This episode’s specialty spotlight is Optometry! Optometrist Danny Clarke owns and operates a family eye care practice. Dr. Clarke joins us to share how he grew his practice when he started focusing on his employees’ growth. We discuss how private equity affects private optometry practices, navigating insurance as a provider, the retail side of optometry, and being proactive about compliance.
Listen to the full episode using the player below, or by visiting one of the links below. Below is the episode’s transcript which has been edited for readability. If you have any questions or would like to learn more, email us at info@byrdadatto.com.
Transcript
Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto. Legal issues simplified through real client stories and real world experiences. Creating simplicity in 3, 2, 1.
Brad: Welcome back to another episode of Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto. I’m your host, Brad Adatto with my cohost Michael Byrd.
Michael: Thanks Brad. As a business and healthcare law firm, we represent clients in multiple sectors and multiple specialties, especially healthcare. This season, our theme is specialty spotlight; where each episode we will visit about some of the nuances that can be found from a business and healthcare perspective and the various practice specialties.
Brad: All right, Michael, it’s your turn. What’s on your mind? Well, when prepping for today’s guests, I started thinking about all the great lessons we’ve learned over the years about business leadership. We talked about past episodes, you know, we’ve mentioned Robin Pou our strategic [00:01:00] advisor. In fact, I think we just had him referenced him a few times ago, we’ve had him on as a guest in season two.
Michael: I just, I get so much energy and love learning from teachings from lots of people ranging from Robin to the more known people like Brene Brown and Simon Sinek.
Brad: Yeah, and don’t forget we’ve had other books that we’ve read that you and I liked. One I think by Patrick Lencioni; He’s written a bunch of books that you and I have read over the years. One of our favorite books of all times, by one of our past podcast guests’, Stephen Harvill wrote a book called 21 Secrets of Million Dollar Sellers, and you and I have been and continue to be obsessed over that book, in so many different ways.
Michael: So fantastic. This is especially is for anyone who really wants to hone in on sales stuff. What it did for us; it affirmed stuff that resonated and what has been working for us. The real reason I started thinking about all this when [00:02:00] thinking about our guest today was the famous commencement speech given by Admiral McCraven at the University of Texas several years ago.
Brad: Yes! The make your bed speech.
Michael: Yes, you got it. I mean, as you know, my wife, Stephanie, and I actually use this on our kids. Um, I’m sure that they have fond memories of that. For those that haven’t heard of it, this man is a Navy seal giving a commencement, talking about changing the world. He gave 10 basic life lessons based upon experiences learned as a Navy seal; and each of these he pointed out would enable you to change the world.
Brad: Yeah, hopefully we can find a link to it. We’ll drop it in the notes, so that the audience who hasn’t seen it can definitely go listen to it. But you know, his first point, and that’s why we said the make the bed speech was, if you want to change the world, you got to start off each day by making your bed. His point is if you don’t do the simple things, right… Imagine how the hard things will [00:03:00] go. And, bonus prize everyone, you accomplished something because you made your bed.
Michael: Yep! One of my favorites, I love that one is a lesson on having a bad day and perseverance. He said, “If you want to change the world, get over being a sugar cookie and keep moving forward.” What was really powerful was the imagery of what the world is a sugar cookie in context to a Navy seal. It was some exercise where the trainees are putt in an environment where they are wet, and then having to roll around in the sand. The point of the exercise is for the trainee to learn how to kind of push through, despite being covered in sand and survive the rest of the exercises. So it’s a really great lesson on perseverance.
Brad: Yeah. Now that we’re talking about that, it makes me want to go back and watch it again.
Michael: Yeah, oh for sure. I actually did go [00:04:00] back and start watching it whenever I started thinking about getting ready for the show today.
Brad: So I’m curious Michael, What does all this talk have to do with today’s guest?
Michael: Why did I think about it?
Brad: Yeah.
Michael: So, the easy one is that we both went to UT. That was our common connection when we first started talking less than a year ago. We have mutual friends dating back to those days; and I know that our guests has a passion for workplace culture.
Michael: I think these two common passions, and the Admiral McRaven speech kind of immediately popped to mind when I was thinking about it. I’d be willing to bet that our guests is heard Admiral McRaven speech. I think we’ve got to find out.
Brad: Well, first off let’s introduce who is our guest!
Michael: Yes. Oh, you don’t want it to stay mystery the whole time?
Brad: No.
