We have a real treat for you this week! We are joined by special guest Rushi Trivedi, who has taken the best possible approach toward expanding into multiple locations. Starting in one family practice with his wife, Dr. Shilpa Trivedi, they have grown steadily and sustainably by placing an intense focus on quality of service, surrounding themselves with a team that is passionate about helping people, and learning how to organize efficiently so they can continue to grow and positively impact even more people’s lives. This week, he joins us to discuss their keys to success.
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Questions From This Episode
What makes a dental practice a good acquisition target?
Rushi looks for a street-level location with heavy foot traffic and room for a big sign, and he will pay a premium on real estate to get it. He also wants to know whether the selling dentist will stay. If the doctor stays, he can close quickly. If not, he gives himself four to six months to find and train an associate first, even if that means losing the deal.
How much should you pay for a dental practice?
Rushi's rule is no more than 60% of gross. He compares it to buying a fixer-upper and putting his own trained crew to work. He discounts from there for heavily discounted plans: a practice with a lot of Medicaid gets an offer closer to 35% to 40%, and a high share of HMO patients lowers the price accordingly. His goal is to keep the practice at least as profitable as it was when he bought it.
Why train a manager before you buy another practice?
Rushi will not buy a practice, even a good deal, until he has a trained manager ready to put in it, because he wants calm, organized growth instead of chaos. His managers-in-training rotate through each post in an existing office, from recall to dental assisting, insurance, scheduling, and reception, for six to eight weeks each. They move up only when their statistics are up, and finish with two months in an assistant manager role.
When are you ready to open or buy a second dental office?
Not until your current location is maximized. Rushi says most practices are missing a lot of revenue where they already are, so don't buy an office just for the sake of buying it. His practices had to be able to run well with a competent, trained team and almost no day-to-day involvement from the owners before they expanded.
Is it worth training staff who might quit?
Rushi says not training costs more. In his example, an owner who skips $5,000 in training loses the $50,000 in added profit a trained team member could have produced, and also gets the chaos of an untrained team. He hires people who want to improve themselves and trains everyone from the same source, such as DDS Success, so the training stays consistent. Some of his staff have stayed more than 20 years.
Episode Transcript
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Jeff: For this week's episode, I have the privilege of interviewing my good friend, MGE Power Program graduate, and one of our senior seminar speakers, Mr. Rushi Trivedi. Rushi and his wife, Dr. Shilpa Trivedi, have been MGE clients for over 20 years, signing up not long after Rushi left Wall Street to work with Shilpa and build up their first practice.
And I have to say, as we did the planning for this episode, these guys do things so well that it was tough to pick which topic to focus on. I've met many members of Rushi's team, and they're some of the nicest, most competent staff I've ever met. There are the training systems they have, what they know about promotion, and how they manage multiple large practices that are in the top half a percent of practices in the United States. There were so many options we could have picked from. So after all of that, we settled on opening and acquiring additional locations. We had to pick something, right?
This is just another area where Rushi is an expert. Before I bring him on, I have to say that what he and his wife, Dr. Shilpa Trivedi, have accomplished over the last two decades is truly astonishing. When they started the MGE program, they had two small kids and one practice. Now they have four offices with more on the way, and both their kids are dentists. And despite being so hyper-productive, they maintain a work-life balance that would be the envy of many people.
Again, we don't get into specific numbers on the show, as it's a public podcast, but as I mentioned earlier, let's just say their first two offices easily rank in the top half percent of practices in the United States in volume and revenue, and with great customer service. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to Mr. Rushi Trivedi. Rushi, welcome to the show.
Rushi: Hey, Jeff, this is awesome. Thank you so much for having me. I had to mention your company, because your company's amazing. You want to help many people, and I have the same goal. I want to help many people. So let's do it.
Jeff: Well, I love having you here. Probably the best place to start is to tell people a little bit about your story.
