0:00:02 - Mark Henderson Leary
Welcome to Practice Freedom. What if you could hang out with owners and founders from all sorts of healthcare private practices, having rich conversations about their successes and their failures, and then take an insight or two to inspire your own growth? Each week on Practice Freedom, we take an in-depth look at how to get the most out of both the clinical side and the business side of the practice, get the most out of your people and, most of all, how to live the healthy life that you deserve. I'm Mark Henderson Leary. I'm a business coach and an entrepreneurial operating system implementer. I have a passion that everyone should feel in control of their life, and so what I do is I help you get control of your business. Part of how I do that is by letting you listen in on these conversations in order to make the biggest impact in your practice and, ultimately, live your best life. Let's get started. Welcome back practice leaders man. Good conversation Coming up with Maddie McLean, who is the co-owner of Boost Patients, a niche-focused demand generation organization focused on just a couple of niches around bariatric surgery and now LASIK.

Why you would want to listen to this is you want to understand the mindset of demand generation, especially if you're in that in that industry it's I would. It's not super technical, but we're kind of in the, in the details and the mindset of what the life cycle is and why. I think, probably more than anything, this is about focusing and getting your mindset around how and why you would want to focus on a very specific niche and why that could be beneficial. We go on the edge of the long just a little over an hour, I think. I think the whole conversation is worthwhile, like if you're in five minutes and you're like this is boring, then don't listen the rest of it. But if the first five minutes is good for you is similar all the way to the end, and so that's kind of like my tip there. But I think if you, if you care about niche, if you care about folks, if you care about understanding how to reach better, better clients and the mindset, I think it's worthwhile. I mean I love the conversation, that you need to know this stuff if you're going to be demand building your organization through demand generation. So I think it's high value. So give us the feedback. Of course, don't forget, though, if you're stuck, reach out if you wanna see your way towards vision, traction and health in your healthcare organization but you don't know where to start If you're stuck somewhere. If you want a tip to get unstuck or figure out what the first step could look like, please don't stay stuck. Reach out to me at practicefreedomcom slash schedule and we'll take a couple minutes to see what that step could look like, without further ado.

Matty McLean. Well, good morning Matty. How are you man? Good morning, mark, I'm doing great. I was looking forward to this because I just feel like you and I have a chemistry around the passion for entrepreneurial healthcare and I guess what I mean was that sometimes I really think I have to prepare and have questions and think about where this is going to go, and in this case I was like I don't think I need to think about this, I think this is just going to flow. So let's just you know, we haven't talked in a month. How are you? How's the world?

0:03:04 - Matty McLain
Yeah, I'm doing great. Spring is upon us. Yeah, Boost is growing. We've got new challenges, new opportunities, but yeah, overall we're doing great.

0:03:16 - Mark Henderson Leary
What do you like about marketing? I told you I had a different question in my mind and I changed it the last second.

0:03:23 - Matty McLain
Yeah, marketing is interesting and I would. If anyone asked me if I was in marketing, I would say no, I would say that I'm in sales. I think it's interesting. Marketing is an industry unlike many others, but I think one you could compare it to is. I always say cause my brother used to be in construction and when I used to do more coaching I worked with a roofing company. And those are industries where you don't necessarily have to have a license to call yourself a handyman or even a contractor in some cases. Right, If you have a ladder and a toolbox and a pickup, you can be a handyman. And yet the spectrum of a handyman who doesn't know what they're doing and a handyman that is the best in the world is very wide. But you don't really know where they fit on that spectrum until they come and work for you. And I think marketing is a similar industry.

0:04:19 - Mark Henderson Leary
You know that's a good point because I usually use marketing as the example, but I don't know if there's always the best example, like cause the handyman is a great example, cause I've for the longest time thought of handyman as somebody could like hang a picture and that was. You know, that was it. But like when I've I've worked some really quite capable handyman like show up with a team and a crew and you know they can do all kinds of construction work and they just they're. The handyman status gives them the ability to do lots of different projects and so, yeah, that spectrum and the expectations it's you know you have to work with them.

Marketing to me has always I guess I got wounds from my early days as an entrepreneur, hiring what I thought a marketing person was to do what I thought marketing was. And after numerous attempts, looking back on the people I had hired, seeing how little they had to do with each other's skill set, like one person can make a website and me as the unsophisticated buyer thought that might be could get customers through the website. But no, not at all. A website that looks good, and even on that in a website, a website that looks good, a website that has functionality that you can update content, a website that has the ability to buy something, a shopping cart, like different people. Each of those three people, totally different people. And who writes the words for the website? Oh, different person. And this is just in website, right? We're not even talking about digital demand generation or brand or strategy or all these things, or CRM and systems integration, and it's like these people are so different. What do you do, marketing? I'm a human, thank you.

0:06:08 - Matty McLain
Yes, oh, 100%, yeah, and I think it and it has only become and will only continue to become more specialized, with each person doing the thing that they're good at. And then you have these you, yeah, I think those people are typically solopreneurs. They're, they're on their own, they may have a couple of contractors around them and they do a specific thing. We do SEO or we do videography. And then you have the larger agencies that say we do everything for everyone, all the time. We do yes, we'll do your brochure, your business card, your commercial, your TV ads, your Facebook ads, your Google ads, and I just I have yet to see an agency that can do all those things and do them really, really well. So, yeah, you end up becoming the own GC of your marketing.

0:06:50 - Mark Henderson Leary
Now, obviously you guys specialize in the industry and I want to talk specifically about that. But I guess strategy is the word that most smaller businesses are afraid of, don't understand, and I, in my experience 15, 20, by now 20 plus years I've sort of figured out that my belief is that that's actually the most important part that is so rarely discovered. And when you're a smaller business and I mean you know less than 10 million, and you say, depending on how you get there, some organizations have to market aggressively from the beginning, so they're very sophisticated by the time they're one or 10 million. And you say, depending on how you get there, some organizations have to market aggressively from the beginning, so they're very sophisticated by the time they're one or two million. Some organizations it's B2B relationships drove their business and they're 10 million and plus and they've never really had to get the word out and so they have no idea what that's like. But strategy, essentially figuring out, I guess there's two reasons to think of strategy, two ways to think. There's the strategy for the business who's our best customer and what do we say to them and that's important, it's really important. But there's also a parallel part of that strategy, which is how do we find them and, from a marketing perspective, let's figure out how to reach them in a strategic capacity.

And there's a whole set of tactics and I guess, as I say, that you could probably argue it it's advanced tactics, but it really is edge to edge. What I'm talking about is that edge to edge plan of like okay, we know who your customer is, we know where they are, we know there's 10,000 levers to pull and we're going to pull eight of them because those eight makes sense for your buyer. And the relationship between that and picking a vertical like healthcare or surgery, surgical centers or whatever you know, that's pretty strong, right. That's really helpful to have that figured out. The general purpose mindset just leaves so many wasted bullets like shooting bullets at nothing. We're going to go digital, we're going to go to this conference, we're going to send emails Nobody's listening to that stuff because you didn't do that first step. What's you know? That's kind of my rant. You know what's your take on that?

