Ep. 150: Urgent Care Growth Hacks: $3M Clinic Roadmap

WIW (00:00)
Hey, what is going on? Walk -ins welcome family. It's Nick and Michael here for another Wednesday drop of our episode. You're listening to walk -ins welcome Michael. What's up my friend. Still in shorts. It's still hot. think the weather we got, we had the faux fall happen already. So like last week was nice. Now I've gotten a good fair amount of time in the plane lately for those who listen. yeah. Well, I had a chance for the pilots out there. Talk about where you are in your training. Yeah. So, okay.

I'm three, three little over going on three and a half years of training or at least being a pilot. I have my private pilot certificate and I'm almost done with my instrument rating, which for those uninitiated, that just means I'm going to be able to fly in the clouds. That doesn't mean legally that is not that is not permission to do stupid things. Now, if there's thunderstorms like what we ran into, we were going back from Miami that one time. I don't care what kind of rating you have. You get out of that. Yeah. And we did. Yeah. And we did.

Almost did. That's for another story. Yeah, exactly. Another time. But I wanted to talk a little bit today, Michael. This is going to be an unscripted podcast. So if you like unscripted podcasts, this is going to be the one for you because it's conversation. And then we'll just watch our listeners drill hard after this. But now it says unscripted, but at end of the day, we have things on this table. We do. And I'm looking forward to showing them to you. But one of the things that I wanted to talk about a little bit is just one of the things that I do with our team.

here is I'm constantly putting in front of them our mission, vision and values. And I try and open up, I botch it all the time, but I try and say it right. Every time we open this podcast, we talk about how we want to help you get more patients. We want to help you deliver better care. We want to help you get repeat visits and we want to help you scale your clinic to essentially to the $3 million clinic. Therefore you have to start making different decisions like hiring new doctors or opening up new locations.

So I just really wanted to talk a little bit about that today. Michael, you're in the background all the time. So if I were going to, you know, just kind of talk about a deeper level of how do we help people get more patients specifically through listening to the podcast, but also ancillary through patient care marketing pros, right? Let's talk about how do we get new patients for people? So from our world and we even price things around this, but at the bare minimum, like if you're doing

If we can say, if you do something right this second, it would be Google Ads. Right. Google Ads. It's step one. It is step one. We say it's step one because it's quick results. It works. It's controlled results. So like you can turn budgets up and down and you can make a pretty big impact on your clinic pretty easily. We've now had multiple clinics that went from, this is not good, to this is fantastic, just with Google Ads.

We thought it was just an anomaly the first time it happened, but then it happened like two or three times after that. We're like, I guess like the impact, because we can only see so much because we can't see all the data from the patient side. But the impact is almost immediate, more like if we kicked off your ad campaign today, within three to four days, you would start to feel the difference. Within about a month, you're like, OK, that was a good.

That was that was very impactful. Yeah. After 30 days, you're very impactful. After 90 days. Yeah. You want to talk about being off to the races. Those are are game changing things that happen whenever you start advertising that on Google. And speaking of 90 days, so I guess it's really a 60 day thing. So we even now have we're working on a new resource kit for you guys. For those who are considering doing a like they haven't started your urgent care, but you're considering it. We're putting together a guide that will actually basically tell you how we do this.

because we've now had multiple startup urgent cares work with us. And we got them from zero to 20 to 30 to 40 patients a day in a pretty rapid pace. And now they're just looking now we even have one of our originals where they're just like, we're at capacity and we're trying to decide what to do next. Yeah. Yeah. And then we have one of our new shout out to Jace. Yeah. And we've had a newer one that's like, I'm already hitting that button of like, okay, I need to figure out what's happening. Anyway.

So we decided, because we've noticed that a lot of the people that engage with us, like they're considering starting an Urge Care, or they just started one, or they're like, yeah, I'm getting like 10 or 20 patients a day, but I don't know what I'm doing. And so we're working on this little package to give you, it's a giveaway. It's not like you got to buy this thing, but it's something that's like, here's our game plan. And if you actually implement it correctly, it will work. But if you don't have time, you know, this is what we do all the time. So going back, step one, Google Ads.

