Hello and welcome back for another episode of the Future Ear Radio podcast!
For this week’s episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Mike Andreozzi, former Owner & CEO of Beltone New England, current Beltone Brand Ambassador, and President-Elect of the International Hearing Society.
In this episode, Mike and I discuss:
– His backstory, growing up in the family business, and learning through osmosis
– Mike’s time at Miracle Ear and the early days of hearing health franchising
– Optical supplier, Bausch & Lomb, purchase of Miracle Ear in the early 90’s and the aftermath of the acquisition
– Mike joining Beltone in the early 2000’s and scaling his New England franchise from 3 locations to 125 stores across 10 states
– The high value Mike placed on fostering a strong company culture and creating a sense of comradery amongst his team
– Identifying potential leaders within the staff and focusing on internal talent development
– Focusing on all the small details which, in aggregate, matter a lot when developing a five star patient experience
– Mike’s thoughts on third-party insurance providers, OTC hearing aids, and where the industry is headed in the next 3-5 years
-Thanks for Reading-
Dave
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Dave Kemp
All right, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the future ear radio podcast today I’m joined by the man, the myth, the legend, Mr. Mike Andreozzi. Mike, how you doing today? Thanks for coming on the show.
Mike Andreozzi
Doing great, David. I’m doing fantastic. Thanks for having me.
Dave Kemp
Awesome. So I wanted to have you on, you’ve had a rather illustrious career, you know, with your Beltone. franchise, and, you know, I think you’re one of the most, one of the have one of the best success stories of, you know, that I’ve encountered within this industry. So wanted to have you on and just let you kind of tell the story of how, you know, the Andreozzi family built your, your franchise, and you know, we can talk through some of the lessons learned along the way, knowing that there’s probably people out there that could could learn a lot from you. So why don’t we just go back to the start, you can walk me through how that your your family kind of wound up in this line of work.
Mike Andreozzi
Yeah, great. And again, great to be here, Dave. And I think what’s so amazing about our profession that we’re in is that there’s so many great stories and so many great people in it. And I think one of the things that makes me love the profession so much is the relationships you develop with so many people along the way. It’s like one big family organization and, and that’s really kind of my story too, and some respect coming from kind of a large Italian family in Rhode Island. My father, Rocco Andreozzi, he is 90 years old, still alive and well and doing pretty amazing. He is funny how he got into the hearing aid space, he was actually shoveling it was a bad snowstorm in Rhode Island. He was shoveling his driveway. And he noticed across the street, that there was an older gentleman that was struggling to shovel his driveway, he went across the street, instead of helping that gentleman without asking them just to clear his driveway. And the gentleman said, What are you doing? He said, I’m just trying to help you shut the driveway. He goes, Well, I’m not going to pay you to do this. He goes, You don’t have to pay. I’m just trying to be helpful. The gentleman said, Well, that’s really interesting. You would do that for someone who said yes. And he says, he goes, You know something, I’m in the hearing aid business. And I think you’d be great in this business because we help people and don’t always expect a lot in return, but it’s all about giving back. And that’s really what kicked off. My dad went into interview with a gentleman named EJ Mack Rory McIlroy, from Rhode Island who owned a small company called Community hearing aid centers. My dad went in an interview with him he was working at the a&p supermarket as a you know, struggling father, a few kids at the time, way back when and he cut into the hearing aid space that way through helping someone through through the challenge. And my dad was perfect for the business in a sense that he loved helping people he loved developing relationships. And someone who didn’t have a tremendous amount of education. This was a good field at the time back in the 60s to get involved in at the time. And so he became active in that business and worked for community Hearing Aid Center for quite a while and then a buying the business for Mr McElroy. But as a kid, I’m one of six children number five or six kids all of us all my brothers and sisters at some point we’re in the business somehow whether we worked on weekends with my dad or just went into the office with him probably no different than you David with your business with oak tree. But with with me. I have two older brothers who are both doctors one was an audiologist didn’t like what he ology was had a hard time selling hearing aids in the 70s for $500. My dad said well lower to 475 he still couldn’t sell them so he became a family doctor. So it wasn’t his wasn’t his racket. My other brother marks and endosome third doctor today very successful, pretty amazing guy and worked my dad for awhile. My sister Kim worked with me and it’s really hearing a business for quite a while with my dad and just recently retired. And other sibling Victoria worked for a little while my brother Eric was the smart one and became the investment bank. I really never did much with the business except help with some accounting systems. But me, I was always passionate about it for whatever reason as a young kid, I would go into the office with my dad and on the weekends or at nights and sell batteries at the front desk as as a teenager. At the time we started doing significant amount of marketing we had this old clunky mechanical machine called an address address a graph machine which was in the basement of one of our main office. And I used to go down there and run these plates through the machine at 14 years old and print out all of the monthly newsletter we call the sound fax that we ship out to 10,000 people every month. And that was my job as a teenager but being around the office and seeing patients and seeing other people in the office. It just became part of who I was to be to be around at so much. So I always had that interest for sure. When I was 18 years old and just graduated from high school I passed the hearing aid dispensing license Rhode Island so I was the youngest hearing aid expensive licensed in the state. And then went off to college, the University of Rhode Island where I, you know, I started studying Communicative Disorders hearing and speech, and also speech communications. But going through college, I still work for my dad, every single it’s a three or four days a week fitting hearing is why I was going to college I used to sell hearing aids in people’s homes I used to work in the office I used to. So it was just embedded in the so much that this business was something that I really was passionate about love the people that we took care of, I love the gratification we got when you change people’s life, even back in those days where technology was so primitive that it only moved the needle a little bit. But even that little bit was pretty good. But I was always somebody who was technical and liked electronic aspect, but I could explain it to people. So it’s very simple for them to understand. So that I think that may be somewhat unique in the space. And really just kind of loved it. But what really kind of set me up to be kind of next level, I think, within the spaces that my my dad was one of the original miracle franchises back in 1985. When we were close, just franchisee he was one of the top first 10 people to sign a franchise agreement, a miracle and decided to franchise within space. And when I graduated from college nada during the five year fraternity plan, I might add the best year was that last year but the I really at that point started really diving into the space much deeper. And what I mean by that is that miracle I had a management training program that I attended when I was a young person learn so much. It’s a week long training program in Golden Valley, Minnesota, I learned so much about running a business. What was the metrics back then to make it work, the telemarketing aspects of it that we used to use back then the sales training, the sales management stuff, and that kind of really layered on to what I learned when I was a teenager when I went to hell fischbein sales training program when I was 16 years old, my father and attended Roy vanes training sales training programs. And Frank ring. It’s darky sales training program. So as a young kid, I saw this, and then it just went to get some miracle there. It kind of clicked with me in a sense that this was a very structured franchise program that had never seen before, that had a lot of really smart people in it, who had just got into it. So I had these incredible mentors at an early age in my 20s, early 20s. You know, people like Ed Dalio and Don gross and Don Ellsworth. And it’s funny, Rick Frazier and i Who’s the big miracle of him, and I started exactly the same time at Miracle ear. So and that was Jeff Dahlberg. And Ken dobrik, this, this miracle thing was so unique because of their lead generation program, the people that they had involved in it was was pretty magical. And they kind of treated it like a big family business in some sense, even though it was a large franchise system. And the systems they taught, I really enjoyed it and said, when we were trying to grow a business, keeping things simple, I think was the most important thing. So one of the things that came out of that was that we sold one line of products was only a miracle at the time, our pictures were 72 inches off the wall, they were three feet apart, they were all the same pictures, the furniture was all the same color, and odor from the same company that cooperating in the store was a very, you know, all the same. So all stars in a franchise environment all at the same time made it very simple to then scale if you wanted to scale because all the systems are in place. And I really kind of liked that for for one big part of the and I really liked what miracle it was doing as far as their sales training, inspiring people inspiring leaders, getting people