Ep. 198: When It's Time To Let Go: Firing Your Internal Marketing Bottleneck

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Hey, what's up, everybody? You're listening to Walk-Ins. Welcome with Nick and Michael. We're super fired up to be here for a second recording of a single podcast episode. ⁓ Here's the thing. Sometimes we mess up. Sometimes a Bluetooth device takes priority over a hardwired device. Yeah. And sometimes our mics.

aren't recording a single thing. Yeah, we did a really good episode. I want to say it was a couple three weeks ago. It was about three weeks ago. We recorded this episode. We thought the content was pretty good. And then Hannah's going to edit and she said, hey, listen to this. I was like, oh no. And I realized what happened. We used to have a Bluetooth speaker. We've had that thing for years. Yeah. But it has a little mic in it. Well.

Lo and behold, our technology broke a few months, like a month ago, where the hub died or USB-C port, something died. And so we had to reconnect all our devices to a new one. And I think the Mac said, I'm going to prioritize that Bluetooth device. Yeah. So we need to change the episode title to when it's time to let go of current technology. Yeah, when it's time to upgrade. Instead, we're going to be talking about when it's time to let go and fire the internal marketing bottleneck of your company.

which is going to sound super self-serving, but it's not. are trying to help you. No, it's that I know it may sound self-serving, but this has literally become pretty common problem we come across where we're chatting with, with you urgent cares. And there are some that come to us that you have a problem. Hey, we can fix this. We can see the problem. And then the internal person that they had hired becomes an emotional attachment of some sort. And the owner's like, I can't let that person go.

Like you are costing your company because you're not, you're letting them do what they want. I think before we do this part, Michael, we need to go into story time with think and Michael. Okay. Right. Or just a little background and just tell a couple of stories. One of them ⁓ was a Russian owned urgent care and great people. ⁓ but like aunt so and so was their marketing. Very family oriented.

clinic. remember getting on that call with them. They had reached out to us and I remember getting on that call. They had an internal marketing person that was a family member and I had gotten on that call and I was telling them the truth. I wasn't beating anybody up. I wasn't doing any of that. But every time I opened my mouth, this lady would just like combat me or tell me I'm wrong or tell me I'm a liar. And all of that may be true. I don't know. Like I'm not trying to be wrong or a liar or

of those things. in her eyes you were. Yeah, because I was a threat to her job. ⁓ But two things there. One, she was incredibly defensive. And two, the owners were exhausted. Like they were exhausted. The look in their eyes. This is through a video call. That's right. Well, we can see the look in their eyes. They had that, here she goes again smile. She hopped off the call for a minute. Do you remember what I said? Because I can't remember.

Oh, I said I didn't want to get into a pissing match with her. Yeah, exactly. Because in a minute, like she had had to hop off the call and said, look, I don't want to get in a pissing match with your person here. I'm not trying to beat her up or anything like that. The fact is, is $80 calls per conversion is insane. showing up for like OB GYN stuff, showing up for hospital stuff. Her technique was something that we typically tell people don't do this technique because it doesn't work. Right.

There's lots of things. But at the end of the day, we did not get the business. And that's fine. And that's fine. No, just being transparent. We didn't get the business. The owner wanted to work with us, but she did not want to work with us. Right. Which we're cool, which we know we understand. Family first. I agree with that. I get that. But the part that's painful is that he came to us because clinic was not getting enough patient volume. I wouldn't be surprised, Michael, if they're out of business today.

It's been like that was that's about a year or so ago on that one. Then we've had more recent ones. And I want to tell that story too. Yeah. That was an existing marketer here. Another version is a massive urgent care that we worked with that we were doing outstanding work for so much so that they had to hire an internal marketer to keep up with everything. Just to organize on the inside of things. Because when you're a larger company, you

maintaining a brand and consistency is huge. And an internal person is fantastic at that usually because a lot because they they understand and breed the brand every single day. Right. And then we're really good about implementing whatever our needs are. And what happened with that one? Tell that story. Gosh, you can leave out names, but I'm just saying like she came in. Yeah, she started. Yeah, nitpicking and is for no reason nitpicking. And then ⁓ I want you guys to go with my strategy.

