167: How to Master PI Marketing (ft. Mark Slater)

You.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Chiro Candy. Today we have with us Dr. Mark Slater. Now, he has such an incredible story. We have so many people that reach out to us asking, you know, can you help us get PI, you know, personal injury cases in the office? And that is exactly what Dr. Mark Slater does. He has been in the profession for over 20 years, but he has cracked the code when it comes to consistently generating PI cases month in, month out. And he's been working with chiropractors all over the US Helping them do the exact same thing. So I'm excited to have him on just as another tool that you guys can use and have at your disposal. Dr. Mark Slater, thanks for joining us.

My pleasure, Billy. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be a Chiro county podcast.

Absolutely. Let's do this. So I could have got a little bit deeper into your bio, but so much of it is just a really cool story of what led you to here. So let's just kind of dive into that story. You know, you got into practice, and then how did you first kind of get into the PI niche?

Sure. So I was floundering around after I graduated chiropractic school here in Atlanta. I went to a Peter Fernandez seminar, one of these old school chiropractic consultants back in the day out of Florida. And I purchased his practice Starters program, and I decided to go back to Birmingham, Alabama, where I'm from, and open a practice from scratch. Well, in Dr. Fernandez's program, he wanted you to. This is why my practice was under construction. Right. There was no practice. He had me knock on. Well, he wanted his clients to knock on 3,000 doors, residents and businesses in concentric circles around your practice and take a little survey of the people. Do you have back pain, neck pain, headaches? You know, I would take a little survey. This was before Internet, cell phones. I mean, this was knocking on doors. And it was uncomfortable when you remember that was uncomfortable, right? Well, in full disclosure, I only did a thousand, And I'm sure Dr. Fernandez knows that. That's why he says do 3,000. So at least you do something right? Massive action plan. So I mailed people thank you notes after the survey. A week before my practice was going to open, I mailed a little mailer of grand opening, and I had a waiting room full of patients on day one. So I was in the black from the beginning because I took massive action before my practice was even open. I sold that practice in two years for a big profit. Taylor Flanagan, the doctor, he's still there at Oxmoor Chiropractic in Birmingham. And I bought an all personal injury practice in Atlanta, Georgia, where I currently live. It had an MD in there, and he did all the clinical work. So what did I do? I was in the streets talking to attorneys, taking MRI reps out to lunch, meeting other doctors that could feed my practice, going to these events, having dinner with other doctors. So I was out in the field doing this stuff for 20 years while. Because I always had an MD that did all the. All the clinical work, and all we did was PI and work comp. I also got into the med spa business. I had laser hair removal clinics and tattoo removal clinics here in Georgia. Well, in 2016, I sold everything and I took some time off. And then I got recruited and hired by one of the largest spinal surgery practices here in Georgia. He had six outside marketers for personal injury. This doctor that I worked for understood that this is just a numbers game. Right, Billy? Right. Numbers game, meaning he, as a spinal surgeon, understood only 7, 8% of these cases are surgical candidates. So he needed a big sample size in order to have people to do surgery on. So he hired me to coach his six marketers, and he wanted 200 new PI patients in his office in a month. He wanted 200amonth. That's what he wanted. So when I got hired, I was asking questions of the marketing team, and I said, what are your rules? Like, what are your goals? And they only had one rule. The rule was, you have to bring 20 PI patients in from your marketing in order to keep your job. Well, I thought to myself, that's kind of stupid, because if it's the 15th of the month and I brought in my 20th referral, what am I going to do on the 16th or the 17th or the 18th of the month? The answer was, they didn't do anything, right? They went to the gym or the movies or the pool or they weren't working. So we got rid of that rule. I created a KPI chart, key performance indicator, which is basically goals. I slapped that down on the table at the next marketing meeting, and I said, you need to go out every day and walk into 10 offices per day. Like that is the daily goal. 10, right? It's hard, it's uncomfortable. But that's how I was able to get 200 new PI patients into the practice, so that the doctor could have people to do spinal surgery on. And in personal injury, spinal surgery pays the bills. It's 150 to 200,000, sometimes $300,000, depending on the spinal surgery. So you could see the attraction of personal injury patients for a spinal surgeon, right? So we were able to break through 200 