Welcome back to another episode of the SPG podcast. Back by popular demand is one Mr. Dave Southchitoli. Dave, how are you? I'm doing great. Happy to be here. Well, Dave's learning the extemporaneous nature of the SPG pod where we open the link. Dave wants to know what the topics are. I say you'll find out. I hit record and here we go. So Dave, thanks for being along for the ride. Yeah, yeah, excited to be here. Happy Monday.
I do happy Monday. We're both a little sunburned, a little crispy. So we'll make the best of it today. What I wanted to first get your thoughts on, obviously we've had an eventful May. I think we've chronicled that pretty well on the SPG pod and on BDP the last couple of weeks. But I wanted to get your sense of how May went from your perspective because I have my perspective,
you have your perspective. And there were just a lot of parallel, I guess we could use the term work streams where we had a lot of things going on internally, a lot of things going on externally, a lot of things going on sort of in that middle ground between internal and external where we're looking at business development and planning out the next phase of growth. But how did May 2025 land
for you? Yeah, I would say that this morning was the first time where I didn't wake up at 430, like, wow, look at the massive list that's got to get done before Friday. So I think May was certainly busy, certainly busy for you guys with travel. But really a great month. I think there's a couple of obviously incredible milestones from our retreat and also the intro to all on X event. But also I think we really saw our team's focus heavily in the
last couple of weeks. It's cool to see a rally towards the end of the month in terms of getting new patients started on their smile journey and moving forward. And so yeah, it was a really great month. Just I think it was just very busy on all fronts trying to get ready for the retreat, deliver for the retreat, sort of some of the exhaustion and fatigue and hold over from the
retreat. And then also getting ready for the intro to all on X event. So having those two back to back was I think was definitely busy, but rewarding in many friends. Well, one of the running jokes of SPG is that every time we have a retreat, there's a bump. So it's just like this well-cronical retreat bump that happened after after every either doctor retreat
or back in the day it was the team lead retreat. And it's hard to put a finger exactly on why that happens other than we have such a scarce opportunity for in-person collaboration, training and camaraderie. Though when we have it, it's this infusion of energy that you get and you see it across the board at all levels. And I think we saw that in the back half of May,
where the first half of May, it seemed like we were struggling for a variety of reasons. But then on the back half of May, a lot of those reasons just seemed to either dissolve or we hit our stride at the right time, hard to exactly pinpoint why that happened. But what did you notice about the sense of urgency, the sense of possibility, the connection with why we do what we do? What would you say were some of the contributors to that stronger, more energetic finish to May that
we didn't quite see in the first half of May? Yeah, I definitely think we got a bump out of the just the energy that we had together, some of the skills that we learned around how to navigate objections that are commonly coming up within consults. I think it was Nick from Sacramento who said during our time, when we had all our small consultant training at the retreat, that basically our entire success boils down to how we handle eight or nine objections.
So if you really boil it down to that, we have patients who are seeking us out. They want some level of treatment. And depending on how we navigate through those challenges, those roadblocks, those obstacles, we can be successful or not. And so because we spent so much time on basically how to overcome those those set of eight or nine objections, I definitely think we saw some
success on the back end. You know, what's interesting though, Matt and I have been looking at the data from the past couple of months, Alex, and and actually sort of the slow start and the heavy finish has been consistent for us actually over the past couple of months. That's why I'm so excited going
into the second week of June, because last week we had a really strong start. And so I think kind of coming out of last month and moving forward, there's been a lot more conversation with us around how we actually pace towards goals instead of having this sort of, you know, sprint rest, sprint rest, you know, that that hit methodology, right within within how we do our, you know, our
weekly collections and look at our month. So, you know, I think that that was also a big bump that came out of our retreat to because we really boil it down to what are the most high leverage activities that you need to do every single day to be successful, rather than sort of this, you know, let's rally towards the end and then we're totally burned out. And then we just, you know,
we rest for a couple of weeks and then we get back after it. And so I think that we're getting smarter, we're getting wiser in terms of how we pace towards those goals and being clear on what each day and each hour needs to look like to be able to achieve those. So, I think that was a really good lesson coming out of May. I'm happy we rallied for those past two weeks, but I'm also happy that we're starting to pace a little bit more effectively day over day towards our long-term
