From $10k to $100k+/mo With an AI Lead Generation Agency | Nico Ciraolo | #26

do so much volume that it will be unreasonable for you not to succeed. You tenx joins us to revenue in the past year and you've hit six fingers a month. What is the secret to that rapid growth in the end of the season? 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 allowed us to innovate really quickly and get a lot of compounded learnings. Tapping into an industry which has needed disruption for a long time and you've pulled it off and really well on your growth is a demonstration of that. 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, cosmetic dentistry is absolute booming. You've generated 2.2 million client revenue if I saw on your Instagram a couple of days ago in the last quarter which is massive. 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. It's an absolute massive for 10Xing the efficiency of anyone on your team. For example Nico welcome to eight-inch giants. Thank you. Great to be here. Good to have you here. So you 10X your agencies revenue in the past year and you've hit six fingers a month which is awesome. What is the secret to that rapid growth in the agency? 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 kind 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. I think a lot of agencies make that mistake where they well I say mistakes and put it off well where they go real real horizontal scale too quickly. 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 high? Because I think it's that level 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 block. 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 this 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. This is interesting and I want to unpack that because I'm will come on today shortly. I mean I think I mentioned this to you before you say you did a new kid on the block, new guys on the block. Dental agency has been around for a long time. I have a good friend who owns a or has a successful dental agency and message me about a six months ago saying a lot of our clients are moving on at the moment and what is later strategy on getting dental clients and how how we can reach to this market and then back in my mind I'm thinking I bet this is Nico. I think it is. I think this is Nico. So I want to explore that today because I think what you've done is incredible like tapping into an industry which has needed disruption for a long time. There's been stagnation across the agencies in this space and so 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? I think it's a really interesting industry because firstly the from a fundamental 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. If you have a gym membership you have to be a member for 12 months before you start you know making huge amounts. And so for dentistry 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 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 is 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 along to 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 described yourself as a complete patient acquisition partner. 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 a 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 in 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 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 who's starting treatment how much revenue of those patients generating because anyone everyone in 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%. I was having this conversation last night with someone who said I've generated a 50 liter of client this month and the conversion rate is really low and we looked at all of the funnel and the point of setting process and so on is like have you not considered that the marketing is the issue here and the issue is we're generating the wrong kind of leads and they haven't even considered that and it's credits them a new new a 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 the 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 after I saw on your Instagram a couple days ago in the last quarter which is massive. 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. Would you mean is it the front end sales? 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? 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 going to spend thousands of pounds on this treatment I'm going to 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 going to go get for years at this best dentist in the UK I'm not going necessarily going to 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 some speaking to a lot of these practice owners really trying to understand what what is the best kind of model? 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 because 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 it's 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 have always that are just absolutely taking off in the last few years is because their diaries are just packed with high ticket cosmetic cases. Other majority of the clients you're working with already working with an agency when you when you start working with them and if yes what are the main problems that they're facing with the other agencies that you're kind of coming at differently? 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 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 a business line and just super hardcore discount focused ads works if you're very you know competitive on the price from a lot of our client don't tend to be you know that's not their positioning at all they're always a lot more expensive than the competition so our ads are much more value-led 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 their pros and cons to that it means that we really our ICP is so narrowly defined and we're not the right fear 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 the process we won't separate our service into different pieces so it didn't fit for them because they they had an internal sales team that they'd invested a huge amount in so we're not going to be doing their their kind of lead conversion sales for them so it doesn't match that's interesting because it was it was going to be a follow-on question was would you take on client so you're not handling that sales process or that's that's very interesting and gone a really big portion of of this I think of our our growth has been having such a narrowly defined ICP it's literally like we do the full process there's no questions asked we're full creative control over everything that we put out we handle 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 that's the ultimate situation as an established agency who's who knows what their worth is and what they can achieve was at 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 secondary sander has been sat there doing it for the past 10 years you know actually we did it from so early on I've only ever my first ever client was the only one who was ever lead genuinely since then every single one has been we do the full process and we really just stuck to that I think you know classic you know entrepreneur 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 on what's driving results right now 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 yeah yeah I want to come into that I want to think about I want