Welcome to the Double your production podcast with the Team Training Institute, the one place designed for dentists and their staff who want to grow their practices by following in the footsteps of those that have done it, who are in the trenches, who know exactly what you are going through. And now, your leaders, the stars of the podcast, Dr. John Meis and Wendy Briggs.
Wendy Briggs: There's a concept that we started teaching, gosh, 10 years ago, probably at the very beginning and that was six weeks to an amazing open house of some kind. And this, we've seen it done successfully with implant open houses. We've seen it done successfully, very successfully actually with AVIVO's appliance or a sleep appliance open house. We've had other doctors choose Invisalign as their product. Okay. The whole concept behind this is you structure an event in such a way that you can drive a lot of a particular service. And what we've seen in the past done with is a higher-end type service, like an Invisalign or implants or something like that. And so, we have a couple doctors in the room that have done this really, really well, and I'm sure Dr. John knows other practices and providers who have done this well, too.
So, we want to find out. We've invited Dr. Herron and Dr. Tendero to join us. Their product happened to be Invisalign that they did this with, but we don't want this necessarily to be about an Invisalign discussion. Instead, what we really want this to be about is how you can structure an event like this with whatever product or service you're trying to promote and do more of in your practice. So, is there anybody else who's done this with implants or any other service or product that we're talking about? And what we're talking about is really setting up the structure, so that an afternoon or a day in your practice, this is what you're focused on. This is what you're doing. Is there anybody else who's had success with this in their practices with the different product or service?
Okay, well, let's have Dr. Herron and Dr. Tendero come up and keep in mind, so that's what Dr. John and I will kind of season the conversation a little bit with other practices that we know that have done this well with implants or sleep, and kind of talk through a little bit of that.
John Meis: There you go. All right. So, how'd you do it?
Wendy Briggs: Well, first of all, maybe, what did you do?
Dr. Robert Herron: Okay. So in my case, we really kind of got short notice in June that August 11th was going to be clear aligner day, an actual gone through the whole thing, national clear aligner day. So, late mid-June, we found out about it. So, that's pretty quick. I usually do EDDMs, Every Door Direct Mail, for most of my events, send out 25,000 cards with the information on it and draw people in. Well, we didn't have a chance to build that for this one, so everything was done, well, we do TV and radio. And so, we pumped it there, and then Facebook and Instagram and TikTok, all the things where people will see, because our practice, we do about half teens. And so, we want the teens saying, "Hey, mom. Can I get my teeth straight for X?" And so, what we ended up doing is get an after...
I didn't know how it was going to work. Well, I didn't want to cut the whole day, so I did an afternoon and we had 14 consults in the afternoon. And by the end of the day, 13 of them had accepted and paid at least a down payment. And how that worked was, is that it was basically assembly line.
It's basically an assembly line. And now, for Invisalign in that context, for me, if you don't have scanners, at least one, possibly two, it's hard to run 14 patients through with PVS impressions. It's just really tough. I cringe at the thought of PVS impressions anymore, but yeah...
Wendy Briggs: But really, what they did was they decided what their special offer was going to be and they invited the community and they had 14 people raise their hand that were interested. And then what they did was they had a process by which they were incredibly efficient in that afternoon only, and they closed 13 of that service. So, that's awesome. Do you have off the top of your head what that translated to, production-wise?
Dr. Robert Herron: Yep. Right at $60,000 for the day.
Wendy Briggs: And that's literally in one afternoon, right?
Dr. Robert Herron: Still trying to beat Ed on a single day, but...
Wendy Briggs: So, Dr. Tendero...
Dr. Tendero: Yes?
Wendy Briggs: Yours was somewhat similar.
Dr. Tendero: Yes, I did 21 in one day. So, my approach was I have everybody scanned. That's a part of my new patient experience, practice philosophy wise. I look at gums, I look at teeth, I look at occlusion. I'm very heavy on occlusion. I can diagnose it. I know how to diagnose all these patterns. So therefore, I know how to fix it and that's important to me. So, even when patients come in with other issues, I go, "Look, we can address this first, but this is something that if we don't address sometime soon, this is going to get a lot worse." Sometimes, just by scanning them, seeing constricted envelope of function, like the amount of wear that they have on the back of their teeth, if you don't have a scanner and you can't whip that around and really show them, "Look at how your teeth are hitting, this is just going to progressively get worse."
At the very least as a provider, I need to tell you, you have every right to do whatever you want, but I have a scan and I take a lot of pictures. So, I have both photography thing set up. So, what we did in order to set that up, we ran a report on everybody that I had treatment planned Invisalign, which is going to be a lot of people. If they weren't going to be in the office anytime soon, we call them or text them and tell them that we were going to have an Invisalign day. I didn't say exactly what we were going to do, but I said it was going to be significantly less than what we had given them. But one of my hygienist from the second I'm like, "Let's do an Invisalign day maybe from June." She started like talking up patients.
