Latest / My Dental Playbook / 047 120 New Patients in a Rural Market

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047 120 New Patients in a Rural Market · My Dental Playbook

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Bought a dumpster fire of a practice.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_02: Literally my first year on operatory chairs catch on fire.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_02: Literally came and it smelled like smoke.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_02: 100% Medicaid when I bought it.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_02: It was doing about a million dollars a year, but your net growth on that was not a lot.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_02: We had four operatories, the building was in shambles, it was brown, it hadn't been updated since 1985.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_02: So it wasn't a bidding war, is when I'm here.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_02: They go, how would you like to buy this one?
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_02: We'll give it to you.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: I walked in, I had a number in my head when I pay for it, and it was like, I'll pay 380,000 for this.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_02: And they're like, how about 240?
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, Yeah, I guess that works.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome back to another episode of My Dental Playbook.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm your co-host, Gary Bird.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: I'm the owner of SMC National, where we help offices just like yours level the playing field against the big guys out there, so you can grow the way that you want.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: And along with my friend Dr.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_01: Blake Hamblin, we're diving deep into his office to watch as he crushes his goals to become a$10 million practice.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_01: Today's a special episode, though, because we filmed it live at the Dental Success Summit and Dr.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: Blake received the Golden Rhino Award.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: It was awesome.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: Also, this particular episode is with Dr.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: Michael McKay, who we saw at the event and he came on to share how he purchased a practice when he first graduated out of school and he transitioned it from a Medicaid practice all the way to a juggernaut of a beast doing big, big things in a small, small town.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_01: He breaks down marketing, team, acquisition, all the things that you would want to know if you wanted to have the same kind of practice.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: This was a great episode.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: You're going to learn a ton from it.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_01: If you want to chat with us or learn more about these kind of things, we have our mastermind right down below.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_01: And as always, check out our sponsor, Cherry.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: If you're not using Cherry, you're missing out.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: Stay tuned.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_01: This is a great episode.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: All right, we are here at the Dental Success Summit.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: And as you can tell, you can just feel the energy here.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: Blake just won the Golden Rhino Award with Dr.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Cullen.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: One of the fastest growing practices.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: You 10X your new patients.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: We talk about it on the show all the time, but he actually really did it.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: And uh there's a lot of learnings from that.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: We'll talk more about that later.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: But how how did you feel up there on stage accepting that award from Dr.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_01: Mark?
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, I mean, I was honored for sure, but I don't typically stand in front of a room in a room of 600 people and talk.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: So this morning I was a little bit nervous, but once I got up there, uh it was just like having a conversation with a friend.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_02: So you looked really good up there, too.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: And we have we have our friend Dr.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_01: Michael here.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: He's from Washington.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: Washington, yeah.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: And we we got to Tex yeah last night.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: You uh like uh all the pheasants in your area and things like that.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: And they're in my yard every morning.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, that's and uh the doves and owls and all kinds of good natured stuff, yeah.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, yep.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: So he lives in uh part of Washington that a lot of people don't know about, but he's built a really successful practice.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: Could you just tell us a little bit about that?
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, well, I think one of those things when you look at a lot of people think a small rural town is not gonna be a great place to want to practice, but uh you do have less competition.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so then you have you look at a patient base.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_02: We have one doctor for every three to five thousand patients in our area.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_02: So even though it's a low blue-collar area as far as kind of like average gross income, we're in the poorest counties in the state.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_02: You just have a lot of patient base, and so as long as you can capitalize on that, you can really make a lot of growth really quickly.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_02: I did it all the wrong way, but you still can if I think being in the right demographic situation makes it easier.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, when people are looking at like, should I start a go to a big city or a small town?
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: I think one of the hardest things about being a small town is people want to live in a small town.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's great.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_02: You get a small sense of community, you don't have traffic.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_02: My work commute is 15 minutes to work every day, like clock work.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but like how do you get successful and build a good quality of life?
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_02: So dentistry actually provides a really nice platform for that because you can have a great quality of life in a very small town, and I think that's just awesome.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and I think one thing you've done, and as I've gotten to know you over the years, is just you've you're really strategic in how you do things and you understand your market really long.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like our markets are very different, yet when we talk, we can always get to the same uh middle ground.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that's what I think is unique about both of our stories is like how do you grow that that large single location mega practice?
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of times it's starting with knowing your market.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and knowing how to operate in.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: How do you end up picking that particular location?
