fbpx

Dentists Who Invest

Podcast Episode

Full Transcript

James: 

What is up team? Welcome back to the Dennis University of Westport. Can I ask you an interesting guest today from across the pond? Where do I mean by that? I mean, of course, the United States of America. Sat in front of me I have my good friend Brandon Hill. We were just trying to figure out if we met in real life before and we both flatly denied it. The second we got on camera. But then we came full circle and we realized that we had right. Isn’t it so funny what flipping zoom does to your head? And it is a crazy world we have met. we met in Nashville at uh, there was a dental conference. Yeah, there we are, and Brandon is here representing dental nachos. For those of us who have not heard of dental nachos, how can I put it in British terms? It’s like for dentists by dentists, except not as good right.

Branden: 

I’m joking.

James: 

Everybody thought I was going to go better there and blow smoke up your backside. No, they’re on a par. They’re just as good as each other, right? Absolutely, absolutely.

Branden: 

Anyway, how are you today? Brandon? I’m doing well. It’s a wonderful Wednesday. I love the middle of the week. I get to reflect and see if my week is going the way I want it to or not, and pivot if I need to. But it’s going well, so I’m in a great mood.

James: 

So far, so good, and it’s officially humped out of date because it’s Wednesday.

Branden: 

Yes, it is.

James: 

We’re halfway. We’re halfway, which is great, brandon, for those of you, for those of the listeners who have yet to meet you, maybe it might be nice for you to do a little bit of an intro and, in that, expand on dental nachos, because I know what dental nachos is, because I see it all the time and it’s a Facebook group for those don’t know, online community for dentists and there’s a lot of good vibes over there.

Branden: 

And, yeah, like I say, I don’t think that many people in the UK have heard of dental nachos or I mean we can be actually, you know, do some things with people in UK, like we’ve actually had some, some docs from the UK, specifically Dr Jason Smith, and come and visit when he comes to America. He often doesn’t see e-course with us. He’s going to do one this October that you know. We would love to get people that want to come to America for it to come do it. Or people that are in America listening definitely come to Philadelphia and check that out. So we’ve done some stuff for people in the UK, got our friends over there across the pond. So basically I’ll talk about the national talk about my background a little bit. So my role with dental nachos I’m the director of sales and business development for the company. My background is in sales and business development in many different industries. I’ve worked in real estate world, I’ve worked in the banking and finance world, I have worked in many different aspects of corporate America and now here I am working in the dental world with the wonderful dental nachos company. We are a company that is unique and I know we’re going to talk about this, james, a little bit about community, but what’s unique about our company is we are a consulting firm for dentists and other businesses in the dental industry. So basically, our clients are actual dentists, but our clients are also other businesses who help dentists in other ways. So we basically have a very unique position in that we help everybody in the dental world in some way. So it’s always a good idea to connect with us, even if you’re not want to do business with us, because in our community a lot of conversation goes on that will help anybody who is a stakeholder in dentistry. Like I said, whether you are an actual clinician or whether you are a business person in dentistry, you’ll learn so much from being involved in the dental nachos community in our Facebook group, maybe coming to some of our in-person events and networking events as well. So that, in a nutshell, is dental nachos. We are a consulting firm for dentists, but we started as a community designed to uplift dentistry. So that’s a big 30,000 foot view and you can ask me any questions, james. I’ll give any detail that you like about how we do that.

James: 

No, I love that. High level is perfect. High level is perfect. And you know what? The reason why, one of the reasons why I wanted to get yourself on today, is because your community, dan and Akjo’s, and my community, dennis and Invest, shared the same inception, in that they started out as base group groups which we’re just throwing out into the ether, and then people began to join and here’s the thing right, I fully believe that for any dentist out there, he has a message right. You know, you get Gary V figures right and they’re like oh, you got to make TikTok, tiktok is 2023. You know, I don’t even know what it is now, because TikTok is 2022. I don’t really know.

Branden: 

We haven’t even me and you haven’t done the new one. It’ll be us.

James: 

I think we’ve got two now. Right, we can invent something.

Branden: 

It’ll be called Pond Connection or something like that. It’ll be getting people in the US and UK to take over the world together. I don’t know, we’ll just have some fun with it.