to dive into your your mindset around that and where this actually goes later but just 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 then getting involved in the actual sale of the service what how far does it go patient in your chair so once the patient is in your chair that's the cleanest point of hand over 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 the patient is in your chair that's where you take over and just from a quick tactical perspective a lot of people who do who run appointment setting services which I believe is I think it's an essential service to offer as a lead generation as you see these days it's become it's quickly becoming industry standard a lot of people struggle with 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 tactics that you can give on guessing or ensuring the show up to that or actually the bum on the chair after the commitment yeah definitely we take deposits for all the consultations I think it's really making patients understand the value of that console 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 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're going to get out of that consultation and then their paying deposits means that short rates are pretty strong nice so the the consultation isn't being positioned as a free consultation we do it's the different models either you can have deposits which are deducted from cost of treatment refundable deposits upon attendance so provided they attend that will be refunded to them majority are or that latter but some do deducted 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 for 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 in conversion rate was not strong enough to justify the increase in cost of birth 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 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 out across the rest of our clients does that mean that your what do you have to have limitation on catchment area and exclusivity to certain kinds? 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 that that's essentially what an agency is and I think if we were to have like big catchment areas and only be able to work with 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 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 going to get you these results do you care who else we're working with because if I can tell you you're going to get this this many patients in your chair this much revenue is going to 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's it matter to you I think it's in the heads a little bit that you're oh you're working with my competitor but if you're going to get these results if I can guarantee you that you'll get this do you do you really care about that makes sense ego comes into my life and what's the alternative working with a subpar agency is going to get even worse results for you but it's not working with your competitors yeah you can have that bespoke trashy 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 going to be for that that campaign yeah that makes sense zooming out a bit and you started your agency two years yeah you're in 11 months yeah 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 just just sticking on course and doing that the only things that you need to be doing you know I haven't really observed you veer and then have to come back I mean you might have experienced it in yourself and we can unpack that but what brought you up to this point what were the foundations that brought you to writing an agency and and why then jump into starting an agency yeah so it's pretty much right after graduating from uni so I did economics and business at UCL was going to finance investment banking and then went to start my agency right after uni so it was pretty quick you know graduate uni then to go straight into agency and then from there I think you were 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 reinforce 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 you know would I have stuck with it at the end of the day I'm not sure 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 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 just call calling dental practices was people just saying like I know I them having faith that I'm going to go to the end 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 later 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 just doing a lot and trying to do absolutely anything and everything for you yeah 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 of the time they're buying into your commitment level I would just think of it like this 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 there's always satirates and there's stagnated like with determines and there are lots of these other industries dentistry is just one of them there are so many of them know 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 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 realize is if they just showed the same level of commitment and passion as or more commitment and passion to master the model that their 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 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'm all in and I'm going to absolutely nail this for you like that's what people are buying I couldn't agree more and I think a lot of people will look including myself will look at these industries dentistry what massive you know be industry being around for the test of time I'm never going to 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 yeah agree agree you're just coming at it from a completely new perspective and they 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 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 a 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% so we've worked together for a couple of years how's that come about how did that how did you stumble across us early stages YouTube through YouTube yeah and straight away I didn't even spend a day in the agent I signed up for it with with you way before I even started the agency oh not way before about 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 ten 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 almost you think at the end of the day right do so much volume that it would be unreasonable for you not to succeed and especially what you've done with your program right operationalizing what the inputs are required in order for after wide period of time to get that outcome 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 woman again who mostly state the fact tell the truth is really really really strong because I think in those early days you know you you feel it 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 were 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 so the person whether that's the issue or not but you know it creates all these opportunities for things to potentially destabilize and cause issues I can't agree more on that point everyone through insecurity or not everyone 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 going to be coming from a place of lack it's not going to be in the abundant energy whereas if you actually just admit you're here but then you have you over-inflate 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 fought 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 