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_02: Did you grow up there?
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_02: Nope.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_02: That's uh my wife wanted to live there, that's where she's from.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, like hey, happy wife, happy life.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: And I will tell right now, having grandmas within striking distance makes your life so much better.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_02: I wouldn't I wouldn't trade living in uh Yakimov or someplace else.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um just because of the family connections we have, it's been fantastic for my kids and my family and the quality of life.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_02: And also, I get to wake up every morning, I see Mount Adams and Mount Rainier in the background.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: So, yeah, it's uh it's a gorgeous place to live.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_02: Now, was it an acquisition or was it a just a startup?
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: Man, so uh I bought a dumpster fire of a practice.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um literally my first year, I'd offer to our chairs catch on fire.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_02: Literally, literally, they're like these Chinese chairs that barely worked, and we came and it smelled like smoke, and we opened up one of the panels and one of the chairs that it laterally caught on fire.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it was 100% Medicaid when I bought it.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um it was doing about a million dollars a year, but your net gross on that was not a lot.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so I bought a million dollar practice.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_02: It was, I mean, I could have probably made the same amount of revenue on a half, like a 500,000 practice.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_02: We had four operatories, the building was in shambles, uh, it was brown, it hadn't been updated since 1985.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_02: Uh like it was just so it wasn't a bidding war, is what I'm hearing.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, I actually was there for a job interview, and they said, What do you want to do in a year or two?
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_02: And I said, Well, I want to practice.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_02: They go, How would you like to buy this one?
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_02: We'll give it to you.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: I I walked in, I had a number in my head, would I pay for it?
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_02: And it was like, I was like, I'll bid$380,000 for this.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and they're like, How about$240,000 and I was like, Yeah, I guess that works.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: Wow.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so yeah, I bought for$240,000, and then I was lucky enough to buy the building from the doctors that used to own it in town for$280,000 back in uh 10 years ago.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_02: So it was uh that was great, and that was the start of my entrepreneurial career, was right right from the get.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: So I never knew not owning a practice, and so I've always been I never got the luxury of being an associate, which I would have loved to do actually, had like a year, yeah.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: But uh in that respect, uh it's been a great growth pattern.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_02: And just after that, I just wish I would have had a group like DSI and had more friends like Blake uh and Colin that I could have talked to through this experience that I would have rock a field.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: Because even from when I joined uh with these guys a few years ago, I mean I was doing 250 a month, and we double that in in the course of like three or four years.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_02: So if you actually look at my trajectory, it was very slow than L-shaped, like a J-shaped curve.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_02: Hockey, hockey, uh hockey stick, yeah.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_02: So I mean, getting up with people like you guys that help with marketing and getting people that can help you increase that curve, it doesn't have to take 10 years.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_02: So you don't have to grind it out like I did.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: You could actually do it in two or three years.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, and you and you can do it one of two ways.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Uh like Colin talked about, just being in the right market and knowing, okay, there's not enough dentists to serve all these people.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: The most the the smartest thing you can do is open up practices if people are just overwhelming practice one, two, three, and four, right?
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas in my market, going and adding more practice to an already uh saturated market can be a struggle, right?
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's a tough road.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, it's been how do I spend more money to do that, right?
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um but it it it returns.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: Like if you do if you're doing the things right, it's not an expense and then it's an investment.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_02: It's an investment, yeah.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_02: I think people look at marketing completely the wrong way when it comes to industry.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_02: They took it as like a line I'm expense that's taking money from them.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean, there's obviously uh like a metric for everybody, like maybe in your town you have to spend$30,000,$40,000 a month.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_02: In my town, maybe four to five thousand makes sense for the same size practice, the same size kind of things.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_02: Actually, I still do old school postmarketing campaigns.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_02: I use I used postcards out because those old people love these postcards that came in all the time.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, how'd you remember my practice?
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_02: And I have 20 of these cards coming in.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, I don't understand how this works.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_02: But people love it.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_02: They go, I've been watching your whole family grow up over the 10 years.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_02: I'll see me and my kids on it, and they're like, they feel like they know me because they watched my my whole family grow up from one baby to two babies to three babies to little kids as they're getting bigger.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, you know, especially in a small town, they love that kind of stuff.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: So, so tell me a little bit about your growth from a new patient standpoint.
• 8:22
  SPEAKER_01: And when you bought it, how many new patients?
