In today’s show, special guest host Dr. Paul Homoly sits down with Dr. Quinn DuFurrena, executive Director of the Association of Dental Support Organizations. Dr. DuFurrena is a dentist and author of Transforming the Cottage Industry – The Rise of Dental Support Organizations.
Hi, I’m Dr. Paul Homoly on the Attainable Podcast network. With me this morning is Dr. Quinn DuFurrena. And Quinn is currently the executive director of the ADSO. Quinn has been an adventurer and an explorer in dentistry, from being a solo practitioner in a small Nevada town, to now being the executive director of one of the most powerful and prestigious organizations in dentistry. Dr. Quinn welcome to the Attainable Podcast.
Thank you, Paul. It’s great to be here. I think this is going to be an interesting conversation.
How do you help dentists, or how do you help groups of dentists overcome their fear of change? Or do you?
Education– that’s the key. You know, there’s this grieving process of change, and education is part of it. The typical corporate world, the name of that brings up all these negative emotions. Well, once you sit down and realize that we’re all just dentists. We all have a choice on how we want to practice. Some dentists like doing the business side. Some like, you know, contracting with all these different individual entities, with these vendors. They enjoy that. I would say most dentists don’t.
I would agree with that. They don’t enjoy the business aspect and they’re not good at it.
Exactly. We’re not trained to do that. You know, there’s a few that have MBAs and good for them. But for the most part, dentists what to do dentistry. That’s what we are trained at. So you’ve got two extremes. You’ve got one extreme where the dentists say, well, I don’t want to do any business at all. I don’t want to own any assets. And that’s where you see a lot of millennials heading to, and they’re going to affiliate with Aspen and Pacific Dental Services and Heartland and those big DSOs.
Then you’ve got on the other extreme, the traditional solo dentists that says, I want to do everything. I want to do the HR. I want to hire fire. I want to do my own marketing. But you have this big gap in between. And with this changing environment, what I’m seeing is what I call it a hybrid in there. And it’s changing the dental industry. And that’s the dentist that wants the control– may want the assets. Dentists take risks. It’s a risk to try to get into dental school. It’s so competitive.
That’s right.
So that’s the type of personality that goes into it. So you’ve got this big group in the middle here, you know, hundreds of thousands of dentists, or 100,000 maybe, somewhere in there.
Sure.
And what they want, is they want to own their own assets, but they don’t want to do all the business stuff. They want to concentrate on becoming an excellent dentist. And so that’s where I see the future going, this hybrid.
Well, Quinn, I really enjoyed your comments today. I always appreciate a visionary in dentistry. You’re not only a visionary but you’re also an explorer. And one thing that I’ve really enjoyed about our relationship, is as an explorer, you’ve left us a map. Transforming the Cottage Industry, it’s your book and I thank you for giving it to the profession, Quinn. It’s an absolute marvelous job you’ve done.
Well, thanks, Paul. And once again, I appreciate all help that you’ve done for dentists, for oral health innovation, and for ADSO. The fact that you’re out there spreading the word, we appreciate it.