Ep. 181: Urgent Care Association 2025 Convention Recap

Patient Care Marketing Pros (00:00)
Michael, we're going to have a fun time in this episode that's brought to you by Michael Styrofoam Cup. There it is. Yes, there it is. Sorry, we just came from we actually had a busy morning. It's been busy. We had a webinar panelists actually, which was our first time. Shout out to Hannah. She made it happen for us. And I was there to moderate. You were there to make answers. And then we had four other people chatting it up. Some big hitters in urgent care space. Yep. Mike, I.O. April. It was good. It was a good panel. Yeah. And so we had to go.

take a lunch break. We went to a place called Tony's hot dog. Come to Birmingham, eat at Tony's. Eat at Tony's. It sounds like the most generic thing you've ever heard of, but they did get best burger in the county and it's thick. It's a thick burger. It's a good burger. I couldn't finish it. Well, in case you're lost and don't know where you are, you're listening to Walk-Ins Welcome with Nick and Michael. Glad to have you here today. We are on a ⁓ post urgent care association week.

Yes. Right. So this is the Thursday after you got back from the event. Yeah. So this is when we're recording it. I'm not sure when this will go out, but yeah. So, ⁓ last week, beginning of May was the UCA Dallas, and it was a great experience for us. It's our third round. Yeah. I was, I was noticeably absent from this one. I stayed back and held down the fort and we're to talk very little about that and more about how you got to talk and you packed out a room. Yes. And, and

became, it turns out the podcast, a lot of people know us from the podcast. So shout out to our podcast listeners who came up and said, hello. Absolutely. I felt like I was famous for like half a second, having random people come up to, I love your podcast. Like, I love you for telling me that because I don't know who you are. This is great. Because, you know, when we look at numbers, we see a couple of hundred listeners, but you don't know what that means, right? You don't know, there active listeners or what they're doing? But when you're sitting at an event in Dallas, like I'm from Birmingham, so

sitting among other urgent cares and just they walk up to you and say, said, Hey, you guys are funny. I like, we are now your podcast. Yeah. And I like, I don't have anything on me. It says walk-ins welcome. It's jarring. Yeah. Do remember that one time we were at the airport? Oh, that was Nick, the marketer Vegas. We're in Las Vegas. How in the world do you even know I exist? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And cause was funny because we had like on our booth that said walk-ins welcome, but it was just like,

in the middle per se wasn't like a super standout thing. And but my shirt was all patient care marketing pros, my badge says patient care marketing pros, but they looked at me and said, we love your podcast. Like, okay. And we love you. Yes, exactly. For the ones who talked to me. Thank you. For the ones who didn't. Why didn't you talk to me? Yeah, just come say hi.

Now I want to hear all about the event, the venue. I know ⁓ compare contrast to Las Vegas. Yes. It was a different venue, a different approach, all of those different kinds of things. So let's just start one thing that was noticeable based on the communication that you and I had is that either they had less talks or you had a hungry audience or both. I don't know. talk wise, it felt like the schedule was just as full as normal. Okay. Like there were quite a few.

⁓ Now I will say, I think some of the feedback I also heard and I could agree with it. The rooms were smaller. Okay. I'll say that. that's a good thing. They were and they were noticeably smaller because in my talk, it was standing and sitting on the floor people like and because I even talked to one of our clients. He said, yeah, this room tends to fill up. But I will say the way actually got to kick out the previous talk person, which was kind of funny.

I walk because you know, they say on the schedule to the speakers, please show up 10 minutes early so you can get set up. Right. Well, I show up 12 minutes early and I'm sitting there and we're all kind of sitting outside the door because it's to be done already because it was like a five minute layover. And so it's like eight minutes till I have to get in here and like, I can't just wait and I peek in and see the guy. He's just answering questions and just talking. And I look at him and just stare at him. And then he's like, is my time up?

