The Million Dollar Dental Membership Plan - Justin Coke

welcome to the automatic patient podcast where we help your dental practice create a kickass recurring Revenue model here are your hosts Mr Jordan and Justin comto this podcast is powered by boomcloud create manage and grow your dental membership program schedule a demo on boomcloud tocom [Music] what's up everybody super pumped to be uh on the show today I got a friend and a industry expert his name is Justin Coke Justin what's up and welcome to the podcast today man hey Jordan how's it going glad to

be here good man just shipped a bunch of my team off to the Yankee Dental conference so uh it's not as wild as usual in in the boom Cloud offices today but uh pumped to be uh going to another event again so yeah how are you doing was it was nice seeing you guys in New York I wasn't able to make it to Yankee I can't fly right now a little bit of eye issues but uh I'll plan to get back at it pretty quick yeah

are you guys going to midwinter or any other events yeah the plan is to be a midwinter uh if things work out but that's that's the plan right now cool yeah we'll be at midwinter uh at Yankee right now going to Hinman really all the big ones this year so I I'll I'll go to several of them but I won't go to all of them because you know I got I got a young family and all girls they want me to be at home so I

Tred to stay I'm a girl Dad too you that I I got two daughters at home as well that's awesome yeah I got three three daughters and I used to have a dog that was also a female so I was really really uh surrounded in all aspects with the girls it's my world I got I got wife two daughters two female dogs and a and a company of 250 people with 9% of them are women so it's my world it's your world man yeah in fact

fun story my oldest daughter she's eight her name is Lennon um and she's a she's she's Super Rad She if you go to our website boomcloud you'll notice that there's pink everywhere so my daughter is the one that chose that pink and I fell in love with it and now it's everywhere in our brand the pink inside the software everywhere and um pink lightning Bowl behind you on your board yep I got a a pink lightning Bowl I have pink shoes when we go to events

I have like a pink watch band Pink Shoes and pink phone cover and so do all my employees and it all stem because my oldest daughter I was teaching her how to set up like websites and that you can control them and change them and she's like no way and I said I pulled up the boomcloud website and because I have access to it and I'm like what color do you want to change that button to and she chose this pink color and it just looked

really good with with the blue I call it our cotton candy theme but uh I loved it so much and yeah my daughters are always a huge influence in in what we do here they come and visit my team and it's it's a lot of fun so no that's awesome so Justin you are the uh do I call you founder or owner of 7 to S Dental what do I call you there both I mean yeah founder CEO founder CEO owner all the above uh you

started 7 to7 Dental uh over in Texas uh why don't you tell our audience a little bit about yourself how how how did you get into Dentistry what did you do even before Dentistry kind of give that story and and what you guys are doing now at 7 to7 yeah for for sure so it's a it's a common question I get asked because U I'm not a dentist and it's very very unusual uh for somebody to say that they are a founder and and managing partner

of a dental organization if they're not a dentist that's a the first thing I get asked when they ask me what I do and then talk about my company and they said oh you're a dentist and I'm not so I I get that question quite a bit and it's actually quite simple I was uh I was working in medical device uh doing business development sales things like that running running a small uh uh surgical Distribution Company in San Antonio it was uh running it for somebody

else which great um but he made decisions on behalf of the company that were not beneficial to me uh ultimately and I needed to do something on my own I'd worked for I'd worked for uh Corporate America for about eight years before probably about six years before I started medical device and and I was ready to do something of my own my my friend my really good friend Brian Stewart is a dentist he h his own practice uh in San Antonio didn't care for the aspects

of management leadership you know being all things to all people all the time yeah all the fun stuff yeah yeah all the things that all the things that make Dentistry great and uh so we were just in his backyard over beer we were talking about you know life and work and both of us were pretty disappointed with our work and uh so I proposed that we do something together and he's what do you want to do and I said I don't know Dentistry seems like a

pretty good gig I said but I think we can do it better and he kind of looked at me funny and said what does that mean and I said I don't know give me a minute I'll you know give me a little bit of time I'm to write a business plan and uh so I did I wrote a business plan for a a dental organization that was high customer touch a level of customer service that I wasn't used to in the industry and it really wasn't

there 15 years ago and extended hours so we're open 7:00 am. to 7 PM Monday through Friday 9: to 5 Saturdays and Sundays so we're open almost every day of the year and that was where we got started and so went to the bank took out a loan that was way too big for my comfort level 15 years ago we open we opened a small four out practice uh soon to grow into uh eight locations about 120 chairs across San Antonio we got about 250 employees

