How To Make Money From Dentistry Passively

This week on Marketing Monday, Angus Pryor the Practice Growth Specialist will share with you how to make money from dentistry passively. Find out how you can make money from your craft without actually having to trade your time for dollars. by watching the video now.

Angus: Hello, Entredentists! Angus Pryor here. I’m coming to you live from the Hard Rock Café Casino in Las Vegas where I’ve been attending a fantastic conference. Mark, who I met at the conference last year and today our topic is how to make money from your craft passively.

Now Mark, you’re not actually a dentist. In Australia we would call you a physio, but in the US they would call you a …

Mark: Physical therapist.

Angus: Physical therapist. Okay, so for those of you watching in Australia particularly, you’re going to have to do two bits of interpretation. One is, he’s not a dentist but he is a physio and secondly he called it something different.

The central theme of our discussion is, it is possible to make money from your craft without actually having to trade your time for dollars. How long have you been a physio for?

Mark: Five years working for a hospital. It was a hospital based outpatient clinic and I was seeing a patient every 30 minutes.

Angus: Wow. Okay and it’s fair to say right now you are earning passive income based on your technical training in relationship, passive income. You’re not trading your time for money. You’ve created some products. You’re doing it that way. Is that right?

Mark: Exactly. I have products that I sell on Amazon, so I learned how to use an Amazon FBA model, which is obviously something that I am not going to learn in physical therapy school and I’ve learned how to market those products through Amazon to get sales which is all passive.

I’ll see sales trickle in when I’m sleeping or just randomly throughout the day. But I’m not actually trading my time to get that sale. I put the initial work up front but after the initial groundwork has been laid, then I start to see the return on the investment.

Angus:  So how long did it take you and you kind of like being a physio.

Mark: I absolutely love being a physio and I actually enjoy working with people in person too.

Angus: Okay, so it’s not as though this is the diary of a grumpy health care professional?

Mark: No, no. For me, it’s always been a positive experience. Being a physio has been rewarding. I enjoyed school. I enjoyed to learn. I’ve enjoyed working with my patients. But what I didn’t like was I didn’t like that I was trading my time for money.

I didn’t like the fact that I could only see somebody every 30 minutes and I wanted to reach more people because I felt like I was able to. I felt like I could impact more people that I was limited to just 30 minute time slots and I had no in the foreseeable future. I didn’t see how I could scale that.

I didn’t see how ten years from now, what is my life going to be looking like as a physio? What am I going to be doing? Am I going to be sitting here at this same desk at this same clinic and doing the same exact thing? Working with people for 30 minutes? I just wanted to see more growth. I’m always trying to grow and I didn’t see that opportunity where I was at.

Angus: It’s interesting. As a business guy, my immediate direction is this is about passive income, but the fact is this is also about you being more effective at what you do because you’re able to. For example, you’ve got some educational products, you’ve got some physical products where you can invest and do the work once and help multiple people rather than just saying I can only see two people an hour.

Mark: Yeah, exactly. You’re not going to be able to replace physical therapy or physio online, but there’s going to be components and aspects that you can communicate online. For example, I’ve developed courses. I have a course for people who have low back pain.

This course is not going to be specific medical treatment but there’s so many principals that are so important and a lot of times people are dealing with these mental barriers and mind blocks to their movements. Many times it has nothing to do with actual exercise, it just has to do with the way that they’re approaching their life and you can communicate that through an online course.

So what I found myself doing in the clinic was, I would be working with patients, I would be talking to them and a lot of this was repetitive. I was saying the same things. There’s certain principals that apply to everybody and those universal principals, you could teach and scale those online.

Angus: Absolutely, so for the dentists watching this and you’re thinking well what the heck could I do? Undoubtedly, you’ve got the same kind of situation which is that you would be delivering very simple.

Angus: As a dentist you’ve got a similar a scenario where you would have exactly the same conversation with people time and time again and you could potentially create a product for that. The other one that we were talking about last night was the more niche you can go, the more attractive the product is.

So you could have an informational product where instead of saying, hey let’s teach everyone how to do something really  general, you could say, well why don’t we pick on a group that has diabetes. for a group that has got some particular niche element where they go, ooh, I do have diabetes and by the way here is some informational product that says, here are the three things that I absolutely have to do to control whatever. I mean, look, you’re the dentist, but I think you get the idea.

So tell us, you had an informational product, what was that actually showing people how to do?

Mark: So for my personal course?

Angus: Yeah.

Mark: One course is low back pain. 80% of all adults in the world get low back pain and a lot of people deal with it but it’s not severe enough where they want to go to the doctor. Maybe they even have gone to the doctor or they’ve seen a physio and they did some exercises and they still have back pain that comes and goes.

That’s what happens. So it’s like, it’s not an immediate pain point but what I’m trying to get people to realise is that they need to take action on getting rid of that back pain and realising that they can actually do so much more. They can improve their function and focus on what they can do instead of what they can’t do and I could teach them exercise online.

So a lot of these exercises you can review technique, you can review muscle activation patterns, you can teach people the proper mechanics through the video and in fact, they could actually re-watch those videos to reference them. If you actually see a physio in person and the same thing with dentistry, you might say something to somebody and it could be completely over their heads.

