The Gold Coast Podcast
Hosted by Eric Winegard, this show dives deep into the stories behind South Florida’s most driven entrepreneurs, business owners, and community leaders.
Each episode uncovers the real challenges, lessons, and victories that define the Gold Coast business landscape. Whether you’re a startup founder, established CEO, or simply passionate about growth, you’ll gain valuable insights, strategies, and inspiration from those shaping the region’s economy and culture.
The Gold Coast Podcast
He Turned a Simple Idea Into a Nationwide Dental Business | Dr. William Balanoff
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In this episode of The Gold Coast Podcast, host Eric Winegard sits down with Dr. William Balanoff, CEO of SmilePerfected and a former dentist with over 30 years of experience.
Dr. Balanoff shares how he identified a massive gap in the dental industry and turned it into a multi-million dollar business—revolutionizing teeth whitening by eliminating one of the biggest pain points: sensitivity.
From building a product dentists actually want to use to understanding the power of customer experience, this episode is packed with insights for entrepreneurs, dentists, and business owners alike.
You’ll learn:
Why most teeth whitening systems fail patients
How SmilePerfected created a pain-free whitening experience
The business strategy behind scaling to thousands of dental offices
Why dental assistants—not dentists—are the real decision makers
The importance of marketing, relationships, and long-term thinking
How AI and digital marketing are shaping the future of dentistry
Dr. Balanoff also dives into real-world business lessons, including how to identify opportunity gaps, build trust, and scale a company the right way.
Whether you're in healthcare, business, or marketing, this episode delivers powerful takeaways you can apply immediately.
📍 Learn more about SmilePerfected: https://smileperfected.com
🎙️ Subscribe for more episodes with top entrepreneurs and industry leaders.
Thank you all for listening in on today's episode of The Gold Coast Podcast!
Hey guys, thanks again for tuning in to the Gold Coast Podcast. I have another unbelievable guest here, a gentleman by the name of Dr. Bill Balanoff, CEO of Smile Perfected, a former dentist himself. You know, he's involved in a product that really has revolutionized teeth whitening. If you've ever gotten your teeth whitened before professionally by a dentist or any of the at-home kits, the sensitivity is unbearable. I've been through it myself. But he has a wonderful product shaping dentistry and healthcare, and I couldn't be more excited to have uh Dr. Bill on himself. Thanks for coming on the show.
SPEAKER_02Thanks for having me. Appreciate it being here.
SPEAKER_00Awesome. So tell me, you know, I don't I actually work with a lot of dentists. Okay. Do digital marketing for a lot of dentists. You know, I I wouldn't say I've done too much marketing for people that are providing kind of like profit centers for dentists would be the best way to kind of describe you. But yeah, you know, an opportunity like uh like a modality almost for uh for a dentist. Kind of break down smile perfected to me. I'm really curious.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, I was a dentist for practicing for 30 years, and the reason I love this story so much is because it kind of gives you an idea of the relationship between patients and their dentists. So this guy comes into my office one day and he had been a patient, really, really rich guy. And he goes to me, he goes, You know, you've been a dentist for 30 years, the name of your dental practice is Smile Perfect, so I've decided as a present to you to um trademark the name called Smile Perfected. And here it is. Here's all the intellectual property behind that mark. I paid for all of it. To which I responded, like, what am I gonna do with this? He goes, I I want you to go start another company. I go selling what? Like, I'm just a clinical dentist. He goes, I don't know what you're gonna sell, but I know that this is gonna help you with the transition for the second phase of what your professional career is gonna be. So I I started thinking to myself, it's like, all right, well, I've got this name, he paid for all of this stuff. He's a nice guy. What am I gonna do? So I started looking around within dentistry and I realized there was kind of a void in the marketplace, which was the whitening products that were available to dentists were so poorly designed with respect to implementation and pricing that I thought maybe there was a place for me there.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_02So I decided to take everything I hated about teeth whitening 13 years ago and say, okay, how do we solve some of the problems? Because there was already a market for it. I mean, Bill Dorfman on that television show Extreme Makeover showed that you can sell a lot of whitening. But the average dentist in the United States was doing maybe one or two whitenings per year. And the number one requested service of a patient to a dentist was whitening. So if the average dentist has got 2,000 adult patients, how could they only be doing one or two whitenings per year?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So to me, it just seemed kind of a natural problem to solve, and that's exactly what I ended up doing. So we launched Smile Perfected with literally no customers. Zero. And then we just started going out there and beating the bushes and telling people that I think we've solved a clinical problem for you. And forget about like the revenue enhancement to the practice, which is like let's just try and figure out a way to make your patients happy. Because if your patients are happy, then it's good for the practice all the way around. So it was really just that simple of a idea, and it turned into this business where we have customers all over the country and it's turned into a multi-million dollar business. Who have our guests. Craziest thing.
SPEAKER_00I'm actually developing an app for a dentist right now. I got something really cool. Yeah, not to tell you some of the other stuff we got going on too. Yeah. It does like a smile makeover forum. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02They have some things like that out there already.
SPEAKER_00Really? Yeah. But it's still a good thing. Yeah, it's like for New York, these are all crowns, so it makes it look like you have crowns or veneers.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, no, it's they have those kinds of things out there now. Cool. So the AI technology out there, especially like with Invisalign and so forth, is really it's phenomenal what you're able to do now.
