Shahin's Corner - The Podcast That Bites
Shahin's Corner - The Podcast That Bites
Shahin's Corner with Special Guest Curtis Marshall - Uncovering the Secrets of Successful Dental Practice Management
Ready to uncover the secrets of running a successful dental practice? Join us for an enlightening conversation with Curtis Marshall, Vice President of Partnerships at Dental Intelligence. Curtis, a revered expert in the industry, dives into the nitty-gritty, sharing insights on challenges currently faced by dental practices including staffing issues and patient retention. His wealth of knowledge promises a transformative perspective on dental practice management.
Are you maximizing your dental practice's production and collections efficiently? We tap into this crucial topic, exploring ways to elevate patient inflow, optimize production per visit, and leverage a well-trained team for case conversion. Curtis introduces us to Dental Intel's revolutionary Masterclass and the Tesla model of software they're developing, designed to automate patient interaction and streamline workflow. We also discuss the potential of Local Med and Modento software when used in conjunction with Dental Intel.
As we wind down, we delve into the relevance of patient communication and customized software for practice growth. We underline the importance of tracking patient outflow and harnessing the power of automation software for effective workflow management. With Curtis's expertise at the helm, this episode is jam-packed with actionable insights to help you drive your dental practice towards success. Tune in and let's shape the future of your practice together!
Hello, my name is Curtis Marshall. I'm Vice President of our partnerships at Dental Intelligence, the leader in providing actionable data for dental offices. As you're with the Love Bites Mastermind Group, you're going to learn a lot of things, and dental intel is going to help you know not just what happened in the past, but really what to do today, because unless you have a time machine, you can't change the past, but you can change today. I'm excited to be working with you in the Love Bites Mastermind class. If you have any questions, you can always reach out to me and tell them. I'm excited to see your office grow. Have a great day.
Speaker 2:All right, welcome to another episode of Shaheen's Corner. We have a very special guest today, curtis Marshall, vice President of Partnerships at Dental Intel, and I'm really excited to have this man here today. What's up, man?
Speaker 1:Top of the day to you. How are you, my friend?
Speaker 2:Doing well. Thanks for joining us today. I appreciate it. We're excited to have you. We've got a lot of things to talk about Curtis, but first I want to find a little bit more about who Curtis is, just in case for the people who don't know who Curtis Marshall is. Who are you, Curtis?
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, you know that's a great question, because one thing I used to do is when somebody say who are you? And I start talking about what I do for work, and a good friend of mine named Bob, he said no, that's not who you are. You have a beautiful wife, who's amazing. You have three children, and I'm going to continue on to that Myself. I live in Utah. I do have a wonderful family. We have three beautiful daughters who are growing up, and every time I come home it's like a little parade. We have lots of great times together. I've got a dog, and I do have a passion for dentistry, though I used to work in a dental office and know all the hardships that come with answering the phones, taking care of patients, doing treatment planning, doing the marketing, all of those things, and I have a background in marketing. I went to school for marketing at the University of Utah, and Doctor that's me, I'm Curtis Marshall, and so listen.
Speaker 2:I have a deep root to the state of Utah. I am a Delta high rabbit. I went to high school in Delta, utah.
Speaker 2:My sister graduated from University of Utah. We lived in Utah for about eight years when we first immigrated to the US in 1978. So I lived in Utah from 78 to 86. That's when I started at San Diego State, my freshman year. So I love Utah, I love the snow, I love the mountains. Beautiful state, man, beautiful state for sure. So you got involved with dental intel. After were you working at a dental office and then you just had the opportunity to work with dental intel, or how did that job come about?
Speaker 1:Yeah, great question. So when working in dental office I was able to really help that office grow by getting new patients. In fact we are getting like 400 new patients a month and what I was doing.
Speaker 1:I had 400 per month. That's a dream man. Well, it was a lot of hard work. Yeah, I bet I had multiple spreadsheets on how much I was spending, where it was going, how many people were responding, how many were calling all of that before they came into the office. And then I had numbers on the back end of saying this is how much was produced. But I could never really find out what was happening together. So I bought a domain called dentalintelcom and said you know what? I want to make these two things come together so I know what to do, rather than doing all this work on the back end and hopefully trying to figure it out. And so, as a founding member I'm one of the founding members here at dental intel we created pulling the data and information from the software to tell offices hey, this is what to do today, not so much on hey, here's what happened in the past, but here's what to do today.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. I did not know that you bought the actual domain dentalintelcom. You're the man, bro. Yeah, quite a few years ago, right, ten years? Yeah, has it been ten years.
