Justin: Welcome to the Dental Marketing Guy Show. I’m Justin, the dental marketing guy and today I have a legendary guest. She really requires no introduction but if you have been on the Dental Town forums, you’ve probably heard of Sandy Pardue. if you’ve ever asked for advice about how to run your practice, we’re talking about practice management, we’re talking about creating systems that work in your practice, we’re talking about all the ins and outs from the insurance issues to how to get more money out of hygiene and how to really just run a practice that leaves you stress free and happy and based on your goals. You know I probably couldn’t even attempt to talk about all your credentials, Mrs. Pardue, so let me just, let me just ask you, how are you?
Sandy: I’m doing great today, I’ve been in meetings all day so I was really looking forward to this time to relax and talk about dental practices.
Justin: That’s excellent, yeah, and I know you’re a busy woman because very, very high demand for your services and what I’d like to do is, you know, I just kind of like to take it back a step and see, you know, how did you get into the dental industry? What’s your background? And what do you do to help dentists?
Sandy: Okay, well it started a long time ago actually about 32 years ago. I never thought I would be working really as an adult, I would tell (inaudible 1:35) and then my goal was to get married and have kids and be a housewife and so I did that. I got married and I had a daughter and I hated being at home and I’d always heard about this dentist in (inaudible 1:51) you back then I’ll tell you it’s 1985, that was doing 1.2 million a year, people were traveling from all over the world to see this dentist. Of course this was pre-computer, he didn’t get computers & till 1988 which was still very early by the way. So they were like 17, 18 staff members and we, I’ll just tell you they had a great reputation, I thought if I could work there, I think I’d like to go back to work. So I applied and I got the job and I was his office manager for eight years and it was so much fun. I knew I needed to expand and become a consultant because people were already, like I said, traveling around the world just to see this practice that was so efficient highly productive and very organized but I loved that job and I eventually, in 1993, I left the building, I went down about three doors down into our own office where we started classic practice resources and I’ll tell you, the rest is history. People have traveled literally from around the world, we just had a group here and we had people from Canada and Alaska and we’ve had people come from japan and Hawaii and Australia as well so it’s been a lot of fun.
Justin: That’s excellent and you know, I love hearing that story because I know a lot of dentists hop on dental town and they asked questions about their practice and you’re on there and you give a lot of good advice. So that’s interesting to hear, kind of the back story of how you got into it, I like that. could you maybe tell us a couple stories about, you know, just one or two stories of how you’ve helped dentists and, you know, what that process was like.
Sandy: Okay, well first off you have to know that people do not contact us just because they have a floundering practice. people contact us for many reasons, they could be stressed out and some could be doing two million a year, solo, making all the money that they could ever want but maybe they just feel like there’s too many bumps and they dread going to work and they know they could be more organized and things could be more Predictable and then we’ve also had a lot of new dentist. They get out of school and they want to be organized and they want to save time, they don’t want to take five years to ramp up their practice, they understand a consultant can get them going very quickly and so we have worked with all of these types of practices. All the way from 400,000 a year to $6 million dollars a year practices. So, you know, like I said they’re different areas that they need help in but I will tell you there’s, I’ve never seen a perfect practice. no matter what the production level is or how wonderful the doctor is, their leadership abilities are fantastic and their technical skills are great, there’s always something that needs to be done and typically the thing that we see the most is that the back door is wide open in practices. so when I say that I mean that patients find the practice, maybe they saw an advertisement, maybe a friend told him over the backyard fence and they called the practice they came in and then the systems were so broken down within the practice that the patient’s never returned and this is very common. The average patient retention and practices was running 40 to 50%. so after a consulting program and its staff are trained, especially on the front end with the telephones and recall systems and verbal skills, then we can see that retention increased to 80- 85%.
Justin: Wow. Alright, alright. you know, and it’s, I like that you’re taking the approach of, you know, it’s not just about money and I always talk in my videos and my blog, the Dental Marketing Guy blog. I’m like, you know, you know a lot of people think that people become dentists to make money and when you have certain systems, I’ve been critical and I don’t think that, there’s a different approach for every practice but I’ve been critical of a lot of coupon mailers and of, you know, the gift cards “Hey, send someone to us, anyone and we’ll give you $25 gift card.” I’ve been somewhat critical of those programs but I know there’s custom solutions for every practice, you know, and I think that ultimately what every dentist is looking for in their practice it differs from one dentist to another. Sure you’ve got a really holistic approach towards that sort of thing so maybe what’s one example of, let’s do not money related. let’s talk about, you know, maybe a doctor who’s have had too much stress, he feels like he doesn’t have control of his staff and his patients like you said the back doors wide open and he just wants to solve some of these non-money issues.
Sandy: Well if I were to ask 10 doctors whether their stress, where is the stress come from, what keeps you up at night. 8 of those 10 doctors are going to tell me staff. That’s going to be their answer so whether they’re doing 2 million a year solo and everything is going great, are they are floundering staff is always going to be an issue. So this is where we get into good hiring protocols and then, my goodness, the most important thing is the training protocols. Its like how can you expect someone just to come into the practice and know exactly how you want to run your business and that happens a lot. Dentists hire staff that worked in a dental practice and they walk into their office as a new employee and then they bring all the bad habits from where they used to work so there are no exact protocols to follow, there’s no real recipe, no practice management recipe and that’s a huge problem. We see that consistently so we go in and we know what needs to take place in a practice. we have 42 systems and then we work on each one of those and that doesn’t mean that when we go into a practice every one of those systems needs to be redone, no, practices are doing a lot of really good things right now, all the time and we see it but we go in and tweak it and find out where the missed opportunities are and get them staff trained so they can support the doctor and the doctor can stay in the treatment room and that’s huge so, I mean right now, patient retention that we just talked about and now staff, hiring the right staff and staff training is very key.
