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Transcript16 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hello, this is Cameron Cortejano with the Becker's Dental and DSO Review podcast. I'm thrilled to be joined today by Rob o' Dell, owner of WP Duo. Rob, thank you so much for being here today.
- [00:11]
B
Thanks for having me, Ken. I appreciate it.
- [00:13]
A
Awesome. Just to start us off today, can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your background?
- [00:18]
B
Yeah, so it's always a challenging question because I've done, you know, a lot of different things in my life and so I'll keep it brief instead of going back to the beginning of time. So my name's Rob. I'm the owner of WP Duo. We are a patient acquisition focused agency, specifically with multi location practices and you know, in the dental space and, and, and actually some other medical space as well, but, but primarily DSOs. And my background is a chief marketing officer of a company and I've been on both sides of the equation of like hiring agencies and then you know, kind of getting passed off to these junior teams. And so I just, when I had the opportunity a couple years ago to come on board and take over this company and grow it, I jumped at the opportunity to kind of make it different and learn from what I had been on the other side and what I would have liked as a, as a chief marketing officer. And so I've been building that and it's been working really well for practices that we work with. And so that's, that's, that's us in a nutshell and where we are.
- [01:18]
A
Awesome. Thanks so much. I appreciate it. What are some of the biggest issues in the dental space that, that you're following so far this year? I know we're almost halfway through with are some of those big topics, big issues that you're keeping an eye on, those kind of trends.
- [01:33]
B
You know, I think, you know, obviously coming at this with a marketing, a little bit more of a marketing angle as opposed to like practice operations, but it kind of bleeds together over time is like one thing I'm still noticing with, with practices is like fragmented patient acquisition systems. So like, you know, you get some leads, get emailed in, some people call on a phone and then they get managed in a different way. And so there's just like almost bespoke processes per place that patients come from and even, even potentially different people. And so I think there's still a lot of like opportunity to, to create more, you know, concise way for people to reach out to your practice and really just start the, the first conversation that's kind of being Ignored. It's almost like, oh yeah, we, we, you know, it's almost accepted fact that some emails, some leads come from emails, phone calls, you know, some come from Instagram DMs, you know, like they come from all over the place. And there's just not a central way to kind of collect all that, which creates a lot of chaos obviously for the practices. And I think that another one that I've seen become a challenge is really around the lead management process. And I think that, you know, for a new patient to come into a practice, you, it used to be really easy. You just put your flag in the ground and you, you get patients. But I think that over time there's no, no net new attention. And so really now it's like you train people on your inside, your organization to really focus on that lead nurture and you know, answering questions, but also encouraging them to actually like book the first appointment and, and balancing that really well and actually doing the process of following up. And I just see that being something that we've been coaching a lot on this year in the last six months, in fact, like developing some programs around it for, for some clients that are larger and just really systematizing how you do that so that at least you have these checks in place when you're, when you're working to. Leads seem to be the two biggest.
- [03:26]
A
Ones that I've noticed when patients are coming in through all these different avenues. Like you were saying, some emails, some social media, some phone. What is the kind of the impact of that on the practice and, and how they can, how the patients come in with patient acquisition and stuff like that. Is it better if they're all coming from the same space? Is it sometimes good to have them from, from different avenues? I just guess what, what's kind of the impact of that? I guess fragmentation is, is how you described it.
- [03:57]
B
Yeah, that's the biggest impact is you actually leads fall through the, fall through the cracks really easily and, or they don't get followed up on right away. And so like, you know, in certain spaces, right, if you're, if you're thinking about urgent issues or things where a patient needs to be seen, you know, maybe squeezed in on a particular day for an issue, you know, if they come in through a specific channel but you're not monitoring that or you don't have a system to give you an alert for that, then you drop the ball, right? You lose that lead. And so there's a lot of just, you know, obviously speed to lead has been important and that's always been true, but I think now even more it's, it's just disjointed. And so I think for a practice to standardize, at least for the most, as much as, as is possible to say, hey, no matter where a lead's coming from, we have this one system where they all come through, right? So if it's our website, if it's social, if it's some like inbound place, then they all come through this one place and we have a tracking phone number in place. We have kind of all this infrastructure in place that allows us to basically monitor essentially like a more traditional style like pipeline of patients. So regardless of where they're coming from, they're kind of being centralized into one place. And that's not usually, I'm, I'm gonna maybe draw some swords on this one, but that's not usually your ehr, right. So it needs to be a different system that is actually capable of doing like proper marketing as opposed to like patient management. So you know, that's where we draw a hard line in, in kind of tools. But, but really just focusing on bringing some tool that brings as much of that as possible into one place for your team so that you consistently follow up and you consistently apply the same follow up practices and procedures for each patient in the same way.
- [05:37]
A
Got it. That makes sense. Something that I'm curious to get your thoughts on or what are some things that are exciting you when it comes to dentistry right now and what are some aspects of the industry that are potentially making you a little bit nervous or concerned?
