Michael Bentley has spent 26 years in UK dentistry as a practice management consultant, and his view is simple: the practices that do well are the ones that stopped running everything through the dentist. The team, and the front desk in particular, is where patients decide whether they trust you enough to stay, and whether they trust you enough to spend money with you.

In this episode, Michael talks about how to tell a front desk that adds something from one that just books appointments, why treatment coordinators so often get turned into closers, and what actually separates private pay dentistry from NHS dentistry in the patient's mind.

Here's what we get into:

• The biggest change Michael has seen in his 26 years of experience.
• Why your front desk is your best early warning system.
• How to spot someone who's technically doing the job but adding nothing to the patient's experience
• What you can train into a front desk team and the one thing you can't
• The real NHS vs private pay difference, as patients feel it
• What case acceptance looks like when education comes first
• Why marketing harder before your operations are sorted tends to burn out the team and the patients

#ukdentistry #frontdesk #growth #newpatients

Your front desk picks up the phone. It's a vendor asking who handles purchasing. The next call is a patient who's been with you six years and wants to move her hygiene appointment. You paid full price for both of those clicks.

For years the default advice was that every practice needed a Google search ad strategy. We gave that advice too. Then we started listening more closely to the calls - the high-intent new patient inquiries we expected to hear weren’t coming from paid efforts alone.

Google Ads isn't pointless, and we're not telling anyone to switch it off this afternoon. But it’s not a default line item anymore. There are still practices and still procedures where paid search earns its place, and there's a clear test for whether yours is one of them.

And if it isn't, the answer is never to cut the marketing budget. It's to move that money somewhere that builds the practice you're actually trying to run.

Here's what we get into:

• Why needing Google ads is a starting assumption rather than a conclusion
• What happens to Google's tracking the second a patient picks up the phone
• Two conditions that both have to be true before paid search is worth your money
• The only two ways we'll judge any channel
• What your review count looks like sitting next to the practices around you and how this impacts ad worth
• Why patients now go and check you on ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini after they've clicked your ad, and what has to be on your site for that to go well

#googleads #newpatients #calltracking #budget

Google will put a blue verified badge on your ad, park it above every other result on the page, and only charge you when someone actually reaches out. If you have spent the last few years watching click budgets disappear into people who were never going to book, that sounds like the deal of the decade.

In this episode, Eric and Sara discuss the three places Local Service Ads quietly break down for dental practices: your review profile, your targeting and service settings, and how fast your front desk actually picks up. Then they get to the harder question of whether a tool built for plumbers and tow truck drivers belongs in dentistry at all.

Here's what we get into:

• Why LSAs sit above every regular search ad on the page.
• Why drawing a five-mile circle around your practice is lazy targeting.
• What leaving every service checked actually costs you.
• How Google grades your responsiveness behind the scenes.
• Why Google is not protecting your practice when it drops your rank.
• What is coming as LSAs move into Google Ads, the reports you should download before that happens, and why boring is sexy once everybody on the page has the same blue check mark.

#googleads #newpatients #growth #budget #reviews