What if more leads and more marketing aren’t actually the solution to your clinic’s growth problem – and could even make the mess bigger?
In this episode of the Health and Wellness Marketing Show, Uli Iserloh is joined by Jody Layne, founder and CEO of Accelerated Medical Practices, to unpack what really makes a hormone, BHRT, regenerative, longevity, or functional medicine clinic predictably profitable.
Jody brings a rare combination of marketing expertise and real-world clinic operations experience, having helped grow a hormone practice from $500,000 to $4.2 million while working inside almost every role of the business, including the front desk. In this conversation, she breaks down her POWER Framework – Positioning, Operations, Workforce, Experience, and Revenue – and explains why these foundations must be built in the right order before paid ads, funnels, or lead generation can truly work.
If you’re launching a clinic, growing a cash-based practice, or feeling stuck in the messy middle of operations, staff turnover, pricing issues, or inconsistent conversions, this episode will help you see why business structure matters just as much as marketing strategy.
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Welcome to the Health and Wellness Marketing Show, the podcast dedicated to helping health and wellness practitioners elevate their brand, grow their impact, and make more profit in their practice. Hosted by Uli Iserloh, this show draws on his twenty-plus years of experience in business strategy, branding, and digital marketing to equip you with the right strategies, systems, and support
All right. Welcome to another episode of the Health and Wellness Marketing Show. And today's guest is a dear friend, a colleague, and a visionary, Jody Layne, founder and CEO of Accelerated Medical Practices. And Jody, to be frank, isn't just a CEO. She's a strategist, cheerleader, and really straight talker who knows exactly how to take a clinic from just getting by to predictably profitable.
And with decades of business and marketing experience, as well as having performed every role inside a hormone clinic, including the front desk when she needed to, she brings both the strategy and the heart needed to help clinic owners create exactly the business and lifestyle they want without burning out.
And one of the things that I appreciate so much about Jody and why I partner with her and her team at Accelerated Medical Practice is that she is really very knowledgeable. She, she knows exactly how to set things up, and we're very much alike in how we strategically approach it. So Jody, welcome to the show.
Aw, thanks, Uli. That was so sweet. I like the way you ended where we do think alike, because I think that is very, very true. Yes. Yeah. And God knows health practitioners, whether they are in a hormone or BHRT field or in regenerative and longevity medicine, there are so many things to do when it comes to creating a thriving, profitable practice.
And, I know you said it, you know, it's enticing to think that marketing and more leads are always the answer to a clinic's problem. But as you found out from running your own clinic taking it from 500,000 to 4.2 million there are so many other things that impact what makes a practice successful, and you've introduced this power framework.
So why don't we start with, with that and then dig deeper into the framework itself? Absolutely. Actually, if it's okay, I'm gonna start with a very short story. I was actually on a call yesterday. It was a discovery call with a practitioner who has been open since 2023. And, you know, the call started great, and she was telling me that she needs marketing and she needs more patients.
And within about seven minutes she started sh- sharing some of the things that have happened to her and she started crying And the entire mood of the conversation changed, and she revealed three or four things that have happened over the last two years that are really detrimental to her practice, and some of the ways that she's responded to it, and it's caused a giant mess.
And I said to her, "If we start marketing, all that's gonna happen is this mess is going to get larger." And that really... the re- I share this story 'cause first of all, I hear that a lot, but second of all, it kind of explains where the POWER framework came into being. So POWER stands for... It's a, it's an acronym, like, most marketing cool things.
It's positioning, operations, workforce, experience, and revenue. And in my experience of growing the practice that I worked for, if you try to build a practice and you skip any of those stages, when you get to building the revenue section, more sales, more marketing, more leads, y- you're eventually going to have a practice that either is not profitable, burns you out, or is just gonna, you know, fizzle.
And so we actually... I- after being in my clinic for seven and a half years, and I, I left and started Accelerated Medical Practices, I sat down, and with one of my partners, Patrick, who was the general manager over there, we mapped out everything we did in order to get to that success. And we realized that it was not just the things we did, but in the order in which we did it that created the success.
And so that's how the framework was born, and that's what we teach Yeah. So, again, I think we never talked about how did you actually start a hormone practice. I know you started out in marketing, and then tell me, tell me, how did you actually get thrown into this hormone clinic you know, running a hormone clinic, being responsible for revenue?
And and again, I think that really informs your expertise, why, you love working... You and I, we both love working with BHRT and TRT and hormone clinics, but we do work with integrative and functional medicine clinics. But I think it's your unique background actually having run a clinic that makes you so much better as a marketer.
Oh, thank you. Because you're not just teaching this stuff in theory. You know for yourself what are the success factor that go in there. We have a similar framework, but tell me a little bit more about how that transition actually happened from marketing into running your clinic and then going back into marketing.
