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This Dental Specific Podcast is dedicated to the Dental "Entrepreneur" Michael Dinsio, Founder of Next Level Consultants, delivers #TRUTH when starting up a dental practice. From the very first step to getting the keys of a dental practice, Michael shares his raw & unscripted playbook with you. Not only does this podcast provide you with "What To Do" but more importantly "What Not To Do". With over over 15 years of experience & over 150 past clients, Michael delivers an educational and informative program in a real and genuine way. Start w/ Episode 01 - as we go through a STEP by STEP process.
Startup Unscripted. The questions you have with the truths you need to hear. Help doctors get into practice the way they want to get into practice. Hashtag truth. That's why we put it out there. What we want to do is we want to bring truth to the startup game. And now your host, Michael D'Incio. What's up? What's up, guys? Welcome back to another episode of Startup Unscripted. As you guys all know, I'm Mike D'Incio, one of the founders of Next Level Consultants. And I'm really excited about today because it's so instrumental to startups and how they get out of the gate running, hopefully, and keep their expenses down and maximize every opportunity that comes through their doors. Startup is a game of catching every single opportunity that walks through your door. And if you miss anything, it's a huge miss and all these little things compound. So But I'll leave that there with a little cliffhanger. I've got some housekeeping. Again, guys, thanks so much for being loyal. I talk to you guys every single day. Lots of people are tuning in and listening to the program. I don't want you guys to miss the transition. We are moving the program from Startup Unscripted to... dental unscripted. So if you are following this program, it will no longer be startup unscripted. Please start subscribing over to that one. We're going to create it live here soon. And then you guys just subscribe. And then once we do that transition, you won't miss a beat. But that dental unscripted program will have all uh both acquisition material or content startup content like this and then also we're going to be feathering in a lot of practice management stuff from some of the other next level coaches and such so I think it's just going to be a much more well-rounded program but don't worry don't fret it'll still be a lot of startup stuff And we'll keep coming to you, bringing you guys great guests and speakers and great content like we always have. So thanks again. Again, subscribe over to Dental Unscripted. But without further ado, let's get into this program. I'm excited to be introducing to you guys a great guy and a cool company. Dr. Anthony Bonavoglia. I think I did okay there. He goes by Dr. B, but Anthony, welcome to the show, man. How are you doing? I'm good. Thank you for having me. Yeah, man. This is great. I think we're going to be talking all things call service today. And Anthony has created and founded a company that I think fills a lot of holes. Doc, tell me just a little bit about you and the company and what you're doing and why you started it. Yeah, well, like I said, thank you again for having me on. A little bit of my background, I'm an orthodontist. I practice in New York in the Hudson Valley region, so I'm about an hour north of the city. So we don't have quite as much traffic as you might have over there. And about three years ago, we launched SmileSuite, which, as you mentioned, is a Answering service, we focus on the new patient life cycle. So where we offer remote services, probably a bit more than just an answering service, but we're remote services, totally dedicated, focused on really just the life cycle of the new patient from that initial contact with the practice all the way through until they sign contracts and actually start treatment. I love it. I love it. So I can't tell you how important this type of service is, but I'd like you to say it. You're a dentist, a practice owner. You still practice. You still are operating and in the grind, as I would say, of ownership. It's challenging. Now you got two companies you're doing. You're a little nutty like I am. I love it. Why, I guess, tell us why. Why did you one day say, you know, orthodontics, great. I practiced on it. I'm probably making good money. I'm doing all the things. Let's just start another company, a call service. So the why behind this whole thing? Yeah, it's a great question. You know, what I love working with startups in our business is the origin story. You know, every startup has a unique origin story with its ups and its downs, its wins and its temporary losses. And, you know, the reason Smile Sweet is around is it goes back to my origin story, which is a little outside of the norm. I finished my residency outside in, I was in Minnesota, University of Minnesota, and I finished in two thousand six and I was looking for a job. And this is right around when the recession was hitting and jobs were not as available as they are now. And I ended up in Maryland, actually, in a very rural town. And I knew right away I wanted to own a practice. That's where my heart was. I wanted to run the business myself. So started putting feelers out there. Long story short, found a practice in New York in the Hudson Valley region. Thought it was just a great fit. At the time, my wife, at this point, my wife is pregnant with our first child and