Answer the Call: Why Rapid Call Response Is Crucial – Episode #444

Regardless of the business, customers expect a prompt response. This is even more crucial for a dental office where the majority of new patients sent to voicemail, put on hold, or not greeted appropriately, never call back! On this episode of the Dentist Money™ Show, Ryan welcomes Gary Bird, of SMC National, to talk about the unanswered calls problem—and how to solve it.

Show notes:
SMC National

 

 

 

 

 

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Podcast Transcript

Ryan Isaac:
Hello everybody, welcome back to another glorious episode of the Dentist Money Show, brought to by Dentist Advisors, a no commission fee only comprehensive financial advisor just for dentists all over the country. Check us out at dentistadvisors.com. Today on the show, I’ve got Gary Bird from SMC national marketing… Dental marketing. This is a fascinating conversation for me to learn not only some of the, call it basics, for me, basics of dental marketing, but how to actually implement it and track it so that it works. A lot of the topic in of today’s conversation that is very common, you hear about marketing is that it doesn’t work, we’ve done before, it didn’t work, but without some very specific implementation items and tracking kind of like in your financial plan, and in your investment life, it’s kind of hard to actually pull something off and stick to it and see if it works and why it did or didn’t. So a fascinating conversation with Gary. Many thanks to him for spending time and being with us today. If you have any questions for us, go to dentistadvisors.com, we’d love to have a chat with you. Thanks for being here everybody, enjoy the show.

Announcer:
Consult an advisor or conduct your own due diligence when making financial decisions. General principles discussed during this program do not constitute personal advice. This program is furnished by Dentist Advisors, a registered investment advisor. This is Dentist Money. Now here’s your host, Ryan Isaac.

Ryan Isaac:
I’m just excited to be curious about this conversation. Let’s start with, Who are you? Who are you and what do you do? And for people who can see the video, I was just geeking out with you about how cool everything looks, and everyone who does know you is gonna be used to how good all your video production looks, but… What’s the intro, man? What’s the background for who you are and what you do?

Gary Bird:
Yeah, my name is Gary and I’m the founder of SMC national. We are a growth partner for dentists, so we do dental marketing basically, but we call ourselves a growth partner for a reason. The reason for that is we are… Company-wise, we’re always growing. And so what that means is, is number one, we wanna make sure our team is always growing, that they have opportunities and that they grow personally and professionally, and we support them the best that we can. Number two, that our offices that we work with, that they’re always growing. And number three, by default, our company grows. We’ve been on the Inc. 5000 fastest growing company list three years in a row, and that’s a credit. That’s not something we set out to do, that’s a by product of helping our team, helping our clients, and then then the result as our company grows.

Gary Bird:
But the reason that we are obsessed with growth is, when we work with a dental office, most people out there in the marketing world provide leads. Nothing wrong with that, that’s the first step. But the average dental office, right now in the dental industry, 35% of their calls are going unanswered during normal business hours, they have no idea that that’s happening, that’s the average… That’s the industry average.

Ryan Isaac:
Hold on, let me pause that. The average is 35% of phone calls coming into a dental practice are not being answered. And they’re not aware of it.

Gary Bird:
They’re not aware of it, and here’s why They’re not aware of it. The dentist, everybody’s super busy and labor is super short.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s crazy.

Gary Bird:
So before the pandemic, it was like 15%, 20%, something like that unanswered. But since the pandemic where everybody’s running short staffed and just playing catchup all the time, it’s around 35%. So what happens is, is that the front desk is really busy. They’re answering phones, they’re talking to people, they’re checking people in and out. And the one thing you can ignore is this next line that’s coming in. You just don’t have a choice. It’s not because they’re bad, it’s not because they’re lazy. It’s the exact opposite actually.

Gary Bird:
It’s just that everybody’s short staffed. And so, but you have to like literally have software to track this. So once we realized this very early on, we just said, wow, we can help people grow if we just help them answer their phones.

Ryan Isaac:
And so wait, like, okay, so are you saying that when they, when you say they don’t know, they don’t hear the phones or they hear it and they know they’re missing a few, but they don’t know how big it is.

Gary Bird:
So the doctors, the owner doctors do not know that their average unanswered rate is 35%. And the front desk isn’t, if you don’t measure it, it doesn’t get… You’re a finance guy.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah no one’s gonna know.

Gary Bird:
No one’s gonna know. So it’s like, yeah, we miss calls here and there maybe most people say, ah, I’d guess like 5%. And I go, well, are you tracking it? No. And I would go, I bet you you’re around 30% to 35%. And when we track it, sure enough, there it is. So just to give you an idea, spending $10,000 on marketing, $3,500 a month is going down the drain on unanswered calls. And you don’t, can’t win those back. ’cause they’ll just called the next office.

