110 - The AI Shift That Will Redefine Your Practice Growth with Caleb Hodges

I highly recommend learning to use AI as your sidekick, your thought partner, or your strategic ally. Because instead of trying to learn all the tools that are out there and stay on track with the news coming out every single day, you can just start building that relationship with, with an AI as your strategic partner and let your AI do the work.

Hello and welcome to Build Your 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. All right, welcome back to the Build Your Remarkable Practice podcast, and I am here with someone I just got to meet this past, you know, immersion in Phoenix who has come on board and is our TRP marketing guru, helping us find not only the clients who need our services, but also learn how to bring more patients into the fold or practice members into the fold for our clients, right? So welcome, Caleb. I know you know tons about marketing, whether that's bringing chiropractors into DRP or patients into a chiropractic office. So we're excited to have this conversation tonight.

Awesome, thanks, Dr. Lona. I'm happy to be here.

Awesome, awesome. So offline, we were just talking a little bit about— you said, I have a bit of an obsession with AI, right? Like, you're in love with AI, is that right?

100%. It keeps me up at night.

I like it, I like it. And I can honestly see why. I feel like in the, in the dabbling and utilization in the last, like, year to 2 years for myself. I, I have a little obsession with it too. It's, it's fascinating how much you can get done that you could not get done before, right? It makes you— or at least so much quicker. So we, we decided we were going to really focus in on how AI can help bring new patients into the office and assist your marketing efforts or run your marketing efforts potentially. So Caleb, tell us more. What do chiropractors need to know about AI, and why should we also get on the train of obsession with AI?

Absolutely. You may or may not have heard this framing before, and it just really is a reality that I think is worth communicating, even if it feels a little bit intimidating. We are going through an absolute radical transformation across society and the economy. You probably have heard that, but unless you're on X or Twitter like every day reading how many breakthroughs are coming out every single day, You're probably not fully up to date of where the technology is at, and that's okay. It's a lot of work to stay up to date on it. But what I'm getting at is over the next couple of years, there's going to be people who embrace and integrate AI into whatever they do. You might think, oh, I'm a chiropractor. I work with my hands. It's a local business. How is AI supposed to help me? It can and will help you in a ton of ways. And there's gonna be a big split between people who actively embrace AI and learn how to leverage it to be more present, be more human, and accelerate their life purpose, uh, and their mission. And those who say, nah, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna dabble. Um, cuz it is a skill, it's a new thing to learn. But, uh, I'd love to give a couple tips that can get you started in the right direction so you can dip your toes in and maybe just jump in all the way as well once you experience how awesome it is.

Yeah, I love it. I'm excited to learn from you. I'm just gonna make a plug here. First of all, great job circling back cuz we just had David Norrie on the podcast and his message at the immersion was be human again and have presence. That's, that is the part that no one's probably gonna replace us with AI doing, right? And so we can double down on that knowing that our ability to give the adjustment and to be a great doctor is not gonna be replaced by AI. But a lot of other things in our practice can be. And I think it was an immersion a year and a half ago, maybe even 2 years ago now, where One of the speakers had brought this idea of like using this thing called Opus Clip and chopping up all, and I had all this content that I wasn't doing anything with and it just, it geeked me out that I could be repurposing this across so many platforms of things that I already had shot. And that made my heart happy cuz it felt like I don't have to reinvent the wheel and I can use a lot of what was already made. But I could never have done that without that AI tool. And we use it every other day probably now with just different things in our sphere of influence. So that was a great add-on. I loved that AI allowed us to do that.

