the one million dollar sign [transcript] · welcome, i’m jim du molin, editor of...

The One Million Dollar Sign [TRANSCRIPT]

©2018 The Wealthy Dentist University. All Rights Reserved. of 16

Welcome, I’m Jim Du Molin, Editor of TheWealthyDentist.com, and I’m here today to talk with you about signage and how you can add a million dollars to your pension plan by the time your career ends. Now let’s look at that.

First of all, let’s start with you when you were children. I often use this story to illustrate the value of entrepreneurialship and what it takes to be successful in business. How many of you have ever gone out as children and set up your own lemonade stand? Low cost of entry into this business, low barriers. First of all you went to your mom and you got your lemonade. You got your mix. You got your sugar. You got all the things you needed and you took it out to the front lawn and you set up your card table and the very first thing you did was you put a sign up so people would know you were selling lemonade.

Now, signage is the easiest, most cost effective way to sell lemonade. It’s also the easiest, most cost effective way to acquire new patients. I’m often amazed that you do such a great job as kids of selling lemonade and you understand all the entrepreneurial issues of marketing but dentists, as they grow older and they become professionals, forget the fact that they still have to market. And one of the key marketing elements that they have, the tools they have, is signage.

So, Designing the $1,000,000 Sign, that’s what we’re looking at today. How we can add a million dollars to your pension plan at the end of your career? We’re going to do it very simply. Let me explain the numbers, we start with a million dollars. The number of years that the sign is going to be of value, the life of the sign, is normally about 25 years. So you divide the 25 into the million dollars and you come up with about $40,000 net contribution after the cost of everything else going into your pension plan a year that’s going to be required to get your million dollars.

Now, we divide that $40,000 by the average value of a new patient generated from you sign. By a new patient that we’re going to use in our example is about $750. It will vary from location to location, so don’t get hung up on the number.

But, after the cost of the dentistry, the lab fees, the dental supplies, all of the things that go into making it happen, your collections loss, you’ll end up with a net of about $555 from an average new patient.

Now, you take your $555 net contribution and you divide it into the $40,000 and you end up with 72 new patients a year that are needed to generate your million dollars. You divide that by the traditional number of months in a year, 12, and you end up with the number of patients required of only 6 per month in order to generate a million dollars in your pension plan, minimum, without compounding from your sign.

Now, this is the layout of an office in Seattle, Washington. I got a call about six or seven years ago from a doctor by the name of Rob Drumhiller. Rob’s a great guy, he called about 7:30 one night, didn’t expect to get me but I saw the light on the phone and I picked it up and he says, “Jim, I’ve got a problem.”



Now, a lot of my calls start out this way. I said, “Okay, let’s talk about it.”

He says, “I’m on the third floor of an office building. I share space with two other doctors. I have about two-and-a-half to three operatories on a good day and I only have eight new patients a month.”

You’ve got to admit, Rob had a problem. There’s no doubt about that. I said, “What are you going to do about it?”

He said, “I’ve already taken steps. I’ve bought a building and I’m remodeling it as a dental practice but I’m 20% over budget and two months behind schedule on it already.”

For those of you who have ever done a building, you know exactly what Rob’s problem is. We’ve all faced this as we’ve put together new dental facilities. I said, “Fine, what can I do for you?”

He says, “I need help especially in the area of marketing.”

I said, “Well, let’s talk about your location, because location is critical when structuring a dental practice.” And right now I’m going to give you some insights on how to pick a location.

So Rob says, “That’s fine. I bought this, it was an old real estate building and it sits on a corner.” Now, corner locations are great because you get exposure from multiple directions.

And I said, ”Well, tell me about the corner.”

He says, “Well, it’s got a stoplight. It’s a four-way stop and a lot of cars go by.”

And I said, “Well, how many cars go by?”

And he thought for a second and he said, “Well, when I bought the building, the real estate people that said 40,000 cars drove by every day in view of the office.”

And at that point you have an epiphany. Sometimes when you’re looking at a case you take a quick look in the mouth and you say, “Okay (you take a quick look at it) I have the solution.” And that’s what happened to me. In hearing that traffic report I had the solution to Rob’s problem and it was signage. So I said, “Okay, let’s start with some banners because you’re under construction right now, right?”