Step two is SEO, assuming you have a good website. And what is SEO? So search engine optimization, which is the organic side of Google. It's not the paid side, but the side that shows up in the Map 3 pack. It's the side that shows right below the map. It is ultimately like, how are my rankings? That's an SEO question. Right. But if you have a terrible website or a non -existent one, SEO can't really start yet.

because it has to go somewhere. If it goes somewhere, it needs to go somewhere that has a good conversion on it. What does that mean? Is it easy to do business with you? In the patient care world, can I click, book now an appointment, or call you within one click? That's where I expect it. Now, if you're multi -location, two to three clicks is OK. But after You've got to pick the right location. Yeah. We don't think you need 20 websites for 20 locations. You need one hub. One hub with location pages all day long.

I was literally working on a site today that had 11 locations and we were building out location content for each location because that's something you do in the SEO world. And I was up to like 70 pages I was adding content for. Like it was just part of the game that we play, but it is something required. mean, just a little extra on that one note, he's not just talking about the location pages. Like if we use the word urgent care, I'm going to use Alabama because that's where we are.

So if I say Urgent Care Birmingham, we'll also have to have one for Hoover, one for Chelsea, one for Pelham. And whenever you're serving. Urgent Care keyword plus the city, the geo, geo modifier. That content has to be rewritten. It can't be the same thing. Anyway, that's just, that's just SEO foundations. But keep going with that. Yeah. So you have SEO, assuming you have a good website. If you don't, you need to build that. We're WordPress people.

We're not saying that WordPress is the only option. It's just the preferred option. We even had a conversation this morning with a guy that does Webflow. And we're not fans of Webflow for lots of reasons. And he confirmed, like, from an SEO standpoint, it's kind of a disaster. It's beautiful. It's beautiful. Really pretty. It's like flash of 2020 or something. Like, it's just, it's beautiful. Designers like it. SEO is kind of hard. Anyway, so.

You have that so you checked off Google ads, you've checked off your SEO, you checked off your website. Hopefully you have good review management kicked in at this point where you're actively garnishing reviews, which we have actually a little it up a little guy right here. So you if you're watching I'm holding it right up to the screen. So this is a review card. The brand would be Zappi card this particular one we got off of Tmoo. Yeah, exactly. So let's be real honest. So Zappi card is like the the original brand of these. Fantastic. And

And so what it is, it's an NFC chip embedded into a piece of plastic. And it's got the branding, leave us a tap for a Google review type thing. And so Zapby card's a good option. It's just priced, right? So if you go to TMU, it's like a tenth of the price. But at the same time, Zap, I think Zap had a nicer look, but we really like these white ones. I'm impressed. So I was in one of our clients' office two weeks ago, maybe? Yeah, Maybe three weeks ago.

and they had Zappi cards and I'm I'm clued in to pay attention to that. And I was looking, she had four or five of them all over her clinic. But they were so tiny. They just didn't make sense. They didn't stand out. Well, they didn't stand out. You would think black full of a white office, it would have stood out. And then I saw this and I'm like, that stands out way better. Now I still like Zappi card and if it starts to come in white, we'll start buying white ones. But I was just thinking for a clinic, these white ones,

You can get them on TeamU, but anyway, keep going with that thought. If you're not afraid of TeamU, you can get them on TeamU. Nothing to be afraid of. You're out four bucks. There's like a six dollar purchase here. And then they even have a little tiny sticker, NFC stickers that says leave us a review in Google. So you can like stick them everywhere. Anyway, so this is just one active way that you can get reviews, your software, your EMR software, whatever you're using to capture patient information, like a solve or whatever.

Generally, they have now some type of review management built in there where they can send off a text. I've seen some now that have AI responders that can respond to review, all the things. So that's part of the SEO piece. So if you're checking off all of these boxes up to this point, the next thing to go into is social. So social, we designed social to be one of the last options you pick because you got to the first two right. 100 % on board with that. Yeah, because social is like the cherry on the top. So we don't.

