John Meis (00:04.858)
Hey everybody, welcome to this month's episode of The Double Your Production podcast. I'm Dr. John Meis here with my partner, Wendy Briggs. How you doing, Wendy?
Wendy Briggs (00:13.878)
I'm great, good to see you Dr. John.
John Meis (00:15.826)
Good to see you too. And with us is Jay Letwat from Sunbit Financing. And we're going to talk a little bit about some of the myths about third-party financing in dental cases because there is an awful lot of outdated old methodology being used in financial arrangements, which is really reducing the amount of care that patients are able to provide. So Wendy and I speak all over North America, we talk about case acceptance, we talk about some of the things that get in the way. And one of the things that gets in the way is bombing patients with gigantic treatment plans with no financing, not really being concerned about how we fit it into their budget. So we thought it'd be a great idea to have Jay come on and walk us through third party financing, the technology that's available, the way that we can do it in a way that's that has the highest acceptance or financing rate and also do it in the most time efficient manner because there's one of the things that we hear from practices all the time is that we don't have enough time to do the financing. Well that's really silly if you do all the work to show the care you know a few extra minutes on the financing end can really make a difference on the amount of care except
Jay (01:33.824)
Great, well thanks Dr. John and Wendy for having me. Certainly appreciate it, looking forward to it.
Wendy Briggs (01:41.458)
Yeah, it's going to be a good conversation. Like Dr. John mentioned, we often hear, you know, we don't have the time to do it, or we hear from practices, we already have third party financing in place, and they may have some of it. But what we found is when we do an audit, they aren't often using it. And maybe it's because Dr. John said about the team feeling like there's not enough time. I think another thing that I see, and I'd love to have your thoughts on this, Jay, is that sometimes we make assumptions about what patients really want, right? We think, well, this patient has money, they don't need outside financing, so we're not even gonna give them that opportunity or give them that option. I even had one office manager say to me years ago, I would never want any of my patients to go into debt for dentistry. So I think there's some outdated thinking about it, and certainly we assign some of our own values onto our patients, we may judge their pocketbook. And so I think there's plenty of...
Jay (02:32.491)
True.
Wendy Briggs (02:36.486)
opportunities that we often miss day in and day out in the dental practice to actually utilize some of the amazing financing options that are out there for patients.
Jay (02:45.392)
And you make some great points, Wendy, and here's what I'll say. Financing is generally something that most people don't like to bring up amongst, talking amongst friends, colleagues, especially a patient walking in the door, who as an office manager, you may have a three, five, 10, 20 year relationship with that person. And all of a sudden you're asking them, hey, your treatment is $3,000, maybe you don't have money. Here's a financing project. Now again, we're not suggesting you use that kind of talk track.
But that's kind of what internally the office manager is thinking. So it's, it's generally thought of as a very uncomfortable conversation. That's the first thing. The second thing is historically in the past, I'll say 25, 30 years, the solutions that have been out there for third party financing or medical credit cards call what you will generally are outdated. It could be paper and pen, they are typically characterized as very, very high declines, upwards of 60 to 70% decline, not approval, decline. So when you combine people being uncomfortable talking about financing, and then when they mention financing, seven times out of 10, the patient would get declined, it adds up to a situation where they just wanna extricate themselves, and they just wanna not talk about it anymore. And that kinda leads to apathy.
And it leads to people not getting the financing they absolutely need and kind of in your bread and butter world, low case acceptance, which is just a terrible thing. We wanna get patients the dental care they need, but clearly as the tickets keep on going up for dentistry, there's a disconnect with affordability.
John Meis (04:26.022)
Yeah, you bring up a great point. It's an awkward conversation to bring up financing. And if they're declined, then now we've got an even more awkward conversation to be had. And those create some kind of mindsets or head trash in our teams as they have dealt with that. They don't know how to deal with that. And so why don't you walk us through kind of what you think are really good ways to bring it up and really good ways to handle it when the patients decline.
