House of Brands vs. Branded House: Scaling Healthcare Without Losing Local Trust

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Welcome to the healthcare success podcast. Today, I get the pleasure of interviewing another old friend. This goes back years, Matt. I don't know how long we've known each other, but for a long time, I'm pleased to introduce Matt Hall. Matt, welcome to our podcast.

Matt Hall (Smile Brands): Thanks Stewart, happy to be here. I think it's, I mean, we might be coming up on two decades, believe it or not. So.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Pretty close, I think so, for sure. So Matt, tell me about your current role for our listeners who may not know you, like what you do, what your title is, the kinds of things you're doing, and then we can talk a little bit more about other things. So this will be a fun one.

Matt Hall (Smile Brands): Sure, thanks again. And yeah, it's been an interesting role. I've been at Smile Brands now for almost four years. It'll be four years this summer. And my role is the Chief Experience Officer. And it's kind of an interesting role. And I think sometimes a bit wide reaching and maybe even nebulous at times. we really looked at this role as an opportunity to kind of fix some things in-house first to be fully transparent and really bring some consistency and a framework to what we're doing at Smile Brands and how we support all the practices and all of our providers. And so we're starting internally with experience and the experience through the infrastructure that enables and supports all of our people first.

So we can then take that externally. So I oversee essentially our digital transformation for the organization. One of our traditional IT departments actually reports up into me with our applications and automations and AI. Of course, traditional marketing as well, our marketing team, I know we'll talk a bit more about that today and the interesting structure around branding, marketing, and advertising in an organization like ours. And then also all of our systems implementation is part of my team as well. So we're going through a transformation to bring one practice management system across all nearly 600 practices. And my team does all the implementation and training for that. So really everything that encompasses the enablement and support of the experiences internally so that we can provide better patient experiences for each of our patients at all the practices.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): All right, great. And that's a big job and there's a lot to talk about today. In fact, for our listeners, we're gonna be talking about today, the multi-location brandings aspect and then we'll talk about tech enablement on a subsequent podcast. So, but today, Matt, you have to start off. I'd love to hear your version of our bridge of how it began and then I'll sort of add some comments. Cause I think it's pertinent actually.

Matt Hall (Smile Brands): Yeah, yeah, no, it's, it's funny, you know, we could probably talk the entire hour about the history, but yeah, I remember first meeting you at the early days or my early days of Pacific Dental Services and at PDS back then, you know, we were really, you know, pioneering kind of this DSO space. was in the, mean, Steve Thorne's been doing it for multiple decades, but we really started to accelerate our growth in the early 2000s. And so that's when we had expanded a little bit of an acquisition model and a lot of a de novo model. we, at that time, were a bit of a hybrid as we were growing and we started to see, you know, the opportunity really to bring all these practices under one umbrella.

And so I laugh because I remember like, I remember getting pulled over actually on my way to your office, ‘cause I was so excited about some of these ideas that Stewart and and I and Lonnie back then and Steve Thorne, know, just we were, you know, we were ideating on some really neat stuff around how we bring locally branded practices all under one kind of umbrella brand.

And, that was, I didn't get a ticket by the way, but that was the first time I met you. And, I think we were scheduled for an hour and we went multiple hours because we're just so excited about the opportunity of creating what became the Smile Generation and still one of the great brands in dentistry and love the stuff they've continued to do over there at Pacific Dental and how over the years we really grew the different components of the Smile Generation, but all with that idea of bringing individually branded offices under one umbrella.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So...

That is such an exciting memory and it's been a long road since then. And Matt, we'll talk about today's discussion is about branding multi-site businesses. But I think that, first of all, you did a fantastic job on your side personally. Steve is a genius. mean, he just is in terms of operational. I wish I had a an inkling of the operational skill he has. It's just amazing. And so the vision to see how, and then for our listeners who don't know this, even before we met Matt, people on my team today were working with Steve back when they had, I think, four offices. So right at the very, very beginning of doing this, and then to see it accelerate. And now Pacific Dental, and then you guys at Smile Brands, these are icons in the industry of working with multi-location providers.

Fun fact, Matt, next week I'm going to a leading private equity and healthcare conference. And when I go to these things, everybody knows Pacific Dental. They know that story. So it's really exciting and kind of fun to be going that far back.

