Ep. 169: Boosting Urgent Care Productivity with AI Co-Pilots - Interview with Geoffrey Gu from Fluency

PCMP (00:00)
What's up everybody. You're listening to Walk-Ins Welcome with Nick and Michael and now Al. I'm excited to have a guest with us today. We'll talk about him in just a minute, but as always, we're here to help you get more patients, deliver better care, get repeat visits and scale your clinics. Michael, what's up brother? How are you? What is happening? Yeah, we're excited. Once again, we're continuing our series of having lots of people come on to be interviewed. Al Yousef, he's with Main Street Family Care, which is also Kids Street Urgent Care and

We tried to get them on a couple of weeks ago, but they had a little mishap on scheduling. So we finally got them on. We're excited though, because what's really cool about these guys, they have 62 locations right now. They're growing. you, has seen a lot of things and we're going to talk about those things and like, how do we deal with this massive amount of clinics and what to do with them? Al, thanks for having me coming on. Say what's up to the Walk-Ins Welcome audience and tell us one thing about you that nobody else knows.

Al Yousefi (00:40)
Thank

What's up, Walk-Ins? Welcome. Glad to be here, proud to be here. One thing folks don't know about me typically is that if it's got strings on it, I can play it. And if I haven't played it before, just give me like an hour by myself and I'll have something okay-ish down.

PCMP (01:09)
I love it, man. Do you have a preferred instrument with strings on it?

Al Yousefi (01:12)
Oh

yeah, definitely. The guitar was where I started as a kid. The guitar and the piano.

PCMP (01:20)
I think what kills me about the piano is I recently realized that it is a percussion instrument. Who would thought?

Al Yousefi (01:27)
Yeah, I guess it is, isn't it?

PCMP (01:29)
It is because you hit it with a hammer. That makes total sense. Yeah. So I just, found that fascinating.

Al Yousefi (01:31)
Bap bap bap. Yeah. So I can play a couple

percussion instruments as well. I can do a little bit of slap guitar too. August Rush style.

PCMP (01:38)
There you go. Now you're in business. Now the harpsichord, harpsichord, harpsichord you pluck.

All right. We got to get you a mandolin and see how it goes. Al man, we're glad to have you on here. Now listen, Main Street Urgent Care and Kid Street Urgent Care. My introduction to you guys is I had to go to, I had to go to an urgent care and I went to Main Street and it was attached to Kid Street. And I was like, okay.

Well, it says main street first, so I'm going to go in there. And then the next time I came, I'm like, well, they had a kid's street, so I'm going to go in there too. And I brought my kid the next time I went. So yeah, we even have a location like three minutes from our office. So we know exactly, it's beside all these.

Al Yousefi (02:18)
yeah, so you

guys must be in want to say close to the Pelham location then

PCMP (02:22)
Very, close to that. we're off in the River Chase Parkway area.

Al Yousefi (02:26)
yeah, that's a good one. It's probably one of my favorites.

PCMP (02:29)
Yeah. My wife shops at the Aldi right next to it. We take our kids to kid street and it is what it is, man. Hey, listen, brother. We're glad to have you today, pulling strings and all, but let's get into this. I want to know, you've been at, main street for about a year and a half, but, talk to us a little bit about your background and your journey. What took you to main street?

Al Yousefi (02:48)
man. Well, when I got into marketing, it was kind of by accident. Walking out of college, my plan was to become either a therapist or go into research in psychology. But, just, you know, one of those weird coincidences, a friend of mine, their dad ran a really big branding firm and he and I got along real well. And so he brought me on board at a low level position and pretty quickly I worked my way up. And after two or three years of that,

I got into agency life, worked at a few different agencies, loved the rhythm, loved getting so much experience across different industries. And I'd say the most defining thing about me, regardless of where I've been is I typically, I'm very outcome oriented and I'm very interested in what it takes to get the win, I guess is a good way to put it. And so,

There have been few times I think that everything I was involved in actually matched whatever my role was, but I kind of like it that way. Main Street is only the second place that I've been in house at and it is my first, I've had team lead type roles, manager roles, but it's the first place where I've been a department head. And it has been.