Michael: Okay, so our guest today is Dr. Danny Clarke. He is a graduate of the University of [00:05:00] Houston- College of Optometry, did his undergrad at UT Austin “Hook’em!” He is an owner at Clarke Eyecare Center in Wichita Falls, and practices with his wife, Dr. Elizabeth Clarke. He’s also a licensed professional coach through the Great Game of Business, has a passion for helping the culture of practices and with business systems; and not only that, his kids Caroline and Drew, both attend UT Austin*. We also just learned before the show, that his daughter just graduated a few weeks ago.
Brad: That’s awesome.
Michael: Welcome Danny.
Dr. Clarke: Thanks guys! Appreciate you having me.
Brad: Yeah. So we’re going to put you on the spot right away! Have you heard Admiral McRaven commencement speech?
Dr. Clarke: I have heard it, right when it came out. I listened to it. Watched it. Then literally the other day I was watching some Simon Sinek videos. We have a team event this afternoon, and McRaven was doing his Longhorns down the side of the screen. I didn’t click on it yesterday [00:06:00] or the day before when I saw it, but I wish I would have now; but I did watch it originally.
Brad: Awesome. Well you know, Michael, as he was introducing you, started talking about that you had this professional coaching side. Why don’t you kind of give our audience some background on that?
Dr. Clarke: Yeah. So you know, going back just to give you some background, my dad’s an optometrist. So, I grew up in the business and he started our practice in 1973. So as a kid, I would always work in the business. We would talk about when I was 16 years old, and we’d stay up till midnight talking about issues at the practice. We would go around and teach other practices, and (I’ll get to that kind of what we do with other optometry practices); but I always say, “What do you think we were talking about? What do you think we were griping about till midnight?” And every single time we’ve talked to groups, staff is the first word that comes out. So, the first day I walk in the business, my wife is an optometrist as well; we had eight staff members. Dad turns to me and said, “He’s in charge,” and this was 1995. So, I started running the business and you [00:07:00] can imagine what happened…. It didn’t go perfect from the start. It was like, you know, I was trying to find the right people to get on the bus and the wrong people and get them off the bus. I’d hire and fire. I tended to be fast to hire and slow to fire. I started figuring out and thinking, you know, I don’t really like employing people; and my mind set changed and I thought I’m going to be a developer of people. I really want to figure out how I can make a difference in their lives personally and professionally, whether they’re in our business for one day or 25 years. So with that methodology, we really started building a good culture in our business. So in 2010, I heard about a ‘Great Game of Business’. It’s an open book management philosophy. It came from a guy named Jack Stack. It was actually a failing subdivision of International Harvester, it was ‘Oh wow!” for sale for $8.9 million. He and some managers got a hundred thousand dollars together; went to the first bank and said, “I have a hundred thousand.” “I want to buy this failing subdivision break 8.9 million.” They said, “You’re crazy! Where’s your [00:08:00] P and L?” I don’t know what a P and L is, went to the next bank. “Where’s your balance sheet? “He went to 53 banks, got an 18% loan in 1983. Through the methodology of ‘engaging your team’ and they had to figure out their critical number was how do we pay off this bill? So they started playing mountain climber games, and playing games within the business to make it more fun for the team members. They paid their loan off in seven years. Then story goes on; they created a consulting business, wrote books and all this. (It was mainly in the manufacturing industry) so we implemented open-book management through ‘great game’ in 2010; and the first year we implemented, we went up 1% in revenues and 47% in profitability.
Michael: Oh wow.
Dr. Clarke: So we were hooked at that point, you know? Then I kid around and say, the reason how do you get to 47% increase? Well, it’s because you’re bad from the start, (Brad laughs) you know, like zero. So anyway, then about two years later, we started working with the Great Game people to teach some of our friends [00:09:00] in Optometry. Then my partner, her name is Jolie Anderson. She was the manager at the time. Now, she’s the COO of Clarke Eyecare. She partners with me in our consulting business. So for the last 10 years, we’ve been working with optometry teams around the U.S. and in Canada, about 350 practices. We have extended that into a leadership development program, because we’ve found that there’s people that really try to implement a methodology like this; where you try and engage your people to think, act, and feel like owners, but there’s a base level foundational elements that are missing. They are giving people the opportunity to develop as leaders and putting systems in place for leadership development. We have a monthly program that we do. Our current clients, proud to say, five or six of them; most of them are signed on for another year. We work with them twice a month. We go to their business, they come to ours, and I’m just real passionate about developing people within the business.
Michael: That’s fascinating. I’m going to go back to 95’. Did your dad [00:10:00] stay on after you were appointed the leader?
