The Three Pillars of Dental Practice Growth with Ryan Menacho of Firegang Marketing

Every patient that is looking for a new dentist for themselves or for their family is always asking the exact same question. It's, why should I choose you? Why are you the best fit for me?

This is Growth in Dentistry, a dental intelligence podcast, where we ask the question, what does growth in dentistry mean to you? I'm Steve Jensen, a data dental nerd and your host. Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of the Growth in Dentistry podcast. Super excited about today's conversation. I always love when we have, like, very clear models to discuss. I'm such, like, an organizer. And so when, when people come in and can explain things to me simply and in a way that I can, I can digest. I love it. So before we jump into the topic and I introduce my guest, Ryan, a huge shout out to the marketing team at Dental Intelligence for sponsoring this podcast week after week after week. A lot of work goes in producing these behind the scenes, so I'm so grateful for them, as always. They have an offering for the listeners of the pod. They are offering a $50 gift card for anyone that will take a demo of Dental Intelligence. So if you've never checked it out or if it's been a while since you've checked it out, they've got some really cool new features. They've got scorecards, which allows you to get any data point that you want to look at and put it in your own view, nice and simple just for you. There's also a cool new little AI bot, so if you, like, don't know what those numbers mean or what they're telling you, you can actually ask it. Hey, will you analyze my scorecard for me and give me some highlights, give me some lowlights, give me some areas we could focus on within the business. It's super awesome to see the way that they're progressing Data in dentistry. On top of all the other cool things, you know, the automated forms, write back automated consents. They're about to release automated post op or post appointment messages that are based off of procedure code. So there's some super cool, super cool stuff that definitely worth checking out. Okay, with that out of the way, I want to introduce Ryan. And Ryan, I should have asked this. I actually don't know how to pronounce your last name. I would say Ryan Minoccio, but I'm not sure if that's right.

You nailed it.

It's Minoccio.

Okay, cool.

So Ryan is with Fire Gang Marketing and, and Dental Intelligence has worked with them for years. For a really long time. We've worked side by side they are. I love them because they focus on giving data driven outcomes to their clients. I know a lot of people want to work with marketing companies that will deliver actual value. So Ryan has been doing this for just over nine years. So he's been in the industry for a long time, specifically in dental. He's been doing marketing his whole career, but dental specifically marketing for the last nine years. And couldn't be more excited to talk to him today. So, Ryan, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here. I think there's a lot of different things we can talk about with marketing, but I'm here today to provide some really actionable insights that I really do think that a Dennis could end this podcast, hearing it and going, I could put that into play, like, into place today. So I'm excited for some of the things we'll chat about now before.

Before we jump straight into. Cause there's like an actual, like, system that we'll talk about now. But before we do that, Ryan, I want to hear from you. How did you get into dental marketing? Because you can go with a marketing crew, you can go about just about anywhere. So I want to hear a little backstory into like, dental marketing, Fire Gang, and then let's jump into kind of what you guys are focused on.

Sure, yeah. I mean, I'll give the quick intro. It's pretty funny because I was in college trying to just figure out what I wanted to do, and I landed in marketing and was like, all right, I want to figure out how to make this marketing thing work. So right after I got out, I was doing all these networking events, and I'm located in Portland, Oregon, so I was going to all these networking events all over the place, just meeting business owners, trying to figure out, like, what direction I should take marketing. There's so many ways to do it. And just lo and behold, I met the owner of Fire Gang at one of these networking events and we started talking and he was like, I need someone to help me with Facebook ads. I was like, at that time, I was so young that I was like, let's just, let's. Let's figure it out. I can help out with Facebook ads. And so I kind of just got into the marketing world. And then from there it was like we were only focusing on dental. And for whatever reason, it just clicked. And I was just nailing these Facebook ads for these dentists from day one. And then, you know, progressed more and more and more and got into more and more different parts of dental marketing. And now I've got a much bigger view of the whole space and what works for Dennis across the board with marketing. But it's been, it's been good for nine years. So it's just kind of like a chance encounter that got me here.

