The EntreMD Podcast

Revenue Boost Series: 5 asks for revenue growth

• Dr. Una • Episode 444

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What's the one thing that will make the biggest difference in your business

Believe it or not, it’s simply asking. 

Asking is something most people shy away from—they don’t want it to seem like they need anything, they fear rejection, and they don’t want to hear the word no. But asking isn’t just about making requests...

Asking is about opening the door to growth and opportunities that wouldn’t happen on their own.

That’s why today, I’ll explain how to become comfortable with asking and share the 5 asks every entrepreneur needs to know.

Tune in.

—

Key Takeaways: 

  • 00:00 Intro 
  • 03:21 Ask #1
  • 05:57 Ask #2
  • 08:24 Ask #3 
  • 12:43 Ask #4 
  • 15:42 Ask #5 
  • 16:40 Building a system around asking 
  • 19:45 Outro 

Additional Resources:


When you are ready to work with us, here are three ways:

  • EntreMD Business School Accelerator - If you are looking to make a 180 turnaround in your business in 90 days, this is the program for you.
  • EntreMD Business School Grow - This is our year-long program with a track record of producing physician entrepreneurs who are building 6, 7 and 7+ figure businesses. They do this while building their dream lives!
  • EntreMD Business School Scale - This is our high-level mastermind for physicians who have crossed the seven figure milestone and want to build their businesses to be well oiled machines that can run without them.

To get on a call with my team to determine your next best step, go here ...

Speaker 1:

Sometimes people want to know what is the one thing that will make the biggest difference in my business. Right, and of course, there isn't really a one thing, but there is something that if you make a habit in your business as an entrepreneur, and if you make this a habit for your team, your business will grow in an explosive way and you will create results in your business that you couldn't even foresee. Hi docs, welcome to the EntreMD podcast, where it's all about helping amazing physicians just like you embrace entrepreneurship so you can have the freedom to live life and practice medicine on your terms. I'm your host, dr Imna. This is something so powerful that in the EntreMD Business School, we built a challenge around it, and this is a challenge people look back to and they say this is a challenge that changed everything for me in my business. That thing is asking, and asking is something that we run away from because we don't want it to seem like we need something, because we are afraid of being rejected. We don't want to hear the word no. We've been told don't talk to strangers. And now, as entrepreneurs, we're not only to talk to strangers but also to ask strangers for things, and sometimes we're like I don't want to bother people, okay, but I'm going to show you five asks that if you make these in your business, you make this where it's something that's happening daily, it's happening weekly your business will change forever. Now, if you have any hangups around this, what I want you to do is really treat this as a challenge and really treat this as something that I'm just going to do. It's not a bad thing. My business is great. It changes lives, solves problems for people. My private practice is wonderful. My coaching business is wonderful. I want you to lean into the beauty of your business for a second here.

Speaker 1:

Think about a patient you've worked with and the transformation that you created in their lives. You're a weight loss doc. Think about somebody who had been struggling for years and, first of all, you help them look at themselves and look at their bodies in a completely different way. You help them to change their eating habits. You help them exercise. Maybe they need a medication. You help them with all of that, and they had been struggling with this for decades and in your business, in your practice, you were able to fix that, reverse that. Maybe they were on medication for hypertension and diabetes and what you did was so amazing that they're either off it or their doses are less, and all of that and it's given this person new confidence and new level of self-esteem, and their marriage is better, their relationship with their kids are better, they're showing up better at work, they got that raise at work. This is what your business does.

Speaker 1:

When you are asking, remember you're looking away from you and you're looking towards the person, the problem they have and the fact that your business can solve that, and then you ask right? So you're asking from that space and that's what puts you in a position where you're happy to ask, you're happy to invite people to work with you because it's just mind blowing. Okay, so you can have the most amazing service, yet Nobody will know and nobody will use it and nobody will come work with you because there are other things that need to happen, like it needs to be amazing. That's one. And then we need to do the ask to get the people to say yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, okay, all right. So five asks.