Dr. Clarke: He did. He just retired actually; right when COVID hit, he retired. He was about 75 at the time COVID hit. He was going retire six months later, but he did stay on so it was my dad, my wife and I. Lucky for us, my wife was like, “I want to see patients, but I don’t want to do the business.” So, you know, we always talk about this three headed monster kind of leader, you know? It worked out really well, because they both stepped back and just let me kind of take the lead on that. It didn’t go perfect of course, he was there for gosh, 20 years. 25 years later.
Michael: That’s amazing. Did you have a hard time, or did the staff have a hard time, switching to you as the boss, so to speak when your dad was still there and they’d been reporting to him?
Dr. Clarke: You know, maybe a little bit back then. Now I’m the old guy in the business; but back then I was the young guy and there were people that were my dad’s age. They were 20 to 25 years older than me. It was probably harder on me than [00:11:00] them; but really- you have to have somebody who’s 25 years older, that are going to say, “Hey, wait a minute. You’re acting like a seventh grader.” “Let’s get this together.” They really accepted it pretty well. I would say in our industry, the problem we have in our industry is that… Have you guys ever read the book, E-Myth by Michael Gerber?
Dr. Clarke: Obviously you have, it’s an amazing book.
Brad: No, we are laughing because someone just recommended that to us on Wednesday, and we had not heard of it.
Dr. Clarke: This was 20, 25 years ago in basically in our business. We’re the technicians: so we’re doing the job, then we’re the manager, and we’re the owner. So we were trying to do all these hats. That was the classic way my dad ran his business. He ran it like everybody else did. I saw that early on; and I was like, I do not want this business to be dependent on me. How can I create an organization that’s not dependent on me? I’m very proud to say now, that I’m only in the business one day a week. It runs. The team is 35 team members now. We’ve doubled the business since 2010; [00:12:00] but best part is our staff is really excited about developing other people within the organization. So we’ve pushed down that philosophy into the business. We kind of like to talk about how we’re really a people development factory. We just happen to check us, rather than being, you know, focused on “What do you do?” Well, we focused on eye exams, ‘No we’re focused on people.’
Michael: That’s really cool! So introduce that context; the technical side of what you’ll happen to do. I would love to just hear a little bit about the specialty of optometry and I’m sure we’re going to bounce back. We get like a drawn like a magnet back to this business leadership people discussion. I’m sure we’ll go back there, but love to hear a little bit about just your specialty.
Dr. Clarke: So optometry is a really interesting profession. Most people, these days know what an optometrist is and they kind of go, okay, yeah, it’s someone who check your eyes. But going back years and years ago, Ben Franklin [00:13:00] invented bifocals. Optometrists were really kind of within a jewelry store basically, and just sold glasses. Our professions have changed a lot. In 1973, when my dad graduated school. He wasn’t even allowed to put eye drops in the eyes to check the health of the eyes. Our Business has changed a lot; now we have all these medicines we’re prescribing. We don’t do surgery. That’s a difference with us, but there’s a lot of interesting things with our profession. As far as we’re about most optometry practices are about: 50% medical and 50% retail. If you think about we’re doing routine eye exams, we’re checking for glaucoma macular degeneration, diabetic retinopathy, dry eyes, cataracts, and then also we have glasses and contact sales. So it makes it really nice when we think about recession and you say retail is going to be an issue, or medical is going to be an issue, we sit right in the middle of both. It’s very unique profession for that. It’s really afforded me a lot of opportunities. If you think about it [00:14:00] I really don’t have any formal business training, but I’ve always kind of migrated toward the business side of things. Most optometrists aren’t formally trained in business they just show up. They’re an entrepreneur. I think I talked to you about this before Michael, but you know with my dad, I did an entrepreneurial venture recently that was like a real entrepreneur venture; but in optometry. I basically had my dad’s business and I’m just tweaking it as I go along and thinking I’m an entrepreneur. We like to say that most optometrists tend to own a job. They say they own a business, but they really own a job; and that practice dictates their lives. That’s where going back, we’ve utilized people to really make a difference in their lives; and then it helps us live a better life. I remember that quote from Zig Ziglar when he said, “The way you get, what you want out of life is to help more people get what they want out of life.” And as you guys said, you were right. I’m talking about the technical side of optometry and going right back to the people.
Brad: Just out of curiosity, these different groups that you consult with, what is the average size of like an optometry practice as [00:15:00] far as like the number of optometrists that might be working there? Is it mostly mom and pops like you guys, where it’s a one or two people and that’s it?
