Ep. 233: Meet the Pros: Lessons From Restaurants, Marketing, and Client Success with Hal Craig

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All right, welcome back to Walk-Ins Welcome. We have a special episode today. It is an interview, but it's an internal interview, which is super cool. And we're doing part of this too, because Nick is right now, he is on vacation, he's heading out west enjoying some time with his family, which is awesome. And so we want to introduce some different episodes for you guys. And today, we're going to do one of our series of Meet the Pros. So Meet the Pros, you know, we've done a couple in the past, but it's been a minute.

So we're going to do some right now. So we actually have Hal with us. Hal Craig, he's been with us now for almost a year. July 1st. Yeah. So we were recording this right now, end of May of 2026. So in July 1st, 2026 will be a full year with us, which is awesome. It's kind of hard to believe it's already here. And so we had bring Hal on as a CSM. So CSM, is the client facing relationship side of the business. whenever our client needs something, needs to talk to us or whatever.

How steps in and does that with our clients, which is super awesome. And you have actually taken on the CSM role for from our legacy clients and our urgent care. So, but you have a mix right now, which is cool. But as a question that we ask all of our guests, let's see if you have an answer. Let's see you pay attention to the podcast or not. may not. It's okay. What's one thing about you that nobody knows? That's a hard one that nobody knows. Well,

Most of the audience don't know you. So I may know it, maybe somebody else knows it, but what's something that's unique? Okay. We did a three and a half year stint where we lived on an island in the middle of nowhere, in the Marshall Islands, which is awesome, but that's something that's kind of random that most people don't know. Marshall Islands, where is that? I It is, I tell people it is like if...

halfway in between Hawaii and Japan. if you were to start flying from Hawaii halfway point, it's right there. And the island was called Kwajalein. wow. Yeah, that's super cool. It was awesome. It was like a mile long, half a mile wide. 1900 people live there. No cars. Everybody rode bikes. Have you been back since? No, you can't. You can't? Okay. You can go back as a contractor if you work for like Raytheon or some of these contractors, but you can't. That's kind of wild.

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That's super cool. But did not know that I like that. It's awesome. Never heard of those islands, which is even better. But anyway, all right. So the goal of this episode is one, let's talk about who you are, what excites you about marketing. And then we work with urgent cares with marketing in general. But yet to me, though, you have a really cool background, because your background is very unique in the sense of not many people have done this, they probably have wanted to. And you'd probably say, please don't. So let's talk about

Before you came here, what were you doing prior? What is your biggest background? That type of stuff. So I know you're referring to, and yes, I have people actually come up and they're like, Hey, we want to do that. I'm like, no. So, you know, somehow God's plan just changes all the different times. And I went in from logistics and transportation and somehow that transitioned to let's open a restaurant. Yes. And so is 17 years ago, I think.

Yeah, it was 2008 that we went into the restaurant business. We decided to open like a little sandwich shop. So this is post the recession starting. Correct. And so we thought that was a great idea. I mean, again, I don't live no regrets, right? But you learned a lot, you know, opening up restaurants and learning how to manage people and deal with people and the...

And then our latest restaurant we did was we opened six months before COVID. your timing is timing is. Yeah, can go more into details on that too. But six months before COVID. so again, lots of good memories. It was fun. Learned a lot. You know, in terms of marketing, you have to you're kind of a one stop shop. You've got to do everything you. We created a brand, had to market and start. So

but I do not recommend it unless you just have a lot of money and you don't mind losing it or you don't want to see your family ever again. So a quick fact is simply don't open a restaurant to make money. Yeah. So I found out afterwards, a lot of people who open restaurants, they do it because they already have a successful career in somewhere else and they either just need a place to put their money or they just like want to make their own steak. don't know. Very nice. All right. So you're in the restaurant business twice, really.

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like two different restaurants. Three. Three restaurants. What was the third one? It was a wine and cheese place at the summit. I didn't know. Primo. Really? That was you? Yeah. Well, it me and some partners. So I didn't know that. So you've done a sandwich shop, wine and cheese in a Mexican restaurant, essentially. I think that's it. Yeah. And then you were also in the distribution side of it where you were selling product to restaurants for a while.

