In this encore presentation of The Happy Practice Podcast, Cameron is interviewed by its host, Adam Sierra, and they discuss their experiences in entrepreneurship, technology, and marketing, emphasizing the importance of understanding systems and processes, adapting to online shopping, and utilizing a centralized database to manage marketing activities. They highlight the growing presence of technology in medical and wellness practices, and the potential of technology to streamline communication, reduce administrative tasks, and enhance the patient experience. They also emphasize the importance of marketing for capturing and maintaining market share, and creating a seamless and convenient patient experience through easy navigation, online booking, and communication through text reminders and chatbots.

Transcript:

This is Medical Millionaire, the podcast helping your metspot increase in status, visibility, and profitability. Join your host as he dispels miss shares trends, and gives you actionable steps today that will take your medical practice to the next level. Here’s your host, expert marketer and founder of Growth ninety nine, Cameron Hemphill. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Happy Practice Podcast.

I’m your host, Adam Sierra, and today I am joined by an incredibly interesting person, joined by Cameron Hemphill. Welcome to the show. Hey, thank you so much for having me. You guys have a state of the art facility.

It’s awesome to be here. When you came really far too. I think you took like, what like a ten hour flight. To get here, three airplanes and yeah, some travel for sure, But I’m happy to be in Utah.

It’s great. I’m actually from here originally, so I moved to Florida a couple of years ago, and I love coming back here. So it feels good to be home. Love that.

Tell us a little bit about yourself, tell us about what you’re doing about your business, just kind of the camera one on one. Sure, So I’ve been in the tech space. I’ve been an entrepreneur ever since I was a kid. I mean I was that guy that was always trying to figure stuff out.

Why do things work this way? Why do they not work that way? And always just was like asking questions, right, And so naturally that got me into understanding, you know, entrepreneurship and technologies kind of where my mind went in terms of solving problems. So out of high school, I went to college, came out of college and got into real estate, and I quickly learned that the real estate process was very much not organized correctly when it comes to managing transactions, leads, systems, processes. And what that caught my attention was this was back in the day when people were sending offers and they were sending them through a fax machine. So like the facts machine was just like there was a line people sending facts and that you could email the facts.

And I’m looking at the I’m like, man, this is so you know, inefficient, and so naturally just kind of explored opportunities of like how can you solve systems and processes? And so that naturally got me into the CRM world, customer relationship management world and raised capital around a company that was an Internet company for real estate transactions, ended up raising capital. We grew up very well. I ended up exiting that. Company, and then I got into marketing and e commerce, and marketing and commerce was on this up and up and really enjoyed that angle of how you could take products, you could put them on the internet, understand how to market and people could find them.

And this is really like you know ten years ago when people were adapting to online shopping, right. And so if you kind of combine the history from tech CRM processes and then understanding digital marketing and online shopping, that got me into Growth ninety nine. And so I’m the founder of Growth ninety nine, the CEO. And you know, I’ve.

I’ve looked at practice owners is very intelligent people. So Growth ninety nine we help practice owners grow. Right. So if you own a med spa, you’re in the aesthetic space, you’re in the dental space, you’re in the wellness space.

That’s what we do as we help them with keeping their calendars, full bookings, marketing, automation, martech. And systems and processes. Right. And so when you look at practice owners, I mean technology is coming a long way.

But when you look at them historically, let’s take five years ago, for example, there was not much tech in the space. Right. These are very well educated people that were focusing on their services, their treatment, like their craft, but not having systems to actually scale their practice. And so our desire is to help practice owners run their practice like a business.

How many leads are coming in, how do I manage them? And how do I look at data and analyze those decisions to really scale and elevate their practice. So do you find a lot of people are already doing that? Yeah, a lot of people, or I mean what I’ve seen. So I’ve been going to these shows, right, there’s conferences all over the country outside of the country, and the show has been going off for years. But I went to the first American MEDSPA conference and it is night and day different.

Like there was two or three tech companies there. And now if you go to it, like I was just there just recently. That was in April in Las Vegas, and almost every exhibitor is a tech company, right, And so there’s a tremendous amount of tech that has moved into the space because we’ve identified that these practice owners they have something special to offer the community and people. They help people with confidence, right, and that’s like the beauty of really what they’re trying to solve.

