Brandon Collier is a practicing attorney and President of Collier & Associates, Inc., a nearly fifty year old firm which specialize in representing dentists nationwide in practice transitions and providing objective unbiased advice regarding the business aspects of their practices, taxes, insurance, investing and how to live a good life.
He is the Editor of the twice-monthly Collier Newsletter, which for close to a half-century has been providing cutting edge, unbiased and easy-to-implement legal, business and financial advice to dentists to help them become and retire wealthy. The Newsletter has thousands of paid subscribers, and over the decades, tens of thousands of dentists have subscribed.
Brandon also conducts the popular Collier and Associates continuing education seminars. The seminars are tax deductible and located at top destinations throughout the country, Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean. Brandon conducts several week-long seminars each year, as well as shorter specialty meetings targeted to Young Doctors, Retired Doctors, Practice Transitions and Special Advanced Investing Seminars. As with the Newsletter, doctors come to the seminars because of the quality of the content but also enjoy some quality time with colleagues and family. Collier & Associates sells nothing but ideas – no insurance and no investment management services.
Brandon also oversees the Collier retirement plan division which designs and prepares profit sharing, 401(k) and defined benefit plans. Over the years thousands of dental practices throughout the country have used Collier retirement plans.
He has many years of experience consulting with doctors and speaking nationwide as an invited lecturer. He believes in giving back to dentistry and currently serves on the visiting committee of the Case Western Reserve University School of Dentistry and has been a past member of the Board of Trustees of the American Association of Orthodontists Foundation (the AAO’s charitable arm).
http://www.collieradvisors.com/
VIDEO - DUwHF #1050 - Brandon Collier
AUDIO - DUwHF #1050 - Brandon Collier
Howard: It is just a huge, huge honor for me today to be podcast-interviewing Brandon Collier of collieradvisors.com. He is a practicing attorney and President of Collier & Associates, Inc., a nearly fifty-year old firm which specializes in representing dentists nationwide in practice transitions and providing objective unbiased advice regarding the business aspect of their practices, taxes, insurance, investing and how to live a good life. He is the Editor of the twice-monthly Collier Newsletter, which for close to half a century has been providing cutting-edge, unbiased and easily implement legal business and financial advice to dentists to help them become and retire wealthy. The newsletter has thousands of paid prescribers and over the decades, tens of thousands of dentists have subscribed. Brandon also conducts the popular Collier & Associates Continuing Education seminars. The seminars are tax deductible and located at top destinations throughout the country, Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. Brandon conducts several week-long seminars each year as well as shorter special meetings targeted at young dentists, retired dentists, practice transition and special advanced investing seminars. As with the newsletters, doctors come to the seminars because of the quality of the content, but also enjoy some quality time with colleagues and family. Collier & Associates sells nothing but ideas — no insurance and no investment management services. Brandon also oversees the Collier retirement plan division which designs and prepares profit sharing, 401(k) and defined benefit plans. Over the years, thousands of dental practices throughout the country have used Collier retirement plans. He has many years of experience consulting with doctors and speaking nationwide as an invited lecturer. He believes in giving back to dentistry and currently serves on the visiting committee of Case Western Reserve University School of Dentistry — that's in Cleveland — and has been a past member of the Board of Trustees of the American Association of Orthodontics Foundation, which is the AAO's charitable arm. Brandon, thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Brandon: Howard, thanks. I couldn't have written a better introduction if I tried.
Howard: Well, I have to tell you, I feel heartfelt sorry for you the last I saw you. We went to the bar with a couple of dentists and we watched the first game of the NBA series and we watched that guy lose it when he could have won it in the last final seconds ending in overtime. Are you heartbroken this morning?
Brandon: It's funny you ask because this is the first podcast or second podcast I think I've ever done, and it took about three hours- When this airs, it'll probably be a month after the game, but it took about three hours to go to bed after that, and I'm on the East coast and my biggest concern today is, "Is this hangover going to carry into the podcast?" The short answer is no, but I have to tell you I was a little worried when I woke up this morning.
Howard: So now we get to hold your feet to the fire on your prediction. Will it go to game seven?
Brandon: Oh man, I think the Cavs will come back and take it in five.
Howard: Wow.
Brandon: No, no, no. If this makes it into the podcast, that's going to be pretty cool, but it's tough to go against four All-Stars and be fighting the Raps and be fighting some bone-headed plays your own team is making so if I had to put money on it, I think I'd bet on the other guys.
Howard: Let's put this podcast out next and we'll see how this plays out in the series and then if you lose, you'll get a bunch of townies sending you flowers and chocolates trying to cheer you up. Hey, I want to start off, this is Dentistry Uncensored, I don't want to talk about anything that anyone agrees with. You're big into 401(k)s and that was a whole media thing just a couple of months ago. It was on this week, it was a real controversial deal, hidden fees, they were talking about "is the guy a fiduciary". Did you see any of that on like this week with ...?
Brandon: Right, well yeah, that's been kind of a hot topic lately. There's a couple of issues here. If you're asking about fees that fiduciaries charge and that advisors charge generally, yeah that's devastating to somebody's long term returns. One of the things we offer are retirement plans, 401(k)s and pensions and so forth, and we get a lot of clients coming to us from having been on a platform where the fees were just eating away at the returns. My own wife works in a company; she's a part-time employee in my own business, but her primary job is at a traditional law firm and they've got the kind of plan that most companies have where it's set up and there are three or four or five different parties with their hand in the till sucking out their fees, and when you try and piece it all together, it's about 2% that's coming out. And the ironic thing is a lot of employers are setting up plans this way through large insurance companies or payroll providers thinking that they're meeting their fiduciary duties, and then the ironic part is if you set something up where the fees are killing the returns, that ends up being a fiduciary problem. Here's the problem with the fees. I'll give you a quick example. Let's say you've got two choices. You can invest your own money about as easy as you can, putting it all into an index fund, something a monkey could be trained to do. And let's say longterm, if this is all in something like the S&P 500 stock fund, you make 7%. Alternative B, turn the money over to an advisor and between the advisory fees and then the fees that are coming out for the mutual funds that are being selected, let's say on average the fees add up to 2% and you got $100,000 to dump into scenario A and scenario B and long term expect to make 7% on the one hand, 5% on the other hand. At the end of the first year, Howard, you make 7%, you make seven grand, you make 5%, you make five grand, so at the end of one year, $2000 is no great shakes. But what's so dangerous about the fees is that people live in the short-term and they don't think long-term and if you make seven versus five, you don't feel that much, but you play this out over a thirty-year career and you have half the amount of money in the end with alternative B versus alternative A. And not to drag this out too much, there's a little math rule called the rule of seventy-two where you take your growth rate divided into the number seventy-two. That tells you how long your money doubles. You're making 7%, your hundred thousand doubles to two hundred in ten years. From years ten to twenty, there was another doubling from two to four. From years twenty to thirty, there was a third doubling from four to eight, so you have eight times as much thirty years down the road as opposed to making just 5% long-term. Your first doubling comes basically year fifteen. Your hundred thousand grows to two. The second doubling is from fifteen to thirty, you end up with four hundred in the end. Those compounding two percent fees over the course of a long career wipes out half the investment value, so that's the issue. It's not easy to see, and when you have the fees kind of sucked out of the plan in the dead of night, you only barely notice that it's happening, so it's a big, big issue that people have got to be aware of.
