The Dental Marketer

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In this week's Monday Morning Marketing episode, we're thrilled to have Chelsea Brock from Gargle as our guest, continuing our research in the realm of Google Ads. Our focus today revolves around the critical theme of same day appointments and crafting the perfect ad campaign for your office. Chelsea shares expert insights on the episode, emphasizing the importance of specificity in your ads to effectively target your desired demographic. She also sheds light on the power of specific keywords like "Invisalign" while advising on alternative, budget-friendly options. Don't miss what Chelsea has to say about nurturing patient relationships by following up with those who book through your ads. Plus, discover the significance of having a dedicated landing page for your same day appointment ad and learn how to include all the crucial details in your ad copy, such as online scheduling, same day appointments, and hassle-free insurance acceptance.

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Jump into the episode now to find how powerful same day appointment ads could be for your office!

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You can reach out to Chelsea Brock here:

Website: https://gargle.com/

Email: [email protected]

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Other Mentions and Links:

Google Ads

Invisalign

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If you want your questions answered on Monday Morning Marketing, ask me on these platforms:

My Newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/

The Dental Marketer Society Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2031814726927041

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Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)

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Michael: in three, Hey, Chelsea. So talk to us about Google ads. How can we utilize this or what advice suggestions or methods can you give us that will help us actually attract new patients

Chelsea: immediately? Absolutely. Google ads are one of the best ways to bring new clients and patients into the practice, and you want to make sure that you're focusing on what your practice needs.

We all want new patients coming in, but perhaps we need to focus on a specific procedure. Or most often my clients have holes in their schedule and they want to know, how do I get those bills? I don't want to see empty spaces. I want to be treating patients and getting production through the door.

Most often we want to check in and make sure they're running the right type of ads. We want to make sure that they have an ad that is Reaching the right demographic meeting their geographical area, but also to fill those empty holes in the schedule, you need your patients to know that you're available when they need you.

Most patients we know are great about coming in for appointments, but also most of them are not, and in an emergency situation, they're looking for who's available. So I always recommend if you're seeing a lot of empty holes on your schedule or if you are seeing that you just can't fill As much as you like perhaps you're bringing on a new associate You want to make sure that you have enough there of a patient base to help support them coming in and give them a good Start I always recommend running and what we call an same day appointment available ad This is going to promote That patient can get in and see you right away.

They can see the same day. It also is A great opportunity to run within specific hours. wonderful part of Google Ads is you can change when that ad is running, what time it's reaching during the day. So we can be very specific to reach times that we do need emergencies available. Also, if you have any kind of an online booking, we want to make sure we're putting that in the add copy and definition and all of my clients that implemented this are seeing that within weeks, months, that's completed and they're not having the hold on their schedule.

They're actually having to say, okay, wait, we're going to need to open more columns. I need to bring in another doctor or. They're even pausing the ad briefly or limiting the times that it's there. So that is always my first recommendation in regards to getting new patients in the door and filling those holes quickly, is making sure you're having the right ad running, which is an emergency or same day appointment available ad.

Michael: Can you walk us through how to create this same day appointment ad?

Chelsea: Yes, absolutely. So we want to start, of course, with just getting more information on the office. You want to make sure that we have the right target. And the right focus for the reach that we need. We're going to stick with the Geographical area that fits to the right radius for the office We're then going to want to make sure that we have the right terms in our copy So we're going to be listing that it's open for emergency same day appointments a lot of our offices will even list free consultations Because most people in pain are concerned about finances at times And so having that in there is just a little cushion to make sure that they're able to get in the door We want to make sure that we have that in the copy.

And then any extra information we can add is always a bonus. Is it fee for service? What insurances do you accept? Do you have in house membership or payment plans available? We want to gather all of that information, effectively write it into the copy so that it matches everything that we're trying to reach with the keywords and then present that with the correct graphic as well so that when it's coming to the top of the search results, patients seeing it, easy to click, and then get right into the practice.

Michael: How do you effectively write that in like that short amount of space that you have with an ad? So for example, like same day appointments, right? But we are somebody that takes PPO insurances and you know what I mean? Kind of thing. How do we do that?

Chelsea: So we're going to want to start with the most important thing.

If it's an emergency ad, emergency appointments, same day appointments available. And then we want to start with going down the list of the next importance. So if the office is highly focused on. We accept most insurances, that's going to be our next line there. We really want it to be compelling to draw the patient in.

If we're targeting emergency ads, same day appointment available, let's get you in and taken care of. Usually with those, I don't recommend adding in the insurance first. I would say, let's put in that same day appointment available payment plans accepted, and then most insurance accepted after that.

in my years of practicing, that's what I found was most patients are concerned about the cost of getting in for an emergency, especially in the dental

Michael: industry. Yeah. I like that payment plans available. So we want to put that in the main description title or? The

Chelsea: ad copy.

Yeah, we want it to be in the ad copy or at least getting them to the landing page of the book now where they can see that it's available and know that's a check off their list and can get into the practice.

Michael: So when they see this ad, they click on it, right? It's in the times that they're open, let's just say from 7 to 5, right?

Chelsea: If the doctor selects that time, we do have a few that if they have an after hours emergency line and they're willing to take those emergency patients, we can run that at the hours past the office hours and direct it to that emergency line with either a call to book or to the landing page with that emergency number listed.

Michael: Gotcha. Okay. And so then they click it. It's the same day appointment, right? And does that direct them to a whole separate landing page for same day appointments? Or is it like the website?

Chelsea: So it is a separate landing page that is for a same day appointment. We usually have one of two options.

If they do have a book now option, some of them have it going to the landing page where they can, patient can instantly book. They have been selected emergency appointment times available. Patient can select and they get in that day. Or it is taking them to that landing page with the number to call and get scheduled into one of their appointments within the

Michael: practice.

Gotcha. something to take action immediately. If it's the book now, what do you recommend? What have you seen like in your years of experience? Let's just say it comes up on our practice management software and I see it, do I call them if I'm the front office or

Chelsea: absolutely if they're booking through that link and you see it pop up on your schedule, that's the first thing I want to call is that patient and just confirm we have you coming in for this appointment.

Tell me more about what's going on. Tell me what's bothering you get as much information as you can while they are either on their way to that appointment or before they're coming in later. We want to have as much as possible. So when they get in, we already know the situation. We get them back. We get them taken care of.

And I always recommend to my practices just reiterate, we're going to take care of you. We're going to get you out of pain. That's their biggest concern at that time. Just let them know you're going to take care of them. So absolutely call that patient as soon as you see it pop up on your schedule through your book now link

Michael: Okay.

And then from the most practices you've worked with and the years and everything like that, what times for same day appointments have you seen work best to leave like your schedule open to kind of almost say like, although we have people for new patients this time.

Chelsea: Absolutely. So I found the best two times to have a appointment open. I always recommend having at least two open a day. You want one in the morning, one in the afternoon. The morning hour that seems to be the best is from an 830 to a 10 a. m. Most patients, you can somehow wiggle going into work late or something there.

If you're open earlier, I would slide a little bit sooner, but if most offices are 8 to 5, that 830 to 10 is a perfect time to leave an emergency slot for you. The second slot for the afternoon, if you're in an 8 to 5 would be the 3 30 to 5 o'clock. Same reason is that most people, if they are having to get off work or find care for children or what might be, it's an easier time for them to find that assistance and be able to get in.

Michael: Gotcha. Okay. I like that two times slots. And then in your experience, what are the ads that have the least amount of impact or clicks or, so same day appointments is like really good, right? To fill in the schedule. But if you look Absolutely. Mistakes

Chelsea: almost. Honestly, you don't want to go for the ones that are oversaturated or if you're not being specific enough. The ones that I've seen most clients not dedicate enough to and we don't get results from if they're trying to go for Invisalign, especially depending on which area they're located in, you're going to have a better result if you go for Clear Aligners.

Or invisible orthodontics, something that's more general term versus trying to bid specifically on Invisalign. There's just so much more in the marketplace than there used to be, but to get that bidding, it's going to take a lot more to get the results. And then if you are doing a very generic search or very generic reach in regards to cosmetics or implants, you're not going to see as much.

So you really want the details in there of, okay, if we're doing cosmetics, what are we doing? Are we doing, smile makeovers? Are we doing an all on six? What are we putting in there? We want to give as much detail as we can to draw on the correct audience.

Michael: Gotcha. Okay. It's interesting.

Invisalign doesn't.

Chelsea: It's a good keyword, but you got to put lot of money towards it to get the results that you'd like.

Michael: Okay. So in your experience, what is a lot of money in a little money?

Chelsea: Perfect question. So a lot of money anything really we're going over.

let's say 1500 to about 4000. That's where we're really becoming a big hitter, especially if we're going for something like Invisalign or we're really wanting to hold the market for a specific procedure. Anything under that 1500 and less, we can get great results. But it's not. It's going to be for something that's really specific.

It's going to give us more of a, we can get the new patients and we can do the emergencies. We can do a very general cosmetic ad or anything like that. Ideally, my recommendation, at least for a starting point is 500 per campaign. That gives us a great point to get through the learning phase, get the data we need, and then be able to say, okay, how do we adjust up from here if needed.

Michael: Gotcha. Awesome. Chelsea, I appreciate your time and if anyone has further questions, where can they reach out to you?

Chelsea: Absolutely. They can reach me at gargle. My direct email is Chelsea, c h e l s e a, dot Brock, b r o c k, at gargle.com.

Michael: Awesome. So guys, you can definitely reach out to her there, go on the show notes below or find her on the Dental Marketer Society Facebook group.

And Chelsea, thank you so much for being with me on this Monday morning marketing episode.

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Ready to supercharge your patient influx? Click the link below to grab your FREE e-book now: "10000 Patients | Tested and Proven Methods to Bring in New Patients This Week!" Don't miss out on these game-changing strategies for your practice! 👇[Click here to download your FREE e-book]

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Guest: Jared WilliamsPractice Name: Lifetime DentalCheck out Jared's Media:

Website: https://www.jaredwdds.com/

Practice Website: https://www.mylifetimedental.com/

5 Day 3rd Molar Challenge: www.3rdmolarsurgery.com

How to get Any Patient Numb -3rd Molar Edition! https://courses.smileaftersurgery.com/courses/LocalAnesthesia

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thejwmethod/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thejwmethod508

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Other Mentions and Links:

Federally Qualified Health Clinic

VistaPrint

The Simpsons

Eric Thomas

Dr. Ronni Brown

Patreon

Costco

Chris Voss

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Host: Michael Arias‍Website: The Dental Marketer

Join my newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/‍

Join this podcast's Facebook Group: The Dental Marketer Society

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My Key Takeaways:

• Just starting out Doctors often struggle with impostor syndrome. This is a great time to gain confidence through smart mentorship!
• Your patients are not doctors, so don't used Doctor jargon when speaking to them!
• When assessing who to gain mentorship from, be sure to see if they practice what they preach, see if their reviews are good, and pay attention to how they make you feel in their environment.
• Shaking hands and meeting in person with local businesses is an excellent way to start off on the right foot in your community.
• Knowledge and understanding are far more valuable than rubies.
• Sacrifice is not just giving up something of high value. Sacrifice is giving up something of low value to gain something of high value.

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Please don't forget to share with us on Instagram when you are listening to the podcast AND if you are really wanting to show us love, then please leave a 5 star review on iTunes! [Click here to leave a review on iTunes]

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p.s. Some links are affiliate links, which means that if you choose to make a purchase, I will earn a commission. This commission comes at no additional cost to you. Please understand that we have experience with these products/ company, and I recommend them because they are helpful and useful, not because of the small commissions we make if you decide to buy something. Please do not spend any money unless you feel you need them or that they will help you with your goals.

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Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)

Michael: All right, it's time to talk with our featured guest, Dr. Jared Williams. Jared, how's it going?

Jared: Fantastic. How about yourself?

Michael: Doing pretty good, man. How's the weather like out in Houston?

Jared: It's pretty good. There's no humidity. that's a blessing. Typically we're at 99 percent and it's 105.

So if I could go outside and not have my whole back Full of sweat, and we're having a great day. So all is well here. That's good,

Michael: man. That's awesome. Hey, man. So talk to us a little bit about your, how you came to where you are today. I know you said you had a little bit, we were talking about before you have a concierge practice, and then you're also in other practices, right?

Jared: Absolutely. Talk to me about that. As a contragental surgeon, I'm a GP and I, majority of my clinical practice is focused on third molars, implants, and IV sedation. And so I work with about, 30 different practices, about 12 to 15 are actually active practices that'll go into their practice and opposed to them referring patients out, I'll actually come into their practice and provide procedures such as thirds, IV sedation or implants for them.

How long have you been doing that for? About nine years.

Michael: Oh, man. Okay. So then let's rewind a little bit. What got you into all this? All right.

Jared: so my wife, we were in Ohio and she was doing her family medicine residency in Ohio, Kettering, Ohio. And I was working for FQHC, a federally funded health clinic.

And when I went there after leaving my GPR at University of Pennsylvania, VA hospital in Philly, I wanted to, focus on how to make the most with doing the least, But my focus was not money first, it was mentorship. So when I was working at this FQHC, his federal funded health clinic in Middletown, Ohio, I was doing procedures, but I wasn't proficient.

I was guessing my confidence wasn't there and imposter syndrome was huge. So as I was doing these cases, you know, I felt because I went to an Ivy league residency, after one year I'd be the doctor's doctor, but clearly that was not the at all. I was taking out wisdom teeth leaving roots in there Purpose.

and it was just like the patients like me because I was always thinking about them taking care of their concerns and making sure they were never in pain. But my clinical skills weren't there. And that's the hints. I decided to do a FKHC opposal going into private practice and just trying to figure it out and make money at the same time.

So when I was working there. my office manager was just like, Hey, you need to meet this guy. You need to meet this guy. And I was like, he clearly can't be better than me. I went to Ivy league. I went to Mary medical college yo, I'm that guy. So after her tugging on my scrubs, I was just like, let me go meet this guy.

So I go ahead and I get his phone number and I call him. I was like, Hey, when can I come out and see you? He was like, you could come on Saturday. I was like, okay. So in the evening time, you know, I still have my jacket on slacks dress shoes and I go into his practice and it's 7 p. m. 7 p. m. on a Saturday, and I walk into the practice. He has his wife to assistance, and then I walk in. I see. A patient being set up for oral sedation, another patient discharged from IV CRNA.

Then to my left, I see a patient who's getting a root canal. Then I go down the hall, I see another patient getting set up, prepped for thirds, another patient being prepped for thirds. And then at the end of the office, he's doing an implant. And I'm like, what the heck did I walk into?

That's almost over. That's almost 30, 40, 000 of treatment at 7 p. m. And mind you, he's been there since 6 a. m. that morning. I'm like, what the heck is this? And so when I started paying attention, I was looking and waiting for somebody to be yelling and screaming. I was looking to see if the root canals were long or short.

I was looking to see if the implant angulation was off one way or the other. And everything's like spot on. And I look at this guy, I'm like, yo, what the heck did I just stumble into? It's 7 p. m. on a Saturday night and he has like over 30, 000 worth of treatment at 7 p. m. And I'm thinking to myself, I was like, wait a second.

I observed him the whole day and I looked him in the eyes. I was like, you know what? I'm not leaving you until I leave this state. religiously, I went there Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday afternoon, and I just sat at his feet, and I was just like, yo, I'm just gonna, listen and learn. And, that was, like, almost ten years ago?

Eleven years ago? Of me doing that after my residency and ever since then I was just like, this is the blueprint, travel, doing surgeries, he was doing that that really just was the catalyst for me getting to this point.

Michael: Gotcha man, interesting. So then, When did you decide or have the confidence to go out on your own then, from that point on?

Jared: after I left Ohio, he told me, he was like, hey, if you're going to do what I'm doing, he was like, go ahead and get your IV sedation training. So I went down to Augusta, Regence, did a two week course, dropped 12, 000. And at the time, I'm freshly married.

I had the money, but I didn't have the money because, you know, I'm just a year out of practice. And so I got my wife's blessing. She said, yes, I dropped the money and I went. And so after I leave, the reason I'm bringing that up is this is when we moved to Houston after we left Ohio, we moved to Houston, which where I'm from.

And I went to a practice because I wanted to get. A lot of implants and so I was just like, what kind of practice I go to, I could just drop implants and just figure it out. So I went to like a denture mill and so there we're taking out teeth and placing implants. And so when I got to the practice, I asked him, I was like, Hey, is it possible that I could use my IV sedation certificate?

And they were like, no, I was like, why? And it was just like company policy. So I was like, screw it. So after six months, I dropped 162 implants and I was like, I'm gone. That six month period. And so I just opened up, I just went ahead and I just started Contacting doctors and, 12 years later, here we are, you

Michael: contacted doctors for an acquisition, or you decided to make like your concierge practice that was from a startup

Jared: ground up.

Okay. How was that process? Oh, it was phenomenal. It was funding. So one of my friends, he's a ER doctor, his name is smash. Yes, Emily. And so at the time. Nine years ago, he came to my office and you know how you have Vistaprint has like boxes of business cards.

And so he looked at my desk and was like, what is this? And I'm thinking to myself dude, they're business cards. Like you're a doctor. Just like, yeah, you see these questions. And so he was like, what is this? I was like, dude, they're business cards. And. he was just like, where'd you get these?

I was like, I went to different offices getting these business cards. Now, at the time, Vistaprint was selling business cards, like 500 in the box. And the whole box was full. He was like, bro, you went to 500 practices. I was like, and your point? And at the time, it was maybe like 3, 350 and I went to literally, I went to door to door, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.

Hey, my name is Dr. Williams and he was like, how did you do this? And I was just like, I just drove down the street knocking on doors and he was like, this is crazy. And so that's how the practice started. This was before, social media was like a real big thing and I knew of it, that's how we started.

Yeah.

Michael: Do you ever feel like that's easier though? Still till today, like going door to door instead of on social media sometimes. Yeah

Jared: the thing is this is not sexy and people are just lazy and, depending upon where you are, I think it's always best to do grassroots approach because it's long term, like those people that I still work with today. Like, I know where all the bodies are buried in the sense here in Houston, if you drive in Houston, if you could see it off the street, I've been to it hands down. they've seen my face lock in with cards.

That was over 10 years ago. To answer your question, yeah, 100%. To be able to touch and speak to the people, go to the practice, see what people are doing. it's given me tremendous amount of insight because now opposed to just being in my own box, which I consider a dental practice, being able to all these different practices from Medicaid, meals, and million dollar practices.

It gives me like a tremendous insight on the lay of the land.

Michael: Yeah, I mean, A hundred percent agree. When you went to these practices, what'd you say? What'd you do? What was the spiel kind of thing?

Jared: So I would go in and say, Hey, my name is Dr. Williams. I'm a contraceptive surgeon and I do third molars implants and IV sedation.

Does anybody in a practice do that? Of course, everybody would say, yeah, no yeah, yeah, yeah. And you know, of course, 10 years ago, I looked a little bit younger. people weren't too open or forthright with, welcoming to the practice. But it was a tremendous character building situation that has allowed me to use that to propel me in my career with training and just my clinical practice as a whole.

Michael: Gosh. So people would tell you like, yeah, no, don't worry. And then eventually they call you

Jared: or how did that work? I recall, like I would have my card, right? And I would say, Hey, my name is Dr. Williams. And for me I'm real big into personality assessments and my personality is like, I'm very analytical.

on the Texas Dental Board, you could look at all the different doctors who have certain qualifications and IV sedation is one of those qualifications you see. so I researched like a thousand doctors and I know that there was like only four at the time that were actually doing IV sedation who weren't.

A specialist. And so I would go into the practice. Hey, my name is Dr Williams, you have anybody coming to practice doing these procedures? And I know from the practice I would go to. I knew that there was only four and I'm one of the four. So I would literally go in and I give my card and say, yeah, we have somebody do it.

And so they would have my card and I would take the card out of the hand. Walked out because I knew that they were lying. Yeah. So it was like a real interesting. No, no, I mean, you know, startup, you know, if you're a practice owner, you're not faithful to a few things, you won't be made rule over many.

So, Business cards are like a real big thing. it's funny now that, you know, it's like two cents. Of a business card, but at the time, you know, just being married, there was a lot of stuff going on and, just following my mentor's advice and saying, Hey, drop the money, even if you don't have it, because it's going to, 10 X everything that you haven't.

So that little money that I spent on IV sedation is I've that I've returned on that. that's a good,

Michael: Way to look at it, but how do you know how much money and where to drop it at? So for example, if you're like, okay, IV sedation, I'm dropping it there. But if you keep that mentality, you're like, all right, I'm going to drop it here too.

And then what if the ROI is not?

Jared: I'm so glad you highlighted that. So you have to know yourself. I am a very analytical. And when I first started my. Career after residency, my focus was I want to make the most spend the least and enjoy life. So my focus was to get mentorship if my mentor didn't have 30, 000 on a Saturday night at 7 p.

m. Doing all those surgeries and he was, a terrible doctor. I'm not paying that money. he had the track record. He was practicing what he preached and patients loved him and he had the personality to go along with it. And so you have to, one has to look at themselves in the mirror and say, Hey.

If you spend this money, are you actually going to be faithful with spending the money? What happens is there's so many internet gurus that are out there saying, Hey, do this, take my course, do all these different things, but they're not practicing what they preach. They have no track record and they haven't been tested.

Or if they have been tested and they have, these wonderful reviews, how does that individual or the guru make you feel when you're asking questions that are super important to you? when I mentor docs, you know, I always tell them, you know, have that mentor pass that test.

And it's a three pronged stool. And it's just Hey, do they practice with their preach? How are their views? And lastly, how do they make you feel when you're in their environment, learning the skills that, they've been able to acquire over the years.

Michael: Gotcha. I like that. So then when it came to you, when did you start mentoring now?

Jared: So I've been mentoring since in college. So that story is a little interesting. When I was in college, I had a 246 GPA freshman year. Not great, right? It just keeps going. It's a story that keeps giving. And so my dad being a military in the military army ranger, I'm thinking being in Alabama, go to Oakwood University.

him being here in Houston, my mom being here in Houston, I'm thinking that he's going to go through the phone and start choking me, you know, like Bart Simpson, and I'm like, yo, I can't tell my dad because he's literally going to kill me. Like he was trained to kill people like he's going to kill his son.

I'm screwing around, going to parties, playing video games have a poor GPA and then saying I'm going to go become a doctor one day. It's It's not good anybody's background. When I finally built up the courage to speak with him I said to him he's like, what's that?

I was like I have a two for six GPA and he paused and I'm just waiting for him to lay into me. He was just like, oh, just go with the smartest person in class. And my jaws dropped and he hung up. Now, I'm at Oakwood University. If y'all have never heard of that school have you heard of E. T. Hip Hop Reacher?

Have you heard of Eric Thomas? Yeah, huh, yeah. Yeah, so we went to the same undergrad, right? When I'm in Alabama and I hear that message, I follow my dad's insight and I find the smartest person in class. And so, I got through college, first, got in dental school the first try.

And I was just like, you know, this is working out for me. And so I decided to marry her. So that's my wife now. She was the smartest person in class. I was going to ask you, like, how'd you, who was it? Yeah, no, my wife, my wife of 12 years, man. she did it. And so, just little true principles and staying in the right environment.

It's got me to this point. That

Michael: worked out, man. It worked out. How'd you do that? How'd you like approach like, Hey, smartest person in class. think you are that. So let's do this.

Jared: being a doctor, you're in the environment, so you see people and you know how we operate.

And what happens is this, we're like weird people. we're smarter than the average. And then when we get into dental school, a brow beat us for one millimeter. it's a big thing. And so trying to find the smartest person in class is very challenging, especially if you don't have anything to offer.

And so, you know, when I found an individual who was the top humble and was willing to help, I literally decided to. Throw my ego out the door so that I could, be successful and, that's the reason why I decided to train GP specifically within one of the more harder procedures in dentistry, a third molar surgery, because after getting students in dental school with Low GPA and me getting dental school and then getting 8 to 10 other college students in dental school and then successfully matriculate through dental school.

I was like, wait a second, there's something to this. And so 1 of my mentors, Ronnie Brown. She's in the dental speaker industry, and after having a conversation with her, she was like, Hey, you got a gift with this whole mentorship thing. And so the reason for me of wanting to mentor is because for an individual who had a low GPA, I know what it feels like to be at the bottom.

I know what it feels like to not have those good grades, and I know what it feels like to be, feel like less than. And. When I realized that, Hey, I have a gift of mentorship, but then I also figured out I cracked the code that is only supposed to be done by specialists who have four to six years of education and I could make it easy for a GP with little to no experience and they could treat more patients, they could tap into a 3 billion business industry and that's 2008 or 2016, literature, and they could change how they're practicing, you know, they could, turn their practice from stagnant to profitable in months flat, it's very humbling. And I take that gift very seriously because I believe the Creator put me on this planet to do that because if you could, go from looking at your account, go red, go negative and, you know, trying to shift money around or, just wanting to jump out of phase of, you know, imposter syndrome, thinking that you can't do something when you're more than capable to do something, I want to have and give individuals, specifically GPs, that confidence they need to, jump in their career because if I look at what a doctor in Ohio was able to do for me I've touched individuals around the globe and he doesn't even realize that.

the butterfly effect of being able to, give individuals the skills to be successful and then I don't, chain them to me forever because it's just like, if you don't come to me, then you will never be successful. I don't like that because I know what that feels like 246. I have to be relying upon.

Did it get the notes? I can know that feels like it. I never want anybody to feel that. And so, like, I have like a real, real, real desire of helping GPS. In that forefront and then just other practice owners as well. Yeah,

Michael: I like that, man. I like how you humbled yourself, right?

Because I feel like when we do that, when we try to find somebody, you really do have to put that and imitate instead of compare, right? Because when we compare, we compete. But when you imitate you can say, okay, I'm going to try and do what you're doing and then as you develop, you're like, I'm going to do it this way now, kind of thing.

when it comes to you, I to break it down now for us, actually for everybody. How can we do that today? How can we make it easier with third

Jared: molars? Number one, you have to get off social media, in the sense of that's your main source of education. That's what I mean. Stay on social media because you wouldn't be able to have this information right here.

Follow, follow, stick with me, guys. It's 246, it's 246GPA. That's how y'all probably gonna remember me now. if you're relying on not paying to get education. It's not gonna work. I take principles from any place I possibly can and one place I get principles from and I'm not trying to convert anybody into anything.

But. There's this principle, it says, if you're faithful over a few things, you'll be made rule over many. That's number one. Number two is, where your treasure is, there your heart shall be also. So basically, if you spent two to three or four hundred, five hundred, even now, eight to nine hundred thousand dollars for your education, You're going to practice dentistry, unless you marry up, That's true. So since that's the case, you have so many doctors who have taken time to, put their treasure into their career, such as dental school, and now they're doing everything in their power to Live the good life, but it's very challenging to live a good life without sacrifice and sacrifice isn't giving up something of higher value to get to give something of lower value.

It's the opposite. It's giving up something of the lower value and getting something of greater value. And so another little principle I like to go by is this is that, wisdom and knowledge and understanding is far greater than rubies. And so you don't find rubies just walking down the street.

last time an individual's seen a ruby, it's between glass, it surpasses what's on the other side of that glass, which is those rubies.

And so I would say when an individual has that unction, That is, I believe, the creator letting you know, Hey, put this desire in you so that you could serve more people. You could live the life that you're wanting to live and you could, help those that are around you. And so when an individual, gains the courage because it's very challenging, gains the courage to, bet on themselves and realize that they're good enough and that there's greatness inside of them. You know, The sky's the limit. And I believe that's the first step.

