What It's Like Working with Medical Doctors as a Chiropractor | Logan University 2018

So Today's speaker is Dr. Jeff Langmeid of the Evidence Based Chiropractor. Dr. Langemid has a lot of awesome experiences working with orthopedic surgeons in a medical setting, but also with his specialty as social media and marketing for chiropractors to other healthcare providers. Without further ado, Dr. Langman.

Thank you. Thank you. All right, how's it going? The next, like, 45 minutes will be super casual. So. So I don't have, like a big presentation or pitch session or anything like that. What I'm going to do is I'll talk about kind of my story within chiropractic, and then I'll just kind of open it up. Like, if you guys are thinking about joining a multidisciplinary practice, how to do it? What's been my experience with whatever. If you have marketing questions, awesome. However you want to go with that is cool, but I figured I'd give like 10 or 15 minutes of context and then we'll just open up and jam on stuff. Is that cool? A little bit about kind of my story. I'll just tell it from the beginning and then we'll just kind of go through the whole thing. So it's probably something I don't talk about very much. I talk a lot about symptoms, a lot about how to take care of it, a lot about marketing and research and all that. But kind of where I got to that is, I think, a fairly unique thing. And probably everybody in here is starting to think about, what do I want to do afterward, which direction do I want to go? Am I scared? Is it hard? Is it easy? I don't know. So I'll give you my insights and then we can open it up. I got into chiropractic because my dad got hurt. So I wanted to be an endoscopic surgeon, knee specifically, since I was in, like, fourth grade. Which is total weirdo move when you're in fourth grade, by the way, when you're doing, like, all right, let's do a presentation. Somebody's like, I have the baking soda volcano. And I'm like, I want to do knee surgery. It makes no sense whatsoever. It's like totally geeked out territory. But I was super into it. But as I got into college, I was like, man, man, it's pretty hard to do that. And staring down a 10 millimeter tube for 40 years kind of sucks. Like, that's not very dynamic. So I was deciding what I wanted to do, and my dad hurt his low back. Classic story. So then he goes to See a chiropractor. They'd been like, saw chiropractors in the past kinda, but not really. My dad hurts his low back, goes to see this guy in Rhode Island. I grew up in Rhode island and he is miraculously better. And he had like disc issues going on basically. Now, in hindsight, right, he had pain down his leg. So Dr. Tim Warren was this chiropractor's name. And he was in Warwick, Rhode island, right outside of Providence. And my dad is getting better and he's like, next time you're home from college, you gotta talk to Dr. Warren. I'm like, okay, cool. So I go up for Christmas break right around this time of year actually, many moons ago, and I go in to meet Dr. Warren. Little do I know that Dr. Warren is the alumni representative for Palmer in Rhode Island. So. So he's like, how you doing? Ever thought about being a chiropractor? No. But he literally picks up the phone. I'll never forget this. It sounds like movie style. He picks up the phone and calls Palmer and is like, here's somebody you want to talk to. So they had their grips in me immediately, right? So they sent me all this information. And as I learned more about what he did, the more I was like, this is actually a lot of what I believe that I didn't know for a couple years. And it like never really catches fire. So at the time, I've also played music forever, so I was touring with my band. So we were typically gone Thursday through Monday. And then I'd practice like Tuesday, Wednesday and half day Thursday before we went out again. And some weeks I would