Howard: So a hundred thousand at 7%, what would it be at year thirty and a hundred thousand at 5%, what would that be at year thirty?
Brandon: A hundred thousand growing for thirty years at 7% is going to translate into about eight hundred thousand in the end. A hundred thousand growing at 5% for thirty years translates into about four hundred.
Howard: Man, you have got to make a little JPEG with your name on it and send it to me. I'll blow it out all over social media.
Brandon: Well, happy to.
Howard: Do you have the ability to do that?
Brandon: I think so. I'll figure it out.
Howard: You must have a college kid living at home or something.
Brandon: Yeah, I've got a couple of teenagers at home that'll help me with it.
Howard: [inaudible 00:08:37] How do you make those graphics? I'm like, "I don't know. Why don't you ask my son Ryan? I have no idea." Another very controversial thing, again, keeping it to the controversy, the President and the Congress just passed this big new tax reform package. How does that impact dentists?
Brandon: Funny how tax reform or tax cuts is controversial in this country, but it is. Why not everybody supports it is beyond me, but you had pretty good support in the house, you didn't have enough support in the Senate to make this thing permanent. I think they passed it with just fifty-one votes using that reconciliation process, and so a lot of the changes go away eight years from now. On the individual side, the lower rates, which is a huge deal, they're only in place for eight years. On the corporate side, those things thankfully are permanent. Now, people are hearing all different kinds of things in the media, but most everybody listening to this is going to save money, and that's the truth. And if you're not sure about this, you can call your accountant, have him or her run your taxes for 2018. They just did it for 2017. Have them use all the same data they did last year. Their computer software has already been updated for the new tax law, and in about five minutes, they can give you an estimate about how much you're going to save. And I think for most everybody listening, it's going to be a meaningful number. There were some negatives. State and local income tax deduction is cut to a max of ten grand, loss of personal exemptions for your family members, but the positives are going to outweigh that. On the practice side, the changes are good, are terrific. The headline is 21% tax rate for C corps. Now there's not a lot of C corps among dental practice owners. There are a handful of them, but it's the large mega corps that are going to see the advantage of that. Our investments are going to go up because the companies we own are more profitable. In our practices, the C corp tax rate is not really an issue because owners zero out their practice profits and never pay the C corp tax rate. One of the changes that affects pass-through companies like Schedule Cs and S corps and LLCs, is that if you have profits coming out of one of these things, you're entitled to a tax deduction of 20% of the profits coming out, unless you're a dentist. I don't know if you've heard this, but one of the big changes, professionals are discriminated against, dentists, lawyers, physicians, CPAs, and that's a big part of the corporate law changes that don't apply to dentists.
There are two exceptions. People at the lower end of the income spectrum, if they got a pass-through entity, one that I mentioned, if they're making under I think the number is a hundred fifty-seven thousand five hundred bucks as a single person- Talk to your accountant because you're going to be eligible for this new S corporation pass-through tax cut if you're single, making under that one fifty seven five. If you're married and you file a joint return and you're making under three hundred and fifteen, that's your total taxable income, mind you, so if your joint income is under that three fifteen, talk to your accountant because you're going to be eligible for this new 20% tax deduction. The code section, the tax law itself, that brings us into play is section one ninety-nine A. Don't miss it. Then if you're at the high end of the spectrum, you've got multiple offices, the collections over the course of the year are in the millions, four or five, six million, then the idea would be to set up your own DSO or DMO. Move the practice management activity into that, pay a large DSO fee from the dental practice into your DSO and draw profits out of that because the DSO is a business company. It's not a professional practice. That isn't the type of company that's discriminated against under the new tax laws. With a little bit of planning for this, these huge practice owners can take advantage of that, but most everybody in the middle doesn't get that advantage. But there are lots of other good things in this. There are immediate deductions for as much equipment as you want to buy. If you're renovating your office, leasehold improvements, totally depreciable in the first year. If you buy heavy SUV, Yukon or Range Rover or whatever it is, 100% deductible in the first year. One of the ironic things about this tax reform is there are no democrats that voted for it in the Senate, and if they did, they would have brought in some of their own pet projects. The heavy SUV thing, the environmentalists would never have gone for that. They would have put some caps on that, but now you can go out and buy a Suburban or big Mercedes, whatever, seventy, eighty-thousand bucks or more. The whole thing is written off in the first year. It's a beautiful thing. There are a lot of nice opportunities in this, but beyond just the changes in the tax law, I think what dentists need to be aware of is it isn't just the tax law, it's giving some nice opportunities. It's just the fact that they are in business on their own. They're operating a company. It's their practice, they have a business, and unlike, let's say, their physician buddies who generally are now W2 employees of some large hospital chains making salary and maybe access to a 401(k) plan. If you have your own business, if you adopt a more aggressive approach to taxes, that opens the door to a whole host of deductions that many, many dentists don't take, haven't heard about it. If they have heard about it, they might be talking to their accountant about it. Their accountant says, "No, no, no, you can't do this. It sounds too aggressive for me." And then they go year after year after year, not taking their meals and their travel and their auto-deductions and family members on the payroll and retirement plan contributions for family members. In other words, learning how to live off the tax deductible practice expense account, so to speak, and that's really the lesson, understanding the opportunities, understanding that in a way, taxes are kind of a game, Howard.
