How To Build A 32,000 Member Community To Level Up Your Marketing 📈

Let's talk about, um, kind of your, your background leading up to, you know, becoming a dentist. And what was that aha moment where you're just like, okay, I can't just be a dentist, I gotta do more than that?

Well, you know what's funny is that, Eric, first of all, I want to say that I love, absolutely love your book Leveling Up. I mean, again, I literally read it in one sitting, it was that good. And just kind of following your, your path, it really paralleled what I was going through. Again, you know, I, I grew up with an immigrant family. I'm Vietnamese. We came into this country and, you know, what do most What do most parents want for their kids? Hey, can you be a lawyer or doctor, right? And so for me, I had to find something that satisfied my parents, but something that I could live with doing. I mean, there's so many people who become doctors and they are miserable, right? They go in there and it's like a prison. And so dentistry was something that I felt like I could do, would make my parents happy, but also set me up to do the other things I wanted to do. And, you know, when I became a dentist, I was like, okay, I accomplished this goal. I'm doing pretty good, but I felt like something was missing. And what was missing was just making that impact, not only with the people in my practice, but I wanted more. I wanted to impact more people. And that's actually how Nifty Thrifty Dentist kind of came up, is because I didn't want to just take care of my patients. I wanted to take care of the whole industry. And that's dentists.

Okay. So I guess, how many— walk us through kind of what you have right now in terms of business assets. How many dentistry, Nifty Thrifty, like what else do you have? What's kind of the Glen empire?

Yeah. So I have my practice, it's called Denton Smiles Dentistry. It's a multi-million dollar practice. I have multiple doctors, multiple specialists working for me. Now, I'm actually only working 2 days a week right now and you guys are probably thinking, well, I mean, he's only working 2 days a week. Is he just sitting around just playing video games all day? No, I'm not. I do still play video games. So shout out back to you, Eric. You know, I have Nifty Thrifty Dentist. And what that is, is that is a platform that helps dentists essentially level up, right? So I have a Facebook group of over 32,000 dental professionals. I'm a part owner in a dental lab. I'm a part owner of dental software. Now, why am I in all these things? Well, again, a big passion project of mine is helping people not only become just a good dentist, maybe a good plumber, a good attorney, or a good physician. I want them to become industry influencers in their practice. And again, I do coaching in that. I'm actually coming out with a book called Industry Influencer that kind of lays out the groundwork, the blueprint on, yes, you have a successful practice, but if you wanna do more, I give you the blueprint for that.

Got it. So can you walk us through, I mean, especially for kind of the, maybe the Asian kids right now, right? Or really anybody trying to be a dentist, like, if you do pretty well with one practice, you know, how much are you making a year? And then can you give people a range of like, you know, with all the stuff you're doing right now, how much more potential there is? Because I just want people to think kind of beyond the traditional stuff that our parents were feeding us, which is they have nothing— there's nothing wrong with that. That's just what they know. So.

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, the thing is, is when you're a healthcare practitioner, whether you're a dentist, whether you're a doctor, right, your practice, your earning potential is tied to your 2 hands, right? So if you have a practice and everything is dependent on you, you can only work so fast. So how do you level up? a single practice owner to something to multiple practices. Well, at that point, you have to take a step away from being the actual practitioner to becoming a business person, right? So kind of like your— what you do, Eric, you know, obviously, if you wanted to scale, you had to hire the right team members, right? So in a practice, you have to hire other, other, other dentists. For me, I have an associate dentist who takes care of the cases that I don't want to do. but I also have specialists as well. So again, as far as doctors go, there's 4 doctors, actually there's 5 doctors now that work in my practice, right? Each of those doctors are doing something so that I can free up my time. So I have specialists who do dental implants, I have specialists who do surgery, I have specialists who do braces. And so again, a single practice owner, a well-run practice is a million-dollar practice. But when you bring in more people, it becomes a multimillion-dollar practice. And once it gets to the multimillion-dollar practice, You can actually sit at home and do other things. Now, why did I start doing other things like real estate, opening up social media platforms, own labs? Again, you can only do so much if you're only— if you put all your eggs in one basket. Once you start diversifying, right, that's where you can start getting more income. And it all goes back to having the right why, right? If your why is just to make a bunch of money and make a certain amount, Well, then, okay, there's a bunch of different things to do that. But if you have a why behind it, for me, my why was to spend time with the people that I love without restriction. Without restriction. And once I had that, I just reverse engineered it. And again, working towards that. So for those who are listening right now, those are the things that you need to think about, right? If you're going to scale and you're the bottleneck, then you need to be able to take yourself out of the equation so you can scale appropriately.