Ryan Isaac:
They’re gone.

Gary Bird:
And if people don’t believe me, here, here’s what I always challenge people, go call dentist in your market. Go call just in the middle of the day, pick up the phone and start calling Dentist.

Ryan Isaac:
And it’s not answering.

Gary Bird:
And watch how many don’t answer.

Ryan Isaac:
Whoa.

Ryan Isaac:
I’m sure you’ll get to this, but, we’re on the subject. How, like how do you fix that? Or what do people do? And well, before you answer that, when they hear this statistic or they see it measured, do they freak out? And do they like oh my gosh, what do we do?

Gary Bird:
Yeah. They lose their… The poop hits the fan. Everybody goes, but bat crazy. But it’s like, look, I have skeletons in my closet. They’ve always been there. We just didn’t know that they were there. So now it’s time to clean it out. And now we actually have, if you can’t measure it, you can’t do anything about it. And you need to set a realistic KPI. So let’s set a sub 10% or sub 5% KPI, And let’s encourage your team to get there. Now usually it’s a capacity issue. So you can break every…

Ryan Isaac:
A people capacity issue.

Gary Bird:
So usually it’s like, you either have a capacity or you have a capability problem. This is not a capability problem. They know how to pick up the phone and answer it. This is a capacity problem. So there’s two ways to handle it. You can either hire somebody and keep them out of the office. So don’t bring them into the office ’cause there’s too many things going on. Or, and this is very popular. You can hire somebody overseas. Like I use Support DDS a lot and there’s other companies out there like that. For about $1,500 a month, $2,000 a month, you can get a college educated person that can answer the phone. And they’re there 30, 40 hours a week, whatever you need them. And that pretty much solves the problem. And here’s the cool part. We’ve measured this. If we train them, so one of the reasons we’re a growth partner is, we actually train people too. We don’t just say there’s a problem, we show you how to fix it.

Ryan Isaac:
Cool.

Gary Bird:
If we train them, they’ll convert really close to the same conversion as a really good front desk person. So that…

Ryan Isaac:
That’s surprising actually.

Gary Bird:
It is. They use, so what I like about Support DDS is they use a company, they use people out of Zimbabwe and they speak English and they have like a British accent, which is like just super cool. Like they sound really nice and friendly.

Ryan Isaac:
I wish I had a cool accent. Mine would be Australian if I could pick any, I talk about this a lot, so.

Gary Bird:
It’s very similar. South African is British African blend is very perfect.

Ryan Isaac:
That’s so cool, man, it’s very cool. Fascinating. So the solution seems simple, but are people not doing it though? Like, people are not implementing a solution? Or it’s just because most artist don’t know.

Gary Bird:
If they’re spending marketing… Yeah, no, it’s ’cause they don’t know. So once they start spending money. So I tell people like, if you don’t know this number, let’s pretend you’re a dentist that wants to work with us. So I’m gonna first question I’m gonna ask you, what’s your unanswered call rate? And you go, oh, I don’t know. That’s good. And I’m like, well, it’s the percentage. Well, I don’t track it like that, but I know we’re not missing a lot and I’m going to, oh, I bet you it’s around 35%. Listen, I don’t know this for 100% for positive, but I’m pretty confident that you’re missing a lot of your calls. If this comes up, are you willing to do things to help me fix it? We’ll work together. We’re partners on this. Are you willing to maybe even invest a little thing or just hold your team accountable if we get there?

Gary Bird:
And that’s the problem. So it’s like, yeah. Sure. So, cool. Now let’s move on to the next problem. The average phone conversion rate for a marketing new patient is around 50%. So that’s a big problem. So if you’re missing 35%…

Gary Bird:
And half of them don’t convert anyway…

Gary Bird:
And half of them don’t convert. Now here’s what everybody says. No, no, no, no, no. Susan at the front desk, she’s a killer. She converts everybody. I sit and listen to her. Here’s the problem. This is what most people don’t realize. Patient referrals and doctor referrals, new patients convert at about 100%. Does that make sense?

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Gary Bird:
So if I tell my wife, you gotta go over to this dentist, they’re amazing.

Ryan Isaac:
Go there. They’re going. They’re going, they’re going.

Ryan Isaac:
If you don’t answer the phone, they call back. If you call on the person who’s like…

Gary Bird:
They show up. Whatever, yeah.

