Virtual CAs: Never Miss Another New Patient Call | Interview with Dr. Allen Miner

All right. Hey, everybody. As promised, I'm Dr. Jeff Langmaid here with the evidence based chiropractor podcast. And I'm lucky to sit down with not only a great chiropractor, but also a friend, Dr. Alan Miner, CEO of Chiro Matchmakers. And today we're going to talk all around virtual chiropractic assistance. If that is news to you, please stay tuned because this is something that has changed my productivity world. And I have a feeling regardless of whether you're new in practice or super experienced, this is going to be an episode you want to listen into. Alan, thanks for coming on and chatting today.

Thanks for having me, Jeff. Does everybody know we call you jefe?

It might have just been publicly disclosed to the world.

The best. Have you ever seen the movie Chef?

Yes, I have. On your recommendation.

And so his tattoo is El Je, which I think means like the boss, the man. Anyways, it's. It's. If they didn't know, now they need to know. Well, thanks for.

Thanks for getting it out there. We'll see if it takes. Let's pick it up.

Right.

With virtual cas. When we talk about virtual assistants, there's like a ton of misnomers out there. Conjecture, like, what am I buying? What are they going to do? I'll highlight in a few minutes sort of how virtual CA has worked for me. But I guess let's start at the super basics for docs. This is a totally new concept. What's a virtual ca?

Yeah, it grabs people's attention. Like, how do I have a CA work virtually? What are you talking about? And that's been really fun. We've helped a lot of docs who have been in a pinch. It's kind of how it started. A CA left last minute. I think a lot of people know we do staffing of associate doctors and CAs and marketers and office managers. The big secret, Jeff, is we've been using a team of virtual assistants to help with our staffing for a few years now. And, you know, like a lot of people, we had reservations. Like, well, I don't know, do I want to hire somebody who's not in. In the US how's their English connection speed online? You know, what am I getting into? The staffing world is a very manual business. You know, we have. And especially the way we do it, we use cognitive assessments and behavioral assessments. And so there's a ton of sifting and sorting resumes, sorting all these assessments, analyzing if, you know, if an associate doc is a good fit for a client. And so we really started to rely on these college educated, college degreed team from all over the world. You know, outside of the US we have team members in Mexico, we worked out of Colombia, Philippines, and we just started to realize, wow, there's a lot of talent out there that we can tap into to help us. Now what we've learned and I think what we can bring to the chiropractic profession is it's, it is, there's a lot of red tape and it's really hard to work out of another country. So it really, it took us about three years to figure out all the ins and outs of this. It's not easy, but when you figure it out, the bottom line is there are some great people in these other countries who would love to help out your business. And that's what we learned with car matchmakers. And so, Jeff, one of our problems we ran into is a lot of the docs that come to us were struggling to grow or they really wanted some help with a CA or associate. But they may be their practice wasn't big enough to justify the expense. And you know, something I learned early on from mentors is one of the most important people you can hire immediately is an assistant. You know, before you even hire the operator, get an assistant. And the basic premise there is we all have our own specific talents and gifts. And if you spend most of your day doing what you're a genius at, it's a lot more fun. You usually help a lot more people and you usually make a lot more money. But when we run businesses, including chiropractic clinics, that there's a lot of other stuff that has to be done that a lot of times we don't enjoy and we're not good at. It can range from notes, it can range from social media. It might be the email follow ups you should be doing, it might be client outreach, but there's things that we do and we grind out. And so we started realizing, you know, a lot of these docs that call us who need help, but they're just their practices can't financially justify hiring somebody. One of our team members said, what if we could help them with our team of VA somehow? And we thought, well, how could you have a CA who's not in the office that won't work. And then we started saying, well, actually there's a lot of work that a CA can do that they don't have to be present physically. And even if that task frees up bandwidth and time for the doctor, now the doctor has more Time to spend serving more people doing what they're usually very good at, making more money to hopefully grow that business another 100, $200,000 so they can afford to bring on the associate in the proper way or hire the CA they need. So that's how it started. We can get into all the different things we help, but the bottom line is, is there's some really great help out there for you in your practice that can really help you do a lot of the things you either hate to do or you're not doing that you know you should be doing. And as you do those things, then your practice usually does better and you make more money and that leads to you then building a bigger team of people that are local.