So today, and the Smile Generation, well, actually, why don't we talk about, I'll come back to Smile Generation in a second. So let's talk about the two models and I'd love you to give your input on this, the branded house and house of brands. You know, we can talk about, you each, but since you're my guest today, I'd love you to speak to that. Like, what is a house of brands? What is a branded house? And we'll talk about the pros and cons of both.

Matt Hall (Smile Brands): Sure. Yeah, no, it's like you said, I mean, it was really interesting. Like I said, Steve Thorne is genius and I was total blessing to have him as a mentor for 15 years. Now I get to team up with Steve Bilt, who's the equal genius to Steve Thorne. And so it's total blessing for me, but I've gotten to see both sides, which is really interesting. And in between, not to get into, you know, my, my history, but in between I ran a technology company, in the healthcare, FinTech insurers, insure tech space. And then also spent time in, in dermatology multi-site. So we had a bit of a hybrid as well at Western Platinum where, you know, again, the, branded house and house of brands.

So yeah, for you know, I guess going back to Pacific Dental Services, we, you know, at the end of the day, and I think we, we see it at Smile Brands too, where Smile Brands, of course, you have this, this branded house and, and it's grown through acquisitions. So we have, we have almost like a neighborhood of brands that we're, we're working with.

But I think when we look at, at healthcare, especially outside of primary care, we see a lot of localization. And so the goal with Pacific Dental Services and same with Smile Brands is always to be local and dentistry is local. We saw that in dermatology too. I worked consulting with physical therapy. You see it there too. It's a local relationship. It's a local service. even when it is you know, and we see this at Smile Brands, even when we have multiple locations with the same name, with the same brand, we still try to localize it because, you know, typically in those types of services, we saw that I did some work in optometry, ophthalmology as well, very localized. So at Pacific Dental Services, of course, our naming convention, was based on being local and same support and operational consistency clinical enablement behind each of those practices. When I left PDS, gosh, somewhere around 1200 or so individually named practices.

A couple of those had, you know, shared names and worked as almost like a small little local group. But again, I think probably said local 10 times in the last two minutes here, but that's been the key for us. And same with Smile Brands is to be very localized, be involved in the communities and connecting with patients on a local level.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So that is such a key point and going back to just the definition for people that may not be as close to this, the idea of a house of brands means that you have, you know, a holding company that has multiple brands. Usually that's three or four brands like Procter and Gamble might have a couple dozen, but Pacific Dental on the extreme had a thousand brands, literally a thousand brands. So that is something that is rarely, rarely done.

And then the branded house means that you have one brand across all your locations. And then there's hybrids. You mentioned that you guys have a house of brands, maybe a dozen or two brands, but not thousand. So there's, and the question that always comes up is, which one's better? And the answer is, it depends, right? And nobody wants to hear that, but it really, it depends. And we'll talk about that in a minute because these are the kinds of decisions our team loves to be part of. Like, we were part of with Pacific Dental at the very earliest days.

And when we work with clients, sometimes that's all done. Sometimes though, it's still a nagging thorn and we'll come back to all those things in a minute. But I do want to go back on the local thing and I'll have to remember to tell, ask our editor to include a link to our podcast that we did about 10 years ago, probably talking about the Pacific Dental strategy.

And essentially to do the summary for today is that you guys were so great, were and are still so great at having that. You'd have community people that would be out in the community that would be in charge of marketing on a grassroots level, all the different locations and Little League teams and sponsorships and park things and having, just being a part of it and then having great signage typically and retail locations as a part of the model.

I don't know if you want to say anything about that before we move on because I think it's just so, because you had to bring in that localized feel for every office is insane. And it's, but it's also very powerful.

Matt Hall (Smile Brands): Yeah, it's, I can touch on that. It's interesting where we're doing very similar at, at Smile Brands and, and we now have, you know, regional, what we call actually regional marketing business partners. So how do they team up with the local provider, with the local, practice manager and really look at how we get involved and how we build relationships within that community. And so understanding the business, understanding the practice of dentistry, the clinical benefits, the oral systemic health benefits of dentistry and why that's important to people and keeping them healthy in the community are all these components that we're trying to work in with our teams to say, hey, now that we know those things, how do we get those out into the community? And so it is...

Again, like, like we talked about that, that local approach around all components of marketing and the practice digitally, of course, and what, what are the different areas we can participate in, contribute in, and of course, advertising locally. And the same with, you know, in the community and, how do we become part of that? How does the team at the dental office, again, we look at total experience and, Smile Brands has such a strong culture, such great people that really truly care about the oral health of their patients. And so it's getting those people in front of the community and getting our providers in the community so they can build those relationships. And then we also bring it inside the practice as well.