So amazing. Yeah, that, that's a great use case for AI, especially Opus, which is leveraging everything you've already made. I highly recommend learning to use AI as your sidekick, your thought partner, or your strategic ally, because instead of trying to learn all the tools that are out there and stay on track with the news coming out every single day, you can just start building that relationship with, with with an AI as your strategic partner and let your AI do the work. To make it really simple, I recommend using Claude. A lot of people have their first experience with ChatGPT, which is fine, but Claude is building more tools that are easier for people to use that are very practical for your business. So getting a Claude subscription and downloading it to your desktop, there's like 3 ways to use Claude. There's normal Claude, which is just like ChatGPT. Then there's Claude Cowork, which allows access to your files, which is a way, a very safe way where you can give it context about your business. Because with ChatGPT, normally you have to be, you have to tell it all the time and it forgets everything and it can get a little annoying. And then there's Claude Code and all of these are accessible from the Claude desktop app. So you can just download that. I would start with Claude Cowork. But start thinking, if I had a super intelligent co-founder or partner in crime, what would I ask them? What would I delegate to them? And how could I, what, what are the biggest challenges I'm having in the business? And then you can just tell Claude all of that and it'll point you in the right direction. It can tell you which tools you can and should be using. It can help you make plans to solve bottlenecks in your practice. It can help. Bring awareness to blind spots that you might have, things that you're not seeing. You can have it interview you. You can say, hey, please interview me about my business and identify the biggest bottlenecks and the biggest opportunities or low-hanging fruit and just start there. And once you train yourself to use AI in this way, then you can go deep down the rabbit hole of specific tools solving specific problems, how to get new patients, how to How to improve your new patient journey. And, uh, it just goes on and on from there. But that's like the simple starting point that I think every serious business owner that wants to win and have more impact and change more lives and make more money, everyone should be at least dabbling and just be okay that it's a new skill. It might feel uncomfortable. It might feel outta your wheelhouse or too technical, but I promise Claude makes it as easy as it gets.

All right, so Claude is number one. You said Claude Cowork, is that right?

Yep, it's in the app. So it's just download Claude, get your account, and then there's a little tab that says Cowork, and you can literally make workflows in your— for your business just by talking.

Right on. All right, well, and I am one of those people that started with Opus Clip actually, or the Opus first, and then went into ChatGPT and then did the paid, and we use it a lot. But someone else was just telling me that Claude's like even better. And you're, you're like, yeah.

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

I'm not, I'm not a technical like engineer. Like I'm not a programmer or anything. I have built a lot of software for my companies just talking to Claude. So I didn't build it. I just said what I needed and it built it for me. And so the, the marketing functions, the creativity, like any blind spot or roadblock you think you have, AI can and will remove it for you if you just sit with it and give it a try.

Okay, okay, I'm sold. I'll try that. Um, the other thing that I've again been dabbling in these conversations of like, what do we— and you and I offline were speaking about this too— if like if 15 years ago everyone got on the train of like, I need to get Google reviews, right? And that we're using our, whether it's Sked or TrackStat or ReviewWave, to like grab those from patients in an automated fashion, which is awesome and has been so helpful. But as we look ahead, knowing that more and more people are going to be searching for like, who's the best chiropractor near me? Or I need a pediatric— or maybe they're not even saying the word chiropractor. They're talking about their child's ear infections and what do they need to do. And like, how can we prime AI or position ourselves so that if somebody searched for that solution, our clinics pop up?

Awesome, great question. So this is— so you've heard of SEO, this is called AEO, uh, AI Engine Optimization. So you've probably seen stats, it's just getting crazier and crazier. Like Google search traffic is down like 37% or something, changing to— and it doesn't mean that people aren't using Google, it's just they surface the AI answer. So instead of all that hard work you did for SEO and all the paid ads that you run, Now the first thing right there is the AI response and AI, I could not know you at all, or it could hallucinate things about you. And there are some easy ways to make sure that AI, especially the search ones like Perplexity and Google and all that know about your business and are able to surface that really well. And here's the thing. You don't need to pay a company a ton of money for this and you don't need to become an expert. Like this might sound difficult to do. All you got to do is have your personal ally, your main executive agent, if you will, Claude, go ask Claude, hey, I want to show up in search results when people are looking for a chiropractor in my area. Help me out. How do we do AEO? And let Claude figure it out. I can't know like every skill and every piece of knowledge that is out there. but my AI can and does, and it helps me implement. So I don't always have to have all the answers, but I can implement at insane speeds. I can tell you that to show up, you need to structure some information on your page in a specific technical way, but our AI just does it for us. So I'm, I'm building a directory right now for, uh, my agency clients so that we can structure that data for them. And it's pretty easy. We just did it with AI and we just made a, a web third-party website. You can, um, use other directories, and you can also just update your website to structure the data, uh, to give AI the schema that will allow you to see this. And when you set it up right with some Google Analytics, you can actually watch the traffic that's coming through, uh, the LLMs when you set this up right.

