Podcasts – SmartBox Dental Marketing

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A Minute (Or Two) With Colin Receveur, Episode 27

- Growing up in a dental practice with my dad, Dr. Ron, and working with so many of his friends and colleagues and mastermind partners.

- The one guiding principle that we've always had here at SmartBox is we have to keep dentists doing dentistry.

- I think that probably sounds kind of elementary when I say that, but it's such a powerful guiding principle.

- Because when dentists stop doing dentistry they start doing their blogging or checking their website and updating things.

- Or, they start monitoring their front office staff, or they start helping their front office staff with training, or they're listening to phone calls.

- I talked to a dentist the other day that would stand behind the corner of his front desk and listen to his front staff answering the calls to see how well they were performing in answering the calls.

- When you start engaging in those kinds of activities, you get away from your number one most profitable activity, which is doing dentistry.

- When dentists aren't doing dentistry, the financial revenue side of the practice grinds to a halt.

- That's why it's been so powerful for us. Everything we do from the systems, the processes, how we work with dentists, our success academy, our success plans, our agency side, we all are focused on one singular thing.

- And that's keeping dentists doing dentistry.

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A Minute (Or Two) With Colin Receveur, Episode 26

- The two most important phrases that a practice owner as a leader of your practice needs to know are, help me understand that, and what do you recommend?

- And as the dentist, you probably with pretty good certainty already know the right answer.

- You already know what to do, whether it's answering the phones, appointing, handling processes, getting rooms set up, all the clinical stuff.

- You've done it. You probably have all those answers.

- But the hardest part of building your team of A players and building a team-driven practice is empowering your team.

- And creating that kind of empowerment or accountability is all about letting them lead themselves, helping them to lead themselves by asking them, "What do you recommend?" and, "Help me understand that."

- Those are two of the most powerful phrases you can use with your team in your practice.

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A Minute (Or Two) With Colin Receveur, Episode 25

- I get asked the question, Colin, should I sell my practice?

- I have these DSOs that are approaching me, I have this private equity money, they're building conglomerates, I've got an opportunity to sell. Should I sell?

- And really what they're asking me is, what's the price of lamb today versus the price of wool tomorrow?

- So if you've got a sheep, you've got two choices. You can nurture that sheep and keep selling the wool, shearing it every year, twice a year, and selling the wool, or you can slaughter it. But you only get to slaughter it once.

- So what is the value of the practice over the long term?

- And in most dental practices, if you look at the price of lamb today versus the price of lamb over the next two to three years, you've got a very close break even point.

- By the time you recapture depreciation, you pay uncle Sam, you pay your closing agent for brokering the practice sale, you've got a year or two of profits in the bank.

- And then the question is, how do you take that money that you made and go re-invest it to earn a significant return, like what you were doing in your practice?

- It's always sexy to think about, I could sell my business, I could sell the practice and just retire, but then you've got a chunk of cash and what do you do with it?

- Do you just do nothing with it and spend the principal?

- You're going to go through that in a few years and then you're going to have nothing.

- So you've got to fundamentally look at the numbers of, again, the price of lamb today versus the price of wool tomorrow.

- Generally speaking, for most dentists, it doesn't make a lot of sense.

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A Minute (Or Two) With Colin Receveur, Episode 24

- I get asked the question a lot: What's the most expensive mistake a practice owner can make in 2019, 2020?

-  The most expensive mistake a practice owner can make is trial and error. It's extremely expensive. It's extremely time consuming.

- Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice, makes permanent. Practice makes bad habits and experience is a very expensive teacher.

- My grandpa used to tell me that brains are cheap.

- And what he was really saying is if you've got to go learn it the hard way, there's a reason that the school of hard knocks is a kind of social quip of bumping your head against something and learning the hard way because it is.

- It's expensive and it takes a lot of time and it's a lot easier to learn from somebody that's already done it and already been there and already conquered that.

- My dad, Dr. Ron, and I went through a lot of that school of hard knocks, learning the systems, understanding how do you build expert status, how do you build a team driven practice with A-players?

- How do you attract the right kinds of patients?

