Ep. 203: How to Grow a Small Urgent Care Without a Big Brand Budget

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Hey, what's going on everybody. You're listening to another episode of walk-ins welcome with Nick and Michael. I'm Nick. That's Michael. We're glad to be back with you. We just passed our 200th episode. Yeah, we did. And I am cracked out on orange kissilani new and I've got Michael Ray drinking some too. I'm even drinking one right now. Great. Grace will be proud. Cause I she's recently an addict of the onilani. Some of y'all met her this past week at a Neruka.

the Rook one of the hookahs. We will encourage you guys if you're looking at somewhere to connect with other urgent cares, go check out the urgent care associations and all their regional chapters. We'll we just went to Narukah. We'll be at Sarukah, which is Southeast. We haven't been to Calukah yet. we love the big hookah too. We call them hookahs. It's just more fun that way. yeah, it's

200 episodes last week, was super cool. Even had a discovery call yesterday where the guy just listened to it. And it was like this funny celebrity moment for me. Shout out, shout out. I don't know if you saw my screen. I'll have to go back and look. Yeah, it's really funny. But yeah, and so 200 episodes, a lot of cool things have happened in 200 episodes. Go back and take a listen to that. We just did a fun recap.

But in a past webinar, more than I guess past webinar and podcast episodes, we've talked about branding here and there. And we're going to take this episode and kind of have an understanding that brand is expensive. Brand takes time. Brand is something that you typically associate with bigger companies. And a lot of you urgent cares are one location, two location, maybe five. Coca Cola, Walmart. Yeah.

Yeah, all these things. Procter and gamble. I'm just thinking these massive brands. Right before we started this episode, was telling Nick about this new show called OnBrand, which is like really interesting, kind of fun to watch. just a competition of trying to do branding campaigns for big brands. But it's so funny because when I was watching it, I was like, man, I could relate to every single bit of what they're saying. But they're talking to a Dunkin Donuts that has, they even said in the show,

we had to get this right because we're spending millions of dollars on this Wayne campaign, which at the end of the I chose to do it on a television show. Yeah, exactly. It's all worked out. got this figured out. You know what it reminds me of is back in the day when like a band would not have a lead singer anymore and they would create this whole show around just getting a lead singer for that band. That's all it is. Yeah. And so it's just live competitions we have because they had a pitch deck. They had a pitch, everything had a live test, all these things. But like Dunkin Donuts, millions of dollars. We understand.

Most urgent cares don't have millions of dollars. Licking good donuts right down the road? No dollars. dollars. Next to Krispy Kreme, probably the best donut you'll ever have. Yeah, exactly. So we're going somewhere with both sides of this. Exactly. And so, and that's the thing too, because it's community, right? Where you know that they're in the community. But they also like they have a really good donut that's better than a Dunkin' situation, all this stuff. actually, and the Kalachies is the Kalachies, man. Kalachies are where it's at. So that's food.

I don't know why we're talking about food. We've already eaten lunch. So well, before we get into that, before we get into the episode, here's what I know. A lot of the listeners will fall off near the end of the episode and we know the stats and that is the time that I typically ask you to either leave us a review or hit the subscribe button. So I'm to go ahead and start our episode this way and just say, if you like listening to us, it really helps the algorithm get this in front of other urgent care owners. So if you'll hit the subscribe button, if you're watching on YouTube or hit the, ⁓ button.

⁓ on Spotify, leave us a review on Apple, leave us a review. And with that, let's get into the episode. Here's what we want to talk about. Here's the theme. ⁓ Grace was in our Monday meeting. Grace is, well, you've probably talked to her on the phone if you've ever called in and had a with If you've ever had an initial relate like conversation with us, Grace was probably there. And if she wasn't there, she was probably on the next call. That's right. She heads up our business development here at Patient Care Marketing Pros. But the reason I bring it up, she brought this concept to our meeting and I loved it. So I started building on

And that is that big clinics, like large, larger clinics, they get their client volume based on brand. Smaller clinics get their patient volume based on experiences and service. And they're two completely different thought processes. ⁓ And there's pros and cons to both. I want to throw that out there as well. But here's the thing with big clinics win with brand small clinics win with service. Here's the problem many clinics are trying to play in the wrong.

