E618 | How To Autopilot Your Practice With Jeremy Dupont

In this episode of the podcast, Doc Danny and Jeremy Dupont delve into the process of auto-piloting a practice. They emphasize the importance of consistent, repeatable systems and understanding the customer journey.

Jeremy shares his experience of implementing technology in his practice, Ripple, to increase capacity and efficiency. By empowering his physical therapists to handle their own scheduling, he has fostered personalized relationships with patients and has been able to focus on the bigger picture.

Both Doc Danny and Jeremy highlight the significance of combining the right people and the right software for successful auto-piloting. They also discuss the challenges of achieving passive income and how technology aids in increasing capacity, tracking KPIs, and facilitating follow-up communication.

Danny and Jeremy emphasize the efficiency that technology enables for businesses, particularly in the context of not having the same resources as in-network practices. They discuss how they utilized HubSpot to intentionally build their customer experience, resulting in a substantial influx of new clients.

The clean and user-friendly interface of HubSpot has made it their favorite tool to use daily. Drawing comparisons between starting Ripple and Patch, they highlight the framework they have developed to customize for each business that joins them, likening it to creating a treatment plan. Tracking and managing customers are underscored as pivotal aspects, with an emphasis on the fundamentals.

The episode touches on the significance of visibility and understanding in reducing stress and anxiety. Reactivation campaigns are recommended, with the suggestion to establish a basic framework that can be adjusted seasonally or when new employees join.

Marketing and sales are emphasized as crucial for success, and following up with potential clients is deemed necessary as they may not be ready to prioritize self-care. Consistent content and tracking customer journeys are highlighted as vital for providing the help people need. 

Finally, the episode introduces Patch as a tool designed to enhance efficiency and prevent patients from slipping through the cracks. This allows healthcare practitioners to hire more staff and create a rewarding income-generating environment. The importance of efficiency for both business owners and clinicians is emphasized, and listeners are encouraged to take notes and implement what they learn to scale their own businesses.

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Podcast Transcript

Danny: [00:00:00] Hey, real quick, before we get started, head over to Facebook and join the PT entrepreneurs Facebook group. If you haven't done so yet, we have monthly live trainings going on there. There's an opportunity for you to join in the conversation instead of just listening to what I have to say on this podcast, as well as the people that I bring on.

And it's a really cool place to join about 6, 000 other clinicians that are. Honestly, trying to change the landscape of our profession through these cash and hybrid practices. One other thing that's really cool is we have a guide in there. That's a quick start guide. When you join, you can go and check this out.

There's about seven videos that we've curated that are the most common questions we get in the best case studies that we've found to really help you start, grow, and scale your practice up to seven figures. So if you haven't done so yet, head to Facebook request to join the PT entrepreneurs, Facebook group.

You have to be a clinician. We're going to check you out. We don't just let anybody in. But if you are, Hey there, go ahead, get signed up. We'd love to have the conversation with you in that group.

So here's the question. How do physical therapists like us who don't want to see 30 patients a [00:01:00] day, who don't want to work home health and have real student loans, create a career and life for ourselves that we've always dreamed about? This is the question. And this podcast is the answer. My name's Danny Matei.

And welcome to the PT entrepreneur podcast.

What's up guys. Doc Danny here with the PT entrepreneur podcast. And we have our good buddy, Jeremy DuPont back again, marketing wizard, CRM wizard, and co founder of patch marketingpatches. com great site. Go check it out. If you're interested in getting some some help with your CRM, we're going to talk today in particular about autopiloting your practice.

Cause one thing that we see with the businesses that we work with now is they're to end goals for a lot of these business [00:02:00] owners, one being a true exit to a business similar to what I did and what my business partner and PT biz did. And the other one being autopilot, which I think is for a lot of people makes a lot of sense where they can really drop their hours down to probably no more than maybe five, 10 a week sometimes less depending on what you want to do.

And in order to do that, you really have to have some very. consistent, repeatable business systems. And then once you get to that point, then you can decide what you want to do. And that's what happened with both Jeremy and and myself. Anyway, Jeremy, let's do this, man. Why don't we get into the.

Process that you went through to autopilot your practice. I think you've done a really good job of this and recently have done this. What were the big steps that you took to get to the point where you could say, all right, I don't even need to live it. You don't even live in the same damn area as your practice, right?

Is it like to actually autopilot to where you can be an hour and a half away and only come in occasionally? What do you think the big steps are for that?

Jeremy: Yeah, I think I think so. I guess a, I will say it's not something that [00:03:00] you can like just snap your fingers and put a couple of funnels in place and just be like, okay, everything's autopiloted here.

All the leads that are coming in are going to be, I have all these automations. Now people are going to get emails and everything's going to be great. I think a lot of people will just purchase these funnels or a CRM and put these automations in place, and it's just Okay I'm good now everyone's taken care of, and I think that's it's a big fallacy for sure, and I think what has worked really well for us, A, is Like really nailing down, our customer journey and taking that.

And I think like the way that I look at the automation side of things is it's again, not just putting a bunch of funnels in place and trying to put somebody in a funnel. And then hopefully they. Coming for an evaluation, but it's, what is the overall customer journey look like and how do we add in certain funnels within that?

Or how does one funnel push somebody to another funnel? And I think that's a really important thought process that you have to have with all of this stuff in order to automate it. [00:04:00] And again, like I started using. I really dove into RCRM HubSpot a little over a year ago. And so it's like just now getting to the point where I've been able to go in, learn how to use it.

There's lots of trial and error behind it too. Taking, some of the data that we have, which is a really important part of automating things and being able to like have some visibility into what your business is actually doing and where are the leaky holes within your customer journey and really, patching that up.

Hence the name, but but yeah, I think it's, it's really like understanding. The specifics on your customer journey and understanding that a clinic in Boston, like where mine is going to be different than a clinic in Los Angeles or somewhere in Florida. And really understanding what is your customer thinking and feeling and.