So what has more potential right now, your dental practices or the other stuff that you're doing?

Oh man, I will tell you this. I would say that the other stuff, and the reason why I say that is because the other stuff you actually can do— what I'm doing with Nifty Thrifty Dents, I can do it anywhere. I actually was kind of— I was in Cancun not too long ago, and I was actually having some meetings on my computer with a Zoom. You have a laptop, You got Wi-Fi, you can work, right? And so there's so much potential there. Again, Eric, you do that, you do, you live that life, right? There's so much potential there. With a dental practice, you actually have to have a brick-and-mortar office, right? You need to have a location. What I'm doing, I literally can work from anywhere. So again, I would say that has more potential, but the dental practice, being a dentist, was a means to an end. Right. Again, I can't, I can't influence all these dental practice owners, have this group of 32,000 dentists if I wasn't a dentist, and they wouldn't listen to me if I didn't have a successful practice. So again, you have to set the foundation before you can branch out.

Got it. And so, you know, when you think about, okay, if you have multiple practices, um, or you're doing multimillion, let's say you take home like $1 million a year, but you know, you still have to go to the office and, you know, there's a lot of work to be done. Now, your other business, Nifty Thrifty Dentist, can you talk about that and how it makes money and how much you think these types of companies can be making long-term?

Oh yeah, absolutely. So, you know, what I— in my book Industry Influencer, you know, my goal was to let everyone know, no matter what niche you're in, you can actually be an industry leader. And I lay out the blueprint for that. And the blueprint is this, you need to have something. Whether it be a podcast, a Facebook group, a blog, anything. You need to have something where you can invite people in so you can network with them, right? So my Facebook group, Nifty Thrifty Dentist, it's a place where they can actually level up, and I help them save money in their dental practice. I give advice. It's a platform. It's a platform for me to reach these dentists. Now, whenever you have a platform, you always have to think about if you want to grow what you're doing, You got to make money, right? People talk about money like it's a bad thing, like, oh, you want to make money? Oh, that's all you care about. No, money is a tool, right? You need to monetize things so you can grow it to help more people. And so in Nifty Thrifty Dentist, what I do is I do affiliate deals. I connect the dentists with the dental companies and I put them together, right? Dental companies, what they used to do is they used to advertise at trade shows and whatnot. I'll tell you what. How did that work during COVID You know what worked in COVID? My group where 30,000 dentists were hanging out in there and they're listening to all these things. So I basically leveraged that ability with these dental companies, affiliate deals, and sponsorships. And again, now I kind of went into coaching as well because again, when I have this platform and I'm sharing all these things, how to run a successful dental practice, naturally what happens? People reach out. That's the reason why I reached out to Eric. I was like, I like what you're doing. I want to learn from you, man. Again, you have to have that platform. You have to have something so that people can reach out to you.

