- Okay, Dan Brown here, MGE Management Experts, and we're here for another client testimonial about the MGE New Patient Workshop. And I'm here with Andrew Crouch. And Andrew, thank you for being here.

- Happy to be here.

- Good, so Andrew, you and your wife came to MGE some years ago, I know it's been a while since you've been to the New Patient Workshop, but you learned the marketing basics, the marketing system that MGE talks about and such. Can you give us a little idea of what your practice was when you first came and where things are now in contrast and what you learned?

- Sure, so I know that when we first opened our practice, my wife had never been in private practice. She was coming from a military background. I'd never been in dentistry either. And I was maybe as a good thing not knowing what we're getting ourselves into. But anyway, the first six months were pretty tough. I mean, we were struggling to pay the bills. We certainly weren't paying ourselves at that point.

And ironically enough, we received a postcard from MGE for a New Patient Workshop. And we said, "We need to learn more, let's go and learn more." And one of the things that we felt was a luxury to have was to go and spend those marketing dollars. We figured, "How can we possibly afford this?" And so it's one of the things that we had a website but we really weren't doing any significant marketing. And going to the New Patient Workshop, we really better understood the key importance of it.

And at that time, we had a marketing consultant and I said, "Look, there's no money in the bank account to pay for this." And they said, "Look, send out some postcards." And they, you know, MGE helped us with the design. And, you know, we, you know, again, speaking with our consultant, he said, "Look, get a hundred out. Get 50 out, it doesn't even matter the number. Just get some out." And we did and there was a response and we said, "Wow. Let's do more and more and more."

And one of the big pieces, and I know there's different pieces to marketing with online and what have you, but in our practice in New York, we got to the point of sending out 25,000 postcards a week. That's over a million a year. And the practice grew more than we possibly could imagine and expect. And, yeah, I mean, we increased our revenue more than 10 times and less than a year and a half.

So, at which point my wife got pregnant. She wanted to move closer to family in Florida. We moved down to Florida. The practice in New York was kind of running by itself. So, we got bored, we had a child open another practice, another practice and another practice. And so, right now, we're at six practices, six locations. And we have this core that marketing is a significant piece.

I know that one of the things that highlights importance of the marketing, particularly when you kind of talk a little bit about this insurance and waiting for insurance to send patients into your practice, you're really putting that in someone else's hands and you're never sure what that result is going to be. And so, particularly with our marketing, whether it be online or direct mail or radio or billboards or whatever it is, marketing is now a central piece in the operation of our practice and is one of the key reasons that we have been able to expand because we have that control.

We know that with the new patient count starts dipping, well, we need to send it some more postcards. We need to send it some letters. We need to do whatever the case may be. But I think that's the biggest thing is having that control and being able to go into growth mode or going to whatever mode is appropriate for the time that's been successful for us.

And I think one of the big things with the new patient workshop was they get you to fill out some forms to say, what do you think your practice can do? And I can say, far and above, we've been able to exceed that by putting in place the things that we've learned. And once we started putting them in place, it started having very quickly. So that was very exciting obviously.

Very exciting. I mean, really impressive. And do you have a marketing consultant now or is that basically you?

Yeah, that's basically me. Yeah, so we have an agreement with our mailhouse. So we send them the mail routes and what have you. And so it's largely on autopilot, I would say, is that we have a set of routes that we have per office. And they go out periodically. We have the radio. We basically have a few vendors that we work with. But yeah, to be honest, I'm the marketing guy. I would say, yeah.

Awesome, just awesome. So you have-- sounds like the purpose of marketing being driving a more business than the organization could possibly ever waste with internal inefficiency. So you've really done so. It sounds like you've got-- sure, you could probably handle more. But you've really conquered the basic barriers of where do I start? What do I do to keep my finger on the pulse of things? Could you share a little bit about what are the avenues that you have now expanded into with your marketing? What are some of the channels that you use? The specific marketing tools.

Yeah. So we have a couple of different direct mail. So we have every door direct mail, which basically within a-- somewhere between a three and five-mile radius of the office, every single person gets a postcard from us on a regular basis. We do some high-end targeting direct mail where it goes to more affluent households, sort of high-end, pretty packaging. We do internal, so people get care to share cards, refer a friend in the offices.

We have TV screens. They're showing different marketing pieces from the office. We do radio, billboards. We did bus shelters for a while, church magazines, magazines that go into different demographics. You name it. I mean, there's a fair bit. I think I said we do radio, newsletters at schools.

And in each of these, we have a tracking phone number on them. So we've got a pretty good idea of what's working and what doesn't, and then the ones that work, we put a bit more into it so that we can hopefully improve the response.

Fantastic. So for those of you who don't know what Andrew's talking about as far as a tracking number is in your marketing pieces, your different marketing channels, you want to be able to know, is that channel producing? And what's making the phone ring? But what specific campaigns are making the phone ring and how much?

So what Andrew has instituted are some of the basics that we teach you in the new patient workshop, which is, yeah, definitely try these different channels. But let's make sure that we see what the result is of each of these channels. And it sounds like you really do have your finger on the pulse of also the return on investment. So do you routinely track your return on investment on these different channels and buy channel?

To be honest, not so much. We look at more of a global marketing spend. But I mean, our bread and butter, to be honest, is direct mail. We know that it works. And we know that it brings in the type of patients that we're looking for. But yeah, I can't give you a hard and fast on per channel, what the return on investment is.

Sure. But you're constantly monitoring your new patient statistics and adjusting your spend appropriately.

Absolutely. And now it's, again, it's almost on autopilot. And so if we see that we don't-- so I mean, I guess our goal is to see 1,000 new patients per office. And so we adjust accordingly based on a weekly level, how many new patients we've seen that week. And then we adjust accordingly.

But I don't know. Again, it's kind of on autopilot, if there's more new patients and we can handle, then we ease it off. Because there's no point wasting the marketing spend. And if things are a little bit light, then we ramp it up again. But we basically have a prescription that we want to see 20 new patients a week per office. And that's our goal. And we adjust accordingly.

Fantastic. Well, I can only tell you guys, congratulations and all the success six offices totally in command of your own marketing and more so. Any last thing that you would say as far as suggestion to somebody kind of on the fence, they don't know MGE. They don't know Dan Brown and these marketing guy and this marketing system. Any other words of advice to another practice owner or a practice couple?

Sure. So I think the discussion that often happens with almost any office and any clinician is usually to do with insurance. And I know that for us, we did a little bit of a toe in the water with it to see what the effectiveness of that was. And I can say, fire it away. Take control. Take control of what you're trying to do and what your goals and aspirations are, rather than leaving it to the hands of an organization that their goals are not aligned to yours. So that's the thing is please just put a assurance to the side, forget about it. And take control of your own destiny.

Sound advice. Andrew, thank you for taking the time, appreciate it. And again, well done on your awesome success.

Thank you, Dan. I appreciate it.

And for you, watching this, you deserve the same success. At the MGE new patient workshop, I'm going to show you a system to get your practice seeing more high quality new patients right away. As a matter of fact, the average attendees he's a sustained 42% increase in new patients. We've helped your colleagues to generate millions of new patients and over $750 million in additional revenue just since we've done this workshop.

And you might say, well, what does that mean to me? Well, I can tell you this. If you're seeing about 30 new patients per month, that's going to be 12 more new patients for you every single month. That's 150 more new patients every year. And we'd really like to help you with that. So sign up today. Go ahead and click the link below to find out more. I look forward to meeting you there.