Ep 134: Perfecting Patient Flow with Cassidy Dustin

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John Meis (00:03.692)
Hey, everybody. Welcome to this episode of The Double Your Production Podcast. I'm Dr. John Meis here with my partner, Wendy Briggs. Hey, Wendy, how you doing?

Wendy Briggs (00:11.686)
I'm great, Dr. John. I'm excited about today's topic.

John Meis (00:13.208)
Fantastic. Yeah, we have with us today, Cassidy Dustin. Cassidy is from Gargle. And so Cassidy, I want you to go ahead and kind of fill people in on who Gargle is, what Gargle does, why you do it. And then we'll go into kind of ways that we've seen people be successful.

Cassidy Dustin (00:30.506)
Yes.

Also, it would be helpful for them to, you can introduce yourself first too, right? So, let's know a little bit more about who you are and how you came to be here with us today.

Absolutely.

John Meis (00:40.6)
Yes.

For sure, for sure. So like you said, I'm Cassidy. I'm super excited to be here on this podcast and to talk through all things new patients. It's something that we love to talk about here at Gargle. I'm super, super excited. I tell people that I've been in dental my whole life because my dad is a dentist and I grew up going to his practice and playing with all the toys and just being around the dental space, my mom was the office manager for a while. So I really grew up around, you know, the dental world and was hearing all the things that they were talking about. And I was never really that interested in it, which is why I'm not a dentist today.

But I went to school and I decided to study marketing and I fell in love with marketing. I love helping people reach their goals and find value in a product and just help people find success within their business. And so that's when I got introduced to Gargle, which kind of married the two major subjects from my life, marketing and dental. And so I work here at Gargle and help with the marketing here. And Gargle's number one goal is to help you get new patients and grow your business for a really great price.

So we always say we're the last dental marketing partner you'll ever need because expensive marketing is hard to swallow. We really value not only high quality products, for, sorry, high quality products for a low price. We do websites, SEO, social media, ads, mailers, review management, basically any marketing product you would need.

And something a little bit different about us is we take a very consultative approach to marketing. So we assign a strategist to each one of our accounts or each one of our clients, and they work directly with you to monitor all the data that's coming in. So, OK, this ad is performing really well. This ad isn't. Your SEO is better after we change this landing page. All sorts of that, all sorts of those details. And then they make recommendations on how to improve. something that a lot of our clients have really talked to us about, something that they really like is that we're very accessible. There's real people here to talk to you. There's real people behind the products. And you're able to talk to us pretty much at any time. We're a one -stop shop and we have really great pricing. So that's a little bit about Gargle and about what makes us different.

John Meis (03:35.938)
Yeah, that's awesome. So I've always thought that the gold standard, the holy grail of marketing is to be able to manage the patient flow very accurately because too many new patients is in many cases worse than too few because quality of care tends to go down if we have too many.

Absolutely.

John Meis (04:02.786)
And so I've always thought the gold standard is being able to do that digitally because you can ramp it up and you can ramp it down really, really rapidly. And so that's one of the things that you guys really understand and help practices do, isn't it..

Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. We have a lot of practices that will come to us and say, you know, I'm up to my ears in patients. I'm booked out for six months or two a year. I just can't handle any more new patients. And that's great. That's a great problem to have. You know, they're very busy, but these people still need to have a strong online presence, a strong brand, need to be recognizable, needs to be easy for their current patients to find the phone number or the address, you'd be surprised at how many dental offices don't have their phone number on the website or the main or easy to find on the website. So that's something that we really talk to with those specific practices that say that they don't need new patients, but we absolutely can ramp it up, ramp it down, depending on what your goals.

Like I said, all of our clients meet with our team at least quarterly, if not more than that. And so if they're, you know, if we're doing our job and we're getting them lots of new patients and they are like, okay, we need to, we need to put a little bit of pump the brakes a little bit. We can definitely do that and align the execution with the strategy and with their goals.

John Meis (05:29.632)
And you use one of my favorite words is strategy. It seems like so many marketing firms that support dental practices are really tacticians, not strategists. And so they have, they're a hammer and they see everything as a nail. So the one thing that they have, they're gonna hammer. And the thing I like about you is the breadth of online marketing that you can do and even offline marketing with direct mail.

Yeah.