goals. That makes me think of is the difference in how we measure success and how that relates to energy expenditure when you're comparing and contrasting traditional GP dentistry to what we do at SPG. And what I mean by that is, I remember distinctly early on in my journey, I would be very cautious about maintaining a drip, drip, drip of production because, you know, in the GP world, we looked at production a whole lot because there was a very clear connection between production
and revenue. And it's different in traditional GP versus there's all the different nuances and dentures and implants. But back in the day, I would look at everything on the month. The month was the time horizon. The month was it felt influensible. You could sort of architect what your month needed to look like relative to the cases that you close and the number of new patients that you saw. And you can more or less puppeteer the different pieces of the puzzle on the
month basis. And it was pretty predictable. Whereas in the denturing implant model, it doesn't work that way. We're starting fresh every single month. We can't really carry things over between months as well. And you just see that because of the types of patients that walk through the door, the types of needs that they have, the types of research that they've done, the level of preparedness psychologically and financially that they come in with, you just can't predict what you're going
to get other than having wide open capacity and rock solid connection calls. You can do things to control for some of those variables. But at the end of the day, what walks through the door is a little different every single day. There's not the same level of predictability that comes innately in the GP dentistry model. And a great example of that was when I was in Little Rock last week where we had Steven from Santa Barbara there training with Dixie and Stephanie and the
team. Lana and I went up there and we basically gave Steven a really good crash course in how a busy practice works and how the smile consultant role has evolved to operate at its highest leverage fulcrum point, I guess you could say, in a practice like Little Rock. And so it was a crazy day where Dr. Hargis was doing a double and he was like, yeah, you know what doubles are doubles. It's not a big deal. It's like a crown prep for me now, which was awesome to hear. And then Dixie and Steven are
in their closing cases. They close like 90 grand of dentistry that day while Kyle was producing a double. And that just made me think that obviously not every day is going to be like that. But the swings are so great in magnitude between a day like that and then kind of a pedestrian day. And so that makes me think that the time horizon that we need to look at on the Dintran implant model is not the same time horizon where we measure a successful fill in the blank month.
Maybe it's a week, maybe it's a day, but I'd love to get your sense on coming from high performing GP practices as your most recent stop on your career trajectory to now seeing what it's like to work alongside SPG and to build consistency within our practice cohort. What have you learned about that appropriate time horizon on which to measure success? Yeah, it's a great question. And you're right, the collections and revenue model, the KPIs we look at for success
and GP is totally different. Because oftentimes the collections are only going to come after you complete the procedure in the GP, right? Because if your insurance base, you're going to submit for claims and then it's going to take that time to come in. And so it's a totally different time where you actually realize the revenue when the GP model versus in ours, where we do collections
beforehand before we actually have the surgery. But you're right, there can be to use your analogy, sunny days in terms of collections and rainy days, and they can swing pretty dramatically. I will say though, again, I think we're learning a lot with some different structures, some different systems about how we can generate more consistency day over day, week over week,
month over month. And I think some of that comes from Danielle, who's our new regional manager who just came in, has brought some wisdom around, you know, if you don't have if you don't have consoles coming in today, then what are the other activities that you help to fill those days and really a focus on outbound on call back starts? Can I call someone today and
get them back in for a reconseal to move them forward? So I think that we're expanding our definition of how we can create consistency within the practices by using a couple of different levers. So obviously, consoles the same day starts as a big one for us. But what does that outbound activity look like? Can I do 20, 25 calls a day to get to reengage patients who were maybe on the edge of the cliff or their financing wasn't quite there, a lock can change in a patient's
in six to eight months? So how do we continually reengage that group and become more consistent time over time? So we introduced a few tools this past week, actually, that the POM is engaging with a little bit more deeply in terms of really understanding how do we pace the goal? How much we need each day in terms of collections? Are we pacing towards our practice goals, our break even point? And what can we all do to pull a few different levers to get people back in,