James: 

Pond Connect, and you know what. I know what platform it’s going to be, because I’m like the biggest proponent of this of all time. It’s going to be on Facebook groups. That’s where we’re going to go. We’re going to go right back to the fundamentals and, yeah, capitalize on that, because I feel like every dentist to this day, 2023 is flipping Facebook groups. Or it can be right, Because there’s still so many amazing messages that are not shared in that format and everybody thinks to themselves right, I’m an Instagram dentist, instadenis. It’s like a hashtag, isn’t it? And it’s like a slightly ironic hashtag that gets thrown around all the time, right, but here’s the thing, right, everyone’s trying to do that. That’s where the attention to content ratio is not as favorable. It’s left right, whereas on groups, there actually is so many opportunities to go and create community centered around things that you love that have not been done or executed to a high standard yet. So I’m sensing I can see you nodding your head we’re both vibing on that one. It is flipping through, right, I think right. But before we get into that, right, let’s go way back to day zero on not dentist invest on dental nachos. Ok, can you just talk us through that journey, of how it came about, and the reason I want to explore this is in this journey and in you sharing your journey, there’ll be people who are inspired because they can see this process how it started and how it’s evolved, how they can go about it.

Branden: 

Sure, and to do that, I’m pretty sure the obvious element in the room is where we get the name from. But the name comes from the story of how we started. So I’ve been in my role at Dental Nachos for a better part of four years now for actually for four years now, and but Dental Nachos technically was born closer to six years ago. Our founder and CEO is Dr Paul Goodman, who is still a practicing dentist. Even though he runs Dental Nachos and our sister company Tennis Job Connect full time, he does still practice dentistry a little bit and he was basically as a dentist. Seeing what goes on in the dental world in America but also I’m pretty sure this is not unique to just America is that dentistry deals with a lot of negativity, both externally but also internally. Oh, wow, and obviously I had to learn this initially four years ago as an outsider to this world, but I learned very quickly, seeing it just about the depression, the anxiety, the stress, the loneliness, the isolation, the suicide rates in dentistry some of the highest of any profession. So there’s that that you deal with and then on top of that you have the external pressures coming from and, like I said, I know it might be a little bit different in the UK, but the external pressures of how the insurance industry works, how patients view dentistry, how corporate dentistry is affecting private practice dentistry. So you have the internal pressures, you have the external pressures and then the trifecta in this suit that makes it a little bit difficult is that dentists, from what I’ve learned, traditionally do not seem to play nice in the sandbox with each other. They don’t exactly uplift each other and they’ve been conditioned to be more in competition than collaborate. So that was our CEO’s world that he was looking at as a dentist and he said okay, what should I do? Can I create something online in a group, in a community type setting, using Facebook, that would buck some of those trends, basically help with the depression, help make dentists not feel as alone, help infuse positivity and support and uplifting each other into dentistry and basically and I’ve heard several dentists say this, our CEO said it as well. You know everybody hates the dentist. So dentists should at least like each other. So the idea was to create this sense of community and camaraderie, where dentists collaborate instead of compete, right. So that was the idea dentists helping dentists and supporting each other. So that explains the why.

James: 

Now the name, so Paul, dr Paul Goodman aka he goes by Dr Nacho, just so you know, if you ever hear that term, Dr Nacho, around, you know America.

Branden: 

They’re talking about Dr Paul Goodman. So, Paul, he actually spent some time as a server in a Mexican restaurant before he became a dentist and he’s a big Mexican food enthusiast. So the metaphor is that if you think of a big plate of nachos, nachos are meant to be shared. Usually, right, Unless you’re really greedy like me. All the gold thing. But nachos are usually meant to be shared. So he was trying to encourage that principle of sharing instead of competing and fighting and being negative amongst dentists. So he called his community dental nachos and it stuck. And then as we grew and as we started becoming this robust consulting firm doing all these things in dentistry, we just kind of kept the branding, the metaphor, and the whole community feel the same. And here we are today with a community of over 60,000 human beings in the dental world that follow and interact with us. So we’re really happy about that.

