Big Case Dentistry: How to Market, Consult, and Finance w/ Dr. Taher Dhoon and Dr. Ryan Bradley

Big box implant centers are everywhere, but there ARE ways to stand out. Dr. Ryan Bradley and Dr. Taher Dhoon know firsthand how tough it is to transition into full-arch dentistry — from figuring out marketing to attracting qualified patients who can pay. In this episode, they unpack marketing, consultation, and financing strategies that will help you compete with big implant centers. Tune in for the advice you need to grow your practice and win more full arch cases!

Topics discussed in this episode:

• The struggle to transition into a full arch practice
• How to compete with big implant centers
• Marketing dos and don’ts
• Financing solutions for patients

Learn more about Colorado Surgical Institute:
https://www.coloradosurgicalinstitute.com/

Check out www.relevanceonlinemarketing.com if you want to get the same great marketing results as Dr. Etch.  Mention DPH and get your first month FREE!

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Chapters

• 0:02 Standing Out in Implant Dentistry
• 11:00 Marketing Strategies and Financing Solutions
• 20:53 Advanced Implant Dentistry Training Program

Transcript

Paul Etchison: 0:02

Big implant centers can outspend anyone on marketing. So how can you stand out? Well, today we're talking strategy. We've got Dr Tahir Dune and DPH client Dr Ryan Bradley here to discuss how non-corporate practices can compete and close not just more full-arch cases, but any large case, and it doesn't involve dropping prices or spending a fortune on ads. Instead, you'll get actionable strategies to attract buyer leads, navigate consultations and make financing work better for every single patient. 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.

Paul Etchison: 0:38

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, what's up everybody? Welcome back to Dental Practice Heroes. I'm so excited you're here. We're trying something a little bit different.

Paul Etchison: 1:05

Today We've got our special guest on. We've got Dr Tahir Dune of Colorado Surgical Institute, someone just very well-versed on full arch he's teaching dentists how to do it at the Institute and just a very successful practice owner that has moved himself just to primarily only doing full arch, which a lot of people want to do. And then I've got a client of mine, dr Ryan Bradley, on there and he's just a dentist in Beaverton Oregon. He's got a really big practice, super productive. He's got associates and he also wants to do the same. So we're going to do a little Q&A between Ryan and Tahir. But before we jump into it, ryan, tell the listeners a little bit about your practice and your journey and then we'll just move on to going next steps to get to where you want to go.

Ryan Bradley: 1:53

Yeah, thanks, paul. So yeah, at a dental school just trying to figure out how to become a practicing dentist and run a business, and we started out single doc office, just myself, two hygienists over the know over the last couple of years, and this was back in 2020. And so today we have myself, an associate, we have five hygienists, eight op office, we just outfitted two surgical ops and you know, I'm really trying to go to the next level in dentistry and kind of tired of the GP world and I love surgery. And you know, talking with Paul, he said, hey, I got a great guest to bring on. He kind of took a very similar route to yourself and just trying to figure out how to navigate this world. It's a whole different ballgame for marketing the kind of patients you get in, how you figure out financing for some of these patients, just trying to see, hey, how can we take that next step and do the kind of dentistry I want to be able to do.

Paul Etchison: 2:42

Yeah, you know it's funny, Ryan, is that I tend to work with two types of clients is one is like I don't want to work at all anymore, and the other client is like I only want to do surgery. So it seems to be like everybody just falls in those two buckets. So I guess, like, what are the things going on in your practice right now that's preventing you from making this transition as fully as you want to?

