What Are You Doing to Market Your Practice?

[00:00:00] So if you're doing roughly six to seven low figures a year and you want your clinic to feel more like a real business and less like a job slash cage, I'd love to see you there. Welcome to the Private Practice Owners Club. Your hosts and coaches, Nathan Shields scaled his practice and exited for millions, while Adam Robin went from working 60 hours a week in one clinic to scaling to multiple clinics while working less than four hours per week remotely.

[00:00:28] This podcast is meant to share with you exactly how they did it and how you can build a business that supports the lifestyle that you truly desire. And don't forget to join the Private Practice Owners Club community on Facebook, where we are obsessed with providing even more resources that help owners, just like you, win the game of private practice.

[00:00:54] Hey, it's Nathan. Quick heads up for all the private practice owners who are listening. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while, you know that it took me at least 10 years of grinding in my own clinics before I finally figured out how to scale and sell my four practices for seven figures and about three times the national average. The biggest shift wasn't some secret marketing hack. It was how I thought about profit, systems, and actually my role as the owner.

[00:01:23] That's exactly what we're going to be working on together with you at the High Performance Practice Conference this fall in San Antonio, Texas. From October 15th through 17th, Adam Robin and I are hosting a three-day hands-on event for PT, OT, speech, mental health, PEDS, pelvic floor, and medical practice owners who want to build clinics that are profitable, scalable, and best of all, don't depend on them 24-7.

[00:01:50] We'll dig into simple profit and KPI frameworks, real leadership and culture work, and practical systems you can take home and plug in with your team. So if you're doing roughly six to seven low figures a year and you want your clinic to feel more like a real business and less like a job slash cage, I'd love to see you there. Frankly, I'd love to see you bring your leadership teams as well because we will have breakout sessions for them too.

[00:02:17] You can get all the details and grab your seat at the link in the show notes. All right, let's get into today's episode. The deal and then we're going to share it to the other deal. Let's do it. You picking up what I'm putting down? Always. That was a little bit of Adam talk. What's that for everyone? We're on. We're going. We are live. And you know what? This is the second live I've done today. I just saw that in the Facebook group.

[00:02:44] You did a live earlier with Jess. Is that right? Jess Turney? Yeah, Jess Turney. Jess Turney. What were you guys talking about? Man, we talked about a lot of just business. You know, we talked a lot about the importance of basically like getting out of the hustle mentality and more into the like, hey, let's diagnose the key constraint in the business and let's work on the systems. Okay. Nice. She's a whiz. All right. With the stuff that's actually holding us back. Yeah. Nice. All right.

[00:03:14] We should be in the Facebook group. Welcome everybody to the Private Practice Owners Club Facebook live experience. Today we're talking about marketing. We haven't talked about marketing in a while. And the original topic was going to be about marketing to physicians. And as soon as I saw Adam's face, I thought, oh, okay, maybe we need to expand this here. You weren't too excited about that topic in and of itself. Let me give you the breakdown. Find the physicians, go walk in and meet them. That's how you market patients. And visit them often.

[00:03:44] Do it a lot. There you go. All right. Come tune in next week and we'll see you. We'll see. We got all kinds of great things. I mean, we've got so many sophisticated systems that can. That's exactly it. Right. And it's interesting because there's a lot of people who are out there like, I'm going to get you more patients. I'm going to get you more patients. And we're going to talk about the four buckets of marketing today. That is a big part of the business. But I know there's plenty of clinics out there that aren't hurting for new patients.

[00:04:12] Like that's not their constraint. You've talked to more owners than I have. Are you still seeing like, I need more new patients as a major issue? I haven't felt that as a concern. No. Yeah. Isn't it interesting? I mean, more people are like, dude, I'm not making money. I can't find a therapist. That's really it. Those two things. Those are the constraints, right? We need to talk about marketing because marketing should be a part of your business. It is.

