Dykema DSO Conference Edition with Brian Colao

Why was it intentional? What is the purpose of expanding the reach and having more of an international presence? It's a huge cross pollination opportunity. I mean, just on so many different levels. First of all, like for example, I just came from the uk. I did the Woman in DSO Global Summit there. I'm going back to do the group practice event at the end of June. They're about 10 years behind us, but they can jump the curve and they can learn from our mistakes, learn from the technology. There's investors over there that want to come invest here. We have investors here that want to invest over there. And so much has come of this. You know, when I go to Europe, they're like, well, we met these people at Dykema and we invited them to come over to Europe. Not the largest DSO event in the world. Not just the largest DSO event in the United States. Welcome back to the Dental Economist Show. I'm your host, Mike Huffaker. And today is a special edition of the Dental Economist show coming to you from the Planet DDS Ignite Revenue Summer Summit here in Newport Beach. And I am joined by a man who probably needs no introduction, Mr. Brian Clao. Brian, how you doing? Hey, Mike, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me to your meeting and also thanks for having me on the show again. Yeah, absolutely. I think this might actually be our fourth time, which is a record. So it's important to me that anytime anybody else gets close, we got to film one of these. So I don't know, this might be the quota. I think we might have met the quota and maybe four is it? Probably not, but I like. Well, look, this is what I'll say to everybody. I still love you, Mike, even if you don't love me. I'm happy to be here and be on your show even if you don't want me. Well, that is too kind. Well, we're excited to have you here at the event. I invited you to share knowledge with our team about the industry. And part of what we're doing is looking for an opportunity to level up our organization to understand what's happening in the dental space today. And speaking of opportunities to gain knowledge and level up your understanding of what's happening in the industry, we've got a big DICOMA event coming just a few weeks from now. I think everyone's familiar with DiComa, the event. What makes this year different, you know, what makes it different is I think the industry really needs the content that we're providing more so than ever this year because these, some of the most challenging conditions we've ever seen. I mean, look, we're going to have. We're sold out of sponsorships, we're almost sold out of attendees. We do have some room, people can still register, but we're almost sold out of that. I think we're going to have 2,500 plus people there. Going to be a great show in general. But last year was a great show and so was the year before. But I think what makes it so special this year, or more so important this year, is it's just there's so much going on and so much uncertainty and so many sort of complicated issues the industry is facing. And we're going to hit them all head on. We are going to hit all of these issues head on. And this is going to be, from a content standpoint and from a relevant standpoint, probably one of our most powerful events we've ever had. I thought you were going to say what makes this year different is that I'm going to be on the big stage this year. It only took me, I think, seven years of being in the dental space to convince you that I wouldn't embarrass myself up there. You know, Mike, my walkout song for a lot of events is It's a Long way to the top if you want to rock and roll. And I think, you know, in your case, that's the way this turned out. I mean, nobody handed it to me. We had. Everybody that has ever heard me talk about the DICOMA event knows we had 41 people at the first one. We had 75 people at the second one. I mean, it took a long time for it to set the industry attendance records and do everything we have. You have been doing some great things with this particular podc. The data that Planet DDS is compiling, that they've presented at some of our smaller events and also last year at the largest workshop we've ever had in the history of dicoma. I mean, it's really good things and it's gotten our attention. I love the data you're compiling because for so many years there's been very poor DSO data. There's been data on general dental practices, but not enough on dsos. You guys have sort of led the way on compiling that sort of data. And this year, I think is the year to get you on the big stage because everybody wants to see, you know, the update of what that data is going to tell us. Yeah, well, you gave me a tough act to follow. I think I'm coming on after Steve Bilt and Rick Workman and so no, no pressure there. Thank you very much. It's going to be a great presentation. But I do think, you know, what you have on your side. Even if, you know, you may not be the funniest, most entertaining person that has ever graced our stage, what you have on your side is data that people want. I mean, I don't think, you know, it's requirement that you get up there and tell jokes and be funny. I think people want that data. That data is incredibly