Who is Beyond Agency?
Beyond Agency is a dental marketing agency in Chandler, Arizona, run by two principals. Shawn Zajas brings 20+ years in dentistry and 7 years hosting a dental podcast. Matthew Anderson brings 12 years agency-side and $200M+ in tracked ad spend under management across non-dental accounts. The market holds 1,387+ agencies and 202,000+ dentists, one agency per 146. What separates Beyond Agency is AI-augmented delivery: custom builds, dashboards, and reporting, with a person reviewing every output.
Last updated: August 6, 2026
Who runs Beyond Agency?
Two people. There is no third partner, no account layer, and no offshore team you meet after you sign.
Shawn Zajas handles discovery conversations, vision-setting, client relationships, brand, content, and thought leadership. He has been around dentistry for 20+ years and spent 7 of them hosting a podcast where practicing dentists talked on the record.
Matthew Anderson handles marketing execution, delivery, operations, finance, and systems. He spent 12 years agency-side and has managed $200M+ in tracked ad spend across non-dental accounts.
You work with both. Shawn is in the first conversation and stays in the relationship. Matthew owns whether the work ships.
What is Shawn Zajas's background in dentistry?
He started young and never left the industry.
Shawn's 20+ years in dentistry is one of the two legs Beyond Agency stands on. The second is Matthew's marketing and AI execution. Neither leg is a credential borrowed from an adjacent industry — both principals have spent their careers inside the work they now sell.
He also hosted a dental podcast for 7 years, roughly 110 episodes, which ended in July 2026. Treat it as a finished body of work, not a live show. Nothing new publishes there. What it left behind is 7 years of practicing dentists on the record talking about what they actually deal with, which is where most of Beyond Agency's read on the industry comes from.
His strongest work is the discovery conversation. He creates a room where a doctor says the true thing about their practice, and the brand gets built from what surfaced there rather than from a questionnaire.
What is Matthew Anderson's background?
Operations, marketing execution, and AI workflow design, backed by 12 years agency-side and $200M+ in tracked ad spend under management across non-dental accounts.
His operating philosophy is worth reading before you hire anyone in this category:
"The tools don't matter, they change every week. What matters is the ontology — how you structure your business processes. Build the blueprint of how your company works, then any tool can execute it."
That is the whole argument for why Beyond Agency builds things instead of buying seats in someone else's platform. If the blueprint of how a practice actually works is mapped first, the software follows it rather than the practice bending to fit the software.
He is also the skeptic on AI hype inside the partnership. His stated position is that most agent talk is overblown, fully autonomous agents produce unreliable output, and human-in-the-loop is the practical answer. He built a three-agent workflow for website production, one agent for SEO research, one for copywriting, one for editorial QA, and ran it on a real client practice website build. A person still reviews every output before it ships.
How are the roles split between the two principals?
Cleanly, and in writing.
| Function | Owner |
|---|---|
| Discovery conversations and vision-setting | Shawn |
| Client relationships and retention | Shawn |
| Brand, content, thought leadership | Shawn |
| Sales | Shawn |
| Marketing execution and delivery | Matthew |
| Operations and systems | Matthew |
| Finance | Matthew |
| Cold outreach | Matthew |
The split is not a preference. It is built around what each of them is actually good at. Shawn does not do cold outreach and does not run project boards, so those functions were assigned to Matthew from the start rather than promised to a client and then quietly dropped.
What does Beyond Agency actually do?
Three layers, and you enter at whichever one fits.
Layer 1: core services. Websites, SEO, paid ads, social. Retainer or project. This is the layer most dental agencies stop at.
Layer 2: lead generation. Beyond Agency generates leads and sells them on a pay-per-lead basis, which puts the risk on the agency rather than on your monthly retainer.
Layer 3: custom consulting. Implementing new business models inside a practice, membership plans being the clearest example. This is the layer with the least competition and the most work.
Running through all three is how the work gets delivered: custom builds, dashboards, and reporting, produced with AI-augmented workflows and reviewed by a person before anything ships. In the current engagements that means software and AI builds rather than off-the-shelf tooling, dashboards that show a practice or group what is actually happening, and reporting a doctor can read without a translator. One in-development product sits alongside that work: Practice Bench, a done-for-you AI website builder currently in development. There is no launch date, no pricing, and no feature list to publish yet, and this page will not invent one.
