📋 Episode Description
Join Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan and co-hosts Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan and Dr. Richard Offutt as they discuss the evolution of dental education, practice management, and group dentistry with Dr. Sameer Puri. From his pioneering work with CEREC technology to his current role revolutionizing the DSO model at Imagine Dental Partners, Dr. Puri shares insights on building dental communities, achieving work-life balance, and the future of group practice.
👤 Guest Expert Profile
Dr. Sameer Puri brings extensive expertise as:
- Chief Clinical Officer at Imagine Dental Partners
- Founder of CDOCS, the premier CEREC educational program
- Former Vice President of Education at SPEAR Education
- Graduate of USC School of Dentistry
- AEGD graduate from University of Tennessee
⏱️ Episode Navigation
- 00:00 – Introduction and background
- 02:11 – Early career and CEREC journey
- 05:32 – Transition from practice to education
- 12:27 – Building dental communities
- 16:33 – Vision for Imagine Dental Partners
- 19:35 – Practice growth and partnerships
- 23:38 – MBA pursuit and continuing education
- 35:06 – Key takeaways and career lessons
💡 Core Topics & Insights
Educational Leadership Journey
- Evolution from clinical practice to CEREC education
- Building CDOCS from ground up to 250+ annual workshops
- Balancing practice, teaching, and family life
- Importance of delegation and team development
Building Dental Communities
- Creating engaging educational content
- Importance of consistent engagement
- Leadership commitment to community growth
- Value of authentic passion in leadership
Imagine Dental Partners Model
- No private equity funding approach
- Focus on long-term practice growth
- Partner-owned structure
- Emphasis on clinical autonomy
- Average 9-10% practice growth
🎯 Key Success Principles
Practice Growth Strategies
- Invest in comprehensive support infrastructure
- Focus on revenue cycle optimization
- Maintain high collection rates (99%)
- Support clinical autonomy while providing resources
Leadership Philosophy
- Surround yourself with smarter people
- Plan five years ahead
- Take calculated risks
- Maintain work-life balance
🤝 Partnership Criteria
Ideal Practice Partners
- Minimum five-year commitment horizon
- Engagement in practice leadership
- Interest in clinical excellence
- Cultural alignment with organization
Support Structure
- 120+ support staff for practices
- Centralized administrative functions
- Investment in future growth
- Focus on practice optimization
📈 Future Vision
- Organic growth of 20-30 practices annually
- Focus on sustainable, long-term development
- Commitment to clinical excellence
- Investment in partner education and growth
🎓 Educational Philosophy
“Tiger Woods has a swing coach. Greatest golfer in the history of existence has a swing coach. You can always do better. No matter how good you are, you can always do better.”
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Keywords: dental education, CEREC technology, DSO model, practice management, dental community building, clinical excellence, practice growth, dental partnerships, continuing education, dental leadership
Transcript
00:00 Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan Good morning. Welcome to the Simplify Dentistry podcast. Simplify is a community of like minded dentists that discusses, explores, asks questions and offers solutions to everyday clinical and operational questions. Simplify podcast is a forum where we have interviews with industry leading experts that discusses a wide range of topics from clinical to operational to financial management. I’m your host, Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan, along with my co host, Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan and Dr. Richard Offutt. We’d like to welcome today’s guest, Dr. Sameer Puri. Sameer is a graduate of the University of Southern Cal School of Dentistry, completed AEGD at the University of Tennessee. Dr. Puri has been involved in community and dental education for the last two decades. Samir is founder of CDocs, the premier CEREC educational program and has served as Vice President of Education for SPEAR Education.
00:47
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
Currently, Sameer is the Chief Clinical Officer at Imagine Dental Partners. Sam, thank you very much for joining us today. We look forward to chatting a little bit about your journey, kind of all of the contributions that you’ve made to our profession and kind of where you think things are going.
01:04
Sameer Puri
Guys, thank you so much for the warm welcome. It’s super exciting to be here and look, any contributions that I’ve made have just been, you know, being part of a great team, surrounded by great people and I mean that’s been kind of the success of my life is just surround yourself with people that are smarter and more successful than you and you have no choice but to elevate your game, otherwise you get left behind.
01:28
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
You sound like somebody who’s married.
01:33
Sameer Puri
Every great man is a great woman. 27 years coming up in November 28th. So.
01:40
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
Oh yeah, congratulations. So I mean one thing we’ve never really touched on with you is kind of your clinical practice. I mean obviously we all start in clinical practice. Yeah, you had a practice in Southern California. You know, kind of relate a little bit to us, kind of how that kind of led you towards C docs and your journey into education and kind of did you see kind of where the profession was kind of going and is that what kind of led you.