Jay (04:57.112)
Sure. So I think first of all, the key is you have to plant the seed. So even before they walk into the office, when they're on the calendar, and you may be doing text reminders, let's say, a text appointment reminders. And what's one of the key reasons why people sometimes don't show up to appointments because they know they're probably going to spend some money. So based on the data that we've seen in some surveys, you know, if the no show rate is 30 to 35% overall on average, we see that 50 to 70% of that relates to the patient fearing the financial piece. So if you can break down or eliminate that barrier, you're gonna get more people to walk in the door. So what we recommend is at the pre-qual stage, and again, we have it, again, I don't wanna be plugging Sunbit this whole time, but the key thing is you have to pre-qual the patient on their own time, at their own location, whether it's their office, their home, whatnot on their phone, laptop, tablet, et cetera.
So you send out the pre-qual, you see what they're qualified for in a short 30 second period of time, and immediately that patient feels comfortable. Okay, yes, I have an appointment in a week, and oh, I qualify for $4,000. Now I feel really comfortable walking in the door. So that's probably half the battle. And then once they come in, hopefully you have some collateral, some signage that talks about patient financing. And then usually at the check-in process, at the same point in which you're doing insurance verification, again, it's a great time to mention patient financing or if you have an intake form, for instance. Some of course do it by paper. Some have third party software that does it. Why not add a question that says, hey, are you interested in breaking down your payments in over 12 or 24 months?
And if they indicate that they might be interested in that, well, you've just got a great candidate who probably will accept the treatment that you're offering. So it's early and often, it's mentioning it at the office level, and then it's treating every patient the same. Whether or not they're walking in with a fancy suit on, or they're just a regular Joe, everyone should be offered, just like when you go to Target, right? You go to the checkout counter.
Jay (07:23.724)
What do they ask you, Dr. John, when you get to the checkout counter at Target?
John Meis (07:27.386)
Yeah, do you have a target card?
Jay (07:29.54)
Exactly. So why is it any different at a dental office than it is a target? So again, not everyone will say, yes, I would like to see what offers you have. And that's fine. But you're giving them options and they value that more than anything. So those are kind of some of the key things, some key talk tracks that we focus on.
John Meis (07:52.518)
when he was, you were just trying to get in here with something. So I want to hear what you have to say.
Wendy Briggs (07:52.638)
Yeah, that's... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I was gonna say, let's take a minute and break down what Jay just said because there was some gold in there and I wanna make sure our listeners understand, the whole key is on that initial phone call listening for those verbal cues, right? So if the patient says, how much does a crown cost? If that's the first question they ask you, that's a great opportunity to say, it sounds like you may be concerned a little bit about cost.
Just so you know, we have a great in-house option where we can pre-qualify you and figure out exactly how we can help you fit this necessary dentistry into your budget. Listening for that question, listening for, do you accept my insurance? All of these are great opportunities on that initial phone call to offer or begin the conversation about, hey, we've got some great options that help our patients fit their care into their budget. It sounds like you may be interested in learning more about that weight. And if the patient says, yes, I would like to get more information about that. That's when you can begin the whole pre-qualification question. Because I'm sure as you were talking, there may have been listeners that said, we've never done that before. We've never really talked about financing before the patients even attended the office. I think that's the key is listening for those verbal cues on the very first phone call and having the opportunity to see that in. Then when they actually get to the office, there were so many times on the hygiene side, our hygienists that we work with are very, very proactive on the preventive side.
And what that means is sometimes we'd find sealants, for example, even on an adult patient. That's no longer covered by insurance, but if the science supports it, the patients got teeth that could be protected. We love to empower the team to have those conversations. And I can't tell you how many times I would talk with a patient and say, listen, I know you weren't planning on this today, but we do have eight teeth that could be protected by sealants, here's what that cost is. And just so you know, because you weren't planning on it,
Jay (09:17.526)
Mm-hmm.
Wendy Briggs (09:42.454)
We have a lot of ways to help you fit that comfortably into your budget. I'd be happy to take a minute and talk about that with you. It's not like you're waiting for the patient to say, oh gosh, that's too expensive. I can't afford it. You're taking preemptive strikes, if you will, on conversation, making it more normalized and comfortable. This is just part of what we do. We know you weren't planning on this expense today, so we have some very comfortable options that patients love that can help you with that.