[00:04:39] I mean, if you're really, truly trying to live out your purpose, then treating more patients the way you treat them helps you fulfill that purpose to an even greater extent. Right. And if you're not growing, you're contracting. I mean, there's all these things I could bring up. But even to the point where at our conference, I'll be interested to see how many of our speakers, and we're still firming up the lineup, but how many speakers are talking about how to get more patients. Right.

[00:05:04] Our conference is the highly profitable practice, how to gain more profit, freedom, and purpose in your business. And plug, it's October 15th through 17th. Go to ppoclubevents.com and check it out. Register there. There's discounts for bringing your team members, discounts for bringing your spouses. So make sure you sign up and get involved. It's going to be in San Antonio. Beautiful hotel. Really excited about it.

[00:05:32] Love San Antonio and the Riverwalk, and the barbecue is really good. But plan on October 15th through 17th in San Antonio. Go to ppoclubevents.com. But marketing is not one of the major topics. I think, you know, for me, being a clinic owner back in the day in Arizona, there was a lot of physical therapy clinics around. So marketing was essential. We had to get out. We had to make our name known. And when it comes to marketing to physicians, yeah, I was kind of proud that I had cell phone

[00:06:02] numbers and direct relationships with the physician's offices so they knew who they were referring to. And we could talk to them. We could talk to them about issues that they might have and whatnot. But that doesn't seem to be a bottleneck for a lot of owners nowadays. I think people have an idea. The general population has an idea of what physical therapy is, what it does for them. Orthopedic surgeons tend to refer for physical therapy. Many times they don't care too much. Some instances, they're part of the hospital system and patients might be sent within the

[00:06:32] hospital system to the hospital-owned physical therapy clinics. And hate to see some of that, but we'll, and we'll talk about it. It doesn't seem to be an issue in general. I'm downplaying all this, but our topic is going to be about marketing today. We've got to figure out how to talk about it some. You know, I think sometimes. Yeah. Well, I think marketing is a very universal. Well, I mean, I'm always scared because like, I like to run my mouth and I don't want to claim to be an expert in anything. I'm a student. I'm learning about marketing, but I feel like it's a skill that can be applied to a lot of

[00:07:01] different things. Like if you could market, you could probably recruit. You could put on an event. You could, there's a lot of things that you can do, right? So I think it's an important skillset to learn because it will become a bottleneck for you. If you decide to like grow your, keep your business open for another 10 years or so, at some point it will become a bottleneck for you because everything becomes a cycle over a long enough

[00:07:26] trajectory, whether the market shifts, whether you decide to shift your model and add cash pay services, whether you decide to open up another location across town and you got to figure out how to get that. Or like, maybe you're a PT and you're like, I want to hire an OT. I don't know how to do that. Or Hey, maybe like, okay, here's another one. Um, let's say you're talking to, you're recruiting this therapist and they're about three or four years out of school and they're just kind of burnout and they're looking for that next exciting thing.

[00:07:54] And maybe they want to get a pelvic floor certification where you're like, Oh, Hey, guess what? Maybe I can like get them the certification and market it for them. Right. And it can be a recruiting tool, right? Where it's like, Hey, not only can we support you with that, but like, we know how to help you market and we can post you on social and like help you become the pelvic floor guru. Right. So it's like, because we're good at business, we know how to market. We can apply that as a leverage tool in a lot of ways. So think about it like that.

[00:08:23] I like that you brought it up like that, because when we're talking about marketing, usually the first thing that comes to mind is we're marketing for new patients. Sure. We need more new patients to come in the door. Like I said, that could be the case in some instances. And in some areas of the country, there are seasonalities, which means you need to rev up the marketing engine a little bit so that you can maximize production of your providers. Right. So let's cover that quickly. Yeah. And maybe we can see how that extrapolates across other things, because I agree with

[00:08:53] you knowing how to market is a huge benefit to finding the right next provider, right? That's all marketing, just like it is for a new patient. And the buckets are very much the same. You can just interchange some words, but the buckets are very similar. We could market for workshops. We could market for new specialties that we bring on board, et cetera. So marketing in general, but the four buckets that we always fall back on are current patients,

[00:09:22] marketing through them to get new patients, past patients to either restart physical therapy episode again, or find patients through them. Third marketing through physicians, and then fourth marketing to the community, either via in-person events or social media efforts, et cetera, Google, Facebook ads, that kind of stuff, SEO, you name it. So those are the four buckets.