Okay, cool. So like instead of watching necessarily how other traditional Google Ads were bringing people to you, it would be how the answer that AI is giving Google is now bringing it to you. Is that right?

Yes. And I would do both. Your Google SEO is still really important when you do a search on Google, which is still where a lot of this, the search traffic is. Because yes, with the AEO, you can get surfaced in a ChatGPT conversation about back pain if it's, you know, local. That is a possibility. But we're also just talking about the AI search results that pop up in pretty much any browser now. But yeah, when you do a search, you're going to have the AI search, and then you're going to have some paid search results. You might have local service ads that show up right under the AI answer. And then you have the map pack, which is your local SEO from Google Business Profile. And then you have your organic search results that are— you had to scroll to even get to them. So it's still important, but you can see where you might want to put your efforts showing up with AI and then pay to play. Having some Google Ads to make sure you're right there and then everything else.

Yeah. Yeah. And that has changed radically in like the last 6 to 9 months, something like that.

100%.

Yeah. Wow. Okay. And you know a lot more than the average one of us that is running offices and maybe not geeking out as hard on, you know, what, what's possible with AI. So if you, besides Claude and besides asking Claude how to help us, get our, our searchability in the AI format up. Any other things that you're like, if I could get every chiropractor to listen to me to do this one or two things, is there anything else that you want us to know that would help us to start to dabble?

Yeah, it's like the entryway. If you just start talking to Claude every single day, it opens the door to everything else. So I know a lot of people's resistance. Is it's unknown. It's a new thing to learn. I just want to be present. I hate AI slop. I don't, you know, everyone can start to recognize AI copy and it's like, I don't like it. It doesn't have to be that way. And I just want to encourage you to go play with it yourself and learn how to get the outputs that you want. Because to keep it simple, your one activity, your one action from this show is to Get a cloud account and download it to your desktop and give it your problems. Because we could go deep on 100 things. Like, I'm using so much AI, you wouldn't even believe it. You can create all your ads. You can, you can literally have it run your Facebook ads and Google ads. You can have it run like every part of the practice. My mindset is I want to use AI to amplify my human genius and other humans' genius. So that admin work can fall away. Stuff that's not in your zone of genius can fall away. It is about amplifying what you are here to do and what you're most excited about and how you can serve the world the biggest way. So when you put on that mindset, it's not about AI slob and just putting out crappy social media posts that aren't really going to do anything. You can actually use that at a meta level to solve your biggest problems. And that starts from strategy all the way down to the practical tactical other softwares to use.

That's excellent. I, I think actually this was at one of the other immersions where one of, um, the marketing speakers was sharing that just like also learning that it's, it's like input and then it's output and then it's input again. Like where you're, you're giving it 20%, it gives you 80%, you give it like another 20%, it gives you another 80%, where you just keep fine-tuning each other essentially. And I think that has to be almost like you, it's just a playground right now to learn how to let it learn you and then ask better questions of it and refine it so that it really is a partner in, in the vision. Yeah.

I love that you said that. Um, cause that's another super critical insight here. I've caught myself doing this over and over and it's one trap you can avoid is it's easy to quickly assume when you're talking to your AI that it's like super intelligent. And it, it is, but it doesn't have the context that you have, and it doesn't know everything that you know, and you are still the human. You are still a far superior intelligence. And so the trap is you start talking to it and you're like, get me new patients. And then it's like, here's a Facebook ads plan and a Google ads plan, and here's the copy for it. Da da da da. And then you look at it and you're like, ah, that's, that's not how I would talk or how I would do it. Here's the thing. Treat your AI agents or processes or chats like an employee. You've got to train your AI like an employee. It doesn't— just because it's super intelligent and has all these amazing things it can do for you does not mean that you don't have to train it. So when you treat it like an employee that you onboard, that you go through your processes and train it on your practice and how you communicate. That's all stuff that you can do in Claude Cowork. You can make what are called markdown files that are basically just a simple text file that instructs Claude or your AI agent on how to behave and what to reference. And again, just ask Claude to make these for you. It can interview you and make it for you. And then now every time you ask for copy, it's going to run it through that file that tells it your voice, your practice, your positioning. So treating AI like an employee instead of getting frustrated that it didn't nail it on the first try will serve you very, very well.