SPEAKER_00Oh yeah. We're using it as a lead generator for the dentist. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So download the app to see what your smile looks like, and now they have their information. Yeah. Right? So they can do push notifications, etc. Well, I love I first of all I love what you said because about business in general, not just the profit center. I love your position about just making the patients and the clients happier. Yeah. Because when someone at my company says, Hey Eric, should I offer one of our clients this, this, or this? And I always rephrase the question, what do you think is best for them? That's all that really matters. Not the dollar amount, not what they want to hear, what they need to hear, and what is actually going to give them value, whether it's cheap or expensive, what's going to get the best results because what gets the best results makes them the happiest. That's how you build a business.
SPEAKER_02No, I think you're right. The idea that we're always kind of like bottom fishing for the cheapest, cheapest thing is probably a recipe for not long-term business. I think when you start to really provide good service and good customer service, then all of a sudden the the money's going to start to flow in regardless. And that's really how I've kind of approached it my entire career.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So you saw this need. I I'm pretty blown away that they're seeing 2,000 patients, they're doing two teeth whitenings a year. How is that? How did you help fill this gap? What what is it? What what's the what's the actual product?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so the actual product is the way the dental industry interacts with dental offices. They think the dental industry that manufactures products like this, they didn't understand who their customer was. And they thought that their customer was the dentist. And it's not. Because as a dentist, I've never done a whitening in my life. I don't have any time for that. I'm doing big dentistry kind of things. So I will relegate that task to my dental assistant. And if my dental assistant doesn't like the product or the company, then it's not going to get sold. So just imagine the zoom whitening, which is the number one whitening in the United States. This is what we would tell patients leading up to their Zoom appointment to get their teeth brighter and whiter. We're going to give you this stuff called MI paste. You're going to brush your teeth with this every single night for the next three weeks to cut down on the sensitivity. The day that you come in for your whitening, we're going to give you 800 milligrams of Advil. And then we're going to put these barriers over the top of your face and over the top of your gums and your lips so the light that we're going to use doesn't burn you. Then we're going to apply this gel to your teeth and we're going to change it out every 15 minutes until the pain becomes so bad you can't take it anymore. And then we're going to charge you $500. And then a couple of days later it's going to start to fade back and you're going to get frustrated and we're going to have to take impressions of your teeth. And then we're going to sell you more gel so that you can continue the whitening product process. When do you want to sign up? And oh, by the way, you're going to complain to my dental assistant, you're going to complain to my hygienist, and you're going to complain to the poor admin at the front desk about how horrible the entire experience was and how he took $500 from you. So I thought to myself, it's like, okay, well, that's the threshold for success. That horrible experience. So what do the dental assistants, well, what don't they like? Well, they don't like the delivery process of the number one whitening system in the world. So we changed all of that. We lowered the price point because I know what it costs to do this. So we made it so that it's a 20-minute whitening process at the end of a hygiene visit. And probably the most important thing we did is when we onboard new customers, we make sure that everybody in the office has to try the product. It's all for free. And that's how we are, that's how they're able to sell more. And anytime they want to get their teeth whitened, they can get it for free. So now you've just removed a barrier because if they decided to do a Zoom whitening, Zoom would charge them $120 for the whitening kit, of which they'd have to pay. So why would they recommend anything that they've got to pay all this amount of money for? Now they would give the whitening to the dentist for free, but remember he or she's not the one who's doing the whitening. So my customer is a dental assistant. If I can make her happy, and typically they're women, then I know that I can sell a lot of this stuff. So to give you an idea, we have some offices that will do 200 whitenings per month. Wow.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. That's some good. Oh, okay. I just added that up. That's a good thing.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so if you're charging $150 a whitening, which is what we recommend, at the end of the year they're making, you know, well, in excess of $100,000 just to do a whitening and happy patients. And happy patients at the end of a hygiene visit. So that was kind of the impetus of how the whole entire thing got started. And probably the biggest thing that really made the biggest difference for us was identifying subgroups within dentistry. So there's a group that we sell to called the American Academy of Clearliners. That group of dentists accounts for about 80% of Invisalign's business, which means that they're going to do this year, 2026, about 160,000 Invisalign patients. Smile Perfected is the whitening product for the American Academy of Clearliners. We sell thousands and thousands of whitenings every single month. And we just developed a brand new product, which we're going to launch on April 1st, called Whitening for Clearliners, Smile Perfected for Clearliners. No one else has ever thought of this idea. So you're wearing those little plastic gel trays over your teeth to straighten your teeth. Why can't you whiten at the same time? Our gel formulation is safe for the whitening trays. You would think that somebody would have thought of this like years ago.
SPEAKER_00Seems so obvious. So obvious.
SPEAKER_02But we did. So we're going to be launching that um uh in about a week.
SPEAKER_00Wow, congrats. Good for you.
SPEAKER_02That's exciting.
SPEAKER_00Do you think one of the reasons the dentists were only doing two, on average, two whitenings per year is they knew what they were getting into is an unhappy patient, so maybe they weren't recommending it?
SPEAKER_02That's so that was kind of how I thought of the idea. Because one day I'm walking by the hygiene room and I hear the hygienist say, don't get the zoom whitening here at the office. Go to Walgreens, buy the crest white strips, because the hygienist didn't want to hurt the patient, the dental assistant didn't want to hurt the patient, and God knows the front desk didn't want to take that person's money only to return it a couple of weeks later. So they were doing everything they could to try and refer that person away from the office. And I thought to myself, there is an opportunity for business here. And that's really how the whole thing came about. And the other thing, believe it or not, dentists, sadly, are charged by marketing, uh, the marketing collateral, like for example, the flyers or the brochures, some kind of stuff. So the dental manufacturers, they actually charge dentists for all of that stuff. We manufacture it all for free. Yeah, we customize it for these dental offices, we ship it out to them for free, and they love having our marketing material in their office to promote uh smile perfected.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, very cool. So what so most of the dentists that you have your product in, is it regional in Florida? Is it national? Where are most of the dental companies?