Gary Bird:
It’s easy. Marketing is, the average is around 50%. So when you blend those together, you get to like a 70, 80% blend depending on the ratio marketing…

Ryan Isaac:
Where people are coming from.

Gary Bird:
So it feels like, dude, we’re crushing it. But where you’re spending your money on marketing, you’re just…

Ryan Isaac:
It’s not…

Gary Bird:
You’re just bleeding. You’re bleeding all… This is why dentists always say, I don’t understand. I’m converting everybody on the phone. The patients are showing up and we can’t figure out how, why we’re not growing and we’re spending all this money on marketing. Why do we, does it feel like we keep hitting a glass ceiling? The reason why is they’re just getting enough patient referrals to kind of maintain and they’re losing through all these leaky buckets.

Ryan Isaac:
All marketing referrals.

Gary Bird:
Yeah. They’re losing them 35% unanswered, 50% on the phones. And then when they get in, they’re not converting them to treatment because it’s the same problem. You have to slow down a little bit more. They don’t know you yet.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. They’re not warm.

Gary Bird:
Yeah. And they’re like, no, we close everybody. It’s like, no, you close the patient referrals ’cause someone else did the selling. You need to slow down. We can see in your ROI, you are not closing the marketing leads at a rate. So you’re either over-treating or you’re moving too fast.

Ryan Isaac:
So with the, I don’t know if the math is gonna be right on this. If it’s like a little over a third are not being picked up, two thirds are being picked up the phone calls, but half of those are not even converting.

Ryan Isaac:
So we’re talking about like a third of all marketing patients get converted. Two thirds of all marketing patients don’t either convert or don’t even get talked to.

Gary Bird:
They don’t. So basically you are, if you’re spending, the simple math on it is if you’re spending about $10,000 on marketing, and in your average, an average dental office…

Ryan Isaac:
6,500 bucks is being wasted.

Gary Bird:
That would be generous. I would put it like 75 about 70 to 75, somewhere in there.

Ryan Isaac:
Gosh, man.

Gary Bird:
And that’s why everybody hates marketing. And I totally get it. I’m like, yeah, I would hate…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. It doesn’t work.

Gary Bird:
It’s like, yeah, I’ve already worked with 12 offices. It doesn’t, or 12 companies, it doesn’t work And it’s like, well…

Ryan Isaac:
Marketing works.

Gary Bird:
It does. And there’s, that’s not to say there’s not poor performing marketing companies. I’m not discrediting that. But we’re, I’m operating on an assumption on this $10,000 that your marketing’s perfect. And then your operations is average. That ends up with an at 75% slippage, and all you… And it’s not hard to fix. That’s the other thing.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s easy.

Gary Bird:
It’s very easy to fix those things.

Ryan Isaac:
So I wanna back up a little bit just ’cause I love these stories. How did you get into this? Like how did your company begin? Like where did you… I mean, it’s funny when you work with dentists specifically, it’s almost a conversation stopper. Like someone will be like, what do you do for a living? Financial advisor for dentists? And they’ll just go, for dentists? And then they’re like, okay.

Gary Bird:
Yeah I don’t even tell people.

Ryan Isaac:
What do you do if they’re outside of dental? I just go, I do marketing.

Ryan Isaac: Marketing. Yeah.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh, that’s so cool.

Gary Bird:
A million questions.

Ryan Isaac:
What do you do? Like social media?

Gary Bird:
No, I work with dentists.

Ryan Isaac:
Doug, crickets. Like, I don’t even know what to say.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s so weird and so niche and like specific, but Yeah. How, what was your journey? Like how did your, how did your business begin?

Gary Bird:
Such a good question. So I ask everybody on my podcast, dental marketing theory when they come on, how’d you get into the dental industry?

Ryan Isaac:
Oh, cool.

Gary Bird:
And that’s my first question. Here’s what everybody says. If they’re a dentist or a hygienist, they’re usually like, oh, a family member, a loved one family.

Ryan Isaac:
Family.

Gary Bird:
And then I got in and I wanted that lifestyle and that’s why I got in. Everybody else is like total randomly on accident. I got… And so everybody’s here by accident is what I’ve learned. Except for the dentist and hygienist.

Ryan Isaac:
So true. So, so even same with you.

Gary Bird:
Totally by accident. So I started marketing. I started in 2018. I decided to quit a good paying job and the economy completely fell apart on me. Just like everything fell apart. And so I was like…

Ryan Isaac:
Totally unrelated industry, like you were in totally like, unrelated industry before. Oh, okay.

Gary Bird:
I was doing email marketing for like restaurants and sports arenas and stuff like that.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh, alright.

