He Leads 54 Surgeons. His Fix Isn't More Marketing. It's Missed Calls | with Trevor Maurer, BOAC #66

0:00I grew up in a small town in Saskatchewan, Canada, and had zero interest or maybe even aptitude to go to college. I ended up going to college to play football and it turned out that college was a pretty good thing to do for a career and cut into healthcare. If you were to ask them on the way in, what would you like to happen right now? They'd like to say, I want to get out of here as quick as possible and I want the pain to be done. And we've actually had practices whose answering the phone philosophy was just let her go to voicemail, we'll call her back when they can. And that's not going to work because these guys are in pain.

0:26People are scared. People need comfort. and it's a relationship business. You don't get referrals from cookies. And it only takes one, like one bad experience and you probably jeopardize the relationship. Silence in healthcare is not a good thing. So a patient leaving and not saying something about a problem they had, it happens more than you might think. If you could read body language, I was visibly uncomfortable when you were talking to people that just don't want to hear their patients. It's ridiculous. How many times have you been at an Airbnb or VRBO where you've heard somebody saying, I'm going to give you a bad review because now the consumer has power?

0:56patients clearly prefer same-day surgery. Any research we've done, they didn't even know it was possible. He was just at our recent board meeting, he was like, I went out, I saw it, I thought, this guy's not even that fast. And the funny part of it is this surgeon's a race car driver, so he knows what fast looks like. He went back and he reported that he's doubled his productivity. Because he tried something he didn't know a lot about or didn't like, I told you earlier, these are evidence-based learners, and there's the outcomes. And so that's what third lever, and that lever alone, can double any practice.

1:33Before we get started, this episode of The Business of a Clinic is sponsored by Virillo. Virillo is the trusted marketplace for clinic owners looking to sell and groups and clinic buyers looking to acquire high-performing clinics. There are very few specialized marketplaces in the UK that focus on this transition for clinic operators. Virillo is one of them. Learn more at virillo.co.uk. Now on to the episode. Hi, everybody. This is Jared. I'm one of the co-founders at Coherent Healthcare. We are back for another episode of The Business of a Clinic. Today, we're with Trevor. This will be an interesting one because before we got started, Trevor was quick to let us know that he thinks he and his practice are some of the best in the U.S.

2:12around thinking about holistic patient and customer care. So I'm going to throw Trevor right under the bus to get started. Hey, that was private. Help us. I think our team does a great job. Help us understand more about that. I think for audience, obviously, we have a chance to catch up a little bit beforehand. And maybe I can just ask you to start with the one minute introduction, two minute introduction. Give people the background on your journey to where we are now. And then I'd love to actually jump right in and start thinking a bit about how your team and you think about this patient problem more generally.

2:41Yeah, so my journey is pretty interesting. I grew up in a small town, Saskatchewan, Canada, and had zero interest or maybe even aptitude to go to college. But like every Canadian, I played hockey. Unfortunately, I wasn't very good at it. So by accident, I shifted to football or in the U.K., I guess you'd call it gridiron, American football, not footy. And it turns out I was better at that. And so I ended up going to college to play football. And it turned out that college was a pretty good thing to do for a career. and cut into healthcare sales initially, and then multi-site healthcare management in Canada and in the U.S., and that's just been a really interesting ride, and it's amazing to see.

3:25So it's been an interesting ride from small-town Canada to Vancouver, Toronto, Canada, down to Atlanta eventually, and Manhattan running a technology startup in healthcare, and then back to Atlanta. Some great experiences, some learning experiences, as we say, along the way. But in a really great spot with a bunch of great surgeons and great investors right now in Atlanta, Georgia. And then the journey of the company started four and a half years ago. And it's a single specialty oral surgery group in nine states, 54 surgeons. And what I love about working with surgeons is they're very direct. They're confident, but they're evidence-based learners.

