$1M Per Chair… and Barely Any Marketing with Lior Tamir

Don't let all your marketing dollars go to waste… Because if you're chasing patients instead of focusing on their experience inside your practice, they may be.

Dr. Lior Tamir has built a practice doing close to $1M per chair while spending under $3K/month on marketing. In this episode, he shares exactly how he did it — from the patient experience details most owners ignore to the follow-up gap costing most practices serious revenue.

Topics discussed:

• Why marketing isn’t enough to grow a practice
• The unconventional moves that differentiated and grew his practice
• How small details compound into long-term retention
• Patient touchpoints that drive organic growth
• Why you should invest in technology (and what to buy first)
• How to unlock hidden revenue in your practice

Learn more about The Dental App:
https://www.thedentalapp.com/

This episode was produced by Podcast Boutique https://www.podcastboutique.com

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Transcript

Marketing Cannot Fix Bad Experience

Paul Etchison 0:48

You can spend thousands of dollars on marketing. You can run the ads, you can hire the agencies trying to get more patients. But if the experience inside your practice is not dialed in, none of it really matters. It's a broken system. And you see, patients don't stay for your marketing. They might come for the marketing, but they stay for the way that you made them feel. And the hard truth is that most practices, they don't actually know what it feels like to even be a patient. They're not thinking about these things. They've never stepped back. They never asked, if I walked into my place, my practice for the first time, would I be impressed or would it feel like every other dental office I've ever been to? Well, today we are going to show you what actually creates a practice that grows without relying on constant marketing for new patients, how you can build an experience that patients want to talk about, and how those small intentional decisions can completely change the speed of your growth. Because when you get this right, when you nail that patient experience, you don't need to chase the patients anymore. They will come to you. Now you're listening to the Dental Practice Heroes podcast, where we help dentists build more profitable, more efficient practices without burning themselves out. I'm your host, Dr. Paul Etchison. I am a dentist, a practice owner, a dental coach, a two-time author, and I've spent years helping dentists take control of their time, their systems, and their growth. And today I'm joined by Dr. Lior Tamir. He's a multi-practice owner. He's built an incredibly efficient operation. He's doing close to a million dollars per chair in his top location. One million dollars per chair. How insane is that? And he's running all this while he's still practicing clinically. Now, what makes Lior different is his background. He didn't just come up through dentistry. He spent years in advertising and branding and software before he finally became a practice owner. And he's applied those things that he learned while he was working in that space to build a completely different kind of patient experience inside his practice. So this is one you're not gonna want to miss. He is an exceptional dentist, an exceptional person. He's got an exceptional story. And he's gonna show you exactly how you can replicate those results in your practice. All right, let's dive in. So, Lior Tamir, tell us about you got three practices. Like, give us like a little brief history, just you know, from practice ownership to where you're at now.

SPEAKER_02 3:21

Awesome. First of all, thanks for having me. Yeah, so I of the three practices, my first one I founded in 2016. It was an interesting story. It was a complete de novo startup, but it was very unique because a previous dentist had done a really fancy build-out and uh defaulted on their loans. And what happened was is the landlord ended up swooping in and taking the debt from the bank. And then the the same doctor defaulted on payments to the landlord. And so was eventually kind of kicked out, and the facilities stood empty for two years in a very, very saturated market. And it was taken a break from practicing dentistry, or I mean, it's a slightly longer story, but I had taken a break and then came across this opportunity. I swooped in and in a very opportunistic way, you know, essentially paid for the build out. I paid 10 cents on the dollar. Wow. And said, all right, let's give this a go and let's give it a try. And previous to that, the slightly longer stories, I got out of dental school in 09, uh, peak of the financial crisis, couldn't really find work in dentistry, no family in dentistry. I worked really as a part-time associate and started working in advertising. I mean, I did that for about uh six and a half, seven years. And when I got back into dentistry, a lot of it was like, okay, let's start a practice and see if I could bring all these, all the knowledge base that I had, you know, learned doing advertising and marketing and branding and so on into the dental field. I scaled that practice up. Uh today it's it's kind of like my best performing practice. It does close to a million dollars a chair. So it's extremely efficient and uh high producing. And then from there, I started to uh just expand. I did one acquisition and I have a second startup. So those are both around two years old and really in the in the phases of fine-tuning them, making them, you know, busier, et cetera.

Paul Etchison 5:16

So gosh, a million a chair. That's outstanding. Tell us about like your how much you're practicing along with this, because that's something listeners always want to know. Oh, is this person just 100% in the CEO role or are you practicing as well?