together on a regular basis. They were they were really ahead of the curve. And then, you know, they started something that really special. I mean, everybody in the industry at the time, would have people walk in their office if they weren’t a miracle dealer and people walk and say I want that little miracle or one that became like the Coca Cola in your air growing industry back then. Because it was incredible lead generation program but you know what was interesting is built excuse me a miracle I then sold the business to Bosch Olam, so Bosch Milan purchased the business from them. Back in the late in the early 90s. First substantial amount of money and Bosch Columbian IKEA company out of Rochester, New York really felt like hey, listen, we can take what we know and and optics and optical in turn and layer this into the hearing aid space and kind of make this go, you know, a large scale because everyone thought that the hearing aid business should be a lot larger. What they found out was that hearing aids weren’t sexy, nobody wanted them to cost too much money. And people will put them off buying them for years and years, versus eyeglasses or sunglasses where they were sexy looking. People wanted them that made them look younger, and they were appealing. So they were convinced They could take that optical mentality and applying it to the hearing aid space. But boy, did they run into some roadblocks. You know, in the, in the four years after national onboarded, I saw a five different presidents from Bosch alum, all from optical industry come in and try to run the hearing aid division. And that was just frustrating. It was really frustrating in the sense that I just really didn’t align with any of the people who were trying to run the business because everyone in America at that time was so hearing minded, you know, these outsiders coming in trying to change the whole philosophy that ultimately didn’t work. Bosch alum had to sell a yard sale kind of full for, to amplify with the Italians who got into the space at that time that I had already exited, I exited miracle I just really didn’t like the management team that was there. At that point. It’s kind of funny, because a year later, after the Epiphone boarded, they called me and said, Hey, Andrew, is you the only Italian that we see with a vowel in your name? Why did you leave the company, so that was a whole nother conversation. But it was interesting, you know, in my perspective, to see something that was going really good, and then something and how fast it could change. And really, a lot of people at that time and miracle air exited out of the miracle ear business, because they didn’t like the culture, they didn’t like the message from above. And you had this machine that was so well oiled, and many, many people leaving it. So it was a great lesson for me in a business perspective, to see, you know, how you can mess something up. And I said to myself, that that’s something that is not going to happen to me if I grow my business, because I really, because culture, family promises, all those things that are really important in business, when you’re when you’re trying to grow it are so important, a lot of those were broken, and it just didn’t feel right. So that’s kind of I exited the miracle of business, like in about 98. And then I became multi line for awhile with Siemens and Starkey and worked really close with those companies. They were great. They were, you know, going back to multilane. Business was fine, had some great relationships there. But that’s when I first kind of encountered Beltone in 2001, they had approached me with an opportunity, they had been Beltone have insulted GN no different than miracle had been sold to Basha Mambo, GN bought this belt on business and really kind of messed it up, to be honest with you, they went from doing a lot of hearing aids till about a 50% of that volume, because of the company that came in changes the whole philosophy and how the business was working, broke up that kind of family momentum, if you will, and you had all these Beltone, dealers leave exit that went to Audibel. Or they went to a multi line practice or they went elsewhere. And it was really catastrophe. And I in 2001, One Belt One approached me they were really down and out. They had one of their larger dealers in Florida who just kind of missed, left them and left the disaster in Florida, they they kind of hired me as a private consultant to come back in and try to open up some stores in Florida to combat what happened. And I did and I opened six doors in five months in Florida two days a week flying back and forth and hiring the staff with people in place, build up the offices, got it up and running literally across the street from other stores that have just abandoned the belts on systems kind of a message if you will. And it went so well. The folks that felt on said hey, we’d love to work with you in a larger capacity. And that kind of kicked off my Beltone world because they came to me and said, Listen, we’re going to do the first concept we’ve ever thought of it’s called the mega dealer, we want you to be our first mega deal. And I said, Well, what is a mega dealer? Well, there was still I think, there was still designing what it was, but at the time. They in the New England marketplace, they had a lot of Belle tell folks that had exited as well. And they wanted to open up a lot of stores in a short period of time. So basically, I signed an agreement with them to be partners with him on a new business to open up, you know, 25 stores in five years, which were very ambitious plans at the time. So we did that. So we went back and we did that in less than two and a half years. It didn’t take five years. But we did it really fast. We did it by scaling a lot of the things I hadn’t learned and what I what was interesting to me is when you come into a business that you don’t know a lot about, I didn’t know a lot about Belton at the time. I thought they were just like, what I left at miracle, which was more of a a franchise system, which would be colors, pictures, carpeting, you know, distinct retail model. Well, the belt on message or program at the time was more a distributorship model, not a franchise and that’s a big difference in the businesses that we see today and the businesses you deal with David oak trees that Some of them are structured so that, you know, they have a similar pattern each one of the office locations, they have others, they let them go. So at the time Beltone was something that really didn’t have a true image across the board, there was some offices that were old and just needed to be done over there was some newer ones and stuff in between. So when I came into Beltone, one of my missions was right away, is we’re going to, we’re going to cookie cut this, we’re going to design a program, an office look, an image, you know, a whole culture around it. And that’s what we were able to do in our New England stores in a short period of time. In fact, it was so special that people were calling to come work for us, because we were building beautiful offices, we were doing great advertising, marketing, we had a great reputation. With with the teams out there, the people that worked for us that came on board with us, and they wanted to be part of it. Because whenever you start a business and you get something going and people want to be part of something special, you know, we live in this world of in this industry, that it’s kind of it can be a boring industry, you work by yourself and an office might be you and your your patient care coordinator. And that’s it, you might have a manager or somebody working in an office, but that’s you have four walls around you, you have to find a way to continually stimulate people get them excited about coming to work, make them feel part of a mission that you know that you have going on as well. And that was a that was something that we were able to do that are very, very, I’d say large scale. And you know, that was because we would meet with our teams on a regular basis. Every month, we had a staff meeting, no matter how big we got, we’d fly them in if we had to on a regular basis, we would have sales contests, we would have ways of communicating without outside of that, that monthly meeting. But in person, it was important, we would eat together, I would make myself so available to learn about the people that work for me, I wanted to know about them, I want to know about their spouse, I want to know about their family, I would be able to dinner two, three times a week with different people that work for me, just to understand what they’re all about. So then I could design a custom program for them, whether it was an incentive program, a sales program that suited their needs, that was very special to them. And we were good at that. And that people felt connected with the organization that way versus just cookie cutter everything out there. So that was that was really big. So I would say I took my family I background and talented family of loving people showing them love with food being great to be with them and, and making sure they felt important. And I apply that to the business we were growing. And I think that really worked very, very well. Not only with the staff, but our management team, everyone around it. We call this thing really big fast. Dave, it was really amazing how you know how it all went from just three offices that I kind of took from in 2001. And made that we grew that to over 125 stores over those years. And we did it in 10 different states. And a lot of the people that kind of helped me do it were the folks that worked for me in my belt on Office, became managers then became partners in some of these areas as well. So everybody had a period background I was I was very persistent in the fact that anyone was going to come work for us how to work in hearing aid office for a while how to learn the business for a while, I don’t know what it’s like to sit in that chair, to know what it’s like to deal with the patients we deal with, because that is not an easy thing for you to dictate that from above, and not ever actually have the position within it. It’s unfortunate, because it’s it’s important that you understand those things. So that was, those are some of the things that we did, we took that small family business made a larger business through scaling, about using kind of, you know, great family values in that regard.
