The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice Of The DSO Industry

DSO Declassified breaks down industry activities from a totally objective perspective. This is the fifth episode of DSO Declassified which is part of the Group Dentistry Now Show. This month we focus on:

🔎 GDN updates
🔎 Is M&A slowing down?
🔎 Current news in the industry
🔎 Upcoming DSO events including Dykema and the DSO Leadership Summit

If you have any questions about the industry, or suggestions for what you’d like to hear on the next DSO Declassified podcast, email bill@groupdentistrynow.com .

To find any of the events or articles discussed on the podcast visit www.GroupDentistryNow.com.

If you like our podcast, please give us a ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ review on iTunes https://apple.co/2Nejsfa and a Thumbs Up on YouTube.

Our podcast series brings you dental support and emerging dental group practice analysis, conversation, trends, news and events. Listen to leaders in the DSO and emerging dental group space talk about their challenges, successes, and the future of group dentistry. The Group Dentistry Now Show: The Voice of the DSO Industry has listeners across North & South America, Australia, Europe, and Asia. If you like our show, tell a friend or a colleague.

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Full Transcript:

Bill Neumann:

Welcome, everyone, to the Group Dentistry Now Show. This is DSO Declassified, and I’m Bill Neumann. And apologies, this has been a while since we’ve done a DSO Declassified. I thought it would make a lot of sense to update everybody on what’s going on at Group Dentistry Now and talk about just things that are going on in the industry, upcoming events, and get everybody caught up. So, hey, thanks, everybody, for listening to the Group Dentistry Now Show. This format’s a little bit different, DSO Declassified. We either have guests on, like we’ve had Dr. Roshan Parikh, also Kim joins us from time to time, and then sometimes I do it solo. So these are just updates on what’s going on in the industry. And if you ever have any suggestions for DSO Declassified, hopefully we’ll be doing more of these in the future, feel free to just email me, bill@groupdentistrynow.com or find me on LinkedIn and contact me.

But anyway, let’s get right into it. I wanted to get everybody caught up. We actually have missed the past couple of DSO meetings. I’ve been doing some vacation time and had some conflicts, but have certainly been kind of watching and listening to both vendors and DSOs about the latest DSO event that happened in Orlando and Women in DSO and then also the DentalForum, which recently happened. I guess they’re all a March timeframe there, so we didn’t hit any of those. I heard they were all very successful. And we typically go to them, but happened to miss them because of some great vacation time.

So my next meeting, I’m actually really honored to be spending time in Orlando with Henry Schein at their national sales meeting. I’ll be presenting to most of the stakeholders at Henry Schein, including the FSCs, the field sales consultants, and some of the multi-site team and also the equipment specialists. So really looking forward to that. That is at the Gaylord in Orlando from June 8th through 10th. So if you’re a Henry Schein rep or somebody that works for Henry Schein, I look forward to seeing everybody there. I’m going to be there from June 8th through the 10th. If you have any vendors that are actually attending, I’d love to talk to you too. I’m just working on the presentations. I’ve got at least three different presentations I’m doing, possibly four unique ones, and I think I’ve got about 10 sessions throughout the entire event. So I’m going to be pretty busy, but looking forward to it.

Next up at the end of June, Caber Hill Advisors actually has their annual Rocket Mortgage Classic Event, the golf outing, in Detroit at the Detroit Golf Club. So thanks to Kurt Harvey for the invite. Once again, it’s a small intimate group. We get together and have a great time and talk business. So looking forward to that. Always appreciate that invite from Kurt and the team at Caber Hill.

And then in late July, the 19th through the 21st, there is the big Dykema meeting. So we will be there as we’ve been for the past, oh, gosh, seven or eight years, can’t keep up with it now, but we’ll be there, looking forward to that meeting. Group Dentistry Now will have a table in the back of the main conference room so look for us there. I’d love to chat with everybody. So that’s a little bit of a rundown of the next couple of meetings that we’ll be attending.

As far as what’s going on in the industry, I figured I would jump into some news events beyond the ones that I had just mentioned and just maybe hit on a couple of real quick topics. This is going to be a quick one. We’re not going to definitely spend too much time here, but I wanted to reconnect with everybody and make sure that I was in communication with people that I normally see at meetings.

