Episode #227: Dr. Scott Drucker – Life as an Entrepreneur, Podcaster, and Periodontist

Dr. Eric Block: And where did you go to dental school and then where’d you do your perio residency?

Dr. Scott Drucker: Yeah, I did both my undergrad and dental school at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, and came to the University of Illinois at Chicago for residency for perio.

Dr. Eric Block: And you ended up staying there, correct? You’re actually living in the burbs of Chicago, right?

Dr. Scott Drucker: That’s right. I’m just north of the city. And yeah, we were joking a little bit offline earlier—I grew up in South Florida, and so people here ask me all the time, why in the world are you up here in Chicago? Especially in the winter? And it’s like, well, you know, lots of great reasons, weather aside. But no, I stuck here, actually. I suppose just to bridge into this now, I started the company Supply Clinic while in residency. So I already had a young company by the time I graduated, and so I was kind of anchored here just by that nature alone.

Dr. Eric Block: Can you just go back to that for a second? First of all, can you explain exactly what Supply Clinic is and where did the idea come from, and how did you do that during residency?

Dr. Scott Drucker: Uh, yeah, I’ll, I’ll touch on the last part last. So, Supply Clinic is an online marketplace for dental supplies, so think Amazon, but for dental. The platform hosts many different sellers of supplies, pretty seamless shopping, price comparing, that sort of thing. Over the years we built out a procurement software component to the company, which allows multi-location groups and larger DSOs to be able to manage and organize their spend across their locations.

Dr. Scott Drucker: So I was really in the weeds on the e-commerce, procurement sort of side of things. Prior to jumping in, I had no background in it. I had the idea for the company actually shopping around for stuff that I had to buy for my residency. I realized that I was put in touch with a Shine rep and a Patterson rep and realized there’s this whole ecosystem of the largest of the sellers, and then mid-market sellers, smaller sellers.

Dr. Scott Drucker: And there just wasn’t a good, reliable, trustworthy way to go about that seamlessly at the time. I was in residency, had a master’s thesis project kind of stuck in the IRB (Institutional Review Board) process. So, you know, the university was taking their sweet time to give my project the green light, and we went through month after month, iteration after iteration. So I had some, I suppose, extra time where all of my colleagues or co-residents were working away at their own projects.

Dr. Scott Drucker: So, yeah, got the project started, roped in my brother, and co-founded the company with him. Came to the point at the end of residency where I kind of had to make a decision whether or not to go the predictable, typical path and go find an office to practice at and grow that way. I actually had a couple of nice offers towards the end of school to join practices.

Dr. Scott Drucker: I also had this young company that I had spent a lot of time building up to that point. The decision was mostly about minimizing regret (laugh). I decided that the easier, predictable path was just going to work at the offices, and I would’ve handed the keys over to my brother entirely. But I would’ve missed that opportunity and thought that I could always jump back to the bread and butter per, we’ll call it.

Dr. Scott Drucker: So, yeah, made the decision to come out of school, go very full-time on the business. I still even at that point practiced at a minimum about a day a week. So I still kept my hands wet, so to speak, treating patients throughout. But, uh, yeah, I’ll pause there.

Dr. Eric Block: So you, you saw there was a problem, and actually thinking back when I did my implant residency at BU and went to Nova Southeastern for dental school, we didn’t have an option when we had to buy our supplies. It was just, here’s the package, this is what you’re getting. There weren’t any options for us. So that’s great that you were able to do that and turn that into—you know, you saw there was a need and a problem, and you actually turned that into a business. For me, I didn’t become an entrepreneur until COVID. You know, COVID and during the quarantine is what gave me the time to start to do other things than just dentistry.

Dr. Scott Drucker: Yeah. I didn’t address that part of your question. The bottom line is it was brutal. I mean, I had a very, very heavy workload between all of the residency, the academic stuff tied to the Masters, all the time in surgery. Then I would basically leave at, you know, whatever it was, 5, 5:30 every day, and in Chicago, take the train into the downtown area of the city, right off of the river. Our original office space was in a shared kind of health tech startup space called Matter in the Merchandise Mart.