valuable to the industry. You know, I think you guys have done a great thing by compiling it and I think everybody's looking forward to just hearing, you know, about the data this year. All right, well, I'm going to scratch all the jokes that I had planned. Try your best once. I, I will, I will give that a shot. But, but all kidding aside, the, the speaker lineup this year is really fantastic. And one of the things I've been hearing spoken about in the industry more and more, which I think is the right approach, is that this is the maturation of the DSO space and the dental industry. We went through this consolidation phase and there were a lot of learnings that I think we've all started to recognize that are now leading us into this new world of what does it really take to build a successful business and a successful organization in this space. And there's a lot of that being touched on throughout the content. Over the course of the few days at dicoma. Would you say there's any particular theme or when you were curating the content this year, what were some of the checkboxes, the things that you wanted to make sure were delivered to the industry. Yeah. You know, I think over the last few years you might remember, Mike, you were there when I did my dinosaur presentation. For a while I did my dinosaurs, but I feel like a dinosaur because I've been here 31 years and I've seen certain cycles repeat themselves and some cycles, if they're successful. Yeah, like that's great to watch. But if you're someone like me and there's not that many that have been there 31 years and you see a mistake being made, but the mistake was made 23 years ago and the people that are making the mistake now have only been in the industry 10 and they weren't there 23 years ago, you want to scream like, stop, stop. But it just kind of has happened. So sort of the theme this year, Starting with the 30 minute film, we've Nobody's ever done this before it's called Journey through DSO history. It's 40 years and 30 minutes. That's the first thing. Then it's gonna be Steve Bildt's presentation, which I believe is gonna be called Turning Points in DSO History. And then he's got a panel that's gonna be Lessons in DSO History. Because we have worked our way out of some of these problems that we're seeing now at the very beginning. And we're gonna focus on the incredible lessons that can be learned from both Journey Through DSO History, Turning Points in History and Lessons in DSO History. And then you're going to come out and give us some data, some real time data about what's going on now. So I feel like that first, say two hours is going to be some of the most powerful content we've ever put on in the, in the history of our event. And now this, this video that you're talking about, I'm imagining is probably pretty low budget because you spent all your money on your pyrotechnics and so actually we spent a lot of money on pyrotechnics that are going to explode and a lot of money, probably more money on this video. It's definitely not, not low budget. But I'll tell you, it's taken, it's been one of those, like, labors of love. I mean, it has taken an inordinate amount of time. I mean, I have new appreciation for anybody that's ever won any type of award for cinematography. I'm not talking about the actors are the easiest as far as I'm concerned. The ones that have to edit the movie, you know, go through it, produce it. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a chore. And you know, it's the sort of thing where the knowledge that I have and my team has from 31 years, none of the professional movie people have that knowledge. So they can't really help us that much other than putting it all together. So I have to spend an enormous amount of time, but I guess everybody will have to let me know what they think. I know you saw just a sneak peek at one of the chapters of it, so hopefully we're on the right track. Mike? No, I think so. So this event, I think is widely regarded now in the industry as the premier DSO focused conference that takes place every year. But in addition to this event, over the past year you've also launched kind of smaller regional DICOMA leadership events. Share a little bit about why you decided to do that, what the purpose of them is and what you see kind of the vision for those moving forward, you know, the biggest, in just talking to hundreds and hundreds of DSO executives, what they've said to me, and I tried to address this directly is they've said, we want to network with our peers. Like, if I'm a CEO and I have 50 offices, you know, I don't mind talking to the CEO of a DSO that has a thousand offices and I'll do that, that's good. But I also want to talk to other people that have 50 offices or 30 or 20, and I want to hear their perspectives on what's going on. But what happens is a couple things. We'll go to a lot of these events and it'll be hit or miss. Some of the people we hope will come, won't come. And they're not even necessarily friends with these people yet. So it's not like they can call them up on the phone and see if they're going to come because they feel like they don't know them. So they show up lot and they're not there. And then the other thing is they get pulled in every direction. And