Welcome back to another episode of the SPG podcast. This is the best kind of episode of the SPG pod because it's not just me. It's me and Diamond Dave. Dave, how are you? Gosh, you're really working to make that nickname stick. I don't have to work. It's already stuck. It's already stuck. Yeah, I'm doing great. Yeah, had a great week last week. I'm kind of working and playing up in Northern Idaho. My ears are still ringing from the amount of fireworks that went off in Northern Idaho.
They really go at it pretty hard, but happy to be back and hitting it today. Aren't all five Philanges intact? That's the real or all five on each hand. All 10. Yeah, I can tell we only have five total in Arkansas because we do so many fireworks, but are all 10 Philanges intact? All 10 are intact. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you love to hear it. Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. Well, we're in a new month. We're in July. We're midway through the year of 2025.
And I feel like this is always a good point midway through the year to reflect on the past and connect what we've learned to what we want to do for the remainder of the year. And I've spoken on prior episodes about how every six months in SPG time, since it tends to be like a time warp in normal time. Because we cover so much ground, we constantly improve so quickly that the speed of iteration is unlike anything most of us have ever experienced outside of SPG.
And you've been with us now for that cycle. Like you've seen the first half of 2025, you joined us a few months before. But what has been your impression of SPG? What has been that impression from call at the last six months or so? Like what do you feel like about the level of accomplishment, the things that we focused on, where we are now versus where we started? Like what kind of energy are you carrying into the back half of 2025? Yeah, I am so thrilled with the first six months of the year.
I know we've talked on various platforms about the success of June. And not only from an overall collection standpoint, but also just seeing new practices that have really stepped up in a big way to make a big impact in terms of our overall collections, seeing some of the stories that are coming out of how we're taking care of patients and creating raving fans has been really inspiring over the last six months.
So man, I feel like to your point, we've worked a year in six months time in terms of change and innovation. And I feel really, really positive about what we've been able to put in place. I think the energy I bring to the back six months is, and I share this on our SC and POM call last week is like, now it's time to, is to really optimize what we've built.
We needed to sprint to sort of getting these dual positions in every practice to getting some of these new platforms like Avora for recording and working towards the CRM in all the practices to track our patient data. We needed to sort of like move quickly to get some of those things established. And now I think we need to sort of ingest a lot of that change and really optimize what we're doing over the next six months.
So that was sort of the word that I brought up in terms of creating some focus for Q3 and Q4 for this year. So I think it's around really continuing to optimize what that POM role looks like, how we manage the profitability of every practice, which we're getting a lot clear at setting benchmarks for certain areas of cost within the break even points that we want to make sure we're hitting so that we can manage profitability.
And then yeah, really optimizing what we're doing in every role and creating the support so that people can be successful. So I've got a ton of energy for the second half of the year, really proud of what we've done and just want to see us continue to get better and move closer and closer to excellence.
That's a better answer than I could have come up with Dave because what I feel like that's the expanded version of my phrase, which would be first we had to learn how to survive in order to learn how to thrive. And so yeah, we had to sprint to getting a lot of platform shifts to happen. We had to implement a lot of changes. We had to make, I guess, create new norms to give us the scaffolding to have survival be hardwired into our ethos every single month.
And survival means at least meeting and exceeding our costs, having more and more of our practices exceed their break even points, which I think we hit a new record for in June, which means that the middle of our bell curve, the middle cohort of practices in terms of overall performance is stronger than ever, which is amazing to see.
And then yeah, for the back half of the year, it's actually taking some of these new processes and getting comfortable with them and using those as a toehold to continue to perform month over month over month. And you mentioned cost control, as you mentioned, driving profitability through being mindful of our different line items and our different variable costs month over month.
I've been going through P and L's with a lot of our doctors over the past month and a half or so, just so that they can develop that muscle of seeing like, hey, here's where my different my different variables come in every single month. And here's how the decisions that I make on a daily, weekly and monthly basis influence how the practice does.
And I really think that that type of sophistication around connecting the dots between the choices that we make and how it affects our performance and affects the health of the practice, that integrated worldview, I guess you could say, of success at the practice level is what we're going for.
And the more people that we have at the practice level, at the central level, with that increased level of understanding makes it so that success is all that more inevitable because you have multiple people keeping eyes on the same stuff. Is that your thought? Yeah, 100%. You know, we have been long talking about collections, collections, collections, which is the tip of the spear. It is what drives a business when you're not insurance dependent, right?
When you are focused on new patients and closing cases like we do. So it's a necessary focus. Now that we have really put a lot of emphasis there, I think we can shift more to it's not the only data point to look at for the health of a practice, right? Collections overall revenue is one of those data points. But also we need to look at what's the level of profitability? Are we spending away any of the margin that we're creating on the revenue side?