And now with the wellness side, you have the aesthetics, you have the injections, you have the neurotoxins, and that’s to feel confident on the outside. But now they’re getting into wellness where it’s feeling confident on the inside. So when you combine those two, like, they’re doing something so special and they need to be focused on their craft. And so if by you know, leveraging technology companies and vendors and building partnerships really helps take that pain point off of them so they can focus on their craft.

We can just help them run the tech and really automate the practice. I love that, and I’ve heard in all my conversations with practitioners that the overarching theme is that, yeah, we went into medicine to practice medicine, and a lot of people want to be practice owners but really want to focus on their craft and connecting with their patients, connecting with their staff, and doing the things that only they can do. Right, then it becomes a game of what do I prioritize and what can I offload, and it turns out a lot of times you can offload things to tech. Yep.

And that’s what we’ll focus the majority of this conversation on. The first thing I wanted to ask. You mentioned mar tech, which is marketing tech specifically for the healthcare space. Can you give us a brief overview of what that is and why it matters in today’s landscape? Yeah? Absolutely.

I Mean it’s a term that’s been around for a while, but when you take it to the practice owner environment, I would assume most of them have no idea what that term means, right, what a martech? They’re like, Okay, what is that? I haven’t you know? Two or three years ago, most people didn’t understand what a CRM was from a practice owner standpoint. Now guys like you and I that work at tech companies or have like CRM one on one, we know what that is, right martech? We also know. So it really it’s kind of understanding that there is platforms out there to help practice owners scale through marketing automation. Right.

And so first thing you have to understand is like when you look at a practice owner or a very successful practice owner, they’re very good marketers, extremely good marketers, especially in the esthetic space, because this is a cash based business and in order to get the customer or the potential patient you’re looking for, you have to market, right. And so there’s channels and platforms. Obviously there’s social Facebook, Instagram, there’s Google, there’s Google reviews, there’s your website, your seo like TikTok, there’s podcasts. I mean, there’s just crazy, right, So how do you take all these marketing angles understand exactly what they’re doing and where to find your attribution? And so what martech helps you practice owners do in any business for that matter, but most importantly for practice owners where it’s like, Okay, what is the actual output that I’m doing on these platforms, like what is coming in and how do I manage it all on one centralized database to where I can understand like what has given me the best results and best astribution and then invest in those specific categories.

So you mentioned several things there, and I think it’s important for people to realize that marketing is a mix and marketing is a bunch of different activities. Now, some people they’re marketing strategy is very simple, like I know practices that just turn on the utilized weave. They just turn on our review feature and that brings some patients and it works for them, right, But a lot of other practices maybe are in different markets and have different goals. Each business is incredibly different.

So what are some of the key things that somebody needs in their Mark markeetting tech stack as a practice owner? As a practice owner, can we focus on the ascetics space for that question? Yeah? Yeah, I mean, like let’s use it because Cameron uh specializes in the aesthetic space. So we’ll use that as a case study. But just the listeners should understand that I’d say like ninety to ninety five percent of things translate over. Yeah, No, you’re and even like I’m seeing, let’s sake dental for example and athetics for example.

I mean, my dentist does botox, right, so there’s a lot of crossover that’s taking place. We’re just talking offline about how autometry is now also getting into athetics, right, So you see this overlap happening. And so you know, one thing what’s different is in the dental space is typically insurance unless it’s like cosmetic procedure maybe that’s not covered, like you know, veneers or something like that. And that’s and then on the asthetics side, it’s like ninety five percent cash pay.

Right, maybe there is some insurance that’s out there that you could take. So what happens is you have to you have to market and it’s a very big undertaking. Right. There is so many especially in today’s today’s landscape.

I mean, you have to build a great website, right, you have to have great call to action on there. You have to have great now you have chatbots, you have online booking, like, there’s so many segments to just that website. Like I look at that as like your digital practice in a way, and I think a lot of people look at it like, hey, a website, just the website, it’s a checkbox, right. It’s like, no, this is actually just as important as your physical location, right in terms of how you get people there, how they navigate, how they get into your funnel.