We rarely see social being the number one leader for your lead count, but it does add to your lead count. So generally speaking, if you're, when we say social, we're like saying running Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Tik Tok ads as themselves. That's for the traditional urgent care. I do want to add the caveat to that, that if you're running weight loss or if you're doing injectables or add on services that aren't sickness related, even like Ocmid. So LinkedIn is a great place to run ads for Ocmid and to target business owners.

there's a place for social media. We're just talking like specifically with urgent care. But when you start trickling into some of these ancillary services, running paid ads on social media platforms for people that don't already know you offer that, that is actually a really good place for that. Yeah. So now if you're just an urgent care that just does sickness, like you're treating ailments and illnesses, you know, it's more of a branding move where people are being exposed to it. We still see conversions happening off of it, just not as much.

And that's the reason why we even say like, let's get your first two buckets full and then we'll look at this third bucket. And then the last bit of that is social posting. Now we offer social posting, but we also say if you have somebody internally that can figure this out, the organic internal posting usually looks really good. Better engagement typically. Because at the end of the day, if you're not feeding us things, we're posting things about the industry and what we've been given or seen on your site. But there's some limiting factors there.

So that's how we view it at the end of the day. And what does that all mean? What does that translate into? So if you're just running Google Ads and you're running a $2 $3 ,000 ad spend budget, you're probably getting 100 plus leads a month minimum. Should be. Yeah, like really and truly. Because our lead costs, let's just break it out to you, our standard for a leak for an actual conversion cost is below $10 now. Like it used to be below $20. Now we're moving toward $10.

Like that's our new standard we're pushing into right now in the Google Ads space. So just run math. We're always about running some math around here because at the end of the day, math kind of tells you if it's a good idea or a bad idea. And in this scenario, if it's costing you $10 a conversion and you are getting a pretty high, we know in the urgent care space that the conversion rate is pretty high because they're basically ready to go, basically to make sure you're open.

and you can do whatever they need you to do. So we'll say the conversion rate is probably like 80 % or 75 % high. so seven or eight out 10 of those that you just paid $10 each. So you paid 100 bucks and you got eight patients in your door. That's the mindset behind it. So if you had $1 ,000, that's probably like 80 patients possibly. That's why we say...

If you're running two or three grand a month in ad spend on Google Ads, you should be getting at least 100 patients a month off of it. And that is getting new patients. Yeah. Right. So that's the formula on the digital side. Obviously, there's some other things that we talk about. But as we get new patients through the door, we need to deliver on our promise to give good care. And we want help you deliver better care. part of our mission here at Walk -Ins Welcome is to help you do that. So we've tried to bring on people that are going to help you be HIPAA compliant.

We'll talk more about that in future, especially with Ron. making sure that you're HIPAA compliant, making sure that you have review systems in place to get that feedback, making sure that you understand that front desk advantage. And there's episodes that you can go back in reference to talk about. Put a smile on, answer the phone with a smile, answer the phone.

Right, please. I'm not gonna lie. I don't. OK, so we were I've been trying to reach out to some certain urgent cares. We sent you guys some cookies and all things. There were two urgent cares that would not talk to me. They kept hanging the phone up on me. Right. Two of them. And they're in Texas. So if you're in Texas, you might be one of them. But literally, I would call. I would hear you go click, click. And I was like, well, maybe they just messed up. Call them and click, click. And like.

You don't know who I am. You literally could be hanging up on some lead that your boss paid for. That's right. Please stop doing that. Please answer. I don't care how busy you are. If you're so busy you can answer the phone. Get a call center. Get a call center and answer something. Come on. For sure. Yeah. And I know you want to filter us out of your conversation. I get that. Like, yeah, we know who I was. But when you don't know them at all. Yeah. That's where you just go. I'm not interested in hanging up. At least at least say hello.