Speaker 1:We've been running close to ten years, just a little under, and I got that back in like 2007, 2008, right around there, well nobody really believed in the internet at that time.
Speaker 2:Right, it's a fad. Look, let's fast forward. Let's fast forward to today. What are you searing? We're going to talk a little bit more about the action items, but what do you see right now that you feel is the main problems with dental practices? I'm sure you've talked to hundreds of offices and maybe thousands by now. Right, what is the main thing that you see in dental offices and their issues that they're having?
Speaker 1:You know, what's crazy is that it changes. It changes not just within the industry, but by office per office, which is why the information, knowing what's happening in your practice is super important, because what's happening in your practice isn't necessarily happening down the street from you or even across the country, but there is something happening right now. Before COVID started, it was more on hey, let's, we want to look at getting new patients and getting more production. That was like a main focus During COVID. We are seeing a big issue of just getting patients to come in Patients, not new patients, just patients in general.
Speaker 1:Right now, what we're seeing are fairly similar across the country is that we're having issues with staff, meaning getting team members in there, not staff, the staff that's working but getting team members to come in, new team members to come in, as well as getting patients to come in consistently, so they're coming in less frequently. So those are the two things that we're seeing right now, which is kind of interesting Coming in less frequently, patients are, and then team members. Getting new team members has been difficult.
Speaker 2:Which is interesting because I think software like dental intel can be a very valuable asset when you're short staff.
Speaker 2:Right, Because it shortcut a lot of the A lot of the metrics and the discussions as far as where you currently are sitting.
Speaker 2:I think one of the things that doctors miss on is the potential of software and technology in their business, the ability for them to maximize the software. In this case, dental intel, could be very powerful when you're short stuff. You know, rescheduling hygiene, for example, rescheduling active patients, how many people are leaving the practice without being scheduled and becoming inactive. I mean, these are all very valuable metrics I believe that the doctor needs to pay attention to, and I know we're going to start a master class here next month together and I'm really excited about it because I can tell you we have about 18 action items and every single one of those action items is something that I didn't pay attention to in the first so many years of my career. And at the end of the day you know, I'm a dentist I want to produce I don't care about business metrics, right, it's just numbers. Who needs to pay attention to that? And 20 years later, I can tell you it's costing millions of dollars to think that way.
Speaker 1:Well, not only that, but team members too Excuse me patient care, patient care. That's where it's really hurting is. That's what you're missing out on, and I'd like to actually do a little story with that, if you don't mind, sure. So my wife, we bought a Tesla, right, love it. My wife was driving it just like she drove every other car. Right. Put it in reverse, put on the gas back up, put on the brake, put it in reverse and forward, go forward. Put on the brake and stop sign, wait for this light to work, and all that right.
Speaker 1:Well, the car itself has some amazing software that she wasn't using, even though we had it. It was sitting there, it was able to be used, and this software is able to make it so that she doesn't even have to put on the brake, so she doesn't have to move forward, she doesn't even have to turn. The software is automatically able to look and see what's going on, so that it will drive safely with her in the car. She didn't know about it as soon as she figured it out. It was scary at first. Yeah right, it was scary to like turn it on and get moving.
Speaker 1:And well, I'm not used to the steering wheel moving on its own. I'm not used to it breaking, so I need to put on a break. But what now, doctor? She loves it so much she turns on autopilot. Take me to my daughter's school. It takes her there. There's a few areas that she knows that she needs to take over the wheel a little bit, but it does most of the driving. It's 2022. And if we can have a car take us from our house to our kids school and back, we should be able to have software also help us with our jobs within the dental office, so that we aren't doing it. We can do the things that are more important, rather than the things that can be done by software. What do you think about that?
Speaker 2:Exactly Listen. I can tell you that to really transition from being a dentist I'm speaking from my experience, from being a dentist and becoming a way becoming a little bit more of an intermediate and then becoming a little bit more advanced and understanding all the parts of dentistry as a business outside of the patient's mouth and clinical dentistry it took me a good probably three to five years to really have a mindset shift of allowing that part of my business to become the front of part of my business. In other words, I opened up a dental practice so I can practice dentistry, yeah Right, and I became a CEO of my own business, paying a couple of grant. But the reality is is through a lot of failures and pain, I realized that I actually opened up a business to run a business that I will practice dentistry in. That right, there is a game changer.
