[00:00:00 - 00:04:19]

Will Smith: Funny to hear that today's guest didn't really think of herself as an entrepreneur earlier in her career because she seems like a natural Gail Azodo developed a thesis around audiology practices. The audiology space shares characteristics with other industries where PE has had success, like optical and dental, but there isn't such PE interest in this industry for now. Gail's attraction to audiology is not the financial opportunity alone. When Gail went on site to shadow an audiologist whose practice was for sale, she witnessed a patient, an older gentleman, be dragged in kicking and screaming by his frustrated wife to get a hearing test.

Of course his hearing was bad and.

When the doctor put the hearing aid in, the man breaks down in tears, overwhelmed by the clarity with which he could now hear.

Gail was sold and also cried. There are a lot of key details.

In today's interview with Gail. Listen for the model that she's using to buy these practices, a model that allows her to acquire them without putting in any of her own money.

She's bought her way to over 4 million of revenue across six practices and she hasn't put in a dollar. You'll hear how Gail inverts the conventional wisdom on buying businesses and that the closer the better. Gail requires that the practices she buys be far enough away that she has to fly to visit them. You'll learn what an MSO is, which is a structure that you often see in roll ups of medical practice type businesses. And of course we dive deep into.

The audiology industry itself, its economics, its.

Power to change lives. A fascinating take on entrepreneurship through acquisition with Gail Hamilton-Azodo

Please enjoy.

We talk a lot about SBA loans in our world, but of course there exist other sources of debt for buying a business.

Today, Thursday, November 13th, attorneys James David Williams and Bill Barlow return for an Office hours webinar and the topic is debt financing for both SBA and non SBA deals. They'll be joined by guest Adam Steiner, who represents both banks and borrowers on SBA and non SBA deals. Bill, James, David and Adam will go over the latest SBA rule changes as well as what's different about borrowing from SBA and non SBA sources and how searchers and independent sponsors should navigate that process. That is today, Thursday, November 13, noon Eastern. Link to register for the webinar is right at the top of this episode's show notes or on the Acquiring Minds homepage.

Acquiringminds Co.

Welcome to Acquiring Minds, a podcast about buying businesses. My name is Will Smith. Acquiring an existing business is an awesome.

Opportunity for many entrepreneurs and on this podcast I talk to the people who do it.

The team at Aspen HR recently published a short white paper targeted at searchers Entitled A New CEO's Guide to Human Resources.

It lays out the key items you should be thinking about as you transition into CEO and owner of the business you bought.

The link to download it is in the show notes.

Aspen is a professional employer organization or peo, run by a searcher for searchers. Search fund veteran Mark Sinatra runs the.

Company, which provides HR compliance, flawless payroll.

Fortune 500 caliber benefits and HR due diligence support for your acquisition, all for.

A fraction of the cost.

Go to aspenhr.com or contact Mark directly.

At markspenhr.com Gail Hamilton Azzotto welcome to Acquiring Minds.

[00:04:20 - 00:04:21]

Gail Azodo: Thank you for having me.

[00:04:21 - 00:04:49]

Will Smith: Will Gail, this is a new one. You're buying audiology practices and you've got an interesting structure for doing so, one.

That means that you've come out of pocket very little to acquire your way.

Up to mid seven figures in revenue.

We're going to learn all about this, what I consider a very intriguing model of entrepreneurship through acquisition.

Some background on you first, if you would please.

[00:04:49 - 00:05:57]

Gail Azodo: Gail well, thank you for having me again on the show. I am a fan and obviously I'm thankful to being introduced to you and whatnot from Bruce who's been on your show a couple of times. A little bit of background on me is I guess got here because I do know Bruce. I went to University of Virginia with him, Darden for graduate school.

Did not necessarily have the path to entrepreneurship at that point. This is now 13 years ago. I was a typical MBA student but looking to go into CPG and which I did. And so my background is heavily in brand marketing and cpg. Prior to that it was in finance.

I worked in finance across different organizations, knew I was going to B school to have a career switch and I was adamant that I was going to be in the world of advertising and marketing and of course at the largest that company that would do that and that was Procter and Gamble. And so that's that's essentially where everything started for me. And recognizing that a lot less advertising, marketing, all that fun stuff that I thought I was going to do because a finance career was pretty boring and more P and L management is what I spent most of my time there doing.

[00:05:57 - 00:06:22]

Will Smith: And business school grads will probably know but maybe not everybody will know that Proctor and Gamble is really a storied institution for brand for product owners and brand owners, brand builders. It's if that's where you want to be kind of in consumer brand for your career.

Procter and Gamble is the place to launch such a career.

[00:06:22 - 00:06:23]

Gail Azodo: Right? It's a.

[00:06:23 - 00:06:23]

Will Smith: More.

[00:06:23 - 00:07:58]

Gail Azodo: Yeah, yeah.

It definitely. It's a premier institution for that. Across. I think B school people know that globally, I think is probably what the biggest aspect about Procter and Gamble is. It's not just an American company.

It's globally known as the company for the largest and the biggest brands in each of the categories right there across laundry, feminine care, household project, product, products. I think the general understanding is everything that's not inside the aisle. So like everything that's inside of the aisles is what is a Proctor and Gamble product somewhere or another. Whether it's Tide, Teardrop era, always Tampax, Bounty, all those aspects, Febreze. And so I knew that going into business school, if I wanted to go into marketing and brand management and at least have those credentials for whatever I was going to do next, it should be with a company that kind of wrote the book on that.

And at the time, and even further now, had been around for over 100 years. And so to be recruited into an organization like that, I feel like was an honor for. At least for me. Um, but I was very intentional. I really focused my recruiting around.

This is what I was going to do. I wasn't kind of going to consulting like a lot of probably my peers were doing at the time. You know, BCG, Bain, BCB, BCG, Bain, McKinsey. Those were the big ones. I was, I was very clear, like, I'm going to Cincinnati, Ohio.

I'm not going to the, you know, the Mid Atlantic or the Northeast. I'm going to Cincinnati, Ohio. And it worked. I ended up in first and feminine care and then in fabric care, which were great organizations and truly, like I said earlier, put me behind the scenes of like, this is not just like ads and the fun stuff that you see. This is P and L management.

And each of these brands are worth over a billion dollars.

[00:07:59 - 00:08:01]

Will Smith: And what brands were you involved in? Can you name them?

[00:08:01 - 00:08:20]

Gail Azodo: Yeah. So I started off on Tampex always and then went into Downey, the Fabricare business.

And then by the time I left, the organization was to move into soap, which is, you know, probably one of their bigger. The bigger size of what people know P and G does, whether it be soap that use in the bathroom or soap that you use in the laundry world.

[00:08:21 - 00:09:06]

Will Smith: Fascinating. Yeah, you. There's just been a conversation in a couple of my interviews recently about where business school, where MBAs are applying these Days.

And you know, historically like you said, the big consulting names, investment banking, maybe private equity at one time, the big tech companies, venture backed startups and apparently at GSP at Stanford, the most popular position among the NBA is coming out is at Alpine. They're like, I don't know what the name of the title is, but the CEO and residents basically run one of their acquired platform businesses, many of which are kind of sweaty blue collar businesses. So it's pretty fascinating.

[00:09:06 - 00:10:08]

Gail Azodo: Yeah, well, now that you're saying it, it feels kind of like although I'm here and we'll talk more about like what I do now, but it probably in a sense is like its own version of like eta but of somebody else's brands. Right.

You are running each business at PNG runs independently. Right. And you have to manage somebody else's business. Mind you, they're worth probably more than the blue collar brands that people you know, go in. But I think it's a very, maybe that's the kind of for me the why it made sense.

I was like, you know what, I do this for somebody else, I can probably do it for myself. Which kind of like the aha moment I had later on, but definitely now hearing you like talk about it, that that is what P and G, at least when I was there and I understand still now that's kind of when you go in there, that's what's happening. You are, here's your brand. I mean at the time we didn't have all the fancy tools. I mean we had Excel and like, here's your spreadsheet, here's how much it needs to make each quarter, each week.

And you know, here's what needs to sell at each one of these retailers and here's the budget, the advertising and you're tracking roi. So really honestly, probably the basics of what I do now then 13 years ago.

[00:10:10 - 00:10:32]

Will Smith: Well, Gail, we're getting a picture of a very intentional person, somebody who sets their mind to a goal and then pursues it with single minded focus. We're going to see more of that as the conversation goes. Okay, you said an aha moment I think happened at P and G that led you to where you are now.

Connect the dots.

[00:10:32 - 00:11:25]

Gail Azodo: Well, I think two aha moments happened. One had to do with place of like living and settling down, a climate. And I, although I was adamant that I was going to go to Cincinnati, Ohio and I thought that I would just be like completely like, you know, taken away with this like storybook career and you know, and this perfect place, I Did not enjoy the Midwest as much as maybe I thought I was going to, or particularly Cincinnati. I'd lived, obviously, in other places.

I was at University of Virginia. I lived abroad at some point. But something I'm originally. What's important to know is I'm originally from Miami, Florida. And at that time, I hadn't lived there for 14 years.

I would travel a lot, back and forth. Anytime I got a break. I had a lot of friends there. And it's always a good reason when you work somewhere, go to school somewhere, other people always like, oh, you're from Miami, like, want to take a trip? So I often was in Miami, but I didn't realize.

I think that was like a year of like the polar vortex was probably. I think it was like 2013.

[00:11:25 - 00:11:25]

Will Smith: Yeah.

[00:11:25 - 00:11:57]

Gail Azodo: Yes. I'm dating myself, but that's, you know, and I was like, this is like, bad, bad, and this will keep happening.

And so that was one thing, a realization that for me, I am very seasonally affected by weather more than I thought I would. And that was probably. Probably one of the worst winters, although I was living at the time already in the Northeast prior to that. And then the second was I was running somebody else's business. And I've told my husband this, and I tell people that are very close to me this.

And I would say this is. I knew that I didn't want to be the CEO of somebody else's company very early on.

[00:11:58 - 00:11:58]

Will Smith: Okay.

[00:11:58 - 00:12:00]

Gail Azodo: I just, I knew that it was.

[00:12:00 - 00:12:22]

Will Smith: Well, what's interesting, Gail, is that you.

It sounds like you envisioned being working in. In kind of in corporate, and you went to. You went to Darden with the idea that you would do that. So you're not somebody who necessarily, correct me if I'm wrong, is thought of herself as an entrepreneur or had entrepreneur leanings earlier.

[00:12:22 - 00:12:23]

Gail Azodo: But no.

[00:12:23 - 00:12:27]

Will Smith: Yeah, but then. But that. But then they come. They hit you kind of pretty strong, it sounds like, all of a sudden.

[00:12:27 - 00:13:44]

Gail Azodo: Yeah.

Because you're. You're one of like 20,000 employees globally. And then I thought to myself, well, to become the one. Right. Like, this doesn't make sense.

Not for me, at least. Right. Like how, how. And it was the good thing, or some of the same driving points that brought me to P and G was that it was a promote from within organization, so it would have to be one of the. One of us, the 20,000 people.

But then I looked around, I was like, this is. I'm not going to be the one. There was just a lot of things, you know, that this company had been around for over a hundred years. These are like rules and protocols and the way that systems and the way that they do things that I don't feel like I want to, you know, or could affect or that I wanted to participate in. So I knew that about very strongly there.

And even when I went left P and G and went to the next organization, I knew pretty strongly there as well. Like I was not going to want to run somebody else's company because there were things that I wanted to do my way. And something that also happened was I realized that I wanted to be able to employ people and support households truly and honestly. And so a lot of the way that I expand and think about methodically is how do I ensure that we are that consistent person or that our business they can consistently depend on.

[00:13:44 - 00:13:46]

Will Smith: What is that about?

That. That. Why say more?

[00:13:47 - 00:15:13]

Gail Azodo: Yeah, so I think it's. For me, it is definitely.

I don't know, people say it's their calling. You know, for me, I'm a Christian. I'm very like religious based in that stuff. It's. I know that my purpose here is to affect households in the way that they can feel like they're working for a company that will be there and through what they need.

I've seen that directly, without even putting that into a lot of things into place where people have had hardship that work for us, and they have directly commented that if I didn't work here, I don't know how I would have went through this. And so a lot of it is built up in how we structure our companies, how we structure even our healthcare plans for being a small business, quote, unquote. I think about all the things that people need to solve for without feeling like it's a burden. And so I feel just called to do that. Thankfully, you know, throughout my years at P and G and then even my other organization and investments that I've made, I know that I can always solve for myself.

So a lot of what I do in building the company is for others. It's for our employees, it's for my goal of being, you know, expanding. And we'll talk about that. But it's really the fact that I know that I can always solve for myself, but to be able to be a resource for other people in their careers, their passions, what they want, if it aligns with my company. So that is really the driving base of even any expansion of how we think about is making sure that people are sustainably employed, running payroll, paying your.

[00:15:13 - 00:16:34]

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Take us up to the decision to buy a business. What was you? We already know that you were chafing under the leadership of others, needed to be a captain of your own ship.

What else led you there?