But we want to help you deliver better care. And so we try and bring on other urgent cares that are out there doing really good work in their space. Mercy urgent care comes to mind, the AFCs that have been a part of our show. And we want to encourage you to go back and listen to those episodes and how they're delivering care that stands out. Okay. The next thing is repeat visits. Right? So repeat visits. You don't just want a one -time patient. You want a multi -time patient and then you want their family too. And we did a very

It's one of my favorite episodes. It may not be the most popular, but it was one of my favorites. And it's called the patient care power move. yeah. Right. So that was the name of it. And it was simply just always book a meeting from a meeting and taking cues from like a dental office that we talked about hands you the card last week or maybe the week before with Jessica. You make the assumption of something of sale, Like come back, right? But we want to help you get repeat.

visits. Now, you brought up social media. OK. So one of the digital strategies for social media is our retargeting. Yep. Right. So if you have... explain it, right? Yeah. Yeah. So if you have patients that are visiting your website, if you have patients that are doing business with you, you have access to that first party data. Well, you can retarget them and people that look like them.

on social media without violating HIPAA. Yeah, because when we say retarget patients, we're talking about people that visit your website. We cannot and will not retarget people who go into your patient portal. No, ever. No, that is a violation If somebody sells that to you, I can retarget your patient base. You got to put a lot of questions to that. So Russ, when we say retarget, like they went to Nick's UrgentCare .com.

And we can see that that's perfectly fine data because they're not entering data anywhere on that site. They're going third party the second they want to put information on that site. And so like we're seeing those people and they could be patients. Most of them probably would be to a certain degree or potential patients. And so but the nice thing is because we have the pixels and things like that on from Facebook, it can now capture that information.

It's not being super creepy. Now we can't tell you exactly what Facebook's doing because we don't really know what Facebook's up to. But we just know that all the platforms know a whole lot more about you than you know about yourself. Facebook doesn't know what Facebook's up to. No, no they don't. But we want you to be able to get those repeat visits also through booking meetings from a meeting. We've talked about that. If somebody came in and they're sick, the best thing that you could do is have your front desk person. The doctor wants to see you next week. Can you come in on Monday or Wednesday?

Yeah, and just get it into their account. mean, they can say, no, I'm not coming back. But that's another copay, another reason to genuinely deliver good care. It's not just a money grab, but you will make money. And that's what we want you to do. It is retail health care. And it's called that for a reason. And we've talked about the ancillary services that do require comebacks, right? So like the weight loss clinic type things or IV therapy, things that like, yeah, coming once isn't going to cut it. You got to come back.

three, five, 10, 15, 20 times. So like that's the that's those repeat business. Yeah. And repeat recurring business is a wonderful thing. And it's some and I will say that we talked about this urgent cares have a struggle with that piece of the puzzle because there's no brand loyalty in this industry. now there's not there's just not like and I think I think urgent cares recognize that mostly we have quite a few like they all do the red letter urgent care. They don't even care about the brand of the name.

so much as they do just want you to know that you can see them from the road. like, there's one turn. I was even having a conversation with the UCA people because they're doing a potential PR stuff in the future. And part of the plan that they sent me, I was like, I don't think people have a misunderstanding what urgent cares are anymore. Right. And she's like, yeah, I know.

And it's like, okay, good. I'm glad we're on the same page. We're not the only ones. Yeah. So what's happening is, so this is a product lifecycle situation on this industry. So it was in growth or startup mode. That was probably 30 years ago. Like the idea of the word urgent care is probably about 30 years old, at least in this country. And 15 years ago, it went into growth mode where not only was your AFC around, but there were lots of options for urgent cares.

And now we're hitting maturity mode where people know what it is, they're not confused by it, and then there's a lot of players now. There's no more early adopter advantages anymore. So now it's just like, this is like a good model, let's go after it. Well, that takes us to our final piece of it, which is to help you scale your clinic. So if you're getting new patients through the door,

and you're hitting those revenue numbers of average between somewhere anywhere between 170, 220, depending on where you're located per patient. you're delivering good care that gives you repeat business for a multitude of reasons. They keep coming back and bringing people with them, right? Then you're going to get into a position where you're doing 60 patients plus a day. And that gives you options. Add more services, add more doctors, add more locations. Now you're going into scalability for your clinic.