02:11
Sameer Puri
To this crack has been a huge part of my life. I mean it’s basically defined my career. It goes back from even before my practice. I was in my residency, the AEGD residency at the University of Tennessee and we had the Mid south meeting where went with our professor at the time and there was that first CEREC machine that was, this was in 1997 I believe. Red cam at that time, I think it was even prior to the red cam, it was the 2D system. So. And he said, I still remember in his Southern accent, he’s like, man, if I was in private practice, I’d get me one of these things and start cranking out inlays and onlays all day. I grew up with a computer background. My uncle was a pioneer in the computer industry and did a bunch of stuff.
02:59
Sameer Puri
And so for me, I gravitated towards a CEREC machine, graduated the residency, started my practice, eventually bought one, and it became a huge part of my private practice. And eventually what that led to was just at that time, the other thing that I was doing was the townie meeting. So my good friend T Bone Agarwal out of North Carolina and I started the townie meeting. And Sirona at the time was one of our sponsors. So they, I got my cerec, I became a trainer, and went down this journey of doing CEREC training that led to having the opportunity to take our training to what at that time was the Scottsdale center for Dentistry and which is now Spear and Cdox, which I was a part of for almost 18 years.
03:48
Sameer Puri
And you know, I looked at my wife, I was going back and forth doing lectures from LA in my practice to Scottsdale. And eventually they off, they, you know, they said, hey, you got to move here because this is not a hobby anymore. Like, we need like full time attention. You can’t do this part time. So my wife and I had a conversation and I said, I can always start another practice, but I think this is an opportunity where let’s take a chance at a very successful practice, tons of family in California and sold the practice, moved to Arizona and you know, yada, yada, here we are 14 years later, whatever it is, in Arizona. But my practice led to the education not by choice, not by a plan. It was just the passion for teaching, which grew and grew and grew.
04:39
Sameer Puri
And eventually I decided to make that a full time career. And then when I sold my practice, I moved to Arizona. I worked in the faculty practice at Spear and CDOCs and saw a bunch of patients. And just over time, though, just slowly as I went from actual teaching and actual clinical care, I went into more on the management side until I retired from CDOCS earlier this year in February of this year. But we had built up 14 CDOCs faculty members, five different tracks of curriculum. We went from, you know, back when I was doing IT to about 60 workshops a year. This past year, CDOCs completed. I want to say in the 250 workshop range. So grew it quite significantly. And, and so the practice obviously led to all of that.
05:32
Sameer Puri
But you know, for the past few years it hasn’t been, you know, my primary focus of the doing clinical care. Sure.
05:39
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
So when you started C do I mean obviously when you initially did it, you were still practicing in Southern California and were you doing it kind of as just a, a bolt on with what you were doing and out of your office and.
05:53
Sameer Puri
Yeah, so I had a partner at the time, we were doing it out of the Patterson branch doing CEREC training, Advanced CEREC training. We hired my cousin india to build our first website and of course.
06:06
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
You would.
06:10
Sameer Puri
We sent out a mailer, got people to sign up for the website and we, that first influx of memberships paid for the website and you know, the web. The company made money ever since and that was a part time thing. Do the practice, do some courses on the weekend. Travel ramped up over time like, and it was to a point where for five, seven years it was like every Thursday I’m on a flight, every Friday, Saturday I’m lecturing, I’m back home, then do practice. And it wore on me. I mean look, it’s, it, there’s a lot of people out there on the road. It takes away from family.
06:44
Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan
Did you have kids at that point or were your kids?
06:47
Sameer Puri
Yeah, yeah, I did. They were there. So my two daughters are 25 and 22 now. So it was right in the heart of everything kind of blowing up. And there was one time I was home on a Friday, it was a Friday or Saturday. And my younger daughter was about three or four at the time. She looks at me and she’s like, what are you doing here? Like never all.
07:09
Dr. Richard Offutt
You may have a problem if that’s the case.
07:11
Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan
Right, exactly.
07:12
Sameer Puri
And I’ll be honest with you guys, you know, I think I’m the only person in the history of dentistry that has basically put myself out of a job by bringing up people below me to help teach, take over my teaching responsibilities and kind of not do it anymore. Because you guys know this. You’ll see a lot of speakers on the road every weekend. They’re somewhere and their home lives are miserable. I, I actually like my family, I like my wife. So, you know, I, it was a means to an end at the time. Don’t regret it by any means, but my priorities were more, you know, it was not something I could sustain for indefinitely, you know, 40 years lecturing. I’ve done. I’ve done day trips from that time from California to New York in the morning, fly back.
