Audiologist, Inventor and Private Practice Owner: Interview with Dr. Daniel Schumaier

{Bob Traynor} Welcome to This Week in Hearing. Hello, I’m Bob Traynor, your host for this episode. And this week is a very special guest, Dr. Dan Schumaier, inventor of the Dry N Store and trans ear aids hearing aids aids and and a very successful private practitioner for 40 years or so in Johnson city, Tennessee. Welcome, Dan, and thanks so much for being with us today here at this Week In Hearing.

Bob, it’s great to be with you. And we discussed some of the changes, I think, as we mentioned, that have occurred. We’ve both been in this business a long time. I think I was the second person to be in private practice in the country. As a matter of fact, a lot of young people don’t realize back in 73 and a lot of young people don’t realize at that time that ASHA frowned upon anyone dispensing hearing aids. As a matter of fact, I was the second in the country to dispense hearing aids. There was one other guy out in California, and they actually kicked him out. And they didn’t kick me out because my brother was an attorney. I guess they were afraid. So things have changed since that time. Oh, of course. And I remember those days too, because I was kind of an ASHA guy at that time. And I had decided that if I was going to do this, I’m going to do it in the right way. I did the whole deal of telling people how much the hearing aids cost and all the this and all the different kinds of things. And that’s why it’s been a little hard for some of us, because the unbundling kind of sounds a little bit like that old ASHA bongle. But of course, it’s altogether different, as we know. Could you tell us a little about your journey, getting that far? How did you get into audiology and some of those things? My interest was tweaked after I got out of the service during Vietnam period, and I was a medic and down at Fort Sand got involved with audiology with Jerry Northern down there. Oh, wow. I was a speech pathologist at the time, and Jerry said, you need to be an audiologist. So when I got out of the service, I went back to school, went to Washington University in St. Louis and got my master’s and studied with some of the great people in the industry at that time. And then I went on and got my PhD at Michigan State University with Bill Reynolds. And all my life, like Bob, I trained to go and teach in the university. You know, in those days, no one was in private practice. They were teaching well in the university. Firstly was the place where the jobs were for doctoral level people because we were the guys that were supposed to train all the new generation of individuals that were coming in. And at that time there’s only like 3% of us that were at the doctoral level route. And of course now all of our colleagues are at the doctoral level and it’s quite a different environment than it was at that time. Well, that’s for sure. As a matter of fact, when I got out, I moved down to the mountains in Tennessee. We’re in East Tennessee, Johnson City, and I got a job with East Tennessee State University. And I started their graduate audiology program, which I really enjoyed. I love doing that and I worked for about two years. But I kind of an entrepreneur and I just couldn’t stand the bureaucracy. I think all of us have had that experience for sure. That’s a terrible- the university for entrepreneurs and people that have been interested in kind of making their own way in the world is a tough environment. And having been at Northern Colorado, Colorado State, Arkansas, I totally enjoy now the adjunct professorial kinds of things because they get to deal with the students and the young professionals and watch them grow a little bit, but there’s none of the academic roundtable. One of our chairs one day, Dan said probably one of the hardest jobs in the world is dealing at a faculty meeting where there’s about five or six PhDs around the table and they all think they know more than the chair and they all bicker while they’re interacting with each other during the faculty meeting. I can understand that. That was interesting. I taught for two years and really enjoyed it. But then I decided I was going to go in private practice and at that time there was only one other person was in private practice. But I decided I was going to do two things. Three things. I was going to do diagnostics, I was going to do hearing aids, which was a ‘no, no’ at that time. Oh yeah, that was you. You had crossed to the to the dark side. By is exactly right. And then I was also going to do the third thing was industrial hearing conservation. Yeah. And our business still is based on those three things. My private practices, we do probably 300 industrial hearing conservation companies. We’ve got crews that go out, we do a lot of hearing aids. I mean, our business is huge. We do probably three or four times more than the average person does. Well, average person does about 12-13 hearing aids a month. We do hundreds, 100 plus. Well, and the thing is that a lot of that is having been around for such a long time, Dan, what I found was the longer I was around, the more people knew the kinds of things that we did. And then when you add to that different components of your practice you put it all together and add the longevity plus the other components really makes a big difference in the numbers. That a guy. It makes it grow. But just like you, when we got out of school and even now I might not be speaking for all schools but as far as Audiology, no one ever told me anything about business. What I knew about business and being an entrepreneur person was what I got from my father. But there were no courses in business and what to do. So it was a lot of learning on my own. And I think that’s still the same situation for audiologists getting out. Now, they have business courses, so they don’t understand. They don’t generally. Now, some of us have spent quite a lot of time in working with the practice management kinds of portions. I did about 20 years of Florida with the development of the AuD and it grew. In fact, Alec Holmes, who was director of the program there at that time called me up and said we want