Sure. So I've been in marketing since 1992. Oh my gosh, I'm so old. I didn't go to school for it. I just literally had a knack for it. Like, I just believe that all marketing really is, is somebody has a concept of something they want to introduce to somebody else, and you have to figure out a way to create a message that entices that person to want it.
Like, that's all re- it really is. But when I started, it was direct mail. It was, you know, email. There were very few channels to market, and so you could get really deep, and you could really create a lot of success for a company. And as time went on, and I owned s- I owned three different agencies over the course of my career, and in between each one, I would leave, and I'd go get a job because, like, I didn't wanna be an entrepreneur, and then I would go get a job, and then I'd be like, "No, I can't work for somebody else," and I'd go back and start another agency.
And so I really... You know, I got very exhausted by the marketing field. And my last agency, it was like there were so many channels that I had to touch in order for my clients to be successful that I could feel myself kind of burning out. However, I also picked up a client who was a hormone clinic owner, and that was in 2015, and I had never even heard of hormone replacement therapy at that point.
I don't think many people had heard of it at that point. And he was struggling, but he was a smart enough businessman to know that he, there were things he didn't know and he needed to pay for And so he was willing to spend what needed to be spent in order to actually produce a result. And so what do you do when you're a marketer?
You start researching. You start diving into the product, the science. And as I was researching, two things happened. First of all, I recognized my husband in all of the symptoms. Mm-hmm. And at the time, you know, you know Jamie, he was in his late 20s, early 30s, and there's no reason that he should be having the symptoms that I was reading.
We got him tested. We found out that he had low testosterone at a very young age. He was born that way. And so it wasn't anti-aging. We got him some pellets and, oh my God, everything changed. So emotionally, I was hooked. Yeah. Of course, that's what all, you know, BHRT clients feel. You get the progesterone pill, and within a week you feel so much better, and you start to believe, "Oh my God, hormones are so powerful."
And obviously, that's a good lead-in to- Absolutely ... getting them as a patient. So the second thing that happened was I started doing Facebook ads, and they were very successful. I mean, it was unbelievable to me. As long as I could create a message that resonated with somebody who had a problem, and then they were willing to be educated, the moment they came in for the consultation, they bought.
So I'd never had that kind of success in marketing before because it was, just evidence-based problem-solving. That's all it was. And so, after two years, I became close with the owner. He had these very big dreams, big visions of where he wanted that practice to go, and he asked me out for a nice dinner, and he says,
You know, I'll, I'll feed you a nice steak dinner if you give me all your wisdom." And so during that conversation, as he was sharing all this entrepreneurial spirit, I said, "I just... Why don't you hire me? Like, I will come and do this for you," because as much as I love marketing, I love building businesses more.
And it was a rash decision. He dropped his fork. He said, "What would it take to get you?" I said what it would took, and he said, "Let's do it." And so I joined the practice. And I, mentioned, I told you about my background, and you mentioned it in the bio about the front desk. And the reason I bring that up is because when I started I had to sell my business, so it took a little bit of time.
And I was starting on a Monday. That Friday, my boss called me and he said, "Our front desk receptionist just quit." And I said, "Okay, don't put an ad in. Don't look for the role. I wanna do the role." So my very first day as chief operating officer, a woman who had, you know, in her 40s, who had owned multiple businesses, I am now the receptionist.
But I wanted to know everything about how the clinic operated, and the front desk is the place to know everything. I mean, I assisted with a pellet on my first day. I learned the EMR system. Like, it was, it was a really great opportunity to learn about the operations of the clinic. So, yeah, that's how I got into running that clinic.
And I think that one of the biggest reasons that we had success was because I had no medical background. I didn't know what insurance-based models look like. I just treated that clinic like I would a coffee shop or a marketing agency, you know? It was retail, and- Yeah ... the rest is history.
Well, you know, fortunate for your current client, they get now to benefit from all that integrated view. And again, as you said, the key here is that just like in functional medicine it's systems, how they connect to each other. It's not just here's the marketing system and you just have to optimize this thing.
It's like, well, what about retention? What about the offer? What about the positioning? So maybe we can walk through the five elements of POWER- Mm-hmm ... to really explain to our listeners what, why is it important and what happens if you don't do it in that order? Because as you said, it's not just enough to have the number to the key lock, you just have to put the number in the right order to unlock the things.
And so let's start with POWER the P, which stands for positioning. Absolutely. So I went... Before you say that, I was supposed to say one little thing. If you are listening and you are a brand-new practice, if you have nothing, I'm not suggesting that you don't do any marketing. I just wanna make that clear, 'cause people hear POWER and they think, "Oh, I have to wait a year and a half and do all these things before I start doing any marketing."