So you've been, you know, essentially you've been on both sides of that aisle where you're a supplier and a receiver of it, which is super cool. But let's talk about the marketing side. So you mentioned a little bit there, but you also have a side business that we're happy to talk about because it's hop pro. but you have a space all about promotional stuff. And so, you know, as a company, we do digital marketing, we don't touch promotional. So we're happy to refer things over to you when it makes sense to. But no, let's talk about that. Like, what does that look like?

Yeah, so now appreciate that. I started that because I kept getting tired of seeing my friends who own businesses. They would just buy junk and they would spend their money on like trinkets and keychains and just, and they would just get thrown away. And so I'm like, surely there's a better way out there. And so we just started it just to have on the side, just to be able to help business owners like use their money more wisely. So like if you're gonna, you're gonna spend money on a hat.

Don't just buy some cheap hat to give away to everybody. Spend some money on a nice hat that people will wear. know, cause that's your brand, that's your name and that's your reputation. And so, you know, if you give somebody something and it breaks and it's cheap, people will think about that with you. Yeah, it's true. mean, and cause if you're going to give away something, you might as well be nice and somewhat memorable. I know that one of our favorite things that we like to give away are the slap koozies. You know, and then

Did you help with Hannah on the new ones that we were giving away? So Hannah is brilliant. I love her. We were I brought a sample of a slap koozie at one point. It was some sunglasses. Yeah. But she took that and ran with it and was like, what if we do like a medicine bottle that we can promote? And people use it. I love it. Yeah. One of my favorite ideas that someone showed me. Yeah. Prescription bottle slap koozie, which is super cool. So we're big fans of it. All right. So you have this.

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business owner background, restaurant background, working with suppliers background, marketing background, and now you've entered digital marketing with us, especially urgent care digital marketing. How has that been? What's been like the most surprising thing so far learning this new world? The first thing is it's like a different language, right? So like I talk about with you sometimes where

coming from a business owner standpoint from before, hiring a marketing agency to help me, I didn't understand it, right? Like I just would pay money and I would expect more business. And if I didn't, I'd be like, what's... If I gave you a dollar, you're gonna give me $5 back and that's just how it works. It's like, hey, I gave you this money, where did it go, right? And I've told you about this for one of the main reasons that I felt super comfortable in working with you and Nick and coming here.

is before this and when I knew you, you would talk about testimonies and showing what you guys have done. And one of the things you did was you showed, hey, we can actually show an ROI of not just impressions, like not just, oh, this many people viewed you or this many people started liking your Facebook page, but Facebook page, but you spent this money and we got this many people to come in your door or we've got this many jobs, new roofs, fill in the blank. And so I was like,

That was the biggest obstacle with me with digital marketing was like, it was all very vague. couldn't, but here, I mean, we're not perfect, but we do better than I've seen anybody. We try to, you know, utilizing reporting, like, hey, you spent this, we want to make sure that you got this back. Which makes in my head, it's logical. So it makes sense to be able to talk about it. Yeah. I mean, we're under philosophy that if marketing should always be, I'm putting quotes here, free because it's paid for itself.

not free because you didn't pay for it, but free because if I put, if I try, you know, put in a thousand dollars and I was able to produce 20 patients at $200 a pop, that's $4,000 for that thousand. And that's like an ideal situation in most cases. It could be different from others. But no, like that, is our goal because if you're spending money and nothing's coming of it, why are you spending it? know, and that's something I think marketing has a bad reputation for.

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where it's hard to say, well, I spent all this money, but I can't tell if anything happened. and one thing just I think that's, I'm not, I you may not want to talk about this, but one thing that I think was like, it just sets us apart. It's like all the marketing companies that I've utilized before, it's like you pay $2,000, three, that whatever your budget, but it's all in one. It's your ad budgets mixed in with their, so I didn't know what was going to Google ads. didn't know. So here's something different that caught, you know, I was like, oh, this is really cool, but I've had to,

be able to explain it is, hey, here's your monthly budget. This is our fee, but then this is going straight to Google. We even put it on a separate card, right? So it's like, we don't touch that. That's you're paying good. We don't make any money on that. it keeps it real clean of, Hey, we're doing our job for this that you're paying Google for. exactly. And that is somewhat unique to us. I think it's becoming more of a standard over time, but a lot of companies will still say, Hey, how much is the marketing package? That's 5,000 months includes everything.