I love that. That's kind of how I ended up at Dental Intelligence. Ran into the founder at a mutual friend's wedding reception. He texted me late at night and was like, hey, are you trying to do what you're doing now or do you want to come, you know, do something cool in dentistry with me? And then, you know, kind of the rest is history. So that's, that's fun. I relate with that. Now, here's what I want to talk about. So most people, Ryan, when they are going and talking with a marketing agency, they're looking for growth. Like, typically there's like, hey, I want to hire an associate, so I need more patients, or hey, my schedule's not as full as I want it to be. So they're coming to a marketing agency to fill that gap where they're hoping like, hey, you'll help make sure that my chairs are full. And most of the time. And when I say most of the time, I would say probably like 99.9% of the time, their belief is that the solution is, is new patients. New patients, new patients from the marketing agency. That's like the primary goal. Which I'm not saying is wrong, per se, but I like the way, you know, I've seen some of your guys's content about how you think about growing a practice. So we. Can we talk about that? Like, do you mind sharing? Like, as Ryan, as you approach this conversation on practice growth and solving these, like, patient flow growth problems, can you break it down and talk to me about, you know, talk to me about how you think about that problem?

Definitely. So the way we look at it at Fire Gang is that when it comes to growing a practice, there are really three main key areas that you have to focus on. And this is what we call The Fire Gang 3, 3 component model, if you will. It's that simple. And it's differentiation, visibility, and conversion. And you have to do all three of these things in order to really grow your practice. So when we think about it from a high level perspective, I think a lot of dentists really look at visibility as kind of like the key area that they always focus on. And they think like, I just got to get the word out about my practice. I've got to, you know, whether that's online or offline mediums, like I got to send flyers out, or I got to Google Ads up, or I got to do SEO or run some blogs, have a website that's all phenomenal and you have to do that. But a lot of times it's where these practice owners stop with their marketing and they've just like put all this stuff out about them without thinking through what the other components are. So we have to, we have to take a step back.

Really.

The first step that we take when we work with dental practices is focusing on differentiation. This is really digging deep to understand what do you offer as a dentistry? Because every patient that is looking for a new dentist for themselves or for their family is always asking the exact same question. It's why should I choose you?

What?

Why are you the best fit for me? And you have to be able to clearly answer that question and articulate it within your marketing. When we think about visibility, like running Google Ads, you can put an ad out there that says we're accepting new patients, but that doesn't answer the question of why should I choose you? So you've got to take a step back and start thinking about how are we answering that question? Figure out how to answer that question first. And now you can run your Google Ads or your mailers or your Facebook ads with that answer in mind and start broadcasting that. And then the last step, of course, this is all about knowing your numbers. Because at the end of the day, we have to understand what's working, what's not working. If we've got two different messages that we're pushing out there, one of them is probably going to work a little better than the other one. So we've got to dig in and have good systems in place to know our numbers. I have definitely talked to Dennis, who have said things like, well, you know, two months ago we spent $500 on ads, and then last month we spent $1,500 on ads. And I'm like, I'm pretty sure I heard the phone ring more. This is obviously not a very data driven way to approach your marketing. So at Fire Gang, we really focus on those data driven insights. Well, let's get to the core of it to understand how many calls did you actually get? And then take that a step further to understand out of those calls that you got, how many were actually new patient opportunities and did that specific number go up? We've got some great ways that we can track that and we can dig in all this in more detail. But when we Think about the big perspective. It's like those three things. Differentiation, visibility, and conversion. And you nail those, and you really start to see practice growth quickly.

Yeah. And I want to make sure you ripped past. I'm glad you just said them again. I, like, made a note where I'm like, okay, I got to make sure I say those three things so that everyone can hear them. Visibility, differentiation, and conversion. Kind of these three key elements to make sure that our marketing is going to go well. Now, I'm going to take this on a. On a very fast rabbit hole that nobody asked for, but I caught my attention. I haven't thought about it for a lot of years. Does the phrase accepting patients actually work? Is there a reason why we. Why we use that in dentistry? Or is that just like a tale is all this time and then we can get back to the actual conversation? I just think it's so funny.

Except, yeah, it's. It's one of those things where I think it's far more prevalent in. In medical than in dentistry, where if I'm looking for, like, a primary care provider, that actually does matter and can help. But in dentistry, typically, everybody's accepting new patients. These. So it's not what it used to be. I think it's okay to say it if you want to, but you have to have something else associated with it. Like, we're accepting new patients, and if you come to us, we're going to do these three things for you. Right.

