Interview - Kiera Dent

Kiera Dent

Kiera is the owner and founder of “The Dental A Team”, a dental consulting and training company that offers consulting, virtual academy, and virtual events. COVID initially brought her in-person consulting business to a screeching halt, but it was also COVID that pivoted her company into a membership model to create a regenerative income. The new model was needed keep her business going but she also believes that her clients also needed this change. Now, Kiera’s membership group is now a massive success.

Implementing A Successful Membership Tier

Kiera and her team offer one-on-one customized consulting. They decide on what membership tier is perfect for a client depending on their needs. She offers three tiers of membership:

1. Silver membership – one-on-one coaching customized calls.

2. Gold membership – one-on-one coaching calls, private zoom training, access to the Virtual Academy.

3. Platinum membership – silver and gold benefits plus In-Office visit.

Kiera believes that to keep their members, they have to create value first, retention will follow, and lastly, they figure out how it’s going to benefit the company.

For Kiera, events are like their crowning jewel. Based on her experience as a business owner and a team member, she realized that in dental practices, team members are not usually trained up because group travel costs are very expensive. Most key players, such as doctors and office managers, were the only people that businesses were flying on to events. Hence the idea of creating a virtual event that can be for her Platinum clients so they get this awesome experience of training their entire team. 

“So thank you COVID, it had been molding in the back of my brain. And then COVID made it into a reality.”

Virtual Event Structure That Works

Kiera believes that asking better questions will lead to better results. That is why she makes sure to brainstorm with her team and ask as many questions like, “With people being zoom-fatigued, what can we do to make this event super fun?”

What they do is they come up with a theme each year. For 2022, their theme is “the optimization of a practice” because of the great number of resignations of team members. The resulting concept for a theme was “need” and how to optimize the team. That focus makes a lot of team members pretty excited to come and hang out with their event! 

To make the event more interactive, they ship out “fun boxes” to their clients. Last year they put sunglasses and candies inside the box. They also pay for a studio and create multiple rooms and have trainers that are in the groups to keep the chatting going.

Kiera also found that high-quality music is one key ingredient in a well-done virtual event. To get people jumping up and down and hanging out in their practices. So it’s all about training them, making it super fun and engaging, and interactive. 

Kiera and her team typically run events for a full eight hours. Purposely, they run fun, engaging activities at the beginning to get the people amped up. Then moving into one of the hottest topics before some sponsor breaks. They also share testimonials from some offices that are either pre-recorded or live. Kiera ends her events is by giving away awesome prizes that she announces at the beginning. The anticipation of prises keeps their audience connected for the duration. Their prizes are practical things that the team members and doctors would actually want to have. 

What’s also unique with Kiera’s virtual events is she doesn’t allow breaks. She believes that people can still watch while they are doing something else. And they also prep them beforehand for what they need during the event, so they know what it’s going to be like. On day two, they have an awesome speaker content line up. “I always do confetti and dance parties always just to make it a ton of fun for people.”, She added.

Kiera also runs an event for one hour every day for five days, called the “combat challenge”. She confirms that format was a success as the metrics indicated that her attendees return each and every day. She found that the key to bringing viewers consistently is not telling them the schedule and only giving them a topic list, because people come and go based on the topic.

Doing Live Events Before Covid

Kiera used to do amazing live events right before COVID. I asked her to share her experience and how it differs from her structure now. Her live events before had a pretty big group but it wasn’t the hundreds or thousands they are now attract virtually. Utilizing the virtual format, Kier as also able to run “tactical events”. After watching more events herself, she realized that many were tiring as they flooded viewers with too much information.  Then she found the balance of creating tactical events that are fun and engaging so that the clients don’t feel overwhelmed with information but get to take home more value.

In the future, she might do a hybrid of elite clients going physically to the studio while other people can watch it virtually. Her big win, according to Kiera, was showing that they could do just as well (or better) virtually as they did at in-person events. “I will forever do virtual events because we realize the benefit of having access to the globe, rather than just an area that we can physically fly into.”

Event Mistakes You Can Learn From

One of the most embarrassing moments Kiera encountered during a virtual event was when the live streaming was cut off when she was trying to connect their platinum clients and new members to the speaker’s virtual room. The lesson learned is to have a breakout room where she could push the people in rather than closing out the mainstream of the event.

Working with an agent like us in Go Leeward can make a big difference in planning events. When the broadcast failed, the agency had the speaker record a segment that everybody could watch at a separate webinar event. Kiera agrees and adds, “Don’t even think about the cost because the stress is so reducing. Go Leeward Agency took care of all the problems at the backend. When planning speakers for an event, definitely hire an agent.” 

Kiera added, “I will refer Go Leeward to anyone because you just made the experience so incredible. Like you’re just a little magician behind the scenes” 

As a final remark, Kiera shares a piece of advice to her old self that entrepreneurs can also learn from. “Always give your heart and soul and more value than anyone expects, and you will always win every single time.” We often expect ourselves to be an overnight success and don’t allow the time factor to come into play. We later realize that it does take time to build your audience, to build an event, and to build followers. “Give it time to grow and stay consistent.”

We hope you learned a lot from our interview with Kiera Dent. Kiera’s company, The Dental A Team, helps dentists nationwide in achieving their goals and getting their dream dental practice. For more information, check out their website at www.thedentalateam.com.