Chicago-based The Aspen Group is seeing their consumer-focused investments pay off, and is ready to double down on those initiatives for continued growth this year.
The Aspen Group supports several brands, including Aspen Dental, ClearChoice Dental Implant Centers, WellNow Urgent Care, Chapter Aesthetic Studio and Lovet Pet Health Care.
The organization recently celebrated several growth milestones from 2024, including 9 million patient visits and a 13% increase in revenue.
Ash ElDifrawi, the chief commercial and brand officer for The Aspen Group, recently spoke with Becker's to discuss the organization's growth in the dental industry last year and its top priorities for 2025.
Editor's note: These responses were lightly edited for length and clarity.
Question: What were some of TAG's biggest accomplishments in the dental industry last year?
Ash ElDifrawi: It was a really wonderful year for TAG from a growth perspective, but also for some of the investments we made both from a consumer experience perspective, from a technology perspective and from a clinical perspective. TAG has 9 million patients, 1,400 locations across the board, and we saw double digit growth across our healthcare brands. In terms of the actual dental category, we obviously opened a lot more offices. Aspen opened 45 and ClearChoice now has 103 [offices], so both of them saw nice de novo growth. Aspen has a lot of patients, 7 million patients, and 26,000 for ClearChoice, a very different type of patient.
We also have grown the implant business significantly. If you ask me about the investments we made, a huge area for us is implants, which is following where the [dental] category is going. Aspen itself grew almost 30% year over year in the implants we provided, and ClearChoice continues to be the leader in All-on-Four. We also spent a lot giving back to our veterans. Aspen is well over $36 million in donated care, and $10 million of that last year [was] through our Oral Care Center.
We made a significant number of investments in technology. Many of our offices are going fully digital with 3D printing. In the broader range of solutions to which we can now print fully digitally, we also made significant improvements in the clear aligner space. A lot of those businesses did not have a great year. We saw a few of the people go out of business — in fact, SmileDirectClub and Byte struggled — where we saw our business have the best growth we've ever had, so we did see our investments in the ortho category do really well as well.
We've made cool investments also beyond great customer experience, beyond the digital experiences [and] beyond all of the great investments we made in the customer experience in terms of being able to easily schedule and manage your accounts. We've also created things like virtual design smiles, which you can actually look virtually and see what it would be like to have your procedure, so you can actually know exactly what the solution would be like before you go. Now that's implemented across all of our brands and even online. So, we continue to try to meet consumers where they're going, and we've seen significant growth this year in both brands.
Q: What is driving growth in the implant business?
AE: A few things. In general, the industry is really turning the corner and understanding that it is the de facto best solution. Dentures, while they serve a really good purpose, they really haven't advanced since the time of Abraham Lincoln, where implants continue to make advancements. What I mean by that is, for us, our mission as a company has always been to create more access for things that maybe [people] didn't believe they have access to or couldn't have, whether that's [because of] cost, whether that's because they're worried about pain or its complexity, or the time commitment. What we've done, and other people as well, is make implants feel accessible. We have multiple different solutions, whether it's semi-permanent solutions [or] fully permanent solutions, that can fit any budget but can still get you the utilization of implants. Having a wide variety of products and making investments in digital and printing, which makes implants more affordable and faster and less complicated, is another way. If you don't have dentists in your area that do it, it's not accessible, so training hundreds of dentists to be able to go back and serve their communities has been a big part of that. If you start thinking about making it easy, making it affordable, giving you options and giving you clinical care, those are the things we've done to really drive the implant business for Aspen, and I think the industry is following.
Q: What has made Aspen's orthodontic business successful while other companies have failed?
AE: That's a clear investment in technology. We have the best solution on the market, even more advanced materials and better comfort and better hygiene and better bacteria fighting [and] a better look and efficiency than even Invisalign has out there. [For Motto,] we were trying to take advantage of our availability and access and willingness to do it. What we realized is, it's not just about that. You have to make advancements in the actual product. So, instead of just taking what was on the shelf available for us to resell, we actually made our own investments in the materials and technology and software so that we had a better product on the market. Not only does that become an interesting value proposition for your consumers, believe it or not, it actually got the doctors excited about it. The doctors want something that they can actually tell their patients, "Hey, by the way, I can give you a better product in the market for half the cost," and deliver on it, so that also helped us turn the corner. That investment has paid off, not just for consumers, but also for our doctors' and dentists' willingness to drive the products. It's showing up in the numbers.
Q: What are some of TAG's goals and top priorities for 2025?
AE: A lot of it is building on the momentum of last year, so all of the progress I just mentioned to you from an implant perspective, I still think we're in the early stages. So, a large part of 2025 is our continued efforts into giving consumers these full-mouth tooth replacement options. The Oral Care Center is the best facility in the world. We're going to get hundreds of more doctors through that facility to get trained. We're also continuing to make investments in the digital workflow, so not all of our offices are there, but getting more and more offices working fully digitally to give people more access to that.
We continue to open more locations to make sure people have access to care as well. We continue to make investments in ortho. We want that business to continue to grow, so that's really about getting all of our doctors comfortable with new technology and the adoption of that. We spent 2024 setting the foundation for a lot of these capabilities and all these investments we made. Now, it's about expanding that [and] getting all of the doctors better so our patients can have access to all these things we made investments in.