Dentists Who Invest Podcast
Official Podcast of the Dentists Who Invest platform. Talking all things investing, money and finance with a dental spin. Have you ever wondered how you can grow your wealth and protect your hard earned money as a Dentist? We've got you covered. Featuring famous guests such as Andrew Craig, Edward Zuckerberg and Benyamin Ahmed we delve deep into EVERY aspect of finance to educate and empower ALL Dentists.
Dentists Who Invest Podcast
Is Marketing A Naughty Word? with John Williamson and Dr. Ferhan Ahmed DWI-EP301
You can download your FREE report on how you can avoid financial mistakes as a dentist using the link just here >>> dentistswhoinvest.com/podcastreport
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Have wondered why marketing in dentistry sometimes gets a bad rap in the UK? Join Dr. Ferhan Ahmed and marketing PRO John Williamson as they unravel this enigma and reveal the true potential of savvy marketing in dentistry strategies for dental practices. Dr. Ahmed’s own journey shows how embracing marketing in dentistry not only honed his dental skills but also brought a steady stream of patients. Meanwhile, John encourages us to think creatively, focusing on customer experiences that could even rival Disney’s. Together, they delve into how personal and professional branding can supercharge growth and success in dental practices.
Learn the magic of Pareto’s Law and how zeroing in on the top 20% of efforts can deliver 80% of the results, taking your practice from good to exceptional. Dr. Ahmed and John also shed light on targeting high-value patients and how this can lead to rapid, cost-effective growth. They’ll share tips on optimising your marketing in dentistry and customer management strategies, giving your practice a serious boost.
Referrals are vital for any flourishing dental practice and our guests dive deep into tactics for generating them. Learn how focusing on high-value services and utilising Net Promoter Score (NPS) can turn happy patients into loyal customers. Dr. Ahmed reveals how multiple full arch reconstructions significantly boosted income at his clinic. Lastly, we explore the “Five Community” initiative aimed at equipping dentists with modern management tools and a growth-focused mindset. Tune in to find out how a CEO mindset can elevate your practice and help you master marketing in dentistry for long-term success.
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Disclaimer: All content on this channel is for education purposes only and does not constitute an investment recommendation or individual financial advice. For that, you should speak to a regulated, independent professional. The value of investments and the income from them can go down as well as up, so you may get back less than you invest. The views expressed on this channel may no longer be current. The information provided is not a personal recommendation for any particular investment. Tax treatment depends on individual circumstances and all tax rules may change in the future. If you are unsure about the suitability of an investment, you should speak to a regulated, independent professional.
Is marketing a naughty word. It is something that, whilst I feel many dentists probably haven't articulated it out loud, we subconsciously have this belief somewhere in our head because we're so averse for it, particularly British dentists. American dentists are a little bit more receptive to this stuff. But we're here to talk today a lot about marketing from two interesting chaps that I've got to know over the years. One is Dr Ferhan Ahmed, returning face in the Dentists Who Invest podcast, and another is Mr John Williamson, marketing expert, who brings context to this marketing debate that we're going to have on the Dentists Who Invest podcast. Looking forward to that, this is John's first time on the podcast. John has helped me out immensely whenever it comes to understanding a lot more about the world of marketing and also a lot of flipping huge pitfalls that I was walking into that I didn't even realize at the time. So I owe a personal thanks to John and it is definitely my honor to have both these amazing guests on this podcast today. Anyway, guys, how are you?
John:Good, good, good, good how are you? Dr Fernand.
Dr Ferhan:I am good, my friend, great to see you see, great to be back on the podcast.
Dr James:thanks for the invite my pleasure reprising your role as a co-host on the podcast, and things have done changed for fair hands since he's been on here, because that was like three years ago, and there's a lot of shit that's been popping which we're going to talk about in just a minute. But before we do, let's start from the top, guys. Let's talk about why we think marketing is a naughty word, or at least dentists think it's a naughty word. Let's just say that, and, Ferhan, you had some interesting insights in that just before we hit record, which I feel it would be interesting to delve into.
Dr Ferhan:Yeah, I mean, when we were just sort of just before here, we were discussing this and you'd mentioned yeah, for dentists, they often think it's a gnarly word. For me it's it's. It might be a gnarly word, but it's a really important word and something that we should absolutely be paying attention to and focusing on. Look, I'm involved in a lot of teaching and education within implant dentistry, with an implant dentistry, and one of the biggest challenges I see and I've observed in the clinicians I work with is patients patients to be able to practice what I teach them like dentistry is a very dexterous profession and really to get better. It comes down to practice. Why am I better than you at doing full arts, James? Just because I've done it more, I've spent a lot whoa whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa whoa.
Dr James:Who says you're better than me at full arts.
