[00:00:00] Dr. Howard Farran: Welcome to the Dental Marketing Podcast, a podcast that helps dentists win in the online world of modern day marketing. Each week, we cover the most cutting edge marketing tactics and strategies that are working right now across our client base to drive leads, phone calls, and more new patients for dentists.
[00:00:21] Now here’s your host and founder of Kickstart Dental Marketing, Chris Pistorius.
[00:00:29] Chris Pistorius: Hi everybody, This is Chris Pistorius here again with the Dental Marketing Podcast. Today we’ve got a super special guest. I’m a little starstruck because I’ve been listening to and reading his stuff for years. So glad to have him on the show today.
[00:00:44] This is Dr. Howard Farran. He is the creator. I mean, he does a lot of stuff and we’ll get into that in a second. But he’s actually the creator, founder, owner of Dentaltown, which I know a lot of you use as a major resource to help run your dental practices. So Howard, thanks so much for taking the time to be on today.
[00:01:04] Dr. Howard Farran: Hey, it’s an honor. We should start a mutual admiration club cause I’ve been a big fan of yours for a decade too.
[00:01:10] Chris Pistorius: Awesome. Well, thank you. I’m gonna get right to it. As you know, you’ve got tons of experience, you’ve forgotten more things about dentistry than I’ll ever know. So what I’m after here, and to pick your brain is, you know, how to help my clients, how to help potential clients, how to help dentistry in general, which I know that you’re a big part of as well.
[00:01:30] But why don’t you tell me a little bit about how you created Dentaltown first, and, how that idea started, and just a little background there.
[00:01:40] Dr. Howard Farran: Oh, man, you gotta go back to, I got outta school in 87, and then it was about 1994. I saw Amazon go public and I couldn’t figure out what all the hoopla was, but I kept an eye on it, didn’t buy a share of it, and I just kept watching, watching, watching through 94, 95, 96, 97.
[00:01:59] And then about 98, I finally realized, Oh my God, this really is going to be huge. And then I was on, I never had an original idea. My next door neighbor was a dentist, so I went to work with Kenny Anderson. And my dad owned a sonic drive-in making cheeseburgers. And Kenny was a dentist. And I thought the x-ray machine was a lot cooler than a grill.
[00:02:22] But I was on the ESPN website and they started this message board thing and we were talking about football and I’m like, Gosh darn, I wish I could be doing this with dentists and talking about root canals and fillings and marketing. And so I hired Ken Scott, and then we started Dentaltown.
[00:02:39] And we were the first we beat Facebook by five years. And that first mover advantage, you know, the brightest University is Harvard only cuz it’s first Coke was launched 11 years before Pepsi. They’re still number one. And that first mover Advantage is kind of like a Hall of Fame website. Then we also have Ortho Town too.
[00:02:59] The orthodontists were the own specialists who wanted their own site. All of the other specialists and all the orthodontists are on Dentaltown, but they just want a private community. Of just orthodontist. But it’s really been cool to watch social media. You know, we had our first generation, you know, the first 20 years and the first is always the worst.
[00:03:19] And everybody’s learning how that’s going on and everything. But it did change the world. I mean, Facebook which owns Instagram and then Alphabet, which owns Google and YouTube. They sucked out about 80% of all the advertising dollars in America, and that killed billboards. It killed radio. It’s killing TV.
[00:03:40] And that’s why these dentists gotta get sophisticated because they’re competing now against DSOs. And DSOs have enough scale. Or they can sit there and say, well, let’s just get the one billboard on the corner of the two highways and radio. I mean, for a hundred dollars you can get an hour commercial.
[00:04:01] Clear choice. That implant company has been sold five times and now Bob Fontana of Aspen owns it because my gosh, they can do 30 minute infomercials on implants in a day. So now you’ve got this individual dentist and you know the first guys I noticed that were really, really smart about advertising was the orthodontist for a couple of exact reasons.
[00:04:26] Number one, they knew each of their new patients was worth basically 6,500 bucks, and they knew where their overhead was. So I mean, if they went on Shark Tank, and if you go on Shark Tank, obviously the smartest man on Shark Tank is the bold guy. It’s always the bold guy. You understand?
[00:04:44] Chris Pistorius: I have.