you know, I, I work with a lot of vendors in this industry and love the vendors, but some of the CEOs are like, you know, maybe some of these folks are, you know, sort of bothering them at inopportune times or pestering them and they feel like, you know, when they want to be networked, they're being sold to. So what I decided to do is create the best of both worlds because I love the vendors and I also love the executives. So these smaller events that I've curated, as you know, Mike, we get 10 to 15, you know, sort of sponsors. Planet DDS has been a big part of, and we want you to come, we want you to build relationships, but it's a no selling kind of zone. You know, you're there to build relationships. And we get usually 80 or 90, as you know, DSO executives, maybe a total of about 125 people. And the whole idea is to put on some content to also have it be heavy networking so the DSO executives can network with other executives and sort of compare notes and talk very often off the record, be unusually candid with each other in a way they wouldn't be at a giant event. And at the same time, all events get to form relationships with these folks. And we do fun things. You know, you were there, we saw fireworks in Disney, we raced cars, you know, in Vegas, we went to the Magic Castle. In la and these events have. Because of this, I'm trying to address the direct concerns. They've been a big hit and we're going to keep doing them. We do three of those sort of a year. They're kind of invite only and they've been tremendous. And then of course we do the very large DICOMA event. And the feedback we're getting across the industry is that these small events are really value added and other people have tried to do them. And you know, I don't. I think what do they say? Imitation's the best form of flattery. I don't get too worked up that other people want to do them because I think it's a really important way for people to exchange ideas and get together in a way that is productive versus a way, you know, where they feel like it's not productive either because people aren't there or their time's not being used the way they want it to be used. Yeah. So the moral of the story there is if you get an invite to one of those events, you should say yes because they are pretty incredible events. Great opportunities to network. I mean, dicoma, the main event is an incredible networking opportunity, but I think there are folks that can get lost in the mix there if you don't come and have a plan. We now at this point have a meeting room and I think last year we did something like 80 pre scheduled meetings with folks that were able to take place during the course of the event. So we were able to, you know, we get a ton of value out of that. What would be some of your guidance to people that, you know, maybe they're in smaller companies or this is their first event or, you know, they haven't been before. How do you maximize the value that you receive while you're there? You have to methodically approach it. You know, it's gotten to the point where if you show up and you act like, you know, a leaf in the wind or a jellyfish in the ocean, you will, by the way, get. There's so many people there, you will run into something. But your question was, how do you maximize it? You know, you're not going to maximize, you know, your potential. You have to methodically, you know, figure out, you know, everybody that's going to be there. And there is, I mean, last year we had of the 200 largest DSOs, there was at least one person. And then of all the rest of the middle market, I think we had eight or nine hundred organizations represented. Think about that. Most conferences, if they had 800 people. They would be jumping for joy even if there was 500 vendors and 300, you know, DSO type folks. But we had something like 900 DSO organizations. So, yeah, we had a lot of vendors running around too. But we probably had, you know, of the 26, 2700 people there, we probably had 1500 were actually DSO folks. It's the largest ratio, you know, in the industry. So you're just going to. I mean, I guess what I would say is you want to be methodical. You want to set up as many meetings as you can in advance, because it's possible at my meeting, unlike other meetings, that you won't run into somebody. I mean, you will unexpectedly run into people. But you might say, I'm there, I know Mike's there. And you might never see Mike. And Mike might be telling everybody, I had a great conference, I did all this. You'll be telling people, I had a great conference, I did all this. And you never cross paths one time. So you got to make a concerted effort to meet the people, you know, that you really want to meet when you're there. The other thing I would say is if you like your sleep, just get used to it. You're not going to get it. You can get it when it's over with because we have breakfast starting at 7:30. If you do the club thing, which a lot of people did a lot of networking at the club thing, you can go till 2 or 3 in the morning and look, there's action packed content starting at 9 again. So it's just kind of. I'm not saying everybody's got to stay till 3, but let's say you started at 7:30 and you went to bed at midnight or 1 or something. Yeah, you just