Summary
This video addresses the challenge of growing a dental practice by fundamentally rethinking why patients should choose one practice over another. Instead of focusing solely on conventional factors like price and convenience, it advocates for value innovation—creating unique value that distinguishes a practice from competitors and attracts a specific target group of patients.
Key Insights
- Being indistinguishable leads to competition primarily on price and convenience. If a dental practice looks like every other option, patients will naturally choose the cheaper or more convenient one.
- The critical question is: “Why do I deserve to be chosen?” This requires understanding how to differentiate oneself in ways that matter to a specific group of potential patients.
- Value innovation means identifying and investing in factors of competition that competitors overlook or undervalue.
- Common factors of competition in dentistry include:
- Prestige of education (degree from a prestigious university)
- Friendliness and staff training
- Modernity of dental equipment
- The dental industry generally clusters into groups such as:
- Dental Service Organizations (DSOs)
- Premium fee-for-service practices
- Low-cost insurance-driven practices
- Each group focuses on a limited set of competition factors, leaving opportunities for others to innovate in neglected areas.
Strategic Approach to Growth
- Identify your target patient group:
- Who is underserved or dissatisfied with current dental options?
- Who is considering alternatives like direct-to-consumer orthodontics (e.g., Invisalign at home)?
- Who avoids dental care due to anxiety, shame, or other barriers?
- Who is actively disengaged from dentistry and why?
- Focus resources on competition factors that matter most to this group:
- Prioritize investments in areas that will directly address their pain points or unmet needs.
- Avoid spreading resources thinly across factors that do not resonate with the target segment.
- Value innovation precedes marketing and visibility:
- Simply increasing visibility (e.g., improving Google Business profile) will not solve growth problems if the underlying value proposition is not compelling.
- Visibility alone cannot differentiate a practice if it lacks distinct value.
- The question of deserving visibility aligns with the question of deserving to be chosen.
Summary Table: Factors of Competition in Dentistry
| Factor of Competition | Description | Typical Practice Focus |
|---|---|---|
| Degree Prestige | Investment in high-status education credentials | Some premium or specialized practices |
| Friendliness & Staff Training | Emphasis on customer experience and staff demeanor | Practices focusing on patient comfort |
| Modern Equipment & Technology | Use of advanced dental tools and techniques | Practices marketing cutting-edge tech |
| Price | Cost competitiveness | Insurance-driven or low-cost practices |
| Convenience | Ease of access (location, scheduling, etc.) | Practices emphasizing accessibility |
| Underserved Needs (e.g., anxiety) | Addressing barriers preventing some groups from seeking dentistry | Emerging or niche practices |
Core Concepts
- Value Innovation: Creating new value for a specific patient segment by innovating factors of competition that others ignore.
- Targeted Resource Allocation: Concentrating limited resources on factors that truly matter to the chosen patient group.
- Patient Segmentation: Recognizing that not all patients are alike; growth depends on serving a well-defined, underserved, or dissatisfied segment.
- Visibility vs. Value: Visibility is necessary but insufficient; value must come first to justify patient choice.
Conclusion
The video emphasizes a fundamental shift in mindset for dental practice growth: moving away from generic competition on price and convenience toward targeted value innovation. By carefully identifying and serving a specific patient group with tailored value propositions, dental practices can create compelling reasons for patients to choose them. This approach requires deep understanding of patient pain points, focused investment, and prioritizing value delivery before marketing efforts. This strategic framework offers a credible pathway for sustainable growth in a competitive dental market.