That's good. Really good. And I've noticed that in what I've been using too, is just like it does get better. But to your point, you do have to, with the ChatGPT anyway, have to keep reminding it certain things and going back and being like, well, remember that conversation we had last week? And yeah. And sometimes it doesn't, sometimes it doesn't. Yeah.

Yeah. Memory is the thing to solve. And when you start going even deeper into it, uh, memory is like 100 times better than it is in ChatGPT now. But that's probably a little more technical than we need right now. But a Markdown file in Cog Cowork, that will get you way further than, than ChatGPT.

Okay. Awesome. Caleb, this was super insightful. Thank you for pushing us over the cliff. To like get into it. I'm, I'm excited. I think we should just have you longstanding every quarter on this so that you can just keep in helping us along. Because I do believe in some ways what's coming with AI and what is evening the playing field for chiropractic practices to be able to do so much more that before maybe we didn't have, you know, the bandwidth of our team or some of the capabilities because we weren't a large entity. So I think it's really exciting.

Amazing. Yeah, this is so fun. I would love to come back and, uh, and help chiropractors help more people.

Beautiful. Thanks, Caleb. How do we, um, connect with you if anyone at, you know, wants to find you or see you at a future immersion? Like, how do they reach out?

Yeah, shoot me an email, Caleb, C-A-L-E-B, at theremarkablepractice.com. I'm happy to answer any questions.

Awesome. Thanks, Caleb.

Cool. Thanks, Dr. Lona.

Hey everyone, please listen in for this next bonus interview of one of our remarkable success partners. They all help us help more people find the benefits of chiropractic. So listen on.

All right, TRP crew, I'm Dr. Rachel Hovey here, and I have the privilege of interviewing Dr. Kendall Price here. So Dr. Kendall Price is with Elevate Media, and we have been a privilege of viewing you guys over the past couple of months. And like probably many of us CEOs listening to this, we have been flooded with different marketing agencies and all the digital stuff that we can do. So I would love to hear more about what you guys do and just about your company in general.

Yeah, well, thanks, Doc. I think that the biggest sort of differentiating point between Elevate and a lot of companies out there, it's kind of, I mean, besides the sort of nuts and bolts sort of things that we do, it's the approach that we take. In that I don't want to be a marketing, digital marketing vendor for you. I want to be a growth partner with a practice to actually help them grow, because I understand what it's like to run a TRP practice. I understand how the systems and philosophies work. And so doing that, we can now plug into running paid ad strategies, we can plug into helping with Dinner with the Doc stuff, we can help plug into, you know, health talks and SEO and AEO and making sure you show up in your local presence. So we understand what it is like to run a practice. I mean, I ran a six-figure-a-month practice before I sold it and, you know, and before I took over doing what I'm doing now. And so I understand what, what is required. And I think that one of the things that really makes the differentiator is just communication, making sure that we're staying on top of talking with our clients on a week-in and week-out basis. To understand how the market is shifting to help clients get the best results.

For sure.

And especially in this digital world where it is changing so quickly on all the things. Again, speaking for myself and experience. So we, we've used some other digital companies in the past and all were fine. But one of my favorite things, I feel like what you guys do is you really listen to us and you, I think being a chiropractor, understand how we all feel like we have the most unique practices, right? But we do want our ads to feel like they're ours and not just like copy paste. And then you get targeted the person 20 miles down the road that's the same copy ad, right? So maybe on how you guys feel you able to connect with a client on that level and what you do like above and beyond, because I do feel like you do.

