Why the Best Companies Feel Like Communities

In this episode, I sit down with Alex Sharp, CEO of Shared Practices Group, to talk about leadership, culture, healthcare, and what it really takes to build something that lasts.

Alex leads a rapidly growing dental organization spanning more than 20 states, but what stood out to me wasn't the business strategy.

It was the philosophy.

Because according to Alex, there's a big difference between a group of people and a community.

A group of people simply works together. A community is united by a shared purpose.

And when people believe in the mission, the work becomes about something bigger than themselves.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There's a big difference between a group of people and a community. A group of people is just multiple folks, like the plural of person, basically. Whereas a community has something tying them together. And usually that something is related to something that each person in that group cares about. So they're to be united by something that's motivating, and in the best circumstance, a company is a community because everyone's choosing to be there.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

Welcome to the I Am Wiser podcast, where the biggest questions in health care and wellness meet the collective wisdom of industry leaders and innovators. I'm Dr. Laura Burdy, and here we explore the intersections of AI, care delivery, telehealth policy, and more. Through the lens of those who are reshaping healthcare. This is not just about theory, it's about lived experience and real industry insights. Let's dive in and get wiser together. So hi, Alex. Although you asked me not to call you Dr. Sharp because you said it sounds like forever and a lifetime ago. Honestly, I say that a lot too these days. I say, I'm a doctor, but I'm not your doctor, so call me Laura There you go.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

I'm gonna steal that one. That was good.

SPEAKER_02 1:12

I'm a doctor, but I'm not your doctor. So, all right. So tell me about yourself. Who are you? What do you do these days?

SPEAKER_00 1:21

I'm Alex. I'm I'm a dentist by training, but these days I'm the CEO of Shared Practices Group. And SPG exists to democratize the fixed arch, which in in dental terms is a fancy way of saying that we want to make the transformational care that we are able to do available as far and as wide as possible. It's not your grandma's dentures anymore. If someone is without teeth or has an alien dentition, or they've been what we call dentally disenfranchised, where they they haven't had the geographic access to care, or they haven't had the ability to uh philosophically understand that there are other options aside from dentures, we exist to help those people by going direct to them. We don't subsist on referrals. So we're able to go direct to the consumer and and help them transform their lives through transforming their dentition. So, you know, started out doing the dentistry myself. Uh, we started a podcast in 2016 that was focused on helping dentists get more out of their own career. Then we started coaching, we ran a mastermind, we ran seminars, and then when COVID hit, we merged all of our practices together and decided to form shared practices group because we had we had a network of people, we had a community in search of a platform. So we had to build the platform for people to plug into like a substrate and then amplify what we're able to do together. And then here we sit in 2025. We're we're 38 locations, 43 by the end of the year, and we're opening more next year. So we're we're on the roller coaster and it's a blast.

SPEAKER_02 2:49

Wow. I'll be honest with you, that is so impressive to me because I know so very little about the business and the practice of dentistry. But are you are all of your locations in Texas?

SPEAKER_00 3:00

No, so we're we're in 23 states right now. Wow. And the the again, I mentioned the the COVID connection. COVID, we feel uh caused us to be very remote first, which we've made into being more of a feature than a bug, even though it would be really nice to have a central hub where we had uh an extreme amount of geographic concentration just because operationally there'd be advantages there. But we started remote first because we found that you have to be very open-minded with the demographics for what we do. So you have to be smart about not planting these practices too close to one another so that you don't cannibalize the early ones by opening subsequent ones. So yeah, we're in 23 states, and you know, we feel like that having that geographic flexibility really gives us the uh the ability to source the best dentists and be relatively agnostic as to where they end up. We can get the best locations, the best dentists, and then have the biggest impact by not just saying, hey, we're only constrained to a certain geographic area.

SPEAKER_02 4:01

Okay. So I'm gonna ask just a couple of technical and knowledge-based questions so I can close my own knowledge gap and maybe have a more informed conversation. So, what are the options? You said we want to teach people about the options for the fixed arch that's more than just dentures. What what are what are those options? Are they things people have heard of?