4:04And it was weird because I came from a couple other health care industries. and with surgeons it just felt different and I realized what it was is when they don't understand something they'll ask you what you're saying they won't gloss over it and when they don't want to do something they just will tell you I'm not going to do that instead of nodding their head and not doing it right so I asked one of the surgeons Dr. Griffith he came out of the U.S. Air Force he's a surgeon with us in Tennessee and I said what's the deal with this he said oh it's easy it's when we do rounds in residency. If you make it up, you just get buried, right?

4:39So you get the answer or you say, I don't know the answer, but I'll get it for you very quickly. And we've heard that a million times in our life, right? Don't just bullshit. Don't just make it up. Say, I don't know what I'm going to get it. But surgeons from my experience do the best job of that and making decisions based on evidence. Thanks for the introduction. I think you're right. And what you said in the beginning, which is your journey is a nonlinear one. It was not an obvious set of things that took you where you are of all the intro. Yeah, like my dad goes on a doctor. And that's usually how it starts.

5:05Oh, I come from a family of doctors. I always knew I wanted to do this. So that's not your story, which is very cool. And it wasn't mine either in terms of getting into healthcare. I don't come from a family of doctors. But I think it's interesting to hear you say that you found your tribe, maybe is the way to describe it in terms of where you ended up. Why do you think that is just on the personal side? What about you and what about healthcare are the right fit?

5:29I think that's a that's an interesting question I should probably reflect on more and not be you know held on the spot on a podcast at my age I should know this already listen I think the further the further I've moved down the path of being a patient's last resort the more excited I've been about serving them if you think about oral surgery if they're in our practice most likely 91 % of the time they were referred to us because a general practitioner, a general dentist wanted a specialist to handle whatever needs to be handled. And if we fail, where do they go next? I guess that's kind of it, right?

6:07So maybe another surgeon, but there's not like another specialty beyond oral surgery typically that they can go to. So I think I like the pressure of the risk of the business in terms of you just have to have the best partners. It's paramount, right? We don't buy businesses. We partner with what we believe to be the best surgeons. They happen to run businesses. They'll say they're probably not really good at it, but because there's so much revenue, there's a lot of room for chaff. And what we do is we come in and we tighten that up to give the patient a better experience. We grease the wheels a little bit, right?

6:40Make sure everything's running well. Yeah, it's interesting. There's a gentleman that we spoke to not long ago who runs a multi-site dental, more generalist dentistry in Ireland, actually. And he said that they are really good prior to their involvement at a group level. They're really good at conservative dentistry, delivering great patient outcomes. And then the roundedness of the proposition, the back office, front office, the non-clinical stuff is really where there's a lot of growth area. It sounds like that's the same in your view. When you think about from a patient journey perspective, this idea of being the last resort, that's a pretty emotional thing, right?

7:14For a patient, like they've already been on a journey of trying to fix something. they haven't fixed it, then they end up in your chair. How do you think about at a group level, at a cultural level, at an executive level, how do you think about the way you're going to serve that patient non-clinically? Because someone's there, they've already, they've been through a few rounds to get there. Now it's the do or die moment. This is where it really needs to come together. How does the customer service complement the clinical service? yeah look i think to work here with us in our group you got to have empathy right this this patient or customer or whatever word you want to use right because part of the way you run your podcast is this is the business of health care so they're a customer they can choose to buy a car or shoes or get care right that that money can only be spent once and their really important that our team understands over 60 % of the time that this patient's in pain and they're in a hurry right so what they want to walk in and get out nobody actually wants to be in our practices if you were to ask them on the way in what would you like to happen right now they'd like to say I want to get out of here as quick as possible and I want the pain to be done and so filling out the same stupid forms again that you already did online that we texted you and emailed you and it's the fourth time and we don't pre-fill anything if we do that that's frustrating because they're saying, listen, I've already done this.

8:42Just get me in the chair. So to think about the utilization of their time, to remove duplication of their efforts, right? All of those things give them a better experience. Nothing to do with the clinician. We have to have the best clinical care for sure. But when they go back to their dentist or whoever referred them, they're going to say, I had to wait 20 minutes. I had to fill out the same stupid form five times. They were running late. They were rude to me at the front desk. When I was done, they didn't escort me out or anything. I just kind of was, I didn't know what to do. I sat in the room and then they said, why are you still here?

