SPEAKER_02 0:00

Do so much volume that it would be unreasonable for you not to succeed. You 10x your Assistance revenue in the past year and you've hit six figures a month. What is the secret to that rapid growth in the MCC?

SPEAKER_01 0:12

I think it's a relentless focus on building a product that solves a really narrowly defined client's biggest issues. It's that level of focus which has allowed us to innovate really quickly and get a lot of compounded learnings. Cosmetic industry is absolutely booming.

SPEAKER_02 0:42

You generated 2.2 million client revenue that I saw on your Instagram a couple of days ago in the last quarter, which is massive.

SPEAKER_01 0:48

The reason why we're able to get consistently such strong results is because we take so there's no possibility for anything to be outside of what we know works. How are you thinking about AI and the impact that's going to have on all of this? Absolutely massive for 10xing the efficiency of anyone on your team.

SPEAKER_02 1:05

For example Nico, welcome to Agency Giants. Thank you. Great to be here. Yeah, good to have you here. So you 10X your agency's revenue in the past year, and you've hit six figures a month, which is awesome. What is the secret to that rapid growth in the agency?

SPEAKER_01 1:28

I think it's a relentless focus on building a product that solves a really narrowly defined client's biggest issues. I think that's really been the key to it. What does that look like in your industry? Well, we started just doing ads for dental practices. Then now obviously creative is a massive driver of campaign performance. So then we started offering creative. Then inevitably, you know, some practices don't have the infrastructure to be contacting leads and converting them to the extent that you really want to be to getting the best results in the industry. So then we started helping with that lead conversion element. Then you know it's snowballed from there. So just really spending a huge amount of time with your clients to understand exactly what their biggest problems are, and then really just staying extremely diligently focused on that one thing to build out the best possible solution for that. So for us, it's kind of snowballed into bolting on these different kinds of elements. I wouldn't say it's like horizontally, we're really fully integrated vertically. So it's kind of we handle the whole process from start to finish. But instead of doing, you know, Google ads, websites, SEO, it's focused purely on the meta front, but really taking on more of the value chain beyond just those initial lead generation points.

SPEAKER_02 2:42

I think a lot of agencies make that mistake where they well, I say mistake, some put it off well, where they go real real horizontal scale too quickly. Uh what is it that stopped you from doing that? Like, did you have you danced on the edge of jumping into other complementary services? And if not, what made you stay hyper focused?

SPEAKER_01 3:01

Because I think it's that level of focus which has allowed us to innovate really quickly and get a lot of compounded learnings. Because realistically, we haven't been, we're the new guys on the blog, we haven't been in the industry 10, a decade like a lot of these other agencies have. So I think it's by staying so focused on this one thing that now we've done way more volume than basically all the other agencies in the space because we are only doing this one thing. So I think by doing so much volume on that one thing, you inevitably uncover a lot of what the biggest issues are, what the challenges are, and we can allocate all of our resources to just building better solutions to solve those problems.

SPEAKER_02 3:39

This is interesting, and I want to unpack that because um and we'll come on to that shortly. I mean, I'm I think I mentioned this to you to you before. You say you did a new kid on the block, uh, or new guys on the block. Um dental agencies have been around for a long time. I have a good friend who owns a or has a successful dental agency and messaged me uh about six months ago saying, Oh, a lot of our clients are moving on at the moment, and and what is the latest strategy on getting dental clients and how how are we going to reach this market? And then in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, I bet this is his Niko. I think it is. I think this is Niko. So I want to I want to explore that today because I think what you've done is incredible, like tapping into an industry which is has needed disruption for a long time. There's been stagnation across the agencies in the space, and so you've and you've pulled it off really well, and your growth is a is a demonstration of that. Why dental in the first place? Like what got you into dental marketing?

SPEAKER_01 4:31

I think it's a really interesting industry because, firstly, the from a fundamentals perspective, like cosmetic dentistry, especially things like Invisalign, like now there's a huge adult market going into, you know, getting these sorts of treatments where it's no longer, you know, just kids getting metal braces. So I think the market is huge and it's growing very, very quickly. Now there's all these other, you know, someone gets Invisalign, then they get composite bonding, whitening goes with it. So the LTV of those customers is really high. If, for example, you're going into like gyms, you know, how much revenue can you drive from each client? Potentially not as high. And also, it's really the lifetime value of those clients, right? You if you have a gym membership, you have to be a member for 12 months before you start making huge amounts. And so for dental street, I think it's really quite high-ticket. It's a very resilient sector, you know, coming out of the wake of COVID, you know, being able to be in a sector which is not really going to be going anywhere anytime soon. Um, and it's really evolving significantly. I think one last element of that, like you said, it's so ripe for disruption. It's quite a legacy sector, which means I think every every industry has its pros and cons, but one of the ones of dentistry that I think is a big pro is that it's really ripe for disruption from an innovation perspective. Obviously, meta-ads has everyone is running ads now. Now it's really a game of, okay, can you be taking on more of the value chain to be solving bigger problems for these dental practices? Now we're moving a lot into the software and data side because we're seeing a big opportunity there. So I think there's lots of opportunities like that to just develop bigger and bigger solutions. You describe yourself as a complete patient acquisition partner. Yeah. What does that mean for your clients? For our clients, it means we take on way more of the process of getting patients in the chair. Because I think there's lots of dental marketing agencies out there that are doing lead gen. And that's fine if your only issue is really just running ads. But many of these dental practices, they might think that it's just this one problem that they have, but really they need the whole, they need each of those systems to be dialed in in order to get the best results. Now, can you get you know uh some decent results just having some external vendor doing lead gen? Probably. But for us, there's so much inefficiency by having by having each of those different stages not communicating with one another. For example, if you're running ads and generating leads, but then the people calling those leads aren't feeding back data back to inform the ads, there's a lot of inefficiency there. Same with on the creative front. So let's say they have an in-house videographer or even an internal marketing team. They're just producing content without knowing what's actually driving results. Whereas for us, you know, the content team are producing content that's directly being informed by which ads are not only generating the most leads, but what's actually generating bookings, what's who's starting treatment, how much revenue are those patients generating. Because anyone, everyone in marketing knows that generating a lead is irrelevant unless that lead is actually going to convert and go somewhere and generate revenue for the client. 100%.

SPEAKER_02 7:37

I was having this conversation last night with someone who said, I've generated uh 50 leads for a client this month, and the conversion rate is really low. And we looked at all of the funnel and the appointment setting process and so on. It's like, have you not considered that the marketing is the issue here? The issue is we're generating the wrong kind of leads, and they hadn't even considered that that was, and it's a to credit to them a a new newer agency. But so much of the conversion on the back end is about the marketing on the front end. You get a lead that comes in who might convert at a favorable CPA, but their LTV is horrendous because they're not the right kind of person who's going to spend long term. And you you generated 2.2 million in client revenue. I saw on your Instagram a couple days ago in the last quarter, which is which is massive. Uh what do you think makes up the majority of that? Is it the front end sales? Is it the back end? Like what does that look like? For our clients. Yeah, for the clients. What do you mean is it the front-end sales? Is it the client is it the sales you're making on the front end from your ads, and so you're you're generating leads for, let's say, Invisalign, or is it really the majority of client revenues coming from the back-end LTV ascension?

