Cassie Kellner [00:00:01]:
Welcome to The Bloom Effect. I'm your host, Cassie Kellner, former chairside assistant turned team coach and founder of Everbloom. This podcast is all about the real stuff, honest convos, leadership lessons, and the heart behind thriving orthodontic teams. If you're ready to grow, lead, and bloom, let's dive in.
Cassie Kellner [00:00:21]:
Welcome to The Bloom Effect. I'm your host, Cassie Kellner, and today I am super excited to get real and raw and super nerdy because let me tell you, the tooth nerd in me is very excited for this. Dr. Brandon Owen, welcome to The Bloom Effect.
Dr. Brandon Owen [00:00:45]:
Thank you so much for having me.
Cassie Kellner [00:00:47]:
This is so exciting. Oh my gosh. Okay. So we start this with every single podcast. I ask my guest, who is Dr. Brandon Owen? And I know it's loaded and I know that this can go in a million different directions, but who is Dr. Brandon Owen?
Dr. Brandon Owen [00:01:11]:
You know, I think at the core of that, I'll say that I'm someone who is at odds with himself in that what I'm really looking for is work-life balance. And I know that that term is thrown around all the time. You know, I, I was going to be a doctor. I have two uncles who are physicians, and I found out in, in college that they worked just all the time. And so I quickly pivoted, you know, my junior year of college and said, well, I don't want to work all the time. And we had family friends who are dentists and they were golfing with their kids on the weekdays and skiing with their kids all the time. And I was like, well, that's way better. Way better way to live life. And so, so I shifted. And, and so that's why I chose orthodontics was, I just felt like, I love helping people. I love like the healthcare field, but I wanted to have family be an epicenter. And so that was kind of the journey. But then you start a startup company, and guess what, it's an 80-hour-a-week job. And so here I am traveling all the time, speaking, working, still running a practice as well on the side. And so, you know, because I feel like orthodontics is so inefficient, it's— I mean, it's 45-year-old technology. That's the last innovation, straight wire appliances, which is a one-size-fits-all system. It's early 1980s was really when it launched. And we really haven't seen anything that's fully been adopted since then. And so we— every other industry gets some like iterative bump up every couple, you know, every decade or 7 years or so you get something new. And self-ligation was maybe a move in the right direction, but it's still only 25% of the market. So not even everybody said that that was worth it for them to pivot.
Cassie Kellner [00:03:08]:
Right.
Dr. Brandon Owen [00:03:08]:
And so, you know, I again was shooting for, hey, work-life balance, let's make a more efficient bracket. And so that was kind of my my calling was this is going to be great for everybody, not just me. So, it was from a place of passion and understanding, but it ended up pulling me down the rabbit hole of losing it for myself. And so, a couple of years ago, I basically told my wife because we were at the brink of fracture in the relationship. And I said, I'm going to drop everything and stop the travel and rededicate myself And then I did that for probably a good 18 months. And then with the more recent kind of commercial ramp up and fundraising, I had to go out and do it again. And I just find myself getting back into this loop. And so I'm divesting myself from that crazy chaos. But it's a constant thing that you have to actively block, you know, this inertia of just protecting what matters the most, which for me, it really is hanging out with my wife and my kids. When I'm away, I miss them so much. I'm depressed being away from them. I love to teach. I love to make things better. I love to innovate. But, at the end of the day, when I'm away from my family, I just kind of feel lost and broken, especially if it's too far out of balance. And so, I have to kind of carve myself back into that.
Cassie Kellner [00:04:36]:
Brandon, I can relate to this on so many levels. So I was a clinical systems consultant for 10 years. I traveled like crazy. And then I had children. I traveled during pregnancy, during morning sickness, during night sickness. I mean, you name it, I was in a hotel during long flights, 7 months pregnant and going like, Are they gonna let me on this plane? Like, I, you know, I don't know. Uh, and, and over the last 3 years with Everbloom, I have really changed my model. And it is because— so it— what you're saying really resonates with me. I have changed my model of not traveling as much. My kids are now 5 and 6. Um, but Everbloom is going into year 3, and it is another baby of mine. Oh, for sure. That, you know, my husband works in medicine and sometimes he does one 24-hour shift a week. On that 24-hour shift, early stages, like year one of Everbloom, I know he wasn't here, my children were sleeping, I could be on that computer grinding until 1 o'clock in the morning. Like, nothing would make my brain stop because you just— you're— it's new, it's yours. It's like, okay, we've got to go, we've got to go. And so what you're saying really resonates with me as a business owner, as a, as a mother, you know, all the things. And so what I've said over the last year— I heard someone say this, and I can't give them credit because I don't remember who it was. It was probably on some Instagram reel that I saw, but they said, you know, they call it work work-life harmony because like I genuinely don't have balance. I try, I try really hard. You know, and what yesterday, it's so funny you're saying this, my daughter is 5. She asked my husband, Dad, why are we alive? And we like, we looked at each other. And he had such a beautiful answer, and he was like, well, we're alive to be good humans. We're alive to do good in this world. We're alive, you know, he didn't like go into the scientific. We're just like, we're alive to do really good, meaningful stuff, whatever that means to you. And so like the fact that you're saying this, and this happened last night, and it wasn't even something we were even planning on talking about, but it, I think it really resonates with everyone, business owner, team member, employee, it doesn't matter, right? I think we're all kind of trying to do the same thing, is have some sort of balance in this life.