SPEAKER_02All over the United States. We have thousands and thousands of offices all over the United States and Canada.
SPEAKER_00Wow.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, Canada has been a little bit challenging in the last year, but we've finally figured out the entire tariff process, so we're good to go.
SPEAKER_00Okay. Is it mostly because of the shipment of the product?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, you know, the tariffs that we have to pay, exactly. But once you figured out all that paperwork, you're fine to go.
SPEAKER_00Okay, yeah. It's a clerical thing. That's all it is.
SPEAKER_02Another tax.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, very cool. So yeah, this is um, and I'm a lot of times I'm gonna ask you certain questions to get an answer from you that helps something kind of go viral ish, you know. But um, you know, are there um is there with your product, has AI been an influencer of it? Will AI be an influencer of it? How does that play a role or does it not?
SPEAKER_02It it does in some ways. We spend a lot of time tracking the statistics of our customers, frequency of buying, and all that other kind of stuff. So AI is able to take a lot of data that we have within our accounting software, and it's able to start to identify trends, okay, which allow us to um manage our uh supply chain better and our inventory better. So we have an entire warehouse down in Davy uh Dania. So, you know, you don't want to keep stuff on the shelf.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So that's where AI has really kind of come into play. The other thing that AI has done for us is it's allows us to work with a lot of our offices with respect to social media content. So a lot of these offices they want to do the social media stuff, they really don't know how to do it. Um so that's where we've kind of been able to help. And we have somebody who's in charge of our marketing. Her name is Bethany, so she'll work with these individual offices and they'll use AI to help that entire process.
SPEAKER_00Very cool. Um you know, is there I I know I know that I know for me personally, I remember because I had a lot of issues with my teeth. Naturally, I had good teeth, but I just had a lot of a lot of issues with them, and I do remember trying to whiten them, and I always remember there being this issue with sensitivity, no matter what. So then it would make me not want to do the dental whitening, and then I would stop drinking the coffee, and it was just like this this vicious cycle. So are you saying that your product doesn't have the same level of um sensitivity issues?
SPEAKER_02Yeah. So we decided to do is be the little scientific little nerd that I am, you know. So besides being a dentist, I have a postdoctoral master's in craniofacial research. Yeah. So I thought, like, okay, like what causes the sensitivity and how can we prevent that? And adding things like potassium nitrate, which is the active ingredient in sensodine toothpaste, and adding other things like menthol and keeping the whitening time to 20 minutes and understanding the ratio of hydrogen peroxide to carbon diperoxide, which I know is really getting kind of geeky right now, you're able to create a whitening experience where there will be zero sensitivity. Wow. Really? Zero sensitivity. And if I'm wrong, I will tell the offices not to charge the patient. I will send you a free whitening kit to replace the one where the person kind of squeaked over the painter sensitivity. Like a guarantee almost. Absolutely guarantee. Yeah. The number of whitening systems, free kits that I send out every single month is probably close to zero. Because it just doesn't happen.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I love that you're given a guarantee because one of one of the biggest ways for me to help a business get business, or for me to get business, is provide a guarantee. Like if you're actually that confident in your product or service that it's going to do it, you should easily be able to say, hey, 30-day money-back guarantee, 60-day money-back guarantee. Because there is so much, like we're in a marketplace today with so much skepticism, right? You just brought up AI and you know, everybody's had a bad experience with a healthcare provider or a roofer or a marketing company, right? So there's so much skepticism. So we live in this world today where your marketing has to, you know, or your offer has to bypass skepticism, and and a guarantee is a great way. Is a guarantee like, do you market that up front with the dentist too?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, we won't even take a dentist or a dental office on board with us unless the office is willing to subscribe to a few certain things that are important to us. You got to try the product. Like everybody's got to try the product. Everybody from the lab tech to the front desk to the dental assistant, everybody's got to try the product, and they all get to try it for free. And then, of course, it's being able to support the office with marketing material and you know all the collateral they need to start to be successful. So we're all into that kind of stuff. You know, when I think about like some of the AI challenges and some of the uh I think there's a lot of things that most dentists don't understand about like their website, and I know you understand this stuff, so I'm glad we're kind of speaking about this. One of it's you know, the whole idea of user experience. I've talked to so many dentists, because we have to work with their web designers and so forth, you know, because we've got to give them banner ads or what we're gonna be providing for them. Um they haven't updated it in so long. It's like pay the ad agency to like upgrade it, put it in like a really good format. You're like, it's worth it for you to do that because where the way you're getting graded, and this is what most dentists don't understand, is the way that you're getting graded by Google is ease of use, time to load the page, you know, all these other kinds of things. And you know, and uh and what I tell dentists all the time is you know, everybody wants like original content on their website. And and when you start doing Google reviews, uh respond to both the good and the bad. You will be rewarded when Google understands that you're part of the fabric of your community. So working with a company like yours, that all of a sudden becomes a big deal. And it starts with something really simple, which is is your website pertinent to the audience you're trying to get a hold of? And is the user experience, the UX, like fun? Like, do you like being on the website and is it compatible with this crazy thing? Exactly. And you know, when I talk to these dentists and they show me their websites and they go, hey, how can we get more patients? I go like, well, first of all, we don't do that. Um, but go to your company and say, Listen, fix me. I did this website 15 years ago. It needs to be updated.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Even like the colors and of course, a split test everything, A-B test everything.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you know your stuff. I love it. You know your stuff. I can show you some wild stuff, really cool stuff. You you know, I look at like any of these dentists or any any business person, any individual, there's two ways to look at spending money. There's the way that I could go to the casino and you know, put $1,000 on roulette and oh no, I could lose. But there's the flip side. You could win. And if you put it on the right number, you could win big. So when I invest, I don't always think of the loss. I always think of the opportunity I may be losing as well. You know, so I think, you know, some people really just kind of hoard their hoard their money, but you know, I want to I want to make an investment in my business, whether it's sales or marketing or hiring people, because I don't just think about what I might lose, I think about you know what I might lose because of what I stand to gain.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Right? So it's like opportunity loss versus investment loss. And I and I think more business people need to think like that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I I think probably one of the first things that dentists need to understand is this ROAS return on ad spend. If they don't understand what ROAS is, they're gonna quit looking at their ad dollars not as a spend in the spend column. They're gonna look at their advertising dollars as an investment opportunity. And if they're not doing it, and they've got to start with the simplest basic things, which is just work on your website, make sure your office looks pretty, make sure there's signage which supports everything. Because patients are coming to your office, they really don't know what you sell. You know, they think maybe you sell cleanings, maybe you sell a filling. They don't know all the other wonderful things that dentistry has, whether it's doing veneers or crowns or whitening or invisalign. So you need to talk about that and you need to work with professional ad agencies to get the message out there.
