Guarding Your Dental Practice: Strategies Against Embezzlement with David Harris

David Harris  00:00 

I always think of myself as so lucky to deal with dentists. I mean, they’re wonderful people. They, they, they really want to help their patients they are they are healers and put other people first and try really hard to do good work and sometimes a challenging environment. So my admiration for them is just boundless. 

 

Shawn Zajas  00:20 

The future of dentistry belongs to the innovators. Welcome to innovation in dentistry. I’m your host, Shawn Zajas. And I believe that the future of dentistry is going to be unbelievably great over the next decade in two decades. But the question isn’t that the question is, are you going to be part of what makes dentistry great? So I couldn’t be more excited today to have the chance to get to interview David hairs of prosperity. And hopefully I’m saying that right. Before we dive into everything, and I set you up, let me just say, thank you so much for letting me interview you today. 

 

David Harris  01:08 

It’s a pleasure to be with you. I’m really glad to get to know you a little better. 

 

Shawn Zajas  01:11 

Okay, so David, innovation in dentistry could mean so many different things. And the way that innovation plays out, it typically plays out in dentistry with either clinical innovation or technological innovation. But what I’m fascinated in is what is it that gets an individual to just feel like they have that permission to say, why not me? Like, why can’t I stand up and lead? Why can’t I start a consulting company or a coaching company, or a software company? Because I meet so many dental professionals, dentists, hygienists, and like that love what they’re doing in the shop. But there’s also something else inside of them. That whether it’s a passion or a calling, that there’s more so I’m curious, because we’re you’ve arrived as CEO, press paradin and the value that you you provide. I’m curious about your story A into serving dentistry, but even into, you know, doing what you’re doing with embezzlement, like, I have no idea how you arrived where you’re at. So I’d love to hear a little bit about that. 

 

David Harris  02:20 

Absolutely. And totally accidental, you know, people come to me sometimes, and they say, so you must have had a vision, you had a business plan, you saw an opportunity, and you went after it. No. It came after me. I, my working life started a little in auspiciously. Shawn, I have the distinction of being kicked out of high school. And started to, you know, like, grade, 

 

Shawn Zajas  02:50 

what, what grade I need to know. 

 

David Harris  02:56 

I was 15. I was a couple of months into my sophomore year. And I got, you know, my parents kind of got the eviction notice. So you’re 15 years old, you have time on your hands, you don’t make good decisions. And I didn’t. And pretty soon the police were showing up at my parents house pretty regularly. And eventually I got put in front of a judge. And he kind of looked me up and down. And he said to me, green or orange. I had no idea what he was talking about. And my face probably reflected that. And he read my look. And he said, Mr. Harris, I’m giving you a choice. And the choice is what you wear next week. And now it kind of occurred to me, Orange is what you were in prison. And of course, green is the color of the army. So I chose green. You know what better with my complexion. And yeah, I just didn’t, didn’t really like the thought of that prison jumpsuit. And to put it into context, this was 1977. So right after the end of the Vietnam War, not a time when a whole lot of people wanted to sign up. And the recruiters were happy to see me even though I was a little under age, in fact that the recruiting Sergeant helpfully went out for smoking left the photocopier attended just about the time I had to hand over my birth certificate. In a way I went, and to everybody’s surprise, including mine. I fit in and it worked well. They ended up educating me. When when when I left the military, I had a college degree and went out into the world. And I worked for bank for a few years I was an investigator there, I get very frustrated one day and quit. And the bank I worked for just was insistent on making the same mistakes over and over and it it just wasn’t the culture I wanted. So I quit my job with the bank 1989 was was when this happened, August of 89. Specifically, I was sitting at home, watching TV bored, silly. And the phone rang. And it was a guy I’d been in high school with in my brief visit there, who was now a dentist. And he said, I think my friend has persons stealing from me and I have no one else to call. So this guy caught me at the perfect moment. Like I say, I was absolutely bored. This sounded kind of interesting. So I said to him, Okay, I’ll meet you tonight at your practice after it closes and we’ll get to the bottom of it. So I went to his practice. Now this was 1989 BC, in other words before computers, and it was the old pegboard system that was the forerunner of practice management software. So I got to his office, and he shoved a pile of these ledger cards at me. pegboard used to have a current for each patient with how much money they owed God talk about, you know, talk about prehistoric that was it. So he had these, these ledger cards, and he was thinking I go through them. And I said to my friend, you know, I’m gonna solve this a little bit differently. Show me where she works. So he took me over to the suspects work area. And I started going through her desk. And of course, my friend is just going bug eyed like, you can do this. Yeah, no problem. It’s not her desk, it’s your desk. And what I found Shawn tape underneath one of her drawers was what we call in the trade her cheat book. So a lot of people stealing need to keep a record of what they’ve done so that they know what’s real in the in the accounts and what’s fiction. And now you’re more likely to see a spreadsheet and Excel spreadsheet or something. But in those days, it was like an old fashioned school notebook. So I found that and once I found it, the whole thing unraveled pretty fast. So my friend was glad that I found this he wasn’t happy that he’d been stolen from. And he asked me if I’d come back in the next morning to help him fire this woman because he didn’t want to do that on his own. I said, okay, because I knew I’d be bored tomorrow, too. So I did that. We got her fired. My friend promised to buy me dinner that I’m still waiting for. And, you know, I walked away thinking, Well, that was interesting, but I didn’t really see a career for me. Except two weeks later, lightning struck. And what happened was, I had an appointment. Totally unrelated to this, I had an appointment at my own dentist’s office. And I got to the office and I had my hand on the front door, and I was about to go in. And I looked through the glass panel in the door. And what jolted me was that the person I saw sitting in his front desk was the exact same one I help fire two weeks ago at my friend’s office. 

