How We Plan To Grow DDS Rank

When we acquired DDS Rank back in June, we mentioned that we think we can double it in a short period of time.

“Doubling it” was referring to both revenue and net income, as most of the growth will come from sales rather than stripping out expenses.

There are always some savings you can make, but not enough to double a business.

As we are now coming up on two full months of ownership, I wanted to put together a list of what we’ve done so far, plus detail the very long punch card of things we are going to work through in order to grow it.

If you are an Onfolio shareholder or SPV investor, you own a share in DDS Rank, so this will be an insightful update for you.

And if you’re thinking to join the SPV, you can still do so early enough to see the upside from our efforts, you lucky soul.

Which one is DDS Rank again?

DDSRank.com is an SEO and marketing agency specializing in Dentists and Orthodontists. Agencies that specialize in a certain industry like Dentists, Doctors etc can find it easier to attract clients, onboard clients, and deliver results.

That’s why for the most part DDSRank has had success with word of mouth and attending a handful of dentist conferences.

(That’s pretty much all they’ve done).

Core services involve helping dentists rank higher in Google for terms like “Dentist near me” or “Dentist + placename” and all the things you’d expect them to want to rank for.

There are also some paid advertising management and web design services, but SEO is the biggest revenue driver.

Around 90% of the revenue is recurring, as the SEO work is ongoing, month-to-month. This gives us a solid baseline to work from.

Essentially our plan for growing it involves adding more services, increasing marketing beyond just word of mouth, and eventually, raising prices.

How to even approach growth?

One of the most intimidating aspects of growing a small online business is how to even tackle it.

There’s a bunch of different tactics out there, ranging from scaling up marketing, hiring growth officers, looking for synergies (oh how the world loves a good synergy play), or stripping out costs.

With DDS Rank, we identified a lot of opportunities before we’d even acquired it (hence our bullishness from day 1).

Everything starts with an audit of the three main areas:

1. ) Marketing and Sales

How is the business generating revenue, attracting new leads, converting leads, retaining clients, offering new services, competing in a crowded space, and generally keeping the lights on? You can’t find all of this out in advance but the more you know, the better.

For DDS Rank, we identified that the business was really doing very little marketing.

Now, every business owner says “If you just increase the marketing you’ll make more money”, but that’s not necessarily true. If it were, the founder would have done it themselves already.

Sometimes new growth can be unlocked by investing more capital than the founder, who had a bootstrapper mindset, is willing to do. Other times it is about just being slightly more proficient than the founder was.

With DDS Rank, the existing business really was doing basically nothing. Not even adding inquiries to an email list.

We won’t know the full impact of “just increasing marketing” until a couple of months into the project, but it is almost impossible to not see a positive impact.

2.) Operations and fulfilment

How is the business doing what people are hiring it to do? Can costs be reduced? Can performance be improved? Can client retention be improved?

With DDS Rank there is already a solid team in place, and clients are happy, but we still saw some room to improve, and some room to add additional services.

3.) Tech Stack

For a service business, auditing the tech stack is a case of looking at things like, what project management system they’re using, what marketing software if any, is in place, and how they are approaching fulfilment. Improving an agency usually involves making the team more efficient, which is done via automation, better delegation, and improved tech utilization.

For DDS Rank, the lack of technology in most places is a clear opportunity.

While we audited many of the above items as part of due diligence, it’s only when you truly sit in the CEO seat for a few weeks that you start to get a clearer picture and build a to-do list.

Let’s take a look at our current to-do list for DDS Rank:

• Analytics audit- have an analytics specialist from RevenueZen (another of our portfolio companies) audit their data infrastructure and make sure we’re tracking everything properly

• Marketing audit- in this case there was literally nothing in place

• Market research/dial in Ideal Client Profile (ICP).

• Set up email service provider + email optin capture software

• Create relevant lead magnet(s) + set up up static + dynamic optins sitewide.

• Set up basic email marketing flows (nurture, abandoned cart, post purchase, testimonial, etc)

• Begin weekly broadcast email (probably a digital marketing 101 for dentists round-up)

• Set up pixels for re-marketing

• Leverage DDS team to start running Google Ads for DDS rank

• ID top 10 pages for traffic, optimize for conversions (either lead capture or sales depending on the page)

• ID low hanging fruit for SEO keywords’s (DDS has a handful of Botton Of Funnel keywords like “dentist SEO/PPC”, etc that are attainable. Optimize these pages for these kw and start dripping links from.

• Establish next tranche of kw targets and begin SEO content strategy (links + content from other Onfo portco companies)

• Audit operations

• Implement project management system (ClickUp)

• ID key responsibilities of current team members and automate/delegate to lower level VAs where possible to free up capacity

I’m aware that for some of you this list may well appear to be written in Greek. For others, most of the above is fairly basic stuff.

Here’s the thing though - it IS basic stuff. DDS Rank is making good profit in spite of itself. As already mentioned, it does not have much, if any, marketing in place. Yet it still throws off a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of net income every year.

If you’ve followed me for a while you will know that generally I am skeptical of “Just buy this business and improve the marketing” as a playbook. Most of the time you will find you’re unable to improve the marketing as easily as you thought, and end up stuck with a lemon.

That’s not the case here, because

1. DDS Rank isn’t a lemon even if we can’t grow it,

2. We paid a price that is attractive even if we can’t grow it and

3. The list of things we can do is so vast and the implementation is so easy and second nature to us, that we really can’t fail to see an impact.

Some things will take time to set up and will take time to see an impact, like the weekly marketing email.

Other things should see an impact quickly, like setting up email capture forms on popular pages.

SEO itself will take a bit of time to yield results, but has a lot of opportunity…and we already have everything we need to implement it.

We are also starting off by having a member of the RevenueZen team audit the property to see what else we are missing.

When they did a similar audit for SEOButler, we found more things we could improve and optimize (like changing the timezone of the “book a call” link, which increased the volume of sales calls right away).

One thing we are finding is that with every acquisition we do, we acquire a team of smart people who have best practices they can share with our other acquisitions. The RZ team for example, have already contributed ideas to 2 of our properties, and these are scalable ideas we can use over and over again.

It’s a nice flywheel and we’re putting it to good use here.

How long it takes to grow DDSRank is the main question mark we have, as things typically take longer to ramp up than expected.

But the key is we do not need to try to figure out a marketing angle or seek product market fit, which is a big chunk of the battle.

For those of you in the US, I hope you have a good Labor Day weekend.

Dom