The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice Of The DSO Industry – Episode 125

Are you tired of posting and paying for job boards that don’t work? Do you hate having to pay large placement or agency fees to staff your office? Are you sick of being ghosted by unreliable hires? Cloud Dentistry is your simple, reliable and inexpensive solution to hiring dental staff. Whether you are looking to fill a permanent or a temp position, Cloud Dentistry has you covered. To create your free account, visit www.clouddentistry.com/groupdentistrynow.

I’d like to welcome everybody to the Group Dentistry Now Show. I am Bill Neumann and thanks everybody for listening in today. Or you might be watching us on YouTube. So, however you consume this podcast, we really appreciate it. Without such a great listening audience, we wouldn’t get great guests like this guest here. And you might hear Impression Dental Group and go, “Boy, not sure I know who that is.” And unless you’re in Europe or Australia, and maybe if you’re in the States, you may have heard of them before. If you’re on LinkedIn, you see they have a lot of activity there. They’re doing a lot of acquisitions. I know Mark O’Brien, who is our guest here, the CEO of Impression Dental Group, is very active on LinkedIn. So Mark, thanks for being here today.

You’re welcome. Thanks for the invite. I know it’s been a bit of a journey, but here we are.

Yeah, we’ve been trying to set this up for a while. And it is tonight on the East Coast and it’s already the next morning in Australia, so 14-hour difference, which is kind of fun. But we’re really happy to have you here. And I think it’s really important for our audience, who’s majority in North America, we have a lot of US practices here, DSOs, emerging groups. We have Canadian. We do have some in the UK, and we’re scattered all over the globe. But I think it’d be really interesting to find out from your perspective maybe how things are similar to maybe what we experience here in the States and maybe the differences. I think we can learn from this global perspective.

Yeah, look, great question. I think there’s a lot of similarities, I guess, between our markets in terms of we’re a people-led business so our focus, as with most of your other DSOs, will always be around people, whether that’s their clinicians, their auxiliary staff, or their patients. I mean, obviously patients are the lifeblood of our sort of business. So, absolutely similarities there. I guess where there might be some differences is the way that the dentistry is funded across the various markets. I know there’s obviously a very different model in the UK, quite different in the US. And Australia is primarily a private market, so 75, 80% of patient [inaudible 00:03:35] by patients. So that’s probably one of the major differences.

In terms of product, in terms of innovation, in terms of how people do dentistry, I think there’s a lot of similarity there. And I guess in this modern world, we’re able to learn and leverage off each other with some of those learnings and some of those skills and innovations as well. Our chief dental officer is an international key opinion leader and spends a lot of time in the US and in Europe delivering lectures. And we’re very fortunate to have him to be able to take our brand out to the international community as well as bring back the best practice learnings as well.

What’s your chief dental officer’s name?

It’s Associate Professor Christopher Ho. And I’m not sure if we want to get into it now, but in terms of Chris coming into our business, it was a fairly material change to our business when we merged our business with his two days before Christmas last year.

Oh, wow. Okay. All right, well hold off on that then. That sounds like a good story so I’ll table that. First off, Mark, let’s talk a little bit about how you became the CEO of Impression Dental Group. Because your roots didn’t start in dentistry, you had experience in animal health previous to this. And so I’d love to hear your transition from animal health and maybe even some other things you’ve done prior to getting into the DSO space that you probably didn’t even know it was a thing before you got into it.

Yeah, it’s been quite an eclectic journey, I guess, coming into the dentistry world. But funnily enough, my very first real job after university was with Colgate-Palmolive. So I feel like I’ve done a bit of a 360 in terms of my dental career, albeit it was the animal health division of Colgate-Palmolive. And any of your listeners may not even know that they do have a brand called Hill’s Pet Nutrition, which is a very successful brand under the Colgate banner. But when I meet dentists for the first time, I tend not to tell them that it was the animal health division of the Colgate-Palmolive business.