to get them reconsealed to actually mine and upgrade treatments? That's something that we haven't spent a lot of time on, who got a traditional denture, you know, eight months ago, because that's all they could afford. And do they want to upgrade into something more fixed? And so I think between same day starts, call back starts or follow up starts, and upgrades, those are three different levers we can pull to create more, more consistency and predictability, I think,
to our revenue model in the long term. That's outstanding. I love that. And what
again strikes me about our model is the power of being the patient advocate. I feel like when you when you approach things that way in the GP realm, it doesn't you don't feel the gravitational pull to doing that the way that you do with our model, because we're taking people that have no teeth or they have a ramshackle set of teeth that have been through the ringer, or maybe it's people that have gone through the fillings and then crowns and then root canals
and the new crowns on top of the root canals. Now we have leaks around the margins of those old crowns that have the root canals, refracturing teeth of the gum line, and to give people the opportunity to have a fresh start with a new set of teeth, I think is very resonant with all of
our teams because we see the impact that we have. And so to me, there's a very clear connection point between those outbound activities, those follow up calls, and the ability to create the next lenny is what I think about because the more that we can in a leadership position and for everyone listening, the more that you can connect the dots between each activity and the potential
for someone's life to be transformed, that's what keeps me coming back every day. Because again, I say all the time till I blew in the face that there's nothing really compelling or fun or value or valuable to the perception of the patient about doing a quadrant of fillings. You do those because you have to, whereas here we get to do things that transform the patient's life. And and we're in a lot of times these patients are self selecting in, they're calling us, they're
finding us. And it's just a really fun environment to participate in more so than what was baked into the traditional GP model. And with that, I want to own a shift gears. And I want to get your perspective on this while it's fresh Dave. So when you joined us, you joined us in a part time capacity, right as we were opening our last or most recent rather, de novo practice, Kansas City, like we were just opening doors when you were when you were joining us.
And now we're on the cusp of opening our next location in Virginia Beach. So you know, in your tenure, it's just a sample size where it's like, Oh my gosh, these guys are talking a big game about opening locations and stuff. Like I hear all the stories, like all the apocryphal tales of like SPG and its growth phase and it hasn't really been that way. So we're about to be opening new locations for for the foreseeable future and walk me through what that's been like as you've
been helping to steer the ship towards the new location in Virginia Beach going in. And then what are you excited about as we start the de novo engine backup? Yeah, and I'm reflecting on just listening to the BDP pod yesterday. And you guys were talking about, you know, we needed this
stabilization phase before we start to ramp that up. I could not, I couldn't imagine what the last six months would have looked like if we had, you know, four to six practices that we were also opening, because I think we, you know, I think you, I think you had sort of the fast sprint and national reach. And then sort of the holdover of trying to stabilize from that. And then really what I see the last six months as is we've really optimized a lot more in the platform, right?
We put a lot more emphasis on, and we still have work to do there certainly, but we've done a lot of, you know, heavy lifting, I think to optimize both our practice level positions and the tools and resources that are available there to help our practices thrive. So I'm actually really glad that, I mean, as much as I want to see fast growth, I'm really glad that we weren't opening practices in
the past six months. I think it would have been, I think it would have been put even more pressure on our platform as we were, we've all been working, you know, really, really hard to, to pull all of these different projects off. And so I'm excited for the growth now, because I think I'm much more confident in our ability of our platform to scale in terms of having consistent systems, consistent processes in place, tools to be able to select and hire the right
people, how we bring those people on. So I'm highly confident now and cannot wait for the back half of this year to open new practices. But I do think it would have been extraordinarily stressful the past six months to sort of be, you know, opening new practices while we're still optimizing quite a few different systems within the platform. Anyone listening who was here in 2023 is like, oh, Dave, welcome to the club. Yeah. Yeah. What you're imagining is what we lived through.
