DSOPro: How did you get into dentistry?
I knew from an early age I wanted to be a dentist. Then, before I went to undergrad, I interviewed a bunch of dentists and asked, “If you could do undergrad differently, what would you do?” And pretty much all of them answered that they wished they had studied business. I took their advice, and I was a business major along with my pre-dental pre-reqs.
It was during my time in undergrad I realized I was more passionate about entrepreneurship. I love building. I love helping find solutions to problems. So, I decided to forgo dental school, learned a lot about dental industry consolidation and the DSO industry, and while I was still in my undergraduate program, found a dentist partner and together we started a DSO in Denver, Colorado.
We grew that group to five locations in 2 years. Admittedly, we grew faster than we should have. At that point, out of both need and want, we decided to sell our five-location group in Denver.
I teamed up with a new partner in a DSO based out of New York City. With his skillset of culture and relationship and my skill set of processes and technology, we were able to successfully scale that organization to just shy of $30 million in revenue.
During that time, we were building a lot of internal tools to use for our organization. That’s when I realized that technology is my true passion. I thought, “I’m building these tools to solve problems for my organization. What if I made this my full-time thing and built tools that solved problems for the industry?”
So, in March 2022, I transitioned out of my role as COO at Underbite Management and went full time starting Unify.
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DSOPro: Tell us about Unify.
One of the issues I experienced as a COO and CEO of DSOs was that often people, including myself, would purchase new software tools with the hope that they were going to magically solve all their problems. However, it was incredible how something as simple as a new website to remember or a new username and password for logging in created a barrier to helping this software work well from day one. Many times, these simple problems such as the URL and the login credentials would cause the software to be rejected by the team and the software wouldn’t fix the problem it was intended to solve.
One of the things we are solving with Unify is this dilemma of having all these disparate tools that don’t communicate. We have created a central platform where your team can access all the different websites, apps, softwares, everything they need to do their job all within one place. Your team can’t remember what the website was for that one tool, or their login is for a different tool. Sometimes login information needs to be shared with other team members, so they put it on a company accessible Google sheet. When you hire a new team member, do you remember to assign them to all the 20+ different apps, websites, softwares, etc., they should have access to?
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DSOPro: What are some of Unify’s features?
Some of the features include password management, password accuracy detection and updating, app access management, etc. We are the central solution to help DSOs manage access to all the different platforms their company uses.
DSOPro: What types of apps can Unify access?
Right now, our customers can access anything that is web based through Unify. This includes products such as Dentira, Henry Schein ordering websites, insurance web portals, as well as non-dental things like your HR or task management software, such as Asana, Slack, or your email. Anything you access online through your browser and use a username and password for can be stored on your Unify and shared.
DSOPro: Is Unify available yet?
We are currently available in a private, invite-only beta. We are always looking for more early adopters willing to work with us and give us feedback. We want the product to be perfect for our customers and build actively to get to that point. However, right now we are working with the most tech-forward DSOs and people.
If you consider your organization to be very tech forward and would like to be a part of the exclusive Unify beta, please request beta access on our Unify website.
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More from the Newsletter
Over the past decade, Tanner Applegate has built and operated multiple award-winning DSOs. The key to his success has been his experience and passion around technology and process simplification. Tanner has spoken on many stages about how he and his DSOs leveraged technology to achieve efficiencies and automation that is unreplicated in very few, if any, other DSOs.
Unify
Due to the pain that Tanner felt while trying to grow his DSO in an industry where all softwares in a DSO’s tech stack were siloed, Tanner set out in April 2022 to build Unify. Unify’s main goal is to allow dental offices and DSOs to automate and streamline their workflows across software platforms that don’t communicate. That way, thanks to Unify, the feeling of “Oh no...not ANOTHER software!” will become a thing of the past!