"Reducing Overhead & Improving Service" - Virtual Assistants for the Dental Office (feat. Dan Johnson)

In this wide-ranging, must-listen conversation, Dan Johnson, founder and CEO of Peak Performance VA, discusses the benefits of hiring virtual assistants (VAs) for dental practices. He shares how VAs can help with administrative tasks in dental practices, reducing overhead and improving patient experience. He also addresses common concerns about language barriers and cultural differences, which the company is creatively addressing with artificial intelligence (VA). VAs are trained in dental terminology and have insurance backgrounds, making them valuable assets to practices. Tasks that can be offloaded to VAs include "anything administrative," including call handling, front desk duties, insurance verification, insurance negotiations, predeterminations, collecting payments, recall/re-care calls, and more. If you're interested in reducing overhead, improving staff retention, and optimizing patient experience, don't miss this episode and check out the show notes for more info!

Transcript

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All right, welcome back to The Dental Domination Podcast. My name is Dan Brian I am the co -founder of DentalScapes scapes we're an online marketing agency for dental practices, but I'm not here to talk about our company or sell anything today. I'm interested in having what I anticipate will be a really eye -opening conversation with a friend of mine, Dan Johnson. He is the founder and CEO of Peak Performance VA. And we're going to get into all sorts of things today talking exactly. what VA's are, what they can do for your dental practice, why you might want to consider them. And we're also going to dive deep into, some pretty cool, pretty out there, technological advances that Dan has implemented into the business and into his service, providing sort of his company's service, providing for dental practices. So I'm so excited to have you here today, Dan. Thank you so much for joining me today. what can you share with listeners about sort of your background how you actually came to not only found peak performance VA, but what brought you into the dental industry and what got you involved in marketing and all of So thanks, Dan. Great name, by the way. I mean, Dan and Dan. So it's like me and my brother were Johnson and Johnson. But we're not the big company, obviously. But my background's a little bit different. My brothers and my dad, my dad's a veterinarian. My brothers, all of them except for one, are in the medical field. Either general practicing doctors, orthodontists, dentists. And I went the business route. I had the opportunity at 18 to... be a co -owner in a Kentucky Fried Chicken. Just wanted a little punk kid, played basketball, nobody would hire me. This local guy, local KFC hired me. And we just struck a good relationship. I was sports guy, he was sports guy. And then at 18, I got offered a part ownership. And so I did the KFC, the fast food route for about 15 years. I ended up having seven KFCs. But during that process, my brother, my little brother Ben was going to Ohio State. for dental school and he just had mentioned. Yeah, so OHIO. The funny side story, my other brother Joel went to Michigan. So my brother is an orthodontist, he went to Michigan. yeah, so I mean, they're both good, right? So me, I'm actually a Georgia Bulldog fan. But he just had asked me, would you ever help me open and run some dental practices? You know, because as we know, lot of dentists will go to school, but they don't make them take business classes. It's not a requirement. so, most of them come out as businessmen, businesswomen. And so it's always kind of a follow me of why they don't require it because there's lots of mistakes that happen throughout from beginning. And part of that is because these, the dentists, oral surgeons, all the, they make good money. so losing a little bit here and there doesn't seem like a big deal. So anyways, my brother was smart enough to say, would you come help me? But it was kind of a little toss up for me because you go from having a franchise system with KFC, which is great, but the money's good, to saying, hey, I'm gonna jump ship and a small little practice. And originally it was gonna be in Idaho, ended up being in Waco, Texas is where he ended up being. But as me and my wife talked about it, with the fast food industry, you go to work in the morning early. and then you don't get off till late. It's not for the faint of heart and your margins are five to 12%. And your employees are hard to deal with. mean, all industries employees are hard to deal with. yeah, yeah, yeah. I can run a business with my eyes closed to people that make our business hard. And so anyways, I ended up talking to my wife and we realized like, listen, my kids are young. I never saw them. When I went to work, were asleep and I got home there in bed. And we just said, listen, if I die tomorrow, I don't take my money, I don't take anything with me, right? And so we wanted to make sure we had a life where I could look back and say, I spent my time with my kids. I had options to spend time with my kids. So we sold, I sold all my kids. Part of the deal when you buy into this franchise system, if you're out, you're out. You can't just keep and walk away and do other things. You have to be in control running them. So when I left, sold them. I actually took about eight months off. Yeah, I wish. You know, it's not really