#255 The 3 M's of Dental Growth

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In this episode, Gary Bird breaks down the 3 M’s of dental practice growth: Market, Marketing, and Management, and why most dentists fail to align them. If your dental marketing isn’t working, your new patient flow is inconsistent, or your practice isn’t growing, this framework will show you exactly what’s missing. Learn how to analyze your local dental market, align your marketing strategy, and improve key metrics like call conversion, scheduling, and case acceptance. Gary explains why even the best Google ads and dental marketing campaigns fail without proper management systems in place. This episode is essential for dentists looking to increase new patients, improve dental practice management, and scale production consistently.

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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 today and we're going to be talking about the three M's of growth. In a dental practice, if you do not have all three of these M'signed, then you will not grow. Okay, so it's like M's like M and M. We're gonna talk about these and again, all three of these have to be working. If at any time you try to do one of these in isolation, you won't grow. And this is where a lot of confusion comes in for dental offices, is because they work on one of these and they think, oh, that will cause me to grow. However, each one is dependent on the other to grow. So let's work through these, and this is the correct order to work through these. Okay. So number one, you have to know your market. This is this is what's going on around you. This is outside of your four walls. This is the area that you're in. You need to understand your competition, you need to understand your population, you need to understand the income levels of that area, and this is where you begin to build an avatar. Now, one thing that we like to do is we like to go in into an office, take their existing new patient flow, and then map that against their market with their competition, with their population, with their income levels, and really begin to break down what is happening in their area because when you do that, it begins to tell a story. Maybe you're attracting patients from areas that there's no competition. Maybe you're attracting patients from the area that there's a ton of competition. Maybe you're marketing in an area that you don't get any new patients from because it's on the other side of a freeway or a river or a lake or a mountain ridge, and you're just wasting your money on clicks over there, but you just never realized it. You can tell all of that by simply looking at the market. The other thing that's important is that your competition dictates a lot of what happens in a particular market more so than you may think. The competition drives what is acceptable and what is the standard. Some markets, a lot of people have 2,000 Google reviews, and your 200 Google reviews just isn't cutting it. In other markets, maybe 200 Google reviews is the most. So it's really market dependent. Also, other areas, some areas, everybody's wait time is a month. And your wait time's a week, you are killing it. Maybe in other markets, everybody's wait time is three days, and your 30-day wait time isn't cutting it and it's causing you to lose new patients. These are the kinds of things that you need to begin to think through in your particular market. That's the first thing that you have to do. The first thing is you have to understand your market. If you want some maps on your market and you want to see what that looks like in your area, comment down below maps, and we'll get those to you. Okay, so that's number one. Number two, you need to look at your marketing. Okay, so the first M is your market. Your second M is your marketing. Your marketing should address your market. It should not address what you think you should be doing. And this is very, very common. I see this all the time. Dentists come in to work with us, and they're like, I want to market like this to these people. I wanna, I wanna be like the the premier cosmetic dentist, and I'm in the backwoods of uh, you know, backwoods of uh the panhandle of Florida, where there's not a lot of those kinds of patients. And that you can't have, like you cannot have misalignment between your market and your marketing. It causes your marketing not to work. And so it's really important that you start with your market first. If at any time you started marketing and you didn't think about your competition, you didn't think about the population, you didn't think about the income levels and what's going on there, you will always be greatly disappointed. And sometimes it's deceiving. Sometimes it's deceiving. So if you want to grow at your dental practice, number one, you need to understand your market. Number two, you need to align your marketing to your market. And just as important, because even if you do those two perfectly and you don't do the third one, you will not grow. The third one is your management. So, what do I mean by your management? Well, what is your unanswered call rate? What is your phone conversion rate? What is your average time to appointment? What is your case acceptance rate? What is your reappointment rate? What is your average case acceptance per new patient? What is the uh from a dollar standpoint and a and a percentage standpoint? You say, I don't know, or I think we're okay. More than likely you're failing in that area. Marketing, you can have the per this is how it works, okay? This is why you got to have all three. You can have the perfect marketing to the perfect market and your management ability of your team, of your, of you, of your schedule. If it's not all in check, you can literally lose all of your opportunities. And this is why so many people get stuck in a world where they're constantly marketing, they're constantly like looking at their numbers, and they're just not growing. This is why. Is because you haven't learned how to manage your team, or you haven't learned how to look at the right numbers. And if those things are happening, you just won't grow. Uh, there's an interesting saying is that the reason that you haven't reached your goals is because you haven't become the leader that can reach those goals yet. Once you become the leader that can reach those goals, things will start to click for you. So hopefully that helps you. Your market, your marketing, and your management. Once those three align, rocket ship, baby. You can rocket ship. But until then, you're gonna be stuck and it's gonna be really hard to grow, and it's gonna be really hard to get more new patients and get your practice where you want it to go. All right, hopefully that was a helpful one. Have a great day.