Dr. Anissa Holmes is a best selling author, a practicing dentist, a podcaster, and a social media strategist. You may have seen her online with her Delivering WOW coaching. Today she comes on to talk about how making small changes to your dental practice can make huge differences.
Book: Delivering WOW: How Dentists Can Build a Fascinating Brand & Achieve More, While Working Less!
This episode of The Dental Experience Podcast is sponsored by Trident Lab. Dental Experience podcast listeners - that's you - you can write the code Dental Experience on your first case, and you can save up to $50. Simply visit tridentlab.com/dep for more details.
The Dental Experience Podcast is hosted by Ryan Vet and is edited by Earfluence.
Dr. Anissa Holmes is a best selling author, a practicing dentist, a podcaster, and a social media strategist. You may have seen her online with her Delivering WOW coaching. Today she comes on to talk about how making small changes to your dental practice can make huge differences.
Book: Delivering WOW: How Dentists Can Build a Fascinating Brand & Achieve More, While Working Less!
This episode of The Dental Experience Podcast is sponsored by Trident Lab. Dental Experience podcast listeners - that's you - you can write the code Dental Experience on your first case, and you can save up to $50. Simply visit tridentlab.com/dep for more details.
The Dental Experience Podcast is hosted by Ryan Vet and is edited by Earfluence.
Voiceover: Today on The Dental Experience podcast.
Anissa Holmes: Many times, most times, we don't have the knowledge of how to actually run the business.
Ryan Vet: How did you pick that coach? What did you learn from them that you've now applied in some of the ways you help practices?
Anissa Holmes: It really becomes like word of mouth, really, on steroids.
I want to get to a point where I can take a month off every summer, and I've got my team that's been rocking and rolling
Ryan Vet: Often, it's the power of small. It's the little things that make the biggest difference and break those experiences we're sharing.
Anissa Holmes: And everybody's like, "We'd love to learn more!" I'm like, "Wait, you guys want me to show you how to do this?"
Ryan Vet: This is The Dental Experience podcast. Here's your host, Ryan Vet.
Welcome to another episode of The Dental Experience podcast. I'm excited to have with me today, Dr. Anissa Holmes. She is a best selling author, a practicing dentist and she's a social media strategist. I'm sure you have seen her online with her Delivering WOW, her logo is very eye catching. It's kind of this gold glitter. You definitely notice it, and she has a lot of fun pictures of her holding balloons and things like that. So, I'm sure you've heard of her if you're not already part of her Facebook group. But, welcome, Anissa.
Anissa Holmes: Thank you so much for having me. Super excited to be here, Ryan.
Ryan Vet: Yeah, of course. And you're just up to so much. You're always learning, the world of social media is always changing, you're managing a practice - you're just up to all sorts of things in dentistry and beyond, even helping marketing for general brick and mortar stores, and representing dentistry well inside of the marketing world.
So, do you mind just kind of giving us a little bit of your history? And dental school was good, it taught you everything you needed to know to care for patients, but then moving into practice. There's a lot of things that you didn't know just to run your business, and grow it, and deliver that WOW. So, do you mind kind of walking us through your journey?
Anissa Holmes: Absolutely. So interestingly, I actually graduated - I graduated from Alabama about 20 years ago, so I've been doing this for quite a while. And you're absolutely right. What's so interesting is that, you know, we go to dental school because - well, for most of us, I can tell you for me it was because I had this drive to be able to like help people and impact people and like put my piece into the universe that way, right? And so like, you go in and invest in dental school and you get the knowledge, right? You get the knowledge of how to be able to do dentistry right. And then, you invest in your practice, right? So for many people now, the investment is significant. Huge. Like, for some people, over a half a million dollars to be able to - or more - to be able to invest in your practice.
But what's really, really interesting is that many times, most times, we don't have the knowledge of how to actually run the business. And so, what was really interesting for me early on, I actually, I remember - so funny - I remember moving here with my husband and starting my practice againwhen we moved to his hometown, and I could not get a loan.
And so, I actually put my practice on credit cards and - because I had this vision, I was like, "No, I'm going to build this practice," right? But I had to figure out really, really fast how to grow the business. And so, I tried a lot of things myself and like, I did a lot of things really, really well, but I didn't want to take forever.
