160: How To Go Viral & Lower Patient Acquisition Cost - an Interview with "The Bentist"

Welcome to DSO Secrets. I know what it's like to be an entrepreneur in the dental industry. I've had my ups and downs just like you. There's so much opportunity to be excited about, but so few resources to get answers. From here on DSO Secrets, we get you those answers so you can change the lives you're meant to bless and achieve your personal success.

When I was working as an associate right out of school, I never imagined I could own these many practices with this amount of support. So thank you.

You have helped build my marketing mind

to a whole new level. You have this natural talent, this unique ability.

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of DSO Secrets. I'm your fearless host, Emmett Scott and this is exciting one. Today we've got Dr. Ben Winters, who you know, not only a fabulous orthodontist, which I have no way of judging, but I'm sure he's just awesome. But probably for me something I can judge is an incredible marketing man. So anyway, Dr. Winters, great to have you on. And I'm just gonna start off like how do you go from going through dental school, becoming an orthodontist to hey, I think I want to try to hit 10 million TikTok followers. You know, how does that happen?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean, I guess we'll just go through kind of a quick synopsis, you know, for, for people that don't know. My name is Dr. Ben Winters. Basically, technically I'm the largest healthcare professional in the world as far as social media goes. We have over 20 million followers overall socials. Last year I was 6 most viewed person on YouTube as a whole with over like 2.2 billion views on just YouTube alone. I think we are you beating out

like the kids opening up the like

so, so I will actually we did and it was only because of one thing and it was because of the YouTube shorts, which is the short form. So as pure view metrics, we were the sixth most viewed person on, on YouTube last year. Yeah.

And did way to push the industry forward. Definitely.

Yeah. Now we have a whole micro niche of dental con. There's people doing like toothbrush ASMR and all this crazy stuff and they're making millions of views on, on just reviewing toothbrushes now. And they're not even you know, out of dental school yet, so that's crazy. But so a little background for me is basically I wasn't new to social media actually. I, I was a bodybuilder for a while in college, worked with collegiate athletes and so I had a fitness page that I did on the early Instagram days when it was really, really tough. And we grew that to about 40,000. And then, you know, when I got into residency for Ortho, I kind of thought it was a little weird to be posting like shirtless pics and seeing kids at the same time. So I said, pretty much like, I'm going to hang up the social media thing, I'm not going to do it. And I got a job with a corporate coming out of school. And basically the job was that they had just purchased some offices from a guy and then basically they needed me come in and they needed me to basically take them and turn them around because they were kind of really bad offices. They needed to say, hey, we needed to flip these into our, you know, usage, our, our ways and kind of make them profitable and everything like that. Right? And they were, this is all around Ortho. This is all in Ortho. Yeah, yeah, yep. And so basically they were like, you do one and show us that you can do one, we'll give you more. And then eventually you can kind of be the guy that goes in, grows a practice leaves, you know, and then heads all of them. And I thought it was a really good opportunity, so we took it. And so I got there and boy, was it worse than I thought it was going to be. And it was even worse than they thought it was going to be. We got there and every patient, Patient, excuse me, got there and every patient was like five years in treatment. Wrong extractions, cavities everywhere, didn't care, wasn't take that. The doctor at the time was actually, he wasn't going to tell anybody, but he was blind enough to where he couldn't see the brackets to take them off. So he was basically just pushing them. He was just pushing them out and out and out and out. It was bad. So I come into this fresh out of residency with which luckily for me, we were really heavily. We trained at ou. We did, you know, University of Oklahoma. We did like tweed. We did everything. So I knew how to bend wire. I knew how to get out of some situations which were pretty tough. It was, it was mostly like the, hey, you've been in braces for five years. We got to take these off and get you in another two years and fix the issues that it was bad. So my first couple years were really bad. So we told them and then basically I ended up getting all five of the guys offices, like immediately. So now all of a sudden I'm, I'm over five offices.

Hey, he Set the bar really low. That really helped.