Ryan Bradley: 3:02

Yeah, with our GP marketing, it was pretty easy. We kind of topped in Google SEO. We were ranking really high, we're getting good volume of new patients in and saying, hey, why don't we just do this for full arch? And we very quickly realized that not being a specific implant office kind of deterred us from being able to see a lot of those implant patients gaining their trust. And then we get we're in a bigger metro area, we got the big, you know implant centers that you know do this all the time. People see their TV ads. You know they put big money into their marketing. You know, hey, how can we be able to attract those patients and not be, you know, one-off implant center? And so what we did is we actually rebranded. We did a different brand, different website, different marketing for the Full Arch to say, hey, this is what we do. We just happened to also have a GP office. That's worked pretty well. We did video testimonials. We set up the office to be fully digital. I kind of went all in on CE training. I'm placing pterygoids, zygos, we have a registered CRNA that comes in, we have a separate consult room and surgical ops, and so then, okay, we outfitted everything, spent the money, got it all under control.

Ryan Bradley: 4:14

And then it's trying to figure out the marketing side of the thing. And what we found very quickly. It's a volume game. So trying to get as many patients to call and a lot of these patients are not your GP practice patients. They have not been to the dentist in a long time or, if ever, they have very poor credit, no money, you know need the treatment, you know no shows on consults and just trying to navigate. Hey, how can we get better quality leads? And then also, how can we help on the financing? Because, yeah, we get a ton of patients that come to the door and it's yeah, I'm all for this, but I have no money to pay for this.

Paul Etchison: 4:49

What say you, Tahir? What do you say to that?

Taher Dhoon: 4:51

That's a lot to unpack and what I'll start off and say is congratulations, first on all the success. I mean to build that alone is difficult to do, and so just consider it, all levels. And now you're just upping your surgical game and bringing in more surgical patients, and it's one of those things. Remember the movie Field of Dreams? If you build it, they will come and just remember, in every geographic area it's going to be a little bit different. So what worked for me? If I went one, two, three, four, five, you might have to do it out of order to have the best results. But so what I will say is let's touch base on working against like the big box, because that's like a big question I get all the time. How do I deal with the clear choices and the Nuvias and et cetera, et cetera, you know like, because it's a race to the bottom. In some areas, and including my own, there's a lot of arches for less these days. So how do we compete? So a few things.

Taher Dhoon: 5:43

Number one in the consultation room. A few things to touch base on is and this is what I like to say I say, hey, we place six implants here instead of four. Now, it just depends on your personal philosophy. And if you read the studies you know four implants loaded without a cantilever is the same load on four as it is on the six implants, because the two middle implants really don't take that much load. But from a marketing perspective and the mind of the patient, they think getting six is better than four. So I like to tell patients they get six implants, even though I understand from, like, a biomechanical perspective, four can be as good as six in many circumstances.

Taher Dhoon: 6:19

Two if you're the owner of the practice. I like to tell the patient like look, I'm the owner of the practice, I do your surgery, I make your teeth, I'm responsible for everything that happens in these four walls. Here's my personal cell phone number. You can call me day or night. I go to sleep at 10. I'm awake at four. If you call me twice in a row, the phone's under my pillow, it'll wake me up. You always have access to me. Because this is something that I take very seriously. We want to make sure you're taken care of appropriately and I handwrite my cell phone on the card. I used to have them pre-written on the card or pre-printed has less of an effect if you actually write it on the card in front of the patient handed to them. That goes a long way.

Taher Dhoon: 6:55

Another big differentiator is if you tell the patients, like all your hygiene is done here, versus some other places like, well, who's going to take care of you afterwards? Like this thing, you need to go to somewhere where that office takes care of patients like you all the time. There are very specific protocols to maintain these things, so you don't have to redo your surgery in 10 years and maybe that 10 years is 30 years with the right type of care. And so I like to stress that we take care of patients like them all the time. And I like to stress hey, other offices are actually sending us patients who are like you for the maintenance stuff because our program is so good here, and then I talk up my hygienist and how we do things to some degree.

Taher Dhoon: 7:33

Also, what I like to have is an in-house plan, and you may already have this created, but it's like an in-house dental savers plan that's specific to full arch. So then when they pre-purchase it, they get four cleanings per year, they get unlimited x-rays and they get a limited examinations, and then it does include taking off the prosthetic if you do it once a year or twice or once every two years. Whatever your protocol is, it includes that as well and cleaning of the prosthetic. So that way I can tell them hey, like, after you do this, if you do a double arch, you can ditch your traditional insurance, you can get on my plan and then there's no questions asked. You know what you're paying per year, it's all inclusive.

