#269 How this Dentist Hit 400% ROI Fast

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Most dentists struggle to grow consistently, even when they’re spending more on marketing.
In this episode, Gary Bird breaks down how Dr. Talon Davis hit 100 new patients, ~400% ROI, and $347K in collections by fixing phone conversion, tightening time-to-appointment, and using patient financing the right way. You’ll learn the exact systems behind 80% phone conversion, 8-day scheduling, and how to scale new patient growth in a hyper-competitive market.

This is real data from SMC working with practices and optimizing dental marketing, practice management, and new patient flow at scale.

Subscribe for more real-world strategies that help dentists grow faster.

✨ Timestamps ✨
00:00 Introduction to Growth Goals
03:20 Navigating Growth Challenges
07:02 Achieving Record Collections
08:57 Operational Efficiency and Patient Care
13:05 Financial Strategies and Patient Financing
18:05 Future Projections and Work-Life Balance

Connect with our Guest Here ⤵️
Website: https://southarlingtonsmilestx.com/

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Personal: https://bit.ly/3SCEQZy

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Dental Marketing Goat is 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

SPEAKER_00 0:00

You spent twenty-two thousand dollars on marketing. You had almost a four hundred percent ROI, and your team did amazing on conversion that month. And yeah, you had your best collections a month. You did uh 347 in collections and you did 367 in production, so that's awesome.

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Do less clinically, be able to do more admin-related stuff, more CEO stuff, likely eventually scale back to only two clinical days. We take, you know, all the best TPO plans. We are a network of Delta, we've negotiated through TPNs for all the major carriers and things like that. We try to optimize that as much as possible. I'm a big believer in profitability, both in hygiene and in a PPO industry in general.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Welcome back to another episode of Dental Marketing Go. I'm your host, Gary Bird. I'm the owner of SMC National. And today we're gonna be talking with Dr. Davis, one of our clients, who just started a couple months ago, just hit a record new patient month with 100 new patients and a record collection month with $347,000 in a hyper, hyper competitive market. He's gonna break down how many doctors he has, how many hygienists, is he in network, out of network, how he got his team to answer the phone. And he's also gonna talk about how he gets a almost 400% ROI on his marketing. He actually talks about patient financing. We have a link down below. If you want access to that, you can go check out a whole training on that and how he did that. Also, he's gonna talk about how he gets his patients in right away. He gets patients in really, really fast, which helps him drive up his ROI. If you want training on that, we also have a PDF right down below on Ghost Scheduling so that way you can always have new patient availability and at the same time always stack your production. It's amazing. It's really smart. You're gonna love this episode. Dr. Davis is an absolute legend and he's knocking it out of the park. He is in the top, top echelons of dentists and just growing and running his practice. He gives some gems in this one. Stay tuned. All right. So I'm excited because I got to meet, I actually got to meet you on through Facebook, I think. We were talking and you were like, I want a hundred new patients. And I was like, Well, we might be able to help you. I don't know. And so you hit you actually hit exactly 100 new patients in March. Um, just working through the numbers just for the audience, because I know everybody's gonna ask. Um, you spent uh $22,000 on marketing, you had almost a 400% ROI, and your team did amazing on uh conversion that month. And um, yeah, you had your best collections month. You did uh 347 in collections and you did 367 in production. So that's awesome. Now it wasn't without its problems, and we'll jump into that. But let's let's just talk through um first the goal side. Like where are you at in your journey? Because I know when we were talking on Facebook, it was several, this was probably six months ago. You were kind of like, I want to do it, but I don't know if I want to grow. I want to grow, but I don't know if I want to grow kind of thing. And I know how that is as a business owner because you spend more money, you invest more time, energy. And sometimes it doesn't really change much for you as the owner. Like I've done that uh countless times. So what kind of tell me a little bit about your growth journey of where you're at mentally with getting to 100 and where you're going.