Dr. Scott Drucker: So I would start my workdays like 5:30 or 6 PM, grind it out till like 10 at night, go home, go to sleep, and repeat. It was a brutal grind. I do not recommend that to anybody—to start a business while in residency. It’s kind of, yeah, it’s not a good idea (laugh). But I did it, and I’m grateful that I did.

Dr. Eric Block: Yeah. I always say, you know, better late than never. I started late. But to do something other than just be a dentist is so rewarding, especially if you have a passion for something. So that’s great, man. Good for you. Now tell me about the podcast. First of all, I love listening to it because it gives me a perspective of the industry side of things. You and Janesh, sometimes it’s just you two chatting, sometimes you have guests on, but the topics are great and there’s no BS. You guys jump right into it and cover great topics and ask great questions.

Dr. Scott Drucker: Yeah. So the two of us—we met on, I’ll call it, the dental industry conference circuit. Janesh has a company called Uptime Health. They do effectively two different products. One is they’ve got a dashboard to log all of your equipment in a dental practice and effectively keep track of the health of all of that equipment for you—in essence, to minimize downtime of the equipment, hence the name Uptime Health.

Dr. Scott Drucker: They also have a marketplace for equipment service and repair people. So if your unit goes down and your Shine rep or Patterson rep is super busy, they’ve got a whole network of people that are both in those companies and third-party service people. So the two of us—me with Supply Clinic, him with Uptime Health—would have conversations at a lot of these conferences, what I’ll call now offline conversations.

Dr. Scott Drucker: And we said, hey, these are interesting—we get to talk to interesting people. Kind of where the two of us came together, he’s not a dentist by background. He’s more of the engineering and techie background. But we’d have these conversations that effectively were at the intersection of oral health and the dental profession, industry, and business startup technology.

Dr. Scott Drucker: So that’s kind of how we—that’s the angle or the focus of the podcast. The two of us will cover, in some episodes, just the two of us talking about news topics and giving our hot takes on the current events. In others, we interview really interesting people who contribute to the space in some way, shape, or form—so other startup founders, or C-suite executives at some of the largest companies in the dental space, or folks from the ADA, or just others that I think are thought leaders generally speaking. We’ll ask questions that are interesting to the two of us.

Dr. Scott Drucker: And we kind of do it as a hobby and a passion of our own and are just sharing those conversations with the world.

Dr. Eric Block: Yeah, I love it. And it’s called the Open Wide Podcast. Can—is it on YouTube and Spotify and Apple?

Dr. Scott Drucker: Yeah, so the Open Wide Podcast is hosted on pretty much every major podcast host. So yes, Apple Podcasts, Spotify. We do upload pretty much all the videos—we do both audio and video recording—to YouTube. We do have a YouTube channel there, although the vast, vast majority of folks listen in on one of the podcast hosts. But yeah, it’s all up there for public consumption, and we hope people find it interesting. We certainly do.

Dr. Eric Block: Yeah, like I said, I love it because it gives you a behind-the-scenes, pull-the-curtain view to see some of the industry side of things, which is great. You guys do a great job. Alright, now tell me, what’s next for you? You’ve got the podcast, you have your SupplyClinic.com, you’re a periodontist—what’s next?

Dr. Scott Drucker: Yeah, so I have stepped back and transitioned into a, call it, advisory role at Supply Clinic. So I’m not in the weeds day-to-day anymore, which is super nice (laugh) to have built it to the point that I can do that. And now I just want to change the way that dentistry is delivered (laugh) and refocus and get rid of a lot of the, I’ll call them, perverse incentives in the space.

Dr. Scott Drucker: A lot of the insurance paradigm, I think, is just kind of a broken system that introduces a lot of waste, a lot of poorly delivered treatment, and yields a lot of treatment that just never gets done in the first place. So, kind of triangulating around building out a practice concept that solves a lot of those issues and also refocuses and reincentivizes practitioners—moving them away from a production mindset and over to a health and happiness mindset.

Dr. Scott Drucker: So, yeah, that was a lot. And we can go into the weeds on any of it.