Dr Ferhan:No, I'm kidding, I hope I've deep dived into. I've immersed myself into one thing, doing it day in, day out. I've practiced more, so it's so important to be able to practice. How have I been able to practice more? Because I've marketed myself, the clinics that I work at, to allow the patients to come through for me to upskill. It's so important, and so there's a huge amount of attention on upskilling when it comes to techniques, new techniques, learning, new skills, and that's really important. Of course it is, and there's this whole, I suppose, drive to do that all the time. But I don't feel us as dentists, as dental practice owners, are spending enough time and thought into the importance of marketing, and that's not just marketing your business but actually marketing yourself and how you're doing that. How is it that you're starting and looking to build your brand so people patients, industry get to know who you are?
Dr James:Thank you for that, Ferhan. And do you know what it's interesting? Because obviously this is not something a lot of dentists talk about, so it's good to get some takes from people who are actively marketing themselves, so to speak, and have been on the receiving ends of the benefits of that. John, obviously this is your first time on the Dentists Who Invest podcast. I know you've got a lot.
Dr James:The interesting thing about John guys, for anybody who's listening is one of John's skill sets is the world of marketing and his understanding of it and his perception of it, his perspective on it, so to speak. And John has marketed in lots of different industries. So what it would be interesting to understand a little bit more about in just a second is, contextually, how open our dentists to this and what have you noticed specifically about our industry compared to others, because there's great power and understanding that stuff. But just before we get into that, John, I was just curious if you were to define marketing, how would you define it? Because I think that's where a lot of people fall down I have no idea we can't.
John:I don't even think it's important, so let's start from there, right? I think people get all twisted up about the difference between marketing and branding and sales and they need to find out the definition. But it doesn't really matter. Ferhan said this it's about connecting with your customers, the patients in the marketplace. It's about building your business in such a way that you're the most attractive offer on the marketplace and the most attractive offer not just with other dentists, but other experiences they can have when spending their money. So if you want the biggest definition, the biggest overall definition, marketing is about creating experiences for people and it's about making your experience better than everybody else on the planet. And so what I often say when I'm talking to people fair hand, you've heard me say this a lot now is that is our service, the experience we're creating with our marketing, with our service delivery. Everything. Does it match up to Disney? That's our competition, right? It's not the dentist down the road who's trying to figure it all out. Our competition is Disney. And are we on a par with them? Now, that changes the way you think about what customer experience looks like, et cetera.
John:But I'm going to go right back to the very beginning of what you guys talk about, because I don't want to miss the opportunity to talk about. Is marketing a naughty word? Well, it is a naughty word if you don't like getting rich. I'm just going to be really controversial here, right, and I'm going to sort of put this thing out there about making money, because what I've noticed a lot with people who are in the professions and I do most of my work with professions, so it's accountants, architects now dentists, et cetera is that they come at business from a different perspective than most people. They come at business from a service perspective where they are taught to care for people. They go into a profession where they're going to take many, many years of study and financial input and pain. And I always feel like Fairhand told his story to me and it's just insane, it's outrageous, what he went through to get to where he's got today before he can even start making money. And that doesn't follow how most entrepreneurs go into business. They wake up on a Monday morning and think I'm sick of working for the boss, I'm going to start my own business. I need to make money by the end of the week and then week two be better. By the end of the year. I want to be a millionaire. That's how most entrepreneurs go into business.
John:Where dentists I'm finding, or what we're finding, is that and I found in the past with, say, accountants as an example, that they need to develop business acumen, they need to develop some hunger, they need to go beyond the technical aspects of the business, and so the thing I always share with people is this Great products and services don't make millionaires. Great marketing makes millionaires. So, great products and services don't make millionaires. Great marketing makes millionaires.
John:Okay, and what that actually means is this it doesn't mean that you go. Oh so I don't need a great product and service, I can just get away with it and go and make millions. No, that's not what I'm saying. You should have the very best ever product or service imaginable. You should sell your soul to making it the best product or service imaginable, but you'll sit there and go poor while somebody down the street who doesn't care half as much as you, isn't as technically gifted as you, doesn't put the same amount of blood, sweat and tears into it as you, but has got great marketing and they will clean up Marketing. Is that much of an edge?
John:And so what I'm always trying to do is find people who have a great product or service, who have that perspacity to be able to do that kind of stuff, and then say now let's align you with great, amazing marketing and watch what happens. So that's my perspective if you want to take a perspective on it, but it's what I share with audience. I've been sharing this with audience for the past 30 years. I often start seminars with it that great products and services don't make millionaires. Great marketing makes millionaires. And I explain that tiny little concept there. Most people it takes them up short because they can think instantly of 10 other businesses which aren't as good as theirs but are making more money than theirs. Most of them sat in that room are going man, yeah, I know what that feels like.
Dr Ferhan:Like that that idiot down the road like, and that you know and they can instantly tell you people who are not as good as them making way more money and that's down to marketing John, I think on that, when you start talking about marketing and ultimately it comes down to where you're putting your energy as a practice owner, as a dentist, and I think that nicely links on to the 80-20 principle. Oh, wow, yeah, because I think that we talk about it a lot and the importance and the relevance of the 80 20 principle house everywhere and actually marketing and the impact that has is massive when you start thinking about it in terms of 80 20 yeah, 100, and there's hardly a single person out there, including dent dentists, who have not heard of the H20 principle.