So, you know, not to dive too deeply into the tactics of it, but that's an important piece of connecting with your community as well. It's, it's, you know, a lot of the larger groups are, are stamping out models of practices. But finding the opportunities to localize that there's, there's certainly opportunities inside each office environment, no matter what, you know, what, what branch of healthcare or vertical of healthcare that you're in, you can find those environmental touch points within the space that you're treating patients, whether that's in the front office or in the hallways or connection points within the practice that really bring in that localization and what are you supporting locally? Who are the people in your practice that live locally and you know making some of those personal connections in the space as well as is critical for us. S

o that's those are things that you know we at Smile Brands we haven't done in the past and we've really you know kind of stuck to the branded house because we had these big groups of branded houses and we're really trying to decentralize those and bring local decision making on local connections to the local office.

It really is, yeah, it's something that that PDS did well. Again, most patients don't know Pacific Dental Services. You talked about, you know, having a house of brands and they know the local dental office and they know, you know, the owner doctor in that practice and they, you know, we make those the hero, not the big, you know, big, you know, multi-billion dollar brand, the hero, right. And so, there's a lot that goes into that. I think, yeah, I mean, it's really fascinating. I know.

You guys do this so well, Stewart, and you advised us so well in the beginning when we were ideating on all this stuff at Pacific Dental was that this was the exact conversation and how we take that strategy then down into the tactical execution for each practice.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That's awesome. So, you guys are both companies, just such great success stories at this, right? And it's evolution, right? They're still evolving to this day.

Let's talk about the pros and cons of both models. You know, like, let's, you know, some of our businesses might have, you know, a dozen locations or two dozen locations or whatever. Some, you know, the people listening may have one or two locations, right? But others have hundreds or some rare rarely have a thousand.

But the idea of, you know, what is the advantage of having, you know, broadly speaking, a house of brands? What are some of the advantages that you see? And I'll probably add a few, but I'm just curious. Let's talk about some of the breaking it down here.

Matt Hall (Smile Brands): Yeah, I can share both sides, but on advantages, certainly, know, yeah, I think it's...

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So yeah, then whichever order you want to talk about this, the advantages and disadvantages of each, you can either do it like the advantage and disadvantages of each one at a time or however you want to just go figure it out. We'll talk about it.

Matt Hall (Smile Brands): Yeah, it probably depends on the listener. So I'll try and play both sides of the coin on advantages, disadvantages. I think, you know, certainly from the practice level, you know, the advantage of having this house of brands is that you have a bit more control and the local autonomy and the delivery. I always, I like, I'm always reminded. And a mentor once told me. “Look, advertising is what you will pay to say who you are. Marketing is what you're trying to tell everybody you are. And brand is actually what other people say you are,” right?

And so I think from the local control standpoint, house of brands gives each of those practices the ability to really influence their own local audience and their community so that their community is speaking positively about them and creating a positive brand for them.

From a marketing standpoint, I would say there's a bit of a disadvantage because as the centralized support of it, there's a difficulty in trying to serve each and every one of those. I think that difficulty is overcome by a lot of the things that, you know, the big groups do well. And I know a lot of smaller groups are investing in different scalable technologies and infrastructure to say, look, yeah, here's some, and we, I'm sure we'll talk about this next time, but here are some tools that actually help scale in an environment like this.

So you can build marketing based off of technology and frameworks, shared content, shared assets with customizable variables that then make it feel local. So it is, you know, it's a disadvantage on that sense to say, Hey, look, you know, we've got to support these is 500, 16,000, you know, 1500 different offices with different names.

So yeah, I'm trying not to be biased, I, again, because I think each, know, the healthcare is localized. So I like the house of brands, even though it's probably more difficult and requires, you know, a bit more from a scalability standpoint and infrastructure investment and people and processes that are very sound and disciplined to be able to support all that. It's a beautiful thing when you get it right, that's for sure.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That's for sure. And so if you were to argue on the other side just for a moment to have the branded house, what would you see the advantages and disadvantages there?

