I want to tell you something that took me a while to see. The doctor is not the reason most aligner cases fall apart. The team is. Not because they are doing anything wrong. Because no one ever trained them on what to do right. Here is what happens in most offices. The patient sits down. The doctor does the exam, sees a great aligner candidate, presents the case, and the patient says they will think about it. The doctor moves on. What the doctor does not know is that when the patient checked...
8 days ago • 4 min read
You already have everything you need to grow your aligner practice. It is sitting in your schedule right now. Most dentists spend hundreds or thousands of dollars every month trying to bring in new patients. Ads. Mailers. SEO. And all of it to find someone who has never heard of them. Meanwhile the patients who already trust them, already like them, already show up every six months, are leaving without ever being offered aligners. That is not a marketing problem. That is a conversation...
15 days ago • 4 min read
Every year dentists spend thousands of dollars going to conferences. The flight. The hotel. The registration fee. Time away from the practice. And most of them come home with a notebook full of ideas and a schedule that looks exactly the same as it did before they left. I get it. The energy at these events is real. The speakers are sharp. The conversations in the hallway are worth more than the sessions themselves sometimes. I love that environment. But there is a question I started asking...
22 days ago • 4 min read
Something changed earlier this year. Dentists who were running ads that worked started seeing their numbers fall apart. Higher cost per lead. Lower conversions. Same budget. Same offer. Same everything. And most of them had no idea why. Meta rolled out a major update to its ad delivery system. They call it Andromeda. It changed how ads get matched to audiences at a fundamental level. The algorithm got smarter in some ways and completely disrupted performance in others. I know because I felt...
29 days ago • 4 min read
I remember the day I told a patient I had trained with some of the best educators in dentistry. She smiled. Then she asked if I could fix the gap in her front teeth. That was the moment I realized something most dentists figure out too late. Your patients do not know what Spear is. They do not know Kois. They have never heard of Pankey or Dawson. And even if they had, it would not change their decision to say yes or no to treatment. What they care about is simple. Do I trust this person? Do...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
One of the things I get asked a lot by dentists is: "Does social media actually matter for a dental practice?" The answer is yes — but only when it’s done the right way. Some dentists are already doing this incredibly well. Doctors like Joyce the Dentist, Dr. Tejas Patel, Dr. Jordan Brown and Dr. Joy are great examples. They’re not just posting random content. They’re using social media to clearly communicate three things: • Who they are• Why they do what they do• How they help patients...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
A patient recently paid more for treatment… and didn’t blame me for it. He came in with crowded teeth and an unbalanced bite. During the exam I pointed out a few cracks forming in his molars. Nothing catastrophic yet, but the bite was clearly putting stress on those teeth. I explained the bigger picture. If we balanced his bite with aligners, we could likely prevent those cracks from getting worse. If we did nothing, the chances of future fractures were high. He listened. Then he said he...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
I recently met with the CEO of a DSO with over 100 locations. And I walked away with a few realizations that most dentists don’t think about. Not every DSO is bad. But every DSO is different. Dentists love to generalize. “DSOs are corporate.” “DSOs don’t care about doctors.” “DSOs only care about numbers.” Some do. Some don’t. The real issue isn’t whether DSOs are good or bad. It’s whether you’ve done the work to understand how a specific one operates. If you’re considering working for a DSO...
about 2 months ago • 4 min read
I just got back from the Chicago Midwinter Meeting. It’s one of the biggest dental conferences in the world. And three things became very clear to me. There are more people trying to help dentists than dentists trying to receive help. That’s not a bad thing. It means there are solutions. It means innovation exists. It means people care. But it also means something else. When the market gets crowded, quality gets diluted. A lot of people from outside dentistry see opportunity here. Dentists...
2 months ago • 4 min read