- How do you do these things to build the kind of practice that you really want to have, not just accepting everything that comes in the door and, "Does my insurance cover this," and, "Oh, can you just extract it? I don't want to get the crown," or whatever it is.

- If you want to build the practice that you always dreamed of having, you've got to learn from somebody that's already done it.

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A Minute (Or Two) With Colin Receveur, Episode 23

- We work with a lot of doctors that are looking to exit, looking to transition their practice.

- And I get the question all the time, "Colin, what's my exit strategy? What kind of strategy should I employ to exit my practice when I'm ready?"

- And I always give them the same answer, and that is that I think the conversation around exit strategy is an inferior conversation.

- There's fundamentally three strategies for exiting your practice: you can run it until you die and close it down, you can give it to your kids, or you can sell it.

- There's your three strategies. Pick which strategy you want.

- The problem with most practices that I see, 90, 95% of the practices I see, is not in the strategy of what they need to do.

- The problem is their exit ability. They are non-exit able businesses or practices for a number of reasons.

- It's kind of like when you go to buy a new car, and you're looking at cars.

- And you've got the Mercedes, and you've got the Bimmer, and you've got the Lamborghini, and then you've got the '79 Pinto that's got 284,000 miles on the engine.

- Right? So when you're going to look at these cars, when was the last time you bought the '79 Pinto with the engine that only half the cylinders fired in?

- Probably didn't buy it. And this is like a lot of dental practices. They're running like a '79 Pinto.

- The processes, the systems, the team, the marketing engine is not running.

- It's misfiring. It hadn't had its spark plugs changed in 100,000 miles, and it's not working.

- Ergo, to a buyer, somebody looking at buying it, there's no value, or there's diminished value.

- So the problem with exit ability is generally around execution.

- It's around building the systems, setting it up for success, building a strong team that's going to maintain that continuity once the practice is able to transition.

- And whatever strategy you employ, whether it's you run it until you die and shut it down or retire, you give it to your kids, or you sell it to somebody else...

… whatever strategy you employ, building those systems and building the team and building A-players and getting that marketing engine really dialed in, is not only going to throw off more cash from the practice and the business in the interim until one of those three strategies comes in down the road.

- It's also going to dramatically change the exit at that point.

- If you give it to your kids, the value and the shoulders that they're standing upon when they take over your practice is going to be so much higher.

- If you sell it, it's going to be worth a half million, a million, two million dollars more because of what you've built, the engine.

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A Minute (Or Two) With Colin Receveur, Episode 22

- I think what we see a lot of times when we start working with a new dentist or a new dental practice is the dentist has had one year of experience, 10 or 15 or 20 times.

-  And they've hit kind of a cyclical cycle, so to speak, in their business.

- The practice goes up and then things happen and then it goes down.

- And then they ramp up the marketing and it goes up and then things get really good and for some reason things go back down.

- Breaking that cycle that roller coaster, if you will, is one of the things that we're really, really good at here at SmartBox.

- Because we understand the headwinds against dentistry, what dentists need with themselves, with their practice, with their team in order to move forward and progress.

- And having 20 years of experience here and not one year of experience 20 times has given us an enormous wealth of knowledge to help dentists and practices and group practices to overcome those headwinds and keep moving forward.

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A Minute (Or Two) With Colin Receveur, Episode 21

- Negative reviews are some of the best feedback that a practice can get, and that seems a little counterintuitive at first. 

- But when a patient takes the time to leave you a negative review, they're highlighting something that they found really, really bad in your practice.

- So there's three types of patients. There's the happy patient, there's the unhappy patient, and then there's the patient in the middle, which is not happy or unhappy, just discontent. 

- Those are the patients in the middle that leave and never come back and you never hear from them again. 

- The happy patients leave you a great review, and the unhappy patients leave you a negative review. 

- So the feedback that you get on the negative review patients is oftentimes things that are in your blind spot, things you can't see or aren't thinking about, which is great for changing and improving the processes and procedures and practices within your dental practice.

- It's important when you get a negative review, the first thing to do is to own it. 

- If you don't own it and you start making excuses for why it happens, the patients don't believe that you're truly sincere and genuine about changing it. 