He said, “Yeah.”

I said, “I want you to put a banner on either side, facing the street, of the office, announcing the new facility.



He said, “That sounds good. What should I put on the banner?”

I said, “Opening soon. What’s the name of your practice, Rob?”

He said, “It’s Rob Drumhiller, D.D.S., PC…(whatever).”

And I said, “Rob, I’m sure your parents are very proud of your name, but from a marketing point of view, I think we want to talk a little bit about how to name your practice.”

Normally when we name a practice, we want to use a geographical locater if at all possible.” And I said, “I’d really like to call it XYZ Dental Care.”

And he said, “Let’s come up with a geographical locater.” The first thing he says is, “How about Seattle Dental Care?”

I said, “Seattle’s a little big, let’s try and bring it down to the local level so people driving by on this street, which seems to have good traffic, probably, it’s a major artery on both side, it looks like. We want to make sure that we have a name that they can recognize.” And we went through probably ten minutes of names.

All sorts of things, and nothing seemed to work.

And I said, “Well, is there a neighborhood that this practice sits in? You know, a local neighborhood that people will recognize?”

And he said, “Well, you know, it is part of the Crown Hill area.” Okay, God has provided. “Crown Hill Dental Care is what we’re going to name this practice.”

And he said, “Well, Jim, I’m probably going to bring in an associate. Is it okay if I call it Crown Hill Dental Associates?”

And I said, “No. People don’t want associates. They’re not interested in associates. Associates don’t sell or market your practice. Care markets your practice.”

And he says, “Well, I’m really into art and if you look at my office, I’m doing all the design, everything, myself. All the colors. And I’m even making all the washbowls….the ceramics and I’m really into this. Can I call it Crown Hill Dental Arts?”

And I said, “No. People don’t understand Arts. They don’t know if you’re selling tooth paintings, they don’t know what Arts stands for. People understand Care.”

So he finally got the message. So we ended up calling it Crown Hill Dental Care.

So, “Opening Soon: Crown Hill Dental Care. Rob Drumhiller, D. D.S. in smaller letters. And gigantic phone number.”



And he says, “Well what phone number should I put on it?”

“Put in your current phone number. They know you’re not open now.”

And he says, “Okay.”

Now, this was about Thursday night. Monday morning he got his banners up and called me, about Friday and says, “Jim, we’ve got a problem.”

I said, “What’s the problem?” He says, “I’ve gotten eight calls from my banners, already, in a week. I’ve got eight new patients. What am I gonna do?”

I said, “Rob, it’s real simple. You’re going to work Friday and Saturday, because you’ve got to pay off this new building. But at that point, I knew we had a winning location because the signage alone was going to generate tremendous new patient flow for the practice. And it’s all based on where and how you position that relative to the drive-by traffic.

Today, when we work with doctors to position a new facility, we always look at what the traffic flow is as it goes by the practice. What the direction of it is and how it’s going to flow into the facility. It’s very important. It’s going to be critical as we move through the changes that are coming in the next 10 to 15 years in dentistry. So, this is what we did for signage.

First of all, we put what we call a monument sign on one side of the building. A monument sign is like a tombstone, very straight forward, that’s why they call it a monument sign. It sits perpendicular. In this case it was about five feet long and four-and-a-half feet high. Anodized aluminum, interior lit with plastic on either side with our sign on it. It was very interesting.

The main rule on all signage is that it has to be perpendicular to the street so people can see it coming and going in either direction. That’s the critical part. Either direction – (from) 75 yards in either direction, you have to be able to read the sign. So if I’m 75 yards away and I’m driving by, that’s when I have to be able to start to read that sign. So it has to be big enough to be able to satisfy that need because people are driving by at 35 to 40 miles an hour. I know that the limit is 30, but the bottom line is they’re all doing 40. So they’re coming through at that speed and you’ve got to have a sign that’s recognizable and readable as they go by.

Now, the other thing with a monument sign that’s really important is that anything that sits on the ground level, we want to make sure that you have flowers around it. And we use “P” flowers, posies, pansies, peonies, whatever flower starts with “P”. And we put a nice little colored band around the sign, outlining the sign and flowers.