new PI patients. Twice in my tenure there was. And he had never done more than 24 spinal surgeries. He did 30 twice in my tenure. Well, I worked there for 11 months, Billy, and I resigned. I just resigned. I resigned because, first of all, I don't like being an employee, right? I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. But I was saying to myself, if I can help my own practice build big PI practice, if I can help a spinal surgeon, I'm just a little old chiropractor. If I can help a spinal surgeon build his PI practice, I said, I have something here with these habits that I've created, these habits and methods and systems. I want to share this with other doctors all over the country and help them who are. You know, I've been in your shoes. Like, I've been a chiropractor sitting in the office, figuring, trying to figure out how do I get more PI patients? Do I send mailers? Do I cold call? Like, what is the process? So I've been there. Well, I've kind of figured out the process. It's taking massive action every single day. When I say massive action, we're going to leverage what's called the compound effect in your marketing. The compound effect says small, consistent actions done every day lead to big results down the road. The key is just being consistent. It's really as simple as that. You know, you're going now to, you know, baseball games now in the summer, the society's opening up. We're all going to sporting events again. You go to the baseball parks. You see Pepsi, Coke, Home Depot, State Farm Insurance, Geico, like, all over. I once counted 46 marketing logos at a baseball game Once. I sat behind the plate. 46 in one stadium. It's crazy, but they don't take them down for a couple months during the season. They're consistent. It's always there. And that is the key to marketing. It's being consistent. But also the question is, what are the things that actually work? Right? And where are people's eyeballs these days? Like, when they're distracted or where they're not working on their phones, their eyeballs are on their phones. So cold. Calling these attorneys, they have somebody paid to keep them off the phone with you. There's a gatekeeper, right? Email marketing business. Emails have a less than 20% open rate, which means four out of five people don't even open Your email. So how can we impactfully market? Well, the answer is getting where their eyeballs are. Social media. And I'm not talking about paying for ads, right? I'm talking about doing this organically, reaching out to the people, becoming friends with them on social media, getting in conversations. And you have to do that on a massive scale. It's just the numbers game, Billy. What my large clients tell me is that 80% of their PI patients come from only 20% of the people that they've reached out to on social media or had their marketing liaison talk to. You just don't know which 20%. So you really have to kiss a lot of frogs to find the princess. And that's the goal. It's just a numbers game. When you think of it as a numbers game, think of how many attorneys and doctors are in your town or city. There's thousands. You don't need all of them to like you. You don't need all of them to send you PI cases. You just need a few. You know, I tell my clients, you can bat 200 in this game, right? You can fail 80% of the time in this type of marketing, relationship building and make it to the chiropractic hall of fame. Right? You just have to talk to lots of people. And because we have this miracle of the Internet and social media, you can use your social media platforms to drive in business. I tell my clients, stop being used by social media. They use your time. They. They distract you. It just sucks the time out of your productivity. Getting in arguments with strangers over politics. You're not changing anybody's mind. It really is a waste of time. But if you can harness the power of social media and figure out how to do it yourself and reach out to these people, it doesn't cost you anything. It just costs a little sweat equity, as they call it, you know, some hard work. So it's not that hard because I give you the whole, you know, I just show you exactly what to do step by step using your social media platforms. I mean, I look at some doctors, their social media on Facebook, they haven't made a post in three years.

Yeah, that's very common.

Yeah, I know. But if you're friends with attorneys on, let's say, Facebook and you get them to like your business page, every time you post something on your business page, everyone that you're friends with is gonna see it. So why not be friends with lots of attorneys and doctors, people that can bring you business and stop letting social media use you as a consumer and start Using it as an entrepreneur to build your business. But that's only some of what I, what I help you with or what I help my clients with in their marketing.

So let me ask you this. I think most doctors, most chiropractors know, okay, I need to build relationships with attorneys. But you weren't just going after attorneys, right? You're looking to build relationships with several different industries, if you will.