Dr. Brandon Owen [00:07:36]:
I think so too. I do. And it's really hard. And I think especially in the US, we, we kind of are brought up to believe that success comes in the form of making a lot of money and having, you know, a booming practice. And I think social media and comparing ourselves to others. And unfortunately, I think on social media, the facade of what others is showing isn't maybe the actual reality.
Cassie Kellner [00:08:02]:
Sure.
Dr. Brandon Owen [00:08:03]:
And so there's this unrealistic expectation of what you should be living up to. And so it just, uh, there's, there's this really big, um, mountain that we're all trying to climb. From a, uh, just, you know, success is so tethered to business success. And I think to me, you know, I just would rather see my focus now going forward the next few years on tethering it to family success and my presence there. And so I'm just really trying to make a pivot mentally to, you know, definitely not neglecting the business, but making kind of priorities lie elsewhere. Because I have a— my daughter's 15, my son's 12, and, you know, there's only a couple more years where they're not going to just be driving around, running around with friends, where they actually want to hang out with me. And so if I don't take opportunity now, I just realize that I'm going to lose that forever. And then they're just out of the house, and, you know, it's kind of poof, gone. So, yeah, um, Yeah, it's crazy. Life is a blink.
Cassie Kellner [00:09:13]:
It really is. Can we kind of talk about the start of KLO and how this, how this happened, the innovation, your story? I, you know, I'm, I'm not really familiar with the details of your story and how this all happened. So if you're willing, I would love to hear how this kind of came about in your life?
Dr. Brandon Owen [00:09:40]:
Yeah, so it was kind of serendipitous in that I just was having a real tough time back in 2006 coming out of residency with aligners. There wasn't good training back then. I don't think the aligner systems were really that advanced, and I don't think we really understood the biomechanics. And, and so I was just really struggling. And so I had a rep walk in from GAC, and she showed me these lingual brackets, and I said, oh, that looks way easier. And so I was doing indirect bonding just anyway, because that's what we did mainly in residency. And so I said, I can teach myself to do lingual. And I did, and we did a lot of it, and we did really challenging cases with it. And she started seeing some of the case finishes as she was kind of circling back a year later.. And then GAC asked if I would start becoming kind of their lecturer lingual, their lingual lead lecturer. So I was flying all over the world, teaching orthodontists how to do lingual orthodontics after Ron Ronconi kind of moved on to a different company. And I think they saw that I had a pretty good acumen in digital as well. And so they said, well, would you also kind of look at developing something in the digital space for us. And, and so they, you know, I had a pretty good contract with them. I spent about a day a week talking with their engineering team and their MBAs on digital. So I was trying out everything. And what I loved was, you know, Incognito did a really good job of filling the slot completely. It was a printed lingual bracket in wax and they cast it in gold. And then they, they were hand filing the strips down to like these tolerances that were so tight. And what I just was baffled by was when you put in their slot, that slot filling arch wire at the end, I was like, oh my gosh, like the marginal ridges all line up. The buccal lingual inclination was always perfect. And I was like, this is amazing. And I'm not putting any adjustments in a lot of these cases at all. But my staff would run the other direction because it was 5 wires. Like, there was a day training just on how to ligate and put— tie in the wire. And so in terms of a complicatedness of doing the wire changes, it was really, really challenging. Yeah. But from a doctor perspective, literally I came over and I said, oh, this looks great, let's put in this wire. I want single tie, I want double overties on these 3 teeth, and I want PowerTine on the bottom and Then I ran away, right? So for the doctor, it was because it was digital, because it was custom, and because they focused so much on the arch wire slot interface, the results were amazing if you did it right. Now, there are a lot of people I don't think that did it right. Sure. But if you did it right, you could get amazing results with very little doctor touch. It was all delegated to the staff. Now, the staff would run the other direction, as I was saying, because it was you know, like perio surgery, like hunched over sideways. And by the end, I'm sure their shoulders— ergonomics there. And then I was doing a lot of other systems like Insignia for one. And they went from this milled custom bracket slot, which was pretty good, but they weren't filling the slot completely. And then they switched to a Damon bracket. And because it was