Right. Some of the smaller clinics are trying to spend every dollar they have to be on every channel they can possibly be on. They're spending money on Facebook, Google, television, print, radio, ⁓ grassroots. They're sponsoring everything they can sponsor. And I like the way, if you're a Lord of the Rings fan, there's this scene where Frodo says, I feel like I'm a butter spread over too much bread. Exactly. And that's the small clinic. Yeah, that's we know too that when you throw

a sizable budget, but you split it up 10 ways and then because a very small budget on each channel, the effectiveness starts to go away. It's just the nature of anything because you are competing. Sadly, you are competing with bigger brands when it comes to budgets on certain things. Now there are ways around all that, but no, it is a challenge where a big brand can throw lots of dollars at something while a small brand just simply cannot. No, and on the flip side of that coin though, the bigger brands

have so much money, they just throw money at everything and they forget that they have a service to provide. Yeah, exactly. They focus more on like the visual of it, not the actual touch and the experience of it. That's right. It's all about the packaging. You know what? Well, first of all, I have to say this. I really like Domino's pizza. Did you like Dono's before it changed?

⁓ No, it tasted like cardboard. But there's a there's I'm actually going somewhere this they used to have the most amazing box in the pizza delivery business. It was awesome. It was fun. It had a lot going on. It had jokes on it. A little coloring areas. That's fun. And the pizza sucked. They spent all their money on the packaging and what you actually ordered didn't deliver.

Yeah, exactly. Follow me. You can make that argument with a lot of big brands. That's right. Exactly. And I don't want to see our larger urgent care clinics because I know you're listening to the podcast as well. I don't want you to spend so much money on your on your beautiful packaging or your beautiful buildings and you forget to deliver the pizza. Yeah. the pizza. It's like you open up the Happy Meal and there's a rotted hamburger. yeah. Yeah. But I will say people like to crap Oliver McDonald's or poo poo Oliver McDonald's. But I will tell you

they're the most consistently mediocre food you'll ever get, which means it's going to be the same every time you go there. Yeah, it's not amazing. It's not bad. It's just right there. But brand will buy the attention, but service will earn the trust and keep them coming back. number two, Michael, why does this conversation matter? Let's get through some of the stats. All right. So a couple of things here. The urgent care industry is growing still. So I know that like I was looking at the stat that you have here from 2023, which

I want to say back when we first started with the industry was probably in the 12th. It was yeah. So that would have been back in 2020 2021. Yeah, pre or right in the mix of COVID. But now it's over 14,000 urgent care centers out there. So it says saturated, but like, that's kind of an interesting term for some of this because sometimes like it is saturated in certain areas. Like, I know when we were I was talking to an urgent care yesterday, startup.

pull back on the mouse. Well, you got like five or six within a mile of you. know what who would make the absolute most money in urgent care if they would just do it? Dollar General. Think about where they put them. They put them in underserved areas. Oh, yeah, I know. I I'm a believer in the model of let the bigger brands do all the research for you. Right. I know actually Hibbett Sports was a big fan of that. So Hibbett Sports, they're actually they got sold. I don't think they exist anymore.

No, I mean, they're still one in alabaster. Well, think they got something about anyway, you don't know where that is. That's in Alabama. But we'll keep going. But Hibbett Sports is it's a very, it's a Birmingham based sports equipment company and their entire location model was we go in the shopping center beside a Walmart, Because they just let them do all the heavy lifting because then Walmart is like, well, we can't offer all the things but we can't have Hibbett Sports, you know, that type of stuff. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to get something from one of my children sports wise on a Walmart and had to go to Hibbett to get

by design. ⁓ But yeah, and you know, not only are there a ton of urgent care clinics, but they're all within a 10 mile radius, most of the time, not in the rural areas, I get that. But most of the time, they're within a 10 mile radius of your house. You know, if you really think about it, if you're listening, just think about how close is urgent care to my house? Yeah. And how many? ⁓ So when I was recently on a webinar with Xperity, and I made this this this connection, ⁓ that it's more like

retail food chain at this point, retail healthcare is retail food chain. And it's almost fast food food chain, not just like sit down restaurant, right? But anyway, over 78 % of patients have that 10 mile radius around them where they can get to it. So keep going, Michael, you were on the roll. yeah, sorry. So in the other side of that, most patients make decisions fast. it is true, man, it's so true on that side of things where we tell people all the time,

