3rd-Anniversary Episode: The 11 Systems that Actually Grow Practices

📥Resource Download: https://dentalmarketinggoat.com/resources/11-systems-behind-dental-practice-growth/
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Dentists don’t realize the real reason their practice isn’t growing until it’s too late. Missed calls, slow scheduling, weak case acceptance, and poor follow-through quietly kill new patient flow.

In this 3rd-anniversary episode of Dental Marketing Goat, Gary Bird breaks down the exact growth moments dentists kept replaying, including the systems that created 122 new patients in 90 days, 95% phone conversion, and over 600% ROI in real practices. These are real-world dental marketing strategies used across hundreds of practices and refined through data from more than 1,000 offices.

You’ll learn how to improve phone conversions, increase Google reviews, strengthen treatment acceptance, and build repeatable systems that drive predictable new patient growth. Whether you're launching a dental startup, scaling a fee-for-service, or managing multiple locations, these lessons apply directly to your daily operations.

Subscribe for more real-world dental marketing and practice growth strategies that help dentists grow faster.

In This Episode You'll Learn:
✔ The phone conversion strategy that doubled new patients
✔ Why waiting too long to fix capacity hurts growth
✔ How financing increased treatment acceptance
✔ The marketing investment strategy that produced 500% ROI
✔ The systems that turned marketing patients into loyal referrals

✨ Timestamps ✨
00:00 Introduction
00:56 Breakthrough #1 - Phone Conversion Wins Everything
02:57 Breakthrough #2 - Treatment Financing Unlocks Growth
08:45 Breakthrough #3 - Competitive Markets Can Still Win
10:46 Breakthrough #4 - Invest Boldly to Unlock Growth
14:02 Breakthrough #5 - Same-Day Treatment Drives Loyalty
18:16 Breakthrough #6 - Preparation Creates Fast Growth
20:27 Mistake #1 - Waiting Too Long to Fix Capacity Problems
24:33 Mistake #2 - Not Being Involved in Marketing
27:07 Mistake #3 - Thinking Growth Happens Without Investment
29:39 Future Insight #1 - Build Trust Faster than Ever
33:32 Future Insight #2 - Financing will Become Standard
37:10 Future Insight #3 - Systems Beat Complexity

Connect with our Guests Here ⤵️
Website: https://queencitydentistryclt.com/
Website: https://chattanoogadentalarts.com/
Website: https://columbusparkdental.com/
Website: https://premierdentalkaty.com/
Website: https://southernsmilestx.com/
Website: https://apoloniasmiles.com/
Website: https://carolinapinesdentistry.com/
Website: https://smilesformilesdental.com/

Connect with our Host, Gary Bird, Here ⤵️
SMC: https://bit.ly/4d4C09F
Personal: https://bit.ly/49cCnh3

Want the strategies we talk about delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to Dental Marketing Digest: https://bit.ly/4cYinzP
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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 co

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Dental marketing goat turns three years old. Three years ago, we decided to start recording a daily podcast where we shared all the best growth hacks that were actually helping offices grow. Since then, we've compiled all the best clips, the stuff that like really moves the needle when it comes to growth. And today, for our third anniversary, we compiled it together for you. You're gonna love this episode. This is like the best of the best. If you really want to grow, this is the stuff you need to be doing. Stay tuned. One of the most important things that you need to do in your practice is you need to get your systems down. Now, can you have the wrong systems in place? Absolutely. So, this next segment, we're gonna give you the top systems that we've seen in all the growing practices they're implementing and how they're implementing them. This is gonna be the system segment. Right before we hit record, you told me, hey, I've done some marketing in the past and on paper it looked good, but it didn't result in necessarily new patients. And that's the problem that so many dentists run into is that marketing data like SERP rates and click-through rates and impressions and bounce rates and all these things can be perfect and you still don't grow. And it's because dental is so much different than so many other industries. You were able to have an amazing first month with new patients right out of the gate. Could you tell us a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_03 1:28

It's actually I I can't take a whole bunch of credit for it. We we have a pretty amazing team over there. Our office manager, Jamie, uh, kind of headed out of the park on the first month, which we were fully live. We had a half a month in February, we had a full month in March with uh marketing, and I think she ended up at 100% or something like that, uh, and and scheduled new patients, which is which is pretty impressive. Um, so she's awesome on the phones, and then we had a higher volume uh this month in April, which is our second month as we're kind of dialing things in, and uh more phone calls, more leads, and she still put it at 80%. So um I think that she's just super skilled at knowing uh you know what to say, what not to say, and how to make it she did 100% phone conversion.

