Jonathan Moffat dives into what makes a dental office not just successful — but unforgettable. Inspired by the viral rise of the Savannah Bananas, he unpacks how creating a buzz-worthy patient experience (not just great clinical work) is what actually drives referrals, loyalty, and long-term growth. From treehouses in operatories to dinner-worthy service touches, this episode is packed with real examples and simple mindset shifts to help you build a customer-centric practice people cannot stop talking about.
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The Savannah Banana Playbook for Building a Dental Practice Everyone Talks About
Valuable Lessons From Savannah Bananas
What do backflip catching, audience dancing, dad bod competition and baseball games have to do with dentistry? In this episode, we’re going to take a little bit of a dive and have a fun time, hopefully, talking about what those comparisons might be. I have a yellow baseball or otherwise known as a banana ball, and for anyone following baseball, or you don’t even have to be following baseball. In fact, the beauty of this is you may not even be a baseball fan, but the group called the Savannah Bananas has done such an amazing job of creating this hype and crowd and loyal fan base based around baseball, but the fun aspects of baseball.
I had the opportunity to go to a Savannah Bananas game with my three boys and my wife. As I’m sitting there in Angel Stadium and the place is completely packed, it was the second night they had sold out, 90,000 fans over 2 days, not an empty seat in the entire stadium. Not only that, but as I filmed and took pictures, and I’m sitting there in absolute awe, as an entrepreneur, as a visionary, thinking to myself, “How have they created this amazing experience where every single person is singing the song, every single person is doing the chicken dance or Baby Shark or dancing?”
They’re pulling people out of the crowd, going down onto the field. The experience is so engaging and so fan-based and fan central, I couldn’t help but sit there and think, “How can I apply these to not only my businesses, but to the businesses and the practices that we talk to?” Savannah Bananas, if you’re not familiar with them, or maybe you are or you’ve heard about them, but you haven’t, go look them up. There are tons of videos on YouTube with what they’re doing.
The founder, Jesse, what his whole vision is, again, it’s very interesting and worthwhile doing a little bit of a dive into that and taking some of those principles and saying, “How can I apply these to my practice?” Essentially, what they did was they took the sport of baseball, which, love it or hate it, like it or not, some people love baseball, others think it’s a long, boring, drawn-out sport, but this is what I was saying.
We just had a mastermind call on this and I said, “Even Major League baseball knew they had a problem on their hands. They knew that they were getting a decrease in attendance. The games were too long, people weren’t as engaged.” The reality is that people consume. We consume entertainment differently now than we did 15, 20, 50, 100 years ago. Baseball’s been around for a long time.
Even Major League Baseball was like, “What can we do to make some changes to speed up the game?” They put a pitch clock and they’ve done some things to try and help speed up the game. Savannah Bananas took it 100 steps further and said, “That’s fine, putting a pitch clock there, speeding up the games a little bit. What if we had a timer on the games and say that we guarantee the games won’t go longer than two hours? What if we involve the fans?”
In Major League Baseball, if a fan catches a foul ball, it’s a souvenir. That’s it. The game goes on. In Banana Ball, if a fan catches a foul ball, it’s an out. They’ve figured out how to engage the fans and bring them as a part of the game. It didn’t happen to the game we went to, but my understanding is if the last out of the game is a foul ball and a player catches it and ends the game, they go get the player, they bring them onto the field, they march them around.
They have literally turned baseball into this experience. Even Major League Baseball, years ago, were going, “You can’t change the game. We’re too proud. We’re professionals. You can’t change the game. It’s okay if we don’t sell out games. There’s lots of games.” You have this group come along, completely revolutionized what that experience is. They are not only selling out baseball stadiums, but are also selling out football stadiums. They’re doing it every single week across the country, which is absolutely amazing. Do I think there’s something that we can learn and take away from this? Absolutely.
Creating A Customer-Centric Experience
Let’s jump into it. As far as it pertains to a dental practice, I know with our practices, we would often talk about how we can make this a better patient experience. What I like with Jesse, with the Savannah Bananas, what they did was they actually focused on, instead of like, “What could we do better,” or, “How can we make a better fan experience,” which is certainly a part of it, and we’ll get into that here in a little bit, they started with an interesting question. They said, “What do the fans not like about baseball?”
Nobody raves about perfectly placed composites, but they rave about how your team made them feel. They will rave about the experience. Share on XThat’s an interesting question. What do your patients not like about coming to your practice? What do your team members not like about working at your practice or practices? I think that’s a really worthwhile conversation to have, not only with your team, but also with your patients. “What are some things that maybe are keeping you from referring your friends or family members? What are some things that are keeping you from rescheduling your appointment and not wanting to schedule it back on?”