I work with 30 plus doctors and orthodontists or general dentists and orthodontists about 40 hygienists about 9 I think it's 92 dental assistants and then a tremend a bunch of administrative team members as well so yeah that's cool so uh Dentistry over Bears is how you got into into this world yes Dentistry over bears I love it man I think some of the greatest things have come from backyard beers backyard beers no I love it dude that's that's Super Rad and you guys have had a

ton of success with uh with uh creating and and growing your own Dental membership plan which you know one of the reasons why I brought you on on this uh the podcast today is because of your guys' success not only with with your with your practices but what you guys are doing and how you're growing your membership plans so I think it's really cool um but before we get into that um number one those of you that don't know what a membership plan is Think Like

Amazon Prime but for your your patients where your patients pay you a monthly or yearly subscription in exchange for dental services savings and you know exams and cleanings so if you're not offering one it's a wonderful way to um attract and retain patience but from your your perspective Justin why did you guys start offering a membership plan because you you started offering one probably before the this interest and wave in the industry of membership plans were you know was was what it is today right so

what what was the reason you guys started offering membership plans uh so you know for years we call it an IDP or an in-house dental plan we've been doing we've been doing one since 2009 and what caused us to do that was you know we were we were one of the lucky ones that got to open and start a new business right before before the 2008 recession so sure yeah that was that was a lot of fun it it proved to us that we knew what

we were doing because we got through it but what we found and being in San Antonio we had a lot of banking institutions and that during that time there was a tremendous amount of consolidation wov is the the Washington mutuals all of these companies they were starting to consolidate and that meant a huge number of job losses in in our city during 2009 kind of what's happening right now Across the Nation a lot of job losses yeah a lot of tech jobs for sure but yeah

you know so this is mostly Banking and we had a lot of banks and so they were consolidating Banks getting rid a lot of their employees and so we recognized very early on that these people were going to lose their insurance and so we decided to come up with a plan to it was more of a it was more of a a bridge for them until they could go from this insurance to that insurance sure but we found that a lot of patients didn't go from

this insurance to that insurance they just stayed on our plan they stayed yeah yeah they they got sticky to the practice and they liked what we offered so they weren't paying the the premium to their their next employer um the problem that we the problem that we had with it and honestly the reason that we've enjoyed working with you guys so much is that um we didn't have the technology to track and manage it very well and so I I couldn't have at that time yeah

200 2009 the tech industry was just a baby then exactly right yeah I couldn't have told you how many patients we had on it couldn't have told you when any of those people were up for Renewal I couldn't have told you anything yeah and so were were you guys at that time were you were you collecting subscriptions or is it just kind of when they walked in you renewed them we were not actively I mean in some of our direct marketing and stuff like that it

was it was in a brochure that we had sent out but it was primarily patients that were coming into our practice that you know they came in for our new patient special which is like a hundred bucks but that's a one time thing and it's like hey while you're here let's just do this moving forward and that was kind of our marketing for it cool um but over the years you know we got like I like I said I couldn't tell you how many patience we

had on it over the the years before we started working with you guys but it worked really well we we knew it worked because we we could we had it in our system that the patients were there but I couldn't really pull any data on it so we knew the patients wanted it we knew they liked it and they they like coming to us and so many people uh you know especially kind of the kind of the whole Co era you know so many people started

moving jobs and and stopped working at traditional companies and doing their own things and so I think there was even more need for it probably over the last three years than ever before because the the job market with gig you know the gig Workforce and all that kind of stuff they don't have traditional jobs where they're getting insurance from an employer so they've got to get it from somewhere and you know Open Marketplace for dental insurance is absolute garbage in fact dental insurance is garbage at

best and so providing them something that gives them the ability to carry it with them no matter where they are what they're doing things is carried along with them it made so much sense to me yeah so you saw the deand the demand the demand and the need for it I mean if you look at the stats you know over half the United States doesn't have dental insurance because I'm sure most most uh Americans realize that you know dental insurance is garbage they do the the

simple math you know on what they're getting in return you know and and what's happening you know with insurance the dental insurance industry in regards to the offer right it's just a terrible offer so over half the United States doesn't have dental insurance and you throw covid in there um and and just the constant uh even the consistent recessions and and things like that that happen in our economy the demand just keeps growing that's all I've seen over the years is the demand for patients that

need some type of mechanism like a membership plan to get access to Quality dentistry and and um and save some money by becoming loyal to the office I think that demand just continues to grow and and you know we're seeing I I quit I did a I've been doing a lot of research lately and I found that Millions there's millions of searches online every month for dental insurance like Alternatives and solutions Millions patients are searching every day every month for for this type of thing it's

