Hello. This is Arianna Portolatin with the Becker's
Dental and DS Overby podcast. I'm thrilled to
be joined today by Doctor. Lincoln Harris, the
founder and CEO of RipeGlobal. Doctor. Harris, thank
you so much for being here today. It's
great to have you. Thank you so much
for having me. It's a pleasure. Yes. To
start us off, can you introduce yourself for
our listeners and tell us a little bit
about your background as well?
Yeah, I'm the founder of FRAP Global. My
background, I'm a general dentist.
I became a dentist in 1998.
I lived in rural Queensland in Australia.
And my journey to where we are now
started in this rural village where there's no
specialists,
and I had to learn multidisciplinary dentistry. Otherwise,
the patients
couldn't have anything except extractions.
And then over time, dentists started asking me
where I learned all those things. So to
start with, I just give them the list
of all the courses I'd done in The
United States and other places around the world.
But over time, I thought, why don't I
teach them? So,
I've been running
conferences,
education,
hands on training, and then,
our simulation training since
2006
in various stages. So that's kind of my
background and how I got here. And then
obviously,
this year, I moved to The United States
from Australia to continue the growth of the
company.
Great. Thank you so much for sharing that.
First question for you here. What are some
of the biggest issues that you're following in
the dental industry currently?
The biggest issue in dentistry, I think, is
still the same as it has been for
a long time. It it's the people.
Initially,
we've used technology to solve the
all areas around the dentist. So we've used
technology to automate marketing. We've used technology to
automate the phone calls and to give you
feedback using AI on the phone calls and
how you have missed opportunities and how your
phone calls can fall into
lead generation funnels. The practice management software is
now super sophisticated
at
at at diagnosing and bringing up opportunities in
the patient journey. Obviously, we now have
diagnostic
AIs
like Pearl and Overjet
and others. And so we have
pretty much
AI'd
every part of the dentist
practice
except the dentist.
And
the funnel or the choke point of all
groups and DSOs and group practices
is that
the
production or the
revenue is still
the hours worked
times the average billing hour of the dentist.
And so if the average billing hour is
low,
then
the production of the practice or the group
is low and the EBITDA is low. So
everywhere we go in
the world,
all over The United States, the DSOs and
the groups that we talk to say their
number one challenge is
onboarding dentists, training them up, getting them productive,
training dentists at scale.
And
really, they're struggling with
the fact that all of the
infrastructure for training dentists
is around the individual practice. It's not designed
for groups that
employ 300 or 500 or a thousand or
the biggest group we work with employs 4,000
dentists. So,
yeah, that's that's
kind of the
we hear the same thing everywhere. That's the
challenge, and that's the exciting thing for us
too.
Great. Can you tell us a little bit
more about your work with RipeGlobal and how
you're working to solve some of those challenges
in the industry?
So we developed simulation. Actually, we didn't develop
it for DSOs. That was a side pro
that that was something we discovered later. I'd
been running hands on courses in Australia and
New Zealand and Singapore and then various countries
in Europe and The UK and occasionally in
The United States
since about 02/2013.
And around about 02/2018,
I was trying to
think, how do I scale this globally in
a more sustainable fashion
than me spending my entire life
on a on a jet?
But on at that particular time, I was
pretty comfortable, and I didn't really have the
time.
And then COVID came along, and COVID both
made me uncomfortable,
but it also gave me the time.
And so we had the time to sit
there and go, how do we scale hands
on training?
And then more specifically,
we thought if you couldn't
fly people, obviously this was in our mind
during COVID, but if you couldn't fly someone,
how do you teach a hand skill, like
a procedure?
So not, not the didactic or the theory
of the procedure,
but the actual skill of it, and that's
when we develop simulation training. So,
in a great flurry of activity in 2020
and 2021,
we,
designed, got manufactured,
prototyped,
the training mannequins that we ship to 35
countries to train dentists. And then we also
built the method because you train our dentists
very differently using simulation training versus
flying them to a facility.
And we also then,
develop the software. So
the reason I'm in America is because if
you start doing hardware and software engineering and
raising capital to do it, you relatively quickly
end up in The United States. There's still
no other country to do those things. So,
that's how we're solving it.