Dr. Eric Block: Yes, this is right up my alley. I could talk about the issues and the broken system with dental insurance all day. So is this going to be for periodontists, or is it going to be for GPs? What type of practice is this going to be?

Dr. Scott Drucker: It’ll be a GP-driven practice at its core. But I’d like for all specialists to be rotated through. I also think that the paradigm of the general dentist being segmented out from all of the other specialists, and the way that we refer out—by and large—from the general practitioner to other specialists just introduces a lot of, I’ll call it, leakage of follow-up of care. Not everybody calls up this new practice and travels to the new practice to see the specialist and follows through with that care. It’s just not a very patient-centric or patient-focused sort of feel. So I’d like to be able to, in an ideal world, have everybody under one roof, but GP-driven and hygiene-driven. GP and hygiene as the workforce of the practice.

Dr. Eric Block: And how are you going to— is it just going to be without insurance? Is it going to be a fee-for-service type practice?

Dr. Scott Drucker: Yeah, exactly. A lot of practices now—there are a ton of qualms that dentists have with insurance. Reimbursement rates are compressed over time. There are waiting periods from the time someone gets an insurance plan. There are all kinds of other time lags introduced, where you can only do X number of, say, quadrants of certain treatment at a time and then have to wait for another day or another appointment to actually complete that treatment.

Dr. Scott Drucker: Or the fact that there’s a cap on benefits introduces a lot of really wonky behavior, where you’ll start a root canal and then have to wait till the next calendar year or insurance cycle for completion of the crown because the patient’s waiting for the benefit. I don’t want to touch insurance at all. So, yeah, entirely fee-for-service.

Dr. Scott Drucker: And I think I’d really, really like to lean into a membership-based model. Lots of practices out there have a membership option for those that don’t take insurance. I think you do that, right? You have a membership. Are you entirely fee-for-service, or do you also take some plans?

Dr. Eric Block: No, we’re totally out of network. We do help the patient with processing their claims and all the coding and all that, but for most of the plans they pay upfront, and then they get reimbursed. So we’re totally out of network, and we have a membership plan that I love and I think it’s a must. I love the fact that you’re doing this. Is the membership plan going to be kind of the backbone of the practice?

Dr. Scott Drucker: Yeah, the idea—and we’ll see how things play out—you know, I’ll test out and iterate a ton in the beginning to find what I’ll call product-market fit, to find what works and what speaks to the general population. But I would really like to go in a membership-required direction. So really all in on the model. I don’t know of many folks that do that today. Most that are fee-for-service and don’t take insurance will have it as an option. But I really think that it’s not only a viable model, I think a lot of the dental profession will shift in that direction over the next decade, 10, 15 years, what have you.

Dr. Eric Block: Do you think that you’ll be able to do this because it’s a scratch office? Whereas, you know, a practice like mine—I’ve been there 20 years and we were riddled with insurance plans—but then we strategically started to drop them, starting with our smallest ones. Then we ramped up to Delta a year and a half ago, and we were able to get most of our patients to stay and either pay upfront and deal with being out of network or switch over to our membership plan. But if we were just to tell everyone—all of our patients—send out an email saying it’s a must that you have to be part of our membership plan, it may have gone horribly wrong. Do you think that, having the startup and the fact that it’s a scratch office, you’ll be able to do this?

Dr. Scott Drucker: I’d say it’s doable in any case. In your office scenario you’re describing, I think you have to expect a lot of patient churn. You will lose patients for sure if you say, hey, now you’ve gotta pay several hundred dollars a year, or whatever it is, to be a member here. Even a couple hundred dollars—it’s definitely a barrier. You will lose patients.

Dr. Scott Drucker: But, you know, I could probably say the same thing about the scenario before you had cut off all insurances and gone fee-for-service. Will you lose patients? For sure. There are going to be people that leave. You won’t have a hundred percent retention. But will your retention be 80% or 30%? I don’t know (laugh).

Dr. Scott Drucker: The conversation is definitely different when you have a profitable, cash-flowing dental practice and make a radical change like that. Yeah, you have to tolerate that risk and know there will be churn. So that’s going to be a much, much harder thing for folks that already have practices to do. Is it doable? Sure. It’s just how much—I’ll call it—pain are you willing to take in terms of patient loss?

