Simplifying Messages and Standardizing Operations in Dental Practices

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 Boom cloud.com [Music] what's up everybody welcome to another exciting episode of the automatic patient podcast I am one of your co-host today Jordan Comstock the founder and CEO of boomcloud with me I got my director of marketing Bentley folman what is up Bentley

how are you doing man I am great I just full disclosure little personal thing this week I officially get to go through my midlife crisis uh I don't know when this will be record be published but tomorrow is my four birthday and uh uh I I've made it this far with most of my hair and only a little bit of it is gray uh so I'm I'm I'm excited about that nice man and you're gonna go pick up a new guitar which is Yeah official midlife

crisis starting I'm gonna haven't owned a guitar since I was 17 so we're gonna get that off the ground again so so you're gonna start a band uh yeah we're gonna call aom yeah yeah so I got a couple I we're all guitar players here boom Cloud so this is one of our guitars it's custom painted with the uh ACDC album that is pretty cool that's nice so Bley yeah Bley gonna shred on one of these I I don't know if I'll be at the Shred

level for quite some time but uh we'll definitely look good doing it whatever it is all right today we got a guest uh his name is Tom Brown from Dental sop Tom I've been following you for years I always bump into you at conferences and always always always enjoy our conversations um so I'm excited to have you on the show today um for the audience that they don't know who you are why don't you explain who you are and how you got into Dentistry fantastic so

first of all it was great seeing you guys at this this last weekend at the dental success Summit um actually ended up staying an extra day and that's why I'm glowing a little bit in red because that's the first time i' I've seen the sun in a while because I'm from Chicago so we get out there it's 84 and you spend a few hours in the pool yeah this is what happens you look great man yes I could probably turn off all the lights and you

could still see me still see you you're bright yeah so um for those who don't know me um I've spent about the last Dozen Years in dentistry and um it's been exciting because I came out of a more um let's say traditional um Industries in Hydraulics and pneumatics and office supplies and equipment and something happens new there every half century right sure come into the Technology field and this is a lot of fun because something new is happening literally every day and so you're really on

The Cutting Edge of everything that's happening um you don't have to go through all kinds of iterations to jump on board and that's what I found most exciting about being in the dental space because I've always been in the dental space on the technology side so that's been pretty exciting from a personal standpoint of why I like it so much is you're dealing with entrepreneurs every day whether they're the dental practice owners or they're the third-party applications that are helping Dental practices either grow become more

efficient um and that's really where my passion lies it it's helping businesses whether their practices or different organizations find some way to grow and in a lot of cases what that comes down to is a couple of things it comes down to simplifying your message um so many people when they're out there they've got such a great idea and such a great product that they don't know how to message it correctly and I I've had a lot of experience with that um some would say I

grew up with that because I was number eight out of 10 kids and so if you didn't message it correctly you just didn't eat right yeah yeah so I started in in a website company was there for a couple of years um went on to one of the ones probably I'm most known for is local M are you guys familiar with that oh yeah oh yeah I'm this was actually this is actually a classic example of what I'm talking about local Med could not have been

a better product at a better time because nobody had real time online scheduling in the dental Community everything was like an email request system yep and in four and a half years and spending millions of dollars they put 30 providers on the platform 30 because it wasn't messaged correctly I I remember on my second day getting a a uh demo from the founder and owner and it was an hour and five minutes long oh wow um nothing seems simple that you're talking about for an hour

and five minutes no so it we turned that into a six-minute demo and one of the key things was um obviously it's a lot simpler if you can learn it in six minutes but finding that connection point with your audience and something that they can relate to and I think one of the important messages right at the beginning for local Med and why it kind of took off was comparing it to a shopping cart I'd go around the country and Jordan you may have even heard

this as I was talking to different rooms full of doctors I'd ask everybody to raise their hand if they'd ever bought anything online and of course everybody raised their hand and then I'd say okay well let me ask you this think about what you're purchasing right now and would you purchase that same product or service at the same time with the same vendor if the shopping cart didn't exist and they had to you had to email them first and then they weren't going to email you

