Beating All Odds: How You Can Succeed in Business and Life with Dr. Taylor Clark, DDS

Host: Ladies and gentlemen. This is the Dental Up Podcast brought to you by Keating Dental Lab, a full-service, award-winning dental laboratory. Each week you’ll learn tips and techniques from real world dentists bringing you in depth interviews, motivating stories, current events, and sports. Here is your special host, the senior technical advisor for Keating Dental Lab, Brandon Fetters. Brandon Fetters: Hey everybody. Brandon here. Welcome to another episode of the Dental Up Podcast. Our guest this week is an author of the hit book, Beating All Odds: How You Can Succeed in Business and Life. He is a dentist, entrepreneur, author, business coach and speaker whose passion is making life better for people. His accomplishments have been recognized in newspapers, magazines, radio and television in many cities throughout the United States. Currently practicing from Boise, Idaho. Please welcome Dr. Taylor Clark, DDS. How’s it going, Dr. Clark? Dr. Clark: Thanks for having me on. I appreciate the opportunity. Brandon Fetters: Yeah, thanks for taking your time to meet up with us. Now, what point in your life did you decide to get into dentistry? Dr. Clark: I was at school, I was going through college and I thought I wanted to be a medical doctor and I was doing my premed requirements. One of my good friends in a lot of my science classes was predental. I had my background, I have a lot of MD doctors in my family, but no dentists. So I really didn’t know anything, had no exposure to dentistry. But one day when we were studying, my friend said, “Hey, why don’t you go dental? That’s where it’s at.” I said, “Well, tell me why I should go dental.” He told me about the benefits of dentistry and the reason why he was going into it and it really caught my attention and I decided, “Well, I better look into this before I get too far into medical.” Dr. Clark: I did, I started deserting dentists and talking to dentists and decided that, came to the conclusion that I could accomplish all of my goals in helping people in healthcare and also have the lifestyle and income and the benefits that I wanted to have with the profession of dentistry. I changed my focus, went into dentistry and haven’t looked back since. It’s been the best decision for me and I love this profession. It’s a great profession. Brandon Fetters: That’s awesome. Where did you attend school? Dr. Clark: I went to Creighton University out in Omaha, Nebraska and graduated in a class of 2002. Brandon Fetters: Awesome. Now did you start off as an associate or did you purchase your own private practice? Dr. Clark: I came right out from school and I didn’t know what I didn’t know, Brandon. I started my practice from scratch, found some space to lease that had a few rooms that had some equipment in there and started from scratch. Learned very, very quickly, Brandon, that just because I put my name on the window and had DDS behind it, didn’t mean patients were going to beat a path down to come in and see me. I had to learn how to do the business, had to learn how to market, had to learn to do a lot of things, and probably learned the hard way how to do a lot of things, but that’s how I got into private practice. Brandon Fetters: In doing so, yeah, that’s certainly had to be a challenge. What kind of marketing strategies worked out best for you? Dr. Clark: Well, when you start out, you don’t have the opportunity to do anything but external. So I tried everything external and I tested and I tested and if it worked, I would scale it. I would do it bigger and repeat it. But I’ll tell you what, the most effective marketing I’ve learned in my 17 and a half years of being in private practice by far is focusing on internal marketing, working with your existing patients, delivering top-notch customer service and helping and harvest that relationship so they refer people just like them into the practice. That’s the most effective in my opinion now. Brandon Fetters: Yeah. Let your patients do the marketing for you in that sense. Dr. Clark: Absolutely. You treat them right, you give them a reason to refer and you reward them for referring and you can do that transaction all day long. Brandon Fetters: So now given this experience, is there any piece of advice that you’d give to dentists that are coming fresh out of school? Dr. Clark: I would say one of the best things you can do, probably the number one thing you can do coming out of school, getting into dentistry, is finding a mentor and getting a mentor to help you leapfrog your way to success. You won’t live long enough to make all the mistakes, make them all on your own and to learn from those, learn from other people’s mistakes and get yourself a mentor. Even if you have to pay for a mentor, that can be some of the best money you ever invest in yourself and in your business because you can increase