Dental Bookkeeper Mara Johnson interviews Prosperident's David Harris

Auto-generated transcript: Dental Bookkeeper Mara Johnson interviews Prosperident's David Harris

You are listening to the dental practice owner's podcast. Brought to you by Prosperident. From our unique perspective as dentistry's and bezel-lit experts, Prosperident's team can bring you the information that is important to practice owners. The dental practice owner's podcast brings you strategies, tools and tips that you can use, and dentistry's thought leaders as guests.

So sit back, relax, and listen to Prosperident's Amber Weber. Wendy Askins and David Harris. Talk about the issues that matter to you.

Hi, I'm Mariah Johnson with MJ Dental Bookkeeping. And I am very honored to have David Harris with us today. He is the CEO of Prosperident and is the dental investment expert. And it's been doing this for, I believe, three decades. He is very much a sought after speaker and is the author of dental investment, the art of theft and the science of control. And he has taught me everything I know about dental investment. So it is a huge honor to have you here.

It's great to see you, David. Great to see you, Mariah. I'm really flattered that you asked me to do this. Likewise, well, thank you. So a lot of people ask me, is this really a problem in general practices? So what would you say to that? It definitely is pinning down the exact numbers is a little bit of a challenge sometimes. And I'll maybe touch on why in a minute.

But it's safe to say that if somebody is graduating from dental school today, there's probably an 80% chance that they'll be embezzled at some point in their career. There's about a 40% chance that they'll be embezzled more than what's. Wow. Wow. The confounding factor in measuring the numbers is that some embezzlement never gets detected probably. And some gets detected but never reported anybody. And those two things sort of make the final number of it elusive.

But the 80% is pretty safe. Yeah, so many people never even know. I just, I think I told you recently about a friend of mine who's dad had a dental practice and was embezzled for 15 years. Sold the practice and didn't find out about the embezzlement. That was almost a million dollars until two years after the practice. So sometimes, Dennis have no clue it's even happening. It's very true. And what I think some of the audience may not realize about embezzlement is how interactive a crime it is.

In other words, how much it is dependent on the person who's doing the embezzling, starting by studying their adversary, the dentist, and saying, alright, what does this person look at? And more importantly, what don't they look at in their practice? And then the embezzler builds a scheme that is designed to bypass whatever the doctor looks at. That's custom made schemes. Well said, yeah, it really is. Well, what are some of the misconceptions? Because I feel like there are so many about how to how to find this and just on the subject in general.

Well, let's start with vulnerability. A lot of dentists convince themselves that they're not likely to be embezzlement victims. And let's face it. Life is more comfortable if you can if you can talk yourself into that. And I hear a lot of reasons why people think they they won't be victims. For example, my staff have been with me forever. Or I live in a small town and really embezzlement is an urban problem. You know, it happens in big cities when you end up hiring people, you don't know very well.

I put that one. Yeah, but all my you know, all my staff started out as my patients. So I know them really well. The thing I'll say about embezzlement, Mara, is that it's a selfish crime. So the person who's doing it doesn't think about their victim or the situation or anything else. It's about me, me, me. I mean or I want. And so there's no there's no immune practice.

There's no practice where the circumstances mean that somebody will never be embezzled. Another one that I hear a lot. And this is a this is a good way to illustrate the point of making is I pity my staff really well. And the typical embezzlement will take between two and four percent of a practice is gross revenue. So on a practice that that brings in a million dollars a year, that translates to somewhere close to forty thousand dollars that an embezzler can be stealing. When a hairdo doctor say that she pays her staff really well, she's talking about sort of one or two dollars an hour above the local going right. It comes nowhere close to scratching that it's right. And then you have the embezzlers who aren't stealing because they need the money.

They're stealing to address an ego deficit. You know, they feel underappreciated by society or more specifically by the practice order. And they're stealing to take what they think they should have received in the first place. And for those people, it doesn't matter what you pay them. But it's almost irrelevant. The real question is what they believe they should be paid, which is invariably a bigger number. You talk in your book a lot about justification. Yeah.

And how, you know, someone that works in a don't practice, they're seeing all that money coming in. They don't know what the loan payment is. The student loan payment for that dentist. They don't know all the expenses they have. They just see that money coming in and so sometimes they feel like, hey, I'm doing all this work for the dentist. I need to get a cut, you know, I need to get a piece of that. So they don't, they don't always appreciate what the dentist has gone through to get where he is. Or she is.