back they were going to call you the next day while you were at work and ask you if you wanted to buy that guess how many people held their hands up guys yeah probably all of them nobody or nobody yeah nobody's buying anything yeah nobody yeah I meant all of them raise their hand that they want the convenience of yeah yes so literally that turnaround was really quick because I could just say by the way that's what all of you are doing with all of your

patients you don't have a shopping cart you get them to come to your website you get them to come to your Facebook page they want to book an appointment there's no shopping cart so they're not doing it and so that opening which was like 30 seconds or a minute really led to people understanding what it was and what it would be for their practice and of course it was really successful over the next three years we had over 9,000 people on it um and in the

first four and a half they only had 30 right because it was a phenomenal product it's not gonna it's not going to work unless it's a product that's going to make a difference and it really helped patients connect with their doctors um and that's kind of the key to that and then finding those different Avenues to put that message out there and sometimes that message has to be tweaked a little bit and the same thing is true for the doctors the owners of the practices what

is your Niche how do you put yourself out into the community and what's going to draw that attention and to me more time needs to be spent on the little things in that because it's just the nuances that tell those stories rather than the you know the the grandiose marketing plans and you need those but you need that message that's going to that's going to connect with it um the other piece of that is making sure all of the customer facing team members are telling the

same story they can tell a different part of that story but it's got to be the team story so that's what I focused on in Dental from a technology standpoint um I'm pretty excited about all of those things I think you guys know that I've done that for a number of companies and so I decided just in the last year that I'm I'm not going to go right at least right now I'm not going to go and just pick one company out and work for it

I'm gonna work with a few companies not a lot because it takes a lot of time and creativity to think of those messages but I'm gonna help people in more of a Consulting role business advisor role and that's where I saw you at at at the DSs and why I'm here representing my dental sop so that's pretty cool yeah awesome I love that so many practices and practice owners need help finding their niche in dentistry and understanding how to message it to you know potential patients

I think that's such a needed uh part of any practice so I I love that you're passionate about that and I I know I've spent a lot of time with you talking for hours at events on this specific topic and it's definitely one that always has fascinated me uh when talking to you so love it well messaging is everything uh is building a connection with people requires you to have that emotional connection and and you can't do that unless your message is consistent as a company

and and is aligned with the the what you offer and the needs of the people you're talking to and so um building that into a standard process not everybody thinks of those needs the same way like you said and and you know I I like to think of it as like a a John Hughes John Hughes I always get his name wrong but the 80s comedy movie writer you know Ferris Beer's day off oh sure there's always those yeah I love those movies right and there's

always in those movies a high school kid who's trying to find his way and trying to be popular and whenever there's a party situation or something like that in those movies uh they always go about it the wrong way they're always like hey if I can do this over-the-top thing I will I will reach my audience right and in in marketing it's a lot more focused and what they learn throughout those movies every time is it's not about about that it's about identifying who I am

who I want to be friends with identify that one person at the party and building a message that resonates perfectly with them and connect with them and in marketing you you don't get that in a face-to-face interaction uh and you get that through through messaging and then the nice thing about marketing too is that now I have a megaphone so I can have that onetoone conversation I can talk real loud and then people that like that conversation can come listen in and now I've got a

group of friends but it's has to be focused on that onetoone message and I like the idea of operationalizing that so that your team knows what that message should be so they can find their own flavor of how to communicate it well and the first the first step in doing that is knowing yourself or knowing your practice or knowing your business because the message that you want to put out there has to be authentically yourself it's got to be your business because that's what you're that's

what you're going to be passionate about people will identify the passion that you're talking about that with because it just resonates with you it's not something you're trying to be it's it's just who you are and that's where you're going to make that genuine connection and the simpler you can do that from a business perspective to to make people understand what you're doing then they can get into some more of of the detail but finding that nuanced message that connects with majority of the people so

they can relate to it and a lot of times it's really helpful to relate it from a business perspective it's helpful to relate what you're talking about to something in your personal life like the shopping cart because everybody knows what that is and it's like wow I never thought about that with regard to my business that I have to have a shopping cart outside of my dental practice right but it seems so obvious after people were doing it that wow this was sometimes the most genius