[00:16:34 - 00:21:29]

Gail Azodo: So I, I think so I left PNG after some years and decided the first thing was like that weather. Aha. Like not going to do this need to move south. Right.

So an opportunity came up like you know, migrating during the winter. Like need to move south. An opportunity came up with another large organization, the Bacardi Organization, privately held third largest spirits company in the globally headquartered in Miami, a Darden alum. So that's the good thing about going to a school like Darden reached out to me. They're building a team with other similar B school type people would I like to join the team.

So at that point it was definitely yes. I happened to just be in the whole mindset of weather wise I need to solve for that first. So I ended up at Bacardi for a few years and then an opportunity came up at Bacardi and it was you can either continue working for us and Bacardi is a liquor company, so they're the supplier or you can go work for the distributor. And in the the organ, the liquor or alcohol spirits business, you can either work for the supplier or the distributor. There's a lot of things that happen but basically teams move between the two having to do with regulations, funding.

Right. You can overfund one side or the other. And I just took my opportunity to say well you know what, I don't want to work for the distributor. I think this is a good time for me to figure out something else in parallel. I was getting married later, had two children and was married to a physician.

And he had his own private practice. And I saw what it took for him to leave the hospital after being in the hospital for 10 years. He's in a. He's in radiology, which is a specific sector of healthcare in which was turning into a tele type of part of healthcare well ahead of everybody else. Because if you think about it, an x ray tech can go in and do stuff, but the radiologist could be in another room.

And from that they evolved into being in another place. And then from that it evolved into there's not enough people coming through school to study radiology. Of all the different specialties, that one is probably there's not enough of them. So let's have one cover several locations. And so seeing him do two things, go out on his own and then also expand across different markets because he is licensed in quite a few states.

And to be able to practice is what I knew was like, this is what I can do. I can run other people's business, I can go out on my own and I can expand in markets in which I don't know, necessarily live in. And that's a big structure or of our organization. And so when the opportunity came to leave Bacardi or continue on with the distributor, I took the, you know, the, the package, I won't be here anymore, and started to plan. And from that I planned and I told my husband that we were going to acquire healthcare.

And he said, well, healthcare is rough because insurance and picking up insurance claims and trying to figure out will they pay you. And it's a very long receivable cycle which, which is, I think a lot of people know. And it's a. Like you have to have a lot of cash to wait around if you get paid or not. And I took that into consideration.

I said, well, traditional healthcare is one thing, but there's healthcare that people just pay out of pocket. At the time, I thought that was just vision and optical. So transparently I was looking at like vision and optical. People go to the eye, the eye doctor. I knew that for myself I'd wear glasses and contacts my entire life.

They go to the eye doctor, they maybe insurance covers the exam. But like glasses are like 5, $600 and I often have to come out of pocket or if there's any coverage, it's a minimal amount. So I. So I immediately thought we're going into like vision and optical. Those people at least pay a significant portion in the office.

And the insurance, there's only so many. I mean, I had some knowledge of like healthcare. I was like, there's only so many codes they could bill against in the first place. So you're not going to have that long, you know, know wait period for like traditional medicine, you know, general practitioner surgery where, where I understood like just having my own experiences that you get like this long bill and you're just waiting for the insurance to page line item. That didn't happen there.

So when I started looking into vision and optical, this is about 2022, I realized that there was a whole bunch of pe, a lot of private equity just buying these practices. And I still was intrigued and it was like looking them up. I'm like, yeah, you could buy one of these things, get an optometrist in or something like that. But then the multiples were just crazy. It was a practice could be barely breaking even and a private equity firm would come in and you know, offer them a ridiculous amount of money just based on the revenue.

And that's when I started to understand like the whole like well, you can buy these things, aggregate them and then create probably profitability that may not have been there, create extra revenue that may not have been there because the people that own them traditionally are optometrists and they are not seeing these little nuggets of consolidation that happens.

[00:21:29 - 00:21:51]

Will Smith: So Gail, your initial plan was to acquire a single one. And then you thought, and then you thought about how you could, you could acquire many and, and by the way, buying a business itself, this was on your radar because of Darden. Why the ETA path? It's not the natural path.

Usually when people want to be self employed, they think about the business they're going to start, not buy.

[00:21:51 - 00:22:49]

Gail Azodo: Exactly. And so during this time, so like the, remember Covid was 2020 and at between 2020 and 2022, I was doing a lot of talking with Darden alum and Bruce and I had always kept in contact and Bruce, you know, owns the blinds business and he was telling me a lot about like hey, you know, this is my, my path. We've had similar path. He started in corporate, went over and so buying, buying the business was not top of mind for like this is what I would do.

I knew I couldn't work for somebody else and be the CEO. That's that part I knew. Yeah, becoming the CEO because I bought the business wasn't like the first like, oh, this is how you be a CEO. Just buy somebody else's business and say you run it. But having those conversations with Bruce, who was also a Darden alum and had taken that path earlier than I did and him just saying, like, yeah, you know, you already were doing the work for somebody else.

Like, try it for yourself. And understanding that I could do it right. So a lot of that connections happened between that time period. Covid gives you a lot of time to think and try things out. And, you know, I don't know if the.

[00:22:49 - 00:22:49]

Will Smith: The.

[00:22:50 - 00:23:12]

Gail Azodo: There was a lot of private equity in the world that I was specifically looking into, but then I think also a lot of just knowledge started becoming more into the forefront. Like podcast. Podcast, similar to yourself. A lot of reading books, like, all these things came out.

So that's what connected the pieces. And so I went full on, like, there's no other way other than buy. I didn't want to start from scratch, so I knew that for sure.

[00:23:13 - 00:23:26]

Will Smith: Great, Great, Gail. This is awesome.

Okay, so now take us back to you. You think optical, then? Optical. The multiples, the price is already too high because private equity is there in a big way. But adjacent to optical is.

[00:23:26 - 00:23:40]

Gail Azodo: Is hearing and audiology, which is completely just like Miracle Ear. Think of old people commercials from, like the 80s and 90s and like the grandma with this large, like, tan neutral device in her hand.

[00:23:41 - 00:23:44]

Will Smith: That is exactly. That is exactly what I imagined.

[00:23:44 - 00:25:18]

Gail Azodo: Yes.

Yeah, that. And that's what I thought too. So I was like, you know, like, let's see about this. And there weren't like, a lot of practices for sale. There were just enough, you know, or we're in optical.

There was everybody, I guess, in optical. You know, they're like, hey, I can get these crazy multiples right now. But I thought, well, what is like. And this is me doing this. Like, what's.

What's like, similar. It's like hearing. I, you know, you got to buy hearing aids. So I thought vision and ears. Right.

So I started doing research and I call it like the, you know, investigative nature. I started reaching out to people. I found listings on my own of people selling practices. Some of them had brokers, some didn't. Because you.

In the audiology world, as I later found out, a lot of audiologists will just post on what would be, like, resource boards, their own, like, education platforms like audiology.com, if that makes sense. Right. There's a lot of trading of not only, like, practices for sale, but there's also equipment. Some of the equipment are sold on those boards and whatnot. So I just reach out to them.

And so one in Georgia, we. I, at the point. At that. The point that the one that went the farthest was in Georgia and he responded to me and was like, yeah, you know, I'm definitely interested in selling. He had gotten into audiology.

After he came back, he was a Vietnam vet, went back to school again. And I told him, well, before I buy anything, I was very transparent. Never run anything in this like, area or what, what this, this segment is. Can I come and visit? So he said yes.

And I was like, okay, well, I'm coming for a week. And I. Gail.

[00:25:18 - 00:25:35]

Will Smith: Okay, let me, let me pause here. First of all, when you were on audiology.com or these boards where industry boards where audiologists are exchanging tips and tricks, were you doing industry research or were you fishing for leads to buy business or both?

[00:25:35 - 00:26:08]

Gail Azodo: Both.

So I was doing industry research, right. Because I at this point, like I'd abandoned vision or an optical. I said, like, I just don't have enough money for that. Like, I didn't know how I was going to fund it, but it's just like I don't have enough money to compete with. I, I had, I had that basic understanding, like you've got to present an offer an loi.

And on the, the research there, even from the brokerage site showed that they were selling for a lot of money. Right. There were these revenues. I would do some light reaching out the, the profit. Profitability wasn't there, but they were giving them, you know, 1x1, 1 1/2, 2x of revenue numbers.

[00:26:08 - 00:26:08]

Will Smith: Yeah.

[00:26:08 - 00:27:22]

Gail Azodo: So I, like, I dropped out that. But I was. Did they use the same type of boards, like buy bit, sell audiology.com, all of that stuff to start looking up audiology and doing research like my own, like just whatever it was. Google reading a lot of these audiology.

The, the audiology resources are actually pretty good just from a technical standpoint. Understanding hearing loss. What does it mean, understanding people who manufacture hearing aids, like the different companies, how do they solve for it? And that's where the intrigue happened because it really is a technology product. So then at that point I fully abandoned like the miracle ear, you know, grandma, with this huge like the 90s ads that I grew up with and realized that behind the scenes there are more people wearing hearing aids than I knew because they're so discreet and they solve for so much.

And what you, what, what a modern hearing aid looks like. And I'm saying modern, but this is like at least the last past 15 to 20 years looks like is a discrete device that is behind the ear and then has a small tubing that goes into the ear canal that is barely visible if you're a woman who has hair down, but in men also. So my research was like online research. And I knew I had to go beyond that point. Right.

And go shadow somebody. Go learn from them what they do without actually going to school.

[00:27:23 - 00:27:46]

Will Smith: Great. And before we hear about your journey to Georgia, Gail, there were two key criteria that you didn't explicitly say here, but you did to me on the pre call. And I think they're really important.

The remote nature. Now you wanted remote, not because everybody wants to work in their pajamas. You wanted it for a different reason. Tell us why.

[00:27:47 - 00:27:57]

Gail Azodo: Yeah, so my.

The. I own practices in cities and states in which I do not live in at all.

[00:27:57 - 00:27:57]

Will Smith: Right.

[00:27:58 - 00:27:59]

Gail Azodo: And so you wanted this.

[00:27:59 - 00:28:02]

Will Smith: This was something.

Not a flaw. This was a feature.

[00:28:02 - 00:28:57]

Gail Azodo: No, this is a feature. This is on purpose for two. One specific reason.

I did not want to be able to drive in to the practice or the. My. The business that I bought and start to run it. And I think even listening to your show and hearing what a lot of people who buy businesses talk about is a lot of the stressors are like somebody quits and they have to jump into the role of the main producer of revenue. And so I knew that I needed to be able to buy something in which if something happened, I had set up enough tools, enough systems and processes that we could fill the gap of what produces revenue there.

So that means it could not be where I was. So I obviously. So I could not jump into like the front. An easier one would be the front desk. Obviously I could not or I wouldn't have the time to go to school and go get a doctorate in audiology.

Right. But I don't want to have to jump in and be the front desk person answering phones or doing any of those things at all.

[00:28:57 - 00:29:24]

Will Smith: So. So to be clear, you wanted this physical distance as, as a boundary because you didn't even want the temptation to be there to get sucked in. I mean, we all want a business that runs itself.

But it sounds like you were going out of your way to make it a little bit harder on yourself to go solve problems physically so that you would have kind of the. It would force you to build infrastructure so that in fact you do build. Build a business that doesn't need you.

[00:29:25 - 00:29:45]

Gail Azodo: Exactly. I mean, I thought about it from working with Procter and Gamble, like if you work on like a Bounty or Downey or any of those things, like it's.

Maybe the team is in Cincinnati, but I'm sure that less than 1 or 0.1% of the businesses in Cincinnati, Ohio. So if it's not on the shelf, like what are you going to do? Fly to Kansas to go put it on the shelves? Like no. Right.

You need to have the team in place for that.

[00:29:46 - 00:30:18]

Will Smith: And so Gail, if you've listened to the podcast or you've just heard other stories of eta, how do you react to the, the conventional approach? Most people want to be able to be close to the business to in case there's a problem, they can go fix it. Are they wrong headed or are they, they do they just not have the same kind of running a business, running an empire remotely chops that you do because of your time at png? What would you say to them?

Because this is your, you know, you are doing the unconventional path here and you're doing it like really intentionally.

[00:30:19 - 00:30:40]

Gail Azodo: I mean I would say to me, I think, I don't know if it's wrongheaded, but I think that they're thinking, for me it looks like more thinking of an owner operator and I. An owner operator that can operate if a. And, and revenue producer. Let me just add that.

Owner operator, revenue producer. I am an owner operator but I do not drive revenue at my practices.

[00:30:41 - 00:30:41]

Will Smith: Right.

[00:30:41 - 00:32:11]

Gail Azodo: And so the other aspect of it is my, when I think about a medical practice, I think about them down to a, you know, you go to your primary care doctor, that's a retail outlet, they're selling you something there and it's, they have locations. And so if you think about the world of retail, Starbucks is headquartered in Seattle.

They can't jump into every location. They need to have a team that is at each location. And so maybe because my mindset was already built around teams at locations and that's how I approach it. When I hear people say that or people on your show talk about like the need to like, you know, I lived in Colorado and I need to, you know, find something in Colorado. I think that limits your, it limits the industry that you go into.