got to get up in time for nine because there is so much stuff going on and it only happens once a year, this event. You don't want to sleep through something if you do that. You know, the networking. You've seen this Mike firsthand. You can come into one of our rooms and you can do more networking in a half hour in that room. Because everybody's there that if you had to track down all of those executives, it might take six months outside of that room, but in that room you could do six months worth of networking. So you don't want to miss it. You don't want to sleep through it. If there's a happy hour, if there's something going on, you gotta make it. You just gotta kind of power through. That's what like espresso's for, you know, regular coffee, whatever you want. They got that kind of stuff for you. It's, it's really, really good. The whole industry built around it. Yeah, I mean that's right when they got at least two or three Starbucks there. Plus we got coffee station. Absolutely. There's no shortage of being able to get that stuff. But you're just gonna have to get comfortable with the fact that it's gonna be very little sleep. You've got to actually work through your meetings, schedule them or else, you know, you go there and you'll be overwhelmed. Possibly. Possibly, yeah. Are there any late night DJ antics? Yes. This year. Yeah. Club Fuego was such a big hit with Lane Terrio from Independence. He's agreed to do it again under the condition that I had to get more LEDs and more pyro. That was his only thing. He said, I'll do it. I don't know. Lane has a writer. His performance was somewhat of a verbal rider, but I'm a man of my word. We shook hands on it. So I got him his pyro, I've got him his explosions and he's gonna go out and he's gonna do it. And last year I think they threw them out. I mean the thing is scheduled from literally like you think I'm, I'm not. It's scheduled 11pm to 2. But my understanding was at 3:45am like they literally like the Gaylord staff was somewhat patient at 2:30, they were somewhat patient at 3. At about 3:15 they started to get a little antsy, but still allowed it to go about another. And then at 3:45 they pulled the electricity, literally shut the lights and said, that's the. It's time to go back to your rooms, everybody. So yes, I've noticed over the last couple of years that there's been maybe more of a. I don't know if focus is the right word, but more of an international presence at the. Oh yeah, that's very purposeful. Purposeful. So I imagined it was intentional. But when you think about what we can learn in the United States or what folks in Europe or those in Canada can learn from what is happening in the industry here. Why was it intentional? What is the purpose of expanding the reach and having more of an international presence? It's a huge cross pollination opportunity. I mean, just on so many different levels. First of all, like for example, I just came from the uk, I did the Woman in DSO Global summit there and I'm going back to do the group practice event at the end of June. First of all, they're about 10 years behind us, but they can jump the curve and they can learn from our mistakes, learn from the technology. And I don't think, even though they're technically Europe is 10 years behind. I think they could catch catch up in three or four years. It won't take 10, because they have the benefit of hindsight and the benefit of technology. So they want to come over here to say, how do we jump the learning curve and how do we learn all this stuff? That's opportunity number one. Opportunity number two, there's investors over there that want to come invest here. We have investors here that want to invest over there. Plus there's companies. I know you and I, Mike, were actually talking today about will there come a time someday that planet DDS sells in Europe and starts offering Denicon in Europe. And hopefully that'll happen some point in time. But you know, the vendors over here, maybe Denticon's not quite there yet, but there's a bunch of vendors at the DICOMA conference that right now sell into Europe or want to sell into Europe. The diagnostic AI comes to mind. They're able to do things like that. Other AI solutions right now are able to do business with Europe. So they really appreciate these folks coming here. And so much has come of this. You know, when I go to Europe, they're like, well, we met these people at dicoma, then we invited them to come over to Europe and then they came over here and they did demos and we brought all these group practices. So there's so much cross pollination going on. I think this year my goal, I don't know if I'll exactly hit it, is to have about 300 folks from Europe, Japan and Australia at the event. Last year we had about 100. This year we're trending way higher than that. I don't know if we'll hit 300, but that's what we're trying to do. Yeah, there will be an international panel. There will be. There will be, yes. Okay. Yeah. You know, a lot of events. Mike would be thrilled to have 300 people, period. And I want to have 300 international participants. But anyway, there's huge opportunities globally. This is, you know, with all the technology we have, this is no longer confined to the us. This is a global sort