Rushi: So I was born and raised in India. I'm a civil engineer from India. I came to the US and did my master's in computer science and finance. My wife is a dentist from India, and she's a prosthodontist also. We got married and came to America. She went to NYU, and then she started her office. Well, she bought someone's office, a very good friend's, and she took it to a good level.
Jeff: When did she buy the office? What year?
Rushi: That was '94.
Jeff: Okay, so she took it over in '94.
Rushi: Yeah. She graduated in '91 and worked as an associate for the same doctor for two years. Then this doctor said, let's start a new operation. And that's how...
Jeff: So she took over the office she was in.
Rushi: Yeah. When he started the new one, he didn't want to continue, because he was successful. So he said, "You run it now."
Jeff: And so while she's doing all this, you're on Wall Street?
Rushi: Yes, and I'm never home. I was in Boston, I was in England, I was all over the place. And my wife loves to work. When I say work, she loves to help patients. You can just feel it. It's very spiritual to see her working. She would work 60 hours a week, because she was building up her office and helping patients, and I was working. Fast-forward three or four years, we have a child, and we don't have time. That's when it occurred to us that we can't continue this way. The usual cycle is: figure out how to make money, and then raise the children. I said, let's figure out how to raise the children, and then make money, kind of in reverse. So for that reason, one of us had to quit. I asked Shilpa to quit. She said, "No, you'll quit."
And I agreed with her, because she loves patients, and I was just working to make money. So I decided to quit. It took me four years. I made the decision in '97, and in 2001 I was done and home. And I realized it's not fun. You have to do something. So a very wise man suggested, why don't you work with your wife?
If I was going to join my wife, I had this viewpoint that she has a skill set, and it should be accessible to many more people, not just a limited number of people. And I learned on Wall Street that if you want to make a million, you find a person who's making 20 million, 20 times higher than what you're looking for, because you get the right advice. So I found some doctors who were helping many, many patients, on a big scale, with all the services. And what they advised me was amazing. They said the most important part of any business, be it dentistry or Starbucks, is training. And that we weren't doing. In our office, training was just, "Sit next to this person for five hours and watch." There was no formal way of training.
Jeff: So you went into the office in 2001?
Rushi: 2001.
Jeff: And I know that you doubled it after going in there. She was doing okay before, and you doubled the practice. And then I know we met for the first time in 2002.
Rushi: Yes, two years later. That was a blessing. You sent me a postcard from your company, and I called you and came to your first seminar, with Dr. Winteregg. Within 45 minutes of the seminar, I realized, wow, there is a business school for dentists. Because my wife had 10 years of dental school, six in India and two in New York, and no business training. What business means to me is, if I have good coffee, I want a lot of people to have it. If I make good oranges, I want a lot of people to have them. If I have a good skill, I want a lot of people to have it. And that I found in your company. And the rest is history.
Jeff: Wow. It's amazing it was that long ago. I should mention also, because sometimes people hear someone's been a client for 20 years and they think, what are they doing for 20 years? You finished your training years and years ago, by 2005.
Rushi: Yes, 2005.
Jeff: People have to know that otherwise they think they have to keep coming back. Now you come back for a lot of our seminars, but just so people listening don't think this is a 20-year program. And I know you're down this week, bringing some staff to one of the seminars.
Rushi: Yes. And my daughter, who's a dentist. She was the youngest dentist to graduate. She became a dentist when she finished Stony Brook, at 21 and some months.
Jeff: Wow, that's amazing. All right, as I mentioned in the intro, you guys have so much we could cover. I looked at some of your training forms you were showing me a few months back, and people would kill for these things. I've met tons of your staff over the years. They're great people, they're all very dedicated, and they love the practice. But we settled on multiple offices, because you guys now have four.
Rushi: We do have four, yeah.
Jeff: You started with one, and now you have four. What is the eventual plan? How many do you plan on having altogether?
