E732 | Marketing Tactics For Cash-Based Practices That Are Working Now With Jeremy Dupont

In this episode, Dr. Danny sits down with Jeremy Dupont, the owner of Patch - a marketing company specializing in cash-based and hybrid physical therapy practices. Jeremy shares his insights on transitioning from owning a traditional PT clinic to building a successful remote/digital agency business. He emphasizes the importance of having the right team members and empowering them to scale effectively.

The discussion delves into the unique culture and atmosphere that can be fostered in successful PT clinics, and the challenges of replicating this in a digital setting. Jeremy stresses the importance of marketing the clinic's culture and values to attract and retain top talent in the industry.

For small clinics just starting out, grassroots marketing efforts are essential to build a strong local presence and reputation. As clinics grow in size and revenue, investing in paid advertising becomes crucial, along with developing systems for re-marketing to past patients to maximize revenue.

Jeremy also touches on the balance between aggressive growth and sustainable profitability, highlighting the importance of aligning growth strategies with personal goals and financial considerations. Listeners are encouraged to explore Patch's website, follow Jeremy on Instagram, and sign up for the Patch newsletter for valuable marketing insights tailored to PT practices.

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Ready to elevate your practice? Book a call at the link below with one of our expert consultants today and start your journey to delivering unparalleled physical therapy.

Podcast Transcript

Danny: [00:00:00] Hey, real quick, if you were serious about starting or growing your cash based practice, I want to formally invite you to go to Facebook and join our PT entrepreneurs Facebook group. This is a group of over 6, 000 providers all over the country, and it's a pretty amazing place to start to get involved in the conversation.

Hope to see you there soon. Hey, are you a physical therapist looking to leverage your skillset in a way that helps you create time and financial freedom for yourself and your family? If so, you're in the right spot. My name is Danny Matei and over the last 15 years, I've done pretty much everything you can in the profession.

I've been a staff PT. I've been an active duty military officer, physical therapist. I've started my own cash practice. I've sold that cash practice. And today my company physical therapy business helped over a thousand clinicians start growing scale their own cash practices So if this sounds like something you want to do listen up because i'm here to help you

What's going on? Dr. Danny here with the pt entrepreneur podcast and today we're back again with jeremy dupont the owner of Patch, which is in my opinion, the best marketing company out [00:01:00] there for cash and hybrid practices right now and excited to dig into what Jeremy is seeing at this point now working with well over a hundred practices all over the country.

And what's cool about that is we have a chance to take best practices and take what's working in all these different demographic areas and. Put that together and see what best practices are for everybody and really share that so that you can focus on the right things. If you're the one, focusing on marketing yourself, if you're looking to outsource it, obviously this is a great place to look.

But it's also another company and Jeremy being a clinician as a background, having to practice of his own and now starting a separate company. It's been interesting to watch. The business of patch grow. So let me ask you this. You've now built a practice of brick and mortar business yourself and how you're building a digital business or a remote business, an agency where not everybody's in the same place.

How's that going? What's been your experience so far? And do you feel like your experience on the PT side with owning a price like that, has that helped with, growing patch?

Jeremy: Yeah it's funny. I was just on a podcast it was like a [00:02:00] tech podcast, basically.

It was like a HubSpot like it's run by the, it's This big HubSpot partner. And he asked me the same question of what's the difference between running a brick and mortar clinic versus, we're obviously fully remote now we're running an agency, it's much different. And, I told him, I was like, I have no idea what I'm doing in an agency side of things.

Like when we first started this stuff, I was like, how do you even set this up? What does this look like? But then you get into it, you break it down and it's really people is the biggest thing and what is your product and how good are your internal people?

And, we're super lucky. Our team at patch, we've got five full time people on our staff now, and they all have experience working in the. The PT world and they've worked in clinics before. And so they, they can talk to the talk when it comes to like actually interacting with, other clinic owners.

So that's been the biggest part for us. Cause a lot of what we do at patches, how do we distill down this very difficult to use piece of software and how do we make it easy for [00:03:00] you? We have an advantage of, our staff members are tech savvy, but they also understand the. PT side of things.

Getting people to adopt the system, it's a little bit easier. We can speak their language. In both sides, it's a lot of it, especially as the, the owner of, both of these, the brick and mortar and the agency side of things. And a lot of what I tell our patch customers that are scaling is you've got to trust your people.

