Welcome to the shared practices podcast. I have with me my good partner and friend, Dr. Alex Sharp,

the man who is a giant among men. And we're going to talk about some fun stuff today. Alex,

how's it going? Good great, Richard. What an intro. I'm standing on my breadbox to try to live up to that.

But what's funny is before we hit record, we have a topic. We have some ideas and we have some bullet points around the topic. But I just think it's funny how over time we were able to come up with a great topic and not put in like hours and hours and hours of prep. We can just volley some ideas back and forth. And then we rough out the bullet points and then we go. So I think that's a sign of you being a consummate professional. No, it's a sign of like, we've lived some crap. It's really what it comes down to. This is no longer theoretical. It's not like, hey, let's get some experts on the podcast who've done some things so that we can pepper them with questions.

It's like, no, we've been here, done this, got the shirt, and there's still more to learn.

But that ability to talk about what's worked and what hasn't worked, we can do it in our sleep.

I was talking to a representative from one of the new dental schools that's opening up, and they were asking a bit about my bona fides.

And I was explaining exactly what you just said, that, you know, I became a part of this amazing podcast that started out with the mission of learning from the experts in the field.

And then somewhere along the way, I don't

know when the torch got passed or the baton got handed off, but we gained enough actual

tangible experience ourselves to have a platform to stand on and say, hey, we've done this,

do this instead of this. Here's a hard one lesson. Avoid this landmine. And that's what I enjoy doing is saying, all right, well, I stepped on this landmine. Here's how not to do that. And here's what I learned as a result. So yeah, it's cool to be on this side of it now. Well, and I'm going to tease some behind the scenes numbers that I don't know if I'm allowed to share, but we can edit this

out if you don't like it. We get a profit and loss statement on a bunch of practices that we get

to see how well they do. And something I'm sure that's actually a little bit painful for Alex or a source

of pride, maybe both, is the fact that your very stable, formerly sharp family dentistry practice is this anchor of

stable profitability, a good office, good people, a solid culture, and it outperforms a lot of denture

and implant offices that have very high production dollar amounts.

You know, Scott Luna talks about these different paths to a million dollar profitable practice,

and we've got our growth avatars. There's a lot that's possible in one large healthy practice.

And your practice has been an anchor for shared practices group, but also for your team, for your

patients. And I think a large part of that, and you and Lana and anyone else who's been

involved would probably agree, has been the concrete culture that you've built that is no

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