And so interestingly, what I did was I actually - my path was I actually hired a business coach and I started understanding how to being able to put in the right people, processes and accountability in the business, and then I started looking at like, "How, how could I grow the business through marketing?"
And so, that's when I stumbled upon social media marketing. What's really, really neat is that like, getting that knowledge was a huge shortcut. And I remember my husband saying like, "You don't, you know, shouldn't make this investment, we don't have the money." And I was like, "I don't even know what that lady knows that I don't even know, but I don't, I need to learn it."
Right? Wow. Really, really neat. And so, like that year we tripled revenue and we continue to do great things and, eventually, we had like 50,000 followers on social media and she's like "Anissa, so what is next for you? Like, I know there's something else inside," and she's like, "You know, what's your legacy going to be?"
And I was like, "You know what?" Like, I've learned some unique ways to be able to get to time and financial freedom by really having a successful practice, making team members really get excited about practice growth and becoming leaders within themselves and within the practice, and also, obviously, with marketing.
And so, that's when I wrote my book and I started my podcast - which I've had for a few years no - and I'm, you know, writing weekly articles to help dentists practice growth and marketing. We've got marketing challenges, and of course we have coaching programs for practices as well. But yeah, it's been really, really exciting.
And like, for me, it's been great just really seeing the growth of dental practices and really being able to see how they can make their impact.
Ryan Vet: That's fantastic, and you hit on so many wonderful things in that. You talked about finding your purpose and the idea of financial freedom and having the freedom in your practice, you talked about just really honing in on what it is that you're passionate about and what's next. But, the one thing that you, you said that I, I do want to revisit as this idea of coaches and consultants. So many people out there are selling different services to your practice. So first of all, it seems like your coach did a lot more for you than just kind of springboard your, your new practice.
But I want to go back and talk about how did you pick that coach and what did you learn from them that you've now applied in some of the ways you help practices?
Anissa Holmes: So let me say this, and you know, it's all about who has the knowledge that can help you to get whatever you want to get faster. And if you like take it outside of dentistry, like I can tell you I just turned like 45 and I knew that I wanted to, I wanted to be consistent with, with exercise, right? It was important to me. And so, what I made a decision to do was to hire a trainer. And so, the trainer, number one, had the knowledge of how to be able to keep me healthy, of what exercises I needed to do because like, that's what he does, and I've seen the results that he's gotten for other people, right? And I see how healthy they are. And so, like, I knew he would be a good coach for me, and so I hired him, right? And the same thing happened, like with my, my first coach that I had for my practice, I always have a coach. Like, right now I keep having coaches because I keep getting to a point to where I'm like, "All right. I figured that out. Like, I want to learn something new," right? But the process of, of having a coach and how do you find them is finding someone who has the knowledge, the person that can give you the shortcut to be able to get to your goal, somebody that has proven that they can do it for other people, and someone that you trust.
And it's really important - interestingly, with my coaches that I've had really, really good success with, is that when they say "Anissa, this is what's worked for other people," I am like the number one best student. Like, I'll be like, "I'll do whatever you say," because I want to get that shortcut, right?
And so for me, for my dental practice, I wanted someone who could help me to understand number one, how do we hire the right team? How do we get people on board? How do we create leaders? How do I create processes in my practice so now there's accountability? How can I have a practice that I can take a vacation for? This was actually my "why." I was like, I want to get to a point where in, you know, a year or two, I can take a month off every summer, and I've got my team that's rocking and rolling and they know what to do. And interestingly, like for me, that was my big why, and now we do that. Like every year, I take a month off and like, interestingly, this morning, we had, we, we have a process called a weekly IDS meeting. Right? And so, we talk about like our personal professional best, we talk about each team member's one thing they want to do. Interestingly, we taught, we coach this in our, in our practices, but I want to share this. This is so powerful. Right? So everybody goes in and they share their personal professional win that week, which builds the connection, right? And then you talk about like your rocks, like what is the one thing you want to accomplish in the quarter?
And so like for my treatment coordinator, it's to close four, $10,000 cases. For one of the doctors, is to close a certain number of Invisalign cases, 'cause she's just started doing Invisalign. For my scheduling coordinators, she wants to reschedule 30 appointments every single week. For my marketing - front desk girl who does marketing, she wants to have a marketing campaign that goes live every month. Like, those things have to happen no matter what, right? So we go through that, and then we go through like action items. Well, what's so neat is that like, we I've been gone for a month. Like, I took my month off to spend with my kids and like, number one, let me tell you what happened by practice this month.