Dave Kemp
One thing I want to just jump in here is, you know, I feel like we’ve kind of seen this time and time again, where you have the some sort of outside large entity comes in says, I have this grand plan for how we’re going to just completely, you know, expand and reimagine hearing healthcare. And I feel like you probably had a, you know, firsthand witness into all of this time and time again, it seems to fail. And so I think, to your point, you know, the most successful people I’ve ever come across within this industry seem to be the ones that are most deeply immersed into it. They really understand intuitively how this works, what some of the inherent challenges are. And, and so I just think it’s interesting to hear that this dates all the way back to, you know, the days when miracle error was first bought. And I’m sure there were other shades of this that went on but I mean, we’re still seeing this today, where you know, now you have like consumer electronics companies that are coming in and they’re just assuming that oh, this is such an easy challenge to solve. It’s a technological challenge that we need to solve or something like that. And there’s just so much more to it. And it’s, it’s interesting to just kind of see this thing, the same pattern time and time again play out.
Mike Andreozzi
It’s so true. And you know it. You know, history really teaches us lessons for sure. What we do with those lessons is really determines what we’re going to do in our business. So you got to pay close attention to those history lessons. And I know what’s happening within the within the profession today is no different that there’s a race to find a way to own some of the retail. And because retail is really where the rubber meets the road. The reality is, that’s true. But the most challenging part of our profession is the retail side of it and learning and audiology and retail, how can you scale at any size, hearing the retail or audiology practice, so that you can do it in a successful way. It’s easy to buy stores, and we see it all the time, we just saw a pack a and phone act and make a deal recently HearingLife continues to Buy stores. I bought lots and lots of stores over the years. But what I noticed was that when we started growing and getting large enough, when we started getting to be a bigger business, I looked around, and when I saw that there was nobody out there anywhere near a size at the time, that we were really the largest practice around. And I think we kind of motivated some other folks to become, look at this at a larger scale and say, Hey, maybe we can grow a business well, we just kept their eyes on the road and did our thing and, and use those values that as as I was saying to you is which is about your people, the culture, you cannot buy a culture, a culture comes from within, when you develop a culture, then it’s contagious. So you have to find a way to develop a culture that works for you. Everyone’s different, everyone’s got a different fingerprint, I just sold my business recently, as you know, and the person that bought it, Brian Snowden, who was wonderful, his fingerprint is going to be different than mine, he’ll find a way to keep that culture that’s really important to him. If you’re a large manufacturer and have, you know, you’re part of hundreds and hundreds of retail stores that you own today, it’s really difficult for the for the organization, and for the people that work for you to feel connected with you in some kind of way. And it takes a special art form, that sometimes it’s hard to explain how to do in order to do it, there’s some people that do it really magically. And there’s others who just do it the wrong way. And they treat it like a very large corporate entity. And people just don’t like that within our profession, our our businesses don’t run that way. Because at the end of the day, it’s still a business, it’s a people business one on one. And what happens in all those stores is between the the hearing care professional and the patient across the table. And if that pair of care professional doesn’t believe in the organization with and all the values they have in the products and stuff, then it’s gonna get lost in translation in that sales will just not dictate that. So I think it’s really important that you develop certain things within your business that make you unique. And we had so many of those things in our business that made us unique, and have fun with that people today still talk about that, that you know that they have a good time I got one example is great one is that when I used to go out and visit our stores, the first thing I would do is I would go to the restroom, the bathroom in the office, and I would make sure it was perfect. I would make sure that off the bathroom was absolutely spotless. Like you’d be proud of it. Like we’d be in your own home. And I would take pictures of the bathroom. And I would then tweet it or I would email it to my whole team say, Hey, I was in Brookfield, Connecticut today. And this is what their bathroom looks like. And that whole thing and I was very serious about that. Because I think if you had a restaurant, hotel, whatever the bathroom sets, the whole presents for the rest of the place and the bathroom is clean, and the kitchen is probably clean or the rest of the rooms are clean. Same thing and hearing aid office it should be just as important that if someone uses your restroom, and it’s beautiful than then they know you have attention to detail that the support things of that little silly thing just amplified such a large level when I went into offices to visit them unexpected sometimes or expected. The first thing they would do is as Mike you need to go check on our bathroom, it’s they couldn’t wait to show me their bathrooms. And it was true in today. If you walk in those bathrooms. They’re always spotless. We took it to a next level we had we had a contest about who could decorate their their toilet paper dispenser the fanciest just like you would see a Ritz Carlton or something like that people would come up with these flowers and designs and I would go in and kind of rate some of those things. It would sound silly and funny but it made it kind of like something special for them to do. They would take pictures of it send it to the other people they would took pride in their office. Just simple things like that were so important. There’s other things you can do but that was one of the funniest ones. I think it applies today. Yeah,
Dave Kemp
I do. I think though that you know, something I’ve really learned from you is the you know how we’re You’re so successful? Well, I think one of the common denominators is your attention to detail, and like you said, is fostering a really good culture. And I think that those things are, they’re kind of wildly dismissed as just sort of like afterthoughts. But, you know, clearly, you did something, right. And I just think that those kinds of things in aggregate, they add up to something where it does actually make a difference in the patient’s eyes. And we’re talking about, you know, that the business, this whole business is more or less a competition of the experience that you’re providing the patient, you know, and you want that patient, you know, I think you can attest to this more than anyone is like, you know, going back to the days when you were working with your dad, I can only imagine what the hearing aids were like back then. So you had to stand apart in some way. And I think it’s a lot of this stuff. It’s the company culture, it’s the attention to detail. And then it’s all the obviously, the way in which you interact with the patient, and that experience that you’re facilitating, and creating continuity and consistency with that, that you can then scale, I think, is what really makes this thing what makes it tick.