The approach that has served thousands of dentists terrific over the past several decades, it basically boils down to a few steps. Number one, every dollar you earn has got to be reported. No exceptions, no cheating, no skimming cash, everything gets reported. If you're caught- I've got a good word to describe somebody who gets caught not reporting their income: prisoner. You go to jail. If you're being audited and they discover that you're not reporting everything, they're going to say, "I think we're done for the day. Let's wrap it up. I'm leaving." Well, within about an hour, somebody from the IRS criminal division is going to show up and put the handcuffs on you and you're going to be doing the perp walk out of the office. If you're reporting all your income, that goes a long way towards changing the whole scope of an audit. The agent sees you're an honest taxpayer. They then go over and look to disallow a few tax deductions because they're not going to leave without their pound of flesh and that's it. They've got twenty or thirty other cases sitting on their desk back at their office they got to get to. This isn't personal, they don't have it in for you. They're not going to waste their time. They're going to look at the automobile, they're going to look at maybe some travel, look for things, a meal or entertainment and so forth, and that's it. It's a negotiation. It's you or you and your accountant on the one side of the table, the IRS agent on the other side of the table, and it's basically a horse trading exercise. You give us a few, we'll give in on a few, and that's that. You write your check. It's funny. If you have an IRS audit and at the end the agent doesn't find anything, you say, "Oh, I got off pretty easy. That was great." It should dawn on you pretty quickly that if they're there to find money, to find some unpaid taxes and if after two, three days they can't find anything, that means you filed such a (unclear 00:18:12) tax return. Your accountant is too passive. I'd probably be firing my accountant for not letting me in on all these opportunities that are out there.
Give you a good example. Often at my seminars, when I talk about taxes, I'll ask, "How many in the room are writing off one or more automobiles through your practice?" Maybe half the hands go up and somebody will say, "I was told you can't do that," or "I was told that your business driving has to be more than 50% and my accountant is saying it's too aggressive and your driving doesn't get over 50%." And then I'll hear some chuckles in the room because I know these people are writing off 100% of two or three cars and they're not keeping mileage logs. I don't know a lot of people that do that, but the attitude they have is, let's say that a typical scenario, a dentist with one office seven miles away from his house. If he drives seven miles in the morning and seven miles back home at the end of the day, that's fourteen miles. It's all personal commute. 0% business. None of the auto expenses, gas repairs, insurance, etcetera are deductible. Well let's change the facts a bit. Let's say you drive typically one mile from home to the dental lab you frequent. That's now a business stop and then you go six miles from there into the office. That's now six miles of intraday business travel that you racked up. At the end of the day, your typical itinerary's driving from the office, let's say to the post office or the bank, you know, send out the office mail or make an office bank deposit. That's another office stop, and then from the bank home, one mile, out of the fourteen, you got twelve out of fourteen that are business, which is about 85%. It's aggressive. But if that's typically what you do, then go for it. The concept here is, when it comes to taxes, if you report all your income and you're aggressive with the deductions- Now I'm not talking fraud. If you don't own a car, you're not going to be writing off an automobile, but if you have a good talking argument and that's what a tax audit is, you're going to give your explanation and you're either going to win or you're going to lose, but at least you tried. And if you lose, and the worst that happens is you go back to where you were as if you hadn't done it. That's not much of a loss. If you're playing roulette and you're told, "Look, you have 99% chance of winning a hundred bucks, or a 1% chance of losing fifty bucks." I think you take those odds seven days a week and twice on Sunday.
Howard: You give a lot of seminars. You have one coming up July 30th to August 3rd, The Aggressive Business, Tax and Practice seminar in Bermuda, then on September 28th to the 30th, you have one in Nantucket, Massachusetts. And then you're in my neck of the woods, November 8th to November 11th in Tucson, Arizona at The Aggressive Business, Tax and Practice Management at Canyon Ranch, Tucson. That place is so gorgeous. You've been in this field for a long time. Hell, you've been on Dentaltown for over a decade. What do you think dentists' biggest financial mistakes are?
Brandon: Biggest financial mistake… Marry the wrong person. Now it's a personal issue, but it's also a financial one. If you marry the wrong person, if you get divorced, you're going to see 50% of what you've built up walk out the door, and there are some dentists that get divorced on a serial basis where every five years, they're dumb enough to get remarried to the next wrong person and there was a second divorce, or even a third one, and then they are always going to be practicing into their late seventies at that rate. Keep your life insurance in force, keep your professional malpractice insurance in force, disability because you can't afford to retire yet, I'm sorry to say. You don't have to get a lot of things right in life to have a pretty terrific life. Marry the right person, find the right profession, find the right place to live. If you get some big things right, you're pretty much home free, but if you choose the wrong partner in life or in practice, life can be pretty hellish for a little while. That's the biggest financial mistake. There are other doozies. I don't see dentists going bankrupt very often. I've seen a couple cases and interestingly it wasn't malpractice that did it. It was them signing on as a general partner to some private business venture. When the real estate venture went belly up, the wealthy dentist was on the hook to pay off the bank debt. That's an avoidable mistake. Getting sucked into buying expensive permanent life insurance, your whole life insurance or universal life. These are all variations on the same awful theme where the insurance agent comes to you and promotes stuff that, if you understood how it worked, you never would have sought this out. High sales, high commission type insurance, annuity products, these things are to be avoided and you're not foolish for getting sucked into it. You didn't know about it. No one was there to tell you. And generally these things are worth getting out of at the first opportunity. Not buying a practice as soon as you have the opportunity is a mistake.
I don't know if you saw this and the thing was in last Friday's Wall Street Journal, there was a profile of an orthodontist in Utah and the poor guy- He's a young guy, he's probably thirty years old. He's got over a million dollars in student loans and — I forgot where he went to college — he went to USC dental, USC ortho residency and the loans are something like $700,000 or $800,000. They've since grown because he hasn't been paying the interest down, so now the principal's up to over a million bucks, the poor guy. I think it said he's working in a corporate office or an associate somewhere, but when I see these huge debt loads, believe it or not, the smartest thing they could do, these young dentists, is to take on more debt, and buy a practice. That practice will pay for itself. The practice will pay off the debt over seven, eight, ten years. It'll leave on the table, even after the debt service, more money than what these dentists or orthodontists or other specialists would be making in the corporate clinic or staying as somebody's associate. It's not always intuitive, but if a practice is valued fairly, you ought to be able to pay it off in five to seven years and still be netting at least what you would be making working as somebody's associate. They don't want to take on more debt, and for people who aren't in a lot of business transactions, I can understand that, but you’ve got to understand that the ceiling is way higher if you own your own practice. The quality of life is way better if you own your own practice, and there were these reps from some of these corporate dental clinics that's hanging out at the dental schools kind of weaseling their way in, trying to get the students to come out and work there and saying it's a great quality of life, etcetera. In many ways, they're subsidizing the dental schools by buying equipment and making a name for themselves there but — you probably know this better than I do — people don't have a long window in those places, and then a lot of times they come out and they buy a private practice and they say, "I wouldn't say I was misled, but when they told me that I had better quality of life working in the corporate office because I don't have to manage it, I just show up and work, tell you the truth, I got a better quality of life owning my own practice, setting my own schedule." A young lady, a pediatric dentist, not too long ago came up to me at a break at a seminar and said, "The best thing I ever did was to go in with a colleague of mine, and the two of us were each working out three days a week. We bought the practice from a busy pedodontist, and the two of us are now working it and we have the best quality of life we've ever had during our practice years."