0:08:54 - Matty McLain
Yeah, Well, the whole, the whole reason boost exists is we chose private practice healthcare, which is a niche in its own and inside of that niche we chose six years ago a niche in its own and inside of that niche, we chose six years ago bariatric surgeons. So and it's probably one of the smallest niches of all medicine, there's only a few hundred bariatric surgeons private practice that do majority bariatric surgery and then we focused on that niche. We said no to everything else. We did nothing else. People said, hell, hey, my brother-in-law is an orthopedic surgeon, Would you do that? No, no, we're not going to do it. We're going to become the best at bariatrics. We went to the shows, we went to the conferences, we learned the vernacular, we learned the procedures, we learned what the patient said, the concerns, the objections we spent to to own that one niche. And we did that over the course of the first few years and it wasn't until the last eight, nine months that we expanded, you know, to our second niche, which is LASIK.

0:09:54 - Mark Henderson Leary
So how hard was it for you to get that niched? Were you just like it was obvious we're just doing this, or was there like cause? I I've worked with so many businesses in my business as well Every time a focus comes up, a niche, which basically means excluding or at least it feels like it, because it's not always, but it almost always feels like excluding, saying no to somebody. And if you're trying to grow the business, the idea of saying no to somebody, it's very powerful and it's the right thing to do, but it's very scary for most people. Was that scary for you guys?

0:10:25 - Matty McLain
Oh, absolutely, yeah, especially the right thing to do, but it's very scary for most people. Was that scary for you guys? Oh, absolutely yeah, especially. I mean, we started with one client and we were doing boost on the side. It wasn't, you know, we didn't launch this full-time company. We both had other things going on in similar work, but we were not doing one thing for one industry. We had, we had other sources of income.

So when you start adding clients and, yes, they tell their friends who are also doctors but they're in other specialties, and you have to decide, hey, yeah, it would be so easy, it applies, we're doing the same thing, let's do it for a chiropractor, let's do it for a dentist. And when we looked out at the rest of the world in chiroprpractic, in dentistry, it's pretty noisy, there are, there are other people doing what we do. Uh, it's expensive to get attention in that, in that industry. So, yeah, for those reasons, we we decided let's, let's move fast and let's go really deep in one industry before we widen out and speak to more so I want to talk about the choice to expand.

0:11:24 - Mark Henderson Leary
This is this is an interesting conversation because I think it has sort of a meta on itself. This is the things that you're learning tactically in the marketing side, but it's also like your journey to that. It's like it's inside and outside of how people can apply this, but how you experience this. And so I want to talk about the choice to expand into LASIK. But I want to slow this down and go back into just bariatric, like how did you, what did you learn? Like where were you going? Like oh wow, this is so useful here, and this doesn't apply Really specifically when the aha's happening of like this is how we're going to get these folks.

As far as getting bariatric surgeons as clients. No, I mean there again, that's the meta. It's like getting the bariatric surgeons as clients.

0:12:12 - Matty McLain
But also getting leads for bariatric surgeons. Oh yeah, when we started the first, the first product that we had or service was we captured leads from surgery surgical websites and then we did the follow-up for those leads. So we did the emails, we wrote all the content and our content was it was pro, it was professional quality. We had copywriters give a lot of input on it. We designed it very intentionally based on interviews we did with other bariatric patients who had been through the process, some of them who'd had surgery, some who hadn't.

We took all those questions and concerns about a very. It's a very emotional very. You know it's a high ticket financial item. It's a huge physical decision. So we took all those questions, concerns, objections and we created content around them and that's the follow-up content we would use for these potential patients and our job being not to talk anyone into ever having a surgery that they didn't want, but helping them quickly filter out the noise in the world.

If you Google, you know what are the risks of weight loss surgery. We took the real facts from the doctors and put that content in front of people and said, hey, you may not even have this objection, but here are three reasons why people would maybe not have bariatric surgery and so you need to. Our job is to help you filter out quickly Is this a path worth going down or not, and what helps the customer our clinic the most is helping a patient decide to filter out of that journey If they had no intention of of going forward with surgery, because what would happen before is they would come into the clinic to ask all the beginning high levellevel questions and we answered those before they came in.

0:13:45 - Mark Henderson Leary
Yeah, so that's actually awesome, because most people don't think of the marketing edge as the disqualifying phase. I don't think. I think sometimes there's an understanding, there's a little bit of a pre-filter. But, like what you said, we're going to lean into disqualification. We're going to work hard to make sure that nobody gets out of this funnel who's not really likely to move forward, which I guess is again an aspect of a high demand item. That makes that more enjoyable to be able to disqualify.

Not all industries have that much demand. And you're like well, for God's sake, like let us talk them into it. You know, don't let them talk. There's not enough to go around. If we talk everybody out of this, you know they're scared of it. So that's, that's another aspect of understanding your target audience and your target market and your supply chain of like. You know we we have to be very clear on this exact buyer. How many do we want? What can we do with them if we got them? Many do we want? What can we do with them if we got them? Were you at that time, were you realizing how far down the well you were going in terms of like? We are learning a lot about bariatric surgery patients, and this is a hundred percent. We're betting on this one thing.

0:14:54 - Matty McLain
Absolutely. We were going so far down in that siloed market or industry that you know. Then we got invited to speak at conferences. Then we started hosting masterminds, bringing our practices together, because they were not when we landed a client. We get on a plane, we fly out, we visit the client, we tour the clinic, we ask all the questions, we see what else we can automate in the patient journey and after a year or two of that, they start reaching out to us. Right, we start getting text messages from doctors saying hey, what are you hearing from other practices about? Fill in the blank, about this problem, this challenge. How do they deal with this? How are practices lowering their no-show cancel rate? What are patients doing for financing? Is there a better financing option? And we were like the home office of all these, because we're the only ones working with, you know, 50 of these clinics. They don't talk to each other, but they all talk to us and so, yeah, sort of even unintentionally, we became the resource for that information.

0:15:53 - Mark Henderson Leary
Yeah, that's interesting, sort of like not quite neutral, it's like they don't want to talk to the competitors necessarily, and some interesting is bariatric is it competitive?

0:16:03 - Matty McLain
The people like they fear each other. Yeah, that's a great subject. So when we held our first mastermind, we had two people from the same city who came, and that's how we started. The mastermind is saying look, if you feel like there are just not enough patients to go around, that comes from a place of lack.

0:16:24 - Mark Henderson Leary
Scarcity mindset, yeah, for sure.

0:16:26 - Matty McLain
Yeah, we want this event and this community to be about abundance. We're sharing best practices, all boats rise together and so that's where we started coming from. Yes, in some markets it is intensely competitive. It is expensive to get the leads, it's expensive to nurture them and keep them and convert them, but overall, the community has become very just yeah, extreme, in fact. Next week we have our third annual retreat, mastermind, with these surgeons coming in from around the country to share what's working, what are the challenges. So it's been a lot of fun.