Matt Hall (Smile Brands): Yeah. So I mean, on the branded house, I think one of the best at it period is Chick-fil-A. Again, total blessing. My mentor, one of my mentors is Steve Robinson at Chick-fil-A CMO for 30 years. And he’s just a legend. They've done it so well. And I, and it's like, Oh, well, this is a healthcare podcast. What are you bringing Chick-fil-A in for?

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): By the way, what is it with you and people named Steve in your life?

Matt Hall (Smile Brands): It's not true, I don't know. That's a good point. I never thought about that. But yeah, there's some good Steves out there. My dad's name is Steve. So there's another one, Stewart.

But you know, Chick-fil-A does it so well. I mean, they've taken one of, you know, they've built one of the best brands, period. But they've done it in a very, you know, it's a distributed model as well. Like it's quick serve restaurants, just, you know, in thousands of them, but they've built the brand so well. And again, he's Steve, Steve Robinson is the one who's really helped me with like in this role to say, okay, how do you, how do we, how do we build the inside? Right? So we can then deliver the right customer experience, patient experience. So we can then market that and you do, you get a lot of efficiency out of having a strong brand, strong single brand.

And then you can allow localization. mean, you look at Chick-fil-A, there's never any coupons at Chick-fil-A. They're just so ingrained in their communities. They've equipped or enabled each of their stores with localized tools. There's kits to be able to, again, this is a it's branded, but here's the kit to localize it. Have your daddy/daughter date night and, you know, have these different events hosted at your store.

And those are things that we can translate into, you know, any multi-site healthcare service where you really, when you're, and we have this at West Durham, really strong brand, you know, in dermatology, was like, we started to do the same thing of, enable them with tools to feel and connect locally, but leverage the brand, the branded house. That's the, to me, that's the ultimate win. That's, you know, if you can get there, I think you have higher upside in having a branded house that is consistent. You think of the, the, the service delivery, the food delivery, the experience delivery at a Chick-fil-A or at an In-N-Out, you know, the simplicity around it.

Like Steve Robinson always used to joke and I'd be back there, you know, in Georgia and we'd have lunch and of course you're eating Chick-fil-A and he's like, this is just Tyson chicken, you know, but It's the way that we serve it. It's the consistency in which we serve it. It's the, you know, the pleasure, the, my pleasure that each of our people embodies and how they deliver it.

And so they've, you know, that's where I in, in healthcare would love to see, you know, and some folks do it well for sure. But I think that's the biggest win when you can get both, you know, the branded house with a local feel. I actually,while I'm kind of like, you know, I've lived in both camps and because, you know, I know that the PDS model so well after 15 years and the Smile Brands model for four years here, it's, yeah, the house of brands definitely works and definitely has an advantage, but as... As those who figure out how to be a branded house and still deliver locally, I think that's the ultimate win.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So it's really interesting too, the, a lot of times when we're talking about this to clients and it depends on the business. Like we have worked with a skilled nursing chain of about 50 or 60 locations and that house of brands really came in handy during COVID because there were some like happened in a lot of skilled nursing homes. There were some deaths that, especially one of them. And like the, if you're in a high-risk specialty, that can help the blowback against the whole business, because that can be really a big deal. So that's something we see.

And then, of course, if you're doing multiple brands of three brands or five brands or 1,000 brands, the scaling of that's the big challenge. How do we do that? So I think that the advantages of the... I think it goes back to the, really, your experience where you are now and then back at PDS before.

It's like the strategy of localization was maybe the core and then above that was the brand, right? Like where the brand strategy, because it's like, okay, how do we localize this? I would also say that another example of the branded house is Starbucks. And so it's interesting about Starbucks. And I've learned this over time, like some of the stores do better than others, but a lot of them have a very local feel. Like they'll have different music, the choice of the way they do things.

So again, there are some that are very generic and you feel like you're in a truck stop like any other Starbucks, but there are some that do a really good job of localizing. It sounds like you're familiar with them as well.

Matt Hall (Smile Brands): Yeah. Yeah. Bringing in that, I mean, really, and it's like the old Starbucks and now, you know, they went through that phase of, love it. The truck stop, they all became truck stops and now they're trying to go back. And yeah, it's through Steve Robinson. I got to work with a couple of people at Starbucks and bringing in that's really from the environmental standpoint, because you really like at Starbucks, they really tried to localize it and.

