Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign welcome to the Victory Show. I'm Travis Cody, bestselling author of 16 books. I've had the privilege of helping hundreds of business consultants, founders, and entrepreneurs write and publish their own bestselling book. In that journey, I've discovered a fascinating pattern. Most businesses hit a revenue plateau and they struggle to break through it. On this show, I sit down with some of the world's most successful CEOs, leaders, and business owners to uncover the strategies they used to overcome those plateaus and scale their businesses to new heights. If you're looking to learn from the best and get actionable insights that can propel your business forward, you're in the right place. And on today's show, do we have a good one? I have the honor of introducing a guest who has mastered the art of helping professionals elevate their practices and achieve extraordinary success. Success. Dr. Lynn Tao. Not only is he a celebrated dentist, but he's also a trusted coach, speaker, and thought leader in the world of dental practice growth and patient connection. With over two decades of hands on experience, Dr. Lynn has transformed the way dental professionals approach patient care and practice management. As the host of the Raving Patients podcast, he shared invaluable insights with thousands, helping them attract loyal patients and build thriving businesses. His passion for innovation coupled with his commitment to excellence has made him a sought after expert for dentists ready to take their practices to the next level. Doctors Lin's journey is a true testament to the power of adaptability and continuous learning. From leveraging the power of online reviews to building relationships, at last, his strategies have empowered countless practitioners to stand out in a very competitive field. So get ready for a super enlightening conversation packed with wisdom, inspiration, and a lot of actionable takeaways. Dr. Lynn, thank you so much for being here. I've been looking forward to our conversation.
[00:01:53] Speaker B: I'm excited to be here. I host my own podcast and I love being interviewed and I love interviewing people, so I'm excited to be on. I appreciate the opportunity to share my story with your listeners.
[00:02:05] Speaker A: As soon as we got online, I saw your neon sign and I'm like, I gotta step up my game.
I love it. That's fantastic. We're gonna be talking about business and business growth and scaling, but we gotta step this back a little bit because we were chatting a minute ago. You shared something with me that was fascina and that was. You became a professional card dealer at 13.
[00:02:26] Speaker B: I. I basically loved sports cards as a kid. And this is in the mid-80s. We now call that era the Jump Wax era because millions of cards were printed and the cards are not worth much nowadays. But back then we didn't know any different. And I was fortunate that I was a tennis player. I played a lot of tennis as a kid. And my, my tennis coach one day invited me. He says, I'm setting up a booth at a trade show, a sports card show. Would you like to come? I was like, sure. So I went and I was like, this is cool. I went home, went to my mom and dad, And I was 13 at the time. And I said, I want a $10,000 loan.
And my mom and dad like a.
[00:03:08] Speaker A: Million dollars in 2025.
[00:03:09] Speaker B: They were like, what for? I'm like, I want to start a baseball card business. They were like, okay, Len wants to be an entrepreneur. Back then they called me Lenny. So Lenny wants to be an entrepreneur. My dad lent me the money. I had to sign a promissory note.
[00:03:22] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:03:23] Speaker B: And we started a joint venture called lnn's Lineup. My dad's name was Mort. My name was. I paid my dad back in about three months his $10,000. I renamed the business Lenny's Lineup. So I got my dad out of there and for the next three months in.
[00:03:37] Speaker A: And you're already bought out your partner?
[00:03:39] Speaker B: Yep. And then I, I knew what to buy, I knew how to sell. I was a great salesperson at 13 years old. And for the next three or four years I was profiting about 60 to $65,000 a year as a teenager. And I thought that I would go in the direction of being entrepreneur because I had that great experience as a kid. I went to Tulane in 1991. I sold the business before I went to college and I sold it at the perfect time. I stayed out of the card business, anything to do with baseball cards. I was almost burnt out at that point. And I stayed out of it for an extremely long time. I have a son, he's now 17 years old. A couple Decembers ago he said, hey, there's this new wax product coming out, can I go buy it? I was like, sure. We bought it, we opened up and I got this rush back. We started going to shows and buying cards. Would you believe now I am a co owner in a sports card business down here in South Florida.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: So how did. Just walk me through that a little bit as a 13 year old. Like I know nothing about the card business, obviously. So how. What did you do to be able to generate enough money to pay off a $10,000 loan in three months?