like, okay, we will, but we're going to prove to you is wrong. Well, we didn't say that. like, we will split it. We'll split test for you. Exactly. And let the data prove it's wrong. That's right. And she was real buttered that her stuff didn't work. Her stuff didn't work. then black does for it. And then when we communicated something, and then the client, the client, not her, but her boss came back us complaining. We're like, we've already told your person this, they just didn't communicate it. We

we've seen it not just in urgent care, we've seen other spaces that we've worked with recently as well. Right. And then like one I had an urgent care come talk to me. And his ad spend was 10 times more than I would have recommended for a single location. And it was barely working for him. And it was one of those I've had this guy for years. I really like him. I'm like, man, that's a lot of money that you're keeping him on for essentially.

that much ad spend is being wasted. he's, I told him, said, look, I'm not here to beat up, we can at least do an audit and just tell him, tell him what we would recommend, he can go implement, we don't care. He's like, okay, I'll talk. He said, I might talk to you, never did. It's been like a month since I talked to him. And that's okay. And that's just the way it goes. But it's like, and I get it, I totally get there's, there's the empath, empathetic, emotional side of every human being.

And there's a part of you that doesn't want to let go somebody because you're afraid of the reaction one and then the, ⁓ don't want to lose this friendship type mindset that you go to. And it's hard. I mean, we had a conversation with a Nurture Care this week that was about, you're going to have to let some people go. And we, but we spent more time on like, we understand that's an extremely hard conversation.

and you need to understand like it's for the greater good. And if you try to save a company for one person, it will cost the whole company. Yep. All 15 of those that you're trying to save for this one person are going to go. Yeah, exactly. Or you have to sacrifice two or three so the tin can stay. so, and it's real and it's so hard about business. that's

Honestly, one of the more difficult things letting people go unless you get a nice little corporate email that we saw a couple of weeks ago that was like, there was no heart in that one. No, that's happened to you. There's also the good marketers out there too. There's Leslie's with Southern Media Care. who are their internal marketing and she she holds the right people accountable, including us, which is easy for us to be accountable because we do what we say we're going to do. like she holds us accountable. She holds her internal team accountable.

She's not she makes sure everything meshes. There's a difference in holding accountable and blaming. Yes. Or holding it accountable and looking for a reason for you to disappear. Yeah. Right. Well, I mean, it goes back to like internally managers exist because they're holding people accountable. Yeah. Where at the end of the day, you know, people try to do what's best most of the time, but they're going to slip up or they get into a rut and they don't realize it and they need that person. There's a hey, hey, come back, come back to this life. So go back over there. So it's real. So we

we want you to know is if you're a marketing manager listening to this podcast today, we're not trying to attack you. But I'm also going to say this. If you feel attacked.

But what we're talking about today, yeah. Maybe you are the problem. If you can change it and you can do better if you starting to feel your blood boil as you listen to us. I'm sorry. let's get through it. What we're going to do first is we're going to identify what the real problem is. Right. So let's start there. Yeah. So the real problem is where. ⁓

When the role becomes a blocker instead of a builder. Yeah, that's the best way to put it. Where and now we're talking to the owner, right? Mostly here where is this internal marketing person? Are they constantly saying they're busy or they've done things, but they can't really explain to you what's been done ⁓ or they've there's some extra. Excessiveness around simple thing like why is this so hard if you're if you're an owner and you've said to yourself, why is this so hard for this person?

these are some of the identifiers. So like this is just a very simple, straightforward, and then a blocker versus builder where they're looking for ways to make block, you know, the block, the idea instead of building your business or kind of putting little blocks up and stopping things. And then if you very say, hey, can you work on this? Hey, I've been trying to figure it out. Well, it's been like

three months. Have you figured anything out yet? No, which means they haven't spent time on it or they're just not doing it. Or more importantly, you say, well, here, let me help you real quick. they go, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, ⁓

Yeah, I mean, I will say this like it's not even a note here. But like if somebody's saying, well, I don't want to show you yet. I don't want to show you. It ain't ready. Yeah. Show me what you got. don't know anything. It should be. I don't know anything to show you. I called. We had a team member one time and I called him out on this particular thing. They were building out one of our productivity systems and they've been working on it in perpetuity. I mean, just for. Well, even I remember in the time because we were doing some time tracking at that time and it was like two hours of this, five hours of that.

