Summary
This video presents a strategic approach for dental practices aiming not just to survive but to thrive by attracting and deeply serving a smallest viable audience rather than trying to appeal to a broad, diverse population. The speaker argues that attempting to be the best for everyone leads to mediocrity, blandness, and compromises that dilute meaningful patient engagement and reduce the potential for premium pricing and patient loyalty. Instead, the focus should be on identifying a specific, psychologically aligned group of patients who share similar beliefs and values regarding dental care.
Key Insights
- Serving a smallest viable audience means focusing on a group large enough to sustain the business but small enough to share core beliefs and worldviews about what constitutes good dental care.
- Trying to serve everyone results in:
- Mediocre and generic services.
- Difficulty charging price premiums.
- Stressful patient encounters and misaligned expectations.
- Lower staff and patient satisfaction.
- Serving a psychographic segment (based on beliefs and decision-making psychology) is more effective than targeting based solely on demographics (e.g., zip code, income, ethnicity).
Process for Identifying and Serving the Smallest Viable Audience
| Step | Description |
|---|---|
| 1 | Define the Change You Want People to Make: Identify the specific patient action or decision desired (e.g., scheduling a dental exam, choosing orthodontics). |
| 2 | Identify Real People Who Want That Change: Find at least three individuals who would want to make this change. These can be patients, friends, family, or acquaintances. |
| 3 | Extract Core Beliefs and Worldviews: Analyze patterns and shared beliefs about dental care, values, fears, and decision-making that these people have in common. |
| 4 | Align Your Practice: Align every touchpoint of the practice—physical environment, communication, technology, staff behavior, marketing—to these shared beliefs. |
Important Concepts
- Psychography over Demography: Decisions are driven more by a person’s beliefs and values than by demographic factors like location or income.
- Touchpoints: Every interaction or experience a patient has with the practice (from the parking lot to the website) should reinforce the targeted worldview.
- Viability: The audience must be large enough to sustain the practice but narrowly defined so that the practice can become exceptional and meaningful to them.
- Premium Value and Willingness to Travel: When alignment is deep, patients will pay premium prices and travel longer distances, as they perceive exceptional value.
Benefits of This Approach
- Increased patient satisfaction and loyalty.
- Enhanced staff satisfaction due to alignment in vision and patient expectations.
- Ability to charge premium prices.
- Attracting patients who are aligned with the practice’s values and treatment philosophy.
- Creating a remarkable, differentiated experience that stands out from competitors.
Additional Notes
- The approach discourages mass marketing or trying to appeal to a generic local population.
- Emphasizes grounding the selection of the smallest viable audience in real, existing people rather than hypothetical ideal patients.
- Encourages dental practices to stop focusing on geographic convenience or price competition and instead focus on deep psychological alignment.
- The speaker offers a free course for further learning on patient decision journeys and optimizing practice touchpoints.
Conclusion
The core recommendation is to shift from a mass-market mindset to a focused, belief-aligned strategy that serves a smallest viable audience deeply and meaningfully. This strategic alignment enables dental practices to become exceptional, command higher prices, attract loyal patients willing to travel, and ultimately thrive in a competitive marketplace. The emphasis is on understanding and serving the psychology behind patient decisions rather than demographics or convenience factors.
00:00:00
If your goal is to own a dental practice that not only survives but thrives and prospers, then it’s going to be really valuable to understand how to attract patients. What are the different steps it takes? So, let’s get into all of that. And the major point, the major takeaway that I want you to have here is that we need to shift our focus away from trying to appeal to everyone towards appealing and trying to serve a smallest viable audience. So many people, many dental practices, many dental owners try to do the work of
00:00:34
becoming the best for everyone, the best for their local community. They’re the best for a 5 mile radius, so on and so forth. But the problem with being the best for this diverse group of people is that this diverse group of people have very different beliefs about what is good and bad. Each of the individual people in that diverse group. So when we do the work of trying to serve these many different beliefs, we end up having to accommodate for everyone and therefore compromise on a lot of the
00:01:04
things that each individual might have found meaningful. So what we end up with is something that is very mediocre, boring and bland. And so when that happens, we aren’t able to get all the benefits of becoming exceptional and very meaningful to a smaller group of people. And when that happens, when we show up as a commodity because we’re average, boring, and bland, then we aren’t able to charge price premiums, uh we get a very unhealthy mix of random people coming into the door. Very
00:01:37
stressful situations, people not accepting case treatments, people unaligned with your vision of how they should be engaging with dentistry and so on and so forth. Whereas on the other hand, if we start to shun the masses and instead choose a smallest very specific group of people to serve deeply and this is not just a small group of people, it’s the smallest viable meaning it’s small enough that they share similar beliefs and worldviews about what is good and bad. Therefore, we are able to
00:02:09
align with those beliefs and create a deeper resonance. But it’s also viable meaning it’s large enough to support you. So that when you can create meaningful experiences with these people now you have a platform for you to provide such exceptional value that they are happy to come and drive from longer places, happy to pay you more of a premium, happier in the office. So there’s going to be more staff and patient satisfaction and all of these benefits that come. Not to mention the number of people who will actually show
00:02:44
up and visit your practice because you are more meaningful to them. So, let’s take a look at the actual process of identifying these smallest viable audience members and show you how you can start to leverage this idea. So, the first thing is actually going to be to start with the change that you want people to make. What are the decisions that you want them to make? Do we want to change them from someone who is not visiting the dentist to someone who is visiting the dentist or change them from
00:03:14
someone who is looking for a way to improve the confidence of their children to someone who is choosing braces or orthodontics? What is that decision that you want more of that you want more people to make? That is going to be critical because at the end of the day, if we choose a smallest viable audience, but we aren’t clear with what decision we want them to make, it it’s not going to benefit you in the end, and you aren’t going to be able to effectively serve those people in a measurable,
