Ep. 122: Profit Injections - Part 1: Lose Weight to Increase Profits

Patient Care Marketing Pros (00:00)
Hey everybody, we're excited to have you for another episode of Walk -Ins. Welcome. We are all about helping you get more patients, grow your revenues, deliver exceptional patient care, repeat visits, all the things. I'm Nick Michael. What's up, man? Hello. Hello. Hello. Welcome back. I'm excited today. One, because yesterday we had a kickoff with a new client that loves our podcast. Shout out to Errol. What's up, buddy? Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. We want more of you guys. Come on in.

Yep. Not harmful at all. Just send us a quick email and would it be easy to say that walk -ins are welcome? Yeah. Okay, good. Exactly. And also another exciting part. So we were looking at our stats and looking at all the analytics because we're marketing people. We like to look at numbers and trends and all the things. And so far you guys have said yes, when you're listening to our series. Yes. Thank you for that. So we just finished up a series regarding the front desk marketing stuff, which I honestly, from

based on the numbers, you really guys enjoyed that first episode a lot. You were kind of enjoying the second episode of Strow wedding and the third one. But now because of that, now we have a new series. Yes. And here we go. And this series is all about increasing profits. We're giving the name profit injections. That's right. That's the series name, not the title of the episode. Not this episode, but it's inside the series of profit injections, which could you take a guess what it means? Anybody?

I can take a stab since I'm the only one here. Take a jab. That's right. Take a jab at it. That's right. Yeah. So our goal, so we know if you're an urgent care and you're listening, you are awesome at your urgent care services, but then you're asking yourself, what else can I do with this facility and with this staff? What can I add on? And we're going to talk about that in a three part episode series. I've been doing some research and Michael, you've been watching me do this. And then of course, I asked lots of questions when we're talking to our...

our clinics that we work with and, and, uh, taking research and then real time, uh, research with our existing client base. And, and, and it all kind of dollars down to three most profitable areas. There's really one that we're not going to discuss that is probably the most profitable way to increase profits into your clinic. And that is dental urgent care. Yeah. Dentist is just such a, it's such a difference from urgent care. Cause you have to have like a separate facility, separate instruments.

Yeah, it's just a whole different separate doctor. So I get it. And we, heck, we here in Birmingham, five minutes from our old office, there was a dental urgent care. Right. So it is a thing like walk ins for dentists, but that's not for this. This is not what we're talking about. We're we're looking at ways that you can simply add on certain services. We're going to deep dive into those services. And we say simply it's a matter of.

placing an order for a couple of medicines or medications or prescriptions and having a doctor do a little bit of training and then do marketing behind it. Yes, we've definitely laid out the product like is it profitable and is it something that you can implement into your clinic without major disruption? And this is not brand new stuff like we've seen data behind all these wither.

Like what we're about to go through, a lot of our urgent cares that our clients are currently doing this or have done it and been doing it for a while or are asking the same questions. Is this something I should get into or not? And there's some caveats to all of it. Like it's not like a magic switch you turn on, you just make more money. Like everything, even in our business, when we looked at add a service, we got to bulletproof the thing out to make sure it's not going to cause havoc or just a big waste of time.

Same thing here. As we talked to you guys about today, we're going to go into the lose weight to increase profits is the name of the title. That's right. Name of the title, name of the episode, name of the episode, which is a title. Anyway, but it, I know you guys are probably touching that. We're just telling you right out of the gate. It can make you a lot of money. It can create a headache for you if you don't take, if you don't do it right. Biggie Smalls, no money, no problems. Exactly. We even have an urgent care right now that started the weight loss path.

because he saw the benefits and then got really fed up with the staff that was doing it. And like, he's like, this is not who we are. We're not, we're not meeting our standards. I'm probably going to cut it. And so like that's something you have to think about because it's so easy. I'm going to add this, but if it's not meeting your standards, you're, you may cause a disruption. He didn't mean to speak of a disruption. I'm going to silence my phone here. That's trying to blow up on me. And then I want to make a couple of bullet point statements here. One,