Like I said, that was my first real job, in sales and marketing and commercializing businesses. Well-branded, well-supported, businesses that really focus on leadership and developing individuals and leaders within their organization. So, had a really rich experience with Colgate. I then, as part of that journey, took one of our key customers to a trade show in Germany and we got along like a house on fire. Excuse me, Bill. And he said, “Come join us. We’ve got this chain of 10 pet retail stores and we want it to be 200 in the next five years, and we think that there’s a great fit.” So I did, I jumped from the security and comfort of a Colgate to effectively a startup that wasn’t necessarily well-capitalized, but had a big dream and a big vision. And I stayed in that business for a good six years and probably learned more in those six years than most people do in their career.

I navigated marketing through to operations management through to commercializing adjacencies like veterinary services and dog grooming. So very much the Petco model. In fact, we had a friendly relationship with Petco and I spent some time with the execs over there as well. I then went into Pfizer. So, Pfizer had an animal health division, so big pharma. They spun it off a couple of years into me being there and became known as Zoetis. And worked to commercialize the retail part of that business, which was an emerging channel. And that was really fun and a really good journey. But again, typical of corporate, and I’ve got a lot of respect for big corporate, it just wasn’t for me. I couldn’t sit in the chair and do year after year. My entrepreneurial brain just couldn’t cope with that long term. So I feel like I achieved my objectives and I need to find the next thing.

So, I took a big leap of faith and left the comfort of a well-paid job to do my own startup. So, I started an allied health business, which was… Its objective was to roll up physiotherapist, podiatrist, remedial massage. And got to a point where I had a term sheet with a private equity firm. And for various reasons it fell over and I was sad at the world but took incredible amount of learnings from that process. And in fact, that private equity firm introduced me to a childcare business. And again, got along and I joined that business, which was 450 childcare centers. We merged two brands together, exited the founders out of that business and did an exit about 18 months later. And then, typical of me, feel like I’ve ticked a box, was looking for the next challenge and saw a role with a large listed DSO in Australia.

And it was quite openly a very distressed business and a business that was quite broken. I knew that going in, but when I got in I probably didn’t realize how broken it was. But typical of my personality, I wanted to just dive into it and try and fix it. And myself and a new CEO at the time were parachuted in by one of the major shareholders. But unfortunately, it just, with COVID and just the state of the business, it did not survive. But luckily for me and luckily for a number of the businesses and the shareholders, a private equity firm bought the business out of administration and we used that business as our foundation for growth and our platform for growth.

So, that was an incredibly challenging time. It was just post-COVID. Business, given the nature of it falling into administration, there was a lot of work that we had to do to build trust back into that business. And albeit I was only in the former business for a tiny amount of time, I was still the face of the business. I needed to build that trust, not just with our teams but with our suppliers. And it was a challenging time, but an incredibly rich and rewarding experience as well, because what we achieved in 12 months with multiple lockdowns, with COVID…

I’m based in Melbourne in Australia, which I think has the title for the record number of lockdowns in the world. So we navigated through that, effectively a new business, a new standup business, and like I said, turned that around materially. And that then gave us the confidence to start bolting on additional acquisitions, which we started in September last year. So that was a group of nine practices. We’re now 21 practices and hopefully soon to be a couple more.

So, very storied career. It’s so interesting. I did not realize Colgate had a dental animal health division, so that is pretty interesting. So, you started in dental, sort of. Well, definitely, just animal. And now you’re in-

A dental company.

Dental.

Yeah.

And then a lot of experience along the way. Right after that you were in animal, but it was retail-based, so I’m sure there were things that you were able to take from that and apply that at Impression Dental Group. I mean, I think that’s one thing that here in the States we have, and maybe it’s a global phenomenon, you have dentists that started… They hung their shingle, so the dentist practiced there and they owned the practice. So they didn’t necessarily look at it from a retail perspective or differentiated patient from customer. The idea was the patient was given the best clinical care, then that was fine. But now it’s different. Patients are not just patients, they’re consumers. So you have to give them the best dental care and of course the best experience. And I think that’s where DSOs tend to shine. And you having that retail experience, I’m sure that’s helped out quite a bit.