Michael: So to gain the courage, right. to understand and be like, okay, and for lack of a better word, I'm willing to put down the cash, I'm willing to put invest in myself kind of thing. I would

Jared: say this, so it's not always just giving the money. It's just on YouTube, there's a lot of resources on there. Like your podcast. This is one that's not paid.

Not yet. At least Patreon is coming. If not, I got you covered. I got you covered, but it's just there's so much content out there. And so once again, just going back to those three pillars, When you're going to look for somebody, how do they make you feel? What are their reviews? And do they have the track record to actually back it up?

And then once those things are established, then be confident with your checkbook and bring it out. it's super challenging. Cause you know, I've seen surgeries on YouTube to where individuals will cut out 15 to 30 minutes of their surgery. And splice And then you have a lot of GPs, young and old, they're watching these things as their main source of training and education. And they get into their, operatory and it goes south and like, I follow the video to the T. Yeah. it's super challenging. for instance, for myself I'm a clinical assistant professor at the GPR program here in Houston.

So it's not like a fly by night type of thing. Like I have, the credentials to back it up. So, It's one of those things where take a GPR, there's a lot of free resources out there, but when you really want to get serious and take your skills to the next level, then bring out the check, but don't lead because there's a lot of grifters and snake salesmen out there.

So be careful.

Michael: Yeah. Okay. So then real quick, if you don't mind me asking. Before this to now, how much are you making?

Jared: So I would say yearly, maybe quarter million, but I only do four days a week, four hours a day. So each day, okay.

Michael: Four days a week, four hours, four, eight, 12, 16, 16 hours in a week.

And then everything else is just your mentorship or funsies whatever you want to do kind of thing.

Jared: funsies is mentorship this is not like, and, or like, I was doing this for free for years. I told you I was going back all the way back in the dental school.

Like I got people I've been mentoring for years, so this is not Oh, I'm doing this to get rich. Like I'm doing this because I'm already rich. You're just enjoying it. I'm just enjoying it. And the thing is this, like I said, like the only reason had to put a dollar figure on it is because if people don't pay for it, it's going to be like, ah, whatever.

Bye. How many times have you gone to Costco and get a sampling? I don't like this, throw it in trash. But if you bought it with your hard earned money, like you're gonna appreciate it or, take advantage of it. there's so many docs have reached out and says, Hey doc, how can you tell me on these thirds?

And, I give them some counsel. And they just run with it. And it's fine because, I give a tremendous amount of free content on IG and YouTube. But it gets to a point to where, if you don't pay, it's going to be hard to play and I'll give you an example. So there was this doc, he was from New York and he reached out to me.

He was like, Hey, can you um, help me? With this case. And I was like sure. I never met him. he never took a mentorship, hands on live course, online course, five day challenge. None of these things. Bought a book, nothing. I'm a nice, I mean, this is what I do. So reach out to me on Instagram.

And he was just like, Hey I got this case. And so he's telling about the case. And I was like, all right, sounds like he did everything well. What happened was He treated the patient on a Thursday and he reached out to me on a Thursday evening. And he was just like my patient's still in pain.

What should I do? He's in New York. And I was just like tell me what you did. So I'm listening to stories I was like, check check, check, check, check. And I was like, hey man, you did a good job. Go about your day. And so he called me Friday evening about 4 30 and he's five years practicing. He doesn't have his own practice.

He's doing, associate in a practice. And so he's like, Hey man, what do I do? And I was like, tell me what happened. So he tells me again, I was like, bro, man, you're good. Just go about your day. He never met me like one to one. He just talked about his case and he left. So when he comes back. Just, that Thursday contact me Friday.

He's like, what do I do? And I was like, man, just let the patient go. Like you did everything right. He was so fearful that he was like, I don't know if I trust you. So what I'm going to do is this. I'm going to do it my way, his way. I'm listening and I'm like, you don't trust me. And the reason why you don't trust me is because you're not tied to anything. it's just you on the line. So I was like, hey, man. How about you do this? it sounds like you just want to send her to the ER. So just send her to the ER and just follow up with her. So he's like, all right, I'm gonna do that. So he sends it to the ER.

Guess who's there? Who? Our friendly oral surgeon, So I have tremendous amount of friends who are oral surgeons. I wouldn't be in this position right now if it weren't for oral surgeons. But there was a non friendly oral surgeon that was present. And the oral surgeon was like, who did your surgery?

She was like, oh, my doctor. He was like, no, what type of doctor? And he was just like, oh, my general dentist. He was like, general dentist should not be taking out their molars. And she was like, huh? She was like, that's exactly why you have this issue that you have right now. It was like, you need to have him pay for your emergency care.

That's at least a thousand, two thousand dollars. Yeah, you could feel the pain coming. You need to pay for your, you need, he needs to pay for this visit. You need to write a complaint and you need to sue him. And imagine doing anything for five years, let alone dentistry. And you get a call from your patient saying, you're going to pay for this.

I'm going to sue you and I'm going to give you a bad review. That is a gut punch to everything in your career and confidence within dentistry is like key, especially, doing a surgery that is reserved for specialists. He's distraught. He's fearful. He's scared. And so a couple days, he reaches back out to me.

It's like, Hey, doc. I don't think I'm going to ever do third molar surgery anymore. And I'm like, why? It was like, man, this thing took a hit to me. And I was like what happened? It was just like. When he took out the tooth, the surgeon took an x ray and he saw that there's a little piece of bone, Interceptive bone, after you do extraction, there's like bone that could be moving in that area, and it could cause pain.

And that was the issue. And that happens against a majority of extractions that individuals end up taking out. And so imagine learning from online, you don't get any feedback. You don't have any necessary counsel. There's no let me get into a community so that if this thing happens, I can bounce ideas back.

You're just literally operating as a lone ranger or some people would say a maverick. And then this happens. And I feel so sorry for the guy because. Now he's five and a half six years now, he's never going to pick up a procedure to where it's a 3 billion, not a million, 3 billion industry. And that's. Almost 10 years. statistics over 10 years ago. Imagine what they are now. you see what a box of cereal is in the store now, there's, it's not uncommon for me to charge out like six, 700 for one tooth, let alone give up the opportunity costs on my whole entire career.

really sad. On the flip side, there's docs who have more practices that they lay flaps and they're taking out completely bony impacted wisdom teeth the day that they're in our trainings. We have docs who are getting five star reviews in their first hands on live course that they've worked with us on.

We have individuals who are doing cases that most specialists wouldn't take on in less than four weeks, and I'm humbled, but when you have a gift, your gifts are going to make room for you. And when you have the wisdom, you could make things that look hard, easy. And so that's my passion behind it.

So, you know, when you do surgery, surgery is the most highly compensated skill on this planet. Now, if we just focus that into just dentistry, third molar surgery, which everybody has, I don't recommend all people's wisdom teeth taken out, but there's 6 million people here in Houston.

Million growing. Yeah, man,

Michael: that's good. I like how it went niche to niche. Do you know what I mean? It's like really like third molar dentistry actually, you know what I mean? And then So would you say Jared? That's something that dentists can do today or gps can do today to improve their Marketing or their business.

Jared: 1000 percent even if you were to have a before and after picture and put it in your operatory and say hey we offer third molar surgery People are going to come. Case in point, when you had the lockdown, the only people that closed were individuals who were doing non emergency procedures. So if you're in pain...

Patients are coming into you. You don't have to sell somebody getting out of pain. You don't have to come up with a, sleazy way of getting people in. If you can get somebody out of pain. They will come and you don't have to fight them for the finances.

And there are situations where, there's a lot of docs are like, Hey well, I can't get, insurance to cover these things. There's ways around it. I've been doing this for 12 years. And to be able to offer that service, it's huge. So for instance, here's a little math for you.

The average third molar tooth to take out is roughly about 425, Nationwide. If you were to do 12 patients, so 14, that's little less than 21, 000. On average, if a doc, if an office is referring out 12 patients out of their practice, that's 20, 400 to walk another practice every month.

A regular surgeon is doing about 10 cases per day. That 20, 400 is without IV oral sedation, nitrous, PRF, bone graft, and membrane. So if you were to add those things that 20, 000 could end up topping about 30, 000.

Michael: Wow, man. Okay. And by any chance, do you teach like how to, market attract this

Jared: Absolutely. We have some different offerings for GPs, but yeah, we teach the exact system on how to market. Okay. How to get your exact clients so that, they're not coming in and doing a U turn right out of your practice.

And we offer all those marketing, items so that individuals can add water, mix, and drink. Yeah. Gotcha.

Michael: Okay. I like that, man. Now. These next questions are just to get in the head of someone who isn't like, if you're not totally involved on the clinical side right, more on the business side of dentistry.

But for you, what do you feel that needs to be changed for people to be open more to dentistry? For example, you know how a lot of people are like, no, I don't like the dentist. No, I

Jared: don't like it. The pain.

Michael: Oh no. It's only when they get to the pain point, right? Where there's sometimes they're like, I need to go.

How can we, yeah, the patient. Yeah. What needs to change for people to be more open like, man, this is great.

Jared: I like it here. So I have an actual book on that. It's the book is called how to get any patient done. Thermal addition, but you can apply it across pedo process, the whole nine. It applies to everything if you're listening to this, all I'm giving you is principles and principles operate any and everywhere.

All right. So the reason why that happens is because doctors. Speak like they're doctors to patients. That is a problem. If I speak to you in a different language and you don't speak that language, We're not going to move the needle in terms of communication, correct? If I start yelling at you and talking like this so that you can hear me in a different language, that's not going to move the needle, right?

So here's a little stat and I'll give a practical tip that you could actually in America, the average. Reading comprehension levels, third grade, we as clinicians have high school, college, four years, dental school, four years. And if you did a residency, one more year. So that's nine years of education.

When you speak above the level to your patients. And they're in pain and they don't trust you. They're not going to want to move forward with services. I'll give you some examples. So when I speak to patients, I speak to them, not as if they're stupid, but I use my language to speak to them at a third grade level.

And this works in million dollar practices and it works in Medicaid mills. And when I say that is this, I am doing a show and tell approach on what we're doing. I don't use any terms. So like the mesial angle, the complete bony impact. It wasn't like the sinus, like not many people understand and can comprehend that regardless of their educational field.

Even if they went on to Google, they'll have a reference, but typically that reference will be a little off there's little different innuendos and different thoughts with different things when you go different cultures and communication. Yeah. Yeah. And so when you speak to an individual.

On a level that they could communicate with your success rate will go up at least

40%. So let's just say I'm working on a patient, right? And they're fearful. First thing's this, I'm going to get on their level and I'm going to remove all clothing that has any type of association with dentistry. As much as you can, right? Docs will have their lab coats on.

They'll have their masks. They'll have their loops and they'll say, Hey, I'm Dr. such and such. How are you doing? So one has to do is mirror the actual individual. Oftentimes when doctors come in, they're sitting up like this. And they're looking down at the patient. That's a paternalistic approach. Now, what you've done is you've taken the more dominant approach opposed to bringing your chair down and you're sitting at their level.

That make sense? Yeah. And so what you're doing is you're showing deference to the individual. Then the next step that you want to do is ask the patient after you introduce yourself with a warm smile. Because when you smile at somebody, it hits their limbic system and you have a mirror. And so anytime you smile at somebody, You typically want to smile back, what you're doing right now.

Yeah, it's good. Yeah, this is for my mentor, Chris Foss. He's a hospital negotiator, so these things could operate anywhere. the next step that you want to do is ask the patient, how can I help you? Everybody wants to be served. Everybody wants to be served.

Most times docs will come in and say, all right, how can I help you? I'm here for you, opposed to you here for me. And so what you want to do is reverse that role and be like a waiter, a righteous serving this individual and say, Hey, how can I serve you? And then show active listening, write it down and say, is this what you mean?

It seems like this X, Y, and Z. And just rephrase what they said back to you once you have that done, then you will then proceed on whatever procedures doing specifically thermal surgery. So what I do is this. I'll go on my screen and I'll actually point out. The actual teeth that we're actually working on real simple And then I'll let them know, Hey, you see this nerve right here. The reason why I bring it up is because if the nerve were to be disturbed, there's likely having numbness. Now, when I say disturbed, opposed to damage. There's no anxiety associated with disturbed versus damaged because if you are on your phone and you're like do, do, do, we're sorry, the service in your area has been temporarily disabled or disturbed, if you say damaged, you go like, man, this person's incompetent.

And these are the things, associations that your patients are bringing in and thinking as you're speaking to them. Then I'll go on to say, Hey, I will plan 10 steps ahead of the patient. So if it's a mesial angle impacted wisdom tooth, and there's a tooth that it's butting up against, I'm gonna let them know, Hey, there's a likelihood that your tooth Could press so hard in tooth that we're leaving there that it could cause damage.

And so when it's damage for them, I put the onus on them because I didn't cause it. But if I did something, it was disturbed opposed to the reverse. That make sense? Yeah. Yeah. I'm using my communication in such a way that it's so simple, but it doesn't ring off any bells in the brain to say fear.

And that's why patients say, I think I'm going to ask my spouse about this. I think I'll take another time. And so by doing these items, what's going to end up happening is your conversions are going to skyrocket because the number one way to get patients to say yes is to get on their level.

Once you do that, then you want to make sure that you answer all their questions. I can't tell you how many times I've been in somebody's practice and they're telling the patients what's going to happen because the patient isn't on the same page. I will spend 10 15 minutes just answering questions because answer questions are Indicative on desire from the person that wants a service from you.

And what happens is because we're so fast and wanting to move to next patient this, this, this, this, this. That patient feels that energy and the energy that you're wafting out hits the patient, hits your assistant, hits your front desk staff. And so you're wondering like, man, why is my practice so stagnant?

It's because you're giving off energy, like a foul odor, you know, people have, you know, you can't see it, but you could feel it and you could really hit your senses. And so when an individual understands that, and it's just the. Awareness of these items.

Individuals flip almost instantly because it's not that this information is new. I didn't say anything new, it's more so the awareness of those things. And when a doc is aware of these things. If their energy's good, when you walk out the practice, guess what the patient's gonna say? So what do you think?

And they're a dental assistant, didn't go to dental school, didn't do anything. And so what happens is this, if your energy's bad towards your assistant, or you decide not to pay them, or you try to screw them over, do all these different things, they say, yeah, I don't know, I'd probably go to the next practice.

I can't tell you how many assistants have said, you know what, my dentist really is screwing me over. And how many patients they've sent out. so if you're a doc who's like, man, I want to grow my practice, but you're not communicating on the level of your patients, you are, have zero awareness of the energy that you're putting out, you don't know your personality type, so you don't know what you could accentuate to bring more patients in one of my mentors says, it's like, there is a guarantee to being successful and you're guaranteed to being not successful.

Like There is a formula to both. And oftentimes that lack of awareness is causing people to literally lose over and over and over. Like, brought this marketing program. I took this course. I did this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, but I'm giving too much. No, no, no. That's good. Yeah. And so I've applied these to my practice and I've given these blueprints to docs and it's just they're killing the game and it's pretty interesting.

And you could literally see somebody who is brown knuckling or white knuckling a chair go from anxiety to a 12 to they're saying, Hey, let's take a picture and put it on Instagram, but on social media, because they felt that from another practice that they've gone to. And the energy that they felt with us and individual take our trainings is like, man, it's a completely different story.

Michael: Yeah, man. It's so interesting. You mentioned all that because you think about it when it comes to, Oh, let me ask my spouse. I feel like I've gotten training in like, how do we overcome that question? but we never really talk about like. that question might not even ever come up because of everything you're doing, which is what you mentioned, right?

Like, Get on their level, talk to them, in a, elementary type of style, like third grade, like you said, right? Make sure you're using simple terms, easy things that way you don't have to be like pushy or salesy or, or anything like that.

Because I feel like a lot of the doctors are sometimes like, I don't want to be too salesy. Oh, you want to talk to your spouse? Go ahead. Talk to your spouse. And so that's interesting. I like that. That was a goal. Good stuff. So then when it comes to this, your third molar extracts, right? Courses or

Jared: study club.

so for docs like, Hey man, I like what he's got, he's saying, I Googled him up. I saw that he's actually legit. Michael wouldn't bring anybody on this, podcast. That would be sleazy. So I'm going to check him out. what I would say is this, is that we have our.

Third molar challenge and we offer it on a consistent basis unlimited basis to where we have docs who have little to no training come on our five day challenge and the whole five day challenges on the premises is for you to build confidence, third molar surgery and this challenge and so we're giving you our exact blueprint To where the individual, the doc could come on and ask all their burning questions.

They could get CE, they could be in a community of docs who are all around the globe learning how to do third molar surgery in their exact same spot as you are. And then you could also, network with these individuals and, continue to grow your practice. And so I would say this is if individuals like saying, Hey, I want to learn how to do it.

I would say, go to thirdmolarsurgery. com. Three R. D. molar surgery dot com and go there. And what happens is they could sign up for the next slot that we would be offering and go from there. If it's an individual that It's just like, you know what, I'm really not interested in the third molar surgery part.

How can I like really speak to my patients so I can get those conversions up? I would say, go to my website, jaredwdds. com, and we have a book. It's our how to get any. Patient Numb Thermolar Surgery Edition. And in that book, it's not just for doctors who are just doing thermolar surgery, but it talks about in depth on how to speak to your patients.

It gives you a script on what to say and how to say it so that you could literally have those conversions go from 10, 12, 13, 14, 30 percent and start boosting up into the 90 percentile just by using some of this framework that we're highlighting here.

Michael: Nice. So guys, that's going to be in the show notes below and then...

Jared, thank you so much for being with us, man. It's been a pleasure. If anybody wanted to reach out to you specifically on social media, how can they

Jared: reach out to you? Yeah, so it'd be the jw method. So t h e J w method m e t h o d on ig and DM me on IG. You get there.

Michael: We'll put all that in the show notes below, but Jared, thank you so much for being with us. It's been a pleasure and we'll hear from you soon. Thanks

Jared: boss.

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In this week's Monday Morning Marketing episode, join us as we dive deeper into the world of Google Ads with our special guest, Xana Winans, from Golden Proportions. Get ready to supercharge your marketing strategies as we uncover tips and warnings for a successful Ads campaign. We'll unveil the secrets of setting the perfect Google Ads runtimes that sync with your office hours, discuss what a sensible ad-spend budget entails, and break down click-through rates in relation to your service offerings. Plus, we'll show you how to address potential patient objections effectively and gain a competitive edge over rival offices through savvy keyword usage.

Jump into this episode with Xana to hone in on your best Google Ads strategy in this forever-evolving ads landscape!

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You can reach out to Xana Winans here:

Website: https://www.goldenproportions.com/

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Other Mentions and Links:

Google Ads

Google Local Service Ads

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If you want your questions answered on Monday Morning Marketing, ask me on these platforms:

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Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)

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Michael: Hey Xana, so talk to us about Google Ads. How can we utilize this or what advice, suggestions, or methods can you give us that will actually attract new patients through our Google

Xana: Ads efforts? Oh, there's so much good information in that question you just asked. That's loaded. so there's a lot of things that make Google Ads successful.

And let me hit on just like a couple of really important tips. One of the first ones is, be very wary about using Google's own artificial intelligence that they're trying to make it look really easy so anybody can do their own Google Ads. Because if you are using Google's own artificial intelligence platform, you are potentially wasting a lot of money on clicks that are not valuable for you.

and, you don't have as much control over reaching the proper target audience. And besides that, Google's gonna actually, you're gonna spend a lot more of your money and get a lot less for it. So, when we do Google Ads for people, there's a couple of things that we do to make sure that they are hitting that success versus what they've been trying to do on their own.

One is, and this seems so obvious, you gotta make sure that you are setting your times for your ads. Only when your business is open. Some people just run those ads 24 7. But let's think about the patient experience. When patients call, we know that they want to get in immediately, they've got about 3 days to get scheduled.

they do not want to get into a practice that scheduling, They to be able to get in pretty quickly. So they want to be able to. Get in, they want to be able to get a hold of you because you're an errand they're checking off their list. So if you're running, you're at it nine o'clock at night and there's nobody there answering the phone, it's a complete waste of your time and of their time.

one way to overcome that is to use online scheduling. Which I think is critical for absolutely any Google Ads campaign because you want to capture people while they are in the moment and they are ready to make their decision. So ideally using online scheduling, but at the very least, people sometimes have questions, so make sure those ads are only running when you're open.

As a matter of fact, I usually stop them about an hour before the practice hours are over. Because we don't always make our phone call immediately when we're doing our research. It might take us a little time and we want to make sure that that phone call actually becomes an appointment.

another thing that I think is important to think about is the topic that you are using in your Google ads. So there's a lot of things that you can advertise for. You can advertise for just general dentistry patients, emergency patients, peds patients. Those three are great. Those are the winners almost every time.

But a lot of doctors want to use Google ads to go after things like dental implants, all on for cosmetic dentistry, sleep apnea, TMD treatment. And here's what we've learned. The click through rates. Those higher level campaigns can be insane. Our click through rates are usually honest to be 27 to 35 percent on those campaigns.

So literally like 35 percent of the people that see your ad when we're running it, we'll click on it. Go to a landing page. The difference is these types of leads are doing a lot of research. They're what I would call their higher up in the funnel. So they're exploring all of their options. And these are not the leads that are going to just click to schedule an appointment or just call you and immediately make your appointment.

There's a lot of contact follow up contact that they need. So, you know, When they call you or if even if they submit a form, for example, it often takes 7 to 9 additional touches before they are ready to commit to an appointment. So if you're just sitting there and waiting for them to like, make that decision on the spot, you're going to end up really frustrated because you'll get a lot of clicks and a lot of people who seem to be interested.

But a lot of them won't convert into appointments. So you got to be ready with an outbound, text messaging campaign, outbound phone calls, outbound emails to keep in contact with that lead until they are ready to schedule with you. another thing to think about, and this one's so frustrating for people in the beginning.

Have you ever heard of the term fat finger? Where they

Michael: accidentally click it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Me all the time, yeah.

Xana: Yeah, so we're all on our cell phones, and you type in, Dentist in Lewisburg, I'll give you from my community. And there's a couple of listings that come up, so you can have a combination of like, somebody just accidentally clicks on the wrong listing with their fat finger on a small cell phone, and then it's a wrong number phone call.

And the teams kind of can say, oh, I'm getting a lot of wrong number phone calls. Well, there's still people who are looking for a dentist. So it's still an opportunity to convert them into an appointment. but 1 way to help overcome that is to actually. Upload a list of all the competitors in your area.

As negative keywords before you launch your campaign. And here's why. So if I typed in Dennis and Lewisburg, the area that I'm in Google is gonna be doing, we've got exact match and then kind of some broad match keywords in there. So it would bring up anybody for an ad that had the words dentist and Lewisburg in it.

If I'm a dental practice named Lewisburg Dentistry. The odds are very, very good that my Google ad is going to appear at the top and people are going to think that's what they're clicking on. and it's basically just going to be a waste of their money. So we want to eliminate as many fat finger phone calls as possible.

So uploading that list of competition helps maximize your budget right out of the gate. you had mentioned before we started talking about budget, like what's the right budget for people to put for this? The budget is, I generally say it's a minimum of 1, to be able to do it properly. And if your 1, 000 only gets you one mile or 1, 000 gets you 10 miles, depending on the area that you're living in, real key is about your impression share.

So do you know what impression share is? No. Okay, so anytime somebody would be searching Dennis in it's the percentage of time that your Google ad is going to show up in their search results based on, how many dollars you have available. So if your budget is, say, 500 a month and you're averaging 15 a click. You might miss out on an awful lot of traffic simply because your budget has already been spent for the day. And you might have a very small impression share. So there might be 100 searches for it in a day, but you might only be getting 5 percent impression share because the cost per click is so high or your market area is so wide.

It's a lot better. Instead of necessarily just going with budget, it's more about setting up the parameters of the campaign to make sure that you are maximizing your impression share. You want to be able to make sure that your Google ad is showing up a minimum of 80%, 90 percent of the time when somebody is doing a search.

Otherwise, they're clicking on your competitor's ads.

Michael: Okay. Okay. Interesting. So more budget better, but if we don't have the more budget, what do we do? We just hone in or what are you thinking?

Xana: so yes, you can, limit the hours when your campaign is running. For example, uh, I've seen practices where we'll only run it, say Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday.

And we'll front load that at the beginning of the week because we know those people want to get in quickly. So we want to make sure that we're not running an ad on a Friday where they're not going to be able to get in until Tuesday or Wednesday of the next week. so you can kind of compress your budget that way.

You can limit the size of the market area that you're in instead of that 10 mile radius. You can say, I'm, I'm just going to make sure I'm capturing everybody in a 1 mile radius, or I'm going to pick a. Particular zip code that's important to me. Maybe everybody in your immediate area knows you. So we want to go outside of that area and just target a certain zip code.

so there's a couple of different things that you can do to really maximize that budget. The thing that I always keep in mind with budget and I tell everybody this right out of the gate is that. It's always going to go up. This is a bidding situation, teasingly say Google clearly does not have enough money.

this trillion dollar organization. so they're going to make it harder and harder for your ads to appear until you spend more money per time that somebody clicks on your ad, which means. That you will not get as many clicks for the same amount of money over time. So what might start out as a thousand dollar budget might have to be 1, 500 the next year or 2, 000 the year after that.

It's not growing quite that quickly, but just know that sometimes you're, you're going to probably have to end up spending more money to get the same amount of traffic over time, just because those ad costs are going to go up. There's kind of a trend lately. Have people been talking to you about these sponsored listings up at the top?

Michael: Yeah, yeah, it's a is there a green check mark I want to say or something like

Xana: that or yes So these listings the thing that's really different about these listings before Anybody could buy a google ad and set up a campaign. I I mean I could be the guy down the street I could be somebody in china. It doesn't matter anyone could set up a campaign These sponsored listings google is making you go through this deep verification process.

You have to give them Uh, not just prove that you're in your physical location, they need to see your actual credentials, like they need to get your, forget exactly what it is, if they need your diploma or your license number or something, but they need actual proof that you are a licensed practitioner and they're not doing it in every market, the area that we're in is rural enough, they aren't doing those sponsored listings yet, they're still just kind of testing it in some of the more major markets.

But the thing with these sponsored listings that's really kind of interesting is Instead of saying, I have, you know, a budget of 1, 000 and I'm trying to get as many clicks as I can at an average cost of 5 a click, you're paying for performance, so they're charging you per phone call.

It is their call tracking line that is used. And so when someone clicks on that ad and calls, it's running roughly around 100 per phone call. For an appointment, which cost per lead, that's actually not terrible, but you got to have a team who's ready to take the phone calls and are able to convert those leads into good appointments.

So, I still kind of see those in like the, testing phase where people are figuring out if they're worth it or not are the. The searcher is actually going to respond to those or not. in my humble opinion, my favorite one, mean, obviously we all love Google Ads and just in general, but I love the ones that are in the Google Maps listings.

That you can do a sponsored listing right in all of the Google Maps so that your name appears at the top. If you are in a market that's so competitive, you can't get into, one, two or three position in your market area, just buy your way into that list.

Michael: Okay. Interesting. Real quick. If you could kind of guide us throughout the part where you were discussing the topic on Google ads, how to keep in contact with the outbound, this. So they click, they don't sign up. You said it takes several touch points. How can we build something there?