 

Shawn Zajas  08:14 

Oh, my gosh. 

 

David Harris  08:17 

Um, yeah, what I said next was a little less polite than that. But yeah, that’s, you know, this this jolt of electricity in me. I turned around quickly, I hope she didn’t see me. I ran to the nearest payphone because in those days, you just didn’t carry a cell phone around, called the practice and I didn’t know a whole lot about how dentistry worked. And I was grasping a little bit. I didn’t know the name of an orthodontist in my town. So when she picked up the phone I gave my name is that orthodontist calling from my dentist and I got put right through to the dentist and once he picked up, I said to him, I’m not Dr. Jensen. I am David Harris, the guy who’s supposed to be occupying your chair right now. Let me tell you why I’m not. And I told him about the bag of tricks that he had working in his front desk. And he panicked, and he asked me like, What the hell do I do now? And about a sentence and a half later, he hired me. And that was my first client. 

 

Shawn Zajas  09:24 

I’m like, this is talking about fortuitous like, like I yeah, you literally got pulled into dentistry because of crazy, fateful circumstance. And yet you are already ready for it. So you said was your education as an investigator already from the military? 

 

David Harris  09:48 

Yeah, I started the army and then and then worked a couple of years in the bank doing fraud investigation there. So I knew how to investigate fraud. I didn’t understand at that point a whole lot about dentistry. But you know, I’d like to say I learned and now after 34 years, I’ve got a pretty good grip on it. 

 

Shawn Zajas  10:10 

So David, if we could go back to 15 year old David. David, I’m guessing were you getting bored, because I saw in your bio, that you’re part of Mensa. So I’m guessing you’re incredibly intelligent. And at the time, what high school wasn’t engaging, it probably wasn’t stimulating, and maybe some other things were going on. So you ended up, I don’t know, just probably not really caring much about it. 

 

David Harris  10:39 

That’s pretty accurate. I didn’t love the courses I was in. And I didn’t really see the purpose of them, and The Parting of the Ways Shawn came in, in history. So here I am in sophomore high school history. We are studying ancient Greek history, if you can believe it. And when I said to my teacher was, can you please explain to me where what use this is ever going to have for me? And she gave me the high school history teacher answer. Well, I’ll help you predict the future. And I, I don’t particularly love 15 year old David anymore. But I was sarcastic. Son of a bitch. And I said to her, that’s great. Could you just show me one example of that? I mean, can you please tell me something that’s going to happen tomorrow or next week? Because of what you know about Greek history? And of course, she couldn’t that was it. I walked out. And you know, I don’t I don’t think a whole lot of tears are shed. 

 

Shawn Zajas  11:40 

So you also mentioned that you liked solving like puzzles, almost like, right? When you came to that girl’s desk, it was like this puzzle that you were trying to solve? Is that something that you knew early on? As a kid like, your parents were like, wow, David’s really good at deductive reasoning, or, like, was that something that kind of stood out from from an early age? 

 

David Harris  12:02 

I guess so. I hadn’t really thought about it when you’re asked a question. But yeah, I always I always enjoyed, you know, when you had 90% of the information to solve something, and you had to go find the other 10. 

 

Shawn Zajas  12:17 

So when you’re in the army, you have these different options for education, what made you land on what you just cited? 

 

David Harris  12:27 

Well, the army promoted me quickly. And they they promoted me to a place where I was supposed to have a college degree, and I didn’t. As we discussed, I also didn’t have a high school diploma. And eventually, that kind of became an issue and the army sent me away to college. I never went back and finished high school. So I have a, I have an undergrad and actually a master’s degree and No, no high school diploma. 

 

Shawn Zajas  12:52 

That’s hilarious. So you don’t have a junior year, you didn’t go to prom? No high school like that. And then you just go straight to college. 

 

David Harris  13:02 

Well, and the funny thing was the same people who kicked me out of high school who saw me get kicked out of high school, were in my freshman class wondering how the hell I got there. 

 

Shawn Zajas  13:09 

Oh, my gosh. Okay, so you get this call, though, from your friend. You investigate, you figure it out, then you have to even fire. And then what you said two weeks later, you see the same individual? Wow. I’m even wondering how I’m guessing the dentist. This is like a big. Like, it’s almost embarrassing on the dentist that hired her like maybe he didn’t check references, I’m guessing, or was it different in 1819 89? 