If you can't get somebody somebody's going to call you and you can't answer within 30 seconds, what a good answer, by the way, not just the half baked rude answer. Right. Looking at you urgent cares. I had a review calls on recently. They're going to move on. They're going to move personal. It is a little personal. So we do a of front desk stuff around here. And so I get to go listen to calls with our clients that have some issues on conversions. And I get so aggravated because there's like

that front desk person was being rude to someone they've never talked to before. For no good reason. the of the that's so much. People are people. They are. but yeah, visibility and word of mouth is a big part of that as well. And then, and the other thing I note here, knowing which lever to pull is there between slow bleed and sustainable growth. We hear that quite a bit. And it's so funny, I hear that which lever to pull in big company conversations. We just pulled that lever and this lever. Well,

In a small business situation, you may only have one or two levers you were able to pull in the first place. So I will tell you this, if we're going to look at levers, if you look at 10 levers across the board, a larger company can pull levers at the same time. Yes. Where a smaller company, when you pull one, the other one pops up. Yeah, exactly. They're more of a pull. Because it doesn't have enough power to move both of them. Well, so let's look at the two different models that we just talked about. One is brand driven, one is service

All right. And I'm going to give you the pros and cons. I will do the brand driven. You can do the ⁓ experience driven. ⁓ But here's model one, the brand driven growth that's used by larger clinics and chains. Right. So here are the pros. Let's start with the pros. ⁓ Scalability, the brand equity. It'll help you open new locations faster with new patients coming through the door faster because there's familiarity. We see that too. ⁓

We absolutely see that for those. I think brand is incredibly important. That's the reason we did a podcast episode. But we also have to recognize that brand is in everything. But with that, when you open up multi locations, when they go in, they go, there's another one of those ABC XYZ urgent cares. Exactly. They know it. They know the coloring. They know the schemes. They know to a degree they know what they're going to get. Yeah. And then they know that like my my stuff's already part of them, probably. I don't want to become a new patient. I'm already a patient in that mindset.

So here's the difference though. When you have that mindset of branding, it has the McDonald's effect. I know that if I go to the McDonald's right down by my house, it's going to have the exact same or very similar experience than the one right across town to the one over in Memphis where my family lives, over the one out in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The experience is going to be the same. Well, here's the deal. It's going to be exceptionally mediocre. We already talked about that. Well, I just had a great hamburger earlier today at

whiskey bravo, whiskey foxtrot, whatever it was called, right? The burger was outstanding. But if I'm traveling or if I'm unfamiliar with the area, the likelihood of me going to that over a McDonald's is going to be pretty slim. especially when you just need something real quick. But one of makes me want to talk about it way more than the other. You know what I'm saying? So search and map dominance. By default, when you start

⁓ getting reviews at multi locations on the Google Business Profile. Organically, you're going to pop up. You're going to just show up. you rise the tide. see it. Because we've always we've had conversations with clinics where they wanted to open a second clinic, but they maybe wanted to call it something different because they wanted to call it the city's name instead. And while strategically for a single location, it's not a bad idea, but multi location, I know it's better. Google would rather

reward the one that has multi locations then as individual locations that just so happen to be owned by the same firm. But the problem with that because Google doesn't know that right. So Google's like this place has 20 locations and it's as consistent on the information I can pull from it. It's naturally going to get you up higher. We see it all the time like we when we work with a company that has eight to 10 locations, the ad location getting that to rank. It's not hard. Yeah.

compared to one location and they decide to add another one but call it something different. It's like starting over. That's right. That's right. It really is. So your brand and multi location is going to add legitimacy, you know, and I know this this year that I wrote says hospital affiliations and change feel more official. But but really there's something in our psyche that says if they're they're if they're smart enough to open up four or five or six or 20 or 100 locations, they probably know what they're doing. Yeah. Right. There's that default.

thing that there's there is a confidence in that level of branding. And then you have better vendor leverage that is for sure. That actually plays out and this is full transparency. I think you guys like it when we're transparent with you. ⁓ If you come at me with a 40, 50, 60, 70 location urgent care, the pricing model is going to be different than if it's a one location. We're going to be like, yes, because even for ourselves.