What type of content can we put in front of these people at these certain points? And really really nailing all of that down. So it's not, again, it's not something that you just [00:05:00] download and implement and you're good to go. It's really taking a look at, what does your buyer. Your prospects, what are they thinking?

What are they feeling? From the time they raise their hand to the time that they're, purchasing a package with you, hopefully buying some continuity and making sure you know where all those points live. And again, like putting some content behind it.

Danny: Yeah. And I think The, when I look at the path to automation of your practice or the path to auto piloting, I should say it, there's two variables that are really super important.

The technology that you leverage and a lot of people in the clinical world are very tech averse, right? They're like, no, I don't want anything to do with technology. I still want to use paper notes. You still, whatever you're doing, this is old school stuff. It's fine. It's just what you're used to.

And it doesn't mean it's what is best for your practice. Just means it's what you're comfortable with. And on the other side, with technology, you need people. So you need people to then run your play that you've [00:06:00] developed the systems that you've put in place. And. Finding and hiring and training those key people and retaining those key people.

That's the other tricky part that that we see. And I'd love to know for you what because you're the way you did it is slightly different than the way I did it. In terms of. We had, we're heavy administratively kind of built out. We had, two full time people running ops.

Then we had, like senior clinician and then more junior clinicians. And for us that allowed us really allowed me to completely step away from patient care and please step away from everything except for basically a meeting once a week and and free up my time to do pretty much whatever else I want, which ironically turned into starting PT biz, right?

And really focusing on PT biz. For you, your structure is a bit different. So why don't you describe like the way in which Ripple is set up, which is your cash based practice. And the key components that you see with that in order to get to the point where you can autopilot.

Jeremy: Yeah.

So yeah our setup is much different than I think even the traditional like cash based clinic. I think it is very smart[00:07:00] that like one of the first hires that people should have is an admin staff. I think that makes a lot of sense. Especially now that I've. I did not hire an admin staff as my first hire and went right into hiring a staff PT.

But yeah, so we grew and I think why our company and our clinic grew this way is that, my first hire was a physical therapist and just because I was, I had way too many people on my own schedule and, I had a bigger vision for the clinic too, in terms of, trying to remove myself as soon as possible.

But I think that led to the structure of what, how my PTs function is, they, and this kind of goes to like our bigger picture of like the core values of ripple is we want these like very high personalized touch points with all of the prospects and patients that come in. And I think like a big part of that is that like my physical therapist.

90% of the time they handle their own scheduling with their patients coming in. So that [00:08:00] obviously takes a huge burden. And it's one of the really big things that I think an admin can really help free up time for your staff members. But again, I just looked at it differently of, I want my PT's aid to be able to control their own schedule.

Which means that, a third person isn't scheduling their patients, wherever things are open or, whatever fits in into this week. And, I want the patients that are coming in to have a, this like high touch, personalized relationship with the, their physical therapist.

And I think like having that part of it really increases that too. So that's the, the deal if you're a PT coming on board at Ripple is you handled. Your schedule there's pros and cons with it. Obviously is you can choose your schedule and if you want to work, three 12 hour days and then have two days off, go for it.

If that works then, it is, you do it as long as you're fulfilling on your KPIs and all of these things. Then that's totally fine. But, on the side of it obviously is they have to do a little bit of their own scheduling, but for the most part, and, it feeds into our [00:09:00] whole like business structure of say Danny, you want to come in you would have your Wednesday at 9am appointment and that's like your reoccurring appointment kind of forever basically.

And that reinforces people have their. Their spot in their schedule with our PTs and just makes everyone's lives easier. So I think that was one of the, one of the really big unlocks. And, I was able to, not have to hire an admin staff and my PTs take care of all of their scheduling.

And I could look at, more of the bigger picture terms of things and really look at like more of the marketing side and putting these automations in place and really dissecting and implementing the customer journey.

Danny: Yeah, and I think you leveraged where we implemented people, you implemented technology on a much higher level, I would say, a much more advanced level.

We, we obviously were using communication tools and project management tools and things to help track what we were doing. But when, when. When I look back on it and ironically, even [00:10:00] now, the, the person that bought athletes potential is a patch client and is implementing HubSpot because it is such a game changer to be able to implement the systems that, that really, you developed and now be dealt to plug those into, you.

All these other practices that we've had a chance to work with and see them work on such a effective sort of high level that it's almost like a no brainer. If you're at a certain size business that you would want to add these in because what you basically did was take technology and probably get a half an admin out of that one person.

If you're looking at output in production Versus we basically just hired more people, which is fine, but also that you could make the people that you have in person more efficient if you did a combination of both. So you could have this sort of admin. It's function almost like a super admin because they're able to do so much more and they're able to run the core of this customer relationship management tool is the CRM software and really be able to effectively [00:11:00] organize and then implement on the things that you want to be done as well as the visibility that comes with that.

Because if you're not in there day to day there's a few things that really can, you can lose track of quickly. So your KPIs not being tracked, your people not knowing what they should be doing and what their scorecard is, and how they're getting graded and if they're winning or losing, these are all things that need to be established in order to be able to take a step back.

And it takes a long time. But I do think that If you look at like, how can you really step away and let's say you want to do this because there's many reasons you could be a you could be a mom and you want to spend more time with your kids instead of just, being in your business every single day.

So you take a step back from practice hours and you really focus more on running the business, but your location independent most of the week and you have a lot more time freedom. That's something that a lot of people want to do. And and it is a hard thing to be able to do. Same thing.

If you're, let's say you have a passion to work on something else. In this case, for you, it was, you really nerded out on the marketing side. You really love the marketing and the, the [00:12:00] digital infrastructure and software that can help support these businesses. And that turned into patch, and it turned into the thing you're doing now, but in order to actually take a big swing at another business. You need to be able to set your people up for success and not just leave them hanging, which is not what you want to do for them, obviously. So I think if you're listening to this and you're thinking that this is a strategy for you, the combination of the right people and the right software is really powerful.