You've got to let them do what they want. You've got to let them run with things you can't micromanage. If you're going to have your hands in every single thing, then it's going to be really hard to scale. And, I think like growing patch, that's, obviously a lot of what we're doing is on the marketing side of things.

That's what I love doing. But as soon as, I let some of our staff members run and bring new ideas to the table. That's when our product got even better. And the same thing on the clinic side of things. I just wrote a newsletter about this and got, had a lot of really good feedback on it is, one of the points of ripple and where we grew the most was when I just totally removed myself and I let our clinic director [00:04:00] run the clinic, do the onboarding.

Handle all the local relationships and as soon as I remove myself from that, all of a sudden we're jumping up 10, 20 K in revenue and I had nothing to do with that and I could just look at the bigger picture and I think that's a really good lesson for a lot of clinic owners. So a lot of similarities for sure.

Biggest thing is, remote versus in person, we're on zoom all day long. So it's the same thing.

Danny: Yeah. I tell you, I think there's elements though, that are that at least I feel like I miss I was just, my son is actually interning at athletes potential this week, which has been funny because I think he's making everyone far less productive.

And, but they're also giving him like, A bunch of just manual labor to do, like just cleaning everything, just clean the bathroom, like three times a day, mop all the floors, like vacuum, everything you didn't do a good job, do it again. Like it's give him a hard time.

But I've been going up there to either pick him up or drop him off. And every time I go up there, I'm there for an hour. Dude, I'm there for an [00:05:00] hour and it flies by. And I just ended up talking to one of the staff members or a patient or somebody I've not ever met before. And we get, I started chatting with them about whatever they're doing while they're waiting for a visit.

And there's a in person piece of. those types of businesses that is that is just fun, and it's hard to replicate that in a digital sense, even if you're on zoom or whatever, it's just it's not quite the same. So do you miss that at

Jeremy: all? A hundred percent. And I think that's why I got kicked out of ripple because I would go there and I would just hang out and people would be like, Hey, I have to work.

Can you please get out of here? You're just like you're taking up space right now. And I think as soon as I, started to realize that, but yeah, it's just like that is definitely what I miss the most about the clinic culture is, just hanging out, maybe it's not my patient, but I know my staff PTs patient, we chop it up in the waiting room and, catch up on what's going on and.

That's the beauty of local services. I think it's, I always talk about like your PT clinic should feel like your local [00:06:00] bar or the barbershop and everyone's there. They're having a good time and that's where your brand comes out. So you just can't replicate that in the digital sense.

That's what my son actually

Danny: said. I was like, dude how's the internship going for you on a scale of 0 to 10? He's it's a 10. This place is awesome. He goes, it's it's he likes to show the office and he's it's like the office, but better, because we just have, we have sports training equipment all around. It's an interesting place if you're, more, interested in sports and return to sports stuff and athletics. And yeah it's a fun environment. And I agree with you. It's definitely, it feels more like that.

Yeah. Neighborhood hangout spot which is fun. Yeah. And, but yeah, I make people, Yeah. unproductive as well. And I, but if you're listening to this and you're on the clinic side, as far as like a clinician that owns a practice, or maybe you're thinking about starting your own practice, the culture we're talking about, I think is a huge part of the success that both of us had with our practices was building a place that was, it was like people came in and they're [00:07:00] there, not necessarily for a great reason.

They're hurt. But if they come to a place like that and that's the best part of their day, they're like, Oh my God, I can't wait to go to rehab. These people are awesome. They're always joking around or, there's like great music on and everybody's, everybody knows your name. And they're all like checking in on how things are going.

You can bring your kid and we're cool with that. There's something to be said for that, for why it becomes such a ongoing relationship that's so easy to maintain for people and for them to see the investment in themselves, because it's Cause there's, I don't know, people can feel really bad on a daily basis with a number of things, but you go to a place and you feel better and they're actively trying to help you live a healthier life.

Dude, that's so rare. And that has to be something that you do intentionally. Otherwise, you end up probably just falling into the, whatever the culture is for most healthcare facilities, which is really more sterile, a little more standoffish and not so much of a personal relationship.

I think you're missing a lot if you don't do that.

Jeremy: Totally. And that's like on the past side of things that we leverage that in our copy. And I think it's a really important, like marketing piece with all of this is how do we distinguish [00:08:00] ourselves between the traditional clinic? And I think that's one of the biggest things that, that you can talk about within your marketing is, people come here, they want to come here.