Yeah, I love that. That's really, really important. One of the things you want to touch on, I want to drive a little bit deeper towards is, you know, when I hired a virtual ca, you know, cost really surprised me in a positive way. Meaning there's just a tremendous amount of cost savings. Maybe just spend a moment highlighting what those cost savings look like in general compared to an in office ca.

Yeah, well, you know, different things have different pricing, but you know, the range for us is $13 an hour to $16 an hour. These are college educated people that we actually, this is a key point, Jeff. We put them through a CA training program for chiropractors, then we put them through our onboarding training at Chiro Matchmakers. Then they work for us in our recruiting team. So we really get to know these people well before we deploy them out for a client. And so in our director of operations is US based Daniella. So Daniella, you know, coordinates with our clients, coordinates with the vca so we don't have any of those lag issues. We test for, you know, speed, time, connectivity, Internet connectivity. You know, we provide equipment to our, to our vca. So we don't have those issues unless maybe a monsoon or typhoon goes blowing through the Philippines. That hasn't been an issue for us. And we're able to, yeah, to provide these services at a pretty cost effective rate. The way we do it, Jeff, is we do them in 10 hour weekly increments. So the higher rate is if you hire some age for $10 an hour. The lower rate is if you have somebody 40 hours a week. But you know, where could you find a college educated person to join your team for 10, 20 hours a week or for 40 hours a week for that matter at $13 an hour and in full transparency, Jeff, what makes this unique when you go, you can go look for virtual assistants in other countries, and you can see rates as low as 9, $10 an hour. The difference is we employ these people. When you hire one of those other folks, they're working for an agency, and so they actually work directly for us on your behalf, which is. It sounds small, but that's how we provide their equipment. That's how we really help them to, you know, make sure that they do the job. We're going to say they do. And because also we pay our people directly because they work for us and they're not going through an intermediary. That was a nightmare, as you can attest to getting that set up to learn how to have a business in a company in these other countries. But it enabled us to get to the spot where we can do it. And the final thing is we truly do train people as CAs, not just as assistants. Like, we put them through full CA training. So they're familiar with chiropractic, the vernacular, the tasks, and it's something that's really, you know, differentiated us with our. With our clients by going that extra route.

Yeah, the cost savings for this, for the specialists are, Are so important. You kind of highlighted it with talking about their education, and I just want to reinforce that idea and message that there really are a variety of different virtual CA specialists. We'll talk about roles in a moment. And being able to get that cost savings, yet still having unbelievable expertise is so, so powerful. But before we get there, I want to touch upon something that you highlighted, and let's dig a little bit deeper. And that's. I know many docs out there, me included. I'm like, I don't want to manage somebody like, oh, I have a hard enough time managing myself, Myself, my family and my team as it is. Never mind somebody new that's. That's overseas. You mentioned Daniella. I've had an awesome experience working with her, but maybe just highlight a little bit more of how that process plays out so docs can really visualize what this looks like for them.

