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My Business Is Busy Enough | Marketing Myths That Keep Doctors Stuck

• Dr. Una

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The Exact Strategy I Used to Grow My Business 657% in One Year: https://www.entremd.com/worksheet

Do you think busyness means your business is safe? Think again. In this episode, you’ll learn:
Why stopping marketing when your business is busy is dangerous for revenue, sustainability, and growth.

By the end of this episode, you’ll understand how to market smarter, not harder, keeping your business thriving even when it’s busy.

Tune in! 

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Speaker 1:

Your business needs you to market, like even when stiff competition shows up, if you've been marketing, it's kind of like, yeah, your business gets protected by your marketing.

Speaker 2:

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 Una.

Speaker 1:

We are doing a series on the reasons why physician entrepreneurs find it really challenging to market their businesses, and reason number three is my business is busy enough. When the growth slows, I'll start marketing again. Okay, now, this one, this particular reason, makes me especially scared. Okay, it makes me scared. And it makes me scared for three reasons. So I want you to lean all the way into this, I want you to listen to this with an open mind and I want you to hear, because when people say this, it makes me scared for them. Okay, all right. So let's talk about the reasons. Three reasons. The first reason is busyness is not equal to revenue. Okay, busyness is not equal to revenue. And so the fact that you're busy, sometimes it makes you feel like you know I'm busy, my business is doing really well, I need to stop marketing, or now I get to not market, and things like that, okay.

Speaker 1:

So what I want you to think about is okay, let's look at the numbers. So let me say that somebody is running a cash pay practice and this person has. They have a hundred members. Okay, I'm just making up these numbers because zeros are easy to count. That's all that's happening here. They have a hundred members, okay, but they're, you know, they're, they're doing all the work. So they're really you know it's tiring and all these things and they're like, if I have more patients, what am I going to do with them and all of those things.

Speaker 1:

But this is the deal. Your goal is not really patients, your goal is revenue, right. Your goal is not really patience, your goal is revenue right. Like, that's the metric, right, that's the metric that we're looking for. So you have a hundred patients, okay, good and well, and you're doing a hundred dollars a month. What does that come to? That means a hundred dollars times a hundred is $10,000. I want you to hear me. It's $10,000. And so at the end of the year, what that comes to, if I keep 100 patients, is 10,000 times 12, which is 120,000. And it's 120,000 gross revenue, not profit, right, because you still have to cover the overhead for the business, you still have to pay yourself and all that. So it's not profit, it's $120,000.

Speaker 1:

So then, even though you're very busy, the question is did you start a business to make $120,000 of gross revenue? Are you going through the stress quote, unquote of being an entrepreneur so you can own your own job and make $120,000 in revenue, and so if that's not your goal, then you have to go back and look at why am I busy, right? Why am I busy? It's not a reason to not market, because that's not the number you want to have. Now, if that's the number you want to have, then maybe the price needs to change, and it needs to change by a lot, right? Okay, so let's come back here.

Speaker 1:

So when somebody says I'm busy, that doesn't mean I'm hitting my revenue target. It just means I'm busy and it may be more a marker that there's some things that are inefficient or there's something a team member can do, or you're just riddled with admin tasks, right? So, for instance, I may look at a practice because I consult with practices quite a bit and I look under the hood of practices a lot okay, now I may look at it and say, okay, you are doing every administrative task. You are answering all the phones, you're calling all the prescriptions, you're calling all the patients, you're doing all of these things, and so it feels like your business is really busy. But it's not. You're busy, the business is not busy, right, it's not busy. And I'm like, a lot of times when I pull up the numbers and do the math. I'm like wait, that's all. I'm like, yeah, so it feels like we're busy, but maybe we're not right, like, maybe we're not, okay.

Speaker 1:

So if that's the case, the fix is not to no longer market. The fix is to say what needs to be delegated, what needs to be removed altogether, Right. What needs to be streamlined Because if I'm seeing so few patients and my revenue is a small percentage of what I want it to be, something needs to give, right, okay. So, for instance, that person can then say I can say why don't you hire even a virtual medical assistant, right? A virtual team member who can do, you know, like do whatever you know calls, answer the phones, you know, do the administrative task and all of those things, so you can do what only you can do for the most part, right. And then, if you do that, could you accommodate another hundred patients? Yes, and if you're going to get another hundred patients, how are you going to do that? You're going to market, right.

Speaker 1:

And so when people tell me, oh, I'm so busy I've had people, they're like I'm so busy, I stopped marketing because I can't get in, I can't have any more people, I'm like so your practice is full, they're like, no, that's the thing, I only have 30 patients. I'm like, okay, that's not the way this works, that's not the way this works, okay. So that's number one. That's the first thing that makes me scared about it. The second thing that makes me scared about it is that results lag, results lag. They can lag by as much as 90 days, right.