And if you think about this idea of passive income, like passive income is this buzzword you hear a lot and it's clickbait in a lot of ways. In my opinion, the only people I know that have generated a lot of passive income a. Already had a lot of income and they just put it into vehicles to generate a passive income, or they inherited it in some way.

And then on the other side of that is they built a business and were able to put it in a place where it was basically. Functioning on its own. I don't really know many other ways to be able to get to a point where you have legitimate passive income that is meaningful. In, in my experience, maybe there's other ways, but for me, it's always been a hard route from what I've seen.

So if you're looking to go that route, I just think software just makes [00:13:00] such a big difference. And it's the reason why we're seeing so many people that are starting to implement this now. So do you even think it's possible to do what you did without? Some sort of tech tool that's similar to a HubSpot to manage everything.

I'm not sure how you do it.

Jeremy: No, I think, and you make a really good point there with the technology should be an aid to like your current process too. And really whatever technology you end up going with, like you just have to make sure that I think the, one of the biggest things that it does is it just increases your capacity and your capacity, but your staff's capacity as well.

And if you have an admin staff, it should just make them a super admin really of if you have, you should have a very clear vision on like, when do you want follow up in your business? And when someone comes in for an evaluation, like what does that process look like for them afterwards?

What technology can do for you is it can, track that and make sure that no one forgets to send the followup evaluation email which is like a really important touch point for people that are purchasing a package. And if your new physical therapist that just started two [00:14:00] weeks ago has had 80 valves in the last two weeks, if you don't have a process in place there or technology to remind them to send this email, They're going to forget on a couple of those.

And then that's, could start them down the path of, this patient isn't getting like the top tier experience. And I think that's where like you need technology, like as scary as technology can be to really like, again, just like maximize. on your staff's capacity. It's going to make your PT's job way easier because they're going to know if someone purchased a package three months ago and they should send a follow up email, there should be like a task or a automated email that goes out to your PT that says, Hey, follow up with Joe.

He bought a package three months ago. Just check in and see how he's doing. And just like very small things like that. If you're going to save your staff members so much time of, instead of going to a Google sheets and seeing who called three weeks ago and then Oh, did I update at that on the Google sheets or did I not?

And then you go into your email to see if you [00:15:00] send this person an email. Crap, I didn't send Joe an email. So then you go back to your Google sheet, type them up an email. That's 15 minutes worth of work where like you could have sent a week's worth of followup emails in that time. So like without technology you're really not doing that.

Danny: Yeah. I think what it does is it allows us to be more efficient in a. To be honest, in a business that requires efficiency, so we don't get as many at bats as a network practice. We don't have insurance companies just feeding us a bunch of people were not attached to a hospital.

We don't have some sort of hospital contract or whatever it might be. So in a lot of ways, what we have to do is just be As efficient as we possibly can be with every opportunity that we have. And that's what I see when I really look at the practices that we work with that do the best.

And even when I think back on the things that, that we did that worked well, and I didn't even realize at the time, that was really that important. It was following up with people, being efficient with every person [00:16:00] that comes in, making sure people get back on our schedules. Making sure our staff is hitting these touch points that we want that we know lead to a customer experience that is great to then lead to a significant likelihood that they're going to leave us a review and then refer friends and family and our reputation in its own right.

It got to a point where We didn't really have to do anything and we'd end up with 20 new people a month coming in because of the customer experience that we worked so intentionally on and built out. And we just felt like it was the right thing to do. And it is the right thing to do. It just happens to be also a really positive thing to do for your business.

If you're only getting. Let's say 10 new people that are expressing interest in working with your business per month versus a hundred at an in network practice. Like they just don't care as much because they can be less efficient and they're still going to end up being a pretty busy practice versus us.

Like you have to take, your time with everybody and make sure that you are doing a good job with it. And if we start looking at different technologies to implement, the CRM side makes just so much of a difference as far [00:17:00] as Not forgetting to do certain things, right? If you're just writing things down on a post it note and trying to remind yourself to do stuff, like you're obviously going to drop the ball on many things.

And I think for a lot of people, they they get a bit confused about what they should use, so maybe we can talk about that a little bit in terms of. Why HubSpot is what we ended up on, because frankly, we've been looking for something that we felt would be 90% of what we needed for years, and I've gone through everything, man, ClickFunnels Kajabi SamCart dude, even Salesforce, my my father in law's His wife is or was like a director for salesforce and she was like, Oh yeah, I can get you this software at a big discount.

And I started looking at it and it's I got to pay five grand a month to have somebody implement this forever. Like you, there's no way for me to just do this on my own. And she's yeah, you don't want to do that. It's too complex. So I don't want to do that. It's not the kind of business that we're running.

So tell me this what was it about? HubSpot in particular that made you think, dude, this seems like the perfect software for this type of a business.

Jeremy: Yeah. I [00:18:00] did the same thing. It sounds like you did as well of I went from keep to, trying out HubSpot free version to infusion soft as keep now, but, tried them all really.

And just try to figure out like, I think we're in a very interesting point, of like with our small businesses, there's no like actual, CRM that should do everything that you want it to do for a small business. Like most of these for these bigger businesses. And it's intimidating to like, be like, I don't know how to use any of this stuff.

Like none of this, the, even the sales process that's like prebuilt into any of these CRMs, it's this isn't how I run a cash based PT clinic. Like how do I even use any of this stuff? So I think that's what drew me to HubSpot. And I think why I ended up landing on it was, when I was a solo practitioner and even had one PT on board, I was using their free version just as a nicer lead tracker.

And. That's how I was able to like, get my first PT filled was like, I just had a big list [00:19:00] and I created like manual tasks for myself. And that's how I did all of my followup. And that's how I did my like pseudo customer journey follow up in the touch points there. And I really liked that and it really worked.