Justin: Excellent, excellent. and you know I think the examples of you helping dentists it’s just, there’s hundreds, I don’t even know there might be thousands it’s very, very amazing. Your reputation, I know Howard Farran is a huge fan you, he says nothing but great things. I mean your reputation is incredible on those forums and you’re not sales, you’re not like “Hey, buy my systems, buy my systems.” you’re actually on their offering great advice and I’ve seen it time and time again where just a quick question doctor comes in, you just answer it. you don’t plug your service in, you’re not like hire me, hire me, people are coming to you because you’re a thought leader in your industry and, yeah, what I’m hoping to do is, you know, before we go I’d like to get into some like quick tips or maybe some, a quick strategy that you could put forth for some of our listeners, some of our viewers to say “Oh, okay, yeah. That’s something I could do.”
Sandy: Okay, absolutely. So what every listener should do, right away, is go to their computer software and if they don’t know how to do this they need to contact their software company and they need to get this figured out, it’s easy. The first thing they should do is find out how many people need to come in right now that haven’t been in, in six months or longer. So they’ll go back and they’re looking for last visit dates. So, for example, let’s just say they would pull a report for every patient whose last visit fall between January of 2012 and January 1 of 2016. so I’d say go back that far and they’re going to be shocked, there’s gonna be thousands of people, ok, well maybe hundreds but I guarantee your practices been, that’s been in practice for maybe five or more years are going to have 1,000 people that are due, right now, to come in and if they have been in practice for 15-20 years they’re going to have about 2,000 patients that need to get it immediately. Of course you can’t get a man all at one time and that’s where a lot of practices look and say my goodness we’ve got all these patients that need to come in, we
Can’t communicate with them, what we will do to handle it. No, they need to start communicating with all of them, right away. Now the next thing they do, because you see this a lot on Dental Town, doctors will come on and say “I have no one on my schedule, what am I going to do? I’m just sitting here on Dental Town.” Okay, go to your software, pull a report of incomplete treatment. Go back 12-months, all the patients that you have diagnosed needing treatment over the last 12 months. You are going to be shocked we see this at 500,000, we see this at $1 million of treatment that was presented and not accepted and by the way keep those, keep your computer, the treatment plans in the computer updated, all the time. So if you offer two different options to patients and they take one, take the other one out so that you’re reporting is going (inaudible 12:23-12:25). So you’ve got patients that haven’t been in and you’ve got in complete treatment and that is huge, so many missed opportunities.
Justin: What’s the action they can take? So that’s obviously really good data, they can take so they get that data, now what do with it?
Sandy: Well, great question. so what they’re going to do is with the first one whenever they find out “Oh my goodness we’ve got 1,500 people that need to come in.” they’re going to start communicating, see most practices inactivate patients after 12 months and my message here is never (inaudible 13:04-13:05) if they have blood flowing through their veins and they didn’t call and say I’m never coming back or I moved out of town, guess what, there our patients in that practice so that message has to be spread around to the dental industry and all staff. Stop inactivating patients just because they didn’t come in, you need to start communicating to these people. If they have been in 18 months, if they haven’t been in two years, guess who needs the work? Not the easy patient that was there six months ago, it’s the patients that haven’t been in a long time. Those are the people so you can send cards, you can send emails, we’ve done a lot of studies and even though I believe, firmly believe, that every practice should be communicating via email. I also believe they need to incorporate in their system postcards, postcards are much more effective than email because only 28% of emails are opened and that’s the statistic. Now, so that’s, so you’re going to communicate with them, you’re going to do reactivation with them and let them know they’re welcome back in your practice, you see, that’s what has, because people you gotta really look at it the whole aspect of this is like patients their become embarrassed that they haven’t made back so they end up going somewhere else. have you ever thought like these new patients this month “Oh, we got 50 new patients” but we’ll have you ever thought like where do those 50 new patients go like three years ago? Well I’ll tell you they were in another dental practice and something caused them to not stay, you see. so that’s what you want to change, you want to change that, you want to keep them in your practice so maybe they went and tried another office and now you’re going to communicate with them, be a postcard and welcome them back to the practice and you’re going to get back a lot of them. A lot of them are going to come, I’m going to say 10% are going to come back if you followed our reactivation project that’s available on our website you’re going to get 9 to 19% of those patients back without a phone call. Now, then you’ve got the people with incomplete treatment, now here’s these people a lot of times practices are overwhelming patients. I’ve never seen a practice with people lined up outside the door waiting to come into the chair I have never seen it and if you know one, call me, I want to go and take pictures. it’s not the case when you look at the statistics at right now that like 48% of patients even go to the dentist, we have a lot of work to do, we have a full heart of work to do in dentistry in educating their patients. the American Dental Association is doing nothing to do it so patients get diagnosed, they don’t understand that their condition will only get worse, it’s not going to get better, it’s only gonna cost more. so we have to educate and tell them what will happen if they don’t get the work and we’ve done a lot of phone recording for many years on this topic and it’s really important so what I suggest, if you just have your staff call and call and call on the phone it’s going to be a turn-off. So what you have to do, in this case, is communicate via incomplete treatment letter, a short letter, not something really long. You want to communicate with a short letter just letting them know that you would like to see them back in the office. They have incomplete treatment, yes.