That is not what I'm saying. A business has to market in order to succeed, but we wanna be careful about how much we invest in marketing before we handle these other pillars. So I just wanna say that first. So I'll start with P. P is positioning. So positioning is really a couple of things. What you probably think of when you hear positioning is messaging.
You wanna understand who you serve, like who is your audience, what is your unique value proposition. And that wasn't as important 10 years ago in hormones, but it is today when there are, at least 30 hormone clinics in a, you know, a metropolitan city. And you wanna understand your pricing, because that is the ultimate key to success.
If you have a pricing model that you just pulled out of the air or you just, like, copied what the person down the street did, and you don't understand your cost of goods sold, your fixed expenses, and what your net profit is, you could be selling a lot and making very little money. So that is number one.
It's making sure that your pricing is accurate, it has a good, healthy net margin. You're not gonna have to change your pricing quickly. You know who you serve, and you know what your messaging and what, your uniqueness is. If you miss those things, then you will, unfortunately probably build a clinic with people that you don't really wanna work with, that aren't really committed to you, and they may be paying you money and that, those dollars are going out the door as fast as you can bring them in Yeah, it's a recipe for burnout, and ultimately, as you always point out, you wanna help practitioners build a business that they love, that fits around their life, that's congruent what their dream is, not just, you know, a business that makes money but leaves them unfulfilled.
We have a whole product around P. So we do this thing, we used to call it the business plan workshop. We changed it to the growth workshop 'cause it just sounds, you know, nicer, but basically that's what you just said. It's a four-hour workshop where we teach a little bit about business, but really what we're doing is we're asking 1,000 questions to get out of the provider's head, what do you want to build?
'Cause most people don't think about that. They just wanna help people. "I just wanna help people." Okay, well, you can help people in about 100 different ways, so let's figure out what works in your lifestyle to help people Yeah. And for all of you listening, if you're wondering, "How can I get in touch with Jody?"
We'll put the link for discovery call into the show notes so, you can connect with her and her team. You can talk through things. You know, it's like no strings attached, but that might be a great first step to explore what it looks like working with Jody's team at AMP. All right, let's go to the next letter, which is the O.
Operations. So why is operations so early in the process? Well, because in order for a business, and I'm gonna say business 'cause it's not just clinics, but for a business to operate efficiently, you need to be able to identify what steps you need to take in order to produce whatever you're trying to produce.
And so we really promote getting clear about your standard operating procedures from day one. Think of it this way. If you were to build a business or build a clinic, and three or four years in everything's a mess, different staff members are, you know, responding to patients at different time frames.
They're using different systems. Everyone has their own way of doing things. To then create a standard operating procedure means you need to go back and change everything, and that is hard. So what we say is from day one, start documenting what you do. People hear standard operating procedure and they get really scared.
It sounds like a big task, but it really isn't. You know, I'm gonna share how to do it right here on this podcast. Sit down and write out all of the major tactics that you need to do within your day in order to serve your patients, as, like, categories. And then pick the people in the office, if you have any staff, that do those things.
If not, you do them yourselves, and every week just write down what you do. That's it. It's really that simple. And then you can turn that into, like, some attractive, you know, operations manual, or you can make... You know, you can buy Trainual or some kinda tool for it. But it's really just making sure that you document.
And, the reason why this is important, and, I'm speaking from, you know, running a clinic with over 20 staff members. If you don't have the processes documented, not only will the experience for the patient be wonky and different and all of that, but also there's a lot of inter-arguing from the staff.
"Well, obviously, I think we're supposed to do it this way." "Well, I think we should do it this way." Well, there's a, probably multiple ways you could do anything, but you wanna have policies in place, you wanna understand what, how everybody's supposed to do things, and a document that people can go back to so that they can reference it when they are confused, when they are unsure.
And then the final benefit of having all of those things documented is, as the business owner, you're also probably seeing patients at least three days a week, if not five. If you are the go-to resource for every question about your protocols and your tactics and all of that, it's exhausting.
So if you have it all documented, it's a living document, meaning you can change it as, you know, time goes on, but you wanna have that place that people can go to know how you're supposed to do things. Yeah. And just to recap some of the core insights here is, SOPs, A, you know, great for relieving the business owner from having to answer all the question.
You define it once. And I think one thing that you tangentially alluded to, when you grow a team, in your case from five to 25 people, the fifth, the sixth, the seventh, the eighth person, they all have to be trained. And if you have to do this manually, this is exhausting. It's much easier of saying, "Hey, here's our SOPs.
Review the SOPs. Have a notebook here. Write down all the questions that you have as you read the SOPs," which is another great way to ensure is the SOP is stress-tested. You know, could an- Right ... a novice person, a novice team member understand what needs to happen or what's unclear in your SOP? So with every new hire, the training becomes easier.