9:19Just really an orchestrated demonstration of empathy to the patient and making sure that they're at the center of the way you run your practice. It just gives a different outcome to the patient, even if the clinical outcome is the same. I have to say we're probably coming up on 100 episodes and I don't think I've ever heard the two phrases that you just used. Number one, duplication of patient effort. Do they have to do the same thing twice? I think a lot of people think about it, but it actually hasn't been said explicitly. And then the second thing is the efficiency of the patient time. So often we're focused on the efficiency of the practice time for obvious reasons, but it's interesting to hear that from a customer perspective.

9:55Actually, like, can we make them only do it once, not twice? And how does that show up end to end in the journey? The thing I find myself in tension with is, and I'm always hesitant to go right toward the AI honeypot, but actually one of the downfalls of the AI honeypot is that oftentimes you have to do things twice. And oftentimes it doesn't really work the first time exactly as you'd expect. And oftentimes you're outsourcing the tax of behaving the right way to the patient and not doing it in-house. How does this idea of, I want to make this fast, smooth, high empathy, which I think is probably not something that we've quite AI-ified yet, empathy, although I'm sure a lot of people would try and sell you otherwise.

10:36How does that show up in your modernization efforts and your efficiency efforts? How do you marry the desire to protect the patient time, but also to introduce efficiency that might be creating more practice side efficiency than patient side efficiency? Let me answer a different question first and and then answer that one. So the question I want to answer is, what does that patient experience look like? And then I'm going to get right to AI. But in terms of putting the patient first, one of our initiatives is same-day surgery, which means when you come in and get your consult, we do the pre-work for your medical history so that you're ready.

11:15And there's got to be some way for us to better leverage AI for that pre-work. Right now, a lot of that's staff-related, team-related. We do have a lot of, you know, insurance verification, AI-driven, and payer communications, AI-driven, so that's helpful. So when you come in, we can say, look, we can take care of this procedure today. And we're maybe 32 % of our procedures at our business is same day. We do have some practices that are up over 80%. What same day does is two things. One, the patient's in the practice 58 minutes in your operatory versus an hour and 40 minutes over two days. The second thing it does is it's one trip for them instead of a Monday and a Thursday, two half days off work.

11:58These people typically are working. Right. And the third thing is if we do a consult and then a surgery, depending on the practice, up to 30 percent of them never come in for care. It's consult, no surgery, busy, fear, pricing, distraction, whatever it is. Right. So now, like to the part, right. I think it's interesting that AI can be so confidently wrong sometimes. like you'll ask AI a question, it'll give you the answer and you'll say, I think that's wrong. And I'll say, it's really wrong. In fact, it's not even close to right. So we try to leverage it certainly on the front end with patient communications, right?

12:34So online scheduling, all those type things on the backend with payer relations. But if you think about, I'm sure you've heard this, if you've done a hundred episodes that humans are about as good as they're going to get right I'd like to think that the phone skill training in our practices is we've deployed training we've trained our buddy and they're as good as they're going to get AI is as bad as it's ever going to be today right so as AI improves we're going to give that patient a better experience because there's already some some major practices that the first ring goes to an AI service, right?

13:12Ours does and ours rolls on the fifth ring because patients would rather talk to AI than nobody, right? And we've actually had practices who's answering the phone philosophy was just let it go to voicemail. We'll call them back when we can. And that's not going to work because if you remember, these guys are in pain. They want to be, they want to be seen within 48 hours. 72 is probably more realistic. And the general dentist wants them to get great care and they want them back. It's interesting. Yes, I think we have heard version. Unfortunately, humans are at peak when they're well trained and AI is like a really high quality intern that's now going to hopefully get better over time.

13:54TBD, we'll see if that plays out. But I think it's interesting to hear the decision that you've made of five rings and then overflow. that's a very deliberate choice, right? It signals, I guess it signals to me that you still feel like the priority, if possible, like in the pecking order is speak to a human, speak to an AI, speak to no one. And that feels like it marries with the empathy first approach. We're gonna give you something that feels, you know, in keeping with what you're ultimately paying for. What was the driver of that decision? It's like a small decision, but it's like quite representative probably of the mindset.

