Cameron: A lot of times, we're so focused on the acquisition of leads, and the reality is that, just like a dental practice, if we stay focused on our hygiene, the practice grows over time.
Take care of your patients and hygiene, take care of your existing customers, and they take care of you. It's not the fast growth trajectory or the 2026 AI wave where people are going to get rich overnight, but that's okay. Commit yourself to a quality product and taking care of people, and more people come.
Anne: Hello, everyone. It's Anne Duffy, and welcome to Dental Entrepreneur, The Future of Dentistry's podcast. I'm so glad you're here with me today. I've got a new friend, and I met him about a year ago, I think. He's just a great guy, and let me tell you a little bit about him.
Cameron Full is the founder of Referral Lab, a SaaS platform serving 450-plus dental specialists, and Techneck, a digital strategy firm with and for dental practices. He holds a doctorate in business administration, studying how entrepreneurs solve novel problems through bricolage, and he's going to explain what that means.
Fun facts: his dissertation research was inspired by his grandfather, a University of Iowa pediatric dentistry professor. He is a girl dad first, entrepreneur second, and I love this: his seven-year-old keeps him honest about both. She sounds like a future Duke, Cameron.
Welcome to the Dental Entrepreneur Podcast.
Cameron: Wonderful. Thank you so much for having me. It's been great to get to know you this last year, and thank you for welcoming not only me onto your podcast, but also having some great engagements with some of our team members as well.
Anne: They're amazing. They came to the retreat, and they're just amazing women in dentistry, like so many that we meet. We're so happy to have them sitting at our table. Thank you for pouring into them, Cameron, because that's a true leader: someone who pours into their team.
With the retreat, we try to give them as much personal and professional development as we can, but they are awesome, and they are strong women from the get-go. I loved Chrissy's article in the summer edition this year. And thank you for sponsoring Marnie Blythe. Her cover was amazing. I can see why Marnie's working with you because, from what I know, Marnie works with a lot of oral surgeons. ReferralLab is genius, and I don't know why every specialist or general dentist doesn't use this, because it gives you so much clarity on where everything's coming from and where you need to work a little harder.
What does bricolage mean? Let's start there.
Cameron: When everybody asks me about bricolage, my wife says, "The short answer."
Anne: Okay, the short answer.
Cameron: The short answer. Bricolage is this unique principle or philosophy of problem-solving. Claude Levi-Strauss broke individuals into two different buckets: engineers, who solve problems by acquiring resources, and bricoleurs, who solve problems with resources that are within their trove.
When I say within my trove, we like to think of MacGyver. I aged myself, but for those who really enjoyed MacGyver as a child, he could figure out how to get out of a room with a paper clip, gum, and whatever. Being an entrepreneur most of, if not all of, my professional life, with my family business prior to all this as well, resource scarcity is very common to the entrepreneurial game.
Bricolage aligns closely with resource scarcity and how to solve problems without getting new things. What can I do within my realm of knowledge or physical capacity to fix problems? Ultimately, that is where a lot of dental teams came up with these unique spreadsheets that we then turned into what is now ReferralLab.
They were trying to solve problems. They didn't have the solutions, and they weren't available in the marketplace. DPMSs don't solve the same issues the same way we do. Teams came up with these unique ways to solve those problems, which we then later operationalized with ReferralLab.
That's how bricolage works through us, and specifically in the dental space as well: coming up with unique ways to solve problems without going out and buying something.
Anne: That is a great way to solve a problem in dentistry because there are so many things they can buy. There are so many shiny objects out there, and it's right in front of them. You've just organized it for them.
Just so everybody knows, bricolage is a French word. Thanks for explaining it. And a fun fact: I think MacGyver's coming back. I heard a new young actor is going to be MacGyver.
Cameron: Seriously? You made my day.
Anne: I know. I think it's really cool. I didn't really watch it when I was a kid. My girl brain, if you will, but that's no excuse. I think that's such a valuable show for young people to watch because you don't need to buy something to fix something all the time. We'll have to see where that goes. You heard it here first, everybody.
Cameron: MacGyver's coming back.
