00:31 Hey, welcome back to the show, and today I'm so blessed to have with us brother Gary Bird. Gary, will you tell us who you are, and what problem are you solving?

00:39 Yeah, my name is Gary Bird and I'm the founder of SMC National. We are a growth partner in the dental industry. We help dentists create, convert and close more new patients so they can grow the way that they want.

00:50 Love it, love it. That's a big problem to solve.

00:52 It is, yeah, no, it is a very complicated problem and one that deserves a lot of attention.

00:58 Right? I mean, truthfully, how many dentists out there are awesome business people? Tell us that.

01:04 Maybe 5%.

01:07 I think you're right. I'm actually going to the dentist as soon as we get off this call, so I'm it's fresh on my mind It's actually very ironic. We have this appointment today, but Well, what do you see?

01:17 Yeah, it's interesting what makes what makes dentists amazing at being clinicians and working in a very small space and they're perfectionist, right? So when you're good, like almost like somebody who builds like a board inside of a computer, you have to be a perfectionist to get that right. That doesn't translate well over to business usually. So there's a lot of people who support dentists. Now, some dentists are amazing at it and run these huge organizations and do an amazing job, but not many. It's a different it's a different side of your brain, for sure.

01:45 Yeah, I've got a little brother that's a dentist and yeah, he's even got it easier than most because he's, you know, military dentist. So, whole different animal altogether.

01:55 I've heard some crazy stories about ripping out teeth and not putting any pain medicine and stuff like that. It's a yeah, that's a different that's a different animal.

02:03 Oh dude, it's a whole different animal, whole different animal. But I will say, dentists in general are really awesome people. To your point, they have a lot of really strong attributes that makes them really good at what they do as a clinician. Talk to us about the business side though. I mean, when you generally engage with a dentist, what are the most common issues that you see? Because I think it will probably translate to a lot of small business owners, to be honest.

02:25 and a hundred percent translates to most small business owners. Probably the closest is like, like pops into my mind are like a restaurant owners, stuff like that. So, so you, you become super, there's, there's basically three stages of the way I look at it, especially in the dental industry is that you become really good at the thing. And the thing is doing dentistry for me, it was doing email marketing or running ads, right? And you have to master that. And that takes a long time to master that. And right when you become good at that, then you have to become really good at entrepreneurship. And entrepreneurship means that you figure out how to take that thing that you're really good at and turn it into a career that actually pays the bills, right? Yes, and then there's a third phase, and most people forget about this, and I definitely didn't know about this, and I wish I would have as I moved through it. Then there's the next phase, which is the leadership phase, which is totally different. It's a different skill set. So the doing the thing. The clinician doing that thing, that is a skill set that takes you a decade to become really good at, you know what I mean? And then entrepreneurship takes years, usually to become really good at. And then leadership is a totally different skill set, has nothing to do with the other two. In fact, you can not be good at the other two and be good at leadership or vice versa. And I always thought that, oh, I'm supposed to be the leader because I'm good at doing this marketing thing. Nothing could be further from the truth.

03:47 No, nope. And you know what, I'm seeing that trend an awful lot right now where the founders, as they jump into, once they get past launch phase, they kind of find themselves in this situation where they're like, you know what, I'm really not the best CEO. I should probably plug somebody else in here who can actually lead my team to do what I want them to do, right?

04:05 Yeah, being a CEO is a very unique skill set and, uh, and there's parts of it that are exciting and parts of it that are boring, probably to people. And, and so, yeah, it's, it's about finding the right people a hundred percent. But yeah, and then it's also just about being real about what your strengths and weaknesses are and deciding, do I want to spend the next five to 10 years becoming amazing at this or do I want somebody else to do it? And I focus on what I love to do.

04:31 Love it, love it. No, so how did that transition work for you? Because I mean, you have a background in email marketing, which is honestly, it's a really, really crafty trade that most people wouldn't even begin to understand all the complexities of email marketing. It's more than just hitting send. There's a lot of science that goes into this. As you jumped out of that world, which I can only guess the reasons why, but jump out of bulk messaging into something more concentrated, more focused, more niche? What made you choose dentistry of all places?