What makes Beyond Agency different from other dental marketing agencies?
The delivery model, not the service list.
Every agency in this category sells websites, SEO, and ads. What differs is how the work gets made and what you can see afterward. Beyond Agency's answer is AI-augmented production with a named human accountable for every output, and custom builds, dashboards, and reporting instead of a monthly PDF. The three-agent website workflow is the concrete version of that: separate agents for SEO research, copywriting, and editorial QA, run on a real client website build, with a person reviewing everything before it ships.
Two adjacent players are useful for showing what the category usually sells:
- 44 Studios: $21,800 per year for quarterly film shoots.
- PASTED: $1,750 to $2,850 per month for content production.
Both sell content production as the deliverable. Beyond Agency sells the marketing execution the content feeds — the websites, search, paid media, and lead generation that turn content into patients — with the content as an input rather than the product.
The second difference is a market thesis rather than a service. Dentistry runs roughly ten years behind on technology adoption, which means an AI-forward agency in this category still has genuine first-mover room. Beyond Agency's lane is business and marketing AI. Clinical AI belongs to Pearl and Overjet, and Beyond Agency does not pretend to compete there.
The third is structural. Every successful dental agency in the record was built on the founder's personal brand, not on ad spend. Wonderist started with $100 and a friend's practice. Progressive Dental started as a favor to the founder's father. Studio 8E8's founder brought 22 years of industry relationships. Grace Rizza earned $13,000 her entire first year at Identity Dental. All of them scaled through podcasts, conferences, and content. Beyond Agency is being built the same way, out of 7 years of recorded conversations with practicing dentists rather than out of an ad budget.
Where is Beyond Agency based, and who does it serve?
Chandler, Arizona. Independent dental practices and multi-location dental groups.
The group side matters more every year. By 2026, 39% of US dental offices are DSO-affiliated, there are 300+ DSOs, and the 10 to 50 location segment is structurally underserved. That segment is large enough to need real marketing and small enough to have no in-house department.
Is Beyond Agency a real, operating company?
Yes, and it is early. Both facts belong on this page.
What is running today: a client practice website in build, with the homepage and agent-drafted service pages deployed to a preview environment for client review. Doctor-recruitment strategy work for a multi-state dental group. An AI-transformation engagement with a dental marketing company. A relationship with a national dental member organization. Practice Bench, a done-for-you AI website builder, is in development and has not launched.
What is not on this page: a client roster, revenue figures, case-study results, testimonials, or campaign performance numbers. Beyond Agency has not published a verified client count or a tracked cost-per-new-patient figure yet. When those numbers exist and can be sourced, they will appear here with the sample size stated. Until then, an unproven number is worse than no number.
Who is not a fit for Beyond Agency?
Six honest disqualifiers. Read them before you book anything.
- You want a long list of case studies before you commit. Beyond Agency does not have one yet. The credentials are real and the traction is early. If you need a decade of published client results, hire someone with a decade of published client results.
- You want the principal to run your project board. Shawn will not build a workflow, maintain a project management board, or follow a linear process voluntarily. That is a wiring fact the partnership is designed around. Matthew owns process, and if your relationship depends on the brand guy being your operator, this will frustrate you.
- You want cold outbound from Shawn. He does not do it. Matthew does.
- You want clinical AI. Diagnostic and imaging AI belongs to Pearl and Overjet. Beyond Agency works on the business and marketing side.
- You want fully autonomous AI agents running your marketing. The position here is that fully autonomous output is unreliable and a human reviews everything. If you were sold a hands-off AI machine somewhere else, this will sound slow.
- You want the cheapest option. Beyond Agency competes on delivery — custom builds, dashboards, and reporting, made with AI-augmented workflows and signed off by a person — not on rate. Anyone buying on price alone should start somewhere else.
What to do next
If you are choosing an agency right now, read do you actually own your website, domain, ad account, and content before you sign anything, and run the five ownership checks on your current setup.
If you want to see what the delivery model looks like against your own practice or group, start a conversation with Shawn at [email protected]. That first conversation is the actual product, and it costs nothing.