your ability to succeed far, far quicker that way. Brandon Fetters: Excellent. Now, when it comes to operating a Saturday dental assisting school, why do you say that that’s the best thing that you’ve done for your dental practice? Dr. Clark: When I got into private practice, I came across a challenge that most dentists never even face in their practicing careers. It developed when I was in dental school in the clinic treating patients, and by my third year out of school, it became so severe. I had a severe skin sensitivity to wearing any type of healthcare glove. Just having contact on my hands, sweating underneath them, washing my hands so many times during the day and working with the dental accolades that we have in dentistry and all the other different chemicals, I just have a skin condition that my hands get irritated when I wear gloves and I saw five dermatologists and specialists in the field and I had to cut back. I was forced to find out another way to grow my income and to grow my revenue without getting out of dentistry. Dr. Clark: So it was at that point that the light bulb went off early on in my career and I thought, “You know what? I’ve got this physical plant, I’ve got this hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of top-notch technology, state of the art, and it’s not making me any revenue on the weekends when I’m not there.” It was then that I decided to get a dental assisting school program put together and leverage it with my facility and get the very best assistant that I could to be the instructor. It has been by far the best thing I’ve ever done in my dental business in my career. It’s provided me not only an income stream that has nothing to do with operating, doing DOBs upside down, underwater, through a mirror on tooth 15 or tooth two, income that comes in independent of me doing those procedures and on a repeatable basis, and at the same time being a source of human capital for me. Dr. Clark: Every time I need a good dental assistant or if I have a dental assistant that’s becoming a bad apple and poisoning the barrel, I can quickly replace them with the very best student in my class. It’s like they’re doing a working interview for me, paying me for it and I get to cherry pick and take the very best students whenever I have an opening or need a good dental assistant. Brandon Fetters: That’s awesome. Dr. Clark: It’s been wonderful thing for me that’s proven very, very valuable in so many ways. Brandon Fetters: Yeah, that’s great. Now when it comes to our listeners, is there a way they can see if they’re in an area that is available for them to attend the school? Dr. Clark: We licensed our program. I have some partners now, it grew so fast and I had so many dentists demanding to be able to to see if the their area was open for operating the Assist To Succeed program in their offices that I asked my very two best clients to be partners with me about 12 years, 13 years ago and we’ve licensed over 125 offices throughout the United States to operate a dental assisting school with the Assist To Succeed program, also in Australia and New Zealand. The way that they can find out if their are area is available, we only allow one doctor per geographical area, one area of exclusivity per doctor, go to assisttosucceed, T-O, assisttosucceed.com and click on the open a location tab and just enter in your office address and we will quickly check to see if that area is available, and if it is, lights out, green light, go for it. It’s one of the best things that I could ever recommend doing. If it’s not, I’m sorry. Brandon Fetters: Seeing [inaudible 00:08:35]. Dr. Clark: If that’s not available. Brandon Fetters: Yeah. Dr. Clark: If the area is not available. A lot of times, it’s not, nowadays. Because there’s so many areas that taken now, but there’s still a lot available still. Brandon Fetters: Excellent. Thank you so much on that. What is Toma? Do you pronounce it Toma, like an acronym or is it T-O-M-A, on how every dentist can leverage it following their dental patient appointments? Dr. Clark: Yeah, TOMA is an acronym for top of mind awareness. In dentistry, we want to do everything we can to the equivalent of putting an iron cage around our best patients so they stay, they pay and they refer, and unless we provide that top of mind awareness or create it in their mind, there’s no saying that they’re going to stay with us and there’s no saying they’re going to remember us the next time they have a dental problem. One of the things that we like to do, every time a patient leaves our office, we have these carnations that are in a vase right at the checkout counter and they cost, I don’t know, they cost us like 53 cents or something like that. We have them automatically delivered from a wholesale nursery and they’re just beautiful carnations. They’re robust. They last about 10 to 14 days. They have a little vial with water at the end of