And the next thing we do is put a band of holly bushes around that. You don’t understand why we put the holly bushes there? It’s very simple. Some teenagers like to decorate signs. They feel your sign needs some improvement in its design and they have Magic



Markers. However, when you have the holly bushes there, they move in to do the Magic Marker act on your sign and the leaves on the holly bushes cut up their little ankles. And they don’t do it. I wanted to suggest Poison Oak, but my wife, Suzanne, felt that that was a little drastic and that we shouldn’t promote that. So, holly bushes serve the purpose of keeping the vandals away from your sign. And that’s very important.

The next thing is that we had another sign. We actually had a sign that was on a pole that was previously there for the real estate office. And it was high up, and it was a big sign. I was really impressed with it. And he said, “Jim, can I put my logo on that sign?”

And I always shudder when people talk about logos. So I said, “You have a logo?”

And he said, “Yes.”

And I said, “Okay, what does your logo look like?”

“Oh, it’s an apple with a bite taken out of it.”

Now, I’ve probably just offended some people, but there are some things in dentistry that are a cliché, and that’s one of them, and you want to try to avoid that whenever possible. You want something a little more unique.

The other issue is: if you don’t have a logo, don’t go out and get one. I have seen people procrastinate for months over the design of a logo while their marketing doesn’t happen, doesn’t start, doesn’t even get under way. The main issue here is: If you have a logo, sure, go ahead and use it. If you don’t have a logo, it’s unnecessary. You’re not going to have a logo that’s going to be able to compete with Ford, Chevrolet, IBM and all those types of major businesses, for recognition. Wait until you’re successful and you have more money than you know what to do with – then you can do a logo.

So, he had one so I said, “Fine, put it up.” We put it up, no problem.

The next thing is that we had another sign going across the front so people coming catty-corner to the office, when they were stopped at the sign, they would see this. And this was really interesting. We had a series of letters made that were about 18 inches tall. They were gold, almost three-dimensional. We had them carved and we put them on a black stake and the black stake would go in the ground and we had “Crown Hill Dental Care” on a rise in front of the office and we had it flood-lit from underneath. So at night, when people were stopped across the street, parked in their cars at the stoplight, what they saw, floating in the dark, in front of the office, just underneath it was “Crown Hill Dental Care.”

Now you’ve got three signs, one on either side, on a major thoroughfare, one catty-corner across the front. We generated an average of 32 new patients a month for the first year. Within six months, Rob had to take his lab man in there and close that down and turn it into an operatory and bring in an associate.



Within 18 months, he had to give up his own personal office and turn that into an operatory so he could handle the flow of new patients. That is the value of signage. And if you want to talk to Rob anytime, you can call him up in Seattle. I think he’s coming close to retirement at this point.

All right. The Rules of Signage: Build the biggest, brightest, reasonably tasteful sign the law will allow.

Now don’t get hung up on sign design. You’re going to get this done at the local level. You’re always going to get at least three bids. Signage people are notoriously expensive when they hear that you’re a professional. So always get three bids. They will tell you the exact regulations around your sign and what is allowable. But you want the biggest, brightest, reasonably tasteful sign the law will allow and I’ll give you some examples of them in a few minutes.

Now we always want it internally lit for maximum visibility. Don’t hesitate to put it on a pole, raise the sign above the street clutter. As you lay out your sign, these are the elements: You want the name of your practice, “Tiburon Dental Care”. If you can’t get a local geographic name, don’t worry about it. You can always go to trees: Maple Dental Care, Oak Dental Care, whatever. If you run out of trees, go to universities, try Harvard Dental Care, Princeton Dental Care. Stick with the Ivy League, something with panache, something that has a good name to it. If you get really stuck, go to rocks. Try Granite Dental Care, whatever. The issue here is: put that name across the top.

If you can’t get the name Dental Care, because it’s already been taken with the combination that you want, try Dental Excellence. Tiburon Dental Excellence - that will work just fine, too.

You always put the doctor’s name, Dr. John Bright, and the phone number and absolutely don’t forget to put your web address on your sign. Your domain name, not your email address, your domain name because this is going to become much more important as we progress over the next few years. You want people to be able to contact you, to go directly to your domain name.