And I started to get a hold on HubSpot, but I knew if I wanted to. Scale and I want to bring on more PTs and this was such a huge part of my marketing was very simply just the follow up process Then I needed something bigger and more powerful and again, like I looked at a bunch of different CRM's and ultimately just stuck with HubSpot because I think the biggest thing is I tried out all of these other CRM's in the design the UX on them or it was just so bad.

Like I've read And logging into some of these just because it would just look so bad and not for nothing, like HubSpot's design and functionality, like it's very clean and it's very easy to use. And once you start to understand how to use it, then it just gets that much easier. And now I love logging into HubSpot [00:20:00] and that's, my favorite thing to do every morning is log into my HubSpot account and see what's going on.

So I think that's you're not going to use the software if you dread logging into it every day. And I think that was really. One of the bigger parts of why I, committed to, the bigger tier of HubSpot and, not to mention as well they do a really good job with the education side of things too I just took every course that they have in their HubSpot Academy and, it took me, I've taken thousands, tens of thousands of hours to learn and start to implement all this stuff.

But I became a really good marketer because of it and I learned how to use their software. So it, just their whole experience just makes everyone's lives so much easier for someone who has never taken a marketing class in their whole life to go to this pretty big software and actually implement it and use it properly.

Danny: Yeah. Just the fact that the best part of your day is logging into your HubSpot, just, you're such a nerd about this stuff that it's definitely not my favorite part of my day but it is for you, right? You're into it and it's something that you're fascinated with. And that's one thing [00:21:00] that for us, as we looked at forming this new company with you with patch and for us it's been interesting to be able to start another company.

That directly helps the people that we work with, but do so with somebody that's such an ups that is so obsessed with the customer experience and the marketing side of these practices that, it's. It's just such a nice fit in a lot of ways for with what you do and what we're doing.

And that's something I want to talk about a little bit is because for a lot of people, we have, we talk a lot about practices. We talk a lot about, cash price, but ultimately we look at entrepreneurship. You may find yourself. And I found myself here with PT biz as a clinician turned entrepreneur.

And then realize that. The thing that I started to become more and more interested in was the business side of things, the actual entrepreneurial side of things, and not necessarily the patient side of things, which had been my obsession for a decade prior to that. And I think we change and we evolve.

And, for [00:22:00] you, you've gone through something very similar and and now. Essentially with this startup, you're back at it again in a very different place. So tell me this, like between ripple, which is your practice in the first company that you started and.

Like what are the biggest differences that you've noticed in terms of, the business getting started and and getting to a point where, it's really starting to pick up momentum and steam.

Jeremy: Yeah, that's a, it's a great question. I think there, there's a, like a lot of similarities to it too.

And I think this is the fun part of what I think like entrepreneurship is like these Like early stages, it's such a grind and you trying to figure out, what you're doing as you go really. And I really like those early days of ripple or man, I'd work like 15 hour days, see 10 people, try to do marketing on top of it.

Like those were crazy days. But, I think with, with this where it's different is I have a framework, which has worked with ripple up till this point. So I almost have like my own proven concept [00:23:00] with, how you should implement a CRM. And, I've hired enough CRM HubSpot consultants to understand that, what I've done with ripple works and we have that proof, a couple of years worth now of proof. And I think the big difference now is taking that framework and how do we customize that for every individual business that comes on board? Because I think it's almost like creating a treatment plan for people, right?

Of here's like the things you should. Start to do on, on the digital side of things. Like here's your plan that this is like how we're doing patch two, and it's probably not a coincidence that it's like this of here's what we're going to do in month one. Here's what we're going to do in month two.

And again, it's like going through a periodized exercise program. You can't do things without going through the first couple of months. Yeah, I think it's the customization piece of it has been, it's been really fun though. And I think that's what I found that I love is really figuring out every business is so different and how do we make these specific [00:24:00] changes for different people's business to get this software to, to work for them.

So it's it's been awesome.

Danny: Yeah. It's funny you bring it back to training and the people that we work with, because I think of it the same way when I think of. Business fundamentals, it's no different than when we work with somebody. It's boring to think that, Hey, we got to talk about sleep, nutrition, man stress management and movement, right?

It's just like everybody wants, Hey what whatever, piece of technology for my training. Do I need, what, whatever, like you can't ice bath your way into physical fitness and longevity. You know what I'm saying? Like you. You have to do the boring things all the time and be very consistent with that.

Now if you do that and you augment with these other things that are, that they can help, then great. Like supplements are there to supplement your. Training. They're there to supplement your diet and your lifestyle. They're not necessarily there to make you fit. You can't supplement your way into a six pack.

I think that everybody [00:25:00] looks for shortcuts in everything, whether it be business or health and fitness or relationships or anything. And if we really boil it down. It's the fundamentals of everything that make a big difference. That is it, does it sound cool to talk about a, CRM software?

Absolutely not quite possibly the most boring software ever put out there. We could sit here and talk about all kinds of AI platforms that can do. All kinds of other shit for you, but it's still going to come down to if you are effectively tracking, managing, engaging, and then moving people through the life cycle of what you want them to do as a customer.

And that doesn't change. And I don't see that changing anytime soon. And it's been the same for a very long time. It's just used with. Slightly different lenses as far as software can be applied to it or people are applied to it or whatever it might be, but it's still the same basics. And what's been really cool is to now take the same structures that we, and even with what we use in PT biz with HubSpot, we run our whole business off of it and take that and be able to apply it and understand how that's going to be used with these practices [00:26:00] and with patch clients and to see them all of a sudden it's Oh yeah, you're right.

Me tracking deal stages of where people are at. It makes a difference in our revenue. Go figure. Yeah, no shit. But you're so busy doing all these other things that you forget about it. And again, it gets drawn back to the fundamentals over and over again. And it's just so interesting to see that.