No, I couldn’t agree more. And we have a… it sounds a bit cliche, but a laser-like focus on our patients and our consumers. Because there is an expectation that from the moment that the patient makes a booking, to the moment that they walk in the front door, to the moment that they’re greeted by the reception staff, to then having that treatment with the dentist, it has to be exemplary along that chain. And then obviously paying, which is a pain point, and making sure that that checkout experience is an excellent one as well, and making sure that they’re booked in for their next visit. And I don’t know if it’s worth diving into it now, but we absolutely take our customer feedback really seriously. And after every single patient comes in, within an hour they get a text from us asking how we did.

Yeah, I mean, if you want to talk a little bit about that, I think that’s fine. Let’s talk a little bit about your NPS score. And I know that that’s something that is important. Should be important to everybody regardless of what business you’re in. And we do hear about it with DSOs. I don’t know how much it’s focused on…. I did talk to one several years ago that that was the number one KPI. They said, “If I had one, if I could only choose one, it would be that NPS score.”

Right. It’s probably not ours, but it’s incredibly important in that it gives us a checkpoint at any point in time that we’re doing okay. And for me, and call it obsessive, but I’m still attached to every single piece of feedback that comes back. I love seeing our practices doing amazing work and having amazing patient experiences. And when I see a six or a seven come through, I’m like, “Wow, that’s really odd.” Because our NPSs, the most recent scores we did were 94 across the network. And that’s a significant amount of data points as well, it’s not just three surveys that go out. But importantly, it’s what we do with those bits of feedback and what we do at a clinic level. And our practitioners, we coach our practice managers and we coach our teams to use that data to celebrate, which is one of our core values is celebrating the success that you’ve had in your business and the success that you’ve had in making the patients’ day.

But secondly, it catches issues before they become an issue. And luckily, touch wood, we’ve not really had any of those. But a really good example we had with one of our practices was they said, “All the patients are complaining that there’s no parking.” And we went through every single piece of feedback for six months and there was not one comment about parking. So we could myth bust some of the perceptions in the practice. So it’s a really valuable tool for us and our operations teams. In fact, the whole business uses it to make sure that we’re on track and that we’re delivering what we need to.

You mentioned if you had a low score come in, how do you normally attack something like that? What’s the protocol?

So, the culture and the beauty of what we’ve developed is that before I even have to do anything or the operations team have to do anything, the practices are on the front foot already. And we’ve provided a safe environment where it’s not about catching people doing things wrong. It’s about, like I said, celebrating all the great work that they do. But occasionally, there’ll be times where we do either drop the ball or, to be frank, the patient’s just been unreasonable.

That’s rare. But like I said, the practice managers typically will get on the front foot and call our operations manager. They’ll then try and engage with the patient. Sometimes the patient just wants to blow off steam and that’s all they want to do. Or we correct it. If there’s genuinely something that we’ve done wrong or we’ve overcharged somebody, then we’ll correct it and solve the issue. And we’d rather know about it than not.

Absolutely. I think it’s great. And again, I don’t think we hear enough about the NPS score. All right. I’d like to go back a little bit here. You mentioned it early on when we first jumped on the podcast, the marketplace in Australia. So, you mentioned that it’s mostly fee for service, so it’s out of pocket, there’s not much insurance. I think you said 70 odd percent is out of pocket. What does the market look like as far as solo practices versus Impression Dental Groups or DSOs? What do you see as far as maybe an idea of percentage, and do you see consolidation there like we see quite a bit of it here in the States?

Yeah. And we obviously look at more developed markets across the world, and I think that’s how I got in contact with you and Kim and joined your group just to stay in touch with what’s happening, certainly in the US. We keep an eye on what’s happening in Europe and the UK as well. And clearly both those markets are much more developed in terms of consolidation than Australia and New Zealand is. I mean, if you look at some of the dynamics in Australia, there’s around 25,000 practicing dentists, around 19, 20,000 dentistry businesses. So you do the math and quickly realize that many of the practices that are in Australia are single practices, single practitioners, single chair practices, and is still very much… We used to call it a cottage Ma and Pa… You use the same terminology.

Sure do.