Advertising Lessons From Major Brands

SPEAKER_02 5:28

So I still practice. I practice three days a week. I enjoy practicing. A lot of what I do is like I'm not taking new patients that are routine hygiene and six-month cleans. So I I do filter out for more complex cases. But I actually think that for the dental app, which is my my company, to really be chair side and understanding how a practice operates and runs and so on, and being quote unquote in the trenches has really given me a lot of advantage compared to other software vendors that are building software from an engineering perspective, trying to fit it into a dental practice. You know, will that change over time? Yeah, I mean, I I am getting to the point where it's a lot to juggle, but I really enjoy. I think that dentistry, when practiced in an efficient way, could actually be really enjoyable. So I'm still practicing.

Paul Etchison 6:16

Yeah, yeah. And I think it's good for the listeners to hear when you were an advertising, I mean, that's a very broad stroke for what you were doing. Do you want to be more specific?

SPEAKER_00 6:26

Because I think you you I mean it was a little more than you weren't just writing copy at a desk at some firm, like 100%.

SPEAKER_02 6:32

So this was early days of like Facebook ads, right? So 09, Facebook ads were finally becoming a thing. And essentially there's two branches of advertising. There's what we call display ads. So when you go on different websites and you see the little pop-up banners and so on, those are display ads. So those are advertising across different websites. And then Facebook, X, Instagram, Snapchat, those are all platform-based ads, right? And so you have to go into Facebook's business center and build out your ads and so on. So in those early days, there was a lot, a lot of people trying to figure out what's the best way to optimize, right? So I kind of taught myself best practices, or, or I mean, it was the early days. It was kind of who's establishing best practices or who can show repeated results and so on. And then ended up building software that did bid management. And so the agency that I started uh scaled, uh, we became the digital arm for WME IMG, which was before they went public. And then we essentially ran ads for most of their events. So we were running um ad campaigns for New York Fashion Week and Wimbledon and you know, large brands, lots of in-person activations. So very, very different than practicing dentistry. But doing that gave me a lot of understanding of like what a modern brand was looking for, how were they advertising? It really helped me see things through the lens of experiences, right? So experiences were also kind of a newer thing. And in many ways, it gave me the edge to essentially start my practice and scale it in such a competitive or saturated market. So yeah, so it was part advertising, part branding, and then a big part of it was learning how to build out software or software company.

Paul Etchison 8:10

Yeah, I thought it was important that we go through that because I think there would have been some listeners being like, wow, he just went and worked in advertising for six years. You know, it's like, what was he doing? Why? How did he do that?

SPEAKER_02 8:21

Yeah. So, you know, when I got out of dental school, I don't have parents that are dentists, I don't have uncles that are dentists. My mom was a nurse, my dad was a business, or both of them are retired now, but my dad built a business in the diabetes space. So he was in sensors and technology and so on. So I got out and I didn't really have someone to call and say, hey, I need a job. And you know, I was really just fresh meat right out of dental school with nowhere to really land. And I had to really get scrappy and try to figure out what I was gonna do. It was it was just a really weird time. And I'm very grateful that it ended up this way. I wasn't I wasn't super thrilled about the reality of it at the time, but again, I I learned a lot and um and I'm doing really ambitious things today.

Paul Etchison 9:00

Yeah, and you made it work and you did really well at it. Yeah. So talk about this practice you picked up. What was going through your head when you're looking at this practice that now has been was this practice already running? It was open or it was just built out?

SPEAKER_02 9:14

The first one. Yeah. It was completely built out, not a single patient. It had sat abandoned for like two years.

Paul Etchison 9:21

I mean, did you look at that and have any fears of like what's going on with this? Why, like, what was your thought process going into looking at an abandoned practice and wondering is there a reason? Am I missing something?