Anne: MacGyver's coming back. Cameron, let me ask you this question. Why is the referral relationship between GPs and specialists the most undervalued growth lever in dentistry, and what does the data actually show?
Cameron: When you posed that question for me to review quickly, what’s unique about dentistry, especially as the space changes, is specialty. I like to think about reps, Anne. We're good at what we practice.
On our own podcast, this same conversation came up, and I brought up the example of Michael Jordan and how many free throws he shoots on a regular day. Go do your own research. It's an obnoxious amount. He was often considered one of the most, if not the most, important basketball players to play the game, and yet he still shot hundreds of free throws daily.
Why? Because it's about reps. It's about consistency. It's about doing the same thing over and over again. Obviously, there's a place for the continued growth of a generalist. There are often things that may not have historically needed to go to a specialist that ultimately then went to specialty.
I do have a tremendous amount of respect for specialization, whether it's in dentistry, going to a baker, or going to a steakhouse. People who do the same things over and over again develop specialization in those things.
When you look back to the question of why it's under-leveraged, I wouldn't say it's under-leveraged. As the industry and space we’re in changes, there's so much energy being spent around generalists learning the gross majority of this specialty trade. At the end of the day, if I've got advanced work to be done, I want that advanced work to be done by the individuals, male or female, who do the majority of that work or where they spend their day.
Seattle Study Club nailed it a long time ago with interdisciplinary care and all the engagements that happened at the local level in study clubs. The data supports the engagement between the specialist and the generalist, and what ultimately happens more often than not is a greater level of care, a greater level of patient outcome, and patients getting the care they need.
If you are not doing this work on a regular basis, how are you able to communicate your level of expertise or proficiency with some of this care? I also advise the Pikos Institute. I'm a faculty advisory board member. Mike is a very close friend of mine, and he teaches advanced surgery down there.
Do we want everybody able to do zygomatic implants? There's a difference between an individual who places 100 of those a year and an individual who has placed one because of a weekend course. The same thing goes with your bakery. When you get married, or when we just got the special cake for my daughter's birthday, cakes at grocery stores are wonderful, but if I want a wedding cake, I go to a cake baker.
Anne: If I want a root canal, I'm going to go to an endodontist because you were saying mental memory, but it's muscle memory. The expertise of a dentist should not be underutilized and undervalued, honestly, when you think about what you're doing. It makes perfect sense.
I think more and more dental practices and GPs are realizing that they do need to turn cases over to the specialist because you're going to get the best outcome. Not only that, it shows that you're connected to the best of the best.
Cameron: Of course. It's about the patient getting the care they need. Again, if you're an individual who ends up as a generalist doing more and more of a particular specialty or discipline, those reps, just like Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000-hour rule, develop a specialization over time. There's nothing wrong with that. That's basically, in a nutshell, what the additional education, to some degree, is: entrance into those reps.
There's nothing wrong with individuals learning additional expertise or developing specialization. But I think the sweet spot lies within knowing where the end of your expertise lies and when to deploy specialization, whether it's in dentistry or in baking. I don't make cakes very well, Anne, so I call a cake baker. I go back to that because I always like to bring examples back to our own lives: car mechanics, the whole nine yards. It's all specialization.
Anne: It’s all specialization, but it doesn't count if you can't remember who you're sending things to, who you've referred to, or if they've called them. So many things go into that. It beats just saying, "Here's a piece of paper."
Cameron: If you drive a nice vehicle, have a nice boat, or have a beautiful watch, let’s say for a car person, your husband or spouse drives a newer Mercedes. Are you going to go to the Mercedes dealer who does only that car and a lot of that car, or do you go to the guy down the street who maybe has touched that car a couple of times in his life? Everything demands a level of specialization.
Anne: This is driving it home. If my husband fixes anything in the house from a plumbing standpoint, then we call a plumber. Then we have to recall the plumber and unfix what he tried to fix, and it gets to be a nightmare after a while. That's the same thing with car mechanics. You are putting it into what happens on an everyday basis.
I think you’ve also realized, through all your research, and you guys have done a ton of research on the back end, that it speaks to your level of curiosity, Cameron, and how to solve the unsolvable problem like a MacGyver. What are the biggest operational blind spots you see? You've got 500 dentists across those practices. What are the blind spots, and what separates the ones that grow from the ones that plateau?