James: 

The hats off. That’s quite some size as well. So fair play. And here’s the question, or here’s it’s similar. You know my journey, or what I was curious to know, was when I started the Facebook group Dentist Unifast. I just made a Facebook group, right, and I thought let’s have some fun, right, and I feel like sometimes, whenever people start followings, it’s like to forward some sort of objective that they have right, and I feel like that is readily detectable by people who follow them right, and I feel like that is something that potentially sabotages their growth. Right, and what I get, the impression I get from you was that this was never intended to be anything other than you know dentists learning how they can all share natures with each other and be nice, right, and have some fun right, and you know community and then all these other things they organically came in addition to that right, and I’m correct in saying that, am I?

Branden: 

Yeah, and I’ll provide you with some more for some more transparency and clarity around that. You know Paul did some things outside of clinical dentistry before he started dental natures. He dabbled in some other things. You know. He created seeking courses, he did some speaking. You know he was a connector of people. We were involved. He was involved in practice transition. So he did a little bit of these things even before he had it. So but as the community kind of organically grew, what we were able to start doing is saying, okay, it’s not just about, you know, making a true business out of this and then saying, you know, it is about making a business out of this, but it’s not just about that, it’s about how are we going to use our business skills and ability and the services that we can possibly provide to address the needs. So what we actually do, if you look at some of the things we do as a consulting firm, they all center around the same four things. We have this thing we talk about about the four major decisions in the life of the dentist. Okay, and those four major decisions are getting your first job, buying a practice, hiring associates to work in your practice and selling a practice. Almost every dentist does those four things at some point in their career. So our content, as well as the actual consultative services that we provide as a business, are centered around helping dentists with one of those four places in their life. So that is how it works. So you see a lot of businesses out there. They create a business, they have an idea of how to make money. They say, no, it’d be really cool to have a community around this. No, we were kind of opposite. We kind of built the community, let it organically tell us what it needed. And then, as a business consulting firm, we said, ok, how can we address specifically the needs of our community?

James: 

Well, there you go, right. So I mean, you can actually learn, basically the second that you realize that you’re giving someone value. The second that you’re giving someone value, potentially there’s a business that you could wrap around it, right. So what’s the best way to understand what value someone needs? Why not let them tell you effectively, which is basically what a forum is, or a Facebook group or Instagram or anything like that. You know the difference between reality before there was Instagram and before there was social media, and reality now is now that happens at scale, right, which is cool. And when you collect all these people together in this community, naturally what that means is there’s scope for you to give them value at scale, right. And then, should you decide, there is potentially something that you can create around that, should that be your objective? Or if it’s not, that’s fine, so fine, right. But the reason that I’m such a proponent of everybody having some sort of community online is, number one, the personal development that you go through without even realizing it, right. And then number two, the scope of people that you can help, the lives that you can change, the value that you can bring to the world right. And then number three is the opportunities and amazing things that come your way via the DM box, which you never see unless you’re on this side of the camera.

Branden: 

Yes, that’s cool things, yes.

James: 

And you can relate, right? Oh, absolutely, you can say a little bit on that as well, because people who have yet to do that and experience that don’t know, and I feel like this is a huge opportunity.

Branden: 

People don’t realize how much work goes into managing the community. You know, on Facebook or anything like that, right, and, as you point, people see what happens in the group. That is just. That is that is looking at the duck or the swan on top of the water, right, the things that are going on beneath the surface are insane. And, yes, that inbox, those DMs I mean, we’ve had to hire people just to manage through that because it is extreme, you know, and but it’s beautiful because it tells us that we’re doing the right thing. People are always coming to you asking for help, asking for advice, asking for guidance. You know you built something of value that you can be proud of. And you know the world is, it can be a beautiful place that people do beautiful things. And if you focus on genuinely helping and giving way more than you take, you’ll, you’ll never grow, you’ll never want for anything. You will always be very fortunate in what you receive, because I don’t think you can out give yourself, you know. So it’s, it’s a cool thing.