Probably one of the most fulfilling experiences of my adult life, the bad times and the good times to both of them. I, I ended up here after leaving my last agency. was just, I'd felt like I had, I had done my, I'd served my sentence in the agency world. getting, getting my feet wet, getting that variety of experience. And a lot of the agency life was focused on digital marketing.

PCMP (04:27)
Yeah.

Al Yousefi (04:37)
with only one or two of them having any involvement in branding and traditional marketing. So main street, when I first showed up there, when I first applied, they were looking for somebody that was well-rounded, somebody young and hungry. And, that was me. And I actually didn't start as the department head. started right under the department head, Betsy at the time, who is fantastic, but she was on the way out and we were looking at.

bringing on a replacement. And pretty soon after I was working kind of close to their CEO for a couple of months. And he was like, this kid's got the right stuff. And so now I run marketing at Main Street and have done so for about 95 % of the time I've been there. And like I said, it's been one of the most fulfilling experiences and definitely a huge learning experience.

PCMP (05:32)
So there's this kind of shift that happens as you grow your urgent care. A lot of our listeners are in startup mode or maybe they're a single location. And then we have some that are in the hundreds of locations, right? But there's this switch and maybe you know when it is. I don't know when it is. We haven't figured it out yet, but there's a switch.

Al Yousefi (05:51)
I would say somewhere around 15 to

20 locations if I'm on the right page.

PCMP (05:55)
Yeah, if you're talking about like once they bring it in-house. so that like with that, so 15 to 20, what is the benefit of having an in-house team?

Al Yousefi (05:58)
Mm-hmm.

Agency you if you want people that are going to manage certain channels or certain tasks, that's one thing. Speaking of marketing in general, like I said, my mindset was I'm going to get my agency years in, get the variety. want to go in-house after that. And I'll be honest, I thought that it was like the kind of thing where in-house is easier because you have one client and not like, you know, multiple, but

The challenge that in-house brings and the benefit to the company is that you have this increased flexibility, uh, especially if you're on the leaner side, cause the margins in urgent care in the urgent care space typically mean that your teams will need to be somewhat on the leaner side, not just marketing, but across the board. And so that means people have to wear many hats. People have to be able to, able and willing to pitch in when it comes to ops or new tech team initiatives, stuff like that.

So like a great example would be we rolled out our kiosks, automated front desk about a couple months after I got here. And marketing played a pretty significant role in making sure that the patient experience and customer feedback was getting back to our tech team. And I would say we were probably...

Even including tech team, would say we were probably the department most keyed in to what the patient and potential patient sentiment was looking like for these automated front desks. So with an agency, in my experience, occasionally you get a client who's bold enough to bring an assignment like that your way and you're there like, hey, you're managing Google ads and Facebook.

How would you like to also be responding to our reviews, making tickets for patients and getting that feedback back to the proper departments? And an agency will say, absolutely. Am I allowed to say hell no?

PCMP (08:06)
You can say it if you'd like to. Yeah, absolutely.

Al Yousefi (08:08)
All right. An agency is going to say hell no. So you get the flexibility that I think is required, especially, I mean, I'm thinking even with the big brands, like the biggest brands like fast pace and AFC, your marketing department is going to have to have some agility that you're not going to get from an agency or from probably from freelancers. And then on top of that, there's the issue of there's HIPAA, not the issue of, but there's HIPAA.

And so you don't want your patient communications going through. And no matter what, a fair amount of this is going to involve patient communications. People are going to respond to things. People are going to hit you up over social, et cetera. And just as well, you're taking the operational side of things and you're putting it out there on social, on your GMB updated regularly. agencies typically aren't going to be very useful for that. And so a lot of people will start with a Betsy and

maybe two or three others. Typically at least one of them is going to be freelance. And then around, I think around 10 locations is typically where you start to see the burnout get to them. And then around 15 is where I think leadership typically tends to recognize it and go, okay, they need a team. I think we got to that point of actually like making marketing a team as opposed to a few people.

somewhere around 25 ish clinics. And then I would say marketing went from being a team to a department around 40, around the same time I showed up. Um, and the good news is I got here right about after 40, but I would consider myself one of the better Main Street historians because I'm a naturally curious person. Um, but yeah, that's probably the biggest that said, especially because lean teams and all every now and again,

PCMP (09:57)
Sure.