Yeah, well, you know, a lot of our clients are like, this sounds interesting, but I'm not sure how I'd use it. So Danielle is an expert at that, you know, and our. Our usual questions are, well, what do you hate doing? What's not getting done? And if it can be done remotely, Daniela builds a system out for you to help take care of that. And so, you know, it's getting into some of the stuff. You know, we thought initially it'd be A lot of like document entering or transcription or data transfer and we do that for, for our clients. But we do a lot of social media and, and the two things we do the usual of we have, you know, short form film editors for your reels and we have content managers to drip out your content. But where it's really gained traction, Jeff, is what I call just being a good steward of your social media. Like I don't have time for the businesses to like all my followers comments, to follow each person who follows me back to DM our new followers and invite them into the page to comment on people, to, to go out to people in the community we serve and follow them and interact. But that is how you organically grow Instagram and Facebook. And so we, a lot of people are bringing on our, our assistance just to do that, to just, I call it being a good steward of your social media. And at the end of the day I might open it for a couple of minutes and look at what's interesting. I don't want to sit there and spend an hour or two or three or five a day liking everybody's comments and commenting. But boy, we've really seen the impact on our offices of when somebody follows us, we follow back and we send a dm. You know, hey, we're here to educate the community. If we can ever help you with any help needs, reach out. You know, that makes an impression on people. Following other influencers in the community, interacting with them several times. All of a sudden you've got some of the athletes or restaurant owners or celebrities or other big business owners who are following and you're interacting with their pages, they become aware of you. That's led to a lot of cool collaborations that our team has set up. And then phones are in communication. Such a big thing today. You know, a lot of offices realize, wow, the phones are really disruptive. You know, especially you've got a smaller staff. Do they answer the phone? Do they greet the patient? Who has priority? Well, you know, the old saying is a burden hand is worth two in the bush. So you should probably take care of the person who walks in. But that might mean you need to ignore your phones and the person who just responded to the Google Ad you're paying $50 a click for. So we do a lot of that work for offices both inbound and outbound. Outbound being, we do confirmation calls, follow up calls, reactivation calls, reminder calls, you know, that kind of stuff for clinics. We do a lot for different people who use social media and you know, they have leads come in, but their staff's not getting to the leads. Or their staff maybe gets to them when they're in the office, but they don't get to them on the weekends or in the evenings at lunches. So our team steps in and does that work. And then the inbound answering the phones, you know, scheduling people giving directions, answering questions, that kind of thing. If a doc has a remote system that we can log into and they can give us a login, so it's HIPAA compliant, we can help them manage that, which streamlines. You know, we have a lot of docs who are going to hire a second or third CA who just onboarded one or two virtual assistants and they're able to run the office with their front desk and them and then two CA virtual assistants running overhead coverage behind them. We do a lot with personal injury, you know, just the follow up calls and attorneys getting notes out really anything that your staff's doing repeatedly. Another big One is stats. KPIs a lot of people just, they want docs, owners want their stats daily and weekly and monthly. But a lot of times the staff is, aren't good at compiling it or don't like compiling it. So again, if you can show Daniela where we access that info, our VCAs can come in and generate those kinds of reports for people. So we do traveling for people that don't like travel. We do email management for our clients for people who just don't like dealing with, you know, email. So we'll go, you know, put what they need in the different files so they know where to go look and respond and clear out the junk. So we have some professional services, we charge a couple more dollars an hour, but things like bookkeeping, our, our film editing for social media as a professional service. So there's, people would be shocked. You know, I always ran a brick and mortar. I, I thought I needed people here and I've seen rates go up. Jeff, you know, to find a good CA around the country, $20 is a pretty normal salary. Most, a lot of places are 23, 25. My first CAS were $6 an hour and until Covid 16 was pretty average. But you know, and when Carl's Jr and Starbucks pays 18 $19 an hour with full benefits, rates have gone up. You know, most dentists now are paying 35, $40 for their front desk people. So this is a great way to help offset those costs with sometimes a higher educated, more professional staff to do a lot of the work. And that way you can run with the leaner staff. So there's a lot of ways we're seeing people use us.

Yeah, that's powerful. I love that you're pulling out the 27th most popular fast food chain ever, Carl's Jr.

Yeah, they pay more. I, I drove by one and like Carl's Jr. Pays $18 an hour and we have CA jobs at 15. I'm like, no wonder we're having trouble staffing these things. And so anyway, that's, that's, that's a very real thing.

