Sell Less Profit More
29 Oct 2021 · 16 min
Matt Gallogly shows cash-based medical practice owners how to boost profits by focusing on the most lucrative 20% of services and patients. He uses the 80/20 principle to cut low-margin offerings, then walks through a case study where eliminating low-priced erectile dysfunction plans and expanding premium packages increased revenue while reducing workload.
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Welcome to the Practice Profit System podcast. Do you own a cash-based practice? Are you looking to start one? Tired of working endless hours and still not making enough money? Want to fire your insurance company? Then you're gonna love our podcast. Each episode is full of insights and proven strategies to grow your practice to 7 figures and more, allowing you to take more time off, make more money, and no longer have to take insurance reimbursements. Plus, get a free copy of my book, The Anatomy of a 7-Figure Medical Medical Practice, where I detail my entire journey to creating my own 7-figure practice. Just go to www.srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. You just pay $7.95 in shipping and handling, and you'll also get over $1,197 in free bonuses. That's www.srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. Now on to our show.
Hey everybody, Matt Gallogly here with the Practice Profit System, and today I want to talk to you specifically about how to sell less and profit more. Now, if you watched my interview with Dr. Mark Haas up in Canada, then you will have a little bit of a primer on this. In fact, if you haven't listened to that interview, you might want to go listen to that one first before you listen to this, or you can listen to it afterwards, whatever makes best sense for you. But we're gonna talk specifically about this great subject of how to sell less and profit more. First, I have to give you a little bit of context so that you understand where this comes from. This is not some crazy idea that I have about selling less and profiting more. And this is not some theory that you just kind of put into place and hope that it works. This theory or this concept is more than a theory. It's actually based on science. And it's based on the science of Vilfredo Pareto, who was an Italian economist at the beginning of the 20th century. Now, he developed a concept called the 80/20 principle, and that is the basis through which we're going to teach today, the concepts that I'm gonna share with you. And we're gonna dig really, really deep into this, and we're gonna show you more than the surface of the concept of the 80/20, but how you can apply it each and every single day into your practice. Now, before I go into that, I wanna remind you that if you are listening to this prior to November 6th and 7th, have the opportunity to attend a free 2-day training with me in Charlotte, North Carolina, where we're going to talk about scaling and growing your practice. There is absolutely no charge for this. Now, some of you have asked, what's the catch? Well, I guess maybe the only catch is that you have to come to Charlotte. I am not going to be streaming this online digitally at all. I'm not going to be making any recordings of it available after the event. This is for people who are wholly committed and all in to growing their practice. Now, you're going to notice I use that phrase quite a bit. that I always look for people to work with who are all in, who are wholly committed. And the reason why is I love to work with doctors, but I want to work with people that really want to scale and grow their practices and do what it takes to be able to do it. So if that's you, if you are tired of struggling and you want to scale your practice and you want to make this thing work and you are tired of beating your head up against a wall, then go check it out. Go to practicegrowthevent.com. That's practicegrowthevent.com. a short video from me and you can learn more about that event. All right, let's talk about the 80/20 principle and let's talk about how you're going to sell less and profit more. So the basic concept of the 80/20 principle is that 20% of your efforts are going to give you 80% of your results. Okay, now the interesting thing about this concept is this is a scientific, proven scientific concept. Vilfredo Pareto, who was the Italian economist who figured this out in the early 20th century, Understood that he noticed that 80% of the sunflower seeds in the head of a sunflower were in 20% of the space. He noticed that 80% of the peas in a pea pod in the plant was in 20% of the space, or 20% of the plant generated 80% of the peas. He noticed that 20% of the people controlled 80% of the wealth, and this list goes on and on. This is a fundamental change in the way that we think about business, if you think about it from a business standpoint. One of the big mistakes I see people make is they, as you know, they offer way too many things. And they have, yeah, we do this, yeah, we do this, yeah, we do this, yeah, we do this. Well, when I was doing turnarounds in the golf industry and then in other business, what we did was we started to take a look at what were the few things that we did that generated the most amount of money.
Okay.
