Good morning and welcome back to another edition of the SPG podcast. I am recording this bright and early on a Monday morning. The sun is shining. I am grateful because last night there were tornadoes cited in my neck of the woods here in Arkansas. And luckily my house didn't sustain any damage. Nobody nearby did. Our power was out all night long. So that was annoying. But internet is back up and the only damage that I'm aware of is that down the road, a dollar general had its roof damaged.
So other than that, other than that, I think everybody was okay. But thankful for the sunshine and the good weather today. And I wanted to record a quick episode about some thoughts that I had while driving home from dropping my kids off at school this morning. And I was listening to a podcast that featured Peter Thiel, who has a long list of credentials in the business world and in Silicon Valley lore. And where I first really heard of him was as he related to the founding of PayPal.
So most of us have used PayPal. Those of us that have been around long enough to predate Amazon being so popular, a lot of us ordered a bunch of stuff online using eBay. And chances are if we used eBay, then we use PayPal to settle up or pay the person whom we're buying stuff from. And so PayPal became part of our lexicon.
It was almost a verb, like a I'll Facebook you or I'll Instagram you like PayPal became so ubiquitous and so commonplace that it became a verb, which is a good measure for how common something becomes in our world. But where I first really got acquainted with that story of PayPal was from this amazing book called The Founders by Jimmy Sony. He released that book in 2021 or 2022. And it went through the origin story of PayPal, which was pretty interesting.
If you want to read a good business biography that has lots of lessons, lots of twists and turns and chaos, it's one of those stories that's indicative of the phrase, the truth is stranger than fiction. You couldn't make that story up with all of the egos and the talent and the backstabbing that happened to get PayPal to where it was.
But what I wanted to talk about is one of the themes of that book and one of the themes of Peter Thiel as an investor and as a thought leader, philosopher, presence in the world is he's well known for being contrarian.
He's well known for calling all of his followers and all of his students to not blindly mimic what's happening around us, but to have the presence of mind to actually stop, hit the pause button and assess what we're optimizing for and what we care about based upon what truly works for us, not just what everyone else is doing. SPG fits into that in a lot of different ways, chiefly because I was a dentist for the first eight years of my career and then I ended up doing something contrarian.
I ended up joining with my partners here and founding a company that had not existed prior to us having the idea for it to exist. In our minds, we did something that was contrarian yet right. Now, right is kind of a loaded term because right is subjective. What's right for one person might be wrong for another person. But in this context, to me, right means does it work for its customers? Does it serve a need?
And I've said on this podcast before that a lot of times when you're when you're trying to find your niche or you're trying to find your role in a company or you're trying to find your place in the wide world of business, oftentimes the solution hits you in the head. It's not something that you go looking for. It's almost like this drum beat that persists that you hear and then eventually kind of like in the movie, Jimongy, you hear that drum beat and you think, where's that coming from?
You follow that sound, you follow where it's coming from and you understand, okay, this is my target audience. This is who I can serve. This is who I can build value for. At SPG, obviously we've done that in several different ways. Number one, we serve as the landing spot for the best implant surgeons to join us and amplify their impact and to really resolutely focus on only delivering top tier full arts dental care.
But then we also serve as an equally compelling landing spot for team members who have experienced the other side of the coin, who've been in the GP dentistry world and who have understood that maybe that's not all there is. Maybe there's a better way to work in dentistry and serve patients. We've found over the years where our niche is, what we do.
It's high quality denturing implant, surgical dentistry, and basically saying no to all of the other ways that dentistry can be performed, not to say that they're wrong, but it's to say that that's not the cohort of the market that we serve, whether we're talking about dentists, team members, or patients. How does this relate to the story of Peter Thiel and PayPal? Well, what's not often known is how PayPal got its start.
It didn't start out by finding ways for you to email money across the country or across the world. That was not its origin story. Its origin story was you had these nerds in Silicon Valley that were all about palm pilots. Again, those of us of a certain age remember palm pilots. What's not often remembered is that some of these palm pilots had this infrared technology that was pre-Bluetooth. If you put your phones together, you can send songs or share data from one phone to another.
We even had that on the old Motorola Razors, but in the Palm Pilot days, they used this infrared beaming technology, which sounds like something out of Star Trek. That was their business thesis. They were going to be the company that had an app on these palm pilots that allowed people to beam money from one palm pilot to another. So they obviously didn't think through, okay, what's my total addressable market?
How many people could possibly benefit from this, even if every single person with a palm pilot chose to use this, what would be the size of the business that we could grow from it? They just thought, this is a cool idea. We have the technology. Let's do it. So they did all this hubbub. They did a big press release. They did this big first ever beaming event in this diner in Silicon Valley back in 1999 or 2000. They made a big publicity stunt out of it.
It was successful, but they still weren't getting anywhere until they realized that what they thought was the afterthought or the extra add-on to their business became the main thing. They had the ability for people that didn't want to do it on their palm pilot. They could send money via email thinking, okay, well, if you can't have your palm pilot next to somebody else's palm pilot, well, you can have your account and then email it to them if nothing else. That's better than nothing.