… industry. So there’s various numbers that fly around in terms of what the percentage of consolidation in Australia is. It’s probably around low or high single digits, so eight to 9%, with no single player having any more than three or 4% market share. So that tells us obviously that the market is ripe for consolidation. But what complicates it when you look at the segmentation of the marketplace, there’s not many of those three plus chair, three practitioner practices out there. You’ve got a big tail of single practices and quite a small, relatively, amount of practices that would be appealing in terms of ticking all the boxes for a DSO.

Okay, yep, that’s a great point. I guess the next question is what ticks the boxes for Impression Dental Group?

I think number one for us, I mean, obviously there needs to be some metrics around billings and number of chairs and number of practitioners. That being said, we’re fairly flexible in the way that we look at transactions. Like I said, the metrics are there in terms of yes, there’s no key man risk or key person risk. It’s not a single practice that if somebody leaves tomorrow we’ve got a lease and a dental chair and a problem. We want to obviously make sure that those things are in place. And we had a chat offline about using the word culture and it is a bit of a buzzword, but it’s really important for me and for our team that there is that cultural fit between who we partner with and who we bring into the business.

And it’s got to be mutual. It’s not just us having the feels about the practice, it’s got to be about the practitioner and that team that’s coming into our fold as well. So that’s apart from the really hard commercials, that’s probably number one for me and for my team is making sure that we bring mutually aligned in values and a growth mindset.

Do you feel that, because you mentioned the market just really looks like just starting to consolidate. Probably, sounds like maybe the way the US was 10 years ago, maybe further back than that, as far as consolidation goes. When you’re having discussions with dentists about partnering, what is their feeling about DSOs? How are they looked at in the market in Australia?

I think that’s probably a common thread across the globe, is that probably with a bit of skepticism. And I think there’s been enough failures out there in dentistry, not just in the Australian market but across the globe. And I shouldn’t just pick on dentistry because there’s been plenty of failures in rollups in other healthcare verticals. But I think it’s guarded. So it’s been really important for us to build a brand. And that’s, you mentioned before, quite active on LinkedIn. It’s important that we get our values out to differentiate ourselves from the other corporates. And in fact, we commonly say corporate is a dirty word for us. We’ve got a swear jar in support office if you say the word corporate. And I think that’s really important that you’re real about that with potential vendors.

We’re not a corporate, but we do have some corporate structure because we need to in terms of being able to scale up. And that’s where the important things and the pressure points are typically teased out with vendors, in that you’ve got a vendor and their wife or husband who’s doing payroll on a Friday night, or just has no idea how to do their Google Ad words. And that’s where a corporate or a support offer structure adds value to their business. And that’s not unique across anyone in the DSO space, but it is a common thread in terms of the pressure points.

You mentioned you think you’re at 21 locations right now. You try and make sure that anyone that you add is in our DSO deal roundup so you’re really good about that. Any promotions or hires we have in DSO people. Which is one of the reasons I think we met. You found Kim Larson on LinkedIn and they’ve been getting us that information, which is great. We love to stay up on that. You mentioned earlier that initially Impression Dental Group was born from a distressed business, correct?

Yeah.

How do you think you were able to make this a viable, strong group that people want to join? What changes did you make? Because it’s certainly not easy. We have a lot of listeners that are scaling up now and they get to five locations and they kind of get stuck. And so they’re working harder and maybe they’re falling backward. Just because they have more practices doesn’t mean it always grows. And I think there’s this point with a lot of the groups that we have where they really are looking for… What did you do to be so successful? And I know we probably covered it all on the podcast, but any thoughts around how you were able to take this from a distressed business to the fastest-growing DSO in Australia, I think you had mentioned?

Yeah, I’d say one of the fastest growing.

Okay. We’ll do it. Why not?

I don’t know that I’ve qualified that we are yet, but we’ll see.

In the running.

Look, it’s a great question and there’s lots of facets to the way that we approached it. The most challenging thing was it was a subscale business and there wasn’t an appetite to build out a large support offer structure. So it was a really lean team, which I think actually worked to our advantage because it meant that myself, head of finance and head of operations, which was really the skeleton staff, and obviously someone to pay the bills and someone to pay the staff, were really visible to the practices.

