I recently caught up with Ali Jhaver, the founder of Adit. Ali has dedicated much of his professional career to helping dentists and other dental professionals. But he didn’t set out to do that. He set out to solve business problems, but the pull of the dental industry was too strong for him to ignore. And today, he’s created software that supports dental practices on multiple levels.

Dr. Vo: I’m super excited to be speaking with you. I want to talk with you about your journey to serving dentists and dental team members. But first tell me a little about Adit, so readers can understand how deeply involved you’ve become in the dental industry.

Ali Jhaver: Well, first of all, thank you so much for having me. Basically, Adit is dental software that helps dentists streamline and bring together their phone system, patient communication, operations, and practice metrics/analytics, and more all into one software. We help practices run their business and grow their practice.

Dr. Vo: Thank you. I like to tell people that Adit does a little bit of everything, but all that “little bit of everything” adds up to massive support not only to the practice but to the team members as well. That’s the thing I hear all the time — that team members love Adit and frequently comment about how much easier it makes their jobs. Let’s just go back in time a little bit to your journey into entrepreneurship and the dental industry to begin with because, as you know, the dental industry is a unique one.

Ali Jhaver: Well, Adit started in about 2013. I had put together a development team because I wanted to build another product that failed. I needed to figure out how to pay their salaries because I couldn’t just let them down, so I had them work with me to help businesses with digital marketing. I wasn’t focused on the dental industry at the time but some of my first clients were two doctors, an optometrist, and a dentist, who each used software to record calls. I listened to their calls to identify which patients booked appointments from my services, so I could prove the value of our services and they were impressed because most marketers typically pitch website visitors or clicks, which don’t mean much to practices.  I focused on appointments booked, which just seemed logical to me.

I’ve always been in the business of transparency because that helps me sell. I can easily sell from the heart if it’s something I believe in. So my concept was to put aside the smoke show and sell what doctors wanted: Patients who actually book appointments. I put my money where my mouth was, too, telling them I would not charge them during any month that I didn’t produce a minimum number of patients. From five customers, I quickly grew to about 700 over the course of seven or eight years, which is when we pivoted Adit to focus on and provide even more support for dental practices.

Dr. Vo: Tell me about that pivot and what made you decide to go so deep into helping dental practices achieve a measurable ROI.

Ali Jhaver: As I grew my team, I was not directly involved with every practice, so it became difficult for me to ensure every dental practice got the same experience from ad services only, so I realized I needed to adjust our services to something where we could be more confident that practices could get consistent results without me having to be involved with every one of them.

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