The old theory, which is now new again for them is, is to actually immerse yourself into the space and make it a comfortable space. They've they got very transactional and app-focused and like, okay, come in and pick it up. See you later. Whatever. It got rid of the names. No, you know, no Sharpies anymore and things like that. Right. Where now they're bringing that back. And that's, we took a lot of pieces from that around the environment. Like I was talking about earlier to say. You know, Starbucks, the ones that do it well, they bring in pieces, you know, pieces of the environment and a local community into the, you know, into the actual store.

So if the store is in a beach town, they're bringing in beach decor, you know, or, or there might be, you know, they're the imagery on the walls is reflecting that, or if they're in a mountain town, it's like, okay, you're seeing one of my favorites fly fishing photos and things like, like they bring it into the environment. And then they also, the ones that do it well, a lot of times you'll see like a local board. And so it's almost like a pin board, like an old-school pin board of what's going on in the community.

Those are things, know, because of dental, we, we inherited and started to bring them into our dental offices. And we were doing similar, very similar at Smile Brands to say, bring those elements in. And then like you said, at Smile Brands, there's, you know, there's some of our brands have over a hundred practices. And so we have to, you know, bring some of these tactics in to help localize it and really make that connection with the community.

So environment's a big one and it's easy, like changing the environment of a practice to make it feel more, you know, ingrained in the community as opposed to this big corporate chain that just got plopped into the community is something you can control by just the environment inside the practice or maybe even some of the things that you use on the exterior of your practice and things like that.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So it's funny because the desire to scale, the desire to make more profit sometimes can get, it's counterintuitive. Suddenly the magic is gone. So sure, we got rid of the Sharpies. This is much more efficient, but now everything is sort of sterile and it feels like anyplace else. And if you look back at it, it's like, how much did that cost again? Why did we make that change? And so it's hard. I can see how that would happen. Like, “oh, we've got this great thing. I've got this great idea. gonna cut all our costs. And we're gonna graze our margin by 3%, 3 %” and then just lost the essence of what it is you're doing. So that's a deal.

Well, let's talk about, it's funny, you would jump straight to the environment, which is great. You're going where I wanted you to go anyway, so that's awesome. I would love to talk about, and I don't know how much you can speak to this, it depends on the business you've been with, but like the culture of the office. And I would love you to talk about that in a couple of different ways. One would be, the culture, you know, trying to get a unified culture with that differentiation within the office. And then especially at de novo offices where you're building from scratch, I'm assuming it might be a little easier. Or if you're taking over an older practitioner's business where I'm guessing sometimes the compliance level isn't so great. So, and like, because the culture can be a big problem, especially in the earliest stages.

I'll just set you up a little bit and then can talk about whatever you want.

But like when we were working with clients, you know, the, I find that there is a different level of maturity of how recently these businesses have been brought together. And so I'll give you an example. We worked with the Durham group when it still had owner doctors and then owner doctors is about 13 of them. And so that they still felt like they had their own individual practices. They had a common name, but they really were practicing very separately. And they had in 25 or 30 locations or something, but it's, everything was still being made by committee. Decisions were made by committee. The CEO was involved, but really it was still, you know, democracy largely.

When the businesses go past, certain point that just falls apart. You can't do that anymore. Like you can't be democracy. And so typically you'll have a stronger, more centralized role of decision making. But I remember even with a business like that, the culture varied, the experience varied, the culture and the experience varied so much by location. And then when you get into large, so maybe the younger the location is, not necessarily smaller, but younger, because sometimes it's going to happen for big businesses. They buy a hundred here, a hundred there, a hundred there, but those cultures take time to do that. So I'd love to just anything you want to talk about that at all. Cause that's it. I know it's, we could do a whole podcast on this one topic, but take your time on this, because think it's important.

Matt Hall (Smile Brands): Yeah, no, it's a great question. It's a great topic. I think, yeah, I, know, early days of Pacific Dental, we were making acquisitions to get into new states. So we dealt with this quite a bit at West Derm and with Platinum acquisition model. mean, it's, that's how we were growing Smile Brands. There's always been an acquisition model and now it's well not always in recent years became hybrid as well with de novos. But I think what I have seen is that a strong culture, you know, centrally is important and knowing who you are and having that well-defined and not, you know, kind of going from the core there, but then having the right people who embody that. think the people side of it.

And this is what a lot of what we're going through at Smile Brands is really then activating those people. We, know, a big piece, for example, of Smile Brands culture is our Smiles for Everyone Foundation. That foundation is actually the largest in the world for dental services. We've got a dozen different outposts around the world. do localized cases as well across the United States in our practices.

