5 Biz Strategies to Seriously Grow Your Practice [PPP #079]
In this episode of the Profitable Practice Podcast, I talk about knowing when it’s time to invest in and grow your practice and I share my 5 biggest takeaways for practice growth I got from James Wedmore’s BBD Live event.
5 Strategies To Seriously Grow Your Practice
In this episode, it’s just you and me. 🙂
There’s no interviewee today. Instead, I wanted to share some exciting how-to strategies for bringing in business so you can grow your practice that were my take-aways from my very first live event with my mastermind group.
I’ve been really thinking about investing in a mastermind group for a number of years now, but the ones that I’ve been hearing about are a H-U-G-E investment. And I just didn’t feel like I was ready to join something that big in my business. So, before I get into my 5 takeaways, I wanted to share my thoughts about “How to make sure that you’re making the right investments when it comes to your business”.
Click below to tune in:
In this episode:
- [1:38] – [11:30] What to do when you don’t have the time/energy resources to learn new skills on your own from scratch.
- [11:31] – [17:25] What the deal is with business mastermind groups and my story of taking the plunge and investing in one to grow your practice.
- [18:27] Biz Builder #1: Automated Webinars – How (and When) To Use This To Book More Patients
- [24:03] Biz Builder #2: Using Q & A to Leverage YouTube To Grow Your Practice
- [26:40] #3: Instagram – Types of Posts That Are Performing Best To Win Patients and Grow Your Practice
- [28:44] #4: The Social Media Scheduler App that’s cheaper and better than the other guys!
- [29:44] #5: Launch Runways – what they are and how to do ‘em best
After you’ve listened to the episode, I would love to hear from you!
Do you have a well thought out strategy for bringing new patients into your practice? Or one for re-activating “dormant” patients? What are they? Leave a comment below and let us know! You never know when an idea or comment could be a game-changer for another. Plus, I just love getting to chat with you about your ideas for growing your practice and help you make them a reality. 🙂
So, if you are dreaming about offering something really great to your patients but aren’t sure how to make it happen, I’m here for you! It’s exactly why I offer these free 30 Min Practice Strategy Calls, so I can get to know you, your practice, and of course, help you break through bring your special talents to more of the patients that need ’em.
As always, thank you so much for listening and learning with me this week. Your commitment to learning the business aspect of growing your practice matters... Not only to you, but to your future patients and practitioners who want to be working with you. It’s time for you to build something great, so let’s get to work and grow your practice.
Connect with Andrea: Facebook | Instagram
Episode Resources:
- FREEBIE: Click the link to book your “Practice Strategy Call with Dr. Andrea”
- Episode 045: interview with biz coach Lori Kennedy
- Episode 014: interview with biz coach Samantha Gladish
- James Wedmore’s BBD Live Info
- BOOK RECOMMENDATION: Brian Moran’s “The 12 Week Year”
- Automated Webinars
- SmarterQueue
Other episodes you may enjoy:
- Take Massive Action with No Plan B – PPP:005
- 10 Things You Must Do To Run a Successful Business – PPP:000
- The True Cost of Running a Business: PPP 002
Ready to stretch yourself and ma$$ively grow your practice?
The MAXIMize Your Clinic online course will guide you through every step of the way and help you get your health and wellness practice running profitably. In it, I show you how to take the right steps to take in the right order, so that you can have your operational processes, group programs and marketing campaigns all created and implemented in as little as 3-months! (Yes, I said 3 months… and I meant it.)
