Scott Leune: This podcast is sponsored by dentalmarketing.com and they have agreed to give the listeners of this podcast a free competitive marketing analysis. This analysis is going to show you very clearly how your practice is doing compared to your competitors. It's going to give you the health of your SEO, it's going to give you a website grade, and you'll also see what your competitors are up to. This helps you know what ad strategy you should have today, how clean and effective is your marketing right now find out by getting this free and detailed analysis, text the word marketing to 4 8, 6, 5, 9, and you'll receive this competitive analysis from our sponsor dentalmarketing.com. So we're all in a pressure cooker right now. It's a tough time. We have on one hand the inability to find great people. We've got team members that are just bogged down in the muck of processing patients and claims and dealing with scheduling.

At the same time, our profit margins are shrinking and we've got this whole technological revolution happening and AI and we're struggling to understand how do we manage it all? Where do we swim? Left, right up, down, what's going on because we're almost going to break in today's podcast episode. I'm excited about this episode because we've got Jana making the president of Curve and Curve is on the forefront of incorporating automation and AI into solid smart practice management. So we're going to be talking about all of these topics on today's episode of the Dental CEO podcast. Alright, Jana, so thank you again for joining us and some of our listeners may not know of you or your company, so if you could let us know what is Curve and what is your role there?

Jana Macon: Yes, curve is practice management software all based in the cloud for any size dental practice.

Jana Macon: Lead the company as the president and Curve's been around for 15 years. We've been here about seven years of that and enjoyed a great amount of growth.

Scott Leune: And so I mean, curve was one of the earlier companies to kind of adopt the cloud-based strategy on practice management software, is that correct?

Jana Macon: That's right.

Scott Leune: So then you've seen a lot of trends of course over the years and you've seen a lot of smaller companies attempt things and come and go and all of us dentists of course, have struggled to have practice management software that had everything we needed that was cloud-based, that was up to date. I'm curious, AI is happening and a lot in dentistry. We talk a lot on the AI side about things like X-rays. How do you think AI is going to start impacting practice management software?

Jana Macon: Well, honestly, I think AI is going to impact everything. I think the main thing that we're going to see in dentistry, of course you have the clinical side, we're already seeing it with Pearl. Those kinds of technologies that are allowing doctors to get better acceptance on treatment, to see things, maybe they missed all of those kinds of things for sure. And we're partnered with Pearl integrated with Curve. But on the curve side, if we think about scheduling, we think about billing, we think about collections, patient communications, catching all those calls that are not getting answered. All of those areas should be impacted by ai and that's something that we're taking very seriously on our development roadmap. And in fact, we have a special innovation team that is just spinning through tons of hypothesis on how are we going to help our dentists the most and what's going to work, and then we're going to put our time and effort on that and really sit.

Scott Leune: Okay, so I'm going to ask you, I'm going to name a topic and I want you to say yes or no if AI is going to impact that pretty soon within the near future. So answering

Jana Macon: Phones, yes.

Scott Leune: Scheduling appointments.

Jana Macon: Yes.

Scott Leune: Resubmitting failed claims.

Jana Macon: Absolutely.

Scott Leune: Eligibility or insurance verification.

Jana Macon: Yes.

Scott Leune: Getting patients to pay.

Jana Macon: Yes.

Scott Leune: All of that is going to be impacted soon you think by AI

Jana Macon: And even clinical notes with ambient listening in the operatories.

Scott Leune: Yeah. If we paint a picture of the future when it comes to, for example, claims management, what might that look like if AI is involved and what might that look like? AI and curve?

Jana Macon: Yeah, great question. So I think that the thing to understand about AI is it is all based on data. You have to train the model to know what's happening for it to be useful to you. So that is one advantage that we feel that we have at Curve is that we have years and years of data. So for claims management and revenue cycle management, we are currently training our model on all of the nuances of claims and of errors, denials, all the things that can happen to slow down the payment of a claim. And we are building a piece that will go over top of any number of instances or one clinic, it doesn't matter, that will automatically move that claim along correcting everything. It can maybe on the front end making the user aware, Hey, you need this. Hey, you're missing this. When there's an attachment needed, we'll know it, we'll attach it. A lot of the things that today, even though we have the ability to do it, the user may not be knowledgeable enough to do it, therefore it's going to end up in a denied claim or just a messy front end process. We know that that affects claims as well. So that's where AI can clean that mess up and people won't have to have all of that knowledge.