So we created an environment where there was an expectation that you went out and you visited, you shook hands with the dentists, you listened to the practice managers, you were just visible. And that built a lot of trust, because unfortunately a lot of that couldn’t happen during COVID because of the various lockdowns. And obviously, the former business was fairly cash-strapped so it was difficult to travel.

So that was number one, was to build that engagement with the immediate team. And I think it’s well understood that an engaged team and one that trusts will be a team that performs. Second to that, we had to build trust with our suppliers. Many of the key suppliers had had a bad experience with the former business. And there was a lot of meetings with them to talk through, “We’re a different business, different board, well capitalized.” But it meant that we just had to be really disciplined about paying bills ahead of time and bringing everybody along on the journey of what we wanted to achieve.

And it wasn’t about getting a hundred dots on a map in two years time, it was about building a really sustainable, successful business. So, that was number one, is just building that engagement, and that was my sole focus for a lot of my time and a lot of my energy as well. Secondly, was obviously being really disciplined around capital and cash flow. And again, this won’t be unique to small businesses or even large businesses, is just being really close to what money’s coming in and what money’s coming out.

Where you’ve got a CEO, CFO relationship that’s really strong, you learn to trust and rely on each other to look through those things. So it meant that we didn’t not invest because it was important that we did invest in those early days, because over the previous years things had broken down and hadn’t been fixed, so we’re able to mop that up. But also from a cash flow perspective is making sure that we had the billings and the patients coming through the door.

So, the third focus was on marketing and building that patient acquisition. And funnily enough, and this won’t be unique to probably many of your listeners, but the gold was already in our database. We had tens of thousands of patient recalls that just had not been engaged for a number of years. So it was really stripping it back to basics operationally, looking at those opportunities, looking at that low-hanging fruit, picking that quickly.

And that just built momentum. So it built momentum, we built the trust, we built that engagement, invested in the team, did conferences, had town halls. And that recipe really worked to really step change the business. So the trust part was gained really quickly, which is a credit to my team because they worked really hard on that. And the results followed. So we obviously looked at our numbers, we forensically analyzed every part of the business and looked at those opportunities. But like I said, the momentum just built and that put us in really good stead, where the market in Australia had declined and we were getting double-digit growth already off solid comps as well.

So from a distressed business that didn’t have the greatest reputation out there, it was a really unique opportunity for us to go out to [inaudible 00:30:36] and say, “Look at what we’ve done.” We took this business that was pretty broken and you’ve got the hockey stick effect in some of these practices where they’ve just fired under our stewardship. And it’s not because we told people what to do, it’s because we stood next to them and walked side by side and showed them how to grow their businesses.

You mentioned culture, which is absolutely important when you’re looking for partnerships. Let’s talk about differentiating yourself in the market, because there are competitors out there. Even though there are not a lot of DSOs in Australia, there still are. So, how do you do that? I know that your operating model might be a bit different than some of the others.

Yeah, it is. So, listening to a few of your former guests, our model is similar to probably Dev and Dental Beauty Partners and maybe MB2, where we actively encourage a partnership model. It’s not our only model and I guess, again, that’s one of our differentiators is that we can be flexible in what we offer vendors. But our preferred model of transacting or partnering with practices is that they retain an equity stake within the business still. And that’s common, that’s becoming more commonplace, I think, in dentistry, but also in primary healthcare where your typical model of M&A where you buy something and you have a 3, 4, 5 year run-out and then you’ve got these cliffs of incredibly well-billing practitioners moving 10 kilometers down the road and opening their business and all of a sudden you’ve lost 40% of your revenue. It mitigates against that because you’re walking side by side with those partners.

There’s alignment in terms of we grow the business, they grow their profitability, they grow their dividends. So we pay out a dividend based on profitability. And equally important is that it then provides a succession plan for dentists that are looking to transition to retirement as well. We’ve seen the model work really successfully over the last six months where we’ve had practitioners retire and they’ve been able to [inaudible 00:33:02] younger associates in the business that may not have the capital, we assist those associates. But it gets them into practice ownership and starts their business ownership career with somebody that partners with them. So, again, they’re just focusing on building their craft, which is dentistry.

Are all your practices partnerships or acquisitions? Do you do any de novos or is it all pretty much acquisition right now?