Xana: So, uh, great question. It's actually something we're working on is, is trying to close that loop for the doctors. but the idea is when somebody calls they have questions, they're not ready to make a decision yet.

So the team first off needs to be ready with a list of very common objections that the caller is going to have about that particular product. So let's say it's cosmetic dentistry. People are going to ask, what does it cost? Is it covered by insurance? How long does it take? Is this painful? can you fix this particular problem?

What do you charge per tooth? They have all these questions. First step is for the team to have all of those objections written down and your answers for them figured out. It just makes for a better experience. People are not going to make their decision in the moment. You'll get a couple. That you might be able to bring in for a consult, but most of them are like, okay, let me think about it.

That's where it's important to get a follow up phone number, a follow up email and then set a regular outbound set of touch points. So, over the next couple of days, email, phone call, text message, and kind of repeating that process until you get that person to make a commitment because they're doing a lot of homework.

they're, um, talking to a lot of different options to see who's going to be the best one for them. And honestly, the person who makes the sale is usually the person who's just more active and showing more interest in that prospective patient. Mm.

Michael: Gotcha. So, stay active. Basically,

Xana: right. You got to stay really active.

You can't just take that one phone call and let it die with, leave it up to the patient. If they're going to call me back, the team has to be the outbound salesperson who is actually calling and following up with that patient to see if they can move them forward. honestly, it takes some, some good sales training for teams who know how to do that.

So I see this a little more successfully in some DSO practices, where they're, they're able to invest in like a call center and people who do some of that outbound follow up. Do you have any practices you've seen that are really successful with that outbound follow up? A couple,

Michael: it's more front office skills training that I've seen where that works.

You know what I mean? Where they have like the. Confidence to know what to say and do when they follow up and they send a text or they have a software that does all that, right, that sends a text and things like that. Um, but I can see how the bar drops a ton right there, you know what I mean? And then they go and say, well these ads aren't working, who's clicking them, you know, kind of thing.

And it just falls apart. So I can definitely see that in that scenario.

Xana: In my opinion, one thing that I found to be a little more successful if you don't have a team in place who either has like the time or the experience to do all that outbound follow up. I'm a big believer in bring these patients in under a general dentistry campaign.

People who are just looking for I need a new dentist, they're going to come in, they're going to go through their hygiene experience, they're gonna have a comprehensive exam with you that is better than anyone they've ever had in their entire lives. And They build a relationship with you, and you can start asking them questions about, so what do you think about the appearance of your teeth?

Is there anything that you're unhappy with that you've ever wished you could fix? Would you like to know what your options are? you've already got their attention because they're in the office. I find it is much easier to move those types of patients forward to things like implants and all on four and cosmetics and sleep apnea.

Once they know who you are as a doctor, And why you're qualified and they like you as a person and they like your office. So, I find it is a far better spend of your money to actually go for the general to kind of get those big procedures in a roundabout way.

Michael: Gotcha. Awesome, Zonya. I appreciate your time and if anyone has any further questions, you can definitely find her on the Dental Marketer Society Facebook group or where can they reach out to you directly?

Xana: I'd say best way is go to our website, golden proportions. com. There's a chat button in the lower, right? There's usually somebody on there monitoring at all times. I tend to take the after hours ones and happy to have a conversation, answer any questions that your listeners might have about ads.

Michael: Awesome. Thank you so much, Zonya, for being with me on this Monday morning marketing episode. My

Xana: pleasure. Thanks, Michael.

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Guest: Damien BonnerBusiness Name: CAD-RayCheck out Damien's Media:

Website: www.cad-ray.com

Cloud-based Dentist CAD Software: https://www.clinux.pro/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cadraydental

Damien's Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mayorofkp/

Email: [email protected]

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Other Mentions and Links:

Patterson

CEREC

Align Technology

Medit Scanner

3Shape TRIOS

Spear Education

Zoom

TeamViewer

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Host: Michael Arias‍Website: The Dental Marketer

Join my newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/‍

Join this podcast's Facebook Group: The Dental Marketer Society

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My Key Takeaways:

• Be careful with tech companies that sell products without healthy support. At CAD-Ray, they walk through it with you step by step, even offering assistance in the clinical realm.
• Patients want to see your cool new tech. Be sure to proudly display it in the office and give patients a chance to share on their social platforms!
• If you make the patient part of the process with your technology, they will love to share with their friends.
• Change is good, but too much change at once in your office can be tough on your team.
• If the team isn't 100% on board with the tech changes, the switch will go poorly. Be sure to show them the value of your new tech!

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p.s. Some links are affiliate links, which means that if you choose to make a purchase, I will earn a commission. This commission comes at no additional cost to you. Please understand that we have experience with these products/ company, and I recommend them because they are helpful and useful, not because of the small commissions we make if you decide to buy something. Please do not spend any money unless you feel you need them or that they will help you with your goals.

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Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)

Michael: All right. It's time to talk with our featured guest, Damien Bonner. Damien, how's it going?

Damien: Good. Good. How are you?

Michael: Doing pretty good, man. If you don't mind me asking, where are you

Damien: located right now? well Actually right this second, I'm in New York, I'm a longtime native of New York, but moved to Florida market about 18 months ago, just up here visiting some family this week.

Michael: Oh, okay. Moved to Florida just for funsies or like it was.

Damien: I don't know if I want to get into all that too much politics, too much taxes, too much things in New York that uh, after 43 years of living here, I've had enough and uh, took the family and moved to what we thought was gonna be greener pastures.

And, so far has been everything we thought it would be especially with the, uh, no state income tax on my, uh, salary. So very important for us. Nice,

Michael: man. Awesome. So then, Damien, talk to us a little bit about your area of expertise. What

Damien: specifically do you do? so I'm a believer in in your why and what your why is, Not so much what I do, it's why I do what I do. So my goal is to help every dentist become digital so that they can offer a higher level of, Thank you. Patient care and patient satisfaction for their patients. So what does that mean that I actually do? I sell digital technology in the dental space.

I've been doing so since 2008. What

Michael: type of digital technology do

Damien: you sell? In 2008, I started with Patterson Dental as a CEREC specialist, so in office manufacturing, CAD CAM systems digital technology back in the day. Sarah was one of the only players, if not the only player in the marketplace.

When I first started today that's obviously grown to many other technologies that offer digital scanning. Intraorally 3D comb beam technology practice management software, CAD software in office manufacturing. And now the big thing is that 3D printing. I went from being a specific CEREC specialist to now selling all the products I just mentioned.

Yeah.

Michael: Man, that's really good. So then how'd you get into this?

Damien: by accident I was in the mortgage industry back in the early 2000. So if you've ever seen the movie the big uh, now I can't remember the name was the movie was but It was a movie about the mortgage industry and subprime lending.

I was right in the middle of that noticed things pretty early on that I was making way too much money for doing way too little work and something wasn't right. lo and behold, the market crashed and. I went from a decent salary and commission to making 25, 000 a year.

And I didn't want to go back to that part of my life where it was very based on the market, I wanted to do something that I felt was going to change people's lives for the better. And I think everybody needs. Dentistry in their lives. They should. And I had a friend who worked for a line technology and said, Hey, there's this product called Eric and uh, there's an opening.

I think you should apply for it. So sort of how I got into it and no idea what I was doing and how I got into it, but haven't looked back one day. Man,

Michael: so rewind a little bit. Talk to me about how you felt when you were at that oh man stuff is racking up as far as like bills and stuff like that.

Damien: Yeah It's very demoralizing Hard on relationships Having to borrow money from my then girlfriend now wife to make ends meet but she stuck with me through everything realizing that you're at the highs, there's absolute highs and then there's the absolute lows. And I was definitely in a low and while starting in dentistry at 25, 000 a year and slowly building my gradual climb to a normal lifestyle.

Was a slow and steady pace, but again, I haven't looked back since my mentor once told me that, you can be up here and down here and up down here and never have a steady aspect of life, but you can maintain the course and just gradually increase what you do.

and that's where um, you know, I'm at today and that's how I try to live life is, not go for the gusto and, take life gradually and build upon that every day. I

Michael: like that, man. That's really, really good. Really smart. So then the selling part of the digital technology. Do you feel like now there's less selling to do and more people are reaching out and like, hey, we need this, but there's more options?

Or do you feel like now we still got to like teach show them like you need technology?

Damien: Well, There's a lot of different technologies out there, and they're all great. There's, probably 30 different inter role scanners which needs to be the hot topic for most offices.

Getting into digital technology is where they start that aspect. If you look at a practice in general, digital starts with the practice management. So you have your practice management. Which is full digital, at least, hopefully, at least, 95 percent or so have digital and they're not paper files anymore.

And then it goes digital x ray, It's no more film turning that corner. From there, intral scanning seems to be the next logical step where panoramic x ray, 3D comb beam, something of that nature. And then comes in office manufacturing. So, We used to call it when I was at Patterson Dental, the digital waterfall of where you have your, 90 percent market share of doctors who are doing practice management digitally, then you have the next level, which was falling over from there.

It would be your, digital x ray. And now that market is complete. So now we're back up here. And now we're still at that intro scanner market, which is probably in my estimation, 45 to 50 percent penetration into marketplace. So there's still a lot of dentists who don't have digital technology in their office in some format.

We're starting to see that it's going to start shooting a lot higher, a lot more people adding the technology to their practice quicker but adding the right technology is the important aspect. And that's sort of where I come in. Again, when I worked for Patterson, I was selling 1 product.

We were selling CEREC. And it was pretty much the only product available at the time, and it was 120, for a full system set up. Not something a lot of people wanted to partake in or invest in as time has gone on. There's been, internal scanners and some people. Who don't want to do in office manufacturing, so they send the files off to a laboratory digitally.

The market was dictating that people didn't want to pay extra fees or high prices for these items. And so we at Cadre discovered Medit early on. Medit is an internal scanner that has no fees involved with price point when we first started selling was at 18, 000. So a price point that was unmatched in the industry for the most part without additional fees.

that sort of broke down that barrier for a lot of people to start looking seriously at digital technology. and today we're the number one dealer of Medit in the world. We also have Trios. We have Shining 3D. I mean, it's not just, all our eggs in a basket of Medit, but the idea was that We could overcome the obstacle the barrier of many offices, which is cost with the product, as long as the product works and more importantly, we were able to support the product people would adopt to it pretty quickly.

And so that it had grown to a point where they have a new system out. The I 700 came out a couple of years ago at an even better price point and even easier to use. And I think that sort of put the industry on notice to re look at their pricing and their fee structures. So a lot of the companies like 3Shape Trios uh, lowered their price, what cost you 41, only a year and a half ago, now cost you 21, 900 with no additional fees.

If it has done anything for the industry, it's break down that barrier and also force other companies to look inward and redesign what they're doing. And so I know it's around about answer there, but to answer your question, there's still a lot of selling to do to doctors to make sure they make the right choice.

I think they all know they need digital technology in their office at this point. I think, that they're all going to adopt to it, but making sure they adopt to the right one is where our job comes in.

Michael: that's interesting. So then, if we rewind a little bit, you said Meta broke down big barriers, right?

Big barriers and people were able to adopt it better. To you, what would be the biggest barrier then? Would it be the price point?

Damien: Price is always the biggest barrier. again, I can bring it back to my CEREC days at 120, 000. Price is always going to play a factor in any decision anybody makes, whether it's buying a car, buying a house buying anything.

Now I choke at spending 3 more for For avocado Chipotle. So price is an important factor for most people, but once you break that price barrier down, I feel it becomes about a mental state of, can I do this? Is it easy to use? And then it comes to, will I be supported? So not just for the sale, but after the sale and beyond the sale.

And that's where we at Cadre sort of take over. To give you a little background on Cadre, if I can for a second. we're a distribution company now, since 2018. Again, Medit was our first product. But prior to that Cadre was started by our CEO and clinical advisor, Dr.

Armin from Los Angeles. he's a one of the founders of sericdoctors. com. Which is now part of spear education. When he sold his aspect of that sericdoctors. com, he still wanted to maintain educating doctors and bring in technology to these doctors to... Show them what helps him in his practice and educate others, spread his love for technology his geekiness for the digital technology aspect.

But one thing he always maintained was Cadre. Cadre was a digital implant planning company. So back when comb beams were 200, 000 and more he had the idea to start these scan centers where. Doctors would be in a metropolis area, like Chicago or la and they can send their patients in to get scanned.

He would then take the file, planning the implant and send a surgical stent so that they can do digital implant planning without having to invest in a cone beam. Technology. Obviously, prices on cone beam have come down now. You can get into a cone beam for as low as $40,000. and do the planning yourself.

So the scan aspect went away, but the digital planning was still a big part of the business, but education was always his biggest thing and trying to find a product that made sense to expand and educate doctors on was something that he was continuing to look for.

So my former colleagues. Rich and John both worked with me at Patterson as CEREC specialists joined forces with Armin and created Cadre Distribution with the idea that we know what it takes to support a doctor. Again, education from Armin on the clinical side of, CEREC dentistry has always been his background.

Rich, John, myself, a CEREC specialist for Patterson Dental for over 12 years. we know what it takes to support a doctor to make them successful. and we sort of felt that was where other companies fail. Anybody can sell the product, but supporting the product is the most important aspect. So when we started this venture, it was about the customer first, not about us, not about the product. In many ways, I feel like we're a education and support company first and a sales company second. And doctors noticed that. And we are very, very organic. Company in that we do no outbound marketing at all.

Everything we've grown to become has been through social media and through referrals from doctors and you don't get referrals unless you do something really good. and our support with medit has allowed us to grow to where we are today to bring in other products and support our doctors.

After so if you were to Google Cadre we have hundreds of five star reviews.

Some people talk about the products we sell, but every single person talks about the service, support, and education they receive from us. And that's our calling card. So support is by far the most important aspect of what we do on a daily basis. Nice. Okay.

Michael: So then some of the biggest barriers we talked about was like money.

But then at the same time, I guess a great point is the support that's how referrals happen. Right. Like you said, Oh my God, they're fantastic. Not so much like, Oh yeah, they're cheap, but they suck. Right It's more like the referrals, their support is really, really great. So then you mentioned something about, Okay. you guys know what it takes to make a doctor successful. what does it take to support a doctor to be successful?

Damien: Knowledge, obviously, right? So from a technical standpoint, be able to make sure their technology is working.

So if they have an issue, they have one phone over to call. More importantly, they get a live human every single time. There's no numbers to press. Hey, enter your phone number. Let me put you on hold when you call our number. You're going to get a live human anytime between the hours of 8 a. m. and 8 p.

m. East Coast time Monday through Friday. From there, that's the technical aspect. More importantly is the clinical aspect. we were virtual before virtual was cool during coven. So we started basically very slow as a virtual company where the beginning we were. Two sales reps and a CEO that was educating people.

And we were able to reach anywhere in the country through zoom, like we're doing right now. So the idea of selling technology over zoom, instead of a knee to knee aspect or a clinical demo in an office was something sort of new at the time obviously it's changed now where it's a very um, status quo for most companies, it was, new at the time.

so being able to utilize the tools like zoom and team viewer to support the doctors was very important. So one zoom to educate them and train them and then to the team viewer aspect. So we have all sat chair side digitally. In a dental office even our support team. Now, as we've grown, we've brought them in.

They have all been dental assistants who have sat chair side. So we speak the lingo. We know the procedures. So at any time the doctor is doing, let's say the 1st implant scan and they need help. not just going to offer them technical help. We're going to log in with them and sit virtually chair side with them and support them to that case.

Hey, this is where you need to go next. Okay. You need a better scan of that area. And make them feel comfortable in doing those cases. And we can do that anywhere in the world, at any time, between the hours of 8 and 8, of course. but that's the important factors. Yes, companies can offer technical support, but where they fall, sometimes it's in that clinical aspect.

And that's where we take over. Gotcha.

Michael: So it kind of leads to my next question. What can a practice owner, a dentist, do today in your opinion, to improve their marketing or their business?

Damien: I've always been a believer that if you build it, they will come digital technology in general has been ingrained in me and I've been great at my doctors and I've seen practices grow by adding digital technology.

not for just from an overhead perspective. Hey, we're going to cut costs here, or we're going to be able to mail in office and cut down our procedures. But. Referral word of mouth from digital technology, the patient base, I believe, is getting younger and smarter. They know technology, they want to see technology for me growing up I'm 46, my 1st dentist, it was a rotary instrument dentist with you know, big octopus looking thing coming at me.

Those things are ingrained in my memory and my kids. Today they go to the dentist with no issues because they like to see the technology and they're not afraid of what's going to happen to them. I fully believe that adding digital technology, no matter how little or how big is definitely helpful to help build that patient base and garner more attention to your practice.

Gotcha.

Michael: Have you seen any of all the practices you work with, any of the practices where they market the technology in like a unique or smart way or,

Damien: or what do you think? well, I mean, social media obviously is a big thing and, you know, especially with tick tock videos and instagram. There's a lot of great information out there now. But back when I first started, there wasn't social media aspect and everyone's doing social media now for the most part.

But, displaying your technology, being proud of the technology, bringing patients through 1 thing that I've learned. Walking into thousands of dental offices is that not every single dental office is the same. There's offices that have wood paneling on the walls. They're very old. Nothing wrong with them.

Not, knocking the dentistry that's done in those offices, but are they pleasing to the eye? No. And then I've seen offices that are absolutely gorgeous and have no patients. where's the difference there? Where does it lie? And totally always believe it lies in the doctor and the bedside manner of that doctor.

And their staff more importantly but I'll ask meeting a new friend or whatever. Ask who their dentist is. And they tell me and I go, oh, okay why do you choose them? I know the office and I've seen the office and I've seen the dentistry that comes out of the office sometimes.

And I'm like, all right, I probably wouldn't send my friends and family there, but I'm interested to know why you go there. And, they say it's I've been going there for years, or I just doctors so nice and doesn't oversell me on things. And, it's important to them, but they've also never stepped into another dental office.

I'm sure if they walked into a beautiful boutique dental office, they might change their mind of who they see just based on looks. Doesn't necessarily mean they're pumping out great dentistry. But displaying the technology getting people to know that technology exists through marketing digital social media, not so much paid ads.

again, personally speaking from my point of view, I think, Facebook ads and social media ads are a waste of money. I think there's a lot of clickbait and a lot of farmers out there that just take your money and people that you want to see really aren't seeing it you think they are.

but just through organic social posts and shares I always love the viral videos but, to go back to your original question.

Yeah, just marketing technology putting it on display. If you have 3D printer, it's really cool technology. Why not put it where patients can see it and see what's happening or a milling unit in the office, putting it somewhere on display behind a glass case. Patients can see their tooth being made they'll take their phone out.

They'll go right up to it. They'll take a video, put it on their social media. And then share it to their friends and family. It's a really cool experience when you see that happen. it happens time and time again when you actually make the patient part of the process. They're always going to pull their phone out and video it.

Michael: Yeah, I like that, make the patient part of their process. It's really interesting. now these next questions are just to get into the head of someone who isn't totally involved on the clinical side of dentistry, Working in their mouth every single day. What would you, Damien, like to see more from a

Damien: dentist?

not to be afraid of adding technology come to courses and learn. I think we fell out of the realm during covid of people attending trade shows and courses and starting to come back a little bit at the trade shows doing lately, seeing more people out there, but definitely not where it was.

7 years ago I think that doctors, there's only so much you can learn online and that you need to get out there and learn things in person especially with the C courses, they take the required courses. They take some ancillary courses that you may want to take, but I think anything that you get hands on with.

We'll change how they feel about certain things. So if you're curious about digital technologies, definitely take a hands on type course. So you can involve yourself in the dentistry that you want to do. Or thinking about doing not just learning online because it's a big difference when you get to see it, feel it, touch it.

Then when you are just, reading something online or reading a Facebook post as many people do.

Michael: Yeah. You mentioned afraid, like have you noticed that like a lot of people are afraid to add technology their practice? So why?

Damien: Again, it's, it comes down to their mindset. the barrier of prices, I don't think any longer there because it makes more sense to invest in technology than it is to continue to do the analog processes just from a financial aspect.

That makes sense. I think from a team perspective is where most people have a hiccup. Whether they don't want to make changes on their team or the team is resistant to change. What I found time and time again is if your team is not on board, you're going to fail with the technology. So having the proper mindset going in with your team is of utmost importance in my opinion.

Michael: Okay. And then right now, what do you dislike or

Damien: hate about dentistry? There's nothing I really dislike about dentistry. In general, from my perspective, from a patient perspective I hate dental insurance. I see so many people letting dental insurance dictate their all care not doing certain procedures because the dental insurance is not paying for it's not health insurance and while it's nice to have a little discount with your insurance. I would never let that dictate my oral care. If I need something done, I want to get it done, but many patients don't understand that. And, I think it's an education aspect of the patient to let them understand what insurance actually is in the dental world and what it covers and what it doesn't cover.

But I see it time and time again where, patients go to get their teeth pulled versus getting an implant because that's what the insurance is paying for. And they don't realize how important their teeth are. So I think education for the patient is the most important aspect of that.

Michael: Yeah.

No, a hundred percent. Yeah. I agree. And then what needs to change? In your opinion, for people to be more open to dentistry.

Damien: I think it's starting to change now just because the population is getting younger and more aware. There's a lot more research going on with overall body health leading from the oral cavity. And, you know, there's a lot of airway issues going on and breathing issues that lead to high blood pressure and other health factors.

and they're starting to. Realize that and put a positive spin on dentistry. I think there's a lot of negativity towards dentistry, especially from the patient population when it comes to cost. but I think as the patient population gets younger, starting to realize how important things are that go on inside the mouth and we're starting to see a change there, at least in my opinion.

Michael: No, yeah, I agree. I agree 100%. We're starting to see that pivot. Right now, any final pieces of advice or suggestions you'd like to give to our listeners, specifically like startups, people who are practice owners.

Damien: So for us, especially with startups and, younger dentists we believe, or I believe especially that we need to meet the doctor where they are today.

It's nice to sell about the future. But I don't want to oversell a doctor on an idea or a promise that I can't manufacture for them. What I mean by that is if you're starting practice and you want to add technology, you may think you need a milling unit. You may think you need a printer and a scanner, All at once start with one. technology is still going to be there when you're ready to buy the rest of it. But especially from the team perspective. Change is always good in my opinion, but too much change at once could have a negative impact on a practice. And so if you're getting into digital technology, start with the scanner, start with a comb beam and then go from there.

Once you master those things and realize the investment on those products, then you can add the other products. we're all sales reps at the end of the day at Cadre. But it's not about us. It's about the doctor at the end of the day and what's right for them. So don't overbuy buy what you feel comfortable with and get into that mindset of you can always add things on later on.

Nice. I like

Michael: that. Damien, I appreciate your time. And if anyone has further questions or they want to reach out to you, where can they find

Damien: you? You can go to cadray. com. You can reach me personally at Damien, D A M I E N at cad ray. com. And I'm sure you can find me in any social media group involving, dental.

I'll be, uh, commenting typically in any digital technology group. So if you haven't heard of me stay out of the group. So you'll, get annoyed by me.

Michael: No, they haven't. Now they have, man. Now they have heard of you. So awesome, Damian. We appreciate your time, man. It's been a pleasure and we'll hear from you

Damien: soon.

Sounds great. Thank you so much for the time.

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‍(If you DO want to work with Crimson Media Group, be sure to mention this podcast/ episode!)

Reach out to Crimson Media Group here: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/crimsonmediafree/

Shane always gives all our listeners a: Free Marketing Analysis (just mention our podcast name)

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In this week's Monday Morning Marketing episode, join us as we cultivate a deeper understanding of the world of Google Ads with our guest, Shane Simmons. Discover how a laser-focused Google Ad campaign will help you truly stand out in today's fiercely competitive market. We unravel the art of campaign precision, emphasizing the value of targeting specific keywords related to one core service, as opposed to casting a wide net. Shane guides us through the essential steps, from implementing call tracking to calculate your cost per patient, to setting a reasonable budget (hint: expect to invest AT LEAST $1,000 per month for significant impact, depending on your location). We dissect the metrics that matter most, including cost per click, click-through rate, and conversion tracking. Plus, learn the secret sauce of creating a dedicated landing page with key details prominently displayed.

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Tune in and gain the insights you need to dominate your Google Ads game and elevate your marketing strategy to new heights. Don't miss out on this invaluable episode with Shane!

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You can reach out to Shane Simmons here:

Website: https://www.crimsonmediagroup.com/

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Other Mentions and Links:

Google Maps

Google Ads

Google Local Service Ads

Facebook Ads

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If you want your questions answered on Monday Morning Marketing, ask me on these platforms:

My Newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/

The Dental Marketer Society Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2031814726927041

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Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)

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Michael: Hey, Shane. So talk to us about Google ads. How can we utilize this or what advice suggestions or methods can you give us that will help actually attract new patients through Google ads?

Shane: Yeah, michael, so with google ads, these are great because these are people, Doing a search looking for a dentist or a dental service in their community So you're really looking at for the most part pretty serious in market patients at this point, so With that being said the number one piece of advice I could give on launching a successful google ads campaign is making sure that your Targeted campaigns are built out individually, and what I mean by that is, you know, if you're running a an emergency campaign, you you should be specifically bidding on and targeting the emergency dental terms in the area.

So emergency dentist, same day dentist, 24 7 dentist, whatever the case is. Having a campaign geared just around emergency dentistry and then if you're wanting to run just a general patient campaign to build the hygiene, um, side of the practice, then those should be general terms that people look at such as, dentist near me, best dental office, dental cleaning, so on and so forth.

So that's the number one thing that I think I've seen in the past is a lot of people try to Build one campaign and then bid on like all the different keywords that are general related. And if anybody who's ran Google ads knows, it can get really expensive really quick if you do it that way. Google ads isn't necessarily like, running an ad on Facebook or boosting a post on Facebook.

Uh, this is something that you have to have a really, solid strategy in. Otherwise, you're going to blow your budget really quickly and not get any results. So... That's number one. I mean, for us, every new client that we take on, we run two campaigns right out the get go.

First is a general campaign. Second is that emergency campaign. And especially for you startups out there listening to this, the emergency campaign is great because a lot of times what we have found is, you're going to have some openings in your schedule as a startup. So people come in, they feel that real personalized service that you're able to give them.

Thank you. You get them out of pain get them taken care of and then what a lot of our startups have found is Many of those patients end up getting put on the hygiene schedule afterwards because they had you know Such a great experience. So that's something for you startup listeners out there I would highly recommend right out.

The gate is launching an emergency campaign. So general campaign being second now One question we get is, all right, when we run these campaigns, what's next? Where are we sending them? Are we sending them to the website? You need to have a dedicated landing page for every ad campaign that you're running when it comes to Google.

So if it's an emergency campaign, having an emergency specific landing page that you're sending that traffic. And what makes up a good landing page? First and foremost, the information that the patient's looking for they shouldn't have to scroll down to get to it when they go to the page So if you have an offer for a 79 emergency exam Then you need to have that right at the top of the landing page with a call to action button to call now Schedule online, whatever the case is have the call to action with the offer right there Um, the next thing you need to make sure that that landing page has is the proper tracking in place And this is kind of a theme every time I do these, uh interviews with you michael But it's so important is making sure you have call tracking set up so you can know where those patients came from which ad which campaign And whether or not they booked or not and then also having the proper form tracking too.

So if you're collecting that patient's information on that landing page, or maybe they're entering their phone number, their name, their email address, and you know, what insurance they have, for example, um, you need to make sure that you have the proper tracking set up for that because Google ultimately in these ad campaigns is going to look at.