SPEAKER_00 2:13

You doubled what your new patients were the year before. So you went from 21 new patients to 43 new patients in March 2025, which is amazing. And the first thing I noticed was your your phone conversion. You are double the industry average. So industry average for marketing new patients is 50%. I mean, it's like just convert on the phone and all your marketing works wonderfully, even better than it's working now. And for you guys, you guys knocked it out of the park month one. And because of that, you had a high, really high ROI from your marketing investment. And most dentists, that doesn't happen. So, what happens most of the time is we bring somebody in, and then it's like, okay, you have all these opportunities, but you're losing most of them. Your practice actually is gonna do over $2 million in collections this year. And one of the big things that drove that is that you went from an average production uh per patient of or is it average collections per patient of sixteen hundred dollars uh 2024, $1,500 in change, yeah. And now over 3,000, and this is over the year, $3,000 per patient, which is a really solid number. And that means your patients are happy, that means your team's happy, that means you're happy, you're hitting your numbers. And we were talking about like how you did that, and one of the things is Yeah, $1,500 and change.

SPEAKER_06 3:35

So, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

With your how you're presenting treatment and using patient financing. So I I would love for you to share how you're doing that and making sure everybody wins in the process.

SPEAKER_06 3:45

Oh, yeah, absolutely. So we have a phenomenal office manager that's been in dentistry like 28 years, and she actually does all of our treatment coordination. That's one of the hats that she wears because she's phenomenal at it. And she started off as an assistant, so she's very clinically versed, so she understands, you know, the procedures and she can explain it to patients because inevitably, all of you know, when you leave the room, all the questions come out. So when your treatment coordinator is going through things, they can really start to talk through those nuances and those questions that patients really have that they don't ask you for whatever reason. So um, one, we have a really qualified person, but she was the same person that was doing it in 2024, and our numbers have have doubled. So, with that being said, one of the coaches at SMC that we worked with for the last year or so, um, she had recommended to us because we use cherry, we use we use some bit. Um, but what we do is when we get a treatment plan in the back before the patient is ever ever leaves the operatory, the hygienist, myself, my husband, whoever is gonna go to Josie and give her a little bit of like a debrief, not in front of the patient, on like, hey, here's where we are. These are some concerns if we know what those are. Um, these are priorities, this is how urgent it is. We're gonna kind of do that unofficial handoff. Then she'll say, okay, let me pull everything. If we can get a pre qualification, we will. If we can't, we'll use the estimator function in these portals and it'll at least print out usually options from as little as three months all the way to 60 months, and it'll say whether there's interest or not. So it gives the patient, you know, a list of kind of budget-friendly monthly options. She already has their treatment plan. If they're utilizing insurance, whether in or out of network, she has that aspect, but she also has this monthly breakdown so that they can know that financing is available and that this is something that can fit into their monthly budget if finances are a concern. And we've been able to close a lot more treatment by doing that. And it just lowers kind of that barrier for patients and puts them in a more comfortable position to say yes.

SPEAKER_00 5:56

Okay, that's awesome. So you've and you've seen massive growth from this. Now, I know what doctors are thinking out there. They're listening to this and they're saying, yeah, but you're paying this cherry fee, right? And patient financing isn't free. It costs money to do that. Um, has the growth made up for the fee?

SPEAKER_06 6:14

For me personally, yes. Um, and cherry, I will say this about cherry. Cherry, the fees are typically less than like with Sunbit. Um, and Cherry, depending on how much volume you do in your practice, those fees to you can change. So the more volume you do, the better it is for you. Um, so there are some strategies to be able to help that number on the admin side of things. But I look at it this way: um, if a patient comes in and they can't afford treatment and they would typically say no, then I've lost $3,000. That's my average. I might have lost $5,000. I might have lost $1,200, whatever it is, but my average is three. So if I lost $3,000, then had I rather lose $3,000, or let's say with my worst hit, it's 15% if a patient has a really bad credit score and they're a high risk patient, right?

SPEAKER_00 7:12

You've lost 100% of that treatment. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 7:14

But 15% of that is a few hundred dollars. Had I rather lose a few hundred dollars or had I rather lose thirty one hundred dollars.