Dr. Clarke: Yeah.
Brad: Is that what you typically say?
Dr. Clarke: So we have five doctors in our practice. My wife and I are both part-time. We have another part-time person and a couple of full-time people. I talked to one of our clients the other day, they have a solo practitioner with four staff members. We work with the practice that has nine locations and about a hundred staff; or 60-80 staff members. So really and truly though if you think about optometry, there’s a lot of vertical integration within the industry. You know from payers, some insurance folks have gotten involved in that and from the vendors are also doing that. So, I’m pretty passionate as well about private practice. So Brad, when you asked that about private practice, going back, solo practitioners are very common. What we’re finding is and what I’m really looking at these days, is how do we keep the practice of private practice, optometry sustainable for the [00:16:00] future? One of those things I’m seeing is that the practices that are mom and pops is that they have one practitioner, it’s very hard to run that business. Now companies like private equity firms are coming in and buying up optometry practices for the quick sell. It doesn’t help culture, but when it’s so hard for you to run that business, then you go, ‘I’m going to just take those dollars and run.’
Brad: Yeah. That’s what you actually went to where my brain was. Lots of the places that you see are owned by something or someone else, and they’re working for someone else. So I was curious, since you had the consulting side, what you were seeing also. So as far as going back to the page, going back to the practice side of it, what are some of the biggest patient challenges you typically see in your specialty?
Dr. Clarke: I think insurance probably is the number one thing. When I got out of school 27 years ago, now we would laugh because in the U S it was pretty much just cash based business. In Canada, we were inundated with insurance. You would not want to go to Canada to practice [00:17:00] optometry if you could. Now it’s completely flipped. Most practices we work with are 80 to 90% managed care. We have medical providers that provide Blue Cross, United Healthcare, and all the ones you can think of. There’s a lot of vision plans and it tends to be that the medical plans are what people pay for. Then they just tack on a cheap vison plan. There’s the discussions with pre-authorization; so we have somebody who full-time and they just call for pre-authorization for insurance. In the exam room, we’ve got so many clicks due to insurance issues so we have scribes that dictate, take down all the notes and everything, because we want to have a good connection with our patients. So in Canada now they got cut out of national health care 10 or 15 years ago, and it’s like 99% cash base now. So, the Canadian optometrists are loving it. They’re laughing now at the U S doctors; but I would say that’s probably the number one thing is the patient challenge is really the lack of understanding and the disconnect between ‘I have this plan that covers everything’ but really they have [00:18:00] a discount plan.
Brad: Yeah.
Dr. Clarke: Where we live, we did a study of one of our vision plans about two years ago. We found that out of all the dollars we collected over the year from this insurance plan, 73% came out of the patient pocket. So you think it’s such a discount for the patient, but it’s actually not that good of a deal. So that’s probably is a lot of the issues and challenges with patients now.
Michael: You mentioned this, and it was one of the things that popped to mind; what are the staffing requirements just to deal with insurance?
Dr. Clarke: Great question! We bought a location in January, actually, a satellite practice about 15 to 20 miles away and we have 35 staff members. I would argue if we had no insurance, we would probably go to half of that.
Michael: Wow.
Dr. Clarke: So they’re not all directly related to filing insurance, but if you think of all the nuances and all the extra clicks frankly you think about meaningful use and HIPAA and all the other compliance issues there too. There’s so many things involved. So, that’s a guess, but I would say [00:19:00] maybe half.
Brad: Do you know in other markets or other specialties, excuse me that allow, you if I decide to go out of network, ‘I’m going to go out and network’ but if patient wants to come here, great; Is that still allowed? Is that something that you’re seeing? Are providers are trying to go Canadian basically, and say, I don’t accept it anymore.
Dr. Clarke: Yes, it’s allowed for sure. I’ll tell you a story is that about four years ago, we did a startup in the Dallas area and we did vision and hearing together, and we took no vision plans or no medical plans. We wanted to test the model and make it very pure. Well, what’s really hard is when somebody has an insurance plan; we weren’t established by the way, but if you go to Clarke Eyecare, my main practice, we have somebody that says all the time when we get them, they say, “Oh, I’m glad I could come back to you because you’re on my plan now.” They could pay out of pocket and come to us. We have a cash price. They could go either out-of-network or pay cash. But the reality is we used to say, “Do your best.” You can do the best [00:20:00] customer service and they’ll come to you. The reality is people want to use that plan, even if it’s not worth that much to them, the perception is we believe.
