Ben Lynch: If you had to, if your life depended on it, double the amount of new clients that were coming into a clinic in the next 90 days, how would you go about it? Here's where I would start. G'day, good people. Welcome to the Grow Your Clinic Podcast by Clinic Mastery. Here's what's coming up inside of this episode. This episode will be right up your Allie if you're looking to double your new patients in the next 90 days. We're diving into your marketing strategy, and trust me, you'll want to hear Jack's take on quick wins to convert more of the new patient inquiries you're already getting. Plus, stick around for when we discuss the publish, partner, and paid strategies to get new clients consistently.

Jack O'Brien: When it comes to content, you must be prolific and pro. Entertaining, informative, and educational. When we talk about paid in the context of doubling new clients in 90 days, people say, I've tried meta ads, it doesn't work. I've tried Google ads, it doesn't work. Okay, well, what you've tried hasn't worked.

Ben Lynch: To what degree do you think a specific offer makes a difference to the effectiveness of your marketing?

Jack O'Brien: We just came off a workshop training clinics in Google Ads and one of the things we said is we don't have to create, we document what's already happening in our clinic. It's now so obvious to have your prices on your website.

Ben Lynch: Before we dive in, today's episode is brought to you by AllieClinics.com. If you're the kind of clinic owner who loves to feel organized and stay ahead of the chaos, you'll love Allie. Think of it as your digital clone. It's the single source of truth for all your clinic's policies, systems, and training. Test it for free at AllieClinics.com. And in other news, applications are now open to work with us one-on-one at Clinic Mastery. If you want support to grow your clinic and bring your vision to life, just email hello@clinicmastery.com with the subject line podcast, and we'll line up a time to chat. Let's get into the episode. It is episode 369. My name is Ben Lynch. I'm joined by Jacobrin, J-O-B, Jack O'Brien. Yeah, he's all three of those things. The alter egos. J.O.B, how you doing? Good. Thank you, mate. How are you? Partially caffeinated, but making my way to full steam. Hey, you sent me a reel this morning. You sent me a reel this morning of some coffee being poured. These are the sorts of things that we send one another. And the crema was just delightful. I mean, I don't know where you get these videos from, but keep sending them.

Jack O'Brien: I need some feedback from podcast listeners. If all of our Clean It Mastery reels should just be over the top of coffee B-roll, I reckon I could do that. I could pull some shots, set some crema up. So if you've got any coffee fiends, let us know in the comments, on Instagram, send us a DM. If you want more coffee content, I'm happy to oblige if you insist.

Ben Lynch: I think so many people are sipping a coffee on their commute into work while they listen to the episode. So you're probably speaking absolutely to people, our people, good people. Anyway, let's get to a few announcements before we dive in because today I want to talk about marketing new clients. I set JAB a challenge and I want to unpack your thinking, your strategy, your strategic mind about how you would double new clients in a fairly short period of time. But anyway, let's do some announcements. Have you got any? Yes, I've got heaps.

Jack O'Brien: Depending on when you're listening to this, we have decided that face-to-face human interaction is worth it. So much in this age of AI and tech is wonderful, but there's nothing quite like rubbing shoulders, shaking hands, high-fives with other good people. And so at the time of this recording, we are running a workshop in Sydney for our members and non-members, anyone. You're in Allied Health. You are welcome to join us in Sydney. That is at the end of May. We're coming to the Sunshine Coast in July. We're coming to Perth in August. We're coming to the places that no one else goes to, Sunny Coast and Perth. We might sneak in a sneaky Adelaide, Newcastle, Melbourne, who knows? In-person workshops are coming. Get amongst those intimate, small-capped numbers. And alongside that, doubling down on the training that we provide to the allied health owner community. I'm just coming off the back right now of a Google Ads workshop. We have an AI and reception workshop coming in June. We have Allie doing a workshop with Cliniko. We have Sarah from the People Plugin joining us to talk all things health professionals and support services award updates in July. With Andy Wang speaking to the budget updates, the training, and I'll give you a hint Ben and for listeners, these workshops are but a slither. of what our members get. It's a whetting of the palate, if you will. So come and join us in-person workshops. Come and join us on the digital workshops. All of the information is all across the socials, but we are here for the allied health community. And finally, Ben, in November, if you are in the United States of America, I am coming to your clinic. I will visit your clinic if you send me an email and it aligns with my schedule, but I will come to visit your clinic. Send me an email, jack@clinicmastery.com. I'm going to be in the States for a few weeks. We are coming to the States. If you want to be one of the first movers, you get all sorts of extra perks. If you're in the United States of America, jack@clinicmastery. Sounds great.