So young dentists, see the advantage in this. If you only see the net salary you're pulling out after debt service, you're missing the point. You're not making two hundred or two fifty if that's your net, you're making the four hundred. Even though you're having to take a chunk and pay off the bank, you're really making the four hundred or five hundred, not just what you have after debt service. If I said, Howard, that I'm pulling out $400,000 from my practice and I'm taking a hundred and fifty of it and investing it in my stock portfolio, I wouldn't say I'm making two fifty. I'm making the four hundred and I'm taking a chunk and investing in an asset and the practice. Paying off that practice is way more valuable long term than a stock portfolio because that's the golden goose that's going to lay all these eggs for me in the future.
Howard: I'm emailing you the thread to that on Dentaltown, "Orthodontist with one million in student loans". It's already up to twelve thousand views, two hundred and ninety-two comments. Gosh, it's crazy. So you ought to come out with another deal on that rule of seventy-two. You should call it "Rule Seventy-Two: Management Fees Matter" and then do your hundred thousand at 7% all that, but then you also got to come out with your "Brandon Collier's Three Ps". You said they were person, profession, place. Don't marry the wrong person. You chose a great profession: dentistry or orthodontics. And the third one you said was place?
Brandon: Right, choose a great place to live. Give you an example. I'll use myself as the example. I grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, had a terrific upbringing, went to great schools, but it's not the biggest city in the country, and after law school, decided to move to New York City and lived there for about five years. I worked there for a traditional law firm coming out of law school and had a great time and met my wife there. But neither of us really had any family there and it's an expensive place to live, etcetera, etcetera, and when the opportunity came to move back home- At that point we were married, we started having kids and one of the nicest things is being close to family and in your twenties I think most people want to be as far away from their families they can get, but when you get to the point and you start raising a family, you will appreciate having parents, grandparents, cousins, what have you, close by, and from a practice standpoint… Say we're doing a practice appraisal and I'm looking at the numbers of a general practice or a specialty practice, and the numbers are huge and it's all fee for service. There's little competition. This is just the ideal practice for somebody to buy, but this could be an old little town I'd never heard of before, but that's part of why it's doing so well and these small town practices are often the best opportunity for somebody, and what I'll say is, "Look, if you want to be in the big city or if you like going into the big city, work in the small town and fly in for a weekend every month to get your fix. You're not going to find an opportunity like this." There are reasons people don't like the small towns, and I get that. If somebody is single, they gravitate to the big city to find a mate. If they're married, sometimes the spouse can't find a job in his or her industry, so the couple has to go to the big city for that reason but there's a disconnect here. The bigger cities are so overcrowded and so over-saturated and so competitive and the small towns are ideal. And again, if you could be close to family, it sounds a little corny, but the older you get the more you're going to appreciate it.
Howard: I just posted this on Dentaltown the other day and I know I should shut up about this because the millennials probably don't want to hear it anymore. In the United States, one hundred and forty-four counties have half of the population of the United States' total. The hundred and forty-four largest counties have a population of a hundred and fifty-nine million, five hundred and twenty-four thousand that’s 50.03% and the two thousand, two hundred and ninety-eight smallest counties have a hundred and fifty-nine thousand, three hundred and thirty-two, which is 49%. Basically, half of America lives in a hundred and forty-four counties and there's just dentists on top of dentists on top of dentists on top of dentists and when I got to Arizona and people don't realize there was no dental school in Arizona, Utah or Nevada and there was no fluoride in the water either. Now it has water fluoridation, has two dental schools, A.T. Still in Mesa, Midwestern in Glendale. They're dumping out two hundred and eighteen dentists a year in a fluoridated community. Utah now has two, Nevada has one. I mean dentistry is half as lucrative as it was in Phoenix than when I graduated. And then you drive from here to L.A. and halfway between, right on the California border between Arizona, is Blythe. It doesn't even have a dentist. There's two dentists that I know in the suburbs. Half of them get in their car each morning and they wake up in an area, it's about a dentist for every eighteen hundred people and they commute an hour into work downtown. When they get out of their cars, it's about a dentist for every five hundred people and then there's the geniuses who wake up in Chandler and in the morning they commute an hour out of town to some small shit-hole town and they're doing a million three and taking home $400,000 a year and I just don't get it.
California now has six dental schools and when they graduate, they all graduate with only one idea. Everyone's thinking, "I know what I'm going to do. I'm going to build a dental office so that when you look out the operatory, you can see the ocean." Oh my god, what an original idea. And then there's these other people who drive an hour inland to some town of two thousand. They do four ten-hour days, Monday through Thursday, then they get in their black Porsche Thursday night, they drive into a million dollar condo overlooking the ocean. They party like rockstars Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and the dentist that they're partying with who practiced down the street, they're all selling food stamps. So when you said place, did you mean demographics matter?
Brandon: Oh yes, absolutely.
Howard: I want to ask something. You said marry the right person, ends in divorce, but you also are a huge leader. Your firm's been doing it for half a century in practice, mergers, acquisitions, transitions. What about divorce of a partner? You always hear the love stories of two guys met in dental school and they want to be partners and one loved root canals, the other one loved this and it was just the perfect, but there's some pretty ugly divorces when dentists marry dentists. Do you agree or disagree?
Brandon: Yeah, no doubt.
Howard: When you married your wife, you make love, you have children, holidays. Now you're going to marry a dentist and you don't have these glues of making love and raising a family and going to Nantucket and you just sit there and you're looking at him saying, "I don't like the way you do this," and he's looking at her saying, "We should drop all of our insurance and be a cosmetic dentistry star," and he's like, "No." When a dentist marries a dentist in just a business with no social love glues, what percent of the time do you think that fails?
