KickStart Dental Marketing is a dental marketing company based in Denver, CO. For more information on our services please call (800) 694-9184.
Chris Pistorius: Hi everybody. This is Chris Pistorius again with Kickstart Dental Marketing. Today, I’ve got an awesome guest that I know a lot of you are going to be interested in. This is Billy Parra, he is the Director of Sales for Elite Payment Group. He’s located in San Antonio, Texas. I’ll let him speak here in a second, I promise. But, I get asked a ton from dental practices and I’ve never had a really good answer about [00:00:30] credit card processing. There’s some of you that do over a million dollars a year easily in credit card processing and you spend a lot of money in the transaction fees. Well, I had a dental consultant friend of mine, Brenda, talk to me about Billy and his company, Elite Payment Group, and I looked into it and I’ve actually switched over myself. His rates are unbelievable and he focuses on the dental industry. So, without further ado, Billy, thanks [00:01:00] so much for being a part of the show today.
Billy Parra: Thank you so much for inviting me. I really appreciate it Chris.
Chris Pistorius: Yeah. So, you said you’re in San Antonio, right?
Billy Parra: Yes. It’s beautiful, great weather. San Antonio, Texas.
Chris Pistorius: Yeah. Today, we were talking before we start hit the record button, that we got our first snow here in Denver and San Antonio is starting to sound pretty good right now, so.
Billy Parra: It’s always golf weather.
Chris Pistorius: Right, right. Well, hey, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your company, Elite Payment [00:01:30] Group.
Billy Parra: We started this company in 2010 because I used to own restaurants and in restaurants I was always… my rates would always keep climbing, my all in rate. My fees kept going, going up. So, we decided to start a company doing processing the right way. In other words, a lot of people… a lot of processing companies are huge conglomerates or units that are small amount of BOPs. What they’ll do is they’ll get you, tie you into a contract, say this is a rate they’re going to give you and then over time, the rate keeps going [00:02:00] up and up and up. Also, rent equipment to you, release equipment to you, which is not what we do.
We kind of flipped the script where, in a nutshell, the way payment processing works is there’s three people that get paid. The bank that issues a credit card, Visa and MasterCard and Amex for every transaction and the processor. The processor that actually takes your payments and puts it in your bank, that’s the only negotiable piece. The other piece is, imagine Walt Disney World and Joe’s little hotdog [00:02:30] stand, they pay exactly the same for the cost of the different types of cards. Your rewards cards, Capital One, business cards, debit. Take debit if you can, that’s the best rate for you.
So, what they’ll do is they’ll say, we’ll put you on a kind of tier pricing and some cards will be at 1.50 and others will be at 2.0. What they’ll do is they’ll just put cards that are 1.15 and put them at the 2.5 rate. And over time, they’ll just keep raising those rates and [inaudible 00:02:57] fees. What we do and I’ll tell you, just [00:03:00] Google interchange pass through pricing. And from there, you can Google that interchange pass through pricing, that way you can learn about pure pricing versus interchange.
We do interchange. Interchange is the actual cost of the different cards. There’s over 600 different rates for credit cards. If you key a card in versus if you swipe it, it’s going to cost you more. What we do, we add only 0.08%. 0.08. So, that’s 0.0008 and 8 [00:03:30] cents a transaction above that. And we have fees that average out to $35 a month, those fees never go up. What we do is, we make very, very little off each customer, but you’ll see on our statements of when you see it, we make very little, but we have thousands and thousands of clients.
We owned about 10% of the self storage market for a long time, we sold that. And we only basically focus on dental, veterinarian, optometry. I handle the dental side. We never raise those rates, we never play games. We don’t put you into a contract that ties you in, you can [00:04:00] quit whenever you want. And we get free equipment, we don’t lease equipment and it’s good quality equipment. You can have a mobile vial that works off your wifi.
And the main thing is that people, we like to say, people come for the price and stay for the service. We answer the phone 24 7. Most companies will just send you to the main processor behind that 800 number and you’ll never get an answer. 24 7, we answer the phone. So, basically the thing about it, you come to us, you will save thousands per year [00:04:30] and it won’t cost you a penny to do it.
