#250 17 Roadblocks to Growth: The Real Reason Your Dental Practice Isn't Growing

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In this episode, Gary Bird breaks down the 17 hidden reasons dental practices fail to grow, and how to fix them with proven systems. If you’re struggling with dental practice growth, patient acquisition, missed calls, low Google reviews, or poor case acceptance, this episode reveals the operational blind spots holding you back.

Learn how to increase new patient flow, improve dental marketing performance, optimize scheduling, and boost treatment acceptance with simple but powerful strategies. Gary shares real data on why most dental offices lose revenue through missed opportunities and how to build scalable systems that drive consistent growth. Whether you’re a startup or an established practice, this episode is packed with actionable insights to help you grow your dental practice faster.

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Dental Marketing Goat, the go-to podcast for dentists who want to grow faster, market smarter and build practices that thrive in today’s competitive landscape. Hosted by Gary Bird, the Dental Marketing Goat himself and founder of SMC National - recently named Best Dental Marketing Agency by over 60,000 dental professionals. Each episode unpacks the real strategies, marketing frameworks and operational shifts that high-performing practices use to attract more patients and increase production. Whether you're a solo practitioner or scaling a DSO, you’ll learn how to align your marketing, team and systems to drive predictable growth.

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Transcript

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So in today's episode, we're going to talk about 17 things that prevent dental offices from growing. Now, these are not going to be your normal things. These are going to be things that typically don't get thought about a lot. They don't get a ton of attention because you're focusing on things that are right in front of you. As a dental practice owner, you're going to focus on the fires in front of you, of course. But there's fires going on all around the practice that usually are not visible. And when left unchecked, they will prevent you from growing. So today I'm just going to give you these 17 things. And the good news is I have solutions to all of these. Whatever one of these that you're stuck on, let me know. And I have a resource that will help you fix it. It'll give you a step-by-step with an SOP and uh they're free. Doesn't cost anything. So let's jump into it. Number one, the thing that holds offices back from growing is low Google review count compared to your competition. Now, a lot of dentists misunderstand this because they go, Well, Gary, I have a five-star rating, and that's great. You should have a five-star rating, or you should have a 4.6-star rating, right? And that's awesome. However, that is not what drives patients in necessarily. So if I'm going to look for a restaurant, or you're going to go look for a good restaurant, and you do a Google search, and you see an Italian restaurant with 500 five-star Google reviews. Sounds pretty good. You want Italian food? They got a bunch of Google reviews. That sounds great. But right next to it is an Italian restaurant with 2,000 Google reviews. Five star. Which one is better? You're probably going to pick the 2,000 Google reviews. What's important to understand is your mission on Google, your number one job, you need to be trying to be the number one rated dentist on Google within your little circle. Now it's not possible for everybody because I know there's some markets that are completely saturated, but you need to be fighting for that. And you need to be moving in that direction. Super, super, super important. And then once you get there, once you get to the number one spot, you need to fight to keep it because other people are going to be coming for your heads, okay? Number two, the second thing that prevents people from growing the way that they want is low quality images on their website. I say this all the time. Offices don't want to spend 500 bucks or a thousand bucks to take new pictures of their office or their team or themselves. And so they use stock photos, they have one grainy image of themselves, and they expect that to perform at the best top end of you know everything. In some markets, it's really hard to get that to perform. And it's hard to know which markets that's going to be, but typically it's gonna be in the ones that are more competitive. You you need to be willing to take better images. Now, something you can do, a little hack around this, is you can take some of your old photos and you can put them into nano banana. If you if you're like, what the junk is that? Gemini, the AI product, you can put the photos in and you have to act, you have to be very specific about what you're asking for. And as of right now, that doesn't hurt anything on your SEO. Now that may change in the future. Google might say, oh, these are AI generated images, but you want the AI just to touch them up a bit. You don't want to make them super exaggerated or anything like that. You can have them touch them up a bit, okay? So that's number two. Number three, 35% missed calls during normal business hours. The average dentist isn't growing because they're losing 35% of their calls during normal business hours. That is average. Some offices are dropping 50% of their calls, some are at 20, but the average is 35%. Gotta get that fixed. All right, number next. Oh, by the way, AI solves that. I have a link for that right down below. It's like two 300 bucks, 299 bucks. You'll never miss a call again. It's kind of a no-brainer and it converts better than your team. All right, number next uncompetitive cost on exam or cleaning because you