But then obviously that caught on because everybody has an email address. There's a much broader use case for it. For people can opt into sending money through email than they could with palm pilot and then the rest is history. They took the data. They took the game on the field. They took the feedback of what they were seeing in real time and instead of saying, we got to shut the business down because not enough people have palm pilots that want to beam money with infrared laser sensor things.
They pivoted. They switched. They shifted in their approach to serve what reality dictated for them to serve. That's what we try to do at SPG. If you look back to our founding four years ago, there are so many things that we do differently and better and more effectively and more streamlined than we ever thought possible back then.
If you're a business or you're a company or you're a person that doesn't take that feedback and doesn't integrate that feedback into how you operate every day, every week, every month, then you're probably leaving some achievement on the field. This could be extrapolated to health. This could be related to fitness. That could be related to how you function as a spouse or a parent or as a friend or a coworker. You have to think about how am I integrating feedback into my approach?
Am I being enough of a learning machine to optimize how I operate day in and day out? For this, I want to shout out the person who's been eluding me over time. I reached out to him this morning again, actually, Dr. Greg Brussel in Louisville. I've been trying to get him on the SPG pod, but the man has his own publicist and my people haven't gotten in contact with his people enough. We're trying to make it happen.
Just messing with you, Greg. When Greg writes his book one day, he'll be able to share all of the twists and turns and stops and starts that he's experienced as a Dintran implant doctor at SPG to where I would venture to say, and I hope he corroborates this when we get him on the podcast, but there's no better time to be at SPG than in April of 2025, just like six months from now in October of 2025.
There'll be no better time to be a Dintran implant doctor at SPG just by virtue of the fact that we've had six months more of learnings, six months more of lessons. We've ended up in a much better spot than we started, and I think it's easy to think about other businesses or other companies having it all figured out, air quotes. But in reality, nobody does. We're all constantly learning. We're all making improvements every single day, but it's all about what do we do with those lessons?
Do we actually experience the hardships or the negatives and have the presence of mind to integrate those into how we operate? Or do we just say, oh, that's a disconnected data point. That doesn't matter. That's just that scatter. That doesn't actually have any bearing on how I operate, but we have to be able to say, all right, we see a trend in these outcomes. We see things that aren't working. What can we do differently?
I feel like that's been one of our superpowers for better or for worse at SPG is that we've been able to solicit feedback and understand what can we do better to first serve our doctors,
serve our teams so that they can then serve our patients. Going forward at our upcoming SPG leadership retreat, I've got this really exciting segment that I'm thrilled to talk about, where it does talk about the thesis of that talk will be the cumulative nature of how we operate, understanding that we have to have the presence of mind to not focus on the patient
before we focus on how we operate as a team. We have to have that dialed in or else the patient flow, the patient experience, the patient acceptance, the fulfillment of the care that we provide falls apart. In closing, what I want to think through is how can we continue to have our ears to the ground and have our antennae up, so to speak, so that we are always thinking about what can we do to improve, to find better ways of optimizing. The example that I want to share in
closing is from the focus day that Dave and Marty had in Sacramento recently. This was a little bittersweet because there's never been a focus day at SPG that happened that I wasn't participating in, so it was a little bittersweet to have Dave and Marty had some major FOMO, not being in Sacramento because I really wanted to hang out with that team, but scheduling circumstances made it to where Dave and Marty took the reins on that one and buy all accounts
did an amazing job. One exercise that they went through on that focus day was they charted out on big sticky pads. What are the steps involved in someone receiving SPG raving fan service? I've made flow charts in the past that come up with this, like little handouts that we want to build upon and continue to improve on to make it trainable for everyone, but they did this as an
exercise with the Sacramento team. They learned a lot and what it really comes down to for me is that we have to find ways for to merge what we find to be the best practices across the order, across the company, but then still find ways for everyone at our practices to put their own
fingerprints on that process. For example, we might have the same eight step that every patient goes through those checkpoints or those invisible inflection points that they follow in order to opt into the care that they need, but then we have creative license at our practices to be able to put our own imprint on how that patient experience looks based upon the skill and the passion of that
team, because I can guarantee you that no two teams are the same. You have the team at Peachtree has that vaunted experience where they had the gentleman who lost his wife and then they went above and beyond for the gentleman's birthday. We have stories like that from every single
practice, luckily in our network. That's going to be what I leave you with is that we want to always be thinking through what can we do to standardize, what can we do to solve problems for people, but yet retain the uniqueness and the humanity within how we treat our patients. As always, shoot me an email. If this awoke anything from you, if you had any epiphanies from some of the topics that I talked through today, or if you just have a perspective that you want
to share, please send me a message, Alex at sharedpractices.com. I look forward to hearing from you. Hope everyone has a wonderful week this week. Let's have a strong finish to April and I will talk to you next time. Hey, I wanted to catch you before the podcast was over. It's Dr. Stephen Voorholt here from the
Full Arch podcast. Shared Practice is podcast on all things Full Arch in Plantology. And if you've ever considered yourself considering or thinking or getting interested in Full Arch implants and what that looks like, please join us in Dallas, Texas May 29th through the 31st. We have two courses run concurrently. Intro to All Next One is for those of us who have never done an arch, or maybe we've done a smattering of arches and we just kind of want to learn the basics again and have
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