fascinating to me that um the demand for this is so strong and Across the Nation right so okay so you saw uh the need because of the the your patients were transitioning jobs and you're like well let's put you on this and you realize that it they retained them on that you're like okay this is actually kind of cool and then you started just offering it regularly now you offer you it's a subscription uh monthly what do you offer do you offer monthly and yearly subscriptions

to your patients that sign up we do uh prior to moving over with you guys we were it was just a it was a once a year payment okay they got a bit of a discount for each additional family family member that they brought on but it was a painful yeah that's pretty tradition well a big part of that was we didn't know uh we we weren't able to to track it uh and Bill for it properly because um and and keeping those credit cards on

file you know we're not PCI Compliant I guess because we're not yeah that's not how we're set up and sure keeping keeping patients confidential information like credit cards was really kind of outside of our comfort zone and so being able to build them every month was almost non non-existent we couldn't do it yeah we just made it but that but that makes it to a point where you got a family of four or five where it becomes uh kind of outside of the reach of affordability

and so we we didn't always get those families and so I really like the fact that we've been able to take it to a monthly uh annual annual agreement with our patient so they can pay it out and make it more affordable do we have patients that still want to pay it in full absolutely we've got some of we got Dave ramseyers and some um you know where everything's got to be in a plastic bag you know this is for dental and you know and some

and we've got a bunch of retired patients that that are that very fixed incomes and everything is just kind of the way that it is and they want to pay so you know and we worked with you guys to figure that out so that we could do monthly or annual but I would say 99% of our patients off for a monthly option yeah that's interesting because like if if I if I owned a practice I would definitely offer you know a monthly membership plan because of

several reasons right number one is that it's under the radar payments you're not like a yearly payment if it's like $400 a year like patients feel that people feel that right um maybe around a birthday party or a uh like a kid's birthday or around Christmas or you know where they get that money taken out and it's like oh that actually hurt right so that's why I like monthly is cuz the under the radar um um payments I also like them because they're Evergreen be because

they're under the radar they they tend to stay on longer where I've noticed at least with the data I have on our platform that yearly subscriptions tend to cancel or churn out more frequently than monthly uh subscriptions so I think that's cool that you guys do that and you guys actually do something very unique in in the dental space with your with your pack your pricing packaging and um I was inspired by it so much and I'll I'll let you talk about that in a minute

because I think it's really interesting but we were inspired by it so much here at boomcloud that we actually for our own service offerings we converted to that type of uh model of of of basically Choose Your Own Adventure type model in pricing how funny you say that I was talking to my marketing director today and I actually use that exact same quot We Choose Your Own Adventure that's what it is right and um we so we switch our own p packaging you know we we're

selling the boomcloud software and the boomcloud marketplace so um RVP is sells uh Tyson who you met in New York I think you've met him several times but um we were hanging out New York all together but I remember Tyson coming to me he's like I really like what 7 to s's doing with their their packaging we should consider doing that you know to sell our software and we did that and increased our conversion rates like crazy so why don't you tell our audience kind of

how you guys have set up your your pricing because I think it's genius and I think it really um kind of caters to all types of uh of patients and their needs yeah so if you if you look at the traditional model whether a practice has a membership or they've got an in-house dental plan or whatever they whatever they choose to call it or however they administer it there's usually a one- siiz fits-all option that they put out for every and and that one size fits-all

is typically you know cleaning or two cleanings a year exams maybe an emergency visit um x-rays things like that at no cost above and beyond the membership fee and then and then they sit there and they and they beat themselves up over what the percentage discount is going to be because they're like I don't want to give away my services I'd rather mow my grass and do a crown for 30% off right and so um but the reality of it is is if if you don't

give them something that's that in their mind meets the needs of what it is that they're going to be doing in your practice then then it's not valuable enough for them right and they're not GNA 20 30 40 50 bucks a month for this membership and so but and then and then setting it up as a one-size fits-all um Everybody Wants choices now if you give too many then then you get uh you get like uh paralysis you know like analysis paralysis from your buyers and

they'll choose tot think about it and then do nothing so if it's yeah if it's too complicated people just shut down like I'm not going to choose I'm not going to decide yeah I call that the cheesecake phenomenon Cheesecake Factory phenomenon right you get their too many cheesec looks like a novel like a like you know like a seven 1700 page novel can't choose what you want to eat so you know go to a barbecue place and you get brisket chicken or yes right so you