Al Yousefi (10:06)
I don't think there will ever be a time, regardless of our size, when we're not relying on at least one or two agency partners, just on the basis that it is, if you have the right relationships, it's going to be much more cost effective than bringing on a role dedicated just to that thing. And even if you have them wear multiple hats, there are some roles that just aren't suitable for wearing multiple hats. someone who's great at navigating.

getting audience data in this post third party data world, they're not gonna be someone great for also responding to reviews. It's just, that is the case.

PCMP (10:44)
Two different skill sets, right?

Al Yousefi (10:46)
So for some

of the more specialized stuff, definitely better going agency, even I would say early on.

PCMP (10:52)
Right. mean, I would even say that I think you've touched on a point that we brought up before in the past of it's difficult for someone to wear X amount of hats and be really, really great at every hat they put on. Cause at the end of the day, like there's a desire or a passion toward one or two things, but they can't expect that for if they have five different things to try and do. Like you say, like an analytical person may not be very social. So like having them do so.

Al Yousefi (11:04)
yeah.

PCMP (11:18)
Take a very analytical person and make them do social posts. Like, it's probably not going to jive very well and vice versa, right? You take a very creative person and ask them to do data crunching every day. It's not going to work out too well. So we've talked about that before. I recognize, I'm glad you brought it up real life, right? And then you also brought up the other interesting part of, while you have a whole marketing department, there is like one or two things like an agency could like be very specific in helping with, just because it just makes sense to like.

Al Yousefi (11:23)
Mm-hmm.

PCMP (11:46)
why waste the entire position on something that an agency could fill in the gap for. And, you know, we've talked about the benefits of the agency because we are one, but at the end of the day, like it's a strategic move. We're pro everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like if you, if you really listen to us, we think there's a season where you need to just do your own thing. Yeah. Cause you need to learn who your audience is. You don't know enough about them yet. And then there's a season where like you need to get out of your own way, let somebody step in like an agency that does it all day, every day. And then you need to learn how to measure the results.

Al Yousefi (12:07)
in here.

PCMP (12:15)
And there's a season that we're talking about now, like what is the threshold where you take it in house and you start building a team for the specifics. And then like you had already mentioned, build to build in the gap. So what is the size of your team?

Al Yousefi (12:30)
Currently, it will range at any given point from 10 to 15 people. And with the wearing of many hats, there are times where there, I wouldn't necessarily call them my team, but times where I'm gonna be, it's almost like secondary leadership involved in operations or product team or tech team.

PCMP (12:35)
You get a nice sized team.

Al Yousefi (12:54)
And so every now and again, I have a project where my team is maybe only one people, one person from my actual department, and then four or five people from a different department. And you have to be, I think, somewhat flexible for that. Although I will also say, I think in general, there is, and this isn't just an urgent care thing, but urgent care and similar. think oftentimes you kind of run this risk when you start bringing on

highly experienced specialists, only on the basis that there are very few things, I think, in this business model that someone can get away with being a marketing specialist of some kind, like exclusively. Which is unfortunate because you you have this network you want to dip into and you have to hire somebody and it's like, I know so many people who are absolute design kings and queens and yet

I know I can't probably rely on them to go outside of scope. They're going to start after a few months, probably feeling a little bit like, well, that's not part of my job. So I would say, and the solution to that is typically hiring very multifaceted people. Like for example, our web designer is also by trade and this is common, just a designer designer.

PCMP (14:02)
That's not what you hired me for. Yep.

Al Yousefi (14:21)
And so they handle both sides of that as well as dipping into tech team occasionally for extra help. And we have a data scientist and that data scientist has the skillsets necessary for programming bots for when we need to start automating work that has become ridiculous because of the scale. so it's like, and in that way I've

I've got most of the, think most of the team minus maybe one, yeah, no, minus one person. They've all been hires that I made. And I've tried to do a good job of making sure that they were similar to me in the sense that they had that multifaceted background and approach. But going back to what you guys were saying earlier, I will say as as a occasional listener, my take with you guys is that you've never necessarily come across as pro agency. You guys always come across as, I don't know.