Designing Touchpoints That Build Trust

SPEAKER_02 9:31

There's a few things that really stuck out to me. So I'm based in uh San Mateo, California. And this practice, in particular, there is an area within our town. We call it dental row. There's like a street with every single dentist, and there's a lot of dentists on that street. And this specific practice was in downtown, about a mile and a half from that dental area. But the things that really were exciting about it was it had its street level. So it's essentially retail, a retail location. Lots of businesses were kind of popping up. It was inside a residential building. So above, you had about 300 apartments. And I think the biggest thing was it was large. It was a six operator. I mean, for me starting out, it was it was a big practice. It was six ops. You know, it came with obviously the overhead of having to like, you know, what do you do with six ops and you know, the rent that's associated with it and so on. In many ways, because I had never really spent much time running a practice, and I never spent much time practicing up to that point, I was really too naive to say, hey, these are the red flags that I should have been looking for. And in many ways, that that kind of that became, again, in hindsight, if I knew everything, maybe I wouldn't have done it. I think not knowing those things, I was able to just jump in and say, all right, I gotta make this work, right? I know what my overhead is. I know what I need to start producing. You know, when I started out, I contracted with a bunch of insurances just to start getting things in, you know, patients in. And then obviously as I scaled, I got rid of a lot of those insurance companies. But in the very beginning, it was like, okay, I got this shell and I have an opportunity to make something unique and special. When I started, my vision was to become like a one medical group for dentistry. And now obviously, or not obviously, but I've kind of shifted my goal to become much more boutique focused and high touch. We're not trying to become like some huge operation or conglomerate. But seeing things through that lens and having that vision from the get-go really helped me pave the way for what I ended up building. I think that because I spent so much time in marketing and advertising and brand experiences. So I have a really good friend of mine who was actually the chief marketing officer for Trident. And then she was working with uh Sour Patch Kids. So, you know, the candy company. And I before I left the marketing world, I got to go visit her at some of her, you know, brand experiences. And they had done some really cool stuff. At the time, they had rented out essentially a mansion, one in Beverly Hills and one in New York City, and they decked these places out with everything Sour Patch Kids. So, like, for example, they had a grand piano, decked out like painted and Sour Patch Kids, and they were bringing up and coming artists, letting them stay at those properties, recording content. And then that was how they were um promoting Sour Patch Kids. So these experiences that I had really started to make me think, okay, like how am I going to set myself apart? How am I going to do something unique? And so coming into this practice, it was a shell. It was actually painted in this really awful yellow color. The main things that I did coming in was obviously clean the place. I had the place painted in more subtle, subdued. But I got very fortunate that the build-out was really well done, really well thought out. And they spent a fortune, you know, building out everything from chairs to compressors to, you know, I walked in and there was like hand pieces. There was even anesthetic and needles. I mean, it was completely turnkey. So, you know, going back to your question, I'm sure there was a lot of red flags that I should have paid attention to, but not knowing those actually played to my advantage because I just said, all right, I got to make this work. I've got to create a unique patient experience. And I really started to obsess over that.

Paul Etchison 13:56

Yeah, that was gonna be my next question is I think so many people I work with, and I could do a lot of coaching clients, and we'll see some people that are just not really doing well in the new patient area. They're not acquiring people. And there's the multitude of factors. It could be in a dental practice, such as the new patient conversion, it could be the phone answering how much they're doing it. But at a some certain level, you might I might look at a practice and go, like, who are you? What are you putting out into the world? Like, who are you? Like, have you ever thought about who you are? So I'm interested to hear with your take on coming from this advertising gig that you were doing, you know, zeroing in on what is the message we should put out to make these Facebook ads work. How did you bring that into your practice and do the same thing with your practice to make it stand out?