I just have seen, you know, I drive around and I still see it. You know, I still see dental practice that have a little banner that says, you know, now accepting new patients. And I just think, was there a time when you weren't. Maybe there was. Maybe there are legit practices out there that are like. But someone shows up in their door and they're like, sorry, we don't want anybody new, no matter what. But anyways, I've always thought, yeah, it's a funny, funny premise behind the phrase. But I wondered, hey, maybe. Maybe Ryan knows. Maybe it really does work. And that phrasing is way more thoughtful for health care. And it just, you know, it just proven to work. Anyway, sorry, back to the visibility differentiation conversion.

Where.

Where do you want to spend some time, Ryan? Visibility. I think most people, you know, understand that concept or want that concept that also probably leans into, like, when they're buying a practice or starting a practice, making sure that they're, you know, visible and they understand, okay, that can help me attract patients, you know, convenience. I'm located in a certain area, so it's easy for people to get to me. So I'm probably, you know, wanting to lean into either differentiation or conversion. Where do you want to. Where do you want to lean in?

I think it'd be good to start with differentiation. And it's. It's kind of like you said, when it comes to visibility, at the end of the day, like, it is kind of as simple as saying we're just going to spend more on Google. That increases your visibility. So you've really got to dial in, like, okay, as you take that step from 500 bucks a month on Google to 1000 to 2000 to 3000amonth on Google Ads, what are you saying in those ads? To make sure that they're effective? And that's all about differentiation. So let's dig into that and what that looks like.

Okay. Yeah, tell me then. So differentiation, what do you mean by that? So as a dentist, I'm a general dentist, and I mean, I get the general concept somehow I have to be different than the other dentists in my area so that patients have a reason to come to me. So maybe a question I'll ask, a natural question is like, what do you see that works? How do I think about differentiating myself as a dentist? And what are some paths I can take?

Yeah, great question, because so. So at Fire Gang, we have looked at this a thousand different ways, and we've tried a ton of different stuff over the last 15 years. And what we found is that, generally speaking, there are three categories of kind of these three buckets of these things that fall into differentiation. And what we call them are your tangible uniqueness. Because when we talk about being different, you really want to think about, how are you communicating to patients? What makes you different in a really tangible and palpable way? I like to use this example. It's a little silly, but if you say, like, I'm the best dentist in town, it's not tangible. Right. And part of being tangible also means that there's someone out there that's like saying the complete opposite. Like, nobody's saying, I'm the worst dentist in town. So there's nothing to like to back it. There's.

It.

It has no meaning. It's not tangible. So we can do a lot better.

Is there a company out there that you can just pay and it, like, gives you the number one dentist in my area award? I'm pretty sure that's a thing.

Oh, you can. You could certainly do that. You can always find someone who says that you're the, you're the number one.

But if you want America's best dentist. Yeah, yeah. And I can just pay for it. That's fantastic. There you go.

That you've, you've solved it.

I don't, I don't know what it costs, but I'm on their website anyway. I don't want to, I'm not promoting them, I'm just saying I was pretty sure at some point I like was on someone, a dentist website and I was like, America's best dentist. Anyway, so that's the thing.

Yeah. So when we think about like this concept though of like best dentist in town, we can start to drill in and say, okay, well how do we want to describe what best means? And so I mentioned there's three categories of this. Typically it comes into money, time and convenience. If you can save a patient money, that's going to separate you. If you can make things, if you can save them time in some way or make things better for their timetable, then they're going to like that. And the last one is convenient. How can we make the whole experience so convenient for this patient that they're willing to overcome things like money, things like distance from you, things like insurance, all because you're just making the process so great for them. So let's dig into money. So not every dentist wants to go down this route, but there are a lot of dentists who are totally fine with it. This is things like doing $1 or free consultations. These are things like having an in house dental plan. These are things like doing 0% financing and getting that taken care of for higher value procedures or having like a new patient special. Right.

Getting.