SPEAKER_00I love it. You're you're like helping me promote it. No, because it's all true. No, look at I love this.
SPEAKER_02No, it's like, but the thing is, is you know, it's all true. Yeah, yeah. Like it's all true. Quit looking at it as an expense. Like when when I hear dentists say, Oh, I spent so much money on advertising, I'm like, okay, that's a horrible way to look at things. Yeah. What you did is you invested in your practice, and if you've done it right, and please, I tell everybody all the time, it's like, don't allow your dental assistant to manage the social media in your dental office. That's like the worst. I'm sure it's cute, and I'm sure she comes up with some cute little TikTok videos and all good stuff. Hire a real legitimate company. And I what I always tell Dennis is like, do you have an accountant that does your bookkeeping and your income tax? You're not allowing your front desk due to your income tax or your dental assistant. So why would you allow somebody who's not a professional to do probably what's one of the most important things that you can do in your office, which is how does the public perceive who you are and what you do?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's not just Dennis. I can't tell. I I did not know we were gonna go down a marketing conversation, but I'll I'll do this all day. You know, at the end of the day, I just care about, especially small businesses, you know, family-owned business businesses, I just want them to succeed. I just want them to do well. Absolutely right. And um, when they hire their niece out of college just to give her a job for social media and they pay her $50,000 a year, that's $4,166 a month, roughly, right?
SPEAKER_02Yep.
SPEAKER_00And she might know how to do a cute post, but does she know how to build your business, build your brand? She might be exceptional, I don't know, but very unlikely, right? She's probably someone that needs to needs a little mentorship and a little tutelage to get there, right? If she already knew how to do it, she would own her own business, right? So, okay. So what I usually tell them is I say, hey, for that same investment with me, I go, I could do something completely different, and you'll get my whole team. You'll get a videographer, you'll get an editor, you'll get a uh creative person, you'll you'll get a team of six or seven to really help build your to build your brand. So I love that you understand this. And I think I think my personal advice to any any dentist of any business out there when it comes to digital marketing, do your due diligence a little bit. You know, just go down the rabbit hole a little bit. Try to be, you don't have to become an expert, but figure, understand a website, understand Google, understand SEO, understand Google Ads, understand Google Reviews, understand AEO, which is searching on Chat GPT now, understanding a little bit about Facebook ads, meta ads versus TikTok ads versus organic content. You know, kind of take 90 days and just be a sponge on it. Absolutely. That way you can eliminate the marketing company that might just be trying to make a sale on you. And at least you can talk a halfway decent game to various marketing companies.
SPEAKER_02Start to understand what you're spending your money on. I tell the dance, it's like, I don't care what you're gonna Google right now, just understand you got paid ads, the map pack, and SEO. Yeah. And if you don't, if you understand those three things, then at least you've started the conversation of kind of where you're going. Yeah. And understand how you get to each of those little spots. Yeah. Because, you know, if you type In dentist near me, you're going to pay a lot of money for that. So do yourself a favor and spend a lot of time. And understand that, especially things like SEO, that's an investment. That is a six to twelve month investment. You can get to the top with AdWords right away. Mat pack, I love, but if you're not responding to Google Reviews, you're not going to be part of the Mat Pack.
SPEAKER_00I'm blown away by your knowledge. Like are you really shocking? But it's true. No, it's shocking. It's the world we live in.
SPEAKER_02You've got to know this. These dentists think that the dentist down the streets is their competition. It's not. It's the person who can actually hire professional agencies to allow them to do what they do best. That tapestry is changing so fast that although a guy like me can speak a little bit of the words, there's no way in the world I can keep up with it because you know as well as I, it's changing, not monthly, it's changing weekly now. That's how fast it's going on.