yeah you know I think clients also really buy into dentologies growth so if you pretend you're you know at a 100 immediately a lot of our clients 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 really bought in these are the guys to be with so much confidence there 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 of what the latest is in marketing and we feel like you guys 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 that the best service possible that really is the catalyst for that you've had you've had that classic what I say classic that the desire that everybody craves hockey stick growth you you you had a nice correct and wrong 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 candlestick it's gone it's gone crazy talk us through that that transitional phase because you you went from like from from from my perspective from the academy and you joined our elite and then you and then all of a sudden you've gone this 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 that's that been crazy 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 when was he 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 kind 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 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 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 yeah then after that in terms of what were the casters or what did it look like in terms of like scaling a lot more I think it's really I think reputation was the key for it I think we're so now 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're getting them really good results and by affiliation meant that once the word spread everyone comes on calls all the time they're like all 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 going to speak to that person asking them about what their experience was 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 I know for the first period of your growth you were very cold outreach focus and then you had this period of ads and I know you're still running ads how how much now has I presume cold is it's something you no longer do 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 the forefront of yeah 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 product 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 who you say you're on 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 negligible we really don't spend that much on ads now it's like yeah now with the multi-month wait list we're barely we're really really extremely selective on who we on board now 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 of dozens of practices rolling out across their whole portfolio practices is way more valuable and interesting than you know signing on 20 more clients yeah I remember when you first started running ads your customer acquisition cost was insane it was like a unicorn we couldn't model it on anything because it's just unrealistic to maintain has that stayed relatively consistent across I think the reason why that was why it was so low is just the people who like as soon as you see the biggest names in dentistry talking about this but everyone is going to 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 I spoke about this and the event yesterday I said that the goal is people think that the we have to sell as people with this big bold guarantee which just get you to a certain point but ultimately the goal is having your clients deeply want to be like all of the other clients that you're working with your clients are the demonstration of 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 yeah 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 lasting reviews all over Google like what's the situation for a client acquisition or are the existing clients well your existing client how are you wearing the the reputation that you've you've filmed if there's an event last week a private dental event with all these big named dentists because 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 testimonials and case studies and whatnot but those events is where it all happens and 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 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 this 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 named dentist is at every single one every time any ambitions to branch out of internationally to other regions I think eventually we will but right now we've really invested so much in 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 or why they're using different practice management software is 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 they tell us that they they aren't built for the way that we get client patients in then it's not going to not going to work I know early on there was that bottles from that road block of being able to integrate with different softwares without giving away your IP like what did that process look like of being able to to overcome that road block of spending into tech yeah bring on a co-founder whose 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 the nature of the treatments right is caused 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 bring experience 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 roleplay is 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 the 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 reporting on every single bit of the funnel and coming from an e-com 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 so 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% how many team members have you got on the sales side 15 15 yeah nice and how is that process being managing those people are you the sales manager you have an internal so it's split into pods each pod has a senior 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 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 to massively improve the the service and the skill of the people who are working with you so sales managers that's purely managing the pod and yeah increasing that's quite interesting how was that transition in general being for you going from a marketer to you know the CEO managing director whatever you want to call yourself because you've done that in a very quick amount of time so your iteration your rate of change must have been pretty quick I think what is good is that because I didn't have a huge background in that team 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 to the relationships that I've built with them but I think my ability or my comfort with bringing in someone and delegating to them has really enabled that to grow quite quickly particularly on the sales front for example people who have managed teams of sales people been in sales 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 recognising a player is 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 it grows very quickly but they 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 just die 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 the business I think a lot from my side is is honestly just making sure making sure that that vision and momentum is sustained I think a lot of people are really thriving off of the momentum that we haven't seen that growth being like this is insane 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 it's not just some agency you know