Jay (09:58.376)
Correct.
John Meis (10:09.202)
The other thing that Jay said that I really like is he talked about it being part of a process. You do the same thing every time with everybody because there may be people with considerable financial resources that could pay cash, but they might be interested in a 0% financing or a very low financing rate. People are, particularly people with resources, are really sensitive to interest rates right now.
Wendy Briggs (10:41.286)
If it's easy, the thing is making it super easy for them also means that more people are going to take advantage of that option. Now, Jay, often one of the things that we hear from doctors is, well, gosh, I'd much rather my patients pay cash because I don't want to take the hit on the percentage that some bit or other financing companies would charge. What would you say in that regard when I'm sure you've got data that shows that the more patients that finance, the better it is long term for the practice?
Jay (10:41.837)
And what it go ahead.
Jay (11:10.452)
sure. Obviously cash is king. Like any patient who comes in with a role of hundreds that's going to pay for treatment, you take that money and you perform great dentistry. But most people are not like that. And I think you have to play the long game as the dentist, as the practitioner or as a DSO group. Most people do not have in their personal quicken a budgeted amount for dentistry.
Oh, $3,000 in 2023, I'm going to pay for multiple crowns. Doesn't work that way. Things happen, right? They get to the doctor, they get to the dentist, it's $3,000, they say, oh, expletive, how am I going to pay for that, right? And the dentist could say, oh, well, you can pay in cash. And they're like, hmm, okay, I'll, you know what? I'll take care of that when it really, really bothers me, which is code for I'm never going to see you again. So,
The idea is sure cash is better if they have it, but very few people in this market in general, when something is two or three or $4,000 or more, doesn't matter how much they're making or what they have saved up, they just haven't planned for it. So are you going to pay something additional for it? Yes, but then the question is, would you like more dollars of a larger pie or less dollars of a smaller pie?
Most dentists, most groups that we work with, generally would say, yes, I want to be able to treat that patient because most of the time, you know, obviously they need to make a living, but they didn't get into dentistry to make a living. They got into dentistry ultimately because they want to help people. And you can't help someone if they walk out the door after you've, you know, given them a $5,000 treatment plan and they don't get any treatment. That doesn't help anybody.
So the idea is if you offer the patient financing, what happens, what we see in the data is, to your point, Wendy, is let's say it's a $5,000 treatment plan. If you don't offer the patient financing, what tends to happen is they take between zero to maybe $2,000 of that treatment plan. They'll kind of figure out, okay, a la carte, which am I taking? I'm gonna get this appetizer and this, but I'm gonna hold off on the main course.
Jay (13:33.836)
But if they have patient financing, they may take that full 5,000. So case acceptance will go up. That's what we see in a lot of the surveys and a lot of the data across several million loans that we've done.
John Meis (13:47.366)
Yep. So average treatment accepted goes up when you add third party financing. And when you understand the principle of marginal profit or what I call the next dollar phenomena, you understand that extra treatment they accept is highly, highly profitable. That more than makes up for the financing fee. So that's why third party financing works. That's why big DSOs actually will, will incentivize and bonus their teams.
Jay (13:54.173)
100%.
John Meis (14:14.69)
on the number of third party financing applications they make because they understand marginal profit better than we dentists. We didn't have any business training, so we don't really necessarily understand some of these things. But these big groups that have sophisticated financial analytics, they do have it figured out and that's why they bonus. So now we understand, okay, the process starts early in the patient relationship.
We need to get our head trash out of there. We're going to offer it in a systematic way to everybody. So the next thing that we hear most frequently is, oh, it takes too much time. So tell me how that problem has been solved and how we can use technology in order to cut down the amount of time necessary.
Jay (15:01.612)
So historically, that answer that a lot of the office managers have given is a true statement. It used to take five minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes. It used to be paper involved. I don't have it with me, but I have basically a credit card application from 1970 from a department store out of New York. And you look at the questions, same questions that are generally asked today. Are you married versus single? What's your income? Do you rent versus own?