Justin: Excellent, you know, that’s so great because, you know, I actually implemented a similar thing in my business where I just tell people “Hey, yeah” I just get them permission to contact me in the future cause sometimes if it’s not the right time for you a lot of dentists contact me about SEO, about content marketing, web design and stuff like that but whatever reason it’s not the right time for them and that’s okay and giving them permission “Hey listen, I’m happy to answer any questions you ever have” you know, just, I think a lot of people just assume this goes for dental patients and dentists and everyone is just assume that if you reject someone services at that time that they’re going to help their feeling hurt and that, you know, you might want to avoid them in order to circumvent any kind of conflict or awkwardness or whatever and so I think that’s really key is what you’re saying is just giving, letting people know “Hey, there are no hard feelings I understand that wasn’t the right time for you, you know, the ADA says you need your teeth clean but you didn’t think you did and that’s okay.” Right. So, you know, and then major, major work, obviously, that’s even more, that applies even more than cleaning because if someone is looking for an all on four and I’m sure you know this, you know they’re going to shop around, they’re going to want a lot of education and content, right, to make that educated decision. So yeah I think, you know, just giving people permission to contact you that’s really huge, I like that.
Sandy: Well here’s the thing, a lot of them have actually gone to another dentist and tried it and you see. So you kind of just making it okay to come back and that’s what happens.
Justin: Yeah, yeah. Definitely, well hey this has been really, really a great interview. I know that the listeners, they, many of them think very highly of you already but I’m happy to hear that story of how you got into dentistry. If I can even talk and yeah I’d love to put the viewers in touch with you, where can they find you?
Sandy: classicpractice.com or they can email me at [email protected].
Justin: Excellent, that’s great, you know, it’s an Internet age and I’m always harping on the, you got to have your website out there, people gotta know it, that’s the hub of your online marketing.
Sandy: Absolutely.
Justin: Yeah, so it’s been so educational. let’s talk soon, sandy, I am definitely interested in, some of my clients are, they’ve been asking me who can I trust, Justin, who can I trust for practice solutions, for practice management solutions and, man, it’s such an honor to interview you. Thank you, Sandy.
Sandy: I’m very happy to do it.
Justin: Excellent and guys if you have any questions feel free to reach out to Sandy. Wherever you find this, on the Dental Marketing blog, the Dental Marketing Guy blog. Go ahead and reach out in the comments below on Dental Town, social media, wherever you find this I’m sure in 18, 19 minutes we weren’t able to cover all your questions but please reach out if you have any. I know Sandy is more than happy to answer those.
Sandy: Absolutely.
Justin: Excellent and thank you for watching the Dental Marketing Guy show.
Check out my dentistry advertising services.
Justin: Welcome to the Dental Marketing Guy Show, I’m Justin the dental marketing guy, and today we have a very special guest, he is Dr Bickel. And he and his wife have been, you may recognize him from Dentistry uncensored with Howard Farran, he has been a dentist and his wife has been a dentist and they graduated in 1993. He and his wife have practiced together since 1998, and you know, Dr Bickel, what spurred this interview is, Dr Bickel shared a thread on dental town about his live chat and how that has changed the conversion rates on his website, but you know, one of the most interesting things about Dr Bickel, is that he actually won a free course with DentalMaverick.com, a lot of people, a lot of them you would know, Tuan Pham, he’s been on the show, and man, I’m just totally interested to hear about your background, Dr Bickel, and some of the actionable items that we can share with dentists, so that they can actually improve their practices the same way you have recently.
How’re you?
Dr Bickel: I’m doing great, how’re you?
Justin: I’m doing great; it’s been really fun following the thread on the live chat. All the, there’s a lot of discussion on that thread –
Dr Bickel: that’s surprised me.
Justin: yeah, and we don’t have to talk about HIPAA, we don’t, whatever you feel comfortable with, but you know, basically, I’m interested in sharing with dentists, what have you done to find success recently, in your practice?
Dr Bickel: well, we, as you said, my wife and I bought a practice in 1998, and at that point we had, what I would call, a fairly successful practice for about ten years, and we weren’t killing it, but we were living a nice comfortable life – 4 day work week, just really enjoying things, and then the recession hit and I kind of panicked when our new patient count went down, and we decided that we needed to join up in a bunch of PPO’s, and we had been only in network with a couple of insurances, that the previous owner Doc had been involved with, and so we branched out to all these different PPO’s, and what happened was, we saw our production and new patients go up, but our collections just continued to go down and down and down. And when I look back at those first couple of years, I don’t even know how we survived with the collections that we were showing then. o, we tried some different things, we bought a hygienist on board, because we hadn’t had a hygienist before – my wife and I just enjoyed the 2 of us, you know, doing everything, and getting to know the patients, and we though ‘well we need to bring a hygienists in and get rid of some of the lower production procedures, and have her do it’, and that helped a little bit, but still we were seeing production and new patients going up and the collections just, and our income especially, just continued to go down. And it was very discouraging, it was almost 7 years that it was going on like that, we were seeing some gradual improvements, but nothing that was really going back to how we were before, and we finally just decided ‘hey, we’re going to drop those PPO’s that we added, go back to the same participation rate that we had before and see what happens’, and it helped. We started to see collections going up, but still not what we wanted. And about a year ago, I had met Tuan on dental town, about a year and a half ago, and he told me about this video course that he was putting together, and I never really did anything with it, and then about a year ago he puts on a thread that he’s giving away a free course, and to explain why it should be you, and I told them my story, and also sweetened the deal with a couple of promised fly-fishing trips, so I won the course, and dove into dental maverick as hard as I could. And we started to see some real changes. The main area that it really helped us with was communication. Communication with patients, because once you go out of network with patients, then life changes and you’ve got to really give peoples reason to come to your office as opposed to the person whole in network. And we found that, with the things that we learnt on dental maverick, we were able to convince people to stay with us, and convince people to come to us out of network. And also, it really increased my treatment acceptance rate;I would say at this point, I am virtually at 100% treatment plan acceptance rate – which is amazing.
