Real Life Experience Over Information

Your social media feed is packed with perfect preps, flawless seats, and “one weird trick” dentistry. Then you walk into operatory three and real life happens. We sit down with Garrett Caldwell, CEO of Corr Dental Lab and the Pacific Aesthetic Continuum (PAC), to talk about the missing piece in modern dental continuing education: experience you can’t scroll past.

We unpack why live patient training changes everything, from solving smile design surprises to learning how to stay calm and communicate when a patient says, “Something feels off,” even when the veneers look great. From there we zoom out into what aesthetic dentistry really means today: comprehensive restorative dentistry finished beautifully, supported by adhesive dentistry, sound occlusion, implants, endo considerations, and the kind of skill stacking that turns complex cases into repeatable workflows.

We also share how PAC is built as a pathway, not a single weekend course, and why lab communication is a clinical skill. Having technicians involved, learning better prescriptions, and training your entire team (front office, assistants, hygienists) can transform case acceptance and execution. Finally, we connect the clinical side to the business side: creating your own “microeconomy,” building a brand, and earning the option to stay in-network or move toward fee-for-service and insurance-free dentistry.

If you want better dentistry, more confidence, and a community that helps you grow, hit play. Subscribe, share this with a colleague, and leave a review with the one skill you’re stacking next.

For more information contact the Pacific Aesthetic Continuum at https://thepac.org.

Transcript

Welcome To The PAC Mission

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Hi, I'm Dr. Michael Miyasaki, and I'm excited and happy to be here today because we've got Garrett Caldwell, the C CEO of Core Dental Lab in California and the Pacific Aesthetic Continuum. And today it's a little bit different because in the past, if you've been watching uh these recordings, probably 90% of the time we've had other guests with us. But I told Garrett today what I want to do is I wanted to focus back on the PAC and the core dental lab because we've been doing a lot of uh activities over the last 12 to 24 months, maybe last 30 years. But you know, it's really grown again in the last 12 months. So I wanted to kind of recap and kind of explain what the Pacific Aesthetic Continuum is doing, again, what we're all about, and really explain and maybe get people interested that are watching this to join the group. So, Garrett, want to say uh thank you for joining us today.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Hey Mike, thanks. Thanks for the introduction. Yeah, it's it's nice to be able to sit back and maybe recap a little bit about what we're trying to do here and where we're going with uh with dentistry now.