SPEAKER_00 4:21

Yeah, I would say so. What we find is that a lot of patients speak in in and you know this in healthcare, there there's certain terms that people fall back on that can be a catch-all that aren't the most specific, but but they they evoke the the overall spirit of what you're trying to say. Yeah. So really it's three tiers. It's it's traditional dentures, grandma sleeping beside the bed with the teeth in a cup. Yeah. Then you have the dentures that are just like the old dentures, except they snap in and out over implants. And then the final version of it, the best, the the Mercedes Benz of tooth replacement, is what we call the all-on-four, which is where you have four to six implants holding in a permanent bridge that only the dentist can remove. And so that's that's where the technology is now. And with the the advent of 3D scans, cone beam CTs, you're able to really nail the location of the implants based upon that patient's unique, you know, unique anatomy. So that's been the great equalizer, in my opinion, as to the accessibility of providing this type of care. So if more people can provide it, because you can make that that care much more um approachable to more providers, then more patients can benefit from it.

SPEAKER_02 5:31

That's beautiful. Okay, thank you for helping me understand that little piece of technical information. My next question is so in telehealth, when we talk about democratizing anything, usually what we mean is helping people pay cash for things that either insurance won't, can't, or is very hard to get them to pay for. Is that also what democratizing means in the sandbox that you play in?

SPEAKER_00 5:58

That's an excellent way of thinking about it. And and I don't know if I had had that exact epiphany when we came up with that tagline, but it's very similar for us, oddly enough. And that's and that's that we don't play in the realm of dental insurance because for us in dental in dental, it's all about truly insurance is a coupon. It's it's not the same as medical insurance. So you get an amount off based upon you know the the terms of your insurance plan, but then it really hampers the ability for the provider and the patient to get along because you have this intermediary middle person that that tends to convolute things. And so for our procedures, we're not a network with anything for a lot of the reasons that that you could probably elucidate better than me. But but we we like there to not be that middle ground across which things get get muddied. And so, yeah, we're direct-to-patient, we don't we don't play the in-network game. And one of the examples I gave in in our seminar this past weekend for all of our doctors was that dentistry, and it may be the same in in medicine, it may be the same in vet, it may be the same in other branches of healthcare, but there seems to be this barbell that that's forming where you have these two polarized extremes where you either have the Amazon effect of healthcare, where you try to be all things to all people and you skim the surface, or you narrow your niche and you you tighten up that aperture to where you only do what you do exceptionally well. And and the concrete example I give is you can buy shoes anywhere. You could buy a pair of shoes on Amazon, or you can go to a custom cobbler and then they can make you handmade shoes. Neither one's right or wrong. There's a market for both, but you have to decide where you as a provider are going to sit in that in that barbell because that middle ground is going away before our very eyes. So you can play the insurance game, put your roller skates on, see 70 patients a day in the PPO model of dentistry, or you can see fewer patients and deliver more value per patient, which is what we do.

SPEAKER_02 7:57

Wow. And so you hone in and you focus on the niche of the the fixed arch options for people who now would if you were, would insurance even pay help subsidize that? You're right, it's not a complete offset. But does insurance care? I'll use the term do they care about giving people teeth who don't have teeth?

SPEAKER_00 8:20

They I mean, actually in actuality, no, they don't. Because back when I played the insurance game before I knew any better, they they would say, okay, here's the exact premise that we're operating under, which is the same as we operated under in 1972, which is if you need all your teeth taken out, you're getting a denture. Congratulations. And they pay for one denture X number of years, and so you get the floppy denture and nothing else. Like, see you later, put them in a doggy bag, send you home with them.

SPEAKER_01 8:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

And and fortunately, implants came along and became more ubiquitous in the 80s. And since then, the science has supported uh relying on those as our workhorse option for replacing teeth. But insurance, of course, hasn't hasn't risen to the occasion of seeing the necessity of paying for implants. They're still viewed as being a non-essential service or an upgrade or something that's elective when in reality you could say, okay, is it really elective when when you get 95% of your chewing ability back, when you are your nutrition is so much better because you're able to eat meat, like you can't really do with a denture. You could go down the line of rationale for why it's it's a necessity, but insurance companies choose not to see that.

SPEAKER_02 9:35

Of course. That's really interesting. And I find a lot of times when I talk to people from other sectors of healthcare, we can find a lot of common ground. And that's a lot of what we see in democratized telehealth as well. If you think about things like erectile dysfunction in men under the age of about 45, insurance doesn't really care, uh, weight loss in people who aren't obese enough. That's the hot topic right now, right? You have to meet a threshold. And even still, if you meet the threshold, you might not qualify. And so I'm very grateful to get to live and work in this healthcare environment today where people do have more choices and more access than they did even 10 years ago, honestly. How old is your model?