Jeremy: Yeah, I think it's I always tell people all the businesses we're working with, and even like my staff at Ripple now too, it's, there's no lead left behind here. Like we work so hard to get a new lead in the door, whether it's all the SEO work that we're doing or. Paying money for Google ads or spending our evenings like doing a, a workshop or injury screen or whatever it is.

And everyone works so hard to get this people to just raise their hand and say Hey, I'm interested in physical therapy. I think I have a problem and I think I need a solution. You should I'm obsessive over every single one of those people that raises their hand, and I want to make sure from that moment that they raise their hand that, [00:27:00] A we don't forget to follow up with them, which I see So often, and it's, it's always, it's very interesting to I've built my business very different than everyone else that I'm, especially that I'm working with of everyone's doing, five or six workshops a month, they're doing all of these injury screens and face to face meetings, and they're doing all this work, but they're just not like tracking who's.

Coming in and where are these people in the life cycle stage? And it's almost as if like when they first meet them and they don't book an evaluation, they just write these people off, which again is, it's crazy. It's insane. And you've got to really understand like. Where are people at in the sales process?

And what type of content can we put in front of these people? And especially if you're trying to scale and you're trying to go to the next level with your business, you're going to get more and more cold leads that come in. And how do you talk to someone that probably doesn't even.

know what physical therapy is, and then they don't even know what PT is. They're definitely not going to know what cash based PT [00:28:00] is. So how do we talk to them about here's what PT is. Here's why cash based is better than the insurance clinic. That's also across the street. Here's, how do we delight them throughout this whole process?

And I think once you start like thinking about your sales process like that and actually tracking it, that's where things can really explode

Danny: for you. Yeah. And I think a lot of people are also. they get to a point where they're interested in running ads of some sort. And it's normal.

I think once you get to a certain point in your business digital marketing, ads on Facebook and Google, they have, they, they serve a purpose to be able to Save you time, get, reach in different ways, get visibility that can help with other elements of your marketing plan.

It's all a big ecosystem, right? It's, I think of it like, if you're fishing, you, if you have four poles out that, that are, that, that are in the water versus one, like the likelihood that you'll catch something, it's gonna go up, right? And you just have to be able to track all those things too and manage all those things.

So when, when we see people that are [00:29:00] focusing on local reputation, local marketing education based events. Those are just the lowest hanging fruit, easiest to do highest likelihood where they don't have to try to learn this big tech curve of of the ad side of things.

But when they do eventually go that direction again, one of the bigger problems that we see is tracking. People just spend money on things. They don't actually whether those are effective or not. And they basically just look at I have more patients this month than I did last month, so it must be working or I'm not seeing more patients, so it must not be working.

And I see people too often leaving advertisements up or taking them down when they shouldn't or in leaving them up when they shouldn't because they don't have. accurate information to make a decision of whether that, 500 to a thousand dollars a month of ad spend that they have going out. Is worth it or not.

So I know for you with HubSpot in particular, they hook directly into Google and Facebook in a very significant way [00:30:00] to allow for a lot of visibility. What did you see when you started advertising and doing digital advertising that allowed you to have the confidence to keep that going, versus not being sure if it was something that you wanted to have as part of your marketing plan or not.

Yeah.

Jeremy: Yeah. I think it's really interesting of this is how my like second upper entrepreneurial life had got started. Cause we run Google ads like pretty efficiently for our local practice. And, people wanted me to, look at their Google ads and start running them for them.

And as soon as I started to dive into other clinics, I was like your ads aren't working because you don't have any sort of like you're, you can drive, we can always drive traffic to a webpage or a landing page. But if sometimes there's not even a forum on that page, like what is the call to action you want these people to do?

And is there no like email campaign after that? There's there no nurture sequence. So I think that's, that's really like how I look at. Again, like how you should build out your marketing plan is you have to have these nurture sequences in place in the tracking before you even [00:31:00] start to think about ad spend.

And like you were saying, Danny, I think what any CRM and HubSpot in particular does really well is you can really figure out like how much is a Google ad lead worth. For you, like out of, 10 Google ad leads that are coming in, like HubSpot will track this for you. Does it automatically?

Which is super nice. Like what is your ROI on those? And again, nine out of 10 people that I talk with that are running ads have no idea. They're like, I don't know. I think it's working. Like my revenue is. Stays the same, at least, if not it go, it goes up and we have more people in the door.

But, if you're not, if you're not assigning values for what is a, what is the average deal size that Google Ads lead? What is that? What does that look like? And how many Google ads leads, does it take for you to sell a package? If you don't have that that, that number you're just, it's not gonna, it's not easy.

You're just throwing out money at the wall and hopefully it works for you. But most of the time it doesn't, I just had this conversation with another clinic owner and [00:32:00] she didn't want to track her revenue through our CRM and we just, got into it of like, why that's so important.

Like you really have to understand like how much money per month are your, is your ad spend driving? How much money per month is like direct traffic driving. So is your SEO working, your social media, is that working your email marketing? Are you getting any sort of revenue from that?

And I think once you can really start to. See what the price points are for these different original sources. That's again, like where you can get to a point like where I'm at in the business and, my referral sources are driving the most amount of money for us. Let's continue to like pump those guys up, give them as many free sessions as they want, whatever they need.

And that our paid ads will fill in for the rest of it for what we need that month. So it's just understanding. What what is your cost per acquisition and what are you getting in return on that? That's, where you have to be with paid ads, I think.

Danny: You bring up a really good point with. [00:33:00] Cost for acquisition and understanding basic math with this and I think that, when I started to get more involved in online businesses and really better understand that type of business model that you can't just go talk to somebody face to face and, end up with a client or something.

You have to really be very clear about where things are coming from, where visibility is, what things are converting, what percent are they converting at, how much you're paying to acquire a client. And as I started to take that lens and apply it to a local business, to our practice, it made a such a massive difference in my willingness and understanding to double down in certain areas that were driving patients.