take off. Not a good way to run a business, by the way, either end of that. So I did that for years, believe it or not, that existed for years, which is absolutely insane to think back on. But eventually the band broke up and we were saying, okay. I was saying to myself and my wife, like, what are we going to do? So that's when we had both. I went to University of Tampa for undergraduate school. So we said, let's go back to Florida. When we went back to Florida, I had an inn with a large orthopedic group, Florida Orthopedic Institute. They're intertwined with the hospital, meaning that their chief of every division is the chief of the orthopedics at all the hospitals. So they do full body, hip, ankle, knee, shoulder, 50 some odd surgeons, a dozen clinics, 700, 800 employees, PT, the whole works, right? So they are a deeply embedded and highly profitable group. I had an in with them and we could talk about this a little bit more after I complete this whole thought. And I got a position as the second chiropractor they had on staff in one of their satellite clinics. So that was my first exposure insurance based, you know, in outpatient hospital, that whole game and system. Right. So eventually that got me on the radar of Laser Spine Institute, which just literally, coincidentally happens to be headquartered in Tampa, Florida. So LSI liked what they saw with FOI Florida Orthopedic and said, we want to start doing conservative care. And throughout a two year negotiation period, which again is outrageous and extreme, it took me two years to leave FOI and come to terms with lsi. I went over to Laser Spine Institute for about three years and during that three years I acted in multiple roles that we can talk about in a few minutes. But I kind of jumped at that point from patient care at Florida Orthopedic. I was seeing patients day in and day out to business executive side, building out programs, meeting with the executive team, talking about marketing, making decisions that way. So that kind of brings us up to about a year ago I went solo. So I've been doing evidence based chiropractor for eight years, for about what seems like 7 and 0.9 of them. Nobody gave a crap whatsoever, at least from my point of view. But then it got to the point where I was in demand enough and I was working 18 hour days every day, seven days a week for two years. Of the three that I was at Laser Spine Institute, unsustainable long term. So it was a good opportunity to say about a year ago, okay, I have enough legs under me with my business, my brand, I'm gonna go all in on it. So that's kind of where I stand today. So I am in a very fortunate and very unique position that like you are watching me do my job right now. I basically travel around, shoot video, talk about health. There's the podcast, there's the videos, there's all that fun stuff. But that's kind of my road, which is, I think every chiropractor's road is non traditional, but mine perhaps is a little more bizarre than most because I've been an associate, I've been a clinic owner, I've been practicing in a hospital based orthopedic group and then more on executive side of an outpatient surgery group specifically devoted to that. So it's really a bizarre mix of things that you end up seeing. When I was in my practice, I didn't have 2 cents to scrape together Then when I'm at Laser Spine Institute, we have seven and eight figure marketing budgets. That's a big difference. So you get to see a lot of what's behind the curtain. You. And that's ultimately not as a pitch, but that's ultimately what I think I bring back to chiropractic is I've seen the other side of the coin and how the other guys are doing it. And I've also seen how we can be effective, how we can be utilized, how we can make money, and how we can have careers in that system. So that's where I kind of say my whole brand is marketing and research, equal parts.

