How to Build a Practice Growth Plan That Actually Works All Year

Narrator: This is The Thriving Dentist Show with Gary Takacs, where we help you develop your ideal dental practice, one that provides personal, professional, and financial satisfaction.

Gary Takacs: Welcome to another episode of The Thriving Dentist Show. I'm Gary Takacs, the Thriving Dentist Show podcast founder and co-host, very excited to share another episode with you that we think will add a massive amount of value to your practice. The title of this episode is How to Build a Practice Growth Plan that actually works all year, not just something you do at the beginning of the year and forget about it. 

Gary Takacs: Two quick announcements to make before we get into that episode. First announcement is, you may know if you're a regular listener to The Thriving Dentist show that we regularly do events, virtual events, so you can attend those from the comfort and convenience of your home or office.

Those events could be webinars, they could be panel discussions, they could be longer form webinars, where we actually do like a summit. We recently did one, and it was three hours in length with lots of information all about AI, and we had a massive amount of attendance on that. In any case, if you'd like to know when the next event is, go to thrivingdentist.com/events . Those events will provide CE if we're allowed to provide it. And by the way, the best thing out of these events is you get lots of useful information you could use in your practice.

Gary Takacs: No tuition. You're there as a guest of ours. In any case, go to thrivingdentist.com/events  and come join us. The second announcement is we have a returning guest you'll recognize, my co-host Naren, and he has a Thriving Dentist marketing tip. This particular marketing tip is very timely today. This tip is titled, Stop Losing Patients to Competitors Who Show Up Before You on AI Search. No further ado. Here's Naren on a Thriving Dentist marketing tip.

Naren Arulrajah: Stop losing patients to competitors who show up before you on AI search. AI search is becoming massive. We have seen our clients almost double the number of visitors and exposure to their websites because of AI search. And AI search is now part of Google search. So when you go and search for something on Google, depending on the person's intent, Google might show you in one, two, or even three places: Google Maps, regular search, and now AI search. Depending on the search intent, Google might show different things to the user.

Naren Arulrajah: And now AI search has become hugely more popular in 2026. Billions of people are getting results from Google through AI search, and this is built into Google. I'm not talking about Gemini as a standalone product. I'm talking about regular search. One of the things we are noticing is when a practice is ranking for a hundred or more keywords, many of our practices even for 150, 200, 300 keywords and phrases at the top of Google search results, you are getting a bonanza of extra traffic from Google AI search. Google already likes you and trusts you. That's why they're showing you.

Naren Arulrajah: So you are in the cream of the crop. Google doesn't want to make any mistakes, so it tends to favor those people who are dominating search. A lot of our clients are also showing up very high, like one, two, or three on AI search results. In AI search, Google will give you a paragraph answer, and it'll give you three sources where it got that information. You want to make sure you are one of those sources Google is citing, and ideally the first source. How do you dominate AI search? Number one, make sure all your content is written by humans. Google realizes anyone can create content through AI, and they don't want that, especially for healthcare.

Naren Arulrajah: Number two, leverage EEAT. These are Google standards to make sure that healthcare content is linked to a doctor who has the necessary qualifications and certifications to talk about that topic. Are you doing that? And last but not least, CrUX. Google wants your website as a whole to be really useful to people. They're looking at it as a comprehensive thing, as opposed to page by page. So are you running your CrUX reports? Are you looking at all these things? Are you fixing all the things that Google is telling you to fix?

Naren Arulrajah: So my question to you is, wake up if you haven't already. Zoom into AI search and dominate it. This is a gold rush. Many of our clients are seeing a massive improvement in traffic because of AI. And at the same time, don't ignore ChatGPT, don't ignore Gemini, don't ignore Perplexity. We check how our clients are doing on all these other platforms. Not only to make sure you're showing up, but also to make sure the information they're showing about you is correct. Unlike Google, these other platforms don't update information every day. They might get information that is three months old and give incorrect details to your patients.