Scott Leune: So what I'm hearing then is some of the struggles we have with claims is that there's a lot of work, it takes a lot of time and AI can do that for us eventually. Some of the problems we have is that the people may not be following the right processes and AI will correct that for us. AI it sounds like will know for example what x-rays to attach, what narratives may be pulled from the notes, how to position the claim so that it's not denied in the first place. All of that is going to be done in some sort of collaboration between AI and practice management software. Did I say that correctly? That's right. That is a new world for us because I think to all of the team members in a dental practice that are in the muck of phones and the muck of collections and the muck of insurance and AI can now kind of perform those tasks on their behalf. That's And that's going to completely change very quickly it sounds like how we run a practice.

Jana Macon: Well, and to that comment of quickly, I would say my prediction is it might be three years before it's super smooth and there's not a lot of little things that might pop up that you have to be a little bit patient with, but the winners are going to be the people that jump on in the beginning and work with the ai, help the AI learn, and they're going to get more and more and more and more benefits. So I've had people say, I tried this one of the phone answering technologies. It was a little clunky still patients were hanging up. Okay, sure that happens. So now that has to get improved. So now that's already six months later that's improved. So it is improving and learning at such a high rate. I would just say jump in for the ride so that you can get your arms around it and work it into how you run your business. And as it improves, it's just going to approve for you. But this is a lot as you just stated, it is a lot that this technology can do for you, but don't reject it because it's not perfect.

Scott Leune: So once we're through that kind of learning curve, I guess it might look something like this. A patient wants to schedule, they can schedule online or if they choose to call, they may speak to an AI agent and schedule the verification, an interest verification. Eligibility benefits will happen automatically with AI and input it into the software automatically. Patient will show up, x-rays will be analyzed by ai. We present finances, patient says yes, the payment process could be managed automatically or maybe even AI would assist with that. We do the work, the claim is created, the claim is sent, the claim is managed tracked, and even recent all by ai, the payment comes in, the payment is processed all automatically or through ai. Did I say that correctly?

Jana Macon: And that's what in software we call the dream sequence or the happy path. Yes. If everything went perfect, that's exactly how it would go.

Scott Leune: And I would imagine then when I think back to the practice management software that people use today and a lot of older systems and some systems that were free and they're open source and other systems super expensive, they're not positioned to do this. They're kind of the prehistoric, or I guess you could say you've got a Frankenstein, a bunch of stuff to it. You got to bolt it on and tape it on to try to get this result. What I love about what you guys have with an all in one solution that is also cloud-based and you have the data is you're going to be one of the companies that can position yourself well to incorporate AI quickly. Would you agree with that statement?

Jana Macon: I would agree with that statement, yeah.

Scott Leune: Okay. Now, from where you stand, I'm curious, what are some trends you're seeing in dentistry and specifically maybe alarming trends, things that dentists should understand or be worried about? Is there anything happening from your viewpoint?

Jana Macon: Yes. I really am worried about the offices, even offices on curves. So this really doesn't have to do with your underlying practice management. This has to do with how you think and if you're aware of what's going on in the consumer world whom dentists serve. It's a business to consumer business and I feel like they don't know things. Like over 70% of patients will choose a different provider if they don't offer a good digital experience. If I can't schedule myself, if I can't pay by a link on my text, if I can't see my treatment plan in my email, sign it and send it back. I can't fill out forms before I ever get there and just have them go, these are what our patients expect. We don't think that because they've been sort of going along with it for a while, but just three years ago it was about 30% lower than this.

It has just skyrocketed since COVID and it just continues. I thought it would settle back down, but it's just continuing to go up because we all got trained during that time that you can do all of these things on your own and you don't need to take time in the middle of your workday to make a phone call and sit on the phone with someone for 30 minutes to make an appointment or whatever. It's a waste of time. So this patient choice, it's getting driven by digital experience and I just want all of the providers out there. I know they're busy doing dentistry and they're busy fixing people's mouths and helping people have better lives, but their businesses are suffering and they don't know it.