And then let’s look at you know, social, let’s look at Instagram, right, I see practice owners that absolutely nail the Instagram like social feed on the reels are getting very powerful. Now if you look at like Instagram’s phone, the whole TikTok algorithm, and so it’s very daunting, Like so back to your question. I mean you have Google where you’ve got to run paid search on. You have Google my business which is location these are brick and mortar places.

You have Google Reviews, which obviously met you know, plays a major factor into SEO and reputation management, and you have to have platforms for that. And then you also have you know SEO around your website. Right, so there’s YouTube, We’re on a podcast right now. Like how do you do all this? Right? How do you manage it all? As a practice owner? It’s very daunting.

I think it’s the most important role besides safety and like doing your procedure at last. Outside of outside of that, I would. Say the marketing is the most important critical component if you’re a cash based practice business. What are some what are some success stories that you’ve seen of practices that weren’t implementing a lot of marketing things they started implementing it and had results And could you speak to what that impact is for some people? Yeah? Yeah, absolutely, I mean you could look at like, let’s take the dental example for a second.

If you’ve if you’ve had like a family owned dental practice for years and a lot of times you see the the father or whatever pass it down to his to his kid. Like, I see that quite a bit, right. If you’ve had your practice for a long time, typically they have a patient base. Right, so like we don’t really need to market.

We have a big patient base, you know, and so they typically you know, kind of put marketing in the back seat, right. Well, if they want to get into like cosmetic procedures for example, like high ticket item veneers. I mean, you’re talking twenty thirty thousand dollars treatment, very profitable, great margins. You know, those aren’t just patients that are just going to come in the door.

So when you look at a practice persona like that and they start investing in marketing, you know, paid search campaigns around cosmetic procedures, high ticket items, search campaigns on paid social around really good organic content where people are scrolling on Instagram and Facebook and they see you, you know, your post. It takes to a great landing page, a great customer success story, like these leads coming through the funnel and if acted upon correctly in a nice you know, time frame. I’ve seen these practice owners go from not doing cosmetic procedures to like that’s their biggest service category in the most profitable service category, and in a lot of times that’s where they have the most fun because they’re helping the consumer build confidence. So that’s one example.

In the aesthetic space, I’ve seen several practices that, you know, they don’t want to invest in marketing because I think it’s so expensive. Right it is. It is expensive, martech is expensive. Investing in ads, a good website, a good agency that understands it’s expensive.

But nine times out of ten I see that they are not investing enough in marketing. Right. A good rule of thumb is you should invest five percent of your revenue should be funneled back to marketing. And the practice owners that follow that rule of thumb are the ones that I see gobble up market share.

And there’s a tremendous amount of competition that’s coming into the market. There’s like twelve point five thousand medspas in the US right now, and it’s growing. It’s not growing as fast as it was over the past years, but it’s still growing. And in order to capture market share and maintain market share, you need to be a very active, solid marketer.

And the ones that do are the ones that stick around and have success. So We’ve talked about it from the clinician’s perspective and from the practice perspective. Let’s talk about it from the patient perspective. A really good marketing stack and a really good patient communication stack.

What is the impact on the patients themselves and what are they thinking and feeling and experiencing throughout this process. I love the question because every decision that a practice owner should make should be about patient experience. It’s all about patient experience. And if you deliver that time and time again, not only are they going to come back, but they’re going to tell their friends, their family, their colleagues or coworkers of where they had the best experience.

And I don’t mean just the service in general, right, I’m meaning everything. Right, So, the minute that they find you, and whether they’re scrolling online on Google or social, whether it’s organic or paid or whatever, the moment they click that link, if it goes to a landing page or the website, or make the phone call or send a text or whatever. If it is not easy to navigate. So let’s say they click the link, it goes to the website.

Most consumers want to book online, right, It’s It’s very common now to book online. So for practice owners, if you do not invest in online booking, this is an area that I would strongly consider, and I would look at platforms that actually have text back communication. So when you do book that appointment on you know, Tuesday at noon or whatever it is, the system sends you a text, it sends you a text reminder, it sends you a text after your appointment to ask how your experience was and get a good feedback loop. Right, So it has to be.