John:Right, James? Even when I met you going back I don't know, a couple of years ago, we started talking. You went yeah, yeah, yeah, I know about the H20 principle, everybody knows about the H20 principle. Yeah, but there's a difference between hearing those couple of words which, within a second, you go, oh okay, yeah, that makes sense. Which, within a second, you go oh, okay, yeah, that makes sense. And actually doing something with it, actually applying it and applying it over and over and over again in your business.
Dr James:But most sorry, James, I was just gonna say. Can I interject with one thing? It's knowing the 80 20 principle and a lot of concepts in life. It's not so much a binary thing, it's more of a continuum. To what, to what degree do we know and embrace it? And even though I felt like I understood 80 20 pareto's law I'm pronouncing that correctly, right, pareto's law. So for anyone who doesn't know, 20 of your actions get 80 of your results. So if you can just continue to focus on the 20, you can scale effectively. And even though I thought I knew that, I think I've been on this journey, which is a podcast, for another day over the last six months where I feel like I've understood that even more. So I just wanted everybody in the audience out there who feels like they've heard of 80 20 to still have their ears alert to this stuff, because you can actually. It's actually an evolving thing. It is actually to what degree you understand it and this is the secret to wealth right here, and marketing is part of that as well.
John:It usually applies to finance the stuff you teach people. It applies to stuff I teach people, and the specific concept is trying to make this super simple in a couple of minutes, or not, sort of a little bit usable, I guess, in the next couple of minutes, because you can go really deep with it and you can be cross-disciplinarial about it across your business. So you can look at the people side of the business, you can look at the financial side of the business, you can look at the marketing side of the business everything and see where it applies and then cross everything over. But if you thought about it this way, it's a natural law, yeah, so you can't do anything to change it. Which means that if you go oh, I'm going to really focus on that 27 and build it, guess what? You just get a different 80% on the bottom. The 80% just changes, but you're always 80-20. It never changes. I've never met a business where 80-20 does not apply, because even if they apply the 80-20 and apply it really robustly, at the end of 12 months, guess what? They're still going to have 80-20. It's just that they're 20. It's going to be five times better than it used to be before, but they will still have 80% at the bottom that don't contribute as much, et cetera, et cetera.
John:So you're absolutely right, it evolves, and the important word here is one of you said scaling, and that's a perfectly adequate word, but the word really is exponential. If you're looking for exponential growth, which means that your cost base compared to your revenue growth cost base stays the same or gets smaller whilst your revenue growth grows higher, scaling a lot of the time what happens is your cost base grows alongside your revenue, and so the reason why a lot of businesses get in trouble when they're trying to scale quote unquote is because they absorb more and more costs of trying to get that revenue number moving upwards. 80-20 doesn't do that. 80-20 means you stay at exactly the same cost base and or it reduces at the same time and your revenue takes off, and that's where it just explodes. So that's where we get exponential growth from.
John:And if you think about it, supposing we've got 10 businesses in the marketplace, I'd like to use the whiteboard for this, but, as you can see, it's already in use and it's a podcast, so I'm not going to do stuff that people can't relate to in the real world. We've got 10 businesses and we looked at those 10 businesses, the top 20% of all those businesses are going to generate 80% of the profits in those businesses. Now, those are not absolute numbers. So if anybody's read a bit about this and say, John, it's not that absolute, it could be that 17% generates 50% of the business, but it's always a tiny amount equals a bigger amount. But let's suppose, just for the sake of argument, we've got 10 businesses and they've each got 20% of the best customers in the marketplace, the most profitable ones.
John:Here's what most people do with the marketing. They do what I call fair share marketing, which means when they market they're getting the 80% and the 20% type of customers attracted to their business. They're getting four times as many customers that arrive on their doorstep who are bad for business in real terms, in absolute profitability terms, than they are the top 20% of which are brilliant. And so here's the cheat on their doorstep, who are bad for business in real terms, in absolute profitability terms, than they are the top 20% of which are brilliant. And so here's the cheat your marketing. Like Fairhands alluded to there, if you get your marketing right, you only market for the best customers in the marketplace and you only take best customers off your competition. You don't take all the other stuff and as your business grows you let go of the not so good customers and guess who gets those your competition? So your competition gets really wobbly real fast. I know this, I've done it in all sorts of industries where we can identify the localized competition and they start freaking out real quick. Because once we start taking one, two, three, five customers their best customers over there, two or three of the best customers from that company they all start to get wobbly. They start to throw money at advertising to try to stem the lack of the best customers who were generating most of their profit. So all of a sudden we're depleting their profit and we're putting them in a situation where they have to throw more money at advertising and we're actually spending less now. So what happens to us? We expand much, much faster.
John:I can't think who said it. I thought for a long time it was Bill Glades, but I can't attribute this to him. But I heard somewhere online that winning the customer, winning the sale, is not enough. Yeah, the competition has to lose. Winning the sale is not enough, the competition has to lose. Andning a sale is not enough. The competition has to lose and when you think about what you're trying to do in absolute terms in marketing, if it's quote unquote, a war, yeah.