And, you know, we're so excited that
when we were back running our first simulation
training courses with dentists, I think back then
it was like across about 15 or 20
countries.
We were blown away at how fast they
learned,
and we noticed that the dentists were learning
50% faster with simulation
than in a sim lab, like a traditional
facility.
And it took quite some time to work
out what was causing the dentist to learn
so quickly.
And And it's because when you're not sitting
next to them and you're using our platform,
you have to be very visual in your
feedback.
And the visual feedback
allows the dentist to see what they need
to correct
so much better than when you sit in
a facility and you point at things with
a probe, which is the traditional way of
teaching. So, it also because of the cost,
it's so much less expensive.
We can afford to get the dentist to
do
often 10 times as many repetitions in training.
So the value proposition, like for the same
cost, the value proposition is
massively higher, but, you know, it's not the
same cost.
It's something like three quarters of the cost
of training a dentist is the flights, the
accommodation,
and the loss of production from them being
away.
So that's how we're solving it
faster,
better, and more scalable.
Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Seems like it. Great to
hear about how you've been able to scale
the platform and all the different advantages that
there are with simulation training. Can you go
over some of the challenges that may come
that may come with this type of training
as well? The biggest challenges are that we
are doing, we can't copy anyone. So
because we are leading
by, like, we're so many years ahead of
anyone else in simulation training,
We can't just go, oh, let's copy what
someone else is doing, but do it better.
We literally have to invent everything, including
how do you sell this? How do you
communicate this to the market? How do you
go to a DSO and show them
this,
type of training that we do? So that's
the most difficult challenge is when you have
to build everything from zero.
I mean, it's good in that you have
a huge head start on the rest of
the world, but
it is difficult. It's like it's like being
the bow of an icebreaker. You know, you're
always smashing into the ice as you break
through.
The other challenges,
that we are doing something that's never been
done before from a training point of view.
We train more dentists say in restorative dentistry,
we run the largest continuum in the world
now. And then when we go into a
DSO,
there's never been an organization
that could
scale up training so quickly and to such
an extent.
And so,
like our pipeline of DSOs is like crazy.
There's like,
we've gone from,
I don't know, fifteen, twenty
DSOs in our pipeline. Before I moved to
America, we took us a year to get
to about 20,
and then it's taken us, like,
two months to go to nearly 80.
And so the demand is
insane,
but
it, it's no longer an education problem at
this scale. It's a change management problem.
So the biggest challenge is you have to
run a very
refined change management process as you roll this
out with a group.
If you just sit there and you're
hairless with your implementation. And about three years
ago with one of our very first groups,
we didn't know all of this. And, you
know, if you're careless with how you roll
things out, you can get change management failure,
which,
the reason we're,
so I guess the reason we put so
much emphasis on it is we've seen how
badly it can go if you don't put
emphasis on it. So that's a big part
of our skillset is understanding
both the psychology of dentists and how you
train them, but also
the change management process of working with a
large organization to roll it out so it
actually works.
Okay. Yeah. Super important. Thank you for sharing
more about that.
Moving on to, another topic here. I'm also
curious to know what are you most excited
about when it comes to dentistry at this
point and what makes you nervous about the
industry?
I think I'm excited with the pace of
innovation. The thing that actually is exciting and
scary is the same thing. The pace of
innovation, like,
there's tools coming out now that just make
life so much easier, and they make dentists
so much more productive.
You know, the three d printing techniques, the
automated
design software that takes scans and automatically designs
the crowns or the onlays and things,
the
automated radiograph reading, all of these things are
super exciting.
I find it, like,
just so, so cool.
I guess the thing that makes me nervous
is
one. How do you keep up with such,
it's not just that, you know, the pace
of innovation is, is accelerating exponentially.
And so just keeping up is actually getting
more and more tiresome.
And, you know, at some point
in the
near to long term future,
we're we're going to need to start thinking
about how do we integrate robotics into clinical
work.
And that's once again, it's one of those
things that's both exciting and kind of scary.
Like it's,
it's hard to visualize,
the speed of advancement in these areas. So,
yeah, I think
technology and innovation is always a double edged
sword. You know, it's, it's
fantastic.