The first thing I would recommend in growing your profits is I would tell you to fill your urgent care first. Yes. Like don't add a bunch of stuff if you're not, if you're not, you know, consistently seeing 50 to 70 patients a day. Like that's your first capability as a one doctor, one location clinic. Like you can see between 50 and 70 and you could be a $3 million a year. I'm honestly, if you're not pushing one or $1 .5 million a year already in your clinic,

Hold your horses, right? Like don't jump on this bandwagon quite yet because at the end of the day, these add -on services are increasing revenue. They're not replacing revenue. And that's something you should know. I also like to say like, one of the reasons that kind of prompted this is we understand again, through not only our own research, but just having conversations with medical practices that we work with is that it's been years now, 15 years or so since...

billing has been updated with insurance companies where they're paying you more money. So you're capped there, right? The insurance reimbursements haven't been increased and costs are through the roof. We know that. Like we've identified that as a major issue. So it's not like you can raise your prices. Yeah. I mean, you're at this point now where your staffing costs has probably increased 30 to 40 % or more. And, but your reimbursements have not. And then your volume is about the same.

And so you're kind of like, well, I was making XML profit, but now I'm only making this and I'm hitting a wall, right? That's right. So now we're looking at the opportunities. What can I add on that's not insurance driven, which is really a big thing because at the end of the day, when it's not insurance driven, you get to pick the price or let the market drive the price, not an insurance company. Right. And the last bullet point that I had is really you have three options for growing your clinic. You can either add more patients.

you can add more locations or you can add more services. That's really all you have because you can't mess with your pricing. And I'd say to Sue, a majority of our clients are typically at a multi -location when they're looking at adding an extra service. Unless they're just like, I don't want an extra location. I got enough headaches. One location's fine with me. Then you look at services. But most of them, they already have two or three locations. And now they're trying to roll this out. And then sometimes they're testing a location on it. I just had a really good idea for an episode.

but we'll talk about that another time. But right now in real time. Yeah. Just remind me afterwards. Anyway, for this episode, we're going to talk about losing weight to increase your profits. Obviously I'm talking about adding weight loss services into your service mix as an urgent care and just a real quick snapshot of some of the benefits. I've bulleted out everything to try and make it simple, but like this is a rising demand. Go to YouTube and look at what I look like. Like I need to lose some weight.

Right. So I'm bringing that up for a very, I'm totally normal. Yeah. Like as an American, we're all stupidly overweight. Now. I think I saw a stat, what 70 % now are overweight. I mean, there's so many different reasons for that, that I'm not going to get into because they all sound like excuses. But the point is, is you can add weight loss consultation. You can add injections. What is it? Moderna? Not Moderna. What is the fancy one?

Yeah, I'm sure people are. It's for like type two diabetes. Yeah, yeah. It's the Hollywood thing right now. Yeah, exactly. But it's like a magical thing. And we talked to one of the doctors about it. He said, well, I thought it was great because he was like, you know, and when I was doing my medical schooling, that all these wonderful drugs come out and now you don't hear about them 20 years later. Right. A reason. So like his mind says, like, I'm not sold on it yet, but you can't deny the results. Ozympec. Ozympec. Yeah, but they also have like all friends of Ozympec now.

Yeah, and so you can't deny the results. Nobody knows the long term yet because it just hasn't been out long enough. But that's the thing. I can't as an individual just roll up to the pharmacy and grab it. I have to go to a clinic. And there are not that many weight loss specific only clinics out there. They're not everywhere, but there are a lot of urgent cares. There are. And there's where the opportunity comes into play, which is why we're talking about it. Because here you already have the built -in demand. It's there waiting on you. You just got to fill it.

That's the built inside of it. Right. And the other flip side of that is you would attract new demographics to, you know, overweight people. God, I don't mean to make a blanket statement. Can I speak as an overweight person? Cause you are. Or it's a deaf factory. So I talk about rednecks cause I are one. There you go. There you go. You know, we're not always overtly concerned about going to the doctor all the time. No. You know what I mean? As a matter of fact, I can't stand going to the.