Why Experience Beats Information

SPEAKER_01 1:09

Yeah. You know, I think absolutely. And I think we should let people know how this has grown because it was uh two or three years ago, you know, Garrett wanted, you know, COVID, we were coming out COVID because during COVID, all the live education programs were just dead. And I think what's happened now is we are flooded by information, and especially with AI out there, there's a lot of content creators. And so they're creating content. And every day on my phone, I know I look at it and I go, wow, that's a pretty cool video. That's pretty good information. But what all that is, is it's information. And it's it's like if I pulled out one of the books behind me and I read up on how to do a crown prep, I know what the information is. So we have the knowledge, but we don't have the experience. And I think one of the things that the Pacific Aesthetic Continuum tries to do is we try to give the doctors the experience. You know, we get we get in our community of like-minded colleagues that we all want to go in the same direction and we share our experiences. Whether it's myself or somebody somebody like Jack Griffin, who headed up one of our last courses that we did in California, what we're there to do is share our experiences. You know, these are things that didn't go perfect, but this is how we resolved this, or this is the this is how we did that perfect case. And, you know, we finished up a group in California too, where we had some cases where there were, I think, some challenges. And maybe it was because of patient communication. And I went back to my practice and we had done just uh working with Core Dental Lab again. We had done a case that was diagnosed to have two veneers on eight and nine. And when I looked at the case, I said, okay, we could do those because there were veneers already in eight and nine and they're kind of failing, breaking down. I said, okay, I could see that. So we did that, and they came out great. You know, CORE did a great job, contacts, margins, and everything were right there. And the patient, the day that we inserted them, was happy with them. And then she calls the office and says she wasn't happy with them. No, so no, but but they were she wasn't happy, she wasn't unhappy with the veneers, she was unhappy with her smile. And so when I saw her, you know how everybody is kind of um anticipating a patient that's not happy with something. And I looked at her and I said, you know what? The reason why you don't like the veneers on eight and nine or two front teeth, were because number 10, the left lateral was too small and too short and at a different color. And I said, you know, well, if we can fix that, I think it'll make your entire smile look much better. And so, you know, I told her, I said, um, we can do a direct composite veneer on that number 10. So that's what we did. We we did a composite veneer on there, and I handed her the mirror, and she goes, that that's what was wrong. And so I think one of the things is that's the experience, right? Because a lot of dentists, when you do a uh and we're not saying you should do veneer cases two units at a time, but you know how that goes. But when you're when you're set with a case and you do that case and there's challenges with that case, I think one of the valuable lessons is you can't hit chat GBT and say, what do I do if I put eight and nine in? And the patient doesn't like number 10. But you can always go back to your colleagues or to your mentors and say, okay, what do I do in this case? So we had our team meeting that morning, and my team was saying, Yeah, you know, we just did veneers on eight and nine, and she doesn't like the way it looks. And they were all like a little worried. And I sat there and said, you know, worry can either be worry because you think something bad's gonna happen, but I looked at it like, this is an opportunity to do another veneer. So where they thought, oh, we're gonna lose money on this case, we actually ended up making more money on the case. And I think that's what's so so valuable about these live patient education programs, is that yeah, I could go to AI, I could watch my Instagram, I could watch some great videos, I could see some great techniques and think, oh yeah, now I can do it. But it's not real life dentistry facing the real life challenges and the solutions that real life clinicians have used to work around that. So, Garrett, I'll I I don't want to take up all the time, but I think that's one of the important things is you cannot beat the live patient experience.

Skill Stacking Beyond Veneer Courses

SPEAKER_00 5:26

No, I think I agree 100%. I when you were talking, it reminded me of being in the clinic with uh at aesthetic advantage with Larry Rosenthal. And Larry always had a solution to a problem. In fact, he loved problems because when a veneer broke, he could show all of us how to put one in and make the patient happy, make the patient go home and give the patient confidence that they could come back and we could redo it if they wanted to, but look, you don't even need to redo it, or there's an imbalance, or there's a color imbalance. Uh, like you said, um, you looked at every opportunity as a value add instead of a problem, and teaching us after decades working together as a group in dentistry in education, you learn that every problem could create an opportunity, a good opportunity. And if you go in that operatory with that attitude, like, hey, it's all good, the patient relaxes and calms down, and then the solution is like, wow, the most impressive person in there is usually the patient. That it's really not a problem, it's really a positive thing. And so I I totally agree, Mike. That's a great observation. Looking looking at each problem as a value add opportunity, is kind of like what real estate people do when they buy a shopping center. If they've got a big parking lot, they're always looking for another spot to put a pad. And I think in dentistry, I think it's the same way, it's a great way to look at it.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

Yeah, I I just did a webinar last week for a group that's been doing education for 53 years, uh, a group associated with UCSF. And what what what my message to them was, and it's my second message to this um recording, is skill stacking. So, you know, again, when we were just talking about this before we started and hit record, was that before when we talked about an aesthetic program, everybody was thinking veneers. And the reason why we really focused on veneers was that a lot of us weren't taught how to do a veneer prep in dental school. Because at least when I graduate from dental school, we were told you cannot put phosphoric acid on the dentin because you're gonna kill the tooth. And if you if the if your instructor came by and it was really hard not to do because they didn't have the gel etchants, they're all the the liquid etchants. And if they saw you putting etchant on the dentin, they would fail you right then because they said, you're gonna kill the tooth. And then after we did the etching, we'd have to, and we would etch for 60 seconds because we had to properly etch. And then we had to rinse up that etchant off and dry it till it was bone dry. And that's what we were then um bonding our whatever, our restorations to that too. So we did we were doing everything wrong, and the beliefs were all wrong. So when we started doing aesthetic programs 30 years ago, and we said aesthetics, we were doing primarily veneers because the dentists at that time had never prepped a veneer. They didn't know if a veneer would even work. Well, I think 30, 35 years later, we've shown people that veneer and teeth does work. It can be a very conservative uh way of restoring somebody's smile. But now, I think when we talk about an aesthetic horse, it's more than veneers. You know, we may do veneers, we may do veneers and crowns, we may do veneers, crowns, and implants all in that aesthetic zone. We may have to do a root canal in one of those teeth. And if we don't do the root canal right, that root's gonna turn dark, and then we're gonna have problems doing our aesthetics. And so there's there's so much more that's involved. And then you throw in function occlusion. And I think today, when we talk about an aesthetic course, it's much more sophisticated than aesthetic courses were 30 years ago. Do you have any thoughts on that?