A single location urgent care has a certain price ⁓ of 45, 5500 location urgent care has a different price because of their size and we have to adjust for that because everything has to make sense and it's not a like we're just going to do whatever they say because they're bigger. It's more of like we understand if we're working with one brand adding locations isn't like starting over every time correct. So that's where that part comes in. But it's true. You know most large brands have lots of vendor

leverage and there's nothing wrong with that. There's just not. ⁓ We were talking the other day how we were talking about like Visa, MasterCard, American Express and how probably Walmart gets a very different percentage rate. ⁓ 100%. And actually I saw an interview on that. Bob's Mart. I saw an interview on that where they questioned like MasterCard or Visa. That was that that was that like government level. It was and they're like, can you tell us what Walmart's rate is?

we can't tell you exactly because it's a negotiated private rate. And if they did tell you all of their existing customers was they will give us that rate. ⁓ And then we jatted about the whole like they at Walmart will not absolutely will not do Apple Pay or Google Pay, which is so frustrating. It is. But they want they want our data and they get their data from Walmart Pay. So well, that sounds great. Let's talk about the negative parts of that and then we'll keep going on the road here. ⁓ high overhead marketing dollars, staff dollars, real estate.

dollars investing in systems. When you do things that scale, there is cost and high overhead that's attached to that. where you have a one location clinic that at 23 patients per day, maybe break even and even profitable. When you start getting to multi-location clinics, actually creeps up, not down. So you would probably be closer to 30 to 32, maybe 33 patients per day.

that you have to hit to those break even levels because your overhead is just that much higher. And then we recognize that a lot of multi locations, let's say you have eight locations, there's probably three or four that's carrying the brand. That's right. We see that a lot. We see that a lot where you have three or four like they're doing everything. The other three or four, the other half of the locations are surviving. Right. And they would not survive if the other ones weren't pumping them.

that in there. So it's real. And it's just part of it. Because I can go and tell you right now, urgent cares who are single locations are thinking themselves, man, that urgent care is like 10 or 15. I bet they're making so much money sometimes. Well, they probably are otherwise. Why would you do it? Multi locations allows you to compound your time. Yeah, it does. ⁓ but they have their own set of headaches. Like we're talking here, like when the bigger you get, the slower you move. That's it. And then if you have one location that goes rogue,

It will affect everybody else. We were having with a conversation with a clinic recently where they were having legitimate problems over standards for like Halloween decorations. Christmas trees. And I'm going, actually, I get that. There's some things in our own company that the bigger that we grow internally, you have to like almost make, you have to put things in writing. that kind of stuff. Stupid stuff. And one of them had like a rogue employees that were

creating TikTok accounts on behalf of the brand, which you really don't want that because then you lose complete control and that can go bad really quick with one video. Well, let's transition from the branding side over to the service driven growth. This would be for our smaller, maybe single locations. Maybe two, but mostly going to be single locations, startup, those kinds of things. Go ahead and start with our pros list. Yeah, and it should be noted, you know, most of the time in these smaller brands, the owner

probably is already known in the community in some capacity. there's a... Whiskey Foxtrot. Yeah. Like the burgers. Yeah. There's some like, oh, I know so it happens all the time. The place was booming. Yeah. And then some of it's out pure, like talking right here where you're going to have good service because you care about the people, because you know, you go to church with them or you go see... You're going to bump into them on the ice cream aisle. Yeah, exactly. Or you're going be sitting in traffic beside them. Like we were having that last week when were in Hal's Jeep and...