Ben Lynch: No AI in this inbox. Isn't that your tagline? That's the line. That's the line. Well, let's draw the line in the sand here and talk about If you had to, if your life depended on it, double the amount of new clients that were coming into a clinic in the next 90 days, how would you go about it? Now, let's talk about there are different sizes of clinics. So, you know, the small clinic perhaps that has 20 a month new clients and they go on to 40 is very different to 200 a month for the big clinic going to 400. However, The principles and arguably some of the practices that we'll cover in this conversation apply no matter the stage of business that you're in. But I want to unpack your strategic mind, J-O-B, rather than people just say, oh yeah, I'm just going to throw some money at Google ads or Facebook ads and probably try it themselves. How could you actually be very thoughtful, very strategic about how you get more new clients into the clinics? Someone comes to you, J.O.B, and says, I need to double the amount of new clients. I've just hired, I've just opened a new site. Help me. Where are you going to first? Let's unpack this.

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, it's really good that you made that distinction. Maybe you've hired as a clinic owner, now's the time that you need an influx of new clients. Maybe you're a PEDS clinic or you're in the NDIS space and you think, I need to diversify my patient types. Now's the time to get ahead of the curve. So this is relevant for everyone. Maybe you're in a profession where there's Medicare disruptions or there's just a lot of competition and you need to stand out. So this is for everyone and you may not need a doubling of your new clients this month. But it's the thought exercise that counts. It's the ability to break the mold and get out of what you would usually think or consider. So, here's where I would start. I would start with the bottom of the funnel, as it were. Thinking about my conversion optimization or my booking confirmation optimization. It's all well and good to have all the strategies. It's all well and good to think about the budget. And budget is just an amplification of a strategy. But what about down the bottom? And so I had this interesting thought exercise over the weekend of like, Why haven't more clinics adopted some of the platform, the tech, the AI that's out there? Why not? Now, we've got Chris from Ava joining us for a workshop in June. He's going to join us on the podcast. There's a number of AI phone softwares out there. Ava is a wonderful one, so massive shout out. If you head to Ava's website and inquire, make sure you mention Clinic Mastery. Mention me. I get nothing for it, but I'd love the pat on the back from Chris. Why haven't you? Because I guarantee your clinic either gets phone calls after hours or you miss phone calls through the day. And if you're whinging that you don't have enough new clients and yet you're letting the phone get missed, you probably need to have a good hard look in the mirror. It's a great point.

Ben Lynch: I love where you're starting with this is like, how could we optimize what's already coming to us? The inquiries, the shoppers, the lookers already. So you're starting with a phone system to look at people that are calling. Maybe the call doesn't get answered, so they call the next clinic.

Jack O'Brien: Okay, that's a really good starting point. And so I put it back to you, Ben. Maybe we're answering the calls, but are our team that are answering the phone, are they trained? Are they optimized? Can they think on the spot? Have they done some role serious? I mean, role play, right? So did you like that? How do you help a clinic add more new clients by optimizing their phone systems and scripting?

Ben Lynch: If it comes down to the scripting side of things, Dan Gibbs and Bet Claire have worked a lot on what they call the star conversions. Those sorts of calls that you get where it's like, how much is it for the visit and actually being able to unpack and understand what's the problem. Have they seen someone like you before? Have they been to another clinic? And then ultimately getting the booking where otherwise they might just be screening based on price. And so often there's a set of questions there to keep it really simple to actually understand what they're looking for and the help that they're needing and ultimately working towards getting them a booking. So I think there's a lot you can do with the admin training side of things and how they answer the calls and how they book those in for the new clients. And even the tracking of those things, of those calls specifically. We had 10 calls today on a Monday for new client visits, eight of those booked in, perhaps which therapist and what was the call reason for them booking in. So I think some tracking there is really useful, in fact, To your point about what's going on at the moment slash what's being missed, in a similar way, I would want to have a look at what are the sources of the new clients they're getting so far and export from the patient management system to understand. Typically, you'll ask that and number one, if they're not asking that, that's a useful place to start. Now, the attribution piece can be a little bit tricky and multifactorial. Do you know what I mean? I found you on Google, but I actually saw you somewhere else and somewhere else and a friend mentioned you and then that's how I booked in. but I find it useful perhaps from a professional word-of-mouth perspective. Like, hey, there's this doctor or this other therapist that's been referring steadily through, but we actually haven't really done much to nurture that relationship and see perhaps there's even more people they could be sending our way Or there's someone that refers periodically, and what if we actually work together? Could we send clients back and forth? So it starts with the analysis of where are the new clients coming from? How many new clients are you getting? and just getting a lay of the land before we start to future set some strategy. Because to your point, you raised it with the NDIS piece for those NDIS clinics looking to go private. Or let's say you get a fair share of Medicare visits. You're like, you know what, we want more private. That comes back to some of that budget allocation, which we'll get to in a moment. But let's just stick on analysis for the moment. Anything else that you're looking to understand first before maybe making some changes, although you did propose the change to the phone system?