self-lagging, they said this is even better. But there's so much play between that wire and the bracket slot that I was bending more on those cases than I was just on my standard indirect bonding cases. And I was like, this is not custom at all. This is glorified indirect bonding with a couple of torque things. And so, but it was labial. And so what I said is, man, if we could couple these two things, slot filling mechanics, but the ease of delivery of a labial system, but make it actually cost effective where you could actually make bracket systems. That weren't, you know, $1,000 to manufacture, right? You could make this something that's under $500 a case to actually be able to sell to an orthodontist. You could actually do this on everybody. Yeah. Then I could be doing the 30-second, oh, this looks great. Let's put in these wires, these ties, these rubber bands, and off to the next patient. And if that became my whole day, life changes for the orthodontist, life changes for the staff, life changes for the patient. And with the labial delivery system, our assistants already know how to do the tie-ins. They already know how to do— it's not lingual. Sure. It's they already know how to do all the other stuff. And so that was kind of my eye-opening moment was just watching all these other custom systems fail because they were making custom pieces, custom components, which is really expensive. It costs a lot to make a tiny little part and piece. And then assemble it. And it takes a lot of time to do that. And so we created kind of like— I like to use the shoe analogy where if you think about conventional braces, it would be like walking into a shoe store and all they sell is a wide size 15 shoe. That's all they stock. It's a one size fits all. And but we have some foam and I'm going to sculpt this foam over the next 4 or 5 hours with you. And I'm going to sculpt it to be the contour between your foot and this size 15 clown shoe. And so, you know, I'm an artisan and I'm going to kind of do the sculpting for you. Right. And so that's kind of what braces is, is it doesn't fit anybody. There's so much torque slop. So we're going to kind of bend the wire or reposition the bracket to kind of get this up and down. And most of what we do doesn't— we don't control torque. If we have like a marginal ridge discrepancy, Usually it's a torque problem, but what instead we do is we put a step bend or we do a reposition to bring the marginal ridges up in a second order mechanic. And so that's how we're kind of making it work, but it's not actually doing the actual movement that needs to happen, which is a third order movement. And so that's conventional. What Insignia was doing, what some other companies still do today, would be like going into a shoe store where they would say, I'm going to measure your right foot. And your left foot today, and I'm going to build from scratch a new pair of shoes for you. It's going to take me 5 or 6 weeks and it's going to cost you $1,000. But by the way, my cost to build those shoes is $950. There's only $50 of profit left for me at the end of the day in that process. It's not a sustainable solution to kind of be going down that road. And so how do we buy shoes? How do we buy clothing? It's— we can walk into a a store and there's enough iterative shapes and sizes, a narrow, medium, or wide in a 9, 10, 11, 12. And, by choosing the best fit for my foot, I can then choose that right size, but then the laces when I tighten the laces give me the last little bit of customization I need to hug to that foot. And so, for us, we have every 10 degrees, there's a new shape bracket. And every 0.2 millimeter there's a new shape bracket. So you position the teeth anywhere you want in 3-dimensional space, wherever you want them to go. You can go well beyond the spectrum of where we would normally move teeth, and then the bracket is automatically selected in the software. But the last little bit of customization, the last 2 or 3 degrees in the last 0.1 millimeter, is built in when you actually glue the bracket to the tooth in the indirect bonding process with the IDB tray. So it's our shoelace is we still get 100% custom solution, but we're making essentially the same bracket cost that we would have with conventional braces. So with 27 bracket shapes, which is about how many you're using right now with conventional braces, with 27 shapes, we can give you the custom advantage, the custom efficiency. And now when you add in things like self-ligation plus digital indirect bonding, we're kind of in the same ballpark price-wise as those two things added up, which is amazing to me that we can still hold the line on that price point and not have to keep raising our price to be profitable as a company. Because we want this to be something where an office can go all in. Because dabbling— and we'll get into this, I know, later— but yes, it's just not worth it to be able to just start one or two patients with a system in a month. Yeah, it's gonna just break your system, it'll break your office, it'll break your staff morale.
Cassie Kellner [00:18:07]:
Yep.