SPEAKER_02 14:42

100%. I think that first of all, that's such a great question. You know, I really wanted to create a unique and special experience. And I started to break it out into a few different areas. It was like, what happens before you arrive to the practice? What happens when you first arrive to the practice? And then I've always thought about dentistry in terms of or any business for that sake. Um, how do you provide more perceived value than what people are paying you for? Right. So I think that anytime you go to any business or engage with any business, there's usually, you know, three different ways that a business typically engages. Either you're paying the money and you feel like you're getting less than what you paid for, you're paying the money and you get exactly what you feel like you paid for, or you pay a business and you feel like you got way more than what you paid for. And I think that starting from that perspective and saying, okay, how do I create an experience that that I can really make it feel like patients or my customers getting more than what they paid for, that's really where magic starts to happen. And so as I started to open my doors, I really started to map out all these touch points. It first started with, all right, what happens when they call? What happens when they land on the website? Those are early days of online scheduling, you know, digital forms, things of the sort. But then really catering or curating a patient experience where it felt honest and transparent. So if you ever think about what are the main complaints or the taboos that people say about dentists, right? They say, you know, it hurts. They say, I feel like my dentist oversells me, right? Or or or is not transparent. Those are the big things that you, you know, that you tend to hear. The other thing is that uh people always say, oh, the dental office feels so outdated. You go in and it, you know, there's not a lot of natural light. It looks like uh horsing from the 70s or whatever it is. And so those are all the things that I really tried to do to fine-tune and create a unique experience. Um again, this is over a decade ago. So these days I see like crazy experiences. Like I've seen some practices that have hidden speakeasies and stuff like that. But even for where I was starting, it was like, okay, let's make this waiting room really nice. Let's get some nice magazines, let's make it smell nice, let's have some pleasant music, let's get some decent water bottles, a coffee station, just small things that really move the needle. Chair side, for me, it was really important to build trust. And the way that this came very naturally to me, but essentially it was like, okay, I'm gonna walk patients through every little detail of what I'm doing. So I locked in a digital scanner, I spent every single new patient exam walking patients through the x-rays, explaining the different layers of the teeth, why we would treat something versus why not. And this instantly became a trust factor. And then a few months in, about I would say six months into starting that practice, I was still looking for that wow factor. And I did something, again, a little bit unconventional. I ended up going to just searching online. I found a dental conference in Shanghai called Dentec China. And I said, all right, well, you know, whatever, let's go check it out. I bought a ticket to um to Shanghai, and I showed up at this conference and I said, Well, let's see if I could find anything cool. And I ended up finding a toothbrush manufacturer, electric toothbrush manufacturer. And I was able to get these super, I mean, amazing, I kid you not, like on par with a Sonic Air electric toothbrush with my own custom branding, landed stateside for$9 a piece. Wow. I bought a thousand of them. So I said, all right, let's give this a try. And I ended up, I got a palette of brushes made, manufactured, and I shipped them out and I just started handing them out. I said, you know, you know, usually you go, you get like a little crappy little sample of toothpaste. I said, I'm gonna do something special and unique. And I pretty much started giving every new patient, you know, a branded electric toothbrush. And I would say, look, we put this together. This is our investment in you. Um, I even got brush heads that I would give patients on recall. And that is actually what really started to help me take off. Again, in a very saturated market, you know, it's always crazy how much people love free stuff. And it just helped me really move the needle. So it was really cool because I kind of had perfected the things that were really critical to run a great practice. I had the website done. The website was mobile friendly. I had uh staff that I trained in the front. I made it seamless to get started. I was extremely transparent. We invest in technology. So early CBCT adopter, early CERIC adopter, lasers, uh, digital scanners, and I kept investing in this technology. Our motto became, I mean, even until today, if you go to our website, it says your best smile back by technology. And being in the Silicon Valley area, that really resonated with my customers. And I think that this is a really important point that when you are going to create your brand, you really have to understand who's your clientele. Like my clientele happens to be a lot of techies, people that work at Google and you know, a bunch of publicly traded companies, specifically in the tech and AI space. And even until today, we continue to make these investments, but this is really what has set us apart.

Paul Etchison 19:37

There's so many things you said that I'm like, yes, we did that. Yes, we did that. We didn't hand out toothbrushes, but we got very focused on that patient experience, like the very first touch point that's interpersonal. How are we doing on the phones? What do we do when they come in? What are the things we're going to say to them? Well, how are we going to bring them back? And what are we going to do the second they get in the obituary? What's the operatory gonna look like? I mean, there's so many little detailed touch points you can go through. And I think like people always ask me, at what point, like when you were two, three years in, how much were you marketing? And I always said, hey, at a certain point, we were just taking such great care of people. Like people couldn't help but tell people about us. Yeah. Like it just reached this momentum point where it just like we stopped marketing. We were seeing so many people.

Low-Cost Upgrades Patients Actually Notice

SPEAKER_02 20:19

Well, I think it compounds with reputation too, right? So as your online reputation gets better, it just continues to scale. It's a very organic growth. I spend less than three grand a month advertising my practice.

Paul Etchison 20:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:32

So my new associates, I sign them up on Zock Doc to get a few new patients through the door. And we average, I think it's 103 new patients a month at my main practice with almost zero advertising. And again, it comes down to perfecting that experience, right? And by the way, if you go out and advertise, you get you know 50 people through the door, and then you have just an absolute trash experience, or you haven't fine-tuned these things, or you you don't really take the time. So many times I talk to Dennis and I'll have them say, Hey, do me a favor, just walk me through these x-rays, and I'll hear how they explain the treatment they need or someone may need. And they're so far, you know, they they talk about it in such technical terms, and they're so far from engaging with a person on a human level, that it doesn't matter how much advertising you do, you know, if if you just don't know how to convert these people, don't know how to build trust, chair side, it doesn't matter what you do, it's not gonna grow. So I really think that, you know, in advertising, we always say advertising is fuel for a fire. If you don't have the fire started, right, and you're just throwing fuel on it, nothing's gonna happen.