SPEAKER_00It's insane. Yeah, no, it's insane. You know, I I had a whole call with my team this morning just about how, you know, we're doing great. Like if you Google uh digital marketing companies in bunker at home, Florida, we come up number one, and that's competing against companies that are doing SEO, right? And we do great with all various forms of marketing, uh, but we also are great at cold outreach. Like my sales team actually does cold outreach too. But I I'm always paranoid of being becoming irrelevant because other people are coming up with various solutions. You know, they're problems problem solving way bigger. And I want to not solve for a $20 million company, I want to solve for a $200 million company. And that problem solving just takes bigger thinking. So I have a whole plan for us moving forward. But God, I I could talk to you for hours about this stuff. Where did you learn about digital marketing? Was it in your dentistry days when you're actually running a practice?
SPEAKER_02The way that I learned digital marketing is kind of embarrassing. So I'm at a family event one time, and uh my brother-in-law's brother, he's there, and I'm looking at this guy and I'm thinking, this guy doesn't really work a lot. But he always seems to have plenty of money. In fact, he's got more money than me. I'm thinking, well, what's this guy doing? So finally I go to Tom one day, I'm like, Tom, like, what do you what do you do? He goes, I do I do payday loans. I go, payday loans? Where'd you get the money to do payday loans? Because I'm thinking he's like actually handing out the cash. He goes, Well, he goes, I don't actually do payday loans. He goes, I sell the leads for payday loans. I'm like, what are you even talking about? He goes, yeah, I do affiliate advertising, which I knew nothing about. He goes, I tell you what, I'm gonna take you to a convention that was gonna be held in Philadelphia, and I'm gonna introduce you to the affiliate advertising world. He goes, all that matters to me is your IP address. Once I know that you're searching for something, once I get that IP address, I own you for the next couple of years. So if you're an older guy like me and I type in there hair loss, because my hair is losing. Okay. Done, got you. Once he once goes, once I find that out about you, he goes, that I'm gonna start sending you ads on male testosterone replacement, I'm gonna start sending you ads on erectile dysfunction, I'm gonna start sending you ads on prostate issues. He goes, the list just goes on and on and on. He goes, and I get a piece of the pie every single time you decide to buy something because your IP address. And at that moment, my head exploded because I didn't even think any of that was possible. He takes me to the convention in Philadelphia and he goes, I do well. He goes, I'll start pointing a few people out to you who look very nondescript, who do 10 times what I do per month. And I was like, oh my gosh. We literally changed our business model because before that we were selling through dental distributors. Yep. And I said, screw that, I don't need a middleman anymore. I'm selling straight to the dentist office. I just need to know how to get a hold of them. And that's really we where I started to learn a lot of stuff. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00There, we we can have an offline conversation, but you know we could just buy you dental lists and target them with. Yeah, we've tried that. Okay. I have an AI that can outreach. Totally, totally different conversation, not trying to pitch you on. No, it's like I love learning about people's business. Uh you know, I I heard I had this guy in my podcast the other day, he said the coolest thing ever. He said that business, you can either look at it as a game of chess or you can look at it as putting together a puzzle. He said the problem with playing chess is there's a winner and a loser. Somebody kills the other one. He goes, or you can put two people at the table and you figure out the pieces to the puzzle and you both make this beautiful picture. And that's how I've always felt about business, but now I look at that's really how I like to articulate business because I genuinely want everybody to win, right? And I want everybody to be incentivized to win.
SPEAKER_02That's I I think it's smart. Interesting that you use that analogy because one of the things Tom said, and he's actually an investor in the business, so he's a part owner of the business. He said to me a long time ago, Bill, the reason I'm glad you're doing what you're doing with the whitening world, everybody thinks that that market is finished. He goes, the whitening business is a big party. And he goes, all we want to do is be part of the party. We want to be one of the many guests in this gigantic room who's having a drink and eating the hors d'oeuvres. He goes, that's all we are. So we're gonna go join that party. And we may not be the biggest headliner in the party, but we will be in the party. And that's the reason why after a 13 plus year, Smile Perfected is still alive and well.
SPEAKER_00Wow. So do you mind if I ask like how many dental clinics you work with versus how many are there are in the United States? Like what's that opportunity for growth?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the opportunity for growth is astronomical. So to give an idea, there are about 180,000 licensed dentists in the United States. Not all of them own their own clinic. So let's just cut it in half. Say there's 90,000 licensed dentists in the United States. We service about 4,000 of those dentists. Wow. 20x. Yeah. Whoa. There's a lot to go there. And when you think about the new product that we're launching on April 1st, so the Clearliner business, the Invisalign business, we've just developed a new whitening product, which is Clearliner Safe, so it's smile perfected for Clearliners. It'll be launched on April 1st through a big uh lecture that I'm going to be giving online with the American Academy of Clearliners. They do, like I say, they'll do in 2026 about 160,000 Clearliner cases in the United States. We want them to use our clear liner whitening product. So if I can get 1% of those patients, that's a lot of business to start out with. 10%, it's we've hit a home run. So our our ask is not big. What we do is we just find niches in the marketplace to find out why hasn't anybody ever thought of this before. And that's really what we've gone after.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's um sometimes the I like your strategy because somebody else already has your client somewhere, and it's I call that business development. It's not marketing, it's not sales, it's who can we align with to where we can infiltrate their network to where it seamlessly you know provides a value add with and doesn't necessarily compete with, right? It actually provides a value add. That's very cool. Um, yeah, dentists are um, you know, they're great clients of ours in general. Most of them are pretty techy and forward-thinking and cutting edge, but I still see you'd be shocked. Well, no, you would know this. There's still dentists out there that aren't really doing digital marketing, and they wonder why their practice isn't growing. Um, you know, I did this cool social media video the other day. I would I didn't even intend to come up with it, but I said that I was born in 1980, and the world that I grew up in as a young man, up until about 25, 27, is not the world my current 46-year-old self lives in. So it's like the first 20 years of my life were this, I don't know what to call it, analog world. Yeah, that's what it is. Right? Yep. And then the last 20 years are this digital mobile world, and now these next 20 years are going to be the the AI world.