How people clicked on the ad, what they did when they clicked on the ad, and whether or not they converted. So if you don't have conversion set up properly, it's going to mess up your whole bidding strategy, and you're going to end up never being able to actually dial in, a cost for new patient.

ultimately when you're running an ad, after 3, 4, 5 months of doing that, you want to be able to get to a point where you say, All right, I know if we put two thousand dollars in ads. We're going to get 10 new patients out of that and that puts our cost per new patient at 200 so that's where we have to get to but if we don't have that proper tracking in place You're not going to ever be able to get to that because the campaign and Google and the algorithm is not going to know who responded to the ad and who didn't. So that's the second thing. Landing page and making sure that you have that proper tracking set up there. And then the third thing is come in with a realistic budget. too many times... I'll see practices say, you know, they're in southern california I spent you know, five hundred dollars a month in google ads, but i'm not getting nothing You're not going to get anything with five hundred dollars a month in google ads It's just the nature of that platform, you need to be able to dedicate at least 1200 a month in google ads spend if not more than that, especially if you're targeting things like implants and higher end procedures.

so just going into it with realistic expectations and knowing that it's an investment and there's other people out there bidding for the same keywords. So you have to make yourself stand out one way or another. And that's where good ad copy comes into play, proper tracking. And of course, the landing page is everything when it comes to making sure that those patients actually convert.

Michael: Real quick, what does good ad copy look

Shane: like? Yeah, so it really is based around a couple of things with Google ads. One is the keywords that people are actually searching for. So if you can, for example, if somebody searches dentist near me, you know, you would ideally have dentist near me in that ad copy and then something that makes you unique.

So maybe that's, we specialize in patients with dental anxieties or maybe it's something around Be seen same week or maybe it's we're a network with most insurances. So having something that's not just You know dentist in fontana and your best dentist in fontana.

It's like Everybody's going to have that so whether it's highlighting the number of google reviews that you have whether it's the sedation Options you have whether it's that the fact that you're in network with most insurances that is what we call effective copy and With a google ad for any of those, people listening who've been into the ads manager themselves You'll notice that there's different keywords and ad copy that you can write based on What the person searched and so that's a big thing there is google's trying to match up with the keywords that you're specifically targeting with what the person searched and then trying to mix that into An ad that matches up with what that person searched.

So that's the key right there for good ad copy is making sure that you actually point out something that makes the practice unique and would make you stop and click on it. To follow up with that, Michael, the other thing is always be testing. So, there's some key numbers that you need to look at to determine whether or not your Google Ad campaign is performing.

certainly clicks is kind of a vanity number. but the big ones are, your average cost per click. Your click through rate and your conversions. So your average cost per click, pretty, self explanatory. How much are we spending, um, in these ads every time someone clicks on the ad, because that's ultimately how you're being charged.

Click through rate is the percentage of times that someone actually Clicked on the ad when it was seen and so with google they typically say, you know anything above two to three percent click through rate is a healthy Click through rate, uh, meaning, you know, you're targeting the right people you have engaging ad copy things like that but for like an emergency campaign we recommend, 30 percent click through rate and then for a general campaign being closer to 10 So that's something you can look at If you notice like your click through rate on a Google Ads campaign is, under a percent, for example, and then your average cost per click is like 15, then you can look at a few things, but most likely it probably has to do with either your targeting or the ad copy that you have in place.

And then, of course, the final piece of that is conversions. How many people... Called the practice how many people submitted a contact form? So then ultimately like I mentioned we want to get to a point where we can be pretty predictable and say All right We know for every a thousand dollars we put in we get this amount of new patients out of it And that's the key to making sure that you're scaling a campaign Responsibly and in a way that's going to give you the best return.

Michael: Gotcha. Okay. At the beginning of the episode, you mentioned like a lot of people try to do one campaign and then stuff in a bunch of keywords in that one campaign. do we do one campaign for each keyword then? Or what? How does that work?

Shane: No, that's a good question. Um, so think of it in terms of service.

So, you want to bid for multiple keywords for each campaign, but you want to make sure it's geared around one service. So, if we're running, a emergency dental campaign, then that's where we would, target keywords in that one campaign, such as emergency dentist, uh, emergency dentist near me 24 7 dentist urgent care dentist, you know these type of terms Anything that revolves around emergency dentistry and those would all be keywords that you would bid on in that campaign What you don't want to do is have one campaign and be bidding on emergency dentistry keywords dental implant keywords root canals You know all of these where you kind of throw all the services into one campaign Because ultimately, it's too hard to create that many ads that's going to match up with what the person is searching for and for Google to actually show that.

So if you're running a specific ad on implants. Only bid on implant related keywords. Don't bid on, hygiene keywords. If you're running a campaign on, clear aligners or orthodontics, don't also bid on implant keywords in that campaign. So making sure it's very service based.

Michael: Gotcha. So really niche, like hone in on that specific keyword and then...

Give it what you got kind of thing

Shane: Exactly go all in on that one service and you can have multiple campaigns running at once you could have four campaigns But each campaign you said it's a budget you said it's targeting you could run an implant campaign an emergency campaign and a general campaign all at the same time You just want to make sure they're Individually built out and not just kind of, throwing all the keywords into one basket.

Yeah.

Michael: Okay, that makes sense. And then you mentioned coming with a realistic budget. What's the realistic

Shane: budget? So it's gonna, it's not a great answer for this, but it's gonna depend where you're at. what I can tell you based on our experience is if you're in, you know, competitive area, Southern California, South Florida, areas like that.

I mean, honestly, coming in at a bare minimum of 1500 a month is probably what you're going to need to spend, in more rural areas, you can get away with, somewhere between 1000 a month, 1200 a month is kind of a starter. but, Michael, we have offices that. Have 3, 500 a month, 4, 000 a month that they spend in Google ads, single offices, and there are bigger offices out there that spend 10, 15, 20, 000 a month.

So it's not necessarily about how much you spend. Certainly that has an impact because you're paying. 10 every time someone clicks on your ad and you have a 50 a day, threshold, you're only going to get five clicks on your ad a day. some of that has to do with it, but it's not necessarily the person who has the biggest budget that's going to win.

In this case, it's going to be making sure you're doing everything that you possibly can to make those clicks count. And that's. Having the proper landing page set up having the conversion tracking set up writing that engaging ad copy We talked about using some of the tips we discussed so you can be more efficient and kind of be the the underdog in the fight and still get some of those patients, but you have to come into it realistically You can't think if I spend 500 a month at Google Ads I want to get 10 new patients out of that because that's most likely just not realistic

Michael: Gotcha. Awesome. So any final pieces of advice you want to give to our listeners on this?

Shane: One final piece of advice I'll give is there's something recently that came out, in dentistry in the last two to three months or so, called Google local service ads. And I don't know if anybody's talked about these on here yet or not, but these are ads that used to only be available for like the home service industry.

So you're like HVAC companies, heating, you know, air and plumbing, things like that. They opened it up to dentistry. And so right now what I would do is I would recommend everybody go through the verification process Uh, it's called google local service ads. You can create an account on there. You have to submit information Such as your dental license.

There's a few things there that you have to do But once you do that, you can run google local service ads Which if you go right now, and if you type plumber near me at the very top You'll see a few businesses that'll be listed above every ad on the page It has the google review rating. It'll have a phone number.

It'll say the business name and then it will usually have a green Circle with like a check mark in it. It says google guaranteed So when you submit this information Your office can get this google guaranteed badge And then you can start running these local service ads and a lot of dental practices are starting to pick up on this now But there's still a lot of people who aren't running them.

So it's way less competitive and the other cool thing about this michael is You only pay per lead with Google local service ads. So they only charge you when somebody actually calls and schedules an appointment. And if they call and they don't schedule an appointment, you can actually dispute it and let Google know that, hey, this person didn't actually schedule and they won't charge you for that.

So Google local service ads, you're gonna start hearing more about this. And I wouldn't be surprised, Michael, if we do an episode on those here in the coming months.

Michael: Nice. Awesome, Shane. I appreciate your time. And if anyone has further questions, you can definitely find them on the Dental Marketer Society Facebook group, or where can

Shane: they reach out to you directly?

Yep. They can always, uh, deal with marketer Facebook group of course. And, uh, crimson media group.com is the other place that you can reach us, and fill out a contact form there. And, uh, we also always like to help our friend Michael out do a free marketing analysis for any of the listeners, of this podcast.

So if you wanna do a marketing analysis, us give you some data feedback, you'll go to crimson media group.com and, uh, we'll help you out.

Michael: Awesome. So, Shane, thank you so much for being with me on this Monday morning marketing episode. Thanks, Michael.

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Join this podcast's Facebook Group: The Dental Marketer Society

Join my newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/[Click here to leave a review on iTunes]

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Guest: Yolanda MangrumBusiness Name: Fortune ManagementCheck out Yolanda's Media:

Website: https://www.fortunemgmt.com/

Email: [email protected]

Phone: 707-478-6394

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Other Mentions and Links:

Costco

UCSF

Hire to Inspire

SuperCamp

DDS4Kids

Mother Teresa

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Host: Michael Arias‍Website: The Dental Marketer

Join my newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/‍

Join this podcast's Facebook Group: The Dental Marketer Society

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My Key Takeaways:

• Learn what you want to do in life and shape your practice to support that!
• Aligning core values and designating purposeful work is essential with new hires.
• We don't want head bobbers with no input in our team. If they are asking questions and engaging, they will be stronger leaders for their role!
• Responding to angry patients with an apology and offer to help will prove much more fruitful than defensiveness.
• We want to support our team members in solving the problems they have rather than just solving them for them.
• Each team member is a leader of their role. Let them have say in the areas that they are the expert!

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Please don't forget to share with us on Instagram when you are listening to the podcast AND if you are really wanting to show us love, then please leave a 5 star review on iTunes! [Click here to leave a review on iTunes]

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p.s. Some links are affiliate links, which means that if you choose to make a purchase, I will earn a commission. This commission comes at no additional cost to you. Please understand that we have experience with these products/ company, and I recommend them because they are helpful and useful, not because of the small commissions we make if you decide to buy something. Please do not spend any money unless you feel you need them or that they will help you with your goals.

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Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)

Michael: Alright, it's time to talk with our featured guest, Dr. Yolanda Mangram. Yolanda, how's it going? Excellent. Excellent. That's wonderful to hear. So if you can tell us a little bit about your past, your present, how'd you get to where you are

Yolanda: today? So, uh, Post dental school. I guess we can start there.

I started a dental practice after two years of being out of dental school. Immediately after dental school, I went into being hired as a educator, the a professor at U C S F. And so I was teaching, two days a week. I was associating two days a week by the time that I started my practice and I was opening my practice two days a week.

it was a busy, busy time for

Michael: sure. Okay. So you opened your practice two days a week and two days a week you were working and two days a week you were educating. So you had one day

Yolanda: Yeah. To go to Costco to buy stuff for the practice or to go to whatever. It was an Aaron's day.

that's how I got started in the practice. Fast forward, I grew that practice to be basically what I felt was like a teenager. My baby kind of grew up to be a teenager and and I'd already had at that 0.2 babies. And I shaped my practice to be. The way I wanted it for my life.

And so I had the great benefit of starting my practice pretty much six months out with a coach. and, you know, the big centering point was, what do you want in life? And let's shape your practice to be that. So at different times, I wanted to be at home to be able to, breastfeed or I wanted to be able to have certain times or days off so that I could pick up the kids.

So the practice was kind of shifted and shaped to support that. fast forward, we were in this having kids stage. and I had a maternity leave and basically at that point it made sense that I have an associate. So we ended up having, coverage for the first baby, and then by the second baby she became a partner.

so that I could have that life balance. What I didn't plan, 'cause that seemed like a logical thing, being a mom and do that. What I didn't plan was being approached to buy another practice. And I was like, oh no, that's not my plan. My plan is this. when this came about I actually took a different trajectory and did invest in another practice and we came up with a bigger why.

And that y became our 10 year mission, in growing this second practice and that y became so big that, it meant that I actually would do something that I would've never, ever thought I would do, which is sell my baby, let my baby that grew up to be a teenager. Go on and exist.

In my hometown and have me move one town over and grow a multi-specialty medical and dental practice. So that's where I am today. I have a 10,600 square foot building, 16 op operatory, a med spa, dental spa, and education center. all because of my big why. that I wanted to be able to have a practice, have the passion, in my practice, and also have all this dedicated time to support my family.

we had this plan for 10 years. my kids were hitting junior high to do dental missions and to travel the world and to service. and that happened pre covid, thankfully. Because if it had happened a year later my 10 year goal would not have came to a full, existence.

So we traveled to probably, I. Five or more countries. and the kids were homeschooled and we did a lot of family values, time in incorporating family values into, experiences through traveling and service.

Michael: So you guys still do that right now?

Yolanda: they're now in high school.

we did it pre covid, and we've done only one mission post covid. we basically weave in. When we do traveling, there's always a way to do some service with it. Even concierge at Nice Hotels can set up a service mission for you. They can look into some local and find ways for you to do a give back, we've done it in Jamaica, Costa Rica.

And those have been more just like checking with the local concierge and asking them how can we help? The other things that we did were more with organizations and they were like planned just to go for that. But almost always especially when you're traveling to these beautiful tropical countries, there's plenty of needs in those communities.

So, One day excursion being of service is been the way that we've been, bringing our children into a give

Michael: back. And they appreciate that. the people appreciate it, but your children will, you know what I mean? Like, it's gonna open up their give back even more.

Right. Hospitality, things like that. that's really good. If we can rewind a little bit. You were hired as an educator. but that was

Yolanda: immediately after dental school. Yeah I was very active in dental school and I've always been happy sharing and teaching. so about, for about three to four years, I was I don't know what the title was, but some kind of professor, like an assistant associate or somebody about professor at U C S F.

I was low on the totem pole, but yes I did some education right after dental school and was teaching things like anesthetic and being on the clinic floor and. And that type of thing. And so all those education things, I was a dental assistant before I went into dental school.

I went to lab, tech school before dental school. So that really helped to have a full experience of all the different fields in dentistry before, I opened up my practice 'cause I, I literally know how. It feels to be in each position in the practice, and there are challenges. So that's what's been a key success, I think to me in 2011, I wrote a book knowing that I wanted this mission to be able to travel with my kids. it's called Hire to Inspire. I've. Updated it, but I haven't published the newer version post 10 years after that. But hired to inspire, it was two things that I realized as an employer.

One, I only wanted to work with happy people, and two, I only wanted to work in partnership with them. and that meant that I needed to be surrounded by leaders, people that were working on their leadership development. And I never wanna be in a management position. When I hire people in my practice, I sit down and I have a conversation with them about purpose Ikigai is a term in Japanese that's called your reason for being.

We start from the very beginning, on our onboarding, which is part of the Hire to Inspire process, which is basically to, from the beginning, make sure that we have matching core values and that we have purposeful work. And so this may be only a point in time for you as far as this leveraging you to your next place.

So I always say, you know, as long as this is your happy place. To come to work, then we're in alignment. But I only wanna work with happy people. So if we get to the place where you really, find that your passion is somewhere else, then I'm gonna help you to find your happy place.

And that means we'll continue our journey, but in a different way. So you will go off to be, say, a hairdresser. Which ironically yesterday, one of my former employees did. or you'll, we'll stay here and we'll continue to grow together, but ultimately we all have to be continuing to grow and.

Be passionate about our work. So Hire to Inspire was a shift in 2011 for me, and I literally took each chapter and I sat down and I read it out loud with my team, many of which are still here with me. many who also have came. And I've supported to go off into other areas. So, So the idea is just to continue to inspire them to look for what their purpose is.

so that's our onboarding process is to really get things straight about our core values, who we are. I have a culture handbook that we go over, and we have what's called Operating Principles. Operating principles. Are basically staying, how we do things, why we do things what our why is, is really important.

And basically team members. as people, we all want to do, a good job and feel good about our work. But we often don't know how. Or what the best way for that work to show up is. So the more clarity we can have, especially onboarding people, the better. right now we have 50 something people in our practice.

Between the two practices. it's always a work. I'm the culture keeper. That's my role is to just keep the culture and it's not always easy. because everybody has different beliefs and things, but. Ultimately having good communication lines and having clarity around your values and, our why is how we, continue to ha live in a happy place and have, that line when you cross over, it's showtime, we're here to serve.

Michael: Interesting. So you mentioned you only hire leaders. what's your hiring process look like? How do we even find leaders in that sense, or the ad and everything like that? You know what I mean?

Yolanda: Yeah. That's the irony. Everybody can be a leader everybody is a leader to some degree.

It's just how well developed are they? most importantly, Do they want to be developed in that way? That's probably number one is everybody in our practice, no matter what your role is, if your role is to clean the toilets, then you are the leader of cleaning the toilets.

So we will listen to you when it comes to taking care of that. It doesn't matter what it is. you know, If you are, the Hy Hygienist, you're the leader of the periodontal therapy, and when it comes to you telling us what needs to happen in that department, you're the expert, you're the person who's going off and making a hyperfocus in that area.

And so we're gonna, all collaborate on things, but at the same time you're the person steering the ship on that area. As a c e o, as an owner I have to be surrounded by smart people and I want people that are thinking, I want people that are speaking their mind. I don't want people just being head bobbers.

Yep yep. Oh, that's not gonna work. Yep. She's gonna fail on that. Nope. I want them to say, I like where you're going, but maybe we need to consider a different direction. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah reasons, or have you considered this? Or, what's gonna happen with that?

So I want people asking questions. Is it frustrating sometimes to be like all excited about doing something, but then have someone put all these questions around? Absolutely. So that's where I had to grow my own leadership. You know, I had to grow who I am to not have such an ego about me being all knowing, we do a collaborative process and everything is about leadership development. I personally, Don't want to be in a conversation where I'm managing something, because stressful at that point. If we're collaborating, if we're working towards brainstorming on how to make things better, then it's a very easy light energy um, process.

Michael: Uhhuh, okay. So there has to be like a balance of with every person you find. Humility and confidence, basically. Right? Yeah. Because it's like you gotta be confident enough to know you're the leader for this, and you're gonna tell us how to do it. Give us instructions, manuals, things like that. SOPs, and then humble enough to, yeah, you're cleaning the toilets, but you're the leader for that right.

Kind of thing.

Yolanda: Whatever it is. to some degree. Um, We all have certain innate skills in certain ones and some things that we have to work on. it's progress over perfection, all the time.

And then we're appreciating also that, failures lead to learning. there's um, many different keys in our development process in fact one historical thing that's shaped me and continued and those that have children highly recommend super camp. There's the eight keys of excellence.

It has been a hundred percent woven into my structure of living my life. And, we actually weave it into our culture handbook. The eight Keys of Excellence with Super camp. And they have some education on bringing children and teaching children personal development skills.

Early on I was a team leader, during undergrad, and so I did three or four years of that When I got out, I was really looking for that camp experience where personal development was forefront in having a team surrounding me with those kind of skillsets, communication, personal development, mindset, all of that.

And so I looked and I, interviewed many different. Consultants. And I knew that I needed to have you know, this ongoing constant learning, environment. and after, probably more than a hundred different seminars of sitting in practice management, learning learning, learning what I could. I came across something called Fortune Management, and that's another part of my life now because I've been Coaching for now 10 years, but been coached for 25 years with Fortune Management and it's about extraordinary life, extraordinary practice.

So that was the key thing when I had the startup. It's like, what do you want in life? Let's shape your practice to meet that. So fortune, has had a huge impact on me and my. thinking, my processing, our team development, super camp, this, personal development skills, started young.

Yeah, I think that these things are a real big part of our development. The reality is, we don't get taught how to talk. We don't get taught how to have relationships, how to get through conflicts. There's a lot of conflicts that can happen in dental practices, and we need to learn how to, come out stronger on the other end.

A bad review is an opportunity because it's a cry for help. It's a cry to say, Hey this happened to me. It's not easy to lean in on those things but if someone comes to you say in the office and they haven't actually sprayed it across the, Google and Yelp and all that, then they're coming to you with a concern, or you might call it a complaint, but then they're caring enough to share.

So humility again, comes into the place of listening to understand. And also understanding that, we're never gonna be perfect. So if that was that one person's experience, what can we learn from that? Our team is encouraged to basically lean into issue processing, and that's a leadership skill too.

Because at first a reaction would be go into defense mode. instead of just apologizing first and then, thinking them immediately for bringing the concern to you, it puts you in a different state.

Now you're not in a defense state. know, I apologize for the impact that had on you. Certainly wasn't my intent. thank you for bringing this to my attention. I wanna help boom, you just say those things to anybody that is upset with you at any time. Now, what do you, how would you feel about that?

Yeah. If I said that to you and you were upset with me how would you

Michael: feel? I'd feel calm. I'd be like oh, oh wait. Okay. I feel, you know what? I feel heard validated like, oh, okay. You're, yes, you're listening to me. Yes.

Yolanda: So part of fortune's training is to, understand that there are human needs, people have human needs, we don't know what's going on in their life.

It's most likely more to do about them than it has to do with you, And to feel validated, that one, they're being seen, they're being heard and that they matter is huge. And then you get to choose from that point. How much of that is really mine and how much of it is theirs?

there anything we could change in our systems or in our processes that could shift the dynamic here? 'cause we are practicing, so let's. Figure out how we can have an issue come up, but then make it better the next time, So we learn from it and we see that as an opportunity to grow.

Versus when we're in a mode of defending, we're not in a mode of growing. So I highly encourage that in the leaders to be big instead of to be small. when you are, thinking small, you're in that defense mode. But when you're willing to set that aside and lean in and get curious about it and think like, how could that have happened?

How could we have done better? Where did this, go to that side what's missing here? Oh, they don't really understand this part And the, key thing is, That you may get to the place where you totally understand that they don't know what they're talking about when they're talking to you, but if you shift right away into telling them something, you have to remember, are you in rapport with them now?

What I said in the beginning that set the framework was to start to get rapport with you, Michael. Mm-hmm. I apologize. it's not my intention. I would never want you to feel like that. So now that was the beginning of rapport. And in our processes and fortune, there's the steps of enrollment, there's steps of getting into rapport with people.

that we train, our team members to go through because rapport is everything. Rapport with your team members, rapport with your patients, rapport and influencing. You influence people all the time, getting really good at influencing it and really good at influencing yourself, like talking yourself off the ledge to be defensive.

is a big deal. So those are some of the skills that we focus on in, in our leadership development. But basically everybody is in leadership development all the time. You never get out of that school.

Michael: Gotcha. And you're a hundred percent right Yolanda, like when it comes to defending We've hear this all the time, they're like, it's good to apologize. It's good to say sorry. Right? It's super good to do that. But you try being the first one to do that, right? Yep. Then it becomes, oh my God. Well, If they say sorry, I can say sorry. You know what I mean? But you know, I'm the first one. I don't know. You know what I mean? Because then you start defensive mode. it takes a bigger viewpoint of there's a bigger thing happening here than just like that little, oh my gosh, we're arguing about the bad review or the defensive, or, I'm not paying you for this or that.

There's a bigger picture that we gotta look into. Yeah. that's really valuable. Super camp,

Yolanda: what is that? Yeah. Super camp is what's called quantum learning. And personal development. Super Camp is held on colleges all across the world. Actually. I even taught in Hong Kong. dental school got in the way, or I'd have been in many other countries, but, it's a really cool 10 day camp.

It focuses on the eight keys of excellence one day, each skill is focused on, so eight keys of excellence. Is this, is it like living in the moment? I'm not gonna list all of 'em right now, but communications, speak with good purpose, failures lead to success. All amazing things to get straight in your head as you leap into the world, So basically you go through a 10 day. Personal development, but also there is these quantum learnings where you learn speed reading. different ways to look at math. s a t prep of some sort. Mm-hmm. So, it's a big impact.

10 days. And I was able to be a team leader. It is not inexpensive to do that, and I certainly would've not been able to attend from a financial standpoint at that point. But as a team leader I got to absorb a lot of those teachings and I was taught to teach them. So, It was like the best of all worlds.

Michael: Nice. Okay. So you were able to absorb as much and you still carry it on until today. Yeah. From what we're talking about, right? Yeah. One of the things I wanted to ask you is, it sounds like from the beginning you've had I guess like a mission or, my children.

I wanna be with them. I wanna be with my family and everything like that. How did you keep that mission in front of your eyes this whole time? for example, I'm opening a practice, then you're just, that's my baby. I gotta do that practice. Then another one, oh, then we get mom guilt and stuff like that. How did you keep that mission in front of your

Yolanda: eyes? Yeah, it's a daily mindset for sure. And it's what you're saying yes to, means what are you saying no to? you always have to look at your yeses and your nos.

And you also have to be really focused on your, why Is it bringing you closer to your why? I certainly, I. Have made more mistakes than, it feels like anyone in making this mission come together. you know, and people think that success is just straight up, but it's like this, you know?

Mm-hmm. you just dip and then you come back up and you dip and you come back up. you win, you lose, you win. You lose. it's just a matter of better the next time. And that's where leaning into issue, processing, leaning into, facing the things that didn't work.

And it's about getting back on the bike and continuing to pedal. So I know that, with my kids it was definitely always the centering for me, and my why I was working and how we were developing the team members. The good thing is that I happen to be one of those people that really enjoy.

Service and support, and I get a lot out of seeing people grow. More than my own successes. it gets me really excited to see someone figure something out and to have been, this little part of it, or maybe just enough to, get them to jump up.

So in my lifetime in the beginning, We got a post-its and we got a big board and my husband and I boyfriend at the time, said, okay, what do we wanna accomplish with this practice? fast forward looking 10 years from now, looking 20 years from now, what do we wanna see after all of our years of work?

And that's where. being in the future is really valuable because now you get your why, but then you have to come back and we have to be in now. What can we do now? What's the best resources now? Because if we're always just like dreamy, dreamy, dreamy over here, then we're not actually accomplishing things.

And the other thing is, that if we're always looking back, What ifs? Should'ves. Could'ves. Wished of, you know, wished, wished, wished. If I'd only known then now we're not doing anything about the now. Things are not moving forward. They're just staying behind. So I think the present, the key, this is it, It's hugely beneficial to stay in the now. each one of those keys, the eight Keys of excellence really keeps me centered.

Michael: Yeah, that's a really good point. I feel like if you stay in the, now you stop so much procrastinating 'cause of the future, right? You're like thinking of my why.

Oh, I'm gonna get there. And then you eventually, you know what I mean? Or it's gonna get there. If you're in the now, you're like, okay, now I got to do this in that moment kind of thing. I only have

Yolanda: now, right? Yeah. Yeah. I only have now

Michael: really good. You mentioned, two words that I kind of want to ask you about issue processing.

is

Yolanda: that? So issue processing, this is where real leadership comes into play because, we look at, say an issue. maybe the phone's getting answered. Mm-hmm. You take an issue and we all, put our emotions aside and we at it and, how could we do that better?

And if we are in a process of brainstorming with all these different people, like how can we get this better? How can we get this better? And the focus is around that one issue. Now some solutions start coming up. What I'm not a fan of is having someone hand me their monkey and then I'm supposed to put their monkey on my back.

Basically, as a leader, their issues come up, but if they just wanna say, here's my problem, so I don't need people coming to me with their problems, basically, that's their monkeys, and I wanna be able to support people to figure things out. I wanna be able to support them to be making some decisions. In fact, we have a process called decision Tree.

So basically my goal is to help them to know which decisions they need to just make and which decisions they need to bring to me. So in a tree, for instance, I'm the roots, you know, in the trunk, but I want my team members to make some branch decisions, or at least the leave leaf decisions.