- [05:51]
B
What am I excited about? I think, you know, kind of going back on this infrastructure side. Like I think that with all the tools and all the AI stuff and really just the technology that's being like released by even some of the better, you know, EHR platforms. I've never been more optimistic about the potential for like tool consolidation. So just using one tool for certain things and really just making it easy on yourself in that way. I think that one thing that's kind of, I guess gotten me more excited about is, is how to really like dominate a market is becoming, I think something where there's a little bit of a formula that works. So I'm excited to kind of like apply that in a couple markets. We've been testing some kind of new strategies and it's been working pretty well. So you know, that type of thing I think on the excitement side has been really like the issue with most practices that everybody thinks they have a lead problem, but they, and they do it in the, in the beginning, but really it's a systems problem and an infrastructure problem when you take a closer look at it. And that usually comes up anywhere between like, you know, 45 to 90 days into working with us. Right? You're like, oh, actually here's our real problem. And so we, we end up solving that challenge. So that's exciting to me. I think things that make me nervous are, you know, things like just short term thinking. You know, I've worked with a couple of, of practices recently, within the last year really that, you know, after 30 days they, they, they had no Instagram account we started, they had no social media presence, they had no, you know, certain things in place. And then after 30 days they're wondering like where, where all the patients are, where the results are. And so I think that if you're, if you're starting from scratch, like really take a hard look at where you're starting from and understand that like you may have ground to make up in terms of like, if you're, if you're applying a social strategy for elite for patients and trying to grow your moat that way and really understanding like what traction looks like and that will, you'll pay dividends if you set your mind on, okay, this is going to take 90 days to get everything kind of flowing in a way that we would expect, then you end up with a better result. Right. Because if you expect results tomorrow, a lot of times that's just not possible. You're breaking through a lot of attention, you're breaking through a lot of noise in your market depending on how competitive it. So I just see a lot of short term thinking with some, some practices and then I think I've heard a lot of people talk about this, but I do think like retention, employee retention, you know, really just around keeping good people, training good people. And I don't think that in the short term that AI tools are the answer. I've, we've experimented with a bunch of them and they just, you lose that personal touch. And so I think there's gotta be a balance in a way to like navigate that. I don't know exactly what it looks like yet, but I do think that there's some stuff that's happening that would be I think pretty, pretty good on the horizon for at least retaining and kind of combining like people with AI tools and kind of making it clear that one is one and one of the other and just working through that way.
- [08:45]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of practices and DSOs and even just companies not in healthcare or dentistry are kind of going through that, those kind of challenges of where is that balance between having the human touch but also using AI? I think it's gonna be interesting over the next couple of years to see how the dental industry kind of adapts to that and where they can find that balance. Yep.
- [09:12]
B
You know, it's funny that you say that because actually even something as simple as one, one group that we applied this across every practice, I think it was 10 practices. We just re. We just had an out of office message. So like if they re. If they text at a specific time and there's no one available, it just says, hey, we're not available right now. We'll get back to you as soon as. If this is emergency, you call this number. But you know, we'll get back to you as soon as we're open. And it gives like the business hours for the next day. Just that change alone has allowed, has given space for the team to breathe to like actually follow up with leads.
- [09:42]
A
Yeah, I think that that definitely makes sense. And then the last question we have for today, what in, in your view, what will the most effective healthcare and dental leaders need in order to be successful over the next two to three years?
- [09:57]
B
I think that there's, there's really probably, well, I'll say two or three things, but I think the main thing is really thinking about their systems instead of just tactics. And this is something that has been a kind of a theme through my whole career. It's like, you know, I started marketing a long, long time ago and people were putting like white text on a white page. It's like that's just a tactic to get. To do what? Like get traffic to your website or get. Generate leads. I think in order to be more effective, especially in a world where, you know, people and technology are combining at a ever blazing pace, you. You really want to start thinking about systems that give you the ability to do that and adapt to, you know, whatever, whatever lead system is working. If Google Ads are working really well right now, like cool, let's switch there for a quarter and see how that goes. Or if social's working. If TikTok, like you don't want to be platform dependent as much as you want to start to think about like the system and that kind of feeds into. I think the biggest thing for practice is to be the most competitive is to actually start to build a real moat around their business with whether that's using like core values and things like, you know, creating Your own purple cow and creating your own brand positioning. But really just the practices that we've seen create the most distance between themselves and their next closest competitor is almost creating like a blue ocean strategy where they focus on these like high value things that drive real impact for the business, like compounding being like really rigorous about their Google review process. And so like one of our competitors, one of our practices has like gotten 10x more reviews than their next closest competitor in their, in their markets. And so being able to, to put the distance between yourself and other practices through like aggressive kind of systems thinking and, and building your competitive mode are I think two of the, the biggest things. And then the last one is really just, you know, tried and true like operational excellence. Right. Being willing to like train people, you know, roll out something in your practice and know like, hey, if we have five practices, it's going to take us a little time to get this in place across all practices because, you know, that's why we obviously track numbers and, and we can coach. But you know, just because one practice is doing really well doesn't mean that all, it will translate to all of them because even micro markets are unique. And, and so you just have to be able to have that insight to know like, okay, this, this, this location might need a little bit different angle on their, their offer or they might need more support in this area because they aren't great at making phone calls and they're nervous about that. So just kind of figuring out what the nuances are but just knowing that like it takes time to roll things out. You know, I don't know the exact numbers, but I remember when Chick Fil? A rolled out that like my pleasure line, it took them like six years or something, eight years to roll it out fully. And that's just one simple line at the end of like your checkout. So just know that if you're running 5, 6, 10 locations and you're trying to roll something out, like it takes time but you'll get there.
- [12:52]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I think those, those all make a lot of sense. Some, some great advice. Well, I want to thank you for joining us today, Robin, and sharing your valuable expertise and insights into the industry. It's been a pleasure speaking with you today and I look forward to connecting with you again in the future.
- [13:09]
B
Okay, that sounds good. I appreciate you having me on. Thank you.