Gary Bird:
So, so then one day I got referred to a dental practice in a super competitive market and I didn’t even realize how competitive it was. He had four dentists in his parking lot. Like you could hit throw a rock from his friend door to four of the dentist. It was in California. And he’s like, Hey, can you help me? We’re doing like $90,000 a month. I’m the only doctor. I wanna really grow. And I’m like, we can try, let’s try some of the things we’ve tried. And we tried it, and it absolutely killed. Like over a short period of time, he grew to about 450,000 a month, four doctors. Like he really, really grew.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh geez.

Gary Bird:
I had no…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Like four and a half X…

Gary Bird:
I had no idea how huge that was. I was just like, oh, cool. It worked. It worked. You know what I mean? I didn’t know how the competition, I knew nothing about dental at that point. So he started referring us to his friends, but his friends didn’t have the same success. And I’m looking, I’m doing a normal marketing thing. I’m like, dude, you got the same amount of traffic to the website, the same amount of, from the same kind of income areas. The same amount of people called your office as his office, but you end up with nothing, and he ends up with 50 new patients. Like, how is that even possible? So then I was like, you know what? Most marketers would just stop there and just be like, dude, you suck. Sorry, I can’t help you. I said, I’m gonna go through and listen to every one of your calls. So I went through and listen to every one of their calls to see why it wasn’t working for these other practices. And I was like, oh, hey Doc, let’s hop on a call. Let’s listen to these really quickly. Listen to Susan here. She’s literally filtering out your patients. And I didn’t know anything about insurance or any of that kind of thing.

Gary Bird:
I could just tell the front desk was, they don’t wanna work. She was like, no, we don’t accept any insurances or Yeah, no. That we don’t quote prices over the phone or Yeah. Like all the red flags that every patient, you automatically lose them instantly. And I’m like…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, you’re not…

0Gary Bird:
And so I’m just like, Hey doc, you just gotta fix this like all you have to do. And he freaked out. He’s like, I can’t believe that’s why I’m not growing. And I’m just like, look, it’s all good. I’m gonna give you, here’s a video. I found a video on YouTube. Here’s how to answer those questions. Just, I’ll train her.

Ryan Isaac:
Cracking me up.

Gary Bird:
I’ll train her if you want me to. Yeah. So I said, this is awesome. So I figured out the secret sauce. All I’m gonna have to do is train people one time and then I’ll be done with it. ‘Cause then now they know and they’ll do great. Wrong. I didn’t realize how busy the front desk was. The other thing I didn’t realize is that the front desk, so in dental, we don’t use the word sales. No one likes the word sales. But there’s two salespeople in a dental practice. It’s the front desk. And the treatment coordinator. The front desk is usually the lowest paid person in the whole office out of everybody. Like the janitor’s making more than them usually. And so, which is crazy ’cause everywhere else, salespeople are the highest paid in the business.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah… Especially if they’re, that’s such an interesting point because most also, most salespeople are tied to the revenue they produce, which is like, I don’t know if I, except for huge offices where maybe a front office person is tied into equity in the practice. I’m not sure I know of any front office people who are tied to like lead conversion or sales.

Gary Bird:
And not only that…

Ryan Isaac:
Because that’s a, you’re right, that’s a dirty phrase in dentistry, sales, lead conversion, whatever. But yeah it’s same thing.

Gary Bird:
But not only that, they’re also usually the youngest. They’re the lowest paid. And if they’re any good, let’s pretend that they’re good and they’re answering the phones, they’re on top of everything, that they have a good personality, you instantly move them. You’re like, oh, you’re too good for the front desk. I’m gonna move you over to billing. I’m gonna move you over to collections. I’m gonna move you over to treatment coordinating. So you’re moving them back further in the process. And guess what? You put a brand new person at the front desk that’s not as good. It’s not as good.

Gary Bird:
And so once I realized, and then plus they’re just busy. Just to be fair to the front desk…

Ryan Isaac:
Slammed.

Gary Bird:
They’re doing too many things. Like either you’re inbound, you’re outbound…

Ryan Isaac:
Well sometimes those front desk people are the treatment coordinator and the billing coordinator and the janitor.

Gary Bird:
Exactly. Exactly. So once I realized that, then I’m like, okay, this is not, this is an systemic problem in dental. Like this isn’t just one practice, it’s everybody. So what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna start tracking it and then I’m gonna update people, and then I’m gonna help these dentists actually hold their team accountable. ’cause what the dentist would do would get super mad, be like, Susan sucks, she can’t do it. And I’m like, well, to be fair to Susan, we’ve trained her one time. We don’t have a true KPI, like she can’t see where she’s converting or not. And we’re not reviewing her calls with her because that’s normal sales stuff.