Scott Leune: So it reminds me of, I guess a simple example where used to call to make a reservation at a restaurant and then you started to be able to do some of that online. And today when I think about making reservations, I go on two date nights a week with my wife and friends and stuff. We don't choose to go places that we can't just make a quick reservation online. I've got eight people and if I can't make a reservation online, I'm not going to call and try to do that. In a sense that's what's happening with dentistry patients. If they can't go and schedule online, then they may not even call to schedule. Or I can think too, gosh, when I call physicians, I've got five kids, it seems like every month someone needs to go to some doctor. It's so frustrating because they're not answering their phones that we just skip. We just go to a different physician. We just call someone else. If I could have scheduled online, I would've just gone to them, but they didn't answer their phone and they didn't have a way to schedule dentists. A lot of us my age and older, we opened practices or owned practices back in the day when everything was paper and p And our patients aren't that, so I bet there's a bunch of dentists, even curve users that have the ability to have online scheduling and they're not even using it.

Jana Macon: Oh, that's right. There's a lot of fear around it.

Scott Leune: So you said 70% will choose to leave a provider or choose a different provider because they don't have this low friction digital experience.

Scott Leune: Wow. That's

Scott Leune: I'm curious, are there other kind of concerns you have or other changes you see besides the digital experience side?

Jana Macon: I think that it's really the thing that I'm most concerned about really is how they're interacting with their patients. That's one. Two is I think that they're constantly hiring. We know the staffing shortage probably was always something, COVID made it worse. Now we're into these people aren't coming back, and here's the thing that I think people aren't thinking about. If I'm on one of those legacy systems or these systems from the 19 hundreds, these older systems, and I'm hiring people that are in their twenties and thirties, I mean I haven't seen someone over 30 at a front desk in a while in that kind of role usually, and they're bringing them in and sitting them down in front of this software that is so foreign to them, what are all these buttons? What am I supposed to do? Which one do I click to? I understand from these practices that it takes 'em three or four weeks to train someone to do their one role because the software is so complicated how it was. But today they have this whole life. They've lived on email, Gmail, texting, WhatsApp, all the ways for them to interact digitally. Then they get it. They need to sit down in front of a software where they just get it. Now they feel part of a team, they feel like they can make an impact. It's not four weeks where the billing manager's yelling at 'em every day. They screwed something up because they didn't understand it. I think this is part of the staffing shortage that people aren't thinking about.

Scott Leune: That's really interesting. I remember, of course, I guess I'm older now, but I'm from the days of you got instruction manual and you read it and you got training on things. But today, the younger generation, they need to pick it up and it needs to be so intuitively easy to use that no instruction should be needed, and then they excel or they leave, they disassociate from it. Right. And you mentioned, I think what you're saying here is the user experience. If it's not this low friction digital experience, the younger generation is now suffering from the conflict of not understanding how to do it. They can't learn it quick enough. They're having mistakes and it's not working, and it seems to be faster that they just jump ship. If they run into a little bit of conflict, boom, they're gone. And to your point, the software experience, practice management software experience can be that trigger that says, Hey, I'm out. This isn't what I want. That's very

Jana Macon: Interesting. Well, let me tell you a story that I think some of the people on the podcast might relate to this. My daughter-in-law, she's about to enter a dental school. She's been working in dental offices getting ready to go, and she came home from a new dental office she started with, and she's been a dental assistant, a front desk. She's done all the roles in smaller practice, and she comes home with this binder. I said, what do you got? She's like, this is my binder. I have to learn all this. I said, let me see it. I started looking at it and I was like, Morgan, you need to find a practice that uses curve. This is ridiculous. You shouldn't have to memorize what codes are needed on an appointment for a particular type of visit. Why do you need to do that? You don't need to do that. If you're using a system like Curve, you've got a preset tag that's got all that in it, and you could have 'em for every doctor and just pull 'em onto the schedule, boom, it's all

Jana Macon: Now you don't have all this friction for the user, but then you also are not losing money in the practice because the user can't get the codes right in your visit. Three to $4,000 a month I think happens in most practices for treatment that was given but not billed. Why? Because all of this stuff is so hard

Jana Macon: Keep together, and you don't have Betty who was with you for 25 years anymore, that was all in her head. Or if you do have her, she really wants to retire. You have to update these systems to get what you want out of the practice.