them, so they’re low maintenance from handing them off as far as that goes. Dr. Clark: We have a little ribbon tied around the stem and there’s a send a friend card on it reminding and letting them know about our send a friend program and that’s the internal marketing program that we have that we leverage, where they refer a friend, they can either get a treatment credit or a restaurant gift card, their choice. They get a gift certificate where they get to choose one or the other and every time somebody leaves the office, they get the flower. It’s not expected. It’s something that that reminds them of us. They take it home, they don’t throw it away. It stays alive usually for about 10 to 14 days. Sometimes they go straight to work and when they go to work, sometimes they give it to a coworker, “Oh, where’d you get that flower?” “Oh yeah, I got it from my dentist.” “You did? Your dentist?” It just creates a top of mind awareness in their mind and helps us with our very, very best new patient strategy or new patient source, and that is referrals from existing patients. Brandon Fetters: Excellent. Now when you have a patient and hasn’t been showing up for their followup appointments, just kind of been inactive, what’s the best thing you can do to give them incentive to come back? Dr. Clark: Brandon, you ask this question, all these questions you’re asking, I’ve tried so many things in marketing and running a dental practice and building and maintaining the business of dentistry. I can tell you, a lot of things that don’t work, but I’ll tell you one of the best thing that I’ve found. In fact, this is the best thing that I’ve found in my career to get inactive patients to come back. We have a re-care letter that we have written and tweaked and modified over the years and you’ve got to give them a reason to call, to pick up the phone and call. You got to give them an incentive and put a little bit of fear in loss, fear of loss and scarcity in there by giving them an offer that is limited time only offer. We send that letter out whenever we feel like our hygiene program is waning or that the people are are not coming in or we need to get more people into the chairs. Dr. Clark: When we send that letter out, it gets people to call and we get them back in and we reward them. To your listeners that would like to have a copy of that letter, they’re welcome to email me at [email protected] that’s [email protected] and just request my re-care letter and we’ll send it out to you. Brandon Fetters: Excellent. Yeah, we’ll make sure and have that on the posting underneath the podcast also. Now, speaking of which on that, what brought you to write the book Beating All Odds, Discover Exactly How You Can Succeed in Life and Work. Dr. Clark: Well, Brandon, interesting you asked that question. You remember back when the economy tanked back in 2007, 2008 the Dow Jones is what? Right now it’s over 27,000. It dropped all the way down to 6,400. You remember that? Brandon Fetters: All too well. Dr. Clark: All too well. People were losing their shirts and they were going bankrupt. People were losing their houses. They were losing their jobs. Businesses were closing down, the doom and gloom, the TD. The world’s coming to an end. The stock market’s going to go down to zero. It’s never going to come back. It was just all negative, negative, negative, especially on the news and the TV and talk radio and everything like that. I could see the fear in our patients’ eyes and I could see and I noticed many, many regulars that had come in, stopped coming in. It was only emergency dentistry there for a while, only toothache dentistry. I thought, “You know what? I got a story to tell as a avid learner of personal growth and development and studier and having read hundreds of books and articles and studied many of the New York Times bestselling authors, teachers, trainers and motivators in the field of personal growth and business development.” Dr. Clark: I thought, “I got a story to tell and I’m going to write a book and I’m going to set the record clear for everybody that comes into contact with me, that our future is as bright as our faith, and depending on the attitude we choose, each day we’re blessed to open our eyes on a new day, we can either put on rose-colored glasses, like Zig Ziglar says and see the problems and attract more problems to ourselves. Or we can put on the rose-colored glasses and see all the opportunities and attract more opportunities to ourselves.” I wrote a 30 chapter book called Beating All Odds and I called it my success roadmap and I took everything I’d learned from these teachers, authors and trainers. I interviewed many famous people and many that you might not have even heard of and put it into a book. I thought it would be a hit and it was. Dr. Clark: It is just becoming a national bestseller with the next printing within the next couple of months. Brandon Fetters: