Acquisitions Anonymous - #1 for business buying, selling and operating - The guys smile big for a dental marketing agency with $1.4M of EBITDA - Acquisitions Anonymous 273

Episode Date: February 20, 2024

In this episode of Acquisitions Anonymous, Bill and Mills discuss a specialized marketing company for dental firms with a $1.4 million EBITDA. This business distinguishes itself through a focused marketing system designed for dental practices, offering cost-effective solutions for customer acquisition, retention, and upsell, with a notable track record of success within the dental industry. Their strategy encompasses internal marketing, database marketing via U.S. Postal Service, and external marketing, alongside support services like training and consulting.Bill underscores the importance of recognizing dental practices as businesses in need of specialized marketing to attract and retain patients. He praises the company's dental industry focus, which grants it credibility and effectiveness over generic marketing agencies. The episode also explores the company's growth potential, operational insights, and the strategic importance of staying focused on the dental sector to build value and competitive differentiation.Today's deal comes from Axial.  Axial is a trusted deal-sourcing platform serving professional acquirers in the American lower middle market.Thanks to our sponsors:Check out Girdley's new course, How to find a great business to buy. It's chock-full of insights and is perfect for listeners of AA who are looking to start their own search!-------------CloudBookkeeping offers adaptable solutions to businesses that want to focus on growth with a “client service first” approach. They offer a full suite of accounting services, including sophisticated reporting, QuickBooks software solutions, and full-service payroll options.Subscribe to weekly our Newsletter and get curated deals in your inboxAdvertise with us by clicking here Do you love Acquanon and want to see our smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. Do you enjoy our content? Rate our show! Follow us on Twitter @acquanon Learnings about small business acquisitions and operations. For inquiries or suggestions, email us at [e-mail]

Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of Acquisitions Anonymous. I'm Mills Snell, me and Bill D. Alessandra, talk about a really interesting business today. It's an axial deal. It's a high-end marketing agency, which we know you've heard that before, but it's a high-end marketing agency for dental practices. It's got some really unique attributes. We talk in a lot of detail about that niche and what that means and is it really worth something and what kind of competitive advantages does it actually provide. They're doing like $1.4 million and EBAA. So we talk about that size and what that means for possible financing. We talk about some in-depth kind of tactics when it comes to customer acquisition that Bill really knows a lot

about. I think it's a really good episode and I think you'll enjoy it. Big thanks to our sponsors and hope you enjoy the episode. Are you looking for a small business to acquire? Well, this book right here is the Bible for people in your shoes. It's the Harvard Business Review Guide to Buying a Small business. It's the go-to book. But here's the problem. You see this whole book, And this little bit, this is the only part that talks about the hardest part of buying a business, finding the right one to buy. And the bad news is it's full of outdated advice and stuff that doesn't work anymore. I'm Michael Gurdley. I own 12 companies, including a couple that go out and buy more companies themselves. And I have a podcast where we look at new businesses to buy each

and every week. I've looked at thousands of businesses for sale, and I've bought and sold nearly 20 of them. And I'm telling you, the old ways they don't work anymore. So I made a course. with the latest and the greatest, and it's called How to Find a Great Business to Buy. It's laser focused on the new way to run a business search with what works today, so you can play smarter than the sea of buyers who are out there competing against you to try to buy these businesses, and you can get the deal that was meant for you. In the course, you'll learn three things. One, how to narrow your search with a tight thesis.

We're hunting with a rifle here, not shotguns. Two, how to scale your outreach to get the most possible leads. This is a numbers game after all. And three, how to run your funnel like a pro so you can boil down thousands of leads to find your one great deal. Plus, you'll get a couple of exclusive Chili's jokes that I've never published before.

So what's not to love? Go to gurdly.com slash great business to take the course today. Oh yeah, another day, another acquisitions anonymous. Bill with the new camera setup. New camera setup. Come see me on YouTube. I'm just glad to be back

because I have missed you guys for two weeks who had a baby. And then, Mills, you were the only one. one kind enough to show up for my first episode back. It was a momentous occasion. Yeah, I appreciate it. That's good to be back. I'm sure the listeners have missed me.