Well, cool. How much is going to Google? It's just included. And then as we're very like, how much do you want per location? This is what we recommend. But what can you allocate? And then we go from there. And then we can even say like, we have, we want to spin up a campaign specifically for SED testing or whatever. Cool. How much you want to put toward that? You know, very specific in that would just make us unique in that sense. So let me ask. So you've now been talking to urgent cares for about a year.

you've been hearing owners talk to you. What is either a misconception or just a absolute priority that you hear from urgent cares when you talk to them? Like a misconception from the urgent care? So I would say misconception of what digital marketing is doing or what it could be doing or one of the things that we find for some urgent care or just businesses in general, they have this mindset misconception that if I build it, they will come.

And that was totally true during COVID. If you put a urgent care in a white tent on the parking lot, people would show up. It's not the case anymore. So what are some misconceptions that you think people are experiencing now? I know. So the biggest misconception I've noticed in my dealings with urgent care is that it's that, hey, my marketing is only digital marketing.

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Right. And so like, hey, I'm paying this and I expect this to work and have people come in the door. But in reality, even though like we're we don't encompass all this, we can help a little bit with it. But it's there's a lot more to that. There's like, what does your building look like? Right. Is it is it look fresh? Is it look clean? What is your signage? What is your name? Right. Like if your name is different, the name matters. It matters. Like I'm learning that right so much. Like knowing now if I were to open an urgent care, I would call it urgent care near me. Yeah.

And that would be my name. Or we also tell people urgent care, insert city name. So like urgent care, Hoover. Yeah, 100 percent easy. And why? Just because that's what people are searching for. So my daughter just started working for an ice cream place in Hoover. It's called near me. And my dad was like, I get it now. I'm like, I've been trying to tell you that. Like, it's brilliant. I love it. But but I think the thing that people don't understand is like, yes, the digital marketing, we can help.

But it's like the clients that have the best wins are win-win partnerships. So like they're the ones that they communicate with us. We communicate. Does that mean we get it always right? No, but we'll let, hey, we dropped the ball here, but they may not get it always right either. And so it's like admitting, hey, we need to do this better. Whether it's like, hey, your front desk is just telling people to go elsewhere, right? Are you looking at that? Or, hey, your building needs to be updated or, hey,

you should offer this type of service or hey, you're not offering this kind of insurance. your sports physicals are too expensive. All your competitors are half your price. And they need to listen. mean, not that I don't want tell people what they need to do, coming. I've learned again, coming from both sides of the table. The most successful ones, clients that we have come with a sense of humility and a sense that, I may not understand this fully. I'm really good at the doctoring part or the medical and the urgent care part. I trust you guys to help me get the patients in the door.

And those are the ones we have success with because it's like, you know, we're working with one now and he's like, Hey, I trust y'all help me hire a marketing person help me. What does this look like in terms of grassroots and you know, like they're asking us that I'm like, okay, can help. I think it's something you touched on too. So we also recognize with urgent care and business in general, it's always good to have multiple channels of marketing, like digital marketing. Yes. In the urgent care space, it is dominant like

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the largest players in the game recognize that. We see that from single locations up to multi locations. Google still matters. Now, will things change? Of course, it's, we just talked about this, how AI is forcing changes that some people really don't want, but it's just happening because we feel like we have to. But, it drives them. But we also know if you are also doing grassroots, flyers, mail outs,

a good looking building with good signage. Having somebody in your networking events and stuff like that for Achmed or anything B2B related. Those also help. Running radio and TV, nothing wrong with that. But what we know is that when you have a company that says, have an overall marketing budget and I have this allocated for each type of marketing so they can all work together, typically wins more. Because at that point, and why?

So when you start to approach like the omnipresent option where if I did a search for urgent care near me, I show up in an ad, I show up in social or I show up in organic and then maybe I'll go to them and then I'm driving by and I see a billboard, it has them on there. I hear a radio ad, I turn on the TV, it's there. I can't escape you so maybe I should go to you because you're everywhere. Yeah, that's where, what did I, we just.

