Your marketing doesn’t work, simply because it’s premature.

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Before you rush to get the word out, to hire agencies, to purchase advertisements, to run promotions on your service or product or whatever is that you do, first pause and ask yourself, what have you done differently to deserve this promotion, to deserve this awareness? What are you bringing to the marketplace that isn’t already there such that the promotion will actually work? because otherwise you’re promoting a commodity and unfortunately that happens to be the case most of the time.

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When we don’t take the due diligence of taking the steps that come before promotion, we end up shipping and we end up promoting something that is completely unremarkable. So what happens as a result? You get inefficiency of promotion, inefficiency of advertising. you pay a lot and ultimately it becomes unsustainable. So, we’re trying to build you something or I want you to build something that is sustainable for you in the long run. And what that means, what that’s going to look like is being unique and filling a

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unique need that no other alternative competitors can. And when you do that, you’re no longer a a commodity. When someone needs something, you’re the only solution for it. And when you go out there and you start promoting yourself as such, then the people who have always desired this, and trust me, there’s going to be a lot of people who align with how you think, they’re going to want that solution. And it’s not enough to come to build something authentically for yourself or

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for myself and just impose it onto the world. That’s not how it works. It starts with building something intentionally with empathy with first spending a lot of time in the perspective in in someone else’s shoes to understand what they want how they see things and creating something for them. When we have intentionality, when we can intentionally build something, our chances of creating something worthwhile is dramatically higher than if we go and say, “Hey, this is who I am. I’m just going to do what I think is

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good and people are either going to love it or not because chances are we’re not. As individuals, we’re way too unique. So when we just scale up our individual selves, it’s not really going to work well. But if we can build something with authenticity and fine-tune it for the audience, that’s when we start creating something worthy of talking about, worthy of remarking upon, being remarkable. And when we’re remarkable, we get all the benefits of lower cost like in advertising, uh better

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referrals, um more awareness, uh staff wanting to work with you more, less turnover. Like all these benefits come when we design intentionally. So what does that look like? First it starts with you seeing the others. So this group of people and and this is you and you’re looking at them. As human beings, we are inherently dissatisfied. We have a lot of problems. Unless you’re very enlightened, you’re going to have a lot of things that you want taken care of. You’re going to have

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a lot of ideas about who you are, about identity, about how I can present myself better, of how I can rise in status or lower my status or maintain my status. We have all these things that we’re trying to accomplish subconsciously, consciously, and so on. The problem is we’re very we do a very bad job of creating those paths forward or else everyone would be on a path towards self-fululfillment or self-actualization. And that’s rarely the case. We know we can kind of we have a hint at what we think is better, but

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we have a hard time materializing it. It’s kind of like when I ask you to draw someone’s face. you you know what it looks like but when you actually go to draw it on paper it becomes very difficult. They understand they have a concept of what better is but they’re not able to create it. You come and you start seeing these behaviors. Maybe they’re behaving in a way that’s causing them to I don’t know lose confidence in their teeth or whatever their behavior is you see a better

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version of it. You see a better path forward. And this is the work of leadership. So it starts with you seeing the market and saying okay um this is how things could be better right? So you have an idea of what things should look like. So very famous examples Steve Jobs had an idea of what things should look like. Elon Musk when he created Tesla had an idea for how transportation should look like. And the people who aligned with that idea became eventually became customers. But not immediately, not when they first

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started with this idea. Uh when they first came out with this idea, they actually had a lot of critics, a lot of doubters, a lot of people who believed it would never happen. And it was only through this marketing engine that they built, through creating a culture, through creating feedback loops, to create creating um peer pressure where they cause people to finally convert and adopt their ideology. So it starts with the ideology. It starts with your vision of what it should what things should look like.

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Then we create a marketing system. And this is where a lot of people go wrong. They do the work of building a practice. So let’s say this is your office with windows and they jump the gun and they just start promoting. They start trying to build awareness this way so that attention can come this way. um so that hopefully there’s some profit to be made. And when this happens, when this system isn’t built out, it just becomes selfish. It’s just your ideology and you’re trying to impose it on people.