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, and think about your phone system and train your team. We want world-class people answering the phone who have practiced the skill of conversion. And so that means helping our admin team, reception team, customer, client service team to answer the phone with confidence, be able to handle all of those different inquiries, train them. If we've got that bottom of the funnel dialled, here's where I'd think about next. And this is a framework that I credit you. I don't know who you borrowed it from. Maybe it was original, but the idea of like the publishing partnerships and paid. And so I'd be thinking about those three key elements, publishing content, developing partnerships, and paid advertising streams. So we can maybe talk about each of those. Yes.

Ben Lynch: That was a reasonable original, I think, that went into the book, which is a nice way to just aggregate a whole bunch of things. Oh, one that you triggered in my mind around the phone thing that I didn't mention before was around the website. We've previously discussed this, but making it super easy for people to book or leave their details or inquire. This stuff is so easy. 500 unique visitors coming to your website a month, just picking a number. And of those, 5% of them actually like click, you know, book now or, you know, leave my details, whatever your system is. How do you make it super easy for people to book in or leave their details for a call-back, whatever your system is, because they're already arriving there. So in a similar way to your point around the phone systems, I'd look at the website. How easy is it for me to book in? I've seen a bunch of websites recently and I think, whoa, you're making this really hard for people.

Jack O'Brien: How many times does a clinic owner just forget to have a look at their own website? Maybe they're used to editing the content or tweaking the things, but use your website as if you're a patient. Think about where you click or where you look. Think about what it looks like on a mobile device because often we're only viewing our own websites on a laptop device. Great point. And then think about your shopping behaviours. We just came off a workshop training clinics in Google Ads and one of the things we said is think about, think seriously about whether your prices are visible on your website. Because this is what so many of our audiences that are perusing our website, they want to know prices. And here's my other rationale, Ben, when I was talking about Ava and PhoneAI. Health, this is health without the E. Health is a fantastic new payment gateway software that you can integrate with your booking, your practice management software, and health will display your prices inclusive of any private health insurance, third party payer. And so if your fee is $165, but out of pocket, you know that most patients are $85. health will display it as $85 and your users can make sure they've got their own account integrated with their healthcare fund and see what their rebate will be. It's now so obvious to have your prices on your website because what we do as behaviour, as consumers, when I'm looking to book a restaurant with my, if I'm going to go on a date with my wife, I'm going to find the prices on the menu to make sure it matches my budget. If I'm going to invest in a flight or accommodation or whatever the case is, we need to know the prices. Why do we not do this with healthcare? It's something I've changed my mind on. And again, I sit there on the weekend and I go, why on earth is not every clinic in Australia on health? Why is not every clinic in America looking to be the first movers of getting health installed? It makes no sense. It's an obvious yes.

Ben Lynch: Well, going to the Byron Sharp work, physical availability is about, is it easy for me to make the transaction happen? And I think that lowers the friction and increases the physical availability, especially across the website when I'm ready to buy How easy is it to do that? So, J.I.B., we've gone to some things that I think, coming back to the objective, someone says, I need to double my new clients in the next 90 days. A number of these things, I think, if you carved out a day, you could take some meaningful action on them. You could set up your health account. telephone system. The training and the reception can take a little bit longer to do. You might need a couple of weeks and a couple of sessions there with them. The book now or book online or reserve your spot, whatever it is, call back on your website can action that pretty quickly. The other one that we've talked about recently is that Yeah, when people Google you, that your Google business profile is up to date with your opening hours, phone number, website, recent pictures, etc. And if you've got some reviews, that's good. Is there anything else there that you find is super useful on that listing?

Jack O'Brien: No, look, reviews are good and reviews are about the experience of your clients or not so much in the healthcare services but reviews go a long way and anyone, doesn't have to be a patient, anyone can leave a review on your personality or non-clinical interactions. Experience. Get those reviews, experiences. Now, let's talk about partnerships and publishing and then we'll get to paid.

Ben Lynch: Go for it.