- So the first thing you've got to do is own it. "I'm so sorry this happened. This isn't your experience of how we wanted it to be. As the owner of this dental practice, I take it as my responsibility," so on and so forth. 

- And once you've properly owned it, now you can start to put steps into place to resolve it within your own practice as well as resolve it with the patients. 

- But if you start making excuses, which is oftentimes the initial reaction of everybody, "Well, this only happened because," or "Well, that patient was unreasonable," whatever it may be. 

- But that's not relevant to solving the patient's complaint. It takes a little bit of an ego hit sometimes to respond to a negative review like that.

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A Minute (Or Two) With Colin Receveur, Episode 20

- So when I go into a practice and I ask a dentist, "What percentage of the calls that your front office staff gets are you converting to new patients?" I get a range of answers. 

- Maybe 30 or 40%, they need to improve. Maybe 60 to 80%, man, they're doing great.

- Every now and then a doctor will say, "Every patient that can be converted, we convert," right? 

- Well we know that's not the case because always and never, never are true.

- What percentage should your practice be at is really a question for the doctor. 

- So we can show you the practices that we've benchmarked. We've benchmarked 8,000 practices in the United States. 

- General practices that are doing at least a million dollars a year. 

- We have 8,000 of those benchmarked. 

- So we can show you what percentage of calls should you be answering? What percentage of calls is average for a point? 

- What are the top 10% of practices appointing in the country? What are the bottom 10%?

- But ultimately, it's not so much as what you should be doing as what do you think you need to make. Changes to grow your practice. 

- So we are more, it's more or less a tool for us to highlight where are the biggest areas of improvement that you can focus on. 

- And then from there, working with that practice to help to tighten up those areas. 

- How do we answer more calls? How do we appoint more patients? 

- And ultimately, because out of those two things, we're going to get more new patients appointed in the practice.

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A Minute (Or Two) With Colin Receveur, Episode 19

- One of the paradoxes of how busy your front office staff actually is, is that one of the major areas that takes a lot of time is scheduling new patients.

- A, it's the most important thing they're doing is scheduling new patients, and B, it also can be one of the most time-consuming.

- What we've learned from doing this for 15 years, in the data of actually looking at who schedules appointments and then do they show up for their appointments and what kind of treatment do they accept, is that patients that take more than about five minutes to schedule their appointments generally are not good new patients.

- So oftentimes, I get the pushback when I tell a dentist this.

- “Well, they have a lot of questions. They're asking lots of questions. My front staff's trying to be super helpful to get these questions answered.”

- Well, when that happens, oftentimes the patient is asking a lot of questions because the trust hasn't been established, or the front office hasn't built the requisite trust.

- So they're asking lots of questions because they still don't feel connected, like they can trust you to come into your practice.

- So they're asking for other things, other points of information.

- And when the calls run long like that, 10, 15 minute calls, it's often a sign of that training at the front desk needs to be overhauled, and that can be a major time savings.

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A Minute (Or Two) With Colin Receveur, Episode 18

- I talk to a lot of dentists that say paid media doesn't work for me. I've tried it, it doesn't work. It's not effective. I spent a lot of money, didn't get any results from it.

- And I think the real story behind that is sometimes, truly, it doesn't work in their market area. We've seen this before.

- There's various factors that contribute to paid media being ineffective.

- 80% of the time that a doctor tells me, "Hey, the pay-per-click just doesn't work for me."

- It's actually not that it doesn't work in their market area, it's that it's been implemented poorly. Right?

- I mean, there's all kinds of crowns that you can get in your mouth.

- You can have a $25.00 crown out of China, or you can have a $1,100.00 or $1,500.00 crown that's made from the best materials and put on with the best practices and the right margins and all that good stuff.

- Well, they're both crowns, right? But what's the difference?

- Well, that's the same thing in marketing.

- You can do pay-per-click and check the box or you can really make it effective and really understand who's my target market, who's going to respond here, who do I want to go after, what's the message, what's the call-to-action and make it work and that's what all marketing is.

- It's figuring out who's the target market and what do they need to be motivated, to compel, to call my office and schedule that appointment?