 Hello everybody, Andrew Maesca here with Dental Pell. So let's talk about what does every dental hygiene business owner need right away and what are things that you don't necessarily have to spend the money on now until you make a little bit of extra money, until you know how many patients you'll be seeing weekly, daily, and just sort of how you want to run your business. So I did leave some notes on my iPad here, so I'm just gonna look at that just so I don't forget anything. So what you need right away, so things you might not think of or you have questions on, well, should I spend the money, should I wait? So number one, honestly, is the intraoral camera. Use that intraoral camera. So why do I say this? I say this because I take intraoral photos on every single new patient that I have, so that that way afterwards I can sit them up and show them all of their teeth, even if there's nothing exciting to look at. So even if there's no cavities, the gums look good, anything, I like to actually show them that. But usually there's something there. So even if there's a little more stain, tartar plaque, the lower interior linguals, I will show them that. If they have a big cavity, if they have a small cavity, I will show them that using my intraoral camera. I plug it into my laptop. So I see patients in their own home, plus over here too. So that's why I like to bring my laptop along so that way I can actually show them even if I go to their house. So I'm talking about the intraoral camera because they can be expensive. When I was first talking to a dental company, so a dental rep, theirs was about $2,000. I found one on Amazon for, shoot, I'll have to, I'll leave the link for you guys on the bottom. I forget the cost. I wanna say $200 or $300. I bought it about a year ago, so I can't remember. But it's perfect. I literally plug it into my laptop and the picture quality is amazing. So definitely purchase it. And it does come with the barriers as well. Okay, it is expensive to get the barriers to get more of them, but it is what it is. But it's still so much cheaper than spending $2,000 from a dental supply company. So I will leave a link for you guys on the bottom, check it out. The nice thing about Amazon is if you don't like it, return it, but you will love it. So another thing that is a must-have, I forgot already, sorry guys, I'm just looking at my iPad here. Actually, that was the number one that I wanted to talk about is the intraoral camera. So other things that are a must-have, which may seem a little more obvious to you, is you want to have enough instruments, but you don't have to buy, let's say 20 different instrument kits. If you're just starting out, I would suggest buying three. I purchased about five or six when I first started and I did end up purchasing more, but if you're looking to save money, you might not be seeing five patients a day. So it is possible to maybe buy three different instrument kits and then just make sure to obviously have them sterilized before the next one, right? But you don't need 20, 30 kits if you don't know how many patients you will be seeing because it does take time to build up seeing patients. But that brings me to my next point is, do you need a sterilizer? So I did spend the big bucks to get a sterilizer right away. It cost me about $10,000, but this way I do have one in my own home. Whereas I know a dental hygienist who did start her mobile business. She tried it out. She did purchase her own sterilizer, some company from China to be honest with you. So it was a lot cheaper and it worked perfectly fine, but if you get audited, that's not gonna hold. Like you can't get a sterilizer from somewhere else. It has to be here. But anyways, it's a good thing that she didn't spend the $10,000 to get one because she didn't really, her business didn't really take off. So she was in business for maybe six months and then she soon thought, okay, this is hard work. This isn't for me. I'm working, I just wanna do other things. She found an amazing job, or I'm sorry, she was offered an amazing job as a receptionist, office manager. So she loves that. So it's a good thing she did not buy a sterilizer right away. That was $10,000 like the one that I picked because she would just have to try to sell it and that's a lot of money, right? So a sterilizer, do you need it right away? Probably not. If you're able to use another office to sterilize your instruments, perfect. But maybe you don't know any other offices that would be willing to let you use their equipment. If that's the case, then you need to get your own sterilizer, okay? So other things that you have to buy right away, think masks, gloves, bibs. You need like pouches if you do have a sterilizer, things like that. So think the basics. But the thing about that is if you buy anything off of a dental supply company, you have to order like a box of 1,000 to actually order anything. So if you're able to find a dental hygienist or a dental office that can sell you say a box of 100 masks or 100 bibs, so you don't have to spend like $30 here, $80 there and $90 there right away, that would be ideal just until you kind of get your foot in the door and you build up your patients. I did spend a lot of money initially because I knew that I was going to make this business work. It was just something that I have always wanted to do. When I want to do something, I just do it. So I didn't mind buying a box of 1,000 bibs that I still have a year later. I didn't mind buying boxes of masks in the hundreds because I knew that I will eventually use them. If you buy in bulk, you do save money but if you're just starting out, if you can help it, try not to buy all of that, okay? So those are kind of the main things. I'm probably missing something but I would feel the most common question that people ask me is, do I need a sterilizer? How many instruments do you suggest I get? That kind of thing. Things that you can hold off on is a computer software. So this is the big thing. Don't spend the money on a computer software for your patients unless you were like me and you do plan to really make this work no matter what. It's