Brandon: Well, what I see I know doesn't compute with what's happening across the country. I would guess that maybe 15%, 20%. If I had to put a number on it, I'd say 15% to 20% of group practices are breaking up. I'm sure in reality it's more than that. I'm sure it is, and there's a perception among dentists who had never been in a group before that this is something I got to avoid because I've got a buddy who was in a group practice and it was terrible and it split apart, and don't all of these groups split apart. You're going to stack the deck in your favor if you anticipate some of the big issues in advance and plan for that. Three main reasons practices breakup: money, power, sex. Let's take them in reverse order. Let's not save the best for last. It's probably good for business if the partners are fooling around with each other, what I'm saying is, one of the partners is doing something he shouldn't — and it's typically a he — with somebody on the staff. Often the junior partner who's, I hate to say it, a young dad married with four kids and he strays and everybody is aware of it. It's terrible for office morale. The whole staff is upset because the young partner's playing favorites with this one individual and it's never going to end well. It's never going to end well. Just know guys, if you're considering this, just realize if you're going down this road, just remember she no longer works for you. That's it. This is not going to end well. You're going to be lucky if you don't get sued for harassment. I see a few of these cases every year. The young lady, the relationship breaks up or she's being harassed and she's not a willing participant, and she says, "I refuse to work in any office where this guy's going to be scheduled for the day," and then it just collapses from there. The practice's lucky if they don't get sued. You've got to select people well, and you hope you do. You never know for sure. But that happens, and I'm sure you've seen this a ton.
Howard: Well, we're approaching eight billion people on the planet. So if you're a boy and like girls, you have four billion to choose from. You don't choose someone from your family or at work. It's real easy. How do you miss that lesson? It's just beyond insanity. And then here's the other thing I see with it. She started sleeping with the owner and she knows it'd be a very expensive divorce, so then she starts embezzling from him because she's thinking he's too stupid to catch me and if I did get caught I'll just say, "Well, I'll just leave and go away because you want me to tell your wife that we'd been doing the naughty for the last three years?" And it's just… My God.
Brandon: The tone is set at the top, no doubt. Now, the biggest reason practices breakup is because of money. Somebody feels like he's or she's not being paid fairly for the work they're doing, and if the compensation formula is inflexible, if it doesn't reward people for doing the work, then the relationship is going to fall apart. These people are not in love with each other; they're business partners and they don't need much. They need somebody competent to be working side by side with and they need to feel like they're respected and being paid fairly for what they're putting in and if somebody is doing all the management and somebody else isn't doing any because they feel I'm more productive and I'm paid to be productive, so why bother doing any management work, that gets old real fast. Put it this way, if somebody generally is rational — and let's say dentists generally are — and if a rational person is coming in with a complaint, that's going to be a rational complaint and it ought to be addressed. When these cracks in the mortar start forming, usually the person who's complaining is in the right and the person who balking at making any changes is in the wrong. Ideally, the partnership agreement is flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances, but when these cracks start forming, if you want to keep the partnership together- I hate to say it, but it's usually the partner who is not carrying his or her weight that's got to recognize that and make a compromise.
And power. One of the partners is just a domineering kind of personality and the other one isn't and feels abused and finally just says, "I've had it. I can't work with you anymore." Good contracts solve a lot of this. Bad contracts unfortunately exacerbate the problem.
Howard: I want to switch gears completely because this is June 1st. By the way, happy June. They come out of school and they're not trained in business and finance and all that kind of stuff, but they're looking at a job and when I talk about millennials getting associate jobs, you remember, most of all the jobs they get are in private practice. It's a bias that they all go work for Heartland or Pacific or Aspen. All the associate issues are the same everywhere, but if she bought a practice versus she is an employee where she's getting paid a payroll check and the taxes are deducted and FICA matching, does she have more advantages to owning- Is money worth more if you're an owner because when you're an employee, you might as well just go to H&R Block to file your taxes because you really don't have any deductions or anything. Do you think it's a significant advantage that they should try to be an owner ASAP as opposed to an employee for ten or twenty years? Talk about that.
Brandon: Well, I think that's a no brainer. Look, if the choices that they have- Because there may not be a good practice available for them to buy, so they're choosing between going to go to work as an associate in a private practice or go to work as an associate for a couple of years in a corporate clinic. I just had a call with an orthodontist last week who really got a one and a half to two man practice, and he needs an associate. If this were six, seven years ago, I would've said, "All right, expect to pay somewhere around $150,000." The corporate alternative has wreaked havoc on that because these first-year orthodontists should figure to make about two twenty-five or so in their first year and a lot of these private practices don't want to pay that or can't afford it, and you can't begrudge these young doctors. If I had $600,000 of student debt and I wanted to start paying that off and if my choices were an associate job making one fifty in the private practice or two and a quarter in the corporate clinic, I'm going in eyes wide open and I'll work there for a couple of years and make some money and then come out and hopefully by a practice. But being somebody W-Two employee, you don't have the advantages of being able to deduct your car or your cell phone or your travel, your meals and entertainment, your CE. That's all coming out after tax, after you pay, after you get your W-Two and you pay your taxes, so owning a practice from a tax deduction side, that's where it's at. You now have a business to be running these expenses through, not to mention your higher income going out into the future. You have a cap on you in that corporate office. I don't know what it is, but if you're making two and a quarter in the first year, it's probably not going to go up too much higher if you stay there for five, six, seven years. Why would they need to pay that, I guess is the question. These associates are, I hate to say it, but they're sort of expendable. If they're trying to keep their costs down, why not bring in another first-year to pay two and a quarter instead of paying a fourth-year three hundred?
Howard: How many practice transitions do you think your firm has done in the last half century in dentistry?
Brandon: Oh my god, well, if we do say 50 a year, I guess twenty-five hundred.
Howard: What is the low-hanging fruit? When you're doing a practice transition, talk about the old fart selling and the young gun buying. What is each side doing, and I want to start with a very politically incorrect question from, from one of my very good friends who I really love. His name was Alan F. Thornburg who is the founder of (Athco 00:45:50) and Associates out of Atlanta, Georgia, and he was the only guy doing it, trying to sell this dual representation that one guy should represent both sides to get the deal done. But in my MBA training at Arizona State University, how do you really represent the seller and the buyer? Do you believe that one attorney can represent the buyer and the seller, or do you think they each need representation? My questions are really, really long because they suck so bad. I'm hoping that something's good enough to answer. What is the major mistakes the old man is doing selling and what is the major mistakes a young doc is doing when she's buying. Was that enough questions in one question? Anything good in that mess?