Taher Dhoon: 8:11

You just have to make sure you make all your appointments, because as long as you make all your appointments, you're speaking to the guy that makes all the decisions or the gal that makes all the decisions here, because I'm the one who can pave the way and, god forbid, there's an error or an obstacle or a complication. Well, if you make all your appointments and you do the things I ask you to do, we're always going to take care of you. I never say warranty, I never say guarantee. I'll get thrown in your face really quickly at some point in the future.

Taher Dhoon: 8:37

But I do tell them like I'll always do the right thing and truly, if a patient does you know all their hygiene visits and wears their occlusal guards and does all the things I ask them to do, and they have a implant that fails, I'll just replace it in no charge. And if I got to replace the prosthetic, I'll do that in no charge too, because, at the end of the day, how frequent is that? It's very infrequent. How hard is it to do? Once you get proficient, it's not that hard to do, and then you get a good reputation in your community. That's a big metro area. So that's a few things I say in the consultation room that helps with some differentiation.

Ryan Bradley: 9:08

I think that's great and you know, kind of my big three questions are marketing, the consultation, then how to get the financing done. I think from a consultation standpoint we had a lot of patients for second opinion saying I never even met a doctor when I went over to X, y and Z implant center. I just met with the treatment coordinator and I think that goes a long way. Me coming in and actually do we do a treatment coordinator-led consult but I still come in introduce myself after they've already sort of talked about all these things. I think that goes a long way.

Taher Dhoon: 9:34

Okay, awesome, yeah. So I think you're on point with how you're handling that for sure. So marketing against big box, that's hard, because they have a very high budget and they put ads out on TV and they hit all the spots. So at the end of the day, a few things you can do is I get referral cards set up where it's a specific all-on-X referral card where on the back it says it's a $500 referral bonus that that patient gets, and so I'll write my cell phone on it and I'll tell them and this is what I do when they're if they're a consultation, I'll hand it to a consult as well. My treatment coordinator does. Because if you're spending all this money on patient acquisition and then I can hand a card to someone who might just want to make 500 bucks and they can't afford the procedure, they can hand it to someone else who they know who might be in a similar situation, where then that cost per acquisition is going to be potentially lower, because then they don't have to go through the whole ad funnel and everything. So I give $500 away to a patient who signs up for that one specific surgery, and I'm very clear about that. They have to do the surgery that you came in for. They can't just be a new patient here getting general dentistry done. It's for a patient doing full arch and if they do one arch or two arches, I just give them 500 bucks regardless. So that's helped a lot. It's a newer program we're doing in my practice. We've been doing it for about a year. But you have people who come in over time and once you hand it to them and they have like five family members who need it, then they're kind of a little bit more pushing for those family members to do it.

Taher Dhoon: 11:00

That's the hardest part. After that, from a marketing perspective, you can go and you can find a specific full-arch marketing company. This is riddled. It's like walking through what's that place between North and South Korea with all the mines. It will be a military zone. Because full-arch companies and marketing with them. It's so freaking painful, man. It's so painful because they just say, hey, keep spending money and be patient, keep spending money and be patient. And I've had a lot of companies I've tried over the years and it's hard. So what I would say is, if you pick a company, stick with them. They all do very similar things, but then they can have a CRM set up for you where it's like an actual software that allows the patients to live in the software with automated texts and emails and all those things, and that helps a lot. That definitely helps a lot.

Taher Dhoon: 11:52

If you want to spend more, then you go outside your traditional marketing that you use for your GP practice and you allocate in a whole separate fund to Google.