expensive. I wish though I did buy a computer, a dental software right away because having to input all of my patients in afterwards did take a lot of work but I was spending so much money initially that I didn't have an extra 3,000 just lying around anyway. I said to myself, I'm just gonna do paper charts, paper like medical history, everything paper until I'm seeing a lot of patients to pay the money to get a dental software but I did find an amazing one for about $3,000 to get the support every year. I wanna say it's $800 but don't call me. I can't remember the price for sure but that's so much better than some of the other dental softwares that I've heard of and talked to. It was $10,000 minimum and then per year like 2,000 something like that. So this software that I went, they are for dental hygienists. I will leave the link for you on the bottom. They're amazing, okay, amazing and their customer service is amazing. It's easy to use which is nice. So I did buy the computer software a year later and I had about 116 patients or sorry, I do have 116 patients. I didn't know I had so many but the nice thing about a dental software is you can send claims electronically if you do use insurance. You can just type it all in there. Your charting's typed in schedule. Oh my goodness, it's so much nicer. But that's another thing you guys, you don't need that dental software right away and you don't have to accept insurance either right away. So that brings me to my next point is do you want to do cash only patients or do you want to accept insurance? If you accept insurance, meaning that you actually submit to their insurance company and they would only pay you the difference at the time of their appointment, it's a lot of work. I can't stand how much work it is, it's difficult but I would not have my patients because of it. 99% of my patients have insurance and they said I simply would not be able to afford your services otherwise. So that's a question that I do get is do patients pay cash or do you submit for them to insurance? A lot of hygienists out there, 90% of them will not submit to insurance because they know it's a lot of work. They have to chase patients sometimes, claims conveniently don't go through. We can't send everything electronically, it's a mess but I still deal with it because I wouldn't have most of my patients because of it. But I'll talk to you guys about how to charge patients especially when you're starting out. You wanna offer a discount maybe but not too much. Don't charge too much because then you're not gonna get the patients. Do you bill for a new patient exam? Do you not? That I will talk about in another video. So other things you can wait on are things like actually this. So this is super handy. So I call this my teaching tool, okay? You can get some amazing teaching tools on Amazon. You don't have to get these right away. So this was about 38, 99 Canadian. So you don't have to get overly excited, get all of your teaching tools right away. Wait until you have patients. So this took me a year to buy. Yes, it's only 38, 99. There's actually more that I did purchase because I find that teaching tools are so helpful. But again, do you need it right away? No, spend the money on things like instruments, masks, gloves. Another thing is loops. If you don't have loops yet, I entirely recommend you get them. But is that something you need right away? Especially if you're not used to using loops? Maybe not. Save your money. My loops were about under $2,000 with the light. They're amazing. I love them. I can't imagine not wearing them, especially the light. I need it. But again, I've been using it for maybe 10 years. So I'm used to loops. But if you're not used to them, or if you don't usually have them, don't waste your money yet. Make some money first. What else, guys? I'm just kinda looking around. I just set up for my patients a couple hours ago. So I'm just trying to think of things that I set up. Talking about slow-speed handpieces, you will need that right away, obviously, to polish patients' teeth. I purchased the new Pro Freedom Handpiece. It's a very expensive one, about $2,000 worth every penny. You don't need the most expensive slow-speed handpiece out there until you know you want to make this a regular thing. Because a lot of dental hygienists, business owners, they realize it's hard work, and then they don't want to do it. So it really depends if this is something that you truly want to do. You'll need to get a stool for yourself right away. If you're a mobile dental hygienist, you want to get end tables, side tables. I found amazing ones. I will leave the link for you guys on the bottom for that as well. Whitening. I do suggest getting some type of whitening kit for your patients. A lot of my patients ask me, so you do teeth cleaning. Do you do the whitening, too? Spend the money to purchase everything you need to do the whitening because you will make some great money doing that. I remember when I first started, I had more patients who wanted the whitening, and then they said, oh, so you clean teeth, too? For some reason, I guess I was just advertising more about the whitening, not as much the cleaning, but people love it, okay? So spend the money doing that. That's all I can think about. This is kind of a longer video. I'm not good at doing short videos because I just keep talking. So I'm sorry. Please comment below, though, if you have any questions. I do hope this helped. I will leave the links for you guys on the bottom because I do purchase a lot from Amazon. Be careful, though, because you can't purchase things like instruments off of Amazon because no. Things that I'm going to be using inside the mouth, I don't purchase from Amazon. That should be from a dental company. But things like a model, a teaching model, hey, purchase it from Amazon. If I were to buy this from a dental company, it would have been at least $99. I saw this at the Dental Convention for $99.95. I paid $38.99 for it off of Amazon, so Amazon's awesome. So check out the links, you guys. Let me know if you have any questions. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.