Gary Bird:
And so it’s like, let’s do that with her and I’ll be her coach. So I learned how to coach them and all that stuff. Now we have multiple coaches that help with this stuff. But so that’s how we got into dental. And then that’s how we started figuring out, okay, what do we actually need to help with? That’s has nothing to do with marketing, but that we need to help with to help our clients get better. So phone conversion scheduling. Like how to properly open up your schedule so we measure average time to appointment. The other thing is like how much treatment you’re actually getting from each patient, which is huge because there’s two things that can be going on.

Gary Bird:
Number one, maybe you have the wrong kind of patient coming in, or you’re sending them through the wrong process, or you’re over-treating. You have somebody who’s just like putting out five, $10,000 worth of treatment on every single brand new patient that walks through the door. And you’re not gonna be successful like that unless you’re really good at building rapport really quickly. And so it’s just like, Hey guys, can we just peel this back just a little bit? And let’s focus on the problem that they came in for. And then if you get that problem or you get them back to their next hygiene appointment, you’ll get the rest of the work. You will. ‘Cause now they’re your dentist now, so. Just, we just keep working deeper and deeper into the office.

Ryan Isaac:
Wow. That is the issue with marketing. I mean, that’s why people don’t stick with it. Why they think it doesn’t work, why they think it’s like broken or it’s like a scam, like marketing doesn’t work. Like no marketing works. It’s just the implementation of it. Just a really, yeah. So, okay. You man, you got into this with dentists specifically at a really interesting time. I mean, if you started this at 2018, you started probably ramping up during the worst time in the world.

Ryan Isaac:
What was that? Okay, so what was that? What has that been like? I mean, here’s what I’ve noticed in the last few years. I’d love to hear how your 2020 and marketing kind of went, but people are growing, they’re collecting, their collections are growing, but everyone’s paying way more money for all this stuff. Expenses are up, profits are down, and the people issue, just finding the right team. I’m curious, what have you seen through how the economy is for dentists right now and how their offices are all operating?

Gary Bird:
Yeah, so there’s a huge problem. And you know this cost, you know this. So it’s cost of goods are super high. Well, let me back up. Before, this is how dentists used to drive their practice. They’d go, Gary, as long as I get 100 new patients a month, and we’ll be successful. ‘Cause they knew out of those 100, they’d close so many, and it would just make them profitable. And they didn’t really have to look at any of the other numbers. That was like their main KPI for a successful practice. However, after COVID, that completely changed. So now they’re hitting 100 new patients still. They’re collecting as much as they used to collect, but then they’re not left over with the same amount of money. In fact, there’s nothing at the end of the day. Which stinks.

Ryan Isaac:
Sure. Yeah, it’s crazy.

Gary Bird:
That’s the worst feeling ever. So it’s like, okay, well, why is that? Well, cost of goods are up. Everything costs more money. Labor’s through the roof.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, it’s crazy.

Gary Bird:
Interest rates are way higher. So when you are borrowing money to do things, it’s way more expensive to do those things. So if you’re like, oh, we’re going to do a build out. Well, that’s gonna going to cost you way more money. Way more than it used to. Way more than it used to. Not just because it costs more, but the interest is way higher as well. So everything goes up. And then patients, when patients get pinched, when inflation hits, what happens is they don’t stop doing the things that they wanna want to do. They just spread them out further. So it’s not like women stop getting their hair done. They just don’t do it every month. Now they do it every other month.

Ryan Isaac:
Okay. Yeah.

Gary Bird:
Like, I don’t stop getting my car detailed. I just don’t get it done. I get it done every month. I get it done every three months.

Ryan Isaac:

As often.

Gary Bird:
Yeah. And that’s how I save money. But that starts to pinch businesses and they don’t, it’s hard to identify like what’s happening. Why is our revenue slowly shrinking? Dentistry is no different. Patients are like, oh, I’m not going to gonna come to that cleaning appointment. And so same day cancellations went through the roof.

Ryan Isaac:
Oh yeah.

Gary Bird:
For dental offices. And that’s why, ’cause patients were like, hmm, I don’t feel like going into my cleaning today and being told I need $2,000 of work.

Ryan Isaac:
Or even this. Yeah. $100 office visit. I just don’t want it to come out of the checking account today.