[00:09:49] And I'll just ask you, I know you have a marketing machine going right now. And where, where do you currently land within those four buckets with your marketing as it goes? Well, it depends. I think it depends on where you're at as a practice, right? I think. Yeah. If you're a brand new practice, you're going to really focus on buckets three and four, right? Yeah. I think if you're a brand new, let's just consider, let's like approach this from a

[00:10:16] place of, I need to figure out how to get something new off the ground. Or let's say I added a new provider to my team. I need to figure out how to fill them up. Let's do that. Right. Because if you know how to fill schedules, then, and you believe in that skillset and you have a team that can do it, you're more likely to take that bet, right? Because I'm, I have confidence in my ability to move that forward, move that ball forward.

[00:10:42] So your current and past patients are always going to be the cheapest and most reliable in the easiest marketing buckets that you have. So I think that's worth mentioning, right? So if you, if you have to start somewhere and you have limited resources, like you don't have a lot of money, you don't have a lot of time. I would start there. Right. And email campaigns, text campaigns. Yeah. Like let's, let's have them when they come to the clinic. Do you know anyone else that's in pain? That kind of stuff.

[00:11:12] Totally. It's really like the KPI, if you will, is really how many enrollment conversations can I have in a day with my current and past patient list. Right. And the more of those conversations that you seek out and you insert yourself into the more likely you are going to convert them into, you're going to find people who need your service. Right. You've got to, you've got to understand that the conversion rate on, on that list, that's a huge list.

[00:11:42] I mean, if you're getting off the ground, not so much, right? You're still focusing on buckets three and four. Correct. And if you've been around for a year or two, you have a list that's consistently growing. It's significantly longer than the physician referral list. And it's significantly cheaper than buying ads and has a greater conversion rate. Cause these people know, like, and trust you already. Correct. Correct. I'd say starting there is really, really important.

[00:12:04] And it's just figuring out a way to position your energy on having those enrollment conversations. And it's almost kind of a sales process. It's the process of letting people know that you exist and getting them into back into the clinic when, when it's appropriate. And I've found that when we starting the conversation can be very easy, we would role play with our providers and team members, not just the providers, but also the front desk was incentivized to get new patients.

[00:12:31] The techs were incentivized to get new patients and it wasn't very easy for them. But once we role played and went through that for a few weeks and show them, help them generate their own verbiage to start up those conversations, they became easier conversations and it became an SOP. It became a system. Like this is what we, this is part of our program. And if those KPIs that we tracked started falling off, then okay, we need to start training again. So it was a constant effort.

[00:12:59] But that is all as part of marketing. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, you're just calling and checking on the people you care about. And they usually really appreciated that. Yeah. Like it doesn't have to be anything more than that. Like you don't have to make it weird. Like don't put so much pressure on yourself. Like just call, like have fun and care a lot and ask how they're doing and become like, try to find ways to add value to that patient. Like, Hey, you already know ways that you can add value.

[00:13:27] Like if you're a physical therapist, you may be, you're really great with shoulders and orthopedics and low back pain. It's like, well, how about you call all the back pain patients that we've had and see, see if how they're doing, you know what I mean? It doesn't have to be any more weird than that. And then just invite them back. If it makes sense. For sure. For sure. You know, and if you could do that 50 or 60 times a week, if you do it over, if you apply volume and consistency over time, you will create momentum. Right. And you will create lead flow.