Cameron: That's a wonderful question. We've got 500-some-odd practices on the product. Over the last six years, Kristi and Jessica have been really instrumental in evaluating at the practice level who makes a good user and what those good users ultimately allow the practice to become.
Good ReferralLab users ultimately coincide with good practice engagement. Good practice engagement coincides with patient care and, ultimately, production. There are byproducts that happen when you're a good ReferralLab user.
We've developed an internal scoring mechanism, Anne, that allows us to see A, B, C, and D users on the ReferralLab side.
Anne: Okay.
Cameron: Obviously, you'd see a bell curve, some sort of distribution in the second and third group. But what you're asking is what separates what we call run fours. What separates a run four, or an A-level user, from a B-level user?
Anne: Okay.
Cameron: ReferralLab and similar products that help with organizational management provide standardization for the practice. You use ReferralLab, and it provides standard referral management. From that, you start to understand data. You start saying, "Okay, great. Now I've got the ability to look and see how well we're converting, who our top referral source is, and whether we're following up with patients to make sure that we're getting surgeries or production scheduled."
But Anne, I'm telling you, the difference between the fours and the threes is leadership. Period. It's such a soft word, but the reality is that leadership clinically happens with production because the doctor is in the back. He or she is spending time with the clinical hierarchy, which is the assistants, hygienists, or sterilization. They come out of school with some knowledge of who should do what, and then there's a hierarchy with the doctor back there.
With the front office team, it's a completely different space. There's no traditional education function telling who should do what, when, or why. As the doctor gets busier, there has to be this dual leadership function that happens up front.
When that doctor then delegates, truly delegates, front office leadership to someone capable of supporting that front office team the same way the clinical team is being managed, that's when the practices explode. And when I say explode, I don’t mean just with ReferralLab usage, but with their ability to see patients efficiently, produce efficiently, get good patient outcomes, have less attrition in their practice with the team, and have less attrition in their practice with patients.
It is purely a leadership function. There must be a leader in the back, which is built from the clinician, but also a partnered leader up front. When practices get busy, one leader cannot be in both places.
Anne: It's not a huge shift either. That's the thing. It's actually relieving the front office from having to have it all in their mind or on the sticky notes all over their computer or wall.
What I love about ReferralLab is your team, because Christy and Jessica really know how to onboard an office, and they're always available to answer questions. Again, you've got to get that front office muscle memory up: checking in and putting in what you need so that on the back end, it's easy, and you know you're not dropping so many balls or so many plates, if you will. We talked about that.
Cameron: Dentistry is a really big, small industry. We know we're not the best solution for all, but we are the absolute best solution for some. Everybody looks to see what the one best solution is for X, Y, and Z. The reality is that ReferralLab is a really unique, novel way of supporting specialty practices that want to engage with their patient referral base in a unique way.
There are wonderful products out there that can serve the greater majority of all dentistry. Where those products leave off is where ReferralLab picks up.
In the AI space, the AI age, whatever you want to call it, automation is in many ways the target. I'm not necessarily sure it's the best in all cases. As more practices adopt unique technologies that are AI-supported, what you'll also realize is that there are places within all of our businesses and practices where the human component remains so incredibly valuable.
That's why, with Christy and Jessica and our team, we don't leverage AI to respond to emails. We don't have a chatbot to get ahold of us. We want to have a call, and we're committed to that level of engagement the same way we coach, with our software, the higher-level practices that are really wanting that level of patient care.
I'll just leave you with this on this topic. If everybody has the same AI-supported product, everybody's using one of the three implant companies, and everybody's doing the same six procedures, all you're doing is commoditizing yourself. It's a commoditization of your practice and a commoditization of the profession.
The variable then is not the technology or the implant. The variable is how we engage with our patients or our team members, and that, for the foreseeable future, is human. I have a lot to say about that one.
Anne: I agree with you. In dentistry, and not in my lifetime, is the human touch going to go away. The relationship between the patient and the dentist, who is the expert, and then the person who is going to get them to a state of health through their network of experts, totally sets the practice apart.
