Ep. 239: Coffee Talk: Marketing, Reviews & Running an Urgent Care Business

PCMP (00:00.738)
Hey, what's going on, everybody? Nick and Michael here for a random episode of Walkins Welcome. And as always, we're here to help you get more patients, deliver better care, get repeat visits, and scale your clinics, which has nothing, none of those topics are on on deck for today. No, not at all. Yeah. or you want to or you if you want to be entertained for the next 20, 30 minutes. I have my coffee. and I plan on drinking it during this episode, like right now.

There you go, drinking the coffee. So I you know, we are right now. Right now we are halfway through the summer. We just had July fourth last week. We you know our our team was off on July third and all the fun stuff that went with that. and here we are. And so now we're I mean, for the urgent care space, you guys are about to get ready for fall coming about a month away. You're still holding on tight for that summer slump. I mean that's a real thing right now. Yeah. Maybe we could start our discussion.

Yeah, maybe. Maybe. we honestly, y'all, I'm being as real as I can. I've got about four or five things that I could talk about. If you have a cup of coffee in your car or you're working out or whatever, grab that and we'll hang out for a minute. So it's funny that you were talking about the summer slump. I was having a conversation with Susan and Hal. I I wanna say it was yesterday. They were both here at the same time. Yeah, they were, which is rare, right? But what what are the clients that we have, which we love and they've been with us for a long, long time.

they reduced their ad spend during the summer. Now, this was already pre-planned as part of their annual budget. Yeah. But what I what I was laughing about is they're like, hey, our patient volume went down. And I was like, Yeah, so did your ad spin. Like what what what outcome were you looking for on this? And it's summer. Yeah. Well, what we really want to do is we want to spend less money and make more money. I was like, well, that's everybody everybody.

I mean I I right now I wish Facebook wouldn't suck the money out of our account for Well they are though. And and and I love that and because we run our own ads for our own like we feel your own pain. We would love for that cost per lead to be free. Yeah. Or a dollar. Right. That'd be great. Yeah. So it it it that was that was a funny moment to me. And it's still like I said, they're they're having some changes in their own company and I'm not gonna go into detail other than that like there's some there's some turnover on their team and there's some some new faces that are coming in.

PCMP (02:25.25)
That are speaking with us. And so far it's been a great, great conversation with almost split my coffee. it's been a great conversation. the best I can tell. I'm looking forward to getting some more face to face time. But I that that was funny to me. Hey, our lead count is down across the board. I'm like, you literally cut your ad spend in half and it's summer. Yeah. And it's summer. So let's see how this works. If you know it's gonna slow down, do you A

Increase your ad spend so that you can make up for the difference and keep it the same. B decrease your ad spend so you can double down on your loss. Or C, cut it out completely and just take the summer off. Right. I mean, there are, I mean, I think we always joke, marketing's the first to go. And any type of adversity in a business when it comes to money, let's cut marketing expenses. And like we under like I understand that from the standpoint of

If you don't know what your marking's doing for you, it makes total sense to cut something you you're not involved in. Yeah. Right. thankfully, like we're in digital, so it's like super it's a lot more obvious what's it's doing versus like, I'm all my billboards and TV ads. Yeah, you could probably cut those because you're not getting real numbers from that, probably. So you don't know. I mean, it's pure branding at that point. Yeah, yeah. So like, but I get it though. Like if and especially if you're like the classic

Here's before marketing, here's after marketing, and there are no changes, and like, yeah, I mean that makes kind of like sense there to a degree. I mean, it's a supply and demand issue. Yeah. Like what happens when supply decreases? Makes it harder to get the next person. Demand goes up. Yeah. Right. And so if there's only one patient in your area that needs you instead of a hundred, that one patient's worth a lot of money. That's right. So so your supply has has your your suppl their supply has not

decreased the demand has decreased, right? and therefore you're fighting over that one or two or three people. And so you you have to do some things. You you you either increase your marketing or you decrease your price to nothing to attract them, make some kind of offer. I mean this is just marketing one on one. Yeah. And then you go into the summer or I'm sorry, into the fall and winter months where your demand, your demand is through the roof, right?