Hey Guys! Welcome to another episode of the Profitable Practice Podcast. I am, of course, your hostess with the mostest Andrea Maxim, and it’s going to be an episode with just you and me. There is no interviewee on this particular one and why is this episode so important is because I just got back from my very first live event with my mastermind group it has been a long time coming, I have been really thinking about wanting to get my mastermind group for a number of years now but, the ones that I’ve been hearing about were huge investment and I just wasn’t feeling ready to join something like that in my business. So what I was wanting to talk about is how to make sure that you are making the right investment when it comes to business and I wanted to do some rapid-fire reviews of all the amazing things that I have learned while I was away for that two-day live event. So, first, the question first, how do I know that I am ready to join a big group coaching of the mastermind of some sort. So, I really wanted to be in a place of my business where I was definitely more advanced, I wasn’t just doing it from the very first beginning from scratch, learning those basic steps. I wanted to be in a place where, if I wanted to make an investment, we’re talking tens of thousands of dollars, that I was going to get the most of this investment.
I will never ever invest in something in my business that I do not see where I can get that return as quickly as possible. So, definitely, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve signed up with business coaches where I put out a fair amount of investment there, with different people that had different strengths and different things that they can offer me. But, it wasn’t putting all my money in one basket so to speak. So, when I first invested in business coaching, all I wanted to do was get my feet wet, like this podcast, one of the first investments that I have made because the Podcast and the website maximizedbusiness.ca all came together with the very same person. So, I pre-recorded 15 episodes of the Podcast before we launched it and I think we launched it now two and a half years ago or even more, I have no idea. That was my first investment and that was the investment where it was just a labor of love. It was something that I knew I wanted to do I knew it was going to be expensive, I knew that in the long run it was going to be very profitable which it now become the first in the first year but until then I was just constantly putting money out every single month to keep the shows out to keep the website running, to get the show notes to keep running else, so when I started doing the Podcast when I started implementing and wanting to put a course. So I knew that in the order you to benefit all as quickly as you could possibly could, I wanted to find out a resource that I could create knowing that when we graduate from school we have next to zero business, and I understand the financial investment, depending on how long you’ve been to school until the point you start doing your extra certifications, going to naturopathic college is definitely not inexpensive and when you graduate from whatever school you’ve graduated from regardless, you have no idea how to make that investment back. And now you’re having to put more money to start your website or to start your branding and get people actually exchanging money for service.
So, I knew that there is a huge deficit in what people are graduating at least from the naturopathic college from in their deficit with regards to your business knowledge and how you put things together. And even the course, I sat on that idea for a year and I wanted to make sure that I implemented all of the systems in my own business before I started teaching you guys. And, I went through a course building program, I wrote up my scripts like I was on our wedding anniversary weekend away with my husband to a beautiful golf resort up north and when he was out golfing, I was in the back of our cottage typing away my script on my laptop. Just putting all of my ideas down of everything that I wanted to put into all of the modules and eventually once that script is written I started recording the modules and it was August of 2016 that we actually launched the maximized clinic course with everything literally walked you through to start and grow your business.
I never wanted that to infiltrate the Podcast, I wanted it more to be you guys and the goal was to reach out to you and inspire you and give you little nuggets that you can take away and take action from, and every single show that I do, I am learning just as much as you are. I’m sure that you hear me that I’m asking questions or you’ll hear me leaving be like” Oh! I didn’t know that!”. This is much of a beautiful thing for me and as it is for you and once I got the course going, now I’m ready to invest in people that know how I can start executing this. I invested in two business coaches in a one-time frame in a year. One was Lori Kennedy, the other was Samantha Gladish. Both people that I have known have made relationships prior, but I knew when I wanted to get someone fast, I needed to talk to people who knew what they were doing. So once I got the course going, I launched it on my own, most of the people that I have launched to are still highly active and I’m seeing their businesses flourish. I have launched it at least 6 times since then.