So what you're basically talking about is. Are you actually tracking where people are coming from and what is working? Or are you just assuming that it's working because there's a big difference and this is again where we see people They're like man. My blog is killing it. Like I write a blog every week.

I'm such a good blog writer [00:34:00] People read it, they tell me it's awesome, but are you getting anybody from that? Do you know if you're getting anybody from that? Because maybe you're spending six hours a month writing blogs and you're actually not getting a damn customer from it. You don't even know, unless you're actually tracking that.

Or, you think you have these awesome referral sources, but in actuality, they don't send anybody your way. They're basically just your friends, but they don't actually send anybody your way. So if you're not tracking where people are coming from, you don't know where you should be reinvesting time and money to invest in your company.

Into your business, into driving new business, and just in this one specific instance and then you can layer that on with digital ads too. And I think the simplest thing to understand, and I had this conversation one time with one of our first providers. I remember having this conversation.

I said, Hey, we're doing training today on sales because we need to be really efficient on when people come in the door. Cause right now we're spending about 150 bucks to get somebody to show up. With ads in our clinic as a new evaluation. And I remember they were [00:35:00] blown away by it.

They were like, why would you pay so much money to do that? Because at the time we were paying, we were charging like 199 for initial evaluation. They're like, we're only making 24. It doesn't seem like it's worth it. And I remember I drew out on a whiteboard. I said okay, that might be true, but here's what we do know.

Our lifetime value is this percentage of people that come in are going to become people that buy a plan of care, so on the front end, I may pay 175, but on the back end, we know predictably that anybody that walks through the door is going to be worth about. 700 for us, which at the time we know it was like eight to 10 X on that.

And I remember just this light bulb moment going off with our, this clinician and they were like, Oh my gosh, that makes complete sense. Okay, I get it. And if you didn't understand that, you would just think, okay, I'm just spending 175 to get somebody in the door. I'm not going to do that anymore. I'm only making 24 bucks off them on the front end.

No way I'm turning these off versus that's an eight X return on your ad spend if you really know what you're talking about. And that's the difference between somebody scaling a practice and somebody literally. [00:36:00] Not and just like slowly growing and not being intentional about it

Jeremy: all. Yeah.

And that's where if your CRM is not doing that stuff for you, that's why I think like why I landed on HubSpot as well, because I know I have a part of my dashboard is like, what is our customer lifetime value? And I can, I look at that number every single day and I can see. See if it's going up, it's going down and we're tracking all of that stuff.

And if you're not, and you're trying to scale, it's going to be really hard. And you have to understand, like you said, it costs 150 bucks to get somebody in the door. We convert on 70 of those 70% of those people that come in. And for us, that's gonna, that they're going to spend 2, 400 bucks with us.

Then you can really, you can just do some math and that's where we got at. With ripple is I'll spend that money all day with Google as long as I'm getting the return. And if I need to up my ad spend, I will because the ROI is always going to be there. But that's all literally because I wouldn't be able to do the math like on a Google sheet.

I'm not I'm not smart enough to do that. [00:37:00] So the CRM just does it for me, which is nice. And I can just track my ROI and I can understand who's spending what. And if my ROI is coming from ads then I know.

Danny: I think it's also, if you look at like bigger businesses, I always found this fascinating that.

The lifetime value for Starbucks is like 7, 000 something like a customer on average is worth about 7, 000. To Starbucks over the lifetime that they're gonna drink coffee at Starbucks, right? So you think yourself like how can they're selling 4 cups of coffee? But how can they afford to put billboards up everywhere and they're branded everywhere and they're on every street corner the most expensive real estate You know in major cities Starbucks everywhere well that's because if you look at somebody anybody that goes into Starbucks their lifetime value is Astronomically higher than you probably would think it is because of how long people end up, going there and they go there everywhere they go, right?

Because they get accustomed to it. They know they can get a similar cup of coffee wherever they're at. You've got to think about this in terms of [00:38:00] applying big business concepts to these little businesses. Cause in the grand scheme of things, even if we're at a seven figure practice, that might seem like a big business.

So if you're listening to this and you've never even started a business. That might seem like only an Avenger could start a business that is at seven figures or some sort of like mythical clinician grows to that point. But that's not the case. It's just people that understand the fundamentals of this and they do it over a long enough period of time to grow a business to that point.

But even still, these are tiny in comparison to something like a HubSpot is a publicly traded company. You're talking about billions and billions of dollars and tons of people. And yet that guarantee you they're still doing the same thing because I shall get hit up by them. Follow up by their sales team.

I still get it. And I'm like, yo, I'm a customer. They're trying to get me to get other stuff. So they're trying to upsell me to other things. So go figure. If you can take some of these concepts from businesses that are very successful, far more successful than anything we've ever done, and you can apply them to what you're trying to do on a smaller scale, you will have a unique advantage because most people are [00:39:00] amateurs.

They don't track shit. They don't take it seriously. All they wanted to do was just not work for somebody else and, maybe they just are a solopreneur for the rest of their life. But if you want to grow a business past yourself, you have to honestly become a professional and try to focus on this as an entrepreneur and not just as like a side hustle.

Jeremy: Yeah. I think that's the coolest thing that we're doing with patch as well as that. That's like what you just described. There's exactly how I built out our CRM and our processes for ripple is I hired these HubSpot consultants that work with multimillion billion dollar companies. And they set up HubSpot for these big companies.

And, I had to convince these people to work with me. I was like, I'll pay your hourly rate. I don't care what it is. Just teach me how you set all of this stuff up and they had no idea how a cash based clinic works, but they understood like just, sales and marketing processes and how to make sure those two systems in a business aren't siloed.

And so I learned from them and they taught me how to, set up their hub spots [00:40:00] for again, these big like B2B companies. And I took all of that information and distilled it down to what works for a cash based clinic with these. Big business thought processes. And like you said, it's, starting a business and running a successful business, it's on scale, depending on how big you are, but everyone's doing the the foundational things correctly, and you've got to be doing those things. And that's like what I'm teaching everyone at patch as well as here are these big business thought processes, and I've created a system where. We take those processes and we implement them for a cash based clinic and it works.