PCMP (04:43.976)
and the supply is either the same or it decreases because the demand will outpace the supply. Here's what I mean by that. There's more sick people than there are urgent cares to serve them. Yeah. You haven't seen that since COVID. So at the moment that doesn't even exist in your world, no matter what time of year. There's plenty of opp options for them. Yeah, yeah. There I mean yeah, since co yeah, it's the classic since COVID comp more competitions now come in because they saw the money. Yeah. now there's been

Like the code demand will never exist again if you're still saying, I back in COVID, I had a hundred patients per day. Well that we need another pandemic to make that happen again. We don't need a pandemic, but we need a pandemic. But we if you where's Bill Gates when you need it. I said it was random coffee talk. You you you chose to stay. That's so funny. We're looking to drop off after that comment. Or maybe increase. I don't know. But Or they're all going, Yeah, where is he? Yeah.

Got quiet again. But yeah, and I I wish we like we do not have a clinic yet that is in a vacation destination city that I know of. Hawaii. I mean, sort of. Sort of, right? Like I'd love to have Honolulu urgent care. That is a tourist trap. It is. Love those guys. It's true. I forget about them, but it feels great. But it's one of those, like, I'd love to have an Orange Beach urgent care. Like or give us a reason to go down to the beach. You want to talk about volatile.

Our poor client success managers would be pulling their hair out because they would either be like crazy freaking busy or dead. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That that I I love to see it though, right? Where like what's your volume look like before you start talking? Like what was it look like? I'd love to see like is it actually just like any other one, just kind of spiky during, you know, the summer.

And does it level out? Do the locals still come to you? Like is that a thing? I'm gonna make a random offer right now. If you're at Orange Beach or one of the Florida beaches on the beach in the southeast. Somewhere I can drive to you, Birmingham. I will give you free marketing for ninety days. Hello at patient care marketing prose dot com. Plus ad spend. I said free marketing, you have to pay the platform. I'm talking about our services. Yeah, we want we want somebody from the beach. But you have to leave me a review and you have to give me honest data. Those are the those are the rules. Yeah. But we'll we'll do our very best work for ninety days for free.

PCMP (07:01.196)
Give us a pure be you have to be a destination beach too. Self service all all the way because I just want to know what it's like. Yeah, we want to see like a true destination location. 'Cause we have clinics in Florida and they're like near beaches, but none of them are like in the deep summer vacation spots. This deal ends on October thirty first, twenty twenty six. If you're listening to this two years later. If you're listening to this later,

So if it's past October 2026, we're gonna charge you for it. Yeah, well outside of it the offer is no longer available. man, I walked I walk it's funny, I walked into this podcast and I'm totally switching gears now because why not? There you go. I had the biggest headache. I'm working on something and and what it is is I I'm trying to make it a better experience for our clients to come on board with us, right?

And and cleaner for us on the other side. It is. It's mutually beneficial. Yeah. W as it should be. Win win partnerships is part of our is part of our core values, and so it's gotta be a win for us and a win for you. And it is a win for you. Like it's gonna make it so much easier. Yeah, your boy here, I think may have deleted it or something. Anyway, I was building it in an AI tool and I really like Manaus. I'm a fan, right? So Mana's is Facebook's AI. I wasn't a fan this morning.