Jack O'Brien: Where do you want to start? I think partnerships and publishing kind of sit alongside one another. I don't mind which one you start first or second. Paid would come third. Paid is really the icing on the cake. It's the cherry on top. It's the gasoline that we pour on the fire that's already there. You don't pour gasoline on dry wood. You pour gasoline on what is already a spark or an ember. Let's talk about content first. The content train has not fully left the station. Now, I personally was doing content in my clinic back in 2012, 2013. This is like 14 years ago. And I thought at the time, I've missed it. I hadn't. I rode the wave really strongly and I would actually suggest, Ben, right now is a better time than back then to do content. Now, you need to be prolific. If you want to double your new clients, you need to – Ben, I was talking with Andrew Daubeny when he was on a podcast recently around Steven Pressfield, the author. Steven Pressfield, wonderful author, many good books. One of his books is called Turning Pro. And we often speak around clinic mastery of what do the best do or how can we pursue something to a degree of mastery. And when it comes to content, you must be prolific and pro. Like if you're going to do this, as one of the prime ministers said, give it a fair shake of the sauce bottle and give it a red hot crack. Yes. It gives you like data points and info. It's a bit of an experiment. You can see what works and see what resonates and see what doesn't. But ultimately, you need to commit to a period where you execute on various types of content to achieve various outcomes. And so I would specifically encourage you to think about educational, informative, and entertaining content.

Ben Lynch: Just to connect the D.O.T.S here, would you say that your page strategy is going to be less optimized if you haven't done this as well?

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, your paid strategy will probably be inefficient if we haven't started with partnerships and publishing. You're paid, you'll get more bang for buck, you'll get more result per dollar if you've doubled down on the publishing and the partnerships first.

Ben Lynch: Talk to me about the publishing side of things. Again, if we had a specific clinic owner sitting in front of us, we would nuance this, we would tailor it to them. Let's try and go as far as we possibly can. The objective to double the new clients. What type of content or prescriptions would you be adding here to give a higher degree of confidence that we are more likely to hit our outcome than not?

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, here's the three types of content that you need to be doing. From a top of funnel perspective, we need to be entertaining. Show your personality and help your audience, your community, know who you are, like you and trust you. So think about entertaining. And then for the middle of our funnel, we talk about informative and educational. And so informative stuff is getting to know the people behind the scenes, helping people understand where your clinic is located or how to get to you or what to expect. That's informative. And then educational is really what to do if you've got a certain presentation or certain symptom or these are the treatment options at our practice. So you want to think about entertaining, informative, and educational.

Ben Lynch: If you're trying to double in the next 90 days, is it the sort of thing you're saying you're going to be posting every day? What would you say? Because so often we talk about, does your action match your ambition? And this sort of bleeds into our whole philosophy, which is there's not a cookie cutter way for your clinic to look. We always start with understanding your desire statement, your personal goals, what matters to you and by extension your family. And then we're trying to build for that and solve for that. And it's very different between people. And all we're saying then is, does your action, does your strategy actually match what you're trying to achieve? So that's where some of the support and accountability can come to life. I hear some clinic owners saying, we need to grow, but we don't need to dominate and have 27 sites and a massive team. But yeah, I like the idea of increasing my new clients. If I doubled my new clients, I'd be very happy and very healthy for my business. So I just want to tempt this with, Okay, let's assume that you are trying to double your new clients in the next 90 days. And as you said, Joby, even if it's just a thought exercise that stress tests your thinking about how you're going about it, let's assume you want to do that. Then what is the prescription you're suggesting here? Is it like, no, you've got to be publishing daily? What else would you give to that clinic owner that's looking to say, Jack, I'll follow your advice. Tell me and I'll do it.

Jack O'Brien: I really like that distinction because are you exhibiting the behaviours that you would expect of a clinic at the size and scale that you want to be at? Are you willing to do what it takes to get the outcome that you want? It's a really key question. Can we just sit back and expect our clinics to double in new clients if we don't change our existing behaviours? You'll get the outcome that your current system is perfectly designed for. This really requires a step change. If you want a magnitudinal shift, not just an iterative shift, if you want a magnitudinal shift, your behaviour needs to magnitudinally shift and change. And so, what does that mean? Posting. Yes, be prolific. Post multiple times per day. Now, you don't need a full-time content person to do this. Just whip out your phone and start filming. There are so many templates and we train our members on how to do this. There are so many ways that you can start to create content or just document what's already happening. Take a leaf out of Gary Vee, we don't have to create, we document what's already happening in our clinic. And so, yes, you need to be prolific. The algorithm doesn't reward perfectly optimized feeds. All of the platforms reward content that is frequently posted and then finds out what pops and what doesn't.

Ben Lynch: Do you think for professions like podiatry, where they're using a scalpel, the old saying, if it bleeds, it bleeds, is useful, sharing some of the goosey stuff?