[00:04:45] Dr. Howard Farran: And if you pitch your bus, your dental office, the list are wonderful. First thing he says is, what’s your cost of new customer acquisition? No dentist knows. But orthodontist, that’s an easy figure. Cuz what is the average customer value? Dentist are like, God, I don’t know. Orthodontists are like, it is actually 6,500.
[00:05:05] So in my journey, when I got high school in 87, you gotta remember the Yellow Pages just became legal after a Supreme Court decision where two lawyers in Phoenix said, well, that’s violates high free speech not to advertise. So there, it happened in Arizona first, but even by the time I got out, it was a very underused taboo thing, and the first guys that jump out on it were the orthodontist and it was an orthodontist who was the first guy I ever met. That 3% of collections went straight to advertising. Now, I could name you a hundred orthodontists where that is eight to 10% because they say, why get $6,500 for invisalign?
[00:05:46] And here’s my marketing costs and here’s my overhead. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel, but orthodontists, they get their money back in two years. General dentist, that takes about five years. And since they have a whole distribution of just a cleaning, just a filling all the way to a big place they’ve always not understood their marketing.
[00:06:08] But what’s going to really bring it to their attention is when they’re no longer competing against a single dentist across the street. But now they got some DSO that’s got a thousand locations and they’re extremely sophisticated. So dentists if they wanna play in the big leagues with the professional players we’re probably gonna have to outsource some marketing to someone like you.
[00:06:34] Chris Pistorius: Yeah. Well that’s, you know, I think you hit the nail on the head, several nails on the head actually in that, you know, we talk with clients a lot about that, about they’re struggling with competition and it’s not just local competition. It’s a lot of pressure from DSOs and a lot of our strategies are around how to compete with that and, there are ways to compete with that without breaking the bank also, You just have to get a little creative kind of grassroots about it and, you can still compete and, relieve some of that comp competition for sure.
[00:07:08] Let me ask you this. What do you see as right now other than the competitive struggles with DSOs, but what else is really kind of threatening local dentistry right now, would you say?
[00:07:21] Dr. Howard Farran: Well I think you know, all dentists would say there, it’s a very competitive environment. I would say that the reason the 20 richest countries all want socialized medicine is by the government is because the same government is the one that blocks out all their competition.
[00:07:37] I mean, if you’re a dentist in India, you can’t move to Phoenix, Arizona and start doing dentistry. I’m on the Mexican border and every time a Mexican dentist comes up here and goes to Guadalupe, which is a hundred percent Mexican and Native Indians and starts practicing dentistry on the poor, the government arrests them, puts them in jail or deports and whatever.
[00:07:57] So it’s hard to say that healthcare is competitive because when I was a little kid, you know, they couldn’t import cars from Germany to Japan. And when they release and the car General Motors had half market share. They were very expensive and the cars never worked. When I was a little kid.
[00:08:14] If I walk down the sidewalk on a Saturday, Every third or fourth garage was a dad, his son, and two uncles trying to fix this piece of crap Chevy and get a run. So, it’s crazy to say that healthcare is competitive because they block all foreign competition from entering with their immigration policy.
[00:08:33] But within the realm of the United States competing against DSOs competing against insurance, I’d say what threatens them the most right now is the onslaught of inflation. And I turned 59 this month. I hear no one talking about it unless they’re my age. I graduated from high school in 80 and in 81 interest rates were 20 and a half percent unemployment and inflation was double digit.
[00:09:01] And so inflation is just completely back. I mean when the pandemic hit, the stock market dropped about 850 million, I mean 850 million, not even a trillion, 850 billion, not quite a trillion. And the Trump, Biden response was 5 trillion. So you’re looking at an economy a global economy where three out of every $4 in circulation today were printed.
[00:09:28] In the last year, and people compare this to the percent of debt to GDP we had in World War II, but you gotta remember, those bonds were paid by real money from Americans taking their money out from underneath their bed and buying a war bond, which you pay in Maneclia. So the deal is if you know, I went to Creighton in 1980, Warren Buffet is from Omaha, so it was his partner, Charlie Munger and Warren came over and spoke to our business class, and I remember Business 101.
[00:09:53] Someone jokingly said Creighton was known for their medical school, dental school, and law school. Someone jokingly asked him like, which one would you go to? And he told me to answer and I didn’t listen. He said, well, I would never go into healthcare because it’s very capital intensive and someone else sets your fee.