08:04
Sameer Puri
I’ve done an 18 hour turnaround to Sydney, Australia. I’ve done two day trips to Europe. It’s. It’s insane. I don’t wish that on. I certainly don’t wish it on myself. So I stopped doing it and started giving away all of my lectures that people were asking and help, you know, friends of mine say, hey, Rich Rosenblatt, great friend of mine for 20 plus years, hey, Rich, I got this lecture here. Do you want to take it? Do you want to take it and, you know, kind of help, you know, support them, get their lecturing career going so I could take a step back and.
08:36
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
Yeah, you know, I remember when I first started doing CDOC stuff. First off, you know, I think it was a fantastic thing that you guys did, you know, because you buy this $140,000 piece of equipment, it’s sitting over here, and you’re like, what in the hell do I do with this thing now? You know, I mean, and the learning curve is steep. And, you know, you show up. And I remember one of the first things you said is, you know, cerex, a computer, you got to trick the computer, you know, sometimes you got to make it do things that are not intuitive, but you got to start thinking about it as a computer. And I was like, you know, that’s kind of, you know, an obvious thing. But you dentists don’t think like that.
09:14
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
So changing kind of the mindset of how dentists think, I think is one thing that really kind of reson with me. And then I remember, you know, you talking about the impact on your lifestyle. I remember sitting at the bar at the Princess with Mike. You know, you just bought it, brought him in, and he was doing a lot of, kind of what you were talking about initially. And he was traveling from Minnesota and he was doing this and, you know, he was like, I just don’t know if I can do this indefinitely, and things like that. He said, but somebody had to do the clinical practice side of it to be able to have the cases to display.
09:50
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
And I remember thinking, I was like, man, this is a lot of stuff that these guys do and how they manage it is kind of.
09:57
Dr. Richard Offutt
At a huge personal price, right? You, I mean, the behind the scene cost is your personal price, right?
10:02
Sameer Puri
Yeah, yeah.
10:03
Dr. Richard Offutt
You know, and people don’t, you know, when, when docs are listening to your lecture, they don’t see that.
10:09
Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan
Yeah, right.
10:09
Dr. Richard Offutt
They don’t see that if you’ve.
10:11 Sameer Puri Ever put together a lecture, you know, that one slide takes you know, X number of hours or whatever the saying is. And there’s a lot of truth to that now granted you that content over and over again. So it’s that initial effort of putting it in there. You know, I think part of why C was so successful is that I made it my full time business. Right. There’s a lot of educators and no knock on anyone by any means. But you know, you have your practice which is your primary source of income, and then you do lecturing on the side, great way to supplement the income.
10:47
Sameer Puri
But you’re never going to achieve the level of success I think that a SPEAR or Seadox did, because myself, there’s a few others, I mean, that became my full time job and so were able to focus on it. So, so at that time it was a wild west in CEREC training. I mean, nobody was going to compete with us. We were going to outwork everyone. Because I’m doing it full time now, which is also why I kind of pulled away from the teaching aspect and not teaching courses after a while, because there was a lot of work to be done behind the scenes in terms of strategizing and, you know, working on the relationships with Patterson and Sirona and eventually Shine, et cetera.
11:24
Sameer Puri
But you’re right, it did take a personal toll, which is why I decided to take the risk, selling my very great practice in la, moving away from my entire family in California and relocating to Scottsdale, saying, let’s give this a shot. I mean, again, if this doesn’t work out in the Scottsdale center for Dentistry, SPEAR education C docs now fails. Well, hell, I got a dental license. I can go practice anywhere. I got both skills.
11:53
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
Yeah, it’s interesting you said, one of the things I do remember you saying is how it was growing. I felt like you were one of the best marketers in dentistry. I think being able to market your mission was fantastic. And one thing resonated with me is you know, you guys used to film these 45 second to a minute and a half clips that could get used in all kinds of things in all kinds of endeavors that Dr. Offit and I have done. We’ve harped on that. This is what you need. You need 45 seconds to a minute and a half clips to get people engaged in it.
12:27
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
And you said, you know what, you challenged everybody on your Team was is everybody needed to do one a day, you know, film one a day and then be able to have these things in the database. So you know, what we’re doing at Simplify is obviously we’re trying to provide educational opportunities and build community with practitioners. And one piece of what we’re doing is our Facebook group. And one thing I’ve challenged both of these guys is hey, we need to each work on post a day and have some material that can kind of constantly go out there to kind of create the buzz that kind of occurs in that and create the community. But you know, community is not the easiest of things to create. But I think you are one of the best at it, you know, kind of.
