047 - Scaling Success: Marketing Strategies for Predictable Growth

As you start to do this properly, you'll start increasing your income. Your business model is set up properly, but you have to get some time in the beginning and then you start buying back your time. With the increased income, you buy yourself some time back. You can learn new skill sets and then you can start to get that time back. Right? But the reality is time, energy, money. If you don't have much money, you'll have to sacrifice time. And if you don't have much time, you'll use the money that you have.

Hello and welcome to Build you'd Remarkable Practice Podcast. This podcast is dedicated to chiropractors who are in the seasons of launching and building their practice. Join myself, Dr. Lona and my co host, Dr. Bobby as we have conversations each week as it relates to building the practice of your dreams. And remember, you can have a remarkable practice as part of a remarkable life, not instead of one. We are here to lead you on the way.

Welcome back to the Build your Remarkable Practice podcast with the amazing Dr. Lorna Cook and myself, Dr. Bobby Lejacevic. Where today we are going to go head deep into planning your marketing calendar. Right now we're in the year of 2025, but quite frankly, you can do this whenever you listen to this, right? For planning out your marketing calendar and setting yourself up for new patient and for new business success. This year, Lorna, I'm going to let you kick off with this one. So we're going to get straight into this, guys. This year. Tell me, I'd love to learn more about. All right, marketing calendars. What are they? How do you plan them? Give me maybe your story about marketing calendar. I know in the beginning you shared with me that used to get a little bit more, you know, fly by the seat of your pants or a little bit more like, well, let's kind of see what's happening. And then you learn the value of a marketing calendar. But then you had other challenges, and I think your journey actually speaks into a lot of our journeys. So why don't you take us through first of all, your journey around marketing and how to kind of nail this new patient pillar inside of your businesses.

Sounds great. All right. So when I opened the first practice, I knew I had to market, right? But I didn't really have a lot of strategy. So my strategy was meet everybody and go out and be. If I wasn't seeing patients in the office, I was out in the community. But I didn't have a plan per se. And it wasn't until a lot of years later that I got more strategic about how we were marketing. So like many of you as you probably found some things that worked well. So for me it was speaking as well as just taking people out to coffee or stopping in places and meeting places. Like really just building my network was really how the original practice started to grow. And then by doing talks, you know, it wasn't until I had more doctors and I realized I don't think just referrals is going to be the method that we can count on forever. It wasn't until that point that I realized I've heard a lot of people Talking about a 12 month marketing calendar, but that sounds like a lot of work and I don't know if we're actually going to execute on it. It took me some years of just first getting better at having even a monthly like rhythm to some of the things we were doing as well as starting to think about quarterly. So if you're like me and you feel like your marketing takes a backseat, maybe because you have adequate referrals happening or maybe because you just haven't gotten organized, I want to teach you a trick. If you're not going to get your, you know, but to think of it ahead of time at least this year, save everything you do on a 12 month calendar and keep good notes so that you will build your calendar over the course of the next 12 months. Right. And that's from everything that you're doing online to in person, to internally keep a rhythm and a record of those things so that you can then go back and say this was great, I want to repeat it. Or we should do that again at this time of the year. Or maybe we should scrap this. It was a bomb. We didn't do well with it. That's how you're going to build it if you don't have it already set out.

Hey, I'm so glad that you brought that up. People often say to me, oh, Bobby, it's easy for you. And they see me as this like, I don't know, marketing guru or whatever it is. Marketing experience.

Yeah.