thing every day. Yeah. And we were just like, man, that's a heck of a program. Seriously. Yeah. And this is my fault. It's a failure in my leadership. But what she spent an entire year working on once we finally made the changes internally that we needed to make, the next person came in and had it done in two weeks. Yeah. Done. Like on its own. Functional. Yeah. In two weeks. And we were tweaking at that point. From scratch. Yeah. Right. Well, that's real, too, because I mean, at the end of the day, there

inside of a business inside of an urgent care. There are certain projects that take time like hey, we're doing an EMR conversion. That's a big project that takes time. Yeah. Hey, we're doing a marketing campaign. That is not a big project necessarily. Something can take time and be a big project. Yeah, but every single one of them should have milestones, milestones, checkpoints, milestones and checkpoints where you can go in and say, okay, show me where we are in this sprint. Yeah, exactly. And so this never should be a

I've been asking for this for three months and you haven't given me anything. Yeah, should never be a conversation because if it is, this is the real problem. So all right, so that we helped identify. So I know for those who are listening, you if you have somebody pop up in your mind as we were describing this, I'm going to go ahead and apologize. You might as well fast forward to the end of this episode and talk about how you're going to get rid of them. That's right. I apologize for that future person.

that person's future but it's real now sometimes so just remember maybe they're just in the wrong there are great person in the wrong seat and you may have a different seat for them but moving on. Well when you start pressing them they're going to activate their fight or flight mode exactly and this is how they weaponize it. Yeah exactly. Yeah so weaponizing chaos I know people have heard of that it's a very I mean it's one of those things that there are people that's all they do is where they take that they

they create their own chaos so people can't go in and fix anything. And some of these things like you'll never understand it, but me, if you let a third party in, they're going to mess all up everything. And I don't know what to, I would, I'll have to fix all the problems we're going to create. What you're hearing is like negative, no, negative, no, like, no, don't do this, don't do this. And let me tell you why, cause it's, if I don't have my hands on it, it's a mess. And then we will talk about like,

Hey, it's such a big thing. You gotta give me more time to work on it. But then they won't tell you what they've actually worked on. And it's the idea that they're creating a house of cards that you're afraid to touch, not that they are, that they're in charge of it. But you're afraid if I touch that, they've convinced me it'll fall apart and I have to stay out of it. And that's just not how to, that's the equivalent of you own your urgent care and there's one exam room that you're not allowed to open. Because you were told not to, that it might

fall in on itself. How ridiculous does that sound? know, in every aspect of business, you should have some foundational knowledge, whether that be with your accounting, whether that be with... Just so you ask the right question. Who's answering the front desk? What's the nurse deal with on a daily basis? Whoever's coding? All of these different things. Like you should have some foundational knowledge and that includes marketing. Yeah. So and it goes back to like you're saying where as an owner, you're not the expert in any

division of your company, right? Like you probably touched or worked on it at different times. You have, you know, you had the most motivation of everybody in the company. But you've hired people to take over those spots. So that can be the best it can be. But you know enough where you can ask the right questions and know what's a good sign or a bad sign. Right. So yeah, it's one of those things like when people are just trying to hold the little box together.

Because they're afraid if you open the box, it's going to reveal there's nothing in there or it's just a mess that they created. We even had a situation where we were taking over marketing for multi company situation and we had like, what's this address? What's this? What's that? And the response is, that sounds like so and so's little chaos that they made that we don't know anything about. That's a horrible place to be. It just really

Yeah, they spun up a location at their house. Yeah, or their beach or their beach house. Yeah, it's it's comical. But you know, that's it, though. They're going to be in a fight or flight mode. There's going to be weaponized chaos involved. And you're going to have to get in there and you're going to have to dig into the muck and the mire. And you're to have to do an audit basically of what's going on. And the reality is, if they become very nervous or protective, when you say, hey, I want to audit everything we have, if they're very nervous and very protective,

There's a reason why. We even had this recently happen to ourselves where we had a client that brought in somebody to audit things. And it's like, okay, that's weird. But then once the audit started, I was like, we have great numbers. Like, I'm actually kind of excited to show this because this is pretty fantastic. And we were happy to give the information over. And they're like, yeah, yeah. they think about that. We were happy to give the information. We were proud of the work that we were doing.

This is what you're looking for from your marketing team, your person internal, whatever agency you're using. We don't care. Just, they should be fired up to show you the work that they've done because they've done good work. Are they? Yeah, exactly. Are they? Are you waiting days for, for a response from email and a report or a strategy? Oh, I forgot about it. Oh, I forgot about it. Yeah. Are your emails going ignored? I'm not even talking about agencies. I'm talking about just even your marketing person. How many times have you had to ask for something and not get it?