0:16:58 - Mark Henderson Leary
So I want to dig into that. But it's interesting because, like a plastic, surgeons like work with me. It's like we want to keep you exclusive to ourselves. You can't be working with anybody else. Like man, you got a year wait list. What are you talking about? Like, how much world domination is enough? There's plenty to go around.

0:17:18 - Matty McLain
Yeah yeah, man, one of my favorite quotes. There's a surgeon in a small market. It was one of our first clients and I asked him because there was a rumor that the hospital was going to hire a competing surgeon same industry and I said hey, what do you think about that? Does that cause you concern if suddenly there's another vendor providing the exact same thing? And he said no man, not at all. May the best man win. You know, like that's what we're here for. We're in the free market. Let them do their thing and we'll do ours. And you know, that's why we're here.

0:17:53 - Mark Henderson Leary
So there's a lot. We're going to start a bunch of things that aren't finished. This may be a second podcast down the line to dig into some of these things, but how much, very, you've gotten so specific. It's bariatric surgery. You know the language, you know the patient, the general demographic, you know who does it, who doesn't do it, organization to organization, customer to customer of yours. How much difference Like, oh, this is the luxury, this is the discount, this is the fast, this is the multifaceted is how much variation do you have to discover and bring out?

0:18:31 - Matty McLain
Oh, great question. And when we were growing, we had our heads down. We were so focused on one market, one niche, and even in the service we provided we were niched down and, honestly, we went too deep. We were customizing things way too customized for every single practice. That's why our clinics loved us. We never lost a client. And as we grew, we got to 30 clinics, we got to 40 clinics and suddenly we didn't know this, but we started having some serious issues internally because, oh my gosh, we're paying so much attention to each client, we are customizing, we're automating, we're charting them out a new product from scratch and, as you know, as you get a little bit bigger and you say there's no way we can keep up the complexity is exponential.

0:19:15 - Mark Henderson Leary
We can't charge enough to make up for this. When you're small, a little bit bigger and you say there's no way we can keep up, we can't charge enough to make up for this. When you're small, a little bit of customization is not a problem. When you multiply that, it's like I can't keep track of anything.

0:19:27 - Matty McLain
We have 400 systems now 100%, and then it becomes so reliant on one of our team members who knows each client or knows this group of clients. We have no idea what he's built out or customized for them. If he left or fell off of cliff we'd be in serious trouble. So we zoomed up a level or two to say, okay, we can solve all these problems for every clinic. Honestly, most of them don't even know that we're doing this deep level of customization and automation. What they all came to us for was can you convert more of my leads to surgery? So if we zoom up to that level, that is a much more standardized approach. And that is when we really said hey, this also works perfectly for LASIK or orthopedics or hair restoration surgery, because that is the common denominator. Can you turn my leads? I'm spending 10K a month on marketing. I know I can't do proper follow-up to those leads. Can you guys do that? And that's what we're best in the world at.

0:20:30 - Mark Henderson Leary
That's interesting, yeah, so I guess there's two things to talk about there. One is I do remember my IT services business never had better customer service than when everything was in one person's head. Like that was the very best experience. When it was two or three people and each of them did it their own way and they did it very personally and they were so connected with the clients. They were like extensions of their staff and it was once I figured out what was going on instant terror, like first of all, not scalable. You start going towards 10 people in the organization. It's like, hey, I'm gonna jump in on joey's thing. And it's like what did he do here? I don't know, oh, I think it's running out of a server on his in his house. It's like what? How is it? Why are you serious?

and like that's real, by the way, I'm I was like oh, the mail goes through the server he's got to set up his house and filters it there. It works great. I'm like, how am I supposed to work on this? It's like who has the passwords? What is the server? This is crazy. So we had to figure out how to standardize. And so you're saying, all right, it's conversions. That's the truth telling. You can suffer a lot of imperfection anywhere else, but that's what people show up for and if we can deliver conversions, then that's what they're here for. So LASIK so what's the common ground to LASIK and bariatric? Because I can think of a bunch of other healthcare transactions like you mentioned, like chiro and optometry and things like dentistry all very different. So you know what makes those things scalable for you guys.

0:22:02 - Matty McLain
Yeah, lots of self-pay, meaning a lot of the patients are paying cash. There is some insurance involved, but lots of cash, and so that is a if you show up as a consumer and you are insurance, or if you show up and you're cash paid. Those are two separate paths, two separate mindsets, two separate sets of expectations. We do really well with the cash pay population. So their cash, their high ticket item. You're talking $1,000 to $8,000 to $12,000 for these two procedures.

There's some education involved. For sure, there are some things you're going to get. It just doesn't take that much education. But these two procedures there's lots of info, there's lots of misunderstanding and so the consumer, they want to know the facts. So you're spending a lot on marketing to get these leads. You need a salesperson or a sales team to get them from lead all the way through the buying journey to close them for an appointment and show up at the clinic. That's where they're very, very, very similar. So there's a few things that happen when leads come in. How most clinics handle it. There are lots of problems with getting those leads to walk in the front door, and that's the gap that we fill.

0:23:09 - Mark Henderson Leary
So I should know this, but is in bariatric is there an insurance aspect? It's just not that common. Or is it just basically non-insurance?

0:23:17 - Matty McLain
So bariatrics, there is a large insurance component and it's really geographic. So depending on where you are in the country, what state you're in sort of depends on how much self-pay volume.

0:23:27 - Mark Henderson Leary
But you're just not concerned with the insurance side.

0:23:31 - Matty McLain
No, we definitely. We take those leads and convert them as well, and, of course, you know any lead that comes in. If you have a follow-up system, you're going to get more of those leads to surgery. However, our kind of our favorite, and the thing that lights us up is can we? And the thing that the doctors light up about is can you get me more self-pay, and so we do love that aspect of the business.

0:23:52 - Mark Henderson Leary
That's interesting. It seems, if nothing else, you've got more influence. You can educate them, you have their attention and this is what you're saying. I'm restating exactly what you said, that they care like their money, like they're the buyer. If it's insurance and you're sort of in the hands of like you're not necessarily, but you're mentally sort of like, well, I guess I'm gonna go wherever my insurance tells me I'm going, and and uh, you know, I don't know what it costs, you know I know my copay is and and so it's. You sort of have this sort of shared ownership of the process and and you're like, well, whatever, whatever they tell me to do is a little bit of it, but if it's all you, it's like Nope, every detail, I'm choosing the doctor, I'm choosing this, this, a hundred percent.

0:24:32 - Matty McLain
Yep, yeah. And if you are shopping for a $10,000 procedure, it's like you're shopping for a nice car and you expect you're going to kick all the tires. You're going to check with multiple people, you're going to read all the Google reviews and when you reach out for information, you want that answer. I mean, that's what's crazy psychologically about a procedure. You may have considered this for five years, but the moment you reach out to a clinic, you want an answer in five seconds.