He did. And so basically, like, you know, we go through the usual things. Okay, how can we market this? Oh, let me call the dentist in the area. And so I called the dentist and all of them hung up on me. Tell me, go kick rock. Screw you. All this type of stuff. And turns out the guy who was there prior to me was also. Because there was dentists attached to some of the offices. And so it was like an orthodontal, you know, combo. And the guy was stealing all the dental patients. So when he got there, he would say, don't go to your dentist anymore. We'll give it to you over here. Come over here. So no dentist wanted to come to our office. And so basically I was left with this terrible office. No dentist wanted to refer to me. I had no way. And I was just like. The only thing I knew was social media from being the fitness influencer. And so luckily, as an orthodontist, you see kids around different areas, right? And I noticed, like, normally I'm pretty observant, like, oh, you're on Snapchat, you're on YouTube, you're on Instagram, or whatever it is. And all of a sudden I started to see they were on different. I had never seen this thing before. And. And they were swiping up and all enamored. And I saw maybe one or two the first day, and then the next day I saw like three or four more. And they were all talking about it. And I finally asked, I was like, hey, what are you guys on? And basically they were like, oh, it's this new thing called Tick Tock. It came out last week. It was musically. And then they changed it and all this type of stuff.

And I was like, oh, you were like, ground floor. Like, oh, yeah.

First week it was open. Yeah. And. And I basically was like, well, I don't. Because I had seen musically stuff before, and it's basically like lip syncing to music. And I was like, I don't want to lip sync, so it doesn't make sense. You know, I don't know how I could market that. And they're like, oh, no, no, no, it's not like that anymore. It's more like vine, if you remember, Vine. And so I looked at it and sure enough, it was like a 15 second vine. And I was like, this is really cool. And for the first time, I had seen something that I had never seen in social media, and that was the invention of a trend. And so basically I noticed that these kids were using the same song and making these little mini skits out of it. And then once I saw one, I saw like five more, and I was like, that's weird. Everybody's participating in this one, like, kind of thing that's going on in their own unique way. You know, maybe one was a football player or one was a nerd, or one was a whatever. And so I was like, what if I just did this in a way of a dentist? You know? And so I took the very first. One of the very first Trends, probably on TikTok. It was. It was some song saying, yes, no, back and forth. And so I just made it to where a patient was in the chair. I use one of my assistants as a patient saying, like, can I get my braces off? You know? No. You know, do you brush your teeth? No. You have. You floss, you know, or whatever. Back and forth.

Right, right.

And so then, you know, I posted it, and I didn't think anything of it. We just kind of posted and we're like, oh, this will be fun. Whatever. Come back the next day. Actually forgot we even posted it. I was eating lunch and my assistant, he was like, hey, have you checked your TikTok or whatever? And I was like, no, I haven't even checked it. And she's like, oh, okay. And so I pulled it up, and we had 10 million views, a million likes, and we had gained 100,000 followers overnight.

Wow.

And so basically, I was reading the comments and everybody was freaking out that, one, an adult was on the app, and two, not only an adult, but a doctor. And so they were just, like, freaking out that some adult doctor was cool enough to get their lingo and their app and everything. And so we actually did that through the corporate until we grew to 500,000 followers. And at that point, you know, TikTok noticed really, really quickly, and they wanted more adults on the app. They wanted, you know, it to grow eventually into a full app that it is like it is today. So they reached out to me and we're like, hey, we're doing this new thing. I know this is completely random, out of the blue, but we want you to be an ambassador for TikTok as a whole. And we're. We're getting this group of, you know, it's like five to 10 people, and we're going to bring you guys in, and we want you to travel all over America and talk for us and go to all these events like the MTV Music Awards or Vidcon or Playlist Live or whatever. It Is. And so I was just like, I think, yes, I would like to do that. And so fun. Yeah. And at that same time, funny enough, I asked and I said, you know, I started to notice a lot of patients were coming in from it and that we were growing and people were happy and they thought it was cool. They were asking for, like, pictures all of a sudden and things like that. And I could tell that there was, like something here. And so I, I basically talked to my corporate. I said, hey, you know, you either got to pay me for this or I'm bringing all these patients. Like, how can we leverage this? You know, how can you monetize me for doing all this work for you? Because I'm getting millions of views for you a month. And I remember I like, said something about their Instagram and we got like a thousand likes on one post. And before that, they hadn't gotten maybe 10 likes between all their posts for the past two years. And so I was like, you're paying your social media team $50,000 each to do this? And I just a 100x. And they were. And they basically came back saying that they didn't think it was worth anything and they didn't think that it would grow any office and they couldn't see any value in it because these patients weren't directly in the same city that I was in. And I was just kind of like, well, you know, social proof. There's a way that that works. Anyways, so basically I said, okay, well, I'm just completely going to stop posting and get rid of that 500,000 follower account. And I started completely from scratch.