Yeah, exactly. It's real. But I said happy to hand it over. And part of the reason I was happy is because, like you said, the results were awesome. And when I was looking, was like, shoot, over across all these locations were under $10 conversions across the board. And then we had some stellar ones that were like $4 conversions. Like, this is fantastic. And then when we met about the things that I turned in, like, yeah, I don't know how much questions about that. I have questions about this thing. Yeah, we don't do a whole lot of that. And here's why.

That's right. And so that was that was most of the conversation. ⁓ But anyway, no, it goes back to like they have to be excited and they have to be honestly excited to talk about a problem. I think I have a solution this problem or Hey, this is a problem I had no idea about. then you're like, Okay, let's work together to figure it out or what solutions that you already have. Like it's very proactive mindset, not reactive, stay away from me. I'm protecting my little spot. It's just real. And so I even heard a conversation today from

Hannah is something related to a friend group thing. She had listed these, so it's fine. I don't mention names because I can't remember them, so we're good. But there was a point where somebody was hired to answer phones, and they don't like answering phones. then somebody was hired to manage that person and some other things, and they didn't make the hire. And now they're like, how do I get rid of this person? I didn't even hire them. I'm like,

you talk to them to see if they're in the wrong seat or tell them to buckle down and learn how to answer phones when you're gone and just move on. so, it was a fear, automatic fear. I'm afraid to this person go. And that's hard. I have dealt with that fear. I am slowly getting over it. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I think it's a challenge. It's a challenge. should not be fun to fire people, but at the same time, you can't like one of our core values is culture trumps everything. Part of that culture is we don't make fair based decisions.

Right, exactly. And I'll say this too, like, I've, fired people, I've fired people. It's not easy. I've not had fun at it. You've enjoyed it immensely. So just a moment ago, I literally says, I need to fire someone. That was coming from a point of there's somebody in this company that's just wasting time. Yeah, for sure. And I wasn't able to do it. Somebody got to go. And we all knew who it was. I just couldn't say it.

⁓ that which if you rewind back to the very beginning of this podcast episode where I talk about when you get family or friends involved in your situation, it makes it incredibly difficult to make hard decisions. And I'll say so I've learned about the family friend thing. It's a dicey situation to hire a family member or a friend because if they were family and friend first and you start a business, there will always be that layer.

Now it's different if you start a business, you hire somebody and they become a friend. That's different. But because I've learned the hard way I've learned it from a client standpoint of don't do work with family and friends because it will hurt your friendship when that business deal eventually goes away because they all do at some point. there's a missed expectation. Yeah. And then all of sudden you have like the severed relationship that you used to enjoy. That's right. And then now I was like, I don't know if I want to talk to you because that's real.

And then like I'm from a family business. Like my family has three generations in this business. And I remember growing up listening to my dad complain about his brothers more than anybody else. Cause he couldn't get rid of them one, right? Exactly. Can't get rid of them. Well, we put that buffer in this business alone just by saying, okay, I'm no longer a hiring person. are. Yeah, exactly. Because all of my family and friends want a job here for some reason.

It's real, which is cool. It's real. But I mean, it's a testament to like you've created something interesting, right? Right. But now, like my dad would complain about his brothers or vice versa. They don't listen to this. They're fine. And and then but, you know, if it was about an employee and you had the ability to fire him, so it wasn't a big deal. Like you're not meeting the criteria. We got to let you go. And so it's the challenge. And so I understand if you hired that cousin or that brother or that

child. Or that marketing person that hasn't delivered anything in the past 90 days and you're just not getting what you're asking for. Well, I'm even going to pull this back in because we'll have fun with that. But you had put on here in our notes as well as like, can somebody else take over what's actually essential in the job until you find somebody to fill in the gaps?

And then you got to start documenting the issues. We've audited the chaos and what's being done, what's being said that's being done, what's actually being done. Yeah. So, so now we've entered the latter part of the episode of like, all right, so those who listened up earlier and thought somebody in their head, right? Now you're here. Now you're to the point, like, I got to get this figured out because they are causing me stress. I just like the idea they live in your head rent free, right? Where they can't, you can't get them out.

and you don't know why or maybe you do, you just don't want to admit why. They're going home with you in your brain. Yeah. And when you talk to them every day, you're like, I don't know about this. That's right. All right. So a couple of things about firing this type of person. One, you've decided in your head you've done this. Like I'm going to fire this person. I need this person gone. Now, if you have a reactive firing, it will come back to you most of the time. That's right. Sometimes it won't. Sometimes you're going to have a reactive fire by high emotions and then it's over. But