Um, but I'll go to an urgent care if I get the sniffles or the sneezels or, you know, love hooker or whatever you want to call it. Right. If I get something, if I get something I'm going to get allergy season. That's always what I've got. Sounds like a flow nays commercial. You got the sneezels, the sneezels. Uh, anyway, um, but like you would attract somebody like me to your clinic on a more regular basis. If I'm there to get weight loss services and you already have me in your system because like,

eight months ago, I came there to get a Z pack or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So you've already got me to talk to just tell me that you offer weight loss. Yeah. Just tell me. Yeah. Right. What's the next one, Michael generating recurring revenue? Yeah, I love this. This is what we're all about at patient care marketing bros. Yeah. So recurring revenue. What does that mean? Obviously it's the same patient keeps coming back. And that's something that urgent care is a challenge with right? Cause like if I go into urgent care, I have a one time problem.

I'm not coming back unless I'm sick again. And that might be years. Or unless you listen to the episode, always book a meeting from a meeting. Yes. But it might be years, right? For most of your patients, like, or they never come back. But with a weight loss program, they're not there for one time. They are. Because as we all know, if you're committed to losing weight or being healthy, it's an ongoing process. And you're here to aid in that.

Because ultimately it's their mindset. They got to make this choice and you're creating aids for them to kind of get them past the hump that they've always get stuck on. Like my dad's a perfect example of this. He had been playing with the weight loss game for years and years and years. He'd lose a little, gain it back. Lose a little, gain it back. And then finally he's like, I'm fed up with this. And so he went to a weight loss clinic, this is last year, and they gave him like the B12 injections and the weekly check -ins and all that stuff.

And now he's lost 40 pounds and he's keeping it off. And how often was he going? Once a week. Okay. So this is literally what I was going to bring up for the generating recurring revenue. Think about it, Urge Care. You have somebody who's coming in and you're going to make $220 off of that one visit that they may come in another time this year. You may get one of their family members or...

you can be making $500 to $1 ,000 a month off of that person, adding real value to their life, adding real service to their life by helping them lose the weight. I promise you it's top of mind for them. They think about it all the time, whether they say it or not. And they want a solution, and they want a solution that works, and even better if it's medically assisted weight loss. Which brings me to the next point. You can leverage the existing resources that you already have. If it's medically assisted weight loss, you already have...

blood work that you can do labs. You already have all the vendors lined up. You have to thank you. That was a great point. I didn't even get that. Yeah, like you have all your vendors lined up. Chances are like it's just an extra order. Right at this point. You're probably throw some ozempic on that next order, right? Or you already have those relationships and the doctors in place and your staff. Whereas it's just an procedure at this point, not like an actual procedure, right? Just a process that you're going through now.

At the same time though, you have to remember these are all the benefits, right? So there's lots of positives, but we got to keep an eye out for the negatives because that's real too. We don't touch too deep on it, but you got to be careful because at the end of the day, if you don't have a doctor that can work on this regularly, it's going to hurt because we're talking about the recurring side. These people are showing up very often. And if you have a visit with them 30 times in a year,

you have 30 opportunities to mess up. Right? And so you want to make sure you're consistent with that. Because like an urgent care, because we know about you urgent cares and reviews, like you guys get more reviews than you want. And then it's just a battle of how many thousands can you get to? Sure. And urgent cares, you know, sometimes you get one shot and one shot. It's OK. But then that same person keeps coming back and back and back. And at some point you may mess up. Now, they may be forgiving towards you, but they may not be. So you have to just kind of think through that. Please don't just say.

we're going to do this because we have everything in place. You got to work it out the process. You got to test it a little bit and make sure it's all going to make a lot of sense. But then they, what's really cool too, that you get here that you don't really go in the urgent care side is the testimonial before and after effect. That's right. Cause you can't always, Hey, I was sick and now I'm not like, that's not going to really fly.