Scott Leune: I can't imagine being the president like you are of a practice management software company today because it's so complicated. All of the tasks that are done inside of a dental practice from how we schedule to how we present to how we bill, how we collect, how we track it, dealing with insurance companies, all the information and the data and all of that is custom from one practice to the next. It's daunting. Now when I think about what you just said, I'm a young employee of a practice. I'm in the same situation. I got to learn all this stuff. I got to learn all these customizations and all this gibberish jargon, dental insurance, coding, and I can't imagine. I'm curious because there's a lot of pressure on companies like yours, software companies to solve everyone's wishlist of problems while technology keeps changing, and now we've got ai, how do you, I'm kind of pivoting now to your role as president of a company. How do you go about deciding what's our focus area for the year? What things do we need to add or customize for people or what new changes in technology do we need to try to get ahead of or how do you look at that as a leader of your company?

Jana Macon: It's a lot. I'll say that. So there's your traditional sort of software serving a particular market methodology that most people use and we use it. And that is that we look at, we keep our data. I mean, we are data driven to the nth degree. So we know who and how many people called and asked us to change this or that. So we have that from our users. We know on our sales conversations what things people are saying, well, if you had this, then I could make the change. So what's stopping us from being able to help more dentists? So that's another one. And then we have to think about if we just keep doing what everyone's asking us for, which frankly what people are generally asking you for is just to do the stuff their other system did not really, maybe because it's needed and definitely not necessarily the way it was done, but that's human nature. What else did they, they're just going to ask you for what they need to keep doing their job. So you kind of have to work through that. Okay, what are they really trying to do?

So now we got to talk to customers and we have to talk to prospects and other people in the market like we call you and ask you questions. What is it we're trying to accomplish here? Because what we want to do is we want to think about what's available to us in terms of technology, AI being a good example. There are others where we can apply that and do this better or do this easier in a way that's going to help them more, but they don't really even know it. We didn't know what an iPhone was going to do for us when Steve Jobs first stood up and showed it. So it's similar. They're not software designers, they're dentists and there are people working in the office with all these details and all they know is that button right there, it does it for me today. So we have to kind of help them zoom out and present to them easier and better ways to do it. So there's a whole very detailed process around what are we putting on the roadmap this year,

But once every two or three decades, I'll say I experienced this at the beginning of my career when we went from what was called i a databases to relational databases and object oriented, that was a huge shift, mid nineties. Now here we are 2025 and now AI is a huge shift and what is different about real ai, not just stuff we put the letters AI on, which by the way, a lot of that's going on out there in dental solutions right now. But what AI really means is that we let the AI engine learn the data and from what it learned, we understand what it can build and what it can provide, and then we kind of help put a framework around that. That's the most, I'm going to call it organic and well-built sort of AI experience that will help the user. So we had half a roadmap that we basically flipped on its ear in March because we said we committed to do a bunch of things for our users and we're going to do it, but we're probably going to do it a little bit slower because what we need to do is stop zoom out and think about how can we apply AI to the main pillars of our software, not just to put the letters AI on it, but really if we're going to invest 20 million a year in this product, really what can we do with AI that makes a dentist life easier?

Scott Leune: Is

Jana Macon: It that I could say when you walk into the operatory, you could say, show me the history on tooth 20. I'm giving you an AI summary from all your clinical notes, whatever that is. Is it ambient listening in the operatory where I'm hearing what you're saying and it's making a note in a certain format. You can edit a little bit and you're done with your notes. It's accurate, it's compliant, and it's going to help you get paid. Whatever that is. Is it that when you schedule someone, because we know their scheduling history, and I always go to the dentist on Wednesday between 1230 and two 30 because that's when I have an opening on my calendar for my set meetings. So if I canceled, they would say back to me or the text would say back to me, probably generated from ai, Hey, I noticed you usually come between 1230 and two 30 on Wednesday. How about two Wednesdays from now? And I'm not having to talk to a person to do this. So we're testing all these little scenarios. There's a bunch of them right now that we've spun up a whole innovation team with AI experience to test, test, test, test, test. What can we do? What do we want to put our investment behind, and what are we going to create? That puts a roadmap on its ear

Because we had a lot of things we planned that we know people want and they need, but we know our software has the foundational and the important things they need to do their business well, and what we need to do is help them go to that next level, even though maybe they're not realizing how much it's going to help them, but we have to step back as technology experts. Just like I wouldn't try to do a crown. You don't try to build software. We want to come as the expert and the partner and say, look what we added, and this is going to make this so much faster, easier for your team, and you're going to be able to serve your patients better.