secret anymore now with everything. I mean, people can figure it out. But it was one of those decisions that, as me and my wife decided, that dental is great, know, Monday through Friday, and then eight to five. And so for me, it was great option. Then I was working with my brother, and some people were like, can't, families don't work. For me, it actually worked very, well because me and my brother are opposites. I am more combative. My personality is I don't mind conflict and my brother doesn't like conflict. He likes to have fun and I like to fun, same thing, but he likes to have fun. He wants just to make sure everything's smooth. And so it worked well. I walked in with a business background and an idea of how to grow things. He was is a great clinician and had a broad plan. We were both kind of what we say is we looked, when we looked at the business, we both kind of looked at the forest, but he could never see a path through the forest. Well, I came in saying, okay, here's our path. We need marketing. We need to make sure our team's right. We need more doctors. They're gonna grow. What's our plan? And so I got into the marketing side of it. No marketing background other than a business perspective and kind of a unique eye and a willingness to And so I came in and did something different. You know, we changed our marketing strategy. We were a small little office in Waco, Texas, four ops, one doctor, two hygienists. And I came in and just said, okay, we're going to switch this completely up. I don't want to do traditional marketing with, you know, a face family. so I, and I take this from the Kentucky Fried Chicken days. The Chick -fil -A was the best marketing campaign with with the cows, right? Like, we don't like chicken. It is so stupid, but it is so brilliant. So we just, I just said, okay, how do I do something? So we did a white banana that said we don't like yellow and on a dental bill. And we put it everywhere in Waco, everywhere. And it was so different that people just started getting a note and noticing us. And because it wasn't your tradition. Yeah, bananas. And it was just, and it was just dumb. And I think with marketing, you know, it's about capturing your attention, marketing is getting somebody's emotions, it's getting somebody to kind of look and go, what was that? Yeah, well in today's day and age, it's all about stopping the scroll. That's all that matters. And so that's kind of how that ended. We built that one practice up to now it's 17 ops. I'm actually in the practice. My office is actually in my brother's practice. And so I deal with the day -to -day stuff. I help manage call center team here as well. And then I oversee our marketing. But we ended up building it to four practices. And through that process, we, you you have a marketing company. I created a marketing company about 2016. Mm And I did it just to help some friends out. And that was mainly because we were being successful. We were seeing about 100 new patients a month at this point in our main office. And it was just doing through part of it was marketing, but it also was training our team to answer the phones. And I think that's the biggest key in the marketing where these offices forget. Oh, and you know that anybody that markets knows when I had my company, the biggest complaint I always got is marketing is not working. And I'd show them the proof and the data and they'd be like, well, we're just not getting the calls. And so we use call tracking. No, you're getting the calls. Now let's listen to some calls. And most of the time, not all, it was a team. The team was bungling it. And I tell people when I talk to offices is you need to train your team. Part of marketing and having a good team is train them how to the phones. Because I could hire my son that's nine years old to answer the phones, but he's not going to be effective. He could answer them, but he's not going to be effective. And so the accountability had to be thrown back on. And so through that process, I learned, we may have to make sure our team is trained. Our team goes to answer phones, their whole job is to answer the phone, to answer the phone correctly and getting those patients from the phone to the schedule. That's it. All the other stuff doesn't matter. And then when they come in, you have the atmosphere and you have the clinical team does their job, right? And so through that process, I built that marketing company and then I sold it to, it got to the point where I found out I'm an entrepreneur at Sphere. like to build and start, but then I like to offload and let other, companies handle it, but then I keep a piece. So all the companies I've built and sold, I've kept, other than the KSC, because they was on my contract, couldn't, I keep a piece of it. And so through this process, what happened is, is when I started my virtual assistant company, which we're talking about today is, is I, about a year and a half ago, we've probably over the 12 years I've been with my brother, we've probably gone over 50 plus. front desk employees for our four practices. Yeah. And you know, I think, you know, obviously not at that same scale because you're a larger practice now, but I think anyone listening to this podcast that's a dentist owner can probably relate to that. I would, I would argue it's one of the hardest positions to hire for and also retain. Yep. And, but it's the most critical. One thing I tell doctors too is remember if your front desk team aren't answering the phone and they're not