You just have them go through the process, write down the questions, and then train them. So I love it- And also just to, you know, and this, really goes back to using it as a training tool. You want your SOPs to be really dummied down. Like, I'm working right now with a clinic in Texas, and they're very confronted because they feel like they're treating their staff like dummies because why do I have to say, like, "Enter this," you know, in...
Like, how, like, explaining how to fill out, like, the patient chart, like all the demographics. Why do I have to explain? Can I just say follow the prompts or, like, you know, fill in the different spaces? But that doesn't really work because it leaves question. Anything that leaves a question in someone's mind, there's room for human error.
So you really do wanna get as granular as possible. And once you do it once, like you said, you don't... It's done. You don't have to do it again. So- Yeah ... take the time. Excellent. Excellent. All right. So, great, great synopsis for O for operations which brings us then to the W. My favorite.
This is my favorite. I... So W stands for workforce, and it's about the people who work for you And I think that if there, if, I mean, there were a lot of things that we did at the clinic that I worked at that were that made it successful, but if I had to pinpoint one, it was the culture we created And culture is not just like going out for happy hour after work or...
it's really creating an environment where you have like-minded people who share the same values, who are praised for what they do, who are coached for improvement, who are paid well and appreciated. And there are-- there's a-- I mean, there's a lot of different things you can add as activities for culture to make it great.
So I always say that your staff is the most valuable product you have. It's not the hormones. It's not the provider, because the patient spends 75% with your staff and not with the provider. So if they don't like calling the office, if they don't like coming into the office, if they don't feel well taken care of, if they aren't called by, by name, it's just not going to be a great experience.
And if you treat your staff like, "I pay you, therefore, you need to do this, no questions asked," then you're going to lose the best people, because who wants to work in an environment like that? People wanna work in an environment where they are heard, they have ideas, and they can be shared. And especially in a hormone clinic, there's not a lot of upward mobility, so you're not gonna get somebody who's like a real driven go-getter and, you know, wants to work in a corporation that has opportunities for promotion.
You don't have that in a small hormone clinic. Even if you're a large hormone clinic, what, what could you have? 35 people? Like, it's really, really tough. So in order for you to get the best people who are the most entrepreneurial-spirited, meaning they act like they own the company, you've gotta give them a lot of other reasons to be there, and cash isn't always the reason.
Oftentimes, it's, you know, like I said, having your ideas being heard. It is giving an opportunity to-- for them to learn, improve. There are-- And I'll just give a couple of ideas of the things that I used to do in our clinic for culture activities. One was we would pay for every single employee, down to the front desk receptionist, MA, everyone, after they were there six months to go to course one of Worldlink Medical, which is designed for providers.
But if they were with us for six months, they learned enough about hormones, we'd send them to Salt Lake City. They'd spend the three days there learning the same thing that providers learn so they could be, you know, very knowledgeable about what they were doing. We did a quarterly meeting at the end of every quarter.
We closed the clinic down and spent the entire day just on each other, team-building, creating new ideas for improving the practice you know, self-development. I'm really-- I love self-development activities and having people, like, look at themselves and what do they need. So I'm going on and on because I just...
Culture to me is the difference between a good business and a phenomenal business. Yeah. I couldn't agree more, and I think that's personally what I'm most proud of what we've built at Big Boost Marketing, that if you have team members that have been with you seven, eight years, in today's world with a digital economy where people work from home, that's unheard of.
It just tells you something, that people love the community, the family that you built. And I feel, you know, again, from my own personal experience when I started out at Sharing Plow, I remember the first day being in a pharmaceutical company, there's 30 people in the project, and there was something, "How do we go about it?"
And I raised my hand, said, "Why don't we do it this way?" And people said, "Yeah, sounds like a good idea. Let's do it." In that moment, I felt, wow, it's the idea that counts. It doesn't matter how long you're in the company, if your idea is good, if you can back it up, we should be doing it. Absolutely. So I always remember that lesson, in that I give my team a lot of leeway and responsibility.
I want you to act as if you own this company. You gotta make decisions that sort of have the right intent. You know, make it right, do right by the client, and you can make up your own rules within that framework in the moment as it deserves it. I think giving, you know, team members the autonomy to make decisions, and backing them up, and giving them the structure that they feel, "Okay, I can run this show.
I have agency in this," is so important. And again, maybe we can briefly talk about what happens if you don't pay attention to culture, because then I think what happens is the wheel... There's always a wheel coming off the cart, right? Every month you're losing a front desk person, you rehire, you retrain.
You never get out of this training environment, and it feels like a very fragile environment to be in. Well, it's not just losing people. It's not just the churn. That's the obvious one. But the other issues that arise when culture is not good, and it's pervasive in the medical world, it's cliques inside of the clinic.