things are the simplest things it's it's just putting those things together and it starts with knowing yourself knowing the problem you're going to solve or the opportunity you're going to create and now how do you simplify that message don't talk about it for an hour and a half yeah yeah I love that that's that's a long time I always tell whenever we have like an intern or right out of school or I Mentor someone in in marketing or business um I always tell them they always

ask what should I study what should I know what should I focus on and my my response is always you know focus on the common elements of of business of marketing marketing is just common sense with different vocabulary and once you understand that once you understand that that's what all running a business is all all marketing Communications is is just stuff that you think about all day every day but with different vocabulary and doing it from somebody else's perspective and it does start with who you

are and and being honest and open and objective of who you are who you are not and and then building that message as simply as possible um around it but you're right people over complicate it because they they see so much there's first of all so much noise out there and so much time you're competing with and and we we've seen marketing for decades now everything from the you know the Mad Men of the 50s and 60s to what we see now on social media and

Tik Tok and it is just gotten loud and obnoxious and noisy but at the end of the day what resonates is those clean simple messages yeah those authentic messages so Tom speaking of clean simple messages how would you explain what Dental sop is and why it may benefit some practices well let me take the next like hour and a half to share this nice no um so and really the first step in for all of us you know when you're when you're going to start working

with a company for a company whatever you really have to do your due diligence and ask yourself the question is what they're doing solving a problem or creating an opportunity are you going to be proud that a an organization in this case a dental practice that they're going to purchase what you're what you're providing and you have to be excited about that because if you're not you should not do that yeah I'm sure that you guys have had a number of people reach out to you

like I have and they've got these great ideas but in the end it's it's not something that's going to resonate with people it's not really solving a problem it's almost like a a personal thing that they're doing that maybe worked in this certain situation so you really have to look at that and say is this something that's going to work and so when I think of like you know another great example is local met I mean now very few practices don't have some real time some

something that does real-time online scheduling because it's it's a musthave right now and to think that nobody was using it eight years ago is kind of stunning that's one of the reasons why um I started to work with Laura Johnson who's the founder of my dental sop she called me up it was back in October and said hey Tom can I just talk to you about this yeah great we're friends we talked for about an hour hour and a half and it I was excited by

it I was like wow it does this really doesn't exist I don't know of it existing somewhere I'm sure people do it in different ways but there are so many practices out there that don't have standard operating procedures or they have them in a multitude of different places on a on a bookshelf Gathering dust or they've got it in a Google Drive they've got it in you know this format or they've got some in an email and in most cases it's in all of those places

so you know like the shopping cart I just at the DSs I I was asking doctors I'll ask you guys this have you Googled anything in the last 24 to 48 hours yes 24 to 48 minutes probably yeah that's probably more accurate yeah everybody says yes and why do we do that because it's simple if you if you're not 100% sure you know something just type it into go boom you got your answer right there well my dental sop is the Google for dental practices everything

that they use to run their practice all of their standard operating procedures for all their roles can be digitized within this platform and now they're instantly accessible so think of the power of that for just a second right so during the day-to-day operations somebody's sick somebody else has to do somebody else's job they don't do it all the time right so now they have to figure out how to do it first of all they don't know where to go to find find the operating procedures because

they're in multiple different places waste of time frustration just all of that stuff that kind of makes a dental practice kind of crazy right Laura Johnson's got a lot of great stories because she's been a dental consultant for years so when she would go into a practice she would see all these Sops and different places and whatnot and then come in with a a a whole training regimen and all of her stuff that would be in one place right but not everything in the practice was

and she saw that even after training people on it she'd get a call back three months later and somebody would say hey so and so just left can you come back in and train them and it's like you know okay but you really should shouldn't have to do that because you have the information you own it now but that was happening and I guarantee you your listeners they know what this is like now I will say this the doctors may not know because they're not as

involved as like the office managers in the front desk in most cases but this is happening every single time somebody's gone somebody has to look something up now the the the better part of this this is kind of a surprise is if they know they don't know how to do something because then they will search out and try to find out how to do it it's when they think they know how to do it that can be the bigger problem because then they're just winging it

right yeah and now that's when errors come up and other things happen think of the power of just being able to type in Insurance verification and instantly you're looking at a step bystep process yeah yeah we we use something very similar here at boomcloud where our our team members can you know log in and find a a process if they don't know what it is or need refresh you know a refresher because maybe they haven't done it in a while yeah I'm a huge believer in