I don't want them bringing me all the leaves, I don't wanna be raking up all those leaves all the time because then that's a whole different level of energy. I want them to feel empowered to make some decisions. So when they're part of issue processing. Then they can understand like, how I'm thinking, what I'm thinking.

for instance, a patient's upset and they're complaining about their crown. Maybe you don't give the entire crown away. Don't just say, we're gonna do it for free. Don't worry. I don't want you to be upset. Yeah. Maybe we come up with a better decision. So, As a leader, leading leaders, I'm careful to Squish them in a place when they've made a decision. And then I said that was a bad decision, so I have to develop them in that regard. So I want them to stay open to possibilities in that issue processing. I want them to have some. Initiative I want them to be willing to defend their decision.

So why did you decide that? Why did you decide, not from a defense standpoint, but ex explain to me, help me understand. ' cause if I can understand why you did that and what you're thinking was, now I can put you on a different level of thinking because, obviously we can't give away every crown.

How could I pay you? what else could have happened Is this, So now you've got that muscle built up and you're building their leadership muscles. So how we talk to them is really, really, important. Build up versus tear down.

Michael: Yeah. You're teaching them basically how to make decisions, And I like that because they're not always gonna go to you and being like, what should I do? What should I do? What should I do? And then you're kind of like, man, I'm always having to tell you what to do. But I guess it comes back to us as a leader where we never help them develop that muscle, like you said.

Yeah. Teach 'em to fish. Yeah. Yeah. Teaching to fish. I like that. So then if we fast forward a little bit more, you were approached to buy another practice. Yes. And your why changed? So what was your

Yolanda: why before. So my why before had much to do with being able to have choice picking up my kids after school, be able to comfortably care for them as a mom, a working mom, Then when I took on the partner, I thought my why was gonna be so that I could be like p t a mom, you know, I could be very active in school and, spend a lot of volunteer hours doing things, but still make enough money and, be able to be at home. And so I was preparing for 50% work, type thing.

and then this other big opportunity came up and, my knee jerk was, no, that's not my why. That would mess up that. And so then my husband and I sat down literally on the staircase up there We said, you know, what's the bigger picture here with raising these kids?

You know, what do we want? What is our job as a parent? We wanna make sure that they have the values, and their own leadership to lead their own lives, if they're always dependent on us, that would be a problem. Not that I couldn't have done that as my other plan.

There became this bigger opportunity because we literally have been in the same home, in the same town growing up in this little area. And we didn't really want them to just have this little microcosm of, of life. We wanted them to be have the humanity to understand the whole world and that the whole world was an opportunity for them.

But how do you travel and. Expose them to things like that. in the current position I was in, even with bringing on an associate and now having that as an a partner, I was not necessarily making money unless I was there. So if I clocked out, say for a month, Then, my income stream is going way down.

ultimately the idea of, go big or go home, I guess came in the thing is about being small. you either stay small or you go big and in the middle you get pounded on with all kinds of, business growth and changes. And that was something that was really clear.

We were reaching the middle ground with that practice that had its own challenges, its own growth challenges. So ultimately, I. The goal of our family and the idea came into play to be able to travel with them. And for two years we did that.

we homeschooled them. We traveled basically about every month. six weeks at a time was our biggest one. And then two weeks being gone was our normal time. So we'd come back, we'd go, so we were traveling a lot each place had a different perspective and a different reason for being there.

But, what I needed to do for that is my team had to be able to take the reins and keep the practice going with or without me. I had to create this practice that these leaders could run the practice with me, still having my extraordinary life without them. this whole way of developing this leadership was a necessary process in order to accomplish my goal of being able to come and go as I want in my practice and have the extraordinary life or whatever life I want.

Michael: that's what your why kind of evolved into. Yes. It's like I just want to do my own thing. Interesting. real quick, which place, 'cause you said each location gave you a different perspective, change your life. Which one to you was like, this one was a whole 360 Really changed my life, my perspective.

Yolanda: I would say that one of my favorites was our Asian tour. I really, really love. Asia. And so that would be one of my favorites. And, post COVID, we haven't been able to get, back to Vietnam, but my plans and my involvement with d d s. Four kids.org continues.

I still fundraise and do lots of things with DDS for kids. It's the number sign four. And Lon Jones, who's the founder of this, she's like a mother Theresa, x fold better. She's like this most beautiful person. And so having met her and having my kids get to know a person that's beautiful. So giving, who's, hasn't had children of her own, but she says the whole world is her children. And so she cares and loves and goes into all these different places to take care of them and make a difference. So having that impact and having my kids know.

That type of person. Knowing you know, when we went to Haiti, That was a little much, that was a lot, much for me. Dr. Laurenti Barnett. He's been doing such amazing things in Haiti for so long, and I'm so grateful that we got that experience to go and do work there.

there's so much going on there. Unfortunately, it's also so corrupt. and, got a lot of dangers I think for traveling. But Dr. Barnett and his, decades and decades of giving and service to Haiti and really helping has been beautiful.

So, Having my kids, having had the influences of these people that do things like that,

Michael: priceless. Yeah. Priceless. Yeah, man, that's beautiful. Okay. So then one of the last questions I wanted to ask you, Yolanda, is you mentioned made many mistakes, right? Yeah. So I guess from the moment you decided okay, I'm going to start my own practice, right? today, what's been some of your biggest struggles or fails or pitfalls?

Yolanda: it has a lot to do with this leadership development. wasn't always as strong of a leader, I certainly had to lean in on, messing up certain relationships along the way because I wasn't, Ahead of this pre communication, I had to have things onboarded with team members, and not have it go longer term because I didn't have my vision or my communication about what I was looking to accomplish.

So clearly documented, so clearly, able to reference. To where anybody walks into the practice that they can understand a direction. I think that we lost a lot of time and a lot of energy with emotions being misunderstood with different things because we didn't have those clear directions and, mistake or just journey.

It was a journey. you journey through and you learn things along the way, and hopefully you don't have to keep making those mistakes over again. But I think the biggest thing is any team members, and there's been hundreds and hundreds of team members that I've had at this point.

They've all taught me something. I've learned to be better because maybe I wasn't as good at the time. But how can I get better? How can I get better? Has been, definitely a support for me in this journey. Yeah,

Michael: I like that. Thinking about each team member and looking at them and saying, can I learn from you?

You know what I mean? Yeah. and it goes back to what you said, it's gonna be like this. Yes. sometimes right now, I know a lot of our listeners may be like, man, I'm trying to reach to that million dollars a year, mark, you're gonna get there, I feel. But then it's going to, there's still gonna be times where you're like, my team, it's worse. I'd rather sacrifice the money and, you know what I mean, Seasons. Two seasons. Yeah.

Yolanda: Go through seasons learning's never out, at all.

It's constantly about learning constant and never ending improvement all the time. And when you buy in and you get your team to buy into some of these belief systems, you accelerate. That was probably the smartest thing I ever did is from the beginning is, stay with a coach, keep a relationship.

Have someone who's on the outside telling you, with all authenticity, then reality, you screwed up. this isn't being your best self. you're thinking small. Be big be the bigger person, apologize, 'cause team members can't do that to you, you're like, okay, you're fired. You know, it's like, it's, there's only so much that they're gonna be able to authentically be your board of directors. that's something to do easily is get a board of directors, get people, be a board of director for someone else, and, get mastermind groups together.

and speak authentically to each other. you're not perfect. This could have gone better this way and recognize that when someone's giving you an opinion, there's plenty of 'em. Maybe that one is not exactly the right one too.

Just because people have an opinion doesn't mean that you need to embrace that opinion too. think through it, continue to be a critical thinker.

Michael: Wonderful. Yeah. Thank you so much, Yolanda, for being with us. It's been a pleasure. But before we say goodbye, can you tell our listeners where they can find you?

Yolanda: You can find me Yolanda Mangram at Fortune Management, which is fortune mgmt.com. That's my email. Or you can call me on the phone seven oh seven, 4 7 8 6 3 9 4. I'm always happy to help, in any way. It's really a beautiful journey. And try to be really nice to yourself.

Mm-hmm. You work really hard and your intentions are straight so, be nice to yourself. Self-talk and self-love is definitely where my focus is right now. We are type A people most of the time and we're pretty hard on ourselves. So as much as I was talking about being humble and taking on, all the learning moments, remember to also focus back on some self-love and giving yourself a lot of credit.

Michael: Wonderful. Thank you so much Yolanda, for being with us guys. That's all gonna be in the show notes below, so definitely reach out to Yolanda and thank you for being with us. It's been a pleasure and we'll hear from you soon. Sounds great.

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Reach out to Studio8E8 here: https://s8e8.com/affiliates/tdm?utm_source=tdm&utm_medium=affiliate&wc_clear=true

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In this week's Monday Morning Marketing episode, I'm joined by an industry expert and friend, Joshua Scott, from Studio 8E8. Today we're bringing to the spotlight the incredible success story of one of their clients who skyrocketed from 0 to a jaw-dropping 3 million dollars in revenue in just one year, all thanks to the power of digital marketing. Joshua unravels the secret sauce behind this remarkable feat, breaking it down into four essential components that underpinned their triumph:

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1. Establishing a proven formula for scaling - Knowing your numbers and how to leverage them for growth. If you know 30 calls equals about 5 new patients, it will be easier to scale!

2. Crafting an efficient and conversion-focused funnel - Locking down all the platform strategies and best ways to drive potential patients to your practice.

3. Building brand authority - Boosting your organic SEO and becoming a trusted brand in your community.

4. Diversifying marketing budgets and efforts - Knowing where to spend more and where to spend less in your marketing budget. Should you market for more emergency cases, cosmetic, or big ticket items? The choice is yours!

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Dive into this episode to get even more in depth on these proven digital marketing techniques!

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You can reach out to Joshua Scott here:

Website: https://s8e8.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/joshuascott/

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Other Mentions and Links:

Google Ad Words

Invisalign

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For more helpful tips, strategies, ideas, and marketing advice:

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The Newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2031814726927041

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Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)

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Michael: Hey Joce. So talk to us about Google Ads. How can we utilize this, or what advice, suggestions, or methods can you give us that will actually help us attract new patients through Google

Joshua: Ads? Hey, Michael. Dude, so always so good to be here with you. I love these, these Monday morning marketing minutes.

I don't, I don't know if that's it. That's it. That's four s Monday morning, marketing Minute. I don't know. I think it's maybe one day. Yeah, I'm, I'm adding, I'm changing the title of your show. no, but man, we just had a client, really cool client that went from a startup practice, a startup GP practice that went from zero to 3 million in revenue in year one.

And a lot of that was based around digital ads. And so I thought I'd bring in some of those keys that our team was like, here's why that happened into this episode. So I've got like kind of four keys that we observed from a high level on why his ads were so successful. Awesome. Let's get into it, man.

Awesome. So number one was he really understood how to scale a campaign. One of the things I tell people is one of the most valuable parts of a digital ad campaign is understanding the formula that you're building. fact, a lot of ways that formula is almost more valuable than the actual spend that's happening.

And so for instance, let's say you're spending a thousand dollars a month in Google Ads, and then that generates, I mean, we can put clicks in there if you want, but let's just make it simplify it. Like a thousand dollars generates 30 phone calls, which generates five new patients to the practice. So if we can establish that formula, well now, you know, okay, so if you're bringing on an associate, you're expanding, you want to grow faster, you're like, okay, we need an extra 20 new patients a month.

Now we got a formula for that. So we know that 20 would actually have to be a $4,000 investment to get 120 phone calls, which kind of tells you what your front office team needs to be able to handle. Mm-hmm. Which gets you the 20 new patients. So once he kind of understood that he started with a smaller budget early on, and by smaller, I mean, um, I probably should have started with this.

So he, when he initially started, we were spending 25,000 a month in Google ads. And once we got a handle on that, that formula, I think right now we're spending about 47,000 in one month on Google Ads. Wait,

Michael: 4 7 3 zeros, 4 7, 0,

Joshua: 0, 0, 0 0 per month. So basically half a million dollars on digital ads.

And you know, here's the thing though, like, if you spend half a million in marketing, but you can get to 3 million in year one, would you do that? You know? Yeah. So, dude,

Michael: so okay, talk to me about the formula then. So that was number one, scale the campaign, right?

Joshua: So number two was really creating a funnel with your ad campaigns. And so we, we know this word funnel, we've, it's, it's, it's out there, but it, it kind of gets, like, it's one of the probably, I don't know, like marketing trends that's coming through, but it's really nothing new.

And so with him, it was creating this, this funnel with different parts of it. So number one, like at the top is uh, what we call like a meta brand awareness campaign. So between Facebook and Instagram, You're using photography and video to just drive brand awareness. Like, Hey, we're here. New practice name recognition.

then using Google Ads so that then driving to Google Ads, which uses as a conversion point. So now they're clicking on that. They're going to the website. We're trying to get conversions from them. But then using, going back to Meta's platform, to remarket to them. So we have this like brand awareness, getting them, you know, now they're seeing Google ads and they're going to the website.

Now they're seeing the, the practice come back up in their feed for the next 30 to 60 days. Mm-hmm. So you're really kind of sophisticated approach to go, let's drive traffic down this funnel. Let's not lose it at just one exposure, but really figure out how to leverage all the platforms out there to do that.

Gotcha. Okay.

Michael: Okay. So then three.

Joshua: So three was really establishing brand authority. And what I mean by that is even though his campaigns were really successful, Building an entire successful business around digital ads is not really like, the best strategy and, and kind of impossible. And so, he used organic ss e o a great patient experience social media to really generate a ton of authority.

So at the same time, we're running this like high powered digital ad campaign. He's collecting 500 Google reviews in year one, average 4.9 stars. He's creating social media, uh, awareness and, and authority, and so, The way this plays into his, cost per click, then being lower because Google is now translating this as a high quality, website, high quality source when they return it.

So conversion rates go higher, pay per click goes lower, and all those things. Realizing it's not just about putting ads out there, it's all the things behind the scenes. Word of mouth, great patient experience, good social media strategy.

Michael: Hmm. Gotcha. So it, a lot goes on with number three, The s e o social media.

quality of the, what's he posting? The reviews? Yeah. All that stuff. Right.

Joshua: Yeah. And it's, and it's really realizing like digital marketing is a compliment to all the other things you're doing to build a business. You know, I think marketing, when you look at some of this, it's like if you go, Hey, uh, startup, zero to 3 million in one year, people are like, oh my God, how do you do it?

What's, what's the key? And the, the key is that there's not one key, you know, the key is like, There was 500 reviews. There was a legit social media strategy. There was, um, you know, pay per click, uh, sophisticated pay per click, with a serious budget to it. So, so I think that that's kind of where we were at, was like, there wasn't one thing here.

He was really building a solid business around an ad campaign.

Michael: Gotcha. Okay. So then number

Joshua: four. Number four, we called it diversification. And so it wasn't a set and forget type campaign. we built out, at first it was a general new patient campaign. 'cause he is like, Hey, we're opening doors, we literally need new patients.

And month one it was 170 new patients, it's climbed from there. It's gone up to low two hundreds. You know, it just kind of fluctuates a little bit. But we also build out emergency campaigns. We build out Invisalign campaigns. And so for him it was different seasons throughout that year of knowing. Hey, just added another doctor.

We've got kind of more margin in our daily schedule, so like, let's put 5,000 of that towards emergencies for the next 30 days. Mm-hmm. Um, hey, we don't have any margin for emergencies, so let's shift that budget over to Invisalign to get higher treatment type procedures into the practice. And so it's, it's kind of having your base built, but then having some other auxiliary campaigns that you almost pull levers on when you need it, based on the needs of the practice.

Gotcha.

Michael: So, Rewind a little bit. You said at the beginning y'all did a general new patient campaign. What's that look like? Yeah, so

Joshua: he was, you know, so a, a lot of us, like what I talked about, like brand awareness through, through the meta channels, uh, with a huge, huge spend in Google. ' cause the majority of it man startups, I'm a big believer in like, you just need new patients in the door.

let's go on Google. I think one of the misconceptions, Michael, around Google ad budgets I think there's two things. One is, You know, a lot of people will think like $1,500 a month for an ad campaign is a lot of money. I don't know that that is anymore. When it comes to acquiring a new patient externally through an ad platform, most agencies are probably gonna take 25 to 30% of that for a management fee.

So you roughly have a thousand dollars you're spending, and I would say right now I think a Google new patient costs 200 to 250 bucks. So if you spend 1500, we're looking at like four to five new patients. And sometimes those, and if you don't, you know, like if your team's not answering phones, right, or they're going to voicemail, it may not even feel like, this is where I think practices go.

We're not getting anything from this. I'm like, well, you are, but really we're only supposed to be converting four or five. The other part is he has scaled this to over $40,000 a month in his area. There's still room to expand that. And so even at 40,000, like he hasn't saturated that search volume. And this is in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio.

So I think people think like, oh, I'm spending 5,000 a month, and clearly we have to be number one. 'cause who else is spending that? And I'm like, I think that lid is way higher than most people think.

Michael: Yeah, half a million. This is, it's pretty up there, man. But yeah, you mentioned about like the brand awareness campaign.

And then you also talk about a new patient campaign. So when it comes to, opening our doors, what's the difference between a brand awareness campaign with Google Ads and a new patient campaign with Google Ads? Or is it the same thing? Yeah,

Joshua: the way we would define it is a brand awareness campaign is just meant to drive awareness.

And so a lot of that is like social media. You know, if you've got a great video, great photography, it's just the thing to get people interested. You're not necessarily trying to convert like. click here for an appointment. Like that's really not those messages. It's supposed to be a feel like an organic part of your social media feed.

So it's just name awareness, you know, A lot of it within was like, Hey, grand opening new practice in the area. Just stuff like that. People are like, oh, that's interesting. Didn't know. Mm-hmm. I, oh yeah, I just drove past that the other day. So that's brand awareness. A new patient campaign is really meant to get those conversions.

Like now this is where we ask, somebody's looking on Google and we're like, Hey, we're here. Click here and book an appointment or call. So you're trying to drive that, that conversion from it. And I think that that's an important differentiation. 'cause a lot of times, like if, if practices just have a budget for one.

They're a startup. I'm like, just, let's just go. New patients, get 'em in the door, you know, as best we can. If they have a more diversified budget, it always will drive better conversions if there's brand awareness sitting on top of an actual, like conversion campaign.

Michael: Gotcha. Do you ever, in your experience with all the practices you work with, see like a push and pull of somebody who's like, yeah, I'm doing my own Google ads, I do it in-house, or I do it myself and you know, we're getting 10.

15 new patients a month. But then there's that pool where it's like, I'm afraid to invest more if I'm doing it myself. You know, I can just increase more on my own. But really the time factor, plays a huge role. And then knowing what to do specifically within the nitty gritty, right? Like the details. Do you ever see that where it's like, uh, I don't know if I should, or, or, or No.

Joshua: Yeah, a little bit I would say. And, and it'd be interesting to ask some of the other agencies as well to get their feedback and I, but I would say we see less and less of that now. Um, five years ago, 10 years ago, certainly a lot of people managing their own campaigns, when you get into Google's like ad platform now, I'd be like, Michael, I, I got a big book here on my shelf.

It's, it was like, uh, from five years ago, like, like learning to, it is like Google certification book. Yeah. You know, it's like this big, I like went through the thing 'cause I was like, I, I want to understand this now when I get in that ad platform, I'm like, no way guys. I just, it's too far down the road. I would rather, you know, pay people to really be experts in that.

Mm-hmm. So I think the days of. Somebody really learning that, getting into it and building an effective campaign. it's more at an agency level now is my take on it.

Michael: Gotcha. So this is not a form where it's like the more money we throw at it, the more new patients you're gonna get.

It's more like, it has to be very strategic with it, or

Joshua: is it not? Yeah, no, I think it's both. I, I do, I think it's like we've gotta be strategic and, you know, maybe phase one is, is the strategy part of. What's the campaign look like and really building out that formula. Like, okay, if we're gonna invest, you know, X and we get this many phone calls and we're seeing this many new patients, I'm like, great.

Once that's established, I. Tell me what you want. do you want 50 new patients a month? Do you want, you know, he was like, we gotta open with at least 150 a month. It's like, all right, so let's reverse engineer that. They cost 250 bucks a piece. how much is that? You know? Mm-hmm. And so you kind of just start looking at those things and, and really understanding you've got control over that.

I. most of this comes down to just honestly, having the guts to make some decisions like that. Like I think most people would, if I said, give me half a million and I'll guarantee a $3 million startup, I think in theory that's like a really easy decision. I think that's a really tough one to make, as a, especially as a new business owner.

Michael: Yeah. That's tough. 'cause it's like, I don't know the guarantee, you know what I mean? Like, it's, uh, you wanna believe, you wanna believe and you wanna trust the, but then like, you know, people have been burned in the past and stuff like that. So it's like

you don't

Joshua: know that is you're, you're smiling 'cause you're smiling.

'cause you would feel the same way. Here here's, here's a little bit of backstory. So just so this isn't, feels like some super anomaly. This was his third startup. The first one went from one to 3 million in three years. The second one went from one to 3 million in two years. And so at each step he, so when he came to us, he actually switched, marketing companies came to us and said, I think I can go to 3 million in one year.

And it was like, yeah, I think you can, he actually has an M B A as well. He is a, he's a practicing dentist, but also has an his M B A. So there's some things there where I think he understands some of that marketing business, investment relationship where, and it's had like two other successful kind of patterns from it, where I think the first one he was, he would spend 25,000 a month on marketing.

The second one was like 35,000, and now this one's like 45,000. Mm-hmm. So it, you know, it's like he's stair stepping up, but um, so he didn't just come into the game like, here's half a million.

Michael: Oh yeah, I trust you a hundred percent. Here's, got you. No, that's interesting man. This is good. So awesome. So scale a campaign, create a funnel for your ad campaign, establish brand authority, and then Diversification. Awesome, man. I appreciate your time. So if anyone has further questions, you can definitely find Josh on the Dental Marketer Society Facebook group, or where can they reach out to

Joshua: you

directly? Yeah, if you're on Instagram, I, I'm there at, at Joshua Scott. I'm still in my dms in that account.

So tell me, you heard the episode, gimme a shout out, and then online www.seighteeight.com.

Michael: Awesome. So guys, as always, that's gonna be in the show notes below. And Josh, thank you for being with me on this Monday morning marketing episode.

Joshua: Thanks, Michael.

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Guest: Thomas ChoiBusiness Name: Eyes of AICheck out Thomas' Media:‍

Website: https://www.eyesofai.com/

Linkedin: https://au.linkedin.com/in/thomas-choi-7a8843241

Practice Website: https://mylocaldentists.com.au/

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Other Mentions and Links:

Leonardo DiCaprio

Mercedes

ChatGPT

Google Ad Words

Yellow Pages

CSIRO - Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization

Cone Beam CT

Khoa and Sen - Eyes of AI Founders

Pearl AI

Overjet AI

Elon Musk

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Host: Michael Arias‍Website: The Dental Marketer

Join my newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/‍

Join this podcast's Facebook Group: The Dental Marketer Society

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My Key Takeaways:

• You cannot be a hero for everyone! Be sure to hone in on the type of patient you would like to serve and market to them.
• If you aren't located in a high foot traffic area you will need to supplement with more marketing.
• Your team is your most important asset! Treat them well and make sure they have systems to follow.
• You can have roles that are meant to be more permanent and positions that are more temporary. Some team members might not stick around forever and that is okay!
• Don't fall into the trap of "I have no weaknesses." Try to reflect of where you don't excel, and hire another professional to help.
• Always track where your new patients are coming from. Having a Customer Relationship Management(CRM) software will help keep good records here.

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Please don't forget to share with us on Instagram when you are listening to the podcast AND if you are really wanting to show us love, then please leave a 5 star review on iTunes! [Click here to leave a review on iTunes]

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p.s. Some links are affiliate links, which means that if you choose to make a purchase, I will earn a commission. This commission comes at no additional cost to you. Please understand that we have experience with these products/ company, and I recommend them because they are helpful and useful, not because of the small commissions we make if you decide to buy something. Please do not spend any money unless you feel you need them or that they will help you with your goals.

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Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)

Michael: Alright, it's time to talk with our featured guest, Dr. Thomas Choi. Thomas, how's it

Thomas: going? Not too bad, Michael. Thanks. How are you

Michael: doing? Pretty good. Where in Australia are you located?

Thomas: We're in Sydney sunny Sydney. On the other side of the world too, you guys, but just to sunny as LA

Michael: hopefully.

Okay, man, that's nice. That's nice. Awesome. Thank you for, I dunno what time it is over there, but thank you for being up early.

Thomas: Oh 9:00 AM So just about I rescheduled some of my patients, pushed them back a little bit, and uh, normal workday for me.

Michael: Nice. Awesome man. Awesome. So real quick, could you briefly introduce your dental practice and the demographic you primarily

Thomas: serve?

Yeah, absolutely. So, um, the group of practices that I, operate and own is called my local dentists. We operate five dental clinics here in Sydney. We are generally Just general clinics. So we your community practice, we are located in small community areas, and so we serve your newborns, your one year old, your two year old, your kids as they go through school.

And then we also make dentures for grandparents. Mm-hmm. So yeah, your basic general practice for, for your general dentist.

Michael: Nice. Okay. So then what has been your experience with different marketing companies and which strategies have proved to be the most effective for

Thomas: you? I own five. And so we've dealt with all a whole range of different marketing options.

So that goes, I'm sure your listeners have gone through all these things as well. That goes from your s e o, from your Google AdWords, from your full service branding and marketing companies. For me, I've found there's no silver bullet, so quite early on. In my little startup phase someone gave me some pretty good advice.

They said, you cannot be the hero to everybody. So when I speak to younger dentists starting up clinics, I find they get really upset if even one person turns away or one person wasn't happy. They want to, they seem to want to sort of capture the whole entire. Little area there. They want everybody that, that, that doesn't work.

The dentist you are looking for for is not the dentist I'm looking for. He's probably not the dentist di Leonardo DiCaprio is looking for. We're all looking for different type of dentists. So I do find in marketing finding that sort of fits your lane and your. What you are trying to do is probably the most helpful thing to do.

But I mean, I'm happy to go around, into detail, into each of those different types of marketing, if you'd like. Yeah, no. Including the,

Michael: if we get into it, when you first started your practice, your startup, your first one, number one, right? Like what were you leaning heavily on? Where you were like, this is what I'm, I'm, I'm gonna keep doing

Thomas: right now.

So my, my first one is actually in the same suburb that I grew up in. So I had like strong community ties. My, my local primary school was literally, I, I serve like half of that primary school now. and I went to that primary school, so that's where I started. And I think in terms of marketing I was leaning really heavily on that community engagement.

And so, My first place isn't perhaps in such a high traffic area, and so it was a lot more of me making connections with the community and that personal relationship, but also because it's not in such a high. Foot traffic area. We did spend perhaps a high percentage of our income on marketing when we first started.

If you go to some of my other clinics, they're in small community shopping centers, but they're quite busy. So these shopping centers aren't like, I think in America, they, you have your malls, which is like your big shopping centers, and then you've got your little small community ones where you'd probably go three times a week to do your local grocery shopping, go to your pharmacy, and whatever.

It's so, A lot of my other ones are in those type of shopping centers. And you'll find with those ones, marketing isn't as important. The shopping center does the marketing for you. People walk past. And so in terms of percentage you spend is, is slightly different. And so your marketing strategy does need to change depending on your clinic, where you're located and what you're leaning on.