14:29Yeah, it's super intentional. I think wherever they're, if it involves the heart, use a human. If it's all about efficiency, where you can, use AI, right? And so are we going to have practices that don't have humans in it? Absolutely not. People are scared, right? People need comfort. And it's a relationship business, right? You don't get referrals from cookies. Do team members at General Bennis like cookies? Yeah, I like cookies. Everybody likes cookies. If you don't, I don't trust you, right? But there's relationships. And that referring practice wants to know, you're going to take care of my patient.

15:05You're going to make me look good. You're not going to second guess my treatment plan. And you're going to get them back here safely and quickly. And you're going to tell me what happened. You're going to give me notes, right? And there's the ability to use technology in some of those four areas. But the human connection, the general dentist still says, I want to be able to text the surgeon. I want them to get back to me. 91 % of general dentists say that's important. That's not AI. they want to talk to the surgeon. It's a relationship. We have a lot of conversations and practices about exactly what you're describing, like where in the journey, whether it's a new inquiry, a longer-standing patient is overdue, whatever the pathway may be, what parts of that patient engagement support layer have to be human?

15:52And the answer is probably much less than five years ago was human, because you can programmatically identify the patient, You can programmatically reach out to the patient. But when that patient writes back in, when that patient comes inbound with something, a question, a concern, an issue, as you say, they're scared. How you handle that matters a lot. That is the$10 million question is like, how do you know whether a patient is anxious, nervous, and can you handle that the right way versus not? And I can imagine in a referral pathway, that probably is the case as well, because they're going to go back to someone else and they're going to say, oh yeah, I had a great experience with X, or actually it was mediocre.

16:27And it only takes one, like one bad experience, two bad experiences, then you probably jeopardize the relationship. Have you had that happen before where you've had this positive referrer relationship and you've unfortunately found that something didn't quite connect? Forget AI, but just like there was a bad experience and you had to do some triage in that relationship. Has that happened? All the time. Okay. Same for it. All the time. Now, what typically happens is we don't know. We have no idea. so we've again been very intentional to to create a position called a referral development manager where we call on our referrals and we walk through co-managed cases how did this turn out were you happy with the outcome and sometimes they'll uncover like absolutely unhappy the patient came back and your front desk was rude or the treatment plan was changed and we have no idea and we bring that to the surgeon and like there was no treatment plan it was like there was no notes and turns out like either it wasn't sent or it didn't get through in the practice and then we go back to the referring dentist and explain what happened like oh great awesome we'll keep using you guys and appreciate your honesty that you dropped the ball whatever it was versus having no idea and just that referral dries up because it's a really interesting thing we will often say here that like silence in health care is not a good thing so a patient leaving and not saying something about a problem they had, it happens more than you might think.

17:53And a lot of practices that we support said that would never happen here. We had this morning, literally an example, similar to what you're describing, where when you follow up with patients, you come to realize actually not everything was great. And the question is, what do you do afterwards? How do you handle the fact that something wasn't great? We've got CEOs that we work with who say, I personally want to see every escalation of bad patient feedback because this is how I improve my business. We also have clinic leaders who say, actually, sweep it under the rug. I don't want to know when things aren't good.

18:21And it's very seriously. It's like a crazy thing, but they'll say, oh, it's the only reason they're saying something is because you're reaching out to them to see how they're feeling. Otherwise, they wouldn't say anything. I was like, yes. But so I'm curious from a leadership perspective, culture, top down or bottoms up, however you think about it at the group level. How do you think about the patient voice, the customer voice? How do you actively surface that? How do you incorporate that into improvement? How do you make sure that you can actually hear, see, speak to a huge number of people without them being physically there.

