Who do you follow?

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Hey everyone, it is Matt, and welcome to the Practice Profit System. I am back from vacation, a week at the beach, and today what I want to talk to you about is who do you follow? Who are you following in your journey for your success in your practice? That's going to be the topic of today's podcast. Now, before we go any further, I do want to let you know that we have opened up 4 spots in our private client group where you get to work with me one-on-one for the next year. To learn more about that, you can go to srpmedicalmarketing.com/mentor. M-E-N-T-O-R. That's srpmedicalmarketing.com/mentor. Which brings me to my topic of who are you following? Now, before I dive into this, let me give you a little bit of background. For those of you that may or may not know my story, my father died at a very young age when I was 13 years old, actually probably about 50-plus years ago, 51-plus years ago today, I believe. Believe it or not, at the time of this recording. But the reality is, is that I didn't have a lot of mentors growing up. Now, we always have mentors. They can be our parents, they can be our brothers and sisters. And sometimes we have good mentors and sometimes we have bad mentors. But for me, without going into the gory details, and I didn't grow up in a horrible, horrible household, but basically I've been kind of sort of on my own. When I was 13 years old, my mom had to shut down my father's business. And then she went back to school in order to make a living. This was 1981. So it's not like I was living on the street or anything like that.

I wasn't going hungry.

I wasn't wasn't living in a U-Haul pickup truck or anything like that. But the reality is, is that I was very much alone and had to figure out a lot of things on my own. And over my life, I've had lots of mentors come into my life, sometimes via books like what you see right back here. I discovered the joy of reading biographies when I was 17 years old in my first year of college, and I never stopped. And to this day, I still read biographies. I'm reading another one about Winston Churchill. But here's my point, is that we have a couple of different ways That we can choose who we follow. Sometimes it's the political party we follow. Sometimes it's our faith or our religion. Sometimes it's the books that we read. But when it comes to growing your practice, or however you're going to pick who you're going to quote unquote follow, I'm going to give you a couple of key things that I've learned over the years in my 54+ years. So I'm going to do it as I normally do with a story. So when I went to college, I went to college for professional golf management. I learned how to become a golf professional. I left that industry and I left that school up in Big Rapids, Michigan, and I wound up working for Marriott in their golf division. Now, the interesting thing about working for Marriott in the golf division, especially at that time, is we were vastly different than what was in the golf industry at the time. So the golf industry at the time was a lot of private clubs, blah, blah, blah. We were very quote unquote corporatey, and we actually had a very specific Look, we were called the Marriott guys. Okay? And it was really interesting to see that because some of my friends went in a different direction and we had different beliefs and we had all these things and different ways that we looked at the industry. And the reason why I decided to join Marriott is because I saw where the golf industry was going. I saw that there was going to be less of a reliance on teaching and playing, and there was going to be more of a reliance on the business side of it.

Okay?

So then when I started my entrepreneurial journey, I didn't know what the hell I was doing. All I knew is that I wanted to my own business. And I had been successful in golf, but in my late 20s, early 30s, this desire to have my own business really, really started to just take over. But I had nobody to show me the way. No one to show me the way. My mom kind of poo-pooed it. I really didn't— none of my brothers and sisters were entrepreneurs. I had one uncle who was an entrepreneur, but my mom wouldn't really let me talk to him because he was kind of, as she said, crazy. And I didn't— all I had was I had all these people at my country clubs that I was running. And I noticed that they all, all the successful ones, they had their own business. And so this kind of just built in me that I wanted to have my own business, that this is what I wanted to do in order to have the life that I wanted to have. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't know how to go about it. All I did was I listened and I watched. And there was a man by the name of Raman Patel. And Raman Patel and I were at Augusta National for the Masters. And He was just all over me about starting my own business, and I think I've told you've probably heard me tell that story before. So here was the other thing that happened from that. Then when I started my first real business, I found somebody to follow. I found a guy by the name of Jeff Keller who taught me how to buy and sell pre-foreclosure real estate, and it was really, really simple. What he did was he said, "Go put up 100 signs. We buy houses cash." Yeah, I was one of those guys, believe it or not. And I did it. He said, "Don't put up 98. Don't put up 102.

Don't put up 50." And leave 50 in your trunk.