Paul Etchison 21:37

Well, it it's amazing because most people are that they don't want to start with that first. They will say, I want to get a lot of new patients. I'm like, what do I gotta do? Like more marketing. Okay, what it new patient conversion. And they're always like, well, like what are you bringing them into? And I feel this when I'm working with clients, it's hard not to want to fix everything at once. You know, it's because it's it's it's a little bit of everything.

SPEAKER_02 21:55

Well, it is overwhelming, right? I mean, this is actually one of the biggest challenges is that I feel like we come out at Dell School and we had like that one semester business course where we write some bullshit business model that we present and get an A minus on or whatever. But you come out and you're out there competing and it's a real world business. And I always talk about this. And anyone who's ever heard me speak, I always say, you know, we're in the hospitality business. We also happen to do dentistry on the side. And it's such a critical part to understand. And you can't fix everything overnight. When I launched my startup, it was my own money. It's not like I went and I had like some investor or so, you know, I wanted to have the least amount of debt possible. So I really put lipstick on a pig, right? I painted the place. I did the bare minimum to kind of make it pleasant and nice. And I feel like many offices can do simple things like that. Like today, if you don't have online scheduling, if you don't have online, you know, digital forms, and there's like bare minimums, right? Where in 2026 there's there's easy, low-hanging fruit people can do, but you don't necessarily need to gut your office. You know, you can start with paint, a nice fridge, pleasant music, make your office not, I always joke, like how many times you walk into a dental office and the smell of IRM just slaps you in the face, you know, like just not making it smell like a dental office, go to your operatories, clean things up, put cables away, you know, tidy it up. We don't think about this because we're so numb to what it's like to be in a dental office. But if you're somebody who has anxiety or if you have fear, or just walking into a dental office, the noise, the sound of the drill, the smell, the Cables everywhere. You know, it's just there's easy things that you could do, low-hanging fruit that you could really invest in. And that's a great place to start. And from there, you compound. And by the way, when I started, I wasn't doing a million dollars a chair. It was, okay, get the patients in, win them over, build an amazing hygiene program. Then we started to layer in specialists. Like that was actually a huge thing that I really unlocked in growth was I started tracking my referrals. I remember there was one year that I had referred out like 273, you know, surgical procedures. And I was like, what am I doing? Like this is well over a million dollars that I'm referring out. Then so it was like then finding specialists to come in and you know, slowly building it up and layering it up. It's a compounding business, right? And it's a business that once you kind of establish yourself and you have systems in place and so on, it continues to grow, continues to scale, and continues to become profitable.

Paul Etchison 24:26

Aaron Powell, you know, looking back on your journey. People ask me, like, could you build what you built? Can you build it again? And I say, of course I could. I could do it in half the time, I'm sure. I would skip a lot of steps. Is there anything looking back in your journey where you say, you know, that one took me a little bit to figure that one out and get over that hump?

SPEAKER_02 24:42

You know, that's a great question. I think one of the things that us as clinicians underestimate is how important it is to have the best humanly possible quality staff that you can find and overpay them. When I say overpay them, like you want to be so competitive in their compensation that they're not looking anywhere. So, you know, my office manager's been with me since the very beginning. She was my first employee. So she's uh 10 years at this one office. But then, you know, all of my assistants and so on, they are incredible. And I've hired them. I first and foremost hire for personality and how friendly and polite they are. It's the other things are easier to teach. Yeah. But heavily investing in culture, heavily investing in people is something that that is really critical, I think. Things that I would look back and try to do sooner. I think investing in technology. I think every, you know, it's very funny because I'm a gadget person, so I just buy every gadget that comes out. Like in any department, like audio, new TVs, whatever. I always gotta try something new. And my wife's always like, you know, it's always a negotiation, like, what is this gonna do for us? Right. In the beginning, it was always, you know, I want to buy this laser. Well, what is it gonna do for us? Oh, you know, let's see. I want this toy, right? And then every single time I purchased a piece of technology, it leveled up, right? So technology, people, and then probably again, the biggest unlock for me was bringing in specialists. So by the way, I'm not saying I know everything. Uh, there's a lot of things I keep trying to learn myself. And some doctors out there are really great at doing surgical procedures and so on. But for me, bringing in like an oral surgeon and then bringing in a periodonist, and we're in the process of bringing in an endodontist, these are things that really started to hugely unlock growth in my practice. And I wish I had started to do that earlier.

