Patrick Chavoustie discusses how the message your marketing sends plays a crucial role in building trust and connecting with patients. He emphasizes the importance of being clear, concise, and transparent to avoid overwhelming potential clients.
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About Patrick Chavoustie
Patrick is the CEO of BSN Enterprises, LLC and Omni Premier Marketing. His extensive background in Medical and Dental Marketing and Business Development, alongside his leadership style, positioned him for this role. Omni Premier Marketing has expanded from working with exclusively plastic surgeons to working with multiple medical practices and developing the premier dental website design and marketing solutions under his direction. He also hosts The Dental Brief podcast.
About Alex Nottingham JD MBA
Alex is the CEO and Founder of All-Star Dental Academy®. He is a former Tony Robbins top coach and consultant, having worked with companies upwards of $100 million. His passion is to help others create personal wealth and make a positive impact on the people around them. Alex received his Juris Doctor (JD) and Master of Business Administration (MBA) from Florida International University.
Episode Transcript
Transcript performed by A.I. Please excuse the typos.
00:02
This is Dental All-Stars, where we bring you the best in dentistry on marketing, management, and training. Welcome to Dental All-Stars. I’m Alex Nottingham, founder and CEO of All-Star Dental Academy. And with me is Patrick Chavasti, the president, the marketing guru over at Omni Premier Marketing. And our topic is getting your messaging right. Welcome Patrick. Alex, so glad to be here. This is, I think, my third time on.
00:30
You know what I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and we’re going to throw this on our podcast as well, the dental brief. So this recording can be found there as well. Hope you don’t mind us doing that, but I’m just, I’m so grateful to be here. I love it. I love being strategic in terms of, and this is something that Chet Holmes talked about or fans of years ago is when you do something, can you get multiple strategic objectives with one tactic or one act that we’re doing right now?
00:59
Let’s talk about messaging because as we speak, we are working with you to help re-improve our website. I think it’s pretty good, but you’re like, Oh, we could do so much better, man. So we’re having a lot of fun with that process. And what comes to mind is this idea of messaging and messaging is so important. And I think the premise that you said to me, and I want you to talk a little about it and we’ll just kind of go back and forth is
01:26
And it’s interesting as a marketing guy, you love spending money on marketing. That’s what you do. But you’re like, look, your messaging is most important before you spend money on marketing. So I think we both share two aspects of this. One is your messaging is critical, number one, and it has to be that way everywhere. And that’s you as a marketing guru. Now when we come in, All-Straditional Academy is, and we work with you guys and your clients as well, is how do you then express that on the phone?
01:56
through case presentation, through the patient experience, that what we do in terms of training. So you need them both. You need the training, but you gotta have the messaging. And it has to be consistent throughout the patient experience. It should be, yeah, at 100% should be consistent throughout that experience. And I think on the outside, it can kinda seem like a little bit of a boring thing for people, right? They’re going, oh, my messaging, what are these guys talking about? But it can be a game changer inside your practice, right? So how you talk to people.
02:25
in person matters, right? So the way that you engage with your team, your family, your spouse, all of that matters. But the way that you engage and speak to your patients matters too. And when we talk about messaging, we’ll kind of give you a little bit my background in messaging is I’ve been in marketing, as you know, for 27 years, it’s a long time. My 50th birthday is this, this month. I actually haven’t got the AARP in the mail. Yeah, thank you. So a few weeks away.
02:52
So I’m not new to this by any means, but not too long ago, a book came out called building a story brand by Donald Miller. I’ve read Donald Miller’s first book, which was a non marketing book. It’s actually a book on spiritual spirituality that came out maybe 25 years ago was the first time that I read it. Pretty interesting. And, um, so I picked up this book, someone recommended it or I saw it and I read it. And I was like, wow, this guy just in one small book, maybe it’s 150 pages. I know you’ve read the book as well.