We had our x-ray sensor, that my hygienist made a mistake and she rolled over it and it broke. But guess what happened? It's cool - totally cool because my head dental assistant took care of it. Like, she called the company, she got it sorted out. We also had our phone system to start getting really bad reception. My office manager, because she knows the profits in the practice and what we can do and can't do, she found a solution, she got that sorted out, like.
And that was my vision. Like, for me to take a month off and see what's happening in my practice. I came back, we had an amazing profitable month, and I was not micromanaging. And like, when you get to that point where you got the right team that are all leaders that are leading in their positions, right, there's accountability. So like, we look at week to week to week, what is our doctor production per visit? Hygiene production per visit? Like, how many patients are going inactive? How many - you know, a lot of times we focus on production and collection, but these are the numbers that actually make it up.
Right? So we have those processes in place, and that's why we continue to grow, and our team knows what to do when the numbers go down. This is kind of what we teach in our programs, but like it's integrated into my own practice, and that's what's given me freedom, and that's really, really cool. And so like, as you're looking for a coach, what you want to find is somebody who can give you the knowledge of how to achieve the goals that you're looking to achieve.
So that's essentially what I did and that's where we are now fitting into the dental marketplace as well, to be able to help practices who are looking for that sort of solution.
Ryan Vet: Well, I want to commend you on really building such an incredible team because it's not - that's not easy to do. And you hit on a lot of things in there that are traditional management style that often you see outside of dentistry, but for some reason, a lot of people don't pull in. You talked about the idea of goals, and whether or not you realize that each one of them, kind of, was what's called a "smart goal." It was actionable, it was time bound, it was measurable, it had a metric to it, and everyone knew exactly what they were doing.
And you also take the time to empower your team and let them lead, give them that freedom. A lot of people are afraid of making that decision to change the phone system, or find a solution, or figuring out how to fix the x-ray system, whatever that is because they don't feel empowered. And so, I commend you on just empowering your team and leading them well every single day so that in your absence, they can continually deliver. Wow. That's just fantastic.
Anissa Holmes: It's really, really cool what happens. And it makes them feel so special. And like, this morning in the meeting, they were talking about, "OK, next month, we're going to go bowling, and then we're going to do this," you know. I mean, they are making decisions, and they're feeling so proud.
So guess what happens? They work harder, right, because they're happy. They feel motivated. And what's, what's really neat is that like - what's really cool is when you can get to the point where you say to your team, "This is the result that I want. I want to be able to have, you know, this many new patients, or I want to be able to have a goal of 30 patients to be rescheduled every week."
And interestingly, like, you know, they are able to find solutions. For example, one of the things that we do, we did this marketing campaign and we've been - it's really cool - we started doing it with other dental practices where we actually get like gift cards from local businesses. And so, we do like a social media campaign with it.
And so, like I just told my team, I was like, "We need to have like however many gift cards from local businesses," and I was like, "You guys, this is the solution," and they sat down together and they figured out how they were going to get them. When you can get to that level of leadership and management in your practice, it's just like, you're unstoppable.
Like you can achieve anything and that's yeah, it's super powerful.
Ryan Vet: Absolutely. Well that, that's fantastic. I congratulate you on that.
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And one of the things, sort of your mantra, if you will, is this idea of "delivering wow." Could you talk a little bit about how you came up with that idea and what that actually means?
Anissa Holmes: Yep, absolutely. So it's really interesting. You know, coaching is one of the things that we work with, helping people put in, you know, the right people, processes and tools, but I'm also super passionate about marketing. And the reason why is that marketing allows the people who are meant to find us to actually be able to find us, right? And so what's, what's really neat, and what's powerful, is we start looking at how are you going to get patients in, right?
So, there are people out there who think - and a lot of these are marketers, right, and I completely live in that world as well, right, and fortunately, now I'm able to help them with their, this false belief - but they believe that you have to have a $49 cleaning or, you know, $500 off of Invisalign or you have to have a deal or discount to be able to get patients in, and that is completely false.
Actually, this is quite opposite because as we know, in the dental space, long-term relationships, or long-term patients, are patients accepting case is case acceptance is based on them really connecting it's, it's really about the connection, right? And so, interestingly with, with online, we have an ability for people to connect with us and they connect with us by what they see that we're doing.