0:25:00 - Mark Henderson Leary
Yeah, that's something that I've learned kind of the hard way is a little long time ago. Luckily is that you want to have this scarcity, like I'm the best, and you'll have to wait for me because you know, and we're only got one appointment and if you want it, you're going to have to wait and you have to pay a lot and this is sort of like exclusive resource. That is not the same thing. As they reach out, you got to. You got to say we heard you, you're in the process now. Now you're gonna have to wait, but but you do not need to find another vendor. So there's this weird kind of paradox of the moment they say they want to talk to you, you have to acknowledge them like as instantaneous as possible, and then you can set them into a very slow track, but you can't wait in that reaction. And so how do you do that?

0:25:50 - Matty McLain
Yeah, we use a combination of things. So there's three things. We've learned that this is the drum that we beat when a lead comes in, typically a clinic. Here's what's crazy. You can have a clinic that's doing $3 million, $8 million, $12 million in revenue and you say who's in charge of sales? And there is no one. No one has that title. That is no one's full-time job, and so that's what makes healthcare and private practice so unique and, honestly, so fun for us.

And interesting is you've got a company spending let's just call it $10,000 a month to generate leads, and in any other industry, those leads would go to a full-time, trained, cold-blooded, highly skilled, highly paid professional to know what to do with them. But in most clinics those leads go to a page or a website or a lead form. An email gets sent to a person who works in the clinic. They do lots of other jobs and in between those jobs they go and check their email. There's inter-office emails, there's Nordstrom emails, there's Best Buy emails. Oh, oh, here's somebody who wants a $10,000 procedure. I better do something with it.

So leads come in, they don't get followed up with fast enough. We used to say, hey, you've got to. This was five years ago, we said whoa, you've got to get back to these people within 24 hours and people within 24 hours. And then, after a year of being in business, we said no, no, these people expect same day, these people expect within the hour. And now, today, we say these people expect a response within five seconds and so don't follow up fast enough.

0:27:27 - Mark Henderson Leary
Yeah, but that's yeah, it's basically instant. You know chat, you know we got to be able to get there.

0:27:30 - Matty McLain
Yep, yep. So you got to follow up fast. You got to use all available medium, meaning it doesn't matter how they reach out to you, you've got to go back to them using AI chat 24 seven. You should text them to their cell phone, you should call them on their phone and you should email them and then let the consumer decide how they want to to interact with you.

0:27:49 - Mark Henderson Leary
Yeah, it's a simple psychology behind that I didn't say that earlier is you want them to feel like they can stop looking, like if they've gotten to you they're in a buying decision mode. They want you to say that you're done looking and you want to just take that off of it, cause, like you give them six seconds later like well, maybe this isn't the right. What am I going to do with the next 20 seconds? Well, I guess I'll keep looking and if they find somebody who gets back to them faster, then you've lost it Exactly, yep.

0:28:15 - Matty McLain
Just take them out of market.

You made me think of something. Yeah, exactly yeah. So in their journey, right when they reach out to you, they're in the mode of I'm gathering info, I'm searching for vendors, I'm Googling and looking and asking friends and Facebook pages, and if you hit them with what we call joyful persistence, they can decide, they can turn that part off and say, okay, well, I've zeroed in on who I'm going to get it from Now it's just a matter of how long I'm going to wait until I pull the trigger. And so I don't think I answered your specific question. She said how do you do that? Well, we use AI that we train on the clinic's specific knowledge base. So how does that clinic work? What's their pricing, their hours, their locations? We plug all that in and that AI component can chat with people 24 hours a day, and it's super effective. You don't know that you're chatting with a bot. So there's that piece. And then we have our own team on staff that poses as the clinic staff, and so they are there to answer questions that AI can't answer.

For many reasons, people get kicked out of the AI conversation when people want to get on the phone. In fact, we almost demand that they get on a quick discovery call with our team. Yeah, because what we learned is you can make it too easy for the patient to book. So easy in, easy out. You can book that spot on your cell phone and never talk to a human. Then guess what your no-show cancel rate is going to be. Easy in, easy out. You can book that spot on your cell phone and never talk to a human. Then guess what your no-show cancel rate is going to be? Through the roof, because there's really no connection. No one asked me any questions. I didn't talk to anybody, so we try to get that's important right?

0:29:45 - Mark Henderson Leary
if you've ever gotten one of those spam emails in the past where it's like click here, go to the website and you're like answering questions, you're scrolling and scrolling.

It's don't know, not necessarily spam, but they don't market this way as much as they used to, but sort of like, like get rich quick schemes would all have this very intensive application and scrolling and click here and watch this video and do this just to create this investment, the more investment you have.

I mean it's a trick and it's not something I want people to abuse, but you need to know it. That taking that friction out, like you said, is you don't want to create obstacles, you do want to create investment and ask questions, asking questions along the way, disqualifying, you know, creating a little wait period that's appropriate, hopefully useful, is actually to your advantage Because by the time they've met with you and haven't been disqualified, if they've got a couple hours in this and it's useful, like it's useful hours, you ask good questions, they're more educated and you're more educated, then you've got a real kind of mutual commitment at this stage and you don't want to take that out of the process to your point. It's like when you have an event you don't ever have a free event. You always like at least 20 bucks, something that says like I'm kind of in this. That way I will at least show, and so that's such an important part of the process.

0:31:07 - Matty McLain
Yep, 100%. And that's the only way. Otherwise communication is one-sided. You're throwing everything out there and hope that that patient, that prospective patient, finds the one thing that's important to them, versus getting on a six-minute phone call and saying, hey, samantha, did you have any concerns about coming in? Is there anything that would keep you from? And she says, yeah, I've really been wondering X how many days I'm short on days off. So do I have to? Can I get in on Friday afternoon? Do I have to take off the next day? Does someone have to drive me home? Am I going to lose my hair? What's the recovery or the prescriptions? You don't know which one Samantha is fixating on, unless you can hop on and say what for you specifically. And the second thing about a personal conversation is the chance to separate yourselves from the pack, because, honestly, you go online.

Most medical clinics do not. You know they don't choose a patient avatar, they don't speak to one person in their specific situation. They try to say, hey, if you need this procedure or this treatment, we will do it. And and so the clinics force the consumer to basically commoditize their and that's why a lot of these you know, plastic surgery, lasik, bariatrics the price gets driven to the bottom because nobody is standing on an island saying well, we actually provide a completely different experience and it costs a little bit more, but that's because X, y, z, we're better, we're faster. Nobody will choose those distinguishing things, and so that's why the consumer calls and says hey, I'm looking on Google. How much do you guys charge? Oh, we charge $4,700. Okay, thank you, goodbye, it's over, and they move on to the next one.