These are all super tangible things where imagine you put out a Google Ad that says we have an in house dental plan for $79 a month come in and you don't even need insurance. Just pay us that. That is a, you know, we can argue whether or not you want to do that if it makes sense in your market. But that's very tangible and a patient can see that, they can grasp it. They can click on that ad and go to your website and decide if that plan is right for them. Same thing could be true with any of these other things associated with money. Now we can also dig into time. Let's say you're the dentist who's like, I don't want to offer any monetary based incentives. Totally fine, you don't have to. We could also look at time. These are things like we're going to be open late we'll be open early, we're open on weekends. We offer same day services, like same day crowns will get you in and out. We do emergency same day appointments, all that stuff.

Right?

Very, very time based. We have some dentists that we've worked with where they don't do any kind of monetary stuff. But, but they're the best at time. I mean, I'm talking like they're open seven days a week, 7am to 7pm and they do emergencies all day long. Like if you want to go, they're always available for you. So they just compete on that and that's awesome. And it's tangible and they get a ton of patients just because of that. The last one is convenience. So think about how can we make this experience more convenient. This would be like a bilingual staff so you can speak multiple languages to all sorts of different patients. This would be things like you accept insurance or if you don't accept insurance, you can help them with like insurance handling, take care of that for them. Even if you're out of network, offering other services like sedation or doing online booking. So I don't have to call your practice, I can book something at midnight to get on the calendar for tomorrow. These are all different ways to make the process more convenient. And what we find at Fire Gang is that the more of this stuff that we do, if we can, we can market like 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 of these all at once. These are when these practices get so competitive that they absolutely crush it. And what I always tell Dennis is that you don't have to do it all, but you have to commit to something. You can't be the dentist that's like, hey, I'm only going to be open Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday from 9am to 1pm I'm going to offer, you know, we're fully fee for service. And that's just the way it is. It's like, that's great. You can do that. If you've been in business for 30 years and everyone knows you by name and they fly out to get implants from your practice, great, you've made it in that way. But especially if you're a startup or you're struggling a little bit in your marketplace and you're not getting the patience that you want, you've got to find these ways to be competitive. And these are some of the best avenues that you can take to start understanding, here's what we want to compete on. And now when you go to build out your ads, when you go to put those mailers out there, whatever you're going to do, you can incorporate all these different components into them and that becomes your messaging and patients really respond well to it.

Yeah. Will you say the three things again out loud, kind of those three areas of differentiation just so we can, like, bookmark that?

Yeah, that's going to be money, time, and convenience.

Okay, sweet. Now let's. Are you. Are we going to move on to conversion and talk about that? So, like, it's one thing to go, you know, differentiate ourselves, and then, you know, we're kind of going to skip over visibility. But that's like, hey, now that we have differentiate ourselves, we're going to drive interest in the dental practice. So now patients are going to start noticing us. You know, that's on Google, Facebook, you know, we're running ads. Do you guys do any, like, mailer stuff? Is that still effective?

It is in some markets. We found it to be less and less effective if you compare it to, like, a digital, you know, if it's like price per, like, dollar, per dollar against, like, Google Ads, Most of the time, Google Ads are more effective. So I'd rather just run Google.

So visibility, you know, we're going to get visibility, and that's kind of that next step. But let's jump from that, because I don't know if that's like, table stakes or not, but I think where we start to find a lot of gaps in different practices, at least on the dental intelligence side, like, when we go and look, there's a lot of gaps on the conversion side where I think the market's getting more savvy about this. I think practices are starting to realize, like, oh, what's happening on my phones is really crucial. But can you start talking to us about the way you guys approach that conversion conversation and how to be the most successful there? So now that I'm driving visibility, I've differentiated myself. How do I make sure that as many of these patients as possible actually end up showing up in the practice?