Paul Etchison 26:38

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know, I have always been the same way with like the gadgets, and my wife used to give me a hard time every time I would go to like a dental CE. Yeah. I would always spend money and sometimes I would, I may have fibbed it a little bit. You know, what I bought new golf clubs one day. Okay. So I went, you know, golf clubs. I mean, if anyone's a golfer, you know how much new golf clubs. Like, good. So I got the bag, I got a new bag, and I got a new set of irons, and I got just one wood and a brand new driver. Okay. So I just had it sitting there in the kitchen when she came home from work and just not thinking anything about like the price tags on it. Like there weren't really price tags on anything other than the bag. But there was a tag on the bag that said$320, and that was for the bag. And she said, You got all these for$320? That's amazing.

SPEAKER_00 27:21

And I looked at that and I said, Sure did. They were like$2,400. Okay, there was it was$2,400. It was a lot of money. But it was like, it was so funny. Yeah.

Building Software For Chairside Clarity

SPEAKER_02 27:32

But you know what? It makes such a difference. It makes such a difference. I feel like a lot of doctors or dentists, the phrase I always use is you gotta you gotta pay to play, right? You gotta invest in the best. If you're gonna be the best, you gotta invest in it. And technology is also moving so fast. Like, you know, there's so many cool 3D jaw scanners and 3D printers and the lasers that are coming out are just wild. Like there's so much incredible technology, but all of those things unlock huge practice growth, right? And by the way, it doesn't all have to happen at once, right? I I do think, and I have my own biased set of opinions, but like if you're just starting out, right? I think, you know, if you had to pick one piece of technology that would really change how you practice, like for me, the milling was a big one. Like the CERIC was just a huge unlock. From there, C B CT. Wow. I mean, the amount of dormant infections or things gone wrong or or just the ability to have CBCT. So when you bring a specialist in, like you could do same-day implants and same-day treatment that you would you wouldn't be able to do otherwise, those investments, and that's really how you have to look at it, unlock potential, unlock growth.

Paul Etchison 28:45

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think it's one of those things is when you start getting the ball rolling and you start seeing almost like you've got a proven concept and you're just seeing consistent practice growth. I think it then becomes a lot easier to take those risks and invest in technology. Now, you being a software person, I mean, you went and created software within your dental practice that was specifically for your needs. What were the primary needs originally that led you to do that? Where you're like, we're just gonna create something.