05:06 That's a good question. So yeah, so dentistry, there was, we basically had a bunch of clients that we were working with and some of them were dentists and what I realized was the cost to acquire a customer for a dentist was relatively the same as it was for like a chiropractor or something like that, but the difference was dentists make about two, three, four times more per patient than the chiropractor. So it was a matter of can these people afford the marketing? That's the first question. Second, or first question is really, can I provide results? That's number one. Number two is, can they afford it? And number three is what is their ROI? And if those things all line up, that's where you wanna pick kind of where your niche is, especially if you're scaling a marketing company. So that's how we picked dentistry. And it's interesting, because I do a weekly podcast with people in the dental industry, and I ask everybody, how'd you end up in the dental industry? Everybody except for the dentist and the hygienist are here by accident. So I'm, it was totally an accident. No one's here on purpose. Everybody kind of like just builds something or does something. And then they work with a dentist. It works. And then the second rule of dentistry is you get there by accident and then you don't leave like nobody leaves and people try to leave all the time, but they always come back. So it's this, this really cool ecosystem of people. It's a small community. I think, I think there's only like a hundred and 20,000 dentists in the United States or something like that. This is a really small market.

06:34 I feel like 80,000 of them are in Utah though. There's something weird going on here in Utah.

06:37 Yeah, yeah, they are. They're mostly, well, yeah, a lot of dentists go to college there and then they stay there. And yeah, it's super, hyper, hyper competitive for dentistry in Utah.

06:50 Is the strangest marketplace for dentists. So if you're looking into dentistry, plan on opening an office somewhere other than Utah. That's my marketing advice. No, but seriously though, so you took your skill sets, you were, I'm guessing what industry were you in before dentistry? What were you doing marketing for? What were your campaigns like? Okay.

07:07 Everything, restaurants, sports venues, like chain car washes, stuff like that.

07:14 Gotcha, gotcha. So you knew the world, you knew the space, and you were like, man, you posed the question earlier that I think everyone needs to listen to. And I'm gonna restate it because I think it's so, so powerful. You ask yourself, who can afford to pay me for what I'm actually doing for them? Because I, you know, I know that what you're providing is a huge valuable asset, it's a huge service that most people don't begin to understand how to do it the right way. You ask the question, who's gonna pay me what I'm worth to solve this problem for them? How did you get to that? Yeah, you've been burned a couple times.

07:47 Yeah, yeah, no, it was literally, I was literally looking at, no, it wasn't even just burned, it was just working with people, right? So like, take a restaurant for an example, if you're gonna be a marketer for a restaurant, their average ticket is 100 bucks, you know what I mean, maybe, 50 bucks, whatever it is. And so you're trying to drive leads at mass into this restaurant, and they're making maybe their profit on that as 10 bucks, you know what I mean?

08:13 I was just going to say 10 bucks. Yeah. Yep.

08:15 Yeah, it has to be small, right? And so it's like, how much can they, like how many customers do you actually have to drive them? How many things can go wrong in that process? And then how many people do you have to drive them for them to actually be profitable on your marketing? And it's almost impossible. Like they're not even breaking even after the second time that person comes if you're charging a lot for marketing. So it's like, okay, well, I don't wanna do that. And then I started working, you know, I worked with like chiropractors and optometrists. And the average tickets for these guys is really small. It's really, really small. And it's relatively the same cost to drive a customer as dental. So it was just for me, it was just common sense that these people can afford it and they get the ROI. The real magic in being successful in business is making other people successful. So if I can figure out how to make you successful, you will… basically pay me or do whatever I want, right? And if I said, hey Todd, I'm gonna blow up your business, I'm gonna 10X your business, it's guaranteed, and we could prove that it was guaranteed. I could basically get you to jump through any hoop that I asked you to jump through. And most business owners don't start there. Most business owners start out on what I'm gonna get rather than focusing on what you're actually providing.

11:16 Right, right, right. Listen, I get it and I think it's so smart and that's why you've been successful and that's why you're still building and growing your business and I really appreciate what you said. Because of the fact, I think most people learn a skill and they do it in some industry where it's really not that profitable for them. And they really struggle to maintain and build and grow their business. And what you've done and what you've illustrated is that, you know, and I've done the same thing about three years ago during COVID, I had to really restart what I was doing. And I've discovered, Hey, I got an easy solution for startups. I started helping startups build their, their initial branding and packaging of their products. It took a year for me to finally figure out, hey dummy, guess what? They're gonna stop paying you and they're never gonna, it's a hard market to serve. I took the exact same product and put it into a higher paying client model and it worked amazingly. It works really well when you're serving the right client. How did you, what advice do you give people out there who maybe are serving the wrong client for them to really effectively build and grow their business?