We just bought a Asana because of that, right? So I got in the Asana mix and also I saw it on Facebook, see it in Instagram, I'm seeing ads for You're like, it must be kind of good. This is meant for me. I have to buy the Asana. But no, yeah. So just going back real quick to the Hoff Pro, part of the thing that I had to realize is with promotional products is going, I need to educate people on the importance of that, the impressions, right? They need to see your brand. So.

The more, what's the term you use? Omnipresence? Omnipresence. So like the more someone sees it, the more comfortable they feel with it, the more credibility. Trust factor. Trust factor. And so it's like, so I realized if I can teach people, hey, the reason why you don't buy a cheap crappy hat is because it's going to sit in the closet and no one's going to see it. You buy a good one, spend more money, people will see the brand. Same thing with urgent cares. You know, like you need to make sure that brand, you know, whether it's Facebook, Instagram, are they going to drive people to

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I'm not going to Facebook, Urgent Care Near Me. No, but like if I see on Facebook this urgent care that has a presence all the time, and Instagram all the time. And have good reviews. good reviews. They have maybe this funny, I don't know. But then when I'm searching Urgent Care Near Me and I see the name and my mind goes, I remember that name from what I see, that impression, that omnipresent, it makes me go, I want to use that one. Yeah, exactly.

No, we do that here with patient care marketing pros. We try our best omnipresent approach. We have a podcast, we have webinars, we have in-person events that we go to. We have t-shirts. We have t-shirts I'm wearing right now. We have giveaways and all the sort of stuff around that. I mean, we put out content regularly. We have been in the industry, like we talk to the top players in the industry and try to bring them on the podcast and go on their podcast or webinars. Because ultimately what we want to show is we care.

And we kind of know what we're talking about because we talked as we interact with your industry all the time. We're not just trying to take your money. We're trying to help you. And we've learned a ton. We've been in the industry now about five plus years. like, so we've learned a lot. Still learning. But no, the IONI Prize is something, it's something that's not, it can't be done cheaply and quickly. And we also recognize that you really shouldn't approach that until you've started making

good profits and we recognize that digital marketing for urgent care gets you closer to that. But once that's cooking all cylinders and there's that diminishing return because there is diminishing return with all marketing, then you start saying, how can I attach other channels at that point? Like we have clients right now that they use us specifically to get patients in the door and then they use somebody else specifically to get Ackmed conversations going beyond just what an ad could do, but like having those actual conversations like B2B conversations.

And so that's just part of the game that we play because it takes all those different areas to make it all work. Yeah. And there's no one, I don't care who, if someone's telling you this, they're a liar. There's no one that's good at all of it. No, no, no. And we tell them all the time, like you can't, we've had episodes like don't hire a unicorn. don't exist. They don't, they don't. Yeah, it's totally true. All right. So the close up the episode, what is one thing that you wish every single urgent care knew that you've learned?

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that was surprising. Like what's one thing like I wish every urgent care understood this and maybe appreciated more or just say I need to do that more often. What's the one thing? And then what's one thing about this company that surprised you? Okay. Those are good questions. All right. And this is not scripted by the way. Yeah, no, I asked him. tried. I said, I said, there questions I can prepare for? He's like, no, we're just gonna have a conversation and I will bring questions when they think of them.

So all right, so then give me a second on this. feel like now my daughter with the great shake. yeah. Pressure's on. So let you think. So the great shake is such a cool concept. I hope your high school or middle school or whatever is doing this where they allow students to compete to be professional with business owners or politician mayors, whatever in their community. And they actually have a competition, which is super cool. And your daughter got close to like top five, top five out of 100 that participated.

It says you got to meet the mayor and got to have a handshake and like a conversation, a lunch. And then we also noticed that the lunch was also a test. Yeah. And so, which was super cool. But such a cool way to get like a 10, 12 year old to say, this is how this world operates. It's not just having a fun time. Like there's layers to it. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. And it's, it's an hour where they're not yelling six, seven or dabby. They gotta be super professional, which is super cool to me. All right.