0:32:41 - Mark Henderson Leary
Yeah. So one thing I want to highlight is sort of one side of the razor's edge of the demand generation. My terminology would be sort of the inbound demand generation side. And then there is sort of like the funnel qualification side. That may not mean anything to the listener but meaning you're putting content out there through various channels for people who are looking for it. That is going to create some interest for them to start a conversation with you, and that's sort of what I call the inbound demand generation side. Somewhere you were throwing hooks in the water, putting nets out there oh look, we might have some. And then there's like how do we reel them in? And there's a real difference in that process. How do you, you know, on the first side of that, you know what are you doing to sort of create the awareness, that like making it easier for people to find you?

0:33:27 - Matty McLain
basically, yeah, for demand generation, our main focus is video Facebook ads. That's where you know, because of Facebook you can get so specific on who you want to see that ad. That has been successful for us. You will get a lot of them and a lot of them are they're tire kickers or they have no intention of ever coming in. And that's why you've got to have a follow-up system, because clinics will say, oh, you guys are going to run Facebook ads. Man, we tried that. We basically threw away 5K a month for a year. We got a bunch of people that they booked and they didn't come in and we say, exactly, you can't turn on digital demand generation unless you have a filter in between that and your clinic, because you'll get all sorts of garbage. You'll waste most of your money, but there are 20% of those leads that have every intention of coming in to see you, but they need some follow-up. So so, yeah, it's like we're paying for gold.

0:34:23 - Mark Henderson Leary
All we got was sand. It's like, yeah, the gold was in with the sand.

0:34:28 - Matty McLain
Yes, yes, yeah you. You didn't have a way to filter out the 80% that weren't coming in today and you didn't have a way to pay a lot of attention and call, email text and chat with the 20% who are coming in. So you get that set up. Suddenly, facebook ads or Google ads work at a much, much higher rate. So we run ads, we capture the lead, we talk to the lead, we email text to get them on the schedule and then, secondly, we will take over the contact us form of the clinic. So, because most clinics have a pretty good flywheel of either their marketing has been dialed in or they've been around so long their SEO is just amazing or they do get a ton of referrals. So they do have people coming to the site and filling out forms. It's just there's no follow up after that.

0:35:12 - Mark Henderson Leary
So Facebook's one of your main channels Instagram, tiktok, articles, blogs, youtube you're using any of those things, or is that you just pick that one that works for you?

0:35:23 - Matty McLain
I think I would say it's clinic and geography. It's clinic and geography, specific, not geography. Yeah, it depends on the procedure, it depends on which one they want more of, it depends on that patient population and based on that we would choose where to put those dollars Interesting.

0:35:40 - Mark Henderson Leary
So from there, you've got the leads coming in and you're filtering and then you're flowing them into the leads. When does this get handed directly to the clinic? And you're sort of out.

0:35:51 - Matty McLain
Yeah, so generating, doing demand generation, capturing leads. We're following up immediately. We're following up using all available options out there in the world, except for we don't use the US post office not yet, anyway and we're following up. The third thing I'd mention is long-term. So many people want to engage within five seconds, but you'd be shocked at how many people. We will continue to follow up for weeks and weeks and weeks.

And 14 weeks later someone responds to a message of the joyful persistence and they say, oh my gosh, thank you, I've been so busy. My husband was ill, we were out of town, we were moving, I was getting a different job, I'm ready, book me. And so our job is do all the communication, get them on that quick call, qualify them, get them excited, make sure that they are qualified, motivated, that they've got the financing or the money, and then we put them on the clinic schedule. And even then our job is not done. Our job is not done until their car pulls up in the driveway and they park and they walk in. That's when. That's when our side is finished.

0:36:57 - Mark Henderson Leary
So you manage the nurture cycle and all all of that 100%.

0:37:00 - Matty McLain
We, we well. We have a couple of different options for clinics, but if a clinic wants to say, hey, why don't you guys be the entire sales team?

0:37:10 - Mark Henderson Leary
They don't have to do a thing, they can just say hey can just say hey, that's what you guys do, I'll pay you, you do it. Do you find sort of the barbell experience where it's like meaning, it's like it's found on each end and like the people who meet reach out today. If you, if you make it really easy, they'll sign up today. And then, if you get into this middle spirit period, it's kind of harder to close them. And then a bunch of them are like look, I started the conversation and sometime in later this year I want to close, and it's sort of like it's at the edges of that. Is that the pattern you're seeing? Yep 100%.

0:37:40 - Matty McLain
Yeah, there's a. There's a big drop off. If you know, let's call it the first 48 hours. If they don't book in 48 hours, there is just this very thin line and then it gets. It gets bigger. You know, call it. Call it two weeks, three weeks later and I think that's just some people's.

There's a lot of internal chatter, but with consistent follow-up. It's like anyone selling anything. You know people just like you have cold emails, you get cold calls. You probably get a few text messages, most people selling something. They're not willing to be persistent and so even things that you opted into, they, they will. They'll message you once or maybe twice. But even if I ask for something from a company and become a lead and I'm happy to, I wanted to share my info, I wanted them to reach out to me they will not do it consistently. No one will show up six weeks later and say, hey, matty, I don't want to bug you, you can opt out anytime, but you filled something out, wanted me to reach out. I'm here to help and you know, sometimes it takes four weeks for life and all the stars to align and you say, man, I'm ready to pay attention to that. Now I actually do want to take that whitewater rafting trip to the Grand Canyon or whatever it is.

0:38:48 - Mark Henderson Leary
Yeah, that's a missed opportunity. And mailing list, I think now, because I'm a ruthless unsubscriber and I unsubscribe from a lot of products I love, because I just know where their stuff is and I already bought it and if I've got the bottle or the bike or the whatever and it's going to remind me that it's there if I need it, in part for it, I'll go get it. But in mailing lists I wonder, because after I see like three or four that I'll respond to, I'm like we're out of here. I just got to clean the inbox up.

Yeah, if they said like, hey, you know I don't, I know you don't want any mail at all, but if just like once a year, I just said hi, so I wanted to find out how you were doing, would that be too often? I'd probably say, yeah, once a year, that's not a problem at all. You know, just remind me what's going. Think, be thinking about that. So you know the really long, long tail on hey, just because what I do find is like I'll unsubscribe from lists. They're like, hey, you want too much mail. Yeah, that's fine, we'll stop bugging you.

but you know you're on seven mailing lists, so don't worry you're, you're gonna get one of our things here in a couple weeks you're gonna subscribe for that one too, but don't worry, you'll still be on six, so it's like that's actually super irritating yes, yeah, it is, and it's interesting how I mean.

0:40:01 - Matty McLain
You know this was even a couple years ago email had the highest return on on spend. I forgot it's 20x return, I don't. I don't think that's as high today. I do think email is still it's still very powerful. But there are some people who have 10,000 messages. They don't pay attention to it ever. But there are people like me and probably you. That's why I'm a ruthless unsubscriber, because every email gets seen and something gets done with it. It gets paid attention to. So, yeah, and do you have I'm assuming you have a work email and you have one personal email? Is that how it is, and how long have you had that personal email address?