So, all right, hopefully everybody can see my screen here. But what I’m doing, you can see we’ve got the …. I want to kind of catch up on some news and recent things that have happened in the industry. This can all be found on groupdentistrynow.com. Hopefully, you’re a subscriber to our newsletter that goes out once a week. So that’s called DSO Weekly. So if you want to subscribe to that, you can go to our website, groupdentistrynow.com and just go to the website and find subscribe there. It’s on the right-hand side. You can actually see it right here. And just sign up. You get one newsletter from us per week chock-full of great content. Maybe you can see here it’s just content. We have a couple of display ads in here. We don’t spam you. You’re not going to get 10, 15 emails from us a week. You’re going to get one, and it’s chock-full of great content. So we really appreciate the 9400 subscribers. And it is free so feel free to subscribe.

Okay, getting into what’s currently going on in the industry. This is just a recent article that was just done by A-dec and a great job if you’re looking to choose the right delivery system. This is really, just really, easy to read. I learned a lot, and I was on the manufacturer side of the industry for a while. So just great stuff for clinical directors, for your clinical staff, to take a look at on the equipment side, also the operations team as well. So just check that out.

And these are all in our newsletter too. You don’t have to memorize any of this stuff. You can go to our website. You’ll see it in the newsletter. We’ve also got, in June, late June, it’ll be the 20th so not that much time, less than a month from when we’re recording this, we have DSO Study Club Webinar Series. And so that’s at 2 PM on June 20th. And Dan Crawford’s going to be with me. He’s the enterprise sales manager from Clear. Dan does a great job. We had him on a podcast last year. Really engaging, knows his stuff, and he is going to be talking about tech to enable revenue in your DSO. So he’ll talk about their membership plan and some tips and tricks and how to make that really work for you.

And I think it’s becoming more and more important as investors and groups are starting to focus on same store sales growth. The acquisitions focus is not as much as it used to be. They’re looking at now what they’ve acquired over the past four or five years or as they build out the [inaudible 00:07:08], are they really maximizing revenue and production, patient engagement, new patients in each location? So I think things like this type of webinar, membership plans, technologies are going to become more and more important to DSOs and dental groups. So this is a great one. You can go to our website and register for it. It’s free. Would love you to be there live, but if you can’t make it live, register anyway and we will make sure we send you the recording the day after we record it.

So again, this is just an update on what’s going on. We’ve got the recent Portman Dental Care. This is across the pond, as they say. Portman Dental Care and Dentex Health have completed their merger. So that just happened. And they are now at, let’s see if I get the number right here. You had Portman. So we’re now at 375 practices with the combined Dentex Health and Portman merger. So they are a really big platform now in the United Kingdom, so one of Europe’s largest DSOs or dental platforms. It’s a really cool article. I’d love to see what’s going on in other parts of the world. We can learn a lot in the US here from what’s going on in Canada, what’s going on in South and Central America, and then what’s happening in Europe and Asia-Pacific as well. So just really interested to learn and really figure out best practices. And we have some of these global DSOs now that are appearing, and I think we’re going to see more and more of that as time goes on and the platforms get bigger.

So those were a couple of things. I’ll show you maybe three or four more things that we’ve got going on and then we’ll move on to the events. And again, you can kind of go through Group Dentistry Now. And if you’re ever looking for anything here, we’ve got 12, I think we’re over 1200. It might be 1300 articles right now on the platform. It’s all open so there’s no paywall. You can access anything you’d like. Just go into the search bar here and type in what you want, and you should be able to find it pretty easily. So this was a podcast we just did. Dental City was kind enough to put this together for us. And really, they included a lot of their vendor partners. We had Jane Levy from Plan Forward and Shawn Lehmann from Dental Whale and Dental Fix and then, of course, Kevin Gladstone, who’s with AbellaAR and OrthoFi. So really interesting conversation there. I think that one went almost an hour so great podcasts.

Note on the podcasts, if you just want to listen to them, that’s cool. You can just go to Apple or Spotify or Google and listen. But a lot of times we do have the video available too. And a lot of people like to engage with this on YouTube, or you can watch it through Group Dentistry Now. Sometimes we’ll have some short videos that run with it. Especially if it’s a product or a service, it might be better to watch the video. But any way you consume it, we appreciate it. And you can subscribe on YouTube and also you can subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or Google. And then, of course, one of the fan favorites here, we had the DSO Deal Roundup, so we’re always a month behind. So this came out in mid-May, and this was for April. So we put together all of the DSO deals that happen throughout the previous month, and then we compile them into an easy-to-read list here.