SPEAKER_00 9:01

Yeah, no, I agree, Mike. I mean, the big stigma that we still run into is that we're doing an aesthetic course. And because we did so many veneer courses back in the day and pre-COVID was still going hard, uh, I think everybody thinks an aesthetic course means a veneer course. They have to go sell a veneer. And really, it's as we said earlier, it's comprehensive restorative dentistry finished aesthetically. It can involve everything. So I think it's really important for the listeners listed to understand that uh we aren't doing just veneers. We're doing restorative utilizing a plethora of materials, uh, bonding and cementation techniques that all are available to to ultimately give the best result for the patient, even including orthodontics and and and implants. Yeah, everything. Yeah. Yeah.

How PAC Education Works Now

SPEAKER_01 9:50

You know, I I think you know, we talk about the Pacific aesthetic continuum education being about comprehensive dentistry, right? We're going to take a look at everything. That helps us present the case and get case acceptance. And then we use adhesive dentistry techniques because even if we had to do a full mouth rehab, which you know, we we would try not to do as our first choice. But if we're in a situation where, yeah, we do have to do full mouth rehabilitation, being able to do it with bonded restorations, we can be much more conservative than if we had to put PFM crowns or gold crown preps around every two. So again, it allows us to offer our patients the very best.

SPEAKER_00 10:27

No, absolutely. No, I agree.

SPEAKER_01 10:30

You know, we just did a course. So let's go back and now that we've kind of explained why, at least I get so excited about what the Pacific Aesthetic Continuum does, is over the last, well, 24 to 36 months ago, we started doing quarterly evening meetings. And that kind of helped us get warmed up because again, we were coming out of COVID. And so we had doctors that would come to these evening courses, and everybody was excited again because that sense of community. You know, it's great to be able to do something on your phone and watch an Instagram group. But I think being back and being able to converse and have our conversations within a group, people really enjoyed that. And from that, it kind of snowballed. So we went from one city, now we're this year planning to be in four different cities. So we're in Sacramento, the Bay Area, um, Denver, and Chicago. And then from there, maybe it'll grow even more. And what the plan is is to adapt the education to today's, I guess, delivery methods. You know, nobody wants to, well, most people don't are are not ready to sit in a room for two days, even though there's no better way to learn. So we have to kind of warm up. We'll have online learning education um that they can start to watch our education and get to know us a little bit better. And then maybe they can attend a live lecture where we lecture and then they have a chance to uh, I think, be more focused, and then after that, do the live patient treatment programs. And when we when we've been doing the live patient treatment programs, and we've been we've been doing a ton of them over the last 24 months, is that the doctors start off doing a live patient treatment with an instructor where they do usually 10 veneers. So it's like an aesthetic smile redesign. It could be veneers, crowns, it could be a mixture. And then we've got doctors now moving up where they're doing the full upper arch and then um doing like an orthotic on the bottom arch because now they've figured out where the bite needs to be. And then during the last course, we had doctors that are doing basically full mouth rehabs where they prep out upper teeth and lower teeth and then reestablish the patient's occlusion and then give them back that attractive smile. I don't want to say beautiful because some guys we have patients that are male, and I don't know if they want to be called beautiful, but you know, if we say they're attractive smiles, I think that's a better way of saying it.