want quality patience. Listen, there's no great patient with a ton of money that's like, oh, you have a $500 cleaning, I want to go there. If you don't understand this, I'm sorry, you just don't understand business. It's very simple. Now I understand from your side of the table, it's like, well, if I just give away a free cleaning and I go run it to the homeless community, yeah, you're gonna have problems. It's not gonna work well for you. But if you're targeting high-income areas, this approach of getting people in on what's called a lost leader, where you're losing money on it and you know you're losing money on it, which every major business does, even the luxury ones, you get people in on a lost leader and then you get them to your profit centers. In your practice, there are profit centers, things that you make the most amount of money for the least amount of time spent. You gotta get patience there to be able to make that work. Oil changes are probably the best example. You go and you you get oil changes on your car. You're not gonna pay $300, $400, $500 for an oil change. You're just not. You're not cheap, you're not bad. It's just you're not gonna pay that much. Now that's what they're probably worth. Do you think a mechanic makes money on a $99 oil change with the oil, the labor, the insurance, the rent, the workers' comp, etc., etc., etc. Do you think they make money on a $99 oil change? Of course not. But they gotta get cars up on the rack to find the problems. Their profit centers is all the stuff that breaks inside your car and tires and all those kind of things. That's where they make a lot of money. They don't make money on the oil change. It's okay to lose money on a couple things to get the right people in. If you don't understand this, you do not understand business. I'm telling you, go to Chat GPT, go type in loss leaders, and go type in some of the most successful businesses in the world, luxury businesses in the world. People understand this, okay? All right, number next. Uh, your front desk isn't trained properly and weeds out new patients on the phones, and they are rude. Just call your own office. Call 10 dunn all offices in your area. You will be shocked at how number one, how rude people are. And I get it. Like the front desk is often busy and they gotta, they're they're overburdened with a lot of things. So I understand that. Like they're they come across very short. Um, but then also they just weed people out. It almost seems like they don't want new patients at the office because there's really no it, there's really no advantage for them. It's just extra work. And most dental offices do not, most dental owners do not realize this is happening. You say, Gary, how do you know that it's happening? I listen to thousands and thousands and thousands of calls every single month. We have over, I think, 11 million calls that we trained our AI agent on over the years, just new patient calls. So like some huge number. I forget the exact number. I'll I'll get that pulled up for you, but it's it's in the millions, millions of new patients that we've trained on. This is common. It's common. And then the office blames the marketing for not performing. It's almost comical. All right, number next. Number six, no accountability to the front desk on how they answer the phone and how quickly they respond. Is a big one. You should be every week, if you want your team to perform well, every week or every at the minimum every month, where you sit down and you go over the calls that they lost, the new patient calls that they lost that didn't schedule, and that they they mishandled, and you review them with them. That's it. Now, most dental leaders will not do this, they refuse to do it. And they don't want to hurt their team's feelings, or they don't know they want to be confrontational, whatever, whatever. You have to do this. The reason for that is your team needs to know that you're serious about following the scripting because this is how you're gonna grow. The average dental office only converts 50% of their new patient calls, so you have to fix that. All right, number next, lost control of your schedule, so you only have healthy patients coming through your hygiene, and no room for new patients that actually need dentistry. So this is the good dentist dilemma. You fix all your patients' problems, your hygiene schedule is packed out. All the hygiene patients are coming in, you've already done all the work, they don't need anything from you. They love you, but they're not they're not doing any dentistry, they don't need anything. And new patients call who need a boatload of dentistry, and they can't get in for a month. So then they end up no showing at a in like a crazy high rate, and you can't grow. So you have to be able to create block scheduling to get those new patients in right away. You have to. You can you will not grow if your average wait time is 30 days. It's too long, it's too far out. By the time they make it in, you've lost a boatload of them. And then by the time you get them back for dentistry, you're two months removed from when they actually came in. It's a huge problem. All right, number next, average wait time is 28 days to come in. We just touched on that one, and you it's because you don't have availability. All right, that's the industry average is 28 days. 28 days for a new patient. All right, number next, you look down on your competition because they they learned business tools you haven't, but you discount their business skills because you look down on their clinical skills. I've seen this so often. I'm like, hey, doc, this office over here, beautiful office, great photos. They have 2,500 Google reviews. Like, this is where most people are going when they need a dentist. You're not it. Like, it doesn't look well, they're a chop shop. Okay, maybe that's true, but