Speaker 1:

Number one first ask is work with me. Come work with me, come be a patient in my private practice, come coach with me, come have me as a speaker, come have me as a consultant in your company, whatever that is. You got to ask people to work with you. You know my service is good. It speaks for itself. No, it doesn't. No, it does not. You need to speak for it and you need to invite people to come work. If you have a great product, a great service, it is your moral obligation, ethical obligation, to tell people about it and tell them to come work with you.

Speaker 1:

Okay, people will not say yes to a question you're not asking. So ask, ask and make it make it a normal thing, normalize it right. For instance, you're listening to this podcast. This means you're a physician, it means you're an entrepreneur, and I'm going to say this right, we are in a wonderful time for physicians. We are in a time where, in the back of the day, we did not have a business education, we did not know how to figure out this thing called entrepreneurship. This is not a problem anymore.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so maybe you're working a business. You're bringing in revenue. You're not really bringing in profits. You're struggling with your team. You don't even know who the next person to hire is. The team that you do have, you're afraid to lead them, you're afraid to hold them accountable because you're like then I'm bothering them, or maybe they'll just leave Right, and you left you to start your own business because there was burnout and you didn't like your working environment and all of that, and you're back in the same spot. You experienced burnout, but you're experiencing it in your business.

Speaker 1:

If that's you, you can have an alternate reality, because in the Entremet Business School, what we do is we show you how to create revenue. We show you how to lead team and lead your team in a profitable way. We show you how to build your dream business and your dream life. We have served hundreds of physicians with unbelievable unbelievable stories of life change, and they're living their dream lives and they're building their dream businesses. And that could be you too.

Speaker 1:

So, if you've been thinking about it, I want to invite you to get off the fence. I want to invite you to say you know what I've thought about this for so long. This doesn't even make sense. Let me make a decision. I want to commit to my goals and I want to commit to the support that will help me get there Right, and so I want to invite you to book a call with my team and they will look at your business. They'll look at what we do and they'll tell you this is amazing. We can support you. And these are five other doctors like you that we've helped do the exact same thing, and these are five other doctors like you that we've helped do the exact same thing. We can share their stories with you, right?

Speaker 1:

And so what you do is entremedcom forward, slash call book your call and we'll be happy to talk with you, okay, okay, do you see that? Work with me, work with me. It's an ask you always want to make. You always want to be making that Second ask. Second ask is continue to work with me. Okay, I didn't realize this until two things happened.

Speaker 1:

So the first thing you know in my private practice is if you don't ask patients to come back I'm a pediatrician, right? So there's this periodicity, right. They come at two months, four months, six months. If you don't ask them to come back and help them get scheduled, they're not going to come back because they're busy. They have other things going on, especially in the years where they don't need vaccines and stuff like that they are not coming. And so if you are here, if you're listening to this and you run a private practice and you've been around for more than two years. I guarantee you you have a ton of patients who are overdue for visits and that's your impact and revenue sitting in your database, right. So you ask them to continue to work with you. So you pull up a list of all the people who are overdue, with appointments split amongst your staff, and have them call. Have them call. It will change your business.

Speaker 1:

This was one of the strategies that kept us thriving in the midst of the pandemic. It was one of those strategies is the people who are overdue. Get them all in, okay, all right. So ask them to continue to work with you. We have done that in the Entremdi Business School school as well, because the entrepreneur business school we did build as a program that you can engage in for the life of your business, right?

Speaker 1:

So whether you are, you know, starting or hitting your first hundred thousand, or you're on your way to your first million, or you're to multiple million, or multiple companies, like we have support for all of these levels. So it's built as a lifetime. It's built as a lifetime program. That's why we had, you know, like a second tier for the people who are doing over a million in revenue and we're going to keep upping the ante because I want to be able to support the docs, I'm committed to them, right? And so one of the things we do is, yeah, they've come, they've done their year and we're like let's go for another year, like if this happened a year, what could happen in another year? And it's amazing, like we've gone for events where, at the event, 40% of the people who came for the event had been in the school for longer than a year and the longer they stayed, the bigger their results, the more they upgrade their identity.