Scaling Up To Bigger Cases

SPEAKER_00 12:56

Yeah, I think um, yeah, you're right, Mike. I think uh we've been talking a lot recently about the direction education's moving and at the pace it's moving. And you know, we I think we both agree that jumping in with both feet and taking a live patient hands-on program and planning on taking two or three marching to the end is is uh is the best way to do it, but potentially not the only way now. So at the PAC, we're trying to the Pacific Assetic continue. You'll hear us refer to it as the PAC. And um we call it the PAC because it's a group of like-minded docs, obviously, that we get it, we enjoy being together, but you don't have to do everything at one time. Like Mike said, you can go into the webcast, you can go, we have some new products that we're gonna be introducing hopefully very shortly. Um that will hopefully integrate some of the doctors that are coming on more slowly. Um, but I think our real message for all the doctors is I'll say this correctly, is being competent enough and competent enough to teach with us, which is what our hope is with every one of our students, whether they decide they want to teach or not. Because once you get to the point where you can actually teach another doctor to do this, and that's our goal in the program, as doctors progress in the programs and they start working with us in the clinic, with other doctors and with other students, um, they start becoming much more confident. And that translates to more diagnosis in the office and feeling more comfortable in the office talking to your patients about it. And ultimately what happens is you get the clinical confidence, but you also get the confidence to diagnose and to communicate to your patients and you feel good about being able to actually deliver it because uh, you know, we have an old adage called prep and pray. We talk about this a lot. Doctors never want to prep anything and pray it goes well. If they if they feel that way, I don't think they'll I don't think they'll engage with a patient. But I think with a Pacific Ascetic Continuum, you go through a process where you get all the confidence to be able to communicate and you get the confidence that you're working with a great lab, and you have mentors like you, Dr. Miyasaki, where you can call up and review cases. And at the end, you're really in a position where you can teach it. And when you're at that point, I think that's when you see the big paradigm shift in your practice economically and enjoyably. You can start doing the kind of work that you get enjoyment out of.

Training Your Eye For Aesthetics

SPEAKER_01 15:23

Hey, if you like the information about what we're talking about, the hands-on courses, the live courses, even online education, go check out thepac.org, t-ep.org. Okay, we'll go back. All concept of what we're trying to teach is we're trying to make doctors comfortable doing multiple unit cases. Because you know, a lot of doctors, if you do one to three units, they get it. And I was talking to a doctor at one of our last courses who told me uh that they were trained to do veneers when they're in dental school. I said, Wow, that's really good because we weren't trained to do veneers. But I said, So how many veneers do you usually do? And and the doctor said, Well, maybe like one or two at a time. Yeah. So which is it's really hard. That's a hard way to make it work. But you know, if we're doing a 10-unit case and you you learn how to visualize that case and then prep out 10 teeth, how to do the impressions, how to do the temporization, how to do the cementation of those 10, then when you go back to your office and you're doing one crown or two crowns, it seems like a, you know, it seems super easy. And then your what your mind starts to do is your mind starts to look at the patients. And instead of thinking, oh, I need to do that crown or that crown, now you start to think bigger. I can do 10 units or 14 units or 28 units. And after that, your practice really isn't the same anymore because one, like you, as you mentioned, you have more confidence, but the confidence is from having the ability now to do those types of cases. And, you know, if you're out of dental school, how do you learn if and you're comfortable doing maybe one or three unit cases, how do you get comfortable doing more? It's it's really hard to do it on um on the internet, you know, YouTube and all that. So the best way to learn is going to be doing uh something that's hands-on. But the very, very best way is actually working on your patients with somebody who's open to help you. And you know, this isn't like dental school or trying to make you feel bad. No, we're trying to encourage you as you're going through and trying to guide you through the case when you're done and you go back to your practice, you will see things that you don't see today. Like, you know, I think one of the biggest um barriers we have to people taking these this type of education is well, I don't have patients that need that, or I can't, I don't have patients that need veneers or aesthetics. And I tell the doctors, you know, because I I've taught lots of different things over the years. I've taught ortho, I've taught implants, I've taught, you know, so many different subjects. And whenever I teach those, I've had doctors in the course say, Well, I don't have patients that need ortho, or I don't have patients that need implants. And I goes, many of them do, but your eyes just don't see the need. And then when you see the need and hit and you go back to your practices, you were mentioning with a different perspective. And now you look at a patient smiling, you go, Wow, you know, that's a patient that I've been seeing for the last 10 years. I've never mentioned whitening or ortho to straighten the teeth or veneers to give them that ultimate smile. And and now you see that that's something you should mention to them, and you've got the confidence now to mention it to them, and you'll be amazed. They go, That's what I want. You know, I just had a patient that came in two weeks ago. And first time I've I met her, we did our comprehensive exam. One of the things that we talk about, did the comprehensive exam. I looked at her and she had nice teeth. She had uh peg lateral tooth number seven, the right uh upper lateral. And I just asked her, I said, Hey, have you ever thought about closing that space? And she said, Yeah, you know, I've always thought that I would like to do that. And then I said, Well, we could do that. And and your her teeth were, you know, she's older, her teeth were a little bit maybe like A2, A3-ish. And I said, Have you ever thought about having straighter, wider teeth? And she goes, you know, I've always wanted to have that too. So, you know, nobody, I mean, she's in her late 60s, early 70s. So she's been, you know, going to the dentist fairly often all these years, and nobody's ever given her the suggestion to do that. That's something she's always wanted to do, and they've never helped her with the information so she can make a decision. And I think it's just one of those things that we do every day. And I, you know, one of the things I tell the doctors is when we do our conference examination, we look at the gums, we look at the teeth, we should do an oral cancer screening, we should do a TMD screening just to see where they are. But I know this seems unimportant to some doctors, we should do an aesthetic evaluation because if we take care of everything else and they have healthy teeth and healthy gums, but they don't like their smile, we still haven't offered them the very best. And so, you know, an aesthetic evaluation should be an important part of our comprehensive examination. And a lot of us don't do that. I don't know. You you see the same thing, Garrett.