doing it, you're going to have to do it. And then you're wasting time and money because you should be, you went to school to be a doctor, not to answer phones. But we forget about the front desk. There are lowest paid employees usually. The ones that are forgot about, but they deal with a lot of crap from inbound calls, people mad about money and that the, that if there's something wrong with treatment plans or something like that, it's usually thrown on front. Right. And Through that process, I kept being frustrated. We used to, kind of unique story, I was part of a hiring team about four years ago for offices, me and our business admin. And we do group interviews. So we would send out on Indeed or Facebook, and we'd get 15, 20 people to apply for front desk positions. Some had experience, some didn't. But we'd send out an email back saying, need you here at this time. Out of those 15, 20, 10 might show And then when we do the interview, we do it as a group right there in front of everybody. And the reason why we did that is we wanted them to see their competition. We want to see, hey, listen, there's other people that want this job. And then it also makes it more efficient for us where we can kind of tell them what our culture is, what we expect. But the last one we did, three people got up and walked out after we told them our culture. So had seven people left. And I was just like, what is going Then we did the interviews, quick interviews, five minutes. And then through the process, we ended up doing the work interviews a couple, and then we hired two. They both came in, started the same day. We trained them. We spent a week. After the first week, one girl doesn't show up on Monday. Just no nothing. call, nothing, doesn't show up. So we have no idea why she didn't. Yeah. then the second one, we trained her for a position, and part of her position was We needed her coming in at 10 o 'clock and stay till six. Our office is closed at four o 'clock. We go eight to four in our office. We did that as a team because our team wanted it so they can get home for their kids from school. And so we, after we trained her and we got her hired from 10 to six, three months and we do what's called check -ins, which is kind of our review process. We just call it check -ins just to see, of course in this check -in, she wanted more money, but she didn't want to the 10 to six anymore. She wanted to go to eight to four like everybody else. And we were super frustrated because we're like, well, that's not what we hired you for. We hired you to be our 10 to six, answer, cause we were missing a lot of after hours calls. Like we use call tracking, all of our phone numbers with call tracks. So could see that we missing calls from four to six a lot. And so there's missed appointments. So we told her we couldn't do that. We'd be willing to give her a little bit of a raise cause she was doing a good job. She quit, left. And so I was mad because I'm like, what is going on? Like we're paying more than we should. We're talking about anywhere between 18 to$23 for a front desk employee. which in Texas, I'm sure in the Metroplex areas in higher densely populated cities like New York or in California, it's probably a lot more. And so I had a buddy, you know, I'm in a lot of groups and I'm on an advisory council. and I was in the Spisery Council with eight other dentists and one guy in there, sorry, before this, somebody told me about virtual assistants and I was skeptical. so so just to pause you there for a second, can you explain to our listeners what a VA actually is or a virtual assistant? So Virtual Assistant is a real person and what they do is they are based out of the USA. Ours are in Philippines. We are working with some people trying to get into Mexico and Uruguay to have Spanish speaking. Fish in Texas, that's a big part. But they're real people that pretty much do admin tasks for you. They can answer the phones, they can do insurance, they can do pre -Ds, they do recall, re -care. But they are real people that act as your admin for your office or And you were skeptical of this when you first heard of because I'm like, how are these people going to know what we, how we do our office and terminology? Like are they going know dental terminology? But what I found out through this process is, is I hired one personally, just through a friend to say, Hey, you should check messages person and just see what you think. So I did a interview with this. name is Chin and my skepticism was, okay, how they, what, kind of English do they speak? Is there a big accent? because as we know, on the region and that, know, folks expect something that's going to sound familiar to them. That's just the reality. yeah, like India, India, we all know an Indian accent. It's like, what is going on? Are you like, I want to speak to somebody in America. The thing we like about the Philippines is they speak in Queens English. yeah. It's just, it's well, I mean, really anywhere, but you get into rural country areas. They, they, they want somebody to kind of sound, they want to say sound American. But anyways, we took a chance. I'm like, all right, we'll try it. She was amazing. We're talking about from day one, what can I do? Google chat is how we communicated. We use Care Stack in our practices. And so there's a Care Stack University. First week, we're like, OK, here's the university. Here's the neurologist. Give her a login into our PMS system. for listeners is terminology and know treatment types and that