And I want to give a little bit of feedback to one of the things you touched on and that's regarding the social. You know, we've seen with smart chiropractor, we've used virtual CA to help use that exact process of liking, following and building. And we've seen about a 50% growth over the last 45 to 60 days based upon having a strategic approach for docs out there that are interested in growing their followings or they're doing the right things themselves by posting, but they want a little extra oomph. A virtual ca, I can speak to it directly is absolutely part of the strategy I use personally. So I think that that's super, super impactful. The second component that I'd love for you to dive into a little bit more because many docs probably might be unaware, you know, the importance of the phone call meaning, you know, what's a phone call worth to you? I always view it. That's a, whatever your lifetime value of a patient is, that could be a thousand, $10,000, that any inbound phone call is worth that much. Because a missed opportunity is a missed opportunity and I'd love for you to speak into that because many docs are probably unaware you have multiple practices. You are very aware of how a calling and inbound calling and the necessity if you're paying for paid ads, time is of the essence. Maybe just highlight a little bit of that because I know almost everybody listening is running paid ads. And if you're running paid ads and you don't have your phones manned with a dedicated person, you're missing opportunities and that is just costing you money. What's been your experience with it?

Yeah, on the Google side, you know, you work to get your SEO up so your page gets recognized and, or you even pay for Google Ads. So you're at the top and somebody dials and if you don't answer, we all go to the next person down the list and you just missed that. And where that was highlighted for me, Jeff, is when I First started Google Ads. They put a pixel on the page and Google send me, you know you have 50 calls and you could actually listen to their calls which you can listen to our calls when people use our service. Anyways, long story short, we answered one call of the 50 people that called through the link and that was my wake up like okay, I just flushed like three grand on the toilet. I got 50 calls and I only got to one of them. Okay, that's amateur and a waste of money. So that was what opened my eyes to this. Also I hear from our folks doing marketing the opt ins a 5 minute response times kind of ideal, you know, where people forget and ghost you that they filled or clicked on whatever your ad was in your link for social media. So having a quick response time is, is really critically important. It, it is, it's just people want an answer. I, I love Google and Yelp because people are looking, you know, on Facebook. We're trying to distract them in and, and maybe they're interested but if they searched for a chiropractor and they come across you and you won that contest today, all everything, your website copy, your SEO, which that all goes down the toilet if you don't answer the darn phone. And I realized early on once I saw my problem of we answered one call out of 50 then we did a better job answering phones. But I realized we were missing a lot of calls when we go to lunch or when we leave the office at night or on weekends. We don't do a lot of personal injury, but we do a little bit. And I started realizing, you know, we pick up one of those calls a month that you know, doubles what we pay for the service. And so that really is where I learned that you are leaving money on the table by not tending to your phones. And I think I saw my behavior once. I needed a air conditioner fixed and I googled and no answer. No answer. Third call answer. Ding. Hey, I need this fixed. They got my business and I and I had kind of that epiphany of huh, wonder how often I'm losing out on business because I'm not answering the phone. So that's the, that's the logic behind why that's so important.

I think it is super, super impactful for docs listening and or watching. I'm going to drop links down below to connect and schedule a call. So full disclosure, I am involved in the marketing at Cairo Matchmakers but I also literally use the service. I use a virtual ca and we use a virtual CA in multiple ways. If you have questions for me specifically, of course everybody knows how to reach out jeff@the evidencebasedchiropractor.com otherwise I'd highly suggest getting in touch with the team at Cairo Matchmakers again. I'm going to drop the link down below. Click the link Schedule a quick discovery call. If you're not sure if a virtual CA can help, ask the question. But I think we've highlighted many great use cases. Whether you are somebody looking to build and grow on social through organic growth and or video editing, whether you're looking for simple data transfer, whether you're looking for better reporting and analytics which almost no doc does with consistency, or whether you are looking for the phones which are absolutely a given in my opinion for everybody listening and watching, having your phones answered and the cost to have a virtual CA do that you is fractional compared to the output you will receive on the back end. So Alan, we're up against it. I thank you so much for taking time out of your day, coming on and chatting and I'm going to encourage everybody listening to reach out to Chiral matchmakers and talk about how a virtual CA can help them as we head into next year. Thank you man.

Thank you Jeff. Appreciate it.

Jim, thank you so much for watching this video on the Evidence Based Chiropractor channel. If you don't want to miss a single thing, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. Subscribe so you can get notifications of every video we put out. And we put out new content each and every week, so be sure to subscribe today.