People often argue with me about this but I’ll tell you right now that you’re always going to want your domain name on your sign because in the future every car is going to be hooked up to the Internet or a wide area wireless land system. People are going to be driving down the block and they’re literally going to be able to tell their car, “Contact Tiburon Dental Care.” It will automatically bring up your website. It will read to them the information about your website, out loud. And they will be able to, using their voice, to automatically make an appointment.

All that technology is available today and it’s starting to go into the high end cars that we see now in 2004 and 2005 so we can watch this progress. Now, the other thing is, a lot of people argue with me about putting the phone number, believe it or not, on your sign. Now



as people drive by your office, what do 80% of them have glued to their ear? Their telephone. Got to have the sign.

Got to have the phone number so they can see it and call you. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had a doctor call me and say, “Jim, there’s actually somebody parked out front of my office who is calling me from their cell phone to make an appointment, reading the number off of the sign. Very important. For those of you who don’t have a website at this time or have one that needs to be brought up to speed with modern technology and some of the issues that you need to know, you might want to check out the Internet Dental Alliance program for web site marketing. Just go back to TheWealthyDentist.com and check the link there and you can get a full program for Internet marketing.

Now finally, the last element of your sign that you should have is your logo. I live in Tiburon, so I have Tiburon Dental Care. Tiburon means shark in Spanish. So of course my logo is a shark. “Come on down and see the biggest, brightest teeth in Tiburon.”

Now – Great Moments in Dental Signage:

This was sent in by one of our doctors. He found it in Mexico. It’s not one of the better signs that I’ve seen. It’s kind of strange, but it does communicate. It’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, but not a lot.

I found this sign in Turkey of all places. I was on vacation riding my bicycle on the coast of Turkey and this sign for an Orthodontist in a little town and he had a sign out and I was impressed by the fact that he had a sign and he had a logo on there. The logo could probably use some work.

Now – Better Moments in Dental Signage:

Sun River Dental Care, this is outside of Sacramento, California. Now that says something! You have sign restrictions in some areas so you have to understand that you can’t always get what you want every time but this really told people that we had a dental care practice there. Over the door we had the doctor’s name again, repeated. So we had it across the top of the building on the other side, on the entrance door we had Sun River Dental Care, with the doctor’s name. It worked real well.

This one is really interesting, Southern Hills Dental Care. This sign works pretty well except for the logo. This is the old style, traditional medical logo. It’s not really up to date so I would probably have Ross redesign this sign a lot. Ross is a great guy and he does really well with this sign and has done some fantastic things.

Here’s another one, Main Street Dental Care, Dr. Clancy Boynton. This works out real well. It’s actually green with white letters and it comes out real well. If you step back you can see it’s on a pole but not a very high pole because of some of the restrictions but it works real well.



Here’s one I really like. This is a gigantic sign by Richard Hixson. It’s Lakewood Dental Care and this is down in Little Rock, Arkansas. Richard has a great practice down there and this sign does extremely well for him.

Here’s one of the classic signs. I put this sign together with Dr. Michael Silverman for sedation. And it’s “Lafayette Hill Dental Care. Implants, Cosmetic, Sleep Dentistry. Comfortable Care for the High Fear Patient. Dr. Michael Silverman.” And the phone number.

Now the really interesting thing here is that it fills all of the requirements that I really like about a sign. First of all Lafayette Hill Dental Care. We talk about what the doctor wants in terms of patients: Implants, Cosmetics and Sleep Dentistry. He can use the words “Sleep Dentistry” because he’s fully IV trained as a sedation dentist. And we say “Comfortable Care for the High Fear Patient.”

That’s really good. You want to remember that if you’re into the sedation side. Now if you look at this sign just to the right of Implant, Cosmetic and Sleep Dentistry, there’s this foo-foo! Now you have to understand what foo-foo’s are.

These are little things put in by graphic artists who design signs. They have a hole on the sign. They have a little bit of space and for whatever reason they feel they have to put something in. It’s totally useless. As far as I’m concerned it’s a weed that doesn’t say anything about what we’re trying to communicate. It’s what I don’t want to see on a sign.

Now it’s interesting, Michael called me up and said, “Jim, I’m going to get rid of the foo-foo on the sign because I’m bringing in an associate and I’m going to put his name on the sign.”