But let me tell you this, like it did not start that way. I don't have some special gift. Right. Or I just learned how to market overnight. No. You know, my first probably 18 months in practice were horrible. Someone gave me advice around the way you build your practice is just sit around and after a while a lot of people will find you. So just try and occupy yourself in your downtime. Okay? So I'm glad that you wrote that down because success leaves clues and let me tell you, one of the things that I did do. I actually had. I remember. And this is completely by chance, I think. Although nothing happens by chance, really. I had this green. My goodness. Watch this. Hang on. If you're watching this, it's right here in front of me. I had Bobby's green books. I call this my. This thing is old. Look at it like, you know, this thing is all. It's dusty. The elastic on it is gone. But here's one of the things that I did. I'm opening the pages of it now. I wrote down what I was doing at the times, right? Because I was like, you know what? Success leaves clues. And I'm actually going to forget what I'm doing, right? And I'm going to forget what's not working. What's working, you know. Oh, Here we go. 2nd of October. I just saw a date here. 2nd of October, 2012, I think I just saw go past. I'm going to. Yeah, Sunday Mastermind meetup with my girlfriend at the time, wife. Now I'm gonna. I'm gonna forget what I'm doing. I would heard, I would hear seasoned chiropractors all the time say things to me like, oh, we're really successful. And then, you know, now we're struggling. And I'd ask them, like, do you do this? Oh, we don't anymore. What? We used to do it. Okay, you do this. Oh, we don't anymore, but we used to do it. And what I realized through those conversations is you forget. So I got into this habit of, like, just writing everything I was doing, whether it was working, whether it was not working, specific from a marketing point of view. And the first page of this book, literature that I just opened up here, guys, it actually had like, here's where I was going to get my newies from that year. Million dollar impact. I was trying to crack a million dollars in collections in that year. And I was like, well, I know to pack a million, I'm going to need 550 new patients. And so I wrote in here, the markets, local markets, local gyms. We're going to do screenings, we're going to try and do our first dinner workshop. We're doing some expos. Referrals, shopping centers, reactivation campaigns, internal workshop. I have it all written down here. So I was like, I'm going to try this stuff and I'm going to write down what I'm doing, what I'm learning, what the failures are, what the successes were. And eventually I told my wife, this is Bobby's green book. That's why it's in his green diary. I love that. I'm so glad that you brought that up, because I would write down everything that I'm doing, what's working, what's not working. And I was collecting data. That's what I didn't realize. And that data later became so critical because it showed me where did I have missing skill sets. Because at the end of the day, that's what it is, guys. If you're struggling with anything, it's simply because you do not yet have a refined skill set in that area. That's it. But just like if you can't throw a tennis ball with your left hand, like me, and you look completely uncoordinated. If I started throwing a tennis ball with my left hand every single day and just did repetitions, repetitions, repetitions, focus, training. I got coached on it. I got trained. I've got feedback on it. I. I stayed in 100% belief. Eventually I'd become pretty good with run with my left hand. So I'm so glad that you brought that up, because that's exactly what it is, documenting, actually what it is that you're doing. What are your learnings during that process?

Yes. I love that. And I love that you had that right there. And fun fact, the book I wrote for Young Chiropractors about 10 years ago on opening your first practice was me just going through my planner for two years of how did I get open? What did I do? How did I talk to my team? And putting that together. So I agree with you if, like, the notes are for you, and then if you do a good job, you share them with someone else. Right. Like, it's great.

You nailed it. So step one, question number one, you should ask yourself is, do you have a marketing calendar? As you can see, Lauren didn't used to have one. I didn't used to have one, guys. But successfully as clues, we both have a marketing calendar now. All right, step two, all the second challenge that you faced, Laura, like I said, you started kind of like, you know, getting some marketing happening, and you started kind of getting one month in advance, two months in advance. But then you shared previously that there was another challenge that you'd have. What was the second challenge that you ran into?

I think you're alluding to where I realized as we had multiple doctors, we weren't going to just rely on organic referrals for new patients. Is that what you were talking about? Yes.

Y. Yeah. I mean, you tell me. Absolutely.

Well, that's one that really stands out as we started to scale is that I, I like you said, like, we start to change as we get busier and busier. We might have a lot of time to go out and pound the pavement and meet people and you know, sync up at different community events and different things like that. And then there's usually a part in our season of build where now we focused on more internal referrals and internal processes, which is awesome. And most of us can't wait to get to that part of practice. And like many of us anyways, we also get to a point where maybe then it's almost like we're a little bit of a fat cat in marketing. We're like, oh, we've got a lot of referrals happening and maybe I don't need to market anymore. And we almost like pride ourselves on like, I haven't spent any money on marketing.

And the problem with that is then when you go to scale, it's like, oh shoot, now we've got multiple doctors and we've got to like re figure out how to do this thing to create more leads coming in. But we haven't been doing that for a while. We've only been relying on our table talk and maybe a process driven referral campaign or two, but that even might not be well leveraged. So for me that was a, that was a exposure was that, you know, we had, we had become fat cats and didn't have a marketing budget and hadn't really thought about marketing. And then as I joined trp, I realized like, wow, there is and you know, so many ways that we could be talking to people in our community that were not and you know, being way more strategic about some of the other models of marketing. Even though my time maybe isn't as available as it once was, we can, we can hire other people to market for us or hire a digital company and, and that could make building our practice that much faster and streamlined by using other ways to bring people into the practice.