I would define it as like pro outcomes or pro urgent cares, I guess I would say. but, and I think a lot of this is the SEO in my background. I usually think of things in a very impact versus ERP effort versus impact sort of way. And that's typically the logic that leads to that, that is immediately before the decision-making for bringing on agency or freelance, help is just, it.

PCMP (15:20)
Yeah. For sure. Yes.

Al Yousefi (15:45)
worth it for us to try to do that in-house, try to make it a thing for ourselves. And a lot of the time when it's, there's just, there's so many situations where it's not.

So we have like two or three agents of governance at any given point nowadays.

PCMP (15:57)
Well, you guys.

Well, I mean, I'd be very interested to know from a pure marketing perspective, how you differentiate Main Street and Kids Street when it's such an integrated brand. And I'll tell you just from the background, have Nick the Marketer, which is our legacy agency, which is we just do Birmingham based businesses. We don't even focus on it anymore because I can't focus on two things like that very well. So we're all in on urgent cares. That's all we do now. But here's Nick the Marketer kind of hanging out here like a redheaded stepchild.

Al Yousefi (16:11)
Thank you.

I feel you.

Hahaha

PCMP (16:31)
And then you guys have, y'all

have Main Street and Kid Street. How are you proactive with both brands knowing they have two different sets, right? Like there's some similarities, but they're two different brands.

Al Yousefi (16:42)
Mm Well, so the the the acquisition part of our marketing for both has plenty of overlap. I would say the because the cool thing about urgent care, like let's say there's no kid street for a second. It's all Main Street. It's a need based service, you know, you there's no amount of marketing you can do to make people sick in higher quantities where you have clinics.

I mean, I guess you could, I've proposed it, but I'm told that it's a bad idea, technically a war crime. So we don't do that. But, what you can do is you can try to maintain that awareness. And of course there's profitability to keep in mind to some degree, but the profit margins don't tend to change too much between the age groups of 18 to 65. And so the targeting for Main Street, and this is more important when it comes to

acquisition, but it's also relevant when we're talking about our awareness efforts. It's a lot more broad. And if there was only a main street, then my job would be a lot easier. and in general, in comparison to other industries, urgent care, that's general urgent care. It's a, it's a pretty good living. It's a, it's a good vertical to get into for a healthy enough work life balance with kids street though, this

PCMP (17:49)
I I feel that.

Al Yousefi (18:06)
Pediatric brand. That's really where a lot of our more critical thinking becomes necessary. And so that's where the kind of research that I'm used to the sorts of segmenting and tactics that I'm used to. That's where we tend to see more of that on your end. I'm so sorry. This is supposed to be silent. It's okay. We'll cut it. perfect. Turn it off.

PCMP (18:28)
We didn't hear you. good news is we didn't know. Yeah, you're all good.

Al Yousefi (18:35)
So it's difficult for sure. And one way that I keep them separate, I noticed early on that the most important place to keep it separate is in the mind of the employee. So when we talk about Main Street,

PCMP (18:49)
That's good.

Al Yousefi (18:52)
internally, we don't we're not talking about kids, we're talking about Main Street. And if we're talking about kids insane for vice versa, and just the same, there's these little things that people probably find kind of odd, but serve a purpose like our budgets are in completely separate workbooks are our campaign docs, totally separate. I

I have to do a fair amount to keep it that way because otherwise there starts to be spillover in the thinking. And as long as I have everyone thinking about it, like two separate businesses with two different requirements that tends to be effective. And for the folks involved in acquisition. It's we have, you know, two portfolios in our ads accounts. And that's about as far as I can go beyond just the keeping documentation separate, but

for social programmatic stuff like that. It's probably easier just on the basis that they have to do so much more for kids streets. So it's more like when we have to when they have to do Main Street stuff. It's like I'm like, Hey, can I get you to do a Main Street thing real quick? As a so there's almost never a situation where I'm talking about the everything across the board.