get like three options and but it but what It ultimately does is you set these plans up that are they're going to be mutually beneficial for the practice and for the patient but it also doesn't are somebody to jump into something that they don't need let's say you've got a patient that has a lot of they know that they're going to have a lot of dental needs and so they're going to choose my my my Platinum package which gives a lot more service offerings a lot

higher discounts but it's it's considerably more expensive than my uh than my routine maintenance package which is basically like a preventative and basic Services package and but you know somebody who's been going to the dentist regularly and may have and may have just recently you know retired or lost their dental insurance or choose chose to not renew it they don't need that they just want the cleaning aspect of it they're going to come in twice a year and they're going to get their cleans they don't

need to pay me the the big and they don't even need to pay for the minimum or the middle one they need to pay for the the least expensive that's going to get them what they need and we're going to have a patient forever yeah you have and then you have patients that really have a lot of needs and they know that and but we even give the option if they choose the least expensive one come in determine that they have a lot more needs that

they've got they can upgrade that so we we give them three options and it's uh it's it's better it's good better best and yeah or low needs medium needs High needs yeah something like that no I I think it's amazing sorry I cut you off go ahead no that's fine and and it's worked really well for us you know I've gotten a little bit of criticism from some of my colleagues they're like well that's too hard you shouldn't have that many options I'm like okay you

do you and I'll do me and and I found that mine works really really well yeah so let's let's go off off of the data right now because you guys grown a very successful membership plan so you you may have some people say like you said well three plans is too much but well let's let's look at the data is it too much because you guys have you know a growing membership plan and what's kind of share the stats with what you guys have achieved so

far with your membership plan what what what's the active members and I know you have mult multiple locations what uh what are the active members how much revenue is it producing for membership revenue is it producing just just so everybody understands we've been we've been working with you guys since October 21 yeah and since October 21 that puts us what right about right about a year and a half that we've been working with you guys is that about right yeah I think so this sounds about

we we've grown that and I don't know exactly how many of our old uh IDP patients we everyone that was on an in-house dental plan has since transitioned but I don't know how many of them transitions or were new uh new members new patients or I I don't have the data on that but sure that's fine what I do know is that in the year and a half that we've been working with you guys we've add we've we've had 20 it's just over 2200 people uh

join our membership plan and that's a that's a combination of of silver gold and platinum funny enough with those with those uh options I kind of thought people would would tend to kind of go towards the middle sure and they don't um they go to the higher end right they either go low or they go high so it's the same on on our packaging too I've noticed it's either low or high our breakup is 45 low 45 high 10 middle wow and I was really blown

away because I I thought I knew what the consumer would do but it it shows how little I know about the consumer apparently but or their decision making but what I do know is they needed options and and this allows them and so yeah we're about 451 45 and and we've added 2200 patients we typically add somewhere in the neighborhood of about 150 to 200 new patients per month wow that does include that does include eight offices across our city but sure but but we're still

adding about 150 to 200 patients and funny funny enough um a lot of the patients that are joining our membership are not joining in office they're they're they're patients that have never even been to our practice signing up for our membership and one of the things that we we have a we have a person that's their sole responsibility is to manage the membership and and make um every new member that signs up her first job is to call them welcome them to the practice and get

their appointment sched so on board them yeah you have you have an onboarding person yeah or a new patient new new membership patient uh committee well that's exactly what it is because the one thing I don't want them to do is is join and not show up and then and then get nothing from us and then like well this is dumb and then they forget to call and they're like oh well I see this I don't need that anymore so our our goal and and it's

there's been studies that show that the the the quicker you get with somebody who signs up for any type of a a subscription of membership and you get them you get them acclimated and on board and moving forward with it the longer they're going to stay on it so that's a big deal for us is making sure that we are the first you get a phone call from us immediately listen immediately to schedule um and get them in practice yeah no I think that's really important

because I mean um onboarding is so critical like you said especially in a subscription economy right um and if a patient is signing up online without talking to anybody it's awesome you want to quickly connect with them and and get them in the schedule because a lot of the times we we've see that you know member patients spend three times more with a practice than than non-member patients from from our data um and I think it's really critical to get these these types of patients in

because of the value they they bring to the table right and obviously it's it's just a win-win for both the patient and your practice so with that with that many uh active membership patients what what what type of monthly recurring Revenue are we looking at here with your platform or your program right now we're we're about 85,000 in growing yeah that's amazing so so that's that's that's uh a million dollar membership plan yeah so and it like I said it's continuing to grow so we're we're

