Secure Dental-Marc Cooper.mp3: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

Secure Dental-Marc Cooper.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Noel Liu:
Welcome to the Secure Dental Podcast. Through conversations with the brightest minds in the dental and business communities, we'll share practical tips you can use to scale your practice and create financial freedom for yourself and your family. My name is Dr. Noel Liu, CEO and Dentist at Secure Dental, and also co-founder of DentVia. I'm your host for the Secure Dental Podcast and I'm so glad you're joining in.

Noel Liu:
Welcome back to another episode of our Secure Dental podcast, where we bring in many bright talents and individuals from both inside and outside our dental industry. Today we have a very, very special guest. But before we go on, I just wanted to bring in our sponsor. And our sponsor for this pod is DentVia. It's a dental virtual assistant administration company that assists in back-end office tasks for your front desk and managers. Visit them at www.DentVia.com. Again, it's www.DentVia.com. Now, without further ado, I'm going to be introducing Dr. Marc Cooper. This guy is a legend. Over 58 years of experience and relationships at every level of the dental industry, from working at the chair, to being chairman of a board. And also, I mean his traveling, over 1.2 million miles. This guy is a legend. He has been like a consultant for single practices to Fortune 500 companies in 17 countries, from single practice to running DSOs in both Europe and US. And his credentials outspeaks his personality. He's such a humble guy. And today I'm so honored to be joined by Dr. Marc Cooper. So, Dr. Cooper, without further ado, I'm going to pass the mic on to you.

Marc Cooper:
I don't know what to do with the mic, but thank you. All that may be true, but it doesn't matter. What matters is where you're sitting in your skin and your situation, and what is the future that you're moving into. And one of the things that I'm working on now is that we are a knowledge society, but we are not a wisdom society. And what comes with those 58 years of being in dentistry to some level, at some level, is wisdom. Wisdom is different than knowledge. It's rarely applied, and certainly not in dentistry. So that's why we make so many mistakes.

Noel Liu:
So when you say wisdom, what is your definition of wisdom, and where do you see it's lacking in this current environment of ours?

Marc Cooper:
Great question. Asked a lot and hard to answer. Knowledge is linear, and it comes in a package, and it looks a certain way. It's information and data and interpretation and assessment and judgment, and it's all wrapped into something, and you call that knowledge. But it's not always effective. In fact, sometimes it gets in the way, not out of the way. Wisdom can see when it's getting in the way and knows how to disassemble it. That's the difference. So wisdom is really powerful. It's not embraced in our culture. It wouldn't look the way it looks if wisdom were more pervasive in our culture. Knowledge is. You can, you know, I use ChatGPT every day. I think it's a wonderful tool, but it doesn't make life better. So that's the work there is for me to do now at my age. But let's talk about dentistry. What's the burning questions your audience has? What do they bother you about?

Noel Liu:
Wisdom and dentistry: these two items, right? Which is why I think you're the perfect fit to answer these questions in relation to dentistry, and how do we get wisdom in this field? Because the dental field is really rapidly changing. The landscape is just shifting.

Marc Cooper:
Yeah. You know, that's a great question.

Noel Liu:
And I wanted to see your insight.

Marc Cooper:
Yeah. Good for you. I do too if I suppose. I don't know if they're insights; this is just the way I see it, you know. And you could say I am inciting what I'm doing both, I'm causing it to look that way and I see it that way. It's interpretive. I've been around a long time. I was just thinking before I spoke with you that I used to do my recalls on five by seven cards. That was the age of dentistry at that moment in time. And then I've been engaged with it and watched its evolution. It has a long tail. So one of the things about wisdom I find really, I really appreciate, is you get to see further into the past and more forward into the future. You can see the trend. So wisdom sees the trend now. It sees the changes. That's one of the differences. And it's like, Oh, okay, of course it's going to go there. People ask me about how I generated my success, and that's because I just knew where it was going. I just got to the right station first. So it made it really easy. So I suppose wisdom is an age bound. It's a way of seeing the world. So I had some wisdom in that particular area, others didn't.

Noel Liu:
So anyone with this knowledge that you're talking about here, so with this wisdom, I mean, we can apply it any time in our lifetime, in our lifespan, right? I mean, it doesn't have to come with...

Marc Cooper:
Yeah, yeah, I know people are looking for it though. The problem is I don't know if people are looking for it. We're so knowledge-consumed. I watched your social media because I'm part of it. I am dentistry in certain ways, and it's wonderful. It gave me a huge world to live inside of; a great reality. Was it true or not? Doesn't matter. It was what I had, and it trained me, it developed me, it compensated me. It did a lot for me. And I tried to give it back. And what I brought to it was: take a look and see where the future is going and then get there. Because if you don't, you're going to be behind. So that's where I always work from. It's like, Okay, I remember I gave the first talk on computers in dentistry in 1987, and it was they looked at me like I was crazy, and then I knew what my job was: to make them crazy. So I did that. I did that for a long time. Same thing with DSOs, same thing with everything that they're doing now. The big boys have really figured it out well. And so you have to understand that's the way where it is.