12:27 stop doing it and go and pivot, you know, learn something else. I know it's scary. It was really scary when we, so when we went from, when we went from, um, you know, working with everybody to cutting off and, uh, half of our company and only working with Dennis, that was really scary, but we grew. So we grew from like probably doing like 40, $50,000 a month to doing a hundred thousand dollars a month in MRR. And it was scary when we said, hey, we're only gonna work with growing dentists. And we went from about a quarter million in MRR and we tripled our business to over a million dollars in MRR. And it was scary because it's like, oh man, there's only probably 40,000 people to work with. Well, when you work with 400 or 500, it's like, okay, well, there's a lot more room here. Yeah, there's a lot more room here. So yeah, there's so much opportunity for us to still grow, even though it's a niche market. It's super niche. And the other thing, here's the other thing that's interesting. If you can become good in a niche, you can become the expert really fast. So if I said become the expert at playing a video game or become an expert at fixing computers, that's so broad. The opportunity of you becoming the number one expert in that space is actually really, really small. It's like making the NBA or making the Olympics. It's like, even if you're amazing, it's still really hard. But if I said, hey, become the number one expert at catching fish at this lake, this bass at this lake in this area only, like you could actually figure that out, find the best spots, find the best bait. In a couple years time, you could become the number one person in that area, and then it grows into more opportunities. So a lot of times we get scared of that. And for me, it's worked every single time.

14:20 I love it. And I love that you're talking about more than just perfecting your craft, but you're really talking about becoming an influence in the industry or in the niche that you're talking about serving. Is that right?

14:31 100% Yeah, yep.

14:32 So what have you done? I mean, you talked about building a podcast. What else have you done to really provide value to the community just to give some advice to other people that are in unique niches like this?

14:43 Yeah. So number one is I, um, started posting on social media every day. So I just said, I'm just going to post on social media every day. And sometimes it's about dental. Sometimes it's not. Um, actually my personal channel, I speak very little about dental. Actually. Um, I just film stuff that I like to film. And then I created four, I have four podcasts in, in dental. Um, they're only for dental. Like you wouldn't be interested in them if you weren't in dental. Uh, those get about 5,000 down between all of them get about 5,000 downloads a month. And then I have, I funnel those and I don't ask for anything. I don't ask people to subscribe. I don't have sponsors of it or anything like that. It's brand building. Then I have events. So this next year, 12 months, we're going to have five to six events that we host and we teach and we don't sell at the events. I just host say, Hey, this is how we do it. If you're interested in learning more, you can come talk to us, but if not, I'm going to show you how to market your practice yourself and what most people don't realize, I heard this story once, someone said they were working with this lady, she was a real estate agent, and she had this course where she said, I'm going to teach you how to sell your own house. And all the people in the neighborhood came and they're all sitting there and she showed everybody, this is how you do it, this is how you do the LMS, this is how you do the blah, blah. And she went through the whole thing, and he's just like, why is she doing this? Why is she showing people how to do her job? And at the end of the speech, at the end of the four hour thing a line of people lined up with her and he went down there and every one of them was like, Hey, I need help selling my house. And so what happens is, and I used to be this I used to be this way, we as entrepreneurs, we become fixed in our mindset thinking, man, I can't give away everything because people are going to steal it and people are going to and it's not true. What you want to do is you want to take your secret sauce, you want to give it away to the world. And half the people are going to go try to execute on it and God bless them for it. Have fun. And the other half are gonna say, yeah, less than half, yeah, I agree, I agree. I just always say half, just to keep people honest. But yeah, the other, yeah, part of them, and then the rest are gonna come to you and say, hey, I need help, and you're the expert now, because you taught them.