Taher Dhoon: 12:02

If you want to get a lot of patients, you have to get above $10,000 per month within just Google ad spends, because the vast majority of the money and clicks get all chewed up in the first 10 grand. And then if you want to start playing at a higher level with the big boxes, with the guys who are getting like 10 arches a month, 20 arches a month, things like that, it has to be more than 10,000 a month towards Google. But at the same time when you start you have to build momentum for at least three to four months. So it's painful because you're going to spend that money in Google for three to four months and just cross your fingers and hope you pick the right company. And then I used to give out the company's names over the podcast and then every company I gave over a podcast got blown up and then they started to suck because they had too many clients come on. So definitely give me a call and text me after that I'll tell you what I'm using right now.

Paul Etchison: 12:50

How many people are going to email the show now? They're going to be like dude. I won't tell anybody, but just tell me I'll get a bunch of emails.

Taher Dhoon: 12:57

And hopefully I can trust every person I give this information to, but please don't share if I do give it to you.

Ryan Bradley: 13:03

So you're doing these great consultations and obviously the marketing, you have to just spend the money. Are you sending out a specific message that you would say is differentiating yourself from everybody else?

Taher Dhoon: 13:14

Yeah, so within the marketing, consider it like multiple messages. So you have multiple avatars and multiple personalities that are going to hear it, and so you want to make sure you talk to all of them. What I will also say is there's companies like the Wellness Hour I don't know if you heard of Randy Alvarez, the Wellness Hour, something like that, sure. So it's a 28-minute special. You can figure out what ad spend is in your area, where you can go, and you can get on to Fox News or ABC or anything like that, and it's a 28-minute special. What you can also do with that special is you can run it in your waiting room. So then every patient that goes through the general practice is getting educated no-transcript, oh, by the way, that was super informative in terms of what I learned.

Taher Dhoon: 14:05

So you can either record your own thing and hire just a filming company to do it, or you can go out and go to Randy. If you go to Randy, the only positive about doing that is then he can take it to the TV stations for you and he gets pre-negotiated rates. But at the same time, you can always go negotiate it yourself, if you want to, with Fox and ABC, and then after that Fox ABC, if you allocate like 5,000 a month, they'll give you a bunch of 30 second ads all over the place, like I have them on, you know, jeopardy Wheel of Fortune. You just kind of the station, do a quick live segment or something and then they redo it. So there's always TV.

Taher Dhoon: 14:46

Tv actually works pretty darn good in a lot of places, but you have to just know your demographics and your geographic footprint and just see if it's a good decision. Same thing with TV. It's going to be spend the money for a long time and then it'll start to roll in eventually. When that is, I can't tell you. It just depends on how saturated your market is. If you're more rural it'll be more quick and if you're more saturated it'll be much slower.

Paul Etchison: 15:10

I think the last thing was talking about financing. How do you get people financed when often these people can't?

Taher Dhoon: 15:17

afford. Yeah, and this is harder now than it was back in the day, three, four years ago. Dude, so many people were getting approved left and right. It was awesome. It literally was like I was getting a lot of people approved. Now I have a lot of people who are not getting approved.

Taher Dhoon: 16:41

So what I'm doing is I'm creating an Excel sheet, especially if you do Zygos and Pterigoids. I create an Excel sheet and I say approved or not approved? And then I say are they zygo, pterygoid, traditional arch, Are they hard, are they medium, are they easy? And then later down the road you build this really robust Excel sheet and then you can call and say, hey, we're going to do a marketing special and call these patients and say, hey, you know what, we're going to do it for 15,000 for the arch, for 10 patients. But I want longitudinal videos where I get pre-surgical videos, I get surgical videos, I get reveal videos and I get videos throughout a whole year and you have a really ironclad marketing form you give them so you can use their information, you can post it anywhere and there's no legal recourse. So they're signing off on the discount for you to be able to use this marketing video and if you can put in hey, we want family members in there too, family members talking about your transformation too, because that's powerful Then you can build up a huge armamentarium or Rolodex of all these cases you've done. Yeah, you did some at a reduced rate, when things are a little slower, but then you can still do arches and still kind of hone your craft a little bit, and then you get a lot more videos and things to take to Facebook and Instagram and the marketing world.