SPEAKER_00 7:23

That's not good.

SPEAKER_06 7:24

Do I love it? No, it doesn't give me a warm fuzzy. So I understand the barrier and the struggle for dentists, but when you really step back and take your emotions out of it and look at it from a numbers standpoint, then typically if you're doing enough collections and volume and size cases, it's going to offset the administrative fee that you're having to, you know, kind of bite the bullet to get there, personally.

SPEAKER_00 7:49

Got it. Yeah. A lot of times, dentists are like, wait, $3,000, you know, I'm only doing $1,000 a year on a patient. Are you are is there are you over-treating? Are the patients not happy at the end? How happy are the patients that they can actually get the treatment done in your experience?

SPEAKER_06 8:05

Well, I feel like that our referrals and our referral rate and our Google reviews kind of speak to themselves that we do have happy patients. Um, and they are sending their friends and family. So I feel like if they were leaving with a bad taste in their mouth, then they would not want to send their friends and they wouldn't. We all know people love to tell Google everything. So if they were unhappy, they would tell them that too. So I feel like that, you know, since those two things are trending in a positive direction and our referral numbers are high, then that is, you know, speaking to that patients are having a good experience. They're telling their coworkers, they're telling their family members.

SPEAKER_00 8:42

100%.

SPEAKER_09 8:43

We've really just been trying to use the phone conversion as our big, big bringing patients in through the door. Um, we did a bit of your training that SMC sent through, um, but it is really a patient forward practice. You pick up the phone, you answer as if you're their best friend, you make sure that they get in within two or three days of when they want to come in. Um, and we try and move the schedule around to make sure that they are a priority and that's what patients want. Um, we also do a ton of online marketing, which is bringing patients through as well. So I think that's generally helpful with the new patients coming through.

SPEAKER_00 9:21

Yeah, I'm looking at your conversion rate. You're at 90%. So that puts you at like the elite, elite. And most people don't understand this. Everybody, it's so funny. Every dentist that we talk to and everyone I interact with, they all say, no, no, no, no, we're amazing on the phones. When we get in and actually measure it, the average dentist is only at 50%. So if you get to like 75%, you're doing really good. So what besides the scripting that you added in and getting patients in right away, is there anything else that you've done to like motivate your team or help your team understand how important the phones are?

SPEAKER_09 9:54

I think when they see that the practice is busy, they're happy. There's a lot of motivation with keeping it's kind of like a game like Tetris, making sure the schedule's packed and full and moving patients around to fit into certain columns, making sure if there's an opening, we try and so we kind of make it it's like a fun thing at work to move the patients around and to get them in. Um if there's like a quiet Friday, we'll message a few of the patients that are coming in later in the month or later in the um in the upcoming months and say, we've got an opening. Do you want to come? Um, so I think that's motivation for them. Um my office manager does get a percent of production depending on, sorry, collection depending on if we hit our goals or not. Um, and our goals change every month, but we've got a new patient goal, we've got a collection goal, we've got a total patient goal. So there's goals that we're trying to hit while we're doing this.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

You guys, because you have figured out some growth stuff in the last four months that a lot of dentists just frankly never get to. And I want to go over that and how you did it because I think it'll help a lot of people. And what I want to look at is number one, you've been able to grow your new patients by 42%. And it wasn't by accident. You guys were very intentional. You had a 90% phone conversion, you had almost a 500% ROI in that time in the in the first four months of working with you guys.

SPEAKER_08 11:15

So when we first bought the practice, we were very cautious about spending on marketing. And uh, we were always told, oh, you should be in this percentage for marketing, this, that. And then, you know, we started joining coaching groups and talking to other dentists, and we realized that we're in a very, very saturated market. So if we want to grow, we gotta invest the money in it. So I think back it's for when you joined you guys. That's when we were like, okay, we can try all these marketing companies and things like that, but let's just really hit the uh ground hard. So we decided to double our marketing spend in in in Google and with you guys.

SPEAKER_00 11:52

And you went from you're spending about 3,000 before and you went to about 7,000, right?

SPEAKER_08 11:57

We went to like 1,500 from 1,500 to 2,500 to like 5,000. And then now we've got it up to 7,000 number. Yeah, yeah. And then we just did that change recently, and this month this is I mean, this week phone calls have been pouring in, and we've already seen like 20 green educations and like 90.