No, all acquisition at the moment. That being said, we have built four de novo practices in the last couple of months, but we’ve done that to move locations. So basically taking a smaller practice and-

It was acquired and just-

Yeah, correct, might have two or three chairs and we’ve built out a five or six chair practice. That’s gone really well for us. I think in terms of our journey where we’re at, we’re not ready for those de novos yet. But that being said, it’s not off the table.

This might be a good point to go back to talking a little bit about your chief dental officer. You mentioned that you had acquired some of his practices and brought him on board and some of the changes, how that affected the group.

Yeah. It was a merger, so it wasn’t necessarily Impression Dental Group acquiring About Smiles and Care Dentistry. It was about two businesses that had a very similar objective to really build a leading dental organization in Australia. But from Chris’s perspective, plenty of people had knocked on his door, either private equity or others, saying, “We’d love to acquire your business.” But he really believed in our model what we were trying to achieve, our financial sponsors, which is Genesis Capital, a pure player healthcare investor. And I guess ultimately backed the management team as well to be able to come together and grow our businesses. So, like I said, that had been a project about a year in the making, and it finally completed two days before Christmas, so the 23rd of December last year was the official date of completion.

We had the Christmas period and then New Year period, so we couldn’t really get into that integration piece until early January. And again, a credit to my team, it was probably the first real test. I mean, we’d done an acquisition prior to that, but it was probably our first real test of a really big transaction where all hands were on deck, onboarding circa 100 people, including dentists, bringing them on the journey. Because that was as important as just being able to do the do. So, again, credit to the team. They did a absolutely superb job of onboarding, and really tested us, like I said. And every acquisition, I think, we take learnings out of, but this one was particularly good and particularly challenging for a number of reasons.

Integration can be a huge challenge. If you’re not set up for it, you could potentially lose a lot of staff if it doesn’t go over well. So that’s great.

Yeah.

Okay, so this is… Because we initially had wanted to talk, I think, prior to this happening, so it’s great. I think we had started in November or sometime before Christmas. So I’m glad that we’ve waited or it took this long to get you on the podcast because we wouldn’t have had this to talk about. Again, we’re talking about the acquisition or the merger, but let’s talk about one of the challenges that I think it’s definitely a global challenge, and COVID I think certainly exacerbated it, which is talent acquisition and retention. So, again, talk about culture and the importance there. How do you get maybe younger dentists or other clinicians to become part of Impression Dental Group and then not just get them to become part of it, but how do you keep them there and keep them happy and engaged?

Yeah, look, it’s a great question and I know it’s a pressure point across the globe and not just in dentistry but other primary healthcare. Even hospitality in Australia is really struggling for talent and for people. But in terms of some of the approaches for us, young dentists quite rightly have a need and a desire to have great facilities, great tools of the trade, and probably most importantly, some sort of mentorship. And I guess that’s where our merger with About Smiles and with Chris Ho is that he brings that incredible wealth of knowledge and experience around bringing in those young dentists and mentoring them into amazing clinicians. Not just clinically, but the way they can communicate with patients as well. So that was strategically one of the reasons why it was a great marriage between us and his business. But there’s been some other things that we’ve done and we’ve talked about it before in that we’re very active on social media.

That’s really important for us to get our brand out there and to get our brand story out there as well. It’s very important that we talk about things like we’re not going to put pressure on new graduates or dentists with KPIs. You’re not going to be dashboarded or ranked against each other every month. What we’ll do is we’ll walk side by side with you and sit with you and show you where there’s opportunities to build your practice. We took away, I guess, some of the other corporate things that are out there. So we don’t tell our teams where to buy their consumables from. We don’t tell them which labs to use. From my perspective, as a DSO it’s our job to go out there and get the best possible deal for those dentists. And whether that’s from a pricing perspective or just added values like coming in and doing lunch and learns or webinars or some sort of educational support, that’s really important for us as well.