Speaker 2:The problem is is we don't have the business acumen to understand that as soon as we open up a practice, we want to just go and go, go, go on clinical dentistry in the practice, produce, produce, produce. There's no systems, there's no culture, there is really no metrics. No, looking at KPIs, hiring accountants is just hopefully I don't have to pay taxes, and that's how a lot of dental practices start. And, on top of that, even before that, when you open up the business, the contracts that you sign for building out the space and all of that there's a lot of mistakes that could be made there before you even open the door as well. And so that's the challenge and I think this is why I'm so excited about the masterclass is because I want that mindset shift to be I am a business owner that is running a practice, a dental practice, as opposed to I'm a dentist. I have a dental business. And if you take that mindset, then what becomes valuable is you realize that there are many times you might be overstaffed, right? So if your associate is producing $1,500 and you're giving two team members to that associate and you're filling two chairs at $1,500, or two associates, it's all garbage, it's not doing any good, it's just a lot of noise in the business.
Speaker 2:If you have a space where you have eight operatories and you're practicing at a three, you're wasting rent and lease and space, right, and these are the things that you have to strategize towards. Whatever you, wherever you are, if you have an ice speed. From experience, I had three practices. Well, I opened one in 2017 and 1718 19, with three practices, and I was having a hard time getting associates to work and produce it was. It got to a point that, towards my last year, I couldn't even go to one of the practices because I couldn't even get there because of how I was scheduled. So these are the issues that Dennis deal with, although you know I'm busy. I'll open up another practice. No, you know, open five days, open six days, open seven days, right, instead of opening up another location.
Speaker 1:So, anyway, what I like about that is like, just like you said and I was mentioning at the beginning, is every dentist and location is very different. But if you truly understand the business of dentistry, the business of being a business owner, you then doctor can do whatever you want, whether you want to do more dentistry, you want to open more locations, you want to get more team members, you want to do more different types of dentistry like implants. It's a lot easier to do that If you look at it by the business itself and not dentistry. You can make your future happen the way you want it to and not let the business itself dictate what you should be doing.
Speaker 2:And that's the key is getting more of a business knowledge and understanding, and as much as we focus on continuing education and clinical skills to learn implants and cosmetic dentistry and there's nothing wrong with that, I'm a huge fan of all of that but we also have to put that time in to become a smarter business owner. So let's talk about some of these action items. Curtis, there's I think, 18 of them. Pick and choose what you want to talk about. Maybe we can talk about three or four of the top ones that well, again, they're all important, but talk to me a little bit about some of those action items For the masterclass yeah, for the masterclass. What are they? What are some of the action items?
Speaker 1:Getting more visits, because you cannot do dentistry without getting butts in the chair. Like I mentioned, I used to bring in 400 new patients a month, right, well, that got us a lot of visits, right. But if you're getting 400 new patients a month, you should be getting multiple new chairs per year. We were not. So, although we were achieving one action item, which was to get more visits, we were not achieving other action items, for example, second action item. Another action item is to increase what's called production per visit. So you're now doing more production when they're in the chair so that you can take better care of their mouth. If I come into the office and you tell me, curtis, you have three cavities, and I only say, yet I only accept one of those, not only are you getting less dollars per visit, but you are all my me as a person. I'm not getting the oral health care that I need. Those are two really powerful ones, dr, that are really, really influential More action item getting more visits and action item getting more production on those visits.
Speaker 2:You know I had a conversation with Travis Campbell we were talking on in one of the masterclass is about variable cost and the discussion really was when you have a patient in the chair and you're working on a quadrant and to your point let's say 29, 30 and 31 need work and they're all in the same quadrant you numb the patient one time, get the entire quadrant numb.
Speaker 2:There should be no reason why you're not doing all three teeth at the same time. The amount of time it takes you to work on number 30 and at 29 and 31 into it at the same time is minimal to do the second and third tooth versus scheduling the patient just for one tooth. So that component as far as production per visit can be a huge asset in understanding that. Get in there and treat all three teeth at the same time. Don't be doing the you know one at a time type thing type thing, because many times the patient says, hey, I don't want to invest in the other. You know, I don't want to pay for the other two teeth right now or I can't afford it or whatever it is. You got to get that team to be able to convert those cases for you and get that production number up right 100% and that's what's the typical production number per visit. What is the doctor looking for for that?