things are moving along great. It looks like I'm going to take over this practice. Everything is just, you know, lawyers are putting pen to paper and we're doing great. And I had a fax machine in my house. And for your listeners, you don't know what a fax machine is. They have e-fax now. Right. Back then it was noisier. So I had this fax machine in my house where we used to send, you know, if I needed something to be signed, whatever it is, I would. So we're getting ready to finalize the contracts. I'd already visited the practice and everything was going great. I was going to maybe, I think it was about three months. I was going to move and get started in the practice and start the whole transition. I get this fax and everything that we had negotiated up until that point, all in good faith. was flipped. It was a fax from the owner. And I don't know if it was because of this looming recession, but everything we had agreed on, he just said, no, I'm not following through with. And he basically sent his terms that were no one would have signed. So it got to the point where even his attorney contacted me and said, you need to walk. Well, that all sounds great, but I'm three months from my contract at my current employer coming to an end. There are no other jobs. I mean, at this point, we're in the throes of the recession and I have no place to go. My wife's pregnant and I could not find another job. And you turned your notice in because you were in the final legs of an acquisition. Got it. You got it. So, you know, uh, in a bit of desperation, I picked up the phone book and called every orthodontist in the area. Cause at this point we had our heart set on moving here and this orthodontist said, come on up, let's talk. I met with him and he said, um, I don't have a practice to sell you, but I do have this building, uh, go home and propose something. So went home and said, you know, uh, what if you let me just rent it by the day? He was older. He wasn't really starting new patients. Let me just use your facilities. Now, if I, tell you what this facility looked like. I mean, we're talking duct tape up the stairs, carpeted bathrooms, you know, the straight out of the sixties. Yeah. Awesome. And so I had really no other option. It was either that or go live in my parents' basement again. Which a lot of you do, which a lot of you have and do. Yeah, you do what you gotta do. So started my practice and there was no one who would give me funding for it because I had no patient base. I had no, I really had no prospectus. I had nothing. I mean, this was, you know, throwing something up into the wind and see what happens. So started my practice with twenty thousand dollars and had to just scrape by. And I mean, you know, cell phone. I answered all my own phone calls, had my I had no computer program. I had paper for everything. I had I had twenty thousand dollars to start a practice in an area where no one knew I was coming. And what year is this? So this is two thousand and two thousand seven, two thousand eight. Wow. Wow. And everybody's complaining. There's no patience. Right. Oh, oh, gee, that is an OG startup. So, you know, long story short, it went well. I never took a startup loan. I have to this day started my practice with twenty thousand dollars. Wow. You know, fantastic. Fast forward, you know, now we have twenty employees. I'm a solo solo practice still. You know, we have a very busy solo practice. I still like having the autonomy of being by myself. But, you know, that in the beginning, everything was through me. Everything was through me. So if a new patient called, it came to my cell phone. And, you know, you know how important those new patients are. Yeah. I answered them. I didn't care what time of day it was. Yeah. How did I do it? I would answer the phone and say, Oh, you know, so-and-so wasn't at the front desk and I don't like the phone going to voice. This is Dr. B. What insurance do you have? I would take all the information down. I'd go get the insurance myself. I'd meet them at the office myself. They're like, we're XYZ coming. You're like, am I credentialed? Yeah. Yeah. I can take that. I can take that. Yeah. Um, So I just learned early on that being available, and I've told this to so many people in startups, they get so concerned of, oh, maybe you don't have this big office, this big practice. I'm like, look, man, you're making yourself available. That's really what patients love. They love it when the doctor's available. Love it. As my practice got bigger, my concern was, is the new patient experience suffering? Because, you know, now I'm having the typical problems turn over at the front desk, you know, lunchtime phones not getting answered, those kind of things. Yeah. So that's when we said, OK, we need to do this better. We need to make sure we can have the systems in place for the new patient lifecycle so that no matter how busy we are, that's not going to suffer. And so that's really the response we came about is just making sure that we had these round the clock services offsite so that it's an excellent new patient process from the minute they contact the practice till all the way through until they sign the contracts. Wow. Well, my screen just froze, but I'm totally right here, brother. So you did an OG startup off of twenty thousand dollars and you grew it. And and I just love that because. I love that because that story reminds me of of actually a pediatric dentist right now that was calling me yesterday saying, oh, my gosh, I've only got two, three patients coming in like daily. Like I'm I'm dead. This is this is not what I thought it was going to be. And I just encourage them to stay the course, like you said, be available. But at the same time, that's a dangerous sentence, be available. Because as you know, overhead is a real thing with a startup. And so all the more reasons why a call service makes sense. So, Doc, tell me real quick, the SmileSuite program that you're running over there, why is it... So important to a startup to to to consider a call service because I I've got my answer. I'd love to hear yours. Like, why does it make sense? Because this is an extra expense. Right. Quote unquote. But but what's the but? Go ahead. Finish my sentence. You know where I'm going with this. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, the ROI is tremendous on something like this, because not only if you miss that one new patient, that phone call, statistics are unless you're an overly established practice, you're going to have about a sixty five percent chance that they're never going to schedule with you. They'll move on to a competitor. they may lose interest, phone tag, they're going to get, you know, you're going to get bothered with. And, you know, not only is it just that one patient, but it's the downstream, right? Who are they referring? Every, I always looked at it as every new, every person I encountered was an opportunity for me to sell them on me so that then they would go and talk to someone else. So if I miss one new patient, that's not just that new patient I'm missing. I'm also missing that interaction that they're going to have with, their friends, with their family and so forth down the street. Totally. I, uh, one thousand percent. I, like I kind of teed up the episode is like every single person opportunity matters. Like, I don't care if it's just a freaking floor ride. Like you have to like, like your re care efficiency has to be almost one hundred percent your floor hide. or whatever you're doing in your practice, it has to be one hundred percent. And so those calls absolutely matter. And, you know, I'm kind of a common sense guy. Like I might not have any data on this, Anthony, but help me help me with this, OK? Because I'm imagining and it's a quote that one of my old mentors gave me when I first started business. And it was like, well, we could do everything ourselves or we could do one thing and be the best at it. And and like the companies that do a lot of different things end up being pretty good about pretty good at a lot of different things versus just owning it. Right. And so with that theory and that that that. you know basic common sense I'm imagining a world where your people are trained killers on the phone quite frankly you do this every single day you're you're lightning when it comes to case acceptance or sorry a new patient conversion and not missing calls right where if we leave it to kind of the front office they have some experience for sure but it's not they're like Well, passion might be aggressive. I don't know if you guys have passion, like super crazy passion employees. But still, if you're doing something, you know what I mean when I say that, right? Like, I don't think someone wakes up and says, I'm going to be a answering call service provider. Like, that's my dream. But still, if you're doing something every single day and you see where the results are, you're going to be better at it, right? I mean, do you have any statistics or anything that you could share with people with us about kind of backing those comments up. Yeah, it's a great point. I think oftentimes there's this misconception that everyone on the team is as driven to grow as you are. And we sometimes lose sight of the fact that the more we grow, the busier we are. So there's almost this counter incentive to not growing. And in my own office, prior to us having Smiles, the girls would laugh because they'd say, when we don't recognize the phone call, we put our finger on our nose because we knew it was a new patient. and that's you know eight ten minutes of questions and you know it's preoccupying your time it's taking away something that they might have been doing otherwise so they don't we want to think everybody is you know go go but dialed not always the case no um so you know just as a little background I'll answer your question on some statistics but we you know as a as a call um answering service We handle new patient phone calls, web leads. If you do any marketing, we tie into that as well. And then we also do the post consultation follow up. So, you know, if somebody calls your office, if you are a new patient, press one, press one. It comes over to our team. We're using your scripting. They don't know that we're not in your office. We have all your information. faq information if they ask questions so that we can qualify the patient we want to make sure we're not putting patients that you may not want on your schedule you don't take this insurance you don't want them on your schedule we can qualify them for that if somebody goes online and let's say you're doing active marketing And they fill out a form. It says, I'm interested in becoming a patient. It's going to come over to our team. We're then going to engage with them over the course of, I think it's ten days through phone, text and email, getting them to schedule. And then on the back end of the new patient life cycle, if somebody comes into your office and you present treatment and they don't start, our remote team again is engaging with them. and trying to get them to come back and schedule. And, and all of it is done with local phone numbers. So that the important thing to me was we can't have it so that it looks like a remote service. It needs to look like this is somebody calling from Dr. B smiles, orthodox or whatever it may be. So a little bit of the, uh, overview, we are seven days a week. So, um, depending on where you are on the East coast, it's, um, I believe it's eight in the morning until eleven at night. So, you know, which is a ton, which is a ton of coverage. We we talked to a lot of folks out there and that's that's more coverage than most. So I think that in itself is a huge advantage. So I just wanted to point that out. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, to your point about some statistics, you know, some people say, well, you know, can we just use you after hours? And that's fine. I mean, you can you can work with us however you'd like. But, you know, a lot of times people don't realize what's happening during the work hours. People don't realize that the busiest new patient call time is eight thirty to nine thirty during the week and twelve thirty to one thirty. when is why is that a bad time for new patients to be calling because eighth or ninth is when you just open the doors and you have people at the front desk other people are calling to reschedule that is not the time you need to be that you want to be rushing a new patient phone call yeah so you you know we we kind of talk about some of the tenants of the new patient process one is to be available uh you know that that expanded hour is very important Also to be present, right? If a new patient gets the idea that there's a person at the front desk and you're kind of doing both things, you're scheduling them and you're maybe telling them, that's a turn off. They can feel it. Yeah, they can feel it. So you want to be present. You know, if you're not having someone, even if you're not using SmileSuite or a service like ours, have somebody answering your phone calls during the lunchtime. Just having that dedicated... full intentional, huge customer service during at least during those hours, right? Eight to nine thirty. Is that what you said? Eight to nine or thirty to nine thirty that eight thirty nine. And then twelve to one. Twelve thirty to one thirty. Twelve thirty, one thirty. Yeah, that I mean, it makes a ton of sense. People driving, going to work. Let's let's get this call out of the way. And people at lunch. Right. That's obvious. And to your point, if you miss them, well, now you're trying to call them when they're at work. And, you know, that's that's a that's right. There's a lot of software companies out there like, well, you know, if I miss a call, just send you a text and say, sorry, we missed your call. Please book here. But let's be honest. I mean, that's not high touch. That's not a customer experience that we want as a startup. And so, yes, back to the quality. So do you guys convert? at a higher clip than maybe a front office person in office. I mean, just from your skills and experience, I would have to think that the scripting and all that is just better with someone that specializes in this. Yeah, a hundred percent. And I mean, there's a lot of data and to show that, that, you know, what, where we do convert at a higher rate. And, you know, there's, there's a lot of variation too, depending on practices that have different, different systems in place. What I can tell you is that we have hundreds of practices across the country and a ninety eight percent retention rate because most practices when they come on, it's kind of like the light goes off because they're seeing, you know, new patients coming in at times and they never realized that new patients were even trying to schedule appointments. Right. What we show right now is about eight percent of new patients are actually going to call Friday after five thirty until and then over the weekend. So. Wow. Really? Yeah. It's a high percentage. A lot of people will just call on a Sunday thinking, look, I'm just going to leave a voicemail message and then we'll start the phone tag process. Uh, not, and then when they get somebody, by the way, that's Monday at eight AM. That's right. Yeah. Um, so yeah, it's, it's, it's a very high percentage of people that actually will call outside of hours that you would think. Mm hmm. Yeah. No, I we work with a direct mailer pretty closely and they track phone numbers or phone calls from the mailers. And I had I had Aaron Boone on on the program. You guys could go back to that episode if you're listening and listen to that. He had some fantastic statistics on missed calls because Aaron was annoyed, aggravated that he would throw thousands of mailers to the quote unquote wind and get all these calls and no one would pick him up. And then someone would call him up and say, well, we're not going to do the campaign again. He's like, are you kidding me? I got you. Thirty new calls like, how are you not doing this again? Yeah, I didn't are we didn't ROI it. That is the epitome of exactly what we're talking about. And he said he said thirty three percent of all new calls get missed. And then of the calls that that they actually did pick up. So the other sixty six percent or whatever, thirty percent of them. Got converted like this is awful, right? So this is awful. And he's sending