Home > Spotlight > Bacon, Mismatched Socks, and Dentistry

Recently on Google Plus, someone asked what three things their followers  feared the  most.   The most popular reply was, “the dentist, the dentist, and oh, the dentist.”  If they knew Richard Wilson DMD, they might think differently.

He’s not your average dentist.  For one thing, he hates golf. For another, he rails against dental marketers who use sleazy tactics to trick dentists into bombarding their patients with unwanted ads and expensive (but profitable) treatments the patients don’t really need.

Writing on his Bite Point blog, he says –

“We’ve done some advertising… and much of it fails. Some works, much fails…as advertising becomes less effective all the time, many marketers feel it necessary to yell at us louder and louder in more and more intrusive ways until we break.

Except we won’t.

[Young dentists] have a great deal of concern, bordering on fear, of corporate dentistry. Walmart may even get involved in retail teeth. On another end of the spectrum, some folks are mightily impressed by the dental practice that advertises heavily, and seems to be making a huge gross. That situation is often that one owner doctor has a legion of poorly paid associate dentists and even less compensated staff. It’s the factory model of business. And the ad copy almost always reads like this, ‘Look at me! I do the prettiest veneers in town! You NEED veneers, you know. So lookatme-lookatme-lookatmeeeeeee!’ “

Yuck.

Dr. Wilson doesn’t do that. He’ll change appointments (without being asked) if it’s going to rain and he knows the patient commutes by bike.

When another patient mentioned going back home to South Africa for several months, Dr. Wilson stopped and took the time to look up the patient’s hometown on Google Earth. Then, they chatted for a bit about South Africa.

Other conversations helped improve his patients’ overall health (teeth are an early indicator of diabetes and heart problems).

His patients don’t feel interchangeable, or unnoticed, because he takes the time to actually listen to them.

Definitely not average, and very visceral.

Then, of course, there’s the novel he’s writing.  It’s about the daring adventures of Aloysius St. James Spottisworth-Gack (World War II flying ace, and owner of a family-run brewery called Gack & Bacon), who always wore mismatched socks (does that last bit sound like anyone we know?).

The novel will, essentially, fictionalize some of Seth Godin’s ideas about being remarkable, avoiding average, and making true connections between businesses and people.

(Full disclosure: I have two modest contributions to this magnum opus. The first is the name of the brewery’s in-house pub (The Pig & Trebuchet).  The second is the slogan of Gack’s nemesis, the completely average, boring, mass market Slore’s Beer: Slore’s – it’s beer.)

Here’s more about Gack (and the first chapter of the book).

Photo courtesy of Rick Wilson, DMD