[00:13:57] Right. And then once you kind of master that skill and you're like, man, I kind of know how to have enrollment conversations. Then you can start teaching your team how to do that. Right. Having role plays and those types of things. I mean, you can even bonus or incentivize somehow with your, with them around that. So yeah, that's all it is. Yeah. So you want to start off with current and past patients as the easiest, cheapest way to move forward. And so you're doing some of that in your clinic. I assuming, is it a low level consistent effort of this engine going on?

[00:14:27] Right. Yeah. And then it will step on that pedal whenever we need to, right? Like if we recognize that schedules are declining for whatever reason, because life, right? We will say, Hey, I got an idea. Let's kick up the machine a little bit. How about that? And then we'll do that stuff. And then the numbers will come back up and we're like, yeah, let's have fun. All of this is predicated upon just tracking some numbers. Yeah.

[00:14:54] And like I had the diagnostics business in Alaska where we did EMGs. And I knew that if I sent out a monthly newsletter that I could keep my numbers up where I needed them to be. And then months where I did not do it were the months that would fall off. And if I needed to kickstart some things, I would add a fax to the local doctor's offices that like, Hey, we've got openings this time this week. If you've got someone that needs an EMG SAP, we can set them up on these days. So we would do, those were like, that was like my two-step process.

[00:15:24] Cause those people aren't necessarily, they don't usually have friends that need EMGs. You need an EMG when you need an EMG and then it's one and done. Right. But that was the metric that I could track. And that was my marketing system. And that worked for me. So knowing your metrics and making sure it's part of your system. And I knew what day I was to create content for the newsletter. And when that newsletter is supposed to go out, I figured those days out, put them in my calendar and made it a consistent system. And it worked.

[00:15:53] I think that's a really important piece of this. You know, a lot of marketing is not that confusing. It's surprisingly simple. And we tend to do just like with most things, we tend to overcomplicate it. But really when you boil it all down, it's just work. It's just work being done consistently over time. You're sending the facts and the facts and the facts and the facts and the make the call, make the call, make the call, make the call. Right.

[00:16:21] And I'm saying that from somebody who I don't necessarily find myself to be like a super like talented individual. I've got some talents, but what I'm really good at is just like, I don't stop. You know what I mean? Like I just don't give up. And I've built several businesses that way. And so if you just consistently show up for long enough, you're marketing. And that's, that's enough a lot of times. So let's go back to what you were, you brought up the scenario.

[00:16:50] We're getting things off the ground, whether that's a, someone we're trying to increase their patient volume or a new niche or program or a new clinic. Maybe we don't have, we can always dip into the current and past patient list, but if it were a little bit newer, maybe we don't have that stuff. And so where do you recommend they go at that point? That is a great question. I think that's where you probably, it's going to depend on what you enjoy doing and what you're good at.

[00:17:18] But for me, where I typically will graduate, gravitate towards is I want to number one, find all of the key influencers in the community that have decision-making authority that are influencers. You call them physicians, right? But you can also call them chiropractors and nurse practitioners and superintendents and people who are leaders of ideally like the types of people that you want to treat. Right.

[00:17:46] What you're saying is you need to know what kind of patient you're targeting. Yeah. Marketing for a lot of the times in a therapy clinic, it might be a physician, but if you're marketing for a workshop, I don't know, maybe the physician's not the place to go. Maybe the gym is the influencer, right? Maybe it's some personal trainers. Maybe it's some local fitness trainers who have a CrossFit box or you name it. Doesn't have to be physicians.

[00:18:15] Just know that you have a specific avatar of the ideal patient that you want to see. And then where are their watering holes? Where are they going to come in line with what you're marketing? Is that what you're saying? That's a very good way of saying exactly what I'm trying to say. I think getting really clear on like who it is you're trying to help. Yeah. And what their pain points are. What are the things that motivate them to make decisions about their health? Right. Right.