It's people talking about each other in private conversations. It's, you know, taking out their frustrations about what's happening in the office on the patients. It's an uncomfortable environment. It's trying to infuse... like, there was a period of time at that clinic that I worked at that we went through a rough patch.
You know, I was there a long time, so of course it happens. So we went through a rough patch and we weren't gelling, and culture was not vibing. And so we started doing these monthly outings where we would-- somebody in the office would, like, take on a month, and they would decide where we're gonna go, like horseback riding or, you know, to an escape room, and we would pay for it, but you-- And it was, like, almost like we had to require them to show up, and that's not culture at all.
It's hard to fix a culture that has gone awry unless you're really committed to this. And yeah, there's also just, you end up with the people that care the least. You end up with the people that are there for the wrong reasons. They're there because you pay what they want, you're close to their house, it's not stressful 'cause there's no emergencies, or whatever their reason is.
But it's just, it creates a real stagnant environment. Great. Great. All right. Let's move on to the next letter, the E. So patient experience. So in 2005, I had the pleasure of going to Zappos. Zappos is the, you know, the Tony Hsieh and, you know, he used to sell shoes and then it became everything.
They used to do a program where you could come for the weekend and they would teach you about customer service, and because they were one of the pioneers in customer service, and his book that he wrote and- Yeah ... um, and I will never forget that weekend. I learned so much about the value of giving a little to get back a lot.
I'll give you an example. We get there, and we had to fill out this form, and one of the things they asked us was what was our favorite snack. So yeah, everyone wrote down their favorite snack, and then they took us on a tour of the Zappos facility, and we were gone for, like, an hour and a half.
And there were like 50 people in this workshop. We come back after an hour and a half, and every single person had their favorite snack sitting on their desk. Even the one guy who said it was a German chocolate ... that they didn't sell in the United States, and I don't remember, I think they ended up getting him a gift certificate to order it because they couldn't actually get it.
But it was awe-inspiring, and that was the very first thing they did. So it set the tone for the rest of the weekend. So that's experience. So i- it's ev- it's find- it's not just, you know, having an efficient office, and it's not just having a great EMR with a patient portal. It's not the basics. It's not what the patients expect.
It's the little things that you infuse into the experience that has the patient go, "Wow." Has them say, "Oh, you know what? I am gonna write a review about this clinic because I was not expecting that." And it's so easy to do, but it's not easy to do unless it's done intentionally. So what I recommend for patient experience is that you sit down, and maybe you do this once a quarter, maybe once a, twice a year.
It doesn't need to be done a lot, and you just kind of map out, what are some things that we could do that seem like they're in the moment or a surprise, but they're actually planned and intentional? And if you can start adding those things into your patient process, there is absolutely no way you will lose because people will refer and you'll get more reviews.
The two cheapest ways to market your practice is to get referrals and get reviews. And you will have greater retention because why is somebody going to leave because they can pay $100 a year less over there when this place is actually enjoyable to go to? So patient experience is definitely something that is a it's a game changer.
It's not going to set your clinic up to win, which is why it's towards the end, but it's definitely a game changer in order to you know, really tweak your practice and keep it successful. And you know what this reminds me is there's this famous saying that, you know, people will forget what you said they won't forget how you made them feel.
Yeah. And again, when it's- Oh, absolutely ... these unexpected wow experiences, surprises, by design it is, emotionally simulating. It activates the emotions. You know, it delights them, and that goes, that feeling goes a long way. And obviously, as you said, there's strategic touchpoints throughout the journey where it's more likely that people have a positive experience or you can channel that more effectively.
But, you know, you have to be intentional about it. You have to realize this is the moment when you ask for a referral. This is the moment where you can ask for a review because of this preceding emotional event. And, ultimately, obviously, it's all about- Part of, you know, the patient experience, setting expectations.
Again, I think all the complaints in business, in life are because of unmet expectations, that one person thinks this, the other person thinks that, and they're just not seeing eye to eye. So, it goes back into SOPs and really defining how does this company, you know, operate?
What's the flow of your care delivery? What happens in month one? What happens in month in two? Is that actually clear and defined so that people feel safe, that they kinda know that they're on this journey with you? And again, I think that also sets up the expectation for retention that they know, "Here's why I should be staying.
Here's what I can look forward to." And, if you think about the way that this framework has, you know, kind of unfolded, the operational portion to the whole framework is basic, right? Like, every clinic, every business knows that they need to have these operating procedures kind of nailed down.
And when you don't, there's chaos. So if you remove that chaos and everybody's just clear about how to do their job, that part's handled. There's nothing to discuss. If everybody is showing up, you know, happy to be there, excited to do their job, feeling appreciated, there's no bitching, there's no complaining, that chaos is gone, which now gives you the room and the availability to focus on things that are, more intentional to create a better result.
