Scaling 100 Dental Practices Without Losing Their Identity

Announcer: Welcome to the Ignite Podcast, the only healthcare marketing podcast that digs into the digital strategies and tactics that help you accelerate growth. Each week, Cardinal’s experts explore innovative ways to build your digital presence and attract more patients. Buckle up for another episode of Ignite.

Ashley Petrochenko: Hey, everybody. Welcome back for another episode of the Ignite Healthcare Marketing Podcast. My name’s Ashley Petrochenko. I head up the brand marketing team here at Cardinal. We’ve got a really great episode for you today. We’re going to be talking about all things building, especially from the ground up. What does it take to go from zero, from five, all the way over 100 practice locations?

Many of our listeners, they are also in building mode. They’re trying to figure out growth. How do you get to the next level? Our guest today is someone who has intimate knowledge on exactly what that takes. Without further ado, I’m going to introduce you to our guest, Britney Long, the executive vice president of marketing at GPS Dental. Britney, welcome to Ignite.

Britney Long: Thank you, Ashley. It’s a pleasure. I’m excited to be here.

Ashley: Now, before we jump into the conversation, I’d like to give listeners a little bit of a context on who you are and the work that you do at GPS, just so we have that foundation.

Britney: I have been with GPS since June of 2018, so going on eight years now. I’ve been here a minute, but had the pleasure of getting in at the beginning when GPS was first starting. GPS today is over 100 dental practices, as you mentioned. We have 300 of those dentists that are 115 partners, and then over 2,000 employees that we’re serving nationwide.

When I first started, I came from the beauty and cosmetic industry retail side of things when I first started. While that may look different on paper, it obviously has a lot of similarities between the two. I was the first inaugural hire, and then we scaled to 113 over time, and now I lead a team of 5, 6, including me. It’s certainly been a pleasure to be a part of, but excited for what we’re building.

Ashley: That’s probably gone by in the blink of an eye, right? Isn’t it?

Britney: Yes, it really has. You do blink, and you wonder where the time’s like–

Ashley: Like, “Where am I?” All these brands, 100 different brands. GPS works in a house of brand model, so every brand is individually branded, correct?

Britney: It certainly is. That approach truly guides GPS in all aspects, not even just the marketing side. Part of that, and the reason why we did it that way, is the practices that we’re partnering with that we are bringing in under the umbrella of GPS are already great practices. They already have incredible cultures, but it’s even better team members and doctors that are supporting their patients and their communities. We just want to magnify that at the local level and certainly not come in and be top-down and implement a ton of change that’s going to disrupt what they’re already really great at.

Ashley: Yes, people love their local dentist. They have a relationship with them. They’ve gone there since they were little. Their kids go there. It’s hard because you don’t want to shake that up and lose that trust, but you also have to build that marketing engine. How do you do that and find efficiencies along the way? That’s one I want to dig into now, is how are you scaling and maybe thinking about website structure, your ad campaigns, SEO, and AIO? How are you structuring all of that across your family of brands?

Britney: If you think about it, we have 100 different entities that we’re supporting. When you say I have a team of 5, the question is, how in the world do you do that and then scale that as we continue to grow? What we have found that’s worked well for us is hiring the right people in the right seats that are experts in their field. As a leader, you want to get out of their way. Then on the other side of that, we’ve partnered with really great vendors. We have incredible vendor partnerships that support us on all of those fronts, SEO, AdWords, campaigns, text, email.

Our team works as the liaison between those vendor partnerships and our practices. We’re making sure that what we’re doing and what we’re strategizing at the core is working well for those practices. While there is a lot of execution lives within our team from the internal perspective, those external things, we’re working with those vendors to make sure that those are successful, that we’re getting a return on our investments, and localizing what we should, but centralizing what’s needed.

Ashley: Thinking about the beginning, where you were the first hire, what was your next hire? You’re getting the right butts, the right seat. How do you make that decision? Where do you go first? What’s the first hire?