Great. And so let's talk about the book a little bit, right? So Industry Influencer, and then let's talk about how that relates to the Facebook group of 32,000 people. So how did you build that? And then you could talk more about the book as well.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So again, people are like, well, how did you create a group of 30,000 dentists right now. I'm going to tell you this right now. I mean, it didn't— I didn't start a group and all of a sudden everyone came flooding in. But the thing is, what I talk about in the book and what I'm going to tell you guys right now, it's all about content, right? But then people are like, okay, well, I have good content. Here's the thing. It's also about consistency, right? You can have good content, but if you put something out there once in a blue moon, again, people are going to hear about it and then they're wondering what's going on. The great thing about what you do, Eric, is that you're very— you have good content. You're very consistent. You're very consistent. Okay. So again, when you have a Facebook group, right, and you're inviting all these people in, right, you got to give them a reason to show up and you got to do it consistently so they can keep coming back. At that point, you do call to actions where you say, hey guys, if you like what you're hearing right now, if you're getting value there, bring some more people in there. But here's the— here's a, here's a quick hack that I want to give you right now when you're trying to grow a community. You actually have to— it's not about you. It's not about you. It's about the community. You got to give shoutouts, right? You got to get people, you got to elevate people because those people that are in your community, there's what they're— what's going to keep it running, right? So again, in Industry Influencer, I talk about how to grow, you know, how to become an influencer, a leader by leveraging the power of community and leveraging the power of networking. With my Facebook group, I'll tell you what, I've been given the opportunity to be able to network with a lot of people, give people a platform themselves. And that's actually helped me grow my brand and my business.

Got it. I love that. And so I guess at what, how long did it take you to hit, like, I don't know, um, what's a good amount of people in the group? Was it 5,000?

Yeah. So, so 5,000, so I like to do increments of 5, right? So 5,000, 10,000, 15,000. So again, like to get, I would tell you the first 5,000 is the easiest actually. You know, the first 5, I would say the first 10,000 is the easiest. It's getting to 15 and to 20 that is really difficult, right? And again, think about money, right? Like, you have these certain milestones, right? Like, okay, I just, I want to make 6 figures, right? Then I want to get to a million, right? Then I want to get up there. But once you get past the million and you're getting to the 5 and the 10, it gets super difficult, right? It becomes crazier, right? And so, same thing with the Facebook groups, right? Again, what happens is that you have all these people coming in there, you're trying to manage it and whatnot, but there's There's a hack to that. There's a hack to that. The hack is you don't have to do everything by yourself. And then you're probably, for those who are listening, like, what do you mean? You're the one who's growing the group. No, you actually leverage the power of your moderators, right? You got people who want to have something to say, you elevate them, you help them do it. And then once you get to a certain point, you gotta have a team, right? People are always asking like, well, man, you got some really cool videos, Glenn. Oh man, you get—

Yeah.

I love what you wrote there. I love those images. I'm not— I'm terrible at editing videos. I'm terrible at graphic design, but I have a team. And so the thing is, this is a mindset shift, right, that everyone needs to have when they're trying to do a side gig. Their problem is, is that they forget how they became successful in their main gig. I'll use an example, okay? I have these dental professionals always reach out to me. They're like, I want to do a podcast. I want to do all these things. I was like, okay, well, why don't you get someone to help you like do the editing and stuff like that? Oh no, no, no, I want to do it myself because I want to save some money. Wait, wait, wait, so you, you have a multimillion-dollar practice and you have a team of 10. Would you try to do that by yourself? No, no, no, it's different. No, it's the same. It's the same. Okay, you are the visionary. You— your time is very valuable. It's the same thing. You have this mental block because you think it's a side gig and you're trying to do everything yourself. That is the number one Number one flaw of people who are budding entrepreneurs or trying to go into different vertical, they forget what made them successful in the first place. They all of a sudden, they're trying to be cheap, they're trying to cut corners, and they forget that. That's the biggest flaw, Eric, and hopefully everyone hears that.

Got it. So I guess, what is the plan long-term? Going back to your dentist and all that, I mean, your dental practices, not dentist.

Yeah.

And so, is your plan to completely be out of the day-to-day and have operators running these things? What's the plan?