Mike Andreozzi
It does, you know, it’s a good, it’s a good Remember, it’s what you just brought up with my dad, as a young guy coming into the office, when I was really watching my dad what he was doing, and I worked with him in the office and stuff, I can remember you’re gonna think this is crazy, but I can remember him bringing in certain foods dishes for certain patients, I’m telling you, there was a couple patients who loved his veal and peppers, for example, he would make sure that he cooked those that that night or day before he bring it in, and that that patient would be in there and they’d say, Hey, I made you some of my veal and peppers. And the patients thought it was the greatest thing in the world. His seafood risotto, his pasta is all these little food things which was so important in my life and my family. But he would give those to patients, certain patients and he kept these little index cards at every patient’s before computers. And he would you know, profile. I’m like, what their dog’s name was where they like to go on vacation, their favorite food. And before the you know, that day, he would brief himself and all those things. So he was so prepared down to the food, which was crazy. And, and I found myself doing it when I was a private dispenser for a long time, doing similar things. And even in my own practice, when, again, the the whole aura of being a group grown up the way I was food was the number one thing. And you know, that Sunday, we would I would, you know, cook meatballs and sausage and short ribs and pasta. And also, that’s how we bought Monday began. And
Dave Kemp
I was gonna ask about meatball Sunday. Yeah,
Mike Andreozzi
I would cook like a crazy man on Sunday, not because I had to just because I was loved it made the house smell so wonderful. And all that food, which was my wife, my daughter, he thought I was crazy. I would bring all that food to our corporate office, we had about 30 people in our corporate office, and the phone, people that you know, the call center, all managers only counting finance, all operations folks. And I would bring all that food in on Monday. And that was that’s how meatball Monday became a real big, big thing in our culture within our organization, and literally be at management meetings at nine o’clock, and people will be eating meatballs, drinking coffee, which became actually normal in our business, which was funny. But most, some people would think we’re crazy, but and then we would send you know, post pictures of the meatball doing something that Beltone and how that was part of our culture. And then every staff meeting we had, we always had to have the balls. And then people wanted my meatballs. And then if they won, we’d have sales meetings where if you won, you know, certain sales, I would deliver the meatballs to your office, there’s a big deal out of it. And people would go crazy just to win that contests for me to come up and deliver the meatballs. So and that’s turned into a kind of a life of itself, the whole people thing, because now we do meatball reviews. And it’s the whole funny thing. But But again, back to something different, something unique. I know that a lot of vendors, like an oak tree or all the marketing companies is to come visit us on a regular basis, they would try to come on Monday. So they could have meatballs, which was really funny. And a lot of them would actually kind of imitated or kind of duplicated what we did, where they had food, a lot of times as meatballs brought into their offices on Monday, thinking that, you know, that was a good cultural thing. And it worked for so many people that they knew that the owners cared about it. For me, that was a way for me just show the love of my team through food. And you know that that was something that came natural to me. But you know, I had so many people that work for us come to our house for dinner with my family to get to know me and me to get to know them, taking them out boating, taking them out golfing, you know too many people I think just expect if you have a job, it’s a job. It’s not just a job. It’s it’s about really getting to know the people that work for you. So to your point, when they when they’re in the office working for you. They know that as a mission is there’s more than just a job there. Are because there’s a purpose to it. And I really feel it’s that’s kind of the missing art form, in our, in our profession today finding a way to duplicate that, you know, in some way.
Dave Kemp
Yeah, I think like, you know, just from our my personal standpoint, it is all kind of a little things I think and it’s grading and company culture, I couldn’t agree more. I mean, I think that’s something that my parents really installed here was the sense of camaraderie that there’s a common goal, you know, we’re very transparent with where we are as a business every single day, we write the sales number during our morning meeting, and we just kind of talk about what happened in the previous day, which is something that I learned about from you recently, that you mentioned that you do these, you know, kind of like, thoughts for Mike or you, you write your, you know, you kind of chronicle like, you know, here’s keeping a finger on the pulse, which I think is an amazing leadership method, I guess, if you will, to capture kind of like what’s going on in your head. And I’m a big fan of putting my thoughts to paper as well. And I think that that’s a great way to communicate on an on a routine basis with your team to just kind of keep them in the know of like, here’s what I’m sensing. Here’s what I’m seeing. And I imagine that that’s fostered a ton of great dialogue. So you want to talk a little bit about that.