I have missed y'all. Well, whatever camera you invested in, it was well worth it because you look very well rested. It looks like you've been sleeping through the night. You know, no baby fatigue. And none of those things are true. So the camera really is magic. Yeah.

All right. So we have got another axial deal today. just a reminder if you guys are new to the pod. Axial.net is kind of like a marketplace. It's like biz by sell, but higher end. So everything on Axial is represented by an intermediary, usually, and just generally a little bit bigger, a little bit higher quality businesses.

It's vetted. You have to apply to get on. So we have started doing more and more from Axial just because we find that they're higher quality businesses. So we've got another Axial one today. Mills, you want to take us into it? Yeah, this is super interesting. 1.4 million EBIDA high-end marketing system for dental firms.

That is, it could go one of two ways, right? This could be just a run-of-the-mill like agency doing marketing work, or they could be hyper-specialized and have some, you know, unique distribution or unique set of tools or something like that. Yeah, I'm interested to learn about this one. I have seen some businesses like this that are really good businesses. And I think this business illustrates how to do, agency really, really well.

All right. So the overview we have is explore a promising M&A opportunity with a company that has developed a distinctive marketing system tailored for small to medium sized businesses. That is generic. So let's see where they go from here. Focused on cost-effective

customer acquisition, retention, reactivation, upsell, and real-time online tracking, the company has demonstrated success, particularly within the dental industry. Ding, ding, ding. Now we're hooked. Now I want to know more.

Key attributes. One, cost-effective approach. The company's solution offers a cost-effective means for clients to acquire new customers with savings of up to 80% compared to traditional methods. So they're probably talking about just whatever they do versus paid customer acquisition, pay-per-click, whatever run of the middle. Two, comprehensive system, a three-pronged approach encompassing internal marketing, database marketing via U.S. Postal Service. and external marketing provides a comprehensive solution for businesses seeking effective and efficient marketing strategies. Third, support services. In addition to core offerings, the company

provides training and consulting services to assist clients in optimizing their marketing efforts. Industry presence, they say they have proven success currently serving the dental industry. The company has achieved notable success, surpassing industry norms and response rates. In terms of expansion opportunities, they say they have adaptable solutions. solutions. Companies success in dental sector does open up avenues for expansion into other industries offering versatile applications for proven marketing approach. The investment appeal, they say it's a compelling acquisition opportunity, unique marketing system, a lot of repetition here. All right. So on the financials, we've got 2021, 2021, 2022, and 2023 estimates. So not sure

if this was, if this teaser was created mid-20203 or who knows, but revenue, top line, 2021, they did $4.7 million, 22, $5.2 million, and $2.23, $5.9 million. Their year-over-year growth was, you know, low double digits, low teens. EBITDA in 21 was $0.8 million, about $800,000. $2,000 was $1,000. $2,23 estimate was $1.4 million. So EBITDA margins kind of being in that 17, then 19, and 24% range. They say that they're just looking for a sale, change of control, and we don't have a specific

geography, but it seems like it's kind of geography agnostic. Bill, what do you think? So I'm really interested in this because I think the thing that people don't understand is the dental practice is a business, just like a lawyer's office is a business. just, you know, all of these, what you view as kind of a professional services provider, right? You just go get your taxes done, your teeth cleaned or, you know, your knee fixed or whatever. They're all businesses. You're their customer.

You're their patient, but you're also their customer. And they need to acquire new customers. You don't just open a dental practice, hang a shingle, and hope people drive by and get veneers, right? And this, I think, works especially well in dental because a lot of dental is cash pay. Now, you know, people do have dental insurance. lot of stuff, veneers, like a lot of cosmetic dentistry stuff is big ticket cash pay. So you, I mean, look in the dental industry, there's marketing, right? People with white teeth like, hey, have you ever thought about getting veneers?