My best launch was when I hired Steffani Joanne who is in the Build your Business Empire, she was offering a 90-day Coaching Program and she helped me completely redo my sales page, rewrite my emails, and make my sales copy more effective. Again, these are the things that I didn’t have the time to learn. I booked when I was going to do the launch, I’m always holding myself to the utmost integrity when it comes to projects. I’m just going to throw another 3,000 dollars at this so that I can have an amazing launch. All I’m doing here is serving you guys, it has never been about the money, or expenses, or how quickly I can make as much money as possible. I’ve always been setting up my business with just pure feelings of serving and gratitude. So, I didn’t even care, all I cared about was how many people I could get to my course, how many people I could help, and how many more people I could serve. Quite frankly guys, the way people approach businesses, whether it’s in your office, online or any sort of thing that you’re doing, the more personal touch things you can offer, the more you can be available for people, the more they are going to start working with you. It is not just about sending emails anymore. And every single launch I have to hustle to make sales that I have, because what we could do three years ago, just by sending out emails. Now, I’m personally reaching out to the people that go to my Webinar, and say “Thank you very much for attending my Webinar”. “How can I help you?” “What can I do?”
All of these extra things that I have been learning have been inspired by every single coach that I have aligned myself with. Which also made me a better coach. I am so much better at the students’ program now and we do group coaching calls and help them to the best of my abilities using all of my knowledge I’ve been gaining from my coaches. But the most pivotal coach that I had was James Wedmore, he has been my longest-running coach that I have had. I still have James Purges who was on three episodes of the podcast right at the beginning talking about business planning. He is my accountability guy, every single Friday morning we have a 15-20 minute touch-point call. He’s really really helping me stay on target. And it’s amazing how even my students and my one-on-one coaching people, when we don’t have calls frequently they’re like “Man, without you being there, I just won’t get anything done, but when I know we have a call it kicks me into action”. So, really think about that with regards to where you are in your business. Do you just need someone to help you build those building blocks to get you to the next level of your business? And once you get to that next level, do you feel that you have now earned a spot at a mastermind group. So, let’s talk about the mastermind group now, a mastermind can be anywhere from I’ve seen it as low as 4,000 dollars to as high as 30,000 dollars. I was really close last year joining a mastermind, it was 25,000 US dollars, and I said “No way!” putting out 30 grand just to join this mastermind. Often the big masterminds have three or four mandatory live meetings that you’ll meet all over North America to do, plus all the obligations. So when I was really close, it just didn’t sit well on me. I sat and thought about it for a couple of days, the investment was just far too great. I knew I wasn’t in the place to get that investment back. So I kind of sat on the idea, and I kept doing my thing, growing my clinic and sharing you guys as much as I could, and in December I went to a BBD live event. Which is hosted by James Wedmore and I’ve been his beta member from the very beginning. He started pitching his new level mastermind. It is for an inner circle mastermind which is for people that are making at least 250,000 dollars. That’s for the trips that you guys will meet together. But he created this another level mastermind group. So, of course, he was up on the stage doing his pitch and I said “Look, I have no idea what he is going to sell it for”, but I know at this stage of my business I can make that return of investment right away with an online launch or having few new patients. So if he puts on the screen 10,000 dollars or less, I’m in. He was on the stage promising what you get and all the benefits, and here comes the price it’s 10,000 US dollars and so without a second thought I said “Okay!” That’s what I’ve been told to do. I’ve had many positive changes in my business because of his teaching, because of the training and all the people I’ve aligned myself with, this is going to be my reward to myself. I went back to the room and signed up immediately with the full pay.
I’ve gone to the bank to get this 10,000 US dollars for them to receive the payment and thought of funny things like being robbed or something. It was 2 years ago since I’ve actually joined a mastermind. Even at where I am right now, I would never feel comfortable hosting a mastermind, there’s so much investment in that with regards to my time and the other thing with the mastermind too is you have to align yourself with people who would help everybody out. We are responsible for motivating each other and commenting on what they’re doing. You also wanna make sure that if you decide to join a mastermind, you wanna know who’s in that group and how they’re going to benefit you, if you’re not going to learn from them it’s probably not the right decision for you.