Speaker 1:

The different kind of entrepreneur Many of them come in to start one business or to build their brand, and they build their brand. Then they build the first business, then they build a second business. And I told them, like, many of you are going to be serial entrepreneurs. You don't know this yet, but that's okay. That's okay. I'm a good pilot, I know what we're doing here. So ask people to continue to work with you. Okay, you're a coach, you have a six month package or a one year package. Ask them to continue to work with you, because they still have problems. You still have solutions. This is not about manipulation. It's not about making a buck. This is about continuing to serve your people at the highest level, right? Number three you can ask them to work with you at a higher level. So you are in private practice and you have ancillary services and other things that people can continue to work with you in that way. You invite them to do that, okay? If you don't, they will not know.

Speaker 1:

Let me tell you this we had a doc I love her, she's so amazing, she's an ophthalmologist and she came for one of our Entrep de Business School in-person events and so she said one of her goals was to have more people do surgeries with her. And I'm like you're an ophthalmologist, where do they go to do the surgery? She's like they just come for their medical care and they would ask her like so where do I go for this? You know, like for my cataract surgery or whatever that is. And I was like, yeah, I'm like the same way you would promote and campaign if you were starting is the same way you're going to promote and campaign for this line of service that people don't actually know that you do. They think you're the glasses lady or you know whatever it is that they were thinking. So she went to work on that. And now she's at a point where there are so many like she's fully booked. She's booked solid for surgeries. Now, think about that. That means her patients, who know, like and trust her, who she knows inside out and she's a great surgeon. They're getting amazing care from her. So her impact in their lives is even bigger, right, and her revenue. I want you to think about it. Her revenue is so much bigger because now she's working with them in a higher way in a way. Right, if you're a coach, let me use myself as an example. Maybe you can use this philosophy, if you will.

Speaker 1:

One of the things that I'm very committed to is I'm very committed to my personal evolution. I'm committed to my growth because I know the more I grow, the more I can help the people I'm called to help. My assignment is to help physicians build profitable seven-figure businesses so they have the freedom to live life and practice medicine on their terms, and the intent is to completely disrupt the physician space and change the physician narrative, where all these things are being stuck and we don't know how to build thriving businesses and all of that. All of those things will be a thing of the past because the new norm becomes we build dream businesses and we build our dream lives, right, that's the intent. And so because of that, I don't have the liberty of growing up to a certain stage and then just stop in there. And I don't have that liberty, right, because I am shattering glass ceilings. But when you shatter glass ceilings you become a glass ceiling, and if I'm going to be a glass ceiling I need to raise that as high as I can possibly raise it, right? Okay, because of that. So initially, you know, we'd help them first six figures, multiple six figures, seven figures and all of that stuff.

Speaker 1:

And the more we did that in the Entremet Business School, the more we realized we were creating more problems, right? So the reward for solving problems aka hit the seven figure mark is new problems, like what do I do now Because the systems that I used to use are broken? I need a different dimension of team. How do I lead that team? What do I do with this profit thing? Like there are new problems that are created. I even had the students from the business school. I kind of knew it was time to do that, but they walked up to me. They're like Dr Una, we have new problems, and we needed to fix these problems, and so what we did is we then created a new tier of the business school called Entremdi Business School Scale. That is for doctors who are either at a million and are still interested in hypergrowth, or dangerously close to a million and are interested in hypergrowth. And so that's what we created, and so if I ask people to come into that, they will come. If I don't ask them, they won't come. That's just the way this works, right, and so I'm asking them to work with me at a higher level, like in this place.