And I said, “Michael, can I make a suggestion? Don’t put the associate’s name on the sign.”

He says, “Well, he’s a real keeper. There’s even a chance that he might buy into the practice.”

I said, “Michael, I strongly suggest that you don’t do it.”

He said, “No, I really want to make sure he feels welcome.”

So he spent his $1500 and had the sign redone with the associate’s name on it.

Well, guess what, I get a call six months later and he says, “Well, Jim, I’m going to have to change the sign again.”

I said, “Oh, the associate’s leaving?”



He said, “No, I’m bringing on another associate. And I can’t have just one associate on the sign.”

I said, “Michael, be real careful here.” Three months go by, guess what, the first associate leaves.

The rule is very simple: The only names on the signs are partners, not associates, otherwise you’re going to find them changing over and over and over again. So always just put the senior doctors on the sign. That way you always know they’re always going to be there. You’re not going to replacing your sign every time your team changes. It’s a critical thing.

We’re going to take a short break right now so you can set up the next segment of this program. I’ll see you back in a few minutes for Section #2.

Welcome back for Section #2 of this program.

Now, sign variables. Signage can get old. You want to update signs with things like balloons. Now you say, “What am I doing?” Well, I learned this trick from a real estate woman. You know how you see on a Sunday when they have all the open houses for homes, you see all these placards, you see all these things that stand out in the street, pointing you up the street to a house that’s open.

Sometimes you’ll see two or three of them on a corner. Well, the one with the balloons on it will get the best response of all the ones lined up. The reason is very simple. People think of balloons and they are attached to the sign. They think there’s party. Psychologically, they think of balloons and a party and they think there’s going to be food at that party so they’ll go to that house first. Now this has been tested, I mean it, it’s really true. And that’s why they’ll go to that house. Subconsciously they’ll think there’s food there. So do this same thing.

We’ve used this in dentistry for quite some time because signs get old. People drive by your sign every day and after a while and it becomes part of the landscape. So we want put a balloon or two, or actually three. Basically you want to get yourself a tank of helium and you want to put up a Mylar balloon and two regular balloons. The Mylar balloon is important because it will twist in the sun and grab the attention because the sun will reflect off the Mylar. The other two are fine. Just attach them and they’re good for about three days. As people drive by your office they’ll see the balloons and they’ll think, “Oh, there’s a party there at the dental office. I didn’t know there was a dental office there. It works. It works all the time.

Now, colored lights for holidays. Halloween. Put an orange gel that slides around and turns and changes the color to orange and black and so forth, whatever, so that it looks like Halloween. You can put a little silhouette inside of your sign of a pumpkin or a witch. If you have walk-by traffic put a transparent lucent box adjacent to the window with a new



patient offer, because if you have walk-by traffic you can use this little box as a way to attract people to your office because it works just like a sign but it has an offer. Just a one page offer like, “Save $25 off an exam, x-ray, and cleaning”. Whatever you want. Put it there and it works just like signage.

Use a professional window dresser if you have walk-by traffic. Now this is really interesting.

I had a doctor in downtown San Francisco right on the street in the Financial District. He had big windows and it was really nice. What we did was very interesting. We went to Macy’s and they have a window designer, of course, because they have big windows and they’re displaying them all the time. But what you want to do is, in the window design business you’ve got the head window designer, you’ve got the assistant window designer, you’ve got the assistant to the assistant window designer. Now it’s that third person down that you want to get to because this person’s usually unpaid or paid minimally. And you want to go to this person and say, “I’d like to give you an opportunity to practice your craft and I want you to dress my windows once a month with a new design”.

So what they’re going to do is you’re going to give this kid a budget and he’s going to come in and give him a budget of $500 to do the job and give him a budget of $500 for props. You can negotiate all of this. That’s the thing you’ve got to remember. And what that kid will do is he’ll go down to the basement in Macy’s and he’ll start to pull props out of the basement. He’ll borrow them (This happens all the time, so don’t worry about it.) for your office and he will do a spectacular job of dressing the windows in your office. And people, as they drive by, will see a different thing every month and it will become an attraction. It actually works.

Now, I have to tell you something about these kids. They’re not your normal kids. They may have piercings in their bodies, they may have strange haircuts, they may not be the normal clean-cut American kids, but they do a great job in window dressing. And you can try it for six months and see how well it works for you but I’m sure it will pay off. It’s always paid off when it’s been done correctly.

