The Real Enemy In Your Business
26 Jul 2021 · 18 min
In this solo episode of the Practice Profit Systems podcast, Matt Gillogly, president of SRP Medical Marketing, opens with a personal update about battling COVID-19, using the experience as a springboard to discuss what he sees as the true obstacle to success for medical practice owners. He argues that there are no guarantees in entrepreneurship—only death and taxes are certain—and that anyone seeking a contract that guarantees business results is misguided. Gillogly contends that the real enemy is the owner themselves, emphasizing personal responsibility and ownership of outcomes. He stresses the importance of choosing mentors who have actually owned and operated clinics, not merely managed them, likening the need for authentic experience to learning from a battle‑hardened drill sergeant. Gillogly shares his own health transformation—losing weight and fixing his lipid profile after taking responsibility for his lifestyle—to illustrate the power of personal accountability. He advocates continuous business education through books, courses, podcasts, and coaching, noting that medical training rarely covers business fundamentals. While positioning himself as a guide who will show the way, he makes clear that the client must do the work; he will not guarantee results. The episode concludes with a call to action for clinicians to bet on themselves, surround themselves with experienced mentors, and commit to the hard work required to build profitable practices.
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Whoo! Yeah, uh, that was an interesting week. Uh, if you have been wondering where the heck I have been, uh, yep, I got the COVIDs. So, uh, as my friends like to say, so, uh, this last week has been a little bit of a blur, uh, but I'm gonna catch you up on everything. Uh, but more importantly, I want to talk to you about something that I thought a lot about while I was drifting in and out of sleep battling COVID, and that is Let's talk about the real enemy of your business, of your practice. Talking about practice. Hey everybody, this is Matt Gallogly and I'm with SRP Medical Marketing. In fact, I'm president of SRP Medical Marketing. Welcome so much to our podcast. I appreciate everybody's great comments and just support. It's been great to watch the podcast constantly increase in the number of viewers. If you're watching this as a video via LinkedIn or via Facebook, this is then broadcasted out to to a podcast that I have called Practice Profit Systems. Okay, so let's talk about this ending in your business. And by the way, for those of you that are curious about my experience with COVID I'll do another video on that or another podcast on that here shortly. All I wanna do is big shout out to Dr. Mickey Barber, who is my doctor and has been a long-term client Thank you so much. Appreciate you and your team. Okay, so let's talk about the real enemy in your business. So this is really interesting. So I did do a little bit of work last week. It wasn't awful and horrible, but I did sleep quite a bit. But I did a consultation with a couple of prospective candidates, and it was really interesting to me because I've been coaching people for— since 2004, 2005, somewhere in there, 2004, 2005. And I've been able to coach, like I said, well over 3,800 business owners in about 30 different niches on 5 different continents. And what's always fascinating to me is the person that goes out and wants to be an entrepreneur but is looking for the guarantee of success, which— that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Quite frankly, those 2 don't go together whatsoever. I mean, the whole reason why you become an entrepreneur is is because of the ride, of the risk, of the joy of it. I mean, if you want something safe, go work for the post office, right? And I'm always fascinated by this, okay? So I wanna talk to you about this enemy, and this is the enemy, by the way. The enemy that exists in you that prevents you from being successful are the things that I'm gonna talk about today, and I know this for a fact. I know this for a fact because I see it each and every single day. Sorry, I'm gonna try not to cough here, but I'm gonna do my best. Okay, so here's the first thing is, is there are no guarantees in life. Bob Hope once said the only 2 guarantees in life are death and taxes. He also did say in a movie that there are 3 things that a man must do alone: be born, die, and testify. But the reality— all kidding aside, there's no guarantees in life. There's a guarantee of death and taxes, and that's about it. If you are getting into being a business owner, if you want to start your own practice or you have your own existing practice and you're doing this because you're looking for guarantees, do yourself, do your family, do me, do everybody a favor and shut the damn thing down. Don't go in this direction. Don't do it. This is not about guarantees in life, folks. It's not at all. So this topic came up later on in the week. I was having a conversation. I had this conversation twice in the span of 2 hours, and I was talking about business owners doing something, coming to work with me, right? Meaning I'm going to coach them, show them what to do. And they both asked the question of, well, where's the contract with the guarantees? Now, normally, if I wasn't feeling all that great and I was on my A-game, Normally what I say to people like that is I go, let's just stop the call right here. You're not a fit in working with me because there are no guarantees. There is not a contract that can guarantee you your success. Now, there are some things that you can do to guarantee your success, but there's not a contract. Which