Dental Practice Heroes
Where dentists learn how to cut clinical days while increasing profits - without sacrificing patient care, cutting corners, or cranking volume. We teach you how to grow a scalable practice through communication, leadership, and effective management.
Hosted by Dr. Paul Etchison, author of two books on dental practice management, dental coach, and owner of a $6M collections group practice in the south suburbs of Chicago, we provide actionable advice for practice owners who want to intentionally create more time to enjoy their families, wealth, and deep personal fulfillment.
If you want to build a scalable practice framework that no longer stresses, drains, or relies on you for every little thing, we will teach you how and share stories of other dentists who have done it!
Dental Practice Heroes
How Important is Branding for a Dental Office?
Branding is more than just logos and advertising; it’s about standing out in your market. This episode will help you define your own brand and measure its impact! We share an easy exercise to uncover your brand identity and real stories of how intentional branding can transform a dental practice. Discover how to deliver on your brand promise, build a base of loyal clients, and position your practice for long-term success!
Topics discussed in this episode:
- Why every practice needs a brand
- Examples of branding in dental practices
- Brand promise versus core values
- How to define your brand promise
- The ROI of branding
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What do patients really think of your practice, Like it or not? Their opinion is what defines your brand, and that's why it's so important to take control of it. In today's episode, we discuss how intentional branding can help you stand out, attract patients and shape the way your patients feel about your practice. Then you'll learn how to define your brand promise and make sure your practice is delivering on it every single day. Let's take that first step in building a brand that patients know and trust. You are listening to Dental Practice Heroes, where we help you create and scale your dental practice so that you are no longer tied to the chair.
Speaker 1:I'm Dr Paul Etcheson, author of two books on dental practice management, dental coach and owner of a $6 million group practice in the suburbs of Chicago. I want to teach you how to grow and systematize your dental practice so you can spend less time practicing and more time enjoying a life that you love. Let's get started. Hey, welcome back to Dental Practice Heroes. Thank you so much for tuning in today and we are going to talk about a topic that I think is so important. It's not the sexiest, because people want to hear about numbers and production and profit and stuff, but I think this is such a critical part of profit and growing our practices and I feel like for me, it's been so instrumental to my success at my practice. And what we're talking about is branding and most people say, well, branding like Nike and stuff like it, it's a logo. No, it's more than that. So I'm just going to turn this to you. First, Steve, Explain why your dental office needs a brand and what that really means to you.
Speaker 3:It has a brand, whether you want it or not.
Speaker 3:A brand is what people think of when they think of your dental practice and you can make it intentional of, like, I want people to think that I am going to be caring or available or whatever it is, but you have a brand, whether you want it or not.
Speaker 3:So I think the purpose of us talking about it is how do we become super intentional with what our brand is and what our promises are. We call it brand promise. I think the purpose of us talking about it is how do we become super intentional with what our brand is and what our promises are. We call it brand promise what our brand promises are to our patients, so that they can know what to expect when they walk into our office and they can know what to tell their friends and family of why they should refer those people to see us. And I think the more intentional that we can become with who we are, the more of the type of patients that we're going to attract. And that's different than throwing SEO or mailers or whatever it is. It's different than advertising, but equally as important to creating a successful practice.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that you mentioned the brand promises. I want to come back to that at some point because that's a document that I have in my practice that I think it's so critical and everyone's always mission, vision, core values, and I think it goes a step further into those brand promises. What can the consumer expect when they come in our practice? Henry, how important has branding been and how intentional have you been at Pleasant Plains, I feel like.
Speaker 2:it's kind of like Coca-Cola. As soon as we see that Coca-Cola logo, we could be in Japan, we could be another country. We just boom, we see it. We know what our expectations are, right. I look at it the same way with our dental practice. We have to figure out what makes us unique, what makes us different.
Speaker 2:For our practice, when we first started, our big thing was, hey, we're the practice that's open in the evenings. We're open, you know, on Saturdays. We always have multiple hygienists. So we're like the soccer mom practice, right. And we also have lots and lots of different types of procedures. So our goal is to keep you here and make you convenient, right, make us convenient. So, whenever we have our logo at like the you know the soccer fields or when we sponsor the town you know events that they have everybody knows, hey, they look at that, and my goals would be like the Coca-Cola of our area. They know that. Oh, they don't even have to see the Pleasant Plains now. They just see our logo and they just know, hey, that's a practice that's convenient, that's a practice that's going to take good care of you. Shoot, that's the practice that's been here for like 10 years, right? So I look at it as our reputation in a picture, and that's what people instantly think of when they see it.
Speaker 1:Well, I think a lot of people and you could do this. You can look at your website or you could read your Google reviews. Like, if you read the Google reviews for my practice, there's tons of stuff about the staff being so nice. There's tons of stuff about it being very clean. It's about our personalities, our customer service and that our office is just really up to date and clean.