they figured out some things on the business side that you haven't figured out yet. Just it maybe they're the worst clinical dentist in the whole world ever to exist, but on the business side, they they did they're doing some things. We need to be able to separate the two and say, okay, what can I glean from the business side? I don't want to learn from them clinically, I understand, but I want to learn from the business side that they are doing well. All right, and and I can't tell you how many times I've had people, dentists, say that to me, and it's like, okay, great. I I have no idea because I'm not a dentist. I can't even tell. I am a dental marketer and I do understand business a little bit. I can tell that they got some some edge on you a little bit here. All right. Number next, when patients come in, you don't have clean handoffs. Really important on the patient journey, you have clean handoffs from front desk to hygiene to the doctor to the treatment coordinator, back to wherever they go, right? Whatever your your patient journey is, clean handoffs where the patient understands who's speaking to them, what their job is, and how the what the next step is and what how long it's going to take, and all those kind of things. Very, very important. All right. Number 11, you are always running behind and patients wait much longer than their appointment time. So whenever the appointment time is, that's when the patient should be coming back. Now, do you always have time to see them right away as the dentist? Of course not. There's you're you're you're you're like a living organism as these patients and treatment and hygiene and uh all these other things are going on, but you can make them feel like everything's running on track. Maybe you're gonna be running 15 minutes behind on their appointment, but you can get them into the chair. And that makes them feel like, oh, my appointment started rather than waiting in the lobby, right? All right. Number 12, there's rarely options for patients to get same-day treatment. This is a big problem. Nobody wants to come back to the dentist for multiple visits. No one in the whole world. Ever. No one's like, I'm looking forward to doing three dental visits for for this one problem that I have. If at all possible, you need to figure out how to do same-day dentistry. This is the expectation of the patient. This is the ex, it's just like same anything with you, do car mechanic. I had a fridge break recently. The guy had to come back two, three times. It's just like, uh each time I'm like, oh, they're gonna fix it this time. They don't, and it's very frustrating and it creates a very bad experience. If you can, and I know it's not always possible, but if you can, and people understand that it's not always possible, right? There's if the if the fridge guy comes and my fridge is broken, and he's like, hey, I gotta order these parts and come back another day. I understand that that you don't have this specific part in your van right at this moment. But at some point, if if you have to keep coming back and keep and and always everything's always like, wait, wait, wait, wait. Patients hate that. Patients hate it. So if you can, shorten that. If you can't, okay? All right, number next, you don't have patient financing offered to every patient because you're scared of the fees. If you offer patient financing to every single patient and lead with monthly payments, your collections will go up 30% right out of the gate. Test it. Check out our sponsors down below, Cherry. We got press special pricing to help with the fees and those kind of things. So far, every practice that I've worked with that has done this has absolutely crushed and they started collecting more money like right away. All right, number next, you don't reappoint your patients before they leave. This is a big problem. Like I thought we I thought everybody understood this. They don't. This is something that we track. You gotta reappoint every single patient to their next appointment before they walk out of the door. Do not wait. There should be no exceptions. This this is like something you cannot compromise on. All right, number next, you say things like, I'm not going to bonus my team. They should do it just because it's their job. I'm sorry, you're the problem. Okay, you're the problem. You don't you don't understand humans and human behavior. All right, number next, you haven't mapped out your competition and looked at your marketing opportunities. This is a big one. You need to know what's going on in your market from a marketing perspective, not a clinical perspective. I know you know clinically what's going on with all these dentists because you see their patients. And I know you know some of them are really good and some of them are really bad. And that's fine. But you need to understand also what's going on from a business perspective because sometimes the worst dentists are the best business people, and sometimes the best dentists are the worst business people, right? Now, in an ideal world, I would love if all the best clinicians were the best business people, but that's just not reality. And so you need to be able to work with somebody to help you map out your market and look at your competition and look at what's going on. And if you don't do that, you will fall behind and they will grab up more of the market share of new patients. All right, number next, and lastly, you haven't figured out how to align your financial goals with your team's financial goals. This is a big one. So I have systems literally on all of these. So just let me know down in the comments. Hey, Gary, I I need help with this one. I don't, I've been trying to solve it, and I will get you help with all 17 of these. I have a resource or a software that will help you with it. So hopefully that helped you. I hope you have a great day.