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And and again, the resulting costs of this are increased cost of advertising, unsustainability, and so on. So, we’re not going to take that route. We’re not going to jump the gun. We’re not going to go into selfishly promoting ourselves until we’ve done the work of creating an empathetic system that’s going to align with them and then we’re going to promote this thing and then we’re going to promote this and it’s going to work its way through like that. All right. So, why is it a system? Why

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don’t we just do this oneoff event where we just um create some noise and get some people to take action? Well, it has to be a system because we want sustainability. You can build marketing in an unsistent way. But what I want for you and what you probably want is consistency of action. You want people consistently adopting your ideology, adopting your vision of how dentistry should be. And the only way to do that, only way to create consistency is to create a consistent system. And so the people who

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come through this consistent system will end up hopefully behaving consistently. All right, that’s just systems theory. So these people are going to engage with the system. But first, it’s a paradox. Do we start with the system or do we start with the people? Because how do I create a system for people if I don’t understand the person? And how do I create something for the person if I don’t have a system or how do I create a change in people? So the system you have to understand a

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system first. When you understand a system you start understanding what type of people you need to bring in. So that’s where kind of that’s how we solve that riddle. The system what it’s trying to do is it’s trying to affect it. It plays on people’s psychology. It plays on beliefs that people carry around. If I believe dentistry look should look a certain way, I might align with your system better than someone else who has a totally different belief about what dentistry should should look like. Let’s

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say you your vision of dentistry is that it should be more long-term sol like it should be providing more long-term solutions and the short-term fixes kind of have no use. Let’s just say that’s what you believe and that’s just let’s just say this is the approach that you believe in and the vision of how you see how you think people should be behaving. Once we see this, once we understand our change, people who align with that belief are much more likely to come through the system and take the desired action that

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we want them to make. Here’s action. in order to become a patient and people who don’t have that belief who believe something completely different are most likely not going to take that action even if they come through the system. So really the first step is understanding once you understand the system the second step is to figure out what are the beliefs that we’re going to engage with what are the beliefs that we’re going to build this system for such that alignment’s created right if

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if I I can’t build a marketing system for people who love dentistry and people who hate dentistry for people who believe dentists are scam artists versus people who believe dentists are there to protect them I can’t believe I can’t create a marketing marketing system that will work on both. I have to choose one. And if you’re going to choose one, I would argue that it’s more effective for you to choose the one that you’re already in align in alignment with. You can do the work of choosing the belief

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system that you’re out of alignment with, but it’s going to be much more costly. It’s going to require personalization. It’s going to require intensity. It’s going to be much harder to scale. If that’s your calling, go for it. But if you’re in this to create as much change as possible if you’re here to make as much of an impact as possible and it doesn’t necessarily require personalization then you know pick the belief systems that’s already aligned with you because

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then you’ll make more scale. So it’s a personal preference there as well. So we go here and and the the challenge that we have the resistance of doing this work of picking who is because we’re scared and we want to appeal to everyone and so we think this is enough just doing this work or we hope that it’s enough. We want we want to believe that right? We want to believe that we are good enough. And when we don’t do this or when we don’t do this and we just approach as we’re good enough, then

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we’re a commodity. All right? So, we resist because we want to um we don’t want to limit our options. In my strategy course, we have an exercise called scale validation. After we determine who we’re going to be targeting for, who which beliefs we’re choosing to align with, um, we validate that to scale. We see if there’s enough of them. And typically what the exercise outputs is that there’s going to be a lot of these people in your serviceable area in a competitive driving distance from your

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office. And the number of people that you actually need to serve active patients is a minuscule percentage of the available um population of people who align with your beliefs. We have a very poor very ineffective understanding of scale. If if I asked you to visualize a $100, you could probably easily do that and $10,000 maybe um a million dollars becomes difficult. a billion dollars becomes difficult, hundred billion becomes difficult. If I ask you to imagine 10,000 people, that becomes very difficult. Right? We we we don’t