 

David Harris  13:40 

It wasn’t different at all. And dentists still do a terrible job of pre employment screening. And of course, thieves know that. So if I have baggage and I want to get a job, somewhere I go, I go to a dental office because I know that their their pre employment screening is deficient. Well, let me be specific, first of all, 70 million Americans. So that’s one in four adults as a criminal record. And yet, the majority of dentists don’t check for criminal records. You mentioned reference checks. And I’m going to I’m going to suggest a slight change in verbiage because a lot of times when people talk about references, they’re talking about character references. And it is not remotely important to me when somebody’s parish priest or their high school science teachers think about, oh, I know what my high school science teacher thinks about me. But that’s, that’s a slightly different story. The only people I want to talk to and I think it’s mandatory before you hire is everybody who’s been this person’s employer for the last five years. Bear in mind, Shawn, that if somebody has baggage, they’re going to do everything they can to prevent that call from happening. One of the things things that we tell dentists, for example is when you’re, you’re hiring somebody don’t ever call any phone number they give you for a former employer. Go online, look it up and call that number. Because we’ve seen more than a few cases where somebody has parked their disposable cell phone with their uncle, and gotten their uncle to pretend to be the former employer and give a great reference. 

 

Shawn Zajas  15:27 

Wow, yeah, people can be pretty creative. 

 

David Harris  15:30 

People big can be creative. And what I’ll say about the dental profession in general, is that they’re very bad with hidden agendas. First of all, dentists hate hiring. And I’ve been lecturing in a room of 300 dentists, and I’ve asked for a show of hands of how many of them enjoy hiring staff. Zero. So it’s like any other job you really despise. My despise job is cleaning out the garage. And my happy time happens when I’m cleaning the garage and my 21 year old son wanders by and he doesn’t appear to have anything more important going on. Because I’ll bring him into the garage and say, Okay, you do that side. In other words, I look for a shortcut. And dentists to hate hiring, sort of trying to get it over with. And what that means is that a lot of things get skipped. Another one that I often talk about with with deficient hiring is I can’t get a job with Amazon delivering the crap people buy online without a drug test. And yet, the norm in dentistry probably 90% of dental offices, don’t drug test people on the way in the door. And it makes no sense. Dentists hold the keys to the pharmacy. 

 

Shawn Zajas  16:51 

Right, right. Wow. 

 

David Harris  16:57 

I see firsthand how much crime is driven by drugs. 

 

Shawn Zajas  17:02 

Okay, so let’s, let’s just back up a little bit. So you, you get hired by this person by this dentist, that’s, you’re going to to get dentistry done. But you don’t end up so did you end up going into the chair to get dentistry that day? Or 

 

David Harris  17:18 

not that day? No. No, he, he wanted me to investigate what she had done. Now. He’d only she’d only been there two weeks. I mean, it was it was a pretty quick investigation. And, but by the time I finished it, the local rep from one of the Dell supply companies realized what I was doing. And he had two other dentists who had problems. And that was kind of the way it got launched. 

 

Shawn Zajas  17:47 

But you don’t know anything about starting a business at this point in time, you have now references, people are coming to you. What what did this road deck like for the next six months or a year trying to did you incorporate right away? 

 

David Harris  18:01 

I went to see an attorney pretty fast. And he said, Yeah, you should have, you should have a company. So that got set up. And you know, after that I needed a bank account and you know, all of the kind of trappings of business, I had none of it. But, you know, over the over the next few months, I built that and for the next four or five years, you know, I was kind of just doing this on my own and word of mouth and kept me busy. The the work environment really stank. In other words, back in the pre computer days, you had to investigate on site. So the way it would work typically is I’d meet the doctor after hours, they would hand me a key and tell me what time in the morning I had to be gone. And you just sit there in the office and work all night. And yeah, that’s that’s what my life looked like for a little while. 

 

Shawn Zajas  19:01 

Now was that prospera didn’t or did Prospero didn’t get more? 

 

David Harris  19:05 

It wasn’t I didn’t have a name then. I mean, there was no name for a while and then somebody said to me, okay, you really need to name your business and thought about it for a while and didn’t didn’t want to use anything with a name that had embezzlement in it because sometimes you need to kind of be a little bit under people’s radar. So with with the help of a guy who was with me at the time, we we came up with Prosperident, which was just contraction for the words prosperity for dentists. Yeah, you know, and it was kind of vanilla, which which fit our needs. Once practices computerized, things changed a little bit once we had the ability to reach across the Internet and get their data and work remotely. Things changed a lot and that’s when that’s when Prosperident and really started growing. We’re now up to I think our current headcount is 25 people. And we are dentistry only we don’t, we don’t work with any other community. 

 

Shawn Zajas  20:14 

So 34 years, you get dragged into this. You learn along the way, was there ever a time where you were like, I’m great at the specifics of it, but I don’t actually know how to either lead or run a business like, what was there ever this imposter syndrome that came like, wow, David, you’re in over your head? Or was this something that you just work you were ready to handle? 