Even I find myself in this situation. The dentist texts me or emails me or calls me a week out before my appointment. If it’s a cleaning, that’s fine. If it’s any other work, a crown or filling anything like that, I’m sitting there like, “There goes the rest of my day and I’m going to be numb, so I can’t do it around when I want to eat because I’m not going to be able to eat anything.”
Immediately, we start thinking about all the inconveniences of this upcoming appointment. If we knew that, and if we knew that more of our patients felt that way, the question that I think would be an interesting conversation to entertain in your practice or group practices, when we call a patient and have them to confirm their appointment, how do we keep them from thinking, “Great. Now this is going to be a massive inconvenience to me?”
Again, this is maybe a harder conversation to have on a show as a one-way conversation, which is why we brought this up in our monthly mastermind. Certainly, this is a conversation that I would love to engage and continue to have with others because I have a lot of ideas and I know there are a lot of other people out there that have even better ideas.
How do you make your practice a place where patients want to go to? How do you make your practice a place where patients are willing to drive 45 minutes out of their way or an hour out of their way or change their relationship or maybe from an existing provider to yours because it’s such a great experience?
It’s interesting, I had the opportunity, I was at an event in Nashville, Tennessee, and I flew in and landed and checked into the hotel and then went straight to dinner to meet some people for dinner. One of the gentlemen at my table who I just happened to be sitting next to, starts telling about his and his wife’s practice that they have. He goes, “What we’ve done is we’ve built this practice.” It’s a multi-specialty practice, and they’ve created like a Central Park in their practice.
They bought this big warehouse, they built it out, and they have a Central Park in their practice. He’s showing me all these pictures about what they’ve done in their practice. Each operatory has a themed room. He did all these things that they’ve done to make it patient-centric. He was sitting to my left, this gentleman talking about his practice. The gentleman in my right goes, “Yeah, we’re actually patients of that practice. My wife will actually drive out of her way just so the kids can hang out and play at this practice,” because they have a massive tree house in the middle of their practice and the kids just want to go play there and hang out.
I’m sitting there like, “There’s something you don’t hear every day. ‘Mom, dad, can we go hang out at the dental practice?” They’ve created that experience. Nobody raves about perfectly placed composites but they’ll rave about how your team made them feel. They’ll rave about the experience. I was thinking about this a few years ago. My wife and I were out to dinner at a restaurant for our anniversary. What’s interesting is we’ve talked about that dinner a lot since then.
Now, if some were to say, say, “How was the food?” We say, “Yeah, it was good.” When we talk about that restaurant, and it’s a very highly rewarded, Michelin-rated restaurant here in San Diego, we don’t mention the food. What we mention is the experience. When they sat us down and they poured our water, it was an experience. It was completely choreographed. I think there was six of us at the table and six servers show up at the exact same time in the exact same position holding the bottle of water in the exact same way. They all poured water into our glasses at the exact same time.
As a restaurant owner, you might be like, “That’s stupid. Who cares?” Yeah, maybe it is, but to us, when they left, when those servers left to go probably serve another table or maybe start gathering our first meal, I don’t remember what, but I can tell you when they left, we all looked at each other and we’re like, “That was crazy.” We’re talking about pouring water. They came back all together. They all placed our food down at the exact same time in the exact same way.
Strive to make simple things that create memorable experiences people will talk about. Share on XIt was so timed and choreographed that every time we mentioned that dinner, again, was the food great? Yeah, I’m sure it was. Could I tell you one thing I ate? I couldn’t. What I could tell you is the experience that we had. I know other nice restaurants do this. You get up and go to the restroom. They don’t just tell you to the restroom, they actually escort you to the restroom so you know exactly where it is. They place your napkin down. They reset your setting when you’re gone.
Those are just simple things that create that experience to where you’re going to talk about it and you’re going to tell others about it. Guess what? That restaurant is sold out. If you call that restaurant now, and said, “We’d like to have a reservation there,” August or September is probably the soonest reservation that they have.
Again, their food’s great, but the experience that they created is what we talk about. We’ve referred other people to go there. In fact, I had a colleague of mine who’s in town from the East Coast and he happened to be in town. It was him and his wife’s anniversary. I said, “You have to go to this restaurant. There’s a lot of great restaurants to eat here in San Diego. You have to go to this one restaurant if you want to have a crazy experience, a great experience with your wife for your anniversary.”