SPEAKER_01 3:20

Yeah, absolutely. We um, you know, I ultimately decided to continue uh growing after spending probably 18 months from mid-2024 through most of 2025, just sort of growing with the natural retention and not really pushing from a marketing standpoint and things like that. Uh decided finally the need to push a little bit more on the growth side because we needed uh more patients to add another associate so that I could cut back clinically and do what I like to do, which is sort of piddle around and shake hands at work and do some exams and that sort of thing, uh, form patient connections um while still maintaining, you know, a decent clinical schedule. Um so to get there, you know, the math on new patient flow is pretty easy in my practice. We need about 40 per per doctor, which comes after about 10 per doctor day. And we're trying to get to 10 doctor days total. We're currently at seven, and so I'm trying to bump up to 10, and that's 10 times.

SPEAKER_00 4:14

So it's you how many doctors do you have? Do you have uh three doctors with including yourself?

SPEAKER_01 4:18

I have it's two right now. Me and my associate. I work three days, he's working full time on four days.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Okay, so at a hundred, you're getting more than your you're getting 50 each, then.

SPEAKER_01 4:28

Yes, exactly. And so the goal with that is that I can cut back, and we just uh have hired a new associate and they'll be starting the next couple months. So I can cut back and add some doctor days that way.

SPEAKER_00 4:39

Awesome. So so there's a there's a method to the madness. It's it's we're going to grow, spend more money. We're you're spending more money on marketing, you're spending more money on hiring somebody, probably have to hire some other people along the way. Um, so you more output. You are, you know, you had a record collections month, but again, you got to put money back out too. But the goal is then to cut back on your clinical time and hopefully have a similar take-home. Is that kind of the goal?

SPEAKER_01 5:07

Exactly. Yeah. Uh do less clinically, be able to do more admin-related stuff, more CEO stuff. Uh, likely eventually scale back to only two clinical days. And I'd like to, I'm trying to cut my personal schedule once to get this next doctor in to eight to three so I can, you know, start and book in my day with uh taking my daughter to school, getting her home from school and all that sort of thing, really trying to make my fract practice work for my life and that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

That's so awesome. I I love that. Okay. And then how many hygienists do you have? Five. Five hygienists. Okay. And then um, you're also in network with insurances. Can you just kind of explain your market and your strategy behind that?

SPEAKER_01 5:46

Yeah, we're 85% PPO. Um, we're in DFW and South Arlington, kind of the heart of North Texas. Um, it's a very competitive market.

SPEAKER_00 5:56

Super competitive, like super, like dentist on top of dentist on top of dentist.

SPEAKER_01 6:00

Right, right. We had a brief period when I moved to this new space where we were the only dentist like for a mile in each direction, but uh that's quickly gone away. Um and so yeah, it's a pretty competitive market, and we're always just trying to make sure we scale appropriately. We also have a somewhat transient population because we have a lot of apartments, um, like more apartments and neighborhoods around the practice. And so we have a lot of patients that are literally only living uh in our area for a year, and we get them and then we call them for recall, and they're like, Oh yeah, I moved 30 miles away from that kind of thing. So um, but we take you know, get all the best TPO plans. We are a network of Delta, we've negotiated through TPNs for all the major carriers and things like that. Uh, and so we try to optimize that as much as possible. I'm a big believer in profitability both in hygiene and in uh PPO uh dentistry in general. And so, you know, we try to get there through efficiency, during specialty cases, and you know, key dentistry nutrition while serving our patients at a high level.

SPEAKER_00 6:59

That's awesome. Okay, so let's talk through some of these numbers. So you had your record collections of 347, which is amazing. Like that's really good. You get 367 of production. Um, is that kind of where you want to be for the new doctor coming in? Is that like your new floor that you're aiming for? Or what do you what what are you what are your thoughts on that? How does that look for the future?