Can you talk about the niche that you had to be able to get into that hospital setting?

This will be shocking. I was not the best looking guy, nor was I the best clinician. So you don't need to be either of those things. So that's good for most of us in this room. Maybe a couple exceptions, right? You need to find who's the decision maker and what you bring to the table. Very clean, very easy. So here's the thing. I said it was the second chiropractor, right? I went to that group when we moved down there. I knew they had one chiropractor. David Rayna is his name. He's a great doc. He still practiced with them in Tampa, Florida. Great, great chiropractor. I went to David and I started shadowing Dave. All the time. Started shadowing him. You have to be astute to realize if it's true. I realized at first, I'm like, dave, are they hiring? Two months later, I realized Dave doesn't have. He's not a shareholder in the group. He's not making any decisions. He's an employed physician. Is he respected? Yes. And we'll get back to that in a minute. But he's not a decision maker. You have to identify these things. So what I would do is I'd shadow Dave. I just kept asking questions. Who do you report to, Dave? What have you seen? Who's the biggest shareholder? Who's the power players here? And as you're just around, you start to see that develop before your eyes. So as time went on, I'm shadowing Dave. And I'm like, they're not exactly calling me, you know what I mean? To do anything. But kept grinding, kept grinding and kept grinding. Then lo and behold, what I found out was that a gentleman named Paul Lopez, a physical therapist, was their director of therapy. And interestingly, because chiropractic with their group is not surgical. It falls under therapy. Paul is not Dave's boss. The PT is not the boss of the chiropractor, but he kind of helps with the scheduling. The chiropractor is this weird. This is unbelievable. It was this weird splintered thing in the group, right? So what I find out is Paul is the guy. So what do I do is I go to my network of people, and I did find out. Stroke of luck. I found out that my wife's very good friend knew Paul casually. Friends. So I got through her the ability to have a meeting with Paul. But here's the key thing. Identify the decision maker. It could be a coo, it could be a director of therapy. It could be the chiropractor himself. You need to identify who's gonna make the decision then. What I did is I went into Paul and I just pitched at the time, if anybody thought. I like. I don't like football, really. I like hockey and boxing. But Bucks had Raheem Morris. He's like the worst coach ever at the time, but he had this saying. He was like, if somebody's got to be great, why not us? And like, FOI was the official docs of the Bucs, of course. So I went in, and that was like, my pitch. Somebody's got to be great, why not us? You guys are missing out on X, Y, Z opportunity by only having David. You have 12 clinics. You have all this, you know, you have all this paid for. It's just straight business, you know? So I'm talking about you have these clinics with this much overhead you're already paying for. You have space in these clinics that's not being used. You are opportunity cost. My salary can be displaced by that easily based upon the production numbers we can get going. And you already have top of funnel. You have so many people, you can't keep track of them. You're the most inefficient group, which all these groups are, by the way, ever created. If I only saw the people who didn't return from therapy that they just don't even call. I need to hire four associates underneath me. So I basically gave a straight business pitch. And Paul said, I like it. Let me get you in touch with our chief operating officer, the coo. I went back two days later, pitched the same thing to the coo, and then a week later, they were like, yeah, let's do something now. With that being said, I'll go one step farther. And this is like super inside baseball tips. What I found out was this. And this is like, this is the salt analogy, right? Salt is really good when used sparingly. So you want to be careful when you use. What I'm going to tell you right now. What I found out was that physical therapy, this is somewhat technical. Florida law dictates, in many states, law dictates that if a physician owned group owns a therapy clinic, then they can bill therapy at a a physician supervised level, AKA more money. Now here's the thing. FOI had this unique situation where they had a satellite clinic. 12 clinics, 10 of them had surgeons in them one day a week, rotating through. They had this really weird satellite clinic that only had pt. That clinic they had to bill differently for they were losing, they weren't losing money, believe me, they were making plenty of money. But it made everything a lot harder. The amount, as soon as I sat in a seat there in the corner and looked at the wall, the of amount, the amount of money they were paying me was offset by how much more they could bill. Now it was physician supervised therapy for every therapy that was going on in that office. Because the law dictates, it doesn't matter if it's an md, a DO or a dc. If you're an employed physician within the group and you are within the premises at X amount of hours per week, you're able to bill. These are things everybody in this room needs to know and they are things you will need to never know unless you hear somebody that's done it. Because how the hell would you know that? That's completely bizarre. But that is about finding those opportunities. There's other. At lsi I did some different things. But at foi, that was really the reason why it worked and why they were so quick after the presentation to be like, yeah, because they saw. I didn't even know that at the time. But my pitch was good enough that they understood that and knew it. And it was like, this is the guy. That's a good question. What other questions can I answer? Yes, with that situation, did you negotiate a salary or did you tell them how much money you think you could bring in and what you might want? How did that go? Yeah, it was a double net contract. So they offered me. My negotiation skills were poor at that point in time, so I would say it was more like a reception of an offer. But yeah, I negotiated the hell out of it. So they sent over an offer and what it was was double net, which is typical and makes sense. So what it would be would be this. These were not the numbers, but I'll just kind of say an example, $80,000 per year. And then after my earnings grossed 160, we did a 6040 split on every dollar earned by me after that. But my salary also included like health insurance, three weeks paid time off, a million dollars in life insurance, 2000 or 3000 for continuing ed per year. Again, I say this, actually what you'd normally expect if you weren't a chiropractor is what they offered me. So they were bamboozled into thinking that I was a doctor, so they offered me the doctor package. So that's kind of what it was. So, yeah, I mean, it was very, very nice at the time. Obviously there's not many of those, but, but that's a typical thing. And the 6040 on the back is where you could probably have the most negotiating power. Who gets 60, who gets 40 kind of thing. But typically a double net is what is standard industry practice outside of chiropractic, but easily applied within chiropractic.

How did you go about developing the brand chiropractor, like all this stuff. And you said like 7ish years.