And we tried, instead of trying to figure out how we could make all of it work better, we looked at a very small portion of what we could focus in on. And if we made that 10x better, then everything else would work a lot better unto itself. This is way, actually way before I even knew anything about the 80/20 principle. But when you think about this, if you think about this in the context and the terms of your practice, if you think about all the things that you do, What are, of the 10 things that you do each and every single day, what are the 2 things that you do that make you the most amount of money? Okay, and this is specifically procedures, types of patients that you meet with, types of, or the charges that people take, right? Meaning what are they actually billing out? And what you normally see is you see this, you'll notice that there is A very specific whole center in your business that generates the bulk of your revenue. And in reality, if you were just to focus on that 20% and get rid of all the other things, you would free up time, money, energy, all of these things in order for you to grow and scale your practice. So what are those things and how do I— how do we identify what those things are? Well, the first thing you have to do is you've got to be able to take a look at your numbers and you've got to say, all right, what is it that I sell? What is it that I produce that generates me the most amount of money? That's the first thing. The second thing you have to look at is, of all those things that are generating me money, What are the ones that generate me the most amount of money that require the least amount of my involvement? Okay, and which one generates me the most profit?
Okay.
So when you factor those 3 things together, what happens is that you start to identify a particular type of customer, particular type of messaging, a particular type of offer, and a particular type of procedure that they will Buy over and over again. So I'll give you an example of this. I'll give you an example first and foremost in my clinics. One of the things that we noticed was we had all of these— now we were pretty specific about what we did. We did trimix injections to fix erectile dysfunction, self-administered trimix injections, and we had 50, 100, and 200 dose plans. Okay. Well, what we noticed And as you would kind of expect, what we noticed was that the 50-dose plans were the things that sold us the most, the most number of units. Okay. But what we noticed was the middle plan, the 100-dose plan, was the one that generated us the most amount of revenue. So we may sell out of 100 units sold, 100 plans sold, let's say, in a, in a month. What we found was that 55% were the 50-dose plans, 35% were the 100-dose plans, and the remaining 10% were the 200-dose plans, the Platinum packages. And so what we decided when we started to take a look at this is we also realized that the 100-dose plan customer took less time. They came from a particular couple of lead sources. They were the least amount of headaches in customer service. Okay, so they became our core. What we noticed was that a lot of the 50-dose plans, a lot of those were on payment plans. A lot of those payment plans defaulted. We also noticed that there was a lot of redosing and order mix-ups when we were doing that. We had a lot more of those people coming in. They were a lot less compliant with the follow-up that they had to do. With regards to the procedure or to the injections. And so we made a couple of decisions. We also noticed that, though, that that group of people came from a couple of particular type advertising. So what we did— and here was some other things— we also noticed that that group that bought, the 50% that bought that lower plan, the 50-dose plan, we also noticed that they took more time on the phone. Their average call length was like 30% longer than somebody because of where they came from versus somebody from one of the other lead gen sources. So what we decided was, we decided a couple of things. One, we got rid of the 50-dose plan. Now that may sound like business suicide to most people, but just follow with me here for just a few moments. What we realized was that these 50-dose plans, while they may generate $110,000 a month for us, Their margin was very, very low. So we were generating a lot of cash, but we were having to work a lot of time, which took us away from focusing in on the higher revenue-producing clients. Okay, so what we did was we got rid of the 50-dose plan and we went to a 100-dose plan, a 200-dose plan, and a 300-dose plan. Okay, we also created a plan that was very high-end with regards to doing PRP injections and HRT pellets. So we created a top end of the pyramid. We stretched the top end of the pyramid versus where we had tested before offering 25-dose plans and stretching the bottom end of the pyramid, expanding the bottom end of the pyramid. What we found when we stretched the bottom end of the pyramid or we expanded it, our revenues actually dropped because we weren't able to spend time with the high-income people or the high-revenue-producing customer. So after we ran that test of broadening the base of our pyramid, what we decided is we decided to stretch the top of our pyramid. And we created, like I said, we created the $100, $200, and $300 plans. And here's what we found. Right at about 50% of