Yeah, and I think you hit the nail on the head there with phones. And there's a lot of different things we look at when it comes to the conversion side, but I'd say first and foremost is looking at what's happening on the phones. The way we approach this at Fire Gang is we just listen to all the calls and so we understand what's happening at the front desk, who's saying what. And it's really important for us to be able to break this down in multiple categories because we want to see, like, I'm just going to give an example with, with easy numbers. Like let's say in a month, a practice got 100 calls from Google Ads. Well, what happened in those calls? It's like, let's say Hypothetically, you had 50 calls that were all for like the wrong number. Then you had 25 that were all just people like asking to reschedule or confirming their appointment time. And then Maybe you had 25 new patient opportunities after that. It's like a hundred calls. If you don't actually look at them on the back end of what happened, you might think, great, we had a hundred calls and we got them from Google. And our Google Ads are crushing it. That's awesome. But then what actually happened? And then if we dig deeper, what we start to find when we listen to these calls is like, okay, we had these 25 new patient opportunities, but the staff only turned five of those into new patient appointments. So now all of a sudden we've gone from a 2500 AD budget to 100 calls to five new patients. And we can look back at this and understand where is the breakdown? Well, we found that there's a couple breakdowns. It might be on the ads because we had all these wrong number calls. We also had a breakdown on the phones where we converted only 5 out of 25 opportunities. So then we can come in and start looking at, okay, where do we need to adjust? So the kind of the action item here is you have to be tracking your calls and you have to have someone listening to them some way to audit that performance. Because just trying to like over. I hear Dennis all the time say this. Well, I overhear them at the front desk. It's not enough. There has to be some kind of feedback loop where you can see exactly what's happening and look at those numbers.

Now do you guys have a way dental intelligence? We don't have a tool that's tracking phone call performance. So we've always been friendly with the folks at Patient Prism. We, the last couple of years have been working with the peer logic team as well. I think they've got a, like an AI call tracking tool. Do you, Ryan, do you guys suggest anyone or do you have anything that you guys use yourselves?

Yeah, we use, we use CallRail and it doesn't have any like, specific, like, at least we, we don't use any like, specific tool within it to like try to analyze these calls. We just keep it simple where we track them by source too. So we'll understand like how many calls came from Google And Facebook and so on. But then again, it's just doing the manual work of listening to these calls and understanding what happened, and someone's gotta do it. We do this for our clients, but, you know, you could have someone at your office do it. As long as someone is just like, okay, call made. Was it an opportunity? Did it turn into an appointment? Tracked. Next call, next call. That's what we find to be the most powerful measure of success.

Yeah, and it's. And it's, you know, perfectly accurate because you've taken the time to actually understand. Okay, this. This converted or didn't, this is what that opportunity was on the phone. Yeah, I like that. I like that a lot. So cool. So talk me through then. Do you guys. What do you see with best practices? So you mentioned a practice might have 25 new patient phone calls and only convert five of them. Why does that happen? You know, and then how do I think as a practice owner or office manager, you know, someone kind of over that? How do I think about improving conversion there?

Yeah, there are. This is a really big topic, but there are some, like. I would say there's like, two key things where if you can at least start with these, you're gonna make some serious headway. The first is making sure whoever's answering the phone is controlling the conversation. We talk about this a lot with our clients to say, if you're answering the phone, you are in charge of how that discussion goes. So think about, like, whenever you're in an interview, right? Whoever's an asking the questions is in control of that conversation. So, like, it's because they can direct it whatever direction that we want to go. So one of the issues that we hear a lot is someone answers the phone and they say, hi, how's it going? And then that's. Basically, they've relinquished all of that control to the patient, who now starts asking a bunch of questions. And you get into these really big, challenging situations where then they start asking stuff about insurance and pricing, and you don't really want to give that over the phone because you can't do a proper diagnosis. And then the patient leaves, and they're like, well, I'll go talk to someone else. Cause you guys seem too expensive. It's one simple example. But we see this stuff happen all the time. So you need to be in control of that conversation. Direct it how you want it to go, and make sure you're asking for the appointment every single time. Don't wait for the patient to ask for an appointment.

In fact, do you suggest that just to make sure everyone hears that you said in control of the phone call equals the one asking the questions. Do you ask for an appointment pretty early on? You know, like, what are some of the basic questions people might ask to keep control? I think that's one thing people are going to hear. You know, is it like, do I ask if they're, if they have an emergency or tooth pain or if they're looking for a hygiene cleaning? Like, do I start like that and kind of start like decision treeing them into the bucket? I want them to. I'm imagining that's how you're thinking about it, but I've never done this personally, so I'm just saying what I'm thinking out loud.