It's quite nice.

Danny: I think what the coolest part for me that I like to see is as people start to get more visibility and better understanding of what's happening, they feel far less anxious. There's just so much less stress because you know what's going on. It's more predictable. And when you don't know what your next month is going to look like, or a [00:41:00] couple of months down the road or whatever next quarter is, and you don't know why maybe you had success in a prior month or something it's very challenging because your family depends on the success of this thing that you've decided to start and, that, that weighs on people.

I know it's a huge burden and I've felt it for a very long time. And I can tell you being on the other side of having predictability and visibility and what you're doing, it's much better. I'm much nicer to everyone else around me now versus when I was constantly stressed out, and I think that the.

The other really interesting part with these is once you start to get these things set up, then you can predictably start to recreate what we call reactivation campaigns, which, it's, it is the easiest money you can possibly make in your business. It's. People that you already have, in your database and you are giving them a reason why to come in for [00:42:00] something, whatever it might be, there's many different ways to do this for a reactivation campaign, reactivation of prior customers, reactivation of people that maybe are not have not come in, but you give them a reason to do so and all of a sudden you have these events that could be twice a year, quarterly, even monthly for some people where you get a chance to clean up all that hard work that you've done.

And once you have actually run a couple of these, you can be very predictable about what that's going to generate. Like we do this every year and we know one of the campaigns that we would run in, in the spring. Every year, it would be a predictable 000 in revenue added to the practice just from us running this reactivation campaign that we know would get a bunch more people in for a reason why campaign versus reactivation.

Once you have that set up, all of a sudden it's okay, I have predictability and I know I can bank on the revenue from these different events that I can run. And those are going to be quarterly, let's say. So four times a year, you're gonna have this much revenue. Then you fill that in with expected new patient volume.

And all of a sudden you can be [00:43:00] pretty close to predicting what that business is going to do if everything is ends up where you want it to be.

Jeremy: Yeah. And it's it's funny talking with other. business owner as well. They're almost like hesitant to run like these mini open enrollments.

My suggestion for them is once a quarter. And again, part of what we're doing with patches we're building out reactivation campaigns. And again, having the nice part about having this in a CRM is that like you said, each quarter you can just recreate. The basic copy that you're doing with these reactivation campaigns and changed it.

I always suggest people do it seasonally. So like right now we just ran one. That's like this, like fresh start. Like in Boston, we had a long winter and like summer's now here. And are you ready for summer? Do you still have injuries? Can you go out and go for runs or whatever it is and. It's a low offer for coming in for the evaluation.

So it's a 50 evaluation. We just had a PT start two weeks ago and he's already seen 18 patients this week. Cause it's on his second week just because of this reactivation campaign that we're running. [00:44:00] So you can do that for spring. You can do it for. End of summer, you can do it for New Year's Eve.

There's just so many different places where you can put this like basic like framework of a reactivation campaign and whether it's seasonally or you're doing it for a new employee or however you're doing it but yeah you've got to do that stuff though.

Danny: I remember being in a, this digital marketing group that I was a part of for a year.

It was a mastermind and I remember they had a guy come in at one of the events that I was at. And he basically made the case that holidays were just made up by marketers, right? And he called him reason why campaigns. It's like St. Patrick's day come by a mattress or something like that. It's what does that have to do with your mattress?

Nothing is just like a, it's just a reason, right? To have some sort of offer that you put out to people. Yeah. And I agree, I think. When people, when clinicians in particular, start to they have this internal battle with themself of okay, I want a business, but I don't really want to be business y, whatever that means, right?

I don't want to be like a... [00:45:00] I'm a clinician. All right. I'm going to, my work is going to speak for itself. And that very well might be true. You might be an amazing clinician, but here's one thing that I noticed. There were people in the city of Atlanta that I very much felt like I was doing. a better job of doing the right things for these people.

I was really trying to educate them and empower them and try to teach them how to take care of themselves longterm and giving them far more longterm value than a lot of people that were, they were just basically doing passive treatments that they wanted them to do for the rest of their life only.

And there really wasn't this consultative, almost education element to that I felt was missing. And we just was not right. Honestly, I felt like it was. It was unfair to not share more with people about how they should be managing themself. And, but yet my business wasn't thriving the way that some of these other businesses were.

And as I started to look at it, I realized, yes, I'm a far better clinician and I have far better intentions for the people that I'm working with than these [00:46:00] other folks that I would get a chance to meet and they would like, Laugh in some ways about some of the things that they were doing on the business side and how they could, in some ways almost manipulate people into, doing things via marketing.

And that's basically marketing in a lot of ways can be very persuasive if you if done right. And I always looked at it like I need to learn these things because, I'm actually trying to really help these people and if they end up in your clinic, then they're not going to end up in mine. And it's up to me to really learn how to, market to be able to get people in so that I can change their life, so that I can teach them how to really take care of themselves and live a high performance, pain free life for as long as they can.

So that's when I started to realize, man, you got to be okay with that. You got to be okay with being a business owner that happens to be a clinician, not a clinician that happens to be a business owner. You have to really focus on the business because if you don't, you're going to get your ass whooped by all these other people around you that are in many ways probably inferior clinicians to you.

But our far better business owners and if that doesn't motivate you to help more [00:47:00] of the right people, I don't know what will right. You can stay small and that's fine, but you will only help a certain number of people if you never were able to grow past yourself. And if you really want to help the most number of people and have the biggest impact, you got to get on the business side.

And that means the fundamentals of sales marketing, people finance, understanding all that stuff and being able to apply that to the business of a clinic, which we just so happened to have picked to own. Okay.

Jeremy: Yeah, that's exactly it. I think you, you nailed that there. People you've got to be okay with following up with people and understanding that you're not annoying people.