SPEAKER_01 8:42

I think given the nature of cosmetic dentistry, so let's say if I were to get some sort of big cosmetic treatment, I wouldn't necessarily be going to my local dentist. Given that I'm gonna spend thousands of pounds on this treatment, I'm gonna evaluate my options that are potentially further away. So I think with these cosmetic treatments, it's very often mostly that front-end revenue that's generated for them. Because if I'm gonna go get veneers at this best dentist in the UK, I'm not gonna necessarily be going there for my general dentistry. A lot of our clients, a big portion of their revenue is majority cosmetic, big high-ticket treatments. It's interesting because I'm speaking to a lot of these practice owners, really trying to understand what is the best kind of model. Uh, is it being, you know, stacking your diaries with really high-ticket cosmetic cases, or is it having that underlying, you know, general dentistry base of patients coming through? And there is quite a mixed consensus on that. Right now, cosmetic dentistry is absolutely booming. So that's why I'm speaking to some of these guys who've been around for the last 10 years and they seem to have a little bit of the perception of it's quite almost like a risk mitigation measure to have kind of that underlying base of general dentistry. But if you're looking at like revenue per hour, obviously these cosmetic clients of ours that are just absolutely taking off in the last few years, it's because their diaries are just packed with high-ticket cosmetic cases.

SPEAKER_02 10:02

Are the majority of the clients you're working with already working with an agency when you when you start working with them? And and if yes, what are the main problems that they're facing with the other agencies that you're kind of coming at differently?

SPEAKER_01 10:15

Definitely. All of our clients are already running ads realistically. And it's interesting because it's not an issue for us if the client isn't running ads, but when we looked at all of our best clients, every single one was already spending money on ads. So now it's almost a qualification criteria. If you're not already running ads, we're probably realistically not the best agency for you. And what the biggest issues are tend to be around lead quality, is the biggest issue if you had to boil it down. Now, why is lead quality an issue? It could be a multitude of different factors. Could be creative, being weak, it could and the messaging in those ads. It's very common to have, you know, hook of the video, a thousand pounds, save a thousand pounds on Invisalign and just super hardcore discount-focused ads. Works if you're very, you know, competitive on the price front. A lot of our clients don't tend to be, you know, that's not their positioning at all. They're always a lot more expensive than in competition. So our ads are much more value-led. Um, but the issue is you're asking, like, for example, it's very often a front-end kind of marketing issue. The challenge is that we don't know what that back-end process looks like. That's why, for us now, the reason why we're able to get consistently such strong results is because we take full ownership of the process. So there's no possibility for anything to be outside of what we know works. And there are pros and cons to that. It means that we're really our ICP is so narrowly defined and we're not the right fit. I spoke to a killer group of practices the other day, literally would be amazing, but you know, it's you know, for us, we have to have full control of the process. We won't separate out our service into different pieces. So it didn't fit for them because they they had an internal sales team that they had invested a huge amount in. So we're not gonna be doing their their kind of uh lead conversion sales for them. So it doesn't match.

SPEAKER_02 12:00

That's interesting because that was that was gonna be a follow-on question. It was would you take on clients are you not handling that sales process for? That's that's very interesting.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

And go on. A really big portion of of this, I think, of our growth has been having such a narrowly defined ICP. It's literally like we have do the full process, there's no questions asked, we have full creative control over everything that we put out, we handle all the lead conversion stuff, we guide most of the strategic decisions, and it means that at least we have full control of the process, so there's not room for okay, their team were weak on the lead conversion side. But clients love it because we take full ownership and accountability of the process. If you're not getting patients in your chair, it is our fault, and we take full responsibility for that. So clients really appreciate it, but it also it's a lot more responsibility for us, but it means that we get such good results.

SPEAKER_02 12:53

That's the ultimate situation as an established agency who's who's who knows what their worth is and what they can achieve. Was that a hard transition getting to that point and having clients buy into the idea of you taking over that process that they've had a secretary, Sandra has been sat there doing it for the past 10 years, you know?

SPEAKER_01 13:11

Yeah, actually, we we did it from so early on. I've only ever our f my first ever client was the only one who was ever Lee gen only. Since then, every single one has we've been we do the full process. So and we really just stuck to that. I think you know, classic, you know, entrepreneurial shiny object syndrome, it's really just been on my mind like consistently, like stay focused, stay focused, and don't do anything like outside of the what we want to keep doing and what's driving results right now. Nice. But it's a hard balance because you want to be innovating at the same time. I think it's that relentless focus on innovation that really drives agencies forward because that's why you have a legacy industry, because everyone kind of stagnates and stops innovating. So you want to be innovating without getting distracted. Yep, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:52

I want to come into that, I want to think about, I want to dive into your mindset around that and then where this actually goes later. Um, but just for anyone that is not getting a clear picture of what it means to be involved in the sales process, are you handling up to the point of booking an appointment for the client? Are you going beyond that and getting involved in the actual sell of the service? What how far does it go?

SPEAKER_01 14:13

Patient in your chair. So once a patient is in your chair, that's the cleanest point of handover. We have experimented with going beyond that, but I think a lot of the practices that we work with now do have pretty good internal processes around patient journey. And each practice is a little bit more particular on how they want what they want their patient journey to look like. Now, I do think longer term there is potentially opportunities to provide support there, but right now the cleanest point of handing over is once a patient is in your chair, that's where you take over.

SPEAKER_02 14:43

And just from a quick tactical perspective, uh a lot of people who do who run appointment setting services, which I believe is it's I think it's an essential service to offer as a lead generation agency these days. It's become it's quickly becoming industry standard. A lot of people struggle with, well, don't struggle with necessarily booking appointments, but do struggle with that show-up and actually that final kind of delivery. Do you have any uh tactics that you can give on guessing or ensuring the show-up to the or actually the bum on the chair after the commitment?

SPEAKER_01 15:13

Yeah, definitely. We'll we take deposits for all the consultations. I think it's really making patients understand the value of that consult. Because I think, you know, industry standard, at least in dentistry, is a lot of free consultations, which really, from patient perspective, might diminish the value of that consultation or at least the perceived, you know, what that dentist time is worth, which is significant. And so I think really educating patients on what they are going to get out of that consultation, and then they're paying deposits, means that short-up rates are pretty strong. Nice.

SPEAKER_02 15:45

So the the consultation isn't being positioned as a free consultation?

SPEAKER_01 15:50

We do it's the different models. Either you can have deposits which are deducted from cost of treatment, uh, refundable deposits upon attendance. So provided they attend, that will be refunded to them. Majority are that latter, but some do deduct it from cost of treatment, and some do just do straight-up paid consults. But what's interesting now is once you really have clear data across the whole funnel, you can start tweaking these variables and split testing across a number of your different practices and seeing, okay, what happens if we move from deposit refundable upon attendance to deducted from cost of treatment. All the metrics moved in the directions we thought they would. So your cost per booking is going to increase, meaning you're getting fewer bookings in, but attendance and conversion rate do increase. But we found that the increase in attendance and conversion rate was not strong enough to justify the increase in cost of booking from that. So I think a big advantage now, because we only work with dental practices and so many of them at who fit the same exact model, is we can be making these tweaks and looking at all the data. Whereas if you're an individual dentist or practice owner and you own a bunch of practices, you can't really be running the same experiments at scale. And there's a big cost of doing that, right? You don't want to just throw off your whole things. Whereas for us, we can be testing different angles in the creatives, be testing different deposit policies, different process things at scale, and then see what happens in the data, and then kind of take those learnings and roll it out across the rest of our clients.