Are you serious?

Yep, started completely from scratch. And so because legally, you know, it was their account, I used their likeness, I did it on their time. And I didn't want to have a point to where maybe we left under bad terms. And then they were just like, no, we got, we got your account. And so I started a completely fresh one. And I was trying to figure out the name for it and I just was like, well, my name's Ben. I'm technically a dentist. And the bentist. The bentist sounded better than the Ben orthodontist. So I just really quickly said the Ben test. And then I went with it. And sure enough, everybody kind of knew my face and we just blew up from there. So ever since then, just kind of a real quick rundown. I've worked with, you know, TikTok as ambassadors. Instagram brought me in to start their short form content. YouTube brought me in to start Their short form content. We work with all the platforms and, and we've done a lot of really cool stuff and worked with a lot of really cool celebrities, musicians, artists, you know, YouTubers, Instagrammers, TikTokers across the board and just kind of been growing the Ventus brand ever since then. And about two and a half years ago during the middle of COVID my wife and I were just like let's move to Plano, Texas and start our own office and do it the way that we want to do it with 3D printing and a cool atmosphere and social media surrounding it. And, and so ever since then we've been here the past two years, we have not really said anything, talked about it, promoted it at all. Just had a link in the bio and we went from basically about 0 to a 750k office, not even promoting it. And we're really kind of doing as a thank you to the followers really. So I do full time production and in social media and this is my studio in the office that I film in. And then we see our followers on the side for braces. But we are currently growing it to bring in an associate and our goal is to double the, double the volume at least to 1.5 to 2 in this year using paid ads. Leveraging my organic growth on social media as well too with it.

So, so freaking awesome. Okay. There's like so many things here that is awesome. One is you're really an influencer who just happens to have a license. I love to patients as followers like that. They're actually followers who become patients, not patients who become followers. I mean talk about having a marketing mindset. The other thing is we've never talked before but we're like 30 minutes away from each other because I'm.

Oh really?

Yeah, I'm up in Denton so we're very close. But how, how cool. Now I wanted to ask about these awards behind you. I see them.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

So tell me. I see the silver and the gold. And what, what is that?

Yeah, so these. So whenever. So kind of like the highest award in social media is this gold award behind me which is a million YouTube follower plaque or a million YouTube subscriber plaque. It's definitely the hardest to achieve out of all the social medias. You know, we have over a million followers on every platform. We're verified on every platform. Probably the two biggest things that somebody can get as a, as an Instagram blue check or verification and a million plaque on, you know, YouTube. Those are like the two things that everybody strives for in the social media world. Do they matter? You know, realistically, no. But, you know, they do bring social proof that, you know, a lot of people care about. You know, me personally, I don't really care that much about it, but, you know, it's just cool to say that I got there. So this is our million plaque for the Bentus main channel. We're now over 4 million followers on YouTube. And then these are what they get when. When you get 150,000 followers on a channel. And so just to prove out, like the concept that I knew what I was doing, I wanted to start two more channels. So I used to do gaming and stuff when I used to play professional gaming. And so we started Twitch streaming and made a gaming channel that grew to over 2 million followers on tick Tock. And we had over. I think we have almost 300, 000 followers on YouTube on our gaming channel. I haven't posted on that in a while. We kind of just grew it to see if I could do it. And we did it. And then onward. And then the next one is the Bentist reacts, which is almost at 400, 000 followers and is 2 million on TikTok as well. And then we are currently in the process of really trying to ramp that up and grow it and have it be the second million YouTube plaque. So that's what those are. Yeah.