Every staff member over estimates how much the dentist takes home. You know, partly because as you say, some of the overhead is invisible. Right. To the staff, even the stuff that they see, they tend to kind of forget about on a day to day basis because you're right. They see lots and lots and lots of money in there in their in their scale coming in. And they just assume that their dentist is is walking home with the gross revenue, which we and every dentist in the audience knows is just not remotely possible. Yeah. When you think about a dentistry is a fairly high overhead business.

You know, and and for most of your your audience probably overhead in the 60 to 70% range is not uncommon. So the difference between gross and that is significant. But yeah, every embellish or who. I've ever talked to about this, had just a very worked perception of how much the doctor actually took home. And then the student loans alone. I don't know what the average student loan amount is,

but it's quite large six figures, usually. I don't think for somebody graduating today, 400,000 would be out of the question. So you're right. There's a significant investment in education and it has to be recouped. And the other thing that I'll say about every dentist is that they made a choice.

You know, they could have left school after their undergrad degree and become a drug rapper, work for Henry Shiner, something like that. And they chose to forgo that and spend another four years if they're a general dentist. And more than that, if they're a specialist,

really not earning any money and paying large tuition all at once. So there's a significant sacrifice, but there's also some kind of pent up consumption. I mean, these people get out of school finally and they've watched all their friends get kind of the trappings of adulthood like houses and cars and savings and all those things.

And now they have to catch up the last four years. Yeah, it's a challenge. Well, it's another form of overhead. It's another invisible form of overhead. And as you say, the thief can't possibly appreciate any of this. Yeah, exactly. They're not seeing that payment each month. Yeah.

So any other myths or misconceptions? Oh, I've got a lot of those. You know, one of the biggest myths is that there's a magic pill that there's a report that the doctor can look at or there's some system or procedure that they can put in place in their office. And it will just shut and bezel them down, cool.

And that doesn't exist. There are a lot of possibilities. We have somebody on staff here who keeps score of how many different modalities we've seen for a measurement over 300. There's almost an endless variety of possibilities. And the reason the magic pill doesn't exist is because there are so many options.

You know, we all know some doctors who allow a staff member to take the deposit to the bank instead of the doctor or spouse making it personal. And he's still very good about that. Like, oh, I have this great internal control in place. Yeah. But inevitably, in some practice somewhere,

the amount of money that leaves the practice and the amount that shows up at the bank will be different. So one thing that I've heard some of the punitive say is that really the doctor should make the deposit himself or herself. And if I'm working for a dentist and my plan is to steal. And the first idea that I come up with is I'll just divert some of the deposit

when I take it to the bank. And the doctor frustrates that by doing it herself. That's not going to make my desire to steal go away. It's simply going to make me an unrequited thief. So I still want to steal, but I can't do it that way. The question is, what do I do next? In other words, do I go home and join the church choir and give up my plan to steal?

Or do I find another way? And I think we can all conclude fairly quickly that that little speed bump on the un-the-enbezzlement highway isn't going to send me to the church. I'm going to find a different way. And I've got lots of choices. So the idea that, and I see these articles in the dental media, five things you can do to prevent imbezzlement in your practice.

And whenever you see the words prevent an embezzlement side by side, what I hope the audience will think forever is whoever said that doesn't really understand embezzlement. What everybody wants to do, Marri, is they want to now acknowledge that there's to other types of crime that they understand better.

And probably from most people, what they understand most is burglary. So there's a lot of research that suggests that if you put a burglary arm system in your house, it reduces the chance of you being robbed by about 60%. And what everybody's looking for is the comparable in a dental practice. You know, what kind of burglary arm can I put in place?

And the problem with that kind of thinking is that the house burglars attachment to their victim is just about zero. In other words, if I want to rob a house and I get to the first house that I'm looking at and it's gotten a alarm system, I don't join the church choir, right? Simply move down the street and find another house.

And as a burglary that's easy to do. As an embezzlement, it's difficult. You have a lot of investment. You have a lot of knowledge. When the practice you're working in right now, and if you're going to switch targets, you have to abandon that and rebuild it somewhere else. And that takes months and months.

So you'd have to be an incredibly patient thief to get discouraged in the practice you're working in and go find a job somewhere else. And then learn enough about the systems in your new practice to steal.