And the other thing that we’ve just recently started working on is partnering with some of the dental schools in Australia. There’s about 650, 700 graduates that come out of dental school each year in Australia. And we’ve started sponsoring the final year students as well as the mid-year students as well, so those that are three years into their five-year degree. And that sponsorship looks like attending events, having some branding, offering them the ability to work in any of our practices, either as a dental assistant while they’re studying. Some of them are hygienists that have gone back to study dentistry, so we’ll bring them on board. And I guess having a distributed network that now has some scale, we’ve now got something to offer graduates that are coming out of the dental schools, to either work in Far North Queensland or Regional Victoria.

So that’s been really important for us to have those connections. And it’s meant all of those things wrapped together. When we’re popping that out for a dentist or for support staff. People have generally heard of us now, whereas 12 months ago they wouldn’t have. And it’s the old familiarity breeds favorability. And I think importantly what’s also happened is that we’ve got that endorsement from our current practices and our partners that we’re decent people to work with and are truly hands-on when it matters, but hands off most of the time for them to get on with their job.

Great information, great strategy too. All right, as we start to wrap things up here, final question, maybe twofold. One is, can you give us an idea of what the future of Impression Dental Group looks like? Next couple of years, maybe. You don’t have to go beyond that. But then also what in general you think the future of dentistry looks like in Australia.

I’ll probably start with the second question first. And I think the dentistry industry in Australia, it’s probably a really exciting time to be in it, I think. We’ve all navigated through the pandemic, which we don’t tend to talk about anymore because it’s been and gone and we’ve learned to live with that. I think, like I said, the industry is ripe for consolidation so I think there’ll be much more consolidation happening in the Australian and New Zealand market. And obviously two separate countries, although we like to say that we claim New Zealand as a country sometimes. But really important that there is that ability to keep growing and keep consolidating. And I think what’s going to win that will be some of the things that I’ve talked about is not just talking about what you do and what you can offer, but actually demonstrating that and getting that endorsement from the practices that you partner with.

In terms of innovation and technology, I mean, that will obviously keep innovating, and we’re seeing things like AI enter into the Aussie market. I think we’re probably a few years behind the US market there. I mean, it’s an expectation now that digital dentistry is part of the fold. So, like I said, some of those younger dentists, they don’t want to take impressions, they don’t want to do that sort of stuff anymore. They just want to take a digital scan, send it off to the lab, and three days later get their crown. So that’s an expectation and something that DSOs and private practices will need to continually invest in. But for us, I never will say we want X amount of practices in Y amount of time. I think, and I said it before, it’s not about putting dots on a map just for the sake of putting dots on a map.

And whilst I do talk about us being the fastest growing and doubling our network, that’s happened organically, not through us saying, “We want 20 practices in the next 12 months.” What is important is that we partner with those like-minded practitioners. Make sure that we not only hold earnings in what we acquire, but demonstrate and continue to grow those earnings in those businesses. So I won’t put a number on what we think we want to be, but I think for us it’s a really unique period over the next two years, as there becomes an aging population and as the macroeconomic conditions improve in Australia. Like I said, I think it’s an exciting time for dentistry.

Well, this certainly was exciting to talk to you. And this has been six months in the making, so I’m glad we were able to make it happen, even across the globe and 14-hour time difference. And hopefully someday we’ll get a chance to meet each other in person. That would be wonderful. So, if people want to find out more about Impression Dental Group or find out more about Mark O’Brien and talk to you, how do they do that?

Yeah, so hit me up on LinkedIn or our website, impressiondentalgroup.com.au. More than happy to chat to anyone. And likewise, Bill, can’t wait to actually meet in person. Would love to get to a couple of conferences in the US and see what’s happening in that market.

Well, that’s good. We’ll talk offline about those and hopefully we can get you over here sooner rather than later. So, we will drop the URL from Impression Dental Group, it’s impressiondentalgroup.com.au. And then we can also drop Mark’s LinkedIn handle in there so you can reach out to him. But everybody, hey, this one’s been great. Thank you again, Mark. And great studio there, too. Whoever set that up for you, it’s awesome. Sounds great, looks great. I feel like you’re right down the block from us. So, thank you everybody for listening in tonight, or this morning if you’re in Australia. We appreciate it. Until next time, this is the Group Dentistry Now Show and I am Bill Neumann. Thank you for listening in.