SPEAKER_02 17:16

Does that mean that you're or do you have to have limitation on catchment area and exclusivity to certain clients?

SPEAKER_01 17:24

We we don't offer exclusivity at the moment because I think if you want to be the best in the industry, we need to be investing in bringing the best specialists to that that's essentially what an agency is. And I think if if we were to have big catchment areas and only be able to work with a certain number of practices, we wouldn't be able to invest as much into our team and building the best product in the industry. So right now, I think that being able to have that and invest in in our team and resources to have the best product or service. And I think at the end of the day, because I get those, you know, we hear those objections from clients from time to time or prospective clients. And it's like if we can guarantee you that we're gonna get you these results, do you care who else we're working with? Because if I can tell you you're gonna get this this many patients in your chair, this much revenue is gonna be generated, which now we have such high predictability of like forecasting exactly what results we deliver because it's so consistent, then like what does it matter to you? I think it's in their heads a little bit that you're oh, you're working with my competitor, but if you're gonna get these results, if I can guarantee you that you'll get this, do you do you really care about that? That makes sense. Ego comes into play. Yeah, and and what's the alternative? Working with a subpar agency who's gonna get even worse results for you, but is not working with your competitors? Yeah, you can have that bespoke strategy. It's the same that comes with the creatives as well. Like with clients, like we can do something completely bespoke for you, but then we have less predictability on what the exact results are gonna be for that that campaign. Yeah, it makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 18:53

Zooming out a bit, uh, you started your agency two years ago. Yeah, a year and 11 months. Yeah. Um, can you bring us up to speed on what brought you up to that point? Because you've you've always I mean, we'll touch on it. You've I've known you now throughout that whole process, and you've always shown just relentless commitment and to just sticking on course and doing the the the only things that you need to be doing. I I haven't really observed you veer and then have to come back. I mean, you might have experienced that in yourself, and we can unpack that. But what brought you up to this point? What were the foundations that brought you to right starting an agency and and why then jump into starting an agency?

SPEAKER_01 19:31

Yeah, so it was pretty much right after graduating from uni. So I did economics and business at UCL, was going into finance, investment, banking, and then went to start my agency right after uni. So it was pretty quick, you know, graduate uni, then go straight into agency. And then from there, I think you're talking about not kind of veering off course. And I think there's always it's it's an interesting kind of discussion around how all in do you need to be? And can you get to the same place by doing 80% of the effort? And like how much do you need to sacrifice? And I think it's by being so all in that gave me that quick momentum that then reinforced that decision to keep doing what I've been doing. And I think could you get to the same place in in maybe a bit less time by doing 80% of the effort, potentially, but if I was growing like that, would I have stuck with it as long? Or you know, would I have stuck with it at the end of the day? I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_02 20:30

What would some of the biggest challenges really early days if you bring yourself back into like early stages of just trying to get your first few clients over the line?

SPEAKER_01 20:43

I think having to learn so much so quickly around the marketing side, because realistically, I didn't come, I didn't have a previous job, you know, running ads, running meta-ads and stuff. So, you know, I was signing clients and just my entire thing was very transparent with them. All the early clients I got were just cold-calling dental practices, was people just saying, like, I know I them having faith that I'm gonna go to the ends of the earth for them, and that's ended up what I was doing. But that's how I think I learned really quickly is spending hours on the phone with my clients, you know, late at night, early in the morning, just learning more about dentistry, about the industry, how to get the best results, investing in you know various different things to learn more, be around people who know a lot. All of those things I think enabled me to learn quite quickly. And I think a lot of our early clients they were investing in the person really more than any sort of product or system that we had, which wasn't really much at the time. So I think it's more that they they knew that you're basically getting free labor, you're getting this young guy saying, you know, that you know, and just doing a lot and trying to do absolutely anything and everything for you. I think they saw that there was, you know, some interesting ideas of how we can be approaching things differently. And even from the start, we were trying to innovate and do things. Differently to the agencies in the space at the time. The buying into your commitment level, I always think of it like this.

SPEAKER_02 22:06

It's like as a business, if it doesn't matter. Obviously, your preference is always to work with the best. But if the best, if you if you if you can't perceive the best in an industry where it's already saturated and it's stagnated, like we've determined, and there are lots of these other industries, dentistry is just one of them. There are so many of them that are in this position right now. If you see a young, hungry man or woman who's committed on the same mission as you to just nail the model that you're in, you know, then you're gonna want to work with that person. But I think lots of young agencies, and not young by by by physical age, but young by business age, miss out on that. They try and sign up clients and they're desperately trying to get people over the line. And what they don't realise is if they just showed the same level of commitment and passion as, or more commitment and passion to master the model that the business is in themselves, why wouldn't you want to have that person on your side? Why wouldn't you be able to want to pay, you know, a a grand, a couple of grand a month for someone to be fighting your corner, committed, saying, I'm actually starting out here and I'm learning this thing, but I am all in and I'm gonna absolutely nail this for you. Like that's what people are buying.

SPEAKER_01 23:15

I couldn't agree more. And I think a lot of people will look, including myself, will look at these industries, dentistry, what a massive, you know, big industry being around for the test of time. I'm never gonna come up with anything that innovative. I think you'd be shocked at how easy it is to spend a bit of time to get to know an industry to then start seeing these small gaps, and you're not looking for a complete disruption, revolutionize the industry, like eventually long-term, sure. But initially, if you're just doing these little 5% improvements on what someone else is already doing in the industry, there really is a big opportunity there.

SPEAKER_02 23:50

Yeah, agree, agree. You're just coming at it from a completely new perspective, and they're they're they're stuck in the day-to-day, and you're just they're able to look at things from a different angle, and I just think that's great.

SPEAKER_01 24:00

I think you just got to get stuck in and just really try and absorb, absorb as much as you can, like a sponge early on. If it's a completely new industry. Now, granted, if you have any connections in other industries or you've been exposed to that industry for from a previous job or family or anything like that, you probably have a big advantage. But if you're coming into something completely new, it's just learning the industry, understanding how they speak, talk, problems, everything about it. Yeah, I think that's really key. 100%.

SPEAKER_02 24:28

So we've worked together for a couple of years. How's how's that come about? How did that how did you stumble across us early stages?