As an influencer, what's your primary goal? I mean, getting the eyeballs. But is it. Is it the paid advertisement and the sponsorships? Is that become the income stream? Is it the consulting other dental practices on the methodology and coaching them? Obviously, you know, you're now converting some followers into patients, but I would think, you know, I just curious the business model, so, you know, what's your primary focus there?

Yeah. So can you still hear me, by the way?

I can still hear you.

Yeah.

You froze a little bit.

Is my thing froze? Yeah. No, you're not frozen. Some. For some reason, my cameras let me turn it off, turn back on really quickly just so we have camera.

Yeah.

For some reason. I don't know why it does that, but yeah, I'm gonna turn that.

It gets tired. I mean, you're influencing so many people. The camera gets tired, you know, I know.

I just want to make sure that people can see me here. All right, good. So we got that. So, yeah. So basically this is one of the. I mean, this is a great segue into, you know, the marketing stuff that I'm doing. I don't know if, you know, anything about the marketing company that I started or anything like that.

Yeah, tell us about it.

But basically, so I think that the future of orthodontics and dentistry is in this. And so basically I'll kind of break down the three ways that you can make money really on social media. And so really the main one that everybody knows is that ad revenue split. Right. And so that's like when you go to YouTube, you see a long form video and then you see a little ad pop up. And when that ad pops up, that's about 50% of the money is going to that creator. 50% is going to YouTube. Right. And so that's, that's what some people are familiar with. Oh, they're making money off the ads. Right. The number two way is what people are also really familiar with, which is sponsorships. You still there?

Yeah, I can hear you. Can you hear me?

Yeah, I can hear you.

Okay.

I have you frozen on my screen, but okay.

Well, it's fine.

Yeah, it's fine. Anyway, so as far as sponsorships go, you know, that's the ad. That's the thing where, you know, they say, hey, you know, we're going to pay you this, you promote this product, you make a video about it, then you go about your business. Right, right, right. And so that's number two, I'm into CrossFit.

And so that's primarily what I see with the CrossFit guys.

Right, yeah. Great. Yeah. So they're pushing supplements or, you know, line or whatever it is, whatever it might be. Yeah, yeah. And so the third way that these influencers make money is basically through a thing called a creator fund. And a creator fund is just a subset of money that these people maybe $100 million and then they basically split it up based on views for every creator. So it's just kind of like, hey, you know, we're just saying thank you. So when you put your views in, we're going to put you in a pool. However, percentage of that, you get a percentage of that hundred million. Now the problem is that's great when you very first start out, but when there's a billion people on TikTok trying to make content, it flushes it out. You know, when, when a hundred million people all get 10 cents, that goes away really quickly. And then all of a sudden you're not making any money. So you know, we'll just. I can't give you exact numbers, but. So let's say I do about a hundred plus million views a month on YouTube or on TikTok. And YouTube plus, but you only make maybe like a thousand bucks.

Got it. Got it.

For an insane amount of views. Right.

From the creator fund, you're saying for the creator fund.

So that one is not very good.

Nobody gets into it for the creator fund. That's really the seed money to get people on the platform.