PCMP (20:10)
I mean, I think you're giving like a almost a warning signal to people, hey, if you're an urgent care, you're trying to spin up a pediatric version, be prepared. Well, I mean, it's it's, it's a Yeah, it's a

Al Yousefi (20:19)
yeah, definitely. Not just pediatric. Any kind of specialized

offshoot, you're going to make, you need to make sure that, and I know that we do it with clinic staff as well. Our kids street staff is trained differently than our main street staff.

PCMP (20:34)
Well, I mean, it's to me, it's two different businesses. And we see it not as often in the pediatric side. Typically when we're dealing with clients, they have a dedicated primary care side, right? So you have the urgent care that they're trying to convert to the primary care, which are same doctor to completely different schools of thought, right? So almost feel like

Al Yousefi (20:50)
Thank you, man.

PCMP (20:57)
there's a mandate that if it's primary care, you have to wait three months to see them. Like it can't be, you have to push it out. Like, whether you need to or not irrelevant. So anyway, that's just a stupid joke, but, keeping those two brands separate, you guys focus mainly on like small town rule. Is that the, is that the brand target? Because it's been my experience that in marketing efforts, talking to people and I,

Al Yousefi (21:03)
Right?

PCMP (21:25)
I know I'm being location specific here in Birmingham at the moment, so forgive me. Talking to people in Pelham is a very different conversation than talking to people in Mountain Brook. Choose your city, right? One is middle class, maybe even lower middle class to like super high end, super high, like top 1 % income earners to completely different methodologies. And that's your target, right? Y'all are just hitting the rule small town.

Al Yousefi (21:53)
So our main streets are all very rural focused. if we didn't have, our kids streets are in small to medium sized cities. Palom's a pretty good example. I would say for Alabama, Montgomery is probably a good go-to example for the kinds of places you would find kids streets. And so separate from the whole like, this is a different audience thing. There is just the fact that there's one brand that's in places like,

Charlotte and Chapel Hill and Savannah, Georgia and stuff like that. And the other is in a lot of places that you've probably never heard of, like Onyona, Alabama and Cairo, Georgia, stuff like that. What? Well, yeah.

PCMP (22:34)
Yeah. I know on the honor, believe it or not, there's an attorney there that I'm friends with. Yeah. Yeah. Servant law, man. Good people. It's not funny when I hear the word on the

honor. I always think of like a T ball. Yeah. You're trying to make the noise and T ball. That's what I always think of on the honor.

Al Yousefi (22:49)
Yeah.

Ani on a oxen free. I, yeah. So our, our rural audiences, we do have to even just in comparison to our small to medium cities where we have kids streets, it's such a, not even just in, you know, the copy and the messaging, but even in the strategies and where we're going to reach them, it's a completely different ball game. If we started opening kids streets in cities like Atlanta or something. man.

PCMP (22:55)
There you go.

Al Yousefi (23:18)
That would be a third layer of distinction that would not be fun. Maybe it would be kind of an extension of like the kid street locations, the Montgomery strategy, but I doubt it. But it really is a whole separate ball game when we're talking about main streets because they are in those rural areas. I mean, so many of them are places with less than a thousand people where people are coming like 20, 25 minutes because we're the nearest urgent care.

PCMP (23:46)
Well, so talking on that a little bit too on the talk about your footprint is so you started there around 40 locations. You're up to 62 and planning to grow more. Can you talk about some of the challenges of opening up those new locations like some things that you face that people may not think about? And is there some strategies that y'all lean into? you're saying rural, right? So like, that's kind of a different mindset for a lot of reasons of, you know,

Al Yousefi (24:06)
yeah.

Thank you.

PCMP (24:14)
because you're having to extend your reach a little further. It's not, because in our world, like two to five mile radius does a lot for an urgent care. But if you're in rural, like you said, they may have to drive 30 minutes, which is more like a 10 to 20 mile radius. So that's always a big.

Al Yousefi (24:26)
yeah.