SPEAKER_01 24:34

YouTube through YouTube. YouTube. Yeah, and straight away. I I didn't even spend a day in the agency. I signed up for with you way before I even started the agency. Well, not way before, but literally right before starting the agency. And I think you were talking about how, you know, what what were some of the early challenges? I think for me, having faith that I know that I'm doing the actions that will get me the result is gives you so much reassurance and confidence that it's like, okay, I don't care. I did my, you know, whatever those inputs are that are going to get me that result, then then I'm happy. And that enables you just to do that day in, day out, regardless of what the outcomes are. So, for example, joining your program where you had operationalized what it takes to get your first five, 10 agency clients, knowing that I'm doing the inputs required in order to get that, you know, even if you don't get traction very quickly, then you can you know keep doing it and know you'll get there eventually. It's hormose's thing at the end of the day, right? Do so much volume that it would be unreasonable for you not to succeed. And that's basically what you've done with your program, right? Operationalizing what the inputs are required in order for after why period of time to get that outcome. Yeah. Yeah. I would say one other thing is when you're starting an agency, I think there is a pressure to know what you're doing. And I think for me, again, hormose, state the facts, tell the truth is really, really, really strong. Because I think in those early days, you know, you you feel like you're coming into this industry, oh, you need to pretend you're some massive agency, whatever. But I think that transparency where I was saying, you know, these guys who are investing early on, they were just kind of buying into the person, you know, that you are being transparent, there's a lot of trust there. If you're some, you know, like trying to be, if there's that sense that you're not who you say you are, it really creates a lack of trust. And then that hurts your ability to get your clients' results as well. If you pretend you're some massive agency and then you know your clients find out that you're not and you're a solo person, whether that's the issue or not, but you know, it it creates all these opportunities for things to potentially destabilize and and cause issues.

SPEAKER_02 26:35

I couldn't agree more on that point. Everyone through insecurity, or not everyone, every but many people through insecurity or ego or doubt or whatever it is will pretend to be bigger than they are. But then if you're pretending to be here because you're not, you're actually going to be meeting here. So like your energy is still gonna be coming from a place of lack. It's not gonna be an abundant energy. Whereas if you actually just admit you're here, but you have you overinflate your enthusiasm, then all of a sudden the perception of you is completely different. It just goes back to that same point. And I think so many people miss out on that. And it's actually a really interesting point that I haven't thought about too much, but in the context of you, I can see how much of an impact that would have made because you've always been ferociously committed to doing the thing.

SPEAKER_00 27:17

Yeah, you know.

SPEAKER_01 27:18

I think clients also really buy into dentology's growth. So if you pretend you're you know at a 100 immediately, a lot of our clients are are so bought into dentology and the journey that we've been on. And everyone, even team members, every single person, team members, clients, everyone laughs looking back on how fast, how quickly things have changed and what what it looks like now versus even three months ago, six months ago, nine months ago. And I think that momentum is so, so key because I think that's what drives our team so much, in that everyone is so bought into dentology and the journey and the mission that we're on. And I think that comes from the momentum that we're having, as I kind of alluded to earlier, from a personal standpoint. If we weren't having that kind of growth, would I have stuck with it? Probably, but who knows, it might have been harder to do so. I think the growth that we're having, clients are are really bought in. These are the guys to be with so much confidence there. Um, the team are so bought in. We have big dental groups now coming on calls with us, being like, we just we want to be at the forefront of the industry of what the latest is in marketing, and we feel like you guys are the ones leading the charge on that front. So we want to be working with you. And I think it's that relentless focus on innovation, results, getting your clients the the best service possible that really is the catalyst for that.

SPEAKER_02 28:36

You've had you've had that classic, well, I say classic, the the desire that everybody craves, hockey stick growth. You were you you you had a nice, correct me if I'm wrong, steady, consistent growth over the course of about a year, and then over the past you know, 10 months, it's just gone absolutely it's a candlestick, it's gone, it's gone crazy. Um talk us through that that transitional phase, because you you you went from like uh from from from my perspective from the academy and then you joined our elite, and then you and then you all of a sudden you've gone this with had this massive growth, lots of changes inside of the business with team and so on. What have what did that look like for you? Like, has that been crazy?

SPEAKER_01 29:14

I think in those early stages, I actually think about that quite a lot. Of you know, had we we could have grown more aggressively very early on, but was it actually the time that I spent investing in building a really good service that meant that once the awareness got there, that then it just shot up? Because I think it's it Homozy talked about it again, which is like building those foundations early on really enables you to build way higher afterwards. And I think if you build like a an okay product and then you just like pour gas on the fire, eventually you should kind of cap out. And and I think now where we have those really strong foundations is why we're able to just keep layering on these different kinds of elements to get better and better results, that ends up, you know, just building the mountain way, way taller. So I think it was actually investing that all of that time in the early months, just learning how to get our clients really good results, learning a lot about the industry, that then meant that once that reputation started being building in quite a narrow niche, meant that then it really kind of exploded quite quickly. So could we have grown faster early on? Probably, but I actually do I'm actually quite happy with the decision that was made early on to build those foundations. But you never know in the moment, right? You're like, should we be pushing more aggressively or should we actually be you know investing in building product and service more?

SPEAKER_00 30:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

Then after that, in terms of what were the catastrophes or what did it look like in terms of like scaling it a lot more, I think it's really I think reputation was the key for it. I think we're so narrow in such a narrow part of the market, obviously dentistry being you know quite niche down already, but really just a small subset of that market. And I think once we had a few big names kind of endorsing dentology, just because we were getting them really good results and by affiliation meant that once the word spread, every everyone comes on calls all the time. They're like, oh, we're hearing this dentology, all this kind of stuff. So I think it's literally just that reputation compounding now. And when you're in a narrow niche, I'm so bullish on being niche down because I think there's so many advantages to it. Then the reputation aspect being a big compounding vehicle that you can take advantage of, both pros and negatives. If you've got to make sure that every single client that works with you has the best experience ever, because you know that five other potential clients are gonna speak to that person, asking them about what their experience is like. So I think it really benefits you if your service is really good, which I think is a good pressure that it pushes on you because that's why at the end of the day we're always focused on product and results first.

SPEAKER_02 31:49

I know for the first period of your growth you were very cold outreach focused, and then you had this period of ads, and I know you're still running ads. How much now has I presume cold is is is something you no longer do. Um how much now has ads I suppose the question is was ads rocket fuel to the fire that propelled you forward and is now momentum gaining from referral, or is ads still very much at the forefront of what's right?

SPEAKER_01 32:18

I think I think ads is 100% the the just multiplier effect on the reputation bit. I think we had strong reputation, but the reach was so limited because we didn't have like a huge organic price, or just people didn't know who we were. Then when you start advertising, but the foundation is built on really robust results, good client testimonials, big names in the industry, like saying that you're you're who you say you are and you're getting good results for them, that is really the the catalyst for it really taking off quite quickly. But our ad spend is is negligible. We really don't spend that much on ads. Now it's like, yeah, well now with the multi-month wait list, we're barely, we're really, really extremely selective on who we onboard now.

unknown 33:01

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 33:01

Because there's so much opportunity for us now to scale our existing clients rather than signing on more. Like when we have big groups with dozens of practices, rolling out across their whole whole portfolio practices is way more valuable and interesting than you know signing on 20 more clients. Yeah. I mean when you first started running ads, your customer acquisition cost was insane.

SPEAKER_02 33:22

It was like a unicorn. We can model it on anything because it's like this is just unrealistic to maintain.

SPEAKER_01 33:28

Has has that stayed relatively consistent across I think the the reason why that was, why it was so low, is just the people who uh like as soon as you see the biggest names in dentistry talking about this per there everyone is gonna click on it, regardless of what's in the ad. So it's interesting because I always ask people, you know, what what brought them to dentology, and very often it's it's the people that you're working with. It's just so much social proof.

SPEAKER_02 33:58

I spoke about this at an event yesterday. I said that the the goal is people think that the we have to the what salespeople is this big bold guarantee, which does get you to a certain point, um, and but ultimately the goal is having your clients deeply want to be like all of the other clients that you're working with. Yeah, your clients are the demonstration of the standards that you uphold. And so people look at that and they're like, well, that dentist is working with them, I have to work with this agency, and then you get to a point where that just ends up snowballing.