you to be part of our faculty for the Doctor of Audiology program at the University of Florida. Oh, that’s great. Well, when is the hearing aids class offered? We don’t want you to do anything with hearing aids. We want you to teach people how to do business. Now, when you think about this, Dan, you’ve got about 500 people in the program there. Well, at that time, I think the enrollment of my first course was 368. But the deal is you got all these people who are in practice and they all are business oriented audiology people. And of course, they all think they know as much or more than you do. So what I did was I went through and I found all the things that I’d screwed up as I built my practice and began that way. But there’s about 20% of the audiology programs that have a practice management course and those are the good programs. They offer that course. And the sad part about that is some of those courses are even offered by people who have never run a business before. And so by the time you boil that down to those of us that are active in trying to teach our young colleagues how to run a business that you’re correct. There’s probably not nearly as many of those programs that have. Those programs, as you would hope. People might say, well, I’m a doctor of audiology, and I’m an audiologist. But you’re still running a business if you own your own practice. And so you have to know all the intricacies of what you do. And this has changed over time, and it continues to change. Remember when I first started? What was our advertising? You put an ad in a phone book. That’s it. That’s it. And if you had more than that, you were really a heretic. Yeah, I did phone books, but then I also for years did advertising in newspapers. I was in about five newspapers, but I always had my picture in there because I thought that would bring people in. As a matter of fact, one should know that anytime you do any advertising, if you put a picture with your ad, the eye will always go to a picture of the person. It’s just a print ad. The eye doesn’t go to it. But if you put your name in there so my logo at first became my picture, and that was in a lot of newspapers. It was in the you don’t go to the hearing aid section of the phone book. It was there. That’s all changed now. How many people get newspapers? Not many. Yeah, I used to try to put my ads toward the obituary column, because most of my page was always, yeah, that’s right. I used to joke with people, my ad is not in there, I’m probably dead. I think we have some commonality in Jerry Northern. As you mentioned, you were in the army with him, but he did my first I was an intern in his clinic in Denver, editing. You should take a minute and see his Giants and Audiology session that he and I did on YouTube, and you can just kind of go there. But the interesting thing is that he went from being a tank commander into being one of the first army audiologists, and actually the first army audiologist, the first person in the 68 mike was a speech pathologist. Anyway, from what I understand. Anyway, can you tell us a little bit about how you got into doing the dry and store kind of a device? For me, when I first saw it, I said, well, hey, Colorado is kind of a dry climate, I don’t need that thing. And all I did was I got a couple of samples and found that I really did need it because some patients needed it more than others. Anyway, so tell us a little about how you got involved in that dry and store program. My father was an electrical engineer, and he had a one patent. I remember when they brought it home, and he showed it to me, and he was so proud of that patent. It had to do with connecting revolve. Something fields on generators. So I thought, I’d like to get one of those one of these days. So I looked at a problem. The problem with hearing aids now, as it was back then, is moisture the leading cause. There’s no question. If you look at the speakers, we’ve got they’ve all got membranes that suck up water. You’ve got electronic circuitry, no matter what they treat with, that causes failures of hearing aids And we’ve got these great hearing aids with great potential. But let me tell you what. You load them up with moisture, either from sweat or from if somebody gets in the rain, they perspire. Then you’re going to have problems with it. So back in those old days, the only thing we had was a bag that we put hearing aids in with a silica gel desiccant silica gel. You sell people the hearing aids at night. I want you to wrap it up in this thing. Now, what does that give as far as stealing? Oh, I’ve got a great product here. You’re going to tell somebody to wrap it up in a plastic bag. So I thought, what’s it really take to take to dry? And it takes three things to dry. It takes heat, because heat breaks the surface tension of water molecules. It takes moving air to move those water molecules out of a small space, such as a hearing aid. And then it takes something to grab those water molecules, because water molecules like to go from an area of high concentration to low, and that would be a desiccant. So I put that into a patent application. I also included one other problem we had with a lot of the hearing aids we still have them is an external otitis, especially from the molds that are tight in the air. So I put a Germicidal bulb in the UVC bulb in this for the first patent. And we’ve manufactured these products for years. All the cochlear implants are using them. Cochlear Corporation uses them because it cuts down repairs. The UVC also cuts down ear infections. I remember one response I got from a guy who was a patient of mine. He had in the ear hearing aids. And I said, what do you think about the dryer when it first came out? And says, Well, I don’t know about it drying, but my ears don’t itch anymore because it killed a subclinical level of bacteria that caused itching in his ears. So we started doing that, and then that got me in the process of inventing. And now I’ve got about 400 patents worldwide. Whoa. I still continue to invent. Matter of fact, this year I probably got about six new patents coming out. One of the things that I remember you for, in addition to the Dry n store, was