Patient Follow-Up Systems And The Dental App

SPEAKER_02 29:15

When I set out to build software, it wasn't like, all right, I'm gonna go build practice management software. So the very first thing that I built. Oh, by the way, if anyone's wondering, my tech stack out of the gate was I had open dental, I had Next Health. Eventually I got dental intel, but that was like my tech stack. Like I had uh, you know, what a lot of people still operate on today. The first thing that I went out to do was I built a clinical workflow. We call it the guided patient exam. Essentially, what I was talking about, like when you're sitting chairside with a patient face to face, that's your opportunity to build trust. That's the equivalent of brand in dentistry. I've always said that. Like your chair side interaction, that's your brand. So when a patient would come in and I would take the time to say, all right, you know, here's the panel, here's the bite wings, this is what we're looking at, here's the right side, here's your different layers, here's an early stage cavity, we're gonna put a watch on that. And here's something that we need to treat, and here are the options and intraoral photos and so on. Going through that process, I cannot tell you how many times patients would stop me and say, nobody's ever taken the time to explain this to me, the way that you're explaining this, right? And so for me, the first thing that I built was I built this guided workflow that essentially let me and my assistant go through the same exact protocol and say, hard tissue, soft tissue, uh, TMJ, ortho screening, cancer screening, blah, blah, blah, and then uh summary and then a plan that showed must do, should do, and could do. And that became my chair side brand. I mean, that's what I did for every single new patient. It also became extremely relevant for when I added associates. Because when associates came in, the first thing I said is like, look, I really don't care how you've done it anywhere before. This is how you're gonna do it here. This is our brand. This is what we stand for. And we're extremely transparent, extremely honest. We don't over-treatment plan. We want to be ethical, but more importantly, we want patients to understand the why. So I started building this essentially this workflow, and then it would spit out a treatment plan. But then what do you do with it? Right? Like you got to then plug it into open dental. And then so it eventually became, well, now I need this part, and then I need this part. And then it became like this whole thing, like full-blown practice management software. But the way that I've built the dental app, which is very, very different than most of what exists in the market today, is it's built from the lens of a business operator. So even though I hold myself to the highest possible standards clinically, I think that what really sets me apart is understanding the business side of dentistry. Right. And so I think that when I built this, it was really from the lens of how frustrating is it that you have to go out, have your PMS on a server, and then you have to log into Next Health, you know, to message patients. And then it doesn't update automatically. So you move an appointment, they're getting multiple uh reminders, and then you have to buy a third-party system for analytics and insights, and you have to do all this research. And as is, we're overwhelmed as dentists, right? By the way, I do think that the landscape has changed and the quality of available platforms has improved. But like when I started this out, this was not the norm. It was actually the furthest from the norm. It was like, man, I got to pick and choose. And I think that that's very overwhelming for dentists. The second part to it is so many dentists focus on, you know, new patients. I need new patients, new patients. I'm slow, I'm not producing enough, I need new patients. But how many have real systems in place to follow up with patients, you know, by the time you do your third recall, so by the time you've done a year and a half worth of running your practice and you have three recall cycles under your belt, you probably have tens, hundreds of patients that have outstanding treatment. And if you've done the work ethically, if you've sat chair side and explained things and treatment planned in an honest and ethical way, then part of your responsibility is to follow up with these patients, get them back in. Many practices do some version of this, right? So they'll have their office manager treatment plan coordinate, they'll follow up once, they'll do something once or twice, and then it gets lost or they forget. And, you know, the patient says, Oh, follow up with me in a month, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, it never happens, right? Outside of our profession, in every single industry, there's always been this tool called a CRM, a customer relationship management platform, right? So, you know, the big ones are HubSpot, Salesforce, things like that, where you have a business lead come in or a business opportunity come in, and you keep track of every engagement and you, you know, it's like a funnel, if you will, right? Here's my lead, and then I followed up with them, I followed up with them a second time, and so on. You know, just like every other business, dentistry also deserves that kind of follow-up, right? Like it is our duty to our patients to follow up with them. And so many offices don't have a very diligent or built-out process because one, they don't know, they've never been taught that this is actually an important part of running the business. But two, they've never had the tools, right? They're using Excel spreadsheets. They have, you walk into a room and you know their office manager is trying to manage this between an Excel spreadsheet that doesn't get automatically updated or post-it notes, or some offices just don't do it. And what we know now working with hundreds of offices is especially big ticket items, right? Invisalign cases, veneer cases, implant cases, all-in-x cases, just anything that's more than a filling, even crowns, enlays, sometimes or many times require multiple touch points, multiple attempts to get patients back in. And patients don't schedule for a variety of different reasons. And so what we've done in our software, again, that really sets us apart is we've built a lot of these business-specific tools. And again, built in a dental office, tested in a dental office that's extremely busy to bring those tools to other offices.

Paul Etchison 35:06

Yeah, it's amazing. And I think a lot of us we forget about the fact that there's a lot of dental patients that maybe life got busy and just two or three years went by. And they kind of think that if they come back to the practice, we're gonna be like, dude, where the heck have you been? What is your problem?

SPEAKER_02 35:23

Yeah.

Paul Etchison 35:23

You know, I can't believe you went away for three years. You should be so ashamed and embarrassed of yourself. And and the truth is, we know we would never, but sometimes at some point, there's a patient that says, I think I'm just gonna find someone new. You know, I just got busy. So I love that your software does that. So talk about like where can someone see the software in action and how it like incorporates all these things? Because that's a huge back-end thing. Nobody's doing it because it's the last thing for the front desk to work on. As soon as I get everything done and everything scanned and all the all the payments in and all that stuff and verified, then I'll follow up on treatment. Yeah, we all know it never happens.

SPEAKER_02 35:57

Well, I'll tell you, you know, first of all, what's very, very exciting is that in this specific day and time, we're getting to a point where there's so much AI coming in where a lot of these things are starting to get automated, right? Insurance verification is probably within 18 months, really a thing of the past. Like the systems that are coming out are so much better than they were. They're you're they're collecting data, they're standardizing it. And so that's becoming less of a hurdle. Data entry for insurance claims, right? There's multiple companies solving these things, right? So what's going to happen is the more that technology helps automate and streamline these aspects of running the practice, it should open up to do more meaningful things like outreach and getting patients back in and so on. And so, again, to your point, I think it's twofold. One, it's really understanding that this is an important part of running a practice. You always need new patients, but you also need to really have a concerted effort to get patients back in so that they don't leave you. They don't go somewhere else and say, hey, you never followed up with me. And even though you said you did, or whatever it is, or so that's one. You were asking, where can people learn about this? It's simple. They can go to our website, it's thedentalapp.com. A lot of people actually ask me, like, why'd you come up with that name? It was the domain that was available. It's so funny because I kept, man, brainstorming, like, what am I gonna call this thing? And then I was like, oh, the dental app, and it was available, and I said, I'm taking it. Uh, but thedentalappap.com, they could sign up for a demo. Uh, we're about to roll out like an interactive uh demo that people can watch. I also sponsor like all the different groups that many dentists are part of, and my face is plastered all over that with videos and demos and stuff like that. Um, they can reach out to me on Instagram, on Facebook. I'm I'm pretty easily available. But yeah, if anyone's interested to learn more, we would love to share.