Yeah. So I mean, I think the first thing is understanding who a practice is and understanding like, are we the type of practice where it's like, look, I love slaying subluxations and that's all I want to do. Or like, I'm decomp and softwave and chiro and all of these things, like understanding what it is that you are trying to accomplish and then tailoring solutions to actually work. Because we've worked with practices who do all of those things and we know what works. And so like, it's sometimes the difference of like, okay, here's my brand, here's straight marketing, what we know is going to work, and then taking those two things and blending them together to get the result where it's, yes, we're getting the results, but we're also keeping on the brand of where we need to be as, as a business. And I think that is something that not a lot of agencies, they only focus on this. But the middle ground is where, where that really focuses. And so our approach is tailored that way where, you know, we sit and we look before we ever start running an ad. We go in and we look at the market demographics in your area because, you know, someone who wants— I mean, I know that you guys are— you guys do a lot of peds and prenatal and those sort of things. That makes sense in a suburb where there's lots of families. That doesn't make sense if you're right outside of a or you're living in an area where it's nothing but elderly people. It's like those two things don't match. And so being able to, to like, okay, I understand, here's what we need to— how we need to focus the strategy. Beyond that, you know, I think that one of the other biggest differentiators besides what I already mentioned would be in communication with our team, because you meet with us weekly or biweekly, is we have a call center that is trained on how to move patients into practices. That's not just someone calling and saying, yeah, I saw you submitted your information, let's get you scheduled. It's building emotional connection, finding out what's going on with them, you know, what makes— what's their motivating factor, and then positioning them. So it's, it's the trust-building process. And so I always look at Elevate, we're a marketing system for digital, and there's a lot of pieces, just like when we do our, our day ones or our day twos, or how we see people from R1 through are for, what are we doing to be able to get patients in the door? And if you don't have a system for that, even when it comes to digital, you're already behind the game because it— there are multiple steps along the way.

One, conversion always starts from trust. Retention, all of it starts from trust, right? And if you guys can build that from the beginning with the ads, with the new patients, the calling in, and having that like TRP, like groundwork, that makes a huge difference for us with that conversion down the road. It's all— it's— that's 100% about it, right?

Yeah.

And, you know, so I— when we get on with new clients, I sit down and I go through and I explain to them that, like, look, if a patient sees your ad at a 1, they're not going from— and they walk into your door at a 10, they're not going from 1 to 10 with a 30-second ad. That's where we need to build resources in the middle for our booking and landing pages to, like, this is where we build intention, this is where we build trust, this is how we get people to answer the sort of questions of who are you? What do you do? Why should I see you? What do you stand for? What do other people say about you? Because when we have those now, when we get into text messages and calls and emails and the things that we do to bring patients in the door, it all works together as a system to get that person to the 10 to walk through your door.

So one thing I do love about you guys too is when we have our 1-to-1 calls, you come in, you're like, let's switch this up, let's change this, let's put money here, let's You know, and as a CEO, obviously a big thing when you're investing into this is like, what kind of ROI do I get? So how do you guys determine that and how are you constantly changing it? And what do clients like maybe can expect when you guys have ROI and new patient recognition, that type of thing?

Yeah, I mean, so number one, how we are looking at things and trying to drive the decision is, is like you hired us as a fractional CMO in your practice to be able to say on a digital perspective what's working, what's not. To be able to look at this and say, well, hey, we had great numbers come in from this ad and this one, not so much. This— we're going to turn this off. We need to create more content like this because that's what's bringing people through your doors. And, you know, one of the things that we do that's a little bit different is we aren't optimizing for cost per lead. We're optimizing for cost per show. Those numbers are important for us. But here's the thing. If an ad— if you've got 2 ads running and one, one has 10 people that opted in and the other has 5, but all 5 of these showed and none of these showed, this ad is better than this one. And so most marketing agencies are going to say, let's ramp this. And I'm saying, let's ramp this. And so that, that plays into the overall picture. And we send that back, that information back to Facebook to say, this is what we want. And so that helps. And so, so I run these numbers about every 90 days. Our average client is going to see about a 4x return on their investment. And I mean, we've got some that are doing 15x. Great. Obviously they're doing a lot of things really well. Great markets, great marketing, great everything there. Some markets just aren't like that. You know, I always say like some of the markets in Phoenix or like Little Rock, Arkansas, like it's crazy how like I would have died to have the sort of numbers in practice that they do. But some markets are just a little bit tougher. And so But yeah, that's— I mean, our expectation, like, I'm not really happy if someone isn't there, like, and that's what I'm striving to make sure that we can do. And then, you know, and then when we sit and we look at our ROI and in our investment dollars to be able to say, okay, where do we put more money to be able to optimize this? It needs to be strategic and systemized to do so.