And ultimately, I think everybody that listens to this podcast, I think you're either in a startup mode, you're in a growth mode. Maybe you're looking to be into a growth mode. Maybe you've stalled out a little bit. You've hit a plateau. Or you're looking for the next direction you need to take your clinic. it more services? Is it more doctors? Is it more locations? Is it all the above? Right. How do we increase our revenue? Again, I'm going to fall back to retail healthcare. This isn't your hospital. You're in this, in my opinion,

part of your main reason should be to turn a profit, right? It is a business. You got into urgent care, dental chiropractor, you name it, you got in it ultimately because you want to feed your family and grow, right? And that's part of what this podcast is all about. We want to help you scale your clinic. We also want to scale ourselves. And that's why I brought this here. And I wanted to talk about some things that are coming up. We have the symposium that's in a couple of weeks. We're going to be

Nashville, if you if you're listening to this podcast, then you're going to be at the Solve Symposium that's coming up. Yep. The marketing symposium. I'd love to say hello to you. Yeah. So would Michael, we're going to be up there hanging out. going to. We sponsored the cocktail. That or the DJ. It's by a DJ booth. That's all we know. Right. And then we're, you know, we're showing up just to chat with people. April has been super kind to us through whole process. We love April from Solve.

group. But yeah, I mean, we'll be there end of September, first of October, three days or something. Yeah, it's coming up and you're either going or you're not. You know if you're going. Yeah. Same thing with the Southeast Regional. Saruca is coming up and that's toward October 24th. Yeah, it's near the end of October. And it's in Atlanta. So we're actually, so this will actually be the first time we're sending our team and not ourselves. Yeah, you're going to get to meet some really cool ladies though. Yeah, it's all ladies. You hear us talk about Hannah all the time.

You've met Grace if you've watched any of our episodes. Grace has been on. Kelsey's our newest team member. Kelsey's awesome. which I do have a funny with Kelsey. So as a company, as a culture here, so we're very nine to five Monday through Friday weekends we do not touch. And so that's what you absolutely have to. Yeah. Like and it's rare. And so like part of our pitch to any new hire is like, hey, we respect your schedules. If it's five o one p you're not being contacted.

For clients lighting you up, you're OK to say go to the next day or whatever. Unless it's a true emergency. But it was funny to me because when we decided that we're not going to this event, we're going to have our team go. And it's like a Thursday, Friday, Saturday thing. And I went to Kelsey. said, Kelsey, I lied to you. She said, what do you mean? I said, I'm going to ask you to work on a Saturday. She's like,

okay. And then we explained, she's, it's fine. She came from an event space where she was working every weekend of her entire life until 4 a every weekend. And so she was like, okay, I don't really. her and Hannah could have just or Hannah and Grace could have just gone. But that's story. That's not for this. We're going to be at the Soruka Conference in Atlanta at the end of October. Again, I want to invite you come talk to us, come hang out with us. We want to meet you.

Our team wants to meet you there. You won't see us in person there, but you're definitely going to want to meet. Actually, if I'm being fair, they're probably more interesting than me. Like less, less. That's what I mean. Like arguably you're going to have a really good experience talking to one of those ladies because they're just genuine all person. Especially Hannah. She'll just tell you how it is. She's our ray of sunshine. Heather adds expletives. My wife has expletives to that.

Ray of Effing Sunshine. But it's hilarious because she is just all personality. All right. And again, in the spirit of scale, we're going to be trying something new. This has never been a salesy podcast and that's not our goal to ever become that. However, no, I'm not going to sell you right now. However, we are looking to bring on a new sponsor to the podcast. the only reason I mention that now is because it

I wanted to say this before they became a part of the show so that I'm not pitching them before they come onto the show or when they come on the show. That sounds salesy, right? What I want to say is like, we know this person, we know their product. We believe it's going to genuinely help you. And they've been on the show. They've been on the show a couple of times. Yep. They've been on the show a couple of times talking and trying to serve this community as well. And it just made sense for us to bring somebody like that on to get in front of you regularly, because it's really going to be a good benefit to your.