this type of uh system in the practice Bentley can I can I ask a question on this because I've I've written a a lot of standard operating procedures and what I've what I found is that how you write them is sometimes more important than even how I mean obviously they need to be able to find them and I love the Google model of being able to search and ask questions and poll information directly um but do you help practices write those effectively because I think I've

run into that problem a lot where like all the knowledge is up here but when I start to put it on paper it doesn't translate the same way and my team gets more confused by how I wrote it than than have their questions answered so do you have a way of coaching and helping them through that process the short answer is yes because we have partners that they can go to that that's their job they write Sops when Laura first came to me back in October

we had a f couple of conversations before she asked me to be a partner and her business adviser on this um we talked about that because she has a lot of great content that she's built over 10 15 years in dentistry right so this was this is all of her content is already loaded into my dental sop but I told her I said that's great you have great content right but you you all three of us know how many people have content and how many people

like to do things differently right sure yeah absolutely I said what makes this special no offense but then I offended her was was it's not your content yes it's great but it's the platform that you've created that makes everything instantly accessible when when we go to market this can't be about the content now the content's all there so it's a good starting point from maybe a a practice but then abiz it this is a no-brainer for like a new practice or somebody that's getting like they're

looking and saying hey we need to write these Sops which by the way was another question we asked at the DSs to a doctor we probably talked to 50 doctors there over the weekend and every single one had some variation of we're working on that or we've got them like 20% done or this or that yeah hey all of this is already preloaded in there but the key thing is this it is infinitely customizable as a matter of fact I'll share with you that right now

there's I I know there's over a dozen different Dental Consultants now that are using my dental sop and they're white labeling it because they're putting their own content in it not using Laura's because I told Laura if you want to get this out and it's based on your content it's it's going to be a slow go because then everybody's going to have to agree with how you do everything that's not part of I mean it's part of it but you can take what you want or

take it out put your own in it we're not telling you how to run your practice we're telling you to run it more efficiently using my dental sop to make sure everybody has access to that but the Consultants see it as such a great tool that because they've had the same thing that Laura's had as a consultant is sure people don't have access to it after they leave this makes it not only more accessible but now everybody's using it every day I'll go back to hey

you guys have Googled stuff you know in the last 24 48 minutes right that's how this can be used and it'll be used by the people within the dental practice now that's the existing group of people but I also asked Dennis now we took a little bit of survey every time we did it we didn't ask him to take a survey we just asked him a few questions sure how many of you hired somebody in the last year everybody had we didn't talk to anybody that

hadn't hired somebody do you expect to hire somebody then they were laughing they were like well yeah of course I mean turnover Staffing all this is like the hot button issue right now in dentl since the pandemic getting people to stay right and so 56 there's a it's a stat I think it's 56 it's less than 60% or almost 60% of the people that leave a dental practice when the first year of being at that dental practice just under 60% of them point to their onboarding

way at the beginning and they didn't have the tools to do their job well well obviously if they have access to this they're going to be able to do their job well because that tool is going to tell them how to do it but think about this from an onboarding perspective right how much time do the existing staff members spend with those new people because they're shadowing them all the time right yeah and then they have to ask questions where is the standard operating procedure you

go through that scramble again of what happens and again if they don't know they find out but now you've got people at the practice who don't know how to do insurance verification telling people how to do it and now you've got issues right it's like the game of telephone if they don't use it that's exactly right yeah exactly so think about this 80 to 90% of the training that can be done for on boarding can be self-taught not only do they have the material the modules

and everything set up and designed by role but when they go through it they can take a test at the end of it whoever their supervisor is now can actually look at their progress as they're going reach in and help at different times if they need to but all the time that they're saving and then once somebody learns wow once they got out of the orientation you guys know this that now those people know everything 100% And they're perfect right no that's not GNA happen so

having access to the tool to make that happen is what's going to make the difference there so sure that's another huge component of of that so I love that yeah it's it's it's making a difference with people when they're starting but then what we started doing because some of our Consultants started doing this so we're not going to take credit for but we definitely will um copycat them yeah hey when when you when you first get on board with my dental sop which again takes only