Jack O'Brien: Potentially. Potentially. And here's the thing, right? I'm not the judge of what is good or bad content. None of us are. And so, let the market decide, absolutely. If you're a podiatrist, post some of the, let's call it skin care reels that you could post, skin and nail care reels. Skin care reels, perfect. That sounds really nice, actually, doesn't it?

Ben Lynch: Yeah, the podiatry reels that are skin care. Nah, it's borderline beautician. You might offend a few. I can't take it when I see some of the podiatrist content after I've just seen a delicious looking sandwich be made on my Instagram. Anyway, that's a conversation for another day.

Jack O'Brien: Post some nail stuff, post some orthotic stuff, post some exercise stuff, post some sterilization stuff, post some client experience stuff, post some team who are doing some quirky things, post some partner stuff. There's umpteen dozen styles of content. It's a great point. all and let your audience, let your algorithm decide what it wants to say more of and then take that signal.

Ben Lynch: A really common one that we suggest is take a bunch of FAQs that you get from your clients, whether that's around just, as you said, what are my expectations at a new client appointment when I come, or it's specifically around how should I pick the right shoes for my kids in this specific example, say for a pod or physio. These are common questions you're going to get, and you're answering that several times a week, no doubt. Can you just create a video, as you said, in the document Don't Create? Here's how we typically get asked this question. Here's our response to it. Let's go to the partnership side of things. my brain goes to, how could I do these three in alignment, coherence, together? Could I find a couple of partnerships that I could go reasonably all in on? and I could do content that's very complementary or adjacent to it, and then use my money paid to amplify it, as you said, rather than seeing it all as discrete, isolated, very different scopes of work. Especially if my timeframe's 90 days, I'm thinking, how could I do this? Is there a partnership with a school, a club, a network, a church, a community, insert whatever, that Perhaps we've already got a relationship with, especially if my 90 day timeline is pressing, right? That I've probably under supported or nurtured, and I'd be willing to publish something, maybe a workshop online in person. I think in person is going to be really good, right? AZ's done plenty on this and the PhysioFit team, they had sort of a longer journey over 18 months or so, I think he spoke about it at the summit, where they're doing workshops specifically for runners and they dialled in three, was it three specific types of sessions? And they just honed and honed. Yeah. And did different run clubs, but did the same presentation so they could get really, really good at it. And then all of a sudden they've got all the run clubs and running SA referring to them and they've carved out this niche. And so they've published content specific to a partner amplified it with paid ads and then they're off to the races with new clients.

Jack O'Brien: Here's the mistake that we see clinic owners make all the time. When it comes to partnerships, they say, yeah, I've tried partnerships. It doesn't work for me. I reached out to two medical specialists and one sports club or daycare center, depending. It's like, okay. You haven't really tried. How serious are you about growing your clinic? Because if you were serious, it wouldn't be two or five or a couple of dozen. It would be tens and tens, if not hundreds of partnership opportunities. Take it seriously. Now, there are ways that you can automate things or perhaps scale things up using tech or using your team. But the point is, if you're serious, you need to act seriously. Partnerships can be such a creative outlet. It doesn't just have to be, oh, where can I put my flyers in your waiting room? Or do I get to bring some soggy sandwiches for lunch? It's like, no, no. Who is their ideal client? Who else do they trust? How can I share some value with their audience and then hopefully glean? How can I refer to others and they might refer to me? Partnerships are a huge untapped opportunity.

Ben Lynch: Yeah. How do you go about choosing which partnerships to work with? Again, let's come back to this premise of, can I double my new clients in 90 days? And partnerships for some are going to be well developed compared to others. And maybe there's a case to say, you pick one of these plays, not all three of them in the 90 days, because you want to do it with intensity or focus, or at least the action matches the ambition. That's all. However much you need new clients, does your action in the week back that up? It's very obvious when we look at the diary. In partnerships, you've rallied the team as big or as small as it is and you're saying, guys, we need to double our new clients. We believe partnerships is the way to do it. We've got a couple of key ones. Or maybe we need to define who the key ones are to pursue to see if we can generate new clients. Just talk me through how you go about that.

Jack O'Brien: So for our members, inside the learning portal, we have the partnerships tracking dashboard. And so you need a hub. You effectively need a contact management system. How can we manage the relationships of our content? Contacts, rather. And so that looks like building a Rolodex of who we're going to go after. Know your ideal clients, know who they trust, and build out that list of targets. And that should be dozens. We're talking 20, 30, 50, 80 potential partnerships. We're not talking twos and threes, folks. You've got to take this seriously. build out the list, and then think about what is the collaboration that we would play with those specific partners. For some, it might be a lunch and learn. For others, that might look like running a workshop for their clients. For some, it might look like a sponsorship arrangement. For some, it might just look like some complimentary services for the business owner who will then happily spruik your clinic. It can look like content swaps or social collaborations. But what is the specific collaboration strategy with each of these targets? And then we go about trying to establish the relationships. And then there'll be some that stick and some that won't. That's a natural attrition, but you've got to start with who are our ideal clients, who are the possible partners, and what's the possible collaboration.