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: So it's a handful of new patients.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_02: No, I mean, since we're a Medicaid practice, we couldn't, it didn't matter.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_02: You just you open your, you say I accept Medicaid, and you're gonna have 130 new patients.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_02: But they're the not the patients, not saying the people themselves are the wrong type patients.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_02: But I was getting reimbursed$33 for an occlusal filling,$33 for an extraction.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_02: I can tell you.
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I could tell you, I could tell you right now how hard you have to work when you want to do$5,000 in a day making$60 an extraction.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_02: Plus people needed four to five of them, but you're so I'm making$300 a patient because I'm pulling five T.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_02: You're still doing Medicaid?
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_02: Or no, we're we're we're out of the Medicaid thing.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_02: But the thing it did teach me is kind of mixed blessing, is I gotta get really fast.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_02: So I got really fast at doing dentistry.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: So now when I'm seeing a better patient base, as far as like people can do more work, man, I could fly.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_02: So like sometimes you always say your greatest problems occurring, your greatest strength later.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_02: Well, being in a hundred percent Medicaid practice, where I literally was doing hundreds of fillings, hundreds of extractions every week.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_02: Now when I'm like, oh, you want to do an extraction?
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like, this is gonna take me about 35 seconds.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: I know you think of these patients as patients and you're always going to take care of the best, best you can of the people that are in front of you.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: But when you talk about it from like a marketing avatar standpoint of Medicaid versus fee for service or PPO, like it's a radical change that what you're dealing with.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_01: How did you deal with that transition?
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_02: So it was it was just slow.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, because I couldn't kill off the goose that was paying my life.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_02: You know, you gotta like you gotta pay the bills.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_02: So I couldn't just be like, all right, I'm cutting off all Medicaid, it would have drowned me.
• 9:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I was also a little slow, you know, because it is a small town.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: I do like the people that are coming in.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_02: And whether they're what insurance they had didn't really matter, but it was hard for me to actually turn that off.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_02: I've been seeing patients for four or five years, right?
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_02: And little kids I've been seeing for years, and I didn't turn off a kids' medicaid thing for like to like two years ago.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_02: It just was hard for me to say no to these group of like 15, 20 kids.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_02: I know it was a bummer.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: We had a lot of upset patients, so I finally stopped it.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but the it was just kind of I started.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_02: I remember when I got my first insurance patient on the schedule.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_02: I was so happy.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_02: And we're still we're still we're still at PPO mostly practical.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_02: Let's still only get 50%.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, I I remember we I'd be like, guys, we had a different color on the schedule.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: This is our patient that has insurance.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: Let's go.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: Like, yeah.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_01: So like we would like we would move patients around like to get them on.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: So it was just kind of like one to two to three to four to five, and then you know, we hit 50, 60, 70.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_02: So now we do about 120 new patients a month.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we still need to get more um new patients just because we have the capacity to see uh more.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so that's what we're working on now is trying to figure out that metric and what we need to do to get that.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_02: But it's at this point, it's different strategy.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_02: If you can't just do one, I think you have to be multimodal about how you market, right?
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it can't just be just Google, it can't just be this, it can't it can't be Especially in your kind of market, you're you're a lot more rural, so there's only so many people searching for a dentist.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_01: Or if you run Facebook ads, you could hit everybody in one month.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: Do like a hundred times.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_01: People complain that they see me too much.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like they're like, I know you, and how do you know you?
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_01: You're on my Facebook all the time.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_02: A thousand dollars of Facebook ads that yak about you're there's like get off my feet.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so you have to hit a lot of different angles.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: You have to hit the people who aren't on those platforms, who aren't searching for a dentist, or are you reaching outside of your community, like pretty far?
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, we go, I mean, for our specialist stuff, we do all in arch cases and dentures and implants.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_02: So we actually go uh sometimes as far as 100, 110 miles away.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: Because like we go, we back up the mountain range, so those small mountain communities either go wet uh west of Seattle or east to us, and most people rather come down east to come see us than go to the building nightmare of Seattle.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: So it's uh you have to kind of broaden, but it depends on the market.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_02: Traditional patient for implant patients, we have a water scope, right?
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_00: Spend more money in different markets, so you just got to kind of pick and I think I think just knowing we we as dentists we don't take the time to really figure out what's working and then double down on that.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: Like we're we think, oh, we wasted three thousand dollars on that mailer campaign.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: Well, did we give it enough time?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Did we try it?
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: Did we have an offer that was actually worthwhile?