Well, I will say the most important thing is to keep such a distinct and separate strategy for new clinics marketing versus existing clinics. That's another way we classify a lot of our clinics is we have our existing, like almost every list is going to be broken down by existing versus new or kid street versus main street or some version of both. For new clinic, especially in the

more rural areas, you got to get out there in advance. You need the that kind of awareness that it gets harder to measure like billboards, traditional radio for rural streaming radio and traditional radio for more metropolitan. But beyond that, I'd say like without giving too much away, our opening our new clinic budget.

which is the budget that a clinic has for the three months leading into and the three months afterwards is about.

double what, so that's six months, that's about double what an existing clinic in the same brand is going to get for the whole year. So we really go heavy early on and the better we do that historically, the better the clinic ends up performing even years later. Beyond that, you have to be really flexible because when it comes to the kinds of properties that most urgent cares use for their businesses,

You run into all kinds of weirdly specific local rules, whether it's like state or, but especially the local, local ones and in smaller towns, especially cause you don't know how well they actually enforce it. They might have some of their own weird quirks. Like we like to put a big coming soon banner in front of a location while it's being built. And you'd be shocked how often a township is like, absolutely not. There's no roof on the place yet. You put a roof on there.

Then we'll talk or it's got to pass inspection for this, that, or the other, things like that. And so a lot of the time, and that's where I usually come in is that I get to finagle some and shake some hands, learn some names, that sort of thing. But the hard part, especially is that, you know, we'll have a whole rollout laid out. And, you know, six months, seven months in advance before the clinic's meant to open. And then suddenly.

it's shifted like two months. And that happens more often than not, that the date that I first get is a different date than what it actually ends up opening. There have been some clinics that when I got there, was like, it's been opening for like six months now, and then it opened finally like a few months ago.

PCMP (27:23)
That's real.

We've seen that in our own experiences with urgent cares. We're like, hey, I'm ready to open an urgent care. Like if it's a startup situation, cool. Well, let us know when you have an official open day and then we'll talk because we realized that it probably won't happen. And we've had quite a few where they may have said January, it becomes April, May, June or more. And some of it's not so much the building. It's because the insurances are being real resistant about trying to allow some things to then.

Al Yousefi (27:44)
Mm-hmm.

PCMP (27:52)
We've had situations where like, I'm opening, only run these ads because I can't get insurance. Yep. I'm just going to do some cash only offers just to get the ball moving. So it's real. Like, I mean, I don't know of an urgent care yet that's opened on time that we've worked with. Yeah. I mean, you're getting insurances and everything else in place. So yeah, it could be a challenge. absolutely.

Al Yousefi (28:08)
I'm

It's messy. You're dealing with a lot of different outside parties and most of them are going by regulations. And I think that's one of the reasons that the urgent care space, there's a bigger emphasis, I think, on relationship building and maintaining those positive relationships because you are going to have to rely on the grace of others more often than you would in something like the legal field or anything e-commerce.

PCMP (28:39)
That's good, man. All right. I want to fire off a couple of random questions and just have some fun with that for a second if you're up for it. So I want to, I wanted to be fired off quickly and then just the first thing that comes to your mind, because I just think it would be fun. So first question, AI integration, yes or no.

Al Yousefi (28:44)
shoot.

When it's done, I'll wait, yes or no, just yes or no, keep it there.

PCMP (29:00)
You can you can expand quickly, but I want to want to fire off some stuff for sure. OK, go with the asterisk real quick.

Al Yousefi (29:04)
Yes with an asterisk.

Asterisk. They gotta do it well. If I have to rephrase the same question so many times that it would have taken me less time to do it myself. Unintegrate.

PCMP (29:19)
Okay, gotcha. Favorite EMR.

Al Yousefi (29:23)
Ooh, I would say Experian. No, no, genuinely, sincere answer, Experian.

PCMP (29:25)
Don't think about the one you use, just one that you love. Yeah.

Experian. Okay. Experian. I wasn't expecting that. I thought that was like a credit thing. You're talking about Experity? Experity. DocuDap. Okay. Okay. So which is DocuDap, Experity. DocuDap's their old name, right?

Al Yousefi (29:37)
wait, I'm thinking, not Experian, I'm thinking of Docutap. Experity! But Docutap is under Experity, I think. Well, is Docutap

not under Experity? Is that not like under the same umbrella?