That's serving the community, that is over-delivering to our patients. And so, I can tell you, intentionally, it's not just something that happens. Intentionally, there are so many touch points that can be placed inside of a dental practice that people will talk about, right? And what I say is your, your brand, what people say about your practice, you can actually manufacture. OK?
Ryan Vet: Yeah.
Anissa Holmes: So, so it's so cool. So, what I want people to say is, number one, I want them to say, when you go there, you don't have to wait. When you go there, the dentistry is beautiful. When you go there, you have an amazing experience. And so when you come in, we have hot chocolate for the kids. We have gourmet coffee and tea, freshly served tarts. We have a coffee table culture book that we created on Shutterfly. So the beginning, it shows us out serving the community, teams doing CE, teams bowling, right? And at the end, the back of the book, is all cases, right? So we're putting in their mind that we do beautiful, natural looking dentistry, that we serve our community, right?
Like we're manufacturing what's going to be in their mind. From there, we give them a tour, which is essentially a walk to the back of the office. We're pointing out, the dental assistant is pointing out "OK, right there as our core values." Let me tell you, the one that resonates with me most is listen with two ears and one heart, or build stronger committees, you know, in November we're actually gonna be treating a hundred kids for free.
This is something that we do every single year, and it's something that really, really makes me proud. Right? And so you're, you're pointing out your core values, right? You're getting warm, peppermint scented towels at the end of the visit, you are giving people headphones to take away the sound. Like, most of these things, by the way, don't really cost that anything. I mean, they're really, really inexpensive.
But interestingly, when we, when we place these thoughts in people's minds, that's when people come back, and they tell other people, and other people come in and say, "Yes, my friend told me about the tour," or "My friend told me about that warm, peppermint-scented towel," or "My kid told me that I had to take him to the dentist because his friend came here and he had hot chocolate and got to go to the toy box first," you know, even that's delivering wow. You know, most people say, "Well, you know, if you're good, you get to go to the toy box." No. Delivering wow is "Hi, you know, Johnny, I'm so happy that you're here. Here's a toy." Like, we make friends first and then now we can do whatever we want, you know, they're comfortable, right? So delivering wow is really all about creating amazing experiences. What's great about social media marketing is you're able to do that, and then now you have a lens, you have a camera, that's amplifying it, right?
So not only will people see it within the actual physical location, but everybody in your community sees it. And when they see it, now they have this in their mind - and interestingly, we have had some patients - oh, gosh, so many - that come in after like a year or two. And they're like, we've been watching what you're doing on social media.
We've been so afraid to come in. We have sent so many people to you, but like, we've been afraid to come in. And then on the flip side, we have people come in and we're like, how'd you hear about us? And they tell us the name of the person, and they're not a patient yet. And so, the thing is that like, when we utilize those media and things like that to, to, to show how we're delivering these experiences, it really becomes like word of mouth really on steroids.
And so that's why delivering wow, because it allows us to be able to grow our businesses. You know, we, you know, we don't want to talk about in marketing "Oh, well we do fillings and we do implants." Like, everybody does that, right? And so, if you can talk about what's different and unique, that's where, you know, really your, your practice is going to stand out and be set apart.
Ryan Vet: Absolutely. And that's the core of what The Dental Experience podcast is. It's talking about how to create those experiences we're sharing for your patients, for your team members and everyone that walks through your practices door. So, I mean, you, you perfectly talked about every single area from what they see to what they smell and touch and feel and taste while they're waiting.
Everything is just so perfect. And not only that, so often I think we talk about the more physical things, but you also talked about culture and how your team members are able to give it to work, and talk about what they like about your practice. It's beyond the culture book, but they're actually giving real time feedback on "This is why I like this core value."
So, that is just absolutely fantastic and something I think all of our listeners should start taking because often it's the power of small, it's the little things that make the biggest difference and create those experiences where sharing. So you, you do this in your practice, so well, but I, I love that you don't keep it to yourself.
You have tons of resources and tools and ways to get ahold of you, and you're very accessible, which I know is just incredible for, for practices. You, you practice what you preach. So tell the listeners, just share with them a little bit about how they can get involved in this delivering wow, and how they can learn more about both marketing their practice on social media, but doing some of the, the things that might be more internal marketing or things you're not quick to think of and how they can work with you on that?