I mean, we live in a day and age where I can go on to Amazon and I can purchase something and it shows up to my door in a couple hours. Pretty crazy world that last night, right, Like, it’s pretty crazy. So you know, have you played with a new the Delta app, the chat app? By chance? I used that last night too? Is that okay? I love? It’s fantastic, right, Like, oh my gosh, I don’t have to call Delta anymore. I can use this thing.

And I would say, what a year or two years ago, maybe we were like, ah, chatbots now not interested? That’s annoying. Now I’m like, oh my gosh, I don’t have to call anybody. I can do it and they’re fast, and it gives you everything. It’s super convenient.

So it comes down to convenience, and it comes down to experience, right, and so like and if somebody inquires on your website or your DMS, your social however they come in because as a practice owner, you’re getting hit from every angle, so you have to consolidate it and you have to deliver a fantastic experience. And if you do, like like we’re big on communication, and then when they come into the actual facility themselves, how are they greeted? Right? How is your front staff better. Be trained on like hospitality right, because we’re taking time out of our day to come here, right, And it’s really like going to a practice is kind of. An inconvenience in a way.

Right, we have to shift from whether we’re at work or the family or whatever we’re doing and go there. So it needs to be an experience. And then obviously when they’re getting the service and treatment done, like that’s where you should shine. That is why you went to school, Like literally that’s where you are.

I’m a golfer, so it’s like that’s where Tiger Woods is wearing Sunday, like red on Sunday and he’s going down the stretch and winning the master’s right, Like, that’s where you shine. And then what is the experience from after the treatment? And I see a ton of practice owners. This is where I really wish they would invest more time because like, okay, you’re done, go see the front desk. That is a time to build rapport, build relationships.

Like if you have a wonderful checkout process, like a great sop design process, you should be getting connected on social with that person organically. You should ask them if they would be open to sharing their experience on social and maybe tagging you, so then all their followers naturally see the posts and then follow you. You’ll get inbound flow from that. You should ask for feedback.

You should have an automatic review like feedback loop that goes to Google if they had a good experience and share that with the world, right, and then also like rebook them, like ask them when. They want to come back. If you have a membership program, tell them about it. If you have skincare product in a retail lineup, like what’s going to help them with their experience if they’re getting an injection for example, you know, like it’s those tiny things that add up time and time again.

So when they leave, they feel great, they feel confident, they’re glad they took the time out of their day, and they want to tell. Everybody about it. Right. It’s like, you know, if you go to a great restaurant or a great hotel or had a great experience, you want to tell people about it because it was fun, you had fun, you know, And so I think people naturally like want to want to do fun things that are exciting and easy, and so, you know, looking at patient experience, I think is like, it’s just critical.

You have to analyze and you have to nail it with tech and personality. Thank you for listening to Medical Millionaire. I wanted to take just a few short moments and tell you all about Growth ninety nine University. Naturally, if you’re listening to Medical Millionaire, the success of your MEDSPA is extremely important to you, and as it should be.

And if you’re listening to Medical Millionaire, you are obviously looking for the best most effective ways to take your medspot to the next level in both profit and customer success. Enter Growth ninety nine University, ranging from online education courses all the way to the full suite of marketing and web services. Growth ninety nine has your MEDSPA covered. No matter the challenges that you’re facing, we are ready and able to help you achieve your next level in business, profit and freedom.

To inquire about all of our support services and products, please visit growth ninety nine dot com and while you’re there, click the university link and check out the companion course to this very podcast. Back to the show. At the end of the day, people are going to your practice to feel better, and they’re going to feel better about how they look, about the functioning of their teeth, their functioning of their eyes, the health of their pet. I mean, I was I think about this all the time.

I had an experience at a dentist and there’s a dentist that I’d been working with, and I showed up for a pretty big procedure and they had swapped the doctor at the last second, and I hadn’t heard anything about it. So all of a sudden, like this person that I’ve never met before shows up and starts working on me, didn’t even introduce themselves or anything. And that was a weird experience. On the contrary, I have an optometrist that I work with, Doctor Cook shout out and he really took the time with me.