[00:04:46] Speaker B: It was more of a Speculation. You bought so many cards made of each person. So you basically said, okay, I think this person's going to be good. They're a prospect. You can buy them cheap right now and hopefully resell them for double, triple, three, four times the money a few months later. And I picked the right players and I did really well and in what I bought and who I bought. And I was able to just make money very quickly back then. Now they have a grading system. Cards are graded PSAs, Becket, BGs, they're graded cards. Back then that didn't exist. So you'd have to look at a card, make a decision, the quality of the card, and then you bought and sold them. And I was very good at wheeling and dealing, going to show and setting up, and just found a way to scratch and make a lot of money.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: So did you just basically do shows on the weekends? School during five days a week, and then the weekends you were wheeling and dealing.
[00:05:36] Speaker B: Back then, the Internet didn't exist. We had a magazine called Sports Collector's Digest and Beckon Monthly that gave us the trends in the industry. I would go to shows on the weekends. I grew up in New York, so there were shows all around New York. I really enjoyed doing it. I enjoyed running a business, making money, keeping the books. I learned a lot to run a business at that age that didn't squash.
[00:05:56] Speaker A: You right down and actually supported what you were doing. That's pretty remarkable. So was your dad an entrepreneur?
[00:06:04] Speaker B: My dad was a dentist, too. He was a good businessman. Most dentists are not good businessmen. They know how to drill, fill and build, but they don't run the business well. I am an extraordinary business person and I now help dentists on the business side. I no longer practice, but I was extraordinary on the business side. I learned a lot from my dad on the business side. My dad was really above and beyond what the typical dentist was.
[00:06:25] Speaker A: Sure. So when you went to college, did you go to college with an eye of going into dentistry or did that end up choosing you?
[00:06:32] Speaker B: It was really funny. I actually thought I would be an accountant first. I took an accounting class in high school and I'm like, absolutely not, not doing this. I was always a very good arguer. I thought about law. I still remember, like, there's very key instances in your life that determines your path. And I still remember this. I went to Tulane University and I was sitting in my apartment, the headline news station. There was a fun fact that came up, and this was probably 92. I remember seeing by the year 2010 there would be triple the number of lawyers in there are now.
And something just said to me, len, you're not going to be an attorney.
[00:07:08] Speaker A: Just one headline.
[00:07:10] Speaker B: And there's a couple instances that really shaped my career. But this one instance, I called my parents and I said, I've been thinking about it, and I think I'm gonna be coming dentist.
And I. I vividly remember my mother. My mom and dad have both passed away, but I remember vividly my mother saying, you're selling yourself to the devil.
My dad and I, we had a great relationship, but we had an odd relationship. We were loud to each other, and that was the goal. The goal was to go into dentistry. So I graduated Tulane and I went to Tufts Dental School, where my dad was a dentist as well. He had gone to Tufts Dental School, and the plan was for me to take over one of his practices. He had one in the home. I grew up in Rockland county and one in New York City in Manhattan. Unfortunately, it's my third year of college. He was diagnosed with a rare form of osteogenic sarcoma, which was a bad cancer. And he had an implant placed in his left femur and knee. Was out of practice for a year and a half and had to sell to New York practice. So there was no practice for me to go into. So that was a question. It wasn't going to happen. The goal was eventually to work with him, and again, that never happened. But that's how my path to dentistry happened. I had a father who was very influential on me, and I decided I wanted to follow in his footsteps.
[00:08:24] Speaker A: But also, what a great model, that it wasn't just a dentist. He was also very smart at the business side of it. I used to live in Los Angeles, and I had a friend of mine who was. He's now one of the top foot surgeons in the country, if not the world. I remember having dinner with him one time. We were chatting, and he. And he said, yeah, if I had to do all over again, I would go back to school and be a dentist.
Well, I was like, why is that? He said, I love what I do and I'm good at it, but I always have to be near a huge city because I'm so specialized. Show me a town in North America that does not have a dentist. He's, you can go any, anywhere. And that was him. Dentistry was the freedom to, like, everywhere I go, there's a job. So I just never forgot. That was probably 10 years ago. He shared that, but I. So that was interesting. So when you got outta school, did you go work for someone else? Did you immediately start your own practice? What was your journey?