You got to get out of here. Yep. for you to go. He's like, OK, I guess that's my time to get me out. And I apologize. was like, sorry. just like, we got to keep going. But no, like, yeah, it was from a speaker standpoint, I was blessed because you were cursed. was blessed with. You're not wrong. Yeah. I was blessed speaking on basically the first day. Right. Where so Saturday we showed up. I think things were already going on. But from a computer vendor standpoint, Saturday we show up.

where you just get settled in and then Sunday is where you set up. Well, I also had Sunday 10 AM. Here's your talk. So I was like the first when you look at the schedule, I was like the third person to talk for the whole event. So like just in that line, which was a blessing because you were dead last. Sorry, you see you were cursed because when you spoke two years ago, you were the last slot of the event and people are mentally checking out.

And we knew that. We saw that happen in the flesh. And it's also like for your side, you had all that anxiety, but just like the pressure, like I still haven't had my talk yet. It's been days. And then we're knocking it out of the park within the first two hours of the actual event, which was great. But no, yeah. So the talk I did was Front Desk Evolution. And holy cow, you people must have a real issue with Front Desk because I struck a nerve with quite a few of you all.

And to the point where. Because I hate when I do, I don't speak a lot, but when I do, I want it to be teaching like I want some interaction. I want some feedback. I want a lot of things. I think a lot of speakers want that, but I don't want. Let me just talk to you. You don't want to give a lecture. I don't want to give a lecture. It's not who I am because I run out of words. One, I don't have a lot of words. Two, it just feels like nobody cares. And so but in this scenario I.

structured thing where I want responses. And there was a moment because Hannah and Grace can attest to this. One of my first questions, I just sat there waiting for an answer. Because the crowd wasn't going to respond. Crickets, Yeah, I basically was saying, y'all tell me an example. I can't remember what the first question even was. I need some feedback here. I'll take it back. It was about, me about your great customer service experience. And I just sat there and sat there. And I was like, I know one of you have had a great customer service.

experience. Somebody raised her, yeah, and she explained how ⁓ her basically her suitcase got destroyed at an airport or something. And they had replaced her suitcase with a brand new one, no questions asked and sent it to her. And she basically like I will always remember, and it has been years ago, it wasn't even recent. It's like, that's an example of great customer service. And the whole goal of the talk was like, I needed you guys to shift from

this passive customer service only mindset with front desk into a sales proactive mindset. And I say it's not a car, I use car sales when I'm talking about, I'm talking about like a true, like you've been well taken care of and you're actually answering the questions I want you to answer, that type stuff. But yeah, the feedback was great. had ⁓ best we could tell about 80 people in the room, ⁓ standing room only, there were people sitting on the floor.

and lots of questions back and forth, had lots of follow up right afterwards that people had questions for that, you know, that kicked us out because we were running over time. But it was great. But I'll say this too, based on the feedback in that one talk, we talk about how the front desk episodes are so popular on this show. It confirmed it, right? Everything we had put out there, like you guys are missing 30 % of your missed calls, all these things.

They confirmed everything. I have the best podcast ever. We're going to title it, increase your patient volume by 30%. And the only thing we say on the podcast is answer your phone and that's it. Roll credits. No, we let it ring twice. Hello, this is, there's your fix. That's it. And I literally pushed that on them and said, well, I was like, if you guys get like thousand calls a month and then you're missing 300 calls, do you not think you can make more money if you answer the calls? And they agreed and all the stuff.

That would kind of be an epic episode, the way. should actually do that. And that'd the only... It's only 30 seconds long. Welcome to Walk is Welcome. Answer your phone. See you next time. We just fixed a lot of problems. But now, so like the talk was fantastic. It also triggered us to start thinking, OK, we got to offer something to our audience about like an actual maybe service or training or of course, or something to help with the front desk.

It was very blanket. ⁓ We've never thought of our front desk as somebody that could like increase our patient volume. They've never like it didn't cross their mind. Maybe one or two. But the whole crowd was like, no, that never thought about this way. And then they even said, I feel bad about this, but they even said that the front desk is typically the last priority. When you look at staff, the front desk is at the bottom, right from a pay standpoint and then from just the investment standpoint. And so

And I'd like restructure, know, restructure their mind on that a little bit. And it was great, great conversation. We were super happy because at the end of the presentation, we threw up a QR code, hey, if you want all these scripts and stuff in the slides, scan here, and we had 77 scans, almost 100 % participation on that site, which was super cool, because it was literally the last two minutes of the talk. So that means they were engaged the whole time.

which was super nice. but then from our standpoint from Hannah, Grace and I were like, well, we're done. go home. Yeah. Our mindset exactly. ⁓ But now so talking about so that was the talk talk about that side things. ⁓ I did laugh though. I don't do they do this for you at the UCA when you talked? Did they have a speaker stress relief room? No. Okay. So this may be no matter of fact, they didn't even give anybody in my room.