13:11
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
And you and I talked about when I wrote the Dental Economics article is coming out in January about community and how you’ve influenced community. What, what’s your take on creating community, influencing community in dentistry these days?
13:24
Sameer Puri
Yeah, look, I think you have it right on. So for Simplify Dentistry you guys are going to have to do hand to hand combat for the first initial, not be afraid to post cases, content, whatever the mission of the group is. Right. And at certain point you are going to have people that are going to feel more comfortable to participate. It’s a little bit easier now than back in the day because it just, that’s our life now. Back at, when I started on Dental Town that was like the only forum around and then you know, grew that to our own at cdocs etc. Now there’s a lot of Facebook groups so people are more used to it now. Yeah, but it will take a concerted effort on the founders, you guys, to be active. Somebody has a question, you got to answer it.
14:07
Sameer Puri
Somebody, you know there’s something hot in dentistry, you got to post about it until that engine just kind of becomes self perpetuating. It’s, it’s hard, it’s not easy. I think the biggest thing is you have to believe in what you’re doing. I, you know, I taught Cirac for 20 plus years. I used it in my practice for 15 or so years. I truly believed and still believe it is essential for a great practice. We have now, you know, 100 practices that imagine in about four years. We encourage our doctors, we seek out doctors that have the CEREC in their practice because we believe it works. We practice what we preach. And so you have to have that same mission if you’re building a community. What is, what is the source of connection in that community? What is the mission of that community.
14:58
Sameer Puri
And you have to believe the mission. You have to live the mission. I believed in CEREC so much. I was willing to sacrifice family, home and train other people for it. I was willing to go across the country and across the world. I was willing to sell my practice and move and focus my career on teaching this piece of technology. That was my mission. That led to a sense of community. I think if you don’t know what your purpose is, and I’m not talking about you guys obviously, but just in general, it’s hard to focus on, you know, what is it I’m trying to accomplish. And it’s not making money, right? That’s the end result of anything. If you’re, if you are passionate and successful, you’re going to make money. So that, put that aside. That, that is, that just goes without saying.
15:44
Sameer Puri
But you have to believe, you have to be passionate about what it is that you are doing. And it has to be something unique and means something important to you. Why I left after my former company, after 18 years and joined my new company. I believe in what we’re doing. It’s our new mission now.
16:03
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
So obviously getting back to community is a big deal with what you’ve done, with what you did at C Docs, what you did at spear. I assume from looking at things and talking to you a little bit about Imagine, there’s the community component of what you’re trying to bring to Imagine. You talked about maybe having a smaller community, but a more engaged community. Can you kind of touch on that for us? Is that a mission of Imagine or what are you looking at, man?
16:33
Sameer Puri
No, look, our mission is to. So group dentistry is here to stay, right? I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. It’s not going anywhere. So our mission here is to just do group dentistry industry different. We don’t have any private equity funding, we don’t have institutional funding. We are not building our company that, hey guys, when you join us in two to three years, you know we’re going to sell the company, everyone’s going to walk away rich. We, that is not even on our radar. We get approached all the time. We have no interest in doing that because we want to have a long term vision. Now that long term vision, unlike the CEREC community, unlike the CDOCs community, we’re not going to have thousands of people. As I mentioned, we have about 100 practices. We’re growing 20, 30 practices a year.
17:18
Sameer Puri
So we’re organically limited by the size of our community. So it’s going to be much smaller than what I’ve done before. But our mission is just to do good dentistry and provide a place for doctors to come and, you know, that want to be part of a group that have, that are realizing that is the future and. But to have a group that is not interested in just, you know, flipping the company, you know, for lack of a better word. So is that what you would say.
17:48
Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan
Sam, is kind of how y’all are making imagine different from the other GPOs or DSOs and those folks out in the world.
17:57
Sameer Puri
And I don’t, you know, we don’t need to get into the details any, but our business model is completely different. Anytime we talk to a doctor, you know, other groups will say, well, we’re going to give you a certain amount of. We’re going to buy your practice. But in two years, when we sell the company, you’ll get another chunk. You will never hear that from us because that’s not part of our business plan. Now, I’m not saying that at some point someone’s not going to come in and say, hey guys, you have a great business. We’d like to invest and we take on a strategic investor. I don’t know. That’s not our plan. Like I’m not going to. I don’t want to go on record and say that’s never going to happen because I can’t predict the future.
