An interview with Dr. Howard Farran

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We continue with the interview of Dr. Howard Farran

•         How was the idea of DENTAL TOWN born?

 

In the late 90s, I turned my focus on running my practice as best as I could – and in doing so, I decided to obtain a Master of Business Administration degree at Arizona State University.

 

The only reason I got my MBA is because I learned all my business knowledge from my father. My father was a massively successful businessman but he did it all on pure instinct. I always wondered how much my dad taught me was reality vs. false. I always wondered if the lessons he taught me even had the right terminology. I was just wondering if I was running my practice the right way. I was a businessman, naturally, but I had no formal instruction. So I wanted to see if there were things I could formally learn that would augment what I’d already knew.

 

It was toward the end of my coursework when it came time for me to fulfill a final thesis assignment. The Internet was a relative infant but it caught my full attention. My chosen thesis topic was “How the Internet Would Affect Dentistry."

 

I really focused my thesis on commerce vs. community. What I saw on the commerce side was that dentists were pretty much all solo practicing individuals. They might practice in the same medical building as five other dentists and will have never gone to lunch with any of them in their whole lifetime. The moment a sales rep came into the office to sell something is when the shy introvert scientist dentist would ask, ‘What is my neighbor using?’ Those salespeople were actually a form of community. Back then, everyone saw the Internet affecting dentistry by merely selling supplies, but I was thinking, “OK, you’re the only dentist in a small town of 2,000, you have a six-year-old girl with a big abscess and you don’t know whether to do a root canal or pull the tooth or whether you should put in a space maintainer or start her on ortho, etc.” I thought “What if these dentists could all get into the same Web site and talk to each other?"

 

I worked very hard for 10 years as a dentist. I paid off my debt. I had saved up a ton of cash and I took all my money and borrowed everything I could on my practice and my house and I hired 19 programmers to program 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year to get a wWebsite going with all the functionality that I wanted. And in March 1999, Dentaltown.com went live.

 

When I conceived this whole thing, I knew that it would serve a huge need for some. I was realizing how fun that was because everyone was just talking in the way humans like to talk – straight to the point, no punches held and I thought this is the way dentists need to get their information. This was the way dentists needed to talk.

 

•         The difficulties you faced in print edition of DENTAL TOWN.

 

There is still a cultural human reality that dentists like to get in their easy chairs and get a beverage and some popcorn and read magazines. I would get dental journal after dental journal after dental journal, and I was an extremely motivated dentist, but the articles just didn’t interest me. They were usually too fundamental in nature, like they’d talk about cancer in rats and weird diseases that you’d never see in your lifetime. I never really read a dental journal and changed the way I practiced dentistry. The message boards on Dentaltown.com had massive amounts of content that I thought we could break down and say, "This is really what you need to know about." You can go online and read any newspaper, magazine or book you wanted, but the human side of you wants to go out on your porch swing and read a book or a magazine.

 

At the same time I was pondering a print version of Dentaltown.com, I came across the history of Sesame Street. I was inspired by this group of grad students who wanted to develop an educational program for children, but kept getting shot down by supporters because "kids would rather watch Bugs Bunny."

 

These grad students went back and took classes of 25 five-year-olds and they started playing them the top five cartoons, and they were able to factually establish that at any given 30-second interval, only 30 percent of the children were actually paying attention to the TV while the other 70 percent were walking around or playing with their toys. They took that data back to the advertisers and said, "Do you buy into this data that only 30 percent of the kids are looking at any given 30-second interval?" and the advertisers agreed, “You’re right, we’re still going to advertise our cereals and toys and things we want these kids to tell their moms to buy.” So the grad students asked the advertisers for funding if they could get 30 percent of the kids to watch. And the advertisers said, “Yes.” The grad students wound up getting more than 70 percent of the kids to watch at any given 30-second interval.

 

I was so charged up by this notion of measured content that I started to seriously pursue development of a magazine. The book would take the content of 100,000 questions and answers in a month and publish the top three discussions that most dental colleagues are interested in. While other magazines relied on editors who weren’t dentists and who used their gut feelings in trying to figure out what dentists needed to be reading about, Dentaltown Magazine armed the editor with data from the message boards and showed, "This subject on CPR – no one cares about, but the subject on TMJ, everybody’s going nuts over!" For the first time in dental history, the editor was connected to his or her readers. Actual measured content opened up a whole new format. This publishing model has been a revolution in dentistry.

 

Dentaltown Magazine has grown leaps and bounds since we started publishing it. Its success has even led to spin-offs such as Orthotown Magazine, which uses the same publishing model as Dentaltown Magazine – but for orthodontic specialists.

 

 

•         The difficulties you faced in http://www.dentaltown.com.

 

Launching Dentaltown in 1999, looking back, was at least five5 years ahead of its time. When Dentaltown was launched, not even one percent of dentists could tell you their e–mail address. The hardest thing about Dentaltown was trying to get a new behavior into dentists, and that was getting them on the Internet. The answering service and the ATM machine were two of the biggest job destroyers in my lifetime. When the ATM machine came out would sit outside of a bank and do transactions, 168 hours in a week and not take breaks or need health care or lunches or whatever, a lot of bank tellers were let go. When the answering machine came out, literally hundreds of thousands of receptionists lost their job because now the CEO didn’t need someone answering his phone, someone could just  leave a message. Well dentists and physicians and lawyers still all have a receptionist because they are dealing with the public transaction. So back in 1999 when I started, there was almost nothing alluring to the Internet that a dentist’s receptionist didn’t already do. If the dentists needed a book, his assistant would get it. If he needed to go to a dental convention, his receptionist would make plane tickets and hotel reservations, he didn’t have to go onto Priceline.com. So for many dentists the only thing that made them eventually get on the Internet was to actually talk to other dentists about dentistry.

        

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