SPEAKER_03 34:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:30

How do you wear those results? Like, how are you leveraging the case studies and testimonials? Do you have a process for that? Are you are you blasting reviews all over Google? Like, what's the situation? For a client acquisition or are the existing clients? Uh well, your existing client, how are you wearing the reputation that you've you've built?

SPEAKER_01 34:50

If there's an event last week, a private dental event with all these big name dentists, because it's it's like a private invite-only event, that that just does your marketing for you. So you don't even need to start broadcasting the figures. We do, you know, in in testimonials and case studies and whatnot. But those events is where it all happens, and uh you don't even need to be there. But that's why reputation is so so important because everyone, my client came back from that event, texted me saying I had so many people asking about you, it would be useful to jump on a call. And so I was speaking to him, and it's interesting him telling me what people are asking and all this kind of stuff. So I think it's by getting into those circles, and it's interesting because when we look at the US, such a big market. I don't know if there's the same possibility. I'm sure there is, you know, the elite group of dentists, but in in UK dentistry, it's so localized. There's these events, and every single big name dentist is at every single one every time. Any ambitions to branch out internationally to other regions? I think eventually we will, but right now we've really invested so much in all these kind of infrastructure blocks, like for example, on the software side. I don't know what the software landscape looks like in the US. They're using different practice management softwares that we've built integrations with, so all this sort of stuff. Like these are all the criteria that that take a part of like which clients we bring on. Things as small as like what software is they're using, what their internal processes look like, all those kind of things. We need to make sure that we're 100% compatible with their kind of workflow. That makes sense. If they tell us that they they aren't built for the way that we get client patients in, then it's not gonna not gonna work.

SPEAKER_02 36:32

I know early on there was that bottles on that roadblock of being able to integrate your different software without giving away your IP. Like, what did that process look like of of being able to overcome that roadblock of road?

SPEAKER_01 36:45

Expanding into tech, bringing on a co-founder who's a tech tech focused, and now we have a software engineering team building more and more software around that, and that's the that's the entire play now because I think that there were multiple different unlocks, so one big one being you know, obviously handling the lead conversion side, and this is where I think um the nature of the treatments, right, is cosm high-ticket cosmetic. You're spending thousands of pounds on on a cosmetic procedure on your face, you know, it's a big decision. So it's not just a matter of scheduling an appointment. And so when we had you know customer service representatives, that was one thing. Now bringing experienced salespeople and running it like a sales team, that's no longer, oh, you're just handling a booking and like you know, speed to lead. Now it's really, okay, what is the discovery process like? Treating it like a sales process, role plays, one-on-one coaching, call reviews, running it like a sales team is really what enables us to convert so much higher than a lot of these bigger practices would. Because these bigger practices, they have booking teams. So it's not just a question of you know contacting leads or having personnel to do that. Now it's really a question of how can we convert at a better rate than any of these bigger groups can do internally, and it's by running it like a sales team. Now, when we have a 15-person sales team, now it's like, okay, what kind of tools can we give them to really maximize their efficiency and convert even better than they otherwise would be? And so a lot of that comes down to tech. Same with all the data side. Okay, how do we now roll this across more practices? How do we have clients comfortable 5xing their ad spend in the course of a couple months? It's because we have really clear data reported on every single bit of the funnel. And coming from an e-comm background, that sounds like, oh, how do you not already have that? But a lot of these dental practices in groups, they either have no reporting or it's all done manually on spreadsheets. And it's okay when you, you know, you're booking a couple dozen consultations per month, but when they're you know multi-location, hundreds of consultations, different clinicians, you need automated systems and robust scalable systems to do that. Because otherwise, like we have practices who they have full-time staff just doing data entry, there's team members manipulating data to enhance their conversion rates, you know, all this sort of stuff. You can't have that when you're a big corporate. Yeah, 100%.

SPEAKER_02 39:04

How many team members have you got on the sales side? Fifteen. Fifteen. Yeah, nice. And how has that process been managing those people? Are you the sales manager? Do you have an internal sales?

SPEAKER_01 39:16

Yeah, so it's split into pods. Each pod has a senior uh sales exec and a team lead. And so that's how we structure the teams. Because it's a lot of it's a lot of it's in really interesting learning that I've had over the past three to six months, which is really how much it takes to be a really good manager, the amount of time you need to invest in your team to help them develop and and really build ultimately the best kind of team possible, it really requires a lot of input. So there is operational inefficiency by having people who are kind of in management roles, but it really enables you to massively improve the the service and and the skill of the people who are working with you.

SPEAKER_02 39:59

So sales managers are just purely managing the pod and increasing their development. Interesting. How has that transition in general been for you going from a marketer to you know a CEO, managing director, whatever you want to call yourself? Because you've done that in a very quick amount of time. So your iteration or your your rate of change must have been pretty quick.

SPEAKER_01 40:18

I think what is good is that because I didn't have a huge background in let's say marketing or ads or sales or anything like that, I was quite happy to invest in someone who knows a lot about this thing and bring them in early on. Now, I still have a lot of input on different elements from particularly from like creative and ad side and a lot around the client relationships because that's often you know how those clients come in is often through through the relationships that I've built with them. Um, but I think my ability or my comfort with bringing in someone and delegating to them was has really enabled that to grow quite quickly, particularly on the sales front, for example. People who have managed teams of salespeople, been in sales for for decades, been through a lot of formal sales training for big UK companies, you know, they're they're really leading that that sales team and they're they're absolutely incredible. And it's by recognizing a players early on and then giving them room to actually go off and implement stuff that really has such strong benefits on both sides, not only as the company grows very quickly, but they are also get so bought in because they love the being able to have that much impact. And some of the people on the team like they they're just died, they almost love dentology as much as I do. So it's awesome to see. Yeah. What have you been doing to build culture inside of the business? I think a lot from my side is is honestly just make sure making sure that that vision and momentum is sustained. I think a lot of people are are really thriving off of the momentum that we have and seeing that growth being like this is insane, uh, and and just loving that. And and also when you see all your clients consistently getting such strong results, it reinforces for everyone in the team that what they are working on is something you know fulfilling. So it's not just some agency, you know, churn and burn kind of thing. I imagine that would be quite demoralizing for the team. But if everyone that is working with dentology is getting really consistently good results to the extent that they're, you know, talking about it at these events and things, and everyone is coming on, we have a multi-month wait list, you know, all these things really build that culture of you know, we're we're building something special. And I think people really get bought into that. Yeah, I love that. They're they're just clinging on to the rocket ship and going to the yeah. Yeah, but it's it's a fully a team effort, as in like everyone is driving so much impact that it really that's that's the thing with being end-to-end, is like the ads will not perform if there's no if those leads aren't being converted afterwards. So every team is is really working together.

SPEAKER_02 42:56

I'm interested just on the on the tech side. Um, having so many team members and managing team members is something I've done for many years, like sales team members particularly. Uh are you how are you running internal tracking systems? So you created custom internal KPI tracking systems to measure the success? Are you leaderboarding appointment setters and so on? What does that look like in your paint a picture?