18:29
Sameer Puri
But our plan is to provide great support for our doctors. So we have a support center. We have 100, and I don’t know the exact number right off the top of my head, 120 some odd employees that are there. Revenue cycle management, you know, marketing, insurance, billing, hr, et cetera. We have centralized functions that support our doctors. Now, do we need 120 employees to support 100 practices? No. But we invest ahead of growth, right? So we are, we want to make sure that our offices are supported, that our offices have what they need. You know, we try to do a good job of that. And that’s. So that’s how we’re different. I think there’s a lot of groups that’ll say, yeah, we got 20 practices, 15 practices, and we’re going to get gobbled up by one of the big guys.
19:16
Sameer Puri
And so we got four people running support. We have 120 because we are investing in the company. Our growth in our practices was higher than most groups last year, and we had tremendous growth. Our practices are actually growing.
19:31
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
Can you Comment on what the growth percentage is in your practices or.
19:35
Sameer Puri
Yeah, we’re where our average growth last year was in about the 10% range, 9 to 10% range. That’s great.
19:41
Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan
So what kind of practices is imagine looking for?
19:45 Sameer Puri So like when do you want, what’s.
19:47
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
Your practices in North Carolina?
19:48
Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan
Yeah, we would love to have you.
19:52
Sameer Puri
Guys as partner and love to be in North Carolina, but as you know, the regulatory environment in North Carolina is very challenging. What we’re looking for is someone with at least a five year horizon, time horizon, someone who’s willing to not say, oh, I got a new owner, I’m out of here, I’m going to go fishing. There’s, there’s a great ad that I saw by Heartland. They’re not picking on Heartland by any means, but it’s just a different business model. Right. There’s some guy holding a fishing pole and it says, you know, and I’m paraphrasing, want to go fishing? Sell your practice to Heartland. Right? That’s, that’s kind of the gist of the ad here. And there are groups that do that. They buy your practice 100% and then you’re off. You have no worries.
20:33
Sameer Puri
We partner, so we’re going to come in, we’re going to optimize your revenue cycle management, we’re going to optimize your collection. So we are, as an organization, we’re about 99% collections, right? We have a team, that’s all they do. And someone that comes in, they got a $2 million practice and they’re at 94%, 95% collection, that actually that extra 4 or 5%, that’s meaningful multiple dollars to that practice. So it’s incremental changes in the practice that we do. So what are we looking for? We’re looking for someone with a long term horizon. If you want to sell your practice and you want to go fishing or golfing, we’re probably not the right partner for you. We want doctors that are engaged, that are going to be the leaders of their practice.
21:14
Sameer Puri
We are going to come in and help streamline some operations on the business end. But you still are the ones making decision on who to hire, who to fire. We’re going to assist you in that. We are going to help you become a better clinician. My background is education, so educating and training our clinicians is very important. I’ve been spending the last six months working on that from our end. And so, you know, that’s the kind of partners that we’re looking for and you know, and we’re one of the fastest growing to 100. And this is 100 one at a time. Not. We bought a group in Orlando that had 15 offices, another group that we merged with in California that had 20 offices. This is one practice at a time, taking the time to meet the doctors. Aligning on culture.
22:09
Sameer Puri
Culture is, I think, the most important thing in any organization. If you don’t have the right culture, you’re going to fail. And we’re not always successful, but we’re pretty darn good and pretty darn aligned with our partner doctors.
22:23
Dr. Richard Offutt
Sam, do the doctors in Imagine, do they. Do they carry equity forward or in their individual practice or in the holding company? How does that work for them?
22:35
Sameer Puri
We do both. So they have. Our organization is majority owned by our partners. So there’s the founders. I’m one of the original investors. That’s why I decided to join, you know, three and a half years into the company, our. We do. We do a percentage ownership of the practice, and then the doctors get ownership shares in Imagine, the top co entity. So we have a very unique business model in that way that keeps everybody aligned. So if we’re making a change to one practice, you know, the other 99 partners have an ownership stake in that practice. And so everything that we do, you are doing to benefit your own individual practice, which you have a ownership stake in, and you are doing to help the partnership collectively, which you also have an ownership stake in.
23:26
Sameer Puri
So as the entire organization grows, you know, everybody benefits that way.
23:31
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
Tell me a little bit about your next hobby. You know, your MBA that you’re doing right now. What made you do that all of a sudden?