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understand scale very well. So, it’s a powerful exercise to do to realize that most of us are overreaching when it comes to the populations we’re trying to impact. We’re trying to create we’re trying to go to too large of a body of water and trying to apply dye in order to change the color of the ocean. Instead, what would be more effective is to choose a large pool, apply the dye, and the whole color will change. All right, so that was my little rant on why we need to niche down and and the

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way we’ve understood niching is not the most effective. It needs to start with alignment of beliefs. All right. Anyway, so one more quick note, like if you’re a cosmetic dental practice, you can see how choosing a certain belief system is going to benefit you a lot. Like if if you start aligning with people who believe that dentistry um or who believe who don’t believe in investing in appearance, that’s going to be very difficult for you. So you start creating you start aligning with people who

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believe in you know taking care of their appearance and you can create a system for those people right so that’s the power of first understanding who we’re deciding to serve all right so next step the things we need to do before we start promoting ourselves the the act of getting the word out the system is going to first take their beliefs and it’s going to deliver events and whether or not you designed this intentionally. You’re going to be delivering events when when they come

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onto your website. That’s an example of them experiencing an event with you as an office and these are called touch points. All right. So, in in the strategy um course, we do an exercise where we will map out all the touch points. First, there’s going to be a patient journey. What are the decisions that they’re going to have to make? Because their engagement with you isn’t going to be one decision. It’s not going to be just whether they accept treatment or not. It’s going to be their

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decision to call you, to book an appointment, to schedule online. The first decision, decision to actually show up, the decision to then accept treatment or not, the decision to follow up or come back or not to recall. There’s a lot of decisions and we want to map it out first. We want to figure out, okay, what are the decisions that they’re going to have to make in order to complete this journey, in order to live the change I see for them, the idea of better that I have for them. Right?

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we we don’t really take the time to optimize the system to maximize decision making and because of that things fall apart as well because now when we just promote we’re asking them to make so many decisions on their own we we’re not holding their hand through the process right so after we determine the patient journey we create we map out all the touch points all the core touch points all the main things that are going to affect their decision- making and from there we’re tweaking them. We we we’re

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writing down what we’re doing right now and also how we can improve it in order to mean better things for them. And what I mean by meaning better things is if I believe that dentistry should be um respectful that dentist should respect me as a human being before and I don’t really care about I mean it’s as important as my health as how they how effective they are to my health. If I come into the office and I don’t get that respect, then the meaning I’m going to create and I and I feel like I

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don’t get that respect because of the events, it’s going to create the meaning of disrespect. If I walk in and the event is that I have to wait at the front desk for 10 minutes before someone comes to me, the meaning I derive from that is disrespect. All right? So, we’re trying to create meanings, positive meanings. And the reason we create meanings, so we first come in with events and we try to create positive meanings and then from here we try to create positive feelings. We’ll get to feelings

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in a second. So events are crucial. We have to identify, we have to optimize for events and we don’t do that enough. We we ask them to just jump to it. Who cares what meaning you derive? I don’t even know who I’m targeting anyway, but just run promotions at it. Spend those thousands of dollars on ads. Let’s hope it works out, right? Not only are there events, there’s also three filters that we use to derive meaning. The filters of culture, status, and past experiences. If I see an event,

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let’s talk about culture first. If I see an event, all my friends are doing it. Peer pressure, right? the way I do it, the culture that I relate to, everyone’s doing it. Then the meaning I create is that this is something I should do. It’s it’s that simple. And and unfortunately, this also causes commodity behavior, right? But we were intentionally I’m intentionally trying to get you to break out of commodity thinking, right? So culture um is how we create positive meaning. If we can get their friends to

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be doing it, then it’s more likely that they’re going to do it. But that’s a late game approach. That’s we come back to affecting culture later. It’s another loop. Once once they come out here, we get them to affect this culture. It’s similar to, you know, how a good experience leads to a positive review and that leads to more patients. It’s a similar effect, but not quite. It’s it’s actually quite different, but it’s a similar effect. All right. Next is status. Status is how