Right. Because you can only pick from what's in that location. And that may not best serve their skill set. And what serves my, my skill set was PNL management. And so retail location, P and L management, I knew pretty well.

And I think that more people, a lot of the B school folks probably know better than they think because there's clear drivers of revenue. Obviously things happen, there's seasonality, cyclical nature of sales. But recognizing that a retail team is a team that can execute and that's what happens in modern business. Right. That's why you have Target.

That's Why you have Macy's. That's why that stuff is drawing those parallelisms. I did. And just because if you're small doesn't mean that that's not the same. And so.

[00:32:11 - 00:32:48]

Will Smith: No, it's great. I mean it's such a good point. And it is, and it is a point that comes up that where the conventional wisdom is to be able to not think that you can buy a business and have it be operated without you having your hands on it, at least initially. But of course all, any business of size and certainly any household brand name operates exactly that way. And private equity has long since figured this out there.

There's no intention by the buyers of businesses that they're going to go and be on the ground there. So it is the model of any halfway sophisticated business that there's going to be satellite locations all over the place. Multi site, it's going to be a multi site operation.

[00:32:48 - 00:33:02]

Gail Azodo: And I would venture to say for private equity. And then you know, I see like sponsors, they, they hire operators.

Right. And so for me I, my provider or the manager on site is the operator. So in a sense it's the same.

[00:33:02 - 00:33:24]

Will Smith: Yeah, yeah. Well we, what we are going to get into though is how small these ideology practices are and key man risk, et cetera.

But I just, I do love how you, you took what, you just really inverted the point. And not only did you say I can overlook having remote locations, you actually leaned into it. You, you, you wanted businesses where, oh.

[00:33:24 - 00:33:35]

Gail Azodo: I don't want to go jump, jump and go have to feel for the front desk one day and I had to think about Mike, my life and I'm available for my business 24 7. But how am I able to operate a business and also like start answering the phones?

[00:33:35 - 00:33:47]

Will Smith: Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. I love it. Okay, return us now to what you more about what you learned about the audiology industry. What does it look like in 2025? What attracted you other than what you've already said?

[00:33:47 - 00:35:54]

Gail Azodo: Yeah, so what I learned about the audiology industry were very important things. Globally there's about five large companies that manufacture hearing aids. And the primary goal or the revenue, the goal in audiology and hearing is to improve hearing for people who have any hearing loss. Right. Or loss or attribution to hearing.

And so that's the first step. And then the primary revenue driver in hearing and audiology are hearing aids, the sale of hearing aids. Sure. There's a lot of things that happen in between. Like you can pay for an exam and screenings in which I think needs to become more regular and whatnot.

But the large ticket item out of practice are the hearing aids. So that was intriguing to me because it was kind of a very clear decision making process as far as understanding like the. What is the customer journey they come in or the patient journey in this case, they come in, they. You evaluate for hearing loss. What we do is important because hearing loss contributes to a lot of things.

If there is a hearing loss, like it's a, you know, it's a decision tree. Yes. Then make these recommendations. And the products are pretty. All the products on the market that are of these, like larger manufacturers are pretty good.

So there's a decision making across them. And then if there's no hearing loss, there's. You can't give somebody hearing aids that doesn't have hearing loss. Right. So I know that we're not saying selling an item just because, if that makes sense to you.

Sure. But what we can do is promote screening because obviously as we age those things change just like vision. So I know there was that similarity. So we will always have a cycle of people coming in for that first touch point, the screening and understanding of hearing loss. So that was the most intriguing point for me, having been in like CPG and recognized that the patient and this, which is also a customer, could walk into a store and pick 10,000 items and have 10,000 needs to solve.

This was very appealing for me. There's only one need that we're solving. Right. It is, it is hearing. You either have a loss or you don't.

If you do, here are the options and how we can solve for it. And if you don't, we recommend you come back for screening at this point in time, given your age. So clear, concise for me.

[00:35:54 - 00:36:03]

Will Smith: Great, great. And the hearing loss is also an indicator or a, or it's correlated precursor or correlated.

[00:36:03 - 00:36:03]

Gail Azodo: Yep.

[00:36:03 - 00:36:06]

Will Smith: Yeah. So say more about that to a.

[00:36:06 - 00:37:33]

Gail Azodo: Lot of comorbidities, diabetes, Alzheimer's, dementia, lots of studies. New York Times has did a excellent like pieces on this over the past couple of years.

Hearing loss is happening significantly at a lot younger age. At one point it was like 70 plus. Over 60% of people have hearing loss. That's more like 65 plus, 55 plus. You're getting into the high 30s and 40%.

Right. Measurable hearing loss and thinking about myself as a millennial, we anticipate that millennials will have hearing loss at a lot earlier age than that. Right. Moving into the late 40s, early 50s. Measurable, needing amplification, which are hearing aids, you know, mid-50s, early 60s.

That's just how, if you think about. We're an earbud society, like, we're walking around with airpods in our ears at volume levels that are pretty high. For whatever it's. For whatever it's worth, there's a lot more cognitive also diseases like dementia and Alzheimer's right now. Right.

Or identification maybe of that. And so to be able to capture hearing loss at an early stage is important for. Not necessarily for the eradication of those things, but to help slow the decline. And also hearing loss that is solved for through amplification, through hearing aids. Those patients that are.

Whether they have Alzheimer's, dementia, cancer patients, a lot of medications cause loss of hearing. Those patients fare better in their treatment just from a pure understanding standpoint of what's going on. So hearing.

[00:37:33 - 00:37:34]

Will Smith: Because they can hear better.

[00:37:35 - 00:38:37]

Gail Azodo: Yeah, because they can hear and understand better.

Literally. I mean, if you have an older grandparent or parents for a lot of us or relative, and you ask if they go to the doctor, I mean, many of us have experience, like, ask them what the doctor said, you know, and you're getting, you know, well, we talked about this and the other, and a lot of people think it's purely cognitive or my mom doesn't pay attention anymore. But hearing loss is not a volume thing. And I think people think it's like, because you don't hear things loud enough, and that's one aspect, but it's not what the most of it is. It's clarity, it's background noise, it's speech, it's vowels tend to go first.

Right. It's a lot of that. And I think about myself, I don't have a measurable hearing loss right now, but it is difficult sometimes, given the quantity of background noise, to hear things. The way that people talk accents a lot of reality tv. I tell people when they laugh, I'm like, yeah, reality tv, the way that things are coming, you know, through and from a perception of what words are being said.

And along with people who have a measurable hearing loss, they're missing every third word, fourth word.

[00:38:38 - 00:39:27]

Will Smith: You know, it's funny, Gail, I had an experience with this just yesterday where we did the parent teacher conference for my daughter, and it was over a zoom call. And for whatever reason, the parent teacher, her, like, mic wasn't working, so her voice was coming kind of like in and out as we had this zoom call. And. And eventually it was really annoying, became unbearable.

And so we called her just landline or cell phone. But while the zoom call was Going on, like, we almost let it slip because it was like, you know, we.

Get the gist of what she's saying.

It was like we. We could understand, like, 60 to 70% of the words, and our brains were filling in the rest.

So we were getting the gist. And you just kind of like what you were just saying. I just realized that, like, probably people who are starting to lose their hearing, they walk around the world getting the gist, and.

[00:39:28 - 00:39:28]

Gail Azodo: But.

[00:39:28 - 00:39:37]

Will Smith: But there's no.

There's no. You know, they lose so much of the precision and the subtlety of that that. That for people who have normal hearing, like, we just take for granted.

[00:39:38 - 00:39:38]

Gail Azodo: But.

[00:39:38 - 00:39:53]

Will Smith: And it's also.

It was also really taxing because you're.

I was straining the whole time. You're tired. Yeah, because I'm, like, turning up my hearing something that, you know, a sense that is so passive. But when you really have to kind of, like, listen hard, it's quite exhausting because it's not something that we're used to.

[00:39:53 - 00:40:09]

Gail Azodo: So anyway, it's frustrating, and many of our patients are frustrated. So when people like, I. I geek out over this stuff now because I didn't know anything about hearing, like, a few years ago, and then now I'm like, how much would I pay if I started having a hearing loss to be able to just hear Will every word you just said?

[00:40:10 - 00:40:10]

Will Smith: Yeah, yeah.

[00:40:10 - 00:40:13]

Gail Azodo: And that number is. Whatever that amount is.

[00:40:13 - 00:40:42]

Will Smith: Yeah. Well, Gail, I want to keep going on the industry here, but I do want to press you also on the form factor of hearing aids, because they're not invisible. Okay. They might not be your grandma's hearing aid from the 80s with a thing that sits kind of coming out of the ear. But I do.

You do notice them, especially on a guy, because the hair doesn't cover it. You do see that kind of box sitting behind their ear with the tube that goes over top of the ear and then in. Right.

[00:40:42 - 00:40:50]

Gail Azodo: It's a Rick. You see a Rick.

So it's like a Rick. It's a. It's a. It's like a little. What do you say?

Box. It's more like a small rectangle, right?

[00:40:50 - 00:40:50]

Will Smith: Yeah.

[00:40:50 - 00:40:51]

Gail Azodo: And they come in different fits.

[00:40:52 - 00:40:53]

Will Smith: Is it over overstating it?

Right.

[00:40:53 - 00:41:03]

Gail Azodo: Yeah. So it's like a small rectangle that grasps the grass, the back of the ear. But let me ask you this. Like, it's.

It's super normal to see somebody with two white plugs coming out of their ear, which are AirPods.

[00:41:03 - 00:41:04]

Will Smith: Right, right, right.

[00:41:05 - 00:41:11]

Gail Azodo: And that's, like, I would argue that those are even less discreet than hearing aids now.

[00:41:12 - 00:41:49]

Will Smith: Yeah, yeah. No, and, and, and I'm not saying anything other than there's still.

There still is the challenge, I assume in the industry of vanity, which was all. Which was, you know, it's less than it was because the hearing aids are less visible than they used to be. But I suspect that that's something that the industry struggles with versus glasses, where an optical glasses are completely normalized and have been for decades upon decades.

So it's.

So it's.

It's still a bit of a. There's much more friction in the sale and they're much more expensive. Tell us what your. The range of cost on hearing aids.

[00:41:49 - 00:43:42]

Gail Azodo: Yeah, I mean, in my practices, on average, the hearing aids range between five and $7,000 a pair, which is two.

Right. We do have some lower. The lowest the Lawrence you could get something, you know, about $3,000. Some practices, the price and depending on the demographic, obviously because given the cities or whatnot, they are. They can go up to between eight and I've seen $10,000.

I'm be honest. Which are pretty high. But it's an investment. It goes back to my previous con, like conversation or what we said is how much would you pay for the loss of your hearing? And so the vanity thing is something that I think that is.

It's difficult in the industry, but that's also why I am excited about it because it's something that I want to tackle. That's where my branding and marketing, like the things I did learn that were actually like branding and marketing and, and it is thinking about the body holistically as an investment. And the same people that are, are super conscious of the vanity aspect of hearing aids. Right. Are also conscious about the vanity aspect of the rest of their, Their, their being, their body.

And so if you want to keep that up, given what, you know, the correlation to those comorbidities like diabetes, dementia, Alzheimer's, and to want to be able to participate fully, I feel like that's just a small adjustment to make. Right, sure. And so we're having those type of conversations. You want to keep up with wellness, the exercise, the fitness, whatever it is, the Botox, the injections, because that's a common thing in the baby boomers and even the millennials. Right.

You want to look a certain way. What sense does it make when you can't even, you know, hear the compliments around that? Like. Right, well, how do you interact with people around those things? How do you be the social butterfly?

Right. Because That's a big push in a lot of brands as people age and making sure that they remain social and commun. Communal. To your point, how do you do that when you've got. You only hear every third word?

[00:43:43 - 00:44:42]

Will Smith: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was so taken with your story, Gail, that I've talked. Had a number of conversations. Hearing aids since we talked for the pre.

Call. And, and, and yeah, one of the points that was made by one of my parents was how the. As you lose your hearing, you withdraw because obviously if you can't hear, you can't engage. You can't be as quick. You can't.

You know, you don't want to keep asking people what, what, what. So you just naturally withdraw. And there's probably some natural withdrawal, social withdrawal that happens as you age anyway. And this accelerates that. In particular, we always hear about men, that they become totally socially alienated and reclusive.

And then that. That is a. That frankly accelerates decline just because. Because the brain function dips because you're not being. It's not being stimulated by social interaction.

And so these things are all loosely correlated, but. But in fact. But in fact, correlated.

[00:44:42 - 00:45:40]

Gail Azodo: Highly relevant. Highly correlated.

When we book somebody in to come to one of our practices, we ask them to come with a companion by yourself, you're going to make less of the decision to say yes. Right. We found that just statistically, data. A lot of what I do is follow data. And we'll kind of.

Hopefully we have enough time to get into a lot of data marketing tracking that I do is people will make the decision to move forward less often when they don't have a companion. But if they come in with a significant other, a spouse, a child. Right. The one that they communicate with. And we are able to.