No, and what's interesting about that from your perspective is that you, you came aboard after we done a lot of the growth. And what I will go to the grave saying is that we had to make all of those decisions to open all the practices that we opened, to get enough feedback and to
gather enough information to be able to derive the best approach. Because unless you go out and do it, unless you get in the arena and open locations and learn what markets work and learn what types of people work in which situations and learn the best type of SPG doc, the best type of smile consulted, the best type of practice operations manager, the best lab tech, the best dental assistants, the best central team members, unless you actually do what you can do to learn
those things, you're never going to be able to get enough information to just magically have the answers. You have to have all kinds of results across the full spectrum to be able to understand, okay, this is what we need to double triple and quadruple down on, which is the point we're at. Now, where we've learned so much. And now we have the avatar for the practices, for the people. And then we have a more well-oiled, well-diled in success path. Sorry to cut you off.
No, no, I was going to cut you off. But I liken it to like there's been a big push within the like the SaaS world in terms of tech development. They call it like building in the open, essentially like, yeah, I'm like from day one, I'm bringing my MVP to market. We're trying some things, we're garnering rapid customer feedback because what was happening for a while is like, we're building this thing behind the scenes, we bring it to market, it falls flat on its face because there's no product
market fit. It hasn't had enough user feedback to really, you know, see if it meets a need or solves
a problem for anybody. And so I think that's the model that you guys have gone down. And while there's certainly some messiness to it and some challenges and some struggle, I do feel like we're at the point where, you know, yeah, like you said, from everything from what the facility looks like, what the equipment looks like, what the vendors are that we use, the people are, how we select those people, how we onboard them, how we train them, how we optimize their and leverage their
skill sets. So I think, I think, you know, the entire structure has benefited from building in the open and just, you know, the course correcting based on rapid feedback from patient, doctors, employees, team members, everybody involves, right?
Yeah, that's an extremely good parallel between you just have to get something out there. You can't just fixate on every last detail being perfect because no matter what you do, whether you spend a year or 10 years on, in that case, like in the SaaS parallel, your product, you have to get feedback. The faster you get feedback, the better you are at improving it more quickly. And that's what we've done. Like we've taken feedback from a lot of different sources,
internal, external, based on the results. And we've learned so much about how to operate existing locations well. And then in addition, how to set the new locations up for success. So to your point, we've gone from optimizing our current locations. And I think we've covered a whole heck of a lot of ground in the last six months. And so that's off to you for helping to orchestrate so much of that. And then we're shifting gears now into welcoming new locations into the
fold yet again on the back half of the year. So we're excited about Q3, Q4 of 2025 onto 2026 and all the growth that's going to come from that. But the next thing I wanted to ask you about Dave, while I have you, as you mentioned, I don't think you use this word, but this is the word that I thought of is kind of gamifying the hiring process and having a method to the madness around, this is the type of person that thrives in this role. This is the type of person based upon
our practices. And if you're taking if you're looking at our strong performers in a given seat, and you're seeing, okay, this is the commonality between these types of people along the personality axis, then we can look at people that we're looking to hire and say, okay, this person compares
favorably to this cohort of people that are known to have done well in this specific role. And, you know, you and I, since we've met each other over a year ago, now, we've we've batted back and forth different philosophies on this as to like which type of index to center our process around, whether that's anyogram or disk or any of those different ones. And we through through a relationship that I developed recently, we found a different one that that I hadn't heard of before, but that
we've studied we've all taken it and we've seen, oh, there's something to this. So walk me through how we sort of, you know, came up with this process over the last couple of weeks, we're rolling it out, we're integrating it into our hiring. What are you excited about with this new index? Yeah, I think you and I have always aligned around the philosophy. It's all about having the right people in the right seat. And it's all about finding that who not how and what if you have the right
who then, you know, a lot can happen. And so sort of building upon that philosophy and, you know, to be candid, we've been building in the open in terms of how we've been learning what the smile gets old and role looks like and what the PM role looks like. And, you know, we haven't gotten that right in every, every situation. I think those roles have both developed and