Pretty rare. Usually they come back with a lawyer, attorney, whatever. We're in right to work state. we have some flexibility as an employer, but we still got sued. So it doesn't really matter. So right to work, just to be clear about that, that just simply means that you can let go of anybody at any time for any legal reason. Yeah, yeah. And they can legally sue you for any reason.

period. We're just make crap up and then you just check your insurance and hopefully you got the right policy. Make sure you check that. Yeah. All right. So here we go. You've decided, okay, I've identified the person I need to get rid of them. This is not working. You need to start auditing everything, right? Like, correct. You start pushing on it. Like you need some verification that you're not crazy. And so

Yes, very simple questions. Can they tell tell me what they've done in the past 90 days like actually done not daily busy work, but that project that this did we make progress on this thing? Did they launch the ads campaign is the new website live?

Is the blog that y'all decided to write on a weekly basis being delivered? Are you supposed to ads account being posted on every single week or every single day? Like you asked for it? Did you spin up that tick tock account? Is there an email newsletter going out? Are you texting people? I could give you tons of things. just saying like y'all had projects that you said, hey, we need to do this. This is the next step in our business and our marketing. Is it being done? Yeah. So you've audit that and then ⁓ in depending on the response you get, it's either confirming

exactly what you thought or okay, maybe I was a little off kilter and I had to be reamed back in. Chances are though, it's confirming what you thought. Then like you had said a second ago, let's consider who could take over some of these essential pieces. some are is because the reality is that person may have created projects to keep their job, not so much to help the company. Correct. And that is 100 % real. The best example I can think of

in the past 10 years that come to mind that comes to mind this exact situation. I was working with a church consultant and he was working. He was consulting a very large like 2000 3000 member church and he was there to help identify expenses. Why are we have this many? We have pretty good tidy, but why are we not making money? It's like classic like just peel back all the layers and you'll find stuff and one of them was what's this lady do?

she does our directory. She designs the print version of it, prints it and makes sure everybody gets one in the church. All 3000 members. Why don't you just put it in the PDF and email it to everybody? Well, this is her job. Well, she doesn't need that job anymore. And it's a hard. She's been here for 30 years. I know. Sucks. So like, is that essential? Absolutely not essential for that church to function. So these are the type of things you got to go through your mind of what's right.

Obviously, they have, if there was a constant communication going out to patients that that need a new message on a regular basis, hey, that's pretty essential. You need to make sure that's not going away. Are they part of the front desk to some capacity because it may be dual rolling? Hey, that's obviously essential. You need to make sure how's that covered. So you got to think through those items. So you've confirmed it. Now you're putting in a contingency plan to make sure things aren't dropped when they're gone.

And now, since you've done all this in your mind, essentially, now you guys start documenting all the issues. And the documentation is missed deadlines, conflicts where they would not work with third party vendors, or just kind of put up all the walls, right? Like we talked about blocking. ⁓ they document, hey, I've asked for this. And they keep putting delays on it. They're just giving ⁓ reasons, but not like real reasons, just like excuses. They're giving excuses, not reasons.

So you have to document all this. You have to document they argued with you. ⁓ It's hard to do that if it's in person, but you can jot down a note in somewhere you're keeping all this thing. This was discussed and it ended badly or whatever. Just something that says, OK, this is becoming a pattern. And one, it's also the thing considered convincing yourself too. Like, OK, this is a real problem. I had no idea until I wrote it all down. It's like that's a whole lot. ⁓ I know personally I have screenshotted.

conversations like we're big slack users here ⁓ and you can delete slacks but you can't delete my screenshot. That's right. And so screenshots are super important especially if your chances are like because we've talked to a lot of doctors and owners you probably do a lot of texting. So you know screenshotting those texts that matter that are like well that's a weird conversation let me screenshot that and move it to my little folder. So you've done all this so you've built your case right.

You built your mindset like this is going to happen. Now you got to have the conversation. The conversation you gots to go. Yeah. Rick James. That's right. There's more to that. Chappelle show. That's right. No, there you go. Good time with this one. Second recording is always a better one. No. OK, so one thing I know that you'll say about this because you understand it.

probably more than I do is keep the conversation short and to the point. The more you talk, the more it costs you. That's right. As a matter of fact, in previous jobs where I've been in positions where I've had to let people go, I have always been instructed to basically say, Hey, we're ending your employment today or we're terminating your employment today. Say nothing else about it.