John:If we're fighting for customers in the marketplace and at the moment there's like no more people gonna buy dentistry, we can't get people out of nowhere. It's like in your locale, you have what you have. If you take a customer on, they are either with another dentist at the moment or they have a choice of where to go, and the best ones in the marketplace. We want to unseat them and get them to come to us instead, or the best customers in the marketplace that aren't with somebody. We want to be their first choice. We want them to always go. I'm going to go to, in this case, edinburgh dental. Makes sense, or have I overcooked that?
John:no, no, we only had seven minutes and I've done like a seven hour thing in seven minutes, right it's 80, 20, and you know what it's like.
Dr James:I say the nice way to think about it is it's a continuum of understanding rather than a binary thing, and what you've added you've just furthered people in their continuum of understanding. If anybody wants to further that continuum even more, here's a great book that I think you recommended to me, John 80, 20, sales and Marketing. What a flipping cool book. But anyway, John, you were in full flow there, sorry.
Dr Ferhan:Because, James, you recommended that book to me and I'm 50% through it. But the insight I received, having read a number of books and spoken in depth with John about 80-20 is 80-20, like you said, is continuum. Your understanding deepens as you really embrace it more and more. So 80-20, of that 20%, there's 80-20. And of that 20%, there's 80 20 and it's it just keeps going. And I got that insight from the book and it really got me thinking.
Dr Ferhan:And so, even within marketing, there's so many areas that you can market, like direct mail, social media kind of leave, like abundant, like google, so loads of stuff like where do you start? And there's an 80 20 to that and and and then even within that and and that's what you need to understand like it's because, because there are a lot of people marketing their practice or go to different agencies to market, but actually what is right for you in in respect of how are you going to market? What's right for you as an individual, if you're branding and marketing yourself or you as a practice? What does that marketing look like and what does it involve and what medium are you going to use? And I think that's really important.
Dr Ferhan:And thinking about the 80-20. It's like everywhere. I suppose one real way to really understand it is that if you look at your wardrobe, there's a good chance there's 20% of clothes in your wardrobe that you wear 80% of the time and that really hit home with me. That's so true. I've got all these clothes and I pick up the same items on a regular basis.
Dr James:I'm going to say 95% of the time for most males.
Dr Ferhan:I'm going to say that it's so interesting and so, really, when you start to really look at it and try to really adopt that as a way of thinking, as you said, John, it's exponential the growth that you can see around you.
Dr James:Ferhan, can I ask a question? So you've obviously been working alongside John and benefited from John's expertise, and not only have you benefited from it, but you've actually honed it towards the dental industry. So what have you done to 80-20 your life, so to speak? What have you noticed is effective?
Dr Ferhan:So if I just look at my dental practice at Edibro Dental, we're primarily a referral clinic for oral surgery, sedation and implants, and when we really got to the micro detail it's very clear where the income is coming from.
Dr Ferhan:In the practice it's referrals, patients through word of mouth and a dentist sending us patients and then, like, for instance, in June I did eight full arches in the clinic through word of mouth or through referrals, and the income those eight full arch reconstructions brought into the practice, like that is what is going to change the trajectory of the business. Eight patients in the 30-day period, eight patients generating over 100,000 into the business, that is what's going to change the trajectory of my business, not the other hundreds and hundreds of patients that come in for hygiene and checkups et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so it's about making my team aware because it's not just about me as the business owner, it's a team approach making them aware and understand the importance of being able to focus and attract more of those types of patients and where are they coming from. And so I think that's really been massive for my clinic and then going forward in future ventures. It's reality, it's real, I can see it and a month to month. Can we share?
John:some of the secret sauce, then we could. Should we look at? Look at his face. His eyes are all over the place like secret sauce man. What are you going to tell them? And all I'm going to share with them is is the underpinning thing.
John:So what we're obviously you've alluded to there, but referralization of the practice, 10xing the referralization you've done naturally, in other words, putting systems, processes in place to actually manufacture referrals. And so everywhere on the Internet you will see people rubbishing referrals. So every ad for every agency will say you don't have to rely on referrals, you can use Facebook ads or whatever. And I'll tell you all day long yeah, you're not 8 to 20 business, it's referrals first. You can if you're listening to this right now, listen real close you can become a buy referral only practice, which means your cost space in marketing drops to the floor, which means the quality of your customers goes to the roof and the sales conversion is a lot easier, and 101 other reasons why. But people just don't know how to do it. And here's the starting point, and this is what we teach inside the FIDE community NPS net promoter score. And so most people have never heard of this before. James, are you familiar with NPS net promoter scores.
Dr James:I think we may have mentioned it in the past possibly touched upon it, but do you know what I'm listening, and with intent here, because I'm intrigued to learn, because it's definitely I need a refresher, I need a refresher yeah, and so it's super important.