Speaker 1:

Then we focus on profit as opposed to just revenue. We focus on building that team that can run your company without you, right. We focus on building the processes that will handle that. We focus on building capacity, right, because the more zeros, the problems have bigger zeros, right, and so the capacity to weather that and the capacity to be okay in that you know, like all that. So it's fantastic, but I have to ask, and so it's the same thing for you. Maybe people work with you in a group setting and you have another version where they can work with you one-on-one and all of that stuff.

Speaker 1:

You ask people to work at you at a higher level. People will say, well, they got all these results, they would know, and they won't. They won't know I'm helping you. I'm helping you add tons of money to your business. They will not know. You're going to ask If they will work with you. You ask If they'll continue to work with you. You ask If they're going to work with you. At a higher level, you will ask. You're going to ask.

Speaker 1:

Number four is the ask of telling your clients, your patients, to tell their family and friends about you. So that's your patient referrals. You're going to ask your patients. Ask your clients to refer. They will know you, they will love you. They will be so amazed at what you do. But if you really want to see them telling other people about you, you will ask them. If you ask them, they'll do it. If you don't, some will, but it will be the minority and it won't be consistent. So ask people to work with you. Ask people to continue to work with you. Ask people to work with you at a higher level. Ask your clients to refer people to you. Okay, private practice.

Speaker 1:

The way I say this is when people say oh, my goodness, dog, you're the absolute best. And all of that. Hear it as them giving you an invitation, hear them saying to you oh my goodness, ask me for a referral, ask me. I say, oh my goodness, thank you. I'm so grateful that we're able to help you with this and all of that. Are there friends and family members you have that you believe deserve a doctor like me? Will you send them to me? Right, simple, that's a one-liner. That one-liner can translate to hundreds of thousands of dollars, arguably millions of dollars, in your business, okay. So it's kind of like McDonald's with you want to have fries with that, you want to have fries with that. Right, dramatic impact to your bottom line.

Speaker 1:

Okay, and when I say bottom line, it's not just your bottom line. This is a revenue conversation, right, that's why we're saying bottom line, but it's also the impact. It's also the impact, right. So, for instance, we had a doc who invited one of her friends to come to the EntreeMD business school, even had her come to EntreeMD live, and she came and all of that, and her friend eventually joined and this friend, in the first 90 days in the business school, grew her revenue by 122%. So it's not just about oh, then they'll come in, then you make more money, people before profits right, but we're cool with the people, we're not cool with the profits. That's why we talk about profits so much on this show.

Speaker 1:

Okay, but think about that. Think about the life change. Think about what she now believes is possible, because a lot of times the win is a win, but it's not the win. The win is you shock yourself and you're like hang on a whole minute. If I could do that, what else could I do? What else is possible for me? It's so much transformation, so beautiful, right? So ask your clients, ask your patients to send you their friends and family and like this is an instant. This is not a paid product, but if you listen to this podcast and it has made any change in your life whatsoever, any kind of change, and you're like this is amazing. Right, do me a solid. Take a screenshot of this episode. Tell people, this podcast has changed my business. This podcast is the reason I have a private practice. This podcast is the reason I'm thriving.

Speaker 1:

Whatever that is, post it, tag me, okay. Hashtag EntreeMD. Add Dr Unachukwu. If it's Instagram, then add Nneka Unachukwu. If it's Facebook, I will reshare it. I'll shout you out, I'll be so grateful, right? That's the same thing you do in your business. Ask people Now, I'll be looking, don't hurt my feelings. Your business. Ask people Now I'll be looking, don't hurt my feelings.