All right. And then here is a formal letter of termination. ⁓ Here are your rights to COBRA insurance or whatever COBRA for insurance or ⁓ any kind of ⁓ severance package and the terms based on that severance package, any money you owe them and when it will get paid, how they will get paid a check or whatever all of that is in writing for them. And then what's going to happen invariably is they're going to say, well, why are you fire me? Hey,

we're not getting into that. The only thing I can tell you is that we're ending your employment today. Obviously I'm not an attorney and I'm not an attorney in your state. There's two ways to approach this. You have the attorney safe harbor way that I just talked about. And then there's the human way to do it, which I prefer, but has gotten gotten me sued. So that's, that's one of the challenges because, because if you go the route of

I care about you as a person, you're no longer going to be here for whatever reason. The more detail you go into, the more you can and will be held against you in a court of law. then, and then for some people you go in firing and you come out, they're not fired. Yeah. So what I did on the most painful one that I've ever had to do is I wrote it and I would not go off of what I wrote. I read what I needed to say off of what I had.

had had typed up. You typed up before the because when you walk into that room and then they sit down, your mind goes a million miles an hour. you need and then like I need to keep my guardrails. That's all I did. This paper. That's all I did. That's all I could do. Yeah. Because it was a friend. It was painful. It was personal. And the only thing I could do to to protect myself and the people that worked here for something that I had no control over, really, because

like that was just the state of the company at the time. This is years ago now, but it was to say, here's the things that I have to say in order to both communicate well and to have empathy and concern for a person that I actually do care about. hated doing that, but anyway, ⁓ it was emotional for me.

And like the rest of them haven't been. Hey, man, we're in our employment today. Here's a here's a service package. I got questions. Well, that's a shame because I don't have answers for you. That's the end of this conversation. And I wish you well. Good luck. Well, as I would say this too. So

⁓ A responsible business owner, manager, whoever should have had enough conversations with this individual where this would not have been a surprise. Correct. And that's the goal. Does it always happen? Absolutely not. the goal is that, you know, for us, we're EOS users. know that people recognize that we use EOS and we highly recommend it. I don't care what kind of business you are. It works. But one of the that EOS is one to ones.

right? You he actually encourages like weekly one to ones like that's a lot. So we do monthly so we're modified. you do weekly for the ones that need weekly. Yes, 100%. There's a weekly side that if it needs to happen, needs to happen. But there's a minimum in our eyes of a monthly. But inside of that is inside of this monthly one to ones, I guess you're having conversation. But if it's like a problem that you're seeing recurring, and there's no correction, like this is the place to get it fixed. Right?

So you never get to this moment of like, we're letting you go because if you get to that moment, it should be zero surprises to them, right? where they were just, if meaning a surprise was just simply, well, I thought it was going to be to tomorrow. So today that may be the close. That should be the closest surprise. Cause the reality of it is, Hey, we we've worked on this. You're not improving. I'm implementing a deadline. If you don't meet the deadline, we're going to have to let you go. And they'll wait. And usually when that happens, they just say, well, I'm out.

right and they fired themselves basically which is fine that's actually a lot cleaner that's easiest way that's the easiest way but it's not the real not the reality of most situations but anyway say so you've had a direct conversation you were firm you read a letter you you kept it clean he didn't become a well you you were emotionally internally but you didn't let it out they were emotionally reactive most likely unless they're like thank you for letting me go because I really didn't want to be here there's that side of it that people don't know

that don't remember. right. So when you know you're going into that meeting, you already have a checklist items that either another employee is running through as it's happening, or you go straight into the second the termination has occurred. And some of those items are, if they're marketing, they have a lot of access to things that you probably don't even realize. One of the biggest offenders is, do they own the Google Business Profile or do you own the Google?

profile social media. So all your social media logins do are they the owner or are you the owner and if they are you made your mistake. So I want to throw this out there anyway because I think this is a this is a pause and an insert into this conversation because yes this is all important for the transition out but this is also something like I have no intention of firing anybody.