Yeah. They brought a product to us last week and it was like, we got to get that on the box. That's going to serve. Like this will actually solve a lot of problems. Cause we even had an urgent care that is no longer a client because they broke KEPA and literally said, I wish they met you guys last year. Cause it would have solved this problem. And I'm so glad we weren't a part of that conversation. Nonetheless, I wanted to lay that up before they actually sponsored the program. Like formally.

because I didn't want to get on there on that episode and be like, here's why we brought them in. And everybody goes, I was rather paying you to do that. Well, technically speaking, we're not taking a dollar for it. That's how much we care about them being on the podcast. And that did it because their impact. So like, while we impact the growth of your revenue, they impact the protection of your revenue. Right. Essentially. So it is not a money grab for us at all. And I wanted to lay that out. The last thing from a more selfish perspective is we are continuing to see growth on this podcast. And I want to first

Thank you for that. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for subscribing to our YouTube channel. And if you hadn't hadn't subscribed yet, please hit that button. Smash that subscribe. I feel like is that like a fad now? I think it's over now. And I'm way late to the game on that. it used to be like they'd be smashed that mid sentence. And before I tell you about this next, they smash that anyway. Exactly. So but we do want you to subscribe. We're it now. So we're totally cool. We're getting good feedback on YouTube and we want to continue to grow that channel. That's the best place in my

opinion to consume this content because you get to see and hang out with and we have unique content on YouTube that's not on this podcast. We've now put out five or six videos that's all about training you guys like actual training videos. If you're going to do this, do that. If you're going to pursue something as a DIY on your business, here's the best practice. This is what we tell you to do. So we know it's not just me. It's not just Nick. We got Philip on there. We have Devin on there. I Ken is on there or we'll be

So we have layers of people on there now. So it's not just the same people talking. And it's a full blown screen share video and shout out to Janie and her editing skills and bringing that. Janie's been our most recent hires and her video editing is on point. Social is great too, but we've been really impressed with her video. So because I'm focused on growing the YouTube channel, well one, if you're listening to this on Apple podcasts or Spotify, thank you again, subscribe to the channel and leave us a review. Really, really value that. But

If you're, we already did this for, for leaving a review. This is going to be a little different. Here's what I'm at. Here's my ask and I'll give you something for it. All right. My ask is one subscribe when you, when you see this video on YouTube, subscribe to the channel. The second thing that I want you to do is I want you to leave a comment saying subscribed and then whatever comment you guys suck. I don't like you anymore and die in a fire or we love you and we appreciate you or Hey, thanks. Right. Anything you want to say.

All right. If you will do that and screenshot it and email it to hello at patientcaremarketingpros .com. Hello at patientcaremarketingpros .com. Just do your screenshot. We're going to give you a tent, a bought the marketer sticker because those are fun. A syringe pen because that'll mail real well in the, in the mail. Anyway, it's a pen, not a syringe. Well, it's not a germax. We're fine. Right. A patient care marketing pro shirt.

You have to tell us your size. You have to tell us your size whenever you do the picture. And then I'll send you a copy of my book. It's called Walk -Ins Welcome Shocker. Shock and all. And a shocking turn of events to absolutely no one. I wrote a book called Walk -Ins Welcome. This is triple your patient volume through digital marketing services. I'll put that in your hand as well. Because that really just, our number one source of getting new business is this podcast.

Yeah, right. And y 'all do business with us and we appreciate you and we want more of you because we like doing business with the urgent care space. So I'm not going to keep rambling here. Michael, any final thoughts and then I'll take us out. other than simply supply is limited legitimately. How about I say this 10 comments? Yeah, 10 is about as much as we have in product right now to give also too. So we've just kicked off a LinkedIn group as well. We have a Facebook group. You guys are you guys are engaging on it. But do

to some suggestions to us. We've now kicked off a LinkedIn group as well. We'll see how it goes. Similar content, not gonna lie. But the goal is that we're seeing more doctors on LinkedIn and Facebook from an engagement standpoint. So it just made sense to pick up that group. And so we just spun it off. if you're listening to this episode, it may be only like a week or two old in terms of growth. we're gonna be sending out some invites and hopefully you can come on there. I love to see you out there. Love that.

Please ask questions in the group because we're there to help each other. We're not here to sell you. So love to see you on that. Awesome. Thank you for listening. Appreciate y 'all chiming in as always. Leave us those reviews, leave us those comments, give us that feedback so we can continue to make this a amazing and getting better every episode podcast for you. All right. See you. Have a great week.