Speaker 1:So you got production per visit by hygienist or by doctor and by office. Those are three different, separate ones for your location. If you're, take all the visits that you saw today, take your production and divide those two together. You should be above 300. That's your production per visit. For the office itself. You should be above 300. Really, to be honest, closer to 400. Okay, okay, that's including your two tooth checks that are free. You're adding up every appointment.
Speaker 1:Do not cheat this number, because this really helps to know what. Because if you have a butt in the chair, you cannot fill it with another button. The chair Only one person, dr Sparion, only one person can sit in this chair. Someone else can sit on my lap, someone else can sit on the back of here, but only one person can sit in this chair at a time, and so when they're sitting in it, do not discount them, even if you're not charging them for this production per visit. Really, make sure you're counting those, because that's going to help you to know where to improve, even if your number is low. If it's below 200, that's okay. That's where you are.
Speaker 2:So, in other words, if you have 10 patients coming in at 300, you've produced $3,000 for the day as an office for that day correct, Correct, or if you do the opposite.
Speaker 1:you saw 10 visits, you produce 3,000, you divide the two and you got 300. Yep.
Speaker 2:So in a situation of $300, I would assume that the doctor wants to see at least probably 25, 30 patients a day, including hygiene, to be able to have a $6,000 or $7,000 day right.
Speaker 1:In that scenario, absolutely and in every yeah.
Speaker 2:So then in that case also, you're probably looking at obviously potentially four or five chairs in the office, minimum to be able to get 25, 30 patients in the chair. It's interesting how you kind of look at that, because doctors always look at chairs and visits and how much a chair should produce a year, for example. Right, so I have four operatories. What is the max potential of my office? Well, at $300, it could be different than if you write $600. But if you have less number of visits you got me thinking about all this stuff If you got less butts in the chair, right, it affects your overall 100%, 100%.
Speaker 1:And you but you know what some people are saying. Well, I can produce with one button one chair. I can produce ten thousand dollars on that one person. Well, yes, but that's in it. You can't do that on on all four chairs For visit. You can't do four visits per day, consistently, every single day. Ten thousand dollars per visit, right, you're unable to do that because you need to be able to Diagnose that's a somebody coming in and you're not doing ten thousand dollars when they're in the chair. In that visit you got to be able to do follow-ups, you got to be able to do cleanings, all these other things. You want to see what the average is. And then if you slightly increase the, the rule of Compounding like compounding interest, if you turn that up just a little bit by 20, 30, even $50, $60 of your production per visit, you are going to see a tremendous increase of production.
Speaker 2:Which is interesting, because what you want is, if you look at that number, you want more butts in the chair. So that's one way you can look at your marketing and see what that. What's that bringing you right? I mean, that might be one angle. If you understand your visits, you understand your production per visit and you understand how many chairs you have and what your numbers are and you want that number to increase. That's one angle is to get more butts in the chairs. Increase your marketing dollars and I tell you what a lot of doctors are not huge fan of marketing, but but that might be one way to accomplish that. Tell me a couple more of these action items that we're going to cover in the master class. I mean that one, I think, is a very important one. Order a couple other important ones.
Speaker 1:Visits. Both of those relate to production. You cannot produce unless you have those butts in the chair. More visits you also can't produce unless you are. You can increase production if you increase your production per visit. I like to go to one now that we all really want that's more green, more dollars, right, sure so? Actually, we spoke. You and I have been good friends for a long time. We spoke long time ago and I remember you saying something to the fact of Curtis. I produced a million dollars. Why did I not collect a million dollars? Right, yeah, we hear this quite often. I Produced ten thousand dollars. Why did I not collect ten thousand dollars? My front desk they they are not doing what they're supposed to when we look at the data. Your mom came into the office. You produced five thousand dollars on your mom. How much did you charge your mom? I Hope you charge for zero.
Speaker 2:I Get it, I get it right.
Speaker 1:Or you have your patient came in. They had Delta dental, right. You charge them a thousand dollars for a crown, but you're only able to collect 500, right? So whose fault is that? It's not a fault, it's not. Oh, how dare you, front desk. Or why didn't I collect my full dollars I produced.
Speaker 1:This action item is called collection Percentage, not how much did you collect collection percentage. If you know what your collection percentages, watch what can happen. If I know, dr Sparring, if I know that I collect, let's make numbers easy for everyone. Hopefully nobody's collecting this. But let's say I collect 50 percent, my collection percentage is 50 percent and I want to. I want to collect this year. I want to collect 500,000.