We had to go out in the hall and solicit people to come listen to me remember? Not really. Not quite. Keep going. I'm just being humorous. No, it made me kind of chuckle when I got there. If you're a speaker, you went into this room to get a little speaker gift bag thing, which has a pretty cool water ball in it and stuff. But she also said, also, this is your relief stress reducing room. So when you're done, you're talking to you like decompress, come in here.

Actually, I could see the benefit of that. Yeah. And maybe Jocko got like, is this like a real thing for people? Yeah. It's called a green room everywhere else. Oh, okay. Everywhere else in the world, they call it a green room. Huh? didn't. Yeah. Okay. So it's just like, go here when you're done. Go here before you go into your talk, grab a snack, chill out. You're away from people. After, after your talk, like churches have them. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know what I mean? Events. Yeah. It's a green room. didn't just, they didn't call it a green room.

Oh, yeah, now I know. They had no idea. So a couple other things to around the venue itself. So it was at the Hilton and totally I probably pronounced that wrong. Nailed it. Close enough. Anyways, in Dallas and it was Asian themed. the whole thing kind of love that. It was amazing. Like the deeds. And there's like some history behind it as a Y base. The owner of the hotel's wife was Asian and all this stuff. So he was like contributing to her type stuff.

When we first got there the first night I had an Indian wedding that was going on. I that was cool. It was wild. There were probably like 300 400 people in a room and they were floating because they're doing one of the dances and they're like it looked like a wave. They even had a tuk tuk there like the little Indian car to take pictures with. It was crazy. Like it was beautiful. They all have the yeah. What's it called? It starts with an H.

No, that's not it. Anyway, yes. Like you could ask. It's the ink. They draw it on you. It's cool. Sad I can't remember that name. But anyway, but no, I saw the Briding Groom. Like they were just gorgeous. Like the whole thing. It was cool to watch. Like that hotel was a happening place. I'm just telling you the Indian nation knows how to do. Yeah, throw it out. Weddings, dance. Celebration was legit. But anyway, so we're in Dallas and that was my first time to visit Dallas and

I like Dallas a whole lot more than Vegas. gonna lie. Okay, I was gonna do a fire around, but keep going with this. Okay, so Dallas is way more chilled than Vegas. Nothing against Vegas, but holy cow, Vegas is like a overload. It is. And not everyone wears clothes there, so. Yeah, overload of smells, overload of food, overload of just constant interaction. And I get it, it's Vegas. That's kind of its thing.

Dallas, way not. Definitely the opposite. Like Dallas had all these cool like neighborhoods that were completely different vibes. The first night we went to a Mexican or Tex-Mex restaurant and there was, was part of a family park area and it was like family food truck night. It was super cool. Like this is really awesome. And then we walked around and found the Dallas museum and it was just.

And I was really surprised because you think Dallas, you think traffic, right? Like that's kind of assumed and there like there wasn't there was never standstill traffic the whole time we were there. I was really just shocked by all that. But I loved the town and then Monday night with Cinco de Mayo. We went to a neighborhood to eat some barbecue because we thought we kind of skip out on the Mexican stuff because it would make sense to be crowded. Well, lo and behold, we ate at a barbecue place, but it was right beside a neighborhood that was having a Cinco de Mayo.

free concert with Mariachi bands and it was shoulder to shoulder. many tubas? I don't know, but no, it was huge. It was awesome though. I thought I was going to lose Grace or Hannah at some point because they kind of like the second you look back, where'd they go? I'm sure they had their find my location. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. then the Ubers kept giving up on us. I heard that was a whole story altogether with the Ubers, but. ⁓ my goodness. So, I mean, we all know about Ubers and lifts and stuff. So we stuck to Uber.