Exactly. But ad revenue is very, very good. So I'm pretty open with talking about my finances with people and kind of letting the dentistry world know, because I think it's really interesting. You know, obviously I won't give you exact numbers because that's illegal terms of service, but I can give you ballpark numbers. Right. So on YouTube this past year, we did over about seven figures, you know, just over seven figures. And so of that, I would say. So we did 2.2 billion views. Right. So you have that in your nature. So on the short form side of things, we probably did 2.15 billion views of it. So pretty much almost everything other than like 50 million views was short form content that occurred. You know, we'll say roughly 250,000 of that million. Right. So about 25% came from that 2.15 billion views. And of the 50 million AdSense views, we made 750,000 of the million. Right. So about 75%. So you can see the massive juxtaposition of the pay on the creator fund, which is short form, versus that ad revenue. Now, the reason why I say this is so huge for dentistry now, one is the fact that I was getting paid to promote my office. You know, if I wanted to, I could have attached Windcrest orthodontics to it versus the ventus just as easily. In fact, the reason why we had to not promote mine organically is because we were getting too many calls from people all over the world that wanted to be in my office, that were kids, like, trying to talk to me and things like that. So it didn't make sense for me. But if you were just an office out there in the middle of North Dakota and you were trying to get local people, say, had 10,000 followers, and you're getting served to your local community in these. These ads via location base, you're gonna start pulling in a lot of patients in your area. And I've helped a lot of other dentists and doctors do this, and I

know you're focused on kids. I'll tell you, a big movement like the all in fours and implants and so forth. And you might say, well, you know, that age group isn't on there, number one. They are Number two is their kids will show them and number three is they'll fly, you know, they'll fly to you.

And the other thing too that a lot of people don't realize is when you make one piece of content on TikTok, you can repost it everywhere. So when I repost it to Instagram, it goes to Facebook as well. So that piece of content is being seen by your older people in the Facebook crowd, it's being seen by your middle age people in the Instagram crowd, and it's being seen by the younger people in the YouTube and TikTok crowd. But the reason why I brought that up is so in February 1st, YouTube just changed this. This literally just change this to where now you are getting an AdSense split revenue from your short form content instead of a creator fund. But I'm getting the same amount of use. So I'll let you do the math on that about how much money you could make. So you know, somebody, you know, it could very be, if I did that same 2 billion views, I could make upwards of 10 million plus dollars, you know, profit free, you know, basically with no overhead. Right. Just there. So now if you're doing a tenth of that, even a hundredth of that, you know, as an office, you're making a hundred thousand dollars extra added on to your top line with zero overhead. Right. To promote your office.

Yeah, I was going to say the best marketing is the marketing that actually makes you money. Right. Everyone thinks of marketing as an expense, but a few people have been able to figure out how to make money off of marketing. And their funnels are insane because you can literally take the money you're making off of marketing and feed it back into more marketing a hundred percent.

And so I think we're in a, this is the first time in history you as an orthodontist can make, just pull up your phone, make some content in 10 minutes, get paid to do it and get new patients. And I teach people. So in my marketing group, this is kind of what we teach people in tiered structures is I teach everybody the whole social media side of how to make organic content. You know, we have an orthodontist that went from zero to a million in one year organically. No paid ads. You know, in her first year of her office just doing TikToks organically. Right. And so that being said, the whole ad world has flipped on its head now. So we went ahead and we changed and we, we, we basically are running a whole entire course to teach them how to do their own ads so they don't have to pay a marketing team 3,000 to $6,000 a month to run it for them. It's not that hard. I mean, they have to put in some work. And if they want to, they can use our agency to do the ads as well too, you know, if you want to do that. But I want to teach doctors how to take control back into their hands and back into their offices again. And so when you do that, the old school way of doing ads with these static pictures and stuff like that, no bueno anymore. It's not, it's not converting as good. And so what you had to do to convert it, so you got to add $500 off or free whitening or 0% finance. And what that does is it brings you into a whole new world of bringing in a patient population that's delinquent. They don't show up. They, you know, break brackets all the time, they don't care about their teeth. And so on the other hand, if you have a really good engaging short form ad, which you learn because you do it yourself all the time on social media, you can run those as inorganic ads and you can get a lower cost per acquisition. You can get a better patient population because that mom who can pay in full and is the area where you need to be, she's scrolling through and she's like, oh, wow, I didn't know they use digital impressions. Wow, this is a really nice office. Dang. That doctor's kind of cute. He's got a really good personality. Man, we should click in and go there instead of that picture that they swipe past and don't care. And so there's 101 facets. Yeah, go for it. Yeah, talk about it forever.