Speaker 1:How much do I need to produce A million? It's that easy. You now know. You can say I want this many dollars to be collected. If you know your collection percentage, you then automatically know how much you need to be producing. And if you know how much you need producing a million dollars. And let's say let's pull up a calculator I'm just gonna pull it up on my. I know you're not gonna see it, but one million dollars and one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. That's how much I want to produce and I'm going to divide that by my production per visit is 400. I Now need 2,500 visits. You automatically know that. Divide that by 12. Team I Want you in. I want everybody in the office to focus on getting 208 visits a month. If we get 208 visits a month and we keep our production per visit the same and we keep our collection percentage the same, we will hit 500,000. Without it, it's gonna happen. Does that make sense?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. The problem is these discussions are not being had in dental practice because we don't have the data and information.
Speaker 1:All we have is how much did you produce, how much did you collect and how many new patients? That's all we have from our softwares.
Speaker 2:This is what we're gonna cover doctors. In our master class I was man. Hey, you know what? I Gotta go look at the. I got dental intel. I'm gonna go look at that. You know, I'm listening man.
Speaker 1:I'm listening.
Speaker 2:You know it's good stuff yeah it's definitely good stuff. But you know what, why don't we learn a little bit more about dental intel right now? I think it's a good time, absolutely.
Speaker 3:Dental Intelligence is the world's number one software for tracking, analyzing, managing and growing your dental practice. Before your day even begins, dental Intelligence is already hard at work. It tracks everything, then tells you where you can get better. It finds hidden revenue, fills your schedule, improves patient care and so much more. When you get in, dental Intelligence tells you which patients need to be called and why. It's all done for you so nothing ever falls through the cracks. No reports to run, tons of save time. It analyzes your schedule, tracks your production, your goals. It tells you when patients have unscheduled treatment or are past your balances. It remembers everything so you don't have to. It finds opportunities then tells you about them. Dental Intelligence sees what people can't always analyzing, looking for red flags and helping you get the most out of every single day. All the guesswork. Now you can see what's actually happening in your practice anytime you want Actionable metrics, financial and performance tracking. The list goes on and on. Imagine the compounding effect of doing everything right every single day.
Speaker 2:This is awesome. Look, curtis and Dental Intelligence have partnered with LoveBytesDental and if you want to learn more about the master class or LoveBytesDental, feel free just to send me an email and we'll fill you in. We're launching next month. Curtis is going to be joining us for these. Our classes are going to be weekly Tuesdays at 4 pm Pacific time and Curtis is going to join us for a couple of those sessions every month. We're going to get them started probably either late April or sometime early May to mid May. So we're excited about that and, curtis, I appreciate you coming on as well. I mean, this is awesome.
Speaker 2:We started we had a podcast together three years ago. I wanted to actually I was looking to kind of put this up. Maybe I'll put it up in the comments so people can see how we both lived three years ago. But Curtis has been great and I'm glad to kind of circle back with him and get involved with him and his team. So we're pumped up, man.
Speaker 2:I think the content we just shared right now the first 30 minutes. You know it's interesting because sometimes doctors sit down they say, okay, I'm going to work on my business and they just don't know where to start. So then within five minutes they get bored because they don't know where to go, where to start. They don't have any direction, and then they start either going on social media or looking into their clinical notes, and then it just becomes clinical again. So the amount of time they spend working on their business is so limited because they just don't have any guidance or direction. I think the masterclass is going to be awesome. So thanks, curtis, for helping us with that process as we move forward.
Speaker 1:You're so welcome. I'm literally looking forward to. One thing I just want to say about this masterclass Is that anybody who joins it, you will get action items and with those action items, guarantee your patients are going to get more care and you're going to get the results you want. Not what you're the practice, the business sorry, not what the business tells you that you should be doing, but you're going to get the results that you want.
Speaker 2:So that's awesome and you know we're going to have some data reports going into those classes and we're going to share that with a small group setting virtually, which is, which is really exciting. Tell us what's coming up for dental Intel Curtis as far as the next two years. What are some of the things that you guys are working on right now? That's very important.