[00:09:13] Speaker B: It's funny you asked that right after that, because, remember, I said, there's a couple of key things that happened in my life that kind of shaped the way things happen. One of them was the seeing that fun fact on tv. After dental school, you have a choice. You can specialize, go to residency or go into private practice. I decided to do a residency. They have a product in or a program in the medical field, in the dental field called the match. And what happens is you rank the programs you want to go to, they rank you, and if you match, you end up going to that program. I wanted to go to the University of Connecticut. It was not far from Massachusetts, where I was living, but I didn't want to get to New York at that point. So what was interesting was I put them as number one and they told me they were putting me as number one. So I figured, okay, Len, you're going to go to Connecticut. That didn't happen. I ended up matching with my second choice in southern New Jersey. And I reached out to the program. I'm like, what happened here? And they said, I don't know, we should have matched. It turns out there was a clerical error and my name and two of the other names they wanted were left off the match list. So I was sent to Southern Jersey, which changed the trajectory of my entire life. I ended up meeting someone in Philadelphia or on vacation. When I was moving to Philadelphia, she ended up becoming my first wife. Okay, I met. So I met somebody before I even got there. She was living in Philadelphia. I was moving there. I ended up marrying her. We divorced a couple years later and I remarried to the woman I'm married to right now. That would never have happened if I was not sent to New Jersey.
[00:10:45] Speaker A: Isn't it fun to look back and this little, like, at the time, that may sometimes even be like, oh, God, I didn't get into the school that I wanted. But then that actually ends up being, like, best thing for you. So how did the residency work? Were you working for a big practice or another?
[00:11:01] Speaker B: No. So I. I was working. It was the University of Medic, New Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, now called Rutgers. I'm in Southern Jersey. I ended up living in Philadelphia for a while because I wanted to live in a bigger city. And I. Once I got out of the residency, I started working for a couple of dentists in New Jersey and knew that was not going to be the End all, be all. But I want and I eventually wanted to open my own practice. My ex wife was from Lansdale, Pennsylvania and she introduced me, introduced me to a dentist there who needed an associate because his associate was leaving. I joined a practice in Lansdale and I worked there for four or five years. I then knew it was time that I wanted to be my own boss. In March of 2007, I bought a practice from a dentist who had committed suicide. In January of that year, I bought the practice and started from scratch because the patients were were there, but the doctor was. That starts the next part of my journey. Because now I was a solo owner in a practice bought under extraordinary circumstances.
[00:11:56] Speaker A: In the world of dentistry, what are the complications of the business side that most dentists don't realize they're getting into when they start?
[00:12:06] Speaker B: I had a very good business background. The dentistry is the easy part, running the business. I had a lot to learn running a dental practice. It's a small business, but you're the CEO, cfo, cmo, you do all these things and you do the dentistry. So I spent 25 hours treating patients, but I spent another 25 hours working on the business. I bought the dentist, the practice from a dentist who committed suicide. I bought the practice which gave me the patients. I bought the building which I then gutted and redid. When people were coming to the practice, you wouldn't know it was the same thing. I built an amazing physical facility. I always say I built the practice of my dreams, but I wasn't living the life of my dreams.
Why was that? Just because I was making money? I was burnt out, but I was struggling to make ends meet. Even though I was making money, I had a big debt service for doing what I did. I wanted to pay the debt off as quickly as possible. So I was not making as much money, but I was working my butt off. It was at that point I decided I did not want to be 75 years old and still working in dentistry. I knew I had to find a way out of the operatory that take starts the next part of my journey. When in 2010, 11 and 12, I realized the power of how online reviews were driving patients to my practice.
I was doing a lot of marketing. I tried all sorts of things. I threw darts at every possible type of marketing. And the one thing that was working was reviews. When I got reviews, patients would come in and say, I came in because of your reviews. And I knew I had something here. I need to find a way to make it easier for patients to write Reviews. I created a piece of software called Isocial Reviews and it debuted at the Yankee dental meeting in 2013.