John:If you won't go, go to any of the top 100 companies in the world, any of the top 100 companies in the uk, wherever they are all using net promoter score and us small businesses, well, what's net promoter score? Right, we don't know. But listen, that applies to a lot of things that big companies do and know about that we just don't get access to because we just not got the resources, et cetera. And one of the things that I've been able to do the years is because I work with big companies is look at how that works over there and then find ways to make it work over here. So, for example, say, with Net Promoter Score, it's usually quite expensive you to score. It's usually quite expensive. You can spend thousands a month just getting the software to actually make it happen, interpret it and create the dashboards and the rest of it. We found a source. I went through dozens of different people, I jumped on calls with people and the rest of it, and we managed to find somebody and make it work for us for what? About $40 a month, something like that? I can't remember. It's crazy cheap, okay, but now we put that in the hands of dentists. So any dentist now could get involved with MPS.
John:And what MPS does is very, very briefly because there's a lot of stuff to it, but fundamentally what it does is it enables you to identify the promoters inside your business, the people who cannot help but say, oh, you want to use my dentist, and somebody looks at them and says, yeah, well, no, no, no, no, no, you need to come on, I will take you to my dentist. Let's go Like those people, the people that are like what we call marketing cheerleaders, that they really love you, they love what you've got, they love the experience and they want to get more and more people involved. Okay, and that's a smaller number of people than you'd think. Yeah, we go for a scale of 0 to 10. We only pick the 9s and 10s, and then we only pick the 9s and 10s that say nice things about us, and then we have a mechanism for once we've identified them for recognizing them and then mobilizing them, and so we put them through this cycle.
John:Yeah, but 99% of dentists out there don't know about this, so they wake up tomorrow morning thinking I need to get more customers, I need to get out there and bang the drum, I need to get more recognition, more visibility, whatever, and so naturally people fall to going out and paying money for ads and all that stuff, whereas actually for not a lot of money inside, your own practice is the biggest marketing machine in the world.
John:You're marketing cheerleaders, but unless you identify, recognize and mobilize them, they'll do their best, but that's all they can do is do the best for you. Yeah, they'll go out and say things, but most of those recommendations when they say to somebody, hey, you should go to my dentist, they're amazing. And the people say, yeah, I'm not really that happy with mine or whatever. Most of them don't take the next step and pick up the phone and make an appointment. So it's what we call well-meaning friends, your well-meaning patients, who go to try and support you but it's left hanging because they can't literally put somebody in a car and drive them to the practice, Otherwise they would probably these people and so what this system does is it gets them into the system where we can show them how to proactively, once you want to recommend somebody, to actually make the contact.
Dr James:Make sense? Damn, it does make sense. So you're basically enabling them yeah, you're enabling them to do what they want to do, which is be a missionary effectively for your practice. And listen, we've all had, no matter what level your business is at, there's somebody there's got to be at least one huge fan in the audience somewhere, right and they love you. We've all had customers like that and that's brilliant. You've made them really happy. You know, imagine being so blown away by something that you can't stop talking about it, and that's how somebody feels about you flipping awesome. But you're right, it's like they've never had any formal guidance in how they can spread the message, so that it kind of sounds like that's what this is. To agree, yeah, and how is that? How is that done? Now I'm really curious. Or is that the secret sauce part? Is that the super secret sauce?
John:that's the secret sauce behind the secret sauce part, is that the super secret sauce. That's the secret sauce behind the secret sauce. Oh, I see, listen, I don't know how many sessions we've done on this now like six or seven sessions, just to get to the point where people are starting to really understand it and we're putting the tools in place and we're putting the mechanisms in place to do it. So it takes a little bit of time to put together and I think this is one of the other things with people nowadays we're all. We're all hooked on instant, like convenience marketing. Yeah, so what's the easiest way of doing it? Somebody knocks on your door, says do you want to do facebook ads? And they go we'll do everything for you, yeah, and they they throw some stuff together and they've got a dashboard and they've got some 18 year old kid sort of banging stuff away for you and they're coming back with numbers which you don't really understand once a week and and you know it happens for two, three, four months and then you go enough's enough. You know I'm not really making as much money as I should be at.
John:So most people are hooked on immediacy. They're hooked on you know what can I do today? This stuff takes a little bit of time. Yeah, it takes several weeks to put the. You've got to get buy-in from everybody. That's team, because the team has to be involved within the process. Um, and there's there's things that need to get done, like setting up the mps in the first place and all of it, but what we do is we use fairhand as a I hope you're okay me saying this outside of the walls of the fine community but we use fairhand as a crash test dummy. So, James, remember the old crash test dummies with, with volvo, don't you? Back in the day? On the adverts? In fact, you're too young you don't recall it, but they used to have these adverts. What's that? What's?
Dr James:that volvo? No, I'm joking.