[00:10:10] He said, I wanna go into a business with low capital intensive. Like if Geico Insurance doubled their business, they just need to double the number of cubicles with people dialing for dollars and typing on a keyboard. But you double a hospital. I mean, you got all this stuff. I mean, I’ve seen dental officer intuitively that by the time you do the land and the building and the college hall, they’re looking at one and a half to 3 million dollars.
[00:10:36] So I would say if you are locked into an insurance company, they say, you get $1 fulfilling and your costs are going up 5, 10, 15, 20%. Is the insurance company going to rapidly adjust their fees to keep you up with inflation or are you just gonna start making less and less money? So I think the inflation on a fixed third party theme is terrible, and that’s why Invisalign, if you look at dentistry, for decades dentistry selling stuff to dentists, about 40% of the market is US in Canada, 40% Europe and 20 percent’s the rest of the world.
[00:11:13] And when you look at their numbers, I mean, it’s a 200 year old profession that started with GV Black in Paris, France. So it just really just grows with and contracts with inflation. The only thing that’s growing, double digit is orthodontics, clearliners, and implants. And the reason they’re so lucrative is because a third party’s not setting your fee.
[00:11:37] They tried to set fees, like, remember when the insurance companies said that you couldn’t charge them more than X dollars for bleaching? And it went all the way to Supreme Court in Tennessee. I think it was like, you know, you don’t even cover bleaching. How could you set our feet?
[00:11:50] So the dentists haven’t been fighting for equality in the eyes of the consumer. I expect that will go to a different legal dimension, you know, but that’s up to the ADA and government and things like that. But I would say I mean, when a dentist gets outta school and says, I don’t know what I wanna do.
[00:12:08] Well, you gotta pick one. Usually you gotta get a lot of blood and guts and get into implants. Are you gonna get into the soft and pretty Invisalign? And I can usually tell by looking into Xray, because if you like me, when you do a root canal, you wanna get all the way to the bottom and a puff of sealer out the apex.
[00:12:25] You’re an apical barbarian and you just love blood. And all of your assistants, you know, when they see like a big pussing pop, all those assistants go, ooh, like, yeah, and that’s stuff just gross. Yeah. You go into bleaching, bonding, veneers, clear aligners, whatever. But I’m telling you that the number one goal of the species is to survive long enough to reproduce that offspring and the way the animal kingdom is, unlike the uni cell, unlike, you know fungi and algae and, we just don’t divide into two.
[00:12:58] We split our DNA into two pairs and we gotta go mix them with someone and going out there I think this pandemic has been a huge boom for dentistry. It’s already proven. Because if you’re a man like me, I mean, think about it. I brush my teeth and floss in the shower. I mean, I don’t stand around looking mirrors all day.
[00:13:18] Chris Pistorius: I do, I do the same thing. I thought I was the only one that did that.
[00:13:22] Dr. Howard Farran: In my side, I grew with five sisters. Man. They’d spend an hour in the bathroom before they go to grammar school. So now there’s all these men on Zoom and they’re all looking at their face and they’re looking at their teeth and they’re looking, like, oh my God.
[00:13:38] And male makeup, which isn’t really even a thing. It’s already up like 400% since the pandemic started. And when I went into Walgreens I went to the the makeup counter booth area and talked to that lady. I said, when I read that, I said, this is truthless. She goes, How? And she goes, Just, Oh God, people you would never expect I wanna cover up this thing or this, that, and they’re asking me.
[00:14:02] So now that the pandemic’s got everyone looking in the mirror that used to never look in the mirror like a bunch of old ugly men. They’re right for Invisalign. I think the ultimate close would be, how do you like your Zoom conference look? I mean, are you liking what you see in the mirror?
[00:14:20] And I used to call all these, I remember when I school the big cosmetic group was Jim Pride. And he was sitting there in a lecture and another one was Walter Haley. I made this remark twice and got the same response from them. You know, he’s up there pontificating at the Arizona Dental Association that, how could you not sell cosmetic does, I mean, they all wanna do it.
