Recently we had the honor of being interviewed as a part of the Mastery Company’s audio series by Dr. Marc Cooper, a periodontist, dental practice management consultant, TED Fellows Program coach, and more. His company helps dental practices become highly successful, managed-group practices and he wanted to know how The Purple Guys aid in achieving that same goal.
The Purple Guys has become an indispensable partner to so many of our clients and we explained how we approach cloud services for dental practices with ease and expertise. Our discussion ranged from transitioning to the cloud with minimal disruption to current processes, to the security and reliability you’ll find when managing a group practice through the cloud.
Interview Transcript: Dr. Marc Cooper Speaks with The Purple Guys
Dr. Marc Cooper: Welcome to the audio series with the Mastery Company. Today we have Chris Miner and Jason Post of The Purple Guys. We had a conversation last week about what they do and what they provide in the dental space and it’s something I think is the future for dentistry. So I invited them here so you could have an opportunity to understand their business, and also understand their commitment, passion, and mission in dentistry.
Jason: Thanks for having us. I’m Jason Post, and I’m looking forward to sharing with you our exciting technology and what we do in the dental space.
Chris: I’m Chris Miner. I help guide practices to gain from the benefits and advantages that are possible with The Complete Cloud™ solution.
Dr. Marc Cooper: What is The Purple Guys and how would you define yourself as a company? What’s your mission?
Jason: The Purple Guys is a dental-focused complete cloud company aimed at improving the practice efficiency and network performance reliability. We provide rapid-scale solutions to meet the goals of our clients on our product.
Dr. Marc Cooper: How do you help dental practices?
Chris: We have clients that want to expand to 20 or 25 or more individual computers in a practice, or they want to expand to multiple locations. They face many technical challenges and The Purple Guys has devised The Complete Cloud™ solution to simplify these multi-location challenges. We give our clients the ability to have their finger on the pulse of everything that’s going on in each of their locations from a performance and technology standpoint.
Dr. Marc Cooper: Most of the practices vary in terms of the platforms that they use. How does The Complete Cloud™ work for someone with Dentrix or Eaglesoft or SoftDent or Open Dental or whatever they are utilizing?
Chris: There are different performance capabilities with different product platforms. As a consulting team we can advise these practice groups about the performance of different software, imaging, and peripheral packages that they may be using or looking to use. We’ve evaluated and really exhausted all the research on the majority of the practice management software and imaging packages out there and have truly become experts who can guide our clients and implement the basics of what they have to help them achieve their goals.
Dr. Marc Cooper: Tell me a little bit about how that works?
Jason: We evaluate all the peripherals and technology that our clients are utilizing and the provide a seamless transition to The Complete Cloud™ with little to no changes to their current environment. This gives them the advantages that technology can provide in the cloud. They’ll have their finger on the pulse of their operations and be in a position where technology is now embraced and utilized in a much more enhanced way without making any changes to their traditional world that they’re used to operating in.
Dr. Marc Cooper: So if you were to differentiate yourself from other technology companies what would you say?
Jason: We take a unique approach to the industry and recognize that all technology is not a one-size-fits-all for all of our clients. And we understand the IT challenges they face as they leverage technology for their business, and that those have become the accepted normal. What The Purple Guys does is take a fresh look at providing a solid foundation for our clients — to provide them a pathway to streamline their operations and to really, truly support the vision of their businesses by reducing the IT complexities and costs to further drive their success and the goals of their business.
Dr. Marc Cooper: What are the benefits of working with The Purple Guys?
Chris: Some of the great benefits of working with MBS is that we understand the background and challenges that come with imaging technology, their communication challenges, their hardware challenges, and we find that this is very rare in our industry.
It’s at the point where some offices, some practices, are becoming complacent or just accept the fact that there are going to be IT challenges. We go to the next step and reduce their hardware. We go to the next step and reduce the costs and needs of their existing hardware and we improve the quality of their performance across the board by providing them with a monthly planned budget so they no longer need to endure surprising capital expenses.
Many times they’ll run into a situation where, let’s say, they have to do a software update. But in order to do the software update, in order to the get performance from that software, they find out that their existing hardware may not be compatible and thereby are forced to spend tens of thousands of dollars to upgrade that hardware for the sake of compatibility.
We pride ourselves on being SQL experts, experts with dental enterprise, experts with a lot of the popular practice management solutions and we understand the background and inner workings of compatibility with those software and imaging packages so we can better guide clients as to what hardware they need and what hardware they don’t need. And when they are using The Complete Cloud™ they don’t have to worry about compatibility because we keep them compatible. That’s a part of our package.
Dr Marc Cooper: How do you relate to the suppliers, the vendors that sell the hardware and software?
Chris: Actually they get many, many support phone calls, many troublesome support calls. We’ve found a great relationship when we reach out to those vendors and say that we’re working with a particular client. It relieves a lot of burden from those vendors when you’re working with the expert team from The Purple Guys. It also provides a lot of comfort and confidence for our clients knowing that we have the technical knowledge to speak the language with the vendors to provide the fastest solution.
Dr Marc Cooper: So one of the questions that is going to come up for the listeners is you know, what is this The Complete Cloud™ thing all about?