Awesome. Dr. Clark: I’m very happy about that. But I wanted to give a copy of that book to every patient family that comes into our office, and I have since it was published in 2009 and wanted to let them know that, “Hey, you are in control. You’re the captain of your ship. We can be, we can do, we can have anything we want in life if we will be willing to do what it takes to get there.” These principles of success that I talk about in my book, I wish I could say I invented them all, these laws of success. But Brandon, they’ve been around for thousands of years and I just put them together and put them, organize them in a way that makes sense to me and shared them with my audience and the book’s been a hit and I’m still living a dream and have to pinch myself sometimes that people like Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and Brian Tracy and and James Malinchak, Chicken Soup for the Soul author. Some of these people that I very much looked up to and had as mentors have endorsed my book and supported the message in that book over the years. Brandon Fetters: That’s most excellent. When it comes to your readers, what would you want them to make their top priority? Dr. Clark: Well, Brandon, when it’s all said and done, at the end of the day, chasing the almighty buck is not the top priority. The top priority that every reader, that everybody that I come into contact with, I recommend you make your family your top priority. At the end of the day, it’s your family. It’s the relationships that you have at home. That if you will, put them as your top priority and focus on them and build your life and your business and your dental practice around your family, everything else will take care of itself much better if you have a strong, strong family relationship with those that matter most. Brandon Fetters: Dr. Clark, what do you mean when you say making the most of your 86,400? Dr. Clark: Well, there’s something, Brandon, that you and me and all the listeners on this podcast today have in common and it’s the number 86,400. Every single one of us every day we are blessed to open her eyes on a new day. We all have 86,400 seconds in that day to work on our goals and to advance our best objectives and if we will make every waking second of our day count as if we have a terminal illness, Brandon, it’s incredible the productivity and the goals that we can accomplish in a day and in a week and in a month and in a year. There’s a compounding effect that takes place when we don’t waste one of those precious 86,400 seconds every single day that we have. You, me, Richard Branson, Warren Buffett, all of the bajillionaires in the world, we all have the same 86,400 seconds. It’s what we do with them that counts Brandon Fetters: Most excellent. Yeah, no doubt. Now, Dr. Clark, what do you mean when you say that adversity is the greatest university? Dr. Clark: Well, all of us when … You say a lot of your listeners to this podcast are new dentists and fourth year dental students, is that right? Brandon Fetters: That is correct, yes. Dr. Clark: Well, they know by getting to that fourth year in dental school, they know that they’ve been beat up for three to four years. In fact, it’s probably seven to eight years. The tests, the quizzes, the wax patterns that get crushed and they go back and say, “You can do better than that. You can do better. You can bring that D up to a C or that C up to a B,” or whatever. There is adversity. There’s unexpected failure, challenge, trial, heartbreak that comes into all of our lives and sometimes it comes in waves. But if we will understand, one of my mentors taught me a long time ago, that every failure, every challenge, every problem, every seeming downfall, discouragement or despair carries with it the seed of an equivalent or greater success. Dr. Clark: If we’ll understand that when the doo doo hits the fan and all heck is breaking loose and we’re just frustrated with all of the problems and unexpected challenges that have come our way, that there is a seed of opportunity in that adversity. If we will understand that and use that adversity as a stepping stone rather than something that is hurting us, we can use that adversity as stepping stones to teach us those things we need to know to get to the next level and the next level and the next level. Some of the hardest problems that I’ve ever gone through as a practicing dentist in the business of dentistry, I wouldn’t trade them for the world. Dr. Clark: I’m glad I’ve had them and I’m so glad I’ve learned the lessons that I’ve had from those adversities because they’ve got me to where I am and they’ve helped me become who I am today. The same thing can happen to every single one of your listeners on this podcast today. Adversity is the greatest university. Don’t be afraid of it. Face your fears, the fear disappears, and understand that many times the obstacle is the way. Brandon Fetters: Absolutely. That’s excellent. Now along those lines of adversity, did you find that a challenge when learning a new language while volunteering in Mexico? Dr. Clark: Yeah, absolutely. I was a church missionary for my church for two years when I was 19, ages 19 through 21 and I had to learn Spanish. I had to learn how to speak the language and everybody that I was surrounded with down there were native Mexicans. It was just one of those things that I just had to put one foot in front of another every single day, do my best, plug away, and let that compounding effect of sustained effort over time take place in my life. It helped me become fluent in Spanish and it helps me with the difficult thing that I face today. We’re all going to have them as long as we’re breathing. We might as well get good persevering and sticking to it. Brandon Fetters: Absolutely. Dr. Clark, in your opinion, what are the three rules of life? Dr. Clark: Well, I interviewed coach Lou Holtz from Sports Center. He was with Sport Center. He’s since left Sports Center. Many of your listeners may know who Lou Holtz is, some may not. Coach Lou Holtz was legendary. You know who he is, don’t you, Brandon? Brandon Fetters: I know the name. I can’t place exactly what he was known for though at the moment. Dr. Clark: He was the legendary national championship coach of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team. Brandon Fetters: Oh yeah. Dr. Clark: He became an analyst for ESPN that after his coaching days ended. While he was an analyst at ESPN, I interviewed him for my book and I share this story of that interview within my book. He said that he has three rules of life that he would teach every single team every year, the seniors, the juniors, the sophomores, the freshmen, the three rules of life that he would teach them. He taught his kids these three rules of life. He actually shared these three rules of life with my father who was at an event that he was speaking at many, many years ago when I was a youngster in high school. My dad shared these with me when he came back and they are these. Dr. Clark: He says, “I’ve just never known anybody that will follow these three rules that life just doesn’t turn out well for them. So I teach my football teams this every single year. Number one, do what is right. Number two, do your best. Number three, treat others the way that you would want them to treat you. If you’ll do those three things, things have a way of working themselves out for you.” I believe it. Brandon Fetters: Yeah, most certainly. That’s excellent. I got to say, I’m a little bit embarrassed that I didn’t remember right off the top of my head on his history. My apologies. Dr. Clark: That third rule, treat others. It’s the golden rule that we all know. Treat others the way that you would want them to treat you. Well, Tony Alessandra, New York Times bestselling author takes it a step further and I love the way that he frames it. He says that the golden rule, he calls it the platinum rule. Instead of treating others the way that you would want to treat you … Instead of treating others the way that you would want them to treat you, treat others the way they would want to be treated. My mission in life with my practice, with my dental assisting school, with my speaking and coaching of dentists business is to make life better for people. Dr. Clark: I want to make life better for our patients. I want to make life better for our students. I want to make life better for my coaching clients. I just want to make life better for people. If I focused on doing that and give them what they come to me asking for, give them what they want and do it as quickly as I can certainly without delay, make their lives better, then that is my mission. Mission accomplished. I think every business in America should have as their mission to make life better for people. Brandon Fetters: Most certainly, just really an overall better outlook we’d all have if we all followed that example. Dr. Clark: You bet. Brandon Fetters: Yeah. Well, Dr. Clark, I really do appreciate you very much for taking your time out of your schedule with us here. Thank you so much. Dr. Clark: Okay. Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thanks so much guys. You take care of David and Brandon and we’ll talk to you later. Brandon Fetters: Sounds good. You too. Take care Dr. Clark. Thank you. Dr. Clark: Bye-bye. Brandon Fetters: Bye-bye- Host: Thanks for joining us on the Dental Up Podcast show this week. Make sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, or search the Dental Up Podcast on iTunes for our weekly feed. Don’t forget to visit keatingdentallab.com/promo for exclusive offers. Keating Dental Lab is a full service dental laboratory and we’re nationwide. We’d love for you to send us a case so we can show you the Keating difference. If you dig what you heard, please leave a review on iTunes and we’ll be back next week.