And so that's where I think we've got to be mindful of it. And so we haven't put a lot of emphasis there. We've been so focused over the past six months again on building our engine to be able to create collections. And now it's about how much more that can we actually keep at the practice level so that we become more sustainable over time.
And we manage our costs to the best of our ability, which, you know, the hard thing about P and Ls that I've always struggled with is you're looking in the rear view mirror, trying to make decisions about where you're driving. So that's always a little bit of a difficulty with this.
But what I will say is when we get comfortable with knowing what a 11 or a 7%, 5% supply cost month feels like, we are able to manage that more effectively day over day because we just know what those rhythms look like. So I've always struggled with that a little bit like looking in the rear to drive forward, but it does help us to build some habits over time where we can manage proactively those line items that impact our profitability.
It makes me think back to some of the lessons of people that built businesses in the industrial revolution because a lot of those great pioneers of business had similar takeaways. And they came at this problem from different angles, but they all came to the same conclusion, which is there are times in the macro economy that you can't always control for what your top line is. But there are things that internally you can always control about your costs and about your overhead.
And so if you're conscious about your overhead and you're conscious about the controllables that you have access to month in month out, then even if the patients don't come through the door or it's just bad luck in terms of the patient candidacy or whatever, whatever those things that you can control to a degree, but you can't completely control for whatever those happen to be.
If you're optimizing what you can control, then you're almost guaranteed to have some modicum of success, even if it's not just a runaway freight train of a successful month. You still have things that you can hang your hat on that you can control that are resistant to whatever's happening in the macro economy, whatever's happening with your patient population.
And yeah, I think it's really interesting that you bring up the point about insurance independence because so many of us at SPG hail from GP dentistry, we're accustomed to verifying insurance before the patient comes in for the cleaning, looking at overdue treatment that they've been recommended in the past. And you get in that flow of what a day looks like in the life of a regular GP office and a DNI office looks completely different.
I think there's some really refreshing things about the DNI DNA, I guess you could say, that I think create opportunities for us. And I view you could look at it, glass half full glass half empty, but the glass half full perspective is that every day is a new day.
And the more mature a practice is the more opportunity there is latent in the patient tracker, latent in the book of patients that have been seen previously to where you can wage the war on both fronts, you can be welcoming new patients in the door and optimizing those opportunities with our current philosophy around building value for treatment, speaking very clearly about what the benefits are, tailoring the proposed treatment to the specific objectives that the patient comes in with.
And then at the same time, we can look in the rear view mirror and say, okay, these are people that came in maybe a year ago, a year and a half ago, that maybe we didn't knock it out of the park with customizing the care plan to specifically what the patient's seeking. Maybe we didn't avail out avail ourselves of all that different options available to us for getting over the financial hurdle.
And so talk to me about what you've seen be successful in your time at SPG Dave around juggling the new opportunities that come through the door month over month. And at the same time, following up with people that maybe were waiting in the wings that didn't develop trust quickly enough, maybe you just couldn't say yes at the time, but are worth pouring back into at a later date. Yeah, I think a lot of that is part of the success of what happened in June.
A lot more of our emphasis, kind of second week of May, I would say, as we started to think about pacing and we started to think about, you know, what are those high leverage behaviors coming out of our retreat that are most important. And I think June was was a result of a lot of that activity. I have to believe that. Now, do I have specific numbers on like call back starts or follow up starts?
I think that'd be great data for us to have eventually to really validate that the outbound activity by our smile consultants, generated that level of activity. But I think there's a lot of really interesting ways that we can be managing the book of business when we don't have consoles coming in directly.
You know, we can obviously be doing lots of callbacks and the teams have been making a huge push on at least 20 outbound calls a day, following up with patients, identifying and shortlisting whether or not their hot leads or warm leads, following up when they have maybe financing that we have gotten approved for them. But it is expiring soon. So creating urgency through that finance expiration.
But we're also seeing some practices have success on the upgrade side going back to people who have had who we did treatment plan and follow through with a traditional denture of some sort or an overdenture and seeing how their experience was and seeing if they want to upgrade to a full fixed. So we've had some success in converting some of those as well.
And then a lot more work, which I think we still have a little bit of work to do here in terms of mask, text or email campaigns to work to reengage people. And so, you know, you probably need to reengage with 100 people to get five or six consoles to come back in. That's the volume that this takes. But again, that's five or six possible arches. It's five or six lives that are going to be changed. That's the volume and grit that it takes to do what we did in June.