Yeah, just super long and super slow. So, so when I thought of the name, the evidence based chiropractor, it actually wasn't to make a statement, it was available. So I was like, that's good. All right, cool. All right. So. So, so yeah, I mean, I thought of the name, the evidence based chiropractor, and then to start the brand, I've went through multiple iterations. So the, the origin of the evidence based chiropractor was an interesting story. Right. So it's actually a continuation of the story of starting at foi. So I start at foi. I've told this story on stage a couple times, but I start at FOI and literally I show up and there's no patients to be seen. This is how I learned that they were going to make money whether or not I saw patients or not, just by sitting there. So I show up and there's zero patients to be seen. I start marketing to people in the community and making flyers. And they were literally like, dude, you can't use our logo on like these crap flowers that you're making your own. Like, we have branding here. Can't just be all cowboy on us. So I was like, okay, well what am I? Like, can you make me this stuff? Sure, we'll put it in the queue for next quarter. Like, what am I going to do between now and then? So I had this miraculous thought. I'm going to, I have to get referrals. From the other guys that I'm working with. There's no other way. They're not going to let me go external. I need to go internal. So that's how I was like, okay, well I'm going to show up at the hospital, Grant, like, where? Where are they? In surgery, at their clinics and at these things called grand rounds, which I had no idea, never heard of before. So I just started showing up to all of them and that's what started the process of me saying, like, okay, like what works here? I did a whole bunch of crap that didn't work whatsoever. And probably super embarrassing in hindsight, but I started to learn, okay, they're like making decisions based upon some of the research. They actually kind of care about that. You need to. The reps are in their offices all the time, so they're wicked busy. You need to have consistency. I just started to piece together about how do you bridge the gap and build these relationships. That's what eventually became the evidence based chiropractor. Nobody else is talking about this, especially 10 years ago. Nobody else is teaching this. And quite frankly, even those who are don't know what the hell they're talking about because they're not doing it. So that's what became the evidence based chiropractor. The initial model of it was a Facebook page and a website that did not have my name or face or anything on it and had very, very terrible branding. Like, I made the logo and it was horrible. But I just started putting up content all the time. Just put content, content, content. So I started just driving content a couple years in. I said, okay, this has to be identifiable to a person because it just looks like this weirdo shell company that's like really scammy. So that's when I was like, okay, I'll be the face of it. So that's when I was like, okay, I'm gonna be involved with this. Then I started saying to myself, three or four years ago, I was like, I should do a podcast. One thing I'm good at is, I think is seeing what happens next. I'm really good at picking out like good restaurants and bars, I think Paul will say. But I apply that to other things as well. Like I just, I kind of have this weird knack of like seeing something before it happens, right? So I started the podcast, which is now the biggest one in chiropractic by far, so most listened to, I should say. So I started that then like a year and a half ago. So I did that like two years ago. Then I was like, okay, I need to do video. I actually knew I needed to do video four years ago, but I didn't start because I was suffering from the five commandments of video. You think you look weird, sound weird, don't know what you're talking about, and everybody hates you. And that happens, by the way. So then I just said, but then the slide after that is get the hell over it. So I got over it and just started. And then that's what started. Now the. So it's been iterated, right? It was mostly text, what I'd say. Then I added in an audio component, then I added in a video component. And that's on the brand building aspect of it. How it's monetized is a little bit different, but I'm happy to talk about it, but that's kind of how I built it. So consistency, blind perseverance and not giving in as with anything in life.

So you said this is your job, is to do these podcasts, to make these videos. What do you think is realistic for either a practicing clinician or a current student to try to model off the evidence based chiropractor?

I think all of it, meaning when I was working nine hours a day at Laser Spine was the period of some of the biggest growth of the evidence based chiropractor. So I don't believe time is an excuse. I believe the desire and ability to work at it is the number one thing. And then being smart about it, I'm pretty technology savvy. So. So yes, I know how to use some of the tools to expedite things like software products. I just know how. I taught myself how to use all of it. I spend about 50% of my time at technology conferences and entrepreneurial conferences and 50% at chiropractic conferences. Because I believe, shockingly, chiropractors are 10 years behind the times in nearly everything. And that's probably giving them a lot of credit. So by going to the technology and entrepreneur conferences, you see what I'm going to call real companies. Exactly the same thing. And it makes you make friends with different people. Guys that run like a sumo company, teachable guys that are scaling from zero to $50 million in three and four years, that are 10 years younger than me. And those guys are unbelievably, if you go to the right places and meet the right people, unbelievably friendly. And the amount of information you can glean from them and apply to a brick and mortar practice is like outrageous. So to answer your question, posting Some version of content absolutely consistently is essential. If you're not doing that, then you're not going to get anywhere. I think a podcast is crucial because there's so many times where people can't watch video and audio just tends to be the best thing. So I think a podcast is a great way to go and I've just seen success there, so I'm biased towards it. But undoubtedly at the top of that whole food chain is video. Builds trust and rapport. People see you. There's so many dynamics you can do. Showcasing the practice, showcasing a case, talking and telling your story. And if you make a good piece of video, you can draw everything else out of it. You draw the audio out of it, make it a podcast. You make that one video, you take the text out of it, have it transcribed. Then you have a blog post, you have an email from that, you have social posts, three or four if it's a five minute video and, and then you link all that to each other. So this is where it's being smart about how you arrange what you're doing, which I don't think is like genius moves, but I think it's just, you just gotta. And you see it as you get started. I didn't know any of this. I learned it by doing it the wrong way and being like, holy crap, this sucks. And being completely inefficient. I ran the evidence based chiropractor. I say, which is true, for two years without collecting an email address. Now I'm like, what? Like that makes no sense. But Again, this is 2006. I didn't even know a chiropractic brand existed. I didn't know what I was doing. I just was like, oh, there's like standard process and these big companies and there was like no identifiable people. So yeah, that's what I'd say. Yes. Going off of that. Yep. Consistent content. How do you find the balance between.