Hey, have you ever getting, you know, all those fillings, you know, retainer, change your jaw, bite, like all that stuff. Those are cosmetic procedures not covered by insurance. Cash pay, great margins. So what I love about this is like the bad version of this, business would be we're a digital marketing agency. We serve all kinds of professionals, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And it just seems so generic. But what these guys are is they go, screw that, dentists. Hey, dentists, we are for you. We only do dentists. We know everything about

dental. When you say pallet expander, I know what you mean. We're not going to write stupid copy that's, you know, making your patients think you're a moron. Like, we do dental. So when they walk into a new dental practice and say, we can do your marketing, they're so much more credible than the miscellaneous digital marketing firm, right? So I love the way they have taken, you know, customer acquisition consulting, digital market consulting, and productized it and got hard at a net market. I love that. What you love to about this is they could go in and say, you know, hey, they could talk shop. Hey, what are you doing currently? And when they hear a couple things, they probably know the rules of thumb to say, oh, if you're doing X, Y, and Z, it's probably

costing you, you know, $10, $15, $100, whatever it may be on your customer acquisition cost on average. And then they can really delve in and say, hey, look, part of me wonders, can they actually do this for 80% cheaper? Who knows? Probably not 80% cheaper. That wouldn't be sustainable. But who knows, once you dig in, you may find that, you know, there is something there. Well, I think they can also come into a dental practice and say, oh, you're not doing this tactic. We know all of other clients who do this tactic bring an extra 50 patients a month in, right? I got 10 examples of that. Like, do you want another 50 patients a month? Like, there's clear ROI on our services. Just say yes. Right. So like that level of kind of productized

industry specific consulting, I think is the way that when you, if you were to enter a big market like marketing consulting, like a digital marketing firm, you can't kick a rock without hitting 12 of them. But like a dental specific one that smashes that industry, I think you create a lot more enterprise value and competitive differentiation there. I think too, you get like within this niche dental, ortho, vets, you know, it's like a herd mentality, not in a bad way, but like as soon as somebody learns about a new trick, everybody's kind of racing to go use it. Right. And until that competitive edge is like competed away. And so I think this is one of those things where you kind of have to constantly be innovating and learning. I was super surprised that they said U.S.

Postal Service. Were you? Did that shock you? No. So postcard direct mail is insane. So I'll look back to the future. In 2023, 2024, postal direct mail is having a massive resurgence because clicks have gotten so expensive on the internet. And everybody over the last decade like, abandoned the mail and all ran to Facebook. And now everybody's going, wait a minute. Direct mail actually did work. People still check their mail. Yeah.

People still check their mail every single day, right? And it's not quite as attributable, but does work. So there's kind of this new wave of digital marketers that are attacking postal mail in a more automated attributable software-centric way. I'm actually an investor in one called Postpilot, which does it for e-commerce. So I'm not at all surprised they're doing database marketing via Postal Service. They're probably what they're probably doing here. So let's kind of break down what they say they're doing.

A three-pong approach, internal marketing, database marketing via Postal Service, and external marketing. So what's that mean? Internal marketing in e-commerce, we would call this retargeting or we would call this retention marketing. Right? You come to the dentist once. Like, we want to make sure you come back for your checkout next year where we're going to sell you some other service once you're in the chair. You don't want churn in your customer base. So there's a whole, if you're running dental practice and you're not doing like really good retention marketing, you're always bleeding.

Right. So stopping the leaky bucket is internal marketing. Database marketing via U.S. Postal Service. That would be, so what is database marketing? It basically says like, let's find all the information about all the people in Charlotte, North Carolina, say, and segment the households by age, by whether they have kids, by whether they, you know, their income by the neighborhood average. Yeah, in their neighborhood, all that stuff. And let's create a targeted blast. This is what they used to do before Facebook could target you better than that, right?

So that's database marketing via the post service. And then external marketing would be sort of everything else. Like let's go get new people who might want veneers and come to our dental practice. And I'm sure that encompasses everything from Facebook ads to billboards. What are people doing on these kind of direct mail? And like, is it a postcard? Is it scan a QR code? is it coupon generated?