John:I've seen, I'm aware of volvos and so crash test dummies with the like warning signs on their heads and all the rest of it, like mannequin type things. They hit them into a bang and then they'd measure what happened when we did that. Is the car safe enough? Can we improve the safety? So what we actually do with Fairhand is we actually come up with the concepts, we start to roll it out. Fairhand leads first, and then we all watch what's happening. How's it going? Is it working out? Is it not working out? All Like, how's it going? Is it working out, is it not working out? All that kind of stuff. And then everybody follows a week or two behind and they implement what they've seen working and we create, you know, lots of really cool explanation videos about how to set stuff up in OSP. So nobody's sitting there trying to figure it out for themselves. It's super easy to do once we've got it set up, and so there's a process.
John:Number one process is, as we said there, identify, and so the first thing you've got to do and you can't do anything with this stuff until you've done it is identify your promoters. Who are those people? And then we recognize them. We recognize them by and I don't want anybody trying this without further, like, even if you don't want to join five, but you want to try this, just ring me first. Don't just go ahead and do this, because you'll get yourself in trouble. But we send people a greetings card, James, yeah, a greetings card. And so that's the first step in the building, this enhanced relationship that we're just about to create with these people, because, fundamentally, what we know is that your promoters really want a deeper relationship with you. Yeah, if you send them a thing and say, hey, come around for dinner on Friday night, they'd be like, oh, my dentist has asked me to go to dinner. And they'd ring all the friends like it was five minutes later, like my dentist has asked me to go to the dentist, like they'd be so excited, they'd be absolutely beyond excitement.
John:Yeah, your detractors in the business or the people that are ambivalent to who you are and there's lots of them they'd go. What? Why would I want to go to the dentist? They're transactional. So there's a difference between transactional people and relationship-orientated people, or what we call relational people, and so what we're trying to do is get the relational people on board and then actually properly start the relationship. Now, most people's argument to this is. They've been a client for four years. We've got a relationship. That's not a relationship because that relationship only takes place inside the walls of the business. Whether you're an accountant, whether you're a dentist, whatever, it only takes place inside the walls. Yeah, and the minute they've left, what do we do? We forget them. And what's the next time they hear from us? Hey, it's time to come spend some more money with us.
Dr Ferhan:Check up yeah.
John:Yeah, Like, book your appointment and that's the next time they hear it. So we're actually working in a transactional way where they are relational. So the next step is to go right, how do we build this relational approach with people? Now here's the thing, the reason why I said don't just run ahead and do this. This has got to be real, it's got to be meaningful. Fair Hand's perfect for this because he's a real people person. Yeah, he loves his people. Yeah, he gets excited by spending time with them. Yeah, he's got a really interesting approach which we're dealing with in about a month's time.
John:I've shared this with you in the past. James called the assistant decision maker process. Yeah, I came across fairhand and fairhand's doing it. He's already doing this decision making process and so what I'm going to do is help him understand how he's doing that and then we're going to build that out and share it with the pride community to enable them to build rapport charismatically with patients in minutes, not Not third, fourth, fifth visit if we get there, but literally in the first five or so minutes of meeting somebody where they go friend for life. Yeah, Where's my dinner invitation, Van? Like, surely people like us we go to dinner right Now. Listen, you don't, and that's not where we're going with this. But we do build a relationship where they feel like they genuinely have a connection with you. Yeah, and we do it for the right reasons. And then what we do is we show them. We've got processes, we've got things we call care, events and things like that, where we show them how to introduce their friends to us.
John:Now let me put something to you here, James. You're probably looking at your clock now and thinking we're going to have to us. Now let me put something to you here, James. You're probably looking at your clock now, thinking we're going to have to wrap. So I'm going to cram something in in minutes. Fair, honey, if you're okay. If I do a bit of cramming, a bit of leverage, yeah, okay. And so this is for everybody's thing here.
John:Your best patients at the moment know other people just like them. Your worst patients at the moment, whatever that means, however they look, they know lots of other people just like them. We sort of know that. Right, If somebody rings up and say, oh, Samantha Smith said I should give you a call, You're like, oh, Samantha, she's awesome, this is going to be a great new patient. Book her in, give her priority treatment, whatever Dave Smith rings up and says oh, I've just got a recommendation from Arthur Phillips.
John:Oh, another Arthur Phillips. Do you get my point? This is an actual thing that your grandma told you about James Birds of a feather flock together. It's a thing, man, it's a thing. And so if you want to accelerate your marketing, you want to spend the least amount of money possible. If you want to get the best customers in the marketplace and I'm telling you now, the best ones are already spending money somewhere else with someone else who they can identify them as their best customers the good news is your existing best customers have a better relationship with those people than the than your competitor does. Is that? Is that wrong like? Is that like it should?
John:be, your best. What was?
John:that your existing best customers yeah, have a better relationship, yeah, with the other best customers in the marketplace than your competition, even though they are with your competition. And so the way to break that relationship is not through adverts. The way to break that relationship, which is usually transactional, is to get your existing best customer, who's just like those other people, to say I found somebody for us, I found somebody who's relational, yeah, and they congregate and then it's like a flywheel yeah, they know other people and they're in a tight knit group and there's four, five, six, seven, eight of them, and before you know it they're all wanting to use the same dentist yeah, so there's a flywheel effect with it. But you just got to break it in there and you've got to make it easy for them and you've got to get them to understand the fact that you are no longer transactional. And I don't mean that in a derogatory way, it's just the nature of how people do business. Somebody comes in, gets great work done, they love you, but you don't do anything extra to make them feel like you've got it's a relational interest, yeah, and so once you switch that on, you switch it over. Finding new clients never an issue, don't care what kind of business you run, it's never an issue. Yeah, you've actually got a real life example of this in your own industry.