Speaker 1:

Okay, and the fifth one. The fifth one is you asking people who are part of your referral base, so people who have access to your people, to refer their people to you. Okay, so again, I'm a pediatrician. Obgyn would be part of my referral base. As you know, entree MD, anybody who has audiences full of physicians, that will be part of my referral base. Asking those people to connect me with their audience. Right, Like to connect me with their audience, whether that's me being a guest in front of their audience or that's them writing an email to talk about what I do or whatever. That is right. Asking referral sources, so not patients now, but what we call centers of influence, people who are leaders of communities that have your ideal patients, ideal clients, in them. Asking those people to tell their audience about you. If you're a pediatrician, a daycare center, things like that, if you are a specialist, a primary care doc, those are people who have access to your people. Asking them to tell their people about you.

Speaker 1:

I want you to pause for a second and think about this with me. Forget about the work you will do. Maybe mindset drama is showing up or any of those things. If, every day in your company, in your company, if every day as a company, you are asking people to work with you, asking people to continue working with you, asking people to work with you at a higher capacity, asking your clients your current clients and patients to send people to you, and asking people who are part of your referral base to put you in front of their audience to you know, what do you think will happen to your business? I mean, I want you to think about it. It will be so wild If you build a system around this. This will be so wild, right? So I want to invite you to do it. I want to invite you to do it. Think about the outcome that it will create and then just decide I'm going to get good at asking. I'm going to get good at doing this stuff. I'm going to get better.

Speaker 1:

It will rock your world in the best possible way, and it is also your insurance policy. I'll tell you what I mean by that. There are times where you may not have as many new clients, but you have many who are continuing to work with you. You may not have as many that are continuing to work with you, but there are many who are choosing to work with you at a higher level. You may have nobody deciding to work with you at a higher level, but you have your patients and your clients sending you new people. Do you see what I mean? It's your insurance policy, because if one of these five things is not performing, you have four other things that could be performing and so you could still win. Maybe you have a month where there's no new client none but if you have these four other levers, if you have three of these other levers really working, you'll be okay. So you want to fire on all cylinders because it's your insurance policy and it'll change everything. Okay, because it's your insurance policy and it'll change everything.

Speaker 1:

Okay, as I've been saying, this is the fourth in a series called the Revenue Boost Series, and in this series, what I'm doing is just helping you figure out how to get your business where you're profitable, where you're creating the revenue you want to have. And at EntreMD, we are committed. We are committed. Our big goal is we want to help a hundred doctors cross a hundred thousand in revenue. 75 cross half a million in revenue, 50 cross a million in revenue, 25 add a million to their business. That's already doing over seven figures. That's you right, that's you. And so to do this, we're doing many things. We've completely revamped the Entrep de Business School, but the other thing we're doing is we're doing a workshop we're going to do it multiple times called the Revenue Boost Challenge, and in this workshop it's a five-day workshop You're going to learn and do, learn and do, learn and do.

Speaker 1:

We're going to give you proven strategies that have worked, that always work, that you can apply in real time and start creating that boost in your business. Right, we've been told oh, doctors can't run, you know great businesses. Doctors don't know how to market, they don't know how to sell, they don't know anything. But they got it wrong. There's a new breed of physicians. That's you, that's me. We have a whole revolution going on and everything's about to change. And for everyone who's like, oh, I'm going to be part of that 175, 50, 25 that Dr Una is talking about, you're going to be the vision board. Who's going to show the physician community exactly what is possible, that is you, okay, so go, save your spot, revenueboostchallengecom. Save your spot for our next workshop, okay, and as many times as we do it. Show up and create a new boost in your business, okay.

Speaker 1:

But this is what I want to leave you with. I want to leave you with this picture Everything is about to change. Your business will have more impact, it will create more revenue, it will create more financial freedom for you, it will create more time freedom for you, and you'll find yourself truly living life on your terms, doing medicine the way you want to do it, doing life the way you want to do it. Because the time for you to be rewarded for the extraordinary price you paid to become a physician, devote your life to taking care of others the time for your reward is now. It's been delayed for long enough. It's now, and we're going to do it together, okay. So I'm rooting for you. Don't forget to share this episode and tell people. Take the screenshot, share it on social media Maybe you know share how the podcast has changed your life, or share how this episode has.