What Your Numbers Say About You (E.155)

“Numbers don’t lie, but they do speak in code. You just have to know how to read them.”
– Dr. Victoria Peterson

Brief Overview of the Episode:

Victoria Peterson sits down with Chris Sands, founder of ProFi 2020 and Phase One Dental CPAs, to unpack how a practice’s financials reflect the beliefs behind every decision. Payroll, marketing, debt, and revenue all reveal what you value most. This conversation brings both sides of wealth together—the analytical and the emotional—showing how to align your mindset with your money. It is not about leaving your practice. It is about designing one that gives you freedom while you still have choices.

What This Episode Reveals:

• Your profit and loss is a mirror, not a math sheet
• Generosity and fear both distort financial clarity
• Most cost problems come from a lack of revenue focus
• Marketing is not an expense but a reinvestment

What You’ll Learn:

✔ How to read your numbers like a leader
✔ Why alignment creates growth faster than control
✔ How to link revenue goals with team motivation
✔ The simple math that builds long-term freedom

If This Sounds Familiar:

• You feel like you work harder than your numbers show
• You hesitate to invest in growth
• You want freedom but feel trapped by financial pressure

Next Steps:

Your numbers already tell the story. Learn to read them and start writing your next chapter.

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TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Welcome to an incredible episode of Investment Great Practices. I’m Victoria Peterson, your host, and I am here with my fellow alumni, university of Georgia alumni, and one of my favorites, Chris Sands, uh, from Pro 5 20 20. Welcome to investment grade practice today.

[00:00:22] Chris Sands: Thank you, Victoria. How about them dogs?

[00:00:24] Chris Sands: Huh?

[00:00:24] Dr. Victoria Peterson: How about them dogs? S sick ’em

[00:00:29] Dr. Victoria Peterson: all for all you non Georgia fans. Uh, that was for you.

[00:00:35] Chris Sands: Like you might find us on a commercial, right?

[00:00:37] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Uh, that’s right. I do love that commercial. Um, um,

[00:00:41] Chris Sands: there’s some insurance commercial out there, right? That, that they are using the, using the bulldog bark.

[00:00:47] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Yeah. So everybody can learn it now. I love that you know, Sam, Chris, you were just part of our built to Last Ready to Rain five part webinar, epic series.

[00:00:58] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Uh, a [00:01:00] reminder to everyone if you’ve not engaged in that, we are giving, I think. Five or six hours of ce We’re getting into the time of year where you may want those. I’ll put it in the show notes. We’ve got those modules, those, um, incredible deep content, pure learning in a webinar format. And Chris, you were talking about, um, your expertise, your firm’s expertise, which is accounting and proactive financial planning.

[00:01:28] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Not financial planning, but. Proactively engaging with your accountant to stay on top. So thinking back on that webinar, if you had to give us like one or two nuggets or pearls as a preview of that, what would you share here today? Like what are some of the best practices that owners ought to be thinking about today?

[00:01:51] Chris Sands: Gosh, there’s so many, there’s so many good, uh, experts on that as well. Um, you know, I think, I think, um, along the lines of what you’re trying to accomplish [00:02:00] with, with the investment grade practice, um, you know, we like, we like to borrow, borrow some of that and say, we, we want to have investment grade financials, okay, yes.

[00:02:08] Chris Sands: To help be an investment grade practice. And all of that is in line with, um, some of the other experts that were on that panel with in, in terms of. Uh, preparing your business for sale. Um, and, and, you know, both, both you and I have gone through the, uh, certified exit planning, uh, advisor certification. One of the mantras, one of the mottos there is, uh, you know, most people think of exit planning as an event and something they’re, they’re gonna do someday and they’ll just deal with it then.

[00:02:38] Chris Sands: But really, exit planning is simply good business strategy should it should be thought of from the day you start your business. Um, so, you know, along those lines of, of thinking about your, your finances, having your accounting, your business, always presentable, uh, and ready for sale at all times. I thought that was a good, good discussion.