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Yeah, see that's really interesting because that's where my mindset from day one differed. I was always from day one looking at it like, internal referrals are great, but why not do both? You know, there was that old El Paso ad that used to run here in Australia, which is like, what's better, soft shell tacos or. Or hard shell tacos, right? And then this little girl pops up and was like, why not do both? It's like. And then everyone celebrates her at the end of that commercial there, like, what a genius idea, you know. So I thought to myself, great, why don't do both? Why not learn to get these external sources of people coming in? My journey in marketing was the first skill set that I wanted to learn was screenings. So in the first couple of years, you know what I did? I booked myself solid with screenings. Literally every weekend we were screening Everam and then on the back of that we started to expand our team so there's more people that would be helping with screenings. We trained CAs that could screen, we trained DCs that we could screen. Then eventually that grew and evolved into like a full time screening position where people that screen for the office, you start to buy back your time and delegate off to other people. So screening was definitely the first skill set that really taught me how to communicate chiropractic, get in front of people. Then the second skill set that I learned was, in this order was speaking public speaking. I got Pretty, pretty good at screening and pretty predictable of bringing in youn put me in front of crowds of people. I knew the formula that I, that I'd use that I would roughly get about 40, 50% of people that I would speak to at a screening. I'd get them in as a newie, so speak to 10 people. I'd book five newies for example. Then I learned well, one to one is very similar to one to many. Just let's just tweak and alter some things. So I started to go head down, bum up. We're learning one to many public speaking. Did my first internal workshops, did my first external and dinner workshops. I'll never forget the first time that I think I closed like 30 people in a 40 minute talk at a dinner workshop and I was like, wow, I just did 45 minutes of work and 30 new years. I would have to screen probably like 3 days to sign up 30 newies depending on the event that I was doing. So I really kind of then learned and committed to learning the skill set of speaking. And then the third skill set more recently that I committed to was digital social media. I, like many of you guys, had the challenge of agency after agency, you know, five, six, seven agencies later, same outcomes, same results, same getting burnt, same getting scarred, same kind of like this doesn't work. But then I committed to like, well no, hang on because I speak to people that they're nailing it, this does work. So then I went bum down, head down, bum up, Sorry. Into like understanding. Hint here. Wrong way around again. Right, Head down, not the other way around. Up. I'm down, sitting down, doing nothing. The other way around. Understanding digital, Understanding things like hooks. How do you create a hook in a video? How do you retain someone's, someone's attention? How do you do an offer and a call to action at the end, you know, and then I started to just create content every single week and start testing that as paid ads and then just started to wait to see which was the paid ad that was going to hit and then the one that would hit, I'd start scaling it and then that just turned into a system where we're just continually creating content, scaling the stuff that's working, shutting off the stuff that's a dud. That's right, I have duds. Shutting off the stuff that's a dud and then build that into our monthly marketing, into our monthly marketing calendar. Right. So if you feel stuck, just ask yourself, which skill set am I committed to learning first? There's not an infinite amount. You pick. Do you want to learn how to screen and become good at that? Do you want to learn how to speak and become good at that? Do you want to learn how to become digital and become good at that? Now, the way the world is evolving, digital is actually interlinked with all them to some level. So even people that we screen, we collect everyone's detail, they go into our CRM, they have nurture campaigns, our talks, the way that we feel, our talks. A large part of that is digital. So the reality is, you know, pick the order and if you're not sure which order to start in, hey, reach out to us guys at us on our socials and I'm shoot a message. But that's the order that I did in terms of mastering the skill sets of different marketing pillars.

So good. And to the listeners who are like, well, my budget is minimal, right? Like, I'm starting and building my practice, I don't have a lot of income, right? There's a lot of things like screening and like giving talks and taking people out for coffee and making sure your network is being built every week that don't cost a lot of money either. So just keep in mind, like a lot of these things, especially with how many podcasts and whatnot are out there. You can be, you can be learning how to market at little to no.

Those same people that don't have much money, Luna, you know what, they have a lot of time and you're going to have to make decision. Maybe you're listening to this and going, I don't have time. I've got three, four kids and my budget is quite tight as well. Well, guess what, you have to find time. You'll have to find how important is it for you to go to business. You're going to have to find the time. And then guess what, as you start to do this properly, you'll start increasing your income. Your business model is set up properly, but you have to get some time in the beginning and then you stop buying back your time. With the increased income, you buy yourself some time back. You can learn new skill sets and then you can start to get that time back, right? But the reality is time, energy, money. If you don't have much money, you'll have to sacrifice time. And if you don't have much time, you'll use the money that you have.

So good. And if you're coming to the Tampa immersion coming up in January here, or any of our immersions, depending on when you listen to this, check out the the digital marketing that we have there, those are all companies that have been vetted and I know me, I use one of them and they do a great job for us. So again, using your money to buy someone else's expertise and time to execute on some of this.