Ben Lynch: We have for members the 29 ways to strengthen partnerships, and it outlines 29 different ways that you could collaborate. You've mentioned several just now. Probably the thing that I've made mistakes with over time and I've seen others do the same, is when it comes to partnerships, they're looking to jump straight to the strategy and like, here's what we can do for you, rather than actually understanding things like, why do you refer to us? Why do you refer to our profession? Are there other options that you refer to? What are some of the challenges you have when you refer to people like us? We never hear back from them. Or we're not actually sure the full suite of services. Insert whatever. And I often say to clinic owners, you've already got the skill set of asking really good questions in a therapy sense. You do that in your subjective history. Same should be true in your partnerships. Why haven't you asked all of these questions to actually diagnose you know, what's going on in this relationship, then figure out what the best prescription or treatment plan is for you to work together and be most effective. So I actually just want to understand a lot more about the partner first, because it might reveal a way that we could collaborate that happens quicker and is way more effective in terms of generating value for the community, but also then leading to new patients as well. I think that's the way I'd be looking. How can I actually turn that contact base into, I understand exactly how I could serve this partner and by extension their community, which is Russian, to solve problems. That would be my call to action there and I'd figure out what could be the highest value way that we could collaborate, perhaps in the shortest period of time, in the most effective manner. I think if you ask the right question, then you start to come to some of the answers that might truly move the needle. All right, paid. Can we go there? Let's jump to paid. You've just come off a workshop around… optimizing Google ads and Peter Flynn is our resident expert there and if you're like me and you think I'm no good at this and I'd much rather an expert handle it, hand it over to Peter Flynn and he can take the ads off your plate and run that for you. I think so much of this is I'm looking at what are my strengths in these areas here. I hear the clinic owner saying, not comfortable to do some of the publishing side of things and getting on the camera and to some degree it's like, well, are you going to do what your clinic needs you to do? Slash, okay, are there versions of this that you could do? For instance, I can publish content in the form of a workshop and do it with a partner I'm much more comfortable speaking in that sense rather than doing you know all these social media trends so I always want to nuance it to the strength of the clinic owner that we're talking to whilst also not being too lax on saying hey If you really want to double it, you're going to have to do some of these things. So let's come to paid. So often, clinic owners, it's a very small minority who even understand what's going on in their meta ads, Google ads. And then it's a smaller fraction of that that are actually really effective at managing it. So for most people, they need to outsource this. But how should they be thinking about the paid side? Because I think that's where the advantage or levelling up can come from for clinic owners about their budgeting and knowing their returns. So talk to me about the paid side of things. What do you mean when we talk about paid in the context of doubling new clients in 90 days?

Jack O'Brien: Well, paid ads can be really complex. Some of the platforms have a high degree of complexity and tracking and managing, but it doesn't have to be, at least out of the gate. It's endless how much you can pursue the complexity. But to keep it simple, think of paid ads this way. It is amplifying what we are already doing. Use Google Ads as an example. You are probably already showing up somewhere in organic searches, but Google Ads artificially amplifies you to the top of the queue for specific search phrases in the way that you want to be found. Meta, you are already producing content and so throwing ad budget behind that amplifies the content that you're already creating or gets you in front of a broader audience through targeting and paying for that privilege. So really what we're talking about is amplifying what already exists. Now, people say, I've tried Meta ads, it doesn't work. I've tried Google ads, it doesn't work. Okay. Well, my response to that usually is, well, what you've tried hasn't worked, but there are multiple ways to try Google ads and there are ways that do work. There are ways that do work with Meta. We just got to keep finding them and keep testing things. Where I would start with specifically, Ben, if I had 100% of a budget, first off, I would say, how many more new clients do I want to attract through paid? Let's say I want another 20 new clients a month through paid, and what am I willing to spend to acquire a new client? Let's say round figures, 100 bucks to keep it simple. I've got a $2,000 budget. If it were me, if I had this challenge tomorrow, I would allocate three quarters of that budget to Google Ads. So in this case, $1,500 to Google Ads because you see a quick return on investment in Google. The intent to book is very high and so I'd put three quarters to Google and a quarter to Meta and I'd be amplifying content. I'm just getting my content in front of the right eyeballs as much as possible to increase the mental availability, increase my presence in the minds of my ideal clients. And that is probably amplifying the entertaining content first.