16:55 You know what? I was the same way as a young, excuse me, as a young startup founder, I remember really being nervous about sharing anything I had going on in my business with anybody else because I felt like they were going to become my competitor. And, and I don't know why I was so worried about that because I discovered as I got older that most people are never going to take the energy to start and be your competitor. And, and all those people that are going to start, very few are going to finish the execution and very few are actually gonna compete with you. And even the ones that do, if you help them, chances are they're gonna really respect you for helping them build their brand.

17:33 Yep, 100%, yeah, no, you're spot on. If you can figure that out early on, that's huge. So that's what's worked for us. And then, yeah, now I get asked to go to other people's events. So other people are like, hey, Gary, you have events, you should come speak at our event. So now it's just a never-ending flywheel of content and opportunities. Yeah.

17:53 Isn't that fun? I get involved in that as well. It is a fun circle to be in. You know what, one of the things that shocked me the most recently was Alex Ormosy's launch of his book, The Hundred Million Dollar Leads. All this hype, all this build, and he just gave it all away. Why? Because he didn't want to make money off that. He wanted to add value to build his real client avatar, which is the million dollar EBITDA business. He wants to buy and invest in those companies. For you, it's the same thing. You don't want to, you know, you're adding so much value to these dentists that who else are they gonna turn to? I mean, four different podcasts, I'm guessing each of them has kind of a specialty niche within each of those subcategories. Everyone that's listening to those things are so primed and ready to trust you with whatever you're gonna suggest. You've built so much value for them that honestly you deserve to get their attention if you wanna pitch them on anything.

18:49 Yeah, exactly, that's exactly how it works. And most of the time, the other thing about dentists too, they hate the word sale. So in the dental industry, sales is a cuss word. And they also hate feeling like they're being sold. Now everybody kind of hates being sold, but salespeople love being sold. So when I go somewhere and someone starts selling me, I'm like, oh, I wanna be in this process, I wanna be in this dance, right? But dentists hate that. So you know what dentists love? They love to learn. They love it. They'll consume, they'll read books, they'll watch webinars. The best way to reach a dentist is through education, like hands down. And so if you can figure out what your target audience, how they want to receive their information, then you just like quadrupled down on that and just really, really go, go hard at that.

19:38 Hence, the reason we're doing this podcast. So, for those of you out there who are building and growing your own business, I want you to pay close attention to what Gary's telling us because, truthfully, almost all of you are really specialized in your niche. If you aren't real specialized and you don't have a niche, you're not likely in a position to grow and scale. You're probably still launching and still trying to figure yourself out. But for those of you that have launched successfully, you're making money, you're generating, you're growing, you're building. You are niched enough to at least have gotten to this point where you're making money. Now the next stage, and Gary, this is where your conversation is really, really gonna drive home for these people. What can they do as they evaluate their own product offering? What can they do to simplify? For you, it was ripping out all the customers you didn't really like working with as much as a dentist. But how do you kind of coach someone through that process of like, niching down even more?

20:38 Yeah. So, so you just keep drilling down and ask how you can help the right kind of people more. So it's just figuring out who your ideal customer is. That's really it. But here's another way, the flip side of that coin, you want to productize your service. So what does that mean? So as a marketing company, we call ourselves a growth partner. We say, and all of our marketing, we say dental marketing agencies are dead. We're a growth partner and that's very much on purpose, but when you're working as a marketing agency, we could sell hundreds of services, hundreds of them, right? I could say, oh, I build websites, I do social media, I do SEO, we don't do any of that. We have one product that we sell, one. It's more new patients. And people go, well, how does that work? How does that work? And we go, well, let's start at the end. How many new patients do you want? Well, we want 100. Okay, great, how many are you at? We're at 50. Okay, so you need 50 more new patients. What's your operational bandwidth? How, when's your next available appointment? Do you, is your team trained on the phones? Is your team trained to present this kind of treatment? Yes or no, yes or no? Okay, great. Let's look at the market now and look at the demand. Let's look at the competition. Okay, we can get you, based on everything you just told us, we can get you a cost per acquisition of a new patient around 200 bucks, let's just say, right? And it ranges everywhere depends what kind of treatment and all that kind of stuff. But let's just say 200 bucks, great. And you want 50, so that's gonna be $10,000 that you need to invest in your marketing. However, before you say yes, you have to realize we're a growth partner. That means somewhere along the line of the patient journey, your team is gonna have holes in their training and things that they don't know. When that happens, we're gonna come in and train them. And we need your support, Mr. Doctor, and when we do that, and that you buy into that. And when that happens, everybody wins. When everybody gets on the same page with that, everybody wins. So what did we do? We got out of the website business. Do we build websites? Of course. We got out of the SEO business. Do we do SEO? Of course, that's part of driving leads. Do we do ads? We do all that stuff, but we don't offer it as a service. We do one thing and it's a product, and it's based on results, and we sell that as one thing. The more you can do that in your service, the more you can productize your service. The easier it is to understand, the easier it is to train your team, and the easier it is to grow.