[00:18:45] And who in the community has influence on that decision-making process. Right. Because if you know that you can start to craft a messaging or an offer or language that can speak a little bit more directly to them. And it doesn't like, I'm trying not to make this more complex. It don't overcomplicate this. You know what I mean? Like it was my ideal patient and where are they, where are they going to come across my stuff? Yes. So it's like back pain. Okay.

[00:19:12] Your messaging can be like, Hey, you got back pain? Like that could be it. Or is your back stiff in the morning? Yeah. I think I can help you. You know what I mean? Like, that's it. Like, like very doesn't have to be, it's the simple consistency that really helps. And then you can speak to the people who have influence over those people with back pain, craft some messaging that might resonate with that audience and then tell the world about it. Tell the world about it. Right.

[00:19:41] So like, I would recommend like getting out in the community, building those relationships with those key influencers, the same principle that you applied with your current past patients. How many conversations can I have to create change? How many influencer conversations can I have to create change? And then social media and technology like makes it a lot easy, very easy to get in front of people. So posting relevant content about your ideal client and what you do, and then creating some type of compelling offer for them to consider you as an option.

[00:20:11] Yeah. Again, I'll share a couple examples. Like one of our clients, he has a mental health practice and, and he likes working with members of the Christian faith. And so in this situation, his influencers are going to be pastors. Like how can I get in front of pastors who might be having some weekly support groups or something? How can I get in front of them and be a part of the support groups and support the support groups? What kind of materials are they looking for that I can be a part of?

[00:20:40] So in his realm, those would be influencers. In the obvious orthopedic realm, yeah, you're going to talk about physicians, but you know, I've had a conversation with Angie McGillivray a few weeks ago, a couple months ago, interviewed her a couple of times, but down in South Florida, their clinic got wiped out by a hurricane. They had to restart all over again. They're like, you know what? We want to do what we want to do. We have an opportunity to have a clean, fresh start.

[00:21:05] Our ideal avatar is 30 year old athlete, female athletes, like CrossFit athletes. So that's what we're going to set up our business for. And that's what we're going to market for. And so they were heavy into social media and highlighting the athletes that they worked with. And they'd go to the CrossFit events with a table in an awning and they'd go to the gyms and they'd bring their ultrasound units so they could show athletes what was wrong with their soft tissue. And that was their focus. And now they built out this brand new facility in South Florida.

[00:21:35] That has, that they bought, they built it themselves. It's perfectly set up. It's got the racks like you would see in a CrossFit gym and it's set up for athletes. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Those 30 year old females, a lot of them are married. A lot of them had kids. And who makes the medical decisions in the family? The moms, right? The moms do. The caretakers. And so if they have a child that has an injury, well, they're going to say, well, I go to Angie's place. We're going to go to Angie's place.

[00:22:05] So this is where you're going. Right. And so in that situation, they, again, didn't focus on the physician so much as who their ideal avatar was for a client. Yeah. And they just stuck to it. Stuck to it. Right. Yep. Just stick to that messaging, like show up and stick to that messaging, stick to that messaging, stick to that messaging. And you get one and then you get two, then you get three and then you get five and you get seven and that flywheel starts to turn. And yeah. So I think, I think that's perfect. That's a perfect example.

[00:22:35] Yeah. Yeah. And then I'll take it to another extreme. So my friend in Virginia, I forgot D bills, D and Mike bills, right? They spend almost 30 to 45 minutes a week with their team role-playing. And this is set in their schedule for three to 45 minutes a week, asking patients for referrals that's built in their system. So when there, he shared the story on the podcast, when things were shutting down over COVID and

[00:23:03] people were relying on physician referrals so much, those tended to drop because people weren't going to see their physicians. They weren't going out in the community. He's like, we, we only get like 10 or 11% of our patients from physician referrals. The rest of them are from word of mouth, current and past patients. So we didn't affect this at all. That was their focus. So there's a lot of ways to do this marketing. You can go the traditional route and there's nothing wrong with that.