He pulls up, we're just chatting to some guy on the highway. It's like, because that's just local. But anyway, so you're going to be driven by high service, good service. And then the word of mouth and that part of peace is really important. So like there's that local piece, right? And urgent cares are community driven. You know, that's such an important piece to know. Other pro to the service, like you're small, so you can adapt on a fly. If there's something happening in that community, you can quickly adapt to that.

or if there's a staffing change or you like I need to make a policy change that didn't expect this to happen. Right. You could do it. You yourself, the owner, could just make it happen. Right. You're not like get five approvals from somebody. Generally, smaller teams have really good culture. So the staff is more or really terrible. Like I could go either way because it could be determined by the leader. But yeah, a bad apple could really mess things up. But ⁓ chances are they're more bought into it and they're not taking just the page. You know, I'm immediately thinking of Andy over at Evergreen.

He's got the best culture. Yeah, yeah. Like his team, like at least the way it's been expressed, the interactions I've had with Andy and the interactions I've seen, like they're so tight knit. He loves his team. He treats them with respect. He cares for them. They care for him. They show up. They show up for their customers ⁓ and for their patients. That's a good small business with a great culture. And so and then the other nice part too, where

While we love paid ads paid as isn't always the bit always the big driving factor because the community hopefully is backing them up as well. Now, I will say all with all that ⁓ is still a challenge because patients forget where they went. They don't remember very bad short term memory loss. do have short term memory on this sometimes long term. Yeah, sometimes forever. ⁓ So what are the cons to the situation or the cost of this type of model? ⁓

The visibility isn't obvious. Like you have to make the effort to be visible to people where you're going out to the community on regular basis, not just the ads themselves. the grassroots is challenging because as an owner, want your businesses to survive and thrive. But then you're like, why? Then you have to have that humbling moment where I really have to go do this to make an improvement. I can't just rely on the system to just do everything for me. And there's some humbling that goes on with that because

the side of you saying, built this thing so I don't have to work. Well, you do have to work for a while. And you still have to work. You still have to work. It's different work later on. The other challenge that you run into because you're small, you don't know what predictable patient volume looks like. so and then your brain can't lift you up in moments where there's when something's happening, can we keep that volume where it should be? Or can we crank up a bunch of dollars to help push in more volume?

So you have challenges there, That's something that's very ⁓ important because an inconsistent patient volume is going to create, what do want to call it, nervousness in your company, nervousness with your staff. And then you may make bad decisions on all of that. So you have to be very resilient about the whole situation. And then of course, you want to, scaling for a small business is so challenging. We talk about it all the time in our business.

Like we need to learn how to scale, scale, scale. We talk about it. We say the word scale. ⁓ And then when when he finally, you know, rubber meets the road, you thought you were scaling and then something falls apart because you haven't thought through it. The bigger brands, they've been through the pain of that. There is an ultimate advantage when you buy into a franchise because they have all the systems in place. While yeah, you're paying a fee and that's super annoying, but they have systems, they have the market, they have everything in place. So they've already experienced the bad, they tell you exactly what to do.

So as a small clinic, you're like, I think this is the right mood. It ends up not being the right mood blows up in your face. And that's always a challenge you have to make up for some of that. And then that also goes into like the marketing side where you like, think this will work. You pull that lever and it didn't do anything. Or it didn't happen in the time frame you needed it to. Yeah, exactly. Or like you pay for this sponsorship because emotionally you were attached to it. And it did nothing but just burn the dollar that you put on it. So like that that happens all the time. And don't still.

Baseball game? or a lot of sporting events out there. you know that you learn from it. And then maybe it's okay. It burned money. It's okay, because you want to just be in the community to support the community. But you have to be mindful. Like you don't have big, big deep pockets to do this on regular basis. And that's scary sometimes. So well, here's what happens. You have two models. You have big clinics that try and act like they're small. You have small clinics that try and look like they're big.

And so when a big clinic tries to act small, they struggle to maintain their experiences across all their locations. It just doesn't work. Right. And then worse, when a problem pops up, they can't change the direction of the ship fast enough to fix the broken patient flow. Right. So just think of it like a small clinic is more like a jet ski or wave runner. And then the larger the clinic is, the larger the boat, the harder it is to turn. So you get one of these

amazing, but very, very large 400 plus location clinics. That's like trying to turn a cruise ship. And it may not make it. It's just going to tip over. Yeah, or they start to turn like, you know, I'm tired of turning, turning back. That's it. I mean, like a wave runner will turn instantly. Yeah, a cruise ship takes probably several miles to turn, right? So that's the point is you can't you can't treat it the same. And then there's a small clinic, they're going to blow through their budget before like 10am.