This is the best hour of their week. You can come in, you can, chat with everybody. It's a really big like you knew unique selling prop for cash based clinics, because this is a place where people want to go. They're continuously coming in. They're paying their own money to come in.

They're not running it through insurance. So we leverage that a ton on the marketing side.

Danny: Yeah I think it's also marketing to hire people, which is so I've had a couple conversations with people that are looking to potentially work with athletes because of their clinicians and they, and we see this within the mastermind.

I think like hiring is such a limiting factor for a lot of, for a lot of clinics because, just. Finding the right people is tough. And as a clinician, when you have a smaller business, you're really viewed more as a risk. You're not as stable. You don't have all the benefits and the history and business that, maybe a bigger in network [00:09:00] orthopedic clinic has this, especially if it's like corporately owned or, private equity owned and so you can't really compete on that level.

But. What you can compete with is on like the enjoyment that they have with their career and the conversations I've had. It's really interesting. It's like you brought up micromanagement. Like one of the people I talked to, they were saying that their boss was micromanaged the heck out of everything they do.

And it's so frustrating for them. This is like a really smart person and they're getting frustrated because, like they just They feel like that person is so intrusive in terms of what they're trying to do. And they feel like they're a professional, smart individual, but they're not being treated that way.

And they want to see a slightly different population, but they don't really have any say over that because they're basically just seeing whatever comes in that needs to be seen. So they don't have any direction in how they can go with what you're going to see. I think if you hear these pain points and you can really.

Market to that, both when you're meeting people in person, or maybe it's how you're recruiting people on your site. If they're interested in working with you. Being able to work with the people that you want to work with, being able to have say over when you're working being [00:10:00] able to have opportunities to work, up and have upper mobility in a fast growing company with a culture that really values, health and wellness and also fun.

And, but also being the best in the area, like that's the standard. The standard is amazing. Like you're the best. If you want to be part of that type of a team, like that is so attractive to the right type of people. And you're basically just marketing in a different way. You're marketing for.

The higher you're marking for, the growth through staff, through people, and I think we forget about that as a marketing channel as well. And we really just focus on new patient acquisition, but you got to acquire the right people to because, they're probably not independently looking for you as much as you might be going and looking for them.

And once you have those conversations, you got to really be able to sell your vision. Otherwise, people are not going to view your clinic as a, a serious option in comparison to places that are looked at as being more stable.

Jeremy: Yeah. And that's exactly how, like with any new hire that we came in, like you took the words right out of my mouth.

There is, like we utilize our social media. We get loads of PTs reaching out to us via our [00:11:00] social media. Cause we're putting up much less like core stability exercises. And we put more of here's the team doing stuff together and it's like fun and it's casual. And that is like the vibe and the chemistry that, that we want at the clinic.

But yes, we have fun. Yes, this is like a, an awesome place to work. The team all gets along, but we are the best peaches in Boston. We are holding ourselves to that standard. And yeah, we can have fun and we can enjoy ourselves at the clinic. But when it comes to our product, this is also it's a casual product and, people are here to have a good time for sure.

But we are the best providers in here. That's why people are paying us top dollar to come in. And I think that's how everybody should look at it for sure. It's an enjoyable place to work. You can still flex your clinical muscle and like what PT doesn't want that. A lot of PGs don't want that.

Danny: A lot of people in general. Want a place they can just they can go and they can do their job and then they can be like pretty good And they just go home and they don't have to think about [00:12:00] it and And that's it right? I mean I saw this so much when I was in the military and just like the government No, no offense.

I feel like sometimes I shit on like government, staff there's, I'm not saying everybody's like this, but if you want to, if you want to be average at your job and just not ruffle anybody's feathers, do just enough, that's a great place. You can thrive there. You can have a great career.

And let's say you have hobbies and shit you love to do outside of it, and you can just turn it off and go home and go, whatever, you Be really like into ping pong or euro cup soccer or whatever it is It gets you so excited that you want to do so much of it and that's your like amazing then go for it But if you are somebody that is obsessed over outcomes for your people Like if it ruins your weekend if somebody's not getting better Like that kind of person kills it in the environment that we structure for them because they're okay with having the standard that we expect, a certain amount of output outcomes and effort on your part to really [00:13:00] hold a standard that we set.

They want that and that's not everybody, but the right person that is ideal for them. And if that person tries to end up in a clinic that a standard is. Average, it's so frustrating for them. Like they just can't, they can't tolerate it. And then they ended up either leaving their profession or they decide, all right, I'm going to go do my own thing.