No, no, no, I love it. I have a couple questions for you, but I do want to do. I'm going to do my own commercial here.

Yeah, go for it.

8 through 10. You're going to be in San Diego, California, June 8th through 10th, DEO Gross Summit. Like this is what we're going to be talking about. And you know, as we walk into some of this recessionary environment, as dollars get tighter, I think it's natural for dentists and a lot of other industries to kind of go into this logical place where exactly what you said, they say, oh, well, there's only one answer and that is to cut costs at the revenue level, like make it cheaper for people. But the reality around financials is that we're all like emotional human people. And so as much as this might, you know, not make sense. It makes sense is that we get connected to people through social media now, and we're willing to pay a premium to people we feel connected with. You know, it's, it's a fascinating social difference that's happening is I want to feel connected with you. I never want to pick up the phone and actually talk to you, but, like, I want to know you completely without ever. And then I want to, like, get on a form and then just schedule my appointment online without talking to anyone. One of the things that I think so powerful, Ben, about what you're doing is you found a niche in a market that by nature, the humans in that marketplace do not want to see themselves on camera. You know, by nature, Dentistry filters in a lot of science focused individuals who love working in a microcosm that they know is predictable. And probably the hardest part of this whole thing isn't getting the, you know, computer to work, isn't getting the, the photos and the video, because that's all sitting right there on your phone. The hardest part is the vulnerability. Like, what do you say to people who are like, yeah, yeah, I want to do it, I'm going to come to your course or whatever, I want to learn this, but like, it needs to be perfect and so forth before I'll ever post anything.

Yeah. So definitely I would say, you know, you need to just start posting. You can't think about its perfection. Because the thing is, if you. And you just get 1% better each time, you're eventually going to climb that hill and get to where you want to go. And so also another thing that I teach people is you don't have to be the guy that does it. You know, there's viral, there's only so many viral structures of a viral video. Okay. Just like a rap song is a rap song, a country song is a country song. If I, if I just randomly, you know, put you in a dark room and played a song and said, guess the genre, you'd probably guess rock, country, rap pretty easily, Right? Why is that? It's because there's structures that we find, there's ways to get people to go viral. And it's scientific, it's proven, and they all deal with basically getting you to watch to the end. Now, some of those require a lot of personality, like a skit or, you know, something like that, you know, and so some of them don't. You know, you can be an educational reaction person that's as dry as a bone and just telling them what's going on. You've probably seen videos like that. And also you don't even have to be on camera. We have guys that are orthodontists that are millions of followers right now, and all they're doing is posting intraoral videos of them taking power chain off or putting a tad in and throwing a viral song behind it. Because they get the viral structure now. They understand how to read the algorithm. So whenever I tell people like one, the first thing of what you said is like, I don't want to do this. I'm science focused. I'd rather, you know, stay behind camera. Or maybe they're a perfectionist and they don't want to do that type of stuff. You know, I definitely don't want to

get criticized for my work. I'm all about quality of care. You know, my work should speak for itself.

Yeah. So that's, that's another problem too, because you're very right. We're moving away from that age of just people go to you for xyz. They want that connection now. They want to be able to know that you're actually, to be fair, you could be a terrible dentist and get more patients than a good dentist. If you have a good personality. That's been tried and true forever though. Yeah. And so now you can put that on blast. And so also for the patients and you know, the doctors out there that don't have that good a personality, find an assistant or you know, a member. Like we have some teams that are using, you know, somebody that's just an assistant. They're turning them into their marketing person and then they're the face of it. They're the flow from progressive.

Well, that dso kind of missed out on the opportunity. But frankly, had they seen the vision.

Yeah.

Right. Then they would be sitting on. Yeah. I mean.

Yeah.

And so somebody in your group that, that loves this, it's probably frankly a little younger if you're, if you're older. I noticed my kids, I've got six kids, but two are at home. One's 15 and 17. It's fascinating to me and I've only seen this over the last year. They'll sit and when they scroll through television now, they just go to YouTube shorts and that's just all they watch like on a 75 inch TV now. Right. They just watch YouTube shorts as like watching TV, you know, so it's fascinating to watch how much it's moved even in this last 12 months.