Brandon: Yeah, real quick, dual representation with a broker, if I'm the seller and I'm being told that the buyer is going to absorb 5% of the broker fee and so it's only going to cost me half as much. Normally that's 10% that the seller pays out of the sale price, but the buyer's going to pay for half. It sounds good, but what buyer is going to want to go along with that? If I'm a buyer and I got two practices to buy, I'm going to gravitate to the one where I don't have to pay half of a broker fee and if I'm the seller, I'd be thinking, "Whose side is this person on? Are they trying to get me a good deal here or are they just trying to get this thing closed and make their commision?" I see that out there sometimes. I'm not a big fan of it. As far as attorneys go, lawyers are trained, it's kind of an ethical rule that you don't represent both sides. We're asked a lot to do it and the thinking is, "Well, we'll save legal fees if we just use one firm." Lawyers can do it, I'm not saying they can't. I'll do it every once in a while if I know both sides of the deal. If I'm friends with them and I've known each of them for a while and I know it's going to go pretty smooth, I'm happy to do it. I have to send them a form they sign where they waive my conflict. So if there's a problem down the road, they say they're not going to sue me for favoring one side or the other. so there's that. I'd also say, "You guys should each hire your own lawyer for a couple of hours just to review my work product to see that it's generally fair, but yeah, I'll do it." I don't like it, but every once in a while I'll do it. Most of the time I don't. If both lawyers are pretty experienced in working on dental practice transitions and there's not a big universe of people out there that do this, so when I see somebody on the other side that we've worked with a lot before, I know in advance, it's going to go pretty fast. We're not going to complain about little stuff. There might be four or five things that have to get worked out, and you have two lawyers, one representing the seller, one representing the buyer, and that's the way to do it.
In terms of mistakes, the biggest one is don't behave like a jerk. You know Dr. Junior? Let me say this a little differently. One thing I'll always mention in the meeting is, more important than the deal, is the person in the deal. That goes for practice and it goes for life. If you're buying a practice from somebody or you're going into a practice with somebody and if they have a terrific reputation and they've treated you fairly in the negotiations, but you feel that the price is too high, you've been told in dental school the practice itself or some percentage of gross 70% or 80%, and this comes in at 85% and it's just offending you. Get over it. You're associating with good people. Good things are going to happen for you long term. And if the practice cost you $100,000 more to buy, well I got news for you. Over the course of a long career, that's totally meaningless. And if you're in the right place with the right people, that's the key. On the other hand, if you're negotiating, if you're going into joining a practice as an associate or to buy it and at the point where it ought to be a love fest. "Dr. Senior, it's a privilege to be associating with you." "You're terrific, and Dr. Junior, I'm so thrilled you're here. You've done so well and you have great recommendations and all that." That ought to be the best time. And if Junior is seeing that every little thing that's being presented is so one-sided in Senior's favor, and that making reasonable requests for compensation and fringe benefits or stuff like that is always shot down, then I'd be scratching my head a little bit.
One thing I will do is if I'm representing a junior doctor, I'll say, "What part of the country are you in?" They'll say, "Houston," and this is some oral surgeon that I'm joining, and then I keep meeting resistance on stuff I think is pretty fair. I'll call around to some GP friends in the city, Houston area and just say, "Off the record, what can you tell me about this guy? Is he a good person?" And if I keep hearing, "No, no, no. He's burned through four other associates." I'll say, "Look, if it were me, more important than the deal is the person in the deal. I'd be looking elsewhere and Dr. Junior, when you buy the practice and you own it, and Dr. Senior is typically working with you for a few months afterwards, your greatest asset here is Dr. Senior, is Dr. Seller. Welcome this person into the office. Use him or her as a sounding board. They've obviously done a lot of things right. Don't, out of immaturity or insecurity, force them out too early. Don't think that for however long they're showing up, they're always going to be the man or the woman and you're always going to be in second place. Use them. If they've had a terrific private practice, a fee for service practice, don't jump into taking every last PPO and converting it. Keep them or use them as an asset. They want to help. They want to help and use them. Dr. Senior, give up control. You've sold the practice. It's not yours anymore, I'm sorry to say. Do what you can to ensure your buyer's success. Don't undermine. Don't criticize Dr. Buyer with the staff or with patients. In both directions, build each other up. The patients don't want to get caught in the middle of this. They love Dr. Seller. They don't want to see him or her leave. They also want to see that somebody coming in is up to the task and can take over. They're happy to stay. The patients aren't going to leave. They're willing to give Dr. Buyer a chance."
Howard: Well, I think the reason they come out of school and they're always thinking that their practice is worth a percentage of sales is because they don't know what EBITA is: earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization. So kids just think about this. There's two practices for sale. They're each a dollar and you say you heard in school they're worth 80% of their collection, so they're both worth 80%, but one practice costs a dollar and it nets three dimes year and the other one costs a dollar and it nets a dime year. Do you really think those $2 bills are worth the same amount of money? Hell, you were talking in the beginning about just a little bitty difference of 2% feed us on retirement planning that over thirty years, you lost half the money on 2%. It's all about profitability and there's so many offices that think they have a competitive advantage, so they signed these Medicare, Medicaid, all these PPOS and they lose money on all these procedures, then they think they're going to make it up on volume. You got to get your overhead, you got to get profitable. And also, so many of those young dentists, they have the weirdest goals. Like they'll come out of school and they'll say, "My goal is to start a practice and within three years it breaks $1,000,000." Nobody grows revenue. Everybody grows earnings. When you listen to the Fortune 500 CEOs, they don't say, "Next year, we're going to double our revenue." They say, "We're going to try to grow earnings." They want to grow earnings, and Warren Buffet only wants to grow net income earnings. He doesn't want to grow sales and noise and all that kind of stuff like that. So same question. By the way, I'm sorry, we went over an hour. I've still got two more-
Brandon: Let's keep going.
Howard: Okay, I'm going to ask you the same question. What is the low-hanging fruit? What is the biggest mistakes you see in retirement planning? And then the same question after that. What are the same low-hanging fruit, biggest mistakes you see dentists making with their insurance related to life, disability, and liability?
Brandon: Well the biggest mistake with retirement planning is starting too late. If you think of what goes into determining how much wealth somebody is going to have down the road, it's number one, how much are they saving? That's pretty important. Number two, what's their long term rate of return? That's also important and number three, how long are they doing it for? That's the most important thing. I'd rather be saving less and making a lower rate of return, but saving longer, starting the habit sooner and you can get very wealthy by… This is compound growth at work and the key to compound growth is time. If I got $100,000 and it makes 8%, at the end of the year, it's a hundred and eight, no big deal. But if that is compounding, that just compounded once and there was eight thousand, but if my investment can compound year after year after year, it's those later years where you see the big growth and I'm not sure these numbers are totally accurate. They're generally accurate. Let's say that you have a young doctor at age thirty who can come up with the money to max out a 401(k) plan and it's not cheap, it's $55,000 a year, and they just commit to doing this the rest of their career and they spend everything else. They should. They should buy stuff and enjoy life and not be a slave to their saving every single penny. There's a nice balance you have to strike. You don't have to save everything. You just have to save reasonable amounts. And if you can cobble together the fifty-five thousand at age thirty and you do that for thirty-five years, takes you up to sixty-five and you make 7% on average, which if anything is low for the stock market. 10% historically is what you'd expect, but let's call it 7%. You do that for thirty-five years, putting in fifty-five grand every year. In the end, you're going to have about seven point six million. That's probably more wealth than anybody coming out of school going into practice ever imagines they're going to have. That's starting at age thirty. What if you delay it a decade and start at age forty? Instead of saving for thirty-five years, you're saving for twenty-five years, but missing those first ten years translates into only having three and a half million in the end. That's less than half. In other words, doing it for the first ten years and letting that ride and just stopping all future contributions, you're going to have more than if you miss the ten years and hit the next twenty-five, so starting late is no doubt the biggest mistake. I'm not as concerned about the investments. I'm not as concerned about how much you're doing.