Like, I know that there have been all these cycles where, like, I think the first people who use Groupon, it was really good. And then it was like a kiss of death for your business, you know? Things like, I wonder, like, what is the tactic right now on postcards for something like this? Because you got to think, the average order value for a dentist is in the probably, well, three to $500 range. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah, hundreds of thousands. Like, it's a big day. I mean, lifetime value of the customer is definitely tens of thousands. Because, I mean, I've been to the same dentist since I was a kid, you know, like every six months, a cleaning, you know, x-rays once a year or whatever. Yes. And it's so, and this is the other huge insight, I think. So I feel like I'm entitled to say this because my dad is a doctor.

He's a surgeon. Surgeons, dentists, like, dermatol, like all these people, great medical practitioners. Horrible business people. Horrible marketers. I mean, like, they don't want to do marketing. they want to clean teeth. Like that's what they're in. That's what they went to school for,

what they're really good at, and what they like doing. They don't want to do accounting and do marketing and all that stuff. So if you can go to one of these guys and go, I'm going to check the marketing box for you. I'm just going to send you a whole bunch of customers

and you don't have to think about that crap. Like, they're going to love you. And they're so bad at, so my dentist, who I've also gone to for a long time, when I lived in Denver, I went to another dentist for a long time. They emailed the Denver,

the Denver dentist. I've been back in North Carolina for three years. Three years. I randomly get an email from the Denver dentist. You know what the email is? It's December 24th. Merry Christmas from the dental practice in Denver. I'm like, oh, thank you for reminding me to unsubscribe.

That was the first email that's in their list in three years. They signed up. Yeah. They signed up for retargeting. They were like, you know what? We really have not made use of this. We need to be top of mind for people. Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas. I know. It was, I just. laugh my ass off. So, like, that is the, like, table stakes. Like, that's what most dental practices are doing. Merry Christmas every three years. So I would imagine that this firm can probably drive a lot of very measurable ROI to a dental practice. And they probably also understand because they're focused on dental, the margin structures of a dentist, what procedures actually drive profit and which ones are, you know, insurance or Medicare or whatever. And we don't want any more of those customers. So they can probably

walk in and go, I'm pretty sure veneers are a good one for dentists. So they can go like, here's exactly the marketing campaigns that we used in Kansas City to drive a ton of veneer customers. Let me come to Charlotte, North Carolina and drive a ton of veneer customers. And there's infinity small dental practices. Okay, so then the question becomes, why is this business not bigger? That's fair. I mean, it is grow. I want to know how old it is. So we have three years of financials, right? Because it has grown. I mean, I mean, Edadda is almost doubled from 2021 to 2023. It's gone from 800. hundred thousand to one point four million in in three years so yeah i mean i don't hate that if this

business is like four or five years old it's awesome if it's 20 years old you know like then they've pivoted to the digital age and now there's like some legs yes i would hope it's four years old three or four or five years old which it probably is i mean it's a digital marketing system i would so like if if you get an india on this thing and you find out that this is a relatively business and that they've been kind of digital from the get-go and they've been in dental since the get-go and this isn't like something they've just started doing. If this is like the pure play, we do great marketing for dental. If it's 25 years old and it's been 600-800-ebat forever, I would want to understand why is it suddenly 1.4, how long have they been doing dental?

What did they start doing differently? Maybe it's flat mills for 20 years and then it inflex in the last two because they started in some different. they found something that worked or they hired somebody who's like, hey, I have an idea. The other thing about this that's interesting is like, so the marketing focus is niche, but there's so many other like complementary services and vendors that are niche in this industry in particular, like Constellation Software is known for, you know, niche software services. Yes. And I think one of the verticals that they've done really well in is dental software.

And so you look at like practice management, patient management, file management. the dentist practiced are not necessarily using the same software suite as the ophthalmologist or, you know, the, you know, orthopedic surgeons. And so you've had this, like, amazing kind of entrenchment within software as a service for these niches. And it makes you wonder, like, is the, who's the best buyer for this business? Is it somebody who has maybe even not like some connection with the software services, but just understand. and, you know, SaaS sales and kind of enterprise sales to, to these niches and can go, oh, my gosh, yeah, we could dovetail really nicely with fill in the blank, you know, software name, and we know they control 60% of the dental software market, and we can help them plug in and, you know, create some API and retarget. Like, you could massively open this thing up if you had a little bit of, you know, a head start. All right.