Wendy Briggs (15:26.659)
Mm-hmm.
Jay (15:31.112)
et cetera. And that's historically how the credit card market has been the past 30 to 40 years. Only recently, I'd say in the past five years, when the fintech or the financial technology field has kind of blossomed, are we able to get more data? Or I would say get more data, get the same data in a different, faster way that gets us to actually a better answer. So,
Again, I'm not here to plug some of it, but just in general, we, as an example, look at thousands of different data points, right? And we basically, but it's the same information we're taking from the patient. We just do it in a way that doesn't require any typing from the patient. So it's a scan of a license, takes 20 seconds. We immediately like that come up with an answer for an approval and the actual getting the patient through the transaction might take another minute or two.
super easy, super streamlined. I like to say, like going through the Starbucks drive-thru. That's how we want the patient financing experience to feel. We don't want it to feel like a financing experience. People say, you know, patient financing is like, financing is like the other F word. We want people to be happy. We want people to actually feel good, both at the office level and the patient level of what they're trying to do and we want a process that is super quick and super easy. So that's what we've designed, but historically that has been the case, but this has really changed over the last couple of years.
John Meis (17:05.65)
So walk me through, I'm the patient, I'm sitting in the chair, the doctor just told me I need three crowns, it's gonna be 4500 bucks. Walk me through what comes next.
Jay (17:17.9)
So you say, okay, hey, we have, would you like to know about our patient financing program through a third party? We have very comfortable monthly payments. Is that something that's of interest to you? Of course, yes, it is. May I have your driver's license or state ID? You simply scan the state ID on the iPad. You enter the phone number in the email of the patient. The patient does that, they click enter. They would see immediately their approval amount.
This is about, between 16 to 23 seconds, very quick. They get immediately an approval amount, right? Ideally, you wanna have that done earlier in the process, but you can have it in the chair too, that's fine. They would get an approval amount and then they would have payment plans. So anywhere from six to 72 months, just like buying a car, right? People go buy monthly payments rather than the total purchase price. So does, as an example, does $200 a month over 18 months, at a 9.99% APR, sound interesting for you? Sure. Then they would go forward with it. Takes about a minute and a half, all done on the iPad, no pen, no paper, and the transaction is complete. You'd get an email confirmation, the office would get an email confirmation, office would be able to see the information in a real-time dashboard, the patient gets the information as well in real-time, and everyone is happy, same day dentistry is actually occurring. So it's a process we're pretty proud about.
It's something that we think is very unique. We haven't seen anyone else do it like that. And quite frankly, as we said, I think before we started the podcast, office managers are super crazy busy. They don't need complexity. And we're trying to make things super simple to help the office manager, help the patient, and help the practice.
John Meis (19:14.75)
Yeah, yeah, fantastic.
Wendy Briggs (19:15.49)
Jay, would you tell our listeners real quick what your approval rates are like compared to other outside financing companies? Because that's another frustration, especially the patient that says, I've been through divorce, my credit took a hit, I'm not sure I could get approved by anyone. What kind of approval rates are we looking at historically?
Jay (19:23.288)
Of course.
Jay (19:34.456)
So in dentistry overall across our network, our approval rate is between 85 to 87%. So eight and a half out of 10 people that walk through the door will get an offer to get the same day dentistry. And that's generally, Wendy, roughly double what the average is for the predominant medical credit cards that are out there today.
Wendy Briggs (19:59.502)
That's really exciting news.
Jay (20:01.376)
So it's inclusive. We want to be, gotta be fast, gotta be easy, and you gotta be inclusive. If you have those three, you can do some damage in terms of increasing case acceptance.
John Meis (20:14.498)
Yeah, those things really answer the main concerns that we hear from office level teams. And so, can the office kind of design what the patients see as far as options?
Jay (20:31.844)
That's a good question. So how we do it is we provide all the options to the patient. The office doesn't have the option of what they see, what the patient sees, because ultimately, I always say kind of like Burger King have it your way, we want the patient to decide what's great for them. And as dentists or as office managers, we really have no idea the financial situation they're in.