Like you said. So before, when I first started, I was leaning on. Me, myself, my story of, Hey, I grew up here and, and now I'm back in the area I'm giving back to the community. That's what I lay it, relied on. And as I'm going bigger I'm relying more on this. This is our brand and this is what we do.

Michael: Gotcha. And so all your five practices are, how

Thomas: far apart are they? Yeah, so they're all in Sydney. driving the furthest one. So if you go from my furthest one to the other furthest one you could probably go 30, 40 minutes from one to the other. Mm-hmm.

So they're all within about a 30 minute drive of each other within Sydney. Gotcha. Has that

Michael: always been the goal, Thomas, or was it more like, I just wanna get this first startup done and that's it, I wanna have my own thing here and then it, it grew Or how did it happen?

Thomas: I, it was not, it was unintentional.

Completely unintentional. So I start, I had this dream of being like this little dentist in a solo practice, which most dentist are. Um, And I was like, oh, in my little area where I grew up, this is nice. And I started that one and I get it started getting really busy. My second shop, it was, I actually um, was walking my dog and I was walking my dog to my local shopping center to pick up dinner for my, for my family.

And I walked my dog there and also just an empty shop. And I went, Hey, this is kind, this kind of work. And then that one worked out and that went really well. And then The third one came along and, and, and someone approached me for that one. And then since then people have just been approaching me actually.

So I actually had another shopping center approach me about two weeks ago and I had to turn them down just 'cause we're not in that cycle yet. But I think you find as you do well people open up opportunities for you as long as you're genuine, as long as you try hard and do your best opportunities to come.

Yeah.

Michael: Okay man. So then goals to have, like are you looking down the future where it's like there's gonna be 10 eventually?

Thomas: At the moment I've taken a kind of break on growing my dental businesses as a dentist. So, that's all on cruise control at the moment. We, we are doing a few sort of infrastructure upgrades in my practices and making sure we do have the most UpToDate equipment.

I do think that is really important patients, depending on what lane of patients you choose. So even for a small community clinics, no one wants to go to a dental clinic. That's not. Nice. That's not clean, that doesn't look modern and up to date you don't want to go see Spittoons that look like they're from the fifties.

But that's that. So I'm actually my, at the moment I'm actually involved in a startup around ai. And so that's where I'm spending a lot of my time around dental AI at the moment. So we'll see how we go in terms of my dental practices, but the AI space is where it's dentistry and the whole world is, is really interesting.

Michael: Yeah. Nice. Yeah. We'll, we'll dive into that right now. But you mentioned something right now, you said lane of patience. Mm-hmm. when you started out, you said, I'm gonna get this specific demographic, or were you kind of like, I just want

Thomas: anybody right now? No, so I think that that choosing your lane and how I said at the start, you can't get every patient that's come from 10 years of experience and speaking to dentists and, and new dentists and, and coaching them and things.

So, When I started out, I was like everyone else. I was upset if a single patient was unhappy with anything. I was like, ah, no. I want everybody, everyone should be loving me. Why? Why don't they like what I'm offering? But you will find, your patient that wants to go to a high-end clinic that wants pure, beautiful, top-notch work.

They don't want your cheaper general clinic. Even if it's the same work, some people want to pay extra to seem like they're paying extra even for an extra hot towel or something while they're doing their treatment. Some people like that and some people, they don't want that whole snazzy thing. They, they go in and they, these are waste of my money.

I don't want that and I don't want my normal community clinic. That's just sort of day to day, and I think if you try to capture both, you lose both. I think the way to do is choose your lane. I am your general clinic. I am the preventative guy. I'm the cosmetic guy. I'm a high-end clinic. I'm an implant clinic.

Whatever it is, choose your lane and focus on those people. And as long as you do that, you'll build your brand on. I am that guy, for example, Mercedes. You think Mercedes, you think, Hey, I'm gonna get a good quality car. It's gonna be luxurious, it's gonna be really nice. You don't see Mercedes now coming up with a $10,000 car, try and get this cheaper market, right?

Yeah. And all the other Mercedes buyers will be like, Hey, I don't want Mercedes anymore. You guys are cheap. So I think choosing your lane and sticking to your lane and making sure all your branding and marketing sort of adhere to what you've chosen and, and it's all concise and and in line.

I think that's the way to go. Definitely.

Michael: Nice. Okay. And how much budget do you typically allocate for your marketing activities?

Thomas: So I think once again, this does depend on the clinic, right? Mm-hmm. So, I do find when I speak to a lot of different marketing agencies and just companies in general, being customizable for, for the person is really important.

And so My clinic, as I was saying, that's not in such a high traffic traffic area as a percentage of revenue. I might spend a little bit more compared to something that's in the shopping center where I don't need to do any additional marketing. 'cause I have hundreds of people literally walking outside the front of my practice every day.

But then that's obviously the counterbalance. But I pay more rent in the shopping center and in low traffic areas, I pay less rent. it does differ. I found when I opened up my very first clinic, especially to know, like no one knows, knows about me, and there's no one walking past. You do spend a lot, you can spend up to like 20% of revenue at this time.

Whereas in a shopping center, you might get a massive influx of patients and only spend. 5% of of revenue on, on marketing. 'cause you're not having to do all this additional stuff. You're literally just using your practice shop front as your big marketing tool. So yeah, somewhere between there. And also obviously depends on your phase of your business.

So at the moment, like I said, I'm on a little bit of a cruise control, so I am just spending enough to keep my associates happy and booked. But if you were going to grow, you'd probably spend more, you know, 10, 20% if you're going to grow. And if you're just trying to stay stable, I aim for five to 10% usually.

Michael: Gotcha. Okay. And then how many new patients are you currently getting? Like a month? Across all

Thomas: five clinics?

Michael: Yeah. Or if you just wanna mention like your first, first one.

Thomas: Oh, my first one. I'm, I'm actually not accepting any new patients myself at, at that clinic. I'm, I'm too busy. But my associates are, and so depending on each sort of thing, you'd, you'd still be getting 30, any between 30 to 40 patients.

A, a month.

Michael: Gotcha. Okay. I think the, sometimes the, the struggle is we, when we're starting out, right, we have that. Certain amount of capital that we have to allocate to marketing. And then we're like, I don't want to spend on something that's not gonna work or spend too much.

For example, a marketing agency can approach you and say, Hey, let's, let's make this happen. Let's do this.

Thomas: And half of the mistakes, half of the mistakes don't listen to all of them.

Michael: Exactly. So can you share with us, like, have you ever faced a situation where the promised results were not achieved with the expected

Thomas: timeframe?

Absolutely. So when I think of marketing, let's stick with digital marketing first. Mm-hmm. 'cause I think that's where most people spend their time on marketing. So when I think of digital marketing, there's sort of three lanes that I've gone down in the past. I've gone down straight ss, e o work now straight ss, e o work.

I think everyone needs to do. Having said that, with chat, G P T, I don't know what Google and Google rankings are gonna be in five to 10 years, but at the moment, s e o is where it's at. So, s e o is really important, I think. SS e o, it costs a lot to do it right? Because what you're doing is you're paying someone to update your website weekly, twice a week with, with new content and making it relevant to those certain areas.

But the advantage of that is your underlying digital asset of your website becomes more and more valuable. And so I'll give you an example. If you do ss e o work properly, let's say you choose a suburb Let's say Venice Beach. I don't know LA at all, but I know that's an area of, yeah, so let's say we choose Venice Beach and you go, I wanna do s e o on and as a dental clinic in Venice Beach.

Now if you do it properly, it shouldn't just be Dentist Venice Beach and you come higher up on Google searches. It should be anyone in this area types in wisdom tooth pain. You should then have an article on your website with Wisdom Tooth Pain that they can read, and they're like, oh, your website is now my source of dental information.

And that creates trust. And so if someone goes dental, crown, root canal, whatever it is, and they're in that area, your ideally, your website should pick up first. And that's ss e o. That takes a lot of time and a lot of money and, and you might not see results for five to six months, but the underlying asset is, is invaluable.

Whereas if you go down like the Google AdWord side, you are paying thousands every month. There is no buildup of an underlying asset, but you are getting a click every time you pay. So I think with my strategy, when I first started, there was a lot of AdWords to pump up my initial book with underlying SS e o and then as your s e o builds, you can do less and less AdWords, I find.

Okay. I do find though, with full service branding and marketing agencies, we dentists. We can't brand and market and keep track unless you are a particular dentist. Like I maybe one of my whole graduating class of a hundred, maybe two, that would sit there and actually go through all this stuff. Most dentists just wanna be a dentist.

Mm-hmm. And so I think if you're a dentist and you start trying to do C r m work, s e o, work yourself, it detracts from your own work. So I do think unless you're really good at it, you should pay someone to do it. And then track it. So if you're using full branded agencies, they should have a C R M network laid out for you which tells you which calls are coming in, where they're coming in from.

Was it from a lead from the branding agency? Was it just a natural lead? And AdWords, you can see the clicks and the conversion rates. You should. Definitely track all those things. And ss e o you can obviously track just with your ranking and, and different words you're searching, but my suggestion to normal dentists mm-hmm.

As a general rule is get an agency to monitor and track it for you, and you just look at the end results and see if you're happy with them.

Michael: Ah, okay. Have there been any ones where you're like, oh my gosh, there's no results. Like, I'm not, I'm not seeing anything. And how do you handle that?

Thomas: Yeah, so I had, I'll give you an example about pre pandemic, just before pandemic.

I had an agency, I used them for a year and their whole gig was, we will provide you high-end work. So they make landing pages per high-end work that you wanna do. And their, their business model was mainly AdWords. So let's say implants and orthodontics. You, your listeners will know mm-hmm that you get a lot of money from implants and orthodontics and so perhaps is willing to spend a little bit more.

So the idea went anyone in Sydney bed search implants, this landing page should be paid for. So you come up the top, you click on that so that you know this lead is coming through that landing page. 'cause this landing page has a separate, input stream. And that landing page is dedicated just for the conversion of your implants or orthodontics.

Right? Depending on what that person searched for. And so, if it comes through there, you're getting an implant and that came from that marketing agency. 'cause it that lead came through this particular landing page. by the end of the year.

I ended up spending just as much on. AdWords, and that agency as I got in revenue, and so I was doing work. Pretty much for free. 'cause any work I was getting, I was giving back to that agency, and this is why tracking is really important and having mechanisms in place to know where that lead came from.

It wasn't a lead from my s e o work that I paid for previously. It was from this particular company and being able to track that. So if I used different branding agencies, I'll have different phone numbers they call through on, so I can track where it's coming from. I'll have different landing pages and websites as well as my receptionist will know.

On our C R M systems. Okay, this person came from this lead. And so being able to track it and then getting an R O I is pretty important because you'll find dentists spends thousands on stuff, don't track it, and they don't even realize they're getting nothing out of it. Yeah,

Michael: that's true, man. That's true.

So tracking it, tracking it is like huge,

Thomas: huge, huge. And most dentists don't, this is what I'm saying to you. Most dentists are dentists. They're not business people or necessarily want to sit there and track numbers. And so if you're not gonna do that, Get an external or a software to do it, but if you are gonna do it, then set up properly, un track it.

Okay,

Michael: nice. And then how equipped is your team in converting calls into actual patients? So.

Thomas: Right now pretty poor to be honest. We, we in Australia since COVID had some crazy staff shortage. last year, even earlier this year, there were days where we had to close clinics. Not even, 'cause we didn't have a dentist because I didn't have receptionist and like assistant staff, which is crazy to not open a business 'cause you don't have a receptionist, right?

Mm-hmm. But that, that's where we were, a little bit better now. But I think once again, as long as it aligns with your practice. So if you, in terms of training them, I think a C R m, sort of portal or, or system is really good for tracking. Because if you don't, you don't end up with a nice aggregated information you can read.

So I've had clinics, I've known clinics where. You know when you sign your new patient form, it says, how did you hear about us? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I was really strong on making sure my receptionist made that person fill that thing out and then actually record it, because then that feeds back on our backend on, Hey, okay, we're getting patients through Google AdWords.

We're not getting anything. There's this thing called Yellow Pages in Australia. We're not getting anything from Yellow Pages, let's stop spending money on Yellow Pages, that type of thing. So training is important. You'll find especially if you use branding agencies, they'll train your staff for you on their c r m on and, and how to convert patients.

But that comes down to also having good staff and long-term staff. Mm-hmm. My, in my first clinic where, where I'm turning away patients for myself, They, my receptionist knows the patients almost better than I do. And so there is that long-term sort of consistency for patients is also important and also important for training.

Otherwise, you'll find new staff come in, you have to train them on the C r M system on how to convert patients on all that thing or those type of things. And you'll find you spend more time on training and more money on training than actually getting conversions of sales. So, Consistent staff, well trained staff.

And your receptionist is probably the most important person in your practice.

Michael: Yeah. How, how often is like turnover would you say, in the front office for you?

Thomas: So I have two sort of categories of, of support staff. So I'm not talking dentists, they're my support staff. I have my support staff that are my people that are gonna be there for years and they're my employees.

And then I have a list of sort of casuals, which are like fill in jobs, like only a few shifts a week. And they tend to be more uni students. So the uni students and the sort of casual in and out type of workers, they change over regularly. my long-term staff, they, they stick around long-term years.

That I don't think I've had anyone leave for any reason other than like their, like something's happened in their life, they're leaving mm-hmm. The city or moving, moving states or whatever it is because, staff is the most important. Asset of, of, of a company. So even big mining companies, you look at their, their, their bills sheet, their HR staff is their biggest expense.

Yeah. And given that even in us, even in a dental practice, staff is our biggest expense, but they're also the most important expense. And also we'll, Change how your companies run from day dot and, and it makes a massive difference. You'll have two receptionists. One receptionist will show you literally 50% more than the other one will, will book in 50% more patients than the other one just 'cause they care.

they'll be nice on the phone. They won't try to shoot people off the phone. They'll, they'll try to find solutions for their patients and mm-hmm. I say to my, I say to my, everybody, I have one hiring policy. Be a nice person. That's it. If you're a nice person, I can train you to do other things.

If you're not a nice person, it doesn't work out. Everyone can read it.

Michael: Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's nice. Yeah. The humility that the person has to have when it comes to those two support staff and then the UNI students do, do you ever think like maybe the UNI students could become part of the support staff or

Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. But for, as a general rule, those casual staff, so the my casual support staff that all. Have one or two shifts a week or have like feeling when someone's sick or something like that. They generally come on with that role because this isn't their primary thing in life. Mm-hmm. They might be a uni student, they might be a mom just wanting part-time work and, but this is not their focus, But at any point yeah, if they're suitable and they want to, there's always opportunities for them to then move on to more of a permanent position in my little organization.

Michael: Nice man. Okay, so you talked to us about that. Everything right now is on cruise control because you're working on something with ai.

What's that all

Thomas: about? Okay, so, I'm the Chief Operating officer of a company called IS ai. And what we do is we've partnered with the Commonwealth Industry Science Research Organization, so C S I R O. Mm-hmm. It's Australia's government. Sort of science agency or research agency. And we've collaborated to come up with the world's first and most granular segmentation on cone BM c t as well as sort of pathology detection on, on all the dental x-rays.

So your bite wings, your peri apical, your op Gs, and your lat surfaces. So, going into marketing, 'cause I know this is a marketing podcast. The, the reason I think this is really helpful for marketing is, as I was saying, people wanna go to clinics because they want to know you are up to date. What you are providing is good healthcare.

Mm-hmm. And AI will only improve healthcare going forward. That's the whole reason it's going to be implemented. If it wasn't going to improve healthcare, it's just something, a cool fancy toy, no one will use it. So what we do in our company, so other than for the diagnostics, Our flagship is the segmentation of a cone beam ct.

So a cone beam CT is a three d X-ray people use for the major dental work. Mm. And we are able to segment that into 130 different anatomical structures. And then using that, you can use that to plan your treatment. So I'm assuming most of your listeners are dentists? Mm-hmm. And so as a dentist, you'll know when you perhaps do an implant or a molar root canal, you'll take a cone beam ct and you'll know that to.

You take that c x-ray to plan treatments and if you're taking that x-ray to plan treatments, if you're able to segment that x-ray, you are able to first remove any noise you don't wanna see. You are able to get automatic measurements, and you're able to get a clear three D model of what you're working on rather than working off two D slices, which is what we're doing.

And so inevitably, AI and segmentation of cone beams and detection of pathology across all x-rays. Is going to save the dentist time, it's going to improve treatments and lead to better health outcomes, which is what we're aiming to do, and that's what everything is about. The last part about it, and I'm really big on patient education, I think a better educated patient is more on board with treatment and that can only lead to good things.

Mm-hmm. It can lead to less stress for the dentist and better treatment health outcomes. And if you have ever seen a cone bean ct, and if you are not a dentist, you'll look at that and go, no idea what I'm looking at. it's gonna go right over my head. I'm just gonna nod as the dentist tries to explain things to me, what we do is we make three D models of that cone bean ct and so you're able to transfer that information to the patient much clearer in a way that makes much more sense to the patient.

Not only are you going to get more conversions for your treatment, but you are also going to get more trust from the patient. But ultimately, and this is my biggest thing, you will get better patient health outcomes. You'll make less mistakes, and your treatments will be better, and that's what it's all about.

Nice.

Michael: Okay, so then how or why did this come out? The AI. You developing this? I guess like, the AI's been there, right? So you're just like, we gotta do something about this scenario because what was happening when this was

Thomas: coming out? Okay. So I'll tell you the little inception story of this company.

Yeah. It's kind of a pretty cool story. So this company started with two brothers, BA and Zen. Zen. I actually went to dental school with Zen, which is why, how I got involved in this company. Then is a dentist and Qua, who is our c e o, went to his brother Sen as the dentist Sen took his bite wings and he noticed an impacted lower right third molar that was causing caries on the lower right second molar.

And the carriers was really extensive and near the pulp Sen said to his brother, Hey mate, you need to take that wisdom tooth out, do a filling, potentially a root canal. Qua turned around and went, mate, you're my brother. I don't believe you. I don't feel any pain. Nothing is wrong. Went away. Then even showed him the x-ray and Qua was like, I don't, I don't know what you're talking about, man.

Everything was good. I think about two months later he had some crazy toothache. Had to go in and had to get both those teeth, emergency extraction on both of those teeth. That was the inception story, and this is why this links back to that whole patient education thing. I think in this world now going forward, people are taking more and more control of their own information.

I can almost guarantee all of your listeners, I mean most of 'em are dentists, but when they go to a doctor or a dentist, they don't actually get the x-rays themselves. In Australia, I. The X-rays are actually the property of the person that took them. It doesn't actually even belong to the patient, right?

Mm-hmm. Because it's our responsibility to keep it for X amount of years and store it and whatnot. We can't lose it 'cause it's patient health records. This is how this company started because we saw a problem there or the, the, the founder saw a problem there if I can't even believe my own brother.

And that communication between. The dentist and the patient is that poor on a two d x-ray. On a three d X-ray. People are just nodding their heads. The other thing we've found going through this and all the non dentists in my organization are, are a bit scared of dentists now mm-hmm. Is we've found a lot of dentists are just are skipping things and, and to save time on a cone beam ct, they're ignoring the rest of the cone beam ct.

If you take it for an implant down your bottom right, you're not looking at the top left for pathologies, which is to me, shocking. it's uncomfortable. Mm-hmm. So, that with the ai, you'll, you will be able to pick up on everything. And so even though it started as a patient communication inception idea, the use cases of it apply to both the patient, the dentist, the clinic, everyone, everyone will benefit from it.

Gotcha.

Michael: And so this is available now or not yet?

Thomas: our business model is not necessarily to go straight to the end user. to the, to the dentists themselves. We're in discussions with a lot of OEMs and a lot of companies everyone we've spoken to once they've seen our product believes this is going to be the new standard of cone beam ct.

Mm-hmm. And, and two d x-rays, but cone beam cts in particular, because you can't have this level of segmentation and then go back to the two D version, it's, it's like, my Jared, who I work with always says to me, he goes, it's like looking at an old U B D map that you're flipping through. And then getting Google Maps and it telling you exactly what to do.

Um mm-hmm. You, you can't go back. And so for that, we believe it will be mass adopted and yeah, we're speaking to a lot of companies then to implement it into existing softwares. Gotcha.

Michael: So you, the idea is not like to the user, like, Hey guys, it's available for this much, everybody get it? It's, it's more like, how can people get their hands on it then?

Thomas: Utilize one of the companies that we'll be partnering with pretty much. Okay. We'll be partnering with companies around the world and all your dental users will have heard of it. I heard of these companies and so if you want to use the product, you'll have to use the company that we partner with.

Michael: Gotcha. Okay. Okay. Interesting man. Yeah, because we've heard of AI and like diagnosing, right. Pearl Overjet, other companies like that. So they're, they're doing. Pretty cool stuff on that end, but this is a little bit different, right?

Thomas: So we do what they do as well. So they do diagnosis of two d x-rays of pathologies, right?

And so that is a, a bite wing, a pa, an O P G. Hey, there is this problem here. pretty straightforward. But if you look at three D x-rays, people don't take cone beam cts to find pathology. Sometimes they do, they, they'll take an ogen go, oh, that's a little bit funny. Let's take another x-ray to mm-hmm.

To confirm what that is. But as the, the majority of C B C T cases are taken to perform a treatment, to do an implant, to do a root canal, to do a surgical extraction of a third molar. And so the initial inception of the, the segmentations on a cone b. Is to make the use case of that cone beam easier already.

So if you are taking it for an implant, We provide you information on that treatment that will make that treatment easier. So we will provide you segmentations for all the surrounding key critical structures, the i n the sinus. We'll provide you measurements, so the crystal bone to the ion. How much bone do you have to play with your lingual and buccal measurements that that's automatic with the click of a button that you can see on a three D model.

That is different from we're gonna scan the whole extra and just point out things that might be slightly wrong, which we do anyway. And like I said, the two D is one thing. I'm much more passionate about the three D. if there's a bite wing and I miss it, and I'm not saying that AI doesn't diagnose better if my AI definitely diagnoses better than me, right?

Mm-hmm. I do miss things, but if I'm missing on that two d x-ray, it is me making a mistake. It is me not seeing something I should have seen. But on the three D, this is why I'm much more passionate about three D. People don't even look for it on a three d on a cone beam ct, which is shocking. So that's not even a mistake.

People aren't even doing it. Mm-hmm. take it to do the implant and they'll review just the implant site and the stuff they need for the implant and ignore the rest of the image. A lot of people, not everyone, mm-hmm. The good dentist look at over all, but, but a lot of people do. And so that's why the pathology detection on three D and scanning through, that's where my passion lies more.

But diagnosis on all x-rays is all helpful for ai.

Michael: Yeah. Okay. Are you utilizing it right now in your practice? I

Thomas: utilizing it right now, no, no, no, no, because it's not into, so I utilize it to demonstrate things, but it's not at, at a commercial level at the moment, so, no.

Michael: Oh, okay. Okay. Interesting. So this is, this is coming out pretty

Thomas: soon then, huh?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. whether it's us or anybody else, this will be the standard tech in the next three to five years. It's inevitable. Like I said I assume it's not only going to be us, but it, Once you've seen it, you can't go back. It is physically impossible. It's just chalk and cheese.

It's it's color TV versus black and white tv. Yeah, sound is black and white. TV versus color tv. We sound, that's literally what it is.

Michael: No, man. We're excited for that, Thomas. We're excited for that. So from the process of, I guess you doing your startup. Right to now at the point where you're at with this startup, right.

Where it's not a, like a building, right. It's not a practice, it's a ai. Mm-hmm. What are some of the biggest struggles you've encountered throughout this time?

Thomas: Time? For me personally, it's time. Mm-hmm. So I know no one really caress about my life, but time is actually the biggest thing for me. You've been talking business struggles.

It's once again time for me. Not even just time, it's the mental ability to focus on running dental practices and this AI startup, which is why my dental practices have pretty much taken a backseat. I do not know how Elon Musk does it. I do not know how you have the mental capacity to really run multiple companies and be on top of it all.

It's really hard. But other than that, obviously the challenges are really different between the two. And I think the common challenge though, as I was saying before, is people. Mm-hmm. I think everything comes down to people. If you have good staff in your dental practice, you don't have to worry. So I've run this enough that I can be on cruise control in my dental practices, and I can trust the staff that I have will run it really well as it's going and approach me if there's an issue that they haven't dealt with and they dunno what to do.

And so I'm pretty comfortable with that. And so even with eyes of ai, I, we have such an amazing team that it makes it really easy to work. And so my one tip to anybody doing any sort of entrepreneurial or any business work people is what makes it, you have someone good next to you, the amount of stress you receive will be half of someone that's just not good next to you.

Yeah. So yeah, staffing. Staffing and time is, is definitely the biggest thing. And surround yourself with people that. Have the same vision as you. Drive in the same direction as you and really lift each other up and support each other. I always liken it to a rowing boat. Right. It is the job of the person on the rowing boat that's beating that drum to make sure that everybody's rowing in the same direction and rowing to the beat of that drum, right?

That is like any organization, the boat will go better if everyone rose in the same direction and rose at the same time. What you don't want to do is get staff around you that don't understand the big picture and don't strive towards that common goal, whether it is. Providing patients is really good healthcare, and that will build up your dental practices or doing the world's best AI that's gonna take over the world.

With ai, you need the team to understand what they're doing, what their roles are, and support each other in that team. So people is the most important. Yeah.

Michael: Do you ever find yourself Thomas like, man, I need, I need somebody to handle this takeover and do this, and you give them the The problem or the Yeah, the problem, the work.

But then you kind of think about it and you're like, maybe a system could have taken care of that instead of this person. Yeah,

Thomas: both. You need both. with staff even though they're good staff, you need a system or a framework for them to work in. Mm-hmm. You can't, no matter how good people are, if you just let five people to do their thing.

They're not gonna come at the same point. So you've gotta give everyone a system or a framework. And with technology like AI coming through, yeah, people are, people's job descriptions are gonna change. What they had to do is going to change. It's unfortunately inevitable. You know, Back in the day, I'm sure law firms had a hundred people researching things, feature their cases, and now it's a Google search and it's only a hundred people hour job.

any new technology you should be skeptical of but would be willing to embrace that goes with ai, that goes with any systems that you have digital, X-rays, p m s systems, whatever it might be. Systems generally make things more efficient and less mistakes are made. Mm-hmm. that's one of the biggest things about ai, right?

That as I was saying earlier on a two d X-ray, if I don't pick up on something that's a mistake, It's not, I didn't know it's a mistake. And so systems and AI and things like that, they don't make mistakes as much. systems are good. But even if you don't have a system in place, even if you've got people, you should have a framework for those people to work around.

Yeah.

Michael: I get you, man. I mean, remember when Chat G P T came out, I was like, what is this stuff? I didn't even care. Now. Can't get

Thomas: off. It's the best. Yeah. AI's amazing. I'm kind of scared to see where it's gonna be in five years. I'm legitimately worried and scared.

Michael: It's gonna be, it's gonna be good. It's gonna be exciting.

I dunno. We'll see. We'll see. But it is interesting. So one of the last questions I wanted ask you Thomas, is we have a lot of young practice owners, listeners, dentists, right. In our also young, in the sense of like year one to year five, maybe they're in their practice ownership process. What

Thomas: advice can you give us?

I think first starting out, be honest with yourself. I think knowing where your shortfalls are. So, like I was saying, don't pretend to be a marketer if you're not, don't pretend to be someone that is gonna sit there with spreadsheets if you're not. I recently have come to love spreadsheets.