[00:14:45] Then I raise my hand. I said, well, Why don’t you do it? You’ve got some of the darkest brownest, gnarliest, ugliest teeth I’ve ever seen, and you’re a dentist speaking to dentists. He lost it. I mean, he almost couldn’t continue and everybody I was with would just laugh ass off. And then Walter Haley, when I talk that to Walter Haley, I was with actually great cosmetic, I was with David Hornbrook and, and Bill Dickerson, the two cosmetic legends had started LVI and they told him, you know, it’s true Walter, and we’ll do it for free.
[00:15:22] You get like this $50,000 Verre case look like it was so free. And he’s like, Ah, I don’t care. I mean, he’s some good old boy from Texas. Couldn’t you get a crap? And his business was lecturing to sell cosmetic dentistry to dentists, and he wouldn’t even do it. So I think that Zoom is gonna make people see the truth that wow.
[00:15:42] I remember, I lost the, I was able to keep in shape the best when I used to do bike room yoga because you’d go into a room in a bathing suit and they have mirrors all over the wall, and that’s the only time you ever get to stare at yourself in a bathing suit. And I’d live with that mirror thing, god, dang you’re fat.
[00:16:00] You don’t need, you need to stop eating crap. And that whole 90 minute yoga deal was this really, you know, reminder that dude, you don’t know what you look like naked. And so I think this is gonna be a big, it is already a big boom for Cosmetic Dentistry. And by the way, implants, same thing. Every study I’d see on implants you know, Dentist always say. Oh, I’ll give you a true story of my first major implant case.
[00:16:31] Her name was Catherine. It was back in like 87, 88, 89. And she told me I never had asked her about implants or anything and she told me she wanted them. And I thought I said, well, Catherine, you always told me that you had no problems eating, chewing, that you can even eat an apple and all this stuff.
[00:16:47] I said, so what change your mind? She goes, Well, you know what, she goes, At my age, my girlfriend just keep dying and they keep dying rather asleep. And I can’t wear my dentures when I’m sleeping, and I’m afraid of dying in my sleep and having them find me without my teeth. And I thought, yeah, dang man.
[00:17:12] So even today, when you look at implant cases, if you really get to the crux of it and you really ask them, they’re not doing it cuz they can’t eat a cheeseburger, they’re doing it cuz there’s a missing space there and they’ve gotta attract a gamma, a mite, and mixed gamma mites. And it’s a very complicated meeting ritual makes like a peacock or you know, they’re all the animal kingdom mating rituals are insanely complex and having your teeth not be a negative and just being neutral is a good thing. If you can make them whiter, brighter, and sexier to make the peacock feathers all come out it works better.
[00:17:50] Chris Pistorius:Yeah. Wow. Well, I tell you what you’ve got. You could unpack a whole webinar just in what you just said. That’s awesome information and it’s gonna help a lot of people watching this. But I did have a question. If you had to do it all over again, the dentistry side of this, what would you change? What would you do differently?
[00:18:10] Dr. Howard Farran: Yeah, that’s a great question. What would I do differently? I mean, I definitely would’ve done it. Cause you gotta go back. You know, a lot of people, they look at, you know, all of our heroes are failed man. I mean, it’s like they think they’re a genius and they found out that some great man had a great flaw. You know, they never said he walked on water.
[00:18:29] But you gotta go back to I was born in 62. There wasn’t any of this technology there wasn’t computers and this and that, and me, when I first saw my neighbor can answer and take an x-ray through the tooth, and then you got to go in a dark room with like the hottest dental assistant in the world and go to this x-ray, and then I’d go where my dad make a cheeseburger, but the technology blew me away.
[00:18:54] And the other thing that it blew me away. It was just like physics. And the fact that when you look at Stephen Hawkings, he lived his whole life and he died before they even know what a black hole is and what’s on the other side, is it a white hole? I mean, you know, and I realized that dentistry was bigger than any dentist that ever lived.
[00:19:13] And that you could be a dentist and study it your whole life and still go to the grave with unknown unknowns that you would never even have known. And it’s part of the human body. Health is wealth. I mean, if you lose your life, you have nothing. And you know, the health, the wealth.
[00:19:31] I mean, it was so easy for me to find a real purpose and passion when you’re trying to learn, discover, and help someone else stay alive on a earth where 98 and a half percent of all the species before us are extinct. And we’re going extinct every year. And the chance that we will go extinct is Absolutly positive.