really pleased with the results um and you know my my director of marketing he has he does most of the work on on getting this out to the community but his goal is to have uh you know I I don't think we're going to meet it because we're we're not we're not moving at the TR trajectory wanted we're we're kind of staying level on the number of patients that joined per month he was really hoping to Skyrocket it but we're staying very we're staying very consistent

but he was wanting to have four or 5,000 members by October of this year which is obviously we're not going to meet that number but I I don't have any doubt in my mind that will probably be somewhere above 3,000 by October this year yeah I would imagine what what are you guys doing to to promote externally so because you got obviously patients walking in and you're educating them I'm guessing you have a sign Edge and you're your team is maybe trained to you know talk

about joining the membership plan from like an internal marketing perspective um is there any did I miss anything there is that is that kind of what you guys from an like as patients walk in are you are you is your team or teams talking uh to patients about it what what are they doing internally the first thing that we did was uh we we came up with a with a a picture that we put in every one of our lobbies and it's basically a bunch of

blue umbrellas within our colors are orange and blue so it worked for us but sure it was a b blue umbrellas with a big orange umbrella sticking above all of them and it says drop the insurance we've got you covered yes and got brochures and we've got brochures throughout the office we have uh we have televisions we have two two TVs in every single operatory that we have and we use a a marketing uh basically like you go to a bar that has like advertising and

then it does some some entertaining stuff like chive or something like that on the back and we do the same thing and so we make custom videos and do kinds of things and part of that real marketing is going to be for our membership plan and and trying to convince people to kind of transition away from dental insurance we don't tell them that dental insurance is bad because that's the last yeah you don't want to talk negative we can yeah you don't want to tell somebody

that their baby's ugly right and yeah especially like to a patient like behind the scenes like you know we can make fun of insurance all we want but when you're talking to patients I think there's needs to be a little bit more class right and not oh there's there's always and you when we're talking to patients we're like oh we love your insurance it works great in our office but we don't really mean it I mean it works it work it does work good in our

office as good as dental insurance can sure yeah no I like that and so um but yeah we we started kind of just internally starting the wheels marketing but um our team because our team is so comfortable talking about a dental plan just modifying the verbage to a membership and having options was not really that difficult for my team it's not we weren't adding something a new layer of complexity that they had never seen before it's pretty simple that so that was helpful we just had

to kind of get everybody on board with what the different tiers were which wasn't too challenging um my my hygienists really like it my my treatment coordinators love it because you know you can take somebody that's got a you know a $5,000 treatment plan and it's got a $5,000 treatment plan and say Hey you know if you joined our membership you'd save this much money and they could kind of show them option so a lot of times patients are saving more on their restorative side with

than they pay for the membership for an entire year right so yeah my treatment coordinators absolutely love it they they won't shut up about it to patients that come in that don't have some type of insurance um yeah a good treatment uh a good treatment coordinator is valuable be especially with membership plans because they understand both the Pains of the practice and the patient and they can kind of use those two to create a really good relationship between your patients that's awesome so oh goad and

once we once we kind of got the internal stuff mapped out we need to start looking at our external side our direct to Patient marketing right uh that's something that we have always done we've always been a very big on direct to Patient marketing because it I look at I look at marketing much like I look at Dental Supplies if you don't have Dental Supplies you can't do the Dentistry for the patients but if you don't have patients you can't do any D absolutely I look

at it kind of like air where a lot of practicers look at it like an expense I look like I look at it as a requirement to run our business and so we've always been very heavy in the marketing we do Direct Mail we do PPC we do SEO we do uh Geo targeting for uh around emergency care clinics for you know like urgent care clinics we we're on Hulu we do geo geofencing on Hulu um uh Pandora you name we do all kinds of stuff

we're on our local radio stations you know the soccer mom the top 40 radio stations where we've been marketing with those guys for years we do DJ testimonials so all the DJs that talk for us they're all of our patients and they oh that's awesome so and you know we sponsor UTSA we we do all this sponsorship stuff and so we we had a pretty easy time getting it out there we just just kind of modify your message a little bit and say hey look what

we got here and it's been very very effective yeah so it sounds like you guys Ed multiple for multiple Market marketing channels which I would obviously recommend because that's how you grow there's no one Silver Bullet marketing channel that's going to work right um I mean what I would recommend is you if if you're if you're new to marketing your practice choose one get good at it and then and then bolt on the next one right and keep adding uh multiple marketing channels because obviously could

get overwhelming if you're trying to do all of them at once but from Radio ads to direct mail marketing to uh PPC or Google search ads um and the the Hulu commercials that's actually really creative uh I don't think you see too many dental offices doing that so that's really interesting and I would imagine it's digital a digital advertising platform so it probably be pretty straightforward to set up from what it seems yeah my marketing director handles it all from his office he doesn't you know