SPEAKER_01 43:20

Yeah, so all of those, all of those things from like pods competing, you know, friendly competition, even sales execs competing against one another, even those small things are things that like dental practices are not going to be doing with their booking teams. And obviously, and and same, like having them working on you know commission structures and all that kind of stuff really helps build, you know, the people really pushing for results. And from a tracking perspective, yeah, everything is on our everything is dentology now. In terms of like all the data systems that we use, everything is is housed in dentology. So connecting everything from what's happening in Meta, everything that's happening in the practice for the patients that we're booking in, you know, who's showing up, who's Not who's converting, how much are they converting for? All those kind of metrics are just pooling all that data together to what's happening in our platform as well, with all the bookings, how many dials per lead, call time, all that all of that stuff is pulling through dentology. Awesome.

SPEAKER_02 44:15

Yeah. Yeah, very, very cool. You mentioned um innovating earlier and like being able to continue innovating. Um, what areas are you looking to expand into as you as you grow? What is your general mindset surrounding as well keeping focused on the task at hand and and not spreading yourself too thin? It'll be so easy in your position to stack on Google Ads or do some organic as well for the for the companies. So, what is your general mindset around innovation yet remain remaining focused?

SPEAKER_01 44:43

I think it all stems from the clients and their problems. And now that we're working with a lot more enterprise-level clients, really digging into their problems is a lot around this kind of back-end infrastructure and op side of things. So that's where the data really becomes a really big component is having scalable systems for patient acquisition. Because what it what a patient acquisition system looks like for a single location practice will not cut it when you have 50 practices. And a lot of the practices that we work with that are growing very, very quickly and adding on lots of different locations, their issues is really around scalability of that infrastructure. Like, for example, they can track things on spreadsheets, but then when you have full-time staff who are only doing data entry, it becomes inefficient. They start having data gaps, issues like that. Um, their booking teams, we've spoken with practices who have 14 full-time staff just calling leads. There's a lot of inefficiency that's created there. So, all of these different issues, it's building out infrastructure that a client can sign on with us. And then when they open, we have a client who's opening three more practices in the next couple months by the end of the year. They don't have any issues around or have to really think about okay, what bottlenecks are going to be caused on the patient acquisition side from this. They just tell us we're opening these practices on these dates, you guys handle it, and then we will take care of that. So, a lot around what we're investing in is building that infrastructure that will enable them to scale completely hands-free, where we're taking on all the burden of managing the lead. Okay, if we're taking on this much more ad spend, how much more creatives are we going to need per month? All of that it needs to be baked into our system.

SPEAKER_02 46:23

As you move in more and more up market, um have you considered what that means for the I don't want to call it the bottom end of the market, but the the the the smaller practices? Will you look to create a separate solution for those agencies? Will you build partner for those practices build partner agency or even a downsell agency yourself?

SPEAKER_01 46:45

Have you eventually, yeah, I think so. I think right now there's still there's still so much we can be doing for our existing clients. That's why even our we're so selective of the clients that we bring on, and you know, we're not in a rush to bring people on, that sort of stuff, because we have so many of these big clients who are just like doubling that ad spend are just like keen to just keep scaling a lot more aggressively with us, that there's so much more opportunity for us digging deeper on our existing clients than necessarily bringing tons of new ones on. So now it's really making sure that anyone who comes on is really like we genuinely want to partner with you and invest in you for the next, you know, foreseeable future.

SPEAKER_02 47:28

How are you handling the wait list in general and managing expectations on that side of things?

SPEAKER_01 47:34

Yeah, I think when we bring on clients, we always tell them. So we manage all our launch slots like well in advance. And so we I tell clients even like when we're even in the early discussions, everyone knows that that we're kind of operating the wait list. And anyway, a lot of these bigger groups, it's not like okay, one day to the next, you know, suddenly you're gonna launch ads with them. So there's often a lot that needs to be done on their side, especially given how deep we go with them. There is a lot of build-out that is involved in doing our service because of all the integrations, okay, we're gonna be taking on a lot of the patient journey, we need to know everything about your practice inside out, train our team on all of that. So there is a lot that goes into it. So very often, you know, it's it's not like a deal breaker for them that there is that wait list. Um, but yeah, they're they're aware that we operate it. And so if we tell the client we're launching, you know, our next slot when we would be able to launch use in two months' time, it's not it's not the end of the world. Yeah, makes sense. It's great for positioning as well.

SPEAKER_02 48:30

They're gagging for it by the time we're done. Awesome. Um you you you call yourself a partner a lot. Um have you and you talk about getting really deep into like just deep into the industry, just completely embedded into it. How far does that go? And have you been tempted to or had offers to actually fully partner with a dentistry in the sense of taking equity in the company and being an extension of it?

SPEAKER_01 48:56

Yeah, there have been discussions around it. I think the the partner positioning is really because a lot of what we do, because we have quite a lot of deep industry expertise now, is it's almost a consultative approach as well. There is an element of like strategic advisory that's going into the service as well. So I really don't think, unlike a lot of other Lee Gen agencies, which are kind of more seen as like a an external vendor who you know you're having your monthly report from, it's a lot more in the we in the trenches with them. Or actually, we're more the ones in the trenches, and then we're kind of keeping them up to speed with what's going on. So that's more why the positioning is kind of like a partner approach because it's really we're bolting on our team onto what you're doing currently. We're basing your whole marketing and sales team pretty much. Um, and then in terms of taking equity and practices, I think our our next our the next couple years is really going to be building out more infrastructure around software and really m building on more into this patient acquisition system. Um, and then and then whether we roll it out to people at different stages as well or expand geographically, that's that's probably on the horizon as well. As in license for people to run it themselves. Yeah. If we build the system, but a lot of a lot of our growth in terms of the product development, I think comes because we are the users of the product. The dentology app and the whole platform that we've built, no clients or they use it for like reporting and stuff, but we're the ones using the platform in terms of like all the sales and everything going on there. So the feedback loop is so fast. I think if we were purely a SaaS and we're trying to build out this platform and we had to constantly speak to our clients to try and learn about what they're liking and what they're not liking, what features we should build, the feedback loop would be much slower. But because we're building it for ourselves, it's an internal tool, means that that feedback loop is so fast where we're all contributing to the product development. It's another element of that I think the team will really enjoy, is they're guiding the product development too. They're saying, Oh, it'll be amazing to have this feature, this feature. The ads team are saying they need they want this and this. Everywhere, the whole platform is being informed by everyone on the team or the departments. Love that. Dentology.ai.

SPEAKER_02 51:16

We were talking about software and tech. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:18

How are you thinking about AI and the impact that's going to have on all of this? Absolutely massive for 10xing the efficiency of anyone on your team. For example, let's talk about the management. Like as a sales manager, how much time do you spend listening to calls and doing this sort of stuff? Especially when you're working with enterprise clients and you're booking hundreds of consultations per month for them, you need really robust quality control in place too. So if you can have AI automatically transcribing every single call, flagging key things that might need review from a manager, guiding your team on how they can be doing better, like all of these small things just add a lot of efficiency on that adds a scalability. And I think a lot of clients or practices or other agencies might look at what we're doing and think that it's a lot easier than it is because they don't realize that there's so much underlying tech that makes it possible. But if you were manually appointment setting for people logging into their platforms and all this stuff manually, you would never I I think it would be extremely challenging to do it profitably at scale at a big level. Whereas everything that we do is all in our platform and it's automatically connecting to all of their software, irrespective of which software they're using. We've built integrations with all the big ones.