Ben Lynch: To what degree do you think a specific offer makes a difference to the effectiveness of your marketing? So the ability for you to package up you know, services to some degree, solutions around common problems, you know, insert the back pain for a lot of the musculoskeletal folks. We've helped a number of people tailor these to the niche that they work with. Now, a lot of people will jump to hearing discounts when we say offers. That could be an element of the offer, but perhaps what we're doing here is we're just saying we're packaging up and articulating our services very clearly in the context of a common pain point that a patient will have and making that very sort of explicit in some of our communication in our marketing. Yeah, to what degree are offers effective?

Jack O'Brien: Yeah, offers can be very effective. And so you think about the context, right? If we're talking about Google ads, for instance, clients are searching for something specifically and they have a high intent to buy or book in this case. And so an offer, think about an offer like a wrapper, right? You might have a bunch of the same product in different wrappers. And that's okay. And so if we're talking about your initial consult at your clinic, your initial assessment, it's classically the same service whether someone has back pain or knee pain or shoulder pain or wrist pain or elbow. And so the offer speaks to what they're looking for. The initial knee assessment covers these types of tech and this type of objective analysis and this type of prescription. It's just a different wrapper, but it's the same initial assessment. So the offer must match the search intent on Google and that really comes down to your landing page. Overall meta though, it's a little bit different. If you're looking for direct response bookings, then the offer really does matter. It needs to be very compelling, particularly if they weren't thinking about booking straight out of the gate. But if you're not necessarily looking for direct conversion straight away, there may in fact not be an offer at all. It may just be the amplification of content and brand and awareness.

Ben Lynch: So let's shift into some of the bigger clinics that are part of the community. And we have some massive clinics that we work with. We're talking doing tens of millions of dollars worth of revenue per year with hundreds of team members. Let's go to the bigger end of the spectrum. When do you think it's right for a clinic owner that's growing and entering some of these brackets, maybe they're growing fast, or they're just a more established business, when do you think they should entertain actually bringing the expertise in-house? You know, they have someone that is managing all of their, you know, paid efforts internally. They have a version of a marketing specialist. They have someone or a media buyer. They have someone that's maybe head of partnerships. Talk to me about that bigger clinic owner and how they might think about when's the right time to do that.

Jack O'Brien: It's a really tricky equation to figure out, but here's a way of thinking about it. There are probably two to five different roles in a marketing team. And so we had this challenge at our clinic. We have this challenge at Clinic Mastery even. There might be two or three or five roles that you require. And when you're growing, you might not be able to fit two or three or five people on your team. And so you think, right, I'm going to try and find the person that can create the strategy around content, who can film, who can edit who understands social media and posting and I'm going to find that one person because I don't need four people, I need one person for four roles. I'm as guilty of this as anyone as we speak. And so you look for the unicorn with it can do all the one person that can do all the things and you're probably just not quite at a point where you can bring it all in house like this. And so it's worth investing in experts and, uh, you know, engaging in agencies or services on an ad hoc basis until you're at a place where you can start to afford an expert in one of those domains. And then as you continue to grow, you can afford an expert in more of those domains over time.

Ben Lynch: It's an interesting point, isn't it? As you're growing, trying to maintain some margins and profitability as you're doing it, but also trying to, you know, commit to investments that get a return later down the track. In this instance, hiring someone so that they could bring some capability to the clinic that generates, you know, commercial results. So I think part of that is around the budgeting side of things. and understanding what your allocations are, say in the marketing category. Traditionally, we've spoken about all of your marketing spend is for a clinic somewhere around the 5% of your revenue, including some of the ad spend, but you would allocate the salaries to it.

Jack O'Brien: Up to 10% if you're in a high growth phase. We see this often, you're like, I want to grow. but you're putting your spare change rattling around in your pocket to growth. It's like, again, do your actions match your ambitions? If your ambition is to grow, you're going to need a disproportionate investment. Your CACT LTV, which we've described previously, but the client acquisition cost as a percentage might need to creep up to 10, 15, even 20% of their lifetime value. Pete Flynn describes this really well. You're already paying team, you're already paying rent, you're already covering a lot of these expenses. Just invest in getting new clients through the door and let momentum carry you through. Be willing to … Growth costs. No growth happens for free. Yes. Get ready to cough up for it.