So that's why we have these things in this specific order because who's gonna spend time thinking about a patient appreciation party when you're still trying to figure out when you're supposed to refill the patient prescription in what timeframe? It's just, one's, patients are always gonna come first.
Yeah. All right, let's finish up with the last letter, which I know is near and dear to your heart. And, you know- It is ... excites me too. Yeah. So revenue is both sales and marketing, and sales may seem like a dirty word in the medical field, but let's... Yeah, I actually interviewed a guy yesterday for my podcast, and he said, "Every single person is a salesperson.
All sales is, is transferring enthusiasm from one person to another." I thought that was so great. You know, 'cause, like, that's really what it is. The provider is excited about taking care of this patient, and if you can express that excitement and knowledge, and they have that same excitement, they're gonna buy.
But we gotta start with marketing first. So marketing obviously is, a very important part of any practice's growth. I know that there are plenty of practices out there that walk around with the giant, like, shield that says, you know, "I don't need to market. I'm successful without marketing."
And, and of course, there's always the exception to the rule if you have, run a small clinic or, you know... But marketing is a necessity. And as the hormone industry is evolving and continuing to evolve, it's going to become even more important because the options are vast. And you're not just competing against whatever clinic is, you know, next to you in your community.
You're competing against online. You're competing against the gym. You're competing against the moms on TikTok. Like, you're competing against everything. So, marketing is very important but also requires a lot of intentionality, otherwise it's going to be very expensive. I'm sure, Uli, you experience this as much as I do, probably more than I do, but the number of providers that we speak to that have already invested 10, 15, $20,000, and they finally get to us, and they're like, "I don't have any more money, and I have no trust."
So you really want to you know, think about your marketing approach in a very traditional business way. And what I mean by that is by creating a full marketing plan. It's not just I need patients, I'm gonna do X to get patients, but, like, what is your scope? How are you going to build your brand? How are you going to get your brand and name out there?
How are you going to bring leads into the pipeline? How are you gonna convert those leads into patients? And how are you gonna keep your patients that you have around for a really long time? So it's all of that. And, you know, we built a system, as you know, because we work together. So our job is not to drive traffic, our job is not to run ads, our job is not to create exposure.
Our job is to create the messaging and the automations for the practices in the hormone space so that they don't have to go through trial and error. So we have campaigns in our system that generate leads. We have ones that convert those leads into discovery calls or maybe just to patients, and then we have campaigns for retention.
So our job is to, you know, teach the basic principles of marketing and then make it as easy for the provider as possible in order to execute that marketing in a way that is in the proper voice of what the provider would write, that resonates with patients and that has been tried, and that's what we do.
But there's another side to that, and that is the sales side, and this is the side that most often gets overlooked because There are very few practices out there that have salespeople. Now, we don't call them salespeople. In our world, we call them patient liaisons. Some people call them patient coordinators.
But it is absolutely a necessity if you're going to invest any money in marketing, even if you're not, you really should do this, but there should be a person that is designated as the point of contact for a lead to talk to, for them to talk to about what their programming price is, and to talk to about anything non-medical after they sign up And without that position, it's very muddy because of a couple of things.
One is, without that role, the person that is going to have those conversations have a bunch of other things to do, and this is probably the last thing they're interested in doing. And so it gets to the bottom of the list. And, you know, I'm sure if you're listening to this and you listen to Uli's podcast, you know that you need to follow up with people very, very quickly, five minutes or less, in order to make that connection.
And an MA doesn't have the time to do that. A front desk doesn't have the time to do that. Second of all, it's not private. So a patient liaison, a patient coordinator needs to be doing nothing else but just sitting in a private office having conversations so that patients can feel comfortable when they're being vulnerable, and they can ask the questions they need to ask in order to make the decision.
And then third, they need to be trained. They need to be, have the right skill set and the personality to have a conversation they don't feel like it's selling. They feel like it's building a relationship. And I've yet to see a truly extraordinary person that's the front desk receptionist and the salesperson, and they do it amazing.
Like, not saying that doesn't exist, but with all three of those things, the time, the the time, the privacy, and the skill set, it's just really hard to do unless you've got someone in that role. So that's the whole world of ours, the marketing portion as well as the sales portion. Can you speak to, you know, when clinics first start out and the lead provider is filling that role of doing discovery calls, can that work?
Or, you know, what is your game plan what you would normally advise? Because from my experience, that role of being a patient care coordinator is incredibly emotionally taxing, right? You're dealing with people that are at the bottom of the barrel. They are distraught. They are, at the lowest point in their life oftentimes.
And it, it takes a certain mindset and attitude on how to go through these processes. So, can you speak to those two things? Absolutely. So, when I work with a practitioner, the very first thing I'm going to do when I'm creating their business plan is I'm trying to figure out at what revenue point can we hire a patient liaison because, look, I'm, I don't live in fantasy land.