SPEAKER_02 52:33

So an agency like yours is always gonna be at a competitive advantage with something like AI, because the AI, the output of AI is only good as good as the input. Your input is the mass of data that you're collecting from working with the same industry over time, and so that is it's gonna be powerful.

SPEAKER_01 52:49

That data piece is is massive. Like I was talking about being able to split test things at scale across lots of different practices and seeing what what variables change and is that consistent across all of the practices? It really means that you house a lot of kind of learnings on best practices in the industry.

SPEAKER_02 53:07

We talk a lot about your growth and your success, and and in very many cases it's just been this constant upwards trajectory. But there must have been some things along the way that haven't gone so well. Can you think back to like one of the biggest mistakes that you've made on this pathway?

SPEAKER_01 53:28

One of the biggest mistakes that we've made. I think investing in senior in slightly more senior people has really, really benefited us early on. I think I think maybe the the hiring was one of the biggest learnings that we had was really now having really good processes for recruiting talent and and then giving them the freedom to actually go out and drive impact is something that has really unlocked a huge amount of value in the company. So I guess maybe not introducing that earlier on, but then again, when you're early on in your agency, you don't have a huge amount of capital to be investing in team. So it is a little bit challenging to do so, but I would say that's been a massive unlock for us.

SPEAKER_02 54:20

I think as you love I love how your biggest mistake is is actually uh is actually a win because this you you there's no point in doing anything differently, then that's what a wonderful position to be in.

SPEAKER_01 54:32

Yeah, I mean ideally, ideally you hire the thing is when you hire early, I think yeah, it's investing a lot of time into your team to get them to replicate what you want to be to be doing or the level of output that you want to be doing. Yeah, it's huge. Yeah, yeah. I I guess I guess on the the cold outreach thing, maybe maybe I would say that's that's probably a biggest mistake, but I wouldn't say it's anything that bad. All the cold outreach that was done, I think also just conforming to how other people approach cold outreach. I think as soon as I started doing it a bit my own style, for example, reaching out to people and doing like personalized looms, for example, to to like big people in the industry, just clearly coming from a position of wanting to provide value. I think just the blast messaging people with the get 10 patients, blah blah blah, no, you know, that that kind of sounding like everyone else is just so easy to just fall into like people won't even look at you twice.

SPEAKER_02 55:30

I I wanted to bring that up earlier, and so I'm glad you brought that back up. The whole um let's let's call it the hundred million dollar offers blueprint, uh, we're gonna get you X result in specific time frame, risk reversal. Uh you still have a guarantee in the in the business. It's it's just a performance model. It's a performance model. Okay. Um two things that are twofold then. Number one, did you have a guarantee like that? Okay. No. And uh and why not? Never used the guarantee. Um didn't feel like it was ever needed, to be honest. Nice. Okay. And so um I would agree with that logic 100%. Uh but I want to know why you then think that you were able to get the clients over the line without in absence of a guarantee. Because many people convince themselves that they have to have one of those specific tangible hundred million dollar offer guarantees in order to be able to grow an agency and sign clients.

SPEAKER_01 56:21

Social proof. I think if you can show results that that it guarantees just because is just to kind of soften the blow of someone who needs more trust or more reason why they they can make this decision without feeling like it's all gonna go horribly wrong. So if you have so much social proof that, you know, I don't think the guarantee it could help that decision even more, but we didn't we never really needed it. And when someone's on a performance model, it's kind of baked in. What does that performance model look like? It's based on the number of patients that we're driving to the practice. So if you're not getting patients, you're not gonna be paying us. So there's no base fee? No, there's a base fee, but it's for enterprise clients, a base fee is negligible. And then it's uh a fixed amount per patient? It's on a sliding scale, a tiered band system. So it gets cheaper.

SPEAKER_02 57:08

So a tiered band system with a fixed amount per patient. Yes. Which gets cheaper the more volume that we're doing. Nice. Was it difficult coming to that point and determining what that should have been, or did you get that pretty right pretty early? Like what was your mindset around um how much you could be charging per patient?

SPEAKER_01 57:28

Yeah, we did experiment quite quite a bit with that. There was definitely an experimental phase of tweaking all the different variables and finding out what makes most sense. What's interesting is that obviously what makes sense for a single location practice or an individual dentist is completely different for these bigger clients. So I think again, it comes from being comfortable pricing for your true ICP, which is now these bigger location groups, and being comfortable with the fact that this is going to completely steer away a lot of these smaller practices. Yeah. But they want it anyway. They want it, they they're happy to pay it anyway, but of course. Because they want to ascend to the next level. Exactly. And a lot of the practices that we're bringing on now, like we we obviously have these big groups with dozens of practices, but a lot of them are, you know, five to ten practices and want to have the right infrastructure that is going to get them to dozens of practices. And so I think a lot of them, if you start building that infrastructure in place at that stage, which is really when you need it most, to be honest, that will enable you to scale to that many practices without coming into the consistent roadblocks that you encounter at every different stage, you know, whether it be that your booking team isn't good enough or scaling fast enough or you can't do it profitably, or you're not producing enough creative, you know, all those issues.

SPEAKER_02 58:43

I've uh observed that over the past few months you've been putting a lot of time and effort into your personal brand and building your personal authority in the space. Um I'd love to unpack your general mindset around that and what your goals are there as a brand, as dentology. Like, dare I say you would probably I mean you're gonna continue growing inevitably in the rate in the rate that you're going in absence of your personal brand. So so talk us through.

SPEAKER_01 59:09

I've actually just thought of something which I think potentially might be the biggest mistake, although it's again it's not like dramatic here, but I think making the team giving access to more of the team earlier on, I think. Even if they were the ones doing it, but making them client-facing. Because I think very quick the team grew very, very quickly. But if the personal brand or a lot of it, it's all founder-led marketing. So a lot of people see Nico, but they don't necessarily realize that there's 29, it's a 29-person team behind. And so I think now a lot of our team are kind of client-facing, and then people now really appreciate that there is a lot more manpower behind what's going into the system. So I think that has definitely unlocked a lot, and it allowed me to delegate a little bit more. If you need to be the you know, guiding every single query, then you know you're a bit more limited as a founder. Um, but to answer your question about the personal brand, yeah, I think that's massive, especially given where we want to be in the industry in terms of like really just at the forefront of the industry, driving um kind of uh opinions on where the industry is going and things like that from a marketing perspective and patient acquisition perspective. Um, so I think that really comes from birth building personal brand. Now, again, there is a little bit of this like, do you build personal brand around the founder or do you build the brand around the agency? And so I don't know, I think a lot of people do buy into a personal brand a lot more than they would a business. So that's why I'm building personal brand. However, I think there are there are pros and cons to it as well. I think building the personal brand is fine, but a lot of what I need to be doing now is being at all of those events and getting that client FaceTime as well, because when you have account managers in place, you know, you're not speaking to clients quite as much. Whereas if I can be at those events, then I'm speaking to clients in those kind of forums as well. Maybe hosting some as well in the future. Yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:01

Very nice. Talking of the future, uh, where do you see dentology going long-term? Like what is the long-term vision here?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:07

Yeah, I think it's building a lot more on the software and infrastructure side of things. So it's a lot more around enterprise infrastructure rather than just, you know, marketing agency. I think a lot of what we're doing around the software side is delivering a lot more value to these bigger clients and really solving the problems that they have. So I think we're definitely going to continue investing a lot more there, working with all these big dental groups in the UK, um, really guiding that change as well, being at the forefront of that, continuing to innovate on that on that front, and then potentially, yeah, longer term yeah, expanding into international markets will probably be on the table too. Nice. Or whether we're also introducing um levels of service that are more, you know, use our licensing access to our system, basically.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:57

And what do you get out of this? Like, is this cash flow? Is this uh a future exit? Like, what is what what is Nico working towards?