of business and we want to have as many people from across the world as we can. Plus, I like to tell you it's the largest event in the world. Not just the largest DSO event in the world, not just the largest DSO event in the United States. And you said that people can still register to attend. Yeah, anybody that wants to attend still@dykemadso.com can. Our capacity is getting up there. But no, I, I feel like, you know, anybody that, that listens to this, that wants to register will make room for you. I think the hotel unfortunately is sold out, but if you want to attend, we can make room. Perfect. And before we wrap, I wanted to talk a little bit about the Dental Capital Forum. So we put that on just about six weeks ago now. I think at this point we co hosted it and you know, when we were first talking about putting the event on, we, we wanted to create something that was unique, that had really never been seen in the, in the dental space. Ended up being a gathering of DSO CEOs representing over 8,000 practices as well as I think private equity deal teams or capital sponsors from 20 different organizations. What was your impression of the event overall? How unique was that in the dental space from your perspective? I've not seen an event like this and it was kind of funny. I mean we were, Mike and I were having lunch today. For anybody watching, but how this started is we were having lunch at another Planet DDS event. And when you mentioned at first to me the idea of this, the first thing that enters into my brain is, oh terrific, we need another event. But then when I heard that we're going to get private equity side by side with DSO CEOs, I mean we've been needing to do something like that for years. Just logistically it's been very difficult to put all that together. But I think the organization, organizations that we had sponsoring it obviously dicoma, obviously Planet dds, Wes Monroe and I think Aquiline did it, had enough contact. We finally were all stronger together. Everybody collectively had enough contacts to get everybody in the same room. When that's been tried historically, some people were like, well, we can get the CEOs but we can't get private equity. Or we can get private equity, but the CEOs or not enough of whatever. Those four organizations that put this together, we finally hit the right mix. We all collectively had enough contacts that we hit a grand slam home run. Not a regular home run, a grand slam home run. We had, you know, I think like I said, 20 to 25 PE guys there and they were all, you know, sponsors or owners of major DSOs. And then we had CEOs of, you know, top organizations plus top middle market organizations. I think we had all in about 50, you know, between private equity and DSO CEOs. It was at the iconic, you know, Union Club in New York City. We all had to wear ties. It was a one of a kind event. And I guess the challenge like I have with dicoma, because the feedback was overwhelming that everybody wants to see this event again and they want it to be exclusive, but maybe a little more than 50 because there were some people that probably, you know, now they want to come that weren't able to come. The challenge for us will be to make it, you know, better next year without losing, you know, sort of the exclusive quality of the whole thing. But I think we'll have to be up to the challenge. We'll just have to doing. Yeah, there were a couple folks that forgot ties. So I, I can commiserate with what happened. What I had my tie. Did they not let him in? What happened with that? I, I don't want to call out his name. No, no. But what happened to him? He ended up, they had a loaner tie, but I don't think it met his aesthetic Right. Requirements. And so he ran down the street and you know, we're in a Manhattan, it's Upper east side, there's going to be a place to buy a tie somewhere. So he ran down the street and he ended up buying a new tie for the event and then coming back. And I was wondering about that. I mean they had a very strict for those that don't know dress code at the union club and we sent out only about 20 emails telling people to do it. But there's always somebody that, you know, maybe miss all 20 emails. And I was just wondering what, what, what happens? Yeah, like my CEO Eric, I think I had every single email said no white sold shoes and guess who wore white sold shirts. Eric. Yeah. Yeah. Eric. Eric. Nice job, Eric. Like we say in Texas, bless his heart, that's what we say in Texas on something like that. Yes, yes. Well, it was a great event. Looking forward to doing it next year and can't wait for DICOMA coming up in a few weeks. So Brian, as always, thank you for joining. Mike, thanks for having me here. And look, I don't take this lightly. The fourth time on the show, it's a big deal. Your show's become a really big deal. I'm a fan of it and looking forward to great things for the back half of this year here. Yeah. Appreciate it. The Dental Economist show is brought to you by Planet DDS to find out more about how cloud based dental software by Planet DDS helps unleash dentists and their staff to focus on patient care, visit www.planetdds.com. stay tuned for upcoming episodes by following wherever you listen to podcasts. Thanks for listening. Sam.