Of course. I mean, primary care doctors, general practitioners, they hate the spine. They don't know what to do. They're not trained to really treat that. They're just going to prescribe a medication and they don't want to be on the high prescribers list. So you can actually become a resource for those doctors. So, yeah, the script is different than when you walk into a law firm, than when you walk into a medical facility and try to talk to the doctor. The script is different to generate personal injury with doctors. From a chiropractic standpoint, if you talk to a doctor, you can just tell them, hey, man, I need a lifeguard for my practice, right? So sometimes I see things, maybe on an X ray or during physical exam that I'm not really comfortable. And like, I need a lifeguard for my practice. You see, what you're doing there is you're setting up a two way street. You're offering the doctor some business, right? Because if something's like out of scope, maybe they have complications from diabetes or organic diseases or they get fevers, and we don't treat those things theoretically. So that's kind of the script for the medical profession. But also MRI reps, these MRI reps, you know, maybe you're sending MRIs to an MRI facility. Have you ever met the MRI rep? That MRI rep can be a treasure trove of introductions. And to help you create new relationships in the personal injury market. If you don't know your MRI rep, become their best friend. They can really help you. And they can also help you figure out, you know, who wears the white hats in the industry and who wears the black hats in the industry. The people that you don't want to work with. Black hats, right. There's plenty of attorneys out there that don't respect our profession, chop our bills, no explanation. They try to, you know, give us all this BS about. Yeah, we don't share that information because it's attorney client privilege. My notes and my narrative is doctor patient confidentiality. The reason that you're getting a settlement offer is from your notes Dr. Chiropractor. So listen, I don't help in that way, Billy, like, I just help you bring the. Get the patients into the waiting room. There's lots of good consultants out there that help clinical. Teach clinical excellence, narrative report writing, you know, Colossus report writing. There's plenty of those guys out there. But I really didn't find anybody with the expertise of creating these relationships and building the numbers of your PI Patients in your office.

Yeah, I've actually talked to. This is our, I guess, maybe third or fourth interaction between you and I. And I spoke to somebody the other day, and. And we were talking, and I just brought you up. I was like, hey, have you ever heard of Dr. Mark Slater? And he's like, absolutely. I coach with him, you know, or, you know, I've got his course. He's great stuff.

And.

And I was like, okay, good. Because, you know, I. Everything that you and I talked about sounded great. But I want to make sure that if I'm introducing you to our audience.

Sure.

You know, kind of like what you're saying, you know, I want to make sure that you've got a good reputation out there.

So here's. I'll just tell you what my goal is. I love helping people. Like, I'm a chiropractor. Like, I went to life, you know, Sid Williams. Love, give and serve. Well, that. That's a part of me. Well, I don't love give and serve my patients anymore. I love give and serve to my clients because I want them to succeed. I'm with you every step of the way here. Like, you can contact me. I want to get you unstuck. There's a lot of technology in my program, but I create videos to show you, step by step, how to get past the technology so that you can have a finished product. Because if you're trapped in technology for two or three hours, complexity is the enemy of execution. You'll quit, and that's not good for anybody. So I'm with my clients every step of the way. I'm here to help them because what makes me happy is when I see my clients flourish and stop struggling, stop sitting in their office with decision fatigue and thinking pain. Like, I give you practical things to do, like action items. Massive action is the cure all. I give you action items, practical things to do every single day to help you grow your practice. It's like, not when you learn how to do this. You're like, wow, this is not that hard. I should have been doing this anyway. And that's what my clients tell me. Mark, I wish I would have met you Two years earlier. Because I could be doing this, especially right before COVID because let's say you had six marketers in the field. Well, when Covid happened last March and the whole country got shut down, there was nobody knocking on law firms doors. And if they were, there was nobody in those law firms. Like, everyone started working remotely. So how could you impactfully market for personal injury if nobody's in the law firms? And the doctors weren't seeing salespeople. They were just trying to get their. Keep their patient volume high. They just wanted to see patients. So this organic outreach through Facebook and LinkedIn and your social media platforms, it saved my clients. Like, I had a client in Jacksonville, Florida, got 46 new PI patients in July. Didn't have one marketer walk into an office. It was just keeping his name and his information in front of the people that he can do business with online. And that's how he did it.

That's good. You know, you showed me. So you have a Facebook group for.