SPEAKER_00 20:05

Yeah, no, for sure. And I what I recognize, and what I tell students or prospective students that are gonna come into the program, prospective docs, I hate to call them students because they're all great doctors, um, is I tell them one of the things you're gonna learn the very first course you take is we're gonna ruin you because you're never gonna look in the mouth and see a single tooth again. And I would say the majority, if not all, the doctors that I bring in to take the course after the first day of lecture and seeing all the before and afters, when they look in the mouth as they go back to their practice, instead of seeing whatever they had been seeing, now they just see everything that can be fixed, everything that can be improved, everything that can be enhanced. And I think that's the first step is kind of seeing what you don't see. And I think that happens very quickly in our program. It doesn't take four programs to master being able to see uh what opportunities there are for the patient to improve their smile. And in fact, I guarantee them when you leave here, we're gonna kind of break you because now you're gonna see everything but the filling. You're gonna see all the potential. I think that's one of the big, the big gifts that the program gives the first the first go-around.

Lab Support And Team Alignment

SPEAKER_01 21:17

Yeah, no, absolutely. So, you know, it's one of those things where, you know, I I want people to listen to this and feel encouraged that there's a program like this where you can come postgraduate-wise, you know, after you're out of dental school, and you maybe you've been in practice for five years or maybe 50 years, and you still want to learn a little bit more. I think, I think the PAC and the education that the PAC offers is a great place to start. You know, I I've done, I figure I probably have taught at least 10,000 of my colleagues, whether it be aesthetics, occlusion. We've I've done live surgery courses with many doctors doing implants and just doing all that kind of work. And you know, what we really want to do is we want to help the doctors kind of reach the goals because a lot of Us, you know, after we've been doing fillings and crowns for a long time, that could get a little boring. And we're we want to move up to a different level. And I think coming to the pack, you know, we're just an encouraging group. Um, there's no egos there. We're not trying to make ourselves look better at your expense. We what makes us feel better is when we make you better. And uh, you know, we we go into these courses very humbled, even Dr. Griffin, you know, sharing the things that we did not do right because it's through having those challenges where things did not go right where you really learn. You know, if everything, if you had the formula, and that's what we do, we we give you a systematic formula that will carry you through most of the cases, but every patient's a little bit different. And what we have to do is we can share all the experiences we've had, whether good or bad. And so it is humbling. You know, there's no um, well, it's a very horizontal type of um, I guess, hierarchy. There's really no hierarchy. And we've got the lab technicians there, and the lab technicians can look at your preps, they can help you um fill out your your prescriptions so you can get back what it is that you want. We talk about uh diagnosing, how to talk to the patient so you get that case acceptance, how to work the lab communications so when you get your diagnostic wax up done. The lab has everything set up for you. You've got your preparation guides that guide you through the preparations where you have to reduce and helps you just ensure that you've uh reshaped the teeth enough. And sometimes it's very minimal and sometimes it's a little bit more of a prep, especially if there's a lot of misalignment or a lot of old restorations between the teeth. The lab technicians are there to check the preps, they're there to check our impressions. And then when we go to do the seat, the lab wants these cases to go smoothly because they're there too. So if the case doesn't go in smooth, you know, uh they're gonna be the ones that we're gonna look to to figure out why, why. But they always go in smoothly. The labs always do a great job. And what you have to do too is as you start to do cases that are larger, and it