And, you know, because of the hotel, you couldn't walk anywhere. You had if you wanted to go eat or something outside the hotel, you had to take some type of Uber or some sort. We probably took 10 or 12 Ubers over the time. Yeah, I got the receipts for that. Yeah, some were pretty cheap. Some were not. And I don't want to know what the whole spin was for the whole trip, but it's OK. It's OK. Kim will report that, I'm sure. Yeah, we'll get it soon. ⁓ did a great job organizing that. But anyway, so the Uber, though.

You know, we joke about Uber in Miami. We're like, it's like 50 50. We'll get an OK one or get one will laugh at. This was more like is my life in danger with about half of them where we had one like this is either the first night or second night. The guy gases it and then slams on the brake because the person in front of it wasn't moving and he like yelling at him, but he hit the brake so hard that.

Grace did the whole lean forward and right into the back of my seat. And I thought I knocked her out, but she was fine. But ⁓ like what's going on? But we're like, we don't want to anything. Cause it was his fault, the driver's fault because he didn't realize he was in a turn or go straight lane. I mean, these people are nuts. And so you take that one. And then we had another one. We were leaving in and out burger by the way. Love in and out. Always a good time. And holy cow, it's cheap. Yeah.

$7 for a combo. just while I hate that cheap, that's now cheap, it's better than like a Wendy's basically, even not doing the four for four. But so we get this ⁓ Cadillac come up, it's okay, it's a Cadillac. This should be pretty good, right? So when we open the door, one, they're always thrown off, were three of us. So I always sat up front, unless it was a female driver. they didn't like that, I'm sure. No, no, no, they threw them off because their seat was not ready for it. It was full of crap, like half the time. One guy wouldn't move his stuff.

He's like, it'll be quicker for you to get in the back. I was like, okay. But, ⁓ but this guy shows up, open the door. You're like, ⁓ man, he just covered up all his weed smell as best as he could. I mean, it smacked you in the face. Well, he seems coherent. Let's go. Hey, can you just look at my eyes? And so we get in there and we always joke out Uber drivers.

Don't ask the passengers about what kind of music they want. They just listen to whatever they're listening to. I think the best memory is the Miami one where she's like talking to the radio. Right. That was so funny. But this person, he starts playing the most sexual rap music you could think of, like vulgar rap music. And we're all just like.

Is he for real doing this right now? What do we do? Is he trying to get a better review? And now we're doing like a group text among us saying like, is this actually happening? That's bad when you don't even feel comfortable to talk to one another. No, no, it really didn't. And then it became a game. So then we'll begin to an Uber like, all right, we'll see how this one goes. ⁓ man. And then when there were two that were maybe three that were good. And at the end of them we would say,

You were our best Uber driver. Congratulations. And when we start clapping for it, it could only go up from there. So it was incredible. Sorry. Definitely detour on the Uber stuff, but it was, I was blown away. Even like, cause I thought Uber had standards on the age of the car, right? Like typically. So once you get it in though, I mean, it depends on how long they've been in Uber. Okay. Cause there were quite a few cars that were pushing 10 plus years. I mean, if they got in early, think it can be only six years old.

Yeah, there were definitely some like 2010, 2012 cars, which I was surprised by. We did get to ride in a Mustang. We did come up with an Uber Classic. Yeah. Yeah. And then you're like rolling around in like 60s Corvettes and stuff. That would be fun. But we did get to ride in one, the Mustang E-Moc. Okay. Rocky. Sorry, not E-Moc. Rocky. Well, how was that? Yeah, that's what I thought. So the interior is kind of neat. I like the interior. The door handle's stupid. Like I know they're trying to do something different, but pressing the button.

You know, it was a problem because the Uber driver had a big sticker that says press here to open. It's like an arrow. Yeah, literally. But other than that, just like any electric car driver, they don't know how to use the gas pedal. Right. So it's like back, forth, back, forth, back, forth. Like, OK, I know you have an electric motor, but can you just use it properly? ⁓ anyway, so that was the Uber experience. So we can roll back now to the actual UCA. Yeah, let's talk about the event. Like, what was your biggest takeaway from the event? Biggest takeaway?