Michael: Wow.
Dr. Clarke: Which is pretty frustrating. There are some people actually; I had an email from somebody just the other day, a friend of mine. They were like, “what do you think about dropping vision plans?” This is going around in our industry a lot. I think it really depends on what you want out of your business. I want my business to not be dependent on me, so we need patient volume. So I’ll take the vision plans and then convert them to other things that we do within our practice that are more cash based. And so to me, it’s a little bit of a loss leader, not complete loss, but kind of. If we took only vision plans and nothing else, you probably wouldn’t make any money. You probably couldn’t make it. You really have to, if you just took what the vision plans paid you is what I mean.
Brad: Right. Understood.
Dr. Clarke: So they can come in and buy extra….
Michael: That’s amazing. So, I’m going to transition. And what I love about your perspective is as a coach, you’re not just seeing Clarke eye care pain points, [00:21:00] you’re seeing the industry’s pain points. You could probably answer the next question with insurance as well, but what are other than insurance, some of the biggest business challenges in optometry?
Dr. Clarke: Yeah. So as far as business challenges going, I mean, I’ll go back to what I said from the start is the staffing issue. You guys know staffing has gone. If you think about it, this has been since I’ve been 16 years old with my dad working on his business, it was about staff. You come to today, as you guys know post COVID, it’s even more about staff. So we traveled around the country and we hear all the time. Well in my area, I can’t find good people. What we find is that everybody’s the same. It doesn’t matter. If you’re in a big city or small town, businesses are not that different. We really think it’s about creating the sticky factor within your organization and really about caring more-not that people don’t care about those people, but depending systems in place to help develop them. With the business challenges, I would say staffing number one, and in our profession [00:22:00] right now one of the biggest business challenges is insurance. You’re inundated with all these extra things we have to do. We’re not really set up to have a bunch of managers in the business. We created with the 35 employees we have a director level for managers within the business Well, most optometrists like Brad said earlier are smaller and they have the owner and maybe a manager. Well, they’re all in patient care all the time. And it’s hard to work on your business when you’re in the business. That’s how our business is setup. Hence, you get the private equity firms that come in and say, ‘I’ll give you six to eight times, EBITDA on your profit, on your EBITDA right now, give it all to you up front.’ We’ll take care of everything and you can walk away. Well, what’s happening is then they’re taking over. It becomes corporate America. Teams don’t like it; it messes up the culture and they’re going to be out of this and have somebody else in three to five years. So that’s the biggest challenge in our business right now. It is hard and [00:23:00] there’s this enticement of cash. We see a risk for private practices remaining long-term because of this.
Brad: Hmm. It goes back to as you said it working for the corporate side versus the medical side, which is a whole another challenge on its face. That kind of leads me into the last question that I was thinking of for this; was in your specialty. You kind of lead a little bit to this, HIPAA; but what’s the biggest healthcare compliance challenge that you guys have in your specialty?
Dr. Clarke: Yeah. When you get to healthcare compliance, I mean, and you guys know this better than anybody, but with HIPAA to meaningful use for Medicare. And then we get into those terms, like MACRA and MIPS, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh,” it makes my head go. You know, all these things and we tend to be, we want to do things right. There are practices that go, ‘I’m not doing meaningful use.’ And they haven’t even gone to electronic medical records and whatever; but we try to do everything the best we can and keep it on the up and up as we can. So about five years ago, [00:24:00] I ended up, you know, kind of as an insurance policy, I told a group of friends meeting up on a Sunday “Hey, there’s this Idea I have, and I really want to hire a compliance officer.” Because I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to do it. You can outsource it to some people, but still even your liaison in the office, who’s working with the compliance company because there’s all these compliance issues. It’s like, how do we manage that? Literally, my second patient on Monday came in and I said, “What do you do?” She said, I’m a compliance officer. I subscribed to this philosophy of, “Dream of what you want, put it out there in the world. Then the world conspires to make it happen” kind of Emerson quote.
Dr. Clarke: Right! So it was the craziest thing. I didn’t offer her the job. I just said, can you help us? Well, three days later, she came back to buy glasses and said, I want to give you my application. She’s been there now for five years. My point to others is if you have a compliance issue and you’re not the one who’s going to be the best at that, figure out a way to let somebody help you. So she is there 30 hours a week. What’s nice about it is instead of us being reactive to the compliance [00:25:00] issues, because as you guys know something else is going to come up; it’s not like the government or somebody or insurance companies are going to say, “okay it’s set” no, something else is going to come up. So she can be proactive and watch videos and get in chat rooms and figure out kind of what’s the next thing and keep an eye on that for us. I took it as kind of just an insurance policy.