Speaker 1:We've already started it, but it's ultimately going to be the Tesla. We are going to be the Tesla, not the last software you buy, because you're going to have other softwares, but we're going to be the Tesla. You're going to say, hey, take my practice, get my patients to come in for me, get my patients to accept more treatment, get my patients to pay their bill. By you telling it what to do, the software itself will go to your patients and help you take care of the patients that are not in your office, so that you and your team can hold the hands of the patients that are in your office. You can give them hugs, you can explain to them exactly what's going on. You can take, get rid of the decay out of their mouth. You can do that. Let the software get those butts in the chair for you. That's the future is it's automatically going to be automatic.
Speaker 2:Well, look, we talked about visits and production per visit, and those two factors are the key. And if you can get a autopilot scenario where software is bringing those patients in, I don't know if I'll ever have 400 new patients a month, but I can tell you that it certainly can help my practice, that's for sure. No, that's, that's awesome. What's the anticipated timeframe for this advancement into the software?
Speaker 1:We already have it for payments the first software not just to collect payments but to actually have a workflow of saying, send a payment request via text to my patients when they're past 30 days. If they don't pay it, automatically send another one in seven days, automatically, do it and keep on doing it until they get a payment, and we're seeing tremendous results from that. There's also, right now, manual scenarios where you can select the patients that you want to send them a link to schedule and they're going to there. We're seeing a higher scheduling because I'll tell you what we're on the this podcast right now.
Speaker 1:I've had a few people call me. I can't pick it up, but if they were to text me and say, hey, I need this done, I can do it really quickly when we're done with this podcast. Right, I'm going to tell you to be honest, I'm not going to call these people back until I have enough time and can talk to them. Right, texting is the future and so we are going to be that. We're going to change these manual scenarios to become automatic.
Speaker 2:Well, I can tell you personally I hardly check my machine. Now. On my phone I tell people to text me if they want to get a hold of me. Sometimes it takes me three days to check the voice messages on my cell phone. So texting is the future for sure. Look, I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about your other programs with local med and Modento. I hope you don't mind, but can you talk to us a little bit about each one of those and how that can be beneficial with collaborating with dental intel?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the local med portion is a company. That's amazing software there's now. They were the first software to be like a calendar or an open table type solution for dental offices, where you would send a link to your patients. They click on it and it automatically gets put into your Eaglesoft open dental denture whatever you have, it automatically gets posted into those softwares so that you don't have to talk to them. They see the openings, they select it. A lot of doctors and offices were a little scared. They're like I don't want my patients to have full reign, but remember my wife driving the Tesla. She did not want the car to do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Until she figured out oh, this actually works a lot better and I can. I can do other things while while the car takes me to, to my school, to my kids school Same thing. You can set up the settings for this to be whatever you want and it will do what you're telling it to do. It it the software should do what you want it to do, not. You do what the software wants you to do, and that's the. That's the thing.
Speaker 2:That's the thing that I think. Also, a lot of times there's not enough time put into the onboarding process by the team and the doctors to customize it for their practice and it just becomes a little bit more of a templated version of what's kind of standardized as far as the onboarding process. I think team members and doctors need to spend a little bit more time in customizing it for their specific practice and their schedule. I think that's really important and I tell you I don't know and I could be kind of exaggerating here, but generally speaking, most dental practices struggle with missed calls. They have a really hard time in not answering the phone and so there's so much effort being put on into. I talk about this in my presentations. I talk about the four attrition in a dental practice. One of them is marketing strategy, one of them is lead management, the other is the sales process and number four is negotiation. But your marketing strategy can be great, but if you're not managing the leads properly, then you got a lot of handoff issues Right.
Speaker 1:Dr Sparring, that is the perfect scenario there. Why are we missing those phone calls? One of two reasons, excuse me. There's two big reasons why we're missing those calls. There's a lot of others, but there's two big ones. Number one is we are already on the phone with someone else and we can't pick up the phone. We can't say hey, patient, sorry, can I put you on hold for a second. I got someone else calling. You're not going to say I hope you don't say that, Right, Right, you got to take care of this patient, or the patient who's calling in, the first one. They're trying to schedule an appointment, and so now, when someone else calls in, you can't take that call either. Software is now saying hey, this second reason we're at the patient calling in to make an appointment. No, here's the link make your own appointment, I don't need to talk to you. For whatever reason, we're calling a patient to schedule them. Don't need to call them anymore. Select all the patients you want to send something, to send them a message. Let them schedule.
Speaker 1:So now you pick up the phone.