Noel Liu:
Yeah. Let's dive into the DSO world since you mentioned.

Marc Cooper:
Yeah, I know, but you know, you think you don't have much to do with it. So if you take a look at the attitude you have, dentistry has towards the certainty that larger business is going to be the future. They're not generating the kind of relatedness or abilities needed to make that future happen. They're resisting it, or they're pushing against it, or they're gossiping about it, or they're assessing it. Rocks are hard, water is wet. And the title DSO is interesting because I don't think it'll be that in five years; it'll be something else. But that is the future. Okay, are we preparing ourselves for that future? And dentist says, I am, like every other dentist is, resistant to change. Like I don't want to change to do that. I don't want to become that. Well, okay. Well.

Noel Liu:
What do you think it is? Is it fear or is it ego?

Marc Cooper:
It's all. You have to not own or take or out of your vocabulary and see how big it gets, like, Oh, okay, it's ego, which is who you understand yourself to be. That is an ego: who you understand yourself to be. And then there's the, yeah, and just people have a hard time recognizing that aspect of themselves. They think it's real, but their ego determines your perception. And so your perception reinforces your ego. So the two are in cahoots to see the world they want to see. But if you look at the anatomy of an ego, it's pretty frail. It's not well-designed. And that's the advantage for a conscious person is to be able to, use a little judo here and the force of the opponent, sometimes the ego is a wonderful thing to use unless it's using you. And so there's a way to learn how to do that. Take some time.

Noel Liu:
And you're absolutely, right, because I've been seeing like these bigger, larger companies, they coming in, they are more efficient, they have more capital, they have more manpower and more resources. I mean, how is a single office or a single practitioner going to be competing against these guys?

Marc Cooper:
It doesn't really matter. I mean, I remember my cousin Harry and I have his operatory with his chain-driven, slow drill. I remember, and the spittoon. One of the things that's been very contributory to me is to be able to look from multiple directions. And so one of the bodies of work I'm working on now is I'm bringing numbers of religions together to see what's the commonality of what is the source for all of them. That's what I'm looking at. And what I'm seeing is there's an access to something that dentists can't go beyond. If they could, it's just a job to learn from. If they would add a Buddhist perspective of the job is the yoga. The job is what can I learn from it? The job is what can I see for? The job is where can I grow from it? Rather than there's some limiting factor if I don't have it my way. That makes no sense because it's going to go the way it goes. That's how life works, I'm afraid, you know? So hey, if it's going in this direction, either I make a choice to get out, which is fine, and do something else, or make a choice to really learn how to play this game because this is the game you've got. And I think it's a wonderful game. I think if dentists could really understand how to play, they could be contributory, participatory, intellectual, knowledgeable; they could have a world that's really pretty extraordinary because these guys, as you said, have the capital, have the means, have the knowledge base, they've got resources that would be, Wow, if I could get ahold of those, that would be great.

Noel Liu:
It's like if they can embrace it and just take. Kid and basically just work with it, like you said. Like making it like the.

Marc Cooper:
Well, that's what you got. Rocks are hard, water is wet. And here's the future. Okay, now choose. See, that's where you said, What are they afraid of, or what is the ego? Both. Change is really scary. It's like, Well, I designed myself to be this way in the future and that expectation will probably not get realized. And then if you look underneath that, expectations unfulfilled lead to upsets. So dentists get upset a lot. It's like they're just, they're not going to make a change that way.

Noel Liu:
Correct. And I've been seeing like data, I've been showing more and more of the dentist population that's coming out of dental schools. They are like less likely to own a practice. And I've been seeing this trend going on for the last five, six years. It's just on a decline. There are still those gung ho's that want, still want to own their practice, but I ...

Marc Cooper:
Yeah, but you know they're, but there's no reason to. It's like building your own dental school. It's like, is there a reason to do that? No. So you went to dental school because there was an existing structure that allowed you to forward a certain career objectives, and you followed it. And so then if you look at the, I just spent a lot of time at the Colorado Plateau and Zion National Park and you see the layers of rocks. And I'm that, in dentistry, I've seen the lower levels and where, you know, its accumulation to where it is right now. It's a lot of rock right now. And you guys, just haven't adapted yourselves well enough to the environment that you're in. It's just, Okay, here it is. I find dentists are really brilliant, really smart. I've worked with a lot of people. And, you know, I'm sitting in a boardroom in Nebraska, wall to wall, ..., you know, everybody with their hair parted the same way. And the red tie was just how perfect for Midwest. But this is a $11 billion company. And then I realized that, you know, they're all dentists. They all are dentists, they just don't really know who they are. So they don't grow into what they could be in the world. They'd rather see in this career path being attacked by an external force; the aliens, they're coming rather than. You know, it's the way it's going. Let me learn how to play in that water. Let me learn that game, because it's a brilliant game. It's been working for a very long time. When I began this whole conversation, DSOs were 3% of the market. I presented a future that no one really wanted to hear, and I'm still still doing that. That's, I guess that's my career path. It's like, Wow, okay, keep it up. Because, you know, you can't win at a game that isn't being played by you. It's just, you can't.