0:40:37 - Mark Henderson Leary
A long time and I've kept it very, very clean. Interestingly, it was my work email for a while as well. I consolidated everything into it and then I split the work brand back out. So there's still some residual work emails that go to it. But yeah, I'd separate it back pretty cleanly.

0:40:53 - Matty McLain
Yeah.

0:40:57 - Mark Henderson Leary
And how long have you had your current cell phone number? Oh my gosh Long time. How old am I? So I think Was it your first one? I think it was not my first one, I think it was my second number and I have to guess it was.

0:41:13 - Matty McLain
We'll call it 25 years ago it was we'll call it 25 years ago probably. Okay, wow, that's that's. That's really. That's on the high end typically yeah, that's crazy. People will have their personal email address almost forever. You just don't change it, yeah. But what I find is most people do. They have changed cell phone numbers two or three times.

0:41:32 - Mark Henderson Leary
Well, I come with the technical side, so I was an it geek, so I was early like hosting email servers and so my personal email address is a personal domain, it's not like some Gmail or something like that. And so cell phones, same kind of thing. Once I realized the tool that that was and became a business thing, so those things became foundational for me very quickly. Early adopter on the technology, when you know, number portability wasn't even a thing at one point, and once it was a thing, I was like we are done here, this is the last number I'll ever have. So you know, I was very much on the bleeding edge of that. Yeah, yeah. So one of the things that kind of crossed my mind you talk about, well, the industry expansion, let's go to there for a second, but if you're going to own the sales process up until, like, they show up, that doesn't apply to all.

Like plastic surgery, I'm thinking patient care, coordinator type roles, these real concierge experiences where you come in and have a lot of conversation, meet with the doctor, is, you know well, in advance of surgery. Are those the kind of things that you're like, yeah, we can't do that, we're gonna. We need to keep this transactional. This is, to me, is the right size surgery, while people are willing to pretty much do the whole process with us. And so what's the mindset there in terms of closing the deals?

0:42:43 - Matty McLain
Yeah. So it's not our job. Our job is to close, but we're closing the initial appointment because and this is actually many clinics will say hey, does your system integrate with our EMR? Because we'd love it if they could talk and it could sync both ways. And we say no number one because that's super time intensive, it's quite expensive. We're not going to integrate with 30 different EMRs. But also this is why we exist, or companies like us exist you don't want how many patient leads do you have? Well, we have 3,000. Okay, you don't want all those leads in your EMR, in your scheduling system. Let them operate over here in a system that is talking to following up with generating new appointments. We close that appointment. It shows up at your front door. Our job is done Now. It's in your staff's hands. Now they go in the EMR. Now, I know they have to have three visits before the procedure, but that's on you guys. That's not what we do.

0:43:37 - Mark Henderson Leary
Okay, so you would work on that. Potentially, it seems like A hundred percent.

0:43:41 - Matty McLain
Yeah, in fact, most well, everything we sell requires actually, we do have a hair loss restoration surgeon, so that is different. But bariatrics, oh there can be three to six months of visits before the thing happens. Lasik, you know you're coming in for at least a pre-screening, then you may come back and see another visit and then you're going to have the procedure. So that is happening on the clinic side.

0:44:04 - Mark Henderson Leary
Okay, so this is, in my terminology, sales, qualified lead showing up at the door. Closing the deal is really on the part of the surgeon, or whatever you know concierge process on the part of them. Okay, that makes sense, so okay. So back to bariatrics. You own it, you love it and you're like let's go LASIK. What made you think that was gonna work?

0:44:26 - Matty McLain
Man and the only reason we got to a certain size, a certain revenue, a certain number of team members and we literally ran out of new prospects for bariatrics. We had a list, we had enriched the list, we qualified, and you know, in a list that only has a few hundred companies in it, it doesn't take long before you say, hey, we've actually we've either talked to these people and they became a client, or we talked to them and, for whatever reason, they did not become a client, or we just cannot get in touch with them. They're unreachable. We'll keep trying, but that's a small list. So now what? We did not want to start working with hospitals necessarily. So we say, well, either we say this is the end of growth or we choose the next service line and we go after it.

We looked at there were probably four that we seriously considered, and LASIK, because LASIK. Lasik is very small but compared to where we came from it's probably three, four times, five times bigger number of leads. It's all there. There is no insurance for LASIK. I mean, it's essentially, it's all cash pay. We think that some people say that number of LASIK procedures has plateaued, but the technology is also changing pretty dramatically. It just it seems like the future is is pretty bright in LASIK. You know, eyesight is extremely important. We like the procedure. I will personally probably soon have LASIK. So yeah, just a number of factors to say, hey, I think this is a similar. The process for a lead has to come in and visit, get scheduled for the procedure. It's what we know. The wording, the marketing. It's very, very similar. So that was the reason we chose LASIK.

What were the others you were looking at? Well, we do love hair restoration surgery, but I think I don't know if you do you read? Have you read Alex Ramosi? No, so he didn't come up with it, but it's just the latest person I heard say it is what's the most important thing in a hot dog stand? Is it the buns? Is it where you put the hot dog stand? Is it the condiments? Is it the price? And the answer is no. You got to find a starving crowd because if you can set that hot dog stand outside of you know a stadium that empties out at nine o'clock and everyone's hungry, it doesn't matter what your hot dog tastes like, it doesn't matter what you charge, they're going to buy it, and so we want to choose service lines that have a tidal wave carrying them in growth. It's kind of like people who host events, maybe even EOS. You qualify people coming to the events because even if your content is average, if you qualify people coming enough, then you're gonna attract people who are kind of going places with or without you.

So we want to be in an industry that is growing, that has a bright future, that will carry us with it, instead of maybe, if we choose one that is shrinking, the price is being driven to the bottom, not as many people are getting it then we're gonna be fighting for a market share that every year is getting smaller and smaller. So we love hair restoration surgery. I think over the next 10 years that one's going to explode. We like orthopedics. I think orthopedics is going to grow like crazy. However, you know there's other factors insurance versus self-pay, hospital versus private. So there are those factors. Fertility is you know that is a big and growing industry which we looked into, did some homework on that one, and what was the other one? I think, yeah, those are the big four.

0:47:52 - Mark Henderson Leary
Okay. So it's interesting because I think of ortho as a little more second tier referral and I've said this before and I might be wrong learning the dynamic, because one of the biggest ways you can make money in healthcare is be in the value chain where, like, if if somebody goes to a primary care physician because that's they have, they're sick, they got kids or whatever that that might be the tip of the spear. Urgent care oftentimes can be the tip of the spear. They're like, okay, now I had to, I had to go find, but then from there I have other things. And so who do I ask the person I just last saw or I'm seeing right now, and if you can get into this value chain of like, well, I've been thinking about some dermatology, okay, yeah, go down the hall, we've got a dermatologist, or I'm thinking about.