SPEAKER_07 12:16

So the biggest thing is I know we have a solid community. We are great when we communicate with patients. We know how to educate them that we get to need education. So as long as that patient is able to come in on a nine-in-old schedule, we can educate them on why they might need an FRP or they might need a digital scale or something more, why they need to look at having fields. That whole experience that Dr. Mark was talking about, that new patient experience is gold. And that's the value. The value is not on that first appointment. The value is in two things them getting treatment and then referring others. So it's not even just how much was this patient's lifetime like ROI.

SPEAKER_00 12:54

It's there's a concept that I learned a long time ago. It's called 100% case acceptance.

SPEAKER_07 12:58

And so, Dennis, a lot of times I'll talk with them and they'll be like, How much was the lifetime ROI of them and everyone else they brought in?

SPEAKER_00 13:06

Well, I don't want to charge $99 for a cleaning. I want to charge $299. And I'm like, okay, well, what is that gonna do to your numbers? That two extra $200. It's almost nothing, right? And the big like from a percentage standpoint, it's like a blip. So it's not a big deal from a dollar standpoint. But the part that people miss is the concept of 100% case acceptance is if you get the patient in the door and they recare, even if they don't buy treatment, if they just keep recaring, you will eventually get 100% of all dental treatment that they ever need for their whole life, plus patient referrals from them. Or if you don't get them in the door because they don't the the extra hundred dollars that you wanted to make on your cleaning or whatever, or they come in and they don't recare, you get 0% of all the treatment for the rest of their life, plus none of the referrals. So it really is an all or nothing game. And so I always tell people like, just figure out the top how to get them in at first. He's seeing over a 600 or almost a 600% ROI in Q1. And he's also seeing over $600 per patient accepting treatment on the first visit right now, or looking at about 80 new patients. Um, and this is a fairly newer office.

SPEAKER_04 14:21

Yeah, we opened about a year and a half ago.

SPEAKER_00 14:23

One of the things that I've noticed is your team is extremely disciplined in following the scripting for their phones, and they're getting over 95% phone conversion on new patients. This is unheard of. A lot of people think that their phone conversion is that good. I only have seen a handful of people with phone conversion that good. How have you got your team performing at that level?

SPEAKER_04 14:43

Um, I think, you know, uh we have a pretty good team in the front. Uh, you know, it was all based on who we hired. We had a lot of potential candidates who did apply. Um I didn't really go out there looking for anyone with specific experience in dental in the front. And then we just onboarded another front. Um, she worked for a corporate uh call center, actually. So she's been helping. We just we just hired her about two, three weeks ago. Um, and she's really helped fill in that schedule a lot.

SPEAKER_00 15:19

So uh I think yeah, a lot of people a lot of people struggle with this because they they're everybody's like, I can't find people to hire. But there's already people out there that are good on the phone, and then you can teach them the dental stuff, right? Like there are that's a great strategy. I love that. Do you do you have any kind of bonus for them or anything?

SPEAKER_04 15:37

Or what what what's their how's their Yeah, we have a monthly production bonus that we've implemented since the let's say close to the beginning. Uh I always try to incentivize our our staff. And you know, we don't open we used to open five days uh a week, um, but you know, you got to give your staff some time off, you know, for them to be fresh and everything, you know, also for you as a doc to be fresh as well. So uh not overwork them too much and not always kind of be uh you know over their shoulder doing things, kind of give them free range, and you know, you you really got to know how to talk to your staff.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

Yeah, got to treat them right. I know sometimes team members don't feel appreciated by their team, but it's clear your team does because they're performing at a high level. Now, I just I see that you you do a couple different things. You do a uh a $99 cleaning, you do a free exam and x-ray, uh, you do some stuff on implants and and ortho. What where's the bulk of your new patients coming from from that sense? Are they coming more through the hygiene schedule? Are they coming through emergency or they or are they kind of coming through everything?

SPEAKER_04 16:47

I would say they mostly come in through emergencies as well as the you know traditional uh hygiene route. Um my bread and butter, my personal bread and butter is from uh uh emergencies. I do a lot of same-day root canals all the way to the crown, and I think I'm the only office in this area that kind of can you know deliver on that promise. And I can see within within 48 hours, no problem, uh, and get it done. I'm also the only office that's open on Saturdays. Um, and so my Saturday, I'm very full of you know, hygiene as well as limited exams. And if you know, if I can't do it on a Saturday, I'll try I'll kind of funnel them into the weekdays to get my weekdays filled.