[00:02:59] Chris Sands: I [00:03:00] thought, uh, Howard Polanski’s portion on how to accelerate debt payoff. ’cause that contributes as well to when you sell your business, you know you’re gonna have. Pay some taxes and then you’re have to pay off any debt and then you get like a net net number. Um, so knowing that number that that is needed for you and working that math backwards and looking at your debt and having some, some sort of focused plan around eliminating that.

[00:03:27] Chris Sands: And then, uh, you, you receive this. You know, they have what, what in the financial industry they call liquidity event, where you’ve now sold your business and converted that business asset into a cash asset. And what do you do with that cash and what do you, how do you make that money work? And I thought, you know, dentist advisors, uh, did a great job in their portion talking about how to be thinking of that to set up your, you know, what is, what is your retirement income stream and how are you gonna build it?

[00:03:56] Chris Sands: So, um. That was a lot of fun to do [00:04:00] it individually and then to come together as a panel at the end and to, uh, you know, just, just collaborate and share. So thank you for putting that together. I think it’s super valuable that everybody out there, if you haven’t done it, you wanna get some free CE credits before the year is over.

[00:04:17] Chris Sands: You gotta go check that out.

[00:04:19] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Aw, that was, that was a really great recap.

[00:04:25] Dr. Victoria Peterson: You know, you and I do tend to live in the, like three to five year out, you know, futuristic view. And that’s what, that’s what makes us such great advisors. And so I wanna bring this into like the day to day and, and just let everybody know, one of the things I’ve come to believe is that exit planning is not about leaving your practice.

[00:04:47] Dr. Victoria Peterson: It’s not about leaving your business, it’s about designing. Your practice so that you have freedom while you still have choices, right? Yeah. [00:05:00]

[00:05:00] Chris Sands: And I think the, the three to five year concept let’s, I’ve, I’ve seen it said that, um, you know, the, the work that you do now is what will determine your life five years from now.

[00:05:11] Chris Sands: Wow. The life you’re living right now is a result of whatever you. Have done or implemented five years ago. And, and your focus, yeah, your focus and your intentionality, your planning, you know, you’re actually taking action. But, um, you know, we’re humans. We, we tend to drift off course and we, you know. I love old, uh, I think I may have quoted this in the last time we met the old Zig Ziglar quote of, you know, if you’re, if you don’t have goals, you’re just a wandering generality.

[00:05:39] Chris Sands: That’s what he used to say. And you can wake up in life and, you know, five years goes by in a blink. So I hear we, we hear that so much. Everybody’s like, oh yeah, maybe, maybe I will, you know, sell my practice 10 years from now, five years from now. It’s like, okay, well what are you gonna start doing now to prepare for that?

[00:05:57] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Perfect place to land. ’cause that’s what I wanted to talk [00:06:00] about today is now, right? Because, um, planning your exit is really about, it’s a gift to your future self. So if you and I came down and got really pragmatic, the one document that every doctor should be looking at with their accountant every month are two documents their their financial packet, right?

[00:06:23] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Their profit and loss, and their balance sheet, and how that ties back to the practice KPIs. Like how do we have a pull through to revenue cycle management? How do we have a pull through to case acceptance? Those kinds of things. So play with me here a little bit because I think there’s two parts to the equation.

[00:06:43] Dr. Victoria Peterson: In my own experience being an entrepreneur and owning dental practices and in those that we coach, that there’s the data side. Accounting and then there’s the emotional side of how those numbers got there. So if we thought about [00:07:00] our practice financials as a, a wealth mirror, something that’s going to reveal our mindset.

[00:07:07] Dr. Victoria Peterson: You wanna dive into that with me a little bit?