in the near future. My team is awesome. This episode is not for me. This one part is because I think you need to go have everything in the company's name no matter what. If our agency does not ever want to own anything that belongs to you and if your agency or your marketer or somebody that is not you the business owner or a dedicated email address for the business that kind of thing like we use integrations right so so if you don't have a dedicated email for your business that

all things go to. I recommend you do that today. And like you said, it doesn't matter if you have the perfect team. ⁓ It's something's going to change at some point in the future. And if you're the owner, it's your head at the end of the day. And I'm talking about like your GoDaddy logins. Yeah, your domain logins, your Google Business Profile ownership, your ads ownership, your email, your email ownership, your

everything that's considered ownership should be tied to one account that you the owner only have access to or maybe one other trusted partner or whatever. in the case you die, someone knows how to get into it because at the end of the day, we talk about it. So we've had lots of companies, urgent cares in particular, purchase other urgent cares. And we tell them, hey, make sure in that contract you get the assets, digital assets, because those are always forgotten.

You say, well, I got the logo. That's not what we're talking about. Logo's a file. Their Google business profile is what you want. In the world, I mean, in the world of urgent care, you have like thousands of reviews in that Google business profile. And if it was tied to the owner, if the owner of that profile was tied to the marketing person that you just fired after five years, ⁓ they're just going to go and hit suspend. Well, I'll just tell you, like even still, there's clients that we pick up all the time that

their previous agency owns all of their stuff and they're literally starting their business over digitally. Yep. Because they had a terrible experience with this agency for whatever reason. And they may even be tied up and like, I'm not going to pay you because you guys suck or whatever it is that they're going to do with that agency. And they're just not going to give the digital assets over because you own money. You know, that's not a problem if you own your stuff.

Yeah, it's real. So just that hard reminder, it makes a difference. It's a little painful to get that done. But the amount of pain it would save you is incredible. I mean, literally may take you like half a day to get it all done to migrate over in terms of everything. You own everything to a certain email address that only you have access to basically. So let's do a quick recap.

Recap. Recap. Let's do a quick recap. That's what you come here for. exactly. Identify the real problem. they too busy? Are they they pretending to be busy? ⁓ Are they creating drama around decision making? Are they insisting that they have things figured out? Step two, are they weaponizing chaos in your company? Are they are they saying that they're the only ones who understand it can do it or whatever? Are they are they dodging?

Are you to touch it? exactly. As it turned into a house of cards that nobody else can go or are there the Wizard of Oz and only they can be behind the curtain. then three, putting together a ⁓ firing or termination blueprint is do an audit of the chaos. Get everything that you need documented and log into all that kind of stuff. Make sure that you've documented all of their issues and then make sure that you have a direct, clear, in writing, you're out conversation.

⁓ And I would even recommend you run that by an attorney or your payroll company or whatever as a matter of fact like most payroll companies Have an HR part of it. Yeah that you can just pull a document from them They'll tell you legally in your state what you can and can't do ⁓ but that should be like If you're marketing person or or your marketing agency mainly your person is who we're talking about if you feel like they check any of those boxes

And finally, again, I'm not trying to like trigger you if you're a marketing person and you're listening to this and you're like, I'm doing these things one do better. You can fix this. You can fix it. Like we're telling you to fix these things. And I want to identify with you on a different level and just to say maybe you're doing these things because you really don't know what you're doing. Yeah, you're not in the right spot. You don't have the training for it. ⁓ You just want the right mindset for it. We've seen that too, where we've had people

that were our contacts for marketing at a company and we're just like, you're asking us like basic one-on-one questions here. Why are you asking these questions? Or they forget, like I'll do this part, they hand us a thing, we're like that, can we redo it? I was just going to tell you, if you're that and you know that maybe you don't have the chops you're in over your head or you don't know exactly what you're doing, go to patientcaremarketingpros.com to our resources area.

And download our done for you kit. We're not trying to punish you or get rid of you or any of that. What we're trying to do is help our clinics get more patients, deliver better care, get repeat visits, make our clinics scale like we Make them the hero. That's right. We want them to be successful. And if you're a piece of that, we want you to be successful to go get those resources there on our website. Awesome. Well, all right. I'm so well, I'm annoyed I'm having to rerecord this episode, but I feel like it was just as good or better. Yeah.

I'm sure we missed some of the cool bullet points from the previous one, but we've added in some good ones. So guys, I hope you all enjoyed this. It was a little bit different for us, but it's just we've had so many recent experiences we thought would worth making episode around it. And also too, if you have an episode idea you'd love to hear us chat about, send us an email at hello at patientcaremarketingpros.com and we'll be happy to look at it and say, guess it's pretty good. But we'll catch you on the next one. Leave us a review.