23:38
Sameer Puri
Yeah, because I’m brain dead and stupid. Look, I’m getting to a point in life where I looked back on my training. My training is entirely clinical, right? I’ve done mostly clinical, but 27 years now, almost starting my 28th year in dentistry, my career has been more business, right? Between, you know, starting C docs, growing it, you know, cdocs and spear. We did sell to private equity. So I have a lot of experience in that, which is one of the reasons we don’t want to kind of do it at Imagine. We want to stay away if at all possible. And now being chief Clinical officer, I’m not seeing patients now, but, you know, I’m helping to set the clinical vision of the organization. So it’s a lot of management stuff. And frankly, I’m the dumbest business guy out there.
24:31
Sameer Puri
My success has been like I said, just surrounding myself with people smarter than me and contributing where I can. So I was looking to do like a part time healthcare mba. They have like, you know, you do a couple of weeks, you know, Harvard, Emory, whatever. Fly in, done. So I looked into that friend of mine’s a orthopedic surgeon at the Mayo Clinic and he said, dude, you got, I’m doing the ASU mba. You need to look into that. And I’m like, I, I don’t know if I want to commit two years of my life. And you know, yes, it’s one week in a month, but there’s about 20 hours of work during the week, every week that what I’ve seen. And actually I went down there and I said, you know, what the hell?
25:11
Sameer Puri
We’re moving into a new house which is about 10 minutes from campus. And I’m at a point in my life where the kids are gone, work is steady and I think at six months in I’ve kind of got a handle on what my workload is. This is just a challenge for me, I guess, and something that, you know, I, look, I always try to plan my life five years ahead. Where am, where am I going to be five years from now? And there’s a very good chance five years from now I might be close. I’m 53, I’m close to retiring. Thinking about it, maybe not the chief clinical officer to imagine anymore, maybe doing a different role, whatever it is. I mean, I’m not going anywhere from imagine because I’m one of the, you know, the original owners here or investors.
25:59
Sameer Puri
But life is going to be a little bit different. But I also realize that I have a very unique career in dentistry. Between clinical and, you know, business oriented. If I want to, I don’t want to stop working, but I want to maybe help out in other ways and use my knowledge, just influence whatever it is, maybe help out and have that business background where I can do some consulting, some other work, help my organization obviously as much as possible. That was the thought behind it. We just finished our first quarter. I’m like, oh, holy cow, this is a little bit more work than I, so, but it’s fine. I, I’m actually enjoying it because I, I don’t care about grades. I’ve got some 30 and you know, mid-30s people.
26:50
Sameer Puri
It’s all career executive and you know, high level managers in our, in my mba, many of them are aspirational about wanting to become a CEO, wanting to do. I’m like, guys I’m not looking for anything. I’m just. I just want to learn. And it’s kind of fun going through school where your only goal is to learn.
27:10
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
Yeah, it’s interesting you say, yeah, I always think in the back of my head, would our profession better if we had clinicians who would do things like that and have a little bit more of an MBA background or learn from that versus relying on outside MBAs to come in and administer the profession? Like is going on? I think. I mean, I think the answer is obviously have clinicians who develop the MBA experience versus MBAs coming in. And is that kind of what you think?
27:39
Sameer Puri
Well, look, I mean, if I had the short amount of formal business training that I’ve done the last couple of months when I first started in 97, when I graduated, I think my career would have been completely different. Like, I would have done things totally different just knowing the few things that I’ve learned so far. So I don’t disagree with you. I think, though, that’s a bigger topic. I think the entire healthcare industry has been taken over. That’s a topic for another day. You have students coming out four or five hundred thousand dollars in debt, and where they go to the big groups. And I think that’s kind of one of the other reasons that we are so passionate about what we do at.
28:24
Sameer Puri
Imagine that we want to have the younger doctors to have a home where they’re not, you know, hey, guys, crank it out. Of course we have production goals. Of course we have business goals. I’m not. We’re trying to run a business right at the end of the day. But what I tell everybody, anytime we look at a new product, a new piece of equipment, a new procedure that we’re going to do, it’s got to do two things if we’re going to implement it. And imagine, first and foremost, it has to improve patient care. You have to be able to provide better patient care. Second is it has to improve your practice. And by improvement practice, meaning, you know, grow the practice in terms of revenue. If it accomplishes those two things, absolutely.
29:06
Sameer Puri
Let’s take a look at it, let’s evaluate it and see if that’s something that makes sense to implement in our offices. And then it’s up to the individual partners. Our partners have clinical autonomy. We can come out and say, hey guys, we have this great new XYZ widget. We’ve looked at it internally. We think it does better job at taking care of patients. And it’s Going to add X revenue. Now, let’s say the three of you are partners. You have to say, okay, guys, let’s implement it in our office and our team will help do that. Or, guys, I’m not a fan of this for whatever reason. Soleil Lasers. Sure.