 

David Harris  20:38 

Um, it grew slowly. Like everybody else in the planet, I’ve probably suffered from imposter syndrome once or twice. You know, and I can, I can remember, the first time I was speaking to a really big audience, like 400 people. And, you know, you, you go, you go through those questions, like, you know, is the zipper to my fly open, and, you know, I really should get my hair cut last week and things like that, you know, you’ve you go through that. But now, for the most part, it’s been, it’s been pretty comfortable. And I’ve had good people around me, I, you know, I’ve got a really good management team who worked with me and, you know, anytime I’m not absolutely sure which which direction, I should point the compass next, you know, they’re, they’re there with me to help. So it’s, it’s been a, you know, it’s been a team growth, and I cannot sit here and say, I made Prosperident and what it is now, a lot of people we’ve got some absolutely dynamite investigators, we have 18 investigators. And you know, we have, we have three levels of investigators. So they they kind of start as a Fraud Examiner, and they become a senior examiner, and ultimately, a supervising examiner, and I look at the group of supervising examiner’s we have, there are four of them. And they’re phenomenal. They’re their ability to get inside the head of a thief just makes me sit back and admire some days. 

 

Shawn Zajas  22:13 

So you built quite an enterprise, David, I mean, to have that many employees, you know, the reach of what you’re doing. I’m just saying that that’s not a, there’s no guarantee that when you start an enterprise, or you start a small company that is going to continue and continue to grow. And I can tell you’re someone that does, right by people you’re probably amazing to work with. But I just know, business is messy. Business comes with challenges in the marketplace shifts, and there’s recessions and there’s, you know, pandemic. Yeah, yeah. Was there ever a time that you went through almost like a dark night of the soul where it was either just difficult to get out of bed? Or? You just ran into it? I don’t know. Just just a obstacle that you weren’t expecting? 

 

David Harris  23:00 

Absolutely. I mean, COVID was, was certainly one of them. And as you know, and hit the dental profession hard, and like anybody who makes their living from dentists, when they hurt, we hurt. Yeah. And oh, yeah, there were some sleepless nights there. And, you know, fortunately, we were well financed, we had a reasonable amount of money in the bank. You know, I got together with my senior people and said, Okay, we we need to make some decisions. And one decision that we made, and I’ll say I had some opposition from my team on this, but I went to anybody we were working with, and I said, look if you have cashflow challenges, because of COVID we will be there for you. So if you want a longer period of time to pay for the work we’re doing, we’ll give it to you. If you really are having second thoughts about proceeding and you want to cancel our work now. You know, we’ll we’ll settle with you based on what we’ve already done, which is something we’ve never done before. But, you know, we went back to dentistry, and we said we’re there for you. And our clients really appreciated that. I mean, some of them, you know, a few of them did veil from the work we were doing. A lot of them took advantage of an extended payment period. But they all said, you know, Thanks for Thanks for pointing our interest first. That That means something. So that that was I think the most challenging time I’ve had in business. And the other thing we started doing that one of one of my teams suggested and my initial response was no and then she she persisted and eventually talked me into it was we started doing webinars, and we did them once a week initially and then you know as as the world got back to work, we kind of slowed the pace down because doing a webinar and the way we did the once a week was was just killing us. But you know I said to Our team, this is our chance to give back. So we’re not, you know, we’re not going to charge people money, we’re not going to ask them for anything. We’re going to bring them information and maybe some guests, and we will give away kind of toolbox resources, but we’re not going to ask them for a thing. And so yeah, we did the weekly for a while, and then we went to monthly and then we went to quarterly and we’re still doing them. But it was, you know, it was a chance to get back because the point that I’ll, I’ll name my colleague her she’s she’s Amber Weber Gonzales who was actually there at the same conference where we met. Amber has our proactive department, which is, which is where we work with dentists to get in front of embezzlers. And she said, look, you’ve got all these dentists who are suddenly have time on their hands because their practices are closed, and we should we should give them some information. And my first thought was no, you know, be who’d be interested in what we have to say, well, the webinars kind of took on a life of their own, I think the most people we ever had in one was 2000. 

 

Shawn Zajas  26:08 

Oh, my gosh. 

 

David Harris  26:12 

2013 was our maximum registration. And, yeah, it was a, it, they just kind of took on a life of their own. And again, it was all about coming from the right place and saying, let’s, let’s give back right now, because we can. 

 

Shawn Zajas  26:28 

Well, I love the way you do business. Looking at looking at the 34 years and this journey. Like I said, I see a lot of businesses, that can be a one man show, they can be a small team of three to five, but scaling to that next place. It’s just it’s not a certainty. So what what could you name like a mindset that either you had to embrace or mindset that you had to shed, in order to get to where you’re at today? 