03:20
I’m guessing it’s about 150 pages. It’s a couple hours to read the book, maybe four hours, if you’re a little bit of a slow reader. Um, and he, he dials in everything that you need to know about messaging in this one book that would take me literally days and days and days and days to explain to someone. One of the things that he does is he talks about messaging in a way that story branding, like telling a story through your messaging and the most important thing, you and I have talked about this offline a bunch is making
03:50
the customer, right? The patient, the customer, they’re the same thing until they come into your practice, making them the hero of the story. So what doctors like to do, what with credentials such as yourself tend to do, they like to talk about how skilled they are and what their background is and what they’re recommend, what their area of expertise is. And that stuff is all really important, it is important to get there in the story. However, you first have to
04:20
make the customer the hero and you’re the guide that is there to help them, right? So once they understand that you’re there to help them or journey, you can then talk about expertise that will come in and we go to Star Wars. I know that you like Star Wars somewhat. I think it’s fantastic. I grew up with it. In Star Wars, I think it’s the first or second one that came out. I forget if it’s episode five or six. Yoda is a Jedi, right? The guy’s as qualified as can be.
04:50
But he’s using those qualifications to help build up Luke Skywalker. Right. It’s an amazing story. Yoda is the guide. The hero of the story is Luke Skywalker. Everybody’s rooting for Luke Skywalker. Everybody wants to be their very own Luke Skywalker. If you try to be Luke Skywalker, they’re going to be very, very turned off. They’re going to leave the theater, throw their popcorn on the floor and go home. Does that make sense?
05:18
Yeah, it’s great in the book and our CEO Shelley regrets sending it to me because she’s like, Hey, Alex, guess what? You’re not the hero of All Star. And I’m cool with that. And then she had me read the book and I’m like, and she regrets it because I’m like, this is amazing. It follows the hero’s journey, which is that was something that was put together. Oh, gosh, it escapes me the name and I talk about it so often. But who’s the guy that does hero journey? Anyways, I’ll look it up.
05:48
I think it’s Campbell, the hero’s journey, man of a thousand faces. So anyways, so he’s a professor. The point is that all great stories, the Odyssey, Iliad, all that, they all follow a similar track. And then in marketing, this is a way our human mind is designed. And part of it is deciding who the hero is. That’s the first step, being clear of that. Because what happens is if you make yourself the hero, you’re competing against the customer, the client.
06:17
the patient, the dentist, in my case, it will be the dentist I’m competing with. Yeah, it’s nice that I was Tony Robbins’ top coach. It’s nice that my law degree MBA. It’s nice your background in marketing. And there’s appropriate point to discuss it as you talked about from the guy perspective, but I don’t want to compete in terms of look how good I am. We want to see how can we make you the hero and enjoy that and we’re the Yoda, we’re supporting you.
06:46
And you got to have good credentials. Of course, Yoda was the greatest Jedi ever, but he came there as a guy to support them, for them to have that experience, much like we love sports. You see these great coaches, these great players that retire and they coach others to do great. And that’s, I think that’s just a journey of being human. And I think the more what you’re really getting at, and this is amazing to see in a marketer and a market, and I just say, and I’ll keep saying it, I think it’s important I say it when I remember it, but on the is you guys do a great product.
07:14
And I think even more important than that, and this goes to this whole idea we’re talking about, is the heart behind it, the caring behind it. And I will say a caveat, as we’re talking about messaging here and giving you ideas, if you don’t stand up for what we’re saying and you manipulate people, it’s not gonna be aligned. You’re really gonna accept people. If you say you’re for them and you’re not. Yes. Does that make sense? And you and I have talked about this a little bit.
07:39
because there’s people that do this. There can be a lot of fear-mongering that happens within messaging. If you don’t buy from us, you’re going to blow up, right? If you don’t buy from us, you’re gonna make the biggest mistake of your life. There is a little bit of room, I think, in for dentists to talk to patients, and they probably should like, hey, if you don’t do this treatment, here’s what could possibly happen. But there’s definitely no room. If you go, hey, if you visit the corporate-owned dentist down the street,
08:07
You’re going to get ripped off. They’re going to, you know, they’re going to butcher you and so on. You’re going to lose that person. You’re absolutely going to lose that person in some places. I think there’s a little bit of room to tell people some of the bad things that can happen if they don’t move forward. And I think that can be important, but be very, very careful on your messaging, not to try to scare people, visiting you or even worse, scare them from visiting competition. One of the factors that I found so compelling or interesting about, and I want to do another episode with you.
08:36
about websites. And it’s interesting because we thought, well, websites is an old thing. You just put a website, they’re all the same and they’re not. And you, when you start going into, into behind the scenes into, and then building them so they’re fast, we’ll talk about that, but also in the future, but also that they, they have the right messaging, the copywriting. It’s so critical. And it’s the, and by the way, we were talking about this in the green room that we mastermind with some of the great copywriters in the world.
