Where is your business at for 2022? Have you reached your goals? What changes are necessary to hit a grand slam for 2022? Dr. Deb inspires you to look at your goals, reset them or pivot to cross the finish line strong.
Do not miss these highlights:
01:02 We are halfway through 2022, this is a great time for you to be evaluating your success in your business.
03:27 Figuring out how to reach your goals.
07:50 Add additional services and have some team members that want to expand into a different market area.
11:12Make sure that you’re implementing what you’re doing, and you’re training your entire team. So they're successful with what we're doing as well.
11:50 Assess your practice, and figure out where you are and what you want to accomplish for 2022.
14:13 Think about creative ways that you can help your clients out during these difficult times.
Resources Mentioned
Join Us in the FMBI Mastermind Group on Facebook. You can find the Group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/5461914567153276/
Transcript of Episode #35:
0:01
You're listening to the Functional Medicine Business podcast featuring Dr. Deb, one of the most creative functional medicine business practitioners in her industry. She shares the wisdom and knowledge that she has gained over 25 years of functional medicine, a pioneer in functional medicine, scheduling, leadership and Practice Management. Dr. Devin has a wealth of knowledge, and he's eager to share to help functional medicine become more productive. And for the practitioners and patients to live better lives. Our podcast shares the good and the bad of our industry. Because Dr. Deb knows the pain you live every day building a functional medicine practice with practical tools of how to manage money, taxes and patient care. She will discuss it all with you.
0:54
Welcome back to the show. I'm Dr. Deb. Hey, everybody, It is halftime. And what do I mean by that? You know, it's been a tremendous year, but we are halfway through 2022. And this is a great time for you to be evaluating your success in your business. Are you at a place in your business that you thought you would be at by the middle of 2022? If not, let's assess what's happened, what's gotten in the way, what's preventing you from moving forward, or maybe you are killing it. And 2022 is your year, like this has been the best year your business is growing, it's busy, you're making connections with people, doors are opening clients are flooding to you. And if that's the case, you rock to you guys, you guys are awesome. But if you're struggling a little bit, and you're halfway through the year, and 2022 just isn't quite what you wanted it to be. This is a great time to reassess your business and say, Okay, this is where I had hoped I would be by the end of June 2022. But I'm not. So what have I done in the first half of 2022? That's been successful? What have I done that's gotten in the way of me not reaching my goals for 2022?
2:29
And then we want to sit back and we want to say, Okay, if something has gotten in the way, what is that? And how do I change it? This isn't a time where you just sit back and you say, Okay, I didn't meet the goal that I wanted to, you know, I thought I'd be billing or collecting a half a million dollars a year so far. And I'm only doing 250 or 175. So now I'm gonna adjust and I'm on track for a different figure by the time the end of 2022 comes. No, we're not in that game space anymore. We are looking at that goal and saying if our goal is to make half a million dollars a year, and you're only a quarter of the way there by the end of June, what do we need to put in place, so you're closer to reaching that half million dollar goal or whatever that dollar figure is for you. This isn't a time that we just sit back and we accept what we've got. This is the time that we forge forward, and we make a plan. And we figure out how we're going to reach that goal. So maybe you need to hire another person to help you reach that goal. Maybe we need to reassess our marketing plan. Maybe our marketing is just not working the way we wanted it to. Or maybe we're marketing to the wrong tribe, the people that we're we're getting our marketing in front of just really aren't our type of clients that we're looking for. Maybe we need to work more hours to reach that goal. Maybe we need to make ourselves more available. Or maybe there's some funding that's needed in order to add a new service. These are all things that I constantly look at in my practice. So in the beginning of the year, or I should really say the end because I always do this on December 30th. I don't know why, but that's just my thing. I assessed the end of the year and I make plans for the new year. I like to do it then. So I look at where where were my goals for the previous year. What was I hoping to achieve in my practice? And I write all of this down because if I don't, I'm gonna forget what my dream was the year before and things will get clouded and the euro go on and things will get in the way. And then at the end of the year, I'll think I met my goal, but I didn't. So I write my goals down. And this is what I want to accomplish in the practice, these are the services we want to add, these are the services we want to take away. And here's my game plan to reach that.
5:16
So for instance, we have spent very little on marketing, in my entire practice. So for the last 20 years that I've been practicing, I've had the luxury of not having to spend a lot of money on marketing, because we have a huge practice of word of mouth. And it's always kept my practice busier than what we could manage. But we have some big goals for ourselves in 2022. And in order to reach those goals, we needed to have more marketing done. And we needed very specific marketing, because of the type of services we were hoping to grow within serenity practice. So we decided, as a team to invest a very significant amount of money in marketing. And it was a huge leap for me, I mean, remember, the only thing I was spending marketing dollars on was a website, and some email campaigns, things like that, but not a lot of money at all. So I invested $100,000 this year in marketing, and that was a huge leap for me, I was like, Oh, my God, I cannot believe we're spending this kind of money. I've never spent this kind of money before I'd marketing that I have to make sure this pays off. Well, what we've done as a team, is we have a marketing meeting every single week with my team, and we go over, how are our ads doing? what's working, what's not working? Are we still looking to attract this? What are we seeing in the clinic as a result? Do we need to tweak things, and we set up marketing campaigns for every three months. So we run a marketing campaign for three months. And we are halfway through 2022. And I'm happy to say that money is really paying off because my clinic practice has grown 67% as a result of the marketing that we've done, no, I'm not saying that everyone's going to get that kind of return. But if your marketing is done, right, and if you're managing it, and you're watching it, and you're tweaking it, and your team is doing that for you, those are the kinds of results that you can have from marketing. But you have to have a really strategic plan in order to do that.