[00:07:10] Chris Sands: Yeah. This is the facts versus feelings. There

[00:07:13] Dr. Victoria Peterson: you go. So let’s look first about the truth behind the numbers. So numbers don’t lie, but they do speak in code. You gotta know the code and every line in your financials. Uh, so we’ve got line items, lab expenses, labor, cost, rent, things like that.

[00:07:31] Dr. Victoria Peterson: It’s really a reflection of the beliefs that’s driving the behavior. So let’s say that your payroll expense is high. Why don’t you talk about the data side of it, like how would my labor cost be too high to benchmark? And then maybe I’ll talk about the behavioral side of that.

[00:07:50] Chris Sands: That’d be great. Okay. Well, um.

[00:07:53] Chris Sands: So anytime that I’m doing a, a new consult with a prospective client for us, a lot of [00:08:00] times they come to us and saying, you know, I’m, I’m looking to work with an accountant that can help me improve my profitability. Tell me where I’m, where I can cut some costs and be more profitable. And I think everybody starts with that, that idea of cutting costs.

[00:08:14] Chris Sands: And there’s really. Only so many costs you can cut. Um, I, I, I have a belief system that 80, you know, 80 20 rule, 80% of your focus should be on revenue and 20% should be on the, the expenses and revenue does not solve all problems. You do need to be efficient and not be wasteful, but, uh. In dentistry particularly, there’s really only three or four variable costs that track with revenue, and those are what you pay your doctors.

[00:08:42] Chris Sands: So doctors are typically paid on a percentage, and then the percentage of of labs and supplies those track with how much dentistry gets produced. And then maybe you could throw in there, you know, credit card processing. And I think I, I talked about that in our, our webinar series as well. But the, uh, the first thing that I tell [00:09:00] them, I say, you know, you really, when you, you want to think about what a percentage is, okay?

[00:09:05] Chris Sands: So if you’re, if we have a target, let’s say of labor percentage, uh, team cost of 30% or less, and someone’s sitting at, say, it’s making this up, 37%. That’s a function of the, the team cost divided by, so the team wage divided by collections, deposited collections, and team cost is one of the fixed expenses in dentistry.

[00:09:30] Chris Sands: So not, not including doctors. Most of your team members are paid either hourly or salary wages, and you get to change that. Annually if you give someone a raise if you hire or fire, but once you change it, it’s a fixed cost and, and a percentage is a numerator and a denominator, right? The team fixed cost is your numerator and your collections is your denominator.

[00:09:55] Chris Sands: In order to make a percentage go down, when the, when the numerator is fixed, you have [00:10:00] to make the denominator go up. So we have to make collections go up. So it’s not necessarily that most practices are overpaying their team, it’s not that they’re over overstaffed. Sometimes they can be, but I would say again, 80% of the time it’s that they’re not, they don’t have a, a focus on what the revenue needs to be to support that quality team.

[00:10:24] Chris Sands: Um, so you can really just take simple math. If your target is that 30% team cost or less, you can start there and say, what is my total annualized team cost? And, uh, you,

[00:10:37] Dr. Victoria Peterson: including benefit max match, things like that. You’re all in it. That 30% or just the, the gross wage,

[00:10:46] Chris Sands: say the beginning of that question again.

[00:10:47] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Are you taking the, the whole compensation package, uh, for this percentage or,

[00:10:52] Chris Sands: yes. Yeah, so, so team cost includes the way I, we, we actually include the wage, the payroll tax, uh, [00:11:00] if there’s any retirement benefits. We throw in things like if you’re a uniforms, health insurance, anything that you’re providing as, as part of the, the role for that team to, uh, to work there.

[00:11:11] Chris Sands: Any, any benefits, all of that. Okay. Yes. That, that gross total cost.

[00:11:16] Dr. Victoria Peterson: So now we’ve got the data and the en numerator and the denominator. I love that. So let’s just say that I’ve got the right number of team members on my team and my ratio is out. I need to raise revenues. I think there’s, let’s go into the behavioral science of this.