He had the most advanced technology. He was able to do this thing where you can see the back of your eye, like the inside of your eye, and he’s like, oh, like the inside of your eye is super healthy. And we were like looking at stuff together. It was the best experience.

Interesting. Do you know how many people I’ve referred to him? Right? Yeah? How many of my coworkers that we’ve Yeah, And one of them walked in the other day she’s like, hey, thanks for recommending doctor Cook. He was fantastic. You know.

So what you’re saying is absolutely true. And I get it. Healthcare professionals are stressed out, you’re busy, you have a million different things going on, and it feels sometimes like the whole place can be you know, it’s like the whole Swan thing where smooth on the surface but chaotic underneath the under the water. But any extra effort to invest in the patient experience.

Is always going to be worth it. Absolutely, it’s going. To come back to you one hundred percent. Just like your example.

I mean, how many people if she told about her experience with doctor Cook, right, So the word of mouth is just like that’s never going away ever, and then when you amplify that through social. Platforms, Hey, I went to doctor Cooks. This guy’s amazing, he did all this and this, like and imagine if that’s an influencer, right and that has tens twenty one hundred thousand followers. Whatever it is, Like that’s you know, we on my podcast in you know, we’re writing a book right now, but like we talk about dark social, and dark social is like everything outside of page, like everything you put on organic when like word of mouth, patient experience, talking about treatments like downtime on YouTube, like elevating your yourself as the specialists in the space outside of just running like ads around keywords.

Because everybody wants to be connected in a way through the internet. Which is crazy to say, but like it’s it’s true. You know, Like I’m sure there’s people you follow on social media you’ve never met, but you feel connected to them in a way. I know, I do, you know, And it’s it’s kind of bizarre that there’s this virtual landscape.

But when people see that recommendation online, I would call that a word of mouth shout out, which spreads so much faster. And like a place like weave that you work out. I don’t know what your guys’ headcount is, but I was I would assume it’s in the thousands. I mean, that guy has the ability and all the people they know, right just from your recommendation, it starts with that experience.

You had a great experience. So for the practice owner like that should be your number one reason for obviously getting up to help people with confidence, but focusing on that experience is critical. Social is huge too, And one of the questions that I wanted to ask you was what are some of the best practices in social And one of the things that I’ve seen you would know this better than anybody. People follow you on social because they want you to be you, right, and so it’s not going to do much for you if you just post the same generic graphic that anybody else can post.

Some of the people that I’m seeing kill it the most. They’re literally just taking out their phone and pressing record and speaking their mind and they’re just being themselves. It doesn’t take that much thought. In fact, it feels like the less thought they put into it, and the more authentic they are, the better it does.

So true. I have some practice owners that have nailed it, and I think like they some people are afraid. They’re like, oh, I don’t want to be on camera. Oh I may sound I may say something that you know, it doesn’t sound good, right, And none of that matters.

It really doesn’t, because everybody’s unique in who they are, and everybody has a story, you know, everybody has like a family life, a professional life, like your own hobbies, whatever it is, and it’s all about connection. Like the social is all about connection. So when you just kind of like peel those layers back and say, you know, I’m just going to be open and honest and share what I think, and like you show the personal life a little bit, you show the business professional side a little bit, people see who you are. And then they can relate.

And once they can relate, that’s where they feel like they know you without ever meeting you, and it kind of creates this interesting virtual bond of trust. And then they can come and they come in and see you, and then once they do see you in real life, they’re like, oh my gosh. Like it’s an interesting dynamic that takes place because they already naturally knew them in a way virtually, and now they’re like become friends. Love it.

Excellent insights there. You and I could talk for hours, and I really love this conversation. The last thing that I want to hit on is emerging technologies. It’s twenty twenty four, about halfway through the year.

What are some of the new trends technologies that you’re seeing out there that people should be aware of? Oh man, great question. I feel like every year we like something new is happening. You know, when I first got into this industry, it was so fragmented, like it needed to be. It’s becoming more and more disrupted, but it was so fragmented.