about 24 48 hours and by the way the dental practice can send us whatever Sops they have in whatever format it can be on paper it can be on a drive it can be anywhere and we'll digitize that and put it into my dental sop into those modules so it's usable and we can do that in 24 to 48 hours so they can be up and running well one of the things that the consultant started doing was hey as soon as you get on this we've

got this information give the tests the pre-tests to everybody at your practice based on what their role is now you've got a knowledge Gap assessment instantly you don't want to make them go you don't want to make them go through all the material you know of everything if they already know it but if they do poorly on the test now they get to go back and actually read the material go through the content and then test again so cool it's it's really kind of cool I

love that I I love also the the reapplication of skills right because like you like you pointed at um I can't tell you how many times that you onboard someone and you get them best practice this is how we do things here and then you go back two months later and you're like what are they what are you doing you know and it isn't their fault they're hardworking but but best practice skills drift over time if not reinforced right so by having access to your guys'

modules all the time they can they can continually reinforce that but then also they they have that that I love the preest idea because then as a manager your biggest your biggest problem is how how and where can I help and jump in right away and say oh this is where my team's is struggling and I can do that without having to sit there and babysitting and micromanage them it makes me look like a good boss because I'm providing the best value and it also makes

it easy for me to do it without having to vote a whole lot of of of time to it I love that concept yeah I think one of I think I don't know if it was the Ada or somebody else came out that it cost like between 10 and 15,000 Dollar in in costs like from everybody having to work with them and time lost and everything just to bring somebody up to speed that's a that's a lot of money and it it hits the bottom line

now you can you can have a a less expensive application and now you're actually training people regularly like you said hey maybe you have a quarterly review but everybody's learning the same stuff and because it's so easy to update the information it's actually now obviously you have to have the administrative access to it but it's like it's like updating a a a Word document so cut and paste things out put it back in hit a couple buttons you got a new test there it it's really

that simple and that's what people are excited about now what's really going to happen is down the road these people that people nobody likes to lose staff and again this is a big big topic right now because when a new person comes in it's kind of a scramble right because they're behind somebody so now they come in they've got to catch up people are trying to teach them they don't feel like they fit in as well because they're not doing they're not they're not providing the

service as an employee like they want to because they want to be good at their jobs they don't want to not know how to do things and then you get people that you're kind of embarrassed to ask questions so think about that sometimes you're overwhelmed with things especially in the first you know few weeks couple of months you don't want to go back to that same person and say hey can you can you help me with the payment process again right because now you feel stupid

now you're judging should I ask that question and now nine months from now you can't ask that question so now I just feel stupid and now I'm going to start looking for a new job and guess what this is a bad practice I don't like it they didn't train me well enough the onboarding was there and all of a then you're then they're out but you've wasted as a practice owner 10 to 15,000 getting them up to speed and now when the next person comes in

everyone's Overjoyed to do the same thing again right not so take that off the table get them on boarded consistently and as quickly as possible save a lot of time from everybody else at the practice and then that's the tool that they can use throughout the time they're there think about how that's going to impact production you're not going to be dealing with errors all the time they're definitely going to be reduced because people know what they're supposed to do and really at this point there's

no excuse it be like if I don't know how to spell a word I just Google it right I'm a pretty good speller so I'll just you know sometimes I'll just I would wing it if if I didn't have Google but now I'm going to make sure of that that's what's going to start happening at these practices and you know we were just at this conference um DSS we took some of the content right off of the off of Mark's opening statements yeah and this is

what we should do at the conferences how many people come back and train or or distribute that information in an effective way with the rest of their practice you ask people it doesn't happen you can have sop open right while you're at the conference whether it's CE business whatever taking notes putting it into a module you can assign it to the people at to practice while you're there so they're actually getting this information so when you come back you can be excited with people about these

new learnings and implement it right away so I love that yeah so do I that's a huge problem in dentistry where they where a practice own who goes to a conference like Dental success Summit gets all this excitement learns all these new things and then comes back and and he or she's the only one excited and nobody understands like the full picture so so you're saying that that practice owners can be documenting what they're learning and what they want to implement create a process or a