the trans cros divide that used some principle. of audiology that both of us know, but for some people, they may not have had quite the exposure to that product and that concept. So tell me a little bit about how that came about and how it’s progressed over the years. Well, at that time, we didn’t really have good cros hearing instruments. And matter of fact, if we wanted to do a cros instrument, we’d have to actually use eyeglasses and frames. And then I don’t remember drilling out across the frames to put the wires in, so we could put the microphone on one side and then put the sound into the bill ear on the other side. So that gave me the idea. I think we could do a cros instrument from putting actually a bone vibrator in the ear canal on the dead ear, and the sound would cross over to the good ear. And so we came up with that product, and we sold lots of those for many years. We still occasionally sell some The product worked very well, and it made people that couldn’t hear out of one side hear out of that side. Also, back in the early days when the hearing aids first came out, we tell people, if you had a hearing loss, you just need one hearing aid. We weren’t doing binaural hearing aids like we did. Now almost all of our fittings now are binaural hearing aids So it makes a difference as far as people being able to localize, as far as being able to hear in noise, it makes a huge difference. Well, and that was a cultural thing, too, I think, to some degree, patients, while they thought they had if they just had one hearing aid, they didn’t look as deaf as they did if they had two hearing aid. A little bit in a cultural kind of a thing, at least in my culture here in Colorado, was kind of like that. There’s a lot of things I understand you’re just about ready to invite me to a BYOB party. That’s exactly right. Now. Oh, it’s great. I’ve got mine here, too. Well, we could wait. I think you misinterpret, though, Bob. Okay. Actually, BYOB doesn’t stand for bring your own bottle. Oh. What it really stands for is build your own business. Okay. Boost your own business is what it stands for. Boost your own business. And we’re doing some podcasts now that are teaching young audiologists and audiologists in practice that want to improve their practice ways to increase their numbers as far as sales, a way to bring people back into the office. Nowadays, a lot of people don’t have products that tend to bring people back into their office. And that’s critical that people come in periodically. We used to have batteries. Not a lot of people are using the rechargeables. So people don’t come in to buy batteries. And a lot of practices said, well, I don’t want to sell batteries anyway. I don’t make that much money from them. That’s not the point. We sell enough batteries in our office to pay for two front people, okay? But it also brings people in. We also have products that bring people in. As far as our dry store products, we want people to come in. If you go to a car dealer and they sell you a set of tires, what do they say? They say, come back in 4000 miles. We’ll rotate them free. A lot of people don’t like that word, free. But they’ll do it free. And they’re doing that for a purpose. They want you to come back in and come back in and eventually they’re going to say you need some new tires. So you always want in any business, you want that tie with your patient or your customer. You want them to come back into your office. And then eventually when they need a new hearing aid instead of tires or new hearing aids, they know to come to you. They’re not going to go somewhere. So many of our products, such as our dryers, have dry bricks in them. And people have to come in to get those dry bricks periodically. They’re inexpensive, but it’s a reason for people to come back. And so they come back, they buy our dry bricks and they know where our office is. They come back a couple of times a year, three times a year maybe. I saw that for years with that was another reason why I think that was the reason I started to try to use the dry and store products was because people had to keep coming back. And of course, at that time they were coming back for batteries as well. But as you say, and I think one of the handicaps to practitioners in audiology has always been the early culture of that you were just a nasty individual if you said anything about sales, said anything about marketing. And now it is a different world out there. But one of the things that I found, and I want to make sure that my young audiology colleagues understand, and I think you would agree with this, is that it’s always better to market yourself and your own practice and not necessarily do what the manufacturer thinks you should do by marketing their product. You’re absolutely correct. People that get hearing instruments, whether they are rechargeable, some people, if they’ve got palsy or something, we go with rechargeables or they use the other dryers. But all of our dryers have our logo on them. So the first thing the person sees in the morning is my name. The last thing they see at night is my name. That’s what I want him to remember. Dr. Daniel R. Schumaier and associates. Audiologist. And it’s kind of interesting. On our Global drying store, we engrave for many practices, we engrave the practice name. And when you press the button, the light comes on the germicidal bulb, but it shines through. And the name of the practice is in lights. And so a lot of times I tell people when I showing it to, I said, I always wanted my name in lights. And here it is. And they come and there it is. Well, you know, keep some posted. Yeah. I think too, some of us have kind of had the opportunity to go around to various parts of the world and talk with people that distribute hearing aids as well as some of the practitioners in other countries. They are totally more oriented toward the business side of what all of us do. Many of them are fabulous practitioners, but they haven’t had that nastiness that was given to us early on, which has subsided substantially. But it’s still kind of there in the background someplace. And it’s really refreshing to talk to a colleague who has kind of similar