Dr. Eric Block: Yeah, I just think there’s so much with being strategic and being prepared. You know, we expected to lose patients—we actually lost less than I thought. And there are patients that are coming back. They left, went to a different dentist, and they’re coming back. So that’s going to happen too. And then, you know, what’s funny is the patients that you never thought would leave did, and the ones that you thought would leave in the drop of a hat didn’t.

Dr. Eric Block: But being prepared and controlling the narrative, getting the staff on board, getting that verbiage down, just getting everyone with the same message about focusing on the quality of care and not about the insurance, was really what made it successful for us.

Dr. Scott Drucker: Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s a big piece of it, obviously, communication to patients. I also think that—do you have an associate at your office or is it just you?

Dr. Eric Block: We do. We actually grew, but we also downsized. We were able to—because we went out of network—we were at a capacity issue. We had three associates, me and my partner, and five hygienists, and we even had to get a temporary hygienist.

Dr. Eric Block: But by going out of network, we did lose patients, but we were able to get rid of our temporary hygiene. We did, however, have to cut loose, unfortunately, two of our associates because we had to focus on keeping me and my partner busy. I mean, it is what it is. But, yeah.

Dr. Scott Drucker: That all tracks. I mean, the way I think that most practitioners are incentivized, and most of the dental profession kind of structures that incentive, is largely tied to productivity—production and/or collections. There may be some sort of net with a guaranteed base pay or something like that, maybe in a transition period at the beginning of an employment. But I understand why this works, I understand why tying unit economics and directly correlating it makes sense.

Dr. Scott Drucker: What I’d love to do is see if you can kind of re-underwrite assumptions and instead tie performance-based incentive or bonus incentive to health and happiness—to the health of your patients. Are your patients coming in for their routine hygiene visits? Are you hitting a certain percentage of your recall number? And is a certain percentage of treatment plan actually being completed? Are you getting patients to health? And are patients happy?

Dr. Scott Drucker: I’ve spent 10 years now very in the weeds in a technology business, not in the delivery of care business on a dental practice. There’s the concept of a Net Promoter Score, right? How likely are you as a customer to recommend that a friend of yours come to the same place or be a customer of the same business or a patient of the same practice? Some practices may do it, but I would guess that the majority don’t.

Dr. Scott Drucker: I think that’s probably a very important thing—if you’re keen on getting that number up and focused on your patient happiness and really aligned toward that, rather than just overall productivity numbers, I think your practice will grow. You’re setting yourself up for growth because the experience is going to be a good one that people talk about.

Dr. Scott Drucker: Again, I’m speculating, but I think—and I’ll be able to test this out a whole bunch—I think that will be a successful path forward: reorienting everybody’s KPI or North Star metric to health and happiness rather than per-dollar productivity. Productivity introduces all kinds of misalignment with the patient when, you know, everybody’s human. Every practitioner’s human—thinking about student loans to pay off, kids’ tuitions that keep increasing every year, buying a house, whatever.

Dr. Scott Drucker: We’re all human. We have those in the back of our mind, and that may introduce how treatment is planned and delivered. In an ideal world, we can just remove all of that from potentially impacting care and treatment of patients.

Dr. Eric Block: Love it.

Dr. Scott Drucker: We’ll see.

Dr. Eric Block: Can’t wait to hear how this goes because that’s such a great idea. I love our membership plan in our office, and I think it’s such a must. Alright, Scott, let’s wrap up with some final questions. I’ve actually—I usually ask two, but I’m going to ask you three.

Dr. Scott Drucker: Ooh.

Dr. Eric Block: And I can repeat these. Okay, first, how do we find out more about your podcast, your website, anything you’re up to? Second, I want to find out some ups and downs during your career. And then the last one—again, I can repeat these—the last one is advice for the young dentist out there.

Dr. Scott Drucker: Amazing. I’ll take them in reverse order. So, advice for young dentists out there: I would say be proactive. So many people lose out on opportunities because they don’t—they literally don’t ask the question. They don’t reach out and send the cold email or ask someone for an introduction. There are so many people out there who are experts in whatever they do who are actually excited to help out younger, up-and-coming folks in their profession. But unless they’re reached out to, they have no idea.