SPEAKER_02Yes.
SPEAKER_00And it's, you know, so for anybody that missed out on this world this time needs to be thinking about this new world, which is a good idea. Absolutely. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Well, when I think about your journey, so my journey was this. In 1983, I graduated dental school so a long time ago. In 1986, I buy my first dental practice. There was a guy that helped me get that practice started. His name was Morris, wonderful guy. Uh he was uh he was the best man at my wedding. And he was 40 years older than me. That's how much I love this guy. He tells me in 1986, Bill, you're gonna start advertising, which was taboo for dentistry in 1986. That was like breaking all the rules. I go, dentists don't advertise. He goes, You want to be in business, you're gonna start advertising. He goes, You don't have to advertise price or anything like that. You just want to advertise that you're here in Fort Lauderdale and you offer, you know, free consultations and second opinions. At that time in 1986, I go, Morris, I don't have the money to run these ads. He goes, Yes, you do. You you if you don't, you're not gonna have any money. He goes, I tell you what, I'll put an ad in, you give me half the profit. I go, fine, I'll put the ad in. So we start running the ads in the Sun Sentinel, which was the only medium back then. It turns out that the wife of the publisher, the Sun Sentinel back then, becomes my patient. And her name was Pat. And Pat said to me, She goes, I will help you. So a lot of times people will say to me, you know, like, why do you would you do this podcast, or why do you go out there still pressing the flesh and all that kind of stuff? You don't really ever know where that connection is going to happen. So you've got to go out there and you've got to keep on beating the bushes and you know, yeah, all about digital and I love the internet and all that kind of stuff. But sometimes you just have to hop in your car and drive from Fort Lauderdale to La Boca and say hi. And this is what you do. Most dentists are loners by profession, it's just who we are. But you've got to kind of come out of your skin a little bit. If it wasn't for Pat and her connections with the Sun Sentinel, because of her husband who was the publisher, I would have had a hard time being placed properly. And she helped me. And as time went on, I started learning more and more about advertising. If you don't advertise, you're gonna perish, and you've got to hire people to help you do that process. And the last thing I was gonna say is I was doing, I did some of the first commercials when cable was just kind of coming into its own. And uh again, you know, they were nice to me, and cable was really, really cheap back then in Fort Lauderdale. My ad for my office ran just before Bush 41's debate in 1988, literally on CNN, which was the number one thing back then.
SPEAKER_00Who is he debating against? I don't remember. Dukakis, I believe. Oh, that's right, yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So you know, you think about that, it's like, you know, what does that mean? It's like meant a lot to me, you know, brought in plenty of business. And without that ad investment, because it's not ad spend, it's ad investment. Who knows where I would be right now? So I'm a hundred percent in favor of companies like yourself and what you guys do. It's fantastic.
SPEAKER_00No, no, I appreciate it. I um I I pride myself, like it I just give businesses honest answers, whether that hurts me or helps me, right? And I do believe that digital marketing is not a luxury, it's a necessity for anybody looking to grow their business today. But I also say it's not the solution to everything. So, like you said, getting into a car, driving up a half hour somewhere to meet somebody you don't know, spend half of your day, it might be a dud, may not turn into anything. Or maybe a home run, might be a slam dunk. And that's why I always tell if somebody puts me in a group text, somebody, hey, can I connect you with this guy? I go, I'll have a conversation with anybody. Not guaranteeing it'll go anywhere, but I will guarantee you I'll give I'll give them five minutes to see if there's uh an opportunity there. And I think I think people, I think people I like your framing on that because people do need to remember that it's still a people business and it will it always will be. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02You know, you know, I I think one of the things I've always told my children, there's always people smarter than you. You just can't let anybody outwork you. So my resume, which I sent to you ahead of time, so I've done a lot of really cool things. The the hard part about a resume is it only shows my successes. There's probably seven or eight times more things that I failed at.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But you just got to keep on pushing. You just don't know, so you just keep on trying and trying and trying. And at the end of a life, you're like, yeah, it all kind of worked out. I was an overnight success, it just took me 43 years.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. You know, we have this huge account coming in, gigantic. And so we have this strategy. I don't want to give other ad agencies a strategy, but it's all good. It's about execution, right? Yeah. So if you go on the job boards like uh, you know, LinkedIn or Indeed or Google Jobs or whatever, businesses will post jobs for marketing people.
SPEAKER_02Yep.
SPEAKER_00So it's a very, I don't want to call it a warm cold call, but it's a you have a lot of intel going into that cold call, right? So you can call and say, hey, we're a digital marketing firm, want to see if you'd be open to marketing. You know, one out of 20 go, you know what, yeah, yeah, actually we're looking to hire you, we'll we'll interview you guys. So we met this guy uh we call up in Minnesota, and he's a recruiter for insurance agents. We do some business with him over the past six months. Turns out, two days ago, three days ago, he becomes in charge of nationally recruiting for this gigantic insurance firm, massive, and he says, Hey Eric, I want to hire you guys for this gigantic right. And it all started with a freaking cold outreach call. Right.