PCMP (29:49)
I think that I think it's

all moved to expert at this point. I think I think that's a good answer. Favorite online scheduler.

Al Yousefi (29:57)
Probably our in-house one. I like it because I know how to navigate it better than I have others in the past. And it actually flows quite well, I'll say. And we're still improving it.

PCMP (30:00)
Okay.

I love it. All right. You have one marketing channel, just one that you can pick. Which one are you picking?

Al Yousefi (30:17)
search, if I have to pick between paid and organic, it just depends on what kind of momentum their organic has already. If not much, we're going paid search all the way. And if it does,

PCMP (30:31)
100 % agree with you on that. Paid

search is going to get the fastest result. Okay, so paid search, favorite traditional.

Al Yousefi (30:36)
Woo!

Ooh, you know, the events have really, no, actually, I love the events, but sponsorships have really grown on me, especially. I love being at a high school wrestling thing that I would never go to otherwise. And I'm like, and they're like, here's some banners, come give a speech.

PCMP (30:47)
Okay.

Let's go. Let's go.

I love it man. how you did. All right. I love that. Favorite book that you're reading right now.

Al Yousefi (31:04)
Ooh, that's tough. Probably gunstroms and steel.

PCMP (31:05)
It can be an audible.

It can be an audible if you need to.

Al Yousefi (31:09)
I'm reading Guns, Drums, and Steel again, because I haven't read it in a few years and just noticing new things. And it's a good one. Work-related, probably the leadership pipeline. That one's actually been really useful, even though most business books kind of fall flat on that front when it's leadership stuff.

PCMP (31:11)
Okay.

Favorite leader that you follow.

Al Yousefi (31:34)
Good night. Now that's arrogant.

PCMP (31:37)
Bro was about

to drop Jesus or something. Okay, that's fair.

Al Yousefi (31:39)
I don't know. That's tough. I don't like most of them.

No, I would say my manager from when I was like 18 at this Italian restaurant downtown Zaza his name is Brian and he has been my inspiration as both just a leader like an official leader and when it's been unofficial, but I've known that I've had influence. I've tried to be like Brian Stanfield. Shout out to Brian Stanfield at Zaza.

PCMP (32:05)
I

love it. We need send them this episode when it airs. There you go. Now you can send it to him and Hey man, you made a podcast episode. Way to go. All right, man. So let's, that's my fire round. Thank you for letting me have some fun with that real quick. I get some of the best answers when I put people on the spot. So looking ahead, we're in, we're recording this in January at 25. I think it's come out probably the first week of February, but that's not the point. 25, I think is going to bring a host of changes in how urgent carers go to market.

Al Yousefi (32:09)
Will do!

Hahaha

That's fun.

Mm-hmm.

PCMP (32:36)
And you guys are at 62 locations. Are we expanding? Are we shrinking? And then with that, what do you foresee being the biggest challenge going into 25? Besides payers, can't say payers. Everybody knows that

Al Yousefi (32:51)
I would say we're

expanding. Well, I mean, that's complicated. It depends on the two major things in my mind that define how a year is going to go, whether it's like a calendar year or a fiscal year is flu season. And how's the economy doing? Cause if people have a cold or something, even the flu, maybe whether they're going to get it taken care of or not has a lot to do with how affordable it is then and there, based on how things are going.

PCMP (33:07)
Right.

Al Yousefi (33:19)
I think that, so on the economy part, mean, that's not my purview at all. It seems like we're going in a positive direction or that we're at least in a good enough place that people are gonna still be visiting urgent cares when they're feeling not quite good. But the big one in my mind right now, the one that's...

really messy and just kind of difficult to like figure out, well, what are we going to do about this? Most urgent care is their revenue is about one to one with national flu rates. More often than not, they rely on upper respiratory infections, flu season, that kind of thing is where they make their nut. And if you only had them

based on if the only care was only if the urgent care was only able to use their slow season, most of them would go under so quickly. And something that's been super strange this year, everyone across the country has noticed how weird the weather's been, know, climate change and all. But it got warm or it got cold later than usual. And that's been a trend. But especially this year, I remember the week of Christmas being like, I shouldn't be able to be out here in short sleeves.