Mike Andreozzi
Yeah, yeah. So one of the communications that key of an organization making sure that you’re connecting with those people. So when you get to a large scale, have a lot of offices and you’re, you’re across different states, and you can’t see everybody on a regular basis, which so guy like me, drives me crazy sums up so touchy, feely about trying to get to know people, but doing it, leveraging it electronically now is very possible, no different than what we’re doing right now. But one of the things we did, first thing we did is we had our belts on today’s show, which was every Monday morning at 830 in the morning, which are built on today. And that was a live broadcast from our headquarters and work with Alan, it would go out to 260 employees. And it was like, we kind of copied it from today’s show, basically, in DC was a half hours compact, it was just short snippets. But we’d be live broadcast, we built a small little studio in Rhode Island. And we do just like we’re doing here, you know, I would have a segment of it, Brian, but of a segment of our sales, VP dot k would do a piece of it our our VP of marketing to William she would do piece of it, or whatever, we might have some our staff members who have had some great success stories in the field in front of patients hear some stories. So that was something that was done every week, that everyone’s expected to be there. And if you were late, I was literally pissed off. Because I felt like listen, if you’re sign up for this job and ask her for half hour weeks and make make it there. And we would log everybody in we if they were late, I would call them I would call them within an hour after the meeting, say, why were you late? This is the one thing I asked you to do. Be respectful of it. You know, I didn’t ask a lot from a lot of people. I asked them to watch this because it was so important to me that they understood the pulse of what’s going on in the organization. So that was one thing we did you know, I think fairly well, in that broadcast. The other thing is, I had something called Thursday news and notes that that which was a kind of a one page or two page newsletter I would write every single week and I still do today, which was something that was really what’s the pulse going on within the profession and industry. What’s going on OTC who’s making moves on it, what what new products have been released within the industry, whether, you know, obviously, we were built on practice, but I was very interested to know what was going on in Phonak or Starkey, Otakon, all those great companies that are out there, what’s going on. So we knew when patients came in and mentioned some of those things, my team was well aware of it. And then just some thoughts and philosophies about motivating our team on a sales standard, from a sales standpoint about life reflection, about you know, who you are. And so when I when we announced that the Beltone conference about a month and a half ago that I had sold my business to Brian, I would share this newsletter with all the other Beltone owners. And I must have had 50 of them come up to me and said, Please tell me, you’re still going to do the news and notes section because we share that information with our teams, with our staff. That’s really important to us. And one of the things that I’ve been able to do now, after settlement businesses to take over this position with Beltone part time as their, as they call it, the brand ambassador, which is basically working part time for Beltone to help build the brand and build the name of the company and bring some more people in and give some guidance to the management team about how the operators the owners and operators out there work. The former get kind of correlation in a positive way in which he was just going really well. But we’re continuing doing that those Thursday news and notes things because it’s important. I don’t think there’s anyone really out there that I know of that is kind of doing that kind of stuff to their teams, to keep them informed to keep them in line with what’s going on and keep them motivated about it again, communications is so critically important. We can over communicate. But let’s make sure we communicate properly that the hit certain highlights with people that get some have excited about coming into their office and stuff like that. Again, I repeat this a few times. It’s a lonely job being here dispenser. And I think it gets it gets overlooked. It really does. Do you have a way to keep them tight tight ends important?
Dave Kemp
Do you have a preferred setting that you like to write your newsletter? Or your two pager? Is it like in your backyard? You? Are you a creature of habit? Or do you just kind of do it different wherever you are,
Mike Andreozzi
you know, I can, I can, as a week goes on to kind of compile some some bullet points of things that I see. And I’m all about life experiences. I’m the kind of guy that goes out of his way to find a great experience. And then and then and then write about that experience. It could be a hotel, it could be an airline person, it could be somebody just you know, buying a coffee and want me watching it across the table for somebody. So I get these ideas, all different ways, shapes and forms and all different professions and industries and try to apply it, I do have to be sitting in front of my computer. Like I’m coming to you from Florida today. So I just suns in my head here. But but it’s it’s I do have to be sitting in for my computer and kind of dialed in and have kind of a clear thought process. If there’s other things going on, it’s distracting to me at time. So this is the one time during the week, I try to clear my head and think through it. And then I try to find something that applies to everybody. No matter what scale of the business you’re in, if you’re in the management team, if you’re a front office assistant, if you’re in a call center, if you’re a practitioner, a dispenser of hearing aids, no matter what who you are something that I think that would apply and that you get it, you would you would find interesting in some respect to, to your life in some way. So those are the things I look for in this. There’s so many great things out there that you can gather, but I try to gather myself, I try to really find things that happened to me that I can apply to other people, because I think a lot of them are just overlooked a lot of times and you know, one of the things I mentioned Dave is talking about being unique and different special. The other thing that I think really attracted people to us to come work for us is that we weren’t afraid to try things that no one else was doing. For example, we we started incorporating the Jitterbug phone in our hearing aid practices 1015 1012 years ago, where we actually had we sold the Jitterbug cell phone in our offices that were track an older adult into the office that we can talk to about hearing here. You know, I had a partner in that business, we know it’s been 1400 locations across the country, outside the box thinking, you know, a vertical, I was involved in the 3d laser scanning company 3d systems, which gets sold to resound and get sold again. But ear scanning unique different something that you can capitalize on. We were the first company in United States that started selling, distributing or making available caption call phones, in our offices with caption called no one really incorporated them into hearing in office, we, we when they allowed marketing of that we were the first of its kind to kind of do stuff like that. And then trying to apply, you know, some of the AI technology that’s available today to really look at your data. That’s one of the things that you know, Brian, who I sold my business to, he is a brilliant guy. And one of the things that he really is fantastic with is looking at data and applying it to what we can do to make our businesses better. So we found really some very interesting points in some of our data and, and then layered it with some other outside things to kind of help with our marketing and advertising and stuff like that. And then we even incorporated put robots in our offices. So we had these beam robots, which we use as front office assistants, we had three of them, and we’d shipped them to different so if someone’s going to be away for a week, we’d have any PCC in that office, we’d shipped this robot that was on wheels that have screen to that office, and that office robot would become the front office assistant assistant clinic and run it. And that wouldn’t interrupt the hearing care professional in the room. Every time someone opened the door, the robot would talk to the person interact with them. And it was someone else’s face at PCC from. So we did all these out of box thinking to do things but people who work for us thought it was just tremendous and thought it was different. And they loved it. So you know, I really stressed to anyone out there who is trying to grow the business, find things that are unique, that are different than other people haven’t thought of. And incorporate your people into some of the thinking with along the same lines and get them thinking about it because they’ll think about it for the company rather than than themselves. Are you thinking about it yourself? The thinking about it on a larger scale? How can I make the company better? And I think that’s something that’s really important these days.
Dave Kemp
Yeah, couldn’t agree more. So with the you know, kind of thinking back on your career up to this point, I I’m knowing that there’s probably some people listening to this that just have a lot of career left in them. And a lot of they’re probably going to fail and learn a lot, just like you did. What are some lessons that you’ve learned, that really stick out in your mind? As a business owner, as an entrepreneur, as somebody that’s just operated in this industry for as long as you have? You know, what, what kind of comes to mind with, with maybe some things that others could avoid? If they were to just kind of if you could impart that wisdom upon them?
