Episode Transcript

Auto-generated transcript: You Ask, We Answer

You are listening to the dental practice owner's podcast. Brought to you by Prosperident. From our unique perspective as dentistry's and bezel-lit experts, Prosperident's team can bring you the information that is important to practice owners. The dental practice owner's podcast brings you strategies, tools and tips that you can use, and dentistry's thought leaders as guests.

So sit back, relax, and listen to Prosperident's Amber Weber. Wendy Askins and David Harris, talk about the issues that matter to you.

Join us on a regular basis for back-lives, and we wanted to have a special edition of our Prosperident Power Hour. You ask, we answer. So we wanted everybody who's attended, and people on the dental world to submit their questions to us, so that we could take the time to go over some important facts with you, our special audience. Back to you, Dave.

I wanted to start tonight by just reintroducing us, because it's been a while since we told you about who we are, and we just kind of assume sometimes that everybody knows. I'm David Harris, I'm the CEO of Prosperident. I've been investigating dental and bezel-lit now for 31 years, and a couple of weeks. I'm a CPA, but please don't hold that against me. I'm also a certified fraud examiner,

and what's called certified in financial forensics. My two cohabosts, who I think of privately as the Texas Pernados, because they both live in Texas, I should introduce, and I'll start with Amber Weber. Amber spent years as a dental hygienist, and then moved in office management, and then consulting, and then I has been with us since 2018. We have three levels of examiner here,

which are called fraud examiner, senior fraud examiner, and supervising examiner. So Amber was promoted, actually, we did it here on one of these episodes to senior examiner. She's our newest senior, but has a whole lot of background. Anyway, she's a terrific gal. The other thing I'll mention is that this whole webinar series

was Amber's idea, and she came to me with it, and said, well, you know, people have all this downtime, and I've been arguing about it. My response was basically, you know, I don't know if anybody's interested in that. Anyway, we did it anyway. We've had over 3,500 people to our webinars, and it was absolutely Amber's branch up.

So that's co-host number one. Co-host number two is Wendy Askins. Wendy is one of our longest serving investment investigators. She started with us, actually, I ended up looking up today in 2012. So eight plus years for Wendy. Wendy is one of three people who hold the title here of supervising examiner. So there are most senior examiners and tackle some of the really ugly files.

Wendy also heads our orthodonic investigation department, and she has a very deep background in orthodonic and really, you know, understands that business like nobody. Tonight, we get to have a little surprise for Wendy, because we're going to present her with something tonight. One of the things that we recognize that prosperity is milestones for when people have uncovered a certain amount of investment. And it's my great honor tonight to present Wendy with her $2 million pin.

It's a gold pin with the prosperity. But do you want to reach through the screening, grab it? Yeah, you can. Here's the actual pin in how it walks. I was worried Wendy that if I opened the box, people would think I was going to propose to you or something. And I have a wife and she has a husband. So let's just take that off the table now.

But anyway, it's a tremendous honor to recognize Wendy's achievement. And I'm covering the $2 million of investment. And what I have to tell the audience, Wendy, that they probably wouldn't know otherwise, is that the actual investment in those cases was much, much, much higher than that. And all we're counting is what Wendy counted in each case before she started. And when you're investigating a investment,

there's always a point where it just doesn't make sense to keep looking anymore. And that happens actually fairly early in most investigations. And we're going to talk about dental insurance coverage for this little while. And I think the audience will see exactly what I mean. But that's the tip of a much bigger iceberg. Anyway, congratulations Wendy. And it's truly an honor to be working with you. Thank you so much.

Okay, well, I'm going to ask, again, thank you so much Dave, that means so much to me. I'm going to try to complies myself. If you know me, the person you know I'm a cryer. So anyway, so today's webinar, you ask and we answer. Our webinar is going to be a little bit longer this evening, because we really want to spend time answering your questions and detail. Now, so if this is your first webinar,

you're not aware what we did was we send a charge out over social media and in the past webinar that we did last month, we're going to be asking, what would you like us to talk about more? What do you want to hear more about? And so lots of people send in questions and we picked the top 14 to the 15 questions. So we're going to be answering those for you today. And we're also going to be answering some live questions at the end. So if you think of anything during this session, please, don't hesitate to chat it out to us and we'll be able to answer that for you as well.

So like I said before, we get a lot of questions. As investment becomes more the topic of conversation. And honestly, as people are becoming more comfortable in talking about it, even our clients are becoming more comfortable in getting their testimonies or telling about their experience, as you saw with some of the individuals in the beginning before we started the webinar. What we're finding are people just have a whole lot of questions. And during this webinar, we're not able to answer all of them because we get barrage by questions. So we either end up missing them, getting a slight overview of the answer,

or we have to return the answer in an email. So this is a wonderful opportunity. that we're taking tonight. We're going to slow down and we're going to be detailed about the top 14 to 15 questions that were sent into us by your colleagues. Take it away Amber. All right. So our first question is a question that we get asked many times. Sometimes before we complete an investigation. Sometimes if we're not even completing an investigation and it is easy, I'm going to fire this employee anyway. I also think they might be embezzling. Do I need to wait until after profanity finishes? So we did a webinar on this that you can reference to, uh, called breaking

up as hard to do. But the simple answer is no. You do not have to have proof or catch someone red handed to terminate their appointment with you. There are some things you need to be aware of though that if you're in an outwell state that allows you to terminate an employee, you need to make sure you have reference and there's not legal ramifications such as unemployment, discrimination. But the main thing to remember here is terminating an employee should not make reference to possible on business. So in the past we discussed that this, that you need to have documentation and policies and procedures in place that gives you a good foundation for terminating that employee and gives you good reasoning