Paul Etchison 37:41

Yeah, and if you're listening to this at home, you're like, man, this is a completely untapped opportunity in my practice. I mean, obviously you can do it with separate gadgets and all this stuff, but it's to have a system that's easy for your team to work, because we all know we always go to our teams and we say, hey, here, we're gonna do this and this and this. The easier we can make it and the more like foolproof we can, the more likely they are to follow through on it and use us to see the results. And that has been my experience in everything.

Key Takeaways And Next Steps

SPEAKER_02 38:06

So I think you bring up a really interesting point with that, is that it's not just about the convenience of having it in one place, it's the clarity that you can get. Yeah. It's not that now instead of five dashboards and remoting in and backing up your server and blah, blah, blah, all that stuff. It's really just having clarity and saying, oh, my analytics are based on real-time data, and I can see my outreach and I can see every single thing that's happening. I'd see outstanding claims and reports and adjustments and credit card payments coming in. Having that level of clarity should have always been the standard, and us as dentists should expect from the technology that we that we want to have in our practices. And I feel like it's the promise is finally getting fulfilled, right? The technology is really an exciting time in our industry.

Paul Etchison 38:51

Yeah, absolutely, man. And I will tell the listeners, troll transparency. We do not have any sort of agreement, but I've seen this software, I've gotten the demo, and I'm interested. I like it. It looks really, really cool, guys. So if you are hearing any of this and just want to check it out, it doesn't hurt to check it out. Reach out to LeOthedentalapp.com. Yep. Sign up for a demo, check it out. Maybe it's not for you, maybe it is, but I I really liked what I saw. Leor, thank you so much for sharing so much knowledge with the people. I think you've like talked on something that not a lot of dentists talk about patient experience and also picking up that that loose open funnel that's just going out the back door of patients that have already liked us and trust us, and we just let them go. So, man, you really spoke to some really magnificent things today. Thank you for coming on.

SPEAKER_02 39:33

Thank you. And I I so appreciate you having me on. It's uh I've I've wanted to connect with you for a long time. So I'm excited to be here too.

Paul Etchison 39:40

Awesome, buddy. All right. So, what this really comes down to in this episode, I think, is intention. Because the practices that grow that I've worked with, the ones that grow consistently, that they grow really fast, the ones that don't constantly feel like they're just like throwing money, begging for new patients, they're not desperate. You see, that they're just not doing anything really magical. They're paying attention to the things that most people ignore, just like Liore was doing in his practice. They're paying attention to the experience, the details, the follow-up, the systems that happen behind the scenes. And when you stack enough of those small advantages together, growth stops feeling random and it starts really feeling predictable. So here's what I want you to remember from this episode. First of all, marketing, it doesn't fix a broken experience. It amplifies it. You have your broken experience and you bring more people into it and you lose out on those opportunities that you might get from just raving fans, from referrals, from providing a great experience and having your patients go tell other people about it. The next big point is that small improvements in how patients feel, those are always going to outperform the big marketing budgets over time. So they're worth doing. And third, there is a ton of opportunity sitting inside your existing patient base. If you can actually build those systems in your dental practice in the way that you do things to capture that opportunity. So listen, if you're hearing this and you're thinking, I know that there's more potential in my practice, I just don't know where to start. That is exactly what we can help you with. You can go to dental practiceheroes.com/slash strategy and book a free strategy call. It is just a conversation. We're going to look at your practice together. We'll talk through what's working, what's not, and where the biggest opportunities are for you. There is no pressure, there's no pitch, just clarity. And if you got value from this episode, I would really appreciate it if you took a minute to leave a five star review. It helps more dentists find the show and keeps us bringing on great guests like this. So thank you so much for being here. I appreciate you listening, and I will see you next time.