For us, a 12 month 0% might be great because it's 0%, but for the patient, they may want to stretch it over 24 or 36 months with a small amount of interest because it fits their monthly budget. But ultimately, we want them to pick what's best for them.
John Meis (21:16.108)
So it automatically comes with a 12 month.
Wendy Briggs (21:18.002)
And depending on what they choose, does that impact, you know, the discount or the percentage that the doctor has to pay for the financing?
Jay (21:26.872)
Correct, it does to a certain extent. But yes, I mean, it's based on the credit worthiness of the patient, for the most part, that's the biggest determining factor. Secondarily is the number of monthly payments, but it's not necessarily the more payments, the more costly it is. So we have a model that we work with, you know, our DSO partners and individual practices that works for those offices.
Wendy Briggs (21:57.01)
And like you said before, I like how you said it, they gotta focus on the long game. So they're looking at overall, once a patient's approved for a certain amount and they use that, is that amount available for future care? Those are the types of questions that the doctors really should be looking at when they choose the finance company because that's gonna determine long-term growth of the practice as well.
Jay (22:18.604)
Correct. I mean, we look at things internally in our business, and I think a lot of the groups we work with and individual drugs look at as well, we look at lifetime value, right? In dentistry, as you know, you're going to have that patient for life if you treat them well and they get the care they need. So it's not just that patient that comes in new, off the street, maybe did some marketing efforts. If you treat them right the first time and you get them great treatment.
They're going to come back again, and again. So they might come back 10, 15 times over their life, maybe a lot more. So there's value there, financial, that obviously there's a lot of value from the dentistry perspective. You're going to help that person a tremendous amount throughout their time. So you have to kind of look at, like you were saying, like the long game, it's not just that single appointment, it's how many appointments are they going to make after they've been satisfied? And-after they get the care they need.
John Meis (23:18.758)
Yeah, terrific. So Jay, I really appreciate you coming on and walking through these things that are such a, appear to our, we hear from our teams that it's really an obstacle in using third party financing. And I can help doctors understand the financial impact. Why, even though there is a discount rate that, it's still worth it if you have excess chair time, particularly.
So I appreciate you walking through this for our team so that they understand how it can be done quickly, simply, systematically, and get answers just about immediately. So I appreciate that. Can you tell our listeners, if your company is Sunbit, do you want to talk a little bit about how somebody can get lined up with Sunbit? What would be the best way for them to contact Sunbit?
Jay (24:12.876)
Sure, absolutely. The best way is you can go to our site, which is sunbit.com backslash dental, or I run the dental division at Sunbit. So you can contact me just directly at jay at sunbit.com. That's S-U-N-B-I-T.com. And we work with, whether it's single practices, multi-unit, large DSOs, we treat everyone the same, which is great, I believe. We want to help more patients get the dentistry they need. Our goal is to serve 5 million new patients over the next two years, and we're well on our way to doing it. And I really appreciate Wendy, Dr. John, having me on your podcast, really appreciate it.
John Meis (25:00.666)
Yeah, well, we appreciate you joining us. And thanks for all the information. Wendy, anything else?
Wendy Briggs (25:06.634)
No, I think it's great what you're doing and congratulations on all your growth. Obviously what you've brought to the market is working because you have grown significantly in the dental space in the last year or so, and we've been delighted to have you on and we appreciate your focus on immediacy because for our clients and the practices we work with, getting that answer very quickly makes it possible to be able to offer same day dentistry and some of the things that they're striving to do every day. So we appreciate that so much.
I would say, Dr. John, you often mention how there's very few dental problems that get easier to fix and less expensive over time. So the urgency that exists with every exam, with every emergency visit that we see, you know, it's very real. And so it's absolutely the best thing possible for patients to help them find the way, the resources to make it easy to pay for the care that they need because everybody wins in that scenario.
John Meis (25:58.406)
Yeah, love that, Wendy. Thanks for adding that. All right, everybody, that's it for this episode of the Double Your Production podcast. We'll see you next time.
Wendy Briggs (26:09.039)
Bye, everybody.
Jay (26:10.348)
Bye.