That and spamming people?

If it's good, it's good. If it sucks, it sucks. Some people think that emailing them once a day is too much. Some people think that emailing them once a week is too much. Some people think once a month is too, too much. So you can't worry about the individual person. You have to look at numbers. And if you're putting out things that are of value to your audience, this is where it cuts down to building audience. Right. You need to know who you're talking to. If your ideal client, not that your ideal client needs to be this niche, but if your ideal client is a CrossFit person and you're talking about some geriatric thing for a week straight just doesn't make sense. But if you know your ideal client is into health and nutrition and you're touching on different topics that are relevant to their life, you can't tell them enough. The other thing to keep in mind is, you know, how much you put out, meaning this. I know I put out a lot of stuff all the time. And what happens? I'm like, man, I talked about neck pain eight times. Well, I talked about eight. I feel like I talked about it a million times. But you know what happens. And my reach is relatively for chiropractic, relatively large, not for other industries, right? So I have about 10,000 out of the 40,000 practicing chiropractors that follow the evidence based chiropractor page. About 25% market penetration. That Facebook post will reach 1,000 people and then the video will be watched by 250 and they'll click through on 50. I reached 50 out of 40,000 potential and 10 like no, tell them again and tell them again and tell them again. Because just because you know you're saying doesn't mean anybody else saw it. So consistency is absolutely crucial. I was just wondering if you ever do any like in office consulting when you travel a little bit, a little bit. Here's the challenge with that is that in my opinion, to do things right, it would be teaching what I've learned over eight years and spending so much time that I might as well use that time to build my own business rather than somebody else's. So to do a really deep dive. To answer your question, there's two layers of what I try to do with that. One is create products and services that are scalable. Smart chiropractor, the evidence based chiropractor, plug and play products around that that don't require as much of my personal time, I create all of it. But then it can be distributed. Whether one person buys or 1,000 people buys, it's the same thing, right? So that's one aspect that's low cost, lower efficiency, higher cost, higher efficiency is that in the spring, spring I'm going to have some of my first. I'm going to do two events per year from now on that'll be within Tampa and they'll be in some ways, to be honest with you, similar to what's going to happen tomorrow. But there'll be multi day just with me with groups of 10 to 20 docs where we actually do it. We break down websites, write copy, write content, write ads, shoot videos, do all that stuff in one sitting. And that's how I think I'm going to be able to sketch. And at least my idea is how I'm going to be able to scale a little bit more of diving deep. But one on one is really tough in addition. So I don't say this to this isn't about bragging whatsoever. But I run evidence based chiropractor. Chiro office coverage is a staffing service I run and then smart chiropractor I'm involved in. Then I have a spinal diagnostics company that's brick and mortar in Tampa that I just started and a consulting company that we do one on. Me and a partner do one on one consulting, but we do it with surgical groups and pain management groups that can quite frankly pay nice monthly retainers. So you gotta kinda wade the time for money kind of things at a certain point. And some of that comes from the previous experience, right? People saw a laser spine and they saw money. So it's a lot easier quite frankly now for me to go to a pain management guy who's like I do 5 million a year and I'd love to do 40 million a year. And I'll just say we've seen triple. That starts to be pretty compelling.

This is kind of a broad question, but what do you think it would take to change public perception of chiropractor?

Right?

So somebody who hasn't been to a chiro, they either have the bad stereotype or they don't know anything about chiropractic.

I think it would take $1 billion. So a lot of money, I mean a lot of money, a lot of time, I mean anything, right? How do people using it? Using the service is the best way, but that's always downstream. Exposure is number one, marketing and advertising. So I think it's marketing and advertising is what drives everything down. Then if enough people utilized it now it becomes ubiquitous, right? Because the good thing as I talk to a lot of people about, especially the members of mine, we do calls and things like the, the great thing about chiropractic is this. You give an NSAID or a drug, they suck, they're like barely above placebo, they have all these side effects, it's terrible, it's complete garbage. But what we DO is like 90% efficacy. Even if you're not very good, it's really awesome. So people just need to use it. But getting people to use it is super hard. Myth, conjecture, history, hate chiropractors heard A story of somebody's brother's mother, sister, and it's all complete junk. But how do you overcome that experience? How do you get somebody to come in and have that experience? Marketing and advertising, There are many of our organizations that are doing great things. Don't hold your breath. Do it yourself. Because the tides of all organizations can change with politics, they can change with leadership, and they can make strategic decisions that might be incongruent with the way you want them to go. And really, are they going to trickle down to people coming into your practice? Hopefully. But they've had 100 years and we haven't seen it yet. So do it yourself. Focus on your audience and grind them. That's the magic. Yep.

