Friday, February 8, 2019
Interview With Brian McCarthy, Dentistry.com
How do you take and create an entrepreneurial environment, within a big corporation? We sat down with Brian McCarthy, SVP of Dentistry.com (www.dentistry.com), a “startup” within a much larger company Futuredontics, which itself is a part of a big company called Dentsply Sirona. McCarthy is a veteran of the local online marketing and startup space, having worked at such companies as Search123 (sold to ValueClick in 2003), Revver.com, CitySearch, IAC, and The Search Agency, We spoke to McCarthy about what Dentistry.com is all about, and the challenges of being an “intrapreneur”--an entrepreneur within a very large organization.
What is Dentistry.com?
Brian McCarthy: We're somewhat different than the companies that you usually interview, as we're effectively a startup inside an existing company. Our company is Futuredonics, which is the parent company of 1-800-DENTIST. We're owned by Dentsply Sirona, a large multinational, which provides almost anything a dentist needs to practice medicine and dentistry, from large scale technology to devices, to digital scanners, to really mundane things like glue and gauze. Futuredontics is the consumer marketing division, and inside that is Dentistry.com.
So what specifically do you do?
Brian McCarthy: First, you need to take a step back and look at the opportunity. It turns out, too few consumers are going to the dentist today. Oral care is not being delivered like it should, and that really is a travesty of epic proportions. Gum disease and tooth pain is the number one reason students don't go to school or call in sick. Plus, half of the population of the U.S. doesn't go to the dentist in a given year. That's just wrong. Oral care is so important for driving your overall health. What Dentistry.com is, is a destination for dentistry online. Dentists have always been slow to migrate and adopt to new technologies on how they interact with consumers, and we are giving them that vehicle. We created Dentistry.com as a destination for consumers, and a place where they can learn about dentistry, ask questions to dentists, interact with others, and find a dentist and book an appointment, all online.
Talk a little bit about your startup-within-a-corporation, and how that came about—and how independent are you able to be?
Brian McCarthy I'm sure you've heard of Clayton Christiansen's Innovators Dilemma. It's no different here in this business. We had a fine business in 1-800-DENTIST, our phone-based referral service. But, over the last ten years, consumers behavior has changed so drastically. People are all now using their mobile devices to find products and services. You can do your banking and everything else from the palm of your hand. However, the dental industry has been slot to adopt. How we started Dentistry.com, is in September of 2017, I spent three hours talking to the CEO of our parent company, and we went through it, and I explained to him what was going on and why we needed Dentistry.com. You have to understand, in a public company, there are earnings, and all these trapping of being a public company. To their credit, they were able to carve out an investment so we could develop this. The real challenge to building the startup in a large corporation, is that there are a lot of people who are wearing multiple hats. They have a day job, running the existing business, and they then have to commit more time and effort into building Dentistry.com, to develop the technology, processes, and all we have to do. We do have some people dedicated to this now, and it's been a great challenge, and rewarding.
As someone in a large company, how do you get resources to do what you want to do?
Brian McCarthy: I can only talk about this situation, but I will say that it has been ideal, because we're actually at a satellite office. They bought this business 4.5 years ago, and never moved it to their corporate offices in Charlotte. We're here on Howard Hughes Parkway, and we actually have a full amount of autonomy. We do have to operate within things like headcount maximums, and we do have some components of budget and cost limits, but inside those requirements we have been able to figure out ways to add staffing, adding product managers, finding outsourcing, and developing technology contractors. We are working with a team in Montevideo, Uruguay. It has been challenging, but we both have autonomy and even just the physical separation to help, since we're 2500 miles away from corporate.
What were you doing before you got into this?
Brian Mccarthy: If you remember Bugle Boy Industries in Simi Valley, that's where I cut my teeth in the 90's. At the end of the 90's, I had the opportunity to launch Bugleboy.com, an e-commerce enabled site, which we launched a week before Gap.com. I ran Bugleboy.com for a couple of years, and then I moved into purely online marketing. There was a company you probably know, a small search company called Search123, which I joined in 2001. We sold that to ValueClick in2 003, and I stayed on at ValueClick for three years before going to Revver.com, a video sharing site. That was backed by BVP and Draper Fishre Jurvetson, A-league venture investors, before YouTube got bought by Google and all the wind got taken off the ocean. I then moved to CitySearch, IAC, and then eveentually moved to The Search Agency with David Hughes. So, that's my story. I then came to Futuredontics, when I came up through product, then business development, and operations. That's the path that led me here, and really what I'm doing here is building a marketing technology company. This was a phone referral business, and it needs to be a marketing technology company, to provide dental practices with connections to consumers, and help them build relationship with those patients.
How do you handle recruiting, and what do you tell potential employees who might be getting recruited by local startups or even large companies with nearby offices, like Google?
Brian McCarthy: You definitely know the right questions. We're here at Howard Hughes, where you can throw a rock and hit Playa Vista, which is just exploding. We're a big partner with Google, and I've visited their hangar offices, which are just spectacular, and Facebook and everyone else is over there. That said, I'm a veteran technology guy here in SoCal. I have been in Santa Monica, in technology, since 199, and over all those years, I've developed some great relationships. So, starting at the executive level, in four years running this organization I've had to replace a lot of people, using the relationships with people I know here to build out a great executive team. That includes the head of data science, technology, the head of marketing, the head of membership, and sales. It's been through years and years of building relationships. That's one part of the answer. The other part is we have defined what we call MTP, our Massive Transformative Purpose, which you may have heard of from Singularity University. I read the book, and it was pretty profound to me, and really created a lot of the framework of how I needed to look at this business. Being in a large corporation, but wanting to be entrepreneurial, how do you build a 10x or 100x business, and the first thing in the book is MTP, Massive Transformative Purpose. We really took that to heart, pulled the team together on an offsite, and went through the exercise to develop our purpose. I'll share it. Transforming Life Through Dental Care. That's what we came to. It relates to hiring, it relates to retention, and it relates to employees. It's very clear to us what our mission is and what we're doing. Everyone who comes here, that resonates with them, and that's why they want to join, and that's why they want to participate. It's not just the paycheck, and it's not just the people you're working with, it's if you are moving things forward, and changing the world for better. That's a huge piece of this.
Any advice to others, on what the biggest lesson you've learned as an intrapreneur?
Brian McCarthy: You have to respect the corporate mentality. I think, when you want to change something, you have to understand it. If you are an entrepreneur inside and organization, you have to understand that organization, and what makes it tick, and how it operates. You have to figure out how to satisfy your requirements as an intrapreneur inside the corporation. Another thing, you you really have to build a relationship with the CEO. A company is like an organism, and when something comes it that it perceives as a threat, it tries to kill it. We think about that here. In one way, it's a battle, but if you can get the CEO on your side, and get people to understand what you're attempting to do, and the value for the long term strategy to the company, that's the key to success.
So what's next for you?
Brian McCarthy: Dentistry.com is lowering barriers, removing the fear, pain, cost, and inconvenience which stops people from going to t he dentist. That inconvenience is a really big piece. If we can get consumers interacting online on their mobile devices with denstiry.com, they'll start paying attention to their oral care. One of the things I think of, when I think of the technology we are developing here, is it's about lowering barriers, and getting consumers to interact and make this easier for them. We're looking at things such as tele-dentistry, which is a next logical step for us. If a consumer has pain, it's often hard to make an appointment to have a dentist take a look. But, if you could talk to a dentist remotely and show them what's going on in your mouth, from 10 minutes, start to finish, that's where this can really become exciting.
Thanks!