Yeah, it's great to just start right at the beginning of figuring out why did they call in the first place. If you can start there and understand what are they calling about? Because they're going to tell you, right? They're going to say, I have tooth pain or, oh, my family's looking for a new dentist. Okay, great. If they open with something as simple as that, you can go straight for asking for the appointment. You don't have to mess around with it. Oh, me and my family are looking for a new dentist. Awesome. Well, we can get you in. Would you prefer a morning or afternoon appointment? Then you're taking some of the pressure off and you're just asking, what works for you guys? Let's get you in a morning or afternoon. Then you solidify a time and you get, just get them in. Sometimes the patient will give you a little bit of pushback and want to ask something else. It's okay if they do, but again, keep controlling control of that conversation overall.

Okay, so that's the first thing is making sure that you're in control of the conversation. What's the second thing you said? If you can kind of hit these two things as a starting point, then this will tip the conversion.

Yeah. The second one is try to never say no. And I, and I know that that's like, it sounds impossible, but there are really good ways to do it. So I'll give you an example. This happens a lot with like, insurance is like someone calls up and you say, hey, and you're asking something like, what are you calling in about today? And they're like, well, I just wanted to know if you take my insurance, let's say you're a fee for service office, for example. You don't want to be like, no, we don't take insurance because Then the page is going to go, okay, bye, and then you've lost that opportunity. Right. So a much better way of taking it is to say, well, let's talk about the insurances that we do and don't take and then explain what your situation looks like and how you can help that patient through all the different financial options that you have available. And so you're basically, you're not saying no, you're just telling them what you have available and what you can offer and if they still don't want to do it, I mean, that's totally fine. Um, but you're not saying no, you're just framing it as, here's what we can do for you and now you can decide if it works for you or not.

Yeah, I love that much.

Different framing will dramatically increase your conversion rate on the phones.

Yeah, I love that. Is there anything, is there anything else that the team can do to help with conversion? I mean, phones is probably the biggest thing you guys, I'm assuming, are doing some things to help with. I guess that more falls into visibility probably like the way you're working with, you know, making sure there's online reviews and the way the ad copy's written, that's all probably visibility stuff. I mean those things do, I would assume, impact conversion. And the way you differentiate, like those things are going to set up that conversation for the best possible. But I'm assuming that's probably like really rare. Do people actually walk into dental practices or is it pretty much like the phone. The phones is the main one.

Phones is definitely the main one. Now I'm missing online.

So you mentioned like online booking. So there are some conversions or like people are starting to do some like web chat stuff or missed call text. Yeah, people are messing around with like voice answering. So like AI stuff or after hours answering services. Can you kind of talk about maybe what you're seeing on some of those. So maybe some of the online options for conversion as well as maybe these other tech options and you know if they're helpful or not.

Yeah, that's exactly where I was going to go because I was going to say it's to be about phones. But one thing I haven't mentioned yet is that one of the things that we see a lot when we start digging into the data especially is missed calls. It's not just about when you take a call and you miss the opportunity, but actual missed calls. So I just saw this on a client about three weeks ago where they had a, it was like a 18 or 19% missed call rate during office hours. So you think about basically one in five calls just were straight up not getting answered to the practice during office hours. So you look at that and you say, okay, well these could be new patient opportunities right here. And we're just flat out not even answering them. A lot of these people are just not going to leave a message. They're going to go talk to somebody else. So you've got to think about how long has this been going on? If nobody's looking at your numbers, you won't even know what you're missing. So that's why we talk about, well, there's these other options like missed call, text back. There's these things like online booking that can kind of shore up this gap. We typically recommend two main things here. One is just online booking. It keeps it really simple and that works really well for a lot of practices. And the other thing that we have seen work extremely well is just to simply do a kind of some kind of staff rotation. It's like we had a pr. That same practice that I'm talking about, basically everybody went to lunch the exact same time. So the practice, it had the most number of missed calls during like this one hour block during the day and then they had others throughout the day. But it was like they just kept it simple as like there's always one person there to answer the phones. And this is, it's way more common than you might think. And so if that's you, your practice, start rotating those lunches and make it so there's always someone who can answer that call.