Justin: wow. Wow.
Dr Bickel: just due to better communication and explaining things to patients and use of intra-oral cameras, they just get it, and really the only time somebody doesn’t complete treatment is because they can’t afford it right now.
So, we had communication, we had treatment plan acceptance, and also what it did for communication with our staff, that has been amazing, just how our staff – we’ve always had a good staff, but they really responded well to just the things that dental maverick explains how to deal with staff and how to explain things to them, and their attitudes just turned around, and I would say that everybody on our staff is a 5 star employee now, and it’s just amazing. We get reviews that come in, that specifically mention staff members by name, as to how they were helpful to the patient.
Justin: wow, that’s great, that’s excellent. And, so, dental maverick was really instrumental, and so what would you say, in terms of some of the more online things; we talked about live chat, we talked about some of the ongoing like SEO efforts and stuff like that, how has that helped your practice?
Dr Bickel: when we started with an SEO company about a year and a half ago, I would say it was January of ’15, and at that point when we started, I think we were, if you googled dentist’s, we’re in Turnersville, New Jersey, if you googled ‘dentist, Turnersville, New Jersey’, I believe we came up on page 6 when we started with them, and we are now on page 1 for a multitude of different search parameters; emergency dentists’, dental implants, orthodontics – because my wife does ortho. So, that radically changed how often we get people requesting appointments through our website, and then the live chat has really surprised me, it just amazes me, how many people are seriously looking for something on the website at 11PM or 5AM, you know, before work, after work, you know, I don’t know how many times it happens to you where you think, you know ‘I got to call this person, or contact this person’ and you don’t remember until your brushing your teeth and it’s time to go to bed. And I guess with the live chat you can go ‘oh I meant to call the dentist today’ and then you can go on the website and ‘oh look at that, they’ve got a live chat’, and then you can communicate with them at that point.
Justin: yeah, and it really is a whole new world; the whole yelp and google reviews, search engines in general. I mean, everything is changed and what we’re seeing is, those dentists who get in early, those dentists who don’t wait till the last minute to create a website and do SEO, and things like that – they tend to get momentum.
Dr Bickel: yes.
Justin: would you say – how important, you know, you had momentum going the wrong way with the recession, then what would you say, how important has momentum been to your development, your practice and your wife’s practice?
Dr Bickel: wow that’s – momentum has been absolutely incredible because, like you said we were on this downward trajectory, and we changed the insurances that we were involved in, got involved with dental maverick, and we started going up instead of down, and I was 6 months into dental maverick, and we were, at that point, 15% over 2014 in collections, and at that point, you know, we were really happy about the trend and my practice is, oh about 7 minutes from my house, and about 1 minute from my house, one Sunday morning in October, we were on our way to church and past an orthodontists office, a half mile from my house, and there was a for sale sign out front, and we have always wanted – right now we’re stuck in a small, 3 operatory medical condo complex, and there’s no exterior signage aloud, we just have a little plaque next to the door with our name on it, so our online stuff is our only visibility, that and our referrals from existing patients. So, we drove by this for sale sign and said “that’s something that we’ve always wanted to do, we wanted to get our own building, but we haven’t found anything in the area that was acceptable” this place was perfect, we went to look at it, I think the for sale sign went up on Saturday, we went to look at it on Tuesday, and that started the ball rolling with the purchase, so we closed on that a couple of weeks ago, and there in the construction phase right now, I think they have the walls down to the studs, and they’re starting to do the demolition. But without the momentum that we got form getting rid of the bad insurances, getting our SEO inline, improving ourselves through dental maverick – I would have driven past that sign and said ‘if only we could do something like that’, and this time I went by the sign and said “that’s something that we need to do”, and I even, Tuan is great, there’s a, when you’re a dental maverick member you can contact him at any point, he and I talk on Facebook all the time, and I sent him a message about it and he said “dude, buy that building before some other Doc does” and we dove right into it. And here we are, you know, going from a downward trajectory to now where about to open a 6 operatory practice with fantastic visibility right across the street from the township high school.
Justin: that’s excellent.
Dr Bickel: without that upward trajectory, none of that would have happened.
Justin: right, yeah, I mean that’s a really cool story, I mean, I can see why Tuan’s showing you his Facebook, you know, people are looking at, for sure. Yeah, that’s really cool.
Okay, so, you did the dental maverick thing, you made some online improvements, and here you are, I think it’s just a great story, it’s not like your -you’re not selling anything, you know a lot of the guests have some things they’re promoting. I just think it’s great for dentists to see a story, once in a while, you know, this kind of content that we’re putting out, it’s not, there’s not, there doesn’t need to be a call to action, we’re not like ‘hey, do this, or do this’, but I think it’s just kind of cool because you’ve given some nuggets about, like you know, the live chat thing, I texted a bunch of dentists, I was like “what do you think about this?” and everyone’s like “let’s try it” because I pointed them to the thread on dental town. And yeah, I mean, everyone’s making a fuss about the HIPAA, and all of that, and so there are, I’m sure there are solutions out there, and there are answers to all those questions.
And there have been some really good posts on that.
Dr Bickel: the thing that, I guess confused me, would be the right word, about the HIPAA thing is that, HIPAA is supposed to protect people from unauthorized information about their medical or dental care. Common sense to me says that, if I’m on a dentists website, and see a live chat and I by my own free will, go on that live chat and start giving that person information about my dental needs, I don’t see that as being any different from somebody calling the phone number that’s on there and giving my front desk information about their dental needs. I just don’t see the HIPAA issue there, because it’s not somebody divulging something without your knowledge, your freely giving that to the website. So, I’m not a HIPAA expert, but that just seems logically to me.