Mm-hmm. But in my previous life before this startup, I didn't particularly like spreadsheets and so to. If, you know you need spreadsheets to track things, but you are not a spreadsheet person, and I would say most dentists are not spreadsheet people, then you should be able to recognize that shortfall and pay a professional to do it.

I find people don't recognize other people's skillsets enough and aren't willing to pay for that skillset enough. That'd be the first thing. The second thing I would say is choose Elaine. I say this to everybody. You are not everyone's hero. You'll be one type of person, hero. And so choose what type of person that is.

If you're starting a practice and drive your business for that target market and nothing else. Ignore everyone else. alcohol companies. They know who their target market is. They don't target kids 'cause they know they're not gonna buy it. They don't get upset when kids don't wanna buy the alcohol.

So they target their audience, do the same thing. And the third thing is be genuine and nice. it goes for both patients and your staff. I find so many entrepreneurs are so up themselves that they think they can manipulate people into positioning themselves and doing what they want.

Now, that might work with a one-off interaction 'cause they, the person doesn't know you. But if you are gonna work with someone for five years, if you're gonna have a returning patient for five years, that. Ulterior motive of, I am here because of money. I'm here because of what it, it, it doesn't last.

Everyone sees right through it. If you want good staff to stick with you, treat them well, put yourself in their shoes. Every once in a while think, Hey, I'm only earning this amount of money. My dentist, my boss is earning this amount of money. He makes me do all this stuff. He doesn't even say thank you.

Doesn't gimme a bonus, doesn't gimme anything. If you were that person, you'd be like, Hey, what? This is not fair. Like this is not a, mm-hmm. Even distribution of what's happening here. Be nice to your staff. Be genuine. Be nice to your patients and that, that's probably the biggest one. Be nice and fair to everyone around you.

People will come back and people will continue wanting to work with you if you are overly fair and overly nice to people. I think that's the best part.

Michael: Awesome. We appreciate that, Thomas. And if anyone has any questions or concerns or they just want to talk to you more, where can

Thomas: they find you? Eyes of AI is probably the easiest website, international website.

You can either contact the support page of Eyes of AI and ask for me specifically otherwise I'm on LinkedIn, or they can reach out to you and you. I'm more than happy for you to give out my personal email to anyone. I'm happy to speak to everyone. I'm a friendly person.

Michael: Always be nice. Yeah.

Awesome guys. So that's gonna be in the show notes below, so definitely reach out to Thomas and Thomas. Thank you for being with us. It's been a pleasure and we'll hear from you soon.

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Hey guys, welcome to this week's episode of Monday Morning Marketing! In today's episode, we're sitting down with the esteemed Dr. Tyler Brady to delve into the dynamic world of startups and crafting an authentic image as a dentist. We discover why authenticity trumps all in the realm of dentistry, as Dr. Brady shares insights on leveraging organic social media marketing to make your mark. From debunking sales pitches to allocating your resources wisely, we uncover the true ROI of your personal brand. Dr. Brady's firsthand experiences shed light on regional marketing nuances, the surprising impact(or lack there of) of mailers, and why you may not need a marketing agency starting out! In a world of algorithms, algorithms, and more algorithms, learn why the heart of successful marketing lies in forming genuine connections with potential patients.

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This episode is brimming with actionable tips for marketing your startup on social media, so let's dive in with Dr. Tyler Brady!

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You can reach out to Dr. Tyler Brady here:

Website: https://www.haven-dental.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/haven.dental/

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Other Mentions and Links:

Ashley Joves Facebook Group

Super Bowl

iTero

Yelp

Myspace

Canva

Walmart

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For more helpful tips, strategies, ideas, and marketing advice:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thedentalmarketer/‍

The Newsletter: https://thedentalmarketer.lpages.co/newsletter/

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/2031814726927041

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Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)

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Michael: Hey Tyler, so talk to us about startups. What advice, suggestions, or methods can you give us that will actually help us with our

Tyler: startup? I think strategizing. I think having a plan and just going all in on it, you really have to dedicate yourself to this. This is a beast.

Starting your own business in any field is extremely difficult. cash is always hard to come by at first because You don't have cash flow coming in. So maintaining your working capital is huge. Spending money in the right places I think is probably. Was my biggest struggle because you get all these sales reps coming in, you hear about all these cool products, about all this technology, all these things that, oh, standard of care.

If you don't have this, you're not gonna be successful. I think a salesperson's job is to sell you what they have to sell. so being, open-minded to new ideas and new things, but also being. Uh, having open eyes to seeing what's really gonna have a good return on investment. I think honestly these, these groups on Facebook were probably one of my biggest resources of places to go.

Products to try people to talk to. Um, Ashley's group has been huge for me. I haven't participated in a lot lately just 'cause I've been so busy. but what she created doing that. Has been, I mean, it's probably saved billions of dollars as far as startups go with dentists spending money in the right places and not wasting, and not being taken advantage of.

'cause you're able to go on and say, Hey, what did you spend for this? Or Hey, I have this, is this a fair price? Or what about this equipment? Things like that. I mean, that, that group has, has changed dentistry forever and it's really cool. I don't think she knew that. Starting out. I think when she started she was like, Hey, here's what I'm doing.

You guys wanna watch? Great. Let's do it together. And, and it's turned into this awesome thing where she's, she's made some huge connections for people all over the world.

Michael: Yeah. Cool. No, that's awesome, man. So you mentioned r o i. Yeah. What to you has been the best r o i so far when it comes to marketing and brand awareness and attracting new patient and what's been the worst where Yeah.

Tyler: You kind of wanna give people warnings. the best r o i, by far has been me. Mm-hmm. Doing the social media. social media is free. it's mind blowing. I was talking with, with another doctor who's an orthodontist who. Whole other thing. I'm actually doing a podcast with her tomorrow. Um, about the power of social media and how much money people used to spend to get in front of just a few thousand people, or 10,000 people, or a hundred thousand people, I mean, Superbowl ads.

Think about it. 30 million people the way the internet works. If you're consistent enough, you can have an audience of tens of thousands of people without even having tens of thousands of followers. and we were talking about the influence of putting yourself on social media, not necessarily your practice.

I mean, everybody thinks that a dentist is a dentist. There's no way, like, oh, cool, you have an iTero, or, oh, you have digital x-rays. Like that's nice, but what they're really buying is. The dentist. Mm-hmm. Am I gonna go to this person? Are they gonna treat me well? Are they gonna take care of me? Do I like their personality?

Do I like the, their approach to helping people, I think is, is the biggest thing. And I know it's really hard at first, it was hard for me at first. Um, and that's the nice thing about these Facebook groups is you can do it in front of your friends, in front of your colleagues first. You can get on and practice live.

you can sign up. and message Michael to see if he'll do a podcast with you and you can practice Uhhuh. No, that's good. Um, so yeah, and, and putting yourself out there is probably, I mean, by far been my biggest r o I. The thing that hasn't worked for me was, as far as r o i is probably mailers. I don't really, I, I tried a good effort.

They were good mailers. They had all the things that marketing needs. But in my market, it just didn't work. Mm-hmm. And I think that might just be specific to me. 'cause I know it works really well in some other areas. Just like Yelp. Yelp in Chicago and New York and Boston is huge in Dallas. Mm. People use it to find a restaurant, maybe that's about it.

Mm-hmm. So, um, you have to kind of be aware of what your market uses for marketing, and spend money in the right place. But, That's the awesome thing about social media hashtags is how you can do that. You just find your local hashtags and you use those in your posts and you're, you instantly have access to at least a few hundred people.

Mm-hmm. Um, even if you live in a small town, that might even be better because you have more people paying attention to little things going on in in town.

Michael: Yeah. No, that's really good, man. Wait, you said, um, putting yourself out there. So then what, what is specifically are you doing to put yourself, what are you saying?

What,

Tyler: you know what I mean? Yeah. the thing I feel like that gets the most attention is answering people's questions. you can do it on TikTok, uh, you can respond with a video on TikTok, which is awesome. Or I go in my stories on Instagram and I just say, ask me a question, and I just literally put a random picture of like my kid eating pancakes or like a tooth that I pulled.

I mean, it can literally be anything. I have noticed that they usually ask questions that kind of pertain to the photo that you're posting, but it doesn't have to be like anything. It could be a hammer grade. You ate for lunch yesterday, and you'll be like, what kind of foods are bad for my teeth?

Like, you'll get questions like that and then you just get on Instagram and you answer those questions. Sometimes. I did find a cheat code with this. If you don't have a lot of followers. You can answer your own question. You can type in like, whoa, what's your favorite color? Or Where did you go to school?

What was your favorite thing about this? And you can kind of cheat that way. I don't really do it that often 'cause now I get enough responses. But initially it was like no one has answered me questions. Yeah, I'd get on and I would say like, oh, what sets you apart as a dental office? Or What do you think about, this procedure or that procedure?

And you can kind of get yourself out there. Even if you're answering clinical questions, you're still, it's you asking those or answering those questions. And people all the time come into my office, like they already know me. They're like, oh, how was your trip to Boston? Like, what's your name again? Mm-hmm.

So it's, it's really cool that you can develop that connection with people before spending any time or money on or vice versa. They feel Less tied down, I guess less commitment, which can be kind of a good thing when you're trying to get new friends. New patients. Yeah, new followers

Michael: through, is it through Instagram or TikTok, or you utilize both?

Tyler: I do both. I think right now TikTok is what Instagram was. all of these social media platforms are generational. So right now, and we've talked about this before, mostly grandma and my mom use Facebook a lot. Mm-hmm. So if you're doing implant marketing, maybe cosmetic marketing, that kind of thing, Facebook is fantastic.

Or decision makers, or probably using Facebook more. Right now, Instagram is kind of that 20 to 30 year old. Or like young moms. Mm-hmm. Or, or young professionals, that kind of audience. So that would kind of be more where you would wanna go, uh, for cosmetic work. And then TikTok is kind of that younger generation, maybe like college, high school age, junior high even and, and all of that.

People stick with that social media platform. So when I. Dental school, Instagram was becoming popular. And so everyone that's my age has kind of followed Instagram as they get older. Instagram's age is aging. It's progressing, it's staying that same audience, and TikTok is doing the same thing. So it's, it started out as maybe like junior high and now it's like high school, college, and then it's even, I see it now creeping into that young professional.

Um, bracket too. So, I'm sure there's gonna be another social media platform. And then MySpace. MySpace is just kind of there. I don't even know if it exists anymore.

Michael: Yeah. Mom's

Tyler: our friend. He's my friend. Yeah. No. Okay. Every

Michael: day, man. Do you, do you get new patients through, how many patients do you get from Instagram and TikTok?

Have you, do you know, like the difference? Like TikTok, we get 10 or, yeah, I'd say

Tyler: TikTok is, Percentage wise, it's probably like 10 or 15%. I haven't really put a ton of effort into it just because I've put so much effort, like, I was talking about, I'm committed to Instagram, so I'm kind of following that, age group.

but I'm seeing the power of TikTok. I think I really started taking TikTok seriously about a year ago. I. 50,000 followers on there now. So what, what, what

Michael: does that mean? You took it seriously now? Like

Tyler: what are you doing? I mean, I started posting regularly. I started putting non-generic content up.

I think I had five or six posts a year ago, and now I have, I don't know, like 50 or 60 maybe. Yeah, I probably post on TikTok like once a week, but I should be doing it more. Um, gotcha. I'm trying to do it daily, but

Michael: So with the advice that you're, with the advice that you're giving, uh, for startups Yeah.

Instagram then, or what are you thinking? Or like how, if you were to give us like a guideline here for a

Tyler: startup, if you're an orthodontist or a pediatric dentist, I would say do TikTok heavily. I think TikTok is where those teenagers are looking for content. and I see dentists on there who have like tons and tons and tons of followers, so I think that's like a starting point.

But it's all about consistency, just like being successful at anything. The more you just pound your head into the wall mm-hmm. The more successful you're gonna be. There's no shortcuts, there's no tricks. It's really just being consistent. You don't have to perfect every post that you put up. You can watch for trends, but you have to have the volume of content in order to be able to see those trends.

Oh, more people respond when I do this, post, less people respond when I do this post. And so you make more of those posts that people respond to, and then even then you're like, oh, maybe it was actually this chunk of that post that people really enjoyed and maybe it was this part that people didn't enjoy.

And so you kind of find your sweet spot after a while. Even then people get bored. I mean, if content works for a while on a specific thing and then it kind of fizzles out, you've gotta find a new angle, something else, a different type of photo to post, or a different story to try out. Um, I've noticed when I do a lot of question and answer things, people kind of get tired of it, and that's mm-hmm.

human nature these days. Yeah. and you can even cross post, you can post the same exact thing on TikTok that you do on Instagram. They're gonna have different, different algorithms, different effects. Mm-hmm. And I think that's a way to actually save a lot of time. You

Michael: Yeah. To do that.

Nice man. Okay. So then with the social media that you're utilizing right now, is that all you're doing for, for marketing?

Tyler: Um, I'm not paying for any marketing. I run a few ads on Facebook. I.

I pay to boost things on TikTok, but not a whole lot. I have hired my sister part-time and she helps me come up with content and she'll come into the office two days a week and like we film a silly video or we brainstorm on things. I don't pay her a whole lot. Mm-hmm. She just needs something to do and she's creative like me.

but I don't, I don't, I mean, most of our ideas we're copying other things we see on social media. It's not, it's not new stuff. Yeah. So, no, that's

Michael: good. I feel like a lot of the times we get boggled down, like, oh, we're gonna have this agency take over

Tyler: everything. Right. It doesn't work. Yeah. I, I hate to admit it.

I mean, I'm friends with some of the people that do that, and I feel like it just becomes a little less authentic. in some situations it works really well. And even with my sister doing stuff, I'm like, I wish she wouldn't have worded it that way, or I wish she would've used this picture instead of that picture.

but also too, people just, they don't want perfection. It's funny, the same orthodontist I was talking about, Small businesses think that we need to have stock photos in Photoshopped things in Canva and Canva's actually. Great. I love Canva. Mm-hmm. But like we need to look big. And it's funny, if you look at these big corporations, they're actually contacting micro influencers to give them content.

Their micro influencer is a person who has like a few thousand followers, maybe 10 or 20,000. And it's funny because the big companies are seeing the value in this authenticism and these people, they're like, oh, I just went to Walmart and here's what I bought. And they show like the clothes that they bought for back to school, Walmart's paying a lot of money to those people.

And then the, the small businesses are trying to make themselves look big when really they just, they want authenticity. Mm-hmm.

Michael: And that's what people want, right? Like that's what they see. Yeah. 'cause I notice you're like live sometimes on Instagram. You're just. You

Tyler: just turn it on and I'm like, the breeze.

I know that's like about sometimes I'm like, come your hair,

Michael: man know. You're just like, you're there and you're like,

Tyler: Hey, hey. You know? Like, this is pretty cool. I like it. I like it. I'm just hanging out with my friends and I don't know, I might change that in the future, but right now that's kind of where I'm at.

I feel like, owning a business is still stressful and I, I mean, there's huge stresses going on with that course. Like that's just life. But I think you have to do what makes you happy. And I think if you're trying to fake something that you're not, people can smell it. Mm-hmm. Like a lot of times, I hate to bring it up, but like dentists who are out there dancing on TikTok and you can tell they hate what they're doing, you can just see it.

Yeah. Or they're singing a song and it's like, this isn't you. This is what you wanna be, or what you think people want you to be, and you shouldn't do that. it doesn't work. Yeah. Just get on and talk about, I mean, you can talk about what you made for dinner last night and people will be like, oh, this dentist loves to cook.

I love to cook. I'm gonna go in it and I'm gonna talk about how I make homemade repair wrong at my cleaning. Mm-hmm. And they, all they want is a connection. And it's really easy to make that connection. Yeah. If you're yourself.

Michael: Yeah. Awesome. Tyler, I appreciate your time and if anyone has further questions you can find 'em on the Dental Market or Society Facebook group or where can they reach out to you

Tyler: directly?

best place is Instagram, um, just dmm me Haven Dental. I don't even use my personal one. I don't even think it's logged in anymore because my personal one is my work one, so yeah.

Michael: Yeah, no. Awesome, awesome. So that's all gonna be in the show notes below. And Tyler, thank you for being with me on this Monday morning marketing

Tyler: episode.

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Guest: Kristine GraziosoPractice Name: South Shore Children's DentistryCheck out Kristine's Media:‍

Advisor Email: [email protected]

Advisor Website: www.sherodentaladvisors.com‍

Practice Email: [email protected]

Practice Website: www.sscdsmiles.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/kristine.love.peace

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Other Mentions and Links:

Dr. Arnold Weiss

Boston Children's Hospital

Delta Dental

Blue Cross Blue Shield

Massachusetts Dentists Facebook Page

Metlife

Cigna

Guardian

Starbucks

Dentrix

Start with Why - Simon Sinek

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My Key Takeaways:

• Your staff needs to be on the same page if you’re switching to fee-for-service! They have to believe in it for it to work effectively.
• Believe in your practice, have good customer service, and be good at what you do. With these points of focus, your office will thrive!
• Tracking is especially important in a fee-for-service practice. Make sure you know where your patients are coming from so you can optimize your marketing.
• Take the extra time to double check the data you’re putting into your practice management software. If you feed it data with even small errors, the generated reports can be misleading.
• Know your geography! Do practices around you ALL take insurance? This will be helpful info when deciding whether or not to drop insurances.
• Ask for help! Don’t be afraid to ask your fellow dentists for advice. Many of them have been where you are now and would love to help.

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Episode Transcript (Auto-Generated - Please Excuse Errors)

Michael: Alright, it's time to talk with our featured guest, Dr. Christine Graso. Christine, how's it going? Hi Michael, how are you? I'm good, I'm good. Thanks for asking. Thanks for asking. If you can, Christine, start off with telling us a little bit about your past, your present, how'd you get to where you are today?

Kristine: All right, so I am a pediatric dentist and I started my practice in 1999, way back when, when things were really different. There wasn't the technology we have today, there weren't the rules and regulations necessarily. So things have really changed. But I have been a dentist for 30 years and a pediatric dentist for 27, practice owner for 23.

it's been a great ride. I love it. So was

Michael: practice ownership always something you wanted to do or how did that come about?

Kristine: I, yeah, I think I always knew that I would be an owner, how that would look. I didn't know, and I really didn't decide to be a dentist till I was a senior in college.

So it wasn't like a lifelong dream. It just kind of happened and it ha and I love it. I wouldn't wanna change anything. Yeah.

Michael: What were you wanting to do before that?

Kristine: Oh, let's see. First I started as an wanted to be an attorney and quickly learned that was not for me. Then I thought an optometrist, and then when I got into physics junior year, I realized, no way, not my strong point.

So I had a little bit of an existential crisis and had to figure it out, and dentistry kind of fell in my lap as an option. And I got a job in a dental office, happened to be a pediatric dental office, and. I knew immediately it was immediate that I had found what I was gonna do for the rest of my life.

So I was really fortunate in that. So

Michael: what was the immediate thing where you're like, this is it now you came home, you're like, I'm gonna do this.

Kristine: What was that? It was really more of just a feeling. So, The first day I walked into, I got a job as a dental assistant and I knew nothing. I knew nothing about dentistry.

And this dentist, who is many pediatric dentists, know his name, Arnie Weiss. He mm-hmm uh, took me in and said, I'll teach you everything, you know, work in a year with me before you apply to dental school. And We have a deal. So he took me in and it was really just a feeling. I had this overwhelming sense of this is where I belong, and this, I loved it.

I just loved it. So it really was not really tangible, but I just knew. Mm-hmm.

Michael: What did you learn from Arne that you still take

Kristine: on today? A lot of the behavior management he is a master at, he's retired now, but he was a master at behavior management and you know, how to charm the little kids. So I learned really, that was the main thing I learned, but I learned a lot more than that too.

Michael: Yeah. But that was the thing, the ma major, major takeaway

Kristine: how to yeah. How to deal with children, so,

Michael: Okay. Yeah, that's interesting. So then you went into dental school and then from that point on, you decided to immediately own your own practice. Was it in dental school or was it out you were associating?

Kristine: Nope. I went to, well, well you have to do a residency to, to go into pediatrics, but I had to break a year between dental school and residency because I was getting married to someone who was in the medical school and he had to go immediately to residency and as a dentist you can just go out and practice.

So I waited and followed to where he did his residency, which was Philadelphia. Pennsylvania and applied to my pediatric residency, then worked for a number of actual pediatric dental offices, then learned so much, went into my residency, leaped and bounds ahead of, if I had just come outta dental school.

And then I came back to Massachusetts and worked with Arnie Weiss again, and I thought I would likely. Become a partner with him. But due to geography and my husband and I choosing to leave the city and move down onto the south shore of Massachusetts, I knew I wanted to open my own practice. So it was kind of gradual.

And then I opened a practice and had a baby at the same time. Oh, me. So talk, talk to me about

Michael: that then. How. How was that? Was that any moment where you thinking like, maybe, maybe I shouldn't open the practice right now. Put a pause on it.

Kristine: I had the moment immediately after I gave birth for like the first month, I, I said something to my mother along these lines, do you think you could have told me what it felt like to be a mother?

You never once told me that maybe I would be like, whoa, what am I doing? So I had that Feeling. And then when my son was 11 months old, I got pregnant again. And I was just in the process of actually building out the space that I still am in more than 20 years later. And. I think I was a few months into that pregnancy doing the build out, having to make decisions.

Also having, still another baby at home that I had some second thoughts, but my husband kind of put the kibosh on that. He is like, nope, you've come this far, you've got it. You're just hormonal. And truthfully, at the time it didn't feel supportive, but he was a hundred percent right. And you know, I have to say, I think that I have been very fortunate.

I was never five days a week clinically, ever since I opened my own practice, other than during the pandemic years. When I went all in again, I really, I practiced three days a week and that was a wonderful way to balance being a mother and a practice owner.

Michael: Mm, okay, gotcha. So it's always been three days a week up until the pandemic you said.

Kristine: For me personally, the practice grew to five days a week. I have, I had associates probably starting at around year seven or eight. So, but I, you know, one thing, and if young dentists are listening to this, that I think it's lost, is don't realize that it takes time to grow. It doesn't just happen immediate, so your practice isn't all of a sudden you're open and you have a hundred patients that week.

It just doesn't happen that way unless you go someplace that is just, you know, there's no other dentist. But where most dentists seem to like to go there, we have a lot of practices already, so it takes time. So it wasn't a big deal to start at two, three days a week and grow it and grow it, and once those days were full.

and then I want 'em to expand to other days to hire someone else to help me with that. So I think that's a really important thing for younger dentists to realize is that it's not immediate success. And just like when you come outta dental school or residency, you're not gonna make the same financial living that someone who's been doing it 25 years is That's not how life works. Yeah,

Michael: that's true. So then, Christine, let me ask you, when will it feel like. When, if you were examining me and you're like, okay, Michael, let's, you're on year five and you, you should have grown more by now, or is it like, no, it's okay. It's okay. Give it, give it a more, when, when is the breaking point where it's like, we're not growing, I, I I need something, I need something to change.

Oh,

Kristine: I think you always should keep seeing forward growth in the, even in the first few years. But, so it was easy for me. I had a husband who worked and. We weren't counting on the money from my practice right away. I did, I actually, I, I should mention this, that I stayed in other jobs. I was an associate for the first two years that I was opening my own practice was another funny story. So, a good friend of mine from dental school, also a pediatric dentist now, her boyfriend at the time, was a pediatric dentist and he opened his own practice while we were still kind of getting out of residency and doing. That. And he used to say, I keep looking at my bank account and I think, all right, next week I'm probably gonna have to shut down.

And then eventually as you get towards the end of that first year, it changes and you start seeing that you can support the bills and you're not only living uh, you know, you're not paying yourself. That's, I think, another mistake. People think, oh, they should be making all this money right away for me and colleagues in my.

Generation, we just assumed we weren't really paying ourself right away, that we kept investing in the business. Mm-hmm. That's kind of a different philosophy I see these days too. They all wanna be making a lot of money, but can't necessarily right away. You have to put the time in. That's what I'd say.

so I think it's really hard for a practice to fail. So just be like, oh, I'm just gonna give up. I, I do think that's kind of hard to do if you are in an area that your services aren't necessary. So, I mean, don't open up when there's five other pediatric dentists within 10 miles. If you open a practice there, it's a little bit harder, right?

If you are in an area that practice is necessary or you buy an existing practice, that seems like a good way to go. And you. Are good at what you do and you offer really great customer service. 'cause to me that's really the key. Customer service is the key to success. Then you are going to see yourself grow and become successful, and then you just have to decide what success means to you, because it means different things to everybody.

It's not only that you make money. Mm-hmm. That satisfied in your life, in your career, that you have the lifestyle you wanna have, that you have time off, you have time with your family. All those things lead up to what I would call success. Not just how much money you make.

Michael: Got you. How long or did it even take you a while for you to realize that when you were starting out, your practice, having your children and everything?

'cause I feel like that's like your, you're boggled down in the moment. You're, did you also start your practice, have a child and you were an associate. Yes.

Kristine: Wow. Yes. And then I think I got out of, oh, and I started working a day a week at Boston Children's Hospital teaching in the residency.

But that didn't last that long. That was only like a year and a half, two years. So there was a lot going on, and I think especially women, we just multitask and go forward and we handle a lot. So then

Michael: what did you feel was being spread too thin in that whole moment? I mean, what would you have done differently

Kristine: if anything, the one thing, it doesn't fit what you're asking me of what I would do differently as far as time-wise, but what I would've done differently is had a greater appreciation for, Purchasing the real estate.

I do not own the real estate associated with my practice. I've always leased and I felt back then, how could I possibly buy it? I can't afford this. I wish I understood that I could have taken loans and it would've been okay to have some debt regarding real estate from my practice. So early on I wish I had done that.

It seemed so expensive. But now in hindsight, all these years later, it wouldn't have been, I.

Michael: Hmm. So that's the thing you wish you would've done is Yep. Bought the whole

Kristine: building and everything. Yeah. Or found a, a space and built a building. It seemed unattainable to me. I do think that younger dentists these days are much more willing to do that, to take on the debt, and they're not as risk averse, but, For me, back then, it was too overwhelming and too scary to contemplate doing.

Yeah. 'cause the property has always been expensive here in Massachusetts. Right. But in hindsight, it's, would've been a smart thing to do.

Michael: Yeah. I mean, you were already taking a lot of risks, Christine, if you think about it. You know what I mean? Sure. You were doing a lot. So it's kind of like you think about it now you're thinking, oh, I gotta take another risk on, you know what I mean?

So maybe hold off. at that moment you were thinking that, so I could totally, I'm putting myself in your shoes. Understand that, you know, So now you're in your practice, let's, if we're rewinding back, you decided to start your own practice and where you're at now. Mm-hmm.

And has it been, when did you start going fee for service or have you always been that way or

Kristine: So When I started, the PPOs weren't really, they were just starting to come into the environment and the people I worked for, Arnie Weiss being one, and then another practice In Needham, Massachusetts, they all just were in network with just like these premier plans.

So Delta Dental, premier, blue Cross Blue Shield, they used to call it indemnity and that was pretty much it. So that was the advice you got and you took those and at the time it was, you know, an 8% discount. reasonable help build your practice. It's just that over the years and there, honestly, there was only one pediatric dentist that I knew that was completely out of network with everything, and she was like, this unicorn, we didn't even, I didn't even think about it or understand it.