Chris: That’s a great question, and Jason, if you don’t mind, I’ll grab this and you can chime in as well.
What we’ve found is that there are different technologies out there, some companies out there with software clouds that profess you need to change your practice management software and change to a software cloud solution. When a practice changes to a software cloud that’s what’s called a partial cloud only. Only a segment of their business goes into a performance cloud situation.
What we’ve done is we’ve revamped the infrastructure world and we’ve created The Complete Cloud™ solution so that their entire business can go into the cloud and so that the compatibility issues are no longer challenges and overall workflow and management structure is improved.
When a client goes into a software cloud situation, many times they still have to retain servers, they have to retain someone to manage activities locally. When they go to The Complete Cloud™, this is in the background. Everything gets simplified and the majority of activities can be managed through the The Purple Guys team. Many times with these larger group practices they have their own IT guy and we work and collaborate with that IT guy and we reduce the burden from that IT person and make their lives easier.
Dr. Marc Cooper: What about backup? What about recovery? What about security?
Jason: So MBS provides a rock-solid environment and we recognize that when a practice moves to The Complete Cloud™, The Purple Guys must take very seriously the hosting of that data, security aspect, and the protection of our client’s information.
We realize that to achieve success in business, that data must be accessible, reliable, and available in the time of the need. We provide military-grade encryption all across the board — in transit, at rest, and in all of our facilities. We take pride in not just putting our clients’ data in one facility, but providing real time backup and accessibility across all data centers to ensure that we provide rock-solid protection of that information.
Dr. Marc Cooper: One of the concerns of the clients is that they all have some level of legacy system and they do not want to change that much. Particularly their hardware. So could you talk a bit about their hardware? You’ve mentioned it before, but I think it’s worth mentioning again.
Chris: Sure. The great thing is when clients take on a relationship with The Purple Guys we discuss their goals. And if one of their goals is not to disrupt their practice, one of our marketing phrases is “they can change little to nothing and receive great benefit.”
We work with groups that look at acquiring existing dental practices to add to their group practice and in many circumstances when they acquire that practice some of the hardware tends to be older. In that situation, they would have to spend significant amounts of money and invest in getting new hardware. If they’re an The Purple Guys client and they’re utilizing The Complete Cloud™, we can actually configure their infrastructure to actually allow The Complete Cloud™ to work with the majority of those hardware situations.
Dr. Marc Cooper: That’s going to be a relief for many of these guys. Many of my clients are growing through acquisition. So when it comes to denovo and you’re setting up another practice, is there certain recommendations you have for these folks to be able to take greater advantage of your product?
Chris: We would absolutely walk them through those types of situations. Especially where hardware requirements are concerned. In most situations, in a good dental performance practice, most practices are looking at about $2,300 per work station.
If the practice is an MBS client using The Complete Cloud™, we’re actually recommending specific technology that is more in the $700-$900 range, as far as the components and cloud appliances that they could utilize in place of robust work stations. This takes up less space, has better performance, better capabilities, and as you can tell from discussion of pricing, is about a 40-50% reduction in overall costs.
Dr. Marc Cooper: In terms of reports and reporting what is The Purple Guys’s relationship in that domain?
Chris: Well, as far as the business management or practice management reporting type structures, we have relationships with consultants that can help with those types of software situations. We standardly don’t do any of the performance or reporting activities.
Dr. Marc Cooper: That answers the question. These guys need to learn how to read reports, get the right reports and so that’s available, but sometimes they want to query the database about population or about psychographics and demographics or about different things, and some of these databases are not relational, so how does that work with you guys? Are you able to do something in there to give them access?
Jason: So what we find in the industry with our clients and having the finger on the pulse of the analytical data, whatever those query reports may be, the foundation that MBS has been able to deliver to those clients is in multi locations where corporate or doctors may need to pull those reports.
Having our technology as the foundation allows the ability to query, access, analyze, and integrate query programs and other software to interact with their practice management. Traditionally, those reports would be run from an office manager or faxed into a corporate headquarters. Or a meeting would take place, going through various reports from various locations. With The Complete Cloud™, you have a single environment that allows them all to cross-collaborate on the information and look at it in real time with those programs, whether they be from the dental management companies, directly from the practice management, or from a third party integrated into that database.
We allow them the ability to grab those queries and then go through the information to review it on a much higher level. And by putting The Complete Cloud™ in place, they have the ability to do it in real time.
Dr. Marc Cooper: That answer is exactly what I wanted to hear. First of all, thank you for your time. I know that it’s valuable, Chris and Jason. What would you like people who are listening to this audio to know about your company and about what you’re up to over the next five years.
Chris: Thank you for that question. We are excited. We’ve been very, very fortunate that we’ve been growing by word of mouth, so we definitely appreciate you spreading the word about The Purple Guys. We pride ourselves on quality and performance and that’s how we’ve built our reputation. We are open to having consulting conversations with your clients and doing an initial discovery. They will find that a lot of the challenges they face we have solutions for and we can provide solutions to help them actually achieve their dreams and goals.
Dr. Marc Cooper: Alright you guys, I appreciate your time and thank you very much for being on the call.
Chris & Jason: Thank you for having us.
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