Live Webinar June 25 — How Startup Dentists Get 100 Patients Before Opening Day. Save your spot →
The Startup Dentist Webinar · On Demand
The full session is below, with the moments marked so you can jump straight to what you need.
The full session runs a little over an hour. The moments below show you where to jump in.
It is 2am. The buildout is paid for, the chairs are in, your name is on the door. And you are staring at the ceiling running the math on a waiting room that stays empty. Every future owner has had a version of this night. This is the session that makes the morning look different.
One random thing is not a launch. Tactics without a strategy are a cannon with no aim. You light it, and the cannonball just rolls out the end and thuds on the ground. Get this distinction early and every marketing decision after it gets simpler.
The system Ideal Practices uses to launch practices: your Agency, your Plus 5 (the five ground-marketing moves you personally lead), and your Give. Three parts that work together. Your agency is one part of the strategy. No agency gets you all of your patients, and it was never their job to.
It is not ads. It is a VIP list: 100 people you already know. Friends, family, colleagues, neighbors, former patients you can reach without breaking a non-compete. You call them personally, before you open, one by one. You can open the spreadsheet and start yours tonight, before you have signed a single lease.
Opening day. You are doing busy work around the office. You look over at your front desk person. You are both waiting for the door to open. If that ever happens, the ground marketing got skipped. Once you hear it described that way, you cannot unhear it.
The G in A5G is a Give, a cause built into your practice from day one. One client, Dr. Lauren, partnered with a local mountain-bike nonprofit because it was authentic to her, not because it tested well. When she opened, the group invited its 1,000-plus members to her grand opening. Patients feel that kind of commitment, and it is the sort of thing a DSO three towns over can never fake.
From the live Q&A
"What does it actually cost to market in a competitive metro area?"
An attendee opening in the Philadelphia suburbs asked, the kind of market where national brands like the Fortune 500 bid up the cost of every ad. The answer came back specific.
Every market is different. The point is you plan with real numbers, not a guess.
What this means for you
Your first 100 patients do not come from outspending larger practices on ads. They come from a VIP list and ground marketing you control, starting the day you secure your real estate.
You do not need to be an extrovert. You do not need a marketing background. The A5G framework is teachable, field-tested across more than 900 practice launches, and the doctors who follow it open busy. The work starts now, and it starts with people you already know.
When you are ready to go deeper
Everything in this session, the VIP list, the A5G framework, the ground marketing that keeps opening day from being the day you wait by the door, is one piece of a larger process. Two full days going deep on all of it, built around your situation, with Stephen Trutter and the full Ideal Practices team.
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