Yeah, it's like and you can't fully take credit for that their body was gonna heal you sped it up a little bit You just kind of sped up the process, but this is like I can change somebody's life. You made him feel better immediately Yeah, exactly, but this is a long -term solution. Yeah, so and the good news is you you should have All the resources or at least access to those relationships already in place without you having to make any kind of profound issue or change in your business Yeah to be able to service

this group of people that need your help. I mean, in our world, this is like a new social platform came out that can run ads. Yeah, exactly. Where like, so for us, TikTok would be the most recent platform that actually has a decent ad manager inside of it. We already had the creatives. We already had people in place. We had clients willing. It's just turning on and learning the system.

Right. So it's the same for you guys. Like it's like any business decision when you when you add these additional services that just makes sense. You usually end up winning with that. Love it. All right. So why do you want to add this service for the most obvious reason is to make money. All right. Look, it is what it is. You own a retail health care clinic. Retail by default means you're in it to make money. Yeah. And by the way, that's 100 percent. OK. But here's the ancillary things.

on why you should have this service. One, you literally are filling a community need. You just mentioned, I know it's not an actual stat, but 70 % of people at this point are overweight. I don't know if that's accurate or not. I'd probably say somewhere around 40%. But you know, somewhere in there is the truth, right? I have a device. While you're talking about that, you know, people are stressed out about their weight. They want a solution. They want to know that it works. And here's what you have that the online weight loss and all these kind of people, you have trust. You're a doctor.

Like people trust what you have to say because you went through years of school, right? How many Americans are in the first place in debt? Like, of course, you know, that person who has a friend who's selling some kind of an MLM product online, it may or may not work, but they don't have trust. They just think they're trying to sell them something where a doctor has built in trust. And so you're filling a community need. Go ahead, Michael. So these stats are old. I see new stats, but.

Pre COVID 40 % pre COVID. So we're all big fat fatties now, right? That was 40 % five years ago. All right. Funny that you threw a stat and I threw a stat. It's got to be somewhere in the middle there. And then like a CDC doesn't really have stuff past. Why are they not calculating this? This is like a big deal anyway, but if five years ago we were at 40 % overweight, it's safe to say 50 % plus where we are now.

Without a doubt. Well, here's what we know. The last stat is at least 40%. So think of 40 % of your current population in your clinic. 40 % of the people that come through that door are likely overweight. 40 % of your clients are prospects for weight loss. Go ahead. And then the Washington Post said in 2020, this is such conflicting information. Dear doctor people out there that are listening, can you tell us what the real stat is? Because this one says from Washington Post, which is part of the National Library of Medicine website.

like that's a good website to pull data from. And it is a official US website. 74 % of adults in the US are overweight. So I'm about to say something that's going to cause everybody to turn the dial. If it's from the government, I probably don't trust. But it says 43 % of the 74 % are obese, which is bad. Let's keep going. Anyway, either way.

If we have three or 400 million people, 200 million people have a weight issue. I'm going to say four out of the 10 people that walk into your clinic need your help. There you go. Four out of the 10 people that walk in your clinic could lose weight and would, and let's just say one out of four of those people would, would stay and, and do business with you at that level because they like you, they know you and they trust you and they've already made the choice anyway.

So you're enhancing your clinic reputation. That's the next point is when you're adding additional value, that's having a real positive impact on your patients. It's going to make your clinic have a better reputation in the community. Oh yeah, absolutely. Cause when you're sitting there taking care, like you're not, cause I think that's a stigma, right? That you have to deal with as an urgent care. Oh, you're just a dock in a box and you're now becoming, you can become more than that. Cause you're not, you're not just a dock in a box. There's more, much more to it.