Mike Andreozzi
Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say the number one thing that comes to my mind is just what your your God given abilities are, as far as what you think you can do with your practice, if you’re a practice owner, and you have one or two or three locations, what have you. And you have the ambition to open a large scale organization with, you know, 10, or 15, or 20. offices, you have to beat Mickey, you have to look in the mirror closely. And really understand what abilities you have, as it relates to, you know, multitasking about how you are with people skills, and people persons and problem solving. The number one thing is how good of a problem solver you are, and not being reactionary. And I think I see it too often and too many people that people think they’re good problem solvers, but they’re, you know, a lot of times they cause a, you know, a whole steer of things that occur and ends up messing up the environment and the people that working with you. So that’s, that’s a big one. But you need to be able to have the ability to really rate how much of a person you are to be able to do something like one of the things that you and I talked about a while ago was that, you know, I have this kind of crazy God given ability, if I meet somebody in the hearing aid space, and I spend 10 minutes with them, a number appears in my head over on their forehead. And that number is basically how many offices I think they can operate successfully in the hearing aid space, and be good at it. And you know, there’s numbers that go start at one don’t go past one. And there’s others that can go to, you know, 2550 or 100, depending on the person, it takes us first special person so so I’d say make sure that you know what your abilities are. Because I think today, a lot of manufacturers will give you the money to grow your business at a large scale. But what good is that a failure if you’re setting yourself up for failure, and I know too many people have done that. So you have to make sure that you are you have the abilities to try to get on a Sunday, you have the abilities to be able to be that person that can do it at a larger scale, then you just have to understand the people you surround yourself with. Because in order to do anything, at a larger scale, you definitely have to have great people around you that think like you that may be smarter than you. In most cases they should be they have skill sets that you don’t possess, because I know someone like me and entrepreneurial mind is a lot of you guys out there right now and girls out there have this entrepreneurial mind, you don’t like the details, sometimes, sometimes you just like the visionary thinking that goes along with it, well, the details are important, you have to have a mix of that. Or you have to have someone by your side that can fill in those blanks to make sure that you can, you know you don’t bankrupt the company in a year, you have to be able to balance things out quickly. The other thing is I think you have to you have to find what things within people what skill sets people have, that you can really kind of hitch your wagon to. So you might meet some people within your organization that you kind of had, you know, I would say segmented for something within your group, then you find out that’s really not what they’re best at. But they can do something else a little bit different, or a lot much larger scale and better, didn’t find a way to incorporate that into what they’re doing. Because that’s going to make them more excited, make them more comfortable and make you more successful for sure. The other thing is just having a vision for anything you do. And so when you want to start a business within this profession and get it logic, you need to have a mission statement for what you’re doing. You need to have kind of develop a what I like to call an operating system we we had built a New England and North Carolina and Florida, New York and all the different areas we had, we use something called the EOS Entrepreneurial Operating System. And that was a book that was Brian stone and read by a gentleman called Gino Whitman. And that book was really a catalyst to to our business because we were growing, growing, growing. And then we came flat for a while and we couldn’t seem to get off that plateau. Well after we got involved in the Entrepreneurial Operating System, that we brought an outside consultant in who was part of this whole thing. And he worked with us for few years and really identified strengths and weaknesses within our organization and try to find a way for us to get up to it. And after that period, we grew again at a large scale. So making sure you design an operating system for your business that has you know, ability to scale up and getting to get larger in some respects as well. And then just the other thing is just being able to be good at recognizing what’s people and understanding what’s good. And some people, I think that’s a lost art form. Dave, today, I was
Dave Kemp
gonna say that the thing that kind of like really resonates throughout all of that, is people. And I think that, you know, one of the things that I really took away from AAA, like, there were two big macro themes that seem to kind of be in every discussion, one was TPAs, you know, third party insurance, that’s just a giant elephant in the room. But the other is staffing. And I think that, you know, and it’s all different types, you know, it’s from audiologists, to hearing instrument specialists to front office staff, there’s just a shortage, you know, and it’s like, I think that people are really struggling with this. And it, you know, throughout this whole conversation, this is kind of something that’s just been lingering in the back of my mind, which is, people are so important in both finding the right types of people, and then identifying what those people should be doing in focusing on that, so that you’re not necessarily, you know, putting them in a role that they’re not really well suited for, or you’re not giving people the opportunity to elevate. Because I think that that’s probably a solution to a lot of people’s challenges is that you need to grow and cultivate, you know, your own workers in a way that they can, you can upskill them, because it’s so hard to find people today, it seems like that are that are good workers, and are suited to do the kinds of things that I think a lot of people are looking for. So, again, I think it just totally reinforces this notion of you got to have a really good company culture, you got to create a place that people feel like they’re part of a broader mission. It’s not just about themselves, and how do you foster that kind of environment. I just feel as if everything that you’ve said and talked about throughout this whole conversation resonates more than ever today, when it’s, you know, we’re kind of living in a time now, where we don’t have the luxury where there’s, you know, all of this labor readily available, I think people are really challenged with that. And so I think that this is a lot of what you’ve been talking about, you know, even though it might seem sort of just like, you know, Oh, of course, that’s common knowledge, I need to make sure that I hired the right people. And I need to make sure that I’m cultivating leadership and all that it’s, I think, way, way harder,
Mike Andreozzi
gone than this. It is you know, and I think what’s interesting, one of the things that I would say was a very impactful fight finding that we’ve had in the last few years and bring bringing people on, within within the hearing profession, for example, when you want to bring on some new hearing care practitioners, you know, obviously, the audiologists are out there, and there’s some great ones, but there’s not enough for them coming into the field to satisfy the growth of the industry. So the AUD things really kind of is funneled it to a point where it’s just challenging. So hearing care professionals are is really the largest growing aspect of the field. I knew I’m on the incoming president’s international Hearing Aid Society, I’m really passionate about what we do at IHS and one of the things is how do we grow that? How do we bring more people in and I know from my own business standpoint, is that because we could not bring people who are licensed within the field, we had to bring it from the outside in. We were really successful with people from the cell phone industry, because they had a tremendous experience with dealing with customer service. We were really successful with people who work for enterprise rent a car, for example, who had that really great management training, and it was a you know, it was a b2c kind of thing, which was really good. We we did not do well find people in the pharmaceutical industry, for example, I’ll tell you why. You know, you have a lot of people who were getting laid off from pharmaceutical jobs who were high end professionals, who had a lot of experience, but they’re always b2b. They were always dealing with the owner of you know, doctor, they were representing a pharmaceutical company or medical device company, and they were dealing with the owner of that of the, of the practice, what have you, when you had a deal, when we put those people in front of consumers, they were never very good at it. Now, there’s exceptions to that rule. I’m gonna say that, okay. But the vast majority was not successful for us. Those folks ended up being more in the manufacturing side, doing b2b kind of thing. So, so when you’re looking for people, look for people who have great customer, customer service skills. We’ve had some, some of our best people have been people who waited on me in a restaurant, who are great servers who just, they were part of my story on Thursday about hey, I met this person, she blew me away. She was so good or attention to detail. And that person came to work for us and has been for a while. We got a number of those stories. So find people who are great at the customer service side of it, then you have to obviously make sure that they can do the skills that are presented with a haircare practitioner, because that’s a whole nother skill set. But making sure you don’t cut any corners when you’re training people. I know, in our business in New England, we had our own built on university training program that was six weeks of classroom, which was a long period, and then they would, you know, feather into mentoring and mirroring people and stuff like that. So it was a long time long process took them months before they get set for license, but we really train them very, very well. We set themselves up for, for success versus some of the people out there, hire someone, train them for a week and put him out. He can’t do that this, this business is much more technical, and much more skill set related than that. But again, I think identifying people who have great people skills in our profession, our industry, dealing with mostly older adults, who really like to sit down interact with you who need compassion, and hand holding, a lot of times, look for those people that have those skill sets. That’s really the key to it. And I think you’ll have some success with it. And another thing about about AAA, because I was just there in Seattle, and obviously I saw you out there, it was so interesting to see, you know, the over the counter hearing aid folks that are trying to enter the space, most of them from Asia. In the last conference we just had, there was a area that just had a lot of Asian influence of manufacturers. And it was interesting for me to see that really, very few people from who were in the hearing profession would do this long time had any interest in going up and talking to which was really funny. Because, you know, we really, there’s OTC devices available that we have ability to get in OTC really hasn’t moved the needle in our industry, it’s it’s been a great public relations type thing to make people more aware of hearing loss. But at the end of the day, professional care is still really the most important thing, there will be people that obviously buy those devices, and that will continue, but having professional care. So I honestly I thought it was kind of interesting to see just kind of looking from afar, what happened with that? I’m sure you kind of noticed the same thing.