sort of thing to familiarize yourself. Yeah, And to learn how most health care offices have a practice manager software. Some way where they can communicate or their patients can schedule, you have all their treatment in there. And they have to know how to utilize that to do these programs. Right. And all of that software is easily accessible remotely now. YouTube, we found out actually all software, any practice software you just need to get on YouTube. There's videos left and right. And so she was great. She had dental background, which was a plus. So she had the dental terminology and that was what kind of made me interested. We hired her and she was amazing. Then let's say in January, no, and I'll get to the fee a little bit later, a little bit more about how much charge or how much she charged and how much we paid because it was eye -opening. Plus to mention, there's no taxes, no benefits. And that's where most business owners know when you pay an employee, they might get paid $25 an hour, but you're actually paying $32, $35 an hour depending on what taxes and what benefits you have. we'll get into the fees here at the end, but we're closer to the end. But what I always think is important to keep in mind, too, people first hear these figures, you're paying them what? Well, in their own countries, they're able to make a very solid living on these reduced wages. And we just have no context for that. But I think just because you're not offering benefits or you're paying this lower amount does not mean in any way, or form that this person is getting a raw deal. And I think that's important to point Yeah, and no, get paid very well. in there, we're gonna remember in the United States, our cost of living is skyrocketing. Like it's a lot and to live day to day and we expect a lot, right? Like, but in a lot of these other countries, no, they, what we pay them is very, very good. And they are very grateful for the work because like in the Philippines, unemployment rates can be 20%. Like, and so people, to have a job, have income. is something they want and they need. kind of get back. Yep, that's another thing is our time, they're 13 hours, we're in Texas, we're central time, they're 13 hours ahead of us. So these VAs are working graveyard shift at night and they are totally okay with it. know, it is one of the things that they're like, we're more willing to work at home and work graveyard than have to try to find a job while in the city. transportation. So, but the way this kind of started is, is I was at an advisory council meeting with I'm in a group, advisory council group with about eight other dentists. We were talking and we were, they were just mentioning, you know, staffing issues. And I said, well, I hired a VA and they, of course they were like, what is that? And then through that I said, well, can you connect me? And that's when I was like light bulb went off. One of my partners, his name is Dr. Chad Latino. One of my good friends, Me and him, we're both in the meeting. We would go outside for lunch and I said, Chad, dude, let's look at that, what we can do. And so I'm like, okay, how do we even start this? So kind of make this long story shorter is this January, this literally was January. And so, but it was just one of those needs and it was more personal. Like we needed people for our office. it wasn't, this was just not just for, this was kind started out of selfishness because we needed them. And we just, we did, we found some people that had some connections in the Philippines where they could help us recruit. And that's how, but then we had to get everything set up. So we said, okay, let's just start from scratch. So we did a lot of testing in our own. We ended up getting network people in the Philippines. And then it just kind of blew up. had friends As I talk to people through my networking groups, I have people reach out to me and just be like, hey, what is this? What's going on? And does this really work? And I'm like, yes, there is training and there is a process, but these type of employees, want to work and they will do anything. That's the crazy thing is if I hire for one thing, but once they get proficient at that, it's like, hey, can you do this? Hey, can you do claims? Do you mind doing some predeterminations or insurance verifications all over Yeah. Well, and it's stability for the practice as well, because as you know, and you talked about earlier, staffing right now is awful. Just across the board, awful. Yeah. Because people can go to Chick -fil or a fast food restaurant and make what usually a front desk team member makes. And so they're like, well, you know, it's always the same thing as we've lost a lot of teams. I told you we lost over 50 employees. Probably about a third of those employees have asked to come back after they left. We have a rule in our office. If you quit without two weeks notice for a reason other than like my husband's got another job moving somewhere else or my mom was sick or something where you're a family emergency. We don't, we don't hire back. Grass is not green on the other side. You know, we pride ourselves having a good culture at our office, which most offices I think do. We have fun. We pay well. And so, but the virtual assistants have made it where it's cost effective for us and we're getting the work done. What we found too with employees is, is the admin position. If somebody's not on them all the time, our regular check -ins, there's a lot of wasted time. work after we do a trip for