So I think we've really seen success on all fronts as we've spent more time focusing on those couple of aspects to generate what we saw in June. It makes me think because you're talking about the different pursuits that are available to us at the practice level to make available the care that we're able to provide so that we can create raving fans. What's the latest and greatest guidance that you can give?
Like if you're, if, think about talking to POMs and smile consultants that are practices, right? And we're getting clearer and clearer on what that division of labor optimally looks like at the practice level and we're giving resources and we're developing those scopes of work as it pertains to who's responsible for what. And obviously there's going to be some bleed through and some carryover because we're all rowing in the same direction.
We're all shooting for the same outcomes that our practice is, but it is good to say that, hey, this role is first on X. This role is first on Y. So what are some tactical tips that you could provide to our smile consultants and our POMs to be on the lookout for as we're further going deep more deeply into these roles and in carving out specifics? Yeah, I'll speak first to the smile consultant role.
Like I said, we've really developed a lot more resources and tools to help that smile consultant to be successful. The one that is certainly newer to most is self-development through watching their own recordings. So if I was to give a best practice and one that we are really pushing and wanting to hold accountable to the practices is you got to review at least one consult a week.
If you want to be a highly effective sales professional within SPG, then you got to be watching your own consults through this incredible tool that we've rolled out. It's different to get feedback from us and certainly RM's and April and Heather are giving feedback through there as well. Little different when you're watching it yourself.
And so I think sitting and watching and reviewing the consult, sitting down with your doctor and PMM, having consults and coffee and watching one together, finding areas of opportunity, yes, it's very transparent, but it is us practicing our core value of constant improvement if we're really living to that. So I really want teams utilizing Avora to generate insights that they didn't even know about their own consult.
If you talk, if you see what's happened, let's just talk about Sacramento, for example. Nick has been on Avora longer than anybody has recorded more than anybody. Now is correlation causation here? I'm not sure. But I mean, he had a pretty dang good month, right? So think right over 300,000. So is his level of self development in terms of watching his own consults, being engaged in that process, has it created results? I'm going to go ahead and say yes. I think it's had results for him.
I think he's learned a lot. I think he would himself would get on here and say that he's grown in how he runs his consults. So that would be a best practice for me if I was to help any small consultant optimize their practice is really get engaged and use this tool for your own self development for creating a culture of transparency in terms of growing and learning and finding insights around your own consult flow that you didn't even know were there.
So it's been really fun to watch those really fun to see it. And it's a tool that we should be using and in often.
I mean, recording yourself, let's just say this recording yourself and looking at post game footage is brutal, but there's no faster way to give yourself feedback than to watch that back, listen to that back and just grimace as you stumble over your words and think about, oh my gosh, I use the wrong metaphor or like in my case, I made it sound like people had five fingers instead of 10. Like you can second guess yourself to death, but that's how you get better.
And so what are some other examples of teams in our practices really embracing the availability of that feedback mechanism? Because I feel like you're right. I mean, it's hard to say is it correlation? Is it causation with Nick crushing it? I think a little bit of both. But who are some other examples of people that really leaned in and seen some fruits be born from those efforts?
Yeah, I mean, by the end of this week, every practice will have it available to them and we'll be able to take a look at it. So I see I'm just kind of looking over my list here. Lots of teams are recording and are getting feedback from their RM are getting feedback from April and Heather. I would shout out to Morgantown has definitely put a lot of time and energy. They were one of the earlier ones as well.
I'm chatting to Nougah and what's interesting is it really teed up Danielle just went out to chatting to get really teed up that visit because she had already spent a lot of time in the console room. So if you want to make an on site with your RM super valuable, do some console recording beforehand because then you then you know the things that you want to work on. You want to implement. You can have that person there beside you. So I think that really set up for a very effective visit there.
Dixie and Little Rock has really put some time there. I'm also seeing it in Valley with Leslie. She's putting some time into the recording. So yeah, I could I could go on and on, but even even people that had really good performance in June too. Yeah. Yeah. Right. No, isn't that funny? Right. Nicole in Kansas City. Yeah, bingo.
So I continue to name those people, but you know, I think yeah, so there's no doubt that reviewing yourself and creating that level of transparency around your behaviors, watching yourself for the things that you consciously and subconsciously do that could either not not have someone move forward or not engage them. So there's a ton to be learned there. And I know that you and I've talked about this as well. You know, I do think doctors need to observe how they are on the consoles as well.
I think there's lots to be learned. And I know that we're going to talk about that in the future on doctor leadership calls, but tons to be learned in terms of how am I engaging with the patient? Is my impact in that five or eight minutes high impact or am I confusing? Was I misaligned with my smile consultant? So there's so much to be learned by just watching game tape.