it's it's nothing just and we make we regularly every month we're making new videos and so we've got a work with a company that does professional videos for us and so making a video about something either it's a training video or marketing video or talking about any of your benefits or membership or whatever may be and what I think what we run primarily on on Hulu when it's not a specific time of year that we're promoting one thing or another is our membership yeah and how

on on like a Hulu type commercial how are you getting people are you getting people a call or they scanning like a QR code from the TV what like what are what are they doing from there typically we we've got a QR code that comes up on that app our goal is not for them to call about the membership it's to go and and look at it so um it takes them to our landing page the QR code Tes takes them to the membership landing page

um I don't want them to call at first and say hey tell me about your membership yeah yeah you know we take you know we take about six to 700 phone calls a day from our patients trying to schedule appointments after said the other you're trying to manage that yeah trying to manage just ask you know answering a million questions that we actually have answer you know frequently asked questions on our website so we encourage them to go there first and then if they have questions

obviously call but that's that's kind of the direction but it also you know it's also very easy for them to sign up right there it's like boom here you're here here's what it is and now sign up yeah that's that's really interesting and you you guys have a like a marketing team right is that Travis Travis is the marketing guy right you call it a marketing team Travis is the marketing team so Travis is all things marketing that's the beautiful thing about Mark though because it's

a it's a one to many uh type uh department or or system in a business so you don't need a large marketing team and because you guys have how many locations you guys have right now uh we've got eight well nine in May so nine nine locations in May and you got one guy doing all the marketing for all locations so that that which is pretty cool because like I said marketing is a one Dem many type um business uh function so you really don't need

a a ton of markers you just need one one guy who's smart yeah good one right so and that's the fun part too is that's my favorite part about business is marketing um you know that's my knowledge of marketing that's how I was able to start my company boomcloud and uh with my knowledge of marketing I was able to scale it just being one one dude at the time right now we got a whole team but no that that's the power of a good marketer so

a nice job finding Travis I don't know how you found him but uh Travis right do I it's right Travis okay cool um I I talked to lots of people so sometimes I get names mixed up um one of my last questions I have for you uh we didn't talk about this but I've I've been getting this question a lot and I know you have experience with it because I want to connect you with several uh practice owners that have dealt with this um there's a

practice up in Idaho that I talked to a lot that it's on our platform and and they're like Jordan we got all these practices kind of uh very simil your setup I think they have a few practices and they're non they're non- dentists right that own them and he's like we got all these uh all of our our Associates you know our dentists that work with us the hardest thing that we're dealing with is is getting them convinced on the membership plan because they think that

you know they want to collect full fee for their what they do which I totally get like I I get it but I'm also a big believer in in if you if you are strategic with like discounting and helping patients save then it could it will pay way more than than um you know trying to collect 100% of your fees so you got uh practices or dentists that you know are have a hard time with the the the mindset and then you have also dentists dentists

that may maybe Associates and they're like well how do I get paid for this right so that those those are the two questions I have for you how did you solve that with all the docs you work with it was a very it was a very tough time of life it was it was it kind of goes back to the beginning of our conversation when I was talking about doctors not wanting to give away 30% because they sure because and and and I understand the the

initial principle yeah if I if I if I get something if I get ,000 for doing something and then I do it for $700 I lost $300 sure but what but what they're missing is is that 100% of the Thousand procedures that you present are not going to do it so if if 100% of your patients always did everything that you wanted when you said to do it there's no there's no reason to have anything like a membership that gives discounts and benefits and reasons for

them to get this stuff done but what ultimately happens is is that you present this thousand treatment or this 10,000 or whatever let's say th for Mass sake thousand procedure and and we're talking about fee for service right we're not talking about insurance Fe fee for service very few people are going to do that unless they're in pain and if you say but if you say hey here's a membership that as a practice owner I'm over the course of a year I'm going to collect now

the associate doesn't get this but the but the practice $400 and then but the associates also want they they say well I want some of that it's like well you're not paying for the hygiene we're doing for free so yeah this is a so so you say okay well you know maybe maybe 10 to 20% of the patients will do that so out of 10 procedures you're going to do two on the high side yeah so you're get so you're going to get $2,000 worth of

production but if you have somebody on a membership who has who has made a personal commitment to your practice and to getting their Dental Care done commit a commitment with their wallet and so they had to pay for it so they want to use the benefit that they've paid for and so okay now I'm going to do uh $700 Crown so let's say it's a 30% discount I'm going to do $700 crowns but I'm going to do 50% of the ones that I present sure so