• 12:19
  SPEAKER_00: Like, that's what I found with working with Gary and SMC is like the problem was the offer.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody cares if you have a$399 cleaning.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's still expensive.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, nobody cares if you're giving away free whitening.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: What they care about is can they come in and get the service that they think is really valuable for next to nothing?
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, you're gonna have people that don't want the service or they they think they want more value out of that service, but most of the people that come through the door, they just they just needed a way to be able to come in and know that it wasn't gonna cost$400.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_01: Because they want to because how the dentists see it a lot of times, you can correct me if I'm wrong, is that hey, I went to school for all this time, I invested all these loans, bought the business, and now I'm giving away this portion of treatment, right?
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it's kind of like a slap in the face.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: But how the patient sees it is, hey, I just want to come in and see if I want to go with this dentist.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: And how do I do this without paying thousands of dollars or hundreds of dollars?
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean, if you think about it, if you could try something before you buy it, that's that's all the time.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_02: Hey, for free ten dollars for the first month,$20.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_02: And so if you give a patient a low barrier to entry to come see you the first time, and you're right, your conversion rate on those patients is gonna be lower than like an insurance patient.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_02: I can tell you for a fact that it's we're about 33% conversion rate for actually them accepting treatment for a cash patient coming on a$99 special versus we're like an$85 with an insurance patient.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_02: But you know, the thing is like even half the people don't have insurance, you're basically saying, like, I'm only gonna cater to the half the people that have insurance.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_02: No, you got to cater to everybody.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's a powerful point.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_02: There's also the other point, too, that you also get market for the bigger ticket items like the all-in-x case and stuff.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_02: And those are by and large cash patients, even if they have insurance, it's basically a cash patient.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_01: And the conversion rate's nothing, but the ROIs, like they're the same.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_00: What I've found too is a lot of these patients that even have insurance, they see the$49 special and they still come in because of the$49 special, right?
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: But what you're really doing is you're building a practice that can revolve around both insurance because you take it and non-insurance because now the people that don't have insurance have have a way of getting in the door.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_00: You know what I mean?
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so you can quite literally build a practice that the rest of the dental world will say that you can't do because they they don't take your insurance.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, no, you just have to give them a way to make them pay, yeah, make them feel that they can afford the dentistry 100%.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_02: I I try to make it a little more sticky too with a membership plan.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_02: So, I mean, we don't get a lot of the cash patients converting, but we probably got 150 people now on a membership plan.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_02: And that makes them a lot more sticky because once they've already paid into the system, they show up for their cleanings.
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I think for me, uh, I was actually listening to Alex Murray who was talking about this, is that getting them back for the second visit is the most crucial step.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_02: And that's actually what I've been focusing on recently is how do I get you back for a second visit?
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't care if you didn't spend any money.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_02: How can I get you back for a second visit?
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: So that's that's actually what I'm dwelling my little head on right now.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_02: How do I get more of those patients only show up for one?
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: Because your retention rate goes through the root roof once you get to the second, so you have to remove all the friction in the first step and the second step.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I'll tell myself, like, well, we should give them a$99 patient special again if that really's gonna help.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_02: Like, how can we get them to be a little stickier?
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_02: So that's that I'm working on right now.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_02: So that's good.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_02: I crack that and I'll let you know.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so uh I want to know for there's dentists out there, there's a lot of dentists, and Mark Mark actually talked about this this morning that are really struggling because the game has changed as far as dentistry goes.
• 15:33
  SPEAKER_01: Sure.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: Insurance is a reimbursing less, labor's up, inflation's up 32%, patients are accepting less treatment overall.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_01: It's harder to keep your team.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: So the game that we were playing clear pre-COVID is not the same game as we're playing.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: Now, from a business standpoint, what what would you tell to those dentists that are out there that are kind of stuck in that old model and now we're having to move to the new model?
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: What would you say to them to help them change their paradigm shift?
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_02: I would say the core things I recognize in most new dentists that I I feel that they need to shift in their own thing is first off, their own skill sets.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_02: I have I can't tell how many patients people I've talked to that refer out indo.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I go, You're referring out molar indo, and you're telling me you can't make money in your practice.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_02: How many cases do you refer on this this month?
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_02: I forgot about 15 cases.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_02: I go, so you just let$15,000 walk out and you're saying you're having struggling.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_02: So that's$180,000 a year.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_02: So you just said you don't want your kids to have an extra$180,000 a year.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_02: That's great.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_02: Did you want to learn molar endo?