 

David Harris  27:01 

Absolutely. The one of the big things is I had to let go of being an investigator. You know, I had to move from, it’s one of those old cliches working in the business to working on the business. And that was hard for me, because that’s, that’s kind of what I do and what I think I’m best at. And I had to let go of that. So Mike, you know, I still to the chagrin of my management people, I still do a few cases a year. But, you know, my caseload is about 1/10 of what our, what our busy investigators will handle. Well, wow. So that was that was hard for me. And, you know, the cases I do are ones now that are really, there’s, there’s something about them, that makes me better set up to handle them than anybody else. And I don’t unfortunately, I don’t see a lot of those cases, because as I said, I’ve got some really, I’ve got some amazing investigators, we, we all get together as a group every two years, we just, we just had our meeting two weeks ago, and this is where, you know, we meet for two days. And the whole goal of that two days is to advance the science of what we’re doing. And, you know, I sit back and I watch, you know, so this time, we were thinking about things, like for example, how can AI impact what we do. And one of my team was, you know, one of one of my senior people was leading that, that that session, for example. And, you know, I just, I just sat back and look, because his his depth of thought on it was way more than mine ever would have been. And we had another of our senior people do a case presentation. So he was talking about a case he worked in where it was three owners of a practice with one of the owners was stealing from the other two. And, you know, it was the first time this guy had had that kind of case. And he kind of took everybody else through his thought process. And it was, it was fabulous. Like it was a it was such a good presentation. 

 

Shawn Zajas  29:13 

So like, I’m curious, even just about, like, you know, with with neuroscience and all the advancements, like you said with AI, like, does this intuition even play a role in investigation? Like, is there is there a place for that 

 

David Harris  29:31 

to a point, one of the things that I had to do as I scaled upward, was start with something that was basically a black art and move it to something that was replicatable. So our principle is very simple. If one of our investigators did an investigation, another one did the same investigation, they should get the same conclusion via the same results. So we we’ve had because when I started Yeah, you know you you were kind of like the Pinball Wizard, you know, you, you play by intuition. And that that can’t be the way you do it in a bigger in an enterprise. So we had to get our process into a series of steps that people could follow that would lead them to similar conclusions. And but having said that, what I always say is what differentiates the great investigators from the average ones is that the great ones construct a hypothesis. In other words, they sit there and say, All right, if I were this person in this situation, how would I steal? And the great investigators will come up with an answer, and then they’ll go after that, first, the average investigator will have 25 steps they have to perform and they’ll start at A and they’ll end up why. And they’ll do A then B, then C, the the really gifted ones will say no, in this case, I should start at L. And they’ll, you know, they’ll, they’ll get to A and B and C, but they’ll they’ll they’ll kind of go where they think that the buried treasure is first and then you know, then look around at the rest of the yard just see what they find. 

 

Shawn Zajas  31:20 

So I bet you have a great perspective on the mindset that dentists have that almost keep them blinded from believing that this is ever going to happen to them. I don’t know, maybe maybe people just go along and they’re like, oh my gosh, like that kind of thing. Yeah, you hear about it, but that’s not gonna happen to me. And I imagine there’s some sense of denial, but what what mindset do you feel like hurt dentists because or just set them up to be blinded by this? 

 

David Harris  31:53 

Well, you know, you and I have both made our careers out of working with dentists and and we probably each know, hundreds or 1000s of them. So I’m sure you’re going to see what I’m talking about. One dentist, friend of mine described his work as follows. He said, what I do all day is I have people come in to see me for the most part, they leave looking exactly the same as when they came in. I solve problems typically that they didn’t know they had until I told them. And for the privilege of doing those things, I have to charge the money and sometimes hurt them a little bit. What’s not to love about my job. Okay, that was that was his description of his day. And let’s face it, there are there are parts of dentistry where life is a little bit different. If you’re an orthodontist, for example, you know, every orthodontist gets that wow moment when people get to, you know, when when people get D bonded, and they see how they really look and they love it. But for a lot of dentists, the way I just described it is the reality. So if you live that way, and you ask people 12 or 15 times a day, how are you doing Mrs. Smith, and three or four of them will say, well, great if I wasn’t here that reshapes people’s personalities over time, you know, when and dentists get I hate to say it, but they get a little bit of subtle abuse, probably from a lot of their patients. It’s not malicious, it’s, but it’s there. And what do I think of as as kind of the prototypical dentists personality, they’re anti confrontational, they look very hard to find the best in people. And as I said before, they’re people of science, and they don’t necessarily function well when people have hidden agendas. So those to me are kind of the the underlying behavioral characteristics, but I’ll add a few more. I always think of myself as so lucky to deal with dentists. I mean, they’re wonderful people. They, they they really want to help their patients they are they are healers and put other people first and try really hard to do good work and sometimes a challenging environment. So my admiration for them is just boundless. But it’s it at some level, it also makes them easy marks. And I’ll pick up on what you said a minute ago, life is a lot easier if you can convince yourself you’re immune. You and I see a lot of dentists, you know, when I start talking about embezzlement, who kind of fold their arms and their face gets tight, you know, you can probably even see them boxing a little bit. And what the whole posture and body language say is, well, you know, it might be you, and it might be you but it won’t be me. And if you ask them why? You know what will come next out of their mouth. There’s what I refer to as the immunity fallacy. Well, I practice In a small town, but really dentistry, embezzlement and dentistry is an urban problem. You know, it happens in big cities where you hire somebody who you don’t know very well. Or, well, I’m thick, especially, I’m a periodontist. And really embezzlement is what hits those poor general dentists but we periodontist are immune. Or my staff have been with me forever, or my spouse is my office manager. I mean, people will come up with reasons like this, why they’re immune. And when you start looking at embezzlement cases, those immunity things all break down. We see lots of small town embezzlement specialists on average probably get hit more frequently than general dentists. We’ve seen lots of embezzlement where somebody worked there for 20 years, and then one morning came in and started stealing. And let’s talk about the final one I laid out, which is suppose is the office manager that works really well. Until that spouse decides that they’re going to trade the dentist in on a newer model. Oh, wow. Phone call I got once that has stuck with me forever. A dentist phoned me and he said, Yeah, I married a woman from who moved here from Thailand. And David, what I’m trying to understand is how come since she married me, all of her uncle’s back in Thailand, where the average income is about $8,000 a year are suddenly driving $35,000 pickup trucks. And this woman didn’t want to ask the dentist for money. So she stole it. They’re not married anymore, by the way. 