[00:11:34] Dr. Victoria Peterson: So there’s the, I say you do, uh, whip ’em into shape model the authoritarian, uh. And I, I, I don’t see it as being a very effective strategy when doctors say, I’m not making enough money. You people need to go and produce. That doesn’t really motivate most team members. What could motivate them though, right?

[00:11:57] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Is you look at it [00:12:00] individually. So from a personal standpoint, as an owner first, take a step back and go, am I being too generous here? You know, have I, and I’ve had doctors do that. I had one client who said, we like working four days a week. We’d like our team to have that same benefit. They kept them on five days a week pay, and gave everybody a four day work week.

[00:12:22] Dr. Victoria Peterson: So they, in essence, increased their overhead by 20% and didn’t have an offsetting expectation of productivity rising in those four days a week. So that’s an example of being very generous. And so now it’s. Change that model. It’s kind of hard.

[00:12:41] Chris Sands: It is hard. I think the, the conversation should have been, you know, from the doctor owner to the, to the team is, you know, we are.

[00:12:49] Chris Sands: Open to see patients four days a week or our doctors are working four days a week and we want our team to have that, that same benefit. Uh, but we want to pay you like your five day a [00:13:00] week, uh, team member. In order for that to work, we’re going to need to target X revenue. And, you know, you can start with, you know, annual amounts.

[00:13:12] Chris Sands: I think. I think it’s a great exercise to, uh. Play a guessing game with the team and ask them, what do you think our total annual payroll is here, you know, per year or per month? They, they would be shocked and blown away. A lot of the times when you ask them that the answer they’ll give you is either only their payroll or, or some estimation, you know, a smaller way, smaller amount than what they think, uh, than when there really is.

[00:13:36] Chris Sands: But the, the, um, the conversation has to happen of the math, you know, in order, in order for that to happen. The kind of the three. The rule of three, we have to have a, a revenue of, of at least three times that. So, and then that number, the annual number is too big for anyone to digest. And so you have to break that, that break that down to a daily number.

[00:13:58] Chris Sands: We have to hit a [00:14:00] daily number. It’s an entire team effort. I think the other emotional piece that I deal with a lot with doctors is, uh, you know. White coats just don’t like and trust marketing. Um, and there there’s this feeling I guess, that um, you know, people will just come to us because they, they’re gonna need care and they’ve gotta find some, and people have options.

[00:14:25] Chris Sands: And I’m gonna go back to the, the numerator, denominator and the, um, you know, the facts of those, the percentages. I would say 99% of the time when, when the team cost percentage is too high. Look at the marketing percentage. I call marketing, not an expense, but a reinvestment. Reinvestment, okay. To get a return of return of growth, a return of profit.

[00:14:52] Chris Sands: And if you look at that marketing expense, when the, when the team expense is too high, I guarantee you the marketing is under 2%, probably under [00:15:00] 1% reinvestment rate. And

[00:15:03] Dr. Victoria Peterson: oh, oh, the

[00:15:05] Chris Sands: businesses that are running some of these practices in the, in the world of DSOs. When they’re treating it like a business, you know, that’s not all a negative thing.

[00:15:14] Chris Sands: They are having to reinvest. DSOs are reinvesting six to 8% of their revenues back into marketing because they don’t have great retention. Private practices have that great retention. They have better relationships, but they’re not inviting enough people to their party and they’ve, they’ve, if they would just think of that.

[00:15:33] Chris Sands: The return, and I have the data on this, if they spend a dollar to attract a new, uh, new patient, if they look at their average revenue per patient, they get three to $4 back. Three to four times that you can’t find that return anywhere else.

[00:15:49] Dr. Victoria Peterson: You can’t find that the stock market.

[00:15:51] Chris Sands: And it’s consistent.

[00:15:52] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Let me ask you this, Chris, um, because I think there’s a behavioral driver around this too.