system absolutely during the conference and then they go and train it when they get back that's cool yeah and and honestly anybody from the practice that goes to a conference that really should be their sop because yeah when you go to the conference yeah everybody loves going to the conferences I do I have fun but you're there for a business reason and now it's much easier to bring that value home rather rather than just go and maybe you know you talk about it a week later

at a meeting because we all know you don't if you don't utilize what you've learned in 24 to 72 hours I think it's a 72 hours you lose 90% of it it's a shockingly high number now you're doing it instantly in 24 hours you lose 50% of it taking those notes modu it's right there for you um it's it's really making a difference I love that I think that's I think that's really cool I talk about taking a software solution and building a multiuse application for

it you're you're you're taking we've now identified quite a few problems that you're solving right we've got an onboarding problem which is uh the number one cause of of turnover as you identified but I think we've heard that from other places as well and it makes perfect sense right you start people off on the right foot you give them that confidence early on you build a better culture of of knowledge and understanding and they're more willing to stick around um not only that but you're not

putting pressure on their relationships with their co-workers they have a way to reinforce that along the way then number two is you're building this great reinforcement of best practices because now they have a a knowledge Warehouse of where they can go whenever they've got a question whenever they're confused or as a leader I can do the testing and the retesting and the pre-testing to help them identify where knowledge gaps are where people have slipped and then reinforced with training and then number three you have this

I have new ideas how do I Implement them before they get lost in the shuffle of the day-to-day now you build that into the standard operating procedure process that sop and now you can Implement new ideas and and validate that they've been implemented effectively I think the three of those things probably solve almost every problem that a dental practice has right now so I think it's great that you guys have it nice at least some of the some of the ones that are causing a lot

of this um this this uh chaos that's in there right so as I'm talking about this with some of the dentists again I I I would throw this at him and I would say hey like isn't this exciting talking about standard operating procedures and I would say it like like really excitedly and they'd be like uh and I said so stop talking about it you know use my dental sop so people can just use it as a tool so you don't have to talk about all

the problems with your Sops or how how we're in the process of building these so yeah no this is awesome for for all of our practices listening uh Bentley and I've realized that you know most practices that are successful have some type of operating system and documentation for processes you know and even with in regards to you know what we do at boomcloud is create and help you grow membership programs the practices that are using systems like this you know within their organization are growing the

fastest because it's clear as day on how to do how to grow a membership program and they're every one of their team members are reading the standard operating uh procedures and it's it's easy to train so I I love this like I said earlier we have a system like this here at boomcloud I kind of I like the assessment aspect of what you said so I'm going to go ask my my brother who's our chief oper officer and and see if there's something like that within

ours because I think that's awesome so for those of for those of our listeners listening um where can they find Dental sop you know what do you guys have freebies on your website or webinars or education like what do you got for everybody let me let me share my screen just briefly can you see this yeah we can see it so you can schedule a demo it's it takes about eight minutes to go through a demo you you're looking at this you can like take a

picture of the QR code um it's you're going to send anything to Joe at my dental sop you guys saw Joe at the dental sucess what's up Joe exactly and anybody listening to this podcast if you talk to us by the end of May um and I don't know exactly when this is going to air but by the end of May and we have to work it out depending on when it airs we're going to give 75% off of the setup fee so all of that

content that dental practice is you know are trying to build is already in here so it's almost a no-brainer if you haven't already built out your own but even if you have the design of the system it's gonna it's it's going to be it's going to be lifechanging for dental practices because things are just going to run so much more smoothly yeah love it so go to my dental sop domcom for those of you that are just listening to the podcast and not watching the video

we'll have the the URLs in our show note so you can just click and go to this link that Tom is sharing with us Tom thank you so much for coming and hanging out with us on on the show today and and talking about my dental sop I think this is a value EP valuable episode for a lot of our practices and if you're not if you don't have standard operating procedures documented let's get started now it sounds really easy with what Tom has to offer

so there you go hey thank you very much I hanging out with you guys at the conferences you know it's almost like a second family because we're all over country the Road Warriors yes and it's it's always been fun again we've been following each other for a long time uh love what you're doing always have um really excited to see where all where we're all going to go next awesome Tom thanks for coming on the show thanks Tom this is a pleasure [Applause] [Music]