29:42
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
Yeah.
29:42
Sameer Puri
Just got cornered at DS World by, you know, someone. You gotta buy Soleil Lasers for everyone. I look, maybe, I don’t know. But does it do better patient care? Yeah, probably. Is it going to help our revenues if I can get it for 20 grand? Maybe.
29:59
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
For sure, yeah.
30:00
Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan
Not 120 grand.
30:01
Sameer Puri
It’s a different decision. So again, not to pick on Salab or anything, it’s just. But that’s an example of something. And if we did decide that, hey, guys, this $120,000 investment is worth it because it does. XYZ for patients is going to triple your practice. It’s still up to the individual doctors to make that decision. They’re part owners. There are partners. So we can. There’s certain things that I think that I’ll say that we kind of, you know, you don’t have a choice. We’re going to take over your revenue cycle management because we do it well. Let’s just take it off your plates, like, don’t worry about it. But clinical decisions, it’s. It’s a hundred percent. Our partners. Yes.
30:39
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
So when you left spear and went to imagine, has handicap gone up or down?
30:45
Sameer Puri
Oh, man, I haven’t hit a golf ball in two and a half months.
30:49
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
Come on, you live in Scottsdale.
30:52
Sameer Puri
I know. Well, so here’s what happened. We’re moving into our new house in the next couple of weeks after this podcast. Actually, I’m going to meet my buddy. We’re finishing setting up my golf simulator. So that’s one thing. So golf balls will be flying very soon. While were building this house, we had a townhouse on the Phoenician golf course.
31:12
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
Sure, yeah.
31:14
Sameer Puri
Literally from my front door to the driving range was 40 yards right across the street. So every day I was on the range, I was hitting golf balls. I got pretty damn good. I got my handicap down in the nines. I started five or six years ago. I was about nine. And then summer came. We thought the house was going to be ready. Okay, let’s sell the townhouse. Well, timing was off, so we’ve been homeless for about two or three months waiting for our house to be done. So we’ve been staying at my sister in law’s, couple that with work at imagine just kind of getting into the gruff. It’s been rough. It’s been rough.
31:54
Sameer Puri
So I will be starting up again at least in the simulator every day practicing as soon as we move in and then I will start getting out on the golf course again. But it’s. But between summer, a little bit of travel that we had, just dealing with the house and obviously the heat in Scottsdale, golf game has gone to crap. I’ll be honest with you, anytime you.
32:18
Dr. Richard Offutt
It happens, it happens.
32:19
Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan
Anytime you come east, let’s play. That’d be fun.
32:22
Sameer Puri
I’d love to do it. I’d love to do it. So. But yeah, look, you know, I think the difference in my career now, you know, early on I’d work, see patients all day, I come home, make videos for cdocs, then get on a plane and fly. It was work, work, work. There’s a funny story. When were living in our old house in LA in my office and I was making videos, it’s about 10:00 at night or something like that, my mother in law was visiting, she walks by the office and I’m talking to myself, I’m making a video. So she goes up to my wife, says, your husband, okay, what’s going on? She’s like, I think he’s cheating on you. He’s talking to someone in the office, he’s making videos. So yeah, now I, you know, I have learned to shut it down.
33:16
Sameer Puri
Like after we get off the thing here, I got a couple of things to take care of the office, but I’m going to shut it down this weekend. No work. It’s. And it’s, and it’s a little invigorating to be able to do that, but when I’m working, it’s game on. Like, you work hard, play hard. That’s, that’s the thing now, you know.
33:35
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
I think it’s a unique thing, just kind of what you’ve done in general and Dr. Offit and I ran another project for 15 years and like you said, it’s full board. You were doing it nights, weekends. You know, my kids actually thought I worked on Friday and one day they found out that I wasn’t working and they were like, you don’t work on Friday. And I was like, no, I’ve never worked on Friday. And they’re like, what do you do?
33:58
Sameer Puri
Where have you been? Where have you been?
34:00
Dr. Richard Offutt
I’m 38 years old, I haven’t seen you in a while.
34:03
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
I do think, you know, kind of what you’re doing, what you did at C docs, you know, what we’ve done in our history and what practitioners do, it’s unique because I do think practitioners don’t have the skill set to be entrepreneurs, to do other things, and to be business people. I think a lot of them are in that mentality of they were, you know, they had a chemistry degree, you know, they went to dental school, they’re clinicians, and that’s kind of all they did. And they really have no knowledge of how to manage things.