That has become a piece of like who we are and what's important to us. And it's really interesting because we found that a lot of folks who are long tenured know it, love it, track it, follow it, contribute to it, you all the good stuff. And a lot of the folks in recent years, because, you know, we're going through transformation, don't know as much about it. And so... We've really tried to grow from the core to say, how do we get these things? Not that we wanna be self promoting in this case of what we're doing from a giving back standpoint. That's not why we do it. We do it to help people in need, but that's a part of our fabric. And that's a part of what attracts a lot of people to Smile Brands is that they want be a part of that culture. They want to be a part of a culture that you know, in the individual offices has autonomy.

Now, of course there's a framework like that's group practice. There's whether you have five practices, 15, 50, 500 or a thousand. It's you have that framework, but you've got to allow some flexibility within that framework. And I think that framework really has to entail the culture of who we are and what we believe and how we act and clinically what we, know, what our clinical team is recommending and training to always stay, you know, what we call continuously elevating the standard of care so that our clinicians are providing the best dentistry and our patients are receiving the best dentistry possible. So a lot of that, think, works from the central culture and kind of allows this framework and enablement into each practice.

And then I think it's equally important for the, I know a lot of models have like Pacific Dental has owner doctors. have partner doctors, even when there's not ownership at the local practice level, there's usually a lead dentist or lead doctor. They, know, again, that's part of leadership.

Part of leadership is in, any, in any size business or any size practice is actually being a champion for the culture. And so we bring kind of that, that what is Smile Brands and who are we culture to each practice. But again, we're a house of brands too. each local practice and each small group practice even has leadership that's building their own culture that's consistent with the Smile Brands culture. And so that's got to be led locally and that's got to be allowed locally. I mean, that's...I think we see stronger engagement and retention when our teams and our leaders and our clinicians are embodying that culture and promoting it locally.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So is it a lot easier? I don't know. It's like with the de novo, especially if you've got a younger dentist, they're buying into the culture. You don't have a culture to change. If you're buying a more mature without being in any way, meaning to the ageist or whatever, but just nature of humans, if you buy into somebody who's had a business for 25 years, they may feel frustrated. They're not where they want to be or they may love where they are, but they've done it a certain way. Is it really hard to move like?

Or do you find that some people you can, can you tell that they're to be easier than others? Can you interview our staff? Like, you know, I often talk about a staff member. Her name was, uh, we call her Dolores, where she was all, everybody's like, well, she's really curmudgeonly. It's just the way she is. And everybody kind of got used to living in this fog. And when she miraculously retired, it's a true story. Like the business went up by like 35% like immediately. So I could, is that a thing? Is that, you know, it's my experience, but I'm curious, is that pretty common? And are there ways of even telling like this is going to be a better fit or not? How does that work?

Matt Hall (Smile Brands): Yeah, it is. That's a great point. think, from a de novo standpoint, absolutely. There's a lot of, and I've got some great friends at Heartland too, and we all do similar. When you're building a de novo and looking for who's going to be the owner doctor, who's going to be the lead dentist or whatever they might call them, typically like, matured organizations are looking at, “okay, who's within my organization and who has been part of like, almost like,” it's almost like dating, like this courting process of like, “is this going to be a good fit? Will this person be a good leader? Have they, from, do they have components of clinical excellence that we've monitored for some period of time to know that they'll provide the best dentistry or the best healthcare to their patients,” even looking at teams that they work with and surveying them, interviewing them, “hey, is this somebody you enjoy working with?”

And so there's a lot of components like for a de novo before, there's such a long ramp and planning period that you can kind of court some of your internal folks to see, okay, who's going to fit best there. I think acquisitions, similar in a sense and, and you know, at West Durham Platinum, like as chief growth officer that we were doing assessments all the time. And one of the components in, and I'd recommend it to anybody, obviously you're doing your due diligence, but, people matter. Like this is a people business. Like this is a people service at the end of the day. You know, is this somebody that we can partner up, with somebody who wants to partner up with us, somebody who's going to carry our culture, somebody who's going to continue to carry their local culture and serving their patients.

It's a big part of the assessment process. And a lot of yeses and nos came down to that fit. it's something any acquisition model deals with, but it's gotta be a... And you've got to value it and be able to communicate to, you know, to your board or to, you know, your investors of like, this is why we're choosing at the end of the day, A over B could come down to because yeah, they've got great historical numbers. We all can see that we all can do historical diligence, but we've got to then take that and take the people that we're partnering with and project that onto what it's going to do for, you know, for the future.