Scott Leune: Yeah, so it's interesting because there's a lot of software companies out there right now that are kind of just sitting back and just saying, this is our software we're not doing. We're not investing 20 million a year into making it better. They're kind just like they're collecting dust.

Scott Leune: And they know that all these practices are just hesitant to ever switch practices just stuck in that prehistoric way of running an office. What also stood out to me in what you just said is you're taking a lot of user feedback and even sales call feedback to try to understand what people are wanting, even though they may not be able to say it the right way, or they may just be trying to do something the old way, even if there's a better way today. But what's really interesting to me, what you just said is you listed things that I don't think anyone else has talked about when it comes to ai. For example, ambient listening into the operatory and writing clinical notes as we're talking to a patient. Some of us have probably experienced that, where you can have an AI agent on a Zoom call for example, and type an outline and it is really good. It's really good what can happen there. So I think that while it wasn't my intent in talking to you today about ai, this might be the most AI examples in dentistry that I've ever heard what you've just said in these last few minutes. We talked about the process of scheduling. We talked about taking the call. We talked also about insurance verification and claims, claims resubmissions and payment processing, but also clinical notes, charting, scheduling, a reappointing, a canceled patient. We talked about every aspect besides the actual tooth that's being touched by it, and it's all real, right? This isn't theoretical,

Jana Macon: It's all being tested. It is not in the software yet, all the things we've talked about today, but these are very, very real things that we are testing with the data in our hypothesis. This is why I said this is a 24, 36 month journey to get these things created and into the product, but these will become me. It's not, oh boom, it's there in 36 months. It's like these are things that we're working on now to get into there.

Scott Leune: So we used to use the phrase tech enabled, Tech enabled, which had a lot to do with getting automation in. Automated texts, for example, is like tech enabled confirmations. But now we're really talking about AI enabled. And so in this AI enabled world, what we might end up with is maybe less people working inside the four walls of the dental practice potentially, or the same people, but they're doing more effective things. What they're not having to do is all the muck that brings everyone down the sandpit of the day-to-day dental stuff is what's going to be solved with this. And of course, there's a lot of people in dentistry trying to understand how to use AI to impact a dentist, but I don't think anyone's in a better position than you guys on how to actually make that happen because the practice management software is the foundation, the core of running that company from scheduling to collecting to just all the data analysis, that's the spot where we're going to get the biggest impact in dentistry. I believe. So much so that the way we practice dentistry, the way we staff, the way we have a business model of a dental practice is going to change how I build a startup changes with AI enabled curve, how I have multiple locations, how I manage A DSO. All of that changes with AI enabled curve. So I'm super excited

Jana Macon: And we're going to see that begin second half of the year, we'll begin to see some of it depending on which things work the best. We want to put the best stuff out first. Today we have the, you might've seen it last night, the mango AI assistant is completely integrated and that's there. You saw how it works. It works. And so those things exist and they are integrated. But I just want to be clear, we are testing these ideas that I just talked about actively and then we'll make a list. We're going to have to this one, first, second, third, and it will be a time, and I'll tell you what, the people that are there will work on the people there will work on the exceptions. So if I didn't have to call for all the benefits with eligibility, plus it all got done overnight and I just have two little red dots of the two that need a little extra attention to figure them out. So instead of 20, I'm dealing with two

Scott Leune: That's already existing. So already about 80% or so of the insurance verification inside a curve is automatically done. About 20% are these kind of miscellaneous, smaller, more unusual plans. And so whoever's having to verify insurance, 80% of the work's done for them already. And you mentioned the phones AI agent. We're recording this podcast session, but what may not be clear is we're actually at your annual conference right now and you have this annual conference. I would assume it's to bring the latest developments that you're planning on releasing, but also to train people that want additional training and curve. And one thing you mentioned yesterday was now we've got an AI agent, meaning AI's answering the phone, talking to the patient, talking about answering questions, all of that integrated inside of the curve environment.

Jana Macon: That's what the curve mango integration where you can have that. You can also have the AI summary of any call, whether it's a human or the AI agent dropped right into the patient note area. So you have that all the time.

