. And so always been that way.
Bill Neumann:
So on the education coaching side of things, you said you’re headquartered in Phoenix, in Arizona. So do you have some in person learning as well as remote learning?
Dr. George Hariri:
Yeah, so this fall we have three courses. One’s October 7th, one’s November 4th, 5th, and then the other one, I don’t know when it is, but we have analytics based, pre-ownership is the one in October, analytics based practice management in November. And then analytics based office management was like training office managers, usually dentist will bring their team leads, those types of things. And I think in January we’re launching an insurance event. So we try to hold… I mean, education is something that… When you think about our organization, the majority of our revenue comes from the practices that we own and operate.
Dr. George Hariri:
But the majority of our purpose, satisfaction and joy comes from the education and the helping of other dentists. So it’s kind of an illogical way for us to spend our time when you think about return on investment of time. But when you talk about the joy of what we do and creating impact in our industry, we think education is one of the biggest sources of that. So our courses don’t sell to the degree that we wish they would. People don’t like in-person events after COVID, but we are stubborn and relentless on offering in-person education because we think that that experience is just unique. And so we do that even though it might not always make sense.
Bill Neumann:
Yeah, well I think a lot more people are more comfortable now doing it, so really interesting model. I wanted to ask, you mentioned this back maybe five minutes ago about the way you’re funded and I wanted to touch on that because. And you actually mentioned it right at the beginning where when you were forming your DSO, you talk about… It’s great. It’s relatively easy to get funding when you have one location or maybe two locations and then you hit a point where the traditional lenders will not lend to you as you start to get to scale. There’s almost this dead zone, so to speak, where you can’t get lending and then you overcome that. And you’ve got two choices. There are some banks that will end once you get to scale, and then there’s the private equity road. So I’d love to delve into that a little bit more.
Dr. George Hariri:
So I would think that so far one of the things that we’ve done that’s saved our butt is strategic resource management because of how hard it has been for us to get funding. So our initial hypothesis was we’ve each, as individual entrepreneurs grown. We’ve had significant same store growth using our practice management philosophy in our GP locations. And so we wanted to leverage our healthy debt to EBITDA ratio to maybe open up a line of credit. And so that was the initial deal was can we recap all of our existing practice notes that are all with independent banks and can we in that process, open up a little bit of a line of credit for us to grow? And that deal took so long to close that by the time we closed that deal, we had already opened four locations. So all, I guess the first… The Valley Dentures and implants was self-funded, Prescott Dentures and Implants was self-funded.
Dr. George Hariri:
And then the four that we opened, so the first six that we opened were funded using profits from existing locations over time. And then our recap closed and the next five that we opened, we finally get to use our guidance line. So it hasn’t been enjoyable, but it’s been worth it to get here to have everyone on the same treasury management to be able to do efficient expense allocations and those types of things to reach that next size. But it took us all sacrificing a lot of things to merge our organization together and to reach that above a million in EBITDA mid-market banking to allow us to go to the next level of banking products.
Bill Neumann:
And now you have a good line of credit and you’re able to expand. You said that you were looking at Denver, you mentioned a couple other cities.
Dr. George Hariri:
Yeah, Denver’s already open. So we have five locations through the rest of this year. And then our goal, what we’re hoping for is 20 for next year. So we have six for the first quarter on the docket. And so we we’re funded all the way through that. So at this point we have funding for the next 25. And then after that we assume that with the growth that we’ve had with the opening of those locations, we should be able… It’ll just get easier and easier for us to get funded moving forward. We’re past the tough days, I think.
Bill Neumann:
This is great info and super unique. I don’t think we’ve ever… And I love the way you sum it up from podcast to DSO, so really interesting. Dr. Hariri, if people want to find out more, if they want to contact you or they want to find out more about shared practices, how do they do that?
Dr. George Hariri:
So sharedpractices.com is our website. I’ll admit, our website’s awful in the sense of showing what we do. I don’t think we do a great job of… We’re in the process of… And when I say we’re in the process of, I mean six to nine months from now, we might have a new website. It’s just something we keep complaining about. So our website, sharedpractices.com talks about, we do, I think there’s links on there for the dentist services that we offer. And I’m not sure if we have… Our events are on there. I know that know the coaching buyers, representation services, those types of things that might be on there. But joining our DSO as a dentist, I think it might be a little bit harder to find. I would send an email to Tyler@sharedpractices.com. That’s Tyler, T-Y-L-E-R. Tyler Tober is our sort of the head of our recruiting arm and all the dentists that want to be a part of our organization, talk to him and see if they’re a fit there.
Bill Neumann:
Okay. We’ll drop that email address in the show links, and we’ll also obviously put the website information in there.
Dr. George Hariri:
Then the podcast is Shared Practices podcast, so that’s not like rocket science.
Bill Neumann:
And the podcast as well. So we’ve got a bunch of different links we have to put in there, which is great.
Dr. George Hariri:
Sorry.
Bill Neumann:
No, it’s all good. There’s a lot of different ways to get the information. And the couple different paths. So there’s the coaching path, so if you want to take that path, we’ll drop those links. And maybe come to some of the educational events that you’re having and then just find out more, you can sign up for the podcast. And finally, if you want to join the DSO or find out what that’s all about there, email Tyler. So we’ll get that in there.
Dr. George Hariri:
Perfect.
Bill Neumann:
Well thanks George. This has been super enlightening to me. I really appreciate the time and I don’t have any final thoughts before we sign off.
Dr. George Hariri:
Perfect. Well I appreciate it and a great time and hopefully we’ll do this again.
Bill Neumann:
That sounds good. So again, Dr. George Hariri, he is the CFO and co-founder of Shared Practices. We’ll have all that contact information in the show notes. And thanks again everybody for watching us on YouTube or listening in. I’m Bill Neumann and this is The Group Dentistry Now Show. Till next time.