 

Shawn Zajas  36:51 

Here’s the punchline. 

 

David Harris  36:53 

Well, I knew that was your next question. 

 

Shawn Zajas  36:58 

Okay, so are there like some warning signs or cautions? Or I don’t know, yellow flags, red flags? That? Okay, yeah, I’d love to hear some because it’s like, if a dentist is hearing this, it’s like, well, what should they be on the lookout for? Just to make sure this isn’t happening in their practice a 

 

David Harris  37:19 

lot of things and they kind of break into two categories. And there are some financial indicators, they have a problem and there are behavioral indicators. So maybe start with the behavioral because they’re, they’re easier, and they’re easier to discuss, and also easier to observe. More than 90% of thieves exhibit some type of behavior consistent with stealing. In other words, if you’re a dentist, and I’m working for you, and I’m stealing, there are probably certain ways I have to act in order to try to protect myself. And I’ll start with a really simple one, I’m probably pretty reluctant to take vacation. Because when I’m gone from the office, what I what I have advocated is control over how information moves through the practice. And a lot of thieves are territorial, and they kind of isolate the doctor from a lot of communication in the office, which isn’t terribly hard to do, because that’s probably where a lot of doctors would like to be anyway. 

 

Shawn Zajas  38:27 

Right? It solves a big problem. Like if you can alleviate this whole headache from me, and I can entrust you with it. It’s great for me, except now that there’s that middleman, there’s less accountability. A lot 

 

David Harris  38:42 

of dentists have the clinical fantasy, and I’m not talking about sex in the dental chair. That’s the other clinical fantasy. This is the one where I get to go in and I do high end dentistry every day, and I don’t get dragged into the minutiae of running the place. That’s that’s utopia for a lot of dentists. And if I’m an office manager who’s stealing that’s also my utopia. Because now we don’t have a whole lot of contact over things like financial matters, you know, Doctor No, you just go to dentistry. I’ll talk to the patients about money. So I really want to isolate them. But also if I go on vacation that isolation ends at least while I’m away. One case that happened very early in my career, it was a two dentists periodontist practice and they got they got taken for about $600,000 and the way yeah, that’s it was big then it’s it’s a little more routine now. But 

 

Shawn Zajas  39:46 

we How was that close to routine I heard of, you know, someone that posted me, lost 80,000 And I thought that was devastating. I thought that was like horror. 

 

David Harris  40:00 

It is devastating. It’s also below average, the average stuff now is about $110,000. That’s the average. Wow. We see. Typically every year we’ll see a couple of people who we described as being members of the million dollar club. 

 

Shawn Zajas  40:16 

Oh my God, that’s not a club you want to be part of. 

 

David Harris  40:19 

Well as a dentist, it’s not as an embezzler, it means you’re pretty good at it. It also probably means you’re in prison. But you know, that’s, that’s another story. So $600,000 from this two Doctor periodontist practice and the way that it all came unstuck was at the office manager who had been there for like 20 years. One weekend, she was skiing and she broke her leg. And Monday morning for the first time in anybody’s memory. Judy was her name. I don’t know why I remember that Judy was not in the practice. And around 11am, one of the one of the receptionist came into the senior doctor’s office operatory he was doing an implant and she took them out of the operatory which was a huge nono in their in their culture. And she said him doctor, there’s something weird going on here, because I’ve gotten these three very weird phone calls this morning. And the three calls were all from patients complaining about their bill, not the amount, but the type of payment. So the calls were like, you know, I was in two weeks ago I had I had a ginger ectomy and I paid by cheque, but I just got my bill. And it says that I paid by credit card, the calls were kind of along those lines. And had Judy been there like she was every other Monday morning, those calls would have gone to Judy and Judy would have said something that would have made the patients just kind of go away. But with Judy gone, they went to somebody else. And that was the person who who rang the alarm with the doctor. And the doctor listened to the receptionist for about three minutes. And then he called me. And we came and started investigating, we found 1000s and 1000s and 1000s of dollars. And if Judy had not broken her leg that Monday morning, for all I know she’d still be doing it. 