All your clients, A private Facebook group. That's right. So you can get support not just for me, but other chiros. And it's not just chiropractors. 80 to 90% of my clients are chiros. But I have interventional pain doctors in there, spinal surgeons in there, physical therapists, any provider in the PI space. And you can interact with those people in my group. You can talk to the guy that post, he had all this enormous success and say, hey, Scott, tell me the three crucial things that you think really help you get to this level of success so quickly. And you can interact with all the members in my program in that Facebook group. Absolutely.

So within the past week, I know you said you had received just an unsolicited testimonial from one of your doctors, because as we were talking, you're like, oh, my goodness, this just came in.

Look at this.

And because we were on Zoom and you did a screen share, I don't know if you happen to have it pulled up right now, because, you know, some people are going to be watching this in the Facebook groups that I have, or they're going to be listening to it, you know, just on the podcast. But even if you don't, if you can't pull it up real quick, I have it. Okay. If you can, I'll let you share your screen, But I also also want you to read it for those just listening.

Sure. So before I read it, what I will tell you is I was doing my work the other day, and boom, in my inbox, I Just got this message, a Facebook message, And I asked Dr. Clark if he would share it to my Facebook group. And this is what it was. He wanted to share his win with everybody. He started with me earlier this year. He hired a liaison, a marketing liaison. I mean, that's the crux of my program. I help you hire, train, coach, optimize, and track a marketing liaison in the field. Like, tracking them is the most important thing. Anyway, they hired their liaison in February. After a couple weeks of my training, his rock star liaison, Amy, got rolling the beginning of March. So here's the thing that really made me happy. They went from 9 PI referrals in February to 32 in March and then 52 in April. And this month there'll be over 40. And this was May 26th, so it was the end of the month, so maybe they did a little more than 40. It's been great to be able to strengthen our existing relationships as well as generate new ones. I'm very appreciative of this program, and Mark's guidance should have done this a long time ago. Now, here's the thing about Scott. He's not in, like, Boston or New York or la. This guy's in Lafayette, Louisiana, man. And he's getting those numbers in a. In a city like Lafayette, Louisiana. It's nothing special. There's nothing. There's no magic trick. It's just massive action and creating relationships with the people that can do business with you.

Yeah, that's very good. And I love. If you can go ahead and stop sharing your screen and then we'll go back to the gallery view just for the recording.

Thank you.

I love the whole liaison thing because, look, let's. Most of us want to be CEOs, right? We want to own a business, not a job. If you can be out there shaking hands and kissing babies, great. If you can have somebody else doing that for you, even better, right? If anytime you can have a marketer. Because that's how I got started in the profession. That's what I did. I was in the community doing all of those things, and that's what really introduced me and why I love this profession so much. So I think that's great. I think everything that you have is great. If somebody wanted to reach out to you and schedule a call, what would that look like? I know we created a special link for them, but if you want to.

Talk about that, I'm going to get there in just a second. But you had mentioned something in that Facebook group. I'll also interview personal Injury attorneys, like high level personal injury attorneys. And the reason that I do that is I want my clients to understand what are their pain points, what keeps them up at night, what stresses them out. So when you learn what the attorney's pain points are, you can be the solution to those issues. Right. So you can also essentially get a peek behind the curtain at these interviews that I do with these personal injury attorneys to learn what they want to talk about when a marketer walks into their office like a liaison. Again, like you said, Bill, you can't clone yourself. Like, you can't be in your business and your practice treating patients and outside your office meeting people at the same time. I mean, it's obvious. But when you have a trained marketer walking into these law firms and talking to case managers, paralegals, attorneys, office managers of medical offices and doctors, you have to train them. Because if you send somebody in there that doesn't know anything about personal injury, they don't know about, you know, lien, letter of protection, PIP insurance, med pay, not only are they going to laugh your marketer out of the office, they're not going to respect you as a doctor. Right. So this person needs to be the first impression that a law firm or a doctor's office is going to get about you. So we have to make sure that this person represent you in a manner that you can be proud of. So I provide that training. So when they walk in there, they know exactly what to say. It rolls off the tongue, it's professional, it's rehearsed, they have talking points, questions to ask, also how to handle objections. What if a lawyer goes, yeah, we don't use chiropractors. Will you just turn around and leave? No. Or yeah, we already have somebody that we use in your area. Thanks for stopping by. We don't leave, we ask another question. Now, we don't want to argue with these people that went to argument training school. That's not what we want to do. We just want to ask a better question and maybe get a better response here. Attorneys have bad days too. They lose cases, they get in fights with their spouse, their kids get Fs, you know, go back in a month, they'll be a totally different person. Don't give up. Marketing is about impressions. They say it takes seven impressions to get somebody to take action. Right. It's hard to take an attorney to lunch seven times. You don't need to do that. But we can stay in front of them with our liaison. We can stay in front of them on social media. And it's a numbers game, right? I have clients that say, hey, how many hours a week does my marketer need to be in the field? It's not about that. It could be four hours a day if they meet those 10 people. Right. Or it could be nine hours a day to meet 10 people. So it's just a numbers game. It's not an hourly thing. Right. So, Billy, you'd asked about. Sorry, follow up with your question. I just wanted to talk to you about what was going on in my Facebook group and some other things.