Britney: When I first started, I was truly a team of one outside of the vendors that we worked with that I felt were part of my team for a very long time. Even though they may not have sat within the same cubicle as me or in Downtown Jonesboro, it certainly felt like I wasn’t a team of one. When we looked at the first marketing hire at the time, it was actually a patient experience coordinator. I tried to echo what I did when I first started.

By doing that, I acted as a secret shopper when I first came into GPS. We partnered with the doctors on site to let them know that I was coming, but the teams didn’t. Not having dental experience, I was able to come in with the knowledge of a true patient. What does it look like, smell like? Is it clean? How are the team? Are they working well together? How am I being treated? What does that experience look like? I did that probably five times as we continued to add practices to our portfolio.

It worked really well because you were able to take that research back to our team at the time, and our team, between HR operations, our two co-founders, Dr. Smith and Dr. Little. There was four of us. It was a very lean team, but able to bring that research back, what I found, and then provide that feedback back to the doctors, and then go to work at the time. It was super beneficial. That’s what led to our first marketing hire as a patient experience coordinator that traveled to practices that did the same rinse and repeat with the doctors on board.

Ashley: That makes a lot of sense because while you may all have different brands across the platform, you still want the experience to hold true to the GPS dental standards. How else would you do that if you don’t have someone in there actually experiencing that? I think that’s a great lesson for listeners and something I think retail does do that, that secret shopping mentality. The patient experience is so important. I think not enough marketers are actually acting as the patient and going through the motions, so I love that.

Britney: Yes. Even eight years ago, when I started, you had your analytics and your call recording. That was not new to the industry, but it certainly was not at the level that it is today. Because our practices were all within driving distance, like Tennessee and right around Jonesboro in the northeast side of the state, it was an easy travel. Now, when you think about, “Oh, we are coast to coast across 28 states with 100-plus and more to come,” working on how do we partner with operations and our regional team at the local level to still have that feedback. People working on that experience for the patient because that’s what matters, is the experience we’re providing those patients. It’s really worked well for us.

Ashley: You mentioned the need to keep some things local and some things at the platform level. How do you make that decision on what really needs to be local, and how do you still maintain any kind of efficiencies at that level?

Britney: For us, the trick was just separating what scales from what shouldn’t. For us, the strategy, how a patient searches your practice, how attribution works, what budgets are we working off of across the different channels, what is our tech stack, our measurement framework, and then those vendor relationships I mentioned earlier, and of course our playbook.

While it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, those are the things that are going to be centralized and then, of course, be able to scale those. Then, as far as what is local is going to be how your practice shows up. It’s going to be online, both in the community, in person, their involvement, the organic strategy around the people that are in their photos, whether that be patients with permission or the team doing a funny TikTok, all of those things, along with promotions and the doctor’s clinical autonomy and treatment. All of those things are at the local level.

Ashley: You mentioned TikTok and the individual social messaging at that local level. How are you helping your practices do that while still respecting the brand position in a way that’s not going off into the left field or anything?

Britney: I have an incredible team behind me. One is our communications coordinator. She also wears the hat of social media. What we learned early on, because when you are a DSO that’s top down or one brand maybe, you see a lot of that stock imagery going across social platforms and trying to make sameness happen. That’s just not what we’re set out to do. What we work on is the strategy behind those social media tactics. We have a monthly email that goes out from our internal team. “Here’s ideas for posts of the month. Here’s what other practices are doing.”

I think that’s the beauty of GPS, and the practices that are partnering with us is everyone gets to benefit from what’s working well. We get to magnify and share that with a larger group. I think that’s how we really keep it structured, is they’re executing it at the local level, but we’re the strategy behind what they’re posting. It’s still unique and organic to them and their practice.

Ashley: That’s great. Everyone can learn from each other. It’s not like you’re in this silo and this one dental practice on your own, but you can really feel like you’re part of a bigger movement and organization.