SPEAKER_00 10:18

So we've we've been in business since 2021.

SPEAKER_02 10:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:21

So it's a relatively new model. And and I and I love what you said about not obese enough or not far enough gone to pique the interest of the insurance companies paying. And it it just comes down to a lack of advocacy. Uh one thing that I trained all of our uh front office personnel on, I think about a week and a half or two weeks ago, was the notion of advocacy. And I gave examples of people in my own family who had struggled with navigating the the maze of of traditional health care in in the US, and how you have to advocate for yourself. That's that's the expectation now, is you have to say, okay, I'm gonna navigate from my primary care doctor to this specialist, and then make sure that the records get sent over and that I'm able to have an informed conversation with a specialist that's never met me before. So really the onus is surprisingly on the patient to self-advocate, which to me in 2025 seems backwards, but then that tells me, like, okay, here's an opportunity for us in our company to say, we're gonna turn that on its head. And if we want to create raving fans of our patients, all we have to do is advocate for them before they come to us, during the appointment, after they leave, and then all the way through their patient journey. So just by simply advocating and giving a crap for these people that need it the most, we distinguish ourselves and we we clear the hurdle of whatever their expectations are.

SPEAKER_02 11:42

You have to care. I'll actually, I I'm thinking of a really good example. I will give you a very good, very real-world recent example. I had a baby about six months ago and my health insurance changed halfway through my pregnancy. And I showed up to my six-month OV appointment and they said, Oh, uh, we don't take your insurance and neither does the hospital. It was Cigna, by the way. I said, What do you mean you don't take my insurance and neither does the hospital? And they said, uh, they just don't. I said, Okay, so I'm six months pregnant now. Uh, I'm I'm 40 years old with my fifth baby. What am I supposed to do? And they said, You can you can pay cash. I said, for a childbirth. What do you mean? What do you mean pay cash for a childbirth? And there was no advocacy. I mean, the the end of the story was I was able to get it changed back to the other one. But uh if if there wasn't someone to advocate for me, which there wasn't, and I think there are a lot of people out there that this is what happens to them is they either eat the cost or they don't get the care. And that's really sad. And I'm sure you see that too in dentistry.

SPEAKER_00 12:40

And and the thing is, not all health needs are as acute as an impending childbirth. So you actually have the gumption and the wherewithal to say, like, okay, I gotta figure this out, versus in the case of dentistry or or something else, it may not be a big enough of a deal to cause people to actually self-advocate, and then they delay and they defer. And what may have been a one-tooth concern became a whole jaw concern if if left to its own devices for 10 years. And so that's where proactive advocacy is the best thing. And then what we do is we find people that are in that dentally disenfranchised category that have not been advocated for for decades, probably. And then we're here to help them, even though it's reactive, it's better than continuing to just fester and and not be able to go out and eat steaks with your friends or smile at your 50th high school reunion, whatever the case is. So better late than never.

SPEAKER_02 13:32

But you care, you care, and that's what's different, is that you care and you help them get back that quality of life or at least as much as they can that they lost at some point in their life.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

Yeah, for sure. And what what we talk about at SPG is the notion of speed to belief. So I was training the doctors this weekend on getting I'm a basketball player, so you you have to see some shots go through the hoop to really get your confidence up. And so for our newer doctors that are newer to the platform, we did a lot of hands-on training. We we have them enrolled in our internal uh learning system called SPGU uh that they go through. And we just talked about how nailing those first couple of cases is not just huge for your own confidence and your own development, but it's huge for your team. Because if they see the patient come in with no teeth or with or with a really worn-out infected dentition, and then they leave with the with the healing teeth attached to the implants, what's your confidence gonna do? You're gonna get congratulated by the patient, the patient's family, you're getting patted on the on the back by your team. And that compounds, that momentum, that flywheel just starts to spin the faster you get those wins under your belt. So speed to belief is something that we teach on immensely. And I think that is that's translatable to all types of healthcare is the more that we can frontload a new team member's belief in why we're here, why we do what we do, the more effective of a teamwork you can, you can really, you can really indoctrinate in your team early on.