So, yeah, it's a great question, Stewart. think, I think everybody should be diving into that, that, that personal, you know, connection and relational component with, you know, both the de novo side and the acquisition side for sure. And, and you got to be able to say no, like it's we've all had acquisitions that we were like, “this is a maybe, but I, gosh, the upside's so great. Let's you know, but we're not sure about, you know, who we're partnering with,” you know, and some of those go well and we've all had them that don't go well. And then we kick ourselves and we learn from it, but it's like, yeah, that's, it is that important of a component when growing for sure.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So let's talk about, we got a couple more questions as we're wrapping up here. One would be rebranding, because that's also another thing. Should we rebrand? You know, like if we're buying into and I think maybe the Platinum Dental, maybe, I don't know which of your businesses may have this issue, but like, if you're buying, maybe Smile Brands does too, like where you're going to buy a local brand and are we going to keep it the same? Should we brand it? Like, let's talk about that a little.

Matt Hall (Smile Brands): Yeah, no, it's a great, it's, it's a great topic because so many acquisitions, because for the most part, like all across the healthcare spectrum, it's, we're still in this phase of, of family named offices, no matter if you're in dentistry, dermatology, ophthalmology, chiropractic, physical therapy, whatever it is, like it's, there's a lot of family named and I think that's, I use that example because a lot of times that's the rebranding question too. It's like, okay, what you've made the acquisition depending on what the timeline is for, you know, for the family named provider that might be leaving, that's a real consideration in the rebranding. Obviously in your due diligence, you've looked at like, look, what is the value of this brand locally? What's the value of our alternatives?

Whether that's, know, for Smile Brands, it's really interesting because we're like, okay, do we want to bring them into one of, you know, one of the brands in our house and which one, you know, where does this fit? Or do we want to create a more localized? Cause we have some of the localized office names as well, which essentially creates another brand within our house, but that could be for good reason. So I think there's a lot of diligence that needs to go into it. Obviously there's a lot of costs. There's the economic side of signage and rebranding, getting the message out to all the patients in the community and reestablishing that online as well. So a lot of components that go into it.

I know, and yeah, I know you guys are, this takes me back too like, these are the discussions we had. I think it was like 20 years ago. It was like, that's where we, again, you know, at that time we went local and then we said, “Hey, we're going to work from here forward. We're going to name them all local.” And we actually rebranded some from acquisitions that were, you know, small group of five or half a dozen, whatever it was and said, “Hey, let's actually divide those up and make them local.” And then, you know, as we started to build consistency, that's where we brought in Smile Generation to say, okay, we're kind of putting a branded house over them to bring them together. But yeah, there's a lot of pieces that go into, you know, the rebrand decision for sure.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): So I want to talk about scaling in just a moment, the Smile Brand is such a unique concept. For people who may not be familiar, we know what this is, just share what the idea behind Smile Brand is. I'm sorry, Smile Generation, I apologize. Smile Generation, talk about that a little bit.

Matt Hall (Smile Brands): Yeah, it was, that was a fun one. mean, we, and at one time, at one time it was actually the, and I joke because at one time it was the most well-known brand in dentistry. And then this company, Align came around, great company, came around and they've done a fantastic job and just blown everybody out of the water. So everybody knows Align and Invisalign, but, but yeah, the Smile Generation. it was really, as we started to grow at Pacific Dental Services, all these individual offices, we obviously from a, again, Steve Thorne being, being genius on the operations model of, of density in markets and the benefits that you get from that and strategically placing offices certain distances away. You know, throughout the communities, we really started to get into this like, this overlap, but, it was kind of like, like I, I remember it even being like a, it's an advertising challenge at that point. And you're like, you know, how are we going to advertise one office that overlaps with these other ones, you know, the same markets, same local analog channels and especially analog at that time and, and digital channels.

What we found was the operational and clinical model was so consistent and the technology and the clinical delivery was so consistent amongst these offices that we really looked for a way to say, how could we bring them all together? And that birthed the Smile Generation. And it really was like this originally an umbrella brand to bring these practices together and say, look, there are two main components. One was of course the referral part to say, hey, we could advertise, market the Smile Generation and then find your closest office. But it wasn't just a referral service or a listing. It was like, this was the second component where we created that these offices were Smile Generation approved.