Identifying The Hiccups In Your Practice
What can you do in your practice to cause patients or team members to talk about what an amazing place it is to work? I think starting with this question of what our patients don’t like about coming to our practice might be a good place to start. A couple of ideas as we’re throwing some things out there is think about what are some of the biggest hiccups or hurdles that patients may have for scheduling. Maybe it’s difficulty scheduling. We’ve probably all had experiences where we want to do business with someone, but because of maybe a difficulty in finding the schedule, getting on the schedule, maybe even taking a payment, we’ve just decided, “I’ll just go do this somewhere else.”
Again, I’ll give you a perfect example. I was at a sporting goods store, grabbing a weighted vest for my wife. I’m in there, I’m in the back where all the workout equipment is, and they had like two vests, but I was looking for like a 40-pound adjustable. You could go to 20, 30 and adjust. We’re looking for a specific weight vest, and it just wasn’t in stock, but they did have it.
I was at the store actually, in there looking for it. While I’m back there and I’m just looking around, there were four employees that were back in that same area with me, doing various things, restocking, putting stuff away, probably grabbing stuff. They were just around. We were in the same area. Not one of them stopped and said, “How are you doing? Can I help you find something?” Not one.
Again, I don’t even know that I would’ve registered that, unless what happened, happened. I’m literally standing in this door, I’m looking, I’m opening boxes and seeing what these different vests are, and they don’t really have exactly what I have. “I’m just going to go on Amazon. This is the one I’m looking for right here. They can have it delivered to my house in two days,” which, even for Amazon standards, is a little bit longer.
In two days, it can be there and it’s exactly what I’m looking for. I was like, “Perfect.” I don’t buy it, but I put it in my cart and I proceed to walk out of the store. As I’m walking out of the store, these two gentlemen are walking towards me and you can tell they’re the management, not just like the store managers. They are like management, management. They’re both holding iPads. They’re still dressed in the polo and the khakis, whatever. As I’m walking out, I walk right by them, they go, “Sir, how are you doing?” I’m like, “I’m doing great.” They’re like, “Can we help you find anything or answer any questions?”
I’m like, “No, I’m good. Thanks. I appreciate it. I wasn’t able to find what I needed to.” I would bet that 99% of our team members at that point in time will go, “Have a great night. Thanks for coming in.” What this gentleman did was he goes, “What are you looking for? Maybe we have it in the back. Maybe I can help you find it.” I said, “I was looking for this weighted vest. You guys have some back there, but not exactly what I was looking for.” He goes, “Let me pull it up.” He grabs the iPad, pulls it up.
“How are you doing? I see you’re wearing a jersey. Are you a baseball fan?” We start talking as his other manager’s looking it up and really pleasant. He goes, “We do have that one, actually.” In fact, it’s just not in stock, but I can have it delivered to your house. I can have it there tomorrow.” I didn’t tell him that I had it sitting in my cart in Amazon. I’m thinking, “I have it in my cart in Amazon. It’ll be in two days, these guys will it tomorrow. It was about the same price.”
I said, “Great, let’s ring it up.” I bought it. I bought it from this sporting goods store. Again, why do I share that story? As visionaries and as owners of our businesses, our practices, we have to rely on our team members to help support and build the company when we’re not there. The owner of that sporting goods chain wasn’t there, but clearly, these regional managers had been trained in a way. They cared enough and were invested enough to not just say, “Have a great night. See you later. We lost another sale to Amazon,” but to actually ask 1 or 2 additional follow up questions, clarifying and understanding where I’m at, then they got the sale that Amazon was going to get. I literally had it in my cart. I was going to sit in my car and hit ship.
Obviously, room for improvement. They had four other team members that were around me in that area that didn’t even ask how my day was or what I’m looking for or if they can help me. I was in two different areas. I was in the workout fitness area, and then I was back by the shoes area. Not one person stopped and said, “Can I help you?” Certainly, again, and I think this is a reminder, all of our businesses have these areas for improvement, but how do we create this culture that we’re talking about with the Savannah Bananas, where if you look at any of their players, in fact, one of the requirements to becoming a player on the Savannah Bananas, you don’t even have to be a good baseball player.
I think you have to know how to play baseball. Certainly, anyone who’s seen them play would say they are good baseball players and most of them are college and maybe played in minor leagues. In fact, there’s a player that plays on stilts. I was listening to an interview and they said he played a little bit of high school baseball and wasn’t even really that good, but because he could walk on stilts and they asked, “Can you hit the ball on stilts? Can you pitch? Can you do something on stilts?” He’s like, “Yeah, I’ll figure it out.” He was on the team.
One of the requirements is they have to be good at social media. They have to be active on social media. That’s actually one of the things that they’re going to look at when they’re going through their interview processes. Are you good on social media? I don’t know. Interesting interview question when you’re interviewing someone for your team. “What experience do you have on social media?”