Gary Bird:
Yeah. So I’ll just punt it ’cause what’s another month or two, if I wait another month or two and I do it, it’s not a big deal. And so that this is like the trifecta on a dental office. So how, and then here’s the other thing. It’s almost impossible for these offices to find hygienists right now. They all, like 30% of them left the industry. And that was the main driver for new patients is that’s how they get into the office. So the average time to appointment. For some of these offices, there’s two, three weeks, four weeks, five weeks. So they’re like, Gary, drive up our new patients ’cause it used to, we used to need a 100. Now we want 150 to get to where we used to be, but there’s nowhere to put them. So that’s a big problem.

Gary Bird:
So what we did is I, I really started to think through this and I was like, okay, if I was a dentist, what would I do? What I would do is I would start to focus on other kinds of treatment, full arch, clear liners. If you don’t really. Unless you hire another hygienist, you don’t really have a choice, to be honest with you. The cool part about full arch and clear liners, they don’t have to come through your hygiene department. They come through another department. They are also higher ticket price. So you’re getting a lot more dollars coming through and then, and then it’s, so that’s going to gonna help stimulate your practice. So you can continue to grow the way you want to, and you can start to build in more profit into those procedures than maybe seeing the hygiene patient that you’re going to average $1500. A year on. So those are, that’s how offices are getting creative. So I, it, there’s like a huge wave of GP offices that are adding full arch ’cause they’re realizing the same thing. The only downside to full arches, it’s complicated. It’s complicated medically.

Gary Bird:
It’s complicated operationally and it’s complicated marketing wise. So you have to really work with somebody who fully explains that to you before you jump into it.

Ryan Isaac:
Is that where, the trend of maybe like, Is that where, the trend of maybe like, sleep, it’s sleep apnea and breathing airway kind of treatment is starting to come in.

Gary Bird:
Kind of, but it’s a little bit different. And here’s why, go find me a person on the street that goes, yeah, I struggle with sleep apnea. So I’m going to the dentist. It like…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, exactly. It’s a huge education problem. It’s the buried entry of educating the general population first is gigantic. Yeah.

Gary Bird:
That’s the hardest thing to do. The hardest kind of marketing is to reeducate people. Think about clear aligners. Why are clear aligners a thing? And everybody does them and there’s all these different brands. It’s ’cause Invisalign went in and invested hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing and education. And to be frank with you, no one’s done that with sleep apnea for dental yet.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s a different topic, but it’s easy. It’s crazy how easy that is as a business to come up with these great ideas, these solutions for people, your customers, your clients, your patients, whatever. But then realize that you have to create a whole new education around it. Like, I don’t remember the time, but when iPhone came out with the first iPhone or Apple came out with the first iPhone, I mean, it was like a glass phone. I don’t know. Was there a lot of education? Did they have to teach us that it was, we needed it? We wanted it.

Gary Bird:
We were using Blackberries at the time. So it was like, Hey, this can do, this is like an iPod that you can call people on. And it’s like, Oh, that’s pretty cool.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, that’s true. I guess we were kind of used to it and you’re, yeah, you’re talking about services that just don’t even resonate with, it’s just not logical.

Gary Bird:
It doesn’t make sense. So it’s like, Oh, my car, my car play, my car shop where I get oil changes are selling refrigerators now. That’s awesome.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s like Costco basically. Yeah. So I’m curious about, and maybe this isn’t like wheelhouse or even maybe this is a totally different thing, but is marketing your practice. So speaking of the employee shortage and having a hard time building and finding, retaining team and paying them, is there a whole separate thought process to marketing, not to patients, but to potential team members in your community being like…

Gary Bird:
100%

Ryan Isaac:
I’m the employer that you’re going to want to be with. Is that, do you, I mean, I don’t know if that’s a thing you work on it, or… Any thoughts about it?

Gary Bird:
That’s not a service that we provide. But I haven’t done a lot of podcasts on this and I’ve actually talked to Aspen’s, chief of staff, president of staffing for Aspen, which if you know anything about Aspen, they’re one of the bigger DSOs. And they’re… They do DeNovo’s only. So their whole model is predicated on hiring. So it was a fascinating show sitting down with him and just talking through this problem with them. But here’s the basics of it. What I do is B2C. So I do business to customer, which is really easy compared to B2B. And the reason it’s really easy is like, imagine if you sell burritos, what are the… What’s the process of selling someone a burrito? It’s like, are you hungry? And do you want burritos?

Ryan Isaac:
Is the burrito halfway decent? Even if it’s like subpar, I’ll still eat it.

Gary Bird:
Yeah, exactly. There’s not, you’re hungry.

Gary Bird:
So there’s only like two or three qualifying questions.

Ryan Isaac:
Is it a burrito? Am I hungry? That’s it. That’s all there is. Yeah.