Just to give everybody a couple of notes on how this all works here. We see what’re still strong M&A activity, still seeing a lot of specialty, in particular, oral surgery, endodontic, orthodontic, see a lot of M&A there. I think what we’re starting to see, though, are less and less of the larger platforms doing acquisitions. Seems to be slowing down a bit. And what we’re seeing are the mid-size platforms or the newly funded platforms are really the ones doing acquisitions. So it’s definitely slowed down a little bit. I think valuations maybe are starting to back down a little bit to maybe what we would see as maybe we peaked a little bit in late ’21, ’22, somewhere around there.

And from what I’ve been hearing, valuations are a little bit different, maybe a little bit more what they should have been. Who knows? But definitely have heard some things about valuations not being where they were last year and in 2021. So just some food for thought there. But that being said, still a lot of activity. We see people in here like TUSK. We see they’re still doing a lot of transactions. We know people like LPS and Polaris and Viper all seem to be still pretty active in the space, working with small platforms and also large solo practices as well to help them find DSO partners.

So this, again, is free. There’s no charge to access DSO Deal Roundup. In fact, we’ve heard some rumors that a lot of these data platforms out there …. and we do have a partnership with DSO DataCONNECT, so they’re able to access this. And I guess anybody is, but some that actually charge are leveraging this free information as well. So it’s all good. So the DSO Deal Roundup, make sure you keep your eyes open for that every single month. Also, another fan favorite is DSO People.

One other thing I’d like to mention about DSO Deal Roundup, if you’re a DSO or you’re a broker and you’ve had a deal go through, feel free to reach out to us and let us know at the end of the month, just maybe a week before or close to the end of the month, any type of acquisitions or deals that you’ve done. Guardian Dentistry does a good job giving us information. MB2 is great. They get us their information at the end of every month. Pacific Dental does that. Affordable Care does that as well. So we’d love to get more groups actually coming to us at the end of the month so we’re not missing anything.

A lot of times we’ll have people reach out and say, oh, you missed this and you missed that. We capture it the best we can, but sometimes it’s not always the easiest. So any activity that you’d like to share with the public that we may not capture for whatever reason, just again, bill@groupdentistrynow.com and we can go through the process how to submit that to us. We’d love to include it in here. And there’s absolutely no charge for it right now. You never know, but right now it’s free.

Beyond that, we’ve got just a couple other things that I wanted to mention. Let’s go over to the events. So I mentioned the couple that I’m going to be at, Henry Schein’s National Sales Meeting, the Caber Hill event, and then, of course, Dykema. But what’s going on in general out there for the DSO space and maybe some of your clinicians? You can always go to our events tab on Group Dentistry Now website.

This is for your clinical directors and clinicians in general, but Ivoclar is hosting an advanced interior composite workshop. That’s up at their HQ in the US, which is Amherst, New York. That’s up by Buffalo. And so if you have any clinicians that would be interested in that, you can find that information on our website. Becker’s is having their Future of Dentistry Roundtable. It’s Becker’s Healthcare. That is in Chicago, coming up June 15th and 16th. And they’re going to have Eli Manning and Erin Andrews there. So if you want to meet some famous people beyond learning about the DSO and dental industry and networking, you can certainly do that. So that is coming up in mid-June. That’ll be here before you know it. And then, like I mentioned, there’s the Dykema event, which will be probably the biggest event of the year for DSOs as far as attendance goes. Brian Colao always does his best to make this a memorable event.

This is actually a 10th anniversary, so he’s definitely lined up quite a bit here. We’ve got Dykema’s definitive DSO 2023 Conference in Denver again at the Gaylord, just right by the airport, July 19th through the 21st. If you want to save some money, whether you are a DSO or whether you’re a vendor, you can use the GD Now, right, Group Dentistry Now. And then there’s an underscore 23, so GD Now underscore 23 to save 150 bucks. Not bad. So you can do that on our website. Oh, and I also forgot to mention too at the beginning of the Dykema event, the day before on the 19th, there is a TUSK Partner workshop. And you can actually save 50 bucks there by using GDN 23. So whether you’re a solo or you’re a small group that is not backed by private equity, this is definitely the event to go to.