SPEAKER_02 14:58

And it sounds like it's really conducive to positive workplace environment, culture, anti-burnout prevention, and professional fulfillment. I would imagine that the people that work in your office are very healthy culturally and professionally satisfied.

SPEAKER_00 15:14

I mean, we're getting we're getting better every day. Like when we do our our quarterly engagement surveys, we we always have room for improvement, certainly. But the trends are as you described, and I think that's because we began with the end in mind. We knew what's the most impactful style of dentistry that we can do. And this is it. Like you, you, if you have a pulse and you come into one of our offices and you see a tr a smile transformation, you can't help but say, I feel connected to this. Um, another quote that I came across recently is uh happiness is downstream of impact. Yeah. People, people that are without, people that are without purpose in their lives aren't having a measurable impact on anyone. So if we can deliver impact for people, reasons for existing, reasons for working, then then we can really take care of some of the depression or the apathy that that is so rampant in our society now. It just comes from being connected to building something bigger than yourself and rendering a service for people. The service economy is not going anywhere. News flash. You talk about the AI that's that's gonna be taking jobs and disrupting things. Service is going nowhere. That that is a currency that's gonna remain valuable forever.

SPEAKER_02 16:24

I agree completely. And it is really important for us to live from our purpose and to work from a sense of purpose rather than just mandate tradition, reflex, obligation.

SPEAKER_00 16:37

Oh, is the way to live. The the get to versus have to, such an important distinction. And that's why I love working with doctors and teams that have worked in other styles of dentistry, or even better, if I'm getting someone from a different style of healthcare or people that are from other verticals entirely that just don't understand the impact that healthcare can have when done well. Uh, and and people are paying you for something that they want. That's also important because back in the day when I was doing fillings all day long, I'm six foot seven. This is it was brutal to be hunched over doing this all day long. That's why I'm at the standing desk. And there's nothing more disempowering than someone paying you money out of their own pocket that insurance didn't pay very much for for a row of fillings. And then me as the provider, I'm thinking, best case scenario, this per this patient leaves and they don't notice that I did anything.

SPEAKER_01 17:29

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:31

Because really you're you're hoping that the bite feels good, nothing's sensitive when you floss.

SPEAKER_01 17:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 17:35

Versus they come to one of our SPG offices and we're banking on them noticing. We're banking on the transformation. They're coming in willingly saying, change my life, take my money, versus oh, I gotta do fillings at the dentist. Completely different paradigm as a provider and a completely different paradigm as a team member.

SPEAKER_02 17:53

Wow. And you're so full of wisdom, and I can tell you've learned a lot and you've made a lot of positive impact on your patients as well as your team. So before we started, we were chatting a little bit about the let's say the foundational pieces of wisdom that we wanted to make sure we touched on. And you were sharing with me some of the things that you say over and over again or the things that you talk about over and over again that came up this past weekend when you were training. Would you mind repeating those for me?

SPEAKER_00 18:19

Yeah, the the one that is top of mind right now is that, and I just did a a post about this on LinkedIn not too long ago, but there's two, there's a big difference between a group of people and a community. A group of people is just multiple folks, like uh the plural of person, basically. Whereas a community has something tying them together, and usually that something is related to something that each person in that group cares about. So they're they're united by something that's motivating. So you can call a community like a religious organization is a community, uh, a chess club is a community, and in the best circumstance, a company is a community because everyone's choosing to be there at the end of the day. And so for us, what we care about is making those transformations that we're able to do through dentures and implants uh available to as many people as possible. And I think when you when you reinforce the why behind that community existing, yeah, you want to focus on the positive, you want to focus on the achievement of those types of outcomes for people, but you also want to focus on the negative. You want to focus on what happens if we don't do this? What is the alternative? If we have the fork in the road, if you have someone that has the ability to move forward with care versus someone who chooses not to move forward with care, then you need to stare in the face of what are they missing out on? Because sometimes the that that lack can be just as motivating, if not more, than the achievement of the outcome. So you can think about the systemic health consequences of not having teeth, the nutritional deficient deficiencies that follow edentialism on down the line. And so the community piece I think is important. And then the other thing I'll say is we we try to be core value-driven. I'm sure a lot of your guests talk about their core values and they put them on the poster, and that's that's all well and good. But for us, we talk about them every day. I talk about them in my communications and my newsletter. We hand out awards based upon people exemplifying the core values. And the the cornerstone core value for us is attitude of gratitude. If you organize them in a pyramid, the base layer is gratitude. Because I think whether you're a person that works alongside me for a decade or two decades, then you're gonna be better off for having done that. And so if you work for me for a year and you think about, okay, what did I learn at SPG? I hope people get an appreciation for how to be a better person. And that starts with having a grateful heart and understanding that things could always be worse. We have breath in our lungs, we're vertical, we're not six feet under. Every day is a good day. There's something good to be gleaned from every day. And so we try to start everything with that mindset because when you have that glass half full perspective, you're better able to conquer whatever gets in your way than if you had the the oh, woe was me, things suck kind of mindset.