They have a measurable hearing loss and we're able to put hearing aids on them in practice. Right. Right at the location, have them adjusted to what their needs are. Because this is a technological product, you need to adjust it based on the type of hearing loss and just have them interact with the person that they came in with. Like tears, people crying like it is just a world of difference.

[00:45:41 - 00:46:15]

Will Smith: Well, that reminds me, we need to return to the story itself, Gail, and, and we're going to come in and out of talking about the industry itself for the remainder of the conversation. So we're not leaving it for good. But let me just say one last thing about the industry. You touched on it. Obviously, demographics are very much in your favor.

We think of. We just think of the. The baby boomer demographic bulge. That one is obvious. But you also just said that the younger generations, millennials are expected to lose their hearing sadly earlier.

So you've got kind of two big macro trend demographic trends in your favor.

[00:46:16 - 00:46:27]

Gail Azodo: Yeah, absolutely. And that's what I'm, I know that to be true whether we want that to happen or not. And that's what we are hopefully what we're growing to be able to accommodate essentially.

[00:46:29 - 00:47:52]

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Okay Gail, take us back to the story now. You go to Georgia to meet an audiologist you met online.

[00:47:52 - 00:51:29]

Gail Azodo: Yes, yes to me. Yeah. I go there, I spend a week there and I sit in on different types of appointments and he's very friendly and he's also, it so happens he's also selling his practice.

If I fast forward I did not end up purchasing his practice but he remained a really good contact and I sat in appointments. I think by the second day it was like a true. So I would say this practices have a lot of appointments. A lot of them are just routine. Right.

Like I said, screenings. Right. Not everybody needs hearing aids. And that's what I know for sure that we do is a good thing is because we can't sell you this product if you don't need it. It doesn't make any sense.

Right. So you get a lot of those coming in. But then by the second day he had what we call opportunities and that means an opportunity because they have a hearing loss and an opportunity to solve for it. So those are called opportunity appointments in our industry and also in healthcare if there's an opportunity to solve a gap. And so he had his opportunity appointments and this gentleman who's also an army vet, just like, the provider comes in, and he is, like, livid.

His wife is a patient. She wears hearing aids. The provider met the wife at an outreach event. So we do a lot of that. And practices do that at the ymca, which, you know, tends to have some older folks during the day.

So his wife wears hearing aids, and the gentleman is livid that his wife would suggest that he needs hearing aids and brings him into the appointment. And it was, like, very tense. And the provider, the audiologist I met, you know, that online and ended up at his practice, did tell me ahead of time that it's not going to go well, but he goes, watch. You know, he knows the wife, and he knows that she's, like, gone in to bring her husband in because she's frustrated. And this is what happens often.

One partner has solved the problem, and it amplifies the problem on the other side. Right. That's how it works. And so she. He told me it was going to go well because he knows that this, you know, she's told him.

And what people should know, too, is that audiologists and hearing instrument specialists and the folks that sell hearing aids, they're often like counselors, relationship counselors, because of this. Right. And so I'm like. He was like, just sit there, you know, just watch. And the.

The gentleman comes in, and he is livid. He says he doesn't need this. You know, he's. You know, he's a vet, and he should understand that. And then he goes, all right, let's do the hearing exam.

And obviously, the hearing examination I got to is, you know, it has. He has a hearing loss. Then, you know, he's still like, I don't need this. And he's going back and forth. And so the.

So the audiologist program some hearing aids based on his loss. He puts them on.

The guy just starts crying. And I'm like, oh, man, this is going really, really bad. He's, like, crying, and he did something really wrong. He's crying because he can hear. Wow.

And I was, like, in the corner crying when I realized, like, he wasn't crying because he was upset, because I thought he was. I was like, you know, this is like. This is. I thought this is the height of anger. Like, he's crying, but he was crying because he could hear.

And it. I knew at that point, I was sold. Like, I'm going to do this. I don't. We'll figure this out.

What other way? But then he came back. So I was there for a week. He came back Two days later for his, like, follow up. And he brought his army photo with him.

And I don't think I told you this. He brought his army photo so that he could. So they do. It's like, you know, just like, if you ever go to your doctor's office or children's doctor's office, and they have, like, pictures of, like, milestones and whatnot. So a lot of offices have, like, pictures of, like, their patients and things.

And he said, I want you to put this up on your wall because you helped me.

[00:51:29 - 00:51:29]

Will Smith: Wow.

[00:51:29 - 00:51:34]

Gail Azodo: And so, yeah, he pro. He brought his photo and he put it on the wall. And so.

[00:51:34 - 00:51:34]

Will Smith: Wow.

[00:51:35 - 00:51:44]

Gail Azodo: Yeah, I was in the room, like, wow. It is. And it's. It does it.

I want those successes more often than not.

[00:51:44 - 00:51:45]

Will Smith: Always.

[00:51:45 - 00:52:15]

Gail Azodo: Obviously, we do get some people that are, like, disgruntled and like, well, you know, you know, they have the need and they don't get to that point, but to see that transition and recognize that a lot of it, like you said, is, you know, it's not. Sometimes, you know, it feels like it's not the most discreet. But there's a.

There's a. I don't know. I don't know if it's like an arrogance hurdle that you have to jump over. Like, I need this. And so, yeah, at that point, I realized that there's so many other things that we can, like, neglect. This seems so easy.

It seems so easy.

[00:52:16 - 00:52:25]

Will Smith: So the experience in Georgia seals the deal for you in terms of the path that you want to go down. How do you find and buy your first practice? What does that look like?

[00:52:26 - 00:54:33]

Gail Azodo: So at that point, I knew that, like I said, I'm gonna start looking for more practices.

All the criteria you said, like, I don't need them to be, like, in my backyard. Preferably not drivable either. Like, flyable the far way as possible. Well, you have to know yourself, right? And you.

I also know that, like, I am the person that will. Can do everything in my mind, at least. Right. And that's probably, like, the. Just not the.

The. The way to go. So, yeah. So it needs to be flyable, not drivable. And I wasn't quite sure to be fully transparent, like, the size of the business.

Right. Like, yet I knew how much I had personally that I. If I needed a loan, I could do. I knew if I needed to buy cash, how much I could do. I understood loans and SBA loans to some extent.

I understood. So I just started looking. But in that process of looking, as I briefly mentioned before, the Narrowness of the industry is that there's only so many people that. That manufacture the actual hearing aids that you need to sell. Right.

If somebody has a hearing loss. And so in my, like, you know, I flew to Georgia to meet a guy I met online that's an audiologist. I also, you know, emailed random people at these manufacturers as well. And with not the intention of, like, saying, oh, I want to sell your stuff. It was like, also, tell me more about the hearing industry.

For whatever it's worth, I got a lot of return on my investment of emailing. My emails weren't just like, tell me about the hearing industry. It was, I'm very interested. Here's my background. One day I want to buy a practice.

I don't know. This must have gone back to, like, my middle school writing days. It's like, you know, write a letter and tell people what you want to do. And I had essentially, like, a resume and a letter, and I can run a business. I just want to know more about the industry.

And two of the manufacturers actually flew to Miami, where I was to take me to dinner.

[00:54:34 - 00:54:37]

Will Smith: But after how much interaction with you? Not after a single email.

[00:54:38 - 00:54:40]

Gail Azodo: One email, one call. Both of them.

[00:54:40 - 00:54:41]

Will Smith: You're kidding.

[00:54:41 - 00:56:03]

Gail Azodo: Weren't short calls. They were long calls. But it was like, here's what I want to do. I also pick up on trends pretty quickly, and these are the things I know I do well.

Why I need to also, like, distance myself from the practice, because then I then I'll think I can pick up on trends and everything. Right. And I'm not the subject matter expert, but I understood very off the bat that, like, in health care, private practices that are not owned in general by, like, hospital groups or whatnot, are owned by a doctor or a provider. And they're. They're generally profitable, would say, but they pay them enough to live a good life.

And so in a lot of my emailing, it was that I want to buy hearing practices and audiology practices. I think I can buy more than one. Over time, I can run them in a more profitable way than a doctor or an audiologist can. Here's my resume of what I've done. And let's have a conversation.

Because I understood that there's like, five companies and you're one of the big ones. And that's what it said. You're one of the largest of the, you know, global manufacturers, and I would love to have a relationship. That was. The email was after that, phone calls.

One team flew from Utah. The other team flew From Boston. And then they had somebody in Palm beach that met me, and then the third company flew me to where they were. Wow.

[00:56:04 - 00:56:29]

Will Smith: Well, okay, so Gail, let me pause you before we get into why the heck they're, you know, investing all this money just to meet you in person and just really quickly understand.

What one.

Of these businesses look like. So you've said it's retail. These are not medical practices in like a medical office park. This is retail.

And like, like an optic. Like you can imagine, like a glasses. But we would probably call it store.

[00:56:29 - 00:56:33]

Gail Azodo: Some of my practices are in medical buildings. Right, okay.

Yeah.

[00:56:33 - 00:56:33]

Will Smith: Okay.

[00:56:33 - 00:56:34]

Gail Azodo: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:56:34 - 00:56:41]

Will Smith: I think I heard you say retail, so I'm imagining strip center. You know, kind of small footprint centers too.

[00:56:41 - 00:56:57]

Gail Azodo: But just like you could have your dentist in. My dentist is in a strip center. It depends on what's in there. It's not like, you know, but yeah, they're just not in a. The biggest thing, health care can be in a strip center or a medical plaza.

I think just that you don't want your surgeon to be in a strip center, but, you know, everything.

[00:56:57 - 00:56:58]

Will Smith: Okay, fair enough.

[00:56:58 - 00:56:59]

Gail Azodo: Everything else. Yeah.

[00:57:00 - 00:57:34]

Will Smith: And so.

And what was your sense of how. How much revenue they generated and how much. So basically what you just finished telling us is that these, these single locations pay the principal, pay the audiologist. Well enough. Good, good lifestyle, not great.

It doesn't sound like they're getting rich. And yet. And so your idea is that you can optimize them to generate more revenue. And so each site can kick off more revenue and then you aggregate that to revenue and you've got an interesting business. Can you put any numbers behind that?

Like.

[00:57:34 - 00:57:34]

Gail Azodo: Yes.

[00:57:34 - 00:57:38]

Will Smith: What is the average practice generate in revenue? Let's start there.

[00:57:39 - 00:58:20]

Gail Azodo: An average practice that's not mine, that if I were looking at driver generates in revenue between 3 and 500,000 with one provider.

Right. But then. And that's one audiologist. Some may have a second, just like your doctor may have started off. And as they get closer to retirement or for whatever reason, hire some more doctors in.

Right. And becomes a small group. Those can do 750. Some can do over a million. But you still need to recognize that they're splitting that now amongst three to four doctors.

Right, Right. So. But one doesn't. I've never seen a scenario where one looks like, you know, your surgery center that's doing 5 million plus. Right.

[00:58:21 - 00:58:57]

Will Smith: Okay.

So.

But let's say as an average 400. You said between 3 and 500. Let's say average for 400 with a single audiologist recognizing there's a lot of variation here, that audiologist is going to want to take home as much as he or she can.

So let's say they want to take home 250. That leaves 150 for everything else, for the rent, for the cost of goods sold, the hearing aids themselves, their wholesale cost of good.

It just doesn't seem like even if you ag.

Even if you are able to optimize these practices, which was your plan and aggregate them, it still doesn't feel like there's enough meat on the bone here to be interesting. Correct me?

[00:58:58 - 00:59:16]

Gail Azodo: Well, I think on its face and that's. It doesn't seem like that, but that's how it looked like to me in vision. And you're right in optical as well. But then when I realized, here's what like the PE companies are doing, there's economies of scale, right. You've got two now you've got some, you know, things that you can combine, right?

[00:59:16 - 00:59:16]

Will Smith: Sure.

[00:59:16 - 01:00:36]

Gail Azodo: There's also an ability to negotiate cogs, right. Because you're not just buying from one location, you're buying two. You're larger customer. And so that's what I saw.

So on its face, they don't look like individually, unless you have a very. And I would say this, you do have some very savvy audiologists out there. I don't want to like, speak on the industry as a whole that have figured out like, hey, I can drive renovanu very similar ways that I do, but most do not. Right. Most of them are retiring and they are often baby boomers.

Plus in age, given the industry, not as many people are going to audiology school. Right. And so therefore you don't have as many people taking over these businesses. So a lot of them are aging out right now as we speak. And so what I saw was what I saw in optical, I saw the ability to consolidate.

I saw ability to negotiate cost of goods sold. I saw some areas in which, if I'm not the provider, that operationally I could put together. A lot of your costs are operational costs, right. Billing, which is a big thing. Right.

Phone systems, little things that people just don't think about. Right. Rent was a, you know, something. But let's. I would say on a whole, a lot of the rent, the rent is not your highest expenditure because it's not a, for the most part, it's not a medical plaza.

That's like a high, you know, value stuff. And maybe you're. And you're not next to a target Right. Or Starbucks either.

[01:00:36 - 01:00:36]

Will Smith: Right.