I actually called them up and said, I don't have any money and I want the remnant space. They have a flea market in the back where they sell bamboo sheets and knives. Stick me back there, I just need to get in. I went in there, I sold nine people, and I knew I had something. My very first meeting, nine people. Over the course of the next 16, 18 months, I had 180 dentists use my product. I sold my company in 2014 to a company that I currently run the dental division for, called Bird Eye. We're a reputation marketing company. We work with close to 11,000 dentists, which I control. We have another couple hundred thousand businesses of all industries that we work with. We're $180 million company now, and it's been a remarkable opportunity. They got me out of the operatory. In 2020, I moved to Florida because of COVID We were sick and tired of being in the cold in Philadelphia. In 2021, I sold my practice to my associate at DIME and in 2022, I retired completely from dentistry. So I've been out of clinical practice for a little over two years now.
[00:14:45] Speaker A: Let's talk about the operational difficulties of running your practice, marketing your business. And now you've got this new software. Like how, how did you juggle all that?
[00:14:56] Speaker B: The very first meeting I went to at the Yankee Dental meeting, I had my marketing friend who helped me market my practice. He went on the Thursday, okay, because I worked Monday through Thursday, didn't work Fridays, so the meeting started Thursday. So he went on Thursday for me. I worked Thursday, hopped on a plane and went there Friday and Saturday. We covered the booth for the first time. I was a full time dentist. I was heavily in debt. I remember telling my wife, I'm going to create a piece of software. She was like, yeah, have fun. Little did I know it would literally change my trajectory of my career. And so we went to another meeting. This was in January. I went to a meeting in February. I went to a meeting in March. And I realized that, hey, Lyn, I can't do both. So I made the decision to stop working on Thursdays. When I was going to trade shows, I would leave Wednesday night. Trade show was Thursday.
Friday and Saturday I would come home and I work Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday again. Well, 2017, I hired my first associate to help alleviate some burden. I started working Mondays and Tuesdays. I was two days a week in the practice and the rest of the time I was off, she was working Wednesdays and Thursdays.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: Let's talk about the reviews then. I'm friends with somebody who's an engineer, started his own business and got into marketing and around 2001, 2002, started getting really good results with Google Ads. Right. And so then he, people started asking for help and he created a process for that. And today to this day, he's famous for being Google Ads.
[00:16:19] Speaker B: Right.
[00:16:19] Speaker A: So he was right at the front of it for what you're doing. I, I remember when in marketing 2010 and 11, a lot of businesses still didn't even have a website. And so now here you are coming in feels like you were right ahead of the. And now look at the world like nobody does anything without reviews. And the other aspect of that is reviews are for every business. Like you were saying with, with Bird Eye. Is that right? Is it Bird Eye?
How many industries you have there? Let's talk about the impact of reviews and what, what, what are some of the things that businesses get right about reviews and what are, what's the money that businesses are leaving on the table? Because they're not paying attention to that.
[00:16:55] Speaker B: So it's all about reviews and ranking. Okay, just getting a review is, is great, but it doesn't help if you're not visible online. What I teach when I speak around the country is visibility and credibility. You need both. Having a visible practice with no reviews, that's a problem. Having reviews with no visibility, that's a problem. If you have a lot of reviews and no visibility, nobody sees the reviews. You don't get the conversion to have the patients come in.
So what? The most important thing is that when you get reviews, you do what's necessary to get you visible on the maps as well. In the past, you'd have dentists A through G, like seven dentists on page one of Google. Now it's a map pack with three people on there. And if you're not One of those three, you're invisible. @ Bird Eye, we also not only get reviews for a practice or help them generate reviews from their patients. So they're legitimate reviews from their patients. It's done through a text message after their appointments, which automates the process of getting the review for them. We also do what's called listing management, citation claiming is the technical term and it's making sure that the name, address and phone number of the practice is consistent online. Google looks at this data as a trust factor that the data isn't consistent. Google penalizes the practice and and doesn't rank them, even though we have a lot of reviews. So it's a combination of things. Okay, so one is number of reviews. Number two is review velocity. The third ranking factor is how close you are to the center of the city. The fourth is what the primary category is. So if you're a dentist, you wanted to say dentist, not doctor. If you're a plastic surgeon, you wanted to say plastic surgeon, not nurse practitioner. Like my wife's plastic surgeon. It says nurse practitioner for them. Not anymore. I changed it for them. You want the primary category to be correct as well. If you include all of those things, practices that check all of those boxes tend to rank higher on the maps. When you have the reviews and visibility, you drive more new patients to the business. More people show up at the door because they're seeing the reviews, which ultimately is why they're determining to come into the practice.