The adaptation of people make is not to change victims. It's to change tactics. So that's why I say the magic pill doesn't exist and the particles that say five things you can do to prevent fraud in your practice are really just going to end up forcing your thief to adapt. Right. So there's one that I hear often is,

I look at the day she every day. And I check that and make sure it's correct. And that is a fabulous idea. I encourage every dentist who's in the audience to make that part of their daily routine. Let's add one thing to it. That day she should be one that you printed yourself. In other words, if you allow a staff member

to print it and put it in front of you, you've lost control over the parameters. And it's very easy for somebody in that case to practice a little bit of selective reporting where the day she looks to you like it tells the whole story of your practice. And in fact, it doesn't.

So the first issue is we need to print it ourselves. The second thing is, thieves will adapt again. So if all you do is look at day and reports, my adaptation is that I'll come in on a Saturday. And I'll do some stuff. I don't want you to see on that day. And I'll print off a report at the end of Saturday and they'll shred it.

And chances are you will not know that any of that happen. So we definitely need to look at that day and report. If that's the extent of your sticking your nose into the finances of the practice, you're still going to get burned. Right. What about, you know, my patience paper, everything online, or, you know, it's set up on automatic payments. So there's no one, my employees aren't going to be able to bezel.

Yeah, I hear that a lot. And a couple of things there. I think what's behind your question is really the cash is the first choice of everything. You know, everybody, if they're going to steal, would prefer to steal cash over stealing a check or a credit card payment or getting involved in what's called an ACH automated clearinghouse deposit, which is what you're talking about when the money shows up directly in the bank account. And the first thing I'll say is that any of those things can be stolen.

In other words, it's not that hard, for example, to cash a check with the doctor's name on it. It's not that hard to hijack a credit card payment or an ACH payment. So it doesn't matter how the money's coming into you. It's able to be adulterated. But I have a lot of doctors who haven't quite made that leap and they believe that what people steal is limited to cash. So if I just don't take any cash, obviously I'm not vulnerable, and that part isn't true.

You know, I will get a lot of people who will call me in one of the first things they'll say is, well, I don't take in that much cash. And I say to them, well, two things, doctor. First of all, you have no idea how much cash actually is paid to your practice by patients. What you know is the amount your staff turnover to you, which could be very different. Right. And secondly, if I were working at your prod desk, and I wanted more cash to come in, I can make that happen.

All I have to do is start telling patients. Well, doctor Smith gives a 10% discount if you pay cash. You know, even if that's not true. And it's up to you, Mr. Patient. But there's an ATM around the corner. You might want to go in with draw the cash so that I can give you the discount. And all of a sudden, there's a lot more cash coming in. That's a really good point.

So what actually works, I mean, we've talked about, you know, there's a lot of internal controls you can put in place. But what is actually effective? Well, let's go back to even before we think about that. The first thing I'll say is that a lot of dentists know far less about people. They hire than they really should. You know, and the irony of it all, Mara, is that there's typically a lot more information available than the doctor's access.

And I'll give you a very simple example, 70 million Americans, which is one in four adults have criminal records. And yet the majority of dental practices do not know criminal records checks before the hierarchy. And it is astounding. Now, to be clear, some of those criminal records probably wouldn't stop me from hiring somebody. In other words, if I'm, if I have an applicant who has a marijuana possession from 20 years

ago, that probably wouldn't bother me. So I'm not saying there are 70 million unhirable people. But what I'm saying is that the decision of whether or not a specific criminal record should have hiring implications is one you can only make. If you know whether there is a criminal record there. And at least as important as the criminal records check is speaking with former employers. And it astounds me how many dentists will hire somebody without talking to the last three or four employers that that person had.

And that's the way to find out if they left somewhere under a cloud or if they just weren't a great employee. Because there are a lot of people who interview much better than they perform on the job. And the only way to find that out is to see how they performed in their last job in the job before that. So the first easy fix is hiring. The second easy fix is this. And this is something a lot of people probably aren't aware of.

When we look at how embassilment is discovered, if we look across all businesses, including dentistry, over 40% of an investment is discovered because of whistleblowers. So what I mean by whistleblowers, somebody who comes forward to the practice on her and says, Dr, I'm a little concerned about something I saw in your practice management software. I'm a little concerned about how selling the office manager handled this. So across all industries over 40%. When the narrow the focus to just dentistry, whistleblowers account for about 9% of detection. Why is that?