And I'm like, "If a patient wants to start today, we're not going to tell them, wait and wait." So, I kind of had to reroute that, but there were patients that maybe when we did present the treatment, they wanted to start but they weren't ready to start. And sometimes, they just needed that little kick to be like, "Hey, you kind of want to do it anyways. Here's the incentive." We did a spin the wheel prize. So, sometimes, they got a little bit more off. They got free whitening trays, which I'm very science driven. I give you my recommendations and here's the paper to back it up. So, something like whitening in trays, where there's not oxygen, whitens better, things like that, that I know personally, so I know this is going to be a better whitening solution for you regardless.
There's that just the little things that we gave them extra. We had little cookies given to them with like just little touches of...
Wendy Briggs: So, they made it fun.
Dr. Tendero: Yeah.
Wendy Briggs: Can you see? They made it fun. They made it an experience, so that maybe they would talk about it as a part of it.
Dr. Tendero: And my staff was great. Carmen was great about it. I mean, we set up like little balloon thing and kind of really made an experience. So, even patients that came in for other things kind of saw that we were already set up for something exciting. So, I had the wheel up before the Invisalign day. There were signs in the office that something was happening. So, that's also something nice to see.
John Meis: Of the people that you did, what percentage of those were existing patients and what percent were attracted?
Dr. Tendero: Oh. So, I gave a bonus incentive to any staff member that referred a patient. So, I think there were two that one staff specifically referred.
John Meis: Yep.
Dr. Tendero: And I know from just... I love Instagram, I'm millennial. I have some patients that really not only believe in the Invisalign product, but me as the provider delivering the Invisalign because Invisalign isn't the same with everybody. And I have an importance in explaining to patients how intentional I am with their treatment. And generally, I move into the cosmetics aspect of it. So, I'm able to show them what I do. So, they're believer in me rendering the treatment. So, I had some patients like share it on their Instagram and they're happy on their own that they received the results.
John Meis: Yeah.
Dr. Robert Herron: So, for us, we pretty much insisted all that were coming were new patients. So...
Dr. Tendero: I didn't.
John Meis: Oh, okay.
Dr. Robert Herron: 14 were pretty much new patients or we weren't seen, because anybody before that, that showed any interest, I said, "We'll tell you what. We're not supposed to do this, but we're going to go ahead and give you the same offer two weeks earlier." If I already had them in the room, I'm not going to jam up my afternoon with already ready to go. So, we want all of ours were pretty much cold call type of patients coming in, in the afternoon.
Dr. Tendero: Well, for my existing patients, we kind of developed a route sheet. Like this person had a pan, this person was scanned. So, we knew, we just needed to do these new things to not waste time. So, sometimes, I wasn't even seeing them, like I was even around.
Wendy Briggs: So, you have two different strategies.
John Meis: Yep.
Wendy Briggs: Right? So, one was a new patient attraction type event, but I'd be curious to see. Dr. Rob, how many Invisaligns you actually started on a existing patients leading up to it? Because that actually elevates your number.
Dr. Robert Herron: I think it was four.
Wendy Briggs: So, really it was 18 by doing the event.
Dr. Robert Herron: Well, I wasn't wanting to cheat. I was wanting to take what I did on...
Wendy Briggs: Well, I'm just saying. So, two different strategies, but I really love what Dr. Jessica said, and we've seen practices do this with like a crown day, where you send out an offer to anybody that has a crown on the treatment plan and you're doing a one time only, almost buy one, get one, half off, or something like that with people that have crowns in their schedule. And then, that day can become a very powerful day. We've seen that.
Dr. Robert Herron: We did that about probably right after starting with you guys. Probably 13 years ago, we had a crown day and that's back when I didn't know what I was doing, for sure. And now, it's just maybe, but I think we did 20 crowns in one day just by pulling off. It might even have been a two for one, if you had two. I don't reminisce, that's getting a while back, but any high dollar or big margin procedure works with this. People say, "I don't want," and then when you give them a heck of a deal, there they are. You got to see some of the stuff.
Wendy Briggs: Absolutely. Awesome.
Dr. Robert Herron: See my body, though.
Wendy Briggs: Anything else? A couple of the things that I've heard over the years and Dr. John might have something to add to this is we've seen dentists do this in their practice, but we've also seen them do this out in the community. So, an implant introductory seminar at a retirement center. Not a retirement home, there's a difference, but like a retirement community, they'll sponsor a wine and cheese event. They'll invite all of the people. They'll fill the room. They might tell patients, but this is a new patient attraction strategy, and well-attended. One doctor even said they had put a ringer in the room, which meant when they said in, if you schedule today, you get X amount of dollars off of the implant. And they had somebody in the room that would stand up and walk to the back to start scheduling. So, guess what happened with everybody else. Stood up and they walked to the back and started scheduling. So, people can get really creative with the approach and the plan, but we've seen those be wildly successful.