Even if they're not entrepreneurs, even if they're like great, clinicians, they just don't know what else to do. And then they end up going that route. And sometimes that doesn't work out too.

Jeremy: Yeah. And I think that's like what we're seeing on the patch side of things, like the biggest bottleneck right now.

And every call I get on with anybody is I need to hire. I can't find anybody. It's really tough out there. And that's a lot of the conversations I'm having with either like solopreneurs that are looking to grow and scale. And they're like, I think I'm like three or six months away from hiring. And it's like the message is you better start looking now.

And I think even with the bigger clinics, it's cool. What a lot of these bigger clinics are starting to do. It's almost like they're starting to have a pipeline of [00:14:00] potential people that are coming in that they've, either saw what they're doing on social media or, they found them in some sort of way.

And it's, we're going to have a job for sure. Obviously like we utilize a CRM to log all those people, make sure you have all these people organized so you can reach out to them because it's a tough spot to be when, a clinic owner has to jump back in and start treating because you have all this volume or you're a clinic, you're a solo clinic owner, and, you're doing 30 sessions a week plus trying to hire.

Once you, if you end up hiring, you also have to onboard. It's a very tricky part. Having that pipeline of new staff members in the door, it's, I think if anybody's looking to hire within the next year, start looking now that's gotta be, that's gotta be the the mindset.

Danny: Yeah.

And to, to really, I just tack on to your point and really hammer this home. The, I, I was recently just chatting with the guy that we sold our practice to and. He was having, I think it was five, [00:15:00] maybe six different, interactions meetings, first meetings. There's a long hiring process with APE where it's multiple it might be start with the dinner.

How's this person? What are they? What are they whatever. And it's a multi step process. You can get to the point where they're going to offer somebody a position, but there are 5 or 6 people that he's meeting with over the next a couple of months that are in different stages.

Some are for hires. In the next two to three months, some are for six to 12 months out. And so they have this you have to, I guess it's like the phrase was Wayne Gretzky, like skate where the puck is going. And so you can't wait. And sometimes you delay too long to hire. And that is brutal because you're right.

If you have to jump back in and you're picking up treatment hours as you're catching overflow. It ruins your productivity and all these other things you really need to be focused on, but you can't because of the volume side that you have to take care of, you have to take care of.

And the hardest hire, the hardest one of all is the first one, like you getting somebody in because you have to find [00:16:00] them, vet them, hire them, train them, mentor them, follow up with them. And along the way, you're still seeing a massive caseload of patients. It is so hard to get over that first. That first hurdle.

Once that happens, though, you really have to start to have this long runway of relationships that you're developing of people that you want to bring on. Because I'm seeing the same thing, man. And maybe that's something that, we can delve into now, which is really smaller businesses.

What's working and what are the bigger struggles that we're seeing? And then we can talk about some of the bigger businesses. So in these smaller businesses on the marketing side, on the business side, what are you seeing? That's like really doing really well. What's crushing it for these smaller businesses right now?

Hey, sorry to interrupt the podcast, but I have a huge favor to ask of you. If you are a longtime listener or a new listener and you're finding value in this podcast, please head over to iTunes wherever you listen to the podcast, and please leave a rating and review. This is actually very helpful for us to get this podcast in front of more clinicians and really help them develop time and financial [00:17:00] freedom.

So if you would do that, I would greatly appreciate it. Now back to the podcast.

Jeremy: Yeah, I think, for the solo clinic owner, it's the tried and true stuff. The local relationships is still, and I think always will be like the thing that reigns supreme there. It's that's how you've got to build your caseload.

Most people that we're working with are getting to that 25 to 30 mark from, the local relationships just on their own, which is awesome. I think, again, that's how you should build your clinic. What I see and what most people end up coming to patch for is they're super time poor because they're seeing 30 people a week.

They just hired this admin that's on part time that they're trying to delegate stuff off to and their back end systems are a mess. And they're, they've got Calendly and they've got this Google sheet and then some leads come through the website and it's all over the place. Where people are, and it's awesome. A lot of the conversations I'm having with these solo clinic owners is they understand that before they bring on this PT, they need to have their stuff together and they need to [00:18:00] have this backend system and have all of, their leads organized.