But up until this morning I was a fan. Did Facebook buy Manaus or did make Mana? No, no, no. They bought it. They bought Mana. Yeah, they had meta AI and to make it better, they bought Manis to to It's kinda like how Apple said, you know what, we suck at AI. Jim and I come on over. Best decision they've ever made, which is kind of a surprise because Jim and I is owned by Google. So And then then you they've been baiting each other, or at least they used to it's kinda like Microsoft and Apple, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. I'm a Mac. I'm a PC.

so anyway, I'm in I'm in there. What I needed to happen is for my entire team to be able to access a form, but it still needed to be like encrypted, safe, all of that, right? You need a login. Yeah, log in. Anyway. so in order for me to do that, I had to migrate my account from my account to a team account. In theory. In theory, it sounds like one button. Yes. there's three. There's options. It's a choose your own invention. I chose wrong.

PCMP (09:17.014)
I I guess. No, I did. I figured like so what I did is I migrated and deactivated, but it the migration never happened properly. So it migrated and deactivated to nowhere. To nowhere. So I had to go into like anyway, I I logged into an old account or my former account. no, no, no. I logged into the to the team account because I'm the admin or owner of that. And then I had to reactivate myself.

I know. If you're listening and you just swerved off the road, I don't even know what I'm saying right now. I react to the most like Facebook user experience ever. This is this is on brand for Facebook though. It is. I'm gonna take something that works amazing and complicate. And I'm gonna complicate the tar out of it. Right. I mean, we we all like when we run Facebook ads for clients, the hardest part of running a Facebook ad is getting the actual access to the meta suite. Access.

because once we do that, all editing works. But getting to that point, it's like who owns what? I don't know. How do we get there? Well, your screen looks different from my screen. Right. For sure. So yeah. Yeah. So that was an adventure this morning. So I walked into this podcast with a a a headache, but I did recover it. It did recover and you could see it. And then we've we've now integrated the bo onboarding new onboarding process into our

system so the next person that signs with us they'll get a new form and we'll find out if it works. Yes. Fun fact I have four manus accounts now. But only paying for two? one. Yeah. So that I could access the form and delegate accesses or whatever. You know, that to me though what you're describing is that like that's a classic reservation I have about AI. Yeah.

At any point, it could just not tell you how to do something and it does something different and all of a sudden you've just lost access. Well, so one of the w we're going down nerd level twelve right now. But GitHub is the reason why that exists. I did integrate GitHub into it. Yeah.

PCMP (11:19.756)
But I don't know how to back it up into GitHub. So maybe that maybe that's something you can help me with later. I know Luis can definitely help you with that. Well actually any of our Luis One and any others that have worked on the AI projects has all their projects live in our GitHub account. Right. Which is great because technically speaking, if it's in GitHub, we have the ownership of it and the AIs can like stay away from it. Right if they wanted to. Right. but no, no, no, but it's it's but it's also scary because I watched you go, where'd it go? Where'd it go? I mean, it was

It was got log in. I was like, I don't see anything either. Yeah, you started with the reporting side of it. Yes. Because it's it's really pretty reporting. Correct. Yeah, the the reporting, I could automate it. It looked great. My clients loved it. And our clients, they loved it. one specific client was like, This is great, this is what I need. I have to report all that kind of stuff. Yeah, and it looked really good on a big screen. It did. Yep. On the little screen, I don't know. I didn't look at it.

But anyway, so I've got whatever that amount of time full of information and it was gone. Just gone. Gone. Like new hist new chat. Like what? No. Where's my old chats? Like, man, come on. Here's what was cool though. Guess who helped me fix it? Mana. Mana's AI. Their little AI support. I never talked to a human. It says it it says, I do I understand your problem correctly? I'm like, yeah, that's my problem. We'll go do these things.