The key is to start early and Howard, when I go into dental schools, which I do a few times a year and talk to the senior dental students about coming out into practice and negotiating your first employment contract, I will always say to them, "Look, you guys, you're in your mid-twenties or whatever, and I understand the hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt you've racked up, but I don't care. Cobble together twenty dollars per week and put it into an investment account." Go over to Vanguard or Schwab and open up a brokerage account or a Roth IRA and just get in the habit of putting this money away and the advice is not if you save $20, in a thousand years it's going to be a million bucks. That's not the point. The point is to get in the habit of saving a little bit because when you come out and you get your first job paying $130,000, $140,000 a year, you will spend every penny of that and then when you buy into a practice and you make a couple hundred thousand dollars, you could spend every penny. You could spend every penny up, two, three, four, five hundred without ever starting any kind of IRA or savings plan. So the key is, when you're young, just get into the habit. So when you do have some money, you can start ramping it up.
Howard: Even Albert Einstein was quoted as saying, "Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world." You agree with that?
Brandon: Yeah, it's the most powerful force in the universe.
Howard: Is that what he said? Did he say was the most powerful?
Brandon: Something like that. It is, but it goes unseen because it takes so long and people live in the present and they see their portfolio go up a little bit from year to year.
Howard: I have to ask you a new question and it's kind of embarrassing, but I have to ask anyway because it's real. There's a big thread on Dentaltown about Bitcoin and I'll tell you what, it's not just millennials. I mean there's old, young, in the middle. I'm not even going to prejudge your mind. What would you say to a dentist who says, "I hear all your investment advice, but dude, I'm in Bitcoin"?
Brandon: I'd say you're nuts.
Howard: Come on. Talk about history repeats itself. This is the tulip bulb deal all over again. I cannot believe four hundred- And you know who lost all of his money in that? The smartest guy in the world. That's what I'm telling you. It was Sir Isaac Newton. He invented calculus, sixteen eighty-seven, Principia Mathematica, made a fortune gazillion dollars, invested it all in tulip bulbs, and lost everything. So it shows you, you can be really smart in math and physics and chemistry and not know your ass from second base.
Brandon: I think that was his quote. He said, "I can predict the forces of the universe, but I'll never understand the madness of people." If anybody can explain what Bitcoins are- I'd love to first of all know what they are and then in terms of whether these are going to be an asset that's going to have value… At some point, governments are going to start regulating this out of existence, so I don't know when it's going to be, but the dirty little secret in this is there are lots of good ways to get rich. You could win the lottery, you could time your Bitcoin investment just right, you could marry into the right family, marry for money, but keep in mind way more people get poor through marriage than get rich through marriage. You could be a member of the lucky sperm club or you can be a member and you'll be born into the right family or you do it the way that's proven to work without having to play the lottery. You get rich quick slowly over time and that definitely works. Long term, the stock market definitely goes up. From year to year, all bets are off, but you give me ten, fifteen years, I can pretty much guarantee you- Looking at the last century, I don't think there's ever been any fifteen year period where stocks were worth less at the end than at the beginning. You have enough time and you have your money in the stock market, whether it's individual stocks or you just dump it into an index fund, you got your investing game plan working great. Ride it out, live through the volatility. The long term trend is up. Short term trend, no one really can predict, but you can get very, very rich compounding your money 7%, 8%, 10% per year. You don't need to be playing around with stuff like this.
Howard: I just want to say one thing about the lucky sperm club. I have lectured in six of the seven continents because I can't find any penguins that want to listen to me. Me and Ryan, how many countries have we been doing this last year or two? Twenty five? And I'm telling you, the lucky sperm club is anyone born in about twenty countries and the people born in the other two countries, they can do everything right and end up with nothing. They can work hard. They can say it's so corrupt. The odds are so stacked against you and when I hear Americans whining about politics today and "Oh, the country so divided." It's like, did you forget about the damn civil war when one out of every thirty people was killed? I'm pretty sure it was more divided then. When people talk about how bad the economy is, have they not been to Venezuela? Have they not read about Venezuela? The only way I can describe America from traveling around this world for thirty years is that every country is crazy, drunk, drinking at the bar, but when the bar closes, everybody looks around and hands America the car keys. No matter what you think is wrong with this country- I mean, there's almost not a single country you can go to in Central South America, Africa and Asia- Let's focus on the lucky sperm club for everybody listening today in the United States and Canada and New Zealand and Australia and Hong Kong and Western Europe. My biggest problem I see with dentists from Phoenix to London is that they graduate from dental school with this immense student loan, but then they can't buy a used Toyota Corolla. They got to buy a beamer. They can't buy a $100 purse at Kohl's. It's got to be a Gucci. They can't spend at an average level in any single category. After work, they can't go to the store and buy a $3 six-pack and go home. They have to go to a bar and drink $10 beers with umbrellas in them. On vacation, they can't go to the lake and camp. They got to fly to Maui. Just every single category, and it's a disease with dentists, physicians and lawyers. What is it about dentists and physicians and lawyers that can't- What percent of them do you think have a spending problem versus a savings problem?
Brandon: Oh god, the ones that do are so notable. Part of me doesn't blame them. If you worked hard in college and sacrificed those four years and then you go to dental school and sacrifice more and then you do a residency and you rack up all this debt, but you've been in school for so long and now you finally come out and have a job, I'd try and reward myself a little bit too. You can definitely go overboard. I like rewarding myself a little bit if I could, and it's not just the dentist. It could be the dentist's spouse that's driving this. The dentist is well aware of the financial limitations but is married to somebody who wants a beach house or wants to add on to the house or buy a house that's too big. That gets into the marrying the right person concept, but it's tough. The student debt stuff is unfortunate. The older generation will tell me very quietly because they don't want the younger generation to hear, "When I was in school, a semester tuition costs a $1000 or eight hundred bucks," and they definitely keep their mouth shut about that. It's really absurd. You mentioned it earlier, I don't know how many dental schools there are, seventy-two or whatever it is, there's more than there need to be, but these are such big money makers you can see why. And these new schools, they're not necessarily great research institutions or what have you. They're there to churn out new dentists and the graduates are not going to work on the Indian reservations. They're just moving to the big cities to make those even more saturated. But I agree. You got to live within your means, but every once in a while, it's not the end of the world to reward yourself a little bit along the way.