Dr. Brandon Owen [00:18:08]:
Absolutely.
Cassie Kellner [00:18:09]:
So you had this moment, right? And then you were like, hey, is this just innate in you, Brandon? Like where you went, hey, I can't find this, I'm going to build it? Because that's a rarity. You know that.
Dr. Brandon Owen [00:18:26]:
Right? I guess it must be. Because I did the same thing. Like I invented my own TMJ splint, which transformed my TMJ practice. Like it's So yeah, I think, I think I just get frustrated with why are we doing something that's been this way for this long and it shouldn't be this hard. There should be better ways. There should be better delivery models. You know, it's not even just about making custom braces. It's about making custom braces that deliver good ROI to the company that makes them. Right. So it's not— there have been custom braces around forever. Like we can 3D print custom braces. In metal and gold and cast them. And that's been happening with Incognito forever. Harmony was 3D printing the chromium cobalt base and then laser welding necks and things that, you know, this is decades-old technology. Yeah. So you can do that, but it costs so much that you'd have to be charging $1,500 a case just to make a little bit of margin, much less to be a, to be a healthy company. You've got to have 70% gross profit margin. And then now you're talking about you've got to be at a $3,000 case price, $2,000+ case price. So this is just where— what does it— does it make sense financially? Yeah, because a lot of these products will come into the market and they're going to price themselves to be attractive initially. Sure, sure. To be kind of— to gain, you know, market share. And then they have to go up to a price point that's $1,500, $1,700. And okay, now we're at margin. Because you have to be there eventually.
Cassie Kellner [00:20:03]:
Yes.
Dr. Brandon Owen [00:20:04]:
And so they're just trying to get you hooked. But what I love about our product is we can actually be at this $500 price point in perpetuity, right? Is this is a model where we can actually hold the line there because it just makes sense. It's a sensible way to give people customization. It's the way big industry gives us customization in shoes and in clothing and everything else. And so that's what I love about this, is it is going to be something that for the long term, the orthodontist can rely on to be something that drives efficiency without having to worry about, is this going to cost me $2,000 in 5 years? Hope, you know, hope that the other ones aren't going to do that. But, you know, there's a, there's a high chance that there's going to be some price upward price pressure on, sure, on anything that's making two, you know, you have to make a single set and a backup set for something where it's a bespoke one-off bracket.
Cassie Kellner [00:21:00]:
Yeah.
Cassie Kellner [00:21:01]:
Okay. Can we talk about dabbling? Because I think that this is really important. I talk about this. I mean, this is anything, right? But can we talk about what does half committed look like in a practice? And listen, in my opinion, I think half committed is you're on a fast track to fail, truly. And I think it's when you're half committed, it's incredibly stressful to your team. Um, but can we talk about when people dabble in new systems like this, what are you seeing is the outcome? And can we give any collectively, like, tips and tricks to people who are like, Yeah, I want it, but I'm going to dabble in it.
Dr. Brandon Owen [00:21:54]:
Yeah, I think, um, I mean, we have pretty good numbers on this. Uh, it, it's really interesting. 6 cases a month was the threshold that below 6 cases a month for the first 6 months, if an office did less than that with us, yeah, they had a more than 92% chance that they were going to just fizzle out and go nowhere. Really? And if they did more than 6 cases per month, it was like an under 8% chance that they would do that. And if anything, they would— we would see that their volume would increase and that they would have bigger adoption. Yeah. And so, um, I don't know what that means in terms of a percentage of, of their office, but, but I do think that it has a lot to do with you've got to build muscle memory. You've got to at least threshold enough to have repetition to build. It's building a new skill, right? This is the unfortunate thing with— I think everybody wants the staples easy button where you just push it and it happens for you. And, you know this better than anyone is we'd all love just to have Asana just done and you don't have to do anything and it's just automated. You have to put some effort, right? And so, you know, I, I like to, when I get to go into offices and train them, I like to tell the staff that they will hate me and they will curse my name for the first probably 3 to 4 months of the process because learning anything new, when you're a good assistant, when you're a skilled assistant and you can kind of do things in your sleep. You feel proud of what you're doing. Even if you're the top of the top of the top, learning a new skill is, you know, it's just, it's just not going to happen overnight. And so you can totally empathize with an assistant who's amazing. And then they go in and they have 3 brackets fall off at an indirect bonding appointment, or a couple loose brackets, and then they don't, you know, remember how to fix it exactly right. And it's a stressful thing. And But if you point out that in the long term, 10 months from now, 14 months from now, they're going to be looking at their conventional cases