So for us still in school right.

Now, what kind of major recommendations would.

You do you have for us?

Start building your brand now, yesterday or today, if you didn't start yesterday, and tomorrow, if you are too tired or hungover to start today. And I say that because of this reason. That's a great question. Here's the thing. I want you to envision this. And these aren't like, wonderful. I'm not giving like these crazy clinical pearls of how to adjust somebody to the moon today. Obviously, this is like straight up business. If you come in and see me in a year and a half and I have four clinics now running in Tampa, Florida, and I'm trying to hire great docs, you come in to see me and you say, I'm awesome. I'm so excited, just like everybody else. I can't wait to get started and I'm going to do a great job for you. I'm going to say, man, that's a great guy or gal, in whatever case. And that sounds good. Let me interview the rest of the people. And when you come into me now, this is me again. But I think this is going to trickle down to other docs, especially by the time you graduate. Now you come in to see me and you say, so excited. I'm going to do a great job. I can't wait to get started. Great. I'm going to interview the rest of the people. Oh, yeah. Did I not tell you? There's about 10,000 people that follow me on Instagram. I have an email list of 700 that I've been communicating with weekly. I have about 600 people following me on YouTube and 20,000 hours of footage watched over the last year. Can you start on Monday? This is real life. The more that you build, you will have power and leverage. And quite frankly, if you do A good enough job doing that, you'll never come in to interview with me. So what if we have no idea.

Where to start on a brand?

Then tell about your story of what's going on. Chances are, I would assume that in the last week you either learned something here that you agreed with or disagreed with. And I think at that point that's a great opportunity. Now, again, you want to be careful. All this kind of stuff, you're not going to go out and just call out a professor or something. It's not going to get you anywhere. But in terms of saying, hey, and I think it's about just being completely transparent. I don't think it's about, oh, I'm going to pretend to be a chiropractor when I'm not licensed or not, hey, the brand can be the journey of a student, chiropractic, physician, whatever you want to say. And then I think it's about hopping on. Hey. One really interesting thing I learned this week, if you throw a baseball like this, it's not as good as throwing a baseball. Like, I don't know. So, like, whatever, right? Or like, you know, one thing I, we got talked. I dove into a textbook this week, and I just don't see this happening in real life. Is mitochondria. Who knows what that is? I still don't know. But this is what I disagree with. You know, I don't know. Like, I think you have way more than you know. And I do a lot of what I'll call higher level stuff. Like, if it hurts down your arm, then, you know, but when you're starting, you should be as niche as possible. Talked about this a couple times, but, you know, I called somebody out in a previous talk I was doing. I was like, you know, if you were to create something today, what would it be? And he was like, into baseball. So he's like, talk about a shoulder. I'm like, not good enough. He was like, what does that matter? A shoulder of baseball players, okay? Baseball players span the gamut. If you are a high school student who's missing games due to a tendinopathy in your shoulder, here are the three exercises you need to do to get better. Starting tomorrow. That's a compelling piece of content. My shoulder hurts. If you're talking to everybody, you're talking to nobody. So drill down, drill down, drill down, drill down. Low back pain. You have 10,000 videos that can go with that. If you have low back pain because you're a, you know, a single mom who sits at the computer Too long answering phones in a call center. I want to tell you two things. You want to know what? It's going to be the same damn two things for a lot of other people. But if you start pitching it that way, you'll come out different. Not everybody's going to see it. It's going to hit keywords that are different. Right. I'll tell everybody here you cannot compete on back pain, neck pain, or anything else. You can't. I'll beat you because I'll spend more money and then everybody else will beat me. Meaning every hospital group, every orthopedic group, every stem cell group, every spine device company, and every other professional that makes $500,000 or more per year. They will crush all of us. But you have a huge opportunity when you start drilling down, because you can get to the first page of Google on a lot more stuff than you think. And you do that. And that's what I've seen. You start doing that. Like my website visits, they just continually do this. Just long tail keywords. Yep.