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we believe that this is going to impact our status. Is engaging with the system is taking the decisions that you ask me to take, is that going to increase my status? Is it going to harm my status or is it going to maintain my status? What do they want? Do they want to increase their status? Do you know? Right? How can you position touch points in such a way? How can you position events in such a way that everything is indicating that their status is going to be where they want to go by engaging with the system. You have

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to intentionally design that. And then past experiences, I made a video on past experiences where I talked about how I was running and because I’m dressed like a runner, people are more um acceptable. they’re they’re more accepting of me. If they turn around and see this guy running at them, but I’m in a running outfit, it makes sense. It it connects with something in their past experiences where they are more inclined to welcome it because it’s just someone running in their neighborhood versus if I was

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running behind them and I’m wearing all black and a mask, their past experiences are going to create a very different meaning of what it is that’s coming right at them. even though it’s just the same me. It’s because I haven’t intentionally designed how I’m going to appear to people, right? And it’s not just about appearance, but it’s about how you do everything. Um, a past experience, someone might have had a bad experience where um treatment planning isn’t like uh there’s no

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communication around it and they just get a bill. So if your behaviors start to align with that process, then it’s going to start raising red flags and it’s going to cause meanings that create feelings of avoidance, shutting down, distrust, and they’re not going to make that decision. They’re not going to take that action. Right? So how can we create uh positive meaning with culture, status, past experiences, and also the events themselves? Those four things. All right? We create positive meanings

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because meanings create an emotional response uh aka feelings. If I believe I’m being respected, I’m going to feel a certain way. If I if I or if I interpret that I’m being respected, I’m going to feel a certain way. If I interpret if I derive the meaning that I’m being disrespected, I’m going to feel a different way. And based on my feelings, that’s really going to decide if I choose to work with you or not. if I choose to take the action that you sub uh prescribed me.

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Imagine you go to a doctor and they prescribe a medicine. Having done no exam, nothing. They just prescribe it to you. Your your your feelings are going to be of confusion, of distrust, of skepticism, right? How likely are you to actually engage even if you because of peer pressure or whatever buy that buy that medicine? How likely are you to actually do the action of consuming it and engaging with the change that they they prescribed you? Unlikely. So we create feelings that promote forward movement. So what are those

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feelings? It’s primarily three feelings of openness, of engagement, and trust. If we can create that, then the the the pos the potential for creating action is much higher. And we’re going to address fear with past experiences and things like this. All right. This whole thing is what we’re missing. We forgot to do this and we rush in with just our idea of what things should be and we’re trying to drag people straight into it. We we haven’t done the work of creating things for them, of considering their

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past experiences, of considering their status, of considering their culture, of considering things that have significant meaning to them and building in such a way that they know that this is safe or that they can trust this or that this is going to actually align with their goals. We haven’t done that work and we’re rushing to spend thousands of dollars to promote ourselves as a commodity. So, stop it. pause, build this thing out, and then let’s get the word out. Let’s now proudly get the word

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out of something that we’re confident is not only going to help this these people, but also that they’re willing to engage with, right? That’s the difference. And that’s what I want for you. So, if you’re thinking of getting the word out, if you’re thinking of investing and you’re wondering when’s a good time to start getting the word out, stop and take the course. It’s completely free. You’ll learn how to build this. Do that first and then you’ll see

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marketing, this whole relationship in such a different light and and you’ll know it when you’re ready. You’ll know when you’re ready to get the word out and when to promote and you’ll know exactly how to do it because the process of promotion, this part is a well-beaten path. Everyone is doing this. There’s so many providers out there who people who are willing to advertise for you. Freelancers, agencies, industries, even like um Dentrics like they’re doing ads. So the tempting path is this and most

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commodities take this path. The question is whether you’re going to be another commodity or not. And I challenge you to not be