SPEAKER_00 17:32

Okay, so I know what a lot of dentists are thinking right now. So they're listening to this, they go, Man, you do a free exam and x-ray, you're getting 80 new patients, you you, you know, you're open on Saturday, you must be just like not like just turning and burning patients, but you're not. I just looked at your ROI numbers. You put in in in uh January, February, March, April, so four month span, you put in $27,000 into marketing, you've almost 600x that. So you're looking at just close to $200,000 uh dollars in treatment from that. You the patients are coming in, they're getting treatment, and then they're they're re-carrying back into your practice. You've been open for three months, and last month you saw 122 new patients, and like there's some practices that have been open for years and not seeing 122 new patients. So you have done so many things right, and I just wanted to talk through those and um talk through how how did you get 122 new patients in in your third month of being open right out of the box, like day one. You were converting at almost 90%, and there were some months as you were converting at 100%. So tell me how you did that. Like, how did you get your team to actually convert that well?

SPEAKER_01 18:52

I just think that delivering the best patient experience is what upset the practice apart and what makes us make us successful as dentists. I we we started the building this practice in Flourville back in 2023, so it took me two years to finish this practice. And we had lots of construction issues, reading books and trying to understand how the best experience can be created. And how I I learned a little bit about marketing and phone conversion, how to talk to patients, how to convince patients to stay stay at the office, and I built SOPs and I wrote scripts, and of course I used AI because that's what everybody is doing nowadays. But I I thought, how can we make that more human, more friendly, not look like AI? And I built scripts for my front desk team, but also SOPs for the office, for for the back office and the front office. The day they joined, they were they're they're just like they don't have lots of experience. So I gave them the SOPs and we spent a full week in my like right when we first opened just studying these plans. And we talked about getting a new patient, how to talk to them on the phone, friendly and kind way, showing compassion to people is very important.

SPEAKER_00 20:09

All right, this next section is about what doesn't work. There's some things that will help you grow, but there's a lot of things that will stop you from growing. This particular segment, I'm gonna give you the top things that we told and warned people don't ever do this if you really want to grow. Stay tuned. Dr. Shane and your practice has been growing like crazy, but there's things that come along with growth that you don't necessarily, there's no way to plan for them. And you you were really growing, you're seeing a ton of new patients, your your collections are growing, like everything's going in the right direction. But then now you started to run into a capacity issue.

SPEAKER_05 20:45

Well, back up and kind of paint the picture six months ago is you know, we were we had a great new patient flow. We were growing, we're growing, we had three hygienists that were well with our new patient blocks or blocked out. We were having to push out new patient hygiene visits for you know three, four weeks at a time. And our goal in our practice is to get them in within a week or two, or they're gonna go find, you know, someone else down the road. I knew I wanted to grow our new patients more, but we didn't have the spot for it. I had an empty chair that's just sitting there, not producing. I took my assistant and made her what we called the new patient coordinator in our office for that day. Um, along with that, she worked with one of our hygienists that we would what we would do is basically kind of stagger a new patient in my chair in the hygienist column. The assistant would basically introduce the patient to the practice, get them seated, take their records, say, Hey, I'm the new new patient coordinator for the day. I'm gonna walk you through this process, get all the diagnostics, usually do the exam with the doctor if the time permitted right for the schedule, and the hygienist would come in and just clean teeth, do her thing, and then and we would do that shift all day long, right? It works really, really well. Because we could build a treatment plan, pass that off to our treatment coordinator while the hygienist was cleaning teeth and it was ready to present, ready to roll. It was like this nice little flow.

SPEAKER_00 22:09

It looks like it you've you're you're on pace to hit 80 new patients this month. So that which would be a record, you're on pace for a record new patient month.

SPEAKER_05 22:16

It's worked really, really well for us to add capacity to add those eight, nine new patients, you know, a month for us instantly. I knew I wanted to kind of invest more marketing, but if you do that and you're spending dollars, you want to make sure you've got somewhere to put those people. So I didn't my production actually went up. Everybody won. Nobody took a hit.