So you said it took you seven plus years to build that traction. How did you know that you weren't doing things wrong and that that moment was eventually going?

I guess so. A couple things. One is that you never know until it's hindsight. Right. But that's where I think it's important to, you know, like, for me, I was like, continuing education. They don't let you teach business or marketing, number one. That's a fatal flaw that everybody should be like pitchforks in the air about. That's beyond insult. Okay. So I try to stay out of the politics of things, but we'll talk privately about anything you like. So regardless of state or national associations and how they go about determining that, that's where I said I need to go where people are. So what do I do? I go to San Francisco three to four times per year. I hang out with people that are doing it at scale and I ask questions about what they're doing and just learn, learn, learn, learn, learn. So I think it's I did do it wrong forever. Everybody does just as the same as your first video that you shoot will be pretty bad. Unless, as I say, you're Ryan Seacrest, probably came out of the womb, like ready to hold a microphone. Unless you are him, you are just going to look back. Like, we talk about this every single time, Paul and I, but it's like my first video. When Paul came on for us to work together, I was like, here's a video I shot and it literally looked like a hostage situation. Like, I had bright lights, and I literally. It's bright lights. And I'm just like, hey, do you need chiropractic coverage? Use chiral. It's like, wow. Like, that's super scary. Like, I can't believe that business actually exists today with that. But. So it always starts out bad, but that you have to iterate. And it's way better to iterate now when you're like, okay, like, it's all upside down. If I screw up now, it's like barring some crazy licensing. You know what I mean? Like, just being an idiot. Like, besides just doing something completely off the rails wrong, you will just get the reps out of the way now. And then when it counts, AKA you have a mortgage that you need to pay, you're gonna feel a lot better about doing it. So I think it's just about doing it and then learning or just looking at, like, companies. I don't know. Like, there's a lot of healthcare companies, quite frankly, that have popped up that, like, I don't know what you want somebody to be like, do you ever heard of, like, move U? They have, like, these bazillion people. Like, I don't know anything about. This is not my. Not my gig. Right. But I'm like, if I was into that, I would probably just be like, I want to model that they did it. I went to school with, with Josh Axe. I'm loosely affiliated with some things that he's doing at this point in time. You want to know what I've learned from one of my friends now who's his lead social media strategic advisor? Model. Model. Model model. Meaning that works. Do the version of it. That works. Do the version of it. That works. Do the version of it. Everybody's done it. Many people have done what everybody in this room wants to do, see what they're doing and copy it. Don't try to be everybody wants to then be Josh Axe. Josh Axe isn't Josh Axe. He's Josh Axe, the brand. You can't do that now. He had supreme advantage. He's had multiple partnerships. He did a lot of inside stuff that we could certainly talk about that enabled him to get where he was and is today where it's going in the future as well. But what you can do is your version of that. Be you, but learn the tactics and strategies that he utilized and just see what he's doing. It's all a Gary Vaynerchuk thing. Like, watch what I'm doing. See what kind of content Josh is putting out. You see one that has 10,000 likes and one that has 1,000. 10,000 is probably a good one to take a look at and see if you have something to say about. Now expect that you're going to get one, you know what I mean? But he did too at some point in time. Do you know much about the Canadian market? I have plenty of members that work with me that are in the Canadian market. So I think that there's a lot that overlaps. Obviously the insurance system is a little bit different and things like that. What I've seen is that still important to bridge the gap with other healthcare providers that you resonate, whether it's md, do, midwife, doula, it doesn't matter. The more friends you have that are seeing people, regardless of how those people get there, if they know trust and like you and you build their relationship, they'll refer. The second component is, I think similar to our system. I mean the best way, you know, cash is king, right? So it's like, yeah, do services that are, I mean, and I'm not sure on the intricacy of the Canadian system on, you know, some guys I talk to, it sounds like they, they're really invested in the, in the socialized, you know, national health insurance. Some I talk to seem way more outside of it. So I think there's just a lot of parallels to United States where it's like, I don't know, some people like 99%, you know, Medicare and Medicaid, not Medicaid, but Medicare here. And it's just volume because you can't make enough money. You know, some people, you know, they have a slant of that or most of their services is cash based. And I think it's just looking at the market and saying, okay, who do I want to see and what's a viable price point and then what makes sense? That's the other thing. I think chiropractors get a little bit like you think you get so excited as a clinical aspect of things. You have to also keep in mind the business aspect of things. Meaning just because if you want to do a hypervolt this 27 other things and spend an hour and a half and the person pays you $15. I hope you really like having a great hobby because that's what that's going to be really quickly, right? Just doesn't. It's not going to add up. So strip what you can or can't charge for, determine what's the minimal viable product that you can offer. And then add on what makes sense. Now, everybody hates to hear that because it's like, man, I don't want to hold anything back from somebody that kind of sucks. Well, I probably say you want to stay in business and pay your rent more than. You know what I mean? Than not. Right. So you have to make those decisions. And I think the same thing holds true. Surgeons would love to do plenty of things, but if they don't have FDA clearance, if they don't have the availability to do it, if their OR is an asc, an ambulatory surgery center that can't keep somebody overnight, they're restricted. We're the same way. You have to look at what you can do. How much can you charge for it and strip the fat? Just because you can do it doesn't mean you have to or should. Yep.