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_02: It's boring.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, it's it's boring.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_02: And I get it.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_02: Molar indo is boring.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_02: But like, you know, same thing.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_02: But skill set up on implants, skill set up on yourself, and then you can also communicate that to the rest of your team, and you can teach and coach your associates as they come on board.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so you like, no, I'm the guy that knows how to do everything, so you can fall back on me.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_02: That's going to help the long term.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_02: In the short term, I mean if you have a patient walking in that needs an implant, and you're referring that out to the to the down to the oral surgeon, you're just giving the crown when you can have got the implant, bone craft, extraction, guided tissue, and all in one bundle, and you can do it the same day because they walk in and you finance them with cherry and you're slam dunk that case with six grand.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_02: That is what you need to be doing.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_02: So if you don't have that skill set, right, you don't have even that opportunity.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_02: So you don't even get that back because you can't even swing the club.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: So let's make sure you have enough tools in your tool set first.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_02: Then you can also say I need to layer on the rest of the marketing and uh manager.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_02: But man, if you got to be an animal when it comes into the chair, you gotta be able to do like 99% of stuff.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_02: Again, you don't want to do sinus lists, I don't like them either.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_02: Fine.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_02: But you should be able to do implants and molar endo and feel very comfortable in those procedures and be able to talk to the patient, communicate that because that patient's in pain and that's same day treatment today.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_02: I'm gonna put an implant on you today.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_02: Let's try not tomorrow, not in three months, and not in six months.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_02: Today, all you want to do today?
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_02: I got my comb beam, let's go.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: I think for me, um So that's full right there.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: No, yeah, it's great.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: I think for me, specifically for the owners, what I see are people that don't really know their numbers and they're they're intimidated by what those numbers will be.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we live in a world now where you can get an answer in ten seconds if you just get on Claude or chat and just put your PL on there and tell ask it to show you where the holes are.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that's where I've had the biggest change in my business, is where I can really look at my numbers and say, if I turn this knob just a little bit, it makes a radically change your world.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I think if more dentists understood that more profitability is sitting right under their nose, if they just made a few changes that their life every practice is sitting on money, like a boatload of money that just for sending a text or an email or different treatment.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_01: Also, you said something that you said on stage that was very powerful.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: You said focus on one or two numbers.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think dentists are very analytical by nature, they because you have to be to be a dentist, right?
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: And you get all these numbers and you try to fix all the numbers, you're cooked.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like you just because one number goes up, what does it do to the other number?
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: It makes the other number go down.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: So just figure out what the most important one or two numbers are and go all in on those.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_02: What are your one or two numbers that are I mean, you're getting pretty big these days.
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_00: So like what's your one or two numbers that really you're well, Gary knows this, but I'm focused on active patient count.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: And that that's really all that matters.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, chill on the new patients.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: I need more active patients.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm like, okay.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_00: So like to me, that that's the only thing that matters to me right now.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I've gone as far as telling him, like, I don't even care what the ROI is, which I don't know if if that's necessarily true.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: But I get your point, I guess.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: What what I mean is that like at the end of the day, even if I broke even, which w we wouldn't, but even if I did, I would be okay with that because I know the snowball is getting so much bigger that I'm building for like what Colin was talking about.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm building for a future for tomorrow.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: If you have a big hygiene department, you own the future.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: It's you have a recurring business model that's gonna work now.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_01: What what um for you, Dr.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_01: Michael, what is um what does the future look like for you?
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like what are the numbers that you're focusing on right now, and what's your kind of next step in business?
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, so for me right now, uh, you know, I'm looking at personally, I want to step back a little bit from the chair because being uh having those I did basically 10 years of dentistry in three years when I first started, so I'm already feeling it.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um but how many doctors do you have?
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_02: We got three of us.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_02: And so my main goal is actually to get my doctors to be me as far as in the chair.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_02: I want them to be the animals out there, you know, having a great time doing the big complex cases.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want to be taking from them.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_02: I want them to be having the skill set and the excitement.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_02: So that's that's part of it.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_02: As far as kind of like just practice growth and where that's going, I just want to continue to make our systems better.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_02: I'm a big believer in like a one big location kind of guy.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: So we have 12 ops.
• 20:28
  SPEAKER_02: So we're a decent sized practice.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_02: I don't really want to.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_02: How many hygienists?