Rushi: So far we have helped 150,000 patients in New York City. The population is about 9 million, so the target is 2 million people.
Jeff: Wow. Okay, so what would be the math on that? Let's see, at least six times. Wait, my brain isn't quite working here. It's more than 10 or 15 times what you're doing now.
Rushi: Yeah. Every dentist has a tremendous product, but what I have is two things, actually. They just popped into my mind. Because I worked on Wall Street, money was the only goal. Now the goal has changed in the last four or five years. The first thing, and it sounds kind of crazy, is to find people who want to get enhanced. People who want to get trained and do well in life. Team members. I'm only going to have people who want to get enhanced. They're not joining me for a paycheck or sick pay or something.
Jeff: So they're looking for personal growth. They want to become more competent and better, and that's a key criterion for you in hiring.
Rushi: Yes. And since I have that team who are willing to get enhanced, the second part is I want to give extreme customer service. Like extreme. They come to our office and they say, "What just happened?" You combine these two things, which I don't see in other operations. Our motivation is not just to treat patients and take their money. It's to give them a superior experience and back up our treatment. We're open 100 hours a week on the phone. They can access us anytime.
Jeff: So the phones are available 100 hours a week?
Rushi: Like 90, to be precise.
Jeff: That's right. I remember you telling me about this years ago. See, this was the problem with picking a topic. You know what, heck with it, we're going to talk about it a little bit. Your first office was in Queens, you have an office in Chelsea, and then you have offices in Great Neck and Little Neck right now. I think you were telling me this about the Queens office. It might have been when you had Chelsea already. It was a new patient thing. You noticed that when you were just answering the phones until five or six o'clock, you got a certain number of new patients. But then you looked at how many calls you were missing after hours and on Sunday. Then you had the phone answered for more hours, and you saw, what was it, like a 30 or 40 new patient a month increase or something?
Rushi: Yeah, it's big.
Jeff: Just by spending money to have the phone answered.
Rushi: Yes. And the viewpoint I carried was, whatever I didn't like in the environment, service-wise, I'd fix. I never like to hear a voicemail, like, "Leave a message, your call is very important to us." Since I don't like it, many people don't like it.
Jeff: I agree.
Rushi: So I said, I'm going to have people pick up the phone, 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. every day, Monday through Sunday.
Jeff: So you're basically adding 50 hours a week of answering the phone. Let's say you were answering 40 hours before. For those 50 hours you're paying, what, minimum wage?
Rushi: When I started, it was always minimum wage. It was probably seven bucks at that time.
Jeff: Okay. But let's say you were even spending $500 or $600 a week, or $2,000 a month, to get an additional 30-plus new patients. The acquisition cost on that is ridiculous.
Rushi: It is. It's much better than any other marketing.
Jeff: Well, you didn't do any additional marketing, right? That was just having someone answer the phone.
Rushi: Yes.
Jeff: That's crazy.
Rushi: And since we're talking about each individual who answers the phone: there's a lot of leakage. A patient calls, and the person who picks up the phone doesn't know how to make a solid appointment, and the confirmation team doesn't know how to confirm it. So you may get 100 calls and maybe 20 will show up. We trained our team at your company, so now we get 100 calls, we'll make probably 80 appointments, and 60 will show up.
Jeff: Again, just with a little bit of training. It's just crazy how much of a change you can get from something so small. And I should also mention, and we will get to this: you went into the first office with Shilpa and built that one up, and you were there quite a bit. You've been very heavy on training. You initially trained a few executives, and then I saw you back off a bit. Then you focused on office number two. You went in there, bought the real estate, built that up, and had it beautifully done. I remember your fights with the co-op board in New York City.
Rushi: Co-op board, yeah.
Jeff: But you got through that. And I think when you rebuilt the Queens office, you were even the general contractor, weren't you?
Rushi: I was managing it. My friend was a contractor, but I told him that for nine weeks, I run the show.
Jeff: And that got done faster than ever.