Noel Liu:
And what is it now?

Marc Cooper:
I think there's a truth about the industry. I think it's a corporate expression now. So when I began, just like you, I began with an individual expression. And then people came along and said, Well, you really need to take responsibility in a different way, which is ownership, leadership, and management. You've got to grow up. It's a business. It's not a hobby; you've got to run it. And then all the tools over time became available from the five by seven, keep your recalls on that list, to a computer system that actually can figure it out and send out reminders and do the scheduling and, you know, manage it so that you have an 82% return rate or whatever you've targeted out for. You know, all those tools are now in place. And then the bigger boys, well, you know, they have figured out how to expand that intelligence into a looking from a much different perspective because they have multiple ways to look at it. So it gives them a different view of what's available so they can see the flow and ebb much more clearly. Because you're on the ground, you're right in it. So you don't have that perspective. That perspective gives you power. So yeah, it has to go there. It's the only place it can go. And there's no, artificial intelligence is its major tool. Now once you have that in your hand, it's like, Whoa, this is a jet engine. I remember the first time I got in a really powerful car when I was a teenager, it was like, Whoa, my God, that's what's here. Now with these two practices a week or whatever they're doing, they're really figuring it out, and they're generating the revenue stream that is less expensive to produce. And that's important. So the investors see opportunity here. So now you have this dance going on in between the equity and the practices. Everybody wants to play in this arena. So it's got a lot of confusion, a lot of upset, a lot of, too many offers, there's not a lot of clarity, you have four major players that have sustained over years that have some stability. You know, it's all over the place. So it's an interesting time. It's also a great opportunity, from my viewpoint.

Noel Liu:
I'm seeing medicine going that direction, has gone the right direction. How do you think like dentistry is? How far do you think we are compared to medicine? Because I have not seen any MDs going to open up their own practices.

Marc Cooper:
Yeah, that's the exact question. You should take a look at the source of that. You speak as though you're not part of the health care system. Yeah, that's a dentist. They don't have an appreciation for the power of context with the part that they're actually playing. There's something that they don't understand about the environment, the ecosystem that they're part of. You're not taking advantage of what you really have, your first responders, and you're not using that particular position to negotiate yourself in the higher order of health care and setting it up that; that's the game you play. That would be a different intention, holding on to the past, that would be different.

Noel Liu:
Let's switch gears a little bit to dental students. Majority of the dentists out there, they are always complaining that when we were in dental school, we were not taught about finances. We were never taught.

Speaker3:
About nothing to do.

Marc Cooper:
With financing. It has nothing to everything can be outsourced. Eventually, if you understand how the game is played. There's a lot of things I am really bad at, but I've learned in my aging process to find people that are good at it and then collaborate with them to get the final product complete. I've worked with probably hundreds of thousands of dentists over my career, and you know what? They're really good people. They don't believe how smart they are. They underplay their value. They don't figure out that they can think in a new way that will allow them to see the future in a new way. And so they limit themselves to a particular view of life in themselves, which doesn't have to be that way. And that's the way I see it. Again, this is the way I see life in the way it works. Dentistry is going to have to go in this direction of larger enterprises, because the money's flowing there and the interests are flowing there. And the health care system of which you are a part is going there and wants to take dentistry with it. And we'll figure out a way to do that. There are larger interests involved.

Noel Liu:
So what are your thoughts on a lot of these dentists? They are like, is it a true assessment that dental school should be teaching a little bit more business on how to read a PNL, how to run or operate a business?

Speaker3:
What are your thoughts on that?

Marc Cooper:
Dentists are perfect for what they designed for, which is to take care of people's oral health. Let them do that, and then figure out a way to develop them in a particular way that gives them a certain level of happiness in life beyond just that, the dental chair. Give them something beyond that, which I think is very doable. Companies can afford to look more in areas of personal growth and development that would allow a dentist to live a life that's with less issues that come with a singular ownership. I think there's a viable offer out there. If the dentist could stand in a particular way when they negotiate their contracts, I'll just leave it at that.

Noel Liu:
And your thoughts on single practice?