now I'm gonna do five instead of two yeah so now instead of doing $2,000 worth of production I'm gonna do what $3500 worth of production yeah yeah a lot more I've almost almost doubled it and if I and if I can increase that just one more then i' more than doubled the amount of Dentistry that I'm going to do yes it takes a little bit more time but the associates aren't paying for the supplies the associates aren't paying for anything the only the only thing is

is a little bit of difference to how they get paid but if they weren't doing those other crowns at $700 you know where they would be where behind a computer doing nothing so it's a matter it's a matter of filling chairs with reasonably priced Dentistry that doesn't cost to practice money you don't want to do things that are going to lose you money but if the associate wins the practice wins and the patient wins totally there is no reason not to do that and and and

it's funny because when we first did this you I got doctors that that are doing you know Delta Dentals probably the largest dental insurance in the country say most practices even those that don't accept most insurance many times will accept Delta because they make it so challenging to be out of network with them yep they do they'll sit there and will do Delta Dental Crown feeds for you know in San Antonio our Delta Dental Crown is $640 my usual and customary fee for a crown is

$1,250 and they do those all day long and they've never said a word about it and we roll out our membership plan and and the crown fee is like 750 bucks and you would have thought that I that I just stole their child or something do you do this to me and and so I mean it we went through through this I had some doctors that were like hey no I get it I understand econom is a scale I'm going to do more work I'm going

to yeah and then I had some that didn't but they also the big one of the biggest challenges they had is like look you guys are acting like every single person that walks through here to do Dentistry with you is going to be a platinum member and I said but I said but think about the data behind this I said we we saw we saw 47,000 hygiene patients last year and 2200 of those are membership patients so it's a small percentage of everyone that we're seeing

so you guys are really overestimating how many membership patients we're seeing but you should want to see membership patients because and here's the number one thing to get past Associates with because most Associates are paid off of net production or collections sure yeah I don't have to deal with any other people other than the patient to get paid for the work that you've done I make an agreement with the between the doctor and the patient and we collect that money so that means that you get

paid right now there is no there is no fear of the insurance company going Ah that's not in their policy uh you can't do that uh you can't charge the patient no you can't do this we don't Crown we don't see that that needed this oh well you should have done a we're going to downgrade that from a bridge to a partial because they are missing a tooth in the other quadrant none of that nonsense so everything that you agree with with a patient you're going

to get paid for and you're going to get paid quicker because because we're not dealing with third party payers yeah so uh we'll sum it up for them so number one a membership plan can act as a attraction tool or marketing tool it allows uh the practice to generate predictable recurring Revenue which is a cash flow strategy it it appears that membership plans help increase the conversion rates of treatment acceptance so it's a sales tool and then um it helps uh pain so it's a loyalty

system and number three the last one would be an Avenue to reduce dependence on ppos did I miss anything there Justin you nailed it you could the reality of it is oh and a patient experience tool because you don't have to deal with the the the BS of uh dental insurance and the patient doesn't have to neither does the practice one of the I would say one of the I mean very rarely are are patient frustrations do they come from the interactions and the Dentistry that's

being done them sure it really comes from some kind of misunderstanding about how their insurance Works their in and and you know how much the insurance cares zero they don't care you know how often they answer the phone and answer those questions in a way that the patients can understand zero but you know who always answers their phone we do so we get to bad guy on behalf of the insurance company something wrong and and a membership allows us to not have those miscommunications it's like

here's what it is here's what your discount is here's how much you owe and we're going to do that for you and you're not going to get a bill from us later because this is what it is yeah simple yeah no I love it no thanks for answering that question because I I may link you up with a couple uh uh practice owners that they may need help with uh their Associates and kind of because you you you've expressed your your your story to me in

in New York and I thought it was interesting how you were able to handle that and and and Coach your your team and I think it it requires some leadership skills and I think uh that that's awesome that you're able to do that but dude I I appreciate you coming on the show and and sharing uh you know information to our listeners about how you've grown a million-dollar membership plan and growing right it hasn't stopped there that's a beautiful thing about these membership plans is they're

not static they continue to grow and offer more value the more effort you put into it so I think it's amazing so um for all of our listeners I do have a book um that teaches you how to grow a million-dollar membership plan teaches you how to think about marketing and a lot of the things we talked about uh on on the show today so go to boomcloud apps.com and have a free book section on our uh homepage that you can go to and grab those