and saying, oh man, I wish this was a KLO case. Our lives would be so much easier if we would have done this 2 or 3 years ago. And the reason for that is, what is the bottleneck in the orthodontic office? It's the orthodontist. You know, when I remember back to my crazy Colorado practice, we were busy, like we had, you know, 7, 8 chairs. It was, I was, you know, 4 adjustments and obs check and then the TC kind of all yelling for me at the same time. And we were 30 minutes behind. Yeah. And they were all, we had to have a patient flow coordinator and they were like, do this, do this, this. And you know, and so I'm just like, I felt like I was a ping pong ball being like swatted around and just being very reactionary. And it was, I had to sit down and I had to do the wire bend, I had to sit down and I had to reposition the bracket, I had to be the one to be the one directing kind of the teeth movements that needed to happen with an analog system. And, you know, I feel like I was a really good orthodontist even with analog, but it meant sure, 15 bend wire bends, and those are long appointments and detail, you know, doing lots of repos. If you want it to be really good, there's just too much slop. Even if you're perfect at bracket positioning, there's too much slop. Yeah. To know exactly where those teeth are going to go. And so 60% of my day when we did the time studies was dedicated to basically repos, bondings, and wire bends. And so that's massive. Like, that's massive. And on the staff side of that, what are the most uncomfortable parts of their day is entertaining those unhappy patients that, you know, 15, 20 minutes, where's the doctor? Where's the doctor? And then it's just like, how are you doing? And some staff are great at it, right? Some staff are the social butterflies and they excel. But then you have other staff members that are, that are not that way. And so What if you took away that, that kind of angst part of the day for them? What if they didn't have to work through lunch because the doctor got behind? What if they got done at the end of the day on time? What if they got their admin tasks done during the day because they didn't have that 60% of the doctor, right? And so, um, so that's, I think, what the reality of this is. And you can kind of see it in the, and it's the reason that so many of like the practices that scaled up to like 100 120 patients per day, went more aligner-based, you know, heavier aligner chair-to-chair, because those are all a 30-second doctor check-in. Sure, right? It's— there's no— there are no detailing bends, there are no repos. The worst-case scenario is things are off track and let's do a refinement scan, which you delegate right back to the assistant. And so that's what custom digital to me is, is basically replicating the aligner workflow into the bracket patients. But you've got to fill the slot. We're the only company that recommends filling the archwire slot completely in the upper archwire. And in my cases, I do it for the lower as well. But because of that, there's no torque slop, which means you get exactly what you wanted out of the digital setup. That's what happens in the mouth. And that's what means I only do like one detailing appointment. Usually it's just a couple of bends. And then we're done. Yeah. You know, everything else is just a rubber band check. So it's a 30-second doctor thing. I mean, I like to say I want less than 10 minutes of doctor glove-up time per patient.
Cassie Kellner [00:27:54]:
That's it.
Dr. Brandon Owen [00:27:54]:
Sure, sure. Less than 10 minutes. Right now, I guarantee you most doctors are gloving up way more than that.
Cassie Kellner [00:28:00]:
Oh, oh, absolutely, absolutely. You know what's interesting too, as you kind of say all of this, and people who are dabbling, and, and the, the, uh, doctor being the bottleneck, and I think people listening to this can resonate so much with this, and team members are probably screaming in their cars right now going, yes, yes, we're waiting, we're— we— you know, there's— I think that there's so much that can be done on the front end to be able to, to handle a lot of the things that you're saying. And also, when you put in a system like K. L. Owen, it is up to your management team, clinical lead, office manager, orthodontist associate, whoever, to be able to discuss the operations and the change management piece that comes with us with this. And I think what's really important is that when people are rolling this out, anything new, not this, not just this product, I mean anything new, is that they're sitting down and saying, here's what we're going to do. This is why we're going to do it. And I love what you said, Brandon, about like the realness and the raw that you say, hey, you're not going to like me for a little bit. Well, why are they not going to like you? Because change is hard. It has nothing to do with anything else. It's change is hard. And we do expect experienced assistants take a hit to the ego if we do not do something up to our own standard. That's just the reality, you know.
Dr. Brandon Owen [00:29:44]:
All of us do. All of us do.
Cassie Kellner [00:29:45]:
Of course, we're human. You know, if we get an emergency and it has my name on it, I'm like, oh no, why? What happened? I thought I did all the things right, you know. And so, so much of what you're saying is so true. And you guys have created a system that will remove the bottleneck, which I think is really important in music to people's ears. And this is why it's so important for people not to just dabble.