If you have large windows in your operatories with drive-by traffic, put big stuffed animals in the chairs and at night, light them with your dental light. It’s really interesting, you put those big stuffed animals in the chairs and you’ve got the light and at night and people drive by and all the kids see them. At Christmas time, dress them up as Santa and the elves. At Halloween, dress them up as goblins. Have fun with this. Turn it into an attraction. Anything which draws attention to your practice is valuable.

There are a couple things about signs that you have to remember. One of the best sign stories that I’ve got comes from Marianne Day in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Marianne came to me about ten years ago and she says, “Jim, I just built a brand new facility in downtown Las Cruces. My husband, Grant, did it. He’s an engineer and we did a beautiful job. But I need as many new patients as I can possibly get.” And there’s an old caution here: Beware, you may get what you ask for. And that’s exactly what happened.


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After three months I got a call from Marianne. She says, “Jim, I can’t believe it. We’ve got a serious problem, 57 new patients a month!” She didn’t have time to treat 57 new patients a month. And signage was one of the big reasons she had so many patients.

Her husband, Grant, being an engineer, said, “I’m going to build a great sign for you. We’re going to put a monument sign up and we’re going to put it perpendicular to the street because we’re right in downtown Las Cruces. It’s too long to go from the office with a power line to the sidewalk area. So I’m going to do a solar sign”.

Now, I always get nervous when people start to make changes in the mechanics of a sign. But Grant was an engineer. He said, “No big deal, Jim. I know how to do this. It’s going to have a solar panel to the side. It will store it (the energy). We won’t have to worry about putting out a big, long electrical line.”

So I said, “Okay”.

So he did a nice sign. It was really great. And he did something very interesting that I’d never seen before. He had taken a course in Traffic Control and Traffic Engineering in college. And because they were on a corner and there was a stoplight, he put one of these little roadside blinkers, like strobes, the little warning strobes that you see, in the corner of the sign and he timed it so that when people were stopped at the corner, this little thing would go blink. And people’s eye would be attracted. They wouldn’t really know why. They would just see a slight blink in the sign and they would look at it. (This guy, I really kind of like.)

Well everything went along just fine, we’re doing great. We’re getting about 13 to 15 new patients a month from the sign alone. And all of a sudden we had a disaster. The Las Cruces River flooded. There was a big rainstorm, the Las Cruces River rose and flooded downtown Las Cruces. Of course, on the news at dusk, they’ve got three television crews out there showing this river of water going down the center of Las Cruces’ main street. All the power is out except for one thing, Marianne Day’s sign. All lit up because it was powered off the solar power battery system. She got 12 new patients in the next two months who called up and said, “I saw your sign on T.V. And I thought I’d call you because I needed a dentist.” Signage works, even some of the strange things.

A lot of you are saying, “I can’t use signage. I’ve got restrictions in my building about signage.” Well, I have to tell you something. Signage is really important and if your lease is coming up and you can’t get any signage at all, if you have an option, I would suggest seriously thinking about moving to a facility or a location where you can get good signage because it has tremendous impact on the value of your practice and how well you can do. I mean, you can overcome almost anything with the marketing strategies we talk about in TheWealthyDentist.com but why make life harder. If you’re going to move, make sure you move to a location where you can get good signage.

©2018 The Wealthy Dentist University. All Rights Reserved.



The next part of that is, if you absolutely are stuck, try this. It’s my Stealth Sign Strategy. If you can possibly do it, put the biggest possible flag pole you can in front of your office. And you put the biggest possible architecturally correct flag in front of the office. So, every morning you come out and you put this gigantic flag up and it’s beautiful. Everybody loves an American flag. Do the whole thing.

And after six months of running the flag up every morning and bringing down every night (and if you want, you can have it lit so you don’t have to bring it down at night), after six months run up a second flag, slightly smaller, underneath it.

Gold flag, red heart, white tooth in the middle. It’s a tooth flag. Everybody will know immediately that there’s a dental practice there. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen done and no one has ever asked us to take it down. So it’s a stealth sign.