Speaker 1:

And so, for instance, if someone says, oh, you know, we're a tad little bit, you know, we just have word of mouth and everything is working and also, I don't need to market, you may not feel it for 90 days. You may not feel it for 90 days because the marketing efforts of the previous 90 days are still working for you, but what happens afterwards is a famine. It's a famine. That happens, right. And so people are like, yeah, so where I see this the most and I'm gonna tell you this, I hope you take it to heart when I see this the most is during the fourth quarter of the year.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so we have October and people are, like you know, kind of chilling, getting ready for their Halloween parties, just winding down and all this stuff, and then in November, you know, they've gone for Halloween from Halloween to now. You know, we have Thanksgiving coming up, and so they're preparing for Thanksgiving, and so they slow stuff down and they don't market here and they don't market there. They don't pay attention to their business that much. It's the holidays I worked hard enough so I can have all this time off and all this stuff. And then all of December is like, oh, we have Christmas and we have all this other stuff, so we're just not going to do all these things and the business seems to be okay-ish. Why? Because in the third quarter of the year they were working, they were marketing. Because in the third quarter of the year they were working, they were marketing. And so what then happens is they get away with it for the most part in the fourth quarter of the year, and when they get to the first quarter of the next year January, february, march it's a famine. I cannot tell you how many times I've seen this happen over and over and over and over.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so we don't get to just stop marketing. This is how we bring in new people into our world, and I'll kind of give you, you know, like more ideas around that in the subsequent episodes, like why this is so critical, right, okay. So that's the second thing that makes me you know because I'm like you will know the impact of what you're doing. It may take you 90 days to figure out, but it's going to be a painful 90 days, okay, okay. The third thing that makes me scared for people when they say this is that marketing okay, marketing works on your current clients and patients. It reminds them you're here, it reminds them why they work with you, it reminds them why you're amazing and all of those stuff. So you retain your current patients and clients by marketing.

Speaker 1:

Okay. Then marketing puts you in front of new people who are like oh, I didn't even know about you before and stuff like that. I want to come work with you. I think this person is amazing, all that stuff. So it gives you new clients. Right, your marketing makes your new clients remember oh, my goodness, this person I work with, they're amazing. And that's true. Jane over here needs someone like this. I didn't even think to refer. Let me refer them to Jane, so it triggers referrals for you.

Speaker 1:

Okay, now you have clients who used to work with you and they kind of fell off and maybe they were busy or maybe, you know, something happened. Life, just you know, was life in and all of that stuff, and they intended to come back, right, but they haven't. And then you're marketing and then you show up. They're like, oh yeah, that's true, I meant to go back, and then they go back. So the thing is your, your business, needs you to market. Like, even when stiff competition shows up, if you've been marketing, it's kind of like, yeah, your business gets protected by your marketing, because if your radio's silent and a harsh competitor comes on, that's the end, that's the end. So what does marketing do for you? It makes your business sustainable. New people are finding you. Current people continue to work with you. Old people are being reactivated. Current people are referring you. Right, competition comes in, but you have a dominant brand and you've served people so much and they know so much about what you do that they, yeah, that's cool, right.

Speaker 1:

So when we don't market, we're giving up the sustainability of our business, the ability of our businesses to withstand trials and withstand trying times and withstand like who knew there'd be a pandemic, right, but in the pandemics it's kind of late to start marketing, but you started that before so you can continue to thrive, right. And so if you want a sustainable business. One of the things you do is you market, you market right, and so if you're thinking, oh you know, we're busy, make sure your business is busy not that you're busy right. Or your thing may be like oh you know, when we slow down, then our market it lags. So if you give up marketing and after six months you pick it up, it's not going to work immediately, it's going to lag. And so now you're going to go from six months to nine months of pain and suffering before you can recover Right, and and you make your business like you put your business at risk when you don't market.

Speaker 1:

Ok. So what do I want you to do? I want you to decide that marketing is your job and marketing is something your business requires, and marketing is something it always requires. I want you to look into the reason why your business seems so busy or you seem so busy. Are there 80% things I need to get off my plate? Are there administrative things I need to get off my plate? Is there a critical hire that I need? Are my things not done in a systematic way? So things that should take one hour are taking three hours? Do that, rather than not marketing or taking three hours. Like, do that rather than not marketing.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so I want you to pull out a notebook, pull out a document on your, on your phone or on your computer and just brainstorm Like, why, what? Like what really needs to give? Is it the marketing which, hints, hints? It never is the marketing right. Do I need to give up on that or do I need to look for a more streamlined way to run my business? Do I need to bring on one critical hire so that everything is better?

Speaker 1:

Okay, all right, so do your homework and, as always, if you need help with that, we're here to support you. Entremd, we are professionals at helping you learn how to manage your time, learn how to spend 80% of your time doing the 20% activities that actually move the needle. We teach you how to build profitable teams and all of this stuff. This is stuff we're really good at. We've done it for years and years and years, and so you can book a call with my team on trendycom forward slash call. Find out how we can support you. We have many ways of supporting physicians across all kinds of all stages of businesses, and we're happy to, we're happy to help you, okay, but this is the deal.

Speaker 1:

I want you to visualize and I love visualization I want you to visualize yourself as the kind of entrepreneur that runs a business that is thriving. You're hitting your revenue goals, you show up as a brand ambassador of your brand, you're marketing. You're doing all of those things and you're doing it without the stress. You're doing it without the burnout. You're doing it without the burnout. You're doing it and it's something that you've built the time to do. You have delivered your business from being just busy for nothing, but it's productive, it's profitable, it's growing, it's thriving. That's what you're doing, right, because you can have that and you can market like a boss.

Speaker 1:

Okay, all right. So rooting for you. Share this episode with another doc, because think of the deception of the first example I gave you, thinking we're so busy. Meanwhile, our business is not creating what we like. The gross revenue is less than what you would have had as a salary, right, and there's so many physician owned businesses that are doing that, and it's in all kinds of levels, right, whether you're at six figures or you're multiple seven figures. This shows up in all kinds of ways. So share this with a doc in your life so that we can all lead businesses that are not unnecessarily busy and we have the time to do the thing, do the marketing so we can build sustainable businesses. All right, rooting for you. See you on the next episode of the Ent Indie Podcast.