It probably happens for a couple of reasons. The biggest one is most adult practices are fairly small businesses. And a lot of people who see something and then are trying to decide if they come forward or not, they're concerned, is this going to be kept anonymous? Is my coworker going to find out somehow that I rass it on her? Is the doctor going to take some kind of adverse action against me because they think I'm a crybaby? And there are allegiances to the office manager and not me. So there's a risk for somebody to come forward.

And one thing that I think dentistry could do better is to alleviate that risk. And the way that that happens is that your practice needs a whistleblower pulse. It needs a way to tell people in advance. There's no point in having a good flow for when somebody comes forward to you that you handle it properly. What you really need to do is reassure all of your employees that if you ever are in a position where you're trying to decide whether or not to approach me on something like this, that you have some certainty about how I'm going to handle it.

And you know that I'll be discreet, you know that I won't shoot the messenger, you know that I will take it seriously and have it properly investigated and all those things. So very few practices have a really good whistleblower policy. And that's another piece of groundwork that we can lay because if we can encourage more people who see something to say something, then we have a much better chance of catching a bezel that early rather than, you know, as has happened in that situation you described where it went on for 15 years and to the extent of a million dollars. I am almost certain if you look back in that situation, there were employees who knew

something was wrong, whether they could. kind of pinpoint and bezel men or not, they knew something wasn't right and they just never felt confident enough in the doctor to come forward and say, you know, I've been kind of torn about this but I really think there's something you need to know. So is this a policy that's that you talk about when you hire someone is it written and posted in the cracked office somewhere? Yeah, it should probably be in the employee manual and yes, every new employee should be briefed on the manual and certainly this part should be highlighted that I expect you to come forward and when you do I assure you that I will treat you proper. In fact, our template policy even says on it and you know, if you feel like I don't feel free to show me this policy and remind me of my commitment to you. So it's great. It's something that needs to be there now in terms of controls. I always say reconcile and reckless and what I mean by that is you said it a few minutes ago every piece of practice management software has a day and report and one of the things that the day and report tells you is here's how much money should be going into the bank.

Broken down by components. So here's how much cash. Here's so much in checks and here are the credit card payments and if you're using a third party like care credit. Here's here's the amount coming from care credit. What the doctor needs to do, Mara, is to either personally or outsource so not not delegate to a staff member but outsource to somebody like. The doctor needs to do a lot of things. The job of making sure that the amount that was supposed to go into the bank went into the bank. And if that isn't done, then you open the door to the stupidest, lazyest and bezel on the planet. In other words, if if doctor, you don't know how much money is supposed to be going into your bank. And you don't check to see that that amount of money actually went into your bank. I can be the least industrial thief on the planet and still steal from. If you lock that one down, now my challenge is a lot tougher because what I need to do now is I need to teach yourself or how to line. And that's far from impossible, Mara, but it's a lot harder than just siphing off some of the deposit because you think nobody will be looking at it.

So do you find that dentists are apprehensive to do this or they kind of push back with doing this? I think that nobody became a dentist because they really, really, really wanted it on a business. I think for most dentists, they got into dentistry because they really wanted to help people, they wanted to be healers, they wanted to express that help through the delivery of a highly skilled personalised service to people. And they sort of get somewhat far along in dental school and as you mentioned before, they owe a lot of money at that point. And then somebody says to them, oh and by the way, you also have to run the place. And whenever I talk to dentists about their frustrations in life, almost inevitably they're around running the practice. You know, I hate it when staff leave and I have to find somebody new to hire. I hate when my staff get in conflict with each other and I have to step in and sort of referee.

When you look at what gives a dentist stress, it's that kind of stuff. And if I'm a dentist and I have to decide how I'm going to spend the next 20 minutes. And I could either spend it looking at some reports from my software or I could go fix another patient's mouth. I'm going to want to fix the patient's mouth. And you know, you have to do a fair amount of that to keep your ship afloat. But it is a business and you have to run it as opposed to it running you. And what I tell dentists is you need to build, what I say is accountability doesn't just happen. You need to build accountability into your daily monthly and annual routine.

So for example, at the end of the day, you need to commit every day that 10 minutes to review your reporting and understand what happened in your practice today and make sure that what happened was what was supposed to happen. There's a month and activity to do there's an annual activity to do. And again, it's tempting as hell because most dentists don't enjoy that part of their routine. And it's really tempting to say, no, I'm too busy for that. Rather than spend that 10 minutes, I can do one more thing for a patient and I can bring in 200 dollars in that 10 minutes. In the in the micro sense, you might be you might be right when we step back a minute though again, if if you're not at the rudder of your ship sooner or later, it's going to land on the rocks. Yeah, which you've seen many times.