us, we do a quarterly training for our front team and We found that for the first month after training that people do great but then the next two months that goes you see the downhill trend of them getting like well, I'll be on my phone playing games or on social media on my computer instead of actually doing the work and What we found with the virtual assistants there's No, they just, go at it and it's task after task or they're task oriented like check off, check off, check off, check off. Yeah, I've worked, you not in dental, but, obviously you and I, have marketing background and in marketing, you know, VAs are quite common. I've worked with many over the years and there has not been one that I would describe as anything but a hard worker. It's amazing. Yep. And it's just, it's just for us, it was practical sense, practical sense. And so that, that is how the company formed. It literally was from a need, which is how most companies are formed. And, and then we tested it. Like, so in our practices, we have three virtual sisters now. We have, we have, we are, we have three total for our, we have four practices and it doesn't replace front. I tell people you still need a front desk team member to check in, check out and Have some in -office interaction. Maybe some offices are smaller. So that front desk person might be doing treatment plants We actually have one of our clinical team does treatment plans just because they understand so they know both sides But I know a lot of offices their front desk team member is a treat the treatment planner, you know And so it doesn't replace them all those as it takes takes the needed needless small tedious tasks That offices are doing that take time off plates so that you can focus on patient -centered care in front of you. And that's what is a good group. Right? know. Well, wouldn't that be amazing, right? see. We'll see. But speaking of, with leaps in technology someday. speaking of technology, I want to get into this AI thing. we've talked offline, and this just blows my mind. I love what you guys are doing here. But talk a little bit how you sort of overcome that challenge that is the issue with language and dialect and accents specific to the region that your practice is in. How'd you overcome that with offshore employees? So the cool thing about all this I've heard of AI and it's not going away. It's been here for a while and once someone said jumped on early, it has changed. Yeah, when chat GPT came up, man, two plus years ago, someone's jumped on it just to see what it was about. like I've gained an extra 10 hours in my work day. Every day. anybody. It's anybody's dream if you're willing to have something look over or do some work. All my legal documents now, I threw it through an AI program. I need these points pulled out. So AI is not going anywhere. It's going to be the future. don't it's not going to replace. I hear people, it's going to replace humans. No, it's not. It's the same thing in working in factories. Machines and factories didn't replace humans. Yes, it replaced some, but you still need people to run those machines, And so I'm a believer it's actually gonna create more jobs in the long term because it's gonna help us grow. It's gonna be the next tech. And so through that, I realized I have a nephew that's a gamer. And when he plays his games, he was joking like, I can sound like anybody I want. I can sound like a girl. I can sound like any character. I was like, that was another thing kind of clicked in my head. I'm like, wait a second, you can? And he's like, yeah, I can. And so I thought, boy, if they can do it gaming wise. Why couldn't we do that with our virtual assistants where they're from the Philippines, but there has to be a software where we can download or do something where our AIs can sound like who they want. And so we're working on a program right now with a company to have our virtual assistants use an AI tool on their computers. They're still talking live. It'd be like me and you talking here. The tricky part is trying to get it so it's not a delay. So it's not a two second delay. It's like live voiceover, voice on voice. where if we have a client in Alabama or Texas where they are in the country where they have a southern accent, where our BAs can sound like they're from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, or they're from Boston, Massachusetts, or they're from South Dakota, or they're Michigan, so you'd need to make you need to make my VA sound pretty obnoxious. or Minnesota, or I Well, I was actually born in Minnesota, so I've got the best of both worlds. so or, you know, Washington, Washington, you know, so that's what's kind of changing it because then your patients have no idea that when you're talking to somebody, they're actually from a the Philippines or wherever they're from, they can sound like they're Amy or Joy or whoever from right down the mind -blowing stuff. So what do you have the the lag time down to now? Because I would imagine that's only going to improve as technology. You know, that's not bad and it's going to get gonna get, and it's gonna be real time. That's the goal to get real time right now where the struggle is actually is making sure the equipment, the sound of it like the RBA's head equipment is good because what the voiceover and the voice does is it changes a little bit. And if you don't have the right equipment with the right quality, it distorts it a little bit. And This is something that's not going away, but it's