00:03:44
consistent, and predictable way. So, what does that change? It might be as simple as visiting the dentist. It might be as simple as getting a dental exam versus from not getting one to getting one or from someone who is feeling very um insecure about their looks to someone who is feeling confident. What is that change you want people to make? When you identify that, the next step is to think of at least three people who would want that change. Three real people who want that change. Because from those three
00:04:18
people, what we can do is start to extract patterns in their beliefs and we can start to develop an understanding of what type of world view would want this change and we can start serving that world view which is simply belief systems and different beliefs that they have. Now from those three people or more and you can find people who are patients, you can uh find people or you can choose people who are close friends or family or relatives or people you know of. And when you identify those people, the
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next step is to identify what are the different core beliefs that they share. And these core beliefs are beliefs that revolve around decisions in dentistry. So it’s beliefs like what do they value? What do they identify as? What do they believe is a good decision? What do they fear? All these things impact their ultimate decision- making around dentistry. So therefore, you can say, all right, these are the beliefs, the core beliefs that we need to really align with in order to get these types
00:05:30
of people to create the change or to accept the change. So remember, we started with the change. We found three or more people who are very inclined to align with that change. And from those people, we’ve extracted a pattern of beliefs that those three or more people share. And so what we’re essentially doing is we’re figuring out a world view that we’re going to serve. And the and the reason we go through these steps is that we don’t want to take an approach where we are manufacturing or
00:06:03
fabricating kind of like a football fantasy draft where we’re just picking the best worldviews that we want to serve. We want to make sure that it’s grounded in reality. So therefore, we start with real people. And so you’re beginning to see that our approach isn’t to serve a demographic or a local zip code or a radius. It’s to serve a psychology. It’s to serve a psychography. The the makeup of someone’s psychology because psych psycho psychography, sorry, is the is from which people make decisions. I’m
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not going to make a decision because I live in a certain zip code or because I make a certain amount of money or because of my ethnicity. I’m way more likely to make a decision if it’s something that’s aligned with what my worldviews with what I believe is good. If if I believe it’s a good decision, then I’m way more likely to make that decision regardless of my demographic attributes. So that’s why we extract this worldview and belief systems from these three or more people. All right.
00:07:13
So now you’ve done the work of identifying who it is that you serve. And again, it’s not a who, it’s a belief system that we’re choosing to serve. And once we do, we have to do the work of aligning every aspect of our dental practice to align with those ideas of what is good and bad. And that is the journey. That is the hard part. That is touch points, right? Touch points are the experience that people have when it comes to your practice. So everything from the parking lot to how you greet
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them on the phone to how you’re dressed to the diploma on the wall to the interior architecture to your website to the technology of your like computer systems. All these different things when people come into contact with it will either align um not go on their radar at all at all or actually detract from uh their alignment with your practice. And the more we can stack these touch points in alignment with what they believe is good, then one after another you become better, better and better
00:08:25
until one day you suddenly become the best. And that is the work of aligning with a smallest viable audience so deeply that ultimately they are willing to seek you out and you’re attracting them from an hour away that they’re flying in that they see so much tremendous value because you’ve done the work of aligning so deeply with what they believe is good that you do this. Um you create that effect, you create that much value for them. And it’s easy to say no one would travel that far for
00:09:00
dentistry or people it’s important to focus on a five mile radius. But I believe you’re locking yourself out by choosing that 5 mile radius by not believing that. And so what you’re doing is you’re choosing to serve the masses. You’re choosing to serve a random group of people around you who are looking for something cheaper or more convenient. And that’s a choice that you can make. But ultimately it’s going to lead you in very two very different paths. So that’s it for this video. If you’re
00:09:31
doing the work, if you want to do the work of growing and thriving as a dental practice, you must start to serve a smallest viable audience. People who share a worldview, people who have similar beliefs about what is good and bad, so that you can create a remarkable experience for them, and so that they will seek you out regardless of where they are. And to do that, it’s going to start with understanding what it is that you want people to do. Then understanding who would be inclined, who would who loves that idea, who would
00:10:04
already be inclined to make that change. Then from those people, those grounded mindsets grounded in reality. Extract what are the belief systems that these people share? What are the patterns that I see? And from there, align everything in your practice to serve that belief system as best as you can. And one day when you’re valuable enough like I have friends who are flying out to seminars in Florida uh I’m in California and that gives you a sense of what we’re actually missing out on that we we are avoiding the work
00:10:38
of doing these meaningful things because we focus so much on the mass marketing because we focus so much on trying to appeal to everyone that we haven’t done the work of appealing deeply to a smaller group of people who are now empowered like we have cars now we have planes who are empowered to travel. So let’s stop focusing on a 5 mile radius. Let’s stop focusing on being a little bit cheaper or being a little bit more convenient. Let’s start doing the work of aligning very deeply with people. If
00:11:07
you want to explore this idea deeper, I have a free course that goes into this concept more uh in more detail and has more exercises for you to identify touch points, figure out what the patient decision um journey is so that you can optimize for it and all these different things. So check it out. It’s completely free. I think you’ll find it valuable and I’ll see you guys in the next one. Thanks.