Cameron: Don't commoditize yourself. By everybody trying to do everything, you're also commoditizing yourself rather than developing your own level of specialization in something.
Anne: I totally agree, and I love that part of it because using that relationship makes it special. I think people are really tired of chatbots. I think people are coming back around a little bit to that high touch.
Cameron: For all the practices and businesses that want to deploy chatbots to save money, the question is, when you reach out to the service, do you want to be responded to by a chatbot?
Anne: Exactly.
Cameron: Why are you doing it to your customers?
Anne: Yeah, on multiple levels. But you started this from the ground up, so that's not easy to do. As an entrepreneur, it's a lot easier if you buy something that's already got some oomph to it. Tell me, how did you do it with outside funding, and what did it teach you about product development? You're kind of a brainiac, and I'm sure that was something you loved looking into, but how did that all come together?
Cameron: I need to give credit where credit's due. My father gave me the opportunity to be an entrepreneur when he had a midlife crisis in his 40s. We started a business together when I was 15 years old.
Anne: Tell me.
Cameron: We started a string of family entertainment facilities, which is where I ultimately got my internet experience in the late '90s and early 2000s.
Anne, I just spent some time abroad for a summer camp with my daughter, and I was really fortunate to spend time around a lot of founders, VC-backed founders, finance people, and a guy who is taking his business public in the next six months. We talked a lot about what the different trajectories of being a founder look like.
The reality is I didn't know it any other way. With an obvious interest in things like bricolage, chicken or the egg, whichever way you want to look at it, the reality was that there was a large problem that needed to be solved. There were a lot of incredible practices poorly managing this function of their practice.
Because I've got an incredible repertoire, or trove, of individuals I know, the only way I could think about doing this was, "I'm going to get some of my best friends who are really good at these particular things, and we're going to build something together."
I have a men's accountability group that also has founders in it. One of them just sold his company about 18 months ago, and he said, "Man, you did it the right way." He had taken money and followed the traditional path. He said, "You've got partners who care, and when something goes wrong or something needs to be improved, they treat it with the same energy that I'm talking to you about it."
Anne: Which is hard to find.
Cameron: It’s hard to find. Ultimately, by doing that, even though I catalyzed the initial problem-solving, the product six or seven years later is a manifestation of a lot of incredibly proficient, talented specialists providing their own expertise, Christy and Jessica included.
We take input from them on our development all the time. Even though I catalyzed the problem, I wanted to find friends who were passionate about solving it too. We got around a table, said, "How do we fix this problem?" and started to craft the solution.
Anne: That's a great way to go. That's how you become an overnight success in seven years. You just don't give up. You just keep working on it and have great input from those around you. It is lovely to not have anybody tell you how to manage it except yourself.
Cameron: What is my favorite line as of recent? You know what the reward for good work is?
Anne: What?
Cameron: More work. A lot of times, we're so focused on the acquisition of leads, and the reality is that, just like a dental practice, if we stay focused on our hygiene, the practice grows over time.
Take care of your patients and hygiene, take care of your existing customers, and they take care of you. It's not the fast growth trajectory or the 2026 AI wave where people are going to get rich overnight, but that's okay. Commit yourself to a quality product and taking care of people, and more people come.
Anne: That’s patience, courage, resilience, perseverance, all of that.
Cameron: And having a good team.
Anne: And having a good team, and pouring into your team. So you not only have a good team, but they know you have their back, and they have yours. That's beautiful.
I love the fact that you're not a dentist, but how did you get involved in dentistry? I want you to tell a little bit of that story because that's kind of cool.
Cameron: My grandfather was a pediatrics professor at the University of Iowa School of Dentistry. I wanted to be a dentist.
Anne: Okay.
Cameron: I grew up in operatories. I assisted him, and I worked in a dental laboratory. I cut teeth on a microtome. I did caries research with D3s and D4s in high school, and I got to orgo two.
Anne: Like many of us.
Cameron: I'm going to try my best not to swear. I stayed up all night trying to cram with my roommate, who's now an OMS. I sat down and said, "Beep this." So I drew a smiley face on the exam and left.