Rushi: We built 16 ops in nine weeks. He told me it would take nine months.
Jeff: Well, yeah. New York City. That's crazy. So then you built that up, you got execs in both offices, and you're at a point where you don't actually have to be in the office much anymore.
Rushi: That was the goal. This is my viewpoint: there's a starting point, and you have to decide where you're going. Like Alaska. You know you're in New York, or Florida, Tampa, and you're going to Alaska in December. So you know two things: where you are and where you're going. If you're going to Alaska in December, you're going to be frozen, number one. You have to do inventory, “What do I have now?” And you look at your wardrobe and say, "Oh, I don't have winter clothes," and you go get winter clothes. Same thing in business. You know exactly where you are and where you want to go. You take a current inventory of your skill set, and you build up a skill set. And how do you know what skill set you need? Because you're talking to people who are 20 times bigger than you.
Jeff: Interesting. It's a very interesting concept. People have probably plugged into the idea of talking to somebody who knows more than them before, but I like that criterion. If I want to have five of something, talk to somebody who has 100 of it. Okay. And then I know you were mentioning to me that you guys are in this huge expansion phase now. You're not in the office. You're kind of the visionary at this point. And I should mention, how many hours a week is Shilpa currently working?
Rushi: She started with 63 hours a week. Within three years of finding you guys, she dropped to 38 hours a week. And currently she doesn't have to work at all. She has 10 associates and nine specialists, or something like that.
Jeff: So now you can tell her to quit.
Rushi: Yeah, and that is a fight going on between me and my wife.
Jeff: I think fight's a strong word.
Rushi: A discussion. I want her to quit. This is very cliché, everybody says it, but before I die, I want to touch 20 million people. Student speaking, and a lot of things I want to do. And she's working, so I can't go away. I want to be in India for six months, or England for six months, or Tampa for six months. I can't do it right now. So that's our sweet argument: when are you going to quit?
Jeff: You quit first, so now she can quit this time. I’m going to stop there, or I'll get us in trouble. Okay, good. So you now have the four practices, you're looking at adding additional ones, and you told me yesterday that you now have, what, 14 executives in training. And the idea is that these people will all go out to the other offices as you open them, right?
Rushi: Yes. What we learned from your company, MGE, is that there's a recall area, a reactivation area, a new patient area, an insurance area, a training area. So I'm creating an executive for each area. Super executives. My top goal this year is 25 executives. We're at 14. Maybe next year I'll have 25. These people will be super specialists in each area, like hygiene. Then there's a local manager. Training is my forte. So let's say we have a new patient person who's super bright. She'll manage new patients across all the offices.
Jeff: I see. Between all the different practices. And I guess it helps too if you pick up a practice in, I don't know, Westchester or something like this. You already have a trained manager you can just drop in there, and they have the company culture down, because they've worked in your Queens office or your Chelsea office.
Rushi: Yes. These are beautiful people I have.
Jeff: What's cool about this is that where you guys started is not that different from where a lot of people started.
Rushi: It's the same exact place.
Jeff: It's just two people in one practice that's moderately successful, and you've managed to turn that into almost a burgeoning empire, which is kind of cool.
Rushi: And the difference between other practices and my practice is that if I know something's going to work and anyone on my team opposes it, I'll explain, and I'll remove them very fast. The viewpoint is, I'm playing football, and I'm only going to apply football rules. If someone wants to play basketball, it's not a bad game, but they can't play with me on the football field. Very simple logic. So everyone must get trained: doctor, hygienist, everyone.
Jeff: And we've met a lot of your team. I know you've trained most of them, and you do some training in the practice as well. You've sent a lot of your team, especially your executives, down here. And then you also do some of the online training as well, right? DDS Success.
Rushi: DDS Success. Oh, man, that is mind-blowing. I think there's 60, 80, 100 hours.