But I think a 10 minutes is pretty reasonable. I think that's pretty doable. That's not bad at all. No, it's not. And unfortunately, dentists don't tend to learn at school. Here's what you look at. I mean, a question I get asked a lot is, well, what reports do I look at? Because nobody's told them in a lot of dentists via practice and they inherit whatever systems the former owner had, which may or may not have had a lot of thought put into them. So, you know, they they feel very unknowledgeable about this whole problem, and that's one more reason just to stick your head in a dark place and ignore it. Well, so I know something that you often talk about that the most effective way to find an ambassador is through behaviors. You want to talk a little bit about that. Absolutely, I do. Over 90% of thieves display some behavioral characteristic of stealing.

And something like 80% of thieves display at least two. So the question is, well, what how do people behave when they're stealing? And there are a lot of possible manifestations here. I'll mention a few. One that shows up a lot in ministry is what I will broadly call territoryality. And what I mean by that, Mara is possessiveness about their their job duties, you know, this is the person who can be run off their feet, but they will not delegate. To anybody else. They certainly don't want to cross train anybody else to do any part of their duties. It may even extend to, they get upset if somebody else sits in their sits at their chair or touches their computer. So they kind of create their little kingdom within the practice and they just keep everybody else out of it including the doctor. So that's a big one.

If I work for you and I don't have ulterior motives, I should want to be transparent with you. I should want to tell you what I'm doing and what's going on. And if you ask me a question, I should generally be able to give you a very clear cogent answer to what happened or why I did what I did or why the insurance only paid this when you thought it was going to pay that. And transparency is probably one of the first casualties of the investment. People who are stealing will sort of give a fuscatory answers to some relatively simple questions and you will get the overtones sometimes from these people that, well, you know, really this is a bit complex for you to understand. And I'll say the audience gently,

you know, if you made it through dental school, there shouldn't be any explanation of what happened with the finances around people's dental treatment that you can't understand. So if you're getting that vibe from a staff member, be careful. Another huge red flag is that people who are stealing tend to want to be alone when they do it. So they will try to set up their work week in a way that they've got some alone time in the practice. And sometimes the doctor just hands this to the like, you know, I'm not going to be in on Fridays, but you come in and catch up on next.

And sometimes people just make it for themselves. So this will be the person who gets there before everybody else, which means nobody else knows how much earlier they got there. Or, you know, everybody also be handing out the door waving goodbye and this person will still be there with their head down finishing the day in balance. So they'll, they'll engineer some alone time in the practice. Another common thing is that a lot of thieves are reluctant to take vacation because when they're gone, what they've lost control over is how the information flows through the practice. Exactly. And I tell a story often about an investment I worked on early in my career. It was, it was really big dollars in those days, like about $600,000 from a two doctor specialty

practice. And what happened was the thief broke her leg on a weekend skiing. So the Monday morning after for the first time in anybody's memories, she wasn't around. And her 11 o'clock in the morning, one of the receptionists came into the senior doctor took him out of the opportunity, which was a huge no-no in that practice. And said, Dr, there's something going on here because I've gotten three very strange phone calls this morning. And when it happened, Marrow was that these were phone calls that normally would have gone to the office manager. But of course, she was at that point still in the hospital. And so they came to this receptionist instead. And after she got the third kind of bizarre call from a patient, she sort of took it upon herself to call it to

interrupt the doctor and tell him what was going on. He called me and we started finding stuff almost immediately and it just went on and on and on. That's crazy. Wow, we're all of the story. Don't go skiing. If you're a mess like, you know, live up. If you're a mess like, right. Okay, any other behaviors? There are. One that I mentioned sometimes is what I call a conspicuous display of honesty. And here's what I mean by that. You know, if you and I were walking down the street and we saw somebody's wallet fall out of their pocket 50 feet in front of us. I mean, we wouldn't give it another thought. We just reached down, pick up the wallet, walk a little faster, catch up to the person and say to them, here. You drop something. I think man, I'm doing that too, but they get their

via a little different thought process. And before they hand the wallet back, they tend to ask themselves a couple of questions like, you know, wonder if anybody else saw that wallet fall. And I wonder how much money isn't a wallet. And based on the answers to those questions, they made it up handing the wallet back. But they got their via a very different thought process than we did. Now, what I'll say about honest people is that they believe that everybody else, first of all, is honest and second believes that they're honest. So if I'm truly an honest person and I'm engaged in some kind of interaction with you, I probably won't have any kind of compulsion to show you or demonstrate to you how honest I am or how honest I'm being right now.

