Filming a dental practice at a mile high, season by season

Mouthguard season starts in August, and almost nobody in Colorado posts about it then

The Front Range stacks its seasons back to back, and each one has a fitting window in front of it that no dental practice is publishing into.

Fall practices open in August, hockey runs from late summer well into spring, lacrosse takes over behind it, and passes for the hill get bought before the first real storm. Every one of those has a moment a few weeks earlier when a parent could still act.

Publish into that moment instead of after the injury. A custom guard means an appointment, a scan and a wait on the lab, and nobody discovers that at the point they wish they had one.

Film the making of it rather than the finished object. The scan, the case coming back from the lab, what it looks like sitting next to a helmet in a bag. A parent watching that stops needing to be argued with.

Say the price out loud if your practice is comfortable doing so. Parents comparing options in a team chat will find a number somewhere, and the practice that stated one is the practice that gets named in the chat.

The first repair happened in a mountain clinic, and yours is the second visit

A tooth broken on a Saturday in the high country gets patched by whoever is open up there, and the unfinished work lands on your schedule days later.

A cracked cusp on a mogul run, a face-first landing at a rink in a ski town, a molar that met a rock on a trail. The patient is an hour or three from home, so the repair happens where the injury did. Somebody smooths the edge, places a temporary and sends them back down.

By Monday they are back in Arvada or Littleton with a mouth full of another dentist's work and no idea what happens next. Nothing published anywhere speaks to that person, because a practice in a flat state has no reason to know the situation exists.

So film it. What a temporary is doing, how long one can reasonably be left in place, what your office needs before it can finish a crown somebody else started, why the paperwork and images from up there are worth asking for.

Be generous about the first dentist while you are at it. Emergency work done quickly in a small clinic is usually exactly right for the hour it was done in, and a practice that says so on camera sounds like a colleague rather than a competitor.

The sun at altitude makes the screening in every checkup worth explaining out loud

Your patients ski, ride, climb and run at elevation, and almost none of them know what you are looking at when you check their lips.

An exam here includes a look at the soft tissue and the lips, and most patients experience it as the quiet minute before the cleaning. A short video naming what the screening is, and why it happens at every visit, turns that minute into a reason to keep the appointment.

Sun is the part that belongs to this place. Somebody spending a season on the hill or riding out toward the foothills is getting exposure they account for on a nose and forget on a lip, and the advice your hygienists already give about balm with sun protection is worth publishing.

Keep it clinical and calm. No risk claims and nothing dressed up to frighten anybody into booking, because a patient who books out of fright is the same patient who cancels once the fright wears off.

Run it in spring as well as in midwinter. Snow throws light back up at a face, and the people who burn worst on the hill are the ones who went out in March without thinking about any of it.

One storm hands your service area two different mornings

A Front Range practice draws from ground that gains a lot of elevation across a short drive, so at seven in the morning a foothills household and a household on the plains are not in the same weather.

The gradient is the whole problem. Snow that shuts the roads above Golden and Evergreen can leave Centennial and Wash Park with wet pavement and an ordinary commute, and it runs the other way too when a storm parks on the plains and the hills stay clear.

A single post announcing that you are open therefore serves neither household. The one higher up reads it as pressure to attempt a drive nobody should attempt, and the one in town reads it as irrelevant, because their street was plowed before breakfast.

Write it as two sentences. You are open and the phone is answered, and anybody coming down from higher ground should move the appointment instead of pushing it, at no cost to them. That is a different message from a closure notice, and it is the one that keeps the day intact.

Then run it again in April. The heaviest snow here tends to arrive well after everybody has decided winter is over, which is exactly the week a schedule falls apart with nobody expecting it.

The parts of this that would read the same in any state, from who belongs on camera to what deserves money behind it, we wrote out once at /industries/dental/social-media.