Cause I think a, like a really important part of bringing a staff PT on board is like having this professional followup of here's the system we use. It's tough to give this new PT that's taken a chance on you. And it's here's our Google sheet of 300 names. And we just color code them to reach out.

That doesn't look super professional. It doesn't look like that have your stuff together when you probably do, but it's a little bit of a mess. That's where, a CRM system comes into play. And if you have This backend system, you organize your leads like who's coming for an evals in the last 30 days, you're tracking lost patients.

And here's who we need to follow up with. Once a solo clinic owner, gets the local marketing dialed in, they have their backend systems. And they're starting to do, a lot of the local marketing side of things too, needs like a supplement to it. A lot of people are doing two, three workshops a month.

But there's no followup involved with that. So again, that's where the backend system comes into play of all of these leads, where they came from, how to follow up with [00:19:00] them. There's automated messaging going out. And if you can get those things and you're on your own doing 25, 30 sessions, then, you're ripe for bringing on a new employee.

And until you have those backend systems, though, I think it's a little tough.

Danny: You bring up a couple of things that I think are worth, diving into a bit more. And one of those being HubSpot had a recent update. So one of the things that was is new for HubSpot is HIPAA compliance with this platform, which is great.

It's something that in cash practices, it doesn't really matter because we're technically not HIPAA covered entity. But if you look at, Hyper practice. It does. It's funny. It doesn't change much. Like it's a very secure platform regardless, but the one that, that, we run our business with and our practice we ran ran with as well, but it does add that little extra level of peace of mind for clinicians to have that, which is cool to see.

But the other thing that's interesting is, for people that are just getting started, some sort of CRM that is very cost effective is a great place to start as long as you can scale into it, as long as you can grow into [00:20:00] it. Because switching is very expensive too. So you talk about being time poor.

Imagine being time poor, trying to hire somebody and then switching the foundational software you use to run your business. Like that's a huge step backwards. It takes a long time. So if you can start with the one, that you're going to be able to grow with. That's great. And especially if it's like 20, 30 bucks a month, like that's awesome.

And you can get a lot of things in place and it does make you look a lot more professional. And you got to realize that if you are, if it's just you and you're trying to attract people to work within the company that you're building, that we know with you That's a hard thing to do when you're piecing things together with, Google docs and, little post it notes, right?

Like you need more sophisticated system. And I think that's a really important thing to keep in mind. The other thing that I keep coming back to, and I realize how important this is more and more. And I, it's definitely something that, listen, this is digital marketing, that you're talking about, like digital marketing services is what patch does, but Is so much easier to get a good outcome with digital marketing when there's a [00:21:00] strong local presence and there's all this social credibility and social presence on, Instagram and things like that show the personality of the clinic.

And you have people that are getting a great service and outcome, and they're talking about your clinic in a positive way. And that runs in the background and that's very hard to quantify, but it makes a huge difference. And that starts from the beginning. And that is the thing that can get you to 10 20, 000 a month in revenue before you go and layer on maybe some of this more sophisticated stuff.

In your case, when you look at a clinic like that, at what size is it? Is it even worth them really looking at trying to layer on Digital marketing and things are going to run the background for them on the digital side. They're going to help, but what's the right time to actually start that?

Jeremy: Yeah, I think it's it really depends on where you're at as we're, still talking about these smaller clinics. I think a lot of clinics can get to the point where they're, Yeah. Schedule is full with just the local marketing side of things. I think it makes a lot of sense if you're starting to think about this other PT coming on board.

And, because [00:22:00] there, there's a, especially on the Google ad side of things, there's a learning process there. It's, you're not going to see you're going to get leads immediately. Sure. But like super dialed in leads, it's going to take a little bit of time in order for, you to get 20 qualified leads every single month on the ad side of things.

So if that thought is even in the back of your head, then you start that process up and then you can the beauty of ads is you can pull that lever whenever you want to, especially if you have all of your keywords dialed in your websites tracked. I think one of the things we do really well on the ad side of things is, of course we create the copy and we do all of that, but we look at the full funnel as well.

And understanding like, This many people clicked on the ad. This many people went to the homepage. Here's how many people went to the contact page. Here's how many people booked a discovery call. So then you can start diagnosing, like where are the holes in this funnel and what do we need to do in order to fix that?

So I think for a solo clinic owner You can start it up at any time. That's really the beauty of it because people [00:23:00] are searching for physical therapy near me. You want to show up for that. And if it's like you said it's a bonus. If you have that local presence as well, the ads start working really well.