What I mean by that is there’s just like I would see practice owners that have like their technology stack was like ten different SaaS products, and I’m like, how do you effectively manage the business life that way? It’s it’s not possible. And so I’m seeing it become less fragmented. There’s still like feature overlap right with a lot of the TEX stack inside the space. But what’s happening is you see advanced platforms coming out.

You see the vendors that have been in this industry for a while getting smarter. The practices and vendors are communicating more on pain points, and so like just kind of developing features that solve problems is really important. And then like obviously the topic around AI machine learning, it’s huge chat GPT, open AI like automated text response, like DM consolidation, Like it’s so interesting what’s happening with with AI automatic text response? And now I’m seeing these AI bots. That can literally learn about your practice, your brand and communicate in a way that they it almost becomes the practice owner’s vocabulary of communication with these chatbots can communicate that way even down to the phone.

I mean, I’ve seen some some ways where you could call a practice and the person that picks up the phone is not a real person. It’s it’s an AI like avatar. But you can train the avatar and it sounds so real that it almost becomes your personal assistant or you know that’s like that sounds real and can actually book an appointment. You know.

So I think AI, with like text communication and the ability to make phone calls and like just get information quickly, We’re going to see a lot of that evolved. There’s still like a lot of room for us to figure that out. It’s not all there yet, but in the next like you know, one to two to three to four, five years, let’s just say five years. I mean I’m bullish.

In five years, I don’t know if practice owners will need to have Like I don’t think we’ll be making phone. Calls to practice owners anymore. And if you want to make a phone call, I. Think it’s going to be a complete automated system that will answer every question you have and then help you book an appointment for Monday at nine am.

That’s where I see it going is here, it’s happening. There’s some bugs and kinks to work out, I think. But for companies like you know, weave and in communication you know, and patient communication of what you guys focus on, you know, like in other companies, EMR companies, CRM companies, like they’re also coming together in a. Way, right.

It’s where you have like communication platforms syncing with CRMs, EMR is online bookings, text communication, automatic feedback loop and so everything’s kind of consolidating. And then when you boilt AI onto that, it’s going to be a pretty cool environment because then it just empowers the practice owner to focus on their skill set, right halving without having to really like focus on becoming a. Tech nerder way, and like, you know, work so hard, right. So I think they’re scared of it in some ways, but in the other ways, Like there’s a lot of positivity for.

Those people that are scared of it. What would you tell them of the reasons to be optimistic. It’s a timesaver, you know. I think like some people are like, oh, it’s a job taker, right, But if you if you go back in history, we were afraid to shop online at one point, yeah, right, we were like, what’s this internet thing? Can you really book you know, an airplane ticket online? Sounds fishy? Right? So things evolve and the human race is smart, Like we adapt, We are resilient.

We adapt, and it will take away some jobs for sure, but those jobs are going to be replaced by like more interesting ways of communication and more interesting ways of like what the next world is going to be, right. Like I think, like if you look at you know. Amazon right now is rolling out a tremendous amount of you know, robots to run their you know, their their supply and their their factories. Right.

But at the same time, now these people have the ability to just level up and really you know, do something else that’s going to advance where we already are. And I think it creates net new opportunities as a patient. Yeah, the staff at the practices that I go to, I’d way rather have them spending time with me and making me the star of the show than being on hold with insurance for two hours. Oh my gosh.

Yeah painful, you know. Yeah, So yeah, I think there’s many reasons to be optimistic, and I think the growth of technology and the evolution of technology is a good thing we should definitely embrace absolutely, Cameron, It’s been a great conversation. How can people find you? Best way to find us so again, I’m you know, the founder of CEO of Growth ninety nine. Just go to our website Growth thndy nine dot com.

So if you guys are interested to learn more about what we do, how we help practice owners. We focus on practice growth, Martech, marketing automation really kind of help solve a lot of the marketing and lead management systems. Integrate with with great products and solutions, EMRs and text communication platforms. Go to our website.

We’d be happy to help you guys grow or you know, see if we’re a good fit. So that’s the best place to find us. Love it well. Thank you for joining us on the show today, and thank you everyone who listened and watched and otherwise observed.

And until next time, stay happy, take care everyone, Thanks guys,.