Scott Leune: Well, I want to shift gears a little bit. Okay. What you are doing is groundbreaking for dentistry, and this is not your first rodeo being in a software company and you're the president of this company. But one thing we struggle with as CEOs is life outside of the CEO life, outside of our career or this entrepreneurial endeavor we have. Could you talk a little bit about that, your own personal journey? Do you have a family? What was that like to go and rise up to the level you're at now as president of the software company while still trying to manage the family side?

Jana Macon: Yeah, great question. I would say that I am a very, very fortunate situation because I found this team that I work with now. When I first moved to Atlanta in 1996, that's where I met who's now our chairman, CEO, Dave Cormack from that time and Gary Long, who's our chief revenue officer. We then moved through a couple other companies. So when we moved from one company to another, maybe that one sold or something happened, we kind of took the best people. So Dave brought me and Gary and then we added a few more people. Our second company, which was in medical SaaS since 2006. So this is why we have a depth in the medical billing and all these details. We've been in the continuum. So dental was our third stop. And so for me was I got the opportunity in that journey to run every area of a software company because chaos and change create opportunity. And I was just not scared of the opportunity. I was just jump in whatever needed to get done. I'm getting it done. I say, we're all grinders, we just all just get in and grind it out. No executives that just nurse spreadsheets in our team.

Jana Macon: For me was that gave me the opportunity, but how did I balance it with my family? When I started at that first medical SaaS, it was 2006. My son was in first grade and my daughter was three. They're now 25 and almost 22. So in that time we thought, well, we'll do this for three to five years. And I'm thinking, great, my son will be getting out of middle school. That'll be perfect. I had all these things in my head. No, that was 14 years and he graduated high school and my daughter was in high school, and we sort of finished that particular journey. What did it for me though was really the support around me. I was sharing with my son-in-law just the other week. He's feeling frustrated as a young professional, just out of college and I'm not doing well enough and he just wants to grow. And I said, nobody gets here by themselves. Look around you. We have a beautiful home on the lake and all these things. And they were there and I said, nobody gets here by themselves.

And that's what I think we have to do. We have to think about either building a community around us if we don't have family as a community or we have our family as a community, and we have to lean on that. I mean, particularly as a female, I told my CEO one time, some of the women that might be listening to this will get a chuckle out of this. He was saying something to me about something we were trying to do, and he said, my wife, we made a decision a long time ago. She takes care of the kid stuff. I do this stuff. And I said to him, I don't have a wife, and it's true, but people in my position who love to work and want to drive and do things and have vision for this kind of a thing, you need extra people around you. My mom was like my second brain. She lived near us. She helped me with the kids. We had some nannies helping the afternoon between school and me getting home and my very active as well. But literally, it takes everybody to make it work. When both people have these kinds of jobs.

I don't think we would really do it any other way, just how we're built our DNA. You got to kind of go with that. You're created to make a difference. You're created to do things. And if you're not doing that thing, maybe you're not as effective or helpful. So yeah, I would say it takes everybody in the best situations. It takes employers who also are sort of on board with those ideas. That's not really very common. It's getting a little more common now where employers are sort of appreciating needs for family and appointments and things like that. I'll say in my journey, of course, this was early two thousands, so this wasn't just my workplace, this was pretty much anywhere. I could tell you I went probably two or three years without even going to the doctor. I didn't have time to take time out of work to go do it. That's probably true for a lot of women that come up in executives. Another point to this that you might enjoy, I was at our private equity partner, CEO conference, and I was looking around and I was talking to our female board member who drives this part of their business, and I said to her, where are all the women?

And she said, Jana, they drop out. If they don't have the support they need and they start to have a family, they got to drop out. I said, yeah, it's true. And it just made me so much more thankful, more than I ever, ever thought of it as I was living it. I have the opportunity to be here because my kids and my family are more important ultimately than what I'm doing in my work. But when you're in the grind of it, it's

Jana Macon: So the fact that I had the support that enabled me to continue to do the thing I thought was my purpose and my best use of my time, let's say in the day, for the good of my family, I'm blessed to be able to have done it. A lot of people don't have that help. They're absolutely capable. They're absolutely smart enough. They absolutely could get it done. Maybe they just didn't have the support

Scott Leune: Or maybe they didn't figure it out.

Jana Macon: True.