doesn't just have to be veneer cases, but you have to work with a laboratory. And this is what Garrett and I uh talked about. I told Garrett, I said, the core is a dental lab, and that they're the dental lab that supports the courses that we do at the Pacific Aesthetic Continuum. What I want as a clinician is I want to feel like I have a lab technician in my office. And unfortunately, I don't have the space to have a lab technician in my office, but I want to feel like I can call up core dental lab and say, okay, I've got this patient, I got these issues, and I need to be sure that you know you keep an eye on this as it goes through the laboratory, the fabrication part. And that's what Core tries to do. So we've got the head lab technicians that attend the courses, and they are, when you leave the course, basically they're training us to use the lab better. And then when we get back to our offices, we can always pick up the phone, send photos, and we can dialogue with the head laboratory technicians. And it's just like having a laboratory technician in your office without all that added cost.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

So I don't know, Garrett, Garrett, you want to talk about the lab? No, I agree, and I no, I agree. Everything you said there, Mike. And I I think one of the things, points we have to also hit on is the staff, is that uh at the PAP when the doctor registers, we encourage them to bring all their staff. If they have their front office manager, their case present, whoever's presenting cases and doing uh finance for patients, uh the assistants, obviously. Um we encourage and we welcome all the staff to come because I think you can talk about this a little bit. There's two benefits to having the staff there, not just your assistant, but the entire team. One is that they really get to see what you're capable of doing as a doctor and being in the volunteer leader. That's really valuable, I think. Um number two, um, obviously uh learning the process to be an assistant in doing a comprehensive restorative case is very, very different and can be very challenging unless the team is trained. So when you bring the whole team, they get the clinical clinical portion of it, but they also get to observe and be involved one-on-one as your assistant with a clinical instructor. So you can maybe talk a little bit about that opportunity for the staff because I think that's super valuable beyond you know getting uh CE credit.

SPEAKER_01 26:25

Yeah, you know, I think the the value of bringing your team is that we train your team for you because how many of us have been to a course and we learn all this information and there's a ton of information you're gonna get. And then you go back to your office, you've got the eyes to see the veneers, but your team doesn't know how to present the veneers, they don't know how to talk to the patients about veneers because maybe you haven't done a veneer case in your office. But after the course, your team can support you. They know what supplies, they know the order of the use of all the materials, and they will see the value of doing a set of cases in your office. So, yeah, your practice will grow, I think, tremendously once your team has come with you. And we always do encourage the doctors to bring their team.

Practice Freedom In Any Economy

SPEAKER_00 27:06

Yeah, I know how hard it is with the hygienist to get the hygienist. If there's any hygienist listening, I don't mean this in a bad way. Don't send me anything. But the hygienist often don't want to attend, they don't see the value. But frankly, they're the ones who have the relationship, in my opinion, with the patient. And they're they have a great opportunity to ask that patient, you know, is there anything in your smile that you'd like to improve? What about these things? And they have that more open communication, and that's a great opportunity for the hygienist to be able to see what it is that the doctor can do comprehensively. And it doesn't have to just be veneers or criniers or a full mouth or implants, it can just be gingival, you know, gingivectomy, it could be whitening, it could be uh, you know, enamelplasty, all those things, Mike. And you can talk about that just uh putting a toe in the water and introducing the patients through the staff to what the potential is there on the practice. I think that's very valuable.