If they're like, Oh yeah, I know what ripple physical therapy is. And they click on the ad and then they go to the website. And that's, again, that's going to be a way more qualified lead. So if you can combine the two you can start off, almost immediately with that stuff.

Danny: Yeah. It, in my experience, it almost doesn't make sense to to do these digital services that, that do drive visibility, unless you have credibility, damn, that kind of

Jeremy: nice. Yeah.

Danny: But no, it's true. Cause if you don't have, if you don't have the. The presence or the social proof or even, think of it as a consumer, right?

If I see an ad for for patch, for instance, I'm a practice owner and I say, oh, patch, big promises, whatever. The first thing I'm doing. Is I'm going to look up everything I can about patch what, who is this person [00:24:00] like that owns it? What tracker they have they been on any podcasts? Are there any reviews that I can read?

Are there any case studies that I can see? I'm going to then I'm going to reach out to people that I know. Hey, have you ever heard of this? What do you think about this? Because I know other people in the industry. And and this is an example of like a. Business to business service, right? But in the local sense, they're doing the same thing.

They're talking to their friends. They're looking you up on Google, Yelp, maybe in some places they're looking on Facebook, they're checking you out on Instagram, seeing what the clinic looks like. You're seeing what you look like or what other people might have to say about it.

And that's how people make decisions. It's not as simple as I click this, I do this thing. I end up in your office. It's just not, it doesn't work that way. So we have to have respect for that and understand that. If you really want these things to work that are going to help, scale, cause they really will help you scale your practice.

There's no doubt about that. If you can nail it with these, it can make hiring your biggest problem, which is a great problem to have versus I don't have enough patients. It's I'll take, I got to find people over. I got to find patients any day. I take that for sure. But you got it. You got to remember a rock solid [00:25:00] reputation is a driver of that.

And it's don't even know how, as long as you have your business, as long as you maintain a solid reputation, right? And it really just, it runs in the background and that's important to keep in mind. The, for the bigger businesses, right? So like the ones that are, let's say they're at.

I don't know, 234 clinicians. And they're growing. Let's say they're growing up to, a million plus kind of revenue range. What are you seeing as are things working that are working for those clinics that you can't really do with the smaller ones? And what does that look like?

Jeremy: Yeah, I think it's we talk about the ads like that's the biggest thing with these clinics that are trying to scale if you know their mindset on ad spend as is this is an investment versus a cost, then you know the ads work really well with that again, especially if we have a dialed in we can understand, for spending this much we can guarantee these many people are going to come in.

You can start like mapping out. And it's been a lot of really fun conversations with patch members of, we have one guy he's hired. Three people in the last six months and we're like [00:26:00] future casting now of like, all right, if this person starts in September, here's what we need to start to up our ad spend to.

And I think again, it becomes a math equation that becomes really fun to grow and scale your business. And my conversation with him is like, Hey, you need to become a really good leader. Now you need to become a really good business owner and make sure these people stick around. What we can handle the ads and the marketing side of things.

You got to make sure that everything is going well at the day to day at the clinic and that w if you have a really good culture, you have repeatable leads coming in. It's not like they haven't stopped doing workshops. They're just doing workshops that like they want to do now, which I think is really important.

And it's just a really good formula. I think another thing that's working really well is on like the lost patient side of things. Again, this is where our CRM comes into play is if you're tracking leads that have fallen off, even if they have, sessions leftover still, but they haven't been in the clinic in the last 30 days or the last 60 days.

And, There's a repeatable system there [00:27:00] to follow up with these people and make sure that they fulfill on their packages. The chase for 30, 40 evals in a month that goes away because their staff schedules are full and they're booked and they may only need 10 evals in a month versus 30. So I think if you combined again, like being a really good leader in the clinic, you've got the repeatable marketing systems and you're following up with people to make sure they can fill on packages.

That's a killer combination right there. Yeah, that's such a great point with the the drop off as a bigger business, right? Because if you're just getting going, everybody directly, cause you're working with them and you can just like text them or reach out to them yeah.

Danny: Where are you at? I didn't see you in a little bit, whatever. And you're not that busy or you haven't touched point with everybody that comes in, and I think of this, like when we sold at this potential at the time, when we sold it, we had almost 3000 patients that we'd seen during that time period.

