aloha y'all my name is dr amanda wilson and i'm an orthodontist turned entrepreneur
my company is called straight smile solutions and we help general and pediatric dentists launch and
scale orthodontics in their practice now before i tell you a little bit more about how you can make
easily six figures off orthodontics in just six months let me take you back a little bit
down history in memory lane so i can tell you how i got here today now if you told
me that in 2021 i'd be sitting here in florida teaching general dennis how to do more ortho
i'd say you're nuts i need my practice i'm going to be busy with my family but sometimes life gives
you a different path than you expect but i am so excited to be here today to tell you more about it
i graduated from orthodontics residency in 2004 university of connecticut from dental
school in 2001 at ucsf in san francisco i even met my husband he was my anatomy lab partner
and we make a great team so along the way let me tell you how orthodontics was back in 2004
so it was completely different for those of you who are millennials or gen zers
you may think this is totally nuts in 2004 when i graduated orthodontics was the king of the
dental specialties we were gunners in order to be able to make it to an orthodontic residency
you studied all the time you had to have straight a's and you can ask anyone from ucsf class of 2001
that was me everyone was out partying and i had my face in a book all the time but i made
it i got into an orthodontics residency why because it was the best specialty super fun
no blood lots of happiness lots of smiles i was psyched to be going to university of connecticut
and why not you know how much money we made as orthodontists back then it was such an easy
profession general dennis handed us patience like water on a silver tray it was so easy we didn't
have to do any marketing because general dennis did not want to do orthodontics it was hard they
had to learn how to bend wires and they didn't learn it in school so i was like life is sweet
i'm gonna go buy a nice car graduated life was still good 2004. i'm going to tell you how much
i made in my first year because it's just going to blow your mind don't worry everything that goes
up must come down so when i graduated in 2004 my very first associate ship which was about an hour
outside of san francisco where i'm originally from was eighteen hundred dollars a day plus a
signing bonus plus two hundred dollars per start that i did and i did an average of three to four
starts a day so on average i was taking home well i mean pre-tax 2500 a day i was working about 10
to 12 days a month it was so fun it was so sweet i loved life now i had two kids under the age of two
really busy you know we had two nannies but you know we were busy we were spending money but we
were making money and it was fine but again like i told you this story has a moral it has an ending
everything that goes up must come down so that was back in the tech boom then in about
2008 2009 you know what happened there was a crash a stock market crash a real estate crash
and an orthodontics crash now remember when i first started and applied the residency
in 2000 there was really no invisalign and it kind of launched but it was really not a thing
invisalign was actually pretty junky no offense if you're from the line technology but back then
you know it was we couldn't finish any case with the liners we had to put braces on right so there
was no thread i wasn't worried about general dennis doing it i would had plenty of cases
i was charging actually between seven thousand and eight thousand dollars per case right
and for braces i was charging five thousand dollars a case still had plenty of cases still
didn't have to market patients coming in like water then in 2009 everything had changed right
um all of a sudden invisalign started marketing to general dennis with clear correct we had fast
braces we had six month smiles and later of course we had our direct to consumer aligner companies so
slowly my patients are going away and all of a sudden i was like oh no you know i have to
lower my prices i have to start marketing my net was going down down down down but my
overhead was going up and i was stressed and i was miserable talk about work life balance what
do i do now this is not what i signed up for i started thinking i hit the floor i crashed
icing on the cake there was a general dentist down the street that was originally a referring dentist
to me he put up a giant massive billboard that said invisalign 2995. i was like what you know
no one's going to go to him i'm not worried i'm not worried i'm really good at what i do
they're going to realize he doesn't know what he's doing well guess what they did go to him
a lot so i picked my humility off the floor and my ego off the floor and i went to go meet with
that dentist i said what's going on here you're killing me you know and he said look doc i'm super
super sorry i don't mean to take your patience i'm not doing this for the money i'm doing this
for the patients i want to do implants i want to do veneers i want to do huge restorative
cases i don't want to do ortho but i need to do ortho in order to do these things because y'all
i'm giving you these patients and you're telling everyone they need a two-year treatment plan
they don't want to come to your office they want convenience they want night appointments they
don't want they want weekend appointments and she said sorry you know so i said okay i gotta
reinvent myself i gotta do something different i took all the information i marinate on it i went
home i talked to my husband who i mentioned was also a general dentist and i said what should i do
you know we got to change and he said yeah you're right so he said well you're really good at
explaining things you're really good at teaching things you know a lot about ortho why don't you if
you can't beat them join them make lemonade out of lemons why don't you start teaching general dennis
how to do ortho your way i said okay can i start with you so i started with my husband and then my
husband's friends and then i started small scale creating content first it was blogs because that's
what we did in the early 2000s lots and lots of writing but my blog's got the interest of
a lot of people and then from there i turned into youtube videos and instagram and now today i have
i would say between 3 000 to 4 000 pieces of educational content that's totally free
it's being used by orthodontists general dentists pediatric dentists and even consumers every day to
educate themselves in an unbiased way about good quality orthodontics and i'm not talking about
just aligners invisalign clearcorrect i'm talking about braces straight wire airway myofunctional
therapy arch expansion you name it we have content about it and it's totally free you're welcome
to use it it's accessible you can access it at straightsmilesolutions.com or you can shoot me
an email at info straightsmilesolutions.com and i'll gladly put together a nice package for you
of educational material and it's again totally free in addition if you just have questions i
want to be that orthodontist that you have in your back pocket for questions or concerns and
again totally free reach out to me at street smile solutions you can schedule a complimentary session
to talk about anything you want in the world of orthodontics just for doctors and team members
and that's what i have to offer in addition we do help general and pediatric dentists
one-on-one with their cases if you want help one-on-one with any type of orthodontic case
some of our one-on-one clients have had zero experience in orthodontics and just need someone
to hold their hand and some have had 30 years of experience in orthodontics and perhaps just have
an additional question or a crazy question with a case that they're stuck on we're here for you
we're so excited to be that orthodontic susie in your back pocket reach out to us take care aloha