SPEAKER_02But but it's relationship building. Yeah. And it's just you have to work it. Yeah, AI is great, it's gonna bring business to you or business opportunities to you that you would not normally have. But at the end of the day, people buy from their friends. And what you've got to do is turn that stranger into a friend. How that occurs, whether it's AI generated content, whatever the methodology is, it's still people buy from their friends.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no doubt. So he he another cool part about the story is he was working with us for about two or three months, and I got an email from him saying, Yeah, I think I'm I think this is the wrong partnership. I'm gonna, you know, probably cancel. And I emailed back. I said, Hey, um, do you mind if we have a quick combo? I just want to find out what's going on. Get on the phone with them, have a quick call. And it's like the simplest thing. And I go, oh my God. I go, we could do that. I go, that's nothing. Are you kidding me? And he goes, really? He goes, Oh, I'll stay on board. I go, I go, listen, I go, I'm so sorry. My rep should have been able to handle that. Maybe they just thought they were spending more money than they should. I go, I want to do you a favor. I want to fly you down from up north, first class tickets. I want you to come down here, come on my podcast, I'll give you all the content. And then I said, uh, and I'll take you out to dinner, uh, I'll take you out to Patrick Bett David's Cigar Lounge. I don't know if you follow PBD at all, uh huge podcast. And I said, I'll give you white glove service, you know, for a couple days, come hang out. And, you know, he ends up buying more stuff from us and all these sorts of things, but but I'm agreeing with you, it was it was the outreach, it was the willing to make the connection, but then it was all about building the relationship. And when the opportunity came from him to do something gigantic, he thought of us first. It's a wonderful story, it's a good story. Yeah. It's the way the world is. Yes, sir. Yeah. So how are we, how are you gonna get these other 94,000 dentists roughly? Yeah. What's the what's the plan?
SPEAKER_02That's a kind of a good question.
SPEAKER_00Um And all their wonderful patients that we care about more.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and all their wonderful patients. Um that's always, you know, the that's always the paradox of uh marketing and advertising, which is, you know, half of it doesn't work, I just don't know which half. You know, and uh so we do is you know, you kinda you kind of create a budget and you start to uh reach out. We've tried a lot of different modalities, and really what we found out is these uh subgroups within dentistry has become kind of our low-cost approach to acquiring new customers. So the American Academy of Clearliners have five or six thousand dentists that they actually have within their organization. There's other groups, and I'll just use a generic name, you know, uh moms that are dentists. You know, you try to start to reach out to those kinds of groups. We don't usually reach out to buying groups because they're not buying on value, they're buying as a commodity, so we don't really like those groups. But we're looking to try and fill a niche within mom and pop dental offices in the United States. So if I had my little magic wand, if I were able to raise it, um, I'm looking for mom and pop dental offices that are trying to add value to their practice with a company that cares passionately about them. And how we go about doing that, whether it's using an agency like yourself, you know, using AI to try and create those lists, you know, we're not opposed to doing that kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_00What um so do the and I'm just hopefully a dentist sees this, right? Do you and I have a dentist, uh I have a couple, they're very connected. I might be able to make a couple cool connections for you. Do you ever work with orthodontists at all? Or is that the no because it doesn't well what if they're offering do they offer Invisalign?
SPEAKER_02They do all involve Invisalign. Most dentists will still do, you know, bonded brackets edge orthodontics. So it's not like, for example, one of our really good customers that we have in Boca, who is one of our original customers, was Carrie White. Um, you know, she's been a customer of ours for 13 years. She's here in Boca. Yeah. You know, what do we do special for people like her? We literally drive to her office once a year and we present her with all kinds of wonderful gifts from Joe Malone.
SPEAKER_01That's cool.
SPEAKER_02So, you know how are we gonna do it? We are gonna find these dentists, we're gonna find these dental groups, and that's really who we like to sell to.
SPEAKER_00Have you ever thought about like uh the ADA, I guess, America Dental Association? No. Not good. Not good. Okay. Not a good idea.
SPEAKER_02It's it's not that we've tried to go to these conventions in person and we've even tried to get those mailing lists and so forth. The the cold outreach is brutal. You know, most of it just goes to their spam filter and what about like a booth at one of the events?
SPEAKER_00Too expensive. Too expensive. Yeah. 30 grand or something crazy. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Between the traveling costs and the booth fee and all that kind of stuff. We've gone to smaller meetings, we've gone to the Florida meeting in June. We've gone to the big meetings, like the Greater New York meeting, which is the biggest in the United States. We've tried all of that kind of stuff. Those meetings don't work well for us. What we found out is dentists love webinars, and we've actually paid different companies to uh promote webinars for us. Okay, cool. So that makes sense for us. So we're very attuned to the amount of money we spend and what we get out as a return and the whole entire thing.
SPEAKER_00Um what about large dental practices? Like uh No, horrible.
SPEAKER_02We used to do that.
SPEAKER_00Okay. I'm just trying to help you out.
SPEAKER_02No, I love the idea. So, like, you know, take some of the really large dental groups, like for example, they used to be based out of Miami, dental care alliance, you know, hundreds of offices. I knew the dental directors, the director of hygiene. I knew all these people personally. Great. So you pick up 150 offices in one day, like you're slapping high five, we've made all this money, are we the greatest company in the world? And then the director of hygiene quits and goes to another company. And they bring a new director of hygiene in.
SPEAKER_01Oh.