Justin: yeah, and I couldn’t possibly even say, what’s what – it’s just not my area, and I think that’s important, you know, a lot of times on dental town, I think people like to chime in on things and be like ‘oh well, I’m not an expert, but blah blah blah’, and I don’t know if people really listen after you say that, you know. So I try not to do posts like that, because it’s like ‘well hey, I know nothing about what I’m talking about, but listen to me’. SoI try to avoid it altogether, but I do want to give you the opportunity to kind of have the floor on that and say your piece on that. It sounds like there are some pretty knowledgeable people that have their say. So, yeah. I mean, I just, I appreciate you coming on, and I like the tone of this interview, because we’re not necessarily saying ‘hey dentists, here’s a product, here’s a service, this is something good for you’, we’re just saying ‘look, you know, once in a while you just need a shot in the arm, once in a while you need to hear a story about a dentist whose done it’ and that’s what this episode is about, so I appreciate you coming on to do that.
Dr Bickel: oh, no problem, it’s my pleasure.
Justin: excellent. Well, let’s talk about, normally there’s a call of action, you know like ‘where can they find you?’ but, you know what? We can find you one dental town, and you don’t have anything to sell, so, all the better. Cool, so yeah, if you do have any questions though, guys come in and talk in the comments, whether it’s a dental town thread, if you find this on the dental town blog, the dental marketing guy blog, just on YouTube, where ever you find this on social media, feel free to chime in with questions for Dr Bickel, I’ll make sure they get to him, or if you have questions for me, and thanks for watching the dental marketing guy show.
Dr Bickel: thanks.
Read more on the dental marketing blog!
Justin: Welcome to the Dental Marketing Guy Show, I’m the Dental Marketing Guy. Today we have a guest who really needs no introduction, it is an amazing honor to interview Howard Farran, the founder of DentalTown.com, you’ve already heard of him, but let me tell you, this guy is changing dentists’ lives’, it is an amazing resource, DentalTown.com, the Dental Town magazine. What we’re going to talk about today is kind of the history of DentalTown.com, how it helps your practice, and what it means to your future. Ah Howard Farran, how are you?
Howard: I’m doing good Justin, how are you doing?
Justin: I’m doing great; it’s such a huge honor to have you. I’ve interview some good guest, some pretty big names in the dental industry, but I’ve got to tell you, I’m almost nervous to interview you man, you’re such a big deal!
Howard: oh how could you be nervous, I’m seeing your wrestling cauliflower ears, you’d kick my butt, this is like going back in time to high school, ah I was on the high school varsity wrestling team, to be with some girl, and ah that was when cauliflower ears were what you wanted, I mustn’t have been a good enough varsity wrestler, because I never got them.
Justin: maybe you did the smart thing and wore your head gear.
Howard: actually you’d think it was head gear, I always though the guys that got it where the ones that used their head as an instrument or a spear. I always thought when you do a double-leg, you use your head as a weapon more, you got the cauliflower ears, instead of hurting’ your shoulder. Do you agree with that?
Justin: yeah, you know what, that might be true, kind of as a front headlock, I think that’s digging the head in, I think that, that’s probably where I got it, from the head lock, but ah.
Howard: From the head lock, digging your head in huh?
Justin: yeah, yeah, in the armpit there.
Howard: right on!
Justin: yeah, yeah, so basically just wanted to ask you to, kind of tell us the story, a lot of people know Dental Town, I mean obviously you’ve got a ton of dentist’s on Dental Town, it’s a huge resource. , could you tell us the sort of history of how Dental Town came to be, and why you started Dental Town?
Howard: well basically, I have 4 boys, ah your friends with one of them, ah Ryan uh, I have 4 boys Eric, Greg, Ryan and Zac, their 27, 25, 23, 21 and my oldest boy was born in ’89, and when he was 9 years old, I saw him on, uh in 1998, I saw him on the internet talking to other people about skateboard wheels and I thought ‘oh my god, forget skateboard wheels, we should be talking about root canals, feelings and crowns’, and what I use to have a big problem with is, I’d come home from work, and I’d try to disengage from work, and engage my four boys, but you always have in the bad of your mind ‘oh my god what happened to that lady, should I have put her on antibiotics, should I have you know, pulled the tooth, should I have not done the root canal in one appointment’, and I just desperately wanted to talk to other dentists and everyone that loved me, you know if I asked my dad, you know, or I told my dad what I thought before he say ‘say a pray’, or my mum would say, you know ‘what do you mean?’, and I just wanted to talk to a dentist and, so I saw that, and I put all my time and effort into building that website, and got it up in ’98. I literally thought, in all honesty, that maybe I could get maybe 20-25 guys or once or twice a month we could have a meeting or a study club and talk about this stuff, and the first month a thousand dentists joined and we never had less than a thousand dentists join in any month, and now we’re over 210 000, and it’s Dental Town, not Dentist Town, because we need guys like you in there. I always said that, if you took away about 500 dental companies, we’d be sitting outside on the sidewalk, on a road with a bunch of flyers we bought from home depot, and we wouldn’t be the magicians that we are, and so if all the dentists are talking about your product and its red and they’re all saying ‘god, I wish it was blue instead’, I though the dental manufacturers need to see that and say ‘wow, our customers, they don’t want them red, they want them blue’. So, I had had Dentist Town, but I called it Dental Town because, you know this takes a lot of different players, you know, insurance, business consultants, marketing gurus like you, it takes a lot of, you know we have to wear a lot of hats, it’s not just about teeth.