Naren Arulrajah: If you want us to do a thorough AI audit, it's our gift to you. Go to ekwa.com/td  and we will do that at no extra cost. It's our $900 gift from us to you. Hello everyone. Welcome to the Thriving Dentist Show. This is Naren, your co-host. Hope you enjoyed that marketing tip. This is perhaps the most important issue that everyone asks me about. If you have any questions, book a marketing strategy meeting at ekwa.com/td . We would love to help.

Gary Takacs: A quick question about that. Do you have any data on what percentage of patients are using AI tools, whether it's ChatGPT, Claude, whatever they're using, as a search engine as opposed to Google?

Naren Arulrajah: Great question, Gary. Google recently announced Google AI Overview is used 2.5 billion times a month. Google also announced Gemini is used 900 million times a month. ChatGPT is used almost a billion times a month.

Gary Takacs: Almost a billion?

Naren Arulrajah: Almost a billion. Again, these are monthly numbers. On a daily basis, that's around 30 million. So knowing everything I know, I think 5% of the total volume of search is AI search. And most of it is in Google, because Google is like a habit. We use Google 12 billion times every single day. I think if I am a practice owner, I would focus on Google, because even AI search is Google. Google has 95% market share and they have made their search engine very AI powered. So just focus on Google, but don't ignore ChatGPT, don't ignore Perplexity.

Naren Arulrajah: When we work with our clients, we check how many times they're showing up on Google AI Overview, Google Maps, Google organic search, but at the same time also look at Perplexity and ChatGPT, and make sure our clients are showing up there as well. I do think Google is still controlling everything, but who knows five years from now. I think on the enterprise side, Anthropic's revenue is claimed to be 50% more than OpenAI's revenue, by the way. OpenAI started the AI revolution, and today Anthropic is 50% bigger and growing so fast.

Gary Takacs: I do have a perspective that might be useful here from one of my tech mentors, Peter Diamandis. He said there's a little bit of a backlash in the public against Google having such a monopoly. Some people are like, I'm going to find something else. But I agree, it's still by far where your effort needs to be.

Naren Arulrajah: I think the same thing with Facebook. Everybody says they're not going to use Facebook, but then they use Facebook. The power of numbers: when a business is 20 times bigger than everybody else, the other guy has to grow 20 times just to catch up.

Gary Takacs: Let's pivot to growth.

Naren Arulrajah: Let's jump into growth, Gary. Every January, many dental practice owners create a growth plan. Everything looks good, the team is energized, the doctor is fired up. February comes along, March comes along, and nobody even remembers what the plan is. The pattern repeats itself year after year. A lot of practices fall into this trap of getting excited, almost like the New Year's resolutions we all make about losing weight. And then back to square one.

Gary Takacs: By January 10th, those resolutions are out the window for most people.

Gary Takacs: And seriously, that wasn't a random number. That's actually data. Set a resolution January 1st. By January 10th, the vast majority of them have already been forgotten.

Naren Arulrajah: Today I want to spend the episode on why most growth plans fail, and how an owner dentist can actually build one that lasts the whole year. A book that this conversation reminded me of is called Tiny Habits. The author talks about how motivation only takes you so far, it's very hard to sustain over time. And I think that explains the January 10th pattern. These tiny habits, these tiny changes you make, compound. Why do most growth plans fall apart so fast when owners start with so much energy and motivation? Where does it leak out?

Gary Takacs: The simple answer is that many practices do have a growth plan for the year. They have a goal of some sort. But what they lack is the strategy to achieve the goal. They just put a goal out there. In other words, they haven't said how they're going to get to the finish line. I'm going to recommend another book: Atomic Habits by James Clear. Highly recommend it. We did it as a book club for our clients, and it made a massive difference because Atomic Habits creates the nuts and bolts of how to achieve your goals. It's not just putting a number out there.

