Unlocking a Dental Marketing Budget He Already Had
We connected with Amplify360 client Dr. Eric Fugate of Vonore Dental, in Vonore, Tennessee, to learn more about his practice, and how he's found success with dental marketing and fee-for-service dentistry.
Dr. Fugate had spent years relying almost entirely on in-network insurance referrals to keep his schedule full. When he decided to make the move to fee-for-service, he knew he didn't want to wait to find extra money to fund it — he redirected money that was already leaving the practice. We asked him to walk us through it.
Relying on Insurance Wasn't a Chosen Strategy. It Was Just the Default.
For a lot of practices, being in-network isn't really a decision. It's just what happens by default, and it works well enough that there's never an obvious moment to reconsider it. That was Dr. Fugate's experience too.
"Before Amplify360, I was mostly relying on being in-network for patient flow, which meant I really wasn't doing any marketing," he explains.
It's how many practice owners get started and often was part of the prescribed playbook of ownership. The networks bring the patients in, so there's no pressure to build anything else. The tradeoff — write-offs on every claim — gets absorbed quietly, treated as simply the cost of doing business, rather than a number worth examining.
Noticing What Successful Practices Do Differently
Dr. Fugate first began working with the Amplify360 team at the recommendation of dentists in his professional network. "I ended up being a client because of other dentists I interact with through my consulting group," he shared. "I do training with them, and some of the greatest dental practices in the country are part of that network. So I started asking those guys, 'All right, what else are you doing that I don't know about?'"
That question led him to Amplify360 — and to a decision that reframed how he thought about the money tied up in insurance write-offs.
"Eventually, I decided to make a change and go fee-for-service. Instead of taking the financial hit from insurance write-offs, I decided to invest that money in marketing — and that's when I chose Amplify360."
It's an even simpler trade on paper. Money that used to disappear into contracted rates gets pointed at building the practice instead.
How It Worked in Real Life
Freeing up the budget turned out to be the easier part. The bigger challenge when they decided to go fee-for-service was patient perception.
"My goal is to attract patients who will truly benefit from coming to our practice," Dr. Fugate says. "It can be challenging because most patients think they have to have dental insurance to see a dentist. My biggest goal — and my biggest challenge — is having Amplify360 help me overcome that perception."
This is the piece that doesn't show up on a spreadsheet, and it's exactly why working with a dental-native partner like Amplify360 can make all the difference. A practice can free up every dollar it used to lose to write-offs, but if patients still believe they can't be seen without in-network coverage, that budget has nothing to convert.
That's why we don't just do dental marketing at Amplify360. We also train the practices we work with to convert callers into appointments and turn recommendations into scheduled treatment. We also work with your team well in advance of any PPO exit to ensure everything is aligned toward the same operational goals. In other words, we make sure your practice is ready for the change and prepared to run with it.
Training as the Multiplier
Like many clinicians, Dr. Fugate treats his team's readiness as part of the same investment.
"I'm always looking for ways to improve the quality of care we deliver, and part of that comes through continuous training," he says. "Once a month, our team meets for a four-hour session focused on training and development."
This kind of commitment is a healthy signal to our team that a dentist is ready to begin planning their transition to fee-for-service. No matter how great our marketing is, no matter how fantastic the clinician, if the team running the practice isn't equipped to support the changes, things will go wrong.
Dr. Fugate's ethos of ongoing learning and professional development showed us he was exactly the kind of leader who could commit to guiding his team with us in tow.
Advice for Practice Owners Considering Fee-for-Service
Amplify360 has helped hundreds of practice owners make this same transition, freeing up the money that insurance networks were quietly absorbing, and building the marketing and training systems to put it to work.
Dr. Fugate's experience points to a simple starting question for any doctor weighing the same move. It's not "Where will I find the budget," but, rather "Where is my budget already going, and could it work harder somewhere else?"
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