18:51Yeah. So if you could read body language, I was visibly uncomfortable when you were talking about people that just don't want to hear the information. It's ridiculous. I was like, oh my gosh, please tell me that I'm not invested in that company. But I think at the root level, our surgeons do a great job of contacting every patient at night that had surgery came in and And just say, hey, just checking in, seeing how you're doing. That's an incredible point. And patients are invariably really impressed. That surgeon took a minute to care, right? And then systematically, we have to send them a follow-up.

19:30Rate your care. Is there anything else we can do for you? Would you refer your friends? That net promoter score is really important. Google reviews, as simple as that is, and as long as they've been around, really important. And even in acquisitions, like we take a long, hard look at the reviews of the business. Do they get a lot of reviews? Meaning, do they ask or not? And are the reviews positive or negative, right? And so when you've got a business with few reviews and they're negative, they don't ask because they don't want to know, right? But the problem there is they're not giving patients who've had a positive experience a chance to speak.

20:04Because if you go out and you get great whatever at a business, you're less likely to give a positive review than if it was horrible than you want to give a negative review, right? How many times have you been at that Airbnb or VRBO where you've heard somebody saying, I'm going to give you a bad review because now the consumer has power, right? And yeah, I think negativity has a lot more power and influence than positivity. So you have to interact with that patient. and they have to know that you want to understand their perspective of their care. If we follow that thread down the patient journey and think about how that shows up for teams, so you said in the beginning when you think about acquisition, sometimes the clinical provision is really tight, but there's other room for improvement elsewhere.

20:49Where do you go first when a new acquisition takes place and you say, okay, actually, clinical provision is really strong. The transformation, the integration story starts here. where's your sort of red hot button that you think actually we get disproportionate positive transformation if we make this one change first and then we have to make 10 other changes over the course of five years but actually this is the one that really moves the needle right yeah there's obviously a lot of different things that happen at the practices and we align with the partner doctors before we close that this is what we're going to do because if you don't agree then please don't partner with us because you're just going to be frustrated we're going to work on the wrong things right so by and large the single most important thing we do with new business is different than what the surgeon thinks they need typically they say I just need more patients get me more patients and then we'll do a quick assessment of their scheduling template which in many cases they don't have or they don't have a template set up to their best day if you ask a surgeon how was your day?

21:55Great. It was great. What made it great? And they don't sometimes, them and the team, they can't clearly articulate it, which is why we break ours down into people, quality, delivery, and finance so we can measure, right? Finance does always last because financials will take care of themselves if you take good care of the patients, right? So when we do that, we set up, what does your best day look like? What is your template? And then let's build that template and back into it every day. It's not always perfect, but if you, Stephen Covey, begin with the end in mind. What are you trying to build versus let's see what shows up.

22:28You can move people around to get your best day every day, right? And there's seasonality. There's all kinds of things that you can shift people around to continuously have your best day. So that's number one for sure. And then number two, like I alluded to earlier, they typically say, we just need more patients. We need more marketing, whatever marketing is. If it's referral marketing or consumer marketing, or let's do a massive campaign. Let's do something we've never done before. because I'm convicted that's going to work. That's not the way to do it, right? It's phone calls. It's missed calls.

22:56And I think he called out in the pre-show notes. Our vendor helps us to identify, it's called patient prism, what's going on in those calls. And up to 28 % to 30 % just go unanswered, right? And so we bring that down to close to zero, utilizing better phone systems, better phone training, and AI on the rollover we talked about earlier so patients can get in. but if we don't have a good scheduling template, if we hadn't built that foundation first, where are they going to go? So build the template. What does your best day look like? And then back in with patients. And we typically find we've got two or three years of runway with patient volume before we need to do marketing to grow the practice.

23:35Now we always do sustainable marketing, right? To make sure our referrals are happy and find the problems that we talked about earlier in the show that we might not know about. But before we really have a demand issue. It's a few years. Now a quick break to tell you a little bit about Coherent Healthcare, the company behind the business of a clinic. Coherent helps fast-growing healthcare providers engage, support, retain, and nurture their patients from intake to discharge. As you get bigger, your patient body grows enormously, and it becomes much more than just another hire, just another front office team member.