Jeff: I don't know how many hours we're at now. We have a lot of content in the hopper too, because we have the finance courses and the sales course and other things as well.
Rushi: DDS Success is just mind-blowing. It's not just lectures. It's drills, pairing off, and you see how it occurs in a real environment. Every single team member has steps: watch this video, then answer this question, watch this video, and go work on it. And the biggest advantage of DDS Success is the same source.
Jeff: That's true.
Rushi: If you have a team member training other people, and then a new team member training, the source changes.
Jeff: Interesting. I hadn't even thought about that. So if you have employee A training your staff, and then you switch to employee B, there are going to be slight nuances, differences in training methodology.
Rushi: Yes. I believe in having the same exact source for every single person. Then everybody's getting the same thing, and you can develop culture.
Jeff: This is cool. Okay, we've kind of gone all over the place here. Let me get to buying, because this is an area in which you're an expert: picking the right office. You guys are aggressively looking right now. When you're looking at a practice, what are some of the characteristics that make it an ideal acquisition target for you?
Rushi: I like street level. That's my first target. Street level, so I can put a big sign. I want a lot of traffic, and I'm willing to pay a premium on real estate for that. If you look at all my offices, they're right in your face. So that's the first criterion: a lot of foot traffic. Plus, we're creating a brand in New York now, Preferred Dental Care. People see it by its signs, like Coca-Cola.
The second criterion is the dentist. Is he willing to stay or not? That's very important for me.
Jeff: How does that affect your decision? Let's say it's a doctor who's, I don't know, 70 years old, and they're looking to bail in the first month or two.
Rushi: I'm looking at multiple offices at the same time, so I know my acquisition date. If the doctor is not willing to stay with me, I'm going to push the acquisition out a little longer, because I have to find a doctor and train them. I don't want to buy a practice and then figure things out. If the doctor is staying, it's a no-brainer. I qualify it with you guys, and I can buy within the next month. But if the doctor isn't willing to stay, then I know my lead time.
Jeff: I see. Because he or she is leaving. So how much lead time would you give yourself to find the right associate?
Rushi: I would say four to six months. Because this is organized chaos. I want to create organized chaos, not unorganized chaos. It may take longer, and I may lose a practice, but I won't deviate from that. I like peaceful expansion. Calm expansion.
Jeff: That's good. And this is what I was going to ask you. The associates you have working in the other practices, have they all worked in at least one of your two larger offices?
Rushi: Not necessarily. Going forward, I can't have it that way, but it was the case. Right now, at our Little Neck office, one of our doctors from Manhattan goes there.
So just to give a sense: when I'm looking for a practice, I'm willing to pay only 60% of the gross. Not more than that.
Jeff: I want to highlight this point, if you don't mind. As far as the algorithm you're using for pricing, you don't want to go above 60%.
Rushi: Yes. It's the wrong comparison, but let's say I have a construction crew. I don't want to buy fancy new buildings. I buy a fixer-upper, I put my crew to work in the building, and I fill the gap, because I'm good at it. So I'm buying at 60% or lower, and right now I'm profitable. I'm buying with cash right now, but even if I were borrowing, I'm buying at 60% of gross. And I have a lead time of six months. I may lose some practices in the process, and I'm willing to do that. For the two practices we just bought recently, I had the managers trained six months before.
Jeff: Okay, so again, we talked about you training all the executives. That's the reason.
Rushi: Yeah. And with these two practices, I realized the doctors might not work out, even though they were willing to stay, so we had to remove them. That created a little disruption. So now my logic is, I need six months of lead time.
Jeff: I see. And the executives you placed into these new practices, which office did they work out of when you were training them?
Rushi: They were training at the Flushing office. The way I train in my office, let's say they start at the most basic post, the recall caller post. They can only leave the recall post when their numbers are up.
Jeff: So you won't promote somebody without up statistics.
Rushi: Yes. Then they go to the dental assisting post, the insurance post, checkout and scheduling, the reception post. Each post is about six to eight weeks.