[01:00:36 - 01:01:32]

Gail Azodo: So it's not those type of retail. So rent's probably the lower end of it. But a lot of operational costs and those, those were the frustrations that I heard from the actual audiologist too. Then I went after like, hey, would you want to sell your practice? It was the operational frustrations.

Who's going to be. They're generally to be able to take home as much money as possible. They're going to want to be the billing person. So at night a lot of them are like, you know, for whatever small claims like the exams or even following up on customers paying. They're the billing person or their wife or their husband.

Right. Is the billing person. They're also paying the light bill, the this bill. They're not going out seeking a deal or seeking a lower price. They don't have time to negotiate because from 9 to 5 they're seeing patients and from 5 to 9 they're doing the back end.

And this is true in health care in general across like even primary care. Why your primary care eventually sells to the large hospital group because they stop enjoying what they do. And so yes.

[01:01:32 - 01:01:55]

Will Smith: So I mean, so your thought was you can centralize a lot of the five to nine, as you put it, when they work from five to nine doing all the back office. You could centralize that extract cost out of, out of the performance of each of these practices.

You could teach them better or best practices related to frankly sales. We don't probably don't want to call it that, but that's what it is.

[01:01:55 - 01:02:00]

Gail Azodo: I mean it's healthcare and sales. Yeah, it is sales, good sales, but healthcare sales.

[01:02:00 - 01:02:56]

Will Smith: And then there's probably a marketing piece maybe drive more foot traffic than they're otherwise seeing.

Maybe some best practices with online marketing, you know, Google my page, whatever it is, generating reviews, that stuff and adding stacking all of these minor improvements, which is really what anybody listening would imagine doing in their own businesses in any industry would yield enough, would yield interesting profit.

And I guess what I'm.

What I'm just pressing on and is you still would like to think that the business is already profitable. And these sound like they're barely profitable. They're just good SDE for, you know, they're basically just 250 or $300,000 for audiologists to have salaries.

But there's no real earnings to be had at from a starting point, maybe you, Gail, will get those but it just, yeah, I, I guess I'm returning to the meat on the bone point. And so yeah, there's more to say. I'm not sure there is.

[01:02:56 - 01:03:58]

Gail Azodo: Yeah, yeah. I think all of the practices weren't like that are or.

And are not like that because my own practices and did go after practices that have multiple providers. Right. And so by the time you have to pay somebody else other than yourself, then you need to have some, there has to be some meat on the bone to give to somebody else. Right, right, right. So that needs to be true.

But even the practices that I own that have single providers or at the time had single providers, I wouldn't say they were in the negative, but I would say that if I were going to like go into, if I were an audiologist and there wouldn't be anything really left to pay a whole bunch of people. Right. Like you pay myself the good salary and a good salary and it's not a bad salary. Right. It's the 150, 200.

Right. Or 250. You know, there's some ways that I guess they, I think a lot of them probably think of it as interesting tax advantages for lifestyle. Right. And that's generally what medical practices sometimes are.

They're lifestyle. Someone says it's a lifestyle practice. Right. But yeah, and that is why I knew it had to be more than one.

[01:03:59 - 01:04:47]

Will Smith: Well, and, and, and forgive me for beating this to death, it's going to obviously is going to have to be more than one, but it's going to have to be a lot of them for you to stack ear enough earnings to get into million 2 million, 3 million of EBIT range.

Maybe that's not your intention. We'll get there. So I, I've made that point. We're going to, we're going to come back to it. But, but I'll address the other elephant in the room weakness, if you will, in this business, the key man risk, key person risk.

So these are, as you said, many of them are single doctor practices. Okay, maybe some have two, maybe three, but that's still, you know, the, the, the doctor decides they don't want to do it anymore and out walks all the revenue or materially, you know, most of the revenue of the practice. How do you think about that?

[01:04:48 - 01:06:23]

Gail Azodo: So I think about that in a very similar way in which I think about what I talked about my husband who's licensed in a lot of states for being as a doctor in the United States. You can be a doctor in Florida, you can be a doctor in Georgia, you can be a doctor in South Carolina, you can be a doctor in a lot of places.

If you are willing to sit through a certain amount of examinations, pay fees or whatnot. And so when I went into it what I. When I two things go together, I think about how his pathway but that allowed flexibility. And the last thing was being able to employ people in a sustainable way that they knew that they could always depend on me. And when I went into it and the first thing I did for everybody and I continue to do that is we will license our providers in every state that we own a practice and continue to pay for their licenses.

So any provider that works for me real hearing it's our company is has the opportunity to be licensed in every. In any state that I own a practice and a lot are. And so we have had key man risk issues. Right. For locations that have had one provider and in a at a drop of a dime, any of our providers can go there, work there.

They're incentivized to do so. And it's while we are looking or hiring. Right. As we talked about. And they will COVID patient load and whatnot.

And that happens today as we speak. That also happens when, if somebody at a single, single provider location wants to take vacation to cover that. Yeah, so it does. And so I, but, but if, if.

[01:06:23 - 01:06:34]

Will Smith: If, if Dr. Audiologist from location B goes into location A because the one in location A is quit.

What happens at location B then? That one's empty.

[01:06:34 - 01:07:39]

Gail Azodo: Yeah, not all locations are. We have few locations with one provider. So they're not leaving, no one's leaving a practice unattended.

So there's no practice unattended. Yeah, yeah. So there's no practice unattended. And so if there's a one provider and I say one loosely because even if there's a one provider location, there is always an A provider that we have a structure. We have lead audiologists or providers that do like a traveling, you know, whatever it is.

If we're having something going on. There's different reasons why there's seasonality in some of our markets. Right. Snowbirds and whatnot. So there's no one ever that's like truly a singular provider, if that makes sense.

So yeah. So no, if, if person A goes to B, there's, there's person C back where person A is to cover the practice. Right. And so they work as a team. They like it because they are independently technically on their in their own areas of the United States, but they are also a part of a larger community of providers that for some of them it's like a vacation.

I mean I do have practices In Florida and people from the Midwest that they like, they love it, like, oh, I definitely sign me up to do a week in Florida.

[01:07:41 - 01:07:46]

Will Smith: But do they do it spontaneous like, like in a pin shorts? Planned. It's scheduled.

[01:07:46 - 01:08:24]

Gail Azodo: It's planned.

So like. So it's planned. It's definitely planned. And I do those things as perks for working for me too. Right.

Like you want to come down to Florida for this? So it's planned. So right now, even at our Florida location, once a month somebody can come down to get an experience of working in Florida. And they're licensed in Florida, they're credentialed, all the wonderful insurance stuff. And they had that.

That's lovely for them. I see it because it works in my household, I can live in more states than not at any given time because my husband can practice medicine in any of those states at any time. So that's a kind of a big draw to work for me.

[01:08:24 - 01:08:33]

Will Smith: So. And do you feel with this, this model that you have solved the key person risk or are you on your way to solving it?

[01:08:33 - 01:10:52]

Gail Azodo: On my way. And some on my way. So there's something in a lot of other states. So there's the audiologist role, but there's a lesser role that's a technical role that can do about depending on the state, between 80 and to 95% of what the audiologist does. Similar how like the nurse and the nurse practitioner came up behind like the physician role.

Right. That the nurse practitioner can prescribe. So very similar. Something that's unique to our organization is we actually hire and train and sit. Send those people to school.

So I have, right now I have three people that have worked for me, started as a, I would say we call it front desk, but they do so much more. The patient care coordinator that are high performing, had education but for whatever life circumstances were in that role that we've sent to school. 100%. Yeah. To become audiologist, hearing instrument specialist.

Audiology school is a doctorate degree, but the technical degree is a hearing instrument specialist. It takes about two years in some states with supervision. And so we've sent them to school and they work in the role that can cover about 90 depending on the state. Right. Just like there's regulation, 80 to 90% of the same thing.

So I train here's. There's my PNG background, I train and promote from within, I pay for schooling. Recruiting is difficult in healthcare right now, particularly for fields in which people are not getting a lot of education in. Right. I talked about that with like radiology for my husband, it's the same for audiology less people that maybe Miracle Ear and those commercials in the 90s knocked everybody out of like wanting to be audiologists because they, they just.

Those commercials were terrible. But not a lot of people are going to school for audiology. And so the states have opened up some sort of like the regulations around like some of the roles, the stuff they can do. And the secondary role, which is a hearing instrument specialist, is. Is allowed to do more.

So that fills what is not said in like that key man risk is I do have those roles in my organization. So that feels a lot of like if somebody does take a vacation or something like that. I also have audiology assistant roles that also fill, you know, all these kind of like can do these things, but not these things. So I train, I pay for that training. There is.

It's something that's important to me. So I've given people new, new careers. They start off as a patient care coordinator, answering phones, scheduling, getting to know patients, and now they're seeing patients.

[01:10:52 - 01:10:55]

Will Smith: That's so cool. Wow.

Good for you, Gil.

[01:10:55 - 01:11:01]

Gail Azodo: I. I love that those things to me, like, if I could do this, that's what I want to do. Like 100 want to do more of that?

[01:11:02 - 01:11:43]

Will Smith: Yeah, yeah. Well, that, that.

I mean it sounds like that's kind of how your. Why is manifesting. I mean, you wanted to have reliable. You want as you said you wanted to provide a reliable place of employ for these families. This is related to that.

But this is also actually elevating allowing people to elevate in their careers or enabling people to elevate in their careers. Sorry to go back to the negative again, but. But Gail, but how do you think you've addressed or you're starting to address the. The a labor shortage for that role, which is. It sounds like it does absorb a lot of the cost or a lot of the work.

But what about the shortage of audiologists proper? How are you thinking about that?

[01:11:43 - 01:12:58]

Gail Azodo: So, yeah, so I think about audiologists now as I would love for them all to work for me, as many as graduate from school. So you have to get early on the recruiting cycle. For the ones that are in school, it is pretty competitive.

But I. My audiologists operate as not only of their location, but they operate, operate. Many of them are essentially like supervisory. So they are able to supervisor supervise those low. The technical like the hearing instrument specialist or the audiologist assistant.

And so that's a perk for coming to work for me. You don't need as many. If that makes sense. So that's how I'm able to solve for it. So if you've got 1, 2, 3 for every 3 you can hire, you know, 2 to 4 underneath, right.

Of these specialist roles, it's not perfect. It takes time because as I said, those technical degrees take about a year and a half to two years if somebody's going to. Back to back. Right. And you know, a lot of these programs are self paced.

I'm solving for it. I anticipate by, probably by the end of next year we have a good, we. I have a, you know, a visual that the organization knows, which, you know, of how I'm looking at it. It's like a tree of like, you know, degrees to specialty to patient care. And so I think by the end of next year, we'll be pretty good on it.

It's something that, that's, that's a, that's a core part of our expansion model as well.

[01:12:58 - 01:13:24]

Will Smith: Great, Gail, returning to the plot. So you, you reach out to these manufacturers and, and say, hey, I'm interested in the industry. I'd like to buy a practice in this industry. I'm really just trying to learn here.

And then, boy, do they pick up what you're putting down. Two of them fly out to meet you and one flies you to meet them. What, what did they see in you? What, what is that? That whole court courting, courtship all about Court?

[01:13:24 - 01:15:09]

Gail Azodo: Yeah. I mean, I think a resume is good for that. You know, school is good for that. It's how I feel about my, my B school experience and my experience at PNG and even Epicardi. It was great for my own personal development.

But a lot of that is what gets, you know, it brings, you know, the, the flies to the honey, if that makes sense. It does. It, it's important I say that because sometimes people ask me about that and they even ask me about their own pursuits of degrees. And I said, listen, find the thing that attracts people to you because it's not always the NBA, particularly right. Right now, it could be something else.

And so every one of them that I met with, they, they all said the same thing. And it's not like to toot my own horn, but it's something I remember to keep me going is like they're like, you are going to do very significant things in this industry. They just have not. They're generally used to dealing with or, you know, know, dealing with a provider and audiologist or trying to. These manufacturers, they sell a device.

So that's also important to Know, so it's a device, it's a hearing aid, but they're very similar to any medical device. Right. Whether it be a pacemaker or robotic tool, they have market share that they're trying to obtain and they generally have to interface with the doctor. Right. And the same thing for pharmaceutical reps.

Right. And so those people are generally very busy. And as we talked about as far as running the practice, we, they want to just make sure they're bringing home enough money to have a good lifestyle. They're not necessarily thinking about it from a business perspective can further benefit their patients. And so when I meet with them, I'm able to say we need to get around key benefits of your product and we need to match those with the patients that we're able to deliver those key benefits to.

This is a generalization, but that's not what conversations generally look like with physicians or providers.

[01:15:09 - 01:15:10]

Will Smith: Right.

[01:15:10 - 01:15:10]

Gail Azodo: Health care.

[01:15:10 - 01:16:02]

Will Smith: Okay. So their, their format, what they're used to doing is as you said, interfacing with the doctor.