24:08It's no longer a people problem. You need technology that can scale with you. Coherent helps you do that by keeping every patient on track. In short, we're the agentic CRM and patient support platform for outpatient hands-on healthcare. To learn more, visit us at coherenthq.com. Now back to the episode. We work with a few quite quick, fast-growing groups. And what we often say, and I've heard people describe it all kinds of things, leaky buckets, toilets, not bathtubs, or all the water goes out, water stays in, however you want to call it. But I think that for us, and very much something that we believe, and I know from having run multi-site ops before, the organic growth story is much bigger than people give credit for, is much bigger than people think it is.

24:54The headroom inside of what's already happening, before you touch, to your point, like inorganic, top funnel, whatever it is, to drive new inbound is much bigger. I think you're right, like inbound is a huge part of that. Do you, I guess you're doing last line surgery, but do you find that there is, like, what other growth levers exist in that two, three year lead in before you're starting to think about new patient acquisition? You mentioned phone handling, inbound handling. Where else do you stick your finger in the hole and then out comes the penny pop? Where else are you looking in the practice?

25:27Yeah, we break every practice down between a demand issue and a capacity issue, right? And so is it patient demand or is it practice capacity? it's always capacity, right? Are there some cases where it would be demand? Yes, typically that's not a practice that we partner with if it's in an oversaturated area or something like that, right? Because we also want to make sure we're supporting a practice that needs what we're great at. And that's what I was alluding to earlier in the show is optimization is our specialty, right? And so the scheduling optimization, the phone system, and then the next lever is the same-day surgery.

26:06There are a number of surgeons that don't like it, and we will never force clinical philosophy. That's not for us, right? I am not going to tell you how to practice. I can't. I don't have the knowledge. I might have an opinion, but it's based on what I heard from somebody else. I've never done it.

26:26Patients clearly prefer same-day surgery. Any research we've done, they didn't even know it was possible. It's phenomenal, right? Off the charts, 10 out of 10, excited. And it's interesting. So we'll have partners come in, say, absolutely not. I'm never going to do same-day surgery. It's too small of a window. It's like risk. There's all the reasons. You can mitigate all those risks if it's done properly, which is the systems we've done. And then we had a surgeon come in. Massive practice, 11-doctor practice. And wasn't quite certain about the same-day surgery. Went to one of our facilities that is center of excellence for us with same-day surgery.

27:11Went back, literally doubled his productivity, his words. He was just at our recent board meeting. He's like, I went out, I saw it, I thought, this guy's not even that fast. And the funny part of it is this surgeon's a race car driver, so he knows what fast looks like. And he goes, this guy's not even that fast, which is great, because they're both amazing people and amazing surgeons. And he went back, and he reported that he's doubled his productivity. because he tried something that he either didn't know a lot about or didn't like. I don't remember which of the two it was, but because it was done safely and well done for years in this clinic that he visited, he believed, I told you earlier, these are evidence-based learners, and there's the outcomes.

27:48And so that's the third lever. And that lever alone can double any practice. We've seen it. So maybe, and this is like a natural transition, I also want to be respectful of the time you've already shared with us. So maybe a closing question is, it feels when you think about that transformation for this practitioner and maybe applying this more widely as a philosophy, and you've mentioned this now twice to three times, practitioners, in this case surgeons, are evidence-based learners. I think that probably carries across to a lot of healthcare professionals. That's ultimately how they're trained, how they move through the system, et cetera.

28:24something that we sometimes encounter and i'd be curious about your experience here is that sometimes you need to adopt something new when you need to try before the evidence is fully loaded you end up with this friction of show me it works and it gives your chicken and egging a little bit yes we have high conviction that it works but the data is not maybe scientifically robust enough i'm not talking about on a clinical side on a clinical side i appreciate why the The robustness will need to be there, and often is in terms of trials and validation, etc. But on a commercial side of the business, the customer side of the business, you don't always have the data.