And then can I think about it kind of the same way with after hours phone calls or, you know, is that like when I think about hiring a call service, you know, or until the next day? Because I'm assuming there are some after hours calls. Maybe I actually don't know how much volume there is there. Like me as a patient, if I see someone's close because I'll be finding them primarily from their Google listing and if I see their clothes and it's like I'm not going to even like try because I know it will go to voicemail or at least I believe as much. So maybe there are after hours calls. Do you have any pulse on after hour call volume? Is that a thing I need to think about heavily or is that more like a fringe opportunity?

Yeah, it's case by case basis. It's also something that we track those after our calls. But there's, there's ways to improve upon it. So one for one, what you can do when you get really nitty gritty into your ads, you can make it so they don't run when you don't have your practice open. And right there, that's going to cut a bunch of calls off so you don't have to worry about it. But you're still going to get those after hour calls if you've got like a really strong organic presence. And so there are clients that do use some answering services. We have yet to find one that's very good. Um, the most successful clients are just basically direct having someone in the office take calls after hours and they just rotate that person around. And so you have your. Every Monday you're, you're taking some calls and you're answering them at home and you're getting those people scheduled. Some practices have done that. It kind of few and far between, but those are the most successful ones.

Oh man. Well, I. Time is, time is flying. We're already like up at the, up at the end of the episode, I ask every single guest the same question to end, which is, what does growth in dentistry mean to you? You're welcome. If you want to give any other, like, hey, here's the last couple, like tips and tricks, you can share those. But just so everyone hears, today we really focused on how to think about growing the practice. Ryan shared kind of the three main focuses from a marketing perspective. So differentiation, visibility and then conversion. And seriously man, like really great advice. It's so like refreshing to talk to someone that can just lay it out so simply with like actionable stuff that, that folks can just like go and implement. So any other last advice you'd give and then I'd love to hear your answer to the question, what does growth in dentistry mean to you?

Yeah, I think they're, they're probably kind of the same, honestly, because when you, when you said that, like, what does growth in dentistry mean to me? Event right where I went to is at the heart of our model. We have this like Venn diagram and there's differentiation, visibility and conversion. And where they converge in the center it remarkable and rewarding practice. And so what we always ask our clients, and it's kind of one of our tenets of fire gang is like, we want to help these dentists create a remarkable and wording practice. Like, what does that mean to you? Because how you adapt this model is going to ultimately be driven by what that is. You know, we have these practices who are like, I want to be the implant guy that only does a couple patients a month and they're like these $50,000 cases. And we've got other practices we've worked with that are accept everything, Medicaid, HMOs, PPOs, everything. And they're doing zillions of patients and at the low cost, but because what's rewarding to them is treating everyone and they want to have as much impact as they can. And that's really cool. So when I think about that, it's like just whatever is remarkable and rewarding to you, whatever those two words mean to you, that's the answer to your growth and dentistry. Really figure out what that is and then apply this model to make that possible.

Yeah, I like that a ton. Which I think is a good, a good measure. Remarkable and rewarding. Those are. Those are great. So thank you, Ryan, again for joining and thank you, guest, for joining as well. Now, Ryan, I got to ask folks that want to get in contact with you, what's the best way to do that?

Yeah, best way to do that. You can go to our website, firegang.com and you can learn more about Fire Gang, our services and all of that. You can also book a free practice growth acceleration call. And you'll be able to take, you know, 40, 45 minutes on a video call just like this with me or someone on my team where we'll just talk to you about your practice and what it would look like to make some changes and apply this model to it to help you grow. So I'd recommend doing that there. We'll also include a link where you can get a free copy of our book where it outlines this model in much more detail. And you can go through all these steps and get some even more nitty gritty details of how you can get this implemented in your practice. We've had thousands of dentists order this book. You can get it for free with free shipping. So I'd encourage everyone to take advantage of it.

That. Okay, sweet. So like an actual book. In my head I was like picturing an ebook. So that's it?

No, it's like almost 400 pages.

Oh, that's great. And I'll put. Ryan, I'll give you the link. I'll put it in the show notes, both the website for that one on one practice growth call. That's super cool of you guys. And then I'll put the link for the book as well. So thanks again, Ryan for joining and then thanks guests for joining. This has been another episode of the Growth in Dentistry podcast. My name's Steve Jensen, your host and fellow data nerd keep growing. We'll talk soon.