Or I go to this primary care physician and like, oh my, you, I hurt my knee running this weekend. Where do I go, doc? Oh, we got an orthopedist. You should go right down the hall or across the street or whatever, and figuring out how to hand up and down the value chain in a very consistent, loyal way, hopefully with really high value. But when those are figured out, man, it rains money in those organizations because they're not having to find these people. They just stay in the ecosystem. And it also seems to me like a secondary thing, like I don't know how many people are necessarily. I mean, some people do, but they don't necessarily go. I want to shop for an orthopedist. They're starting a conversation with somebody else oftentimes, and so is that in your thinking in terms of the industry?

0:49:30 - Matty McLain
100% yes, and we do have a relationship with an orthopedic surgeon and he didn't know how to answer that. He said well, yeah, the majority of my patients originate from a referral. However, you know, he said, I want more high ticket, I want more knees and hips, and I wonder if we were running ads to get people at the very top of the funnel, could I get more of those people in here? And so far we don't know the answer to that. But that's our list. But that's a very expensive question to answer.

0:49:53 - Mark Henderson Leary
I love that question and I've tried to do it before and in fact usually as a visionary inside of me. You know I'm the kind of guy who's like I figured it out. We will just capture all the leads that no one else is getting, and by marketing it, and then I'll be like two years into this like we have gotten no leads. The market knew something we didn't, and so we've been humbled by the reality overtook us. So hopefully you're understanding how to expand when the opportunity is there, or just learn from what nature's telling you People. Just don't go to you first. Figure out, figure out who to talk to, the who, who does get the call first. So you expanded into LASIK. How long have you been doing that? Six months, Okay, and it's everything you hoped.

0:50:37 - Matty McLain
Yeah, so far. Yes, yeah, so far it is. In fact, we had a meeting last week with a LASIK clinic. It's going fantastic. We met as a team and looked at the LASIK stats and, yeah, so far, everything. You know. Everyone's rubbing their hands together saying, oh my goodness, this is, yeah, this is our next niche that we want to really have a presence in, because I hate to say the bar is low. But the bar is low because it's easy for me to sit here and talk about how to get patients through a funnel when I don't have to walk into a clinic, I don't have to manage the clinic and the equipment and their schedules and the staff and the overhead. So of course, it's easy for me to armchair quarterback and say, hey, I can do a better job getting your. You're spending money now on ads. I money back, guarantee I can get more of those people into your front door, because that's the only thing we pay attention to all day, every day.

0:51:32 - Mark Henderson Leary
So I want to go to the niche side of this. Of people listening to this, I'm sure thinking well, I'm in hair restoration, or I. You know our business isn't that different than LASIK or bariatric surgery. You know, we're in plastics, we're in whatever. Well, you, as an owner of the organization, you want to grow. How do you internalize this? Hey, we're going to say no to people. Or how do you say yes? I mean, this is really asking you as the business owner, not so much as the marketer Like, how do you stick to your guns? And what is the process there? Somebody calls you tomorrow and says, hey, we're not in either of those industries, but we think you're awesome, can we sign up? What goes through your mind and what do you do?

0:52:09 - Matty McLain
Yeah Well, it has to be. Believe me, as the you know, I led the sales effort for the last five years, so really near impossible for me to say if someone shows up and says oh my goodness, my friend told me about you guys, I have a credit card, I'm ready to go. You know how difficult it is to say no, we will not take your money. However, we've learned through the pain of there are people who fit what we're doing. If it's not today, it's in the future. That's why we do have a plastic surgeon, that's why we do have a one single med spa and that's why we have a hair restoration surgeon. We consider those R and D, so we will. If they meet certain criteria, we say okay, do you? In fact, I had a. This came from I can't. I don't think this was an EOS referral.

But I had a fantastic call with a dermatologist come super busy clinic, but he has a lot of holes in his schedule. He wants to fill those holes. We went back and forth and he doesn't meet one of our big check boxes, which is do you have one procedure or treatment that is worth $4,000 or more to you, lifetime customer value? And he did not and he said no, but what I do have is 60 spots a week that I want to fill. I want to fill those things up. That would mean, you know, that would mean another million dollars in revenue. And we said that's not our bread and butter. We don't do teeth cleanings, we don't do low ticket items. For us to hit a home run, for you, for you to be very happy with us and us to be very happy and successful with you, you've got to be speaking to one patient population about one procedure that is a high ticket item. That's where we hit a home run. So if you say-.

0:53:45 - Mark Henderson Leary
It's a psychographic of the patient. The psychographic is somebody willing to invest time in learning and you're not gonna invest Willing to invest Multiple readings of multiple blogs to figure out how to get my teeth cleaned. That's not happening.

0:53:57 - Matty McLain
Yeah, exactly, and Boost would have to deliver. How many teeth cleanings would we have to serve up to you for you to say you guys are amazing? It's not five or six, it's way, way more. And it has to be a, it has to be very elective, right, if a clinic showed up that we didn't work with today and they said I already spend $10,000 a month in marketing, I'm not happy with the results, I believe what you guys are doing, I have a high ticket item Then, yeah, there's a, there's a good chance we'd say, ooh dang, we would. We would love to set up and see how this goes for a few months.

0:54:29 - Mark Henderson Leary
So you know a couple of things. I'm really glad I asked that question and of you, because I oftentimes interview people, questions where I'm kind of fishing for an answer, hoping for an answer maybe, or just or learning, and I'll I'll see somebody who's running a pretty good business and they're doing something that I just think is terrible and they're getting away with it for some reason, and so I'm like I'm always like, ah, I wish now. Now the listeners are going to think that was a good idea, like that's not a good idea, don't do that. And so hopefully I can kind of call those out in the moment.

But you nailed the answer that I would teach in terms of principles, in terms of, like you know we are going to not, it's not a 0% outside our target market, it's carefully thoughtfully, sometimes some onesie, twosie Eyes wide open, both sides of the equation. Hey, by the way, you're not our core. We think you could be, but you know the guarantee is not exactly the same. We think you could be, but you know the guarantee is not exactly the same. We got to have an open relationship, open relationship, an open conversation in the relationship to to make sure that every step of the way expectations are being met and it's and it's not chasing every dollar hey, we could grow and it's really cautious and and the what you described and and I assume you so you said no to that.

0:55:44 - Matty McLain
The dermatologist, oh okay, 100 yes, that's because because years ago we said yes to that dermatologist, right and yeah, and through pain figured out oh dude, this is terrible. If we can't, we knew we couldn't do a great job. It's. It's bad for our team. It takes focus and energy. It's bad for the clinic. They're they're not thrilled, and's just. It's not worth going down that road.

0:56:05 - Mark Henderson Leary
And so the goal in the conversation where you said so what we asked, the silver bullet question is there a $4,000 procedure or not? And that is so powerful and I'm guessing not the question you thought of immediately five years ago, like it took a bunch of mistakes. It's like what is it? What's the thing? You know, can we drive tons of volume? And you're like no, we can't drive tons of volume, we can drive consistent volume around high value, and so we now have this sort of profit per X kind of mindset from you know, jim Collins, good to great.