probably look a little bit different than they did six months ago. And so shout out to our team. So sort of, you know, been on that journey with us and adapted and grown with us through that process. But, you know, there's, there's kind of different components when you're looking at finding and optimizing talent. You are looking for a specific technical skill set, right? So, and that comes in more positions than others, right? For dental assistant, there's a specific
technical skill set. Yes, we can teach that. But like we like to have some of that. We've talked a lot about our doctors that we're looking at sort of as our next crop of doctors. And we're getting lots of doctors now who have that specific technical skill set. But you also need the behavioral skill set and how are you hardwired to where the type of work that you're going to be doing every day either energizes you or exhausts you. We want people who are energized by the work they're doing
every day, right? If it's a misfit for the role, what ends up happening for people is they, they will bend the role towards things that energize them, which may not be high leverage activities for what, what is needed within the practice, right? And so they'll end up doing other things that are energizing for them that aren't valuable for the practice. So, I think we've been trying to get smarter at how we screen for that behavioral side. And it's hard, right? You know,
to get at the, how are you hardwired? How are you sort of created and where do you find that most energy? So, yeah, we did land on a platform called predictive index. It's been one that's out there for a long time. It's probably one of the more leading platforms out there. But what it allows
us to do is to create top performer profiles based upon our top performers. Because, you know, what a practice operations manager somewhere else, you know, in, in Pacific dental services or MB two or whatever, that might look different than what it looks in our model, because our model may have or does have more of sort of the sales management a little bit those pieces. So, and then same thing for smile consultants, that's going to look different at a different place than, than
somewhere else. So yeah, so this index, we're just sort of launching it. I have a lot of work to do this week. We've had three candidates now come through it and it basically allows us to reference those candidate profiles, which only takes, gosh, like five minutes to do. It allows us to reference that profile for a percentage of job fit. Now, you know, we will be
using this as one additional data point. There are some platforms out there that are like, you know, if you were screening thousands of applicants every day, you may just like completely not look at other candidates. We're using it as one of our data points to triangulate how we find the best candidate between that. And you know, interviews with RM screening from Mariah, meeting people in the practice, right? So there's multitude of ways that we can sort of
get that 360 perspective on a potential team member that we bring in. But this is another tool for us to sort of get at like, how are you built? And are you going to be energized by the actual day to day activities that this work is going to require? So I'm excited about that. Yeah, this week to lean into that a little bit more. Yeah, the operative phrase there is to triangulate because it's not it's one data point amongst several. And I think of it almost as a tiebreaker,
where maybe you have two really good candidates on paper that interviewed well. And then you have one that has just the requisite profile that we know lends itself, at least when you're trying to make apples to apples comparison between two people in the same bucket. I think that's really nice. But yeah, I think I think the more that we can quantify or attempt to quantify the different ways that people are constituted, the more effectively we can steward those that work with us by putting
them in the right seats. Because I think that's that's really critical. And understanding the person behind the person, that's what I joke about with with doctors when when I'm meeting doctors that want to open practices with us. And I'm sort of the final boss that that people have to vanquish before they can be accepted into the company, because I do the final core values call. And I and I say the intention of this call is to get to know the person behind the dentist.
And and trying to understand are you a full cycle individual to to go back to the rainy versus sunny day thing like how do you show up what's the what's the difference in amplitude between how you show up on the best day ever and then the most challenging day ever. Because in a perfect world, there's not that much variance between how you show up on the best day versus the worst day, but we're all human. And can you always get at that and in the span of an hour long call? No,
but you can get a sense of how people perform under pressure. You can get a sense of how much they've thrown themselves headlong into growth opportunities that sometimes come in the form of things not going perfectly to plan in on surgery days. But really, that's the secret at SPG because
we don't have a whole army of people at every single location. So what that means is we owe it to ourselves and to those at the practice level to put everything that we can into getting the right people in the right seats because we open our practices with a smaller footprint in terms of the physical location and in terms of the number of people on the bus than some of our competitors do, which we view as again, way more of a feature than a bug, though others may disagree.