ideas and actually got those ideas. Maybe I got some of mine from you, I’m not sure. But the idea is that having the capability to market and present yourself and the things you do, you have to do that. Because if you do not do that, then the competition is going to do it for you, only for them. Yeah, they’ll eat you up. And that’s why we’ve got this BYOB program that we’re starting. It’s every two weeks. We’re coming out with a new program. It deals with marketing, it deals with the way to market your services. It talks about anything connected with business that can help your practice. And it’s about a 15-20 minutes session. And I think it’s going to be beneficial for a lot of audiologists that have been in practice and want to improve their practice and also for new people going out say, how can I make this work? It sounds like it’s also a way for independent audiology practitioners to actually stay as independent audiology practitioners and not join some group that wants to know everything about them as well. That’s exactly right. And nowadays, with the over the counter hearing aids and stuff like that, you got to be smarter than you were before. You got to do things a little bit different. And that’s what we’re trying to teach some people what to do to market their practice, which helps people. And that’s the reason I do what I’m doing. I still see a lot of patients, and because I get the thrill out of it, it also gives me ideas to invent new products. But I get the thrill out of seeing patients, helping them hear better. That’s my purpose in life. And that’s why continue to do it well. And these kinds of things actually brand. And branding is extremely important. As you mentioned, we were naming lights on the drying store. But more than that, they see the practice name and they see that, but when they see your name, they see, oh, they have a certain feeling about that particular name and that particular place when they walk in the front door. They know certain things are going to happen. And branding is essential these days to keep your practice thriving and not only bring people in, but also keep them coming in over a long period of time. You’re absolutely right. Branding, look at just what I’m wearing now. Every day I’m branded. Some way I’m branded, but I don’t have a brand to do too much with anymore. We brand our products. As a matter of fact, as I mentioned about pictures, we’ve got billboards might say, well, billboards, we’ve got big billboards, and they’re branded with our logo, which is kind of my face and some of my other audiologists. And so people drive by, so I see you on such and such, or I see you. It’s a different way of doing business nowadays than what we did before when we were just in the phone book. And that’s what people need to learn. Absolutely. There are certain things that need to be done, not just to bring people in, but also they have to have a good experience to be able to feel that they want to come back. And that experience is part of the brand as well. You’re absolutely right. And let me tell you, the front office person is the first person they see. You’ve got to have a great person there. You don’t want someone walk up to your front office and somebody’s on the phone and they can at least look up. So I’ll be with you in a second if they’re on the phone, but they get that warm feeling as soon as they move in. And our offices are all that way. Well, and again, that’s why you do hundreds of periods, and some people, they do ten or this or that. Not that the numbers actually are what’s necessary, but the whole thing is creating an environment that is a welcoming kind of a facility for each and every individual. And yeah, there are some people that we’re really taking care of well, but we don’t like those people very well. But there’s others that when they lock the keys in their car, they have a spare set of keys at home, you’re going to get in your car, take them over, get their keys out of the garage so they can get back in their car, because they didn’t want to call their kid, because the. Kids thought they might have lost it. There’s a whole lot of reasons why. There’s those that we’re going to do a fabulous job with, even though we don’t care too much for them. But there are others that are going to be very welcoming individuals that we all want, but everyone has to feel comfortable and welcome and so on as they move into the clinics, though. You’re absolutely right. Absolutely right. It’s the whole environment. Well, how do we get involved with your new BYOB program, Dan? If some of our young colleagues are interested in contacting you and interacting over this particular program, they can just go online to Ear Technology (eartech.com) and sign up for BYOB. Okay. And then that podcast will go on every two weeks. There’ll be a new one and they deal with different topics, about 10-15 minutes at the most, but kind of gives them a way to do business a little bit differently. No, they can take their this Week in Hearing episode and then combine that with their BYOB episode and then have a nice lunch hour. I think that’s absolutely right. We’ll get some information from two old guys. Two old guys. Well, Dan, it’s been my pleasure to have you here with us at This Week in Hearing. And those of you who want to work with someone who’s been around longer than any of us want to admit, go to Ear Technology and just check it out because you may find some tips for the things that have changed in marketing these days. Branding your practice, how to bring in new patients and probably as important, keeping them. And also you might find some new products and maybe something that’s coming from those 400 patents that we did. And I’ll be looking someday to bring my own bottle to Dr. Dan Schumaiers, and hopefully we can have another golf game, another day real soon. That sounds great. So just bring your own bottle and to boost your own business and we’ll be in touch again. Great. So today my guest has been Dr. Dan Schumaier, one of our pillars of audiology and private practice over the last four decades or so. Thanks so much for being with us. Dan. And thank you for being with us at this week in Hearing.