23:05 Holy crap, I love that. I absolutely love that, I sense shivers down my spine. Honestly, I've got a prospect that I've been talking to and it's like the request of the services they want has become so much more complicated than I wanted it to be. And I'm just like, oh my gosh, colluding this proposal together is just a nightmare. And what you just described is literally what every business should be doing right now. If you're in a service business, turn yourself into a performance business, right? And if you're helping people perform, you deserve every bit of up, what do you call that? An upsell path that you created for the client. You deserve some rev share on that, right? And I'm assuming that's how your pricing model works.

23:48 No, it's not rev share. It's just like upfront, we're telling them, Hey, this is what your cost per acquisition is going to be. Your cost per lead is going to be in this range. We can own cost per lead so I can generate an opportunity for you, but I can't promise you a patient because if you don't answer your phone, yeah, that's up to you, but we're going to train your team. We're going to show you where. So here's the interesting thing about dental. Most people can't see where their business is breaking. Like that's one of the reasons dental really struggles from a business perspective is you can't actually even see the patient journey. So we've developed software to help them see where things are breaking and things like that.

24:24 Love it. Ah, love it. Love it, love it, love it. Gary, I have a feeling we could probably do a whole LinkedIn Live on this for an hour and just have fun talking about this, but we should, honestly. And moving forward, let's do that. This is a short form content piece, and honestly, I love where the conversation's going. We provided some huge value. And for those of you listening, if you're a dentist especially, which I'm gonna specifically target some of my friends who are dentists on this. You've got to engage with someone like this. If you're in a service industry and you're really specialized and you don't have a good marketing partner or growth partner, you have to find someone like a Gary who knows your industry, who knows the ins and outs of how to find new clients for you, because there really is a huge ocean of clients out there. And when you find a partner who understands that there's a lot of clients for you, and I know how to grab enough, how much is enough? Like you asked all the right questions there. How many can you handle? What is your operational capacity? If I get you to this point, how much is that lead worth to you? You know what I mean? Those are great questions to ask.

25:31 Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. Those, and here's the thing that most dentists don't realize. And this is true for most industries or a lot of industries, I should say. There's, there's an abundance of new patients. There's not enough doctors to actually serve them. It's just, you have to know how to communicate with them and reach them. Yeah. Even in Utah, there's, there's still enough. Maybe there's a lot of dentists in Utah. It's a little, it's, it is tougher in Utah, but I work with, I work with multiple dentists in Utah and they absolutely crush their, they're killing it. So you can do it and if you know how to rise to the top. And if, especially when you're in an industry where people, their skillset that makes them good at doing the thing, makes them usually not good at marketing or sales, then that's an industry ripe for the picking.

26:15 Love it, love it. Great advice, Gary, love the information, love the insights, fantastic episode. For those of you listening and you want to learn more about what Gary's doing, we're plugging all his info in the show notes below, so take a look, catch up with him, follow him on social media, and you're probably going to learn some things about how you could build and grow in your niche, in your industry, and I'm guessing, Gary, are you telling, are you teaching people how to do this in their niches, or are you just focused on the dentist?

26:42 Nope. I'm happy to, I'm just focused on dentist, but I'm happy to help people for free. I have a podcast called the 8 figure agency show. I literally just go on there and talk about how I built my agency. It's it's I don't have anything to sell or any email capture. I would love people to follow me on social media, the Gary bird. If you want to follow me, I post fun stuff on there about inflation and stuff and, uh, right now. So, yep.

27:05 Cool. That's always fun to talk about. Hey Gary, thanks so much for your time today and for the rest of you, we can't wait to catch up with you on the next episode. We'll see you then.