SPEAKER_01 7:21

Yeah, I mean, in the sh I would say relative short term, next six to twelve months, if we were around 340 with 10 doctor days, I would be more than happy with that. Uh the way our numbers break down, that would net that would be both a net increase in my income and a decrease in my clinical uh requirements. And so I'm fortunate to already, I think I'm only about 30% of the actual clinical production for the practice. Um but I would like to get that number and increasingly um yeah, and just do that. Rely on that magical uh term once it e bit uh that everybody tells me about, to rely on that a little bit more uh and continue to scale the practice. And realistically, I understand that's just gonna require something that most people just aren't willing to do, which is like spending a lot of money on marketing and getting a lot of patience to come through the door.

SPEAKER_00 8:08

And then adjusting your operations, like you guys did an awesome job uh to leading into your record month on phone conversion, and your team did amazing. They converted at, I believe, almost 80%. But then I wanted to talk a little bit about some of the you know not good stuff, because there are there are hard things that come. So you had like one of your best months, and then that put a lot of strain on your office. So then your team started to struggle a little bit on the phone, patient referrals dipped the next month, and but you identified it really quickly. Like a lot of times people see that and they panic. They're like, what's going on? Everything's broken. It's like, no, it's not broken. We broke it, but it's a good, it's a good break, right? And then now we go in and now we know where we need support. How did you how do you think through that? And how did you handle it so well?

SPEAKER_01 8:56

Yeah, I would say we're at this one, we're pretty used to it. Kind of the boom bust cycle of you know, highly productive months followed by you know breakdown of systems, burnout, things like that. We talk about burnout a lot in my office. Um, we make, you know, I think at my the monthly meeting at the end of March, I told them if you're feeling the strain, feeling burned out, this is not something I can fix for you, please in April take time off. And so that also contributed to our April numbers being a little bit worse. Is that people, you know, we I you know, I frankly just told them, like, you need to take some time off. Like to sustain this long term, you have to uh take care of yourself. Um, but also just operationally, yeah, people are tired. People, um, you know, your charisma wanes a little bit after you've been uh stressed and had a really, really busy month and putting in a lot of effort uh to earn like our collections bonus and that sort of thing. And so it was really nice to be able to pay that bonus out. But yeah, everybody starts the next month just a little bit tired. And we recognize that PBN um makes it really clear, like, hey, you know, your next two weeks aren't quite as good as your last few weeks are gonna be, and that kind of thing.

SPEAKER_00 10:00

And sometimes just for the audience, PBN is practiced by numbers, which is which is a lot of a lot of people use that for like mid-level tracking. Uh it sits above the PMS, it it works well.

SPEAKER_01 10:11

Right, exactly. Um, so yeah, it helps to track and let you know um you know what you're doing, how your numbers are looking. We uh are you know, most a lot of our production is do patient driven. And so it was interesting. In March, we observed that we got a bunch of new patients in the first probably half of the month, and and probably you know, 70% of our new patients in the first half of the month, and then you know, the other 30% in the second half, which in sets up a slower start to the following month, um, because we get all of our stuff. We get our patients in, we get them scheduled, we get the treatment scheduled quickly. Um, and so there's always that lag in that sort of thing. That's something that we tweaked uh with the marketing, was trying to get more consistent flow throughout the month so that we don't really have highs and lows and try to keep it as even as possible.

SPEAKER_00 10:54

Um, one thing that I noticed is there's two things that you're doing really well, and I want to hit on both of them. Actually, three things. Number one, your ROI is really good, meaning you're almost at 400%, which is really high for just coming out of that month. Normally people would be at like 200, 250, and then it would climb over time as they got the patients back in. So that tells me the patients are coming in, they're buying treatment. How what are you doing there to get obviously you're in network, but you're there, you're you're it's way more than what the insurance is covering. You're not just doing what the insurance covers.