No, that's good, that's good. Because, see, I think we all know there are people out there. So if you're a chiropractor listening to this, obviously there are people in your community right now that need what it is you do. And a lot of them, maybe they did just get in an accident. And some people don't even know that they need to go see you just to get checked out. I mean, this is still, yes, it's beneficial to you, but this is still a huge service for your community. And then you have to think, what would it look like if, okay, you know, this, this one referral or testimonial you just showed, you know, they're getting 40 to 50, you know, PI cases a month. What if you're consistently getting 10? What would that do to your practice?

Listen, everybody. Everybody's different, right? Where you are in your practice right now, you may be happy with like your level of success may be different than somebody else's level of success. For instance, the spinal surgeon that I worked for, 150 new PI patients a month is not enough. But for a chiropractor, like you said, Billy, 10 to 20, life changing for their practice, for their families, for their investment portfolio, for their philanthropy, Right. It's not how much money you make, it's how much money you keep and what you do with it and the good that you can do with it. And that's what I'm all about. Yeah.

Then, I mean, even whenever you lose a client or a patient, you don't just lose that opportunity, you know, to, to make that income or whatever, you know, and help that person because they go down the street, they go to somebody else, you also lose that referral, right? Any referrals that they may have sent in you also now. So now they're down the street seeing somebody else and that person gets the money off that. They get all the referrals, and now they have more money to go out and market and do more of that. So every time you don't have one of these people coming to you, it's a much bigger loss than just that one patient.

Yeah. And in terms, I know we talked about this before we went live here, Billy. We were talking about, you know, digital marketing for personal injury. And you said you have tried it. You have a digital marketing company, and quite frankly, it's hard. Right. The average person, like citizen, has four car accidents over the course of a lifetime, including minor ones. So that's one every 16 years. So marketing to those patients, not only does the timing have to be right, it's expensive, man.

Right.

Like on Google, if you type in car accident doctor near me, car accident chiropractor near me, those clicks are between 30 to $60 per click. Car accident lawyer near me, 200 to $300 per click. But going back to the medical keywords, car accident doctor, car accident, chiropractor, if you put that into Google, you'll see attorneys bid on those keywords, too, because they're cheaper. So unless you have a war chest of 10 to $15,000 a month for digital marketing on Google, if you do, great, good for you. These attorneys use it. They're never shutting it off. Supply and demand, right? The price is that high. Google sets that price. I mean, it's working for them. But they have larger margins on settlements than we as chiropractors do. We have a $4,000 bill. We may have to take a cut to 3,000 or whatever. On $100,000 settlement, the most you can get is 4,000 on your bill. They're getting a third of the entire settlement. They have bigger margins, so they have more marketing capital. But when you do it by creating relationships, those relationships are evergreen. They last as long as you keep your side of the street clean and do what you say you're going to do. If you tell a law FIRM it takes 72 hours to get records from our office, you better get them there in 70. Right? Keep your side of the street clean, because if you don't have marketers walking into those law firms, other doctors do, and they get shiny object syndrome. So we always have to create what I call tomato in the marketplace to m a top of mind awareness so that if a lawyer gets a client that lives or works near you within 5 to 10 miles, Dr. Slater is our guy.