Gary Bird:
Okay. So now let’s walk through B2B. So I’m going gonna to and recruiting is very similar to B2B. You have contracts, you have seasonality you have, multiple decision makers. You have the spouse involved. You have like all of these things. Contracts, all these things that come into it where it’s like, it’s not straight forward.

Ryan Isaac:
It’s not simple.

Gary Bird:
It’s not simple. And it’s not straightforward.

Ryan Isaac:
Now you’re trying to get someone to buy your burritos to sell them to someone else.

Gary Bird:
Yeah, exactly.

Ryan Isaac:
And now it’s a totally different story. Are you a good burrito wholesaler? Is cost and yeah, contracts and food quality. And yeah it’s huge.

Gary Bird:
It’s huge. So that’s B2B marketing. And so, like for me, when I have to sign up a dentist, it’s like, are you in a marketing contract? Is your team willing to learn? Are… Do you have the finances to even afford this kind of growth? Do you have operational bandwidth? All these things. So when you’re recruiting, it’s similar to B2B is that it’s not B2C. It’s not a simple like, oh yeah, I guess I want a burrito.

Ryan Isaac:
Do you need this? I have it. Let’s do it. Let’s connect.

Gary Bird:
Yes. It’s not that simple. So, and the other thing is, is that, people are dentistry is a hard job. It’s not like a super easy job and you can build a negative reputation for yourself and not even realize it. Like it’s not even fill it. I just had somebody who I talked to today. They have like 10 practices and one of their, they’ve hired maxed out everywhere at all their other practices. But at this one practice, they can’t hire because they’ve had doctor turnover and they’re just like, yeah, we can’t hire a doctor. We can’t hire and hide. It’s like chicken and egg. It’s like, well, yeah, ’cause you have an unstable environment.

Gary Bird:
So no one wants to work there and words kind of passed around. So it’s like, what do we wanna want to do? Do we want to create a stable environment first? So then we can attract people. So then we can attract people, which that’s a time issue. I mean, you have to wait or do we want to overpay, which eliminates the time issue. We’ll get people in there, but you’re going to pay a lot more.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. I hope it works out, man. Yeah. I’m, I was chatting with a practice consultant last weekend at a conference and I haven’t thought much and I don’t know if it’s been that big of a theme in the dental industry anyway. Like even just marketing to patients is fairly new in the dental space, isn’t it? 10 years, 15 years or so. So we were on this topic of just marketing yourself as an employer in the community, which is totally different. But nowadays it’s just a totally different thing, which is kind of maybe a last question we can, we could, we should just do this like every few months. Honestly, we can’t do so many things here. I’m just wondering like, what, what advice would you have for people going into 2024? What has changed? What doesn’t work anymore? What should they be focusing on for next year? Like what’s on top of mind for you and your clients going into next year?

Gary Bird:
Okay. So number one, to solve your hygiene problem, your hygienist problem, what you need to do is you need to meet the hygienist where they’re at. So your biggest competitor for hygienist is actually not other practices. It’s temp agencies. Why? ’cause the temp agencies are just like, cool, pick your schedule, work whenever you want. You’re going to gonna make more than working at the practice that, and the hygienist would be stupid not to sign up for that. So they sign up for that. Here’s the thing. Sign up for the temp agencies. You got to have an amazing culture to do this though. Bring them into your office and talk to them and see how they do. And if they do an amazing job, say, Hey, you know what? We have a plan where you can pick your hours at our office. You don’t… Don’t you hate as a temp that you sometimes have to drive 60 minutes this way or two hours this way. And don’t you hate when you end up with one of these crusty offices where the culture is horrible and every, and don’t you hate that?

Gary Bird:
Yeah, I do. Well, guess what? We have a great culture. We love you. You can work here and we’ll let you pick your hours. We’ll give you everything that the temp agency has. Plus with none of the downsides, short commute, consistency, great culture. How’s that sound? Oh, I would love that. Great. Pick which days. Now here’s the downside to this model. You have to have somebody who manages a lot more hygienists. Now you’re going to gonna have to have more part-time hygienists, but it works. Everybody who’s executed on this has made it work with the caveat. They have to actually like your office. If your doctor’s mean to people and the office managers beating people up.

Ryan Isaac:
You’re the crusty office.

Gary Bird:
If you’re the crusty office it’s not going to gonna work. Okay. So that’s an easy…

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Okay. That’s cool okay.