 

Shawn Zajas  42:19 

So I’m just shocked that like that’s like day one day one of the person not being in control, and all of a sudden immediately, something’s off.  

 

David Harris  42:31 

That is exactly what happened. So if I’m a thief, I don’t want to take vacation. The other thing we know about these is that they like to be alone when they steal. I’m partly it’s about not being observed. But the other part is its concentration. And it’s hard to generate that amount of concentration when the phone’s ringing and you got patients moving around the office and staff and everything else. So a lot of thieves will plan their lives so that they get some alone time. And they arrived before everybody else in the morning or they stay late or they kind of make our quiet visit to the office on the weekend. territoriality, so I mentioned kind of isolating the doctor from patient discussions, that’s part of it. But it goes a lot further than that. It also extends to I guard my duties pretty carefully. I probably don’t want to cross train anybody else to do any part of my job. It might even extend to somebody’s workspace in their computer. I got a call a little while ago from a dentist and she said, Yeah, I you know, my office manager was at lunch, we had an extra person and I had nowhere else to put them. So I put them at the office managers desk. And she came back from lunch and she lost it. Do you think there’s anything suspicious about that? And I said, Well, yeah. You know, if I were the office manager and then happen to me, I would you know, I would probably just take the doctor somewhere private and say, You know what, I have my personal stuff in the desk. You know, I’ve got a few personal things on my computer. Before you you kind of invite somebody into my space, I wouldn’t mind you checking with me now. That would be what I would say as an office manager, but in front of other people. She just lost it. And to me that seemed like like a huge overreaction. There 

 

Shawn Zajas  44:29 

 So David, wait, I thought I’m just so curious. So if you’re speaking and you’re at an event and you’re sharing, and people maybe didn’t go to this event just to find out if if they’re getting embezzled? Do you see the eyes in the audience when all of a sudden they start like oh my gosh, like that, like, I’m sure you’ve seen that look of like where they go white or something and it’s like, oh my gosh, I think this is happening to me. 

 

David Harris  45:02 

I’m a I’m a very interactive presenter, I mean, I always am locked on in my audience’s eyes and kind of watching facial expressions and stuff. And yes, you can, you can absolutely tell when somebody’s wishing there was an Ativan dispenser in the room somewhere. 

 

Shawn Zajas  45:20 

They’re like going over the checklist, and they’re just in their mind being like, oh, my gosh, six out of seven of those, like, that’s that Susie, my practice? So that’s Mark, you know, like, that’s probably the worst thing. And I’m sure there’s a there’s a measure of willful denial, just because it’s got to be a mess. I mean, how, what’s the typical lifecycle of when someone hires you to all of a sudden, things legally getting wrapped up, because I’m sure discovering it’s one thing, but then all of a sudden, there’s the whole legal mess that ensues afterwards, right? 

 

David Harris  45:51 

It can take years. And I wish I had a better answer than that. But you said it a minute ago, the the important step happens when you fire the person and that, you know, that leak that you have in your in your pocket suddenly gets sewn up. After that, everything gets better. And a typical thief, Shawn will take between two and 4% of what a practice collects each month. You know, and 2% doesn’t sound like a lot. But if you think of the economics of a practice, you know, take a take a practice that’s bringing in $100,000 a month, you know, overheads probably consuming the first 70,000 of them. So what the doctors living on and saving for retirement and everything comes out of the other $30,000. And a thief can be taking 10% of that. For a lot of doctors, that’s they’re saving, you know, that’s their ability to save for retirement that just walked out the window, or walked out the door, you don’t walk out a window, and mix metaphors and getting rid of that person. And the other thing is that person is often toxic to the office culture. Because there’s this hidden agenda, and it’s driving a lot of their decisions. You know, sometimes they will, you know, they’ll do a lot of things that are dysfunctional that may not, at least directly have anything to do with the embezzlement. But you get rid of that person and all of a sudden, the you know, the office starts functioning better the doctor has more money, you know, the the aftermath kind of stuff where you where you work on getting your money back and you you put this person into the justice system, yeah, those take a while. But that’s, that’s happening at a better time. 

 

Shawn Zajas  47:46 

Now, I imagine this is happening, like in every form of dentistry, like not just the private practice, but the private practice that has a little bit more connection to, again, maybe autonomy. Now at the same exact time, the DSOs have processes in place to probably try and limit this, but there’s also less connection to the 50 entities that they have. So this must be happening everywhere. 