SPEAKER_02 21:08

Attitude of gratitude at the foundation of the corporate values. Can I ask you what are the rest of them? What are the additional layers of the pyramid?

SPEAKER_00 21:16

All right, speed test. So number one is attitude of gratitude. No, I got it. So it's that's the base layer. Then you have constant improvement, which is which is number two. Number three is sense of ownership. So those first three only you can control. You you have 100% uh agency over if you show up for each of those three things. If you do those three things, then you're poised to be a good teammate. Number four is team first. Number five is communicating with compassionate clarity. So those two things dictate how well you play a team sport. If you can put your teammates first, if you can take care of their needs and trust that by doing that, you're taking care of your own needs. And then to do that, you have to compute communicate clearly yet compassionately. You can't be a complete a hole, but you also have to listen. It out there. And then the sixth capstone core value is creating raving fans. If you do those first five, then you can't help but over-deliver for your constituency. For me, it's my doctors. So am I over-delivering for my doctors by embodying those raving, those, those five first core values? And then the doctors are poised to then over-deliver for their patients. So I don't treat patients anymore. My raving fans are the doctors. Then they ripple out to affect all of all the patients. So those are the six.

SPEAKER_02 22:29

That's challenging. So tell me about number two. You said constant improvement. Is that at the individual level or at the organizational level?

SPEAKER_00 22:37

No, what I loved, one of the books that that really knocked my socks off recently was Um Atomic Habits by James Clear. That's a seminal work. I mean, everyone needs to read that one. If you if you've been living under a rock, you haven't read that. And one of his ideas was 1% better every day in something. And I think that sounds so easy to do, but if you plot out all the different vectors of improvement, if you care about your sleep or your relationships or your professional development or your education, there's lots of different ways that we can each improve. But if we commit to just doing 1% better on something every single day, then that trend line is going to be up and to the right. Uh, because if if you're improving, you're going to have that positive trend line. And if you're not improving, guess what? You decline. So the notion of that middle ground, I think is a fallacy. I think to expect to be able to tread water isn't real. So you're you're either growing or you're dying. And so I think the constant improvement, even if it's just an incremental micro improvement every day, then that's much, much better because you're focusing on it than just trying to stay afloat. And then what do you know? You got eaten by a shark because you're not swimming.

SPEAKER_02 23:50

Okay. Well, I agree with you. You're either, what'd you say? You're either you're either winning or you're dying. Is that what I heard? You're either improving or you're dying. So how do you, at the executive level, working with you said 30-something or 20-something practices? I mean, when you're bringing people on to your team, because some of these things I've learned the hard way, you can't teach these to people. I mean, you can teach them, but you can't instill them and you cannot create in people these things if they are not already there. They cannot be produced in other people. So when you are looking for teammates and you're looking for people to join your organization, how do you screen for these things? Or or can you? It's hard to do.