Justin: yeah, excellent, you know I think that’s why it’s such a powerful resource. You’ve developed synergy in the entire dental community, you know, you’ve got hygiene town, and then I think you’ve got a couple of other websites; could you tell them about, tell us about that?
Howard: yeah, we have ah, HygieneTown because a lot of the hygienists’ wanted to discuss without their employer reading, and after 9 specialties, the orthodontists’ were the only ones that wanted their own gig, the orthodontists, you know endodontist and oral, all the specialist have no problem sharing all of their information, but the orthodontists, don’t feel that way, they feel very strongly that if there is any orthodontists needs for there patients, they should be the ones that do it from A-Z; so we started OrthoTown, so there’s a 10 000 orthodontist and I’d say half of them are on OrthoTown, but uh, lately you know, the big month meet is on DentalTown.
Justin: excellent what would you say, what are the top 3 benefits, that dentist enjoy as a result of your work with DentalTown?
Howard: I would say that the number one, would be the social comradely of being able to cry on someone’s shoulder, I mean that’s what you do, when you’re a dentist and you call your brother and he’s a engineer or a pharmacist or a physician, I mean, they, no one truly gets what it’s like to practice in dentistry. If your world is dentistry, I doubt your mom or your sister or your brother or your dad gets it, I think that just going that. I think number two; clinical, the, its very country intuitive to go share, everybody, I mean, you go on Facebook everybody, they share the picture of their perfect crown or their perfect root canal, and that’s just like having a deer head over your mantel or fire place, it just shows that you shoot a deer, it doesn’t show how you did it, all the details and what I think is the most beautiful thing about Dental Town, is when people are so proud and so real, no one needs help on their perfect root canal, they need help, or they dropped the ball, they fumbled they lost the game, and to post a case on DentalTown and ask your peers, you know, ‘what went wrong?’, and let everybody critic it and talk about it and share, and so, you know, everybody in clinical dentistry, the cases, you know there’s hundreds of cases, posted everyday there, it’s truly mind-blowing.
And then third is where you come in; we were trained 8 years in math, physics, chemistry, biology, I mean, just all science and then we graduate, and a week later we’ve got to figure out, you know how to make it, and how to make payroll, and pay our rent, or mortgage, and were supposed to, you know, know our numbers and file our taxes and we’re supposed to do marketing, so you know, the funniest letter I’ve ever got on my, I came out with all these dang tapes called the ’30 day dental MBA’, and there on YouTube and iTunes, and ah catholic priest wrote me a letter when they came out, he sent me a letter he said ‘man, I feel just like a dentist’ he goes, ‘I went to 8 years of seminary school, all we did was read the bible for 8 years, and then I graduate and they put me in charge of a church, and elementary school, and I show up there and the elementary school is a million dollar in debt, all the teachers want a raise, everybody’s upset, and I just sit there and I thought, you know where was I trained in the seminary to run a catholic elementary school, and my sisters and I said ‘you know, I don’t know if this applies to a school’, but my brother played these tapes and said ‘here, listen to the tapes, maybe you might learn something” and he said ‘oh my gosh, the entire 30 day dental MBA, if you just take out the dental, and put in catholic church elementary school, and nothing changed, it teaches the business of hiring teaches and doing job performance and talking to the accountant and why we’re losing money, and what percent of collection should be revenue should be teachers’ salaries and electric bills’ you know, he said it was the best thing that ever happened and those tapes have been handed around to half the priests in his area.
Justin: that’s amazing.
Howard: and that’s when I, and that’s why thoughts and feedback like that, is why my last book, you know my first book was on business in dentistry and then it was the consumers road map, the patients side of the dental equation, but my third book is just uncomplicate business, you know, manage people, time and money. I took out all dental references, I didn’t even put on the title that I’m a dentist, because; business is business, and it really doesn’t matter if you’re running a casino, a restaurant a swimming pool, a catholic church, it really doesn’t matter, you know, you can’t manage people, your time, your money, I mean every business does the same thing, they just makes something, sell something, what’s the number? So I uh, I wrote that book its doing fantastic on amazon, its number one on the category of dental, and they just bumped it to the international best seller book list.
Justin: its, that’s, yeah, I mean it’s, it’s amazing because, when you wrote that book, like you said, it’s not even referencing dental, but its, I mean, your such a big name, you’ve given the industry so much help, you’ve been such a huge value, ah , and the way you’ve collaborated with dentists’, on Dental Town, that’s been parlayed exponentially. So, that makes sense that your books a best seller. You know I saw Tuan Pham at the Townie meeting, and he was bragging to me that his book for a minute there, his was the number one best seller, I said ‘oh yeah, but Howard’s is coming back, we’ll see, we’ll see’. So you guys are battling.
Howard: he’s an amazing man, I mean, when you think about dental leaders, leaders in dentistry, I mean he’s the kingpin, he’s the number one, and that’s something where, you know, if kids are at a school, and there trying to do the perfect crown, and the perfect bite, and at the perfect new price, and then the next day, some of them take years before they realize they have to be a leader for their team, I mean they never thought when they signed up for dental school that they were going to be the head coach and have 5-10-50 people working for them, and he just uh, and he had that exact problem, what’s interesting with Tuan is that, he actually had that problem too, so he dove into it, and by the time he figured it out, he said ‘I can really transfer all the years of pain and suffering and knowledge that I gathered, and concepts, I can teach it demographically’, and he’s been doing very well with his program, there’s just, yeah there’s just so many hats that you have to wear in dentistry, and dental school cant prepare you for that, only life can.