Yeah. You know what I mean? We've seen that quite a few times where, know, hey, this is your daily budget, but it ran out at 11. Yeah. And you're like, well, can you add more? Like, do you want to add more? Can you add more? So let me just be real with you. If you don't have $1,000 or $1,500 or even $2,500 somewhere in that range to invest in digital, for example, I would tell you don't waste your money at all. Yeah, exactly. Because it's not even worth it. You're not going to get enough. You're just going to be frustrated.

And those dollars can be better leveraged somewhere else. And then of course, you end up with a really nice design. this is one of small clinics are trying to look big. They have this beautiful design, but there's nobody in their rooms. We've seen that too, where that that new clinic, they put all the love and effort into it and then there's nobody there to fill it up. And that's real. And the sad part is like that takes a lot of time, energy, mental energy.

And then it's depressing when it doesn't do anything. Real depressing. Well, so Michael, like, what do you do? If your clinic's small? What do you do? Double down on? All the local parts of it. reputation reputation. Reputation is probably the biggest thing I would say. It mentions these other things like focusing on local SEO reviews and speed of service friendliness. But it goes back to reputation because we've seen it.

we have clinics, the single location clinics that have impeccable reputation and their patient volume is very consistent. And that's because the community believes in them and they know they're going to get a good experience every single time. That's right. And that's so huge because I would say this if I was if I was going to actually let's just roleplay this. If you were going to start an urgent care today, we've know a lot about urgent care. We don't know everything. We know a lot. ⁓ How would you make sure that like your reputation

is top notch on a regular basis. Think about it. Yeah, you're you're in there. You are the primary doctor because we know how that goes. And you have three staff. I mean, I would give the best service I could possibly get. That'd be like the number one way I would be able to. Service would be it. But I'm thinking like ⁓ you would find the ways to go that little extra mile each time. That's definitely something I would do. And let's explain extra mile.

an extra mile. We've talked about this in the past, but an extra mile is that follow up call that follow up text by you, not always the staff person. The tell me how you're doing beyond what's wrong right now. Like just conversation, making sure like let me walk you back to the front desk to get things taken care of not just yeah, just walk down the hallway. I'll see you later as I'm staring at my iPad to fill in my information. You know,

that just I want to pay attention to you. And then also the, hey, this is what we typically do. But because of what you just told me, I'm going to make an adjustment and take care of you. Like that's the type of service and reputation that a local single location urgent care should care about. Because that's what makes you different from a big brand. Because a big brand, they have to follow policy, they have to go through bureaucracy.

There are so many layers. gave them a conversation I had the other day from someone who was... I'm sorry, was a call recording I was checking in on. And they said, we don't have that. I have to check with so and so. And they're not here. Could you make the extra step of pulling up the file? Like in my mind, I was like, why didn't you just pull up the file? You have access. Anyway, it's just like these little things. Like, let me just take care you. Let me be a mama bear. We joked about because she was awesome.

Just the extra little piece because I even think about like when we first started here with our agency of we would go the extra mile service matters service still matters but it was very like we're going to take care of you the best way we possibly can even if we have to be more flexible in our end just to make because you're not as flexible right well and now we have to do that just based on the size of it we're not the biggest agency on that we're making incremental

increases every single month, every single quarter, every single year. And so we have to think like a larger clinic, because that's the direction we're going. Right. So how does a larger clinic do this? Well, you've got to standardize this stuff. Yes. Right. You have to increase your check-in speed, and you have to make a system for that. You have to systemize your wait times. Right. And it has to be standardized across the board. I have those metrics. Yeah. What's really cool, and I don't mind giving a shout out to Xperity on this, they have this thing called Care Agent that they're rolling out.