It was like everyone that I was talking to, it felt like we're all family. Yeah, it is starting to feel that way. So we felt like we're a family. felt like we were having like a, and they even said like even the urge cares like it feels good just to talk to other people to understand what's going on. Right. And that was strange. Same from the vendor side, because like I would say this, mean, good or bad, like the list of vendors doesn't change dramatically from each event. And so we knew a lot of faces and so we had lots of good conversations. It wasn't

like, you know, deer in the headlight type of feeling like people walked up to us and say, how's it going? You know, just like, I forgot about you mindset. It's good to see you again. Right. And then we had a really cool so we always like to make booth buddies, right? yeah, sure. So the booth beside us, I wish I could remember their names. know Hannah and Grace probably can. But ⁓ they supplied dental services to urgent care. So they could do like remote dentals like

It was fascinating. OK. And but the fun part was like a niche within a niche. But yeah. So essentially like, hey, we realize that you have people coming into your urgent care because they chipped the tooth or did something. It's just sending them away. We actually can supplement that service for you and you make money. Right. So super fascinating. But the cool part was it was a mom and daughter. And we didn't know that till the mom left to go to another event. And she said, that was actually my mom.

I was like, that's super cool. And then like her background, like she's been all over the country, all over the world and actually spoke Spanish first type of stuff. And it was just super fun to chat with them. But now, yeah, so overall, it just felt like family felt like we're hanging out with old friends. Lots of people came out to us just checking in on us and then even hang out with Kristen a little bit. And then remember Kathy. ⁓ So Kathy, like

She was like our number one cheerleader. She would walk around. Have you all talked to the patient? She was awesome. She was carrying around the torch basically for us, which was pretty neat. And then Hannah did street interviews. So we had these little mics, these little road mics that we bought. You've seen them on lots of TikTok videos, little squares, little fuzzy thing on top. And she walked around the vendors and said, well, tell me more about you and how you guys solving problems for the urgent care space. And it was just super fun to do all that.

But now it was it was good and cool and the pace of it was pretty good. I will say because there was jokes about even on today's webinar, the weather was horrible in Dallas. OK, on the last day, I never heard you talk about that, but that makes sense that was all the delays were about. Yeah, so we we we left on Wednesday, but a lot of vendors were trying to leave out on Tuesday like pack up and leave. But we did Wednesday so we didn't get this effect. you know how they say like, hey, don't close down your booth until 2 o'clock on a dot.

Well, they made an exception because the weather was coming in hard. Right. And so like at one 45 year, you hear lots of clicking around and people are dropping and going. And then most of them, we talked to some of them and then like, yeah, my flight was at two o'clock or three o'clock or whatever it was. And I didn't leave until 11 PM that night. So we felt great for leaving on Wednesday. We still had some delay because of a mechanical issue, but we only had like an hour delay. So it was, was nice for that piece of things.

All right, so let's do a quick lightning round then and we'll talk about all right. We'll do Vegas venue versus Dallas venue. All right. Amount of people that showed up to the event. Vegas are. Which had more? Yeah, which had more? It felt like Vegas did. OK, Vegas had more people. maybe. Well, it's not that much more central. It's not more central. Well, you know, you think about I think Vegas is so intriguing to people. They're probably more likely to come. Right. All right.

the venue itself, not the hotel, but the venue itself. like Caesar's forum or the Dallas one. It's kind of a mix. the pros and cons of both. The problem I did not like about Caesar's for me to walk from a hotel room to the... It was an eternity. It was a 20 minute power walk. Yeah, exactly. We got our steps in, no doubt. We got our steps in. Dallas, depending on which tower you're in, you were less than a five minute walk from the event. But the complaints, the general complaint was...