We now have like a very simple way of understanding the common ground between LASIK and bariatric surgery and the next thing, and so you can expand into the knowledge of the next industry around this core principle. Like we are really good at driving conversion around high value cash pay procedures and that's our guiding principle and it's exceedingly valuable to know that and it's very it takes a lot of patience to discover that. And so if you're listening to this and you're thinking I don't know what it is, well you should, and you should take some time and have some patience with yourself and get to the point where you know what it is that really drives that high value.

0:57:25 - Matty McLain
Yeah, 100%.

0:57:27 - Mark Henderson Leary
So we've covered a lot, man. I was saying we try to keep these under an hour so people don't get intimidated by that more than one hour. I think by the time we're done with this it's going to be just a hair over, but I've loved everything we talked about and I could keep going into the details on this. Is there anything you feel like we missed in the conversation?

0:57:43 - Matty McLain
Anything we missed? No, not the only thing, I guess. Just to expand on a little, I've talked a lot about how Boost chose who we're we are going to go after and it has served us well. And and in LASIK we've well. This is a whole different episode, but our outreach, the way we've we've identified our perfect fit client and how we reach out to them, so far is working just fantastic. And I think you know if someone's driving down the road, if they made it this far, my goodness, I don't know how they could listen to me and you talk this long. Don't say that, man, this is good stuff.

0:58:17 - Mark Henderson Leary
I love it. Now, if you're serious about growing your organization, you need to let us listen to every word. That is a good point.

0:58:25 - Matty McLain
But I would say, you know, go to your own website and just Google yourself Google plastic surgery, atlanta or whatever else you may be and compare what do you see first with what everyone else, what all your competitors or other choices, are doing, because you can go after one patient population, even if you have multiple. You know, if you have multiple campaigns, going to multiple pages, find a specific customer to talk to and you know what could you be the best at in your industry and say, yeah, look, we, we're really. We do this for professional athletes and we're the best you know. Women age 42 to 47.

If you pick that niche, it does not limit you. In fact, you will still get all the other people, but that one singular focus will take you and basically do the selling for you. That's been our experience. If you will give them all the time and attention and say that you're all about them, you know their pain points, their objections, their concerns, you will still get the other patients. But that singular that, that focus will, that little army or tribe will, will carry you and and and grow your business like crazy.

0:59:38 - Mark Henderson Leary
Yeah, I think that's right, because when you, when you do that, you're creating raving fans, you focus, you're really able to provide 10 out of 10 service and experiences with those, the narrow niche which does nothing but build your reputation around great experience. That does bring with it, I think, the responsibility to say, yeah, we're getting all this sort of adjacent traffic and people who are similar and some outliers, and yet then you have to say, like you said, you're an outlier here, sort of adjacent traffic and people who are similar and some outliers, and yet and you have to say, like you said, you're an outlier here. We now, we know where we're great and for us to keep our reputation, you're just outside of that. We probably can't take care of you, which then hopefully you've got somebody to send them to, cause that's really important.

I my, I've learned that one the hard way as well, that if you're going to say no, which you should say, no, you are well-served to say, but here's your yes, here's somebody I know and I'll get you. I won't hang the phone up on you. That's the worst. I mean, I've had that happen. Like, hey, we're not, you're not the fit for you. Who should I call? I don't know. Ah, I remember that that was not good customer service. So so I hopefully that's the whole whole value chain there. You're taking care of your best customer, you're taking care of those adjacent ones you can take care of, you're saying no to those ones that are that are out on the outliers and your help hopefully getting them in the hands of somebody who can take care of them, building goodwill, creating abundance in the in the world for them and for those partners and those people who do different things. So that's my hope. Yeah, absolutely so. On that point, what's your passionate plea for entrepreneurial healthcare leaders right now?

1:01:13 - Matty McLain
Passionate plea for entrepreneurial healthcare leaders. Yeah, it's in private practice anyway. Man, what a different world even five years ago. I think my passionate plea is more you know, we'll have to talk about this on another episode but more of the mastermind that we're doing again next week more groups of private practices coming together. You know the whole MSO movement. We've got a few practices involved in that and we're very interested in it. The whole, just the EOS community. I think if private practices do not band together, if we don't have some sharing of resources, if we don't have some economies of scale, I don't see how it's sustainable. So that's my. The thing I'm passionate about is keeping private practice private, and I want to see physicians make a good living, enjoy their work and have thriving businesses. So to the degree that we can play a part in that, that's what I'm extremely passionate about.

1:02:11 - Mark Henderson Leary
Well, that's what brings us together. I mean, I have absolutely the belief and experience that what's missing in entrepreneurial healthcare is some fundamentals of leadership, and it's totally solvable. It's not because physician leaders can't lead, it's because they weren't taught to. They were taught lots of other stuff. 100% of education in that mindset in that community was for the craft that made sense in the past, but to lead into the future. We got to fill in some of the blind spots for leadership and management and it's eminently doable and it works and it's and it.

There's some resistance because it's new in some, some of these communities, but when the resistance falls it's like, yeah, you're humans too. It's a business, it's an organization. The principles apply and they work and it crushes. It's amazing. So it's a such a privilege to be helping and I can see the path right forward to. You know, having all of these entrepreneurial healthcare organizations, well-led, well-managed, in control of their destiny, providing super high value and having amazing cultures that everybody likes to be a part of, and that's so. Seeing the momentum build in, that has just been a privilege and it's just, it's just awesome that you share that vision as well. Yeah, same here, absolutely, look.

Matty it's been a pleasure. I want to wrap this up because we went a little long on this, but I'm super grateful for the time together and glad we're on this journey together. We'll have future conversations, for sure, but if anybody wants to keep in touch with you, reach out and know what you're doing, how does somebody find you in sort of the simple way?

1:03:49 - Matty McLain
Well, in the show notes you can fill that out, and that'll be the easiest way for both of us.

1:03:53 - Mark Henderson Leary
Awesome. Thanks so much, matty. It's been a pleasure. So that's our time for today. That's our time for today.

If this was valuable, please get in the hands of those people who you think would also find it valuable. Give us the feedback, hit us with the reviews, the feedback. There's obviously the SpeakPike link. You just send us a voice message and I get right back to you if you got some feedback questions. All the feedback we can get is so valuable and you think everybody's providing feedback. Like of all the listeners, such a small percentage of people provide the feedback, so you will not overwhelm us with feedback. We want it. We want all of your input. It's so helpful and so valuable. We're grateful for it.

And, of course, don't forget if you're stuck, if you're thinking to yourself if only I could have this great culture, this thriving entrepreneurial healthcare practice that's growing, making a big difference. But all I see is toxicity. All I see is like these terrible employees and I don't know how to do better hiring and I don't know what my first step would look like. Please don't stay stuck. Please reach out to see what vision, traction, health could look like in your organization. You can find me at practicefreedomcom slash schedule. We can get a few minutes together to talk about what that could look like. So in the meantime, we'll see you next time on Practice Freedom with me, mark Henderson.

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