[00:15:58] Dr. Victoria Peterson: I love where you said white coats [00:16:00]are afraid of marketing or, or don’t understand marketing. Um, it, it comes back to. The same premise of what is gonna motivate my team about being engaged and being here and playing their part. So getting the team engaged about patient care. That’s, that’s how you lift revenues, the volume.

[00:16:22] Dr. Victoria Peterson: So that’s the, um, those are things like. Case presentation, the communication skills, all of that. You’ve got your patient financial options. All of that is like team motivation and, and driving those systems. When it comes to marketing, you know, we’ve been doing this for a long time. Uh, we’ve actually created our marketing agency in 2011, so it’s been about 14 years now, and we see the same thing.

[00:16:48] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Those that invest like six to 8% and. Part of that, uh, about 3% or so is going directly to internal marketing today. ’cause we [00:17:00] started asking the question, when does a new patient journey end? And when I poll dentists, and you can ask yourself right now, answer really quickly before I give it to you, but nine outta 10, if not all, 10 doctors will say, when I do my exam.

[00:17:15] Dr. Victoria Peterson: But when you’re thinking about, uh, and I go, so what happens to the patients if they say no to the next step? And they go, well, they go into hygiene. And I said, no. They said no, they’re not coming back to your practice. So in a marketing term, I love that you said reinvest in the practice because there is this piece of re-engagement.

[00:17:37] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Because people need to hear or see a message three to five, sometimes seven to 11 times. So by the time they come and sit in your chair, they might be on number three on building that bridge of trust. We’ve recently, uh, really expanded our reengagement programs and we had to [00:18:00] call it that because doctors have an emotional reaction to, um.

[00:18:05] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Reappointment or reactivation. We, we realize that there’s an emotional reaction to the word reactivation, and we got an absolute hardcore, no, no, I’m not gonna do reactivation. And I said, well, tell me about that. Well, my hygienist is already busy enough. We don’t need to spend money on that. So I think we need to tease that apart a little bit and you’re one of the few accountants that I know that really understands marketing at a deep level.

[00:18:32] Dr. Victoria Peterson: What I’m talking about is that unscheduled, restorative, those new patients that came in that didn’t come on your books, they you comprehensive treatment plan in hygiene, and they’re not coming on, every practice is sitting on half a million dollars. The most we’ve found is 3 million. So. Pulling the market all the way through getting, getting past your own limiting beliefs about what that is, [00:19:00] and, um.

[00:19:03] Dr. Victoria Peterson: If there’s so much automation, it would be tempting. Tell me what you’ve seen about this. It would be tempting to say, yeah, we’ve got it automated. So if the patient doesn’t schedule, they start getting messages from us, and that’s all we need to do. What we have found is those stock messages may not be authentic enough.

[00:19:22] Dr. Victoria Peterson: To really connect with that patient’s unique experience. And so having marketers who understand storytelling and making the patient the hero is what leverages it back. And we’ve been running this for about a year and a half now. On a low, we’re getting $27,000 on the schedule. Not hypothetical, but in the chair and on a high, you’ll, I don’t think I’ve shared this with you.

[00:19:46] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Guess what, the highest, like a single, a single outbound message. Text and email. What do you think the highest reschedule rate was?

[00:19:57] Chris Sands: Single outbound. Uh, [00:20:00] let’s say 10%

[00:20:02] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Uhhuh. Give me a dollar figure. What’s the highest you think that we could reengage treatment?

[00:20:08] Chris Sands: The highest dollar amount that you could of treatment you could get?

[00:20:11] Chris Sands: Mm-hmm. Oh, goodness. I, I mean, I don’t know. You could probably, you might potentially get someone with a full arch case.

[00:20:17] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Yeah. Our highest. Practice wide, we rescheduled $305,000. Wow. So it’s, it’s not only that you’re doing the activity of the marketing, but that you’re engaging it in an authentic way. I think that is the big advantage that solo practitioners have on DSOs is that they can customize and get authentic.

