Hello and welcome to the Becker's Healthcare Podcast.
My name is Chanel Bunger and I am
currently recording live at the Becker's Future Dentistry
Roundtable
and sitting down with Demias Piguis, the CEO
of My Orthodontist North Carolina.
Demias, thank you so much for joining us
today. Thank you. Yeah. Appreciate it, Chanel.
Now to get us started, could you please
introduce yourself and tell us a bit about
your background?
Yes. Like you said, I'm Demias, and I
am currently the CEO of My Orthodontists,
which is we have 14 orthodontic practices in
this all in the state of North Carolina.
And our motto is, we accept everybody.
So we wanna be accessible,
and we wanna be affordable, and that's where
what we focus on doing.
I actually started my career as an engineer,
and I quickly learned that I'm not an
engineer. So I went to back to school,
went to grad school, got an MBA in
marketing and,
entrepreneurship.
And then since that time, which was 24
years ago, believe it or not, I've spent
most of my time doing 1 or 2
things. Either I was, doing
health care, which is what I'm doing now,
of course, or I was doing multiunit,
leadership. And some of that was on retail
and some of that was, obviously in health
care as well. And that sort of brings
in 2019 is when I first got into
dental and I worked with a very large
DSO,
and I
oversaw
2 over 200 locations across 15 states.
My next role was a COO in dental,
and then now I'm CEO, like I said,
of Myerford Donnas.
Now you've already kind of walked us through
some of the
key experiences that have shaped your leadership journey.
But could you maybe delve into that a
little bit further?
Absolutely.
What's great about health care, and back when
I was in grad school,
you know, I realized that I'm going to
spend
and most of us do. We spend 40,
50 hours,
at work during the week. And back then,
it occurred to me that if I'm gonna
spend that much time in my job,
I want to work in an industry, that
helps to impact lives. So
my first job was in pharmaceuticals.
I've been I spent some time outside of,
health care,
but it always was pulling me back in
for that very same reason.
And in this
industry, we're able to touch people's lives.
So something as simple as what I'm doing
now is, you know, of course, I work
at a company where orthodontist, we straighten people's
smiles. And one of the things we do
is we do a smile,
a smile reveal,
after someone takes their braces off. And it's
always an amazing thing, when we see
young man, young woman for the first time
seeing their teeth
straight, and
they're no longer holding their smile. They're no
longer putting your hand up in front of
their face.
There's a lot of meaning in the work
that we do, which is why I'm really
drawn to them. Oh, exactly. Braces definitely
changed my life. That's for sure. Exactly.
But moving forward, now that you have the
ears of a lot of dental professionals,
what strategic initiatives are you currently prioritizing
for your growth strategy and for patient care?
So I've actually
was on a panel earlier today at Becker's,
and this is something I've been I did
a podcast actually a couple of weeks ago,
a different podcast, And I've been mentioning this
a lot, because I think it's low hanging
fruit, and it pretty much applies to any
dental company out there,
whether you have a single practice or whether
you're a group.
I challenge
doctor owners,
leaders in the industry
to take a look at how many calls
are coming in.
And out of every 100 calls, how many
get answered?
Anytime I've asked someone that question, they all
say to me, 90, 95 percent of the
time we answer the phone. Reality is is
about 60 to 70%.
So that's one. I always wanna put that
out there.
It's just a way that if you wanted
to drive
very quickly growth in your business,
make sure that you are answering the phone
close to a 100% of the time. So
that's one.
Some of the other things that we're doing,
another big initiative is, we're
rolling out a marketing platform.
And in that marketing platform, it's gonna allow
us to do 2 things. 1,
communicate
more easily with our patients. So it's actually
something that will make our patients' lives easier.
So, for example, one of the things a
patient cannot do right now is that if
they needed to make an adjustment to their
appointment,
they cannot do that. They have to call
us. Right? And that's an inconvenience. People don't
like to call. So with this new platform,
they'll be able to just
go right in online
and make the adjustment themselves.
Now that's awesome. How does that help grow
the business? Well, we actually get about 19
calls every day in every practice.
And, typically, what they're saying is I need
to make an adjustment to my appointment. So
now what that is gonna allow us to
do instead of having,
a team member on the phone,
helping a patient adjust their appointment, the patient
will do that themselves. And now we can
reallocate that time with that team member to
doing more for the patients that are actually
in the practice. Right? So that's one of
our big initiatives.
Got it. Got it. Now moving forward, with
all of your different practices,
what would you say the most significant challenges
dental and DSO leaders are facing at the
moment?
And how are you addressing them at your
practices?
No. It's a great question.
And this I've heard this a lot. This
has been a theme, and this has been
a theme across dental
is what I I'll say it's turnover. Right?
This is what I hear people talking about
turnover, and we all talk about turnover in
dental.
What we've done at MyOrthodontist
is put a focus on retention.
It's the same thing, but it's almost sort
of like two sides of the same coin.
And when you change your mindset from saying,
okay, we have turnover. So how do we
deal with the turnover? What strategies may be
we need to hire
faster, for example.
When you start to really focus on retention,
you don't want the people to leave, period.
And if they don't leave, then you don't
have to worry about
hiring faster. So the question is, how do
you retain the people that you have?
And that's what we've really been focused on
across our practices. And one of the things
we've done is we've really worked hard to
align incentives.
So when we win as a company, our
practices win,
and we continue to sort of develop
incentives
for our practices.
So we have a practice level bonus across
all 14 practices.
And when the practice bonus, literally everybody in
the practice gets some kind of bonus. Right?
We have a quarterly bonus that says,
even if you didn't make your
bonus in month 1, maybe you made it
in month 2, maybe you missed it in
month, you made it in month 3,
and you also made your goal for the
quarter, we go back and pay you for
month 1. Right? So there's just a lot
of creativity that we put into,
you know, sort of joint winning.
We win, they win, and that has
impacted our retention in a way where we've
seen over a 12 month period,
95% retention.
Love to hear it. Well, Demias, I wanna
thank you for your time. But before I
let you go, with all of your
unique experiences
and background
and engineering
and as a COO and now you're a
CEO,
I think you're the perfect person to answer
this question. Could you share some advice for
other emerging leaders looking to have the same
type of success that you've had in your
career?
I would say
it's sort of going back to what and,
you know, we were just talking about earlier
is I really do have a passion for
the work that I do,
and
I thrive
in this industry.
I was talking to one of my colleagues
earlier about a lot all the things that
we have going on. He was like, man,
you have a lot going on. You must
be exhausted.
It's like, not really. Energy's high, man. I
love what I do, and I love the
impact that we're having on our lives and
especially,
what our founder, doctor Larry Murray,
his whole vision and being able to execute
his vision
is we wanna bring great dental
and dentistry
to areas
that are not necessarily getting served.
And that further sort of drives my passion.
Right? So what my advice to all the
young leaders out there,
find that thing that you're very passionate about
and get in that industry and then see
how you feel about it. Excellent advice. Well,
Demias, I want to thank you once again
for your time today and for sharing your
insights on the Becker's Healthcare Podcast. Thank you
so much. Appreciate it, Chanel. Thank you.