Dr. Brandon Owen [00:30:16]:
Yeah, but I think the hard part is that the doctor's the one that— so with so many things, the doctors go to these conventions, make a decision, and they come back to the staff and say, Hey guys, guess what? We're doing this new thing. Yeah. And, and then the staff is like, great, you know, another new thing, another new promise. And then, you know, one of the things that I've been really trying to focus on with our own internal team when we launch a new office is to try and focus a lot more on the staff and let them really come along for the journey of why we're doing it. Yes. Because I think so many people think custom braces is about indirect bonding and that's what you— that's the win. And it's not. I would tell you indirect bonding is a hurdle you have to clear over to get the benefits of custom. This is the number one misnomer because there's other easier to use, cheaper, faster turnaround indirect bonding systems. And indirect bonding systems are great. It'll save you— there's lots of research out there. It'll probably shave off 1 to 2 visits, but you're still going to be— I've done 16 different digital indirect bonding systems. Wow. It's the torque slop. I have a little model here I can pull out, but it's the torque slop. Even with digital indirect bonding that requires us to repo and wire bend. It's— and it's the big benefit to custom comes in eliminating those repo wire bends down the road. So you're not going to see the benefit really for 9 to 14 months. That's where you're going to notice the big difference. And so this was a case with, with DIBS, and then one half we did, I think it's like a really expensive twin bracket and the other half, it's a really expensive self-ligating bracket. So the bracket positioning is really good. But look at the torque slot. So I don't know where those teeth are going to end up. Could they end up perfect? Maybe. Could they end up like that? I mean, that's crazy slop, right? This is a 19-25 wire in a 22 slot. And so that's what even if you get the brackets in exactly the right spot, You don't know where they're going to end up versus with our.
Cassie Kellner [00:32:27]:
Solution.
Dr. Brandon Owen [00:32:28]:
Yeah, there's just no play. Like, it's like less than 4 degrees at most on any of these teeth. There's just where you put the teeth digitally is where they're going to go within a very little range of error, which means I'm going to sit down one appointment and just— it's like a hole in one on 25 teeth and maybe I have a 3-foot putt on a couple. Right? That's it. And so my stress level as the doctor is low. But that's the bond— indirect bonding is stressful for the staff member, not for the doctor. Right? When you have a loose bracket, repairing that loose bracket is stressful on the staff member because it's a different process than they're used to. And it's really interesting because we track this the first couple of months, you may have more loose brackets, but after the first few months, if you're doing it consistently, again, this is not dabbling. If you're doing it sporadically, you're going to have tons of loose brackets and catastrophic failures because you're not going to build muscle memory. And that's the big problem with it. And you're going to be running so many systems that you're like, frustration, frustration, frustration. Of course. But it was really interesting. If you had to fix 10 loose brackets in a day of conventional and 2 that were custom, those 2, your cortisol levels will raise way higher. You're going to have to get out the book. You're going to be in panic mode. And so those two loose brackets are going to feel way more stressful and they're going to stand out in your mind so much more. So your psychological bias towards those two are going to make you think that there's so many more of those because the other ones are just like riding a bike. It's just like if you're riding your bike and you're riding your bike to take your driver's test, you know, you ride your bike to the driver's test and that driver's test is like super stressful. When you're driving your car 3 days, you know, 3 years later, like it's a piece of cake. But the first couple of times you do it, it's super stressful. And so, you know, it's just that that's what you have to clear is that onboarding journey. It's not about indirect bonding. It's about the straight wire at the end, not having to wait for the doctor to repo and wire bend. You're not going to see it right away. But we do tell doctors, like when you see these cases for your pano repo visit at like 6 months, point it out to the team. Yes. Because it's going to look like night and day. I mean, I just had— I had a— this last week I had a Hollywood actress who's getting ready to film a new season on a show. She only had like 4 months to let me do as much. She was in Invisalign. She couldn't wear trays enough, so it was kind of failing. She gave me like 4 months and we like transformed her smile in like 4 months. It was like, this is awesome. We had another lady last week who had 5 months before her son's birthday. She's like, you only get 5 months. And I was like, all right, let's see what we can do. Like, it looks amazing. And so, I mean, these are things that with custom we can achieve greatness. With conventional, I would have said no, no way, no way am I gonna get ideal. Like, you could get straighter, straighter, yes, but ideal? No way. So anyway, I think it's just really fun.