[00:23:31] We're just, I'm just trying to open up your minds to think there are other ways to do this that don't have to be traditional. And if your focus is on, if you know your avatar, your ideal client, another way for saying avatar, if you know your ideal client, then you can find where they're at in better ways. Yeah. I think that is a great, I mean, that pretty much sums it up. It's kind of one of those things where you don't want to oversimplify it, but in my opinion, I don't think it's really much more than that.

[00:24:00] If you wanted to get a little more tactical, I think that in my opinion, I think there's probably some pretty relevant tools that you might need to put together just a decent marketing plan. Number one, I think obviously you're going to need some type of video or camera capturing device. You could use an iPhone, right?

[00:24:25] With the ability to do a very light video editing or some graphic design. Somebody's got to do that. And it could be like, you could hire a virtual assistant for that. You could go to Upwork and be like, Hey, can I hire you for five hours a week to just do this stuff? It could be very simple. I think that's a key piece, right? And so your cadence as the marketing director of your company would be to have a block of time on your calendar every week.

[00:24:54] And it doesn't have to be, let's assume you're trying to do some social media stuff. It doesn't have to be a lot of time, but it needs to be enough time for you to stop and say, Hey, who is my ideal patient? And what message do I have for them today? And capture that, capture that. And it doesn't have to be any more complicated than like, grab the voice memo app on your phone, hit record and start talking to them and start saying like, Hey, Sherry, I know you got some back pain. It's stiff in the morning, isn't it? It's hard. And then you know what?

[00:25:24] I know you're trying to do your laundry. And every time you do the laundry, you pick up your laundry, you pick up your towel and it's hurting. And you feel that pain down your leg. You know what I'm talking about, Sherry? And just have fun with it. And the cool thing about it is like, now you've got a full transcript of your message that you can just throw into your favorite AI tool. You can craft emails from that. You can craft social media posts from that. You can do, you can craft scripts, phone call scripts or whatever it is that you're interested in. And you could distribute that to your people. So you're going to need that as a tool.

[00:25:54] You might also need maybe like a CRM or a social media posting schedule. And which is all a bunch of systems. So just some things to think about, right? If you wake up tomorrow and you're like, Hey, I want to start marketing tomorrow. You're probably going to, you're going to need a cadence and a rhythm of doing it. Right. So have a schedule, have a block schedule time with specific deliverables that need to be delivered at a regular cadence and then posted or fulfilled on at a regular cadence. Right.

[00:26:24] I think, like you said, trying to make it as simple as possible, but consistency, and calendaring your marketing efforts is imperative. Even if it's like, Hey, every Christmas we take X, Y, Z around to the referring physicians, set that up in January for December of that year and make sure it's on the calendar. If we do something for July 4th, same thing, yada, yada, yada, all the way down the line. But just really quickly, cause I know you've experienced this yourself. There's plenty of owners out there that are like, you know what?

[00:26:54] I've really gotten crushed because all of the physicians are now employees or got by hospital systems and they're trying to keep all their referrals within the system. How are you, or have you navigated that? Well, I would say that number one, stop making excuses. That's number one. Let's start there. Like, I don't feel sorry for you. Like you got to toughen up a little bit and you're probably giving them a little bit too much credit.

[00:27:22] They don't have as much control as you think they do. Like there are things you can do. You just got to do it better than them. Now they're going to have some control, but a very easy thing to do is to double down on the way that you impact the community and the way that you leverage the community. Right? So have better relationships with and build referral partnerships with the people that can actually support you.

[00:27:49] And it doesn't necessarily have to be people, physicians in the hospital, but you need to double down on there, double down on that. Do the workshops, show up at the career, like at the community events, like do those things consistently be better at that. So that's number one. Number two, social media. And depending on where you're at it, you know, I'm not necessarily somebody that that's a big proponent of like dump a bunch of money into Facebook ads or into Google ads, but it could be a relevant tool for you. Right?