Justin: yeah, you know, speaking of the Townie meeting, talk about some amazing speakers, you know I went out there, I saw John Nosti, he’s incredible, you know he’s a wrestler too, you know. He gave a reference to, you know he had some quotes from some wrestlers, it was pretty amazing, his presence on stage. You know, so the next Townie meeting, so that was pretty cool at the cosmopolitan this year, we just had it, uh, the next Townie meeting, when is the next townie meeting?
Howard: uh, it’s next year, same time, in Caesar’s palace, so it will be next April in Caesar’s palace. You know what, speak about wrestling, it’s an uh, it’s an individual sport, but a team sport. So, you know there’s 12 weights you know that win, but you win one at a time, sort of like a football game, where you hike the ball and all 12 people are playing, I mean it is, you know, when you’re out there on the mat, you’re the only guy from your team, it’s a very individual sport, but it has that team comradely, and that’s kind of a lot of lie dentistry, I mean you’re in a dental office, your alone, you are the dentist, you are the one working on that tooth, but if you see that mat, there’s 12 people in that weight class, you need your assistants, and your hygienists’ your anesthetists, and you know all your suppliers and all, you know, I think it was very good. I started all my boys into it when they were 5, and they all did it for over a decade, and I think it’s very good for personal growth development.
Justin: what, what would you say drives you Howard? I mean you do so much for the dental industry, I know when you had the Townie meeting it was podcast after podcast after podcast, you know I’m just wondering, I think a lot of people are looking at the value you’ve bought the dental industry, and their like ‘man, what drives Howard Farran?’
Howard: you know, I think, I just love it, I mean, I decided I wanted to be a dentist when I was 12 years old, and now I’m 53, so 41 years I’ve just been; living, breathing, dying, dentistry, and I think what really motivates me the most is, inside the united states is; how do you transfer the knowledge? you know, so you’ve got a guy like me whose been working on patients in the same office for 30 years, and he makes it, and then you see a kid walk right out of school, and their like ‘you don’t want this kid to have stick his tongue into every light socket, trip on every obstacle in the way’, and you sit there, and it motivates you to think ‘wow, how can, how can I, you know, double this guy’s knowledge, faster, easier, highly quality, lower cost’, and then when I go around the world, I went to 50 countries, there’s only, there’s 220 countries I think, there’s about 20 countries that are, you know, are like the united states, you know, very much like us, like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, you know western Europe, japan, Singapore, but there’s like 200 countries that are not like that at all, and you know, there’s 50 countries on the bottom where dentistry it’s got a long way to go, and what’s got me most excited is, when I first was on the internet in 1998, and then we had you know online CE in 2004, and then that internet jumped onto the cellphone in 2008, with the little guy named Steve Jobs, and now you go to Tanzania, and I have that DentalTown App, and those courses are on the phone, and you meet the little beautiful Tanzanian dentist, and she’s Muslim, Islamic, and she’s all in her garb, and she’s sitting there holding her phone and she’s listening to the latest online CE courses and you see the sparkle in her eye and she’s all excited, and there no way she could afford a Tanzanian, into Libya, into Namibia to jump on an air plane and fly to the Townie meeting, but me being in that CE online that she seen for four days, at one time in her life, she’s going to practice for four decades. So I’m just so excited about the internet, getting it into the cellphones, YouTube, Wikipedia, and this is going to be a game changing century, I think 2008 was pretty much the dawn of civilization, because when that, you know the main frame for the rich fortune 500 companies, the personal computer, was really only rolled out to basically the rich 20 countries, and now every kid on earth, either has a smart phone, or someone in there hut, has a smartphone, and this is, you know, in 1880, 80% of the planet couldn’t read or write, and were illiterate, and now we, you know when I was, I was born in ’62, we got our first encyclopedia’s when I was 10, so that was ’72, they were published in ’52, so my first internet was these 320 encyclopedia’s, from A-Z, 20 or more, that were 2 decades old, and now that little kid in Tanzanian, when he gets a smartphone, he goes to his encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and its 51 million pages long, and its completely up to date, edited, the instant he logs on, so this going to be the genius century, I think the last century was you know, world wars, and the depression, and the Spanish influenza, you know it was a tough century. I mean, imagine the next century, when everybody’s literate, when everybody has access to information, when everybody can read or write, when anybody who can hear something from their buddy and say ‘are you sure that’s right?’, and they can go to google, and then find out on Wikipedia that it was only half right, there’s more to the story, I mean. So this is going to be the most existing century that we’ve ever had, since the caveman.
Justin: yeah, I think your right, I meant this is like, they call the information age, and it’s amazing.
Howard: all knowledge is going to zero costs and affordable for everyone. I mean, I don’t even understand, I mean I don’t even get the college value promises anymore, you go pay some university $30 000 a year for 4 years to sit in some brick and mortar building to listen to some geek talk for an hour, and write a test on paper, in all the time of that would have been far well better spent, just surfing YouTube on any subject you’re interested in!
Justin: yeah, you know, and I think it’s changed the way we consume entertainment, and it’s changed the way we educate ourselves, you’re definitely right about that.
Howard: when I was little, mom, I mean everybody called the television the ‘idiot box’, and I mean for the most part, it was the idiot box, and now these kids, now television, for kids under 25, the view ship has dropped off most to the poor, but the only people watching TV are over 50, I think the average age of someone watching CNN, or Fox News, is now over 60. And you see these kids, and there watching YouTube, and documentaries on all of their subjects, and there just so, I mean, I got a son, Greg, gets into the history, I mean holy moly does that kid know history, and it’s all from just sitting in a chair, you know listening to YouTube documentaries.