It's like, well, I did these things. And it goes, Well, you're doing it wrong. try this. And so I did it and it restored it. So I was like, AI broke it, AI fixed it. Yeah. Cause I always think, you know, what I I think about what's the Will Smith movie iRobot? iRobot. Like to me like I'm the only person on this planet I think that has not seen that movie. If you watched it right now, you would say, we are actually in that reality. Okay. It 'cause it

When you think about the Tesla Yeah, the Tesla bot. The Tesla bot. Yeah. And you look at irobot and you watch and you're like, and then like there's even a scene where Will Smith is driving but not driving his car, it's driving itself and he has to take over, but they're going too fast for a human to take over. So it didn't Tesla last year when they rolled out like the robotaxi and the bots and everything, didn't they call it like

PCMP (13:43.478)
Tesla or something. I don't remember. It was a it was a parody on iRobot. I'll have to go back and you definitely should watch it. Like I'm not like a huge Will Smith fan, but it is one of those ooh, this actually feels way too close to reality. I was a Will Smith fan until he slapped the tar out of what's his name, man. what Chris Chris Rock. Chris Rock. I mean I was like publicly knocked yeah. Especially after

After his wife has just completely devastated him publicly. I'm about to say his wife controls I was like, that dude looks to me now like he's a puppet or something. I feel bad for him because I think he's I loved Prince of Bel Air, Fresh Press. I loved all of his movies, even I liked his rap stuff back in the nineties. Hey, he seemed like a legitimate dude. Yeah, he probably is a legitimate dude in a very bad situation. That he can't get out of it. So yeah, went look, I told you it was gonna be random time. Here it is.

We just gave Will Smith a review. Let's talk about a review that we got recently. that a nice segue. Very nice segue. That was in radio. It is hard. We got a review from a from a former client and I am not gonna use the time to bad mouth ever a client. That is not my goal here. Nobody wins new things. I was and and believe it or not, even though there may have been some frustrations, I don't dislike them or their company or anything. but

What what happened is we got a a pretty pretty nasty review. And what what what I am learning when when our urgent cares get negative reviews, why they take it so personal, I get it. Yeah I mean that's probably the first legitimate, I'm gonna say legitimate, I'm gonna say half legitimate, half legitimate negative review. We've gotten negative reviews in the past, but we were able to get rid of them because we weren't even

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We I like majority of any nay reviews we've ever received has been Who are you? Yeah, exactly. Like and then one, we got just inundated with them one time, but it was a spam thing from like a bot and all of them got removed and it was a bunch of companies that had that happen. That was heavy. Yeah. I mean we got twenty or thirty one stars. And then they disappeared in like a day or two. Yeah, Google Google caught it pretty quick. Do you remember when Google lost all the reviews? I do remember that.

PCMP (15:55.798)
Yeah, they disappeared and our and our urgent cares were losing their minds. Like I had 200. I refresh, I have a hundred. Like refresh again, see what happens. Maybe quit hitting that refresh button. Yeah. excuse me. So we we got this review and and and it the team got really upset because it, you know, you take your work personal, right? Yeah, yeah. And I had to sit back for a minute. I was like, there was a time I would have gotten pretty mad.

Even Hannah held your hand. She did, but I was fine. I was like She's like, I need to tell you something. She did. She can't like I thought somebody I thought she was quitting. I don't like I was like in my mind before. It's like this either looks like somebody is about to quit or die. Or something or somebody died somewhere that meant something to you. Yeah. But it wasn't. Let me just tell you all, I I don't have a bad temper. I don't know why people have to stage this for me, but I don't think I do anyway. Maybe I do. I feel like I don't have a bad temper.

But that being said, she she's setting me up to make sure that I'm gonna be okay. And which I either it worked or I've just gotten better with age. I don't know. But it did not bother me that because one, they were they had a legitimate reason to be upset, although it was distorted. Yeah, yeah, yeah. and two, I wanted to take some time to really think about how I wanted to respond to this. And by the way, I have not responded to the review yet. I will. I responded to the doctor.