So it's like, it's like we've heard about, well, there's bad stories about the pharmaceutical companies courting doctors or whatever, but that, that is the structure of health care in general. You have the manufacturers, the drug companies, and they basically are always trying to wine and dine the doctors because the doctors are their channel, essentially. Yeah, they, but they supply the pull through demand and so no difference in hearing aids. But the frustration for these companies is that the doctors are not business oriented or not business minded so much. And here they have this mba, this bright, hungry, ambitious, visionary MBA knocking on, knocking on their door, saying I want to make a splash and basically give the next 10 years of my life to this industry so that it was worth a plane, a plane ride for them to see what this person's all about.

[01:16:02 - 01:16:24]

Gail Azodo: Yeah, I mean, you know, I've come from the industry where we would do plane rides for less. So I knew that that was like, to me, to other people, it may sound like shocking, but when you're working in a billion dollar company and these brands and these companies are billion dollar plus. Right. That's nothing. Right.

You know, what's a $300 flight to Miami? Where you want to go anywhere? Good thing I'm in Miami. That's a good thing about the location. Right.

Like, they probably want to come here anyway to visit, but the, that keeps coming up.

[01:16:24 - 01:16:26]

Will Smith: I didn't realize that living in Miami was such an asset.

[01:16:26 - 01:16:57]

Gail Azodo: It is an asset. That's why we have all these hedge funds moving down here, Right? So, so it's, it is, it is, it's, it's.

So it made it easier, I would say, so I would give the, that location. But also the, the conversation. You have to kind of be very direct with folks with what you're trying to get done. But I'm always on this, the side of saying here, this is what I want to do. I would have had a conversation with them where they were at that point too.

I was like, if they wanted me to go where they were like, that's the investment in the business for me, that would have been that. So I could have done that too. So sure, sure.

[01:16:57 - 01:17:04]

Will Smith: Okay.

And so what were they, what did they pitch you?

Or you know, what, what, what came out of these meetings?

[01:17:04 - 01:19:25]

Gail Azodo: So what they pitched me was something I was familiar with, but not like super familiar with. I would say maybe not in, in working, but a supply agreement, right. And so what they said was here is a way that we could structure your growth. And that's literally what it looked like.

We have supply agreements and they've done these. I'm not the first person to get a supply agreement, but, but it generally looks like you get a supply agreement for an existing practice, right? Because sometimes you want to do a, a build out, right? You want to, you know, van. Revamp your, your, your, your doctor space, right?

You want to make it look nice because you've been having it for 20 years. And they, they, they lend you some money, which is a supply agreement. And they said you can pay off this loan by selling our product, right? Because we want you to do good. And the, the, the better you do, the better we do.

So they presented me a supply agreement that looked like an acquisition supply agreement. And a supply agreement says that you, you know, we'll lend you some money and you go out and we'll align on how many, how many units or how many of our product that you'll sell every year. So that over a period of time in supply agreements and mine as well, fall between seven and 10 years, right? Is the agreement. And if you fall short of that, then you're just going to like a traditional loan.

You'll give us the money. If you exceed it, great. We'll put it in the bank for you. But if you hit it on the nose, that's what's good to know, right? That's great.

And so I was very intrigued because I thought, as I said before, that I could figure out with my own assets, which I had, how to buy a practice, how to get an SBA loan, how to get a traditional commercial loan. You know, I had an arrange but with a supply agreement I felt I could run faster. Because, because with the supply agreement, if you do the right type of modeling, meaning like you're finding practices that at the least hit. Hit it on the nose. Right.

Based on what they already do. So remember, I'm not starting from scratch. There's already an existing patient list, there are sales that they already have. All I had to do was fill in the gap. Right.

If it said, you know, we need 50, 50 a year, which is not the number, but it's like 50amonth or 50 a year or something like that. The type when I'm evaluating a practice, I need it. That's my due diligence. How many units are you selling?

[01:19:25 - 01:19:26]

Will Smith: Right, yeah.

[01:19:26 - 01:19:37]

Gail Azodo: How many? And that's, it's a, it's clear path. How many people come in to get screenings of that. How many absolutely have a measurable hearing loss of that. How many make the decision to move forward?

[01:19:37 - 01:20:07]

Will Smith: Yeah, let me just repeat the, what the supply agreement is. They present you with basically an offer to Finance at 100% your acquisition of existing practices. They'll give you, they'll, they'll provide the loan to go acquire practices in the way you pay back that loan is through the sale some agreed upon dollar figure of sales that you'll hit of their goods over a number of years.

[01:20:07 - 01:20:34]

Gail Azodo: Not non exclusive though you, it's not exclusive to their, they have of their goods. But that does not mean you have to be an exclusive retailer of.

Right. You're not opening the Apple Store. Right. You don't only sell their things. And that's important because you can't do that.

And that's not ethically correct. Right. In health care we need to be able to say that if somebody has a need that's outside of yours, we can solve it. So.

[01:20:34 - 01:20:51]

Will Smith: Yeah, yeah.

And, and so they were basically giving you a total sales figure of their hearing aids that they, that you were committing to sell on over I guess on a yearly, on an annual basis for seven to nine years.

[01:20:51 - 01:20:52]

Gail Azodo: Seven to 10 years.

[01:20:52 - 01:21:06]

Will Smith: Yep, seven to 10 years. And you could take that number and as you went out looking at practices to buy basically fit whether or not that number was within the range of what this practice you were looking to buy was already doing or close enough within or could do or all that.

[01:21:06 - 01:21:18]

Gail Azodo: You could, you know, you could create somebody that's more depending on how you, what you, your, how confident you felt on your improvements.

You could say it's doing 20% less, but I know I could do 20% more. Right.

[01:21:18 - 01:21:19]

Will Smith: Yeah, yeah.

[01:21:19 - 01:21:34]

Gail Azodo: Or I know that you remember hearing aids is what, what is a large revenue driver. Right.

But there's other things. There's things to be considered. Maybe they do services. And so even if I don't hit this number, I know I get enough people in for screening, so the cash is there for whatever gap. There's things.

[01:21:34 - 01:21:41]

Will Smith: Because if you don't, if you don't move the, the agreed upon units of theirs, there's a dollar amount that you have to make up. Right.

[01:21:41 - 01:22:00]

Gail Azodo: So you can look at practices in different ways, too. So you could, you, you're able to look at it in two different levers. Like, you know, here's the numbers that I could.

Should hit. But then there's also like, they, we get enough people in that do these, these screenings or these services, so maybe they hit that they're 20% less, but we make up for more than that in the, in the, the dollars for some other things.

[01:22:00 - 01:22:19]

Will Smith: Yeah. Okay. So really, really, it comes down to, rather than the bank giving you a 90% SBA loan and then being your lender, the manufacturer is giving you 100% loan, and they're your lender and you're, you're paying them back either in cash or in sales of their units.

[01:22:19 - 01:22:20]

Gail Azodo: Yes.

[01:22:20 - 01:22:34]

Will Smith: Great. Now you didn't have. No. An SBA lender is going to require, due to SBA rules and probably their own underwriting, some deposit did you have.

To have some skin in the game.

Here, some equity into these acquisitions.

[01:22:34 - 01:22:44]

Gail Azodo: As far as, like putting actual cash in of my own, I was not required to do that, but I had to have the assets that back the investment payments, if that makes sense.

[01:22:45 - 01:22:48]

Will Smith: So you had to have a balance sheet. You had to have some net worth.

[01:22:48 - 01:22:49]

Gail Azodo: You had to have a personal balance.

[01:22:49 - 01:22:58]

Will Smith: Sheet net worth of the, of equal to the amount of loan. I see. Okay. All right.

And then you. Were you personally guaranteeing these loans?

[01:22:59 - 01:23:07]

Gail Azodo: Yes, but I think the SBA can take your house and these people can't take your house. Is that what the SBA is like? Can take your house?

Yeah, if that makes sense.

[01:23:07 - 01:23:08]

Will Smith: Okay.

[01:23:08 - 01:23:14]

Gail Azodo: You have to back. You have to. I think you have to.

The sba. You got to put your, your, your, your primary residence up and all that type of stuff.

[01:23:14 - 01:23:22]

Will Smith: Although there states where, where that's protected. But in this case. But they could come out after all your other assets.

They just can't come after your home.

[01:23:22 - 01:23:23]

Gail Azodo: Yeah.

[01:23:23 - 01:23:23]

Will Smith: Okay.

[01:23:23 - 01:23:24]

Gail Azodo: Yes. Yeah.

[01:23:24 - 01:23:31]

Will Smith: Okay. And, and did they all three of the manufacturers that you had dinner with offer you some similar structure?

[01:23:32 - 01:23:47]

Gail Azodo: Yes, they all the industry operates very similarly there. No one's doing anything that different just because they do similar structures for existing practices and audiologists on a lot smaller scale. So they're all, they all operate in supply agreements.

Yes, they do.

[01:23:47 - 01:24:14]

Will Smith: So so the reason they probably had this kind of this court courtship of you really dialed is because they probably for audiologists who express interest in going into private practice who are coming out of school or whatever they aggressively sign them up to be there to be there to have a supplier relationship. So they have something really kind of a playbook here. They have a playbook. They're not used to seeing a non doctor like you do it well.

[01:24:14 - 01:24:53]

Gail Azodo: And they're also not inclined for audiologists coming out of school. Right. Because they've never run a business before. So they're more looking for an audiologist that's worked with another one or that's going to take over an existing practice that they worked at. So so that's another way to get to it.

But the key factor of why it's appealing to work with me is because less people are going to school. So yeah the, the funnel is starting to dry up if that makes sense. And that need that, that finding that like you know the person by the time if you look forward ten years from now there's just not even as many audiologists that have been working for 10 years to take over anything at this point.

[01:24:53 - 01:24:59]

Will Smith: Yeah, yeah. And so how did you choose which manufacturer you wanted to sign up with?

[01:24:59 - 01:26:55]

Gail Azodo: So the manufacturer I chose is one that I believe in industry wise is is it's the second largest as our primary and then we have, we have pricing non supply agreements with the largest if that makes sense. So just because we're we. We have economies of scale we buy a lot so we have pricing preference with the the largest but the second largest globally has the latest technology as far as product wise is the most I guess innate feeling hearing aid. I know we talked about like the appearance and like the fit and whatnot but feels the most innate actually and has a lot of the technology that also makes the experience feel innate. Does not feel like you have a second a secondary hearing device on.

And so they are the premier you know I'd say the luxury brands if in in manufacturing of hearing aids their price points fit that as well. There's some features that price point are a determinant of will you get them and so they fit them but across of like the the needs so everything is a. You have to be filling a need, an actual medical need right around it. They fill about 90% of the needs of somebody with hearing loss. Right.

Across the spectrum of hearing loss, there's a smaller percentage which they've recently gone into. There's like a custom need. The only thing we cannot solve in our offices and which we have strategically taken oursel out of. Where there are other offices that do that is an implanted cochlear hearing aid. Like we do not do any implanting.

Some offices that are not owned by me that are in the hearing industry do that. I feel like that's going back into like general medicine. Like people who have a need that should be solved in a true medical like office with an EMT and other stuff like that. So yeah. So we choose a second.

We chose the second largest manufacturer. But the most. They're the most premium and they solve for 90% of measurable hearing loss needs.

[01:26:56 - 01:27:01]

Will Smith: Gail, are there other multisite operators like you? There's got to be some in the.

[01:27:01 - 01:27:04]

Gail Azodo: U.S. yes, there are. There are. They are entrepreneurs.

[01:27:04 - 01:27:06]

Will Smith: I don't mean companies though.

[01:27:06 - 01:27:34]

Gail Azodo: Yeah.

So there are other entrepreneurs like me. I think I'm just have done similar things. I mean they're just a different. They're older than I am. They've been in the industry.

They generally had started off as working in practices, not they were audiologists. So I. There's a couple that are audiologists. But often they were like the support. Technical support, smart business.

Like if that makes sense. And they went on to own. That's what you usually see. They were like a hearing instrument specialist.

[01:27:35 - 01:27:35]

Will Smith: Then.

[01:27:35 - 01:28:02]

Gail Azodo: Then they hire an audio like they go off and like hire an audiologist because the audiologist can, you know, see different types of patients. And then they have multiple locations. There's a lot of those. There are people, there's a couple of folks like me that are non like providers but their parents were.

And they see the business opportunity. But I would say in the United States, probably less than 100 aggregators. Mm. In the space.

[01:28:02 - 01:28:09]

Will Smith: And it's not a space that our crowd or private equity is aware of or active now.

[01:28:09 - 01:28:10]

Gail Azodo: They are aware of it. After this.

[01:28:11 - 01:28:11]

Will Smith: They will be.

[01:28:11 - 01:28:13]

Gail Azodo: After this. Yeah.

After this. Now. Yeah.

[01:28:13 - 01:28:16]

Will Smith: Here you are structuring this as an mso.

[01:28:16 - 01:28:17]

Gail Azodo: Yes.

[01:28:17 - 01:28:33]

Will Smith: Which is what. What we hear. Those are letters that we've heard. DSo, I guess for dental. That we hear for these health or quasi health organizations that are for profit, that are being aggregated.

That's about the extent of my knowledge of what that is what is an mso.