I remember listening to Gary Vee, who was a guest speaker at a dental conference a few years ago, and he’s like, “As dentist, you should be on TikTok, Instagram and on all these platforms where these kids are.” Maybe not kids, maybe you deal with an older patient base. They’re also on Facebook, Instagram. You should be in those spaces. If you don’t have the time to do that, that’s fine, but make sure your team is creating that content for you.
Meeting The Pain Points Of Patients
One of the points that I want to point out here, and to keep in mind is that most dental practices sell dentistry. The best ones sell an experience. They recognize that dentistry is just the vehicle to deliver the service that they’re in business to deliver, but they’re creating an experience. When we had our practices, we would do the warm towels, we would do some of the stuff, but it was never really consistent. It really wasn’t helpful.
At the end of the day, that was us coming up with something that we thought, “This is maybe nice for our patients, but as opposed to actually understanding what our patients are and what their hesitations and reservations are can be very helpful.” Again, I was at my dentist and I was about to get numb. I was the last patient of the day. He’s also a client of ours. I think it was replacing an old crown or something like that, I can’t remember exactly, but I was going to get numb.
He and his associate and myself were going to go get food afterwards. What am I thinking? I have to talk and I have to eat and half my mouth is going to be numb. I’m not looking forward to this. I love the guy. I was looking forward to hanging out with the company, but I’m like, “I’m sitting here. I’m not looking forward to drooling all over myself while I’m going to be eating. It also limits what I could eat.” I asked him. I said, “Is there something you can give me that speeds up the numbing wearing off?”
And he is like, “Yeah, there is. We don’t have it, but yeah, there’s absolutely something that I could give you afterwards that would speed up the numbing going away.” I’m sure there’s a medical or dental term for that. I told him. I was like, “I would pay for that, especially tonight. I’m going to go from you numbing me up, getting this new crown and then we’re literally getting in a car to go to dinner and have this conversation with your associate. I would pay whatever. I would pay for it to have that numbing be gone in fifteen minutes.” I don’t know how quick it works. The point is, that’s a conversation. Maybe ask your patients, “Is this something you’d be interested in? If it costs extra, would you want this?”
Maybe it’s not always be yes, but maybe there are situations where it’s like, “I can’t come into your practice at 2:00 in the afternoon because I have to leave work and even though it’s going to take 45 minutes to an hour to get whatever I need to get done, I have to then go back to work with half my mouth numb and I’ve got to jump on a Zoom meeting.”
As visionaries and owners of dental practices, we have to rely on our team members for help and support in building the company when we are not there. Share on XThose are things that are going through our patient’s mind. How do we take this perspective from our patient’s point of view of what are the things that are keeping them from coming in? What are the things that are keeping them from accepting treatment? What are the things that are keeping them from wanting to pay or whatever those things are? What are those pain points that they have from their perspective and how can we meet that?
Again, I’ll just give you another example. I was in another dental office this a couple of years ago and I went in and I sat there for almost an hour and a half waiting for my appointment. The doctors running late. I get it, it happens, but no one really came out and talked to me. No one let me know what was going on. I almost left. It was a far drive. It was a specialist. He came highly recommended.
I know in our offices, if we were late for an appointment, we had a rule. If the patient had to wait more than I think it was fifteen minutes, we, they would get a Starbucks card or we would have a movie passes, things like that. Again, did that help? Sure. Is there a better solution that maybe you could provide for those patients in that event?
Thinking Outside The Box
If that’s a pain point for them, that waiting, is there something fun or engaging or different that you could do to make that a better experience for your patients? Some of the other ideas, again, like for how to make your practice like the Savannah Bananas might just be things like a QR code on a TV screen where it says, “Pick the music mix,” and maybe they get an opportunity to pick what music is playing in the waiting room while they’re waiting there.
My chiropractor that I go to, they have such a cool thing. In fact, we recommended a client in Hawaii do this and they didn’t. It was a massive hit. The chiropractor that I go to, in their office, all their walls are covered with local artists’ art and it’s actually for sale. You could buy it. I don’t think the chiropractor makes any money. They can just shoot it as a way to give back to the community.
We were talking to a client of ours in Hawaii and I was like, “There’s a lot of artists on your island. I know there is because we see their art everywhere. How awesome would it be to give them a place to display their art, even maybe even sell it? You could do an art gallery or like an art exhibit where you open up your practice one night a month to feature a local artist that then brings their friends and family members and others into your practice to see their art, maybe drink wine and whatever.” Again, legality-wise, I don’t know. I’m just saying these are the things that make it a little bit different. You’re tying and aligning experiences with your dental practice.