those people who would— and we kept all the advertising the same. 50% of the people who were coming from that other, those not as strong lead sources, what we found Was that they automatically moved up to the 100-dose plan. So immediately we made ourselves more money. Okay, so we didn't really lose anything. We actually made more money because we got rid of the people that were the big headaches, simply because of pricing. And then what we did was we expanded the top end of the pyramid where we created like a $10,000 package, where before our top package I think was like $4,000. So we stretched the top of the pyramid, and what we found was our revenue. Started going up and how busy we were started to decrease, which allowed us more space for recovery, personal recovery. My doctors could take a little bit more time off. We, we created procedure days. What we found was we were a lot more efficient in our business than we were just trying to service as many people as we possibly can. So what we did from an 80/20 standpoint is we noticed who were the 20% of the people that were generating it. In our case, in all fairness, so that you're really clear on this, we found that 31% of the people were generating 72% of the revenue. And what we did was we created plans and services to take care of that 31% to expand their revenue, as opposed to where most people, what they're going to do is they're going to focus on trying to convert more of the people who don't buy. And that's going to be a waste of time generally. Okay, so, so this whole concept of the 80/20, and what it really did is we wound up selling less, seeing less patients, and our revenues and our profits went up, all because of this basic concept of what we call the 80/20 principle. So here's some things that I want you to kind of just take a look at. I want to give you some takeaways of things that you can work on between this recording and the next, and to really get an understanding as to what is it that is what's driving your business? So the first thing you need is you need data. For a lot of you, that may be very difficult to gather, but I encourage you, you either doing it or you find somebody on your team to do it. I would prefer that you do it. I actually started doing this stuff, believe it or not, on late Friday afternoons and Friday nights. Okay, this is how I'd spend my Friday nights. Uh, some people do it on Saturday mornings. Okay, whatever works best for you. But it was just something that I just would work on. And what we did was we looked at first and foremost, what is selling and what makes us the most amount of money? Okay? So if you're doing, say, $50,000 in the month, you're going to have— the 80/20 principle is that you're going to have somewhere in the neighborhood of, say, $40,000 is going to be generated by 20% of your patients/procedures. What is that? What is the thing that's generating the most amount of revenue for you? What are the things that are generating the least amount of revenue for you? And those things that are not generating revenue for you, you have to make a decision to, to stop doing. Okay. So this is a really important thing, is that you have to make a decision to stop doing those things. Okay?
That's the first thing.
The second thing you need to do then is take a look at where are these people coming from? How are they hearing about you? And if you don't have ad tracking in place, that's fine. Just, you can just talk with them and get an understanding of where they're coming from. Invest more of your money into that space. Okay? That's a really, really big thing is invest more of that money into that space. All right? So this concept of selling less and profiting more actually goes against Much of what is told to you is that, oh, you gotta hustle and you gotta offer a bunch of different things because somebody's gonna want this or want that. And I'll tell you right now, my experience is very, very clear on this. And my experience, not just of me personally, but also the results of what my clients get. And that is very specifically, when you begin to offer less and you get more and more specific about what you do and who you are, the more your profits and your revenues go up.
up. So take a look at it.
Highly recommend that you get a book from my friend Perry Marshall on the 80/20 sales and marketing. It is a brilliant, brilliant book. Um, it will dive into this topic even more.
Take a look at it.
I think you'll find it very, very helpful and beneficial. All right, until the next time, join us on our next podcast. And, uh, as always, if you could do us a favor, rate us, give us a 4 or 5-star review, post a review, let us know what you think. We want to hear your feedback. I appreciate it so much. Have a great day, everybody. Talk to you soon. Bye-bye.
Thank you so much for listening. If you liked this episode, take a moment and share it with your fellow medical professionals, or post a positive comment and rate it on wherever you just listened. Now don't forget, you can get a copy of my book, The Anatomy of a 7-Figure Medical Practice, for free. Just pay $7.95 in shipping and handling, plus you'll get over $1,197 in free bonus material. Simply go to To srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. That's srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. Thank you so much, and we'll see you next week.