SPEAKER_01 1:02:06

Right now, more from a personal perspective, I'm just loving all of these different challenges that you face at different levels of entrepreneurship, and it's changing so rapidly now that it is so challenging, and I'm loving those challenges that you encounter these issues, you need to upskill yourself to be able to solve these problems, and then boom, it changes the next couple months. And so I'm loving that kind of cycle of um personal development that I feel that I'm gaining out of it. Then on the agency side, I think building team personally for me is incredibly fulfilling of having people who are actually loving what we're doing, and equally clients as well, loving you know what they're getting out of dentology and helping them build their businesses. In terms of longer term, what that looks like, um I think we will be building more and more around you know, the whole kind of system as a whole, software side being a big component of that. Whether that spins off into something else on the software side, that could be potentially feasible, but it will very likely be in as in like staying in the dental sector and really guiding um change on that front. Nice. Alongside Luca as well, being a huge component of that too. That's been a game changer. That's been so fun. Awesome.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:18

Working with your brother. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:20

Yeah. Uh what's it like working with family? It's awesome. I love it. I absolutely love it because I think we have such complementary skill sets. Like and I'm so fortunate as well to have a brother, like a technical co-founder who's my brother. I think it's quite difficult if you want to start a software company. It's incredibly hard to find a founder that you want to partner with for your career, really. It's a massive decision, and to have all that trust there. So I think for me, I'm incredibly grateful and fortunate to be in that position. I think we have very complimentary skill sets, and it's just been really fun building building with someone as well. So that'd be really cool. That's awesome, man.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:58

And he's he's all in. He's he's yeah, he's all in. He's all in. Yeah, that's so nice. It's it's that's an exciting opportunity to be able to bring your family into the business as well. Um I'd I had a follow-on off the back of that of working with Luca. Um hold that. Looking in the short term, uh in we're talking six, twelve months maximum, what are the current bottlenecks? Like, what are you what are you trying to overcome at the moment?

SPEAKER_01 1:04:25

A lot is around ops and systems, just because we scaled the team very, very quickly. So whilst it's all fine, I think we could be doing, I think it's the right time to be professionalizing the business a lot in those. So, for example, introducing a lot more um progression roadmaps, formalizing culture things, um, you know, a lot around also financial, you know, client-level PLs, or you know, all these time-to-value checkpoints, tracking all those KPIs, all that those sorts of more operational things. I think it's the right time to be investing in those and get another really solid layer of foundation in before we go for another aggressive period of growth. I think obviously the last three, four months were were just absolutely explosive. So I think now just taking another moment to kind of slow things down slightly, just because we have so many clients who want to be scaling their spend so much more, that I think it's the right time to be kind of focusing on those those aspects now.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:20

Nice, nice. I want to jump into some quick lessons for agency owners. Um, starting with like what you think is in going through this period of growth and getting to the point where you're at, which is kind of the dream goal for many people, although you're just starting, really, like as far as the beginning. This is just the beginning of where this is going, and uh, I just you're on a you're on an absolute rocket ship. It's just incredible to see. What do you think is the biggest misconception when it comes to agency success?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:51

That you need to follow some sort of playbook. I I think uh then again in those early stages, I really liked following something that would get me. Those early results, but I think also leaning into you as a person and what your advantages are. Like, for example, when we're talking about the outreach, like just conforming to the ways that other people do outreach rather than leaning into yourself. So, for example, when I started going on site to every single meeting, I'd go to the practice. I did that for ages. I was going to every single content shoe across the country just to go spend time with the clients. Um, and really that I think they really appreciated. So I think leaning into those sorts of bits of what you think you should be doing that can drive growth for yourself and kind of the business, rather than necessarily saying that this is the only way to do it. I need to do what everyone else is doing.

SPEAKER_02 1:06:43

That's I mean, and then that you're the ultimate demonstration of that. In a market full of agencies doing the same thing as each other, all copying each other, you've broken out of that. It's following a playbook is great for getting you off the ground, and then you have to figure out your own path and business. Completely agree. I just remembered the question that I wanted to ask you. And that's do you have an office? Are you are you physical office-based or are you a virtual international company? And what is your general mindset surrounding that?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:10

Fully remote for now. Um, I definitely think we want to be doing more in-person things just because it it's fun from a and it's from a culture perspective. I think it's really, really the right thing to do as well. Um, but yeah, fully remote for now.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:26

And I think more of a hybrid approach is what your desire would be, right? Or would you, if you were to go back, would you go physical from day one?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:33

No, I think remote has been has been amazing for us, especially in those early, early phases. Um I definitely think fully remote and for the foreseeable future, but I still think there's a place to be doing in-person events, even if it's not just every day, you know, working with your team in an office. Nice. I think it's nice to do when you really want those like elements of professionalizing the company. You know, when you're at that stage, I think having those sorts of events and things that you're supposed to do. Um people like physical presence. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:00

But also you are the the new age of agency, and so you know, why wouldn't you benefit from having that hybridized approach? Having that's one thing that we realized in the agency. We were virtual forever until you know a couple of years ago when we decided to get that workshop in in Sheffield, which is now a content warehouse. And it's nice to have that that base, and everyone can go there and on Black Friday, seven days within a Black Friday lock in everyone with flying people in internationally and we're just locking in the office, like and it's it's gonna be awesome and countdowns and timers on client revenue and so on. It's wonderful to have that piece, but having the ability to pull out of it and have the hybrid virtual, I think that's I think I think that's the the sweet spot.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:42

I think from a morale standpoint, like you're talking about having that team kind of culture all together on site is is really nice as well. Now, if you can foster that in a digital kind of setting, then that's great. And we do as much as we can to do that, but I still think it's not quite the same as being in person together. So I think if you can be doing some in-person events, let's say on a quarterly basis, can you pareto 80 20 it? I don't know, but that's what the direction that we'll probably go realistically. Nice, yeah, nice.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:12

Okay, final question for agency owners that are at a brick wall at the moment, um, they will feel at least they are perceptionally, yeah. Maybe they're stuck at a around 50k a month or below that point trying to get past that. What advice would you give to those guys?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:33

I think pipeline is everything. I I think building that demand was completely transformative for a dentology because once we had that demand, you can really narrow down who your best what what kind of clients you want to serve and only bring on the clients that you know you can deliver the best results to. I don't think it's just building demand like cranking paid ads and just like you know, attracting not the right types of people or just piling on too many clients that you can't service. But I think building that demand for dentology, which is built on really strong reputation, really allowed us to do a lot internally that that enabled us to grow quite considerably. Nico, pleasure. Thanks, Jordan.