09:06
because it’s so important. Copywriting is an ongoing thing about messaging. There’s this concept with that I found in the book and also that we’re doing with All-Star and with clients, dental clients as well is the grunt test. Tell us, tell me about the grunt test. What is it? Where did dentists fail and how can you make that better? Yep. So grunt test, we’re going to talk about cavemen. We talk about the grunt test, but we’re going to kind of move a little bit more into today’s far from caveman brains that we have.
09:35
We’re, our brains are so over-related on a daily basis. And the cognitive overload that people have is crazy, right? We’ve got phones, we’ve got messages. I’ve seen different numbers between 10,000 and 14,000 messages are pushed in front of us every single day. I mean, just, it’s nonstop. You’ve got billboards and like I said, phone, you go to TikTok, every other thing that you scroll, don’t go to TikTok. But if you went to TikTok, every other thing that you scroll through as an ad, you look at Facebook.
10:03
It’s like being in Las Vegas. It’s nonstop. It’s in your face. When you go to a website, if somebody has to think about what you do when they get there, you’re losing. And I see this happen all the time. I see it on some dental websites where you get there and there’s like, you know, here we’re in beautiful Colorado. There’s like a picture of the front range. Well, that may kind of tell people that you’re in Colorado or one of the mountain towns. Sometimes the mountains are actually not Colorado, not the Rockies. But it might tell them, hey, you’re there, which is seems kind of okay.
10:32
then you don’t even know if it’s a dental website. You don’t even know as, hey, is this a dentist? So the first thing that happens when the person gets to your website is they have to think. The more they have to think on that website, the less likely they are to get overloaded, cognitive overload, and they just leave. They don’t take any action whatsoever. Going back to the caveman, that grunt test is a verbiage. You know, the word dental, the word dentist, the city name right on the hero section.
11:02
which is different than a story brand hero. The hero section is that big part of the website that you see, right? When you land. Above the fold. Above the fold when you land there. The fold, think about old school newspapers where it folded in half. So everything below the fold, you couldn’t see until you unfolded the newspaper. That’s what we refer to as a fold on. Oh, I didn’t know that’s where it came from. Yeah, that’s where it came from. Yeah, so you couldn’t see it until you unfolded it basically. On that fold at hero section, it needs to say exactly what you do. Now, if you’re a specialist, it needs to say that.
11:30
You need to say you’re an orthodontist if you’re an orthodontist or whatever your specialty is. Don’t let people go, well, is this an orthodontist website or is this a dentist website? People don’t know the difference. Don’t make them think. It’s another great book that I love. It’s called, Don’t Make Me Think or Don’t Make Them Think. It’s fantastic. If you think about airlines, it’s really kind of crazy, right? Every time we get into an airplane, they show the same card, they show the exits. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t know where the exits are on an airplane.
11:59
Something else they do is they show you how a seatbelt works. I also don’t know anybody who doesn’t know how a seatbelt works, but if they do show you, you don’t have to think about it. You don’t think, Oh, where’s my seatbelt? Is it here? Is it there? Is it going to be one of those new kind or one of those old kind? They show it to you. There’s no thinking about. I like that. And also in this, this analysis and what we spoke about too, is I get so excited when I read this book because it, Alex, it’s one piece of the puzzle. You have to balance. There’s many great thinkers and this is a story brand.
12:29
This is one of many, it gives a good framework and you bring in other tactics. And as you mentioned to me as well, from a website SEO standpoint, sometimes you’re going to have to negotiate what’s good for Google and what’s good for the client. You also want to make sure upright in the hero section, what do you do? How is it you’re going to help me? How are you different? And then what do I do? What’s my next step? And what was clever, and this you credited to, I think it was Childini or others.
12:57
that sometimes you can have two call to actions. You can have one that’s direct, make an appointment, or one, hey, now let’s learn more. You’re not ready, let’s learn more about, you can get a guide, a video, learn more about the dentist. And remember, the dentist’s not the hero. The guide, the way we write it as well is that we’re here to support you and think about what the patient wants. And look, my dad is a great dentist. He retired, he does some part time still.