SPEAKER_00 22:35

Wow. And so and your associates' production went up too? So everybody's production, so everybody ate, everybody won. Those are the best. So if the new patients are getting in faster, they're getting more treatment done, your team is running smoother, and your doctors are all doing more dentistry, like there really isn't a loop. Like those are the kind of situations you want to create.

SPEAKER_05 22:54

Where we're at now is like we realize, okay, we hit capacity again, let's add it again. So then we had to go through the pain of that. And so I had to change my schedule again, which led to changing my blocks again. And it was just kind of this cycle of how do we how do we play this jigsaw puzzle? But now that we have it figured out, like it took us a few months throughout this year to get it, we're we're gonna start rolling again. But it built the backlog of patients that I obviously didn't expect or have the foresight to see. Six months from now, like we're booked, so we're we're seven almost eight months out for a recall exam. So if we have someone fall off the schedule now for recall or perimattenance or whatever it may be, like, sorry, we'll put you on an ASAP list, but we're gonna have to see you, you know, out in whatever it is now, November or something, like something crazy, right? And that's not that's what we're tackling, just kind of added a new chair in the office and a consult room to allow me to continue to work and then open up that other spot. Um, like I mentioned, we do have another hygienist on. We we had eventually we had to hire because what we did essentially is we we ramped up hygiene, we ramped up the capacity to justify the fact that hey, now we need a hygienist to to sustain this, and we and we can sustain it. So rather than hiring that person off the start and then trying to ramp up, we ramped up first, and now we can hire that person and and just go and just go at it.

SPEAKER_00 24:17

Swap the person in. Yeah. And you can keep doing that over and over and over again. So it's like you like it it's much easier to do that. And I think a lot of dentists do get stuck on the you know, the chicken and the egg or the horse in the cart, like which one goes first because it is confusing.

SPEAKER_09 24:33

I knew I had to market. I'm in a really competitive area. How else do I get my name out there? And the only way I could think about doing that was marketing. I was working with a company prior to working with SMC. Um, and it just didn't seem like they knew how to effectively market what I was looking for. I think that's really important because if you can if you can see marketing doing something, then you feel like the money's worth it. It's a lot of money because there's Google, there's social media, there's just a ton of things that need to happen. Um and my previous marketing company used to sit down with money with me once in every three months.

SPEAKER_00 25:10

That's rough when that's rough at the beginning, though, when you don't have patients coming in and your office is empty and you have bills, right? Especially in Manhattan.

SPEAKER_09 25:17

And you're paying a lot of money to this marketing team.

SPEAKER_00 25:20

Um, you know, the number one thing I've I've over the years, I've tracked like happy clients, clients that do really well, and then the clients that don't do well, aren't happy, or leave. And the number one trend that I've noticed is that the doctors who are involved in their marketing, meaning they're meeting with us on a regular basis, um, that they are the most successful. Like hands down. They all do well. All of them. Like the 100% of them. And guess what happens to the dentists that don't meet with us on a regular basis? What like I would say 90% of them don't do well. More times than not, they're they end up failing. And it's because marketing requires a lot of system changes, right? Like, oh, we got to change the pricing of this, or oh, we got to uh uh put new scripting in, or hey, we have to change the way we're booking and we're scheduling people. And the front desk person can't do that. The hygienist can't make those decisions. So it has to be the doctor involved with that. So I I I really like that you're calling that out, that you're like, hey, I'm meeting and I need to meet on a regular basis, because I I really believe that's the recipe for success and really marketing and just growth overall.

SPEAKER_09 26:23

Yeah, definitely. It's it's really important because it does you do see the growth and you see where your money is going. And we first started working with you guys, and we I was still like because I came from a marketing that wasn't team that wasn't working. So I was so skeptical at the beginning, but you need that, you need that communication, you need that monthly check-in, you need like an alignable, alignable, trackable, trackable, trackable, trackable, yeah, yeah. Always made um you need the trackable, you need to be able to see like where the patients are coming from, where the money is going, and it makes you a bit more comfortable to be like, okay, well, I'm opening a second practice. This is when I need to start putting more money in, this is what I need to do for the website, so it makes it feel a lot better.

