A dental group rarely grows by adding patients. It grows by finishing the treatment it already diagnosed.

Four areas and a plan. Treatment presentation and acceptance, meaning diagnosed, accepted and completed value by provider; hygiene, recall and retention, meaning reappointment and attrition measured at the chair; procedure mix economics, meaning contribution and affordable acquisition cost by category and payer; and location capacity, so the growth target matches chairs and clinical hours. The output is a written plan with owners, a marketing brief your vendors can be held to, and a monthly scorecard your team maintains.

A coach works with the owner and team over months on leadership, systems and accountability, and good coaching changes practices. This is a shorter, narrower engagement: a data project that produces a commercial diagnosis and a written plan, then ends. We do not run a coaching program, a membership community or a training curriculum. Many groups run both, using the plan as the agenda the coaching then holds people to.

It is built for groups, DSOs and private equity backed platforms, because the value comes from comparing locations, providers and acquired models against each other. A single practice with one operatory pair and one provider usually gets more from operational coaching and a tighter recall system. Where a single practice has several providers, real specialty volume and a genuine mix question, the analysis still pays, and we will say so at the scoping call.

An agency is paid to buy media and generate new patients. This engagement is paid to find out where the group actually loses production, and in dentistry that is usually acceptance, completion, reappointment or schedule utilisation rather than reach. Because we take no execution work inside the engagement, the plan can conclude that you should spend less and fix the coordinator handoff. If you want execution afterwards it is scoped separately, and the brief is written so any agency, including your current one, can deliver against it.

No. Diagnosis, treatment planning standards, coding and regulatory questions belong with your clinical leadership and your own advisors. We stay on the commercial side: presentation and financing process, mix, recall, capacity and the marketing brief. Where a recommendation would touch a clinical or regulated area, the plan flags it and routes it rather than guessing.

A fixed fee quoted after a scoping call, with deliverables and dates written down before you commit. It varies with the number of practices, how many specialties are in scope and the state of the data, so publishing a rate would mislead most readers. For budget context, The CMO Survey puts marketing at an average 9.0% of company revenue, with 33.6% of digital activity run by outside agencies. Book a meeting for a scope and a number.

No, and tidying it is usually part of the value. We work with what exists, reconcile production against collections, and state plainly which findings are solid and which are directional. 62% of organizations report losing revenue directly because of poor data quality, and only 41% have a dedicated data governance owner, so this is the norm rather than an embarrassment. The plan includes the field and process changes that make next year's analysis reliable, or marketing operations consulting if the rebuild is larger.

Because the arithmetic is usually kinder there. Average case acceptance is 42% while the top 10% of practices reach 75%, and average retention is 70% against 94%, so a group that lifts acceptance and reappointment gets paid on demand it has already bought. New patient acquisition then compounds instead of replacing leakage, and the marketing brief can set a real cost per patient by category.

It does once the base is healthy, and the platform data shows the size of it. Practices seeing 75 or more new patients a month grow at nearly double the rate of practices seeing fewer than 35, while the average practice sees 46 and nearly 40% see fewer than 20. The plan sequences it: fix the leaks that make acquisition expensive, then buy volume against a cost per patient the mix can support.

We measure them and recommend the standard; your operations team runs it. Cancellations averaged 12.9% and no-shows 6.9% in the 2026 platform data, both improving year over year, and the average new patient waits 25 days for an appointment against 4.5 days in the top 10%. Those two facts together often explain a stalled practice better than its advertising does.

The same method, run per operating brand and then compared, because that comparison is the point of a platform. Acceptance, completion, reappointment, production per day, schedule utilisation and contribution are cut by practice and by market, which shows which acquired model deserves to become the standard and which integration assumption is not supported. The plan is written so an operating partner can read it and act on it, and the marketing brief is portable across the platform.

No. We are not a broker, an investment bank or a valuation firm, and nothing here is investment, tax or legal advice. What we do is the commercial work underneath those conversations: showing how the group really earns production and margin by practice and category, how much of the growth is repeatable, and what the plan for the next four quarters is. Owners preparing for a process often use that alongside their own financial and legal advisors.

Twelve months of production and collections by practice and provider, treatment plans with accepted and completed status, hygiene reappointment, scheduling records including cancellations and no-shows, and new patient counts with source where it exists. If the source field is unreliable, say so and we will work around it. We reconcile against the accounting system rather than taking dashboard totals at face value.

Yes. The mechanics are close enough that the same engagement runs for adjacent categories, with the mix and recall cycles changed. The parent version is growth advisory, and there is a sibling page for medical spa growth consulting, where membership penetration and provider utilisation dominate the analysis instead of case acceptance.

A marketing audit examines what is currently running and what it returns. This engagement is wider: it covers acceptance, hygiene and recall, procedure mix and location capacity, which is where dental growth is usually decided, and it ends in a plan rather than findings. Groups that want positioning and brand work rather than commercial mechanics should look at marketing strategy consulting instead.

Your team runs it, and every workstream has a named owner on your side. Many groups book a review at ninety days to re-measure acceptance, reappointment and contribution, which takes half a day and is optional. Where you want ongoing marketing leadership rather than a project, a fractional CMO or scorecard advisory is the next engagement, quoted separately.