Now, do whatever is necessary to draw attention to your sign and your practice. I think that’s the message I really want to convey to you on how to make things work.

Here’s a sign: North Valdosta Dental Care. Dr. Brad Bynum. You really don’t understand how big this sign is in this picture. Excuse me. It’s got all the elements that you need: North Valdosta Dental Care, Dr. Brad Bynum, the phone number AND the web site. Now let’s take this and look at it from a distance. Look at the two people. You realize that this sign is gigantic. This sign has to be at least 18 feet tall and 10 feet wide now that you look at it. This is the biggest, brightest possible sign that he could put together and still be legal. And it works for him, extremely well.

Now here’s another way to attract people to your practice. This is done by Dr. Steve McAnaney in Texas. And in Texas, he has a company come out and put lights on his office because he’s got drive-by traffic. And he decorates the office and you notice that he’s got his sign there, but he decorates this and it has a tremendous impact because people really like to see the decorations.

There are professional companies that will actually come out and put your lights up and take them down. It’s not all that expensive and it’s really paid off for him.

And here’s the back side. It really kind of looks nice and people get into the thing and say there’s a guy with a dental practice. They look at it and they read it. This is his sign, a great sign; it really jumps out. The interesting thing is that Steve’s been so successful that he’s building a brand new facility.

We talked earlier of Dr. Drumhiller. We had him put banners on either side of his building for the drive-by cars. Well, this is the sign that Steve’s got in front of his building. You can’t tell, but it’s got all the things: Coming Soon; Lake Texoma Dental Care; Dr. Steve McAnaney; Call Today; the phone number and it’s got the website. Everything I absolutely want.



Now if you look at it from the back, you’ll see that it’s actually two signs put together and so that it’s on the corner so you can see it from both directions on the road. He’s got it visible on both sides really well and it pays off.

You’ll also see in the background in the big one that IHOP’s in back. He’s right between IHOP, McDonald’s and a great big service station. He has unbelievable drive-by traffic. Stick with us. We’re going to have Steve report on TheWealthyDentist.com on how this new facility he’s putting together right now comes out in about five or six months. And how well the signage we’ve got planned for it works. I’ll be able to update you on his signs because he’s going to be sending us the final signage for the new facility. And we’ll have the actual statistics for you. So come back to TheWealthyDentist.com and check our section on Signage and you’ll be able to see what’s happening.

Now, what does Signage cost?

First of all, cost will vary depending on size and number of signs, that’s logical.

You can estimate construction cost of anywhere from $1,000 to $5,000 dollars depending on the size of the sign, plus $75 dollars monthly for maintenance.

You want to have a separate maintenance contract to fix the sign, clean the sign, change the lights. You don’t want to be going out and doing this.

I’m going to tell you something that’s really important. I don’t care how much the sign costs. It is so important to your success and has such high return on investment value that I’ve done signs for up to $50,000. I have to tell you that, because they pay off.

I had a doctor once, he’s from Missouri. He built a 12 operatory Taj Mahal practice….in a corn field, next to a highway, five miles outside of town. I asked him, “Why? Why did you build it?”

He said, “Well, the land was cheap. I owned it.”

I said, “It’s kind of out of the way. You have to get off at the next intersection, go through a clover leaf, and come back, to get to the practice.

And he says, “Well, what can I do?”

And the only thing I could say was, “Signage.”

You know what we did? We put up a sign. The sign was 47 feet long, 20 feet high. It did everything but dance. It lit up. The pylons for the sign, you could barely get your arms around. It pulled enough power to handle a small community. But it generated 43 new patients a month. It more than paid for itself. It was well worth it. Signage always works if it’s done correctly.



So, you can estimate $85 a month. Marginal profit, remember we talked about marginal profit? Standard new patient is $555 after the cost. There’s no token offer. We’re not going to have an offer on our sign. We don’t have to send any thank you gift with a sign for patients who come in with the sign. So your net contribution is $555.

Like I said, go to TheWealthyDentist.com. And if you want a real discussion on marginal profit, go to the section and look up our training program on “Maximizing Your Marketing: Targeting the High Value Patient”. It will take you through a complete discussion of marginal profit and how to calculate the value of a new patient.