Brad: And yet you brought it back to people again.
Dr. Clarke: So it’s not always about people, you know, Brad. It’s funny you say that about people, but I’m telling you what I figured out in the past six months to a year is I always felt like I want to develop people; but what really is, is if we can develop people into developing people, (brad interjects) that’s when it really becomes magical. I can say I want to develop people; but when I’ve got an organization of people that want to develop the next person, that’s when it makes a big difference. We can step back from our business and just watch it grow and watch these people grow. I really do think it is all about the people.
Brad: It’s not as the force multiplier. Yeah, love it. I feel like we need to read this book the E-Myth. So Danny it is so funny, cause we literally just heard [00:26:00] this comment from someone else and neither one of us had heard it and we actually just bought it on Amazon yesterday.
Dr. Clarke: I’ve got it right here. It’s impactful I’m telling you.
Michael: Awesome. Well, we have reached our time. It went by fast. This was really interesting. We are grateful Danny for you to join, and grateful for our relationship with you. What we’ll do next is go into a commercial; and on the other side, we will give a little legal insights to wrap up the conversation today. Thank you.
Dr. Clarke: Thanks guys. Appreciate you having me.
Michael: Absolutely!
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Brad: Welcome back to Legal 123s with ByrdAdatto. I’m your host Brad Adatto and I’m still here with my cohost Michael Byrd. Now Michael this season, you know, we’ve been really working on the Specialty Spotlight. Well, I mean, Dr. Danny Clarke came on and what an amazing, we all got pulled into so many different stories he had about him. Obviously running his own practice, but then also based on working in consulting with other practices. At some point we did talk, started talking about the creep of private equity in this specialty. Optometry is seeing like a lot of areas obviously. We have had Private equity on and our past season, talked to them about what’s going on; but I think for our audience, we want to hit that pause button. I know we’ve talked about corporate practice of medicine on several other episodes, but I think they should understand [00:28:00] just like a lot of areas. There is such a thing as corporate practice of optometry.
Michael: Yeah, and it’s great with us being a Specialty Spotlight to understand from a legal perspective that if you have a license to do something, anything- if you’re a licensed to be a lawyer in a state, you have rules that go into what that can look like; and who can own a business practices, in that particular profession. And so you always have to check that when you hear about non-business people, in a particular profession coming in. Usually we say it in terms of private equity that it it’s workable; and the corporate practice of optometry in Texas, for example, is really strict. It’s actually more strict than the corporate practice of medicine or the corporate practice of dentistry. Essentially, just to kind of reset what is a [00:29:00] corporate practice doctrine? It’s this idea that says, if you’re a providing these types of licensed professional services, then only people that are so licensed can own those businesses. Optometry it’s no different except they also add in Texas, some special, add-ons: like a limitation on the number of locations that you can own. So even though you’re an optometrist, you are limited to three locations. And when you think about private equity coming in, you have to navigate that because they want to scale, right?
Brad: Yep.
Michael: The other aspect of it is in optometry, they really talk about control. So it’s not just ownership, its control of the practice. And so [00:30:00] what do I mean by that? Well, it’s one thing to say, “okay, you optometrist are going to continue to own it, but I’m going to do a management services agreement for my company and I’m going to control operate your practice.” Well, it’s real easy in optometry to overstep the line and be in violation even though you own no part of the optometry practice.
Brad: Yeah. And that reminds me a lot of back in the day with a dental support organizations, where there are a lot of restrictions about what they could and could not do over a dental practice. So I think for the audience just perspectives, just understand of course, every state’s going to be different on that. The point is just because you’ve flipped it, and done it over and over in one type of specialty, does not mean it’s going to follow that same suit.
Brad: Alright, Michael, next Wednesday’s show we will have a specialty spotlight on Dermatology with Dr. Paul Jarrod Frank!
Brad: Thanks again for joining us today. And remember, if you liked this episode, please subscribe. Make sure to give us a five star rating and share with your friends.
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Outro: ByrdAdatto is providing this podcast as a public service. This podcast is for educational purposes. Only this podcast does not constitute legal advice, nor does it establish an attorney, client relationship. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by ByrdAdatto the views expressed by guests are their own and their appearance on the program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Please consult with an attorney on your legal issues.