Dave Kemp
Yeah, you know, I think it’s, like I alluded to earlier, I think the much, much more relevant conversation that’s actually being had is around the third party insurance. You know, vendors is, at least in this channel, you know, OTC might end up being successful in the more direct to consumer channels may be big box, I’m hearing rumblings of people trying to, you know, get into the pharmacy area and stuff like that. But within the professional channel, I just think that it’s not fully thought out. Because I don’t, I think that the professional looks at it and says, Okay, wait, you know, your, it just feels very much like you’re trying to fit a square peg in a round hole where you have, you already have like, types of devices that exist that are prescription hearing aids that are roughly around the same acquisition cost as an OTC device. So it just as semantics and how you label it, it’s over the counter versus a low end prescription hearing aid. And the thing that really stands out to me that like as time has gone on is, you know, there will probably be a self serve market to do it yourself market. I don’t really question that I actually, I encouraged that, I hope that happens, because I think that would actually grow the funnel. But I think it’s becoming abundantly clear that the vast majority of people in the in really the true value isn’t the widget, it’s the person, it’s just like you said, you know, you’re talking about largely a generation that sort of comes from a time where it’s all interpersonal skills they want you to know, I mean, the thing that like really resonates throughout this conversation is the story about your dad, having a Rolodex, and he’s got little, you know, notes about the different types of recipes that he should be making for those people. I mean, if that’s, if you can take that to heart, like, that’s how you will succeed. And this is a word of mouth business, people are going to come away from that and say, wow, like, this person really impressed me and amazed me, and I’m gonna go and tell all my friends and vice versa, if it’s the opposite, you’re gonna say this thing sucked. I had a horrible experience. And so I just look at this. And I say, I think that at the heart of everything is people in the people skills and being able to create an experience that wow people and makes them feel that they are heard, because so much of this is they just want to be able to describe what’s going on with themselves. And they want that sounding board that I think that the hearing professional provides. And that’s why I think that, you know, I’ve seen the numbers in the workforce data that like, you know, Imean and Lonnie and Victor Bray have put out where it shows this giant spike in the hearing instrument specialists, the hearing instrument specialists, the audiologist, and the audiology assistants like these should all be working in concert in simpatico they all complement each other beautifully. They’re not each other’s enemies. And so I think that if this, I think that if this industry can kind of rally together and figure out how do we all sort of like play a part here, because there’s so many people that need this kind of help, and I’m not really sure if the solution is just, I’m gonna just give people lower cost widgets, because that already exists. I think what we need is more points of access to make this person to person experience more readily available.
Mike Andreozzi
Couldn’t agree more. And, you know, you mentioned, you know, how this integrates into pharmacy and how some of the, you know, some of the direction might be going in that way? Well, listen, the training in pharmacy right now, in pharmacy, and hearing aids has been around for awhile, you know, I have personal experience in it, you know, probably 10 years ago, we open 35, CVS, hearing the locations, in five months, we built these tiny six foot carts that would you know, there was like a hearing, you know, it was like a bathroom for an airplane, we built a audiology clinic that we’re rolling into, in front of the Hallmark card section of a CVS store. And we could see patients, you know, with in privacy, which was pretty amazing if I showed you to picture this thing. But we sold a fair amount of hearing aids, a lot of hearing aids at regular retail prices, in CVS stores with a licensed professional doing doing the testing, they know obviously, that’s going to continue because they got a little gradient on their commissions and what they should take for rent. But the reality is that they want to open their own stores, they’ve put now put OTC behind glass, or you know, an 800 number, whether it’s Walgreens or CVS, they’re not moving many products at all very, very few products. And it’s not, it’s because it definitely still need someone to kind of orchestrate the whole experience in some way. And kind of bridge that gap. Because we’re not at the point yet that hearing aids are sexy, and people want them, they’re less of a handicap which is great, which is really, really great. But they’re not people are not spending eight $9. at a CVS when the average dollar amount of catridge is like $16.75, it’s just not going to happen at that level. So some of the companies, whether you’re BestBuy or some of these other companies that might have a professional that can at least guide people is gonna have a better opportunity with it. And I agree with you, I think that there’ll be a space for this at a large scale for people to you know, obviously do it. But for the vast majority of the folks that have been taken care of today, and I can tell you this, from talking to a lot of patients in our offices, they just don’t believe that can be that easy. They just don’t. So the patients who have come in and I’ve seen all the OTC commercials and direct to consumer commercials, really, how can they do that use you see me every three or four or five months, you have to take the wax out, you have to clean it, you have to readjust it, how can I do that on my own. So again, there’s there’s gonna be a place for some of that. But the vast majority of folks realize that its cure to aftercare, it’s a relationship. And as you said about my dad, those relationships go so deep. And when you touch someone and show them you care so much, they will tell so many friends, it’s amazing. It’s it really is when you do the right things and, and everybody has the ability to do that. And you can’t make it fake, you got to make it real. You got to it’s got to come from your heart and you really got to do it. I’m not telling you we learn how to go and take a break. Do something special for people remember Roy Bain years ago, used to we did open houses with him he used to make us go to you nursery and bio these little plants and every person that came in left with a plant? Well, it was just a simple little thing. And those plants would stay in their house and the plants got bigger. And they would think of you hearing it office when that plank up there. All those little things mean something, you know, you just have to find what it is the niche that kind of that really is your fingerprint and your touch and your marketplace that makes you unique and and that’s that’s the fun of this business. You’re using your entrepreneurial spirit to get you there and everybody possesses it.
Dave Kemp
This is great. I really appreciate this conversation to kind of wrap up. You know, let’s just dive in real quick. Where do you sort of see this industry? From your perspective moving across the next call it like three to five years? What do you think are going to be the big opportunities? What are the big challenges from the way that you see things?