James: 

It is a cool thing, and you know what. It’s an unbelievably human thing as well, which is great, right, because you’re only on the surface. So much time not to get all waffling and philosophical. But you know, let’s leave everything else aside. It feels amazing, it really does, it does Curious, ok, so you know the roadmap of that journey of dental, dental nachos from day dot to where it is again, 30,000 feet, what you said earlier, high level. How did that evolve? You know, did you start the group and then it wasn’t really getting anywhere and then, or was it like this instant success? You know, because I feel like people start these communities and then they’re like oh, you know, I haven’t hit 50,000 followers in five days. You know something like that, I’m going to throw in the top. You know something like that, whereas in actual reality, day to day, it’s really a grind, at least in my experience. Worth it, but still a grind.

Branden: 

Yeah, yeah, I definitely have some some views on that. Number one it’s not about the number of people in your group. I mean that matters. That tells part of the story, but it’s really about the strength of the, of the relationships that are being built, the information being shared and how engaged people are in the group. I’m in so many Facebook groups I can’t count. I don’t get alerts. I’m not actively involved in all of them. Ok, there’s only a handful of them that I’m probably really heavily involved in. But what in? Some of the groups that I’m not involved in may have 100,000 members. I’m not even talking about another business type groups that I might be in, but they may not be as engaging and interesting. But the people that lead or run one of these Facebook groups have to really view it as a job and can’t just be a hobby. If it’s just a hobby, your group will feel like that because it won’t be moderated well, the content won’t be intentional, there won’t be a lot of time and ability to really tend to the needs of the people that are in that group and need things in that group. So that’s number one. It really you really have to make it a real job to spend time in doing this, which is why it’s very important from a business standpoint to have some type of monetization business around it, because you can’t do a good job unless you’re putting in that amount of hours and time into it. So if you’re going to have to put X amount of time into it, it’s going to have to be something that you actually get compensated for that time in some way, provided that you’re providing value worthy of that compensation, if that makes sense. So it’s very important to try to do that. So that’s number one as an overview. Number two and more of the details. You’re not in competition Like you and I are not in competition games, you know. We’re not just not a competition with other Facebook groups that have a football in a dental industry. Matter of fact, we encourage and promote those groups. We are friends with the people who run those groups. So a lot of times it’s piggybacking off of the Facebook group community in dental so that all the groups grow. You’ll create content that gets shared in my group, I’ll create content that gets shared in yours and will all help each other’s members and help grow the group and help grow dentistry in a positive way. So there was a lot of that in the beginning. There was the organic growth and there was the intentional like OK, we’re collaborating with these other Facebook group founders to kind of help each other and build all of our groups and that, and as you do that, you know it’s kind of like the two heads are better than one. You know five heads, or like having a million, and then everybody starts to grow exponentially and see value. So those are a couple of things that I can say we’ve done. The other thing, like I said, I’ll just I’ll just say this again I know Facebook groups that have, you know, a fraction of the number of people we have, but they’re awesome. They’re awesome groups, they do awesome work, the people are very happy and it’s very valid. So it’s not, you know, somebody’s thinking of building a community like this. As long as you have a right reason for doing it and can commit to well providing that value, I would encourage you to go forward and just let the numbers be what the numbers are.

James: 

Then, and here’s the thing, it’s fun, that’s the part that everybody forgets, at least for me it is. At least for me, when I was putting out community about, I was putting out content about investing, right, and I think that, whatever it is that you’re bringing to the table in terms of creating a following surrounding something that you enjoy when you love it, when you enjoy it, when you’re going to be doing it anyway, right, your content is just document the things you do already, correct, and it’s fun for you to share that, right. So it’s almost a way of leveraging that time that you would be spending anyway to get more out of it, because now you’re going a community around it. And then the second that has value, that will attract people who want to understand more about that particular hobby, pastime, whatever it is, because it can be anything in the whole wide world, right, so you’re going to do it anyway. Maybe you might as well document and put it up as content and then, if something comes of it and you can make a community around it, that’s even more beautiful. So you know that those early days whenever it was the early days of dental nachos, right, and the obviously the group was just getting started and you could see it growing slowly and steadily, I’m sure. How did that look at the very beginning? Was that a slow process or was it like whoa exponential growth straight away?