Taking a quick pause here. I have something to tell you. This is Michael. I hate bookkeeping. I hate bookkeeping. I hate doing HR. I hate doing all that kind of stuff. But for bookkeeping,

I have found a solution. It is my friend Charlie's business called cloudbookkeeping.com. So that's cloudbookkeeping.com. They are your perfect partner if you want to get bookkeeping out of your hair and focus on making your company, your customers happier and more successful.

So please give them a call. Call Charlie, cloudbookkeeping.com. Tell them we sent you. They're a great way. If you're a business buyer, if you're a business owner, you're tired of hassling with getting your bookkeeping done. He's got a whole fleet of people that are well trained and work for him. He's located here in St. Antonio.

So I can tell you because of that, he's awesome. And they're a great partner for you to potentially call to help with all your bookkeeping needs so you can do the important stuff in your business rather than worry about getting your books right. So give Charlie a call, cloudbookkeeping.com. And now back to the episode. Yeah, I agree. If you know how to sell to dental practices, you are a killer buyer for this.

I'm not saying you have to because it's not rocket science and find them, you know, but if you really, if you have a big network in dental and know how to sell in, this is a, this is killer for you. So, Mills, I will, I'll tell you a story about my very early career. When I was in high school, I worked at a place with a guy who did basically like outsourced IT support. He was like a very small MSP. And he specialized in dentists. So I would spend summers and high school driving around to most of the dentists in Charlotte, North Carolina and working on their computers.

So I got super familiar with like dolphin dental and like all of these like specialized softwares that dentists use to do all their imaging. Like if you ever go to the dentist, like they've got on the computer, they have like a map of your teeth, like they're marking out where your cavities. It's very specialized and it's doing appointment management and all that stuff. It's like ERP for dentist office with the imaging, everything built in. And it's breaking all the time because at the time, none of it was SaaS. It was all running out a server in their closet.

So I was spending my summers at dentist office. So I know intimately what you're talking about. They all have their own software stack. And all they want to do is clean teeth. Like they were so glad when we got there. They were like, just make it be fixed so I can do more teeth. You know, they didn't want to think about it at all. We just want to make sure that our schedule is full and we don't have to worry about, you know,

XYZ breaking down. Yes. And when you talk to them, a lot of times they will even talk about like utilization, like how full is my schedule. Like when they have air gaps, they don't make money. Right. So there is even like the marginal, like you would be willing to fill an empty. You'd be willing to pay a different KAC depending on how full your schedule is, right, if you're a dentist. So I think this is a great opportunity for sophisticated.

marketing firm to come in and say, hey, based on how full your schedule is, you know, let's calibrate our marketing for this week or next week or next month. Yeah, and let's like fill those empty spots and, you know, retarget to people who maybe had canceled and haven't rebooked or, you know, easy kind of low-hanging fruit. That's, I think, the thing that's so cool about specialization. Like to a marketer, this is basic stuff, right? like basic remarketing, basic reactivation and retention, you know, what's the cac that we're willing to spend for veneers and how do we get them? But to a dentist, this is wizardry, right? It's

wizardry and it will change their business if it gets dialed in, right? And that's my favorite part about business, to be honest, is like to get in your wheelhouse and mine is marketing and e-commerce and then to go help other people like with the where you're in your water and then to see other people in their water and you know have them help you or invest with them because i'm never going to be you know our friend chris powers i'm never going to be as good at real estate as chris like never i spend my whole life right but it's so cool to watch him uh and you know i'd rather just invest with him and watch what he does it's great he makes it look easy he makes it look easy you know he does yeah to give you an example my dentist does not have my dentist does not have my

email address. So I think that is like part and parcel for the whole industry. You know, they still give me a little card, like a business card, and they write my next appointment time on it. And I'm like, you could just like send me a calendar invite, but no, not after that. Yeah. And so this is an example, by the way, Mills, of like why specializing in dentists, like if your generic digital marketing firm comes in, they go, okay, great, how many people you got on their email list? And the dentist is like 27, right? And the marketing firm is like, well, okay. If they're ethical, they'll say, okay, see you later.