something that I don't know of any other company that's doing this. And turning the lights off in my office. It is so it's a little groundbreaking. But but for me, it's just it makes sense. Right. Like and initially we thought I've had a couple of people I've done some interviews and talked to about them like, what are the VA Singh? Does that make them feel like you're taking away their voice and I'm like no like if I was working in China Well, if I was a VA in the United States working for someone in the Philippines, I would think they would do the same thing to me in reverse, and that makes sense. Yep. China. Like if I'm a businessman and I'm doing and I have a business in China or work with some in China and I use the voiceover app to translate, it's the same thing, right? Like they're not here, my voice are here in the Chinese version. And are you piloting this actively, the AI component with certain practices right Yeah, we're pining it mainly with our own because we got to make sure before we roll this out, this is something that we're that it's going to be fully rolled out by the beginning of the year by 2025 because there are some things in there we have to make sure because remember with me to have my own practices in my part, Chad has a practice we can and then my brother Joel's an orthodontist. So we have pilot program because we want to make sure that that if we rolled this somebody they're not having issues because then also they get to their calling. They're calling me. And they're saying, Dan, why is this being all funky and what's going on here? And what's this? and, and so. Well, you can just change your voice and pretend to not be in the office. Yeah. But so it is something that's rolling out. But the whole point of this is having a virtual assistant in your office actually helps you grow. Like I said, it takes tasks where somebody's on the phone with insurance for an hour. You don't have to have, you can have your virtual assistant do this. Like your team doesn't have to get boggled down by doing those claims. Like I said, predeterminations, insurance verification, even where we're having one of our teams tedious time consuming stuff that's ultimately, you know, not worth, you know, the 18 or 20 bucks an hour. Quite honestly, when you think about efficiency, it's just not, yeah. are you gonna have your team sit on the phone for four hours of call and patience to try to get them to schedule? No, like, you're gonna want them to do it, but they're gonna hate that. I mean, because they see everybody else in the office walking around, talking, going to break room, and so... So we've talked about all these tedious tasks and being able to offload that is invaluable. Can you just recap real quickly before we close out here? Because I want to get a sense of what this costs, what it looks like to work with you guys. I want you to be able to tell folks how to connect with you if they're interested. But what specifically, just broadly, what are the tasks that you're able to offload to these VAs through your services? So we've already talked about call handling, front desk. insurance verification. What else though am I missing? Any admin, so any admin, we do this for all healthcare. So this is not just dentistry. We actually have healthcare, because I told you to mention my brothers are doctors. I have two other brothers that are doctors, but it's any admin task. we, some of them can be even personal assistants, like personal secretaries for the doctor. That's mainly for DSOs or multiple practices or multiple offices. Cause I mean, a dentist is not crazy busy. And they usually have that one of their assistants handle most of the admin stuff, like personal, but really it's Like I said, predeterminations. So if you need to get a pre -D for somebody, you can do insurance verification, insurance negotiations. Like they can reach out and negotiate on your behalf for insurances. So, because we know insurance, especially for offices where people struggle because you get placed on an umbrella and it goes down and down. It can be Medicare claims. So if you're Medicare office, right? It can be collecting payments. It can be insurance verifications. Yeah, anything. pretty much anything your admin does, these VAs do, and all of our VAs have dental background. What's the most unique use case that you've got with a client right I would say probably a personal secretary where they handle and they handle like emails, deal with sales reps, things like that. it's and that that Dennis has 15 locations. And so he's he's pretty busy. And so it gets a lot of emails, a lot of spam and the VA kind of handles his personal side of it. Schedules schedules dinner, reservations for his family, know, haircuts. like a concierge service. yeah, pretty much. And, it's, our most valuable is our time, right? And he's the point where he's like, listen, if I can afford somebody to do this for me so I can focus my time on what I'm doing, which is growing his business, it's all. But other than that, and so we. what does it look like to work with you all from a cost standpoint? So ours are flat fee of $19 .95. So it comes about $12 an hour is what the cost is. These VA's work 40 hours a week. They can work Monday through Saturday because we have some offices that do Saturday. They can work whatever hours some offices, it can be eight o 'clock or seven o 'clock in the morning to four. It can be eight to five. It can be nine to six. It really depends on what your office needs. They're very