Britney: Yes, definitely. Really, how we conquer that, too, is even outside of the day-to-day dental practice and seeing patients; we have made a central focus on internal events. We have an event portion to my team. What we do is an annual leadership summit. It’s called Engage for all of our office managers and administrative team. Then we have a dental summit for all of our doctors, a hygienist conference.

The reason behind all of those things is bringing those like-minded folks together so that they don’t feel like they’re on an island. We recently this year, established an office manager advisory board. A group of office managers get together. They work on what’s working well, what’s not. Then they’re able to take that back to their practices. Then once they have something to share, then it can go out to the broader group. It’s really just helped for those practices not to feel like they’re on an island and also part of something bigger.

Ashley: I like that, yes. It’s lonely. You have these challenges, and you’re putting your head against the wall, and you’re like, “How do I solve this?” You’ve built that system that they can come face-to-face and actually connect and learn together and call someone up when they have that problem. “Okay, what did you do to fix this?”

We mentioned the tech stack is something that’s easier to scale across the different practice brands. I think for some organizations, you’re building it from the ground up, whereas some people, maybe you’re inheriting a mess or you’re bringing a few different things together. There’s different ways to approach that. I think when you were starting to build that tech stack, where did you start? What were the priorities? What advice do you feel is like you have to get this implemented from day one? What’s the priority for you?

Britney: I have to give a shout-out to the Liine team. Brad and his team is incredible. For so long, that struggle that I had as a solo team or when my team began to grow is data overload, and what do you do with that data? We’re tracking referral sources, and we’re working on our advertising spend and looking at the return on those investments, but it always felt like you were working a month behind because you’d run ads for 30 days, you’d look at those results, and then want to tweak the ads after they’ve already ran for 30 days to then run it for the next month.

With Liine, they’ve solved that for us. Not only through the call tracking, through conversion rates, knowing reasons not booked and the outcome of those calls, but also from the ad campaign perspective, they’re optimizing those ads in real-time using AI. I think that has been a world of difference for us. Liine is truly a non-negotiable. When I talk about centralizing tech stack, that is the one thing that I would recommend to anyone that’s in this position or in a similar industry that Liine supports, because you’re getting all that visibility.

What it’s also allowed us to do is, let’s say we have a practice that might be on Weave and then one on NexHealth, because what we do know is what works well for a practice in Arkansas may not work well for a practice in California. Maybe Weave really benefits them or NexHealth benefits an Arkansas practice, just as an example. Liine connects those things together. They connect the phone systems and the ad campaigns that you’re running, your CRM, and all of those. That’s been super beneficial for us and a game-changer in the tech stack side of things.

Ashley: The call tracking, recordings, and sentiment analysis really helps you understand a patient experience, too. If someone is struggling to book and trying to get an appointment, and they’re calling in, you can actually understand, “Okay, where’s that breakdown in that experience?” Some people really do not want to use online booking, but some people really do like it. It’s like every market is so different. My husband calls everyone, and I’m like, “Why are you calling people? Why are you doing this? Leave people alone. Just schedule.”

Britney: Yes, it certainly made a difference for us. It’s allowed us to know truly where those leads are coming from, what we spend our money on, what is the return, what are the outcomes and experience of those patients. Centralizing that for us was absolutely necessary and really helped push us forward.

Ashley: You’re centralizing everything into one patient platform, EHR. Can you talk a little bit about that? Is it all one central one for the entire platform?

Britney: Yes, I think by using Liine, the CRM piece of it, we’ve not centralized yet. Reason being is when you look at the CRMs we’ve looked at, every practice being its own unique brand, scaling that, at some point, there’s a cap. We’re close to the cap already, from what we’ve realized, but the customer side of things, whether that’s NexHealth or Weaver, are preferred platforms. They’re the ones that have worked well with our systems. Then, as far as online scheduling, Jarvis has been wonderful. It’s something that we’re rolling out now. From the online scheduler side of things, all of those plug into Liine, and you’re able to know what’s happening across all of those systems.