[00:18:53] Speaker A: Wow, that's fascinating. You said something really interesting. In my business, I help people write and publish books. Everybody wants a book because they want credibility. And there. There's a thousand firms out there that'll help you write and publish a book, but none of them focus on the visibility. They don't have any visibility. So they have the book and take the time to do it, but they're not getting any eyeballs on it. That's interesting that the. The combination with the reviews, if you gotta have both. So, like, how in. As you were doing this with your own business, when did you, like, what was your process of figuring out that it took all of these different things? Because originally starting off, oh, I need the reviews, but was there a point where you're like, oh, that review got more attention. Why?
[00:19:33] Speaker B: And like, how did you start to.
[00:19:35] Speaker A: Put all these pieces together?
[00:19:36] Speaker B: The landscape of the Internet changed dramatically over the years. The one constant has been, hey, you need reviews. A lot of stuff has changed around it. Adwords, the website, the social media got involved. The reviews have remained pretty constant. And I thought it was really interesting that I got in there very early in the process, well before people were doing it on a regular basis. And now here we are, 1112 years later. You can't function without having reviews for any business out there. It's almost as important as your credit score. I was a very early adopter of that. I was very early into the knowledge that you needed to do this. I was almost like a trailblazer. People reach out to me from all walks of life, all over the country, asking me for advice. I have a Facebook group called Raving Patients And I have dentists dropping bad reviews in there. They want to know how to respond or what to do about them. It's really nice to be known for something. I've worked very hard throughout my career. Ultimately, my goal is just to help as many people as possible. I have a lot of people pick my brain. So I've learned that when people want to pick my brain, they want free advice. I'm more than willing to provide advice to people who reach out to me. And I have a really good name in the industry because of that.
[00:20:41] Speaker A: So when you sold your software to iberg, what was the journey like? You sold it and you're still with them. How was that? What was the journey there? How did that lead to where you're at today?
[00:20:50] Speaker B: Birdeye. When they bought my company, I was almost hired as a consultant. I was not hired as a full time employee. The software became Isocial Reviews, powered by Birdeye. So I was using their engine in my software. They didn't realize how good of a salesperson I was. Remember I, I told you in the beginning I knew how to wheel in deal. Even as a dentist, I was the one presenting the fees and the procedures because I was very good at getting patients to say yes. So I, I had a knack for selling this software, which is the whole purpose I went into it. I wasn't really there for long term in implementation and design. I was there because I knew I can sell the product. And I originally was hired to consult as a consultant for the company. They didn't realized how good of a salesperson I was. And then they brought me on full time as an employee. So I got my insurance paid for, I got my expenses paid for. So it was a really good transition. I was given the dental division in 2017. So now I'm the only rep at the company who deals with dental leads. So if you're a dentist, that's less than 10 locations. I have a team of SDRs that work the leads and put it on my calendar and I do the demos. I travel around the country 30, 35 times a year on various marketing topics. I'm the director of the dental division. I don't have a team underneath me, it's just me. I work from home, I travel a lot, but I enjoy what I've got.
[00:22:01] Speaker A: Any advice you could give to someone in the dental space that's listening to this? Maybe they're just getting started or maybe they're like their businesses. Maybe they're where you're at. I've got this Building and I'm underwater. What's two or three pieces of advice you give them, knowing what you know now about what does it take to scale their business?