SPEAKER_02And you lose 150 companies, cut offices in one day. And now you're depressed. So we so about ten years ago we decided, okay, let's not do that. They do make up about 35% of the the landscaping of dentistry, but we're only going to sell them mom and pop dental offices because they are so loyal. It takes a while to earn their trust and their business. Once you have it, they never leave you. And the dental assistant who will be reordering the product, she never leaves you. She's been with that office for 20 years. You've made it easy for her to reorder. She's never leaving you. And that's really how we've built our business. Slower going than trying to sell to the big DSOs, dental service organizations. But once you have them as customers, you never lose them.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, because I do have a contact that's about a half a billion dollar. I know the chief marketing officer about a half a billion dollar 150 location group. If you ever change your mind, let me know. Yeah, no, I'm not sure. He's right here in Boca.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I I probably know the group you're talking about. Okay. And they all know me too. So besides doing this kind of gig, I used to be the chief clinical officer for a new dental implants, and uh, you know, um, I've done a lot of things with in dentistry, so I know all of these guys. Yeah. Um yeah, it's all good stuff until it's not. I love I love mom and pop dental offices. They're like the best.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you gotta know your clients too. And I think um, you know, whenever I work with somebody too, or my team works with somebody, I think there's three ways you can sell somebody something. You can overcharge them, and I and that's not cool. I've I've done it accidentally in years past. I don't do it anymore. Um, you can undersell somebody, right, and not give them enough of what they actually need. The right thing to do is adequately work with somebody, adequately sell something. So whether it's 500 bucks a month, 3,000 a month, or 10,000 a month, whatever the number is, it's about what's actually right for that person, right? And product. So sometimes if the product isn't right for this clinic or this giant clinic, it it is it is not worth it, actually. Um any other keep uh anything you specifically want to talk about? I don't want to because feel free to promote the product.
SPEAKER_02The thing that I we'll kind of kind of end with this. So I I think one of the things that most dentists don't do and they should do is they need to connect. To their patients and the people that they do business with on a much more personal level. Now, in today's world, you know, these young kids, the idea of them actually getting on a phone call and talking to people is a thing of the past. I still hand out my phone number to almost everybody that I do business with. So one of the examples I love to give is uh, you know, because of my background in dentistry and, you know, my ability to think of crazy little things, I was approached by this nonprofit under New York about 10 years ago. And this guy was a big shot on the radio. You know, he did a radio show with Boomer Saias, and he was like a he was the guy up in New York where he was on the fan and all that kind of stuff. He calls me up one day because of a product that I developed, which is a performance appliance for sports. And we made most of the mouth guards and mouthpieces for the NBA, Major League Baseball, NFL, you name it, we did it. The last six years that Derek Jeter was playing baseball, he was wearing the appliance that I invented in his mouth. I have the pad for it. It turns out that there is a this guy announces on the radio that he's got Tourette syndrome. Just a five-second passing kind of comment. And it turns out that uh this lady has two kids with Tourette's, and he she reaches out to him and says, You need to like figure out a way to like help the Tourette community because you're so well known, you know, on this radio show that you have literally across the United States. He doesn't really want much to do with it, but he starts to do a little bit of research about some crazy dentist that thinks he invented some oral appliance that would possibly help with Tourette's. And it looks kind of like what Derek Jeter is wearing, but not exactly. So Boomer Sizen went to Maryland. The product was branded Under Armour because we were paying for the licensing of Under Armour. Boomer reaches out to Kevin Plank at Under Armour, says, Who's making these things for you? He goes, Some dentist down in Florida does this for us. This guy, Craig from the fan, reaches out to me and says, Hey, can you help us with this Tourette's appliance? I don't even know what Tourette's is, but okay, I'll help you. I think I can maybe help you. So eventually I developed this appliance, and we need to do um research to make it legitimate, and research is expensive. Craig raises all the money, does an amazing job. We do the research at two different locations. We're having trouble recruiting patients. So Craig says, no problem, I'll reach out to Dr. Phil. He's a CBS guy. Craig was a CBS guy too. We'll get you on the doctor's show. I go in the doctor's show, we do our little tap dance on the doctor's show in LA. And uh CBS asked me afterwards, like, how do patients get a hold of you? I go, my phone number. They're like, are you crazy? People are gonna call you like forever. I go, I hope they do. Like, I hope they do, because the divorce rate among the Tourette's families is like 90%. Mom needs to talk to me. My phone number is still posted on CBS's website for that Tourette show. And I give out my phone number to everybody. People call you when they need to call you. And sometimes you just need to talk to somebody. People buy from their friends, so make people your friends. Turn strangers into friends, and you're gonna be really, really successful. So my phone number is 954-683-2693. And who am I giving this out to? There's probably a dentist out there that's listening to your podcast, frustrated with dentistry, having a tough time to make a go of the whole entire thing. They need to speak to somebody like me. They're on the ledge, not literally, hopefully, but figuratively, and they just need to have a friend within dentistry. That's who I am. I love being a dentist. I love everything about dentistry. I do everything I can to try and help dentists. So I want them to call me 954-683-2693. The website for Smile Perfected is that smileperfected.com. So if you want to learn about whitening, it's all there. You want to talk about dentistry? I'm your guy. Give me a call.
SPEAKER_00I love it. You know, you ended it with uh how I normally say, hey, look into that camera and tell where they can find you, but you're obviously a man who knows marketing well. Thank you very much for coming on. This was this was awesome. I learned a lot, and um I I can tell you're in a very ethical businessman. If I was a dentist, I would want to do business with you.
SPEAKER_02So thanks a lot for having me.
SPEAKER_00Appreciate it. Guys, thanks again for tuning into the Gold Coast Podcast. Make sure to like and subscribe and share this with share this with some dentists that you think might find this information useful. Thanks again, guys.