Absolutely. Cool. And as you look at the world of technology and everything advancing very fast with all the AI, all that kind of stuff, What are you guys seeing with the profession going forward in the future that you're working on to keeping you guys staying relevant and fresh?

This is a great question. It's funny, I actually was just on a, on a call yesterday with one of my mentors and business coaches, and we're talking a lot about what's happening in the SEO, AEO, you know, answer engine optimization. So being found in ChatGPT and Gronkh and Perplexity and all of these things and how One of the things that I am seeing so prevalently in our profession especially is the sort of cookie-cutter websites that, you know, people are paying $200 a month for these companies that, that you don't own your website, you don't own the content, you don't own any of it, you can't optimize it properly. And it's a big problem because when they go in and make changes to websites, all of it's the same. And what's really detrimental about this is a lot of times that information can't be indexed because it's copywritten by the company. And so that's one of the things that we're seeing a lot of in how do we help patients to be able to make sure that when someone is looking for a, a non-branded search, meaning someone is searching for chiropractor near me Minneapolis, are you showing up for those things and where are you showing up? And so And the other, you know, kind of where the puck is going is about 5 to 15% of the U.S. population right now is using things like ChatGPT or, or any sort of AI engine to search for things. Are you showing up there? And so we've, we've really honed in a really specific process to be able to do that that really focuses on improving Google Business Profile and optimizing that for engagement and authority. We obviously doing the things on a website to be able to fix that. And then the third thing, which nobody is doing, is we write syndicated press releases that go out to news, TV, radio stations every single month that consistently drive the authority signals for Google that say this is a really high authority website, we should continue to rank them higher. And what's cool about this is like, it's like I've got— I was actually looking at one. We had an office that started with us. She's a pregnancy and prenatal office in the St. Louis area, and she went from not ranking for anything within like 90 days to where she's on the top page for like 50 out of the, you know, 95 keywords that, that she wanted to rank for. And so it's just cool when you can see that and you're like, okay, here's where you were, here's where you are. And she's like, that's insane. But it's just building the strategy. And so AI, if you're not staying consistent and you want to be able to be found, Google has changed their algorithm so much that it's really, really, really important to do that. And, you know, we've got some other things that are kind of— that we're toying around with around AI avatars and things like that that are hopefully— I'm going to say by end of the year we can, you know, we can start being able to launch to clients. But AI is here to stay and it may take over the world at some point, but for right now, we should all be using it as a tool to get better results. It's not going to replace us, but it can help us to be more effective and more efficient.

And exactly like Dr. Kendall said, if you're not using something digital right now, you're behind. But there's no better time to start now and just set up an interview, learn what you can do, see what you guys can offer. So, Dr. Kendall, how can our listeners hear some more about you guys and even get in contact with you guys too? I know you're at immersions all the time too, so that's a great place to speak with you. But even on top of that, Yeah.

So I mean, the best way is goelevatemarketing.com. So just goelevatemarketing.com. Obviously you can go to the success partner page on TRP's website and you can get in touch with us that way. You can always shoot me an email at DrKendall@goelevatemarketing.com. Yeah, those are the best ways to get in touch with us to, to be able to start a conversation because the world of digital is changing and if you're not changing with it, you're probably already behind.

Amen. We'll end on that. Well, thank you, Dr. Kendall. Let's see you guys later. TRP.

Thanks, guys.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Build Your Remarkable Practice podcast. Remember, what the world needs now is chiropractic, and what chiropractic needs now is more successful chiropractors. If you like the podcast, please subscribe, share with your friends, and leave us a review. And if you'd like to connect with personally, please click the links in the show notes to schedule a call.