[00:20:44] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Now, it took that doctor maybe two months, three months, to fulfill all of the treatment that we got from that one campaign. So it’s the attraction. It’s the re-engagement and then it’s the continued care, that heartbeat of the practice through [00:21:00] hygiene. Um, I, I see that as a trifecta of, of stabilizing revenues.

[00:21:06] Chris Sands: You know, I, in both, uh, dentistry and accounting, ’cause I’ve, I was not, you know, privy to the accounting industry and, and how they operated. I’ve, I’ve acquired a couple accounting firms and through that acquisition, seeing how they operated, how they, uh, really what their client. And I was interested in what their prospect list was.

[00:21:27] Chris Sands: And it turned out that they didn’t, that a prospect list didn’t exist. Um. In both of those industries, you know, and something I think in most of business or entrepreneurial people who have to go out and seek, um, clients or patients, they are, there’s a common phrase or, or technology called a CRM,

[00:21:48] Dr. Victoria Peterson: right?

[00:21:50] Chris Sands: Um, which is, what does it stand for?

[00:21:52] Chris Sands: Client? Uh,

[00:21:54] Dr. Victoria Peterson: relationship management.

[00:21:55] Chris Sands: Relationship management, yes. And. [00:22:00]There’s a, you know, you use the word reactivation in the dental industry, which you say there, you’re getting pushback on, but in, in marketing or in business, we call it nurturing. You know, you have to, your, your, the value of your business is in your list.

[00:22:14] Chris Sands: It can be a client, a patient list, a client list. It can also be a prospect list, I mean, a database. And to be able to nurture or prompt or use multiple mediums to. Connect and reach out to a prospective patient or, or to reactivate an old patient. Um, that, that’s a, that’s a normal part of the cycle of business that’s missing in, I can tell you both accounting and, and in dentistry, um, most of them think of just what’s in their practice management software that has, that they’re either doing work on or that has, you know, done work in the past.

[00:22:55] Chris Sands: It’s a lot easier and cheaper to. [00:23:00] Reactivate or to reconnect with a former patient or client, uh, than it is to go out and find a new one. Yeah. You know, but, but then once you have the, their contact information, it’s, it’s somebody you should nurture. We’re in the relationship business, and the relationship has to be with.

[00:23:20] Chris Sands: You, your brand. Um, and there’s, there’s the old saying of the, uh, absence makes the heart grow fonder. I believe that’s a false statement. It’s absence makes the heart grow more absent. Um,

[00:23:34] Dr. Victoria Peterson: yeah, I, I think absence in that context breeds apathy. And so if you said, this is important and I’m gonna follow up with you and you don’t follow up, and then they come in six months, well then it must not have been too important or you would’ve got me on the books.

[00:23:50] Dr. Victoria Peterson: And so I think it really breeds apathy with our patients. Um,

[00:23:54] Chris Sands: you believe that you, you, if you really believe and love what you do, and you believe you’re the best of at doing it, and I [00:24:00]hear that so often, like, oh, I’m the, we’re the best practice. We have the best dentist. Why aren’t you shouting it from the mountaintops?

[00:24:08] Chris Sands: You know, you’ve got, you’ve got to get that word out there.

[00:24:11] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Well, thank you for being with me today. I know our podcasts are kind of like short snippets. You can definitely hear more from Chris on our webinar series and we’ll get you the link to that. Uh, also go tofi 2020. You really shifted your model, um, this last year so that you’ve opened up access to even more dentists.

[00:24:32] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Do you wanna tell us a little bit about that? ’cause I know you were, you were like Premier 2 million and more. And now I think you’ve opened up a little more access. Do you wanna tell me about that?

[00:24:41] Chris Sands: Sure. Well, a little bit of the reason behind that is that we, uh, had a shortage of accountants. After COVID, we lost over 350,000 accountants.