Dr. Robert Herron: They read [Caldini 00:12:06], didn't they?
Wendy Briggs: So, anything else that you've heard with this type of strategy?
John Meis: No. These are pretty much two different approaches on how to do it, but the idea is pick a high dollar item, create some excitement around it. You can use it as a new patient attraction, and then kind of hold on. These are outstanding results we did when I was still practicing. We did this when they first got imaging, where you could take a picture and they could modify the teeth. So, you could see what it would look like when that first came out to the point where you could do it really fast. We did one of these for cosmetic dentistry and our results weren't as good as yours. And hearing you talk about it now, I understand why they weren't as good. And number one, we didn't really make it an experience. We didn't have a build up to it exactly. And we went with our existing patient base, probably would've been smarter to go for new patients, as well. Yeah, you were about to say?
Dr. Tendero: For the... Is it working? Yeah.
John Meis: There you go.
Dr. Tendero: Okay. Sometimes, for the cosmetic stuff, when I do, I take way too long for my cosmetics. It's a production in my office. I need to scan, plan, digital print, mockups. It's too much. But one of the incentives that I've gotten is that sometimes, you can also kind of have like a social media contract with them that if they're an influencer, somebody like that, that you can give maybe something off based on how much they're willing to post for you, and that works really, really well.
John Meis: Yeah, okay.
Wendy Briggs: Love that idea.
John Meis: Well.
Wendy Briggs: Social media contracts for same day [crosstalk 00:13:54].
Dr. Tendero: Yeah. So, find people that have a lot of local followers.
John Meis: How do I become influencers?
Wendy Briggs: On social media?
Dr. Tendero: Influence People.
John Meis: Yeah.
Wendy Briggs: Yeah. You got to do some TikTok dance or something. I think people in this room would really like to see that actually.
John Meis: Yeah, that'd be great. You guys really enjoy that. I don't really understand TikTok, but I have been enjoying your team's TikTok videos. That's pretty clever.
Dr. Robert van Haren: Yeah. Go to Herron but under slash dental, I think it is. And my gals, I shake my head sometimes and just move on. But...
Wendy Briggs: So, let's do this instead.
John Meis: How you guys get any dentistry done? Because...
Wendy Briggs: Dr. Rob, you need to share those TikTok videos to our Blue Diamond Facebook group and to our Successful Dental Practice Secrets page, so that people can see what we were talking about. That would be awesome.
Dr. Robert Herron: I don't even know how to do that.
Wendy Briggs: Yay. So, you'll share the videos and then for those that want to, you can follow his account because one thing Dr. Rob's always done incredibly well in social media that he was Facebooking back before most of us even knew what it was and does that really well.
Dr. Robert Herron: 2006.
Wendy Briggs: Yeah. So, awesome ideas. Does anybody have any questions for either one of these doctors on their open house event? Awesome. Oh, there's one question back here.
Speaker 6: Did either one of you do anything different with the financial arrangements? Like just talking to the front desk, they were like, okay, well, 14 people have to set up 14... How did y'all structure that financial arrangements?
Dr. Robert Herron: Financial arrangements? Did you do anything different? My daughter does my financials for me. And so, what we did when we did this was literally, we had one assistant take the Panos F. Another one was starting the consult, my coordinator starting the consult, then I went in and a different assistant was with me taking my notes. And then, Andrea came in and talked to financials and what... We did a $1,500 off, which I have struggled to actually put prices when I do any type of advertisement, if we're just going to call it that or marketing. I have gotten over myself on that. And now, we do $1,500 off as ambiguous. And when we started actually putting the number and comparing that to what others are doing around us, that's when we started seeing some of the big changes, but we really didn't do a lot of different on the financial arrangements. We had it set up where if you did X down or you paid in full, it was X. That type of thing.
So, there were some incentives to put everything in the bank that day. But we were more than happy to do it on just a $500 down payment. And if you're doing Invisalign and you... I used to look at it if I wanted to get at least the lab cost as my down payment, we don't do that anymore. That's way too much of a barrier for most people, and so what we do as I think 500 is our down payment and get rid of all the barriers and I've never, and I say never very rarely, but I've really never had anyone stiff me with just the down payment because we just take their trays away. We repossess. Right.
Wendy Briggs: So...
Dr. Tendero: I did, since a lot of my patients already existed, so depending on how I was doing in the back, like if I was running a little bit behind, Carmen could just, I always told, "Print the old one," what they had signed and agreed to previously when they came. So, you can show them the difference of what it was. So, sometimes, she went over the financial arrangement, regardless, like they've had already had a consult with me. So, it was more like the flow of how fast this was going to be. So, it was given the old one, the new one, here's the difference. You've already talked to the doctor. I didn't have one consult that didn't start that day. So, it was good enough for us.