Directly. And I just send him an email saying, hey, I understand and and and I I see where you came up with that. By the way, there's a couple of things you left out in that review that probably were worth noting. but I'm happy to talk to you about it. And you know, it that that brings up the question when you're getting reviews, how are you how is your mental state when you get those? So you know, where where do you go when somebody, especially when you can't say anything, right, from a HIPAA compliance.

where does your head go when you get these reviews? I'm just curious. I it's not like you can answer because you're sitting in your car and I'm on the other side of the microphone, but I am thinking about it. I I know I imagine most people go either like in my mind, I go to screw them. Like my mind kinda goes like screw them. That ha that about half the office went that direction. Yeah, we're like screw them because we know what actually happens. Yeah. And

PCMP (18:14.166)
And and I and we were laughing at the timing of it. We're like, rejection is a real thing for this person. Because we haven't named anything, I don't want to go into too many details, but but yeah, we we but but the reason the legitimate reason, like the real reason was simply we were protecting another client in a territory within range of that clinic. And we we're trying to be respectful to our existing client.

This one had canceled six months ago. We got another. We got another one and we were protecting the area. So anything It's a whole thing. It's you can go read about it. Yeah, yeah. But you can go look at our profile if you want to. There you go. and if you actually work with us, please leave us a review because we need more of those. I can use a couple of nice things set up. But no, so I where do mine go? So so when I was doing a primary care check in with checkup with my primary care doctor.

I'd said something of like I saw that you had some reviews and people really like you. And he said he kind of laughed. He said, Yeah, I don't like to look at I mean like he avoids them. But but it's funny because I told him why I said I told him, I said, You should go look at it because people really like your personality. Yeah. And he's like, Well, maybe, but he's like, I'm gonna do it. You know, the r the review system, whether that be Google or Amazon or whatever, it really holds a little too much.

I mean I I think i if you had Google Business profile and it didn't have reviews, it'd be a dead platform. Yeah. Honestly. Because why would people want to see that panel of information just to say, there it is? No, they want to see what people are saying. Right. But I I I'm always fascinated how like what did reviews look like pre internet? Was it just I mean it was word of mouth, wasn't it? Was it word of mouth newspaper maybe? I don't or just commentary

that section of man I did those well I I don't know like I'm trying to think because you know for me I would not know because the time like I was born you know in the 80s and so I grew up when the internet was on par when I realized what the internet you know even was right so I didn't know what pre true pre internet was like I remember distinctly a couple like hey these people got married it's a clipping in the newspaper and then that went away shortly after once I I actually had my dad wrote up something for Heather

PCMP (20:36.001)
Yeah. So like that's gone. Yeah, well there's no newspaper. There's no newspaper. And now it's just a Facebook post. But but no, I'm kind of curious. Like the reviews have all this power. Who was first? Was it Yahoo Yell Ps? I wonder who was first. I guess we could go to Chat GPT and find out. I honestly I don't know. I I mean it for me it's just like kind of always been there. Yeah, when I think too, so I I really I wonder, because I think word of mouth think you're correct.

And then I just think about like the billboards in the back of yellow pages. Like that was your review section almost where it was a promoted review, but like, hey, we're best in the business and a snippet from somebody that said something somewhere. Yeah, it was a quote. Yeah, just a little quote somewhere. But it wasn't a star. No. I wanna I want to know how the star rating system came up. Yeah. Nonetheless, I I guess more on a more relational point. I I get how you can get

Personally offended or frustrated or or irritated when somebody leaves you a negative review, especially when you feel from your perspective you've done everything that you could do to make somebody happy and and it's just like your best doesn't feel good enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. no matter what it is. I will tell y'all though that it's one thing to be a negative review in a C of a thousand, something else to be a negative review in the C of five or seven. You know what I mean? marketing agencies don't get a whole lot of reviews, which is why we ask for them.