Yep, absolutely. So, guys, this episode, we wanted purposely to make it short and sweet for you guys so that you can not get bogged down in detail, but actually get bogged down in the implementation. Okay. Note taking is one of our mantras. 20, 25, you should write that one down. Let's get bogged down the implementation. So step one, do you have a marketing calendar? Okay, step two is let's not rely on one source. Let's commit to learning a new skill set. And then step three, you decide for yourself which skill set is that you want to start learning first because it's going to take you time to learn it. Right? So if you're in a position of I'm desperate for new is they're not going to start coming in tomorrow. All right? But you need to start the process of learning the skill set because when you develop that, then you can rely on that and you can put it into your marketing calendar. You can say, I have the skill set now of closing a talk pretty consistently to generate new patients. So now inside my marketing calendar also I had the skill set for filling a talk. That's a different skill set. So now my marketing calendar, I'm going to put two talks per month as an example. I have offices that we work with that shoot for two talks per day. That's right, guys. That's the scale of this thing, right? That's the scale of this thing. Two talks per day. We're talking like a multi, multi seven figure office with like 70 C's in there. But, but it just shows you like the scale of what's possible. So it's like, you know, then you sit there and you go, we're going to do one talk per month. Two talks per month. And then at the same time, you start going, I'm going to learn another skill set. Maybe it's digital, maybe it's streaming. And then you add that in and you say, okay, every month we're going to be expecting 25 new patients from our ads, our digital ads, right? Direct. They'd be there. An example of a direct offer ad. So you want to start learning skill sets because that's what's going to turn into a predictable system for you. And then you want to use the extra money that you're Getting to buy back your time, get people that are experts in those areas and start adding them to your team to do it for you.

And just a little side note, just because we started this with the talking about this is obviously taking notes of what you're doing and if it worked well and what you would do better so that when you execute on it again, it keeps getting better and better. And also notes so that when you follow up on these leads, even if they don't come in as new patients right away, that they're nurtured, which Bobby is also genius at. But so many times I think we get leads from a screening or we get leads from a talk, and maybe we don't have the systems in place yet to do a good job of nurturing them. And so let's work on that too, so that every year that's getting better as well. Just like our hopefully reactivation campaigns have some nurturing and some seasonal things that we're doing to nurture them as well.

Yeah, correct. And that gets into the world guys of automation, which we won't go into in this call. But, like, you know, are you using a crn? People always ask, what CRM are we using? There's different CRMs out there. I won't get detail now, but here's what I will do and here's what I'll offer for you guys. I probably think that you'd find it useful. I actually have a photo of one of my original marketing calendars. Would you find that useful to see that, Lana?

Yes. Let's see it.

Okay, I'm going to send it to Elena. I've got a picture was taken of one of our old marketing calendar. It was like pen and paper written down, but you can actually see like January, February, March, like what's mapped out. Where are the talks, where are the screenings, like the different highlights? At the time, one of my. One of my team was running it, I think already. So I've got that. I'm going to send that photo over to Loner and the serum that we use. Guys, if you want that photo, here's what I need you to do. Add us on our socials to add Dr. Loner and myself on Instagram. Find our Instagram handles, plug in with Jasaby, because for me, Loner will be Loner Cook. I'm assuming Loner.

You got it.

Great.

It's Cook, Lona, dc, But yes.

All right, so find us on our Instagrams, guys, and then DM us their marketing calendar. I'll send Loner a photo as well, or DM it to me and we'll send you a photo of that so you can see what it looked like. First pass, first reiteration and then just have something to model. So just model the same thing guys, because success leaves clues.

Love it. Thanks for that.

Awesome. You're welcome. All right, team, until next time, have a fantastic day. Go be remarkable and build that amazing practice of your dreams this year.

See you, Bobby.

Catch you later.

Hey Doc, I have a question for you. Do you feel like you own a job or a business? If you're like most chiropractors, you feel like you own a job. In fact, if you're being honest, you probably feel like your job owns you. Hey, I'm Dr. Steven Franson from the Remarkable CEO Podcast for Chiropractors. Are you ready to make a bigger impact and a bigger income, but you want to do it in a way that it doesn't just demand more of your time and your energy to do so? Would you like to get back your time freedom, create greater leverage in your practice? What would it be like to have a wide world class team that wants to grow your practice? Or finally dial in the seven figure associate doctor? Are you ready for your business to become more productive and more profitable? If this sounds like you, then be sure to check out the remarkable CEO podcast for chiropractors. Join me, Dr. Steven Fransen and my co host, Dr. Pete Camiolo as we share the insights, strategies and stories that we've gleaned along our own journeys of going from owner, operator to CEO. This practical and tactical podcast will inspire and equip you to make your own ascension as we keep it real, teaching from the scar tissue of our own experience of turning pirate ships into battleships with our own practices. And now for thousands of chiropractors around the world. Follow the link here in the show notes and check out the Remarkable CEO Podcast for Chiropractors.

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