So, we’ve got $555. Projected response: Estimated new patients, six a month / annual, 72. Marginal profit: $555 Per month: $3,300 That’s almost $40,000 annually Less maintenance cost: about $75. $900 annually. Less construction cost (that’s amortized over the next 25 years) And we end up with about $38,000 a year, almost $40,000 in net income.

Now let’s look at your Return on Investment.

First of all, you’ve got a yearly profit of almost $39,000.

ROI: You take the $39.000, and you divide it by annual cost of the sign, which is a little over $1,000 when you spread it out over the 25 years. It gives you a 3,817% Return on Investment! This is an outrageously great Return on Investment! Let’s just accept that.

Then you’ve got CAP. CAP stands for Cost to Acquire a Patient. You divide the cost of the sign annually, which is about $1,000 by the 72 new patients that you get and you get $14. So you hand me $14; I hand you a patient which nets you $555. How long do you want to play this game? This is an unbelievably low cost to acquire a new patient. I can’t stress this enough.

Break Even: That’s break-even number of patients. You take the $1,000 that it costs you and you divide it by the value of a patient, $555, and you only need 1.8 new patients a year to pay for your sign.

This is an extremely low risk and this is why I love signage. And this is why whenever we build a new facility, we always negotiate signage, whether we’re leasing or building. It’s very important to negotiate signage and you negotiate signage before you sign the lease! Or before you sign the deal with the company that you’re taking the land and the construction with. Very important.

Now, we looked at that with standard new patients. What about a high value new patient? If you target your signage like Dr. Silverman did towards cosmetics, implants, sedation, you have a different set of economics.



Let’s say we use a sedation patient which has a gross value of $2,600 and a net contribution of $1,575. Again, no token offers, no gifts that we have to give out.

We net $1,550 or so, and we look at the statistics and we end up with $112,000 when we start to target, using our sign, high value patients.

As part of TheWealthyDentist.com almost all of our marketing strategies are targeted at high value patients. If you’re going to spend a dollar for marketing, always use that dollar to target a high value patient. You will still get the regular, standard patient but target the ones that you really want. The ones that you really like to work on, the ones you’re trained best for. That means the sedation, the cosmetic, the implant, the ortho patients. We have a whole training program that walks you through how to calculate that.

Now, Return On Investment for the sedation side? Well, we’ve got $112,000.

Your ROI’s outrageous, don’t even worry about it. Your cost is still $14 and your break-even is the same. Targeting the high value sedation patient, though, adds $2,000,000 to the value of your sign for a total of $3,000,000 over the life of the sign. Just retargeting and focusing on the high value patient on your sign has a tripling effect on your profit over the life of the sign. So it’s an important issue.

Now, Additional Resources, return to TheWealthyDentist.com for a printable version of this presentation to help you and your team in training and implementation. You just hit the button and you can print it out.

An audio version that you can download to your computer and burn to a CD and play it in your car.

We want to make sure that you get the most value out of this presentation. A lot of our doctors use these presentations as training programs for their team.

They’ve hooked up their computer to a little video projector and they project it up on the wall in their lunch break room or their training room or one of their consultation rooms and use it as a training tool. We try to keep these presentations to about 20-30 minutes in length so they can fit within a training period so you can educate your team on why you’re doing marketing and all the issues around marketing.

Three. We also have a sign design gallery with the latest pictures of signs submitted by doctors. So you can go in and see some of the signs that are being built, that are being submitted by the doctors who are part of TheWealthyDentist.com.

I’m Jim Du Molin, Editor of TheWealthyDentist.com. I really appreciate the time you’ve taken to work through the issues in building the ultimate $1,000,000 Sign.



By now you’ve figured out that if you really use the issues and the ideas that we’ve given you, you can really turn this in to a $2 to $3,000,000 Sign just by targeting high value new patients. As you move through the process of building your sign and designing it, you’ll probably want to come back to TheWealthyDentist.com and check out the different issues on signage. You can look on our Forum and look at the ongoing discussion on signage and some of the ideas and be sure again to check out the Gallery.

Our philosophy at TheWealthyDentist.com is that profit is the natural result of doing what’s right for your patients. And that’s our purpose. And that’s what we want to deliver to you. Thank you.

the one million dollar sign [transcript] · welcome, i’m jim du molin, editor of...

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