Mike Andreozzi
Yeah, I see the industry growing. I think OTC is still going to grow with it. It’s a certain degree will have a certain percentage of the of the business. But I think I think lodge lodge practices will continue to kind of own the share in the marketplace. So I think there’ll be some more consolidation within the retail sector. I think the retailers will get smarter and how to run their businesses. As we mentioned earlier, I think the technology will continue to get stronger as well. I think there’ll be one of the players and the retail manufacturing that will develop the book Just to do some kind of national advertising marketing campaign campaign, that will put them in front of the rest of the folks, I think that’s what’s really missing these days. For for household brand name to really distinguish yourself within the space. There’s enough locations out there, that will happen. I think the number one thing, as you mentioned a couple times earlier is that HPMC hearing benefit managers are TPAs. They are the biggest effects and biggest focus that is occurring within and maybe the biggest disruptor, if you will, within the place OTC is nothing compared to the TPAs in each PMS, because they are shaping the way that the hearing field is having to dispense the products, and also affect the margins and how we do business. And that’s really affecting the business marketplace, you have practices that have decided to be completely Bo Tiki that do not take any of those H PMS. And there’s others that do 100% of it, and still make a pretty good living. The question to you and to the listeners out there is what percentage of MCs a you’re going to have in your practice to be successful. And I have my own philosophies on where that should be. But that’s going to be the big piece in the next three to five years. In my opinion, the number one thing would be how do you manage the managed care piece of it? Because that’s what’s really kind of affected us the most more recently.
Dave Kemp
Absolutely couldn’t agree more with that. I think that it’s a you know, we kind of talked a little bit about it when we were out in Seattle is I think that it is kind of a business model issue that will have to be solved. I mean, the way I’ve sort of thought about this spaces, you know, we’re kind of currently, or kind of the old status quo was low volume patients high margin product. And I think that with the three pas that kind of flips, it turns into more patients like but a depreciated profit margin, which to me doesn’t necessarily mean anything more than we need to just, I think that people need to figure out, how do you make a practice conducive to seeing more people knowing that your ROI for a patient is less, but you also need to factor in that, whether you feel that those are your patients, and that they’ve came in your door through your marketing. The fact of the matter is, there is definitely some depreciation of the customer acquisition cost as well. So you’re not spending as much most likely to bring these people in. But I just I know that these are, they’re all so variable based upon where you live the kinds of insurance that exists. But to me, it seems as if the insurance piece isn’t going away, you know, we talked about the silver tsunami and the baby boomers that are moving into retirement and moving into Medicare, that’s going to be huge. And it’s like all of those people are going to become eligible for Medicare, and therefore they’re going to if Medicare has a hearing benefit, like it does today, a lot of people are going to be using that. And so I think that’s what we got to think through the numbers don’t
Mike Andreozzi
lie, you got about 52% of the people who are 65 on a Medicare Advantage Program. And of those 52% of the people over 65 on a Medicare Advantage program, about 98% of them have a hearing aid benefit attached to their Medicare Advantage Program. And the Medicare Advantage programs is going to hit 65 70%. Before you know it in the next few years. So then that means all of those people have a Medicare Advantage benefit to the hearing aids. And they’re going to be looking first to that versus you know, pursuing a marketing item that’s directly sent to them or electronically sent to them about pursuing hearing. And you’re always going to want to find out what that is, at the lowest cost possible. The problem is, and this is something that was instilled in me as a young person from my father said, he said, Michael, you know, we need to treat everyone exactly the same way who needs a hearing aid. And that was instilled in me my whole life. And that didn’t change until recently. And I hate to admit it, but it’s because of the way these new programs exist. Because you can’t afford in your practice to give the same amount of time to a Medicare Advantage third party payment fee for service model patient than you can with someone’s a private pay because you’re getting 60 545 $600 per year as a fitting fee to fit that hearing into the patient. You have and then you get they get three allotted service checkup visits in that first year. That is a whole different philosophy on how you run your business versus a higher margin, low volume play like you mentioned earlier. So you have to really dictate where you want your business wants to be. And I tell you late night after 11 o’clock at hearing the convention, that’s when you learn the most about the industry. Right dad told me that when I was a kid, it’s true. until the wee hours of the morning, one two in the morning. That’s when you learn the most about the hearing industry. And these were these deep rooted discussions about managed care and TPAs come about and philosophies on it. in it. There’s no simple solution but the It’s more of a philosophy, how you’re in practice. And I know, I know some real successful people who don’t take any of this stuff at all, and just run a private practice that is more of a boutique e higher in practice. And they do remarkably well. They just stay away from it. And then people are attracted to their practice in a certain way. And others think they have about GP practice, but they really don’t. So it’s really against back to looking yourself in the mirror, understanding what Yeah, and having someone maybe advise you on it, because sometimes you blinders are up, you just don’t see it in your own practice. And you need someone to kind of tell you,
Dave Kemp
which is, I think, a testament to someone like you that you’ve always been very approachable and forthcoming with your own wisdom that you’ve gained. You know, as a young person in this industry, I’ve always really appreciated that, that you’re willing to engage with someone like me and say, here’s what I’ve learned. And here’s how I’m thinking about something like this, because to your point, you know, I don’t even own a practice or anything like that. But it can be lonely in the sense that everybody is sort of heads down working on their own thing. And so I think that one of the things that really I’ve mentioned this before on the podcast a bunch, but the thing that I gets me really excited about kind of the time that we live in today is there’s a lot of collaboration that’s going on right now, there’s a lot of dialogue that are in these kind of new channels that I think are really exciting. So last question. You mentioned you do the meatball reviews, best meatballs that you’ve had around the world. And you can’t say your dad’s or something like that. That’s
Mike Andreozzi
no, that’s cheating. You know, it’s funny. It’s a place you wouldn’t expect because I’ve had some great ones in Boston and New York and Rhode Island. Rhode Island is a mecca of food. There’s a restaurant in Rhode Island called Camille’s restaurant of Federal Hill, which is it’s a nine something 9.456 Incredible meatballs really great. But the best people ever had. It’s kind of funny. I was in San Diego, California. I was with Ron and Roy bang. And we went to this restaurant called The Godfather restaurant, which literally had red velvet on the walls. There was a guy playing the organ. When when I walked in, I thought I was gonna get whacked or something. We ate dinner there and the meatball was on believable. So I have to say that was probably that was the best meat I’ve ever had. And I it was a place I didn’t expect it the most. So anyways, that’s the best one. But there’s a lot of other great ones that are out there. But thanks for asking, Dave. I appreciate that.
Dave Kemp
That’s fantastic, Mike. Well, thank you so much for coming on today. Thanks for everybody who tuned in here to the end. We will chat with you next time. Cheers. Thank you