If they're unethical, they'll charge you, you know, $1,000 a month, email 27 people. But this firm, I would hope if you're specialized in dental marketing, would say, no problem, we see this all the time. Here are our tactics to gather email addresses from your entire base, right? Here's what we're going to do at the front desk. Here's how we're going to incentivize giving the email, blah, blah, blah, blah. And in a couple months, you've got all your client's emails. Right. That's what you can do if you're engaged in this industry versus if you're just a kind of a carpet bagger. If you're also selling to, you know, flower shops and, you know, car salesmen, you know, and like you don't have that inside knowledge. But you're right. All of a sudden you go from just like kind of a software slash service, you know, on like on retainer to being able to charge that plus kind of a consulting layer to say, hey,

we can actually help you roll this out and here's the tips and tricks of how you get better buy-in, better retention, you know, better adoption from your team. And it doesn't sound like that's their model. I mean, it seems like they are maybe a little bit hands-on because they say they kind of do, you know, some kind of, you know, additional services, the kind of support services, they call it. But you got to think, I mean, the people who really probably just knock the cover off the ball in this are the ones who are like, we will help grow your business. and we will ride coattails and charge more along the way. Yes, exactly.

Like, when you get rich, we get rich. Like, that's the best business model in the world, right? The most ethical, like, it's wonderful to do this that way. Yeah. One thing that bugs me about this listing that bugs me about almost any listing is they just cannot resist saying the company's success in the dental sector opens avenues for expansion into diverse industries, which is the exact thing you should not do based on everything we've talked about.

This business has $6 million of revenue and $1.4 million of dollars of EBITDA. Until this business is 10 times bigger, you shouldn't think about anything but dentists for one freaking second. That's a great point because it's so tempting. Yeah. You know, to say maybe should we go try this with chiropractors or something? But yes, you have not even gotten close to saturating the market or, you know, building the right support structure.

And I don't know what that is. It's something about entrepreneurs' brains. like the shiny object syndrome, it like they're like, oh, I know, like let's go get 10 chiropractors. Like, no, no,

hit you with newspaper. No, like go get 10 more dentists. What are you doing? It's way more easy to get 10 more dentists and just do the same thing, way more easy, right? Then try to get 10 chiropractors

and now you got two divisions that are both subscale. Like, what are you doing? More dentists until there are no more dentists. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And then sponsor a dental school.

So when the, new dentists are coming out, they use you, like, they're signing up right away. Yeah, like dentists until the end of time, like stay in that circle of confidence. But every broker, I feel like is obligated by some broker bylaw to put that in there. Like, you can pull, or you you could totally ruin this business by chasing shiny objects. Getting distracted. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think something like this sells for, Bill? Because it's not software. It's really like a conglomerate of probably services and tax. and, you know, commercially available software and things like that.

I mean, if it's, let's assume it's everything we think it is, which is, you know, a modern business that is really focused on dental and really understands dental, you know, I don't know. I think it probably trades 4x, trades a 4x. I think it trades, you know, like a normalish small business. You know, maybe if it's like exceptional, you get four and a half, you know, but if it's, less exceptional, you're down in the three range. but it's got nice growth.

It's got a million four of Ivetta. You know, is it big enough that you're not flying super close to the trees? Like you're beyond buying yourself a job at this point. You know, that's why I think it's a, you know, high three is low force. I think Heather would probably tell us if she were here that this is very hard to do SBA because there's no assets. No hard assets. But isn't that sort of the point of SBA though, right?

Like the PG, you are the assets. I just think they're going to look at it and say, okay, the collateral's limited. how like how durable is this? Could it kind of move out from underneath you? You know, I think it, it's at the right size to be under probably or flirt with, you know, that five and change cap of SBA. So I think it's probably in the right size range. But I think unless you're somebody with some kind of edge and industry experience, they probably have a hard time getting comfortable. If you're just an outsider who's like, I've been a golf pro before this and I want to go try it.