Right. Yeah. So anyway, in a completely different turn of events, we've been doing annual reviews. Speaking of reviews. Yeah, speaking of reviews, we've been doing annual review. So there's the external review and then there's the internal review. Yeah. so the way we do that is probably like everybody else, I don't know. We use Gusto as our payroll, I believe. So we we have gusto which does payroll but also does performance reviewing system. Right. So we we install our

Annual review questionnaire and our w monthly one to ones. We're an EOS company as well. but yeah, so like that's that's how we pr before that we was strictly like here's a Google sheet or Google Doc and fill it up. Print it off and write write some words and I don't even know where those are. Maybe they got scanned somewhere. Yeah, yeah. I'm sure Kim's got You could bet she's pretty organized. Her computer crapped out, so we'll see what happens there. but you know, I I'm I'm curious.

PCMP (22:57.954)
from from an audience perspective, like how are you doing annual reviews with your team members? How are you doing how are you doing pay increases? Do you have a scheduled increase? Do you is it merit based? Is it cost of living based? Does it stop? You know, that's a really good question too. Is if somebody's doing the same job for twenty years, do they get twenty years worth of pay raises? Right. I've never 'cause

I it's like a legitimate question 'cause I've asked it to our agency friends and they didn't really have a good answer. No, because turnover is a little higher in our world. Yeah, yeah. So like they didn't ha they had very few people past five years. So it's not like a and this in our the net, you know, digital marketing industry has only been around for twenty years. Correct. So it's or twenty five years now. And it's just one of those like there's not enough depth to it. But like I came from a banking background, like my f like in the my family's in the banking world. So like those people stuck around for fifty, sixty years. But

you I've never sat down and asked my dad's like, how does that w work? You know, but I remember distinctly, my brother, he worked for the government and they had him on a pay plan and he's and basically it said at year five, you're capped. Right. He hit year five, he capped, and he left. So like he saw like I I guess in my mind he saw like I will not get a pay increase anymore. Right. And and and you know his pay was pretty good.

So in my mind, like if if that's the mindset, is that good or bad? Like I don't know. Well, I could imagine that everybody wants to make more money. Yeah. You know, and and I don't think that scratch goes away. Hit let me say it a different way, something that I've learned over time. I've done really good recently. Right. What happens is you have a bubble. Your income will will your your bubble will shrink to match your income. Yeah.

Your income doesn't necessarily s stretch into your bubble. Here's what I mean by that. lifestyle creep. That's it. You you you you nailed it. Like if you if you make fifty thousand dollars a year, you have a fifty thousand dollar a year car, house, whatever it is. Hobbies. If you made two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year for whatever reason, you spend it all. Yeah. Like you just your your life, your your life fills, right?

PCMP (25:19.418)
that bubble that bubble grows. And so what the the goal would be and I I hope this is making sense, but what you want is your income bubble to be bigger than your lifestyle bubble. And it doesn't and but it's always opposite. And and then the goal is that you make a line of this is where my income my lifestyle bu lifestyle bubble stops at this income level and will not increase even if my income level does. Yeah. And 'cause I you know, I mean

Dave Ramsey, all the other like financial people out there. Susie Ormond. Yeah, all of them will say like lifestyle creep is a real thing. Yeah. And like even so, where looking at the my life where I'm I've been living in the same house for almost 11 years. And so the payment for that house hasn't changed in 11 years. And I remember what I was making when we got the house. Yeah. And like, how did I do that? Because the house hasn't changed.

But somehow everything's just like in grown to the income. I was like, where does it go? But then I then I look back and say, okay. So what's happening, like for me at least, I will say yes more often and I will say yes to convenience more often. And convenience always costs more. For sure. And so if you the only like exception that we've had in our lives recently about saying yes to something that actually is cheaper is we do a lot of camping. Well

Our vacations are camping usually. Well, now I'm so trained by it. Like I can go camping for fifty to eighty dollars a night. If I wanted to go to an Airbnb and do the same trip, just in an Airbnb, it's two hundred plus a night. Minimum. Yeah, I was gonna say. Three hundred, four hundred plus a night. And then my mind's like, that's my whole trip in one night. And so like it but but there's a convenience, like, I can get Airbnb, it's air conditioned, it's