It's kind of scary.
But the new the new dentist graduating
in this environment, that's all they will ever
know. So for them, it won't be scary.
It'll just be normal.
True. Yeah. That's a good point to make.
And and I know I've spoken to so
many dental leaders previously about the risks that
kind of come with not investing in new
technology and not keeping pace. And as you
said, it's advancing so quickly. So this is
definitely
an important issue, in dentistry right now. But
I know that there are a lot of
dentists out there who are finding it hard
to keep up with the pace of innovation,
as you said.
What do you think is challenging about keeping
up? Is it just
the amount that's, you know, out there? Is
it, the cost, the time, you know, the
the effort that it takes to to train
on these things?
What can you tell me about that?
I think it's just the effort more than
any other thing.
Like, some of these programs are expensive. I
mean, you know, a a rule that I
read in a
book, it was like some sort of practice
management book that I read when I was
at dental school, and it said, you know,
basically, don't be first and don't be last.
And I think that's a pretty good rule
to follow. Like,
there's a small percentage of people who just
love to be cutting edge, but cutting edge
is always very risky because you also find
out all the things that don't work.
So you don't wanna be for the average
dentist. You don't need to be first. There's
someone else who's happy to
pry things out. And if they find that
it works
good on them, they get to be the
tip of the spear and they can market
to all their patients before anyone else can.
But you definitely don't want to be last
either.
So, you know, let people try things out
for a bit and then you start to
get some sense. I think
the thing that makes it hard is it's
just tiring.
Once upon a time,
you could learn something and then you could
kind of put your feet up and chill
for the next two or three years until
they invented something new.
Whereas now
you
have to
continuously
learn
all of the time without stopping because there's
so much new stuff.
And so
if you do that all the time, you
kind of get fit. It's like, you know,
if you go to the gym regularly,
it's not so painful,
but if you want to take some time
off learning all of these new things,
then the catch up period is going to
be super hard. And then some people just
kind of get stuck where they just can't
catch up. So
I think
a little bit of effort all of the
time
solves a lot of these problems,
and just accept that it just doesn't go
away. It's just
you're just having a never ending torrent of
new things coming at you
forever and ever until you retire.
Correct.
Some good points that you make there. So
thank you for sharing those.
Last question for you here. What will the
most effective health care leaders need to be
successful in the next two to three years?
So we get to work with a lot
of health care leaders
across
so many organizations now, and
there's two things that make we can tell
we can tell when they a group has
really good leaders.
Like, you can see it in the group
very quickly if they have good leaders, And
we can also tell if they're, you know,
maybe a little bit challenged in the leadership
department.
So in health care in particular,
you need,
an understanding
of clinicians
and clinician
led
business.
So clinicians are not like normal corporate people
or technology people.
You can't treat them like that. They generally
have a higher standard of
what they think is right because of their
oaths that they make when they graduate.
And also because they get ethics and putting
the patient first drummed into their head from
the day they start dental school.
So,
I've seen, you know, people come from technology
and big corporations and try and bring that
big corporation attitude into dentistry. And it's always
a massive failure.
So they need that clinician understanding that clinician
led approach.
However, if they are a clinician,
they need executive
ability, executive function.
And so what I see frequently
in quite a few say clinical directors or
chief clinical officers is they understand the clinical
bit,
but they don't have executive function.
And it's when you have both those things.
So executive function, like just a simple thing,
like, you know, replying to your emails,
dentists are notorious for not reading their emails
or replying to them. And if you go
into a leadership position, then, you know, answering
your emails is quite important. So, you know,
that, and then how to
effectively communicate to people without just ordering them
or using authority, which as a dentist, you
tend to do a lot because
in a clinical situation, you don't have time
to
go through a whole communication process with your
assistant if the patient's bleeding to death.
So that
is what we see is when you get
a someone who has
good understanding of clinicians
and amazing executive function,
then that group is going to win.
And if you lack either of those things,
then
those groups tend to have EBITDA problems.
Alright. Well, that is all I have for
you today, Doctor. Harris. Thank you so much
for joining us today. It's been a pleasure
speaking with you, and I look forward to
connecting with you again in the future. Thank
you so much for having me.