Pop analysis: the case of Sauk Valley Orthodontics

In this post, we examine the closing of Sauk Valley Orthodontics, a 2 office practice in Illinois.  If you are so inclined, you can read the news story about it here.  

Certainly, this practice is not the first to close nor will it be the last.   Moreover, I am not going to discuss what seems to be the rather abrupt closure of the practice.  Maybe they had a good reason for having to close with almost no notice or maybe they didn’t.  No need to speculate about that.  Our goal is to take the facts from the story and what we see online to determine what operational changes could have been made to enable the practice to survive.  

To do this, I am going to make one major assumption: the practice had to shut down because the volume of paying patients was insufficient to enable the practice to pay its bills.  In other words, the practice did not shut down because someone stole a bunch of money or major malpractice or a radioactive leak at both offices.

Here’s what I see:

Marketing case study: Daily deals site

In our last post, we ruminated on some of the issues involved with using daily deals sites to promote dental and orthodontic procedures.  At the top of that post, we promised to discuss some results that we’ve had with using them so this post is dedicated to that subject.

Before diving in, note that as believers in quality advertising, we are willing to try a number of new avenues to keep marketing diversified and in front of as many people as possible.  You may have found the formula that works for your practice and do not want to change things.  That makes perfect sense.  But if you ever want to experiment with something without having to affect your delicate balance, we might be willing to try it (if the cost and setup are reasonable) in one or more of our offices for you and then provide full feedback on how things went.  This gives you a “live fire” test without deleteriously impacting your results if things don’t go according to plan.

With that, on to the case study:

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