I can do what you it's just a typical vacation at that point. Sure. but it costs more. And it's just like what are and then your expectations keep going up and up and up and up, right? Where now you're like, Well, I've gotten used to like you say, like first once you fly first class, it's the wor first it's the worst thing to do because you can never unfly I think it's the best thing you can do. But no, no, but but it's like the now you can't go back. It's the I it's the mindset you can't go backwards. it's very hard to go backwards. Once you go to Perry's and taste that steak, it's

PCMP (27:43.0)
Yeah, yeah, it's hard to go back. It's hard to go to Applebee's. Yeah. And then yeah, I think that's a real thing that people experience. And that goes back to the raised part of well, inflation says it's gone up, like sure, but not always directly, right? Like it your choice is 'cause there's plenty of people that we know that I I've I've heard it say you make a million dollars, but you spend a million dollars, you made zero dollars. Right. Doesn't matter. That's right. So

and if if you have somebody that makes a million dollars and somebody that makes a thousand dollars, but the person that made a thousand gets to keep the thousand, they're more rich than that millionaire that spent every single penny. Right. So I don't know. Well, just going back to the heart of that part of the discussion was just simply like, is there a cap on on income growth? I don't think there is. You're either going to move into another role or you're gonna move into another role at another company. Yep.

Or, you know, you're gonna keep getting raises for whatever those raises are worth, or eventually, like your brother, you're just gonna leave, you know? Yeah. and I get that. But here's the thing, the market the market will support an income range. Yep. Right. Just because somebody thinks they're worth more, they may be, but the job isn't worth more. Yeah. Does that make sense? So, you know, it d

That that just because you want it doesn't make it real. Right. And I think we dealt a sa same for me, by the way. Yeah. I think we dealt a lot of that during COVID. Yeah. Because there was a weird everybody's worth six figures out of college. Yeah. I don't know where that came from, but it came during COVID. And but then we ran into issues. They were pitching that. Yeah, it was the pitch of like you should be making if you're making sixty thousand out of college, you're being underpaid and which like whatever. And then

So that started happening. And then but then we had the problem, like all these companies were just hiring because they were making a bunch of money because like COVID made people a lot of money. yeah. Like not just in the medical, but like across the board. In all fairness, it put a lot of people out of business too. Yeah. It it it shrunk it got rid of the people that were already on the edge of not doing well. Got flushed out. And then the people that were already making lots of money, they just brought in more because all his little competitors kind of disappeared. like that actually happened. And but because I

PCMP (30:03.894)
the hiring was stupid. So people were just hiring and just paying whatever. And now we're like now we're on the flip side. Like we're finally at that point where, okay, now companies like, no, no, you're not worth that much. I'm I'm now AI's come in. Now we're flushing people out that we shouldn't have hired in the first place. Yeah. Honestly. Probably. And then so that's happening. And then like yesterday Walmart announced, hey, we're cutting

250 items prices back down. So I was in Walmart yesterday and it was high like I could see it. I was like, this is like what it the price should be, not a discounted price. Cause like to me, the biggest indicator of like, man, we're overcharged for things is 12 pack of coke. If you're up north, 12 pack of soda, whatever, Pepsi, doesn't matter. 12 pack, 12 cans of some soda. currently

Well, as of before yesterday was $10 to $12, which is insane. Like 'cause pre-COVID, it was four to six dollars. Yeah. So then yesterday was the announcement. We've reduced two hundred and fifty items, including they said twenty-four packs of Coke. And they didn't say twelve packs of Coke. So I was like, this is interesting. So I went over to Walmart to get something. I went to the aisle, lo and behold, 24 pack of Coke, $9 and something. Okay. 24 pack. I was like, okay, so that's a five dollar, twelve pack.