The education side was a five, like a three to five minute walk to the vendor expo side. They didn't put them right beside each other. So it was too like, there was a disconnect between where the event stuff was happening and the vendor stuff was happening. Yeah. The only who was the complaint from vendor. I was going to say something tells me that the providers there didn't care much. Yeah. And they did have one central area that like for the big ⁓

keynote speakers, then that was directly beside the expo. From a vendor perspective, I would call that a win only because the people went out of their way to go see the vendors. So there was probably better conversation. There were because there weren't, I would say there weren't as many conversations in Vegas, but there were more meaningful conversations. Which we appreciate because the pace was better. It wasn't like we're trying to play catch up chat and all these people was more of

Here comes somebody. Here comes somebody. You know, just it was was nice. Nice. Okay. All right. Very good. The booths was it was the layout pretty much like any other event thing. It was so because the last one was nicely done. So food spread out. Yeah, I mean, like it was cool. I think the venue created a challenge that we weren't I think a lot of vendors weren't quite ready for so. Caesar's had it was kind of squared off of it. Yeah, right. Where the distance from

one wall to the next and vice versa was pretty equal. This was a rectangle. ⁓ And so on the map, it doesn't really give that appearance because it looked like there were lots of of entrances, but it was one entrance. OK, so we were and so we were further back than we thought we were going to be. ⁓ And so that was interesting because it was a very it's a much longer, narrower like I think in Caesar, we probably had five lanes. Yeah, this is more like four or three, three or four lanes.

types of stuff. Much longer. Just longer. So it's different. Okay, I gotcha. How was the food? Food was pretty, no, I think so the hotel food, I put Vegas a little higher. Okay. Like that was pretty good. They had good Vegas food. Now I will say I did appreciate some of the Tex-Mex type food they had on Cinco de Mayo day. You can bet it was good. It was pretty good. So, but beyond that though, ⁓ yeah, I kind of put Vegas food just a little higher. Sure. Okay, I gotcha.

⁓ And then just overall experience one versus the other. If I was going to say which ones you prefer, I'd probably lean into the Dallas more. Okay. Just because it felt less overwhelming. Okay. More direct, meaningful conversations. And it does help that I got to speak at the very beginning. I'm not going to deny I was going to say that that'll build some confidence quick. It will. ⁓ But overall, it didn't feel chaotic. Like Vegas felt chaotic. It's because it's Vegas. Right.

And I think talking that we talked to some others, they're all like, yeah, we're kind of tired of Vegas because most people and they'll say this. If you're deep into the conference event space, you're going to Vegas multiple times a year, like where they happen. So yeah, would like I actually would love just to go back to Dallas on a personal note, just to kind of check the town out more. But from a peer event standpoint, I think I appreciated the Dallas a little bit more. I do agree with I wish things were a little more

together because to me in Caesar's years like next door to each other on that was everything it was that stupid long walk to get to it. Yeah, it took forever from the room, but it also kept people from going back to their room. Yeah, forced them to hang out. And then arguably the best bathrooms on the planet. Yeah, the bathroom. Yeah, we talked. Second only to Bucky's. I don't know those those Caesar forum bathrooms. They were they were super nice. They felt like an Instagram. They did. They were nice. They were nice.

So awesome. Well, there you go. That's the UCA event coverage for this time. What else do you have? I say so we have a tradition so far that we go to Meow Wolf. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. And so for those who don't know what Meow Wolf is, you're welcome. Or I'm sorry. It depends how you interpret it. ⁓ How to explain it. It's like an interactive art exhibit, but that doesn't even come close to what it is. I tripping on acid. I've never done that, but it seems to me like if I were tripping on acid, that would be what.

Yeah. And so they do it in big major cities. So there's one, there's like six of them, maybe. I don't know. You've been to Colorado. Yes, I've been to Colorado. I've been to Vegas. Yeah. So we've been now to Vegas and Dallas has one. Right. And so I would say because it was Grace's first time with Meow Wolf. OK. And we kept telling her, we don't know how to explain this to you. We just had to There's no way to explain it. And then when it started happening, she's like, my goodness.

What's going on? said nothing. If I could say nothing is as it appears and it rang true. So which one's better? I think if you want pure insanity Vegas was nuts. It was incredible. If you want like this is really cool. I'm a little confused, but I'm intrigued and this is a good way to burn one or two hours Dallas. OK, because Dallas was laid out completely. Colorado had a theme.