brings me to my second point. If you are looking for someone else to guarantee your success, You're making a huge mistake. It doesn't work like that. It doesn't work like that at all. Okay, when you go out on this road to be an entrepreneur, you are making a decision about a lifestyle. And that lifestyle, that lifestyle of going out and being an entrepreneur, it's— I'm not gonna lie to you, it's a tough road. And it's a challenging road, but it's— to me, it's the best road out there. Okay, so if you need somebody to guarantee your success, you are focusing on the wrong person. You're at that point. What you have to do is if you're looking for somebody to guarantee your success, what you need to do is you need to look at yourself and you need to look at what you are doing in order to become as successful as you possibly can. Okay, so you only you. Nobody else has the control when it comes to your success. In fact, if you are looking at working with people who are going to be guaranteeing your success or guaranteeing a steady flow of customers or guaranteeing that you are going to make X amount of dollars if you do X, Y, and Z, I would run because it doesn't exist. See, that's a great pitch, right? See, I'm in marketing, right? And we spend all of our time trying to figure out what we call the hook. Okay. And the hook is the thing that you can write that if I put it together in one line, that people are going to stop what they're doing, they're going to turn in my direction and they're going to go, I want that. Okay. Now, that's a very smart thing to do from the standpoint of a marketer. However, from a business standpoint, I can tell you that most of the people in our industry, pretty much any industry, that are out there guaranteeing your success if you work with them are not being 100% truthful. And here's why I know this. I don't have to know anything about what they do. Here's why that is so true. Because the ultimate success comes down to you and only you. If you are looking to abdicate and say, look, I'm gonna go hire this group over here because they're gonna guarantee me 30 leads a month, or they're going to guarantee me that I'm going to do so many procedures a month, or they're gonna guarantee that I'm going to get some specific type of result. Well, then you are not doing the work that you have to do. See, you can't— look, I work out All the time. I'm a 3 to 4 day a week in the gym CrossFit kind of guy. All right, and if you know my story at all, um, I struggled with my weight when I got divorced about in my 50s, right at the age of 50, and I put on— I got up to like 215 pounds or something like that, and I'm 5'7, 5'8. Okay, and my triglyceride numbers and all of this were out of whack. My lipid profile was all out of whack. I struggled for a couple of years until I finally, at the beginning of the year, was able to— sorry, remnants of COVID I get all excited and I start coughing. Well, I wasn't taking responsibility. So then when I finally did, I lost the 25 pounds, I got my lipid profile in line. All that stuff. Well, you know what's funny is I just had my blood work done and my neighbors— my numbers came back elevated in a particular couple of categories. Well, it's my damn fault. It's not my doctor's fault. It's not— it's not my doctor's fault. It's not my nutritionist's fault. You know what? I started doing a few things that probably weren't really wise. Okay, I know exactly what they were, and so I change it. I take responsibility. I take ownership. Okay, but here's the thing, and I'm gonna go back to this. You have the control when it comes to your success. Nobody else, no one else has the control over this. If you are looking for these guarantees, well, then you've come to the wrong place. Because what I'm gonna do is— when I— when it's so funny when people say, well, Matt, you know, what are you gonna guarantee me when I work with you? And I want to guarantee them, as I said, I'm gonna I'm gonna, I'm gonna push your ass. I'm gonna be honest with you. I'm not gonna feed you a line of bullshit. I'm gonna show you exactly what to do. Now, what you do with this is up to you. But if you want to, if you want to debate certain things, if you want to, if you want to debate whether or not an idea is any good, you're more than happy to do that. But I'm gonna tell you this. No one else. Listen to me on this. No one else that you will work with in this industry has the experience of ownership the way I do. There is not one other quote-unquote guru in our industry who has owned clinics, started them from the square up, ground up, spent their own money on advertising, Hired over and had over 30 staff members in place, seen 50 new patients per week per clinic. That's over 3 clinics. No one else out there has done this and offers their services to coach you on how to do it. Nobody. I beg you to go find somebody else who has done this, okay, where you work directly with the guy or Or the gal. Now there's a bunch of people out there that'll be like, oh well, I was a, I was a manager. That's not the same thing of writing a paycheck. Okay, so you want to find someone who has been there, who has done that. I've always said if I were to go to Marine boot camp, I would want my drill sergeant to have been in the battle of war, who has been shot at, not somebody who has read about it in a book. Okay. And so it's, it's, you have control over this. You can choose, and you've got to choose who is your mentor. You have to have a mentor. You have to have somebody coaching you how to do this. It could be your drunk Uncle Leon, okay? Or it could be a book that you check out at the library. It could be someone like me. It could be a doctor friend of yours who has