13:27
When I, many of you know my story, I used to help his practice. We turned it around, doubling it in 18 months from 1 million to 2.4 million, seeing heads of state. He’s a Panky trained dentist. He’s a fellow of the Academy of General Dentistry. He worked with, he was a top producer for the Extreme Makeover Lab, did work with them, was on the news, whatever. But and those are important, that’s important to establish the authority there. But we found patients, they, they, the dentist that did the…
13:56
The best and had the my dad did very well Yeah, they didn’t necessarily had even close to what my father had an accolade, right? But it was a chair aside matter It was the way they can the way they made the person feel that They were on that the journey and they were supporting them on the journey. It wasn’t about them So the more the dentist is all about them you start to tail off and your accolades and the more clinical experience doesn’t necessarily translate to balanced practice
14:26
Yeah, happy staff teams go extreme here to kind of like break that down. And you can have a very successful dental practice where you’ve never been a dental school. You’ve never even been to high school and you’ve probably not even lived in the country for six months and you open up shop in your garage somewhere and you get patients to come to you. We see this in the news. It’s rare. It’s extreme. But you see it. You see plastics, quote plastic surgeons are obviously not plastic surgeons.
14:52
but they’re doing business as, and they’re busy. People are coming to, I mean, we see this. We see it on the internet all the time. We see people, you know, I don’t know exactly what they’re called. I haven’t studied this obviously, but some type of like clear aligner slash, right? Some type of grill that you can buy and snap on, right? Those people are doing dentistry and they’re not legal, right? They’re not skilled, but they’re literally very, very busy.
15:16
You do not have to be a good dentist to be busy in dentistry. You can be really great at messaging and really great at marketing and be as busy as you want to be. Now, when you can add those two things together, when you’ve got great training, right? When you’re experienced and you’ve got skills and you’ve got great training or a pinky dentist, like you said, or, you know, you’re, you’re crushing it on CE, right? You’ve got the skill and then you add the messaging together. I know.
15:40
That’s where the big explosion happens. That’s where the amazing practices, the finances come out of the great patient care, the raving fans, all that happens when you put the two together. We’ve seen great, I mean, we went to them, right? Amazing dentist, like, why am I so busy? There’s a dentist down the street who’s terrible, right? Or is this, I see their revision work all the time. I don’t understand why they’re so busy and I’m not. Well, they don’t have marketing, they don’t have messaging. And by the way, you know, I can go on and on and on here.
16:10
Messaging is part of your marketing, right? Everything you do in your practice is part of your marketing. I say that all the time. How you answer the phone, if you answer the phone, that’s part of your marketing. But you get your marketing right and you have great skills, amazing things can happen. Yeah, it’s all marketing, internal or external marketing, and many of them it’s internal. And that’s what you even say, besides having all the external services available, you say, this isn’t the important stuff. It’s the other. And sometimes you’ll say, I’m not gonna work with you.
16:39
unless you work with All-Star and get your phones fixed. Yeah, we do that. Because it can’t help you if you can’t answer a phone. And it’s interesting for my father’s practice, I took over the marketing before I even knew all this, but I SEO’d the Daylight side of the website and we were getting ranking on everything and phone calls, but they weren’t converting. So that’s where myself, my wife, who was a former retail manager used her skills to upgrade the practice and then I became All-Star. But you see that there are certain elements you need. You need the messaging.
17:08
You need the training, phone skills, case acceptance, and it’s something that, guys, you can’t just do it once. The best are always training, they’re ongoing, it’s boring, maybe, we make it fun, but you gotta keep doing that. And you gotta continue to invest in your marketing and your messaging, and then it’s good to have the people around you that support you. But if you’re, it’s another thing too, another simple thing as well, even if you throw all this out, if you have people that really care,
17:37
and that are nice and not pushover nice, but that’s the product and people keep coming to be attracted to that. So I guess what I’m saying prerequisite, you gotta care and you gotta like doing this and your team has to care and like doing this. And then you build the stuff around it. But like Patrick said, look, my whole family are dentists, well, doctors, dentists, surgeons, my brother and I were the black sheep. We went to law school, okay? He got his master’s in accounting, got my master’s in business in that respect.
18:07
But what they would always complain to me, why I’m also the best, why are they not coming to me? I said, I get it, you gotta, and of course, I didn’t know the messaging to the level that I know now, and the systems, I didn’t have it back then, that’s part of it, but some of them have some great marketing and are in, they’re out there. So you gotta do it if that’s what you want to create. Yeah, and I talked to Dennis too,
18:35
maybe business isn’t what they want it to be. Like I do great work, my patients love me. And I go, hey, are you asking your patients to talk about you? Or are you reminding your patients that referrals are important to you and that you’d really like them? And that if their friends and family want the same level of care that you’re giving them, that they could refer them to you? And they go, no, I don’t feel good, I’m too modest. Let me just say this to that person that’s hearing this. You’re actually keeping someone from having great dental care.