six million postcards and he has people listening to the call. He doesn't have a call service. He's just listening just to report back. And I'm just like. That is a problem, especially for a startup. You cannot only convert thirty percent of your new patients. But I think what you said right there, Dr. B, is telling because most of our clients don't track stuff. They don't listen to calls. There are now a CEO of their business, quote unquote, and their heads all over the place. They're an associate. You probably remember this. I mean, I mean, actually take me to that. I mean, why don't doctors track stuff as tight as they might later on in their career as a startup? I'm assuming there's just a lot of things going on. Yeah. I'm, Maybe just don't know to track it. I think you track what you like. I just do. If you like technology, you're going to track how your technology is working. If you love dentistry, you're going to track how well your dentistry is doing. But if you don't like this stuff, you're just not going to follow it. There's so much as a business owner to follow. And you have to at some point go, I got no more time or bandwidth to follow anything else. I'm done. The hard part is that a lot of us miss the important things and we track the stuff that might be interesting, but really doesn't help you from a bottom line perspective. Could that be a plug for consultants? I don't know. Could that be? Do you need another set of eyes looking at the important stuff? Maybe, maybe. I don't know. I, I a hundred percent agree. Nobody loves tracking profit. Well, people, some people do, but most dentists don't love, tracking profitability don't track it I had someone in their startup six months in and I asked them to pull their pnl and send it to me and they're like what's what's a pnl that you did it where do I get that I get that all the time where do I get that yeah um and so and so if if somebody's not tracking their pnl they are one thousand percent not tracking their missed calls so you start tracking them you guys folks you'll you'll You'll be shocked. You'll be shocked. And it'll be heartbreaking, quite frankly. Okay, so every missed call gets picked up. You guys can convert it better and obviously drive more production. I really... was interested. And Anthony, I know at Next Level, we're getting you guys plugged into our program. And a lot of my coaches ask some questions about follow ups. And this is another department that I feel like could really move a needle inside of practice because the statistic is fifty percent of patients that don't accept treatment at the time of their service will not accept the treatment, right? And so I don't think the follow-ups are being done. Hey, you said you were gonna ask your spouse if this made sense, you guys wanted to talk about it. Who's following up with that? And how many of those are walking out every single day And how many follow ups do you have from a month, two months ago that you could get somebody back on the schedule and convert it? You just didn't follow up. You guys have a service like that, right? You guys do follow ups. Yeah, we do. Yeah. So patients that come into the office, we have a presentation platform where you can present treatment and tied into that can be our remote team who can do follow up on those that didn't sign or schedule their treatment. you know, I think there's this underlying feeling as dentists, we want to make people happy. And, you know, there's underlying feeling of if I follow up, I'm going to be it's going to be too much. I'm going to be annoying. No, you have to be persistent. And if you don't have to believe me, I would just like to ask everybody listening, when your doctor asked you to schedule your next appointment, did you call them right away? Or did you kind of happy they followed up again with a text or a phone call a week later? Because it probably went to voicemail and then you forgot about it. One hundred percent. I'm included in that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. All the time. So being persistent is, is important on it. Now that, that level of followup needs to be nuanced a little differently than let's say a, like a web lead. Someone comes on your website and says, I'm interested in treatment. That followup cycle should be shorter than someone who already came into your office. That's a different level of qualification. And you have to spread that out a little bit longer because there are more things that they have to contemplate, you know, finances, those kinds of things. What you ultimately want is a yes or a no. The last thing you want is a, I have no idea what happened to them. In basic sales school, which I went through in my first career a long time ago, was you work for the no. You you because if you work for the no, then you can take them off the list and following up with somebody and getting them off the list is music, literally music to my ears as a consultant, because I know that if we have a tight system and we're following up, I know no one's slipping through the cracks and a nose. Great. A nose. Great. But if I have a tight system, I'm going to get a lot of yeses, too. I love that you work for the know. I've never heard that before. That's great. Let's jump over to plans and kind of fee structure. What's the philosophy here, Anthony? You don't have to give me any hard numbers or anything like that, but what's the plan? How do you charge these guys and why is it flexible? Because I think it's