Scott Leune: And so was there a time where you were getting to a breaking point where you needed a reset or you needed to find more support or you were at this kind of crossroads? Did that ever

Jana Macon: Happen? Yeah, it did. Yeah. When we finished that home health hospice and durable medical equipment business that we had, I sold this to ResMed, who's a big medical machine maker. That was really good partnership, and after a year I had to exit. I personally had a lot of personal ownership in the business. I've been there since. It's very small and I didn't do well in the big, big company running it. I just needed to let them have it. And I'll tell you something, I didn't expect this, but literally I laid on my couch every afternoon for nine months. Kids got off to school, I got things done I needed, and literally I was down for the count for two or three hours every day. I had a adrenal fatigue. I was completely wiped out. It was a tough time, but thankfully I had the support and the ability to just rest, to just do it. And I kind of came out of that saying, okay, if I do this again, I'm going to do it a little different. It doesn't hurt that, again, for the women who might be listening that I kind of crossed over that 40 barrier. I want to tell you, as a female executive, when you get to about 40, you've lived long enough, you've dealt with enough boardroom conversations, you sort of know how it goes, and you sort of decide, who am I going to be

And am I just going to be the okay, okay, okay, I'll go along with it. Or am I going to say what I think pay me to say what I think? I'm going to say what I think, and I'm not really going to care what other people think about that. That's a hard thing for a female executive at times. Even someone with a strong personality like me, it's a hard thing to get to. So that was good. So I went back as this different, more sort of empowered, I'm not killing myself again, person. And so I made different choices. I said no to some things. I let other people go on the road and do the trade shows and whatever. I didn't need to be at everything. So some of that is trusting others to do their job. Some of that is going, Hey, if I'm not there, they'll survive. Although I want to be there, but you got to let go of stuff

Scott Leune: Without the No. Everyone's going to steal your time. You're right. Everyone's going to

Scott Leune: And I think back to we've got our kids and we're constantly pulling on my wife. It's in an unfair way compared to what they do with me. They're constantly pulling on her and she doesn't want to say no, she doesn't want to say no to any of that, but at some point it drains you completely. How did you decide, or what were you thinking once you had that kind of reset? What made you say, alright, I'm going to die back in the business and keep going in my career?

Jana Macon: Well, the real answer is we had a nice exit from our business as having ownership in the business. And after that nine months of doing almost nothing, then I started doing some consulting coaching CEOs at smaller businesses, which was fun. And we had a house on the lake and we had a house in town on the golf course, and we didn't change our lifestyle at all when I kind of had that exit. And so my husband says to me, Jana, if you don't want to go back to work, I get it. I support you. I want you to do what you want to do, but we're going to have to sell some stuff if you're going to do that. So I said, you know what? I think I want to work my brain again. I'm ready to do it again. I had enough rest, I was ready. And the curve opportunity kind of came up at just the right time. And it was our same team. It was actually our private equity partner who was with us in the other one who said, we need your team. We need your team. It's another medical vertical they don't have, it was single digits of people using the cloud for practice management. When we bought this business seven years ago,

Literally less than 10% had converted to the cloud. Now we're bumping up on the 20% for practice management, not the little point solutions. There's a lot of point solutions, your weaves that work around those old systems. But for a whole platform, we're up to 20% now.

Scott Leune: And how many practices is that

Jana Macon: Today for curve?

Scott Leune: How many locations?

Jana Macon: For us? Yeah. Yeah. We are bumping up against 5,000 now. Wow.

Scott Leune: Yeah. That's pretty exciting. That's significant. Wow. So I'm curious now a little shifting of gears again, curve as a company, what I've noticed from the outside looking in is that you've got this kind of calm confidence and it's like y'all are proud of what you do. It's like a cool culture. Of course. I'm sure there's always drama happening in some way, but I don't detect it. So what do you think some of the ingredients are of that? How has this culture developed into what it's,

Jana Macon: I think the culture that we always have that brings us all together, no matter who's maybe annoyed about this or that it's human, is that we're all there to win. And all of our team, our executive team and all of our team members, we like medical, dental software because we're building technology for people that help people. And I think that's kind of a little bit altruistic, but it really is a thing that drives me.

Jana Macon: I would rather build things for people that are helping people. So I think that's it. I think we want to win. I think we know how to stay focused. That's something that we've learned along these almost 30 years in software, 25 years together in software, is that if you don't focus, if you let yourself be dragged all over the place, you just won't accomplish anything.