7:50
Now, the other thing that we've been looking at is adding additional services, I have some team members that want to expand into a different market area. And we have been looking at bringing in some different services since pre COVID, COVID hit and like everybody else, we kind of put on the brakes and said, okay, hold on, not so sure we can do this. Let's put it on the back burner. Well, finally, second quarter this year, we decided it was time to explore that option, again of bringing those services into the practice. And we found a magnificent company to work with who had great trainers. And I actually flew off with my team for a two day training. And we came back fully energized in the practice ready to add this amazing service, looking at our practice differently. Because here's the reality, guys, when you're in your practice all the time you get used to it. And the truth of the matter is sometimes we get stagnant in our own practices. And so if you can go to someone else's practice, and you can see how their practice is running, and what the cool things are that they're doing, it will reignite you and get your ideas back into your business and saying, Okay, if they can do this, I can do this. And if you have somebody that can show you how to do it, that's even more amazing because it pushes you to the finish line that much faster. If you have team members that are willing to share their knowledge and share how they do things with you. It's an amazing way to learn. And it's a great way to give you ideas on how to expand your own practice.
9:37
So here we are. We're at halftime, and we're implementing for new services for this last half of the year. Yep. I said for my team is not happy with me. They're stressed. They're trying to figure out how we're going to do all of this. But remember, you're not coming in one day and saying okay, all of a sudden we're adding weight loss and we're aesthetics and we're adding stem cells. And we're adding hormone therapy. And we're adding pellet therapy, and we're adding genetics. It's not like that, we're rolling out a plan. So you know, this first two months of this last year, we're going to do this, then the next two months, we're going to do this. And then we're going to end the year with this. And it doesn't mean that we're not going to offer these services to our inside clientele. But as far as like a marketing campaign and a big launch strategy, we're not doing that all at one time, we're easing our way into that we're training our team, we're giving them the tools that they need to be successful, we're bringing people in to train the entire team on things we don't know how to do. And that is where the success comes in. Because if you're anything like me, you're really excited about cool ideas, and you want to bring them in right away. But sometimes, as providers, we're really good at the idea part, we're not so great at the implementing part. And we have to make sure that we're implementing what we're doing, and we're training our entire team. So they're successful with what we're doing as well. Otherwise, you're just going to have a lot of frustration on your side, if you're not training your team to, to be able to support you, and then then you're gonna get mad at your team. And it's not your team's fault, it's actually your fault that you didn't train them properly. So there are lots of strategies on bringing things into your practice. But what I want you guys to do this week, because it's already, you know, the second week of July coming up, if you have not assessed your practice yet, and you haven't figured out where you are and what you wanted to accomplish for 2022. and evaluate whether or not you did accomplish that, I want you to sit down and just take a little bit of time, it doesn't take a lot of time, actually, you could do this in about a half an hour to 45 minutes.
12:11
But if you have not reached your goals of what you want, then you need a strategy on how you're going to do that. So either you brainstorm by yourself, you get your team together and brainstorm with them. Or you can join us on FM bi, and I'm happy to hop on a call with you guys, and help you strategize where you're at and where you're going. And how are we going to get you there. So you're successful in 2022. You know, people are talking about economy falling, they're talking about things getting really bad financially, here with inflation and gas prices, and everything else. And what is going to give when the finances get really tight for family members is ancillary things that they don't need. So if they don't feel that they need hormones, or health care, or you know, wellness options or supplements, and it's getting tight, those things are gonna go by the wayside. The problem I see with that, though, is when they do get the finances again, and they've been off their supplements, and they've been off their regiment for, you know, four or five, six months, they're going to be hurting. And it's going to be harder for them to get back on track with things like that. I seen this happen in the last crash. And it's a challenge, because it's a lot more work to get people back to where they were feeling really great than it is for them to be sustained.
13:45
So if your practice is struggling with that, because of the patient population that you have, there are some unique ideas that we can do to help those patients stay on their treatment plans. So that they stay healthy, you keep the finances, and they don't have to work so hard on the backside of this thing, three, four or five months from now. And it's not so much work for you to get them back to where they were before. So think about you know, creative ways that you can help your clients out during these difficult times. Because it's so important to be able to support your clients. You know, the other day one of my patients said to me, what they love most about my practice is that we treat our patients like family, and our patients feel like they're part of our family. And it was one of the best compliments I could have ever been given. Because that's the intent of my practice. I want every patient that comes in that door to feel like their family, and that they know that we care about them. And we're looking out for them. And we understand what's going on in the world and we're supporting them both emotionally, physically and financially.
14:59
And so So, when you're assessing your practice, you want to take these kinds of things into consideration. If your practice hasn't grown in 2022, why not? Is it because of the population that you work with? are they struggling? Is it a marketing piece? Is it a scheduling piece? Or is it that your practice has just gotten stagnant? Look at all of these things. And it will tell you a clearer picture of exactly what's going on in your practice. And it will give you a clear pathway to success at the end of the year. So you guys, I hope this was inspiring for you. I really want to know all about your goals and where you're at, and how how we can help. So if you want to put something in the chat, or hop over to our Facebook page, and we can have a conversation there. Or if you want to talk through what's going on with your business, just hop over to functional nba.com. There's a link in there where you can book a call with me happy to hop on and just have a conversation and get you sorted away for 2022. So enjoy the gorgeous day, it's July. Let's just love this weather up because you know what's coming, and it's going to be coming fast that the weather is going to change and we're going to have our winter time and wherever you are in the world, we have a winter time but for you, if you're someplace else winter may be exciting because it's not so hot. But if you're like me and you live in the north, winter is a little cold here. And so it can it can slow us down a little bit. But everybody, enjoy your beautiful day. And again, share your goals with us if you share them out loud with other people. Other people can help you make those goals a reality. So take care everyone. Thanks for listening.
16:54
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