turn and burn kind of thing I imagine that would be quite demoralising 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 these events and things and everyone is coming on we have multi-month wait list you know all these things really build that culture of you know we're building something special and I think people really get bought into that yeah love that they're just clinging on to the rocket shipping yeah yeah yeah it's it's fully a team effort as in like everyone is driving so much impact that it really that's that's the thing with being intent 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 I'm interested just on the on the tech side having so many team members and managing team members is something I've done for many years like sales team members particularly are you how are you running internal tracking systems so you created custom internal KPI tracking systems to measure the success are you leading a boarding appointment setters and so yeah yeah yeah what does that look like in your painting picture 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 with 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 the people really pushing for 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 housed in dentology so connecting everything from what's happening in matter 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 or all of that all of that stuff is pulling through dentology awesome 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 the spreading yourself to thinner 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 remain focused yeah 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 upside 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 spoke of the 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 is 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 creative so we're going to need per month all of that it needs to be baked into our system as you move in more and more up market have you considered what that means for the the bottom end of the market but the the the smaller practices will you look to create a separate solution for those agencies we will partner for those practices but partner agencies or even a down-to-downs agency yourself 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 to 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 how are you handling the wait list in general and managing expectations on that side of things yeah I think when we bring on clients we always tell them so we manage all our launched lots 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 then anyway a lot of these bigger groups it's not like okay one day to the next you know something you're going to 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 going to be taking on a lot of the patient journey we need to know everything about your practice inside out train our team on all 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 but yeah they're they're aware that we operate it and so if we tell the client we're launched you know our next slot when we would be able to launch use in two months time it's not there's not the end of the world yeah it makes sense just great for positioning and so on that you're gagging for it but that's awesome 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 and being an extension of it 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 Legion agencies which are kind of more seen as like 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 we're 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 basically your whole marketing and sales team pretty much and then in terms of taking equity in practices I think our our next our the next couple years is really going to be building out more infrastructure around software and really building on more into this patient acquisition system and then and then whether we roll it out to people at different stages as well or expand geographically that's that's probably rising 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 built no clients you know 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 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 as another element of that I think the team all really enjoy is there guiding the product development too they're saying oh be amazing to have this feature this feature the as team are saying they need they want this and this every the whole platform is being informed by everyone on the team or the departments love them. Dentalogy.ai we were talking about software and tech yeah how are you thinking about AI and the impact that's going to have on all of this. It's absolute 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 the sort of stuff especially when you're working with enterprise you know 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 that might need review from a manager guiding your your team on how they can be doing better like all of these small things just add a lot of efficiency on that adds the 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 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 as irrespective of which software they're using we've built integrations with all the big ones so. And as you can see like yours is always going to be at the competitive advantage or something like AI because at the AI the output of AI is only good as good as the input your input is the massive data that you're collecting working with the same industry over time and so that is it's going to be powerful. That data piece 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. 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 path? Well 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 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. I think as opposed to how your biggest mistake is actually a win because there's no point in doing anything differently and that's a wonderful position to be in. Yeah I mean ideally you hire the things 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 doing with the level of output that you want to be doing. Yeah it's huge yeah yeah 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 bad. Spending time on cold outreach or 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 like big people in the industry just clearly coming from a position of wanting to provide value. I think just the last messaging people with the get 10 patients blah blah blah you know that kind of sounding like everyone else is just so easy to just fall into like people won't even look at you twice. I wanted to bring that up earlier and so I'm glad you brought that back up. The whole let's just call it the $100 million or offers blueprint we're going to get you extra result in specific time frame risk reversal. You still have a guarantee and it's it's just a performance model. It's a performance model. Yeah okay two things that twofold then number one did you have a guarantee like that okay no and and why not. Never used the guarantee didn't feel like it was ever needed to be honest. Nice okay and so I would agree with that logic 100% but I want to know why you then think that you were able to get the clients over the line without an absence of a guarantee because many people convince themselves that they have to have one of those specific tangible $100 million offer guarantees in order to be able to grow an agency and sign clients. Social proof. I think if you can show results that guarantees just because it's 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 going to 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 do you have 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 going to be paying us. So there's no base fee? No there's a base fee but it's for enterprise clients the base fee is negligible. And then it's a fixed amount per patient. It's on a sliding scale a two advanced system. So it's a two advanced 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? What was your mindset around how much you could be charging per patient? 