extremely flexible. Go. Yeah, our free structure is very simple. You pay per patient. It's a flat rate per patient that varies depending on the service that you want. It's very a la carte. I want this. I don't want that. You're only going to pay for what you need. I'm a dentist orthodontist first. I like simplicity. I like to know what I'm going to be paying at the end of the month, and I don't want any surprises. So that's how we design the fee structure. I think it's fair. It grows with practices. So it's fair to startups all the way, and it grows if you have a larger practice. So I think it works for practices of all different levels. I think that's great. For the YouTubers, I'm having all kinds of tech issues today. Today was just not my day. I was driving into the studio and of course there's a wreck and Dr. B was super patient and yeah, now I'm having video issues. But okay, so why that matters, can I break that down just a little bit? Because when you're a startup and doc, you know, you remember, It's all about who's going to help me start this business, front office, dental assistant, whatever. And how much are they gonna cost me with no production at first, right? And then, and so it's always a production comparison to wages or payroll, more simply put, to production. And guess what? That little metric, Doc, is that the same in your business right now, busy? It's the same exact thing. Production, wages. It's always a percentage that we chase. And there's always levels like, oh, do we hire someone else or should we just stay here and make a little bit more money? And then when you hire someone else, it's like, okay, we got to push for more. And it's always that life cycle of I have too many people or I have just the right amount of people or I have... not enough people and that conversation in your mind is so so so sensitive and important to startups because you guys have zero production and so to that point if you can get somebody to work for you for two days three days whatever and not have them at the office five days a week just picking up the phones, because that's usually what happens. There's no insurance being processed. There's nothing going on in a startup. You'll be lucky to have two patients or three patients a day. And so if there's nothing going on, what is everybody doing? They're just hanging out, right? So the model that you just described of pricing and pay for what you use, is super efficient and it gives you ultimate coverage. So it's a win-win all the way around. Do you remember those days as a startup thinking, how am I going to pay this payroll? And we got, I mean, you started on twenty thousand dollars. You had no working capital. What? Yeah, I remember those days. I mean, you know, where you just everything is, you sweat everything, every decision, everything is monumental. It's tough, but we make it through. And when you have a consultant that's working with you, I look back at my career and I eventually did hire a consultant years after I had gotten underway and it hands down was the best decision I had ever made. I only wish I had done it earlier. because you've got someone who's helping you make these decisions. So even just for your peace of mind, you know, having that. So, but yeah. Yeah. Well, I've really enjoyed our time today. We've hit that thirty minute mark. I'm having a complete meltdown with my camera right now. So we're just going to we're just going to call it a day. But I just feel like And such a great service, a great guy, Dr. B, guys in it with you, practice owner, did a startup, started this company on the right why, find your why, Simon Sinek stuff. And he did it right. And he cares, you can tell. And he cares about you guys. He knows what you're going through as far as even if you're doing an acquisition, it doesn't matter. He's a practice owner like you. And so it just checks all the boxes. The fees are right. the why's right, the statistics are right, just all the good things. So we want to support Dr. B. Doc, any last minute, kind of like, I know we spent most of this time talking about call service and whatnot. Should we have you give anybody a specific tip on startups and just kind of like any words of advice for folks thinking about doing a startup? I think going back to just, you know, putting yourself out there and just, you know, really letting people learn about you and so that when they meet you, they have something to tell the next person and start talking about you and spreading the word that way. And just finding ways to make yourself available. I think those are the two most important things. I love it. I love it. And and does it take grit? I mean, I mean, I grit is my favorite word. I just I think lower your expectations, guys, and and and have grit because that's what a startup takes. And you follow the playbook. you'll be fine, but you need some grit along the way. And so you guys all share that. I know Dr. B went through that too. So, all right, guys, we're shutting this down. All the information of the company and doctor, the guests, everything's going to be below in the descriptions, just like always. Again, another reminder, we're switching to dental unscripted. Please, please, please don't lose track of this great program. And again, And I guess that's a wrap. Dr. B, thanks so much for your time, brother. And all the tech issues and the traffic this morning. I appreciate you. No worries. Thank you for having me. All right, guys. Talk to you soon. Bye.