Yeah. And the thing, I mean, we really see this all the time. I Mean, I am kind of in betweener though, because like, some people are like, you just gotta post 100 times a day. Like, I love Gary Vee, he's a friend of mine, but he does say that a lot. He's like, you know, post 20 times a day and just post, post, post. Algorithmically, from what I find scientifically, it's not a good idea to do that. You end up digging yourself into a hole. But I would say there is, like, once you learn how to just at least do something in the right direction, you can do things a little more strategically. And then when you learn that strategy, then you have a much greater chance of building yourself into a good spot. But I mean, you definitely have to at least post. I mean, you can't win the lottery if you don't play type thing, you know what I'm saying?

I love your structure of country rock, like for all these different virals. So at the DEO summit, will you talk about these different structures? Because, you know, as you're, as you're talking about this now, I'm thinking there are those who are the outgoing skits, funny, et cetera. And then there's that genre where you're like, you just trust them. They sit there pretty stoically, but like, they just hit on concepts that you think are really interesting, right?

It's, it's the structures always change. It's just the artists have a slightly different voice. That's all of it. And so, yeah, we'll talk about, you know, some of the structures while we're there. You know, obviously we'll teach all of them in, you know, our marketing course. But, you know, that's here nor there. I mean, if you're smart enough to understand the concept that there's structures, you'll really quickly be able to pick them out and kind of decipher them for yourselves.

But yeah, my practice, like from an org chart perspective.

Yeah.

What kind of person do I need? Because, you know, I'm thinking a lot of dental practices right now, they're having a hard time just retaining staff. You know that they have to like, see the patients. Right. So what would I need if I said, hey, I really want to do this? Do I need some kind of individual with a certain capability to do this? Especially if I don't have time?

So once again, you know, I go back to the who. Who are you as a person? What is your personality? Are you the guy who wants to be on the camera? Because you can easily start yourself. I mean, I did this all with one Hour only on a lunch break in between, you know, seeing 100 patients a day in a very fast clinic with five offices. So I was zooming. And so if I had time to do it, you have time to do it. But that being said, if you want to do it the smart way and you don't want to be a part of it or you're new to it and you want some help, you know what, I've told a lot of these, you know, a couple of these people that have joined like, you know, and working with me currently, you know, they were paying $6,000 a month for someone to do their social media for. And I looked at their social media, they were getting like 10 likes total a month. And I was like, you realistically think this is worth 6k a month? Like, well, we gotta do social media. It's like, get rid of the 6k and hire some, you know, high school or early college age kid to come in and be your marketing person. They understand TikTok. And then what we do is we give that kid our course. And now all of a sudden they're a world class marketing expert for your office. And now all of a sudden, welcome

to the new university education, which is so much better. Right? A certification with group like yours.

Yeah, exactly. But you don't have to just hire somebody. A lot of these offices already have somebody doing that that was maybe an assistant that transitioned into that or like, you know, in your case, we have a lot of dental service organizations. So you have a marketing team. Right. And so then there's different people in each office that probably deal with some of the marketing here and there. And so I know this is kind of crazy to see, you know, would you say that there's more, Are you more of like an orthodontics service organization or more like dental offices?

Us personally, so Community Dental partners has pediatric orthodontics and, and adults. So we support all different kinds of practice.

Yeah, So I was going to say, you know, this is weird hearing, you know, from an orthodontist point of view, but I even suggest most orthodontists, you know, stop putting so much money and effort into other dental offices. And it's because, like, I would rather

you quote, unquote, go direct. Huh?