And then out of nowhere, it snapped back so quickly and got freezing. think one of the days this week was like the coldest day on record for Alabama in nine years, or one of the coldest days in nine years. That's nuts. But flu rates, upper respiratory infection rates have this, the same one-to-one relationship with how the temperature is changing. So over the last couple of years, something I noticed with

the national flu rates and URI rates is that they start and end later. Like last year, everybody gets kind of panicky and finicky because they're like, it's November, we should be making so much money right now. And then it starts a little bit later and they're like, okay, things are normal. And then it slows down in March instead of February and primary care season starts a little earlier.

I think this is probably been the most dramatic that it's been, and I guess it's only gonna continue in that direction for the foreseeable future. But I'm curious to see if the length of time is still going to be similar, because if it is, then there is nothing to really worry about. It's just a different set of dates. But if the changes that we're seeing in the climate end up...

making the flu less of a problem, then a lot of urgent care and URIs and a lot of urgent cares are going to have to get more creative and lean more into their Achmed services, lean more into the necessities like sports, physical stuff like that. So I don't know, and any urgent cares out there who are having that little bit of, just remember.

Climate change is shifting everything seasonally a little bit. And don't freak out until March.

PCMP (36:25)
Yeah. Well, March, it's all one day.

it's, it's time to burn it all down in March. You know, it's real, hang in there. know, it's real. That's true. It's real though, about you talking about the November late start. So, you know, we have, you know, we have clients all over the country. So we have from California down the, to, know, down to Miami and, you're right because November hit and there was a, especially in the Florida area, like, Hey,

Al Yousefi (36:29)
I'm

PCMP (36:49)
These numbers aren't as good as last year. And I'm like, we can't, and you go pull up search trends and you can see where search trends are down. Like we can't fix demand. I'm sorry. And then once like late November hit, and then really the past two weeks, like these things are great. You know, our numbers are, we can't even keep up. You know, this is awesome. And then we don't hear from them. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think we're going to see this year, we're going to see spikes. And what I mean by that is like,

Al Yousefi (36:57)
yeah.

It's so sudden. It picks up so suddenly.

Mm.

PCMP (37:18)
You're used

to seeing hills and now we're seeing mountains and valleys. Yeah, because I want to because we can see some patient number data and we've seen somewhere. I mean, it's radical. Yeah, like two or three days, like 15, 20 patients like this is crap. And then boom, 65, 70 patients like, oh, those poor souls. We're over here like, hey, we told you we would get you an average of this in the timeframe. The average is working out. I just can't help when they all come in at the same time. exactly. So we'll listen out.

Al Yousefi (37:21)
I think you're right.

yeah. So my number one piece of advice

would be adjust your model. And number two piece of advice would be, don't be overly reactionary. Look at trends, look at averages and try not to freak out because that week numbers were low.

PCMP (37:51)
Yes, that's good.

Exactly. I wish you could just take that piece, play that for every urgent care client we talked to and just say, remember this. Hey, listen to what Al said. Yeah, listen to Hey, Al told us to tell you. They're going to be like, who? And then we can promote the podcast. I love it.

Al Yousefi (38:07)
Hey, please do. Please do. He yells it so many times at like passerbys. I love to give

my unsolicited business advice. It really is my favorite hobby.

PCMP (38:17)
There you go.

I like to call mine my humble but accurate opinion. There you go. Hey, you can have it for free after you give me credit for it twice. There you go. that it's all yours man. That's how, that's how I did it. All right. And on that, thank you Al for coming on. We've enjoyed this podcast. We burned up the 20 plus 30 minute thing already. So we're going to have to end it.

Al Yousefi (38:22)
I might borrow that.

Alright, deal. Alright, fair enough, fair enough.

Thank you.

PCMP (38:42)
but you brought some great information to the table. I know there's some nuggets that our listeners will pull from this. We'll probably get some emails from it too, which is always fun. But Al, thank you again for coming on. Audience, thank you all for listening and we'll catch you on the next one. We'll see you soon. Thanks, Al.

Al Yousefi (38:59)
See you around.