That's a lot of people and we had no system in place for what you're talking about. And I know they have that now, and it's something that [00:28:00] I look back on it. It's just what a, what a. Missed opportunity to be able to leverage the people that you already have a relationship with and internally market to them, because it's not all about like new patients are important.

There's no doubt. That's a huge KPI that we take a look at. But for the people that are running a, a, a. A tight ship where they have all the things in place that really lead to the schedule density that they want for the services that they're trying to provide. There's a lot more to it than just let me get more new people in.

And you think of this with any business, right? Think about the past with PT biz, it's all the same. You want to not have to chase down new business and live and die off of that. That is a sketchy business model. And if you're listening to this and that's the way you feel, You're missing, some of these key systems that you just don't have currently, maybe don't know how to build them or what you should do.

And that's fine because you probably didn't go to business for this or to business school or marketing, degree or some sort and try to figure this stuff out. That's how I was. And and we were. 10 years in and I still, didn't have something like that figured out.

So it does make a [00:29:00] big difference. And it's just one of those things that sometimes you don't know what you don't know. So at a bigger stage, there's two things you said that are really key. Number one, have internal systems that are remarketing. The second is. You have to look at ads at that stage as an investment.

If I didn't look at the, what we spent on ads a month in PT biz as an investment, it would make me sick to my stomach. Okay. I would literally just puke thinking about it. And, but I look at an investment because I know we're investing in building a contact list. We're investing in getting new clients, investing, branding, and all the things we need as a business.

And with practices One of the mistakes that I see, and I'm sure you deal with this is people, they set their marketing threshold at 500 bucks because it's a round number and, but you might be making 50, 70, a hundred thousand dollars a month. And you haven't even gotten to the point where you can test the waters to where's, where is the sort of equilibrium.

Where's the spot you're going to hit that is. [00:30:00] The most efficient per ad spend based on the, on your area and your goals, whether it's fast growth or whether it's stability, whatever. But I chronically see people underspending. When I look at their numbers, it's like you're getting an astronomical ROI.

You need to increase this. And I know that sounds counterintuitive, but maybe you can explain how do you find the right sweet spot? Because for a lot of businesses, they're nowhere near where they should be.

Jeremy: Yeah, it's, that's where a lot of the data pulling comes in on the ad side of things. And if you don't understand the ad side of things, it's going to, it's really hard to figure out where that threshold is.

But you can figure it out pretty easily and it's very, it's variable, of like in Boston, like we still haven't found that threshold yet. Like the number is probably unlimited. And I think in most metropolitan cities, like you're not going to be able to spend enough money in order to capture all the searches that are coming in, which is an awesome problem.

That's a really good problem to have versus some of the clinics that we work with that are in smaller towns. Like we can start [00:31:00] to figure out like, where is the law of diminishing returns here? What is that ad spend going to look like? And we can just set it and forget it.

But you have to understand what is, cost per conversion looking like, what does the total search volume look like? And, without that data, it's really hard to understand what that looks like. But again, I think you said it well there too, of, being able to, one of the things we do is we run a campaign for all of our members inside of patch is when they bring a new staff PT on board and we call it like our, our Get staff PT to 25 sessions or something like that program.

And it's a full marketing campaign. We do email marketing. We make sure that people are on their website. We do the last patient reach out. But we also, there's an ads component with that as well of let's up your ad spend for the next 60 days and get this person full. If you feel totally comfortable with them seeing five, six evals a week and you've got them fully onboarded, this is a lever that we can pull and we can up that ad spend for a small amount of time and get more people in the door and get this person filled up faster.

So you make your, it's a lever. Make break number [00:32:00] faster. You're recognizing profit on them sooner. And that PT is also going to be happier as well because they've got a full schedule eight weeks in that's pretty awesome. And I think a lot of, new staff PT is coming into a cash clinic there.

I think their hesitation is. Am I going to see patients here? What is this going to look like? And if you can guarantee that it makes hiring easier, it makes that staff PT a lot more comfortable. And again, that's just the beauty of ads is you can up or reduce that amount, whenever you want to.

Danny: Yeah. And you're right, man. If there, you, if you hire somebody, it's crickets. In their clinic, they're like, Oh, okay. I've got five people. I'm two months in, I got five people on my schedule every week. That is a tough place to be as the owner, because you're either sliding people away from your schedule, which is fine, because you probably need to see fewer people, but it doesn't mean your total number is not changing enough.