And so like this is adding to that as well because when you're because we all know when you help people lose weight you change their lives Not only from like their mental life like their outlook of how they feel and everything how I feel and look but also like their heart health is all sudden is a lot better their overall health It's just better. They don't get sick as often all the wonderful things that go with it. Absolutely Last thing here. It's gonna make you a differentiator in the marketplace. So if there's you know, five urgent cares and you're

10 to 15 mile radius, and only one of you offer weight loss services, you're going to have a more likelihood to convert that patient into a long -term patient, period. You're just going to have more opportunities. You're offering more than what your competitors are doing. And also too on the competitor side. So we know, you can't really compete on price in a traditional urgent care service because if they have insurance, you're really just competing on copay and the copay never changes, right? But on this service, it's not insurance driven.

So you can be competitive on your pricing where if Doc down the street is doing it for $200 a visit, you can do it for 175, they might lean to the 175. And because it's like, you have flexibility. And that's something that we love because even from our standpoint, like when we run ads and stuff like for this, you can run specials, you can run offers. Because you don't really run offers with an urgent care, like a traditional urgent care service. Like the offer is,

get in now, get sick now and we'll take care of you. Yeah, exactly. But the weight loss stuff like we'll get you on a five week program for the price of a two week program or whatever. So like it's way more flexible and more fun to us at least. And you that's why it can grow really quick too. So like you so much you can do with that that you're somewhat limited on the urgent care side. So one of our clients has been with us from essentially, you know, they want.

Day one, month one, definitely year one of patient care marketing pros. Leslie has a weight loss clinic, but to back up a little bit off of that, she used to work in bariatric health care. And they added this service and it's probably 2016, something like that 2017. They added this service and just like the bariatric care center wasn't taking it seriously. Like she was brought on to do that. Yeah.

They weren't taking it seriously, even though they were making good profit off of it. They did what they did and she broke off and she opened up her own weight loss clinic. Yep. Y 'all she is printing money. Yeah. I'm not going to get into her details, but because we work with her, like we know how much money she's bringing in the door. It's, it's a significant amount of money for just one service that she offers. And then we also know.

like when people call in and, and cause we asked her to like, what's your lead time now? She's always can't take in new patients for the next five to six weeks. Yep. And that's how long before they can do a consultation with her and it is medically, uh, facilitated weight loss. Yeah. It's not just a, here's a, a nutrition program. Yeah. She has actually, you've probably heard of like med VIP or what MD VIP, whatever that's called. Like it's attached to her business. It's not the same business, but

but she has an agreement with them to do the medical part of the weight loss so that she can, you know, sell the injections and do all the things. I'm just telling y 'all she's crushing it and she's getting amazing results for it. And she's been doing it for years, like years and every time we've like have a, cause she's kind of hard to track down sometimes. I text her, I get a meeting and she's like, I got a bail on you. She goes, but you're doing a good job. We love you. We're still booked out. We're still booked out five weeks. So what do you want? And so that goes back to like,

Could you imagine an urgent care that you now have five weeks of patients coming in your door and you don't have, and it's all scheduled out. Like, so you just brought up one of the next points, which is the benefits to your clinic. Keep going with that point. I just want to segue it so that it'll make sense. So the thing about how predictable that income becomes, right? So like you are now saying, Hey, for I have a hundred patients that are coming in my door that are new.

for next three weeks or five weeks, whatever number it is, in addition to what I don't know it's coming from a walk -in clinic. Because I think that's the challenge too. So we know there are trends and there are averages and all the things. But sometimes there are dips. We know, urgent care is that summers are tough. They are. We know it. But everybody wants to wear a bikini. Right? Or they go to the beach and say, crap, I need to get a...

Why haven't I lost weight? Somebody tried to roll me back into the ocean because they thought I was a whale. I need to come see you. You're a walrus. Look man, this is my wife says I look like when I roll over in the bed. She goes, you look like a walrus. Tried to roll over and I'm like, Heather is so kind. I'm going to make her listen to this. Anyway, listen, there is a financial.

predictability and a financial upside to adding this service to your clinic. It's a huge profit margin. That's why it's number one on the list. We wanted to get this out to you first, right? It's because just adding this one little thing is going to go again from a patient being a once, maybe twice of your patient to like once a week. Think about that. Think about the impact. If you just got 10 % of your patient volume, 10 % think about your number. I don't care where you are.