I do realize that a provider that's starting out doesn't have the income yet in order to afford that role. So there is that chance that the provider has to do those conversations. And so you gotta put up some guardrails. It really is wearing two different hats. So if you're wearing your provider hat when you're doing a discovery call, you're gonna get into trouble because it's really difficult when a patient asks a personal question about their own symptom, their own issue, to not answer the question.
'Cause the response has to be, "You know, I really want... we can get into that, but that's what we do at the initial consult. So during the discovery call, we can talk about, like, some high-level things, but really, I need your labs, I need to sit down with your intake forms, I need to understand you better before I can actually give you personal advice."
And that is a very difficult thing to do, but it's a necessity. And I'll tell you a couple of reasons why it's a necessity. One is because, the more obvious one, people could just be fishing for information, and then they're gonna go take that information someplace else. Okay, that's the kind of negative way of looking at it.
But another way that people don't think about is when you are giving tons of information out in the discovery call, you're training that patient to expect more for less, and that can be a revenue killer for a practice. So when you are putting together your pricing, you're obviously thinking through how much time you're gonna spend with your patient, and that's how it's gonna dictate what you're charging.
If you're the kind of practitioner that just kind of gives it away, then you're gonna train the patients, and that's fine, except as you grow and your time becomes more and more limited, you're going to eventually piss the patient off when they're like, "You used to give me, like, all of this for nothing, and now you wanna charge me."
So That was really not about sales, but I had to throw that in. And then when it comes to pricing, so, you know, when it comes to sharing the cost from a provider's perspective, my advice is to be very documented and you know exactly what the prices are, and you predetermine what your potential discounts are.
Never rely on your heart and your head in the moment to talk about pricing. I hate when a provider talks about pricing. I think it muddies the conversation. The provider should only talk about the medicine so that the patient doesn't ever feel like, "If I share this symptom, I'm gonna get sold to." But until you're in a position where somebody else can talk about that, you can expect the provider to be a little, you know, like, "Oh, but, but they need this, and they say they can't afford it, and I know I could change their lives, and that's why I'm here."
You've gotta really think about every time you give away a piece of your service, you're not just giving it away for free, it's costing you money because you have expenses. And then another thing, and I just released a podcast on Monday that talks about this. It's about the confirmational bias of a provider being a business owner.
If you give it away to the person in front of you that is telling you you know, their hardships, what about the person who came in before that had the same hardship or worse and didn't share, and they paid full price, and maybe they went into debt for it? So you really wanna be as strict as you can with the pricing so that you remain fair, you keep your profit margin healthy so that you can continue to treat the next 100 patients who walk through the door.
And it's not a negotiation. As soon as it becomes a negotiation, you've lost the conversation- Yeah ... and that could really hurt you down the line. So those are some, you know, things that, I presented them in a negative way and, you know, I do that on purpose 'cause I do want the provider to understand how important it is to get somebody in a role that can talk money, but it's also to, like, look for the pitfalls that you can fall into when you have to be that person.
Absolutely. And I know, I feel I could talk to you for another five hour and then turn this into a Joe Rogan style five-hour podcast. But I feel you have shared an incredible amount about valuable insights about the Power of Framework. And again, as a listener, I hope you can see why I admire Jody and her team so much, because this is the business essential foundation that you need to have on before you do marketing, before you do paid ads, before you do anything where you're actually spending money, right?
If you don't have the foundation in place, all you're gonna do is amplify the pitfalls and the negatives, and it will become a dumpster fire, and nobody wants this. So if you feel like you're at the right stage, whether you're just thinking about opening a clinic, whether you already have a clinic, whether you are in the messy middle where you feel like you're the overwhelmed operator, I hope you can see the benefit of talking to Jody and her team.
So we'll put the link to her discovery call there. And I know, Jody, you have a couple other resources that people can tap into if they're not yet ready for a discovery call. But you have a fabulous webinar, you have a couple guides. So let's talk about those things. Okay. Yeah, sure, sure. So and you can have the links in the show notes.
But the first thing, if you are intrigued by what we talked about with Power, I have an hour-long Power training webinar. It's on demand, so, you know, you can watch that and, go into a little bit more depth on each of these different pillars and some ideas of things that you can do. And at the end, there's actually a workbook that you can purchase for $97, where you can take basically like an evaluation quiz of your practice and see where you score, and then there's like a handout that goes with it that gives you some guidance on things you can update and change in your practice in order to get your score a little bit higher.
So if Power is something that you're interested in, you wanna do it on your own, then of course that would be the way to do that. We do have another webinar called Why Leads Don't Convert, and it's all about automation. So, one of the reasons that, you know, Uli and I work so well together is because we have the same philosophy about marketing, that, if your practice in essence is messy, and chaotic, and not functioning properly, marketing is going to be an issue, and the leads you get are not going to convert, and that's where Power comes in.