And when it says follow ups, how can we do a follow up systemize it, but it still do what you just said, which is how can it sound like it's coming from the doctor about their ailment? Yeah. And so expertise come out with an AI that'll do that, where it'll dig into your system. They'll say, Hey, how does that how's that cough? Is it improving? Like, that was an AI that did it though. That's wild to me. So I think that's pretty cool. ⁓ But you at this point, you're using your brand to dominate your market share, you're not doing a service level. And you back it up with

as much operational excellence as you can. Yeah, but you have to find a way to systemize it. Yeah, and systemizing there's so many nuances to it because we find out here too, where we think we have a system figured out and then it gets broken. And broken systems are meant like scissors are meant to be broken. Like they're not meant to be I built this five years ago, and it's still doing exactly what it's supposed to do, even though we're 10 times our size. That's right. That's pretty rare, right? Like that doesn't

ever happen where even your EMR of today may not be doing everything you need to do in five years for now. And that is the reason why people make switches. But I just think about how like the way they put it, the staff that you have today will not be the staff you need at the next level. the way we said it when we were small is the things that got us to a million. Yes, yes. that took us to a million won't be the same staff that takes us to 10 million. Exactly. And actually, with the exception of you and

basically Hannah, Kimberly. Yeah, that's proven out to be completely true. like the staff like because we look back at our old Christmas photos. Yeah, we keep them up because we still love people. Yeah, we love people and they were all their incremental important pieces to the puzzle. Like if you look back at like there were some things that mattered when they were there. They made these changes that we either still use today or it taught us something. But notice, yeah, because you look at the team that we had six years ago, seven years ago, like

That's a whole lot different. I would even say the first two years of the company had a lot to change. Well, so think of it this way, because we're talking about big brand versus small brand. Yeah, right. The type of people that you would hire that are very attracted to customer service are most likely not very attracted at all to a system. They're not attracted to corporate mindset. I'm not. I'm not attracted to corporate mindset. It turns me off greatly. I don't like it at all. That doesn't mean that I can't work with corporations. We do. Right. But

Like when I hear the word synergy, I throw up in my mouth a little bit. I'll circle back on that. To which people are going, jerk, that's what we say around here. And I'm like, I'm not mad at you for saying that, but when I hear synergy and silos and going forward and these kinds of things, I die a little inside because I'm not built for that personally. And so what I've done though, think about this, this is the important segue here, is I've put people in place who can handle that.

who do enjoy that so that the company, my company, and by the way, your clinic isn't limited by you, the owner, you, the leader, right? ⁓ It better not be. John Maxwell talks about the law of the lid. You're the law of the lid. And your company will never outgrow your ability unless you find a way to work on it. Yep. And sometimes that is fixing yourself and sometimes that's putting people in place that in areas that you know you can't fix. So that's it, man. Yeah, I just think about

Tom about the staff part. I know last week we're reminiscing on 200 episodes. Our staff was completely different when we started this podcast. That's right. lot has happened since then. you know, the staff that we have now is so different looking than it was a few just three years ago. I look older. It's real. And it just everybody looks a little older on us. It just it's kind of funny because we have them right here in our hallway of almost all of our Christmas photos. Right.

I know the oldest one I can see is where Addie was an infant basically and that was her poop explosion day. That's funny. You remember that? Yes. She hasn't pooped in two days. there it is right in front of the photo. She waited for work. She did wait. She was just waiting the whole time. But that was six years ago. So it's just cool to see all that. And it's all good memories. Like there's some challenges to it. But boy howdy, if we didn't have those challenges, we wouldn't be where we are.

And if you didn't know we were in Alabama, boy, howdy, you do now. I'm okay with that. I'm a Southerner. That almost sounds like Texas though. I can't tell. I can go any flavor you want. I love it. It's all good. Well, listen, in urgent care brands fill the waiting room. Service keeps it full. There you go. That's true. There you go. Cause service will actually keep it empty if you don't watch it. If you're not careful, also clear out your, clear out your.

Well, as always, we appreciate you listening to us and I hope we've found some ways here to help you get more patients, deliver better care, get repeat visits, all the clinics. We'll see you next week. See you.