John:The person who switched me onto this in the 80s, the person that got my mind thinking man, this is entirely possible the guy's called Paddy Lund. Paddy Lund, the Australian dentist. Yeah, I heard about this guy making three times more than the average dentist in Australia, who were working 60 hours a week and he was doing 25 hours a week and he was making three times more money. Do you know how Referrals he went? I'm going to be referral only To the point, James, where he put a brass tack on the front of his door and it said I'm a bi-referraling practice. Unfortunately, I can't help you if you haven't been referred, but here here, here are three other dentists locally that may be able to help you. Man, imagine having the confidence that you knew you. At any moment in time you could pull in brand new patients, best patients, that you could actually send patients, potential patients, to your competition.
Dr James:You get it. I do it's when you believe in yourself to that level, right.
John:Yeah, there's a sort of magic with this and and yeah. So I don't know if that was the question or not, but what we're doing inside the five group, that's what we're doing. Yeah, we are helping.
Dr Ferhan:Yeah, John, if I may add one of the like, there's multiple benefits to adopting revitalization, this process that that you've come up with, and one of the benefits of this whole process is an awareness, more active alertness to the customer experience. Like me and my team are much more attuned to thinking and awareness of their customer experience, because we're we're doing all this identifying, recognizing, mobilizing our best promoters, we're also constantly thinking about what experience are we giving the patients, the clients that come to see us, and then we look at ourselves like how are we turning up? Each, each one of us, and and so bringing this into the clinic has side effects, and those side effects are positive hell yeah man hell yeah, I'm sold I'm even more sold as a result of explaining this with you today than I was before I came in today.
John:Like I'm so sold but here's the thing.
Dr James:I think the key thing to realize is that when you apply the 80 20 process to your life, first of all it's an ongoing thing. You've probably 80 20 something to get to where you are. But what I mean is being what the difference is, being intentional about it, when you're aware and listen. We've had the time to go into what one facet of marketing because I'm sure there's a billion billion trillion others, uh, beyond what we've talked about today but this one is a flipping, super juicy, valuable one. John, you mentioned the fad community and, fernan, I know that you also run that alongside. John, what is the five community? Is that something to do with marketing?
John:John, but fair hand, so yeah. So here's what happened. Um, farah and I were working on stuff and I, and, and he was saying, like more dentists need to know about this, because that's how fair hand is. He's not. He's not. He's not like a protectionary guy, he's like wrap this up secret sources, all mine. He's not. He went you know what? We should share this with loads of other people, and so we sat down and talked about what that would look like and and initially, um, we've called it the five community. Uh, hot news, it's about to change its name. Hot news, but that's not important.
John:Um, so the five community stands for fiercely independent dentalurs, and the concept really is to put the tools in place to enable dentists to do everything we talked about today to referralize practice, to implement the H20 principle, to learn about assistant decision making, to create something called the marketing manifestos which I've shared with you in the past, James super, super, super valuable conversion tools. So, basically, to give dentists access not just to marketing, but the very specific kind of marketing I've been doing for the past 30 years, which has already been tried, tested and proven with who I would consider to be the somewhat distant, related but not dissimilar cousin to dentists, which is accountants, and I know some of you sitting there and you're either thinking well, that doesn't sound too bad being associated and related to an accountancy firm and others are going no way. No way, I'm no way as boring as an accountant. I get that Okay. But there are many, many, many similarities that I've noticed by working. Like I say, my major client base for the last it's been accountants. They share many. Is he gone?
Dr James:Is he gone. I'm here, I'm just putting my book away. I'm listening, I'm here, you were right on accountants versus dentists. I was listening with a dent.
John:Yeah, and you guys are all very similar for a whole bunch of reasons. What I'd say is you're probably where accountants were maybe eight or ten years ago. Accountants have had a massive wake-up call over the past 10 or 15 years. Their industry is changing massively. I think your industry is about to change massively, notwithstanding there's going to be changes within, I believe the way it's funded, like the whole National Health Service, and how that's going to pan out over the next 10 years, I think we're due for some massive changes there. It's going to be massively disruptive in the UK, I think. If you look at AI and how that's going to impact on your industry, I think it's going to be huge. It's going to be massive for great benefit.
John:It's happened in accountancy a little bit earlier than you guys, and so the first to really embrace marketing, the first one is to really grab a hold of it now and say we are going to be leading edge entrepreneurial dentists and we're going to treat it like a proper bona fide business. We're really going to grow the heck out of it and we're going to be very, very customer, client, patient centric and really get that under. You've got such a head start Like. Now is the time. Now is the time to really crack on.