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_02: We have seven right now.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_02: One's a restorative hygienist, which if you can have restorative hygiene, that's a team.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_02: It's huge in Washington, right?
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's like having a mini associate paid.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: Uh not quite as much, but still quite a bit.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um, yeah.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_02: So I for me right now I'm focusing on new patient count, trying to get a new patient count so we can make sure that we can keep all the columns full, busy.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_02: We've seen a little bit of decline in Washington State, especially in our area, the it's rural, like I said, and we're we're it's the expenses are going up, things people are getting paid less.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_02: So we've made it.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: And that's driving things up.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_02: Is that no?
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's just uh cost of gas.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, like just fuel.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, if you think about it, if you're a person that makes twenty dollars an hour, I was talking to somebody about this other day.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: You make twenty dollars an hour, gas is six bucks.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_02: So it's again just to fill up your car costs you a day's worth of work, and then I'm telling you you need a five hundred dollar crown, and you just and you went from three dollar gas to six dollars.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: It sounds simple, but realistically, and you have patients living on the line, yeah, the average person can only afford a$400, can't even afford a$400 emergency.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_02: Correct.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_02: So they're walking to my office, I'm telling them it's two grand and they can't afford$400.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_02: So like whenever you have these marginal changes, now we're working in this new field of what we can do as the economy is getting tighter, at least in my market, what can we do to continue our growth while things are shrinking?
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_02: So that'll that means more volume, chasing better uh.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_01: Are you doing patient financing?
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: Do you do that?
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: How do you do that?
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like, uh walk me through that.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_02: So we actually pre-qualify everybody that walks to the door because you can do that with cherry.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: You can you can know just with their name, birth date, you know, there's no social security number, anything like that.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_02: You can find out if they're supposed to provide or not.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um so they're already pre-qualified before they even walk in the door, or at least we know they can get it.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_02: Every patient gets offered financing every time.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: We I don't care if it's for a$50 family.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_02: Like, so would you like financing for that?
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, people say no, but the thing is it happens too, if you offer financing to everybody, they'll tell you no.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_02: When they I can't tell you, tell me no, I'm gonna pay cash.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_02: Then they walk in the day of and they say, Hey, can I hook up that cherry?
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_02: If you didn't offer them that financing, they didn't know that was an available option, then they're then they're gonna cancel their appointment, not keep it, but they know in the back of their head, hey, that water here just blew up, but I still don't get this tooth fixed.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_02: They have financing.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_02: Let's go monthly payments, guys.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so monthly payments is also a big focus because I don't want I don't want to talk to people about 10 grand.
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_02: I don't want to talk about it's gonna be a hundred dollars a month.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, black gotch is the one that turned me out of that.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_02: He sent me this whole little like packet and it was beautiful and looked great.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_02: And so I stripped it down and made it worse and uglier.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_02: And then you got a lot of three colors on it.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, I did.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_02: I pretty much just copy paste, and then I'm like, hey guys, we have this great thing.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, here's the system.
• 22:56
  SPEAKER_02: Look what I did, yeah.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_02: So I mean that's a great part about you know, actually, you know, Mark was talking about getting in front of people.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_02: Nobody's gonna send you that over at because he's you're on a like a Facebook group together.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_02: But if you're talking to somebody live and you're looking in the eye and like, hey man, can you help me?
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_02: And they're like, Yeah, man, let me let me send you something.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: That's so good.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: Any more questions?
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's great.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: I love Mike.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: He's a great dude.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he's built he's built a great business.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: I know you're shy, so I appreciate you guys.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, well, I appreciate that.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you know, I really quiet.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_02: You know what's but the humbling part too is that like I'm 42, you know, Blake's in his early 30s, and I just see their career trajectory, like, but this time near my age, they're gonna be like president world domination.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_02: I always say I just can't what's up in the G5 for me.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_02: So, like, you know, just come pick me up.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: We have a small airport, it's fine, guys.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: That's so awesome.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_01: You're crushing it.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: I really appreciate you coming on.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_01: This event is awesome.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_01: And uh hopefully other dentists can watch this kind of content and learn from it and figure out that you can be really, really successful.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard, but it is out there, and it doesn't matter where what market you're in or what model you have, you can make it work.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's for fun too.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 23:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's way business to way more fun.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's more fun.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, yeah, more money, yeah.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_02: Money always helps.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, money helps.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_02: They would say they can't fix problems, but I find that to be very untrue.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it fixes problems, yeah, fixes all the money problems.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_02: Awesome.