So that leads me to another question I had Dave because you know, you you did a lot in terms of integrations in the past where you would help to assess a location that might be acquired. You were assessing how well that practice might fit within the confines of that platform that you were working with. And so you were you were looking at stuff you're prejudging, you're trying to see would this be a good fit or is this going to be oil and water? And in our world,
it's different because we're able to say blank canvas. Where do we want to go? Which markets do we like? Which which which doctors do we want to work with? So we have a lot more authorship over over our growth path rather than having a constrained number of potential acquisition targets, which is the way that most companies of our size grow. So what have you liked about the narrow focus of of the DI model? Because what I found is that discipline sets us free
by having those guardrails. It allows us to be really excellent at just what we have chosen to do. But you're over six months in now. How has that felt of that relative level of focus? Has it been constraining or do you feel like, okay, actually, I'm loving this? Yeah, before we go there, though, what'd you think about your profile? Did you like it? You're pretty. Yeah, I thought it was about right. Yeah, I thought I thought it was about right. Yeah, especially the part about like not
responding well to authority. I was like, yeah, that explains a lot. That's why we're here right now. Yeah, some of us just aren't so good with authority. But yeah, that's good. What do you think about yours? Yeah, I, yeah, I felt like it was decently accurate. And we'll share more, you know, as as we get deeper into it. But it's hard because, you know, nobody likes to sort of be like, you know, put into a bucket. But yeah, again, I think you take it broadly. And there's like,
there's other elements to you. No, you're not a robot. But so that was that was my takeaway, because there were other people that we know that had the same bucket as me. But it just goes to show certain things about our worldview, more so than it does about like our external manifestation of that worldview. I think that's the, that's the thing. Because for example, you look at the list of some of the reports that we've gotten back, and we'll just pick one, we'll say Maverick, right? So
you see people that have the Maverick designation. Some of the people that got Maverick have wildly different, I guess you could call it phenotypes. The way this show up is completely different. Yeah. Because if you're bringing it back to biology and you're thinking about genotype, phenotype, like your actual, the way that you're genetically encoded, but then the way that it manifests outwardly
expresses, yeah, completely different. But you can see like, okay, that's, that's how they're wired, even if one's an extrovert, one's an extrovert, one, one is highly, highly confident, one's a little more pensive. You can see the different manifestations, even if they're encoded the same way. And so with the people that I'm talking about, you can see like outwardly, we don't show up the
same, but inwardly, we're wired similarly, if that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, obviously we're multifaceted people and our, you know, our experience shape who we are and how we express, you know, how we show up in different contexts, certainly, you know, you're different in, you know, recording this pod, then you would be somewhere else, right? So yeah, so it's definitely complex. So let me shift to your other question though. So I think you guys have converted me into the
de novo model. I think I'm squarely, we're at least stuck in loving the de novo model. So I should have written down the date that you drank the Kool-Aid. So I can put it on the yeah. Well, and again, let me back up because in prior experience, it was acquisition. And then we did do one startup and that startup, like what was just a anchor on revenue for eight, 10, 12 months. And so, you know, I was clouded a little bit by, you know, we had one startup experience that
wasn't so great. And then the other acquisition experiences were, you know, it was instant revenue, right? And I think we did a lot right there. But sort of watching what's happened, you know, again, because I've only been privy now to really Kansas City and there, I'm watching what's happened with Kansas City seeing now in our model how quickly we can ramp up a practice because of our, you know, relative treatment plan size. It's very different. And so, yeah, I don't think I would
want to go back to the acquisition space. I do love, you know, there's something about being able to bring in a practice that has legacy, you know, legacy, you know, patients who have been coming for a long time, like, like there's something about buying a patient base that I think has a lot of value. It may not in our model, maybe at some point it could. But there is something about buying those patient bases who are loyal to a location or to a practice, there can be a lot