29:00The data doesn't look as clean, not as clinically documented. And so you have to move a decision maker and key stakeholder audience who are typically very evidence-driven to embrace a sort of living slightly in the gray and making some choices based on something that maybe is slightly in the gray. so I'm thinking in terms of experience you've had how do you think what tools, what strategies have you found most effective in helping maybe a more black and white decision maker live in some of that gray area yeah so this is really tough for me because I'm a cynic I'm a Simon Cynic fan I love to be a fast follower I don't want to be first right now I think that causes me to miss some opportunities.

29:48But there's so much chaff. Everyone and their brother has an AI company that does amazing things today. And a lot of times it's not. It's just not. So you can really, as an organization our size, or bigger even, spend a lot of time and spin your wheels testing things that are going to fail. However, because of my background at Procter & Gamble, which is all test and learn, I love doing tests and trials. I'm sure my ops team is sick of it. They're all very kind and polite, but I'm sure when I'm not in the room, they're like, this guy, and it's ridiculous. Hey, try this vendor. Like, he's got to wear them out because at some point, you've got to focus on the business, which is the patient, right?

30:28So you can be distracted by too many trials. There's a delicate balance on leading and testing the brand new thing and being a fast follower. And I like to live right in between the two, right? Like, we do think, when I say we, Momus 360 team thinks that there are significant margin improvement opportunities and patient experience opportunities utilizing AI that we haven't taken advantage of. Our investor, Shore Capital Partners out of Chicago, is so committed to it that they've created I believe 25 is the total target number of people, but currently we have 14 people. All they do is support the short capital partners invested companies like i'm number 34 almost 360 is the 34th company started by short capital they're up to number 87 right now and so these people work within our portfolio companies to help us leverage that works so we brought an ai forward and you know they pressure tested it aggressively and now it's across our dental businesses right otherwise imagine we have four dental businesses.

31:40We had to test these ourselves. We've got four companies doing the same thing, right? Or we probably have 40 healthcare companies across the portfolio, all 40 doing the same thing, but we centralize these pressure tests. And they're the experts. Like, what do I know about AI? What's the output? Like, I don't know what goes on behind the scenes. And so to have a group that is that dialed in is, it gives us competitive advantage for sure. and then it helps us live between like fast follower and first. It's interesting to know so precisely where on that adoption curve you live. And I would argue that many of the folks that we speak to on a regular basis, customers and our partners and our people on the podcast, I don't think that they always know, hey, this is where I sit on that curve.

32:24And so we sometimes find ourselves having conversations with folks who are already onto their third or fourth vendor. They said, yeah, I know. I want to rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat. And then we've got other folks who I think are far more conservative, but I don't know that they know they are conservative. And so I think they are probably spending a lot of time getting ready, but actually maybe they need a bit more evidence. And I can't help but smile when you say short capital partners. We had someone on their team on the show probably a couple of months back who's now joined the investing team in short capital.

32:53And we did talk a little bit about the technology strategy. And I think he said something very similar, which is one of the big things that they want to do at head office is to do a lot of that pressure testing. Because knowing the problem and solution is something that the operating partner is going to have a much better read on. But doing the sort of in-between, connecting up the two ears, that's a harder job. And that needs a different kind of diligence. So it's interesting to hear that sounds like it's your experience then as well, which is that you see something that you think is interesting.

33:22You can surface it, but then they're going to go in and send the tech team in to do the due diligence and actually verify that what's on the wrapper is actually in the tin. That feels like a very healthy partnership. It gives us a lot of comfort. I can imagine it much. For sure. I can definitely see why. Trevor, thank you so much. I appreciate the time. I know you're traveling, and actually I think you're here in the UK right now, even though normally back west. Beautiful Oxford. In beautiful Oxford. So we get a bit of both. It's been wonderful to have you folks. for those interested. Trevor, I'm sure, available online, email, find him.

33:54I'm sure he's happy to chat. Growth and very interesting story. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode of The Business of a Clinic. We hope you had a good time. We hope it was helpful. If you can think of anyone who should join the conversation, feel free to nominate them, send them our way. We'd love to invite them to participate. If you like what you saw, give us a like, share, comment. We hope we'll see you again next time. Thanks so much.