These are just, again, some of the ideas and ways of thinking differently and thinking outside the box. Some other ideas and again, I went to ChatGPT and just said, “Here’s what the Savannah Bananas have done.” ChatGPT knows who the Savannah Bananas are. “How can I take those same things and implement those into my office?” Some of the ideas that came up with were a superhero day where staff are in capes or dress up as different superheroes. Throwback Thursdays, ‘80s music, different scrubs. Tooth Fairy Fridays, make it more kid-focused and fun. They said giving away teeth whitening. Shout out patients of the day on Instagram stories. Again, I don’t know HIPAA, what you can’t or can’t do.
I’m sure if you put in there, “Please make these HIPAA compliant recommendations,” it would do that. Banana Bucks, prizes for referrals or Google reviews, punch cards for checkups and surprise awards, kids coloring contests. The list goes on and on. You have to decide what type of practice you want to have and what your culture is.
If you’re not clear on that culture, that’s a whole other exercise you should look into and really look to spend a lot of time developing that culture with your team and then saying, “What is this culture?” Most practices that I’ve talked to or seen business plans or talked to the doctors like, “We believe in providing healthy dental care and for healthy patients mouths whatever.” Okay, great. It’s one thing to say it. How is that actually translating to how you’re delivering that to your patients? How is that translating to understanding really what your patients want?
Understanding Savannah Banana’s Three Question Rule
We’ll close with this. With the Savannah Bananas, everything that they do when they’re thinking about something new that they do or, “Let’s try this,” which again, I’ve only been to one game, I’ve seen others on TV. At the game I was at, Jesse was wearing the yellow suit. You can’t miss him. He was like, “We’re going to try this. This is something new we’ve never done before,” and they tried it. I think when I watched another game with my kids, he said the same thing.
Always make dentistry a shareable experience for both employees and patients. Share on XEverything that they do pass a fall through this filter. They call it the three-question rule. The three questions for them are, is what we’re proposing we want to do to improve the experience? Is it fan first? Does it make baseball fun and is it shareable? Can I share this on Instagram? Is this something that we can share or people share with their friends?
In your practice, you get asked those same three questions. Is it patients first? If your bigger issue is team and team building and culture within your organization, is it team first? For most of us, is it patient first? How do we get more patient referrals? Internal marketing, patient referrals. How do we get more? Make your practice patient first, patient-centric. Does it make coming to our office fun? Does it make dentistry fun?
You might seem like dentistry fun. What’s that? Again, think. Remove that barrier, that idea of dentistry can’t be fun because think of the hundreds of thousands of people that were like, “How do you make baseball more fun?” I don’t know. Baseball’s great how it is. You can’t really change it, yet they figured out a way to do it.
How can you make coming to our office where dentistry is fun and then is it shareable? How do we make this a shareable experience? I’ve been to enough conferences to see the little hand things and Instagram and photos and photo booths or whatever and maybe those things work, I don’t know. I’m not saying they do or they don’t. Maybe you have a photo corner and it’s like, “For every person that posts a photo and shares us or whatever, we’ll make sure to like you.”
You’re going to have to come up with a lot of your own. It’s hard. As I’m sitting here having this conversation essentially to myself there are a lot of these ideas and I love brainstorming these ideas, but I want you to do this for me. If you’ve read this and you found any of this information interesting, helpful, or insightful and maybe even a little bit funny angle from a yellow banana ball, baseball and dentistry, shoot us a little note.
Get us up on Instagram. Tag us at @TheJonathanMoffat on Instagram and let me know what are some banana ideas you are going to do or want to do in your practice. I’d love to hear about the success stories. I’d love to hear about the things that maybe you tried that maybe weren’t as successful. I could sit here for probably another 10 or 15 minutes going off on more examples that I’ve heard throughout the years that make it fun and shareable.
One more. I think this is actually Eric Roman, who, as a lot of you guys know, a lot of times is a cohost of mine on here and I’ll ask him next time, but I think this was his practice. They would do a Halloween costume contest between their different offices. The patients would actually vote on the best costume and then whatever office won, they had this obnoxiously large trophy that they would get for the next year, bragging rights, and all that stuff.
That’s fun. It makes dentistry fun. You’re involving the patients like, “Vote for our office.” That’s engaging and obviously shareable because everyone’s sharing that on social media. Think about those ideas, think about those three questions. I’d love for you to share with me what your ideas are. Hit me up on Instagram and social media and I look forward to hearing what exciting and fun outside-of-the-box ideas you come up with. Have a great day. I’ll see you out there.