Marc Cooper:
I think it's a great way to play. I think it's an end game. If you want to play that game, please make the choice. There's a benefit and a cost. Just know what you're buying. The benefit is your autonomy. I love that myself. I love to be autonomous. I love to be able to make my own decisions and all that, that it gives me. But then I have the cost side, and the cost sides are pretty heavy because I've worked in both arenas. The cost side is I'm responsible and I don't have a shared responsibility. I'm part of a singular game. I'm a singular cell. So, you know, if you look at the natural evolution of everything becomes multicellular. And that's just the way it was designed from the original start. So businesses have all gone that way, they have all gone that way. Can you name anyone in the Fortune 500 that is a single unit? Of course not. So there's, you know, when you take a look from a certain reality and the reality is rocks are hard, water is wet, and here we go. This is where it's going, and it can't be stopped.

Noel Liu:
No, you're 100% right. Even these big companies like Amazon's and Tesla's, these guys, the co-founders I mean they are like part owners. They're not even like, they don't own the 100%. They are like, you know, 10%-15% owners.

Marc Cooper:
Yeah. You know, I don't believe the media. You know, it's all that, I had the opportunity to work with people...

Noel Liu:
I think it's just comparing like the mindset that we dentists have, that we want to own 100% of everything, right? And it's like like you said.

Marc Cooper:
See, that's another fallacy and fantasy. You tell yourself, because you don't own anything. The bank owns it. The staff owns it. Patients own it. Your wife owns it. You know, everybody's got their fingers inside of you. It's a shared responsibility in a whole different way. There's something else that the dentists have been unable to do, which is to be able to form themselves in a way that has allowed them to sit at the table with the other players that are absolutely in the game in a way that represents themselves well and gets a better outcome than they're getting now. They don't know how to do that. All they knew was resist. That is not an appropriate strategy for this future.

Noel Liu:
What are some of the issues that you would see with this kind of attitude?

Marc Cooper:
Exactly what we're seeing now. If I took a larger view of the whole situation and look down upon it, what I would see is what's going on is aggregation. What's going on is, Oh, look at all these things that are going on, and I'm a part of all of this. There's a whole healthcare system that says we need certain things to allow us to operate better. I have the assets to be able to deliver to that, but I'm not forming my assets, so they're transferable. So you begin to see in a whole new light the industry as something more than individualistically that we do now. And people have an external viewpoint of seeing what I'm talking about in a way that they'll have the patience to bring it about. A lot of the DSO ownership is now not dentists, so that tells me something. It's like, Wow, they saw something that the dentists couldn't see, or they would have done it.

Noel Liu:
So lastly, for dental students.

Marc Cooper:
Dental students. You know, they're.

Noel Liu:
I mean, is that a career you would still say ...?

Marc Cooper:
The whole deal is set up so strangely that it's interesting. Ideally, which would never happen, but ideally, there would be a forced, not a forced, a contributory but a strongly recommended mentorship program set up post-graduation where people would get a direct experience of what it's like to be a dentist. But on the other side, would be the dentist being willing to say, I'm responsible for the future of dentistry rather than personally becoming successful. I'm responsible for its future, not just my future. That would be a significant change that would be to occur. But what they have now is go out and scramble and figure it out and take a ship for a couple of years, and if it doesn't fit, then get on another ship. And you know, their world is more mobile than I grew up in. And so that mobility will continue and the flexibility will continue. But what I see, though, is the entire opportunity for different expression coming out of the dental schools, which is more open to what is occurring, and learning to collaborate in a different setting than sitting at the lunch table with your colleagues, learning how to talk in a horizontal fashion rather than just a vertical fashion. Learning how to collaborate.

Noel Liu:
I love that collaboration is a key in these days. I've really evolved, like from a competition mindset to a more being collaborating with people, and that has helped me out tremendously. Just one thing: what are you doing now? What's your role like? I see that you're a founder of the Elderly Foundation. What's that?

Marc Cooper:
Best time in my life right now. So people have this whole conversation about aging and the issues that occur, which are all true. But there's another way of being about going through the aging process. And so I and a bunch of collaborative partners see that the trajectory of aging dictated by the culture is one that does not give you a level of satisfaction and happiness and joy. And so we've designed a different way to look at aging that has given us a different perspective of how to go through life, and a lot more joy and equanimity and peace and appreciation. So I'm having the best time I've ever had in life at this moment in time.

Noel Liu:
It seems like you're next level now.

Marc Cooper:
Yeah.

Noel Liu:
All right. Well, thank you very much. Thank you so much for your time. I know your time is very, very precious, and I appreciate that.

Marc Cooper:
You're welcome.

Noel Liu:
Thanks for tuning in to the Secure Dental podcast. We hope you found today's podcast inspiring and useful to your practice and financial growth. For show notes, resources, and ways to stay engaged with us, visit us at NoelLiuDDS.com. That's N O E L L I U D D S.com.

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