How This Dental Startup Produced $200K/Month and 128 New Patients in the First Year
- Opened in the middle of a disaster. Dr. Tran's practice was set to open right when the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires tore through his community, delaying doors opening by a month or two.
- $200,000/month in collections, just 9 months in. And he's hired an associate doctor already, less than a year into ownership.
- 481 five-star Google reviews before hitting his first anniversary. No software gimmicks. Just a team that asks, every single time.
Meet Dr. Tran
Dr. Steven Tran never planned on becoming a dentist. He stumbled into it after volunteering in college and fell in love with the work. After dental school, he went through an associateship like most new grads, finding his footing and sharpening his clinical skills. But somewhere along the way, he realized the clinical side wasn't the only thing pulling at him. He was drawn to the business side of dentistry: the systems, the optimization, the challenge of building something from nothing.
That pull eventually became Summit Dental Arts, a PPO practice in Altadena, near Pasadena, California. Dr. Tran started the process roughly two years before opening, and permitting delays pushed the timeline out even further. Then, weeks before he was finally ready to open his doors, the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires hit his own community. Summit Dental Arts officially opened April 14, 2025.
To grow the practice, Dr. Tran partnered with Crimson Media Group on Google Ads and Meta ad campaigns, backed by video content production designed to put patients, not the doctor, at the center of every ad.
Scroll down to learn how Summit Dental Arts grew to $200,000 a month in collections and 128 new patients a month, all before its first birthday.
Opening a practice is hard enough. Dr. Tran did it in the middle of a citywide crisis, in one of the most competitive dental markets in the country.
- A Bold Bet in a Brutal Market: Summit Dental Arts opened as a PPO-only practice (no Medi-Cal, no HMOs) in Los Angeles, a market saturated with dental offices competing for the same patients.
- Wildfires Hit Weeks Before Opening: In January 2025, wildfires tore through Pacific Palisades and Altadena, the community surrounding Dr. Tran's new office. His brother's house burned down in Palisades, and the timing pushed his own opening back by one to two months, right after his permits had finally cleared.
- A Community Still Rebuilding: The fires meant fewer people in the immediate area to draw from as patients. Dr. Tran and his team leaned into serving a community that was actively rebuilding around them.
Dr. Tran came in with a business owner's mindset: measure everything, and treat marketing as an investment, not an expense.
- Patient-First Meta Ads: Instead of the typical "Hi, I'm Dr. Tran, come visit my office" ad that most dental practices run, Crimson Media built ads that spoke directly to patient pain points, like not having a dentist you trust or being tired of getting bounced between specialists. The ads were scripted and voiced over rather than filmed live, giving Dr. Tran room to nail the tone and message without the pressure of an on-camera take.
- A Multi-Channel Mix: Google Ads brought in a steady 20 to 30 new patients a month on their own. Meta ads did the heavy lifting beyond that, reaching people through Summit Dental Arts' business Instagram page well before they ever booked an appointment.
- Consistent, Compounding Spend: Dr. Tran kept marketing spend around $15,000 a month, adjusting based on whether the practice was patient-constrained or capacity-constrained in a given month. Staying consistently visible, rather than turning ads on and off, built recognition and trust over time and lowered the cost to acquire each new patient.
Nine months in, and Summit Dental Arts still isn't a year old. The numbers already tell the story of a practice that's outgrowing "startup."
- $200,000/Month Collections: Summit Dental Arts' collections have standardized at roughly $200,000 a month, just 9 months after opening its doors.
- 128 New Patients a Month: The practice safely sees 128 new patients every month, all through a PPO-only model in a highly competitive Los Angeles market.
- 481 Five-Star Reviews and Growing: With a five-star average across 481 Google reviews, and a team of about nine (including an associate doctor hired less than a year in), Dr. Tran has built a practice, and a culture, that's set up to keep growing.