And so we're very, very focused. I would say that's important. And I think that we believe in our team. We don't have employees, we have team members. We update them on what's going on in the business. Every quarter we share information with them. We try to help them see the bigger picture of what we're trying to accomplish and what we're trying to do for the industry. So I think that also we respect everyone's contribution. I think you can get into companies where the executive team sits behind the closed door all day and their doors are closed and nobody can talk to them and they're not out working with the people. That happens a lot in technology companies. Or you have people that are so in the weeds, they can't see and run the business. And so for us, our doors are open when we don't have any executives, like I said, that nurse spreadsheets all day and tell everybody from on high what they should be doing. We're helping people do what they need to do. Yes. Do we use data? Yes, we use data, but we don't use that as an excuse not to coach people or help people or help customers. I'll get on the phone with customers. I get on the phone with prospects, people who are trying to make a decision. If it's many locations, like now we have more and more multiple locations coming on. I tell my sales team, six account executives like you bring me on that call

Because I'm going to talk to that dentist about what we're going to do for them, how we're going to partner with them, and how important this technology decision is for him

Scott Leune: Or

Jana Macon: Her.

Scott Leune: And that's a good point because I think a lot of us in dentistry, we really don't appreciate when we're bringing a significant organization, let's just say I've got 10 locations and I'm trying to make a decision that's going to impact hundreds of people. And at that point, I might need more than just the salesperson. My needs and my complexities are tenfold. And the fact that you as the president of the company will get on that call and talk from president to president.

Scott Leune: That is a significant thing. But that also bleeds into the culture and that your team says, sees, excuse me, your team sees that that is what we do, that we do the right thing.

Jana Macon: That's right. We do the right thing. That's right. And also, interestingly enough, I like those calls also because we bring consulting to the table. We bring business change to the table. We're not just plugging in software at your practice and there's investment that's required for that. And it's surprising to me how much dentists struggle with that investment, 10,000, $15,000 for us to come and do this consulting. If you remember that program I showed you when we were together in Provo, like this whole upfront,

Scott Leune: I've never seen a more detailed trained

Jana Macon: Program. And then we come back for go live support. It's so important for their success. Hundreds of people are impacted and they struggle to get over that hump sometimes. So I really, really value those conversations. We can have a business conversation and talk about how we're going to jump in there with you. We're not leaving you. We're in the boat with you and we're going to make this happen. So that's another reason I really jump on there.

Scott Leune: Okay. Well, we are almost out of time here. Before we wrap this up, I'd see if there's any last comment you'd want to tell our listeners. And before you do that, I do want to thank you for not just allowing me to interview you, but specifically being so transparent and direct and giving us actual content. I think there's a lot of people right now that are just throwing out the word AI and things like that, and we're not really learning anything yet. We don't know, but you've given us a real glimpse into what's happening, and I really appreciate you doing that for us. Is there anything else you want to leave our listeners with before we wrap this up?

Jana Macon: I think I would just say from a business owner's perspective of a dental practice or a group, please think about how your technology is affecting your business, your ability to track patients. Think about who you partner with. You want to partner with people who are investing, who care about your business and care about helping you grow, not just about taking your money. And that's something going back to our culture, that's a really important thing for us is really being partners with the dental industry and helping them get to this next place. It's coming fast. You're not going to be able to get away with what you've been doing for a long time. It's pretty soon you're just going to have to move. And so do it now. Talk to us. Let us help you just take a tour of the product and think a little bit outside the box of what might be possible and we'll dream with you because we can, because actually going to be able to take you there. So I would just say let us help you.

Scott Leune: Okay. Awesome. Well, Jana Macon, president of Curve, thank you so much for being on the dental CEO podcast. Wow, what a cool episode. So many things we spoke about, this whole vision of where we're going to be in a few years is mind boggling and how it's going to impact how we run a practice, how it's going to make the team's jobs, jobs more predictable, more consistent, easier, how it's going to impact just the day-to-day of running a practice. And it's highlighted to me how important it is that we've got the right software partner and that we are on top of these changes. I want to thank you all for listening today to the Dental CEO podcast, and please subscribe. If you haven't, please leave a review. If you haven't, we're trying to do some cool things with this. We would love your support. Until next time, I'm Scott Leune. Thank you very much.