Cassie Kellner [00:35:34]:
Yeah, I, you know, I, I think there's so many powerful messages from what you're saying today and the product that you've created and the fact that you've been in the trenches and you're seeing this kind of really make monumental movements within this industry. And while I do think that this is obviously the orthodontist the owner is making the, the decision, the, the chairside assistants are— that's what's really happening once this whole journey begins, right? Yeah, for sure. Because it's less wait time. I mean, I can't tell you how many in my clinical consulting years I would look at treatment cards and it'd be like appointment after repo, repo, repo, and I'm like, oh my, your patient's been in treatment for how long? Just, you know, like this, the stress that these team members feel when the wait time is so incredibly long and they're like, we have to play catch-up and now I know I'm not going to be able to get an appropriate lunch. I mean, it's everything, right?
Dr. Brandon Owen [00:36:52]:
I know, I know. It's everything. All those things.
Cassie Kellner [00:36:55]:
Yeah, it's— you're right, the indirect bonding system I think is a wonderful, beautiful, really high-level thing, but it's more than that. It's the entire case. It's the entire treatment. It's the feeling that your team gets when they have to wait for you. It's the feeling that the orthodontist gets and they come out of an exam and you have like 7 stalker eyes on you of like, oh my God, okay, where do I go? Where do you need me to go? And then you have like the mom in chair 3 who's like mad that she's been waiting for 20 minutes. You know, I think, you know, it's, it's all the things. These are the scenarios that are happening in clinics all over the world, you know? And so it's, your message is really powerful.
Dr. Brandon Owen [00:37:44]:
And I think too, just, man, it might, just personally staffing for me since I moved from Colorado to Austin, just coming out of COVID it's so hard. Yes. It's getting more expensive. It's just getting more challenging. And so to be able to do more high-quality orthodontics with fewer team members, not because you need to fire people, but just because it's so tough to retain and have the good ones. And you don't want the good ones to get burnt out because they're having to do workloads of people who are leaving and you can't fill the spots with good ones and you're having just to get anybody in the office. And so when you have you know, I think Scott Fry had a really good post a few years ago that really just resonated with me, where the appliance cost and the staff cost really should almost be tethered into one kind of overhead bucket. Because if you can defray and offset staffing costs by investing a little bit— so, and this is how we kind of, when we look at our white paper numbers and some of the other stuff that Gauge Data has provided with us. On average, we save our customers over 7 visits. That's on average. So if you think of a US average of 19 appointments, kind of if you look at the, some of the data from Gauge and some of the other surveys and things, you can go from 19 down to like 12 appointments. You know, that's massive. And if you think about overhead per visit, costing somewhere in the $150 to $220 range. Yep. You know, the break-even point for something like this, it's probably going to cost you $300 more than maybe what you're doing now. And so basically 2 saved visits is your break-even. And so if we're saving even 5, you've more than doubled the ROI. Yeah, but it's more than that because it's doctor time savings. It's not just the visit, but there's a big difference between a detailing visit or a repo visit and a 30-second, hey, let's put a power chain on and these new wires on.. And that's the visits that we're— I do one detailing appointment typically, maybe two, no repos almost ever because I have the CBCT integration feature that I use. And it is like, it's nothing for me to have to do. Like, I took a case to Engel that was, I think, one of the most beautifully treated cases. I was really hard on myself and it got a CRE of like 14, which is a really good score. And I put one bend in the wire and it took 8 months.. And I was like, it was a 30 DI, really, really challenging case, treated in 8 months. And I just did like a tiny little step bend between the centrals and that was it. And I'm like, this is not normal, but it's normal in my practice. It's like, this is my practice. This is how all of our patients kind of go in the practice.
Cassie Kellner [00:40:35]:
So, and think about too, the, you, you talk about staff burnout, right? You think about what the, the, what you're doing for the mental state of your team to be able to, to do this. The, the level of— you're de-stressing so much of what's happening in your clinic because these are practices are high-level, high-functioning, high-volume. And if there's a ton of wait time, then the stress that people are feeling in these practices leads to burnout, which leads to turnover. And so if we can look at these all-encompassing systems that really change the, the energy that's happening in our teams. I mean, Brandon, it's a no-brainer to me. You know, it's all connected, which I wish people would really, really pay attention to.
Dr. Brandon Owen [00:41:36]:
And it's time. I mean, we're so overdue. This.
Cassie Kellner [00:41:40]:
Is such a— we're overdue on.