So did Vegas. It was all the grocery store thing. So and then if you look it up, all Meow Wolfs are connected. OK. And so the Meow Wolf in ⁓ Vegas was all about the grocery store with the greed of corporate and like killing his daughter, whatever it was. Right. But you don't have to have the story to have fun with it. And then Dallas was like the backstory of this kid that got kidnapped. But looked like he got stuck in some time warp of some sort. And you're trying to figure that out. The mom was like a secret scientist.

Because then you enter like some random town that's in a different dimension. It's just like layer after layer layer, but they're all connected. like you would see like random Omega Mart stuff mixed in. Colorado was all about the takeover of robot AI. Okay, so it's just all over the place. And then as a side note that the mall that is part of had to be one of the best malls I've been to in a lifetime.

It was the grapevine mall in Texas. And I think it's called grapevines. And the so it was one level mall, which I don't see those much anymore feels like. then it's a one mile loop. It's that big. It's a big mall and it's full. Every store is full. But they had like here. But I like a Ross inside of it, a five below inside of it. So you take all the traditional strip malls and they shut them into this mall. OK, but it was.

When we were walking around, like, this is what I felt like an eight-year-old, like as an eight-year-old would think of a mall. Like, it's so great. And like, there's people here. That's the key ingredient there is the people. There were tons of people on a Tuesday night. That's wild. So we were just in awe of it. And we ate at Rainforest Cafe, which was super funny. I don't know how that place stays the way it is. It's just crazy. Well, it's just like, you could feel the 90s off of it.

And the food was actually pretty good. We'll credit the food. The drinks were not my own taste, like just pure pineapple juice. But instead of the graces. But now the theme was just funny because like the thunderstorm would come and the monk and all the animals to start screaming type stuff. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And but it was just and it was like it's like a ride at Disney that they should have retired. Yeah, because then because then we had that. It's funny you say that because I did we were at Universal Studios.

And when I was a kid, we went and I did the E.T. ride. Yeah. Well, they didn't change a thing. it's the same E.T. ride. And I'm going all the advancements that have been made. still loved the E.T. ride when I went as an adult. But I was thinking I can see the lights like I could see the animatronics. You know what I mean? You see where things have broken over time because we had this intrusive thought when we looked up at the tree over us like I wonder if that's ever been dusted. ⁓

Probably not. Yeah. All right. Tied up on a bow for us. So a tie up on a bow is if you're in urgent care, you need a break. The UCA annual event is a great break for you. Right. It allows you to hang out with colleagues you haven't seen in a year, hang out with some vendors that may be helping you out some problems, but it allows you to relax a little bit, kind of think about your business and not just be in your business.

So I recommend it for sure, because I know most people this might be your only escape once per year. Right. That's that you can write off as a business trip, right? Write it off. Extend it. Because we saw lots of... be doing that in July. There you go. So we saw lots of families in the mix. And so like this is your chance to do that. Recommend it if you like, I don't want to do this. If every time you walk away from your business, you come back with a fresher mind and you can see like solutions that you didn't see before.

So I definitely recommend it next year is Chicago. So we're very excited for that. And apparently it's been a long time for you say to be at Chicago as we're excited. I've never been in Chicago. Have you been in Chicago? Yeah. I've never been. I'm excited to go next year. Hopefully they'll let one of us talk. Well, we'll put in for it for sure. Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Well, I'm glad you had a good time, man. That sounds like an event. I had FOMO. I wish I was there, but I'm also glad I stayed behind because- was still mentioned. ⁓

What do you do? I'm a pilot. I don't know the name of the person who stopped us, but we were in the elevator going to our rooms and the guy looked at me. He looked at my badge. He looked at me and he said, are you the pilot? I said, no, that's the other guy. So whoever you are, thank you. And if you've been keeping up with the saga over the several episodes, I passed my instrument rating and I can poke holes in the clouds now, baby. can fly in the clouds.

with our children, that's a different story, but legally I can do it. anyway, we'll, we'll end on that note. Uh, with that y'all have an awesome week. We'll see you next Wednesday. See you next time. Fire us out. All right. We'll see you.