That created a really interesting dynamic, both internally and externally, because externally it was like, what does that mean? Of course, we think back to good endorsement brands, right? Like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval or whatever it might be. And that's kind of this idea of the endorsement brand side of it that said, when you go to one of these practices, here are all the things available to you and all the all the different components that this practice is committed to and guarantees essentially to deliver to you in your oral health care and we actually in the early years like we governed that to not allow offices where it was like “hey your office isn't doing these things so you can't be on it” or “your office doesn't have this type of nps score, so you can't be on it.” And so the offices then have this internal pressure to say, all right, “I need to elevate my level of service and level of service delivery so I could be a part of it.” And so it, yeah, I mean, we could have a whole podcast on that, but it just, then it got legs. mean, we extended that brand into other components of dentistry as well. And yeah, that was a fun one for sure.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): That's an awesome story. that's an awesome, I love it. And it's fun to hear, yeah.

Yeah, for sure. So let's talk about scaling and we'll set this up for our next podcast. I'd like to do the, and we've got all of a couple minutes left. But I'm curious about scaling the human element. We talked about culture a lot, so probably not too much of that, but like to be able to like quickly, you know, build that sort of scale internally, but especially externally.

And you know, technology is going to be our savior when we start talking about marketing a thousand offices, I'm pretty sure. But any comments on scaling internally or externally with the marketing side of it?

Matt Hall (Smile Brands): Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I think I go back to, so one of my mentors actually named Scott. So Scott Beck, mean, not Steve, but Scott Beck just, again, just brilliant. And he always helped me break down infrastructures and platforms as, really, really, how do we look at three components within those? That's pretty common. Like it's super common now with like people, processes and systems. And so, that's really how I think I've approached it at Smile Brands, we're doing the same thing. That scale requires, we're going through this simplicity, standardization and modernization in each of those buckets of people, processes and systems. And so how do we simplify, you know, how do we simplify how we support practices? How do we standardize? And that's a terrible, you know, it's funny, it's a polarizing, I was going to say it's a terrible word in healthcare, but it's actually polarizing because when you think about it, like you want the highest standards as a patient. And so it's like, yeah, standardization is good, but you've got to allow for some clinical autonomy to customize treatment, right? And so it's like, how do we build a framework that allows for optionality and some flexibility and customization, personalization? Like you can't be too rigid, but you can't be, you know, too loose either, otherwise there's chaos and variability. And ultimately, you know, chaos and variability leads to poor results. I think when we look at that of like, yeah, there's this simplicity, this standardization.

And then really, you know, I know we'll talk about it at a later time, but the modernization, how you can leverage technology now, again, in that equation of infrastructure around systems or platforms, you know, how do we have the right people who have the right mindset and the right understanding, the right expertise to then develop the most efficient processes by leveraging the best systems and technology and platforms.

I was hoping we'd go the entire podcast without saying automation and AI, but it is a reality. It's a reality of scaling for sure and being able to scale efficiently. That's ultimately the, you know, the goal of the group practice or the MSO or the DSO is to be more efficient and allow for, you know, to be the most scalable platform in how they enable the different practices and providers and teams in those practices.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Matt, that was awesome. I knew it would be. We talked about doing this podcast a while ago and it's taken us months to get our schedules to work out. But I'm, I think it's a master class. There's a whole bunch of times I can just, I'll use this podcast again and again when I'm working with a business that's trying to figure this out. So I appreciate your time. I hope our audience gets just how experienced Matt is. You've got a really rare insight into this. So I appreciate your time.

Matt Hall (Smile Brands): Thank you. No, I appreciate it. It's always fun hanging out, whether it's a podcast or just catching up, Stewart. So I appreciate you. Obviously, you know, again, just a fan of Healthcare Success and what you've been able to do over the last couple of decades. It's, yeah, you guys have been always pioneers and leaders in the space at the same time, which is super unique. And so, yeah, it's been... Yeah, it's just been a total blessing to have the friendship and partnership over the years. So appreciate you.

Stewart Gandolf (Healthcare Success): Awesome, great, back to you, buddy. We'll see you next time and we're gonna give it a little add here. Look for another podcast with me and Matt and future weeks as we haven't recorded it yet, but it's gonna be another good one. Thank you.

Matt Hall (Smile Brands): Thanks.