SPEAKER_00 27:06

He worked with several other marketing firms before us and he started working with us, and then he proceeded to 3x his marketing budget. Marketing is an investment. If you want more new patients, you're gonna have to pay for them. There is no way around that. You can you can have slow growth if you want, but you're not gonna double over a year if if you're just kind of puttering along. So here's something that people don't understand. If you are focusing on optimizing for profits today, then you're stilling from growth tomorrow. If you're focusing on growth tomorrow, then you're stilling from profits today. Companies do not grow unless they're invested. You gotta invest into growth. It's an investment. If you're investing into tomorrow to grow tomorrow, then you're stilling from today's profit. And you have to choose. Anytime somebody tries to do both at the same time, gets neither. If you're trying to grow and you're trying to optimize for profit, you can't optimize for both of those things. It's like trying to optimize for speed and strength at the same time. It doesn't work. If you want to be super strong, then you're not gonna be super fast. If you want to be super fast, then you're not gonna be super strong. And so you have to optimize for one or the other. He said he got a growth mindset. So what's a growth mindset? Most dentists do not have a growth mindset. Most dentists have a scarcity mindset. Meaning they think automatically, default, anytime they go and enter into a conversation or go to think through their practice, they are optimizing for profits and they're opt they're usually thinking there's not enough opportunities to go around. So I have to protect my downside. Okay, and they're dentists are naturally more conservative that way. It's nothing wrong with that. However, it's not compatible with growth. It actually fights you on growth and it doesn't allow you to grow. What happens is when you get a growth mindset is there's abundance of opportunity, there's more than enough opportunity to go around, and so because of that, I'm going to optimize for that because I'm gonna have a great next year, it's gonna be amazing, and I'm gonna keep growing, and when you have that mindset, you grow. One of the biggest mistakes that we see dentists make is that they don't look into the future when it comes to growth, marketing, and those kind of things. In this particular segment, we're gonna talk about what the future of growth looks like, and we're gonna just go through all the segments of the things that we're super bullish and that we're seeing are gonna be huge trends over the next couple years. Stay tuned. What I have noticed is most doctors are asking for, I just want quality new patients. Well, define quality for me. What is a quality new patient? What does that exactly mean? How do you define a quality new patient? And usually it's like someone who comes in, they need some treatment, and I do I present the treatment and they do the treatment. What they're what you're really asking for is high trust patients. Patients that don't ask questions, patients that don't um, there's no pushback, there's no like, hey, how's this gonna work? Anything like that. They're just like they come in, they trust you, and they just do the treatment right away. If those are the kinds of patients you're looking for, what that is, that's a patient referral or a doctor referral. Patient referrals are amazing. When I tell my wife, hey, you should go to this dental office, she goes. If they don't answer the phone, she calls back. If they do answer the phone and they can't answer her question, she still schedules. If they schedule her three weeks out, she still shows up. If she goes in and they present a bunch of treatment, she does it. Why? Because I said, This practice is amazing. She's going off of my word. The trust was built through the referral already. And doctors love these, and I totally get why. The numbers all bear out. These patients are better, they accept more treatment, they come in faster, they they show up better, like the show rates better, the ROI, everything. They b everything's better about them. However, there's a misalignment because marketing never produces those kinds of patients ever. You say, Well, why not? Why can't I get those kinds of patients from marketing? Marketing can't build that kind of trust. It just can't. Marketing patients are gonna be more skeptical. If you don't answer the phone, they'll call another practice. There's no loyalty there. If you um don't answer their questions correctly on the phone, you lose them forever. If you schedule them three weeks out, 40 to 50% of them are gonna no-show. Because they end up in another practice. If you do see them and you present a bunch of treatment and you haven't built any relationship with them, you're probably going to lose them. And and they're not gonna recare. And then they're never gonna refer to you. So the name of the game is you have to learn how to take marketing new patients and turn them into patient referrals. If you can learn how to do this, it's very, very valuable. With patients, you don't have that luxury because they're searching and they want a dentist right now. So how do you get those people in? How do you build trust? Well, Google Reviews is a huge part of this. Huge part of this. That's number one. Number two is how um you answer the phone. Can you answer basic questions? Hey, I have ABC insurance. How does that work? Hey, how much is an implant? You gotta be able to answer those. Your team knows how to it has to know how to answer those. Well, we just don't answer those questions, then you don't get the new patients. You gotta it's so they're simple. It's not hard. It's just that no one's training the team and no one's holding the team accountable. You also can't schedule them a month out. If you schedule them a month out, you're gonna lose the vast majority of them. And also when you present treatment, you need to lead with monthly payments. So that way you're presenting a $200, $300 payment, not a $5,000 treatment plan. When you do that, all of a sudden the patients start to trust you, they like you, they reappoint, and guess what they do? They send you more patient referrals. And then you have the patients that you want. This is the back door to get the high trust patients that you want, or in your words, the quality patients that you're looking for. You gotta change the way that you're thinking, and you gotta change the way that you're talking and the the way that you're focusing on the problem, and you will get the results that you want from that if you if you focus in on it. I know right now you guys are projected to hit above 50 new patients, which is double, more than double what you had last year at the same time, and it's you know one of the harder months. Um, and then, but then also it's not just increasing the new patients, your production is going up as well. I know this month you're aiming for 200 of adjusted production, looks like you're floating in that like 180 range. So t tell me a little bit about how that journey went of because it's one thing to get the fundraising and it's another thing to get them to schedule, which you've done a really good job of, but then you got to get people buying treatment. Was that a bit of a process for you?

