Episode 161: More Dental Management Secrets from Dr. Bruce B. Baird

“It doesn’t matter how good you are if you don’t have people sitting in your chairs.” ~Dr. Bruce B. Baird

So, you’re a great communicator with fantastic technical skills? That’s awesome. But none of that matters if you don’t have people in your chairs.

I’ve seen this over the years. A dentist has all of these skills, but they don’t know how to get people in the door. Maybe you’re in the mindset that I was early in my career: People will come if I provide it. Well, that’s not always the case. 

Think about it this way. If you don’t tell anyone what you do, how will they know? Marketing is your way of telling the world how you can help them. And here’s a little insider secret, you can control who walks through your doors by marketing to the people who need the procedures you love to do. 

Join me for the second half of this two-part series about dental practice management where I unpack the final two areas of dental practice management – marketing and patient acquisition & risk management –  and share:

• How to think about marketing for your business
• The power of building a reputation as the best
• Risk management strategies to protect your business

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Regan 0:00
Hi, Dr. Regan Robertson, CCO of Productive Dentist Academy here and I have a question for you. Are you finding it hard to get your team aligned to your vision, but you know, you deserve growth just like everybody else? That’s why we’ve created the PDA productivity workshop. For nearly 20 years, PDA workshops have helped dentists just like you align their teams, get control of scheduling, and create productive practices that they love walking into every day. Just imagine how you will feel when you know your schedule is productive, your systems are humming, and your team is aligned to your vision. It’s simple, but it’s not necessarily easy. We can help visit productivedentist.com/workshop that’s productivedentist.com/workshop to secure your seats now.

Dr. Bruce Baird 0:47
People say, “Oh my gosh, that’s, I can’t afford to do 8%.” Well, you’re writing off your PPO write-offs are probably a lot more than that, so and that is actually marketing. You think you’re signing up for these plans for some reason that they’re going to bring you patients, but for the most part, they’re going to bring you patients that probably don’t need a lot of dentistry and it’s just not my way of doing things. Hello, everyone, this is Dr. Bruce B. Baird, and you’re listening to the Productive Dentist Podcast. In this podcast, I will give you everything that I’ve learned over the last 40 years in dentistry working with 1000s of dentists. I’ll tell you it’s not that my way is the only way, it’s just one that has worked extremely well for me and I’d love to share that with you so you too can enjoy the choices and lifestyle the productivity allows, more time for things you love, increased pay, better team relationships, and lowered stress. Let’s get into it with this week’s episode of the Productive Dentist Podcast.