There’s a lot of people who offer low value of masterminds if there’s a live component, go to that event because that’s where you’ll meet people. So, that’s kind of the premise of joining these big groups. That has high value to them but also has a high cost to them. But if you could think of the idea of joining a mastermind and talk about the right decision for you, I’m happy to share my experience with you. I’m going to go over the rapid-fire stuff that I’ve learned it was really cool, so we got this 90-day goal planner at our table which I really need to start using because I think it’s really awesome and basically with the 90-day planner is another book, research I encourage you to look into, it’s Brian Moran’s 12 Week Year, ultimately what it’s talking about is instead of chunking out everything into quarters. You want to set a start date and an end date with a 90-day time period and treat it as if it were the end of the year. Treat it as a date where you had to meet all of your financial goals and deadlines by that time and watch how much of a difference that makes for your business.
So, the first thing’s first one of the coolest things I’m definitely going to implement this year is automated Webinars. Over the past months, I did two Webinars to my current list of online followers and patients. I also did a Facebook live and boosted it just to a targeted area to people who could come to my office and ran to live Webinars. The topic this time was doing Lab values which is one of the presentations in my Rock your Seminars Program. This month we’ll be doing it much on Synthroid, when it is not good enough for your thyroid and talking all about hypothyroid and all the different ways that you can assess thyroid issues, and it was wildly successful. So out of the two webinars that I did, I booked in one new patient, five old patients that have seen me for years. Each had a value of 160 bucks which is my hourly rate. So webinars are definitely something I’m going to be rinsing and repeating for the rest of the year to engage previous people that have been to my seminar. To get some new people on a locally targeted audience from Facebook onto these webinars. Anyway, we have Melissa Griffin who runs the Pinterest online course. She was just talking about her automated webinars and it is a million-dollar automated webinar funnel that she has created. What she does is, she will send two welcome emails, plus two emails that are an invitation email to join in a webinar, and then she’ll have it go out a day later. At the end of it, she compiled a list of Q&A with the common questions that came up when she was live and just put it right at the end of the webinar. That is definitely something I really wanted to do and cross your fingers to make a million dollars as she does. The other thing that came up is, how do I use YouTube to grow my business. Which one of the social media platforms are Search engines and more into engagements. Facebook and Instagram are more into engagement, while YouTube and Pinterest are kinds of more searchable. So, the biggest thing with YouTube, is if you want your YouTube video to get searched, popular, and get likes. You need to make it answer the questions that the people are asking and search on YouTube. Every single youtube clip, I’m going to snippet out the pieces that aren’t answering a question. But if I’m asked “How do I use YouTube to grow my business?” well that’s the snippet I’m going to put onto youtube and say “Watch the rest of the episode here at this particular address”. Even with our Podcast now we are specifically asking questions to the interviewees and snippeting those out and post it on youtube because they’re searchable clips. The same thing when I’m doing a youtube live, I am inspired by a blog post and I will form it in a question. Pinterest is also all about keywords and it is a Search Engine so your pins that have been posted 5 years ago, are still going to come up if people are searching those particular keywords, almost like an Evergreen Way of having people find you. Pinterest is going to be another platform that I’m going to look into for my business to drive not only patients but also spread my message to healthcare practitioners like you guys about the Podcast. For Instagram, when it comes to social media, the biggest thing is showing up authentically. So always want every single post to be very much aligned with your values, how you speak, and what your messages are all about. Post at least once a day, and you want to make content that’s very replicable. Like things that people can take away from their Instagram feed and then put in on their own lives. The other big thing that the other people are doing on their Instagrams are using polls, in their Insta Story, they’ll add the poll graphic to a post and anybody that answers that poll you can actually look in the analytics and see who answered yes or no, and you can send a direct message and talk to them and kind of build again that therapeutic relationship already. The best way to respond with direct messages is through videos, you can actually send like a minute video clip.