Well, Dave, we're about to come up on our time here and I wanted to be sure that we carve out some opportunity to preview what I think is going to be an amazing use of time next year at the leadership retreat. So the SPG leadership retreat is going to be March 6th and 7th, 2026 doctors, small consultants, POMs. And I'm actually in the process right now of working with our team to finalize part of the reception that's going to happen on one of those dates.
There's going to be an insane cool factor is all I can say fit for that retreat. So I can't say anymore right now, but I will share when I have more information nailed down. But talk to me about what you're excited for for that retreat because it's, you know, we say it's eight months away, but it's going to be here quickly. We know how fast time goes.
And I'm already starting to plan the curriculum for it, the agenda, things that we want to hit, how we're going to split up the rooms, how we're going to leverage our cohorts of docs, small consultants, POMs as, you know, functional pieces of the practice, but then also together as a cohesive team for that practice of a lot that we can do, what are you most excited about? Yeah. For one, I'm just excited that you guys are willing to make that investment.
It's, you know, for us to close, close practices fully for us to, you know, have that experience. It's not cheap, but I think again, we saw that that investment has returns for us in terms of not only a sense of unity and collaboration and community. And you know, I think for me, it's the things, these are the things that matter as you grow bigger because, and especially in a remote team, because it's hard to get, you know, it's hard to get everybody into one place.
So I think these are the things that we need to hold on to as we continue to scale and grow. Yeah. What I'm excited for is to have that time fully together as an organ, as a team, to make sure that we're 100% crystal clear on the vision of where we're headed. But also I love the breaking up into the different groups so that we can get hyper specific on tactical items and on behaviors that are going to be most important moving forward.
And you know, I'll be the first to say that we are continually learning that what the POM role looks like, how it can be most effective. And we have lots of POMs who are modeling that for us, bringing ideas forward. And I think even by, you know, eight months from now, we'll have an even clearer picture of what that looks like. But so I'm just excited to one, be able to have that level of togetherness, camaraderie, a really project for the future, bring that energy around what we're doing.
But then I also think there's a ton of learning for us, I mean, growth to be had once we, you know, as we did in our last retreat and breaking up into the groups and delivering some really high quality conversation and development specific to the role. So yeah, I'm super excited and, you know, like you said, it'll be here before we know it. We started planning three or four months before the May retreat in a big way. So March will be here before we know it. Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
And what I would leave us with is SPGs at this point in our growth path where we still feel like a small company, but the numbers point to us not necessarily being a small, intimate company anymore, because we have so many folks that work with us and so many patients that are served on a daily basis.
So the thing that I'm always navigating is how do we keep the small company feel with the quick communication, the quick decision making, the lack of unnecessary red tape and bureaucracy, while at the same time being able to derive a lot of value from our newfound stature and stability as being a larger institution with more access to relationships and a more robust network and better vendor partnership relationships and all those things.
So just know that that's an ongoing equation that's being solved because what we want to do is keep all of the benefits of being a startup company with all of our energy and all of our passion. That's never going away. We want to layer on some of the benefits that are afforded by being larger.
And so for us, that's going to be the goal is to keep all of the benefits of the rapid communication, the accessibility, all of the things that you love about our culture while at the same time, constantly improving how we support all of you through some of those partnerships and through some of those economies of scale, you could call it. So Dave, final thoughts on that because as you know, working in multi-site dentistry before, that's a moving target. Yeah, absolutely.
And let me, I'll just connect the dots here because we didn't even really start about how we kind of came at that decision around having the POMs come. So we got about, I think over 75% of the whole team gave us feedback on our mid-year poll survey and certainly something that you guys brought up in your comments, you know, in terms of having development for POMs and wanting to grow.
So definitely a data point that went into making the decision around having all of our teams there for the March retreat. So I would just continue to encourage that you give us feedback. You continue to give us a beat and a pulse of what's happening at the practice level, what conversations are happening so that we can make the best decision possible to move the organization forward.
So yeah, I think, you know, maybe a conversation for next time would be around the question of, you know, from your seat, Alex, the CEO, what are those things that you want to make sure we retain as we continue to grow, you know, from mindset, behaviors, practices, I feel like that's a whole podcast in and of itself. So let's set a date and let's actually put it on the schedule and let's do it. I think it's a good, good topic there for sure.
So yeah, I'm going to hit, I'm going to hit stop on the recording and we're going to find a spot on the calendar to do that for that right there. Okay. Perfect. We'll do it. All right. Well, hey, everyone, thank you for listening, Dave. Thank you so much for for being on this episode and we will see you guys next time on the SPG podcast.