[00:22:19] Speaker B: If you don't know how to run a business, hire a coach to help you. I've had a number of coaches. I had a coach come in right when I bought the practice. She pulled me aside and said, len, you suck at listening. And I was like, what do you mean? I listen. I'm a great listener. She goes, you suck at listening. You need to take a listening class. I took a class on active listening, and I became an amazing listener, which is part of the reason why I think I'm really successful, because I show the people that I'm listening to them. It goes a long way that I remember key features of conversations because I am truly listening to the conversation. One of the big things I took away from that was when we wear Apple watches, we're so distracted by everything on the Apple watch, we don't really listen to conversations. So when I'm in a really important conversation, I used to take my Apple watch off because I didn't want to be distracted. Now I don't even have one. I just have a regular Cartier watch, a Santos. But I. I would never wear a smartwatch anymore because it's too distracting to me. So that was one thing I learned from running a business. So you need coaches. If you don't know aspect, hire someone. Be willing to spend money to grow your business. If you don't invest in your business, it's going to be stagnant. If you invest in marketing, you invest in things that help you grow and you implement them properly, your practice is amazingly at growth, amazing at growth. I'm very fortunate. The dental industry has been great to me. But the dental industry is a great business to be in. If you know how to run the business, that's the most important thing. Dentistry is always going to be the easy part. The drill, the fill the bill. It's the same thing, monotonous, yes, different patients, but you get very good at that. You have to really learn to run the business aspect well in order to take your practice from a million dollars to two million dollars and more. And you have to really be concerned about the overhead as well. The typical overhead in dental practice is 65%, 70%. I met someone today that had 82%. When you have an 82% overhead, you're making 18 cents on the dollar. It's hard to make a lot of money. Then you have to know how to manage the expenses again, you have to be the CEO, the CEO of your business. It's very difficult to run. And that's part of the reason why I think dentistry has a very high suicide rate. It's very hard to run the business side of things. The first practice I worked in after residency, the dentist had passed away. He committed suicide and I to go for him. Five years later, I bought my own practice from someone who committed suicide. I've been directly affected by suicide in my practice or in my life.
[00:24:32] Speaker A: The coaching aspect is probably one of the biggest, most overlooked aspects I think, of any business or any industry. Years ago I had the opportunity to sit in a fireside conversation with, I forget his name. He's the person who formed Intuit and then eventually bought QuickBooks. At the time, he was worth, I want to say, $8 billion. Somebody asked him, what's the biggest mistake you've made in your career? Without hesitation, he said, if I knew then what I knew now, I would have hired a business coach way earlier. He finally started working with a business coach like three years ago and he's, I would probably be worth 50 or 60 billion today instead of only seven, which I thought was funny if he had worked with a coach. They help you see what you can't see. So your coach was like, you're not very good at listening and that was a big clue on what to do. So what, what is it that lights you up now from this point forward, you've exited dentistry, you've had a great career there. Now what are you looking for over this years ahead?
[00:25:29] Speaker B: I love speaking. Speaking has become a huge passion of mine. I've given over 600 presentations. For those that are speakers listening to this, they know the feeling when you get in front of an audience and they come up to you afterwards and tell you how amazing the presentation was. That's what drives me. So I'm extremely passionate about speaking. I love being a speaker. I have a podcast which I love to grow. I've done about 378 or 380 episodes at this point. I'm in the middle of season eight right now. I've written a couple books. I am truly an educator. So even when I demo Bird, I always tell the people I'm demoing that if you don't buy from me, that's fine, but you're going to learn a couple of things. Because I do truly educate people when they reach out to me for assistance. I put on an annual event now the first One was in 2023 in Delray Beach. 2024 was in Scottsdale, Arizona. But we're bringing it permanently back to South Florida where I live in Fort Lauderdale. Moving forward. It's called Supercharger Dental Practice. So I've spoken at both of my events because I'm the fill in speaker, but I host it. I hosted. I have an MC hosted and we get 12 to 13 speakers, plus a panel discussion and a ton of dental vendors who come with about 250 to 300 dentists. So that's what I'm looking to grow as well. The best way that I can have an impact on dentists is. Is where I want to be moving forward.
[00:26:42] Speaker A: Sure. So Raving Patients podcast, do you have a website that people can learn more with the the event that you do in Florida? Like where do they go to get more information about that?
[00:26:51] Speaker B: They can go to my website, which is Dr. Lentau.com. there's information on there. Or they can go to Supercharge's website, which is www.SuperChargeYourDentalPractice.com. i'm. I try to be as easy as possible when it comes to branding. So awesome.
[00:27:06] Speaker A: Dr. Len, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. It's been fantastic.
[00:27:10] Speaker B: Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
[00:27:12] Speaker A: Take.