And like the marketing that you're actually doing, the emails that you're sending, the, the follow up sequences that you're doing it's, you're helping people in the long run. They, maybe they're like on the second, third, 10th follow up. They're not going to send you an email back, maybe on the 20th follow up, they're going to be like, thank you for reaching out.

Like you, I know you actually care. Like I do need this. My knee is all screwed up. And then you're going to change that person's life eventually. I think that, that light switch really went off for me when, I had two, three [00:48:00] clinicians on staff and I'm like, these people now rely on me to, pay their own bills. And we've I've got to turn into this marketing sales guru. And like you said you're just going to help, the main goal for 99% of PTs is to help people. And this is how we're going to help people at scale is get people to understand that what we're doing in the cash based PT side, especially it's far superior than wherever else they're going to go.

And we've got a market and we've got to sell these people.

Danny: Yeah. Yeah. And. It's... The thought that you're just bothering people with follow up, it's just such an interesting thing that I feel like everybody comes everybody thinks that, early on and but as you started to do more of that, I know like you referenced, somebody thanking you for following up with them.

I've had that many times, thanks for staying on top of me about this. I've been really busy, this is definitely something that's been, on my on my goal list of what I want to do, take care of this, but they just put it off. They put it off. They put it off. And if you really think about that person [00:49:00] and what's happening, they're putting off taking care of themselves typically because they're You're usually taking care of other people.

Maybe it's their job. They're trying to, support their family via income or they're busy because they have kids and they're shuttling their kids all around to, all the events that they go to. And, but yet they're, they never actually take care of themselves. They never actually take the time to invest back in themselves and their health and wellness.

And if you stop following up with that person, They're never going to actually work on themselves until it gets so bad that they literally can't do the thing that they love or they can't enjoy the activities with the people that they love. And then they're just in a far worse spot. So I think if you're looking at marketing, if you're looking at.

Follow up and, the things we have to do to actually be able to really, run an effective business. Yes, it can feel like you're pestering somebody, like you're just, consistently checking in with them and they just want you to leave them alone. And it's not that they don't want you, they want you to leave them alone.

They want the help. They just haven't really gotten to a point where they have committed to solving that problem yet. And if you [00:50:00] leave them alone. They may never do that. So I always think of it that way. It's I'm doing this for your own damn good. I'm gonna check in with you cuz I know you need this.

You know you need this. Maybe we're not in the right spot, but I'm not gonna forget about you because you're important and I want to be able to help you be able to live this life that you want. And you only got one body. And that's the truth. And it's not it's not like we have businesses. Like I was talking to somebody that made a bunch of money selling.

PPE equipment during COVID just like a shitload of money, right? And he doesn't give a fuck about medical providers. He just want to make money and I go, dude, I just don't take this the wrong way. I just could never do that. Like I love that. I get to help people with my businesses. And in many different ways and they truly are have a better life because of it and it's not a cash grab.

It just so happens that it can be a profitable business at the same time, so we are so fortunate that we get a chance to do that. Like our practice, we have so many examples of these people that just like they give us a hug, when they see us out and they're like, Oh my God, this is my doc or whatever.

And it's what is that worth? It's you got to be okay to follow up with those people. You got to [00:51:00] try to get those people in because you can literally. Change their life in so many positive ways. So you got to get over that shit, man You got to be able to market you got to be able to follow up And and if you don't then they're not gonna get the help they need Yeah.

Jeremy: And I think tying it all in, of without having your customer journey or digitizing that customer journey and understanding where those people are at. And if that person, is that the kind of the end stages of his customer journey or like his loss patient part of the customer journey, then.

Then you're never going to follow up with that person. And you just won't know, like you might have six dozen people in, in that part of your business's customer journey. And if you're not tracking that and you're not sending them content, like on a consistent basis, then. Then that's, six, 12 people that you're not going to help.

And I think that's a really big part of a, like on the morality side of things, like we're helping more people. That's our, that's the goal with all this stuff. And, B it's that's, this is how we grow in scale and make this way more repeatable. It's just, it's so important.

Danny: Jeremy drop the link again. Where can people [00:52:00] find out more if they're interested in learning about patch and how past can help their practice.

Jeremy: Yeah, it's a marketing patches. com. I'm also, I'm going to put myself on blast here too. I'm going to start. Putting some content up on my own Instagram as well.

So we'll be talking more about patch there which is just at underscore Jeremy DuPont. Feel free to reach out to me on that as well. If you guys have any questions, but yeah, marketingpatches. com more to come with it for sure. Yeah.

Danny: Yeah we'll definitely have more to come. We're excited.

Like I said, we. With PT biz and we, partner with Jeremy for a reason, like it's obvious how the depth of knowledge he has with this stuff and how interested he really is. And and borderline obsessed when it comes to, marketing and really at a high level, implementing a really solid customer experience.

And also, integrating software into a world that is somewhat software averse. But, we're aligned on the same thing of the people we're trying to help, the businesses we're trying to support and and not letting things fall through the cracks, right? And the whole point of patch is just being more [00:53:00] efficient and understanding how to.

Make your practice more efficient so that you can catch one of those people that will fall through the cracks and help more of those folks and then ultimately be able to hire more of our peers that we know they just, they don't look forward to going to work on Monday, seeing, 25 patients a day and the bigger our businesses get, the more of those people we get a chance to absorb and really Help them get back to loving being a clinician again and and having a career that is one of the most personally rewarding things you can possibly do and, to, to match that up with the ability to make a great income and support your family at the same time.

Like what a great opportunity we have to do that. And it's people like us to get a chance to really. Build the businesses that, that that are going to employ those people. So we need to be, real efficient. We need to be great business owners, not just great clinicians at the same time. So guys, hope you like this one.

Hope you take some notes on it. There's definitely a lot of stuff in here that you can you can implement at at scale within your own business. And as always, we really appreciate you listening and we'll catch you next week. Thanks.[00:54:00]

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