Jeff: So you're cycling this person through different jobs in the office, to make sure they understand what's going on?
Rushi: Yes. And the last two months will be a manager role, kind of an assistant manager role.
Jeff: Interesting. And then you just move them into the new place.
Rushi: Yeah. I've done this four or five times successfully.
Jeff: This is cool. So you don't want to pay more than 60%, and you want something street level so people can see you from the street. Are there any other points, when you're doing due diligence, where you go, "I don't want to take this place"?
Rushi: No Medicaid. Zero. If there's Medicaid, I'll remove those patients, and I'm going to go for 35% or 40%.
Jeff: So you're going to pay a lower premium?
Rushi: Much lower, because then I remove all these patients. It's not that we don't like Medicaid. We want to help them. Actually, one of my wife's goals is that after we reach a certain level, we're going to have a Medicaid office with no intention of making a profit. Just give superior service.
Jeff: We had a client in North Carolina do that, if you remember him. I won't mention his name, because I haven't cleared this with him. He had a bunch of Medicaid in his practice when he first came on, and from a financial perspective it just didn't work in a private practice. But he wanted to help all those folks. So once he got successful, he and two other doctors in town built a Medicaid practice, and they would each spend a day a week there. They practiced there and took care of it, and it was done out of a desire to help, not an effort to figure out how to make money from it.
Rushi: Yeah, we definitely have that plan.
Jeff: And what if there are a lot of HMOs in the practice? Would that lower your price?
Rushi: 60% is the mark, and HMO and Medicaid will be discounted.
Jeff: I see. So 60% is your starting point, and if there are any additional heavily discounted plans, that's going to lower what you pay.
Rushi: Yeah, I'll discount it accordingly. If they have, say, 40% HMO, I'll discount accordingly. Because when I go in, whatever profit margin they have, let's say they're making 10%, whatever the number, I want to keep that.
Jeff: You want to keep it as profitable as it was.
Rushi: Right. So I'm growing kosher. No tension, our own money. It may take longer, but it'll be solid growth.
Jeff: Well, I think the interesting thing, and I was going to ask you about this, is the major difference. With you and Shilpa, and now your son Saahil, who's one of the key players in all of this, it's becoming almost like a doctor-owned group of practices, like what they call a DDSO, but owned by doctors. In a lot of cases, DSOs are heavily funded by PE, private equity. So they're only looking for practices that are doing big bucks. They want at least $1.5 million a year and blah, blah, blah. Whereas in your case, you're looking at an office that's maybe beaten up a bit and hasn't done real well, because you're confident you can go in and get it really killing it, right?
Rushi: Yes.
Jeff: Which leads me to two questions. First, I would have to imagine, with the two offices you have that are already doing very high volume, that you've had corporate come in and offer to buy your practices. I'm sure you have.
Rushi: Oh, a lot. We were offered 1.22 million.
Jeff: Oh my gosh.
Rushi: I mean, it was crazy. It was just an offer. It just happens. And I thought, how would they run an office if they're going to pay me this much money?
Jeff: Well, because you already have specialists in your practices. In a lot of cases, they'll add specialists, add more insurances, add a bunch of this and that. I don't understand it personally.
Rushi: Me too.
Jeff: You understand the financial side of it, because that's your area. But it just doesn't make sense.
Rushi: It doesn't make sense. Financially, since I know Wall Street, as you mentioned, the goal is to recapitalize, meaning just keep selling it to new people.
Jeff: Well, yeah, I think that's what's happening with a couple of the newer DSOs now. Initially, the DSO would just buy you out, and you'd stay on as an employee. Then it became the DSO would buy 80% of the practice and leave you with 20%. You'd stay five years, and at the end of five years they'd buy the other 20% based on how the practice was doing. The newer thing I've seen is 70% to the doctor immediately, the doctor keeps 20%, and 10% goes into the DSO, so the doctor has an interest in the DSO. So when the DSO recapitalizes, the doctor makes big bucks. The problem is the DSO has to get to the point where it's going to recapitalize and someone wants to pay money for it.