Justin: yeah, definitely, and you know the internet has caused dentistry – the average solo practitioner, or private practice, is able to put out that information way more efficiently. I mean if you’ve got a YouTube video, your ahead of the curb, if you’ve got a professionally crafted YouTube video, that’s basically, just like this podcast, just like, ah, when you do your podcasts, your putting yourself out there, its automated, its automated; people know you Howard, and you’ve never met them, but they know you, so they can go to your practice, and they feel like they know you, ‘oh, yeah, I recognize you!’, you know people coming up to me at the Townie, they’re like ‘oh you’re the dental marketing guy’, you know like, I’ve never met this person. But that’s the thing is, you know, in dentistry if people know, like and trust you, their more likely to accept treatment, so in this internet age, to put yourself out there in video, or even just photography, and it’s just amazing how much patients will trust you when, it’s all automated; you don’t have to be there. Nowadays, you don’t have to be face to face, so, I, yeah, it’s really cool, and I’m sure you’ve seen that in your practice and you know plenty of dentists who experience that too.
Howard: yeah, and these Dental Marketing videos, some dentists are treating the poor Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare, and some people are medium practice, other people are higher end, but it seems like that the people that are just crashing it, are the ones who, ah, do something; maybe its cosmetics, maybe its implants, maybe its gum surgery, whatever; but their website is filled with these documented cases, and these people, these consumers, their on their smartphone too, there not on the old simple yellow pages, and they’re going to these websites, and they’re seeing, here’s the dentist websites, and here is the dentists website, and hers the dentists name and picture, and a picture of him standing there with his wife and you know the dog and a cat, and then they go to another site, and there is just like 20 cases of before and after, of some, you know, amazing dentistry, and people are literally blind to their city, because they want that. So, you know it certainly is engaging, compared to when I got out of school, when you put your name and phone number in the white pages, and then the yellow page you get a little square and then maybe the ad was maybe a little more attention grabbing, but it certainly wasn’t very much transferred information, kind of like when I was a kid and mom would take us to, where grandma and grandpa were buried and all you saw was 2 dates and a dash, that whole dash was their life, and now we hear that there’s over 30 million dead people on Facebook, and a 100 years from now, or 200 years ago, you’re wondering ‘oh, I wondering what my great-great-grandfather was like’, you go to his Facebook page, you scroll through his whole life, that’s a lot more amazing then just a dash on a tombstone. Or a number in the white pages that says, you know, ‘Howard Farran, dentist, he’s the phone number’, now you can go to the website where it all comes alive.
Justin: right, right. And you do have, you still prac-, you know I get the Dental Town magazine in my mail box for people that want that medium, but probably the internet is where things are going with dental town, is what I’m guessing, maybe you can tell me; what’s next for DentalTown?
Howard: well, you know Dental Town, well, we so, we started the print in ’94, and everybody says print, everybody that says print is dead is crazy, what changed on print is – people aren’t going to pay for newspaper, they can just go to google news for free, so this comes at a price. But what you’ll notice in a magazine, their still a market, they still pick a magazine, sit in there big rocking chair and like to read it. But, we came out with it, we put in online in ’98, we did online CE in 2004, what’s really robust is the classified sections, the blogs, the podcast, so now that’s all jumped into the App. The app is up and running, we added online CE to app this year, ah, last year. I think this year we’re going to add the classified ads and the blogs, and ah, the podcasts are on the ah app too. The classifieds are amazing, because just like you wouldn’t want to buy a brand new car, if you know you can get rid of your old for half the price. It’s amazing what you can buy, the dental town app, there’s like 6 000 classified ads and it’s just amazing, the value you come by on stuff and so on. So, I would just say, we’ll just keep on truckin’
Justin: excellent, excellent. Well, you know it, we’ve come to a close on our time, and I know your time is super valuable. Our listeners really appreciate you coming on and they can find you at DentalTown.com, and you’ve got the podcast, Dentistry Uncensored, its Dentistry Uncensored right?
Howard: Dentistry Uncensored
Justin: excellent, excellent. And you book, what’s the tittle of that one more time?
Howard: Uncomplicate Business, it’s on amazon, it’s in book, kindle, print, audio; I think the audio is about 5 and a half hours long, the book, if you want to read, is about 275 pages. The secret to writing is re-writing; I wrote that thing, I re-wrote it, I wrote it again, and it’s just the most clearly simple way to transfer what I learned in a half a century and an MBA in Business in 5 hours; so that was my goal.
Justin: Excellent, cool. Well hey, thanks for coming on the show Howard, I uh, to our listeners, if you have an questions, I’m sure you will, if you see this on YouTube, dental town, whatever, the dental marketing guy blog, wherever you see this on social media, feel free to reach out, ask some questions, if you have questions for me, if you have questions for Howard, just get connected, get on DentalTown.com, ah, get that magazine subscription, get on there, you go the book; uncomplicate business, the podcast; dentistry uncensored. Just amazing value, if you’re a solo practitioner, if you’re in a private practice, if you’re thinking about one day maybe 20 years from now, starting your own practice, even if you’re working as a dentist for someone else, the clinical side of it, everything is covered on this website. So, if you haven’t heard of it yet, uh get out from under a rock and get on DentalTown.com, uh, once again, I’m Justin, the Dental Marketing Guy, from DentalMarketingGuy.com, thanks Howard, thank you very much.
Howard: Justin, it’s been awesome seeing you at Townie and Ryan and I sure had a lot of fun with you, that was a great meeting, thanks a lot. Have good day.
Justin: okay, till next time.
Howard: till next time.
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