[01:28:34 - 01:29:38]

Gail Azodo: So for an MSO is like, like you said, it is the management service organization. It services and manages a set of practices. DSOs do the same for, for dental. They're operationally consolidate.

Often they buy. They often own the employees as well there. I tell people to think about it as someone can come in and acquire the MSO or the dso, right. Completely or another MSO or DSO can come in and acquire the practices and tell the MSO DSO goodbye. Like we will run it.

And so for us, why I structured it as an MSO is to be able to achieve what I talked about. Those economies of scale, the cost of goods, employee benefits are important to me. So whereas individually these are in different states and locations and that, you know, you're, you're talking about benefits, you know, in each state that you are different health care plans. To be able to structure an environment in which my employees feel like they're part of a bigger organization even as we grow and that they have the same health care opportunities available to them. It's a management service organization that hires them.

Right.

[01:29:39 - 01:29:48]

Will Smith: But Gail, how is that, how is it different than like just a Holdco that holds all these businesses and can provide, you know, blanket services across all these health business?

[01:29:49 - 01:30:02]

Gail Azodo: Well, yeah, there's different tax benefits for MSOs. MSOs are often C Corp's looking to like if they're, if I'm acquired at some point in time, they have like a, you know, a Q sub election or things like that. So I think maybe that's one of the bigger differences.

[01:30:04 - 01:30:16]

Will Smith: Holdco, I guess is.

Is the MSO like a. A an actual formal legal definition or is it just. Is it just industry speak for. Industry speak for the holdco?

[01:30:16 - 01:30:16]

Gail Azodo: Yeah.

[01:30:16 - 01:30:17]

Will Smith: Oh, okay, okay.

[01:30:17 - 01:30:56]

Gail Azodo: I think it's descriptive. Okay. It's not illegal.

You're not legally an mso. You're legally an llc, a C Corp or whatever and you. But an mso. So hold co is on top of the organization, on top of the. Of the individual locations.

And MSO or DSO sits to the side. So the MSO does not own the locations. They supply the things that the locations need. So the locations pay the MSO out. Right.

Does that make sense? If you have a very interesting. A hold code is like, you know, is at the top and the holdco owns each location.

[01:30:56 - 01:30:56]

Will Smith: Right.

[01:30:57 - 01:31:01]

Gail Azodo: A service organization sits to the side and services the organization.

[01:31:02 - 01:31:07]

Will Smith: And is that if you go to exit one day, is that where the value is in the mso?

[01:31:08 - 01:31:11]

Gail Azodo: It's often in the mso The MSO.

[01:31:11 - 01:31:12]

Will Smith: Combined with all the practices.

[01:31:12 - 01:31:13]

Gail Azodo: The whole practices.

[01:31:14 - 01:31:15]

Will Smith: Yes, I see.

I see.

[01:31:15 - 01:31:52]

Gail Azodo: And there's also. There's also a lot of, I think, legal and technical reasons why sometimes who is servicing the organization is sitting to the side versus who's owning. Right. The hold code.

That's owning it. Right. Particularly in medical. In the medical world. Right.

If somebody. If there's a malpractice or things like that, you want it to be contained to the individual location in which the events happened. Right. And potentially there. But then you don't want that to affect your ability to continue to service, buy, pay, employ across the others.

Health care is traditionally structured in that way because of those caveats. Right.

[01:31:52 - 01:31:53]

Will Smith: I see.

[01:31:54 - 01:32:00]

Gail Azodo: Insurance malpractice, individual provider malpractice, that you need to have those general liability aspects.

[01:32:00 - 01:32:04]

Will Smith: Yeah, yeah.

You can sort of silo the risk of every.

[01:32:04 - 01:32:13]

Gail Azodo: Yeah. I think this after practice is a very good. Like, hca, like the hospital, like, they have their own of that. Even from, like, employees recruiting.

They do it all, like, in separate buckets, essentially.

[01:32:14 - 01:32:28]

Will Smith: And going back to your vision of taking off the plate of the doctors, of the audiologist and our technicians, all of the billing and back office stuff that. That all of that stuff is now done in. In the mso. That's.

[01:32:28 - 01:32:28]

Gail Azodo: Yeah.

[01:32:28 - 01:32:29]

Will Smith: Okay. Yeah, great.

[01:32:29 - 01:32:42]

Gail Azodo: You could put it. If somebody.

Let's say some. Let's say at one point, I'm like, well, I want to spin. Spin off. You know, that's not where we are. But somebody could spin off three of the locations.

They could put it right back in an individual location. Right. But we do that centralized.

[01:32:45 - 01:32:58]

Will Smith: Okay. Gail. Well, still haven't actually talked about the acquisition or acquisitions, and we're getting very close to time, so can you bang us through? Well, maybe if they're.

[01:32:58 - 01:32:59]

Gail Azodo: Yeah.

[01:32:59 - 01:33:07]

Will Smith: Maybe the first. The first acquisition or if any of them have a particular story behind them are emblematic of the. Of all of them. Let's hear what one of these looks like.

[01:33:07 - 01:33:55]

Gail Azodo: Yeah, let's give a good summary then.

So we own six practices. I own six practices and seven that have seven locations. Because one practice has two locations. We acquired our practices. They're at different.

You know, we talked about what an, on average a practice does, and if a practice has one provider versus like two or three, it probably does more. The range in which we acquired were anywhere from the low three threes to the low three hundreds. The low three hundreds to the low seven figures. That has to do with the quantity of providers, revenue and whatnot. On average, our practices, they do Pretty well, I would say they've increased revenue year over year and then we've owned them now going on year three next year.

What are the important. You guys want to know?

[01:33:55 - 01:34:14]

Will Smith: Wait, Gail, you said you buy them for 300 to a million in that range in that. But that was also. It sounds like that was the revenue range.

So you're so from an EBITDA multiple perspective, they're pretty expensive. It sounds like if, if you were to back out what the EBITDA multiple is. Is that fair on your.

[01:34:14 - 01:34:27]

Gail Azodo: On the. On for traditional provider, what you were doing?

Yes. For what like before, if a provider owned them, but now that we've aggregated they're not. If that makes sense. We've unlocked the opportunity. The EBITDA opportunity.

[01:34:28 - 01:34:34]

Will Smith: Yeah. Okay. Okay. And so they're basically purchased on a multiple of revenue.

[01:34:34 - 01:34:36]

Gail Azodo: They are purchased on a multiple of revenue.

[01:34:36 - 01:34:46]

Will Smith: Okay, interesting. Okay. And so so that is a lot of health cares. So you're give. Give us an example deal of one of your six.

[01:34:48 - 01:39:01]

Gail Azodo: So like one of our practices is in Tennessee. It's. There's multiple locations in Tennessee. That's our. One of our larger practices, that one was two.

Two providers owned it, but they employed at the time seven providers. It was a lot pretty heavy on providers. But because the two that owned it weren't working full time in it, they were very business minded. They broke off from another large group that turned into a. So audiology and hearing has a lot of adjacency to ENT offices.

Sometimes people get their hearing care in the ENT office. So they broke off from ENT office where they felt like we're not giving the hearing side a very, you know, a lot of attention and form their own practice that grew into more than one location. It was. That was probably one of my easier sales. They were ready to retire.

Both providers, they had multiple. The multiple locations, they had enough providers. So I didn't have a key man risk there, if that makes sense. Where I saw opportunity where the quantity of providers. When we purchased a practice people started to.

There was a few two providers that one was on maternity leave and like a month after came back but then decided that they did not want to, you know, they wanted to go back to spend time with their child, which I understood completely, which I didn't have to replace because of some of the efficiencies. So that allowed me to go down on. On headcount and you know, further improve. And then there was another one that was planning that her husband was relocating, didn't replace her either really was a lot allowed me to go on down on headcount there, if that makes sense with the efficiencies. And those were natural like kind of attrition.

And so for that practice, I call that the easier one. It's been the easiest to manage just because most a lot of the risks that you have in with a, a medical practice or even you think about some of the other like ETA stories. It's like somebody calls out how do you fill this in? I don't have there because of the scale. So that one was purchased at scale ready to continue to scale.

Yeah, the most difficult practice I have or I've had an acquisition around. It's probably one of our practices in the Midwest, what state it is, but it is in a rural part of the Midwest. And so hiring in rural areas in healthcare, even around general medicine is difficult. And so we had a loss of a provider. But luckily it's in a state in which I could train within.

So I trained from within. At the time I knew immediately is like I need to find somebody that's very smart that wants to deal with patients as far as like an assistant, check them in, make sure the provider is, you know, having everything that they need in the exam room and whatnot. And so I trained somebody there to be a hearing instrument specialist, a technical role. And so when we had the loss of that provider, two things happened in parallel. This hearing instrument specialist is already seeing about 90% of like what that the audiologist could see.

And then on the secondary aspect, this is where, where we talked about having like multiple practice locations. I already had licensed providers in other locations for that state as well. So it's not been easy because of what state stated it's in and how to get there. But we've been able to have continuity of care. And it's difficult in that state just because it's the rural nature of it.

Rural states, the patients are loyal. So they're. They actually that is a, it is a high revenue practice because there's not a lot of options. However, to get somebody to move there is hard and that's probably my, my most difficult practice just because, you know, there's a lot of caveats to like training somebody and like promoting them from within and then you know what not there's things that they didn't know before. Right.

So they may be smart, but I'm like doing also professional training often. Right. Like how do you manage this, this new world, this new life you have? So that's what that looked like so that acquisition, when I acquired that practice it was from a, a family owned practice which speaks to like the recruiting was within. It was the grandfather, the father and then it was the son in law.

It's been around since 1959.

[01:39:01 - 01:39:02]

Will Smith: Oh wow.

[01:39:03 - 01:39:45]

Gail Azodo: Yes. And now the children did not go to school for audiology so they had to sell it and so that's. They had a recruit from within model from their family.

And now that there's, you know, the two children didn't go to school for audio audiology. It was a good so on paper I think those are where acquisitions can be deceptive. Right? It did well. It does well.

Very like you know, from a revenue standpoint there's not a lot of places to go and this and whatnot. But then to maintain that revenue you need a provider to be there. And so that what that one is I think was probably the most difficult. And even now I'm still training. I'm always.

That's a location that I'm always hiring. Why? Because it's very hard to hire for and I.

[01:39:45 - 01:40:01]

Will Smith: So is the, is the takeaway from all the scale that you would, that you would target bigger markets going forward? Primary and secondary markets.

This sounds like it's not even a kind of a tertiary. It sounds like it's rural. So rural. Is that, is, is that the, is that the answer going forward?

[01:40:03 - 01:41:04]

Gail Azodo: I don't know.

I mean maybe I think we don't. I, I don't seek out rural locations anymore like that. But I don't know if I, if one came like, if I felt like I had a good like plan because rural locations are, are different in a way that you don't necessarily. We do happen to be open five days a week there but a lot of rural locations are not five day a week locations just because the nature of rural living so. And they are like I said, there are high revenue generating because people commute in.

You've got like a hundred mile radius of people that need to come in sometimes more than that. So yeah, the takeaway is that I wouldn't do primary but secondary markets obviously. Yes. Like yeah, because they're, they're close enough to larger markets and a lot of people settle in the suburbs rural. I would have some consideration around.

I think I, I would do a better job and moving forward about float about floating the days open just because you don't need a five day location going into it. I think I went into like everything is. I'm open to flexibility and even on the days open for these practices and getting our patients attuned to that. So. Yeah.

[01:41:06 - 01:41:10]

Will Smith: Gail, how much revenue are you doing in total now?

[01:41:10 - 01:41:14]

Gail Azodo: Over 4 million on an annual basis.

[01:41:15 - 01:41:23]

Will Smith: Over 4 million from six practices, seven sites. And you didn't have put any equity into this project?

[01:41:24 - 01:41:27]

Gail Azodo: No, that's.

[01:41:27 - 01:41:47]

Will Smith: That's pretty great.

Well, and going back to the loan question and how you were able to do that with no equity, has your prediction or projection or this prediction that you could project sales based on historical sales of these practices and what they'd then be able to do with your new supplier come to pass?

[01:41:48 - 01:43:08]

Gail Azodo: It has come to pass and I think it's just getting better. I think we had some bumps in the first year as far as it coming to pass. One month and then like, you're solving for what you said, like the key man issue, and then the next month you're like, you're in a like, oh, crap moment. Right?

Like, how do you make up for this? But then while I'm training people and while I'm licensing people, because those things take time to do as well. But I. We've been pretty smooth for a little bit now. There's still things that happen.

There's still. It's. It's a. I'm, I'm in the business of like, I wanted to employ people and I'm in the business of people. That's where I'm at right now. I think it's very.

The job market is an interesting one. And so not only am I making sure health care providers are doing a good job, I'm. I myself are like, I get a. We. We interact a lot.

I'm always like, trying to make sure that they're okay to, to. To. To do the job that they do. So yes, it has come to, to fruition. We do, we do hit our numbers.

There's seasonality. We hit our numbers over, you know, overall for most months. And then I know, like in our winter months, like, remember that, remember those Cincinnati winters. I know what to expect in the Midwest. I also know what to expect in the South.