Gary Bird:
Okay. Now, as far as marketing is concerned, you have to know the basics. So you, and I would say 90% of the people don’t, even the big DSOs don’t track a lot of this stuff correctly. You have to know what is your average unanswered rate during normal business hours. You have to know that. Number two, you have to know how much your phone conversion is for just marketing patients. You have to know out of your new patients, how many are patient referrals and how many are coming from marketing. They’re not the same. They’re two totally different beasts and you need to track them on two different tracks from there. You need to know what your average cost per qualified lead is and what your cost per acquisition or new patient coming through the door is. How much does it cost you to generate a new patient to walk through the door? That’s not a referral referrals don’t count just for marketing. And then from there You can do it from there. You then can start tracking ROI properly and you can look, I spent 10,000. I got this many new patients through the door. My cost per acquisition was $300 and my ROI on that is five to one and now it works.

Gary Bird:
Now you can scale it. You need to have a scalable solution if you’re going to gonna grow. If you’re guessing at your marketing and you don’t know any of those things, you’re literally just throwing money at the wind and crossing your fingers and that’s why sometimes it feels good and sometimes it’s really scary. So those are the things that you need to know. Those are the main things that I would nail down this year. If you really want to crush next year.

Ryan Isaac:
Just thinking how much that tracking message resonates with everything that we do in our business and preach about making financial decisions. There’s so many decisions. There’s so many moving pieces constantly in a person’s financial life, kind of like in their marketing life. If you’re not tracking things, then your likelihood of sticking with anything is just very, very low and really that’s the secret sauce to everything is sticking with it long enough to make it work. Assuming you’re doing the right thing in the first place. So I love the emphasis on tracking. I assume that’s, part of your whole service. That’s what, yeah, without it, it’s kind of pointless. I mean, that’s why people spend money on this stuff and they’re like, it didn’t work, but they don’t even know why it didn’t work. Like where and how and why and when they don’t know in tracking.

Gary Bird:
We won’t work with somebody if we can’t track this stuff.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah, cool.

Gary Bird:
It doesn’t… It’s a waste of time. It’s a waste of our time and a waste of their time.

Ryan Isaac:
Who’s the typical person who calls you, who reaches out? What, where are they at in their career? What’s their practice like? What are they thinking about when they pick up the phone or shoot you a message?

Gary Bird:
Yeah, it’s basically anybody who really wants to grow. So we’re not, so sometimes we’ll have people reach out and be like, Gary, we want to upgrade our website. It’s like, for what? I just don’t like our brand. That’s all.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. So it’s not about just branding for the sake of branding. Okay.

Gary Bird:
Yeah, exactly. Or just, they’re like, yeah, I’m, I’m good. I’m comfortable where I’m at. I don’t really want to grow. Like if you don’t want to grow, we’re like killing an ant with a grenade. Nope. We’re way overkill. There’s…

Ryan Isaac:
Which does sound fun though, to be honest about…

Gary Bird:
It doesn’t. It is fun it’s just a little… It’s little overkill.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah.

Gary Bird:
So it’s mainly, we’re bringing in people who are like, look, I’ve already built three practices for practices or I’ve already filled two or three ops. I’ve already hired an associate and I’m kind of scared to take that next step because I have no visibility in my marketing. I have no idea why my new patients are coming in or where they’re coming in. I know I’m spending money on marketing. So I know something’s working. I think, but I actually need to be able to visit visibly, see it to be able to take this next step with confidence.

Gary Bird:
That’s the people that we like working with ’cause we can actually level set with them pretty quickly, get the basic KPIs into the place, figure out what’s working, what’s not, and then provide coaching to their team in the areas that they need. And then the cool part about what we do is we just charge one growth budget and it includes everything. We don’t nickel and dime, break everything down. We’ve productized our service to like, Hey, you’re going to have to spend X. To get to where you want to go and here’s the KPIs that we need to hit to accomplish your goals.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Cool, man. Where do they find you? How do they reach out?

Gary Bird:
SMC national is the company name smcnational.com or you can find me on social media, the Gary bird and just hit me up. I’m always posting a fun inflation videos and stuff like that.

Ryan Isaac:
Yeah. Awesome. Very cool, man. Well, thanks. Thanks Gary for spending some time here, man. I appreciate it. Thanks for giving me like the tech rundown two before all this too, you have a super cool, high quality presence and the content you do is really good, man. So thanks for spending some time. Appreciate it.

Gary Bird:
Back to you, my friend. You guys are killing it. I love… Watch your podcast all the time and see you guys on social media all the time. So it’s really an honor to be on your guy’s show. I really appreciate it.

Ryan Isaac:
Thanks. We’ll do more of this for sure. I really appreciate it. Thanks everyone listening. We’ll catch you next time. Take care now. Bye bye.

Practice Management