Ashley: In your role, you have this ability across every practice?

Britney: Yes, every practice that we support through marketing across our portfolio, yes, definitely.

Ashley: When a doctor is joining a practice, is joining the organization, what is one of the first things that you fix or that you find that’s usually broken that you need to come in and fix right away?

Britney: Certainly, for us, it’s always the foundation. When you look at the foundation of a dental practice, and you take our phase approach or our playbook, it’s always often the website design, maybe it’s outdated, maybe it’s not mobile-friendly, their Google business listing’s not tended to, they’re not responding to their online reviews. All of those things matter, especially in the AI-driven world that we’re all living in now, because AI is using all of those things to give those answers to people that are using those tools. For us, it’s always the foundation, first and foremost, because you have to get that right before you spend more marketing money or increase those budgets or look at the other strategy in our other phases.

Ashley: Are you using a template approach for some of those practices in terms of similar structure, but maybe it has a little bit of look and feel from the original practice branding? Is that how you’re approaching it, or are they truly unique?

Britney: As far as when a practice comes into GPS, they go through a integrations process and then when they have the operations handoff, marketing is one of the departments that they’re going to meet with. Going into those calls and those meetings to kick off those practices, we have our non-negotiables right of what we want to centralize and then what we want to keep local, but we have our core services as marketing team that we offer.

We want them to be educated on that, but going into those meetings, we know already how those practices are performing, what their new patients are like. Do they have capacity to fit more new patients? What is their current advertising spend? We go in already having that information handy from due diligence, which is nice. Our template is we know it works well. Here’s our playbook. Where do we adapt that playbook to fit that practice in the market that they live in? While it’s templated on our side, it’s custom to fit the practices. Part of our group is not one, it’s the same.

Ashley: That’s the whole how is GPS a differentiation, right? For helping clinical autonomy and doctors and dentists to feel that their brand, their baby’s intact still.

Britney: Yes. Absolutely. Well, because if you think about it as a business owner, and Dr. Smith and Dr. Little were both dentists by trade, so we are certainly doctor-led, doctor-founded, but that’s why GPS exists today. They knew how difficult it was to run a dental practice and be a business owner while also caring for patients, taking care of a team, and the complexities of all of that.

For us, that’s what we started on, that’s what we built on, but we’re able to meet those practices where they are. Instead of saying, “Here’s all the things we’re going to fix and all the things we’re going to change.” It’s more about, “Where can we plug in? Where can we add value outside of those non-negotiables, of course, that protect the practice and patients and the business?” It’s certainly worked well for us so far.

Ashley: Do you have any advice for listeners on, I think people feel that tension between the practice wants this, the doctor wants this, and marketing’s, “No.” That’s a thorn, I think, in some people’s side, but it sounds like obviously you guys have that figured out, you have an approach that really prioritize that relationship. Any lessons or tips that you’re going to share with our listeners?

Britney: Of course, over eight years now being here, everyone’s going to make mistakes, but I think through those mistakes along the way, you get to come out better for it on the other side, and taking those lessons and applying them. For us, friction’s not always bad. Clinical autonomy or independence can be buzzwords in the dental industry, but for us, clinical autonomy and how you differentiate that fine line is doctors at their practice are going to have a real voice, and it’s represented. They’re going to have decisions in their clinical autonomy, and they’re also going to be part of decisions from an operations perspective, but of course, “Here’s what we’re seeing.

Here’s the information. How do we work together to then make your practice more successful or get to the next level?” When that friction shows up, because marketing sometimes can be the fall guy, as you will, it’s going to be around the speed and consistency when you’re centralizing things to scale. Our job is to explain the why. When you start with why, and you lead with why. That would be my first piece of advice to anyone listening to this, is when you start there, the rest will follow. Early on in my career, I didn’t always lead with why. Now, learning that, it certainly helps those conversations. Then, of course, everybody’s on the same team and aligned and moving forward in the right direction.