Speaker 2:So let me tell you this and this is kind of where I was going with it, which is you hit on it, but if the phone is ringing and if you can identify that phone, call the phone number right and it's not being picked up, on the third ring they get a text that's got the local meds link and thank you for calling. We're currently busy, but here is the link. You can go ahead and feel free to schedule your appointment. There's phone trees that you can create that have those kind of scenarios and that's one way in my head. I'm just kind of brainstorming as we're talking, and that's a great way to attend to that call, because you might be spending thousands of dollars on the marketing strategy and they're doing their part.
Speaker 2:It's just that you're not able to manage the calls that are coming in, and that's the rub, isn't it? Is that a lot of times they're talking the doctor says the phone ringing enough. Well, yeah, but you just got to have your team to pick it up. So I think that's a huge, huge problem. I mean, that rub between the marketing and the lead is the problem and again, as I talk about it in my presentations, that's exactly a very important aspect and you can grow your business. I mean you want the visits, right? You know you're at $300, just pick up the phone, get that patient in. What about Modento? Tell me a little bit about Modento.
Speaker 1:Modento. I'm just going to be honest. It's what every other patient communications wishes that they were. There's multiple patient communications, which is like the reminders right, they're reminding you what's going on, they're asking for you to fill out a form. They're doing all these things right. Smile reminders was the first one to really come out and break into this market and they did a fantastic job. Finally, I can get a text and I can say that I'm confirming my appointment so that the dental office doesn't have to call them up and confirm, right. And all the other practice management softwares have something a little different, but they're all virtually the same.
Speaker 1:When we bought Modento that's another software that we purchased. It was created by two wonderful people named Drew and Carl. Love them both. But this software, when you look at it, when I first saw it, I'm like, okay, another patient communication system, that's great, we got one. Let me see it. It is doctor.
Speaker 1:This software is now automatically able to sense oh, curtis has not filled out. We don't have the information for his email. So when I'm sending him a reminder, it's also going to say, by the way, and without the team doing this, curtis, also to help us better, uh, being contact with you. What's your email? I fill it out and it doesn't just send an email to the office manager to manually put in. It automatically fills in the slot on my profile inside your software of saying the email is now done. It has all these forms that can be customized and it automatically populates it. Once again, getting to that Tesla mentality there's not many others out there like that. I was blown away and we get, whenever we do a demo, people are their jaws dropped to the floor. It's a cool product for patient communication.
Speaker 2:Yeah and um.
Speaker 2:One of the things I talk as well about is that you don't want to be the practice today that sees the patient once every 12 months and has absolutely no communication with the patient in that process. Today people are looking for relationships and a relationship is not only when the doc, when the patient and the doctor and the, you know, in the clinical room or the patient is in the office. There's so much you can do outside, when the patient's outside of your office to build a relationship so they can stay loyal to you and they can still, you know, come they could refer to you, they can. They. There's so much they can do if they feel like you care. And it's not always just that interaction and dental practice. And I think that's that's also missing link A lot of times with doctors that they just don't communicate with their active list and what happens is that the back door opens, so you might get an influx of new patients, but your back door is open, so you might get 50 new patients, but you're losing 70 in the back door.
Speaker 1:Back door is happening to me.
Speaker 2:That's why I yeah, and, and so you know, are you really growing? You're excited about the 50. You don't know about the 70.
Speaker 1:So you're losing yeah.
Speaker 2:So you're actually minus 20 for the month. You're at best stagnant, but your business is decaying or it's dropping. These are things that you have to pay attention to, and I think patient communication while the patient is not in your office is a huge aspect and a huge way to close that back door.
Speaker 1:Amen, it really is. And, like I said, bit more visits. You can either get more new patients or keep your existing patients and have them do more visits. Which do you want?
Speaker 2:And the cost of new patient acquisition. You already got existing patients right, so if it's costing you three to $500 to get a new patient, just attend to the patient that's already in your business. Well, I tell you what it's. I wish I knew all this stuff, at least even 10 years ago. Forget 20 years ago, 20 years ago.
Speaker 1:So, dr Sparrow, we might want to. I don't know how much time you want, but if you're spending $300 to $500 for a new patient and you're only doing two visits and then you're losing them and your production per visit is two, 300, let's just say $300. You're only making $300. Two visits times 300, it's 600. You spent 300 to get the new patient, that's 50% taken away, and then you got 50% of that production is overhead. If you have 50% of that production is overhead, that's 300. And you spent 300 to get the new patients and you're only having two visits because you're losing them, you have zero profits.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, that's what they call dental noise, right? Dental noise, just because your business is noisy doesn't mean it's profitable. And boy, man, that actually gave me some goosebumps, man, I don't know, but it's so true and so powerful and it's just. This is the business mindset that dentists need to have. This is the depth that you need to dive into and look at the end of the day, it helps you, it helps your business, it helps your team members, their families, your family. So there's a lot writing on that component.