10 % of that converted into a weight loss.

That's an absurd amount of money you're going to add to your bottom line. Yeah. And so I know some of the naysayers or the urgent care owners or the doctors are going to say, I don't think this should be part of an urgent care or I feel like it might dilute my brand or whatever. Right? So here's the thing to think about because we've seen this happen with other urgent care clients. You can build a separate entrance. Weight loss is health care. I would also like to...

Yes, it is. But you can, I was saying from a pure, like I want to make this, like I want to do this, but I don't want my urgent care brand to be a hundred percent tied to the weight loss. Like I want it to be separate. Start with building like a separate entrance to your cats and dogs for vets. Yeah. Right. And fats, the feline clinic, y 'all gonna kick me off this podcast for it's over with at least toward the end. And we know that people make it to 80%. So, well, you know, there's a financial upside. You know that you're going to have patient retention. It's going to increase the satisfaction.

Here's some next steps for you. And we'll take it out from here. Do some planning and research, right? Like what is the market telling you? Here's an easy way to do it, right? Go to Google and just say, how many searches were done for weight loss this month? It'll tell you, it'll give you an exact number. Or type in weight loss clinics near me. That's it. While you're sitting in your urgent care and just see who pops up.

And you may see like, they're not really a weight loss, blah, blah, blah. Like, and you're like, Hey, maybe have a chance here. Cause if you think about it, if, if it pops up like three or four and only one or two are like dedicated and the rest is an urgent care, there's so much opportunity. I would even add medically assisted weight loss. Yeah. Because believe it or not, there is a difference. I can go in and I can get vitamin B12 shots without being a, a clinician, right? Yep. Or, or even have a nurse practitioner. I think I don't want to lie, but.

I think you like, you can get B12 injections, right? I was just gonna say they were giving them in the office the other day, weren't they here? But that's another story. Let's see if they're actually listening to the episode. Anyway, so medically assisted weight loss, you're automatically going to be a differentiator just by adding medical to the word, right? Yeah.

Take an inventory on what resources you currently have access to. That could be relationship inventory. That could be actual inventory. Do you have on -site labs? How long is your labs turnaround? Do you have vendors in place to order a Zempik or whatever it is that you need to get the products you need for weight loss in -house, the medications that you need for weight loss? Who's doing it right that you can pick their brain, if you will? Yeah. Right? Yeah. And then, and and.

I think another slight advantage that a weight loss has over a traditional urgent care service, people are willing to travel a little further. Oh, for sure. You could have like, for example, the weight loss clinic that we work here. I was just talking about Leslie. We cover the entire city of Birmingham. Yeah. And we're not covering her little seven mile radius. We're working on the whole thing, man. Yeah. And that's something worth knowing because we know in the, in the urgent care world and dense population, three to five miles.

if that depending and you know, sometimes it gets bigger on population sizes, but weight loss, you could do a whole DMA. Like it can get pretty big. Last thing, and then we'll wrap up as compliance and training. If this is something that you're going to incorporate into your urgent care, make sure that one, your compliance with other regulations are in your city for that. And then train your team and consistently train your team. I know that goes without saying, but if I didn't say it, you wouldn't know. No, exactly. And then finally too, if, uh,

you're doing this and you're like, I'm going to do this. Don't forget about your marketing. We'll go and learn about it. We're a marketing podcast. We're going to say that. So if I'd love to hear from people, have you started this weight loss program? How's it going? Where are the pitfalls? What's been the amazing part or what's like, Hey, I don't, I thought I had this figured out, but I'm hitting a roadblock. Love to know hello at patient care, marketing pros .com. Please send us that love mail, hate mail, any mail. We like it because it helps shape these episodes sometimes. So.

Well, thanks for listening to the first part of the series of profit injections. We want to make sure that you're making more money so that you can make a bigger impact in your community. What you do matters. I want to thank you for listening. We'll see you next week. See you.