SPEAKER_02 34:10

Right. It's because especially with the team who's been with the same office for 20 years, they have the same verbiage over and over. Um, and also, like you said, they were all so hung into what the insurance covers versus what their copay is, and then how the balance is ending up. Um we really told them like our office mission statement is to provide quality care that exceeds expectations. So I just try to focus on that statement throughout the whole thing, like a treatment planning discussion. I let them know even though this is gonna cost, um, and if that's the concern of a patient, that's fine. But we have to let them understand why this is important. And no one's gonna take care of their teeth better than the patients. It's not gonna be us, it's gonna be the patients who are making that decision. And if it's like a big decision, we ask, like if let's say if the patient is a husband and then the financial like um decision making is more on the wife or any other house member, then we we tell them at any time we're gonna reserve 30 minutes of of our time with our treatment plan discussion, like treatment plan coordinator, 30 minutes on the side. We put them in the private room, and then we ask them, bring bring your family member with you. We we can we can go through all the details.

SPEAKER_00 35:33

Oh, so you're telling them up that up front that hey, this is we're gonna make sure that you fully understand what's going on.

SPEAKER_02 35:39

Right, just especially for bigger cases like veneers or like all in all in four, all in six, or implant, or any like single implants too. If the patient is really concerned, we let them know we can always set a time uh set aside a time just for you and your family member in a private room so that we can discuss about this in full detail. And also adopting another um third-party financing company has been helped a lot too, not just like care credit, but we do offer other um companies.

SPEAKER_00 36:10

Who else do you guys use?

SPEAKER_02 36:11

We've been um using cherry a lot and patients. Patients have been loving cherry a lot. We can we send them the like when they first make the phone call. Um, some patients are unfortunate not to even have the $49 to and then we send them the link for the cherry. They apply if they get approved for how many hundreds of dollars they can still use. Wow, yeah, right away.

SPEAKER_00 36:34

So I've never heard anybody use it that way before. That's really smart. Yeah, you're so you're basically just like, we'll help anybody. We just need to figure out how we're gonna help you.

SPEAKER_02 36:43

Yes. So the the one of the challenges that we've come across so far recently is the changes in the demographic in our neighboring area. Um, so that's why I think adopting the cherry has been um a lot of good experiences with not just for the patients, but for but for us too, when they go over the treatment plan, their the treatment um case acceptance rate has been a little bit higher because of of that um option too.

SPEAKER_08 37:10

I think the biggest goal we've had or like the biggest change we've had the last few months is just keep it simple. We've been trying to simplify our systems because we were expecting, why did we overcomplicate things? Like why did we have XYZ process? Just keep it simple, right? Bring them in.

SPEAKER_00 37:25

All right. If you've watched this far, you're obviously somebody who's really serious about growth, and I'm really excited for you. I want to challenge you, just something super simple. What I want you to do is just take one thing that you've learned, not all the things, just one, one system, one growth hack, one thing you need to stop doing, or one thing you need to really focus on in the future. And I want you to go all in on that thing. If you can get laser focused on one thing and it starts to move the needle, what that's gonna do is it's gonna free you up to focus on the next thing. And so here's to more growing. Thank you so much for everybody who watches. Thank you to the SM SMC team who edits these and puts all these together. And without you guys watching it, we wouldn't be creating it. So thank you so much for tuning in. Have a great day.