Got you enough time. So this is hard. But again, I would tell people I've seen both sides of it. So I can tell you I'm not just telling you this, like you said, to try to sell you something. Yeah. But it really is. If you try it's a win win partnership. If you trust us like you've already paid and so you're trusting us with that regard. So, you know, it may take a little time, but we have people who are really good. Like our production team is really, really good at what they do. And if given the time,

Like, and given the resources, will, if all the other variables are there, you will see success. Now again, we could have everything perfect, if, you know, things we talked about, if the building's wrong, or if you're in a bad location, you have a bad name, or like, we may not be able to have full success there, but we will also tell you that, you know, and say, hey, here's where we're at. But to answer that, to sum it up, that question, I would say,

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You said in the beginning, it's hard to trust marketing companies because they've been burnt. so like one of the hardest things people would always say is like, we have great customer service. You can't prove that until you trust me to show that. I would have to say like, we really are good at what we do. Just if you trust us with, hey, send us your patient counts, right? So we know that. us that, know, send us pictures when we need pictures, send us the things that we need and our production team can take that and rock with it. But

Sometimes what happens is marketing is only important when it's important, right? So what that means is like, sometimes they're not thinking about it because maybe it's working so well, they don't have to. then when it's, you know, when things dry up, that's when they're like, we need our marketing. That's when it gets stressful. And then it becomes that we've been asking this for three months. Yes. And now you're telling us because you're under some fire, because we were trying to tell you upfront, this will make, prevent the fire. Yeah.

Preventive maintenance. Preventive maintenance. And we're all about preventative maintenance because as we're recording this, about two weeks away from summertime. And summertime is always a challenging time for urgent care. And so hopefully preventative maintenance is already in play for some. And then finally, the final question was, what's something that surprised you about this company? easy. I'm just going to prop ourselves for this one. So when

when you were talking and in the interview process, one of the things you had to stress to me because especially now doing that, was the Meyer-Briggs we did. So like reading through it going, oh my goodness, this is my personality. My personality requires creativity. Like I have to be in a creative environment. Which I think where your hot pro helps. Yes, that definitely helps. But you guys stress, like, how we just want stress? We're not a creative agency.

We are an ad generation agency. That's what we Our lead generation agency. That's what we do. We're not a creative agency. I like, I'll be okay with it. I'll be fine. And I fully came in here expecting to just learn the business, right? Learn digital marketing, learn all this. But when I came in here and I started meeting the people that I work with, I'm like, is a creative agency. It's just not creative in a sense that other, like we would call a creative agency, but we have so many creative people in here that come up with stuff that altogether help the

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full picture of the company. And I'm like, you no, they sold them, you guys sold yourself short. This is a, I'm not gonna call it a creative agency, but it's been so fun working here because it does let your creativity come out. Oh yeah, absolutely. Well, and like I said, we will position ourselves to lead you in first, but the creative side comes out sometimes, but we just don't have like a really super cool, here's a wonderful massive.

creative process that goes through. We have built things, have built logos and branding guides, all the things for our clients over the years, but we've never just sat down say, here's what we're going to do, and just have a whole team for it. right now we hybrid our team to help facilitate some of it. I think that's one of the cool things to see. Like one of our, I don't know if I'm allowed to say it, but like Easy Care, like I love them, but they have now built trust with us where they're like, hey, they're asking us for some of that creative stuff. Yeah, and we're happy to...

And yeah, and so it's like, hey, we want to see them more successful. We want to help them get even over that time. So it's like, when we get to that point, it's like, okay, now it's the best of both worlds. It's like, we're doing what we can to bring in leads. But we're also like, hey, we can take some of that credit and like help them out. Yeah, absolutely. Love it. Well, Hal, thanks for coming on. I know it was a little impromptu because I did not give you a script. didn't give you questions.

We're doing it. And we're actually doing it 30 minutes earlier than the time. Cause you were just sitting there and I was like, you want to go and do it? He's like, okay. But thanks for coming on for that. I love doing meet the pros because you know, Nick and I, we're on here all the time, but we have an entire team of people that allows us to be on here because if we didn't have them, we would be pulling our hair out and trying to keep things moving. So thank you again, Hal for coming on and we'll catch you on the next one. Yeah, it's fun. Thank you. See you.