Yeah, that's good. You know, Grant Cardone says best known always beats best. You can be the best in town, but if nobody knows it, they're going to go to the one they know.

Give me A chiropractor with those two letters after his name. DC who knows how to market and create relationships. I'll take that guy in personal injury over the medical doctor, or any doctor for that matter, with 15 letters after his name, who doesn't know how to market himself and doesn't know how to talk to attorneys and doctors and talk the language, the lexicon of personal injury. I'll take the D.C. every time.

Yeah. So you said that you would like to have some people schedule calls with.

You.

So we created a link just to make it easier for everybody. You can go to cairocandy.com mark. That's it. Cairocandy.com mark. And then you'll see what he has available on his schedule. I know you did say it is pretty limited.

It just depends what week, but, yeah, it's a free. Call with me. We take a deep dive into your practice. I want to understand what you're doing today, where you are. I want to understand your current situation. Like, what are your habits? What are you doing to. Maybe you're not doing anything, but what are you doing to generate patients in your office for personal injury? And then I want to know, what are your goals? Like, where do you want to be 12 months from now? Right. If you're at 20,000amonth, you want to be at 50,000amonth? Are you at 50,000amonth? Now you want to be at $150,000 a month. We want to figure out what your goals are. Once we understand that, I'll help you set up a massive action plan to achieve those goals. And I'm doing this for Billy and Cairo Candy, the first 10 callers that book a call with me, you're going to get a free gift from me. It's a part of my program that I'll just give to you. And what it'll help you do is discover what exactly makes you special, what exactly makes you stand out so that you're different than all the other chiropractors out there. That may be marketing to these attorneys and doctors. We're going to figure out what your X factor is so that they will remember you. And, Billy, if you'd allow me to share my screen one more time. I just want to share that map.

Sure, go ahead.

The goal here, and every attorney has this. Every attorney has an interactive Google map like this. Can you see this, Billy?

Yes, I see it.

Okay, so this is a map of Atlanta. This is one of my buddies as a PI Attorney. These are all of his relationships for his clients, meaning these are the chiropractors and the doctors that he has relationships with all over greater Atlanta. Red is Cairo, blue are medical offices. You don't want to be yellow. Yellow is never ever sent, Never ever send a client to yellow. So you don't want to be yellow, but you just got to get on this map, right? So that if you're a doctor and an attorney gets a client that's in this little box here, if he has a relationship with you and you got on this map and if this person needs medical care, it's going to go to this blue guy. But if it's a soft tissue, chiropractors wheelhouse kind of case, you're going to get the case. So we just want to get on this map so that attorneys will say, hey, if I get somebody in, you know, Johns Creek or Sandy Springs or, you know, Forest park in Atlanta, they'll just go to this map and say, oh, these are the guys that we have relationships. That's where we use. Listen, if this chiropractor over here sent 20 unattached cases to the attorney, but his, the attorney's client, new client, lives over here. I'm sorry, this guy that sent those cases is not getting this client. No one's going to drive 30, 40 miles across town three times a week to go to this guy who referred all those patients to the attorney. It's about location for chiropractors. So you got to get on this map and that's what I help you do.

Yeah, that's very good. Well, Dr. Markslater, thank you so much for coming on today. I think this is. I know you're meeting a big need, you know, in the profession and then you're allowing these chiropractors to meet the needs they have in their communities too. So it's a win, win, win for everybody. But we appreciate your time and I do want to encourage you guys. Just head on over to Cairo candy.com mark that's M A R K. And hop on a call with me, you know, just to find out more about what they do, more about how, what it would look like for him to help you in your practice. So thank you once again for joining us.

Thanks again, Billy. And again, I'm offering that free gift to the first 10 callers from Cairo. Candy to do that. And again, Billy, thank you for having me on your podcast. It's been an honor. I really do appreciate it. I'm grateful to be able to help all these doctors that may be struggling or just trying to figure out how can I get more PI Patients in my office to help these people that are hurt, but also generate more revenue for my staff, myself, and my family?

Sounds good. Thank you so much, Billy.

Thank you.