Is having a Facebook page just as useful as having a website or those people, or do you have to have both?

I like to have both. And I'll say it. Why? I used to pay a lot less for my advertisements on Facebook than I do today. Facebook will continue to evolve. They'll continue to charge more money. That's their right. And I never complain because it's still the best, cheapest way to reach people, but it's an uncontrollable asset. I like controllable assets, so I recommend always having a website. You need to have email collection. It's kind of hard on Facebook, it's not that bad. You can use bots. I've been getting into that. You can do a lot of things there, but always have your own website, in my opinion, because you own that turf and it's a controllable asset, regardless of the platform. I think being diversified on platforms is the best. You don't want to just do everything and do all of it poorly. There's a fine line there. But picking a few that resonate, like Twitter, I'm not good at. So I don't really do Twitter, quote, unquote. I'm more vested on Facebook and my website. LinkedIn probably third and then Instagram, but Instagram goes a little more personal, but somewhere in between kind of thing.

So coming from someone that doesn't really use social media a lot or post anything, actually, even personally.

If you were.

To start, you said yesterday would for your brand, for yourself, would you want to start maybe on your personal account, start off or actually create like a business account or just a community account on Facebook? Like if you're going to start posting content, it depends.

There's no Right or wrong answer? So it depends. Is my answer to you? I probably would start with a branded account because that's just where it's. It's hard to push people around online. So if you start in one place, not that you can't change, I've changed, but like, it's just easier that way. I mean, the other thing that you can do. For instance, there is a girl that I met. I want to say her name is Cassie last year. And she was like, I want to start doing video. And basically what she did is she created a page that was like a dummy page that was really hard to find. And she just like invited like 10 people to, like, the page. It wasn't a group, it was a page. Facebook. And she had a few people, including myself. And she just would put out videos, but her intent was not to grow it. She just is like, I want to do bad videos for a while, but she was doing it right. So It'd be like 10 people, a couple of her friends, me and somebody else. And then she just would put out video content. And eventually now she's gonna then change the name, which doesn't have to change the URL, just the physical branding. She could eliminate or delete what she doesn't want seen. But now she's like, you know what I mean? I think more than the technicality of it just getting the reps in, you might not want to do video, you might want to do audio, or you might just like writing. You're going to have to do something like one, you know, you have to market. Right? So you have to decide, what do I want to do? What platform is that most closely aligned with? And then I just would go to that platform and just. I would start there. As far as whether it's personal or branded, I don't think it's. I don't think. I think it's of far lesser importance. Occasionally you could be jammed on this kind of business page that you can't like those weird anomalies. But Facebook could also change things tomorrow as well and make it so. I don't know. I think the stature of how it's built is far less important than getting it started. Can you talk about SEO stuff tomorrow? So search engine optimization, how you rank in Google? You can always pay to rank in Google. You will always be able to pay to rank in Google. But figuring out the things that you can do to get in the top five or top three without paying is absolutely crucial. And it comes back to doing the very short. We're going to go like seven hours of that tomorrow. But the very short version is creating whatever content it might be, video, audio, text that resonate with the keywords to draw you up and in and then to get traffic there. It's not only about putting out the content, but but it's about distributing it. So you need to always be thinking of both of those things because tree falls in the woods, who heard it? I don't know. But if you go tell somebody, you tell somebody else, everybody knows about it. So it's like, and yes, at first that's hard. At first that's like, yo, my mom watched my video, Cool. But it's like that's literally just the progression. So I think it's putting out the stuff, keeping it fresh and then making sure you're doing paid or free, which we'll talk about to it. Thanks, guys.