To where it's going to be really challenging on the finance side to pay that salary for that person when you're not getting really a significant [00:33:00] increase in new volume. So you're basically are just cannibalizing your schedule to then slide it over here. So the total revenue is not much different.

And that means your profit goes down dramatically. So the other thing too, is that person sitting there shit, man, I may not have a job. If I, I know if I'm not seeing enough or whatever, or so they start. Thinking if they don't know if this is the right spot for them. So you definitely have to look at it that way.

I think everything to keep in mind too is there's going to be a give and a take based on if you're trying to grow fast, your profits going to be lower because you're aggressively reinvesting in marketing and people in trying to grow Your gross revenue or your top line revenue at the expense of your bottom, your net revenue or bottom line.

And this is very common in, in businesses that, that, are friends of ours that have like tech companies or e commerce companies or things that are different than a cash practice, like a service based business. They're typically like pre profitable. They run at. Very thin margins and they're comfortable with it because their goal is different.

They want a fast growth. They want to [00:34:00] exit whatever But if you want fast growth, you're going to have lower net profit You're gonna take less money home because you're reinvesting more of it in the business But once you get to a stage where you say, okay, i've got a fully staffed clinic I've got five clinicians.

This clinic is pumping out, I don't know a hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue Now all of a sudden Like I can pump the brakes a little bit and we can cruise until we get to the point where we want to Be maybe we jump to another location. Maybe we add, a second location different part of city, whatever all of a sudden that clinic goes from being fast growth kind of Exciting trajectory lower profit to all of a sudden it's like holy crap This is making a lot of money Because you've grown to a place where there's a lot of revenue coming in and then you can back off a little bit I don't know if you've had that conversation with people where they're like, You I just need to bring this much out of the business, but I want to grow this fast, but you can't do both sometimes.

And that's a challenging conversation to have.

Jeremy: Yeah it's, and it's, I don't know if one is right or one's wrong either. I think it's really based on the clinic owner for sure. But that is a, a lot of the conversations to have some people have very serious growth [00:35:00] goals for what they want this clinic to be.

Cause I think they see that of if I just put pedal to the metal here for the next six months and I bring, three staff PTs on board, we're doing seven figures. That's a pretty comfy spot to be as a clinic owner. And, again, you can treat as much as you want to, or as little as you want to, you can show up when you want to.

And, a lot of people want to get there faster. I think a lot of. A lot of other people are a little bit more risk tolerance and that and they want to grow a little bit slower and recognize a little bit more of the profit, which, again, I think it's, based on the clinic owner and what they want to do, but there is that route.

And I I think even when I started the, my, my clinic, I wasn't sure, like, how fast can we grow this thing? What is the size that we can get this thing to? But I looked at it, in that way of I'm going to reinvest every dollar I've gotten to this thing. And I want to grow this thing as fast as I can and, see what we can do with this.

Again, that's just the beauty of having these back end systems and that's where the ads really come in. Yeah. Yeah. And it's, it is a personal decision, right? It's because some people are a different place. Let's see, [00:36:00] You're married, you got three kids and you're the person that is the person that's primary sort of income driver for the household.

Danny: You're probably going to have to focus on slower growth, more profit along the way and less of reinvesting in the business. If you're somebody that has a position where maybe your spouse has a good income or you're early, where you don't have kids or other family members that you're responsible for, you can really drive the business.

Faster in terms of growth and maybe take a bigger swing. So it's not the same for everybody, right? It just really depends on their personal, situation. Jeremy, this is cool. I think hopefully people that are the earlier stage later stage or some stuff that they can really focus on and work on the marketing side.

If people are interested in learning more about patch and what you guys do or learning a little bit more about it, where can they go and find out more?

Jeremy: Yeah, you can check our website out, the patch system. com. Gives a full overview of, what we do and what we offer and, how we do things.

And I'm posting content on Instagram as well, trying to help people write newsletters and sell on the phone and, all that stuff as well. So that's just at [00:37:00] underscore Jeremy DuPont. And then, yeah that's where we're at.

Danny: How does somebody get in your newsletter?

Because I think. You have one of the better business like health marketing newsletters that is out there. So where do people get signed up for that? Because it's awesome.

Jeremy: Yeah, go to the website. There's a sign for the newsletter at the bottom in the footer there. And or just reach out to me. I'm happy to add you as well.

Either one of those spots. Cool. All right, man. Jeremy, thanks so much for your time. I hope you guys like this one and as always, we'll catch you next week.

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