Chris Pistorius: Yeah. And I’m attested, I mean you did a rate comparison for my company and it’s going to save me a considerable amount of money. And quite frankly, I get nothing for doing this. This is legit advice to all my clients. The process was very simple, I signed a couple documents, emailed them back over to you guys and everything’s right on track.
So, [00:05:00] this is the real deal and it’s one of those things that… Sometimes my clients will say, well, I can save a couple hundred dollars a month to switch credit card processing companies. And I’m almost like, it’s not worth it because you got to go through and change processes and it’s just not worth it. But I’m seeing your company literally save dental practices, thousands of dollars a month in credit card processing fees. And that’s just, [00:05:30] that’s amazing. So, is there anything that you can tell the audience? Because my clients do get a lot of calls about credit card processing and it’s taking up some of their front desk time. Do you have any tips or advice on how to really stop those calls other than saying, “Hey, stop calling us.”?
Billy Parra: The best tip is, when I had my restaurants I would get calls all the time, I got to say your money or the boss, the boss says like, we need, you need to say [inaudible 00:05:56] I am the boss, I never spoke to you. So, tell them when they call, tell your [00:06:00] front desk or whomever, just say, “I have my own ISO.” Now the ISO allows you… You can do your own processing and you’re not going to rip yourself off. Anybody can become an ISO like we are, and that way you can tell… At least that person will not call you again, you know?
Chris Pistorius: Gotcha.
Billy Parra: They’re not going to call you because they know, Hey, I’m not going to rip myself off. [inaudible 00:06:21] We do so much volume that our buy rate, our cost rate is extremely low. That allows us to do that 0.08 and 8 cents of transaction. [00:06:30] I have to say, I have my own [inaudible 00:06:32].
Chris Pistorius: Yeah. Okay. And I’ve always wondered, this is kind of my own personal curiosity, but why is it that Amex rates seem to be higher than Visa and MasterCard? Is that just a negotiated rate or?
Billy Parra: Well, Amex has the prestige about it, shall we say. Usually when you had Amex, you’d have to pay it off every month, that’s why they charge that 2.89. We have, we were the first in the country to have a program a few years old, that [00:07:00] our Amex is lower than the average. The average is 2.89%. If it’s under $300 a transaction, it’s 2.14. If it’s between 300 and a thousand, it’s 2.4. And then if it’s over a thousand, it’s 2.89%. The thing is that those rates cannot, they won’t go up. And the best thing is the rates on top of that, that we put on, it’s not going to go up.
Chris Pistorius: I see. Okay. Great info. I know [00:07:30] Billy you’ve offered to my clients and my audience to do a free, absolutely free kind of rate comparison of… I think you take a statement that they currently have, you analyze it and then compare it to what it would be with you. Did you talk about the details with that and how that would work?
Billy Parra: It’s real simple. Just get your last current statement and I’ll tell you a little trick to do for yourself. Take the fees that they charged you for that month, divide it by how much credit card volume you did, [00:08:00] and you’re probably going to be in the 2.65 range, which is high. Our average all in, with Amex and everything, is 1.8%. All depends, if you’re in the very affluent area of town, people are going to use more Amex, more rewards cards so you may be in the 2.1, 2.2% range. You send us that statement, within 24 hours we send you back an analysis detailing exactly the savings and how, side to side.
If you’re doing well, I’ll tell you, you’re doing well. [00:08:30] I’ll say, “You know what? You’re doing well enough, just ask them to get rid of this fee.” It’s not about trying to get as many clients as I can, but trying to make as many clients of a lot of my CPAs and marketing companies happy. I would love to do that, just please send me a recent statement, I’ll email it back to you. My email is billy@elitepaymentgroup.com. You can also text the word “Dental” [00:09:00] to (321) 244-3031 and you’ll get my brochure that basically states what we do.
Chris Pistorius: Awesome. That’s great. Billy, I really appreciate you coming on. This is truly, you know, I don’t really bring a lot of vendors on this show and try to kind of represent what they do just because… Especially credit card processors, because it’s such a flooded market and it’s hard to find people to trust. But I know that you’re doing great work with [00:09:30] dental practices, and like I said, my company’s switched and I know a lot of dental practices already have. I appreciate you coming on and sharing this information, and I’m sure that a lot of people in our audience today is going to reach out to you. So, thanks so much for being on.
Billy Parra: Thank you very, very much.
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