That's true because it does seem specialized. The other thing Heather would tell us is that they would look at customer concentration. You know, if you have like two big dental groups that you're doing marketing for, this is much scarier. Yep. Right? Because you have one leave and you're in trouble. So they'll look at that and also you want to look at just for you also, length of contract.

You know, like to customers stick around or are you as the marketing firm always having to acquire new dentists because they churn after three months? Obviously, that would be bad. Yeah. If you're acquiring dentists. and they stick around for three or four years, I mean, that is killer, right? Because now you've got a pack on your side.

What's it cost you to acquire a dentist? What are they worth? How long do they stay? And so you want to look at that kind of cacted LTV model for yourself here as the marketing provider. Because I would think, I mean, I would think you could bill a dental practice thousands of dollars a month for this service. So, I mean, you're mid five figures, LTVs, easy.

Which, by the way, is like Salesforce territory. Like, you can hire. human beings to call dentists and visit them with LTVs like that. I wonder what the employee base is like on this. Do you think that there's full-time W-2 employees, or do you think a lot of this is like subbed out, farmed out, offshore? Well, so offshore and full-time is not mutually exclusive anymore here in 2020. No, yeah, yeah.

I'm thinking like, you know, captive in the office, they're all sitting in one place, full-time, 40-hour a week, you know. I think you probably have full-time 40-hour a week, but I don't think you have an office for this thing. Because it's inherently virtual, right? Like you can do dental marketing in Cleveland as well as you can do in Miami. So it's inherently virtual. I don't think this place needs or would have a big office. But I do think full-time employees would be really valuable here because you as the marketing firm are trying to build up this institutional knowledge around dentistry.

Right. You want your employees to build up some institutional knowledge around how to do dental marketing. And then you also want to, and this is another thing I would diligence, you also want to actually be writing down that tribal knowledge. Like if you just have a whole bunch of, if the specialization of your firm in dental is actually just the specialization of the people that work at your firm in dental, that's not the same thing. Right. You need, this company needs to be getting knowledge out of the heads of its employees so that when they can hire new employees, they go, let me train you on how to do dental marketing. here's the whole guidebook, right? That's much more valuable.

It's interesting. It is interesting. I usually hate marketing firms also, but I love how focused and product dyes this is on one industry. And it's a good industry because it has high ticket values. And it's the kind of the white collar professional who like just wants to clean teeth doesn't want to do marketing. Right.

So you can really, they just want to farm it out to you. So I really like how this is positioned and product dies. You notice it's called a high-end marketing. Like, I've never seen anybody say marketing firm, marketing agency just plainly. It's always high-end. Everything's, they've got it on the mediary. Everything's high-end. It's market-leading.

It's, you know, top-tier. It's all those things, of course. Yeah. One of the largest in the country is the other one. It's like they can't all be the largest. Okay. No. No.

And speaking of the largest, like, I'm sure there are bigger ones. I would also be interested in, do they have a bunch of independent dentists or, you know, there's a bunch of dental roll-up groups. You know, there's a ton of roll-up going on in dental right now. And I would imagine if you could get in with one of these dental roll-up groups, they're probably going to try to in-house you at some point as like a shared service. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Right. Like, we spend a million dollars a year with you. We're going to do it ourselves perhaps. Right. But that actually, by the way, it could be an interesting buyer. If there's a roll-up that doesn't have that and wants to add it and they want to add it like that. Maybe they want to buy it. This is a good one. That was a fun one. This is a good one. Thank you to Axial. See, like I said

at the beginning, the actual ones are usually interesting. That's why I like them. Yeah, this is, this is unique. Yeah, it's good. Well, cool. Mills, thank you for being the only one to greet me back to the podcast post-Paternity leave. I'm here. I'm here for you, Bill. I appreciate it, man. I will, I'll be back again next week and I will see you and maybe some other folks then. Yep. Thanks for joining us, everybody. Bye.