[00:19:55] I mean, we’re not gonna go through the black hole. I mean, when this whole Milky Way goes through the black hole, I doubt my teeth are gonna make it. But I just had a lot of purpose, a lot of passion. And I got accepted in med school too in Creighton, and I didn’t wanna do that just because dentists forget of all the politics that goes on in hospitals and now it’s something like seven out of every 10 physicians is an employee for a hospital. It’s about 50% or a big corporate DSO for about another 20%. Only 30% of physicians own their own building. And the thing I liked about what Kenny Anderson did, is he owned his own land and building.
[00:20:37] He was a dictator. I mean, if he didn’t want you to work there, you didn’t know if he didn’t wanna treat you as a patient, you can, you know, just a simple life in a small kingdom where you’re the king and you’ve got, you know, a half dozen helpers and you have your own people coming in and gosh, you know, I love it and I can’t really think anything I would’ve done different.
[00:21:00] Chris Pistorius: Well, that’s awesome. That’s great. You know, one struggle that we see with some of our clients is, especially the ones that are, you know, they’ve been an associate for a little while maybe, and now they wanna start their own right. And the question we get sometimes is, based on your experience, is it better to buy an existing practice with the base of patients or do you start off scratch? What do you think?
[00:21:26] Dr. Howard Farran: Well you know, that’s another great question you have. I can tell you’ve been in this a long time, but I just wanna tell you about when these DSOs popped up, you know, the first round was way back in the days in the eighties when Orthodontic Centers of America went public and there was like a dozen on Nasdaq and who was their business model, their business model was, if you go sell a house in Phoenix, if it’s three bedroom, two bath, you’re gonna offer today, if it’s four bedroom two car garage, it’s totally liquid. But if you’re an NFL player and you custom built a 19 bedroom house with a seven car garage, I mean most of your professional players their number one mistake was the house they bought cuz it’s liquid.
[00:22:08] They can’t sell it in orthodontic Senators of America. That founder on gastro rise knew that if your orthodontic practice did a million dollars a year, you could sell in an hour. But if you built up to three or 4 million, it was a liquid. So he was buying all the illiquid ones and that’s what Heartland was doing.
[00:22:25] So when I look back at every single general dentist that had a dental office doing three to $5 million a year, they all had the same strategy. And that was this, which answered your question. They graduated school, they went to a small town that had 10 dentists. And every five years, the oldest guy would retire.
[00:22:43] In most towns, the old guy would just sell to some new young guy with a lot of energy, and the competition say vicious. And these guys would say, well, I’m gonna buy out the old man’s practice and I’m gonna have him come a month and then I’m gonna tell him, Well, you say you’re gonna retire, but if you wanna stay a day or two a week, I mean, and they always do.
[00:23:02] And so what they did is when they graduated at school, they were the 10th dentist in their town. Five years later there’s only nine and then eight and then seven, and now there’s 65 and there’s only four dental offices in the town. But one office has five dentists and they’re doing 5 million. And you know what, that was the exact same strategy that Thomas Watson Jr did of ibm and, the reason he became big, he inherited the company from his dad.
[00:23:33] He drank his way through college and swears he didn’t learn a damn thing. And you know, doesn’t even know why he got the degree, but he only noticed one thing. They grew up in this small town and there were three hardware stores in this small town. And he’d go to one line to belong and he’d go to another one line Belong.
[00:23:50] So he’d go to this other one and they had two cash, they had two employees and he got there faster. And one day he realized there’s three locations, but there’s just four salesmen, and each salesman has a quarter of the market. So it’s not based on locations, it’s based on salesmen, and nobody knows what they’re supposed to buy.
[00:24:12] To fix this, what nuts or bolt they’re gonna know. And he goes, no one knows software. So when he took over ibm, you told his head signed, just look, I’m just standing way, I don’t know what you’re doing. I don’t even care. Just go do you’re thing. I’m gonna focus on sales. And he started the IBM sales deal and every six weeks he got, you know, 20 new salesmen and they got him through a piece soon in a briefcase and went to the whole sales pitch.
[00:24:36] And he always said, if 70% of all the computer salesmen in the world work for ibm. We will have 70% in the market. And it came true, and they asked him, I said, Well, why didn’t you go for 80, 90 or a hundred? He goes, Well, then I knew the government would’ve to step in and they would grade me up. So I just thought that was about the most I can get away with.