Rushi: And as for Shilpa, the whole goal my wife has is to help people. So she doesn't intend to sell out anytime soon.
Jeff: Well, there's really no reason to, with the direction you guys are going.
Rushi: For her, this is not charity, but it's like a philanthropic activity, to help. She thinks it's a duty to provide patients good service. It's a different ballgame. It's a very unique viewpoint. She works 11 hours a day when she works, and she doesn't have to. She works as if she's working for some church or something. That's the viewpoint she works from.
Jeff: Wow. Well, I'm sure that communicates to the patients.
Rushi: Oh, man. Highest-rated dental office in New York City.
Jeff: That's true. You have, what is it, 4,000 reviews?
Rushi: 4,000, between two offices. And I think in the next year or two, we could be at 10,000. Because of service. If you look at our reviews, they love my wife, they love my doctors, they love my team. Nobody's talking about margins or quality dentistry. It's the service.
Jeff: Well, and that's what keeps the place growing. So it's interesting, because you're effectively starting a doctor-run DSO. I know that might give you a twitch, because DSO has a bad connotation. But you're doing it the way a DSO doesn't do it. They wouldn't buy any of the practices you've bought, because they're too small, and they don't know how to scale them, whereas you know how to actually scale these things.
Rushi: Yes. And I like to buy real estate.
Jeff: I was going to ask you about that. I think you own the real estate in your first two offices, and then you'll work toward that eventually with the others.
Rushi: Yeah. We also know how to run big offices, 13- or 14-operatory offices. So one of the goals is, in Manhattan, I want 10 offices with 15 operatories each. Because people deserve service.
Jeff: I agree. So people will be covered from Battery Park all the way up to Central Park West.
Rushi: Yes, maybe up to the Upper East Side. You know, patients come to our office just to hang out. They just want to be there, have a cup of coffee, chat with our staff. Actually, it's funny. The demand to speak to our team is so high that I told Saahil, my son, that we should have one or two people just for talking to patients. The job is just to chat and socialize.
Jeff: Interesting. Okay, I've got to keep us on topic. I keep jumping all over the place here. So we looked at the basic criteria you're looking for in an office and the price you want to pay. Let's say you've purchased a practice, and the doctor is willing to stay for a year or two. It may have employees, so I imagine you interview them, and you might keep some, and some don't fit. But what's the first trained employee you're going to put in there?
Rushi: Manager. The highest possible level, which is manager. As I mentioned, I will not buy a practice until I have a manager trained, regardless of whether they have a manager or not.
Jeff: Interesting. So that's kind of a deal breaker for you. You've got to put the manager in there.
Rushi: Yes. Let's say an offer comes in and it's a good deal, but I don't have a manager. I won't do it. The reason is, at this point we don't need chaos, everybody running around. We need to organize the growth. Otherwise, my son would have to work 200 hours a week. He's already working 80 hours a week.
Jeff: Well, he's early on in his career. He's doing his thing. Okay, so let's say someone else is listening to this and they think, "I would love to buy additional offices." What would you suggest that they do?
Rushi: So this is the blueprint I'll give. Don't buy an office just for the sake of buying it. First, maximize your current location, because you're missing so much revenue there. Our example: before finding you, we were doing X. At the same location, after we found you, we were doing 20X. So my viewpoint was, I'm not going to buy a new office until I can potentially help every single patient in my current system. That's the first goal. Like Chelsea, you know how big it is, and Flushing. Within six years of finding you, we had two offices running quite well, with almost zero involvement from me. Zero day-to-day operations, I mean. That I'm not changing. Me, my son, my wife, or my daughter shouldn't have to get involved too much. It has to be run by a team, and the team has to be competent. And if the team has to be competent, then I have to train them before I acquire a practice. This is the route I'm following.