John Meis (05:56.122)
But like I said, the gold standard is if we can have everything online, then we can ramp it up and ramp it down very quickly, whereas direct mail takes time to print, takes time to go out. So that really understanding how to support the practice from a strategic standpoint is really important and not very common in dental marketing firms.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and a lot of times we've seen in practices, the doctor wants to do marketing and they give that task to the office manager or the front desk to manage the social media or manage the website or even Google ads or Facebook ads. honestly,

These office managers or front desk people are already so busy and this is something that takes a lot of time and work. And if you're not an expert, you're spending that time just trying to figure it out. And that's, you know, that time is money to the practice. so Gargle is a really great way for them to offload that task for a really low cost and also still be involved. You know, like, like I said before, we have lots of touch points with our, with our customers so they can always be involved, but they're not having to figure out, you know, like I've been on a, on a phone call with an office manager. That's like, how do I hook up my Facebook account to the ads and where do I put in the budget and all this stuff? And you know, let us just do that for you. And it's a low cost. can save you a lot of time and it's a win -win for everyone.

It's so important right now, especially, you we follow the statistics from the ADA Health Policy Institute and still the most common, the most, I guess, urgent challenge that dentists are complaining about in this day and age, even at this point past COVID, is hiring and finding enough team members. And, you know, when you mentioned that, having the office manager or other team members handling the marketing exclusively with everything else on their plate, often with a few people short on the team.

It doesn't make a lot of sense. So we're big fans of having partners that understand dentistry and it sounds like you do, right? We've been impressed with the team at Gargoyle as well. And really we learned about Gargoyle from some of our top clients. And so we love partnering with companies that are getting results that actually do what they say they can do and understand dentistry as a whole. Because in our experience, dentistry can be a little bit of a different animal when it comes to marketing. You know, some of the things that that may work in other industries aren't as effective when it comes to dentistry. So we love that we've heard so many good things from our members about the results of the impact that you have brought. And again, when we're short team members and that's causing headaches and frustrations for us, it doesn't make sense to continue, excuse me, to give this along with so many other things to our team when, excuse me, when we can outsource that effectively.

Right, exactly. And one of our directors, like I said, she's one of our strategists that's assigned to all of our accounts. She has been an office manager. She's been an assistant, so she can speak the dental language, but she's also really, really good and in tune with marketing decisions and reading the data and helping you make those decisions. So I think that's one of the main value points and what our clients really appreciate is

We understand what it's like to be in a dental office and speak that language and we know the procedures that you're wanting to see and all that good stuff. But we're also able to talk the marketing language that maybe practices aren't as in tune with.

John Meis (09:36.406)
That's awesome. What we see when, when practices try to bring this in -house and have front office team do it, they aren't necessarily experts at it, first of all. and second of all, they're busy and it tends to be one of those things that's done when they have time, but they kind of never have time because they're busy. And so it's done very intermittently and very disorganized this way. and it's one of the things and you know, we,

Mm right.

John Meis (10:05.048)
We think that there are certain things that are fine to outsource and there's certain things that you shouldn't outsource and there's certain things that you shouldn't do. And this is one of those things that you shouldn't do. Now when it comes to social media, obviously the office has to have a role because you have to have pictures of real people and real people in the practice and there is a role. But that role when managed, it's simply images or short videos, things like that, that's much easier for a team to do as long as someone is managing it, asking for it, getting back in a timely manner. So, and that's what you guys do.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. And we have experts on our team that, that, analyze what best time it is to post and what order to post things in and, know, they get the reviews to post and they have all your branding and your logos and the graphic design behind it. And that part of it takes a lot of time. If you wanted to snap a couple of pictures and send it to us, saves you a lot of time, but you get the same outcome for same amazing outcome for, for the amount of time that you're spending on it.

You know, we often talk, Cassidy, one of our practice pillars is patient flow. So it's funny how many practices really believe, really feel like they need more new patients. And we mentioned our upcoming retreat in just a few short weeks is all things new patients. So there are many practices that really do need to focus on generating more patients, generating more patient flow, but it's fascinating to us how often that's really not the case. And as you mentioned, you do have an understanding. love that you say you assign a strategist because too often I think we get lost in dentistry as a team, especially if the team members are the ones in charge of the marketing strategy on the tactical side. And we're really not looking big picture. How many patients do we need? Do we really need more new patients? And understanding, you know, the entire process of patient flow and the entire patient journey. You know, it takes more than just marketing. Obviously I've heard in the past people say the goal of marketing is to get the phone to ring and that's part of it.

Yeah.

But there's so much more to it than that. And so I love the fact that you guys look comprehensively at what's happening in the practice and you can customize your recommendations based on what that practice individually needs at that moment.