34:34
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
I think what you guys are doing and imagine, really, I mean, you can take a practice and you can take a good clinician and you can kind of coach them up and provide the support that they need to be very successful when a lot of these guys just can’t do it, you know, And I think that’s a, that’s a great thing. I think what you’ve done has been fantastic. We look forward to continuing to follow your career. Kind of, you know, from, for our audience. Would you say there’s any kind of takeaway messages that you have from our discussion today? And just.
35:06
Sameer Puri
Yeah, couple of things. One, going back to the growth of the practice, Tiger woods has a swing coach. Greatest golfer in the history of existence has a swing coach. You can always do better. No matter how good you are, you can always do better. Two, ignore the negativity. I think one of the things I hate most about social media, you have these anonymous folks that jump in and just, hey, guys, I’ve got a practice down the road and it does $2 million. And the, the owner just won the lottery and he’s willing to give me the practice for free. Should I take it? Yeah, well, you know, what about the liability and, you know, patient, you might lose some patience and, oh, my God, you have to ask, like, come on, take a chance.
35:56
Sameer Puri
I think one of the greatest lines I ever heard was Howard Fran back in the day said, you know, somewhere out there’s some dude driving around with a trunk full of cocaine in his trunk. Take a chance. Take a risk. You’re not going to get harmed here. People take risks all the time. And I think as dentists, people are afraid to take risks. And so I would encourage people to take risks, smart risks, and then the next thing, plan your life out. Where are you going to be five years from now? Don’t make decisions that are going to affect you today. Make decisions that are going to affect you five Years from today. Because today is it today. You cannot change what’s going to happen. Today is going to happen.
36:37
Sameer Puri
But what’s going to happen five years from now is a direct result of the actions you take today. So my mba, why am I doing that? I think five years from now it’s going to give me an advantage in my life. Why did I move to Scottsdale in 2011? Because I realized that at some point five years later, it was going to give me an opportunity. And it was five years later to the day that we ended up selling CDOCs to private equity. At that time, you know, why did I join Imagine today? Because I think five years from now, we’re going to be at 2, 300 practices. And you know, that’s going to be a great opportunity for all the partners and shareholders in our organization. So plan for the future. Don’t get discouraged by negativity and surround yourself with winners.
37:24
Sameer Puri
I mean, you guys are, three of you guys are hang out with each other and you support each other, you elevate each other. I, I have the same. I, I only surround myself with people that are successful and that have a positive outlook on life. That doesn’t mean you, you can’t have a bad day or anything like that. We all have bad days. We all have bad weeks. Hell, 2020 was a bad year. Right? Yeah. Or imagine at C Docs, we C docs and spear, we get roughly 10,000 people a year through our doors for workshops and the pandemic hits and we get 800. Talk about a bad year. Right. And so, but so what? Like, get over it, deal with it. Life is not, you know, just going to happen where everything is just a straight line up.
38:17 Sameer Puri You’re going to have challenges, you’re going to have, you know, trials and tribulations. It’s what you do in those trials and tribulations that make you a better person when you come out of it.
38:28
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
Yeah. Well, Sam, can’t thank you enough for taking the time to be with us today. It’s been my pleasure personally knowing you, calling you a friend for 15 years.
38:36
Sameer Puri
On time, my friend. I appreciate the, I appreciate the kind words and appreciate the opportunity to chat. I hope somebody enjoyed it.
38:45
Dr. Murtuza Shah-Khan
Absolutely.
38:45
Dr. Richard Offutt
I enjoyed it. I spent most of time just listening to you.
38:49
Sameer Puri
I enjoyed it a lot.
38:50
Dr. Richard Offutt
In fact, Chicago looks over at me, says, you know, you can say something, and I go, oh, my God. I just enjoyed listening to.
38:56
Sameer Puri
I appreciate it.
38:57
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
Yeah. And we want to thank all our listeners for joining the Simplify Dentistry podcast today. Please be sure to join our community. Dentistry is a hard profession. We hope that our community can help make our profession simpler. And thank you again for your time, and we look forward to having you on again sometime.
39:18
Sameer Puri
I’m going to say one last thing before we go. I’m going to log on to Facebook. I’m going to go to Simplify Dentistry right now, and I’m going to make a post. And I would encourage everybody to kind of chime in and let’s start the conversation.
39:28
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
Thank you very much. We appreciate it.
39:30
Dr. Richard Offutt
Thank you.
39:31
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
Take care. Look forward to beating you on the golf course.
39:35
Sameer Puri
I look forward to getting beaten.
39:39
Dr. Mustafa Shah-Khan
Thanks again.
39:39 Sameer Puri Thanks.