of benefit with that. But there is the, you know, the other bugs where you're wondering if it's the right team members and there's all the change management of them coming into a group and being integrated. And again, I think you can do that really well. But to answer your questions succinctly, I'm really excited about the startup model. And I mean, I just don't see any, there's not a whole
lot of road bumps in our way, I think moving forward. I think we have so much potential, so many markets, so many lessons that we've learned, so many doctors after going to the intro at all on X event who want to join us. I mean, I couldn't be more excited about the growth path for us for the future. Well, with any upstart company, with any company that's trying to make noise in its given sphere of influence, I've learned the hard way through, I guess you could
call it introspection and through working with with advisors and stuff. You have to have certain things that are truly unique, truly one of one truly cannot be replicated by anyone else. And at SPG, we have like five or seven of those that just are not replicable by anyone else, just by virtue of the fact that they they stem directly from our own experience. They're things that we offer, they're ways that we are influential in the sphere of dentistry. And a lot of it just comes
down to the people that are on our roster, just aren't available anywhere else. And so, whenever you're building something new, you have to have unwavering confidence in your ability to overcome obstacles. And for me, my confidence in that comes from the fact that we just have so many things that are unique to us. And the further I go, the more I realize that our trajectory is so different than any other companies, because we have the right people on the bus that have such a
high ceiling together. And yeah, and I mean, it's not like we haven't had challenges and won't continue to have challenges in the future with operating different practices and certain things. But I think the other piece that gives me a ton of confidence is just how resilient this and this team is and how resilient we have expressed as an organization. I think we've got a lot of really good problem solvers. And we've had some successful months, obviously, in the first five
months of the year. But there's been other challenges as well. And it's been cool to see our team be able to problem solve, be able to be resilient, be able to have grit through some of those challenges. And so yeah, I think we, I think the growth path is really, really exciting. But I'm also confident in our ability that if things happen along that growth path, we have the resiliency and the grit and the perseverance and the commitment to be able to navigate those for whatever comes up.
Speaking of growth path, you mentioned being at the Intro to All-Next event in Texas a couple weeks ago. And for me, that was really cool simply because we had done that event six months prior in Arizona. And it was a much different, I don't want to say caliber of event, but it was more confined. You could tell it was the first one. It was like a beta test of the event. It was
great. And we got amazing feedback from all the attendees. But this was a much more involved event where the attendees got a well rounded experience of didactic and like thoughtful
analysis of different cases, plus all the hands on components. So, you know, as you were meeting with some of the doctors and hearing what these folks, what their notion of SPG was from an outsider perspective from having listened to the Full Arch podcast from seeing all of our doctors post on Instagram, the way that they had their view shaped of SPG and then the future. What was that like reconciling what your experience has been like with SPG internally,
with those doctors that are looking to join us? I feel like that was just a really cool opportunity to hear what they're excited about, which is a great mirror. It's a great way to reflect what do we value about ourselves and then what actually is valuable to prospective new doctors? I learned a lot from that. But what did you take away from from meeting those doctors that are
breaking down the door to work with us? Yeah, I remember, I think a text that Matt G after or some or one of you guys and was like, man, I wish we had 10 locations right now just to grab all these people because there's some really neat doctors that really need doctors who were, you know, both from a character standpoint, you know, from their experience standpoint, there was just a lot of really positive doctors. It was really fun actually to see some of them that came back from the
event. You know, it was their second event that they came to. So it was nice to see some folks that we had met in Arizona back in November and then they were at this event as well. And I think what's unique is that I really think the future of sort of recruiting and finding right talent is around
community. And so not only were the doctors excited to talk with us about the potential opportunity and what we're doing, but like there was this community between all of those doctors as well, because how many general dentists are doing full arch at scale and doing it well? I think, you know, there's a niche there or niche or however you want to say that word. And so they were also loving engaging with each other about how they're going to do that.