Dr. Brandon Owen [00:41:41]:
A lot in this industry. That's what I mean. It's— we— so much of what we do is so archaic and when you, when you transition to these things and you look back, you're like, how did I ever function? How did I ever function with— I like to tell people that, that aren't using custom the right way, because this is the other thing, is you also have to, as the doctor, learn, you know, how to use the software, how to do a good setup. Of course. What is the wire sequence? What are the biomechanics I want to use? So again, there's not an easy button. There's a learning, right? This is— yep, you're a professional in this field. You need to learn the new tool. And just because you switched to a new bracket system doesn't mean you get to just keep doing things the same way. You have to kind of learn your new— the new tool you've chosen. And so we try and do a lot to educate, but you actually have to dedicate some energy yourself into doing that. And so That's the hard part is even if you are doing my, my, I wanted to make my convert or my lecture topic for next year custom braces, you're doing it wrong. Because the number of people that I talked to, when I say, oh, how, you know, what are you doing? Tell me, you know, what, why are you finishing? And I'm just like, that's, you know, they're using these tiny finishing wires. And, and I'm like, you're paying $1,000 for custom braces and you're using a tiny little wire where you don't get any torque expression, and like, you might as well just be doing any indirect bonding system at this point. And, and, you know, are you using the right wire sequencing? And are you marketing your practice with the custom messaging to differentiate and help conversion? Are you doing all these extra things? Because this is a differentiator. I mean, we are— my practice is an extremely competitive area. And, um, I don't market because I was trying to keep my practice kind of small because I've obviously got too many plates spinning. Sure. Right now. But, um, you know, our average treatment time for the last 5 years has been under 10 months, and the word's just gotten out, and we're kind of blowing up. I brought on an associate who hopefully will join as my partner here soon, and now we're actually trying to ramp up and do some marketing. But yeah, people want faster treatment. Like, they just are— when they hear about this, they're like, this is amazing. Like, why, why, why isn't everybody doing this? And I'm like, they will. I think it's just a— it's a foregone conclusion. It's just, you know, I think sometimes it's, it's when you know, like, when you've got it all dialed in. I think this is for you as well, right? You and I are like, once you've got the systems all done, you're like, how isn't everybody doing this? But I have to kind of slow back and say to our team is change is hard, you guys. We need to focus not on like blaming our customers for not getting it. We have to build, build the bridges that help make it easier for them to get to where we are. That's the tact. That's, that's how, that's how people become successful. It's not blaming, blaming people for not just saying you need to get this. No. We need to facilitate the road and the pathway. And just, you know, we've never been— we never went out and raised like hundreds of millions of dollars as a company to be able to kind of go out and invest in that. Yeah, it's been more bootstrapping. And so, you know, we're kind of slowly building those, those kind of bridges to help. Um, and, you know, thank you for being a platform that helps us, you know, reach out to others. And because it really is fun, it is life-changing. It is neat to see how, you know, we can transform people's lives, both not just the doctors, not just the patients, but the staff members as well. I think it's really been neat to see that, um, that happen, that evolution. Yeah, but, um, but it's not easy. It's not without effort. And it's kind of like, you know, we, we can take you to Shangri-La, but you have to climb up a mountain to get there. And we need us all to be like traveling together, um, on that path. It's not just one person can't make the decision. Yeah, it has to be a team effort.
Cassie Kellner [00:46:04]:
Yeah, I agree. Dr. Brandon Owen, I cannot thank you enough for joining me. I feel like we could go in.
Dr. Brandon Owen [00:46:13]:
So many other directions. I know, this could be like a 5-hour podcast.
Cassie Kellner [00:46:17]:
Oh my gosh, there's— get— listen, there's gonna be a part 2. There has to be a part 2. There's so many different directions that we can take this that I'm like totally geeking out in my brain right now because we are so aligned. I love what you've created. I love why you've created it. And this industry, it's time. It is. There is— it's time to do so much. It's 2026. I know. It's, it's really wild to watch. But this has been a really, really cool, fun conversation for me.
Dr. Brandon Owen [00:46:53]:
So thank you so much for joining me. Absolutely. Thanks so much for your time as well. Thanks for having me on the podcast.
Cassie Kellner [00:47:02]:
Oh gosh, absolutely. Thank you for joining me on The Bloom Effect, where we keep it real, keep it growing, and always keep it team first. If today's episode sparked something for you, an idea, a shift, or just a reminder that you're not alone, take a second and share it with your team or a fellow ortho leader. Be sure to subscribe so you never miss a convo. And if you're loving the show, leave a review. It helps more practices find us and join the movement. And if you're ready to bring this kind of energy into your practice, visit DiscoverEverbloom.com to learn more about working together. Until next time, keep leading with heart, keep building with intention, and keep Blooming right where you're planted.