Gary Takacs: One of the goals we have for our Thriving Dentist clients is that they grow every year, that every year becomes their new best year. I let clients set their own goal, but a lot of times they'll say, Gary, what do you think is realistic? And I share: I would like you to grow by at least 10% in collections every year.

Naren Arulrajah: You made it very specific. It's one thing to say I'm going to lose weight versus saying I'm going to fast 14 hours a day. The more specific you are, the easier it is to put your hands around it.

Gary Takacs: The number one reason why plans for the year fall apart is they didn't have any details behind them. Just bold and ambitious. By the way, the reason we've decided to do this episode right now is this is being published around mid-year. So it gives everyone a chance to reboot. There's still plenty of time to hit your goals for the end of the year. If you're listening close to when this was published, you have about five and a half months. That's plenty of time to finish this year really strong and carry it into 2027.

Naren Arulrajah: Let me ask you a different question. What should the plan look like instead? Walk us through how you coach your clients. Give us a glimpse, Gary.

Gary Takacs: It's highly individualized. But let me unpack this so you can apply it. When we look at an annual growth plan, we have to break it down into a variety of projects that are going to help achieve that growth. I would say there shouldn't be any more than four of those. Don't make it 15 things you're going to do this year to grow the practice.

Gary Takacs: Here's what that might look like. Let's say you're a solo doctor, general practice, two full-time hygienists, and you would like to grow 10% this year. One: grow the adult orthodontics component through your aligner program. Two: work to have 92% or more hygiene occupancy. Three: refine your marketing to get at least 25 new patients a month. Four: get serious about diagnosing and treating conservative periodontal therapy to grow the hygiene production component.

Gary Takacs: Notice those four things are specific. The way I like to do this is at the beginning of the year, we do a longer format team meeting, maybe three to four hours, around those goals. And then we also do one mid-year to track where we are. If you've not done that one at the beginning of the year, just restart now. Have that meeting in the next little while and talk about what you're going to do between now and the end of the year.

Gary Takacs: Then assign champions for each of those goals. Someone now owns that goal. We're beginning to get accountability within your practice, with everyone pulling their weight and rowing in the same direction instead of just the doctor. And then I'd do regular check-in meetings with our team and with our champions. One of the terms we use, borrowed from the book Traction, is rocks. Those four things I just described would be your rocks. So now we get focus, individual accountability, and a plan to achieve it, not just the goal.

Naren Arulrajah: Thank you, Gary. I think what you're saying is: focus, clearly defining what we want to get done in a certain timeframe. Those are the missing links as to why a lot of practices don't do well with plans and goals.

Naren Arulrajah: How do you keep the team engaged with the plan all year, not just in January?

Gary Takacs: You have to have regular meetings, and they've got to be productive. I believe every practice could benefit from three types of meetings: a morning huddle every morning, seven minutes to set the tone for the day; regular team meetings every two weeks for two hours, which allows you to go into more depth; and semi-annual meetings where you really dig into planning. One of the ways we keep it engaged is during your regular team meetings, part of that agenda is to revisit how we're doing against goal on the four areas we've decided to focus on. It's a constant assess and adjust, not set it and forget it.

Naren Arulrajah: What are your thoughts about team member incentives in a practice growth plan?

Gary Takacs: I am a fan of team member incentives. Now, we don't have to incentivize everything. Some things should be just part of the job. But when we have properly designed incentives in a win-win format, it can create interest on the part of the team. Now let me share an example I learned last week in one of our coaching clients. One of the goals for the practice this year was to get more Google reviews. This was an office that was, quite frankly, asleep at the wheel on Google. They had less than a hundred Google reviews in a suburban area where competitors had 500, 600, even 400 reviews.

Naren Arulrajah: The minimum standard I recommend to all of our mutual clients is a minimum of ten a month, Gary. And I want those to be paragraph reviews.