Yeah. And so the thing is, is like, like I tried, you know, when we got here, you know, even early on. So for people to know. When I got here to Plano, we had basically everybody and their mom told me not to come here. They're like, it's one of the most populated areas. These people have been here for 30 years. You're never going to survive. Even the lone people were like, how are you going to do this again? And I showed them the following and everything, and they were like, okay, we believe you that something's at least good gonna happen out of it. Right? And really just by putting myself out there and showing people, you know, kind of the quality that we have in the office. The 3D printing, the techniques, just me and my personality. Now these dentists are reaching out to me on the vice versa. And it's not costing me time, money, hours of my time trying to swindle them into dinner and trying xyz. It's like, you know, it's. It's so much better. And the relationships I form with them are from doctors that actually care about me and vibe with me. And so I know that their office is a vibe that's going to match the vibe of my office. And the patients are going to cross over and be happy. And I know when I send them out, they're going to go to a dentist that. That works really well too.

Yeah. It's fascinating how much connection we can make on social media. As much as much as it gets criticized. This, this has been awesome. Like, we burned through our time way faster than I thought. So I'm thrilled that you're coming as our keynote speaker at the DEO Summit. So I'll just say again, June 8th through the 10th, go to DEO Dental Group. Sign up. Register now. Yeah, get. Get a good price early on and come here, Ben. Talk about how to get, I don't know, what, is everybody there going to get 10 million followers? Like what, within a week or two? Is that what you can.

You know, I definitely, I definitely tell people that, you know, there, you know, you can't teach somebody to be a bentist. I mean, you know, but you definitely can grow pretty consistently easily. You know, I would say most people could easily get to 50,000 followers. You know, as long as they just tried the basic, you know, stuff, you should easily get to 50, 000 followers. If you're not, you're doing it wrong. You know, I've done it for probably five different channels now on my own in like, you know, a month. And so it's just the process of, of showing up and doing it and learning and getting 1% better every day, and then also just kind of learning some smart secrets by talking to the right people and doing the right things, you know, onward and upward.

You know, Can I be honest too. I think you did it the hardest way. You know, I mean, we certainly have the. Yeah, you have the personality, the capability around influencing, but the reality is if you're out there and, you know, you're in DEO and you have five locations, 10 locations, and you can launch some kind of influencer and then bring that into your current patient base that's already, you know, a million patients or whatnot, and allow them to start being a part of that. That, like, man, you could go viral very quickly on those things. You just have to know the formula.

So, yeah, I mean, we talked about. Because when I initially came here, you know, we built up Windcrest to basically kind of go into that DEO model or that DSO model and use the Bentus and Windcrest name as a whole to grow it. Now, I mean, we have a ton of other things on our plate, you know, but, you know, if there's any other DSO guys out there that are, you know, thinking. Thinking bigs and need a. Need a flow from progressive, you know, know, I'm always down to talk, but yeah, okay, awesome.

Well, Ben, thank you so much. I really appreciate you being on. I'm really excited about June. It'll be in San Diego, which will be beautiful in June. So Texas, by the way, will be hot as heck. So, yeah, get out to San Diego. If people want to look you up, man, they just have to Google bentist. Right?

Yeah, just. Yeah, the bent is still find me everywhere. But, yeah, we'll definitely be get. We'll get into as nitty gritty as you guys want want.

And I'll.

I'll stay and answer all the questions that you guys have. So. It's always fun. It's what I do. It's literally my job, and I love talking about it, and I think it's going to be a huge part of dentistry, and I think it'll even become a massive income portion of your office. Just like whitening or cleanings or anything else is going to be such a.

Such a blessing. I always say this. What we're competing against today is not other dentists, not other orthodontists. It's everything else people can spend money on. We've got to get at the level you're at. All of us do. It's great for the industry. It's great for oral health care. So thank you so much for being on Ben. And for those who are listening, come over to our Facebook page at DEO Growth used to be DSO Secrets. Come over to DEO Growth. And until next time, Keep smiling.

Foreign.

Thank you for listening to DSO Secrets. Join our community on Facebook at DSO Secrets and get answers and resources to some of your most challenging questions. If you want to get a copy of the seven secrets of any DSO, go to our website at dsosecrets.com and we will get that emailed to you. Remember, don't go at this alone. Let us be your team while you build your team.