What happened was I went on my own path, got my own education, and found a path that was a better fit for me. Then, 11 years ago, just through the synchronicity of the universe, I crossed paths with a gentleman by the name of Bob Margeas, who's a very well-known lecturer. Bob recognized my last name. I was doing internet work at the time, 11 years ago, and Bob said, "Is Clem Full your grandfather?"
I said, "Yes."
He said, "Clem was my favorite professor. Can we work together?"
I said, "Yeah." That's how I got back into dentistry.
Bob introduced me to a guy named Rob Ritter, and then Jason Stoner, and that's how I got into specialty. Jason introduced me to Mike Pikos. Obviously, continuing to do the right thing over and over, doing what you say you're going to do, always showing up, always being available, and working hard compounds over time.
Anyway, that's how I got into dentistry. I loved it. I fell out of love with orgo two. Then my grandfather blew me a kiss from heaven and gave me a shot.
Anne: It's hard to not stay in dentistry. So many people leave for a while, but it always draws you back in because of the caliber of people you're working with. We're smart, we love helping people and beauty and all of those beautiful things. It's our joy that you're back in, and your grandfather is blowing you a kiss from up in heaven. I am sure that's super cool, and I love that.
Even your dad helping you become an entrepreneur at a young age, you realized that that's something you wanted for yourself and your family. But if you could give one piece of advice to a new dental entrepreneur, because there are a lot of them out there now with tech and all that, let's wrap up. What would your final thoughts be on that, Cameron? What advice would you give?
Cameron: I'm not the smartest guy, but I'll outwork you. I've always been committed to consistency, integrity, and hard work. As an entrepreneur and as a dental entrepreneur, the first few years of both of those entities were very hard.
Even now, with a family, I have a seven-year-old at home whom I love. I have already done 40 legs of flights this year. It's about being visible, it's about being consistent, and it's about hard work.
There are plenty of really fun articles about the overnight success, the people who made it because they had an incredible idea and somebody found it at the right time. But the reality is that the gross majority of individuals who are successful over time, yourself included, Anne, are successful because of consistency. It's about doing the hard things. It's about working hard. There are no shortcuts. Stop looking for them.
Anne: Don't expect it.
Cameron: Don't expect it. Singles and doubles, and that's a win. Hitting singles and doubles is a win, and if you string together enough of those, you've got a successful business, and you've got people who want to work with you.
Anne and I have chatted on the phone numerous times, and we end up knowing the same people. That's because good people want to surround themselves with good people. That's it. That would be my closing thought.
Anne: That's what I love. You just hit a couple of DeW principles. Good people find good people. We say good DeWs find good DeWs. Number nine is start and don't stop. We don't retire.
I think if you're an entrepreneur, you love what you do, and you see the potential, it is something that just gets in your blood. You just can't quit. I think so often, what I've seen is they start, they get in over their head, and then they quit right before they're ready to hit it.
You're a great example of what to do to build something from nothing with very few levers, I guess, to push or pull. You're MacGyvering in the beginning, but look what you've developed and formed.
How do we find you? If you're a GP or you're a specialist, you need to get ReferralLab in your system so that you can actually make that happen and make connections mean something, not only for your practice and business, but for your patients. How do we find you?
Cameron: You can find me on LinkedIn. You can also reach out to us at ReferralLab.io.
Anne: ReferralLab.io. We’ll have it in the show notes. We'll see Jessica and Christy at the retreat, and we're going to get our Insta Live done, so look for that. If you haven't seen it, you can go back in the archives and look at that. That'll be on our Dental Entrepreneur Woman page.
Cameron, thank you for this today. You've inspired me to keep going, and I know you'll inspire so many to keep going as well and to keep building those great relationships in dental and beyond.
Cameron: Thanks so much, Anne, for having me on. I appreciate you and all that you do. Christy and Jessica have been so excited about their engagements with DeW and with you, and it's hard not to lean into them when they get the reward from their engagements that they do.
Anne: You can tell. It's a good family. You've got a family business here that's growing like crazy, so congratulations, and I'll see you on the road. All right?
Cameron: All right. Thanks, Anne.
Anne: All right, Cameron. Thank you, dear.