Exactly, exactly. And another thing that I didn't touch on before is a lot of practices will come with us and say, I have lots of new patients. then we start talking about, what's your ideal patient? What's your ideal schedule? What ideal cases are you wanting to see every day? And could we replace some of those time slots with high dollar cosmetic cases or implant cases or whatever it may be? How can we target those people for you and optimize your schedule? Is there someone else that can take those other patients that you're getting? So optimizing your schedule to create the most return on investment for you. How can we help you do that?

John Meis (13:05.516)
Yeah, no, that is absolutely terrific. And when we think about marketing, you know, a key number that we like to look at is cost of acquisition. And of course, it's very difficult to measure that exactly from an effect from marketing, because some your patients some patient flow comes from not from marketing from referrals, for instance. And so

Mm -hmm.

Right, right, of course.

John Meis (13:32.086)
So when we think of cost of acquisition, an easy way to measure that is marketing spend divided by the number of new patients that you're getting. So it's very quick formula. So part of that formula is the cost of the marketing. Part of the formula is how effective it is in driving new patient flow. So do you want to talk a little bit about maybe a success story where someone had used your services and had an increase in

Mm

John Meis (14:01.332)
in new patient flow.

Yeah, absolutely. One of our main case studies that's up on our website, I love telling this story just because I think it kind of hits home for a lot of different people in the practice. So this was a practice up in Washington and they came to us, their office manager actually came to us and they were using us just for their postcards at the time. And they were using like, I don't know, like.

five or six other companies for like their social media and their ads and their website and their SEO. And it was just like so much for this office manager to handle all these different relationships and be tracking it all. she just decided, okay, I need to make it all, or combine it all to one place, one point of contact and one place where she could track everything. So she decided to come with us.

for their entire product set or their entire marketing strategy. So we were able, when she switched over to us, we were able to save the practice $62 ,000 in their marketing spend, which is already such a win. if they didn't make another dollar off of using us, they were saving so much money. And with our strategy, we did a custom strategy, we leveraged their brand, and then we...

reported on all the on the dashboard. Sorry, we gave them a dashboard to track all of their results on their website, on their social ads, on their Google ads, on their postcards, everything. And in less than a year or in about a year, we were able to increase their collections by $2 million. So they were at a $4 .8 million in collections, which is

Awesome. So not only were they saving $62 ,000, but they were making to to they increase their collections by $2 million, which is awesome and their office manager ended up she gave us a little bit of a testimonial and She was saying how much time it saved her to work with us and she trusted us to You know make sure that their money was in good hands. She trust us to save them money

and she trusted us with our strategy and it really paid off great for their practice. So if you wanna take a look at that case study, it's up on our website, justgargle .com. You can download it there, but that's a really great case study that I love to share with everybody.

John Meis (16:38.766)
Yeah. Now that is absolutely awesome. One of our core values in the team training Institute is simplicity. so driving everything into one person, one relationship that's managing the entire thing. First of all, you get a more integrated result. The second, it's much, much simpler. And in this case, $62 ,000 of savings. Well, that all, all 62 ,000 of that falls to the bottom line, right? So that's take home.

Yeah.

John Meis (17:08.078)
money that you can use for whatever you like, new technology in the office, a bigger boat, whatever you want. So yeah, that's fantastic.

Exactly.

Well, Cassidy, one other thing too, real quick. We often, we love to have a page on our website as well. So in the show notes for the podcast today, we're going to go ahead and put a link for our listeners to follow. And on that link, it will send them, they'll see gargle there and they can click on that and get whatever information they may need. And again, they'll be able to view that case study as well as some additional resources. I know you're working hard on putting some of those resources together for us as we speak. And we really appreciate that because we want our listeners to be able to have

one resource, one place they can go to get information on a lot of the partners that we work with. And Dr. and I are super careful about who we partner with because we know that these relationships are critical for practice of success. And so we want to make sure that everybody understands, you when we work with a company, it's because we've vetted them and we've looked at their history and we hear good things, right? So for the listeners on today, you know, we'll put that.

We'll try and make it easier for them and we'll put that link on our show notes so they can access that more easily.

Absolutely. Yeah, that would be great. and I just wanted to echo, we love partnering with the team training Institute because we love how hands on you guys are with the practices and how focused you guys are on helping them, helping practices grow within their teams and, within the work that they're doing. And it really aligns with a lot of our goals that we have with our clients. So I just love how connected we are in, in being interested in the success of.

of practices and of clients.

John Meis (19:02.316)
Yeah. Well, Castie, thanks so much for being with us today. That's it for this episode of the Double Your Production Podcast. We'll see you all next time.

Thanks everybody.

Thank you.

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Ep 134: Perfecting Patient Flow with Cassidy Dustin

Ep 134: Perfecting Patient Flow with Cassidy Dustin

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