This honest people, on the other hand, will often try to flag that. That's a warning sign. I was involved in a deposition a few years ago. So this is somebody who was being asked questions by an attorney in preparation for a trial. And they must have said it doesn't times, you know, this deposition went on for about two hours. They probably said 12 times in that two hours, the words I swear to God. And then some declared a statement after that.

And every time, whenever it came out of their mouth after I swear to God, was a big fat lie. If you are truly religious in any religion I can think of, you take being honest as just a duty part of your job. And you don't need to invoke the deity to emphasize that this particular time might be honest. Right, interesting, very interesting. Well, gosh, this is so much insight and just great information for dental practice owners. So if they feel like something is happening or they notice these behaviors that you've talked about, what do they do? Let's talk about what they don't do. And what they don't do is alert the suspect to the fact that here she is under suspicion. If I've been stealing from you and I think that you're about

to catch me, I may do the dental practice equivalent of a Hail Mary pass. And I suspect most of the audience know this, but if you don't, a Hail Mary passes what you do in football, when you're down by six points and there's 30 seconds left on the clock. And you throw this desperation pass and hope that somebody on your team catches it. Desperate people do desperate things. And if I think that I'm about to get caught and that the consequence of getting caught will be that I'm going to go to prison, the list of things that I will not do to prevent that is pretty short.

And I remember getting a call from a doctor and we're going back over a decade now. And he had some of the bezel and concerns and I talked to him for about 15 minutes. And I was pretty convinced that there was something behind his concerns. Anyway, he decided that before he hired us, he was going to dig into this a little bit further himself. And I'm not sure Merri exactly what he did, but he did something that let the thief know that she was going to get caught. And her response was very simple.

She came back that night with a can of gasoline and burned down the practice.

That's a little extreme. It's a little extreme. And the poor dentist, I mean, she was the person, of course, who made the backups. And those days they were using tape backups. So she stacked the three backups right next to the computer before she torched the place. So all of the computer records were destroyed. And as well, the paper records, I mean, the doctor, the poor guy had to take out ads in the paper saying our records were destroyed in a fire.

If you're a patient of this office, please contact us. I mean, they didn't even have a record of who were their patients. No, no. No one to check. I'm sure. Yeah, actually, she ended up serving more time for us and then she would have for our investment. But the point is that we tend to think of the people in our practices as sort of nice,

healing, nonviolent people. And that's probably generally true. But when somebody's got their back against the wall, the rules change. And like I say, this woman was prepared to commit a crime. That let's face it. Somebody could have been hurt or died from to try to keep herself out of prison. So don't let them off, but you know, I don't tip them off. And tipping them off can happen in a lot of ways.

You know, you ask them to print you off a whole bunch of reports that you've never asked for before. And then you go in your private office and close the door and spend the next hour on the phone with your CPA. If I'm stealing from you, I'm looking at you daily and saying, does she suspect? So discretion and secrecy are an essential part of it. And certainly, if we are involved, our whole investigation is 100% secret. I mean, nobody on staff knows that we're doing it.

So to answer your question, if you suspect, I think the best thing you can do is reach out for professional help. And we're always happy to receive a call from a dentist who's got concerns. And we'll talk to them about what their concerns are and then guide them through what happens next. But it's not to do it yourself project. And that can end really, really bad. Okay.

That's great information. Well, this has been fabulous. You've heard it. I mean, I've been talking about investment, but we get to hear from the horses mouth who has so much experience. I think she just called me a horse. In a kind way, in a kind way. Very kind way.

But David, I really appreciate you joining me today. This has been wonderful. And yeah, I just really appreciate it. Thank you. Well, thank you, David, for joining me today. So much good information was shared. And I hope that it's helpful to dental practice owners out there. Well, thank you, Mara.

It's always a pleasure to talk to you. And I really appreciate what you do for dentist as well. Well, thank you. Thanks for listening to the dental practice owners podcast. We're onto you by Prosperidant. You can contact Prosperidant through its website, www.prosperidant.com or by calling 888-398-2327. If you have questions about this podcast, if you would like to discuss your practice, or there is a topic you would like to see in a future podcast, we would love to hear

from you. Amber, Wendy, and David will be back soon with another episode.