So it felt like they were also building community as a group of, you know, again, general dentists who are looking to do full arch. And so yeah, just just need to see them engage together. And I think the more that we can bring that community together sort of, you know, leverage that community towards future locations, but also continue to help them grow and prepare them for
whenever we have a location where we can bring those people in. So I think that community, I would love to see us continue to lean into and sort of grow as part of as an arm of our not only our recruiting, but just growing it, you know, nationally. Yeah, that's a great perspective because I consciously use the word ecosystem whenever I can to describe our outreach and the people that are in our orbit, because obviously you have these
concentric circles that get bigger and bigger. And you have people that are internal to SPG currently. You have people that are around us that want to engage. We have doctors that have put their names on the list and that are in our CRM that want to open with this on some such date after some residency is completed. Sometimes they come to us and we say, Hey, go take these courses and do this homework and bring us this portfolio of work. And then we'll be ready to
have a conversation. So it's I think the one of the unique things about us is that we've we've done what a lot of people would say is the impossible where we've subverted the supply and demand curve where we have a lot of doctors that want to work with us more so than we have opportunities, which is great in some sense. But then to your point, we want to do what we can to alleviate that backlog because we want to have a place and a methodology to work alongside these amazing
doctors. And so timing's got to be right. Location's got to be right. All of those things. But now it's an exciting time to be a part of SPG where we've we've spent so much time improving, tweaking stuff, refining the model, taking feedback, being humble, and knowing that, you know, sometimes our best best laid plans and our ways of approaching a given part of the company, sometimes we have to learn, sometimes we have to modify. And I think we've been open to doing
that as needed. But you know, as we round to a close, what are you thinking about Dave for the for the back half of June? Obviously, we've we've had a good start to the month. Obviously, a lot of efforts that you've been working on for the last several months have been coming to fruition. But but what are you excited about as we're talking to our teams right now? What do you think is going to be a big point of emphasis for the the back half of June? Yeah, like I said earlier, I think
continued focus on how do we pace our our goals every single day? How do we have clarity on what's our collection goal for today? What are we doing with one of those three methods, whether it's, you know, consoles, the same based arts, follow up starts, upgrades potentially for people who
would need that. So using a lot of those different levers and outbound activity to drive more consistency and pacing, I think that's going to be a continued conversation because we saw we saw it with the first week of June, and I'd love to see it continue to where we don't have these again, sprint and burnout kind of weeks and months. So I think there's going to be a lot of
conversation there. I'm really excited to continue that conversation and see our teams kind of all focus on that doctors, POMs and SCs included, because the more that we can pace, again, the more that we can all be successful month over month over month. We have some other really cool stuff going on this month, Avora, which is the consults recording platform. We have onboarded group one, they'll start recording this week, and then we'll be onboarding all the practices by the end of the
month. So or by mid July, I guess I should say, so I'm really excited about that, just to have that as a tool for self reflection, a tool for growth. And there's some really cool AI insights that we're driving out of those consults. So really focused on that for the backup of this month in addition to launching some people onto the CRM, again, allowing for SCs and POMs to be hyper focused on who are their warm leads, their short leads and driving their
activity to be able to reengage those patients and start them on their smile journey. So yeah, some more structural work for sure, but I'm also just want to see Virginia Beach launch and successful and I'm really excited about that location and about the growth of that practice as we get going. So yeah, lots of really positive stuff for this month and can't wait to see where we're at a couple weeks from now. Yeah, shout out to Dr. Jacob. It's almost
his time to shine. He's been crushing it and Richmond and him making the jump to Virginia Beach with all of that opportunity there. We could not feel more excited about that market and about him as a doctor. I mean, he's crushed it every step of the way. So congrats, Jacob, on the impending practice opening and Dave, any final thoughts for our listenership before we sign off? No, yeah, may taught us a lot. Busy, busy months. I think we, you know, we double down and
continue to apply those lessons over the next couple of months here. And I think we're just getting clear and clear on what's the calculus for success? What are the behaviors? What are the inputs? What are the outputs? We just keep getting better and better refining what that problem looks like and how we solve for it. So that's the exciting part, I think, as we move forward.
So well said, we're getting closer to cracking the code than ever. And my final thought, which is very similar, is that I learned recently that you want to be pursuing significance at the same time as success. Because usually, if you play it right, you can do both. Sometimes you can do, you can feel like you're successful, but you're not doing anything significant. And we're fortunate to be in the type of dentistry in that specific vein of dentistry,
where what we are doing is significant by the definition of what we do. And I've been successful in dentistry by different measurements. And I've felt successful, but I haven't always felt significant. And I feel like at SPG, we're so fortunate to be ever more significant in keeping with how successful we are. So that'd be something to think about, something to ponder is the connection
point between significance and success and how the two interrelate. And Dave, maybe that's a topic for a future episode, but I happened upon that quote in a meeting I was in and I thought, you know what, that's pretty powerful. So think about significance as it relates to success. And with that, we will see you guys next time on the SPG podcast. Thanks, Dave.