[00:24:56] And it’s just absolutely true. So, you know we already know this about a practice. I mean, why would you go in and start a new supply when you can buy out an existing supply, you know, building more on that. In fact, let me tell you this. There’s 168 hours in a week, and the average dental office opens 32 hours a week, which is 19% a week.
[00:25:19] So if you have like a Uber Dental app where a patient says, I wanna make an appointment, and all these other dentists had Uber Dental offices, they can rent, I mean, 80% of all the dental operatory capacity is never being used. So I mean, it’s just insane to go, Bob, build another dental offices when every dental office in America is not being used four out of every five hours a day.
[00:25:48] As far as competition with the DSOs, every major DSO guy is already on the record saying, I’m not going to the rule, because they trade that. And by the time the kids get out of dental school, they’re at the prime time to attract a mate to mix mites, and they have better odds in a city of Phoenix, and they do two hours out in the middle of nowhere in Eloy, Arizona.
[00:26:12] So by the time they were you know, well put in the rule on any given day, 10% of the offices didn’t even have a dock in the box. So, you know, there’s no DSOs in the rule. And so that’s a haven. So I would say go to the rule, and by the time you are two hours away from where a Southwest Airlines plane takes off, they drop insurance.
[00:26:35] I mean, you’re one of only three guys in a town of 3000 and you know, they just thought he would take it. And you can always tell, cause your fool’s like, well, how much has a root canal? Thousand. How much crown? Thousand. How much partial? Thousand? How much extra towel?
[00:26:49] Everything’s rounded off to a thousand. And they all have about 40% overhead. Cuz in a small town labor, you know, a 15 hour dollar job at Walmart’s considered bank and you have to pay a hygienist $50 an hour. And in San Francisco. So I would say get two hours away from airport. Go rural, buy out an old guy instead of building more capacity.
[00:27:12] And if you’re a hell of a programmer, you ought to make a Uber dental lab so that patients can meet these young dentists outta school and any office they want them. I mean, they could be working for DSO. We won’t let them do that, but on their day off, they could be meeting a dentist at like my dental office when it’s closed.
[00:27:30] I mean, it’s closed every day at 7:00 PM It’s closed Saturday and Sunday. I mean, so I know that was a long winded answer to a very short question.
[00:27:37] Chris Pistorius: No. That was awesome. That was great.
[00:27:40] Are you looking to grow your practice but are a little unclear on what the best way is? Let us help you out. We have over 13 years of experience in helping practices just like yours, increase new patient growth.
[00:27:52] Just go to KickStartDental.com and sign up for a free strategy session where we will give you some great insights on how to take your practice to the next level.
[00:28:06] We’re gonna wrap up here in a minute, but to any of those that are out there, I can’t imagine there’s many that don’t know about Dentaltown. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about what people get outta Dentaltown, how it works, and, why somebody should pay attention to Dentaltown?
[00:28:24] Dr. Howard Farran: I would, first of all, all your scientific institutions like NASA, the Jet Proposals Laboratory, you know, I’ve been to many of them that they only use the message board format. The social media that people are used to is called LIFO last in first out, and it’s kind of just almost entertainment.
[00:28:43] But on a message word format, all 6 million posts made on Dentaltown are still there. They’re archived, they’re searchable. When we look at all the studies on like Facebook and Twitter, it’s scientifically factual that everybody balkanizes. So if I’m pro dental insurance and you get on there and say, don’t take it, we’ll just unfriend you.
[00:29:04] So everybody’s in this Harlem position, but when you go to Dentaltown, you can’t unfriend someone. You can’t delete someone. So a lot of people are there in a bubble. When they believe something like, say that you know, implants cause gum disease, you gotta do ceramic and on their Facebook page are guru.
[00:29:24] No in dental town, people just start popping holes in their bubble and they either are a scientist and want these observations to grow with. Or they’re emotional and they run from it. So I just think it’s a treasure. And the other thing is on Facebook, I know who you are, but on downtown, I know who you are when you register, but if you wanna call yourself smiley tooth, there has to be a place for a stupid question and like a specialist. An orthodontist can’t get on Facebook and say, here’s a case of mine that failed.
[00:29:57] Does anybody know went we’re wrong? I mean, all his competitors would be sending that to everybody, but he could on Dentaltown. So I want a place where no, you’re not gonna grow and put yourself in some bubble and, you know, I mean, you’re still a doctor and you have to be aware of that there’s people that think other thoughts and so I think it’s beautiful.