[00:24:50] Chris Sands: And so we didn’t have the, the. You know, manpower to serve everyone, um, and, and less accountants being in the space. And the [00:25:00] co cost of accountants and cost of accounting in general has gone up. So, uh, we, but we always wanted to stop turning people away. We, we know there’s so much value that we can give and you, uh, I, if I have that belief system that you should be.

[00:25:13] Chris Sands: Exit planning and working on your business from day one, that we need to be serving the people who are starting their business from day one. So, uh, profile 2020 is still a more of a, a premier or advanced, um, accounting relationship. For the startups and first time practice buyers and the smaller practices who are just wanting to scale but don’t have clean financials or are blind to what’s going on.

[00:25:36] Chris Sands: We started a, a company called Phase one, uh, dental CPAs and phase one. Similar to like phase one orthodontics. Uh, it’s a great starter place. It’ll, it’ll have you investment grade financials still and then be, you know, bank ready and investment ready, sale ready at all times. Um, and then as you grow and you feel like you need more coaching and [00:26:00] more complex, you know, tax strategy, you can, you can grow into our profile model as well.

[00:26:05] Chris Sands: But you can find us@profiletwentytwenty.com or phase one dental cpas.com.

[00:26:10] Dr. Victoria Peterson: I love that so much and we, we’ve kind of done the same thing with, with our service mix, you know, so we’re, we’re tiers, we’re not phases. So our, our tier one like really helps you get your team and practice management systems. But what I love about, um, your mindset and ours, this is why we work together, is that.

[00:26:31] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Doctors shouldn’t have to start and stop to move down the pathway. And in the past you might work with this group for a little while and then go to that one and then go to that one and everything kind of has a start and stop piece to it. But there’s a pathway here. Uh, for accounting. There’s a pathway for legal, there’s a pathway for practice management that does get you investment grade from day one.

[00:26:55] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Uh, and I love that ’cause. What I find unless true [00:27:00] startups, they need systems. Once you’ve been at it for two or three years, you have systems. So it, it’s not really about managing the systems at that point, it’s more about alignment and optimizing. So thank you for this great conversation about, I, I would call, I guess the wealth mirror.

[00:27:18] Dr. Victoria Peterson: There’s the data and the emotions around the finances, and you really shifted my mindset a bit, um, on marketing. I mean, I know a lot about marketing, but you, the way that you. Talked about it being a reinvestment into, I think that’s gonna be one of my big takeaways today, and also the calculation and having the conversation with your team about, yeah, I wanna be generous.

[00:27:44] Dr. Victoria Peterson: I want to have each of you live a full rich life and we have to work the math on it. So I think, you know, you gave some great strategies for how doctors take this back to their team and have really constructive conversations.

[00:27:59] Chris Sands: I think [00:28:00] we, we only scratched the surface today on kind of what I call the, the front end of the factory.

[00:28:04] Chris Sands: You know, we, we did, I ended up going down that path and talking a lot about marketing and, you know, attracting new patients and you brought up reactivation, but next time we talk, we need to talk about the, the back end of the factory where, uh, I think, you know, you guys shine and, uh, scheduling and case acceptance, uh, all of those are processes for the, for the entire practice and the team that.

[00:28:26] Chris Sands: Everybody, they don’t always wanna talk about these things, but the, you know, we’re trying, we’re trying to change people’s lives and change their healthcare. Um, it helps to have a system and a proven process that works to, to do that.

[00:28:39] Dr. Victoria Peterson: I love that so much. All right, just one more time so people know where our affiliations are.

[00:28:45] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Go dogs.

[00:28:46] Chris Sands: Go Dogs.

[00:28:50] Dr. Victoria Peterson: Have a great afternoon. Thanks for joining me on this day. Uh, Chris, always good to be with you.

[00:28:56] Chris Sands: Thank you so much, Victoria. Likewise.

[00:28:58] Dr. Victoria Peterson: See you soon. Take

[00:28:59] Chris Sands: care.