Anissa Holmes: Absolutely. So, so one thing that I wanted to make sure that I've always done is to be able to help people where they are. So interestingly, like I said before, we do have - we have lots of amazing resources for dental practices. We have our weekly blog that we put out on our website, which is "Delivering Wow" is our website. We have our podcast, we have our Facebook group that has over 15,000 practices in there. And we also have, you know, our books. So we have lots of amazing resources that are free resources.
And then, we start to have different programs where we can help. One thing that I really, really proud of, and we were talking about this before is our, our marketing and practice growth challenges. And this actually happened - I was, I was in my Facebook group and I was talking, telling them about some of the accountability tools that we use to get our teams excited about practice growth, and one was actually using whiteboards. And with whiteboards, interestingly, you're able to look at all of the different components of production - so all of the different services that you're doing - and what happens is we start looking at this daily, and what happens is now you have accountability. And so if you say, for example, we want to do you ask your team "How many sealants -" if we were actually looking at it, for those who believe in sealants - "How many sealants do you think we could actually do?"
The hygienist is like, "I think we can do 50," and we're like, "Great." We do 50. Right? So you set a goal. Well, guess what? Now that she's looking at it, and you're tracking it every day, all of a sudden she does like 75, and she gets excited, and "You're like, look at you." You're like rewarding, high five. And then you're like, all right.
She's like, "You know what, doc? I think next month I can do a hundred." And you're like, "All right." You know, so now it holds her accountable to have the conversations with the patients, right? When you're looking at crowns, again, when the doctor's tired, the team member can say, "Come on doc, you can do it." Or they work in same-day rollovers, or you have a process to learn how to, to actually have conversations with patients.
And this is a whole nother podcast about communication and how you can really very simply add more crowns every single day. But well, we started talking about this and I was like, "You know, I've seen practices that are in our coaching programs use this, and they actually, some of them actually doubled their production in two or three months, some of them even less."
And I started talking about social media and I'm like, "There's this campaign that I ran for my practice and like, we had 90 people share it for like all these different days and like it built up huge audiences," and everybody's like, "We'd love to learn more." I'm like, wait, you guys want me to show you how to do this?
And they're like, "Yeah." And I was like, "All right, cool." So then like a week later I told my team, I was like, we're going to do this challenge. So we started these 21 day challenges, $47. So like, anybody can do it. It's kind of a no brainer. And we teach whiteboards, and we do social media campaigns. And then I was like, you know what? We'll just actually help people build their whole year's marketing calendar for the whole year, how they can get their patients to talk about them in the community and how themselves as a practice can do it without spending a lot of money. And so, we've now had over 300 practices go through our, our challenge.
We've had people grow social media followers by two or three hundred, increase their engagement by some of them, even 20000%. We've had practices have their best month ever by putting in whiteboards, the teams are excited. It's so cool. So, those are our challenges, and then from there, we have other programs.
So, from there, practices say, "You know what? I want to be able to have my team do what your team does." And so, we have our platinum mastermind, we have our training only options. So if you want to get in there and do the training and watch training videos, we've got that. But then, we have a full coaching program where we actually have accountability coaches.
I jump on, and I look at numbers with the practices and give strategy and talk about marketing strategy and practice growth strategy and how do we whither the verbal skills to be able to easily close multiple 10K cases, and that is our coaching level of our platinum mastermind. So as you can see, we built up a wide range of resources for practices, really, to be able to help them grow.
But right now, the one I'm most proud about is like that, that marketing and practice growth challenge, because the fact is that if you're a startup, if you're a seasoned practice, it's, it's something that is a no brainer. The cost is, is really irrelevant, it just covers the cost of us sending you a T-shirt, to be honest with you, but it's really, really has been really rewarding for me, and it's been just super powerful for practices as well.
Ryan Vet: I love it. Thank you so much for your time. And listeners, thank you so much for listening to another episode of The Dental Experience podcast. Please, if you liked this episode, share it with a friend, share it with a colleague. And if you have a minute, we strive for five here at the podcast, and we'd love for you to write us a review.
Thank you so much.
Voiceover: Thank you for listening to The Dental Experience podcast. For show notes, to ask a question or for more information, visit www.thedentalpodcast.com. The ideas discussed during this episode are the opinions of the participants and do not serve as legal, financial, or clinical advice.
Until next time, this is The Dental Experience podcast.