The south is, you know, think about our age group, the demographic of our patients that snowbird central. So during the summer, the people that need hearing aids are not always there. They're back north.

[01:43:09 - 01:43:26]

Will Smith: And Gail, when you look to acquire new practice, do you have. What is the deal with the supplier?

Is it like a. I don't want to say a blank check, but have they pre allocated a certain amount of capital toward or a certain amount of debt towards your project or do you go back to them Every time or what.

[01:43:27 - 01:44:32]

Gail Azodo: Yeah, I don't think they free out. I don't know what they, I don't know if they pre allocated but they know that I'm a, a buyer. Right. So I don't know of what they, what they do on their end.

They know I, I know that I'm a buyer. I know them, a good customer of theirs and I think for them what they, they often send me leads because remember they're thinking about their reps, their sales reps, this and this person is going to retire. So they send me leads. I don't take all the leads. So that's one way.

I mean I'm thinking about our growth and expansion in different ways as well. Like I haven't, you know, we acquired so quickly as I mentioned, we're now just next year, going into year three. And so. Yeah, so we, I haven't had that moment to sit down and do traditional I guess like prospecting or looking for leads. This every lead has come to me after like the first two first like one and a half.

I've not ever gone out looking for leads. And so now it's like we've got systems in place. We're making, we're making money. We know how to, we know how this thing works. I think about what other.

I go back to the PE model like what they do in optical or whatnot. Like how do I go look for leads and to expand this model.

[01:44:32 - 01:44:56]

Will Smith: And when they, when you look to acquire another practice and you go to the supplier, do they, I mean a traditional lender is going to do underwriting. Right. So they're going to, they're going to vet the, they're going to vet your logic on, you know, whatever the, what you're offering for the business, what you're anticipating paying for it.

We're expecting to pay for it, what the business looks like, et cetera. There are degrees of underwriting. They're doing that as well.

[01:44:56 - 01:45:09]

Gail Azodo: They do full underwriting. I mean they have an underwriter.

Yeah, these organizations have that. Yeah, this is, yeah, they're not just taking like my little B school spreadsheets. They don't care about those. Yeah, they chop them up, they underwrite. Yeah, yeah.

They have full finance.

[01:45:10 - 01:45:12]

Will Smith: This really is a playbook for them. Done an.

[01:45:12 - 01:45:33]

Gail Azodo: It is a playbook. I mean it's done.

Like I said, I, I think it was maybe some of ease of doing business and maybe that's something that's important for me to even make it easy for people to do business with you. I'm sure it's very hard to get some physicians or providers to do that. Right. That they've been utilizing before to kind of put a P and L in projections. But you have to turn that in.

Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

[01:45:33 - 01:45:46]

Will Smith: And, Gail, you're going back to our conversation about remote. So how has that been? Has it also been according to plan that you.

You've liked not being able to get there via car? You have to fly to go see everybody.

[01:45:46 - 01:45:56]

Gail Azodo: Oh, of course. That's great. I mean, I think it's good.

I mean, I work every day, obviously. I run and operate. We do a lot of zoom and team meetings. I do fly to my practices, but not to work.

[01:45:57 - 01:45:59]

Will Smith: How often do you go see everyone?

[01:45:59 - 01:46:02]

Gail Azodo: I'll be at one next week. So that was one.

[01:46:03 - 01:46:07]

Will Smith: Once a quarter to each one. No, that would be way too much. Once a year to each one?

[01:46:07 - 01:46:34]

Gail Azodo: Yeah, at least once a year to each one. I have. I have leads. I have a lead audiologist. Right.

I have an operations manager. They are. They fly more than I do. Yeah. As needs come up, I've done.

It's not. Not. Not the undercover boss things, but I have sat in the front desk because I want to see what they're doing. Right. As well.

So I've done that. I can obviously see patients. I'm not a license anything, so I don't do that part. But, yeah, I think twice a month, I'm flying somewhere, and I.

[01:46:34 - 01:46:36]

Will Smith: Twice a month, you're flying somewhere.

Wow, That's a lot.

[01:46:37 - 01:46:41]

Gail Azodo: Yeah, but it's not always. Sometimes it's to the manufacturer because we have partnerships.

[01:46:41 - 01:46:41]

Will Smith: Right.

[01:46:42 - 01:47:05]

Gail Azodo: So sometimes it's industry stuff.

So as a CEO, it's. I. What I've structured is, you know, the CEO of what a company adjacent. An adjacent large company would do. Sometimes you do site visits, and sometimes you do manufacturer visits, supplier visits.

Right. Sometimes. So that. Those are the. So about twice a month, I do those things.

So I do fly. It's not always to a practice. It's the things that. Supplier practice.

[01:47:05 - 01:47:13]

Will Smith: How big could this get, Gail?

How many of these could you acquire? If. Is that. Is that the path just to. To basically put more dots on the map?

[01:47:14 - 01:47:55]

Gail Azodo: Yes, I think it can get very big. I mean, I look at adjacencies and optical. I think I even look in veterinary. Like, there's a lot of adjacencies there. Like, I love these models like this.

And I think hearing is the. The next model for it. And I want to, you know, if I'm not the first, I want to be the Second, I think about hundreds. Like it's just needed Miracle wear. We, we talk about them as, as old ads but they have thousands of stores.

But that's, that's just that like we, we can do this and I can do this for forever and I, that is one of the biggest pools that the manufacturers have with working with me. And I'm not intending to sell now. I'm not even, I don't even know what the sell date looks like because this is a long term hold me.

[01:47:55 - 01:48:00]

Will Smith: Well, and you have no investors. Not only do you have no investors, you have no, none of your own equity in it.

[01:48:00 - 01:48:32]

Gail Azodo: So, so for now, but to grow to where I want to be. You know, I, I was, I'm a purist in that way when I went into it. I don't know if it's a purist or more like I don't maybe I just didn't like how I felt about like what private equity was doing in optical and just other areas. And like this is just so competitive and like I don't want to like you know, have to report to anybody back to my, like I don't want to have to report to anybody like mindset. But I do think I, I'm, I'm now in the mindset of that I could report to somebody but share with somebody, share with a group or something like that from an expense.

[01:48:32 - 01:48:41]

Will Smith: And if you brought in third party capital like that, how would you spend it? Because you're all on more people to do more deals because you already don't need the financing for the deals themselves.

[01:48:42 - 01:49:25]

Gail Azodo: Or why not think about it as like that's one. My approach is one way. Right.

Of getting the financing for the deals. But, but you could become more agnostic if you brought in one of those groups. Right. And have less of, more of a, less of an obligation to a single or secondary. Right.

So I'm, that's, that's something that is on the radar for me too. Right. And you have the ability so recognize that because I have supplier agreements and I have to meet the right patient needs that, that creates its own narrowness. You want to. It does.

It doesn't. It means I'm not in every, in every market I want to be in. I can't be in because then that becomes like you're forcing a product on people who they don't. That don't need that. Right.

[01:49:25 - 01:49:25]

Will Smith: Yeah.

[01:49:25 - 01:49:42]

Gail Azodo: And so I. Bringing in private equity dollars or going for a raise to me where before I was like oh man, that would be terrible. I do See where that could be something that may be a good decision at some point because you can become more agnostic, there's more markets, there's more available.

[01:49:43 - 01:50:10]

Will Smith: Well, and despite my excitement around the supplier agreement model here that you have and no money in, in fact, you could probably buy these practices for very, very little money in and have them sell and have the retiring doctors sell or finance most of it anyway.

I mean, I could imagine where you could bring 20% of the deal, 20% of the deal here, and they sell or finance 80%. I'm putting, pulling that number out of the sky. So that could be totally wrong.

[01:50:10 - 01:50:16]

Gail Azodo: Do people do seller. I mean, I hear people say seller financing, but to me it's like when you're like 65 years old, are you doing seller financing?

[01:50:17 - 01:50:27]

Will Smith: Well, when there's no other exit for them.

This is a contracting. Well, it's not a contracting industry, but the, the, the number, the pool of audiologists who might buy their practice is contracting.

[01:50:28 - 01:51:14]

Gail Azodo: You know, I've made that con. I've tried that.

Not tried fully, but like, we aren't always in communication. So I'm not looking for leads, but leads come my way, right. And, and when they come my way, it's not obligatory. Even though a supplier sends them to me, that I utilize their methodology of getting that right. I don't have to do a supply agreement.

They also just want the practice to not close down. Right. Because that's a funnel for them, for business. So sometimes they send leads just like, hey, somebody needs to buy this thing. Right.

So I've had conversations with sellers like, you know, why don't we, you know, even partner on this in a sense, like you can try drift your way into retirement and get some, I guess, some version of a seller financing. And you, you'd be surprised. Providers, physicians, they're not that type. A lot of them, they want their money now.

[01:51:14 - 01:51:23]

Will Smith: Well, all sellers do.

I just see a market where there are no other. There aren't going to be a lot of other buyers. And so you have a lot of leverage as this right now.

[01:51:23 - 01:51:23]

Gail Azodo: Yeah.

[01:51:23 - 01:51:25]

Will Smith: One of the leading acquirers in the entire industry.

[01:51:25 - 01:51:26]

Gail Azodo: Yes.

[01:51:26 - 01:51:46]

Will Smith: Let's close with what you might say to the searchers listening. Is this something that they should pursue? We talked about how, like, you know, whether or not you want people to, you want other people to be aware of this incredible opportunity that you find yourself in. And your answer is actually yes.

[01:51:47 - 01:52:34]

Gail Azodo: Yes, they should, but they should do it with me or like, you know, we can think about it as. When I say, like I see a lot of this in veterinary and dentistry and whatnot. It's very like I would love to be able to expand our model or like our brand are with operators. I think there's other operators out there in areas and regions that are, you know, operators on top of operators meaning like on top of providers similar to what I do to be able to expand. So yeah, I think I don't think of anything as encroaching on my territory or like there's no other.

Other searchers shouldn't be in this space. I would love to be able to partner with other searchers and they would also being to be able to diversify the way in which we go into acquiring is also something that's top of mind for me. So I do love the, the no money down. You know, that's like the car sales like no money down thing.

[01:52:34 - 01:52:35]

Will Smith: Right.

[01:52:35 - 01:53:02]

Gail Azodo: But you know, there's something about the way that traditional searchers are operating now. They may have like a sponsor or things like that that, that's another way to diversify the way that we go in so that other people have skin in the game. But we all, we all mutually benefit. So I'm open to a lot of different things right now. I think there will be a, a single singular two paths that will probably like be like the takeoff model.

But right now, you know, seven locations in two years is I think is pretty quick for whatever.

[01:53:02 - 01:53:23]

Will Smith: Yeah, no it's, it's very impressive. I mean as you know, I, I was really excited to have our pre call actually close us with this point. Gail, the industry, forget the market dynamics, the, the money, but the actual product itself and the technology you have found to be surprisingly exciting. Say more about why this is actually an exciting industry.

[01:53:24 - 01:54:22]

Gail Azodo: It's an exciting industry because it is life changing. Not only from how you are aware of like your surroundings or your ability to, to not be socially isolated. It's because it can change your health trajectory. The technology in hearing aids is not just sound up or down. It has a lot of.

There's dual chip processors and it has the same technology, if not better than what's in your cell phone and your AirPods. It is being able to recognize who you talk to daily and have markers on there that uses AI tools in which those, those voices, those sounds, those tones come through. It's to be able to talk with your spouse or your partner or your friends in a crowded environment and to be able to actually hear what they're saying. So when I think about like hearing and the technology and hearing it is far beyond what people think it is. Um, in a way, in a sense, people with hearing aids are probably living a more amplified life than you and I without hearing aids.

[01:54:24 - 01:54:30]

Will Smith: You, you have internalized the industry pitch and you deliver it really well.

[01:54:30 - 01:54:31]

Gail Azodo: Thank you.

[01:54:31 - 01:54:47]

Will Smith: You, you, you really have a compelling sales. Sales pitch there, Gil. Well, fascinating what you built.

Really neat to uncover this and, and see what you've done in I guess, less than three years or going into your third year.

[01:54:47 - 01:54:48]

Gail Azodo: Yeah.

[01:54:48 - 01:54:56]

Will Smith: We'll put a link to your LinkedIn. In the show notes, you mentioned the name of the organization, but say it again. And is there a URL?

[01:54:56 - 01:55:20]

Gail Azodo: Yes. So we are real hearing USA. So real. Like something's real. R e a l hearing h e a r I n g USA.com there you'll see our locations and find out more about each individual location.

But LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn as my name. Gail Hamilton Ozotto. That's a great place to like, contact me and that's honestly where I do a lot of my primary conversations with people outside of the organization.

[01:55:20 - 01:55:25]

Will Smith: Okay, great.

Gail Hamilton Azoto. Thank you for sharing. Thanks for coming on Acquiring Minds.

[01:55:26 - 01:55:27]

Gail Azodo: Thank you. I appreciate it.

[01:55:28 - 01:56:11]

Will Smith: Hope you enjoyed that interview.

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