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. They want it anyway. They want it 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 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. I've 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. I'd love to unpack your general mindset around that and what your goals are there. As a brand as dendology like dare I say you'd probably I mean you're going to continue growing inevitably in the rate that you're going in absence of your personal brand. So talk us through. I've actually just thought of something which I think potentially might be the biggest mistake or there'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 oh a lot of it it's all founded 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 unlocks 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. 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 kind of opinions on where the industry is going and things like that from a marketing perspective and patient acquisition perspective so I think that really comes from 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 in to 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 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 or something as well. Yeah definitely. Very nice. Talking of the future. Where did you see Dentalogy going long-term? What is the long-term vision here? 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 a 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 really guiding that change as well being at the forefront of that continuing to innovate on that on that front and then potentially a longer term expanding into international markets will probably be on the table too. Nice. Or whether we're also introducing levels of service that are more you know use our licensing access to our system basically. And what do you get out of this like is this cash flow? Is this a future exit like what is what is Nico working towards? 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 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 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 change on that front. Nice. Alongside Lucas well being a huge component of that too. That's been a game changer. That's been so fun. Awesome. Working with your brother. Yeah. Yeah. What's it like working with family? It's awesome. I love it. I absolutely love it because I think we have such complimentary skill sets like 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 for your career really is 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. That's awesome man. He's all in. He's all in. Yeah he's all in. He's all in. Yeah that's so nice. That's an exciting opportunity to be able to bring your family into this as well. I'd had to follow one off the back of that of working with Luca. Hold that. Looking in the short term in we're talking six, 12 months maximum. What are the current bottlenecks? What are you what are you trying to overcome at the moment? 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 progression road maps, formalizing culture things. A lot around also financial client level PNLs or all these time to value checkpoints tracking all those KPIs. All 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 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 aspects now. Nice. Nice. I want to jump into some quick lessons for agency owners. Start 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 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? That you need to follow some sort of playbook. I think then again in those early stages I really liked following something that would get me those early results by 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 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 I need to do what everyone else is doing. That's I mean you're the ultimate demonstration of that. In a market full of agencies doing the same thing as each other or copying each other you've broken out of that. Following a playbook is great for getting you off the ground and then you have to figure out your own path in business completely agree. I just remembered the question that I wanted to ask you and that do you have an office? Are you are you physical office base or are you a virtual international company and what is your general mindset surrounding that? Fully remote for now. I definitely think we want to be doing more in person things just because it's fun and it's from a culture perspective. I think it's really really the right thing to do as well. But yeah, fully remote for now and I 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? No, I think remote has been has been amazing for this especially in those early early phases. So I definitely think fully remote and for the foreseeable future by still think there's a place to be doing in person events even if it's not just every day working with your team in an office. Nice. I think it's nice to do when you really were like elements of professionalizing the company. When you're at that stage, I think having those sorts of events and things that you're supposed to do. People like physical presence. Yeah, exactly. But also you are the new age of agency and so why wouldn't you benefit from having that hybridized approach? Having that there's one thing that we realize in the agency, we were virtual forever until you know a couple of years ago and 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 when a Black Friday lock in everyone we're flying people in internationally and we're just locking in the office like it's going to be awesome. Countdowns and timers on clientele 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 the sweet spot. I think from a moral standpoint like you're talking about having that team kind of culture all together on site 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 by still thinking it's not quite the same as being in person together. So I think if you can be doing some in person events that say on a quarterly basis can you pre-toe 80/20e? I don't know but there's well with the direction that we'll probably get realistically. Yeah nice. Okay final question for agency owners that are at a brick wall at the moment and they will feel at least they are perceptiony at maybe they're stuck at around 50k a month or below that point trying to get past that. What advice would you give to those guys? I think pipeline is everything. I think building that demand was completely transformative for for a dentology because once we had that demand you can really narrow down who your best 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 serve this. 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. Nice. Me too. Pleasure. Thanks for all the