Branden: 

It was actually pretty steady from what I saw. So, and you know so, I came not at day one, but very early in the game and I’ve seen, I mean since I’ve been here, the group has probably tripled in size. So and like I said, it’s pretty steady. I mean, you know, you might have certain months where there’s a bigger bump than other bumps, but for the most part our group has a very, very steady slope of it. We haven’t done a lot of, you know, specific marketing to get people in the group, as it is just organic word of mouth I mean honestly, there are occasionally people that you know we wonder how in the world they heard about us. You know, because you know our group is a dental group and you know it’s like 70%. Dennis but then in most of the other people that are not dentists are still connected to dental, but every once in a while I will hear people that have no connection to dental. So yeah, I heard of dental nachos. I was like, oh, you heard of dental nachos. Well, I saw it on Facebook. Maybe they know a dentist, maybe they’ve seen you know, maybe they or something like that. So it’s very interesting how things can just take a life with their own on social media. And, you know, it’s like I said, it’s just really important to make sure that you stay focused on why you created your group, so that it doesn’t stop that growth or that it doesn’t stop that engagement.

James: 

Love it. Obviously, this podcast is going out to dentists. Lots of them will be at various stages of the social media journey, so to speak. So you’ve got people and they’ve been doing it for ages, right, and they’re the clerics. You know, they’re, like, already converted. Okay, they’re preaching about it. Right, most of them are right. And then you’ve got the people who are the unconverted. Maybe they’ve yet to see the light, let’s put it like that, right? So you know these people at the very beginning of their journey, which is actually most people from in your experience right, you could speak to those people and you could say something to them that would inspire them to take that step and take that leap. Maybe something that they’re unaware of, something that you can say to allow them to understand what they’re missing out on. What would that be? What would you say to those dentists to encourage them to take that leap?

Branden: 

And James, you’re specifically talking about dentists to be involved in these groups or to start groups of their own.

James: 

I would say I would oh, okay, thank you for clarifying that. I would say to begin to appreciate social media, yes, or so right, so that could be both, I suppose, really.

Branden: 

So, number one generally social media in general, all the different types of social media platforms. There needs to be some level of attention paid to all of them, because you’re never going to interact with everybody the same way. There’s certain people that I know you’re not going to meet unless you meet them on Instagram or unless you meet them on Facebook, or unless you meet them on LinkedIn or just meet them on any of these platforms. So, right off the bat, there should be some involvement in as many areas of social media and other types of networking that you can possibly do and it’s something a lot of dentists don’t understand. The value of networking in their business and the value of networking in their career will do so much more in their career than some of the other things that dentists probably are traditionally taught to do. As far as furthering their career, Networking is one of the most powerful things anybody can do. But just from a social media standpoint, I talk to people all the time and they’re like well, I’m not really on Facebook, like that. I don’t like social media. I see a lot of ugly things and people are cyber bullying and all that. I get it. It doesn’t matter If you’re a dentist or if you’re connected to the dental world, getting these dental groups, even if that’s the only thing you have a Facebook account for. I know people that do absolutely nothing on Facebook but these dental groups, because they learn that they’re never gonna get the attention and learn they learn they’re never gonna get the attention from everybody if they need to, unless they’re involved in social media and they’re never gonna get their message out to the people that need to hear it, because that social media might be the only way certain people get their message. So I would say you don’t have to turn yourself into some Facebook expert or a person who’s on social media for four, five hours a day. No, if you use it for nothing else other than your dental networking, please do it.

James: 

Boom, love that. And I’m gonna chuck one more thing on top. You know the amount of stuff that you learn about dentistry just through being present on social media. Like, I’ve seen some crazy procedures that I was like whoa, I didn’t even know that was possible. Or procedures undertaken in a way that I do them every day and they’re undertaken in a way and I’m like whoa, you can do it like that. Or oh, that little annoying thing that always happens. I didn’t even know it could be fixed. I just accepted it as something that is reality. You can’t do anything about that. I didn’t even know it was something that was. We could do it in a better way. And there we go. I just learned that from scrolling. Okay, I had flipping this TikTok dancer, then I’ve had something else, and then this teeth bam, out of nowhere. Okay, oh, that’s how you fix that thing. Wow, yeah, and those little things helped me so much when I was in clinical dentistry. Brandon, thank you so much for your time today, my friend, looking forward to connecting with you again super soon. Always a pleasure, thanks, james.

Branden: 

See you everybody.