SPEAKER_01 11:24

Right. Yeah. I mean, we we treat the plan comprehensively um and then pair back whatever treatment plan is necessary uh based on what the patient wants, right? We're big believers in giving patients exactly what they ask for. And some patients come in wanting everything, and some just come in wanting a single toothfold. And I find my life is a lot easier and a lot simpler when I just give people what they want all day. Um, you know, it stops being a sales kind of thing, and it's just asking them what they feel like is going to be best for them and then making it work uh as best as possible. We, of course, do a lot of specialty procedures in the office, and so it helps when you can do almost everything that comes through the door, uh, because a lot of those specialty things are of course higher higher dollar than the sellings and crowns and that sort of thing. So um what's the like the main stuff to get?

SPEAKER_00 12:12

What's the main higher dollar treatment that you're doing?

SPEAKER_01 12:15

Yeah, most of that'll be surgical related, you know, EHT braft, implants, a lot of a decent amount of uh immediates uh coming through the door in our practice. That's like the big thing. We do a lot of you know, single tooth, endo, RCT bowl crown, we you know, mill our crowns in house. So, you know, a three thousand dollar tooth for two to three hours of our time is uh you know from my perspective, and my associate was doing one of those in the morning, one in the afternoon, we'd all be kind, you know, yeah, we'd all be pretty happy here. So I would say surgery and endo are the two big ones. We do some ortho for probably 50 starts a year or so, and so that's kind of the nice little cherry on top that helps to augment the production, among sorts of things. But again, I think it's just having the ability to be comprehensive in the care that you offer to your patients because patients really don't like having to go somewhere to get one tooth worked on. You know, no, like they just they just despise that.

SPEAKER_00 13:04

So what is uh are you using patient financing?

SPEAKER_01 13:07

Yes, yeah, lots of it.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

Like what percentage do you know what percentage of your like do you have a percentage that you're aiming for of your total collections uh that is financed?

SPEAKER_01 13:16

Uh we don't set a target with that. If I had to estimate, I'd say it's about 30% for collections. That's really financial.

SPEAKER_00 13:21

That's really good. That's that's high. So yeah, most see, and this is I try to so that means you're probably offering it to almost every person, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:29

Oh yes, oh yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

Okay. So this is most dentists do not do this. Like I would say 95, 98% of dentists do not do this. The all on X doctors all do it. All the like all the ortho does it, but outside of them, the GPs don't normally do this. If you present to every patient the monthly payments first or with the treatment, um, your collections just go through the roof. And uh the marker that people try to hit is like 25 to 30 percent is like excellent. And you're you're paying a big fee, right? Like it costs a lot of money to the financing company, but you're collect you're collecting a lot more at the same time.

SPEAKER_01 14:08

Yeah, I mean, I've always um, and it's kind of the same idea with taking insurance. Um, a lot of doctors get really bogged down about this phrase of I'm getting paid what I'm worth and that sort of thing. And I totally understand that. I totally understand you don't want to get a $50 growth from Belta, all these things. Like I get that. But for me, I would rather take 85% of anything than 0% of or you know, 100 or 100% of zero, you know. Um and that's the way that it uses patients are stretched financially, right? The the realities of the modern economy and and food and gas prices, all these things. And the easier we can make it for them to say yes, you know, and say it's a couple hundred bucks a month, that kind of thing. And also while offloading administrative burden of having to like manage in-house payment plans and things like that, because I just have no interest in that. Uh I'll just gladly pay that fee all day and twice on Sunday.

SPEAKER_00 15:08

Yep. Uh, I've heard I've I heard from a consultant one time he said the most expensive thing in a dental office is an empty chair. So if you can keep those chairs filled and you are uh keeping the the collections going, I mean it's it's huge. And and your growth is uh it definitely shows that. Now, the other thing that I noticed is that you did um your average time to appointment is eight days, which is really good. The industry average is like 28 to 30 days. So how have you done that? Are you doing anything special there besides having five hygienists?