SPEAKER_00 24:31

You can screen for them. And I think you can screen for one of two things. You can screen for do they have them? Are they already inborn with that person? Or are they a clean enough slate to where they can be impressionable enough in a good way? That's a word has a negative connotation. But can they be brought along into the fold? And I and I would say that in our world, we have doctors of all different types, all different shapes and sizes. Yeah. You have the the doctors that are so bookish, because you know, medical school, dental school, you're rewarded for being nerdy. You're rewarded for being able to do organic chemistry and and in our case do little microsurgeries on people's faces. So you're probably not going to be the most gregarious person under the sun. It's the exception, not the rule. So a lot of those people I find rise to the level of support that they get. So you plug someone into an ecosystem. If you think about a sports analogy like the San Antonio Spurs of yesteryear, where you plug someone into that ecosystem, their upside is higher than if they were in some rudderless ecosystem on another team. And so the way I screen for it though is we we obviously have our hiring criteria based upon resume, based upon residencies completed, based upon continuing education that they've done. We have uh a quiz that we administer that's a clinical quiz where we give x-rays and we we have them narrate through their process of attacking a given case study, and then we compare and contrast that with what we call the SPG way. And then the final hurdle that someone has to clear to work with us is the core value call, which is what I do. So that's that's where I give them the smell test. I hop on a video call just like this and I pay attention. I ask questions, I give them situations, I ask about what describe your worst day at the office that you've ever had. And then I zip it. And then I listen to see, are we taking ownership? Yeah. Is this something that I did wrong? Or did every single thing that happened that day, was it actually the fault, air quotes, of someone else? Was it someone else's fault that you had your worst day at the office? That tells me a lot about those first three core values attitude of gratitude, constant improvement, sense of ownership. So if they have the wherewithal to recognize that, hey, it might not have been my fault, but it was my responsibility, that's probably someone that I want to go to war with.

SPEAKER_02 26:57

That's powerful. And how often do you find candidates who meet that criteria?

SPEAKER_00 27:05

I would say for every three that are good fits ideologically like that, there's one that isn't.

SPEAKER_02 27:14

That's pretty good.

SPEAKER_00 27:15

Well, because you have to consider the sample size, right? Like so for us, we started as a podcast. We find a lot of our doctors that are interested in us because guess what? They listen to our clinical podcast. Yeah. So they've been indoctrinated because I've been in between their ears for a while. If if everything that I say is repugnant to them, then they're gonna self-select out and they're not gonna want to work with us. So chances are if they've made it this far, if they've listened to the boring dental podcast and they've they've studied us and they've followed us and they've they've honed their skill set to be ready to join us, then there's a pretty decent likelihood that they're gonna be someone that I want to work with. But occasionally you get one where you you start to get your spidey senses tingling and you're thinking, I don't get the warmest of fuzzies with this person. And then you have to have the the ability to say, not right now, or hey, here's some growth areas that I'd that I'd like you to pursue before you're ready to work alongside us. We had one like this recently, uh in Flyover Country. I won't I won't say which state, but there was a doctor in flyover country uh that that wanted to work with us, and I just couldn't get there. I just couldn't there there was there was something missing. And so we we gave the homework, I gave the feedback, I said, hey, these are some things to develop. Not that you're wrong, not that you're broken, not that you're not good enough. It's just these are some skills that we find to be uh extremely useful in in making the most out of your time with SPG. And so develop this this aptitude, let's talk about it, let's let's keep the conversation going, and then let's see where it goes. But you have to have that discernment because when you're doing multi-site healthcare, and and this is the case in dentistry, this is the case in uh like my buddy owns pharmacies, he has the same issue. It's just getting people in the four walls to be able to do the thing. And so you have to resist the urge to populate the four walls with a pulse. Yes, knowing that sometimes the cleanup from it being the wrong person is worse than deferring and waiting for the right person.

SPEAKER_02 29:20

Yeah, it is worth the wait. We see that a lot in telehealth too. I mean, people are working from home, licensed in multiple states, and there's a lot of competition, there's a lot of places to work, right? But I agree with you quant quality over quantity when it comes to hiring decisions, even if it means you have to wait a little longer, it's worth it.

SPEAKER_00 29:40

No doubt.

SPEAKER_02 29:41

Wow. Okay. So we talk about community, we talk about the core values. I feel like we've gained a lot of wisdom today. So do you have one last piece of wisdom you can drop for me and then we'll wrap it up?