 

David Harris  48:12 

It is we do a fair amount of DSO work. And yeah, you know, DSOs have a couple of challenges with this. The first is hubris, I mean, some of them are afflicted by the disease that says we’re big, therefore, we must also be smart. But in fairness to them, or financial oversight of a DSO is a tremendously challenging process. And I was we’re just starting to work right now with a DSO with about 100 practices. And they are running I kid you not 17 different pieces of practice management software. Because they’ve grown by acquiring offices, and their policy, and I understand why they’re doing it, their policy is when we when we affiliated with a practice, you know, we’re already going to have some challenges in holding on to the staff and, you know, keeping everything functioning and the last thing we want to do is say to them, oh, and good news, by the way, you have to learn a new piece of practice management software. So they’ve left the software exactly where it was when they when they affiliated beyond that. They’ve also basically left the control systems in each office as they work. So picture an office that a doctor owns, which means that they’re keeping some kind of eye on it. And then they affiliate with a DSO and one of the reasons a doctor affiliates in the first place is because they want to get out of the running of the practice and they want to become a pure clinician. So the doctor who own the practice mentally checks out of a of the administration. So you have a set of systems that were there that the DSO is counting on to still function. And the doctors kind of abdicated. And that’s what you have, then you have regional managers who in a lot of DSOs, don’t necessarily come from dentistry. There are some VSOs that like hiring from retail, because they bring a customer service focus. And that’s, that’s great. But they, you know, they don’t necessarily have the ability to dissect what an individual offices. And then finally, we have the factor that you just mentioned, which is that one of the things somebody must do when they’re stealing is rationalizing. In other words, they must tell themselves that I know that in general, stealing is wrong. But it’s okay here because and it’s a lot easier to rationalize when you don’t really know the victims. I mean, stealing from the guy or gal who works 30 feet away from you all day and signs your paycheck is harder than stealing from some private equity investor who you’ve never met. Wow. There’s a lot of stuff that goes on in DSOs. 

 

Shawn Zajas  51:19 

Okay, so David, right now, if a listener is hearing this, and they’re saying, Oh, my gosh, like, I don’t know, maybe this is happening in my practice? Do you either have some like downloadable resource? Or do you have a webinar? Or where would you like their eyeballs to go so they can learn more information? 

 

David Harris  51:36 

You know, the best thing and we have a lot of resources, but one thing I’d suggest is go right to the horse’s mouth. In other words, I am happy to talk to any dentist who hears this. And it says, Yeah, I’m wondering what’s going on in my practice. And, you know, call me and talk to me for half an hour and with with no cost and no obligation. And then after that, decide what you want to do. If you if you want to kind of go the most expedient route, that’s how to do it. Our website, which is triple w.prosperident.com, has a lot of information. We also have a self assessment questionnaire that we normally charge for, but I’m happy to give any listener viewer of this podcast, the self assessment questionnaire at no at no cost. That’s about a 15 minute job. And people get a score on it and scored like a college exam. So if you get if you get 100, you did well, if you get 40, you probably aren’t going to find your mom to brag about it. So any any of those things are available. Yeah, our website has articles. And all of our past webinars, I mentioned our webinars series, all of them are available on our website, as well. And yeah, we’ve we’ve talked about a lot of different things in those webinars. 

 

Shawn Zajas  52:58 

Okay, so David, here’s a question in closing, everything that you’ve learned so far in your professional career, you know, as, as an investigator, as a CEO, as someone that’s been leading a very successful enterprise. Imagine you are now walking down the street and you see 15 year old David, the one that just got kicked out of high school. And you have a moment just to share one sentiment with him, based off of everything you’ve come to learn, what do you share with him? 

 

David Harris  53:33 

Buy Apple stock when it’s still $10? That would be my share. In terms of what would help David in business, what would I say to him? Trust your gut. Keep good people around. Don’t be scared to fire them. Because I think one of the failings I’ve had as CEO is that I’ve been too loyal to my people sometimes. And I’ve, you know, I’ve kept people around that I shouldn’t have. I think those would be my invocations. 

 

Shawn Zajas  54:18 

You know, David, thank you so much. This is kind of a topic like on the dark side of dentistry. It’s something that people probably don’t mind learning about from afar. Okay, the statistics, okay. I don’t want to hear too much about it. But the second it becomes upfront and personal. There are so much reassurance to know that there’s companies like yours. What Prosperident has been doing last 34 years is there’s no way to say the value because again, I had a close friend that went through a situation just like this and the way that it messed with their identity. second guessing man who can I trust? Just how come I didn’t see it earlier? The way that it even mess with the culture, it is so challenging and to know that again, there’s a company like yours that is trusted that they can walk through and get just that expert. Take on it and just get that help. Like, it’s amazing. I love what you’re doing. I love what you’re doing in dentistry. And just thank you so much for letting me interview you today. 

 

David Harris  55:24 

Thank you. It’s been a it’s been a pleasure. And I’ve had I’ve had fun talking to you. 

 

Shawn Zajas  55:31 

Awesome. Hey, thank you so much, David. Thanks for listening, and be sure to follow so you never miss an episode. To learn more about what’s going on in dentistry. Check out innovation in dentistry.com