With regards to Social Media, a lot of people are using Meet Edgar, it is about 60 dollars a month to use. It is amazing in a fact that you can put all of your Blog Post into social media posts into like a pool and it will keep going back to that pool and keep reposting for you every single hour of the day if you want to. But, somebody at the event said SmarterQ is like 10 dollars a month and uses the exact same thing as the Meet Edgar so when it comes to social media stuff, SmarterQ would be something that you would wanna look into. Finally, we started talking about launch runways, some people will make their runways like 3 months long, I usually do a minimum of 2 weeks and the biggest thing that I’ve been finding, is that I am using Facebook ads to target cold audiences, these audiences that have never engaged with you at all are very expensive. So, what we’re doing in our business is we’re going to try to make a lot more videos like thought-reversal videos and very polarizing videos, and boosting that to a local audience, just for the audience who could come and visit my office. One of my videos got 5 thousand views the other one was 2 thousand views and it cost me 40 bucks just to boost that. And it’s amazing with regards to social proof and I’ll keep doing that this year. But, if you can start using video and then actually using your Facebook ads just to target the video viewers. You can actually set up a custom audience in the Facebook business manager. You can target people who have watched 25% of your video, 10% of your video, the first 10 seconds, the first 2 minutes, like whatever you want and those leads will sometimes be less than a dollar. To boost video views we’re talking about cents of view like it really significantly cuts down your Facebook ad cost.
So, we were talking about the launch runway, James right now is launching BBD, this month one is going to have a whole bunch of thought-reversal video, they’ve made 8 different videos all on thought-reversals, meaning if I were to say “You have to work hard to be successful” the thought reversal would be “Is, everyone that has been working hard successful? No because of the X..Y..and Z. it kind of changes the people’s thoughts around certain things. So, you have to be slightly polarizing a little bit, so they’re doing that for the whole first month and they’re putting a ton of money into the views. So again, cents of view is all you need, you could put 100 dollars on that video and let it run for even a couple of weeks. The other thing that they’re doing is, they’re creating a Facebook pop-up group. Anytime, you’re launching something you can create a pop-up Facebook group. This isn’t a group that you have to manage all around. You would just make it for that event just to get people all in one place and then as soon as your launch is over you could essentially archive that Facebook group until you relaunch, re-open that and you’ll get all kinds of new people there, keep the old ones and you can reuse your Facebook groups that way. And that is a beautiful way to kind of keep everybody that was once interested, reinterest them again and get them to your office in some way.
Whenever you are about to launch something, you definitely want to give yourself ample time to really get people excited and hyped up about it. Then definitely launch whatever service or program it is that you want to launch, and this is more like the big stuff. I’ve definitely talked about it in my previous webinars, that I’ve done my flash sales and things like that, that’s not really what we’re talking about. Although I did use Facebook to run a flash sale two months ago for the Rock your Seminars Program sort of like the attachments that I have for my maximized clinic course, it cost me 40 bucks and I made almost 500.
And, really that was kind of like the biggest takeaways I got from that live mastermind event. I hope that this helped you, think about what it is that you want to achieve in your business and I strongly recommend that you set yourself up from this video, from this Podcast to 90 days from now and what we did at the end of the event was, we wrote down everything that would happen by August 21st, it was 90 days from when we did the live event, we had all these crazy, amazing things happening and you don’t wanna write down the logical things that will happen in 90 days. I will most likely, be creating some sort of download so that you can see what this whole ramble was all about and kind of follow the flow better. But, it is really important for me to share these extra tools and pieces of value that I picked up last month and kind of share with you what I’ve been doing with my business and how I’m engaging old patients as well as getting new people and what to be expecting from me the rest of the year. So, again if any of these things really inspired you, please reach out to me. I don’t you listening to this episode and now completely overwhelmed because I said so many different things. It is overwhelming when you put it on one 40-minute episode. I’m picking out pieces of what I can do, week by week and learning and kind of implementing and I will tell you guys if you are at that place of the business where you have things set up and you don’t wanna waste any more time in doing them wrong, and I would like to have a chat with you, you can personally email me and find me on Instagram. So, again please reach out to me, direct message on Instagram @AndreaMaximND. So thank you so much for continuing to listen to the Profitable Practice Podcast, I am of course Andrea Maxim and I’m out.