Dr. Scott Drucker: I had no experience with e-commerce or the healthcare supply chain before I got up and running with Supply Clinic. I didn’t go to school for it. I had no background. So my philosophy was, okay, I need to learn as much as I can—read and consume. There’s so much free content out there online. People have their own podcasts with a ton of information. Plenty of experts have written books. Just get the book and consume that and be proactive.

Dr. Scott Drucker: My philosophy with my brother was, we knew what we didn’t know, and we were brutally honest about it. We surrounded ourselves with people—we joked—people who either had much less hair than we have or much more gray hair than we have, right? People who had just been around the block and we could learn from. So we put together an advisory board for Supply Clinic, including an ex-Amazon executive, so we could really lean in and take advantage of all that experience from the e-commerce world, from arguably the company best at it in the world.

Dr. Scott Drucker: We took on an advisor who founded the second-largest group purchase organization that supplies hospital systems in the U.S. We just—and a lot of these were just cold email outreaches that folks responded to. So be proactive about your own education and your own conversations with folks. Don’t hesitate to reach out and see what resources are available to you or what people are willing to help.

Dr. Scott Drucker: That’s my big piece of advice. In terms of ups and downs—that was the middle question. Man, we went through a tremendous rollercoaster over a decade with Supply Clinic, from starting something from scratch and employing our first folks, and then being responsible for their income and the health of them and their families.

Dr. Scott Drucker: But, yeah, there are—and to make a long story short, we ended up making in profit more than we were hoping to raise in a capital round. So we got the money we needed without having to dilute any, you know, give away any equity in the company.

Dr. Scott Drucker: So, yeah, just, man, lots and lots of those crazy moments, and they will come up. It’s just, okay, I’m here, I’m in it. What do I do? Map out possible paths forward and pros and cons, and just figure it out.

Dr. Scott Drucker: Yeah, I mean, man, lots and lots of stories came out of that probably 18 months post-March of 2020. But, yeah, that’s just a little bit of a taste for some of the ups and downs and what that was like.

Dr. Scott Drucker: And then how to get a hold of and how to find out what we’re up to. So, SupplyClinic.com is the website—totally free to use. Go check it out, shop around, see if there’s a better deal than whatever supplier you purchase through regularly. The podcast—Open Wide Podcast—check it out on any of the podcast hosts. All of the interviews we title “Conversation with” and then have the name of the person.

Closing Thoughts

Dr. Scott Drucker: Check those out, and there’s lots of startup advice and stories that Janesh and I tell in some of the episodes. So, yeah, that’s all out there in the public domain. And the best place to find me and what I’m up to is LinkedIn. Honestly, that’s where I sort of shifted to. Several years ago, I got way overwhelmed with all the Facebook groups and how massive some of them had grown—I couldn’t follow and keep track. So I just shifted mostly to LinkedIn. For anybody listening that wants to reach out, direct message me there. I’m pretty active and pretty responsive there. So, yeah, that should be it.

Dr. Eric Block: (laugh) Yeah, I’m a huge LinkedIn fan. I loved your comments about the ups and downs. You know, my podcast and my book and a lot of what I do is called the Stress Free Dentist, but in reality, there’s going to be tremendous amounts of stress. It’s just understanding that it’s going to happen and how you deal with it is the important thing. This life as a dentist or entrepreneur—it’s a marathon, not a sprint. There are going to be lots of ups and downs.

Dr. Eric Block: So, Scott Drucker, amazing episode. Love what you’re up to, and I think you’re helping a lot of dentists out there. Thanks so much for joining us. We’ll be in touch.

Dr. Scott Drucker: Eric, thank you for having me on.

Dr. Eric Block: Thanks again for listening to the Stress Free Dentist Podcast. And don’t hesitate to get in touch with me at info@thestressfreedentist.com. If you haven’t already, please subscribe on your favorite platform and leave us a review. Until the next episode, I’m Dr. Eric Block, the Stress Free Dentist.