Ali Jahver

From five customers, I quickly grew to about 700 over the course of seven or eight years, which is when we pivoted Adit to focus on and provide even more support for dental practices.

Dr. Vo: Tell me about that pivot and what made you decide to go so deep into helping dental practices achieve a measurable ROI.

Ali Jhaver: As I grew my team, I was not directly involved with every practice, so it became difficult for me to ensure every dental practice got the same experience from ad services only, so I realized I needed to adjust our services to something where we could be more confident that practices could get consistent results without me having to be involved with every one of them.

There were too many variables that had been making it difficult for us always to drive results. More patients started no showing. Practices got fewer reviews. Offices missed phone calls. Google and other online platforms changed their algorithms. The list went on.

So the biggest problem I ran into was churn. How do you scale a business without churn going out of control? That’s when I started to realize I needed to help practices succeed not just by getting them patients but by streamlining everything they’re doing.

Having been serving dentists for years, I had learned many of the aspects of running a dental practice that could be optimized using software, so I introduced online scheduling, appointment reminders, text messages for missed phone calls, reporting that shows missed calls, metrics that show how much you generate from new patients, patient retention rates, online review software, and more.

Essentially, we just observed and listened to our customers and built services that could help them. And that’s what’s made Adit so successful.

Dr. Vo: It’s funny how things work out, because Adit, the platform that it is today, essentially grew out of a necessity. Your customers needed help in several areas and you needed help adding value in ways that didn’t require your direct involvement if you wanted to scale, right?

Ali Jhaver: Exactly. It was a true win-win-win. My customers win because their businesses become more profitable and their lives become easier. I win because I can help more people and scale my business. And my team members win because they get to help more people by doing exciting work that makes a meaningful impact on our customers’ lives.

Dr. Vo: Very true. I’d love to talk with you more as an entrepreneur about how you overcame obstacles. Obviously, we all face obstacles. And you’ve told us about how your first product failed and your challenge when first scaling your business. Can you share a little more as an entrepreneur how you handle obstacles?

Ali Jhaver: Sure. When someone joins Adit as a team member, the first thing we try to instill in them in the first 90 days is that we want them to fail. Failing is part of success. When people get afraid to fail, they stop thinking and act scared. And anytime you act scared, you’re going to fail. We like to encourage them that failing is not a bad thing and, so long as you’re not making the same mistake over and over again, you’re going to succeed over the long term. You also learn a lot from your mistakes. So, for me, mindset is really the issue. Getting into the mindset that small failures are a good thing makes obstacles much less stressful.

Dr. Vo: So true. Okay, last question: As the founder of a company, as a CEO of the company, you must be looking at the future and not just the present or the past. Talk to me about some of the things you can disclose that are coming up with Adit and what makes you really excited about the future of dentistry.

Ali Jhaver: Dentistry is an interesting space where it’s often years behind in adopting technology because a lot of the software that we’re using is usually locked by bigger players. In the last two to three years, however, a lot of software has broken the shackles. Because of that, they’ve made dentistry to be a more open environment, just like normal software is in other verticals.

That’s a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good because it means more innovators are coming in but can be bad because it means big corporations like private equity firms are also coming in and consolidating the market as well. That means dentistry could become like even smaller practices to have basically the same systems, support, and information available as larger organizations so they can compete effectively with corporate practices and others. For example, we built this amazing software that helps dentists recall patients. Still, 60% to 80% of dentists lose the people in charge of recall at least once in a year. That means the person in charge of making sure patients don’t leave your practice is, on average, leaving your practice 60% to 80% of the time. That’s a huge problem and one our software is helping alleviate.

The second and third people with significant turnover are treatment coordinators and the people who handle billing and collections. That turnover is very hard on a practice. So what we’re trying to do at Adit is create software that automates as much of those roles as possible so turnover in those positions is not as problematic for the optometry, where 70% to 80% of practices are owned by corporate America. Or it could stay the way it is.

What we’re doing to support dental practices is to make Adit the type of software that allows practice using simple software solutions. We’re also evaluating how AI can help alleviate some tasks to support those team members and the practice even more.