flexible. think as far as the average amount of time that one of your clients puts into managing or actively supervising this particular type of employee? The first week is probably about 10 hours. After that, it's probably about five minutes a day. And does your does your company interface at all with the VA from the point of hire or what does that look like? Yeah, so the point hire, we're part of the hiring process. And then we have a manager that manages the team of VAs just to make sure that they're on task and see if there's anything on their end. And then they also will communicate with the offices to make sure anything on there. But we found most offices, they just assign somebody in their office to kind of keep tabs or just stay in front. And it's through Google Chat. We just use Google Chat. Super, super easy to stay communicated with the VAs. And then we also ask our offices to include the VAs in their monthly team meetings if they're doing it. They should be doing I hope they're doing it. To be a successful office, think I'm hoping you're doing team meetings. Just so it's critical for culture to involve them too in some way, or form. And then the last thing we tell our offices, so it's $19 .95 a month flat fee paid semi -monthly. So these are contracted employees. There's no, if you don't want them after a month or you don't need them, there's no big deal. There's no right to hire, I mean, it's kind of right to hire as part of the contracts. so we don't, our contract is just a two week contract. You just have to be every two weeks. That's when we take the payment, semi And then they can do any tasks that you want or need for your office. it's pretty seamless. We'll send you resumes. We'll send you three or four resumes of candidates. You pick ones you want, and then we'll set up a virtual interview where I'll mirror by the manager of them will moderate and let you ask questions to the VA. And then you get a pick and choose. then the setup is pretty much, they have to be able to get access to your practice management software, which is super, super simple these days, especially with an open system. Most offices have open. Sometimes we have offices have to have a separate computer in their office where they can log on, these VAs can log on. It just has to in a corner somewhere. So sometimes there is something they have to get, but most offices have extra computers. Like the doctor's logging in somewhere, somebody's logging in somewhere when they're off work. And then they have to make sure they have some type of VoIP system for their phone system, which most offices do now. Most of them are not plugging their line in. So, and that's it. That is pretty much it. And then there Once they learn their system, the best thing is dental terminology. They already know about dentistry. So you're not teaching about root canals and crowns. a lot of have insurance background. So they already know how to deal with insurances. Most of them work for Cigna or Delta or Aetna. And so they understand the process. And so it's pretty seamless. They know how get around things that we just don't know who to talk to, how to get around things, which makes them valuable. well you all are doing amazing things and I'm really excited about it. I think this is you know the next generation, the next the future of this in dentistry and health care in general. So I applaud what you're doing and I can't tell you how much I appreciate you coming on and sharing your insight and explaining how this process works. If folks want to connect with you and are interested in getting started with a VA for their practice, what's the first step? Where should they I think the first thing is check out what we do. I think it's important for you to kind of get some knowledge about what a virtual assistant is, what they can do. So go to our website, it's peakperformanceva .com. But if you really want to have a conversation, even talk, so a lot of my conversations is a little bit about virtual assistants, but it's a lot about how we brought our practices when I talk to talkers. And so just send me a text or calls, I'm in meetings all the time. So if you call me and leave me a voicemail, I'll call you back. But the best way to text me is that my number is 254 -527 -5981 or my email at djohnson at peakperformanceva .com. I'll respond to you. unfortunately, it's the way we're going because it's just way to combat having employees do the jobs that we need done to be successful. Well, I'll add all that info in the show notes and folks can connect with you if they like. Thank you so much, Dan. I really appreciate you coming on today. And if I have my way about it, I'd love to have you back on in the future. And especially as you continue to integrate AI into your product offerings, I just think it's amazing what you all are doing. yeah, man. Yeah, man. So right. Yeah. I mean, come on, just come on, come on, come on anytime and I'll feel better about myself. Yeah. I love that. I love So anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show today, Dan. And if you enjoyed what you heard today, anyone listening out there, please take a moment and give us a five star review on Apple podcasts or Google podcasts or YouTube now, I guess, or Spotify, wherever you listen to your shows, we'd really appreciate it. It is the best single way possible for us to reach other dentists and help other practices out. So thank you all for listening. Thank you, Dan. And yeah, take care. We'll talk soon. Yep. See ya.