How To Be An Entredentist Part 2

This week on Marketing Monday, Angus Pryor the Practice Growth Specialist will share with you the second part on how to be an Entredentist. Find out more by watching the video now.

Now, we’re in a series looking at how to be an Entredentist. Last week, we talked about investing. Today we’re going to talk about something else, how to be an Entredentist. Now, an Entredentist is a mix of the words entrepreneur and dentist together.

A few weeks ago, I talked about why you absolutely must be an Entredentist.

Point number one is around what I’m calling experiment. When I say experiment, I mean in relation to a number of aspects of your business.

One of the things that happens is we can’t control change. Change is happening all the time. When you’re thinking about your marketing, your customer service or however you’re doing different things.

One aspect of the dentists that I deal with that I consider to be true Entredentists is they’re prepared to try things. 

Now, what I would recommend in both of those areas is that you start small. You can experiment with something. Let’s try something, let’s do a partnership with a local business or whatever the case may be. Let’s do a small experiment. Give that a go and see how that goes.

If it goes well when you experiment small, then you can always make it bigger. I just caution you. That mindset of experimentation is very helpful for in business because if something goes badly, at least you haven’t trashed your entire marketing efforts or your entire customer service.

Be prepared to try things, experiment but remember to start small.

The other thing I wanted to bring to your attention is the concept of the big picture. The reason I mention this is because, to be brutally honest with you, a certain portion of your marketing efforts are not gonna work. That’s just the way it goes.

Marketing is about human psychology. That’s effectively what marketing is. We’re trying to influence human psychology. Even the psychologists get it wrong occasionally. It’s okay to get stuff wrong. Start small but look at it from a big picture point of view.

What can we learn from this? We invested over here. It didn’t work. How can we apply that? Take that sort of big picture approach.

Just to give you an idea from my business and mine’s a marketing agency. I would estimate that around maybe only 30% of our marketing we do actually works. That is to say, about 70% of what we do doesn’t work. You might say, “Well, that’s pretty stupid, Angus. You’re obviously not doing it very well.”

Well, here’s the thing, 2018’s been a record year for us. I’ve just been processing the payments for December. December will be an all-time record month for us. It’s not as though the fact that you experiment and fail that it means you’re gonna fail in business. It doesn’t.

I think what’s a much bigger risk is that you don’t experiment, you don’t try things and then your business is slowly sort of creeping downhill. That’s a much bigger risk.

For point number two about how to be an Entredentist, it’s really around experimenting. Try stuff. Try it small. Iterate. Iterate. Iterate each thing. Just keep that big picture perspective.

As I said for our business, a lot of the stuff we try doesn’t work but that’s okay because it hasn’t effected the fact that this is going to be our biggest year ever and our growth just continues. Keep going. Experiment. Try stuff.