[00:30:19] And then as far as the business. On Dentaltown, I am my 30 day Dental MBA. It’s free on Dentaltown, it’s also on YouTube, it’s also on iTunes. And my gosh, I went to MBA school, I took my laptop. Took notes just towards my dental practice. And then when I came out, I ran it out, the notes, it was 30 hours long.
[00:30:40] I called Dr. Farran 30 day Dental MBA. It said it’s a thousand downloads a month just on iTunes. The views on YouTube are insane, but that’s what’s neat about the internet and in Dentaltown, all the information you need to do a root canal or run a business is zero cost. You just need your time and you know, when I was a little kid all that information was hidden in expensive universities and only rich kids went to, and you couldn’t do that in a poor town or a poor country.
[00:31:12] And then it’s all there on the internet at zero cost. So if you really want to work like no dentist has for a decade, you can still live like no Dentist has for three decades. So if you just want to get out there and work your butt off and hustle and do what is everybody knows what to do. It’s all spelled outta my 30 day dental MBA.
[00:31:34] It’s all on Dentaltown. The opportunity is sitting right there, but it’s not gonna be delivered to you. It’s not gonna be easy. You’re gonna have to do it the whole fashion way, which is get out of dental school and work your ass off for a decade.
[00:31:49] But here’s my last piece of advice regarding you and me. Number one, this isn’t a paid endorsement. He didn’t gimme any money, but if he ever does come out and visit his grandma and in Phoenix. You gotta buy me one beer. That’s all his life is asking. But the deal is, Dude, stay humble. Stay in your wheelhouse. You’re always, you think you’re an expert in everything and you’re not.
[00:32:13] And my gosh, you think you know everything about marketing, but you probably don’t. And I’m telling you that the DSOs, I met their marketing agents, and it’s a department. It’s five six seven, eight people, and they are not kidding around. So then for you to sit there as a dentist and say, Oh yeah, I mean, anybody can be an excellent marker and understand Google and Facebook and all.
[00:32:36] No, no, no. You need someone that specializes all they do. You know what an orthodontist can do Invisalign better than you. And you know that there’s a marketing guy that can do marketing better than you. So stay humble. Stay in your wheelhouse I’m still always meeting Dentists that run into a disaster with little things like their lease.
[00:32:55] There had been a Dentist in Phoenix on lease and it was a triple lot lease and three doors down. It flooded the whole roof. Long story short, he was the only tenant in a 10,000 square foot building who had the money to pay for it. The yoga studio. Everybody else just walked out on the lease and said, you know, call it a bankruptcy.
[00:33:17] So you know you’d need a lawyer before you sign a real estate lease. You might be that guy who’s spent a decade in dental marketing before you start your ad campaign.
[00:33:27] Chris Pistorius: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that’s great advice.
[00:33:30] Dr. Howard Farran: Yeah, stay humble in your wheelhouse.
[00:33:33] Chris Pistorius: Yeah. Hey, I really appreciate this. And if you don’t mind, I know you’re a busy guy, but maybe in a few months we can hook back up and, tackle a couple more subjects. If that’s cool.
[00:33:42] Dr. Howard Farran: Anytime you want, man, it’d be a blast. I could talk about dentistry until the cows come home. I just love it.
[00:33:48] Chris Pistorius: That’s great, man. Well, Howard, thanks again and thanks to everybody out there watching today. I know you got some great information outta of this. And be sure to join us next week for another great episode of the Dental Marketing Podcast.
[00:33:59] Thanks for joining us this week on the Dental Marketing Podcast. Make sure to visit our website, www.KickStartDental.com/podcast, where you can subscribe to the show in iTunes, Spotify, or via RSS so you’ll never miss a show. While you’re at it, if you found value in the show, we’d appreciate a rating on iTunes, or if you’d simply tell a friend about the show, that would help us out too.
[00:34:24] If you are ready to grow your practice, then you might want to schedule a free strategy session with us. Just go to KickStartDental.com and click the free strategy session button and give us 15 minutes of your time to change your practice forever. Be sure to tune in next week for our next episode. And thanks for listening to The Dental Marketing Podcast by Kickstart Dental Marketing, where dentists go to win online.