I will be at the TUSK event, and I’m also, of course, going to be at the Dykema event. And so yeah, any questions on either, give me a shout, email bill@dentistrynow.com. And then we kind of move into September. We’ve got DentalForum, which is coming up, one of my favorites. This is the speed dating for the DSO industry. Clinical directors, procurement directors meet up with vendors. And you do your 15-minute meeting and you rotate and you rinse and repeat for a day and a half. It’s high energy. It’s a lot of fun. I think this will be probably the fourth or fifth DentalForum that I’ve been to. And this one is in San Antonio. Vendors? I’m not sure how many spots, if any, are left, but you can certainly reach out. DSOs, there’s still some availability. And the contact info for the OpenRoom events people? OpenRoom is the organization that runs DentalForum that is actually here on our website. Reach out to them or shoot me any questions.

And I think what I’ll do is I’ll finish up here with our event that we’re partnering with HR for Health for the third year in a row. So when I say our event, it’s a partnership event with HR for Health. So it’s their event. We do the Emerging Groups to Watch Awards, and we are excited once again to present the 2023 winners with an award. This is in Austin, Texas, at the Marriott in Austin. Love Austin, one of my favorite cities. And anybody that’s been in the industry for a while has ended up in Austin at some type of DSO event. So you know it’s a great, great place to be. It’s October 12th through the 14th. You can save 10%, whether you’re a DSO or a vendor, GDN 2023.

And as we get a little bit closer to the timing of this event, we’ll have another discussion. We’re going to have a podcast with the HR for Health team. We’re going to talk about the speakers. We’re going to talk about the Emerging Groups to Watch Awards. But we’ve got some interesting things planned. We’re kind of in the middle stages of planning out the agenda. The speakers, for the most part, have been chosen already. But that’s pretty exciting stuff. Yeah, I guess I’ll kind of sum everything up with looking forward to seeing most of our friends in the industry, or all of our friends in the industry, not just most, all of our friends in the industry and this summer and fall at the different meetings. Feel free to reach out to us if you have any ideas for the show or if you have any ideas for Group Dentistry Now.

We’re working on a lot of different things at the organization. We’ve got partnership with the DSO DataCONNECT people, and we actually have a joint venture with a publication called DSOPro. DSOPro is really interesting. We do interviews with DSO thought leaders. So if you go to dsopro.com, you can sign up for that. That’s weekly. And we have a focus on procurement and operations, HR and recruitment. We have a quarterly hygiene newsletter, and then we have a happenings newsletter as well and a technology newsletter. So what we’ve done with DSOPro is really get focused on these different segments of the DSO industry. So if you’re interested in technology, if you’re interested in HR, in recruitment, if you’re interested or you happen to be, if that’s your job, if that’s what you’re working on day in and day out, procurement operations, then feel free to sign up. Again, that’s free. And it’s just one more offering that we have, leveraging the audience of Group Dentistry Now.

If you’d like to be interviewed, reach out to me and I can get you connected with our editor and content creator there. That is Alison Walker, who handles things over at DSOPro. But a lot going on. We also have our relationship with the Seattle Study Club and the Group Dentistry Institute. So if you are looking for continuing education and you’d like to customize it or you’re looking to really make sure that you’re in compliance, that all of your clinicians have the right continuing ed, you are able to monitor that and make sure, really Group Dentistry Institute can do that for you. So we’ve had a lot of good response from that, and that is another way to really keep your clinicians engaged and happy. So if you’re looking to keep them engaged, you’re looking for ways to recruit, having Group Dentistry Institute powered by Seattle Study Club is an incredible way to do things.

So I think with that, that’s it. I didn’t want to keep anybody too long, but we really appreciate all the support. We’re having a great year. The industry’s changing, for sure. We see some slowdowns in acquisitions. We are seeing a lot of focus on how groups now create more value in the practices that they already manage and own. And there have been some changes. We’ve seen some changes with CEOs lately. A couple of groups, more than a couple, I think I’ve seen three or four in the past month have had changes with their CEOs. So that’s kind of interesting. We’ll keep our eyes on that and what that means. But then we’re also seeing still continued strong, strong growth in the specialty industry, on the specialty side of the business, endo, oral surgery, ortho, and pediatric. That’s it for me. If you have any questions, you can reach me at bill@groupdentistrynow.com, bill@groupdentistrynow.com, or you can find me on LinkedIn. And hope to see everybody this summer at one of the upcoming meetings.