Angus: I’ve had that experience personally. In fact, I’ve started taking notes when I go, whether it’s a physio or a dentist to remind, because they say, and I’ve had this same conversation with clients ten times a day, so I’m sure you were just kind of, it all just comes out, but from the patient’s point of view, that’s tough. So having a video can be quite helpful.

When I’m thinking about other informational products to do with dentistry, I mean, one of the things that a real key to doing information products is figuring out what is people’s pain. Now, we won’t mention the guilty party but we were talking last night about someone had a real problem bad breath. Well there’s a real pain point there.

Anyway, the goal of this video is not to say, here’s the ten things you can do and give you the exact details. You’re the expert.

Mark’s an expert in his space. He said, there’s a need. Let’s turn that into a product. You also have got your finger in a bunch of pies with some physical products as well. Tell us about those.

Mark: Yeah, so as I was saying, low back pain is one of the biggest causes of disability in the world and sitting posture is a big contributing cause to lower back pain and it’s because people sit for many hours in a day. It’s prolonged sitting that leads to back pain. It’s being in one position for too long and usually it’s being in a slouched position.

So I’ve developed a low back support that’s really easy to strap on your office chair so you can just put it on an office chair or the driver’s seat of your car and you have something that can support your low back. It’s a low cost option instead of buying a new office chair you can just use that to support the spine.

That’s especially helpful for people for people who are currently in lower back pain because you need to take that pressure off the tissue. That doesn’t mean that you have to use that back support 24/7, but it’s something that could provide that temporary relief and get you past that hump.

And then we have other fitness products. We have basically the tools, we have different types of resistance bands, and these are all the bands that I would recommend on a daily basis. These are bands that every physical therapist uses and so it’s just something that if you have these tools in your home, they are so useful. You can use them for strengthening, injury prevention, physical therapy and basically you just get so empowered when you have the education, the exercises, and then you have the tools as well.

Angus: Absolutely. But you know, if you’re a dentist, there’s no reason why you can’t be spending some of your spare time thinking about physical products. One thing that’s’ been in my view life changing, has been, I’ve got a brand name, which is Picksters, instead of having to get out floss and do that, I think they’re called interdermal brushes. Someone just dreamed that up and every night I just go, and it saves so much time.

The reality is you are in this space all the time and the only thing that really stops you is going maybe this is a possibility. Maybe I could create something. Inter dental, you’re absolutely right. Inter dermal would be this, wouldn’t it? Sorry about that.

So, what was it that caused you to go down this path, Mark? Why did you , because you as far as I can tell, the only difference between you and what you’ve done and the people who are watching this, is what’s in here. You said, I need to find another way to do this.

Mark: That’s been one of the most challenging aspects of trying to start a business and trying to go against the grain, because through my education and through my co-workers and colleagues, they have that limited mindset because that’s what physical therapy has been traditionally.

Angus: Same with dentistry.

Mark: It’s an industry that hasn’t changed in many decades. Health care is slow moving because of many different reasons, but physical therapy is the same way. We’re giving old techniques that need updates. Research comes out and it takes 10 – 15 years to adopt some of the best practices. And so that was the hard part for me was that I love my colleagues and I love my profession, but I had to actually go outside my profession to change my mindset and to learn different strategies.

So what I was doing is I actually got involved with some entrepreneur groups in San Diego and through conferences like what we’re attending right here and we’re talking to other people starting businesses like you’re working with marketing and working with dentists. That’s different than my field, but very similar though.

I’m learning from you and you’re learning from me. We’re exchanging ideas and we’re both learning ideas from people that are in real estate and they’re doing these real estate ideas that can apply to what I’m doing, whether it’s email marketing, whether it’s using Facebook ads, whether it’s through creating funnels and lasers getting people to your products and services. It doesn’t matter. The principals are basically the same.

And so I’m not learning that from other physical therapists. I’ learning that from other people starting businesses and applying what they’re doing in their business to my business. For me, that’s been transformational.

I try to still stay connected to my professionals and that helps me stay up to date with best practices in physio, but for business reasons, if I’m trying to be innovative, and if I’m trying to go outside my profession and innovate physical therapy and do something that no one else is doing, then I can’t be getting advice from the people that are doing the same thing, I have actually have to be connecting with people who are doing something absolutely out of the ordinary.

Angus: Okay, that’s interesting. Got inter professionally judgmental. Okay, that’s interesting. Well look, I hope my goal here really is just to get your mind thinking. This is really a mindset thing. I don’t believe there’s a single dentist watching this who wouldn’t be able to come up with another product if they put their mind to it,

So the question is, what’s the stuff that you’re looking at every day which you can turn into an information product? What’s the stuff that you’re dealing with every day where you could go, you know what? I could probably come up with a physical product which would help a need or solve a problem and the rest goes from there.

Thanks so much, Mark. I really appreciate your time.

Mark: All right. Thank you so much.

Angus: We’ll put Mark’s link in the show notes and until next time, see you on Marketing Monday.

Mark: Thanks for your time.