Gary Takacs: One, three, and two weren't getting it. Then we go to April and May. April, 24. May, 27. I said, what happened? And my client said, Gary, true confessions, you had suggested we put a fun little incentive in place back in January. I didn't want to do it. I felt like getting reviews should be part of their job. Well, it wasn't working. So I put an incentive in place: if we get 15 or more Google reviews in a month, everybody on the team gets a hundred dollars.

Gary Takacs: He went from averaging two new reviews a month to averaging 26 in April and May. And he said, Gary, I was wrong. A hundred dollars isn't lottery money, but having an extra hundred in their purse or wallet was fun. And it was worthwhile. The team had their own parts in it. It wasn't just one person driving this. I am a fan of carefully designed incentive systems around those rocks. It has to be a win for the practice. But the quick answer is I am a fan of putting incentives, and that can often be the difference between meeting our growth objectives and not.

Naren Arulrajah: Marketing is almost always one of those rocks that drives a practice. Why does marketing fall apart in the same way as the rest of the growth plan? And what should owner dentists be doing?

Naren Arulrajah: There's a difference between marketing and new patients. Some people get marketing right but don't get new patients right. To get new patients right, you have to get marketing right and the new patient experience right. For a client to do well with new patients, their marketing machine has to be solid. We know they're ranking for a hundred or more search terms. We know they're getting 20 or more new patient calls. We know they are getting 10 or more Google reviews every month. We know people can book appointments within two to three days, maximum a week. We know the team answering the phone is trained, and instead of the average of one out of three, they're booking 70% to 80% of new patients into appointments.

Naren Arulrajah: At a high level, the metric I would check is: what is the cost of a new patient call to me? You can pinpoint and say, I spent a thousand dollars and I got 15 leads, therefore the cost per lead is $60. Or I spent a thousand dollars and I got only three leads, therefore the cost is $300. You need to know on a per-source basis what is the cost of a new patient. And then if one method is costing you $60 a new patient and another is $400, you don't do the $400, or you do a lot less of it.

Naren Arulrajah: The third thing is consistency. I suggest our clients meet with their customer success manager at least quarterly, review these numbers, and make adjustments. Practices don't stay still. Maybe you used to do implants and you don't want to do them anymore, or you want to add something new. Is your marketing evolving and changing to meet the needs of your marketplace?

Naren Arulrajah: If you are interested in analyzing how you're doing and what you could improve, book a marketing strategy meeting. It's our gift to you at ekwa.com/td. We will do a complete analysis on you and your competition and tell you how you're doing. Remember, it's all relative. If everyone in your area is weak, you can get a C and get away with it. But if you have tough competitors, you need an A-plus. So really understanding where you stand is the starting point.

Gary Takacs: The bar is raised in most areas. The marketing bar is elevated and you've got to be good. It's not a nice to have, it's a must have. Marketing is an important part of the growth plan and it needs to be addressed very specifically. It has to be designed for the practice and it has a lot of moving pieces. If our clients don't have a marketing firm or they're not happy with the one they have, I'd say schedule a marketing strategy meeting and determine if Ekwa might be a good fit. We've seen great results.

Gary Takacs: The takeaway I want our listeners to get is that just having a growth plan isn't enough. You've got to get specific around it, and it's constant input and adjustment. It's not set it and forget it. At the time of publishing this episode, you've got time to still make this your best year yet.

Gary Takacs: If any of you would like help with that, to put some real specifics around it, schedule a coaching strategy meeting with me and I'll be happy to share some input once I learn a little more about your practice. Go to thrivingdentist.com/csm . That's a Zoom meeting with me. We'll talk about your practice, share a little bit about our coaching, talk about your goals and aspirations, and talk about how we can get you on track to have a thriving practice. We expect to see at least a five times return on investment on our coaching fee in terms of value to your practice through increased collections and achievement of the seven goals. On that note, Naren and I want to express our appreciation for the privilege of your time, and we look forward to connecting with you on the next Thriving Dentist Show.