Podcasts

How Do You Know If A Location Can Support Your Practice? The Demographics That Actually Matter

Nate Woudstra can tell you which houses in a neighborhood buy premium toothpaste. Which ones contain dentures. Which direction John and Jane Smith drive to work, how many kids they have, and whether they’re the kind of household that makes a dental decision this year.

“From a personal level, I’m creeped out by it,” he told us on the Dentelligentsia podcast. “On the business side, I salivate.”

Woudstra is the Chief Marketing Officer and national strategist at EOS Healthcare Marketing, a firm with two connected halves: real-time, house-level demographic data — the founding team’s pedigree runs through the development of IBM Watson — and a full marketing operation built to act on it: designers, SEO and Google Ads specialists, direct mail, even an actuary on staff. His operating principle ties the halves together, and it should sound familiar to any clinician: “I don’t want to start drilling until I know where to drill.”

Here’s how he thinks about the question every startup and relocating dentist eventually asks us: can this location support my practice?

First, know what data you’re holding

Not all demographics are equal, and Woudstra’s first filter is blunt: “If somebody says census — run.”

His reasoning: census data comes from a survey the country fills out once a decade, takes years to compile before release, and then gets projected forward for the next ten. By the time you read it, you’re making a seven-figure decision on information that may be a decade stale, sourced from whatever people chose to write down. Real-time household data — continuously updated, house by house — is a different instrument. When the report can count the actual homes in a trade area that fit your practice model, “the circle on the map” stops being an abstraction.

That’s the difference in practice: in one market he described, roughly 45,000 households sat in a practice’s immediate footprint — and 7,825 of them were qualified, high-probability dental households worth marketing to. You don’t advertise to a zip code. You advertise to those homes.

The ratios — and how to adjust them

The benchmark numbers, straight from his worksheet. For a general dentist, Woudstra wants a population-to-practice ratio above 2,300 to 1; most banks want to see north of 2,000. For a pediatric dentist, he starts at 10,000 to 1 — and then adjusts hard for households with children: a market at 50 percent kids can carry that ratio, a market at 25 percent needs it much higher. (Veterinarians, same joke, different species: a million people and no pets is still zero patients.)

But he’s emphatic that no single number is a verdict. A market at 1,300 to 1 isn’t automatically dead — it means you’d better have a differentiated model, a real budget, and a reason patients will pass other doors to reach yours. Competition tells you your growth curve and your cost per patient, not your fate. What he layers on top: income fit (a great ratio at low income is fine for a Medicaid model and wrong for fee-for-service), growth (are new rooftops going in?), and household stability — a university town like Ann Arbor churns residents constantly, which doesn’t make it bad, it makes marketing a permanent line item rather than a launch expense.

The chicken-and-egg, solved in the right order

Here’s the trap: data can identify the perfect street corner, and the perfect street corner can have nothing available on it. Pull expensive data across an entire state and most of it is wasted the moment you pick one site. Chase availability without data and you’re guessing.

Woudstra’s sequence: start with two or three areas where you’d actually want to live and practice. Check availability there first — this is the handoff to the real estate team — so you know an option exists before you spend on analysis. Then pull the data on those defined areas. If it comes back strong, move, because in most markets the window between a good site appearing and disappearing is short. If it comes back weak, next area, same drill.

And one strategy note that costs nothing: market to your market, not to your competitors. If the practice down the road is built on Medicaid volume and you’re fee-for-service, copying their pricing or their message is aiming at someone else’s patient. “Run your practice based on who you’re trying to bring through the door,” he said. The data tells you who that is and where they live; the competition mostly tells you what to ignore.

What investing in a good market looks like

The story worth the whole episode: a two-doctor startup in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The data showed roughly 3,800 residents per practice — comfortably above benchmark — decent incomes, no direct competitor crowding the site. A good market by every measure.

Then they did the part most owners flinch from: they invested like people who believed their own data — about $110,000 into marketing in year one, four operatories with more plumbed and an equipment team on call. First-year production: $2.5 million.

Woudstra’s framing is the Apple-stock question. If you knew the stock would take off, would you invest a cautious little sum — or everything you could find? (“Sell the dog,” was the consensus on air. Apologies to the dog.) A great market with a timid budget produces a fine practice. A great market with conviction produces the outlier. His firm had eight startups cross $2.5 million in their first year; every one was a strong market met with a serious investment, not a lucky address.

The same conviction runs in reverse, and it’s why we trust him: a doctor from one of those hot startups recently called with an extra $4,000 to spend on marketing, and Woudstra talked him out of spending it. “It’s not spend money to spend money. It’s invest into the things that make returns — and know when you’re investing too much.” A marketing firm that says slow down is a marketing firm you can believe on go.

Budgets, Google, and the AI caveat

On how much to spend: he resists percentage rules entirely. CPAs like two to four percent of collections for an established practice; his answer is that the market dictates the number — $50,000 goes a long way in Holland, Michigan and disappears in a big metro, and a competitive suburb demands more than a percentage formula allows. Decide what the market requires to hit your patient goals, then check what percentage that turned out to be — not the reverse.

On Google, which is the only search engine that matters in his world: intent is everything. An ad that fires on every search containing “dentist” is paying for people googling “how long does a dentist go to school” — curiosity, not patients. Target the searches that signal someone choosing a provider, in the geography you actually serve. Reviews follow the same logic of compounding: Google watches growth, not just totals, so build the habit early — and the practices that do best at it are the ones where the doctor personally asks, rather than outsourcing the relationship to software from day one.

And on AI, the buzzword he fields daily: it’s a tool, and “it’s only as good as the person putting in the inputs.” It writes a competent blog in seconds; whether that blog builds authority with Google depends on the strategy behind the prompt. Nobody’s getting drilled on by a robot anytime soon.

The chair is a bank

The best metaphor of the hour was his closer. Everything you buy for a practice — every operatory, every piece of equipment — is money sitting in a bank you cannot access until a patient sits in the chair. The entire game of demographics and marketing is getting people into the chair so you can withdraw what you already deposited.

You’re scientists, was his parting advice. You wouldn’t diagnose without an image; don’t pick a market without data. Define the zone, confirm something’s available in it, pull the numbers, and then invest like you believe them.

The full conversation with Nate Woudstra is on the Dentelligentsia podcast. And for the availability half of the chicken-and-egg — knowing what spaces actually exist in the zone before you spend a dollar on data — talk to us.