Ben Lynch: I think that's where to that question and then the answer around when might be the right time to bring this in-house. One of the things that is an advantage of having, say, an agency work with you or outsourcing it is you might be able to wrap that up relatively easily if it gets really hard or they're not getting results for you. It may be a little bit trickier to have a team member that comes on and then all of a sudden you feel like you need to let them go. I just want to say we want to look to recruit for the long term and be really committed to these things. So I think that's an interesting distinction is around, yeah, literally put your money where your mouth is. If you want to grow, again, does your action match your ambition? Have you allocated? your money, your budget accordingly. To your point, so often we talk to these clinic owners and have a look at their budget. I remember one just recently, very ambitious growth goals. hardly spending on marketing, yet the marketing they were spending on was quite effective. And it's like, well, how can you expect to hit these growth goals if you're going to underinvest in your marketing side? You've got to allocate more. Of course, we want to make sure it's an effective spend. You need to ramp up these numbers here. That's what you're looking to get a return on.

Jack O'Brien: It's such an interesting cognitive exercise, right? Particularly if you're maybe a peds or an NDIS clinic who has not had to spend two parts of nothing on marketing for the last little while. That's the reality. And so, anything more than 1% feels hard. to have a little bit of perspective is that most other clinics and most other businesses for that fact would invest somewhere between 5% and 15% of their budget on growth. And so yeah, going from 1% to 4% feels a lot. It is a lot, but it's really in the big scheme of things, it's not much. So we've got to get comfortable with investing and the same is true when the numbers start getting bigger, you're like, I spend how many thousands of dollars on Facebook? It's like, yeah, but that's only in light of how many tens of thousands of dollars it generates in revenue. The thousands of dollars is not expensive when it generates tens of thousands of dollars. This is where it comes back to a lot of the paid stuff, Benny, is quite scientific in its approach. You need to be across the numbers and managing some of those ratios so that you know if I spend $10 and I get $100 back, I'll often say to clinic owners, okay, max out the credit card. Let's go. If you've got this dialed and assuming it continues linear, if you've got your metrics measured, then let's go. Pour the gas on the fire.

Ben Lynch: That's what it's there for. It's a really great point. I'll be interested to unpack this a little bit more with Mic Rizk as well in how they go about it. There's so many different ways to go about it. That's what we love doing It's just nuancing the story here to find what works for you. I just come back to, we're often reflecting on what's working, what's not working, and there'll be periods where the marketing is more effective than others. A strategy worked previously, doesn't work today, or we didn't do it in the same way. So you just need a rhythm to actually review, what are we spending? How's it going? Part of that that we've discussed periodically, especially this is for the bigger clinics typically, where they have therapists that they take offline in terms of client billables to do some version of publish, partner, or paid. Part of that budget allocation in my mind is, okay, I'm paying this therapist X amount over Y amount of hours over the year. What is that? I think that's a really good thing for you to look at because it might be like, oh, it's just a couple of hours a week, but you look at it over a year and it's maybe tens of thousands of dollars that you are budgeting, you are allocating to this therapist to do, call it new client generation. My question and challenge is how effective is that? at the moment, is it better that they change that ratio, go more back to client billables, and you're essentially reallocating some of that time and money to other people or other strategies as well. So it comes back to the point of assessing where we started this conversation, actually assessing what's going on right now. How many new clients are we getting? Where are they predominantly coming from? I know that can be a little fraught with danger, but at least give us some sense. What is our current budget? What is our current lifetime value? Understand some of those ratios and make some informed bets moving forward and continue to repeat the analysis and adjust. Probably the challenge that we've spoken to is clinic owners that say they want these outcomes with new clients. And then you're like, to budgeting, if I looked at your week, how much of your week have you actually purposefully, with blinkers on, actually focused on trying to get this outcome? And it's like, yeah, I've got this time block, but it's filled with emails and slack and phone calls and disruptions. It's like, well, of course you're not going to get any outcomes if you keep getting distracted.

Jack O'Brien: Not to skip by the fact that that's hard. That's a challenge. I recognize that clinic owners are wearing multiple hats and often working more than they would like. It's like being stuck in the weeds is hard. And so that's where getting the right people in your corner, putting yourself in the right rooms that help you to level up, that understand the challenges, but also know the solutions. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. There are ways. through this. You just need to tap into them and you know that when you lean in, it's going to be different. It might come with an investment, but the return's there. So, of course, you should do it.

Ben Lynch: Well, J.O.B, thank you for your insights here. I would love to hear from listeners. If you made it this far in the episode, thanks for tuning in. Send us what was your key insight. from this episode. It's a question we ask at the end of each of our sessions, our webinars, our workshops, our immersions, our coaching sessions. What's the key insight and then what's the key action? What are you going to do about it? Because you want to make sure that you're getting the results, you got to take action. So key insight, key action, send it through to Jack, jack@clinicmastery.com from this episode. J.O.B., we'll see you on another episode very soon. Bye-bye.