[00:28:17] You may be somebody that should consider spending a little money on Facebook ads or, or Google ads to drive traffic to your practice. And most States have direct access, right? So like, that's another tool that hospital systems are not going to compete with you with. So like there are lanes that you can play. I think it's just about finding which lane you need to play. And so the strategy that I wouldn't use is go try to market to the hospital system and convince them to give you referrals. I would not use that as a strategy. That's probably the worst strategy.

[00:28:47] That's right. Right. So anything other than that, I would quadruple down on. Is that helpful? I think so. Well, cause I've, you know, I've watched you since 2020, maybe in 2019 and you've gone through the phases. So I remember when you first came on coaching with me, I think you had a bus station bench. You might've had a billboard. I know you're doing ads in local paper. I don't know if you ever got to radio ads or not. I did a newspaper ad one time.

[00:29:17] I did a newspaper ad. Did you not have a billboard or a response or a bench or something like that? I did a billboard at the clinic. I did that for like a year. And then I remember you also had, you had hospital systems coming in. I remember you worried about that and how are you going to market it? They're still coming in, right? They're infiltrating even in your small towns. And so you've had to navigate accordingly. So you're speaking from experience here. Yeah. I think it's just playing the game. You know what I mean?

[00:29:42] Like, I think, listen, there's plenty of things that I can do better. But one of the things that I have learned with marketing and businesses that we've had, especially this is a great kind of tie into what we're trying to build at the conference. And it's those who pivot will survive. And it's so incredibly important for you to continue to learn and to get better.

[00:30:06] And if your goal is to seek comfort and stability, you're playing the wrong game. You know what I mean? Like you're just playing, you're going to get crushed. You have to learn new skills and be creative and come at a different angle and try to get an edge over here. And each clinic location is going to be different with different rules. And you have to learn how to navigate that and to apply different skills.

[00:30:29] And so I would just say the ultimate skill is your ability to stay at the top of the organization as much as possible so that you can continue to learn and grow as an entrepreneur and apply the appropriate strategy at the appropriate time. Right? Whether that's marketing or hiring or whatever. Yeah. And it's also training up other leaders to do, to offload some of this as well.

[00:30:52] Like if you're truly going to sit at the top of your organization and run it, you might need to hire a director of marketing or someone who's doing it full-time, part-time, 10 hours a week, you name it. But you have to oversee them and make sure that they are, they're supposed to be doing. And you have to learn that skill set overseeing them and what's expected out of that marketing department that you're overseeing. These are all skills that need to be developed over time. Totally. And you could totally do it.

[00:31:15] I think you can totally figure out how to create movement in that marketing department, but it's going to take a lot of clarity from you as the owner on what the priority is, what the outcomes are you're trying to create. And you got to create discipline. Like we've got to have the marketing meeting every two weeks or whatever it is, right? Like, and measure your stats and make decisions and challenge yourself and stay true to that. Right. Stay true to that. It's surprisingly simple. You know, I will back up and say that.

[00:31:42] Whenever I encounter practice owners and entrepreneurs in general that are struggling, that are really like floundering. It's usually those that are like, they have these blinders on and they can't get their head out of the water, right? Like they, they're in this emotional, habitual pattern of behavior. And they're just treating patients and hoping that one day they'll crawl out.

[00:32:06] And it's not until you decide that like, okay, I got to create a little bit of space and think about this a little bit better. And maybe I have to pivot and say no to a patient and learn a different skill and use my calendar as a guide to manage my priorities. Thanks for listening to the private practice owners club. If you enjoyed this episode, would you mind doing us a huge favor and leaving a review?

[00:32:31] This helps us get the podcast out to more clinic owners to help them create greater freedom and profits so they can own their future. And visit our website, ppoclub.com to find more resources and connect with us.