Howard: So there are sixty-six accredited dental schools in United States and ten in Canada. I just want to say also, I know my homies, our brand's an hour because that's the commute, I really want to thank the twenty-five thousand dentists who follow me on Twitter @HowardFarran and I just retweet- I know you're driving and can't take notes. Where we place the podcasts on Dentaltown, we do a transcription, because I don't want you taking notes while you're driving, but anyway his web's collierandassociate.com. That's C-O-L-L-I-E-R and associates, but his Twitter's @CollierAdvisors and I just retweeted, "Is your investment portfolio too conservative or too aggressive?" and that was one he tweeted out three hours ago, but on April 30 he tweeted out, "Navigating practice transitions is stressful all by itself. Add in new tax reform policies and you've got yourself a potential migraine." So we're out of time. I'm going to ask you one final question, Brandon. What do you love the most about your work?
Brandon: I love the clients, not all of them, but as a lawyer, being able to work with doctors and especially dentists because physicians, surgeons won't be quite as nice, but friendly people, people that you know you're helping, people that you like seeing from time to time at meetings. For a lawyer, it doesn't get any better. Most lawyers are working in large firms for large corporate clients and there's not the personal interaction. That's no doubt that's the best part.
Howard: And one last part, I'm sorry, I said it'd be the last but just one last, last, last. I hear this a lot. "I got out of school. I'm $400,000 in debt. I'm not married, so why the hell do I need life insurance and disability? Note, I don't have some little two year old that want me to bring home milk and cookies? So if I'm twenty-five and single, why would I need life insurance and disability?"
Brandon: Well, you don't need life insurance. Don't buy it. Don't buy it. You only need life insurance when you're leaving behind family that can't support itself without you. So whatever the reasons you're being told for the investment aspects of the insurance policy or for the tax savings that come with the insurance policy, the only reason you're buying any kind of insurance is because there's a risk you can't afford to carry, and you dying prematurely, yeah that stinks. But from an economic standpoint, you're not leaving behind anybody that depends on you. So don't buy life insurance. Disability insurance, buy it and buy as much as you can get, because by definition you haven't died. You're disabled and you're going to have to pay off the debt. You're going to have to support your lifestyle for the rest of your life, and even though people don't think in terms of them ever getting disabled and you don't want to spend the money on something you don't think you're going to use, this is insurance that you need. And not to promote any particular seller of this, but if you're a member of the ADA, if you a member of the AAO or (Anis? 01:11:32) or what have you, you're going to get a much better deal on long term disability insurance, on term life insurance when you need it, and you're going to buy term and not permanent. Buy it through the professional associations. Even if you don't feel you're getting great representation from them, and that's a subject unto itself, the dues are going to be worth the savings on the insurance policies, and as your income goes up, buy more disability. As I say, nobody wants to do it, but this is something you're going to need and this wasn't asked, but also have plenty of liability insurance. Dentists are targets for aggressive prosecutors. They're targets in their communities, and if you're driving and you cause an accident, the liability insurance you have on your car is maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars. That is way, way too inadequate. You're going to need something in the millions. I wouldn't sleep too comfortably with less than $5,000,000 of liability protection. Now this wouldn't happen, but if I was drunk driving and I run over somebody in the street and I kill somebody, or financially, even worse is they don't die. They're just incapacitated the rest of their life. That's even more expensive. That judgment against me is going to be in the millions. You need what's called umbrella liability coverage. Talk to your insurance agent, buy an umbrella for a few hundred extra dollars a year that's going to boost the liability up from the low base amounts that’ve come with your homeowners insurance up to something in the millions. Term life insurance, plenty of disability, plenty of liability and don't waste money on a lot of the other stuff that's pitched to you.
Howard: Are you talking about Chappaquiddick Bay, the movie?
Brandon: I haven't seen it yet. I'm actually dying to. That's a bad pun.
Howard: I was thinking that it had something to with Chappaquiddick Bay because I noticed your three next seminars, July 3rd, one’s in the Bermuda Triangle. Now that’s got to be dangerous. How many people flying into Bermuda Triangle are never found again? And then the next one is at Nantucket Bay, so if there was going to be anybody talking about an umbrella policy … are you going to actually drive over the bridge? I saw the movie and great movie, but what I love about the movie is, obviously kids hate to read books and the parents always complain, "Well, they're always on their iPad." Well, if you want to teach kids history- I mean I love the way they do the timepiece, the accent, the clothing. The Department of Education, they should fund a major movie of all the greatest history lessons they need to learn because you can go in there and in a hundred and ten minutes feel like you really understand the story. It was a great movie. And then you'll be in my backyard Tuesday. Are you going to fly straight into Tucson?
Brandon: Probably so yeah. Now where in Scottsdale are you?
Howard: I'm in Phoenix. I'm ninety minutes from Tucson.
Brandon: Alright, but what part of Phoenix are you in?
Howard: The very Southern part, Ahwatukee. Are you familiar with Ahwatukee?
Brandon: Is that south of Tempe?
Howard: Tempe's right to the east of us.
Brandon: To the east, oh okay.
Howard: So basically in a nutshell, Phoenix has a million people and there's this huge mountain park that goes from forty-eighth street to fifty-first avenue it's called South Mountain and it's the largest city park inside a city in America. South of that mountain is 10% of Phoenix. It's like eighty-five thousand people, but nobody calls it Phoenix. They all call it Ahwatukee. They all live in Phoenix, but if you say, "Do you live in Phoenix?" They say, "No, I live in Ahwatukee." But if they talk to their lawyer, they'd have to be advised that they're in Phoenix. But yeah, good luck on those deals. I sent you two emails of threads I wish you'd comment on. One was that orthodontist who graduated with million dollars of debt and another one which has exploded is a fifty-two year old oral surgeon, retired with disability because of his allergy to latex, and some dentists were on there saying, "Is that true?" But it was all these people they’re saying that latex glove allergies are huge. But hey, I know you're a warrior and you got better things to do than talk to me, but it was just an honor that you came onto the show today and talk to my homies. Thank you so much for all that your firm has done for dentistry for the last half century and thank you so much for coming on the show.
Brandon: It's an honor to be with you. Thanks for having me.
Howard: All right, thank you, Brandon. Thank you, Ryan.
Brandon: Alright, thanks, Howard.