That actually is that. So the plan is that I'm, uh, the actual hands-on dentistry, I'll probably want to cut down to half a day. The reason being is because there's certain cases that I still— that's fun to me, right? Like, it's a— I wanted to turn it into more of like a hobby. This is fun. I want to do these special cases. And the patients that, that really only want to see me, well, then I'll still keep on seeing them. So that's the goal. But the goal also is to, to grow this particular practice. I mean, again, we have 10 operatories, which is a big size. practice. My goal is just to build this one practice. I've been thinking about possibly opening more locations, but I think I want to have just like a huge mammoth practice to be able to take care of everyone in my community. And then also level up my team members, right? These doctors that come in, I love the relationship I have with them. I love to mentor them. I love to teach them. And that's why I got into coaching, because I love to mentor and help these, these doctors not only grow successful practices, but really go be successful in their home life and their side hustles and all these different things. As far as Nifty Thrifty Dentist goes, I mean, again, my goal is to turn it into one of the biggest media companies in dentistry, right? Obviously we have a very successful, uh, YouTube page, Facebook group, successful podcasts. Again, now I'm going into creating original programming, right? Where I'm helping other people. elevate their stature and doing programming for them so that we can add it to our YouTube page. So again, that's my goal. That's my goal, is to turn it into like one of the bigger media companies in dentistry.

Yeah, I think that's super smart. I mean, you know, media is one of the ultimate forms of leverage, right? Right now it's still very much your time is being required, so that, that's smart. Um, I think a lot of people are probably wondering too, you know, you mentioned moderators. One of the hardest things to hire is like a community manager or a moderator. So how did you go about doing that? How much do you pay them?

Yeah, so, so the biggest thing is, is that, you know, I have to look for someone who naturally— you have to hire on personality, right? So again, in my practice, people always think about like, well, I want to hire someone with X amount of experience. No, I hire actually on personality. I can train anybody, right? I can have them do exactly what I need to do. But if they have an open mind and if they have a great personality, I can work with that. And the same thing when it comes to moderators, right? So again, if you're, if you're, if you're not very active on social media, you can't really help me, right, as a moderator, right? But again, you know, there's different— I have a salary that I pay my moderators, and then I give them bonuses for, again, things, certain milestones they have to hit, right? So again, you got to give them some kind of skin in the game. But there is a hack for that too. You actually can have moderators And you actually don't have to pay them, but you gotta give them what they want, right? And most of these moderators, what they want is a platform so they can talk about the stuff that they're passionate about, right? They also want to learn from you. They also wanna level up too, as well. So if you wanted to do it the nifty thrifty way, getting someone moderating, find out what they want, right? Oh, I wanna start speaking more. Hey, I wanna have my own podcast. Hey, I wanna see how you do these things. A lot of times I call it the intern technique, right? Interns work for free because they want to learn, right? They want to get their foot in the door, right? They want to be in good with you, right? Use your clout, use your platform, and leverage that relationship to create a win-win. So again, that's a quick group hack where you don't actually have to pay for moderators. Great.

So 2 more questions from my side, I guess. So we talked about your book a little bit already, but what's your favorite business book that's not yours?

Oh man, and okay, and I guess I can't, I guess I can't use your book, right? Because yours is up there. Yours is up there. Um, I will tell you this, it's not so much of a business book that it's more of a mindset book, but again, you can apply it for business. Atomic Habits. Atomic Habits. Um, it's just, it literally has changed my life, okay? And in fact, it's actually helped my home life as well. I'll give you an example. There's a thing that James Clear talks about that's called habit stacking. Okay, habit stacking is basically you have a habit, you stick another habit on top of it, you connect it, right? So, um, my wife— and this is what— this is a home thing, right? My wife used to say, man, why aren't you washing the dishes? You know, you, you like to eat, you like to cook, you never like to wash the dishes, you know? And it got to the point where she brought it up more than once, so I knew that it was something that was bothering her, right? And so I told her, okay, you know what, I'm going to use the habit stacking thing. When I go over there and I put my plate into the sink, I want to start washing the dishes right away. So guess what? Guess who washes the dishes more often now? It's me. Because I eat and I put my plate in the sink, right when it sits in the sink, I start washing the dishes. So again, I know that's like a very basic example, but stuff like habit stacking, adding different things into my morning routine, right? So again, my morning routine, I wake up, I work out. And I told myself, well, You know, my goal has always been to read the Bible a little bit more, right? Like, I felt like I needed to. I never had enough time. So what I used to do is when I go work out, I'm really sweaty and I got to get out of my clothes, right? I got to let it kind of like dry off before I get out of my clothes, and I didn't want to wake up my wife. And so during that cooldown period, I would sit down and I would read a couple of passages in the Bible. So now I created a habit to where I can actually make time for it. I make time for it there. So Atomic Habits.