So we figured out that we train managers. Right now I'm looking for four or five managers to be trained. Then we realized that if the dentist doesn't want to stay, at this point we can afford to have a dentist on payroll just for training. So now Saahil, my son, is looking for two dentists who will be ready for the next office. This is a new thing that just happened in the last few months.
Jeff: So if you're a dentist looking for a job in the New York City area…
Rushi: We would love to have you, if your goal is to help others and use your dental skills. And money always comes when you have that goal. We are there for you. We already have eight or nine dentists, and our dentists, Jeff, stay with us 15 or 20 years.
Jeff: Right. I wanted to ask you this, because I've talked to a lot of doctors, and one of the primary arguments against investing in training team members is, "I don't want to spend all this money on this person and then have them quit." That's the big one. You've trained so many staff and invested a lot into it, and obviously it's paid dividends. What's your response to that?
Rushi: Again, go back to: I don't want chaos. I want beautiful things around me. I like beautiful people around me. Not everybody should do it this way, but I'm doing it for myself. I want lovely things around me. But financially, it also makes sense. If you have an untrained person in a position, let's say, for the sake of numbers, you would spend $5,000 to train one person. Dr. A doesn't spend the $5,000, and he could have potentially helped X number of patients and earned an additional profit of, let's say, $50,000. So he loses that $50,000. Dr. B trains, spends $5,000, and now there's a productive team member, and he makes the $50,000. I saw that very early on. Not training a person costs tremendous money, and then there's the upset, the chaos. So I came at it not from the viewpoint of saving money, but from the viewpoint of not having chaos.
Jeff: And definitely whatever you're doing when you're hiring. Because again, and I'm not just saying this to be nice, I've met a lot of your team, and they're some of the nicest people I've ever met. Like you said, they're beautiful people inside. They're great people. One of the things I've seen that's very important is how you select your team members, and the hoops they have to go through to be part of the team. I like that idea that the person has to actually want to get enhanced themselves. They have to want to train, and they have to want to be a member of your team. That seems to go a long way, because I've met team members that you've had for over 20 years.
Rushi: Yes, like Jelissa, 27 years.
Jeff: Oh gosh. That's when you know you're getting old.
Rushi: It is. A lot of my staff members, I saw them get married, and now their children are in high school.
Jeff: Well, and I met your kids when they were little. And I met Jelissa, your first manager, here. What, in 2002 or '03?
Rushi: Yes.
Jeff: All right, Rushi, I think we hit it on the head pretty good here, and I super appreciate having you on. For anybody listening, I'll put a link to DDS Success, which we talked about, on the episode webpage, as well as the MGE Power Program, which has the training. Any parting words you'd want to leave people with?
Rushi: If you're going to do something, do it very properly. I'm not promoting you guys. That's not the goal here.
Jeff: That's okay if you want to promote. I'm kidding. It's fine. Go ahead.
Rushi: No, it's not the goal. The viewpoint I carry is, if I see a gold mine and I've got enough gold, it's my responsibility to tell others to raise the gold. So, similarly, MGE is a gold mine. Every single friend I've introduced to you has done extremely well.
Jeff: That's true.
Rushi: So it's not promotion. My children did your training. My family did your training. My cousin in India did your training, and he's in a food business, and he still did your training. It just works. So my final thing is: buy a practice at 60%, train a manager, buy a location people can see, not in the big buildings, and just grow. And through you, they can contact me if they want to.
Jeff: I love it. Rushi, thank you so much for being on. I so appreciate it.
Rushi: Thank you, Jeff. You're awesome, man.
Jeff: Thank you again. If you want to know more about MGE, we have the links on the episode webpage, and you can call us at (800) 640-1140 or find us online at mgeonline.com. Folks, that's all we have for you this week. Have a great week, and we will see you at the next episode.