Speaker 1:But you know, I remember working with one client and I think she was out of Florida somewhere, if I remember right, but she was really struggling to get new patients and when we looked at her town, which was maybe 35,000 people, so it shouldn't be too hard to stand out but we looked at all the competitors and it's like no-transcript and we started branding it more as like a techie place, like an up-to-date, cutting edge sort of thing, and she started seeing a completely different type of demographic of patients. She's like my gosh, we're seeing so many more new patients, but it's so weird they're different patients than I was seeing before. Steve, you know somebody that went through a similar process with, I mean with, I think, kids or pedo or something. Right, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:And this is what actually started us having this conversation. I was talking to a dentist and his practice was always very he's a general dentist, but it was always very pedo heavy and he actually doesn't even like seeing kids. So we started to talk about like, how do you grow the practice? And the more I peeled back the onion of like who the community thinks he is, they think of that practice as the pediatric practice, of where kids go, so that's his brand. So to change that is to change everything that the community knows about who he is, and that's going to take time.
Speaker 3:It's not just putting out a new piece of advertising or a new mailer or a new keyword on your SEO. It's changing the entire reputation of why someone would come to see you. And that first starts with how do I change me? It's got to be within you. So when we were talking about, I brought up brand promises to you. Paul, do you think there's a difference between a brand promise and a core value? How do you differentiate those as a practice owner? Like, how do you differentiate those as a practice owner?
Speaker 1:I mean, in my opinion, I think the brand promise is just much more specific. I mean, it is like one of our brand promises is that we will, we do every procedure in-house. A brand promise is that we see every emergency same day. A brand promise of us is that our bathrooms are always immaculate and I think where the core values are more broad or general term, but I don't know. I mean what would you say?
Speaker 3:I think it's hard and I struggle with it a little bit because you know, our core values are trust and caring and humility and passion for dentistry, which I think are important, and they come through within our brand promises. But our patients see it as they don't really understand what caring means from the employee side or what humility means from the employee side. So the way I see it is, our core values are how we behave to one another and how we behave towards our patients. Our brand promises is just our outward reflection of what the patients see and our core values can show through within them. That's how I differentiate them, but they are both so important and when you go through the exercise of understanding why someone would select you, that is your brand promise and those are the things that the patients see and you should build upon them and just dive in and say I'm okay with who I am, I feel great about it, I want the patients to see that and then just double down on that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, henry. Have you ever done an exercise like that with your team, or have you drawn up a document similar About?
Speaker 2:two years into the practice we did a similar exercise and I would look at it this way to build upon what you said, steve the core values are how we act. If there's ever a decision we're thinking about making like ours are productive, enthusiastic, trustworthy. So any decision we make, are we holding ourselves to the core values, so that it's kind of like how we act Branding? We did an exercise a few years into practice where we took we had all the team and ourselves go through all of our reviews, every single review we've ever had, and we had like core words that we had and sometimes we put like little tally marks there and we came up with the ones that were like the most common, the most common and the three most common we came up with. I still have in my head our three main branding are we're gentle and caring professionals to adhere to a dental needs by offering same day treatment and IV sedation. That's one. Second, we exceed expectations by offering high quality care through professionals that accommodate, with extended hours in a state of the art facility. Two, three, where patients are treated like family and comfort and excellent customer service are priorities. So it's like we noticed so many times in our reviews, people were saying, oh, same-day treatment, oh IV sedation, oh extended hours. So we kind of just came up with all those things and we said, okay, this is what we are. Well, let's focus on this and always adhere to these things, right? So this way, like the Coca-Cola example before, when I want to people envision our practice, I want them to envision these things. That's us.
Speaker 2:And other people can do this also, like you have. If you're a struggling dental practice owner out there and you're just like gosh, we're struggling with the new patients, we're kind of at a point where we're just flatlining Well, look internally to your practice and what makes your practice special. You don't have to do extended hours. Maybe you're the doctor that does CEREC and gosh, not many people do. And we can do same-day crowns. Well, I would go all in into making your practice the one that's known as the technological practice, that do same-day crowns, and gosh, my darn dentist has that temp with all that stuff in there I have to be careful with for two or three weeks. So it doesn't have to be a certain thing, it can be your thing that you make yourself. That's special.
Speaker 1:Well, I think what I'm hearing is that this is something that we need to do and a lot of owners just skip over it because it's just like foofy, it's not operational, it's like internal, it's like personality, it's like your brand personality, it's the voice of what your office is, and if we don't declare these things, like you mentioned, steve, we're going to let it just leave it up to our patients and what they think about us and sometimes that's not a very positive thing and go read your reviews and see what it is. My team paid somebody on Etsy at one point to go through all of our reviews. I don't know if they went through all of them because that would have took a really long time, but this was like before AI and they made one of those like word graphic things where, like, the repeated word is bigger than the other one. And I was surprised that our number one was compassionate. That was the biggest word on there and if you asked me, I would have been like dude, it's going to be integrity, it's got to be integrity, you know, and that was just a tiny little blip on the radar and it was just okay.