Speaker 3:And.
Speaker 2:I'm excited about the masterclass, so let's get.
Speaker 1:if you're out there, let's go. Yes, so look, here's the thing.
Speaker 2:Follow me on Facebook, dr Shaheen Safarian or Love Bites Dental, on Facebook, youtube, instagram, linkedin, all over the internet. As far as that goes, we are going to make announcements. As far as our launch, we're planning on launching probably by April 10th to April 15th, and I'm pumped, man, I'm pumped, so we're going to take deep dives. What we're going to do is we're going to, once you sign up for the masterclass, the team at DI is going to contact your, your office, they're going to download some information from your practice management software and once we have that, we'll have access to it during our masterclass. And then Curtis is going to teach the class himself and look at the data reports of all the different practices that are part of the masterclass, and he's going to take a deep dive with you and help you better understand the metrics and the depth of some of the things that we're talking about here today and help you grow your business and be more attentive to the metrics. So, curtis, a couple more minutes, my friend, anything you want to add to that.
Speaker 1:It's all yours. When performance is measured, performance improves. Plain and simple. It doesn't matter what it is. When you water a plant, it grows. When you listen to your children, they become closer to you. When you do anything, when performance, when you measure it, it improves, because we're humans. We're human beings that have a brain that works and we can figure out some small things. But when you take that measurement and you're improving and you add software that's been developed to help you to get your accomplisher goals, you can get there a lot quicker. Another great example of that is in hiking. You can measure as much as you want, but if you get the technology that's out there to have nice shoes that work to keep you warm, to clamp into the mountain faster, you will get to the top quicker. You don't need those things. You can still get there. It's just going to be more difficult. But when performance is measured, it improves. That's what I want to leave with.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. You know what Is Lehigh, the new Silicon Valley? I just want to know. There's so much tech out there Silicon slopes, that's right. I know. I was actually in Lehigh a little over a year ago. Tech is booming in that Silicon slope Pretty cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Good comment there, ashley. If anybody can see that there's a good comment in the comments below Ashley Bass says what's measured improves and what's measured track publicly and discuss daily as a team improves drastically. It's true Well said Thank you.
Speaker 1:Here's one more thing on that 75 hard. Whoever's doing 75 hard, I'm super envious of you. You're doing a great job. I don't have the willpower to do 75 hard, but one of the things that they say is take a picture. It's a help.
Speaker 2:Yes, 75 days. Right, it's a 75 day workout. I've heard about it. I don't know much about it.
Speaker 1:One of the things that they say to do is take a picture of yourself every day. If they suggest that you share it with other people, by doing that you're being held accountable, just like what Ashley says. You will accomplish that 75 a lot quicker if you do that thing, and that's in help, that's in business, it's in personal development. Any that same philosophy works everywhere. Awesome.
Speaker 2:Well, we're going to end with that man, 75 hard, but take a picture of myself and see where I go. I got to read into that a little bit. But, curtis, thank you so much. Man, I appreciate your time, excited about the process of joining the master class and having you teach the doctors grow and how do they sign up for master class. Well, what we're going to do is we're going to have a launch. So what we'll do? We haven't launched yet. We're kind of beta testing right now and we're going to. We're at a launch pad, if I can use that term, but we'll have the links. They'll just need to follow us on social media. They can email me as well, but our launch is going to be. The actual time that they can sign up will be after we launch, right after around April 10th to April 15th. We're still not quite there, but we're very close, so just follow us and they'll have all the information for that. Curtis, thank you so much. My friend Love it and we'll be seeing you very soon, man.
Speaker 1:Sounds great. Thanks, Dr.
Speaker 2:Thanks, buddy. All right, that was awesome. There was a lot of valuable content in there that Curtis just shared, and I hope you doctors took some notes and are going to take action. I hope this doesn't go in one ear and out the other, because then you're just going to stay the same. What a couple of things you could do right away. Go look at your visits and go look at your back door. Don't get excited about the new patients. See how many people are leaving your practice every day, so, or in every month. With that said, I'm Dr Shaheen Safarian. Thank you for joining us at another episode of Shaheen's Corner, and we'll see you very soon, thank you.