I was like, I don't even know what that's about. because everybody took these two plans and then as the PPOs started coming in, I just always said, no. No to all of them because I was like, why am I gonna take that discount? Why, you know, I knew what it cost to run a practice. Mm-hmm. But the overhead was, this is a little bit of a long story, so I'll tell it and you can interrupt me when you would like, So I took those two plans and I really didn't pay that much attention to what was going on. I just went about my business. My practice was growing. I ran my business by my gut. I wasn't data driven at all. I didn't look at the numbers that much. All I knew is I was profiting. I every year. I made a better living, even through the recession of 2008.

You know, growth happened. I had this a, a vibrant practice that I loved and it was, it was becoming profitable and I never like, looked deep into the data. 2016 hits and one of the large insurance companies sent out every dentist in Massachusetts, a contract that was basically most, a lot of people just signed it because we hadn't, we never used to have to renew our contract.

I hadn't signed a contract since I opened, you know, it was like, 15, 18 years, they never used to make you resign. All of a sudden we get this big contract. And some of us were like, what is going on? And they basically were trying to force us all into a P P O, 30% pay cut kind of right up front is what it looked like.

So some of us got really nervous and started, we hired attorneys to review it and realized there was no way we could sign it. It opened my eyes and I really started digging into the numbers and I noticed that, oh boy, I wasn't taking an 8% discount anymore. We were down to like 17% and it was only going to go up.

So then when all this was happening, you saw, wow, you know, when you weren't paying attention, they were discounting your reimbursements more and more. And that was routine in the practices of insurance companies, and I was supposedly not in PPOs, well, they were acting like PPOs without calling themselves that really, so, well, a couple things happened.

I realized there was no real good place for dentists to communicate and we were also. Being told you couldn't communicate because you would be under collusion, so you're not allowed to talk about this stuff. So a group of, I formed a Facebook page, the Massachusetts dentist Facebook page, as a place for dentists to have to communicate.

We were, I hired an attorney to make sure that there was no collusion or anything that was said. They monitored my page so that we made sure we did everything correctly, legally, and at that same time, we didn't feel that our dental society spoke for us in this matter. They were kind of agreeing with the insurance company and going along with it.

So a group of us got together and over a. A matter of 4, 5, 6 months, we formed an alliance and we made it a nonprofit. Again, had attorneys to make sure we did everything right. And we became a, a force that went in front of the division of insurance and lobbied the legislature and we had our attorney's right.

An appeal to the Attorney General. So we did everything legally and it kind of got my, I got fired up for advocacy. I really did, and at the same time I realized that I couldn't sign that contract anymore. It was taking away all my rights as a dentist, and I felt like the rights of my patients, there was too much control from the insurance company.

So I started, I. Working with my office manager to really look at what it would mean to go out of network. And I talked to a lot of pediatric dentists around the country who had already done it many years before. And in other parts of our country, people never even took insurance. This was just normal what they did.

But up here in Massachusetts, and I know other states you, you went in network with insurance, so. I started really doing my research, as they say. I talked to a lot of people. I read books. I got on every Facebook page I could that would talk about this, and then I made a plan. In my office and I spent two and a half years educating my staff, making sure our customer service was elevated and we made a, a deadline that as July 1st, 2020, we'd be out of network with all insurance.

So I was getting out with the two insurances I was in and also with Medicaid. I had started being a Medicaid provider 15 years prior because I wanted to do the right thing. I wanted to help patients and I wanted especially to help my special needs patients. So I decided for me, I had to drop all at once because I didn't want any one group of people to feel that they were being discriminated again.

So to me it was easy to go all at once. Now I wasn't in 20 plans. If I was in 20 plans, I would've done it differently. So just coincidentally the drop date of my insurances. 'cause you had a plan, you had to give six months notice to one company. 90 days was right. In the beginning of the pandemic, so things got a little messed up in the process, but here I am three years later and I'll tell you what, no regrets.

No regrets. I love that. My practice is, we're not a truly fee for service practice. There's different terminologies. I call it an out-of-network practice because we still do all the work for our patients. We, the part of the customer service we give is to do all the insurance work. We file for them. We still look into things and we accept assignment of benefits on all the plans.

I always accepted assignment of benefits on. Like the MetLifes, the Cignas, the guardians that I was always outta network with. So we didn't change anything for those patients. The plans that won't do assignment of benefits in our state, our Delta Dental and Blue Cross Blue Shield. So now my patients have to receive that check.

And that was a big hurdle to overcome. But now that we've overcome it, it's really not as big of a deal as every dentist think it's going to be. It's not. You just have to plan and appropriately Train your staff and educate your patients. So, most dentists are a little bit afraid of doing this because they're afraid they'll lose all their patients.

So that means they're gonna lose out financially. And you know, many other reasons, but every dentist I talked to had told me, you are gonna lose patients. You are gonna be slower, but you're going to stay the same financially. And frankly, they're right. So it's a different mindset. It's taken me a couple years to accept, you know, my head and my heart coming together to realize that we are slower.

We do have less patience, but the profitability in the end is the same. And I'm a really, I've changed and I'm really data driven now. So we track everything in my office. 'cause I wanna know, And this is a big point. I, I started actually marketing. We hardly ever did marketing before, and now we put a lot more effort, energy, and money into actually marketing.

But where it used to be, so I told you in 2016, 17, I looked and we were probably at a 17% discount. It went up. By the time I dropped in 2020, we were over, like we were probably 21, 20 2% insurance fee discount. Now my dis my discounts or my write-offs or adjustments, better word to use instead of a discount.

But adjustments are one to 2% a month. So, so you can spend more on other things like marketing. Wow. That was a

Michael: fantastic though. It's fantastic how it all kind of, You created this whole movement, right? Especially when it came down to, to Massachusetts. You talk about making a plan and training your staff.

Can you kind of break down to us instructions wise, like what is the plan that you created?

Kristine: Well, the first thing I did, and this was on advice of one of my colleagues, he had me read a book by Simon Sinek called, start With Why, and I read that book and I found my why, and then I decided to educate. My staff on the why, because one thing that really surprised me was.

They were not on my page. They were like, no way. We can't do this to our patients. Mm-hmm. Everyone's gonna leave. I wouldn't pay more money to come for cleaning. They're used to, they were not on my side. And I thought for sure, because I, you know, I thought, well, I've led them in, in every other aspect of this.

They're just gonna say, okay, well you're the owner, you know, and that was not the case. That was a big surprise. But it was really good because it made me work harder. It made me work harder to train them. In addition to that book and then presenting my why, we did a full day staff meeting, slides and everything about the book.

I. About how I found the why for me, how I what it meant, and then teaching them to understand it. We also did a whole day staff meeting on customer service, and we used the Starbucks example. We read a couple books about Starbucks and we used their customer service model. We broke it down into dentistry.

And so, and my office manager, she was, she was really in charge of that presentation. She even went and gave that presentation at like dental courses and stuff because it was really good. So we spent time, I literally spent time and then we spent days role playing, role playing, role playing. I. By the end of all this, my team was bought in.

The ones who weren't kept it to themselves, and they came to me six months. A year later, they're like, oh my gosh, Dr. G, we thought you were crazy. Like, we're like, we thought you were gonna destroy your practice, and this is the best thing you ever did. They're happier. They like the, the pace. truthfully, the hardest, most difficult patients.

99% of them left. all the great patients stay. So my front desk will tell you that it's rare for them to have, they're not chasing people for money. They're not being argued with, they don't have like the people who give attitude. And unfortunately our world's a little crazy right now. All the crazy we see everywhere is in every dental office too.

Makes sense. Right? So that's true. So that's how, how we did it, we, we. I made sure I knew what was important to me and that my office manager was on the same page. I have a fabulous office manager, I have to say fabulous. And she and I work really closely together. And then the other dentist in my practice, one is my associate, but we're partners in a second practice.

I do have a second practice and she, you know, I made sure they all agreed and, you know, understood where I was coming from so that it was just, it was a lot of time and effort, but it's so worth it. Yeah,

Michael: no, a hundred percent. So you got your whole staff, first of all, I guess, to get on the right mindset, to understand your why, right?

Instead of being like, Hey, do this, do that, do this. We're changing it up, right? And then maybe they might have in front of you been like, okay, yeah, but behind your back they're like, what the heck is

Kristine: she doing? Right? They wouldn't be able to effectively communicate if they didn't believe it. So you have to have the staff around you that believes it.

And I think that scares some people too. They look, they're like, I don't know that this one, that one. And then finding staff right now, we all know it's a challenge. We're, we're living in a very different time right now, so it's under understandable to be worried about that. You actually though end up needing less employees when you go out of network and your fee for service because you have less patience.

You just do. It's rare that you don't, right? Rare that there's exceptions to every rule. Nothing is a hundred percent, but, I'm in a saturated area. When I opened my practice there, there were two pediatric dental practices within, five to 10 miles of me. They were there before me. Then maybe a year or two later, another one opened maybe 20 miles away, and in the last 10 to 15 years, four or five, six or seven, I can't remember how many have opened within 10 to 20 miles of me.

So we're saturated and I'm the only one out of network. So it's possible to do. But you have to make sure that you believe it, that you are good at customer service and that you are good at what you do. I, I have great pride in my practice and it's not all about me. I said, I have other people who work with me and for me, and they live my vibe and my dream, and I thank them for that every day.

That's, you know, I, it's clear to me that they are doing it the way that I dreamed and wanted without, they don't parrot me. But, you know, that's, mm-hmm. I don't know

Michael: if that you do. Yeah, no. You do what you want. Yeah. Yeah. And so you officially went out of network before the pandemic, right? Like

Kristine: literally like little July?

Well, we gave the notification, but the actual date was July 1st, 2020. So we just got back into our offices. We were out from, I. Mid-March until we started being back for emergencies mid-April and then we kept back to like back to normal business June. So we were only in our office a month normally, and it wasn't normal, it was anything but normal.

Mm-hmm. But seeing, you know, all kind the full schedule of patients, but all socially distance and all that. But we were only in the office for a month. And I will say that we kind of were so wrapped up in all these changes with the pandemic. I mean, we changed so much that we let. Go of all the planning and all the, the process of being on a network.

So when July came, it was a little bit of a nightmare. We had a tough month. It got better each month, but the, it was a little bit out of our hands. I mean, I look at it and I was like, we were in such chaos in the pandemic that the chaos of going outta network. I'm kind of glad it all happened at one. Yeah.

Yeah, that's

Michael: true. In that month, what was out of control at that time?

Kristine: I, we could have had better conversations with the families about being out of network. Mm-hmm. But we were also wrapped up in asking about the. You know, if anyone was sick, did they have a fever? Did we do this? Did they were calling from the car? I honestly, I can't find fault with us because it was such an unusual time and every dentist knows like crazy.

Yeah, yeah. You know, and especially in Massachusetts where a state that really believed that it was a dangerous virus and all that, we weren't running our, you know, People were scared up here. We had, we'd lost a lot of people early on in the pandemic, so people were

Michael: scared. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred percent. I agree.

Now you mentioned to get your team involved, right? Let them know your why. Things like that. Does that involve just like, all right, we're gonna do a team meeting, 45 minutes. Let me show you this thing. All right. Everybody's on board. Cool. Let's get, let's hit the ground. Or how, how often the consistency

Kristine: I would say every couple of months we had full day staff meetings or half day staff meetings, and we talked about it at morning huddle all the time. And no, it was, it was intense and it would've continued to be intense had the pandemic not happened. You can't just have, you can't just talk about it in two minutes.

We did role playing, months of role playing. I still actually break out into role playing I still check in. It's three years later and I notice some things might've slipped a little 'cause we've kind of gotten comfortable.

So I check in with the staff and if I'm like, well, we could be saying it this way. We have a quick meeting and we talk about it. And we role, role play a little bit because, again, Well, that's one thing I learned. This is off topic, but you can't just sit back. you have to have your finger on the pulse of your practice.

And I will tell you that even from a distance, 'cause I've been a little distant from my practice the last six months, but even from a distance, I keep my finger on the pulse. Even if I'm not physically there, I am working behind the scenes and I'm diving into the data and I talk to my office manager every day and I check in.

So that's really important for practice owners to remember. Micromanaging is one thing you don't have to do that. I've been guilty of it, especially in the last three years. I did a little bit too much of that, but again, we all were thrown up. You know, we didn't know what was going on, but I do think you have to know what's going on and I do believe you should look at your data.

Michael: Yeah. So you're the one who always, how often, what data, what data are you looking at specifically? Like I know like, okay, yeah, let's look at production collection and things like that. But when it comes to specifically what are you keeping your finger on the trigger, what are you like saying, okay, office manager completely trust you So where does that

Kristine: fall? right now we're really, because we went out of network, we are really good at tracking new patient calls where they were referred from. If it's multiple places, knowing where, how many of those calls convert to an actual visit, what the people who don't convert, why they didn't.

Was it because we're out of network with their, their insurance? And that's. Pretty much what it would be. So we track all that and I'd get a, a report on new patients every single month. We also implemented a few new things that we are doing to try to increase our new patients, and we track if we're seeing a benefit and we've found some interesting things.

So it's all about the new patients. in, in the new patients we track, where these referrals come from. So are they coming from families that are already our patients? Are they the siblings of the existing kids? Are they coming from the pediatrician, from other dentists, from Google, from Facebook?

Where are they coming from? And then we really have been looking to see where our resources should be going for when we market to these things. Because before it was kind of willy-nilly marketing, but now we're looking, so we're tracking the data to see where our marketing. Efforts are paying off and where we should invest more, where we should invest less.

I, of course, the financials, I look at the production, the adjustments, all of those things. You know, they like to say KPIs, key performance indicators. I couldn't even list what all those are. I know what I wanna know in my practice. those are the main things that pop into my head right now.

Michael: Okay. Okay. And do you have like a software for that mainly,

Kristine: or, I'm using Dentrix currently. I've been using it since I opened. Every program has flaws and I'm looking to go to the cloud, but that's another project. So Dentrix, we, we spend a lot of time and effort making sure that the information going into Dentrix.

Was correct so that the report's coming out because there's flaws in reporting in almost anything. So if you don't have good data going in, you're not gonna, you're gonna get flawed data coming out and a lot of practices suffer from that. And we have checks and balances. I have two different, three different women who have different tasks, and they are the ones who will draw the data.

They and I have monthly meetings now. I get reports on everything. and we meet and they tell me what I need to know so that I'll stay on top of it. 'cause it's easy to just like not think about it. Mm-hmm. I also, another thing, having my finger on the pulse of things, I even now have a clinical meeting every month where they have to report in.

What's going on with equipment? Are there any equipment, breakages, what do we need? You know, any of the issues there. I need to know what, make sure they're on all the same schedules for, making sure the autoclaves are clean and all these things. We are very systems oriented, so we have tasks, charts, and check boxes for everything, because if you don't have a system in place, Things don't go the way they're supposed to.

And that's like, you know, now I think dentists are better at starting their practices that way. Back when I didn't even have a computer when I started, you know, it, it, and then eventually I got a computer. I used to do all my billing by hand. Mm-hmm. Set. I wrote out insurance forms and sent them off. I mean, it was so different.

Really different than today. We didn't have the technology, they didn't have digital x-rays, you didn't have digital charting, none of that. Mm-hmm. So it is a little bit different, but I think the quality of your data going in is so important to get quality reports coming out. And then my office manager's really good at, she set up a lot of spreadsheets that do the calculations and everything.

So you are able to do it on your own. You don't need to hire companies, but if you're not good at that, then they do have companies out there. Yeah. To get

Michael: the right, right. Data. Interesting. And. You mentioned marketing. What right now is working where you're like, this moves the needle and other stuff where you're like, no, let's, let's drop it or invest less into that.

Kristine: So interestingly, back in the day, the things that were the number one referral sources for pediatric practices. Now I can't speak to general at all. This is all pediatric, where you wanted to have a presence in the schools, the pediatricians, things like that. The schools are a little bit less important, it turns out.

So you don't need as much of a presence 'cause people don't really care about hearing from the school anymore or the fact that you visited, which, you know, it's kind of sad, but it's true. Really online presence and I'm not talking about your Facebook posts, that's not what builds a practice. I don't care what anyone says, you have to do it, but it's really you being talked about in.

Town groups, mommy groups, and then your Google presence, your s e o placement and all of that.

Michael: Okay. And reviews. Are you doing,

Kristine: reviews are huge. I should have said that. Yeah. Having good reviews I think are really important. 'cause nobody will pick their dentist now if they haven't checked out their reviews.

So if you have strong reviews, I don't have an exorbitant amount, maybe little under 500, but the majority of them are five star and they're all authentic. we do ask people to give them to us when they leave and you know, only a small percentage do, but. Still

Michael: that's stoke really, really good.

Yeah. Like yeah. I thought you were gonna say, oh, I only have a little under like, you know, 50, but five hundred's. Fantastic.

Kristine: You know what I mean? Yeah. I'd like to get to a thousand. Who doesn't want a thousand?

Michael: Yeah, no, that's really, really good. Okay, that's interesting. And so I have a question when it comes to now, ' cause this happens sometimes, Christine, where you've probably heard of it and it is in your Facebook group, I'm sure.

Like where it's um, They are a startup, they're about to open, but they want to go a hundred percent fee for or out of network or fee for service right now From the beginning. Sometimes, I mean, we've been on some interviews where they're like, Hey, I'm, I'm gonna take on insurance 'cause I can't make it.

And then sometimes they're like, I'm gonna fight through it. I don't care. where's the balance here in your opinion? Like what, where's the good mindset?

Kristine: So I think the balance is you need to know where you're opening, right? So all of my friends in the south, they never took insurance.

So if you're opening in North Carolina, you don't need to take insurance. You'd be crazy to take insurance right from the start. Yeah, take it, help with it. But don't be in network. North Carolina, South Carolina, all you know. I would say know your geography, so know what's going on, and then talk to the area practices, the dental community, we should be helping each other. Not, we're competition, but, we don't have to be competition in that way. As a matter of fact, I, my office manager has gone into a woman's practice near me who opened up right near me in the town. That was my main draw, and we tried to help her with running reports and looking at the financial data.

'cause she just wasn't doing it. I don't know if she is now or not, but I'm like, why not help others? It, it's, Silly to not, right? Mm-hmm. You come on a podcast like this and, and share, you know, I opened, I told you I had the Massachusetts dentist page. I also run the fee for service pediatric dentistry page.

I opened that. It's all about sharing and helping. So go ahead and call the dentist around you. Too many of 'em are trying to hide all the time, and like most of them didn't. No one called me and said, I'm opening a practice near you. when I opened, I went to the two practices around me, met with them and told them what I was doing, and they gave me great advice.

Nowadays, people just open and they hide it from you. I don't think that's a good idea. Go talk to the dentist around you. Ask for advice. Find out who's in network and who's not. If no one's in network, you'd be crazy to go and network you. You have the patients are, know what that's like. So I think that's the most important thing, You need to be educated in what it all means. And here's the other thing. New dentists often have no clue about insurance at all. I didn't. Mm-hmm. You know, I didn't, and I'm still learning. There's so much, I don't know. 'cause I never took all these lower end plans. I call it a lower end plan, but lower reimbursing, pain in the neck, p p o plans.

But I look at it like, why would you ever wanna work for 50% of your charge? No one goes to work and gets. Discounted. So And if you wanna give to me the best care with the best materials that you could afford, all that you need to be reimbursed. 'cause another really important point is being busy is not being profitable, right?

Mm-hmm. Profitability and busyness are two separate things, and that I. I wanna jump back. Remember when you asked what I checked the data? Mm-hmm. Profitability is so important and it often gets overlooked. People look at their production, what's my production? What's my collection? But where's your profitability?

What's your overhead? How, you know, that's what's really important. that's true. And then, and back to choosing insurances. the point I'm at today, I like it this way, So I'm happy I did it, and if you can open without ever starting to take these low paying insurances or insurances, that really, it's not only about the reimbursement, that's a big part of it, because that's how we run our businesses.

But it's about, Basically the control the doctor, patient, patient relationship gets interfered with. If an insurance company's in charge and can say when a patient come to you, what services they can have, all those things. So better off not being controlled by a third party administrator.

Michael: You're technically, I guess like they're the leaders, right? Kind of thing. They're the managers and they're telling you like, what, 'cause the patient's gonna do it, right? Like whatever my insurance covers kind of thing. And then, They get, they get boggled down with that. But that's interesting.

Okay. Because yeah, like I told you, there's sometimes where people, they're like, man, Michael, I'm gonna have to take, I, I'm doing everything I'm gonna, but I never thought about asking them like, well, why'd you pick where you're at? Right. Like Beverly Hills, why are you in Beverly Hills right now where everybody else is taking on, like Delta Dental right.

Kind of thing. starting off, it's hard for them to just fully be. I love you. You know what I mean?

Kristine: Right. 'cause you have to build a reputation. And I will say, so, you know, I had a 20 year reputation, before I went out of network. So I admire the people who start that way. But just now knowing what I know, like I said, so many of my colleagues started that way.

It's just, you just have to know what you're doing and how to talk about it and how to explain it, and your staff has to know, so,

Michael: yeah. Interesting. And one of the last questions I wanna ask you, Christine, is throughout the process, let's talk about from the moment you decided to own a practice till today, what's been some of the biggest struggles or pitfalls that you've experienced?

Kristine: Hmm. you know, I can barely remember way back when because it was such a frenzy as we talked about being a young mother or wife, and then owning my own practices. So I think the biggest pitfall people don't understand is the emotional toll it can take because you feel very responsible to your patients and to running this business and to your family because you, you're trying to make money as.

to support your yourself and your family. So it can be emotionally draining. And when you work with the public, and in our case it's the parents, because the kids, you know, they can. Scream and cry or whatever. You never blame a child. You understand behavior. You, your goal is to try to make it as good as possible, but people can be cruel.

Their parents. So you, I think growing a thick skin is really, really hard. And we take things on so personally because we're providing care. It's what we're doing, we're giving all day long. So, that's a struggle to learn how to, you know, deal with the public You're just, you're opening yourself up to it because it gets, if you get attacked verbally or nowadays, these reviews that people leave for you, we didn't have that back when I started.

you take it personally because we all, you know, our practices are our babies, really. And even if you're an associate, you would take it personally if someone said something negative about you because they can go right. Other struggles are time management because it's hard to do it all right.

You, you have to find a way to prioritize and then realize that your practice isn't the most important thing in your life. It never can be. It's important because it's your livelihood and you wanna take care of other people, but, you have to put your family and yourself first. Yeah.

Michael: When did you, how did you realize that,

Kristine: My mother has always had always said about me that she would call me Chrissy.

You know, Chrissy, you really work hard, but you're not a play hard too. I think I just always, you know, I don't know how, but I'm kind of blessed with Emma. Positive, optimistic person. But I'm a realist too. I'm not, I'm not like living in some naive world. But, so I think I was really kind of just lucky and I'm, I am an extrovert most of the time.

I like my alone time, but I like to be around other people. So I think for me, I never really had a realize it. It just was what I did. I always surrounded myself by a lot of people, friends, family. I just always did. Part of why I think I was good at being a practice owner and a pediatric dentist, 'cause I really like people.

I'm not the person who says they like dogs better than humans. I like humans better. I love dogs, don't get me wrong, but I call myself a humanist. So,

Michael: yeah. So was there a moment where you started realizing you're going away from that and you started just owning just all about the practice all the time or?

Kristine: No, I never made it all about the practice all the time. Mm-hmm. That's my point. I guess I just never did that. I've worked really hard, but I always, three days in the office, four days with my kids, so I was like a stay-at-home mom. But yeah, when they went to bed, I stayed up late and would be at my dining room table doing the ledgers.

But it's just the process. I look at it as like the process and the way life, you know, is, and I here's a big thing. Ask for help. That would be what I would say. I always ask for help. I was never afraid to, I'm not afraid to ask other people for things because I know I would do it for them.

So many people think they have to do everything on their own, that it makes them weak if they ask for help. So if you're a young practice owner, get a few mentors. Go online now we have Facebook. It's so, you know, for as much as we hate social media, there are some benefits. You have, thousands of people who've done this before, sharing their knowledge with you, listen to 'em because they've been there, you know?

So yeah, I, don't know if I answered your question. No, that's, yeah.

Michael: Yeah. I love that. And then real quick, for the emotional draining part, Where it feels like we gotta grow thick skin, but still be super loving to the, parents, the children. But even then, when you are, sometimes you're like, we, you were just in my office and you left me this review.

How come you didn't tell me that in person or or even just emotionally draining in general, what advice do you have for that?

Kristine: it took me probably 10 years to realize that I just needed to get away. I always liked to get away, but I didn't do a lot of that. You know, you don't have the money.

You have young kids, you have the practice. Around 10 years in, I'm also an empath and I used to take on every problem of my staff. Hmm. You know, members, I, I would feel their pain and I realized that it was sucking me dry. 'cause I was always feeling everybody else's pain and worrying about their problems.

So I got really good at what I call compartmentalizing and putting it where it belonged. I could listen to it, I could feel it. I could understand it, but I had to let it go. I'm not exactly sure, you know, everyone has their own method to do that. But I started just making sure we got away as a family. We went on vacations and I, didn't communicate with the office very much, if at all.

Sometimes there was some communication and I always regretted it. I could tell you and So getting away, making time for yourself, and I did a lot of, you know, the catchphrase, self-care, but I early on started doing that even when I couldn't technically afford it and things like I would get, I.

Massages. to the point I was doing weekly for many years, but, or at least every other week because it relaxed me, but it also did help with all the neck and shoulder pain from being a dentist and it, the relaxation. I would do girls weekends away and leave my kids and my husband because, Again, I needed to recharge with other things that were just fun, right?

So I think that's really important is to take care of yourself. And I do think everybody, male, female, should I. Talk. So if you don't, aren't comfortable talking to your loved ones or your family, or you need outside, you should get therapy. I think that everyone could use therapy at some point in their life.

I tend to talk so much. I'd be in a therapist all the time, except I talk out loud to all my friends. So, No, but I do think that's really important for, that goes back to what I said about relying on other people. So many people think they have to be in charge. They can do it all, and they shouldn't have help.

I really believe you need help, and I think you need it emotionally. You need it in so many ways. So you just have to find people you trust and can rely on a little bit. We're not islands alone here. We are in communities. So to me, that's the biggest piece of advice I could give. And then, Not to be trite, but really focus on the good in your life and focus on what you do have, not what you don't.

And that goes a long way, you know, telling your blessings as they say.

Michael: Mm-hmm. Wonderful. Christine, thank you so much for being with us. It's been a pleasure. But before we say goodbye, can you tell our listeners where they can find you?

Kristine: Oh, sure. Well I didn't mention this and it's, I hope it's okay. Just recently I did open a consulting company with another dentist and her office administrator, and we're calling it Shero Dental Advisors.

So if anyone wants to talk to us about some of this stuff I talked about going out of network and fee for service, please visit us at. Www shero dental advisors.com. Although the website's really still under construction, but you can email us at [email protected] and shero is SS H E R o or you can Facebook message me.

I'm Christine, love Peace on Facebook. Many pediatric dentists might know that My website is www.sscdsmiles.com. So there you go.

Michael: Awesome. So guys, that's all gonna be in the show notes below, so definitely reach out. And Christine, thank you so much for being with us. It's been a pleasure and we'll hear from you soon.

Kristine: Thanks so much for having me. I enjoyed it.

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