Wendy Briggs: So, what I'm hearing is they had it structured out, and with Dr. Haren, he's like, they go here, they go here, they go here. They knew how to move people through. And the financial team had the guardrails. They knew what the offer was. They knew what the typical things were. So, that made the financial consults more succinct and efficient as well, which is the whole reason we're doing this discussion is because that's what the focus of this retreat is, is on driving efficiency. And so, if you're going to have an $80,000 day or whatever it ends up being, having 21 starts in one day is an awesome day, you kind of have to have that structured out and you've got those things really efficient, which is why this is such a great exercise, because when you figure out how to do it more efficiently in one day, what do you actually get to take with you?
The knowledge on how to do it more efficiently all the time. Of course, cash is always the most efficient. Here's the ATM, right? I'm sorry. She don't have one in your office. Dr. Haren, he has a question.
Speaker 7: Hello everybody. So, I have a few associates that might be very interested in starting orthodontics. I actually have an iTero, too. That's just sitting collecting dust right now, because we're using the three shape for our crowns and such. What would you recommend as a course that could be something for them to start from to become Invisalign credited, whatever?
Dr. Tendero: Invisalign. So, if you want to get good at Invisalign, my recommendation is reengage Dr. Galler, the ACA, the American Academy of Clear Aligners, that has a lot of resources. I think it's also wise to pick slam dunk cases to begin with because sometimes you get in over your head and you need to know how to use Invisalign, not the Invisalign tech in Costa Rica. That's 20 years old moving the teeth, telling you how to do it. So, you're the doctor. You need to know what you're doing. And once you start working into the more complex cases, you need to know what you're doing. You need to know how to diagnose and you know how to move treatment forward. So, where to start, if you just want Invisalign there in terms of now we're talking occlusion and all these things, that's a long-winded answer, but [inaudible 00:20:24].
Dr. Robert Herron: 25 years of doing bands and brackets has really helped me, knowing what... John's seen them and some of the cases that we take on make you pucker sometimes, but you get through them and you've offered a tremendous service for someone that was told that they couldn't do Invisalign. And I just shake my head when I see a lot of that.
Wendy Briggs: When we talk about exit strategies, that's one of the reasons why Dr. Haren started looking at doing more Invisalign is because he knew that at some point, he wanted to retire but he also knows himself and he's like, "I probably won't really want to retire," but Invisalign is some he can do when he is 90 if he wants to. So, that was actually part of the strategy. Build that side of his practice up, so that he has a profit center and a revenue stream that he can keep doing for as long as he'd like. I'm not saying that's the answer for everybody, but that's part of it.
Dr. Robert Herron: But the only issue with that is then I have to stay. The value of my practice is built into me being there, doing the Invisalign or having someone that I'm showing how to do it or consulting it in that type of thing, but the value of the practice comes from me being able to do the Invisalign. So, I'm not tiger-proofing right at the moment. I'm creating more of a Roy situation I think.
John Meis: The love and focus on a particular treatment, whether it be Invisalign or sleep or anything, if you love it, great, as a business and practice strategy, eh. Right? Because now, Rob's got more Invisalign but now, he's got to do more Invisalign. And so, I just have seen many people get so in love with a particular procedure that they focus on that rather than building their entire practice and having that be part of a whole practice mix that you can have other dentists come in and do, and so you can do less of it. So, our CEO group really is about building an enterprise and the CEO then can step out of the chair over time as the organization grows and maybe not all the way out, because once you get down to a day, a week, it's kind of fun, right? Yeah. So, anyway.
Speaker 8: This is just a little off topic, but with everybody's growth and expansion and everything that people are planning, it's probably relevant for a lot of people. Do any of you have any suggestions for a new building open house?
Dr. Robert Herron: Yeah. We've done patient appreciation events that would double as a building open house. That's just, bring in food trucks or we brought in bouncy bounce houses for kids. I sat in a dunk tank. I mean yeah, dunked the doctor kind of a thing, and just little things like that. Balloons, party, we gave away prizes every hour on the hour. I mean, there's all kinds of strategies for an open house.
Wendy Briggs: I think we actually have a resource on the member website. It's six weeks to planning an open house. If we don't have it, then we can post it there. It used to be, so I'll make sure we find it. It probably needs a little dusting off to be honest because it's something that we've had for a long time, but it's a six-week planning tool that can help you with an open house. We've seen some really creative things. I know Seven Pines just had an awesome open house, where I think Dr. Lamberts and Dr. Peroutka actually played instruments and things, as well. That's where the dancing tooth came in. So, on our break, we can maybe ask them what they did on that. So, Dr. John, I think we are out of time. Awesome. Thanks.