Dr James:Ferhan yes, any more thoughts? Or did John do a really good job?
Dr Ferhan:Finance community is really, for me, a vehicle to learn more, to be around like-minded people. Yeah, absolutely. If I circle back to what I said at the start, marketing and building yourself as a brand and projecting that out to the world and being active and intentional about it so you get to control that whole side of things is really important because it's going to allow you to do more, become better through a process of practice and and upskilling. So for me, it was. It was it was very easy to go.
Dr Ferhan:Yeah, John, it'd be great to do something like this because I know, in a way, I'm going to be riding on the, the slipstream of John as he's directing me and navigating, building up this, this community where we can bring in dentists, and we're very much aligned.
Dr Ferhan:Like you attract people like yourself, so we're going to attract people like us that are growth driven, that want to get better and and so it's only going to benefit me and what I do in my own businesses and I was really keen for that. So for me, that was the huge, uh sort of attraction of of going yeah, John, let's do this. It'd be really cool. And what I've noticed is, when I look at my life, it's certainly chapters where I've I've done certain things and and for me this is definitely the next chapter where I'm really going to focus on sales, marketing, communication, teamwork, leadership. Just to become a better clinician, I need to start to think outside the box and I really feel, by learning these other skills, I'm going to become a better clinician, because they're linked and I don't think enough people think about it as a link, but I tell you that's linked. You become a better individual, a better person, a better leader when you start to learn about this stuff and it's going to make you a better clinician.
Dr James:Well, it's the ceo energy, isn't it? You know what is? What is the thing about a ceo? An employee knows a lot about one specific thing. Ceo knows a little about a lot, because then they can offer input and guidance and wisdom on each and every area.
Dr James:So in order to do that, you have to do that. You have to expand your consciousness, you have to expand your bodies of knowledge, and this is the stuff that's not taught in dental school whatsoever. And this actually fits in very nicely with the broader theme of dentists who invest, because for me it was a whole big voyage in finance alongside my dentistry and business alongside my dentistry, and then that is what literally led to the community. So I think about think, being active and intentional about doing that sort of stuff can only ever be a good thing. But I feel like people don't necessarily appreciate that until they've been through it through it a few times. And that's what we're here to inspire people to do today. On this episode, guys, if anybody wants to learn more about the five community, how would they be best off finding you guys?
John:So I'm thinking we've only just instituted this literally this week, but we have something where a couple of times a week we're doing an intro webinar. But it's a proper training webinar, it's not a sales pitch. So like people can come in and they I get the whiteboard out and we start to explain some stuff. So we go through the elemental basics of how this stuff works and the mindset and all that kind of thing. So I'd say the first stop is probably to head over to ReferralResultscom. Referralresultscom Do you like that, James? Referral.
Dr James:Results? I do, and it's actually very neatly linked into the subject matter that we all talked about today.
John:It's literally about referral results, wow, yeah, and then just plug us in or reach out to either myself or fairhand on um on insta I guess, because we're there every morning sometime around 8 am if you want to sort of enjoy the conversation that we have first thing in the morning. It covers all sorts of subjects, doesn't it not fair?
Dr Ferhan:yeah, sometimes relationship a therapy because I just talked to John about my relationship relationship with my partner, my wife and the children struggles hell it's. It can be anything and everything. And today we were speaking about positioning and what does positioning mean in relevance to marketing and the difference between positioning and branding, and how we're all sort of positioning ourselves in one way or another and actually really thinking about it. So it's really interesting. It's just a good way to to to get the creative juices going in the morning, because me and John haven't planned it. I'm like, John, eight o'clock, thumbs up, let's go right. How you doing? Yeah, this is why I came up with, or what, what I was thinking about. Yesterday I spoke to this person and it leads to one thing to another, and I love that because, genuinely, there's no script, there's no idea what we're going to talk about. We'll just go. Oh hi, how are you doing? What have you got on today? Yeah, let's go.
John:Tomorrow morning, Fern, I want to speak about tapering, so put that in your head. It's tapering, yeah yeah, why don't? You join us tomorrow morning, James? Yeah, why not man?
Dr Ferhan:yeah, yeah, join in like anybody out there listening. Please just like request to join. Join the conversation. Go hang out, yeah and maybe ask John a question.
Dr James:Let's freestyle on the gram, let's do it. We locked it. We locked it in. And, guys, just for the listeners, we're recording this podcast on 29th of August 2024. Recording this podcast on 29th of August 2024. So it might be out after that tapering conversation, but I'm sure if you guys browse the gram you'll be able to find it, and Ferhan and John will be doing a lot more where that comes from over the next few weeks. So I want to watch out for it. Guys, listen. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. I'm looking forward to the next episode, because I think we're just scratching the surface of this marketing business, so that'll be fun. Looking forward to the next episode, because I think we're just scratching the surface of this marketing business, so that'll be fun looking forward to it. In the meantime, hope you guys have an absolutely smashing thursday. Thank you, James, good to see you again.