00:00:00
If you’ve been trying to grow your dental practice and you’re having a hard time, you’re stuck and you’re asking yourself why people aren’t choosing you, why patients aren’t coming to you, then a better question to ask might be, why do I deserve to be chosen? And to answer that question, you have to start understanding that if you just show up as everyone else, if you’re just another option, then of course you’re going to have a hard time being chosen. that if you look like everyone else, price and
00:00:30
convenience are the only two factors by which people are going to choose you. If two things look the same, we go with the cheaper one. Or if two things look the same, we go with the one that’s easier to get. So when it comes to the work of attraction in order to grow, in order to get or to get more patience in order to grow, then you have to ask yourself, what should we do in order to be chosen? How can we create the conditions so that people will want to choose us over someone else? And this isn’t to say that
00:01:00
everyone will choose you. Everyone is too diverse. They want too many different things. So how can we create the conditions so that a specific group of people will want to choose us? And that leads us to the idea of value innovation. So what is dentistry doing right now? Look at your competitors, the people around you. How are they showing up? What are the factors of competition that they’re investing in? So, do they have they invested in a large amount of time and money into getting a degree
00:01:32
from a prestigious university? That’s a factor of competition. Some people will care more about that than other factors such as what is the degree of friendliness that they’re investing in. Are they investing in training and making sure they’re hiring the right people who can project that friendliness? Or maybe they’re you know, investing into the factor of competition of modern dentistry, what are their equipment like and and so on. You get the idea. And if you look at the competition around you, um, and if you
00:02:05
extend that, the competition, the competitors, the players in dentistry and what they’re focused on, so the investments that they make into the factors of competition they think others would find valuable, we start to see patterns. We see that most major dental groups of players, so a DSO might be a group, uh, premium fee for service might be a group, very cheap insurance driven practices might be a group. And when we see those different groups and we see what factors that they’re leaning into,
00:02:35
we can start to see the limitations of those groups that when everyone is focused on these factors of competition, there leaves lots of room for other practice to to show up and start investing in other areas of factors, other factors of competition that the current groups aren’t prioritizing or they fail to see. So when they don’t prioritize these factors of competition and you see that there’s groups of people who would love to have that then that becomes an opportunity for you to
00:03:06
start leveraging or if there’s something that the industry hasn’t considered at all then you can add that as a factor of competition and people will notice. So this is the first step that we have to take when it comes to growing your practice. Again going back to the question of why can’t we grow our practice? Well, why do you deserve to be chosen? And if you can figure out how you can deliver value in a way that’s better than what the current industry is doing, then you can win and you can
00:03:36
answer that question. But of course, the problem is that we don’t have unlimited resources. We can’t make all the investments in the world in order to provide more value than the next competitor. So, we have to be very focused. we have to really lean into the factors of competition that matter most to the group of people we seek to serve in order to um to shift all our resources into those factors of competitions that matter most to them. So step one is actually figuring out who do you seek to serve?
00:04:06
What is that group of people who are being underserved such that you can have the ability to create something for them that is going to be more valuable than what the average dental industry or what the dental industry’s average the status quo provides. And you can identify that by looking at who who are who is dissatisfied with the state of dentistry. Who is eager to leave dentistry if they can? who’s ready to jump ship to a direct to consumer like um Invisalign at home or something, right? And why are they so dissatisfied?
00:04:43
And you can start to put more resources into there. Or you can look at who’s not in dentistry right now. Why aren’t they in it? What’s what’s preventing them from seeing the dentist? Maybe it’s anxiety. Maybe it’s shame. And you can figure out solutions for them to bridge that gap. And you can look at people who are actively uh actively moving away from dentistry. They would never go to the dentist. And you can figure out why they chose that too. And by looking across these spectrums of people who
00:05:12
aren’t in dentistry or don’t want to be in dentistry, we can find real pain points from which we can start to focus all of our factors of competition towards or all of our resources towards those factors of competitions that would benefit those people. All right. So this is the fundamental approach that we have to take before we even take a look at marketing or advertising or any of that stuff because it’s not about visibility. Visibility is solved. If you just put your practice onto Google business
00:05:41
profile, you have all the same level of visibility or the same potential visibility as everyone else. And why do you deserve visibility is another question you can ask. And it goes back to the same question and goes back to the same process of figuring out why you would deserve visibility. All right? So if we seek to solve the problem of growth at the visibility level, it won’t work because the same conditions that allow us to grow in terms of visibility are the same conditions that allow us to
00:06:11
grow in terms of patient attraction. So we have to start first with value innovation. And what precedes value innovation is figuring out who we seek to serve and what they care about so that we can start to deliver stuff in a way that is more valuable for them. All right, I hope that’s been a fundamental shift for you in terms of how you think of how you grow, how to grow your practice. I hope you enjoyed this video. video. Hope you found it valuable and I’ll see you guys in the next