The 12 pack right beside it, $8. I was like, we gotta figure this out. What what do y'all cause up until this point it's always been buy two, get two, or whatever stupid logo was. You worked for Coca-Cola for a while. I know, so you probably understand more of that than gr grocery stores drive revenue. Yeah. Gas stations drive profit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. So it for context, think of a pallet of twelve pack of cokes is worth less in profit.

than a twenty-four pack of twenty ounce bottles to a gas station. Okay. I'm d revenues there. I'm talking about profit. Yeah. Right? There's more profit in twenty four bottles of twenty ounce Cokes than there is in a pallet of Coke at a grocery store. That's fascinating. Pallet. That's 120 cases, by the way. Crazy in case you're wondering. That math doesn't make sense, does it? No. Right. So at some point something had to have given. Yeah. Like, so anyway.

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or Coca-Cola was lying to me for five years straight. And you know, who knows? But it but it's one of those like I we're starting to see that shift again of like, okay, let's go normalize again and stop playing this game of COVID numbers. Like we're now way past it. Even one of the things they drop pri 'cause like I do meal prep stuff every week. So I see the pricing and I know how to like I can eat for three dollars a meal if I wanted to because I know how it works. You're lying to yourself, it costs ten dollars to eat lunch, it's just not true. but anyway.

Or twenty two dollars at the local restaurant for a turkey something which was funny. There you go. So it's eleven dollars. But anyway, so but even like their great value branded ice cream was now back down to two dollars and fifty cents and which then followed with Blue Bell's ice cream down to seven dollars. I remember when it was like nine to ten dollars for that stupid thing.

So I love this because we're talking about absolutely nothing urgent care related. We knew this was gonna happen. Yeah. But yeah, I think like we're entering this weird spot, right? Where people want more money, but now we're saying, well, things aren't as ex as expensive as they could be, and it's a choice. You gotta make lifestyle. You know, I heard a a a funny quote. I say funny, it was just like kind of eye popping. Back in the eighties and nineties when people were building like I mean they

Yeah, yeah. Really good money. life's life was cheap. Lifestyle was expensive. All right. So think about it. That's that's a good thought. Like if you go back to the 80s and 90s, specifically in the 90s, you remember those massive TVs would be like five or six or seven thousand dollars. Yeah, luxury was actually expensive. Luxury was expensive, but it cost nothing to live. Rent was cheap, utilities were cheap, gas was cheap, car like

The basics. But the to live your life was it cost nothing. Now lifestyle is cheap and life is expensive. Yep. Food, gas, rent, all of that is through the roof, but everybody can go on a cheap vacation on a carnival cruise or Gatlinberger. Yeah, now now the the fifteen hundred dollar, two thousand dollar vacation is like, that's whatever. A eighty four inch T V at Walmart is

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seven or eight hundred bucks. Even barely, right? Like it keeps going down. Yeah. So I mean, something's very wrong. Yeah, yeah. And I guess now luxury is moving towards services. Well think of cost of healthcare. Yeah. Cost of healthcare is through the roof, but it's an essential need. Yeah. It's it's really screwed up. Well.

Here we are. I think we've rambled on enough, but I tell you what, if you absolutely hated this episode, come back next week. It's gonna be all right. Send Hannah an email at hellofagicare marketingprose.com. Janie, I know you're listening to this because you had to edit this thing. I hope you enjoyed it. We we we promise you we're gonna bring you back value on how to grow your clinics, how to scale, how to how to deliver better care. All of that is coming. this was just one of those days where we just wanted to chit chat.

Yeah, just a little bit and just have fun because we are in that mode. Like we just finished up a quarter. We're moving into our new quarter. Here we go. Summer summer has its slows for here too, sometimes it is. Until a random giant urgent care shows up and we gotta onboard them, which happened. Thanks for that. Yeah, we enjoyed that. But but like it does take busyness. But anyway, well, thank you guys for coming on to this episode. We'll catch us on the next one. That will probably be more urgent care when you, but I hope you had a good time. All right, we'll see you soon. Bye.