books um it's fantastic so Justin I I know you also own a a a little company called uh treatment 247 which is another software tool why don't you explain a little bit about that and direct some of our listeners over there so they can check that out too yeah uh thank you for for uh plugging us I appreciate that so basically treatment 247 I created this back in 2010 um because I'm just I'm just an old salesman at heart and I found that practice the practice

management software that we have is absolutely horrific any dentist any any office manager any anybody that works in Dentistry that needs some type of administrative or or realistic understanding of what's going on knows that dentrix eagle soft open Dental all of those and almost all of them anyway are pretty much garbage they can't they don't track anything yeah they and a schedule that's about it and so and and the treatment plan that these things spit out was was so confusing patients would you know I had

patients ready to move forward as I would treatment plan them and then they would see this treatment plan with a bunch of it looks like they I may as well rented these I mean it was they they couldn't make heads or tails out of any of it so I created something that allowed us to present dentistry in in layman terms so instead of you know resin composite two surface posterior he says two c filling right and sure and then and it took all of the numbers

out of it it took all of the the fee the insurance coverage because I felt that that was lying to patients telling them how much their insurance was going to pay because we don't actually know you don't know yeah we don't know we and and you can say the word estimate to patients all day long but they still think it's yeah they don't so we just change it to how much the patient owe and you know they're like well how much is my insurance covering like

it's going to take care of the rest and but more importantly than that so we we created this very simple uh treatment plan for patients to use and we've even improved it now where it's a it's a full from start to finish payment payment uh platform so the patients got a QR code on their treatment plan they can scan it make their payments and ident it lets us know when those payments have been made so we can schedule the patients but so they don't want to

make the decision right in office if they need to talk to somebody they don't have to call back and pay for it um but it's a CRM and for anybody that's ever been in in business environment CRM is imperative for you and dentrix has no CRM eaglesoft has no CRM and none of the practice managers have a CRM and so um every patient that you create a treatment plan for in dri when they walk out of the door if they don't schedule and do that indry

right then they just they vaporize Into Thin Air they're gone your team doesn't know how to follow up with them without looking back days and days and days on your schedule then looking at the treatment going to their chart so we created a CRM uh we're we're synced with dentrix eaglesoft open Dental so everything is real time uh so the second you put it in dentrix it's back in our it's back at our side and it keeps track of um everything keeps track of who the

doctor was who the treatment coordinator was all the notes that the treatment coordinator leaves about what they talk to the patient about it has followup so it will remind the treatment coordinator next time they come in here are all your follow-ups for the day then you can you can set managers can set objectives for them on followups things like that but cool it's millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars that most practices having opportunities that never get touched again until that patient comes back

for their six 8 10 12 month recare visit or 18 you know most patients aren't even on a six month so it's just millions and millions and so what most practices do is they're like we need more new patients it's like no you don't you need to be more effective with the treatment plans that you've already done yeah no I agree with that no I I think you guys have a really cool product and in the same way I think about um yeah most practices think

they need more patients which I think obviously you don't want to turn that off but there's probably more value in in the existing customer or patient base than what most practices realizes and that that's why I think most successful companies grow because they realize that they don't want to ignore their current customer base or patient base because of the the opportunities that probably are sitting right under their nose and they already have a relationship with those patients right so I think crazy thing new patients are

new patients are a must in any in any business or new customers new patients because you're gonna have natural El attrition people are going to move people are going to go somewhere else um whatever the case may be but so many I mean really I believe that probably the most mismanaged AG business in the world is hygiene Department of any dental practice and they allow the patients to just go away and and and they don't it's like they've got a database of patients that that are

that were their patient and they just like well they just keep filling them with new patients and and so it's probably get back yeah get them back I know that's one thing that I look at being I mean obviously I don't run a a dental practice but business is universal I run a software company and our existing customers there's a lot of value um you know packed in there and and offering them new services or ways to help them you know grow their membership plan is

that's how I think about it like and I'll let my vpsl you know focus on the new customers but I'm I'm focused on adding more value to our our current customers right and learning from them I think that's you know really how successful companies you know grow and and and become better so man um share the website what's the website for treatment 247 it's treatment 47.com that's the word treatment the number 24 and then seen.com cool I'll put that in the show notes go check their

that product out johnon man thanks again for coming on the show I I hope all of our listeners have learned something new today I always do when I talk to you it's it's always fun to pick your brain and and see what's made you successful that's one of my favorite things about podcasting is learning from other people so thanks again and uh we hope everyone has a rocking day thanks Jordan it's always a pleasure to talk to you buddy we'll see you soon