Dr. Bruce Baird 1:57
Hi, this is Dr. Bruce Baird with the Productive Dentist Podcast. Looking forward to talking about practice management. Again, this is part two, we talked about patient management, taking care of the patient, we talked about taking care of your team and we spoke about financial management and set those are super, super important, but the other areas that, the other five things I look at number four is marketing and patient acquisition and that, to me is one of the most, I don’t know, it’s great to be a great communicator, it’s great to have unbelievable technical skills. It’s wonderful to have all those skills, but if you don’t have people to talk to, if you don’t have people to show it’s, it’s like going to a dance, you really kind of get the beat, you know, you kind of got a little groove going but you have no one to dance with and that’s got to be pretty frustrating and I’ve seen this over the years, people will go to, to kois, or they’ll go to spear or LBI or you know, you name it panky and they have all this skill that they haven’t learned how to you know, and they may even be a good communicator, but they just literally don’t know how to get people in the door. Or they have this attitude where people will come if I provide it. Well, I’ve said this before, when it comes down to marketing and patient acquisition, “Marketing is my way of telling the world, my world, and my world is anybody that I’m reaching through my, through my marketing.” My world was very small, it was just in Granbury, Texas for a long time, because that’s the only place I marketed and as my budget became bigger and bigger and we believe that Productive Dentist Academy marketing and 8% is what you should be doing 8% of the previous month’s collections. People say, “Oh my gosh, that’s, I can’t afford to do 8%.” Well, you’re writing off your PPO write-offs are probably a lot more than that. So and that is actually marketing. You think you’re signing up for these plans for some reason that they’re going to bring you patients. Well, for the most part, you’re going to bring new patients that probably don’t need a lot of dentistry and it’s just not my way of doing things. I do not want to have a 30 or 40% reduction in my fees so that I can see somebody so that I can actually get to do dentistry and somebody I want to reach out and market and what we teach is to reach out and market to people who need the things that you love to do. You love doing implants, you market implants, if you love doing cosmetics, market cosmetics, if you love doing reconstructions then market to train wrecks, if you just want to be a family dentist then market to families. So, and what I found is kind of interesting, you don’t, if you like doing everything, if you like, just common thing, you know everything, well, then your marketing is going to be much broader. You don’t want to just market implants, you don’t want to just mark cosmetics. You want to have a plan that markets these things over a series of output, whether it be radio ads, whether it be what you put in the newspaper, what you put on billboards, whatever it is, you want to kind of switch up your marketing, if you’d like to do everything and I tell that story about my buddy who comes up, comes to me on we’re on the first tee box, he goes, “Hey, look at my smile,” and I went, “Man, it looks good, Kevin. Why didn’t you? What’d you do?” He said, “Well, I had veneers done.” I said, “Well, why don’t you let me know?”, and he said, “Oh, I thought you just did implants.” Well, that was an eye-opener. That was years ago and it changed my, changed my ideas and my thoughts about marketing. So you know, successful dental practices employ marketing strategies to attract new patients but it also is to retain your existing patients. When they see you out there marketing, they go, “Yeah, that’s my dentist.” I’m going to be going to my high school reunion this coming week and it’s kind of funny, because I haven’t seen a lot of those people in years but when I do see them out in the out in Fort Worth, or in, wherever I see them, they go, “Oh, my gosh, you guys are doing great over there,” because I hear my radio, my radio ads, they spread all over North Texas. So you guys are on there all the time. Well, that’s what I want. You know, I want people to remember me, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said my name and I’ve been Oh, at a golf fitting, they were getting me some new clubs, and they go better, that sounds familiar. I said, “Well, I’m a dentist,” and remembering, “Oh, you’re the dentist, that’s arm, you know, Cliff or whatever radio station I go, that’s me. They go, “Oh, man, I’ve been meeting, I want to come down and see you guys.” Well, that’s, that’s crazy. It was 80 miles away where I was getting fitted for my clubs. You also need a strong online presence. I remember when we built our first website, it was expensive, really expensive. We probably spent, this is back in the day 20 grand and within a cache, within about a month and a half or two months, I got about a $30,000 case and I thought, Oh, good. I’m gonna pay for my pay for my website but there’s so much more than just websites today. You know, with the online presence with targeted advertising. It’s, it’s really changed and that’s really why Productive Dentist Academy formed our own marketing company so that we can kind of get out to more people, you know, that maybe don’t have the same philosophies as Productive Dentist Academy, but we’re teaching that and we’ve been very, very, very successful in doing it. So our new patient flow, I want to help the new patient flow and marketing and patient acquisition is a huge part of that, yes, having one patient tell another, there’s nothing like it, those are the best, I would say, you know, I would see a patient because of our radio reaching such far, reaching our new patients, they come from our average new patient would come from probably 60 Miles drive along long way to come see us why because we branded ourselves as an office that did reconstruction, an office that did implants and office that did cosmetics and office that had the latest technology and office that was progressive and office that is a place you’d want to go and, and so you know, I would see a patient from Graham, Texas that, you know, was president of the bank, and I did get a full smile on him and then I get another patient from the country club where he plays golf, and then I get out his wife to come in and then all of a sudden you build these little, these little areas of influence because of the work you’ve done and there’s nothing like that kind of dentistry, there’s nothing like having that kind of fun and so those are things but marketing is critical. I know some people out there, “Well, I just want it to be word of mouth,” and I’d be a little bit pissed off if I had a brand new treatment that I didn’t know about for my daughter, one of my girls that would help them from a medical standpoint or whatever and they had some rare condition and there was some new treatment available and nobody educated me. I looked around the country for somebody that did it and then I find out at a cocktail party that this guy actually has the technology to help me right here in my town, I would want to punch him in the nose, because I’m sure you’re gonna look up and looking all over the country for you and you’re right here, you need to communicate that to the community what it is you do. The days of no advertising, I’m a professional, no those days are hopefully gone because I use, I use marketing as education. I don’t do two-for-one happy hours, we don’t do the blue light special, we don’t have come on and get three-for-one cleanings. We’re talking educating on what an amazing practice that we have developed and I want to share that with the world and that I don’t mind spending 8%. When I was doing 50,000 a month, we were spending eight percent. When we were doing 100,000 a month, our marketing budget went 8000. When we were doing 200,000, they went to 16,000. When we were doing 300,000 and went to 24, we’re doing 400,000, you get the picture. So really important, big deal and hope that makes sense to you. What about compliance and risk management, you know, dental practices must adhere to various legal regulatory requirements. Every state has their own requirements, so know what’s going on in your own state. You know, all the stuff about HIPAA and practice privacy and confidentiality, we have, you know, we have a HIPAA compliance person in our office, that’s super important.

Dr. Bruce Baird 11:35
What’s really become crazy lately is our infection control protocols. You know, it’s not good enough just to wrap and cover things. I mean, now you’re spraying, you’ve got ionisers in the room, you’ve got all kinds of things since COVID, to try to help and let the patients know, you know, our team would clean the room and then while the patient is sitting there, they would put the little wraps on the handles, and they would do a lot of that stuff while the patient’s watching. I want them to know, our infection control protocols are second to none. Also, documentation, you know, you got to document everything that you’re doing and staying updated on your continuing education requirements in your community. Again, super important. I I’ve just heard recently that in Texas, and I’ve said this for years, if hygenist in Texas, could give injections, I would just hire a hygienist just to do injections. I mean, I would pay somebody that kind of money, because I don’t want to do it and I think it’ll be good. So I believe that just passed in the Texas Legislature. So we’re hopeful that that comes to fruition. Implementing all these risk management strategies and helps you mitigate potential legal and professional risk. I just believe when it starts talking about risk, is take care of the patients. Like they were your family. If you know I don’t have a problem, if something hasn’t worked, and it’s not a good deal, it didn’t, you know, the tooth failed for one reason or another. You know, I’ll credit the money they spent for that for something else. I’m not trying to nickel and dime a patient to make money, I’m trying to build relationships and build trust and patients come from all around that trust us. They know us as the most expensive dental practice in town and the best, the one with the most technology, the one with the best communication, the best communication skills. So those are the things you know, we talked about them over the last two, two podcasts, you know, patient management, taking great care of the patients, team management, training, financial management, making sure you’re tracking your revenue and your expenses and then we talked today about marketing and patient acquisitions and compliance and risk management. So hopefully this has been helpful. Thanks again for voting us the number three podcast in dentistry. I look forward to our next time together. Thank you for joining me for this episode of the Productive Dentist Podcast. If you found this episode helpful, make sure you subscribe, pass it along to a friend. Give us a like on iTunes and Spotify, or drop me an email at podcast@productivedentist.com Don’t forget to check out other podcasts from the Productive Dentist Academy of productivedentistpodcast.com Join me again next week for another episode of the Productive Dentist Podcast