The Bible one makes sense to me. So Atomic Habits, great book. The Bible one makes sense to me. So by the way, we had— we've had James Clear on this podcast.

Oh gosh.

So, okay. But the other one doesn't make sense to me because if I don't like doing something, I'm not going to do it because it's not in my zone of genius or I'm just not interested in doing it.

Yeah.

How do you— I mean, it seems like you kind of just were like, okay, whatever. It's such a small thing. Was that what it was?

Yeah. Well, so I will say this, you know, there's— think about there's certain things in our life that we just have to do But we don't necessarily like to do it, right? And so what happens when you don't like to do something and you have to do it? Okay, again, that's the key. You have to do it, right? Like you don't have a choice, right? When you, when you, when you, when you don't have to do something, you just blow it off. You keep blowing it off, right? But at this point, my wife was nagging me to the point, and hopefully when she hears this, honey, I'm so sorry. But anyways, you know, I had to start pulling my weight and washing the dishes, right? And so for me, it's almost like a reaction, right? So like someone throws a football at you and you react, you flinch, right? So for me, it's almost a reaction now to where I put the plate down, I just grab the scouring pad and start washing the dishes there. So again—

That's a good habit.

You're a good husband. Again, do I like it? No. Do I feel like I have to do it? Yes. And that's the big difference there. So again, like there's certain things that I have to do in my dental practice, right? Like I hate writing my notes. What I just did. I think it's boring. I think it's mind-numbing, you know, but it has to be done because I have to document everything I do or else I'll get sued, right? So now again, right when I'm done with a patient, normally what I would do is I would say, okay, I'll write at the end of the day. Well, guess what happens? It doesn't get done because I don't really like it. I know I have to do it, but I don't really like it. Now when I'm done with a patient, I walk straight to my computer, don't listen to anyone else, and start writing the notes. So again, for things that you don't like to do, But you, you have to do it. I've used the habit stacking technique to really get those things done.

Yeah. All right. Well, Glenn, final question. What is your favorite business tool?

Oh man, favorite business tool. It's actually— I'll give you the tool that I use all the time. It's an app and it's called Voxer, right? So what Voxer is, it leaves kind of like voicemails or voice messages. Again, It's like a walkie-talkie. And so for me, it's like I have so many conversations going on all the time, but sometimes I— it's easier for me to just kind of talk it out instead of typing it out. And so I literally have thousands and thousands of Voxer messages that I listen to while I, while I go run, and I also listen to while I'm driving. So again, with Voxer and with any tool, if you don't put limits, it will control your life. Literally, if you don't get a hold of it. And so for me, I only listen to Voxer when I'm running or when I'm driving back and forth. I don't listen to it and get it in the way of my, you know, my family time or my business time.

Got it. That's awesome. So Glenn, this has been great. What's the best way for people to find you online and learn more about your book?

Yeah, so guys, easy, drglennvoe.com. That's everything about me. And also they'll have information about my book as well. And then also, you know, message me on Facebook. Literally, I am on social media a lot. I try not to have it dominate my life, but message me, send me a message. I answer everyone's message there, and we can connect there.

Cool. Glad. Thanks so much for doing this.

Eric, thank you so much, man. I had a blast.

Don't forget to check out the next video over there, okay? Over there. And before we go, Open a new tab, levelingup.com, to learn more about the book. We may or may not have other goodies tied to this book. All right, levelingup.com in a new tab. You can check out the next video first in a new tab, and we'll see you later.