Ashley: I like that. I think it’s almost like thinking back to your kids. “Why? Why are we doing that?” There’s a fundamental need to know, “Why do I need to do the thing you’re asking me to do?” I love that advice. I think friction’s good. It’s uncomfortable, but it makes us better people, better professionals. Those are two great closing recommendations. I have one more question for you. Looking ahead into 2026, what’s the biggest marketing priority for you right now as you’re looking to continue to scale and grow GPS?

Britney: Two priorities for us, and I would say that they’re related. First is going to be the AI search optimization piece of it. I think anyone listening to this in healthcare is living again in that world. It’s making sure that when patients ask those AI tools, Dentists near me or Who should I see, that our practices across our organization are showing up with the right signals, that the information’s consistent, accurate and on the leading edge to make sure that those patients are choosing us because we know if they choose our practice, they’re going to get the best care possible. They’re going to have incredible line of service menu to choose from and doctors that are going to take great care of them.

That’s certainly the first, and what we’re working on building now. The second piece of that is going to be tightening our marketing to operations feedback loop, or conversion loop, I guess you’d say, because the most cost-effective new patients for us are the ones that have already come to our door through the existing marketing efforts we’ve had. What I mean by that is when I was first hired, it stuck with me my entire time with GPS.

Dr. Little said, “Britney, what we’re trying to do is open the front door as wide as we can and close the back door. How do we do that at scale? At 113 practices, we feel like we’ve figured it out, but then when we continue to add practices in of 300-plus, what does it look like to make sure that we’re bringing in a healthy amount of new patients that are getting taken care of, but they’re not leaving without that next scheduled appointment and they’re certainly not going out the back door and it’s not realizing it? Those are certainly two of our priorities as we look ahead.

Ashley: Are you looking at more lifecycle marketing, really trying to improve that patient experience, and then make sure that there’s that remarketing and lifecycle marketing to keep them on track for their appointments and care?

Britney: Yes. We’ve actually worked with TNT Marketing, if you all are familiar with them, through their patient engagement platform. That’s been super helpful for us through that lifecycle marketing piece that when we’ve spent the money for a patient to come to our practice, we want to schedule them back, of course. There’s always going to be those reasons. Maybe they don’t know they’re scheduled in a few months. Maybe that they’re moving or whatever the case is.

Anytime that we can re-engage that patient, because for me, there’s been moments where maybe you have a baby or life takes off, you put those things on the back burner, they’re still a patient of the practice, and they still consider that dentist their dentist. It’s just that we need to get them back in to make sure that they’re on track for their care. That’s really something that we’re focusing on outside of tracking new patients is re-engaging those, for sure.

Ashley: That’s great advice. Like you said, you spend all that money getting them in the door. Don’t lose them at that point. Life is messy and complicated, and it’s really easy to just forget to schedule your appointment. I love everything that you’re doing. This has been a great conversation. If listeners wanted to connect with you, had any questions, where can they find you?

Britney: Yes, no. I’m on LinkedIn. Through our website, www.gps.dental. You can also reach me via email if you have questions. I’m always happy to help other marketing leaders, whether in the dental industry or just in healthcare or a different one, retail, maybe. I can be helpful. Certainly, my emails belong at gps.dental. Please reach out if you have any questions. I’d be happy to connect.

Ashley: Great. We’ll have those links to the show notes. Thank you again for joining us. Everyone, come back next week for another episode of Ignite. Thanks so much.

Britney: Yes, Ashley. It’s been a pleasure.

Announcer: Thanks for listening to this episode of Ignite. Interested in keeping up with the latest trends in healthcare marketing? Subscribe to our podcast and leave a rating and review. For more healthcare marketing tips, visit our blog at cardinaldigitalmarketing.com.