And it's very easy to blame the marketing agency, of course, which we wanna solve. But then there's also, like, when the marketing agency is driving all this traffic and you're getting leads for these great educational pieces, the likelihood of them converting on their own is extremely small. So the Why Leads Don't Convert webinar explains why that is and what to do about it.
And then of course, we have our practice automation system, which is the solution to that. So, in the Why Leads Don't Convert webinar, I spell out exactly what you need to do in order to fix those funnel leaks. And you can do that on your own, or we've built this system where it's $1,000 to onboard, $850 a month, and you get 20 campaigns on day one, a new campaign every single month.
You get access to a community of other hormone practitioners like you who can talk in like a forum style. We do office hours, we do sales and marketing tips. Like, you get full support, but all the campaigns are built, and it's inside of a CRM system so that your team can keep track of the leads. Not just...
You know, like all the automations are happening in the background, but we actually do want you to physically call them and actually, like inquire into these patients, and it gives you the access to do that Well, wonderful. And, I've personally seen those exact systems on the inside when Jody and her team launched those a while back so I can definitely vouch for it.
And again, remember Jody is like unlike so many other hormone marketing agencies, she ran a hormone clinic. She knows what it's like too. She knows the challenges, whether it's for the owner, for the front desk, for the patient coordinator. She has had all these roles, and what she and her team have created is informed by this.
So it's not just some, marketing kit that whipped up something with ChatGPT and says, "Hey, here's our marketing system." You and I know that when it comes to integrative functional medicine, longevity, or hormone care, patients need to be educated, they need to be followed up, and you need to have a system to actually be able to roll this out, and Jody's team has built it, deployed it.
And what I like about it that it's not just you get a turnkey system, it's like you have a supportive community that as a practice owner, you may feel lonely. You need that container to, to see what other clinics are doing to, stay abreast of best practices. And again, that's again why I love working with you, Jody.
It's, you know, you and I think so much alike. You do solve a big part of the puzzle with POWER that we don't really cover at Big Boost Marketing. So again, if you are an existing client of Big Boost, I wholeheartedly encourage you to reach out to Jody and see what else could help your practice, whether it's on the revenue side, the team building side, any of the elements that we talked about today you're in great hands.
And Jody is a no-nonsense straight talker, so you get the unvarnished truth, what you need to hear. And again, as a German, that's another thing I like that it's like- ... you know, we're not sugarcoating things. We say- Yeah ... what it is that needs to be said. There's no judgment, there's no shame.
We all have to start somewhere. Rome wasn't built in a day. But if you have dreams of building a pr- a thriving practice, if you dream of serving more patients in your community, and God knows there's an infinite number of people that need our help, then, reach out to Jody and her team- Thank you
And sit with the resources there to make that happen. And I'll, if I could just throw one last thing in there. So, when we started Accelerated Medical Practices, our why is that we would like 10 million people to be on hormones, and none of us are providers. So in order for us to help those 10 million people get to their hormone journey, we have to help practices.
So as a part of that, I started back in September my own podcast called Beyond Hormones: The Business of Wellness. And I wanna share that because, one, like you said, I do speak pretty straight, and so there's a lot of content in there that hopefully, you just get the value and off you go, and y- you, there's things you can implement into your practice.
Also I share it because if anyone's a provider, a hormone provider, a wellness clinic provider, functional medicine provider, and they would like to be a guest, then I'd love to host you 'cause that's... Every other Monday, I do an interview with a clinic owner to talk about their journey as a business person.
There's a lot of places they can talk about the medicine. We talk about the business. And next Wednesday, I'm interviewing Uli, so I'm so excited about that. Yay. Well, as is usually custom with my podcast, I'll let the guest have the last word. Obviously a fantastic discussion from my perspective, but I'll let you have the parting words for our audience and go from there.
The woman that I said I spoke with yesterday that shared her vulnerability and cried, she said, "Maybe I shouldn't be a nurse practitioner. Maybe I shouldn't even be doing this." And I really, I really feel for her, and I feel for all the providers that feel that way. You want to take care of patients.
You don't have a structure out there in traditional medicine to do that with the way you want, and so you're a qu- you're kind of forced into this entrepreneurial lifestyle. And so I just want you to know that you're heard, and there are people like Uli and Jennifer at Big Boost, and like here at Accelerated Medical Practices that, that have integrity, that are here to help, and you don't have to do it alone.
So, before you throw in the towel and say, "I'm just not gonna do this anymore," and let the world doesn't get the benefit of your wisdom and your gifts reach out to the people that can help you and make it happen, so. Well, thank you so much for wise words. Fully endorse this.
And for everyone listening, thanks for your time. We'll see you next week. Thank you.