SPEAKER_01 15:40

Yeah, so it's just maintaining uh available capacity far and away is the biggest thing. Um in our weekly level 10 meetings, we have in our scoreboard how many hygiene openings do we have over the next two weeks? You know, our target is uh 16 openings, and the months that we have 16 or more, and I I'm I'm okay with more. Uh doesn't bother me to have 20, 30 plus hygiene openings um, because I just know that we're gonna get them filled to get the patients in. In my patient demographic, if you give somebody a month to think about whether or not they want to come with the dentist, you might as well just not make the appointment. They're not coming, you know. Um so yeah, I happy to hear that that's it's that low. I didn't realize it was that low.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

Actually, I'll go over the last six months at your last six months, which is uh like amazing. Like so good.

SPEAKER_01 16:24

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 16:24

Yeah, hard. It's hard to do, it's hard to do because what ends up happening is you do everybody's dentistry, they come back and they fill up your hygiene and they're like, they're healthy, they don't need anything. And but you can then you don't have any capacity for new patients, especially when you start adding associates and you need more new patients. So that's you you're doing an excellent job. Um, and I I I I think a lot of it you've you're you have two doctors right now and you're only doing 30% of the total production. So that's probably freeing you up mentally to be able to work on these kind of things. Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 16:57

Absolutely, absolutely. Um, it's hard to run a large general business and be like in there cranking out 10k a day. I mean, if you're if you're a guy that's doing bigger, bigger cases, I can understand. But even then, those big cases consume a tremendous amount of clinical time and a lot of uh you know mental power. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, having a productive and profitable hygiene department, having a productive associate has really allowed me to, you know, do more CEO admin type stuff and you know anticipate things and work on these sorts of things because yeah, back when it was and then I remember back when I worked four days, we grew because the founder dentist worked four days, right? And so there was a lot of you know it was inevitable that we were gonna continue to do better and better. Um, but we didn't really grow from a systems standpoint. And it isn't so I've cut back and taken less and dumb and forced myself to do less clinically. Um, that we've started to grow in those respects.

SPEAKER_00 17:56

Got it. Um, last thing. So this is really good. And I I love just the level-headed approach that you approach business with. So um, what does like the future look like? What do you need? Are you thinking 120 new patients and 450 collections? Is that kind of your target or what what are you thinking?

SPEAKER_01 18:15

Yeah, I think the new patient flow will absolutely want to be uh in the low 100s. Um, I think the what I project is something like 120, 125, something like that, uh, when we're really humming along. I do see 5 million, which is around what 420-ish, yeah, 425, 430, uh, as kind of our I say that as our ceiling, just in the sense that uh I don't like our days to be crazy. I I'm a very let's keep it smooth and easy. And so if we get up to say 18, 20 hygiene days eventually, I think 5 million is a really nice kind of long-term projection. Um but it might take us several years to get there, and I'm okay with that. Um, you know, we got a long runway here, and uh, I'm not really in any rush to max this out as quickly as possible. I'm not in any rush to go build another door or anything like that. I have a large, highly profitable dental business that takes care of every financial concern my family could have. And so my bigger priority is while we could continue to grow and outsource things to my leadership team, it that's that's great. But I want to just you know take back as much of my life as I can and enjoy it from that perspective.

SPEAKER_00 19:24

That's so awesome. Great, great mindset. You did a great job. Thanks so much for coming on. Uh, and I always say this, but I really appreciate when dentists are willing to come on and talk about this because you have no, it's not like you make money or you have something to sell on a podcast. You know what I mean? So I appreciate you just coming on and just sharing your journey because it it does help other dentists to know that there are um you can grow. There, you can't, even in a really competitive market, you can do it if you put your mind to it. So great job.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

Yeah. Thanks, Garrett. And I appreciate uh everything that SMC has done for us. Uh it's I would say you're the first marketing company that we've worked with that truly, you know, you set targets for us and delivered on exactly what you said you would. So uh let's go. Thanks.

SPEAKER_00 20:04

That's awesome. Well, I'm trying to get you to 420 by the end of the year. So that's where my mind's at. So you said a couple years. I'm thinking into the year we can we can get you there.

SPEAKER_01 20:12

All right. Thanks, man.

SPEAKER_00 20:13

Thanks. Peace.