some success. But the most important thing that you have to look for when it comes to a mentor is somebody who has been there and done that. That is what you are looking for. Okay, now you've got— I'm going to leave you with this last thing here. Okay. While it's, while it's not your fault that you weren't trained on business while you were in med school or PA school or NP school or whatever you are. While it's not your fault that they didn't talk about business, it is your fault if you aren't learning about business. Let me say that again. While it may not be your fault that you didn't— you weren't taught this in college or in school, it is your fault if you aren't learning this today. And there's a couple of different ways that you can learn, right? So you'll see behind me, I have a steady flow of books. And this is just a small, small sampling of the books that I've had over the years. In my prior house, I had an entire library, and I got rid of a lot of them. Most of them donated them, figured it was time for me to pass them on, and I donated boxes and boxes to Goodwill. Um, but this is just— this is a smattering of what I have left. And the thing is, is that I'm constantly learning and reading and studying and understanding about how to run a successful business. Even though I could probably write most of the books that are behind me, I never stop learning this. And the question I'm going to ask you is, are you spending more time learning the medical side of things? Are you learning about running a business? And if you are learning about running a business, who is your mentor? A mentor can be a book, right? You can just grab a book, right? And you can say, okay, I'm going to learn from Mike Masterson, great brilliant man, by the way. And I'm gonna learn how— I'm gonna study everything that he has. He's gonna become this mentor. And the mentor can just become from reading these books. I have plenty of mentors just from reading books. Or it can be by going to courses or taking classes, or it can be from watching and listening to podcasts or things like this, or it can be, quite frankly, signing up and spending money to coach with someone. Yeah. Here is the thing. Only you are going to take the steps for you to become successful, and it's gonna be incumbent upon you and only you to become successful. It's not my job for you to become— for me to make you successful. It's my job, if you were to hire me, it's my job to show you the way. To be your guide. Nope, don't go down that path. That path is bad. No, go down this path. Yeah, but I want to go down that path. Don't go down that path. That path is bad. Go this way. Trust me on this. I've been down that path, that path over there. It's not pretty. Yeah, but this guy over here is telling me that I can guarantee that I'm going to make a lot of money with this new procedure. Don't do it. Don't lock yourself into a $150,000 new piece of equipment without testing to make sure that it's right. Go in this direction. Look, I have, I have one very simple mission. And you ready? You ready for this? My mission is to help doctors DOs, PAs, NPs, practice owners, for them to make the money that they richly deserve. It's that simple. That's what I do. Okay? I'm not an agency. I'm not, I'm not gonna run your ads for you. I'm not gonna do any of that, but I'm gonna show you the way. And if If we want it being a good fit and you like what I have to say, I'd love to work with you, but you have to do the work. It's not my job. I'm going to show you the way, but you have to do the work. It's that simple. Only you can do the work. I can't do the work for you. You can't abdicate this stuff off to me. You have to do the work. And ultimately, you, only you, not me, you and only you are the one that has to say, look, I'm going to take ownership of this. I'm not going to, you know, I'll leave you with this. I had a guy one time, this is about a year ago, and he goes, well, Matt, once you send over the contract and, you know, I'll take a look at it and go over with my attorney. I said, you can stop right there. He goes, what do you mean? I said, my contract is one paragraph. What? My contract is one paragraph. I said, I'm coaching you. There's— there is— you have to do the work. Well, you know, I don't— I think that there should be some more guarantees. And I said, there are no more guarantees. It's very simple. It's very straightforward. You— if you want to have success In business and in life, you need to continually bet on yourself. You need to constantly and continually bet on yourself. And then you have to do all— you've got to do the work. You, you've got to put the hours in. You've got to push yourself. You've got to have people around you that are going to push you. Okay? You— the Olympics are going on right now. You think You think those Olympic champions, you think that they're carping and whining and bitching and complaining about their coach? No, because they're in there doing the work. This, the athlete is doing the work that the coach tells them to do. Pretty simple and straightforward. All right. Um, hopefully I'll do another one this week. Hopefully I'll continue to feel better. Um, this is Matt Gillogly. This is the Practice Profit System podcast. And if you're catching us on LinkedIn or YouTube or Facebook, thank you so much. But remember, folks, I'm gonna leave you with this. I started this with who's the real enemy in your business. The real enemy is you. The real enemy is you. Do the work, make the sacrifices, get people around you that can show you the way, that have been there, done that. Have a great day, everybody. And I can't believe I made it through without coughing that much. Have a great day. Thanks.