SPEAKER_00 29:54

I think that doing anything as a group in healthcare can get a bad rap. I think that's something that's worth disambiguating, is that healthcare by and large became started as a cottage industry where one person worked in one office and the doctor, him or herself was the font of all knowledge in that community. Yes. And then as technology evolved, as patient demand evolved, as the economics of healthcare continued to evolve, there became a centralization of a lot of different styles of healthcare. And we we see that in the hospital system now, we see that in uh you know dentistry, you have bigger thousand location dental service organizations or DSOs that that have bought up a lot of the market share. And when done incorrectly, the patient can suffer. But when done, when done well, and and that's that's where the the artistic side of it has to has to show through, that's where the the subjectivity comes to play, you have to do things with the patient in mind, which is easy to say, hard to do. And so if you're if your commitment is to providing a backstop of support for as many doctors as possible, to automate a lot of the back-end processes, to take care of the marketing and the phones and the scheduling and the operations and the procurement and the labs and everything else that a good back-end support structure would look like, then the doctor can focus on just providing top-shelf health care. So that's what I would say is that to the uninitiated, to people that aren't as elbow deep in healthcare as we are, it can seem like that consolidation is is a 100% bad thing. I would argue that consolidation is just the way of the world right now. It's a reality. So we can either hunker down and and try to ignore ignore the tidal wave coming at us, or we can build a surfboard that helps as many people as possible. And that's that's what we chose to do.

SPEAKER_02 32:02

When done right, with the right motivation. And when I talk about right motivation, what I say is not purely fiscally minded. We do have to run businesses and be responsible stewards of the resources that we have. But if we're doing it only for the purpose of the revenue that we're generating and the profit that we're making, surely we will be doomed to fail eventually because the lasting impact just isn't there.

SPEAKER_00 32:27

Well, there's easier ways to make money than healthcare. That's true. Because healthcare in dentistry, you think about the dynamics of it. Every single dollar of revenue that we collect symbolizes the work of at least two sets of hands. Because you're you're working with people on people. People businesses are really challenging. You have to have a screw loose to want to do people businesses. And so now, I mean, there's there's people out there starting new AI apps that are that are vibe coding stuff and they're getting to millions of dollars of ARR in month two. And you know, there's easier ways to chase money. If if you're doing health care, then to do it well, to not burn out, you have to really enjoy it. And to enjoy it.

SPEAKER_02 33:08

The care must be there. The care must be there.

SPEAKER_00 33:11

Okay, now you're the one with the quotes, right? Like that's my that's my new bumper sticker. The the the care must be there. That's great.

SPEAKER_01 33:18

You have to care, right? You do have to care. Fantastic.

SPEAKER_02 33:22

Oh, goodness. Well, thank you so much for spending so much time with me today. I feel like even though we are in separate corners of the sandbox, we share a lot of the same passions, drives, challenges, opportunities, and even some of the same impacts on the world by democratizing whether it's the fixed art dentistry solutions or democratizing um nationwide telehealth. It's we're we're giving people access to things and options for their health care or their dental care that they didn't have in even in the recent history. So I really appreciate your time today. So before we wrap up, can you tell everybody where we can find you? Where we where can we find you in your practices and your business online?

SPEAKER_00 34:02

Yeah, so sharedpracticesgroup.com uh stays up to date with our current locations, our new locations that are opening up. Uh, we're active on LinkedIn. Uh probably the best way to interact, though, is to listen to our podcasts. So we have the the Full Arch podcast, which is our dentist-facing clinical podcast. So if you're looking for some good nap juice, or you're trying to get some good sleep, you can listen to that. Um, and then my podcast is the SPG podcast. So that is sort of the bird's eye view intended for our team members. We have 300 or so people that work with us. So that's my way of shouting from the rooftops what I'm learning about, what I'm focused on, what success looks like. And then we have a lot of people that listen that aren't affiliated with us that just love to see the journey and the evolution. So sometimes it's me yammering into a microphone. Other times that's me interviewing doctors or key stakeholders. So SPG Podcast, Full Arch Podcast. You can find me on LinkedIn, Alex Sharp, if you want to connect.

SPEAKER_02 34:57

Thank you so much, Alex. I've learned a lot today. I've really enjoyed our time together. I wish you all the best. Good luck, and thank you for chatting with me today.

SPEAKER_00 35:05

Appreciate it.

SPEAKER_02 35:06

Bye. Thank you for tuning in to the I Am Wiser Podcast, where each episode brings us closer to a wiser, more human approach to healthcare. If today's conversation inspired you or sparked new ideas, share it with someone who's ready to rethink healthcare. And if you have a story or innovation that could light the way for others, reach out. We'd love to hear from you. This space is yours too. Don't forget to follow, rate, and review us on your favorite platform. Until next time, stay curious, stay courageous, and stay wiser.