Where To Find PAC Programs

SPEAKER_01 27:57

Yeah, and I I agree. What I want to do is is right now in the economy, there's a lot of trepidation. I I think we don't know which way the economy is going. And you know, to tell you the truth, it doesn't matter what year we're looking at, we always feel the same way, right? We don't nobody can predict the future. So we're always trying to figure that out. But I but I think one of the things that we have to remember as business owners, if you own your own business or if you're even an associate watching this, is that you have to create your own future, right? So in our practice, everything that's going on with the economy, I I always tell the doctors, we have the power, especially today with social media, to create our own microeconomy. So it doesn't matter if I woke up tomorrow and I read in in newspaper online that, hey, you know, dentistry is gonna go down 10%, 20%, or whatever. All I would do is I would say for the average dentist, that's gonna happen. Their practice is gonna shrink up 20%. You know, we've gone fee for service, and what we learn working together through this education is this education will give you the option. You can stay in network if you don't want to mix things up that much in your practice, or having these skills and setting your practice apart and being able to stack your skills will give you the ability to become insurance free. So, right now, a lot of clinicians feel like they have to stay in network because they can't break away. I think what we teach during the pack education is information and knowledge and showing you how to implement it. So you have the option to either stay in network or leave. And it's just nice to have that choice. But when we when we do and we talk about education, we talk about how to market our practices, we talk about how to do that case presentation we talked about, and you will elevate your practice to a different level. And I think that's when when you see that, it's easy to say, oh, I could I've seen practices or I've had buddies that have done that. But I always tell the attendees, you know, we are like the the our five closest friends. And if our five closest dental colleagues are in network and they're getting beat up by all the financial constraints because reimbursements level are going down and cost of doing business is going up, and you see that there's no way to get out of this, then you think, okay, I have to start doing more work. And you do more fillings and you start to do more crowns. And the problem with that is there's no profit in doing that because the insurance company has squeezed everything out. So what you have to do is you have to go to the services where patients are willing to pay, even if it's covered by insurance, they're willing to pay a little bit more for the care that you provide because you've elevated your practice to a different level. That's what we call creating your brand. And now you're able to increase your fees instead of decreasing or holding your fees steady. And I think that's where a lot of happiness and freedom comes from. So what I would encourage you to do is listen to this again. Remember, this is information that can change your practice, elevate your practice. It can give you a choice whether you want to stay in the network or maybe get out of network. And I think it's going to have a profound impact on your life, not just by the education, but by the people that you're able to associate with, whether it be uh one of our instructors and all of our instructors are have gone through different things in life. Uh Jack Griffin, who's one of the best dentists in the United States. And you have a chance to rub shoulders and ask some questions. And what happens? Pretty soon, those that you're working with during the course become one of those five people that are closest to you, and your life and your practice will change. And so I really encourage everybody to think about attending a course. I think um, yeah, it's it's something that you should experience if you if you've already graduated from dental school. And it's not like dental school, it's encouraging, but I think it's life-changing. And so with that, I will end and I'll give you the last word, Garrett.

SPEAKER_00 31:58

Oh, no. Thanks, Mike. I think you said it all. It's fantastic. I agree. I would encourage everybody. I hope to see anybody listening in the Denver area, the Chicago area, the California, San Francisco Bay Area. We're there. We have a whole suite of programs on our website, www.thepack.org. You can go there. You can go to core dental designs. You can go to the Pacific Aesthetic Continuum online on Google and Google search that. Uh, and you're more than welcome to contact any of us, and we're happy to help you um answer any questions and get you registered. And Mike, thanks. I think this was great. And I really look forward to some of the new exciting things that are coming up here in the very short near future for our uh for our for our group.

SPEAKER_01 32:40

Yeah, no, thank you very much. Well, thanks, Garrett, and we'll see everybody in our our next episode. Thanks, Mike. Thank you.