19:03
Right? If you offer terrific dental care, and maybe there’s some places in town that’s not as the high quality or high standard that you offer yourself, if you’re not getting more patients into your office, you’re actually preventing people from having high quality of care. So it’s a win-win-win by getting that messaging straight. So that’s important. Let’s go back to Yoda and Luke Skywalker here for a minute. Well, it’s important to make the customer the hero of the story. You also want to work with Yoda.
19:31
Right. So that has to come out and part of the story. It’s just not the first thing. Right. So in this particular place in your history and, you know, with your dad and, and your wife, Heather, like your history and practice, you guys weren’t Yoda when he started, but you got there with your dad, right? You became the Yoda. Your dad, your dad became the Luke Skywalker and that’s really happened. And now you can be the Yoda, you know, you and your team and what you’re doing there. Now you’re the Yoda’s for everyone else. Now.
20:00
Last thing I want to say about Yoda. There’s a lot of people that don’t know what I’m talking about right now. I am shocked that they want people to watch that movie. I think go watch it if you don’t know what we’re talking about, you’ll understand it. You can watch a movie, if you got kids, you’ll be entertained, and you’ll see what we’re talking about. Think about who you want to be in that story. Do you want to be Yoda, or do you want to be Luke Skywalker? Everybody want to be Luke Skywalker. You can also say Dumbledore, if you do Harry Potter. Every- Trotty Kid’s a good one? Yeah, there’s so many. This is the hero’s journey. Right. Joseph Campbell.
20:29
I got it. There you go. Man of a thousand faces, but the research behind being the hero’s journey with respect to that. So I want to provide the listeners some resources. So we have both on dental all-stars and the dental brief. So dental brief listeners and all-star listeners, great webinar. Go to alls backslash webinar. And in that webinar, we’re going to talk about phone skills, case acceptance, living the life that you want to live. It’s a great program, education. I give you.
20:57
tons of, and that’s what we both of us are big education based people. Like I give you all, all of it. And so it is Patrick. We feel like there’s so much education on that website that you’ll get from that webinar that you’ll be able to work right away. You want to work with us? That’s fine. We’d love to have you, but I want to make, put that out there as well. Patrick, what are some resources or those that are listening that can kind of connect with you and your team? Here’s what I’ll do. I will give away 10 copies of a story brand, Donald Miller’s book to anyone that reaches out to us.
21:25
They can contact All-Star and say I want that pre-book from Patrick or they can go to our website OmniPremiere.com and ask for it there. I’ll get it to them. Ten. I’m not doing a hundred. I’m doing ten. So just keep that in mind. So respond quickly. I’m also a StoryBrand guide. So I think I’m one of the very few that are actually in the dental industry. I might actually be the only one in dental history. I can’t say that for certain. If you go to their website, you’ll see that I’m a guide. I’d be glad to talk to you about this. Take a look at your messaging. You can shoot us your website and say, hey, how does this?
21:55
Does this pass the grunt test? I’ll be certainly, I’ll be glad to let any listeners know if their site passes the grunt test. So yeah, 10 free books, one per person, first 10 people only, and then be glad to do a grunt test for you. That’s, we gave it all away, man. You got the webinar training, you got the books, you got the time with you. I mean, you get your messaging right and your training right, like that.
22:22
The only thing missing here is Robin’s, our hiring service department. She didn’t get any attention. Then you get all covered. So we help with hiring too, hiring team members. Messaging and that’s, that’s what’s so important about Robin. I’ve met Robin and her team and know that it’s so important in hiring. Messaging is so important in hiring, right? So sometimes you put a job out there and you wonder, why doesn’t anybody respond to this because the messaging is so bad. People are looking at the ad going, I don’t want to work there. You got to have great messaging in your ad too, right?
22:50
your wife, your family, kids, your customers, hiring, gotta have great messaging. Thank you, Patrick Shabasty, Omni Premier Marketing. Remember, follow both of us and follow our podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify. Both of us have YouTube channels, follow that. Get all the episodes as they are released. Make sure you’re following these two podcasts. Share with your friends and until next time, go out there and be an All-Star.
23:22
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Dental All-Stars. Visit us online at allstardentalacademy.com