Speaker 1:We are compassionate, that's who we are, and having meetings and talking to the team about. You know, this is who we are. I think always realigns people once a year, every year. And man, what a better time to do it than right now, when this episode's coming out in January, beginning of the year, reasserting what is your vision, what is your brand and what do you stand for. Add something to that, steve, what do you think? Oh, just, you're just going to just add something.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I was. While you were talking, I was thinking about you said there's no ROI. It's kind of soft and that's what your team wants.
Speaker 3:Though If you have a team, they are going to rally behind the reason why you are doing something special or why they want to work for somewhere that is unique, that is different, that takes really good care of people.
Speaker 3:I've never met anyone that wants to just go to work for someone that they don't really care for, do something they don't really like and just get through the day. They may say that, but those are the people that end up going to the next office down the street. So when you're intentional about who you are and can communicate that to your team, and then they get excited about who they work for, what they're doing and can feel like they're actually making a difference, they're going to rally, can feel like they're actually making a difference. They're going to rally around that too. So the ROI yeah, I can't tell you the exact ROI of our brand, but I can tell you the reason why we continually grow year over year for the past 18 years is because of our brand, and that it needs to be the reason why it's so important to know who you are and know why you're doing things and get the team behind it. And just as jazzed up as we are about brand promises or branding or whatever else Paul wants me to, add to this conversation.
Speaker 1:That was a good ad. I appreciate that ad, steve. Do you have anything additional? Henry, oh, got to be an adder too, huh.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think it's very important. It's not something that we think about as owners, like everybody's mentioned, but you want the team to understand why we're here, right, the why we're here, what we're doing, and maybe it's also a chance for you to. You said it well, paul, like once a year, look through your views, come through common terms that are there. You could find good and bad. You could also find the bad thing. Well, dude, we're getting these tally sheets. That's saying lots of negative things. Let's stop doing this damn thing, right, because ultimately, that logo, I hold it near and dear. It is our legacy of the practice and that's what we want people to always think about moving forward of the practice, and that's what we want people to always think about moving forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think if we don't declare this to our team, if you had to poll like a million Americans and you said, like what do you think about your dentist, there is a certain like we're on family feud or something like that.
Speaker 1:One of those top answers is going to be only cares about the money, and I think that's going to come out from the patient perspective in a lot of people about the money, and I think that's going to come out from the patient perspective in a lot of people. And if we don't declare it to our team, there's a possibility that our team thinks us, as the owner, are only about the money. And then I think, if we've got team members leaving for a $2 raise, I mean, where did they learn this only about the money from? We need to have a bigger purpose, and that's what will bind people together. And if we have a purpose that's big enough and inspirational enough, then we can have a team that will do things for the right reasons and not for the transaction of the money. So you want to close us? I feel like I wanted to tee you up better, steve, I don't want to ask you just to add to that.
Speaker 3:Oh, that was a great. That was a great deal.
Speaker 1:Passing it to you. Steve Passing the ball. I appreciate that. Make sure you're additive and you're usually subtractive when you comment, but this is going to be good.
Speaker 3:I know and I, yeah, I appreciate that I'm going to try and really take us down here. But, as as you were talking again and I was, I keep thinking about how do we measure ROI, and I think that as practice owners, we get so caught up in like, if I don't get this ROI right now, then I'm not going to do it. Like last episode we were talking about adding new services and if I can't get this to do it, I'm just going to give up these branding stuff is the long game and if we're not in it for the long-term health of our business and that's what inspires our team, then they're probably right. It's not worth it. But if we want to have something that is going to be bigger than us and our team can get behind, we need to have a true inspirational brand.
Speaker 3:And then there are ways that you can measure it. I was thinking about, as you were talking, paul, of one of our brand promises that were available, and then there was time last year when I was looking at our call answer rate and it was in the 70s 70% of our calls were answered. I'm like, no, that's not who we are. We actually can measure these things. So if we say that's who we are, let's make sure we're doing it no-transcript meaning we stick by our word.
Speaker 1:And when a patient calls my office and we tell them we're going to call them back and if we don't leave a post-it note, there is a high chance that we're going to get distracted and forget about that, and that is not in line with our brand promise or our core value of integrity by being by our word.
Speaker 1:So I think the moral story is you got to sit down. These are things, as owner, you've got to think about. You've got to sit there and say who am I, what is this office and what do we want to portray to people. And I think you're going to find, if you do this and you've never done this before that you're going to find a lot more commitment coming from your team, because people want to do something that matters. People want to show up at work and have a purpose to be there and feel like it's part of a bigger thing, not just a transaction where a patient moves through. So if you're thinking about working with a coach and taking your practice to the next level this year, please reach out to us at dentalpracticeheroescom and see what we offer. You can work with any three of us, so check that out, reach out to us and we'll see what we can do. Take care everybody.