Don't order 100 and leave them in your garage. Put up 100 on Friday. And he said, I promise you by Monday you'll have a deal. And he told me how to do these letters and these things didn't make any sense. But I remember my then wife and I sitting in the bed and doing it exactly as he told us how to do it. And it was amazing. Within 10 days, I had my first deal and I made $60,000 profit within about 60 days. All I did is I did exactly what he told me to do. And I did another, then I did another, then I did another, then I got into coaching with him. And then when I decided to start my own coaching company, What I did was I found someone that had done it before, a guy by the name of Dan Kennedy, and I spent a ton of money with Dan Kennedy. I probably spent a quarter of a million dollars over 4 years learning from Dan how to write copy, how to market, how to create offers, how to create coaching companies, how to become an expert in your field, all based on my knowledge of real estate. And then that went on to— then there's other people that have come along, and I always— here's the thing, I always pick someone to follow. Now, it takes a little bit of time for me to sort through that, but what I look for most importantly— and I'm going to tell you how to look for this— and, and look, if this sounds like something that you're interested in and you want to research what it would be like to work with me for, for the next year to help scale your practice, or if you're starting a practice or transitioning a practice, then go to the site srpmedicalmarketing.com/mentor. But here's, here's what I really want you to get from this. Is that whether you choose me, whether you choose somebody else, whatever you do, don't go it alone. I'm gonna say that again. Whatever you do, don't go it alone. Find a mentor. Find someone who can show you the path of how to start, scale, run, and sell a successful cash practice. Preferably somebody who's done it before. So that's my first criteria is I always want someone who has done it before, who has a proven track record of doing it and doing it well. That's how I got into the medical space. There was a guy who had done erectile dysfunction clinics and he showed me the way and I paid him a big fee to learn how to do this. And I did exactly what he told me to do. And in our first 7 days of being open, we did $70,000 within— that was in January. In April of that year, We had our first $200,000 a month. And all I did was did it exactly as he told me how to do it. So that's the first thing. Find somebody who has done what you want to do and do exactly— that's part 2— do exactly what they tell you to do. Okay? That's the key. You have to find someone who has done what you want to do. And it doesn't have to be specifically in the— like, for example, you don't have to find somebody who's just done— only done regenerative, or only done erectile dysfunction, or only done anti-aging. Find someone that has done it in the cash space, not someone who's thought about it, not someone who's sold some machines in it. There's a big difference between following the path of somebody how to treat somebody and following the path on somebody of how to scale a practice. And this is one of the biggest things that I tell my clients is, look, all I'm asking you to do is just do this. Follow this path. and you have a greater chance than not to succeed. Okay, so that's— those are the first 2 things, right? Find somebody who's done it before, do exactly what they tell you to do. Because if you think about it, this is what you did when you chose your undergrad school, right? Or when you chose med school, or when you've chosen a fellowship, or somebody to study under when learning how to do a particular procedure, or buying a machine. You find somebody that is doing it and you do exactly what they tell you to do. Now, over time, you're going to adjust it and you're going to determine a better way of doing it, That's what we did in the ED space. Very quickly, I realized that there were limitations to what my mentor had taught me. And so based on my wealth of experience, we made a number of adjustments and we were able to scale to 3 locations in 18 months. And it was phenomenal and it was fantastic. It's the same stuff that I do today for my clients. Okay, so what else do I— so I told you the basic rules, do exactly what they tell you to do. I always recommend at least do it for 90 to 180 days, somewhere in there, and just follow the path and then work with them to make it your own. Okay, you're not— you don't completely abandon that person. You work with them, make it your own. A great coach will give you the basic fundamentals and then over time make adjustments based on who you are, your personality, what you want this business to be, and how you want this business to serve you. Okay, so here's the other things is— and here's what I look for when it comes to working with someone. All right, and I want you to write these down because you have to ask yourself if you're not getting the results that you want from a business side, if your practice isn't growing the way you want it to, there's probably a couple of things. This first and foremost is, are you coachable? Now, what do I mean by coachable? All right, you know, before I started coaching people in this, I used to give golf lessons. Okay, so I'm a former PGA golf professional. I understand the golf swing very, very well. And when you work with someone, the best advice I ever gave when it got to when it was giving golf lessons is don't give people too much. Give them one, maybe two things to work on. During— between each lesson. That's it. Okay, and you want to build upon it. A coachable person will understand that this is a process. I have a couple of clients over the years that have said, no, I don't really want to do it that way, I want to do it this way. I'm like, well, if you want to do it that way, then why'd you hire me? Okay, it's about being coachable, about saying, hey, I don't understand this completely, I'm going to listen to you and I'm going to dive in with that. The second thing is, do you have a learning and growth attitude? And usually that's determined by how many books you got here on your Kindle. I have way more on my Kindle. Or how much time do you spend listening to podcasts about growth and personal growth and things of that nature? Do you have a willingness to follow a system? Every success that I've had in my business life is about following a system. And if there wasn't a system in place that I could do, I had to put together my own system. I'll go back to the EB clinics. There was a basic system that we followed in order to get people coming into the practice and the medical side of it. But in order for it to scale to 3 locations, I had to create then my own system that the rest of the team could follow. Here's the last one. Do you have grit? Do you have the desire? Do you have what— or other people will call it the commitment? Are you just interested in running a successful business and a successful practice, or are you committed to it? And this is the same difference. It's the same thing. If you've wanted to lose weight in the past and you haven't been able to do it, that means you were just interested. Because if you're committed to losing the weight and keeping it off, you will make the necessary changes to be able to do A year plus ago, when I decided to lose 25 plus pounds and I want to taking my body fat from 33% to 20%, I before my failures were because I was interested. I got committed today. I'm in the same place physically. My lipid profile is fantastic. My body fat is fantastic, and this has been going on now for a good 15, 16 months at the time of this recording. So you have to be committed. You got to be committed. You got to have this desire because it's the commitment that's going to get you through. The peaks and the valleys and the struggles. So there you go.

Who do you follow?

Who are you following? Whose path are you following? Whose advice are you taking to get yourself to that financial promised land? If you're not making the money that you want to make revenue-wise, profit-wise, personal income-wise, if you're not making— if you're not— if you're not living up to those dreams that you had, it's most likely because you don't have the right person to follow, the right system to follow. I'd love to have that opportunity opportunity. My track record hopefully speaks for itself. We have countless, countless success stories over and over and over again. Maybe you're going to be the next fit and one of the next 4 to work with me over the next year. So go to srpmedicalmarketing.com, that's forward slash mentor, M-E-N-T-O-R, M-E-N-T-O-R. There's some information there. You fill out an application and I'll jump on the phone with you to see if you're a good fit. So there you go. Pick someone to follow, whether it's me, whether it's somebody else, I don't care. But if you aren't making the money that you want, find someone to follow who can take you to the promised land for the money you richly deserve. Have a great day, everybody. This is Matt Gallogly with the Practice Profit System. As always, it's my pleasure. Thanks for listening. Have a great day, everybody. We'll talk to you soon.

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 srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. That's srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. Thank you so much, and we'll see you next time.