Taher Dhoon: 17:56

From a financing perspective, proceed is probably the best one so far. Hopefully you're using them. If you haven't signed up for Proceed Finance, you should. Cherry is also getting a lot of signups. Now, cherry is mainly for one arch. You're not really going to get a double arch on Cherry and then sometimes Comp Finance, compassionate Finance Bruce Baird's thing I don't know if he still owns it or he sold it but at the same time, compassionate Finance means you're the bank.

Taher Dhoon: 18:20

Now I'm going to be very clear with everyone listening to this. This is high risk and this is like me telling you to invest in Bitcoin. If you do, you're still 100% responsible for your success or failure in Bitcoin. But what I do is I'll meet the patient and I'll determine like, hey, is this someone I can trust, is this someone I'm willing to take a bet on, because I don't offer it to everyone and then I make sure they have a minimum of 6,000 down and then the rest they put on compassionate finance over five years or whatever the terms they choose, but it's usually five years and it's usually due to like 18% interest. It's freaking crazy.

Taher Dhoon: 18:55

But at the same time you're the bank and what I've found over a long period of time is I used to do it where I did the whole case on compassionate finance and huge default rates. Right, don't do that. But if you can get your money down, you can get your expenses down and you can say, hey, they covered my overhead for this entire case. All you're giving up is your time, your time and your expertise. But you're going to do more cases in the beginning and then you're going to make interest and for any of the cases that actually default, the amount of interest you make on them, you tend to actually make more than your UCR. It usually comes out to like 102, 103% after everything is said and done because of the amount of interest that's coming through on the patients that are paying. So hopefully that kind of wrapped up financing in a nice little bow there.

Paul Etchison: 19:43

Well, I think that's great. Listening to you talk to here, like if you the first part just talking about, hey, this is how we differentiate from the big box, that place I'm like listen to you speak and I'm just like, dude, why would I go anywhere else? I mean, everything is here, Like it's almost like you've touched on every little thing that people might not like about the big box and you've got an answer for it. I love that. Great stuff on financing and man, just tons of great information. You know, just for the listeners, if they want to learn more from you and what you offer, tell them about Colorado Surgical Institute and what they can find and what you guys provide.

Taher Dhoon: 20:17

Yeah, so Colorado Surgical Institute is a live patient training program. So essentially, I mean, at the end of the day, you tell me what procedure you're looking for, whether it's single implants, full arch, wisdom teeth, iv sedation, laterals, block grafts, digital workflow for full arch. I'm working on a crown and bridge one as well, but you just call, you say, hey, I'm trying to get better at this procedure, can you help me? And then we'll do a conversation about where you are from a complexity level. And then, if you want to do easy cases, I find an easy case and I pair you with that case. You know, if you're at Ryan's skill level with zygos and pterygoids, I'd find a case where it's like very, very challenging.

Taher Dhoon: 20:53

And then, for the docs who are really sophisticated, we're going to look at your ergonomics and your timing. We're going to get your arches under an hour. We're going to tell you how much your back was bent during certain periods, like when you were suturing, or where you need to improve from like a higher level perspective. And then, if you're brand new, we're just going to make sure you understand, like all the basics of how to get your distal angular implants, how to get stability, how to engage the nose and the sinus. So it's a live patient training program where we walk you through it. What I think the secret sauce is is we do coaching calls afterwards for free, forever. So you can call us. We are there to treatment plan with you. We're there to handle complications with you. We're just there for all our attendees, until I'm an old man on my walker, you know kind of retiring and hanging it all up. We're going to be there to support you.

Paul Etchison: 21:39

Awesome. Thanks so much, tahir. Really appreciate all the information. Thank you so much, dr Ryan. Really appreciate you coming on and asking some questions and I hope some listeners got some new direction from that. All right, thank.